msluyter

12 ms·

61.
by msluyter 4y ago
Exactly. I often think of scenarios such as this in evolutionary terms. Imagine a doppelgänger competitor in this space, exactly the same, except they're pretty content with their crappy tech ecosystem and focus on delivering features
62.
by msluyter 4y ago
I have doubts about the author's overall point, but something to consider is how does a name help/hinder search? A name that's overly mundane, say, "Go", becomes problematic to google (hence the need to search for &
63.
by msluyter 4y ago
Some of these complaints seem fair to me, some not as much. tl;dr -- Snowflake requires a fair bit of knowledge/effort to use optimally. I spent a number of months last year focused on lowering Snowflake spend. In the process I learned
64.
by msluyter 4y ago
Everything is relative. We moved from Austin to Orlando last year for family reasons and our new house of roughly equivalent size/amenities was significantly less than our Austin house. And now we wouldn’t be able to afford our old Aus
65.
by msluyter 4y ago
One that a professor of mine used when I was in grad school which I don't see that often these days is the use of sentinel values. For arrays/lists of unknown sizes, it's sometimes nice to do something like: while val !
66.
by msluyter 4y ago
Not sure if this counts as a "programming trick", but for maneuvering around the shell: learning readline. https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html ^This one cool trick will increase your productivity by 1000%! I&#
67.
by msluyter 4y ago
My bachelors was in music and I was midway through a masters in music when I decided to switch to CS. Needless to say it was a huge paradigm shift, and having had very little experience prior to that, and also as a result of a program that
68.
by msluyter 4y ago
"- Accelerate game play by automating score keeping and timekeeping" Yes indeed, this is huge. I'm thinking of you, Through the Ages, with your incredibly fiddly and easy to make mistakes in upkeep rules. Our first few run th
69.
by msluyter 4y ago
I rewrote an invoicing system (originally in .NET) in Python and yeah, I totally feel this. All the system did was generate a CSV file that could be input into another system (Quickbooks, iirc). The original .NET version was nonsensical at
70.
by msluyter 4y ago
Totally tangential comment: You can click play on any/all of the samples simultaneously, resulting in a neat sonic effect vaguely reminiscent of Steve Reich's famous "Come out." [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com
71.
by msluyter 4y ago
I don't know anything about the company but I applaud the sentiment. But is it obvious to note that a lot of companies start with similar ideas... and then any number of forces -- the market, shareholders, the board, management chang
72.
by msluyter 4y ago
Preface: I have a pretty deep musical background; bachelors & masters degrees in flute performance. I have a 7 yr old. Her kindergarten required either piano or violin, and we opted for piano. At that time, we implemented a daily '
73.
by msluyter 4y ago
Whenever jq comes up I feel obligated to mention 'gron'[1]. If all you're doing is trying to grep some deeply nested field, it's way easier with gron, IMHO. [1] https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron
74.
by msluyter 4y ago
These conversations remind me of the "why your spam solution won't work" checklist that used to go around slashdot: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt It's been a while though, so perhaps some of th
75.
by msluyter 5y ago
Am I alone in just never answering my phone? Like, ever, for _any_ unknown number. Seems like that alone solves a certain class of problems.
76.
by msluyter 5y ago
Aside from one's subjective take on pair programming -- and there are obviously many valid reasons why it doesn't work for some folks -- I'd have to guess that doing it 100% of the time is quite inefficient. Software develo
77.
by msluyter 5y ago
Similar to what the famous psychologist Albert Ellis did: "As an adolescent, Albert was extremely shy around ladies. At age 19, he started showing signs of thinking like a cognitive-behavioral therapist by forcing himself to talk to ab
78.
by msluyter 5y ago
> At that level, it still makes sense to borrow all you can, buy the basket of goods or gold or anything that holds its value in dollar terms, sell it later on, and pay the loan back. I'm guessing -- also not deeply versed in macroe
79.
by msluyter 5y ago
It seems like we're approaching what I call the "dismal equilibrium." This is the idea that any free site/service/app eventually will have to monetize itself in order to remain free, inevitably in a way that degrade
80.
by msluyter 5y ago
It disrupts insects (and thus, everything downstream of them in the food chain): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210317141651.h...
81.
by msluyter 5y ago
Agree with most of this, but I'm curious where Facebook groups fit in here. We recently moved to Florida and have been scrambling to find non-religious home school friends for our daughter (homeschooling because of Covid). Facebook has
82.
by msluyter 5y ago
Re government websites: they're often terrible. I've occasionally contemplated a side project just to scrape and restructure some local/state websites into a usable forms with search and whatnot.
83.
by msluyter 5y ago
>>* remove the mortgage interest deduction >So what's your goal here, given that historically this was the single biggest tax benefits to the (ever-declining) middle class. Weird, I've mostly read that it disproportionall
84.
by msluyter 5y ago
Re: "where did I put that" -- I got a set of Apple airtags recently and they've been a godsend. I also have an apple watch, so via the watch I can find my phone, and via the phone I can find my wallet/keys/etc... Th
85.
by msluyter 5y ago
Isn't that crazy, that one could go 45+ years without knowing they had ADHD? It wasn't until I was... > 50yrs until someone I was talking to said "sounds like you have ADHD" and I was like "what???" But sure
86.
by msluyter 5y ago
By "Woodpecker method" do you mean this: https://www.amazon.com/Woodpecker-Method-Axel-Smith-Tikkanen... ? This is why HN is great -- appears to be an amazing book.
87.
by msluyter 5y ago
I agree with this, but when it comes to scaling, making things faster at the language level is only one option. And while, as you suggest, the Python/static_lang gulf has narrowed, I would guess the gulf between "what needs to be
88.
by msluyter 5y ago
Random OS/2 stories. My first real technical job was doing OS/2 support as a co-op (sorta like an intern). Our team supported larger clients, who'd send us questions via IBM's mainframe system (RETAIN, or PROFS, iirc). I
89.
by msluyter 5y ago
Tom Kyte books were great and beyond Oracle, I learned a lot about databases generally from them.
90.
by msluyter 5y ago
Some other useful tools for csv files, in particular: csvkit, a set of command line tools for manipulating csvs: https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ visdata, a quite terminal based csv explorer: https:/

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