npsimons

36 ms·

331.
by npsimons 6y ago
> (but then again, I moved here from the train heaven that is Switzerland) I hiked the Haute Route last year, and while we were only on the trains and buses a handful of times, it was flawless every time. Like, they had things schedule
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by npsimons 6y ago
> impingement on their freedoms. It's funny what terms we choose (framing) can do. "death tax" instead of "inheritance tax", "driver's rights" instead of "driver's privileges." Peopl
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by npsimons 6y ago
> At least git is Free, transparent, auditable software, designed to track the work itself, not surreptitiously log each device you glance at a document on and MS only knows what else. Yeah, GP's comment was completely off base. O36
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by npsimons 6y ago
> never use your time to help out junior team members. Yeah, I'll be honest, if I had this sort of metric forced on me, I would completely ignore everyone , not just junior devs who (quite often) ask for my help on finding the righ
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by npsimons 6y ago
This sounds like an intractable problem, and putting it politely, the fault lies in the file format, not the VCS.
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by npsimons 6y ago
> To add to that list: abstract syntax trees. Are you joking? Because you can represent these as Lisp sexps in plain text.
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by npsimons 6y ago
> - DAGs > - Arbitrary graphs (Topology) GraphViz ( https://graphviz.org/ ) and PlantUML ( https://plantuml.com/ ). > - 3D models (Geometry) My experience here is much more limited, but I'm certai
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by npsimons 6y ago
Email is perhaps one of the most useful tools, ever, yet so many people just don't use it. Like, they won't even respond , I just don't get it. And forcing someone to put a concept down in words is invaluable. It's like
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by npsimons 6y ago
> People do not want to represent most of them as text. "People" don't care what things are stored as. You could make GUI tools save to GraphViz's text based format (or heck PlantUML[0]) for graphs at least and it wou
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by npsimons 6y ago
By some peoples' standards, I'm a young un', but I can distinctly recall being 100% remote in 2000, working on adding real-time to the Linux kernel. We were using BitKeeper, and had no central office. We'd meet at each o
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Our entire system is built upon maximizing ROI at all costs. Dealing with these values is extremely difficult. I may have miscommunicated; perhaps I should have phrased it as re-evaluating what "return" we want to maximize.
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by npsimons 6y ago
https://thenib.com/the-spirit-of-compromise/
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Everything is fine unless someone is sick or wants to take vacation. That doesn't sound "fine" to me. People get sick. Vacations are necessities.
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by npsimons 6y ago
This is a trope we see repeated: back in "the day", they couldn't run the numbers, so for safety margins, they just overengineered. It's usually applied to civil engineering, but I could see how it could be applied to st
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by npsimons 6y ago
This was my number one motivation for reading "How to Read a Book" (an HN recommendation, I might add). I can plow through texts without even trying (no effort to increase speed), but what's the point if I don't retain a
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by npsimons 6y ago
The HN discussion is technical.
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by npsimons 6y ago
It's been a while since I've done any pure C, and I'm sure I'll be outshone by others', but I've always liked RAII in C: https://vilimpoc.org/research/raii-in-c/
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by npsimons 6y ago
I can tell you as a Linux user since before there was an iPad, I just don't care about that. At all. Meanwhile, this sort of story (and the often technical discussion with people who know their shit) is precisely why I keep coming ba
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by npsimons 6y ago
> The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. I wonder what they'd think of my proxy which I have setup to (among other privacy respecting features) rewrite the User-Agent to "By allowing me access, you waive al
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by npsimons 6y ago
On your points 1 and 2, absolutely I recognize those problems. The second appears to be a user education or non-bounded task problem (can't you just have the cloud shutdown VMs that aren't accessed for a specified time period?). I
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by npsimons 6y ago
> All great tooling becomes a victim of its success. Packaging is so good now and simple that you don’t have sysadmins anymore Too true. A lot of my interaction with sys admins at work is "hey can you install this package from the r
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by npsimons 6y ago
You are both right; GP in that this isn't the end of Debian, and you in that the article author's points should be addressed.
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by npsimons 6y ago
There was a quote on slashdot long ago that has stuck with me: > When I was walking into NEC a couple months ago with my good friend at Red Hat, I asked him why he worked at a Linux company. He told me, "Because it will be the last
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by npsimons 6y ago
Believe it or not, putting down books, stepping away from screens, and just getting the blood flowing through exercise is a great way to clear the mind and just let it wander. I'm also reminded of walking meditation. Used to work with
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by npsimons 6y ago
> You can't anticipate every possible use case of your library! On the flipside, I consider a successful software tool is one that is used to do something undreamt of by its author. One should not try to imagine every possible use t
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by npsimons 6y ago
> There's a kind of arrogance that we fall into making decisions for others when we design APIs, library interfaces, etc where we know what we're exposing and users don't know what's good for them. Maybe that's r
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by npsimons 6y ago
So yes, the spread of powerful computing certainly is to be lauded. I'm not denying that, but I feel it's more to do with a driving down of costs than anything. If (and I admit that's a big if ) big iron vendors had paid att
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by npsimons 6y ago
This I will give to DevOps - it's hyper focus on automation, change management and repeatability are all good things. As someone with a leg in each domain (software developer by day, system administrator by night), I've really f
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by npsimons 6y ago
I just went through the Emacs tutorial (C-h t), then used Emacs everyday, for everything. I pick up bits and pieces here and there across the web. I went through Chassel's Emacs lisp book a while back, but can't remember most of i
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by npsimons 6y ago
I chose salt after failing to get Puppet and Chef working. Out of the box on Debian, just no luck. Salt was just plug and go. Haven't bothered with Ansible (yet) as it didn't officially support states when I was evaluating options

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