npsimons

42 ms·

391.
by npsimons 6y ago
Honestly, as someone also currently inside a v. large bureaucracy, I concur. Sometimes it almost feels as if half of the "value" or "work" in selling to big businesses that I hear of is in navigating the purchasing depar
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by npsimons 6y ago
> In my humble opinion passive consumption of media is entirely different from engaging in a creative process. Perhaps it's just projection on my part but surfing the web for hours reading Reddit, Hacker News and YouTube is entirely
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by npsimons 6y ago
He's not wrong. Look further down thread, you can find people pointing out examples of domains where there is a dearth of software, and a definite need to keep writing it. All due respect to the expertise shown in articles posted on HN
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by npsimons 6y ago
"Ten years" reminds me of the Decenarian maths in "Anathem." There are other little concepts in that novel that point to the value in taking one's time, such as the "chalk, ink, stone" mediums, and which i
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by npsimons 6y ago
> I think in a lot of ways, UI ebbs and flows; a lot of modern UI feels pretty terrible and non-intuitive, and re-designed for the sake of being re-designed. I think we're still figuring out UIs. As someone who sucks at them myself,
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by npsimons 6y ago
> The same is true of so many other fields. The Dunning-Kruger effect can be fiendishly subtle. So many people are limited by their experience, they don't stop to think (as you have) and imagine what fields outside theirs have taken
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Creating a culture of home-cooked software must happen in the margins, without capital, because capital by nature goes to restaurants. I honestly think this is the root of the problem, and that there is "too much software" is
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by npsimons 6y ago
> "you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy" Honestly, as so
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by npsimons 6y ago
Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic that this website won't load with JavaScript disabled? Perhaps some people should stop writing software, on that I fully agree . . . In seriousness, we don't have this kind of AI yet:
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by npsimons 6y ago
But he mentioned "Rick and Morty" and Monty Python. I myself didn't even see a single episode of "Rick and Morty" until last December when I binged them all at my brother's place. Yeah, I had heard of it, was v
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by npsimons 6y ago
Triple Crown of Hiking.
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by npsimons 6y ago
Oh, trust me, I've definitely drank deeply of the pleasures of life and plan to continue down that road, just on a smaller scale. Seven course meal with wine pairings at Chez TJ in Mountain View when I did my Google on-site interview w
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by npsimons 6y ago
Number one thing to get me out of a depressive funk, or help get unstuck on a problem? Get up out of my office chair and get some GD exercise! Even a simple meditative walk can do wonders.
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by npsimons 6y ago
> I feel like if I reached the FIRE point, I would continue to work, but entirely on my own terms, not as an employee of somebody else. I'm right there with you - this is my number one goal for FIRE, is basically to not have to put
405.
by npsimons 6y ago
> To me, it’s a very convoluted way to learn ruby with a ton of irrelevant comic strips and pop culture references I don’t get that just add to the sizable cognitive load of learning a new language. Fair, and to each their own. I do appr
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Every time this book is mentioned, I feel like a moron. Admitting you don't know or understand is the first step to knowledge. And this may not be a shortcoming on your end - many Great Books of literature are well-known to be goo
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by npsimons 6y ago
> A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon. Or maybe they truly enjoy it, and you&#x27
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by npsimons 6y ago
> You are about to close 28 windows with 305 tabs. Are you sure you want to continue? And this is a low number for me . . . I think I might have a problem.
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by npsimons 6y ago
Oh yeah, I found his http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/spreadsheet.html about org-mode and spreadsheets, yet another thing that I love about emacs and can't imagine a "modern" IDE doing as we
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by npsimons 6y ago
It is at home! Thanks for the pointer!
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by npsimons 6y ago
"External" is relative; at home, I can install whatever I please, although I do prefer to stick to what is included with Debian stable, which is pretty comprehensive (it includes pychecker, pyflakes, pylint and python-contract). A
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by npsimons 6y ago
> That's how. There are so many Python linters out there. Ah, okay. I've been using pychecker, pyflakes and pylint for quite some time, was just hoping there was something more that would help do stricter type checking. I'
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by npsimons 6y ago
While I laud the idea of having tests that reach 100% coverage (only half being snarky here), I feel that this is a bad habit to get into, just mindlessly changing things and assuming your tools will catch it.
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by npsimons 6y ago
> but programmer discipline is perhaps even more important. Honestly, I think this trumps everything else. If you don't care enough to write good code, you won't. Yes, some languages make it easier than others to write good sof
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Advertising-dependent, though. News is not going to work right until the readers pay a significant chunk of the revenue. That caught my eye too. Your second sentence is why I put a good chunk of change into https://thecorres
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by npsimons 6y ago
> a few seconds where the user's live desktop is displayed after resuming from standby I would be surprised if this isn't configurable. In fact, I'm pretty sure that XScreenSaver has exactly this "fade" paramet
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Arch requires more time to maintain, and more manual maintenance. So in order to justify that extra spent time a lot of times they will bring up minor stuff that happens in Debian/Ubuntu, like this bug from 12 years ago, in order
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by npsimons 6y ago
> Doesn't Debian sometimes go so far as to split software apart into multiple packages? IMHO, this is the correct thing to do. I've spent a considerable amount of time as both developer and systems adminstrator. Not quite Dev
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by npsimons 6y ago
Fair enough, but I don't put Ubuntu in the same class as Debian, because while they may share many base packages in common, I do seem to remember them patching the kernel more than Debian, and usually stuff that would break my kernel d
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by npsimons 6y ago
I actually got a decent answer to this, from what appears to be a developer working on something in the FreeDesktop.org ecosystem: > Way better for writing gui apps against instead of wrapping suid binaries and parsing strings horribly.

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