prosaic-hacker

8 ms·

31.
by prosaic-hacker 3y ago
I believe not now but Perl 5.004 was installed on Window NT (3.5 or 4) by default. That made the case for its use on project that could not afford the IBM AIX or Silicon Graphics systems we were using at the time. We used Netscape Fasttrack
32.
by prosaic-hacker 3y ago
Perl does not die easily because of the way many of us learned it. We started to used it for sysadmin automation (prehistoric DevOps) and then the early Web showed up and we used it for that too. After 15 years (much more the 10,000 hours
33.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Other comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35281089
34.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Perl and Python have syntax options that are similar to the style of awk. The style was described to me as filter thinking. These were not tested on real data. The awk program translates to #!/usr/bin/perl while (<>) {
35.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software 1st Edition by Elecia White I have not read the book but listen to their podcast https://embedded.fm/ http://makingembeddedsystems.libsyn.com/rss
36.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
One of the science show (Nova ? could not find it quickly) did an extinction event analysis on a point far upstream a river and tied it to the Chicxulub event. The local flora and fauna were killed by water flow high up river and hot ash ra
37.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I decided a long time ago to buy the cheapest unlocked android phone I could get at the time. 6 phones for 2 people over 10 years. I paid 140 to 200 (100-150 US$) pretax for each. This has been mostly Motorola E or G phones. This has kept u
38.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I teach programming and have experimented with Codetry Readings(C)(TM);) (think beat poet) I have not hit the sweet spot of reading the code in idiomatic spoken language to match to idiomatic code language. Work in progress. But now with ad
39.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
In 1979 I was developing the same application on several different systems with Basic. Durango ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durango_F-85 ) and Sord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sord_Computer_C
40.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I would extend this idea with Step-Wise semi automation. There have been large complex data sets I had to wrangle or sysadmin operational tasks that I have have to complete that I did in several automation steps. "Bend, fold, and st
41.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
BGP Ranking site https://bgpranking.circl.lu/ serve a 503 error Service unavailable. I do not know any more details.
42.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I have reread my top 200 books I like more than once. I owned well into the 2000s of books. Most bought second hand. Most gone, but not the 200. As life ebbed and flowed books got boxed and unboxed. Glee ensues when a favorite shows up
43.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
HexFlexagons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexagon Angle trisection tools. https://www.instructables.com/The-Tomahawk-an-Angle-Trisecti... First AA proof I learned: Cannot trisect an angle with ruler
44.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Back Then. When was that? At University (1978) we used Pascal as the first language to learn (if you exclude CDC Cyber 6600 assembly). Yes we did the Discrete math problems common in CS ( https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Floyd-
45.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I teach people in your position in life. I recommend at this stage bite size steps in education. Find Colleges with 1 or 2 year programming curriculum. This way you get to working sooner and see for real if this is what you want. These pr
46.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26410047 Sounded familiar.
47.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I have been a vocational Lecturer in Computer Support (System Administration) for over a decade. Before that spent 35 years as SysAdmin (Vax, Unix[Aix,Irix...], programmer (FORTRAN real time / Webdev [LAMP Web 1.0 era], Manager of PC d
48.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Each department had a person service their internal or external client. The could provide the service the old slow way or our way. EG You ask the Tech Pub dept for the 5000 page Word perfect documents and wait a month to get it printed and
49.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I teach system admin for a living. When Covid hit and on line classes became the norm we put 500GB ssd and 16GB memory into some Dell 5420 laptops(2011 era). We ran Google Classroom and up to 4 VMs (Win1X/Fedora3X) depending on the to
50.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I have had a "Plaque Remover" since the 80's when they were medical appliances($$$) due to medical needs. In a sample size of 1 my oral health is always worse when I use a regular tooth on vacation. Today I use a moderately
51.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I have experienced leaderless teams in my career (46 years) a handful of times. They formed around a problem that was unrecognized by Management (thankfully) but need to be solved. My best example was at a large SW dev firm in the late 80s
52.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Separate from knowing the syntax and semantics of a programming language (which you have to know), Programming in the real world is about code herding and coding support tools . Each environment has its mix of Code storage location eg folde
53.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I have heard of variations this technique of Spinrite in VMs with pass thrus to physical disks. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/windowsserver/en... https://macmad.org/blog/2018&#x2
54.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I like small retro hw supporting distros. Puppy Fossa is running on several of my machines. I don't like the background on web page enough that I got off of it before downloading the distro. Please give me an option to visually ass
55.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Get a hobby or 3. I am 2 to 3 years (or one TTJaSI moment) from retiring. I have been an system admin, programmer, accountant, manager of these roles), teacher teacher of them too. I made an early choice to do SW over HW. Now repairing th
56.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
There is now 128 million bit of space garbage orbiting the earth and some orbiting the sun. How long would that stay in orbit? The next civilization would have to make it to space to verify if we existed.
57.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I would not be surprised if other constrained interpreter environments could be created like this one. From the descriptions I believe a Hypercard, Logo, python or (forgive me from saying this) Basic scripting could be created. We could t
58.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
It is amazing how the understanding of what happens in our computers goes from : the air we breath to a mystery. Although if you asked one of my 900 coworkers in 1981 who wrote flight simulation software in Fortran, how the VT100 terminals
59.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
Seconded. (or maybe that should be Thirded) Read the whole series in the early 70's when I was in high school. (Thank you High School libraries).
60.
by prosaic-hacker 4y ago
I teach Computer Support for a living so I need to hear about tech trends from a support and development point of view. I also need to like the style of the presenter if I am going to spend time listening to them for months or years. In no

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