The first comment (by mikekchar) in response to this student going through a rough spot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14312416
Direct link to the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14312684
Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
231–240 of 247 posts
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#232The first comment (umvi) in this thread I thought was great advice for those who are ambitious but also practical :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826
Direct link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24262337
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a confluence of factors behind Mercurial's and svn's losses for git to emerge as the dominant SCM tool. I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?
I’m not who you were replying to, but I’m interested in reading about that.
If you don't mind, you can please subscribe here so you can be alerted when articles start going out: https://ayewo.substack.com/
Thanks for your interest!
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#234This comment where I first learned about using a bare Git repo for dotfiles management: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071754
Dammit, now feel like a complete idiot for my mess of a bash script that creates symlinks all over the place. I guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow morning.
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Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, could that be me ? I had that exact conversation on HN. I was the one asking for studies (and my previous comment was sthg like "helmets should be mandatory" then I was told "do you realize it increases injuries ?" then I ask for proof) and the reasoning in the studies was that making helmets mandatory decreased car drivers' attention to cyclists making them less cautious around them, resulting in more serious…
This might be you because I replied to the OP here with what sounds like a very similar article. Does this sound correct? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532534
I am not sure.
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#236My smart-ass comment[1] got us new Unicode characters[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959139 [2] http://www.righto.com/2016/10/inspired-by-hn-comment-four-ha...
Love it
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#237I stash mine here https://twitter.com/hackercomments?s=21
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?
It's a trap if it's not for you, not what you want to do, not your interests. Whose business is it to solve millennium problems? Certainly not yours to decide for others. I think he does with his life what he chooses, and you do with yours what you choose. What are you doing with your life? I don't think you intended to be arrogant here, but the premise is that someone who has talent is required or expected to solve…
> And the dude is still a genius, not was.
Semantic error. Like using past tense to describe someone you met once long ago and otherwise know nothing about.
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?
I decided to make my reply a blog post: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-l...
Wow. Amazing. Thank you.
The parent to my comment pointed to a most remarkable piece of internet lore, but it was really about your argument against taking VC. A very quick look showed that you did exactly what you said you were going to do, with probably the exact result you indicated. I pointed to TarSnap because that was the result, and it seemed important to the story. Success? Sure, exactly as planned, but what about the audience of your original argument, those that said to go for big venture investment? Surely they still exist here. What do they think? However, if the story is to be a guidepost for others, it's really about what you think about your story, and so I think anybody following can be grateful that you've closed the loop on this. I realize that you could have interpreted this as some kind of personal slight, and a few did on your behalf, but it's obvious that you think differently, and your lack of offense is very telling of your satisfaction. So really you've answered in two ways. For my part, I don't think that gifted people necessarily owe 'us' their highest altruistic purpose. Maybe that is between them and whatever higher power they believe in, or not. But we at least hope that others also respond to aspirational attention with some kind of honesty, even if we can't possibly understand. Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#240I really like this comment about learning to cope with programming when requirements keep changing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24543596
> From where I sit (a backend developer, thoroughly burned out by webdev a couple years ago), most of coding I do is software bureaucracy. Turn this data into that data, ensuring module X and Y get paged in the process. Oh, half of the code I'm about to write is implemented elsewhere - quick, figure out how to juggle the dependency graph to somehow route control from here to there and back. This data I want to convert is not of the right colour - oh, I need to pass it through three sets of conversion layers to get back essentially the same, but with a correct type tag on it. Etc.
> It's utterly and mind-numbingly boring, unless you architectured the whole codebase yourself, at which point it's somewhat fun because it's your codebase, and who doesn't like their own Rube Goldberg machines?
> At this point, I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land. Doesn't matter that the software I wrote half of is going to help people do exciting stuff with industrial robots. What matters is that the customer changed some small and irrelevant piece of requirements for the 5th time, and I now have to route some data from the front to the back, through the other half of the code, written by my co-worker (a fine coder, btw.). So a bunch of layers of code bureaucracy I'm not familiar with, and discovering which feels like learning how to fill tax forms in a foreign country. If I start thinking about the industrial robots I'll just get depressed, so instead I focus on making the best jump through legacy code possible, so that I impress myself and my code reviewer (and hopefully make the 6th time I'm visiting this pit easier on everyone).
> Maybe it's a problem of perceptions. Like in the modern military - you join because you think you'll get to fly a helicopter and shoot shoulder-mounted rockets for daily exercise. You get there and you realize it's just hard physical work, a bit of mental abuse, and a lot of doing nothing useful in particular (at least until you advance high enough or quit). And so I started coding, dreaming I'll be lording over pixels on the screens, animating machine golems, and helping rockets reach their desired orbits. Instead, I'm spending endless days pushing people to simplify the architecture, so that I can shove my data through four levels of indirection instead of six (and get the software to run 10x faster in the process), and all that to rearrange some data on the screen that really should've been just given away to people on an Excel sheet with a page of instructions attached.