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A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

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Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#181

Post by jimmaswell »

WalterBright wrote: post #175
bluedino wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds right up there with filed-down cards or connectors that had longer grooves cut in them!

I had a parking light burn out on my car. Went to the car store, and a replacement bulb was $$. Perused the lamps on tags in the aisles, and found one that looked the same but had different "ears" on the side. Bought it, and filed off the ears so it would fit in my car's socket. Worked perfectly, for a small fraction of the price. Of course, my car is full of aftermarket parts, so I am used to making "adjustments" to…

I had to look up what a parking light is. It sounds totally unnecessary to me, but I'd say that about a lot of things put in cars after the 90s.

Probably not important in this case since it's just a light for parking, but lights for cars cost more due to having to meet exacting DOT standards/testing. I wouldn't do this with a brake light or real headlight.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#182

Post by samatman »

Just as a random tangent from a great story, the Data General Eclipse was the machine designed and built in Tracy Kidder's excellent book The Soul of a New Machine.

Really fantastic book for anyone interested in the history of computers, captures its moment in time perfectly and won a Pulitzer for it. If you liked Halt and Catch Fire you'll love it.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#183

Post by freetime2 »

jpm_sd wrote: post #126
ergot_vacation wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A strip poker game on my c64." I can only imagine what this must have looked like.

Wonder no more! https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive109-StripPoke...

NSFW... if anyone was in doubt

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#184

Post by samatman »

3pt14159 wrote: post #132
cmos wrote: post #64

It was 1992 and I was a high school senior. My teacher got me a job at the local DPW in the electical department. I was to work in the warehouse under a guy named Al who was an old timer and lost his hand in a forklift accident 30 years prior. My job was to clean the warehouse, and when I was done Al told me to 'go hide somewhere' which I did, at the top of the shelves 20' in the air, which I had also cleaned. This g…

> saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. I'd like to hear more about the details of how this worked. Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor? Was this technically legal or in some part of a grey area?

A lot of universities have their own power plants, especially of a certain age. The U of M in Ann Arbor has a plant and uses the waste heat to keep the relevant sidewalks free of ice and snow in the winter.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#185

Post by grosswait »

WalterBright wrote: post #175
bluedino wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds right up there with filed-down cards or connectors that had longer grooves cut in them!

I had a parking light burn out on my car. Went to the car store, and a replacement bulb was $$. Perused the lamps on tags in the aisles, and found one that looked the same but had different "ears" on the side. Bought it, and filed off the ears so it would fit in my car's socket. Worked perfectly, for a small fraction of the price. Of course, my car is full of aftermarket parts, so I am used to making "adjustments" to…

They’ll have different resistance. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#186

Post by unnouinceput »

JackFr wrote: post #36

Under questions you’re unprepared for, years ago at a Wall Street job a couple of weeks after a re-org my new boss calls me into his office and asks me what sort of bonus I was expecting. Caught completely off guard I quoted him the real number I had been expecting. He smiled and said great, which let me know I had absolutely left money in the table. A trusted colleague then told me if that situation ever came up aga…

Probably you meant 20%. So that's X * 2 * 1.2. Or X * 2.4. Or make it easier and say 2.5. And 2.5 is 10 /4. So another way to say this is "take your reasonable expectation, multiply it by 10 to become really unreasonable then make it reasonable again by divide it with 4".

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#188

Post by unnouinceput »

tester756 wrote: post #122
arrozconcosas wrote: post #120

I had two jobs in high school and learned a lot from them. In the first, I was a temp worker for a P&G re-packaging facility. This means some temp agency was paid $12/hour and they passed on $9/hour to me. The job was backbreaking, in intense heat, and with very strict management rules (e.g. no lunch break, sitting down for even a moment was grounds for being fired). In the second, I did lawn mowing for individual fa…

> was allowed to keep the extras and ended up with a 1 year supply of coke zero for myself and all my friends. that's pros or con? :P

Definitely con considering back then all "zero sugar" soft drink had Aspartame as replacement and there are studies that link Alzheimer to Aspartame. I'd say OP has a very big chance to develop Alzheimer if he drank so much in such a short time.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#189

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Tried his "hastyhex" binary to hex filter which claims to be faster than alternatives. In tests I ran, it was much faster than hexdump, and even faster than xxd, but was not faster than lesser known public domain code, which was about 2x faster for small files and slightly faster for large ones. See, e.g., [1]

https://github.com/skeeto/hastyhex

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216195

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216187

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#190

Post by sanj »

gpm wrote: post #155
3pt14159 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. I'd like to hear more about the details of how this worked. Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor? Was this technically legal or in some part of a grey area?

> Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor? Not the person you're replying to (and never directly involved in electricity generation), but my university just had it's own small power plant: https://www.fs.utoronto.ca/utilities-and-building-operations... I assume it was a mix of historical coincidence and a solution for less-interruptible power supply for the labs, but I'm not really sure.

University of Toronto had a research reactor back ~20 years ago: a "slowpoke" reactor.

I don't believe it generated incremental energy, but it was used for irradiation.

I worked there one summer and enjoyed it immensely!

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