A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work • Hacker News Board

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#261

Post by xnx » Fri, May 21, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #73

Apparently this is the "story time" thread, so here's mine, of how I hacked the Linux kernel without ever having written more than maybe 50 lines of C code. This was in early 2001, I was an exchange student in Japan, and I'd bought a really cool gadget in Akihabara that almost nobody had heard about: a hardware MP3 player. For storage, it used MMCs (precursor of SD cards), affordable ones held 32MB. To get music onto…

I love it. This is true hacking to me. You had a problem and kept digging until you solved it.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#262

Post by realaether » Sat, May 22, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

jugg1es wrote: post #95

I have a story similar to many of the others here. Mine was in the mid 90s when a kid could make good money developing websites. The hardest part was the client interactions, which is not something a 14 year old is particularly good at. But the real take-away is that this era of computing was a true green field for the kids growing up in it. My cousins, who are over 10 years younger than me, grew up in a totally diff…

I had a long conversation about this a week ago. My worry is that "hacking" things — in the sense of "finding a way to use a program in a way that the developer didn't directly intend" — is getting harder every year and that this may have implications for the next generations of developers and indeed power users.

"View source" is not only virtually useless on many pages, but also unreasonably difficult to access in the first place (if not completely impossible) on systems like iOS.

UX, generally, seems so rigid now that, especially if it's on a more locked-down platform or a web-app, it seems there's often almost no way to use an app in any way other than the developer intended. The barrier to entry for hacking seems incredibly high now.

I don't know when the concepts of batch processing and scripting — or even keyboard shortcuts — came to be seen as a hindrance to UX, but I have a feeling it developed in parallel with touchscreens and the ever-increasing incentive to make apps addictive. In that respect it seems like we haven't really evolved in the last 10 years (at least), but actually regressed to some pre-computer, pre-automation age.

Perhaps everything I've just written is a load of rambling nostalgia. These thoughts come to me almost on a daily basis though.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#263

Post by dotancohen » Sat, May 22, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #246

dotancohen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to post this. The offset ears on the bulb base are used to specify either a dual-filament bulb, such as tail lamps and brake lamps combined, or high-resistance, low-wattage parking lamps that are designed to not run down the battery while the alternator is not charging.

That makes sense. The cheap bulbs I bought were just slightly dimmer. So they must have had more resistance. But heck, even a parking light will flatten the battery if left overnight.

  > But heck, even a parking light will flatten the battery if left overnight.

Nominal modern car batteries are about 12.6 volts. I wonder if the high-resistance bulbs will completely dim once the voltage drops to a specific threshold, say around 12.0 volts. If they do, then they should leave just enough charge to crank, as most starter motors can safely crank over with about eleven and a half volts (and all the way up to over 14 volts).

That might be an interesting experiment to test.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#264

Post by anoncow » Wed, May 26, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

LordGrey wrote: post #30

anoncow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When and how did things change, if I may ask?

If by "change" you're asking, "when did I stop underselling myself and getting in over my head" then I am not sure I could identify a single point in time where that happened. It's been an improvement on a continuum. Those early years certainly felt painful but in retrospect provided valuable concrete experience in negotiating, marketing, and self-assessment. I learned how to figure out what others really wanted, how…

Thank you for your response. Appreciate it.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#265

Post by aaronchall » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

rags2riches wrote: post #160

brazzy wrote: post #73

Apparently this is the "story time" thread, so here's mine, of how I hacked the Linux kernel without ever having written more than maybe 50 lines of C code. This was in early 2001, I was an exchange student in Japan, and I'd bought a really cool gadget in Akihabara that almost nobody had heard about: a hardware MP3 player. For storage, it used MMCs (precursor of SD cards), affordable ones held 32MB. To get music onto…

That's like a scene in some old TV series about a startup I only vaguely remember. It's important demo day, but a bug is threatening to ruin everything. Everybody is trying to find the bug. Somebody yells out "I found it!" and everybody rushes over. For a long moment, they all stare quietly at a big red flashing line of code on the screen. Then somebody blurts out "delete it!" and the person at the keyboard deletes t…

what tv series was this?