91–100 of 279 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it isn’t supposed to log things that aren’t urls being pasted into the browser.
So? In any decent programming environment, checking if a string is a URL is a one liner
E.g., is "foo.bar" a URL? Maybe. But it could also be a filename. How do you know if it's a "real" URL or not?
Great example. This is something I struggle with myself, but it especially annoys me when my non-engineer friends complain about bugs or missing features when we game together. “Why can’t I just do {x}, it would be easy to implement, any programmer could do it, why are {y company}’s developers so incompetent”. Now I have a link to send them rather than awkwardly coming up with an example on the spot of why {x} is pro…
They'll usually say something like "boil the kettle, pour the water in the cup and wait a few minutes"
So then you go in and probe all the requirements and edge cases:
- what if there's no water in the kettle?
- what if there's no power to the kettle?
- what if we're out of tea bags?
- how do I know when the kettle is boiled?
- can I put the tea bag in the cup while the kettle boils, or do I need to wait for the kettle to be ready first?
- what size cup do I need?
- how do I remove the tea bag?
- what if there are no clean spoons?
Great point, and a good way of illustrating it. But I have to respond: Or you could grab something similar and use that as a beginning point. Say, for this application, `clipman` which gives me a popup list of the last few clipboard entries. Get into that and add some regexp filter and log output and it need not even interfere with the original functionality.
I think that both article and you are missing a very big aspect of development - ongoing support. This is specially problematic when using existing code to create new product for a specific use case\client. It may not take very long but what everyone seems to forget is that this new product has to be maintained. Every time new feature is added to base code, it has to be tested with that new product as well. Repeat th…
I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...). We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour ma…
I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…
Also: For some stuff I want to be able to use the "arcane" parameters for some really obscure task where it is just the right flag or something.
I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...). We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour ma…
I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…
Reminds me of how some companies give take-home assignments to job candidates. > Here's a task that takes a day to do sloppily and at least two days for you to show your best work. We want to be respectful of your time so please don't spend more than 2 hours on it.
The take-home assignment seems to me a slightly broken system; it's easily gameable because there's zero supervision. Let's say there's two candidates for a position who are both asked to complete the take-home assignment, Candidate A and Candidate B. Candidate A is the superior candidate and spends only two hours on the task (as requested), and Candidate B spends 2 days. Candidate B submits the better assignment and…
Nothing complicated - shouldn't take too long.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The programming parts of this would take 2-4 hours This is, literally, the error that the entire article works on dispelling. Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. Writing a usable GUI application is a lot more work. That’s not project management, that’s coding work. The ratio of project management work to coding isn’t 10:1 or even 100:1 like you’re suggesting.
> Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I have to agree about the "peak HN arrogance" bit Most things about software dev are never taught to college students. This is actually an excellent project to teach students beyond programming for computers and building things for humans. Not thinking about UX is what leads to most software projects failing because we are fundamentally different from computers (do I even need to explain this?) I wish I had t…
> I wish I had teachers teaching me stuff like this in my software dev classes instead of the usual stuff. I think this would be a great class project with the teacher acting as a fictive user. I think it is a horrible hobby project to suggest.
Most of UNIX literally seems to have been built like this.
I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...). We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour ma…
I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…