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It’s a Unix system I know this

elaine-cao-93.medium.com

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Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#31

Post by sgtnoodle »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #4
ajross wrote: post #2

I had to jump in here, not to argue with the substance of the article[1] but to pull out this one quote that I just can't get behind: > In popular media, a genius hacker codes some solution from scratch in the space of an hour or two, solving a problem that would otherwise doom the other protagonists. But in reality, programming is slow. I mean, sure, it's not like The Movies. But hacking is fast ! In no other profes…

> Who else gets to do that? No other engineering profession for sure. You've never met that wizard with the machine shop, have you? He'd be insulted if you called him an engineer, but he eats engineers for breakfast.

You may enjoy reading the non-fiction book, "Hot Tech, Cold Steel", by Chuck Hutchins. It's his story of starting a tech company on the forefront of CNC machining.

One of the chapters talks about Chuck's experience in his first job after graduating from college. He accepted a relatively low compensation offer at a machine tool manufacturer, on the condition that he would spend his first year sequentially shadowing every other employee. There's an anecdote about him being handed a power tool by a machinist and told to go ahead and cut metal on a several hundred thousand dollar linear rail (in 1950s dollars), and the boss running and screaming across the shop to stop him.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#32

Post by Karupan »

> Surely, “just whip up a solution in an hour” doesn’t ever happen in reality. > > Right?

Err, maybe the author hadn't experienced that before, but IMO that happens pretty frequently, even for projects that have been in production for years.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#33

Post by sgtnoodle »

kragen wrote: post #10
bryanlarsen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who else gets to do that? No other engineering profession for sure. You've never met that wizard with the machine shop, have you? He'd be insulted if you called him an engineer, but he eats engineers for breakfast.

I watch MrPete222 on YouTube. He's certainly capable of whipping things up on the lathe on occasion without drawings, and he's no novice, but it's common for him to spend days or a week making a part that you could design in CAD in fifteen minutes. Same with Abom79, Stefan Gotteswinter, Joe Pieczynski, and Tom Lipton. Dan Gelbart is still using the spot welder he made in his youth 30 or 40 years ago. Some of these gu…

> So machinists are generally methodical, patient, and careful.

Some machinists do shots of vodka while operating a lathe.

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#35

Post by dmurray »

The standard way to pair Swiss tournaments in chess used to be index cards. One card per player. Each round, you write their opponent and their cumulative score, then you keep them sorted by score bucket and put them in pairs by trial and error trying to alternate colours and avoid successive upfloats.

Some arbiters, particularly in the UK, still did this at least as of ten years ago. Either they don't want to learn the computerised tools or they think humans give "better" pairings - not impossible, as humans can look ahead to reserve some combinations for future rounds.

135 players is a lot to handle manually, though, and this would make the last round pairing system almost impossible. (Calculating tiebreaks for a handful of players in the prizes is OK).

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#36

Post by sgtnoodle »

bsder wrote: post #22

Big own goal by MTGMelee that they couldn't absorb the traffic when Eventlink croaked. I need to remember that for the future: if you have a competitor, make sure you can absorb the traffic if they go completely AWOL.

What if your competitor is Amazon or Google? Build your service to work on both AWS and GCP?

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#37

Post by vanderZwan »

racl101 wrote: post #26

In the movie Hackers, knowledge of computers didn't just save lives and put criminals behind bars, it got people laid.

Lol. Well, Crash Override also had a group of friends as his wingmen. One that included Matthew Lillard. Probably didn't hurt.

(also, for all the jokes we make about how (wonderfully) cheesy the depiction of tech in that film is, with all the smart homes these days I wonder if the hacked lighting at the ending would make more sense nowadays than back then)

(edit: also also, I recall reading somewhere that the creators of the film said they never tried to be fully accurate, they were going for "fairy tale about hacking subculture that communicates the vibe of the scene to non-nerds" and I while I was never part of it I would like to believe it succeeded pretty well in that regard)

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#39

Post by dimensional_dan »

erlkonig wrote: post #15

Amusingly, that UI in the film is a real piece of Unix software named FSN on IRIX; I used it some around 1994 on Silicon Graphics hosts at Origin Games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

I also used it, a relative had one for their startup. There were dozens of us at least!

Re: It’s a Unix system I know this

#40

Post by ctrlmeta »

Karupan wrote: post #32

> Surely, “just whip up a solution in an hour” doesn’t ever happen in reality. > > Right? Err, maybe the author hadn't experienced that before, but IMO that happens pretty frequently, even for projects that have been in production for years.

Exactly! An unfortunate truth about running live and complex services is that they break frequently in strange and weird ways and we need to write a fix as quickly as possible, get it reviewed quickly and then roll it out asap. The term "hotfix" literally comes from that. The time range to develop and apply hotfix can be 30 mins to 48 hours--depends on nature of issue.
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