It is more important that actually disabled people can easily collect assistance than that we catch fraudsters, though I suspect the US, as a culture, has a different opinion.
Yeah, I figured that contracting is probably the only way I'll break in. I haven't ruled it out, though I really hate working for consultancies like that.
Maybe I should just get my mom to write them a note explaining how clever and handsome I am, because I don't know that that comes through clearly in the resume. If I attached that as a cover letter, it might at least be memorable :)
Yes, people think this behaviour came out of nowhere. It’s because if you are younger, phone calls are not the default (only two friends ever call me) and overwhelmingly are scammers or salespeople.
I went through a two-year period where I didn't have a decent job and couldn't afford a computer of any kind for myself. I ended up spending some time volunteering for a local non-profit, and they gave me an "old laptop" they had in storage. This was in ~2005.
It was a Sony Vaio, and the only thing I really remember about the hardware/specs is that it had a physical scroll widget under the touchpad on the edge of the case. Software-wise, it was running some relatively locked down version of Windows. I installed Arch on it and used it to rebuild and manage the non-profit's website.
The other thing that I remember from it is that it was my entrance into using the terminal as my primary interface - the first place I used Vim regularly, and the first time I'd installed tmux. One day I was trying to test a dropdown or something on their website, and discovered that my touchpad didn't work. It turned out to have been broken by an Arch update, which wasn't terribly surprising. What was surprising is that once I'd traced down the issue and corrected it, I realized that it had been broken for almost two weeks. I'd used that computer every day and hadn't needed to use a mouse even once.
> Disabling C-z (suspend) because accidentally suspending Emacs in a terminal is never fun
This reminds me of a story from a past job. I have to get it out of my system.
There was this bearded sysadmin guy who was very proud of his "15 years of experience", and was quick to scold us new employees for every little thing he could.
He used vim, and every now and then would say that it's a good editor, but kinda "unstable". Crashed a lot, he said.
You probably know where this is going.
One day, one of us sat next to him and discovered many suspended vim jobs in his shell (this was the kind of guy that doesn't power off his computer).
He was fat-fingering C-z all the time, and has never heard of job control - bg, fg, etc.
If you have regular KDE I urge you to just shake your mouse vigorously for ca. a minute. The cursor has this mouse finding feature where the mouse cursor gets bigger if you shake it. It can get comically big, like fill the whole screen big.
Older HN users may recall when busy discussions had comments split across several pages. This is because the Arc [1] language that HN runs on was originally hosted on top of Racket [2] and the implementation was too slow to handle giant discussions at HN scale. Around September 2024 Dang et al finished porting Arc to SBCL, and performance increased so much that even the largest discussions no longer need splitting. The server is unresponsive/restarting a lot less frequently since these changes, too, despite continued growth in traffic and comments:
I really don’t appreciate BigCoffee pushing their anxiety juice on me.
Ever since I stopped drinking that mini-panic-attack potion, my heart hasn’t skipped a beat, my sleep has been great and I don’t feel tired all the time.
Hopefully one day people wake up (haha) and dump it the way we’ve dumped cigarettes.
Makes you wonder why we even have research universities when their results can be so easily DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC by HN’s top JavaScript developers and vibe coders.
I don’t tip either, simply because the work done wasn’t worth tipping. The only time I tipped was in a 7 stars restaurant, and the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table changing utensils and plates and filling the drinks. North America tipping “culture” is out of control, I remember picking up some street food and the guy asked for a tip.. Most restaurants nowadays buy the food from costco, machines do most of the cooking, and the waitress job can be literally replaced by a robot, it’s just a scam and it should be illegal actually.
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with 2 copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.
And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.
You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
If I could wave a wand and ban a single class of comments on HN, it would be this. Rambling, non-specific handwaving useless text.
> user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape.
It's ignorant, and its insulting, and it's stupid. You can read one or two KDE blog posts, look at the roadmap for Cosmic, look at the attention Valve has put into Linux and know that sentence is just rude. It's just so frustrating.
> People will tell you try this or that distro.
Dumbasses on reddit will. No one that has a single clue encourages distro-hopping.
This is especially bad when “GUI only” goes in the blank. In the early days I mostly worked with folks that were terrified of CLIs. Windows shops typically.
I still run across it sometimes, and it’s such a limiting form of identity.
Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition (whichever was the one with the most characters) as well as Street Fighter Alpha were great for the arcade machine.
Most of my buddies at the time would come over, have a beer, immediately hang it on the boat-coozy cup holders (the ones that gyro) and go to town shoulder to shoulder playing SF2. The cup holders gyro would prevent the beers from spilling as the arcade cabinet rocked back and forth from two grown men having a virtual fist fight. Best times.
They just like banning stuff. Guns, child porn, whatever is just a pretense to restrict your freedoms. That's what governments, any and all governments, do.
> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.
It’s much more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.
A friend of mine has all these failed hobbies he tells everyone he’s going to do, then gives up on. I wait a few months before telling people I’m doing something so I’m fairly confident it’s something I will carry on.
I truly hate, more than anything else in the tech discourse, that this gets trotted out every time the discussion of RAM comes up. "unUsED rAM iS wASTED RAm", always used to defend and justify abhorrent and incompetent software development practices. Even with 32gb, I routinely run into out-of-memory crashes on a near-daily basis with workloads that should not in principle be anywhere near that usage.
If they were making decisions based on RAM, they were almost certainly encountering real-world issues which prompted looking at their usage statistics in the first place, rather than just looking up their RAM usage metrics for funsies.
I may not need this sort of shell bling. And I don't use it. But my first Unix system was an early version of Xenix, which had the original Bourne shell that didn't even support cursor up to get a previous command. (I do use cursor up, C-r, and the shell editing commands.)
But yesterday's conveniences become today's essentials, and those who came in after me have their expectations set by the much more sophisticated things available at the time. Like, I'm still flabbergasted by people—working professionals—who go "I can't program without syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and my IDE generally going bing bing wahoo at me as I work, and I don't know how anybody can." We just type the code in. Like we all had to back in the day.
Anyway I can certainly see where someone younger than about 35, or who came to Linux late, would be completely at sixes and sevens without their colorized racing-stripes shell prompt.
I got this advice in 1998. I have the book. I found it useful for the "art" part. It got me through the projects that I was working on at the time, but personally it didn't help me with the fundamentals. Paraphrasing what has been said on this site many times in the past: AoE is a great first book in practical electronics if you already have an undergraduate degree in physics. I showed my brother AoE when he was building guitar pedals and he couldn't make sense of it and said it was obviously assuming things that he didn't know (he had no high-school science background).
There are a lot of potential and/or assumed pre-requistites even for basic electronics: high school physics, first-year calculus, maybe a differential equations course, certainly familiarity with complex numbers. As I understand it EEs take vector calculus and classical electromagnetism, that's a long road for self-study. For that reason it's hard to give general advice about where to begin.
For someone starting out I think the first things to study are DC and then AC analysis of passive circuits (networks of resistors, capacitors, inductors), starting with networks of resistors. Ohms Law, what current and voltage actually mean, some basic introduction to the physics passive components. This is the basics, and I don't see AoE getting anyone over this hump. This could be learnt in many ways, electronics technicians and amateur radio people know this stuff -- there are no doubt courses outside university both on line and in person. If we're talking books, get a second hand copy of Grob's "Basic Electronics." Once that's covered you can move on to semiconductors. I can recommend Malvino's "Electronic Principles," but this book won't teach you about resistors, capacitors and inductors. After that I think the Art of Electronics would be approachable. And also more specialised topics like digital design or operational amplifier circuits.
A book that usually gets a mention is Paul Scherz "Practical Electronics for Inventors." I got that book later, I personally found it a bit overwhelming with the mixture of really basic practical stuff combined with more advanced circuit theory, but it's no doubt popular for a reason.
Another standard recommendation is to buy one ARRL Handbook from each decade (I have 1988), the older ones have less advanced (hence more accessible) material. But reading the "Electronics Fundamentals" chapter is no substitute for Grob and Malvino.
It's amazing how we still haven't learnt that.