Hacker News: 20thCB

New comment by 20thCB in "Writing books is not really a good idea"

20thCB — Tue, 11 May 2021 14:52:34 +0000

Reading books has always been a niche activity. Many (most?) people don't have any books, and haven't read any since they were forced to at school. Of course HN readers will skew towards readers but they are the minority.

New comment by 20thCB in "Ask HN: What's your keyboard and what you love and hate about it?"

20thCB — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 17:18:28 +0000

I think you are right. I never think about my keyboard at all. None of my co-workers do either .

New comment by 20thCB in "Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?"

20thCB — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 14:21:25 +0000

My kids just type the calculation into Google.

New comment by 20thCB in "Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)"

20thCB — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 23:40:11 +0000

- I'm not young

There's your answer.

New comment by 20thCB in "It Can Happen to You"

20thCB — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 04:36:59 +0000

C string processing is the other "billion dollar mistake" we are all paying for decades later (in terms of slow programs, time wasted, power used etc).

New comment by 20thCB in "Learning Ruby: Things I Like, Things I Miss from Python"

20thCB — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 12:36:36 +0000

"If you learn for Rails, start with 5.2.3, webpacker and the other black magic in Rails 6 will frustrate you and currently eliminates a lot of the ease of getting started and building relatively sophisticated web apps quickly."

Anyone else agree with this?

New comment by 20thCB in "Show HN: Shopify's Top 90 Most Successful Startups in 2021"

20thCB — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 12:46:45 +0000

Exactly. Really odd to see them on this list.

New comment by 20thCB in "Short fat engineers are undervalued"

20thCB — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 23:13:32 +0000

Gotta laugh at the HN definition of "failure". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide a good career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.

New comment by 20thCB in "Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)"

20thCB — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 11:38:37 +0000

Martin Campbell-Kelly was my lecturer for "History of Computing" at Warwick University in 1986. Nice guy, and one of the few CS courses I actually enjoyed :-)

New comment by 20thCB in "What If You Could Do It All Over?"

20thCB — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 13:21:19 +0000

My 20s were spent living the single bachelor party life in London in the 90s. Noughties I had 3 kids and emigrated to Australia. Then I hit 40...then 50. Now I'm 52, still in good health. I have a job, a partner, family, a few savings. Sure I haven't written the next great novel or got a PHD, but I sure as hell don't worry about what might have been.

New comment by 20thCB in "What If You Could Do It All Over?"

20thCB — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 13:15:14 +0000

52 here, beat that.

New comment by 20thCB in "Developing a CLI Music Player in C# using Terminal.Gui"

20thCB — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 13:55:09 +0000

Gorillas.bas :-) Remember it well. Chucking bananas was fun!

New comment by 20thCB in "Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code"

20thCB — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 06:53:41 +0000

It's not common at all.

New comment by 20thCB in "WSL Getting GUI Support"

20thCB — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 01:38:57 +0000

Dual boot takes way too much time. WSL2 literally fires up instantly and then you have an actual Linux VM running actual Ubuntu or whatever. Just no GUI. You can then use Visual Studio Code (the Windows app) to develop for Linux or Windows. If you do Linux GUI work it's obviously not ideal.

New comment by 20thCB in "WSL Getting GUI Support"

20thCB — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 01:31:25 +0000

True. It's unfortunate that most people don't seem to realize this, based on WSL1. MS really haven't marketed WSL2 that well.