Hacker News: arbie

New comment by arbie in "Generate Flowcharts from Text"

arbie — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 22:52:43 +0000

Input text in https://www.bpmn-sketch-miner.ai/doc/00-intro.html to create a BPMN, download it and edit in Camunda Modeler?

New comment by arbie in "Show HN: Dumbdown – A dumb alternative to Markdown"

arbie — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 17:21:04 +0000

As someone that could never get into Markdown, this looks promising to me!

New comment by arbie in "I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit"

arbie — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 19:41:18 +0000

Caution: NewPipe may cause your entire Google account to get locked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759

New comment by arbie in "Bash $* and $@ (2017)"

arbie — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 03:09:37 +0000

> back in the 1990's ... everybody in VLSI design expected you to know Perl.

Has this changed at all?

New comment by arbie in "LaTeX, Instantly: Extract LaTeX from PDFs or Handwritten Notes"

arbie — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 01:39:37 +0000

This could blow Nebo out of the water.

New comment by arbie in "Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)"

arbie — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 06:09:56 +0000

Keyboard-only input is not antithetical to discoverability. You can have a menu system (including top-menu bar) with clear hotkeys displayed.

New comment by arbie in "Generating a Java program with 90% less code"

arbie — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 17:30:39 +0000

What if the IDE did not traverse a specific file during the global search and replace?

Are you relying on a correct and comprehensive project/workspace setup within the IDE?

New comment by arbie in "Today’s Top Tech Skills"

arbie — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 18:18:20 +0000

I think we are seeing the difference between software development and software engineering laid bare.

The distinction is similar to a property developer and a civil engineer. Both create buildings, but one does it at scale by offloading functions to known entities and prepackaged solutions, while the other understands one domain in depth.

Both are needed in any team or organization, because not every solution needs to be "engineered" (a Dockerized Redis instance without SSL or auth behind a corporate firewall may survive untouched for a decade), but sometimes you have to engineer something that withstands gale-force winds at 1000 ft height.

New comment by arbie in "Google Kills Cloud Print"

arbie — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 03:49:52 +0000

"250M printers compromised by Google Cloud Print" is an ugly look. It won't matter at that time that Google rescued a beloved product from being Deep-Sixed.

New comment by arbie in "Google Kills Cloud Print"

arbie — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 03:17:30 +0000

No one? It is an open standard originally created by Apple.

New comment by arbie in "uBlock Origin: Address first-party tracker blocking"

arbie — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 18:44:42 +0000

Isn't NaCl deprecated now?

New comment by arbie in "Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities"

arbie — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 18:40:51 +0000

Can the Server be launched on a Windows machine?

New comment by arbie in "Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities"

arbie — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 18:22:36 +0000

Is there a Windows or Web client for DevonThink?

New comment by arbie in "Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities"

arbie — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 18:08:01 +0000

If it (or Notion.so) supported Inking, I would switch completely from my combination of GDocs, GKeep and GoodNotes5.

Will see if I can contribute to this project.

New comment by arbie in "Why Is the Migration to Python 3 Taking So Long?"

arbie — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 23:31:37 +0000

In ten years, there will be serious money in it as enterprise codebases need to be renewed.

New comment by arbie in "L.A. temporarily suspends Uber’s permit to rent out electric scooters and bikes"

arbie — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 20:03:15 +0000

Public transit exposes everyone's full routes, anyway.

Metrocards can lead back to the payment card used for the purchase, and buses (which also record passenger ingress/egress) can remember all swiped Metrocards.

New comment by arbie in "L.A. temporarily suspends Uber’s permit to rent out electric scooters and bikes"

arbie — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 18:45:00 +0000

This is a fascinating piece of history, the Taxi Riots of 1934: https://untappedcities.com/2015/02/05/today-in-nyc-history-t...

New comment by arbie in "They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken"

arbie — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 19:48:36 +0000

There are many industries where the workflow espoused in the manual IS the secret sauce, and, once replicated, can be replaced by a much cheaper product.

In these cases, you will never recoup your NRE.

New comment by arbie in "They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken"

arbie — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 19:44:27 +0000

I agree completely. Just observing users stumbling through what you had thought was a blindingly-obvious, low-friction workflow is an eye-opener.

Sometimes, you have used your own code way too much to judge effectiveness.

Having a no-agenda meeting with users is also a great idea, but it is important to set scope on feature requests before it snowballs into a request for the moon.

New comment by arbie in "Some Employees Chafe as Google’s New Internal Rules Take Hold"

arbie — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 02:39:03 +0000

The difficulty is in rolling back previously unlimited freedom.