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One of my faults is "When somebody tries to explain something I hear 'A' and everyone else in the room hears 'B'". And vice-versa. But if someone can iterate a very VERY rough cut of what they want and hand it off to a design / development team ... well ... damn. That might make everyone's life a lot easier.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.

Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.

Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340325

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I don't want to watch 45 minutes of "live coverage" from a news chopper hovering over a building on fire (or, from recent events in Los Angeles, water being sprayed on some storage tanks) while all of the talking heads try to make it sound interesting and relevant. Or, even worse IMO, a helicopter following a car chase for three hours, from freeway to surface streets and back to the freeway. Or a helicopter hovering over somebody's house for an hour because there are dead people inside.

This is worth 30 seconds of coverage. Tops. Move on to the actual news, please, and if it's worthy of a follow-up when there's an actual conclusion, another 30 seconds to wrap it up.

If I turn on the news and see a helicopter shot, I change the channel.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172848

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/move-fast-break-things-fac...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Autonomy?

[autocorrect strikes again! :-)]

I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it.

IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and rent-seeking, to my own bought-and-paid-for computer sitting on my desk that did exactly what I told it to do using software that never changed unless I wanted it to change, and now we're back to dumb terminals (browsers) that talk to mainframes (the cloud) that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software and have gone back to renting me the software and pushing changes that I never asked for and never wanted in the first place.

I will never use spicy autocomplete for anything, and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job. I see a very dark future for computing if real skills are all replaced with garbage being vomited out by rules engines that harvested their "guess the next word" results from today's internet.

In Firefox, about:config > general.useragent.override > new string, click +, paste in the value from the website above, click the checkmark.

This will work most of the time on the sites that hired lazy, incompetent web developers to design their pages -- washingtonpost.com, lowes.com, and the worst offender of all, homedepot.com.

MS Press used to publish some amazing references. I have a LOT of 'em.

"I deficated this issue. Closed."

Anyone remember this one?

Microsoft Press: Learn Java Now (complete with J++ installation CD). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572314281

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

Just scroll down the page and look at the size of the completely self-contained executable programs. THIS is what Win32 is capable of. Something we always had with Win32 that was thrown away with .Net and C#.

And _please_ just spare me your opinions of how Steve Gibson "doesn't know anything about security". That's not what's important here. What's important is how freakin' small his full-on GUI stand-alone executables are.

EDIT: Just noticed this on his page.

Total Historical Count of files downloaded from this page: 52,292,601