Hacker News: sas224dbm

New comment by sas224dbm in "Laws of Software Engineering"

sas224dbm — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:07:43 +0000

Oooh, saw Andrei's name pop up and remember his books on C++ back in the day .. ran into a systems engineer a while ago that asked why during a tech review asked why some data size wasn't 1000 instead of 1024.. like err ??

New comment by sas224dbm in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

sas224dbm — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:24:53 +0000

"shall" and "must"

New comment by sas224dbm in "How Britain built some of the world’s safest roads"

sas224dbm — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:37:21 +0000

A favorite past-time back in the day was driving at night from pub to pub along the 'back roads' (B-roads specifically in the UK) as fast as 'possible'. There were typically no street lights, however lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger. It was fun at the time, but i wouldn't do it now .. lol ..

New comment by sas224dbm in "Every Visual Workflow Tool Is Just Excel for Developers Who Gave Up"

sas224dbm — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:24:28 +0000

of course it's re-usable .. most passionate excel jockeys would agree, as long it's their VBA that gets reused

New comment by sas224dbm in "The Secret Stanford Program No One's Heard About"

sas224dbm — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:15:24 +0000

Tony Wheeler has a lot to answer for

New comment by sas224dbm in "Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens"

sas224dbm — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 23:58:41 +0000

This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.

New comment by sas224dbm in "Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine"

sas224dbm — Tue, 27 May 2025 02:00:14 +0000

Grandpa can help with that too

New comment by sas224dbm in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

sas224dbm — Fri, 16 May 2025 10:41:33 +0000

A Gattaca moment ?

Kona Blue Unclassified [pdf]

sas224dbm — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 22:36:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/UAP_RECORDS_RESEARCH/AARO_DHS_Kona_Blue.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092686

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by sas224dbm in "AT&T Says Personal Information from 73M Customers Leaked on the Dark Web"

sas224dbm — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 18:54:34 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20240330173821/https://www.forbe...

New comment by sas224dbm in "Life on board a British nuclear submarine (2012)"

sas224dbm — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 23:01:20 +0000

I went as a contractor (fixing a port from PDP 11/44 -> SUN 5/110) on-board a UK nuclear sub back in the 90s, and had a contractor berth in the 'bomb shop'. I slept underneath the Tigerfish MK24 torpedoes, smelly and greasy, but i don't remember it being cold !!

New comment by sas224dbm in "“Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)"

sas224dbm — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 13:58:57 +0000

Some good stuff in there, but heard most of it in earlier publications. Reading Steve McConnell's "Software Estimation" covers a bunch of it, Cone of Uncertainty etc etc.

Here's where i've seen estimation become accurate:

1) The people doing the work are estimating the work, and KNOW the software base they are estimating for.

2) Technology being used is not shifting considerably for the piece being estimated.

3) Processes being used to go from requirements elicitation to acceptance are not shifting dramatically for the new piece of work.

You have to have probably 2 of these 3 to have any chance of reasonably accurate estimates. I've seen this work on a fairly large (1 MLOC C++) sonar system development. After a couple of 'late' releases, where those 3 premises were not true, estimation became better, and after 3 or 4 releases, teams were getting pretty accurate, such that customer trust went through the roof.

If you don't have 2 or 3 of those ticked off, you'd better add in a bunch of padding, or get some risk $$ from the C-suite signed off.

New comment by sas224dbm in "The SAFe Delusion"

sas224dbm — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 19:56:03 +0000

I have been involved in 2 medium sized-ish (~300) software support projects for western-nation's land forces project that brought in SAFe with a fanfare. Lots of ($$) training, everybody gulping down the coolade etc etc. It started off OK, but as with most of these ideological methodologies, our projects' circumstances started to clash with the SAFe 'way'. Our customer was very fond of his existing rituals (meetings, committees, progress meetings etc), but we also folded in all the SAFe rituals too. It seemed we were in meetings too much of the time, and we did a poor job of convincing the customer to move wholesale to the SAFe way. In addition, the organizational structure and governance models never operated in the SAFe way, with the customer's insistence on being in our shorts on every decision hampered most of the 'delegate decisions as deep as possible' philosophy. At the end of the day, it steel feels like RUP re-invented for 'agile' .. never again.

New comment by sas224dbm in "The Life of a Backpacker in Asia in the 1970s (2018)"

sas224dbm — Thu, 26 May 2022 22:07:23 +0000

I was backpacking around Asia in '94 .. my connection to the rest of the world was my trusty Sony shortwave radio (ICF-SW1) .. anyone else remember those glorious days ? :)

New comment by sas224dbm in "iPhone is a terrible Product Name"

sas224dbm — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 04:42:45 +0000

Why are they still called phones though ? that's my point .. essentially you have a computer in your hands that happens to have an ability to make voice calls .. I was looking for stats on how people use their devices but can't find much actual data

iPhone is a terrible Product Name

sas224dbm — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 03:57:37 +0000

I'm presuming that the iPhone is not being used for phone calls by the majority of today's users.

What should Ive and Jobs have named it to make sense in in the 202x's and onwards ?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133841

Points: 2

# Comments: 11

New comment by sas224dbm in "Wait, what –. Mass Zoom Firing Boss back at the helm?"

sas224dbm — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 04:03:29 +0000

Yeah, good call.. feel free to remove "Zoom" as you're reading. I agree, it's irrelevant in some aspects, however, i would posit he likened to the idea of Zoom for dismissing his staff, as he could do this without actually looking into the the 'whites of their eyes' while dismissing them.

New comment by sas224dbm in "Wait, what –. Mass Zoom Firing Boss back at the helm?"

sas224dbm — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:48:24 +0000

that's exactly what the remaining employees are discussing over their Wednesday evening drinkies too !

New comment by sas224dbm in "Wait, what –. Mass Zoom Firing Boss back at the helm?"

sas224dbm — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:43:12 +0000

As in so many other domains, i'm disappointed but not surprised. The corporation let this douche-bag 'cool-off' and is now bringing him back to invigorate the company .. awesome .. can't wait to see how that pans out

Wait, what –. Mass Zoom Firing Boss back at the helm?

sas224dbm — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 02:44:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60059259

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003776

Points: 19

# Comments: 12