SL61 (u/SL61) - Readit News

SL61 commented on Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) norvig.com/21-days.html... · Posted by u/smartmic

II2II · a month ago

These books shouldn't be dismissed since they provide people with a foundation for further learning. They also offer a friendly introduction to programming, rather than imposing an intimidating wall that will keep people away. It is also important to note that these books break the learning into 24 one hour modules, or something similar, so they can have reasonable coverage of a programming language.

If these books have a failing, it has little to do with the concept and everything to do with being poorly written.

SL61 · a month ago

Yes, the biggest fault of those books was that the titles were a cheap gimmick. The implication that you could blow through the book in a day and know the language is kind of a lose-lose, because it undersells the difficulty of the lessons to newcomers and sounds patently ridiculous to professionals. Realistically, someone who has no prior programming experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial.

My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.

SL61 commented on Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009) wisdomandwonder.com/link/... · Posted by u/borski

90s_dev · a month ago

To be fair, if you learn computer science well enough to thoroughly understand Scheme, I don't think it'll take more than a few weeks during the summer to learn Python.

SL61 · a month ago

One of the big shifts in academia over the past couple decades is that, for any number of reasons, students today are less likely to self-study or tinker outside of classes and internships. The increased prevalence of basic bootcamp-style classes like "Let's Build a Rails App" in CS programs is because departments can no longer assume that students will explore things like that in their spare time.

SL61 commented on Intel CEO Letter to Employees morethanmoore.substack.co... · Posted by u/fancy_pantser

johngalt · a month ago

The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?

There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."

SL61 · a month ago

Remember that executives answer to the board of directors. The board's job is to make sure execs do things that make the company money, or in practical terms, "things the board thinks will make the company money".

A sensible, sober CEO would still need a lot of political capital to push back against a boardroom that's hounding them to jump on the latest hype train. You certainly won't get that from a CEO who just took that position a few months ago.

A sensible, sober boardroom that doesn't push their execs to jump on the hype train would need to answer to angry shareholders. It's almost certain that >50% will support the latest fad and would vote out a board that they perceive as being behind the times.

That's where startups and privately owned companies get their natural advantage of being able to go against the grain.

SL61 commented on Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on? · Posted by u/_false

ecshafer · a month ago

No the salaries aren't high. They are typically lower than other software engineer salaries. There are a large number of contractors from Indian consulting companies with "experience in cobol" to make run of the mill cobol cheap enough.

The very high salaries you hear about sometimes are always for VERY specific mainframes that are extremely old with a lot of quirks, and are usually being paid to consultants.

SL61 · a month ago

A while back I came across job listings for a COBOL consultancy near me that only seems to hire fresh grads for well below market rate (not much higher than retail/restaurant jobs - this is in a cheaper part of the US). They promised to train their employees from the ground up and implied that COBOL knowledge would set them up for a really profitable career. It seems like they were taking advantage of the common advice: "just become a COBOL developer, it pays well because nobody wants to use COBOL!" But I'm skeptical that someone coming out of that consultancy with 2 or 3 years of experience in nothing but COBOL would do well on the job market.

SL61 commented on Why are credit card rates so high? libertystreeteconomics.ne... · Posted by u/voxleone

tmoertel · 5 months ago

Or get the best of both worlds: buy now and always pay off your full credit-card bill so you never pay interest and get, in effect, a free short-term loan.

SL61 · 5 months ago

I've made thousands of dollars in cashback and rewards from my credit cards without ever paying a cent in interest. That's the main value proposition of credit cards for people who never carry a balance.

SL61 commented on A vending machine, on the internet threekindwords.com/blog/v... · Posted by u/EFFALO

ipsento606 · 6 months ago

> The machine was jammed. It wasn’t a big deal. I shrugged and moved on to buy my groceries.

I resonate with the sentiment, but this is very far from my experience selling cheap software products.

I had multiple people reach out to me because a software upgrade they paid $2 for 8 years ago stopped working. And they were, like, pissed about it.

SL61 · 6 months ago

I run a free website with a monthly active user count in the 100k range. When something breaks - even if it's a really niche feature or a compatibility issue with an outdated browser - I get an army of furious users contacting me however they can. I can't imagine what would happen to me if the site completely broke or went down for more than a few hours.

SL61 commented on 1 bug, $50k in bounties, a Zendesk backdoor gist.github.com/hackermon... · Posted by u/mmsc

zer0x4d · a year ago

This is worse than Docusign. What do 6000 people at Zendesk do? It's a simple ticket management software with maybe 10 features

SL61 · a year ago

A lot of them are probably sales and support.

SL61 commented on What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine nrm.org/2024/08/mad/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

scottyah · a year ago

I think the Onion has become very political over the last year or so. When I started following the Babylon Bee, they were already very political to me.

SL61 · a year ago

The Onion has always been very political with a liberal slant. I have some of their print collections from the early 2000s and they're similar to today's Onion with maybe a little more edge.

Their gun control headline "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Sa...) dates to 2014.

SL61 commented on Anatomy of a credit card rewards program bitsaboutmoney.com/archiv... · Posted by u/disgruntledphd2

kasey_junk · a year ago

This is mostly not true of the local shops near me. They’ve stopped taking cash because costs of cash are higher than cards.

SL61 · a year ago

There seems to be a split in my area with small businesses, mostly along generational lines.

The ones run by younger people are very credit-card-first, love not dealing with cash, etc. They usually have one of those Stripe iPad things. If you do pay with cash, they'll get a bit flustered because it breaks their flow.

The ones run by older people are either cash-only or try hard to disincentivize customers from using credit cards, sometimes with signs guilting customers about how much money card companies take from businesses.

It really feels like a generational thing depending on what people are used to. The older shop owners remember when cards were a lot more rare, and they've seen their swipe fee expenditure go up over the years. While the younger owners have only ever lived in a credit card oriented world and just bake the swipe fees into their prices from the beginning.

SL61 commented on Why is it so hard to build an airport? construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/gmays

emiliobumachar · a year ago

One can be surprised by the traffic increase. "When I moved here 25 years ago, there was one flight in the morning and one in the afternoon. Now it's every 5 minutes from 6 am to 10 pm and they're trying to extend it post 10 pm!"

SL61 · a year ago

This is what happened in my childhood home. We lived within a couple miles of a mid-sized airport. We could always hear the planes to some extent, but over time they expanded their cargo operations, which typically fly at night. They also added a new flight path that went directly over our house, so it became common for 747s to fly 2000 feet above us every 15-20 minutes through the night. I was fortunate to be a heavy sleeper.