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cyco130 commented on Malleable Software   mdubakov.me/malleable-sof... · Posted by u/tablet
tablet · 2 days ago
The problem here is in definition. Context is quite diverse and better practice for team A is an absolute disaster for team B.
cyco130 · 2 days ago
In fewer words: It was already a fairly flexible and customizable tool. But then came a time when a client requested faster horses we could show them our car instead and they recognized the value. (And occasionally, when _they_ requested a car instead of our faster horses, _we_ recognized the value and implemented it).
cyco130 commented on Malleable Software   mdubakov.me/malleable-sof... · Posted by u/tablet
tablet · 2 days ago
The problem here is in definition. Context is quite diverse and better practice for team A is an absolute disaster for team B.
cyco130 · 2 days ago
Absolutely. When we started growing (I was employee #3, we were about 20 people when I left), we didn't use our own product for our own needs. It wasn't designed for a tiny startup, it would be like building a sand castle with a bulldozer.

But we started as a "boutique" company that implemented everything requested by our then small number of clients (mainly out of desperation, we were self-funded and we didn't have much leeway, we needed those clients). It was as flexible as it gets before the LLM times.

But after a while, you start noticing patterns, an understanding of what works and what doesn't in a given context. Our later customers rarely requested a feature that we didn't already have or we didn't have a better alternative of. It's not like we had a one-size-fits-all solution that we forced on everyone. We offered a few alternative ways of working that fit different contexts (hiring an airline pilot is a very different context than hiring a flight attendant). And in time, this know-how started to become our most important value proposition.

At some point we even started joking about leaving the software business and offering recruitment consulting services instead.

cyco130 commented on Malleable Software   mdubakov.me/malleable-sof... · Posted by u/tablet
cyco130 · 2 days ago
For six years I worked in a SaaS startup that built an applicant tracking system (a tool to manage recruitment efforts in big/mid-sized companies) tailored for the local market of the country we lived in. My experience tells me that our main value was in forcing them to rethink their recruitment processes, not adapting to their existing ones that were usually all over the place.

As much as I want to believe the opposite to be true as a “power user”, good tools often force you to adopt better practices, not the other way around.

cyco130 commented on PHP 8.5 adds pipe operator   thephp.foundation/blog/20... · Posted by u/lemper
bapak · 24 days ago
It's chaining without having to vary the return of each function. In JS you cannot call 3.myMethod(), but you could with 3 |> myMethod
cyco130 · 24 days ago
It requires parentheses `(3).myMethod()` but you can by monkey patching the Number prototype. Very bad idea, but you absolutely can.
cyco130 commented on It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA   jonoalderson.com/conjectu... · Posted by u/tambourine_man
dzhiurgis · a month ago
Never thought about scroll position (tho SPA I’ve built recently I think does it ok). How do you solve it?
cyco130 · a month ago
I write some of my thoughts on this sone years ago. The library described at the end is now fairly out of date but the ideas and suggestions are still good, I think.

https://dev.to/cyco130/how-to-get-client-side-navigation-rig...

cyco130 commented on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore   archaeologymag.com/2025/0... · Posted by u/hilux
tremon · 2 months ago
The original argument was that neanderthals didn't have good language skills because "their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds". Pointing out that deaf or mute humans still have complex language skills seems like an adequate counterargument to me.
cyco130 · 2 months ago
Fair enough. I fully agree.
cyco130 commented on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore   archaeologymag.com/2025/0... · Posted by u/hilux
contrarian1234 · 2 months ago
Do you think a community of deaf people wouldn't be able to do it? :)
cyco130 · 2 months ago
Deaf homo sapiens sapienses do have perfectly good language skills.
cyco130 commented on I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it   philmckinney.substack.com... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker
lukevp · 3 months ago
Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
cyco130 · 3 months ago
It also had the best “swipe” text typing mode for Turkish. iPhone got it very recently and it’s close to useless and Android one was meh last I checked.
cyco130 commented on Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data   bbenchoff.github.io/pages... · Posted by u/wanderingjew
selcuka · 3 months ago
When I was a kid, I had a ZX Spectrum 48K with a cassette tape as the storage unit. Tapes are notoriously unreliable. One day I loaded a game [1] and got the dreaded "R tape loading error".

Instead of adjusting the azimuth and retrying, I decided to take my chances and typed RUN to execute the one-line BASIC bootloader that starts the actual machine-code game.

To my surprise, the game started, but there was something odd. Even though I should have lost all my lives, the game kept going. Somehow the loading error had modified a few bytes in the game that were responsible for checking the game-over condition.

I finished the game several times without ever seeing the Game Over message. Well, the probability isn't as low as accidentally writing a game from scratch, but it's certainly interesting when you think about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebirds_(video_game)

cyco130 · 3 months ago
Another way to induce memory corruption glitches on old computers was to quickly turn off and on again. I never managed to get anything useful like your unlimited lives hack out of it but I did see lots of interesting graphical glitches on my Atari 800XL back in the day.

u/cyco130

KarmaCake day491June 24, 2021
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Developer, musician, and occasionally other things. Creator of Rakkas, Hattip, and vavite.
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