itwrangler (u/itwrangler)

itwrangler commented on I am done. I give up · Posted by u/wakana

jurmous · 3 years ago

A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail and you have to be ok with that for yourself. Even how many times you try. It is ok, it does not make you a failure because you tried. It makes you a brave and daring person you tried.

It does not help that the media only celebrates the few lucky ones, and because they were lucky they will propagate all their steps of wonderful execution, but overlooking the fact that they were just with the right timing, market & people. That it was pure luck.

There are more journeys in life to be happy than being an entrepreneur. There are more paths towards personal fulfilment.

itwrangler · 3 years ago

so true. and luck can be a big factor in any aspect of life..

itwrangler commented on What Is Code? (2015) bloomberg.com/graphics/20... · Posted by u/jbredeche

galaxyLogic · 3 years ago

A great all around introduction to programming.

It poses an interesting question which I think it doesn't really answer well: "What Is the Relationship Between Code and Data?"

I can easily understand what a "program" is. It is a set of instructions we give to the computer for it to do something we want it to do.

But what is "data"?

itwrangler · 3 years ago

and there you have an unanswerable question! :-) at an atomic level in computing, as others have said, it's a stream of ones and zeroes.. after that everything else is implementation, i.e how to interpret, use, store etc. In fact it's one of the "bug bears" in computing that there are so many "data format standards" (used loosely not definitionally)..

or the age old joke: "The good thing about (data) standards is there are so many of them!"

itwrangler commented on Show HN: Pornpen.ai – AI-Generated Porn pornpen.ai/... · Posted by u/dreampen

itwrangler · 4 years ago

yeah, like, I was thinking just the other day.. "there's just not enough porn in the world" haha

itwrangler commented on Plex: Important notice of a potential data breach · Posted by u/Flollop

flexd · 4 years ago

I'm a long time Plex user, and I have not received this email. Not sure if I should be worried or if the breach has just affected a subset of users. I use random unique passwords for everything anyway, as long as no credit card details were taken it shouldn't be a big deal hopefully. I was able to log into the site now and no message was displayed at all.

Edit: Not sure why I would be getting down-voted for this. Security breaches are a big deal, but if the only result of this for the users is that we need to change our passwords that's a fairly good outcome, no? :-) The biggest hurdle ahead for Plex is to figure out exactly what these attackers did, if they were directly targeted and for how long they were in their network. A lot of the times a incident is discovered it's discovered a long time after the first breach (based on my own personal experience)

itwrangler · 4 years ago

I received email 5+ hours ago

itwrangler commented on Inky Impression 5.7“ – Colour e-ink display for Raspberry Pi core-electronics.com.au/g... · Posted by u/kristianp

itwrangler · 4 years ago

very cool, thanks for the video, enjoyed it, as well now being aware how easy it would be to 'project this' into something in the future should the need arise :-)

itwrangler commented on Writing for the internet across a human lifetime len.falken.directory/misc... · Posted by u/Curiositry

itwrangler · 4 years ago

Ok, I get it, I love technical elegance too :-) But if you'd like people to actually read what you write (and I get just writing for yourself too, I do a lot of that) then they shouldn't be the ones to pay the 'technical debt' IMO Sadly nobody (nobody = vast majority of users now) knows about RSS anymore.. Text - absolutely, no hyperlinks or images in the actual content - ok. I get it. However, it's like 10 minutes more work with the basic tools you outline to script outputting this stuff (without changing the base texts) into a browser in html with html links etc established through delivery code (which - html - after all, is the browsers lingua franca). IMO if you're bothering to put out content for users on the internet via http then it seems reasonable to do it in a way that they expect.. just my two penneth worth :-)

itwrangler commented on Using the wrong dictionary (2014) jsomers.net/blog/dictiona... · Posted by u/cosmojg

itwrangler · 4 years ago

Thanks for posting this :-)

itwrangler commented on I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer” visaalambalam.com/the-inv... · Posted by u/visaals

itwrangler · 4 years ago

This thread (the HN comments) is quite interesting, as opposed to the article which says pretty much nothing and is an email harvesting exercise.. If you're going make a statement such as the title (particularly prefixed with I) then you better say something about your own experience and why you believe your 'title proposition' is true.. if not, and you're not just 'fishing' (for hits and/or email addresses), why bother?

itwrangler commented on Ask HN: What are some must read books? · Posted by u/melonbar

itwrangler · 4 years ago

A smattering from my audible listening list which I particularly remember liking (this might actually be a 'less read books' list sorry ;-) ): Michael Palin - Erebus ; Alan Moore - Jerusalem ; Graeme Green - Travel with my Aunt ; Karen Maitland - A Company of Liars ; Louis de Bernieres - Captain Correlli's Mandolin ; Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose ; Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls ; Robert Harris - Imperium trilogy ...

I'd second for Master & Margarita and almost anything by Dostoyevsky

itwrangler commented on Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast? · Posted by u/dmje

itwrangler · 4 years ago

At 55 I can relate. I'm wondering in the tech space whether we happen to be the first generation that has spent our whole professional careers in tech (me electronics first, then computers, then networked systems, then internet systems, with a bit of dev. sprinkled throughout) and thus after 40 years of constant change you (or one) just gets to certain stage? I know I'm done (at least professionally, I've retired), although I still tinker with tech daily but out of pure interest. The last prof. gig I had I spent a lot of time thinking why am I spending so much time re-tooling, re-fixing, re-inventing the wheel? :-)