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zigman1 commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?    · Posted by u/unsupp0rted
gopalv · a month ago
> What Trick of the Trade took you too long to learn?

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly"

And as a corollary, every complex system that works came from a simple system that works.

I learned this in programming, but now I apply it on everything from motorcycle maintenance, home appliance repair to parenting.

--

Often the easier way to fix a complex system is to pretend that it could be simpler and then reintroduce the complexity-inducing requirements.

I had a professor who taught debugging as a whole another skill from programming and used to say "Most of programming is starting from an empty editor and debugging until your code works".

The debugging "lab" in Java course (in the year 2000) was one of my transformational after-school classes - where I got a java program which fits within 2-3 pages of print code with a bug and was told to go find it in print for ~20 minutes, then given 40 minutes with a debugger instead.

zigman1 · a month ago
My new life motto, thank you very much! You just made a stranger's day better
zigman1 commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?    · Posted by u/unsupp0rted
frontfor · a month ago
Some might object to this analogy, but I view life like investing in an index fund. It’s a diversified bet across many aspects of life and many projects (akin to how an index fund is a diversified bet across companies, sectors, geographies). Many of the bets will fail (much like many companies in the market will crash or delist), but some will deliver so much return they carry the rest, but you don’t know which ones and when ahead of time. It will be volatile, but if you persist and survive in the long run the expected outcome tends upwards.
zigman1 · a month ago
Not trying to be rude towards you, but I am always a bit shocked and a bit sad hearing people take their life as an investment strategy. I understand your point of view, but life also needs to be lived, not experienced as a constant chart moving up and right. My brother was/is like that, who is calculating profits and opportunities when hanging out with his friends, and will stay friend with someone as long as he will get something out of that himself. I find it a bit weird.

However, I understand if you are coming from a poor background, most of your life resolves around how to improve it, so me not knowing anything about you, I am not judging you for this, just find it different.

zigman1 commented on Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"   simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/simonw
bojan · 2 months ago
In the Netherlands we have this phenomenon that around 20% of voters keep voting for the new "Messiah", a right-wing populist politician that will this time fix everything.

When the party inevitably explodes due to internal bickering and/or simply failing to deliver their impossible promises, a new Messiah pops up, propped by the national media, and the cycle restarts.

That being said, the other 80% is somewhat consistent in their patterns.

zigman1 · 2 months ago
This is almost 40% in Slovenia, but for a moderate without a clear program.

Every second election cycle Messiah like that becomes the prime minister.

zigman1 commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends   pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits
fuzztester · 2 months ago
sounds like some cool automations, thanks.

by api you mean youtube api?

zigman1 · 2 months ago
In this particular case I call a commercial api by supdata

And I use youtube api to extract metadata of the video(s)

zigman1 commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends   pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits
fuzztester · 2 months ago
examples?
zigman1 · 2 months ago
My very first thing was automation of placing my journal entry to appropriate Google Drive folder. I write my brain dump/journal everyday in Google Docs, and if I just click "New document, it places it in the root GDrive folder, and I had to move it manually which I am to lazy to do it.

LLM helped me write a python script that searches the root folder, finds the right document (name is always the date of the day), and searches for the right folder in assigned Google Drive repository (and creates a yearly or monthly folder if a new month starts).

It also helped me create a yaml script for Github actions to trigger this once every day.

I felt like a magician. Since then I created second brain databases, internal index of valuable youtube videos, where I call the api to get transcripts and send it to llm, other note taking automations etc etc

zigman1 commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends   pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits
hiAndrewQuinn · 2 months ago
You can make an awful lot of useful little tools with an LLM, vanilla JavaScript, GitHub Pages, and the user's own localStorage as a semi-persistence layer. Two 9s and cross-platform to boot.

Recently I made a diet checklist [1] that I've been following more or less to the letter 5 days out of the week. I have a little Android button that just opens right up to the web page. I click, click, click, then move on with my day. If I feel I need to change something I can copy a plain text screenshot of what's on there currently and chat with Gemini about it.

I'm really liking this new wave of technology.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/diet-checklist/

zigman1 · 2 months ago
+1 over this. As someone without a deep technical background, LLMs enabled me to improve my life unimaginably, being able to quickly sketch and develop small features that remove every day annoyance.
zigman1 commented on The Shape of the Essay Field   paulgraham.com/field.html... · Posted by u/luisb
zigman1 · 3 months ago
I find the analogy with the car in the beginning a bit weird. He says it is not important to know, and only a handful of readers will learn something from it.

But later he states that "the essay is something you write to figure something out". So why contemplating about the audience and how important it is to them in the first place?

Maybe I was nudged because I enjoy reading and listening knowledgeable people about (classic) cars, but i wonder if pg would make the same statement if the subject of the essay would be a computer science technicality or obscurity.

zigman1 commented on GPT-4.5   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
ukuina · 6 months ago
My site https://hackyournews.com does this!

Been keeping it alive and free for 18 months.

zigman1 · 6 months ago
Wow I find this very useful, thanks! Bookmarked.
zigman1 commented on Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
zigman1 · 6 months ago
Did at least their competitors seed?
zigman1 commented on When your last name is Null, nothing works   wsj.com/lifestyle/null-la... · Posted by u/impish9208
rco8786 · 6 months ago
My last name is a popular Irish name with an apostrophe in it. I have tons of issues with my name in forms. I'm basically a walking SQL injection detector.

But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.

zigman1 · 6 months ago
Slightly related thought, but I have a popular Slovene name with letter Ž (pronounced as g in mirage) in it. Since I started living abroad, I use the letter Z, even when introducing myself. It often throws people off guard completely and it is much easier to use just Z.

So I guess some cultural aspect of names will also disappear, I know I want I children to have a bit more "international" names.

u/zigman1

KarmaCake day258June 10, 2021View Original