HN user

Calamitous

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Admin of Ctrl-C.club. I have been manufacturing high-quality software bugs for over 30 years.

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news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: When to Quit?

Calamitous
64pts87
ctrl-c.club 11y ago

Ctrl-C.club, a Tilde.club-like for practicing programmers

Calamitous
1pts0
blogs.discovermagazine.com 13y ago

How the Wet-Dog Shake Gets Mammals Dry in No Time Flat

Calamitous
13pts0
techcrunch.com 14y ago

Google Acquires Zave Networks To Bulk Up Commerce

Calamitous
6pts0
media.pragprog.com 15y ago

Agile Web Development with Rails 4th ed. released

Calamitous
1pts0
calamitylane.com 15y ago

Hidden Chrome Features on CR-48

Calamitous
21pts12
calamitylane.com 15y ago

Chrome OS on the CR-48: It Has Developer Bits

Calamitous
3pts0
demandprogress.org 15y ago

Congress To Vote On Great Firewall of America

Calamitous
1pts0
www.guardian.co.uk 15y ago

This is a news website article about a scientific paper: Brilliant

Calamitous
1pts2
letsfreckle.com 15y ago

How Freelancers Can Avoid Old Boot Soup

Calamitous
66pts13
jenniferlawler.com 16y ago

For Jessica

Calamitous
101pts13
volokh.com 16y ago

How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy

Calamitous
65pts22
hotair.com 16y ago

Congress about to limit political speech of bloggers?

Calamitous
10pts1
reason.com 16y ago

The FCC Makes Its Move on Net Neutrality

Calamitous
2pts0
hotair.com 16y ago

The Wall Street regulation overhaul gives FTC authority over the Internet

Calamitous
12pts6
blog.creativethink.com 16y ago

Tom Hirshfield's Rules of Thumb - Thinking About Problems

Calamitous
2pts0
www.weeklystandard.com 16y ago

Pelosi Breaks Pledge to Put Health Care Bill Online 72 Hours Before Vote

Calamitous
1pts0
www.reason.com 16y ago

FCC Chair Genachowski declares himself Top Cop of the Internet

Calamitous
3pts1
calamitylane.com 17y ago

A Rails Developer Spends One Week With Merb (and HAML and JQuery and DataMapper)

Calamitous
1pts0

The only anti-phishing program I've ever seen that was even a little effective was at one company I worked at, where there was an ongoing phishing test.

Users were randomly selected to get the test, and each phish was hand-crafted to trick people specifically at our company (but using only publicly available information). Anonymized results were posted quarterly, divided by department.

I only got fooled once, but man, it felt so bad to see Engineering show up on the dashboard with one hit that quarter.

(Sales was usually at the top of the list, which makes sense, since they interface with a lot of folks outside the org)

That's because it moves from being a project to being a process. I've tried to express this at my current job.

They want to take time out to write a lot of unit tests, but they're not willing to change the process to allow/expect devs to add unit tests along with each feature they write.

I'll be surprised if all the tests are still passing two months after this project, since nobody runs them.

These are surprisingly often easy to answer

I agree that maintenance costs are often overlooked/ignored, but I'm curious how you get answers on the costs. I've never found it particularly easy to get reliable information on maintenance costs.

There’s still some of that feeling in little pockets around the Internet. The tildeverse (https://tildeverse.org) might interest you; it’s a loose group of servers that offer free shell accounts for hosting simple web pages, chatting, programming, or playing around on a mostly unrestricted Linux box.

I run http://ctrl-c.club, one of the oldest tildes. We’re (mostly) closed to new signups, but if you’re interested, send me an email to admin@ctrl-c.club and we’ll get you in.

Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.

That’s what responsibility is: taking lumps for making mistakes.

If I make a mistake on the road and end up killing someone, I can absolutely be held liable for manslaughter.

I don’t know if jail time is the right answer, but there absolutely needs to be some accountability.

Ludum Mortuus Est 2 years ago

Nobody wants deflation.

I hear this argument regularly, but I’ve never understood why. Hyperinflation is historically a bad thing, but whenever I ask about deflation, I just get hand-waving about the Great Depression. Is there any reading that lays out the dangers of deflation?

In business, I have four "bad words": just, only, simply, and obviously.

Used in a work context, they are nearly always used in an attempt to diminish the perceived effort of something, so I get very sketched out when anyone (even/especially other programmers) starts throwing them around.