I, like probably most other people, tend to start a habit and then it quickly fades away, not necessarily due to lack of wanting. I find that I might want to start, for example, strecthing my hamstrings regularly, I do them for some days/weeks and then I forget some days, then forget some more, and then after a while I realise I haven't done any for months.
So I wrote a webapp that I usually myself constantly now, it's very basic. I enter a habit I want to keep up and then visit the site everyday and click the "done" button when its done. It also has a calendar so I can see how often I've been doing it because not every habit is to be done every day.
I started this for exercising but i'm not using it for very basic/stupid things. One example is cleaning my glasses. I would never remember to clean them and I'd occasionally realise I'm viewing the world through a layer of grime. I now click "done" every day and the world looks crystal clear.
I guess it's just gamified habits a little bit and its working really well for me. There's a ton of habit trackers out that but I never found anything simple and quick to use.
I got my first job out of college 29 years ago. For the first 10 years or so, the process was I guess you could say agile-like in that we certainly didn't do waterfall, we just talked about stuff, built stuff and banged it straight into production. Testing was not an official thing at all, somebody had a quick look-see if they felt like it.
My first 10 years on the job was Turbo Pascal and Delphi for various shops. Working in that old DOS-based Turbo IDE felt like magic, I remember plumping for a shocking blue, yellow and pink colour scheme - I miss Pascal. The move to Delphi was a huge change, OOP, native strings over 255 long and some truly unbelievable drag-and-drop GUI building functionality.
We had no source control until we started using Delphi, I think it was Subversion but there might have been something before that. Prior to SVN it was a case of baggsying report.pas for the day.
Thinking back, and maybe I've forgotten, but I don't think we shipped anything that was particularly worse than stuff I see getting shipped today. Yeah, stuff went wrong, but it still does. Without reviews, Git, CI, etc we still shipped something that largely worked and kept customers happy.
Code quality was bad. No standards were followed across the team, so files all had different styles. It wasn't uncommon to see procedures that were 100s, maybe 1000s, of lines long. Turbo Pascal's integrated debugging was a life-saver.
Unit testing was not a thing.
I think we wrote far more stuff ourselves, whereas today there's a lot more libraries and systems to use instead of building.
Obviously there was no Stack Overflow, I signed up to that when it first came online, it has been a game-changer. I read a lot more programming books back then, you had to. I think there was a lot more try-it-and-see work going on, I used to write many small apps just to work out how some thing needed to work before touching the main codebase, that's something I still do a lot today, I'm not sure the new-bloods do?
Work-life balance was absolutely fine, there was no pressure to work extra hours but I don't find that there has ever been. I've always prioritised family-time over work, I put in full effort for my contracted hours, the second they are up, I am gone.
I certainly enjoyed programming a lot more back then, it felt closer to the metal, it felt like a voyage of discovery, I couldn't just Google to find out how to pack a file down to 50k whilst keeping read-time quick, I mostly had to work it out myself, read a book or ask colleagues. You had to work harder to learn stuff, and I don't know, it felt like that hard-won knowledge stayed with me more than something I googled last week.
Moden languages have abstracted away a lot of the complexities and that is of course a good thing but I kind of miss the pain!
In my opinion the Oticon OPN hearing aid is the best on the market, I have been wearing it for 2 years or more and have zero complaints. I have tried aids from all manufacturers over the 40 years I've been wearing them, Oticon wins. GN ReSound are also very good. Phonak is the most popular but overrated IMO, havibng said that, Costco repackage Phonak aids and are almost certainly the cheapest place you will pick up top of the range aids.
It is important to test the aid during the trial period. They are never "pop them in and go" you will find some things too loud and others too quiet, a first fitting is rarely correct and certainly not the for the first time wearer. Check wind noise, background noise in bars and pubs, check what people sound like behind you and to the side. Do all the normal things you do everyday and see how the aids perform in those situations, many are not perfect everywhere, so what it sounds liek at home may be different to the office, etc.
Bluetooth connectivity has been a solved problem for many years. Most new-ish aids will work amazingly with iPhones and most with Android.
Check the apps. GN ReSound app is briliiant, Phonak's is too. Interestingly, Oticon have very little custom tuning in their app whereas other brands do (ie. you can move the bass/mid/treble etc) I thought this was a terrible mistake when I first got the OPNs but it was not, the aids are so good I never needed to fine tune them myself.
The "OTC" (over the counter) act is happening right now, which means hearing aids will be available to buy off the shelf and online. Some places are already doing this, Gn ReSound have a reseller online (I forget the name, Amplify?). But other brands like Oticon and Widex are still only available by going to a practioner and getting a fit from them.
If you do go and see a professional and get a hearing test and a fit, be very choosy, ask a LOT of questions. Just like any other profession, there's a human element and not all audiologists and registered hearing aid fitters are equal. Some will do a hearing test, fir the aids to the defaults settings and kick you out the door, you want someone who will tweak them based on your feedback.
I haven't posted much of late but check out our hearing aid info site at www dot hearingaidknow dot com.
Thank you! I really appreciate your thoughtful response.
One thing that led me to this realization was doing a simple app-based hearing test and then applying the audiogram to my airpod pros (after reading the thread below). The amount of extra detail I heard was startling - but also annoying in terms of things I didn’t care to have amplified. So in that sense, I may have slightly more than zero understanding of what tuning might sound like.
It is but, for me anyway, it's a world away from Facebook, Insta and similar sites in terms of quality and usefulness. I do find myself opening my phone and having a quick look down the HN homepage listing but I'm fairly safe in the knowledge that anything I do read will of decent quality and have some benefit.
The other big difference is that HN doesn't got out of its way to make you consume more or want to constantly come back, that's not their business model.
I travelled a fair distance to sign a contract with a third-party that I was contracting though for a major bank. They handed me a bunch of documents to sign and left me in a room for a while, I read them all thoroughly (took hours) and flagged up several things that were just plain wrong, stuff that made no sense and, similar to the OP, some clauses that suggested they wanted my first-born.
They were happy to change the details to fit what I wanted and we all went away happy. The thing that surprised me was when their intiial response was, "No-one has ever mentioned these before and we've been using these for years". I mean, the wording of the contracts could have gone very badly for me if things had gone south and we ended up in court.
Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.
A sand volleyball venue in my city has a waiver that you have to sign to play in a league there. In the contract you have to agree that you won't own or operate a volleyball related business within a 30+ mile radius for three years.
I signed since I don't plan to open a volleyball business, but I raised it with the venue owner who basically said their lawyers suggested it and that only one other person objected to it over the last three years. He was willing to strike it out.
Anyway - people/businesses with clauses like this need feedback or they won't change it. I let the sand volleyball place know that I thought it was a scummy tactic, and that pushing something like that onto the rank and file patrons of a business is not appropriate for someone who chairs the community improvement district that the business is located in.
My takeaway was also that the vast majority of people just don't read what they sign.
Random things don’t become real just because they’re written down. Contracts have to represent “a meeting of the minds” and there has to be adequate consideration (expensive asks should be paid for). Slipping an uncompensated noncompete clause into a sports liability waiver has a low chance of satisfying either principle.
Yes, this was my thought as well. The beginning of the waiver read something like "In consideration of the services received from COMPANY NAME, ..." and my immediate reaction was "I'm the one paying you here, not the other way around." The owner is a real estate attorney so I'm sure he's not oblivious either.
> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.
Nope, not typically, in my experience. I'm one of the folks who does, and it usually catches the other folks by surprise.
I signed a contract for a blog post I was writing and in the contract it said I couldn't mention that I was working with said company. But they were going to put my name on the blog post? I asked the person who sent me the contract, "should I not share this blog post?".
They changed the contract with no issues, but it showed me that they were just using a standard contract that no one ever bothered to read.
> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.
A lot of times, no. It happens to me even. I’m not a lawyer and I’m asked to sign contracts written by lawyers for other lawyers. I’ma reasonably smart guy and I can usually put two and two together in a contract, but often it’s written in a way that simply very difficult for me to understand and I can’t really tell what the contact is saying.
It’s a burden. If the stakes are small I might just sign it. Otherwise I might ask for clarification but most times you’re asked to sign something it’s assumed you’ll just take a minute to sign it so now you’ve thrown everything off.
I understand why contacts need precise language but I think it’s a bit unfair to expect lay people to sign contracts without a lawyer present much of the time.
> often it’s written in a way that simply very difficult for me to understand and I can’t really tell what the contact is saying.
My experience is that contracts are easy to read - much easier than code. For one thing, contracts are written to be completely unambiguous to a human (a judge), a goal which few coders attempt.
The challenge is knowing and applying what isn't in the contract: The outcome depends on the contract & the law & the court. The latter two apply many rules, many of which are complex or require judgment, and many also require anticipating how a judge might rule. You can write whatever you want in a contract - 'if Employee leaves Employer less than 10 years from the date this contract is signed, Employee must amputate Employee's left leg.' (And the last sentence brings demonstrates first point about the importance of non-ambiguity: If it said '... their left leg', whose leg is it?)
> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.
Generally, no. Everyone always expresses real surprise when I actually read a contract before signing. Usually, I just end up signing because there's not often room for negotiation, and I want to do the thing that requires the contract, and whatever, but I'd rather know. I've gotten some contracts changed, but often it's not worth the effort, IMHO.
> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.
I was in the military reserves, and one of the training weekends there was some thing they needed everyone to sign; I forget what it was, just something to make sure we were all aware of some random change in policy. I skimmed through the thing they asked us to sign, and one of the lines said, "I have received a pamphlet regarding $TOPIC." So I said, "Where are the pamphlets?" The admin person gave me a blank look and said, "What pamphlet?" I pointed to the text and said, "I'm signing to attest that I've received a pamphlet; I just wondered where it was."
I wasn't trying to rock the boat or make a big deal out of it, but generally if I sign something saying "I have received X" I want to have actually received X. Apparently I was the only person in the unit of 100+ people, including the admin staff, who actually read what they were signing.
A reasonable response to the problem of “companies are trying to push dubious clauses in employment contracts” would be “make those dubious practices illegal and/or unenforceable”, or maybe “make obfuscated or hard-to-read contracts illegal and/or unenforceable”. Your response was instead, as in the linked comic strip, “let’s make an app to fix it!”.
Empowering individuals to solve societal problems rarely work, IMHO. Giving people guns doesn’t solve the crime problem; improving society to have less desperately poor people and drug addicts does. Giving people the ability to read and right to refuse contracts doesn’t give people better working conditions, empowering government and/or unions to enforce better conditions does. Building larger and more tank-like cars does not improve traffic safety; lowering and enforcing speed limits and seat belt laws does. Being conscious about your personal carbon footprint will not solve the climate crisis. Et cetera.
Thanks for sharing that, its got some amazingly deep articles on audiology. It's really hard though, to find out what Crescendo actually is and how to buy it!
It is a multi-band nonlinear compressor. It deals with each band of hearing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_scale) individually. In each band, it elevates soft sounds to just past the threshold of audibility with someone's impaired hearing, to make it sound like the softest sound they can hear. And it elevates medium sounds a little bit less, to make it sound like a medium sound. And it elevates loud sounds not much at all. Hence the nonlinearity.
With most new hearing aids users, multiple tunings are required as they cannot handle the new volume and intensity of sounds that hey haven't heard for years.
An audiologist will typically test someone, see that they need amplications across the range but send them away with a much lower amplification for a weeks to get used to things. Then bring the volume up as time goes by.
People amy also need to get used to the aid's noise reduction algorithms as they can seem unatural at first and is a nightmare for anyone who used to wear an old analog hearing aid with no noise reduction.
So, yeah, hearing aids are rarely plug-and-play from day one - the user needs time to adjust.
A non-linear loss should not be an issue for any modern hearing aid, they are designed specifically to deal with that. I've never seen an audiogram with a complete flat (linear) loss, I'm sure some have it but its not common.
I have a severe sensorineural loss in both ears and wears hearing aids with a lot of success. My loss was the result of some unknown illness when I was younger - a loss resulting from illness or drug reaction tend to present randomly across the frequencies, whereas an age-related loss is almost always a "ski slope" loss, which means the high frequencies are mostly lost and the lowers are mostly fine.
Your experience is very common with new hearing aid users. The aids are able to increase volume at specific frequencies as defined by your hearing test(s) and the other features of the aid, e.g. noise reduction and compression are able to give a great quality of sound. The problem is usually in the person's ability to comprehend these new sounds, i.e. their brain, not their ears. A person with a hearing loss typically takes seven years to try out hearing aids, in those years their brain has got used to not hearing certain frequencies and sounds altogether and it can take time and training to get that ability back.
There is not really a great set of tools for brain training part of the hearing problem at the moment, in my opinion its badly overlooked by the hearing industry.
I agree with this and I haven't done enough of these kind of projects but I did create this parkrun map as the one on the parkrun website was not very good.
So I wrote a webapp that I usually myself constantly now, it's very basic. I enter a habit I want to keep up and then visit the site everyday and click the "done" button when its done. It also has a calendar so I can see how often I've been doing it because not every habit is to be done every day.
I started this for exercising but i'm not using it for very basic/stupid things. One example is cleaning my glasses. I would never remember to clean them and I'd occasionally realise I'm viewing the world through a layer of grime. I now click "done" every day and the world looks crystal clear.
I guess it's just gamified habits a little bit and its working really well for me. There's a ton of habit trackers out that but I never found anything simple and quick to use.