Hacker News Reader

DrTungon From macOS to Windows and WSL

Was on Windows from 1986-2010, Ubuntu 2010 - today, but will be switching to MacOS on a MacMini soon, and the reason: Apple's old filesystem HFS was slooow when grepping/compiling etc. but the new APFS is comparable to EXT4 in speed, makes all the difference.

DrTungon C++ Annotations

Good read but class template argument deduction is not mentioned.

DrTungon Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought

In a few years I'll probably have grandkids and when I read this, think it increases the chance that those kids will still be able to go to Disney World in Florida, i.e. it will not be submerged.

DrTungon Ursula Le Guin has died

More than 40 years has passed since I read it, but I still remember that last part of the book, where he goes skiing down to the waiting guards. You know when you read the last sentence that it was the last sentence of the book, no need to turn another page.

DrTungon Microsoft and the UWP for Enterprise Delusion

Agree 100%. I had a bunch of legacy Winform apps and faced the same dilemma.

Solved it by switching to Qt. It's excellent even if you just use it for Windows development, i.e. never use any of its crossplatform abilities.

DrTungon Why Raspberry Pi Isn't Vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown

Me too. Finally I understand how the leakage works: no actual reading of kernel memory is taking place.

Instead, the read-ahead/speculative logic causes one of two addresses in user space to be read, and thus placed in the cache. So, by reading both of them, and checking the time it took, the exploit can indirectly determine one bit (0 or 1) of kernel memory. Scary!

DrTungon PDP-11 Instructional Tape (1977) [video]

2nd that! First machine I learned assembler on was a 11/45, still remember toggling in a bootloader to load RSTS/E from the RK05-disk :-)

DrTungon How do you find integer solutions to x/(y + z) + y/(x + z) + z/(x + y) = 4?

Agree, good article. Thanks to it I think I understand more why cryptography based on elliptic curves (like Curve25519) is considered pretty safe for now.

DrTungon Windows 10 Tip: Turn Off File Explorer Advertising

There's also a huge, ever increasing, technical debt that's dragging down the quality of Windows.

For example, switching from Windows\System to Windows\System32 for Chicago made 100% sense, but how did we end up with 32-bit software stashed in \Windows\SysWOW64 and 64-bit software in \Windows\System32?

It's like that movie The Day After Tomorrow where they discuss how big a part of US they have to abandon, a few releases back Linux tossed out a lot of 90's assembler code, such purging has never occurred in Windows source tree.

DrTungon Go fonts

I 2nd that. Before I've usually ended up with PT Mono, but this Go font is bit more pleasing to work with. Thanks Google.

DrTungon History tells us what will happen next with Brexit and Trump

It's easy to do a pessimistic forecast:

In order to sway the opinion Trump will need a fake attack on US soil around October, something big and spectacular.

Then join our TTT movement:

"Trump for a third term!"

DrTungon Five weights monospaced typeface for the benefit of charities

Good news: the purchasing process works fine.

Bad news: you cannot download the font (the supplied URL, when clicked, first goes to gumroad.com then to cloudfront.net which gives the error: Safari cannot open the page).

DrTungon Swift Asserts

Reminds me of Objective C happily calling a nil ptr, Apple wants to be generous and not pester you by terminating your app :-)

DrTungon Cracking BurgerTime, a 1982 game on a floppy disk

I remember cracking A2FS1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWIuTP_A6IQ This was before floppy disks, the game came on a cassette, but it had the same style of boot0/boot1 encryption. Starting the game from a copied cassette, it just printed "STOLEN AIRCRAFT! STOLEN AIRCRAFT!" all over the display.

DrTungon Modern C++ Features – override and final

Perfect, thanks. I've meant to get up to scratch on the override and final keywords, fixed now :-)

DrTungon Timers in the Linux kernel, Part 2: Introduction to the clocksource framework

Thanks, good timing :-) of this article, been trying to understand why my new fancy Skylake CoreI5-6500 crashes with "Switched to clocksource tsc" when booting Ubuntu 14.04 (Ubuntu 15.10 works fine, so not a big problem).

DrTungon Bug in widely used OpenSSH opens servers to password cracking

Have you tried fail2ban? It really helps to keep the hacking attempts down on your ssh-server(s), especially if you increase the bantime from the default 600 seconds to a couple of million...

DrTungon BASIC, Second Edition (1964) [pdf]

I like that motto "Typing is no substitute for thinking." in the PDF. Applies equally well today :-)

DrTungon The Story of Microsoft's Minecraft Buyout

Always thought he'd opensource Minecraft and then sell it to Unicef (or Unesco) for 1 dollar. But alas it was not to be :-(

DrTungon ALL CAPS AS a SERVICE

Alright, finally I understand how they did that AWESOME menu bar in Visual Studio.

DrTungon Early Copy Protection on the Apple II

Not mentioned was the A2FS1 Flight Simulator Game, I still remember hacking it to make a tape copy.

1st stage loader was easy, but when I started the game from the tape copy it just printed:

"Stolen aircraft!" "Stolen aircraft!" etc.

Much later and after some Jolt Colas I got it running on the copy :-)

DrTungon Farewell, Dr. Dobb's

"Running Light Without Overbyte" still remember that title, when reading Dr.Dobb's while waiting for my turn fiddling with a new KIM-1 computer at my friend's house in 1976. A while back... I was a subscriber for many years.

Also I remember Al Stevens writing his columns from his RV, the incident with the exploding tire. Did you know he came up with C# as a language name before Microsoft did?

In those days before the internet DDJ was a welcome sight in the mailbox, every issue had something worth reading.

See you around Dr.Dobb's!

DrTungon John Carmack on Inlined Code

You're right, it wasn't the software as such (more like the design of the system).

I just read more about PIO and it's funny, it reminds me of a short story I read a long long time ago, written by Arthur C Clarke, I remember the scene in it where a pilot is remote controlling his big space ship or plane of some kind, while standing on the ground. But because the remote is going through a satellite, there is a feed back delay, say 1 second or so. So when he tries to compensate for a wrong turn, a flavor of PIO is induced and the ship crashes. Think that particular story was written in the 40's, good foresight of Mr. Clarke.

DrTungon John Carmack on Inlined Code

The Saab Gripen aircraft that is mentioned did crash anyway (in its first flight show over Stockholm 1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involvi...) in spite of that specially crafted fly-by-wire flight software...

DrTungon WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)

Thanks for the link, I'm trying jupp now, and indeed it feels a bit newer. One thing that causes screen refresh problems for me with joe/jstar, is editing files with long lines, say 160 characters or more. I'll see if jupp fares better.

DrTungon WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)

Not just for a writer, for programmers too. Without my WordStar plugins for Xcode and QtCreator I work much slower.

DrTungon Domain without dot (http://uz)

Thanks, this is a good URL to use for a quick test if you have an internet connection, e.g. "traceroute uz" or "ping uz"

(On my Mac, you can type just "uz" in Firefox but in Safari you need "uz/")

DrTungon Localizing Papers, Please

Being Swedish I totally agree with XKCD since that's how dates are written here since the 70's. But this standard seems to be receding, for example recently the Swedish DMV had to change so that on new driver's licenses the date is written '01.01.1984' instead of previously '1984-01-01' :-( because of EU parliament rules.

DrTungon Localizing Papers, Please

Very minor complaint but first of January 1984 is always depicted as '1984.01.01' in the game, regardless of I18N selected. While this is good in Germany, it many countries like US you instead prefer something like '1/1/84'.