Hacker News Reader

GnarfGnarfon Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf]

Such brilliance, such originality. Buried by a copier-focused organization.

Ironic that Xerox published a book called "The Billions Nobody Wanted", about Chester Carlson's long road to inventing xerography.

GnarfGnarfon Monitoring Is a Pain

The logs are written as raw HTML. They can be searched by including HTML id's, tags, etc. They are plain text so they are searchable.

The color option really makes things stand out. The formatting possibilities has made debugging so much easier.

GnarfGnarfon Monitoring Is a Pain

I write my app’s logs in HTML. It allows me to format as tables, large fonts for alerts, colour for errors, embed images, all sorts of visual aids. Easy to scan and identify the important stuff at a glance.

There is one common function to format as low-level HTML, and a trivial markup code to simplify calling it.

GnarfGnarfon The Diagrammer (1970) [video]

This is quaint. In 1970, computer-driven plotters were already widespread. It would not have been hard to see CAD coming, even with punched cards.

GnarfGnarfon Arduino reads punched cards for cloud computing

A hole at any of those points could represent either a one or zero

That's not quite correct. There were twelve rows: 0-9, 11 and 12. A hole in row 0 was a zero, etc. Holes in 12 + 1 was an 'A', 11 + 1 was 'J', and 0 + 2 was 'S'. Other combinations were for punctuation.

GnarfGnarfon Two years of teaching high school CS

Programming is not for everybody. It's hard. It takes patience and humility. That's why those few who master it get paid the big bucks.

GnarfGnarfon Ted Kaczynski has died

We cannot escape that "all our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end" (Thoreau).

The perversion of knowledge is a paradox that was known to the writers of Genesis: it's the Tree of Knowledge that gets the first humans in trouble.

GnarfGnarfon Farewell American Computer Magazines

The loss of magazines in general is a shame. I spent many magical hours perusing the back issues of Scientific American in my school library in the 60's. Some of the "Amateur Scientist" projects I built steered my career.

As a teenager, I grew up avidly reading weekly Time magazine during lunch.

GnarfGnarfon Printing Money: The Absolute Privilege of U.S. Dollars

Do you really trust China to manage the World’s currency?

Scenario: Monday: China buys 100 billion Yuan of oil from Saudi Arabia.

Tuesday; China prints 100 billion more Yuan.

Oops!

The only countries that the World mistrusts more than the U.S. … is everybody else.

GnarfGnarfon Programming in Standard ML (2011) [pdf]

"ML" = Meta Language

GnarfGnarfon The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives

DVDs should not be overlooked for backup. The Millennium type have been simulated to withstand 1,000 years.

GnarfGnarfon Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes

Tape has come a long way since the 800 BPI (bits per inch) NRZI (Non-return zero insert) and 6250 BPI PE (Phase encoded) 2400' tapes I worked with in the 70's.

The tape sort algorithm read tapes backwards to avoid the delay of rewinding. Pretty cool.

If you put a ping pong ball atop the blast from the vacuum pumps, it would hover magically in the air.

If a tape got worn out from use, you cut off the first 100' and pasted a new silver Load Point Marker.

GnarfGnarfon IBM AS/400: Databases all the way down (2019) [video]

RPG is an abomination. It's a paradigm of the old plugboard tabulators from the 40's.

No indentation. Cryptic op codes. Rigid fixed-column OP1/OP2/operation/result. Assembler without the power.

"Repulsive Programming Garbage".

GnarfGnarfon How Software Companies Die (1995)

Borland C++ ver. 3 was a great product, vastly superior to Microsoft's Programmer's Workbench (character-based UI).

However, when we upgraded to Borland 4, we encountered catastrophic bugs: Symbols were flagged as undefined that were successfully linked a few modules earlier. Use of 'new' operator in a DLL crashed the program (that one cost us two weeks). To be clear: these were bugs in the compiler, as they had compiled & run with no problem in the previous version.

We had to switch to Visual Studio.

GnarfGnarfon Former Hiroshima Branch of the Bank of Japan

hibaku: The term is from Japanese: 被爆, lit. 'bombed, A-bombed, nuked'

GnarfGnarfon Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C

Too bad. STL deque's are non-contiguous, allow for much bigger arrays. I had an application that used vector<>, ran out of contiguous memory. deque<> solved the problem.

GnarfGnarfon Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C

I found a lot of bugs went away when I switched to STL (Standard Template Library) arrays and ditched managing my own memory. That's C++, I guess it's not available in straight C?

GnarfGnarfon Named Booleans prevent C++ bugs and save you time

Excellent suggestion. I use this style myself in many places. Makes the code more legible.

As has been pointed out, there are cases where it's not efficient or correct, but in general it's very useful. (Been coding since 1965, not always C++ obviously).

GnarfGnarfon Exploring the impact of code style in identifying good programmers (2022)

Sorry, but not good. Too many statements on one line. By indenting the functions, you lose too much space at left of the screen. If I had to work with this code, the first thing I would do would be to completely reformat it.

However, if you are the only person maintaining this code, chacun à son goût!

GnarfGnarfon Prisma laying off 28% staff

What, I can't learn something new?

GnarfGnarfon Prisma laying off 28% staff

That's pretty deep in. Requires more time than I'm willing to invest, not knowing if there will be an outcome

GnarfGnarfon Appalachian Apple hunter who rescued 1k ‘lost’ varieties (2021)

They're only good until December. They don't keep, so beware of how old the apple is.

GnarfGnarfon Prisma laying off 28% staff

ORM = "Object–relational mapping"

You'd think they'd mention that once in their Website?

GnarfGnarfon Appalachian Apple hunter who rescued 1k ‘lost’ varieties (2021)

Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store. The tastiest apples are often smaller, brown or dark skin, not the big red 'juicy' apples the uninformed consumer thinks are the best. Viz. the Red "Delicious", whose flavor was bred out in favor of color and appearance. It is now insipid and flavorless.

In the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, the humble-looking Cox Orange is sweet as candy, with a hint of pear. You can only get it from local suppliers.

GnarfGnarfon Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites

Radio Amateurs will be indispensable when the next CME (Corona Mass Ejection) annihilates our grid and the Internet.

Look up "Carrington Event".

GnarfGnarfon A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

Software systems will be fragile as long as people and organizations don't understand the cost of quality software, or don't think it's worth it.

You don't get what you don't pay for™

GnarfGnarfon A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

Funny! As a Canadian, I am riveted by CNN/MSNBC/PBS/ for news on American political developments.

GnarfGnarfon Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in computer science?

I first saw this cartoon in 1971.

GnarfGnarfon Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report

Just to put things in perspective: for ~350 years (1600-1949), the West dominated and exploited India. The British taught the Indians that it was OK to steal from another nation. And they taught them English too.

What goes around comes around.

GnarfGnarfon The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all time: OS/2 for the Mach 20

We once made the mistake of stepping through a program in Microsoft Programmer's Workbench debug mode. Caused a problem which could only be fixed by re-installing OS/2 (26 diskettes).