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alexjm

128 karma · joined September 21, 2018

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alexjm··on We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
Are you thinking of "The Codeless Code" poem about this?

https://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/234

alexjm··on I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
I read it as a to-do or calendar event: at such-and-such time, we will put the icing on some cookies.
alexjm··on Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?
I have a kitchen slide rule that I use to scale recipes and do simple conversions. I used it last week when inflating a ball that had a target diameter in centimeters, but measuring the circumference was much easier and my measuring tape was in inches.
alexjm··on 221 Cannon is Not For Sale
We don't even need the term "identity theft". We already have a perfectly good word for than: "fraud".
alexjm··on Passkeys: They're not perfect but they're getting better
From the article... Passkeys:

- are generated securely and so can’t be guessed - can’t be phished - are unique for each website you use, so if one website is compromised it doesn’t put your other logins at risk

alexjm··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Watch out for Occam's Hacksaw: Any complex problem can be made to look simple by hacking away enough parts of it as "not essential", saying you'll handle them in version two.
alexjm··on I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
Many filing cabinets in the US are also sized so you can put letter sized folders in one way, or rotate the folders 90 degrees and legal sized folders will fit correctly.
alexjm··on Hacker News Hug of Deaf
You might want to add the --http0.9 flag to curl, to tell it that getting a response of just "ok" (HTTP 0.9 style, body only without headers) isn't an error.
alexjm··on Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)
Grep is from an ed editor command: global (g) to apply a command to all lines that match a regular expression, a regex surrounded by slashes (/), and print (p) to display those lines. Or g/re/p for short. This proved a useful enough operation that they made it a separate command in the early days of Unix.
alexjm··on Beej's Guide to Git
The minor difference is that :q! quits without saving but returns zero as the exit code, but :cq quits with a nonzero exit code. Git interprets the nonzero exit code as "editing failed", following the Unix convention that zero means success. If you didn't save the commit message while working on it, :q! will send the empty template back to Git, which Git is smart enough to not commit. But if you accidentally save your work partway through, :q! will still commit the message you wanted to abandon.
alexjm··on Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard
That was how I learned to tense my ear muscles -- because I could see they made my glasses shift on my face.
alexjm··on UI is hell: four-function calculators
I have a kitchen slide that I use for ratios in recipes. It's an old plastic one from Think Geek.

For example, I usually put 15 grams of coffee with 8 oz of water (please excuse the mixed units). To make a different amount, I align the 1.5 on the top rule with the 8 on the bottom rule to set the ratio. Then each number on the top rule (coffee in grams) matches the scaled value on the bottom rule (water in oz). The 6 on the bottom rule aligns with ~1.1 on the top, meaning I should brew my little six-ounce cup with 11g of coffee. In practice, I do this a lot with bread, but the "baker's percent" convention for writing bread recipes makes it a more complicated example.

Another way to use a kitchen slide rule is when scaling a recipe. Say I want to make 2/3 of a batch of cookies. I line up the 3 on top with the 2 on the bottom. Then for each ingredient, I find the recipe's quantity on top, and read off the scaled quantity on the bottom. This works better with recipes that use weights, to avoid awkward fractions or converting between units so you can subdivide.

alexjm··on US will ban cancer-linked Red Dye No. 3 in cereal and other foods
Shellac isn't made of bugs - it's made by bugs. Specifically, it's the resin secreted by a female lac beetle onto the branch of the trees that they live and feed on.
alexjm··on Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps
Some of the letter shapes look like Latin/Roman cursive, but even then I'm not sure I recognize any words either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive

alexjm··on Thomas E. Kurtz has died
It's most likely legacy from pre-computer unit record equipment. These machines could only handle numbers and printed zeros without a slash because there was nothing to confuse them with. When letters were later added, it was the new character that got the slash.

Additional citation hunting from 2020 when the BASIC manual was shared & discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25462835

alexjm··on Buy payphones and retire
I saw one city park where they took this one step farther. They had a small wooden structure (I think the cover to a water valve, from years ago when they used to set up an ice skating rink). The open it so rarely they don't even padlock it - they just bend open an S shaped link of chain, put that where the lock would go, and bend it shut. When someone needs to access it, they cut the one link of chain with a pair of bolt cutters, and then put on a new one.
alexjm··on Covid-19 Intranasal Vaccine
To your original question, yes. The phrase "formerly known as" comes before the old name.
alexjm··on Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real
BBS, Gopher, Usenet, and friends are all still there - no need to invent a new protocol.
alexjm··on Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications
A push notification is generally what creates the "you have a new message on <app>" red bubble.
alexjm··on The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City
It's not real - but imagine if it were!
alexjm··on USB Made Simple (2008)
LLMs generate content that's statistically plausible, not factually accurate. We don't need more content about USB that might be mostly right.
alexjm··on Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
Yes, you're looking for US patent 4,549,302:

> Thus, even if the file being transmitted [...] includes occurrences of the escape command string of bits, it is extremely unlikely that any random occurrence of the escape command would occur unintentionally in the environment of the entire escape sequence, that is, the escape command string surrounded by a second of no data on either side.

alexjm··on Ask vs. Guess Culture
I've heard that the "do you not have" phrasing was used in polite Soviet-era Russian, leading to a joke about a customer who walks into a shop and sees all the shelves are empty:

- Excuse me, do you not have any bread? - Sorry, this is a butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. The bakery is across the road. They're the shop that doesn't have any bread.

alexjm··on Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his SPARC4 was running slow
It's a poorly worded message, but the idea is that you press F1 after plugging in (or otherwise fixing) the keyboard.
alexjm··on Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
In the Apple documentation for MVC, "controller" refers to a class that sits between the model and view. When data changes in the model, it updates the view; and when the user interacts with the view, it passes events to the model.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...

Elsewhere, the documentation contrasts the Cocoa and Smalltalk versions of MVC where all three pieces communicate directly:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Like you said, this separation means you can "drive" the same model through different UIs. That's one of the things I always thought was cool about AppleScript support -- the app exposes a different interface to the same model.

alexjm··on Sunset at the South Pole
If you're curious what spending the night on Antarctica might look like, this video shows one experience (although it's from a part of the year with daylight & darkness).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA9fmEe8nJU

alexjm··on Apple passwords deserve an app
Same. And now I'm trying to figure out if there's any advantage to using the UI in System Settings instead of the app I already know.
alexjm··on A CPU is a compiler
To help me keep the spellings straight, I pronounce them as "pie pea eye" and "pie pie" respectively. That's also the PyPI project's preferred pronunciation.

https://pypi.org/help/#pronunciation

alexjm··on Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?
Another resource for how Apple silicon Macs boot is the "EFI Jumpstart" chapter of "Apple File System Reference", which starts off with a section about the boot process.

https://developer.apple.com/go/?id=apfs-file-format-spec

alexjm··on TWM − Tab Window Manager for the X Window System
Most man pages give good PostScript output with "man -t". I like reading those on screen or occasionally printing manuals I refer to frequently. The main problem I've run into in recent years are man pages that use ASCII art but don't wrap that in explicit roff requests for a fixed-width font, making the result mostly unreadable outside the terminal.
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