Hacker News Reader

benjaminpvon How CD pregaps gained their hidden track superpowers

Do you remember if the textbook was orange (possibly with a two-tone cover design)? I had a really good textbook in college that had a... 4? CD set (with the big jewel case) that had a bunch of tracks and like you I really enjoyed it.

benjaminpvon WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics

Contrasting seemingly all the other responses to this, I use it the same way you do (only opening it when needed) and I'm fine with the delay: even at its slowest rebuilding the index and searching is faster than the in-built windows Search.

benjaminpvon The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder

I always liked the cases where people have broken open ROMs only to find that the compilation process stuffed a bunch of directory and filenames in the silicon. It's funny to think that in a time when literally every byte cost money there's a fair number of carts that have people's FAT entries burned into them.

https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17324

benjaminpvon Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)

In Windows when you set a wallpaper it (sometimes) silently transcodes the one you selected into a new, smaller version. It doesn't always, there's a heuristic, but it's assumed it happens to prevent people from selecting a 1TB terapixel photo and have it destroy the machine.

Anyway, since it transcodes the WP into a JPEG, it has the ability to select a compression ratio. That ratio is pretty famously < 100% and as a result there's some degenerate cases where a wallpaper that looks good when viewed in the filesystem looks terrible when set to the background.

https://superuser.com/questions/1377883/how-to-prevent-wallp...

benjaminpvon This USB flash drive can only store 8KB of data, but will last you 200 years

Do things like the upgradable firmware and integrated text editor live in a path that's separate from the 8KB of data? If not I'd fear it would die before the actual storage did.

I also vaguely recall that Sonic 3 used this storage type? Like it was a weird outlier for cartridge-based saves IIRC.

Edit: Yeah, it did: https://hackaday.io/project/13425-sonic-3-feram-adapter

benjaminpvon If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

Or more broadly, don't do something unbidden on my behalf then complain when it doesn't work. I swear 75% of the times I've daydreamed about a return to a single-tasking OS like DOS was on account of software trying to 'help' me.

benjaminpvon If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

Yeah, people frequently trot out the Sim City classic example, but the fact is that games in particular have borne the brunt of Windows API changes. If it didn't happen we'd have no need for wrappers like dgVoodoo: software once only meant to wrap Glide calls, but now used to get around deprecation to DirectX as well. Not to mention the breaking changes to the audio stack that happened between 9x and Vista.

benjaminpvon If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

I don't know if anything's changed but for a long time a lot of Word's formatting was impacted by the printer you had installed and/or selected. So it was pretty easy to run into scenarios on a network where printers being taken offline/their capabilities changed resulted in documents getting reformatted.

benjaminpvon Fixing Classical Cats: How I got tricked by 28-year-old defensive programming

>mService always immediately returns the “drive ready” code

I've read enough of these emulation / reverse engineering blogs to know this will inevitably come back to haunt them.

benjaminpvon How Apple's developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the '90s

Decades late, but they could have told you to use Special: Eject Disk if dragging to the trash was too much for you. Then you'd have to grapple with what to do now that the physical disk was in your hand but its icon remained. There was also...Command+Y, I think?

benjaminpvon American travelers are being charged up to 3 times more for vacations

Absolutely this. My parents would take an impromptu vacation toward the tail end of winter and every time they basically just told the school 'we're leaving, give him the homework he'll be missing, end communication.'

Years later I was having dinner with a coworker and his teacher wife and explained it to her. "Yeah we'd go to like science exhibits and museums and all, it was really fun!" She was just aghast. Like 'y-you can't just t-take kids out of school?!'

benjaminpvon COBOL: Thinking about it wrong

COBOL was actually in the CS curriculum for my university, a fact that several of my friends brought up when the 'COVID is prompting a real need for COBOL programmers in light of the need to change benefits rules and unemployment!' stories were a regular feature on the nightly news.

'You should do it, man!' Yeah, sure. I'd already suffered through the liquidation of my entire department in 2018, the prospect of the heat around COBOL dying down and facing that once again with the additional stain of 'oh, what've you been doing? Cool, popular JS frameworks? No, COBOL? Pass.' on my CV during my next round of interviews didn't seem at all appealing.

That mentality should set the expectation for anyone looking into a COBOL job. It's not just this job, it's the next one.

benjaminpvon Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb (2021)

Yep, you still see it come up nowadays with people running it under virtualization.

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-mac...

benjaminpvon Logging practices I follow

Something I haven't seen discussed very widely: it feels like there's not only a balance needed in determine what to log vs what not to log, but also logging in a way that isn't a detriment to the readability of the code overall.

Over time I've actually found myself logging less just because having to sorta mentally elide logging lines added to the cognitive overhead of reading & understanding code.

benjaminpvon Unbricking a BIOS-Bricked Motherboard

That feeling of absolute dread, thinking 'my parents are gonna kill me when they realize I killed the family computer' did a lot to prepare me for the white-knuckle experience of troubleshooting problems in Production. :)

Bless the talented engineers that put together last-ditch recovery methods and bless the folks that documented things well enough to let us make use of them.

benjaminpvon Subtext - A multi-user BBS server for classic macOS

Somewhat surprised that you could even use threads in System 6. I know in the 7 era you'd find applications that shipped with the Thread Manager[1], I'm guessing this individual must have rolled their own thread handling?

[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/thread-manager

benjaminpvon YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option

Try tap+holding the "+ Save" button. If you just tap it the video goes to Watch Later but if you tap+hold it should show you a list of your playlists.

That said, the behavior's really janky. When I do this on my iPad you kinda have to 'hold+smudge' your finger around before it'll reveal the list for some reason and sometimes it just wants to save to Watch Later no matter what you do.

benjaminpvon An Apple II Tale

I'm not terribly familiar with Apple ][s either but given the surrounding context it sounds like there was a computer and fixed disk that was sent to a junk sorting center. It was initially thought that the disk they were sent was bad (with the owner having written as much on it), but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad.

With the author's knowledge and some nearby spare parts he was able to revive the disk and computer and then started looking through its contents by dumping it to the screen (sorta like if you look at a raw hex dump from dd or a tool like Spinrite). From that he realized that the source code for that copying software was on the disk, the source code everyone theorized had been lost.

benjaminpvon An Apple II Tale

I was gonna say, from context it was clear it's some sorta container but I'd never heard it used that way.

benjaminpvon Hertz is still having rental car customers wrongfully arrested, lawsuit claims

I'm sure they'll treat the matter very seriously and profess that steps are being taken to prevent it happening again.

benjaminpvon What we learned after I deleted the main production database by mistake

Funny to think that the issue here is just a relative of the 'no-preserve-root' feature rm (now) has: it's easy to let the user use the same actions equally on the branches of a hierarchy as you could the leaves, but should they?

Pretty recently corporate changed something on my work laptop that resulted in a bunch of temporary files generated during the build getting redirected to OneDrive. I went in and nuked the temp files and shortly thereafter got a message from OD saying 'hey noticed you trashed a ton of files, did you mean to do that?'

The developer side of me thought 'of course I did, duh' but I can imagine that's useful information for most users that made an innocent yet potentially costly mistake.

benjaminpvon YouTubePluginReplacement.cpp: YouTube-specific code in WebKit

Raymond Chen talked about how periodically the devs were tasked with getting a handful of software purchased at CompUSA or w/e out of a grocery cart, opening them up, installing them and testing that they worked with the then-unreleased Win95.

benjaminpvon Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

I worked on an app once that used two different, equally ancient libraries to a) generate thumbnails and b) create a png from a pdf. While modifying part of this process I started realizing that there were conditions where you'd get a PDF thumbnail at the end, but its output had a red tint to it.

Input looked fine and invoking each step manually worked fine as well.

Come to find out that certain PDFs contained color calibration information that, combined with how we were calling it, would treat ARGB as RGB. The input would have transparency info defined and the thumbnail generator would happily repurpose the alpha channel as the red channel instead.

benjaminpvon Winamp 5.9

No disrespect but your experience with foobar seems like the inverse of how it works? It definitely has a Library function, but my workflow for using foobar for years now is:

- Install

- Turn off visualization

- Drag and drop folder full of audio on the main window

That's one of the things I like about it the most: I do a ton of reorganization of my audio, so the fact that foobar can run in 'dumb' mode is a godsend.

benjaminpvon Ask HN: Are Linux HowTos dead? Why?

While formal HOWTOs might not get much attention, it's pretty clear Linux tutorials of all types are both being made and consumed in a variety of media. People often bring up how much value they get out of the articles DigitalOcean puts together, for instance. Those aren't HOWTOs necessarily, but does it matter?

There's also the fact that people just consume that kind of content differently nowadays. While it's hard for me to understand, people younger than myself seem to get a lot out of guided video tutorials over text.

benjaminpvon Quirky computing books

It's not as high-minded as the examples in the link, but as a kid I really enjoyed Woody Leonhard's "Mother of All..." books about Windows (the 3.1 and 95 ones, specifically).

Woody introduced a series of characters, each with their own personality & level of familiarity with Windows itself, then used them in asides to explain things. The great thing about those books (and something I seldom see anymore) is that they were really great about riding the line between 'the power button is the button you press to turn the computer on' and 'the A20 gate defines when low memory etc. etc. etc.'

Having the characters gave a great way to get super-deep into minutiae but let the reader know they could skip if it didn't interest them, plus their interactions with each other were really fun.

Also, and I'm sure most people know him already, I always really loved how David Pogue would put weird little stories or dialog in the examples he'd give when demonstrating a program. Like I think Macs for Dummies had a bit where his Word examples had a really flowery story about a guy riding a rollercoaster or something. Really influenced me, whenever I create a demo UI or example page I try not to use boring "This is example text" or "Lorem ipsum."

benjaminpvon Google Trying to Solve a UUID

This is as much a stab in the dark as any, but as someone that builds/rebuilds ROM sets pretty often (leading me to do a lot of hash-specific searches) I've noticed that there's a lot of crypto-trading related hashes in the indices they maintain.

I'm assuming what happens is that the hashes for various blockchain transactions have a lot of common sub-strings within that collide with non-crypto stuff, hence why they get offered.

Maybe the folks that manage the search engine were finding that these crawls were adding a lot of useless info and just blanket blocked their inclusion?

benjaminpvon PowerToys – open-source Windows utilities

It's easily forgotten now, but in the 95 and 98 eras Microsoft actually bundled a utility called Quick View [1] that added a quick preview to the context menu. It got lost in the XP transition and I have to wonder if they thought that the changes that came along with the IE-ified version of explorer.exe (image thumbnails, document previews in the sidebar) replicated enough of the functionality that it wasn't necessary anymore (they didn't).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_View

benjaminpvon The Last i486 Online

The first computer I ever upgraded on my own was a P3 system (my family owned a few, we just never upgraded them without taking them to a shop). I knew if I broke something/did something wrong my parents would never forgive me, so before I tried upgrading the RAM I read all the documentation and a couple A+ books.

The thing they all repeated was how applying force was absolutely the wrong thing, you should never need to force anything into place.

Well, I'm sure you know how this turned out: none of the RAM I installed was seated in its socket properly so in a cold sweat I forced all of them into place. Still feel nervous about installing RAM to this day.