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cellularmitosis

2,986 karma · joined October 23, 2009

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cellularmitosis··on Toasts are bad UX
> I would much rather only get the toast if there is a failure to commit the change ... And being far on the screen from where I’m taking an action makes them even more of a distraction.

But wouldn't this situation be even worse with a failure-only toast? A request timeout could happen 30 seconds after the fact. You're likely in a very different UI state at that point, and unless the error message is very specific, you'll have no idea what even failed if you are quickly performing lots of actions.

cellularmitosis··on Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?
Mixed in with this may also be architectural decisions based from a "let's just spin something up quickly" mentality. Those foundational architectural decisions have a way of becoming set in stone, long after the freelancers have left, dooming the project to scalability and latency problems which seem to linger forever.
cellularmitosis··on Please do not attempt to simplify this code
If you think these things are considered harmful, I'd encourage you to read "John Carmack on Inlined Code" http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

"The flight control code for the Armadillo rockets is only a few thousand lines of code, so I took the main tic function and started inlining all the subroutines. While I can't say that I found a hidden bug that could have caused a crash (literally...), I did find several variables that were set multiple times, a couple control flow things that looked a bit dodgy, and the final code got smaller and cleaner."

If Carmack finds value in the approach, perhaps we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

Also worth noting his follow-up comment:

"In the years since I wrote this, I have gotten much more bullish about pure functional programming, even in C/C++ where reasonable... When it gets to be too much to take, figure out how to factor blocks out into pure functions"

cellularmitosis··on Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
> and a signed floppy disk containing eight images that Andy Warhol created that day. He said he’s had them on display in his home for about 39 years.

Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. I was quite disappointed when I discovered many of my writable CD's started failing at the 15 to 20 year mark.

cellularmitosis··on Romram: Using QSPI RAM with RP2040's SSI in read-write mode
> Our HardFault handler can now ... quickly interpret the faulting instruction, emulate the write, flush the cache line, and resume.

This sounds similar to the approach taken by yocto-8

https://github.com/yocto-8/yocto-8/blob/main/doc/extmem.md

cellularmitosis··on Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]
Yup! A while back I made a little timeline for putting things like this in perspective. https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840...
cellularmitosis··on Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]
Yeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.
cellularmitosis··on A RP2040 based DECstation 3000 emulator that can run DECWindows
Seriously!

“ The PSRAM/HyperRAM PIO engine provides 42/32 MB/s (write/read) of memory bandwidth. Further, four PIO engines are used to provide four seperate read/write memory ports. This allows independent memory access for the emulated CPU, video DMA, and receive/send Ethernet traffic.”

cellularmitosis··on GMC made a motorhome that pumped sewage through its exhaust on purpose
Tailpipe “emissions” indeed.
cellularmitosis··on 'Writing a C Compiler' is a book (2022)
Just so others in this thread are clear: this post is from 2022, but her book just started shipping last week (mine should be arriving today)
cellularmitosis··on New insights into transcription factors and chromatin remodeling
Yes, of course! As I said, that’s good news.
cellularmitosis··on Entering text in the terminal is complicated
I think I didn't communicate that well. What I saw was:

    jvns: I didn't know you could go to the beginning of the line
    you: But you could have just pressed the Home key
The obvious answer is: jvns doesn't have a Home key.
cellularmitosis··on New insights into transcription factors and chromatin remodeling
They asked “are we decreasing the slope of this graph” and you replied by pointing to the graph and saying “if you choose a lower value of x, you get a lower value of y”.

That’s good news, but that’s not what they asked.

cellularmitosis··on Entering text in the terminal is complicated
I feel like you're being willfully obtuse here. I can't remember the last time I used a laptop which had Home / End keys.

Edit: actually I do remember -- it was an HP ProBook from 2011.

cellularmitosis··on Entering text in the terminal is complicated
Its funny, the thing which most keeps me on a Mac is simply the disambiguation of copy vs kill (Command-C vs Ctrl-c) in the terminal.
cellularmitosis··on Entering text in the terminal is complicated
On Sonoma I get:

    The invoked shell does not support interactive features
cellularmitosis··on Japan introduces enormous humanoid robot to maintain train lines
Couldn’t agree more! It is remarkable how similar it feels to GITS 95
cellularmitosis··on Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
Cancelling your ISP doesn't leave you surrounded by peers who default to solving problems from scratch.
cellularmitosis··on Japan introduces enormous humanoid robot to maintain train lines
I was about to say, isn’t this how the plot of Patlabor starts?
cellularmitosis··on A modern 8 bit design, built using 1950s thermionic valves
> 200 amps

Something I’ve been curious about: is the current actually required for the thermionic effect, or just the heat?

Could you lower the current requirement by thermally insulating the tubes?

cellularmitosis··on MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5
Yeah, that's what sets the RP2040 apart from other micros. I think of it as being analogous to the recent advent of "software-defined radio" -- the RP2040's PIO are fast enough to allow for software-defined Composite video, software-defined VGA, software-defined DVI, software-defined USB, etc etc etc.
cellularmitosis··on Swift Static Linux SDK
Speaking of Swift on other platforms, turbolent now has Swift running on PowerPC/Darwin via his wc2c project: https://forums.swift.org/t/retrocomputing-what-would-it-take...
cellularmitosis··on PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx
Thank you for highlighting this — I hadn’t realized how far the lower end of the price range had advanced since the days of cheap Pro Micro clones. 240MHz, 2MB ram, 4MB flash, circuit python —- this is incredible for $12, and from Adafruit no less!
cellularmitosis··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
We tried GraphQL for about a year, then switched back to REST, but took the important bits with us: a published API contract (an OpenAPI spec), and code-gen'ed Swift from that spec.

Looking back, it is hard to believe I spent a decade working in shops with no published spec, no code-gen. So many ugly surprises discovered in production, all of which were avoidable. Never again.

cellularmitosis··on Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code
Strange that they didn't include a single screenshot on that page.
cellularmitosis··on MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
Not really the same. High school is typically prodded to completion by parents. MBA degrees are a better indicator of voluntary involvement.
cellularmitosis··on Borgo is a statically typed language that compiles to Go
Has anyone written a language which targets golang assembler yet? I’m surprised I don’t see that.
cellularmitosis··on Show HN: I made a programmable computer from NAND gates
Slu4 has a great series of videos about exactly what you are looking for, with his Minimal 64 computer https://youtu.be/FJsnKu20ch8

61 TTL chips mentioned in this 8 minute overview https://youtu.be/3zGTsi4AYLw

cellularmitosis··on Ask HN: Which books/resources to understand modern Assembler?
Thanks for the reply.

Actually, I ended up finding the answer to my question (“why doesn’t every assembly tutorial cover calling conventions on like, page 2?”), and it was because I was coming at this topic from a C perspective.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/17309038

“ If you're writing in assembly language, you can do whatever you want. It's only when you want to interact with some external code (maybe a library, maybe a system call) that you need to obey the calling convention.”

cellularmitosis··on Ask HN: Which books/resources to understand modern Assembler?
1) is the bit I seem to have trouble finding good resources for. It seems every "intro to assembly" tutorial spends all this time talking about instructions, and never seems to get to something as basic as "how do I create and call a function in assembly?".

Any suggestions there?

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