Hacker News Reader

dnewcomeon 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience

I just remembered ripterm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Imaging_Protocol

dnewcomeon Elektron Machinedrum in the Browser

I have a UW (user wave) version. It doesn't look like they implemented some of the more interesting parts of the MD. I wonder if this was a firmware R/E effort? I don't see any details on what's behind this and I can't read the non-english parts of the app. Anyone have more details?

dnewcomeon I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

Good to know I'll still have the reassurance of a 9:30 standup even though AI is reading my thoughts.

dnewcomeon Reverse-engineering the Alesis MMT8 firmware

The MIDI sequencer that launched a thousand 90s EDM careers. Unique workflow that I wanted to preserve so I reversed it and built a simulator with Claude.

dnewcomeon Curses-exec: interactive xargs for less

I always wanted to pipe `ps -a` to something interactive using vim key bindings to select the process to kill. Maybe now someone in the comments will tell me how to do it with xargs and a complicated vim script instead of vibe coding my own.

dnewcomeon Researchers demonstrate the first chip-based 3D printer

The authors mention the possibility of holographic curing of multiple simultaneous layers. That seems significant although they haven't demonstrated it here.

dnewcomeon The C64 OS Programmer's Guide

There was GEOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) in 1986.

dnewcomeon Furnish JavaScript - Let the classes on DOM elements generate the CSS for you

This is basically the Atomic CSS idea [1]. Yes it violates separation of concerns, but it does a good job at getting the page weight down.

[1] http://acss.io

dnewcomeon David Karp Quit School to Get Serious About Tumblr

Since I moved to California I no longer wear socks at all. I find that there is little need given the climate. Maybe this is the real reason for the miracle of Silicon Valley?

dnewcomeon Linux is not about choice (2008)

You can prefix your command with pasuspender to temporarily disable pulseaudio. This is usually what I do. It's kind of inconvenient and half the time I forget to do it, so sometimes I just write a little launcher script that includes it.

dnewcomeon Why you need a home lab to keep your job

To get true understanding of what you're working with you need to be able to trash the configuration of your gear at will. I learned a lot buying up some big old Cisco Catalysts and EMC Clariion SAN boxes back when I was doing data center work. Later on though, when I was in charge of buying new stuff I'd rack the stuff up first and go crazy with it before it was in production. Either way works. I don't miss having those fans running in my house though.

dnewcomeon Delete the Save Button

There just needs to be some UX work here indicating the document status. Just like typing a chat message. "blahblah has entered text"-style. Evernote did this early on in their Windows application, we did it with Ubernote - it rocks. Everything should be autosaved+versioned.

dnewcomeon On Configuration

This is one of the reasons I stopped messing around trying to find the perfect text editor. I focused on getting better with a stock VIM install.

I think the spirit of this post is that you should at least give the defaults a chance before you go crazy trying to make everything "better". However, I would add that you shouldn't totally ignore that voice that says "is this setting getting in my way?".

dnewcomeon Chernobyl's radioactive trees and the forest fire risk

Citing a single data point doesn't refute the quoted assertion. It is basically the same as me trying to refute that air travel is safer than automobile travel per passenger mile by mentioning a single notable crash.

I'm not trying to downplay the plight of those affected, but it's worth separating these concerns when evaluating the true risks involved with any technology that can potentially have great benefits for the bulk of humanity, the rare catastrophe notwithstanding.

dnewcomeon Cascading errors caused AWS to go down

It takes a lot of discipline to run a shared power setup like you describe. Most of those servers that have two power supplies operate in a shared power mode, rather than active/failover. This means that if one of your sides (LH/RH) is over 50% and you fail over, you are going to have a cascading failure as the other side goes >100%. It used to surprise me how often I saw things like this, although I'm talking about server rooms in the low 100s of servers, not huge data centers.

dnewcomeon Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

I used to use CopSSH for running sshd on Windows. Worked pretty well from what I can remember. It's just cygwin+sshd packaged up nicely.

dnewcomeon On Mastery

> by acknowledging the mastery, we have changed the practice.

I'm somehow (without irony) enlightened by this statement.

dnewcomeon Save Time On Hacker News: Mark All Read

I wrote something like this as a user script that works in FF(w/Greasemonkey)/Chrome/Opera a while ago [1]. The idea is to remove individual stories or add filters rather than removing everything like the OP. My script is based on VI-style shortcut keys though so that may influence how useful you find it.

[1] https://github.com/dnewcome/hn-plonk

dnewcomeon Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

I like the declarative way of defining/extending the highlighters in code. Clean, direct and easy to grok if you're familiar with regexps.

dnewcomeon Cleaner Hacker News

Hacking HN content helped me more with readability than hacking the style. I wrote a userjs to apply kill filters https://github.com/dnewcome/hn-plonk

dnewcomeon How I improved my life with a PS3 controller

I've tried what the OP has done in the past. I ran into the mouse issue and what I did to make it better was to map the button under the analog stick to increase the mouse speed. Getting the pointer to a rough position quickly is a more gross muscle movement involving pushing down on the stick while moving it in some direction. Fine positioning is done then by letting up on the stick and maneuvering using fine motor control. I agree that using analog sticks for the mouse is kind of awkward though.

dnewcomeon Do you make these 5 database design mistakes?

I've got to push back on the anti-guid stance for surrogate keys. They may be big but it is nice to have opaque IDs so that no one makes flawed assumptions about ordering or relative insertion time/trying to guess valid IDs, etc. Opaque is good...

dnewcomeon Poll: How much do you make as a programmer?

This made my morning. You should write a gonzo-style programming epic. It reminds me that some of what we do might as well be magic to the people that hire us and unlike in past cultures where we'd be anointed as medicine men and revered as holy, we're given gilt boxes by monkeys.

dnewcomeon A git implementation in pure JavaScript

I thought about doing an in-browser git implementation for enabling offline mode in a webapp. Doing things with git would make some really interesting sync scenarios possible. Looking at what was involved though, I think I'm glad I didn't go down this particular rabbit-hole.

dnewcomeon Google Chrome Hacked?

It would have been trivial for them to patch Process Explorer to hide whatever they wanted anyway.

dnewcomeon Create web apps in JavaScript right from your browser

I have played with making an absolutely positioned single-char text input box in my custom editor (https://github.com/dnewcome/richie). The idea is that it forces the built-in keyboard to show but the input is caught and inserted into the DOM. I don't use contenteditable since it doesn't work on most mobile devices. My hacks are really rough but I think the technique could be polished eventually.

dnewcomeon S4

I wish I had heard about this a few months ago. I wanted to implement a way to create and connect streaming web services. I hacked up something then called webpipes (https://github.com/dnewcome/webpipes) using node.js. Unfortunately I haven't looked at it again since I first put it up on github. S4 looks a ton more advanced than anything I was envisioning, but I still think that something simple done in one of the evented servers like node.js (the S4 implementation looks to be Java) would be useful.

dnewcomeon Why Do They Hate Us?

Alas, if anything I ever wrote commanded criticism akin to that in comment #59 by voralex I think I could die happy.

dnewcomeon Apple's attention to detail

Lenovo went to a lot of effort on the battery/charging indicator, but they just managed to make it as complicated as possible. http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=79

dnewcomeon You should blog even if you have no readers

You get the most value out of blogging if you publish it. Period. Writing drafts is great, but it just isn't the same as putting it out there. It's like practice vs. performance. No amount of practice can take the place of the experience gained by performance.