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fcbrooklyn

740 karma · joined October 2, 2012

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fcbrooklyn··on Cuomo Aides Spent Months Hiding Nursing Home Death Toll
That was true initially, but they changed tack about a week later. The ship reduced capacity from 1000 beds to 500 specifically so that they could accomodate covid patients, because there weren't enough other patients to matter. In addition, the Javits center field hospital never reached more than about 5% of its available capacity. Meanwhile the nursing home down the street from me was begging the city to let them send their covid positive residents to to the ship, or to the javits, were told that those were only for hospital overflow, and they should keep the residents in place. more than 60 of them died, the highest death toll of any nursing home in the state.
fcbrooklyn··on This Artwork Does Not Exist
"What I'm asking of you is to be less cynical about what actual art and artists and be genuine in the search for meaning."

There's a typo here, and I honestly am not sure what you're trying to say. I will say this: I am not a modern art hater. Far from it, I love modern art, and I go well out of my way to enjoy it. My complaint is entirely with the ham handed descriptions of pieces that require no descriptions at all.

fcbrooklyn··on This Artwork Does Not Exist
I agree with everything you've said. However, many people I know who produce art, are not thinking in these terms, and resent being forced to do so, and they are forced to do so, by the commercial reality of the fine art industry. Furthermore, if someone is trying to find meaning in the word salad I produced in about 90 seconds, I wish them luck, because whatever meaning is there exists entirely in their own head. I suspect the same is true for a great many (not all) descriptions of modern art.
fcbrooklyn··on This Artwork Does Not Exist
sounds like a job for thismuseumcuratordoesnotexist.com.
fcbrooklyn··on This Artwork Does Not Exist
I have friends who are (modestly) successful fine artists, and they uniformly hate having to write that dreck. But you wanna pay the bills, you pick up a pen and write.
fcbrooklyn··on This Artwork Does Not Exist
Is it really a work of art if it doesn't include the obligatory ridiculous description? Something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change."
fcbrooklyn··on Windows93
that's right. 3.5... 5.25 was long past.
fcbrooklyn··on Windows93
Heh, no, but it was a close call. Shipped in August of 95. I was working on Office "95" at the time, and we were seriously under the gun, for a few reasons. Firstly, it came down from on high that all Office apps needed to be ported to 32-bit, as opposed to running in Win95's 16 bit subsystem (this was a massive job, and introduced numerous bugs). And to make matters worse, this was a time when software was delivered in boxes, which contained CDRoms, or 3.25" floppies, as the customer desired. Win95 had completely reserved all of msft's manufacturing capacity for like 6-7 weeks, so in order to ship in 95, we had to ship like 2 months earlier than a normal release.
fcbrooklyn··on Windows93
Heh, yeah, I remember when they switched to labelling everything by year. Those of us on the development teams thought that was seriously tempting fate given our track record of routinely shipping things a year late.
fcbrooklyn··on Windows93
There may have been some overlap, but as I remember it the main thrust of Cairo wasn't really about UI. It was an object based filesystem, and some other fancy shit going on under the covers. (I was on Apps, and we never targetted Cairo, never got a chance to play with it directly, but I saw it demoed a few times, and I remember the UI looking more like NT/3.11. Could easily be misremembering that part though)

EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia:

"The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."

fcbrooklyn··on Windows93
At the time there were two branches, the win 3.1 branch, which was consumery, and the NT branch which was for servers / developers, etc. Cairo was an OS based on the NT branch, which was ultimately cancelled. Chicago was the project name for win95, which came off the 3.1 branch. Eventually the NT/3.1 branches merged, in the release called XP. And yeah, there's no such thing as windows 93.

Source: worked at msft from 92-97.

fcbrooklyn··on The Computer History Simulation Project
They've built emulators for many, many old computers. The website is clearer than the github page. http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
fcbrooklyn··on Google Maps Hacks
Another feature I want is "money is no object mode" when travelling around new york city. Sometimes it's fastest to take the subway, sometimes it's fastest to take a Lyft/Uber, but sometimes it's fastest to take the subway part of the way, and then take an uber from there. This last situation is really tough to figure out by hand with the existing tools.
fcbrooklyn··on 35 Year-Old C64 Easter Egg Hidden on Vinyl [video]
Good Lord, I'd have killed for that checksum feature you mention. I've spent hours typing pages of hex into a TI-994a with no such functionality, and typically you'd just have bugs that would require a careful re-reading of all the hex vals.
fcbrooklyn··on Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
And the if-else construct is also a macro. The whole thing ends up being a case I think.
fcbrooklyn··on A Telegram bug that disclose phone numbers of any users in public groups
The impact is specifically related to Hong Kong, where the protesters are using telegram to coordinate, and where, according to the bug report, the telephone number range is limited.
fcbrooklyn··on 20 Years Ago, Microsoft introduced its optical mouse
I used those three button optical SPARC mice, and the bigger issue than the fact that you needed a special mousepad, was that the pad had to stay properly oriented. If the pad was rotated slightly, your mouse would go in strange directions.
fcbrooklyn··on Shipping a Linux Kernel with Windows
can't speak for the OP, but there are several apps I wanted to run that would have been cumbersome with that approach (although I looked at it). Main apps in question were Excel, and Ableton Live.
fcbrooklyn··on Shipping a Linux Kernel with Windows
I did exactly this last summer, and have been quite happy with the decision. (context: my dev work is all about elixir/erlang, some python, and some haskell). So far I've had very little trouble with WSL, but its performance is certainly worse than running on windows directly, or on macOs, but for dev purposes it's adequate, and it sounds like that part is about to be solved for me anyway.

My thinking is mainly that while windows is still a little behind MacOS for some things, it's headed in the right direction, and MacOS is heading the other way. The hardware is superior in almost every way to what I was looking at in a MBP (my windows machine is a SB2), only complaints are about the location of the headphone jack, and the fact that the rubber "feet" on the bottom of the laptop have come unglued, which does kinda suck.

fcbrooklyn··on Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
The real "killer feature" is the Erlang VM (the BEAM). Thanks to a combination of exceptionally lightweight "processes" (not true OS processes, a construct of the VM), which share nothing, can only interact through message passing, and which can be supervised by other processes, it's possible to build incredibly robust systems.

Elixir makes the Erlang VM much more pleasant to use in my opinion (plenty of Erlangers will disagree with this, ymmv). It provides a developer-friendly, modern ecosystem, with doc support, testing support, a great macro language for building DSLs, package management, etc, but underlying it all is a battle-tested VM, that has been under active development for 30 years.

fcbrooklyn··on Full Shutdown of L Train to Be Halted by Cuomo
A very interesting history of the NYC subway. https://www.amazon.com/722-Miles-Building-Subways-Transforme...

It's been years since I read it, but as I recall, the system was built by private entities, who were gradually driven out of business when the city set a cap on the price of a fare (first at a nickel, then at a dime). When they folded one by one, they got subsumed into the MTA, and I guess at some point it was decided that it was ok to raise the price.

fcbrooklyn··on Full Shutdown of L Train to Be Halted by Cuomo
Interesting, although the article is strangely silent on the subject of property taxes, which are extremely high in NY. NYC and surrounding areas undoubtedly have higher property values, so perhaps the ratio holds, but the rest of the state is very very big. It may also be that property taxes don't find their way to the state coffers, I'm honestly unsure.
fcbrooklyn··on Full Shutdown of L Train to Be Halted by Cuomo
It's crazier that it's paid for by the state government in Albany, with taxes collected from the entire state. The control is a side effect of that.
fcbrooklyn··on Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves
The video is well worth your time. The device works very well, and the fart spray has a purpose, in that it encourages the thief to ditch the package as soon as possible, enabling him to recover and reload it.
fcbrooklyn··on Surviving Jonestown
I've always assumed that "drinking the kool-aid" was a reference to Ken Kesey, rather than Jonestown, and I'm surprised to learn otherwise. It's certainly in lousy taste.
fcbrooklyn··on Two years of Elixir at The Outline
Speaking as someone more into Elixir than Erlang, I'm wondering why you want to move to Elixir at all? If you're happier in Erlang, then why not stick with that? For me, the best thing about Elixir is the BEAM, and you've obviously already got that. If you don't want or need metaprogramming, or the various Elixir conveniences feel less than convenient to you, it seems like you may as stick with what you find comfortable.
fcbrooklyn··on Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
At some point, you will be confronted with a problem (a bug most likely), and you think it is beyond your ability to fix. Do not give up. If you can't figure out what's wrong, figure out what isn't wrong, and keep figuring out what isn't wrong. This may not feel like progress, but it is. Do not go to your dev lead and say "this one is beyond me". Say "I'm stuck, but I've tried X, Y and Z, and it's none of those things. Do you have any ideas?"

Biggest issue I find with developers right out of school, is that they often feel ok throwing a problem over the wall to a more senior dev. The truth is, all of us are confronted with problems we don't know how to solve. That is the job, but if we don't solve them, who will? You will not magically discover an ability to solve impossible problems and diagnose inscrutable bugs. But if you don't give up, and you fight your way through these problems again and again, you will develop confidence, and the instincts that allow you to do it a bit quicker next time.

On a related note, do NOT rejoice when a bug you've been struggling with suddenly goes away (another thing I've seen many times). Nasty bugs "going away" is one of the worst things that can happen. I promise you, 90% of the time it's coming back. And it's coming back at the worst possible moment, and possibly in a less friendly form.

fcbrooklyn··on Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You
Yeah, I don't think it'd be that big of a stretch. I knew someone about 25 years ago who went from creating applications in visual basic, to working on device drivers (often involving assembly). There's a learning curve obviously, but working in assembly and working in js have plenty in common.
fcbrooklyn··on Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach
I'm not sure (not a lawyer). In theory, both request should be squashed, and I think there's a serious penalty for knowingly issuing a bullshit request, but i've never heard of the big guys being sanctioned, perhaps they lean on the excuse that their automated tools generate false positives. So you need to put up the content, and then point crappy automated tools at the big boys, maybe. I'm not gonna do it, but if someone who knew what they were doing managed to generate a ton of takedowns at the large providers, in a legally safe manner, it might at least prove a point and generate some press.
fcbrooklyn··on Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach
Is there any reason this can't be done in reverse? (IANAL) Perhaps a small orchestra can put a bunch of stuff online, with copyright of their performance, and then issue takedown notices on all of Sony's versions.
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