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hortense

372 karma · joined February 15, 2019

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hortense··on Drugwars for the TI-82/83/83 Calculators (2011)
What was the first letter of the city in which that happened?
hortense··on Apple Blocks Fortnite's Return to iOS App Store, Epic Claims
This is why devs are afraid of publicly criticizing Apple, let alone testifying against them in the court. Apple has shown that they will then prevent you from accessing 50%+ of the US market. In short Apple is a bully, has been for more than a decade now, and it has worked out well for them.
hortense··on Patriot Missile Software Problem
To store dollars with a precision of 1 billionth of a cent, you store into your integers 1 billionth of cents instead of dollars.
hortense··on Patriot Missile Software Problem
To store dollars with a precision of 1/10 cent, you store into your integers 1/10 cents instead of dollars.
hortense··on US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission
Wouldn't that be Microsoft? It's worth 2.9T, vs Apple's 2.84T.
hortense··on Patriot Missile Software Problem
To store dollars with a precision of 1 cent, you store into your integers cents instead of dollars. No need to mess with anything more complicated.
hortense··on RyujinX – Open Source Nintendo Switch Emulator
You start spending all your time programming in middle school. By the time you enter college you know everything needed to write simple emulators, and then you meet other students that motivate you to up your game and complexify your projects, like working on a Nintendo Switch emulator.

It doesn't require being a genius or a fast learner, it just requires the good fortune of having programming be your passion.

If you want to catch up to these guys when you only start to learn programming in college, it's doable but it requires you to be a fast learner and also be somewhat passionated in programming.

hortense··on JPEG XL: How it started, how it’s going
Last time I looked, all the top commiters were from Google.
hortense··on Rowan Atkinson on free speech (2012) [video]
It's possible that the problem is that speech is not the right abstraction. Perhaps we should be advocating for something along the lines of "free expression of reasoning".
hortense··on Google and Mozilla are working on iOS browsers that aren't based on WebKit
No chance of Apple implementing this outside of the EU if they are not forced to.

They are getting billions from Google every year because Safari is the most used browser on iOS, and they will do what is necessary to make this last for as long as possible.

hortense··on What is Google doing with its open source teams?
> These are not coasters.

Citation needed. Even if they were not coasters, I suspect they had a fat paycheck disproportionate to what they brought to the company.

hortense··on Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past
If you take a constant fertility rate of 1, you'll always have an inverted pyramid, until there's no more pyramid.

(I'm assuming that the life expectancy does not change significantly)

hortense··on Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past
> A perpetually inverted pyramid would require that fertility rate shrink even further, until it approaches 0

That is incorrect.

hortense··on Bye Twitter – Manu Cornet
I would say he's trying to control the narrative so that his future prospective employers believe that he was not laid off because of his performance.
hortense··on Fuchsia Workstation
Modern browsers use an extremely wide range of system APIs: process/IPC/sandboxing, memory, networking/connectivity (e.g. bluetooth), filesystem, GPU, audio, windowing system, device IO (keyboards, webcam), and more I'm sure.

I can't think of any other kind of software that come close. If you can run a modern browser it means that your OS is already quite mature.

hortense··on Playdate Software Development Kit is now available for free to all
Almost all the most popular apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Chrome, Google Maps ..) do.

And of course, nearly all games do.

hortense··on Why Airbus Is Canceling Orders from Qatar Airways, One of Its Best Customers
"Airbus says Qatar is trying to squeeze money out of it for aircraft underutilized during the pandemic"

Yeah that's sounds pretty obvious to me. They have unused inventory, and they are trying to get a refund. Not sure it's a good strategy though.

hortense··on Heuristics that almost always work
Note that the size of the place is important.

"highest temperature ever recorded in town X" does not mean much.

"highest temperature recorded in country Y" on the other hand is more significant, especially if the country is large.

hortense··on To reduce student suicides by hanging to fans, institute in India removes fans
Which is why they are replacing the ceiling fans with wall mounted fans (it's explained in the article)
hortense··on A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland)
From the link: "although the resemblance with the lunar analemma is striking"
hortense··on NFTs are the new Beanie Babies
> You own the pointer to the image

You own a pointer.

hortense··on Bye YouTube, Hello PeerTube [video]
You can turn your history off if you want, but then you'll get suggestions of videos you've already watched.
hortense··on Web-based editor
Some people are excited because there's no gatekeeper taking 100 USD every year for the privilege of distributing apps on it. Also, it's quite simple to start developing for it.

For complex software (e.g. video games) on the other hand the web is a real piece of crap: performance suck, no UDP, a certain browser is purposely a ton of useful APIs (or is straight up buggy).

hortense··on Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store
In general, WebKit has more bugs and fewer features than gecko.
hortense··on Git password authentication is shutting down
You can switch to bitbucket, they still support passwords.
hortense··on Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution
> The official Cuban annual median salary in 2018 was approximately 9,300 pesos, or around $372.

To put this into perspective, a single bitcoin transaction currently costs $2.3.

hortense··on Malicious PyPI packages stealing credit cards and injecting code
This can be done with capability-based operating system, though it requires running the libraries you want to isolate in a separate process.

On a capability-based OS you whitelist the things a given process can do. For instance, you can give a process the capability to read a given directory and write to a different directory, or give the capability to send http traffic to a specific URL. If you don't explicitly give those capabilities, the process can't do anything.

hortense··on For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
If you take into account the download/extraction/installation time of the user, many times yes.
hortense··on Finding a kernel regression in half an hour with git bisect run (2018)
On large codebases that does not hold because you can't expect everybody to know all the code and how it should behave. If you broke it but there was no test, it's not your fault.

"if you liked it, then you should have put a test on it".

hortense··on For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
> Why should I be excited about Filesystem API and the like when we can already do that on the operating system directly?

Because it's easier to update to a website than it is to release a ton of binaries ({windows, Linux, macos}x{x86,x64,arm64}) and have users download them.

Not to mention it's safer and faster for the user.

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