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iandev

333 karma · joined January 18, 2017

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iandev··on Show HN: A game where you build a GPU
I'm confused about a difference in the NMOS and PMOS. The scenario I'm confused about is when the source is VDD and the drain is connected to GND and output.

For the PMOS, the output toggles between 1 and 0 (opposite the gate) as expected. However, for the NMOS, the output is always 0.

I don't understand why GND pulls VDD down to 0 for the NMOS, but not the PMOS.

iandev··on The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple exec at Epic trial
Should have clarified that it's not an issue that they're profiting. It is sometimes implied that they _have_ to charge 30% to run the app store. My point is that the app store could exist without the 30% charge.
iandev··on The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple exec at Epic trial
I honestly have sympathy for the case he makes. I don't take issue with the way that Apple has restricted the ability to get apps on an iPhone. The problem is the 30% cut that they take in the app store. I think the system can largely stay the same, but they're clearly profiting from the cut they take. It's not simply recovering operating costs.

edit: I'm not saying that they're not allowed to profit. I just wanted to point out that the 30% isn't strictly necessary to run the app store.

iandev··on Programming is hard
Is it possible that programming is both hard and easy? I somewhat feel that this post lacks the nuance that it complains of the other side lacking.

I'm of the opinion that anyone that thinks you must be of some special intelligence to become a software engineer is wrong because frankly it's no harder than many other careers. However, I do side with the author that we shouldn't be dismissive and pretend it's extra easy either.

I want some nuance. As with all things, programming is easy to get into, hard to be great at. Doing it doesn't make you particularly special. Working hard and getting better at _something_ is what matters.

iandev··on Blitz.js Now in Beta (Batteries Included Framework Built on Next.js)
This sounds very interesting to me as my team has had some real struggles figuring out how to deal with things like authentication in Next.js. In one case, we've rolled our own oauth with a completely separate express api. In another, we still haven't quite decided. I've been on the lookout for a sort of Node equivalent of Rails.
iandev··on The Cult of Best Practice
I can't say that I agree with everything in the article, but "The Way Out" is certainly something I can get behind. There is great value in understanding where "best practices" come from and what problems they solve. I think it's easy to see there is an issue with mindless pattern following.
iandev··on YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud
A PhD would imply first hand experience of academia. I don't think they're using it to signal any particular level of intelligence.
iandev··on Show HN: Rook – get small tasks done for free
I don't mean to be inflammatory, but is there no ethical concern with charging money for the site and then giving none of it to the people that actually do the work? I'd ask you to reconsider the project, and to really think about whether it's acceptable to profit off of a bunch of free workers. I am of the firm opinion that it's not.
iandev··on Ruby adds experimental support for rightward assignments
> While the above pattern has become standardized, it feels somewhat unnatural as we read most of the spoken languages from left to right.

Is this true (the 'unnatural' part)? Reading left to right, `age = 42` can be read as "age is 42" which feels perfectly natural in English. `42 => age` would be read as "assign 42 to age"? This feels more awkward to me. I'm not sure I understand why anyone would want Rightward assignment.

iandev··on University of Utah pays $457k to ransomware gang
> "The university's cyber insurance policy paid part of the ransom, and the university covered the remainder. No tuition, grant, donation, state or taxpayer funds were used to pay the ransom"

I was looking to dunk on them but it seems that what they did wasn’t entirely unreasonable. The article further states that they paid to protect student data.

iandev··on An update on our security incident
It’s possible to have zero tolerance and not fire anyone here. My understanding is that no employee misused their credentials or tools. The attackers misused them. I suppose you could argue that accidentally exposing credentials is misusing them, but I don’t think that’s what Twitter means there.
iandev··on White hat social engineering: How to become an admin of a system
I think the article makes some good points, but I'm not sure that the gatekeeping step (step 6) is necessary. I think if you look at all the other steps, it fundamentally comes down to one thing:

Care enough about making things better such that others view you as valuable.

iandev··on ESLint 7.0
If your team consistently writes code that looks like your first example, you absolutely shouldn't use prettier. However, in my experience, your first example isn't what people regularly produce and the output is a wild improvement on a lot of things that I've seen people write.
iandev··on Show HN: A programmable tooltip on Mac OS
Also worth noting that you can pipe the result to `pbcopy` to put it in your clipboard. Super useful if you haven't seen it before.

    $ date -r 1577733633 | pbcopy
iandev··on How to Make Apple’s Mac Pro Holes
With drilling, the fluted drill bit evacuates material for you. When milling, you don't have the same luxury.
iandev··on VPN – Very Precarious Narrative
This seems to be the YouTube video in question if anyone was curious

https://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4

iandev··on Going to university does not broaden the mind
> those who had chosen the vocational route showed marked drops in interest in tasks that are investigative and enterprising in nature.

Am I incorrect to think that this is narrowing of the vocational route?

iandev··on Going to university does not broaden the mind
The title is a bit sensational. The bigger picture is in the first paragraph.

> However, it was not the case that university broadened minds. Rather, work seemed to narrow them.

Basically, going to university doesn't make your mind broader, but not going to university does result in a narrower mind.

iandev··on Show HN: Rebuilt My CSS Grid Generator with Vue.js
On Safari 11.1.1 TypeError: "1fr ".repeat(e).trimEnd is not a function.
iandev··on I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores
According to this: https://developer.apple.com/support/enrollment/

A DUNS number is only required for organizations, not individuals.

iandev··on I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores
In the article: "Aside: I guess Apple won’t let you submit an app unless you have a registered, legal company?"

Although it does seem to be this way, you can submit an app to the store without being a registered, legal company. The most common route is to just mark yourself as a sole proprietorship using your own name. No need for an LLC or anything. However, this may vary from country to country.

iandev··on [dead]
Nothing particularly scandalous comes up in this article. Completely unsurprising that Uber disables whatever self-driving ability the car already has to test their own solution. What is mildly interesting is the claims that had it not been disabled, the Volvo supplied self-driving software may have prevented the crash. However, I don't know how reliable that is and could just be PR at work.
iandev··on Show HN: Lockbox – simple encryption with key management
It looks neat. I'm sorry I don't have much feedback, but I think this line is incorrect in your readme.

file_put_contents( "key.txt", $k->Export() );

I think you meant $key->Export(). Just a heads up to save the copy and pasters.

iandev··on Ask HN: What are your favorite browser extensions/add-ons for Firefox or chrome?
Shameless self promotion:

SearchIT is something that I made and use almost everyday https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/searchit/fioambgbh...

You can swap where you are searching easily. Maybe someday I will eventually add more sites, but no promises. It's open source here: https://github.com/IanBurgan/SearchIT

iandev··on Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
This is both the fault of Facebook and the police. Unfortunately, not all police forces require evidence to arrest people. I would argue that the larger problem is actually the way in which the police handled this and not so much Facebook's inaccurate translation.
iandev··on New law bans California employers from asking applicants their prior salary
Although banning the box unintentionally hurt those that it attempted to help, it may ultimately be the right move if the problem of the resultant discrimination can be tackled also. A one step back, two steps forward situation.
iandev··on Open Source Datasets
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure for what a dataset like the "Collectible Card Game to Code"[0] might be used. Can anyone explain how and for what it might be used?

[0] https://github.com/deepmind/card2code