Hacker News Reader

jdporteron Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture

Back in the day, I did quite a bit of programming, professionally, on 6800-family CPUs, mainly 6850 and kin. It was an absolute pleasure to work with. The 6502, by comparison, felt like an absolute nightmare.

jdporteron Hello, stranger – Talking to random people

The book Willem says he is reading, by Joe Keohane, talks about the benefits of talking to strangers, and calls this "connecting". That is not at all what psychologists mean by "connecting". I talk to people all the time, both familiar and strange, and yet am not connected to anyone, in the latter sense.

jdporteron Unpacking Elixir: Observability

> Your compiled C or C++ program will be very different from the code you wrote

Sorry, you just lost beaucoup credibility points. C is just "high-level assembly language". The output looks exactly like the input, modulo some optimizations by the compiler. Every computer programmer knows this. Or should.

jdporteron Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

"I am not going to sanitize things just so your precious little Jeighden can locate the latest tweenwave ringtone they ripped off Twitch."

jdporteron Crusty Windows

I just realized - the logos of Windows 3.x through 7 look more like flags than they look like windows. I wonder what the reasoning was behind that? I'm sure it has been documented/analyzed somewhere.

jdporteron Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

looks cool, but D specific. how easy would it be to generalize this?

jdporteron CS quotes found while browsing Notepad++'s code

omg, this is primo java trolling. at least, I think you're being sarcastic...

jdporteron A Sun-like star orbiting a black hole

Or, for extra challenge/fun, as a stage play.

jdporteron Ask HN: Carrier “lost” my number in a port request

Since you can't call it the slashdot effect, obviously...

jdporteron What Is the Fediverse?

I don't think they're federated. They don't transparently share data using a common protocol under the hood. They simply link to each other. They're a web.

jdporteron What Is the Fediverse?

I was also a #gplusrefugee on pluspora :-) Very sad to see it go. Once a nomad, always a nomad, I guess?

I joined Nerdica not long after joining pluspora, but wasn't active there because the (web) UX is pretty poor. But still, it's my main sn now... besides Fosstodon, which is pretty cool.

jdporteron Ask HN: Why do my online accounts keep getting banned?

Show up, pay, and ride? Like getting on the subway? Not workable, for two reasons: 1, from the passengers' perspective, you need to get to Indianapolis, and when you show up, there are no seats, or worse, no flights. 2, from the airlines' perspective, no one buys advance tickets, you have no idea how big of a plane (and thus also how much fuel and how many support staff) you'll need, nor when, nor even whether you'll need a plane at all. Planning. Airplanes aren't subways.

jdporteron Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

Apparently not 100% of National Forest is freely usable. I learned this lesson painfully not long ago. I planned my overnight campout "carefully"... but there were still things I didn't know, even after reading everything I could find online. Namely: there are "pay to stay" campgrounds. You are not allowed to camp within the perimeter without a temporary permit. And even if you try to simply drive through, you might find gates closed.

Somewhere, people have collected this wisdom, I'm sure. Any pointers?

jdporteron Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA

Why do you say it's a non-SI unit? Seems to me it is. I mean, it's a derived unit, not a fundamental unit; but still SI.

jdporteron Loneliness a 'bigger health risk than smoking or obesity'

I do feel bad for those who have lost their social net during the pandemic; loneliness sucks, I know it. At the same time, I find it hard to be sympathetic because - it must be nice to have had a social net to lose! For me personally, the isolation of the last year and a half has been a barely noticeable difference from the decades prior.

jdporteron Loneliness a 'bigger health risk than smoking or obesity'

> Loneliness is a widespread problem, even prior to pandemic

Tell me about it.

> often associated with the older generation - despite more young people struggling with loneliness.

Thanks for the age shaming.

> Three times as many young people deal with loneliness compared to older people.

I do wonder what dark hole you pulled that factoid out of.

jdporteron CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command-line programs

Hit us up on Twitter.

Eh, I think not.

The "commands" I create are, most often, small tools for my own use, so I don't worry about making the names short. I always try to make the name a verb, or include a verb, e.g. "fetchbookmarks", "deleteduplicates"; one exception would be in the case of converters, in which case "convert" is implicit, e.g. "csv2xml" or whatever; and there may be other cases where the verb is implied. The Huffman Coding is important, though, and I have made some tools I use a lot, so I gave them short names. I use gvim a lot, and the wrapper I wrote for it (which does smart finding - it will load foo.cpp wherever it is under your cwd, as long as there's only one) I named g. I don't expect to distribute this tool, so I don't care. :-)

jdporteron CLI Guidelines – A guide to help you write better command-line programs

jdporteron Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

It isn't always fake. I used to work in a retail chain store (I won't say its name, but it ends with "xx" and starts with "TJ") and we were trained to use certain codes on the PA when we needed security to come deal with a situation. The difference, I think, is that these real alerts were coded so as not to be understood by the customers.

jdporteron I asked GPT-3 for the question to “42”

What if "What is the question?" is the question?

(ht Hofstadter)

jdporteron Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku

Of course it's from the Bible -- as a quick google would have told you. It's Mark 2:21-22.