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legends2kon Source-Available Is Meaningless

Until I read your definition I assumed what the parent comment mentioned i.e. there's some inherent fairness in the project/code, which made little sense.

legends2kon Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

Nah.. many have started moving out to SourceHut, Gitlab, self-host, etc. I did see the /s but just saying.

legends2kon Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

Of course [1]! How would they give consistent, cleanly designed UI. I find the UX/UI much more cohesive than Windows' where some apps look like flat boxes (metro UI), others look like classic Windows.

You thought open-source means there'd be no design and they'd only jam code, while designing and architecturing is only for proprietary projects within ivy towered castles?

[1]: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

legends2kon Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

You, sir/ma'am, are a genius. I've actually seen this happen to quite some extent.

legends2kon Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

Classic "I've a nail so everyone will have nails and all they need is a hammer" attitude. Not everyone will use DHCP. Static IP is a thing for a reason. I use it on servers, Wi-Fi printers (for mobiles to immediately pick them up), IP packet logging/bucketizing based on client, etc. There's a lot of spheres in computing other than the end-user one which is just the final tip of the iceberg.

legends2kon Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

Can you give some example tasks that you do on both OSes? Just curious to know how the difference is so stark.

legends2kon Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

I agree with your sentiment and I use Linux religiously too. Respect it for what it has accomplished and continues to. Most of my friends don't care. They're into productivity more than passion for computing in general. They don't care one way or another. Tomorrow if there's another proprietary OS that makes their work easier they'll easily pay for that OS and move on. Just saying that our sentiment isn't shared by everyone.

legends2kon Show HN: Dut – a fast Linux disk usage calculator

And to hash something needs reading all of its data. I think deducing the file size would actually be faster in some file systems and never slower with any.

legends2kon Exercises to Learn Rust

https://exercism.io/tracks/c

Exercism.io is not just limited to one language it has a track for most popular languages. I've used it a couple of times and can definitely recommend it. You get to compare your solution with other (top-rated) solutions and you also get mentorship at times (depending on availability I guess).

legends2kon The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

+1. I've done the same with SymbianOS.

legends2kon YX Problem

The author laments about the relationship being asymmetric when they think it is symmetric. The fact that someone is teaching someone makes this asymmetric, no? Mentor-Mentee relationship is asymmetric. Giver-receiver relationships are asymmetric. Nothing wrong about that as long as both respect each other.

legends2kon YX Problem

Graphics programmer here. Many times drawing a square isn't a great option in games; particularly when there are many. The usual approach is blitting them squares from raster/image data which is a mere copy of texture data into frame buffer. If you're experimenting with Bresenham's line drawing or writing a game is the right probing question here.

legends2kon Comparing dd and cp when writing a file to a thumb drive

I've found when there are many files but overall size being small i.e. many many small files, archiving, copy and unpacking works faster. Perhaps due to enumerating, analysing overall size and then copying vs archiving directly.

Would be happy to learn the real reason.

legends2kon Comparing dd and cp when writing a file to a thumb drive

Interesting.

My guess: speed up is due to buffering involved in the latter's case, not sure though.

legends2kon Random Animations

True that! Though with Pentium MMX turning on those WinAmp visualizations led to significant drop in system responsiveness that I don't do anything other than watch those visualisations when I turn them on. Simpler, fun times though.

legends2kon Penrose – Create diagrams by typing notation in plain text

Inkscape for WYSIWYG or Latex figure package.

legends2kon What's up Python? Epic CPython commit, Django 5 and 2FA for PyPI

If someone who made the changes can't explain things clearly, I'd even wager that they didn't understand what they're changing properly. A good commit message is needed as the author might be gone but software is maintained for decades. Productivity is easy, writing a good message isn't, as the latter seems to be hard for many and it's telling of their understanding of systems they change.

legends2kon Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler

That's besides the point. Adhering to a language standard is much clearer than specifying it by a language compiler's version. Behaviour is documented in the former while one has to observe the output of a binary (and hope that side effects are understood with their full gravity).

legends2kon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)

I understand your angle but the reason is not in the language's technicality but in the community and its culture. Most Perl speakers are seasoned hackers who are great at low level programming and use Perl when C was an overkill; their documentation skills are also noteworthy. Just my observation; I've read Perl docs (just type ('perldoc perltoc') if you're on a non-Windows box) and giggled at some of the funny remarks and admired pithy writing.

legends2kon The bash book to rule them all

While man pages may not be for reading end to end, Bash's man pages are actually Info documents i.e. They're books with clear chapters, and are intended to be read like books.

legends2kon YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

I agree with the spirit of your comment; I too hate over-engineering. Choose your battles is an important step in mastery, yes, but being lazy can't be chalked up to mastery.

In this particular case I disagree with using `sleep`; using the idle timer it's not as roundabout as you put it: _Transcompiled frameworks inside of microservices talking to DBMS adapters over virtual networks_. It's a straight-forward callback, some lower-level timekeeper signals you and you do your thing: it's nowhere close to the convoluted jumping through hoops you explain.

Mastery comes with balance: putting in the optimal effort, not more, not less either. Of course, depends on what one's trying to master: job or programming. Former means do the minimum and get maximum benefits from your job/boss, latter means enjoy learning/programming and arrive at the most optimal solution (for no reason, just because you're passionate).

legends2kon YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

Using an idle timer, like window: requestIdleCallback [1], is good engineering. If anything passes that's not good engineering, it's laziness.

I'm not even a JS programmer but I know about timers, idle wait in UI programming is a common pattern. It's the attitude of mediocre engineers not bothering to lookup or learn new things.

If every OS/browser/stock market dev did what they want "because it works" we don't have a working system. We'll have systemic lags making the system sluggish and eventually unusable as more engineers follow the same mantra.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...

legends2kon As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

> what's the point? What is somebody going to do 100 years from now when they get your .zip off archive.org and you're long gone?

The author seems quite aware of this. He calls it out specifically: it's for learning and curiosity purposes.

legends2kon As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

Downside is GitHub or any of the commercial git-hosting sites might use your code in ways you didn't intend e.g. machine learning, training neural nets, etc. Alternatively they might go out of business and go down after hinting you to save a local copy. These are countered by self-hosting your repo in your own (home/cloud) server.

Downside of self-hosting is time, money and effort. You've to spend for energy and hardware and your time and effort to keep them shipshape. Chances of it surviving beyond you are slim.

Both has downsides; just pick one depending on what kind of person you're. If you only want to write code vs that and also know how to maintain it. The latter is necessary skill if you ask me, instead of being just a code monkey.

legends2kon As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

This is a problem only we'd to face. Kids these days use Git in some hosting hub or the other that it's a rarity that their code gets lots. Of course if these "free" services go down... it matters. Self-hosting has its uses.

legends2kon Cosmopolitan Third Edition

Thank you. My thoughts exactly.

legends2kon Cosmopolitan Third Edition

I noticed a similar comment from you in the same thread. If you don't write portable software, it doesn't mean the world isn't writing portable software in C, C++, Rust, etc. To list a very few ones:

Blender, GIMP, Emacs, Vim, Pidgin, Evince, Firefox, gEdit, Inkscape, Krita, FFmpeg, Python, Perl, ... I could go on and on.

legends2kon SumatraPDF Reader

I understood "pretty much" as "most" but not "all". I've been viewing PDFs for 20+ years and never encountered one with 3D content so ”pretty much” seems like a good adjective to use here for me.

legends2kon XML is better than YAML – Hear me out

True but that's to be tackled differently instead of not providing scripting at all.