Hacker News Reader

mpalfreyon Java at 30: The Genius Behind the Code That Changed Tech

Decent talent pool.

Decent tooling. Been around for long enough that a lot of the quirks of it are well known and documented. Basically it's a blue collar programming language without too many gotchas. Modern(ish) day Cobol.

(I'm predominantly a Java dev still, even after diversions over the years to Javascript, Python and C#).

mpalfreyon 3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023)

I still am a bit of a 3dfx fanboy. Ended up emailing 3dfx at one stage and got sent a load of posters and case stickers (remember those?).

I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the end which was a bit more evenly matched.

Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under (only paid £50 for it).

Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while, then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!

mpalfreyon Apple software update "bug" enables Apple Intelligence

I always say if I can reproduce a bug, I can fix it.

Hardest thing is reproducing a bug reliably.

mpalfreyon The Rise of Malört, an Unexpected Midwest princess

I went on a stag do (bachelor party for non-Brits) last year. The groom had just returned from Chicago on a business trip the morning we went away. He brought back a bottle of Malört.

I developed a taste for it that weekend - it's not that bad (I'd take it over something like Becharovka). Annoyingly years ago (2009ish) I spent a fair amount of time over in the Midwest with work and never drank the stuff.

mpalfreyon Automatic braking systems save lives. Now they’ll need to work at 62 MPH

AEB at 62mph is likely to be pretty damn scary.

I've experienced it slamming on at slow speeds and it's pretty aggressive.

mpalfreyon Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?

Not too many even in London really.

mpalfreyon Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

+1 for formal methods in Z. I've still got the book at my dad's house.

My first year of uni also had a pretty evil pure maths course which was worth a high percentage of the year. Not much fun.

mpalfreyon One dead as London-Singapore flight hit by turbulence

I'm flying LHR -> MEL on Friday on Singapore Airlines (on a 777 actually for LHR -> SIN).

I tend to keep my seat belt fairly loosly fastened throughout the flight. At least once I've experienced bad turbulence around where this flight had it - enough to make me hold tightly onto things and for service to be stopped. Usually I need a few trips to the bathroom during the flight though and if nothing else, a chance to stretch my legs (20 hours on planes in 24 hours means walking around is important).

Be interesting to see if anything is different on board (either with crew or fellow pax). RIP to the guy who died.

mpalfreyon WebSDR – Internet-connected Software-Defined Radios

Have used this for number stations in the past. It's great - amazing what you can still find on shortwave.

mpalfreyon Cisco Acquires Splunk

I worked for NDS when they were acquired by Cisco. They've spat them back out a few years ago. Not entirely sure Cisco should have got into the video space.

I enjoyed Cisco (great 4th July parties!) but it never felt like we were properly integrated.

mpalfreyon North Korean campaign targeting security researchers

This is well worth listening to. Great podcast.

mpalfreyon Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh

Good map. As someone who grew up in Cardiff it doesn't surprise me to see this distribution. A lot of media roles are also billingual in Cardiff.

I've got a GCSE in Welsh (having been one of the first years to have to do it mandatory). Used it once in anger up in North Wales. It was a difficult language to learn and I'd have preferred to continue with another European language ideally. I'll probably try to teach my daughter some Welsh though (she was born in England and will go to school in England).

mpalfreyon Shopify discourages meetings by shaming employees with cost calculator

I kind of agree with this. I used to work for a large enterprise software company and I often made the point that you'd have to jump through hoops to get approval to spend a couple of hundred EUR, but you could call a meeting with 30+ people in it no problem.

I interviewed at Shopify last year, I didn't end up accepting (I stayed at the unnamed software company) but I do agree with a lot of their processes (not so much since the layoffs they've had however).

mpalfreyon Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

+1 for an awesome interview experience. I had an offer last year which I didn't end up accepting (for various reasons) but I walked away from the process having actually enjoyed it.

mpalfreyon Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

Exactly the same here. I had email hosted with TSOHost here a few years ago and had no end of problems with bounce backs.

In the end I moved it all to GSuite for a few bucks a month. It's simply worth it to avoid the issues with sender rep.

mpalfreyon Colon Cancer Isn’t Just an Older Person's Disease Anymore

Likewise, my mum (as British) died at 65 of bowel (again, British, colon otherwise) cancer. Planning on starting to look at private screening from 40 here.

mpalfreyon Ask HN: How do I get back into the tech industry after 4 years of unemployment?

This is a bit (a lot) dodgy.

I've had to provide background references for a number of jobs in the past. This could well come back and bite you - what if the person hiring knows people from the company you supposedly worked for? It's a small world out there, in particular if you're looking for roles close to home.

mpalfreyon Down the Cloudflare / Stripe / OWASP Rabbit Hole

I wonder what is actually causing the error here. Looking at the 2 payloads diff on the site I can't spot anything. It's a weird one that's for sure.

mpalfreyon Down the Cloudflare / Stripe / OWASP Rabbit Hole

Would it still do DDOS even without the WAF?

mpalfreyon Down the Cloudflare / Stripe / OWASP Rabbit Hole

Microsoft Regional Director is effectively someone who is an advisor to Microsoft - https://rd.microsoft.com/en-us/about/ .

mpalfreyon Incident: Qatar B788 at Doha on Jan 10th 2023, steep descent after takeoff

Runway length at LGW is OK for a 777.

I'd guess they knew it was safe and it's easier to deal with a plane full of pax at your originating airport than diverting to STN (where there's no BA ops) or LGW (BA have ops here so could have worked).

mpalfreyon Female spies of MI6

Apparently there are some companies who are suppliers to these organisations who do pay better, but otherwise, yes. The salaries are pretty poor. I get that some people would want to work there for the kudos, but compared to tech companies the advertised salaries aren't great.

mpalfreyon Adventures in Teletext Recovery

I'd guess you might be thinking of the darts game that Playjam had. This was on Sky Digital rather than analogue Sky, so more like 1998-1999. From memory the old analogue system didn't have any interactive features.

I got addicted to that too, and Beehive Bedlam in 2001.

I love TV tech. The old Teletext / Ceefax product was pretty impressive for its time and some insane engineering. I spent a number of years writing software for the TV industry (both backend and STB software) as a result of playing about with this when I was younger.

mpalfreyon Ask HN: I have education budget to use before year end, how should I use it?

O'Reilly. Pluralsight.

Public speaking or presentation course can be good.

I've been doing some certs lately. AWS Solutions Architect Associate was about that for a virtual course + exam voucher.

Find a conference somewhere next year and book that? Not sure where you're based but $1200 would cover a couple of days and some travel depending on the conf.

mpalfreyon Ask HN: Why did phpBB forums go out of fashion?

Got to agree. I've hosted instances of PhpBB over the years. It was a good product (this would have been around 2000/2001).

I still go on certain forums (e.g. Pistonheads.com) but the niche groups are all on Facebook these days.

mpalfreyon Microservices – Please, Don’t (2016)

This.

Instead of a simple method call, you now have the joys of distributed systems to deal with instead.

I'm a fan of right size architecture. Monoliths have their place. Microservices have their place. Neither are necessarily better than the other. Different tools for potentially different jobs.

mpalfreyon Pwned, the book

https://www.troyhunt.com/

Owner of https://haveibeenpwned.com/

mpalfreyon Pwned, the book

Got to agree unfortunately. I'm a huge fan of Troy and HIBP in general. This was a tiny bit too much right now (I've got a 7 month old and my wife isn't working!).

mpalfreyon Apple Introduces Apple Watch Ultra

I'm getting tempted. I said that if Apple brought out a G-Shock style Apple watch, I'd buy it instantly.

I've had an Apple Watch SE for the last couple of years. It's been pretty good on the whole. Bought it after my Garmin Forerunner nearly failed to get a GPS lock in time when I was in a start pen for a half marathon (AFAIK the Fenix gets a lock far quicker).

mpalfreyon Ask HN: What is the cheapest laptop I can buy for development

Old T or X series Lenovo gets my vote. Good machines, although I'd question if they're the best bet right now as some are getting kind of old (e.g. I had a quick look at a T430, cheap but it's a 3rd gen CPU). Could a consumer machine be a better bet at the expense of ruggedness? Might be quicker.