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qsion Atari ST in daily use since 1985 [video]

I had to clean the button switches every once in a while, and IIRC one of them failed on me completely.

qsion The GIL and its effects on Python multithreading

> and i'll be honest: if you're writing code thats so performance critical that you're worrying about the GIL... why the hell do you use python in the first place? use at least a compiled language.

Fair enough, but sometimes your freedom of choice may be limited. We have a large push for Python at our org, and for most people that's probably fine (or even really good), but I'm holding out as long as I can with Matlab and Julia.

qsion Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

Actually SwiftKey in multiple languages helps me write in the ones I am less fluent in, due to its autocorrect. I agree it can be annoying too... you have to be careful with activating languages, and I switch off the languages I am unlikely to use in the near future.

Still miss my BB though.

Edited to add: unlike other commenters here, I never use the glide feature in Swiftkey! I just use it as a better keyboard...

qsion Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

Yes, absolutely!

This may be nostalgia talking, but I loved (most) of my Blackberry devices. Certainly in the earlier part of its ascent, through to its heyday, it was indisputably the best at what it was supposed to do: emails (and messaging more generally).

I was able to type much better on my BB, although these days I'd miss the multi-lingual autocorrect of a SwiftKey. But not BBs were made the same: I remember upgrading my BB once to a newer, fancier model (I have long forgotten the designations) but its keyboard felt inferior to me. Keyboard feel is subjective of course, but I that one was a big step backward in my enjoyment of typing. I quickly switched to a newer model.

At one point I was forced to an HTC Blackberry-lookalike. I think it was a Windows phone, and while it looked similar, it was infinitely worse to use. I was happy when I could go back to a Blackberry again, and I kept using them until the last servers were switched off at my company.

I could be on the road for a few days without taking a charger too. I would only pack a charger for longer trips... but that had started to erode towards the end too.

Blackberry had a long afterlife in Indonesia; it must have been around 2014 or 2015 when I visited Jakarta and the one phone to have was a Blackberry, presumably due to its network-effect lock on the messaging market.

Meanwhile my Samsung's battery is down to 53% barely halfway through the day.

qsion Hacker News in the Style of Teletext

IIRC the more "modern" TVs did have some sort of cache for Teletext pages, but my memory is definitely hazy...

qsion Hacker News in the Style of Teletext

Obligatory mention of [1] Minitel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

qsion Julia: Faster than Fortran, cleaner than Numpy

I think restraint and common sense are key here (once you're comfortable typing the non-ASCII characters). In parts of my code it's much more intuitive to use \Omega or \Sigma and \mu than giving them ASCII names, and others looking at my code will immediately understand what the matrices and vectors do.

On the other hand, if you're going to use \mathfrak{i} to index a simple loop you're doing it wrong.

qsion Julia: Faster than Fortran, cleaner than Numpy

I strongly agree with that, coming from Matlab to both Python and Julia. While I enjoy some of the similarities between Julia and Matlab, it does take some learning and effort to write proper code in another language. Array indexing with square brackets in Julia tripped me up initially for instance as Matlab uses parentheses, and it still take non-zero mental effort to adjust when writing Julia (despite having done C in a distant past...).

Writing proper and idiomatic code that gets the best out of each language takes even longer as it requires more knowledge and experience. Having spent the last ten years or so predominantly in Matlab, and the corporate environment moving increasingly to Python, and my own interest in Julia, I am getting a double dose of this.

Pragmatically I like Matlab best, in large part because I am so comfortable in my workflow and the large existing codebase, but also the IDE, debugger, etc. I most fascinated by Julia but find that exploiting its potential has its own learning curve, and wrangling with type stability has its own challenges. I am least enthused by Python, which I am learning mostly from necessity, but this may be colored by my extreme aversion to its use of indentation.

qsion Truly unified inbox – BlackBerry got it right and nobody has since

I loved my Blackberries, and hung on to the last one as long as possible. I think I had to give it up around 2012... but even within the Blackberries, there were differences. Some keyboards were better than other, or at least, suited me better.

Having said that, I am not sure they could have withstood the app revolution without participating in. I do think they made major mistakes in their strategy at critical points, but simply focusing on their core business demographic might not have been enough. The get corporate IT on board, IIRC, you had to run a Blackberry Enterprise Server (?) for security and corporate connectedness. This was not cheap. That was becoming increasingly problematic as the iPhone and Android infrastructures caught up security-wise. In the end the cost to maintain the Blackberry servers was no longer justifiable as many people wanted the shiny new phones with all the apps.

qsion DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags

It's probably the single most blatant gaming-related fundraiser scam I've personally come across... but they got YC backing.

It'll take quite a bit to beat Star Citizen.

I don't understand the YC backing either though.

qsion Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

In addition Czech has the sound ř, which is almost impossible to pronounce unless you learn it in childhood. I don't know of any other language with that sound. Tongue-twisters will almost by definition explore the weird sound combinations in any language, but Czech is a fruitful hunting ground for these!

Interestingly, the geographically close but linguistically unrelated Hungarian makes up for all the vowels that Czech eschews. They're almost polar opposites in vowel usage.

qsion Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything.

[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/

qsion Book review on the history of modern Singapore

Oh, that's interesting. I had not heard of such cases, nor have I seen them. Do you remember which part of the park this was? I'll keep an eye out next time I am there.

qsion IPTIA Fidonet/Usenet Message Archive

It's a great initiative! I have fond memories of FidoNet in the olden days (wrote a scanner/tosser at one point) and would love to see more of it preserved. The Fido contents here look very limited with only a small smattering of echos, primarily from the US.

One of my to-do's is to go through a stack of old 5.25" floppies that may contain some old echomail. Life tends to get in the way these days...

qsion Book review on the history of modern Singapore

Erhm, if you want to camp in East Coast Park (or anywhere on public land in Singapore), you need to apply for a permit and it's only allowed at designated camping grounds. The campers you saw were recreational, and seldom stay for more than one night. On most weekdays you won't see any tents at East Coast.

qsion Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?

> I've though about working in a Amazon warehouse. There's one near me. But they don't get health benefits for 3+ months. Have to do intense manual labor etc.

I think you need to focus on your priorities here. As I understand you're currently jobless and obviously have no health benefits, and are on the verge of becoming homeless. Doing three months of "intense manual labor" to get a paycheck and health benefits is (in my view at least) far preferable to being homeless and penniless.

My perception of your reply is that you think the Amazon warehouse job is beneath you; does homelessness appeal more? Seriously, at this stage, in the very short run, your number one priority should be to avert homelessness, and do whatever it takes. I know you mentioned back pain, but if the Amazon warehouse isn't your thing, there should be something else you can do to tide you over.

More broadly as lot of commenters have very kindly offered to talk to you and help you in various ways. That is an immense gift! Make use of it, and don't make them regret offering their assistance.

You're in a bad place mentally right now, but you're young, you're not stupid and you can get out of this, but you need to be willing to put in the effort. Asking the question here is a very good first step.

Lastly, you may also want to visit Ask A Manager [1] which has a lot of good advice on cover letters, resumes, interviewing, etc. It's not tech-specific, but most of the advice applies universally.

Good luck!

[1] https://www.askamanager.org/

qsion The latest DSM update makes btrfs drives unavailable on budget Synology models

Ouch, this is terrible. I have been happy with my Synology NASes over the last decade or so, and their tech support, but this really, really, rubs me the wrong way. I am not affected by this act of deliberate vandalism, but Synology's reputation has been very seriously tarnished; this is close to the worst possible thing you can do as a storage provider. I cannot in good conscience recommend their products after this. Very disappointing.

qsion Ubiquiti all but confirms breach response iniquity

Thank you for that link, I had not realized Synology had moved into the router space, and I've been running Synology NASes for almost a decade! Generally I've been happy with them, and on the few occasions I need tech support, it was surprisingly good (going on with zero expectations based on other companies' support in the past).

qsion Ubiquiti all but confirms breach response iniquity

Probably not big by US standards, but WiFi attenuation across multiple floors is such that an AP in the living room won't provide any decent signal one floor straight up. Depends on the materials and layout of your house...

qsion Ubiquiti all but confirms breach response iniquity

Similar to the other responses, it's the fact that I can manage my network remotely from a simple app or UI. This helps me answer phone calls from my family asking why Netflix doesn't work on TV #2, when I'm not at home. Won't solve all problems, but at least I can narrow it down and troubleshoot.

And I like the fact that I can an overview of the state of my network; one of my wired links to an AP would degrade to 100 Mbps at times, and being able to see the link speeds easily was very helpful (it was a bad ethernet cable in the end).

Before I moved to Ubiquiti I had a spate of problems with my fiber broadband, which would stop working for a few minutes at random, resetting my RDP connections. I had a vendor-supplied Linksys (I think?) router, and trying to troubleshoot it was painful. If I ever have such problems again I'll have much better diagnostics.

That said, I won't buy any Ubiquiti gear that requires the cloud, and my faith in the company is eroding. But, like others, I would be at a loss what to replace my gear with at the moment. I just hope it'll function well enough until either Ubiquiti gets it act together (again?) or a viable competitor arises.

qsion Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

Same here. I switched to Ubiquiti gear a year ago, and by and large it's been very solid, running 2 AC-Pros, 2 AC-HDs and a bunch of switches and a gateway. My controller is a docker image running on a NAS, and having read about the problems with the v6 versions I have stayed on v5, and likely will for a long time. It's a relatively simple home setup so I'm not using any of the fancier configuration settings. For my purposes, it's infinitely better than the hodgepodge of equipment I had before.

I still like the UniFi experience and have not had any problems. I am increasingly concerned about the direction the company is going. I figure I get can a quite a few years of service from my current setup. I don't need to update or change anything for the time being, so there is no urgency. I might still recommend a Ubiquiti setup to others but it would be heavily caveated.