HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

root

39 karma · joined December 23, 2007

submissionscomments
root··on Using street lamps as EV chargers
Oh that seems difficult. In Finland the postal service uses right hand drive cars.
root··on How to Read Assembly Language
COBOL has MOVE ... TO ... which seems to be the logical order for a command named MOV/MOVE.
root··on All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)
Famous British philosopher Andrew Zaltzman put it like this: if you leave a man alone in a room an electric socket he will eventually try to stick his dick into it.
root··on Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
BASIC only ruins you if you have no intellectual curiosity. BASIC was my first language and with each new language I’ve learned since I’ve always been excited at the new possibilities and paradigms it opened up.
root··on When the state shifted to e-learning, a rural school shifted to the copy machine
A stencil machine. We used it to print the school newspaper. Just by writing this I can smell it.
root··on Is Elon Musk Prepping for State Failure?
The bullet proof thing is just a gimmick to give you a retort when a retard questions your manhood for driving an eco friendly car.
root··on Klaus Fuchs: a spy for the atomic age
That should be “Fuchs”.
root··on Virgin Media (UK) stores passwords in plain text, sends them through the mail
I’d say that at heart they’re a utility company rather than a tech company.
root··on Working Out Inside the Office
Care to give an example where a study with strong self selection bias is still scientific?
root··on Working Out Inside the Office
If they were volunteers the study would have a very strong self selection bias and therefore not be scientific.
root··on Working Out Inside the Office
Thank god I'm self employed and decide myself when and what to exercise. I can't imagine having to dance to the pipes of these corporate clowns. 18 people being scrutinized by their bosses collectively lose 150 lbs (25 of which are accounted for by 1 person)? I can't say I'm impressed.
root··on Are slide rules still useful?
The following cover from Astounding springs to mind: http://up-ship.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/feb59a.jp...
root··on Three complete specs for OSx86 compatible PCs
>but it IS called the "Pro" for a reason

Exactly, the money you safe on hardware you'll lose on support issues. If I were still a student I'd probably be running a hackintosh but my time now is too valuable to dick around with such a setup and afaik there are no firms offering support for hackintoshes.

root··on Teenagers allowed to wake up later have fewer absences from school
In the early nineties I used to start extra early so I could get my work done before the Americans started hogging mainframes.
root··on Check Mate: Apple's iPad and Google's Next Move
See, its so easy that 75 million people already learned how to use it.
root··on 2000-2009: Microsoft's Decade of Shattered Dreams
When the kids got a Wii I bought some Wii points just to get the browser. I used it once. An app that requires me to sit pretty much exactly in front of the tv to be able to control it just isn't all that useful to me.
root··on 220 Billion Lines of COBOL? BS
220 billion doesn't sound all that big to me. Let's say there are 100,000 firms that use Cobol, that would mean 2.2 million lines of code per firm. Since even a fairly trivial report coded in Cobol is easily 1000 lines (source: ran wc on my old Cobol directory), this would be the equivalent of about 2200 simple reports per firm. This is a very low number considering there is bound to be more complex transaction processing code, lots of (even more verbose) code generated by code generators, and the tendency to have lots of tweaked versions of the same program.
root··on Ask HN: Do you swear in your code?
It is ok as long as only friends read it, "Haha, look, Johnny used a swear-word, he's such a witty guy" they'll say. But there may come a day that someone who doesn't know you reads that comment, without knowing you and your colorful personality and reading it completely out of context her first impression of you will be that you're a cantankerous old fart and she'll hook up with that dumb html-"programmer" instead.
root··on BMW prototype uses textile instead of sheetmetal
I definitely do not discard it. Another solution that sprang to mind is that the softness of the hood makes it possible to put some kind of airbag(s) over the engine. Though this probably has a rather complicated set of problems (when to fire it, how to time the firing, can the required volume be inflated in time, etc.).
root··on BMW prototype uses textile instead of sheetmetal
Cute, but in this form it will never be allowed on European streets. If you hit a pedestrian they will smash their head right into the engine block, so it is never going to pass safety standards. Still, the idea is nice, does anyone have any stats on how much weight this safes?
root··on Rumor: Mac Fusion - a new developer Mac
I don't know, using "Fusion" to market a product that runs multiple OSs via Boot Camp seems like asking for trademark trouble about VMWare Fusion.
root··on Asus to embed Linux into all motherboards
It may not be all that useful to you or me, but it would be all my wife and youngest son need. I would count it as a big plus in a purchasing decision.