Hacker News Reader

Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.

I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.

samfon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://samf.work/

This is pretty new, and I'm still trying to figure out what it will be. For the moment it's a blog, and it's mostly my astrophotography work, with some random code and nostalgia thrown in.

samfon Using the Apple ][+ with the RetroTink-5X

In my case I stick with ][ for the sake of nostalgia.

samfon Show HN: Empty Enter Expander – Type less in the terminal with this tool

I'm the same way, and "clear" or ^L isn't what I'm after. I want the history to still be on my screen, but I want the vertical separation too.

samfon Is 1 Prime, and Does It Matter?

Ha, yes, I was thinking of the theorems that refer to "odd prime" to exclude 2. :-)

samfon Is 1 Prime, and Does It Matter?

This is the best answer.

We could declare 4 to be a prime number, and keep the rest of the definition the same. Instead of just saying "no", you could ask, "okay, what would that do for us?" If there isn't a good answer, then what's the point? And usually, you're not in the 1% of 1% of 1%.

samfon Is 1 Prime, and Does It Matter?

Some examples are in these comments, e.g. the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an amusing outcome, where 1 is the only prime if you take it literally.

But also mentioned elsewhere in the thread: if we declared 1 to be a prime, then many (I daresay "most") of our theorems would have to change "prime number" to "prime number greater than one".

samfon Baltic countries disconnect from the Russian power grid

Very cool! I couldn't tell from the article if Kaliningrad will remain on a grid with the Baltics or become its own island.

samfon The story of Rogue

Rogue Basin or Rogue Temple?

samfon Why Bridges Don't Sink

The WWE didn't invent it, they perfected it.

samfon Apple II graphics: More than you wanted to know

One thing I used shape tables for was for a fade-in effect. I would draw my spaceship one pixel at a time, choosing the next pixel at random. (I made a tool to help with this, or else it would have been too tedious!) The shape tables were rendered so slowly that it make the ship "materialize" in a cool effect. After this initial fade-in, I would render the ship more sensibly.

Other than this, I never found much use for shape tables.

samfon AI can catalogue a forest's inhabitants simply by listening

I've often thought about how this sort of thing could be used for site security, much like cameras are used. E.g. it could hear a person's footsteps, and hear a person breathing, and it could distinguish between a person and an animal. With multiple microphones, it could determine a location.

I wonder if this is being done already.

samfon Ask HN: How do you create a cross-platform GUI without using Electron?

I haven't used this, but it should be mentioned:

https://tauri.studio/

samfon Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs (2010)

Yes, this is a major problem when you introduce ACLs into unix-like systems. A comment in the article mentions the "Richacl" work. A key problem with this work was that even "chmod 777" might not get you out of a situation where an ACL was denying access. It's been over ten years since I've been involved in this; it might have changed.

The POSIX draft ACLs had the same problem, where a chmod might not grant you the permission that you're asking for. Back when Solaris implemented POSIX draft ACLs, they needed to change many user-level interfaces (e.g., the chmod command and the ftp daemon) to have a chmod request work the way end users expected.

samfon Postgres scaling advice

Good info; I came here looking for experience with managed databases. Does anyone have experience with managed instances on other platforms?

samfon Every bookmark manager ever made

Surprised not to see del.icio.us there.

samfon iTerm2 3.3

Is anyone else having problems with vim? Specifically, I can't see my cursor since upgrading.

I don't really remember what my cursor looked like before the upgrade; maybe it was a red block? But now you can't see it.

My cursor outside of vim is fine.

samfon Projecting Unicode to ASCII

I use pastebot on the mac. It should be easy to add this as a "shell script filter", but sandboxing prevents me from getting unidecode. Has anyone else accomplished this?

samfon I call my OCD ‘Olivia’

I worked out that sequence while ignoring my assignments in elementary school, and I've been mildly obsessed with it since.

I don't think I'm OCD, but this thread is kind of freaking me out.

[edit] I also use my fingers to count binary on each hand independently, starting from different numbers and moving them forward in lock step.

samfon Build a burner phone with Twilio and Kotlin

Do the numbers being held register as disconnected to anyone calling them? It seems like that might cut down on some of the junk calls by the time they're released.

samfon The Other Half

I've been seeing the same doctor for nearly two decades. She does the same routine every time she takes my blood pressure: "So, (puts on cuff), do you have any trips planned? Anything fun coming up? (pump pump pump)".

I laugh inside at how consistent she is, so I guess it still works on me.

samfon Weaponizing PostScript

I've always wanted to trick someone into sending this to the printer:

  %!
  initgraphics clippath fill
  { copypage } loop

Please don't do this! It'll run you out of toner and paper as fast as possible.

I'm just surprised I haven't seen more things like this, especially back in the days when postscript was popular.

samfon A Visa for founders, engineers and investors willing to join France

It might help if you were immersed in it, as opposed to a small amount of time in school. But would you be able to function those first few months, that's the question.

samfon Thorium

At least the author should have someone proofread it. There are grammar and spelling problems throughout.

samfon Dropbox Project Infinite

Thanks!

samfon Dropbox Project Infinite

Thanks, I just turned that on!

samfon Dropbox Project Infinite

Not disagreeing, but I'm not seeing that on my wife's iphone. She got a 16 gig phone (big mistake), but we were thinking that getting everything on iCloud would make up for this. We pay every month for iCloud storage.

That's not what we're seeing. Her phone gets to be 100% full, and deleting a photo frees up space. When we delete a photo, we get dire warnings that "this will delete the photo on all of your devices, and in the cloud too." I download them to my computer before doing this, so nothing is really lost. But it's annoying.

samfon Bash Academy

I love this option. I type "/tmp" when I'm about to create some short-lived scratch files. Those saying "you can just alias that" are missing the point. Where do you stop with the aliases?

samfon Amazon Snowball

I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...

samfon Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

I agree, I just think your initial statement was a bit extreme.