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sime2009on Historical memory prices 1960-2026

aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.

sime2009on Migrating to the EU

proton.me? That is in Switzerland, not the EU.

sime2009on Microsoft Edit

Seriously? We're going to complain about a couple megs in a text editor in the year 2025?

sime2009on A 10x Faster TypeScript

> we're undertaking this more as a port that maintains the existing behavior and critical optimizations we've built into the language. Idiomatic Go strongly resembles the existing coding patterns of the TypeScript codebase, which makes this porting effort much more tractable.

Cool. Can you tell us a bit more about the technical process of porting the TS code over to Go? Are you using any kind of automation or translation?

Personally, I've found Copilot to be surprisingly effective at translating Python code over to structurally similar Go code.

sime2009on Tesla sales in Europe down 45% in January

I'm in the Netherlands and the used market for Tesla has already dropped like a rock. It is flooded with cars from leasing companies who after 5 years now want to sell them on for deprecation and tax purposes.

sime2009on It's been 30 years since Intel's infamous Pentium FDIV bug reared its ugly head

From https://www.sgoc.de/pentium.html

    Q:  How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light
        bulb?
    A:  1.99904274017, but that's close enough for non-technical
        people.

    Q:  What do you get when you cross a Pentium PC with a  research
        grant?
    A:  A mad scientist.

    Q:  What's another name for the "Intel Inside" sticker they put 
        on Pentiums?
    A:  The warning label.

    Q:  What do you call a series of FDIV instructions on a Pentium?
    A:  Successive approximations.

    Q:  Complete the following word analogy:  Add is to Subtract as 
        Multiply is to:

                    1)  Divide
                    2)  ROUND
                    3)  RANDOM
                    4)  On a Pentium, all of the above
    A:  Number 4.

    Q:  Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586?
    A:  Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got
        585.999983605.

    Q:  According to Intel, the Pentium conforms to the IEEE 
        standards 754 and 854 for floating point arithmetic. 
        If you fly in aircraft designed using a Pentium, what is the
        correct pronunciation of "IEEE"?
    A:  Aaaaaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!

    TOP TEN NEW INTEL SLOGANS FOR THE PENTIUM
    -------------------------------------------

    9.9999973251   It's a FLAW, Dammit, not a Bug
    8.9999163362   It's Close Enough, We Say So
    7.9999414610   Nearly 300 Correct Opcodes
    6.9999831538   You Don't Need to Know What's Inside
    5.9999835137   Redefining the PC -- and Mathematics As Well
    4.9999999021   We Fixed It, Really
    3.9998245917   Division Considered Harmful - No Life-
                    Maintenance Devices Should Be Used With This
                    Processor
    2.9991523619   Why Do You Think They Call It *Floating* Point?
    1.9999103517   We're Looking for a Few Good Flaws

    And the 0.9999999998th Slogan Is...
                                    The Errata Inside

sime2009on Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

I contribute to NodeGui, Qt on Nodejs. It doesn't try to emulate the C++ API by allowing subclassing. Instead it exposes most methods on QWidget classes/subclasses which process QEvent objects (and their subclasses) in the form of events which you can subscribe to as an application. You can listen to signals and also QEvent related traffic in much the same way. So, if you want to subclass a QWidget to do your own custom rendering/painting, you would create an instance of QWidget and then listen to/hook into, the incoming requests to repaint. Qt sees a normal QWidget instance, but you can customise it do act like the subclass you desire. This avoids any attempt to do a real C++ subclass at runtime. Internally, NodeGui subclasses almost every QWidget (and more) to hook into them to allow this. This works far better than you might expect and saves a ton of complexity.

sime2009on Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

Is it possible to extend/subclass an existing QWidget and customise it?

sime2009on Partnership with News Corp

garbage in, garbage out

sime2009on EU tells Meta it can't paywall privacy

There is no company size threshold here. This is GDPR related. You and Gruber are both mixing up GDPR with the EU's Digital Markets Act. Digital Markets is the one which has a "gatekeeper" concept tied to company size and market power.

sime2009on Agile Is a Tainted Term

That's right. It can't be pushed down from above. The team has to want to do this and take the power.

A manager can start work on this kind of culture shift without even saying the word "agile". They need to give their teams more trust and room to govern themselves. i.e. managers need to get out of the way. When a team is open to the idea of Agile or scrum, then the manager could ask the team if they would like training or coaching. But the ground has to be made fertile first.

sime2009on Agile Is a Tainted Term

The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure.

The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers.

So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.

sime2009on Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

Yes, it kind of is. But the whole article talks about the extremes but spends zero time describing what the desirable middle ground looks like.

sime2009on The failure of self-checkout technology

23% did, just to be clear.

sime2009on Ask HN: How many of you are consciously downsizing your devices/going retro?

I prefer desktops because is something breaks I have a chance of working around it immediately (e.g. screen), and if not then I can have a replacement part sent to me in about 24 hours or less which I can install myself.

sime2009on LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024

I've found LLMs great for vague questions about functions and APIs whose details I've long forgotten. Recognising the right answer when it appears is often faster than digging through random results on google.

sime2009on Using Make – writing less Makefile

A similar tool is `task` https://taskfile.dev/ . It is quite capable and also a single executable. I've grown to quite like it.

sime2009on Waveterm

TermKit was one of the inspirations for Extraterm ( https://extraterm.org/ ). It separates command output, allows for reuse of previous output, as well mixing content types.

The terminal VSCode has been picking up on these kinds of features lately. Now they can even "sticky" the previous command line at the top of the window when scrolling through long output.

It has taken a long time, but these ideas are slowing spreading around.

sime2009on Goodbye, clean code (2020)

Design patterns, for example, really should only be studied once you have quite a bit of experience with complex code bases under your belt. You need to have done battle with some nasty code problems in bigger code bases before you really understand the problems design patterns are trying to solve. Inexperienced developers can't be trusted to apply them because they don't have that judgement. It just looks like a shiny thing.

sime2009on Terminal graphics protocol

Synthetic images like generated graphs with fine lines and text (i.e. not photographs), need pixel perfect rendering otherwise they look terrible. This is likely to be a far more common and useful use case for images in a terminal than showing photos.

sime2009on Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

https://gdpr.eu/fines/

For Facebook is would be either 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, or 4% of said revenue.

A bit bigger than a rounding error.

sime2009on Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

Where in the world is this?

sime2009on Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

It's really not that hard. Under GDPR you have a right to privacy, and companies can't demand you give it up as part of some kind of condition to gain access to their service.

sime2009on Cosmopolitan Third Edition

Cosmopolitan is cool and I have some uses in mind for it that I wish to get to.

But what I don't understand is the use case for an exe which supports both running as an user app on normal operating systems and from the BIOS. For which application specifically does it makes sense to run it in both these very different contexts?

sime2009on The Windows installer of ImageMagick will no longer be signed

Of course MS asked for it. They created and sustain this situation where software needs to signed for it to easily run on the Windows platform. Who do you think put the signature checking code and root keys in Windows?? The code signing gnomes?? fairies??

sime2009on The Windows installer of ImageMagick will no longer be signed

"Look at it this way, why should a project like IM pay anyone for the privilege of enriching and adding value to the Windows platform?"

sime2009on The Windows installer of ImageMagick will no longer be signed

Who actually receives the money is not relevant to my core point.

sime2009on The Windows installer of ImageMagick will no longer be signed

Look at it this way, why should a project like IM pay MicroSoft for the privilege of enriching and adding value to the Windows platform?

sime2009on Scrollbars are becoming a problem

> A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator.

Thank you! finally someone understands what a scrollbar is for. It primary job is to show the user that the document is bigger than the window, and secondly, to show which part of the document is visible. Letting the user scroll around is not the primary function!

I was genuinely surprised when Apple started hiding scrollbars by default in macOS. Their UI designers clearly don't have a clue what the basic UI controls really do.

sime2009on Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

umm.. wouldn't an agreement about where you work and when be the kind of thing you would have written down in your employment contract?