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zowanet

39 karma · joined May 4, 2019

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zowanet··on PHP Pipes in 156 Bytes
Presumably this is meant to be a (very approximate) userland-implementation of the declined Pipe Operator RFC[0].

[0]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/pipe-operator-v2

zowanet··on PHP Pipes in 156 Bytes
Passing the first argument as part of the variadic array isn't necessary.

Here's my version in only 66 bytes, what do I win? ;)

  <?php function pipe($v,...$p){foreach($p as$f)$v=$f($v);return$v;}
zowanet··on Ithkuil – An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)
A very enlightening read -- I certainly didn't expect the tangential connection to the separatist crisis in eastern Ukraine.

More on topic; is anyone aware of any attempt to employ Ithkuil's grammar as an intermediary for lossless translation between natural languages? It occurred to me that translation of languages with poor interoperability would benefit from an intermediate representation that is capable of preserving the nuances of both. The idea being that you would only ever need to build a model for translation between {SomeLanguage} <=> Ithkuil, and this would allow for precise (albeit probably verbose) translation between any two languages.

Or is this more or less how automated translation works already?

zowanet··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
What's your revenue like?
zowanet··on MH370: Could missing Malaysian Airlines plane finally be found?
> The title is very misleading [...] Seems like puff piece for now

This has become typical for the BBC:

Phrase a headline as a question to which the implied answer may be "Yes", but in all likelihood is actually "No" or "Not yet".

zowanet··on Show HN: Hookdeck – An infrastructure to consume webhooks
Provided your request and response payload is guaranteed to be <6MiB (for synchronous invocation) or <256KiB (for asynchronous invocation).

These are AWS Lambda's hard limits, and are too low for many webhook applications.

zowanet··on Grbl – open-source, high performance g-code-parser and CNC milling controller
Note: current/later versions of Grbl are hosted under a different GitHub organization:

https://github.com/gnea/grbl

instead of https://github.com/grbl/grbl

zowanet··on The Art of Picking Intel Registers (2003)
> Note carefully that the context here is size optimisation only.

Indeed, and even if other benefits were once possible in the early x86 era, modern CPUs use register renaming[0] which presumably would make such benefits redundant.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_renaming

zowanet··on DaVinci Resolve – A high-end video editing/post-production software program
<waving> Hi W. </waving>

Interesting, it seems that even after several years away from the company, I have fallen foul of the Foundry's culture of secrecy.

> I had the privilege of using 4 red rockets, all of which broke.

Unsurprising; the original RR was a repurposed DVS Atomix with custom firmware. Now redundant since R3D decoding on GPU was released. RED's overpriced, unreliable hardware is my #1 gripe, but not really relevant to this discussion.

> I was there when Whitmore got the email about redcode, and not using the official SDK. That we "had illegally reverse engineered proprietary code".

I didn't know that a non-SDK-based REDCODE integration was ever in Nuke. If correct, to be honest that was an unwise move anyway; RED have always warned against reverse engineering in their licence agreements (and yes, reverse engineering was necessary to read R3Ds without the SDK, it was never plain vanilla JPEG2000 and didn't use the tar format at all). If Whitmore allowed it, he should have expected RED's response.

The legal grey area is that reverse engineering a file format isn't the same thing as reverse engineering proprietary executable code by disassembly. However, after having had a similar run-in with RED regarding reverse engineering, I have no doubt that Jannard's legal team would have persisted and come out on top.

> I was there looking at the RED forums where they were sharing the cracked version.

Sure, some end users pirated Storm like other Foundry software because the licence manager had been cracked long before, but that wasn't RED's fault.

> RED saw the software, stole the interface and made a free version.

The interfaces were no more similar that any two "pro" video apps (REDCINE-X looked particularly awful at launch). RED built a competing app with an overlapping feature set. This happens all the time.

> "it turns out they like storm a lot, but not enough to pay for it"

And why should they have? RED established a team that could develop their app without charging end users (a loss leader, I suppose), while still remaining profitable. The Foundry failed, or declined, to do so. Storm could have been expanded to cater for the needs of the DSLR (and later mirrorless) filmmaking communities; a much bigger market than indie RED shooters that was crying out for reliable and affordable post software. Instead, Storm was assimilated into Hiero with a big price tag for a handful of customers.

Years later, Bill told me that Storm was ultimately killed "because we didn't understand the low-end market". They could have just asked.

zowanet··on DaVinci Resolve – A high-end video editing/post-production software program
As much as I dislike many of RED's practices, I must state that this version of events is highly inaccurate.

Source: I am a former Foundry employee.

zowanet··on Monitoring a high risk conjunction between two large defunct objects in LEO
I wouldn't say it's a meme, it's just a convenient shorthand for "I'm not overly familiar with the domain, please help me understand".

No need to overthink it.

zowanet··on Level 3 Global Outage
Here's a direct link to this month's messages:

https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2020-August/thread...

zowanet··on What's new in PHP 8?
Coerced-typed (weak) comparisons and easy accidental fallthrough are the problems commonly associated with switch statements.

The new match construct fixes both of these and is also an expression instead of a statement, allowing for more expressive code.

zowanet··on PHP 8.0.0 Alpha 1 available for testing
JavaScript's async features are made possible because of its event loop (Node.js is essentially V8 + libuv).

You can use one of many event loop implementations with PHP, including libuv, if you so wish.

zowanet··on PHP 8.0.0 Alpha 1 available for testing
This[1] works fine in every version of PHP since at least v4.3.0 (released in 2002). Do you have a concrete example of this supposed breakage?

[1]: https://3v4l.org/DWDLn

zowanet··on Design updates to repositories and GitHub UI
Already under discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617229

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616422

zowanet··on Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?
I don't like change.

I don't like the circular avatars - I don't need the place I store my code to feel like a social network.

But the worst change for me is that the 'Languages' section is now below the fold. Now I have to scroll to find out if I should ignore the latest compiler, package manager or system tool because it was written in JavaScript.

Edit: Gah! I only noticed this by directly comparing old and new, but the filenames in the main list are no longer blue, so now on each row, the filename, commit message and timestamp are in three subtly different shades of gray. That, combined with the lack of gridlines just makes the whole thing look like word soup.

zowanet··on Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?
Also GitHub supports https://github.com/<username>.keys
zowanet··on LibreOffice 7.0 drops Adobe Flash support
LibreOffice supported Adobe Flash...?
zowanet··on Xkcd: RIP John Conway
Beautiful.
zowanet··on Blender 2.80
I don't suppose there's a torrent/magnet link?

My http download is glacially slow right now...

zowanet··on Better Portable Graphics
And BMP, TIFF, DPX, EXR etc all work really fine if you are not worried about the size.

But being worried about the size is the whole point of image compression.