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32bitkidon Show HN: Turn voice messages to beautiful journals

I think it’s also think it’s interesting to consider from the perspective of side-channel attacks/information leaks. For the most part, I think text notes are well just text. But I shutter to think what other metadata, fingerprinting, or background conversations/information could be extracted from a bunch of audio. But maybe I’m just being overly paranoid.

32bitkidon PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC

For a while, I was using PC-BASIC to generate audio files for the IBM PCjr cassette interface to do some more diagnostics, for a machine that I had that didn’t have a working disk drive. I don’t even know if there is anything else out there to generate those at this point. PC-BASIC is great!

32bitkidon Git Things

I’d take it one step further: if `git log`—a hierarchical view of the connection of commits—is the only way you (and your team) interact with commit messages, then yea it’s probably fine.

But, I think the value of commit messages become really apparent once you (or your team) are relying on other visualizations of commit messages like `blame` and `bisect`

Tracking down the introduction of a bug with bisect and resolving to a commit whose message in “minor”, because the person in the past didn’t think this change was important enough to describe intent can quite the temporal foot-gun.

32bitkidon Is it my fault if you can't handle the truth? (2019)

This is the epitome of the sentiment: those interested in the pursuit of “hard truths” are only extrinsically motivated to find fault in others and gleefully “correct” another’s “faulty” self perception. Never intrinsically motivated to better themselves…

Tell me more about how everyone else in the “modern world” is the problem…

32bitkidon Disney Plus to Raise Prices by $3 a Month as It Launches Tier with Ads

Legit question: who, exactly, classifies as “the insane” in this statement?

32bitkidon Keeping a project bisectable

For the latter I use often use `git stash` for that; stashing off the test case/data, then at each step of the bisect, you can do `git stash apply` (rather than `git stash pop`) to reapply the same changes multiple times.

Before moving on, a quick `git reset —-hard` will get back to a clean flip

32bitkidon Robertson vs. Torx screw drives (2021)

Something that took me an embarrassing long time to realize was that North American electrical outlet binding terminals are a combination slotted/Robertson screw head. The Robertson is great.

Klein tools makes combination head tools that engage both, which is fantastic if you are upgrading a bunch of outlets.

32bitkidon Copilot sells code other people wrote

If I pay for grammarly, and it plagiarizes an existing work but represents it as an entirely new, independent work and I am unaware of the existing work that is being stolen, who is doing the stealing?

32bitkidon What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years

When, exactly, was this period of unbiased/opinion-free event coverage in UK journalism you apparently long for? You rail against “modern journalism” like it’s some kind of recent downhill slide, a by-product of modern political biases, but when was this not the case?

32bitkidon Show HN: NoteCalc

Just wanted to also drop a recommendation for soulver, but I have been split between it and Calca (http://calca.io/) which I think is _also_ worth checking out, if you like this kind of hybrid notes/calculator like interface.

The ultimate interface _for me_ would be somewhere in between Calca (which I think has superior support for functions/graphing/logical calculations) and Soulver (which I think has better usability/readability) and a graph-based note-taking system like Obsidian/Zettlr. I'm sure somebody will say "there is a Vim plugin that'll do that" but… yea.

32bitkidon Birth of BASIC (2014) [video]

QB64: https://www.qb64.org/portal/

And

Color Maximite 1/2: http://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Are two interesting takes on modern BASIC

32bitkidon Git commands to know just after you get the basics

git bisect and got blame are underrated tools, that in my opinion get lost in the conversation about should-you-squash-or-not. They really have diminishing returns when you start squashing huge feature branches into a single commit.

32bitkidon Git commands to know just after you get the basics

This one is interesting, because if I recall correctly, if you are using the single symbol they more or less mean the same thing. You can do ~~~ or ^^^ and get to the same spot

The difference is in their numerical notion. ~N means go to my Nth first parent. Where ^N means my Nth parent, which is really only valuable/useful on merge commits (Or more specifically octopus merges that merge more than two commits)

This is why ~ and ^ in the single form mean the same thing.

So, in one mental model of the DAG you can think of ^ as horizontal navigation (Right) and ~ as vertical (Down)

32bitkidon Build stuff

for people who haven’t gone to a top-tier college/university for computer science—especially self-taught developers—I would say that the corollary advice is also true:

Don’t just build stuff—study stuff!

32bitkidon Mirth – a type-safe concatenative purely functional programming language

I thought for a second this was a post on Mirth Connect and I had flashbacks to doing hl7 integrations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirth_Connect

32bitkidon ASCII Art in .NET Code

I have no connection or affiliation with this product, but I enjoy a good ASCII/Unicode chart in code—a picture is worth a 1k words—and I've been leaning on https://monodraw.helftone.com/ lately for my text drawing needs.

32bitkidon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)

  Role: Developer/Designer
  Location: Denver, CO
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: React, ES6, Typescript, CSS, SCSS, Go, Kotlin
  Resume: https://j.holmes.codes/resume/
  Email: j@holmes.codes

32bitkidon Non-Euclidean Worlds Engine [video]

I'm glad to see other people working on this kind of stuff. The old Descent games had a related—although more primitive—rendering engine that could be (ab)used to similar effect that was a lot of fun back in the mid-90's. Some of the home-brew levels back in the day exploited this for some pretty mind-bending overlapping non-euclidian level design.

As for myself, I've been working on a 2d-space combat game set on the surface of a Poincaré Disk as a hobby over the past few years, not sure i'll ever do anything with it for real, but it's fun.

32bitkidon More games should be honest about death

I would also like to add x-com on Ironman. Losing a soldier because you got sloppy and arrogant; putting them in an indefensible position and watching them get slaughtered. Do that enough times and you literally cannot win with just rookie replacements. But yea, I felt actually bad for losing some soldiers in my Ironman runs.

32bitkidon Photographs: Removed

I agree with what you are saying, in regards to a healthy relationship… But, I'm nearly positive that's not the message that is being conveyed by the artist/photographer in this image/collection of images. So, I'm not really sure where you are going with this.

32bitkidon Photographs: Removed

I guess what I'm trying to say is which is more depressing or sad: a couple ignoring each other, or a guy watching a couple ignore each other, or even, if I were to turn the lens on myself, a guy watching another guy watching a couple ignore each other.

32bitkidon Photographs: Removed

I get, and appreciate, where I feel the artist is going with this: a reflection on the loneliness epidemic and our relationship to technology. BUT I think one layer of meta out is just as creepy and weirdly out of context once you start erasing things. Namely the picture of the couple in bed is another level of creepy if there is some guy/girl hovering over them staring at them with a digitally-erased camera.

32bitkidon Great Adventure-Game Puzzles

One of the first games I played as a kid was the DOS port of infocoms Deadline (1982) — a police/detective mystery. Easily one of my favorite adventure games of all time. It had a branching story line, multiple endings, a real-time-ish clock. Combine that with the “feelies” that infocom was known for in the early 80s and it was a unique experience that I’m not sure anyone will be able to reproduce.

32bitkidon Performance of the 8088 on PC, PCjr and Tandy 1000

I find stuff like this fascinating; I'm old enough to remember computers from this era, and—at least for me—I have a certain nostalgia for them. The first computer I was exposed to was an IBM PCjr, so seeing stuff like this 35 years after-the-fact is pretty mind-blowing, that people still care.

I know that a lot of it is just my age, and I remember my father growing up used to work on/rebuild the engine on his '64 VW beetle. I think for very similar reasons: nostalgia, limited complexity, the tangibility of the "API". For me, POKEing a value in memory and seeing the screen change or a sound play is tangible. The opcodes of an 8088 are _just_ enough that I can feel like I understand it. Modern computers feel several orders of magnitude more complex and—admittedly—more powerful, but at a _cost_. I'm sure my dad thought the same about electric fuel-injected engines and the ever increasing complexity of "modern" cars.

Currently, on my work-bench in the garage is a half-completed [Micro8088](https://github.com/skiselev/micro_8088) and 8-bit ISA back-plane; still waiting for a few parts to come in. Its been a lot of fun to work on, and the intent is to get back into doing some retro-programming. (Hopefully, I have a better understanding of the underlying architecture now than I did when I spent a summer when I was 14 trying to figure out the relationship between AH/AL and AX without a concrete understanding of binary/hexadecimal math)

32bitkidon Go-benchmark: Golang benchmarks used for optimizing code

more detail on why `defer` can/is more expensive (and not equivalent) to unrolling it: https://blog.golang.org/defer-panic-and-recover

32bitkidon The C256 Phoenix Project aka What Commodore 256 could have been like

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot, myself. Growing up, I never had access to a c64—we had a pcjr at home and apple 2e at elementary school—but I am, now as an adult, really interested in these types of projects and could easily see myself picking one up.

What intrigued me though is two fold: one, I find myself also remembering my father when I was growing up, he was not interested in computers, they were more or less just a tool to get a job done, but he loved cars. He had a VW beetle, late 50s early 60s model (though they didn’t change much) and he would tear it down, rebuild the engine, do whatever. But I mean honestly, I can’t see much difference between what he was doing then, and what I am doing now (building a home-brew Micro8088). In fact, probably for a lot of the same reasons...

There is something about that era of computing, I can hold a lot what is going on in my head and there are very few abstractions between myself and the machine. The limitations of the architecture inspire creativity and doing things “the wrong way”, but in a way you can gain a more significant understanding of the underlying system. But, part of that is just nostaligia, and I imagine if i could time travel back and have a beer with my dad over his car, he’d probably say something very similar about the lack of fuel injection computers and the simiplicity of a two stroke engine...

And secondly, and this isn’t intended to be a scoff at “millennials”, quite the opppsite actually, I wonder what the current generation will look back on as this level of “things were simpler then”-retrospection. Because I’m sure that my dad never thought that I would look back on the 8088s and z80s of my youth as a manifestation of “simplicity”. So, what am I not seeing about my present?

32bitkidon Moving efficiently in the CLI

Try: `esc F` and `esc B` instead of alt.

32bitkidon Nintendo’s Resurgence

I'm not sure I agree with this definition of a "toy"; to me is an item used primarily for "play" (or not exclusively for "work"/"productivity"). Play is most definitely not restricted to children.

32bitkidon Insect: a fast, repl-style scientific calculator

I've used Calca[0] for a while now; and it computes pretty much anything I throw at it. And while its paradigm is nice for a lot of things (a markdown editor that can also do math), I would love a REPL-style interface to it, for quick commandline calculations, so maybe this will fill that void. However, my initial reaction is that its different enough to make it not worth my while. But it's always good to see other products/tools in the same space.

Oddly enough, the reason I eventually stumbled Calca was trying to find a replacement for qalculate[1].

[0]: http://calca.io/ [1]: https://qalculate.github.io/

32bitkidon Ask HN: Best Git workflow for small teams

`git blame` and `git biscet`