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_Donny

230 karma · joined September 26, 2017

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_Donny··on New Casio F-B100W – Upgrade to the iconic F-91W after 40 years
I feel that the smartphone connectivity feature is a departure from the philosophy of the F-91W. Is having a smartphone for "Easy watch setting" not a flaw of the watch, rather than a feature?

I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.

_Donny··on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)".

I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.

It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..

_Donny··on BareMetal OS
I used BareMetal and Pure64 as a source of inspiration and knowledge while writing an OS as a student. It is simple and well written.

I miss the days of reading AMD64 manuals and directly interacting with my hardware through assembly, and I want to get back to it.

What would be a good entry-point to OS development nowadays? I have the "FYSOS: The System Core" by Benjamin David Lunt. While I love the series, I wonder what other alternatives there are, perhaps supporting ARM?

_Donny··on Tiling with Three Polygons Is Undecidable
Woah! It is the same guy that got me through my algorithms course at university with his youtube MIT OpenCourseWare videos!

His lectures are absolute gold. He explains everything so clearly, simply, and efficiently.

I started skipping lectures in favor of watching his videos, and it saved me countless of hours -- and I got a perfect mark :)

_Donny··on The Reddit blackout will continue
Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations.

I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.

Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...

I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.

At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.

_Donny··on Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?
I use Nextcloud hosted on Hetzner. It is pretty cheap and supports almost all systems I can think of. It feels a bit sluggish at times (slow sync, apps can be buggy), but I'm pretty happy with it.

Oh and the mobile app has a decent editor for text / markdown files :)

_Donny··on Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?
I have been writing a journal for about 6 years now. I usually write 3 entries a week spanning from a few sentences to hundreds of words.

Personally, I feel there are many benefits to it, mainly:

1. It gives me time to think, to process my thoughts, explore ideas, and handle emotions. I often learn a lot about myself, what I did well, and how I can improve.

2. It is a great way to preserve memories. Only after I started writing my journal did I realize how much I forget about my past. I've always taken photos throughout my life, but those only capture a very small part of my life. My worries, the music I listened to, the TV-series I raved about, my dreams, my thoughts on the books I've read, the deep talks with my friends, are all preserved in my journal. It is easy to remember your vacations to exotic locations, but do you remember your everyday life from years back?

3. It can be meditative. It feels great to be able to sit for up to an hour and write without any barriers. I don't have to stress about my writing style, the words I use, embarrassing stuff about myself. I truly feel I can express myself to the fullest.

I'm really happy that I decided to write my journal in Markdown. This format can be opened pretty much everywhere, even on my phone or my moms computer. Furthermore, it enables me to do some crude formatting for code, create headings, and even attach images. And since it is digital, I can search in it pretty easily.

_Donny··on Ask HN: What companies are embracing “HTML over the wire”?
I am incredibly annoyed by slow websites. I noticed that I have started using my browser in a very asynchronous way where I open multiple tabs, do a single action, and move to the next one. When I get to my last tab, the first is hopefully ready.

For instance, on GCP, I:

  0. Open 2 tabs for a 2 google cloud instance
  1. For each tab, I click on the action I want. E.g Logs, deployment, and networking. 
  2. Then, for each tab again, I click on the nested action I want
  3. Repeat step 2
It might sound like a lot, but each click easily takes 5-10 seconds, which is an excruciatingly long time if you spend a lot of day on that site -- and yes, it takes just as long doing it sequentially. Furthermore, I usually use fairly capable machines, so performance should not be an issue IMHO.

It does not happen on all sites, and I know GCP is a very complex site, but it happens often enough that it has become a habbit to me.

I love sites like Wikipedia or HN where everything is snappy.

_Donny··on Kagi: A Premium Search Engine
If this really lets me block certain websites for good, then I'm sold.

I absolutely hate those sites that scrape other well-known sites (like StackOverflow, Quora, Reddit) and add ads and SEO spam. They are increasingly better at being on the top of the search results, and I cannot get rid of them.

_Donny··on BlackBerry held the tiny keys to my heart
I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun.

I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct.

I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.

_Donny··on “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says
Living in Europe, I couldn't believe that if I wanted to unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was out of order.

I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...

_Donny··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2021)

  Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
  Remote: Some days of the week
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, C/C++, C#, SQL, Django, Docker, Git, Linux, ML (Keras + TensorFlow)
  Résumé/CV: https://nx2098.your-storageshare.de/s/sYF85cyaixR9Bb9
  Email: jan~at~meznik.dk
Graduated with a MSc in computer science back in 2019. I have a passion for the scientific part of software engineering, I like to learn new programming languages and technologies, and I am very interested in low-level programming.
_Donny··on Lego Island Rebuilder
One of my very first PC games was the Lego Racer 2. Although the racing was not as good as in the first game, it still had some interesting elements.

I was completely blown away that I could build my own car and race in it. Furthermore, you could free-roam the world with your car, exploring the tracks, finding shortcuts, discovering secrets, and completing missions.

I felt very disappointed that I could not build my own house, but I was still amazed by the (limited) creativity that the game provided.

Funny how just a bit of freedom to create and explore in a game kicks off the fantasies in a child.

_Donny··on Quickdraw with Google AI
I drew a beautiful sea turtle; I was sure it was going to guess it! But no, it couldn't. Then I checked the training set, and it was full of tortoises...

I guess they should check their training set :P

_Donny··on I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)
That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the excellent explanation, Nition!
_Donny··on I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)
I do not quite understand how the guys in the simulation can determine which level they are at. If L1 universe interferes with L2, will the guys in L2 see the divergence in L3? How do they determine their own level?

Fantastic story. Will read more from this author!

_Donny··on Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for Google login
I am really happy with Nextcloud!
_Donny··on Casio F-91W: The strangely ubiquitous watch (2011)
I was really entertained by a little note in the manual for the watch:

"NOTE: THERE IS NO WAY unit components can be damaged or malfunction due to misoperation of buttons. If confusing information appears on the display it means entry sequence was incorrect. Please read the manual and try again."

I don't see many modern manuals stating this.

_Donny··on Ask HN: Are you depressed?
I hesitate to write that I am depressed after reading so many tragic and heartbreaking comments... My everyday life just seems so good in comparison.

I've recently graduated from a university and I have my first full-time SWE job as a backend developer. Although I really like my job and I can barely imagine a better workplace, I really dread my everyday life.

Working 8+ hours every day is soul-crushing to me, and with all other errands and a good sleeping schedule, I barely have time and energy for the other things in life that I enjoy. Dating, working out, being social, finding a place to live, as well as being quarantined is just overwhelming with a full-time job, I feel.

Since I've been getting negative work reviews, I called a career counselor. When he said that "I got to man up and prioritize my work above everything else", I was severely depressed and suicidal.

_Donny··on If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience
Not being able to select your own hardware for a job is perhaps one of my worst experiences to date.

At one company, I was handed laptop with an older version of Windows, preinstalled bloatware, 3rd party encryption software, anti-virus, VPNs, etc. Even worse, the laptop was about more than 16 inches and weighted over 3 kg because the company crammed in as much expensive hardware in it as possible -- so that the computer would fit everyones needs.

I understand the need for company IT policies, but global companies have such complicated policies it basically hindered all my work.

You won't believe the sigh of relief when I started at a small start-up company, and I was able to choose all of my hardware. The CTO ensured my SSH keys would grant me access to all the servers I would need.

_Donny··on 0.999...= 1
I think this is spot on, at least for me personally.

I am not very good at mathematics, so I never questioned my professors when they said that "You cannot treat infinites as regular numbers".

Perhaps due to that statement, I did not really pursue these kinds of equations. For instance, I do not really see how the algebraic argument on the Wiki is any different from:

  2 * inf = inf
  inf + inf = inf   (subtract inf from both sides)
  inf = 0
_Donny··on Ask HN: Smallest laptop that is decent for coding?
I used to have an ASUS EEE PC from about 2010 (I think it was 1215P). It was an incredible machine -- it was cheap for a student, fairly powerful for internet browsing, text editing, and a bit of coding. The battery easily lasted over 6 hours, so forgetting the small charger at home was not even a concern. Lastly, the keyboard was actually decent as well.

I have never really seen many as well-executed machine since (although I have not been looking too hard).

_Donny··on Emulating the Original Gameboy’s CPU
I can also highly recommend the PyBoy[0] project for Game Boy emulation. It is written in Python, has an accompanying report for documentation, and is still being developed.

It provides an interesting basis for student projects to work on, such as machine learning on games, rewinding time and replaying (great for machine learning), adding the sound-subsystem, link-cable, and much, much more.

[0]: https://github.com/Baekalfen/PyBoy

_Donny··on Reasons Not to Use Google (2015)
His pedantic personality is unbearable to me.

He held a talk at my university recently. During the QA, every time a student asked RMS a question, he would spend 2 minutes correcting the formulation of the question, and then dismissing the actual question with a snarky remark.

For instance, one student asked something about RMS being the "CEO" of FSF, followed by snarky remarks by RMS that "FSF is not a company and that he is actually the president". (I might remember wrong, but it was something along those lines)

I understand and respect him and his beliefs, but his personality just annoys me.

_Donny··on Lenovo Shipping Ubuntu Linux on 2019 ThinkPad
Yes, but even though I myself have created my own Linux distro, I would absolutely not be able to do that with restricted internet access, without access to the guide-books, and without the help of IRC. I suspect this would be the case for most of my developer friends as well.
_Donny··on Lenovo Shipping Ubuntu Linux on 2019 ThinkPad
It has always amazed me that North Korea is able to create an OS like Red Star. I assume it takes a lot of knowledge and skill to stitch together such an OS, with fairly "unique" spying features not really seen in other distros.

Considering the limited access to the internet and not being able to ask StackOverflow users, how can they even manage building such a complex piece of software?

_Donny··on The new Dropbox
Have a look at Nextcloud. It is a FOSS alternative that works just like Dropbox without all that bloat. It works surprisingly well on most platforms and is nicely customizeable: https://nextcloud.com/

There are several providers that setup an instance for you with an admin login. I cannot stress enough how happy I am with that solution.

_Donny··on De-Googled Android Experience
I de-Googled my Android 3 months ago, and the article reads as if I wrote it. I can totally relate to everything!

Without the Play store, I had to take long hard look at what apps are really essential to me, for which I cannot find a FOSS alternative. Turns out, except Spotify and banking, there was none! Without Google Play, I did not really feel the need to fill my phone with various apps... My primary email and SMS was all the communication I needed.

In the beginning, I missed my notifications. I felt almost uneasy if I did not check my phone every 30 minutes because I felt like I could be missing some urgent notification. However, after only a week, I noticed that nothing of importance was lost, but more importantly, how much focus I reclaimed!

I know this sounds cheesy, but de-cluttering my phone made me realize how much all the apps strived for my attention all the time.

_Donny··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2019)

  Location: Copenhagen
  Remote: OK, prefer office
  Willing to relocate: Within Scandinavia or close-by
  Technologies: Python, C, Assembly. Experience with Android
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-mezník-325175b7
  Email: Please use LinkedIn
Graduate Masters in Computer Science this summer. Interest in low-level hardware, OS/kernels, embedded, but generally interested in exciting projects!
_Donny··on Firefox 66.0.4 is out, fixes disabled add-ons
I have been on the tipping edge of switching from FF to another browser for a long time now.

Short-lived bugs such as this one do not annoy me as much as the terrible performance of FF. It is not rare that FF uses 2 cores at full utilization all the time.

I always end up installing a new browser out of anger, but I _always_ come back to FF for its great features that I have become addicted to.

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