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akandiah

2,589 karma · joined May 25, 2012

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akandiah··on The Tesla Cybertruck Can't Take a CCS Charging Adapter
The world outside of the USA that functions perfectly fine with CCS2 adapters.
akandiah··on D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off
The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport. In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.
akandiah··on Ask HN: What is the oldest, still supported OS?
Fun fact: z/OS is now emulated on Red Hat Linux nowadays for "new" deployments.
akandiah··on Selenium may explain brain boost from exercise
I'd read the following before eating too many Brazil nuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut#Nutrition_and_human...
akandiah··on Ask HN: What are some good tech magazines?
Communications of the ACM.
akandiah··on Windows 96
> Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons.

I had to chuckle. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 days, there used be a separate monochrome set of icons for all Windows (and Microsoft) programs.

akandiah··on Boeing charged with 737 Max fraud conspiracy and agrees to pay over $2.5B
> An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO.

Sun Microsystems had this. Didn't work too well for them.

It's not at all as simple as this.

akandiah··on In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)
I think this aspect is also worth considering: https://www.thebillfold.com/2012/05/only-an-idiot-would-rob-...
akandiah··on Writing a Memory Allocator (2019)
I believe Bryant and O'Hallaron wrote a text book just for this course. You can always "optimize" it by reverse engineering the benchmark app and providing the correctly aligned blocks to the bench-marking application. It'll beat the standard malloc calls by several magnitudes if you were to do that.

This is one of the reasons why people write custom allocators - to suit a specific purpose where the allocation pattern is known well in advance.

akandiah··on Writing a Memory Allocator (2019)
This is probably the best way to learn about pointers in C. The book "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" addresses this area very well: https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/product/Bryant-C...

Debugging it is great fun as well.

akandiah··on I Think Bluetooth Is Finally OK
Bluetooth still isn't perfect for certain use cases. That's why Apple ended up augmenting it for audio.

Apple was an early adopter of the standard. I remember when being amazed at being able to use a Bluetooth keyboard in the EFI!

akandiah··on Gimp 2.10.20
> A lot of people forget that the G in GTK stands for Gimp

Source? It's always stood for Gnome Toolkit. You must be confusing this with the GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) that's between the library layer and the display server. The GDK is part of the toolkit.

akandiah··on Windows Package Manager Preview
Is this an msi hiding in a wrapper? Anyone who has dealt with the innards of an msi file knows it's a dog's breakfast!
akandiah··on Apple TV, Apple TV, Apple TV, and Apple TV+
They even had a version of Java for .Net called J# (J-Sharp). That didn't last long.
akandiah··on How to Improve MacBook Pro Performance and Thermals
> You need a special screwdriver

P5 Pentalobe screwdriver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentalobe_security_screw

akandiah··on Writing a Book with Unix
A couple of things I've noted over the years:

- Fields, or anything that uses fields: They're completely broken. They only seem to function in straight-forward case. For e.g: it's very easy for sequences to completely go off whack.

- File comparisons: this feature can only tolerate up to a certain number of pages. It will crash and burn for large documents. I sometimes wonder why this is even offered!

- Formatting: No matter how carefully paragraph spacing etc. is controlled there are always instances where things won't work as intended. A good example is cover pages.

- Hanging and freezing on large documents while Word figures out how to render them.

- Font rendering: it's never great. It never looks the same as what it would on a printer (irrespective of the printer). The Mac version does a decent job, but the Windows version, even with ClearType configured, is not great.

- Lastly, my biggest issue: feature incompatibilities between the versions of Word available on Mac and Windows. The Mac version (the latest O365) release doesn't have a lot of advanced features that are available on Windows such as document signing and style breaks.

akandiah··on Writing a Book with Unix
I'm glad there's always LaTeX.

For any serious writing, Microsoft Word is one of the worst pieces of tools out there. It starts showing its ugly side when start using anything remotely advanced.

akandiah··on Google is “pausing investment” in Allo
I'm hesitant to rely any new Google services these days thanks to Google doing this almost all the time.
akandiah··on Original Windows File Manager with enhancements
Hit Command+Shift+G and it will pop up with a dialog box requesting the path.
akandiah··on Original Windows File Manager with enhancements
No functionality to cut and paste for one... Adding extensions (for example installing XtraFinder) has become a pain due to the new security features that need to be turned off.
akandiah··on Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?
The great thing about a Macbook is the warranty. If you have coverage, you can get it repaired anywhere in the world. It's a pain with any other manufacturer.
akandiah··on Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
The link reads like an advert.
akandiah··on LCUI – A small C library for building user interfaces with XML and CSS
The problem with Electron are the large resulting binaries. Sure, it gives you everything, but you don't want to ship a whole browser engine every-time you ship a small app.
akandiah··on LCUI – A small C library for building user interfaces with XML and CSS
How big are the resulting binaries? This is something that's always stopped me from using frameworks like this.

Also, from what I can see, the documentation seems to be in Chinese: https://lcui.lc-soft.io/guide/zh-cn/

akandiah··on Jeff Bezos' Guide to Life
Advice is a form of nostalgia. It's up to the recipient to digest it correctly.
akandiah··on LibHTTP: Open Source HTTP Library in C
It's good to see more libraries filling this space. One of the foremost contenders is Libmicrohttpd (https://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd/). The only problem with that library is the LGPL license.
akandiah··on Chip Hall of Fame: Atmel ATmega8
The magic of AVR was that it always had a great, opensource toolkit in the form of avr-gcc and plenty of community support around it. The AVR Freaks forum started well before stack overflow and offered a tremendous volume of support.

I do agree about the expensive programmers though. However, there were people out there who wired up their own using the STK200 configuration and put the schematics online for the community's use.

Programmers (irrespective of micros) have always been relatively expensive - even the home-brew ones. It's only recently (say in the past 5-8 years) they've become cheaper thanks to people's interest in hobby boards like the Rasberry Pi.

The biggest problem was the availability of JTAG debuggers. Atmel had the reference, closed-source implementation. Although the community managed to eventually reverse engineer their implementation and cheaper ones became available on eBay (usually from China).

akandiah··on Reverse engineering guide for beginners: Methodology and tools
Even if you can't get access to this course, I highly recommend that you read the text book for it.

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...

It's one of the best books ever written on this subject.

One of my courses at UQ (Australia) followed some of it and I'm glad that I took it. There's no better way to asses the skills involved in debugging/analyzing machine dumps than the binary bomb assignment.

akandiah··on Google Maps will let you share your location with friends and family
The same situation that pmontra has described above/below. I love being on time to meet people. However, with Glympse, I don't have to stress about being punctual (even when leaving with enough time). There's no need to risk the life of others (or mine for that matter) by speeding/texting/calling the while driving.
akandiah··on Google Maps will let you share your location with friends and family
I've been doing this for years with Glympse. I can't believe it took Google this long to bring around this functionality.
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