Hacker News Reader

Incredible, the yodel's worth jumped from 3 to 7 figures once the artist's lawyers evened the playing field!

This story reminds me of the Nike logo one, quote Wikipedia: For her services, the company paid her $35 ($206 in 2015 dollars), citing that she worked 17.5 hours on creating the Swoosh.

alxmdevon 800M Email Addresses Leaked Online by Email Verification Service

> Some of data was much more detailed than just the email address and included personally identifiable information (PII) ... ‘Emailrecords’ was structured to include zip / phone / address / gender / email / user IP / DOB

How messed up is it that random 3rd parties collect and assemble all this information to begin with, leaks aside? Sounds to me like all this data fell into unscrupulous hands way before any hackers may have found it on the public internet.

alxmdevon SSD Storage: 2018 in review

Exciting times indeed, just type "ssd" in your favorite search box. I'm about to upgrade to a 512GB SSD that costs half what an SSD half its size used to cost 5 years ago! Starting this year, I'm considering getting a low-end 120GB for $25 every year on January 1st to use as a write-once backup for all my work.

alxmdevon C2x: the next real revision of the C standard

In case anyone is wondering, GCC and other compilers catch non-volatile locals clobbering when you compile with -Wextra.

alxmdevon The BASIC Engine

I have a Meta and program little games for it in C. It's a lot of fun to code for, especially if you like optimizing your code and pushing what you can achieve within the system's limits. A lot of what you learn doing this applies to general programming too (reworking calculations to avoid expensive operations, judicious use of memory, etc.), which is a nice bonus.

alxmdevon 2D or not 2D (in the C++ Standard) – that is the question

Indeed it does, and you can use it to draw accelerated scaled and rotated images, lines, and rectangles. There are even a few blending modes available. It's a nice foundation for simple cross-platform 2D graphics, it's come a long way since SDL1.

alxmdevon Twitter also sold data access to Cambridge Analytica researcher

It's really too bad, up until a few months ago the Twitter timeline was an ok place to see what other people whose work I admire were up to, but now it's a torrent of irrelevant spam so why bother using it. So frustrating to see something good be ruined, goes to show how little control over your experience, and indeed everything else, you have with these services.

alxmdevon What it feels like being an iPad on a stick on wheels (2013)

It would be really interesting to read more about the physical participants' impressions of this. Having a screen on a stick with a live human face on it follow you around must be quite the uncanny valley.

alxmdevon Flexbox and Grids: your layout’s best friends

> Not just Electron, but also when making UIs for things like industrial tools, where you control not just the browser, but the hardware it runs on.

Wow, is that becoming common these days, using web browser engines to run UIs on specialized devices? Sounds a little off in the context of industrial tools, where I'm thinking embedded systems and relatively low-performance SOCs.

alxmdevon IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

It's been done alright!

> "As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less than one-fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/16/software-devel...

alxmdevon U.S. House approves proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars

Not exactly a steady decline, quote from the NPR article linked above:

In its own early estimates that were released late in 2015, NHTSA reported seeing a 3.5 percent rise in vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. But it also said the fatality rate — the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled — was rising at a slightly higher pace of 4.4 percent.

alxmdevon Introducing Exclusive Features to GitLab.com Bronze, Silver and Gold Plans

Maybe that's just because of GitHub's overwhelming popularity, hosting their code there is probably the best way to get attention and lots of contributors as they build up the product.

alxmdevon VW engineering executive sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case

I wouldn't say it's a well written article, it's confusing and ambiguous regarding the sentenced individual's role and position in the company. That makes all the difference between this being a slap on the wrist or a more meaningful reprimand.

alxmdevon Ask HN: Best way to transition from .net to open source tech like python, etc.

I would start a small hobby project in whatever language and platform you'd like to work with, pick something you enjoy so that you keep building it for a while. That's real experience that will expose you to many issues you wouldn't have known about otherwise, and will give you lots of platform-specific things to talk about in addition to your previous experience.

alxmdevon Firefox marketshare revisited

I can't pay my phone bill with Firefox, for example, and have to use Chromium for that. It's a redirection problem between the company's website and the external payment service they use, been going on for years. Similar annoyances all over the place from all sorts of major corporations that all seem to invest the bare minimum in cross-platform QA.

alxmdevon Microsoft leak reveals new Windows 10 Workstation edition for power users

> "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."

That's right, because all these unsolicited prompts and notifications are a waste of people's valuable time. A well-designed OS should aggressively keep quiet, stay out of the way, and err on the side of user privacy.

Your Windows crashing is an issue strictly between you, Microsoft, and the makers of whatever software and hardware you were using when the crash occurred. Absolutely nothing to do with anybody else.

alxmdevon 68000 Tricks and Traps – Some assembly language programming guidelines (1986)

Indeed! I started with C by following the TIGCC TI-89 tutorials from http://www.technoplaza.net/ long ago, and since I got an Arduboy I've been itching to dive back into calc stuff and try some small assembly gamedev. So many little projects worth doing and so little time!

alxmdevon The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died

That's a nice post, thanks for the link. Some may point to various coding apps available in walled gardens, but that means allowing 3rd parties to define what the general-purpose computer is and set its limits. Who are they to say where curiosity begins and where it should end? I want the freedom to run native code on the CPU, and the freedom for others to easily run what I make without jumping through any hoops.

I'd like to hear your opinions about the Raspberry Pi and other cheap computer boards where you can load Linux and just plug in a keyboard and screen. I see a future iteration of that as my next PC in a few years. The Raspberry Pi 3 is good enough to run Ubuntu MATE (I was blown away), and if it had more than 1GB of RAM I would start using it full-time today and save myself some money on the power bill while I'm at it :-)

alxmdevon Ask HN: Can I get in trouble for crawling using the Googlebot user agent?

I wonder if most major sites that whitelist Googlebot also have exceptions for Slurp, Bingbot, and other major search engine bots. If not, then it would be interesting to know how these other companies deal with it, or if they just politely back off.

alxmdevon How to write a simple operating system

Well-written primer, so cool to see something complex reduced to its simplest form that captures the essence.

Funny to read how PC memory can be "millions of bytes on modern machines". To be fair, I was using a computer with only 128MB as recently as 7 years ago :-)

alxmdevon Amex, Challenged by Chase, Is Losing the Snob War

> “Or, more precisely, snobbery has to be hidden and camouflaged as something else”

Yes, just like this advertisement seems to have been hidden and camouflaged as a New York Times article...

alxmdevon In the Videogame Industry, Hiring People Is a Last Resort

A while back I was chatting with an engineer who worked on the network code and infrastructure for a popular simulation game. After all the heavy lifting was done, he and others were promptly fired and replaced by contractors. The guy poured his heart and soul into the project and was vested way beyond a paycheck, yet he was literally replaced like a cog the minute a spreadsheet called for it. So much for wanting talented and loyal employees. It must be too easy to forget that all these business decisions affect real human beings, not empty automatons.

alxmdevon Employee burnout is becoming a huge problem in the American workforce

Having children is the choice that, if nobody were to make, would lead to humanity's literal extinction. For many it's also a natural biological drive, and nobody should be pressured about it one way or the other. Calling it an "elective" is stretching it even for devil's advocate.

alxmdevon The Privacy Revolution that never came

If anyone else is curious about the cool title artwork, the artist is Josan Gonzalez and you can find more here: https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-art-photography/the-f...

alxmdevon Godot Game Engine – Tutorial Series

I know a lot of indie game developers that use Unity, and not having access to the source code to understand why something isn't working as expected is a very common complaint. Being able to dive into the code you're building on top of is a super power.

alxmdevon US man pays tax bill using five wheelbarrows of coins

Canada did away with pennies: http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about-the-mint/phasing-out-the...

From Wikipedia:

Production of the penny ceased in May 2012, and the Royal Canadian Mint ceased the distribution of them as of February 4, 2013. However, like all discontinued currency in the Canadian monetary system, the coin remains legal tender. Once distribution of the coin ceased, though, vendors no longer were expected to return pennies as change for cash purchases, and were encouraged to round purchases to the nearest five cents. Non-cash transactions are still denominated to the cent.

alxmdevon Ray-Casting Tutorial for Game Development and Other Purposes (1996)

Yes, it's amazing how many game development techniques appeared and faded out in the 90s, in that window of time between fast-enough CPUs and affordable GPUs. I have a copy of the Black Art of 3D Game Programming on my shelf and it's full of awesome tidbits.

I recently browsed flipcode.com and sadly parts of it are broken and only available thanks to the Internet Archive.

alxmdevon Ray-Casting Tutorial for Game Development and Other Purposes (1996)

Excellent resource, I remember browsing it many years ago - glad to see it's still online!

Also check out this other nice raycasting tutorial: http://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html

alxmdevon Game in-app purchases are warping kids’ understanding of basic economic ideas

A reasonable course of action is to vote with your wallet and only buy full-priced games. If you were going to spend money on IAPs anyway, might as well use that money to support higher quality products that deliver a deeper experience and whose business model does not involve getting people to cave in a little more dough every week.

alxmdevon What was it like working on the original iPhone project?

The robots.txt comment explaining that they disallow the Internet Archive crawler to protect users' privacy sounds so facetious given they require people register with their real names and in certain cases go as far as to ask for government ID scans: https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users...