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batteryhorse

96 karma · joined May 20, 2018

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batteryhorse··on If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]
I disagree that engineering is the best approach to writing software. I think this is the fundamental difference between people who prefer static vs dynamic typing. People who prefer static typing are more likely to say that one solution is more "correct" than the other, whereas dynamic typing allows more flexibility.

I see writing software to be similar to writing music. Music has rules and structure, but leaves room for creativity and allows two or more highly skilled musicians to be able to play music together and improvise.

Static typing imposes limitations (kind of like government), whereas dynamic typing gives you more freedom (but requires responsibility)

batteryhorse··on Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
I was going to say the GNU version of /bin/false and /bin/true, but I actually took a look at the source and it is terrible.
batteryhorse··on Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple
If I were you I'd send them a cease and desist letter
batteryhorse··on Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow
Perhaps most safety problems. But if you need to outrun an erupting volcano, a tsunami, or the police, slowing down won't really help you.
batteryhorse··on Apple now strives to design and build products that last as long as possible
Yes but iOS 11 was really slow.

Does it run faster than iOS 6?

batteryhorse··on Handling Notch on iPhone X, XS, XR, XS Max
Instead of cartesian coordinates, you could just program it using polar coordinates. And ring buffers.
batteryhorse··on Handling Notch on iPhone X, XS, XR, XS Max
I also bought the iPhone X on day one, but I had to get rid of it, I really hated the notch. Also didn't like the aspect ratio of the display, it's getting way too vertical.

For me, it's like living in a room where one of the walls has a weird inset, which makes it more difficult to arrange the furniture.

Or like having a picture frame on the wall that is slightly crooked no matter how many times you try to fix it.

Or maybe it's like having a mole or birthmark, and calling it a beauty mark.

Sure you can live with it and just ignore it, but that wouldn't be my first choice.

However if you are willing to boot camp into Windows, you are probably less likely to care about a notch.

batteryhorse··on A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]
It's like being a chef but not wanting to eat the food you cook.

For example, a lot of people want their salmon cooked extremely well done, when you as the chef, think this is wrong, but this is what the customer wants, so you do it anyway, but you no longer care about it.

batteryhorse··on Apple Goes Vertical and Why It Matters
No. No. No. Yes.
batteryhorse··on Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing
> If we believe that self-driving cars are inevitable

I am a programmer and I would never ever get in a self-driving car if I had a choice. I don't trust other programmers, I don't know if a backdoor has been put in by someone, and I don't want to get into a vehicle that can be hacked.

I believe self-driving cars will be a catastrophic failure.

batteryhorse··on The Story of Why I Left Riot Games
So if I said one of the following:

a) "Brandon, imagine that I f* your wife..."

b) "Brandon, imagine if I cut off your arms and legs one at a time..."

c) "Brandon, imagine if you shot yourself in the back of the head... with a shotgun... twice... and declared it suicide..."

d) "Brandon, imagine if I fed you to the pigs, and they never found your body..."

e) "Brandon, imagine if I tortured you to death..."

f) "Brandon, imagine if the Germans cut your d* off..."

I just don't really get their "sense of humor". Why is (a) funny? It's like when somebody says "that's what she said", it's just not very funny, but I can imagine they say that there.

I've actually never heard of Riot Games before this article, but I don't think I would ever want to work there. Seems like a waste of time.

batteryhorse··on The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined
I can't express how wrong this response is.

Term limits are necessary, there should be no such thing as a "career politician". A politician should be required to have actual skills, and not just a nice smile.

Experience with politics is meaningless, there should be NO establishment. It is always the new guy who reveals the truth to the people, which is a good thing. Experience only results in being able to lie to the public, to further the establishment. Otherwise it becomes us vs them.

People will do anything to maintain power. It should be one year and out, nobody should be able to get rich by becoming a politician.

A good first step would be to get rid of Diane Feinstein.

batteryhorse··on The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it all went wrong
Do you realize that many "scientists" are paid to generate and publish research that supports a specific outcome, for political purposes? You should do your own research on climate change and come to your own conclusions. Blindly trusting "experts" is a very dangerous game.
batteryhorse··on 'Coerced into tipping'? How apps are changing the culture of tipping in SF
I don't think retail is a bad job. I would hate to be stuck at a computer all day writing code and dealing with non-technical managers and clients.

Someone who works a job where they receive consistent tips can make a lot of money, and if it's in cash it's tax free.

Plus the tips never go to the kitchen who do all the actual work.

batteryhorse··on Elon Musk Confronts a Fateful Tweet and an ‘Excruciating’ Year
Plus there's no way I'm trusting my life to some idiot programmer.
batteryhorse··on Elon Musk Confronts a Fateful Tweet and an ‘Excruciating’ Year
This is bowling?
batteryhorse··on How to Hire
I have to say, I found his comment that it was a PHP shop funny, but your response asking 'why is that funny' is even more funny
batteryhorse··on TinyWM – A tiny window manager in around 50 lines of C
I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for, but you can use 'xdotool windowresize 0xabcd 1920 1080' to resize an arbitrary window, 'xdotool windowmove 0xabcd 0 0' to move a window, and you can use 'xwininfo -root -tree' to get a list of all windows and the window ID which you would pass to xdotool.

If you want to write it yourself in C using Xlib, you can use the 'XMoveResizeWindow' function. You could use 'XGetWindowAttributes' to get the size of the root window.

I'm just not sure if you need a window manager to handle the dialog windows. If you do, I would just use Blackbox.

batteryhorse··on Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change
If we're talking climate change, you'd need to go back tens of thousands / millions of years to see if recent fires are out of the norm, with recent being defined as 10,000 years or so.
batteryhorse··on On Apple's Love Affair with Swift
I definitely agree with you.

The way that I write Objective-C is to use 'id' for everything and have as few classes as possible, mostly I just add methods to the existing classes mainly NSString, NSArray, and NSDictionary.

Objects are interchangeable as long as they can respond to certain messages. For example, any object can be an array as long as it responds to objectAtIndex: and count. There was a whole discussion above about how Objective-C doesn't have generics, but this completely misses the point because Objective-C doesn't even need generics. "Modern" languages are not necessarily an improvement, software generally does not get better over time, it reaches a peak then it declines.

Objective-C is one of the best languages I have ever used, but the vast majority do not understand it, even the ones who say that they used to write Objective-C for X amount of years but now love Swift. The truth is, they never understood the beauty of Objective-C.

I consider Swift to be a language for large teams of average programmers, reading Lattner's response to Swift's criticisms tells me that he is a compiler guy, but that expertise does not carry over at all to programming languages.

I don't really like the direction they were taking Objective-C anyway, so in the end it doesn't matter. I'm against things like dot notation for accessing properties and ARC, I don't use either when I program in Objective-C. Those recent changes end up making the compiler more strict and a pain to deal with.

batteryhorse··on On Apple's Love Affair with Swift
The ones in between the arguments. The beauty of sending a message to an object has been replaced with a function call with a horrible syntax. I guess that's what makes Swift a modern language.
batteryhorse··on Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
Yup. Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson were able to figure that one out. It can't be that hard. They were under a lot of pressure as well.
batteryhorse··on The world is losing the war against climate change
It's true. Climate change really is modern day religion.

A volcanic eruption is more likely to cause the climate to change.

The war on climate change suggests that humans are capable of preventing a volcano from erupting.

The poles are shifting as well.

Pollution is a separate issue, of course we should keep everything clean, but when the climate stops changing, that probably means the planet is dead, like Mars (setting up a colony on Mars makes absolutely no sense either)

batteryhorse··on ThinkPad X220 MacOS High Sierra Installation
It can be a bit of a rabbit hole. I wasn't happy with any of the window managers or desktop environments for Linux so I wrote my own. I didn't like the way any of them handled multiple monitors, but it ends up being more than a multi day project. I still don't have what I want, so now I'm trying to find a way to get rid of X or at least fix XRandR, because it doesn't support multiple GPU's the way I would like (Wayland is not a solution either).
batteryhorse··on Apple Reports Third Quarter Results
All they need to do is keep the old form factor and update the internals. No redesigns. I've been waiting for a 11" Macbook Air with Retina screen, but I'll never get it. Many people would buy a cheese grater Mac Pro with updated internals, or a Mac Mini with updated cpu's.

My feeling is that they were so jealous of Steve Jobs legacy that they had to redesign everything to prove something, and screwed it all up in the process. Maybe it's like having a parent who is very famous and successful and having to live in their shadow.

batteryhorse··on Role-playing game theory
The Iliad and The Odyssey are historically accurate, it is actual history. Heinrich Schliemann proved this with his archaeological excavations.

Star Wars is just a kids story, you really cannot compare the two.

batteryhorse··on The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT
What about when Burrell Smith was going to quit by urinating on Jobs' desk?

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

batteryhorse··on Do Great Writers Really Steal?
My point is that nobody knows who he is. So he's not considered to be one of the greats.
batteryhorse··on Do Great Writers Really Steal?
Well, the difference is a few hundredths of a second. Ever heard of Tyson Gay? Second fastest man in history.
batteryhorse··on Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?
I've wanted to do this as well. I came to the conclusion that you'll need to bypass the X windows input system and read the device directly, none of the current solutions (like libinput, mtrack, or synaptics) would work satisfactorily. And integrating it with Gtk or Qt will never work well because of the structure imposed by those frameworks (Cocoa/ObjC is a much more flexible framework)

I was able to write a prototype version of things like a tableview or image viewer that gets input directly from the touchpad device (that draws straight to an OpenGL texture or pixmap). The problem is that you'll never be able to integrate this with Gtk and Qt, it just doesn't fit together. And working within those two frameworks is kind of hell. Generally, gestures are not discrete, you can go halfway through a gesture and change your mind, but you'll still get graphical feedback from the UI. That's part of the joy of using the touchpad. But it's just easier to write it from scratch than to add it to Gtk or Qt.

For me personally, it's not a huge problem because I generally avoid Gtk and Qt apps if at all possible and make my own UI's, but I don't see it gaining widespread adoption so I don't know if it's worth the effort.

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