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fexecve

58 karma · joined December 23, 2022

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fexecve··on Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice
Seems AI-written. Doesn't give any justification for MacOS being better for older hardware than Linux or even Windows. You won't be getting updates for your Intel hardware on MacOS, so you're right back where you started with Windows 10 going EOL.
fexecve··on CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ source code
Web software is incredibly simple. Having someone's ruby code doesn't really help you much. Hackers just try a few SQL injections, stuff script tags into all of the form fields, and call it a day. More advanced hacks on webapps are virtually unheard of. Certainly custom-designing a hack for some company isn't going to happen. It's a waste of time, because chances are you won't find some complicated hack that wasn't already exposed through the spamming techniques I mentioned above. And most larger, "worthwhile" companies tend to run their own in-house CI and not use Circle.
fexecve··on CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ source code
Most people will just update their keys, so I doubt anyone is going to burn botnet cycles on trying to use the keys.
fexecve··on Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
Who said I was scared? I'm just pointing out that the phrase you used it very vague and some interpretations can be scary. It pays to be specific, especially in tech and medicine, you know? Winkyface.
fexecve··on Lisa Source Code Release
I'm not sure why it took so long, but I think that lawyers dragging their feet probably wasn't it. I'm guessing that they would have never announced the release, unless the lawyers had already signed off on it. I think instead, it took them 5 years to make the landing page (something like this would normally take two years, but the pandemic wasted three years of that time.)
fexecve··on Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
Then you just need to find an angel investor. The capital has to go somewhere. The wealthy aren't just going to leave their money in publicly-traded stocks, they want some risk in their portfolio.
fexecve··on Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
This. People underestimate how much technological progress has been slowing every decade. 2008 was even slower than 1998, which was even slower than 1988. Meanwhile almost nothing new has happened since 2013.
fexecve··on Lisa Source Code Release
> You may not and you agree not to:

> publish benchmarking results about the Apple Software or your use of it

Damn, there goes my Apple Lisa vs Amiga comparison video! I was going to get so many YouTube views! Meh, maybe I'll make it anyway. So sue me!

> the Apple Software may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S. embargoed countries

I'm sure keeping Iran from getting this valuable software from 1983, which runs on a completely dead CPU architecture that Linux doesn't even support anymore, is very important!

(But seriously, as a license geek, and not a lawyer, the wording of this license is really interesting. It seems to have completely different disclaimers than you usually see in open-source licenses...)

fexecve··on Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages
I was there in those days too. VB was a very beginner-friendly language, more akin to what we call today "low-code" than other languages. Those developers didn't have to "re" learn software development, as you think, instead they probably never knew software development well enough to use languages like VB.NET (which is what all of the VB devs I worked with ended up on). "C# and .NET" is equal to any language you can think of in terms of complexity, so C# devs are going to be just fine.
fexecve··on No Start Menu for You
What? The comments here are very on-topic as far as I can tell.
fexecve··on No Start Menu for You
Source availability.
fexecve··on No Start Menu for You
The Windows team probably has laptops with high-speed SSDs, and tons of RAM, a fast CPU, and a fast internet connection. So now already with that, 13 seconds is probably down to 3 seconds, and they are probably also okay with (sometimes) waiting 3 seconds while the search box opens after pressing the windows key.
fexecve··on No Start Menu for You
Woah woah woah, who said this is "secret"? Were you expecting a big red skull and crossbones to take over your screen whenever a phone home occurs?
fexecve··on Show HN: Otterkit – COBOL compiler for .NET
ChatGPT thinks it knows everything, god.
fexecve··on Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
This is correct. This also excludes contractors, which there are tons of in the Bay Area, and they make a lot less than a regular employee, even at places like Google.
fexecve··on Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
> There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively.

Wrong, that research only shows that when you use a GPS, you don't learn routes as quickly. That is only equal to "impacts brain function negatively" in a narrow sense, which you should specify rather than use such a broad and scary-sounding phrase!

fexecve··on Ask HN: Why do companies use terrible job application portals like Workday?
Workday is cheaper, right? I think that's the ultimate answer.
fexecve··on Windows 98 icons are great (2015)
> navigate a ridiculous start menu tree

That's not true, the start menu tree was usually relatively clutter-free until the XP era, where companies went absolutely insane and started putting things like manuals and links to the website inside of the start menu tree... yuck!

fexecve··on Faster than the filesystem (2021)
Interesting, I suspected some of those things. Thanks.
fexecve··on Ask HN: How do you trust that your personal machine is not compromised?
Law of averages. If I am hacked, then likely millions of other people are hacked, and I haven't heard about millions of people being hacked. QED.
fexecve··on Friday night’s near-disaster at JFK airport
Murphy's Law in action. With this many flights per day, you need tons of safety measures to ensure that mistakes like this are extremely unlikely. Like "defense in depth", you can't rely on just a few layers of countermeasures, the more the better. So yes, red lights at every intersection are good, but retrofitting planes with a gps-style map that shows exactly where to go and when to turn is even better (and of course probably insanely expensive).
fexecve··on Faster than the filesystem (2021)
How does it do this? Does it cache changes and only write them every so often? Does it keep a file open to write uncommitted changes?
fexecve··on CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ source code
The sad part is, the damage this does to companies won't be felt for years (which is how long it'll take someone to take the stolen source code, analyze it, and make a convincingly-distinct clone), so companies will think that nothing came of this, and they'll keep using CircleCI (and other similar platforms which put everyone's eggs in the same basket, how appealing to hackers that must be).
fexecve··on Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?
I love software engineering AND programming. But too often working "in software" involves neither.
fexecve··on Nintendo 64 Java
There are knockoffs for a lot less, the author here is even using one. But then you aren't supporting the inventor of the thing, just a factory that's churning them out somewhere.

Nobody asked, but I'll list differences I've noticed between the real everdrive and the knockoffs: Games that require a cartridge battery won't won't work correctly on the clones, the SD card slot is a lot cheaper on the clones, and the clone doesn't have a USB port (which I think is used for live game dev debugging?)

fexecve··on Nintendo 64 Java
There's a fun conspiracy theory that Nintendo intentionally made the default RSP binary they provided sub-optimized, so that later in the console's life they could release an optimized version so that games continue to appear to get better. This is likely entirely rubbish, of course.
fexecve··on U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
Now remove lung cancer and see if the numbers have changed that much.
fexecve··on Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
I think that technical communication isn't the same as other communication, so I don't think it's a logical given that people "on the spectrum" would be bad at it. Technical communication is about conveying technical information, at various levels, with just a few constraints. It's a solved problem, really. It just needs to be followed to the letter.
fexecve··on Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Most companies either do too little documentation (they have a little page with the bare minimum high-level overview), or they do way too much (detailed change request forms for every change, which go into a file cabinet, and are never looked at again). Alas, it's really hard to get people to understand that documentation is good and necessary when they've only ever been exposed to one or both of those systems.
fexecve··on A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?
I disagree with everything in this article post-2000. There were no "software gatekeepers" preventing Japanese software from flourishing on the PC or Mac. I'm not sure what the author is talking about there.

So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development tools for those environments are English-centric. The translations are lacking or no existent. The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer.

Also, outside of USA/China/India, software developers are still not given much respect or seen as equal to say, mechanical engineers or electrical engineers. So there's little reason for Japanese students to major in software.

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