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Is the quality of a place only dictated by instagrammability, today?

froh42on Focusmate – Virtual Coworking Helps You Get Things Done

That might be true for you. For me just that - sharing a workspace over video - sounds great, as I've got the most problems with "emotionally challenging" tasks. (Like doing those things piling up for some time now).

In the past for some things that are hard to do I asked a friend to come over to my place and/or having them on the phone for some time.

So I'd not feel that as "video surveillance" but rather human company. (For video surveillance alone you wouldn't need a partner, it'd expect it is not to difficult to train an AI to detect whether you're working or slacking locally from video capture and desktop screenshots plus use a virtual call center of "central scrutinizers" to oversee the AI).

(Update: OH SHIT THAT ALREADY EXISITS: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2119734-ai-tracks-your-...)

froh42on The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition

So if it annoys you, why do you still surf their site? I shift my attenton to sites which treat me fairly (and so I do with them. tit for tat).

froh42on Alan Cooper on the “10x” Programmer

As an experienced programmer - if you really want to improve productivity 10 times, find the junior programmers in your team, empower them, give your advice when asked, shut up when not being asked, tell them they can do that hard task and help them out when they have problems. Be a decent human being. Then watch with pride as they grow in amazingly quick time. Oh - and just work for a company, that honors when you're doing that.

Nowadays programming is teamwork.

froh42on Java is Pass-by-Value

The exception was named like that before pointers in Java were called references. Urban legend says it was Sun's marketing department demanding Java sounds less dangerous than C/C++.

froh42on Ask HN: Does Apple slow down old Macbooks as well?

There are regulations on how much li ion battey a machine may have to be allowed in the cabin pn a plane. I think many companies won't cross that limit. So something like the removable / modular batteries from the past might be great

froh42on How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster [video]

You try and fail. And try and fail. And try and fail. And then one day you have learned enough to try and succeed.

Learning how to NOT land it is learning how to land it.

froh42on The language of programming

Growing up (Generation Commodore 64, later having an Amiga) taught me enough computing lingo that I one day started to read English books. Because at some point the really interesting books didn't have German translations anymore.

So there I was struggling with my English, always being happy when there were enough technical terms which I understood. (And worst thing of all - English speaking authors dare to use puns and humour in technical books. Which I didn't understand, because of the vocabulary and because we Germans would never do anything like this, we're much too serious for that.)

froh42on Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?

Which is really sad, because (and I say that as a hard core auto driver) riding a bike through the city significantly lowers your death risk (also by health benefits) as long as there are bike lanes.

Bike riders also solve traffic jams (by NOT going bar car), make cities more silent and more liveable, bring more business to local stores and restaurants etc.

froh42on Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?

Over here in Germany a speed limit typically means there's a good reason to follow it. On the Autobahn we've got places where there is no speed limit at all (yep, there's places where I can legally go 250 km/h) and on other places the speed may be set as low as 80 km/h (around 50mph).

A low speed limit typically is enforced with a traffic camera. Additionally we've go a lot of dynamic speed signs which show a speed limit which fits the current traffic conditions. (empty road at night - it's turned off. Rush hour - 80 km/h. Fog - 60 km/h And several steps in between)

Not having a "fixed" all the time limit makes drives accept the speed limit more easily.

Oh yes, and 85'th percentile. I frequently drive "+15km/h", so I go 95 when there's 80 allowed because the fine when I get caught that is not too expensive. (Fines for speeding are lower when you get caught outside city limits, speeding in a residential zone or in front of a school for example is one thing I have no tolerance for as well.)

froh42on German traffic light stays red for 28 years (2015)

Yes great idea. Build a new rule into a nation-wide law just to solve a problem that needs no solving as "red light with static green right arrow" is a typical sight over here in Germany and drivers DO understand it.

It would be much better to change traffic la nation-wide so we can get rid of this ONE traffic light in Germany. Isn't it?

froh42on SNES preservation project on hold due to missing $10,000 package

I was just checking DHL web site over here in Germany for the cost but found something that may be interesting:

Aufgrund der Streiks bei Lufthansa im Dezember 2016 wurden für Sendungen in die USA Ableitungen über alternative Transportrouten notwendig. Unter anderem über den Seeweg. Das führt aktuell noch zu stärkeren Verzögerungen bei der Zustellung von Economy Paketen in die USA.

Translation:

Due to a strike at Lufthansa in december 2016 packages with destination USA need to be redirected using alternate transport routes, amongst other by ship. This results in even bigger delays delivering economy packets into USA.

Source: https://www.dhl.de/de/privatkunden/pakete-versenden/weltweit...

If you have the DHL tracking number you should try tracking.

There's also the DHL facebook page where you can start a facebook chat, with good luck your supporter will speak english. (Just try!) https://www.facebook.com/DHLPaket/app/1609168226005546/

From what it looks there's a high chance your package is on a ship somewhere. And even more importantly, the sender should create a "Nachforschungsauftrag" with DHL (ha, one of our bureaucratic german words I can't even find a translation for - it's a request for inquiry of a lost package). Even with domestic packages over here the tracking information sometimes is plain wrong, and I expect it even more so to be wrong if they don't use their usual ways of transport. (No tracking of all those packages in a shipping container on a freighter.)

Good luck. (Btw, once I have given up on a package from the US to Germany after 6 months. The day after I gave up and purchased an alternative product my packet arrived ... UGH).

froh42on Ask HN: What is the best way to learn for the easily distracted?

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I have what is commonly being described as ADHD (oh, yeah, and I'm a software developer ;-) ) and my son has it as well.

I refuse to see ADHD as an illness. It is a different way of thinking (and unfortunatley does not fit too well in our modern indoor office world with 90% "other" people).

All your examples led me up to FINALLY having a different word for ADHD that does not involve "disorder".

Me and my son, we're having non-linear minds. Time to find non-linear things to do, so we can be happy.

Thanks.

P.S.: Your coping strategies: I've developed roughly the same ones for myself as well. GTD, done. Pomodoro, done. Non-linear job, done. They work quite well.

froh42on How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Just 4 Generations

"child endangerment"

This seems to run rampart in the US, but also a little bit over here in Germany.

My daughter (now 12) is allowed to use public transport across my city (Munich) since she was 9 (close to 10) - and my son who's 9 will change schools in summer and take public transport to there as well.

What's (still!) normal here might be child endangering in the US. The kids are free to roam from here to the city's river Isar (around a 20 minute walk, 1 subway station) because there's just a green, nice place.

And no, Munich is not a rural area, it's a 1.6 Million people city. And the first year when my daughter was taking public transport she was switching lines at Munich central station. In 2015. During those days when there were several thousand refugees here.

You teach the kids about sensible behaviour, about how to travel safely. And then you have to let them take a risk, because locking them up in the apartment is a very dangerous thing, for their mind, for their health.

There IS a certain risk that something bad happens. But I refuse to encumber the kids souls with fear and panic. I definitely believe part of the "obesity epidemic" is parents driving their kids everywhere because "its safer". No it's not. The kids get sick and fat.

froh42on The JVM is not that heavy

Not all JIT compilation needs to be fast. I think it was hotspot that first does interpretation, then - when interpretation proves too expensive - switches over to a quick jit. And when code gets executed lots of times it runs jit again, this time with deep optimization settings.

What I personally don't understand: Why don't we cache JIT results between runs? That might be a worthwile optimization and even possible in the face of class loading.

It probably would be like running ngen on .net, just WITH performance statistics of a program. (Enabling specialization of calls for types commonly passed or eliminating constant expressions while keeping the generic version of a function around - that's hard in AOT as you need profiling information. I think sun's C/C++ compiler was able to do that for AOT, resulting in large speedups. But maybe it only used it for branch prediction).

Edit: What I forgot to add - I like the way you could always AOT things in .NET with ngen but also use a JIT where possible. Now that Java turned out to be owned by the evil empire and .NET the one by the company committed to open source - imagine reading that 10 years ago - I'm really curious in which way things will develop. And with all the new contenders as well. JVM (and .net) is not dead, but a lot of interesting alternatives are getting traction now.

froh42on The JVM is not that heavy

Haha, AOT native compilation.

This comes back time and time again. AOT native results in slower runtimes for applications with one simple exception: startup time. In every other case a modern JIT compiler like the JVM will win due to gathering information and layered compilation.

Where AOT really makes sense is for an interactive app on a mobile device where you don't care about the last millisecond of performance but startup times and even much more importantly: energy expenditure. (That's why google AOTing the apps on device startup is quite sensible)

Most funnily Microsoft was heavily advertising AOT with .net framework 1.0 but in general switched to dynamic profiling and optimization in later versions of .net. (System assemblies that everybody uses during startup are AOT compiled using ngen, however)

It is just not "one size fits all", depending on your platform and requirements you'd have completely different requirements to your virtual machine. What you want is different between interactive use and "batch processing" and between energy starved devices and big iron.

Java - while ironically advertisted for "applets" years ago - is optimized for the latter case and there it really shines. On a server with long running processes AOT makes no sense at all.

So what AOT will take over is phones. IOT devices. Everything were energy is at a premium and startup times need to be quick. Layered JIT compilation takes over where you want to squeeze out the last bit of total performance. (Even interactively, looking at you, Google V8 and Chakra)

froh42on POTUS Twitter account is registered to a private Gmail account

Regarding Trump: I can't decide whether I'll see the upcoming events the next four years with schadenfreude (you've got what you elected, Americans!) or with fear and terror.

froh42on Ask HN: The habit adopted in 2016 that had the greatest impact on your health?

I started dancing Zouk. Besides the fact that dancing is fun and good for your soul it greatly improved my posture.

froh42on Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

Mike,

I'm just saying that you're putting yourself on risky ground, not that I want to do something personally.

In fact I'd even consider keeping GA enabled IF BEING NOTIFIED.

The current notification is the problem, as it is close to invisble. Hiding output in a long log message is a dark pattern, I think it did not happen out of spite (you just used your normal shell output mechanism to show that).

However: Such a chage of policy is more important than the list of files being removed by git. Even opt out is OK IF THE USER IS INFORMED.

Currently it's like arthur dent being informed about the highway being built ... yeah we did display the notice.

I know building an open source project is no fun and I can really relate to your desire to know more about installations and deinstallations. Personally I don't even object to using google GA, just to the way it feels being snuck beside the radar.

froh42on Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

if you want to raise a stink

If you have a judge who is not completly dumb he would laugh you off for such litigation. If you have a judge who still has his staff print out internet pages for him it might get compilicated for you as a contributor. Idiot judge already happened to me, that was an expensive lesson life taught me.

So no, I wouldn't risk sticking my name on something like that.

Because everybody else does it, doesn't mean you don't get away with it. (And over here the big boys google/apple can do a lot of things the small ones can't even begin to try - they have the advantage of getting before a "high enough" court with intelligent judges)

froh42on Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

Im extremely pissed off by the way they snuck the prompt in between several hundred lines of shell output on update. This is NOT being prompted.

I can live with the analytics. I'd might even consider to leave it on IF BEING ASKED PROPERLY.

All previous discussion says "oh you get notified". The point is, you don't get properly notified. And this is, why this is news again over the old discussion on HN.

froh42on Brew commands send data to Google Analytics

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

froh42on HP Allegedly Time Bombs Unofficial Ink Cartridges from Working in Its Printers

Such behaviour is the reason I threw out a perfectly working HP OfficeJet one day and will never buy a single HP printer in my life.

In the OfficeJet in question I only used genuine cartridges, but every few year it would stop receiving black and white faxes because (the nearly full) color cartidge was passing its expiry date - forcing me to throw away the full color cartridge and buying a new one.

froh42on Radiobox.css – Tiny set of CSS3 animations meant for your radio inputs

It's just <blink> all over again

froh42on Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them

With all these recipies - one thing I do whenever I attempt some stunt in git: I assign temporary tags to every changeset that's important.

    git tag tmp
    git perform-stunt

This eases undoing the stunt without needing to find the "before" state from reflog. And if you use a graphical log viewer (I like SourceTree on Mac) you'll see the tagged state in the history view - which makes things a lot clearer.

And to be aware what happens, there one single explanation of git that helps a lot: http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/

As soon as you start viewing git as a graph of nodes with branches/tags just being "marked" nodes a lot of things make sense, and whatever "git perform-stunt" you attempt it's easy to explain within that mental model.

froh42on GitHub's 2015 Transparency Report

Holy shit. People in the land of the free discussing what they are legally allowed to say. Such tricks sound like stories from Soviet Russia that still linger around.

froh42on T-Mobile is giving postpaid customers a free share of stock

This is so strange. "un-carrier". T-Mobile is a brand of the Deutsche Telekom, the former monopoly and state-owned carrier in Germany.

It can't get more "old inflexible heavy carrier"-y than that. Bandwidth caps. Trying to push Netflix and Google Video out of the network for promoting their on in-house service (net neutrality? Telekom hates it.)

They have problems on the American market, lost a lot of money there, so they try hard to create a "different" image.

froh42on Subversion vs. Git: Myths and Facts

Does svn still force me to update before I commit (and possibly fuck up and destroy my changes) when there are conflicting changes with upstream?

Being able to commit first and then care about conflicts second is my biggest selling point for DVCS (git/hg).

froh42on German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says

There are Windows computers in there. They are not connected to any outside network "to be safe". Therefore they are protected, even protected from updates. Software that runs on them is validated for that specific OS version with a specific state of updates applied.

Regulations say you can't just ran any random device (including software) there, that's unsafe.

Unfortunately regulations weren't being made with PCs in mind where anybody can plug in an infected USB stick. Or needs to in case he's a service technician. (Yes, those ports are not available for "anybody" who is there, but somebody needs to install software on those machines).

There are things I have seen I wish I could unsee to feel safe.