jsrcout

> 11. If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.

That brings back some memories. Just glad I eventually learned better.

It was amazing to read the original account in the alumni newsletter, and it was great to see the photo. The legend is real! Heh heh.

I was... not prepared for your standup to comic README. Besides just being a cool idea, you gave me some things to think about and several new rabbit holes to explore.

> 1948 was an interesting time for computing.

Not a commonly seen statement :-)

Dammit, another horrifying yet entirely realistic near-future scenario to keep me up at night.

Oh, absolutely. For instance I never thought Lysenkoism would happen again, but the conditions are ripe for it.

Same here. The Teams meeting page layout pisses me off on a regular basis, with way too much useless space around everything, tons of unhideable icons and crap filling half the screen, and all the actual content crammed into a little box. I'm sitting here with a 4K 27" monitor and all that space and resolution is just wasted. Yeah you can work around it, but what a PITA.

Ratarmount is so cool. Recently I wanted to look at a couple random files in a > 300G compressed tarball. It just wouldn't have been worth doing without it.

  - Terrorist Bomb Pierces Bob Dole's Outer Hull
  - Are Your Cats Old Enough To Learn About Jesus?
  - Deadly Super Rainbow Tears Through West Coast
  - Clinton Deploys Vowels To Bosnia
  - Rescue Chip Sent In To Save Broken Tostito Submerged In 7 Layer Dip

That last one in particular was absolutely epic.

Correct.

Docs like this make playing space engineer so much more fun.

Very sad to hear. As an already-addicted computer nerd when The Soul of a New Machine came out, his book put me inside an utterly fascinating alternate world, a world where brilliant people fought incomprehensible difficulties to create the hardware that made my software come to life. Better yet, he brought those people, not just their machines, to life. Still one of my favorite books.

Same, this is something I would use often. Sort of like #pragma once, but for initialization.

Just realized they tag the releases with great names in math/computing. Very cool.

Edit is unironically one of my favorite text editors these days. It opens incredibly fast compared to everything else I use, it's easy to use, works fine on Linux. It's not going to replace emacs or VS Code, but it's incredibly handy for basic editing chores.

I've been trying to track down "What's New" for a long long time. If memory serves, there was a daily email titled "What's New on the World Wide Web" - very possibly the source for this monthly summary.

It was a fascinating way to experience the early WWW's exponential growth. It started out small, but once it began to grow, you could see it expanding faster and faster practically in real time.

At first it only took seconds to give the daily list a good once over. Over time it started taking minutes, then 20 minutes or half an hour (if things weren't too busy at work), and eventually it morphed into almost another full time job. There was just no way to keep up. Around that time they stopped sending it out.

From a historical point of view, these daily emails and monthly summaries would be a terrific resource for those interested in the early Web. It's hard to believe now that there was once a time when you could literally check out every new Web site as they came online.

Tried to answer this question years back for just the "basic" x86 registers. Quickly realized there was never going to be any single answer until I had mastered the entire ISA. Oh well.

ENOPE.

Art, photography, acting, music - none of them are good career choices. You'll either be one of the fortunate few, or you'll struggle to make a living. Sucks but that's how it is.

Plenty of places, actually. Maybe not so much in the companies people here tend to be familiar with. It happens all the time where I work (smaller company far from the Bay area).

From valued professional to surplus inventory just like that. Where does this process end? Because right now it's only accelerating.

"We" might be such an industry, but I'm not. My focus has always been on creating new capabilities, particularly for specialists in whatever field. I want to make individuals more powerful, not turn them into surplus.

Have seen this time and time again during my career.

Most of the time, it's something you could never conceivably figure out without having been there at the time. But after 10 seconds on the phone or a brief email from someone who was, it makes complete sense.

I'm pretty sure we've achieved that already, centuries ahead of schedule :-)

At my first job circa 1990, our codebase was constrained to 6-character function names in the core libraries, which had to run on many platforms including mainframes. If I recall correctly, you could have longer names, but only the first 6 characters were significant to the linker.

Never thought about why that might be other than "yeah, memory is expensive".

The Apple II Reference Manual includes assembly listings (with full comments!) for the Monitor ROM and Autostart ROM, the mini-assembler, floating point routines, and a very nice 16-bit "pseudo machine interpreter" called SWEET 16. Most of which was written by Steve Wozniak. Learned a lot from this book back in the day.

Here's a link from archive.org. It's not the best scan, but you can easily find other copies.

https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78/page/n69/mode/2up

If you're feeling adventurous, you can find assembly listings for the AppleSoft BASIC language (though maybe only from third parties). It's pretty huge.

> It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.

While it's true to a certain degree, you make it sound like Kyiv residents are having a grand old time right now. But in reality, the majority are trying very hard to keep from freezing to death as Russian attacks targeting their power and heating infrastructure have destroyed much of it.

My first job was on a large-ish software product that ran on several completely incompatible platforms - various Unixes, early Windows, IBM mainframes, etc - and window systems. At first, making all of them happy seemed like annoying busy-work.

But our code was extremely clean and extremely well-factored, because it had to be. And after porting our product to the first two or three new platforms, the later ones were much much easier to do. Lesson learned.

Since (say) the 1990s, it feels like "the world" has slowly converged to pretty much (a) the browser; (b) desktop computers - Windows, Linux, Mac; (c) phones/tablets; (d) everything else (mainframes, embedded, industrial, what have you - stuff that most people will never deal with). And portability across different platforms is no longer all that important. Which is fine, but I do miss how the need for portability forced us to work with discipline and be relentless on quality.

Thanks, didn't know about this one.

I've been using less for years, still learned a few things from the article and comments. I used less + PCRE (for pattern highlighting) for many years for detailed code analysis. It was a great way to get "down in the weeds" and really explore the code. less' bookmarks were another key microtool in that work.