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kbobon The “Activate Windows” watermark ported to Linux

Can someone explain this to me? It looks like a desktop wallpaper with mountains and the words "Activate Linux".

kbobon Ask HN: Are there any rural tech communities?

This. Every one of the 50 states has a flagship university, and some of them are doing very good research in a variety of fields. You won't get rich there, but you can have a lot of fun and do cutting-edge work.

College towns usually have a lot more culture, in many senses of the word, than non-college towns of the same size. The highly educated workforce makes a big difference.

We used to live 30 minutes outside Eugene, Oregon (University of Oregon) on 50 acres. In retrospect, it would have been better to have a smaller place (3-5 acres?) closer to town. But we were definitely secluded.

kbobon I didn't return my Apple Studio Display

Different people are different heights. Amazing but true.

kbobon When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX

Different code bases. MAE was developed in parallel with, and started a little earlier than the PowerPC Macs.

I thought MAE emulated a 68030, specifically a Mac IIci. But I could be wrong -- it's been a while. I am 99% certain we used an IIci ROM image, and it's unlikely that an '040 could run that unmodified.

kbobon When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX

N.B., I didn't learn the term, "Duff's Device" until several years later.

kbobon When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX

I was part of the MAE engineering team from 1992-94.

The original plan was to machine-translate the Mac ROM from 68K machine code to SPARC/PA-RISC/POWER machine code. It would have brought MAE much closer to RISC-like speeds. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dirty assembler in the Mac ROMs, and the decoding project faltered. So about 3/4 of the way through the project, we scrapped the binary translation and ran the whole ROM in the 68K emulator. It started working quickly, but it was slower by a factor of several.

We had a binary translation app, basically a compiler that took 68K machine code as the source language, written by a 3rd party company whose name I forgot. They were east coast, possibly Research Triangle, and might have had defense contracting ties.

I personally identified about 20 Duff's Devices in QuickDraw inner loops and recoded them as not-Duff's-Devices so the binary translator could grok them. (Sorry, can't remember exactly how I de-optimized them. My/our assumption was that the RISC processors were so much faster than the 68030 of the Mac IIci we were porting that optimization wasn't a big deal.)

We (largely me) developed a huge list of hints for the translator, hundreds of instances of "The code at address X looks like it does this, but it really does that." or "Address Y is an entry point. Start translating here." or the converse, "Address Z is data. Don't mess with it."

It was an insane engineering effort, and I'm still disappointed it never shipped. It was happening at the same time other parts of Apple were developing the first generation PowerPC Macs. They were going through equally insane gymnastics getting 68K and PowerPC to coexist in the same address space, with calls in both directions.

Unfortunately, it's been nearly 30 years, and I just can't remember very many details any more.

kbobon Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

Rust may allow 100 engineers to work on the same codebase without spending all their time debugging memory corruption errors. I say "may" because I don't have firsthand experience in a team that big.

kbobon The Crypto Backlash Is Booming

> I compare it to the dot com bubble.

I don't see the similarity. Yes, the stocks were overpriced, and people who didn't understand venture capital were effectively providing venture capital. But the dot com era produced some major corporations: Google, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and many more. Those companies have real economic value because they create products that people want to pay for.

Web3 hasn't produced anything comparable. The space is now polluted enough that I doubt it will.

kbobon The Problem with C (2020)

Computer science is less than a century old. There's no reason to think we know enough to design perfect languages yet. But with an additional 30 years of hindsight, we can make somewhat better languages now, and we should.

kbobon Const all the things?

I wouldn't choose C++ if I wanted to have fun. Practically any language (maybe not XML) is more fun to get things done in.

If using C++ is the right business decision, I'll use it, but I won't expect to enjoy it.

kbobon Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)

I found my father-in-law, and I found a guy I went to school with. The former worked in Columbus, Ohio, and the latter was also from Ohio. I wouldn't be surprised if all of Department 375 was in Columbus.

kbobon Everything must be paid for twice

Or walk right on past the gym. Once you're outside and walking, going inside to walk on the gym's machine isn't an improvement.

Running might be different, depending on your local streets.

kbobon WLED Arduino WiFi LED Controller

How does WLED compare to PixelBlaze?

https://www.bhencke.com/pixelblaze

kbobon Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer

Go look at some of the programming languages from many years ago, when most of the good stuff we like hadn't been thought of.

A good starting point is the video, 50 in 50, by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel. It reviews 50 programming languages from the first 50 years of computing.

kbobon Icon Programming Language – A brief introduction (1993)

I found SNOBOL a lot harder to work with than Icon. Icon is an Algol-like language in that it has the usual flow control mechanisms, enhanced with Icon's backtracking. SNOBOL is a lot more like assembly. So it's harder (for me) to read the basic control flow of a program.

I think SNOBOL predated the invention of structured programming, or at least Griswold wasn't aware of structured programming's advantages when he designed it.

kbobon Open Dynamic Robot Initiative (2020)

Neodymium magnets and brushless DC motors. The brushes and commutator have been replaced by a micro controller and set of power MOSFETs.

kbobon The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered

Are there resources for delta encoding transcendental functions in general? A fast, compact tanh() function would be great for making ladder filters in an FPGA.

kbobon Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?

Satoshi Nakamoto will be revealed to be an extraterrestrial info-warrior sent to destroy humanity by tricking us into turning all our carbon fuels into random numbers. This will happen sometime in April.

kbobon Apple’s New Screen Repair Trap

> [Shops'] only options will be to join Apple’s onerous IRP network—not an option for shops that value their customers’ privacy...

Is this code for shops that repair stolen phones?

kbobon First Flight of Kestrel, the FPGA OpenPOWER-Based BMC, and Arctic Tern

A BMC with a soft CPU will create a whole new class of security vulnerabilities. Now you can hide malware within the BMC's gateware as well as its firmware.

kbobon What's the deal with fictional influencers?

We've had fictional characters in movies for decades, in literature for centuries, and in myths and legends for millennia. And people have made their living (and occasionally made fortunes) telling those stories.

How is this different?

kbobon Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

Are you in a crowded office with lots of Bluetooth devices? At my house, Bluetooth is rock solid up to 10 meters. But there are only a handful of devices in the house, and the neighbors are far away.

kbobon Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days?

Here are the parts they're selling. (A lot of them are "coming soon", though.) https://frame.work/marketplace

I'm not familiar with current ThinkPads.

kbobon Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

It might be a popular action for people to take just before they move out. Instead of selling one house for $3M, build the duplices, sell them for a combined $5-6M, and leave instead of living with the consequences.

That might happen in the really rich neighborhoods too.

kbobon Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Many, many rules. That ones that stood out to me are:

* Do not demolish more than 25% of existing house's exterior walls.

* Each sub-lot must be at least 2,400 square feet.

* Each sub-lot must be at least 40% of the original lot.

* Each housing unit must be at least 800 square feet.

I didn't read it closely enough to see how you can turn an existing single-family into a duplex.

kbobon Mossad assassinated Iran’s chief nuke scientist with remote AI gun – report

3.0? Don't forget the 1991 war.

kbobon Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

> "We advertised locally for 70 fruit-pickers and we had nine applications. On follow-up, only one was still available... in terms of recruiting locally, we failed completely," says Ali Capper, the owner of Stocks Farm in Suckley

That's not what her web site says. https://stocksfarm.net/vacancies-2/

> There are currently NO vacancies at Stocks Farm.

> Thank you to everyone who has applied for roles. Due to an amazing amount of applicants, we have been flooded with enquiries. We have closed the April jobs and will reopen for August some time in the summer.

kbobon Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

That's not what her web site says. https://stocksfarm.net/vacancies-2/

> There are currently NO vacancies at Stocks Farm.

kbobon Transport noise linked to increased risk of dementia, study finds

Worse, it can take several hours to thoroughly study a research paper. That's hundreds of cheap articles whose ads you didn't see.

kbobon Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera (2016)

This is from 2016. Did Charlie end up writing the space opera he was mulling?