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sehuggon Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?

I started with iOS in 2009. I wish I hadn't used Core Data, and made the decision to store lots of large binary blobs in it. Changing the schema became impossible, because the migration process often crashed or ran out of disk space in production. That, coupled with lots of Core Data crashes that persist (pun intended) to this day. It may have been easier to just use SQLite directly.

My decision to use NSThread for worker threads wasn't optimal either, but there weren't many async options in 2009 (Remember ASIHTTPRequest?)

sehuggon Time to Stop the ‘Doomsday Clock’. – Lawrence M. Krauss

They say more in the link if you care to read it:

Continued corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision making depend has heightened the nuclear and climate threats. In the last year, many governments used cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns to sow distrust in institutions and among nations, undermining domestic and international efforts to foster peace and protect the planet.

sehuggon Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

Whether or not the occupant has just been impeached for leveraging public assets against political enemies seems to also be a relevant factor.

sehuggon Time to Stop the ‘Doomsday Clock’. – Lawrence M. Krauss

In other news, the Doomsday Clock has moved closer to midnight:

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

sehuggon _NSAKEY

Occam's Glomar

sehuggon The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC

The Digital Antiquarian had a good article on this game in 2018: https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/another-world/

sehuggon MS OS/2 SDK Document Dump

I remember testing the networking component of a game by running two simultaneous Windows 3.1 sessions, and fuzz testing DOS apps in multiple VMs (using DPMI, even!)

sehuggon The StingRay Is Why the 4th Amendment Was Written (2017)

It wasn't memory-holed: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...

sehuggon Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

FPGA tools, with few exceptions (IceStorm, SymbiFlow)

sehuggon WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation

Thanks -- we use Emscripten/WASM mainly for running command-line compilers/assemblers (like cc65 and SDCC).

Right now the emulators are all in JavaScript (except for MAME) which makes integrating with the IDE's debugging tools a little easier. It's performant enough for now, since we only have 8-bit platforms at low clock speeds.

Integrating a C emulation library like https://github.com/floooh/chips should be doable, since it doesn't have any dependencies.

sehuggon WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation

I use it in a web worker to compile, assemble, and link C programs into 8-bit ROMs: https://8bitworkshop.com/

I was using asm.js in the past, but WASM gives a noticeable and necessary performance boost.

sehuggon Byte Magazine: Future Computers (1981)

They don't remove hidden lines like that anymore, do they? Nor do they solve Go quite the same way.

sehuggon A Trail of FBI Abuse

Paywalled ... and also this is an op-ed by the WSJ Editorial Board (https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/924810328747204608)

sehuggon Facebook Tells Barr It Won’t Open Up Encrypted Messages

This is the same William Barr that released an official DOJ statement yesterday claiming abuse of the FISA courts, no? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-wi...

sehuggon Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

SAGE also didn’t have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your liquor

No, but the Weapons Director Console incorporated an ashtray and cigarette lighter on the left side.

sehuggon Spleeter: Extract voice, piano, drums, etc. from any music track

It's really good on the 2-stem stuff. On the 4-stem model, it's a bit shy about the bass part, and parts drift in and out. I'd like to try it on a FLAC.

sehuggon Mapping the World of Amiga Samples

You can approximate the LED filter with a WebAudio node BTW

sehuggon Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract

In a book slated for publication Oct. 29, retired Navy commander Guy Snodgrass, who served as a speech writer to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, said Trump called Mattis and directed him to “screw Amazon” by preventing it from bidding on the JEDI contract, according to an excerpt of the book seen by Reuters ahead of its release.

“Were not going to do that,” Mattis later told other Pentagon officials, according to the excerpt. “This will be done by the book, both legally and ethically.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/reuters-america-update-5-mic...

Mattis resigned December 2018, his successor put Amazon's contract up for review in August.

sehuggon Pascal Compiler for the C64: Introducing Turbo Rascal SE

The original Turbo Pascal was a pretty simple one-pass recursive-descent compiler: https://www.pcengines.ch/tp3.htm

It looks like this one has a lot of constraints for easy 6502 code generation, like only allowing 8-bit variables in a FOR loop.

sehuggon Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

Anybody remember FantaVision on the Apple ][? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7V5nfmveI

Vector tweening in 1985. Though not interactive. (and I think the video is sped up a bit)

sehuggon 600k concurrent websocket connections on AWS using Node.js (2015)

I did this with Netty back in 2010. Increasing nf_conntrack_max is a hard-learned lesson.

sehuggon Broken

I just restored from Time Machine after getting stuck on the “Estimating time remaining...” screen and then googling some other peoples' experiences. Three hours spent restoring from backup seemed like a better option.

sehuggon Russia’s Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers

How easy is it to find people with the know-how? How much do they charge?

I'd think you'd find dozens of qualified volunteers willing to work pro-bono to keep a Apple ][-powered museum running.

How about 10 years from now?

You'd find slightly fewer.

sehuggon A basement hacker transformed Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600

The NES wasn't released at that point, or even the Famicom. Nintendo relied on Coleco and Atari for distribution of DK in the US.

sehuggon An Oral History of ‘Snake’ on Nokia

Or Gremlin Industries' 1976 "Blockade" which invented the Tron light-cycles genre, and probably inspired the Snake game genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_(video_game)

sehuggon Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp

This reminds me of when the Infocom folks moved from the functional MDL to the micro-friendly ZIL, while keeping much of the syntax of the former: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html

sehuggon New games for the Atari Lynx

160 x 102 is also the resolution of the Bally Astrocade (1977) and at 2 bits per pixel it takes up almost all of the 4KB of RAM. Luckily, you can adjust the number of visible lines, otherwise you'd have only 16 bytes for your data and stack. Lynx has an 8KB frame buffer (4 bits/pixel) out of 64KB.

sehuggon ProjectPSX – A C# coded emulator of the original Playstation

Mesen (for NES) is a good example of a cross-platform C# emulator with a comprehensive debugger UI: https://www.mesen.ca/

(As long as you have Windows or Linux, that is...)

sehuggon New games for the Atari Lynx

Atari 7800, too. Even though only about 100K were produced.

sehuggon Famous Graphics Chips: Microsoft’s Talisman

This reminds me of the Atari 7800's architecture. The screen is composed of horizontal "zones" with variable heights. Each strip renders one or more objects (sprites or tiles), stopping the CPU to do a DMA transfer on each scanline. A lot of this is controlled by display lists in RAM, but some settings (palettes for example) have to be changed on-the-fly via interrupts. And sprites invariably span multiple zones, which is another PITA.