Hacker News Reader

to3mon U.S. Regulators to Subpoena Crypto Exchange Bitfinex, Tether

This is good for Bitcoin.

to3mon Show HN: How to store a set of four 5-bit values in one 16-bit value

Use a phony target that does whatever you want. Mine typically invoke cc to build the program ("cc -O3 -Wall -o main main.c", something like that?), then run the program ("./main"), which prints its stuff to stdout and stderr. Makes it very easy to build+run from within Emacs, where the default compile command is "make".

to3mon Tesla employees say Gigafactory problems worse than known

Righ - I mean it’s 4 full weeks of 7 days, so 28 in total, rather than 4 working weeks of 5 apiece, totalling 20.

to3mon Tesla employees say Gigafactory problems worse than known

It’s 28 days in the UK. Those weeks include the weekends!

to3mon Car insurers accused of discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts

I don't know about Mahapatra, but Stuccio is a denizen of this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas

to3mon Bitcoin.org removes “fast” and “low fees” from Bitcoin description page

The people that got the money probably didn't put it under their bed.

to3mon Horrible doors on British trains (2010)

He's doing that because the designers of the door appear to have forgotten that 90% of people are right-handed...

to3mon BMW's Apple CarPlay annual fee is next-level gouging

Exactly. This is good for BMW, and that's why they do it.

The initial keeper is happy, because it's cheaper for them. ~100% of them will lease it for <4 years, and you can consult my table to discover this.

Subsequent buyers are less happy... but, wait, fuck those guys. When N>0, the Nth owner pays owner N-1, not BMW. So previously BMW would see nothing from these transactions. And now there's a >0% chance these subsequent owners will pay them $80/year.

(Many software vendors have been trying to move to a subscription model. They want the recurring revenue. The iOS and Android video game markets have by now almost entirely switched to a free-to-play model - which is basically the same thing, just with a more compelling free sample, so they can sucker in the punters. This is basically the same!)

This might make a dent in resale values, but I assume the >0% chance of getting $80/year from future owners makes up for this. I do admit, though, that I really don't have a good feel for how this would play out.

Of course, people that buy a BMW with the intention of keeping it for >=5 years will get the shaft.... so I expect you can be sure that they've got good evidence that most keepers of a new BMW get rid of it before that point.

to3mon BMW's Apple CarPlay annual fee is next-level gouging

I don't know what the problem is here. Instead of adding $300 to the cost of the car, you now add $0, and then after year 1 you pay $80/year.

Maybe it's different in America or something, but in the UK approximately 100% of BMWs are leased, or bought with some kind of loan secured on the vehicle (I think based on estimated resale value when the period is up). So the "owner" will have the car for 2-3 years, maybe 4, then they'll chop it in for whatever's newer at the time.

With that in mind:

    1 year.  Old way: $300. New way: $0.
    2 years. Old way: $300. New way: $80.
    3 years. Old way: $300. New way: $160.
    4 years. Old way: $300. New way: $240.

Cheaper!

    5 years. Old way: $300. New way: $320.

OK, but I wonder how many people keep their car for this long?

to3mon Walkable Streets Are More Economically Productive

There's minimal car access during business hours to the walled part of York: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York#Transport

to3mon How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

The UK's roads are an unrestricted free-for-all and the amount of time you spend in your car having to wait for people walking in the road is far short of all of it.

The roads end up mainly for traffic anyway, because people aren't dumb, and they're well aware that most drivers would prefer to kill them than make the effort to press the brake pedal. But there's no need to enshrine this in law and prevent people from crossing where they please when the road is empty, the traffic light and/or slow-moving, or the mass of people large enough.

to3mon It can all go to zero

But this time it's different, because you can invest your entire net worth into KODAKCoin: https://www.kodak.com/kodakone/default.htm

to3mon Ask HN: Forced to choose Python

Maybe you have never had to maintain a program written in Javascript or Python ;)

In my experience, if you have a language with a compilation-like step, e.g., assembly language, then you automatically have a massive advantage over a language without, e.g., Javascript or Python.

The advantage over languages such as Javascript only grows wider if you opt for a language with a comparatively sophisticated and thorough static type system, e.g., C89.

Now, suppose the Javascript code has 100% test coverage, and the C89 code has 0%. But so what? I was assuming that already. In my experience, the C89 code is still easier to work with.

to3mon How Neglecting Minorities in Medical Research Has Led to Deadly Outcomes

The article mentions in the first sentence that it is about North America. So presumably it is talking about specific apparent population groups that are minorities in North America? With this in mind, you can probably imagine some examples. But the first sentence does include some, if you're unfamiliar with America.

to3mon Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong

Suppressed? If only! It was all over the news, we didn't hear the end of it for several weeks, and it still crops up every now and again.

to3mon Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

I very doubt it's anything to do with the cache, and that isn't an uneducated guess. But I've very doubted things before, and they turned out to be the case anyway, so why would you listen to me?

My assumption was/is that it refreshes stuff on a timer. On each timeout it puts a refresh event on some kind of queue... and then somehow manages to fuck it up, and ends up having a bunch of these events to deal with all at once, rather than handling each one as it comes in with a sensible gap between each one. Well, sometimes it happens, and don't ask me how I know.

But I have to say that you usually don't release it like that :(

to3mon Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

This still happens for me on OS X Sierra sometimes.

to3mon SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

Labels, macros and comments still help!

to3mon 2018 Is the Last Year of America's Public Domain Drought

Start the fee at $1 and double it each year?

to3mon Scrolling on the Amiga

Uridium's scrolling on the BBC Micro was also somewhat interesting: https://youtu.be/ToTQN6dxwDw?t=243

Multi-way scrolling was common for BBC Micro games, as the hardware directly supported the barrel-type scrolling described in the article, though only on a full-screen basis. Uridium programmed the CRTC in a particular way, however, allowing the screen's base address to be set halfway down the screen, giving a stationary area at the top and a fixed area at the bottom.

I think the only other game of the period that did anything like this was Firetrack (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxdd2_qrpg), which used it to get smooth vertical scrolling.

The technique is easy to do (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/rupture/), but you do have to know the trick! It's know a well-known thing, and there's a couple of modern BBC Micro games that use it.

to3mon Scrolling on the Amiga

Thread about porting X68000 games to the Atari Falcon: http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=24111 (bullet hell shoot-em-up video on page 19)

(Atari Falcon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Falcon - it's quite a lot better than the original ST, but still doesn't have sprites or multiple playfields)

to3mon Scrolling on the Amiga

The bottom 8 bits were alway zero, so all you could really do was 8 row (1280 byte) vertical scrolling. I don’t think you could change the screen base address mid-frame either, so you’d need a double-height buffer to do a continuous scroll.

The STe fixed both of these problems, and had variable wid5h rows and the pixel offset thing too. That meant a setup that was roughly equivalent to a 4-bit Amiga screen, though with interleaved bitplanes (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

to3mon Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse

But the engine speed doesn't change until you lift the clutch. So if this were due to the RPM, putting it in reverse while stationary surely wouldn't do anything in particular.

to3mon Office Parties Feel the Chill

Likely to engender exactly the sort of boring meta discussion that you've managed to start :)

(After a while you get attuned to the HN hive mind/group subconscious, and it's easy to tell which articles will induce this sort of thing.)

to3mon The largest living thing on Earth is a fungus (2014)

If you don’t eat, you’ll die. I’d say you’re being sensible...

to3mon Redoing all my home networking

Well, you're quite right, but I disagree that it's a problem. Snark, sarcasm and underhanded jabs are absolutely valid rhetorical techniques; and, if you don't like them, there are plenty of good responses in kind, that will reflect on you far better than if simply tell on them to teacher.

In case you were having difficult guessing, I'm minded to agree with tptacek. (And not just because of my sibling comment, in which I admit that my home network is indistinguishable from that of a 90 year old technophobe who got his not-daft-but-still-technically-ignorant grandson to set it up for him.) Is the interviewee's home network, assuming they even have one, really relevant?

If they're going to be setting up a network for you, wouldn't you rather they had experience doing something significant on a professional basis, not just setting something up at home?

If they're going to be doing something else, what relevance does any of this have?

to3mon Redoing all my home networking

I hope this isn't unusual. I like to think I'm at least OK at software development, but my home network consists of a wifi router that I bought in late 2005 from PC World.

to3mon Low Hanging Fruit of Programming Language Design

A C++ project that features generated code will probably run the generator during the build process - and possibly build it too, if it's written in C++ itself - and so the generated code might well not end up in the repo.

to3mon Luxon – A library for working with dates and times in JS

https://js-joda.github.io/js-joda/cheat-sheet.html

EDIT: My precious internet points! ;) - wait, is this not a page of examples, as linked to from the GitHub page?

to3mon Compiler Optimizations Should Pay for Themselves (1994) [pdf]

Better than that - it only really works for languages that are only used to write their own compiler ;)