Hacker News Reader

wrlon FTDI driver kills fake FTDI FT232s

The FTDI OSX drivers will still randomly cause kernel panics when the device is unplugged and a program still holds an open file descriptor for the serial port. While working with a company which was developing and selling products with FTDI chips in them, we made FTDI aware of this issue and attached many panic logs.

It's been about 5 years and they've still yet to actually fix it.

wrlon Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir

Crippled at the moment (because Weston is the only option) or crippled by design?

wrlon LTTng: An open-source tracing framework for Linux

In the event LGPL is too restrictive, there's also concurrencykit (http://concurrencykit.org/), which provides similar mechanisms (both for concurrent memory reclamation and various datastructures built on top).

wrlon Finger Trees

The log-time concatenation may be the real win. Still though, why 4? Why not 2, or 8? Is this covered in some of the research?

wrlon Finger Trees

So, if I'm understanding this right, finger trees are just 2-3 trees with an extra array of 8 things per level (four for prefix, four for suffix). Does this really have a benefit over just using a 2-3 tree?

wrlon The obesity era: The problem may be bigger than any of us (2013)

> For example, egg protein is different than soy protein. If you switch from the former to the latter while keeping everything the same, you will notice a difference.

Do you have a citation for this? For what it's worth, I avoid soy products in general because of concerns about hormonal effects, but I'm not quite up on the state-of-the-art in terms of the research.

wrlon Embedding Scheme for a game mission scripting DSL

Embedded programming languages are really cool. Lua's still ruling the roost, as far as I've seen, but there are some nice options out there.

I'm currently using mruby for a project and have been quite happy with it so far. The community around it is still somewhat thin, but the code quality is good and development is quite active. https://github.com/mruby/mruby

wrlon Parse for PHP: A Fractal of Rad Design

It's a reference to a fairly well-known piece of PHP criticism:

http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

wrlon Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

The two main resources I refer to (and hang out around and in) are:

the KVR DSP forum: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=33

and the music-dsp mailing list: http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp

Even armed with all the resources in the world, though, I cannot stress how important just jumping in is. Write a couple of basic plugins and you'll get a really good feel for how the pieces fit together, what's important in the algorithms, etc.

wrlon Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

http://imgur.com/O1YnLed

I'm writing a software synthesizer (a VST instrument plugin). I've been working solely on the DSP (audio processing) code for a while, and am shifting gears to work on the user interface.

The synthesis algorithm, roughly, is that the graph on top describes a Lissajous curve which is used to shape the phase of a cosine oscillator, and there are two cycles of said oscillator displayed underneath the curve. The knobs underneath it are the parameters for adjusting the curve shape.

The UI is all OpenGL 3.2 using a convenience toolkit I rolled myself (for layouts, event dispatching, etc). Currently working on hooking the UI into the DSP side of things.

wrlon My experience at a coworking space in Osaka, Japan

More than "none", at least. My main machine is a Thinkpad T430s running Arch, and no matter how many times I've tried to flip over to a Mac, I don't like it and come back to Linux.

Still have a MBP because I need to port software to it, but my day-to-day ops are on my Thinkpad.

wrlon CSS Diner

It is really bugging me that I can't prefix ".table" or "div.table" to any of these, since intuitively that's what I'd do when writing styles.

wrlon Wine 1.7.12 Released

There's a clean-room reimplementation that LMMS ships with called VeSTige. Ardour3 also uses said code for VST hosting.

The effort isn't complete (they didn't re-implement all the corners), but it works well enough.

wrlon Ruby 2.1: Profiling Ruby

So, I'm a Ruby neophyte. Why did adding parenthesis speed that line up so much?

wrlon Actualvim – Sublime Text 3 input mode powered by Vim itself

For C and C++ at least, it uses your compiler, so yes.

wrlon Windows 8.1: Not Using Secure Boot? Don't Worry We'll Let You Know

Just a reminder that Microsoft is cool with dual-booting, but only if it's to increase their own marketshare.

In particular, the bit about wanting to dual-boot WP8 on Android phones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497126

wrlon C++ For C Programmers

Here's my preferred way of handling errors: https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode...

wrlon Show HN: NSString + Ruby

I prefer:

    #define RGB(color)                        \
        (((color & 0xFF0000) >> 16) / 255.f), \
        (((color & 0x00FF00) >> 8) / 255.f),  \
        (((color & 0x0000FF)) / 255.f)

Pass in an HTML-style color hex triplet.

wrlon Microsoft Looking To Put Windows Phone On Android Devices, Starting With HTC

Unless I'm mistaken, WP8 phones have UEFI Secure Boot too, and it can't be turned off like on desktop systems.

So now that Microsoft wants more market share, suddenly dual-booting phones is okay, but I doubt they'll lift the secure boot restriction on their own devices.

wrlon Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?

I'm mostly self-taught. When I was very young (kindergarten age, if I recall correctly), I attended a few QBasic courses at a local college, took some VB (it was billed as "advanced computer programming") at a summer camp when I was 15 or so, but other than those, no formal training.

I remember writing BASIC on the Apple IIGS computer in my first grade classroom, playing with HTML in second grade, but my big breaks came around 6th iirc. I helped move an online community from a hosted bulletin-board provided (ezBoard) to a hosted phpBB instance, and hacked on that code for a while, but was nothing serious. Write a few scraps of PHP here and there before getting into Python, and did web development in that for a while.

Over time, though, I've followed this gradual descent down toward the metal, learning C from K&R (great book) while holding down a Python/ActionScript day job and occupyng myself outside of work learning how to design C APIs and writing a few libraries. The second-to-most-recent position I held involved Python and Ruby at work, and I contributed some code to the Linux kernel in my free time (some USB audio stuff). The position after that was for Linux kernel development and other low-level embedded systems work. I've tried to get into infosec a few times but nothing's panned out.

Currently I'm getting a startup off the ground (surprise, surprise). Desktop software, audio production, lots of real-time DSP, lock/wait-free data structures, some OpenGL...I'm happy as can be.

To answer your questions:

1/ Totally self-taught from books and RTFM. Lots of help from the Internet as well, though I own my fair share of college texts.

2/ I'm 24 now, started learning around 2001 I think (when I was about 11).

3/ Got my first development gig at 17.

wrlon Tarsnap logo contest

Short for "snapshot", I think?

wrlon What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? (2011)

I had a line of code in one of my C projects which read:

    free(self); /* so liberating */

wrlon Paul Graham Thinks You Should Exercise

Seconding the "Starting Strength" recommendation. It's pooh-poohed by some in the greater strength training community, but for somebody without any prior lifting experience, it got me off to a great start.

Some excellent official forums for the book over at http://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/forum.php too.

wrlon Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement

On the contrary, there are still perfectly good uses for goto. The two I can name right off the top of my head are stack-like error unwinding in C (which comes with an endorsement from CERT recommending its use) and computed goto dispatch tables in threaded interpreters.

Still, you're right that structured control flow statements have obsoleted goto for all but the tiniest edge cases, and so too do I look forward to callbacks suffering a similar fate at the hands of things like await.

wrlon Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement

Let's not forget that "if", "for", "while", "switch", and friends, fundamentally, aren't anything more than syntactic sugar for "goto" either. ;)

wrlon Show HN: C library of generic, reference-counted data structures

Absolutely, but that's something I feel that could be implemented on top of these macros if necessary.

Currently I'm using this code just for a string buffers and other arrays where the individual elements are stored in-place in the array.

wrlon Golang Diaries I

"Nice C-flavored code (there’s even ++) but look, Ma, no semicolons!"

The hate for semicolons is far, far more annoying to me than semicolons ever are.

wrlon Linux has better hardware support than OS X

A brand-new T430s worked out-of-the box with Arch. Everything came stock in the kernel, and everything worked and still works perfectly.

wrlon Show HN: C library of generic, reference-counted data structures

Should you ever need said macros, I've written a set: https://github.com/wrl/wwrl/blob/master/vector.h

wrlon Why a veteran web developer finally turned to OS-native apps

I'm of the mind that platform-independent code should be written in either C++ or C, then compiled into the platform application as a static library.

This is how it's often done with desktop applications.