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Wild seeing local stuff on HN. My dad used to work in that police station, probably the first (and only) HN story I’ll send him.

Weirdly, as an en_GB native, neither of these seems wrong to me. I suspect one is British and one is American, and too much TV has driven me to accept the American one.

Not sure about the legal frameworks in the US but that’s exactly how it works in most places in the UK. Cities have restrictions for on-street parking (metered, permitted, illegal) whereas the towns and villages don’t (unless they also bring in bylaws to help with congestion).

This is my take as well. I haven’t felt that graphics improvement has “wowed” me since the PS3 era honestly.

I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.

And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.

We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.

This is a significantly better handling than the previous game (final fantasy viii). My disk 1 (it had four disks) got scratched over time (I was a child after all), and the failure mode was just to crash - thus the game was unplayable. The game had a lot of cutscenes.

Maybe it is, these days? As much as I appreciate all the functionality brought to us by these tools, when I started web-dev circa 2005, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL + PHP) was the go-to for hobbyists.

As much as I look back at the simplicity (Apache config was not that difficult for a small site, at least with Apache 2.0), the part of me that operates production software these days gets anxiety the idea of it all.

And yet, when I wrote a small website to host my wedding website last year, it was indeed Linux, (some webserver), Postgres and PHP, with me copying files manually to FTP. It was probably nginx but you know what, I paid a company £50 for a large amount of storage, bandwidth, a domain and SSL certificate, for year, and everything went dandy. Horses for courses and all that.

I realize the chemistry is different, but in my head the idea of submerging Lithium in _water_ to _extinguish_ a fire is pretty funny.

And of course it's even more complex when you mix UK vs US English:

- an herb (US), where the "h" is silent

- a herb (UK)

Cue confusion about "an historic".

This is one of the strongest pushbacks against USB-C that Apple have:

USB-C: You break the stem, you have a useless device and functioning cable

Lightning: You break the stem, you have a functioning device and useless cable.

One of these is clearly more optimal considering the cost difference between the two. Anecdotally, I have had problems with USB-C ports that I did not have with Micro-USB and (so far) with Lightning (admittedly I have only been an iPhone user for a year or so).

Of course, this directive is the correct stance and direction - having a standard and forcing it on everyone. It's just a shame the one they chose may be inferior.

Let me tell you a story about playing The Settlers IV on a 233Mhz 64MB RAM Voodo 3 2000. This game was cool in that it had two audio features: a soundtrack on the CD itself, played using the CD drive's DAC [^1], and you could also drop MP3 files into a folder where the game would play those instead. It was common practice to use a NoCD crack when playing online, because the CD check took long enough you could time out of the lobby, and if you forgot the CD you got booted. That meant most online gamers had MP3 files, and no CD.

The minimum requirements to play this game were a 200MHz CPU w/ MMX and 64MB RAM - I was pretty close to this baseline. So anyway, I discovered that the game played at much better FPS (like 30 instead of 5) if you turned the music off - but only when playing MP3 - CD Audio had no hit. Now perhaps the game used a sub-par audio codec, but that single MP3 decode stream was enough to make the game unplayable.

Anyway that's not to say that I would expect MP3 decoding to be a problem in 2014, in fact you can likely play audio with no noticable increase on CPU usage, but when you have multi-stream audio (think voices, background music, sound effects from various channels - guns, explosions, etc.) I can see it starting to add up - especially when the CPU is already constrained for the graphics, game logic and perhaps of course everyone's favourite anti-piracy/anti-cheat logic.

[^1] For younger readers, yes, CD Drives used to come with built-in DACs and a special cable you could hook directly into the audio card, allowing you to listen to CD Audio on PC for "basically" free in terms of CPU cycles.

Even if it's not an always-available thing, how you can control Slack really depends on expectations - especially working remote. Do my colleagues and mentees really want to be blocked for two hours because they need a two-minute input from me?

I have set Slack up so that certain things alert me, and most channels are just muted, but as others pointed out more fine-grain controls would be even better. Really just "only notifications for DMs for these people" would be a great QoL.

This was my initial thought as well, but from the text I gather there is a flow like this:

[Input Data, maybe null] -> Validate field is not null -> Call this method with the assertion.

This is a small bug-bear for me with nullable types and I wish there was a better way to do it, but many languages allow you to smart-cast away nulls, but only within the local scope. If you want to pass a struct-type around which has nullable fields, but you have already checked for non-null (like this one) you need to convert to a different struct-type, which doesn't have the nullability on its fields. I can't think of a good way round this - as you say with the unit test remark, there is nothing to stop another piece of code calling this method with nulls.

I was hoping there was going to be some minimum definition, and that I could call myself Lord, but alas, my ~300m^2 of land doesn't seem to qualify me either (I live there, I didn't get scammed ~3k times over for 1 sq foot).

I mean honestly if you could be a lord with 1 square foot, there would be a lot of lords in Scotland due to the ownership nature of buying a house (very little of this "leasehold" thing that's prevalent in England). My parents would be a lord and lady, so would their parents...

I've not encountered these ads though, I guess it would be pretty dumb to geo-target it to people living in Scotland.

Edit, on the other hand, if you buy a house and let it out, I guess you can be a land lord, even if you still can't call yourself lord.

I doubt this is what the author is alluding to, but a few years ago[^1] I read a proposal about CPU cooling using small-scale fluid tubes, much like a car engine is cooled. This would allow cores to be stacked vertically, much like HBM memory is stacked today. Perhaps this new development could allow better implementations?

[^1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/researchers-demonstr...

This looks really cool, but the author... is... replacing their laptop every year? Like, I'm writing this on an 8 year old MBP that has survived as my round-the-house driver because it still does everything well. My daily driver is getting on a bit now (3yr) and my desktop only just got replaced after 5 years.

Forget the cost, but the waste!

Indeed - SP2 brought in the firewall which finally got rid of the Blaster and Sasser type-viruses that could be executed remotely because most folks still had their PC connected to the Internet with a public IPv4 address.

I remember fondly that it took less than half an hour for a fresh XP install with no SP to get the dreaded "your PC will reboot in 60 seconds" shutdown window.

> As far as I could tell, the debugger trap was basically calling the debugger function if it detects a running debugger.

This is a fairly common trick, you just run the debugger method in a setTimeout loop since it's a no-op if the debugger isn't open. It's a common tactic used by quasi-illicit sport streaming websites that are usually filled with ads.

There's a button in Chrome Dev Tools to disable breaking on breakpoints that gets round this.

Is that why JDK9 is 350MB (Windows x64) vs 190MB for JDK8u144? I'm off to go explore more, but for something that's meant to be smaller and more modular, this was a bit of a surprise!

Edit: Also, I was sure Jigsaw was approved in the end; that's why we've had to wait until September.

Game dev is different than back-end server dev, is different from front-end web or desktop dev.

For example, in back-end Java dev, I never use singleton objects in the truest sense of the pattern; singletons cannot be mocked out to test units in isolation. Instead, instantiate it with a dependency injection container and let your framework (Guice, Spring) wire things together. In effect, your global state becomes contained within a single context. Nothing stopping you having two contexts in the same runtime environment though.

I find static methods are okay if they are concise and have no state; in particular if I'd never want to test the caller without it making the call to the static method anyway. This is becoming more important with Java 8's lambdas and needing to write helper methods.

On the other hand, the cost of doing this might not be worthwhile for a game dev? Do game devs write unit tests? I have no idea.

From what I gather, it's not the same case here.

Safari is now unsupported because Spotify deprecated their Flash website in favour of HTML5 + Widevine. Safari doesn't support Widevine, so can't use the new player. However, Safari on iOS never supported Flash so the old version of the Spotify player wouldn't have worked either.

I think you're right on this, for example .moi, which Amazon is taking registrations for (and has been for six months or so), is still listed on that wiki as proposed.