goatmobile
Re:Fractals on an IBM 1401 mainframe (2015)
on Monday July 10, 2023 @05:23PM (#36673168)
You get arbitrary length arithmetic for free (the 1401 in the Computer History Museum runs a demo program that computes powers of 2, it only stops when it runs out of columns on the printer paper instead of bits in memory). Also there is no alignment to think about and no padding is necessary, which is nice when memory space is scarce as it was and considering the 1401 uses a variable word length instruction set. Plus it's easier to type into a key punch [0] when programming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch#/media/File:IBM26.jpg
Re:Ask HN: Any alternatives to Google Analytics that don't require coo...
on Thursday March 16, 2023 @02:13AM (#35178743)
I use "Google Analytics" [0], just a simple JavaScript snippet to fire off to a Google Form that sends responses to Google Sheets. It obviously has a ton of pitfalls but it works for me.
[0] https://goatmobile.github.io/blog/posts/forms-analytics/
Show HN: rfilerunner: a simple command runner
https://github.com/goatmobile/rfilerunner
Hey HN! This is a little project I made a few months ago and have been using on every project since. Where before I'd use Makefiles to keep all the necessary commands for a project written down, rfilerunner has some more accessible expressiveness (i.e. I can just write bash or Python), built-in file watching and parallel execution, and niceties in making simple project-specific CLIs.
Re:Ask HN: Recommendations on how to become a Git expert?
on Thursday July 14, 2022 @01:18AM (#32092298)
git didn't really click for me until I learned about patch[0] and had to use it some. I'm not sure if this is entirely correct, but I started thinking of a git repository as a DAG[1] of commits, where each commit is a patch (the changed lines of code) along with some metadata like a message, date, etc. Branches fall out of this as they're just names for specific nodes in the DAG, and thing like rebasing is taking a set of nodes (e.g. commits/patches) and replaying them on top of some other base. This has at least helped me get a grasp on how to get out of various situations.
That all said the best way to learn is to do! Maybe see if there is some bug that came up recently but was working in the past, where 'git bisect' would be a good tool to help you debug. And if the GUI tools work for you on a day-to-day basis, there's nothing wrong sticking with them over the command line. To me developer tools are a second-order thing, you should only use them as much as necessary to help you do your actual work.
[0] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/patch.1.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
Re:I'm building a free spaced repetition flashcard tool. Would love so...
on Thursday January 13, 2022 @11:53PM (#29930709)
Looks pretty slick! A couple things I noticed:
- It wasn't obvious (is it even possible?) how to make or import my own deck aside from the default one of Spanish words.
- Fetching the next word over the Internet introduces some noticeable latency when going from the back side of the previous card to the next side. Maybe you could pre-fetch the next several dozen words in one batch to hide the latency?