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nickzoic

I don't suppose anyone noticed what hash they were using?
Re:Writing an Apple 2 game in 2021 on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @09:48PM (#31418390)
G'day all! That's me ... as you can tell, it's been on the back-burner for a while due to work and so on but I'll get back to it at some point and at least get our goose walking around.

@deater those look great, I'll check them out and add a link, especially since there's some lo-res stuff there! I don't recall every seeing a lo-res game other than brick out!

Thanks for the tips re: blanking interrupts, although to be fair there's no way in the world I'm going to cycle-count the entire thing ... unless ... unless ...

Anyway, such a shame there's no little wire there to trigger IRQ from VBI, it'd make so many things easier. It seems really obvious now but I guess at the time it Wozn't.

Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @08:49AM (#12297092)
Also pathology samples, although I believe there's now some interest in robots doing similar things.
Re:“CPUs are optimized for video games” on Thursday August 11, 2016 @02:23AM (#12266576)
In the olden days of x86: "REPNZ SCASB" to get the length of a zero-terminated string and "REP MOVSB" to copy bytes from place to place. But I think more modern CPUs actually work faster with the RISCier equivalents.
Re:The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @09:42AM (#11854424)
Yep, a pretty serious piece of kit, although you really needed a monochrome monitor for it to work properly ... regular TVs didn't have the horizontal bandwidth.
Re:Airport Trains Suck. Will REM Too? on Sunday May 29, 2016 @05:43AM (#11795722)
Sydney's works fine. London's too, not the special one the regular tube one. Also Tokyo Narita and Schipol. What they've all got in common is that they're well connected to a good public transport system.
Well, sure, and theoretically a success gets you 2xx and a failure gets you 4xx/5xx.

But there's a layer beneath HTTP as well. If all you get back is a TCP RST, did the request succeed or fail? How about if you get an ICMP unreachable or just a timeout ... should you retry?

So, the Internet being what it is, it is probably not a bad idea to aim for idempotence for the critical bits.

Re:ESP8266: A $5 microcontroller with wi-fi that runs Python on Monday February 22, 2016 @06:23PM (#11155193)
There was a good talk about these at LinuxConf AU: http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2016/05_Friday/Wool...

... they're a very exciting device and incredibly cheap, and the supplied SDK libs look very nice, even though they aren't quite fully open source.

The NodeMCU boards are very useful even if you're not interested in Lua, they add power, USB and breadboard friendly headers in a smallish package.

I've started messing around with different ways to program them for educational purposes: http://nick.zoic.org/etc/flobot-graphical-dataflow-language-...

Re:The sad graph of software death on Sunday January 03, 2016 @07:45AM (#10830415)
What I'm a bit puzzled by here is that if I'm reading the X-axis right the rot sets in at 3 weeks ... I mean, that's not very far in. It seems odd that the graphs are both otherwise so linear.

I just EOLed a project which started 8 years ago ... at least one bug existed for 7.5 years of that. It was a minor UI bug and just bumped along at Priority Low with no-one really minding it until the company got acquired and the project got merged into another one. There were others as well.

My point is: without splitting the "backlog" by priority it is hard to see if this is really "software death" or just "bug fossilization" ...

Maybe I should draw my own graph.

Re:The day I did something on Sunday November 29, 2015 @09:02PM (#10647182)
I think also, a really top notch expert makes what they're doing seem so effortless that you do think "yeah, that's just what I would have done".

And probably you would have, at least eventually, although maybe with a couple of false starts and by that point perhaps some misfeatures have already been locked in and now your simple, elegant solution (the one you came up with all on your own without some fancy consultant) isn't quite going to work the way you'd like it to, but it's still 90% of the way there and you're only a little bit over budget -- so long as you cut a couple of the less useful features you should hopefully get the whole thing done before you lose the support of management -- but then they change CTO and the whole thing gets put on hold indefinitely.

Re:Kinglake road crashes (2014) on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @07:15AM (#10620297)
The climb up from Whittlesea is impressively direct in places on a pushie. I've seen plenty of people do it, but it is a different kind of ride and I'm not going to try it any time soon ...

I like his GIS work, but there is no conceivable way that there were only 3 pushie accidents on that road in 7.5 years so sorry VicRoads but I doubt the dataset is accurate.

Funny to see my neighbourhood on HN :-).

Re:Amazon Snowball on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @09:13PM (#10350272)
Really? Why? I mean, Kindles are pretty cheap, but sticky shipping labels are a few bucks for rolls of 500, and very hard to damage in transit.
Re:How I Got and Lost a VC Job Offer in 72 Hours on Sunday September 27, 2015 @10:53PM (#10288713)
The negotiation process worked successfully. OP didn't want to work for less than $X, and he isn't!
Re:Bye-bye blackboard on Tuesday September 15, 2015 @06:54AM (#10219902)
> But I don't know what academic activity students would want to engage in when they are not being forced to do so.

Plagiarism, mostly :-/.

Re:Tufte CSS on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @08:24PM (#10013881)
I don't know if RPF himself had anything much to do with it, but the typesetting of the /The Feynman Lectures on Physics/ is beautiful.

It features the main column / side column design as discussed, with notes, diagrams and navigation hints in the side column and is a great demonstration of the value of whitespace!

Re:Three hundred programming interviews in thirty days on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @07:47AM (#9770922)
I think you mean

    static const int days_per_week = 8;
:-).
Re:Google Cardboard on Friday June 27, 2014 @03:28AM (#7953055)
Ha, I made a thing like this back in 1994 or so out of an old monochrome 640x480 laptop screen, a couple of those plastic fresnel lenses and a whole bunch of glue and cardboard. It worked about as well as you'd expect.

I was totally into the Virtual Reality hype of the day. It's funny to think that 20 years later it might almost be useful. Maybe I'll buy an Oculus Rift to celebrate :-)

Re:Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @08:50PM (#7741580)
Imagine!

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/the_character_of_physical...

OK, so that's not quite everything but it is a pretty good start, and there's lots of other stuff out there on the web.

Agreed, this is a case where a small number of test cases would have been sufficient to cover the critical parts of the code and avoid this particular error and many like it.
Re:Does Meteor Scale? on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @03:58PM (#6843145)
It's a very useful feature, which can feed a cache layer, act as a kind of trigger mechanism or give you a (very limited) kind of transaction.
More like Taipei, I think ... which also has vast electronic doodad markets. Well worth a poke around, even if you don't have a use-case for a snake or an SCR the size of a beer can :-)
Re:23andMe Is Terrifying, But Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @05:44PM (#6811687)
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog ... until you link your Google+ and 23andMe accounts.

(there's already a link there between YouTube comments and flecks of spittle ...)

Re:Why You Should Never Use MongoDB on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @12:48AM (#6716097)
You could absolutely do the same thing with Postgres (or SQL Server) and computed indexes over JSON (or XML) blobs. Of course, then you'd have exactly the same schema migration issues.

My point was more that a lot of the time, if you structure your data right (and get the right balance of denormalization) you don't need joins very much and so the lack of them isn't really a big disadvantage.

Re:Why You Should Never Use MongoDB on Monday November 11, 2013 @05:27PM (#6714539)
MongoDB doesn't forbid you from having entities and relations. It just doesn't support them in the same way that SQL databases do. Ditto for CouchDB, etc.

You end up having to do some joins yourself still, but this is often appropriate. Imagine that the "actor" entity contains a complete bio, including family history with relationship to other actors, links to wikipedia & fan sites, etc. When you're displaying the page for episode #202 of "Everyone Loves MongoDB", you don't want to retrieve all that data for all the actors. You're not going to display it all on the episode page anyway. Instead, you just need an ID (to href an a and src an img) and probably a small amount of denormalized stuff (name, for the img alt ...). Since that's what you need, that's what you store.

There's a limit to how far you can denormalize schemas before it is no longer helpful. The author explores this limit, and finds that MongoDB doesn't make the limit go away.

Finally, something with better bandwidth and worse latency than Andy Tanenbaum's station wagon.

> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 4th ed., p. 91

For some perverse reason, I've found clients get less uppity about a day rate than an hourly rate. Plus that way your timesheets are simpler.
Re:Ask HN: Why are POS systems all POSes? on Thursday October 10, 2013 @01:31AM (#6525803)
Not my company but check out Kounta http://www.kounta.com/
Hexapodia as the key insight!
... and a bit of LaTeX mixed in for good measure.

It'll never catch on.

Re:Platonic Solids - Why Five? on Monday September 02, 2013 @07:06AM (#6314562)
It occurs to me that (per the second argument) these have Schläfli symbol {s,m} = {6,3}, {3,6} and {4,4} ...

for each of these, working out

    1/s + 1/m - 1/2 = 1/E
gives

    1/E = 0
... which makes sense (kind of) since those three cases are infinite regular tilings instead of regular polyhedra ...

(EDIT: Just noticed jonsen's comment here too, "infinihedron" suddenly makes sense to me :-) )

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