baud9600

Someone should put this somewhere. In a book or a poster. On a LinkedIn post for managers

It’s true that “zen of” is bolted onto many topics… it’s a tired cliche to suggest “simplicity” when things are complex. Does it help or is it faux spirituality?

I’ve enjoyed reading the comments here and I think there’s truth in how the technical problem is divided and teams are arranged. The idea of frequency of features (or builds) being a reflection of our division of the problem, is interesting. It made me think about our teams trying to ship releases and the problems arising, but zen and parallelism don’t give any hints. It’s just about effort to organise better, like it always was

I remember when Steve Jobs stood on stage and complained about Flash, how he hated its dominance of the free web, how it was a heavy and proprietary technology that prevented mobile devices from participating. His solution? To adopt the latest HTML standards… and also to build responsive apps. But now some apps have become heavy, advertising-bound, subscription nightmares. So it’s back to HTML, right?

Daft! And very strangely true. I recognised several moments and events in the story

I was hoping this article would conclude with, “and the C language spec in K&R says THIS which is the correct answer”. Apparently not. So the appendix in K&R is ambiguous? And yet we use ++ so often! I can see people crawling the Linux source tree using LLM-bots looking for bad uses of ++ …

Brilliant. Love the tech-disrespect and the “right to repair”!

At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’ I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader

Strange days we live in. Python and C++? What about a line of bash:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory. So if we replace this with awk using a hash map to keep count of unique words, then it’s a much smaller data set in memory:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | awk '{c[$0]++} END{for(w in c) print c[w], w}' | sort -rn

I’m guessing this will beat Python and C++?

Does not render correctly on iOS (mobile Safari)? It’s a fixed Desktop view and you can’t pinch to zoom as needed. It takes effort to prevent mobile users like this! Do others get this experience?

Once you were familiar with occam you could see deadlocks in code very quickly. It was a productive way to build scaled concurrent systems. At the time we laughed at the idea of using C for the same task

Very interesting. Reading this made me think of occam on the transputer: concurrent lightweight processes, message passing, dedicated memory! I spent some happy years in that world. Perhaps I should look at BEAM and see what work comes along?

Mobile Safari only does this for sites that implement dark themes (and when you have dark mode enabled in iOS). But many sites don’t have these themes. The Noir extension seems to fix the problem for now. There is a reader mode that can go dark but it’s manual, per article

I added the “Noir” extension to mobile Safari, now I automatically get dark mode on all websites including Hacker News.

This is such a great article!

I found myself thinking, “I wonder if some of this could be used to playback video on old 8-bit machines?” But they’re so underpowered…

In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story

I’m loving the comments here. But I confess I exoected a ‘social technology’ solution to the problem!! Like “casserole” in the UK, which connects people in a neighbourhood with others who need food and a visit. You make a casserole and take it round. I’ve not seen this in person but it seems like a great application of tech to help ward off loneliness… You could easily extend this to “dog friends” or “cat friends”, where you’re connected with someone who’d like you to visit them and bring your dog or cat for an introduction and a pat

I wrote sound-sampling software for Atari using Action! and Mac/65 by OSS, using my own DAC+ADC hardware (8-bit of course). They were fast tools, it was very productive.