HN user

samf

218 karma

samf.at.hn

Former cloud infrastructure and file systems developer, still doing webdev for fun.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/samf; my proof: https://keybase.io/samf/sigs/1ns27IHq0cuoRaSMLPi_tUcH8N0Kl1uuUsryA-AMsrU ]

Posts2
Comments41
View on HN

Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.

I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.

This is the best answer.

We could declare 4 to be a prime number, and keep the rest of the definition the same. Instead of just saying "no", you could ask, "okay, what would that do for us?" If there isn't a good answer, then what's the point? And usually, you're not in the 1% of 1% of 1%.

Some examples are in these comments, e.g. the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an amusing outcome, where 1 is the only prime if you take it literally.

But also mentioned elsewhere in the thread: if we declared 1 to be a prime, then many (I daresay "most") of our theorems would have to change "prime number" to "prime number greater than one".

One thing I used shape tables for was for a fade-in effect. I would draw my spaceship one pixel at a time, choosing the next pixel at random. (I made a tool to help with this, or else it would have been too tedious!) The shape tables were rendered so slowly that it make the ship "materialize" in a cool effect. After this initial fade-in, I would render the ship more sensibly.

Other than this, I never found much use for shape tables.

I've often thought about how this sort of thing could be used for site security, much like cameras are used. E.g. it could hear a person's footsteps, and hear a person breathing, and it could distinguish between a person and an animal. With multiple microphones, it could determine a location.

I wonder if this is being done already.

Yes, this is a major problem when you introduce ACLs into unix-like systems. A comment in the article mentions the "Richacl" work. A key problem with this work was that even "chmod 777" might not get you out of a situation where an ACL was denying access. It's been over ten years since I've been involved in this; it might have changed.

The POSIX draft ACLs had the same problem, where a chmod might not grant you the permission that you're asking for. Back when Solaris implemented POSIX draft ACLs, they needed to change many user-level interfaces (e.g., the chmod command and the ftp daemon) to have a chmod request work the way end users expected.

Good info; I came here looking for experience with managed databases. Does anyone have experience with managed instances on other platforms?

iTerm2 3.3 7 years ago

Is anyone else having problems with vim? Specifically, I can't see my cursor since upgrading.

I don't really remember what my cursor looked like before the upgrade; maybe it was a red block? But now you can't see it.

My cursor outside of vim is fine.

I use pastebot on the mac. It should be easy to add this as a "shell script filter", but sandboxing prevents me from getting unidecode. Has anyone else accomplished this?

I worked out that sequence while ignoring my assignments in elementary school, and I've been mildly obsessed with it since.

I don't think I'm OCD, but this thread is kind of freaking me out.

[edit] I also use my fingers to count binary on each hand independently, starting from different numbers and moving them forward in lock step.

The Other Half 9 years ago

I've been seeing the same doctor for nearly two decades. She does the same routine every time she takes my blood pressure: "So, (puts on cuff), do you have any trips planned? Anything fun coming up? (pump pump pump)".

I laugh inside at how consistent she is, so I guess it still works on me.

I've always wanted to trick someone into sending this to the printer:

  %!
  initgraphics clippath fill
  { copypage } loop
Please don't do this! It'll run you out of toner and paper as fast as possible.

I'm just surprised I haven't seen more things like this, especially back in the days when postscript was popular.

Thorium 10 years ago

At least the author should have someone proofread it. There are grammar and spelling problems throughout.

Not disagreeing, but I'm not seeing that on my wife's iphone. She got a 16 gig phone (big mistake), but we were thinking that getting everything on iCloud would make up for this. We pay every month for iCloud storage.

That's not what we're seeing. Her phone gets to be 100% full, and deleting a photo frees up space. When we delete a photo, we get dire warnings that "this will delete the photo on all of your devices, and in the cloud too." I download them to my computer before doing this, so nothing is really lost. But it's annoying.

Bash Academy 11 years ago

I love this option. I type "/tmp" when I'm about to create some short-lived scratch files. Those saying "you can just alias that" are missing the point. Where do you stop with the aliases?