Hacker News: OnlyMortal

New comment by OnlyMortal in "AI code is legacy code?"

OnlyMortal — Sun, 04 May 2025 19:10:15 +0000

You’re quite clearly wrong.

You write code to fit the immediate business need and that shifts rapidly over a year or two.

If you do otherwise, you’re wasting your time and the money of the enterprise you work for.

You cannot see the future however smart you might be.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "AI code is legacy code?"

OnlyMortal — Sun, 04 May 2025 18:59:31 +0000

All code is legacy. Business needs shift.

The likes of Copilot are ok at boiler-plate if it has an example or two to follow. It’s utterly useless at solving problems though.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Mathematician solves algebra's oldest problem using intriguing number sequences"

OnlyMortal — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:42:27 +0000

Lagrange? I see your point.

I’ll get my coat.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Bloom Filters"

OnlyMortal — Fri, 02 May 2025 14:42:22 +0000

Such as deduplication.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Chimpanzees act as 'engineers', choosing materials to make tools"

OnlyMortal — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 17:02:50 +0000

throws faeces

Nonsense!

Source: Engineer

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover"

OnlyMortal — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:04:15 +0000

I heard that, in the Netherlands after WW2, the descendants of people who starved were shorter in height even though they were born after the war.

Admittedly this was from a Dr Karl podcast.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp"

OnlyMortal — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:28:45 +0000

Heh. I worked on the Mac version of ViaVoice. I joined as I was already an expert in AppKit and Obj-C.

We were given old Macs running Classic to run Notes so we had two computers. One being MacOSX. Notes was the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had to use. With one exception…

On the OSX box we were happily running svn until we were forced to use some IBM command-line system for source control. To add insult to injury, the server was in Texas and we were in Boca Raton (old PC factory as it happens). The network was slow.

It had so many command-line options a guy wrote a TCL for it.

Adding to that was the local IBM lan was token ring and we were Ethernet. That was fun.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Hyperspace"

OnlyMortal — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:11:29 +0000

That’s very interesting. Typically a Rabin fingerprint is used to identify identical chunks of data.

Identifying similar blocks and, maybe sub-rechunking isn’t something I’ve ever considered.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Cannonball: An enhanced OutRun engine"

OnlyMortal — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:33:04 +0000

I assume he’s clipping hidden surfaces?

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Sombrero Galaxy dazzles in new James Webb image"

OnlyMortal — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 20:21:51 +0000

I see what you did there :-)

New comment by OnlyMortal in "How I ship projects at big tech companies"

OnlyMortal — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:13:00 +0000

:-) I worked in the first OSX version. I did the AppKit UI being one of the few on the planet who had a NeXT background.

It came with a UK language model as the US model didn’t recognise my accent.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Show HN: We built the simplest Online Unit Converter for everyday use"

OnlyMortal — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:04:56 +0000

My personal favourite unit converter is here: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

New comment by OnlyMortal in "How I ship projects at big tech companies"

OnlyMortal — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 08:18:54 +0000

Heh. I can relate to seeing your product on a shelf.

I recall seeing IBM ViaVoice X on shelves a Circuit City. It was rather an ego trip.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Kernel optimization with BOLT (binary optimization and layout tool)"

OnlyMortal — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 18:00:01 +0000

Back in the day on the Mac, the order of source files in your project would determine locality in the binary.

If memory serves, this was with MPW C or maybe CodeWarrior.

You could see the jump (jmp) instructions use short jumps rather than long ones.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back"

OnlyMortal — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 20:32:50 +0000

In a car they’re a distraction from driving. You have to look at the iPad stuck to the dash and not on the road - where the driver’s focus must be.

With knobs and buttons, you can feel for them whilst still having your vision in the road.

This must make it safer to drive.

As a MX5 (ND) driver, even having a knob to scroll around the screen is a poor design choice. Touch would have been better (you can hack that) whilst driving but, frankly, this kind of car shouldn’t have a screen at all. It’s a driving car, not a home entertainment system.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "New iMac with M4"

OnlyMortal — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:06:39 +0000

People also don’t get the idea of an appliance.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "How to do distributed locking (2016)"

OnlyMortal — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:33:34 +0000

Interesting. We went through a similar process and ended up with Yugabyte to deal with the locks (cluster).

It’s based on Postgres but performance was not good enough.

We’re now moving to RDMA.

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Show HN: Coros – A Modern C++ Library for Task Parallelism"

OnlyMortal — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:47:30 +0000

Have you had a look at SeaStar and how it works with coroutines?

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Nintendo Files Suit for Infringement of Patent Rights Against Pocketpair, Inc"

OnlyMortal — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 06:12:10 +0000

Here’s a link to a video about loading games on the C64: https://youtu.be/YUigiY53YCs

New comment by OnlyMortal in "Graphics Tricks from Boomers"

OnlyMortal — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 18:31:24 +0000

I miss 68k assembler. Doing Amiga demos or Polytechnic work on a ST.

I ended up doing Mac 68k and C after Poly in the early 90s.