Hacker News: fnj

New comment by fnj in "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Mapped the World"

fnj — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 18:12:42 +0000

Multiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.

New comment by fnj in "Darwin-xnu: The Darwin Kernel"

fnj — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 21:09:02 +0000

XNU is a hybrid kernel incorporating large elements of Mach (microkernel) as well as BSD (monolithic kernel).

New comment by fnj in "PocketBeagle – A $25 open-source USB-key-fob computer"

fnj — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 15:51:09 +0000

Does it have an HDMI connector? The description is extremely poor.

New comment by fnj in "We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach"

fnj — Sun, 17 Sep 2017 11:03:11 +0000

> We've failed: open access is winning and we must change our approach

"What do you mean, "we", white man?"

New comment by fnj in "Western Digital Ships 12 TB WD Gold HDD: 8 Platters and Helium"

fnj — Sat, 16 Sep 2017 20:59:18 +0000

Physical? You could jam a lot more storage in a 3.5" drive than you're ever going to see, but it would not be economically practical, and the MTBF and reliability would be very poor.

New comment by fnj in "Western Digital Ships 12 TB WD Gold HDD: 8 Platters and Helium"

fnj — Sat, 16 Sep 2017 20:54:29 +0000

You completely missed the drawn of HDDs with the ST506 5MB, and the big breakthrough when the much faster 10MB ST512 replaced it? Those were the exciting days.

New comment by fnj in "North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)"

fnj — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 11:12:09 +0000

What other possible way is there to pronounce it?

New comment by fnj in "North American Regional Dialects and Accents (2016)"

fnj — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 11:02:33 +0000

"Gaz" for gas/gasoline.

New comment by fnj in "What does an innocent man have to do to go free? Plead guilty"

fnj — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 17:59:22 +0000

Reminds me of the ludicrous idea of medical savings accounts. Hardly anyone below the top 0.1% could ever hope to "save" enough money and put it away to cover a medical or legal disaster or a really bad accident involving personal injury or destruction of extremely valuable property.

It just isn't a realistic proposition. Insurance with all its flaws exists for good reason.

New comment by fnj in "Hell is a multi-threaded C++ program (2006)"

fnj — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 22:54:16 +0000

Honest question: If you aren't going to share data between/among threads, why use threads at all? Why not just fork-abd-exec?

New comment by fnj in "Dalin – A C++ non-blocking network library on Linux"

fnj — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 12:09:33 +0000

It's not even fully C++11. Massive fail.

New comment by fnj in "Dalin – A C++ non-blocking network library on Linux"

fnj — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 12:08:18 +0000

> It passes shared_ptr via reference

Talk about not getting it.

New comment by fnj in "Tesla Model S battery degradation data"

fnj — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 02:09:00 +0000

> Mine is beat and barely holding together and it is at 97_000 miles.

You are ridiculously hard on your capital equipment. It must be nice not to have a care in the world for your expensive possessions. Personally I couldn't bring myself to torture fine machinery like that.

New comment by fnj in "A Review of Perl 6"

fnj — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 01:06:42 +0000

I would say perl6 was stable as of the Christmas 2015 release of rakudo.

New comment by fnj in "A Review of Perl 6"

fnj — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:56:20 +0000

I found this a nifty intro to perl6. I am a 70 year old retiree and have 37 years of C programming and some C++, perl5, and other languages. This is the first time I've been able to make the slightest headway digging perl6.

New comment by fnj in "I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon"

fnj — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 01:40:32 +0000

Didn't you bother to run SMART and see what the power-on time was? Just for curiosity if nothing else.

New comment by fnj in "I Fell Victim to a $1,500 Used Camera Lens Scam on Amazon"

fnj — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 01:35:46 +0000

That's odd. I certainly wouldn't [feel bad, that is].

New comment by fnj in "uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions"

fnj — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 16:50:24 +0000

I don't see any control keys at all in that picture! This has to be a joke.

New comment by fnj in "SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition"

fnj — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 20:06:26 +0000

- over 40% thermal efficiency

- significant reduction in CO2

CO2 production is directly inverse-linearly related to thermal eficiency. It is silly to list both.

New comment by fnj in "SKYACTIV-X: first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition"

fnj — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 20:03:25 +0000

An electric power transmission is hardly hybrid. You just have two extra conversions in your transmission, mechanical to electric and electric back to mechanical.