Hacker News: jmiserez

New comment by jmiserez in "Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org"

jmiserez — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 06:51:53 +0000

Marathon is still alive!

AlephOne is the new engine for Marathon, runs all 3 games on modern platforms and is GPL: https://alephone.lhowon.org/

The original Mac OS 9 game files are freely available if you want to run them on a old Mac: http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/

New comment by jmiserez in "Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)"

jmiserez — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 22:49:57 +0000

Give hstr a try: https://github.com/dvorka/hstr

It's saved me countless hours over the years as it's just so much better than regular CTRL-R. I also find it to work better than fzf.

New comment by jmiserez in "Git Notes"

jmiserez — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 06:24:15 +0000

No that's not the same thing, in fact that'll just do a git rebase, changing the commit itself and all commits after that one. Pretty much the polar opposite of what you want!

IntelliJ products try to provide a common interface and common naming for all "VCS" operations, whether it's Git/Mercurial/etc. In practice this obscures the actual Git operations though and requires learning yet another set of "abstract" IntelliJ-specific names for the same thing. I wish they'd stop doing that, it's really confusing and inaccurate.

New comment by jmiserez in "Photography for geeks"

jmiserez — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 05:33:06 +0000

No magic and the same photons, but you can have the hardware sensor read them out differently. Specifically using varying amounts of analog gain / amplification before doing analog-to-digital conversion, minimizing noise. This varies based on camera design.

See the "ISO-Invariance and Downstream Electronic Noise" part here for a better explanation: https://www.lonelyspeck.com/how-to-find-the-best-iso-for-ast...

The article mentions the Sony A7S as an example, with the sensor showing marked improvements in SNR when reaching ISO 100, 200, 1600 and 3200, while behaving ISO-invariant wrt. noise in between those values.

New comment by jmiserez in "Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code"

jmiserez — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 06:18:08 +0000

I don't often hack my own tools either, but it's great to have the possibility to do so.

When you really need that bug fixed for your edge case or platform, it's much easier to submit a patch rather than wait around for someone else to fix it.

New comment by jmiserez in "macOS Ventura is now available"

jmiserez — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 21:28:20 +0000

Ventura even drops support for the 2016 (Touchbar) Macbook Pros which is frustrating. The machines are certainly powerful enough. But support for Intel Macs will probably be dropped sooner rather than later.

New comment by jmiserez in "What ID3v2 could have been"

jmiserez — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 11:23:06 +0000

Usually the whole row is copied, updated, and then appended to a different file on disk. After some time a job runs that removes the unused rows by deleting them for good, thus rewriting files and compacting the database. This has lots of advantages, on a small scale resilience against power outages (journaling), and on a large scale you can e.g sync a second DB / backup by just streaming appends.

Simplifiying a lot here of course. E.g if your DB uses MVCC (multiversion concurrency control) old values cannot be removed until the last transaction is done seeing them.

Of course if you write your own storage engine you can do whatever you want. I wrote one for MariaDB a few years ago and you basically just have to implement the minimally required interfaces for it to work.

DBs traditionally have these technical details figured out pretty well, and the line between what is part of the DB and what is done by the OS can be blurry at times.

New comment by jmiserez in "Ask HN: What are some good keyboards?"

jmiserez — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 16:37:28 +0000

The version with MX Silent switches is considerably quieter than the standard MX Red version. I'm hoping the Kinesis 360 coming out this year will be even quieter.

New comment by jmiserez in "Hypercard Simulator"

jmiserez — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 21:14:51 +0000

>I guess a the height of hypercard, that really wasn't really on people's radar.

It didn't matter yet. People were shipping the software they made in HyperCard to customers on floppies or CDs. IIRC these were self-contained executables, so you didn't need to have HyperCard installed for it to run. One of the most famous examples of this was Myst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst.

New comment by jmiserez in "LG’s new 16:18 monitor"

jmiserez — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 15:12:17 +0000

FancyZones (part of Microsoft PowerToys) works well for me. I also like the fact that it's first-party, free and open-source:

Project page: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

FancyZones docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/powertoys/fancyzone...

New comment by jmiserez in "LG’s new 16:18 monitor"

jmiserez — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 14:23:32 +0000

I wonder why they couldn't go just a bit wider to make it 2880x2880 (1:1 and the same number of pixels as 4K), instead of 2560x2880.

New comment by jmiserez in "Why Wolfram tech isn’t open source (2019)"

jmiserez — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 16:39:36 +0000

I'd also recommend the classic "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay by Eric Steven Raymond:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

From Wikipedia:

>In 1998, the essay helped the final push for Netscape Communications Corporation to release the source code for Netscape Communicator and start the Mozilla project; it was cited by Frank Hecker and other employees as an outside independent validation of his arguments.

Netscape's public recognition of this influence brought Raymond renown in hacker culture.

New comment by jmiserez in "Kinesis Advantage 360"

jmiserez — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 09:00:51 +0000

With the Advantage 2 you got 4 extra keycaps in the box: 3 Mac keys and an additional Alt key to replace the Windows one.

For the Advantage 360 they're saying 11 additional keycaps in the box. I'm sure one of those is a Windows key replacement.

New comment by jmiserez in "When HDMI 2.1 isn't HDMI 2.1 – the confusing world of the standard"

jmiserez — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:43:20 +0000

Apparently he uses [1] a "Advanced Cable Tester v2" from Totalphase for his tests, starting at 15000$. Probably depends on what you need to test.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/ny4y6z/commen...

New comment by jmiserez in "Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start"

jmiserez — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 20:46:03 +0000

Regardless of model it's a good idea to put a emergency hammer / glass breaker in your car. (addendum: also to rescue someone else, not blaming the driver)

New comment by jmiserez in "Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-East-1) Region"

jmiserez — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 12:36:26 +0000

It absolutely is written down. The issue is that the results you get from modeling systems using queuing theory are often unintuitive and surprising. On top of that it's hard to account for all the seemingly minor implementation details in a real system.

During my studies we had a course where we built a distributed system and had to model it's performance mathematically. It was really hard to get the model to match the reality and vice-versa. So many details are hidden in a library, framework or network adapter somewhere (e.g buffers or things like packet fragmentation).

We used the book "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis" (R. Jain), but I don't recommend it. At least not the 1st edition which had a frustrating amount of serious, experiment-ruining errata.

New comment by jmiserez in "Pixel prevented me from calling 911"

jmiserez — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 10:42:33 +0000

To be honest that doesn't sound good at all. No response while you're in an actual emergency and then just "closing the ticket" unless you call again.

New comment by jmiserez in "Apple broke up with me"

jmiserez — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 11:59:13 +0000

You can register domains for >1 year. You'll still need to renew it every year but you'll have a buffer in case something goes wrong.

New comment by jmiserez in "Consumption of coffee and tea and risk of developing stroke and dementia"

jmiserez — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 08:11:43 +0000

>fruity i associate with citric acid.

Minor exception: "Exotic" fruits like mango or pineapple may mean there are fermentation flavors present, e.g. with naturally processed beans (vs washed process).

Good introduction by James Hoffmann: https://youtu.be/O9YnLFrM7Fs (decoding descriptions starts at 12:53)

New comment by jmiserez in "Ask HN: How do you manage your personal documents?"

jmiserez — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 12:14:45 +0000

I've found - after trying several apps and custom scripts to do OCR - that the easiest most convenient solution is to just get a printer/scanner combo that does the PDF & OCR directly in hardware. That usually means something targeted towards SMBs that works standalone (in my case a Canon). I.e. specifically not a consumer device: the consumer units usually rely on separate client-side software for doing the OCR processing which complicates the workflow.