Hacker News: krueger71

New comment by krueger71 in "What’s New in C in 2023?"

krueger71 — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 17:39:25 +0000

What's the opinion here on decimal floating point (_Decimal32/64/128)? I'm guessing there's a significant amount of business software using double for monetary amounts out there that could benefit this being standardized. I think it has been in gcc for over a decade as an extension though...

New comment by krueger71 in "Kurt Vonnegut at 100"

krueger71 — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 07:45:12 +0000

Incidentally Vonnegut shares his birthday with Dostoevsky who was born 201 years ago.

New comment by krueger71 in "Color of text on monochrome terminals with green-on-black and amber-on-black?"

krueger71 — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 13:22:18 +0000

I used info in this article when I made this VSCode-theme a couple of years ago: https://vscodethemes.com/e/krueger71.crt-themes/crt-amber?la...

I tried to coax all elements in VSCode to use only two colors (background and foreground) with the foreground in only a few different intensities. It might give a CRT-vibe to some.

The theme is due for an update since newer VSCode has elements that aren't styled correctly.

New comment by krueger71 in "Apache NetBeans 15"

krueger71 — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 16:43:54 +0000

Back in the day I thought Netbeans rocked! Instead of the Lego-like assembly of plugins in Eclipse you got something that worked right out of the box (we're talking a 10-15 years ago and focused on Java/JEE/JSF).

New comment by krueger71 in "It's Harder to Read Code Than Write It"

krueger71 — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 12:10:25 +0000

Often mentioned and relevant to the subject:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

New comment by krueger71 in "Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy"

krueger71 — Sun, 15 May 2022 18:28:20 +0000

I had an Onkyo 5.1 system in service from 2002 - 2018. Great stuff! First movie I watched on the system with a 28" CRT TV was "Driven" on DVD. Going from TV-speakers to a full set of speakers including subwoofer was amazing! Later on it serviced Blu-ray:s and a PS4 beautifully.

New comment by krueger71 in "Ask HN: Does anyone use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer?"

krueger71 — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 13:38:21 +0000

I use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a cupsd print server. It is powered by usb from the Wi-Fi router and connected directly to an old USB laser printer nearby. Works great to print wirelessly.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 (8gb) with an Argon One M.2 case and a Kingston SSD. I use it mainly for coding/tinkering in C, Pharo, Racket etc. Not logged into any social media or mail in the web browser, just using it to read docs etc. Fast enough to be usable but no speed demon for sure. Overclocked to around 2GHz/64-bit OS.

New comment by krueger71 in "Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought"

krueger71 — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 18:12:54 +0000

Is this the first, second, third or 47th time they've said this?

New comment by krueger71 in "Ask HN: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W availability"

krueger71 — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 15:54:43 +0000

Shortage of Raspberry Pi in Sweden too it seems

New comment by krueger71 in "Ask HN: What book(s) did you love reading this year?"

krueger71 — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 19:05:35 +0000

Of the Tolkien books I've read, the LOTR-trilogy is a classic page turner. Once you get past Bilbo's birthday you can't really put the books down. The Hobbit has more of a children's tale-vibe, but still worth the read. The Silmarillion is harder and the first time it feels like you are cramming for some history exam, but I found that if you read it again you get more context and start untangling all the relationsships which gives a lot of extra character to the other books. The Children of Húrin can be found in abbreviated form inside The Silmarillion and is a dark and tragic tale, but really good in my opinion.

Fortunately Peter Jackson made a good job with the original LOTR-trilogy. You can be a fan of the movies and the books at the same time even though there are (probably necessary) differences between the formats.

New comment by krueger71 in "Ask HN: What book(s) did you love reading this year?"

krueger71 — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 13:39:05 +0000

Fiction

- Three Body-trilogy, Cixin Liu

- The Children of Húrin, Tolkien

- The Silmarillion, Tolkien

- The Hobbit, Tolkien

- Lord Of The Rings-trilogy, Tolkien

- The Green Mile, Stephen King

Non-fiction

- Practical Vim 2nd ed., Drew Neil

- Pestens år: döden i Stockholm 1710, Magnus Västerbro

New comment by krueger71 in "We are recreating the entire planet in Minecraft"

krueger71 — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 05:17:15 +0000

Swedish Lantmäteriet (The Swedish Mapping, Cadastral and Land Registration Authority) provides Minecraft maps for the whole country in various resolutions.

https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/maps-and-geographic-informati...

New comment by krueger71 in "Sir Clive Sinclair has died"

krueger71 — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 06:23:30 +0000

Sad to hear this. I got a ZX in the mid-eighties. It was the 16k-model but my father upgraded it to 48k, I think it even involved some soldering.

One of my best friends also had one and we tinkered a lot, all by ourselves. To get stuff to load from copied cassettes on whatever tape deck or boom-box you had available was sometimes a very frustrating experience. We cleaned the tape heads with q-tips and alcohol, set the five-band eq to some previous good setting (marked with a pencil), then loaded, adjusted and retried. Typing in long listings from computer magazines, often failing and having to double check and re-type parts was quite common too.

We also learned the value of RTFM. The first game my friend had on a cassette had a fold in leaflet. We spent one evening not being able to load it using the instructions. The next evening a brilliant move was made, remove the leaflet from the cassette and read the remaining part on the hidden side :) Success!

These experiences definitely help remove any fear of tinkering with respect to computers and other digital equipment that I later on have noticed in others.

New comment by krueger71 in "Digitize MiniDV Tapes with Linux"

krueger71 — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 16:50:49 +0000

Did something similar on my Mac. Dongle for Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire and then got the raw .mov files via iMovie. De-interlacing and encoding with ffmpeg. For a raw file with a size of say 600 MB you can get down to something like 30 MB with h264, h265 can reduce this further to perhaps 15 MB. All of a sudden those old memories will be easy to keep and share :)

New comment by krueger71 in "Neural networks emulate any guitar pedal for $120"

krueger71 — Mon, 31 May 2021 11:09:57 +0000

I'm guessing a Hi-Z input before this contraption could improve the tone and do the pickups of the guitar or bass justice. A dedicated buffer pedal or just a pedal with buffer bypass perhaps?

New comment by krueger71 in "Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation"

krueger71 — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:45:27 +0000

In the Zen-tradition it's almost expected at some point during meditation to have hallucinations (sometimes severe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maky%C5%8D

New comment by krueger71 in "Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation"

krueger71 — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:37:18 +0000

The first variant of Zen-meditation is often to count your breathing from 1 to 10 repeatedly. Sounds easy enough, but the mind starts to wander pretty quickly. If you get lost in your counting you just start over on 1 again.

New comment by krueger71 in "Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?"

krueger71 — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 08:39:23 +0000

Tab-completion in the shell

New comment by krueger71 in "Teaching Compilers Backward"

krueger71 — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 08:29:10 +0000

I remember back in the late 90's when I was studying Computer Science at Lund University, Sweden. They had a research focus in compilers and had their own Simula-compiler if I remember correctly. When they taught compilers, students first had to take the low level programming course where you needed to build a compiler back-end for an in-house IL. The first compiler course you could take after that was very focused on the practical aspects of building a front-end for the back-end you already had. Theory was pretty minimalistic at this point if I remember correctly. You got the hang of basic operator precendence parsing with a recommendation to use if for the expressions in our toy language and recursive decent for the rest. Of course this was almost like throwing someone at the deep end of the pool and se what happens. A grueling course that was renowned by students to be one of the more work intensive in the whole curriculum at that time. A lot of late nights in the computer lab for sure.

Afterwards, when I had the second more theoretical compiler course, I did feel that all that practical hard work to make a fully functioning compiler with mostly elbow grease gave an appreciation of the theoretical constructs that could make this more tractable.

New comment by krueger71 in "The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar"

krueger71 — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 14:42:34 +0000

I remember hearing about this guy a few years back. Apparently he found them :) https://www.oneindia.com/2008/06/02/lived-17-years-mars-choc...