Hacker News: nox100

New comment by nox100 in "IDEs we had 30 years ago"

nox100 — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 01:24:26 +0000

I'm surprised pjmip is missing the point here. Or maybe I am

> Instead of sending streams of bytes to render text, it sends streams of encoded X Windows commands to draw the UI.

(Simplified) VSCode is sending no bytes to a server when you're editing a file. The entire file exists on the client, you can edit all you want and everything stays on the client. Only when you pick "save" is a data sent to the server.

My understanding with X Windows is as you mentioned above, you press a key, that key it sent app on another machine, that other machine sends back rendering commands. Correct? Vs VSCode, you press a key, nothing is sent remotely

Note: There's more to VSCode, while it doesn't have to send keystrokes and it is effectively editing the file locally (so fast). It does send changes asynchronously to the remote machine to run things like the Language Server Protocol stuff and asychronously sending the results back. But, you don't have to wait for that info to continue to edit.

New comment by nox100 in "Particle Life"

nox100 — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:40:16 +0000

It's not hard to believe that we could make self replicating drones in the next 100 years that go from system to system, make a few more, and continue. We've already sent drones out of our solar system. They don't have to go fast. They'd still visit every system in the known universe in a "relatively" small amount of time. (relative to the age of the known universe).

New comment by nox100 in "Generation Junk"

nox100 — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 06:59:53 +0000

Let me also add, in many other categories, I've rarely found a correlation between price, brand, and quality.

Worst luggage I ever owned was Rimowa. It was the most expensive I've bought and broke several times. They'd fix it, but who wants to spend their vacation taking their luggage to the repair shop (and lugging it full from the airport to the hotel while it's broke)

Worst and most expensive jacket I ever bought, Paul Smith, got a hole in the main pocket within 30 days and the hanging hook in the collar broke in 2 weeks.

Worst jeans I ever bought, Diesel. Ripped in 1 month.

New comment by nox100 in "Generation Junk"

nox100 — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 06:50:10 +0000

I'm curious. My previous soft was from Ikea. Of course Ikea makes cheap disposable furniture but this sofa, IMO, was not one of those. It was made of real wood, not particle board. It was super well designed. It assembled into 4 parts using slots and a few very large steal bolts and was also easy to disassemble for moving. It's entire cover was easy to remove so you could clean stains or easily replace it. Same for the cushions. And it was comfortable. It was under $1000 (note: I know Ikea redesigns things so the same soft today might not be as good as that same model from 2016)

Moving overseas I had to buy a new sofa in 2021. Middle of COVID, Ikea didn't have any I couldn't wait. The sofa I ended up with is the cheapest shit sofa I've ever owned. The materials are clearly inferior. No part of it is cleanable. The cushions are one sided so can not flip them in 4 directions, they only fit one way. I got tired of looking and settled on these though, expecting to replace them.

Anyway, my point was (a) I understand your POV but also (b) there are possibly some good under $1000 sofas. I've had similar luck with a few Ikea dining room tables that were solid wood, not particle board.

New comment by nox100 in "BASIC was not just a programming language"

nox100 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 22:01:57 +0000

my experience was I would not have learned anything without a manual and examples. There was no autocomplete so there was no discoverabliy and there was no internet so unless you bought a book or happened to have access to a library that had modern basic books you were out of luck.

VS Today wheer there are 1000s of websites that will teach you JavaScript and 1000s of free video classes and hundreds of thousands of free examples. JavaScript is several orders of magnitude more discovable than basic ever was

New comment by nox100 in "3D Map of Shinjuku Station in Three.js"

nox100 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 21:51:19 +0000

the smart way to do it is to name an exit like Exit B5 or A12. The signs in the station, and Google Maps, will generally tell how to get to a specific exit. Or probably better would be a famous landmarks tho there aren't many to pick from in Shinjuku. A common one used to be "in front of the Alta building on the east exit" another still is "in front of the police station just outside the east exit

New comment by nox100 in "Learn Modern C++"

nox100 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 08:55:25 +0000

I think you missed the point. The point isn't that these features don't have a purpose. The point is rather, at every line of code you have many choices that you arguably shouldn't need. Should I use a raw pointer or a unique_ptr or a smart_ptr. Do I need to call make_shared here or can I do something else? Should I call std::move here or not? Should pass by value or pointer or const pointer, or reference or const reference? And on and on, every line is a foot gun.

I get why it's that way, backward compatibility. The problem is, the original way, the path of least resistance, is now effectively deprecated, but it's the official syntax.

    char* s = malloc(size);

is considered bad code. I get why. But, in a "good language" the default would do the right thing and I'd only escape into bad code by extra work so that all the easiest code to write did the right thing by default.

C++ is trying to fix all that old bad code by coding standards and linters but I don't want to have to type a bunch of boilerplate I need to memorize to do the right thing. I want the right thing to be the most obvious, no brain cells required path.

New comment by nox100 in "BASIC was not just a programming language"

nox100 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 08:44:45 +0000

Don't know which ones did. TRS-80, C-64, VIC-20, Atari 800, Apple II, did NOT

New comment by nox100 in "BASIC was not just a programming language"

nox100 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 08:40:04 +0000

I grew up typing programs from softdisk magazine, Compute! etc... into TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 800, and C-64. I still think JavaScript in a browser is better.

JavaScript is way more powerful than Basic on any of those 4 platforms. The canvas 2D API is way more capable and easy than what came with those systems. Even getting something like

Was 50-150 lines of code in BASIC, by which I mean a text input line with a cursor and editing and not just BASIC's "INPUT" command which provided nearly zero editing support.

Libraries like pixi.js or three.js or p5.js etc make it trivial to get fancy graphics on the screen. Making something you can share it with your friends or the entire world with a link, even if they don't own the same type of machine running the same OS. Host them on codepen, jsfiddle, github pages, all free.

I loved my experience with Basic and those old machines but I wouldn't force my kids to learn that way.

New comment by nox100 in "Show HN: I made a GPU VRAM calculator for transformer-based models"

nox100 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 08:21:59 +0000

I haven't a clue how they compare but a Studio Mac with an M2 Ultra can get 192GB of unified ram for $5700 (PS: not a mac fan, a curious)

New comment by nox100 in "The C++20 Naughty and Nice List for Game Devs"

nox100 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:49:47 +0000

I just cleaned out my build folders and did a full build. 40M+ lines, 3 mins and 35 seconds. If you're not getting similar speed then maybe you should look into adding more machines. Last time I was on game dev the best you could do was share other programmers machines via incredibuild. No thought about adding more machines just for building or using cloud infra

New comment by nox100 in "Learn Modern C++"

nox100 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:46:01 +0000

That's not the point. The point is you shouldn't need that crap in the first place.

New comment by nox100 in "Most homes for sale in 2023 were not affordable for a typical U.S. household"

nox100 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:27:37 +0000

You realize you're talking about a 1bedroom apartment, not a single family home. It shouldn't require an L5 job at FAANG to just barely be able to afford 1bedroom apartment.

New comment by nox100 in "Website search hurts my feelings"

nox100 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:12:33 +0000

tagging doesn't work period because people will tag things to try to get their product in front of your eyes and add any tag they think is popular entirely unrelated to their "product".

New comment by nox100 in "Most homes for sale in 2023 were not affordable for a typical U.S. household"

nox100 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 23:51:18 +0000

> today it would be much harder,

> It also helps that my SO works as a designer for another FAANG.

Thanks for confirming my point :)

New comment by nox100 in "Most homes for sale in 2023 were not affordable for a typical U.S. household"

nox100 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 20:22:10 +0000

They're not affordable for FANG employees. According to levels.fyi an L5 at Google makes $349,163, of that they'll keep 60% after taxes so 209k. It sounds like a lot (and it is in comparison to people making less) but a 1bd apartment costs > $1 million almost anywhere near one of those jobs. You need to pay rent until you've saved $200k-$400k which will take 5-6yrs and then you buy a 1bed apartment and pay $7000-$9000 a month (apartment + hoa) (seen HOAs as much as $3k a month!).

AFAICT the only way they can do it is as a couple or down payments from family.

If you wonder why traffic is so bad, it's because the only places affordable are 90 minute commute

New comment by nox100 in "Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website"

nox100 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 16:58:26 +0000

and you require a whole OS. I expect browsers to outlast OSes. Browsers ran on MacOS 9 and software that ran on those browsers still runs today. MacOS 9 itself, not so much

New comment by nox100 in "The C++20 Naughty and Nice List for Game Devs"

nox100 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 16:20:50 +0000

If you've got a 10M+ LOC project and you're not doing some kind of distributed build you're throwing money and time away.

New comment by nox100 in "Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom"

nox100 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 16:14:04 +0000

feature phones are not a dominate thing in japan.

https://www.soumu.go.jp/johotsusintokei/whitepaper/ja/r04/ht...

86% of the population owns a smartphone. That's higher than the USA

New comment by nox100 in "Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website"

nox100 — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 15:56:16 +0000

A website works on all platforms; Mac, Linux, Windows, ChromeOS, ... maybe even Android. An app works on a single platform.

To me, they could put it on github and serve it on github pages. I suspect though that there's a bunch of non-open source libraries being used and getting into a condition that could be open sourced is person power they don't want to spend when they have an infinite list of things to work on.