Hacker News: porlw

New comment by porlw in "Ask HN: Create an app that sends an email with some text"

porlw — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 07:13:29 +0000

This can easily be done with a small shell script and standard linux commands.

   #!/usr/bin/bash
   
   MAILTEXT=$(grep "dbkey" db.txt)
   
   cat emails.lst|while read ADDR NAME
   do
      mail -s "Subject" $ADDR <


Schedule with cron.



Can this drone design break the Guiness World Record? [video]
porlw — Thu, 16 May 2024 17:05:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoSSaSkOTTc
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380669
Points: 1
# Comments: 0



New comment by porlw in "Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season"
porlw — Sun, 12 May 2024 15:25:52 +0000

Another reason is that farming machinery compacts the soil.
Techniques such as min-till and no-till aim to minimise soil disturbance (to reduce emissions from deep ploughing and improve soil fertility), but to achieve this you really need to make sure the equipment accurately follows the same path through a field every time, so that the area affected by compaction is mimimised.
Not a farmer, I learned this from the youtube channel Harry's Farm.



New comment by porlw in "Bash Debugging"
porlw — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 10:40:03 +0000

grep has a bad interaction with set -e, since it (infuriatingly) exits with 1 if no lines are matched.



New comment by porlw in "Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode"
porlw — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 20:46:26 +0000

I remember back in the day these were used by the A86 assembler to identify code assembled with the unregistered version of the software.



New comment by porlw in "Simulating protected mode in the Z80 [video]"
porlw — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:10:37 +0000

I think it was because in the 80's the US was wealthier and systems with disk drives were a lot more common.
People would swap games on disk, and there was less pressure to learn how the underlying system works.
Having a disk drive also enables more complex, larger games, which would be harder to produce as a lone programmer.
Contrast this with the UK - we had much less money, it was common to type games in from magazines, which is how a lot of us learned programming.
We mostly had to make do with tapes, which limits the size of a game and its sound and graphics to physical RAM. It was entirely possible as a lone programmer to create a commercial level game with a few weeks of late night hacking.



New comment by porlw in "Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents?"
porlw — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 16:48:09 +0000

The thing I miss about Usenet is maintaining article and comment scoring in trn (based on the subject, keywords and/or author)
With this I could easily surface interesting articles or replies by insightful people, while avoiding subjects and authors in which I had no interest.
This worked at a thread level, so I could quickly see any new threads, and new replies added to threads I was following, skipping over everything I had already  marked as read.
For me this was more effective than the communal post scoring that took over on web forums, reddit, hn etc.



New comment by porlw in "System/360 Announcement (1964)"
porlw — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 12:13:37 +0000

I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?



New comment by porlw in "If the US Market for SWEs is on fire why isn’t Europe’s, or India’s?"
porlw — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 07:09:53 +0000

1) The contracting scene in the UK is massive, that's where a lot of the higher paying UK tech jobs are. I suspect this skews the salary averages.
2) I'm in South Africa, I've recently been approached on linked-in to (quote) "Earn a US based salary working remotely from South Africa". So it seems some US recruiters are starting to look further afield.



New comment by porlw in "Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop"
porlw — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 06:48:55 +0000

It's not really a conspiracy, just the natural outcome of design optimization - any part that still works reliably at the end of the design lifespan is a candidate for cost cutting in the next iteration.



New comment by porlw in "What happens to used electric car batteries?"
porlw — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 08:40:03 +0000

Tyres are breeding grounds for mosquitos, shredding them stops this so this law is having the intended effect.
https://blog.epa.gov/2015/08/26/improperly-stored-tires-lead...



New comment by porlw in "How much power can we expect from rainfall?"
porlw — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 05:30:45 +0000

There is an interesting series of videos on Youtube about harvesting energy from gutter flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6oNxckjEiE



New comment by porlw in "ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop"
porlw — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:38:37 +0000

Ben Eater's Youtube series building a simple CPU from scratch was a real "lightbulb" moment for me. After 40 years of programming (including Z80 assembly back in the 8-bit days), it took my understanding of the CPU from a mysterious black box to what's basically a simple look-up table and some control signals.



New comment by porlw in "I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code"
porlw — Tue, 21 May 2019 14:43:21 +0000

What I find fascinating is that Lisp, commonly perceived as too high level to be practical, is actually at its core (in its original implementations!) an incredibly low level language.



New comment by porlw in "Ask HN: Anyone getting sick of all the 'web apps'?"
porlw — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:22:12 +0000

The problem is latency, which actually will get worse as bandwidth increases.
1 request pulling down 1 Mb can be quicker than 4 requests for 10Kb each.



New comment by porlw in "The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse"
porlw — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 07:25:50 +0000

Typically an architect's design would need to be signed off by a structural engineer before construction begins. The structural engineer would take on the liability for safety critical aspects of the design.
The architect and engineer would presumably collaborate to ensure that the design is at least clear enough to be safely built.



New comment by porlw in "Coming changes to Apple's App Store"
porlw — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 08:28:45 +0000

Use my new app!
It's a special folder.
When you put an app in the folder it will DELETE the app from your phone and store it like a symlink. When you try to open the app from the folder it will install it again for you.
Think of all the subscription money you will save!
Only $5 per month.



New comment by porlw in "Persistent “pipes” in Linux"
porlw — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 09:08:51 +0000

Soooo...
What happens when an errant grep wanders in to the directory holding these persistent pipes?



New comment by porlw in "Estimate the cost of a Web, iOS or Android app"
porlw — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:32:40 +0000

Double that to get the agency rate, and no one wants an app completely designed by juniors, you'll need at least one senior resource and probably a PM.



New comment by porlw in "Estimate the cost of a Web, iOS or Android app"
porlw — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:26:27 +0000

The politically correct HR unit for worker resources is FTE (Full Time Employee)