Hacker News: sdk77

New comment by sdk77 in "One surprising psychosis treatment that works: Learning to live with the voices"

sdk77 — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 13:35:29 +0000

By coincidence I re-watched that film this weekend (I like it a lot) and seeing this article immediately made me think of it. Yes, in the film he takes meds, but he stops doing it after a while because of the side effects (impotence amongst others). Then he learns to live with the voices.

New comment by sdk77 in "Listen to what gets lost when an MP3 is made (2015)"

sdk77 — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 13:49:27 +0000

Very interesting! The audio of Tom's Dinner rejected by the encoding sounds mesmerizing to me. I still find it to be musical - it reminds me of a record I bought a really long time ago, it was called modulation & transformation on mille plateaux, it's a collection of songs in the abstract and experimental genre.

New comment by sdk77 in "All the electricity you'll need for 40 years"

sdk77 — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 20:44:03 +0000

It all depends on the situation. Here in the Netherlands almost everybody has an PV installation with no way other than the breaker to turn it on and off. Some inverters do have an interface, and sometimes it's available. Even less people know anything about this at all, they just had panels installed. The technical solution is simple, bit implementing it will cost much more, I assume.

New comment by sdk77 in "All the electricity you'll need for 40 years"

sdk77 — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 20:19:40 +0000

Sure. Of course. Not being allowed to disconnect them would be ridiculous. But do you want to keep an eye on the market every day, and run to the breaker to turn on an off your inverter? No. So you need a solution for that. Then a battery is much more interesting.

New comment by sdk77 in "All the electricity you'll need for 40 years"

sdk77 — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 20:09:06 +0000

Well, until '27, I'm allowed to use the grid as a free battery, basically, this is a kind of government subsidy. But that will end, and the contracts available will be fixed price with a feed in tariff or dynamic (realtime) market price, but then prices can and have been negative during peak solar hours. A battery can solve this only for a bit, and maybe with smart algorithms it can be trading on the electricity market full time, I'm not sure if that makes enough money for the grid power in winter.. it's nice to think about though.

New comment by sdk77 in "All the electricity you'll need for 40 years"

sdk77 — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:57:01 +0000

It's nice to have solar panels, I have them too and while they do generate even more electricity than I need, they do so in around 6 to 7 months peaking in July. So in winter, it's grid power and in summer I might need to pay to feed in the surplus. This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer, and knowing I could have enough for all of the winter if only there was some way to store it, all of the 1MWh..

New comment by sdk77 in "The C23 edition of Modern C"

sdk77 — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 11:15:02 +0000

The thing is though that even with array bounds checking built into the language, out of bounds access due to programming error can still be attempted. Only this time it's safer because an attacker can't use the bug (which still exists) to access memory outside of bounds. In any case, the program still doesn't work as intended (has bugs) because the programmer has attempted, or allowed the attempt, to access out of bounds memory.

Writing safe code is better than depending on safety features. Writing safe code is possible in any programming language, the only things required are good design principles and discipline (i.e. solid engineering).

New comment by sdk77 in "Why my apps will soon be gone from the Google Play Store"

sdk77 — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 08:54:08 +0000

Mine as well. Sucks that I just went through the required updating of the build (minimum sdk) of my only app on there, a 2016 Java string art app below 2MB with no data collection, advertising or monetization whatsoever.

Now they want to publish my full address too, because they believe I make money off of it, and I can't contest this in any way. Fine. I'll let them delete my account and I'll open source that app and put it on F-Droid then.

New comment by sdk77 in "Is My Blue Your Blue?"

sdk77 — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:14:34 +0000

On my phone, turquoise is green for me, but on my laptop it's blue. I guess that's why it's called turquoise. The same thing happens with the purple spectrum. There's an unlimited amount of purple hues, ranging from red purple to blue purple. That's why there's pink.

New comment by sdk77 in "Number 16 (spider)"

sdk77 — Thu, 23 May 2024 09:23:16 +0000

It doesn't. The spider's name is 'Number 16'. It could be any alphanumeric string.

New comment by sdk77 in "C Style: My favorite C programming practices (2014)"

sdk77 — Mon, 20 May 2024 10:39:32 +0000

There are popular embedded platforms like STM32 that don't have hardware double support, but do have hardware float support. Using double will cause software double support to be linked and slow down your firmware significantly.

New comment by sdk77 in "Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices"

sdk77 — Mon, 06 May 2024 09:52:51 +0000

Me too. I didn't even know about this blockade. I'm using T-Mobile fiber internet and rt.com loads just fine.

New comment by sdk77 in "The history of MSX computers [video]"

sdk77 — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 20:06:11 +0000

What a coincidence, I first saw this video in my YouTube recommends and now here. I used to have an MSX-2, a Philips. It had a double sided 720K 3.5" floppy drive, fhe file system is FAT12 and the disks were compatible with PC's. I learned Z80 assembler on the MSX and had a lot of fun with it both with playing games and making it do cool stuff. This computer was quite popular in the Netherlands as well as Spain.

New comment by sdk77 in "Goodbye, clean code (2020)"

sdk77 — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 10:27:40 +0000

From the article: "When we don’t feel confident in our code, it is tempting to attach our sense of self-worth and professional pride to something that can be measured. A set of strict lint rules, a naming schema, a file structure, a lack of duplication."

I feel a little triggered. Maybe I'm not feeling confident? No. I've dealt with lots of other people's code and I'm really not bothered by repetition, even not by overuse of abstractions. But. Strict lint rules, a naming scheme and a file structure (in other words, basic coding standards) are, in my opinion, the minimal foundation of any professional software development project. Looking at it this way, clean code is code that is consequently adhering to a given coding standard.

New comment by sdk77 in "The analog computer for the Nike missile system (2001)"

sdk77 — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 11:44:44 +0000

Very interesting to see this here. I bought the Nike missile control unit years ago from some guy here in the Netherlands and it still sits in my garage. It has cool mechanical gyroscopes and microwave components. I disassembled most of the electronics modules and made a guitar amplifier from some of the pencil tubes. Sounds great and it's kind of cool I think, making a musical instrument out of a weapon.

New comment by sdk77 in "My personal C coding style as of late 2023"

sdk77 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 10:34:10 +0000

The case of what is a constant, and whether or not it even really is, is not always clear in C. As an embedded developer (almost always on bare metal), variables declared with the const modifier are usually (but not always, it depends on the linker script) placed in read only memory. For those kind of variables (read only ones, they're not really constants as in C++ constexpr) I don't use all caps. But for preprocessor macros, always. Even "#define MY_CONSTANT 10" is a macro, and not a constant or a variable. And it should be treated with caution, because it is dangerous (inexperienced programmers might change it to #define MY_CONST 2 * OTHER_CONSTANT, which opens up a can of worms).

New comment by sdk77 in "Dinner for one: A little-known British comedy famous in Germany"

sdk77 — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 14:52:57 +0000

Really nice to see this here. I'm in the Netherlands and it has been a tradition in my family and my mother's family to watch this (on tv) on new year's eve. It's been quite a while since I watched it, living on my own. I'm going to tune in tonight!

New comment by sdk77 in "How Firefox Got Fast Again"

sdk77 — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 09:26:10 +0000

I switched to Brave a few days ago and have never been happier. The problem with firefox on Android is that it is extremely slow, though apparently not for everyone. Slow in the sense of tapping a link, then having to wait 5 to 10 seconds before the GUI updates and the link starts loading. It's incredible and I never found a solution to this problem. It's a pity really.

New comment by sdk77 in "Oscilloscope pong for 1 or 2 players"

sdk77 — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 10:34:38 +0000

The oscilloscope works like a vector display (or x-y plotter). A circle can be displayed by feeding a sinewave voltage to the Y input and a cosine to the X input. Adding a voltage to the Y input moves the ball up and down. Similarly, adding a voltage to the X input moves the ball left to right. Increasing the amplitude of both the X and Y signal will enlarge the ball. State is maintained by flip-flops built from discrete transistors (mono-stable multivibrators). Collision detection is just a matter of comparing the X and Y voltage of object A to the X and Y voltage of object B. If the voltage are (almost) the same, both objects are on the same screen position.

New comment by sdk77 in "What a $347B conglomerate holding company's web site looks like"

sdk77 — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 10:07:14 +0000

Looks good. Simple, humble, to the point. It has a certain elegance that I like. It loads fast as well.