Hacker News: wfraser

New comment by wfraser in "Intel 4004 programming manual (1973) [pdf]"

wfraser — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 07:37:31 +0000

You mean Harvard architecture?

New comment by wfraser in "How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac"

wfraser — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 01:31:58 +0000

> plugins

Finder doesn't have plugins, hence the accessibility API shenanigans necessary to get the same effect.

New comment by wfraser in "Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3"

wfraser — Wed, 21 May 2014 19:36:17 +0000

Re: 1, 2, 3: Those are Linux problems, not Surface ones. There are types of hardware that Linux is just poor at supporting. It's up to Linux devs and the component manufacturers to fix that problem, not Microsoft.

I found it pretty easy to put Linux on my Surface Pro 2. The problem is that once it's on there, it kind of sucks. Poor hardware support, extremely poor touchscreen UI.

New comment by wfraser in "Rust 0.10 released"

wfraser — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 19:38:03 +0000

> there isn't a clean way to make 'unit types' (second, millisecond, meters, etc) in Rust..

Actually, there's this bit on Tuple Structs[1] in the tutorial:

> Types like this can be useful to differentiate between data that have the same underlying type but must be used in different ways.

  struct Inches(int);
  struct Centimeters(int);

[1] http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/tutorial.html#tuple-s...

New comment by wfraser in "NwAvGuy: The Audio Genius Who Vanished"

wfraser — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 23:38:51 +0000

Correct. It also needs a wall wart.

New comment by wfraser in "Apple's Buttonless Mouse Came From Steve Jobs' Misunderstanding"

wfraser — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 09:39:58 +0000

I'm guessing that's what the Wikipedia article means by "modern": able to work on most any surface, not just a special mat.

New comment by wfraser in "Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO"

wfraser — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 07:35:03 +0000

I think they're too distracted with the WinRT and its accompanying C++/CX silliness to properly focus on C++11. It feels like the 1st party platform got the priority in manpower.

New comment by wfraser in "With Amazon Redshift SSD, querying a TB of data took less than 10 seconds"

wfraser — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 08:24:00 +0000

Interesting. What are PostgreSQL's "fingerprints"? What makes it possible to tell a PostgreSQL derivitive from one based on another engine?

New comment by wfraser in "OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on"

wfraser — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 13:22:52 +0000

"GNU's Not Unix."

New comment by wfraser in "Find Friends Abuse"

wfraser — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 03:14:12 +0000

"How dare they tell people about the insecure API we wrote and how it works!"

New comment by wfraser in "You are not a software engineer (2011)"

wfraser — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 05:50:02 +0000

The part of this metaphor that I really like is how a garden is always changing. Unlike a bridge or a building, software doesn't stand in isolation; it's always relying on other software for something. These other pieces of the system are in constant churn, and your software must change with it. This is even disregarding other factors like changing customer demands. You have to continuously prune and maintain your garden, or the weeds (continuously changing software/hardware/services/etc. environments) will choke out your plants. Software is never "done".

New comment by wfraser in "Surface Pro 2"

wfraser — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:49:06 +0000

Wow, thanks! I didn't know about that. I'll try it!

New comment by wfraser in "Surface Pro 2"

wfraser — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:47:45 +0000

Yeah, from a technical standpoint, it runs pretty well. There's still at least one hardware compat issue to be resolved (when I last tried Ubuntu Saucy beta, the wifi didn't work), but it was very performant, and looked nice.

New comment by wfraser in "Surface Pro 2"

wfraser — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 05:38:13 +0000

The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)

I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either.

Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)

New comment by wfraser in "Windows Phone nears 10% share in Europe"

wfraser — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:12:17 +0000

What's wrong with the developer onramp? I thought it was pretty painless to sign up, grab the SDK, and figure out how everything worked. Just curious what beef(s) you have with it.

New comment by wfraser in "Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home"

wfraser — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 22:54:53 +0000

Did you even read the article? It has nothing to do with EAS or Microsoft; it's Motorola software siphoning pretty much all the user's credentials off to Motorola servers.

New comment by wfraser in "New GitHub Logo"

wfraser — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:50:57 +0000

Only at larger sizes. At the 16x16px version, there isn't anymore.