Hacker News: yuubi

New comment by yuubi in "nic.funet.fi: Serving freely distributable files with FTP since 1990"

yuubi — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 21:35:44 +0000

now do that without dragging all the data through your workstation.

New comment by yuubi in "Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning"

yuubi — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 21:56:10 +0000

as someone who doesn't use heroku, so disregard my opinion:

i'd probably prefer feces-by-email to surprise database deletion

New comment by yuubi in "A Tale of Two Feet"

yuubi — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 16:12:52 +0000

the inch changed in 1959 from exactly 1/39.37 m to exactly 2.54 cm; the survey foot is for compatibility with large-scale measurements based on old inches.

New comment by yuubi in "“Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)"

yuubi — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 19:03:01 +0000

the story seems to be set in a world that uses gas to weld steel as part of a production process, making a blue flame. are there any torches that can weld steel and make a blue flame? does anyone use manual gas welding in automotive production‽

New comment by yuubi in "Canonical shows ads in the Ubuntu CLI"

yuubi — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 14:00:25 +0000

part of the deal with cable tv a few decades ago was that the cable channels didn't have ads because you paid for them directly every month. (local stations obviously had their usual ads).

New comment by yuubi in "Gems from the man page trenches (2016)"

yuubi — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 05:01:26 +0000

sunos4 disk devices were named like xy0a or xd2h or sd1b. the first 2 letters were the controller (xy/xd were different types of xylogics smd controllers, sd scsi), the number was the unit number, and the letter was the partition, with some fairly strong conventions (a=root, b=swap, c=whole disk, d..h=other)

New comment by yuubi in "A Microfluidic D-subminiature Connector (2013)"

yuubi — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 17:42:01 +0000

if a pin expects rs232, and you give it 120v ac, or saline,

New comment by yuubi in "Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes"

yuubi — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 23:38:55 +0000

for instance, the shoe-mount roulette predictor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

New comment by yuubi in "Apple warns suppliers to follow China rules on 'Taiwan' labeling"

yuubi — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 16:25:10 +0000

i recently got an electronic product that said 中國 instead of 中国 on the label (traditional vs simplified characters). i wonder if this was meant as a subtle indication that it was from traditional-character land.

New comment by yuubi in "Specifying Spring '83"

yuubi — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 03:03:21 +0000

the search is to generate a valid signing key pair, where "valid" means the last 28 bits are as specified. once a poster generates such a key, they can use it for as long as it's valid.

New comment by yuubi in "Tell HN: We are trying to get tail calls into the WebAssembly standard"

yuubi — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 02:11:56 +0000

erlang/otp gen_fsm maybe?

you define a function with a clause per state (and some other args including the incoming message), and each clause returns a tuple with the new state and some other stuff. the loop is part of the framework, and handles generic otp stuff like updating code in a running system.

New comment by yuubi in "Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed"

yuubi — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 05:59:48 +0000

Standard C provides only a few ways to obtain valid pointers. implementations can define behaviors in cases that the standard leaves undefined, such as allowing more cases of casts of integers to pointers than the standard defines (common in embedded-land), or functions like mmap or sbrk. so you or your chip vendor could define FOO_REG as (uint32_t )0x80001234 and use it as if it were a variable.

Olde C used to just let you use integers as struct pointers, and there was only one struct member namespace. so code like this was valid and did an integer-size write to address 0177770. old unix did this for device register access; see the lions book.

struct { int integ; };

f() { 0177770->integ = 012345; }

New comment by yuubi in "Eve Online is getting Microsoft Excel support"

yuubi — Sun, 08 May 2022 04:40:55 +0000

however, the safe logoff button avoids emergency warp. in exchange for sitting in space without maneuvering or activating modules for 30 seconds, you disappear immediately when the time runs out. at least this was the mechanic a couple of years ago.

New comment by yuubi in "Ask HN: What happened to Twitter poison pill?"

yuubi — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 01:18:20 +0000

the action held up; the court upheld it.

New comment by yuubi in "35mm cinema film and digital audio"

yuubi — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 17:12:11 +0000

Dolby digital could be used without replacing much existing equipment: the sound head looked like it bolted right onto the 1940s-vintage projector in the one installation I've seen. would look like it belonged if the projector wasn't gray wrinkle paint and the sound head smooth black finish. yes, several parts have been updated, including the light source and a platter system, but again it looks like none of this involved doing any violence to the actual projector.

New comment by yuubi in "C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines"

yuubi — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 19:36:59 +0000

the 6502 has a single 16-bit address space with some parts (zero page, stack) addressable by means other than full 16-bit addresses. the 8051 has 16-bit read-only code space, 16-bit read/write external memory space, and 8-bit internal memory space, except half of it is special: if you use indirect access (address in an 8-bit register), you get memory. but if you encode that same address literally in an instruction, you get a peripheral register.

at least that's the part I remember

New comment by yuubi in "Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)"

yuubi — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 05:11:22 +0000

GPL 2 says "machine-readable", which I read as meaning on a tape or ftp site or something in a useful form, not handwritten on paper or similarly useless form. Also, I doubt obfuscated code would comply with the "preferred form" part.

New comment by yuubi in "Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?"

yuubi — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 16:11:54 +0000

POP3 defines separate retrieve and delete requests. Some servers lose messages when you retrieve them, but I've only seen that misbehavior on major ISPs.

New comment by yuubi in "Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook"

yuubi — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 05:30:55 +0000

I don't think I've ever seen any of the stickers from the telegram company actually used in a chat. I've seen lots of stickers that people have had drawn, though, sometimes even used by the people who commissioned them.

New comment by yuubi in "Handling argc==0 in the Linux kernel"

yuubi — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:13:04 +0000

The ldd program that lists the shared libraries used by an executable at least used to exec with an empty argv, which the dynamic linker detected and listed libraries instead of linking and running. I learned that when I screwed up an inetd configuration and saw a list of libraries instead of the desired results.

Edit: just tried on windows 10 WSL, and it had a sad (blue screen).