fbomb | 4 months ago | on: Paged Out Issue #7 [pdf]
Oh my goodness! This gives me similar vibes as the first time I picked up an issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal in the early 80's. Just awesome!
fbomb's comments
fbomb | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Books That Dramatically Transformed Your Programming Skills
Well, not exactly a book and not necessarily something I recommend everybody reads, but when I was getting started (early 80's) I purchased a copy of the source code to HDOS, the HeathKit Disk Operating System (written by J. Gordon Letwin, who went on to work on IBM's OS/2). I spent many months poring over every line of 8080 assembly language code in that massive set of bound photocopies of source code printouts. The OS itself, device drivers, command shell, assembler, BASIC interpreter...everything was there. I don't think anyone can realistically do the same thing on a modern system but that experience taught me so much about programming and software engineering.
fbomb | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?
I learned regex incidentally from reading the classic book "Software Tools" (Kernighan & Plauger). It has a chapter which briefly describes the syntax but focuses on an analysis of the code used to parse & process them (in RATFOR).
fbomb | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your policy regarding smartphones for your children?
My policy has always been to not have children.
fbomb | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?
Over the last 30+ years, I've found automata theory to be pretty much indispensable. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've run across hideously complex logic that I replaced with a simple and maintainable finite state machine.
fbomb | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Scribble Diffusion – Turn your sketch into a refined image using AI
got some cool images by keeping the owl drawing and changing the prompt to "batman on drugs"
fbomb | 4 years ago | on: The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight
fbomb | 7 years ago | on: US military to tech protestors: “We’re at war; pick a side”
"Microsoft is going to provide the U.S. military with access to the best technology – all the technology we create."
So which is it? The best technology or the technology Microsoft creates? You can't have it both ways.
fbomb | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?
The unicode power symbol looks like someone's giving you the finger. Nice.
fbomb | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How old are you (optional) and what was the last thing that you learned?
55. Just stumbled across a philosophy course online. I had always thought of philosophy as archaic, useless and boring. I could not have been more wrong.
fbomb | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Online challenge: Build a CPU from scratch
Holy crap! this brings back memories. I actually did this many years ago with real logic gates, eventually ending up with a 4-bit CPU that could address an entire 16 nybbles of RAM. That was so much fun!
fbomb | 7 years ago | on: DevTube: Searchable index of developer videos
Nice. Consider adding a favicon so that people who put it on their bookmarks bar without a name can easily distinguish it.
fbomb | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is the best Modern C++ MOOC?
I literally just finished reading an article on how the myth of learning styles keeps getting debunked - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...
fbomb | 8 years ago | on: Domain Pascal Language Reference (1987) [pdf]
I remember these machines fondly. I suppose they were pretty Unixy, but since it was the first *nix system I was ever exposed to, it was hard for me to judge. I do remember they renamed a lot of the command line tools (like fpat instead of grep).
After working on some of the console-based systems of the time (VMS, CTOS, PC-DOS), Apollo systems seemed almost magical to me. It had a mouse and I could just click on a file to edit it (it was also my first GUI).
We used their Pascal compiler to develop software for a certain government agency. The very day that we flew to DC to install the software on their systems, they let us know that they had changed some of the fundamental requirements. Back to the drawing board...
fbomb | 8 years ago | on: First Blood Transfusion: A History (2015)
My first thought was that this was a trailer for a new Rambo movie. First Blood: Transfusion
fbomb | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do you mostly program in a non-FP or non-OO style? Why?
Perhaps, but doesn't the fact that a piece of code has bugs imply that it wasn't actually written as cleverly as possible?
fbomb | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What advice would you give your 18 year old self?
I agree with you completely, but if I actually had a chance to talk to my 18-year old self, I'd tell him to put every penny he could spare into Apple ;-)
fbomb | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
YMMV. I found the style extremely distracting to the subject matter.
fbomb | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Can I get in trouble for crawling using the Googlebot user agent?
I handle a number of sites that require a login but need Google to index their content. I verify that Googlebot requests are actually coming from a domain owned by Google. I can't imagine that I'm the only one doing that.
fbomb | 9 years ago | on: Extortion extinction: Researchers develop a way to stop ransomware
Have a good backup system which keeps every version of a file for at least a few months - or is that too obvious?
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