andrewf (u/andrewf) - Readit News

andrewf commented on Ask HN: Anyone have a good solution for modern Mac to legacy SCSI converters? · Posted by u/stmw

itomato · 24 days ago

If you need to connect them physically, I think you're blocked by HBA chipset support in macOS.

There is a path, but it's not what I'd call "good". Thunderbolt to Firewire to SCSI. It's a dongle Rapunzel and you're reliant on device enclosures for power.

May be better with a native PCI-e or PCI HBA and 700W power supply and a junker ATX Linux machine to provide network shares.

andrewf · 24 days ago

You could do "network shares" as in mount the filesystem from Linux and export over Samba/NFS/etc; it would probably also be possible to export the drive as an iSCSI device and mount HFS(+) filesystems directly from the Mac.

andrewf commented on Tell HN: Properly using dishwasher reduced friction with my wife · Posted by u/xylo

EvanAnderson · 25 days ago

Last fall I stopped trying to optimize loading the dishwasher and waiting to run it until it was full. I call it "dishwasher anarchy".

Now it gets loaded haphazardly throughout the day, run at night, and emptied the next morning.

It really, really offends my sensibilities. Stuff is in the "wrong" place. We are using a lot more detergent. I assume we are using a lot more energy and water.

I haven't had any dishwasher-related fights with my wife and daughter since we started this new protocol. I guess that's a win.

andrewf · 25 days ago

> I assume we are using a lot more energy

What I've learned from visiting my own parents is, you can alleviate the energy concern, if you (1) get solar panels and (2) ban your spouse from running the dishwasher at night :P

andrewf commented on Ask HN: Help with LLVM · Posted by u/kvthweatt

andrewf · a month ago

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130108-00/?p=56...

Sounds like this is about making .OBJs that fit in the conventions set by Win32 and the Microsoft linker. If you were using Microsoft's LINK.EXE I'd look at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/nodefa... (and /Zi for the Microsoft compiler)

More generally, a lot of compiler generated code (including from LLVM IR -> native) will rely on compiler-specific runtime library functions, which aren't necessarily considered part of the "C runtime". https://wiki.osdev.org/Libgcc occupies this role for GCC-compiled code. See https://godbolt.org/z/fb75PPobz for an example (64-bit division on 32-bit x86 generates a call to ___divdi3)

andrewf commented on The compiler is your best friend blog.daniel-beskin.com/20... · Posted by u/based2

eterm · a month ago

Better yet, `assert(false, message)`, with the message what you would have written in the comment.

andrewf · a month ago

Swap the parameters around for C++ and similar langs where `assert(a, b)` evaluates the same as `(void) a; assert(b)`.

andrewf commented on Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux loss32.org/... · Posted by u/akka47

tssva · a month ago

Using Linux gets you much more hardware compatibility especially for the consumer desktop and laptop systems this is targeted towards.

andrewf · a month ago

True

andrewf commented on Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux loss32.org/... · Posted by u/akka47

sedatk · a month ago

> NT kernel ABI isn’t even all that stable itself

Can you give an example where a breaking change was introduced in NT kernel ABI?

andrewf · a month ago

https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/

(One example: hit "Show" on the table header for Win11, then use the form at the top of the page to highlight syscall 8c)

andrewf commented on Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux loss32.org/... · Posted by u/akka47

andrewf · a month ago

Starting with FreeBSD might be easier than starting with Debian then removing all the GNUisms. But perhaps not as much Type II fun.

andrewf commented on Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English npmjs.com/package/ezff... · Posted by u/josharsh

Tempest1981 · a month ago

I was surprised that macOS (QuickTime/Preview, iMovie) can't read .mp4 files. Not sure if it was due to H.265 or the audio codec. I tried using ffmpeg to convert to .mov but that also failed to open, since I guess MOV is just another container format.

Is there an easier way?

andrewf · a month ago

Try something like: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:v h264 -c:a aac out.mp4

To re-encode the content into H.264+AAC, rather than simply "muxing" the encoded bitstreams from the MP4 container into a new MOV container.

andrewf commented on We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better) blog.helix.ml/p/we-mass-d... · Posted by u/quesobob

londons_explore · 2 months ago

> have limited control over their encode pipeline.

Frustratingly this seems common in many video encoding technologies. The code is opaque, often has special kernel, GPU and hardware interfaces which are often closed source, and by the time you get to the user API (native or browser) it seems all knobs have been abstracted away and simple things like choosing which frame to use as a keyframe are impossible to do.

I had what I thought was a simple usecase for a video codec - I needed to encode two 30 frame videos as small as possible, and I knew the first 15 frames were common between the videos so I wouldn't need to encode that twice.

I couldn't find a single video codec which could do that without extensive internal surgery to save all internal state after the 15th frame.

andrewf · 2 months ago

I'm on a media engineering team and agree that applying the tech to a new use case often involves people with deep expertise spending a lot of time in the code.

I'd guess there are fewer media/codec engineers around today than there were web developers in 2006. In 2006, Gmail existed, but today's client- and server-side frameworks did not. It was a major bespoke lift to do many things which are "hello world" demos with a modern framework in 2025.

It'd be nice to have more flexible, orthogonal and adaptable interfaces to a lot of this tech, but I don't think the demand for it reaches critical mass.