cr0sh (u/cr0sh) - Readit News

cr0sh commented on Teardown of a $1.25 LED Lightbulb electronupdate.blogspot.c... · Posted by u/teucris

himinlomax · 6 years ago

An under-fed incandescent could last centuries. However it would waste 95% of its energy as heat instead of producing light. That's actually not much of an issue if you either live in a cold climate and the heat is useful to you, or if the light is only lit on occasion (attic, cellar, closet ...).

cr0sh · 6 years ago

My wife and I were talking about what lamps we had that were LED vs fluorescent vs incandescent; one of the bulbs that we have that is of the latter is in our closet, and has been there since before we bought the house in 2002 (the house was built in 1973).

18 years now, maybe longer, but it still turns on and has yet to burn out. Of course, we don't use it much, and it's only something like 30 watts (clear bulb).

Someday, maybe, it'll get replaced.

cr0sh commented on C4: C in Four Functions (2014) github.com/rswier/c4... · Posted by u/azhenley

cestith · 6 years ago

Most of these abbreviations are well established. 'pc', 'sp', and 'a' are the names of those registers in many assembly languages.

cr0sh · 6 years ago

To clarify, you don't usually see just "a" for an accumulator, as there are usually more than one accumulator-style registers in a CPU, and in many cases they are split along byte (possibly word) boundaries.

So you end up with accumulators called "A" and "B", but are composed of registers "AX" and "AY", and "BX" and "BY", with each being one byte (or word) wide; X and Y being high and low bytes/words of the register (and dependent on "endian-ess" too).

Sometimes you even get where multiple registers can be referenced by a singular name - "D" is a popular choice, and may be made up of "A" and "B" (being low/high "registers" of the larger word). IIRC, the 6809 was like this (?) - A and B were 16 bit registers, but could be referenced as a 32-bit word "D" (or maybe I am thing of the 68k or some other architecture - it's been a long while).

The only other time I have ever seen singular letters used for registers in assembly was for very old pre-microcomputer systems (beasts like the Univac and System/360 - though I think the PDP-8 had similar style). Also some of the very early "microcontrollers" (which were more like glorified sequencers with some extra memory and rudimentary branching, if any) had similar "registers" (Radio Shack once sold, as a part of their "Science Fair" electronic kits, a "Microcomputer Trainer" that was something like a very small 4-bit microcontroller with 128 bytes of memory or something like that - to teach assembler and a bit of hardware interfacing - it had "small" registers like that referred to in single letters).

cr0sh commented on Corona Labs is shutting down, will open-source everything under MIT coronalabs.com/blog/2020/... · Posted by u/minxomat

tga · 6 years ago

I remember evaluating it around 2011 when they were first picking up speed. What put us off was that, although the simulator worked offline (and writing Lua for it was a lot of fun and 10x easier than getting into native development), the app build process happened on their servers — so it was essentially a service, not a tool. All code would have instantly become useless if they would have just pulled the plug one day.

Not sure what happened afterwards, but it’s nice to see they were able to open source what they had, and to keep it possible to build old projects locally.

*edit: removed uncertainty about building old projects locally

cr0sh · 6 years ago

I used Corona around that time - and from what I recall, projects did build locally; the only exception being that if you wanted to build an iOS version, you had to do so on a Mac with XCode installed. I also recall having to set up the Android dev environment in order to build for Android. I know that later they had where you could build on their servers, but what I recall (and I admit, it's been a while), local building was there back then.

cr0sh commented on Corona Labs is shutting down, will open-source everything under MIT coronalabs.com/blog/2020/... · Posted by u/minxomat

cr0sh · 6 years ago

This is kinda sad to see. It's been almost a decade since I last used Corona (then, it was called Ansca Corona), and I found it fun and exciting to use. My employer at the time wanted to use it to build a game app, and I spent a while messing around with it, learning Lua on the fly, and in general having fun making a "game".

I found the system to be easy to use, and relatively high performance. The only thing that was an issue - at the time - was something very strange, which kinda impacted another app we were building:

Corona had a map component, for google maps - but for some reason, it wouldn't work for Android - only for iOS! So - you could create an app with that component, but if you compiled it to install on Android, it would fail, but you could compile it for iOS and load it on an iphone and it would work fine.

At the time, we had an app idea from a client that we wanted to use Corona for, but because it needed mapping, and that didn't work, we were forced to go with another option (PhoneGap and Bootstrap Mobile), that wasn't nearly as performant - but we could embed a google map easily.

Contact with Corona revealed they were working on a fix to get the map component to work with Android, but it came too late for our purposes (and actually didn't happen until about a year or so after I had left that position and had moved on).

Anyhow - I'm glad that the system will live on, although today there are a ton of other options available for easy cross-platform mobile development. Still, I haven't found anything that worked quite as well as Corona.

cr0sh commented on Show HN: I published my first website – ShellMagic.xyz shellmagic.xyz... · Posted by u/manjana

cr0sh · 6 years ago

Gotta say thank you for this resource; I'm always using bash for one thing or another, and this will be a helpful site for the future. I've got it bookmarked for just that reason!

cr0sh commented on What's SAP? retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/dvdhsu

bgun · 6 years ago

Reminds me of a recent HN post about the uncanny survival of MS Access https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401198

cr0sh · 6 years ago

I probably posted to that one as well...

cr0sh commented on What's SAP? retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/dvdhsu

swampthinker · 6 years ago

As someone working in healthcare, I can attest to the value in getting an healthcare org to adopt standardized workflows. I'll take an org that follows process over better software that isn't used in a consistent manner.

There is too much operational and human complexity to solve healthcare with software alone.

cr0sh · 6 years ago

Years after I worked for the company I mentioned before (building an in-house VB6-based ERP system), I worked for another web applications development company who had a client I was "assigned to" to develop software for healthcare management and billing, etc.

It was all web-based - we even had a version for "mobile" (at the time which meant a ipaq personal assistant, running a version of Windows CE and a browser that made IE6 look sane).

The idea behind it was "patient-centricity"; the patient could manage, view, and "edit" their own healthcare records, and any physician on the system could have access to that patient's records (the patient would have to give approval to share with the provider).

It wasn't ever going to replace EPIC or any of the other large medical record systems, but the fact that a patient could control their own data was a significant part of the core marketing behind it - provided you could get other providers and support people on-board.

Things were going rather smoothly (but not very quickly) in the progress of the development of this app, until the client wanted to make the entire thing HIPAA compliant. At the time, this meant taking it off our in-house shared hosting environment, and get it on something else. What we found was, at the time the only option was to lease a full rack from Rackspace and use their services (and servers), as they were (supposedly) fully HIPAA compliant.

The client balked at the cost to implement such a system, and instead opted to roll their own. Then the client decided to hire their own developer (without telling us), and wanted us to backdate some HIPAA "compliancy documents" to say their system was fully compliant on a date when it wasn't. My employer thankfully decided not to go down that road, and instead to drop the client and contract (probably the best decision he ever made).

cr0sh commented on What's SAP? retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/dvdhsu

chadash · 6 years ago

> I (am actually told to) teach that changing the business to fit SAP is preferable to changing SAP to fit the business. And it's accurate advice. It shouldn't be, but it is. SAP is SAP. It doesn't care about your USP. Or your custom approach to business. As far as SAP is concerned all businesses are the same, they do the same things, and all must conform. Resistance is futile.

I've worked in companies making decisions around which ERPs to implement. You have two options: roll your own ERP or adapt your processes to an existing one.

The first approach means that you are basically committed to becoming a software company. At a minimum an ERP needs to tie together your accounting, supply chain and inventory. So it's not a simple endeavor and it's easy to mess up. You'll need a team of people to build it and you'll need ongoing support. Compared to these costs, the price that SAP or NetSuite will charge you for their ERP is trivial.

Alternatively, you can adapt your processes to an ERP. In many cases, this is the right thing to do. It means that you can use readily-available software and have practices that are good enough.

cr0sh · 6 years ago

I once worked for a company that let me go because I looked bad on their bottom line and they were looking to sell the company, around 2003. So, severance package in hand, and one week later I had a new position at another company making much more than I was originally.

Anyhow - I was essentially the sole developer of a simple ERP system written in VB6 and using an Access 2003 MDB file for storage. It was being used in-house by most of the company at that point, from billing, to shipping software and patches, to other reporting, CRM, etc. I looked bad to the bottom line because my salary was going entirely into this in-house developed product, that was producing no revenue for the company. I was a literal cost center; I don't blame them for letting me go - it was probably a good business decision...

When I was let go, I was trying to transition to postgresql for the backend (away from the MDB file), and hopefully move the frontend away from VB6 - and make the whole thing a web application in some manner.

They told me when I was let go they told me they were looking into other options to replace the software I had almost single-handedly written to manage the business.

So - I was let go, and the business was sold. Twice. Today, it's part of HP, last I was aware - about 3 years ago. That was about the time that I had to look for a new job, and talked to my former supervisor there (he'd since become VP of his department).

Yep - still using the same old software, with virtually no updates or fixes. Still running on the MDB file. And somehow, it was still all working, nearly 15 years later. I'm amazed, impressed, shocked, and also in complete wonderment how it hasn't fallen over hard since then.

As far as I know - they are still using it. I've been told that both the original company that bought them, then HP (after they bought that company), both looked at the software and wanted to monetize it - everyone who's seen it has been fairly impressed with it, from what I understand. But, because it's so tightly integrated with the business, plus that it was never designed to be modular and salable, has meant that without a major refactor, it can't be easily done.

Honestly, I'm glad it can't - I'd do so many things differently today that I didn't do then (and if done, they could probably sell it as well); it's the kind of code that I know some developer will look at, then want to track me down for a good ol' fashioned murdering - or at least to beat me with a baseball bat.

cr0sh commented on What's SAP? retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/dvdhsu

cr0sh · 6 years ago

SAP is a company (and software system) that exists to buy up other company's software, business, and services and then integrate that all into SAP's "core" systems, and do so in such a poor manner that their name and the system has almost become synonymous with the words and phrases "nasty", "unreliable", "run away now", "if you know what's good for ya" and a host of others.

However, due to their entrenchment in various other markets (and who knows if there is any graft or other under-the-table business going on), they continue to manage to exist, and scary enough sell their products to new victims (ahem - customers).

SAP is the old-is-new-again-we're-IBM type of business; nobody ever got fired for buying SAP (but the golden parachute was nice)?

Ok - hyperbole and I don't really know what I'm talking about, so the above should probably be ignored...

...that said - I don't think I'm too far off, either.

cr0sh commented on Programming an HP-15C (2013) blog.plover.com/brain/hp-... · Posted by u/luu

edeion · 6 years ago

Given how hard it can be for me to focus when the web is just one click away, these dedicated tools are such a boon. Plus the hacker touch of these programming languages has something lovely.

(I don't get what's so funny with the 38x3, though...)

cr0sh · 6 years ago

Yeah - I'm not mathematically inclined enough to understand what would be so funny about the 38x^3 denominator either?

Unless it's something that would cause an error due to memory/register size constraints, or cause the calculator to sit there forever on some of the other larger squares or test values due to 1986 speed of the ALU or whatever is in the calc?

My gut assumption is that it's some mathematics inside joke of some sort...