username42 (u/username42)

username42 commented on Low-cost 3D printers and crowdfunding suicide 3dprototypesandmodels.com... · Posted by u/dangoldin

afafsd · 12 years ago

>I can also imagine a day where all your currently disposable plastic goods (cups, utensils, clips, etc) would be printed on demand and disposed in a hopper that would recycle them as raw material for the next round.

Is this the killer app for home 3D printing? Printing plastic spoons? The same spoons you can buy mass-produced in packs of fifty for eighty cents or something?

username42 · 12 years ago

I think printing houses is the app killer.

username42 commented on Xkcd comics which can illustrate programming questions explainextended.com/2014/... · Posted by u/MarkusWinand

InclinedPlane · 12 years ago

To be fair, the example in #4 is EXACTLY WHY IT'S BAD TO USE GOTO. It's a horrible abuse of the construct that makes program flow much more difficult to follow and should have been replaced with moving some of the code off into methods.

username42 · 12 years ago

'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers, but it's worth remembering that he made that statement in the context of an argument with Donald Knuth. Knuth won: ( http://web.archive.org/web/20070927094626/http://pplab.snu.a... See also http://web.archive.org/web/20051128093253/http://kerneltrap.... about goto

Good uses of goto are very rare with current programming languages. The only cases where I have found good uses were with languages that did not have exception handling and in each cases, there was some deficiencies in the specifications and the code containing the goto has disappeared with the corrected specifications. Maybe this was luck.

I still think it is ridiculous to hate goto.

username42 commented on Ask HN: How best to learn software design principles? · Posted by u/chaimkut

username42 · 12 years ago

Teach them. Whatever the subject, when you have to teach it to someone, your level of understanding increase. If you can find a public ready to listen to you, teach the subjects you want to master.

username42 commented on Why use www? yes-www.org/why-use-www/... · Posted by u/bergie

Tomte · 12 years ago

I have had people ask where the "www" went and what that means.

The technical "solution" is only half the story. You break people's expectations, you get questions.

username42 · 12 years ago

Do the redirect always the other way. People understand when the www appears that you have done something to help them.

username42 commented on An Awk Primer en.wikibooks.org/wiki/An_... · Posted by u/networked

jkbyc · 12 years ago

Knowing bash, sed (single-line), grep quite well, I still regularly run into problems (mostly multiline complex regex substitutions I guess) where I could use a more expressive or more efficient tool. I am thinking that I should perhaps invest in learning AWK. But then, why not go all the way and learn Perl? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

username42 · 12 years ago

I think there is no use to master bash, sed and awk. When you have a task that becomes tricky (beyond entry level) in sed, it is often easy in awk. When you have a task that becomes tricky in bash or awk, switch to a more powerful scripting language like perl/python/ruby/?. I love perl, but I feel it is getting outdated. I try to improve my programming speed in python but I am still far from my speed in perl.

username42 commented on RawGit serves raw files directly from GitHub with proper Content-Type header rawgit.com/... · Posted by u/rnyman

InclinedPlane · 12 years ago

To prevent using them as a file host. If you can just dump files (of whatever size, it doesn't really matter) onto github and serve them natively across the web then they become a file share or a CDN. They'd have to seriously lock down the rules on publicly available free repos if that happened (and they'd have a copyright nightmare on their hand as well). Whereas if they force git into the loop on the client end then it keeps them in that repo hosting butter zone.

username42 · 12 years ago

In fact I wonder why they do not have the problem yet.

username42 commented on The Unix spirit set free: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (2006) [pdf] docs.huihoo.com/plan9/Pla... · Posted by u/wtbob

username42 · 12 years ago

I love the slide where plan9 is compared to Linux (37 syscalls, 148,787 lines of code).

For me, the missing tools would be a good up to date browser (google chrome or firefox) and something like virtualbox for virtual machines. I think the browser can not work correctly without good video drivers. Libre Office would be a bonus.

username42 commented on How Apple Cheats marksands.github.io/2014/... · Posted by u/libovness

mantrax5 · 12 years ago

Apple has no dominant position in smartphones, so you may at best argue they have a dominant position specifically in their own iPhones.... But if Apple making design decisions for their iPhone product line constitutes an "abuse of dominant position" where do we draw the line exactly?

- Should Apple be forced to open all internal APIs to third party developers?

- Should Apple be offering iPhones with alternative operating systems?

- Should there be an open standard so people can build compatible iPhone clones?

No. iPhone is Apple's product, and they decide how far they will go in opening up their platform.

Third party developers are not fully trusted to do the right thing, and as you can see with Android's malware situation, it's a good thing Apple is not letting random developers do whatever they want.

Since Apple is held responsible by both developers and users to have a reliable product, when they decide to make an API public this is a huge commitment.

Apple has to guarantee said API will be supported in a reasonable way in future OS releases, it has to guarantee to users that calling said API won't result in poor UX or security vulnerabilities.

The situation is much different for Apple's own apps, as Apple can then make the personal guarantee it won't be abusing its own APIs to create poor UX and implement malware.

username42 · 12 years ago

> Apple has no dominant position in smartphones

Where do you live ? Inform yourself (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/3/comS...). Apple has 41.6% when the second one, Samsung has 26.7%

username42 commented on How Apple Cheats marksands.github.io/2014/... · Posted by u/libovness

Geee · 12 years ago

No, there is a stone in every the car but Apple hides it and you can't unhide it.

username42 · 12 years ago

Well, I have lost 7 karma points because I agree with an article.

username42 commented on How Apple Cheats marksands.github.io/2014/... · Posted by u/libovness

mantrax5 · 12 years ago

Oh yeah. Without UIPopoverController on iPhone, it's like you lease your phone, and at any moment Apple may pull the string to that UIPopoverController and take their phone back.

Do you even read what you write or you just mash the keyboard and hit "reply"?

username42 · 12 years ago

Please, do not joke about my english. This article is about the iphone that has features that are blocked by Apple. If you own the phone, you remove the block and use the feature. Take the example of a car where there would be a huge stone on the middle back sit. You can not use the middle back sit without removing the stone, but the seller of the car prohibits to remove the stone.