kosma

15 ms·

121.
by kosma 10y ago
Branch rot is a known problem, and it hints at a larger issue lurking somewhere in the organization - usually either inability to ship or inability to keep things in order.
122.
by kosma 10y ago
This workflow, like all others, is just a formalization of some reality. The reality is that many organizations and teams run on nothing but trunk - and it more-or-less works on them. Some teams work by building blocks separately and then j
123.
by kosma 10y ago
This seems like a good place to get inspiration from, or quickly look up file formats and conventions - but actually using it? That would be an overkill. (This template, alone, is 1000 lines long, counted with wc -l. The last Python project
124.
by kosma 10y ago
PS. You seem to me like a person bent on building The Next Big Thing, reading up on things, accumulating knowledge, having big expectations... I used to be like this most of my life. If you want to actually cash in on that knowledge, you ne
125.
by kosma 10y ago
> I must confess my curiosity at the type of copy protection you referred to. I was thinking you electrically glitched the EEPROM in a dongle, but that doesn't explain the asm code. Load exploit/dumper code over JTAG, then glit
126.
by kosma 10y ago
My advice? Start small. You might want to build a car, but in order to do this, you first need to build a dozen skateboards before moving on to bicycles. As for Secure Boot - it takes expertise in breaking things to build something unbrea
127.
by kosma 10y ago
Whenever I see an inexperienced young hardware startup striving to build even just 1000 of some widget, I feel sorry for them. They often go twice over the planned budget both in terms of time and money... and only after several screwups th
128.
by kosma 10y ago
My point is that even if your supplier plays fair, the manufacturer may change the designs slightly and you either dont't get the PCN or fail to understand the implications of a change. We had a case once where a manufacturer added a m
129.
by kosma 10y ago
I don't remember, unfortunately, as I wasn't the one handling logistics, I just spec'd out parts we needed. If anything, here's a bit of advice: don't ever assume your supply chain is 100% clean - more than once we&
130.
by kosma 10y ago
This was so entertaining & insightful to read I ended up buying the actual book [1]. Thank you. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F9IV64W/
131.
by kosma 10y ago
Hook your phone to your computer via USB and try to invoke that command on the serial port that appears; you'll get a PPP connection right away. It won't work with the dialpad app.
132.
by kosma 10y ago
And then killed that convenience by literally bricking counterfeit chips. Most users have no way of knowing whether or not their chips are genuine - and, what's worse, most electronics manufacturers have no way of knowing either, becau
133.
by kosma 10y ago
Speaking out of curiosity, can you name some companies that provide NDA-laden USB-serial bridges? I'm painfully aware that it's hard to even know such products exist, especially when your production volume barely runs into hundred
134.
by kosma 10y ago
I've seen this kill entire companies in an extremely slow, painful death. I used to fight this... These days, as soon as I see a Chief Architect or a CTO start to social their way to some technical goal, I just leave the company - for
135.
by kosma 10y ago
You'd be surprised how little has changed in that regard. Establishing a data session, from the early GPRS days until today's LTE, is still: ATD*99***1# Even if the underlying technology has completely changed, the interf
136.
by kosma 10y ago
> One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set. Or who the younger guys curse for being stubborn and not adapting to reality. I've seen plenty experienc
137.
by kosma 10y ago
It used to be "just" FTDI... but then other manufacturers and endless copycats jumped in, which resulted in a XKCD #927 situation. As if we didn't already have a USB-CDC standard... (For an interesting side story, search for
138.
by kosma 10y ago
Wait until you find out that "coder" originally meant "someone who encodes messages into Morse". And if you start digging into the word "code", you'll find it comes from latin "codex" which is a
139.
by kosma 10y ago
And don't forget the lace card - a card punched full of DEL. Having every single hole punched, it was so fragile it would crumple up and jam the reader. People today think they're smart 'cause they invent things like DRAM row
140.
by kosma 10y ago
One pleasant upside of such systems is that the protocols are usually so simple you can reverse engineer them in a couple evenings. I can't count the times I ended up deriving the serial protocol from some undocumented, baroque source
141.
by kosma 10y ago
> I'm happy to have gotten mostly rid of this. Gone are the days of choosing motherboards based on the LPT support, and praying that the JTAG drivers would work on an OS upgrade. It's still there, and not going anywhere - the o
142.
by kosma 10y ago
> They need to step up their game - it started off strong but then went legacy. They didn't go anywhere... it's the world that moved forward. It just show how short-term and fad-like many startup ideas are, and how much timing
143.
by kosma 10y ago
It's the other way round. It's a specific kind of personality that's easily attracted to Lisp, not a programming language that makes you special.
144.
by kosma 10y ago
Or just exceptional brilliance. At the extreme end of IQ or similar scales, aspects of one's very existence become eerily similar to ADHD symptoms - except the mind isn't understimulated because of chemical imbalance; it's un
145.
by kosma 10y ago
You're confusing someone too talented for their own good with a self-entitled asshole. Being a bipolar programmer is not glamorous, and certainly not a point of pride; if anything, it's extremely hard and frustrating - not just co
146.
by kosma 10y ago
Suppose the person who illegally ripped the ROM also altered it in some way. Does this constitute derivative work, with that person holding partial copyright to the result? Or does the illegal copying preclude such possibility?
147.
by kosma 10y ago
> It needs a bit of getting used to if you only programmed dynamic or scripting languages. I'm an embedded C developer. Our shop doesn't let single-letter variables pass in code review.
148.
by kosma 10y ago
This might just be my Python upbringing, but... am I the only one to be troubled by Go's single-letter words? I've always found Go code very hard to read because it isn't self-descriptive at all.
149.
by kosma 10y ago
Even if the miracle occurs and you get bought out and get shittons of money thrown at you, you've already built a company with a "fake it till you make it" culture. Even if you get to hire great new engineers to build your pr
150.
by kosma 10y ago
I worked for a startup that had basically the right idea but proper execution took so long we ran out of runway. The first iteration of the product was built in an extremely haphazard, cowboy way - and took months, if not years, to refactor

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