thristian

10 ms·

61.
by thristian 3y ago
Author here, I didn't bother submitting this to HN because I figured it would be too niche and trivial to get much attention. Evidently I was wrong!
62.
by thristian 3y ago
The PDFium plugin that was part of Chrome was based on C++ code from Foxit. PDFjs was written in JS from day one, and (as far as I know) was not based on any previous PDF reader.
63.
by thristian 3y ago
A little of column A, a little of column B. Generally a key generator does not itself watch for mouse-movements, it just gets random noise from the OS. But the OS gets its random noise from a random number generator, and the random number
64.
by thristian 3y ago
I remember playing with this years ago, when rendering fractals at all was an accomplishment and rendering them in realtime was unheard-of. I'm glad to see it's been brought into the modern era, ported from DOS to Qt to WASM.
65.
XaoS, fast interactive real-time fractal zoomer(xaos.app)
2 points by thristian 3y ago|1 comments
66.
by thristian 3y ago
The BASIC I grew up with (Applesoft Basic) didn't have a built-in command to renumber a program, but it did have a helper tool you could run from disk. Unfortunately, it only updated the number of each line - it didn't update th
67.
by thristian 3y ago
I was hoping that would be the case! Unfortunately, the bitmap font manipulation tools I'm using (monobit¹ and BitsNPicas²) do not support putting more than one strike into an OpenType wrapper. If there's some other tool that can
68.
by thristian 3y ago
As I understand it, the Kickstart ROM wasn't ready in time for the Amiga 1000's release, so you had to boot off a Kickstart disk which loaded the "permanent" resources into RAM, then swap to the Workbench disk which load
69.
by thristian 3y ago
OpenType can contain vector outlines, hinting instructions to align those outlines to pixel boundaries at low resolutions, and also pre-rendered bitmaps for systems that don't want to run the hinting VM for each glyph. Some tools will
70.
by thristian 3y ago
Inter is one of my favourite user-interface fonts. It's great to see it's still developing!
71.
by thristian 3y ago
The site says all the games offered are shareware, freeware, demo versions, or "liberated" (i.e. officially released as freeware after they became commercially unviable). Most of the currently listed games are shareware from id So
72.
by thristian 3y ago
There's languages where a slashed circle is a letter, and a slashed zero makes things confusing. Dotted zeroes have much less opportunity for confusion in that direction. I guess type designers could emphasise the convex sides of a dot
73.
by thristian 3y ago
deadpixi's sam port[1] includes a "ssam" command, but it's just a shell-script that writes standard input to a temporary file, launches sam to run commands, then copies the temporary file to standard output - it's n
74.
by thristian 3y ago
If you'd like to try out the sam command language yourself, there's an X11 port that works quite nicely on modern POSIX systems: https://github.com/deadpixi/sam Alternatively, the vis editor combines sam&#x27
75.
by thristian 3y ago
https://pairdrop.net/ is a fork of SnapDrop with a more responsive maintainer (apparently: https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop/discussions/115 )
76.
by thristian 3y ago
Compression is all about detecting patterns in the data, usually with some kind of sliding window of past data, used to predict future data. For gzip in particular, this sliding window has a fixed size of 32KB. If the "weird" vers
77.
by thristian 3y ago
Do you have some examples of hip-hop tracks that steal well?
78.
by thristian 3y ago
> In May 2022, the MIT License of SIMH version 4 on GitHub was unilaterally modified by a contributor to make it non-free, by adding a clause that revokes the right to use any subsequent revisions of the software containing their contri
79.
by thristian 3y ago
Wikipedia says¹: > Although `&ZeroWidthSpace;` is one HTML5 named entity for U+200B, the additional names `NegativeMediumSpace`, `NegativeThickSpace`, `NegativeThinSpace` and `NegativeVeryThinSpace` (which are names used in the Wolf
80.
by thristian 3y ago
In the medieval university system, there were four fields of knowledge: medicine (MD), law (Juris Doctor, or JD), theology (ThD), or philosophy (PhD). In the centuries since, new kinds of knowledge were discovered, but they generally got sq
81.
by thristian 3y ago
"...the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language."
82.
by thristian 3y ago
Their justification is: > Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is far below 2¹⁴ = 16,384. ...and ye
83.
by thristian 3y ago
Because `echo -n` is a BSD-ism that's not supported on System V derivatives¹. It's perfectly legitimate for: echo -n "please hash this data" ...to output the bytes "-n please hash this data\n", which i
84.
by thristian 3y ago
The Unix kernel API only returns a numeric error code, no additional information. Nine times out of ten¹ the file that wasn't found is the file that you just tried to open or rename or whatever, so a language runtime can make a copy of
85.
by thristian 3y ago
I find it incredibly useful for iterating on SQL queries. Write a query, send to the database, examine the result, tweak the query a little, go around again.
86.
by thristian 3y ago
A DMCA takedown is a tool for a very specific situation, where a small-time, difficult-to-identify, near-anonymous user uploads copyrighted content to a third-party, big-time, easy-to-identify host. The copyright owner would prefer to sue
87.
by thristian 3y ago
It's a different model of file management that some people might find more familiar or comfortable. It's not my preferred style (I was a Norton Commander fan), but XTree was wildly popular at one time, there must be something to i
88.
by thristian 3y ago
One of the reasons is that there's like half a dozen different hardware revisions of the original Genesis/Mega Drive, and Sega simplified the sound hardware quite a bit over the years, changing its tone and the relative volume of
89.
by thristian 3y ago
It seems to be a convention that means "this comment contains Markdown and should be rendered in the generated documentation" as opposed to commenting out unused code or whatever.
90.
by thristian 3y ago
The Internet Archive's browser emulation is an excellent way to scratch a nostalgic itch over a lunch-break. If you'd like something a little more local, Commander Genius¹ is an open-source engine that plays all the Keen games (an

More ›