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dadhacker.com
Personal blog · dadhacker.comprogrammingcareer
dadhacker.com is a personal blog at dadhacker.com about programming and career. Since 2007, 60 different Hacker News readers have linked it 103 times, most often “Donkey Kong and Me”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Donkey Kong and Me6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2008-03-08
- Newton Storage History (2007)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2007-12-03
- Patching the Newton4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-07-04
- The Atari ST, Part 23 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-04-10
- How the Atari ST Almost Had Real Unix (2011)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-03-11
- /blog/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-03-06
- Clownspace 2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-02-21
- Keeping sharp2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-07-22
- Harlan and Me2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-02-06
- Some assembly required - on writing assemblers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-09-04
What Hacker News says?
I wrote a transactional object store for an early PDA that could use both vanilla battery-backed RAM and flash media. Took about six back-to-back hundred hour weeks (and had a surprisingly short tail of bugs). http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=948 Later, I hooked the store up to the NewtonScript garbage collector in a way that let us have garbage-collected semantics for persistent memory-mapped objects. This let us d…
Comment linking /blog/?p=948
on “Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?”Submitted How the Atari ST Almost Had Real Unix (2011) as a story · 153 points
HN discussionIf you finish these and want more, it's worth skimming back through time on http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ Bemused frustration is such an entertaining writing style. Alas, my attempts tend to end up as incoherent raging. Maybe switching to bourbon would help.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Essays from the funniest man in Microsoft Research”Submitted Patching the Newton as a story · 106 points
HN discussionRob Thomsett had an article titled "Estimation Games" published in American Programmer, 1996: > It is our belief that over the 30 plus years of commercial computing has developed a series of sophisticated political games that have become a replacement for estimation as a formal process. > More importantly, like all good games they are passed on from generation to generation by "children" I.T. people learning from "a…
Comment linking /blog/?p=2267
on “Why Fogbugz lost to Jira”Submitted 30 years of C as a story · 101 points
HN discussionI wrote code for a MCU that did power sequencing on a consumer product. 4K of code, 2K of RAM, some EEPROM, a 16Mhz clock . . . 18 cents. It was a fun little project: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1911
Comment linking /blog/?p=1911
on “The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers”Submitted Things I'm not allowed to do anymore as a story · 83 points
HN discussionI've done several embedded projects in the past 5-10 years years. Mostly it's a matter of writing just enough assembly to get things running, and flipping into C when humanly possible because life is short . Talk to old video game veterans [waves]. We wrote tons of assembly because there wasn't much choice. But these were largely 8-bit processors, the compilers weren't any good and the code space was constrained. Bu…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1911
on “Introduction to ARM Assembly Basics”Submitted Newton Storage History (2007) as a story · 78 points
HN discussionhttp://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2267
Comment linking /blog/?p=2267
on “Ask HN: How do you manage your manager?”Submitted It's called fdisk because as a story · 49 points
HN discussionI've since also found a comment on an interesting blog post in which one of the original designers is quoted in saying that virtual memory was not a consideration for the 68000 initially: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1383 Though qualified with "until the design was almost complete", making the answer to my question (as often) much more fuzzier than I thought. And another commenter speculates it was Apollo with t…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1383
on “RISC Is Unscalable”Submitted Donkey Kong and Me as a story · 47 points
HN discussionA story from the GP: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987
Comment linking /blog/?p=987
on “Playing Atari with Six Neurons”Submitted DadHacker on why C is staying as a story · 38 points
HN discussion> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!) The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider: http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ ht…
Comment linking /blog/
on “The need to code”Submitted On Reviews as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI'll just add that I found the author's story of how he started working at Atari in the first place[1] far more interesting than the present article. [1] - http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987
Comment linking /blog/?p=987
on “How the Atari ST Almost Had Real Unix (2011)”Submitted Shipping (circa 1995) as a story · 30 points
HN discussionI've worked in groups where we've had mid-afternoon "walkies," and about eight of us would participate (not all on the same day). We got a lot of interesting engineering issues out of the way (in addition to the usual bantering and social interaction that helps glue a small team together). When no one else wanted to go on a walk, I would still go. Got some interesting designs out of it (for instance I designed an MM…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1383
on “The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk”Submitted This Is Not Your Daddy's OS as a story · 24 points
HN discussionFWIW, here's one of my more popular posts: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987 There are a bunch more, but nothing that really covers my early experience with Unix. Something about "common tools of the late 1970s line-oriented computing environments" might be an interesting subject, we'll see . . .
Comment linking /blog/?p=987
on “GNU ed 1.15”Submitted Patching the Newton as a story · 17 points
HN discussionAn article I wrote a while back, largely about how assembly is not dead: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1911 That project was using a CPU costing less than twenty cents to control the power of a consumer product. Code space mattered a lot, and doing the project entirely in a high-level language would have doubled the part cost. When you're talking quantities in the tens of millions, saving ten or twenty cents on t…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1911
on “Assembly Language: Still Relevant Today”Submitted Building the Atari ST as a story · 17 points
HN discussionMy experience at the U of MD (probably dated, but man your summary sounds familiar...): http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=755
Comment linking /blog/?p=755
on “If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)”Submitted How the Atari ST almost had Real Unix as a story · 14 points
HN discussionOne perspective is that negotiation of schedule and resources is often nothing resembling estimation but is a political game. Ed Yourdon's book "Death March" has a chapter about Negotiation . http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/013143635X/samplechapt... There's a list of "negotiation games" that, sadly, you'll probably recognise. And a bit of more practical advice: >> The problem I have with “estimate” is that I u…
Comment linking /blog/?p=2267
on “All late projects are the same (2011) [pdf]”Submitted Build times sneak up on you. as a story · 13 points
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