Hacker News Reader

Adaptiveon Show HN: Plot directly in your terminal with matplotlib

iTerm2 is nice, but Linux has a zillion terminal emulators. I'm running images inside of urxvt right now using w3m. https://twitter.com/ethanschoonover/status/83422756684828672...

Adaptiveon The farmer who built her own broadband

Worth reading Tim Wu's "The Master Switch". He has a chapter that discusses the early history of wiring up the United States for telephony and how in the 1890s many of the early telephone lines in rural America were run by farmers (based on cheap "squirrel line" wire often just nailed to existing fence lines).

This is followed by the inevitable buy out of these rural telcos and the even more inevitable shuttering of what (for AT&T) was unprofitable business.

Wu, T. (2010). The master switch: the rise and fall of information empires (pp. 48-49). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Adaptiveon A world without the Mac Pro

Out of three daily desktop drivers, one is an XPS 13, one an old repurposed T3500 xeon, and one a Mac Pro 2011 tower. Arch runs faster and smoother on that Mac Pro than OS X.

I only really miss Adobe, but I was a heavy user of it. VMs/Wine aren't the same.

Adaptiveon A world without the Mac Pro

In 05 I was based in Asia. Macs were edge cases. From 99-03 I ran online ops for a large ad agency network in Asia. PCs were by far the norm outside of the video departments. By 07 I worked in the states for a mac software firm, so I was definitely no outlier by then.

Adaptiveon A world without the Mac Pro

"Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change."

When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platform was, I said! And it was!

The platform I switched to in 2005 wasn't Linux. It was OS X.

In 10 years the world has changed and today if you are in most of the "creative" professions, not using a Mac is the exception. You can today make a lot of arguments against desktop linux, yet for the past several years I've run it exclusively on all my main systems (laptops and desktops, work and home).

10 years ago, plenty of Windows users couldn't imagine a world in which Macs were where they are today. I mean couldn't imagine. The way Mac enthusiasts can't imagine desktop linux today. The parallels aren't exact. They don't need to be. I am neither predicting success or failure. I am simply pointing out that imagination fails and it is a mistake to say "that will probably never change."

Adaptiveon Ask HN: Learning to code, without a computer?

In junior high we had a couple Apple IIs and a lot of IBM Selectrics.

We learned to code by typing out programs on the selectrics...

Adaptiveon G Suite: intelligent tools designed for teams

I agree fully on the lame way Google rolls out (or fails to roll out) key features for Google Apps. Even when features do roll out, they are sometimes incomplete, for example, you can't set up Google Music family accounts with Google Apps accounts. Dumb. I like Google Music but Spotify is easier for me to use with my family's various google apps accounts.

However, there is one VERY important difference: data ownership and privacy. Google Apps for Work (and edu) accounts, which I use for various organizations as well as even for my own personal, single-user domain, have much better data ownership and privacy terms:

See: https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en

    Does Google use my organization’s data in Google Apps
    services or Cloud Platform for advertising purposes?

    No. There are no ads in Google Apps Services or Google Cloud
    Platform, and we have no plans to change this in the future.
    We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other
    Google Apps services. Google does not collect or use data in
    Google Apps services for advertising purposes.

    The process is different for our free offerings and the
    consumer space. For information on our free consumer
    products, be sure to check Google's Privacy and Terms page
    for more consumer tools and information relating to consumer
    privacy.

Adaptiveon Valve Steam Machine selling very poorly

Steam Link definitely undercuts sales. It's a great experience if you have a steam pc in the house.

But steam box isn't dead. It's not like a console where the platform IS the hardware. Steam's platform is... Steam. Valve can keep at this. Steam compatible games are on the increase.

I think this is still toe in the water stuff for Valve.

Wait till Half Life 3 is a steam box exclusive. ;)

Adaptiveon Apple's forgotten virtual-reality project QuickTime VR

In 1996-97 I was working at an anthropology center in Thailand. I was using quicktime VR to capture the interiors Thai temples and cultural heritage objects in 3d. We used a gigantic pivoting rig for the large objects.

This was all on film cameras (nikons). We had film scanners (and film printers for creating presentations), the works (a special tripod head was used for the interior shots).

This was back when you had to use MPW (mac programmers workbench) to do the actual stitching.

I'm sure all those photos are sitting in some government office still (or maybe in that center) and could even be reprocessed today, in a MUCH easier manner.

Adaptiveon The fall of Salon.com

I stopped reading after their horrific redesign a while back (it has since gone through some other mediocre rework). It was so hamfisted and mirrored the decay of content.

Back in the early days I read Salon regularly. It was such a huge disappointment when things went off the rails.

Adaptiveon Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

I understand this concern. I've helped deploy chromebooks and linux based laptops and pcs at my daughters school. I am pro open source and would love to see lots of digging into understanding the systems. However I am also in favor of chromebooks. Here's why:

The alternative to chromebooks isn't a glorious world of non-locked down non-cloud dependent machines. It's a world of poorly managed, crappy windows boxes. A world where students pass around USB keys. A world that is at least as locked down as a chromebook but much less secure and in many ways less flexible.

Chromebooks, as locked down and hermetically sealed as they are as an ecosystem, are great for one simple reason: they free up time and resources. I'd rather see a fleet of chromebooks that are dead simple to manage and deploy and then take all that extra time and money and spend it on equipment a linux or osx or whatever based lab full of machines students can hack on and learn to code on and hook up to actuators or whatever they want to do.

90% of computer management in a school is dealing with day to day "can't print / how to load a document / etc". I've seen this completely evaporate at my daughter's school after rolling out chromebooks. It's amazing.

So bring on chromebooks as locked down, easy to manage dedicated "get homework done" devices and free up time and money (because man are they cheap) to teach programming and hardware and everything else in a real computer lab.

Adaptiveon “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

CUPS is better, no doubt. And from a sysadmin perspective CUPS is great, but there are still crazy gotchas.

Part of this is the byzantine config of network discovery, CUPS, driver sources, etc. A big part of the problem is the pieces may be there but distros have done a mediocre job getting everything together on this in the best way for the user.

Adaptiveon “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

I've noticed that printing is still one of the poorest UX aspects of *nix/OSS and regularly seems to suffer from errors so egregious that they can only be attributed to OSS devs not dogfooding these features. I'm assuming they just don't print much (I mean, we ALL print less than 20 years ago, but all the more reason to test these features which, when you need them to work you REALLY need them to work).

Adaptiveon Mosh: the mobile shell

This. Here's a handy zsh alias that I use:

    alias tmosh='() {mosh $* -- sh -c "tmux a || tmux"}'

so I can mosh into any of my ssh aliases and resume my tmux session seamlessly

Adaptiveon NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

associative arrays are one of the biggest v4 advantages

Adaptiveon Magic Leap: A New Morning [video]

Great video. Was really hoping the baby would get up and do something when you clicked on it.

Only partially joking. There was a mental pause where I stopped to think whether something was going to occur. Testament to the overall quality of the AR.

Adaptiveon Games with creative copy protection (2013)

those that ran commodore 64s will remember the same with the 1541 drive units.

copy protection involved various methods of introducing errors onto disks. this played hell with the drive head alignment and sounded terrible.

see: http://c64preservation.com/dp.php?pg=protection

Adaptiveon Jerks, Asshats, and the Unstable Politics of Civility [video]

rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-4 is the higher resolution stream, fwiw.

Adaptiveon Dell’s Skylake XPS 13, Precision workstations now come with Ubuntu preinstalled

I have the previous gen xps 13 9350 in matte 1080p and it's great. I don't want higher res or touch. Plus lower power. I do wish I had 16GB in it, but that wasn't an option.

Adaptiveon Blockly is a library for building visual programming editors

I picked up a chromebook for my daughter the other day and was looking for web based programming apps. I came across "Run Marco", built using Blockly, which is fairly basic at this point but seems to be under active development.

https://www.allcancode.com/runmarco

(in the CWS https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/run-marco/objdeaib... )

Worth checking out if you have a child and you're looking for a lightweight web based programming intro.

Adaptiveon It was once socially acceptable to send children by post [pdf]

I'd like to point out that this is effectively VPNing your child on a USPS port.

Adaptiveon Automated encrypted swapfiles

I can believe it. On the XPS 13, even when modifying or NULLing the master password on the internal sata drive, the unit's BIOS will reassign the BIOS (UEFI) admin password as a valid SED drive password, with no user intervention.

It's really just an 'in case of (casual) theft' level of encryption as far as I'm concerned. Good enough on the systems I'm using it on. For everything else, there's LUKS.

Adaptiveon Automated encrypted swapfiles

Another alternative: Self Encrypting Drives (which can be managed on Linux with hdparm).

I'm using this currently on my XPS 13 (2015). Works great. However given the architecture of SED and its implementation in this case, it's not as trustworthy as LUKS, for example.

For general laptop security not involving government intervention, I consider it good enough.

Adaptiveon Off the Grid, but Still Online

Came in to this post thinking of Joey as well. I use multiple utilities he's written. All on a small laptop and solar power. I don't know how much has changed since '12, but there is a nice summary of his infrastructure here: https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/

Adaptiveon The Little Printf

The little printf interjected: No, that's not what I mean, and he then added I mean it's funny that tools are meant to solve problems for us, but for you, the tools themselves have become a problem.

HN homework should be to re-read that section a couple of times.

Adaptiveon LogMeIn acquires Lastpass

FWIW, regarding the ongoing complaints about the LP UI, they just released a beta update to their chrome extension a couple days ago. Still a ways to go, but they are/have been clearly working on the end user experience.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lastpass-prebuild-...

Adaptiveon Inside the Creation of the Microsoft Surface Book

I own an SP3 and ran Arch Linux on it for many months of constant roaming use, sitting, at tables, in bed, etc. I do own the detachable keyboard. I can say from extensive experience that it is very awkward to use on your lap compared to a true laptop.

The problem is that the center of gravity is under the screen/kickstand, not the base. The new book looks like a much better option in that regard.

Adaptiveon PaperBack – How to store data on a single A4/Letter sheet

Not 100,000 years, but if you're looking for something that will last longer than paper, I recommend... paper. Rag paper. 100% rag, acid free copier/laser paper should be available at most office supply stores.

I'd be more worried about toner de-lamination than paper deterioration in that case.

Adaptiveon WIRED gives Apple News exclusive story – future of monetization?

This case isn't the future of monetization, it's just the present of marketing. Dollars to doughnuts that Apple paid for this, directly or indirectly.

Adaptiveon Chromebooks Gaining on iPads in School Sector

Google Cloud Print is definitely a weak link in my opinion. I've set up a full chromebook deployment for my daughter's school including rollout of GCP, and there are still occasional hiccups with printing (for example management of a stuck queue is obfuscated).

However it has improved a lot and management (once you get your head around it) is really great.

For example, you can easily provision printers to either groups or devices, so teachers can be provisioned on the user level while students are restricted to printing from provisioned devices.