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Anonymous4C54D6

34 karma · joined August 2, 2018

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Anonymous4C54D6··on Gresham’s Law: Bad Drives Out Good as Time Passes (2009)
Meh. If you have two coins that are nominally worth the same but one is actually worth more - because it can, in a pinch, be melted down for a valuable resource - I wouldn't call this the bad driving out the good.

Of course the point that bad behavior may give a higher fitness score is still true.

I also like the idea of lemon market's in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons In short and very simplified: if the customer cannot tell the good products from the bad products he will not pay the price of the good products and so the good products disappear.

Anonymous4C54D6··on The Intensional Spreadsheet
So, what happened to all of these? I feel like a multidimensional spreadsheet would be a great alternative to things like MS Access.
Anonymous4C54D6··on Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
As way-too-often, I think the solution should be a good IDE. There is nothing stopping your IDE from completing "foo" as "module1.foo" and offering "module2.foo" as well if it exists. Alternatively the IDE could just display "module1.foo" instead of foo because that is what the import dictates.

As always with dynamic things and editing code for them, this will be more difficult to get right when imports are dynamic.

Anonymous4C54D6··on Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
Serverless is about running functions this is about distributing their code. I agree that there is some overlap but different problems are being solved.
Anonymous4C54D6··on The PGP Problem
Hi Thomas et al.! Good write-up and with several software suggestions that I didn't know. Excellent! I think one thing you are missing is an "alternative" for the identity problem. I somewhat agree that all long-term keys are a problem but how do we build an identity out of a bunch of keys for different systems, covering privacy concerns, with some sort of key transparency to detect attacks, ... I think this would be a very interesting post from you guys that I would love to read. ;)
Anonymous4C54D6··on When it comes to composition and length, passwords mostly don't matter
This article is slightly inconsistent.

All those arguments for why a password's strength doesn't matter because the attackers gets the exact one have one important conclusion: Don't reuse your password.

And then there are a bunch of arguments that the strength mostly doesn't matter but the password shouldn't be too weak.

So we end up with having to remember lot's of non-trivial passwords and now the conclusion should be to use a password manager and certainly not that your password "mostly doesn't matter".

What sadly mostly still doesn't matter is MFA because it is a site-specific pain to set up and use.

Anonymous4C54D6··on Writing a small ray tracer in Rust and Zig
Also, https://www.arewewebyet.org/ is somehow trying to provide a little bit of this but fails to actually recommend the best option.
Anonymous4C54D6··on Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL
This actually looks a lot cooler than the OP. :)

Edit: oh wait...chrome only

Anonymous4C54D6··on CSS Grid Level 2 – subgrid is coming to Firefox
Oh...oh...the numbering is 1 based. O_o
Anonymous4C54D6··on A Sealed Garden That Was Watered Once in 53 Years (2017)
Unfortunately in German but still pretty easy to get some information out of and it has DIY guides: https://ulfsoltau.wordpress.com/
Anonymous4C54D6··on Show HN: CSSFX – Click-to-copy CSS effects
I especially dislike most of these because they don't actually feel very responsive. The animations are so slow that quickly hovering something looks jarring and waiting for the animation just feels wrong.
Anonymous4C54D6··on Interface Dispatch (2018)
The ascii art is broken.
Anonymous4C54D6··on TKE: Modern Tcl/Tk-based text editor
That sort of misses the point of comparing different editors. :)
Anonymous4C54D6··on TKE: Modern Tcl/Tk-based text editor
So, Hackernews, here is what I want you to do. Create a website with "solve this with your editor" challenges where everybody can upload screencasts and compete. :)

An obvious metric would be /time to completion/ but I would also be interested to see /can be done with mouse only while drinking coffee/ or in general /can be done one-handed/, /can be done left handed/ (so the mouse is free) or maybe /keystrokes+clicks/ instead of general timing because it takes the typing speed out of it. Some metric that measures how many shortcuts you have to memorize would be great, too.

Now somebody go and do it! :)

Anonymous4C54D6··on Why [Insert Thing Here] Is Not a Password Killer
Has anybody made a list of [Insert Thing Here]s? I'm curious what kind of trade-offs they offer.
Anonymous4C54D6··on FrontPage 98: Elegant and Exquisite (1997)
I miss this. Web pages were just data not programs.
Anonymous4C54D6··on Generative Art Finds Its Prodigy
You can't say generative art without saying demoscene.
Anonymous4C54D6··on Pandoc
Just reading C-c C-f C-b is an issue for me and I haven't even tried to remember and type it yet.
Anonymous4C54D6··on Lubuntu is taking a new direction
How about we use a raspberry pi as a definition of an "old" machine? It's the most popular low powered system. Which distribution would you use?