Hacker News Reader

Donchon The Genius of Winding Paths

Local legend says that Birkenhead Park was an influence to Olmsted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkenhead_Park#Influence

Donchon Garry Shandling has died

Very sad. Here's some gold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfNHX_gVKJ0

Watch all seasons of The Larry Sanders Show!

Donchon Stockfighter Developer Hub

Here's another one :-)

https://github.com/donovanhide/stockfighter

Based on the docs and only tested against the unauthenticated endpoints so far...

Donchon Russ Cox: Go, Open Source, Community

People subscribe to Go lists because they want to discuss technical aspects of a programming language. For other topics, there are other venues.

Yes, and for highlighting off-topic subjects, there is the simple moderator acronym "OT". A rigid rule book and enforcement policy has nothing to do with free speech. It's all about trying to balance the inequalities in the tech sector. Unfortunately, a rule book is not going to solve that problem. The cynic in me just thinks this a conference "feel-good" announcement planned as a result of Googlers feeling bad about the fact that they are a 83% male workforce.

If the real problem is going to be solved, it's got to be about encouraging and educating people from all genders and races to code. That starts much earlier than any engagement in online communities. If the output of schools and colleges of trained coders was balanced, all the horror stories of harassment and abuse would soon become history as the workforce also becomes balanced, in my opinion.

I strongly dislike the idea of self-appointed judiciaries. Mistakes happen. The nuances of behaviour of people with mental health issues is likely to get caught up in these rule books. That's why we have courts, to help deal with difficult cases. Vigilantes may well refer to the code of conduct for justification for statements of intent like this:

http://dave.cheney.net/2015/06/13/listen-up

I'm not comfortable with that.

Donchon Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

Much more authentic:

https://twitter.com/bbc_micro_/status/572313372345016321

The plastic which held them in place was always broken on the school computers :-)

In all seriousness though, I personally owe a great debt to Sophie Wilson et al for building computers and software that made it very easy to start programming the second after turning a computer on; A BASIC interpreter and an Assembler available instantly from ROM. I had endless hours of fun building parallax scrolling star fields by poking directly to video RAM and slowly rendering 3d scenes in Render Bender. It was just a shame that the computers were so expensive.

Donchon Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

*sheet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewSheet

Donchon A trading platform that outlaws what it sees as abusive practices

Read all three! Thanks for the reading list extension and gratuitous downvote :-)

Donchon A trading platform that outlaws what it sees as abusive practices

Read "Flash Boys" for a better insight into how much difference variable latency between exchanges and clients makes to the profitability of fast execution of trades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys

Donchon Apple Acquires FoundationDB

Reminds me a little of Apple's buyout of the compositing software Shake from Nothing Real and their brutal "end of life" process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_%28software%29

"Existing maintenance program subscribers had the option to license the Shake source code for $50,000 USD."

Donchon Kyoto Tycoon for modern systems

I believe he went to Google.

Donchon Kyoto Tycoon for modern systems

Has the fork author discussed with Mikio the implications of forking and the need for a commercial license for proprietary applications? It's a shame that development stopped on Kyoto Cabinet and Tycoon. I personally learned a lot about efficiently using on disk storage from the source code.

Donchon MDBM – High-speed database

Care to share any details on the hashing scheme? Is it based on linear hashing, a la Litwin and Larson?

Donchon MDBM – High-speed database

Thanks for the reply. Interesting that linear hashing had such a big effect, seeing as it is meant to be a slowly-occurring process that only happens when the average load factor of all buckets exceeds a threshold. I guess that was back in 2004 though. Wonder if the same performance is still applicable?

Donchon MDBM – High-speed database

"We abandoned them in favor of B-trees in OpenLDAP 2.2 because extensive benchmarking showed that BDB's B-trees were faster than its hash implementation at very large data sizes."

Didn't bdb's linear hashing scheme extend the size of the hash table enough to keep it at the required loadfactor?

Donchon Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read

I was just about to make the very same suggestion. Ignore the list and just read this book! The threading of the 'jaunting' concept was way ahead of its time in 1956 and the inspiration can be seen in many modern films.

Donchon Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

Number one link on Hacker News is an article stuffed full of Amazon affiliate links for personal heating products. Something isn't right.

Donchon Jed McCaleb dumps his Ripple holdings

Cross posted here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ripplers/comments/266m12/selling_my_...

Donchon Maze Tree

Frankly, that is true art. Inspired.

Donchon Leaving Go

It was an example of a language feature, that is short variable declarations in type switches, which avoid repetitive casting. The example below has the default clause which handles unknown types. I suppose the point is that you'd never actually do any of this because the method is disgusting.

Thanks for the downvote :-)

Donchon Leaving Go

It's horrible method with a horrible signature, that I didn't test :-)

But the short variable declaration in the type switch does indeed save the casts the OP was complaining about.

Even more correct and horrible: http://play.golang.org/p/ZMQKQhuUQT

Donchon Leaving Go

The example could have been simplified:

  func abs(x Top) Top {
	switch v := x.(type) {
	case int32:
		if v < 0 {
			return -v
		}
	case int64:
		if v < 0 {
			return -v
		}
	case float32:
		if v < 0 {
			return -v
		}
	case float64:
		if v < 0 {
			return -v
		}
	}
	return v
  }

Donchon The Heartbleed Bug

  ./bin/Heartbleed openssl.org:443
  2014/04/08 12:15:44 ([]uint8) {
   00000000  02 00 79 68 65 61 72 74  62 6c 65 65 64 2e 66 69  |..yheartbleed.fi|
   00000010  6c 69 70 70 6f 2e 69 6f  59 45 4c 4c 4f 57 20 53  |lippo.ioYELLOW S|
   00000020  55 42 4d 41 52 49 4e 45  47 69 05 e8 90 a6 60 d6  |UBMARINEGi....`.|
   00000030  b4 18 c3 f0 4a 20 40 3a  ef dd 06 8b 87 32 42 00  |....J @:.....2B.|
   00000040  00 00 10 00 0e 00 00 0b  6f 70 65 6e 73 73 6c 2e  |........openssl.|
   00000050  6f 72 67 00 05 00 05 01  00 00 00 00 00 0a 00 08  |org.............|
   00000060  00 06 00 17 00 18 00 19  00 0b 00 02 01 00 00 0d  |................|
   00000070  00 0a 00 08 04 01 04 03  02 01 02 03 09 14 ce 7c  |...............||
   00000080  6d 0c f5 a0 3b cc 16 aa  3b d4 b1 b8              |m...;...;...|
  }

  2014/04/08 12:15:44 openssl.org:443 - VULNERABLE

Donchon Redecentralize: Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net again

Here's the raft algorithm we chatted about:

https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...

And an implementation:

https://github.com/goraft/raft

Decentralised conversations :)

Donchon GCHQ: Can you find it?

https://gist.github.com/donovanhide/6541191

Donchon GCHQ: Can you find it?

https://gist.github.com/donovanhide/6540272

Donchon GCHQ: Can you find it?

Answer 3: enigma2013

Donchon GCHQ: Can you find it?

Answer 1: turing

Answer 2: bletchley

Answer 3: ?

Answer 4: colossus

Answer 5: secured

Don't feel like supporting this recruitment drive, to be honest. GCHQ appears to be the rolling data buffer for the NSA...

Donchon The Best

American Psycho.

Donchon Wikipedia Zero grows readership in Africa and Asia

Zero Facebook only works on some networks in certain countries:

http://readwrite.com/2010/05/18/free_mobile_facebook_with_0f...

Donchon Wikipedia Zero grows readership in Africa and Asia

The greatest barrier to Internet usage in Africa is data charges. The vast majority of mobile owners cannot afford the price of data and are limited to using older "featurephones". Any move to widen access to information is to be applauded. There is no public information that Zero Facebook is actually being charged for the zero-rated access from the mobile networks involved.

Network neutrality is an irrelevance to someone who cannot afford Internet access. First world problem :-)