Hacker News Reader

IvarTJon We Need More Operating Systems

Having recently studied operating systems in school, I am not so sure the Linux kernel can be used for such a great variety of systems. It is built to support a set of system calls that are tightly coupled with Unix heritage, including its filesystems. You may create a user-level system on top of this, and I do find Inferno interesting for that approach, but you (the parent poster) also dismiss microkernels for their lack of performance.

IvarTJon Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

I personally prefer AbiWord because of the startup time, but it failed to display Word document vector graphics at all. Open/LibreOffice did not display them correctly at first, but displayed them better in later versions. Later I managed to get some Windows systems to convert the docs to PDF so that I could read them on Linux.

I am very grateful for the work that has been put into open-source office software, and know that they face an uphill battle with the peculiarities of Microsoft's formats.

IvarTJon An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto

While I can't read much of any CJK languages, I am interested in seeing code samples from these Chinese and Japanese programming languages.

Anyone know where to look? What obstacles or advantages does the character sets give these languages?

IvarTJon For Zelda-playing daughter, Dad gives Link a sex change

These are not hypothetical comics. If the characters are primarly tools to entice male audiences, then they are unlikely to also serve as good role models.

IvarTJon For Zelda-playing daughter, Dad gives Link a sex change

Both Wonderwoman and Kusanagi are modeled with apparent sex appeal by male authors. Could they really still be good role models? I ask this as someone who don't know much about either comics.

IvarTJon The IDE Divide (2004)

I've been using vim for class projects recently, but then I haven't needed to deal with particularly long package or symbol names. Eclipse users seemed to struggle a lot with getting the Nachos instructional operating system to work in their environment, which used Makefiles and which is not structured like typical Eclipse projects. I also notice that many of them know very little about the command line, and get instructions from the lecturer for how to set command-line arguments in Eclipse.

IvarTJon Valve: Linux More Open Than Windows 8 for Gaming

Some TL;DR:

The article speculates that the emergence of Windows Store app platform from the Windows desktop could become similar to the emergence of Windows from DOS, and that newer technologies will similarly only be available on the Windows Store app platform.

It describes the locked-down properties of the Windows Store, and, extrapolating from the current certification requirements for Windows Store apps, it asserts that a game like Skyrim would be denied certification on Windows Store in 2032 because of its PEGI rating.

IvarTJon Ask HN: What's in your .vimrc?

   syntax off
   set backupdir=~/.vim/backup

IvarTJon Command line tool for blocking sites to be more productive

    var hostsFile = process.platform == "linux" ? "/etc/hosts/" : "C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts";

Surely this won't work on anything but Windows.

IvarTJon Association between violent video games and aggression among adolescents

Am I misunderstanding this?

"Sustained violent video game play was significantly related to steeper increases in adolescents' trajectory of aggressive behavior over time. Moreover, greater violent video game play predicted higher levels of aggression over time, after controlling for previous levels of aggression, supporting the socialization hypothesis. In contrast, no support was found for the selection hypothesis. Nonviolent video game play also did not predict higher levels of aggressive behavior over time."

They write that they find support for the "socialization hypothesis", presumably meaning that players pick up norms from the violent games.

IvarTJon Vimium: Vim Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Chrome

I stopped using it as it conflicted with the key bindings of various websites such as Gmail, and because I want to use a desktop setup that does not impede me from using other computers. I mostly just need to scroll down (Space button), and focus the address bar (Alt+D) anyway. I think that way of selecting links is really cool, but I often found myself selecting the wrong one because of mistypes or misreads.

IvarTJon Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed

I'm on a recently installed Fedora. I figured that it would be what I would settle with once I got tired of fiddling with things on Arch. A pretty good selling point was that it would readily handle our dual scanner and printer without me having to deal with the HPLIP software package, but I suppose this is a somewhat appropriate occasion to rant on a few bits. Some of them may be related to software Fedora is composed of, such as Gnome 3.

Non-administators can't add a password through the graphical dialogue if they are currently without password. "Choose password at next login" was the next best option for fellow family members interested in trying out Linux.

The infamous obscurity of the power off and restart buttons. You can read all about it on Google. Family members are sure to reach for the physical power off button and do cold shut downs once they want to use Windows.

The Firewall thing assured me that SSH is a trusted protocol, but incoming SSH connections were met with "No route to host." Disabling the Firewall fixed this.

Selecting Terminal in Activities gives focus to a currently open Terminal. Opening new Terminals can be done through the File dialogue.

Entering a non-existing command results in a very noticeable delay before the prompt returns.

I haven't found a way to enable focus follows mouse. Instructions on the web seem outdated.

I was met with a confusing "Enter password to unlock login keyring" window when trying to set up instant messaging accounts. I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with my changing from the original Fedora user password, or with using passwd. Empathy didn't really work out for me because of detail-lacking connection error messages.

These are some of the surprises I have encountered during the first day of working on it. I will probably stick with it for quite a while as it is acceptable to work on.

IvarTJon Google's Go Programming Language Grows Up: Now What?

I made an uneducated guess for why sgdesign disliked golang.org’s web design. I think an unearthly visual design is more appropriate for adventure games, less so for software tools. That does not mean that only “mysterious” visual design is good visual design.

IvarTJon Google's Go Programming Language Grows Up: Now What?

I am not sure what you find unappealing about those websites, but I find Go’s website very easy to navigate and for browsing the standard library. When looking for software to depend on, I think I prefer a visual design that does not attempt to be in any way “mysterious,” but rather simple and predictable.

IvarTJon A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Right. Not never, but after 3 billion years.

IvarTJon The year 2000 illustrated in 1900

France has been by far luckier than Poland.

IvarTJon Open-Source High-quality PDF of SICP

It is explicitly disallowed by the share-alike clause.

IvarTJon The Opposite of a Bloom Filter

So combining the two will not give you something that will make up for each of the ones weaknesses and always give a definite answer, but will give one of three answers – definite positive, maybe, and definitive negative.

          | P | M | N
    Bloom | X | X |
    Oppos | X |   |

IvarTJon SVG, Use it Already

Could SVG become widely used for animated decorations? Like you always see in games and television news programs?

IvarTJon Ask HN: more sites like HN

If you really have the time to read everything on HN, then maybe have enough time to read a news source that requires more concentration:

http://arxiv.org/

IvarTJon Ubuntu for Android

Wouldn’t login sniffing on these supposedly dumb machines be a greater concern? Murders are more common within families after all.

While the I/O from those plugged-in devices could still be sniffed, including what appears on a screen, at least you could encrypt your communication when using a portable device.

IvarTJon Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

I had fun making a horizontal web page once.

It might have worked better if the columns were more segmented so that you didn’t have to scroll down and up and then down again. That way you could get more content for less scrolling and maintain comfortable line length.

IvarTJon In case SOPA passes: IP addresses of popular websites

I may not know that a domain no longer directs to the desired service before I am no longer getting it, and by that time I presume any caches from the previous resolvings have been deleted.

This happens not just because of legal troubles, but also because the website owners have forgotten to update their domain name.

IvarTJon In case SOPA passes: IP addresses of popular websites

I have often wished for a way to see a history of what IP addresses domains are resolved to, from my system’s resolver or a DNS server. This, in contrast, seems awfully primitive.

IvarTJon RMS on evil developers, spying social networks, the legitimacy of Anonymous

If I understand, he is first of all referring to DDoS attacks where many people voluntarily traffic a server with common computer setups, not when a small number of people pull off major attacks using extra resources such as unwilling puppets.

IvarTJon What feature would improve the web?

The web is a great application platform – it lacks a good hypertext system, though.

IvarTJon Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

Without being confident enough to have voiced it earlier, I thought similar thoughts. Clojure appears to depart from something that characterizes both traditional Lisp and Unix systems – having one universal interface, with a big emphasis on one. Though by the definitions he outline, that would perhaps be easy more than simple.

IvarTJon AmyEditor: Web-based collaborative code-editor with syntax highlighting

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) 
    {
        printf("Hello World!\n");
        return 0;
    }"")}])

I refuse to reach for my cursor keys, I switched to Programmer Dvorak for a reason!

Eclipse gets this more right by overwriting inserted right bracket symbols once they are written by the programmer.

IvarTJon Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

But aren’t the core users the most important?

Shouldn’t Gnome 3 instead have been a spin-off or separate project from traditional Gnome?

IvarTJon Raspberry Pi - Logo competition winner

Not an expert on design, but my intuition tells me that having it more red would hurt its clarity as it could have more easily been mistaken for a strawberry.