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Mafana0

273 karma · joined March 20, 2010

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Mafana0··on A personal Dropbox replacement based on Git
The title alone says much about the simplicity of the product. "Dropbox" is more friendly and much easier to remember than the name of "DVCS-Autosync".
Mafana0··on How to Insult a Computer Scientist
Related: Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.htm...

There are some interesting points in that list, some can be used against theorists, others can be used against experimentalists.

(I'm not sure if that article has been ever submitted to HN)

Mafana0··on Code School now open to the public
Second that. Video lessons are great, I'm a happy customer of both Lynda and Total Training. What really helped me to start learning web development is their ASP.NET lessons.
Mafana0··on Code School Launches
More discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354776
Mafana0··on Firefox 4 is here
Count me impressed. I use netbooks a lot and FF4 gave me the best browsing experience I've ever tried on a 10"-screen, Atom-CPU powered PC. Performance improvements and the amount of space it saves on a small screen for my usage are pretty amazing. Kudos Mozilla for another great release!

EDIT: Just noticed that FF4 allows me to resize text-fields that render quite small because of the small screen. Small, relative-sized text-fields can be easily resized to a convenient size.

Mafana0··on Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes
True. However, HN isn't just about hacking, it's about anything "good hackers would find interesting"[1].

[1]:http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Mafana0··on Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes
It's the sort of story I'd love to see more of on HN. Quite amusing and an insightful idea about PR for tech-companies.
Mafana0··on Wife Said No, Apple Said Yes
The guys who did that are VPs, according to the article:

"It was escalated as something funny, and two of the VPs got wind of it."

Mafana0··on Regular expression to search for Gadaffi
There are over 32 accepted ways of spelling Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi. Here's a dance song to help you remember just a few of them: http://www.buzzfeed.com/danilic/gaddafi-the-duck-sauce-remix...
Mafana0··on Regular expression to search for Gadaffi
>I'm assuming here that Iraqi and Moroccan Arabic are not entirely mutually understandable -- is this correct?

Moroccan Arabic is very hard to understand for Iraqi people. In fact, if you're an Arab from the Asian part of the Middle east, you may need subtitles to watch a local Moroccan movie.

>Suppose a Moroccan and an Iraqi are talking. Suppose also that these are educated, literate people who understand MSA. Wouldn't they talk in MSA, or at least something halfway between their local dialects and MSA?

What usually happens between Arabs from close-dialects countries is that they speak their local dialects and use the MSA to express the different, unfamiliar words.

But between very far, quite different dialects (e.g. Moroccan and Iraqi), they often speak MSA, entirely. (Native speaker here)

Mafana0··on Regular expression to search for Gadaffi
I totally agree. I'm a native speaker and my Arabic name (ضياء) has no definite, accurate transcription in English for another reason.

Arabic language has many letters and sounds western languages don't have equivalents of and therefore foreigners are completely unable no pronounce.

Another point is that vowels have different characteristics in different languages; height of the tongue, backness, roundedness, nasalization, ..etc, make it almost impossible to write the correct equivalent for some Arabic vowels in English. For example, we have a word (هيل; means cardamom) whose vowel length is between hail and hell that I can't think of any accurate way to transcript in English.

Mafana0··on AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA
Thanks for the explanation. After taking a look at the certificates that come with Windows, I can see that there are dozens of trusted root certificates, issued by some organizations that I've never heard of. Can I really trust those "root ca"? especially that I noticed some differences between the two PCs that I've checked!
Mafana0··on AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA
>In a similar vein, I've deleted all the trusted root CA certs from my computer, and am now marking individual certs trusted as I hit them. Not fail-safe, but safer, I think.

Excuse my ignorance, could you tell why it's useful to remove the certs from a PC. I've heard about root certs a couple of times already but don't understand what they really are.

Mafana0··on New Chrome extension: block sites from Google’s web search results
Discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382
Mafana0··on Al Jazeera.net has been hacked
The article was posted after the hack was fixed, obviously.
Mafana0··on Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard
You are a gentleman and a scholar...

The name of the lady is Mona Saif, who sent another tweet in Arabic (native speaker here): http://bit.ly/dTj11s

Mafana0··on Revealed: The guy behind IMDb
No info about the current number of employees, but the article states that "in 1996, IMDb was managed by a group of 20 volunteers. IMDb became a company in 1996 and was sold to Amazon in 1998 He's now the Chief Executive of IMDb and his role is to oversee future strategy and make sure his creation stays true to its roots."
Mafana0··on Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?
C# in Depth by Jon Skeet.

Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen (there's a newer edition about .NET 4 which I haven't managed to read yet)

Mafana0··on Ask HN: Where I can find the latest security exploits?
I don't consider myself "new" here, I've been reading the discussions here for months, and I do understand what the site is all about. I do understand that "HN" isn't about breaking systems, which I'm not trying to do.

Have asked about the "latest" security exploits, I'm not trying to "attack", I just want to know "modern" security exploits I can try on my own system. I'll appreciate it if you tell me about new security exploits along with their fixes.

Thanks and sorry again for the inconvenience.

Mafana0··on Ask HN: Where I can find the latest security exploits?
I'm not looking for info to break systems, I'm just trying to learn the potential exploits to protect my own software, by learning the best security practices.

Sorry if the question isn't very convenient here...

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