Hacker News Reader

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon ZPL: (Almost) C99 Powerkit

To play devil's advocate: it's because one size does not fit all. C gives you the flexibility to tailor your implementation for your specific needs. Whereas in a higher level language, you'd have to fight the language / standard library if your requirements don't match the "few" true ways to do things.

That said, too many projects believe they have special needs, when they're better served just using e.g. apr in the first place.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon We created a fake language to root out resume liars

> [...] [H]e was only ever challenged once in the many years I was there.

I suspect that's because your client's spending their company's money, and it made no difference if the rate were cheaper. They'd rather sign the deal quickly then GTFO. Challenging Joe would only prolong the process.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Void Linux Switching Back to OpenSSL

IMHO, LibreSSL was doomed to "fail" by the mere fact that it was not picked up by Linux distributions to replace OpenSSL, the same way that x.org had replaced XFree86. Linux's influence's simply too big. LibreSSL will survive in the BSDs, and OpenSSH. That is, until OpenSSH's forked for whatever reason and the fork becomes the standard ssh on Linux distributions. I fear that's inevitable (cf. zfs).

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Signal Desktop is corrupting its database

How does it differ from the 1st party encryption[0]? I couldn't find any comparison in SQLCipher's readme.

[0] https://www.sqlite.org/see/doc/trunk/www/readme.wiki

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon VideoLAN is 20 years old today

Thank you. In the link in your reply to a sibling thread, you asked for donations, and I'm happy to oblige. I know you're based in France, but is there a U.S. non-profit entity I could donate to (e.g. SPI)? The reason being that $WORK will match my donation, but sadly VideoLAN is not on the approved list.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon VideoLAN is 20 years old today

Are there plans to sandbox / harden VLC against security vulnerabilities? While my jolly roger days are long gone, and virtually all media I play are from trusted sources, VLC probably ranks top 5 by attack surface among the software I run regularly.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano

I'm a fan of OpenBSD's more conservative and structured approach to software development, but in this case I must beg to differ. In the linked CVE, OpenBSD was unaffected because "[it] didn't chase the fad of using every Intel cpu feature." The feature in question was user-space hardware debug register access. Without such access, watch-points are borderline unusable[0].

Perhaps prohibiting access to user-space except GDB would be a reasonable compromise. Also, debug registers are not unique to x86: most (all?) CPU architectures have them. So calling it a "fad [...] Intel cpu feature" is a bit unfair.

[0] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152609160230624&w=2

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Why webcams aren’t good enough

Like it or not, Apple's often the benchmark the rest of the industry measure themselves against. So if / when Apple improves the MBP cam, the rest will follow. Until then, there's no point in cutting into the razor-thin margin.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

At this point my sentiments can be summed up thusly[0][1]. Although I'm the fortunate few who could work remotely -- and I've been doing so since the beginning of the year -- my job[2] still bounds me to CONUS. I'm beginning to entertain the thought of quitting so I could move to one of the few Asian countries that takes COVID-19 seriously.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&t=26

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04&t=266

[2] My company's COVID-19 response so far is excellent, but it doesn't help when (seemly) no one else gives a crap.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon On Learning Chess as an Adult – From 650 to 1750 in Two Years

If you don't already know, then you might be interested in the Classic Tetris World Championship, which is currently running on Twitch (with VODs on YouTube). The YouTube channel aGameScout[0] also has a lot of interesting information on the history and recent developments of the tournament.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/aGameScout/videos

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Scary Outage Stories from CTOs

Shit. I use a somewhat critical .st domain. I should look into moving off it.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon 7k MS-DOS Games playable in the browser

Technically I played the Macintosh version, but Mavis Beacon[0] was one of the first games I'd played in elementary school. I've recently wanted to try and raise my typing speed to 100+ wpm -- my current speed is ~80 wpm on a good day -- and TypeRacer[1]'s font and color choices sometimes make the practice texts hard to read. I should give good old Mavis Beacon a try...

Ha! I'm immediately thrown off by the double-space-after-period default. Fortunately that can be changed.

[0] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typin...

[1] https://play.typeracer.com/

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Evolving Reddit’s Workforce

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Works fine for me. But I also run it in a dedicated full-fat profile I use only for Reddit, because I'm paranoid.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Teens' mental health did surprisingly well in quarantine

FWIW, I've never had any nightmares where I dreamed I was back in secondary school. I've had many about undergrad and grad school, though. It's been more than a decade since I graduated from grad school.

However, I've also had plenty of nightmares about my first job. It's never about my performance or my co-workers, mind you, but about my immigration status back then. Currently, in my (virtual) room of co-workers, many are also immigrants; I wouldn't be surprised that they've had similar nightmares.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Stripe Will Pay Workers $20k to Leave New York and San Francisco

Ironic, I was offered almost $10k to relocate to the Bay Area a few years ago as part of my signing bonus. Having lived here for a few years, I'd love to be offered $20k to move away...

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Escaping strings in Bash using !:q

I do generally prefer Perl's q and qq, though Python's triple-quote and its raw form are often good enough. Python also inherited C's (mis-)feature of concatenating consecutive string literals automatically, which comes in handy in some cases.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon APFS changes in Big Sur: how Time Machine backs up to APFS

> I let Time Machine starts backups automatically whenever it pleases. Does it have a hook to run a command to take a snapshot?

I don't know, but you can trigger backups on demand using tmutil(8), and that's what I do.

> And if you do say 3 backups then get rid of #3, can it take incremental #4 on top of #2, or will it complain that the #3 state it expects is absent?

You can delete arbitrary backup(s). "Classic" Time Machine backups are snapshots deduped using hard links. HFS+ even supports directory hard links.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon APFS changes in Big Sur: how Time Machine backs up to APFS

Yeah, my "solution" to that problem is to backup to a zfs NAS, and through shitty^Wclever scripting, create a snapshot after each successful backup. If TM backup fails for any reason, I roll back on the NAS end and start again.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon APFS changes in Big Sur: how Time Machine backs up to APFS

By snapshot I mean filesystem snapshots as implemented by zfs and btrfs. So functionally they're snapshots, but space usage wise they're incremental backups.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon APFS changes in Big Sur: how Time Machine backs up to APFS

If I read the article correctly, Time Machine's switching to something similar to overlay FS, but nested? I really hope they get it right: backup is where my tolerance for bugs is really low.

APFS already supports volume snapshots but not (I think) snapshot send / receive, à la zfs & btrfs. I thought that would be the logical next step. If Apple do add this or similar feature, would Time Machine have to switch its backing store yet again?

I've been generally happy with Time Machine's stability, but this is getting me a little worried. I guess now's a good time to looking into Arq (or similar) to replace my janky secondary backup scripts...

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

WTF. There's is literally a stand-up skit[0] on this. Moreover, any quick research would show it's the Mandarin filler word. Plus, I dunno, just ask the other Mandarin-speaking faculties and students?

Do you know the number 99 (nine-nine) sounds like the derogatory term for mammary glands in Mandarin? Are they going to redact every instance of the number on campus, on grounds of potential sexual harassment?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsWp07BwVk

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon We didn't encrypt your password, we hashed it

This is less annoying than sites that accepts your strong password, except their backend actually couldn't handle it. I love being locked out immediately on account creation.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Non-obvious remote work techniques

Just use a headset with a physical mute button. I've been using this pair[0] for years. It works great.

[0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/wireless-headset-h800

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Beta users of Starlink get downloads of 11 to 60 Mbps

In a vacuum. See Cherenkov radiation[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal

That's not a problem. For example, you could run the Mozilla VPN on your router, and your work VPN on your laptop.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal

Here's a VPN idea for Mozilla: bundle your VPN with a PO box / mail forwarding service. Target it to all the FAANG developers who's trying to take advantage of the WFH situation by moving to a lower CoL area, but are hesitant due to their companies' aggressive geographic-based compensation adjustments and enforcement.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Mozilla Lifeboat

Users don't care about browser engines, but they may care about better ad blocking, and YouTube playback in the background (w/o paying for Premium). A "true" iOS FF port could do both, and more. Hopefully this would increase FF's market share, and give Mozilla better bargaining powers.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Mozilla Lifeboat

If Mozilla could stand alone and compete with the other big players, that'd be best. If they couldn't, then forming alliances with others, even former "enemies", would be 2nd best, and work towards independence.

Even Apple took MS money back in the day: seems to have worked out for Apple.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Mozilla Lifeboat

I know it's almost a meme at this point, but maybe Apple should buy Mozilla (or financially support them in some way)? The enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of way. Surely Apple don't want to cede more control over web standards to Google? They both promote valuing user privacy, so it's not like they don't have some common ground.

If Apple really wants to stick it to Google, they could make an iOS App Store policy exception for Firefox / Gecko engine. Heck, that alone may be enough to buoy Mozilla, w/o paying a cent.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9uon Mozilla Lifeboat

They are not, but they are perhaps the most consumer visible (because web is eating everything). For less "sexy" non-porfits, there's Apache Software Foundation ("where software goes to die"), and of course Free Software Foundation (gcc, nano, etc.).