SloopJon

Even outside of the recent scandal, I've long had mixed feelings about Blizzard: harassing independent servers, always-connected DRM (I got booted out of single-player CoD: MW so many times), and milking franchises with remasters. I will say, though, that after a several year hiatus, a friend and I have discovered StarCraft 2 co-op with weekly mutations, and it's a lot of fun.

SC 2 recently went free-to-play. If the rest of their catalog is added to Game Pass, that will be something. Blizzard games have been stubbornly expensive years after release. I wonder what this means for Battle.net?

> it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expenses necessary to develop it

Without necessarily taking a position on the ethics, I would point to macOS and its derivatives as a clear example of this. Apple invested significant resources into a successor to System 7 called Copland, abandoning it in 1996. While the purchase of NeXT in 1997 hugely influenced the design of OS X, look at all of the free and open source projects that accelerated its development: Mach, Clang/LLVM (and GCC before it), KHTML, KJS, CUPS, much of the BSD and GNU userland, and the list goes on.

macOS, and by extension iOS, would not be where it is today without its open source core. Put a little spit and polish on it (no small thing, of course), add a kernel extension named Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext, and voila: new O/S.

In the US, at least, Google Fi is essentially a T-Mobile MVNO. It was previously T-Mobile, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular, but T-Mobile bought Sprint, and U.S. Cellular divested a fair amount of its network.

I saw conflicting reports about whether Google Fi was affected by T-Mobile's reported text message censorship. I don't know where it stands on this iCloud Private Relay issue.

I'm trying to think of a case in which Apple has used public opinion in this way. The closest I can come up with is Adobe Flash, but Apple was the one blocking a product on its platform then.

I tend to keep way too many tabs open in my browsers, some of which I never, ever go back and read. Once in a while I dump these evergreen tabs into bookmarks.google.com (yeah, I know), which is just enough to satisfy my inner hoarder that I haven't completely lost whatever was so special about that tab.

I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.

In terms of space usage and its impact on the buffer pool, storing as 128-bit integers (if your DBMS supports it, which MySQL does not) is essentially equivalent to the bin16 case in the first "UUID insertion rates" graph. Performance still falls off a cliff, just a little bit later. As the author says, "The use of a smaller representation for the UUID values just allows more rows to fit in the buffer pool but in the long run, it doesn't really help the performance, as the random insertion order dominates."

If you look at the fastest approach the author tried in the second "UUID insertion rate" graph, it actually stores a modified UUID in a 36-character string. There is a missed optimization to store the modified UUID as 16 bytes, rather than 36, but imposing some order on the keys is the dominant improvement.

I bought Loopy HD several years ago after seeing Jimmy Fallon and Billy Joel use it for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." YouTube has some slide shows with audio, but I can't find a video that shows Jimmy using the app.

I can't say that I've used the app to as good effect.

Neither counter nor idx strike me as an improvement over i.

If you want to be descriptive, name the purpose of the loop variable. If it's an array of foos or an array named foo, then use something like fooIx. Then when you loop over an array of bars, use something like barIx. If you're counting retries, call it retryIx or retryCt (or something that describes what you're retrying, like loginAttemptIx).

Depending on the context, i may be fine. However, a single-character name like that is bound to be reused, which is a bad smell.

This is not a category of software that I'm familiar with, so I don't know how Nebulosity compares to its competitors, free or proprietary. My intuition says that 71,000 lines of C and C++ code is manageable for a person or group with the right motivation.

One thing that puts a clock on it in the intermediate to long term is camera support, which I gather from the README is a significant maintenance task. The project will bleed users if it doesn't support their new cameras.

Edit: it looks like Nebulosity sold for $95. Some other software in this space I see mentioned on the Cloudy Nights forum are Astro Pixel Processor (€ 165), PixInsight (€ 165), and Siril (free).

> Thankfully now the clang / lld / libc++ / lldb ... toolchain works pretty well on Windows

Off topic, but I wonder if anyone knows whether it's possible to use rustc with lld, instead of link.exe? I tend not to have Visual C++ on my home systems. Is it as simple as the Cargo equivalent of LD=lld-link.exe?

I just started looking at music streaming software last week, and installed Navidrome on an Oracle Cloud instance as a test. So far, so good, although it took a while to discover that Oracle's Ubuntu image uses iptables, after which I found that the network connection with unlimited ingress and 10 TB of egress is a lot slower than the advertised 1 Gbps, at least on a free-tier ARM instance.

My impression has been that MusicBrainz has more typos and weirdly formatted metadata than FreeDB. Now that I know more of its background, I'll look into it more. My CD collection is mostly ripped to full-album FLAC + CUE, so correct metadata will likely be an important part of converting to MP3 for streaming.

The article suggests that hashing (PBKDF2) is done client-side only, and that LastPass stores this hash directly. If true, this is very bad. However, LastPass claims that PBKDF2 is also used server side:

> We then take that value, and use a salt (a random string per user) and do another 100,000 rounds of hashing, and compare that to what is in our database.

https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice/

While it's true that the client-side hashing means that LastPass never sees your plaintext password, the first hash effectively becomes the password. Then it's on LastPass to treat it as such, which they claim to do by hashing it again.

Edit: another link describing the use of PBKDF2:

https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass/help/about-password-...

This is a nice turnaround from 2015:

> Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encrypti...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791

Recall that this was in the wake of Heartbleed, a vulnerability that exposed our dependence on OpenSSL, another critical, and chronically underfunded project.

The project got a nice boost after that article, leading to this Ars Technica story about the windfall:

> Given the ramshackle state of massive GnuPG code base, it's not clear what's the best path forward.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/once-starving-gnupg-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011138

Nonetheless, a fundraising campaign followed just two years later. It turns out that $150K isn't actually that much of a windfall.

I tried to activate an iPhone on an existing Google Fi plan using eSIM, and it was a nightmare. The frontline support is responsive, but can't do anything about it. The specialists I was escalated to were useless, and only reachable by email every day or two.

After a week of this nonsense, it occurred to me that maybe I could start over with a physical SIM card. I chatted with frontline support again, and he said he was positive that would work. (So why didn't anyone suggest that?!) I couldn't use the old card, because it was clearly beyond their capabilities to reactivate a perfectly good SIM card, but I was able to buy a new one at Best Buy and complete the process in about five minutes.

I would have swapped the card in the first place and been blissfully ignorant of the eSIM fiasco, but I somehow had it in my head that the iPhone used a smaller card than the five-year old phone it was replacing. It may not be eSIM's fault, per se, but if the design is dependent on carrier competence, it's fatally flawed, as far as I'm concerned.

That Reddit thread is a better source link for this submission.

I very much like backlit keys. My Max Keyboard Blackbird is red, which is just right at its dimmest, although when the side panels reset I always turn them back off.

On the Kinesis Freestyle Edge, I actually like the per-key RGB lighting as well. Most of the alphanumeric and punctuation keys are red, the home keys are green, and the rest are blue. I also turn off the backlight for keys that I don't use, like PRTSC. It looks gaudy as hell, but I feel like it makes it easier to find certain keys in the Freestyle's slightly unusual layout, and to come back to home position.

The other thing I like to do with RGB lighting is to make different layouts different colors--QWERTY is all blue to distinguish it from my multi-color Dvorak.

I know you're pointing out the author's concern about acknowledging his LGPL library, but I otherwise would have missed what is one of the cooler features in this huge post, CenteredInterval.

Indeed, the post essentially brags about how big it is:

> In Version 1.0 there were a total of 554 functions altogether. Yet between Version 12.0 and Version 13.0 we’ve now added a total of 635 new functions (in addition to the 702 functions that have been updated and upgraded).

With these batteries-included languages, mastery of the language really requires mastery of the library.

My favorite way to use tmux or et is with tabs in iTerm2.

The post quotes a comment from the Python source code for the dict object:

  This is done by initializing a (unsigned) vrbl "perturb"

Is "vrbl" a term I should know, or just a prvrs abbrvtn for variable?

For those who like a little contemporary folk with their jazz, David Wilcox wrote a nice song a while back called "Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song." (k.d. lang covered it as "My Old Addiction.") Worth a listen while you read this article or get lost on Wikipedia.

Edit: although David Wilcox is fun live, I suggest you look for the studio version with the flugelhorn part; e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEBncfBVmxQ.

> Supported for three years as the latest long term support (LTS) release.

This is the first thing I look for in these announcements. .NET 6 is the successor to .NET Core 3.1.

I made a diagram like this for a test automation system inside the firewall that talks to cloud providers. Using Graphviz (DOT), it was challenging to depict the system faithfully without a maze of lines from nodes on one side of the graph to the other.

I agree with the sentiment of defining a graph in code, but I really wanted to give it a nudge from time to time, like swap these two nodes so the arrows don't cross. I'm only an occasional user, so maybe there are ways to do it.

At the end of the post is a link to a Github issue to "support compiling and linking c++ code":

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4786

It was closed in March of 2020.

There's a blog post that describes this:

https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...

HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27872596

previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138

The first tweet links to an InfoWorld article (pseudo-paywall and many ads):

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3633002/the-future-of-rust...

Steve is probably objecting to the paragraph that starts, "Given that Matsakis and Miller both work at AWS, it's not surprising that the [Rustacean] principles started out as a spin on Amazonian tenets."

This is the library I settled on for a project a couple of years ago. Although I was intrigued by the magic of expression templates, my usage is actually pretty straightforward and boring. One thing it has that some of the other libraries I evaluated lack is the ability to parse numeric strings yourself, which I wanted for a decimal floating-point type.

There are lots of other libraries, and surely some faster ones, but I haven't felt any need to change. I was nervous when I got an inexplicable overload ambiguity in xlclang++ for AIX, but it went away when I grabbed a newer version of the library.

I was reminded of this post by a bullet point in the "Constexpr is a Platform" post:

> There is no UB at compile-time; the compiler is required to issue a diagnostic whenever it encounters one. With sufficient coverage, you can thus verify that your functions don’t contain UB.

On the flip side, $3B is a lot more than it would have cost Oracle to keep supporting the platform. Having worked on a product that at one time or another supported Windows (including IA64), VMS (including IA64), and thirty-one flavors of Unix (including HP-UX and Linux on IA64), the marginal cost of continuing to support a platform is not that high. Sure, if the demand isn't there, we drop it, and we have dropped a lot of platforms over the years, including VMS and everything IA64. If HP claimed the demand was there, and furthermore claimed a contract required us to keep going, it would be a no-brainer. I don't get it. I mean, it's Oracle, so I get it, but I don't get it.

If up to $100 million of that was to places like highway medians and a "parking garage ... surrounded on all sides by multiple companies offering gigabit service," then no, it's not odd at all.

This is what I'm referring to:

> A lot will be from before 2000, before we had things like "Agile" and "unit tests" and "widespread version control", so you can't extrapolate any of their conclusions to what we're doing. As a rule of thumb I try to keep to papers after 2010.

While I admit that even in the late 90s, it seemed strange to me to see citations from the 70s or 80s about projects from the 60s (like, say, OS/360), I'm not convinced that so much has changed in the last ten to twenty years as to render all previous research irrelevant.