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Solomoriah

12 karma · joined March 24, 2012

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Solomoriah··on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews
I sell books on Amazon.com through their KDP Direct platform, and I have one book with two different covers; each is its own "book" in their catalog. FakeSpot repeatedly marked reviews I knew were valid as fake; I knew this based on the fact that the same reviewer reviewed the "other" book and that review was NOT flagged as fake. And this happened multiple times, and sometimes the wording of the two reviews were different. Further investigation showed FakeSpot had rather a poor reputation overall due to too many false positives. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned.
Solomoriah··on New better alterative to XML, JSON and YAML
This is not enough of an improvement over JSON to justify choosing another format, given that the new format is (A) not recognized and (B) uses even more special characters. (By "not recognized" I actually mean there are no implementations given for any languages, much less accepted standard implementations.)
Solomoriah··on New better alterative to XML, JSON and YAML
There are <> characters, which are awkward on a good day. Yeah, we use them in HTML but the editor helps with that. And there are a bunch of special characters and "objects" that require interpretation. JSON has what? Quotes, square brackets, colons, and commas, used the way they are used in most programming languages, and thus familiar to most of us. Outside of terseness, which is overrated, what real advantages does XENON provide?
Solomoriah··on Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
This question seems like a trap... asking people who have overcome narcissism to talk about how much better they are now. Wouldn't that be narcissistic?

With that said, I'll agree that talking to a mental health professional might be the best thing, if you can afford it. Autistic spectrum disorder, for example, sometimes looks like narcissism... if you can't sense other's emotional states, it makes listening to them instead of talking about yourself more difficult, mimicking narcissism. And I'm sure there are other diagnoses that might also have the same effect.

Solomoriah··on A fork() in the road
Okay, this one has me laughing out loud. Of COURSE Microsoft doesn't like fork()... Windows pretty much can't do it. I'll admit, there have been a lot of times I wish there was a more streamlined way to spawn processes on Linux (particularly daemons) but when I don't have fork() I always end up missing it. I'd take this paper a lot more seriously if it came from someone with a less obvious bias.
Solomoriah··on The MAD Computer Program
I was in college about this time; did a lot of programming on the Apple //e. I didn't have one, but the college I attended had a lab full of them in the business department, and a lab full of boring green-screen IBMs in the computer science department. What can I say, I like color. I wrote a bunch of Apple code that is long gone and not lamented, and created some RPG materials that I did rescue from the floppys a couple of decades ago.
Solomoriah··on The 6th Underhanded C Contest is now Open
Site hasn't worked for me since it first appeared here. I've tried from several different ISPs. What's up with that?
Solomoriah··on Typing Free Captcha
Doesn't work with mobile Firefox, at least not on my tablet. Would be a dealbreaker for me, obviously.
Solomoriah··on REBOL to become open source
I looked at REBOL years ago, thought it looked kind of okay, then ran into the whole issue that they wanted to be paid for it. I don't believe that anyone should be required to give their work away... but when I can get Python, Ruby, or Perl for free, why would I want REBOL?

Also, I think their announcement is a bit rude to the Open Source world. Sounds like they are reluctant to do it for fear that the unwashed masses (us) will come in and, I don't know, name a variable improperly or something.

Solomoriah··on On Blogging: A Response to Svbtle and Obtvse
I'm running static generation on one of my sites, RSS included. Turned out to be very simple. Code is in Python, and right now I'm not sharing it because it's an unholy mess... but it does work.

Seriously, though, it's such a simple system, anyone who can program at all ought to be able to do it.