Hacker News Reader

alecon Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

I work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about this because the video/audio quality is much higher.

When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993.

In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution.

I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel more connected to people.

alecon Pebble 4.0 Apps and Firmware Released

I recently got a Pebble Time Round and love it. Never wanted a watch before.

Few watches provide vibrating alarms, but Pebble's helps keep me on track during the day without disturbing everyone around me with beeps. I wrote a tiny app to vibrate at different points of a meeting so I know how much time is left without boorishly checking a clock, and the development experience was smooth.

With the Android Light Flow app, I can control which contacts for which apps can send notifications, which helps keep me aware of things I need to be aware of without being a firehose of alerts.

alecon Introducing Kindle Oasis

Saving half a pound (225g) on a backpacking trip is a enough that a frequent hiker would notice.

alecon Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

I don't think this offers an "incompatible experience" - my reading of the post is that the experience is fully compatible and that users of non-Chrome browsers will still be able to use Google Search. Currently, some/all non-Chrome browsers won't do the extra prefetches.

alecon Permissions asked for by Uber Android app

> there's nothing in this analysis that suggests they're doing otherwise

The article included a decompiled code snippet showing it running methods like "sendMMSLog" and "sendPhoneCallLog", apparently logging a bunch of private data and sending it back to Uber.

alecon CVE-2014-6277

My computer runs Debian, so I read debian-security-announce, which gets one email per updated package. Sample of messages from this year: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/threa...

alecon Facebook Announces Apollo, a New NoSQL Database for On-line Low Latency Storage

Google talks a fair bit about their internal systems at this level of "descriptions but not code" - Bigtable, MapReduce, Spanner, Flume, Chubby, and more have been influential.

alecon Ask HN: How bad is it to use a self-signed SSL certificate?

Works for me - I have a StartSSL personal cert and an Android phone (Nexus 5 / KitKat), and all of Chrome, Chrome Beta, and Firefox load up the site without any sort of warning or other indication. I also dug out a Jelly Bean phone (Galaxy Nexus) to try with the stock Android Browser and didn't have any issues.

alecon No more ads

re: "One way less for Google to track me."

Google says that they don't use Google DNS for tracking.

From the Google DNS privacy page: "We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."

They go on in some detail to say how and what they log.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

alecon Go Read: One Year with Money and App Engine

Thanks! I don't really know when the website has a problem, when goread has a problem, and when I have a problem, so I end up assuming that it's goread problem. I like how the desktop web version gives a "last refreshed" and "next refreshed" indication.

alecon C-Reduce, a C program reducer

See also Delta Debugging for a line-based (non-syntax-aware) version of this. Very useful for cutting down test cases to size. I'm enthusiastic that c-reduce is threaded.

https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/dd/

alecon Go Read: One Year with Money and App Engine

Interesting writeup, thanks.

I'm a user and have been negatively impacted by the feed fetching optimizations - daily feeds are often a few days behind and come in bunches. Two examples:

- Penny Arcade updates its comics Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, always at 7:01AM UTC, and then news other times during the week. It's Wednesday at 4:25PM UTC - 9 hours after - and goread hasn't picked it up.

- Dinosaur Comics is updated weekdays. I'll eventually get all of them, but usually two or three at a time. For example, yesterday I marked all my feeds as read; today, I have entries from Monday and Tuesday, but not from Wednesday.

I had hoped that the move to the everyone-pays model would give you the resources (either developer or quota) to fix these issues, but they've gotten no better or maybe worse.

I haven't looked at what you're doing, but I believe Google Reader used pubsubhubbub where available to reduce/eliminate polling for many popular feeds.

I honestly didn't have a great experience with my last bug report, so I haven't tried again.

alecon Practical Tmux

I'm with you. I tried tmux but didn't find any benefit and several serious drawbacks.

Many of the purported benefits - better configuration language, more maintainable code - don't matter to me:

- Screen is done and isn't going to change. Debian has had the vertical splits patch for so long I was surprised it was a patch.

- My configuration of screen is not going to change. It's five lines that I copied and pasted 10 years ago. There's just not that much that needs to be configured.

The "Multiple Clients Sharing One Session" thing is important to me and screen gets it right by default. It's useful to have a few fixed xterms on my screen and a bunch of multiplexed terminals in screen. I use one screen session per task.

I think "screen contents persisted through full-screen programs" is screen's "altscreen on" setting. Or at least that's my note from the person whose screenrc I stole.

alecon Practical Tmux

I think he's asking what happens if you have two panes side-by-side and try to select text in one to copy. Does it also select text from the other one?

alecon Oracle continue to circumvent EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()

The person who wrote the CDDL says it was deliberately written to be incompatible with the GPL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribu...

alecon A collection of Unix terminal/console/curses tools

I'm a big fan of Joey Hess' moreutils - https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Examples:

- sponge: read in all of stdin, then write to the given file. Great for pipelines: sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd

- vipe: easily drop a $EDITOR instance in the middle of a pipe chain

- ts: timestamp all standard input; great for long-running output

alecon The average top 1,000 web page has grown 150% in three years

A 2007 Yahoo investigation found 40-60% of Yahoo's users came to the site with an empty cache, accounting for 20% of page views. Empty cache experience is important.

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-...

alecon Two years of production Go at CloudFlare

"The guarantees needed to avoid leaving the server in a bad state when handling panics would be impossible without the defer mechanism Go provides."

I'm only passingly familiar with defer, but I understand it to be equivalent to RAII in C++, Python's with statement, Common Lisp's unwind-protect, and others - does is actually provide something more, and if so, what?

alecon You’re infected—if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins

Since the Bitcoin blockchain is public, couldn't you follow the money? Make a list of all wallets that accepted these funds initially, and then do graph analysis, either to see where the money went or provide others with a tool to avoid transactions with those wallets?

alecon Specter – A minimal, elegant and free Markdown-enabled blogging platform

Uninteresting: "Use my blog platform! It has the power of node!"

Interesting: "I wrote something new in a way or with tools that I had not used before. Here's what worked, here's what didn't, and here's what I learned."

Unfortunately, this is the former. I'd be interested in reading the latter if you wrote something up about your experience with this.

alecon Twelve Go Best Practices

"Deploy one-off utility types for simpler code" can be called a monad or Optional. I wonder if the language developers will add more formal support for that; it looks impossible to add Optional as a library due to lack of user-configurable generics.

alecon Looking at CPU/GPU Benchmark Optimizations in Galaxy S 4

The AnandTech link in the article says they found the string "BenchmarkBooster" in the apk alongside the class names of several well-known benchmarks.

http://anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchmark-o...

alecon How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/go...

"Google Lawsuit Challenges N.S.A. Domestic-Spying Apparatus"

the first hit on google for "google nsa lawsuit"

alecon Google flights

I'm surprised at your result - Google Flights was effectively instant on the routes I tried, while on those same routes dohop.com had a progress bar that took over ten seconds to complete.

alecon Google+ Games is shutting down

You probably didn't. They had desktop ebook software (can't find a link describing it at the moment) pre-Kindle that was phased out due to low usage.

alecon Google+ Games is shutting down

The "shut it down, you lose all your stuff, and we're starting over" strategy worked for Amazon and ereaders (result: Kindle), but hasn't so much for Microsoft and music (result: Zune marketplace).

alecon What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

Google does not sell your data. http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

alecon Indie game Haunts unable to compile its Go code

It's likely a bad idea to use the Google cache of "jquery". It's likely a good tradeoff to use the Google cache of "jquery x.y.z" on the assumption that they won't change it. The Go convention is to the former.

alecon Unreal Engine in JavaScript/HTML5 – Citadel demo

v8 doesn't look abandoned to me: there have been 19 commits so far today to the public v8 repository. https://code.google.com/p/v8/source/list

alecon Google Now on your iPhone and iPad

I don't think it would be very useful to have RSS feeds in Google Now. I like Google Now because it tells me what I want to know right now, like that my flight is delayed or traffic is bad or here's how to get to that restaurant and you need to leave in 15 minutes. I don't want to know about a new article right now.