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alexjeffreyon Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

sounds exciting - I've pinged you an email and am keen to check it out!

alexjeffreyon Working hard for the sake of working hard is laziness

I think this is more targeted at people who don't push towards more aspirational work - e.g. staying in a 9-5 job as a web developer and paying the bills rather than developing a business and being ambitious. They may feel as though they are working hard and applying themselves, where they may be under-utilised and just using "hard work" as an excuse for not pushing themselves.

In other words, the classic "work hard / work smart" contrast.

alexjeffreyon I Asked 1000 Americans to Name a British City Other Than London

as a Brit I totally agree with the notability thing and it's a crying shame - the UK has always been such a key player on the world stage (not always in a positive light, mind you) until WWII. It seems pretty crazy that Germany has since recovered to become the most powerful economy in Europe while Britain has never really found its feet again, given Germany suffered arguably much more crushing losses.

alexjeffreyon Show HN: Very basic Unix-like operating system built when I was younger

I attempted the very same in my first year of college (in the UK, so about the same age). I only got as far as a memory manager, FAT16 filesystem driver and basic bootloader though so congratulations for making it so far!

Here's some great resources for OS dev, if you wanted to take this further (or if anyone else in this thread fancies a shot):

- http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page

- http://forum.osdev.org/

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record (MBR layout)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

- http://www.ctyme.com/rbrown.htm (full BIOS interrupts list)

- http://www.emu8086.com/interrupts.html (much friendlier BIOS interrupts)

alexjeffreyon Show HN: Shyahi - Showcase your developer contributions and social activity.

Hey, love the look of the site - I'll try it out tonight when I get home. I reckon it'll be great if you did as good a job on this as you did on the iDitty app ;)

alexjeffreyon Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=i+have+a+dream&p...

thank god for those who don't respect overzealous copyright holders.

alexjeffreyon Does Steve Jobs know how to code?

a recent example of this taken to extremes would be the film "Mermaid: the body found" - pretending to be a documentary claiming evidence of the existence of mermaids, until the credits roll and reveal that the whole film and most of the evidence was a fiction. Granted the subject matter is unlikely, but the deception comes off as very unethical.

alexjeffreyon Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements

this is beautiful; this will definitely come in handy when I start machining...

alexjeffreyon Show HN: Content underload

it sounds like this first phase is more market testing than the final product - I suspect if interest is high then they will have enough data and potential buyers to formulate a business plan.

alexjeffreyon When Power Goes To Your Head, It May Shut Out Your Heart

that may not always be practical though - how would you go about stripping the power of the employer over the employee? without an employer's power to say, decide whether an employee gets fired or a raise, the relationship would no longer be there.

alexjeffreyon Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask)

Imagine how slow progress would be if for every different condition you had to either create a new query or alter an old one, with the latter potentially meaning you have to add new JOINs, adding weight to all other queries based off that string. It's very painful - I should know, this was my reality for a few months before implementing an ORM over the top.

alexjeffreyon "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"

I understood the article as less saying "People are only using personal computing devices for trivialities!", more saying "Entrepreneurs are building businesses with little to no real positive impact on the world".

Obviously the PC is revolutionary given that people can now do things that were impossible/difficult before, like meeting people from disparate communities (see: HN), freely communicating with distant family/friends, becoming citizen journalists through blogging, finding their place in hard-to-find or sparsely-located communities, so on.

alexjeffreyon “NASDAQ is owned.” Five men charged in largest financial hack ever

it is when used correctly within quotes (and used with common charsets, but that's a different story altogether). There is no publicly known way to inject the following when the database is encoded in ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8:

"SELECT ... WHERE `field_name` = '" . mysql_real_escape_string($string_value) . "'";

alexjeffreyon “NASDAQ is owned.” Five men charged in largest financial hack ever

in this case it was supposedly done using SQL injections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection#Incorrectly_filte...

alexjeffreyon “NASDAQ is owned.” Five men charged in largest financial hack ever

the idea that NASDAQ might've been hacked using an SQL injection is pretty scary, as it's a pretty trivial attack to protect against in most cases (mysql_real_escape_string?) - is security in stock exchanges really so lax?

alexjeffreyon Ideas for Computing

some of these are really interesting ideas. I have one to add to the mix: go implement them! As technologists we all have unprecedented power to create change at our fingertips and I'd love it if you could come back with a list of great ideas, _with some of them implemented already_.

[note] the biggest one for me is the "life engine" - I would happily pay you £50/month for this!

alexjeffreyon Seven years in hell

what can you even say to this? a system so corrupt and biased towards women accusers that a callous ex-wife can ruin her ex-husband's life with very little chance of punishment, with the full help and support of the police, the law and advocacy groups?

This is what feminism does - while there are plenty of feminists who want equal rights, there seems to be an ever-present element of women who will eternally play the victim card to stack the deck in their favour, with an undercurrent of anti-male sexism that somehow seems to be considered acceptable.

I will always support the movement towards equal rights but things like this make me sick and only serve to harm the overall image of equal rights. I hope something is done about these laws and policies.

alexjeffreyon Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?

To quote:

“This old lady is giving some of her money away for free to charities she picks. Obviously, she doesn’t care to keep her money, so it can’t possibly be a big deal that we take the rest of her money without giving her a say about it.”

“These people are having sex with a lot of people. Obviously, they don’t mind having sex with other people, and that gives me the right to have sex with them, by force if necessary.”

If these two statements come across as shockingly arrogant to you as an offline-born, then you need to learn and understand that the first statement, which treats privacy as up for grabs, is perceived exactly as shockingly arrogant to the net generation.

maybe privacy invasion and theft can be compared against each other, but bringing rape into the equation as if it somehow sits on the same level is ridiculous.

alexjeffreyon Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?

The use of "offline-born" in this article is very disconcerting and seems to express something of a "superior-us vs. inferior-them" mentality. While I agree with the majority of the article and the need to preserve the right to privacy, calling a large group of people "offline-borns" and equating their actions with theft and rape is dehumanising and should not be considered acceptable!

alexjeffreyon A refresher course in empathy

it's still called signal vs. noise, but they use the name as heavily any more. From the page header:

You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

alexjeffreyon How ASCII lost and unicode won

I believe it depends on the encoding - UTF-32 has a limit of 2^32 characters, but UTF-8 could potentially expand infinitely (ignoring the current arbitrary 4-byte limit).

alexjeffreyon Distributed Everything

the UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) is gaining traction over here, on the back of a single policy - get Britain out of the EU. It's not all holding hands and dancing round the may pole:

- Much of our legal system is now amended in Brussels, rather than London. This should be fairly obvious but the UK != Belgium != Finland != Lithuania, and making sweeping laws across all of the above can/has caused some serious issues.

- We were lucky not to have moved over to the Euro, as currently France and Germany are being lumbered with the task of keeping the currency afloat amid financial meltdowns in Greece, Italy, and Spain. France and Germany caught the short straws here.

- It costs a lot of money to stay in the EU - it's difficult to get exact numbers but between 6 and 14 billion GBP per year are the figures I've seen.

- The European legal system can block the UK government from making rulings, which has both practical and political implications. In the widely-publicised extradition case of Abu Hamza (a known islamic fundamentalist, supporter of Al-Qaeda and general dick), the UK moved to extradite him to the USA to face trial but this was blocked by the European court (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/08/abu-hamza-human-rig...).

Now the EU has its benefits too which should be weighed against, but let me just emphasise that it's not all rosy.

[full disclosure: voted liberal democrats]

[edit: formatting list]

alexjeffreyon Ubisoft hacked, account data compromised

arbitrary length passwords simply aren't necessary though, and are unlikely to be used - if you were to cap passwords at, say, 128 characters, who would run into that limit?

I'm not arguing that if this functionality were already present in an app that you should remove it; however if it's not there already there's very little value it could add that would justify any development time. That's just my opinion though.

alexjeffreyon Ubisoft hacked, account data compromised

no it doesn't remove any security, but why implement a feature that doesn't add anything?

alexjeffreyon Ubisoft hacked, account data compromised

this doesn't add extra security - the first hash becomes a substitute password. A cracker could modify their steam account to take said hash as input and sent it directly over the wire.

alexjeffreyon The Underhanded C contest

while not exactly similar in terms of objective, http://js1k.com might tickle your fancy - the aim is to write a javascript app within some category or definition which is provided at the start of the contest, and to use no more than 1kb for your app's code (not including what they give you). It can really test your ability to minify by hand!

alexjeffreyon The Underhanded C contest

my entry is in there. I would encourage anyone with a bit of spare time over the next few days to write up an entry! It's great fun and you're guaranteed to learn something if you try to build a creative exploit.

alexjeffreyon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

Ok here we go.

Feminism as taken from an encyclopedia is basically equated with the equal rights movement for women. I am in 100% support of this side of feminism and the idea that all people regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation and so many other dimensions should live as equals.

The feminism I am against is that which seems to have strongly influenced gender politics in recent years in such areas as domestic violence convictions, accusations of rape, how divorces are perceived and handled and so many other important issues. This is the feminism that says men are inherently sexist and that the whole system of life and governance (the "patriarchy") is designed for the systematic rape, enslavement and degradation of women.

However, this isn't the point you've raised in this most recent comment so I'll try to address that instead. You say that the fact that the blogger is a feminist doesn't matter, and you're completely correct. However, seeing some self-professed "dirty old man" make a comment about how Marissa Mayer looks attractive and jumping straight onto "he's being sexist!" is a classic feminist move and is what's being criticised here. Sure, the comment was inappropriate in a professional environment, but it's not like the guy was saying "how do you expect us to take you seriously, you're a woman". The fact of the matter is men are physiologically built to recognise and look for beauty in women, and there's nothing sexist about that. Mislabelling everything as being sexist against women is how said feminists seem to be able to hide blatant sexism against men as if it were a perfectly normal belief to hold, and I will happily attempt to neutralise any such statement if only to try to minimise some of the extreme views that can grow from it.

Anyway, I'm reading too deeply into this now so all I can do is suggest you watch some videos and read some posts by Karen Straughan aka girlwriteswhat. She very succintly covers the issues with modern (some would say radical) feminism while at the same time advocating for equal rights, and hopefully from taking in some of her points you'll be able to understand why I've reacted so strongly to your suggestion that feminism is "a no-brainer".

alexjeffreyon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

well no, I was emphasising that these aren't just "some jerks" in the feminist community; these are quotes from central figures who have affected feminist doctrine in a direct way.

alexjeffreyon Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman

I could totally get on board with what you're saying if it weren't for the fact that some of the most prominent figures of modern feminism were massive sexists. I've attached some quotes below from some prominent radical feminists, and these women certainly aren't on the fringe of feminist thought.

Andrea Dworkin: "I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice."

Robin Morgan: "I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

Marilyn French: "All men are rapists and that’s all they are"

Catherine McKinnon: "In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent."

[edit/note] I can't post a full rebuttal of what you've written right now as I'm at work, but if you're still on this once I've gone home I'll be happy to debate this point with you.