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ankhmoopon Conferences

You don't need a conference to go out for a beer, and you certainly don't need an exclusive conference to go out for a beer with someone interesting.

You do need a way to gather interesting people in one place, but you don't need a traditional conference (especially an expensive conference) to do so.

ankhmoopon The Flimsy Doorknob & The Forgettable Receipt

Unless you're going to deliver a receipt that matches my meal in value, I don't particularly see the point. I don't want some stock-printed receipt merely intended to impress.

Receipts are just receipts, and there's no real value you can provide for me there. Instead, remember who I am, and welcome me back next time.

I should also note that the author's point could have been better elucidated without relying so heavily on braggart anecdote.

ankhmoopon Database of hidden settings for Mac OS X

Mac OS X preferences -were- human-readable (and editable), but that's not what makes the NSUserDefaults API so handy. What makes NSUserDefaults handy is the support for varying default domains (network, system, user) and dead-simple serialization of Objective-C basic types (strings, ints, dictionaries, arrays).

Additionally, Apple switched to a binary file format to improve performance in 10.5, which may be converted to/from the text format, or edited directly using the property list editor.

There's also nothing stopping a software author from documenting their settings file keys, and some do. However, most of the settings options you do see listed on that site are undocumented because they are unsupported.

ankhmoopon Conferences

Given that the talks are canned, and the materials they are based on are almost always published, why should I pay for a conference when I can already leverage existing networking/social channels to stay in touch with the latest?

ankhmoopon Nate Lawson Breaks Google Keyczar's HMAC Crypto Signatures

While I don't believe Atwood should have anything to do with educating developers about how to build crypto, the fact is that the available libraries are remarkably poor, and as a developer I've been placed in the unfortunate position of "building crypto", with my OpenSSL reference and Applied Cryptography in-hand.

Until we developers have books that better elucidate the pitfalls of implementation, or better libraries that avoid the pitfalls on our behalf, we'll be stuck "building crypto", somewhat blindly.

I've seen you recommend GPGME previously. It's practice of executing the GPG command line tool is just not workable in many implementation environments. In my most recent use-case (several years ago), if there had been a decent portable, liberally licensed stream-supporting implementation of CMS (RFC3852), I would have gladly, readily used it.

ankhmoopon Database of hidden settings for Mac OS X

No, because then there wouldn't be such a nice API for managing live settings from within the programs themselves:

http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Reference/Fou...

ankhmoopon Poll: Should we ban TechCrunch?

The prevalence of linkbait Coding Horror, TechCrunch, and Rails-Drama articles has resulted in a significant reduction in my daily reading of HN. I'm interested in reading and commenting on informed, insightful articles.

TechCrunch, Coding Horror, and Rails-Drama are not insightful, often factually incorrect, always incendiary -- linkbait flytraps for junior technologists.

ankhmoopon Next gen mapping visualization

It looks great, but unfortunately, the plugin is Windows only (and I'd never install a random plugin anyway), and the Java-based demo won't work either since I just turned Java off (http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/CVE-2008-5353.2009...)

ankhmoopon Preparing For A First Meeting With Me

From the article: "Regardless of the outcome of a meeting, I view it as a success if I learn one thing."

This is a phrase I've heard more than once from individuals who lack the humility to appreciate that the meeting is also a success if they teach just one thing.

ankhmoopon Superduper Slow Jar Command (embarassing bug in the jar code)

I can't believe that no one's discovered this yet. Maybe this is a manifestation of the Python paradox. The kind of people using the jar command (Java developers) are the kind of people who just accept the limitations of their systems without questioning.

Your argument is pretentious, arrogant, and ultimately clueless.

For small builds, jar is sufficiently fast as to not raise any red flags. For large builds, jar overhead is small enough as to be easily lost in the noise.

The build should have been profiled, and this is an embarrassing bug, but it's absolutely, completely ridiculous to generalize this to the fact that Java developers could be the "kind of people who just accept the limitations of their systems without questioning".

ankhmoopon Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac?

We're forced to regularly ban Mibbit users on Freenode technical channels due to abuse masked by Mibbit's proxying, and for that reason I must say I'm not a fan.

ankhmoopon Hire HN: Web Developer Needed in Columbus, OH

Assuming your web development position actually requires a computer science background, I'd recommend rephrasing your educational requirements as "Bachelors in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience".

ankhmoopon ACLU sues over patents on breast cancer genes

Regardless of the merits of the case, choosing to frame the gene-patent fight in terms of reduced access to health care and breast cancer research is a brilliant political move.

ankhmoopon The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon Peyton Jones [pdf]

My browser provides an inline PDF viewer (no Acrobat required).

ankhmoopon Y Combinator’s ReMail Finally Brings Full-Text Email Search To The iPhone

Apple already has quite a bit of experience with full-text e-mail search, not to mention running Mobile Me's mail servers.

What would be the upside?

ankhmoopon Y Combinator’s ReMail Finally Brings Full-Text Email Search To The iPhone

They may be referring to IMAP's server-side search support. If the message isn't cached locally, the IMAP server can search the message headers, body, etc on the phone's behalf.

See RFC 3501, section 6.4.4:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html

ankhmoopon Magical iPhone View Controllers

The lack of a vendor-documented API guarantee means that any findings are moot, and usage of this feature is unsafe. Open source, for all its developer benefits, would not change this.

ankhmoopon What Killed Smalltalk: My Balls

The article is a puerile rant; it borders on incoherent, lacks any rational supporting argument, and does little to convince the reader besides advancing emotional declarations.

"The only question is, how big a dick move was it?"

"It's only a good thing for people who fuck up a lot."

ankhmoopon Speeding up a Rails request by 150ms by changing 1 line

You've missed an important but subtle point. The article points out that the reason this was overlooked is not because Rails isn't profiled but because this behaviour is happening outside the standard rails profiling scope. That is a) why it's not a "relatively-straightforward bug fix", b) why it hadn't been caught already and c) why it is interesting. Actually I take that back, it is a relatively-straightforward bug fix. As with all the best bugs it's finding it that wasn't straightforward.

Properly profiling the full execution path should be an entirely obvious step to take.

ankhmoopon Speeding up a Rails request by 150ms by changing 1 line

The short and to-the-point version of the post went to the Rails-core mailing list. On my blog, I prefer to tell stories.

There are quite a few stories of this nature, which could simply be summarized as individuals finding incredibly simple inefficiencies and then fixing them.

ankhmoopon Speeding up a Rails request by 150ms by changing 1 line

I'm not sure why individuals feel the need to write an entire page of text regarding a relatively straight-forward bug fixes. "Improved [Rails|Ruby|...] performance by [X] ms by changing [N < 20] lines of code" posts are becoming a common occurrence.

The regular occurrence of such issues in a project implies an immature, poorly profiled code base, and are the kinds of things that other projects fix without fanfare.

Our most recent database-backed dynamic web application can serve >10000 requests/sec on our mid-range hardware at <2 ms/req, which we achieved by running the most basic of profiling early on and throughout the development process, and using software that does the same. I don't expect a gold star for this.

ankhmoopon Artists Commandeer (illegal) Manhattan Billboards

That's typically how it works. Paul can ban people from his site. The New York Times can prevent you from publishing an article on its pages. Neither infringes on your free speech rights, as understood by law and Western intellectual tradition.

Yes. However, I can also choose to not read Hacker News, or The New York Times.

ankhmoopon Artists Commandeer (illegal) Manhattan Billboards

I believe the most interesting aspect of your comment is the conflation of individual, corporate, and commercial speech as "free speech".

Why, exactly, do you think that your proposed "right not to see things you don't want to see" trumps the right of others to advertise on their own property / speak their own minds?

Your position is predicated on the idea that other's speech and property rights trump speech rights -- that is, the artists' free speech rights are constrained by the property and free speech rights of the advertisers and owners.

Does this not imply that there could be constraints on the exercise of free speech insofar as it infringes upon the rights of others? Could pervasive, unavoidable public advertising, explicitly designed to instill desire through emotional manipulation, somehow infringe on my rights as an individual to not listen?

ankhmoopon I Want My Memory, Apple

Just curious, can swap space be enabled on a jailbroken iphone?

The iPhoneOS doesn't ship with dynamic_pager, which implements user-space allocation and enabling of page files, but in theory, the necessary kernel support should be available.

Enabling paging to a specific file is done via the macx_swapon syscall:

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/bsd/vm/dp_backing_file.c?v=...

dynamic_pager handles allocation of swap files on-demand (requires free ADC account):

http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.0/system_cmd...

ankhmoopon I Want My Memory, Apple

Well the way you use memory in a game is non deterministic, so "OS having time to free memory" is not a good enough answer.

Once the memory is made available to the foremost application, it will not be reclaimed by the operating system; As a game author you do not need to attempt to introduce determinism across all allocations, but instead ensure that initial allocations are not so rapid as to outpace the low-memory handling.

Also , maybe someone around here knows, or my question is stupid, but why isn't a virtual memory mechanism implemented into the iphone OS?

The OS does have a VM, it simply does not have swap space allocated to support paging to disk (flash). Paging would introduce a considerably less enjoyable user experience than forcing applications to account for the available RAM, and significantly decrease flash lifetime.

ankhmoopon I Want My Memory, Apple

I'm not sure the author is sufficiently familiar with the iPhone's memory management. The iPhone will terminate a user process if it consumes all available memory before the OS' low-memory handling has triggered low memory warnings, causing (in this order):

- Running processes (including background processes) expunge caches, non-visible UI, etc.

- Termination of Safari and Mail, which are kept running to improve the user experience.

In reality, one can use up to approximately 40 megabytes of RAM without triggering an application failure, as long as the memory is not allocated and used before the OS has time to free memory by warning/triggering background processes.

While this is more complicated than a guaranteed minimum available amount of RAM, it does permit applications to consume (and rely on) a relatively fixed amount of RAM, and seems a reasonable compromise on a multi-purpose, non-console consumer device.

ankhmoopon Face Detection on iPhone (including source code)

Most github links appear to be code dumps, not projects (or, at least, what I would consider projects).

My definition of a 'project' includes documentation, stable releases (ie, tar/zip archives), issue tracking, mailing lists -- these things seem to be perennially missing from most github projects I encounter.

ankhmoopon 'Hackers wanted' ad fed security misconception

Or take software. Does anyone actually believe that it was harder to write code for the ActionScript interpreter than it was to get Dowd's exploit (http://bit.ly/13OjyR) working?

It's not my intention to disparage Dowd's work in the least, but yes.

For all the cleverness involved in breaking software, it still takes years (decades?) of clever man hours to produce a secure, well performing virtual machine.

ankhmoopon A Painful Decision

The inappropriateness of the images is their context -- whether classified as porn or merely risque, their only purpose in this talk was to cloud a technological discussion on the state non-relational distributed key/value databases and their comparison to RDBMs systems, and in doing so unnecessarily offended a significant subset of the audience.

For example, compare slides 15 (RDBMs):

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

and 52 (CouchDB):

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

ankhmoopon Rails is (still) a Ghetto

The side of a bus shelter usually displays advertising, not a subtle technological discussion on the state non-relational distributed key/value databases and their comparative value to RDBMs systems.

For example, compare slides 15 (RDBMs):

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

and 52 (CouchDB):

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...