Hacker News Reader

clordon Show HN: Create font in your own handwriting style

Would like a tool like this that finds ligatures too. I combine certain letters when writing.

clordon What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

I blame the rise of more effective DRM and the removal/demoting of lan play in favor of hosted servers. All of my favorite RTS games were discovered while at a friends house. We’d do a quick copy and have an epic game session, creating a legend game that I’ve bought multiple times since. Studios should allow copying of games for some purposes like local multiplayer, but protect single player and internet content with IAP, so that the game spreads virally, creating a large market and a strong brand.

This was exactly how many of the classics got started, but back then it was in spite of the studios intentions. I think a good rts could still spread that way but now players would welcome the IAP, as long as core mechanics are available and it’s not pay-to-level-up.

clordon A better zip bomb

Yes. Chrome is surveillance-ware now. I’d rather use Safari or Firefox than Chrome.

clordon Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

I use 2, one controls fans and pumps, linear actuators, and sensors for my greenhouse. The other does likewise (plus heaters and heat lamps) for my chicken coop. I prefer rolling my own to ensure it works without internet.

clordon A Failed Experiment with Python Type Annotations

It’s only true if you have the function body available for deduction. Headers/decls need types.

clordon The Feds May Come to Regret Charging Assange with Espionage

> "is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct"

That sounds so broad. Doesn’t it include lobbyists? voters who threaten to vote out a party if they don’t do as they like? What if the government is trump 2.0 and is acting tyrannical? What are the limitations?

clordon IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries

Lots of things are “rooted” in dark places. Rocket technology developed in wartime Germany. Some pesticides came out of gas chambers. Agent orange is a herbicide now. Should we throw out everything developed by someone who holds a bad idea by today’s standards?

clordon Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video]

You’re complaining that DOS lacked features and protections. But zero cost abstractions like DOS can still be robust (in the sense of being reliable and solid.) yes it requires more trust, But there is no guarantee modern OSes can run arbitrary zero-trust binaries.

clordon Rise of Candida auris embodies a serious and growing public health threat

It is so incredibly stupid on so many levels to be spraying antifungals into the environment. Not least because of the resistance problem. There are many ways that fungus interacts with plants and animals. Destabilizing the base of some critical food chain to get 10% better crop yields seems like a bad idea for us to do.

clordon YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes

I wouldn’t mind having these customization methods you suggest organized under different “smart playlists” with different recommendation methods and levels. Some are just chronological subscriptions, others try to dig up new and interesting/different content.

clordon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (March 2019)

  SEEKING WORK  
  Location: Alberta, Canda  
  Remote: Yes, world-wide  
  Resume/CV: https://www.pliosoft.com/docs/ChristopherCLord.pdf  
  Email: christopher@pliosoft.com  
  Technologies: C++, Haskell, JS, React, GraphQL, Ruby, Qt

Hello, I'm Christopher Lord, cofounder of Pliosoft. I am available for freelance work. I am an expert in several technologies, including C++ and JS, and quickly coming to a similar level in Haskell. I have an eye for design and user experience. I run my own company building a SasS app and have deployed a web-based point of sale system for on-premises installations, both using React frontends and Haskell for the backend. I've done a fair bit of work on embedded and user applications. Interested in open source work. In the past I worked for 8 years as a compiler engineer at IBM. I'd prefer something in the 30-40 hours/week range but let me know if you want something else, anything is possible. Rates negotiable.

clordon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2019)

  Location: Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Will Consider
  Technologies: C++, Haskell, JS, React, GraphQL, Ruby, Qt
  Résumé/CV: https://www.pliosoft.com/docs/ChristopherCLord.pdf
  Email: christopher@pliosoft.com

clordon Canada's Bell Tried to Have VPNs Banned During NAFTA Negotiations

Looks like I manage to boycott them entirely without really trying.

clordon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2019)

SEEKING WORK - remote short to medium projects - Canada & US - christopher@pliosoft.com

Experienced freelancer (4 years) seeking a contract. Before freelancing I worked with IBM on their compilers (C++ and fortran) for 8 years. More recently I've been working on QT and C++ projects, react native apps, a point of sale system for ski-hills with haskell core, and an in-progress react webapp for organizing classes. Rate is negotiable.

https://pliosoft.com

https://github.com/pliosoft

christopher@pliosoft.com

clordon Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Real

I'd hope for a journal the only publishes replicated results. I think there is limited funding for this right now.

clordon Fortran is still a thing

Fortran has better aliasing rules than C. Most of the strangeness you have to do with restrict pointers in C are not a concern in high performance code. Because strides and dimensions and types are all laid out explicitly, the optimizer can really go to town. And with co-arrays the same syntax generalizes to multiple compute nodes.

I worked as lead on IBM’s ASTI component (part of xlf) 10 years ago, and kind of miss it sometimes.

clordon International System of Units overhauled in historic vote

It was metricized with all the rest before that. What happened in 59 was harmonization with other countries including Canada, who had a different agreement on the metric yard. The older american definition was 1 yard = 3600/3937 meter. The international metric yard is exactly 0.9144m. (A difference of 0.002mm)

clordon International System of Units overhauled in historic vote

The US units are defined in terms of SI since the Mendenhall Order[0], so they also benefit from this change.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order

clordon As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

I downvote you because the research withstands your attempted ad hominem attack. If the result is good we should not cast dispersion just because the researcher has a particular bias.

In fact those times when your ideology does not line up with scientific results are precisely when you should sit up and take notice that perhaps your ideology is failing you.

clordon Idempotence: What is it and why should I care?

Your error changed the state S of the world.

clordon Using rope physics to simulate cabling a data center in VR

Would be fun to hook this up to crossbow or another robust virtual network stack. Virtually wire up virtual networking. Throw in a little virtual PDA to configure and spin up new VMs (spawning them into rack on demand).

clordon Going IPv6 Only [pdf]

you don't have to spoof, just leave the WAN device off around the time when your dhcp lease expires. When you come back online, you'll find you have a new lease with likely a new address.

clordon Transfer.sh – File sharing from the command line

This particular tool seems useful for sharing files with people who might not be comfortable with the command-line, or where you don't have an account on the receiver's computer, since it produces a regular http link to download the data.

clordon TextMate 2.0 (rc 10)

Most of my issues with e.g., SublimeText are on the selection side of things. For example, last time I tried SublimeText, I tried ^W to build a multi-select. Didn't work. Tried incremental-find, didn't work. Finally try quick-find, didn't actually multi-select (yellow highlights), but then notice there are cursors without selection, so finally can move them around and build the selection. I don't remember there being any issues once the multi-cursors are turned on.

Other editors get the other side of the coin wrong, and don't have all the movement operators needed to do a some jobs (word-move while selecting/deleting to remove ragged whitespace).

That all said, there is a big component of what one is familiar with. I'll admit TM's multi-select was the first good implementation i've used and haven't strayed too much since.

clordon TextMate 2.0 (rc 10)

* MacOS has a system-wide feature that does this better than N++: Select a word, command-e, and the selected word goes to the "search pasteboard" or whatever it's called. It fills the search box, and also primes command-g (find next/prev) It works with other search features really well, and is cross-app.

* TextMate has amazing regex support. I replace multi-line stuff all the time. Best i've found.

* TM column select is most likely just as good, and it has multi-select (non-column based multi-selection). (I don't know the in's and outs of n++ to comment)

* TM uses the usual command-t for something else, but command-option-n isn't too bad for a new tab.

* command-e to prime selection, then option-command-f to selects all. These are real multi-selections not just highlights, so you can edit-all, copy-paste, etc.

clordon TextMate 2.0 (rc 10)

I've been a vim user for at least 18 years, but I still use textmate often as #2. TM's find/replace system is the best of any text editor I've ever used, and if I have to bulk-convert a file from one format to another by hand, the multi-column editing support is first-rate. Often I can just select all first-positions, and word-move around all lines at once, inserting commas and deleting parens. Those features just seem native and intuitive to me, and I miss them dearly elsewhere in the OS. Other editors try to implement those features but it's usually janky and hard to call native-feeling.

clordon Two Canadian banks say accounts compromised: CIBC 40,000 and BMO 50,000

A little bird told me it's because they still use cobol fixed width data and are basically scared to change it. To fix, first they have to finish their rewrite.

clordon Haskell's Missing Concurrency Basics (2016)

Use an STM channel or some other lock and put your messages for the shared resource (the terminal ui) through that channel. There’s no way to automatically figure out what granularity the programmer expects from the output so make them specify. Haskell makes specifying that staggeringly easy compared to other languages.

clordon What's the size of that vector, anyway?

I'd guess it chooses the implicit string(const char*) constructor and then feeds it a nullptr. I think the plan is to get rid of this in the future with the new nullptr_t/nullptr mechanism, but for now we're stuck with it.

clordon Planets evenly spaced on log scale

Another wild guess: a sphere of gas collapsed to a rotating disk. If you take a sphere and squash it flat, the middle has most of the mass, and it declines to zero as you get farther. I would guess the pattern of falloff of a squashed sphere is roughly logarithmic. That pattern gets quantized into planets, and so we see the original spherical distribution in our planets.