HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cm3

3,067 karma · joined September 17, 2012

submissionscomments
cm3··on Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
Not all topics warrant certainty, but given the power of news outlets forming opinion and thereby influencing the population's behavior, I do think certain topics demand responsible reporting which doesn't report anything at all if uncertain. It's the same as a good police detective not disclosing speculations to the media because they pursue many leads but only conclude one, and you don't want a mob go lynch people. The same logic applies to news outlets forming people's opinions. That's why I think there's a need for, admittedly few, certain-report-only news agencies. That way, if you read posts on TheSun or E!Online, you get accustomed to not taking it seriously, forming doubt that this is most likely speculation. Once something gets confirmed unquestionably, it can migrate to one of the few vetted-only news outlets, if that's something they cover.

That said, our weather models are pretty good but not good enough to make certain predictions that far away into the future, but they can for the next few hours.

It's like a software company's model of code branches. The Apple/Google/whatever filesystem team works on something, it gets pushed into their level of production branch, then it percolates up to the shared production kernel branch, and after a couple more layers it hits the common branch, which is what public production binaries are made from and consists of kernel, userland, foobar modules all merged together. Not all software shops operate this way, but it's what size of a project can demand after it hits certain amount. The linux kernel works this way too, to name a successful non-commercial project. You can argue this doesn't prevent regressions, and that's true, but it's hard to deny there would be more regressions (aka false reporting) with unfiltered (aka unvetted) reporting.

cm3··on Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation
I'm still waiting for the day that there's a responsible entity that only ever publishes things when they're 100% certain and is willing to bet their freedom (going to prison) on it. But given how information and influencing of opinions is a market and means control of the population, I'm afraid this won't happen with official support, and only be seen as the crazy lunatics news agency that publishes stuff a week or month later after having vetted things.

I'd like to say leave speed reporting to the Twittersphere and mandate a clear label on unvetted news reports on any network, but I doubt politics can have such influence on the media. I would love it if the news reports had a watermark that says fresh-and-unvetted just like "preliminary results" or "consult your doctor before taking".

First we have to encourage and support critical thinking, but too much of it may lead to some influencers misusing it to support causes which deny past and current crimes of humanity on itself and the planet.

cm3··on Introducing the Nextcloud Box
The disk isn't cheaper than in retail, if you don't consider the case to be worth a lot more than is realistic.
cm3··on Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment
I cannot use st because it still has corner cases that xterm works well but st doesn't yet, and I find the need to patch the sources hard to maintain when a new release comes out and has refactorings included.

But I must say that st's font rendering of Unicode is more complete than rxvt-unicode or xterm. With the same font configured in all three, st is the one that manages to render the most glyphs of plan9port's unicode sample file. Would be great to have the same in urxvt or xterm.

cm3··on Introducing the Nextcloud Box
Strictly speaking that doesn't say it includes one, just that there's room for one. But I hope you're right. I've looked at the PDF instructions and still wasn't any wiser.
cm3··on Introducing the Nextcloud Box
From the description on website, it appears to not bundle the computer, just the case and hdd. So, if we consider the HDD to be 60EURO max, having compared to other WD blue mobile disks (couldn't find the exact model listed anywhere), then that leaves you with 10EURO for the case. The total of 70EUROs may or may not include shipping, I couldn't figure that out without trying to place an order. It's not cheap, but that pricing isn't expensive either. If it includes a Pi 2, then it's cheap.
cm3··on Show HN: LosslessCut – Cross-platform GUI tool for fast, lossless video cutting
That's another issue, but it can also lose other data which will cause warnings but play most likely with correct color reproduction.

I don't have such a source file handy to reproduce, but if you try enough ISO MP4 containers with H246, you will hit one where this is the case.

Is `-t` different from `-to` which I've been using?

cm3··on Show HN: LosslessCut – Cross-platform GUI tool for fast, lossless video cutting
How do you deal with the fact that some video tracks do not provide the needed cross-frame data or the times you're cutting are at unfortunate points which would require a re-encoding because a quick byte copy of the existing stream doesn't work or at the very least will complain later about missing things like color info (although it's played back correctly by mpv)?
cm3··on FlyWeb – An API for web pages to host local web servers
Opera 12 had, which doesn't really exist anymore. It's Blink based now and I don't recall the feature being restored (yet).

http://help.opera.com/Windows/12.10/en/unite.html

cm3··on FlyWeb – An API for web pages to host local web servers
Sounds like extensions that delegate text fields to native editors should be easier to write with better ability to expose a localhost http endpoint.
cm3··on FlyWeb – An API for web pages to host local web servers
How similar is this to Opera 12's built-in httpd?
cm3··on 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results
1 and 2 go hand in hand in recursive functions, but 1 is useful without.

Say you have a function that should will tell you a file extension is likely to be that of a text file:

  isTxt("txt") -> true;
  isTxt("org") -> true;
  isTxt(_)     -> false.
With a more comfortable syntax, this can be expressed more concisely, but I just wanted to show that this isn't only useful for recursive functions.

If Rust is planned to get HKT, then I don't see why I cannot get pattern matching in function heads when there's also guards as found in ML languages.

cm3··on 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results
I should add 3, Erlang's bit syntax, which would be a perfect and natural fit for the target of Rust code. It's a very natural DSL to parse or build (complex) bit streams. You don't necessarily have to add bit syntax comprehensions.
cm3··on OCaml 4.04.0 released
I feel your pain, but the features will land when deemed stable. Without more frequent releases, those features would get into a release even later, so more frequent releases are a win either way.
cm3··on 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results
> It's actually more of a sibling in the family who ran away from home at the age of 6 and fell in with the crowd on the wrong side of the tracks.

> Initially Rust was very much like ocaml. It isn't anymore :) Many of the normally-in-functional-languages features in Rust come from these days. Others were lost and re-added later. It's a very complex history.

Yeah, having tried Rust in those days, I kinda stopped when it broke every week, and was then surprised with the surface of 1.0. It seemed like a different person to talk to.

I've made my peace with the C'ification of Rust as the price to pay for attracting a large crowd of developers who grew up with C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, the list goes on. It's a reasonable sacrifice to make, but the two mentioned basic features aren't complex things to wish for.

> could you elaborate? I'm not familiar with this feature (only have dabbled in sml).

Imagine being able to hoist your match clauses into function head (signature?).

  oldEnoughToDrink :: Int -> Boolean
  oldEnoughToDrink 21 -> True
  oldEnoughToDrink _  -> False
Not all languages with support for that force you to repeat the function name, and there are good arguments for/against. For example in Erlang, when you define an anonymous function, you do not repeat it:

  OldEnough = fun(21) -> true;
                 (_)  -> false
              end,
Now, this may seem like a stupid little feature, but trust me when I say it's a natural feature to use like recursive functions after you're used to it.
cm3··on 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results
I know, that's why I wrote "when", knowing it's been considered, but it doesn't appear to be missed by enough developers. I'm just spoiled having used those two features, and anytime someone cites the ML family as part of Rust's influence, it reminds me of these two basic, missing features.

Regarding semantics, without having thought about the Rust semantics too much, I'd suggest to check out the most prominent uses for recursive functions in OCaml, SML or Haskell, then try to consider that as the sweet spot to support in Rust.

cm3··on 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results
We are discouraged from writing recursive functions, which comes naturally when expressing many algorithms. Missing TCO is one cited reason to avoid it, so I gather we're not supposed to, generally speaking.
cm3··on 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results
This wasn't one of the question of the survey, but while having the right crowd around, I have to ask.

When will Rust get

1. function head patterns like other languages in the ML family, although Rust isn't really part of the family, but rather a distant cousin from another continent, which once played with ML and family during a summer vacation

2. support for naturally writing recursive functions

cm3··on How “Black Mirror” Gets Its Barely Sci-Fi Tech Just Right
I don't know if it's US production influence, but seasons 1 and 2 plus the bonus holiday episode were, compared to season 3, raw and felt more real. If I had to explain it, I'd say it's because it was a pure British production. I really hoped after the bad 1st episode that it would get better, but it didn't achieve the same positive effect as the previous seasons.

That said, if the content of season 3 manages to push some of the concerns outlined into the general public's perception and highlights them, then it's a good thing and well achieved.

The thing that stuck and was funniest for me was from the worst episode (ep 1) about the adapter and planned obsolescence.

Since San Junipero is mentioned here positively, I should add that it didn't work for me and seemed like ep 1 just too long for the content, but that's a subjective thing I guess. I kinda found it uninteresting and boring and honestly the ideas brought forward not crazy or exciting. Maybe it's because having lived in the tech world, the concepts are just as old as the availability electricity or even anyone who watched the matrix or read the mangas it's based on would find it "old".

Playtest reminded of the No End House creepypasta.

My favorite episode, despite the plot flaws, was Hated in the Nation, and that one almost saved the season. In light of InternetOf*, it was the episode I enjoyed the most.

cm3··on Turkey blocks social media again to stall protests, here’s how to access them
> overnment was behind the fake coup.

Has this been proven yet? I'm under the impression that we're still in the stages of better not believing any side of the arguments because any secrets - if they exist - will be fresh and well hidden for the moment. If you ask me, I would be very careful claiming to know who orchestrated what.

cm3··on Turkey blocks social media again to stall protests, here’s how to access them
Genuinely curious, only serious answers, please: can someone living in Turkey explain how the government can justify ordering a ban while publicly using Twitter themselves? What am I missing?
cm3··on Here’s to more HTTPS on the web
uMatrix offers a feature to randomly pick a UA every 5 (configurable) minutes from a set of configurable UAs. This works, although GMail might complain about the UA being too old. Reloading GMail resolves it.
cm3··on Here’s to more HTTPS on the web
I did, sorry. And I cannot delete it, will amend the comment and find and comment in the right context.
cm3··on Here’s to more HTTPS on the web
uMatrix offers a feature to randomly pick a UA every 5 minutes from a set of known UAs. This works, although GMail might complain about the UA being too old. Reloading GMail resolves that.

EDIT: Replied to the wrong parent, please ignore in this context.

cm3··on Web fonts, boy, I don't know
My primary reason is that I don't view a page on the same display and machine as the author, so more often than not the presentation is sub-optimal or entirely unreadable locally. Custom fonts are similarly abused like low-contrast text (grey on white).

Also loading via JavaScript and changing the fonts of an already rendered page disrupts my reading. If you want remote fonts, load them from the beginning, or if this isn't possible, just don't, please.

Another justification for disabling remote fonts is that it's one security critical interpreter of complex data which, when disabled, doesn't adversely affect the presentation, whereas on most pages disabling images does and cannot reasonably be disabled. The latter justification may go away with Mozilla's Oxidation efforts with time, leaving just loading time and readability as arguments.

cm3··on Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers with WebSockets
Thanks for the confirmation. I expect new engines like Servo to support content and request filtering at a lower layer for efficiency reasons, while of course still exposing it to JavaScript as needed. Opera already does this out of the box, though I don't know the internals and it's not as full featured as uBlock Origin. Without uBlock Origin and uMatrix, the web would be unusable from a UX perspective. thanks gorhill and friends!
cm3··on Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers with WebSockets
Is it correct that the Firefox uBlock Origin doesn't need the companion as it already supports WebSockets filtering?
cm3··on Pornhub Bypasses Ad Blockers with WebSockets
Presumably the site in question wouldn't be functional then, but it would solve it.
cm3··on Switching from macOS: The Basics
Not trying to downplay issues or shame another system, but if you compare Linux's HiDPI support to Windows, it doesn't look so bad anymore. For one, it's more likely to find apps that scale on Xorg/Wayland than on Windows, most Microsoft Windows official system apps included. Simple things like apps with list controls that have a huge number of entries where you're not able to resize the window while other more prominent MS apps waste white space like macOS and GNOME is an interesting phenomenon to observe.
cm3··on This Summer in Redox: A Complete Rewrite of the Kernel
Oh, and if you extend it with multi-kernel functionality, scaling to very large number of cores/chips will also be solved in a fundamentally cleaner way. I haven't looked into it but there's an seL4 branch that implements multi-kernel support. If you don't know what this is, it's simply a way to have one kernel instance per processor, making scalability easier. Fujitsu has a linux variant to achieve the same and I think it's a goal of Barrelfish as well. Similar solutions exist in certain linux and dragonflybsd subsystems where, say, the network stack uses one scheduler or queue per core, removing the need for synchronization in a coarse way. Then, of course, you have to be smarter about scheduling things, but if you bind certain hardware bits to cores long-term, it should avoid accidental overhead via random migration. Language runtime VMs do the same for green threads with job stealing designs and pinning schedulers to cores. None of it is bleeding edge research material, we just have to use what's been invented.
Page 1 of 34Next →