HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dscpls

65 karma · joined July 2, 2013

submissionscomments
dscpls··on What's so hard about PDF text extraction?
Organisations that have existing business processes to publish to print and pdf but now want to publish in responsive formata for mobile or even desktop web.

Changing their process might be more expensive than paying a lot of money for them to carry on as is for a few more years while getting the benefit of modern eyes on their content.

Edit: concrete example would be government publications like budget narrative documents.

dscpls··on What Unix Cost Us [video]
I'm literally repeating words and phrases from the talk.
dscpls··on What Unix Cost Us [video]
Please point out my

- baseless assertions

- gratuitous blanket personal attacks

Right now it looks like that's what you're doing, because I don't see that in my comment.

Did you watch the talk to the end?

Edit: line breaks

dscpls··on What Unix Cost Us [video]
Awesome talk. Especially connecting how leaving an entrenched mindset behind applies both to architecture and to diversity in our communities.

And that our meritocracies are not as pure as we'd like to think.

dscpls··on The “No Code” Delusion
Yeah while I think one of the hardest parts if a software developer's job (working at multiple levels of abstraction), that's literally the job. You're translating between the business and the sillicon.

By all means restrict yourself to assembly but yhe rest of us will get more done by using things at convenient levels of abstraction for those specific units.

dscpls··on The “No Code” Delusion
This says it's very either or, and I think misses the point of a lot of nocode tools.

One of the best measures of tools is their composability. Can you use this for what it's good at, and integrate that solution with another tool that's much harder to use but can solve the last 5-10% that's just too hacky or not supported directly by this tool?

For my that's where zoho creator falls down a bit. Their APIs are just web form post handlers. But it works!

We're doing a lot of stuff on webflow by dropping some custom javascript in there to hook it up to an API or do some very data-driven stuff beyond their interactions.

The point is, nocode isn't just for proofs of concepts, although it's great for that.

When evaluating nocode tools, look for integration/extension points, and think about your migration path should you need to replace it. Hopefully you're succefful enough to need that but don't build 100% of your app by hand because 10% actually needs hand-written code.

dscpls··on “I would like to maintain the floppy driver”
Always amazes me that people find it necessary to downvote a comment like this
dscpls··on “I would like to maintain the floppy driver”
This is the best comment here
dscpls··on Show HN: robots.txt as a service, check web crawl rules through an API
Why a service and not a library?

It looks like a great way for you to discover URLs but like a terribly slow way for people to avoid implementing robots.txt rules.

dscpls··on Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
Wow. I literally just sat down to relax after building a cardboard prototype cat door fitting in my open window in winter. You just made me feel partly inferior, and partly like I'm in good company
dscpls··on News Websites Are Dumpster Fires
Do we have any evidence that these issues are really the causes of people consuming news elsewhere?

- Clickbait headings with misleading information

Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking?

- Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present

What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for?

- Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts

Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users?

- Taking massive performance hits (specifically on mobile due to huge JavaScript blocks)

Maybe getting closer to what users actually care about

- Pop-up ads

Again - any evidence this puts normal internet users off so much they'd stop using a site? There must be a reason MEDIUM.COM and every single recipe blog pops up their newsletter subscription as intrusively as possible.

- Fixed headers or footers which leads to harder readability / accidental element interactions

Here's again an actual deterrent - if someone physically can't use a site, they might actually give up.

---

I'm not saying news sites are not dumpster fires, but I'm a techie and love a good boycott.

I'd question the premise of this article - it seems to be very much from a techie privacy-active (not just concerned, but actually willing to take action) perspective which I suspect does not represent the majority of the internet.

I suspect that if people are actually using news sites less, it's because of much simpler reasons...like that Google intercepts a user's attempt to read news linking to their favourite publications.

dscpls··on Linux distros without systemd
To be fair, erlang would have been the better choice here. Memory safety, concurrency and solid error handling all in one.
dscpls··on Achieving 100k connections per second with Elixir
Erlang tends to have excellent cpu utilisation if you follow the most basic principles in Erlang and OTP.

The question is if you cannor want to write better concurrent code by rolling it yourself.

dscpls··on You probably don't need a single-page app
I could make the reverse argument: bad frontend programmers who dont use the facilities available to separate concerns create unmaintainable spaghetti when good backend programmers who separate concerns properly produce beautiful maintainable code.

The key being bad programmers dont isolate concerns and good ones do.

dscpls··on Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (2016)
Why not firefox on mobile? Been using it for months and about as hapoy with it as firefox on desktop
dscpls··on The Blank Box – When lifted, a 12-gauge shotgun blank goes off (2017)
Why would a tech solution change matters? I mean yeah having it all in one place helps, but it's all out there already.

What else is needed to make.it actually work?

dscpls··on Swedish ISP Protests ‘Site Blocking’ by Blocking Rightsholders Website Too
How do we feel about this with regard to net neutrality? Are we ok with the blocking they choose to do here because we agree with them ethically in this case?
dscpls··on Maersk installed 100-foot-tall rotating sails on one of its tankers
There's no question sails can move today's cargo volume. But the shape of the ships doesn't lend itself to sail power. I think these sails are specific to supporting other power. And the shape of today's ships is very much towards fitting more cargo. I think you'd need at least slightly bigger ships that are efficient for sail power alone, and able to carry similar cargo volume or mass.
dscpls··on A2Z: A computer designed and built from scratch. Custom CPU on FPGA (2017)
I don't think it's necessarily two fundamentally different personalities (unless I have multiple...which I might...)

I grew up taking things apart, and I loved the courses where we build logic gates or modified compiler or interpreter code.

I now build things on the shoulders of giants.

But when I need to, I know I can dive to the deepest levels to debug something, or I can write or customise any part of the stack.

It sure is a mindset shift and a context switch. I consider choosing the right moment to switch approach to be one of the most important and hardest tasks of developing software systems.

dscpls··on Ask HN: Simple, beginner friendly ETL / Data Engineering project ideas?
I think it's as vague as it sounds. But the stereotype is probably something like translating rows to columns; or normalizing a column; or creating a composite column
dscpls··on ODKCollect: Android app for forms, designed for use in challenging environments
Also look at kobo toolbox and kobo collect. They're based off the odk and forhub codebases I think.

Kobotoolbox provides a useful interface for previewing your data and building forms. Also an api for pulling collected data into other platforms

dscpls··on A decentralised Universal Basic Income platform based on personal currencies
As long as we call it a company, its raison d'etre is precisely to maximise the value for its shareholders. A non-profit has the freedom not to, and can focus on a core mission. As much as I'd love to believe in social entrepreneurship, if you define yourself as something which by base definition maximises value for shareholders, that's what you're gonna have to do when push comes to shove.

So sure - some kinds of organisation can and do provide social glue. The problem is, the capitalist notion of organisation doesn't support this. Not to imply I'm against capitalism - it has its benefits, but social glue is not it.

dscpls··on Continued G4 (Severe) Geomagnetic Storming Observed
Nice resource, thanks!

Note that this is exactly why they teach you not to rely on your gps for navigation between rocks. You should be using sightings, log and compass. And that's why you dont leave anchorage in fog.

dscpls··on Neural Nets Can Learn Function Type Signatures from Binaries [pdf]
Are you sure? AFAICT their method only uses debugging symbols for training. I haven't read it all but it would be a big omission if they didn't mention that it only works on binaries with debugging symbols. When actually reversing they work on numeric "symbols" for the assembly instructions.
dscpls··on Set in Your Ways: Perl 6’s Setty and Baggy Types
One of the best punny titles I've ever heard. Well done. Really well done.
dscpls··on UK government bars foreign academics from advising on Brexit
If you qear glasses, get contacts now!
dscpls··on Announcing SyntaxNet: The World’s Most Accurate Natural Language Parser
syntactic analysis is generally a precursor to semantic analysis

EDIT: but sure, this is only the first step and semantic parsing is far from solved

dscpls··on Advanced Economies Must Still Make Things
This inference of "making implies jobs therefore make things" is just short sighted. Is making things really the _only_ option of making providing jobs?! It's not realistic when there's nothing more we need to make and consume!
dscpls··on After fifteen years of downtime, the MetaFilter gopher server is back
I say gopher it!
dscpls··on The Perfect Birth Control for Men Is Here. Why Can't We Use It?
I'm not impressed that they say condoms are not effective
Page 1 of 2Next →