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em-bee

10,514 karma · joined August 27, 2018

software developer / trainer / mentor / CTO on demand

contact me for mentorship, training or project work opportunities:

embee+hn at societyserver dot net

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em-bee··on Show HN: Whetuu – a zero-config cross-shell prompt written in Zig
that's a fair point, but the script doesn't do much, and this method should not be normalized. i downloaded the release manually, unpacked it, and moved the binary into ~/bin/

what's left is adding the init command to the shell init script.

and it turns out that this is included as an alternate way to install in the repo README.

i really don't see the point of the install script. the verification it offers is of no value because if the repo is compromised then the install script could be compromised too.

em-bee··on Show HN: Whetuu – a zero-config cross-shell prompt written in Zig
The XDG Base Directory spec covers config/data/cache/state, it does not define where executables go.

it does:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/

User-specific executable files may be stored in $HOME/.local/bin. Distributions should ensure this directory shows up in the UNIX $PATH environment variable, at an appropriate place.

i prefer ~/bin/ but this is better than creating you own directory that needs to be added to the path.

em-bee··on Men That Don't Fit In (1911)
no, they are saying that not committing to anything need not be lack of persistence or focus. i have been that person. i am that person. it turns out my goal wasn't to master a specific skill or trade, but to build connections, work with people and help them with whatever they need help with. so my focus was and is on that. it didn't help me build a traditional career, but it led me around the whole world, building up a unique set of experiences and understanding.
em-bee··on Men That Don't Fit In (1911)
man (humans) is not an animal. the society of man has always changed and evolved. it's actually in the nature of man to change and adapt. the question should therefore be: why should you imagine that men have not changed their character?

believing that you can not change your character is merely an excuse to demand tolerance for bad behavior.

em-bee··on Men That Don't Fit In (1911)
seems they haven't read george bernhard shaw or at least heard his famous quote on the subject. he was a contemporary too.
em-bee··on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
but then amazon would not tell her that she should find the code in whatsapp, because amazon would still be sending send an sms. it should not have any awareness of whatsapp hijacking the sms function, and therefore the amazon message should reference the SMS. if it references whatsapp then it means amazon wants to send to whatsapp directly.
em-bee··on New US homeownership measure puts people first
can you elaborate please? how do the methods differ? do you have some links to explain that?
em-bee··on New US homeownership measure puts people first
that number does not feel right. global statistics show only very few countries with a homeownership of less than 50%, two of which are germany and switzerland. and there it's not because they can't afford it but because the cities where people want to live do not even offer enough properties for sale because the majority of housing is owned by large rental businesses.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/home-owne...

the europe average is around 70% and globally i expect it is similar. unfortunately numbers for africa are mostly missing. the few examples there suggest that homeownership is either high, or extremely low, which means you could be correct, but i'd like to see actual numbers. and then it is still a question why it is low. it could be because land is owned by government, tribes or private and not for sale.

https://globalhousingdatabase.com/ shows more african countries, with most of them being medium to high. but it also hows high for nigeria, whereas the other statistic shows nigeria with 25%, and south africa and kenya are shown as much lower here compared to above.

em-bee··on Firefox Containers Preview
the Multi-Account Containers extension always only added additional UI functions to manage containers. it was never a different container implementation. so they are migrating UI features from the extensions back into the core.

"Not all of the features of the add-on are available in the first-party version of containers just yet, we’re still building them out."

the migration is not complete yet. i expect that eventually the extension will be made redundant.

em-bee··on Firefox Containers Preview
interesting. i was not aware of that feature. this will be very useful.
em-bee··on Firefox Containers Preview
as far as i remember, the low level container functionality was always in the core browser. what the extension adds is the UI to manage containers. with this change it appears the UI is merged back into the core browser.
em-bee··on Firefox Containers Preview
the benefit of containers is that they are all in the same browser. all your settings, extensions, remembered passwords, etc. apply to all containers and you can more easily reopen a site in a different container.

i don't get the login with google problem. you would be logged in in one container and not in any of the others. unless you open a site in your "google container", nothing will happen. the container where you log in to google should automatically stay logged in anyways (i am not sure, i don't use google login, but it works like that for many other logins, hackernews for example) so you should never be tempted to hit that login with google button. the separate process only helps you if you save the google password in the browser. if you are like me and don't store passwords in the browser then the containers have the advantage that it is easier to check if you are in the right container instead of making sure you are in the right profile, unless you use themes to differentiate your profiles.

em-bee··on New US homeownership measure puts people first
There should be social housing in every ZIP code

exactly. it has been shown elsewhere that one problem that makes it difficult for people to escape poverty is that everyone around them is poor too. as long as you live there there is an invisible ceiling in how much you can improve your life as an individual/family. people who were able to move to a better neighborhood found it much easier to improve. mixed housing avoids that poor neighborhood trap.

the same btw, is true for the integration of immigrants.

em-bee··on New US homeownership measure puts people first
housing should be an investment the same way that planting trees is an investment. it should not be a financial tool to make you money by selling it.
em-bee··on Mullvad and Daniel Berntsson's Failed Cleanup
interesting examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascual_Jordan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Stark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg

also, traditional german blackletter and german handwriting were abolished by the nazis, so if we take this concept of complete rejection of any of their ideas seriously then germans should have gone back to the old forms after '45. attempts were actually made but failed and in hindsight i think going back would only have strengthened german nationalism as it appears to do today. imagine germany using blackletter today and you ask them: why don't you use normal print like everyone else? only to get the response: we can't, nazis tried that first, and therefore it's a bad idea.

em-bee··on Mullvad and Daniel Berntsson's Failed Cleanup
we can separate technology from ethics, but should we? and if yes, how do we do it? the problem is not that we couldn't, but that the debate around this seems to be polarized. either the separation is 100% or there is no separation at all.

if we take google, amazon, etc, for example, clearly their products are of benefit to a lot of people but on the other side they do a lot of bad things too. if we didn't insist on separating ethics from technology then maybe more people would protest and refuse to use their tools and services. on the other hand, sometimes you are forced to use a tool because there are no alternatives, or because you can't afford to quit your job or reject a client over it. so some separation is necessary.

mullvad is a milder case. the company is clearly doing something positive, and many just disagree with the personal actions/opinions of one of their founders. some people are comfortable to separate that and others are not.

personally i would approach this from the question: how strongly do i want to send a message to this person that i am not ok with their actions. how strong i feel vs how much i depend on the tool/service will affect my choice.

em-bee··on The Fedora project grapples with change
that's an interesting point, but the problem in my opinion is not the medium but the people that gravitate to one or the other and the culture they bring along. i am annoyed by a bump posts in forums just as much, on the other hand, sometimes you do want to revive an old thread on a mailinglist too.

in the end, i think splitting a community is more problematic than trying to align the discussion cultures of different people.

we do need to accept that there is diversity in the fedora or any other community, and we need to account for that and make allowances. if that means tolerating a bump post on a mailinglist, then so be it. (and in the forum version bump posts specifically could be approached by an interface that offers a "bump" button, and maybe pops up a textfield asking: "why should this be bumped?"

i know that is finding a technical solution for a social problem which doesn't always work, but community building is a topic that i am very interested in so i would like to explore this further, from the technical and from the social side. what do people who prefer email expect vs people who prefer forums and how can we accommodate them without dividing the community?

em-bee··on The Fedora project grapples with change
it's surprising that there is still an issue with mailing list and forum split. that's am issue we already had 30 years ago. and i thought by now it's a solved problem. google groups solved it for example. is there no FOSS platform out there that does it too?

the platform i am working on could do it too, but i thought it's not worth the effort because there should be enough alternatives. am i wrong? what stops fedora from using a platform that integrates email and forums?

em-bee··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
good points that i wasn't aware of, thank you. though personally i rarely start huge operations that need to be parallelized so i prefer simplicity over speed.
em-bee··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
you are right, i forgot to check the default. fixed my comment.
em-bee··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
the example as given does not accumulate, so that is what i worked with.

    find -exec command '{}' '+' 
accumulates file arguments too. the only advantage of xargs is that you can tell it how many arguments to accumulate,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶x̶a̶r̶g̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶u̶m̶b̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶a̶s̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶m̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶.̶
em-bee··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
why would you ever pipe find into xargs instead of calling -exec?

    find -exec the '{}' iterated command ';'
em-bee··on Fake food delivery site for the dopamine
shopping LARP
em-bee··on Fake food delivery site for the dopamine
NFTs instead of nothing? equally worthless, but you can pretend otherwise
em-bee··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
i'd like to add, there are many things that can be criticized on C++ or java. but language stability is not one of them. in fact i believe language stability is one of the things that keeps both languages an ongoing success.
em-bee··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
Why are we so obsessed with updating dependencies, and at the same time, not willing to put in the work to update our own code?

because i want to benefit from the improvements/bug fixes in the dependencies, whereas updating my own code does not bring any improvements (unless it is taking advantage of a new feature in the dependencies) and for a large project can be very expensive.

more practically for my work, i need to be able to compile my application with a compiler that is actively supported, but i have no budget to rewrite old code just because the compiler developers decided to break old functionality.

em-bee··on A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
that's the conclusion i came up with after learning common lisp. it didn't feel much different from what i had learned before.
em-bee··on A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
that's the book i learned with. it got me far enough that i was able to write two applications that i ended up using for several years.
em-bee··on Photos of items from families in different countries with different incomes
what is your point? as far as i can tell the pictures only show the reality. they don't explain why. the interpretation is up to the reader.

my personal experience suggests that cost of living vs living standards is pretty uniform globally if compared on a national level. (at least in the places i have been to. higher cost of living in a country always also meant higher living standards, and vice versa. differences only mattered within a country with popular locations being more expensive, and there mostly it affects the cost for homes.). so your idea that raising poor families to $2500/mo would make them wealthy is only true if they don't try to change their living standards.

and what does that have to do with international economics being based on exploitation? again, that's an interpretation of the things we can see here. i don't disagree with the interpretation, it's just that the photos do not themselves make the interpretation, they only observe.

em-bee··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
pike has that. or had it. for two decades. inline in the code, in each file you could specify the version. they decided to drop it because of the maintenance overhead.
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