HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

eriknstr

1,862 karma · joined May 29, 2016

Dear HN, please delete this account.
submissionscomments
eriknstr··on Convert ASCII scribbles to SVG
https://ivanceras.github.io/spongedown/complex/Ascii_art.htm... errors out

    rustc 1.17.0 (56124baa9 2017-04-24)
    error: unknown start of token: `
     --> <anon>:8:1
      |
    8 | ```bob
      | ^
eriknstr··on Pix2code: Generating Code from a GUI Screenshot
I submitted this to some subreddits and a couple of people made some quite similar questions that I'd like to see a video for in case OP here is the author or in case the author sees this.

>What would happen if I put something other than a clear mockup as input? Replications?

>What happens if you try to scan console output [1] or this mess [2]?

1: http://i.imgur.com/LJqJUnF.png

2: http://i.imgur.com/OMbZsgd.png

eriknstr··on Ask HN: Do you ask to use cookies or check IP?
I seemed to recall having read so too. Thanks for the link. This should be higher up IMO.
eriknstr··on Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?
I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?
eriknstr··on 1Password Travel Mode: Protect your data when crossing borders
The data is actually removed from your device so you aren't hiding anything. Like someone else said it would be ridiculous if you were forced to have all your data on your device when you travel.
eriknstr··on GitHub announcements: Marketplace, Apps and GraphQL API
>this subtly piggy-backs on it towards lock-in for tooling

FTA: "More than a dozen integrators have apps in GitHub Marketplace today, including Travis CI, Appveyor, Waffle, ZenHub, Sentry, and Codacy"

Travis CI and many others were widespread prior to this marketplace. Seems to me that creating a marketplace is a logical way to collect these third-party services in one place.

eriknstr··on TFS: A file system built for performance, space efficiency, and scalability
I use ZFS under FreeBSD but I am wondering what the future of ZFS looks like.

I went to the OpenZFS website (http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page) to try and get a feel for the amount of work currently going on. They have some videos and slides, they have a mailing list. The mailing list is mostly full of messages via GitHub but at least that lead me to https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs which I was previously unaware of and which I had not found when trying to look for an OpenZFS specific repository.

As far as I have come to understand, the goal of the OpenZFS project is to merge changes made to ZFS by Illumos, FreeBSD, ZFS-on-Linux and other projects. Their videos might answer this but I wish their website had a clear and simple overview of what has been done. Most of what I can find on their wiki is various ideas for things that they want to do, but I can't know if that means that the OpenZFS project is mostly talk and not so much action, or if it's just that they have done a lot of those things but because they are busy doing they don't have time to write about it. Could be that they have some pages on the wiki I haven't seen also but in that case I think it should be organized better.

I know that Joyent picked up several highly skilled software engineers and programmers that used to work for Sun, and that their SmartOS operating system builds on code descendant from OpenSolaris and that ZFS is as integral on SmartOS as it was on Solaris, perhaps even more so on SmartOS. I have not seen mention of SmartOS on the OpenZFS wiki though.

All in all I feel that ZFS is still being actively developed and maintained by many people. But to what extent they are able to cooperate as much as a lot of them seem to want to I would like to know. It would be a shame if btrfs overtook ZFS simply because the development of ZFS was too fragmented :/

eriknstr··on JavaScript Concurrency Model and Event Loop
>In what order should the logs appear?

Firefox 53 produced a log that matched what I expected but then I ran it a few more times and then it happened in another order which I then read was the order they were supposed to appear.

>Microsoft Edge, Firefox 40, iOS Safari and desktop Safari 8.0.8 log setTimeout before promise1 and promise2 - although it appears to be a race condition. This is really weird, as Firefox 39 and Safari 8.0.7 get it consistently right.

So Firefox 39 may have gotten it consistently right on his machine, Firefox 40 did not on his machine and Firefox 53 still does not on my machine.

eriknstr··on Windows 7, not XP, was the reason WCry spread so widely
I think the reason that they were downvoted was not because people have a hard time accepting it but because they just stated that windows xp was not targeted without linking to any sources for that claim.
eriknstr··on Vulkan and OpenCL will merge into a single API
Great, maybe we'll finally get OpenCL support in the proprietary Nvidia driver for FreeBSD? And then maybe CUDA support in their driver also? One can hope/dream.
eriknstr··on Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
Contribute to the Tor Project, aka The Onion Router.

https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Pro...

eriknstr··on JSON Feed
Absolutely agree about the MIME type.

Someone filed an issue and created a pull-request for this after you wrote this comment.

https://github.com/brentsimmons/JSONFeed/issues/22

https://github.com/brentsimmons/JSONFeed/pull/23

I hope they will merge it.

eriknstr··on Collection of photographs of WannaCry infections from around the world
Another couple of big ones I remember:

Sobig, 2003. In particular I recall that media was talking about Sobig.F - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobig

Mydoom, 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mydoom

eriknstr··on Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop
I bought a Pine 64 also after someone mentioned it on HN and I failed to look at reviews for it. After it arrived when I was going to get started with it I read about how difficult it was so I didn't bother to even try to boot it, I just put it aside. Someone else ITT did mention that OpenBSD supports the Pine64 so maybe I'll try and boot my Pine64 with that.
eriknstr··on Pinebook – A $100 14" ARM laptop
Whoa, that page lists Raspberry Pi 3 as supported also.

Every time I've searched for OpenBSD for Raspberry Pi in the past, all I got was people saying that it would never happen due to the reliance on proprietary blobs.

eriknstr··on Not Hotdog App
For future reference, the show is Silicon Valley.
eriknstr··on What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
penis land
eriknstr··on Proton.B: What this Mac malware does
>anything on disk

Not if the file system is isolated per app as I said.

eriknstr··on Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
Sweet! I've been wondering how much work PXE boot would be.
eriknstr··on Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
I am powering the Raspberry Pi from the usb port of my router and would prefer not to have an additional power adapter. However the SD corruption issues also happened previously when I was using the Raspberry Pi for something else and was using a power adapter.

To be honest I think perhaps the SD card I am using is actually bad. I seem to recall that I lost some photos from the same SD card previously when I used it in a digital camera. So I could also try replacing the SD card if I haven't already but at that point I feel like a USB stick will be just as good anyway.

I intend to configure my Raspberry Pi to not write logs and such to persistent memory in order to reduce wear on the storage since such files are of no interest to me anyway, but haven't gotten around to do so yet. Still the files for my website will be on the USB stick though so therefore I wonder, will the read and write speed be ok even with USB? I think it probably will. Additionally I've been wishing to keep the website files themselves in memory as well (but to write to disk when they are changed ofc) but haven't gotten around to that either.

eriknstr··on Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
>I've configured it to boot off of the Hard Drive. You don't even need an SD card in it to boot.

Woah, that's awesome! I had no idea the pi 3 could do that.

I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B and a 3 B at home. I host my website using the 2 B with cloudflare in front of it [1], as well as use it as a login server, but every couple of months the SD card gets corrupted. The last time that happened was a couple of weeks ago and since I'm currently away from home there's nothing I can do to fix it until I get back so now my website is down and additionally I can't send data to my desktop computer for backup, though fortunately I have two external drives with me so I can have multiple copies of my data still just not at different physical locations.

Totally going to put the 3 B in charge of my website and have it boot from a USB stick instead of from SD.

Searched and found a post with more details about this from the Raspberry Pi guys: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-i-usb-mas...

[1]: https://github.com/eriknstr/interweb

eriknstr··on WannaCry – New Variants Detected
I'm am very much in favor of open source always but let's not pretend that embedded systems don't end up with out of date software just because it's open source.

In the case of WannaCrypt0r, the vulnerability had already been fixed by Microsoft but those who were hit hadn't patched because as discussed elsewhere applying patches may break things so some postpone or ignore it. Same thing could have happened to a system running Linux.

eriknstr··on Proton.B: What this Mac malware does
Because since the only way that a program can have access to information is by explicitly handing that info to the program from another program the only place you enter a password is on your login screen.
eriknstr··on Proton.B: What this Mac malware does
Not sure if you're being sarcastic about how users feel or about that kind of configuration for UAC, but personally it's one of the many things I dislike when I'm on a Windows computer.

For power users it's annoying and disruptive. For users that might benefit the most from it they quickly learn to press ok always whenever they are prompted for something, no matter what it's asking.

In my opinion, an ideal OS would have absolutly no confirmation dialogs what so ever, but instead it would have unlimited systemwide undo for any action. Look at Gmail vs Microsoft 360 webmail. One is a pleasure to use, the other a pain in the but. Some of that difference comes from dialogs and extra steps in 360 where GMail instead lets you undo.

Add powerful application isolation like in iOS, but make it as simple for the user to pass data between programs as it conceptually is to pipe text from one command to another in Unix, except that you shouldn't have to set up the pipeline first, instead you open a program work on something, pass it to another program work on it and so on. Each program also has an isolated location in the fs for persisting user data but since the only way for one program to access data from another program by the user explicitly sending it over, no application can access something it shouldn't have without the users interaction. So like iOS in that respect also. Of course the user can still be socially engineered into giving some data to a program that shouldn't have it but I don't think it could possibly be worse than what we have today.

There are a bunch of other problems and challenges also that I've not gotten around to consider, but I feel that an operating system like the one I described, if open source under an acceptable license (ISC, BSD, MIT or similar preferably) existed, I'd gladly throw away the portability advantages of POSIX in change for it.

eriknstr··on Understanding deep learning requires re-thinking generalization
They are jumbling the labels for the training data before giving it to the network. Thus they are misinforming the network about what it is supposed to learn.
eriknstr··on Noun Project – Icons for Everything
> Little pictograms for buttons are often extremely vague and open to interpretation.

True. I remember Lynda Weinman refered to this as "mystery meatball" navigation in one of the books she wrote on web design somewhere between the mid 90's to early 2000's. Probably it was the book Designing Web Graphics.3 [1] as looking through the Google results the cover of that one looks the most like what I seem to recall.

Tying into what was said in a sibling comment about the icons used in programs like Photoshop, I think the important thing to keep in mind is the context in which you consider adding icons. For a professional market piece of software like Photoshop where you expect your audience to put many hours into learning how to use the software and where you expect them to become power users, you can allow more in terms of UI elements that might steepen the learning curve, but which when learned can be employed by proficient users for faster and more productive workflow and which therefore will make the additional time required to understand them increase the value that your software provides.

Meanwhile for tools and websites that are used only occasionally, or where you don't expect repeat use but want to provide the best value for your users still, you should hold their hand more and make it immediately apperent what everything does and how to use it.

I've been thinking a bit about interfaces that would evolve with the user but my conclusion thus far has been that the amount of work required to implement that successfully would take a lot of time and might even never be worth it. That instead it still seems better to me to decide wether you are targeting heavy repeat use or not, and to optimize your UI accordingly in the manner I stated in the above paragraphs of text.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Graphics-3-Lynda-Weinma...

eriknstr··on First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI
>Personality change after TBIs is not a good thing.

Reminds me of a documentary I saw recently about snowboarder Kevin Pearce called The Crash Reel (2013) [1]. Kevin Pearce was changed by his TBI also but the one I came to think of when you said this was another person that was affected even worse from a TBI they got from a snowboarding accident.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2499076/

eriknstr··on First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI
> Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the operation as an extreme form of body art, but because she believed it would have a life-changing effect on her. She hoped that a hole in her head would increase what she terms "cranial compliance," that alleviating the pressure in her skull would allow the heart to pump more blood to her brain, thereby giving her a new feeling of buoyancy. "If you don’t have that expansibility," she says of the prison of inflexible bone that most of us have for skulls, "then the heartbeat pushes against the brain cells, which isn’t very good."

She wasn't doing it to get rid of evil spirits.

> Archaeologists have speculated that the operation was performed as a religious rite, an initiation into the priestly caste, or as a treatment for demonic possession—symptoms we might now diagnose as epilepsy, psychosis, or migraine. A hole in the head served as a mouthpiece to the gods, it was thought, or as a window that would allow bad spirits to escape.

People might have done it for that reason previously but she wasn't.

eriknstr··on New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store
Someone on /r/linux said, and I agree, "it's like putting sugar in your cup full of piss".
eriknstr··on Keybase is out for iPhone, Android
>That's a long introductory way of saying: KBFS on phones will be fantastic - but I've long intended to move my (pretty much personal use only, but still) app to using a database rather than raw files, so is there any plan for programmatic access to KBFS for other apps? I realise there are non-trivial issues concerning permissions there, but it could be really great - perhaps silo other apps from full access, e.g. 'App is requesting access to KBFS/Appname, approve?' and 'App is requesting access to KBFS/none-of-its-business, approve?'?

Alternatively, have you considered implementing an input method provider as the means of inputting passwords into your apps? I know that on Android you can create your own input method apps. I think on iOS you will need to jailbreak the device and even then I don't know if you can make your own input method app for it.

I am imagining that the input method shows you your list of credentials and allows you to select from it.

← PreviousPage 5 of 18Next →