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erlehmann_on I want to motivate you to keep trying to switch to Linux

I stopped using Ubuntu years ago because of their development process making upgrades more complicated than necessary. When I do recommend an operating system to someone nowadays, I usually go for Debian Testing or Debian Stable.

erlehmann_on I want to motivate you to keep trying to switch to Linux

> It's not the UI, the problem is that driver support for Linux is not as good as for OSX.

Driver support for new hardware platforms or one where the hardware producer does not help enough might not be that good: I think Intel's Skylake platform might serve as a good example – an older Linux kernel had a bug where laptops would crash when the lid was closed; now that Skylake is older the bug has been fixed.

That being said, Linux has drivers for many more stuff out of the box than every other operating system. Of course, for the perfect out of the box experience, you have to choose matching hardware – same as with OS X actually.

erlehmann_on Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms

We were allowed to do multiple laps. I stopped attending the (non-mandatory) course after I saw that the other teams were no challenge and some even had problems to just follow a line.

erlehmann_on Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms

> And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance.

Ha, I did that as well with Mindstorms RCX in like 11th grade or so! Later, in university, Mindstorms NXT was used: Our first assignment was to follow a track on the ground and the team I was the only one had two programs, one for recording the track with the sensors and another for following the previously recorded track in high speed without using sensors at all.

erlehmann_on Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms

> At my age I can barely read the article's thin, small, low-contrast font

I am 28 years old and find it hard to read as well. People who choose small font sizes and low contrast degrade usability a lot. Here is an article about the numerous failure modes of low-contrast designs: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/

erlehmann_on Movfuscator – A single-instruction C compiler

Previously on Battlehacker Newslactica: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10021259

erlehmann_on Mitigating MIME Confusion Attacks in Firefox

To me it looks like the actual security problem is that the browser does not trust the server, using its own heuristics instead. Mozilla asserts that as well:

> While MIME sniffing increases the web experience for the majority of users, it also opens up an attack vector known as MIME confusion attack.

The header tells the browser to stop shenanigans and behave.

erlehmann_on “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

I did not know that blog post. However, it does not give evidence that Moxie Marlinspike is friendly to federation and third-party clients. If anything, it shows that he opposes open, interoperable protocols as well.

Moxie Marlinspike asserts that federation needs standardization and that standardization inhibits changes. He also asserts that protocols have to change to keep up with changing requirements. His unspoken assumption is that it is impossible to create real-world forward-compatible protocols.

While I agree with the first assertion, I strongly disagree on the latter two. Consider that protocols and data formats that do not have to change exist. An encoding like UTF-8 will probably never have to change to keep up with new codepoints. Also consider that forward-compatible protocols and data formats exist. HTTP seems to be a very good example for that.

erlehmann_on “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

The XMPP ecosystem has federation, security and almost every client can talk to almost every server. If Moxie Marlinspike claims that interoperability does not work well in the context of instant messaging, I see this as him trying to manipulate the users so they do not judge him for his behaviour.

erlehmann_on “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

Please elaborate on what exactly you dislike about XMPP.

erlehmann_on “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

You do not need an account at conversations.im – the app works without it.

erlehmann_on “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

The author of Signal (Moxie Marlinspike) seems actively hostile to not only federation efforts but also compatibility with other clients, even one that only removed the dependency of Signal on Google Play Services: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/signal-lock-in.ht...

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

I added an updated version of the above text to my own website: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/notes/buch-schreiben.ht...

erlehmann_on Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

> I used to work for a company that sent spam (I swear, I didn't know until after I'd already accepted the job)

Did you look for a new job as soon as you knew?

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

Thank you for the linked comment. I have rarely seen moderators address users' concerns in more depth – especially if they think such worries are unfounded.

erlehmann_on The War on Cash

I do not know what exactly he did, but I found two pages there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Isomorphic/Minions_of_the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_s...

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

Please share the code to generate your view.

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

I think I understand what detaching means, but what effect does marking a thread off-topic have?

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

The point is that they have not reimplemented it.

If the Microsoft versions of curl and wget were compatible with the original utilities, there would not be any problem.

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

Offtopic: What I find interesting about this discussion is that comments regarding “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” and Microsoft's past misbehaviour got upvotes first, then suddenly many downvotes at once. I have seen this earlier on HN with other controversial topics and I do not know what it implies.

Is this voting brigading / shilling or just normal behaviour of groups trying to suppress dissenting voices?

Also, is this part of why semi-noobs think that HN is turning into reddit?

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

To me it seems they only try to fix it because they got caught (and now publicly shamed).

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

Microsoft has been doing this for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish...

erlehmann_on Curl author asks Microsoft to remove 'curl' and 'wget' aliases from PowerShell

To me this looks like a twisted version of step two of the “Embrace, extend and extinguish” strategy – creating interoperability problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

To recap:

1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.

2. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.

3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

erlehmann_on Why Are New York City’s Streets Always Under Construction?

The story mentioned by the parent seems to be this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebungsrisse_in_Staufen_im_Bre...

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

Please elaborate on the complaints. What about the directives do users consider problematic?

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

If she has written a blog post or something about her experiences, please link to it.

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

What do you mean with “more approachable” ? Markdown surely is more popular – but which constructs differ much in usability?

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

A HTTP GET to a URL prefixed with http://web.archive.org/save/ archives the content behind that URL.

I use the conkeror web browser [1] and have included the following code in my $HOME/.conkerorrc/config.js and execute “wbsave” for many documents (even my own) whenever I send the URL to someone else.

  define_webjump("wbsave", function(url) { return "http://web.archive.org/save/"+url; } );

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkeror

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

Pandoc can also process reStructuredText [1], which looks similar to Markdown, but has more features and a single non-ambiguous specification. Me and my co-author rejected Markdown for our book about internet memes [2][3] after a short evaluation, mainly due to ambiguities [4] and lack of features.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText

[2] The book can be downloaded for free: http://internetmeme.de

[3] About the writing process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311546

[4] http://roopc.net/posts/2014/eval-stmd/

erlehmann_on How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

Here are some lessons I learned writing the German-language O'Reilly book about internet memes [1]:

• reStructuredText [2] looks superficially similar to Markdown, but is vastly more useful: It has more features and a defined specification without ambiguities. Many RST processors do not follow the specification in edge cases, but at least it is clear how the document should be layouted. The author of Pandoc [3] fixes bugs very quickly. The Sphinx document processing system [4] can export to HTML, PDF, LaTeX, Epub etc. and can check included URLs automatically (we did not use it for the final version).

• Using Git is a good idea even if you are writing alone: The web interface for our repository and Sparkleshare – a DropBox-like interface for Git [5] – helped immensely with reviews. Gitstats [6] helped me to find out that crunchtime before a deadline always led to at least a few days of writer's block, which enabled me to gauge what amount of text I could write in a sustained manner.

• If possible, save everything relevant to the book in your repository. One example: I investigated the origin of the first lolcats (“Happy Cat” [7], it came from promotional materials of Russian distributors for the “Happy Cat” cat food brand), but have lost some of the emails related to the investigation. Similarly, footnotes in our printed book are now exhibiting link rot. Both of this could have been prevented by importing all source materials in the repository for our book and making sure that all the web pages we mentioned are archived in the Wayback Machine [8].

• The file format of the text matters for interoperability, but which text editor you use does not. Do not learn a new editor for the project if you are already comfortable with one. I used GNU Emacs while my co-author used GNU nano; we never had any problems due to that.

• Me any my co-author worked remotely for the most time. Each evening we had a short chat about what each of us finished during the day, what we were working on, and what plans we had for the next few days. At least for me, telling someone else what I did boosted my motivation; having such a routine process helped me to overcome writer's block.

• There seem to be at least two different writing modes. I think a long time about what I want to write and then write the text, making a few cosmetic changes later. My co-author writes a rough draft and then refines it with each pass. This means that my text is always of the same quality, but he will always meet the deadline. Using Git, we found out he wrote around twice the amount of text as I did, as he re-wrote almost everything at least once. We had no problems with this because we clearly allocated who was responsible for each chapter in the beginning.

• Avoid changing your workflow mid-way or towards the end of the project if you can avoid it, it probably leads to more stress than it is worth. Thanks to publisher shenanigans, we had to send in our texts as multiple ODT files and got it back as one layouted PDF that we had to annotate and send back. One problem was that there seemed to be no software to merge two PDFs with annotations. I quickly hacked up something with Ghostscript only to be told much later that we unintentionally overwhelmed the publisher's pipeline as each one of our around 1000 annotations to the PDF text was apparently faxed to the layouter.

• Get a proper advance. We did not want one and I think it was a failure. You will most likely not make much money with your book – even if it is good and about a popular topic. Three years after the book is published, only around 15 copies are sold each quarter; I suspect it might be one university course using it as classroom material.

• Include a section in your contract about free licensing in case the book is not available. We told O'Reilly we would only accept the contract with a provision that the book would be CC BY-NC-SA and the licensing would switch to CC BY-SA (same as Wikipedia) as soon as O'Reilly stops selling the book. Now that the German section of O'Reilly went under the book is still sold, but by another company that uses the O'Reilly imprint [9].

• Get your hands on as many specimen copies as you can get away with, those are some of your best promotion material in terms of effort vs results. O'Reilly did not do much to promote our book, but they did provide us with copies.

• Do not neglect your loved ones because of work. I regret not having spent more time with the ex-girlfriends I was together with during the time I wrote the book.

[1] The book can be downloaded for free on http://internetmeme.de.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText

[3] http://pandoc.org/

[4] http://www.sphinx-doc.org/

[5] https://www.sparkleshare.org/

[6] http://gitstats.sourceforge.net/

[7] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/happy-cat

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprint_(trade_name)