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fbcocqon KeePass 2.14 released

There's also the issue of installing Keypass itself. I see it has MSI packages available, which I know sysadmins at big companies like. There might be some other technical requirements for the password-storage software itself.

I've been carrying around KeePass on an USB flashdrive for about 3 years now and haven't yet encountered a problem running it on random Windows machines. Deploying it is just a matter of copying 4 files to the target machine really.

fbcocqon DirectX 11 Tutorials

HRESULT D3DX11CompileFromFile( LPCTSTR pSrcFile, D3D10_SHADER_MACRO pDefines, LPD3D10INCLUDE pInclude, LPCSTR pFunctionName, LPCSTR pProfile, UINT Flags1, UINT Flags2, ID3DX11ThreadPump pPump, ID3D10Blob ppShader, ID3D10Blob ppErrorMsgs, HRESULT *pHResult);

Eleven arguments, Microsoft. Please find somebody sane to write your APIs.

fbcocqon Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

It's reasonable to assume that if Hitler wanted you to die, he wouldn't poison you with a sandwitch and risk being called a woman behind his back.

Anyway, motivations do not matter one bit when it comes to evaluating whom to trust with your data, if it's not safe by design then it's not safe period.

fbcocqon Did Pascal beat C++ at the 2010 International Olympiad in Informatics?

I was hoping to get feedback on why a contestant would be able to compete very well with Pascal over C++.

Because that's what he's been practicing with. CS courses in schools in Eastern Europe are tought in Pascal, or at least used to be.

In the end it's as interesting as the brand of chess pieces at a chess tournament. If you look at the solutions to Google Code Jam (http://www.go-hero.net/jam/10/languages/0) for example then you'll see that it's mostly disgusting code made of arrays and loops and you can do those in pretty much any language. People get good at algorithms by sitting down, learning and implementing them, not by sweating the choice of language.

fbcocqon Life After OOP: C++ is not just an object-oriented language

How is this free?

fbcocqon Lua VM cross-compiled to JavaScript (1.4mb - takes a while to load)

It breaks for input as simple as "for x = 1,10 do print(x) end". It's a shame I can't use Lua for browser scripting instead of JS.

fbcocqon Coding Horror: Your Internet Driver's License

I have all my logins saved in Firefox and there's not one site I'm using where Firefox is able to autocomplete OpenID details, it forces me to enter my ID, leave the page, authenticate with OpenID, go back and submit. It needs to either die or get way more convenient than this.

fbcocqon Bizarre Google Trend Search Spike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Trends

"Originally, Google neglected updating Google Trends on a regular basis. In March 2007, internet bloggers noticed that Google had not added new data since November 2006, and Trends was updated within a week. Google did not update Trends from March until July 30, and only after it was blogged about, again.[2] Google now claims to be "updating the information provided by Google Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly."

Google Insights for Search seems to be better for this sort of analysis since it offers regional filtering options and puts the searched term into context.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=xkcd%2Cpenny%20arca...

fbcocqon 1,000 Years of European History -- An Animated Map

This is amazing, I wish it were interactive, learning history was (and still is) difficult for me as a visual learner.

fbcocqon Ruby:

I think the speed increase comes from += creating a new string object every time, whereas << literally concatenates it.

Programming the hunches and guesses way on the HN frontpage makes me sad.

http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M000807

str + other_str => new_str

Concatenation Returns a new String containing other_str concatenated to str.

str << fixnum => str str.concat(fixnum) => str str << obj => str str.concat(obj) => str

Append Concatenates the given object to str. If the object is a Fixnum between 0 and 255, it is converted to a character before concatenation.

fbcocqon Stop looking for nontechnical founders, go get an MBA. It's easy

In case you missed the reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820495

fbcocqon Facebook Fails at https

Hilarious outrage. I keep telling people to learn some basic networking ever since I fired up a traffic sniffer on a Lan when everybody was still using POP3. Facebook forcing https on all it's pages won't solve anything, people need to educate themselves before using one of the most complex systems humanity has built.

fbcocqon Is the Linux Desktop Dream Dead?

The 21st-century desktop isn't based on the fat-client desktop of the last 25-years. It exists on the Web in Web-based applications and software as a service (SaaS) and what I call "Content as a Service." If the content providers have their way, you'll view content from the Web instead of downloading it.

So I just took a break and played a round of SC2 and now I'm back to do some work in Photoshop/Excel. Just thought you'd like to know.

fbcocqon Wikileaks dumps 400,000 more files

Actually, the fact that it's obviously important that the people, who administer and have access to your IT infrastructure, think what you're doing is legal and moral, is rather interesting.

Ignoring the content of these files for a while, it seems to me that nobody is too concerned with the fact that the US government managed to lose 400.000 secret documents and what implications this might have for future conflicts.

fbcocqon CMU Researchers Break Speed Barrier In Solving Important Class of Linear Systems

I'm terribly sorry if this is an ignorant question but does this somehow apply to manually solving a, say, 5x5?

fbcocqon Wikileaks dumps 400,000 more files

Exactly, just give me the gist of the illegal or highly suspicious activities amongst an otherwise perfectly legal invasion.

fbcocqon There are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with PhDs

Me too. I know a lot of people with degrees in Law, Linguistics, Literature (in their respective languages) and so on who moved to the US and now have regular jobs because their degrees lose any meaning when changing the country.

You go to college to have options later, not to pursue a career, you know little about at the age of 18, due to some misguided sense of loyalty to the taxpayer.

fbcocqon How to write cross-platform code

Care to elaborate on why you chose C/C++ instead of Java for the backup client?

fbcocqon Online privacy: what’s at stake

It is widely believed that a flourishing democracy requires an independent, diverse, and financially solvent press.

Most of Europe has a socialized independent press, in Germany it's financed by a soon to be mandatory per-household charge (currently mandatory per-TV/Radio charge) and it's been mostly working out so far. Quite frankly I don't understand how you can call a company owned newspaper like the NY Times independent.

fbcocqon The Pleasure of the Text

Sure, suprise me. I'd really like to see a video of someone typing for an hour or two on an iPad without needing a chiropractor afterwards and in the end producing more text than he'd produce on a laptop or netbook with a stock text editor. If you have trouble focusing, maybe it's because your body is in an awkward posture.

I don't own an iPad, but even thinking about the angle, that I'd have to look at it from while it rests on my lap, hurts my neck.

fbcocqon The Pleasure of the Text

"this application turns this flat thing on the lap into the most efficient tool for writing that I know of."

Writing using your index finger on a touchscreen seems like a huge step back in terms of productivity and ergonomy to me.

fbcocqon Ask HN: Review My Startup - Hypernumbers The Team Spreadsheet

Your post and the intro video on the page, e.g. "Hypernumbers : the Team spreadsheet...". Also, requests to team members to update their figures in a spreadsheet do not end in sad smilie faces unless it's a team of girl scouts.

fbcocqon Ask HN: Review My Startup - Hypernumbers The Team Spreadsheet

I don't know if there's a consensus on using ellipsis in today's communication but it really, really annoys me.

fbcocqon Man jailed over computer password refusal

Yes

fbcocqon Man jailed over computer password refusal

I've been resetting people's 8 character passwords lost due to Post-Vacation-Insomnia for ages, I'd really like to see them expect me to remember a 50 character password under stress conditions.

fbcocqon Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?

Well, computers and the web are just tools, like a hammer. Due to its fascination and novelty when we were young it's easy to forget that while we're here discussing the intricacies of building a better hammer, others are out there erecting cathedrals with it. Maybe take a look around and see what you can actually do with it, learn something not related to IT and see if you can push it forward by improving the IT side of it.

fbcocqon Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books last quarter

Also, keeping in mind that online book sales account for only 15.5% of all books sold (at least in Germany), it's not the end of the printed book by a longshot.

fbcocqon Ask HN: How do I improve my reading speed?

I can finish a 500 page book in about 4-8 hours. Building the scenes in my head is much more of a bottleneck than the actual mechanics of reading. Complicated scenes, e.g. The Pillars of the Earth, which is heavy on architectural terminology I'm not familiar with, and a huge amount of characters, e.g. Good Omens, slow me down considerably.

Also, being within earshot of people having a conversation slows my reading down to a grinding halt so my technique to read faster, outside of reading more, is basically finding a quiet place.

fbcocqon Thoughts on Clojure

If it gets added to SPOJ (https://www.spoj.pl/) I'll give it another shot. The JVM is just a frustrating platform when it comes to experimenting with new languages.