HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

fdsary

61 karma · joined March 5, 2014

submissionscomments
fdsary··on Thunderbird Usage Continues to Grow
I'm a foreigner living in Germany, and can tell you this is true. 'Everyone' uses Firefox.

They also really like these 2-click-social-media-buttons, because it apparently gives better privacy (load the tracking/tweeting/liking script upon the click of a button, and when clicking again run the like/tweet function) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Fuer-mehr-Datenschutz....

Which seems like security theatre to me. Why not just load the script on the first click, and then run the tweet function immediately after?

fdsary··on Apple: March 9th 'Spring Forward' Event
I'm a programmer, and know very little about art (sadly).

The picture in the background here is very beautiful. Someone who makes that kind of thing, how do they do it? How do they chose colours, and how would they go about making the shapes actually appear on a screen?

fdsary··on Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY
What happens if someone built a service based on it? Should they never trust browsers keeping alive even the shitty (in comparison to free and standardised HTTP/2) features? What's great about the web is that now 20 year old services still are working in the latest runtimes (browsers).
fdsary··on Ross Ulbricht’s private journal shows Silk Road’s birth
Reading this, and other recent events, gives me the realisation that we need the successor of UNIX. Nowadays, everything runs UNIX. My iPhone, Android, my Mac, my Ubuntu laptop, my Debian or BSD server, even my e-reader runs some Linux.

On recent systems like iOS & Android applications run pretty isolated. You can't read and write the whole file system (afaik), and you need to have the user tap "yes" to use many system API's (like microphone, camera, etc).

Using UNIX for a desktop computer, you don't really utilise the user system. Everything I run is either as my own user, or as root (when adding/remove packages or doing system updates). Otherwise, it's a singe user system. So any program I run can read all permanent data stored by other programs in my home directory. In effect, all programs have 100% access (except for changing system settings, but why would they care when there is only one user to own?

When I encrypt my drive, I encrypt it all but also unlock it all when logging in. It's inherent to the system that my whole home dir is open when using (except for things I encrypt manually, like GPG mail or other user land things). Defaults matter. That's why Ross's documents were readable to the American government.

I think we need a new OS to take over after UNIX. One that is built up of sandboxed modules. Where each program gets it's own file system, where they can do whatever they want. That file system is, if I wish, encrypted until I chose to open it. It could be encrypted with a public key system, so I can have many FS's opened with one key, or derive keys from a master key.

These small systems could even be virtual machines, I can't say anything about the eventual overhead that would bring.

In short, UNIX is bad because the file system is bound to my user, and anything my user runs has 100% access to everything else I run. The user system is nice, but not practical. If it was, Ross would be a free man.

fdsary··on From React to Riot 2.0
They say it's "React-like", but afaik it doesn't do the cool things with a virtual dom? What's cool about React is how it doesn't write to the DOM all the time, only when there is a diff. Does Riot do that? If not, thanks but it doesn't compete with React.

Also, does it render to string?

fdsary··on Winklevoss Twins Aim to Take Bitcoin Mainstream with a Regulated Exchange
What mining does in Bitcoin is to generate consensus, so that everyone agrees on the financial history, which === keeping track of what public key owns what amount.

The actual hashes are pretty worthless, but that's the service mining is providing. Personally, I think it's kinda worthless to build a bunch of skyscraper on perfectly fine land just to fill with people working for some bank, just to keep my $ secure. For my intents and purposes, having a bank company (with employees, offices, leaders who get compensated like kings, etc) is a bigger waste that I can't wait to get rid of. Same with my VISA debit card, employing thousands just to let me access my money. Also charging a 3% fee on every transaction.

If only there was some kind of network of computer programs that could replace those people...

fdsary··on Riot – A React-like, 2.5K user interface library
Well, Riot is pretty old... This is a major upgrade, and as such font-page-worthy I'd say.
fdsary··on The Tell of the Proprietary First Movers
Wouldn't Paypal be the first proprietary mover of sending money over IP, and Bitcoin being like SMTP/POP/IMAP/whatever? Or maybe I misunderstood something
fdsary··on BitCannon – A torrent index archiving, browsing, and backup tool
A torrent index that I can view thru an emacs mode would be the most useful. If the data format is just a text tile with each torrent taking one line would be amazing. It would be long, but it's just text so memory consumption is negligible. Kinda same style as Org-mode, I imagine.

You could just search like usual, open a magnet with Return, click 'c' for it's comments. When opening the file, the mode would check for seeders/leechers and display it inline.

fdsary··on How My Mom Got Hacked
I think Duplicity (http://duplicity.nongnu.org) is what you're looking for. For Ubuntu I know there's a nice GUI that anyone who can use a computer can set up. For other platforms I think cli is the only way, but someone could just write a QT/Cocoa wrapper around it.
fdsary··on One day left to help Internet Archive reach its donation goal
Does archive.org let you download dumps of all of their data? If they make a weekly torrent containing their whole data-set it would be easily immortalised...
fdsary··on Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2014
Congrats on the kid & move to 中目黒!
fdsary··on Supersonic: New UI Hybrid Framework – Ionic, AngularJS, Cordova
I thought the same, and made a Cordova/Angular app. It was a mistake. Don't go there! It's easier to learn the native languages/sdk than to debug that mess.

Also, cocoa touch is nicer than any web framework you've ever used.

fdsary··on Lispkit – A Lisp browser using WebKit
I wouldn't call Xmonad a window manager, but just a thin wrapper around X11 (C?) that happens to be written in haskell.
fdsary··on FreeBSD: the next 10 years
>But, since you can't please everyone, it's better to have choice than to have someone's (Microsoft's/Apple's/Ubuntu's) idea of "good" forced down everyone's throat.

Sometimes it's more about not wanting to spend another 5h on config files for some deamon on every new system you have. Using Ubuntu's or Apple's defaults is nice when you want something that works and let's you start getting shit done now.

fdsary··on Functional Programming Patterns
I thank the lord every day that the language I work in (Javascript) supports functions! I try to write pure functions as often as possible, so it's easy to refactor the code when I come back three months later.

But is there, except for Clojurescript, any true (like Haskell) FP language for browsers? Something that has the tools, and community to back it, so it's viable to actually make projects in it?

fdsary··on Meditation study shows changes associated with awareness, stress (2011)
I think this comment was important to me. I've never understood what the fuzz is about, but after reading this I decided "fuck it, why not try?".

I just did a 5 minute one. Genius idea about the timer, wouldn't be possible otherwise. Afterwards I felt 5kg lighter. I will put this in my life toolbox. Thank you.

fdsary··on Bitcoin Wikipedia Article Views
Why is that?
fdsary··on FreeBSD: the next 10 years
Choosing a unified format for configurations is an interesting task, because they all suck a lot (hehe). XML is too verbose to be nice to work with. Plain text files with config flags delimited by newlines lead to the program in the end implementing a small scripting language for config files.

JSON is pretty nice, but also a bit clunky. A lot of {:} all the time.

Personally, I think the nicest and most expressive way is S-expressions. I'm no lisper, but you have to admit sexprs are expressive, easy to read, and can be run as functions if the program knows lisp.

    {  
    "configFiles": "in JSON",  
    "wouldLook": {"like":"this"}  
    }  

    (while sexpr
      (could look)
      (even nicer))
fdsary··on CotEditor – Text Editor for OS X
I'm pretty effective with vim, so much that other 'normal' editors like sublime & other modern gui editors make me feel a little crippled. That is a problem, because you need to be flexible about things in life.

Has anyone succeeded in deliberately changing editors, even when not feeling like it's necessary? I'm especially curious how I could start using emacs, and actually get up to speed with it instead of using it as Notepad/TextEdit (as I would do if I started today)?

fdsary··on Duck Programming Language
This looks like a nice language, mad props to the author(s) for actually creating a new language, that's something I dream of doing one day!

But I wonder, is this means for me to use, and then why should I use it? The text had great examples of how to use it, but I couldn't find the why.

Again, super cool that you wrote a language!

fdsary··on Shortest TodoMVC implementation
that "import" function is really handy for writing short programs!
fdsary··on Will It Optimize? (2010)
And I upvote every time.
fdsary··on Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Donating $25M to the CDC Foundation
I know Zuckerberg is rich from creating Facebook, but where did Chan find her stash of money? Or are they donating Mark's money but using both people names? Asking out of curiosity, not trying to make some dumb point.
fdsary··on Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency'
I mean, anyone who ever used bitcoin will see how it's clearly superior than going to a bank office, getting an account, waiting days for it all to work out. And then transactions take a night (at least in the countries I've lived in).

Bitcoin transactions show up instantly. There's no need to a trusted middle man. Anyone I show it to is swooned, because it's simply really really cool.

fdsary··on Mystery Man Who Moves Japanese Markets Made More Than 1M Trades
How can we make this title a complete aliteration?
fdsary··on Clojure Distilled
I love clojure, and dream of the day I can work with it.

But do you know why more people get into ruby or js? It's community is beginner friendly. Most texts on the subject of lisps feel like wannabe dissertations, preferably with the Computer Modern font and 5 pages long.

fdsary··on Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
Websocket would be the solution to doing that, especially cross platform. Meteor is built on top of websockets, just saying...
fdsary··on Show HN: Javelin Browser
Wow, this makes me want to ditch my iPhone...
fdsary··on SlackTextViewController: A new growing text input for iOS
So I'm making iOS apps sometimes, but have not implemented a chat feature.

Why would I want to use this rather than a UITableView where I append the newest message in the end of the UITableView every time (you'd have to increase it's length +1 for each new message, but hey that may be ok)?

Page 1 of 3Next →