Hacker News Reader

ff0066moteon ISPs "exaggerate the cost of data"

This is heartening news because connectivity is becoming a commodity. Will anything come of it?

Recently net neutrality ended and now we have 250 GB/Month bandwidth caps as Comcast customers. I'm not worried about ever hitting that cap, but I am worried about the cap tightening over the next couple of years.

Everyone talks about Google and Facebook's control over their information, but I don't hear enough concern about ISPs' collective control over access to information.

ff0066moteon The State of the Art is Terrible

I think the second part needed to be long to make your point clear. I think it worked.

Since we aren't machines, sometimes we express ourselves in long rambling thoughts. That's okay and, when it's not we have Editors.

ff0066moteon Size is the best predictor of code quality

"Bigger is just something you have to live with in Java. Growth is a fact of life. Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly."

I am reminded of http://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html

ff0066moteon I am nothing

This immediately made me think of the line from Desiderata.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Full text on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata#Full_text

ff0066moteon Modified ecstasy 'attacks blood cancers'

The researchers, in collaboration with the University of Western Australia, have chemically re-engineered ecstasy by taking some atoms away and putting new ones in their place.

That sounds like a nod to Mitch Hedburg's line about fixing one of his jokes...

ff0066moteon Lost skills: What today's coders don't know and why it matters

I was caught off guard by the first line, where the author uses PHP as one of the examples of an environment out-of-touch with hardware issues.

I started to learn how to program in PHP. Back then there was a sentiment that PHP and similar high level scripting languages weren't real programming.

With the web so ubiquitous today, I didn't that sentiment had survived, but here it is.

ff0066moteon The Zen of Python by Example

Forgive me if I am wrong, but I believe that section 1 contains mistakes. In the implementations of evens_only, shouldn't both of the places where modulus is used be preceded by "not"?

This isn't meant to detract from the truth that "Beautiful [code] is better than ugly," I merely thought the implementation should be correct.

ff0066moteon Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards?

My apologies. I've corrected my sentence to use the article "an" instead of "the".

ff0066moteon Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards?

That guy you know is doing the world a favor.

This is an alternative: <http://www.google.com/images?q=guiyu%2C+china>;

ff0066moteon Homoglyph attacks: How to create an internet hoax

One could argue that a filesystem which contains two files, one in ASCII and one in EBCDIC, is on the whole just single mapping of characters to numbers. Your point isn't well argued.

What I'm suggesting differs in that it would use consistent tags to indicate deviations from the intended primary language of a string.

Surround sections of a string which should be interpreted differently with tags-bits indicating such. These tags should not be treated as characters as the mirror character described in the article obviously is. And finally, display routines would easily be able to indicate what's what; any sections of the string with tags indicating an alternate encoding could be displayed with bold, highlight, or in a different color. (ie. As in "ti<cryllic>a</cryllic>n<cryllic>a</cryllic>nmen square", except the tags would simply be unused bit-patterns.)

To accomplish the same thing with a Unicode string, one would have to store a list of ranges of code-points which correspond to the string's locale. Then, anything which isn't in one of those ranges could be displayed in the alternate color. (ie. A character outside of the range 32-126 would be considered "not EN-US". For other languages, the code-point ranges might be more complex.)

The scheme I suggested isn't great, but it would avoids having to compare each character to see if it falls somewhere in a list of ranges for the current locale.

ff0066moteon Homoglyph attacks: How to create an internet hoax

This article presents some interesting consequences of using a unified map from numbers to glyphs for all the plethora of human languages.

Perhaps instead of Unicode there could have been an established way to change character encoding mid-string? Regarding and treating control characters as normal characters, as this article demonstrates we do with the mirror character at least, is nonsensical. Maybe a string could have a primary encoding, and tags could be placed around sections which use an alternate.

Under such a scheme, in an english string any cryllic sections would be surrounded by "tag" bits. The viewing program could then handle the cryllic part according to its capability and known environment:

- An english terminal might render as nonsense english characters.

- A capable viewing program could render proper cryllic glyphs according to the cryllic encoding.

- A good browser could render the cryllic glyphs but highlight them, display them in a different color, or even remove them.

Likewise, right-to-left languages would be implicitly rendered as such according to the capability of the viewing program.

But this has no-doubt already been suggested and rejected by somebody...

ff0066moteon Bring me Cakes and Ale

You can still get hanged for stealing somebody's horse from where it is tied-up outside of a saloon in New Hampshire.

ff0066moteon How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025)

Regardless, there is no reason we shouldn't continue to help them succeed (by being rational and decent).

ff0066moteon How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025)

The fact that we have to rely on the nature of bureaucracy scares me. It shows that rationality and human decency are failing.

I do not believe that current attempts to control internet access and content are being micro-examined end to end.

ff0066moteon Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

Ah, I didn't think of that and it makes sense. Thank you.

ff0066moteon Here's why you should not buy a Drobo

Not related to Drobo:

I use a cron script which runs rsync each hour and synchronizes my / and /home/ with my /mnt/mirror/.

Ever since I've set this up, I've had a reliable backup which I don't have to think about. I've even migrated my system to it once, because I needed to swap the primary hard drive out.

What's the big deal about backing up? Why buy a dedicated unit anyway? Am I missing something fundamental?

ff0066moteon Tell HN: Turn small images to html for fun

Photoshop does that too. This method is different because it uses the data URI scheme to encode the (small) image as base64 data in the <img /> tag. No tables here!

ff0066moteon Reinvent the Wheel Often

They forgot to mention that reinventing the wheel is, often, simply enjoyable.

I'm currently writing a little javascript library to do Linear Algebra operations, even though one already exists. It's helping me to gain a better understanding of what I learned in college, and it's fun.

ff0066moteon Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

I've noticed a trend recently whereby social networking sites on the internet are becoming integrated into desktop applications, panel applets, and now you suggest integrating it into my browser?

Personally, I like keeping my online social identity sandboxed away in my browser, in a tab. If it's integrated into my browser's code, then it's harder to understand how my privacy works.

In the current situation, I just have to clear my cookies to ensure my privacy is secure.

I'm _not_ enthusiastic about a future where my browser has the functionality of specific web services built into it.

ff0066moteon The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.

I think he views his coded-creations as a form of self expression, or art. This is perhaps why he wants them to be treated with the same hands-off approach as his fiction writings.

However, when it comes to code I think it's best to make known your intentions for it because code generally has a practical function beyond its artistic value as a creation, and as a result people may want to alter it.

ff0066moteon For a cleaner and safer internet (video)

This is definitely a satire, but it's so deadpan that it was hard for me to pick up on until nearing the end of the video. Amazing.

ff0066moteon Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query.

Oh, I'm not implying that they should provide any more results than they already do. I just thought it was mildly interesting.

Google's brand has the aura of an unlimited wealth of information. People don't even see it as a means by which they search anymore. When they say, "I found it on Google!" the website they actually found 'it' on is completely irrelevant.

However this note I found at the end of the list of search results destroys this aura. It makes you think, "Oh yeah, Google is just a website with a finite capacity to serve information."

ff0066moteon Facebook: How do I opt-out of instant personalization? (in 1 + n steps)

Please note the second part of this answer at the end of the paragraph. You are required to opt out of each website/app proactively. This is not good for those concerned with privacy.

"To prevent your friends from sharing any of your information with an instant personalization partner, block the application: Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, Yelp."

ff0066moteon Facebook Social Plugins

I feel like this move by Facebook is opening up a ton of new opportunities for phishing scams.

There are a lot of people who won't carefully check the address bar when, upon clicking something on a website which looks like a Facebook plugin, they are asked for their Facebook login information.

ff0066moteon Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query.

I just found this striking. It makes the sentence on the previous page sound rather grandiose.

"Results 916 - 922 of about 642,000,000 for search terms. (1.46 seconds)"

ff0066moteon [dead]

This 'article' makes you think... We have got some fixin' to do!

ff0066moteon Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future

I giggled at that quote for ten minutes.

ff0066moteon Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice?

Which technology-related fields are you referring to, or are you just speaking in general terms?

>> "...may not necessarily be able to directly apply your skills to whatever good causes you're passionate about."

I'm hoping there's a niche.

ff0066moteon Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice?

Stats, wonderful. I deplore math. Your advice is interesting and highlights my major shortcoming.

I've heard the idea to "work on a side-project that will impress" your desired future employer many times around the HC site. Is that the entrepreneur speaking, or are you offering that seriously? I have to learn their business backwards-and-forwards before I can independently produce something which NGOs may find universally useful. I guess I have to start small to go this route.

ff0066moteon Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice?

Did you have something particular in mind when you said that "finding out why they suck may not be a pleasant experience" for me? Or, did you simply mean that such work would not be easy, ie. because of human factors: "This is how we do things here! Why do you want to do everything with computers?"