Hacker News Reader

fournmon German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock

This is pretty much my situation, except my personal experiences have never actually been awful enough with them to persuade me to switch when all I really use them for at this point is easily sharing stuff.

fournmon Atom

I'm certainly getting that feeling.

fournmon Microsoft Office Online

OneNote is included!

Wow you have no idea how happy that makes me as a OneNote user since 2006 or so. It's my favorite part of Office.

fournmon Anyone Who Still Thinks IPv6 Won't Happen Isn't Watching the Measurements

I'll admit to being scared much more recently than that, ha.

fournmon People in your organization that grow legacy code

I think we can safely assume that two to four billion unique users for a single deployment of some software that originally had a small user count and only four billion unique public network identifications are at a completely different level of risk for happening.

fournmon Neovim

I agree with almost everything--except for backwards compatibility when it comes to throwing stuff out. There is definite value in it, especially when we're talking about something as old and widely used as vim!

The thing about compatibility is that it doesn't matter how great your new and shiny is if it can't talk to old things at all. Imagine the best new text editor in the world, but it's completely incompatible with every file format that's ever been written previously, even .txt! No one would use it, because the cost of switching is too high.

In some cases, it's definitely worthwhile to have some development pain to keep that around. Stuff like keeping vimscript (and therefore the entire ecosystem around vim) functioning means that neovim could be a drop-in for some people, and HAS to be preserved at least partially. Stuff like keeping ancient Amiga support or integration with Sun workshop? Definitely not worth it anymore.

fournmon Neovim

Ambitious. Best of luck to them--I've considered trying to do a full port to a language like Go or Rust, but I've never quite had the time (or self-hatred to try and handle quite so many corner cases as what I've seen in vim's code).

fournmon Banking Startup Simple Acquired for $117M, Will Continue to Operate Separately

This isn't actually surprising, to me. I'm indirectly with BBVA through SmartyPig, which is pretty in line with Simple as well.

Good deal to the Simple team, I hope this works out for everyone involved well.

fournmon Why is Git better than Subversion?

Because they're binary files, used entirely for archival purposes. They shouldn't be changing, they shouldn't have "versions" that are anything to deal with meaningfully as far as your repository is concerned.

They should be in flat storage somewhere, with some directory or file name scheme that makes sense based on your version numbers / builds / what have you. Backed up, (ideally) with hashes that verify that they're the same file they once were.

fournmon Why is Git better than Subversion?

Why are your binary builds living in version control?

fournmon Don’t Use Mozilla Persona to Secure High-Value Data

I'm sorry, I might just be misunderstanding so please correct me if I'm wrong but...

The main vulnerability he talks about is if a major provider were to be hacked and have their file replaced (or go rogue, entirely). In either case, is any login system that doesn't use two factor authentication and allows for password resets via email really going to do any better?

Edit: I realize he points out that 2 factor auth really is the only solution here, just, it seems like the criticism applies much more widely than just against Persona.

fournmon CSS source map support, network performance analysis and more in Firefox DevTools

These just keep getting better and better with every release. Vim keybinds might finally be my Firebug switch.

fournmon How much would an iPhone have cost in 1991?

Ah, no, you're correct! I had originally misremembered the statement (going with G4 and laptop), and forgot to change the word laptop to desktop when I switched it to the G5. That was totally my bad.

fournmon How much would an iPhone have cost in 1991?

That reminds me of the joke about the A7 in the iPhone being faster than the old PowerPC cores in the G5s, which wasn't the first time that a phone's processor beat an older laptop's, but the first time that the comparison was Apple's to Apple's. Terrible pun, but it happened in what, a 5 year span?

I play the same game, and I love it (no one ever believes me about it, either).

fournmon Brackets, a code editor

What an incredibly strange trend that I keep seeing lately of externally using sprint numbers as version numbers. Actually labeling them as Sprint numbers prominently, I mean, instead of just v35 or v.35 or something.

fournmon Ask HN: Which Tiling Window Manager do you use?

Awesome was my introduction to tiling WMs, then I went to xmonad for years, and I recently moved over to dwm as I realized suckless had taken over the rest of my machine so why not.

fournmon Seven Years Is Too Long

The notation just happens to give a good shorthand when discussing bits of code, as it tends to be rather fast to calculate.

fournmon Google's updated Java coding guidelines

We do, in fact, use tabs at work. But I wanted to attempt to avoid starting this war yet again.

fournmon Google's updated Java coding guidelines

I don't like their indent guidelines, 2 spaces just feels incredibly "cramped" to me with Java. I understand it with an 80 or 100 col line limit (I also tend to 120, but 100's okay), but really, that's the only thing. I personally agree with most of this and we have warnings generated on commit (thanks Sonar!) if people don't follow some of these because they just lead to too many issues down the line that are really easy to accidentally skip over.

I wouldn't imagine it would be too hard to get an IDE auto-formatter to follow all of this (it's more or less what I use with mine, anyways).

fournmon Seven Years Is Too Long

It's certainly useful when you find that someone accidentally made something n^5 instead of n and you need to explain to that person why they were very, very wrong.

fournmon Hacker Says He Could Access 70,000 Healthcare.Gov Records In 4 Minutes

http://boingboing.net/2014/01/21/70000-healthcare-gov-record...

Except not. This was misreported and spread like wildfire.

fournmon What should we expect from a modern init system?

Upstart also has the issue of being non-portable as of right now, so either way a porting effort has to be actually undertaken (even if Upstart is saying that it's planned)--And Debian is adopting large amounts of systemd for other systems.

Lennart hate is fine, but let systemd stand on its technical merits (or lack thereof, if you really feel that way).

fournmon Spotify position in support of systemd in the default init debate

Russ's points are an incredibly well thought out and written discussion of systemd vs upstart and worth reading for anyone who needs background on the two.

fournmon Never Going Back - A Week of Not Eating Lunch at My Desk

I actually never bring my lunch to work, entirely for this reason. We don't have a cafeteria, and if I don't force myself to step away from my desk for an hour I'm never going to.

fournmon Fixing Windows 8

I'm actually impressed. I've got an eternal skepticism of basically every "Fix Windows 8" thing that I've ever seen, but yours is pretty much the first that doesn't boil down to "re-release Windows XP" and actually focuses improving Metro's and Desktop's individual strengths/weaknesses.

I'd actually not even entirely hate that incarnation of a returning start menu, which is hard to believe at this point. Good job.

fournmon Microsoft confirms Windows 7 sales have ended, but Windows 7 PCs can still sell

The other difference between most people's first attempts with Vista and 7 is that by the time of 7's release, even Nvidia had cleaned up their driver situation (and Creative, the other main offender, seemed to basically vanish as a company you'd need something from).

fournmon Is it a Good Idea to Write Tests for Legacy Code?

Seconding the "you want a GREEN light to start." When you're dealing with legacy, untested code like this, you're sometimes going to write a test that by all accounts should be RED, but it'll come up GREEN.

And the problem then becomes "okay, now, which of the other 16,000 untested files in this codebase are relying on that broken behavior." It's not a fun place to be in (welcome to my day job) but you have to remember--You're writing characterization tests, you're trying to capture what it currently does. Not what it should--every difference between those two is, unfortunately, potentially an important one.

It's not worth fixing one minor thing if it breaks 14 other things down stream (that you then won't catch, since they also don't have tests).

fournmon Facebook Messenger 3.0

I didn't, but making it a requirement to enter your phone number to use the app with no mentions of what the privacy controls for people being able to message you with just your phone number are made the new app a quick uninstall.

Facebook, you've had enough privacy problems in the past, is it really that hard to outline what's going on here or even just not require the number? I've heard that GVoice numbers don't work, as well, which just makes it even worse.

fournmon Ask PG: Is HN experiencing server problems?

So many defects knocked out this week during the HN issues. I don't know whether to be glad or what.

fournmon Microsoft Office is killing Google Apps and anemic iWorks

I prefer Office. Libre/Open Office compatibility always fails me in some strange way and they've still got certain settings buried deep in strange locations. Google Apps are okay in a pinch and I don't mind using them for smaller documents, but they also don't play 100% nicely with Pentadactyl/Vimperator.