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iffycan

427 karma · joined May 10, 2013

www.iffycan.com
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iffycan··on Show HN: Compare benefits of second passport based on the one you have
I think it's funny that HDI doesn't have a tooltip hover, but the other 4 spelled-out headings do.
iffycan··on Show HN: T2b – A wicked-powerful text macro language for building binary files
If you use the prebuilt binaries, does the GPL apply?
iffycan··on The rise and fall of Sugru
Yes, the short shelf life is what turned me off, too. For my quick repairs I found myself using only a fraction of the smallest packets they sell, leaving the rest to dry out unused. And after needing it a few months later and finding it unusable I never bought anymore.

I'm going to try your recipe.

iffycan··on Pyre: Fast Type Checking for Python
There's https://pyre-check.org/
iffycan··on GDPR: One Unintended Consequence
It is a minimum (for the noted offense). Also, your language is out of place.

From http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5419-2016-IN...

Article 83:

Section 4:

> Infringments of the following provisions shall, in acccordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 10 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 2% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher:

Section 5:

> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4% of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher:

iffycan··on User-defined Order in SQL
Yes, they could get long in theory. In practice, in the place I'm currently using this method, the strings are 3 characters max.
iffycan··on User-defined Order in SQL
It's less efficient storage-wise, sure, but there's no "occasionally take the hit of shifting" problem.
iffycan··on User-defined Order in SQL
I've had success just using letters between a and z.

- The first item added has rank "m"

- If I want to add an item before that, it's m-a/2 (somewhere around "f")

- If I want to put something between "b" and "c" that's "bm"

- The database can sort it just fine.

iffycan··on Stephen Hawking helped us create this show and today we’re releasing it for free
These are fun. Just the right amount of silly mixed in with breathtaking graphics and Hawking's commentary. Thanks!
iffycan··on Comparing published scientific journal articles to their pre-print versions
Conclusion from the pre-print paper:

> We have shown that, within the boundaries of our corpus, there are no significant differences in aggregate between pre-prints and their corresponding final published versions. In addition, the vast majority of pre-prints (90% - 95%) are published by the open access pre-print service first and later by a commercial publisher. Given the fact of flat or even shrinking library, college, and university budgets, our findings provide empirical indicators that should inform discussions about commercial publishers’ value proposition in scholarly communication and have the potential to influence higher education and academic and research libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

iffycan··on All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate
Is there a macOS equivalent?
iffycan··on Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?
Buckets, private desktop budgeting app.

https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com

iffycan··on Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
No limitations. After a few months, you'll get nagged a bit, but the trial version has every feature the full version has. There's nothing but your penchant for honesty stopping you from using it indefinitely :)
iffycan··on Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
You might be interested in this: https://www.bucketsisbetter.com
iffycan··on Choose boring employees
Though the typo'd version probably has some merit, too.
iffycan··on Let’s kill no-reply
I won't say never. I think your distinction (GitHub merge vs bill overdue) might strike the right balance, but I'm having trouble sorting out what the principle is that distinguishes those two.

As I've never even paid attention to the sending address of GitHub merge notifications, perhaps the principle is: "If someone notices that your email came from noreply@ then you shouldn't use noreply@"

(And, no, you don't seem critical -- more like thoughtful)

iffycan··on Let’s kill no-reply
Author here.

I'm writing from the perspective of a customer. As a customer, I don't care how your email queues work. I do care that you sent me an email and forbid me from replying to it. It chafes. And you want my money?

From the perspective of a company, I can sympathize. I've been directed to create noreply-sending mailers in the course of my job. In every case, it would have been better sent from support@, but because of understandable but dumb reasons (bureaucratic laziness; not-my-problem-itis), it's way easier just to turn on the mailing hose and forget replies. So that's what we did.

I've also worked on handling bounces of both email replies and (cringe) faxes. Yes, handling bounces can be annoying, but to create a good customer experience I think it's worth the cost.

iffycan··on Leaving Python for JavaScript
Is TypeScript one of your goto "transpile-to-js" languages? I'm a Python developer who is learning to love TypeScript. With TypeScript I feel like I can write maintainable, collaborateable JS.
iffycan··on In Defense of Electron
As someone who produces an Electron-based app, I was curious what my energy use was as reported by Activity Monitor.

Avg Energy Impact:

- 14.08 Google Chrome

- 3.01 Docker (for Mac)

- 2.55 Sublime Text

- 2.04 Slack

- 2.03 Terminal

- 0.28 Mail

- 0.20 My Electron app (which hasn't been open all day, so this number is definitely wrong)

Some of those surprise me.

Those who complain about Electron being a hog are right. But it's not like there's nothing that can be done about it. I'm sure there are optimizations that could be made to reduce resource usage. Firefox recently improved memory usage. With enough demand, I'm sure Chrome could, too.

iffycan··on Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
Have a link? I'm not seeing what you're seeing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabun_(nerve_agent)
iffycan··on Show HN: Webhook – A lightweight configurable tool written in Go
This was also my first thought.
iffycan··on Sublime Text 3 dev build 3128 released
You got me excited, but VS Code is missing the one feature that prevents us from using it (or Atom, or Brackets): the ability to open, display and edit a file with null bytes in it. Sublime does this wonderfully. VS Code refuses to open the file. Atom pretends the bytes aren't there.
iffycan··on Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
Call me crazy, but I think your example illustrates one reason why IRC is great: I can read it. And I could probably get it right even typing it from memory.
iffycan··on What makes the perfect office?
Bless you
iffycan··on Show HN: LHTML – local, portable webapps
Thanks, I had the same thoughts, though I chuckled when I read:

> we're almost leaving the 90's and entering the 00's.

Because I feel the opposite: computers were first terminals attached to mainframes, then in the 90s the pendulum swung to personal computers free from the mainframe. In the 00s we swung back to the "cloud" (terminals dependent on the central computer) and LHTML feels like the pendulum swinging back to computers being able to run without the mainframe/cloud.

iffycan··on Show HN: LHTML – local, portable webapps
Thank you for this list! I wondered if this kind of thing had been done before. MHTML seems especially interesting. I'll have to test browser-compatibility for my use case.
iffycan··on Show HN: LHTML – local, portable webapps
I should also highlight this important issue about what to name this thing: https://github.com/iffy/lhtml/issues/2
iffycan··on How banks are getting around open banking and PSD2
I feel the same way. I made http://www.simplefin.org
iffycan··on How banks are getting around open banking and PSD2
And for this reason, there's the SimpleFIN spec and SimpleFIN Bridge[1]. Until banks implement the APIs themselves the SimpleFIN Bridge will bridge that gap.

[1] https://bridge.simplefin.org

iffycan··on Help: Suicide note on blog
I hope someone found him while they could help. His last two posts could have been clues :(

- https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2017/01/24/adieu/

- https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2017/01/24/love/

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