Hacker News Reader

jed_son Bootstrap's maintainer hates the semicolon

Basically, people don't want the minified versions of files while they're developing, and there will always be people coming to the project with whatever minification tools in their build that can't handle the missing semicolons. Currently, the answer is "change your build tools".

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/1795

jed_son Bootstrap's maintainer hates the semicolon

> many providers (o2, t-mobile, vodafone) across the world embed another js script

> The lack of semi-colons in the dropdown js file causes this compression to break

Thanks for the heads up, no bootstrap for me! (At least without something that's going to add the necessary semicolons... I wonder how many HN weekend projects out there simply don't work for people using their wireless connections?)

Also interesting that it appears the issue was closed because it contained the key phrases 'compression' and 'semicolon'... but it was not re-opened even after the maintainer realized the problem is with the wireless providers.

jed_son C++11 will be introduced by B.Stroustrup at Microsoft Event

I'll warn in advance that this is the jazz hands answer, because it's really impossible to tell. I doubt any one person decreed WinRT should be native; most likely it was the best of many compromises. Anyone willing to name names while documenting the internal politics that went along with the decision(s) could write quite the page-turner!

* I could see decisions being influenced by long-term career prospects, but believe that people would be smart enough to hide most of this by working harder to find evidence supporting the direction they needed the tech to go.

* According to my limited understanding, Microsoft long ago threw out a bunch of OS-level managed development pre-Vista (WinFS-type stuff) in part because of performance related issues.

* ASP.NET (SharePoint) / managed code server-side is not going away any time soon, if ever... it's just too easy (and server hardware can typically handle any overhead).

* .NET client-side could go either way; I think this is what the accepted answer is saying (eg. Silverlight as this decade's VB6 - convenient LOB tool killed with no direct transition to new tech)

* Mono/Unity 3d/etc. are wildcards here, particularly as they support C# for non-Microsoft platforms (especially iPhone/Android).

* Microsoft, or at least powerful people within Microsoft, love COM (one of my least favorites, but I don't deal with cross-language runtime/binary compatibility).

I found this StackOverflow link on a huge discussion of the death of Silverlight, saying it was the first casualty of a "death to managed code" campaign: http://forums.silverlight.net/post/612643.aspx

jed_son MESH: SSO via SSH public key authentication

Project Page: http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/projects/mesh/

"Mesh is a secure, lightweight grid middleware that is based on the addition of a single sign-on capability to the built-in public key authentication mechanism of SSH using system call interposition."

jed_son Join Bitcasa right now

Is this the "we're thinking about a product" page or the "we have a product you can start using now" page? I can't tell... the question not answered is "when?"

This led me to pay slightly more attention and notice the pretty background pegging my CPU. It does look nice though.

jed_son C++11 will be introduced by B.Stroustrup at Microsoft Event

Windows 8 WinRT is unmanaged/native; this has caused a conspiracy theory blaming infighting between Microsoft teams:

Why is WinRT unmanaged? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7457371/why-is-winrt-unma...

jed_son Hackers destroy water pump via SCADA abuse

Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

Control System Cyber Security - State of the State

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/111012.html

"Industrial control systems are used in electric power, water, pipelines, etc. These systems were designed for performance and safety considerations, not security. Traditional IT security technologies, policies, and testing may not apply to these systems. Moreover, there is currently no university with an interdisciplinary program accross multiple engineering disciplines to address control system cyber security. There have already been more than 200 actual control system cyber incidents to date, though most have not been identified as cyber. In the US alone, there have been 4 control system cyber incidents that have killed people, 3 major cyber-related electric outages, 2 nuclear plants shut down from full power, etc. With the advent of Stuxnet, cyber has been introduced as an offensive weapon. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a state-of-the-state view of control system cyber security."

The speaker gets quite a grilling from the academics.

jed_son PG's Rarely Asked Questions

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.paulgraham.com/r... crawled 130 times going all the way back to February 7, 2004

jed_son Android account passwords are stored on disk in plain text

They don't.

Issue 7589: Android dev team ignores its own bugtracker http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7589

jed_son Android Issue 5669: Android deleting all SMS threads (Dec 2009; 1100+ stars)

FYI: Android deletes corrupt DBs (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=756653)

If you have an Android phone and care at all about your ever-growing message history, install SMS Backup+ by Jan Berkel or an equivalent ASAP. (https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus)

jed_son Bitcoins Cryptocurrency explained by Steve Gibson

transcript: http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-287.htm

"It's something that a cryptographer, a Japanese cryptographer created about two years ago called BitCoin. ... this thing really looks like it's the first solution to the concept of a distributed, non-central server, no central clearinghouse. ... it's Internet currency, which can work and is working."

jed_son Hackable Linux clamshell goes on sale for $99

If someone does this, make sure to support using the iKid phone as a bluetooth headset for the real phone so they can actually talk with someone.

jed_son Must-Have Windows Programs (or Windows Programs that I use)

http://superuser.com/questions/34388/whats-the-best-ramdisk-...

a few more ideas, and links to even more

jed_son Is StackOverflow compatible with non-cc-wiki-compatibly-licensed software?

According to the footer on every StackOverflow page, all submissions are under the copyleft cc-wiki with attribution required license. CC licenses are specifically not recommended for software. (¹)

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#C...

[Insert favorite legal disclaimers here.] An ultra-conservative/pessimistic interpretation of the "remix" and "share alike" portions of the cc-wiki license (yes, just the human-readable summary) would prohibit use of even ideas expressed on the site without licensing the result under "the same or similar license" -- imposing restrictions incompatible with many open source licenses, let alone closed-source development.

Several meta threads at StackOverflow have pointed out this issue, resulting in a lot of discussion about fair use/excerpts, snippets, re-implementation, etc.; some users have even begun putting an additional license for their contributions within their profile.

http://www.google.com/search?.q=site:meta.stackoverflow.com+...

< I decided to cut my editorializing />

~Jed

(¹) In order to comply with StackOverflow's attribution requirements, I am required to indicate that:

1. This information was pointed out on StackOverflow

2. Specifically, in the following answer: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/3646/im-worried-abou...

3. By StackOverflow user "Mark Harrison",

4. Whose profile is available at: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/116/mark-harrison

I may actually be in violation of the attribution requirements due to an inability to direcly link the StackOverflow user's name to the associated profile.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/

jed_son Using WIP branches to save every edit

this should be integrated into editors as undo/redo

i've long thought proper version control makes sense if it's fast enough -- eventually everything will be tracked anyway.

it doesn't make any sense to lose any ideas just because only one of them was "the winner".

jed_son Canabalt: iPhone Game

Some are unable to pay (app store i18n, etc.)