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johnboyer

92 karma · joined May 14, 2018

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johnboyer··on We need decentralized communication
It was my understanding that the asymmetric key pair was generated locally, and only the public key was exchanged. I am unsure about whether or not this is a requirement of the Signal protocol, but Signal itself will only store the private key locally, meaning they would need to alter their software in order to store said keys in a centralized database.
johnboyer··on We need decentralized communication
Android/iOS will always have a chokehold on their users. The Librem 5 is a potential alternative, a Matrix-integrated and fully open source phone. Although it still has some rough edges to be ironed out.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
I would most definitely be interested. I always assumed that certain algorithms are better suited for certain string sizes, but I was never sure which ones. The ideal implementation is probably combining multiple algorithms with ranges of the string size.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
Thanks for the feedback! I did forget to change the version in the documentation, updated that now. As for the usability of the docs, Doxygen isn't exactly known for its intuitive user interface, but I will try my best to make it easier to navigate.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
I just really needed a string library written in C, and it didn't seem as though there were many options. The first thing I found was the Simple Dynamic Strings library, but it wasn't maintained and depended on GCC extensions, so I decided to write my own. After getting a basic functional concatenation, I benchmarked it against std::string to see how slow it was, and to my great surprise, it was actually faster. From that point, I realized I can actually write some pretty fast code, and I decided to make the library centered around that.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
Most of the STL is header only, which is what the library is compared to in the benchmarks. Both would be just as likely to get inlined.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
As it turns out, I actually have the Boyer-Moore string searching algorithm as one of the planned features in the Project section on GitHub.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
Unicode is supported with UTF-8, only different character types aren't supported because generics are messy in C. I thought of accepting void* to support wchar_t and others, but some performance penalties came with it so I decided against it.
johnboyer··on Rapidstring: Maybe the fastest string library ever
Hey there, creator of the library here. Strangely enough my initial post about this on HN received no attention, but better late than never!

If any of you have some questions or feedback, I would be delighted to hear it.

johnboyer··on Show HN: Google Drive as a file system
From my understanding, the primary purpose of this is for backup and syncing your Google Drive files between multiple devices, which is very similar in nature to Syncthing. Is there something else that I am missing?
johnboyer··on Show HN: Google Drive as a file system
Although this is fairly nice, I would recommend Syncthing over this. It has the benefit of not relying on any third party to store your data, it's all exclusively on your devices, along with some very solid security.
johnboyer··on C++ Just My Code Stepping in Visual Studio
Although it does help, I would say its only a bit faster than actually just setting a breakpoint of where you want the code to stop, and running till then, unlike Microsoft's example which shows 85 step intos, as if people actually do that.
johnboyer··on So Your Startup Received the Nightmare GDPR Letter
Doesn't load in Canada either, at least for me.
johnboyer··on Ten Years of Vim
>Vim IMproved

Oh, so you are using an improved version of Vi IMproved? ;)

johnboyer··on Ask HN: Which VPN?
Cannot agree with this enough. When I first started looking for a VPN, the only source of information I found were these disingenuous websites that based their reviews off how much vpns were paying them, with every off-site link being a referral. thatoneprivacysite is by a landslide most unbiased source of information I found on VPNs.
johnboyer··on Has wine gone bad?
Oh, I thought this was some kind of play on words for the Wine software, turns out it's literally wine.
johnboyer··on EFail – Vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME
Aren't the point of the standards to ensure there is no room for security holes? It seems kind of strange to make the security dependant on the implementation. Imo, it should be impossible to implement the standard in an insecure way.