Hacker News Reader

jonathonfon Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost

I've had web browsers perform a web search for 'localhost', or even just redirect me to localhost.com.

Annoying.

jonathonfon Torvalds: I've pulled this, but if problems, ext4 is going on my shit-list

Ted Ts'o (extremely well-known developer) being warned by Linus Torvalds (extremely well-known developer) about a Git pull request that has a misleading commit message.

Edit: correct spelling of Ts'o. :S

jonathonfon Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000

> a good business just selling to Apple(servers), Facebook, AWS, GCP and Azure

How can other clients get in on this? My CS department (UK university) is wanting to replace servers (and extend ML capacity) and I've been making them wait until AMD availability becomes clearer (but I can only do that for so long...).

There's definitely a market here - if anyone from AMD happens to be reading this and would like to demo... though I'm not sure our volume would be quite the same scale as the above.

jonathonfon Ask HN: What other career choices can one do with CS degree?

While the pay is different, the situation is the same in England for Primary teachers in "desirable" locations (e.g. good schools, rural and suburban schools). Positions in some areas simply don't exist until teachers retire.

jonathonfon Ask HN: What other career choices can one do with CS degree?

> school teachers

Teaching truly is a vocation; you don't (let alone can't) do it for the pay. Before you consider it, if you don't know any teachers, don't go into teaching; you need to know what it entails.

jonathonfon Ask HN: What other career choices can one do with CS degree?

Shockingly, the quality of PhD students varies widely.

Just because you don't think you'd succeed in ${world_renowned_and_highly_pressured_university} doesn't mean you can't do amazing things at ${other_university}.

Seriously - if you have an original thought in your head, can write, and can justify your point of view, you can do a PhD.

jonathonfon Steven Furst’s role on Babylon 5 was a remarkable example of a sci-fi sidekick

> There was always something cringeworthy about the deferential and meek actors representing the warrior race that almost exterminated humanity (Minbari)

That would be down to the three-caste system (warrior, worker, religious).

Personally I didn't have an issue with the way even the religious caste were portrayed - peace-loving but fearsome when wronged.

_Spoilers_

I mean, the entire Human-Minbari war was down to a misinterpretation (about open gun ports) - and revenge, of course. The fact that Delenn was religious caste makes her initiation of the war even more poignant.

jonathonfon Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug

According to the linked memo [1] it was ordered by Mick Mulvaney [2]. It will be interesting to see what else has been cut that's not such a trivial item.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Mulvaney

jonathonfon Asciidoctor PDF: A native PDF converter for AsciiDoc based on Asciidoctor

Marginally related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12837454

In-browser, zero-config, JS-based Asciidoc renderer.

jonathonfon Password Sharing with Organizations

> Just doesn't feel right. ... various ... seem to ...

Could this sentiment be any less specific?

jonathonfon Password Sharing with Organizations

Just be aware, there are bugs in the interactions between extensions and sharing. For example, if you share a secret via the web vault then edit it (without syncing first) in an extension it becomes inaccessible. If you perform a sync after sharing, the secret isn't visible in the extension any more.

jonathonfon Password Sharing with Organizations

All of Bitwarden is open source. https://github.com/bitwarden/

jonathonfon WordPress Core up to 4.7.4 – Potential Unauthorized Password Reset

I'm missing something - how can this be exploited? AFAICT it's only if a user replies to the email (and thereby includes the reset token)?

jonathonfon Buku v3.0 – Command Line Bookmark Manager

That sounds so obvious yet is brilliant... no more link-rot for any of those interesting sites you bookmarked years ago...

I suppose the next logical step would be to save the page with assets so it can be made available for posterity. Not sure what impact that would have on storage use but it would at least enable full text search.

jonathonfon Why 1866 Set the Stage for Two World Wars

> England

Britain. Along with contingents from most of its Empire.

(Saying "England" when you mean "Britain" is like saying "Texas" when you mean "U.S.A.")

jonathonfon Nim programming language

Easy enough to solve, just change the destination directory:

    git clone https://github.com/dracula/terminal.app.git terminal-theme

jonathonfon Ask HN: Best budget Linux laptop for a developer?

I got my X230 for £168 a year or so ago (i5-3320M, 4GB, 320GB, I shortly added a 256GB mSATA SSD for ~£50), the same place is currently selling T430 and T520 for the same price. I got an X61 a couple of years before that for £65.

You just have to find a decent refurb or recycling shop (i.e. those that take and resell ex-corporate stock); I imagine you've got an even wider choice in the US.

jonathonfon Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

Still missing the whole cross-platform GUI thing though.

    $ ./red
    Compiling compression library...
    Compiling Red console...
    --== Red 0.6.2 ==-- 
    Type HELP for starting information. 
    
    >> view [text "Hello World"]
    *** Script Error: view has no value
    *** Where: catch

jonathonfon Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

Why will it do that?

jonathonfon Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

Why is FreePascal unpopular (or what makes you say that)?

Is it lack of mindshare, lack of "hotness", some specific deficiency, or... ?

jonathonfon Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

Something a little less hyperbolic might be better, e.g. what specifically is wrong with FreePascal?

jonathonfon Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

> I would take opinions on here from developers with a big grain of salt.

If you "Ask HN" for opinions how can you take those opinions with a grain of salt?

Surely if you can't trust HN commenters then Ask HN is a waste of time.

jonathonfon LastPass RCE vulnerability fixed

bitwarden has a Firefox extension [1], and it has a password generator.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/bitwarden-password-...

jonathonfon LastPass RCE vulnerability fixed

No Linux support might be a biggie.

jonathonfon Why I've Retired My PGP Keys and What's Replaced It

> I only need to find a replacement for archival encryption.

Author replacing PGP with his own archive/file encryption software: https://github.com/skeeto/enchive

jonathonfon Lever: a programming language with built-in support for GUI and OpenGL

I'm waiting for native GUI support under Linux. While running it under WINE works fine it feels a bit suboptimal. (64-bit support would also be nice to simplify deployment)

jonathonfon Private Git Repository on Any Computer

Made me wonder too.

Add in a post-commit hook on a server-side repo and you have a decent code deployment system.

jonathonfon Linux becoming a professional multimedia platform

I upgraded to 2.0 specifically (and despite the new "12 months of updates" license) because they do Linux.

Reaper is good, but Bitwig is much easier to get into.

Also, if anyone doesn't know about Airwave [1] they should check it out for running their Windows VST instruments (or those from e.g. vst4free.com [2]).

What annoys me about music software, though, is the way the authors/companies have special offers which are time-bound. Free u-he VST instruments if bought within a two-week window? Eh? What about the people who already bought the software? Or did beta testing? Or... ?

[1] https://github.com/phantom-code/airwave/ [2] http://www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?plugin=TAL-Elek7ro&id=6...

jonathonfon What happened to Python?

Surely tauthon should be python6.2 ?

/ducks from downvotes

jonathonfon How setting the TZ environment variable avoids thousands of system calls

If this has a real-world/measurable/etc. impact why isn't this set by default? Are there potential side-effects? Is it set in some distros but not others?