HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

limmeau

1,538 karma · joined January 9, 2009

I live in Freiburg, Germany. I upvote mostly for relevance rather than agreement. HN topics which interest me most: security, safety, Python, Emacs, Eclipse, functional programming.
submissionscomments
limmeau··on Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
In page 44 onwards, this describes how to do class-based OOP with assembly language extensions to generate vtable calls. I wonder who ever used that…
limmeau··on Learn TLA+
You can watch Leslie Lamport himself explaining it at https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/video/videos.html . It doesn't cover Pluscal, but goes deep into TLA+.

(BTW count the different shirts).

limmeau··on Debugging with GDB
gud-gdb in Emacs, yes.
limmeau··on Debugging with GDB
By transcript, I mean every command and every response in the debug session. Usually, in the beginning, I do not know yet what I'm looking for, and set breakpoints at points that may be interesting, and when I reach the breakpoints, I look at variables. Later, when I reach the point where things have gone wrong, I can look at variable values now, but also at the result of every previous query. This helps me answer questions like: was this object here already in that queue over there when the previous request came in?

I can also attach the debug session to an issue in order for others or future me to understand what was happening then. In a purely GUI-driven debugger, I can copy&paste a stack trace of the final point, but the history is lost.

limmeau··on Debugging with GDB
I can really recommend debugging with command-line gdb (inside a text editor, of course; we're not barbarians). The transcript that lets you look back at the past of your debug session really adds a new dimension to the debug experience that a plain IDE integration just does not offer.

(Time-travelling debuggers are OK, too, I guess)

limmeau··on Ask HN: How to Learn Linux Debugging?
Just learn a tool at a time. Ftrace, for example, is a nice tool to trace kernel events. It is not the coolest kid on the block, but simple enough for basic things.
limmeau··on Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid
Mermaid has explicit support for diagrams that look UML-ish (never mind the filled triangle arrowheads for inheritance): class, state and sequence diagrams. Graphviz doesn't do that easily.
limmeau··on Ask HN: What do you do when your insight (& vision) scares you?
Remember when Blackberry succeeded in the market by calling their text-messaging device a "two-way pager" even though, technically, it was a mobile computer with modem and not at all a pager?

Chances are you'll fare best by hiding your earth-shattering new paradigm behind a veneer of familiarity. Then nobody has to know you have deep insights no one else has.

limmeau··on Ask HN: How to handle situations when co-workers laugh at you in meetings?
Please elaborate. How did this happen?
limmeau··on Ask HN: What is the best but the simplest way to host NextCloud for a family?
If you're at least a bit into home-lab tinkering, you could run NextCloud from a Docker container on your NAS or home server or RPi. For external access limited to your family's devices, you could use Tailscale.

But yes, you could just have Hetzner host it for you for a handful of Euros a month.

limmeau··on Ask HN: Any offline privacy-friendly sleep and fitness trackers?
There are occasionally projects on hackaday where people replace the firmware of cheap fitness trackers, like https://github.com/curtpw/nRF5x-device-reverse-engineering -- you could start from there.
limmeau··on Your product is a joke: lessons from improv to build better product
So what about the other improv principles...

"Is my partner having a good time": Make your partners look good. That is usually a good idea in any team.

"Find the earliest end". That would mean don't ever maintain an old product because there's nothing interesting in it...

"Yes and" principle: you accept the ideas that your fellow players introduced and build on top of them. For example, "Backend moved their data store to a novel distributed document store they read about on Twitter -- Yes, And we'll let the frontend run in a JS-emulated Browser-in-a-Browser!". I see that being applied, but I'm not sure it's good advice.

limmeau··on Compiling Word for Windows v1.1a
The reason why this works is that IBM CGA/EGA/VGA map their text-mode video-RAM at segment 0xB800..0xBFFF, and in graphics-mode at 0xA000..0xAFFF. MDA and Hercules, on the other hand, map the video memory at 0xB000..0xB7FF, for reasons I never fully understood.

So, if you plug a Hercules card and a VGA card, you can have two screens. Some debuggers supported it. I never got it to work back in the day with my ET4000 and an MDA scavenged from a PC-XT, but I was just a teenager with no access to StackOverflow.

limmeau··on Lightweight, open-source, universal paper wallet generator
My daughter also generated paper wallets in kindergarten, approximately like this:

http://www.mathematische-basteleien.de/portmonee.htm

limmeau··on German expressions that don’t exist in English
So while we're in the market for "words your language doesn't have" -- any recommendations for Turkish words you haven't seen in other languages?
limmeau··on German expressions that don’t exist in English
While we're proposing useful words, may I humbly suggest two useful adverbs:

"fei" (Bavarian): in contrast to what I think you're assuming. "Des is fei da letzte" -- "This is the last one, and I think you thought there would be more".

"als" (Allemannic/Suabian): something like "in the default case, which is also frequent".

limmeau··on [dead]
Are you planning to do fraud monitoring? Your service can easily be used to verify stolen credit card details.

Related: https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit...

limmeau··on Show HN: Project Management as Code with Graphviz
Bugzilla does it out of the box, even using GraphViz.

However, Bugzilla only has one flavour of dependency ("blocks"), whereas JIRA implements the whole Allen Interval Algebra (which, however, only those people use who have ever wondered why the number of Allen relations is exactly 13).

limmeau··on Introducing the GoodWatch
At first I thought this was a firmware mod for those calculator watches, but it's a new circuit board. Comparable in power to those TI msp430 developer watches, but with better UI possibilities.
limmeau··on Beyond Nokia: A love story
I got that book. It helped me deduplicate the address book of my E72 from within an interactive Python session. Oh, those times.
limmeau··on GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
Does it use GNUnet? I only see them mention REST here, HTTPS there.

As to the carder-friendlyness: credit card companies are known to treat payment aggregators with lots of suspicion, so I suppose there just won't be many credit-card-to-Taler "banks".

limmeau··on GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
The authors are employed by TU Munich and Inria Rennes, paid for by taxes, so I guess they assume that some taxation is necessary. At least they designed some anonymity into the taxation interface. How much remains to be seen.
limmeau··on GNU Taler – Electronic payments for a liberal society
This sounds a lot like David Chaum's eCash of the 90s. You transfer ordinary money into a Taler account in a Taler bank and transfer them to other Taler accounts, and from there to ordinary money. That's unlike Bitcoin in pretty much every respect.

It takes some courage to make a crypto-payment protocol explicitly taxation-friendly, but they claim the tax man only gets to see the amounts, not the identities. What a pity the design doc isn't yet on their website.

And I hope the eCash patents have expired...

limmeau··on 32- and 64-bit ARM Open Hardware Boards
They use a HiSilicon SoC. Does HiSilicon publish docs?
limmeau··on Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
Just the same as Emacs scripting and Eclipse plugins. You can do the same with both, but the initial friction of bootstrapping a Plugin Project, declaring this year's flavor of OperationDescriptorFactory, etc. discourages plugins for one-off tasks.

Actually, the last platform I've seen that was ad-hoc scripting friendly was Symbian with PyS60. Now if there was a Firefox phone with a decent camera...

limmeau··on BasicCoin, a cryptocurrency in less than 600 lines of Python
Wouldn't it be even easier to just use Git for most of the heavy lifting?

- Ledger is a file in a Git repo

- Blocks are confirmed by committing them with a SHA1 with sufficiently many leading zeros (adjust a nonce in the commit msg until it fits)

- Some bot accepts all pull requests into the Github repo that are fast-forward and whose commits have sufficiently many leading 0s (possibly after confirming that the booking is valid ;)

We could call that... oh I don't know, DvcsCoin or so.

limmeau··on EncFS Security Audit
ecryptfs is also file-level, though more difficult to set up. (The "e" is for "enterprise", so you spend time entering token into keyrings etc).
limmeau··on EncFS Security Audit
I don't know whose thinking that is, but when I recommend against Truecrypt on Dropbox, it's because you can't auto-merge two diverging Truecrypt volumes even if the two changesets are unrelated.
limmeau··on Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?
Is "disturbed system" intentional? Nice term for a bunch of processes which are expected to die occasionally.
limmeau··on Show HN: Massren – multi-rename tool using your text editor
Emacs users can use wdired in a dired buffer instead.

M-x wdired-change-to-wdired-mode

(not to spoil the fun of creating a useful command-line tool with Issue9 ;)

Page 1 of 21Next →