Hacker News Reader

maninalifton Knuth and Plass line-breaking Revisited

Is anyone aware of any line-breaking algorithm which penalises for rivers or typesetting algorithm which adjusts spacing to compensate for it.

I'm interested that rivers are such a concern of manual typesetting but I have never heard mention of it in typesetting algorithms.

maninalifton All Major Browsers Fall at Pwn2Own Day Two

dumb question: "more ht2000 lines of code" - is that a typo of "more than...", is "ht2000" something I don't know and can't google, or are are these hacks in some way related to an antique motherboard?

maninalifton Sandstorm – An open source platform for personal servers

ghost what?

maninalifton Show HN: A simple “stateless” password manager for Chrome

yes, that's exactly what stepstep said

maninalifton Narrowing the notion of a runtime in Rust

The description notes the replacement of many uses of "tasks" with native OS threads. Tasks may map to threads or may be managed as green threads.

Threads unlike tasks must be detached if they are too be allowed to outlive their parent.

maninalifton Classic arcade game TRON on a cloth modelling grid

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg awesome!

maninalifton Our Development Workflow

even if software is formally verified, and even assuming the specification is both totally accurate and complete, there is plenty of room for issues at software deployment in a multi-component system such as this

maninalifton Show HN: Bloop: Information-theoretically secure, expiring messages

This appears not to actually solve the hard problems of cryptography. It simply generates a random key, them XORs your message with it.

The key and the message are independently just random data and don't reveal anything about the content of the original message (except it's length).

It is a pretty rare case where we cannot transmit messages securely but we are confident that we can transmit two messages and not have them both intercepted.

If on the other hand you can securely transmit keys that are as big as your data, you could of course just transmit the data itself.

As such this is a starting point in understanding cryptography rather than a practical application.

I think, please tell me if I am missing something

maninalift on A Quick Intro to Rust Macros

Readers may be interested to cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corecursion

maninalift on Programming with Nothing (2011) [video]

A nice demonstration of lambda calculus using Church Encoding in Ruby, without saying that that's what he's doing.
I guess at the end of the video, he will probably reveal what the thing he's been doing is called.

maninalift on CUPS 2.0

Voted down? It's just a quick, weak joke, I don't see the harm.

maninalift on CUPS 2.0

unmatched </semisarcasm> at (3,123)

maninalift on Twitter waterflow problem and loeb (2013)

I heartily recommend this short accessible article to anyone interested in loeb:
https://github.com/quchen/articles/blob/master/loeb-moeb.md

maninalift on How To Validate Your Business Idea By Testing A Hypothesis

I usually skip the start-up advice posts on HN but this was worth reading for the first point along "focus on the problem not the solution". Good advice for hackers as well as entrepreneurs.

maninalift on How to Make the Best Pourover Coffee

Put enough ground coffee into a cup that a spoon shushed into it goes "thunk" like a spade into sand and stands up.
Pour over hot water to just cover, stir until saturated, fill cup, allow to settle, drink.
No need for filters or devices. All the flavour stays in the cup.

maninalift on Underscore.go

Ew, now you can have an awkward weak implementation of some FP ideas in Go too.
Yeah, I'm a bitch.

maninalift on Guess the Programming Language

Am I shallow that it made me feel good getting all the answers right even though I knew most of the people who tried it would?

maninalift on Amazon granted patent for taking photos against a white background

I just read the first one 8718462, and I actually think it might be worse than the "photographs on a white background" patent linked to in article.

maninalift on Amazon granted patent for taking photos against a white background

"positioned in a longitudinal axis intersecting" = "pointing at"
obfuscation is the name of the game
You wouldn't get away with horrendous babble like this in essay in any subject at any level of education.

maninalift on Those Who Say Code Does Not Matter

Surely the key point is that most of us read indentation first, it doesn't matter whether you are witting C with semicolons and curlies or ruby with no semicolons and "end"s or lisp with parens, what the programmer really reads first is the indentation. Those other things are sometimes checked afterwards.
Therefore there are two reasonable courses of action to prevent this kind of problem:
* use automatic code indentation * use a whitespace significant language
The second is absolutely the better choice. You may disagree but you are wrong. This is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of programming language syntax actually reflecting what the programmer reads.

maninalift on What do you need to make a successful web app?

Why so many articles about how you don't need the cool hip new technology to be successful? Surely this is a news site populated by people who like playing with cool new technology.
I don't want to be successful it sounds stressful. I want to enjoy hacking maths and code.

maninalift on Mozilla's low-overhead open source replay debugger

except me of course cos I don't write bugs

maninalift on Mozilla's low-overhead open source replay debugger

...but that's great.
Wow, this is a wonderful thing.
I would go as far as to say it is the tool every developer wanted and most thought was impossible (the low overhead part at least).
Only recording the nondeterministic parts and replaying the rest is so obvious, once someone else has thought of it.

maninalift on Show HN: My new JavaScript MVC framework

I think the m.prop getter/setter creation is a good compromise between the "magical" creation of properties employed by Vue and Ractive and the cumbersome use of SomeFramework.set("propertyname", value) employed by other MV* frameworks.
I can't think of a good argument against it.

maninalift on Show HN: My new JavaScript MVC framework

I like the small, unmagical, well-defined API.
That strength is also a weakness though. Particularly because for coffeescript (or my favourite, the related LiveScript) it doesn't result in the super-cute syntax of e.g. TeaCup[1][2].
[1] https://github.com/goodeggs/teacup
[2] Markaby begat CoffeeKup begat CoffeeCup and DryKup which begat Teacup

maninalift on Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

Really? It just makes me feel sea-sick. As my eyes scan the words, I can't help the feeling that the colours are changing and staying the same at the same time, it's a most disconcerting optical illusion.

maninalift on Spanish government limits crowdfunding to € 1M, donations capped at € 3000.

yes I meant used cars. I'm the sort of cheap-ass who wouldn't even consider buying a car new.

maninalift on Spanish government limits crowdfunding to € 1M, donations capped at € 3000.

No it's not
It's meaning is quite clear.
That's not to say you can't argue that it should be ignored but please have a grown-up argument about it rather than resorting to rhetoric.

maninalift on Spanish government limits crowdfunding to € 1M, donations capped at € 3000.

I have been told that Spain has a big black market economy, it is part of ordinary life there to pay for say a car with "black money".
However I think even there the idea of setting up a tech company with more than a million euros of illegal currency that can't appear on your books might be a little challenging.

maninalift on Project Tango

I thought they were investment-scamming techno-cons who had never been releasing video demonstrations for years without ever releasing a product.