Hacker News Reader

mclemmeon Apple invests €1.7B in renewable energy data centres in Denmark and Ireland

The IT spokesperson from the same party as the former and current mayor of Viborg wrote a very critiqued article about making it attractive to build data centers in Denmark on the 6th of February[1].

Now when this deal is public he will surely boast about his brilliant foresight in the upcoming election...

There's of course no definite proof that he knew about this deal at the time of the article, but the timing couldn't be better.

[1] = http://www.version2.dk/blog/tid-til-danske-datacentre-76979 (in Danish)

mclemmeon The Danish Don't Have the Secret to Happiness

Best way I ever heard the law of jante described, was in a TV-show about the Danes for an American TV-channel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_jo69ZTwbE ).

Where some dude says "They have this thing called jantelaw, which essentically says that you're no better than anybody else, a garbage man can live in a middleclass neighborhood and hold his head high." - Which I think is a nice way to look at it.

Of course there's differences and social "classes", but there is some truth to the contentedness of many Danes, many people know that more stuff will not necessarily make them happier, so why work so hard to earn money for it?

mclemmeon The Danish Don't Have the Secret to Happiness

I always find it a bit strange and it takes me a few days to adapt, when I'm in countries where "how are you?" is a common way to greet someone (I'm from Denmark & live in Cph).

It feels very rude for me to just answer with a "great/fine/ok and you?" when someone asks me how I am, I think is has something to do with that the Danish version of that sentence (hvordan har du det?) is something that is most often said to someone when that person is having a tough time or is sick or if the person saying it is worried about the other persons emotional well-being.

mclemmeon 2015: The Year of the OpenBSD Desktop

"Now don't get me wrong, Linux does great things but it's never worked out of the box well enough as a desktop. There's always something to tinker with, some driver to compile, some knob to fiddle with."

Been using Linux (Ubuntu LTS releases) as my everyday desktop and laptop OS since around 2007/8. I had issues at first with drivers, especially with wifi and graphics cards.

But lately (approx since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), stuff just works, no need to manually install or compile anything, no need to tweak anything unless I want to. Of course you can find hardware that doesn't work on Linux, but that's just a matter of a bit of googling before buying a laptop/desktop.

I've found that lately, it seems like Ubuntu requires less fiddling than osx or windows, especially with printers & scanners, where I just plug it in and it works (or it auto detects if it's on a network). But colleagues on windows or osx have to download drivers, usually filled with crapware (i.e. "YOU ARE OUT IF INK, BUY IT HERE" messages, unless they're careful to download the barebone drivers instead of the full driver pack).

mclemmeon Stockholm’s Home Shortage Could Stifle Startups

Not everyone wants to buy, especially not if you are only going to be there for a few years.

And I'm guessing it's not easy to get a loan (I haven't tried so might be wrong).

mclemmeon Stockholm’s Home Shortage Could Stifle Startups

Where are you from? And are you studying something that you can get SU from? There are special student housing (called "Kollegium" rooms) in Denmark, where only students are allowed to live. And the rent is considerably lower than normal rental apartments.

It's been a while since I've studied, so my information might be outdated, but feel free to send me an email if I can help in any way. I live in Copenhagen.

mclemmeon Stockholm’s Home Shortage Could Stifle Startups

Lived in Stockholm for ~1½ years, ending in the spring of 2013.

Was lucky enough to have the company I was recruited for help me by having their name on the rental agreement, covering any expenses the owner might have if I thrashed the place, didn't pay rent, etc. Ended up finding a place for 13.000SEK/month on the outskirts of Stockholm, at the very last subway stop.

For most of the employees starting at the same time as me, most of their rental agreements were only valid for a year or so (and the owner could kick renters out pretty much at any time), forcing people to go and find other apartments, which is not easy when the employer no longer offers support with the contract.

One colleague of mine found that his response rate was extremely low on his bot that automatically applied for an apartment, which matched his criteria, as soon as it came up online. He suspected his non Swedish sounding name was a factor, so he changed the name in the message to something Swedish-y ("Sven Karlsson" or smth. like that) and instantly the response rate rose dramatically. As a foreigner, not having anyting on your Swedish credit report doesn't help either.

mclemmeon Comcast turns 50,000 paying customer homes into public hotspots

A Danish company, yousee, did something like this, in an opt-out model. After launching it nationwide, it was found that the two wireless networks were not quite separate. IIRC only IPv4 traffic was separate.

Translated article: http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=da&tl=en&u=...

While it was running, some people reported that not opting out and then putting your cable model in bridge mode, would disable both wireless networks, but allowing you to use the extra bandwidth for your own use. Didn't get to try it myself before the feature was disabled due to the bug mentioned above.

mclemmeon Quake-style dropdown Mintty console using AutoHotKey

Can recommend guake[1] for linux users, it looks decent and works like a charm. Modified the code a bit to color the active tab so it's easier to spot[2]. I think it's also included in the most recent version, i.e. if your distro has it or if you build it from source.

[1] = https://github.com/Guake/guake/ [2] = http://i.imgur.com/njoTQXe.png

mclemmeon Ask HN: Unknown IPs visiting my mock web app. Should I be worried?

https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Port+5000+traffic+and+snor...

Anything you put on a public IP address is going to get scanned pretty regularly by all sorts of bots/worms/etc.

mclemmeon Bitcoin 2014 – Top predictions

much thanks, very generous, wow :)

mclemmeon Bitcoin 2014 – Top predictions

Here's to hoping :) DQtb7RvPtZp1qxmvwuGEMXUHqEz1fRBBLw

mclemmeon Ask HN: Best current model routers for OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc.?

I'm a big fan of the WNDR3700, bought it on a whim a few years ago, the firmware it comes with sucks, but with *WRT it just works (I've got a V2, have a look at http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndr3700 for details about versions).

With a powered USB hub and an external disk drive and a webcam, it functions as remote backup via. rsync and monitoring my home when I'm on vacation, when enabled it takes pictures every 2 seconds when there's movement in the frame. The pictures are uploaded offsite immediately.

I'm using OpenWRT and have had very little problems, only issue I've noticed is that the wifi transfer speeds are a bit slower (10-30%) than when using the factory firmware, but I can live with that.

    21:47:12 up 221 days,  5:22,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.04

mclemmeon Nginx security update

Seems to be ok

http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2013/CVE-20...

mclemmeon Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

Been using 64-bit for the last 5-6 years I think, never experienced any major issues with it. Only weird isses I've had were browser plugins (java and flash), which were a bit dodgy on 64-bit, but that was years ago.

mclemmeon Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

The minimal CD can be found here:

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/raring/main/installer...

Always use that instead of the official desktop CDs, to avoid all the extra programs that I never need.

mclemmeon Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

Life: Giving up WoW and starting to socialize instead

Programming: The 2½ years I spent at a small startup as the only full time developer

mclemmeon PHP As A Templating Language

After working with django, going back to simple PHP based templates is pretty sucky. Twig for PHP is pretty similar to django templates: http://twig.sensiolabs.org/

mclemmeon Chrome DevTools could do that?

Was at the talk and what really looked useful was the HAR stuff (HTTP archive), see httparchive.org