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mgurlitz

329 karma · joined April 30, 2011

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mgurlitz··on Pixi.js is out
Putting Octocat in the header image for the blog post is a little misleading if you don't know what Pixi.js is, considering the only relation with GitHub is the repo is now hosted there.
mgurlitz··on Don't Buy the Snake Oil of Beamr Video
That's actually a very good analogy to why Beamr's "minimal bitrate for no quality loss" isn't groundbreaking at all, especially since there is necessarily quality loss in lossy H264 -> H264 encoding.

85% is already a quality number, saying relatively how much quality you are willing to give up for kilobytes in your output JPEG. Similarly, x264's CRF option is a quality number, saying how much quality you are willing to give up for bitrate.

Inevitably Beamr will produce some files that are inefficient, as well as some files that have noticeable banding and banding. The difference is CRF allows adjustments.

mgurlitz··on Fluxcapacitor: spoof Posix time functions
If it's useful to you why would you care what it's called.
mgurlitz··on PeerJS — True peer-to-peer data in the browser
See the demo at http://holla.jit.su/
mgurlitz··on Editing text is the opposite of handling exceptions
It looks to me like his scheme would remove the real-time requirement. With Google Docs you'll get unresolvable conflicts when one of the users is editing offline or from a slow network. Recording edits in the described way enables asynchronous conflict resolution, and changes don't have to be submitted in real-time for everyone to get the same document.
mgurlitz··on Another theory on the “FBI” UDID leak
Exactly. I installed and used Glitter Draw Free, presumably this data was sent to spankapps.com, and my information was not in the dump.
mgurlitz··on Show HN: my weekend project, whatsnerdy.com
Very cool site. Looks like you might have a Unicode problem: "Show HN: My Github résumé"
mgurlitz··on Why you should not be displaying relative dates.
One of the author's points is that relative dates discard information. 10:37 and 10:36 are both encoded as "9 hours ago," and therefore you can't map back to absolute dates without potentially losing order.
mgurlitz··on Never again be thwarted by restrictive “guest” wifi (e.g. on buses or airplanes)
The typical environment variable for socks proxies is SOCKS_SERVER, so: export SOCKS_SERVER=127.0.0.1:8000 in conjunction with ssh -D8000

Unfortunately many utilities don't support SOCKS or have non-standard flags, so you would need a wrapping program like tsocks to force TCP through your proxy.

mgurlitz··on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser for the first time on Mars
NASA used the hashtag "PewPew" in the tweet: See the 1st laser-zapped rock on Mars [pic & info] 1.usa.gov/NQC0bW Team is analyzing data now #MSL #PewPew
mgurlitz··on Thoughts on being a programmer
Wouldn't the Pythonic thing be to only fail after you've tried, instead of validating your parameters in advance?
mgurlitz··on Arch Linux vs. Slackware
Here's the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#cite_re...
mgurlitz··on Cling: Running C++ in an interpreter
To be clear, those empty #include's are typos, not Cling inferring desired header files. Both are:

    #include <iostream>
mgurlitz··on Browserver: a node.js HTTP server, in your browser
Github has a good readme if this site doesn't stay up: https://github.com/jed/browserver-node
mgurlitz··on How To Write Good Log Messages
Moving away from using regex to parse JSON, you can use Jsawk and Underscore-cli to manipulate JSON like Awk or JavaScript.

https://github.com/micha/jsawk/ https://github.com/ddopson/underscore-cli

mgurlitz··on Show HN: DailyCred: User Accounts as a Service
> DailyCred integrates just like Facebook Connect but with your branding. You also own your users' data and can take it with you at any time.

The context isn't clear if this means my OAuth credentials or my Facebook profile information but you shouldn't invite the question that the app owns my Facebook data or that they can access it when I'm not online.

mgurlitz··on Wikipedia Redefined
It's hard to say what's going on with the font. Works fine on Mac 10.8 Chrome 22.0.1215.0 (http://i.imgur.com/QMfte.png), but not in Safari, Firefox or Chrome iOS (http://i.imgur.com/8FruE.png).
mgurlitz··on IOS 6 Automatically Scales to Fit Taller 1136x640 iPhone Display
From above the page indicators to the bottom of the screen is roughly 176 to 180 pixels on the retina iPhone.
mgurlitz··on Want to be more secure? Build two-factor authentication into your webapp
Chances are the only ones who will try this are your users already using two-factor auth somewhere else, and it's most likely they got started with Google. Might as well use an app that's already on their phones, Google Authenticator (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4348475)
mgurlitz··on Curiosity was built with 2.5 million lines of C
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344945
mgurlitz··on Show HN: Statwing is statistical analysis, simplified
You're right, they shouldn't be making that average. Specifically, Likert data is ordinal, meaning 14 is less than 15 and greater than 13, but the gap between 15 and 14 may be different than 14 and 13.

For example, let's say people measure neuroticism exponentially, and an increase of one point means 10x perceived neuroticism. Because mean(log(x)) != log(mean(x)), the average won't be representative.

Everything else looks OK though: count, median, percentiles, a histogram.

mgurlitz··on X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
X11, Flash, and Java were all potential attack vectors whose security is provided for by a third party -- I can see why Apple would want to discourage this.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple's Radar bug tracker had a few dozen bugs in Safari RSS, maybe even a potential DOS threat, and they chose to move on rather than allocating more resources to an unpopular feature.

mgurlitz··on What is the Mars Curiosity Rover's software built in?
They make models of the software before writing any code, and a lot of the code can be generated from the models. There's a guarantee that if the model is correct so is the code. Or, you don't have to check that your hand-written C actually matches the system you were building.
mgurlitz··on Dropbox confirms it got hacked, will offer two-factor authentication
While the RFC mandates the ability to send and receive email from user+detail@example.org it doesn't require that it go to user@example.org. It's an extension to the email standard, and you could have labels in another form if you wanted to, e.g. inbox0-user@example.org (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233)
mgurlitz··on Dropbox confirms it got hacked, will offer two-factor authentication
> It turns out a Dropbox employee’s account was hacked, allowing access to user e-mail addresses.

This is misleading.

> Some Dropbox customer accounts were hacked too, but this was apparently an unrelated matter.

Unrelated how? What I read was: "Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites... A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account"

This article dangerously leaves the impression that an intrusion was made into Dropbox's system to access the employee's account, and possibly an admin interface. In reality Dropbox let a spammer with a valid email and password look at someone's files.

mgurlitz··on Hbro: Haskell based browser
The comments criticizing this for using WebKit are ridiculous. Most Safari users would never guess that Chrome runs on the same layout engine, but with a different JavaScript core, networking code, a sandbox, an extension architecture, and UI.

Using Haskell for any of the above components (especially the last three) could help make a browser that's more configurable and safer than anything Firefox Chrome or Safari could ever offer.

mgurlitz··on Fedora 18 to feature the GNOME2 fork MATE
I don't know if "feature" is the right word when all this means is you can choose to install it. GNOME3 is still the default DE (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18/FeatureList)
mgurlitz··on Want to learn about that beer in your hand? Send an SMS to learn more.
If you have an Android phone, on the BreweryDB's Apps list (http://www.brewerydb.com/apps) it looks like "Beer Friend" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.friendly.b...) will do this and more (calculate BAC for you and your friends).
mgurlitz··on How you can get hacked if you are using iPad/Safari/gmail
It's easy to check -- delete all secure cookies and see if you stay logged in. Maybe Google is doing something that keeps MobileSafari from reading the secure attribute, since I've never noticed this in my tests on iOS.
mgurlitz··on Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS
There are plenty of todo apps for syncing to every device you own. Atleast I would pay $1.99 for a gorgeous, dead-simple to use todo list just for my iOS devices (that works offline too).
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