HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nextw33k

244 karma · joined October 12, 2012

Senior Software Developer from the UK.
submissionscomments
nextw33k··on Things I learned from OpenSSH about reading very sensitive files
"you should never use your own crypto code"

The sentiment behind that is to keep out those that don't know how to code. If everybody followed that advice there wouldn't be crypto code.

If you have the ability to create good code and are confident you can understand the maths of cryptography then by all means contribute to the community. If the past year has taught us anything it's that the crypto community needs more good engineers.

nextw33k··on IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10% deployment
That's not entirely true though. IPv6 has been prioritised on various devices and Google taught us over a decade ago that response time makes the web experience feel better to the user.

You'd better be on dual stack if you don't want your users to think the competitors feels faster/smoother. Otherwise you'll be the Yahoo of your market.

nextw33k··on What us worry? Ashley Madison says it added over 100K users last week
Studies report the answer is yes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18233843

nextw33k··on England House Prices Sad Story – Live Dashboard
> It's just that you can't have your cake and eat it too.

You can build up instead of out.

nextw33k··on C/C++ facts we learned before going ahead with CLion
I know the Pidgin project used to build their windows version on Linux using GCC and setting the make target.

You get a constantly up to date compiler (because of the system package management) and you don't need a MS license for your buildbot. It's a win win.

nextw33k··on The New York Times uses WebRTC to gather local IP addresses
Yes they can grab the IPv6 address but IPv6 has a privacy extension to cater for this. It will alter your local IPv6 address periodically. You could configure it to update every hour and effectively they'd be thinking you were a new PC on the network.

IPv4 you'd have a small range of IP addresses but with IPv6 you can have a different IPv6 address each hour if you so choose.

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/privacy-e...

nextw33k··on Uber’s Manhattan Invasion Is Killing the Loan Market for Taxis
"New York must stand up to the hostile takeover being attempted by a Mafia-like Silicon Valley, in conjunction with predator banks,” Freidman said.

I understand someone is lashing out at losing their cash cow but I don't think I've heard Silicon Valley described as a Mafia before.

Can anybody explain how this is even a remotely comparable thing to say?

nextw33k··on Greek Debt Crisis Deal Is Reached, but Long Road Remains
It is in the creditors interest to only provide a short term solution. They want to see reforms actually put in place to ensure the money is going to where it is needed.

If Greece were given enough to tide them over for 10 years how do you think the government would spend it?

Debt management is about a partnership, where financial responsibility is learned but both sides. The creditors are learning to be more cautious and Greece is/has learnt to control its spending.

nextw33k··on Greek Debt Crisis Deal Is Reached, but Long Road Remains
I don't know the exact details but I didn't think Iceland was in Europe, the UK wanted to rush them in so that those rules could apply:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Iceland_to_the_Eu...

nextw33k··on Show HN: Remote Desktop Protocol in Node.js
I would hazard to suggest those outnumber the skilled large organisations by quite a margin.
nextw33k··on IPv6 Exhaustion Counter
Sky are certainly looking at a roll out:

http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SKY-IPv6-T...

BT are apparently going the opposite direction (and looking to create a lot of hurt) with CG-NAT: http://www.alphr.com/news/broadband/381646/customers-fume-as...

nextw33k··on “Systemd should not default to using time{1,2,3,4}.google.com”
Sounds like Mr Poettering hasn't read the vendors page and has just gotten stuck on the word vendor:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issuecomment-1...

"Open Source projects are of course particularly welcome to use the pool in their default setup, but we ask that you get a vendor zone when using the pool as a default configuration."

http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/vendors.html

nextw33k··on Ask HN: My co-founders are trying to get rid of me. What should I do?
Did they give you the reply in writing? If not ask for confirmation in the form of a letter.

It only takes 5 mins to type out a letter. If they blow you off you know you are getting shafted.

nextw33k··on Ask HN: My co-founders are trying to get rid of me. What should I do?
Have you signed any contract? An employment contract would place ownership with the company. You've mentioned you've been compensated which doesn't sound good.

(Hence why people are advising you to stop working)

Go sick until you speak to a lawyer.

nextw33k··on Test Pilot Admits the F-35 Can’t Dogfight
A pragmatist would say that you are right. However ethics teaches us that you are wrong.

Remotely destroying things is not going to help us as a race. Keeping the human in the danger zone helps prevent violence, everybody has something to lose.

nextw33k··on Crossover to support DirectX 11 on Mac and Linux “in the coming months”
There is a Google Summer of Code project for D3DRM: https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/g...

There is a lot of recent D3D changes in the wine source: http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/shortlog

nextw33k··on Ask HN: Company got acquired, new contract seems oppressive
After reading that I would imagine he's going to jail for fraud.

If you disagree with sections you are to strike them out and initial them, additions or changes are appended to the bottom. This helps everybody know what's happening.

From reading the article it sounds like he didn't create his own agreement (for them to sign) but copied and then altered their agreement. If it contained their letter head and the terms as if they had written it not him, then it's clearly an attempt to trick the other party.

nextw33k··on The Animatrix
> I don't think a modern website with CSS3/HTML5 favored will load that perfect in 10 years.

I'd be willing to bet it will, modern design principles are about separating the content from the style. Many of the techniques used were just workarounds because we didn't have the standards we have now.

In fact I'd say that this sites days (probably years) are numbered. It uses frameset for example. I would imagine that browser developers are going to start pushing for a cleaner underlying HTML/CSS/JS.

Having to support valign attributes in the HTML tags is not something you want to support forever.

nextw33k··on The Netflix Website Gets a Major Upgrade
I had to cancel my satellite TV subscription because of the Disney channels. All the main protagonists are self obsessed trouble makers that never get their comeuppance.

I would rather run the risk of my kids hearing a youtuber swearing about the latest minecraft addon than watch my kids grow up with Disney shows. At least the Youtubers are causing my children to want to create things and then showing them how.

nextw33k··on New York's Rent Regulation Fight
The correct solution to this problem is to tax the rental income and hand that money to low income households. It would create a balance of correct market prices and allowing low income people to stay.

Just letting the price float and pushing low income people out creates an unbalanced society where a class divide builds up over time. Modern housing policy in the UK is to mix social housing with regular housing developments, having social housing all grouped into one location was a catastrophically bad idea from the post war era.

nextw33k··on New York's Rent Regulation Fight
You need to learn about old age and how it effects the brain.

You take an alzheimer's patient out of their home and place them in a hospital or new home and you are effectively transporting them to another planet, it freaks them out.

Your home is your kingdom, she's been there too long to feel comfortable anywhere else. Its not idea, its not economically the best utilisation of a resource, but it is human.

nextw33k··on Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...
brew is a package manager, I can install a set of applications and libraries that will be kept up to date with a simple command line. If your coding doesn't take you outside of what Apple provide then you are probably not missing anything.

Personally I have the Android SDK and NDK, QtCreator, Qt5, cppcheck, cloc, mongodb, node, wine and others. If you are not using a variety of 3rd party tools to produce/automate your work then you probably don't need to worry.

Having all those kept up to date for me saves me so much time.

nextw33k··on The Cuban Internet Crisis
Customer acquisition costs is usually the first problem for businesses.
nextw33k··on WinJS: The Windows Library for JavaScript
My problem with PowerShell is that its Yet Another Syntax To Learn (YASTL).

If a JavaScript runtime like nodejs had access to the same interfaces as PowerShell or to COM I'd be over the moon.

It would be very powerful, you'd effectively be opening up windows shell programming (OS scripting) to tens of millions of developers rather than the 1% that take the time to learn PowerShell.

nextw33k··on Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat
That's kind of old world thinking, it's been bugging me. In traditional programming and processor architectures that statement would be true. But if it were true today then Google wouldn't have built the Dalvik and then ART layer into the OS. They'd be compiling them on the developers PC and you'd end up with a fully static App.

The VM approach allows the VM to synchronise application wake-ups which can increase battery life.

Google chrome on Android is acting much like a VM to developers and I'm willing to bet the Android Chrome team are spending a much time as the Java runtime team are on optimising.

nextw33k··on Exchange Between the Ubuntu Community Council and the Kubuntu Council
An anonymous council member points to examples:

http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2015/03/19/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#...

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-community-team/2015...

To me it seems that there is a frustration at the lack of progress in the answering of legal questions. That in turn has created friction.

The truth is that they are all correct from their own points of view. Jonathan Riddell is complaining that the council are not doing enough, whilst the council are waiting on lawyers but still keeping things active.

My biggest question on this would be whether Jonathan Riddell could quit and claim constructive dismissal? If this were a company (and its kind of mixed in) it could be considered that technically he's done nothing wrong in a legal sense to earn a demotion. He would have had to have been given a couple of official warning first.

nextw33k··on Firefox experimental build with support for LZMA2 compression (2013)
Whenever I hear about HTTP compression I always think of Jeff Atwoods blog post: http://blog.codinghorror.com/youre-reading-the-worlds-most-d...

Basically DEFLATE beats GZip because its faster at decompressing. Choosing a compression scheme should be about balancing the transmission time with the decompression time, compression time is the least important aspect of the problem since caching can help mitigate that problem.

Statements like "This algorithm compresses better than gzip/deflate, at the expense of slower compression. Decompression is much faster than compression." mean nothing because its not telling you if the decompression time on a mobile device is worse than if you had sent it without compression. Plus I'd be surprised if there was any algorithm that was slower to decompress than it is to compress.

nextw33k··on AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance
I remember reading that link and thinking about how the standards are not working.

It also concerns me for the future of the open source graphics stack. If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base.

I can only hope that the Mesa 3D stack comes to Windows in a meaningful way to ensure a common open 3D graphics library. Vulcan might shift the problem to the game engine from the driver but that's a long way off yet.

nextw33k··on Avoiding the Question of Who’s to Blame in Autonomous Vehicle Accidents
As with current insurance, if you mod your car without telling them they will invalidate your insurance.

Once you do tell them you've altered the programming on the cars computer they are more than likely to tell you to find someone else crazy enough to insure you.

The self drive feature of a car is about to get very proprietary, like a flight system there is going to be assurances that the software the manufacturer installed is the same one that's running. Crash investigators are going to have a tonne of information from these cars (Assuming they don't blow up in a Michael Bay style crash).

nextw33k··on Coming This Summer: U.S. Will Run Out of Internet Addresses
This is the one I use:

http://ipv6-test.com/validate.php

Page 1 of 8Next →