Hacker News Reader

obiterdictumon Firebase is Joining Google

Call me old-fashioned but I shy away from unique platforms precisely because they are, well, unique, as you don't have a lot of vendor choice should you decide to migrate for whatever reason.

obiterdictumon Rm -rf remains

The classic version of it:

http://lug.wsu.edu/node/414

obiterdictumon Defensive Bash programming

What is wrong with piping `ls`?

obiterdictumon High-Speed Traders Rip Investors Off, Michael Lewis Says

> HFTs and other trading firms actually buy up the order flow from brokerages.

I'm going to ask for a citation on this one.

I remember a similar incident at KRX in 2009, and it resulted in a criminal investigation [1], so that ought to be illegal.

[1] http://www.traderdaily.com/07/koreas-elw-players-get-hfc-wak...

obiterdictumon Russia approves use of military in Ukraine

RT (of course) gives such a different view from Western media, it may as well be a completely different story. Right now, for example, it tells how "armed extremists sent from Kiev tried to seize government buildings in Crimea".

obiterdictumon A Bitcoin Address with 782,000 BTC Moved Through It

You can also use alt-coin exchanges, e.g. BTC->LTC->BTC, or even multiple exchanges (one to buy, one to sell) to obscure the trail even more.

obiterdictumon How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

Comparatively few people will read this story. Even fewer will care enough to continue the crusade against the attacker for any prolonged period of time to raise awareness among the potential future audience that this account was stolen.

High chance the story will be quickly forgotten and the account will be re-used.

obiterdictumon Expanding Context in Diffs

Worth noting that BitBucket had this as long as I can remember.

obiterdictumon NSNotificationCenter with blocks considered harmful

On a related note, I've run into a similar problem in C++, but opposite effect. A lambda won't keep my object alive if I try to capture a shared_ptr member, because C++ lambdas, similarly to blocks, by default capture implicit reference to "this", rather than individual instance variables.

http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764564/23643

obiterdictumon Bitcoin $600

This reminds me of a story of Sir Isaac Newton and South Sea Company bubble. He got out early, then watched all his friends get rich, jumped back in again with both feet, lost a fortune. Even smart people are not immune to bubbles.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/isaac-newton-and-the-south...

obiterdictumon Deep C and C++ (2011)

Conversely, JS programmers I complain about JS gotchas about contend that "once you learn all those horrible gotchas, it's a great language".

Even C++ programmers, at least the ones that had good fortune to have time away from C++, agree that C++ gotchas are unforgivable.

But in general, C++ and JS communities have the biggest cases of Stockholm Syndrome I've seen.

Disclaimer: I'm a recovering C++ programmer.

obiterdictumon Apple cuts 5C orders due to weak demand

I think what GP is saying is that in emerging markets, or at least in Thailand, there is no "compromise" market segment (and it's not going to appear regardless how much Apple "want" it). Normal people get ultra cheap phones, rich people get high-end iPhones, which is why 5c is a miss.

obiterdictumon A "Hacker's" Guide to the Bay Area

Pardon my ignorance, but is it $700 a month or a week? I'm used to Sydney prices where a 1-bedroom apartment could easily cost around $500 a week.

obiterdictumon 'TWTRQ' Up 685% in Clueless Trading

> It might be an interesting failure scenario for algorithmic trading.

It's not how auto trading works. Traded instrument ranges are preset before the algo is started. I've never heard of an algo that tries to pick stocks to trade dynamically based on a name, it would be astoundingly risky.

obiterdictumon LinkedIn Customers Allege Company Hacked E-Mail Addresses

I think it's more likely that LinkedIn mobile app grabs your phone contacts, if you happen to give it permissions to do so.

I've noticed that the "People you may know" section started to contain faceless placeholder entries with emails from my address book (though, I'm not sure if/when I've given the iOS app the address book access).

obiterdictumon Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction

It highly depends on the team. In a small team that know each other well, it can work. Most of the time it's not the case, however.

obiterdictumon Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)

Note the article is from 2000. Joel mostly talks about big and mature desktop software (big as in Microsoft Excel). Average startup's code is small, narrowly focused, has a (relatively) short lifespan, so it can be rewritten from scratch by 1 or 2 people.

If you've ever worked with legacy systems older than 10 years, you'd notice that they become a victim of their own "success". You can't throw away features added over years, because a lot of users depend on it, and if you tried to rewrite it, you'd have to rewrite bug-to-bug.

I worked on such systems, and I did try rewriting, and gave up because of sheer volume of work and the knowledge of institutional lore that was required to do it. On the other hand I'm currently embarking on our startup's "rewrite" and things are much much easier, because the feature set is small and I can freely throw away stuff that didn't work.

obiterdictumon Nokia acquired by Microsoft

> I really enjoyed the pre-Microsoft Nokia, I had account in their dev forums, and loved their SDKs, community, Sybian, whatnot.

Really?

I thought their SDK circa 2007 (especially the emulator) and API docs were terrible, and Symbian C++ was a real pain to work with. Also, segregation between regular developers and Nokia partners (who paid to have access to extra private APIs) put unnecessary barriers to development.

I won't miss it.

obiterdictumon Brilliant or insane code?

I think that dependency on argument evaluation order inside zip function smells a bit.

It's OK here, but may bite you with a different function.

obiterdictumon Apple seeks to trademark “startup” in Australia

I have been using it full-time circa 2006-2009. I guess that counts as "past decade".

1. There was no out of the box support of my particular NVidia video card, so I've had to build the driver from source and fiddle with my system to install it.

2. I've had userspace processes freeze on network activities and become impossible to kill, because of a kernel deadlock in my wireless driver.

3. Proper smooth fonts required work at the time (freetype did not ship with good subpixel hinting).

4. Proprietary media codecs did not work out of the box and required a third-party repositories.

5. The whole KDE four-point-not-really-zero debacle.

A minimalistic XMonad+Vim+terminal setup was decent and worked for me, but eventually I got sick of desktop Linux and moved to OSX.

I realise that many things have been fixed in the meantime, but it was not a flawless experience back then. If I was to give desktop Linux another shot today, I'd be cautiously optimistic, but not expect a miracle.

obiterdictumon Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement

Obligatory mention of gevent[1].

It handles all the plumbing for you with monkey-patching I/O calls. No annotations necessary, you just write linear code.

[1] http://www.gevent.org

obiterdictumon The Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks

On a related note, for anyone interested in this, I recommend reading "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely[1]. He does actual studies and discusses a lot of these things (bias to loss aversion, change in behaviour when 1-layer detached from cash) and more.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...

obiterdictumon Show HN: C library of generic, reference-counted data structures

Along the same lines, there is also CCAN.

http://ccodearchive.net/list.html

https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan

And GMP for arbitrary precision math (integers and floating point numbers).

http://gmplib.org/

obiterdictumon Golang heap corruption during garbage collection

You simply do not use "go get" on 3rd party repos in production. It's not different from pip or gem.

obiterdictumon C++11 breaking changes in const-correctness guarantees

C++98 "const" code still works exactly the same in single-threaded environment, so this change is not breaking, because no existing code is broken.

obiterdictumon Google’s programming language, Go, gets a big speed boost

Not a disaster, but a word of caution:

https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/gotchas-irritan...

obiterdictumon Python Number Conversion Chart

It should be noted that data.encode('hex') and data.decode('hex') would not work in Python 3.x:

http://stackoverflow.com/q/12917278/23643

obiterdictumon What technical reasons are there to have low maximum password lengths?

Because the developer is storing passwords in plaintext, and he wants to save database space.

This seem far fetched, not sure what thought process would lead anyone to come to this conclusion. Even if you have a million users, you have ~8MB worth of passwords. I'd imagine even developers who are not competent in cryptography realise that.

obiterdictumon A nice, little known C feature: Static array indices in parameter declarations

On the other hand, static_assert will have a more helpful compile error for users of the code. They will clearly see assertion condition that failed, rather than missing candidate error due to substitution failure (or worse, a different overload silently considered instead).

obiterdictumon It is cheaper to fly to US than buy Adobe software in Australia

Property bubble has been predicted in Australia for years now. I was waiting for a market crash for years too, but now I'm not entirely convinced. With high urban sprawl, poor transport options, growing population and generally high income, I'm not surprised property costs as much as it does now.