Hacker News Reader

paulannesleyon The Rise of the $8 Ice Cube

This brand is ridiculous, but…

Crystal clear ice cubes look great in a drink, and are far more difficult to make than “filling a 50-cent plastic tray with tap water and throwing it in the freezer”. The author of the article seems to avoid pointing this out.

See https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danprovost/neat-ice-kit and https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wintersmiths/the-ice-ba...

paulannesleyon Emulating a 6502 with cycle-perfect timing

Nice project zellyn; I've got one with the same creative repo name: https://github.com/pda/go6502 ;) Mine currently makes no attempt at being cycle-accurate; it's basically the dev/test environment for a breadboard 6502 computer I'm working on.

paulannesleyon Elm 0.12.3 – Hardware accelerated 3D rendering with WebGL

elm was my daily-use email client at work twelve years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elm_(email_client)

paulannesleyon The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

I seem to remember Apple TV updates are optional, and can be deferred until later.

paulannesleyon What 4chan thinks of HN

> Show HN: My full-stack web framework written entirely in CSS3

paulannesleyon The cost of Linux's page fault handling

shudder. Node.js-powered linux kernel builds? One small step towards https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... coming true ;)

paulannesleyon Show HN: NCurses Terminal Webcam

paulannesleyon Bad Password Policies

That could do more harm to the site users than the site itself. Especially with people sharing passwords between sites.

I guess that's an example Full Disclosure vs (as an alternative) Coordinated Disclosure; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure_(computer_secur...

paulannesleyon Bad Password Policies

It seems reasonable to enforce a size-limit on passwords, but in the order of kilobytes, not a two-digit number of characters. Perhaps 64 KiB, to commemorate Heartbleed.

paulannesleyon OpenSSL vulnerable to timing attack?

Follow-up email: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Apr/149

> Not used anywhere though, just a corpse lying around in the code. — Jann Horn

paulannesleyon My Surreal UberX Experience

Uber could wait until you've been collected before passing that information to the driver.

paulannesleyon What I learned about stop and frisk from watching my black son

Uh… what?

Maybe you accidentally hit reply before elaborating on “racial stereotypes exist for a reason”.

paulannesleyon NSA blows its own top secret program in order to propagandize

I believe the “When you're the good guy …“ quote by Michael German is sarcasm, or perhaps that's the wrong word and he's speaking from the point of view of Keith Alexander.

The article says German is at the Brennan Center for Justice, a civil liberties organization, and believes that Alexander's world view "reflects a career in the national security bubble".

paulannesleyon NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

> Therefore there is no point to the article.

I disagree. What difference does it make _which_ foreign country the article refers to?

The fact that 100% of calls made by all people in a country are being recorded by another country is enough.

paulannesleyon Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

The word “forgot” was chosen to rhyme with “plot”, so may not have been a normal use of the word/form.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes#Quotes_about_Fawkes

(Now you've made me want to watch V for Vendetta again!)

paulannesleyon SR-72

“At this speed, the aircraft would be so fast, an adversary would have no time to react or hide.”

“Hypersonic aircraft, coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour”

… sounds lovely.

paulannesleyon What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD

“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” — http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Then again; “Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, […]”

paulannesleyon WebSID

True in any context.

paulannesleyon Sta.li: Static Linux

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2010 Stali: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110727064007/http://eleveni...

paulannesleyon Automated deployment with Docker – lessons learnt

I'm using, and highly recommend, apt-cacher-ng: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/

paulannesleyon Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

You can specify what version you want. That doesn't necessarily imply that version will continue to be available. Ruby has the same problem with "yanked" versions of gems.

paulannesleyon Anatomy of a Program in Memory

Just one of thirteen articles in the “Software Illustrated series” on the authors "Best Of" page. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/best-of The remaining twelve are on my reading list now.

paulannesleyon A Tiny Speaker Printed on a Single Sheet of Paper

To answer the “what kind of printer does it require?” part of the question; Here's the Circuit Scribe pen being used in a pen plotter, in this case to draw an arduino-compatible circuit: http://www.instructables.com/id/Paperduino-20-with-Circuit-S...

paulannesleyon Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

Likewise; two or three times, always quick and happy to refund.

paulannesleyon Envconfig: Environmentally friendly Ruby configuration

dotenv reads a file into Ruby's ENV.

envconfig reads Ruby's ENV and exposes it as a useful configuration object. envconfig-rails uses that to e.g. push the SMTP settings into ActionMailer.

The key value, though, is that envconfig knows about Heroku and Broadstack add-on ENV names.

e.g. when you add the MemCachier Addon, it simply puts MEMCACHIER_SERVERS, MEMCACHIER_USERNAME, MEMCACHIER_PASSWORD into your ENV. Envconfig knows those var names, and assigns them to the memcached service.

If you looks at the various provider mappings in e.g. https://github.com/broadstack/envconfig/blob/master/lib/envc... you'll see that it knows about ENV-provided, and static, configuration for each provider.

paulannesleyon AbsurdJS – JavaScript based CSS preprocessor

I think it makes a lot of sense to build the features of Less/Sass etc on top of a well-known parser/interpreter (JS), rather than inventing a new one from scratch.

I already feel like I understand how AbsurdJS works better than I understand Less/Sass, for that reason.

paulannesleyon Adding Vi To Your Zsh

For highlighting that you're not in vi insert mode, try using an emoji (e.g. high voltage sign: Unicode: U+26A1, UTF-8: E2 9A A1) instead of [NORMAL]. It works in iTerm2 on Mac OS 10.8. Can't vouch for other OS/terminal combinations.

RPS1="${${KEYMAP/vicmd/⚡}/(main|viins)/}"

paulannesleyon Cornell Scientist’s Quest: Perfect Broccoli

“… his collaboration with large seed companies like Monsanto …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_actions_and_cont...

paulannesleyon How to permanently delete a Facebook account

Worth adding, because it's not mentioned on the linked page:

When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request.

Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.

paulannesleyon Pat's Guide to Running Events

Doing events at a cafe with a good barista and a coffee tab instead of a bar tab sounds awesome. As does the eradication of mediocre (or worse) food & drink, and useless bags of landfill.