Hacker News Reader

polpoon Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)

I want to thank you for this page! It really helped me understand how X11 worked when my job at the time required some rather esoteric (to me) X11 knowledge. I had to write a very specific purpose window manager (in JavaScript, which really made it interesting) that had to work around some odd client behavior, and I also had to submit a patch to X.org to fix a bug in Xephyr. Without your guide I would have spent far longer digging in the docs to figure things out.

polpoon Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

The $50/mo rate is for charter members who signed up within the first 3 months of it being available. New customers have to pay $70/mo, which drops to $60/mo after the first year. So not everyone is paying the $50/mo rate.

polpoon Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

Longmont, just south of Fort Collins, was the first city in Colorado to build out a municipal ISP, and it’s inspired surrounding cities to do the same. It’s where I live and it was a not-insignificant reason why I chose to move here. So far it has been a resounding success for the city. The buildout completed on time and adoption rates are higher than initially expected (the city planned for 37% but the last number I saw was around 54%). In my experience, the service has been so good as to be totally invisible. And I know my $50/mo rate will never rise. I wish Fort Collins the same experience. The fact that they both cities have municipal electric service will help this significantly.

polpoon Apple to Deprecate Scripting Languages in Future Versions of macOS

It’s a big deal for Homebrew, which is written in Ruby and uses the version shipped with macOS to install itself.

polpoon Quora pays thousands for posting questions

Ask MetaFilter: https://ask.metafilter.com/ It costs $5 to get an account that lets you ask or answer, and they have paid moderation staff that keep answers on-topic and high quality. The signal-to-noise ratio is quite high.

polpoon Flying for Thanksgiving

The SSID for the WiFi at SFO is called “#SFO FREE WIFI”. It’s named as if someone has a wireless hotspot in their backpack running on a battery pack trying to steal the login information for your bank.

I had the same reaction the first time I saw the WiFi SSID at SFO. “Surely that can’t actually be the name of the official WiFi here. Let’s let it keep looking for networks...”

polpoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)

Occipital (The Spatial Computing Company) | Full-time | ONSITE | Boulder, CO & San Francisco, CA

At Occipital, we’re working on spatial computing - using computer vision to 3D reconstruct and understand your surroundings so that software can operate over real-world spaces. We believe it will power the next generation of augmented reality and some of the key parts of virtual reality as well. https://occipital.com

* ACCURACY AND TEST ENGINEER (SAN FRANCISCO OR BOULDER)

* ASSISTANT CONTROLLER (BOULDER)

* BACKEND ENGINEER (SAN FRANCISCO OR BOULDER)

* CALIBRATION SOFTWARE ENGINEER (BOULDER)

* CHANNEL MANAGER (SAN FRANCISCO OR BOULDER)

* COMPUTER VISION ENGINEER (SAN FRANCISCO, BOULDER OR MADRID)

* FIRMWARE / EMBEDDED SYSTEMS ENGINEER (BOULDER)

* FRONTEND ENGINEER (SAN FRANCISCO OR BOULDER)

* MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER (SAN FRANCISCO OR BOULDER)

* MARKETING MANAGER (SAN FRANCISCO OR BOULDER)

For detailed information check out https://occipital.com/jobs

If you apply please mention that you saw this post on Hacker News. Thanks!

polpoon Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (1998)

Also interesting is that Dave Cutler, architect of NT and VMS, was the first lead on Azure.

polpoon The world's smallest desert is in Canada

Reminds me a bit of glades where I grew up in Missouri: areas where the topsoil is just a thin layer above the bedrock and can't hold much water. This creates small arid ecosystems, complete with prickly pear cactus and tarantulas. https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/habita...

polpoon Dell XPS 13 Review from a lifelong Mac user

Look at that screen, indeed: it has a 3:2 aspect ratio, which is practically unheard of in recent Windows laptops. It's good to see someone going for something taller than 16:9 (or even 16:10).

polpoon Possible BGP hijack of 1.1.1.1

Cloudflare operates a public DNS server on 1.1.1.1 that has gotten a lot of attention since it was launched a few months ago. If a bad actor hijacks it, they can answer DNS queries with malicious answers, similar to the Amazon Route53 hijack that was used to redirect an Etherium wallet site to a fake server: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/04/amazons-route-5...

polpoon Hijack of Amazon’s domain service used to reroute web traffic for two hours

Here's a source on Twitter showing some documentation of the self-signed certificate that myetherwallet.com users ignored warnings about: https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/988785871188045825

polpoon Hijack of Amazon’s domain service used to reroute web traffic for two hours

It means just that. Since they had control of DNS, they could have easily gotten a DV certificate, but in this case, they didn't and people clicked through certificate warnings.

polpoon Apple starting to alert users that it will end 32-bit app support on the Mac

On the other hand, it is a bit crazy and impressive that OS X/macOS has had to support 32-bit x86 binaries for >12 years because they sold 32-bit Core Duo machines from January 2006 (introduction of Core Duo iMac) until August 2007 (replacement of Core Duo Mac Mini with Core 2 Duo version). 12 years of binary support because they sold 32-bit x86 CPUs for 20 months.

polpoon Show HN: Wey – A fast, open-source Slack desktop app

Interesting to see this is from zcbenz, who was the initial creator of Electron. Slack's desktop app, which is based on Electron, is often criticized for its memory and CPU usage, so I'm wondering if the creation of Wey and its underlying Yue library are an answer/atonement for that.

polpoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)

Occipital (The Spatial Computing Company) | Full-time | ONSITE, INTERNS | Boulder, CO & San Francisco, CA

* Computer Vision Engineer (Boulder, CO or San Francisco, CA)

* Web Frontend Engineer (Boulder, CO or San Francisco, CA)

* Embedded Systems Intern (Boulder, CO)

* Firmware Engineering Intern (Boulder, CO)

For detailed information check out https://occipital.com/jobs

If you apply please mention that you saw this post on Hacker News. Thanks!

polpoon My Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app

I don’t trust Vizio since they watched people’s viewing habits without people’s permission: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/7/14527360/vizio-smart-tv-tr...

That’s worse than the Samba.tv app in the OP since Vizio didn’t even tell people they were doing it.

polpoon How to Clone Mineral Water (2012)

Imagine my surprise when I clicked the "a mineral water calculator" link and my browser downloaded an Excel spreadsheet. It'd be cool to port this to the web.

polpoon Speed improvements in Python 3.7

A literal tab character is equivalent to 8 spaces in Python source (or 1-7 spaces if the tab is preceded by a number of spaces that is not an even multiple of 8). This follows well-established Unix standards.

So the following lines are at equivalent indentation:

    <SPC><SPC><SPC><SPC><SPC><SPC><SPC><SPC>foo
    <TAB>foo

Or do you mean that when you press the tab key in your editor when editing Python, you don't like that it emits 4 spaces instead?

polpoon Qt 5.10 released

Well, there's GNUstep... I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has used it recently and how complete it is.

polpoon The FastMail Security Mindset

Yes, they support SMTP and IMAP just fine. In fact, they're one of the few providers that actually support IMAP push with iOS's Mail: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when...

polpoon The FastMail Security Mindset

This is an entry in FastMail's series of Advent Calendar blog posts that they do every year. I'm glad to see them continue the tradition this year, and it's valuable to get this level of insight into a company that I trust with my mail. If you're interested in seeing more, check this year's first Advent Calendar post which has links to their calendars from 2014, 2015, and 2016, which are all worth reading if you're a FastMail customer or just interested in how running a mail hosting company works: https://blog.fastmail.com/2017/12/01/fastmail-advent-2017/

polpoon Standalone Signal Desktop

There was a period in late 2014-early 2015 where NW.js stagnated, but since then it's been very actively developed. I found this 2016 comparison pretty even-handed and comprehensive; it'd be nice to see an updated version for 2017. http://tangiblejs.com/posts/nw-js-and-electron-compared-2016...

polpoon Standalone Signal Desktop

They could use NW.js instead, which stays up-to-date with the latest Chromium version, including security updates. They usually release on the same day as Chromium. https://nwjs.io/blog/

polpoon Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

Occipital still produces the Structure Sensor [1], which uses similar technology to the 1st generation Kinect. They've also recently introduced the Structure Core [2], a new generation, miniaturized depth sensor designed to be embedded into anything that needs that kind of sensing.

[1] https://structure.io

[2] https://structure.io/core

polpoon A Closer Look at the $13B Premium Eyewear Market

I thought it was shady as hell when I got an explanation of benefits letter from my vision insurance (branded Aetna) with a return address of 4000 Luxottica Place.

polpoon Adafruit's Read-Only Raspberry Pi

It's good to see a nice easy script to do this. I can confirm that mounting the SD card as read-only works great. For a couple years, I used a Raspberry Pi as an AirPlay receiver hooked to a set of speakers, and whenever I was done listening, simply turned off the power. I had / mounted read-only and never had SD card corruption.

polpoon The iPhone X’s notch is basically a Kinect

If you want something to hack on, check out the Structure Sensor (https://structure.io). While it's mostly iOS-focused, you can get a USB hacker cable and interface it with a computer. (Disclaimer: I work for Occipital, makers of the Structure Sensor)

polpoon Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)

The arcade hardware (MVS) and home hardware (AES) on the Neo Geo have the exact same specs. And in the linked article the author is applying the fix to an MVS cartridge (which can be used in an AES system with an adapter).