polpo

I don't think the ability to put some of the heavy lifting in C++ code diminishes the value of Electron or Node.js any less than any other scripting language that lets you write modules in C or C++. The way Node.js C++ addons are written and built doesn't diminish the "write once, run on all platforms" nature unless you try really hard to write platform-specific code.

APNG support landed in Chrome 59, released in June!

Yes, you can sync a playlist to the watch so it can play it independently: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204691

(looks like the case for aircrack-ng, at least: https://github.com/aircrack-ng/aircrack-ng/blob/master/src/a...)

4,733,979 out of the 14,344,391 passwords (33%) in the rockyou.txt dictionary file used for cracking in this guide are too short to be WPA2 passwords, which have a minimum length of 8 characters. Are aircrack and/or hashcat smart enough to not bother hashing those short passwords?

I learned this pretty quickly - I used Mathematica a bit too much for help on calculus homework and wound up paying dearly during the first few exams.

Yeah, the first thing Highlights brought up for me this morning was some image posted in our company's #random channel. Uh, thanks?

Over the many years and several companies I worked with Qt, nobody could bring themselves to call it "cute." Everyone called it "que-tee."

Cool tech demos like this one can have unforeseen uses: On an episode of the podcast Reply All [1], a "trip sitter" would use this site to help calm people down who were on bad trips, and it was pretty effective.

[1] https://gimletmedia.com/episode/44-shine-on-you-crazy-goldma...

Whether you believe code schools are good or bad (I lean somewhat towards good), I wonder if we have not fully learned the lesson from the rash several years ago of fly-by-night for-profit colleges preying on vets and providing substandard education and inflated job promises, all on the GI Bill's dime. I worry that if the GI Bill was extended to code schools, we'd see the exact same thing happen again.

And here's another article from 1993 in PC Magazine which goes into detail, and with a bit more accuracy than the original article for this HN discussion (for example, it explains how XMS works on the 286): https://books.google.com/books?id=gCfzPMoPJWgC&pg=PA302&lpg=...

This article is a bit inaccurate about XMS. XMS works just fine on the 286; see the original spec [1]. This is done purely in real mode on the 286 with the the A20 line [2] which allows addressing a 64kB area above 1024MB, in combination with the the undocumented LOADALL instruction, which allows addressing even beyond that [3].

[1] http://www.phatcode.net/res/219/files/xms20.txt

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line

[3] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/1006/what...

About 1/4 of the floor space of a typical Whole Foods is taken up by homeopathy and other quack remedies.

I've always imagined that the reason that FastMail's web UI is so fast and responsive is because their developers are based in Australia, but their main server presence is in New York. They're optimizing for speed when communicating with a server halfway across the globe, and that benefits everyone.

It's not -- I'm getting OOM on some java processes and my swappiness is set to 60.

Me too! It's one of the first things I check when upgrading. I was worried it wouldn't survive the first Retina version of Lion and then the flattening of Yosemite, but nope, it's still going strong. I hope they're leaving it in as an Easter egg intentionally.

The Rio IP and engineers went to Sigmatel [1], who essentially turned the firmware for the Rio Karma into a reference firmware for their MP3 player SoCs. The Trekstor Vibez [2] was probably the most well-known player that used that platform.

By the way, the Karma firmware was really ahead of other players of the time, supporting perfect gapless playback, Vorbis and FLAC support, and on the fly playlist editing. The iPod never got on the fly playlist editing, which I really missed when I moved over to using one from a Karma.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/27/sigmatel_rio_deal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrekStor_Vibez

This instantly brought to mind the classic 1984 book, The Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike [1]. Note that they call Unix a programming environment, not an operating system. This book shows that the original purpose of Unix is to be a tool for writing software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme...

What the Archive Team saves does get uploaded to the Internet Archive, but they aren't officially part of it. I think Maciej's description of the Archive Team is accurate - they are the archivists of last resort. When a commercial service is about to disappear forever, they're the ones that spring into action and rescue as much data as possible. If companies and the people that comprise them cared enough about their users' data, there would be no need for the Archive Team.

I think it's just a video. The meat is in the article below it.

Given the good reaction to an out-of-the-blue patch from me on the HAProxy mailing list, I'd imagine that contributing even major changes to HAProxy probably would go rather well. It's one of the best open source development communities I've experienced. Welcoming, but still highly focused on quality contributions. The quality and performance of HAProxy reflects this approach.

The PS/2 keyboard interface is just AT with a mini-DIN connector instead of DIN. It's the same protocol.

To address the "started using newer versions of Node and Chrome" point, since NW.js v0.13, on the day a new version of Chrome hits the stable channel, a new version of NW.js is released matching the Chrome version. At the time of those releases, NW.js ships the current stable version of Node. So as of late, NW.js has been ahead of Electron in being more up to date with Chrome and Node. There is also a corresponding beta version of NW.js that tracks the Chrome beta channel.

A much better option than this is to just use NW.js [1], which supports all of the chrome.* APIs natively, without polyfills [2].

[1] http://nwjs.io

[2] http://nwjs.io/blog/chrome-apps-support/

He is certainly willing to divulge the details. He's posted his expenses yearly. Here are 2015's: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15RdDg3XyOGzW1T0Wjw9M...

This is somewhat accurate. The Netflix Player was an internal Netflix project. Close to launch, Hastings realized that other device makers would balk at Netflix making their own hardware, so it became a Roku product. [1] Most articles I've seen about this say Netflix spun off Roku, but like you I remember they definitely existed as a company before that. Did they simply just transfer that whole department to Roku? Did they have any kind of relationship before that? It's a little murky.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3004709/inside-netflixs-project-...

I went to high school next to a dioxin superfund site [1]. They incinerated it (I could see the smokestack from the school) and supposedly it's all cleaned up now [2]. We'll see how we all turn out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

[2] https://clu-in.org/download/remed/incpdf/times.pdf

Quackle[1] and Elise[2], two of the best Scrabble AIs, do look ahead.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/doc/how_quackle_... [2] http://www.codehappy.net/elise/

I was also surprised to see this here. It needs a (2012) tag in the title at the very least, as this is not what is being litigated right now.

Comic Sans is a terrible font, even when used for its intended purpose. It has a really off-kilter awkwardness that doesn't evoke any sense of youth or playfulness.

The perfect argument against Comic Sans is Chalkboard [1], a font created by Apple to have the same look but fixes everything wrong with it. Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans, uses it as an example of how great Comic Sans is, saying "if Comic Sans is bad why make something similar." [2] But they made something similar because it was bad and needed fixing. Chalkboard shows that the concept of a casual handwriting/comic font is valid, it's just that Comic Sans blew the execution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalkboard_(typeface) [2] http://www.connare.com/whycomic.htm