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prairiedock

42 karma · joined May 30, 2012

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prairiedock··on Ask HN: What do you hate most about HN?
My main dislike is a technical feature: that every response to a comment does not link back to the parent comment. This often makes discussions difficult to follow. (Indentation helps very little when reponse threads grow over multiple pages.)
prairiedock··on A Cornell Scientist’s Downfall
You don't need the extension to get the benefit. Just go to https://outline.com
prairiedock··on EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time
If you read the article, you will find that they do propose to make daylight saving time (they call it "summer time") permanent.
prairiedock··on California's beaches belong to the public
The only interesting question here is: why isn't he (Khosla) in jail?
prairiedock··on Password Rules Are Bullshit
Can anyone explain why all authentication systems don't enforce a (say) 2-second delay on repeated password attempts? Wouldn't this solve nearly all insufficient entropy problems?

Even a 5-character password should suffice in this situation, and a human user would never even notice the 2-second delay. How would malevolent password-crackers get around this?

prairiedock··on MacOS could drop below 6% market share this month
Seconded. Their statistics without Chrome OS are of little interest, and a distortion of actual desktop trends.
prairiedock··on Some advanced bash scripting
It's not advanced, it's not long enough, and it's not correct either.

> This will set the value of TMP to `/tmp/myproject` only if it has not been set.

This should read "if", not "only if". And it should read: "This will set the value of TMP to `/tmp/myproject` if it has not been set or if it is null."

The form that means 'if it has not been set' has no colon; it is

  TMP=${TMP-/tmp/myproject}
  
See https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Shell-Par...
prairiedock··on How To Think About Chess
You'll be glad to know that in GO, the ancient Japanese game which is played with black and white stones on a cross-hatched board, black goes first and has the advantage.
prairiedock··on Pandoc Markdown and ReST Compared (2013)
I Looked at the site for z.m.l (http://www.z-m-l.com/). It doesn't seem to do math, so it's a nonstarter.

BTW, Pandoc (which does do LaTeX math) really needs no improvement, only more widespread implementation (e.g., an online site, and/or a chrome extension coded in javascript.) I suppose its being written in Haskell has been an impediment.

prairiedock··on Ubuntu Edge funding reaches $10M
This thing is dead in the water, IMO. I just tried to contribute (more than enough to get a phone) and discovered a Paypal account is required. (Over my dead body.) I would have been glad to contribute via any of several credit cards I hold. Do NOT understand why that was not an option.
prairiedock··on What Bitcoin Is Teaching Us
"it does what currency should do, which is increase in value over time."

What utter rubbish. Bitcoin may or may not survive (as a volatile commodity, like gold), but you buy it now at your peril. It is backed by nothing, and generates no earnings. It started at $.10, and to $.10 it might well return.

prairiedock··on Writebox – Syncs with Dropbox. Chrome, iOS, Web
Chromebooks out of the box lack any kind of straightforward text editor which will edit local files and/or files on Google Drive. (Google Drive is much more convenient to use on chromebooks than Dropbox.) Writebox looks as if it might be a candidate to fill this void, for it loads and saves files on Google Drive, even though 'distraction-free' tends to be code for 'featureless'.

Unfortunately, it's got a serious bug, fatal for my usage, which the developer promised to fix over a month ago but which has not been fixed yet. If you edit and save a web page (i.e. an .html file) on Google Drive, Chrome OS no longer recognizes the file as a web page to be viewed in the browser, but only as a text file, to be viewed as text or edited.

Eventually, this might be a good app. In the meantime, if you need a text editor for a chromebook, put it in developer mode, install Ubuntu 'cli-extras' with the Crouton script, and 'sudo apt-get install nano'. (Vim is also automatically installed by Crouton.)

prairiedock··on Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
You haven't been following Apple's lawsuits against Samsung much, have you?
prairiedock··on Why I Use Perl: Reliability
familiar? have? number? Don't think so...