Hacker News Reader

sfkon Are we shooting ourselves in the foot with stack overflows?

C is used in such applications precisely because it is one of the few languages that allow you to reason about things like stack usage.

Try that in Python, Ruby (or ML for that matter).

sfkon MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

Display technology has been stagnating for decades. The "retina" display (if it is as good as promised) might be the first display that matches the quality of ancient IBM flexview displays or rarities like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

So I'm having issues with the statement that technology continuously improves. In many areas that's just not true.

sfkon Always a starter, never a finisher.

I'm not talking about you or your company, but a lot of Starters are excellent bullshitters. They have an idea that is the equivalent of "Lets go to the moon" and leave it to others to build a Saturn V rocket. The latter of course is just an implementation detail.

sfkon Why must you laugh at my back end?

Does anyone here think HN's markup is meant at all to be inspirational?

Yes, it's one of the most usable and beautiful sites on Internet.

sfkon Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK

My sincere apologies to Eric Schmidt, and thank you for the information.

sfkon Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK

The 15-year-old fanboys are downvoting in realtime again. Who else has time to guard threads so closely?

sfkon Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK

And? Perhaps it is not the life goal of the majority of people to push advertisements to their fellow human beings.

If the criticism came from Knuth - fine - but Eric Schmidt? Who is he to make such a remark?

sfkon U.K. men get 4-year sentences for Facebook riot posts

Much better article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls...

"Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, of Latchford, Warrington, used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August to design a web page entitled The Warrington Riots. The court was told it caused a wave of panic in the town. When he woke up the following morning with a hangover, he removed the page and apologised, saying it had been a joke. His message was distributed to 400 Facebook contacts, but no rioting broke out as a result."

sfkon Fog Creek releases WebPutty

Could someone explain why most recent websites look as if the members of the target audience are five-year old children? This is not a troll - I'm honestly wondering if anyone actually likes such a "design".

sfkon Hacked Gmail Account

Why would a server that only runs ssh and qmail be less secure than Gmail? Why would I need a password recovery system?

Remember that Gmail had a sysadmin reading the mail of users:

http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

sfkon [dead]

The depression and anxiety scores are complete fabrications. Why is this nonsense voted up so high? Also, some of the comments smell of astroturfing.

sfkon You should learn to type (properly)

What an arrogant posting (presumably by a web developer). Go write some mathematical software or anything serious at all and you'll find soon enough that typing is not even remotely the bottleneck.

sfkon Tennessee Makes it Illegal To Share Your Netflix Password

I don't think that you necessarily will get jail time. The new law elevates theft of entertainment services to the same level as theft of other services. In practice, I think theft of services is mostly punished by a fine.

But in theory, according to the old law you actually could go to jail for loaning out your rail pass in Tennessee. So actually all the people who are upset about this law should first focus on the existing law.

sfkon Tennessee Makes it Illegal To Share Your Netflix Password

In other news (http://www.japanrailpass.net/eng/en008.html):

"Use of a JAPAN RAIL PASS is strictly limited to the signer (hereafter "you") only."

Surely an outrageous clause like this one can only be the product of big corporations and corrupt politicians. What about "the right to travel"?

sfkon Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Comments)

I'm not sure that I understand. You have just demonstrated that the algorithm does not work.

sfkon Entrepreneur Manual: Paul Graham's Essays in ePub Format

Well, he funds scribd, which has a substantial amount of illegal content. I don't think he should complain.

sfkon Canadian-backed report says piracy is a market failure, not a legal one

The intellectual contortions used to justify piracy continue to amuse. Unbelievable that this gibberish is at 10 points.

sfkon When it comes to hiring, I'll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

Could someone explain why "being on Github" is synonymous with "contributing to open source" in some circles?

The Github projects are a very small part of the open source universe. You can easily build *BSD or LinuxFromScratch with a substantial userland without ever downloading anything from Github.

sfkon Why Fukushima Daiichi won't be another Chernobyl

Words are cheap. Go and help the cleanup crews on-site.

sfkon Cloud9 IDE - Your code anytime, anywhere

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2

HTH

sfkon Intel Launches Next Gen Itanium Monster Processor

Not sure if it is the main market, but you can still run OpenVMS on HP Itanium servers:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/index.html?jumpid=/go/openvms

sfkon The Ada Initiative: Salaries for women to participate in open source

Those are highly biased reports. Moreover, all the issues raised in these reports apply to big open source projects where women are claimed to be excluded.

For argument's sake, let's assume that this is true. What about individual projects then? Surely no one can exclude the primary author from his own project. Where are the female counterparts to Daniel J. Bernstein, Fabrice Bellard etc.?

sfkon The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002)

An interesting piece of information nonetheless. It is almost as if lisper knew the author personally...

sfkon Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good

Excellent advice. Reminds me of Greenspun's tale of two servers:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-...

sfkon A VC: Anatomy Of A Pirate

Try reading the article. The author lives in the US and refuses to buy from Amazon US. In short, he (and many other people in this thread) are complete hypocrites.

sfkon A VC: Anatomy Of A Pirate

"It was listed on Amazon US as an import that would be available on Feb 15th, but only in CD form. I'm not buying plastic just to rip the files and throw it out."

What a hurdle indeed.

sfkon What Separates a Generalist and a Dabbler?

hvs did not say that he didn't have time to read it. Your writing style is simply horrible and incoherent and any sane person would stop halfway through.

sfkon CDE: Easily run a program on any linux without thinking about dependencies

Reposting the comment of chbarts, which has been killed despite being entirely appropriate. Moderating has gone completely out of hand lately:

chbarts wrote:

" I think the potted example on the web page is somewhat poor, as it seems to be a problem existing package management systems already solve.

The more interesting aspect is the sandboxing, and how this is great for one-off software runs where it isn't worth it to install the needed packages on your base system because they're logically just a unit with the software you're testing. You mention this, but I think you'd do well to make it more obvious.

This is also, and this is something you mention, a way of preserving historic software and data. Bundle a full CDE package with an emulator and you can keep running that program for even longer; in fact, it seems a CDE package could gradually grow layers as time demands, from moving a (user-mode) kernel in, to adding device emulation, to going the final step and making the package more-or-less a ship in a bottle running in full hardware emulation.

This could also grow into a way to run untrusted (or minimally-trusted) software in an iron box, not just a sandbox. But that is harder and probably not your preferred direction."

sfkon Show HN: I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind

Well, here it goes:

1) White text on brown background is very difficult to read for many people.

2) Horizontal scrolling is bad.

3) The main headline is far too big. You should be able to take in a headline in a single glance.

4) The placement of the gigantic green button seems somewhat arbitrary. In general, those buttons always look as if they've been designed for a baby toy.

5) I'm forced to create an account to read a sample.

6) The "written about by" references are not clickable.

The general impression is that the site looks cluttered, trying to spread out a modest amount of actual information over as large an area as possible.

sfkon What is a safest way to set all bits of a variable to true in C?

Sigh:

"The contents of the header <limits.h> are given below, in alphabetical order. The minimum magnitudes shown shall be replaced by implementation-defined magnitudes with the same sign."

  #define UINT_MAX 65535

Key here is implementation-defined, with a minimum of 65535.