Hacker News Reader

smellfon After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs

At work and play I use only vim to write C++, Python, Javascript, bash and web frontend stuff. Only plugin is rainbow parentheses. Manpages and web for docs. My system is very flexible and I wouldn't have it any other way.

smellfon Google Hangouts Chat

Well there's also "Messages", which is the default Android SMS app. And even if you're on Fi and set Hangouts as your default SMS app, some things ignore that and open Messages anyway. This shit is so frustrating.

smellfon Solving Minesweeper and making it better (2015)

Small world, at least three different programmers spoonerized Minesweeper. No, mine is not online, nor will it ever be - it was jacked-up student-written Java, I had no idea how to structure code at the time. It's amazing it ever worked at all.

smellfon Solving Minesweeper and making it better (2015)

Wow. My Minesweeper clone was called Swine Meeper, and the premise was similarly bonkers (interstellar livestock pig shipment infected with alien parasite, the player "meeps" them to find the infected hosts). Wrote it in Java way back but never got it on Android.

smellfon Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice

What natural cancer cure would you suggest? Maybe tumeric, or fasting, or acupuncture?

smellfon Curry spice turmeric boosts memory by nearly 30%, eases depression, study finds

I have - filling by hand (set up opened capsule halves, pick up larger half, scoop and pack powder into it, close it with other half, repeat) for something you take daily gets really old really fast.

If you know a better way I'm all ears, as I'd love to keep filling my own piracetam capsules (commercial caps are 800mg, way too strong for me) but hate actually doing it.

smellfon The Marriott Family's Civil War

> Everyone involved in this story sounds like a horrible person.

I can't speak to the entire family, but in an old service-type job of mine about 10 years ago I would occasionally interact with one of the senior Marriott ladies at her home in Potomac (not sure if it was the patriarch's wife, Angie, or John III's sister). Some of the wealthy people living in that area are decent people, but Mrs. Marriott was not. Rather than speak in a normal conversational voice, she would yell orders across the room; when calling our office, she would berate the receptionist. Icy, cruel person.

Edit: Just found out it was Dick Marriott's wife, the sister-in-law of John III.

smellfon “Toward the Year 2018”, a speculative book from 1968

Simak was a terrible predictor (if "prediction" is even what he was trying to do, vs just writing science fantasy), but his "pastoral scifi" is such a treat to read even today.

It's possible that he was predicting, and that those ideas were common at that time - Clarke's Childhood's End came out just one year after City (1953) and also features personal flying transport and lots of rural life (even though cities still exist).

smellfon Magic Leap One

Personally, I would have gone with "the size of a trade paperback". Or maybe "the size of a large hardback book held with the arm fully extended."

Honestly it sounds really small. Not sure how you could have a viable product that only works in a small rectangle in the center of your vision.

smellfon An Open Letter to the FCC

Donate the the EFF, it's basically the same thing as you're suggesting except that the organizational structure is already in place.

smellfon Show HN: /usr/bin/htop

That's so cool. This is the best link in these comments IMHO.

smellfon Out to Get You

Yes, it takes a bit more cognitive processing to follow, but I feel that the idea of the piece couldn't have been expressed much more clearly, given that the subject is so abstract.

The level of abstraction reminds me of Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_. Now _that's_ a tough read (though it should tickle the fancy of any HN'ers not already familiar.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Baudrillard,Jean/sim...

smellfon Git git git git git

Debian is the same way. But as soon as you open a file with vi on a fresh install, you know it isn't vim, so you close the editor, install vim, and then the vi command opens vim.

smellfon Git git git git git

Think about all the keystrokes you'd save if you just typed "vi" instead.

smellfon Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Attraction

"Met a few other times in our past lives"

smellfon Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them

Your suspicion is correct. Your number gets out there because you give it out, and then 10 years later the company goes under and liquidates their assets which includes a load of customer phone numbers; or because you give it out when you open a credit card or buy a mortgage or car, and you legally can't limit the sharing of your personal info to third parties, who can share your personal info as widely as they want... point is, not having a phone number will be tantamount to not having a social security number in many situations.

smellfon Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them

What does it matter if the numbers are contiguous? Just keep allocating space for mobile numbers.

smellfon Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them

Now you can often get so much more done talking to online chat for whatever utility or organization. I guess it's only a matter of time before you're talking to a robot there too (or is it happening already?) So have we perhaps reached "peak communication"?

At least until the direct neural implant, when we can express or receive the information we need by joining minds. But then will there be frustrating computer minds that we have to interface with?

smellfon Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them

True, but presumably your carrier is still paying for the call. If the transaction were reversed, then the robocaller or their "carrier" (or whatever the equivalent is in robocaller land) would have to pay, and the profits would crumble.

smellfon Analog Computers

How long have subreddits been accessible through a subdomain? Is this something the subreddit mods have to turn on?

smellfon The story behind the default Windows XP desktop background

This is my favorite version of the Windows XP hills:

http://i.imgur.com/1xtcI.jpg

smellfon Private Git Repository on Any Computer

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I hadn't seen that. Worth reading is the last post in that thread, where Unknwon finally responds.

smellfon Is the Switch the second console this generation to run FreeBSD?

Do what? Are you saying the Switch has a Steam client?

smellfon House Passes E-mail Privacy Act

Exclude all the audio and video data streamed over the internet, as well as the contents of torrent traffic and other data useless to the panopticon (just keep the metadata), and I'd imagine the amount of data you'd be left with would be very possible for the US government to store.

smellfon Deniability and Duress

    echo "Truecrypt test" > /mnt/plausible_deniability_volume/README && history -d $(history | tail -n1 | cut -d' ' -f1)

smellfon Telescope That ‘Ate Astronomy’ Is on Track to Surpass Hubble

Not this satellite. Not yet.

smellfon Telescope That ‘Ate Astronomy’ Is on Track to Surpass Hubble

I was thinking the same thing - JWST is slated to ride an Ariane 5, which has had something like 75 consecutive successful launches.

smellfon Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

Just run a tor exit node. Problem solved, sort of.

smellfon Microsoft Concept Graph

I was unable to parse "animals other than dogs such as cats" because it isn't a sentence, it has no predicate. Shouldn't language sort of be their thing here?

smellfon Why I hate frameworks (2005)

The author was being cheeky, but it definitely dates the piece. People are a lot more sensitive about that sort of thing today than they were 10 years ago. Back then it just came off as dark and sort of funny.