Hacker News Reader

theGimpon Teach Yourself Computer Science

It's a British statement free from all sarcasm.

theGimpon How to never complete anything

You can ship daily even if your process is not automated. I usually automate building and deployment later in an application's life -- not at the beginning.

You can automate all steps for building an application but the signing to make your life easier. You can also automate things locally if you're worried about what you're signing.

The bottom line is that this applies to all apps (though your users might be irritated if they need to keep downloading updates).

theGimpon Quantifying the Impact of “Cloudbleed”

Credit cards and SSNs are regularly compromised. The real problem is that they are used as an authentication mechanism. That's what we should be concerned about.

This issue is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the amount of sensitive data leaked.

theGimpon RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next

The team behind RethinkDB has been a class act. Thank you for creating a fantastic product and doing what's right by your users even as you were winding down.

theGimpon Federal judge stays deportations of travelers in Trump immigration order

I hope you have read the entirety of my comment because I explain why I see things that way.

I did not claim Obama was a saint, but his record on this specific matter is already far better than Trump's.

P.S. the downvotes for the parent comment are unwarranted.

theGimpon Federal judge stays deportations of travelers in Trump immigration order

I'm an Iraqi Canadian with a Muslim name, so I know a little more than the average person about this issue.

I can tell you that what Trump is doing is unequivocally worse than what Obama did. One of the things Obama did when he became president was make it easier for nationals of several Arab countries (including Iraq) to travel into the United States.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration required travellers from a number of Arab countries to disclose their travel plans at entry. It also placed limitations on their movement within the US. Obama and the Democrats waived that requirement. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of this law, and I couldn't find it now. If you can find it and comment with the name, I'd greatly appreciate it. (see update below)

What Obama did in 2015 might have been negative for Arabs who come from the nations affected, but he still left the process better than he had received it.

Also, he didn't campaign on banning Muslims from entering the US, didn't thoughtlessly keep out Green Card holders and dual citizens, didn't say "Islam doesn't like us".

There is no comparison between Obama and Trump.

Edit: it was NSEERS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Entry-Exit_R...

I should point out I'm not criticizing your opinion, which is entirely valid. Just pointing out how I see it myself.

theGimpon The MongoDB hack and the importance of secure defaults

I'm no Mongo fan, but that's a false equivalence. You don't need to use Mongo in order to survive.

theGimpon Attachment theory is having a breakout moment

A lot of connections made in that article, with no data to back any of it.

theGimpon Browser auto-fill phishing

My thinking is the user should explicitly autofill each field. Yes, it involves more work, but it's really not much work to click on a field and pick the right autofill value.

I'm always concerned about using autofill because browsers eagerly fill any field they have data for.

theGimpon Why HTTPS for Everything?

Redis and Postgre are meant to play different roles.

If you don't like what Redis does, you're welcome not to use it.

theGimpon Yes, You Have Been Writing SPSC Queues Wrong

I'm new to systems and this is enlightening to me. Are there any books out there that enumerate pitfalls like this one?

theGimpon Things You Notice When You Quit the News

Every morning, I start my day by loading a bunch of news sites I enjoy reading and look at the top couple of headlines. If something piques my interest, I read it.

My news sources: NYT, BBC, CBC, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star. I'm Canadian, as you might be able to tell.

Sometimes I read what Brookings puts out, but it's important to keep in mind their biases as a think tank.

theGimpon Secure ROM extraction on iPhone 6S

Back in the day I had similar problems, but I used a different Canadian ISP. The issue was their DNS: for some reason it did not resolve some valid domains.

Switching to Google's DNS might fix your problem. If it doesn't, it's probably Shaw's routes.

theGimpon Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/tree/master...

theGimpon I Found Myself Accused of Stealing Code from WordPress

I don't know where to start answering your argument.

1. Some people claim pirating movies is not tantamount to stealing. Some people call violating open source licenses stealing. Those are not necessarily the same people.

2. The GPL is a legally enforceable license that grants you the rights to use and distribute code if you abide by the license. If you don't, you're not allowed to. Whether you agree this is stealing or not, it's against the law to use GPL code that belongs to someone else and violate the terms of the license.

theGimpon Wikipedia and Internet Archive partner to fix 1M broken links on Wikipedia

Thank you for posting the donation link. I have donated in the past and always think about donating when the Internet Archive is mentioned.

I just set up a monthly donation amount, and I encourage you to do the same if you believe in the Internet Archive's mission!

theGimpon How Snowden's Disclosures Made All Our Data Safer

Of course I won't contest that, but Snowden's revelations did nothing to change that knowledge.

We have always known private companies keep all the data they can get their hands on and use it to sell ads.

theGimpon How Snowden's Disclosures Made All Our Data Safer

Liberals can and have been violent in the past. No group large enough is free of extremists.

theGimpon How Snowden's Disclosures Made All Our Data Safer

[edit: the downvotes aren't warranted...]

Aren't email and phone calls monitored anyhow since they're not encrypted (by default)? Why wouldn't the three-letter agency capture all email traffic if it can?

theGimpon Obituary: Great Barrier Reef

[The Australian Government] shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.

It's the other way around. If you tell people the reef is dying, they go en masse, which contributes to the bleaching greatly.

theGimpon Remediation Plan for WoSign and StartCom

Small nitpick: StartCom refused to revoke certificates at the time, not renew them.

theGimpon Decap of a Cell Phone SIM card [video]

That is a very well-made video.

Like the video creator, I'm very surprised the humble SIM card has been made so capable!

theGimpon The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn (2015)

Quizlet, but I personally still use Anki because it's free and it works on my phone.

theGimpon I am a fast webpage

My mistake! I assumed you meant the time it takes to fulfil a request and the bandwidth cost were related because they were mentioned in the same sentence.

Agreed on all other counts.

theGimpon I am a fast webpage

How long S3 takes to fulfil a request does not affect bandwidth.

I personally went the other way. I still use CloudFront as a CDN but made it cache items for short periods of time. Invalidation was too much of a hassle, and it took too long. Admittedly, I should use hashes or something of the sort to keep my items versioned, but laziness always gets in the way.

theGimpon Canada’s tech sector is hemorrhaging talent [audio]

Maybe I'll get there someday :-)

I should have mentioned I'm still a student. I'm sure that for a senior developer, the difference is significantly larger.

theGimpon Canada’s tech sector is hemorrhaging talent [audio]

Any Canadian developer will tell you the problem is the abysmal pay that Canadian companies offer.

I love my country and would love nothing more than to stay here, but when moving south of the border means a 50% bump, it's hard to stay in Canada.

It doesn't help that most Canadian CEOs talk about the issue as if they're entitled to Canadian graduates working for them without making any attempt at matching US pay packages.

theGimpon Salesforce buys word processing app Quip for $750M

Some individuals, yes.

CEOs are often paid hundreds of millions of dollars, and some VP-level executives at big companies are also worth that kind of money.

theGimpon A founder's perspective on 4 years with Haskell

I did not know COBOL was functional too :)

Out of curiousity, what other criteria would you apply?

theGimpon A founder's perspective on 4 years with Haskell

To me, as long as functions are first class members, and higher-order functions are possible, I consider a language to be functional.

Everything else is a convenience and not a requirement for the functional paradigm.

Mind you, I do much prefer a Lisp or Scala to Javascript, but I face no trouble writing functional code in Javascript.