thomaszander

The ratio of bad to good posts has always stunned me too. But for the opposite reason.

The linked post explains that there is a performance regression in a very rare and specific usecase: creating 100k files in a short span of time. And I'm not talking about unpacking boost, that's not enough files.

Additionally, it will be fixed before any distro packages it. (even Arch is still on 5.9.14.)

On the other hand btrfs got rather impressive speedups for fsync https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....

Why are people making so much noise instead of just reporting the bug upstream when stuff goes wrong with btrfs, and why do we hear so little about the positive impact of new improvements. Almost like the people behave like customers of commercial operating systems. :-)

GnuNET is one of those open source projects that really is a research project and focuses on getting things right instead of focusing on getting users.

There is something to be said for this approach, but personally I'm not sure that 19 years since initial release (according to wikipedia) and still not having something end users are expected to use is promising for the future.

Anyway, these guys are trying to do a much better version of anonymous routing. Something that Tor is most known for. Tor has plenty of issues though, so there is something to be said for more research less marketing.

Last week he corrected people on this 'payday' usage, I think this is the same misusage.

He is allowed to buy the stock for this price, he does not have the right to sell it for 5 years, though.

So he pays taxes based on todays stock-price, but if it plummets he goes down with it getting nothing since he can't sell for 5 years.

So, sure, he's already rich and this will make his valuation much better. Over which he should pay taxes. But its not a payday in my view of the world when you can't actually buy anything for it since he can't sell those for 5 years.

There is nothing stopping you from doing exactly that, and I have.

All you do is go to the dir, do a git init, and then regularly you do an add and commit (and push).

Really simple due to the fact that all files are just plain text with markdown syntax.

I agree with every point you made.

A counter-point:

I, and many others, ended up funding puri.sm to actually undertake this project. Which included hiring a bunch of people full time to work on the software on all layers of the stack.

Today we have a much different landscape with pinephone and others working to slowly release phones too.

My take is that we needed this kickstart of the libre-phone movement. They started it, before them there was nothing relevant going on. They obviously didn't do it alone, far from it. But they showed there was real money to be made, they pushed consistently and had actual people do the hard work.

So, even though I have not actually received an actual piece of hardware, I'm still happy I funded their campaign. I may not get a great piece of hardware, but I did get a lot of worth for my money.

The natural consequence of our last 50+ years of ever increasing economic growth is the lifestyle we had until a couple of months ago.

The push to improve economic output every year has as the effect that people have left very little time for themselves, that they have created smog hells in cities around the world.

I would argue that this environment we created is the antidote, where productivity has not gone up based on what you expect from the amount of hours worked. People keep putting more effort in but the output is not moving much.

I would expect that after some time of stabilizing (and articles like this show its already happening) that people will be more productive and be competitive with those that just keep chugging on.

It is easy to see on an individual level: you can try to put in 80 hour weeks, but a competitor that gets plenty of sleep and is happy doing his job just might outcompete you anyway.

I think the same can be seen on a larger scale, and probably with larger difference as well.

An economy where people are able to work in clean air, with much less pressure and much less feeling of being a consumer will end up being more productive even though a lot of people are working from home.

Because, remember, the main reason a lot of jobs are lost is not because productivity went down. It is because money is not spend. And money not spend is left available to be spend on other things. This will re-balance itself.

I would fully agree about their main website :)

but, yeah, its a website they use to sell stuff. Advertisements tend to work better if they don't get stale.

On the other hand, the doc.* website (its on its own sub-domain) is almost boring and just entirely functional. And that is what techies actually use.

Its a great overall look, but I'd like to add some details to the Qt parts.

* he reviewed the QtWidget parts, and the designer for such. This is by now 15 years old tech that has not seen any new development for years. He didn't look at the QtQuick and QtComponents parts which people use now.

* He writes: «You can always buy a commercial license that gives you the rights to statically link your application but it comes with a hefty price.».

This seems an emotional conclusion. First, most people don't actually require to statically link their apps. So this is only required for a small subset of users. Shipping your app on mobile, for instance, can be done with the open source version just fine. I think it helps to actually ask the sales team a price instead of concluding it has a heafty price. Compared to visual studio it actually is cheaper, last I checked...

* «Chart components are missing.»

Actually, there are several. Including 3rd party ones.

* he first states that QML allows one to use Javascript as a con, and then continues in his next line saying it is not nice to have to use C++. I think thats unfair. You can write your entire app in Javascript or C++. You can mix them. Your choice. This are add-ons. Like NPM can be seen as a bunch of add-ons to Node. Complaining about the ecosystem being diverse doesn't really sound like a negative to me...

All very good points and my suggestion is mostly in line with those points.

In most decentralized systems there are no incentives (other than wanting privacy, etc) and I agree with you that this lack of incentives has a bad effect on the quality.

In many ways my suggestion is to create a base layer that is run on centralized servers (like ISPs are centralized, without lock-in) and they have an incentive to make it better because the content-creating users pay them.

So the suggestion is to have a new horizontal market that enables distributed developers to create applications on top of.

The examples of services (chat / reddit etc) could be written on top of this horizontal market layer where the basic data communication part is paid-for and well maintained and the developers will have much less work to make their decentralized systems ready for mass consumption.

Thank you for the advice.

I might do a better writeup some in some time, so this is useful for sure.

People here may know that some bitcoin-scaling issues are being addressed by the Bitcoin community. It is certainly very interesting to realize that todays hardware and internet can already scale quite massively above any need imagined today.

This may be nice, but it makes me extremely uncomfortable to have this ran by a company on a server that knows my phone number.

It looks like its also skipping any sort of encryption and is instead just using sms messages.

> Bitcoin slumped 5.5 percent against the dollar as of 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday in Tokyo, bringing its two-day drop to 13 percent. Prices also sank 6.2 percent on Monday, although it was not clear if that initial move was related to the hack.

The price has actually been dropping consistently since the 31st of July.

Granted, this hack has caused a the drop to be bigger, but attributing the entire drop to it makes no sense. The timeline doesn't fit.

The most likely reason the price has been dropping is because the Bitcoin miners have ran out of reasons and deadlines to stop the bitcoin hardfork which will cause an increase in block size, which is the main reason why Bitcoin is artificially blocked from accepting more customers and grow.

Investors likely don't think its worth holding onto a currency if it has (and reached) an artificial ceiling.

Tl;Dr using a better way to structure a transaction we can improve on SegWit in many ways. Most importantly in complexity so we can lower the risk of deployment very significantly. Additionally space savings are better than in SegWit and the result fixes many issues that SegWit doesn't.

This service, and it seems by extension namecoin, raise some questions in my mind.

It seems to me that you will very quickly run out of useful names and instead get confusingly similar names. It gives the illusion of human-readable, but its really not. Refer to xkcd 1279 for why this becomes an issue :)

The bitcoin integration is flawed; People don't have one wallet address, any wallet can generate hundreds or thousands of addresses. Remember, there is no message you can send with a bitcoin payment so what you are expected to do is create a new bitcoin address for every payment you want made out to you.

What is with the limitation of only supporting 'a-z0-9' ? Swedes and Russians would probably appreciate a much larger set of characters. Not to mention Klingons!

What do you mean, you generate a default address?

Where is that wallet located? Are you a wallet supplier on that website too?

For all living in the US, proof the story-teller wrong by linking to this video on liveleak on their social media and suggesting their friends and family look at the full 30 minutes interview.

Getting to the truth is about hearing both sides of a story, so anyone not willing to listen or let others listen to Snowdens story is part of the problem.

Given that in the USA 98% of the worth is owned by 1% of the people, I'm not sure what you are thinking of when you talk about "fair".

In bitcoin we long passed the point where money is created. The only way to own bitcoins now is to get them from others by giving them something else in return. Dollars, or a painting etc.

I'm not sure what you mean with "money is created through debt".

The history of the VMs is that many years before there was QML there was QtScript. A Javascript based engine. This got used for Qt4. In Qt5 the V8 open source engine got used instead.

Either way, they ended up picking something that was already there, which would explain why it was easier than creating a brand new langauge.

QML was the natural extension of where Qt was evolving to. With listviews in itemviews-ng having delegates that were just a set of graphics-view objects, QML took it one step further by defining it in QML.

The effect is really an amazingly well working separation of concerns. The biggest and simplest reason is that when you can wrap your head around QML, it takes no time at all to write a good UI.

So, the goal changes from having a complicated UI that has to work well on 5 different form-factors to instead have up to 5 different UI layers to work best on those form-factors. You really can write a good looking UI in a fraction of the time compared to a QWidget approach.

Most of QML is based on core Qt/QObject concepts. A binding is just a combination of a signal, getter and maybe setter. Just to state again that this is just a extension of the direction Qt had been going in for some time already.

See for a simple overview; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6_F6Kpjd-Q

ps. I didn't "get" it until I took part in a kdab course. Its really not that trivial to wrap your head around ;)