Hacker News Reader

trabon How And Why We Switched from Erlang to Python (2011)

Then they acquired whatsapp that was written in Erlang.

trabon Blockchain isn't about democracy and decentralisation – it's about greed

Yes curious like the money that got poured into the .com tech in 2000 helped it get realized.

trabon Macedonia changes name, ending bitter dispute with Greece

>> We can't even be sure that the Greeks, at the time of Philip & Alexander considered Macedonia to be "Greece."

This is plain wrong. There is absolutely no dispute what so ever among historians about the Greek origin of Macedonia. The new country of Northern Macedonia in no way disputes this either. Comments like yours are the prime proof that what happened is very very wrong.

This is a quote from Wikipedia about Alexander the great.

>> Alexander was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this >> authority to launch his father's pan-Hellenic project to lead >> the Greeks in the conquest of Persia.

trabon In Greece, Property Is Debt

If you can generate income from all over the world Greece is a great place to work at. Great weather, great food, private health coverage with about 1K per year, private international schools for about 1K per month. Life and especially rent is pretty cheap compared to other European cities.

The problem though is that there is always a danger of a Venezuela style collapse but you can always move out.

trabon Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsing

I have been frantically researching for a temporal tagging library that can be used on an Android application with no good results.

I have looked at SUTime, HeidelTime, natty and some others. I am trying to parse (among others) expressions of the type "the first week of the previous month", "The last week of September". The only library that can parse this type of query is SUTime.

Can you comment on why you implemented a home grown solution instead of using SUTime or some other library readily available. Have you measured the performance of Duckling vs the state of the art in temporal tagging ?

Duckling seems very well made with good docs but unfortunately for me will be hard to make work on Android.

trabon The Athens Affair – The most audacious cell-network break-in (2007)

This is the link to the wikipedia article about the "hack" http://tinyurl.com/l2pfdew (Using tiny url because greek chars on the url get really messy on copy paste).

Translated excerpt from the wikipedia link above. "Two years later, in 2010 the case reopened with the advent of new evidence suggesting espionage with involvement of the American embassy."

I put hack on double quotes because it was anything but a hack. This was coordinated from within the phone carrier and the company that wrote the software, with the management most probably being aware of it.