Hacker News Reader

uint32on Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music

This idea is often presented as soon as anyone mentions "harmonic series" and "Western music theory" in the same breath, and in the same hand-wavey terms. Do you have any material to support these claims?

uint32on No POST after rm -rf /

Poettering's behaviour ultimately reflects poorly on his employer, Red Hat. It seems like they just allow this behaviour to continue unchecked.

The personal attacks on Poettering should be directed to Red Hat instead, who actually have the power to do something about it.

uint32on What's Worked in Computer Science

This article discusses "today", yet it has no publication date. Well, it mentions "2015" in the conclusion, but that's it.

This trend to publish without a date is ill-conceived.

uint32on The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation

Better than either approach is to take both the objections and the computer-assisted explanations seriously. Then we might ask the following: What qualities do traditional explanations have that aren’t currently shared by computer-assisted explanations? And how can we improve computer-assisted explanations so that they have those qualities?

I am interested in this line of reasoning. Can anyone point me to relevant discussion (preferably scholarly)?

uint32on When will we stop using Facebook?

When will social networks be federated?

uint32on RMS on why Emacs lisp doesn't have namespaces

Richard who?

uint32on Should I Get a Ph.D.?

Seems rather narrow in focus, given the general title.

uint32on Newsletter #4 – Thanksvimming Day

For me the biggest advantage will be the support for embedding in other programs, so we can do away with the proliferation of imperfect vim emulators.

uint32on Kill init by touching a bunch of files

What's the point of watching for init config changes? Who has init configs that change so often that this is useful?

uint32on “No-CAPTCHA” reCAPTCHA

Where did you find that?

The problem is that the OP posted nothing at all.

uint32on Bup – towards the perfect backup

Same principle just different mechanics and assumptions.

I can't work (very effectively) in two places at once, so I don't need robust merging, just CYA synchronisation. Using only rsync features I can do a full 2-way rsync merge and catch potential conflicts, erring on the conservative so I have reasonable confidence I don't lose any work.

Minimal workstation dependencies: only bash, encfs, rsync, ssh, coreutils/findutils and optionally atd for automation. encfs is optional, too.

Instead of dvc-autosync and XMPP I just use periodic execution. I partition my stuff into smaller/high-frequency vs larger/lower-frequency to keep this efficient. These are triggered from bash (PROMPT_COMMAND, in the background) and recursive at (atd).

The local data is unencrypted on disk from this tool's POV. I use encfs --reverse and rsync the result. To browse the history, I combine sshfs with encfs in forward mode.

Linux only because that's what I use, but it should be possible to support OSX.

All in all I'm pleased I'm able to use such minimal tooling for such a successful result.

uint32on Bup – towards the perfect backup

Like any good hacker I got tired of other solutions that didn't quite match my needs and made my own dropbox-like backup/sync using only rsync, ssh and encfs.

https://github.com/avdd/rsyncsync

Not polished, but it's working for me.

    - only runs on machines I control
    - server requirement is only rsync, ssh and coreutils
    - basic conflict detection
    - encfs --reverse to encrypt locally, store remotely
    - history is rsnapshot-style hard links
    - inspect history using sshfs
    - can purge old history

shell aliases showing how I use it are in my config repository

encfs isn't ideal but it's the only thing that does the job. Ideally I'd use something that didn't leak so much, but it doesn't exist.

uint32on Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems

> systemd cabal

That phrase isn't doing them any favours.

Software packaging sucks. It will continue to suck until there is a concerted effort from a quorum of stakeholders to fix it. I'm not holding my breath.

uint32on Building Bigger Roads Makes Traffic Worse

Also: bigger/faster computers makes programs bloated/slower.