Hacker News Reader

zmanjion S.F. tech companies' civic image at stake as backlash grows

Doesn't the city effectively control housing supply by issuing permits for new buildings and controlling zoning boundaries? I can see how the city cannot produce new housing but it seems they can definitely restrict housing supply.

zmanjion S.F. tech companies' civic image at stake as backlash grows

As a visitor to SF I'm having a hard time trying to understand why there is so much anger directed towards 'techies' and not towards the city/mayor. Isn't it the mayor's responsibility to ensure that housing supply can meet demand and low income earners are not pushed out of the city entirely?

zmanjion iPad Hack Statement Of Responsibility

If anyone thinks weev deserves any sympathy, you don't know the full story. weev had malicious intent and wanted to harm AT&T by exposing users data. Instead of doing anything remotely rational he took all the data and wanted to sell it.

Laws take into account indent (mens rea) and there is a lot of evidence in his indictment that he wanted to profit off this act. He shouldn't be compared to Aaron Swartz

zmanjion It's "locking" if it's blocking

How does one implement message passing without atomic instructions and/or locks? Without some sort of lock I fail to see how one can have mutual exclusion on a message queue.

EDIT: I also fail to see how this is academic atomic instructions are needed to implement any basic concurrency construct.

zmanjion Awesome WM 3.5 released

The product page has some screenshots[1] as well as the wiki [2].

[1]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/ [2]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Screenshots

zmanjion Tom Preston-Werner: Development of Jekyll to be revived in 2013

A serious alternative to Jekyll is Nanoc[1]. It is absurdly easy to compile any format to another format using a simple 'Rules' file. I for example have pandoc -> HTML with custom syntax highlighting and LaTeX -> pdf on my personal website [2]. Everything is customization and configurable so you can have your own conventions for posts, etc.

[1]: https://github.com/ddfreyne/nanoc [2]: https://github.com/zmanji/zameermanji.com

zmanjion How I coached a basketball team in Afghanistan and what went wrong

Afghanistan has been a perpetual warzone for decades now and every attempt after each war to rebuild important civil instituions (courts, taxes, police) has been poorly done. In the brief period where there were institutions and stability things were better. If from the article, “During the time of the Taliban we did not have such encounters. Everyone kept to his lane.”.

zmanjion A Better Makefile for Bootstrap

This is an awesome improvement to the Makefile for bootstrap. The OP clearly sees the strengths of make and hopefully upstream will incorporate these changes.

zmanjion Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

If 50% of your clients are cheating, are you really playing a game?

zmanjion Bring Google Fibre into Canada

No, Rogers Communications is not owned or apart of AT&T. I believe they have mutual roaming agreements for their wireless customers though.

zmanjion Bring Google Fibre into Canada

This can't happen because it is illegal for telecommunications providers to be foreign owned. The correct first step would be to lobby our "free market" prime minister to let the free market operate.

zmanjion Best Papers from 27 Top-Tier Computer Science Conferences

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.

zmanjion Github Raises $100 Million

Consider the audience of the WSJ. I doubt Github is known to more than 5% of the WJS audience.

zmanjion Oatmeal, IndieGogo, National Wildlife Federation & American Cancer Society sued

This is the most bizarre series of events I have ever witnessed unfold in the legal system.

zmanjion Vim: Buffers, Windows, and Tabs

Any suggestions on getting started with emacs and evil?

zmanjion Magenta - "It is fully binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0"

If this can run CoreFoundation, then can't anyone with the iOS SDK target this platform with no modifications to the SDK?

zmanjion Microsoft Certificate used to sign "Flame"

Is this more serious than the signing for stuxnet?

zmanjion Manhattanhenge

It depends on how much of that documentation will survive.

zmanjion "Ubuntu 12.04 completely freezes frequently"

I can't tell if the problem was fixed by installing the vanilla kernel or reverting to an older Ubuntu kernel. Does anyone have ideas?

zmanjion Diablo 4 to Feature LocalServer Technology

I wonder if Blizzard will ever turn off the servers for Diablo 3.

zmanjion Revenue could be fatal: 3 reasons your startup should consider waiting

What evidence do you have to support your claim? As far as I can tell Instagram was a cool idea/product that got lots of users. I am unable to see a moneymaking opportunity from any angle from the current iteration of the product.

In addition, if they wanted to build a large independent business why would the sell out so early?

zmanjion Revenue could be fatal: 3 reasons your startup should consider waiting

Are you honestly saying that Instagram's team was "trying to grow a very large, independent businesses"?

zmanjion Revenue could be fatal: 3 reasons your startup should consider waiting

[...] it would have been very hard for them to get to the scale [...]

Without revenue you can say it would have been very hard for them to, you know, exist as a company for some period of time.

zmanjion Revenue could be fatal: 3 reasons your startup should consider waiting

This is the stupidest drivel I have ever read. If you brought this up outside of the inane SV bubble, you would be laughed out of the room.

They even state "for many apps, like Instagram [...]" as a good example when revenue is not needed. I'm flabbergasted.

zmanjion Resumes are dangerous

Why? Some prof worked hard to create the starter code for many assignments so the student could focus on a few key parts. After the student completes the few key parts of the assignment it is obvious it is a derivative work of the professor.

Also posting the solution online would obviously make it difficult to use for the next year and I don't think it is productive to make a professor remake an assignment every year when the could be focusing on refining lecture content.

zmanjion Volatile Software (2012)

This has expressed the ideas in my head far better than I could. When I first started to work with Rails in many projects I just dumped all of the gems I wanted to use in my Gemfile. I quickly learned that a simple bundle update could fuck my shit up pretty badly by having gems change APIs, remove features or both.

Since then I always specify the exact versions of my gems or in cases where the gem authors are known to be comptent use the "~>" operator. I find it to be stupid though much like the article states, why are newer versions making my life harder when they are supposed to be better?

zmanjion Oracle v. Google judge to decide whether APIs are Copyrightable, not the jury

I feel the judge will rule that APIs are not subject to copyright. There is no expression of creativity and it is fairly mechanical. I also think that if they are subject to copyright lots of people are going to get sued.

zmanjion Day 3 of Oracle v. Google: Larry Page bests David Boies

I'm not sure what is being contested in the case any more. Larry Page testified that their implementation of Java was a clean room implementation. Is Oracle trying to assert that an API is something that is subject to copyright?

zmanjion Taxes Prompt More Americans to Renounce Citizenship

Did you read the article? It relates the increase of people renouncing citizenship with the increased enforcement of IRS and legislation targeting foreign income.

This has been a topic of discussion in Canada for some time now where there are many dual citizens. I think that it is insane that even if you have not earned any income in the USA for many years you still need to file a return or face insane penalties.