Hacker News Reader

Ficeon Vim is moving to GitHub

Fossil supports incremental import and export to Git, so it should be possible to maintain a Git mirror of a Fossil repository or vise versa. This does not work for tickets and wiki, but the Fossil web server can also render markdown documentation located in the source tree.

Ficeon Vim is moving to GitHub

That reminds me of Fossil, a DVCS that integrates issue tracker and wiki so that every clone of a repository contains fully functional project website accessible via built-in http server.

Ficeon Vim is moving to GitHub

I see no technical reason why GitHub could not have been implemented as a federated system. Should we even consider convenience of a service that has serious ethical issues?

Ficeon Vim is moving to GitHub

For increasingly many developers (potential contributors) a project effectively does not exist if it is not on GitHub. And, being a huge centralized service, GitHub is very susceptible to censorship (e.g. repos being taken down via DMCA or Russia blocking GitHub until they started to cooperate with the censors). I see this dependence as very bad and dangerous for the global free software movement.

Ficeon Vim is moving to GitHub

Why is everyone so happy about the whole open source community becoming dependent on a single commercial company?

Ficeon Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

They might or might not steal your files, but the mere fact that to use their service you have to install proprietary software is a reason not to trust them.

Ficeon America’s Toughest, Ugliest Warplane

"Ugly planes don't fly" (a saying often attributed to Tupolev)

Ficeon Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end

In the article and elsewhere Clojure is often used as an example of an anti-OOP language, yet by either Alan Kay's definition (quoted in my previous comment) or by Bertran Meyer's definition^1 Clojure uses the object oriented paradigm. Clojure is more object oriented than PHP or C++ which only provide some OO-inspired data abstraction mechanisms, but are not based around them.

^1 «Object oriented software construction is the building of software systems as structured collections of implementations of abstract data types.» Bertran Meyer. Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition, 1997.

Ficeon Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end

One more quote by Alan Kay:

«OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.» (E-mail to Stefan Ram, 2003, http://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/doc_kay_oop_en)

Ficeon Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

This is not an abstract logical problem. If you imagine yourself in the situation, it still feels like taking a risk, and this will influence your answer.

Ficeon Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

Pushing the large man is risky, you can't be 100% sure that it will work, and you can't be absolutely sure that five people will die if you don't do it. So it could be the willingness to take chances rather than the moral judgments.

Ficeon Russian Smokejumpers

It's not just physical safety. In Russia we have a popular saying, "the severity of Russian laws is offset by their non-observance". Variants of the phrase has been attributed to various authors from the 19th century, yet it still holds true.

Ficeon Fourier Image Filtering

Darktable has similar wavelet-based filter: http://www.darktable.org/2011/11/darktable-and-research/

Ficeon Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture ... So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue, 2004, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Ficeon Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

I understand how it is justified technically, but that does not invalidate the fact that reCaptcha is discriminating against the users who care about privacy.

Ficeon Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

Dear website owners, please, do not use reCaptcha. As was noted in other comments, Google discriminates against the users who try to protect their privacy by showing them nearly unsolvable variant. For instance, I see the hard version all the time since I started to use Privacy Badger for Firefox. It is also not impossible that they discriminate by user-agent.

And generally it is a very bad idea to choose the most popular service among the alternatives, as by doing so you are contributing to the centralization and monopolization of the Internet.

Ficeon At

"Кракозябра" is a more common spelling, means any strange character. The plural "кракозябры" often refers to a text interpreted in a wrong character encoding.

Ficeon Inside the Building That's Calling Itself the People's Republic of Donetsk

Adidas track pants and leather shoes (mentioned in the article) are typical attire of Russian gopniks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopnik).

Ficeon What's New in Mercurial 3.0

For me, the extreme popularity of GitHub is the No. 1 reason to avoid it as I do not want to contribute to the centralization of the Web. Also I like Fossil's [fossil-scm.org] approach of integrating wiki and bug tracker into DVCS, which allows projects to be less dependent on hosting services.

Ficeon Torn and weary (on Brendan Eich and Mozilla)

That remark (which I put in brackets because it was not integral to my main argument) was meant to hint that even within LGBT community there are different positions on SSM.

A position against SSM does not imply homophobia because it is not necessarily based on hatred or aversion towards homosexuals. For instance, there is no justification in calling Eich a homophobe.

What bothers me is a tendency of LGBT activists to put a homophobe label on everyone with an opinion they do not like. That is a witch hunt.

Ficeon Torn and weary (on Brendan Eich and Mozilla)

Even some gays are against same-sex marriage. And that does not mean that they are also homophobes.

Ficeon Torn and weary (on Brendan Eich and Mozilla)

Did I say anything about homosexuals who are also homophobes? My point is that being against same-sex marriage is not necessarily homophobic.

Ficeon Torn and weary (on Brendan Eich and Mozilla)

Being in opposition to same-sex marriage does not make one a homophobe (even some gays are against it). If Eich did not express any aversion or hatred towards homosexuals, it is not justified to label him as a homophobe.

Ficeon 1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: Closing Panel

Also a very interesting read: A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue, 2004, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Ficeon Google Doodle Upholds Gay Rights Ahead of Sochi Olympics

The anti-gay laws are there not because the Russian government is homophobic. These laws were created to provoke reactions like this or http://youtu.be/0KWhaqr1v8s which will help to turn some strata of the Russian population firmly against the West and prepare ground for the new Iron Curtain. Thank you Google for helping Putin!

Ficeon Turn any application that uses stdin/stdout into a WebSocket server

I noticed that the Makefile downloads Go over plain http and runs it immediately. It is a security risk to run software without proper verification of its origin.

Ficeon German president to boycott Olympics in Russia over human rights

Boycotts and scandals is what Putin probably actually want from Sochi Olympics to raise tension with the West and lead us to the new Iron Curtain.

Ficeon Alcohol without the hangover?

The link to the Guardian article appeared earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720342) and was ignored by HN readers.

Ficeon Could we kill the icon?

Have I said anywhere that using metaphors is wrong? What is wrong is when a UI uses the button metaphor but avoids making buttons look like ones just to seem more "digital".

Ficeon Mozilla bug 923590: Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM

> The mere fact that this works every day for billions of people demonstrates that you're wrong. Flash/Silverlight are easy hacked and yet the content cartels have decided they're enough.

Flash and Silverlight do not provide any real protection and they are certainly not enough for content cartels. That's why DRM solutions are being developed. As soon as the major software vendors will provide complete DRM implementation restricting all levels from user agents to drivers and bootloader, content providers will start to require it.

> Even if the OS starts becoming as locked down, you're still technically inaccurate: a CDM could just be a shim which pass data through to an OS media API which handles the actual playback.

But that shim will not provide any real content protection if the OS is open for modification. For example, someone could make a version of the OS's media API implementation that will allow users to save any media stream decoded by CDM. Thus, the OS will have to be locked down to support DRM, that's what I am trying to say.