HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

RickHull

2,407 karma · joined September 10, 2010

Ruby hacker, cyclist

https://github.com/rickhull

submissionscomments
RickHull··on Low income SF students from Mission nonprofit ejected from Dreamforce
This has the markings of a PR stunt. As a reader of the article, I'm very curious what the badges look like, as those are a legitimate cause for concern for security. Any legitimate reporting on this issue would investigate that detail.
RickHull··on Show HN: Building a Formula1 (Game) Telemetry Display Using Crystal and RethinkDB
Very cool. Is there any need to wait until after pushing to rethinkdb before updating the websockets? I'd look for I/O concurrency here and block until they're all complete.
RickHull··on Tufte CSS
I disagree. It's made for writing papers and paper-likes. It sets the tone and expectation with itself as a fluid set of examples.
RickHull··on Tom Petty has died
End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UMVjToYOjbM

RickHull··on A Large-Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in GitHub (2014)
Uh, where is it shown how "software quality" or "code quality" is measured or determined? Can anyone provide a succinct definition of quality which the paper uses?

As best I can tell, they use commit messages to identify bugfixes, and later they jump to "defective commits". Presumably the bugfix commit is not the defective commit. There is no explanation I can find that shows how they arrive at a defective commit from a bugfix commit.

This specific methodology seems rife with weakness, all of which should be explained clearly and admitted up front.

RickHull··on When Dissent Became Treason
No -- you've got the roles reversed: the claim is that he will be imprisoned if he assaults the insulter, claiming that the insulter provoked him with "fighting words"
RickHull··on PocketBeagle – A $25 open-source USB-key-fob computer
I want to embed something like this into a nice mechanical keyboard, with some way of hooking up to a display (possibly an Android tablet or something head-mounted). Finally, ultra portable computing with a decent keyboard!
RickHull··on Jupyter C Kernel
Aha, thanks!
RickHull··on Jupyter C Kernel
What makes this a kernel? It appears to be not much more than a wrapper around gcc.
RickHull··on Price manipulation in the Bitcoin ecosystem
Every market participant wants to buy low and sell high. They are all manipulators in some sense. Dedicated manipulators exist, but really they are just part of the market and assist in price discovery. Deep markets generally defeat the type of manipulation that worries people. Multiple competing exchanges keep the exchanges honest.
RickHull··on Driver who died in a Tesla crash using Autopilot ignored 7 safety warnings
> Since the crash, those reports have said, Tesla has updated its Autopilot feature to include a strikeout system, whereby drivers who repeatedly ignore safety warnings risk having their Autopilot disabled until the next time they start the car.

Looks like this concern has been addressed already.

RickHull··on High Performance TCP Proxy Server
Multiplexing?
RickHull··on This $400 appliance that squeezes juice out of a bag appears unnecessary
> “775 aircraft-grade aluminum.”

That would almost certainly be the 7075 alloy [1].

> Byline: MEGAN GEUSS

Dare I guess at the pronunciation?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7075_aluminium_alloy

RickHull··on An Oral History of Something Awful
Transcribed, thankfully
RickHull··on Shenzhen is a hothouse of innovation
Rule of (arbitrary and capricious) man vs. rule of law is a similar distinction
RickHull··on Octopuses and squids can rewrite their RNA
Isn't more that that their RNA is constantly being rewritten than the cephalopods themselves doing writing? What force is responsible for choosing the new RNA?

I would not say it is the animals themselves doing the writing as a force of will, sentience, or consciousness, which is what the headline implies.

The article itself says:

> Their RNA is extensively rewritten, particularly the codes for proteins found in the animals' neurons.

Tune in next week for more headline pet peeves

RickHull··on What’s the Matter with Covert Action?
> I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal. Perceptual uniqueness is the real metric, and it’s darn tough. It is the difference between an actor being a face in a crowd scene and a character that is memorable.

This was a big problem for a recent, massively hyped game that flopped (Steam refunds, etc), No Man's Sky

RickHull··on A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown
> I don't blame Gruber for being upset at that.

I do, when he has abandoned his project's raggedy implementation yet defends the trademark viciously.

RickHull··on BSD socket API revamp
Also https://github.com/go-mangos/mangos
RickHull··on How to Close a Gender Gap: Let Employees Control Their Schedules
> and that it is indeed coercive to give someone or class only a choice between forcing to sell their labour or to rely upon the charity of others or death.

That is nature. Consume or die. Since one can only consume what is produced (or windfallen), one must produce (or scavenge windfalls) or die. In a society one can escape this iron law of nature through charity or trade.

None of this descends from private property. These are laws of nature.

RickHull··on Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Right, the system baseline (255) starts well below the vendor's max priority (128). The vendor would start at 254 presumably, and overeager vendors wanting to start at 128 would only harm themselves (in terms of future flexibility).

When MS needs to supersede the vendor driver, they can issue priority 253 (i.e. vendor + 1) graciously or 127 violently. They can also retract the 127 driver or overwrite its priority back to 255 when appropriate.

RickHull··on Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Drivers have a priority field 0-255. Vendor drivers can only use 128-255. System drivers start at 255 baseline. Highest priority (0 is highest) always wins, and ties are broken with version or date comparison or what-have-you.

Disclaimer: near zero forethought

RickHull··on Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Using the date is obviously a kludge and does not match the semantics of the desired mechanism (3rd party specific drivers overriding baseline system drivers).

Nothing profound about this kludge IMHO.

RickHull··on Shutting down FTP services
How about WebDAV? Is that minimally relevant these days? If not, what has superseded it?

The modern web is much more about routes, resources, and URLs than directories and files.

RickHull··on Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
Lightning bolt / Zap icon
RickHull··on Alexa: Amazon's Operating System
> More fundamentally, Amazon sought to sell the phone through hardware and OS differentiation, much like Apple, but the company could not be more different organizationally and culturally from the iPhone maker; you don’t make good products because you really want to, you make good products by fostering the conditions in which great products can be made, and Amazon’s deeply rooted culture of modularity and services was completely ill-suited for building a highly differentiated physical product.

Eh, Amazon hit it out of the park with something in the Kindle line, no matter your e-book-reading taste. They have good reason to believe they can design products for the masses.

RickHull··on Leonard Cohen Has Died

    Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
    So I can sigh eternally
RickHull··on The Building Blocks of Japanese Cuisine
This passage raised my red flag:

> Harshly produced industrial salts interfere with the symbiosis of salt, air, and sun, which are part of the salt preservation process. Natural sea salts don’t overpower the base ingredient that is being preserved and allow the inherent strength of those ingredients to interact productively.

RickHull··on The Building Blocks of Japanese Cuisine
For beer, what about Hitachino Nest? They are generally very good, if not a great value here in the States.
RickHull··on NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent
> > "Dare we suggest that particulates are more important than CO2?"

> The question poses a false dichotomy.

Eh.. assessing relative importance does not present a dichotomy, false or otherwise.

← PreviousPage 5 of 20Next →