HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

danmg

462 karma · joined April 19, 2018

Hey there, Dvorah U. Altemanstern here
submissionscomments
danmg··on Calibre 4.0
It's not like he bundled it with a complete copy of chrome. Now that would be bloat.
danmg··on Calibre 4.0
I'm not sure what these people are complaining about.

You have a search box with a big list box underneath and a preview frame on the side. I guess it's 'dated' in the sense it doesn't use a browser engine, layout everything with CSS, and have icons that match 201XQY's design fad.

danmg··on Calibre 4.0
Can you explain to me what's so bad about the UI? I've used it for years and I never really gave the UI a second thought.
danmg··on The Rosie Pattern Language
Why use a 'better regex' when PEGs exists?
danmg··on Google Is Uncovering Hundreds of Race Conditions Within the Linux Kernel
Yikes.
danmg··on Google Is Uncovering Hundreds of Race Conditions Within the Linux Kernel
How does rust negate data race conditions? These aren't memory errors.
danmg··on Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS
There have been several articles in the past few days whinging about both mozilla and chrome incorporating DNS over TLS. Someone seems to be REALLY unhappy about this and those people seem to be trying to use the press as a microphone.

It seems like it's touching a nerve and advertisers and governments are really sweating losing their ability do low effort snooping.

danmg··on Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]
I remember going to Barnes and Noble and buying a programming magazine because it came bundled with a beta version of the .NET framework circa 2001.
danmg··on Ask HN: PostgreSQL or MySQL?
Materialized views, common table expressions, outer joins, are all missing in mysql and essential. The Postgresql's stored procedure language blows mysql out of the water, and it's possible to use different language backends.

SQLite has json extensions. You need to select them at compile time though, so you can't just assume they'll be there by default.

danmg··on Conference Speakers, Check Your Egos
It's bandwagoning. When someone uses that phrasing you can safely ignore what they're saying.
danmg··on Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
The common pattern is to have some system wide file in /etc or /usr/share that is used by default, and allowing the user to override this with a dot-file in their home directory or passing in a config file as a optional argument.

What is being proposed obliterates most of the workflows that people are use to: editing configuration files in the editor of the user's choice and then having the option of using normal backup or using source code repository tools to maintain and version them. Instead, we have the same windows registry mechanism, with some modern flourishes, that most people have ridiculed Microsoft for decades over.

As a user, I can 'strace -e open' and see what locations my program is trying to open. This is very helpful for what configuration data is being read. Everything is a file, and every file operation is a syscall. As a developer, JSON isn't appropriate for every kind of application.

danmg··on Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'? You just add a new file to the directory. Reinventing the windows registry, but this time in JSON, is a lateral move that is only going to complicate maintaining systems.

For user level configuration, you already have too many competing mechanisms for doing this already, and this one requires systemd level integration making it much more coupled to the operating system and system in general.

danmg··on Smart TVs sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook
Smart TVs will start including bluetooth sniffing so they'll know how many people are watching and who.
danmg··on Banks are getting back into the business of building mortgage bonds
What's stopping them from claiming misfeasance or just 'unknown unknowns' in the face of malfeasance? Absent smoking gun emails where they laugh at how stupid their clients are for buying the crap, how do you demonstrate this to a jury in a civil case?
danmg··on Banks are getting back into the business of building mortgage bonds
Does removing legal immunity mean anything to these people? Is there really going to be any reckoning this next time around? C-suite people never go to prison. If the company gets dinged, they just declare bankruptcy and reform under a new name, or some such maneuver where they keep operating.
danmg··on Magnus: Shazam for Art
Didn't Google Goggles do this already?
danmg··on Improving our homemade JavaScript obfuscator
The next step of this cat and mouse game would be for the Javascript interpreter to detect intentionally obfuscated code and then give the user an option to stop executing the scripts on the page, just like how browsers do if it detects a script is taking too long to execute, with the default option being to stop it. This could be done heuristically from the JIT based on the CFG and the entropy of the symbol table.
danmg··on The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued
PhpCE should have just blocked him, as this was an argument in bad faith, and moved on.
danmg··on For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic
If you look at what people have to go through in 2019 for an entry level job at the coding fields, everyone hates it and it's not just 'toxic' for female coders.

Take a look at /r/cscareerquestions on reddit. People grind for 18 months at a time on leetcode and interview prep, like how rich suburban kids prep for the SAT, and then offer this advice up as the pro-tips others can use to get their foot in the door of a high prestige tech company.

danmg··on OpenDrop: An Open Source AirDrop Implementation
I followed the instructions and it worked.
danmg··on Mercedes-Benz pre-safe sound
I own a 2003 Mercedes W203 C230 and it has 400k km.

No problems with the engine and transmission other than the valve cover gasket blows every once in a while and starts leaking oil. Simple fix.

Some of the other parts on the car aren't quite as robust. I had to get the front end rebuilt. The key fob died. (That was a fun day since the steering column was locked, and there was no way to get diagnostic codes out. The only way to diagnose that it was the key was to buy another key and see, so that required a trip to the dealer with the title in hand.) The starter failed twice. It started leaking oil from a gasket around the oil level sensor and got onto the wiring harness, and had to replace the wiring harness. The transmission gear in the panoramic sun-moon roof wore out, not worth fixing---just keep it closed. The motor actuator units under the seats both died a year apart from one another during a cold snap and started drawing 1A all the time, replaced the drivers side, and just disconnected the passenger side.

As long as there aren't any major problems with the engine/trans, I'll just patch it up. People just want too much money relative to the value of the cars. We'll see if there's a correction in that market once this next recession hits. Convincing people to finance $50k vehicles for 144 months, so that their payment is roughly $500, isn't a sustainable market.

danmg··on The lat/lon floating point delusion
Users don't usually care about raw lat/lon. If you want to display them as an approximate so you can tell them apart as some kind of logging output do something like "(%+07.4f,%+07.4f)".
danmg··on Maps Reveal the Difference in How Cities Are Perceived by Tourists and Locals
Philadelphia Resident: The art museum.

Philadelphia Tourist: The Rocky steps.

danmg··on Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smith' malware
Brave + Blokada
danmg··on Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature
Why should text chat need more than a 'terminal client'?
danmg··on Raspberry Pi 4
It's somewhat common. https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-Composite-Video-Raspberry-AD...
danmg··on Able Archer 83
The Able Archer exercise was the backdrop of the show Deutschland 83. Very well done series.
danmg··on i386 architecture will be dropped starting with Ubuntu 19.10
Just use a VM with an old version of Ubuntu is not a solution.
danmg··on i386 architecture will be dropped starting with Ubuntu 19.10
How will this impact Wine users who rely on 32 bit libraries to run 32 bit windows programs?
danmg··on Transforming a Tesla Model 3 into a Pickup Truck
Terry would not approve.
← PreviousPage 6 of 14Next →