Hacker News Reader

divtxton Groupon is About to Run a Groupon on Itself

1. Why would management care about the price? The founders and early investors have already taken a lot of cash out. (one of warning signs in this IPO, btw)

2. I expect it's (mostly) illegal for a company to manipulate their stock. One option is to buy back shares, but I doubt that's a good use for their cash at this stage.

3. Even if illegal methods were an option, how would they keep the price up?

divtxton Strange line of Python

I too expected the syntax list comprehensions to chained.

Turns out that nesting is a feature:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0202/

- The form [... for x... for y...] nests, with the last index varying fastest, just like nested for loops.

divtxton Ask HN: Marketing with minimal hours? (small desktop app)

The reason I want to avoid Twitter & Facebook is that meaningful use requires constant attention to check for incoming messages and respond.

divtxton Ask HN: Marketing with minimal hours? (small desktop app)

Thanks. Will try AdWords to see how it costs.

Unfortunately, my app functionality doesn't lend itself to funny pics/videos. Will think about it.

divtxton Ask HN: Marketing with minimal hours? (small desktop app)

Thanks! I was planning free copies for friends in the space, but somehow didn't think of the bloggers. Probably because I don't know any in that space, but I'm sure my graphics/design friends will. :P

divtxton Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

There's no payoff for me as a developer to make my website 'semantic'. The only semantic part of my websites is 'robots.txt'.

A nice step forward would be by giving me a way to separate data & presentation. E.g. when a user navigates to list page 2, let me send only the data and reuse the layout html like how we can do with css.

Now, I also happen to consider the Semantic Web to be a delusion that sufficient semantic information can achieve strong AI. I may be wrong, but not any time soon. :)

(edits)

divtxton Moore's law for Solar Energy?

Existing storage technologies are insufficient to replace fossil fuels by multiple orders of magnitude.

Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405

The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.

divtxton Time to fork the FSF

EDIT: Already it's own post now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084961

Wow! Easily the best Steve Jobs article I've read this week!

For me, this paragraph captures it all:

I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

NO - this is about the availability of DOCS to setup 3rd party software.

10 years ago, Debian may have had apt-get and stable but a lot of software setup docs were for building from source leading to possible compile issues and version conflicts for libraries.

Now, many setup docs are written as apt-get of binary packages for the last Ubuntu LTS.

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

Here's an example showing how a human user does not require a local unix user of each server:

Jack starts Apache on one of the web servers:

    $ ssh jack@web4.example.com
    Password: secret123
    [_x_@web4] $ sudo /usr/bin/apachectl start # or similar
    [_x_@web4] $ logout

Now, there are 2 possible values for '_x_':

A) 'jack' - because there's a unix user 'jack' (what we have today)

B) 'sysadmin' - because there's no unix user 'jack' - only an entry in /etc/sshpasswd

B is the same as A as long as you update auditing to trace the Apache start to the jack/secret123 combo.

Sidenote: wow this thread blew up!

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

Replying to multiple comments:

1) Automation: Yes to automation, but if I'm arguing that a task is needless, automating it does make change that.

2) Authentication: Yes to authorized_keys, auditing, LDAP, etc. I'm killing the local 'login' - not trying to kill security.

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

Sounds like you've misunderstood that either password1 or password2 will get you in!

I didn't change any behavior - just the UI strings. So you need both!

i.e:

    $ su maybeUniqueString1
    Enter Password2:

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

LDAP is a sensible suggestion.

Why can't we still kill the local login i.e. directly map LDAP user -> permissions instead of LDAP user -> local 'user' -> permissions.

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

Uniqueness is not an issue - see my original point - we only create one admin user on servers!

Imagine a team of 3 people running a SaaS webapp on 3 web servers & 1 db server. I guarantee no one will waste their time creating 3 'users' on each server i.e. 3x4 = 12 'users' on that cluster.

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

[mild rant]

Usability discussions like this invariably fill me with rage because of how oblivious and dismissive some of the comments are.

They might as well say: No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame.

You'd think people would know better after 10 years & $350B in market cap!

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

Here's a simple thought experiment:

    Imagine a distro that changed the terms 'login/password' to 'password1/password2'

No commands you type would change, but you'd wonder why the password is in 2 parts. That's how redundant user is!

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

On a practical note, I've seen the install situation improve in the last 5 years thanks to two ubuntu features:

- the ease of apt-get install (inherited from debian)

- ubuntu LTS releases

I now use availability of apt-get instructions for an LTS as one of the measures of the maturity of a software package.

divtxton “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

Challenge accepted!

- Here's how needless Unix users is:

Every fresh server install, I have to make up a meaningless string called the 'login' of an 'admin user' who belongs to a 'group' called 'admin'. Once upon a time, I could use the well known admin login 'root'. Now that's not allowed. I have to make up a name, remember this name when you connect and then remember to prefix every command with sudo.

- Here's a better way of doing it:

Give me a server distro where I don't need a 'login'.

Meanwhile, why is apache pretending to be a 'user' called 'nobody'/'http' and not using some 'capabilities' or some shit like that?!!!!

divtxton Trader: I dream of another recession (and Goldman Sachs rules the world)

But that doesn’t mean they want the stock market to go up.

Apparently, capitalism = rising stock market!

How ironic that he makes fun of Zero Hedge - a site that points out such absurdities!

divtxton HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer

If you mean the death of the old HP, the 2008 acquisition of EDS was the formal declaration of HP's death.

The company named HP will not die anytime soon but that's irrelevant - it's just another large IT services vendor.

divtxton The Rust Programming Language

It's like design by contract (preconditions/postconditions) without classes.

Interesting parallel to how Go has interfaces without classes.

divtxton The Rust Programming Language

I like the concurrency trend - channels & cheap threads like Erlang and Go.

The concurrency feature that stands out: ... no need for ... concurrent garbage collection. (slide 17)

The upside should be amazing performance compared to simple GC.

The cost is developer effort for memory management hints (slide 22). We'll have to see if it's worth it.

divtxton Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures

Don't burn out for asap. We'll still be here. :)

divtxton Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures

Thanks! Remember to 'Show HN' when you hit beta / have it up on the chrome extensions site.

divtxton Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures

Does anyone know the equivalent Chrome extension?

divtxton Apple Investigators Posed as Police in New Lost iPhone Prototype Search?

This comment reminded me to check Gruber. Sure enough: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/09/02/iphone-5

Translation from Gruber-speak:

> Nice reporting by Peter Jamison at SF Weekly

Let's think positive things about people.

> Cook’s first crisis at the helm?

Let's think of this as a management challenge for post-Jobs Apple. (and not as Apple breaking the law)

> UPDATE: SF police now confirm they were involved.

The police were there so obviously nothing illegal happened! Move along, nothing to see...

----

Can't wait to read Gruber's full editorial if this story blows up. :)

edits: wording, formatting

divtxton Why threads vs events is a nonsensical question.

The important question is: how can humans correctly write concurrent code?

We think of "threads" as one of the options. The thing is that we've mostly been using threads with locks (e.g. Java), and slide #3 points out where we have gone wrong:

  Drawbacks of threads
    ...
  Drawbacks of events
    ...
  Actually drawbacks of locks and top-level select loops!

In fact, it is "locks" that humans have trouble with.

Note the title of the presentation - Threads without Locks - suggesting another option. (as others have noted, this presentation describes Go, and I personally believe this is why Go will do well)

edit: wording, formatting

divtxton GNOME-Designer Jon McCann about the future of GNOME3

At this point, it's the "lower" level issues - suspend, graphics, sound - that are ruining the Linux desktop, even for us geeks.

They were the reason I gave up on Linux desktop two years ago and forked over the extra money for a Mac. Closing your laptop and knowing it will work when you open it later!

BTW, we got new Dell laptops at work last year and found they would degrade with every suspend/resume (e.g. audio glitches). Did I mention this was Windows 7?

divtxton HTC sues Apple over everything

Haha - fooled you!

If you tried this, you would probably fail!

The government (lobbied by big companies) will convince the courts to block your injunction and force you to settle. You know, "risking national security by ruining the economy" or something.

divtxton HTC sues Apple over everything

Unfortunately, big companies with shipping products have every incentive to settle by cross-licensing & royalties.

What we need is someone with deep pockets to form a patent troll and actually block shipping products rather settle. This will force big companies to lobby congress to fix software patents.