Hacker News Reader

febon Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try

The previous posts of this serie have been discussed on HN:

* Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403351) * Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423724) * Doing Windows, Part 3: A Pair of Strike-Outs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470844) * Doing Windows, Part 4: The Rapprochement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523926)

febon AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS

Interestingly, it looks like Intel is making MIPS SoCs too according to patches sent for the Linux kernel : https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-clk/msg27348.html.

febon A security vulnerability in Git that can lead to arbitrary code execution

And the announcement from the Git project is at https://marc.info/?l=git&m=152761328506724&w=2. See also CVE-2018-11233 and 11235.

febon Stimulus: A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have

Turbolinks is a feature in Rails. See for example https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

febon Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

Someone said the same thing in the comments. In a reply, the author does not know why the MD5 fails but confirms that the post is correct:

  I wondered if anyone would check :-).

  I'm not sure what the problem is with the first post. It's been a long time. You'll have to take my word for it that the first post is the right text :-).

febon The Concert Programmer (2014) [video]

In the video, Andrew creates music live on his laptop by writing a few lines of Scheme.

Besides the musical aspects, the video also provides an example of changing snippets code on the fly. The snippets can be started while the rest of the program continues to run. That's based on Extempore and the Impromptu language that they created specifically for cyber-physical computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impromptu_%28programming_envir...)

febon The “Unstealable Bike” to Begin Shipping in September

Unfortunately, they only make the frame harder to steal. Wheels will be stolen and they are more expensive to replace. To protect a bike from theft, one shold lock the wheels and the frame to some fixed anchor.

See for example whet bike guru Sheldon Brown has to say about locking bikes: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/lock-strategy.html

febon Transparent Git Encryption

As said by Hamano, if you want encryption, use an encrypted file system. Besides cryptfs, Encfs uses FUSE and works well too (http://www.arg0.net/encfs).

febon GitLab, open source github clone, reaches 3.0

It gets more interesting when adding google code which started before github: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=sourceforge%2C%20gith...

Looks like google "stole" mindshare from sourceforge.

febon Raspberry Pi now with 512MB RAM

For example, an advanced garbage collector can group the remaining allocations together, reducing the fragmentation and potentially increasing cache hits.

febon C Finally Gets A New Standard

When adding locking without evaluating all locking paths, how can you be sure none of those paths cause a deadlock ?

febon The EU signs up to ACTA, but French MEP quits in protest

According to the text in the votewatch report you linked, the European Peope party voted against the proposition from the left in order to get their version to pass : "However, to win on this issue, the EPP and ECR first had to reject the joint Motion for Resolution proposed by the centre-left. The EPP and ECR managed to win thanks to 11 defections from ALDE and 13 from S&D members (the entire British Labour delegation)."

febon Solar PV rapidly becoming the cheapest option to generate electricity

In the article the author claims the price reductions came from technology improvements. But some say they are caused by the entry of the Chinese on the market with heavy subsidies and dumping practices (http://www.grist.org/solar-power/2011-10-19-are-we-in-a-sola...).

febon World's leading patent troll sues Motorola over Android phones

Google is not the first one who funded IV and gets sued. Xilinx had the same experience. http://gametimeip.com/2011/09/07/xilinx-lawsuit-reveals-more...

febon Merging In The GNU D Language Compiler To GCC

Reading the thread, it's surprising how much work is still needed to merge the D frontend (GDC) into the GCC project:

* Assign copyright to the FSF which requires contacting all authors including those who are MIA.

* Update the code to the GCC coding conventions

* Submit for review patches to the GCC core that where shipped with GDC and get them accepted

* Finding a co-maintainer

* Promise to continue to maintain the code

* Implement naked functions attribute

* Convert the testsuite to Dejagnu

* Downgrade the zlib library used by GDC or upgrade the one in GCC

Those are all reasonable requirements from the GCC project, but impose some extra work for the GDC maintainers. Cheers to them for biting the bullet.

febon Why (special agent) Johnny (still) Can't Encrypt

A big lesson from this post (at least for me) is how much user interface affects security. He references an older paper "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" (http://www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf) where the negative impacts of the user interface in PGP 5.0 are analyzed. This is an old lesson which was not taken into account for the secured P25 handsets.

A similar analysis of the certs/SSL protection in browsers would be very interesting too.

febon Ten Ways to Check if an Integer Is a Power Of Two in C

That depends on the CPU used. Modern CPU have more arithmetic units than logical units and can perform more divisions than bit shifts. There was a good video presentation of that, but I can't find the link now.

EDIT: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2007/03/19/a-story-... gives other reasons why multiplications can be faster than bit shifts.

febon Why US health care costs grow: The most important chart in health policy

Doing an X-ray every year even when it is not needed, does cost more and does not improve your health. Actually, your body gets more doses of radiations increasing the risks. Thus one can say that at the more expensive place your health gets worse.

febon Belgian newspapers: Google blocking us on searches

Yes, they are back in the index: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388635,00.asp

And in a simple test, it looks to work too: http://www.google.com/search?q=copiepress+lalibre+critique The second link (lesoir.be) is one of the newspapers.

febon Ask HN: If you think ideas are not worth a dime then post yours here

Games which do more than entertain are exceptionnal which makes your idea exceptionnal too.

As CF is a genetic disease, how does a game help ?

febon Reactor Design in Japan Has Long Been Questioned

"Mr. Tetuan said there are currently 32 Mark 1 boiling water reactors operating safely around the globe. “There has never been a breach of a Mark 1 containment system,” he said."

As the containment system is stressed only in case of failure of all other systems, it didn't happen before. His 0 defect statistic is not really accurate.

febon Put to the test: Visa's credit card concierge service

Can users of the Visa concierge service here on HN confirm or is this a good advertisement for extra Visa services ?

febon My webapp: pik

With Firefox (Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100402 Namoroka/3.6.3), I also got this warning.

Detecting the browser instead of the features is often bad practice: http://www.jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/not_browser_detect.ht...