Hacker News Reader

gegenschallon Sonos CEO says the old app can't be rereleased

I love that you're doing this for free; I've done similar things in the past and learned that at some point you may be doing people a disservice by keeping old systems and broken implementations alive for free. I'd call it vendor lock in by generosity. Or, tongue in cheek: had the business owner paid for support for those Sonos boxes, he probably wouldn't have them anymore.

gegenschallon Dinner for one: A little-known British comedy famous in Germany

This is an interesting one and I’m going entirely off anecdotal evidence here: yes, you will be seeing David Hasselhoff posters and the like quite often throughout Germany. Me personally, I have yet to meet a single person who unironically likes his music or is a „fan“ (whatever that may mean to you) - and this holds true for the generation of my parents as well.

My working theory is that there’s some kind of reverse self-fulfilling prophecy at play here: It’s been imposed on Germans that “we love Hasselhoff” over and over again and at some point we just went with it, albeit it’s mostly and irony thing now.

Then again, I might be totally off and not realize that I’m looking at it from within a bubble of people not actually liking him.

gegenschallon Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show

Where in my previous comment did I say I knew? You are basing your dismissal of my comment on something I never said in a quite frankly unnecessarily passive aggressive tone.

I am not trying to attack you personally. Your comment is FUD because you’re making it seem as if it was undisputed that long term risks exist, and we just don’t know them yet. In your words these risks are even „significant“. Now that we’re pointing fingers, how do you know this?

If I may, I suggest you read up on this vaccine, paper here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2022483

gegenschallon Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show

This comment is the very definition of FUD and leans on to myths that have been debunked over and over again the last few weeks/months.

gegenschallon Berlin police find radioactive iodine on playing cards

Plain and simple: No!

Except when there is public interest, say politicians committing crimes, etc.

gegenschallon Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off

> Windows has gotten a lot better [...]

Remember when we used to say the same thing about Linux? Funny how times change.

gegenschallon Casually removing root files

Apologies. I haven't been using Ubuntu in a while and did not know you had to modify stuff under /usr there. (Eww!)

gegenschallon Casually removing root files

You should be using /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/*.conf for that.

gegenschallon Pytest 3.2.0 released

It is actually discouraged by pytest-django[0] to run it using Django's test command. Just run `pytest` itself.

[0]: https://pytest-django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#why-would-i-...

gegenschallon File System Improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Haven't used LXSS in a while but my X11 of choice for Windows was VcXsrv: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/

Just export $DISPLAY to :0 (AFAIK) and you're all set.

gegenschallon Ask HN: Open source OCR library?

If you are using OpenCV and tesseract, you might have a look at Scene Text Detection in OpenCV 3. It's in the text module within OpenCV_contrib [0].

There are samples here [1] and here [2] to get you started. The paper is here: [3]

---

[0] http://docs.opencv.org/3.0-beta/modules/text/doc/erfilter.ht...

[1] https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/blob/master/modules...

[2] https://github.com/Itseez/opencv_contrib/blob/master/modules...

[3] http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~neumalu1/neumann-cvpr2012.pdf

gegenschallon First fully sandboxed Linux desktop app

In my understanding you can just (read-only) bind-mount the necessary libraries into the sandbox, ship your own, or do a combination of the former two.

gegenschallon Unicode Text Converter

Wow, that page crashes Chromium (Linux, 38.0.2125.111) every time I open it.

gegenschallon Unicode Text Converter

Well Python 2 "protects" you from silly things like that and throws a syntax error.

  In [4]: class АnotherClass():
     ...:     pass
    File "<ipython-input-4-ad6e67ea5e19>", line 1
      class АnotherClass():
            ^
  SyntaxError: invalid syntax

gegenschallon Apple might be running a web crawler written in Go

They might actually do that: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/google-inc./id281956209

gegenschallon The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing

Something that I really enjoyed doing as a child was typing around on an old Sharp PC-1401 [0] calculator. To be honest, I completely forgot about that "machine" until I read this article. Heck, I didn't even google for it in 15-20 years.

The amazing thing about it was, that I had BASIC and so I taught (with the help of my dad) myself to write easy games on it (you know: Guess the number and such). I just right _now_ discovered that the thing has an RS-232 interface and you could use PEEK, POKE and CALL. Oh my, the missed opportunities; But hey I was just to young at that time.

I think I know what I'll do, when I get home for christmas: Grab that PC 1401 and try out the RS-232 to see what's possible. Good times.

[0] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1401

gegenschallon CVE-2014-6271: Remote code execution through bash

If you're on Arch, you might want to think about using dash as your /usr/bin/sh after updating, see [0].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dash

gegenschallon Game about squares

Further more it is completely unusable on some touch devices, I tried iPad 4 and iPhone 5. They both scroll the page (better: bump to the top, as if you wanted to scroll past the end of a page) instead of moving the blocks. :-/

gegenschallon This maze looks familiar

That's just too easy and doesn't make sense.

OTOH one could argue that the maze itself does not fall under the scope of the Urheberrechtsgesetz because its threshold of originality is too low (no offense, it is after all auto-generated). But I'm no lawyer and this is just a spooky idea.

gegenschallon 42.zip (2004)

I'm sorry, but I have to say this: I like how this entry had 42 comments before this one: http://i.imgur.com/KmCodSM.png

gegenschallon Nginx 1.7.1 adds syslog support

Have a look at this[0] blogpost. Also, I'm just guessing, once kdbus is in the kernel using direct calls to journald will (or could potentially) be more efficient.

[0] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/journal-submit.html

gegenschallon 808 Cube

I do not see any cubes and there's no sound using Chromium 34.0.1847.137 under Linux. Firefox works however.

gegenschallon Broken by design: systemd

I do not really understand what you're saying.

1) This is actually modular. I mean... those things are even called "modules".

2) Even if it wasn't modular, how would it matter? You're comparing to the Linux kernel. If that one isn't modular then according to you, systemd also isn't modular. Allright, so be it, did you have any problems with missing modularity in the Linux kernel lately?

gegenschallon Broken by design: systemd

I guess this post has some relevance in this thread: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

gegenschallon Poll: What is your age?

Put a poll out there, give it at least one irrelevant/obviously inapt answer and people will click it. Not really an HN problem if you ask me...

gegenschallon Why I created Comic Sans

> Just like a good band with bad fans

Actually, as a band you have a certain say in which fans you'll going to have.

gegenschallon A word on cryptography

So, first of all: Does that look like recruiting to you? Looks more like a personal vendetta to me. If you're trying to recruit someone, you're most likely not going to do it by saying "oi, look. I'm gonna be the next chancelor, don't you wanna work for me?". Not even ironically. "ACTUALLY making money on stuff" is great, probably more people should do that. But making money out of something and then selling out your customers (if you can call them customers) is not at all the right way to do it. And that's exactly what happend with Dotcom and his BBS stuff, where he was actually selling warez and denouncing his customers to the authorities, afterwards working for von Gravenreuth.

The funny thing is: In the mid 90s he was making money out of surveiling other people's messages and posts on his own BBS.[1] By the way, that whole story makes me nervous when I think about people hosting their sensitive data with him. That can't be good.

Now, back to the recruiting thing: Would you like to be recruited by that kind of guy? I for one completely understand the CCC people.

What is it with him that people seem to trust him and his businesses? I mean, it's not that any of them have prevailed and not been closed down by authorities after some time.

-----

[1] Again, German. Maybe I should translate that. :-) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz#Auftreten

gegenschallon A word on cryptography

The ad hominem way of discussion may or may not be present in technical debates in general. What actually doesn't surprise me is that this style surfaces on publications associated with Dotcom. If you happen to speak/understand German you (really!) should read this: http://arnold.babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt Basically the file contains old newsgroup postings from de.org.ccc wherein Dotcom (Kimble) argues with or better harrasses the CCC guys. It's really "worthwhile" and and an eye-opener.

gegenschallon Configuring Sublime Text 2

I really like this theme. Looks best on Ubuntu. :-) https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme

gegenschallon The Differences Between Germany and the United States

Didn't think of that. Arte is actually one of the few good TV channels in Germany (and France).