HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

iandioch

89 karma · joined June 24, 2016

http://noah.needs.money

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/iandioch; my proof: https://keybase.io/iandioch/sigs/pKGPnyRcA0isSRap-onuEu63SYEzhupCLyxJnqMxkCQ ]

submissionscomments
iandioch··on Patagonian Welsh
FWIW, Scottish and Irish (and their sister Manx) are not Brythonic, they are in the other branch of extant Celtic languages, Goidelic/Gaelic.
iandioch··on More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound gives some details about that. I knew that some Irish English speakers inhale when saying "yes", but it seems fairly widespread across Europe...
iandioch··on An exploration of why Python doesn't require a 'main' function
This is true. A related post about discovering this, and some links to more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681745
iandioch··on Mozilla patches Firefox zero-day abused in the wild
I don't understand this logic. It's better to have everyone see it and to guarantee it is seen by a malicious actor, instead of only a small few seeing it and there being some small potential for it to be seen by a malicious actor?
iandioch··on Mathematics all-in-one cheat-sheet (2013) [pdf]
In Ireland, we literally called our reference book for exams "the log tables", despite there not having been any table of logs in any edition of it for quite a long time.
iandioch··on On the Trail of the RoboCall King
A lot of the replies suggest a language barrier being the reason, but we don't really get them here in Ireland, despite English being a national language.
iandioch··on A sold-out city? The fight to save Dublin’s nightlife
I would think Sandymount routes would have few students on them, considering the price of living in that part of the city. What's more, blaming the problem on students/young people (ie. me and my peers) seems short sighted.

I have lived near Ballymun/Glasnevin for years (where there are indeed students), and would consider the problem similarly widespread everywhere I've seen in the city.

I think the mentioned problem of the choke point in the city centre was the important one for me; it's impossible to get from where I live to more or less anywhere else on the Northside without a half hour's bus to O'Connell, a change, and then a 30 minute bus again in the other direction, even if where I am trying to go is just a 10-15 minute direct drive from where I started. Walking to my destination, no matter where it is, has almost always taken a similar amount of time as getting a bus, since I moved to Dublin.

All this said, there's new bus routes coming in, so we'll see if it changes. I'm leaving the city ASAP though.

iandioch··on Ask HN: Media recommendations for hackers
Without any doubt, I'd recommend the following books:

- 'Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon' by Kim Zetter.

- 'The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage' by Clifford Stoll.

Both of these books are old-school infosec stories, and both are well worth the time. If I remember correctly, I listened to Countdown to Zero Day over a few days on Audible, and read The Cuckoo's Egg in one or two sittings in paperback.

iandioch··on The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Translation (2017)
A good example of this going wrong is described here, with the "spunk" debacle: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/time-coca-co...
iandioch··on Georgia Has a Coast?
I believe here they're talking about Georgia in the United States.
iandioch··on Facebook to publish data on Irish abortion referendum ads
This is great news. However, I saw the most ads on Youtube; it would be great if Google followed suit and released similar data.

I hope this sets a precedent for publishing ad spending in future referenda too.

iandioch··on Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer
It's maybe worth keeping in mind that Ireland was neutral in WWII. I guess that the belligerents still lost many ships in Irish waters (and indeed Irish ships were often attacked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality_during_World_... ), but it's still some important context.
iandioch··on World Airports Voronoi (2014)
I did a similar visualisation a few months ago, but less polished, for my own curiosity: https://twitter.com/iandioch/status/968938231550107649
iandioch··on Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)
Speakers of my Irish-border dialect do sometimes use "childer" instead of "children", you're correct. I suppose many remnants of old English (and equally other languages) are preserved in random local dialects.
iandioch··on Inside Amazon Go
It looks like you need to scan in on the way into the shop. If your phone runs out of the battery, is it impossible to eat?
iandioch··on Ask HN: Why don't websites show password requirements at the login screen?
I used to do the same. I'm sure that's what thousands of others do too :)
iandioch··on Dynamic Progamming: First Principles
There are lots of interesting competitive programming problems (and their related algorithms) that involve it. For example, it was important in the solution to a problem in the UKIEPC (UK & Irish programming contest to gear up for the ACM ICPC) this past weekend: https://domjudge.bath.ac.uk/domjudge/public/problem.php?id=3... :)
iandioch··on Google’s Founders Wanted to Shape a City – Toronto Is Their Chance
Or better yet, forgo a hub at all :)
iandioch··on Google’s Founders Wanted to Shape a City – Toronto Is Their Chance
A point worth making is that this is not Google, it is Sidewalk Labs. I believe (ot maybe would like to believe) that part of the reason Alphabet was created was to remove these conflicts of interest.
iandioch··on 150 days of living and coding in a van
In Ireland you can get unlimited data for 20eur/month.
iandioch··on From Facebook account takeover to an empty bank account
My bank only yesterday froze my card because it is being used in a different country and they suspect fraud.
iandioch··on The fifty shades of Latin
This is somewhat true, but many of the accents are not as strong anymore.

The Irish language itself is interesting. Before standardisation, I'm told the Irish of the north of the island was more similar to Scots Gaelic than that of the south. Many of the regional dialects have disappeared now though.

iandioch··on Guide to Italian Bakeries
I am quite sure! Maybe I was looking in the wrong places, but all the bread was too sweet for me.
iandioch··on Guide to Italian Bakeries
When I was living in Switzerland, my biggest woe was that all of the bread seemed to be white, or sweet. I could find no good simple grainy brown bread, like at home in Ireland.

But the beer was better, so I was happy.

iandioch··on The new £1 Coin
What might be fun to try is to use a Euro 5c coin in a machine that expects 20p sterling coins. Living on the border with Northern Ireland, we figured out when I was young that the sweet machines in Northern shopping centres could be conned like that.
iandioch··on AsciiMath – An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics
My father opted to write his maths textbook with MS equation editor. There's always a strong need for tools that aren't just for the technically minded (or HN-reading) audience.
iandioch··on πfs – A data-free filesystem
We can celebrate pi day too, just to less accuracy. The third of January?
iandioch··on Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
I am just on the final few pages of The Cuckoo's Egg, and was planning on finishing it tonight. I too would say that it is a fantastically written page-turner, and it has taught me a lot about the old-school networking scene.

How do the other two books you mentioned compare?