Hacker News Reader

jackalopeon We Found Our Son in the Subway

Not sarcastic. The story has some key elements:

1. Right place at the right time (found abandoned baby in subway).

2. Unexpected (wasn't 'in the market' for a baby or considering purchasing/obtaining one in the near future)

3. It's who you know (in person, the judge offered the option to adopt)

4. Narrow window of time for decision making (had to commit to a yes or no at moment of offer or it would become less likely)

5. Total commitment, against all odds (sceptical partner, unreliable system, health of infant unknown, same-sex parenting unorthodox and not universally supported, etc.)

6. Happy ending (stories of wasted opportunities are a dime a dozen and impossible to substantiate, "What if...?")

I would think any startup could easily relate to these aspects of the story. That's why I think it works so well as a parable.

jackalopeon Pkgsrc on OS X

Great article, and it's nice to know there are more choices for package management on the Mac.

But, sadly:

Install Xcode from the Mac App Store...

This is the main reason why I've stopped using OS X and am installing Linux on the Macs I use personally. I know it's free and I have an Apple ID, but it really bothers me that Xcode is no longer included with the OS and is unavailable as an anonymous download.

jackalopeon We Found Our Son in the Subway

I can't think of a better parable for opportunity than this story.

jackalopeon HTML5 localStorage allows sites to fill up users' hard disks

It doesn't. Flashblock is one of the most popular Firefox extensions[1], and variants are available in other browsers. Even though it offers some protection against hidden Flash elements and supercookies, it would still be popular just to prevent autoplaying flash presentations.

The author of Flashblock even specifically mentions YouTube on the extension page[2]:

Youtube videos not blocked: This is because they are now increasingly HTML5 Videos. I plan to add HTML5 blocking in the next version. Meanwhile you can try out a experimental version at: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/installation1.html#unstable

This indicates there is a demand for the autoplay blocking feature alone, regardless of the medium.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/

jackalopeon LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

I think group watching will remain popular, especially among kids, and for that you need a large display. Maybe the trend will be towards screen sharing, where you'd use a tablet or phone to select programming, then switch it to the screen. Maybe 'screen control' would be a more apt name, since I wouldn't want to depend on the tablet/phone for data & rendering. I'm not convinced that enormous standalone tablets are sufficient, because I have to believe that fingerprint smudges on a TV would be seriously distracting.

jackalopeon Why Use Make

I depend on make for recording a workflow history of my projects. There's no point in creating an alias in my ~/.bashrc for an arcane command I'm only going to use once or twice a year to transform, sync or configure a group of files. When I check a project out of version control, it's nice to have a Makefile there to remind me how I accomplished something.

Make allows you to consistently specify actions in a universal way. Typing 'make edit' will open the main file in vim for me in any project. Typing 'make update' will check for available updates on any platform using the appropriate package manager, and 'make upgrade' will download and install them. Typing 'make sync' will transfer my project files to the specified $SERVER as the specified $USER with the appropriate protocol. Typing 'make install' will copy an updated configuration file and restart all of the daemons necessary for it to work. It's a great timesaver. Even when I need to write shell scripts for something too elaborate for make, I tend to create a target that runs the script, instead of trying to remember its name and all of the options.

jackalopeon Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language (like INI, only better)

Possible improvements occur to me:

1. If indentation is significant and required, dotted notation should be optional:

    [foo]
        [bar]
            [car]

The parser should be able to understand that this results in a foo.bar.car structure without explicitly using dotted notation in the keys.

2. Support include files. With #1 implemented, includes would be extremely powerful and flexible. Since indentation is required, no special syntax is needed to relatively position the included files. And without requiring dotted notation in keys, include files can be reused in a configuration (such as common settings in the [servers] section of the example).

jackalopeon Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

No. As a society, we became numb to gun violence to the point where the media stopped reporting it on the news. The Newtown shootings reminded us that the problem is real and pervasive enough that it demands a solution. Stories of gun violence are rightly reassuming a place at the top of the hour because of the horrible, devastating tragedies that they are.

This isn't about a liberal agenda in conflict with a conservative conspiracy. I fully believe in and support the 2nd amendment, and strongly feel that any new legislation must comply with it. But this right comes with responsibility. You don't get to shoot through your door because someone turned the knob without ringing your doorbell and hide behind it being an act of self-defense. You don't get to prove your bravery by firing into a group of innocent students from a rival high school. You don't take psychologically troubled individuals to the firing range for therapy and teach them to be efficient killing machines. And if you own guns, you don't leave them on the kitchen table so your seven-year-old can grab it on his way to school for show-and-tell.

This isn't political. We need to shame the idiots who abuse their rights to the detriment of the rights of others. We need to express a sense of outrage when this happens, loud enough for our families and friends to hear it. If that means a continuous stream of these stories on the news, stories of actual life-changing events, is what it takes, then so be it. It's about time the media did its job and reported real news instead of tie-ins to the latest blockbuster the parent company just released.

jackalopeon Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck As Much

Yes, it's actually pretty easy.

First, create a zone file that all of the domains will share. I put mine in /var/named/master/dummy:

    $TTL    1d
    @               IN      SOA     ns1.localdomain.       hostmaster.ns1.localdomain. (
                            2012100601 ; serial
                            8h ; refresh
                            2h ; retry
                            7d ; expire
                            1h ; default_ttl
                            )
    ;
    ; Name servers
    ;
    @               IN      NS      ns1.localdomain.
    @               IN      NS      ns2.localdomain.
    ;
    ; Host addresses
    ; Leave commented to return NXDOMAIN
    ; Uncomment to resolve to IP address
    ;@               IN      A      127.0.0.1

I prefer not resolve these hosts at all (NXDOMAIN), because it seems to be faster and I don't want client machines to probe themselves, but you can uncomment the A record and use whatever IP address you want (e.g. for sinkhole monitoring). Remember to increment the serial number with every edit (which will be rare or never, once you've set it to your liking).

Next, create a simple file with each domain you want to block on one line. I put mine in /var/named/dummy:

    ads.example.com
    tracker.example.com
    example.org

Now create a conf file in the format bind expects, pointing every domain to the zone file (for convenience, put this in /var/named/Makefile in a 'dummy' target):

    sed 's/.*/zone "&" { type master; file "master\/dummy"; };/' < dummy > dummy.conf

Which will result in /var/named/dummy.conf containing:

    zone "ads.example.com" { type master; file "master/dummy"; };
    zone "tracker.example.com" { type master; file "master/dummy"; };
    zone "example.org" { type master; file "master/dummy"; };

Finally, add to your named.conf:

    include "/var/named/dummy.conf";

Restart bind and you're now authoritative for those zones on your network!

jackalopeon LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base [video]

Some developers don't appreciate the value of separating data from UI. A UI designer says, "Give me the data and I'll present it." But if they get a mixture of data and UI code, there's a serious problem, requiring a rewrite. If you're lucky, the project is already using UI templates, but that's no guarantee that they're flexible. It can be hard to keep a designer's interest if they're waiting on a complete refactor just to make a new UI even possible.

The worst I've seen is where users have been encouraged to embed UI elements (such as HTML or nonprinting ASCII) in raw data or settings to trigger certain functionality. That'll drive a UI designer to drink.

jackalopeon LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base [video]

I think I'd rephrase that to:

The company that's going to put you out of business is using an early version of their own legacy code.

It's not always obvious when you should attempt a rewrite from scratch. Having done a few refactorings, I've noticed one desirable trait in good code bases: If you can implement new logic easily in a few lines of code, it's probably a good design. But if you need to get out the surgeon's knife and write tons of new code every time you want to implement new logic, it might be fundamentally flawed enough to warrant a complete rewrite. A good design is adaptable and will allow you to be resilient against newcomers.

jackalopeon Google Now's smartphone is the real deal

As a user, I'm not sure I'm impressed. On my WP8 phone, I pin a live tile to the home screen exactly where I want it, at the size I want it, and it displays the information I expect to get from it. But Google Now sounds like a live tile knockoff that's constantly changing because it's guessing what I want to see based on personal information that I agree to share with it. I don't recall this approach ever working, and it practically guarantees that it will only have information I want a fraction of the time, so I'm unlikely to give it a prominent place on my home screen (or even use it if it affects battery life). If/when they start slipping in ads, it will be even less attractive.

But in the field of personal agents, it's definitely a significant milestone. At some point, we'll want to be able to ask what's on today's schedule when we wake up in the morning, or immediately check messages when we walk into our homes, or find out where a movie is playing and buy tickets when we hop into our self-driving cars that will take us right to the theater. Nobody's going to want to talk into a quaint little smartphone when all this becomes possible, but it's probably where personal agents start getting refined into a usable state.

jackalopeon Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere

Yes! This ridiculous bug is still out there and is why I never use 'ID' when designing my schemas. Seriously, why can't reserved words be designed to be so uncommon, you'll never have a conflict? If I see another 'klass' object in Python or email broken because someone started a sentence with 'From' I'm going to cry.

jackalopeon Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere

Unfortunately, Excel can't cope with some of the more modern authentication systems being deployed on the web, so it's no longer as easy as providing a URL that spits out an HTML table, if you have to protect sensitive data behind a login (I think it can handle HTTP-Basic, but not anything requiring redirects; this may have changed in recent versions).

jackalopeon Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere

This is why I'm continually amazed that Excel is used in business at all. I use a command line program to record my hours and can report the time I've worked on a project to the second. Unfortunately, my Excel-based timesheet sucks at math, and shaves off time when it converts my HH:MM:SS totals to the decimal figures (HH.x) required by payroll. It's so bad, sometimes the values displayed in the columns don't add up to the displayed total if you enter them in a calculator. No sweat, I only get paid for the displayed total, and at the end of the year I compute the difference and add it to my last timesheet.

I can't imagine trusting my business finances to a program that can't deliver a reasonable amount of precision. I wonder how many fortunes are made by people well-placed enough to exploit Excel's weaknesses ("Hmmm, Excel shows that we made only $10,000,000 at our bake sale. What should I do with this leftover $700,000?" or "I can use Excel to show you that I owe you less money than I actually do.").

jackalopeon Inventing Chromebook

I worked this way for years in the 80s, when my main platform was the Atari ST. I had a whopping 4MB of RAM and would load the OS from a floppy disk into RAM, after which it would create a decent sized RAM drive that I would periodically save my work to. Compiling and running programs was nearly instantaneous, and everything ran smoothly and silently (the ST didn't even have a fan). At the end of my session, I would save whatever I wanted to keep to disk before shutting down. I never even bothered to buy a hard drive, it was such a pleasant experience. Moving on to other operating systems was an abrupt shock when the time came, leaving me somewhat nostalgic for those days.

I still prefer local storage, though, without a forced dependency on the cloud.

jackalopeon Show HN: a web-based xkcd-style comix editor

It was the most forgiving browser, with a quirks mode that handled broken code like a champ. But Opera was the best browser, and if your code rendered correctly in it, it would probably render correctly everywhere else (except maybe Netscape 4, an abomination that took too long to die).

jackalopeon Security Firm Bit9 Hacked, Used to Spread Malware

While it's possible that their product might have protected them, that angle is merely self-promotional spin. The real reason that this happened is because Bit9 didn't properly secure their assets in the first place. It shouldn't matter if "a malicious third party was able to illegally gain temporary access." A perimeter defense can be a useful deterrent, but you should still keep your jewels in a safe.

jackalopeon ORDER BY RAND()

For selecting a single random row with equal distribution and no need to worry about holes, the following might be simpler:

    SET @var = (SELECT FLOOR(RAND() * COUNT(id)) from random);
    PREPARE statement FROM 'SELECT name FROM random LIMIT ?, 1';
    EXECUTE statement USING @var;

I don't know how well this compares in performance to the examples in the article, but it's certainly easier to comprehend.

jackalopeon In 2005 Motorola Tried to Sue Me For Unlocking Phones

...a crime that’s punishable by up to 5 years in prison and half a million dollars in fines per incident.

It's time for some common sense sentencing caps if this is a possibility for merely tampering with an inanimate object. If it can't be proven that you actually harmed someone (and physical harm should carry far more weight than financial harm), the threat of any jail time at all should be easy to laugh off. Laws with such harsh potential sentences indicate an abuse of power by a privileged class.

jackalopeon The Promise of Firefox OS

When I open an app or browser on my smartphone, I'm usually focusing on a single task, where ads are intrusive and take away precious real estate from an already tiny screen. It's an enormous relief to use an app or site that just does what you want it to do and nothing more.

Ironically, it's on my smartphone that I'm most likely to use an app that's completely focused on advertising. When I'm looking for a movie or nearby restaurant, I love being able to read reviews and eventually move on to a dedicated web page where I can get more info (movie times, menus, etc.). There are apps that do this very well.

There are plenty of ways to get consumers to happily view advertising and promotional material, but inserting unrelated/unwanted ads into apps and websites just creates a frustrating user experience, especially on mobile.

jackalopeon GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

An email concerning my most recent transfer to NameCheap included the following line:

eNom, Inc. has received a request from [Me] on 22 Jan 2013 to become the new registrar of record.

The subject was:

Domain Transfer Request for [Domain]

The message included links at transfer-approval.com for verifying the transfer.

The whois information for namecheap.com shows NameCheap, Inc as the registrant, but eNom as the registrar (which may mean nothing at all).

So, there appears to continue to be a link between Namecheap and ENom, but it might be limited to NameCheap using eNom services and/or not updating account information to display the right info. It's easy to be a customer of NameCheap and assume they are a reseller or that eNom is the parent. If that's not the case, they have some work to do to clarify things. That said, I'm a happy customer.

jackalopeon Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

Honest question: How are timestamps different from any other user-supplied data? Is the timeline of events ever recorded using an unsynchronized clock for relative comparison?

jackalopeon A Short Rant About Working Remotely

On the other hand, hourly-paid remote workers can be a tremendous value, since their pay is limited to the time they actually work and they usually don't receive many benefits.

jackalopeon Show HN: Forget Flash, Skip GIF, Control iOS

I viewed three examples simultaneously from the Phosphor gallery at http://www.divergentmedia.com/phosphor/gallery and each one only used about 5% CPU, for 15% total. I closed them and viewed a YouTube HTML5 video (no Flash on this machine) and it consistently used 70% CPU. It seems the Phosphor approach is more lightweight than video and it was entirely smooth (on a 2007 dual core MacBook Pro running a 64-bit Linux). If you don't need audio and want to include a video or presentation in your page that doesn't require a plugin and looks to be supported on a wide range of browsers and platforms, this looks like a compelling option.

jackalopeon Calcutta girl who fled home & marriage at 17 returns as millionaire US innovator

I baked like a lobster once after spending too much time on a boat without any sunscreen. I was extremely concerned about the cancer risk and was surprised to come across this in the wikipedia article on sunburn:

...if sunscreen penetrates into the skin, it promotes indirect DNA damage, which causes the most lethal form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma. This form of skin cancer is rare, but it causes 75% of all skin cancer-related deaths.

So, while the sunburn you get without wearing sunscreen technically causes more cancer, it is of the mild and nonfatal kind. Now I'm left with one more dilemma added to good vs. bad cholesterol, omega-3 vs. omega-6, natural vs. alkali-processed cocoa, etc.

jackalopeon Tips to accelerate SSL

The first tip for setting the cipher suite in Apache httpd is incomplete without:

    SSLHonorCipherOrder On

Without it, the client's preference is used, which may be a slower cipher in your list. You'll want to revise your SSLCipherSuite directive and there's nothing wrong with specifying individual ciphers instead of aliases when using such a short list.

You'll also want to monitor the effects of the change. Before you do anything, make sure you're logging SSL information with something like this:

      CustomLog /var/log/httpd/ssl_request_log "%t %h %{SSL_PROTOCOL}x %{SSL_CIPHER}x \"%r\" %b"

Collect some data for a few days, then update your cipher suite. In most cases, you'll probably want to see RC4-SHA (for now), since it's fast, widely supported and immune to BEAST attacks.

jackalopeon If you need Java, use this one instead

Didn't Sun start this practice before the Oracle acquisition? Maybe it continues due to a long-term contract that must be honored.

jackalopeon Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday in the U.S.

As one commenter points out on that page, this may only be true for plans with a single phone. I have a family plan with 5 phones on it, and I couldn't find a prepaid account with comparable service for the same price.

jackalopeon Namecheap Makes $44,000 Donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

I took advantage of yesterday's sale to transfer the last of my domains from GoDaddy. Namecheap has a decent website with an intuitive interface for managing domains, pretty good knowledgebase and forum, and nice features like email alerts for account activity. GoDaddy lost me as a customer because of their unreadable emails and deliberately unintuitive web interface. Namecheap is a refreshing change. I only use them as a registrar, since I handle my own DNS and email. I've dealt with around 10 different registrars over the years and like Namecheap the most, so far.