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marcus

1,540 karma · joined November 10, 2007

Hacker, Poet, Philosopher, Retired bum
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marcus··on Helion
I haven’t checked their technology yet but if their iteration speed is an order of magnitude faster than the competition my money is on them
marcus··on Ask HN: Are programmers a commodity?
Programmers aren't commodities as they aren't interchangeable, there are vast differences in outcome between different programmers.

To a good programmer most jobs offerings are commodities, they are interchangeable and their offerings/rewards/challenges are very similar.

Thus the developer you are interviewing is also interviewing you.

marcus··on CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_period
marcus··on One in every 600 websites has .git exposed
ENV variables are inherited by child processes by default, so please use care when using this approach.
marcus··on MiniLock – File encryption software that does more with less
Use the tuple (email,passphrase). Still easy to remember and the email functions as a salt, and will prevent any rainbow attacks
marcus··on Thoughts and Observations Regarding This Week’s Apple Event
In a private company you would be mostly correct. In a public one changes like these might require that you go back and fix your previous quarterly fillings -> not something that is done lightly.
marcus··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2013)
Wix - Tel Aviv, Israel

Looking for Front-End hacker. Wix is looking for you, an experienced developer with passionate for Web development; JavaScript, HTML5 ,CSS3, TDD, Angular.JS

Contact info in my profile

marcus··on Nvidia plans a Tegra 4-based portable gaming device
Everything you need is part of the standard Android SDK directional pad support, start/select buttons shoulder pad buttons and joystick support

An existing game can be switched to use the physical buttons with minimal work... This isn't a rewrite, more like connecting another source event to the functions that handle user interactions. I expect most games to need less than a couple of hours of work to support this device.

marcus··on Show HN: FollowWWW - a point and click web scraper (early beta)
Sorry about that, missed a config param when transferring to the host. Should be working now.
marcus··on I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit
Not quite ready for prime time but I am working on a project that makes it really easy to grab content from any site using a point and click interface no xpaths selectors or regex.

You enter the url you want to capture data from, it gets loaded in an iframe, you click on the texts you need and set a schedule to receive updates and how(email/twitter dm) that's it.

It supports javascript driven content and can handle practically any website.

http://www.followwww.com

marcus··on Detect iPad Mini in HTML5?
iOS audio will only play in response to user generated event (click for example) never when the site loads.

And I am not saying it has to be a random noise or very loud the accelerometer on the iDevices since the iPhone 4 is superb a very low sound will probably be sufficient. The sound can be easily integrated into the natural flow of the site, as many sites already do small beeps or play music etc to provide feedback to the user.

marcus··on Detect iPad Mini in HTML5?
Already posted it on SO but here goes:

Play a stereo audio file and compare the accelerometer response when volume is high on the right channel and on the left channel - iPad2 had mono speakers and iPad Mini has stereo speakers built in

marcus··on Show HN: my new iPad app - Creativity Workbench - generate new ideas
I have, but I wanted to get some feedback first, hence the "Show HN"
marcus··on Show HN: my new iPad app - Creativity Workbench - generate new ideas
The app is iOS 5.1 only right now, a new version which supports 4.2 was submitted last week to apple
marcus··on Show HN: my new iPad app - Creativity Workbench - generate new ideas
I would really appreciate your feedback.

Here are some promo codes for you JARLP3JERT4N

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marcus··on Yahoo sells 1/2 its Alibaba stake for $7.1B
So Yahoo without Alibaba is worth about $4.6 billion (18.8-14.2), subtract the $2.1 billion cash and short term investments and you get a price tag of $2.5 billion for all of Yahoo's other operations and assets.
marcus··on 5 Years of Bad Ideas -- Python tips, tricks, and chicanery
I believe in a balance, too little magic, and you're working with one hand tied behind your back, too much magic and you're working with blindfolds.
marcus··on 5 Years of Bad Ideas -- Python tips, tricks, and chicanery
My definition of magic:

Magic is anything which makes other code behave in a way that would require reading the magic to understand, despite not being apparent in the magicked code.

Good because it makes many things a lot easier, bad because it makes code a lot less explicit and simple and increases cognitive load (you need to always consider the magic not just the current code you're looking at).

marcus··on Apple's inspirational note to new hires
This reminds me of a conversation I had once with a friend who worked in McKinsey, I told him "I might be smart enough to work for McKinsey, but I am definitely not stupid enough to work in McKinsey"
marcus··on Reversible programming
Given the fact that the entire call/uncall mechanism is based on keeping the original parameters that are required to undo the calculation - it will work fine, but you won't be able to call the undo on the result you got from any other source (i.e. not through the call/uncall mechanism)

read the source for p-divmod (one of the most useful functions in cryptography). You need to pass the original y to get back the original x in the reverse

marcus··on Notepad.cc - a piece of paper in the cloud
Actually as all email traffic is sent in clear text (unless encrypted using PGP or a program of the sort) - these can be read by any node between your SMTP server and the recipient's POP server not just the end points.
marcus··on HN Build This: iPad iPod Apps Data Syncing
Unfortunately, it is impossible to modify the way a locked iPad/iPhone syncs...

Even assuming you can trust that the internal data structures of iPad/iPhone versions are identical - you can't implement this as a 3rd party app you install, as 3rd party apps are sandboxed and can only access their own data. And the only sync supported is via iTunes, which again can't be modified or replaced without jailbreaking the device.

marcus··on Twitter launches own shortener t.co
Its url shorteners all the way down...
marcus··on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
That is easily solvable - clog/duct-tape the exit nozzle or tamper with the cartridge test (a lot of the substitute cartridges already disable this)
marcus··on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
I'd rather have one of the printers listed as having yellow tracking dots and yank out the color cartridges.

Its easier to disable a security measure you know than praying there isn't a security measure you don't know.

There is still a chance of a redundancy but I believe it is somewhat lower - as normally companies would do the bare minimum to comply with a directive like this one.

marcus··on Drug dealers shouldn't make iPhone apps
Actually drug dealers and developers are the only two groups that call their clients -> users... so maybe they should.

Plus the holy grail of game development is making the game addictive

marcus··on Small Teams Need Redundant Skills
If you are trying to build a long haul business one of your key tasks is getting your Bus Factor above one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

marcus··on GNU Emacs 23.2 released
Considering the fact that gmane.com isn't secured, both are useless from a security viewpoint. It would be easier to intercept the request http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.announce/17 and change the checksum that appears in the HTML, than to generate a new .tar.gz with the original checksum. If you can't trust that no one tampered with the checksum what good is it???
marcus··on Barbie Computer Engineer
Last time I saw the 40 something pages of specs/requirements docs I had to fill to write a 50 LOC program in a big corp, I almost choked.
marcus··on Panic-inspired Dashboard Made From Photo Frame for ~$150. Code is OSS.
I did the same thing a few months ago, only my implementation uses an old PSP I had lying around.

http://hackaday.com/2009/03/30/psp-as-a-status-monitor/

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