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npad

332 karma · joined August 30, 2010

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npad··on UTM – Virtual Machines for iOS and macOS
If you're running VMs on Mac for a development environment what you want is OrbStack: https://orbstack.dev/
npad··on In defense of cryptocurrency
I was a crypto skeptic for many years. If you look at crypto purely from an engineering lens, you'll always find it wanting. What I didn't understand was that crypto is as much of an economic and political project, as it is an engineering project. If you think decentralisation and trustlessness are valuable, you should think crypto is important. If you don't care for decentralisation then being negative on crypto is a consistent position.
npad··on USV Dumps 100% of Coinbase Stock
They have LPs. LPs need an exit.
npad··on Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board
"For a long time" was the qualifier. I was talking about the 70s and 80s when Japanese imports were disrupting the market.
npad··on Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board
Interesting, yeah those are good points. I can certainly see it reducing the severity of disputes in theory.

In practice though I'm skeptical. I've read a little about the history of UAW. They really seemed to view workers vs mgmt as an adversarial zero sum game. Meanwhile Toyota were developing their production system using the kaizen principle of bottom up continuous improvement. Unions played a huge role in making US autos uncompetitive against the Japanese brands for a long time.

I want to be pro-union but it's hard when you observe their real world behaviour. All too often they slowly strangle their company, making it less and less competitive and innovative and ultimately dooming it to defeat by new entrants who aren't yet encumbered by unions.

npad··on Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet from 2018 must be deleted: U.S. labor board
I'm taking it to mean union employees wouldn't get new grants. Which makes sense to me - I have a hard time squaring how you can be in a union with an adversarial relationship to management, whilst at the same time being an owner of the company. It's one or the other.
npad··on GitHub Source Code Leak
I'm guessing this is just a dump of the GitHub Enterprise source? Apparently it's never been all that hard to decrypt - e.g. https://gist.github.com/iscgar/e8ea7560c9582e4615fcc439177e2...
npad··on How Spotify ran a large Google Dataflow job for Wrapped 2019
Microsoft doesn’t own Spotify. It seems there were rumours they might be acquired by MS around the time of the IPO but nothing came of it.
npad··on Alan Turing to feature on new £50 note
The Queen is on the other side of the note.
npad··on 1Password: Standalone / Local Vault Option Gone?
1Password actually has a feature for this called Travel Mode: https://blog.1password.com/introducing-travel-mode-protect-y...
npad··on Show HN: Paperplane – web page to PDF conversion API using Chrome
Whenever I’ve had to build PDF features I’ve found it tedious, and thought it should be easier.

Paperplane is basically an API layer on top of autoscaling servers running headless Chrome.

There are a couple of features that make this a little different to other solutions out there: automatic uploads to S3 and the ability to queue up batches of documents and be notified via webhook when they’ve been converted to PDF.

If you’re looking for a solution like this or are already using something similar, it’d be great to hear any feedback!

npad··on What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?
Thanks, I wasn't aware of htmldoc or that LibreOffice had a headless mode.

It does seem like htmldoc doesn't support CSS which is going to be a blocker for a lot of people.

Pandoc is definitely worth considering but I didn't include it as I believe it just delegates it's PDF rendering to a configurable engine like LaTeX, weasyprint or wkhtmltopdf.

npad··on AI Uses Less Than Two Minutes of Videogame Footage to Recreate Game Engine
There’s a good summary by Two Minute Papers here: https://youtu.be/2VyhmbEjs9A
npad··on Startups should not use React
What happened to the "software patents are ridiculous and should never be granted" argument?

Now it seems that the same sort of people advancing the anti-patent argument are angry about FB's licence. This seems like pretty muddled thinking.

npad··on Ask HN: What is the best way to distribute an iOS app to Kickstarter Backers?
How about distributing the app for free on the app store.

When the app is opened, prompt the user to enter a secret code that you've distributed only to Kickstarter backers.

And for non-backers, set up an in-app purchase as an alternative method of unlocking the app.

It's possible though that an app that isn't functional without an unlock code or without making an in-app purchase might violate Apples' rules in some way.

npad··on I don't know Regex
There are implementations of this idea for lots of languages (including C#) available here:

https://github.com/VerbalExpressions

npad··on Make $377,000 trading Apple in one day?
I've been wondering - couldn't you just impose a small delay, say one or two seconds, on each order - forcing everyone to wait a moment to get their order on the order book.

Seems like that should eliminate high-frequency trading altogether?

Betting exchanges use this idea to prevent people doing time-based arbitrage on live sporting events. For example, to prevent one guy who's watching a match live in the stadium gaining an advantage against someone else watching on TV, where the pictures are delayed a few seconds.

npad··on Bitcoins featured in Forbes
Presumably against anyone who runs a service that exchanges bitcoins for regular currency.
npad··on Show HN: Crondom
"10 Things you can do with crondom.com that you can't do with crontab: 1. Run a job every 7 minutes"

I thought you could just do:

  */7 * * * * whatever...
npad··on Microbes use arsenic in their DNA: Proves phosphorus is not required for life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation#Artificial_speciatio...