Hacker News Reader

parvenu74on The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascular event risk

Perhaps (s)he's concerned about political backlash (via down-voting) on HN?

parvenu74on Linux Mint Dumps Ubuntu Snap

I noticed that Mint is working on LMDE which uses Debian as its base directly without using Ubuntu; I wonder if this is one of the reasons motivating that project and what the other reasons are.

parvenu74on The trouble of measuring programming language popularity – Delphi

"TIOBE gives away current stats and sells access to historical trends" (paraphrased)

How is that not accurately described as click-bait? Click to see compelling "news" AND see an advertisement we hope you'll buy...

parvenu74on Ask HN: What's the best corporate password manager?

Ideal would be if you could issues U2F hardware keys but not everyone supports that yet. I've seen KeePassXC used effectively as it works on Widows, macOS, and Linux.

parvenu74on Kubernetes is NOT a container orchestrator

Is there even a viable alternative to Kubernetes at this point? For that matter, is there an alternative to YAML for defining Kubernetes setups?

parvenu74on Microsoft Teams Now Available for Linux

Is Teams not an Electron app? I gather that it's not otherwise it would have been on Linux long ago...

parvenu74on Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?

Sam Vaknin is a self-confessed Narcissist and maybe psychopath. His oeuvre is invaluable. He served time in an Israeli prison for financial crimes.

parvenu74on FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

I want to root for it but I think the LGPL license ruins it as long as there are BSD or MIT licenses alternatives that are good enough. Firefox might implement it but I think there’s zero change that Chromium or Safari add support.

parvenu74on NetBSD 9.0 Coming Soon with Arm64, Updated ZFS, HW-Accelerated Virtualization

"NetBSD 9.0 is bringing with it support at long last for ARMv8/AArch64 64-bit ARM..."

Ironic that the BSD that's legendary for "running on a toaster" and whose slogan is "of course it runs NetBSD" is just now gaining support for these not-exactly-rare chips/architectures.

parvenu74on Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance on a $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

The headline is that it's a $199 laptop but the link in the article is to a $280 laptop. Is this a mistake or did the price go up?

parvenu74on Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies

HN Hams anyone? :-)

parvenu74on Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies

Is there such a thing as a straight key or paddle (iambic?) key that connects to a USB interface? The amount of bandwidth required to conduct a CW QSO via the internet would be far less than a VoIP call. A Morse code chat program would make for an interesting Show HN project.

parvenu74on Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies

A lot of the gatekeeping and lack of interest in SDR, GNURadio, etc is from the older HAMs. Having local clubs with upper age limits of 45 or so might encourage more digital experimentation and openness to the kinds of innovation that used to go hand-in-hand with amateur radio clubs.

parvenu74on Carrier sales of phone-location data is illegal, FCC plans punishment

But Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et al are still free to sell phone location data acquired through apps (or Android itself in the case of Google), right? I wonder if there is any hope of laws to limit the ability of companies to sell this data...

parvenu74on OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall

What is the Windows equivalent of this tool?

parvenu74on Decentralize Messaging

Isn't this, at least in part, the goal of OStatus/Mastodon? It's a great idea but I find it humorous and ironic that many mastodon admins circulate block lists specifically meant to cut off nodes. I would prefer that users just use the block features available (and adding the ability for a user to block nodes or apply blocklists if they want to, but not for admins to make that decision for them).

parvenu74on Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

You don't think that going the "Consequentialist Route" and funding bounties for developing F/OSS alternatives to the non-free components[1] if viable? What's not viable, in my opinion, is the shunning by the purists of everyone who doesn't believe and act like them. Some of us might if we're allowed to get there one step at a time and if they encouraged the transition the F/OSS as a whole would benefit.

[1] Setting aside issues like NVidia drivers...

parvenu74on Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List (2005) [pdf]

I've been in the habit for years of making liberal use of the catch-all feature of email to make up email addresses unique to everything. This makes it easy to add NDR bounces to specific email addresses that end up on f-ing mailing lists I don't want or for which the address was sold/given to other groups (political parties are the WORST about this!).

parvenu74on Voting machines pose a greater threat to our elections than foreign agents

I don't think the machines matter as long as the vote can be replayed/recounted without ambiguity.

An idea: https://medium.com/@dotnetmike/touch-screen-voting-should-be...

parvenu74on 'Pwnagotchi' Is the Open Source Handheld That Eats Wi-Fi Handshakes

Try trespassing on the White House lawn to pick up trash and improve the landscaping and see what happens -- even though you did nor intend no harm. If you violate the law your intent might change your punishment (or in some cases, prompt the judge to dismiss the case) but not the finding of fact of whether you are guilty or not.

parvenu74on Secretive military spaceplane lands in Florida after record-long orbital flight

Lots of theories about what that vehicle does... the one I like the best is that it intercepts "enemy" satellites and reprograms them. Of course, what comes around goes around and it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese do that to us if that's actually one of this vehicle's missions. A more likely scenario is that it is doing maintenance on and/or bringing home some of our own stuff -- as well as being an observation platform in its own right.

parvenu74on The WeWork debacle should be an indictment of modern finance

WeWork seems like it should be a buyout target either by a hotel chain or a restaurant chain (Starbucks?) since the basic model is "more permanent and slightly more private than a coffee shop"...

parvenu74on I, Language Robot

Talented authors have less to fear from AI than talented programmers have to fear from coding boot camps that churn out thousands of entry level devs. It sounds like the AI might be good at taking some random bits of data and presenting it in prose which could threaten the careers of a lot of journalists. But anywhere that abstract thought, analogy, simile, and syllogism would be required to express concepts and ideas will remain the domain of human authors -- forever. Machines can automate and compose passable works based on programmed rules, but they will never be able to improvise, crack jokes, or move the soul.

parvenu74on Amazon won't spin off AWS. That's hurting AWS

Oh please... more of this JEDI/WaPo stuff? It ignores that the NSA (and by extension, the DOD) have a long relationship with Microsoft just as the CIA have a long relationship with Amazon and have "AWS-lite" installed at Langley. Microsoft has been very accommodating to the DOD, agreeing to continue maintenance on Windows XP for as long as the Navy continues to request (and pay for) it. Yes, Trump has his gripes with WaPo and might have suggested to Mattis to screw AWS, but it's very likely that the Five Sided Puzzle Palace wanted to go with Azure Stack all along but had to do the open competition thing to avoid being sued by companies not named Microsoft.

parvenu74on Ask HN: Most Current Kotlin/Android-Studio Learning Material?

https://developer.android.com/docs

Most, if not all, of the code samples allow selecting Kotlin or Java.

parvenu74on Ask HN: What's the best thing a software engineer can do for climate change?

Abandon JavaScript and only code in C: it is more power-efficient.

parvenu74on Why do developers use what they use?

I'm writing this comment on a new MacBook Pro which I purchased in order to write Xamarin mobile applications (including iOS, hence the Mac). In the case of iOS apps you have to have a Mac and Xcode installed and up to date. As for the rest of the existential "why do you use that" the answer is mostly "because they are the best tools given the job requirement" and I take the jobs because they pay well and are fun.

Perhaps a better question is: why are you drawn to the area of programming that you are? For me, the idea that my apps are used on PERSONAL devices and are HELD AND TOUCHED by the end users is a powerful thing. Line of business web apps have the antiseptic separation between the screen and the user: you need a mouse to proxy your physical gestures to the computer. Mobile apps have a sense of being with you at all times as opposed to something on a desk. In a world of decreasing personal interaction, creating mobile apps seems like a very high-touch and personal way to affect people.

parvenu74on The Flix Programming Language

1. Flix ... takes inspiration from F#, Go, OCaml, Haskell, Rust, and Scala.

2. Flix compiles to JVM bytecode and runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

3. Flix performance is typically within 1-3x of equivalent Scala code.

So... it's mainly just a faster Scala -- but without the ability to integrate with Java, Scala, or Kotlin?

parvenu74on Texas bill would ban throttling in disaster areas

This is a crazy idea. A disaster area is EXACTLY where you want to throttle and prioritize traffic. Are the legislators really saying that during a natural disaster one's ability to watch Netflix should be on the same level of priority as First Responders communicating/coordinating on rescue and recovery efforts?

parvenu74on ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?

"Pessimistic" is a good generalization of the GPL mindset in my opinion: "If I don't make this thing GPL then some greedy-bastard company will make a fortune off of my ideas and never give me a cut, credit, or contribute back."

Maybe, but it's a dim way of looking at other people.