Hacker News Reader

perion Firefox to get a “walled garden” for extensions, Mozilla to be sole arbiter

Sorry for the rude question here, but is this speculation on your part or based on stuff said by folks at Mozilla (the corp, not just contributors/clients)? Some clearer sources would be helpful this early in the morning.

perion Firefox to get a “walled garden” for extensions, Mozilla to be sole arbiter

Agreed. Cryptographic signing of extensions in this context doesn't seem to me to be significantly different from the signing done by your other package management systems.

One of my professors said "the browser is the new OS" about a decade ago. This seems like more proof of that to me — if we want fast, low power JavaScript in browsers, we have to have a reasonable chain of trust imo.

perion Another Game Boy emulator for your terminal

HN has a very particular parser because a lot of us have found we'll copy paste too much too fast if we don't have a weird parser with separate noprocrast settings from our normal work.

perion The Duct Tape Programmer

That's great for some products. Others require a big initial rollout to justify the capital expenditures involved with development.

perion The Duct Tape Programmer

I think that confusing "duct tape", "gaffer tape", and "crazy glue" is a problem in any kind of shop. Maintainable glue code is more like painter's tape or gaffer tape than it is rubber cement, imo.

perion The Duct Tape Programmer

This is a great thing to grumble about. It's also a great thing to only fix enough to hit your performance targets. But you probably already know that :)

perion The Duct Tape Programmer

This is a great article, but the comments make me feel like I'm twice as old as I actually am.

I think that maybe if we called these programmers "gaffer tape programmers", some of the sense might be clearer to programmers who've come to the field (like me) from a linguistics and theatre background, not a traditional mathematical one.

perion Using common table expressions to solve the “eight queens” problem in SQL

Sorry to poke this thread so far later, but I was actually thinking more of other users of your VMs if you're doing this in the cloud :)

perion Show HN: vim-hackernews

Ah, uhm... as someone who has m-x TIMEWASTERDUJOUR for a while, be careful :)

perion Once-starving GnuPG crypto project gets a windfall. Now comes the hard part

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what I meant 18 hours later, but I think it was a joke about folks who know what my DCI number is.

perion Show HN: React-live

No worries! I've been swapping between laptop and personal litigious fruit pad so I wasn't sure if it was me or you

perion Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over

Press gangs and indentured servitude were things, too.

perion Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over

I am cool with the content of your messages in this thread, but you should be aware that many of us come from linguistic backgrounds with more complicated nomnitive reference sets than (he || she).

perion Developer Saved Years Later by His Own Hardware

I can't help you on the religious origins of this, but the concept got introduced to me by a game by this dude named Richard Garfield in the early 90s. If I recall correctly, the term that that dude and a bunch of other WotC folks used was "mana".

It took a while before I learned that it was apparently a term in hawaiian slang, but it usually seems appropriate, especially when you're discussing this with folks old enough to remember alpha, beta, and unlimited Magic: the Gathering.

perion Once-starving GnuPG crypto project gets a windfall. Now comes the hard part

Not much to add here myself other than something for the folks who are less steeped in networking and security concerns: you should not try to audit this stuff yourself. Parent to this post can help you find a good auditor for your language.

It's very tempting, especially for smart, multilingual, incredibly talented individuals to just roll this as if the libraries below you don't matter. Crypto is, unfortunately, the leakiest of the leaky abstractions you can end up building on. No matter what, I always have someone else (and preferably several someone elses) check my work when it comes to authentication systems and encryption.

IANAL,EIIWTWNBFLA,UHTPMTGMROOTS. tpateck is a much better person to talk to than me if you need to find someone to help you deal with these issues most subtle.

perion Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over

coughs I'm not sure what time zone you're in, but my folks have been scammed like this since tulips were a thing.

perion Show HN: React-live

Sorry, I am having this problem in another browser, who should the GP contact?

perion Heartbleed in Rust

I'm incredibly slow to check this thread, but I wanted to make sure I mentioned that this made me feel better about the rust community also. Keep doing great work :)

perion Monty Oum, animator at Rooster Teeth, has died

I was trying to distract myself from bad news here, too. Hard to escape it sometimes. Hope you're doing better now that it's a few days later.

perion Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

That wasn't parody the first two dozen times I read it in the 80s and 90s, alas

perion Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

What you're spelling "politically correct" I tend to spell "on faut dit-il elle heureux là" と思うのけれども， but I tend to prefer business English to other languages when in California.

perion What the Flux?

Heh, yep, that's pretty perfect

perion Designing Crypto Primitives Secure Against Rubber Hose Attacks

This paper is from a few years ago, but I think that for folks who aren't quite as in to the net/info security side of things, it's better to think of "rubber hose attacks" as a polite way to say "having to fight too many subpoenas from a more wealthy adversary".

Hopefully doesn't apply to your businesses, but it sure delayed a lot of things in the 80s and 90s before the EFF/CDT/and so on helped settle a lot of the law that we take for granted now.

(No I do not work for the EFF, CDT, or any other TLA. I just think that programmers and painters both need to be cognizant of copyright)

perion All the Technology but None of the Love

Unsurprisingly, I disagree with a lot of the tenor of the comments so far on this article on HN. It might be memories of various international issues in the 80s and 90s, or just my personal bit of growing up, but I think the tenor of this post is spot on.

Of course, this is my judgement as a contralto in French, so shrug

perion Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

Glad you enjoyed it. It's really difficult for me to share writing about this stuff publicly.

perion Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

Being polite costs me a lot. I have to keep HN on aggressive noprocrast settings or I will never finish anything. I'm lucky enough to be at a stage in my career where I can do that. Wasn't always this way.

perion Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

OP here. I'm not bringing this up to reopen old wounds — I talked with antirez privately after this happened and I think we both learned a lot.

But I do think it's a good reminder, now that students are coming back to campuses and getting back online again, that things that you say hastily can stick around the internet a lot longer than you'd like. I'm relatively lucky in that most of my weird computer experiments were in the 90s when the demoscene was pretty active.

Even without policy changes to the CFAA or DMCA, it takes a very delicate hand to guide students. Those of us who teach, publicly or privately, have a serious responsibility here to make sure we're dealing with subtle linguistic issues even in documentation or comments.

perion Sexism Isn't Simple (2013)

Personally, I prefer indefinite articles for third person when possible, but you should talk to folks fluent in your target languages for clarification.

For example, when we're talking in French, I don't mind folks (especially students and non-native speakers like myself) confusing on/il/elle. Il faut imaginer and On faut imaginer are only very subtly different and not enough to bother this French speaker.

That said, if you're posting to someplace that deals with regular recurrences of Eternal September, you're better off being cautious. A lot of the 25-35 year old "digital native" crowd has been seriously burned by WELL leaks and the like.