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pooriaazimion What iOS7 should look like

It is. Safari is all white (instead if blue), and the keyboard is also much lighter. The same is true for Mail, Settings, Music and Phone. Folders are all white too, and the "dock" is much lighter. And don't get me started on calendar and notes! Even the stupid clock is bright as sun :)

pooriaazimion iOS 7 looks familiar

When we talk about fragmentation (as developers), we mean API/display size fragmentation. My iPhone 4 doesn't have Siri, but developers can safely use iOS 6 APIs, knowing I can upgrade.

THe iPhone 5 and the 4" display was a step backwards in that regards, but still, you can safely target iOS 5+ and reach about 95% of active, current app-buying iOS users, or target iOS 6+ and reach 90%. But you can't do that with Android (yet) - targeting 4.0+ would lose you a lot of sales.

This will be fixed in the Android market in the next couple of years though, but until then, iOS users/developers/lovers can rightfully boast about "less fragmentation".

pooriaazimion Apple Announces Mac OS X 'Mavericks'

> Yes, the keychain is encrypted with your OS X user login password and only unlocked on login

The "login" keychain is encry..... (the rest of your sentence).

You can have many more keychains, and they can have far more sophisticated passphrases. I have an "Internet Identities" keychain (for iCloud, Gmail, Dropbox, VPSs, Github, ...) that has a very long passphrase and is not unlocked at the login, nor it stays open after you enter the password (so, if Safari asks for the password and I enter it, the keychain doesn't just stay "open" for all apps to feast upon).

pooriaazimion Vesper app

I hate that too - It can be turned off in the Preferences though.

pooriaazimion Vesper app

(please note that my post is meant to give others another use-case for the Vesper app, and isn't an ad for a competitor product!)

I don't care much for a diary or travel book, but I do use DayOne[1] (for OS X and iOS) as a journal of interesting stuff I find (mostly on HN). Years ago I used delicious to save/tag webpages, after its stagnation I used other services (I don't even remember their names), then started tagging stuff in Evernote, but none of them were as natural and easy-to-use as DayOne. It lacks a lot of features, but the Markdown format and its general ease of use makes up for that - I just press Control-Shift-D and start typing (or pasting a URL + it's HN discussion link for future reference). Occasionally I write down an interesting quote or image, or a passage I've read in an article. Also, the way it stores entries is using plist files, so I'm not afraid of platform lock-in. If I find something better (like this Vesper app here), I'll just write a convertor and translate those .plist files to the new format.

I haven't tried Vesper yet (probably will wait until there's an OS X client, which is where I use DayOne 99% of the time), but it looks very nice and promising.

[1]: http://dayoneapp.com

pooriaazimion Georgify: Make Hacker News More Readable

Yes, this is what I've been dreaming of for maybe a couple of years...

I like HN's simple look and feel - my custom CSS would be just a couple of lines to make the damn text bigger on iPhone.

pooriaazimion Glass

> 15. If Glass is “on” and anyone near you says “OK Glass,” they can control what you see, take a picture, etc.

That's what I thought, though oddly, I haven't seen this obvious fact mentioned anywhere else. It can be fixed in future I'm sure - but in the short term it might cause some problems:

"OK Glass. Tweet 'I'm an idiot'." - someone shouting in the subway

pooriaazimion This Is What Winning Looks Like – Afghanistan War Diary

(sorry that this comment is not at all coherent - I have a bad headache right now)

I agree. But the problem is that those who chant "Death to America", like the status quo; they don't want change! If things change (like you said in the second to last paragraph), they'll be out of their jobs and have to do an honest day's work. They don't want that. And do everything they can to prevent that. They "have" to portray US as the "Great Satan", that is behind all their economic, cultural and political mistakes.

It might be strange and unfathomable to you and me, but some people prefer to be King in a wasteland, than to be an ordinary citizen in a country with much greater standard of living. They'd rather be a powerful Mullah in Taliban, than to live normally in a western country. Many of these clerics have spent years studying in European countries, but after finishing college they've left the west and now are living in a shack somewhere in Ghandahar and are the local commander of Taliban. Why? I don't know.

Most of these people won't "cool down, relax or embrace peace", because they are enjoying their shitty lives. And that's the problem, because they have the power to make life miserable for others too. They'd sooner bomb their people (Saddam, Ghadafi, Assad) and ruin their own country, than to "let it go".

There are exceptions like Mubarak or Bin Ali (or Iran's Shah) that fought furiously, but in the end decided not to completely ruin their countries and fled. But not all dictators are like that; some are like Assad.

pooriaazimion This Is What Winning Looks Like – Afghanistan War Diary

> The comments also apply a lot to Iran and Iraq.

No, it doesn't. I don't disagree with you on the whole (and certainly appreciate that you are even attempting to understand the issue, which is more than almost anyone does), but like neebz I think your narrative is very simplistic and out of touch with reality.

Islam is not as powerful in the "Islamic world" as you portrayed. Taliban is the exception, not the rule.

I currently live in Tehran, and TBH I personally know less than 8 people (less, because it's been a while since I've talked to a few of them) who are supportive of the government, or in general of Islamic rule. And the number of "religious" (as in, religion is more than something theoretical for them - you believe in Quran, and even though you don't follow it's instructions, the mere belief gets you a place in paradise) people I personally know is probably no more than 20 (most of them friends at college).

The reason for Islamic rule (at least in Iran), is not because they have the support of the people, but simply because they have the money and power. You don't sell hundreds of billions of dollars of crude oil every quarter and get rich and powerful, only to allow to be overthrown! You do everything you can to prevent that.

I hate typing on iPad, so, please read the rest of what I wanted to say in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4820604

pooriaazimion Improving the security of your SSH private key files

If someone gets hold if your smart card, they can enter a wrong pass phrase to remove your private key, right? So, you have to have multiple of these smart cards (that all share the same private key), some in your wallet, some in your house and some in a bank or vault somewhere. Otherwise, you can lose access to your private keys forever.

Am I right, or I'm missing something?

pooriaazimion Improving the security of your SSH private key files

AFAIK, in bash/zsh you have to do

    export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace

in .bashrc or .bash_profile for the above trick to work.

fish, OTOH, seems to do this by default.

pooriaazimion 2010 Unibody Macbook schematic [pdf]

Why is their Apple logo (printed at the bottom of every page) so horrendously ugly? http://d.pr/i/dCoo

pooriaazimion \d less efficient than [0-9]

`man perlunicode` is chockfull of utf8-related stuff (and it's looong): http://perldoc.perl.org/5.14.0/perlunicode.html

pooriaazimion Apple's new Objective-C to Javascript Bridge

Completely off-topic, but those (who like me, liked Hypercritical very much, but aren't active on Twitter to learn these things there), Siracusa has a new show here: http://atp.fm

It's not as good as Hypercritical, but is better than nothing!

pooriaazimion "Programmer. Come Work For Us"

> Yes. But when I affect someone's life, I'll get a email, maybe a call about it, and I'll have a real conversation with someone. I'll know who they are and how I affected them.

And a few hundred 1-star reviews on the app store(s), saying that while they use your app daily, it really isn't worth the $1.99 they paid for, and people should use X instead, which is FREE. Or 3-star reviews that say the app is PERFECT, they love it, but it needs feature X (assuring you that they'll bump up their reviews to 5 star when you add the said feature).

At times like that, I'm sure you'd rather you worked for some giant corporation and didn't have to deal with customers directly.

pooriaazimion Why I Develop For The Mac

You seem to have missed the whole "Features" section. Here's a list of what he said he gains "for free" by developing for Mac (of course, other environments might have similar stuff, but not exactly like OS X's): Undo/Redo with Core Data, PDF export (and "import" into current documents), Multi-touch zoom.

pooriaazimion Apple More than Doubles Capital Return Program

It's not their money to throw away (even to the noblest of causes), it's shareholders' money and should be used to further shareholders' interests.

It would be absolutely unethical and wrong of them to donate more than the normal amount to charitable causes. Now, should those +$100M executives pay more to charity? I think absolutely yes. But Apple the company (or Google, or Microsoft, or any other company) is there to serve it's shareholders not the whole human race.

pooriaazimion Did an Apple 2.0 story touch a nerve at Samsung HQ?

In my experience it has been really better than "old" systems (source: my family and many friends). Of course, that's just one data point, but these things are hard to quantize and measure. Still, the trend to "post-PC devices" is a clear sign that people want things to be simpler.

> power user hostile

Exactly. If by being hostile to us, they're being more accessible to others, I'd say it's a good thing. Now, are they being more accessible to ordinary people? That, as you said, is not and empirical fact and is a discussion worth having. My point is that "we are not important. We're just a tiny fraction of the population. We should ask whether what Apple is doing better for the other %99 or not. Not being 'power-user friendly' is immaterial to this discussion".

----

And I agree about the notification center or Settings app. But I see them more as failures in implementation than a failure of vision.

For example of a horrible implementation, Windows (I have experience with Vista and older) gives you a million different options for wireless/wired networking. But setting a global SOCKS proxy is ridiculously difficult: Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Connection -> LAN settings -> Advanced. Or assigning an static IP to a wireless card: Control Panel -> Network and Sharing -> View status -> Properties -> Select IPV4 -> Properties.

Now, OS X's Network panel is just as feature-rich as Windows'. You can do almost everything you can do in Windows too, but the implementation is much better. Creating a VPN, assigning static IP, setting a global proxy, etc. are all easy to access: Click '+' and select VPN, then its type (PPTP, L2TP, Cisco) and you're good to go. Or select Wi-Fi and go to Advanced menu and instead of DHCP select an static IP. Or go to "Proxy" tab and assign a global proxy.

That was just an example that I think OS X's implementation is far better, but the vision (= intention) is the same: Give user the ability to change everything he wants about the wireless connection. Just because Microsoft failed to give a decent UI (at least in Vista) does not mean it's not possible. Just like because Notification center is horrible doesn't mean it can't be done better (look at Android).

pooriaazimion Did an Apple 2.0 story touch a nerve at Samsung HQ?

> That Apple is using every chance it has to close and lock down what was once an open architecture.

Open (although it's debatable if that is entirely accurate. As you very well know we've been living in a Microsoft world for the past 20 years), but accessible only to a few of us computer nerds. They're locking it down, but making it accessible to more people. People who previously despised computers and hated working with them and often couldn't use them very effectively. Now, they still despise them, but at least are less frustrated when using computers, and are able to do more with their devices.

I find your line of thinking a bit selfish. It's like arguing why car engines are nowadays sealed - we can't even tweak our own cars easily - cars that we have PAID MONEY! How will the next generation learn about car engines and be able to tweak stuff if he wants to? They have to bring the car in to an authorized repair shop that's been approved by GM and pay them lots of money while previously we used to do it ourselves at no cost.

Not everyone has to know how to repair a car engine, or a refrigerator, or how to compile a program from the source. What's wrong with that?

In other words, I don't give a fuck about my profession. My profession is to serve the humanity. If Apple is making the lives of millions of people easier by making my profession harder or obsolete, so be it. Now, if you are arguing that what Apple is doing is harmful to humanity in the long run, that could be a valid argument that's worth having. But arguing that Apple is an unethical company just because it makes our profession harder (regardless of whether it's good for the rest of the world), I think that's not a valid argument. I think it's selfish and disagree with it.

pooriaazimion Ask HN: What are the HN karmic privileges/penalties?

Another factor in ranking of comments (apart from "average karma" of the poster, and of course the points it's received) is simply its length! The longer, the more it counts. I think it's there to promote deep and lengthy discourse, not one-line, "Stupid article. I stopped reading at [x]" kind of comment.

Source: experience.

pooriaazimion Apple records and keeps users' Siri queries for up to 2 years

I can't speak for the parent, but this is my reasoning: They make close to a hundred billion dollars a year by selling hardware, so they don't need to sell my private information for some quick cash.

It's stupid, I know. But the same couldn't be said about advertising-driven companies (like Google and Facebook).

In other words, being mindful of user privacy is a luxury they can have right now, and it's good for their business (i.e., they're not doing it because they're "good", or others that do are "bad" or "evil" - it's just that they're now in a position that respecting user privacy is better for their bottom line than not being respectful)

pooriaazimion Why the use of GPL is declining

Yes, this kind of behavior that you describe is the reason I personally dislike FSF and Richard Stallman (knowing and acknowledging that they've done more than I can in probably 1000 years, but it doesn't mean they're above criticism).

You might recall this recent thread: "GNU sed 4.2.2 released, maintainer resigns" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956899

It cites http://lwn.net/Articles/529522/, which is a living proof of what you're saying. Two main developers of GnuTLS, that had written 10,600 commits out of 11,000 wanted to respectfully part ways with FSF. This is Stallman's reaction:

> Nikos, when you volunteered to maintain GNUTLS, the GNU Project entrusted its development to you. Your contributions so far are appreciated. However, the project GNUTLS does not belong to you.

> If you want to stop doing this job, you can. If you want to develop a fork of GNUTLS under another name, you can, since it is free software.

> But you cannot take GNUTLS out of the GNU Project. You cannot designate a non-GNU program as a replacement for a GNU package. We will continue the development of GNUTLS.

This really ought to boosts the morale of GNU contributers to know that even if they had contributed more than 96% of the codebase, they're still not trusted, and are deemed completely replaceable.

pooriaazimion Verlet-js - Open source dynamic body physics engine

I thought you were joking (about dragging the spider out), but it actually works! Extremely well-done.

pooriaazimion Fish 2.0 shell beta

Wonderful!

I made a slight variation (and also posted it there):

      function .runsudo --description 'Run current command line as root'
        set cursor_pos (echo (commandline -C) + 5 | bc)
        commandline -C 0
        commandline -i 'sudo '
        commandline -C "$cursor_pos"
      end
      bind \es ".runsudo"

Instead of outright `execute`ing the command, the above would save the cursor position. You can (theoretically) bind `\cs` so control-s adds the sudo (instead of option-s), but I couldn't get it to work.

pooriaazimion 1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s

@rorrr: You've been hellbanned for almost a month.

------------

His comment:

> It's nearly identical.

> There are around 170,000 english words (including all the obscure ones you've never heard and have no idea how to spell).

> Number of 4-word combinations:

    170,000^4 = 8.35 * 10^20

> Lowercase (26) + uppercase (26) + digits (10) + special characters (36) = 98 characters

   98^10 = 8.17 * 10^19

> An order of magnitude difference.

> And if they start bruteforcing with the simpler words (which you used in the example), there are only 5,000 - 10,000 of them, the number of your combinations drops dramatically:

    5,000^4 = 6.25 * 10^14

    10,000^4 = 10^16

> So unless you use very obscure words in your password, you are doing much worse than you think.

pooriaazimion Mobile Hardware Statistics (and more)

Relevant: http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats

    All platforms (on iOS 6): 87%
    iPhone: 93%
    iPad: 78%
    iPod touch: 80%

I'm a bit surprised as to why % of iPads running iOS 6 is so low. I mean, IIRC ~150M iPads were sold, and only 12M of them were iPad 1. But I guess his app (Audiobooks) is not a good representative of what people do with their iPads, so I take his numbers (about the iPad) with a grain of salt.

pooriaazimion JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE

@martinced: You've been hellbanned for the past 5 days. Which is a shame - your comments are long and informative.

> I'm using IntelliJ IDEA on Linux since version 4 or so (we're now at version 12).

> And I agree with you but...

> The trick is to use a pixel perfect font with no anti-aliasing at all and to set the correct vertical spacing between lines and then IntelliJ is just going to look fine (for a Java app).*

> So first you go download a real font (a font made especially for programming, like the Proggy fonts which you can get at proggyfonts) (I take the .ttf version)

> You relaunch IntelliJ and then go to:

> Settings / IDE Settings / Appearance / Editor / Colors & Fonts / Font and then you set your pixel perfect font, say :

> ProggySquareTT (Size: 16, Line spacing: 1.3)*

> (oh and btw IntelliJ is so stupid that if you have "Show only monospaced fonts" checked it won't understand that Proggy is monospaced and hence not show it into your fonts choice list)

> I'm 40 years old and still have 10/10 eye vision, which I attribute to two things: avoid dark characters on light background scheme anytime it's possible and never ever using anti-aliased fonts (which are blurry)

> "Pixel perfect" is the way to go here. And anyway anti-aliased fonts under Linux are so fugly compared to OS X / Windows that you're really not missing much by going pixel perfect.

> Regarding the other IntelliJ IDEA fonts (the ones which are not the editor / console), I'm stealing a Tahoma.ttf from Windows and settings everything to be Tahoma.

> Same for my Emacs but for whatever reason under Emacs I'm using Terminus and not Proggy at the moment ; )

> Now of course it's really sad that the only "ok" desktop UI ever made with Swing is the one made by JetBrains: it took people who wrote the fscking most advanced Java IDE to come up with a reasonably looking Java Swing app : (

> The Eclipse guys didn't even bother and created their own UI (SWT) which kinda speaks volume about the nameless mediocrity that Swing is : (

pooriaazimion Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t (2011)

(just to clarify, I was confused with the (GMT+1) part)

pooriaazimion Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

vor_: unfortunately, you're hellbanned.

> I have no experience with iCloud, but I'm pleased with Core Data for managing a persistent object graph. It automatically handles version migrations, undo, and faulting, and some interfaces can be populating with almost no code via bindings. I'm happy with it. Still, I'll be very interested to watch the Core Data presentations at WWDC.