HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

slight

106 karma · joined February 20, 2014

submissionscomments
slight··on Don't Over-React to the Facebook Patents License
Could you explain to me how it's worse than if React were released without the patents grant like most OSS is?

It seems like you'd have no patents grant then anyway and you'd already in the position you're in now if you sue Facebook for patent infringement (and are using React).

slight··on New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned from 2040 in UK
I'm not trying to talk for anyone else, just giving my experience. I now live in Barcelona and have a 4 year old son. Most of the furniture in our flat is from Ikea. So while a car would certainly make things easier at times, it's not essential in many cases. Depends where you live of course. In the country with kids would be a lot less manageable I agree.
slight··on Breakthrough: solid-state alkaline batteries a viable alternative to lithium-ion
In racing and acro drones on the other hand you're lucky if the lipo hasn't puffed or burst into flames after 20 cycles!

edit: typo

slight··on New diesel and petrol vehicles to be banned from 2040 in UK
I lived in the UK until I was 28 and never had a car. I lived mostly in small towns and the country, never had a car, wasn't a problem.

The UK has a reasonably good public transport network though it's horribly over-priced since privatisation, especially trains.

slight··on Fluent Design System
Xubuntu is a distribution not a desktop. Distributions have all sorts of settings that affect GTK and Gecko.
slight··on Experimental Nighttime Photography with Nexus and Pixel
Also if you're in the EU remember you have a statutory 24 month warrantee for non-consumables. (The standard example of the sort of thing not covered is an oil filter which is expected to have a shorter life)
slight··on What Rust Can Do That Other Languages Can't
I mostly work with PHP in my day job and I've been following Rust so had an idea about its constraints but hadn't written any. I decided to port a personal web project I've been working on to Rust as my first attempt at the language and was able to port the core classes and get some other initial stuff up (web framework mainly) in about a day. It was a lot simpler than I expected. With the IDEA plugin and a bit more experience I think I can be about as productive in Rust as with PHP, and that's coming from about 17 years PHP experience.

Edit: With the caveat that the number of available libraries and SDKs is still low, but in the case of PHP that was the case until the last couple of years anyway after Composer and Packagist came along.

slight··on Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
There are plenty of scooters in Barcelona but honestly I've never noticed generally worse behaviour from them than anyone else, except maybe starting off from lights early, but it seems everyone is guilty of that here.

Aside from that however, as a cyclist from the UK, I've been very pleasantly surprised by the lack of aggressive driving since I've been living here. I very very rarely feel threatened by other road users on my bike, except by Bicing (city-wide bike rental/'sharing' scheme) users, and I think that's just because Bicing is used by people that don't cycle regularly so aren't very experienced.

Also there are already an increasing number of semi-pedestrianised streets in the centre of town and they work fine, cars, scooters and bikes go down them too but very slowly and usually only if they really need to because there are faster routes if you're through traffic.

slight··on Why I’m Suing the US Government
It's not hijacking this stream, it's allowing the legitimate user of the stream to modify it with an overlay while viewing it, at home for example.
slight··on Experimental Qt and QML in the browser
That IMGUI demo is awesome. I'd love to be able to drive it from regular JS, it would be really handy for all sorts of things.
slight··on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)
Invent two thirds of a new alphabet and then get distracted by the idea of creating new numbers and promise to complete the alphabet "real soon now"? ;)
slight··on Uber wants access to browsing history, bookmarks, and running apps
Not OP but I found Lollipop pretty laggy and that it didn't add much I wanted, most of Google's updates come via Play now anyway. So also no reason to upgrade to Marshmallow either.
slight··on Velocipedia
Men's bicycle and women's bicycle in the UK.
slight··on Reddit removed NSL canary from 2015 Transparency Report
> What they could argue is that by ceasing to publish the canary, you're committing the crime of communicating something you're not allowed to communicate. That, however, skirts dangerously close to forcing someone to lie.

This was my point, but the issue seems to me not about them forcing you to lie but rather about you setting up a system that you know will either force you to lie, or to break a court order by communicating something you were ordered not to. The only point of a warrant canary is to try to bypass the intention of a potential future court order.

slight··on Reddit removed NSL canary from 2015 Transparency Report
They wouldn't force you to lie, they'd punish you for communicating something you've been ordered not to. 'You' didn't have to set up the canary in the first place.
slight··on Telegram has now 100M Monthly Active Users
I'm using Prosody 0.10 with MAM and carbons with Gajim on Linux and Conversations on Android. Working fine.
slight··on Chemical clears Alzheimer's protein and restores memory in mice
143.50€ here... (Spain).
slight··on The Guardian goes all-in on AWS public cloud after OpenStack 'disaster’
It means cheap commodity servers as opposed to iron which is beefy expensive servers.
slight··on Amazon Will Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices
You don't have to have a literal monopoly afaiui, I think leveraging a strong market position in one area to benefit a different market can still apply. Not a lawyer though.
slight··on Ethical Adblocking
This site has a problematic design.. I couldn't see anything but a logo and a searchbox on my laptop (720p-ish).
slight··on Tarsnap email confirmation bypass
tl;dr has also become a general shorthand for a summary.
slight··on This Is Not America: Why Wal-Mart Left Germany (2006)
The food in Lidl isn't junk quality, most of it is fine. They have some junk quality non-food stuff quite often but there's nothing wrong with the food in my experience.
slight··on The Promise of 5G
I'm not saying it has no uses, just that it's not going to bring some sort of revolution, especially with such low data caps. If the current networks aren't rolled out more widely then giving hot spots of very very high speed isn't going to lead to new services as there's not wide enough coverage.

I use my mobe for tethering on holiday and it's great but the only problems I have in that case are bad 3G coverage.

Yes of course the bump from 10mbit (which I get with HSDPA, top speeds on HSDPA here in Barcelona are over 15mbit) to something like 40 is useful if you're using it for your desktop/laptop but that's not really what this article is about.

The general assumption that higher and higher data rates will enable new uses just doesn't hold true to me. In the last few years my home connection has gone from 30mbit VDSL to 300mbit fiber and honestly it's only really noticeable in a few edge cases like downloading games on Steam. I see no radical new use cases taking any sort of advantages of these sorts of speeds, just as I haven't for 4g mobile networks.

slight··on The Promise of 5G
What a load of nonsense. The idea that faster and faster wired and wireless broadband open up huge new opportunities just doesn't make any sense to me. 4G just gives me webpages a bit faster, it's not even especially noticeable most of the time. I can already stream 720p video to my phone which is more or less indistinguishable from 1080p at that size. What other massive fast downloads do you need on a mobile device while data caps are still in the low gigabytes?
slight··on The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far (2012)
It's not just him. I'm a British English speaker and read it the same way. I read it as "We are far [along our course]". It came across as a bit of an odd phrase but I don't think it's really good English either way, it needs an object to be clear.
slight··on Bhutan's dark secret to happiness
No it's to do with how the main BBC and the international BBC are funded. The BBC in the UK has to be non-commercial, it's funded by TV license, and BBC Worldwide is commercially funded, so showing BBC Worldwide content in the UK would probably contravene the BBC's charter.
slight··on A demo that Magic Leap was going to show at TED
No it's really not. This is a long way from anything that's been shown so far and is clearly a mock-up. The devil is in the detail, the production value is too high and the visual integration between the CGI and real elements is too slick.
slight··on PHP7 Gains Scalar Type Hints
Sending structured data from JavaScript to PHP is much easier via json and in PHP its as easy as calling json_decode() to get back and object or array depending on your preference.
slight··on PHP7 Gains Scalar Type Hints
You've heard of JavaScript I presume?
slight··on There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me
Also try grabbing what you think you'll need then taking your laptop if you have one and go and work somewhere without internet. If your laptop has a 3g modem leave the sim at home, leave your smartphone at home. You don't need the internet all the time.
Page 1 of 2Next →