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walty8

117 karma · joined July 6, 2017

https://www.bart.com.hk
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walty8··on HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain sent final email before sudden death
Actually, my experience is, there is always a cause. But some causes could be very subtle or unexpected.
walty8··on Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
In general, for complicated items, I prefer to code at one place and think at another place. They seems to require different parts of your brain, and have different 'comfortable spots'.
walty8··on How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (2014)
thanks, my son would love this :)
walty8··on Phone is still the best way to order pizza
> The app or website should make my life better but instead it's harder.

This is the sub-goal, but not ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to maximize the profit, with accounts created, all the analytics will work out, and they could do all kinds of promotions or targeted ads.

I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE. It does not attempt to make your life better. At least it's not the ultimate goal of ecosystem.

walty8··on Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed
But the in the screen capture of article, the user name is actually 'issac.asimov', i.e. the mime type does not immediately follow the dot.
walty8··on Vim Modes Transition Diagram
yes, it's useful to comment out a bunch of lines.
walty8··on China lands rover on Mars
> I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.

Well, this actually reminded me the case of Apple issued Microsoft for the infringement in 1988 [1], and Apple did not win because the Mac UI was actually 'referenced' from Xerox as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....

walty8··on Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?
We recently converted a chrome extension into safari extension using the tool provided by apple [1]. While the conversion is smooth in general, the generated app (not the extension) got UI issue during extension review! Reviewer insists the app does not fit the UI guideline. I need to write back and explain the entire app is actually generated by the official Apple tool. The only use of generated app is open the preferences page of Safari. Anyway, after two back and forth, the extension is finally launched.

[1]: https://bartsolutions.github.io/2020/11/20/safari-extension/

walty8··on Rust is a hard way to make a web API
Thank you! The tutorial is great.
walty8··on NASA's Curiosity rover: 3k days on Mars
It's for another rover, but I can't help thinking about it :)

https://xkcd.com/1504/

walty8··on 51% of 4M Docker images have critical vulnerabilities
I believe it's discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400249
walty8··on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams
Oh, yes, Share point, the worst nightmare when I worked in a big corp years ago. I wonder if there are really some sort of experts that understand how does it supposed to work?
walty8··on A founder’s guide to understanding users
But, that's still better than 'trying to create a product that may solve the problem of others', right? I mean, feeling the pain seems a valid start point?
walty8··on Blogging vs. Blog Setups
Actually even writing on wordpress.com is a bit too much, sometimes I just can't help but do the text decoration (font size, bold, underline). Nowadays, I write the blogs on the evernote first, it just makes your mind of writing more fluent. (Notepad also works, but you may lose the content accidentally.) Once you got the content, move it to a blog site and put down some cosmetics are just easiest tasks to do.
walty8··on Git is too hard
Yes, it works but not intuitive. I mean why use the checkout for the file reversion? And I think that's the problem of git: it's powerful and it works, but it's really not easy to get started.
walty8··on Ask HN: Are you depressed?
Just some experiences of mine, I had been really stressful when trying to get a job, long time ago. And eventually I started the jogging at the time. To me, it's like sort of hedge, if I got my job later, I got a heathier body due to more work out. In other words, the destiny is not going to screw me up on both sides :)

Actually, I kept on jogging even after I got the job later, I don't know why but that does make you feel a bit better about life.

walty8··on Going from $0 to $2M ARR in 2 years
The article is actually useful, despite the annoying introduction line of `a few million poorer`. People could stop reading the article for whatever reasons.

Just one typo I believe, at the end of https://laskie.co/playbooks/bootstrapping-b2b-sales/cold-ema..., should be `same for emails` instead of `same for calls`.

walty8··on The code I shared was so bad, someone got kicked out of the country
I think the title is a bit misleading.

> ... a while later I found out that the stress of completing all his other courses on top of his master's project had lead him to take the very bad decision of cheating on one of his exams. He'd been caught, expelled from the university, had his Visa revoked, and ultimately been kicked out of the country.

walty8··on Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
I figured it out in another incidence. I was in my first year as programmer, and I believed I was a pretty good one.

I remember I was hanging around in a small computer book store, and there was a big book of 'code complete 2' there. I have totally no idea what's that, just opened it out of interest, and I remember I flipped to a chapter about how to write a good 'if else'. And I was like 'holy crap, I wasted my entire life, I never thought in that way, I must be the rookiest rookie in the entire programmer world'. I immediately purchased the book, and that indeed helped me a huge deal in the career.

walty8··on Rust explained using easy English
I think the paragraphs are simple enough, but my personal preferences is, some paragraphs better come first than others.

I am not sure if it's the same to others, but for me to learn a language for the first 15 minutes, I am really not interested with the differences of signed vs unsigned integers. I may have look of this when I got stuck somewhere later.

I think a better order will be:

1. play ground

2. hello world

3. control flow

4. function declaration

5. string, list and dict

6. featured stuff with this language (e.g. threading, async call)

I should be able to write basic stuff and play around with the above. Then I would try to sort out all kinds of remaining pitfalls myself :)

walty8··on Guide to Python Debugging
may be python pdb?

https://docs.python.org/3/library/pdb.html

walty8··on InboxSDK – Build apps inside Gmail
Yes,I did fix a few. However, there are two places I am uncomfortable with gmail.js (again, that's a few years ago):

1. I remember it greatly depend on hijack of a global variable in Gmail.com, but occasionally the value is not available (depend on where the user refreshed the page and network speed of the user)

2. it try to send network requests to Gmail.com directly (on behalf of logged in Gmail user) and get the query result, but those API are supposed to be used only by Gmail.com internally. So once the API format changes, some data could not be collected.

In general I think this approach raised too much dependency on misc aspects of Gmail.com. Now customized DOM parsing also depend on Gmail UI, but that should be the ONLY thing that would break the system.

walty8··on InboxSDK – Build apps inside Gmail
I am the author of Simple Gmail Notes (a free extension for Chrome and FF). When I started to develop the extension years ago, I did some research of InboxSDK and Gmail.js. I am not sure if it's still true now, but at that time when I use the SDK I need to load a remote and minified JS file hosted at the Streak server, which seems not a good idea for security concerns. I don't think Streak will try to steal the data in purpose, but still... Also, I wonder if that might cause problems with extension verification nowadays. Both FF and Chrome has more strict safety policies now.

I then tried to use Gmail.js for a while, but it seems not that stable, the extension got a lot of complaints of not working from time to time (Gmail.js cannot load email data correctly, but not every time).

After a few months, I finally decided to parse the DOM data myself, it's actually not THAT difficult, if you are not trying to build an extremely powerful extension.Gmail.com did change the UI from time to time, but it's not that huge actually. For the latest big UI change on Gmail, I remember it took me about 1MD to finish all the required code changes.

walty8··on How SSH Port Became 22
I am sure the site admin will find surprisingly high traffic today :)
walty8··on I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days (2015)

  (Actually in order to keep the commit history clean, I continue rewriting commit history and doing `git push -f`, 
actually I wonder if you might consider to maintain another clean repository. So there is a raw repository to record every real history, and a clean repositiory to for better reading? Because sometimes the raw history could be interesting too.
walty8··on Betrayed by the Android UI [slides]
Just curious, is this restricted to Android only?
walty8··on Improving DuckDuckGo
From your source:

In fact, DuckDuck Go gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

We continue to partner with more and more sources to bring you the best Instant Answers from the best sources. Our focus is on synthesizing it all together into a superior search experience.

I suppose that's quite different than 'DDG is a frontend to Bing results'?

walty8··on Improving DuckDuckGo
just open a guest window from chrome, and type the same search terms in the two different search engines, and you would see different results. it's not hard to verify.
walty8··on Openbook social network
Based on wappalyzer, webpack & jquery are used on the website. But no other framework (React, Vue, Ionic) is detected... So it's just jquery + webpack?