HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zoky

1,087 karma · joined June 14, 2023

submissionscomments
zoky··on Apple Music 404 Not Found
Neither does the posted link, that’s the point. It was a reference to a legendary Slashdot post from when the original iPod came out… never mind.
zoky··on Apple Music 404 Not Found
No wireless. Less space than creative.com/nomad. Lame.
zoky··on IRCv3
FTP is perfectly secure though when run over SSL (FTPS), so why not use the protocol that’s already designed for file transfer with the server that makes it easy?
zoky··on IRCv3
It’s way more of a hassle than that. Things like per-user chroot, managing permissions, restricting access to port 22… all much more difficult with SFTP. With an FTP server like vsftpd, you can just create virtual users and assign them home directories, then everything is just owned by the user running the ftp daemon process.
zoky··on IRCv3
SSH requires a system account. FTP access can be granted and revoked via a database, or even a text file.
zoky··on IRCv3
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.

FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).

zoky··on IRCv3
FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.
zoky··on Time Travel in Braid (2015)
It seems like over the years Braid has gone through alternating periods of being praised as an absolute masterpiece and being derided as pretentious self-gratification by an arrogant and particularly insufferable developer.

In any case, anyone who like Braid should play Baba is You. Both games present the same sort of enjoyable mindscrew.

zoky··on Fastpotify
It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?
zoky··on A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy
Running it through the pipe lets you preview the command first and make sure it actually looks correct. Then you just re-run the command and append the bash pipe.
zoky··on A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy
The cool thing about programming languages like Ruby is that they’re very conducive to one-liners. You can use them to generate bash statements that you can then pipe back to bash. `ls | ruby -nle 'puts "mv #{$_} #{$_.gsub(/_/, ".")}"' | bash` is a pattern I use all the time, for example. Easy way of generating complex bash statements without having to bother with the bash man page.
zoky··on git's –end-of-options Flag
As a primarily FreeBSD user who feels like I have to relearn the idiosyncrasies of practically the entire system every I install a new Linux distro, the mess of configuration options somehow actually seems entirely on-brand to me.
zoky··on SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
something something XKCD competing standards something something
zoky··on The seven programming ur-languages (2022)
Not at all. That’s like saying learning how different kinds of engines work is redundant in the age of taxis. You don’t have to know any of this stuff in order to get from A to B. But if you want to understand the processes involved in getting there, or you maybe want to be the one that builds a better self-driving vehicle, this is where you should start.
zoky··on Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh
This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.

If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.

But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).

zoky··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
Passersby
zoky··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
And likewise the Romanian “dumneavoastră” evolved into… nothing, that’s still the polite form of “you” in Romanian. Interestingly though, it can be used in both the singular and plural, and takes verbs conjugated exactly the same way for both forms (i.e. the second person plural).
zoky··on Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
The 2019 Intel Mac Pro had PCIe slots. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro still has them as well, but they’re pretty much useless.
zoky··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
Except that requiring you to testify in order to absolve yourself of guilt violates your Fifth Amendment right not to testify in a trial against you. It is up to the government to prove you did something, not up to you to prove you didn’t.
zoky··on Meta Deployed AI and It Is Killing Our Agency
Man, fuck Facebook Marketplace. I cannot figure out for the life of me why everyone decided to abandon the perfectly useable Craigslist for that unreliable, buggy, scam-laden pile of hot garbage. Never once have I had a single good experience with Facebook Marketplace.
zoky··on Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus
Well, okay, but that’s like 95% of flying.
zoky··on An open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller
It is a work in progress and is far from providing all the features you might expect from a later model 3174, but it does provide basic TN3270 and VT100 emulation.

+ TN3270

+ Extended Data Stream

+ Basic TN3270E

+ Device name (LU) negotiation

o SSL/TLS

I think that last one is a joke but I really don’t know enough about this sort of thing to be sure…

zoky··on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
Such a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.
zoky··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
I mean, technically it’s short for alter on the way to being short for alternate
zoky··on Email experiments: filtering out external images
I see them all the time. Usually it’s in the form of “choose your 2FA method” and it gives you a choice between SMS/email/phone call or whatever.
zoky··on Television is 100 years old today
For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.
zoky··on Captive Wi-Fi
How do they block them? The only way I can think of would be signal jamming, which is super illegal and would have the FCC on them like brown on coffee beans…
zoky··on Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025)
Actually, the Canadian government suppresses it because they just really don’t want anyone to know how to get to 64K RAM, ON.
zoky··on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
I mean, you gotta read it. I’m not normally a huge fan of the classics; I find Steinbeck dry and tedious, and Hemingway to be self-indulgent and repetitious. Even Twain’s other work isn’t exactly to my taste. But I’ve read Huckleberry Finn three times—in elementary school just for fun, in high school because it was assigned, and I recently listened to it on audiobook—and enjoyed the hell out of each time. Banning it simply because it uses a word that the entire book simply couldn’t exist without is a crime, and does a huge disservice to the very students they are supposedly trying to protect.
zoky··on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
Banning Huckleberry Finn from a school district should be grounds for immediate dismissal.
Page 1 of 14Next →