News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ctstover

Re:Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @10:12AM (#41109393)
fyi - that font is almost illegible on chrome on x11 @ 96dpi
Re:George H.W. Bush, 41st president of United States dead at 94 on Saturday December 01, 2018 @12:46AM (#18575433)
That was the spammy-est link I've seen in a month. I never even made it to the article behind a blitzkrieg of adds.
I would love to see this catch on all over the country. There always have been, and always will be trade offs that often do make rail travel (in the abstract) superior to commercial air. 75 year long story short, the implementation in the US is broken, and will never be fixed. This should be marketed, and envisioned as a competitor to rail and existing bus lines.

I also think they should research route combinations that have terrible or no commercial air options. There are hundreds of these. Think about flying between two tier 3-4 cites. Or places where people take road trips to popular destinations from tier 1 cites. For that matter you might do well with families.

Ah, but do not spellcheckers use the capitalization to detect proper nouns in the first place?
Are there any known reasonably accurate algorithms for taking all caps English words, and converting it to mixed case?
Re:Flippaper: Draw your own pinball in real time on Saturday April 09, 2016 @12:33PM (#11461955)
You honestly don't think people in the 2030s are not going to think smart phones and tablets are "shitty useless junk"? There are plenty of people now feel that way.

Also I think your impression of 80s consumer tech is woefully laking.

Re:Aligning Text Smartly in CSS on Thursday April 07, 2016 @01:02PM (#11448798)
Good riddance! Back in my day we had character cells, and we had pixels. Is it not self evident that the entire browser ecosystem is wholly dysfunctional and psychotic? Personally, I'm holding out for left-align text as a service that uses a client with a 2GB dependency tree and infinite polling.
Re:Ask HN: Book binding / printing nomenclature question on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @08:30AM (#11438287)
thank you

Ask HN: Book binding / printing nomenclature question

Most people have probably encountered a book of say a few hundred text pages on cheaper "regular" paper, with a bundle of a few pages of color glossy photos in the middle. Does this technique have a industry name? Is it commonly called something? There are a several variations. Sometimes you see the same type of paper, but the line drawing figures are all in the same few pages.

( Read More... | 2 comments | on HN )
Re:Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms on Monday April 04, 2016 @01:47PM (#11423811)
While I would love a contemporary performance computer that can be trusted, no such device is even remotely possible in the manufacturing and fabrication ecosystems of today. Consider for just a moment ALL the chips inside the box. All the microcode, all the ROM, all the places something could be intentionally hidden. The idea that you could buy some parts on the internet at retail price that could satisfy the truly paranoid (ie defense & espionage communities) is ridiculous.

On the other hand, it still is probably possible to prevent a computers unrestricted access to the internet. For now at least.

Re:Ubuntu on Windows on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @11:51PM (#11394862)
I've seen plenty of windows centric IT departments that would try to ban this from being installed. This act of admission will just be to iconoclastic for all those really enterprisey entrenched forces. You know the type.
Re:A Saner Windows Command Line on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @12:20PM (#11390407)
let me guess (the keyboard is the give away) when you say unix, you mean osx. Yeah, that terminal induces rage, and the bash is like 40 years stale.
Re:Lee Sedol Beats AlphaGo in Game 4 on Sunday March 13, 2016 @01:38PM (#11278526)
As a human, I'm pulling for the human. As a computer programmer, I'm pulling for the human. As a romantic, I'm pulling for the human. As a fan of science fiction, I'm pulling for the human. To me it will matter even he can pull off a 3-2 loss over a 4-1 loss.
Re:The VAX platform is no more for OpenBSD on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @11:46PM (#11257422)
I installed it on simh a few weeks ago. It took a few tries, but compared to the netbsd which I never did get 100%, it was a smooth ride. Now where did I save that...
Re:C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @09:53AM (#11253249)
Are they still offering the C1? It's absent from the pricing page.
This peaked my curiosity since I'm considering moving there. You must be exaggerating a bit since I just looked it up, and around the winter solstice the sun rise set times are like 7:55 - 4:20.
Life Tip: Most of the time, things at work are not going to go your way. Most of the time, you will not be rewarded, recognized, or even treated fairly. You will also always see others with seemingly the opposite experience. This is baseline normal.

Now, when this happens to you, you might be tempted to ask if things are stacked against you for one reason or another. When you get to this line of thinking, you should revisit the reasons why life is good, instead of fanning the flames of political cancers.

Re:Ask HN: Raising money for the first time, any tips? on Monday March 07, 2016 @02:38PM (#11241019)
> 1 intermediate engineer = $65,000 CAD / year = $48,888 USD / year

The gross annual amount of an employee's base salary is very different than the cost of hiring an employee with said base salary. I know CA != US, but payroll taxes, benefits, retirement contributions, unemployment and disability insurance, etc can't be that alien of a concept. Or is it? In the US estimate 130%-160% of the salary for base employment. Or is circa 30k for an intermediate engineer normal in Vancouver? In which case what would the entry level position make?

Re:Cygwin and MinGW utilities may lose files on Friday March 04, 2016 @12:55PM (#11225506)
In any case where one has to mitigate the problems of bringing windows into the mix. At my last job I had several bridges to windows only systems and silliness that exposed out to a nix universe with ssh invokable cli tools.

Currently my only use case is that it does count in my book as a different variety of nix. If you are attempting to have a portable software it is another platform you can use to for testing that can be brought into a CI pipeline.

A more common use case (though still strange) is people using windows natively, who want to use C, C++, Fortran, Ada, etc to make windows programs (instead of cross compiling from Linux). Generally this category is students, and this is still far more educationally beneficial than attempting to learn skills with long term value from say visual studio's IDE.

edit note: asterisks make things italics on hn

Re:How to Deploy Software on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @01:12PM (#11211756)
The font rendered with iceweasel on debian 8 is illegible.
Why does this make me think of RAM doublers from the win 3.1 era?
Re:Investigate switching away from GitHub on Thursday February 11, 2016 @10:57PM (#11085193)
lol
Re:Kill Your Dependencies on Thursday February 11, 2016 @05:37PM (#11083891)
Ran out of RAM or address space? I've run out of RAM trying to ridiculous stuff like native builds on tiny embedded systems (due to whack code bases that wouldn't cross compile). Though, in the end I overcame this with even more perverse solutions like adding swap space via USB1 flash.

That aside, that is the third time in a couple of months that I have heard people mention situations where they ran out of RAM without explaining why swap could not at least work as a stop gap measure.

Re:Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @11:44AM (#11073961)
1. Sounds like a market opportunity for a beginner oriented forum, that somehow incentivizes experts to help constructively.

2. The number one sign an expert is an impostor is the way the play the role of a teacher and student.

3. The main thing I hate about SO is the illogical ban on questions that recommend something. At least 80% of my searches that land on a SO page are like, "this is blacklisted by some troll master, because it encourages people to post links to cool and interesting things that might be outside of the box".

Re:Nanomsg postmortem and other stories on Monday February 08, 2016 @09:52AM (#11058366)
Really? The whole thing used to be about fun. Like, "hey look at this!". Do you really need press secretary and events coordinator? If you were running a business, yes. That was the entire concept of enterprises like Red Hat and Canonical, even parts of Intel and IBM. That is, repackage and support semi-organized hackery.

Again, we don't want to devolve into the bureaucracies F/OSS usurped. (Ideas + fun + seeking prestige + curiosity) * tenacity = occasional glory.

Stalinist, no. Mob culture? Lost its way? Disconnected from history? yes.
Re:Secret US flight flew over Scottish airspace to capture Snowden on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @12:27PM (#11027838)
Four legs good, two legs bad! Snuff him out!
Re:The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry (1944) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @05:04PM (#11023043)
My startup is a leader in cloud based turbo-encabulation.
Re:Open-Sourced Logos on Saturday January 30, 2016 @11:45PM (#11005259)
I like this, but I'm trying to understand the consequences of more than one person using the same one. I think the answer is, nothing until two or more users start to clash. At which point it will come down to who trademarked it first. That sounds reasonable, since you are probably dealing with small use cases wouldn't bother trademarking such a thing. They would get their own unique one first.

One the other hand, I suppose a new type of "trademark troll" could hypothetically arise from paying to trademark these, and then suing you for using them. Although I would like to think that a reasonable defense in court would be, "look I just got it for free from this site, and I willing to stop using it". ... and on the third hand, we see actual out of court settlements for patents that have less to stand on than that.

So I guess it's more of a "who gives a damn", and "quit worrying so much" thing.

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