News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jesterpm

Re:The Minneapolis Street Grid: Explained on Thursday September 12, 2024 @07:25PM (#41526710)
I wouldn't be surprised if it's not already in the Municipal Code for the city, since they need a way to maintain consistency. For example, here's the divisions in Renton, which are oddly complicated relative to the size of the city: https://www.codepublishing.com/WA/Renton/#!/Renton09/Renton0...
Re:Mod_blog: A Blogging Engine in C on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:34PM (#39151416)
Oh this is fun. I'm in the process of building something similar, but I'm splitting it into two parts: the first part is a static site generator and the second is a CGI that implements the micropub spec, which can run the static site generator when it receives new content.
Re:Where does my computer get the time from? on Thursday October 05, 2023 @01:13PM (#37781228)
It's even weirder with people: blood sugar level change with how you perceive time to be passing, not the actual amount of time: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1603444113
Re:Amazon Ion Specification on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @03:38PM (#37500782)
That comparison would depend heavily on what you're storing.

Ion has the option of using symbol tables to replace strings (e.g. in struct/map keys or in values). So, if you benchmark had a large number of records with similar structures, I would expect Ion to pull ahead. On the other hand, if each record had nothing in common, I'd expect them to perform similarly.

One feature of the Ion libraries that I've liked is the parser will take any of the formats and figure out what to do with it (text, binary, compressed binary). It's one less thing to worry about. You can switch encodings later without breaking consumers, you can write plain text Ion when you're testing, etc.

Re:Amazon Ion Specification on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @02:33PM (#37499971)
Ion is heavily used on the retail side of Amazon, but it's only recently started to appear in AWS products.

AWS is starting support PartiQL (https://partiql.org/) queries in some places and PartiQL uses Ion's type system internally.

Re:I Still Use Windows 95 (archived, 2008) on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @10:17PM (#35983493)
> and the OS installed takes up well under 500MB

Fast-forward to 2023 and many individual Android apps are 100-500 MB each.

Re:Passkeys: The Beginning of the End of the Password on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @04:57PM (#35807696)
I don't use my google account for much anymore, but I love the idea. I tried very hard to use it and... it didn't work.

I went to my google account and clicked "Create a passkey", but apparent my "device doesn't support creating passkeys" (Linux, Firefox).

The page said my Pixel 2 has an automatically created passkey, so maybe I could experience the "use another device to sign in" flow. Opened a private window and my only option was a password (but there was a feedback prompt asking why I still wanted to use a password).

I tried again with Firefox on Android, but the "Create a passkey" button doesn't even appear. Same story with Chrome on Android.

Is it just me, or does the future look a lot like Internet Explorer in the early 2000s?

Re:HTTP Response Header Field: Carbon-Emissions-Scope-2 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:35PM (#35533989)
Sometimes. Sometimes the fast thing is just heavily parallelized.
RA (Router Advertisement) handles announcing the prefix for SLAAC addresses and DNS.
Re:Dumpster Diving FAQ (2004) on Monday February 27, 2023 @10:08AM (#34957255)
I suspect the lock is more about keeping other people's trash out than keeping theirs in.
I expect that's a corollary to Parkinson's law
Re:Paper Map Sales Are Booming on Monday January 23, 2023 @04:13PM (#34495139)
On our last road trip, I gave our 4 year old a printed map with the route highlighted and lettered milestones every hour or so. I was hoping to give a sense of scale (how far away are we, how far we do we travel in a certain time, etc.) that's harder to convey with a digital map. It also worked to practice letters and cardinal directions (we're at K, what's the next letter? the road turns at M, which direction will we be going now?). It worked rather well, but probably because he got a gummy bear at each waypoint.
Re:Essential Climbing Knots on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @10:25AM (#32412516)
The book I learned from suggested five types of knots for different problems and suggested learning one of type, which I found to be a great starting point.

The five were: a stopper knot, to keep a line from pulling through something, a fixed loop, a running loop, a hitch (attach a line to a thing), and a bend (attach a rope to a rope).

My go-to knots were a figure 8, bowline, running bowline, clove hitch, and sheet bend respectively.

Re:From novice to master, and back again (2013) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @12:54PM (#32400475)
I generally only need `ln -s <src> <dst>`. I know the -s means symbolic link, but in my head I read it as "source", since that's how I remembered the order long ago.
These, and the spoofed number phone calls where the other side just hangs up when you answer. For the phone calls, I just assumed that someone was trying to build a database of phone numbers that do or do not answer for some other/future purpose...
I assumed that the gap between the cost to do the bare minimum and the cost to do some elaborate was smaller at the time. If you're already laying each brick by hand, it seems like the incremental cost to work a pattern into the bricks would be small compared to modern (bland) poured-concrete buildings, where we lay a whole floor in one go. Likewise in other trades.

We invented machines to build large amounts of simple things cheaply, so we designed simpler things.

Re:Assembly Instructions Distribution on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:30PM (#31727789)
Coincidentally, just before this was posted I read a similar analysis of Windows executables from 2008: https://www.strchr.com/x86_machine_code_statistics

MOV is still the top, but it was followed by PUSH and CALL.

Re:Knots 3D – Learn how to tie over 150 useful knots on Friday May 27, 2022 @07:16PM (#31536014)
Ha, that is quite satisfying when it comes together. Maybe it's just from practice, but I think the sheet bend [1] is easier and faster to tie though.

[1]: https://www.animatedknots.com/sheet-bend-knot

Re:Knots 3D – Learn how to tie over 150 useful knots on Friday May 27, 2022 @07:10PM (#31535980)
The book I learned knots from said that there are ~5 categories of knots and knowing one of each will cover you for most things. The categories were fixed loop, running loop, stopper knot, hitch (rope to object), and bend (joining two ropes).

I have about 4-5 knots memorized for each of those category, but sailing I typically only use a cleat hitch, bowline, and clove hitch (in order of frequency).

Re:Knots 3D – Learn how to tie over 150 useful knots on Friday May 27, 2022 @06:59PM (#31535901)
Ebook: https://archive.org/details/TheAshleyBookOfKnots

The ABoK was something I always wanted to see, but never bothered to buy... until I found that PDF. Scrolling through it finally convinced me to buy a hardcopy. It's one of my favorite books to just flip through. There's more than just the knots: the history and the anecdotes are a fascinating window into the past.

Re:Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @10:16AM (#31504829)
I would actually expect worst outcomes if you turned it into a three day weekend. Why stay in town and vote when you could use the three day weekend for something more fun?

With typical work weeks in mind, midweek makes more sense to avoid conflicting with weekends.

(and here's why we don't have unanimous agreement—it's always the little details that hang people up)

Re:Twelve-factor app anno 2022 on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @07:21PM (#31254867)
My bigger concern with credentials in environment variables is that environment variables are broadly accessed through may different frameworks, libraries, etc. If you can convince a library to give you an arbitrary (or all) environment variables, your credentials are leaked. The developer of that particular library may have never even considered that environment variables might contain sensitive data.

PHP's phpinfo() function comes to mind immediately: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.phpinfo.php

Older »