News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

snoopybbt

Re:Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets? on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:42PM (#9293123)
Charles Baudelaire.
Re:GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter on Saturday March 28, 2015 @09:19PM (#9283518)
Oh, I see your point.

Anyway, it was my small contribution to the discussion :-)

Re:GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter on Saturday March 28, 2015 @08:28PM (#9283375)
Source from sample Makefile:

    default:	qualcosa.sh
    	JOBS=${#J} ./qualcosa.sh
Source for sample shell-script:

    #!/bin/bash
    
    echo "According to \$JOBS environment variable, the argument of -j/--jobs is $JOBS"
Re:GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter on Saturday March 28, 2015 @08:27PM (#9283372)
I don't know how many hours the author has spent/wasted on this topic (and how many people are now wasting their time coming up with other solutions that in the end do NOT fix the real problem), but...

Quite frankly, I find this whole "look i did a horrible hack and let's see who can make the best worst horrible hack" thing quite stupid and silly.

GNU Make is free software released under a free license, my opinion is that instead of doing that crazy thing, the author could have just written a patch for GNU Make in order to make it export a "JOBS" environment variable to all its child processes.

Oh but yes, "I felt this feature was missing so I added it" is way way way less cool than "geez the gnu make folks are insane lollerplex they have no way to know how many jobs they're running".

ALSO: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe2

Here it is a patched version of GNU Make, providing a #J variable that holds the number of jobs as passed via -j/--jobs:

    http://santoro.tk/~manu/gnumake.png

As can be seen in the screenshot, it can be passed as environment variable to programs called by make

Source: https://github.com/esantoro/make

Re:Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb on Monday March 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#9253478)
Hey, OP's point on the topic:

I like GNU Emacs, and I run GNU Emacs most of the time.

I _do_ know how to use vi/vim and I'm quite pragmatic on the matter.

When I am doing server configurations, by the way, vi/vim start up way, way more quickly than GNU Emacs.

This is good, but as I use emacs most of the time, I end up in mixing keyboard shortcuts.

Thus, on my system, $EDITOR is /usr/bin/mg and /usr/bin/vi (vi, not vim) is a symlink to /usr/bin/mg.

So I get emacs keybindings and a fast-starting editor.

If i __do__ need syntax highlighting or anything, i run vim (not a symmlink) or the full GNU Emacs.

Put simply.

Re:Can Your Webcam Do This? on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @02:28PM (#9227619)
I am pretty much scared from this.

I mean, not only NSA and such organization were theoretically able to get a photo of you without your consent, you they can get an actuall 3D reconstruction of your whole face.

Just... Scary.

Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware on Monday March 16, 2015 @02:03PM (#9213123)
Multiple reasons:

1) you can't get new hardware delivered and get it up and running, all in under 10 minutes.

2) also, assuming the previously gathered hardware is not needed anymore, you can't just return it and say "i used it only for two days because i had a traffic spike, take this 200$ and we're okay.

3) you can't programmatically install, configure, reinstall and reconfigure hardware configurations, networking and services on phisycal services. At least, not as easily.

Many others, but these are very valid points.

Of course, Amazon is not the solution to all of the problems you could ever have, but still it solves a great deal of problems.

Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware on Monday March 16, 2015 @01:59PM (#9213084)
There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing:

Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything but it's expensive in the long run.

And this is OKAY, this is GREAT.

Once you're big enough, you know what your load is now and what your load will likely be, and you know exactly what you need now and (approximately) what you're going to need in the near future, setting up your own datacenter is way, way more effective.

Amazon does not get free electricity, free servers and/or free people time. Of course, you're paying that, and you're also paying Amazon's profits.

This is absolutely fine, as long their service fits you.

But when you grow enough, put simply, your needs change. It's just that.

Re:Pruning and Polishing: Keeping OpenBSD Modern on Sunday March 15, 2015 @05:22AM (#9205921)
That made me wonder too! Well played Ted, well played.
Re:Beware the Pretty People on Sunday March 01, 2015 @05:37AM (#9126645)
The problem comes when groupies want to make rock&roll and steal the scene from actual rockers.
Re:Ask HN: Alternatives to Gmail? on Saturday February 28, 2015 @08:12PM (#9125659)
Oh, great, thanks!!

Ask HN: Alternatives to Gmail?

Hello HN!Let's assume that for some reason you don't want to use GMail for your emails.And that also, you don't want to run your own mail server.What are the alternatives to GMail, comparable in services and quality?I think this is a general interest question, but by the way, I'm mostly interested in SMTP/IMAP access, a decent amount of space, reliability.Thanks in advance!

( Read More... | 16 comments | 26 points | on HN )
Re:Noisli – Improve focus and boost your productivity on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @02:40AM (#9025862)
For a splitsecond i read Nisoli, and i had a micro-heart-attack.
Re:Ask HN: How to estimate full stack skills? on Thursday January 29, 2015 @12:09AM (#8964463)
This is actually a good post, and it would be very useful to have some sort of repeatable way to compare your own skills to the skills requested by a certain industry/market.
Re:Olivetti Programma 101 “Perottina” on Thursday January 22, 2015 @06:32AM (#8928601)
The story of Olivetti is another sad story of great business created by visionary people like Adriano Olivetti, and destroyed by the same old ignorant people that run the country.

When Olivetti was in financial troubles, a task force of government people and people from other industries (FIAT, cited in the video at "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA", linked in another post) gathered together not to help Olivetti, but just to sell it.

They just did not understand what they were dealing with.

Re:Italy Now Home to World’s Deepest Swimming Pool on Saturday December 06, 2014 @02:17AM (#8708636)
Un'altra grande vittoria del PD.
Re:Simple Revision Control on Thursday November 13, 2014 @10:33AM (#8601988)
Yeah, sure. I'm definitely going to use it. Sure. Trust me.

Older »