Hacker News: Carpetsmoker

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes"

Carpetsmoker — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 09:16:04 +0000

Perhaps this is a cultural difference, but the entire thing just seems strange from my own (European) perspective. Only in the US do people seem to take pride in their measurement system as some sort of patriotic symbol, which is why I originally thought it was a parody shrug

I'm not even going to get started with all the problems I see with "God bless America", which would be long, tedious, probably inflammatory, and fairly off-topic.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes"

Carpetsmoker — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 04:41:10 +0000

I guess ... but "God Bless America!" seems like a statement to me.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes"

Carpetsmoker — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 21:42:45 +0000

I can't tell if this is intended to be serious or a parody? "All units set in inches" makes it sound like a parody, but the "God bless America" footer makes it sound serious? Hmmm

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers"

Carpetsmoker — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 09:10:56 +0000

What advantage does this give you? DDG just gave you a list of URLs, so how can it be "tracking" the results it just presented to you?

The issue, as I understand it, is that the Android app loads the favicon service for search results you actually open in the app.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion'"

Carpetsmoker — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:37:40 +0000

Yeah, maybe. I don't really know much of the Windows internals, so I try not to assume too much (hence my question in the top comment[1], which was very much a "curiosity"-question, and not a "omg, wtf"-question).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23656237

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Palm – The best small phone for minimalists, athletes, and kids"

Carpetsmoker — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 10:44:10 +0000

The device was released in Oct 2018 though, so at the time it was the newest Android version (9 was just released, probably too late in the Palm dev cycle).

The $280 price tag is a biggest show-stopper IMO (and according to the Palm website that's a "sale" from the $400 price tag, although I never quite trust that). I paid $70 for my basic Android device (Samsung Core A2) and that works just fine as well (with some minor caveats/limitations of Android Go, such as the screen not lighting up when there's a notification).

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion'"

Carpetsmoker — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 03:14:38 +0000

I think that might actually be harder than it sounds though, since Windows is such an integrated system.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion'"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:01:01 +0000

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but if you're going to do forced updates then you might as well spend some time making the entire user experience nicer. I don't know what the technical challenges are exactly, but not forcing a reboot unless there's really a critical patch might be a good start.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 19:39:04 +0000

So what is the latency on seL4 then for a similar program? And how well is the performance under real-world desktop conditions compared to Linux, macOS, Windows, etc? I read through that PDF and it doesn't really contain concrete answers to that.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 10:11:05 +0000

But there are also a lot of drawbacks of RTOS systems, no? Just searching "Real-time operating system downsides" shows a lot of drawbacks that makes it seem like a poor fit for a general-purpose OS: multi-tasking is limited, it's less efficient, and much more complex. There are certain use-cases where this is a good trade-off, but for my desktop OS? Probably not.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 09:47:02 +0000

I'm sorry, but this is such a non-answer. What am I supposed to do with this? Clearly things aren't that simple to achieve negligible latency, otherwise we would have it. I bet there are a lot of trade-offs involved here (there usually are), and simply stating "take latency serious" isn't helpful in having any meaningful conversation about this.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 07:56:52 +0000

What would a "non-pathetic" latency look like? What improvements in "the stack" would be needed?

The 130ms is "the time from light hitting the camera to when it appears on-screen on the other side". The article doesn't really specify where the latency happens, but with just the encoding/decoding of video alone I think you'll very quickly get latencies in roughly the ~100ms ballpark no matter what.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 05:31:13 +0000

BitCoin has fluctuated much more than 10% in the last year though: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XBT&to=USD&view=1Y

Certainly much more than USD/EUR: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1Y

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Show HN: Aviary.sh – A tiny Bash alternative to Ansible"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 05:12:40 +0000

Discounting an entire tool just because you don't like their recommended installation method (which you're hardly forced to use) sounds rather strange to me.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "When you type realty.com into Safari it takes you to realtor.com"

Carpetsmoker — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 04:12:55 +0000

Sponsored search results are marked as such in the Google results, it's nothing like the automagic redirect Safari is showing here.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics"

Carpetsmoker — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 08:55:16 +0000

You don't need anything, but it's a useful way to do it without any significant drawbacks. In many cases, it's more or less the only option.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics"

Carpetsmoker — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 08:27:45 +0000

IMO it's pretty much useless (and possibly even harmful) and a failed experiment. GoatCounter intentionally ignores it. Context: https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics"

Carpetsmoker — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 08:23:41 +0000

> I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if that was intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post and the goals of open source.

Yes, this was intentional as this article was focused on "light-weight" analytics. I think they'll do an article about Matomo at some point in the future as well.

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics"

Carpetsmoker — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 08:22:38 +0000

Counting how many people come in to your store and how many of them actually but something is not "spying".

New comment by Carpetsmoker in "Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics"

Carpetsmoker — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 08:21:02 +0000

GA alternatives are a fairly new thing. When I looked at this in May last year there was essentially only one alternative: Matomo. It seems some sort of "critical mass" has been reached, and in the last year quite a few people have independently started working on alternatives.

I agree for many features are still lacking, but as a counter-argument 1) not everyone needs those features (not every product needs to solve 100% of the use cases), and 2) a lot of these products are still quite new, and are actively working on adding a number of those features.