Hacker News: Lazlo_Nibble

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work"

Lazlo_Nibble — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 22:45:39 +0000

In 15+ years of building and maintaining SWIFT-connected systems that run SWIFT-provided software, I’ve never encountered a situation where a SWIFT message has “just disappeared”.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Cryptocurrencies: looking beyond the hype"

Lazlo_Nibble — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 19:41:02 +0000

SWIFT charges pennies (well, eurocents) per message. The fees you’re referring to are imposed by the institutions on either end of the transaction.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?"

Lazlo_Nibble — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 19:39:34 +0000

CD ripping. Initial audio pass in an older version of EAC, which hands off to the scripts. Those validate the audio against the AccurateRip + CUETools databases and file the rip appropriately if there's a failure (e.g. "might be a different pressing" vs. "few enough bad samples to be repairable" vs. "completely aborted the rip", etc.). Then a second pass on the disc to extract subcode data and embed any TOC/subcode differences as comments in the cuesheet. Then, based on that, automatically generate a de-emphasized version for discs with the PRE flag set anywhere, then extract additional metadata (full release date, disc number, featured artists) from the title data I manually entered in EAC, compress to FLAC, embed the cuesheet, transcode .m4a copies, and file.

Automatically adding sort-artist fields to the cuesheet/.m4a files is next (I have a good source in the software that I use for cataloging the collection). I also need to write something that backports changes made to the tags in the .m4a files to the original cuesheet...

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Review: The NES Classic Edition and all 30 games on it"

Lazlo_Nibble — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 20:37:53 +0000

There are already a lot of completed "presale" sales on eBay for $125-$189.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "The 'bogus boss' email scam costing firms millions"

Lazlo_Nibble — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 21:15:10 +0000

Oh, the havoc you could wreak with control of the .corn TLD!

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Headphones are the new walls for people in open-plan offices"

Lazlo_Nibble — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 19:01:34 +0000

The pro-open-plan side is armed with hard numbers; cost-per-employee for one buildout vs. another is easy to measure up front. The anti-open-plan side has no way of generating the equivalent numbers for lost productivity and even their best attempts at estimating them (relying on studies, etc.) are vulnerable to being dismissed as "just guessing". Hard numbers win over soft numbers.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "24/192 music downloads are silly"

Lazlo_Nibble — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 03:42:37 +0000

Uh, no. Bit-perfect ripping is trivial and routine, and tools like the AccurateRip DB (which has checksums for around three million different titles you can use to verify the checksums on your own rips) and the CUEtools database (which has recovery records you can use to correct bit errors on your own rips) prove it. I routinely get bit-accurate single-pass high-speed rips--no "paranoid" settings or re-reads--of discs dating back thirty years or more, and so do hundreds of thousands of other people. If you get different checksums on successive rips of the same CD, either the disc is damaged or the drive you're using is failing.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Elevator Algorithms"

Lazlo_Nibble — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:30:22 +0000

I saw this implemented at (I think) Times Square Tower a few years back. It had you enter your floor at a podium in the main lobby on the way to the elevators, and it worked beautifully. 49 floors and not once did I have to wait more than ten or 15 seconds for an elevator.

Then they retrofitted a similar system back at my corp HQ. It had you enter your floor on a screen on the wall right in the middle of the elevator lobby and it was (and is) kind of a pain in the ass...because when there's a crush of people waiting for the elevators, you can't get to the screen to enter your floor. When it was just the "up" and "down" buttons in the same location, the odds were pretty good that someone in the crush had already pushed the button you need, but...

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "RFC: Blanking all Wikipedia as SOPA protest"

Lazlo_Nibble — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:43:04 +0000

EFF is a 501 (c) (3). If EFF can advocate, so can Wikipedia.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Amazon Will Pay Shoppers $5 to Walk Out of Stores Empty-Handed"

Lazlo_Nibble — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:53:12 +0000

Amazon is already working with 7-11 to provide this service.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior "

Lazlo_Nibble — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:34:08 +0000

You can't? What's this screenshot showing, then?

http://i.imgur.com/acOje.png

(That's a serious question, BTW. I would check it myself but I can't upgrade to iOS5 until I figure out how to get Windows DEP to stop killing iTunes 10.5 every time I launch it.)

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Google Calendar has a new look"

Lazlo_Nibble — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:40:45 +0000

The search bar is ridiculously large, especially given how rarely I suspect most folks actually run searches against their calendar. I'm sure some people are doing it constantly but if I've even done it once I'd be surprised.

There's an awful lot of unused horizontal space in that black bar. Seems like a good location for a search box.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games"

Lazlo_Nibble — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:27:07 +0000

Zork was an adaptation of DUNGEON, not Adventure. (Or DUNGEO, as it was called on our PDP-11/34a in high school. Still have my maps!)

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "The Lost Art of Threaded Discussions (2009)"

Lazlo_Nibble — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:54:30 +0000

Agreed re: community size and Usenet's inability to scale to it (see: http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/images/wiredquote.jpg). My lament is strictly about the tools used to interact with that community.

Most web discussion boards are just GUI on top of a message store, and the reading/posting pieces of NNTP are a stable, standardized API for interacting with just such a message store. If every VBulletin instance also exposed an NNTP interface to its message content, I think it would be a huge step forward for discussion-board usability. (Well, once the NNTP-client world woke back up again. Are there even any actively-developed NNTP clients left that aren't focused on guzzling pirated media from the .binaries. groups?)

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "The Lost Art of Threaded Discussions (2009)"

Lazlo_Nibble — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:52:58 +0000

Unless you've actually used a decent newsreader like trn, It's difficult to appreciate just how much we've given up by moving most online discussions to the web. Loss of threaded discussions isn't the worst of it -- many of the web-based discussion boards I frequent don't even properly track which messages you've actually read, using a vague "last time you visited" heuristic instead.

I miss being able to catch up on all my discussion topics using almost nothing except the space bar.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year"

Lazlo_Nibble — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:19:47 +0000

That's a huge assumption that I doubt very much will survive the EULA you'd need to agree to in order to use iTunes Match. It seems unlikely that the labels have licensed Apple to run the world's biggest pirated-music-laundering service.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "What Safari’s Reading List means for Instapaper"

Lazlo_Nibble — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 01:40:59 +0000

Instapaper also works from any browser on any platform. I don't see that happening with Reading list anytime soon.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "What Safari’s Reading List means for Instapaper"

Lazlo_Nibble — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:40:46 +0000

The vast majority of the articles I add to Instapaper, I add from Firefox on my desktop at work. And virtually all the articles I read in Instapaper, I read when I'm off-network completely (I have an iPod touch). I don't think Marco has much to worry about yet.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Purpose of a 'mystery key' on IBM PC 3270 keyboard"

Lazlo_Nibble — Tue, 31 May 2011 21:23:08 +0000

People have actually paid me to do editing (the fools!), and I know the standard proofreading marks backwards and forwards, but I still didn't read the graphic on the key as "delete". I might have been able to suss it out if you told me it was supposed to represent an editing mark but looking at it absolutely cold? No way.

The person who designed the keycap probably had to cobble it together from a set of standard characters/symbols. If they'd used a more freehand representation, like the one shown on the 6110344 layout further down the page, it would have been immediately obvious.

New comment by Lazlo_Nibble in "Skip Flash, Build Animations in HTML5 With Hype (YC W11)"

Lazlo_Nibble — Fri, 20 May 2011 21:33:57 +0000

Is the name Hype not admission enough?