Hacker News: a8000

New comment by a8000 in "For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins"

a8000 — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 13:04:37 +0000

Fast international money transfer is something that is already handled very well for those that truly need it. I know for a fact that the european central bank handles large volume transactions in a matter of seconds if not less. There is really no reason why traditional banks could not offer significantly shorter processing times for the majority of their services, it is just not in their interest to do so.

New comment by a8000 in "For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins"

a8000 — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:56:57 +0000

They actually have to at least in some countries, you can't just only accept a made up currency and not legal tender.

New comment by a8000 in "For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins"

a8000 — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:49:07 +0000

In the case of fiat money, it does have value because you have to pay taxes with it and anyone has to accept it for settling debts.

New comment by a8000 in "LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment"

a8000 — Thu, 08 May 2014 23:15:16 +0000

I remember when I first switched to kde 4.0 and everything slowed to a crawl because some background process (nepomuk) thought it was a good idea to index the whole filesystem.

New comment by a8000 in "Cakebrew: The Mac App for Homebrew"

a8000 — Thu, 08 May 2014 18:11:12 +0000

In my eyes it is unfortunate that the terminal standard we are stuck with is dictated by a device designed in the 70s (vt100). There have been more advanced terminals, that had support for graphics and so on.

New comment by a8000 in "Free Your Android"

a8000 — Thu, 08 May 2014 14:12:27 +0000

Just like Private Browsing Modes in Chrome/Firefox tell you that they won't protect from agents.

New comment by a8000 in "The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source"

a8000 — Wed, 07 May 2014 21:51:37 +0000

"Not even wrong" is something W. Pauli said first, although Feynman might have quoted him.

New comment by a8000 in "Facebook announces anonymous login"

a8000 — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 23:13:35 +0000

I think people solve universal login without any service fairly successfully. They use the same email as account name and the same password on every service. There is really no need to have some external provider that manages "universal login" however convenient this might be for advertising and marketing purposes.

New comment by a8000 in "Twitter Reports First Quarter 2014 Results"

a8000 — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 01:13:35 +0000

Does stock based compensation of 640 million mean that they are buying 640 million dollars worth of their own stock each year?

New comment by a8000 in "Cakebrew: The Mac App for Homebrew"

a8000 — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:50:15 +0000

In principle you can add full colors, image capabilities and direct manipulation of objects to a shell, see for example IPython (the Qt-shell) or Mathematica. Ultimately any large enough GUI application will add scripting support, take autocad for example. There are arguably tons of simple applications that are simpler to use if implemented as command line tools, for example video/audio conversion, archival tools

New comment by a8000 in "Why Facebook Can’t Figure Out What to Do With Its Apps"

a8000 — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 15:10:17 +0000

Events in the sense of: Here are all the queer reggae parties in Birmingham tonight/the next three months displayed on a map. If you decide to attend, get a semianonymous link you can send to all your friends by whatever method you chose, they can decide to attend simply by adding themselves to the list. Basically like doodle.com but with public location sensitive event listing. No signup or authentification required. There is no good reason to tighly couple all this to a online friendlist, you can just as easily manage your friends with an offline contact list that is synced to all your devices and use email/im to communicate.

New comment by a8000 in "LibreSSL"

a8000 — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:20:34 +0000

People not using Windows, wont see this font to begin with, unless they chose to install Comic Sans for some reason.

New comment by a8000 in "LibreSSL"

a8000 — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:18:08 +0000

There are efforts by Microsoft Research in this direction: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/slam/ They have developed several domain specific languages and specification tools for developing drivers. I think similar methods are applicable to protocols.

New comment by a8000 in "LibreSSL"

a8000 — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 08:03:54 +0000

Of course anyone who has not installed Microsoft Fonts won't see this at all.

New comment by a8000 in "Why Facebook Can’t Figure Out What to Do With Its Apps"

a8000 — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:16:07 +0000

I think a startup focussing on only events and doing them well could have some potential.

New comment by a8000 in "Why can’t America get the sidewalk café right?"

a8000 — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 08:23:42 +0000

England does also not have the right weather. It is much nicer to sit outside in the evening and enjoy a whine, if you are not freezing.

New comment by a8000 in "Why can’t America get the sidewalk café right?"

a8000 — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 08:19:30 +0000

Lots of european cities have pedestrian zones, usually in the historical center of the city, there also aren't as many malls. The traditional medieval european city layout has market, town and church squares at their core and those are still places of public gathering today.

New comment by a8000 in "Uber hit with preliminary injunction to stop service in Berlin"

a8000 — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 22:24:36 +0000

"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt..." is the beginning of the first verse of the national anthem that has now been banned, although mostly because it refers to borders that Germany now does not have anymore.

New comment by a8000 in "Tptacek's Review of "Practical Cryptography With Go""

a8000 — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 10:26:21 +0000

One symmetric cryptography method are one-time pads. Essentially you generate a truly random key (for example by observing some decay process) that has the same length as the maximum length of a message you might want to send and distribute the key to the receiver in advance. You encrypt the message by modular vector addition and decrypt it by subtracting the key. If you use the key only once and it is random, there can't be any attack on this method.

New comment by a8000 in "Tptacek's Review of "Practical Cryptography With Go""

a8000 — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 10:15:10 +0000

What I don't understand why most crypto libraries are then implemented in an inherently unsafe language. I feel something like the secure subset of Ada would have been much more apropriate.