Hacker News: ax0n

New comment by ax0n in "newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release"

ax0n — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 16:20:24 +0000

It's been a while since I used it on "embedded systems" but in our case it was running on top of OpenWRT and OpenBSD on appliance-like SOC systems (think of Soekris and Mikrotik), not directly on microcontrollers.

New comment by ax0n in "newLISP v.10.7.4 Development Release"

ax0n — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 16:15:54 +0000

I worked with Lutz, the primary developer, briefly in 2006. I used NewLISP for a few years after that, mostly for distributed computing with net-eval(). I briefly tried using it as a systems programming language where one might have reached for Perl or the then-up-and-coming Ruby or Python. If you like lispy languages, you'll probably enjoy playing with it.

New comment by ax0n in "Ask HN: How can I become more eloquent?"

ax0n — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 13:36:25 +0000

When writing, read your work out loud to find phrases that are awkward to speak, and think of ways to be more succinct. Most people process spoken and written language differently, and this technique allows you to use the strengths of language you've obtained for both forms of communication.

New comment by ax0n in "OpenBSD 6.0, to be released September 1"

ax0n — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 21:28:04 +0000

Hotplugd is crazysauce. So much you can do with it. Toad claims to need kern.usermount so it won't work with a default install, and will be toadally broken once this option is removed in OpenBSD 6.0. I can't speak for all OpenBSD users, but I just end up putting my sd-card reader (which sees most FAT formatted cards at sd1i) and the first available USB external drive (again, usually sd2i for FAT) in my /etc/fstab and call the mount with doas.

doas mount /sdcard

Not that big of a deal.

New comment by ax0n in "OpenBSD 6.0, to be released September 1"

ax0n — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:26:03 +0000

As someone who's used OpenBSD daily as a primary desktop OS, usermount will force me to use doas(1) (the replacement for sudo) to mount external media on my desktops/laptops. No big deal. Honestly, I usually do that anyway, just force of habit. Checking my systems, I only set kern.usermount on my daily-driver laptop, and none of my other OpenBSD boxes.

None of the other changes impact anything I do on a daily basis. I haven't used Linux emulation since 2006 or so, and even then, it was a gigantic pain in the ass. The devs have a native virtual machine hypervisor in the works that I was hoping would be ready for prime-time in OpenBSD 6.0. I doubt it'll be ready that soon. This will provide a better option than the old Linux emulation layer.

New comment by ax0n in "Free DNS management service"

ax0n — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:20:16 +0000

A cautionary tale: I had good luck with ZoneEdit when they launched. It was/is kind of in the same space as this. Their new UI is okay, but yours looks a bit better. They started out with freemium, but eventually had to re-structure how their premium service worked, and in the process crippled how the free service worked. It got bad enough that I abandoned them.

Be very careful how you structure your premium offerings. People don't like when the free version starts losing features or capacity.

New comment by ax0n in "Script to test if your ISP is blocking your ports"

ax0n — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:28:22 +0000

better script to test if your ISP is blocking your ports (finished for me in well under two minutes):

nmap -sT -oN output.txt -p1-65535 open.zorinaq.com

New comment by ax0n in "Why I Switched to Linux"

ax0n — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:58:02 +0000

FWIW, Debian's package manager (and its concepts of package repositories and dependency resolution) hasn't changed much since I tried it in 2001 -- and probably even earlier than that. Slackware and Red Hat were my first forays into Linux, and the dependency hell you speak of was enough to drive me to FreeBSD and OpenBSD in the late 1990s.

New comment by ax0n in ""Thank you. That was a lot of fun.""

ax0n — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:54:37 +0000

Hackers do everything they do for fun. If it's not fun, it's not worth doing. It's important to note that fun things can be hard and very challenging, be it a grueling mountain bike ride or taking an idea all the way to a multi-billion dollar acquisition. Talking about how difficult something was is good for show, but hackers are often a lot more likely to dwell on how fun their journey was and all the awesome things they saw and learned.

New comment by ax0n in "IBooks detects jailbroken iphones"

ax0n — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:53:50 +0000

No, this does not open Apple up to lawsuits. Any corporation has the option of telling you what configurations are supported, and choosing to not support configurations that are the result of extensive tweaking.

New comment by ax0n in "New Lifehacker"

ax0n — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 16:52:41 +0000

Doesn't fail gracefully with javascript disabled. That's three strikes all at once for me. Thankfully, they still have a full-content RSS feed if you dig around deep enough for it. You can say RSS is dead, but I'll probably see your proclamation via RSS. This solidifies LH as a site I will never intentionally click through to.

New comment by ax0n in "$1.50 per gallon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions?"

ax0n — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 13:51:00 +0000

Most ICE's will run on pretty much anything as long as you nail stoichiometry and it burns at approximately the same speed as the hydrocarbon chains found in gasoline. It's actually pretty trivial to retrofit a normal car to run on liquid propane or natural gas. You can even run them directly on hydrogen gas, but pure hydrogen's far too volatile to be dragging around in a passenger vehicle. Interested to see where it's going.

New comment by ax0n in "Silicon Valley is Broken. Should We Even Bother to Fix It?"

ax0n — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:58:01 +0000

That sounds an awful lot like lazy and/or out-of-touch entrepreneurs being broken to me. Still, while the venture and angel money in the area isn't explicitly "must be present to win," you have to admit it helps. But being present doesn't guarantee winning.

New comment by ax0n in "XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet"

ax0n — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:36:36 +0000

No, that is an XSS exploitation (juxtapose: prevention) cheat sheet.

New comment by ax0n in "An USB plug that goes both ways"

ax0n — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:06:23 +0000

Exactment.

Also, people damage the heads and/or the jack by trying to insert them the wrong way? Either the plug slides in gently, or it doesn't budge.

New comment by ax0n in "Hans Reiser: former genius, convicted murderer and future mad scientist?"

ax0n — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:51:04 +0000

Without a massive boost in senility, a lobotomy or way too many psychoactive drugs, isn't it kind of hard for one to become a "former genius?"

New comment by ax0n in "Poll: How many hours do you work each week?"

ax0n — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:10:02 +0000

I'm AT WORK 45, sometimes 55 hours per week. Productivity comes in spurts. I'm basically working in a field that's also one of my passionate hobbies, so while part of my work day involves grinding through mundane stuff, I am often inspired and do things I love to do. Off the clock, I often come up with solutions that help me and my peers back at the day job.

New comment by ax0n in "Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme"

ax0n — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:55:19 +0000

In that whole thing, there's no numbers or names to back anything up. There's one hyperbole ($100 spent in ads to sell one book) and a bunch of really vague "people I know..." rhetoric.

Also, the author does not know what a Ponzi scheme is. Facebook Ads might be unsustainable, but it's not a bona-fide confidence trick of any sort, just like the VC dot.bomb burst at the turn of the century wasn't a confidence trick.

New comment by ax0n in "The Social Network Wins Golden Globe for Best Picture"

ax0n — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:23:26 +0000

It wasn't an overt knock on TSN -- I just don't watch many movies, so I really don't know what to expect. Aside from the geek jargon and a bit of drama, I suppose I was surprised that it was Best Picture material. I think the only movie I saw on the big screen in 2010 was TRON Legacy, which was technically part of the 2011 movie year anyway.

New comment by ax0n in "The Social Network Wins Golden Globe for Best Picture"

ax0n — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 04:33:05 +0000

I finally saw this last night. It wasn't a BAD movie: Reznor's score was magnificent, they didn't mince hacker jargon and it was interesting enough to sit through. It boggles my mind that it took Best Picture. Was 2010 really that bad for movies?

I should mention I was actually blown away by not only the technical correctness of the programmer jargon, but the fairly accurate representation of hacker wordplay, i.e. referring to the Winklevoss brothers as "The Winklevi."