Hacker News: bct

New comment by bct in "History of rat control in Alberta"

bct — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 17:19:39 +0000

> The only one I've seen is the gartner snake but here in Edmonton it is just a little bigger than an earthworm.

That might just be because Edmonton has lots of enormous dew worms :)

There are bigger garter snakes around - I live just outside Edmonton and see them pretty frequently. I hear there are plenty of rattlesnakes in southern Alberta too.

New comment by bct in "Choose your own IP"

bct — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 22:58:29 +0000

Starlink's IPv4 is behind CGNAT, and their IPv6 prefixes are not stable.

The good news is that it's relatively easy to punch through the NAT. This blog post describes an approach that is working well for me: https://www.jordanwhited.com/posts/wireguard-endpoint-discov...

New comment by bct in "Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on Arthurian Legend"

bct — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 18:28:46 +0000

"The Kitchen Knight" has this plot element: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/590413/the-kitchen-k...

In this version it's the Red Knight who is strongest at noon (IIRC).

New comment by bct in "How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)"

bct — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 03:24:13 +0000

You can do a lot worse than ACH. It's hard to read, but it's simple and pretty well-defined.

What _really_ sucks is one-off fixed-width formats that aren't well defined, or that change suddenly (oh, you thought that field would always be populated? lol no.)

New comment by bct in "How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)"

bct — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 03:19:13 +0000

Even calling it archaic is too harsh. Granted, the batch-centric nature is not ideal (and it's hard to imagine a system with this kind of latency built in being designed today), but if you're designing a system based on batch processing then shipping files over SFTP is a pretty reasonable way to do it.

New comment by bct in "ActivityPub: a federated social web standard"

bct — Thu, 25 May 2017 16:57:22 +0000

We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now.

What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.

New comment by bct in "Radar – A new set of integrated tools to help prevent fraud"

bct — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 21:09:33 +0000

In addition to what everyone else said there are big regional effects: in North America cardholders have often never seen 3D Secure before, they don't know their passwords, and issuers don't care enough to make their authentication pages usable.

But in France and the UK it's pretty standard; cardholders are used to it, and issuers make an effort to decide whether it's worth requiring authentication.

New comment by bct in "German WW2 code machine found on eBay"

bct — Mon, 30 May 2016 02:29:26 +0000

It's not a lightning bolt, it's the rune ᛋ.

New comment by bct in "Amazon open-sources Ion – a binary and text interchangable, typed JSON-superset"

bct — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 13:31:07 +0000

The XML serialization Apple defined for plists is awful and not easy to query with XPath.

New comment by bct in "You Can't Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs. DRM, Round Two"

bct — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 19:50:40 +0000

> If DRM requires a non-standard plugin, and plugins themselves become increasingly verboten

The unstated assumption here is that DRM that isn't a standard won't be built into a browser.

Stripe: Instant debit card transfers

bct — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 19:23:34 +0000

Article URL: https://stripe.com/blog/instant-debit-card-transfers?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10355389

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bct in "RAML – RESTful API modeling language"

bct — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 21:51:12 +0000

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt

New comment by bct in "Why is Canadian English unique?"

bct — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 15:28:54 +0000

I'm pretty happy having a powerless figurehead, especially if the alternative is presidential elections.

New comment by bct in "How to Center in CSS"

bct — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 05:33:41 +0000

Browsers should e.g. allow tables to be sorted by clicking column headers. They can't, because tables aren't always tables.

New comment by bct in "Show HN: Primrose – a text editor that runs in a WebGL texture"

bct — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 05:34:58 +0000

> Like, why do we still use plain text in flat files for source code

Information density. Images and graphs are exceptions to the general rule that text can contain a lot more information on one page than graphics can.

New comment by bct in "Google's Nest Stops Selling Smart Smoke Alarms Over Fire Safety Concerns"

bct — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 16:27:31 +0000

We're not talking about crossing the street, which is pretty unavoidable.

We're talking about an expensive gadget that introduces new risks, for a questionable return.

New comment by bct in "Bitcoin to adopt a finite coin supply."

bct — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 22:23:44 +0000

This is a pretty amusing way to document a bug.

New comment by bct in "Email, an idea so old that it's new"

bct — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 18:45:10 +0000

In Canada the banks provide this service, and it's used very widely.

New comment by bct in "We Built a Hacker News for Biotech"

bct — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:26:25 +0000

zerop posted a comment with links to many different HN clones here, but it's marked dead. Maybe because it included too many links?

New comment by bct in "The Patriot Missile Failure"

bct — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 22:50:13 +0000

> The article listed the speed of a scud at "1,676 meters/second"

Which looks suspiciously like a rounded "3750 mph to meters per second" conversion. Indeed, "scud 3750 mph" turns up a lot of hits.