Hacker News: estrabd

New comment by estrabd in "Show HN: PDFlower – Reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading"

estrabd — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 17:34:10 +0000

I just want something that'll collapse 2 columns into 1.

New comment by estrabd in "Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?"

estrabd — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 17:26:16 +0000

Perl, sh, awk, sed, C, Fortran. There's a freedom in not chasing down all the shiny new things.

New comment by estrabd in "Tor at the Heart: Firefox"

estrabd — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 16:54:23 +0000

It is frighteningly effective.

New comment by estrabd in "Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras"

estrabd — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:50:03 +0000

> If an organization is in a position to confiscate the camera from a journalist, they're almost certainly ALSO in a position to extract the encryption password from the journalist.

This is basically why GBDE exists.

See s.s. 4.1 "Protecting the user" of http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcon-03.gbde.paper.pdf

The drawback is that GBDE is for cold storage protection (which I imagine could be okay in a camera).

New comment by estrabd in "The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)"

estrabd — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:51:06 +0000

Always a good cautionary tail.

New comment by estrabd in "Major advancements in Deep Learning in 2016"

estrabd — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 18:50:39 +0000

Whoa, those images kind of weirded me out.

New comment by estrabd in "Amazon Go"

estrabd — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:22:41 +0000

"Alert, alert you are too poor to be in here."

New comment by estrabd in "Amazon Go"

estrabd — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:22:09 +0000

What Would Glenda Do?

New comment by estrabd in "Show HN: A DigitalOcean-like support community for your website in 3 minutes"

estrabd — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 18:34:32 +0000

You had me until I had to use pedo twitter or Fakebook. No thanks.

New comment by estrabd in "[dead]"

estrabd — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 17:15:31 +0000

Regardless of who you think was behind the leaks, what makes you think that the blockchain and crypto-currencies in general are not compromised somehow? Based on the BTC mania of 2014, I am not entirely convinced it's not all part of some sort of globalist psy-op. It easily fits into the narrative.

New comment by estrabd in "What Is Déjà Vu and Why Does it Happen? (2013)"

estrabd — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:21:29 +0000

I have had a situation where I had what was I thought deja vu, only to realize that I accurately "knew" what was about to transpire for at least 1 minute after. I've had regular deja vu before, and this was not it. I was interacting with another individual, so I don't think I was having a weird seizure or was mentally detached in any way. It was not a lucid dream either.

New comment by estrabd in "How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015)"

estrabd — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 20:51:48 +0000

1. sell house

2. buy van

3. get someone to customize your van

4. ???

5. profit

New comment by estrabd in "Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail"

estrabd — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 19:38:34 +0000

I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back tbh.

New comment by estrabd in "Amazon Posts Another Blockbuster Profit"

estrabd — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 20:40:22 +0000

I find that eBay's bread and butter is really small fry to small fry - or at best, dealers in collectibles to collectors.

New comment by estrabd in "Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem"

estrabd — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 20:40:36 +0000

TIL what language Stack Overflow is written in.

New comment by estrabd in "Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?"

estrabd — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 01:51:23 +0000

I heard a similar story about Polaroid having their own digital camera. Not sure about the details.

New comment by estrabd in "Test Anything Protocol specification (2006)"

estrabd — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:42:11 +0000

You can use prove for anything that outputs TAP, not just Perl scripts.

New comment by estrabd in "Things Unix can do atomically (2010)"

estrabd — Tue, 31 May 2016 18:20:39 +0000

Why one would like to have an atomic operation is easier to understand.

For example, one can use the atomic nature of creating a symbolic link on nix to create a lock file to prevent a race condition in a forking shell script. Say you have two or more processes wanting to do something that can (or should) only be done by one process at a time; one naive solution is to manage access of each process to said action by using a lock file. However, writing or touching a file itself is not atomic.

The answer is to throw a symbolic link into the mix. In this scenario, the lock file already exists. However, the lock is not the file itself, but a symbolic link to the file. The protocol for each process to follow is:

1. try to create a symbolic link to lock file (any file really)

2. if successful, proceed; if failed, wait (or exit)

3. when process is done, delete symbolic link to lock file

Simply checking for the existence of the symlink is not sufficient since there is a period of time between checking for the symlink (or file) and proceeding with said action where another process can think it has the lock.

The OS ensures that one and only one symlink (of the same name) can exist; attempts to create it again (even simultaneously) will result in a failure of one process to create the symlink. There is one winner; all others are losers. This is to say, the kernel ensures that the operation is atomic. As a result, the OS is now arbitrating what process can proceed to action, at the very lowest level. Another way to think about it is that it provides a way to make competing processes serialize - or get in line so that they may complete their action one at a time.

In my experience, it is important to experiment and test to make sure that the atomic primitive you're using is actually working as expected. I've run up against some inconsistent implementations of symlink creation that make this action not as straightforward to use as one is lead to believe.

New comment by estrabd in "Things Unix can do atomically (2010)"

estrabd — Tue, 31 May 2016 18:06:29 +0000

Always a nice reminder.

New comment by estrabd in "Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?"

estrabd — Wed, 25 May 2016 12:09:53 +0000

ZFS doesn't have history in that way; snapshots are far too coarse. HAMMER, for example, is closer to what you want if you're going to replace git with a FS.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/