Hacker News: obiterdictum

New comment by obiterdictum in "Firebase is Joining Google"

obiterdictum — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 17:42:16 +0000

Call me old-fashioned but I shy away from unique platforms precisely because they are, well, unique, as you don't have a lot of vendor choice should you decide to migrate for whatever reason.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Rm -rf remains"

obiterdictum — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 09:02:50 +0000

The classic version of it:

http://lug.wsu.edu/node/414

New comment by obiterdictum in "Defensive Bash programming"

obiterdictum — Thu, 29 May 2014 16:44:51 +0000

What is wrong with piping `ls`?

New comment by obiterdictum in "High-Speed Traders Rip Investors Off, Michael Lewis Says"

obiterdictum — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 14:59:29 +0000

> HFTs and other trading firms actually buy up the order flow from brokerages.

I'm going to ask for a citation on this one.

I remember a similar incident at KRX in 2009, and it resulted in a criminal investigation [1], so that ought to be illegal.

[1] http://www.traderdaily.com/07/koreas-elw-players-get-hfc-wak...

New comment by obiterdictum in "Russia approves use of military in Ukraine"

obiterdictum — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 15:54:51 +0000

RT (of course) gives such a different view from Western media, it may as well be a completely different story. Right now, for example, it tells how "armed extremists sent from Kiev tried to seize government buildings in Crimea".

New comment by obiterdictum in "A Bitcoin Address with 782,000 BTC Moved Through It"

obiterdictum — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 14:14:47 +0000

You can also use alt-coin exchanges, e.g. BTC->LTC->BTC, or even multiple exchanges (one to buy, one to sell) to obscure the trail even more.

New comment by obiterdictum in "How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username"

obiterdictum — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:00:22 +0000

Comparatively few people will read this story. Even fewer will care enough to continue the crusade against the attacker for any prolonged period of time to raise awareness among the potential future audience that this account was stolen.

High chance the story will be quickly forgotten and the account will be re-used.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Expanding Context in Diffs"

obiterdictum — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 16:19:58 +0000

Worth noting that BitBucket had this as long as I can remember.

New comment by obiterdictum in "NSNotificationCenter with blocks considered harmful"

obiterdictum — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:59:42 +0000

On a related note, I've run into a similar problem in C++, but opposite effect. A lambda won't keep my object alive if I try to capture a shared_ptr member, because C++ lambdas, similarly to blocks, by default capture implicit reference to "this", rather than individual instance variables.

http://stackoverflow.com/q/7764564/23643

New comment by obiterdictum in "Bitcoin $600"

obiterdictum — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:17:06 +0000

This reminds me of a story of Sir Isaac Newton and South Sea Company bubble. He got out early, then watched all his friends get rich, jumped back in again with both feet, lost a fortune. Even smart people are not immune to bubbles.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/isaac-newton-and-the-south...

New comment by obiterdictum in "Deep C and C++ (2011)"

obiterdictum — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 11:44:33 +0000

Conversely, JS programmers I complain about JS gotchas about contend that "once you learn all those horrible gotchas, it's a great language".

Even C++ programmers, at least the ones that had good fortune to have time away from C++, agree that C++ gotchas are unforgivable.

But in general, C++ and JS communities have the biggest cases of Stockholm Syndrome I've seen.

Disclaimer: I'm a recovering C++ programmer.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Apple cuts 5C orders due to weak demand"

obiterdictum — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 09:47:17 +0000

I think what GP is saying is that in emerging markets, or at least in Thailand, there is no "compromise" market segment (and it's not going to appear regardless how much Apple "want" it). Normal people get ultra cheap phones, rich people get high-end iPhones, which is why 5c is a miss.

New comment by obiterdictum in "A "Hacker's" Guide to the Bay Area"

obiterdictum — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 12:54:36 +0000

Pardon my ignorance, but is it $700 a month or a week? I'm used to Sydney prices where a 1-bedroom apartment could easily cost around $500 a week.

New comment by obiterdictum in "'TWTRQ' Up 685% in Clueless Trading"

obiterdictum — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 02:56:57 +0000

> It might be an interesting failure scenario for algorithmic trading.

It's not how auto trading works. Traded instrument ranges are preset before the algo is started. I've never heard of an algo that tries to pick stocks to trade dynamically based on a name, it would be astoundingly risky.

New comment by obiterdictum in "LinkedIn Customers Allege Company Hacked E-Mail Addresses"

obiterdictum — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 08:35:45 +0000

I think it's more likely that LinkedIn mobile app grabs your phone contacts, if you happen to give it permissions to do so.

I've noticed that the "People you may know" section started to contain faceless placeholder entries with emails from my address book (though, I'm not sure if/when I've given the iOS app the address book access).

New comment by obiterdictum in "Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction"

obiterdictum — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 02:39:29 +0000

It highly depends on the team. In a small team that know each other well, it can work. Most of the time it's not the case, however.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)"

obiterdictum — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 15:49:50 +0000

Note the article is from 2000. Joel mostly talks about big and mature desktop software (big as in Microsoft Excel). Average startup's code is small, narrowly focused, has a (relatively) short lifespan, so it can be rewritten from scratch by 1 or 2 people.

If you've ever worked with legacy systems older than 10 years, you'd notice that they become a victim of their own "success". You can't throw away features added over years, because a lot of users depend on it, and if you tried to rewrite it, you'd have to rewrite bug-to-bug.

I worked on such systems, and I did try rewriting, and gave up because of sheer volume of work and the knowledge of institutional lore that was required to do it. On the other hand I'm currently embarking on our startup's "rewrite" and things are much much easier, because the feature set is small and I can freely throw away stuff that didn't work.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Nokia acquired by Microsoft"

obiterdictum — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 03:29:27 +0000

> I really enjoyed the pre-Microsoft Nokia, I had account in their dev forums, and loved their SDKs, community, Sybian, whatnot.

Really?

I thought their SDK circa 2007 (especially the emulator) and API docs were terrible, and Symbian C++ was a real pain to work with. Also, segregation between regular developers and Nokia partners (who paid to have access to extra private APIs) put unnecessary barriers to development.

I won't miss it.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Brilliant or insane code?"

obiterdictum — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 14:27:18 +0000

I think that dependency on argument evaluation order inside zip function smells a bit.

It's OK here, but may bite you with a different function.

New comment by obiterdictum in "Apple seeks to trademark “startup” in Australia"

obiterdictum — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 06:45:39 +0000

I have been using it full-time circa 2006-2009. I guess that counts as "past decade".

1. There was no out of the box support of my particular NVidia video card, so I've had to build the driver from source and fiddle with my system to install it.

2. I've had userspace processes freeze on network activities and become impossible to kill, because of a kernel deadlock in my wireless driver.

3. Proper smooth fonts required work at the time (freetype did not ship with good subpixel hinting).

4. Proprietary media codecs did not work out of the box and required a third-party repositories.

5. The whole KDE four-point-not-really-zero debacle.

A minimalistic XMonad+Vim+terminal setup was decent and worked for me, but eventually I got sick of desktop Linux and moved to OSX.

I realise that many things have been fixed in the meantime, but it was not a flawless experience back then. If I was to give desktop Linux another shot today, I'd be cautiously optimistic, but not expect a miracle.