Hacker News: wuest

New comment by wuest in "Geeksphone's Firefox OS smartphones go on sale tomorrow"

wuest — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:28:16 +0000

This is exciting news. I'll probably end up with one of these as well as a Jolla (the Sailfish phone) in the near future.

New comment by wuest in "Operation Shock and Awe - DDoS operation set up for major bitcoin sites"

wuest — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:52:32 +0000

Saw this posted by Mikko earlier. It's an interesting ploy, and I'm interested to see what comes of it. Specifically, I want to know whether the media, as it were, is going to be willing to propagate this sort of story, even with the plan being relatively well-known at this point.

Of course, this could be a long play. "Leak" this plan, build confidence that the media isn't going to propagate false stories, and then when a similar plan is effected, people are potentially more likely to take this manner of news seriously.

New comment by wuest in "Sailfish – An open source mobile OS"

wuest — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:05:37 +0000

While that's a fair statement, an OS--mobile or otherwise--doesn't really need to be among the top few in terms of adoption to be valuable. Lots of people still use their N900 and N9 phones and want something to be a successor to them. This is likely the way I'll be going next.

New comment by wuest in "Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer"

wuest — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:21:19 +0000

It's an interesting (read: niche) market, to be sure. It's the same market as someone who might buy 8 raspberry pi boards, or 4 ODroid U2 machines for the purpose of learning about parallel computation.

The Epipchany chip (the coprocessor on these boards) is supported as of GCC 4.8, so we also may see some novel ways to offload work to this chip in the future.

New comment by wuest in "Security incident update"

wuest — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:09:18 +0000

> What is not cool about Perl?

Perl is my first interpreted language. It has a very special place in my heart, even if it was awkward at first to get used to it coming from a C background. Perl will always be a cool kid.

New comment by wuest in "Women, Tech Conferences and the Bullshit Surrounding It"

wuest — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:56:09 +0000

>May be a better way is to create a nice atmosphere where women feel welcome and comfortable, having very strict code of conduct in conference and generally us (male engineers) being nice to them - this might take time, but the changes would stay.

I agree wholeheartedly! I think that this is the sort of attitude which would be conducive to moving the state of affairs along. In these fights it's often lost that the problem at hand is that treating people in a way that makes them feel like they're not welcome and not respected is at the root of the issue.

New comment by wuest in "Nobody Knows That I Use These Apps"

wuest — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:42:04 +0000

Is this a limitation of Widgets, or of the status of Widget development, though? It seems to me that there's a LOT of untapped potential when it comes to widgets.

New comment by wuest in "How many 10K hours do you have left?"

wuest — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:25:30 +0000

Anecdotal data, admittedly not perfectly analogous.

I got serious about playing the game of go relatively late in life for a go player--I was 23 years old at the time. In 2 years of hard study (1~2h/day, and a bit more on weekends) I rose from essentially a complete beginner to dan level play. Since then, life has pulled me away from playing go as actively, but the work I do at this point does let me maintain my level of play.

I think it's fair to say that you get MORE out of your effort at a younger age, but at the same time, I think that if you're serious about learning and honest about the way you learn, you can absolutely get a LOT out of those hours--and that ultimately, you can get the same utility as you would have, by tailoring your studies to the way you learn more effectively.

New comment by wuest in "Scribd hacked – emails and hashed passwords leaked"

wuest — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:39:46 +0000

...Which they ought to do. Offering the ability to enumerate user accounts is unlikely to be the immediate goal of this utility, but it's an effect nonetheless.

New comment by wuest in "Don't specify X years of experience required - You're breaking the law"

wuest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:48:26 +0000

A good portfolio can be created well before one goes into--let alone graduates--college. I understand the graphic design industry to be largely portfolio-driven, and it continues to confuse me that the IT industry isn't the same way.

New comment by wuest in "Ruby 1.8.7 EOL in 90 days"

wuest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:27:28 +0000

I lean pure CLI as well except on macs, which I use purely to try and maintain compatibility with as many Unixy OS variants as I can.

New comment by wuest in "Sweden axes new word after Google intervenes"

wuest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:46:11 +0000

Just in case anyone isn't aware of the video to which you're referring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYVCk10AzS0

New comment by wuest in "Sweden axes new word after Google intervenes"

wuest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:42:24 +0000

I don't speak Swedish and I'm considering using it out of spite.

New comment by wuest in "Ruby 1.8.7 EOL in 90 days"

wuest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 08:05:33 +0000

Order of installation on new macs: Quicksilver. Brew. Tmux. JewelryBox.

Lazy package maintainers have created the perfect atmosphere for a project like rvm to be an essential part of life.

New comment by wuest in "Expect – automates programs that expose a text terminal interface"

wuest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 08:00:48 +0000

I think it's probably marginally better than linking the Expect site proper, since it provides decent context.

New comment by wuest in "Expect – automates programs that expose a text terminal interface"

wuest — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:07:09 +0000

It's a really useful tool that has a surprisingly small amount of awareness.

New comment by wuest in "Expect – automates programs that expose a text terminal interface"

wuest — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:40:40 +0000

Shameless plug: I built a small library to provide more Expect-like features in Ruby, since I didn't care for the interfaces exposed, for application development. Presently works on Linux and OS X for 1.9.3, and Linux for 2.0.0 (OS X untested, but assumed good)

https://github.com/cwuest/expectr

New comment by wuest in "Changes to the Blog"

wuest — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:48:05 +0000

> Facebook's button seems to be perceived as more user-friendly than the unknown button on someone else's site, even if the unfamiliar button was designed to be less hostile than Like.

I expect that Schneier's blog is one of the best places to start reversing that common (and understandable) perception. Given the pervasive nature of fraudulent sites focusing on Facebook, one can't blame the users--but shifting their frame of mind from "fraud is bad!" to "tracking/other invasions of privacy are bad!" is overdue.

New comment by wuest in "It's Not Just Apple vs Android"

wuest — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:37:07 +0000

I love my N900! It's on my shelf as a backup phone. Ours aren't all that uncommon in terms of Maemo users' stories, as I understand it.

New comment by wuest in "A story about Vienna. (an interactive narrative infographic)"

wuest — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:22:13 +0000

The parallax effect on the final page was a nice touch.

This makes me want to visit Austria (and Vienna in particular) sometime soon.