s_tec

8 ms·

31.
by s_tec 6y ago
I think it's basically a weird-looking RV.
32.
by s_tec 6y ago
Which ones? I think I would like to try your setup, since it sounds like a good compromise between having my data harvested and being kicked off of sites for blocking their ads.
33.
by s_tec 6y ago
I know, right? What's with all these people, expecting their personal computers to respect their privacy? If you want cool features, just be quiet and let Apple send whatever data they want to their servers. It's fine!
34.
by s_tec 6y ago
The human eye is really good at dividing things in half, so it's easy to make power-of-two divisions without special tools. Just divide whatever it is in half, then divide it in half again, and so forth until you have a sixteenth. The
35.
by s_tec 6y ago
The US uses different bolt threads than the rest of the world. Just today I had to buy an 1/4 inch long 8-32 threaded screw to fix our stroller. The 8 refers to a standard diameter in the US system, and the 32 means "32 threads pe
36.
by s_tec 6y ago
As a long-time Arch user, I can say that the switch is not for the faint of heart. Arch won't do anything automatically, including installing basic things like a window manager or a browser - Arch is more of a "build your own OS
37.
by s_tec 7y ago
Sattelites are always falling to the ground, but they are also going sideways really fast. Imagine tossing a pebble off of a bridge onto a boat - if the sideways velocity is too high, the pebble will miss the boat and land in the water inst
38.
by s_tec 7y ago
The basic intuition behind symmetric cryptography is that once your input bits are "thoroughly mixed", there's no way to un-mix them besides brute-force. On the other hand, we don't have a solid theory of computational c
39.
by s_tec 7y ago
It looks like the speedup is coming from two main changes. The first change is reducing the number of rounds from 10 to 7. Think of it like making a smoothie - you add bits of fruit to the drink (the input data), then pulse the blades to bl
40.
by s_tec 7y ago
Right, and the only solution is to audit and compile all the code running on your computer, including firmware. Otherwise, you have no idea what your computer is really running. In the real world, most people run pre-built software, which i
41.
by s_tec 7y ago
You can't roll your own TLS replacement using Javascript, because you need some way to deliver that Javascript to the browser in the first place. If you don't use TLS for that, you're doomed. Sure. On the other hand, that&#
42.
by s_tec 7y ago
It is true that async functions work similarly to the coroutines found in other languages, and that some transpilers convert async functions into Javascript generator functions under the hood. However, these are both implementation details.
43.
by s_tec 7y ago
Wow, I had not considered the deeper power shifts from this perspective. The root the problem, I suppose, lies with public-key cryptography. We all know encryption is a good thing (unless you want to broadcast private information to the wor
44.
by s_tec 7y ago
This attitude always amazes me. You have obviously mastered a set of system administration skills over several years, and you are comfortable with a particular way of doing things. When somebody points out a weakness with the status quo and
45.
by s_tec 7y ago
> Firefox decided to stop using my DNS server In an ideal world, your probably want some sort of encrypted connection to your own DNS server (unless your LAN is 100% trusted). Maybe something like HTTPS would work... oh wait. Most people
46.
by s_tec 7y ago
Right, except that communication between developers is the least scalable part of running a software team. For every new member you add, there are n existing developers to communicate with, so your communication costs go up as O(n^2). If th
47.
by s_tec 7y ago
And why are these build systems necessary in the first place? They mostly exist to work around the lame library ecosystem, where you never know what's installed or where to find it. Solving the "library problem" would presuma
48.
by s_tec 7y ago
Do you ever wonder how crazy ideas like "the Earth is flat" or "the Moon landing never happened" get started? Well, it might look something like this. It all depends whether or not this thing collects enough followers to
49.
by s_tec 7y ago
Bummer. The posit number system ( http://www.johngustafson.net/pdfs/BeatingFloatingPoint.pdf ) is super-cool, and its inventors often speak of its potential performance advantages. On the other hand, their claims did see
50.
by s_tec 7y ago
> > I realized that I couldn’t rely on the compiler to get my back when I was doing mistakes > That's not how engineers work. Maybe "hackers" work that way, but actual "engineers" seek and use the best tool
51.
by s_tec 8y ago
Nice demo, thanks. It's funny how technology go in waves. This reminds me more of programming microcontrollers than writing Web stuff, and yet this is the hot new thing!
52.
by s_tec 8y ago
Plus, you can solve all the issues the article points out using linting tools like ESLint. Rules like no-case-declarations, no-duplicate-case, and no-fallthrough already exist for this exact purpose.
53.
by s_tec 8y ago
I'm talking about the Free Software movement. I have a moral right to use ad-blocking technology, or any other software on my own computer. Spotify can refuse me service if they have a problem with this (no free music), but they can&#x
54.
by s_tec 8y ago
No problem at all. Spotify has every right to do this. The original comment seems to argue that ad-blockers are morally wrong, which I disagree with. Ad-blockers are a morally neutral technology, even if they hurt some company's bott
55.
by s_tec 8y ago
> Why should you be allowed to use a service in a way they don't intend you to use it? The Free Software movement has been fighting against this exact mentality for decades. Digital autonomy should be a basic human right. Anyone sh
56.
by s_tec 8y ago
When somebody says "have not been updated in a couple of years," they are really just saying that the code is unmaintained. Unmaintained code is bad code, no matter what year it is from.
57.
by s_tec 8y ago
I get what you are saying, but the two cases are different. Typescript is a whole different language from Flow, so they can't interoperate. Every package that migrates to Typescript deprives the Flow ecosystem of compatibility and mind
58.
by s_tec 8y ago
Exactly. Even strongly-typed languages have this problem. In C, it looks like `void *`, while in Java, it's `Object`. The `any` keyword is just the latest in a long line of escape hatches. Pretty much every language has one.
59.
by s_tec 8y ago
This is supposed to be a phone Richard Stallman can use. A phone that doesn't betray your freedom is more valuable than a phone with a PDF viewer, at least according to some people. At the same time, the whole point of free software
60.
by s_tec 8y ago
This disagrees with my experience working in this space every single day. Most projects in the Node ecosystem will continue to use CJS. If you are writing "Node software", like web servers, there is no reason not to just use CJS.

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