simias

41 ms·

391.
by simias 5y ago
Instead I lose half my messages because the desktop application won't sync correctly and/or corrupt its database every other week. Surely there's a version header in the protocol that could be used to reject outdated clients
392.
by simias 5y ago
I completely agree that Signal could very much use a third-party client, especially on the desktop. That being said if they want to push their cryptocrap they have to keep a strong control on the clients because third parties are likely to
393.
by simias 6y ago
The move is pretty transparent to me, when CentOS was effectively "free RHEL" many people who didn't feel they needed support just ran CentOS in lieu of RHEL knowing that they'd get near-100% compatibility without paying
394.
by simias 6y ago
I always thought that unicode opened pandora's box with emojis. It makes sense to represent those that already existed in previous encodings for compatibility (it is meant to be universal , after all), but beyond that it's just a
395.
by simias 6y ago
If the attack surface is large enough and the duration of the experiment long enough it'll return to baseline soon enough I think. It's a reasonable enough compromise. After all if the maintainers are not already considering that
396.
by simias 6y ago
It does seem rather unethical, but I must admit that I find the topic very interesting. They should definitely have asked for consent before starting with the "attack", but if they did manage to land security vulnerabilities despi
397.
by simias 6y ago
I never bothered to measure it but I suspect that for older CPUs dynamic consumption is not super high compared to the other elements. The main reason for that belief is that I know that some "retro" consoles didn't even feat
398.
by simias 6y ago
I wasn't talking about hand-written algorithms like the article is using, I'm talking about machine learning. TFA made me think about it because we've seen a lot of "this X does not exist" lately. I should've b
399.
by simias 6y ago
I'm fascinated by the implication that in the not so far future we'll reach a point where we can teach a computer to generate arbitrary works of art endlessly. Want new episodes of Seinfeld? Just feed the existing episodes to an A
400.
by simias 6y ago
Remember that The Economist is in print, and while they do have color the quality of impression and the available space is probably not sufficient to get good enough details to meaningfully compare the technology. Besides, it's not Wir
401.
by simias 6y ago
What makes you think this limitation is related to Excel? 4GiB is a very common limit due to it being the max size you can fit on a 32bit integer. It's the max file size on FAT32 as well for instance.
402.
by simias 6y ago
I think it's kind of pointless to fight for an exact meaning for these buzzwords. "Big Data", "Webscale", "Web 2.0", "NoSQL" and whatever other trendy hashtag du jour have lost most of their mean
403.
by simias 6y ago
Surely that's marketing&sales, not R&D.
404.
by simias 6y ago
To be clear Rust will give you a clean exit in this situation (or at least, I assume that to be true, it would be a glaring issue if it didn't). On linux however since malloc usually can't fail you won't ever see that since t
405.
by simias 6y ago
I agree that the OOM killer is frankly irrelevant in this discussion (and a bad idea in the first place IMO, cue the "airplane company deciding which passenger to throw out the plane" argument). But on the other hand in my experie
406.
by simias 6y ago
This is really cool. However I'm going to bring you the Traditional HN Nitpick: it's very odd to see Google use these horribly over-compressed gifs over proper videos: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-pu
407.
by simias 6y ago
I use DDG as my main search engine but I share the parent's concerns. In the end an ad-driven business model will always pit the interests of its users vs the interests of the advertisers. Should DDG become ultra-successful, how long u
408.
by simias 6y ago
The main problem with FB IMO is the community, not the moderation tools. I highly doubt that adding downvotes to FB would vastly improve the average quality of the contributions, actually it may well make it worse.
409.
by simias 6y ago
That's sometimes true but it depends a lot on the filesystem used, and sometimes on the options used when building it. ReiserFS, ext4 and FAT 32 won't have the same performance profile. I think breaking down large collections in s
410.
by simias 6y ago
I think downvoting is an anti-pattern because it's a negative interaction, and I think negative interactions shouldn't be encouraged if we value high quality discourse. If downvoting bad comments (for any definition of bad) was ha
411.
by simias 6y ago
Indeed, I got caught by the HN formatting. I meant un<star>x for unix/linux.
412.
by simias 6y ago
I think the only way to kill bitcoin is either to break SHA-256 (and that would probably be short-term) or aggressively shutdown the exchanges. As long as BTCs are worth tens of thousands of dollars people are going to mine them. It's
413.
by simias 6y ago
I feel towards the un x shell the same way I feel towards Vim: there's quite a bit of cruft, some poor decisions, quite a bit I'd do differently if I decided to write my own implementation from scratch. But on the other hand it mo
414.
by simias 6y ago
>I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. Sure, those are very niche, but not all BSDs or every Linux distros have bash in the base distribution. And if you work with e
415.
by simias 6y ago
As always my take on this is that if you don't care about portability, why even bother with bash? My rule of thumb is that if your script becomes too complicated that you find POSIX sh limiting, it's probably a good hint that you
416.
by simias 6y ago
I don't own an Apple device myself but don't they have a pretty good track record when it comes to the security of their apps? Plus all the guidelines they've been enforcing lately when it comes to user tracking etc... At any
417.
by simias 6y ago
The plane industry is heavily subsidized and manages to get (IMO absurdly) low prices for some rides, and there are some situations where it's more convenient to take a plane than the train (for instance if you arrive from a long dista
418.
by simias 6y ago
I'm not sure I understand. Crypto won't protect you from malware by itself, it just creates a chain of custody. App store apps are not secure because they're signed, they're secure because they're signed by Apple .
419.
by simias 6y ago
Oh, I completely missed that the links were clickable until I read your comments. I thought it was an image.
420.
by simias 6y ago
"Fonts can be malicious" made me think of security vulnerabilities in font engines that can be exploited remotely by untrusted websites through things like webfonts. That doesn't necessarily involve Turing completeness, just

More ›