zach43

I wonder if there is a typo in the title: '"C is how the computer works" can lead to inefficient code' makes more sense to me.

zach43

7년 전discuss

> I've got great experience with Indians working in Europe, not so great with Indians working from India. My impression is that the best Indian developers tend to move here, because they'll be able to earn European/American rates.

as an Indian developer working in the US, I have to say that this is a bit of an unwarranted stereotype, despite being repeated often on HN and Reddit

There absolutely is a large contingent of good developers in India (as you'd probably expect from a country with over a billion people), but they are mostly working with locally-managed projects and teams. A lot of them wouldn't work for outsourcing companies because of the poor pay and hours.

There is a bit of confirmation bias going on here: since western companies will frequently outsource to the low-cost shops in India, they will mostly see poor quality work. I don't think its fair to generalize this to all Indian devs.

zach43

7년 전discuss

out of curiosity, how wide apart do you place the two halves of your split keyboard?

i recently got one, and been wondering if i should place them full shoulder width apart or not.

zach43

7년 전discuss

Given the stagnation that's set in the mobile form factor, i think its the perfect time for unwalled FOSS mobile environments to develop.

also, the demo with gesture typing on the console is pretty cool: https://postmarketos.org/static/video/2019-06/nexus5-shelli-...

zach43

7년 전discuss

used / refurbished iPhone SEs still work beautifully...i got one a few months ago and i've had zero issues with it

its not really "top of the line" anymore, but the fact that its light on the wallet (~$250) is another major benefit

zach43

7년 전discuss

Gentoo also seems to have updated firefox-bin (and possibly www-client/firefox too?)...I ran an emerge update a few minutes ago and saw it install the firefox update

zach43

7년 전discuss

I think the question of "Why does it takes fifty lines to create a dialogue with a button" is very programming-language dependent:

If you're working with a higher-level programming language, you can make cross-platform GUIs very easily (see tkinter + python as others have recommended) without having to write 50 LOC.

If you're working with C / C++ specifically, then your bottleneck really is figuring out how to build and link with your cross platform library across all platforms. In my experience that has been much more painful than the lines of code required to set up a GUI in C++.

Once you've got the build/deployment system working in C++, most GUI libraries don't need as much as 50 lines of code. For example, even with Qt this is the code to get a dialogue with a button:

    #include <QApplication>
    #include <QPushButton>

    int main(int argc, char **argv)
    {
     QApplication app (argc, argv);

     QPushButton button ("Hello world !");
     button.show();

     return app.exec();
    }

In newer low-level languages with sane standardized package managers, like Rust, things should be much better, but I'm finding any good examples right now

zach43

7년 전discuss

Yeah, I understand the pains of implementing native GUIs, but one of the niceties that they provide is that you can implement simple - moderately complex GUIs in fewer lines and cleaner APIs than what the cross-platform libraries provide.

zach43

7년 전discuss

I looked at Imgui before for a project, but decided not to go with it since the examples are all over a hundred lines long, for example:

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/examples/exampl...

It seems like there is a lot of setup / configuration code necessary to wire up Imgui with the graphics rendering back-end.

Note that I haven't used Imgui in a real-world project yet. Does anyone know of a better way to set-up Imgui that does't need all this configuration code?

zach43

7년 전discuss

People who aren't very tech/privacy-savvy, like elderly people, or kids/teenagers.

I remember signing up for facebook when I was in high school, and I probably would've provided my email password if facebook asked for it...as an adult now I wouldn't provide my email password to anyone, of course.

zach43

7년 전discuss

its such a coincidence that these accidents keep happening in ways that enable further data gathering...surely there isn't a larger problem with Facebook's attitude towards their users' private data or anything

zach43

7년 전discuss

I'm personally not at all attached to the 'mastodon.social' domain (i'm self-hosting my own account on a different instance), but I am somewhat surprised at this perspective on TLDs.

Most users of the internet have been exposed to TLDs other than ".com". For example, wikipedia is at a .org TLD, US government sites are at .gov domains, university websites are at .edu domains. Most non-US users will frequently interact with their country's (and neighboring countries') ccTLDs, like .de, .uk, .in, ... I find it surprising to assume that users of social networks who have already understood abstract concepts like "like vs retweet" or "like vs share" would find it difficult to understand the difference between .com and .social.

Also in a sense, it is more accurate for Mastodon to be at a .social TLD instead of a .com since Mastodon is a Patreon-supported FOSS project, and isn't a commercial entity like twitter.com or facebook.com. But yeah, I know that .com doesn't really mean "commercial" anymore, and is more of a general-purpose TLD now.

Mastodon has a number of issues that could stifle broader adoption, but I can't convince myself that the TLD is really relevant here. Most users will just be linked to Mastodon from other sites, or find it from a web search. Once its in their web history, web browsers will just autocomplete the site name in the address bar. And isn't the domain squatting and exorbitant pricing on ".com" the main reasons why the new TLDs have been released anyway?

zach43

7년 전discuss

I've had a pretty good experience self-hosting with Pleroma. Its quite amazing that I can run a social media server with just a $5 VPS.

Not sure if there are bots / apps that can easily let you follow Twitter users on Mastodon, but I've definitely seen mastodon - twitter crossposter apps before.

zach43

7년 전discuss

I know you're joking, but if you found your way on to a site called "Hacker News" at a URL like https://news.ycombinator.com , it it really going to be so much more complicated to understand that https://mastodon.social is the website of the Mastodon social network?

I'm honestly fine with the mastodon devs not having to spend 1000s of dollars to get the mastodon.com domain. Evidently that domain is so expensive that even the popular heavy metal band "Mastodon" haven't bought that domain (they seem to be at https://www.mastodonrocks.com/ )

BTW, if you're having difficultly finding an instance that caters to your interests, https://joinmastodon.org has a signup flow that shows mastodon instances based on interests. That might help.

zach43

7년 전discuss

Just wanted to say that i moved from twitter to mastodon sometime late last year amd couldn't be happier with it. Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity.

the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more relaxed and pleasant in comparison.

Maybe i just accidentally joined nicer communities, but i see a lot of small-scale chitchat and genuineness on mastodon than i rarely see on twitter.

I've also had zero issues with the platform from a technical perspective...overall i think Mastodon, etc have done decentralization "right", and have a lot of potential for growth in the future

zach43

7년 전discuss

i could imagine a third camp between Free Software and Open Source following something like the Qt dual-licensing model:

1. You are free to use this software for non-commercial use.

2. If you'd like to use this software for commercial use, you must either actively contribute to this project, or provide a donation to the project maintainers at Patreon / Paypal / Liberapay, etc.

zach43

7년 전discuss

this is truly really cool! are there any resources you'd recommend to learn more about this area of music theory?

zach43

7년 전discuss

> Instead, what we need is a simple API with opaque handles and C function calls. No fancy OOP or macro preprocessors. Simple OpenGL style. At least regarding portability, OpenGL made sane choices I think.

FLTK [0] might fit some of this, at the cost of being somewhat ugly.

[0] https://www.fltk.org/

zach43

7년 전discuss

one of the coolest things about mastodon and pleroma is that you can just start your own instance and immediately federate with the rest of the network.

this means that if youre unhappy with the moderation in a community, if you want to own your own data/privacy, or if you want to use self-hosted software, you can just do that with mastodon.

a few weeks back i went through a pleroma guide and set up my own pleroma instance. it only took a few hours, and it has been running for over a month on a $5 Linode (1 GB RAM). i migrated from mastodon.social, and it carried over everyone i was following seamlessly.

i get that the whole decentralized thing has been blown out of proportion in the past, but in the fediverse (mastodon, pleroma, GNU social, etc) it is working quite well.

zach43

7년 전discuss

this isn't production-ready yet, but there's a federated blogging platform being developed called "Plume" that might satisfy a few of criteria that you've listed in this thread: https://joinplu.me

Submissions

Impact of SKS Keyserver Poisoning on Gentoo

Ubuntu Not Dropping 32-Bit App Support After All?

AMP for email is bad

Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

April Progress Update – Librem 5 Hardware

A Complete Beginner's Guide to Programming

Always Own Your Platform

NetBSD hits 100% reproducibility on builds

Fish shell design guidelines

Why the world reads Wikipedia: What we learned from a recent research study

The Treacherous Optimization (2006)

Defective C++ (2009)

Writing a Self-Mutating x86_64 C Program (2013)

Why Semantic Versioning Isn't (2015)

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