HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

nitrogen

no profile record

comments

nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
I seem to recall reading that they (used to?) track abandonment of the search results page as a successful answer to your question from the embedded page snippets or info boxes. So if you get a search result page that's complete garbage and just give up, they increase the ranking of those sites.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
The people talking down are the people who think gamers are beneath them (but might play NFL or CoD on their console). AKA jocks vs. geeks.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
For me, I'd rather get a bug report about a failure during compilation, than something more obscure and harder to find at runtime.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
Is inspecting stacks used for logging backtraces during instrumentation?
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
Legal isn't there to make sure the company complies with the laws. Legal is there to advise on and minimize legal risk.

"It's not like we're building bridges or something." -- any legal department when faced with engineers' ethical duty to report a hack.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
That page doesn't actually give any numbers.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
ALSA already comes (or at least did in the past) with an optional daemon for dmix and dsnoop. Putting as much of what jack and pulse do as possible into libasound (which already handles a lot IIRC), with the minimal amount necessary into a shared daemon, could have allowed all existing ALSA applications to work with the dynamic switching that is now handled by PulseAudio, or the low latency that is now handled by Jackd. ALSA already had a signal graph that could have been evolved into the independent signal graphs that PulseAudio and Jackd can now build.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
ALSA is just the kernel layer

Just one point about ALSA; most of it actually lives in userspace. The ~/.asoundrc file can specify complex routing and mixing, including the use of LADSPA filters. What's done is done, and pulseaudio is reasonably usable now, but IMO we'd be much better off if the work that went into Pulseaudio and jackd instead went into the ALSA userland.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
- Init system responsible for way, way, way more than init, gradually taking over everything to such a degree that distros are forced to abandon Upstart, SysVinit, whatever Gentoo used back in the day, etc.

- Audio system that ignores all the foundations of ALSA and builds Yet Another Layer instead of improving ALSA.

- Display system that leaves way too much as an "exercise for the reader".

- 10+-year-long transition periods on the above, during which nobody's use cases work well.

- Decisions made by fiat rather than by consensus.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
One example is a tree. We are looking at a forest.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
Maybe things have improved over the last several years, now that systemd is fait accompli. Earlier on in its life I recall discussions of GNOME features that would only work on Linux+systemd, and the BSDs were complaining.

But the point remains that, even without any ill intent, the lack of competition and compromise can produce outcomes that look like malice -- people gradually get used to making decisions that go unquestioned, and unwittingly walk all over everyone who no longer has a voice in the discussion. This pushes more people out, and the cycle of the tail winning against the dog repeats and continues.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
The whole purpose of tools is to make people more productive. Software is just another set of tools. Software works for people. Not the other way around.

Imagine a screwdriver that would randomly switch to requiring a hammering motion instead of rotary motion, then the next day it only works if you hold it just right, then the day after that it freezes itself to the table to download updates and the update changes the shape of the tool bit so it won't even turn the screw you are now two days late on tightening. People would riot.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it.

I think the parent comment was alluding to the fact that RedHat has the ability to manufacture consensus. All the distributions use systemd (and pulseaudio and ...) because GNOME and other core components were modified to work only with systemd. So everyone agreed to use RedHat's way because there was no other way. No matter how good RH's creations might be, that's the kind of tail-wagging-the-dog power that is bad for an ecosystem.
nitrogen
·5 years ago·discuss
Lost mental state is generally as painful as data is. People hate it viscerally.

This is hugely underappreciated. Last fall I decided I would get back into making videos for YouTube after 7 years away. But two videos into the new series, and the constant crashes of my video editing software I just paid $$$ for have reminded me why I stopped making videos in the first place.
nitrogen
·6 years ago·discuss
Even right next to the antenna, wires will have less latency and packet loss than wireless.
nitrogen
·6 years ago·discuss
This is better with more open space. A toddler I know can occupy himself for hours outside, but you have to keep a watchful eye for what he's getting into, so it's not as relaxing for a caregiver as a tablet or phone.
nitrogen
·7 years ago·discuss
Yes, I remember a 21+ section in the rental store as a kid, in a small room next to the kids section and partitioned by a ribbon curtain.
nitrogen
·7 years ago·discuss
My 2005 car will use engine braking to control hill descent speed automatically, and will downshift in some cases to assist braking.
nitrogen
·7 years ago·discuss
People made this argument about Steam, Battlenet, game DRM, etc. But it happened anyway.
nitrogen
·7 years ago·discuss
It used to be that Microsoft was famous for vaporware--product announcements that never materialized, to take the wind out of competitors' sails.

Not sure which I like better.