Viewing profile — samuellb

In practice, no. The legislation has major loopholes, such as allowing unsolicited business-to-business marketing. And spammers still send junk to individuals with a disclaimer suc…

These kinds of attacks are already happening. It has actually happened in the apartment area where I live: We have a hot water central heating system that distributes heat to the a…

As long as there are still incoming links to the domain, I think it's hard to make Google reset it's page rank permanently. You could do a HTTP 301 permanent redirect and use Googl…

I know a small company that shut down it's Facebook page while keeping it's website (an old one, from 2005). Probably because it's not selling directly to it's end-customers, so th…

Technology improvements are good, but all these sensors in devices scare me, especially in network-connected stuff. Let's say someone exploits and modifies the firmware to trigger …

I've noticed that sometimes updates to Firefox cause it to stop working until it's restarted. If you're writing a long message, or filling in some form, or if you have an order con…

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702845

There's also the question of where we should draw the line. It's very different if you post a funny video of a cat, or if you write a joke at the end of a comment. IMHO the latter …

I learned to program myself and did some small-scale freelancing as a web developer while in high school. But after that I went to university because I felt it would be easier to g…

Protocols that require online signing are impossible to cache and hard to scale. Even OCSP is often used with pre-produced offline signed responses for that reason (but they are pe…

Sealed with tape, with your signature on the tape? And/or some tiny mark on the container that's hard to find.

On the other hand, it's quite convenient to not have to do null checks in debug messages. Compare: log.trace("doStuff(" + obj1 + ", " + obj2 + ")"); to this: log.trace("doStuff(" +…

Previous HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12397246

Or people who use a "mixed tabs and spaces" indentation, e.g. size 8 tabs with 4 characters wide indentation, and spaces for uneven indentations. (Which IMHO is broken because it l…

Yes, security of number porting is too lax. My number was once ported by a telco (accidentally in this case). They did call me and I had to confirm that I would get a new SIM card …

Yes, it's quite different in different countries. My web server gets only 3,9% IPv6 traffic (based on counting unique IPs). Quite OK given that none of the major ISPs in my country…

3. open source software projects (and distributions, e.g. Debian) usually don't want to be dependent on non-open source software. And they are usually very strict with licenses, so…

I've used a re-compressed version in the past, with reduced xml markup, and with the most rarely visited articles removed. It was around 1GB when I downloaded it, and it used the p…

Or a lid that can be slided over it. As a bonus, it would also protect the camera from being scratched

0.0.x = proof of concept? 0.1.x = first actually usable version (but may be buggy, missing features, etc.)

I'd call a systems programming language "something which can use the low level ABI of the underlying platform". So C and e.g. FreePascal would fit the description (for most hardwar…

That's true. And in the OOP case you usually have exception handling (i.e. try/catch blocks) as well, instead of "goto error" style error handling which is common in C.

The Linux kernel has a code style with 8 spaces and still has the 80 characters maximum. The coding style says "if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway…

I welcome this change, because I've lost a lot of form data with the backspace key. Not specifically in Chrome, because I remember having the same problem with IE 6 at the time whe…