Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]

#31

Post by hasmanean »

jabbany wrote: post #24

So, as someone who has lived in regions with pretty severe internet censorship in the past and built circumvention software back in the day, I've always pondered the idea of whether one could build a fax-based thing like this for browsing the web. Kind of as like a "last resort" system.^ Could have a form that you fax in with, like a URL and session info (cookies and stuff), and then it faxes back the page, and you c…

If you had a ham radio connection and wanted to broadcast emergency bulletins to people, radio fax would be quite useful.

It’s push rather than pull like the web. Email works too, but fax has more utility in an emergency situation. Beats having to download adobe acrobat on every computer….

Re: Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]

#34

Post by skissane »

reaperducer wrote: post #26
jabbany wrote: post #24

So, as someone who has lived in regions with pretty severe internet censorship in the past and built circumvention software back in the day, I've always pondered the idea of whether one could build a fax-based thing like this for browsing the web. Kind of as like a "last resort" system.^ Could have a form that you fax in with, like a URL and session info (cookies and stuff), and then it faxes back the page, and you c…

Slightly related: There was a time when web browsing was crazy slow and expensive, but there were e-mail services that were also crazy slow, but free. There were mail to web gateways that you could e-mail a URL to, which would then reply with the contents of the web page. You'd then send another URL from that page, and get another reply, and so on. Free slow-motion web browsing. I say "slow-motion" because this was b…

RMS was still doing that this century

https://lwn.net/Articles/262570/

I wonder if he still is today

Re: Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]

#35

Post by eru »

playingalong wrote: post #25
jabbany wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if OCR could be improved by adding a "language model" of sorts... Like, sure, maybe it's hard to tell apart a "1", "i", or "l" purely visually, but if you knew it was supposed to be code, I'd suspect one could significantly improve the recognition accuracy if the system just worked in the probability of each confusable option given the preceding (and following) text.

This would also have a higher risk of introducing some nasty, hard to spot errors. It's actually better for the compilation to fail than for the Clippy to make up something syntactically and compilation correct, but wrong.

You might be right in a practical sense, but for an art project like this, maybe not?

Re: Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]

#36

Post by eru »

hasmanean wrote: post #31
jabbany wrote: post #24

So, as someone who has lived in regions with pretty severe internet censorship in the past and built circumvention software back in the day, I've always pondered the idea of whether one could build a fax-based thing like this for browsing the web. Kind of as like a "last resort" system.^ Could have a form that you fax in with, like a URL and session info (cookies and stuff), and then it faxes back the page, and you c…

If you had a ham radio connection and wanted to broadcast emergency bulletins to people, radio fax would be quite useful. It’s push rather than pull like the web. Email works too, but fax has more utility in an emergency situation. Beats having to download adobe acrobat on every computer….

I'm not sure where Adobe Acrobat comes in here?

Re: Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]

#37

Post by Dutchie987 »

reaperducer wrote: post #26
jabbany wrote: post #24

So, as someone who has lived in regions with pretty severe internet censorship in the past and built circumvention software back in the day, I've always pondered the idea of whether one could build a fax-based thing like this for browsing the web. Kind of as like a "last resort" system.^ Could have a form that you fax in with, like a URL and session info (cookies and stuff), and then it faxes back the page, and you c…

Slightly related: There was a time when web browsing was crazy slow and expensive, but there were e-mail services that were also crazy slow, but free. There were mail to web gateways that you could e-mail a URL to, which would then reply with the contents of the web page. You'd then send another URL from that page, and get another reply, and so on. Free slow-motion web browsing. I say "slow-motion" because this was b…

There where even mail-to-ftp gateways. I vaguely remember using bitftp (?) to get a copy of the Utah Raster Toolkit that way. Long time ago...
Post reply on HN