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ericfontaine

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Don't want to use your real name? Don't join a site where the goal is to publicly connect with people you know."

ironically, many people joined facebook with the names they used in "real" life, only later to find their accounts suspended because they didn't use their "real name". Additionally, some people joined facebook to connect with certain groups of people they wanted to interact with but coudldn't in their real geographic area (e.g. threatened minority groups or viewpoints that are thinly scatted across the globe), so they may have been allured by facebook's promise to help connect them, only to find later when facebook changes their name policy that their account is suspended.

Don't want your privacy violated, post only what you feel comfortable with.

Facebook's data collection go beyond the information that you post, but extends to all the metadata and interactions that many users for the most part are unaware that they are giving out and may would prefer not to reveal. Had people listened to Stallman more, these interactions would more likely be handled by people's own private or community servers running free software, allowing people to share only the information that they want to be shared publicly, and keep other information & metadata private.

I would add for 2. that there are newer architectures, especially low power and various experimental parallel ones, that could use better optimizing compilers.

as jessaustin remarked, "[RMS] is complaining about the specific implementation of mobile tech with which we're currently saddled."

Listening to RMS would mean that if you do carry a mobile device, that it would use entirely free software including all drivers and bootloaders, that it only communicates with other hardware running entirely free software (i.e. only basetowers or wifi routers running free software), and that all the internet services accessed ran entirely free software (e.g. private email servers instead of gmail, pump.io & GNU social instead of twitter & facebook, mediagoblin instead of youtube, wikipedia, yacy or some other free software for search, etc.

I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles

The trick is configuring your blog to autopost to facebook, for which I use https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/ which also automatically grabs likes and comments from the facebook post and adds them to the wordpress comments database. Maybe this is acknowledging facebook's value, but at least I don't have to personally interact with facebook, nor are visitors to my blog tracked by facebook's javascript.

:)

It is not minutiae when someone phrases their posts in a manner that may imply they're taking credit for other people's work.

I didn't mind spending a few minutes because I respect all wikipedians who created and maintained the bitcoin article.

I wanted to help you understand, but now see it is futile. I would hope that the Wikipedia personality whose name is the abbreviation of the enlightened Pratyekabuddha ("a lone buddha", "a buddha on their own" or "a private buddha" [1]) would understand, but apparently I am talking to the personality "contingencies".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratyekabuddha

Yes, so what? So were many others. But you don't see everybody who created a wikipedia article make ego-boosting comments on HN whenever their article is mentioned. Nor do you see everyone involved in nurturing bitcoin comment on HN whenever bitcoin is mentioned.

Honestly, the reason I did research was I was hoping you were one of the cool people I used to chat with on the early days of bitcoin forums. I was curious to read your early comments and eager to ask you about your experience or how you first came across bitcoin. But all I found by searching for you username on bitcointalk was someone else's post "Paying homage to Pratyeka of Wikipedia for Bitcoin's inclusion." https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99437.0 featuring this bravado quote from your wikipedia profile of "particular contributions that your proud of":

"I argued bitterly for the restoration of the Bitcoin article from the evil hands of the deletionists, and have since been vindicated in my judgement as Bitcoin's rise to prominence has continued."

Your quote sounds like it is from a Middle Earth fantasy epic, and is just asking to be signed something like:

"-First Knight Pratyeka 'The Clairvoyant' of Wikipedia, The Creator of the Bitcoin Article, and The Protector of the defenseless Bitcoin community from the Void of Obscurity, The Hero entrusted with the Power of Wiki-Influence who rose during The Challenging Times and singlehandedly defeated the onslaught of The Deletionists."

I'm exaggerating, deliberately to give you an idea of what impression your comment and wiki profile imparts on others. I know many of us all like to speak like that on the internet in good humor, but after I combined your wiki profile quote with your HN comment, the picture of you in my head was another internet personality with a little too much ego that needs to be dampened. I'm imagining that in real life when you overhear strangers in public talk about bitcoin, you approach them to tell them that you created the bitcoin article.

Your comment feels just like the cliché first comment phenomenon that typical on sites like youtube. It offers nothing of substance or insight itself. Yes, everyone knows about the butterfly effect and how little things do make a difference. But this means every little bitcoin transaction, every little bitcoin bug report, every little bitcoin commit, every time someone explained bitcoin to their friends, everybody who made a bitcoin for ______ service, and every little anonymous wiki edit deserves some bit of credit for bitcoin's rise. And the blunt reality is that the reason the wikipedia article was reinstated was because these little interactions gradually increased the market price, causing more news sites started taking notice, so there were more 3rd party sources which is precisely what the article needed to survive. That was due to everyone's little contributions. And regarding your initial "creation", had you not made the initial stub, someone else would have made it a couple weeks later.

The good feeling of advancing human knowledge and understanding by creating and editing Wikipedia articles should be the reward itself. Posting on internet forums that you were the "first" just seems like your seeking attention or praise. And even worse, as another commentator kiro said earlier, your comment sounds like you take credit for the whole Wikipedia Bitcoin article. Regardless of the truth that factually and technically you did indeed "create" the initial stub, did a few edits, and argued to keep the article up, a humbler comment that offered insight wouldn't have provoked such a strong negative reaction.

Regardless, I am appreciative of Wikipedians like you for contributing and defending against The Deletionists.

I've been hoping for things like this to start appearing.

The difficulty with getting these things going is getting enough of a user base to prime the pump. Before major arbitration decisions can be made, people need to start off arbitrating little things. Like being a referee for a small game tournament with friends.

There's a lot of poor grammar, for instance:

"Mining in Dcoin is not usual familiar mining we got used to with other cryptocurrency."

I'm having trouble parsing that sentence and can't tell if you mean mining is similar to other currencies or different.

Plenty more grammar mistakes... (you should get an English editor and make sure to get an arbiter with high dcoin reputation to protect your transaction:) ).

Also, it is always nice to have localized websites...us americans aren't used to seeing decimals reversed with thousand separators, for instance: "0,0004%"

I see that your website has a link to http://stani.sh/pratyeka, which is the same username as "Pratyeka" who created this 529 byte stub for bitcoin on 8 March 2009:

  Bitcoin is an open source peer-to-peer electronic cash system developed by Satoshi Nakamoto that's completely P2P|decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties. Users hold the cryptography|crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the network to check for double-spending.
But the stub article did not meet wikipedia's standards as it lacked references to 3rd party sources, so was marked for deletion July ~10, 2010 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342.0 and officially deleted July ~31, 2010 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=652.0 and was only restored after the bitcoin community rewrote it fully in a manner deemed sufficient by the wikipedia community.

And for the entire history, you are only responsible for 0.19% of edits to that page, according to https://tools.wmflabs.org/usersearch/usersearch.py?name=Prat...

Every little wikipedia stub and edit is important, but sorry I was off-put by you entrance displaying the mantle "Article creator here".

Netflix on an NES 11 years ago

Neat. I was also wondering if maybe it was possible to switch between two colors based on a certain ratio of frames, faster than the CRT phosphors to fully switch colors (or atleast faster than the eye could detect the swapping), such that it looks like a fractional blend between two colors based on that ratio. I remember doing this trick with the TI-85 calculator to give any degree of greyscale even though the LCD was only black and white.

"Github and Bitbucket deserve the mention because those projects are well established."

According to Wikipedia article, GitHub and Bitbucket were established in 2008, and GitLab in sept 2011, making it ~3.5 years old and about half the age. Although the precise meaning of "well established" is vague, and while you could say that GitHub and Bitbucket are "more established" than GitLab, I would say GitLab is at least "sufficiently established" (i.e. at least sufficient enough to host projects with %99+ uptime). Quick searches reveal that GitHub is known to go down, with major ddos in Nov 2011 and 2 hours in March 2014, Bitbucket was down sometime 27th April 2014, GitLab.com went offline for a full 8 hours in July 2014. (Someone who cares further can do a more precise comparison of uptime). But they were all fixed quickly, still up, functioning, learning, and improving. While maybe your threshold for consideration an internet service to be "well established" is different from another person's threshold, your threshold is not necessarily more valid and cannot be determined without more specific criterion.

Based alone on the argument that "well established" services deserve mention, then that should mean services established before Github and Bitbucket that are still running reliably should be mentioned as well. But you have specifically said it's ok for github and bitbucket to deserve mention but not others.

"I really don't think (and that was my original point) that a Google announcement of shutting down Google Code should act as some sort of advertisement for $code-hosting-site/project."

It should not. And as I pointed out clearly in my original comment which I will repeat for emphasis as it has been the core of my whole argument:

"google code blogspot post specifically mentioned both GitHub 8 times and Bitbucket 3 times"

While it was appropriate (and arguably a duty as benefactor) for google to post a link to https://code.google.com/p/support-tools/ containing their export tools to github and bitbucket and the sourceforge import, that reference only takes one sentence and doesn't even require the google blog post itself to specifically mention any services. Considering that a shutdown announcement is a serious matter, it should be kept brief and limited to only information relevant to shutdown. All those specific references could have been omitted and the shutdown announcement would still make sense. By specifically mentioning certain services multiple times, the writer of the blog post has opened the door to queries about mentioning alternative services specifically. Had he written in a neutral manner (either by only posting the Wikipedia link or not mentioning any services), then it would have been inappropriate for GitLab to query for a request to be mentioned.

Well if we're using "Responsiveness of the UI" as the metric, then I would argue that http://fossil-scm.org/ beats both GitLab and GitHub. Fossil is easily self hosted (just run one small executible file). And it is really fast, because it is written in C with sqlite and is simple and minimalistic. It is not git based, but is a simpler DVCS. Dynamically generated pages on my home computer take less than .001 ms to display. It has all the features most small developers need, with a builtin lightweight wiki, issue tracker, and code tree. Your self-hosted website is available even if you don't have an internet connection, or you can use free hosting service like http://chiselapp.com/. Of course it looses in terms of size of community. But popularity does not determine quality.

You will likely loose arguments on public forums if you make statements like "absolutely no objective reason to ..." because someone just needs one reason to disprove. Here goes: GitLab has a functioning interface for managing git projects and lets anyone selfhost the community edition. Therefore there is an objective reason to put a project on GitLab. QED.

"There are many other hosting services like gitlab, what would make gitlab different so that it would deserve a pitch there?"

Which is why I said the blogpost would be fairer to just post the wikipedia comparison link. I never said that gitlab should "deserve" a pitch on the blog. I did say it was fair for GitLab to pitch their services, as the CEO has done here, but that is different from "deserving" a pitch.

It is hard to objectively determine what is the better hosting, but based on people's individual preferences, they can subjectively decide for themselves, which the wikipedia article helps out by clearly explaining the differences. Everyone who uses google code knows about github anyway, but might not be aware that there are other services.

We saw gitorious, an entirely-opensource service, fail due to lack of revenue. And we've seen Google Code, an entirely-proprietary solution, fail. For those concerned about the longevity of their hosting setup, they may want a hosting provider that both has a steady source of income to help guarantee longevity and that is based significantly on opensource software (maybe for reasons of philosophical principle in that opensource development should use opensource infrastructure, or for pragmatic reasons such that they can always fork the hosting service code). GitLab fills this niche nicely, in that the community edition is based on fully open-source code, while the enterprise edition (that the their commercial service gitlab.com is based on) uses proprietary extensions.

"The projects with the most stars on gitlab s gitlab itself with 221 stars right now. Even the smallest nodejs project achieves that popularity on github."

The lack of stars on gitlab projects may simply be due to the first-mover advantage of github, but does not necessarily represent any fundamental deficiencies is the hosting service.

I'm sticking to self-hosted fossil-scm. Very simple, lightweight, C, but has full wiki and issue tracker and code trees.

The one thing self-hosting lacks is the social network. What is really needed for self hosted sites is a federated network (maybe with something like pump.io and openID) to allow coders from other self-hosted or sass hosts to seamlessly login and contribute and display their profile, and to help mitigate spam.

"We need some way to distribute open source projects so they're on at least two services simultaneously, synched."

google "git sync mirror" and a bunch of solutions appear.

interestingly I wasn't able to run vi, but could run vim. I reported to the github issue tracker.

This seems very neat. Definitely much less overhead than VirtualBox. Plus can write to the same filesystem as windows without windows admin privileges (which can be done with cygwin, but not with virtualbox). Once it supports x86-64 binaries and threading and users, this could be very useful.

Netflix on an NES 11 years ago

I was wondering if maybe they preconverted the videos into a sequence of tilemaps and a set of approximate tiles. I notice they are only using the same 5 colors, which is under-utilizing the capabilites of the nes which should be able to display a 13 colors at the same time. (Each individual tile uses one palette of 4 colors, and there can be max of 4 palette used at a time, but one background color is shared by all palettes.) To more fully utilize the nes they could also use a different set of 4 palettes for every frame, which would allow for a much broader range of colors.

Hypothetically, the NES could play streaming video. For memeory limitations, a custom rom cartridge could be used which would grab a new set of video frames (consisting of tilemaps + tilepatterns) via a network controller. The 6502 core does not need to decode video, but could simply swap in chunks of these tilemaps+tilepatterns which the picture processing unit displays.

how about just use whitespace, like python:

  div class="red"
    p
      Hello, World!
(of course I know would not look nice if had to place <b>tags</b> inside of single line of text, and might get a little too indenty)

Ok, I simply linked to that as an example of a device that can interface with the free ath9k driver. Looking at https://www.qca.qualcomm.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AR92... I can't really see any closer detail inside of the black boxes labeled "Baseband PHY and Wireless MAC" and "Host Interface" but I can make a very educated guess that they are running some very simple RISC and/or DSP with code off a ROM responsible for performing all the non-analog functions necessary for wireless media access control (e.g. error recovery, finding free channels, Rx/Tx buffering) and for interfacing with PCIe bus, outside of functions that handle higher level of the networking stack that are more practically implemented in the ath9k driver code running in the x86 cpu.

"There is no firmware at all on the ath9k wifi chipsets."

No, there is firmware inside the wifi. Just looking at a specific chip ath9k wifi device: https://www.qca.qualcomm.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AR94... I see it has a "32-bit Tensilica Xtensa CPU" and this CPU is running some proprietary firmware on the embedded Code ROM. Although this firmware cannot be updated, is completely isolated from the main x86 CPU in my libreboot X60s, can't directly access any data outside of the physical miniPCI board, and only interfaces to the rest of computer via open-source x86 driver code on the main CPU, this embedded ROM code controlling the embedded RISC processor is however still proprietary firmware. This is the same deal with the microcontrollers inside the HDD/SDD and graphics chipset, which all have proprietary embedded firmware which is interfaced with by the opensource x86 drivers. Firmware != driver.