babebridou's comments

babebridou | 9 years ago | on: Why does Google Play need constant GPS?

It's really strange to me. I noticed yesterday that the Play app started leaking battery like crazy on my Nexus 5. 100%-0% within 10 hours of idle, 33% due to Google Play Store.

Today, 6 hours since the full charge I'm looking again at the battery screen: 38% battery left.

16% Chrome (Background CPU: 1min 24s, Foreground CPU: 16s, GSM: 2h36min 58s)

16% Google Play Store (Total CPU: 10s, GPS: 6h 20min 6s, GSM: 1min28s)

6% Screen

4% Android system

Chrome is most surprising, as it's not usually there. I did a single web search three hours ago though. The phone is idle all day otherwise. There's something rotten in the mobile software industry that's literally making our pockets warm for no good reason.

Dear Google, please at least be a good citizen in your own ecosystem.

babebridou | 9 years ago | on: Billionaire founder of Free launches free coding college

Be careful, it's more of an accelerated natural selection than a school.

The postulate of 42 is that talented people will acquire this fundamental knowledge no matter what, and that non-talented people will simply drop out of school. The big idea is to make sure that people with a gift for programming, no matter where they come from or what they did before, become highly productive and achievement-driven. The rest better pack up and go do something else.

That's also one of the reasons why the school is free. Dropping out and failing should be as quick and painless as possible for both the school and the student.

babebridou | 10 years ago | on: Kill Your Dependencies

The idea in the OP is that if you're going to use the Amen Break, don't require "Hiphop-all", "Breakbeat-all" or, hell, if we're going by some of the Wikipedia examples, "Futurama-all".

Just import "AmenBrother-drums" or something and start from there, because obviously you're not going to use Zoidberg's leftmost tentacle in your cool new sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break

babebridou | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: What should replace XMPP?

Putting the format and security aside, isn't the main issue that XMPP was so good that we tried to bite more than it could chew?

- Local Federation is great, but Global Federation doesn't benefit the big players

- Extensibility is great for domain-specific problems, but it leads to more fragmentation

- It tried to handle data streaming, but it's inherently suboptimal at it

I mean, it was a great protocol to explore the IM design space, but it was bound to be replaced once we clarified our needs (for the most part, multiple devices and media streaming).

As a side note, I often get showerthoughts about mixing IM and blockchain techs. I'm not sure where that would lead us.

babebridou | 10 years ago | on: Docker for Beginners

It's my understanding that containerization's major benefit is not for development but for system maintenance. It allows sysadmins the luxury to stop spawning VMs left and right, since you can safely avoid all the overhead of keeping full VMs worth of hardware resources for applications that will ultimately only need them in short bursts.

By itself, containerization is great already, without involving the devs at all.

What Docker attempts to provide is a Framework that allows Devs and Sysadmins the use of the same tools. Ideally, if you can get your devs to use this framework, you will unlock the next step: you no longer deliver sources or packages in production, but rather entire Docker Images, ready to use and with clearly identified interfaces with other systems. It's a dream come true for IT sysadmins, who can focus on their own problematics, monitoring, logging, security, resource management, network architecture etc.

And that's what great about the Docker effort: it's the devs trying to be the best wingmen in the world with their sysadmin pals.

babebridou | 10 years ago | on: Why is nobody using SSL client certificates? (2008)

We used to use client certificates to declare and pay our taxes online in France, about a decade ago.

They dropped the technology because no one savvy enough used the same computer long enough to be able to benefit from the feature more than a couple times. And you were still required to enter codes to match your forms with the administration's data, so it felt a bit useless even at the time.

babebridou | 10 years ago | on: FOIA'd Email Shows French Motives for Overthrowing Libya [pdf]

That's true for the most part, I mean, the government obviously didn't mention some of the things that are in the cable unless they deliberately wanted to shoot themselves in the foot, but the news would systematically feature pieces about Qadaffi's awkward presence on Bastille Day along with the oil, gold and silver.

My point is that the cable was nothing more than a short compilation of common knowledge and hearsay, like you said, "more or less valid assumptions" that you could easily get by switching radio channels a few times during your tuesday morning commute.

babebridou | 10 years ago | on: FOIA'd Email Shows French Motives for Overthrowing Libya [pdf]

To be honest, as a French person I didn't see anything new in this cable. None of this was secret, it was pretty much the official stance, except stripped of the humanitarian aspects such as the ongoing civil war and repression or the Arab Spring.

It feels like Hillary's advisor was merely watching French TV and transcribing what journalists and politicians said publicly. The mention of Bernard Henri-Levy proves it. When you sum up a geopolitical situation in a few sentence, you don't waste any explaining BHL is a "semi-joke", unless your own knowledge is cursory.

With regards to the French population, you have to put it in context (April 2011, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Arab_Spring ). The Arab Spring was still going "smoothly" elsewhere, and we were all watching Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria and Algeria where things were handled "more or less peacefully" back then, at least to the French eye. Qadaffi's repression, on the other hand, was violent from the get-go.

It was a perfect storm (1) for Sarkozy, as on top of the things mentioned in the cable, he had to prove that he was serious with his Mediterranean Union, and more importantly he had to disprove the allegations that Qadaffi financed his election.

Wether it was the right thing to do or not, I personally have no idea, but it was pretty much a no-brainer at the time for France to distance itself from Qadaffi during his civil war, and fuel the opposition.

(1): unrelated, but maybe I should have said "homerun" in this case? My English fails me.

babebridou | 11 years ago | on: Uber offices raided in Paris by French police in 'car-pooling' controversy

It is, actually, an issue specific to driving businesses, and Uber is far more lenient than the law.

Uninsured and unlicensed drivers are normally very rare because many, many people in large cities such as Paris (where Taxis services thrive) very rarely drive. Companies such as Uber incentivize unlicensed and uninsured motorists to drive by making it profitable with seemingly far less control than existing businesses, hence the panic reaction and public debate on the matter.

Paris is relatively small but very dense, and can be maze-like. You can live in Paris and be completely lost a few hundred meters away from your place. Streets and directions are hard to follow and remember, and distances are skewed by traffic, one-way-streets, pedestrian zones, bus lanes and cycle lanes. Some streets open and close depending on the hour of the day/night or the season. It can seriously be a mess and you simply can't assume you're going to be a decent professional Parisian driver just because you live in Paris.

Lastly we all have a proper ID, so it's absolutely viable not to have a driver's license at all (provided you don't drive). Driving itself in Paris is generally a time-sink and a money sink. You only drive when you don't have a choice. For me, that's only when I'm on holiday away from the city.

Insurance is another matter, and yes it's illegal to drive an uninsured vehicle, and you also need a special license to drive for profit.

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: Why is the web so slow?

The key is the pacing of the asset streaming relative to the rate of environmental change the player is creating on the screen.

Streaming essentially disables fast travelling and teleporting to some extent, but makes slow travelling seamless and much, much more enjoyable. World of Warcraft was among the first online games to get it about right at launch, and I'm pretty sure the absence of loading screens was a huge factor in its universal acclaim.

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: I don’t have any connections

You forgot another company runner in France, and a very important one: the procurement people.

These guys make it incredibly difficult to build new businesses. In their mind contracting a company with less than a hundred people is heresy.

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

Aye, I won't bother critiquing the example, I see what you mean with the boilerplate as noise and part of me agree with you.

One of the main points of programming is to reduce the noise to enable higher levels of code, while keeping an easy access to what's under the hood to fine tune or add new functionalities. A programming language is merely a list of things that will make you lose your temper while you do all that.

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy

Well, there are programming languages and then there are conventions. I think a programming language is more like an alphabet, and programming conventions are the real languages.

I can scroll through code at high speed and understand it at a mere glance once I "get" both the language and the convention that was used (if only the doc and comments didn't get in the way all the freaking time...) Things that feel out of place immediately stand out for more careful inspection.

Autocomplete, code snippets, common refactor options etc, pretty much everything an IDE does automagically for programmers, those are a boon for enforcing conventions as well, once you're proficient with them and how they're configured for a project you can pretty much "see" the history of the code without even looking at the commit history.

I once had a boss who used to say this: "I love looking at programmers reading code. It's like that guy from The Matrix, he's looking at undecypherable numbers and says 'my, my, look at that brunette in the sexy red dress'!"

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Showcasing a mobile app in the desktop browser

The first few people who were shown the page didn't notice either that they could interact with the phone, I had to add quite a few visual cues, apparently that was not enough yet :(

This project started when I discovered PlaceIt by Breezi(1) as I was making my app's landing page. Since the app is heavily using html5, I could relatively easily take it to the next level and make it actually usable in some ways from the browser.

Anyway I'm glad you like it, I'm hungry for more feedback!

1: http://placeit.breezi.com/

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: If you were to build a new webapp today, how would you pick your techs?

Php is an old lover to me, I haven't even touched it in the last decade. Revisiting this tech is very tempting, especially when I look at the first line of the changelog for all the things I missed:

> Switch to using Zend Engine 2, which includes numerous engine level improvements.

Does anyone have an executive summary of how Php evolved since the 4.3 days? Where there any fundamental changes anyone should be aware of?

babebridou | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: If you were to build a new webapp today, how would you pick your techs?

So basically, passion, right? Or is it what you already know and do all the time?

It's an interesting take nonetheless, I've been toying with the concept of data/documents as the integration of event streams (commits, status updates etc) for a few years but never really thought to use the concept "from the ground up". The idea to me never really had any technical justification, mostly end user ones. Collaborative editing (Google Wave), action replays and time machine visualization (Starcraft, Gource), status update and event analytics dashboards (google analytics or the twitter firehose)...

It's a bit outside of the scope of my webapp for the time being but I'm glad there are people who think there is value in that approach!

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