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Roger Binns
Personal blog · rogerbinns.com/blog · on HN as rogerbinnsprogrammingsystems
Roger Binns writes Home Page, a personal blog at rogerbinns.com about programming and systems. Since 2012, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “A history of VisionFS”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
No feed foundVisit the blog
29mentions?
4HN people?
2012–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link to his pages on a list of blocked recruiters and on the history of the VisionFS SMB server. The comments are bare links and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Posts and writings by Roger Binns
Most-linked posts?
- A history of VisionFS2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-08-08
What Hacker News says?
Just because it is called insurance doesn't mean it actually is. The health care industry is pay by activity/procedure/items consumed, and everyone has a vested interest in others not knowing what is paid while (usually) increasing activity. In general everyone is spending someone else's money. "insurance" doesn't cover catastrophic stuff (there is some) but also covers everyday things like checkups. (The analogy is…
Comment linking /blog/gplus/the-first-rule-of-the-american-healthcare-industry.html
on “Richard Lynch, an awesome PHP community guy and former colleague needs our help”Submitted A history of VisionFS as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYou forgot things like consumers needing information and having a choice. Those need to be present for capitalism to work. For fun I ask how much it is going to cost when going to my doctor. They refuse to tell me. They can't even make an estimate (tens? hundreds? thousands?) Even after seeing the doctor they can't. I pull out my card and say "I would like to pay now". I get told I have to wait for the bill. It is v…
Comment linking /blog/gplus/the-first-rule-of-the-american-healthcare-industry.html
on “Show HN: I mapped US medical prices. Save thousands by driving a few miles”Submitted APSW in Colour (Async) – Another Python SQLite Wrapper as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI maintain one at http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt My resume has a "note to recruiters" attached. It is very clear if a recruiter has made any effort to read any of that. The clueless ones end up in the list above. http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html
Comment linking /recruiters.html
on “The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever”I gave up on G+ because they kept making it more and more unreadable. Posts ended up being pictures wherever possible. Then they made things go horizontally and vertically in random sized boxes. You could switch to single column mode, but ended up with almost no actual text on the screen - http://www.rogerbinns.com/galleries/From%20Posts/plusunreada... shows in yellow to tiny areas of actual content. I still don't u…
Comment linking /galleries/From%20Posts/plusunreadable.png
on “Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company”Even more valuable is that you are giving them access to you. They can now contact you whenever they want. I really detest sites that insist on registration in order for you to even work out what the heck it is they offer (eg access to SDKs, whitepapers etc behind registration). http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/gplus/a-pet-peeve-is-company-...
Comment linking /blog/gplus/a-pet-peeve-is-company-websites-that-demand.html
on “People (understandably) hate to register”There were other reasons too. I worked at a place where we ported our software to 20 different versions of Unix[1]! gcc tended to be a lot less buggy than vendor compilers, and what bugs there were tended to be across all platforms. gcc's error messages were also a lot better than vendor compilers, as were regular diagnostics. gcc -Wall was a huge boon to improving code quality. If you were doing C++ for cross platf…
Comment linking /visionfs.html
on “Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life”SMB has an extension mechanism and SMB 1 has support for Unix extensions for over 15 years - I was the author of the original Unix extensions spec. You can get full Unix semantics using them (links etc). The predominant form of extension is an "info level". Somewhat analogous to a data structure like that returned from stat, the numeric info level controls what structure is returned (or supplied). Microsoft had a te…
Comment linking /visionfs.html
on “New OS X uses Windows file sharing by default”But you are rewarding those using DRM and going against their intentions. And by spending that money and your time/attention on those, have taken it away from the alternatives that are in your interests and what you want to reward. Yes the alternatives may be worse right now, but they will get better quicker with your money and attention. http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/gplus/those-of-you-who-downlo...
Comment linking /blog/gplus/those-of-you-who-download-content-the-copyright.html
on “Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users”Location: Santa Cruz, California Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python (including its C API), C, SQLite (C API), Linux, deep techie generalist Résumé/CV: https://www.rogerbinns.com/rogerbresume.html Email: rogerb@rogerbinns.com My sweet spot is working as a developer in a small team that has to do all the work to ship the product, using Python for practical and productive development, and as glue,…
Comment linking /rogerbresume.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2025)”I recently bought a Panasonic camera - in the compact travel zoom class. One feature is wifi support, where for example it can upload pictures to your computer. There are several places the camera lets you enter text such as names in face recognition, and in SSIDs. But for some unfathomable reason a Panasonic engineer added extra code so that spaces are disabled for wifi passwords. This was actual extra effort, and…
Comment linking /blog/support-tale.html
on “Home entertainment implementations are pretty appalling”After you start the upgrade process running. I am doing it from a USB stick. You can see a screenshot in http://rogerbinns.com/blog/developers-should-work-in-support...
Comment linking /blog/developers-should-work-in-support.html
on “Microsoft quietly rewrites its activation rules for Windows 10”There's another list here: http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt
Comment linking /blocked_recruiters.txt
on “Awful Recruiters”I started with Nikola because of familiarity. I use the Python-centric Sphinx tool for documentation in all my work and personal projects. The primary author of Nikola also wrote rst2pdf which integrates into Sphinx if you also want to build your doc as pdf. Nikola takes the same approach as Sphinx - for example defaulting to rst content and using conf.py for configuration. It also has reasonably complete functional…
Comment linking /blog/all-change.html
on “Open-Source Static Site Generators”I use Nikola. On the tech side the developer decided to model it as a series of tasks such as render photos, render posts, build rss etc. Those tasks are also implemented to run incrementally. For example if you add a new post then only that new post gets rendered to the output directory. While this sounds fine in principle, it soon gets messy. A configuration change may require everything to be rebuilt. But if you…
Comment linking /blog/on-nikola.html
on “Open-Source Static Site Generators”Location: Santa Cruz, California Remote: Preferred Willing to relocate: Not likely Technologies: Networked software including mobile Résumé/CV: http://www.rogerbinns.com/rogerbresume.html Email: roger@rogerbinns.com I strongly prefer small companies and startups. My résumé references what I am like to work with, and a note to recruiters detailing what I am a good fit for.
Comment linking /rogerbresume.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2014)”I originally started out doing exactly what you said - dumping Python dictionaries into a file and reading/writing that. It worked well. Where it really hurt was I wanted to add undo functionality, and that means needing to store the before and after view of the data. And I wanted it more sophisticated than that - be able to view what the data looked like at any point in time. That forced me to use a database, becau…
Comment linking /blog/20-years-of-apsw.html
on “apsw: Another Python SQLite Wrapper”> I don't understand why it bothers people so much to be contacted by recruiters. It likely depends on how big your online footprint is. I've been on the Internet publicly since 1989 and hence you can find me all over. That also means recruiters do. I have no problems with the ones who are good at their jobs, but about half are below average, working on commission, and their tactics are the same as spammers (spread…
Comment linking /recruiters.html
on “Dear Google Recruiting...”BTW I am a Brit and think the US is dysfunctional in many ways. What you are paying for is not the incoming call getting to your carrier, but for your carrier to then connect to your phone using radio (or whatever). Same for outgoing calls. To flip it around, when I call YOUR number, why should it be relevant to me how YOU choose connect to the phone network? Why should I care if you use cell, satellite, machines in…
Comment linking /blog/gplus/i-finally-have-a-solution-for-the-number.html
on “Announcing Free Incoming SMS For All”There are very good reasons (for calls anyway), and arguably the rest of the world is broken. I wrote about it here http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/paying-for-incoming-calls.htm... In short it is to with termination rates, area codes, and how people in the rest of the world get screwed but don't realise it.
Comment linking /blog/paying-for-incoming-calls.html
on “Announcing Free Incoming SMS For All”While we were a division of SCO, SCO weren't that relevant to us. They bought IXI to ensure stability in supply of their desktop. SCO distinguished itself from other Unix vendors by having a friendly desktop including for administrators and their tools. IIRC our business was something like 3% of sales on Intel chips with the rest being RISC, although SCO itself isn't counted in that since we didn't sell on the platf…
Comment linking /visionfs.html
on “CDE Open Sourced”I've got what seems like a good solution. At the very top of my resume and on Linkedin I have a link titled 'Note to recruiters'. It is pretty trivial to tell if the recruiter actually read it (after all the majority are clueless/useless). I also add their domain to my email server blocklist. (After all if the recruiter is unable to recruit competent recruiters - its own industry - then why would I trust them for an…
Comment linking /recruiters.html
on “Why I Hate Tech Recruiters”Location: Santa Cruz California Remote: Preferred, but including periodic office visits Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Networked software including mobile. Résumé/CV: http://www.rogerbinns.com/rogerbresume.html Email: roger@rogerbinns.com
Comment linking /rogerbresume.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2015)”The VisionFS SMB server referenced in the article has some interesting history: http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html
Comment linking /visionfs.html
on “Breaking into ASOS”I have a prominent link at the top of CV/Resume/linkedin to my "Note to recruiters" which helps with all this - http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html For example it says to name the company (and why) and that if the recruiter has trust issues with their client that I don't want to get involved. It becomes very obvious which recruiters have actually read the note to make sure the company and I are possibly matche…
Comment linking /recruiters.html
on “Recruit this”I've been threatening to do it for years, and I guess this is as good a time as any. Note of course that this is based on my experience. http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt This is my "Note to recruiters" http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html
Comment linking /recruiters.html
on “ReCAPTCHA Mailhide”
