skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So say 50 elements. With a 50ms difference that's 2.5 seconds of total time. Most browsers will do 2-4 simultaneous connections, so let's say 4, that's still over 1/2 second faster page load. Now put that end user in Europe or Africa, and you're looking at 200-500 ms latency per call, versus 10 ms. You can see how the math works.

Assets loaded on some of your recently submitted URLs:

21 - http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/

60 - http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/2/JavaScript-Scoping-and-...

104 - http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/falling-skies-lawsu...

282 - https://plus.google.com/u/0/111314089359991626869/posts/HQJx...

54 - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223601/Anonymous_dup...

67 - http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/rand-paul-in-pa...

70 - http://www.wptavern.com/bad-behavior-in-the-wordpress-commun...

etc....

The impact of reducing latency for each of those calls, and offloading those requests from your server(s) is a big deal for big sites.
Countries don't need protection from treaties to censor the internet.
Learning Ruby on Rails: Month 1
From the second paragraph of the article:

"In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses."

It looks like the issue isn't that it's free; it's that Google provided free maps services to some businesses while charging others. That's the gist I got from the article, anyway.
The problem with ACTA isn't its content. The problem is with how it got negotiated and signed with almost no democratic accountability. And this article is specifically addressing that deficit.

If you're an "ends justifies the means" kind of guy, then this stuff doesn't upset you. But it upsets me.
If ACTA was a singular event in an otherwise perfect universe. Your stance may indeed be correct.

But, today our freedoms are being assaulted from all sides. There are global databases being build, capturing, indexing and processing all the little details of our lives as we speak.

There is an increasing tendency towards control, censorship and abuse of power throughout the world, facilitated by technology and special interests.

What the protests around ACTA are about for me is that some US private interest group basically worked to get most of the world to adopt their view on IP and privacy. If that were not bad enough, they did it in total secrecy, not allowing the public to know what the officials paid for from our pockets are doing.
I'll make it simpler for you. Even if that is correct, even if ACTA doesn't change the existing laws: we want those laws reversed.

They are not our laws. They were forced upon us by a combination of US government pressure and outright bribery. And they are now sending our people to prison and censoring our internet access for things we do not consider to be crimes.

The protest against ACTA is not so much a matter of "ACTA is evil", it's more a matter of "this corruption stops now".

We want our freedom an sovereignty back, not to have it signed away in some treaty, even if that treaty has been watered down to something merely symbolical with no immediate effect. It is patently obvious that they won't stop at ACTA in it's current form.

Sometimes that mere fact that you finally draw a line is more important than where exactly you draw it.
It was your decision to start talking about something you know nothing about without reading the article. It was your decision to be negative from the beginning. It was my decision to correct you when you made claims which are plainly false. That's the decision I made.
You could probably hire a free-lancer to get most of this stuff going for you (there are plenty of sites around for hiring people to do small jobs).

Ultimately, though, you should look at trying to do as much as you can yourself. The better you understand your system, the better you can run your company.

Still, CDN and database optimisation isn't the first place to start. As I mentioned, look at YSlow, which should give you a few places to work on for optimising your sites.

As mentioned by someone else, depending on the technology your sites are running on, there may also be plugins/tools available to speed things up with little to no real effort.
Ask HN: How do CDNs work?
Ok, there is a geographically diverse high speed network. But, how does you browser know which server to go to as there is a single URL? Is there some DNS magic going on?
Briggs responds: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5154

My experience is that usually in a contentious debate like this, the person who can keep a cooler head is right. It's not a perfect heuristic but it's a good starting point. Galileo can afford to be calm whereas Cardinal Bellarmine has to rant and rave.
I'll have to give XFS a look again. We use subversion at my work and an "svn up" took 4-8x longer on XFS than on reiser3.6; it was insanely faster for just about everything else though.

It definitely is not great for sudden power-failure, but really if you're not using a laptop, buy a UPS, it's not that expensive.
My first explanatory blog post on MapReduce, How did I do?
"Yahoo" has (had?) a similar connotation in the US.
Ha. That's actually pretty funny. To state the obvious: that's impossible. If the list omits itself, it's incomplete. It it includes itself, it's invalid.
Thanks for the input. Agreed that these are small UI changes and building browser add-ons could do the trick. The removal of comment-karma is probably a bigger deal; this was my personal take on things I haven't necessarily heard talked about as much.

In my view, it's the small UI things HN and other sites get right that often make the difference though, and a bunch of browser add-ons just seems like a fragmented approach to changes that may benefit a lot of people on HN who may never discover or use the add-ons.
Be an Angel Investor, Just Don't Be Dumb Money
Just taking the parts which sound bad to me:

"At least with respect to pirated copyright goods and counterfeit trademark goods, each Party
shall provide that, in civil judicial proceedings, at the right holder's request, its judicial authorities
have the authority to order that such infringing goods be destroyed, except in exceptional
circumstances, without compensation of any sort." (Article 10, page 15)

OK. What if I have a chinese imitation of some product and I don't know it? Why do they have to destroy it? And, about pirated content: the damage is done. If I have some music pirated in my MP3 and you destroy it I'm not going to buy it again. Also, how can I prove that the content is not pirated? Shall I carry over my iTunes receipts if I travel to the US and they take my iPod at the airport control? And how do they destroy the pirated content? Do they delete the files or they trash the whole gadget containing them?

"1. Each Party shall provide that its judicial authorities have the authority to order prompt and
effective provisional measures [...] to prevent goods that involve the infringement of an intellectual
property right from entering into the channels of commerce" (Article 12, page 17)

What kind of goods involve copyright infringement? Will they block P2P programs although they can be used for legal downloads (Linux distributions, for example)?

These are two examples that I found without much effort (I'm not a legal expert so I'm sure there are more).

Also, the fact that it was created in secret is a good reason to reject it. In Wired they explained very well the four main points of criticism.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/24/acta-101?page...
Good list of useful configuration options. I'd also like to add the "Compression yes" option that you can add on a per-host basis, and this could save some bytes sent over the wire. To see how much it saved, invoke with verbose ("ssh -v"), and it outputs the number of bytes saved after the session ends.

Another config option that has saved me a lot of time is the "ProxyCommand" option that lets you specify a command, whose stdin is used as a pipe to talk to a remote server. So, something like:

Host inside
ProxyCommand ssh gateway nc inside 22

Would allow you to just type "ssh inside" and ssh to a machine behind a gateway, without ssh-ing twice!
I understand it as international harmonisation effort to European IP law standards.
When do you think 4Chan, Reddit, or ... GASP ... even HackerNews start to become considered honeypots for terrorists?
"Oh my God," said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and before that the top lawyer at the National Security Agency. "That could allow people to imitate almost any company on the Net."

Does anyone else feel this line is more suited to a Hollywood movie than a Reuters release?
You misunderstand me, which is my own fault. I believe that complacency on the part of citizens with regard to policing one's own government can only accelerate the rate of abuse of governmental power, and becomes difficult to reverse should the government ever feel it has free reign to remove the ability of its citizens to legally police it.

In short, thank $deity for the crackpots and the whistleblowers both. I prefer to err on the side of caution. Slight stupidity is worth the price.
Unfortunately, in Germany GEMA enjoys the privilege of inverted burden of proof. Look for `GEMA-Vermutung' for details.
I know I should thank you by up voting. But also, just want to say that the guide was a very interesting and insightful read.
Yaf::Function - Generic callable entity wrapper library (C++)
Hotmail is a complete and utter mess; short passwords, constant account breaches, spam, spam, spam - I wouldn't throw stones.
Subsection 5 From section 5:

"Each Party shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies
against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors,
performers or producers of phonograms in connection with the exercise of their rights, and that restrict acts in respect of, their works, performances, and phonograms, which
are not authorized by the authors, the performers or the producers of phonograms
concerned or permitted by law."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

The above is effectively censorship: making certain numbers illegal. It's exporting some of the DMCA and the european copyright act to countries that don't have it already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive

I can forsee subsection 7 of section 5 having implications for ISPs:

"
To protect electronic rights management information, each Party shall provide
adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against any person knowingly
performing without authority any of the following acts knowing, or with respect to civil
remedies, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or
conceal an infringement of any copyright or related rights:

(a) to remove or alter any electronic rights management information;

(b) to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast, communicate, or make
available to the public copies of works, performances, or phonograms,
knowing that electronic rights management information has been
removed or altered without authority."

electronics rights management AKA DRM. Coming to a CPU near you, soon.
RIM’s new chairwoman promises shake-up isn’t over
No, you're not paranoid - this is the new reality; the new America. And to clarify, you will have no trial and the jail you would be held at is at an undisclosed location.
Is there a "tech blogger of the year" category somewhere so we can nominate this guy? Every single one of his posts is epic. The peri-relational metaphor for shell command composition, this one, and every one before should be required reading.
The (reported) fact that they were hacked repeatedly in 2010 and the CTO at that time (claims he) didn't learn of it until Reuters called him for a comment doesn't exactly paint a reassuring picture.

I bet Symantec is a little irritated that they bought the VeriSign^TM CA business in 2010. Are they going to want their money back?

If they can't prove there was no compromise of the private keys, will Symantec reissue the 30 year VeriSign root certs?

EDIT: The SEC filing is here (keyword "breach")
https://investor.verisign.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125...

Interesting how the filing mentions the threat to their DNS business. Perhaps the potential risk to the root CA is no longer considered relevant since they've sold it?
This server is does not come with ECC-memory. How "bad" would it be to run a database server on a non ecc server?
Your equivalent is, imho, incorrect.

See it that way, when does predatory begins? As a matter of Fact Google Maps is already the biggest on the market with a price next to 0 for users. If we would compare it to something in real life it would: "Somebody has given to a group of people a serious death threat". Then in that case you'd need a punishment.

Anyway, I read some of the comments on this story and I believe take attacks on websites and companies as personal offense. Nothing could be far from reality. A society has to maintain a balance and competition is GOOD. Allowing Google to phagocyte the whole Maps business is not beneficial at all for society as a whole. Actually it's quite bad, even for users.

The French government is not racist, they don't want to attack or kill Google, they want a favorable ecosystem for innovation and fair competition. Google is a big business that can use its other services to temporarily dump prices on one of its product to totally wipe out competition, there need to be safeguards!
Peek offers remaining hardware to hackers
Useful link. Very comprehensive. I wish there was a better way to connect people who need these apps with this link and the pages for the apps since personally I knew of HN Search but never navigated to the Cool Apps page. I guess people just need to be aware of it. Maybe HN could promote it on the site at some point.
Not Everyone Copies Apple
Comparing vi to an IDE is like comparing a screwdriver to a fully automated car assembly line... it is completely beside the point and they each have their purpose and downsides.
Looking for Two Rails Dev to help hack HealthCare
Your [1] is an ad for the Samsung Galaxy S II, not the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

At least your Mac/PC and Galaxy S2 ads had some copy telling the viewer why they might want to use the product in question (Use a Mac because it's simpler, Use the Galaxy S2 because it has most of the features the iPhone 4S has (and you don't have to wait in line)). This Microsoft ad is just plain GMail bashing.

Edit: Yikes, why the downvotes?
Would a company get convicted under the same law if it was backed by an entity with unlimited (a lot of) cash and gained a dominant position because of the backing entity?

I'm not defending Google, just wondering if the case I describe above is the same as what Google was doing?
Less relevant how? nil.object_id is still 4 in MRI 1.9.2.

The article noted that all integers have odd ids, but not why—the LSB is a http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TagBit in MRI. I would hope other implementations are permitted to choose different schemes; it would suck if user code began assuming nobody found a use for more than one tag bit.
Things are starting to heat up all over Europe now, inspired by the Polish protests.

The European Parliament is notoriously sensitive to grass roots movements, because they are eager to prove themselves and rarely get to deal with controversial issues that capture the imagination of public and media. And being relatively free from domestic political power games, they can vote more independently.

And if one or more countries (especially if they are founding EU-members) turn against ACTA, and become likely not to ratify, the politicians may actually quietly encourage the European Parliament to kill ACTA to prevent the much bigger embarrassment of high profile rejection by member states.

There's a really good chance to kill ACTA before it even comes to national ratification.
Does this check vendor prefixed (-webkit,-moz,...) "features" too?
Interesting. I had always assumed it had something to do with word size being 4.
Yar. there's also blender, sketchup, wings3d, art of illusion - there's a ton.

I guess, it's easy for me to imagine a shape - i can draw that shape on a piece of paper, but i find it hard to express that same shape using modeling software.

Say, wrap some text around the surface of a sphere. I'm pretty sure i could, letter by letter, orient and kern text in OpenSCAD but it would take me a long time to do.

i imagine in the not to distant future there will be a motion tracker or kinect app to allow shaping stuff like clay - or maybe just use clay and scan it in.

In any case, all the software i've used feels clunky. iMovie for modeling will be a big deal.
I'm one of the really blasphemous vi nuts who uses both Dvorak and the arrow keys for movement. I keep a very minimal vimrc, and I don't use or remap the standard hjkl keys. But that means I can also seamlessy switch between multiple IDE's with vi-compatible modes, and have zero problems using vi/vim on machines that don't yet have my vimrc set up. I feel that it gives me a superior editor with a superior keyboard layout, and the flexibility to use some of the best tools for the job.

For the record, I use a "Tenkeyless" [1] quality keyboard, and depending on what languages I'm working on, I use:

- vi/vim for editing one-off files or small, isolated projects

- Sublime Text 2 with vintage mode for Python or PHP projects

- Eclipse with Vrapper for Java/Android projects

- Visual Studio with the OP's ViEmu plugin for C#/Xna projects

I'm pretty freakin' happy with my setup.

1: http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=leopold,tenkeyles...
Also, if people are misinformed over ACTA, it's because the whole freaking negotiation was done in secret.
Thanks! I think comment systems generally (not just HN's) can use a lot of improvement. Better and better sorting algorithms based on recency, user quality, responses to the comment, etc. seem incremental, honestly. It's helpful, but if I were to redesign commenting systems from scratch I would think about the current linear format, whether comments that relate to each other could intelligently be grouped together, etc. I feel like if companies like Disqus and Livefyre are going to compete with the added social value Facebook brings, they're going to have to figure this out and really revolutionize conversations on sites.
Stop Using White iPhone Images
What would be the downside to using non ECC RAM in a heavily loaded server? Would it cause processes to crash?
According to Microsoft, you have your priorities wrong, and you should be more concerned about targeted ads. :)

Edit: No sense of humor?
I can't find one either. In fact, AWS doesn't seem to be running with ECC RAM except for some of the GPU instances. Happy to be corrected here.
I am actually a bit surprised the latest Opera didn't score better than 56%. Oh well, I guess I'd complain about the speed if everything was implemented.
No, he must act in good faith when acting in his capacity as a board member and corporate officer. When acting in his capacity as a shareholder, he has no such obligation. The line between the two roles is usually pretty clear.

Think of a member of a military. They have a clear duty to act according to the policy and orders of their superiors. But in most nations, they can also vote, in their personal capacity as citizens, to change the top level of leadership, and they have no obligation to exercise their vote in furtherance of anyone's agenda but their own.

Zuckerberg's position is similar. What's out of whack is that he controls a majority vote of the "citizenry" (shareholders) himself.
An outrage. I know an eminent chemist who will not referee for Elsevier--he was ahead of his time. The monopoly that the scientific publishers have consists of controlled access to 60 years of copyrighted work. An embargo of a few years after publication would be considerably better than what we have, but the intellectual monopolists want those billions. The cost of publishing hasn't gone up--the money is going into their executive suites. And most likely to their executive's sweetie pies.
Actually all 3 of those are true.

I don't know exactly what this company's product is, but if they offer an API for creating maps on a website it would be a rival product.

Next, the barrier to entry for online mapping is huge. The raw data to generate and create maps is not easy to collect. Especially for satellite images and topo data. And then there's the infrastructure required to actually process and serve the data.

Switching mapping APIs is not always trivial. Along with the different interfaces, most of them have slightly different features. Once a site is using a specific mapping API it's anywhere from a hassle to a major PITA to switch to something else.
This talks about port forwarding but does not mention using ssh as a socks proxy, with is extremely convenient. Also, although tricky to configure ssh can also be used as a VPN with tun/tap support (although a good /etc/network/interfaces on Debian can make it as easy as ifup/ifdown tunX)

Unfortunately this guide does not mention ssh-agent to have usable passphrased keys. Tip: Mac OS X Keychain integrates fantastically with ssh-agent.

My favorite trick is transparently bouncing via ProxyCommand+netcat:

Host target.domain
Hostname target.local
ProxyCommand ssh -q bounce_host.domain nc -q0 %h 22

Also, authorizing by key but restricting the (passwordless) key to certain commands, allowing for remote action automation. [0]

Ssh agent forwarding is also particularly awesome instead of naively scattering keys.

Ssh ControlMaster allowing to reuse connections can really improve responsiveness. Tip: start the master connection as a daemon (-f), so as not to mistakenly close the terminal which handles it, else you will close the channel for all other currently opened slave sessions. I wish ssh would fork and start the master on demand then close it when the last channel closes.

[0] http://www.cmdln.org/2008/02/11/restricting-ssh-commands/
Accessing HP Cloud OpenStack Nova using Python and Requests
Great piece, I wrote something similar on Google+ recently but you've summed it up better than I did.

Pinterest could create real social shopping and users want it. They'd love to to be able to purchase the items they repin. That would be easy to monetize and eventually could even allow for payments to go through pinterest to make it a slicker solution and without the need for lots of accounts.
This article is completely biased and titled "a very good decision", its author is known to be anti-google and complains about SERP for his biased website on his twitter account all the time. Pretty pathetic guy.
Countries don't but governments and politicians very much do. "It's required from us by the EU" is already a common excuse, this is yet another treaty that will be used that way -- it solidifies the current copyright regime making it more difficult to introduce changes later.
Widespread Facebook latency issues
A "burning sensation" joke? Seriously, there's ample opportunity for comedy here and they went with this? Did Microsoft hire Adam Sandler's writers?
Always combo update, if you can.
>This Microsoft ad is just plain GMail bashing

Unlike the others, this isn't really an ad that is part of a big campaign, so it's not comparable. It is right now just an uploaded video to YouTube, and doesn't show up in popular TV like the other two ads.
Yes totally flagged. What a worthless piece of "linkbait" as the author describes it. At the most all we learn is that the CIA has one or more documents mentioning the name of the Iranian scientist. Of course they'd have at least one report on the assasination (whether or not they were involved) and they probably do keep track of Iranian nuclear scientists. Precisely what you would expect without wasting taxpayer money on an information request. A bogus headline and a bogus article.