skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'll often see comments like OP on articles or comments from Kamp. I've left some.

Poul-Henning Kamp is a polarizing figure. I sympathize with the sentiment on occasion, and I'm occasionally annoyed by his writing style ("everything but Varnish is written poorly" is evident in this one). Another one that bothered me was You're Doing it Wrong[1]; great information, offensive tone -- most of his publications in Queue are the same way.

That said, I can also disregard most of that annoyance as he's a genuinely smart guy, and I want to know what he's trying to tell me. Put it this way: I'd listen to anything PHK has to say, but I'd (probably) never hire him because I need to foster a team environment, and PHK can be divisive when he communicates.

I'm sure the commenters you see commit karma suicide like this feel the same way and are just quite poor at communicating what I have. OP dug in on a detail, but reading the rest of his comment another way, it's a criticism of the writing style and tone (in my reading).

[1]: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327
Have seen a few comments about US water quality. It may be good in general, but the water here in Los Angeles is horrible (though sterile?). I grew up in Ventura County and never thought twice about tap water (and laughed at others too) until I moved here.

Part of it is LA's fault, they use so much chlorine it smells like you're drinking from a jacuzzi. Even after letting it sit for a day or two for the chlorine/ozone to dissipate, it still tastes bad in a similar way. I'm not sure what the other minerals/contaminants are. Finally, our current building is old and we get red rusty water first thing in the morning once a week or so.

So yes, we filter our water before drinking, pretentious or not. We have a PUR 3-stage attached to the sink, and it costs a bit more than I'd like, but honestly ~10 bucks a month is nothing compared to the night/day improvement we get from it. I hope the claims about removing heavy metals are true for my daughter's sake.
From the article: "It's worth mentioning that this general approach to dependency management is not original; the ideas go back to the 1970s and flow through languages like Modula-2 and Ada. In the C family Java has elements of this approach."
A little bit ironic to sell a book about HTML5 games using IMG tags for the background game.
Judge OKs $20 million privacy deal for Facebook's “sponsored stories”
With a name like nihilogic, I don't think he cares.
This article is one of those interesting things that doesn't affect me directly because I don't do systems programming, but holds a great deal of fascination. I've often wondered about how the kernel allocates memory and deals with disk, and how that affects the behavior of an application that may do it's own memory allocation.

In object oriented programming there is a thing called a CRC card[1] where you list what the responsibilities of important classes are. This helps the developer visualize and understand how the system works, and to keep things as orthogonal as practical. Here we have an example of someone pointing out that the system-level "CRC cards" are stepping on each other's toes. Pretty compelling stuff.

An aside - would there be any benefit to using `go` rather than `c` for writing something like varnish if you were starting in 2012?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-responsibility-collaborat...
I do not mean this as an attack but have you written much actual "real" Go code?

There are several reasons I'm interested in D and more so Rust, but they're very different than Go.
I agree that a complete fix is unrealistic; however, identification of the problem certainly leads to potential for mitigation.

My personal favourite was the idea of a day of no interuptions. I think this would be relatively easy to implement and one day of high productivity is still an improvement over zero days of high productivity.

A further solution might be good old fashioned office hours. You have a question for that requires my personal advisement? Great! I'm happy to answer! Anytime between 4:00 pm and 5:30 pm. If it really can't wait, email me and hopefully I lose my flow and check my email in time.
To add to this, anyone using D3 as the render target in Backbone views?
Isn't it the abstraction (virtual memory) creating a problem in the first place? By programmers not understanding that an abstraction has been applied.
Awesome. Was walking next to a bike store this weekend with $5000 bikes in the windows and was just plain gobsmacked. Could only utter "WTF" a few times.

Perhaps this one can restore some sanity.
I imagine it's due to the superficial similarities, i.e. a bunch of people running around not really knowing what they should be doing, but in a big hurry.
Half of all app store revenue goes to just 25 developers
You go through all the pomp and circumstance like it actually mattered, even though the majority of the people running around know it doesn't.
Walter Bright (who created D to solve some of the same problems Go aims to solve) wrote something a few years back which touches on this topic:

http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/c-compilation-speed/228701711
Developer Preview of AWS SDK for Node.js
Plain gauge steel tubing is superior in every way to using rebar.

Tubing is lighter, stiffer and cheaper. It can be used with conventional bike parts (bottom bracket, headset, seat tube etc).

A tubular steel bike gives you the option of using lugged construction, which in turn allows you to braze instead of high-temperature welding.

There really isn't much to like about the rebar bike at all.
Steve Jobs introduces WiFi to the masses
Yeah. A lot of people are up in arms about the fact that this might only mask taste, since it's nothing more than carbon-based filtration.

Personally, I live in Escambia County, Florida... home of the worst water in the country, ranked. I don't know a single person that lives here who doesn't own a Brita filter because our water is nearly unpalatable. You will actually get strange looks if a local sees you drinking the tap water. And yes, I realize that the fact it is palatable at all puts us in a much better position than a great deal of the world. But why is it a crime for me to want my water to not taste like utter shit?

I can understand the general dismay at the strength of the claims being made. But don't dump all over the product because it's "just" a fancy Brita filter. It looks great, it makes the water taste better, and compostable isn't a terrible sell either.
Group Petitions White House for construction of Death Star by 2016
I see where you're coming from about a VPS, but for most people, a $15/year VPS would be perfect for their needs. Granted, it only has 128MB-256MB RAM, the 10GB space and 500GB bandwidth per month is fine for a few thousand visitors per day.

I used to dabble in this sort of stuff when i was an early teen. Back then i'd be using free hosts such as 110MB (how the mighty have fallen) and free .co.nr domains. I found all talk about web hosting, servers and domains interesting, but eventually stopped messing about with scripts.

Fast forward a few years and i have some cash saved up from working part time. I manage to buy a few domains (some personal, some jokes and some for future plans) and some shared hosting with Dreamhost (it was $95 off). Even though i'm only serving some gifs and html, with a bit of Wordpress on another domain, i'm seriously happy about it.

Thanks for posting this. Also, your first link to Namecheap is broken.
Agreed.

What I notice at my current employer is that trying to avoid pulling people into meetings results in what I call "Development by game of Telephone", where software requirements become rumors passed between employees. (Even when requirements are documented -- because the documentation is vague.)
Have you considered buying 20L water tanks from fresh sources as well? I guess that is probably the most expensive option but it might be the "safest" since they probably test the water thoroughly before shipping it.
Don't mess with the Dronefather
I wonder if this is more a result of exceptionally high unemployment rates making locally-sourced assembly line production practical once again...
Is there any serious mail (not GMail) client for iOS except for Apple's own and Sparrow? And it's hard for me to invest in Sparrow now.
Practice at your local user group. We have several national known experts in the our field at the NTSSUG and they all do their dress rehearsals for larger conferences at meetings and regional conferences. And a majority do virtual meetings, video blogs and teach classes.
Chinese student fails job interview because he owned an iPhone
You're right, it could be a passive inspection. But... if they are your ISP and have access to your packets, chances are they can rewrite and inject traffic too. Sure, they might need a bit more hardware to do so, but it's not exactly difficult.

But you're correct, DPI doesn't necessarily imply MITM capabilities.
An added easter egg: he stores mario's position in a cookie, so when you return to the site, mario is where you last left him: mario-data=2008%2C190%2C10
CyPhy Works Exits Stealth Mode with 'Unlimited Duration' Surveillance Drones
Blanket statements make Breakthrough sad :(

Your colleague probably did not base that on the engineering or CS buildings. Plenty of times I've bumped into a colleague and had a long-winded discussion about software radios, or have fun debates regarding our favourite programming languages - not to mention the projects we've got on the run...
Good idea. Like testing water from two indistinguishable cups and A/B and B/A fashion. That kind of data is easy to produce and can be used as a sales pitch.
5.2% of the worlds top 10,000 websites use it, as of July 11, 2012: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/07/11/how-popular-is-varnish/

So the question is- if it is so great, why only 5.2%? I'm not being sarcastic. This is a totally serious question.
Lights out, Boeing creates the first working EMP bomb
I rather thought he was saying that since 1975 there have been abstractions developed, but people aren't taking advantage of them. Or perhaps people are not trusting them in this case.
Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.

I used to think that too. Specifically Windows NT was said to need a pagefile at least as large as physical RAM. This was back when a workstation might have 16MB RAM and a 1GB disk. I thought this was because the kernel might be eliminating the need for some indirection by direct mapping physical RAM addresses to pagefile addresses. I was wrong.

On the Linux side, you would typically see the recommendation to make a swap partition "twice the size off RAM". Despite the possibility of using swap files, most distros still give dire warnings if you don't define a fixed-size swap partition on installation.

I don't think there was ever a solid justification for this "twice RAM" heuristic. A better method might be something like "max amount of memory you're ever going to need minus physical RAM" or "max amount of time you're willing to be stuck in the weeds divided by the expected disk bandwidth under heavy thrashing".

Regardless, if your server is actively swapping at all you're probably doing it wrong. It's not just that swapping is slow, it's that your database or your web cache have special knowledge about the workload that, in theory, should allow it to perform caching more intelligently.

I'd prefer to disable swap entirely, but there are occasions where it can make the difference in being able to SSH into a box on which some process has started running away with CPU and RAM.

But this guy is a kernel developer so he seems to feel that the kernel should manage the "one true cache". I like the ease and performance of memory-mapped files as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't go sneering at other developers for attempting to manage their disk IO in a more hands-on fashion.
Yeah. When I referred "Dispute Center" above, all the messages took place inside Paypal's internal dipsute center messaging system.
Foldify - print foldable 3D figures from iOS
No. Virtual Memory has been known about since the early 60s, the issue was that the x86 architecture picked it up in the '90s with the 386 CPU.

The problem with programmers not knowing how the operating system works is not the fault of the operating system, it's the fault of the developers.
What build tool are you using?
Twitter and SMS Spoofing
Seth Godin - We Are All Artists Now
Namecheap link (the referral one) is broken. Extra a href in there.
In every social network or social area online I follow, I see people saying these things regularly, along the lines of: "I can't take it here anymore". While I understand and respect it, I think it comes from what importance you put on these services in your life. You control your own mental filter - use it. No point getting upset by what random people on the internet said, and to completely stop using a service seems like an exaggerated response, as these services DO provide value.
$5000 bikes in the windows

Clearly they were keeping the expensive bikes[1][2] away from the windows then?

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/worlds-fastest-bike-m...

[2] http://www.competitivecyclist.com/frame/2013-wilier-zero-7-r...
The same reason that Windows 3.1x was used when people could have been using X. Sometimes these things take a while to catch on.
dnsmadeeasy.com
Or a field which requires fine motor skills.
My buddy and I make between $50,000 - $60,000 per month. We have been doing this exactly 1 year.
To be fair "researchers" have also stated the converse:
http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhasbrou/Research/Working%20Pape...
http://www.automatedtrader.net/headlines/127545/hft-helps-ma...
http://home.uchicago.edu/~bweller/files/Liquidity_and_High_F...

Not sure what we're arguing about. I never said HFT is "justified" by its infusion of liquidity. It is simply a function of High Frequency trading, whether justified or not.
This is why I created my own alternative to ordinary clocks - Maker Time: http://willholloway.net/makertime.html

Clocks get it wrong because they count up, but one day we will all die, so from our perspective time is counting down.

I started thinking about alternative calendar systems when I learned about Post-Revolutionary France's attempt at introducing metric time.

The problem with dividing the year by 1000 is 1000 is divorced from astronomical reality of life on earth. Swatch internet time is the latest attempt at this but I think it misses the mark.

I wanted a time keeping system that matched up with our cosmic reality and the reality of making things vs managing people. We have two important events, the year (one rotation of the earth around the sun) and the day (one rotation of the earth). The moon's cycle is only important for tides (and it's close in duration to the female menstral cycle)

Maker time divides the year into 1095 (or 1098 in a leap year) blocks. Each block is 8 hours. On January 1st the count resets.

This way I don't have to look at the clock and feel the stress it engenders, but also I get to mark the passage of time.

There are 82 maker time blocks left this year and I have big plans for those 82 remaining blocks of time. And one 8 hour block for sleep per day is productive time, thats when my brain encodes the things I learned into long term memory.
A new apparel start-up makes the greatest hoodie ever known to man
CA regulators' new proposal could legitimize Lyft, SideCar, and Uber
The thing of it is, it's just so freakin' awesome to leach knowledge from all the smart people on HN. Some comments are full of useful links; some have just one really awesome link. Other comments describe a trick, technique, or experience that is enlightening.

Slashdot used to be this way for me; I'm not sure what changed, but it saddens me now that it's mostly a flamefest between the Linux old-timers and all the Apple fanboys and Windows shills. That's one of the reasons I came to HN. Funny thing is, I was just about to post an angry response in another story thread, but was on the fence about it; I used to do that a lot on slashdot. I think I'll just go and close that tab now; it doesn't really add much.
If order to meet, they would need to match both position and velocity. Meaning whatever history they had gone through, they both had to get to that position-and-vector.

There are some faster and slower paths. More missions to Mars have taken an 8-month-or-so journey because it's easiest and lowest power, and all unmanned cargo are probably going to take that route.

But by using just a bit more energy, you can cut the travel time down to about 6 months.

Most Mars missions involve launching stuff to land on the Mars surface (or maybe in orbit) that would take the slower path while the humans take the faster path.

(If you really want a bigger craft than you can launch from Earth at one time, just link up in LEO.)
No employee boycott is going to help, they'll just hire someone else. We won't see change until we start electing better leaders, or changing the system. Reduce the demand.
Varnish isn't life-changing software. One thing Poul-Henning Kamp is very good at is selling Varnish, but once you use it for a bit you'll understand why it's a pretty advanced tool that many people avoid.

I've deployed Varnish once and I was annoyed by how it is configured. PHK will, of course, spin that as a positive, but my preference is not to write C when configuring my infrastructure support.

Beyond that, caching is a complicated topic with specific nuances for every deployment. As an example, I work on a high-traffic social site and we have absolutely no need for Varnish or any software like it. At its essence, Varnish is fixing a problem that many sites (a) do not have (yet), or (b) fix in other ways. We don't cache our dynamic views at all, and our system keeps up just fine. When it doesn't, we fix the system. Caching is on the radar as an improvement but we have determined that in terms of reward it does not make sense for our environment (invalidation is too frequent).

If you find yourself needing Varnish, ask yourself why. The answer to that question might lead you down some things to fix before investing in a big cache tier. There's a reason Facebook uses Varnish and you're wondering why others don't.
> Obviously it's not "most profitable" for Disney to make it's stuff free.

Granted. "Easier to access" in this case in analogous to a manufacturer selling their wares in more stores, instead of limiting sale to a handful of select retailers. Of course the literal interpretation of "easier to access" means that everyone finds a copy of the latest Disney content mailed to their doorstep with no expense to the consumer.

To your second point, assuming the marginal cost of distributing content through 3rd string distributors is negligible, why shouldn't Disney want their content distributed through anybody who will pay? My assumption is that all things being equal the market will abandon those providers. On the other hand, if Disney decides to go exclusively through a provider like Netflix, consumers don't have the option to move their business elsewhere.

(Obviously a site that installs malware would and should be shunned by Disney, just as a retail store that steals credit card numbers might be black listed. These are ethically and legally wrong.)

I agree that Disney has tremendous incentive to do things they way they do. In my personal utopia, they would be incentivized to behave as I described in the parent thread. The question remains: how should the market and industry shift to get us to that point?
That's how DPI was done in the 00's, yes.
If they actually had to devote much resources to investigate our claim, they would probably lose money on the transaction.

But, really, it's okay to lose money on some transactions, especially if you reduce buyer/seller stress on other transactions.
Probing PHP with SystemTap on Linux
Except that the primary purpose of a web cache is to utilize storage to avoid duplication of work. Caching is a fundamental operation the storage hierarchy, so as soon as the possibility exists that your cached data will exceed available physical RAM, you're "optimizing" disk IO whether you admit it or not.
Because X sucked. I hated X Windows, nothing worked right at all back then. Actually, the last time I used it, it still sucked. And how has X caught on?
When do you think you guys will launch? Anything you've already started sharing with alpha testers?

PS: who is "we"?
Washington DC now rewriting its taxi laws after Uber win
NIP Tip: Removing EXIF Data from Images & More
I use godaddy, but I'm not impressed. Just haven't got around to transferring. I would recommend you go with someone else.
This could be very useful - it's a purely client-side solution to remember which account you used to log in to a site the last time and multiplex accounts.

My only initial complaint is that the UI is ugly and confusing, and it doesn't seem like they want you to customize the UI (especially the post-sign-up UI). There's nothing stopping you from forking AccountChooser and running your own implementation, but it seems like much of the potential value is getting users accustomed to a common sign-in UI.
Yes I have, and I'm not a fan. It creates artificial scarcity. I can understand their reasoning though.
Every site is different. Varnish is great for a particular fairly common use case, but it's not an all purpose "make site go faster" button. For example, putting varnish in front a CMS is usually a fantastic idea, or anything that has a high ratio of reads vs. writes and serves the same pages to multiple users. That could be anything from a content blog or site, an online store, etc. However, for other types of sites it doesn't make as much sense. A site like facebook or twitter would gain almost no advantage from it, since the overwhelmingly most common use case is for every single user to receive different pages on every single visit. Similarly, it doesn't make sense for search engines, or for web mail apps, etc.

Also, most really large sites have probably already developed some other method of caching if it suits their site needs, so it wouldn't make sense for them to switch over to varnish all of a sudden.
>Sites that use Varnish normally return the X-Varnish HTTP response header when you access the site. We used this as the indicator if a site is using Varnish or not, and scanned the response headers for the top 10,000 websites in the world according to Alexa.

Terrible methodology. I suspect it is vastly more popular than that methodology would lead you to believe.
Kenneth is awesome, in the true sense of the word.
Does gmail web have a unified inbox? Not that I've seen. Why should the mobile client by Google have one.
So let me get this straight?

Governments who are fighting to keep these negotiations as 'closed' as possible want our communications to be as 'open' as possible?

War = Peace

Freedom = Slavery

...
The Future - A Trip into the Year 2000 and Beyond [pdf]
John McAfee flees Belize for Guatemala