skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thttpd is probably the most well known "simple" webserver, and is very, very fast[1].

In fact, I think the op needs to explicitly mention thttpd on the page for shortfin and provide a performance comparison, since that's all anyone really cares about ... "is it faster than thttpd ?"

[1] http://acme.com/software/thttpd/benchmarks.html
While I agree with you that putting session data in a cookie is a risky idea, I had a question:

> I have even written my own session handling wsgi middleware just because I don't understand encryption and cannot find a framework that doesn't try that.

You wrote your own library that stores in plaintext because you weren't sure that pre-existing libraries were doing crypto correctly?

Why couldn't you treat those other libs' ciphertext as plaintext and apply your custom security engineering to it.
This seems to be a common complaint but I can't see any reason you can't give it a once over when it's hosted on the web…
Waiting For Benchmarks.
If Feynman were still around, he'd set things straight. I don't think a bicycle staying upright is much different from a train keeping course [1], but I can't describe why. Instead of the rail veering off and the wheel adapting, it's like the bike does what it wants and the ground shifts beneath it.

If you've read about Einstein's pail-of-milk-on-a-lazy-susan, it's a similarly unintuitive frame of reference. Also, if the experts haven't figured it out: I don't know what I'm talking about.

I find it fascinating that we as a species can observe, define, and exploit Maxwell's law, neutrino physics, etc, but we can't clearly explain bicycles. Or why wings provide lift.

EDIT: forgot the Feynman video

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE
Vagrant + Chef.
One-stop adaptive browser polyfills
Right now it's a buyer's market for legal services. Regardless of what the retainer says, if you call up the relationship partner and point out that you were just billed $1500 by a second year associate for photocopying he will work with you.

Beyond that larger clients are negotiating (imposing really) explicit conditions into thier agreements to prevent abusive billing. Things like minimum detail requirements (no more "5hr - lgl resrh"), no first year associates, no clerical work, etc. Then there's capped and flat fee billing.

Definitely a time of big changes.
"Provide an install tarball and provide a checksum of it that we can verify."

https://github.com/timothyej/Shortfin

My point was the people who are going to blindly run curl/sh commands are also going to blindly download the source tarball and run configure/make/make install, and the people who want to do more verification are certainly free to do so.
Jeff Bezos Solves His Last Mile Program
How Long it Takes to Learn a Dvorak Keyboard
Seems like this story has been killed by HN mods - not sure why.
Life in a Toxic Country
What makes you say that? I can still see it - what symptom are you seeing?
Lamborghini Gallardo LP 570-4 Squadra Corse
No wonder they almost killed your business.
I don't follow the example given "the system flagged a line item where a professional billed a half hour for mailing." - that doesn't sound like an outlier to me, possibly the smallest billable time is half hour, or maybe the one page mailing had other complexities, like needed to be over-night delivery, required trip to the PO etc etc. I would need to see the system detect something more demonstrative of being useful.
It was on the front page, and then magically disappeared. In my submissions page it's greyed out.
Haskell vs. C
I like this story. I have provided this level of support in the past and it made me proud. But beware the lesson you learn from this "$4m call" story.

The lesson could easily be: I played the lotto and won big. Therefore, everyone should play the lotto.
NSA Surveillance and Mission Creep
Samsung Starts Mass Producing Industry’s First 3D Vertical NAND Flash
I wonder if there is a way to create standard documents like PDFs and Powerpoints that phone home quietly so you know when the document has been altered for reuse as an RFP.

There should be some technological way to determine if your copyrighted work is being used honestly.
I made about 2/3 of the money in my Coop as I do now as a full time employee but then again my university required that we have a certain amount of paid internship time to get our degree so my experience may be atypical.
I would also like to see this thing run on the 5 GHz band. My apartment unit has 30+ available 2.4 GHz wi-fi connections from my living room. Streaming HD video & gaming on 2.4 GHz can be quite a bit of hit-or-miss with the interference.
Blippex has now served more than one million searches
> Your modified Go server doesn't return "Pong" for "Ping".

The program doesn't read the result, so it doesn't matter. Returning Pong isn't harder, but why write all that code if it's going to be ignored anyway?

> It's fundamentally different. - you're firing off all your requests before waiting for any replies, and so hiding the latency in the more common RPC style request-response chain, which is a real problem.

As I said, the program isn't correlating the responses with the requests in the first place -- or even validating it got one. I don't know scala, but I've done enough benchmarking to watch even less sophisticated compilers do weird things with ignored values.

I made a small change that produced semantically the same program (same validation, etc...). It had similar performance to the scala one. If you don't think that's helpful, then add further constraints.
Story seems to lack...well a story. What was your business? How did you try to convert the gamer influx as paying customers? Did the gamers in question note they started to get blocked? etc.

Give some substance.
I like the idea - but this would make a lot more sense if it was a straight Amazon acquisition rather than a Bezos acquisition.
Thought I should point something out. Followgen seems to be a favorite-spam service.

Someone posted an article a few days ago about how to do this yourself and was slammed pretty hard for the technique (though I tried to defend it a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147210

>Basically their attitude towards paying for my software was "fuck that". But obviously gamers are willing to spend on some software (like Steam).

I think you're conflating "gamers" with 13 year old boys who play too much xbox. They probably pirate all their PC software.

This was interesting, but I would have liked a little more detail. I didn't understand how they were abusing the system until the screenshot and then it was over. How much damage did they do initially? How effective was the blocking?
see my last comment above
Please explain what that statement means, serious not snarky.
That fact that you tell him he is wrong and never really explain the "why" makes me not believe you. What little explanation you do give is the abstinence argument. It sounds great but it is not what people are doing.

Also, I think someone like a thief, jealous spouse, unscrupulous roommate or coworker or the like is much more likely to try and get someone's password to do evil with. The way Chrome is now, all a person needs is 4 or 5 minutes alone with the computer to get the user's passwords.
10 ways to ensure you don't get too drunk
10 ways to ensure you don't get TOO #drunk
OK, then, sorry if I'm being dense, but how can it be "for serving web apps"? App seems an odd term for a site consisting of only static files.
I think this is a little silly, and an understanding of why will help you with your business, so here goes:

If the late payment decision comes from the project stakeholder, the person who deliberately engaged you, your contact at the client, then really your relationship is over when they decide to mess with you. Do a standard collections process with them, then terminate the relationship.

If the late payment decision comes from a procurements or payables department, as is often the case, then they don't care about any of the emotional appeals in your letter; in fact, they don't even care about threats of reduced availability or flexibility. People in those departments are compensated for deferring and reducing payments; they aren't measured by how well they maintain the actual customer relationship. Do a standard collections process with them.

You might consider informing your client contact of the dysfunctional payments department, but I haven't seen that produce reliable results (again: the incentives of the procurements or payables people aren't aligned with those of your client contact).

It's important to understand why you aren't getting paid. Here's another fun thing to know: like it or not, sometimes its your fault; if you're working with a company with a formal payments process and you don't follow that process to the 't', you're going to get paid late no matter what you tell them.
HTML5 And The Incredible Editable Web
Comfortable life: if it weren't made illegal, cows bred for meat would be locked in cages where they can barely move. After all, all energy spent on movement can't be spent on gaining weight.

Also, cows bred for their meet are slaughtered at 7-8 months of age. If cared for, a cow could live for 20 years, but economics prevail.

Cows held for their milk have it a bit better, as they get to live for 5-6 years. Also, things have improved. For example, the milking robot not only improved yield, but also allowed each cow to select the time it wanted to be milked, and does not require farmers to chase their cows towards their milking place two or three times a day.

Not kept in buildings: That depends on the level of industrialization of the farms and on the quality of your grassland. For example, in the Netherlands, mowing grass mechanically and feeding it to your cattle which is kept inside year round is the way to go, if you look at this purely economically (cows destroy too much grass by trampling it and by dropping cow peas on it)

Consequently, there is now talk of paying farmers to let their cows go out on the meadows.

Not in huge buildings? Go to https://www.google.nl/search?q=cow+stable+design and click on 'Images'. Fewer cows per stable than we do with pigs or chicken, but not small stables, either.
If you're a Fortune 500 company, you have the legal staff to handle legal billing--or even the legal work itself directly.

Otherwise, I agree--going upmarket is their most likely pivot. They're also likely to switch to a %-saved fee model, which is what existing bill analysis companies already do, quite successfully. (SimpleLegal isn't the first company to tackle this problem, and it won't be the last.)

My advice to SL? Since they're clearly going the website-based growth route rather than the human interaction growth route, they need to work out partnerships with other legal tech providers, i.e., Clio and various legal app developers for iOS/Android.
Right. Basically, Strassen's is not friendly to the cache - any improvement you get in the asymptotic behavior is usually swamped by the cost of cache misses.

In that vein, the naive implementation (O(n^3)) implementation is also not cache friendly - if you flip the inner loops you will get far better performance (in row major languages).

But I mainly replied because I love the concept of "galactic algorithms" and Regan&Lipton (orignators of the idea and name).

EDIT: the BLAS routine in question is dgemm.f (double general matrix multiply) and is easily googled so I won't paste it here. No Strassen's in sight.
... and you have a BOFH-style excuse in case something goes wrong!
Higher-order programming in Javascript
I don't mention what my business as it's not really relevant, and might seem like I'm trying to sell.

You say that it lacks a story ... it's just real life, which doesn't always contain a story.
I admit I haven't checked the example thoroughly - if it goes in lockstep then buffering won't be the culprit.

But you're wrong that better performance implies less buffering. A typical way to write such applications to do less buffering is to do select() or poll() or equivalent followed by a large non-blocking read, and then picking your data out of that buffer.

As pointed out above, if this "benchmark" does ping/pong's in lockstep across a single connection, then buffering vs no-buffering will make exactly no difference, as there's no additional data available to read. But in scenarios where the amount of data is larger, the time saved from fewer context switches quickly adds up and gives you far more time to actually process the data. Usually your throughput will increase, but your latency will also tend to drop despite the buffering as long as the buffers are of a reasonable size.

Buffering is a problem when the buffers grows to large multiples of the typical transaction size, but for typical application level protocols that takes really huge buffers.
In other news, obvious consequence is obvious.
LIFE OF A STRANGER WHO STOLE MY PHONE
I fail to see how that's relevant.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130305060258_AMD_...

AMD Kaveri CPU will support GDDR5 apparently. Furthermore, DDR4 is set to appear soon, with significant improvements in bandwidth / latency / power.

So RAM tech may be lagging behind, but by 2014 or 2015, we'll start to see some interesting advances in RAM.
adding random amount of bytes to response may break your caching, in a variety of ways.
You've suddenly introduced a new concept: "recent". I don't see how it's relevant. A gene will encode the same protein regardless of when it was introduced into the genome.

"23andMe would have no problem telling them apart"

If someone you define as "black" marries someone you define as "white" and their child sends a sample to 23andMe, will the report say that the child is white or black? Remember, you claim they will have "no problem".

Andrew Sullivan, from the link you provided: '“race” is a social construct when we define it as “white”, “black,” “Asian” or, even more ludicrously, “Hispanic.”'
It's not greyed out for me, perhaps it's just a visited link. I don't know your setup, so I can't comment on that, but it's clearly visible to me on your submissions page, the new page, and possibly elsewhere (checking ...) yes, currently on page 2.

With regards disappearing from the front page, it's pretty clear that it's been penalised, and I suspect it's tripped the "flame war" detector. It's got lots more comments than it has points, and that's strongly correlated with flame wars. I believe (but cannot independently verify) that PG has implemented a means of detecting this, and applies a scoring penalty to any item tripping that detector.

And I note that you've done this before, claiming that things are getting killed by mods, when in fact the symptoms you observe are adequately explained by other mechanisms. Perhaps you could be more explicit about what you observe so that people can suggest alternate scenarios.
Never notice it if others make mistakes in language. To notice by word or look such errors in those around you is excessively ill-bred.[1]

[1]http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/06/19/37-conversation-rul...
With A Little Pluck And $770, One Unemployed Man Got 60 Job Offers
I think this is more about acquiring the information. You have to know exactly how tall to make the cuts, where the grooves go, how long it is, etc. It's difficult information to get from a photo, if you don't have prior knowledge of the kind of key you're trying to imitate.
Interestingly, just posting a photo of the NYC master key set should be enough to duplicate them. Has anybody already gone from that photo to 3D models to a set of functioning NYC skeleton keys?

TBH, there is no reason that the city should be using such archaic key types. In Brazil, they typically used a four sided key like a philips head screwdriver that would need to be photographed from at least two sides to be able to reproduce.
I think the landing page would greatly benefit from two short paragraphs:

Why Shortfin when we have Nginx/Lighttpd?

Why Shortfin when we have thttpd?
> Next time a law surfaces Amazon tax they will have much bigger mallet with which to hit the gong. WaPo has amazing team and journalists.

No need to wait until next time, Amazon labor conditions have been making headlines recently and even Obama is making gestures to do something.

Since Amazon is such a low margin business raising wages could be crippling so there is an immediate and critical need for Amazon to start doing public relations and lobbying.

An important media analysis would be to compare WaPo coverage of Amazon, especially the labor conditions issue, before and after the acquisition. It would also be interesting to know how much Amazon has increased lobbying funding and political contributions recently.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-24/politics/40860...
The epic live demo of Kevin Mitnick and Dave Kennedy at Def_Con
Why Product Innovation Isn't Everything
New LaunchSky idea: vote for which food truck shows up near your office today
The attacker just needs to work out the average size of the normal response, then the average size of the response with the extra character. Send enough requests and the difference will be noticeable. It slows them down, but doesn't fix the problem.
That article came up recently and someone linked to your service in the comments. I think it's clearly relevant.
The goal is not to completely get rid of the use of cows. Scroll down on http://culturedbeef.net/home/, and you will read

"Better livestock conditions
Cultured Beef can be produced without the slaughter
of cattle, and far fewer cows are needed, so they
can be reared without the need for intensive
farming."

http://culturedbeef.net/faqs/ also states:

"Cultured Beef is created by painlessly harvesting
muscle cells from a living cow. Scientists then
feed and nurture the cells so they multiply to
create muscle tissue, which is the main component
of the meat we eat. It is biologically exactly
the same as the meat tissue that comes from a cow."
I think the point made above was that you shouldn't care if they use your proposal/design as an RFP because you ALREADY billed them for just the proposal/design.

When I worked as a consultant doing software customisations, they were always done in (at least) two statges. Proposal and design work was a separate contract from implementation. It was made clear to the client they could go elsewhere for implementation. They rarely did.
Did you intend to stimulate discussion?

Yes.

the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support

WTF? BoI is not fiction.
> I like prose that is a commentary on observations about life, man and business, if you're able to find anything.

No idea about prose, but in terms of fiction, Death of a Salesman is the obvious one, I guess. Also, Rise of Silas Lapham, maybe?

I'll be honest with you, I don't like to read books about man and life and business all in a single work. I took a few American literature courses, but none dealt with all those themes.

For something completely different, have you ever read Slaughterhouse-Five?
You could commission a new piece of art and it wouldn't cost as much as some of those: https://artistsnclients.com

Disclaimer: I am dev/founder of A&C
It's enough substance for me, e.g. the quoted stuff makes it pretty clear that conversions were not going to happen. Well, maybe he could try to figure out if any did happen.

It's short, simple, and useful; tells you there are groups from which you aren't going to get any money, warns you to be on the lookout for such crowds paying attention to your site, etc.
Jeff Bezos could turn it into a micropayment based newspaper. He could easily have Amazon Prime be a gateway to WaPo articles.

Alternatively, he could send out a Kindle to every WaPo subscriber and kill the print version tomorrow.
If you put /home on its own partition [1], reinstalling linux from scratch becomes really easy, better than dist-upgrade imho.

Backup your packages [2], overwrite / with the CD/DVD/USB installer, tell the installer to use the existing /home as the new installation's /home, then reinstall your backed up packages [2]. Any software you don't get from the repositories, keep on /home (git repos, JVM, etc).

This essentially makes the system files disposable, rewriteable, overwriteable, reinstallable at will, while all the custom config and personal data resides on /home. Keep /home backed up to multiple media. Makes upgrading to a new version relatively painless, and you get the benefit of a fresh install.

1. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-partplan/i...

2. http://askubuntu.com/a/81112/20362
Hackers can steal Windows Phone passwords using Wi-Fi vulnerability
What I would vastly prefer over this is if laptop manufacturers would just make it so the power input could be switched into max-power-point-tracker mode. Almost all the electronics necessary to plug a solar panel into a laptop are already there; they probably just require some firmware changes.
Nobody doubts that adding a master password will stop nobody who knows what they are doing. If someone has access to your computer and wants to do damage, they have full access to do it.

However, keep in mind 'open door' syndrome. A crime of opportunity is very different than one of bad intentions. Leave a car unlocked with a $20 bill on the seat and you might find that $20 gone when you return. Now, if you lock the doors the odds are it will still be there when you return. The fact is that when you increase the barrier to doing evil, many give it up. A potentially honest person might open a door and take something but if they must now break a window to accomplish the same task many will not pursue it.

Having to potentially download a third party program to decrypt the password DB and/or run additional commands is very different that just navigating to the chrome settings page. Its almost akin to why so many coworkers always jacked each others wallpaper when they forgot to lock their computer. They could have still done it even though the computer was locked, but they did not because it was too much work.

Also, going off what you have said, the "locking" process in windows is pointless since it offers a false sense of security. It can be broken just by rebooting the computer with a boot disk, right? So why include it? Because its useful.
>Taking on the title of hacker isn't some prestigious achievement, it's a self-aggrandizing social signal for tech hipsters.

This forum is called "Hacker's news" for a reason. And that reason predates "tech hipsters" by 40+ years. It's not an achievement, I'll give you that. But it IS a culture, and that culture doesn't take self-censorship and puritan values very well...

>Beyond that, every caliber of individual can be upset by 'mere words', including yourself.

Being upset when some words are targeted at you or at people you do not think deserve such treatment is normal. It's being upset just because of the use of words that's prudish and bad.
There's evidence it happens to the Earth too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal seems like it's probably a fairly common thing with any spinning core.
While I appreciate the time and effort that went into this, I'm more concerned with security than just speed alone. It's still relatively easy to throw hardware at the load problem (up to a point, naturally), but safety shouldn't take a back seat to performance.

The wget shell script installation does make me nervous and I'm glad the source is available separately. Blind installation of scripts was never "a thing" with me.

Of course, I'm still glad people are writing proper web servers (as opposed to simple 2-10 line ones). That creates an opportunity to explore the field with fresh ideas.
5 interesting facts about XAML UI controls
What I got from the history is that there wasn't enough signal to be as definite as you suggest.
"c$ - change (replace) to the end of line"

I find 'C' simpler for that command.
Firebug can definitely slow down the browser. You can try browsing for a while without it, perhaps using a separate profile.