skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, in Linus's case, it is a faster overall runtime, but such a stark difference in cycle times is a bit of an eyebrow raiser.

Caching is supposed to speed things up, so it is kinda silly that the caching system has somehow gone backwards in overall performance.

Pagefaults are a critical path for performance concerns in almost any software system that needs high-performance. If they are 10% slower, then its like the worst case performance of the computer is 10% slower.

Anyone who needs to write high performance code (say, simulations, or game design: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/data-locality.html ), is concerned with avoiding pagefaults and cache misses, but the average code (general case?) doesn't concern itself with this as much, so the average program may end up experiencing this more than a linux compile.
It is usually consumes less memory for the same amount of concurrent connections. The callback chain for it should be pretty short. Instead of spawning a process, it would get an event that there is data on a client socket. Then parse http (this might happens across multiple callbacks, and then handle it (serve the file).
Nice idea and very neat execution. I like the self-destruct aspect which would help be get excited if you offer them something(think couponing..etc). Personnally I can see myself using it when tweating something very particular and contextual (i.e. agenda of a conference which updates automatically when we progress during the day)
To me it seams way to early to switch.

Wait until libreSSL is battle tested, and we know if it is actually better or worse than the original.
Splicity – Simple Story Telling. Make interesting Videos
Splicity is an app my business partner and I created. We are trying to help people make more interesting videos. We are having a soft launch tomorrow and we would love any feed back.
It seems to use HTML5 Audio in Safari on OS X
If you watch the video you can see that the RSS code is used to receive RSS feeds (I guess for those people who don't have internet access) and the Twitter auth is used similarly to receive Twitter updates (e.g. they show :twittersearch=#syria)

The video is quite interesting, it shows the proof of concept.

I agree about the source code though, they have tried too hard being "lulz" at the expense of readability.

This project is very, very interesting. Unfortunately it requires some investment in the radio equipment, but I can see in a few months some Arduino bundles with this code and the radio antenna...
Internationalization on the web – why is it so bad?
How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch
If your servers are handling HTTP traffic, another big win is to make sure HTTP keep-alives are enabled on the servers. This will cause connections to be reused and so fewer connections will be closed.
Try to count the total number of page faults per second in any task you're doing. I don't know of any "average code" that produces an order of 3 millions PF per second, which is needed for you to observe 10% slowdown. The code which does that doesn't do anything than doing the page faults. Linus claims he managed to get 5% slowdown when doing nothing but PF.

It's probably something like hundreds of thousands per second at most, giving you something like a less than 0.5% slowdown. Versus the speedup of 300% for some other code (it's an extreme value actually, but still). Your newer Intel CPU certainly didn't get slower on average code compared to the Core Duo, for the same clock speed.

Nothing to raise the eyebrows here. I believe it's not "in Linus case" but "in every case" that the overall time is shorter.
Why 'A113' Is Planted In Nearly Every Pixar Movie
This seems like it would completely replace Disconnect/Ghostery. Am I correct?
Just because the code doesn't confirm to your latest language standards and flavor-of-the-month Javascript-framework doesn't mean it is silly or insecure.

In fact you even acknowledge this in the last paragraph. This sounds like a cheap stab at Perl.
I would love it if there was a plugin that combined the blacklist part of Disconnect/Ghostery with the learning algorithm of Privacy Badger and the anti-fingerprinting features of Secret Agent.

There are many trackers that are known in advance and there is no need to analyse them. Stop them right away.

New ones crop up, or old ones change domains, watch them and block them.

And randomize my headers so even if cookies are blocked, they can't fingerprint me statistically.

Btw. what is the point of Privacy Badger without the Do Not Track header?
Zaranga (YC W13) is hiring a UI Designer -Web designer
Do you want to design a company's web site and UIs that blow people's minds away? Do you feel that your creative juices are not adequately recognized at your current company? Do you want to build a company from the ground up and shape every look and feel aspect of a company? Do you want to be part of a company at its very early stage in one of the hottest spaces - vacation rental market? If you answered yes to these questions, then we want to talk to you.

We are looking for a UI designer to design our web pages across multiple platforms (web, mobile, email). You will work closely with our Founders, and our engineering team to design easy to use, differentiated, and clean user interface.

This position is a Full time.

Requirement:
•	Ideally, 1-3 years of experience designing web applications, but open to folks with a keen design sense, and strong knowledge of consumer space
•	Strong experience in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks or related tools.
•	Bonus for CSS, Javascript and HTML skills
•	Experience translating product requirements, use cases and wire frames into visually appealing UI designs for web applications

About Zaranga:
•	Venture backed start-up looking to disrupt the $54 Billion Vacation Rental Market
•	Launched early 2013 and had a phenomenal first year
•	Office in San Carlos, close to Caltrain station
•	Free lunch and a fridge that is always well stocked with beer

Send resume to zarangajobs@gmail.com and mention why you believe you are the perfect candidate for the job. Any examples or past experience that you can correlate to this job will strengthen your application
https://www.opendesk.cc/ for furniture
Just for good measure, here is a short criticism of a few points in this talk:

http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Rants/HammingBelco...
OK I have reached saturation point with all these plugins. I value the work that the eff are doing.
I think a comparison page on wikipedia is a good idea, who agrees?

for example:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_numerical_analys...
In general the security on the equipment is because hideously high acquisition costs keeping most hobbyists out of fooling around with it. And most places with the equipment won't let somebody sit there and fool around with it. It's not quite security through obscurity, but more like security through expense.
Your opinion is out of date.
2014 Will Not Be the Year of Flat File Websites
I almost wonder what a completely reimagined vertically integrated health care system would look and cost like.
Technology in Africa | April 2014 Digest
I feel the same about open source in general.

People may think "If I write something and it gets enough attention, facebook or google might buy me out" or something to that effect. Basically a get rich quick kind of deal.

You only have to write one! thing, cash a multi million dollar check and be set.

While that may have happened in the past a couple of times, wanting to start an open source project just because of that possibility would be nearsighted. But starting such a project to promote oneself is not.

It is a great addition to your CV. Something future employers can directly check up on.
So this addon just blocks some third party cookies? I already have third party cookies disabled in my Firefox settings. Does that make this plugin useless to me?

Wasn't there already plans to "block" third party cookies from being delivered as standard anyway, when the top level site domain changes?
I think some of this rant is invalid.

If you look at the portable versions of their products they tend to ship a chunk of the OpenBSD library implementation with them to give consistency guarantees.

Perhaps we need a consistent OpenBSD platform abstraction layer that gives solid guarantees?
I'm twenty-something, and those are my comedy 'bases'.

Perhaps it has something to do with the types of humor?

Monty Python, for example, tends to create comedy from the over-exaggeration of pure logic. I think we, as programmers, tend to do that anyway; to see it portrayed on the silver screen is great, and maybe we also get a sense of relief from realizing that we aren't the only ones coming up with such silliness, albeit mentally.

Same sort of traits abound in Dr.Demento and MAD. 'Wet Dream' and most of the 'Lighter side of...' series are similar. Take a logical premise, and take it to the point of silliness.

RIP. I have fond memories of MAD, and it definitely helped created the person I am today.
> [...] competing on providing greater privacy a "Business Differentiator".

Facebook described as "competing on privacy" shows us just how fucked our notions of privacy are.
Even without DNT, it still blocks tracking cookies, etc.
I believe a lot of the major players these days to be pretty fragile. All it takes is a good privacy policy and a "sign in with Twitter" button to move a person's environment over. Sure, you lose your messaging history, but I doubt that's a dealbreaker for a lot of people. All it takes is a crappy enough experience to motivate people to pick another corner to hang out and gab.
It's OK cyber with anyone. Do whatever your sexual desires are (as long as they are legal).
/dev/urandom is a perfectly fine source of machine-generated randomness. In order to break /dev/urandom (but not /dev/random), you need to find a corner-case where you can break the cryptographically secure random number generator (CSPRNG) only when you can make certain guesses about its seed values. Since making those guesses about its seed values in the first place from the CSPRNG's output is a hard problem, and making an accurate guess about what eventually happened to the CSPRNG's output is a hard problem, this is pretty unlikely.

But let's quote the kernel source on the matter[1], just to be clear:

> The two other interfaces are two character devices /dev/random and
/dev/urandom. /dev/random is suitable for use when very high
quality randomness is desired (for example, for key generation or
one-time pads), as it will only return a maximum of the number of
bits of randomness (as estimated by the random number generator)
contained in the entropy pool.

> The /dev/urandom device does not have this limit, and will return
as many bytes as are requested. As more and more random bytes are
requested without giving time for the entropy pool to recharge,
this will result in random numbers that are merely cryptographically
strong. For many applications, however, this is acceptable.

The real point to be made here is that, yes, /dev/random is theoretically better - but for many applications, letting /dev/random hang to wait for entropy is worse than having /dev/urandom use a CSPRNG in a way that is generally recognized to be secure.

[1]: http://repo.or.cz/w/davej-history.git/blob/d0562c8dc:/driver...

Edit:

I would like to add that the original article is talking about using /dev/urandom to generate long-lived keys, not session keys or similar. In this case, the blocking is sometimes acceptable to generate appropriate entropy, since the fact that the key is long-lived implies that you don't do this very often. The argument for /dev/urandom only holds clout when you are making a tradeoff for non-blocking behavior (which is 99% of the time). As such, there is nothing wrong with being slightly paranoid and using /dev/random if you can afford the time spent collecting entropy.
A somewhat tangential question that I'm genuinely curious about: Would anyone happen to know why the New York media always puts the periods in I.P.O. and I.B.M. and presumably N.Y.T. too?

It's so different from what I'm accustomed to, and seems to definitely be a New York thing. Everywhere else it would be IPO, IBM, and NYT.

So why does the N.Y. media do this?
No need to be defensive, this really is crappy code. It's just one big file of hot mess.

Clearly, the author is better at home breaking software than making it. And it's fine. He or she also has certain amount of artistic leeway in expression, but not excuse from secure programming.
Watch SpaceX reusable rocket fly to 1000m and then return to the ground to land
Your unit test guarantees the intended interface of the unit, but it doesn't guarantee the usage of said interface. Typically other unit tests will stub out this dependency. But what is your guarantee that the stub agrees with the spec'ed behavior.

Now this may range from a non-issue if the interface is obvious and straightforward and leaves little room for error, to extremely error-prone in a duck-typed language. Of course there are ways to mitigate this with the test and stubbing infrastructure, but it can be brittle as well.

This problem is why I think there is some sense of coarser-grained units with fewer stubs and some qualities of integration without going all the way up to the full-path acceptance level.
How does what your company is doing differ with the "Shark Tank" featured Plated (http://www.plated.com/) [1]?

As for scrambled eggs recipes/techniques, I prefer Gordon Ramsay's [2].

1. http://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/episode-guide/season-05/5... (Plated at ~22:15)

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUP7U5vTMM0
I always wonder how the puzzles for games like this are created.

Can this be done procedural? Or did you have people sitting there and come up with new puzzles one at a time?
Because people perceive video not to be 1 frame/second.
Shape-shifting PaperFold smartphone joins the fold
Have you ever looked at the Linux kernel source files? ViM? Just because the code is bad doesn't mean the application is bad.
Good job. I felt like i have a DJ's control box :-)
Have you? Linux is gorgeous!

Plus this thing is meant to evade governments; you can't expect something this hideous to be audited, and used, and for others to trust their lives with.
> Once your process starts using threads, suddenly every bit of state in it can be shared by all threads.

Only when you use highly inconvenient model of shared memory. Message passing and shared-nothing combined, as it is done in Erlang or Go, are way easier to reason about, giving at the same time more natural way of structuring code than events handling.
Depending on the software and what it's used for, the first class or errors might and should be recoverable from.
This honestly is not an example of very readable code: https://github.com/lulzlabs/AirChat/blob/master/airchat.pl#L...
Most these arguments seem to completely miss the actual issue.

It's quite normal to hear a crime described in terms of "Motive, Means, Opportunity". People bring the Motive. Guns bring a Means. Neither exists in a vacuum.

"Gun control" boils down to how you propose to attack this. So far, we haven't found a good way to control Motive. So we're left with restricting Opportunity - eg, metal detectors on US schools - or Means, eg, gun control in the rest of the civilized world.
I have to say, I love that the EFF is doing this. No more wondering about some of the classic privacy extensions' ulterior motives. Having "one extension to rule them all", built by the EFF, is excellent. On top of that, no more conflicts between them either (and disabling each and every one of them whenever you get a loading issue on some site is frustrating!)

I fully intend to contribute to my browser's extension's repository. I hope other developers on HN will join me.
There's a reason it's called "the web"
WordPress is_home() fixed
The manifesto seems silly. Reactive systems are defined as being scalabe, the very thing we want to achieve by using the approach (reactive approach in this case). Yet, the system needs to be scalable first in order to be called "reactive". Something went wrong.
How exactly do you think LibreSSL will be battle tested?
12k words (of 36 bits, iirc).
From my understanding, at this point if the detective still wanted the data (without a warrant), he'd get the data, but the user would be notified. However, if he gets a court order and come back to google, he will get the data without the user being notified. Basically it forces LE to go through a judge to get a warrant. This is a good thing imo.
> While I can see the anti-phishing advantages of emphasizing the domain

I don't even think it would help there. In fact, I think this would help fraudsters. If I think about the various scam attempts on steam for example.

They direct you to a url like www.stempowered.com/q?phishlogin=true or something.

Knowing that a correct steam url would never have this sort of thing in its url would be the first thing to notice if you were already duped into clicking on a link that lead to the above url.

If the browser then only displays "stempowered.com", it would be way more difficult to notice you are on a phishing site. Just because you didn't notice the missing "a". And let's face it. The average consumer/user does not go and verify any certificates.
It's funny you should say that, because outside cross-browser functionality testing, Firefox has been my default browser since back when it was still called Phoenix. The reason I complain about Firefox's memory leaks and general flakiness is not because I hate the browser and want it to die, but because I like it and I'm sick of having to kick it over and restart it every day so that I can use it without the UI freezing for ten seconds out of every thirty.

Naturally, I've grown quite accustomed, in those rare cases when I muster the temerity to express this opinion, to being shouted down for it. I am surprised to see that happen on Hacker News, though; on 4chan it'd be de rigeur, of course, but I expected better here. I don't know why, though; after all, it's precisely the same attitude which characterizes Mozilla's approach to bug reports.
I'm not sure exactly what would happen but I'd bet against the companies replacing the government by just not complying with a gag order.
read 9780132302340 before investing.
You probably know this already, but I would be extremely wary of playing "active investor" with anything greater than 5-10% of my total portfolio.

I look at it this way: even if you believe it is possible to beat an index consistently through active management (which I don't), you're unlikely to do it without spending 80+ hours/wk focusing on it like the pros do.
Infant Reminder International – No more forgotten children in vehicles
> The paper doesn't seem to discuss the important concept that writing threaded code is hard.

It mentions that using threads is hard. The implication is events are harder.

> suddenly every bit of state in it can be shared by all threads.

Long overlapping chains of callbacks have similar issues. Points where concurrency contexts switch are much larger (between callbacks instead of between machine instructions) but in a large system the danger is real.

> Reasoning about code paths and data accesses becomes amazingly complicated.

Based on working on large systems based on callbacks and based on threads, I've come to the conclusion that both are hard, but callbacks are much harder and messier.

> Where are these servers?

There are everywhere. Java, C++ backend systems. Twitter is using Scala. WhatsApp is using Erlang. PostgreSQL has background processes that help. Apache is the most popular web server.

Now are you saying "where they are?" because we don't read about them on HN every day? Yeah, nobody talks about stuff that works and is established and boring. So perhaps picking technology based on what is read or discussed on HN might not be the best approach ;-)
question : could this be the result of spambot detection criteria having a bias towards one race/gender or another?

as a video game player with a leaked email address due to the poor actions of video game companies, I routinely receive spam from gold-farmers with Asian names in the headers, or female names offering me pills or pornography..I hastily indicate that their spam.

although I wouldn't for a second doubt the existence of a real-life bias, I'd be curious if that kind of thing had been accounted for. I didn't notice it mentioning it in the article linked. I'd hate to attribute a spambot bias to the staff of the schools.
iPhone location data of millions of people?

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/10/your-iphone-knows-whe...
That link lines out the single most important technical detail:

> FreeBSD’s kernel crypto RNG doesn’t block regardless of whether you use /dev/random or urandom. Unless it hasn’t been seeded, in which case both block. This behavior, unlike Linux’s, makes sense. Linux should adopt it.

It boils down to a tricky and potentially misleading interface. Abstractions are leaky beasts, and if there are many ways to get apparently identical results, we will use the one that most closely aligns with our usual way of thinking.

Security is hard to get right. Cryptographic security depends on entropy, so getting sufficient entropy should be hard too. Right?

Maybe the default answer should be "yeah, right" instead.
We Aren’t the World (2013)
Most is invalid in principle, perhaps not in practice (stupid as that is):

1. Ye shall use C11 memset_s().

2. Ye shall (as you note) use a reallocarray() with OpenBSD-like (ANSI C) wrap checking.

3. Ye shall use /dev/urandom on Linux (I know you guys love him, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361868 by tptacek)

4. Also, timingsafe_bcmp() is 3 lines of ANSI C99 code (minus variable and function declarations), include it with the code (as you note).
I think it's essentially part of the fabric of the Internet today, and far less replaceable than something like Facebook

There are many examples of communication mediums getting abandoned suddenly and rapidly on the internet, just off the top of my head there's BBSes, ICQ & MSN Messenger. Even email to an extent, I get much less personal email than I used to and it seems to be much less common for young people to have their own email address.

What people use to talk on the internet seems to be an incredibly faddish thing.
Doesn't sound like the author has convincing story, as most of the examples he discusses are not actually producing static (flat) files.

Also, I could be wrong, but hasn't Jekyll become rather popular in the recent months?

The author also names Ghost as an example which is doing things correctly (in his opinion). Did I miss something or is Ghost not powered by a database and creates dynamic output like all other regular CMS out there?
Isn't Huawei owned and run by the PLA?
Ah, of course! My mind automatically filled in [bytes] where the [sic] is in that quote.
Spring Console – Spring management and productivity tool
Robotic Bees
Happiest software developers are better in analytic problem-solving performance
Unless of course you have a high bounce rate (intended or otherwise) never use HTTP keep-alive.
By OpenBSD

From http://www.libressl.org/
"LibreSSL is primarily developed by the OpenBSD Project, and its first inclusion into an operating system will be in OpenBSD 5.6. "
You must be unlucky then, because I've been using Firefox for years, on various versions of OSX, Linux and Windows and have never suffered issues as severe as you describe. And over the past year or so, things have just got better and better. From what I've seen, most people don't have the problems you describe with recent versions of Firefox.
The systems community has a very different understanding and use for events when compared to the PL community. All these papers are talking about wouldn't make sense from the reactive programming perspective (I work in both worlds and deal with the difference all the time).