skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No, you don't. There's nothing stopping you from creating `NSURLRequest` directly.

There is a lot of basic http setup missing from NSMutableURLRequest that needs to live somewhere.

> Request serializers are not unlike any other class in Cocoa, like say NSURLSessionConfiguration, which is not often mutated beyond initial setup, but exposes properties to remain flexible and not overwhelm the user with init parameters.

Except NSURLSessionConfiguration is more of a data type, right? By that I mean it is just a blob of parameters that can be inspected. The serializer is not just a configuration, it's something with an 'er' on the end. Plus, many of its properties are direct duplications of NSMutableURLRequest that could just be set after the fact in a wrapper function. AFJSONRequestSerializer and others suggest i follow a pattern of subclass inheritance to provide further customization when everything is just permutations on values of a core set of parameters.

> You'd have to create classes for each kind of part, which gets complicated because AFNetworking handles data, files, and streams alike. So that's, like, 3 extra top-level classes. And even that doesn't really work, since it makes it really difficult to just append data to the multipart body manually, in case there was some missing functionality that AFN didn't provide. Add to that the consideration of how to specify options on the stream itself, like throttling...

I don't understand this argument. What's wrong with creating the simple data types for the cases you need to cover? What is the importance of the top level class count metric? Would a fourth top level data type for the raw data case suffice? Can't throttling go in a parameter of the outer configuration data type?

> You should give all of that another look—it's one of the best parts of AFNetworking.

Maybe. When i look at it i see class hierarchies, singletons, and protocols with contractual state manipulation for a case that seems to (maybe it doesn't?) reduce to an output (NSMutableURLRequest) that's a straight function of a bunch of inputs.
We use Django behind gunicorn for most of the stack. Not that Django is slow (we still happily use it for 99% of our public facing system) -- it's just that OpenResty is so fast[1].

Besides the fact that OpenResty is built on C/Lua, Nginx's evented architecture makes it scale concurrently really well. We use Gunicorn in a multiprocessing configuration for the rest of the stack -- so each worker consumes much more RAM than the equivalent evented configuration.

We were toying with the idea of implementing the service with Tornado (also evented, but in Python) -- but OpenResty/Lapis has been so great for our use case that it's tough to justify the test at this point.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
Interesting... I should do an experiment to see how many encodes I can do at once and what ends up happening.
UX innovation == O. Boring, lame.

That may well be a Good Thing. Not all "innovations" are useful or desirable. Sometimes something that "just works" is all that's needed.

Me, I like KDE just fine the way it is. shrug
I understand that - I'm saying that Mozilla has an opportunity to go even further now than they were with Flash and Silverlight (users always had control over whether those were included as well).

As explained in the comment I linked:

> I could imagine [Mozilla] using the opportunity to display a message to educate users as to what DRM is and whose phone number to call if they don't like it. ;-)

Obviously not including DRM at all is ideal, but at least would be a way to remain true to one's values (supporting freedom and the open web) and educating users in the process, while still providing support for these features.
I feel like this is a rationalization. The fact that a market is free doesn't mean that producers can't sell on the terms they want. There is DRM-free content, just not the content you want. Content creators choose to use DRM because very few users object to it, and I bet with modern DRM most don't even know it exists. That's a perfectly functional free market.

Its like saying that there isn't a functional free market for social networks because you want a subscription-supported site while Facebook, etc, are ad supported. The fact that a seller won't sell on the terms I want doesn't mean its not a free market.
To quote [1]:

" * Each person will be able to decide whether to activate the DRM implementation or to leave it off and not watch DRM-controlled content.

* We have surrounded the closed-source portion with an open-source wrapper. This allows us to monitor and better understand the scope of activities of the closed-source code."

So your hypothetical built-into-the-browser and on-by-default implementation does not describe the same thing that has been announced for Firefox. Indeed the actual plan is quite close to what you suggest in your final paragraph.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...
> How do you hire your first employee as a solo founder

With money. If you can pay market rates, you don't need to give any equity.

Without revenue, profit, traction, something ... your equity is valueless, so it's not a good way to hire anyone.

If I want to work for valueless equity, I'll work on my own idea.
Is there a way to disable all related code in Firefox itself? Just for the sake of it. May be Mozilla can produce clean and tainted builds for that purpose.
Regarding your first point, hasn't this always been the case even before DRM? For example, one cannot directly interpret the magnetic fluctuations encoded onto a cassette tape - a tape player is needed to transduce the signal. DRM just takes this a step further by introducing cryptography and obfuscation into the decoding process.

I don't think backups are relevant to DRM-laden streaming video, given that it's someone else's data that you happen to be observing.

I'm not sure what you mean by a security and privacy threat. Surely it is no more of a threat than visiting potentially untrusted websites, or using closed-source or unverified open-source binaries, in the first place?
So time to fork Firefox?
Because it's a need of the market, using third-party plugin is no harder, maybe even easier to implement. So it's not an overhead for the site implementing it.

But rather it's an overhead for the user. you'll have to install a third-party plugin on your computer. Making it to your job now to make sure this plugin is not security vulnerable, that it is updated etc' etc'. And, it's probably closed. the web is open.
'Hoverbike' Aerofex will come to market in three years
PCIv3 brings nearly every web page into scope
PCI v3 brings into scope any system that even redirects to a payment solution for processing. The first step of thinking takes you to small e-commerce sites that send you to a third party to collect payment (eg. pay with PayPal). But how far does the rabbit hole go? If you are a blogger, and you want to link to a product on Amazon with your blog, is your little WordPress install now a PCI nightmare?

Sure a hacker could compromise your blog, change the link to a page that looks like Amazon, and subsequently steal the users's card data. Nobody is arguing that this is not a risk, but is the potential risk great enough to require the full extent of the SAQ A-EP?

Where do we draw the line? The web is defined by it's links, and any one of them is at threat of being "rerouted". At what point is security in the hands of the buyer? The buyer should make sure that they are connected correctly with SSL and that the certificate clearly shows they are on a trusted domain before they enter their card data.

If the buyer cant be trusted with their own security, then who can be? What kind of disruption is needed to make their cardholder data safe? It is impossible to remove all risk, so how much risk is tolerable? Can't we come to a compromise where small startups can get off the ground without such ridiculous requirements?

Perhaps our websites are not the problem, perhaps credit cards are.

http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2014/04/26/why-saq-a-ep-makes-sense/
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/SAQ_A-EP_v3.pdf
SHA-256 Certificates Are Coming
Thanks, great feedback! I've taken most of it into action and revised. I also built a small demo on the landing page, hopefully it will give a better picture. More feedback is very welcome!
I toned it down a little bit -- hope that helps. :)
Aerofex hoverbike could be yours by 2017
Apple has for political reasons disabled the possibility to install a Flash plugin on Safari/iOS. Why doesn't Firefox do the same with a CDM component for political reasons?
Something I'm toying with the idea of doing is to write a common interface in HTML5 and having that in a webview, then using an evented architecture to communicate with a common lisp backend. This way your logic is native/portable and your UI is portable (although not as fast as native UI most likely).

This saves the pain of having to do some more complicated logic in JS where there's a significant speed penalty (especially in older native browsers) with things like crypto, but still lets you have a common interface/logic.

The only thing you'd have to write for each platform is the glue that sends events between the web view and lisp. I guess it'd be a bit like Phonegap on steroids if I can pull it off.
Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head.

Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.
If all major browsers support eme, every website will use it. Say goodbye to youtube-dl. Maybe next year eme will be updated to "protect" html. Soon the entire web may be a closed system. It doesn't matter what the FCC decides on Friday, today is the day the web dies, at mozilla's hands.

There is always a choice mozilla, please make the right one.
A search algorithm can only search what it is allowed to search.

If you don't want a search engine to find a webcam stream of your home, then don't allow a search algorithm to index it.

Don't put it online in the first place, or if you do restrict access to people with a log-in.

> Would you be okay with making searching everything you have ever visited online or said to someone?

If I want to allow a search engine to access that information, then yes. GMail does search everything I have GMail'ed to or from people. That's incredibly useful. Chrome History Search does let me search sites I have visited.

> Would you be okay with this search algorithm to allow finding your political allegiances?

If I post, "I, Viking Coder, am a tea party Conservative," then yes. (I'm not, by the way.)

> No?

I didn't answer "no" to any of your questions.

> There has to be some limit then.

Yes, people need to limit what information they, themselves, SHARE.

And if someone else shares something ABOUT YOU with everyone else on the internet, then you should be mad at them.

The fact that the search engine is a magnifying glass / microscope / index tool that allows you to search the data on the internet doesn't give me any right to be mad at that tool.
Just an idea that came to my mind: What about the idea to refuse support to any Firefox user that has installed a CDM component (for the same reason the Linux kernel developers don't give any support to users of "tainted" Linux kernels (i. e. kernels that have loaded non-open-source modules)).
Serious question, is it even possible for the so-called "little guy" or "mom and pop" to acquire one of the new domains coming out?

If so, how? during the last group of .tech, etc, the land-grab was incredibly quick.

Say there is a new .petstore domain, how can mom and pop buy theirs before Acme Inc mass purchases them all. (Pick any major city.bike, for example, and it has already been snatched up by places like Domainsales.com)
If service providers are hit with unfavorable regulations they may reconsider being in the 'Internet' service provider business and instead return to an AOL/CompuServe style model.
Mozila will never have the marketing firepower to pull off such a boycott.
Why Amazon should get into Social Reading
Honest users couldn't care less, as long as it works.
Really interesting that you put so much emphasis on the proprietary formats.

As a Pentax (K-5, K-5II, K-3) and Nokia (Lumia 1020) user, I use nothing but DNG. Sure I could squeeze a few more bytes from a memory card with PEF, but I prefer my records to be in a standardised format.
Who watches the watchers? Big Data goes unchecked
> no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today.

Flash is not an add-on, but a plugin. And there is a good reason why plugins have a bad image and browser developers and users prefer to get rid of them.
You might want to reconsider. Chrome sandboxes the Flash runtime [1], meaning a 0-day exploit in Flash alone doesn't get an attacker access to your machine.

1. http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/13/google-declares-flas...
Samsung issues 'deep apology' to cancer-hit semiconductor workers
The problem is that no one can guarantee that the "opt-out" choice will continue to be there in the foreseeable future. What will happen when, suddenly Mozilla starts "feeling the pressure" to remove that option? What then? The problem is the building's foundations, not the decoration.
So by that logic, if a site creator wants their site in powerpoint 97 .ppt format instead of using HTML, are browsers obligated to support it?
> Regarding your first point, hasn't this always been the case even before DRM?

It's not the case for any normal standard portable format (video, audio, etc.). They can be accessed on any platform. DRM prevents that limiting your options where and how to use it. If you take tapes analogy, you can play your tape in any player. Imagine a tape which is only playable in Sony player or whatever. It's clearly a defective product in my view.

> I don't think backups are relevant to DRM-laden streaming video, given that it's someone else's data that you happen to be observing.

That's exactly the point. It means usability is reduced if anything goes wrong with the service or you can't connect to it or whatever other similar reason.

> I'm not sure what you mean by a security and privacy threat.

Since DRM is based on distrusting the user (assuming all of them are potential criminals by default), symmetrical treatment for it from the user's side should be "always potential malware by default". Here is a good example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

Since DRM is always a black box / closed code, it adds to the reasons to never trust it.
Unity doesn't look like Win98. But there are a lot of UIs that don't work like Windows (KDE) or Mac (Unity or Elementary, sorta). For example, I use i3, which drops the "desktop" abstraction completely in favor of fully tiling the screen with windows.
I don't get how it does so badly in the queries and writes section when compared to node.js while the serving plaintext and json is so high.
I just wrote a letter to the FCC about the open internet
I just wrote a letter to the FCC about the open internet and I hope you will do the same.

Email openinternet@fcc.gov

My letter:

Dear FCC -

The vote tomorrow must make the internet a common service defined as telecommunications not limited to hard lines, but even wireless service providers. The companies that manage the internet in the United States have demonstrated no interest in upholding the founding values of the internet: openness and cooperation. Who can blame them when they have shareholders demanding more and more profits. The FCC must step in to remove these business decisions that are not in the interest of internet consumers. The cost of peering, content delivery and other important parts of managing the internet infrastructure are supposed to be covered by the service costs of each entity accessing the internet. Netflix pays for connections to the internet to their service providers and anyone who is paying an ISP to access the internet should expect that the cost of their service completely covers their share of the ISP's costs to deliver it to them.

I read today that a number of telecommunications companies are suggesting that the infrastructure of the internet would crumble if the FCC declares it telecommunications. The fact is, companies are always going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming for change. They always make accusations like that and they always seem to get along just fine when decisions are not in the favor of their interests. Companies always suggest that they are well-equipped to provide services because they can more easily adapt to changes in their business. This is a change we must make and they must adapt—or someone else will.

Best regards,

Jerrid Kimball
Time to fork Firefox maybe?
Maze Tree
Well, the Torah and Quran are version 1 and 3 of the same book. The Christian Bible can be considered version 2.

> I just find it odd that a Bible is more likely to get changed than a rap song.

I think your issue is about who can change it.

Back in the middle ages there were wars and conflict because of who could read it. Catholics said that only Holy people could read it, protestants said that everyone could.

Shortly ago, the Pope asked for 'Prophets' to appear, to make the Catholic church less 'catechismic' and make it adapt to the times. If that happens, the Bible will be edited, possibly but not limited to adding books.

So I think you probably disagree with common people editing and adding stuff to the Bible, but have no issues with Catholic sanctioned 'Prophets' writing new Bible stuff.

I think that this public editing is great and fantastic. This is because the Bible, Holy or sacred or whatever, is just a book like any other. It should not be held above any person, and people should be free of any oppression related to it.

However, I think this effort will fail. Because people can 'respect' and 'fear' things they don't fully accept, and this particular book is basically the most resilient one of these things.
Agreed. People whining about the loss of a "free market" are, in reality, whining about their loss of control over the producers' options. It doesn't make a bit of sense.

In fact, one indication of a "free market" at work is when they're selling things you don't like.
> So I'm not sure this is a 'natural monopoly' at all.

To be clear, by 'infrastructure' I mean physical lines going to the premises. There's still hope for wireless, but competition in the physical connection space is effectively dead, and getting deader with every merger.
Best and defacto do not necessarily coincide. BIND is just one of those classics that have been around forever and have huge momentum behind them. BIND also powers many of the root servers afaik which gives it some extra credibility. But what is best for root servers might not be best for your average personal/small-business/startup use.
How is this question symptomatic of anything but a tool fetish? Watch the movies, not the OS.
Wait until measurable abuses actually exist, and persist for year or two – enough time to understand – rather than acting on paranoid fantasies (like the "cable tiers" mockup) that might never materialize.

For example, what if ISPs roll out traffic-preferences-for-pay... but the base bandwidth available to customers, and sites that don't opt to pay for preference, also keeps improving, on a price/performance basis? Would that still be an emergency requiring novel nationwide regulation?

And wouldn't we learn something if some local markets showed abuse or lagging price/performance, while others thrived? Couldn't we, and especially the lagging jurisdictions, then do the minimal targeted reforms to improve results based on actual history, rather than a theoretical "neutral net" ideal?

Note that unlike the shared broadcast airwaves, the economic case for wires being a 'commons' needing public management is weak. There's already at least 3 sets of wires running to most structures – electricity, phones, and cable – and more could be added if those aren't satisfying the customers. And even electricity – far more foundational than internet – is regulated in a diverse manner locally, not nationally.

Wait and see and let localities and businesses experiment is just fine - it's what got us to this point, after all, and the internet is doing just fine – albeit prone to occasional panic attacks: "Death of the Internet Predicted, Film At 11".
Amid PBOC Crackdown, Richest Man in Asia Supports Bitcoin
Building an Email List to Build Your Ecommerce Business
Mozilla has had real power for a brief period, when both MS and Google had their eyes off the ball. Once Chrome matured, the game was up. It didn't help that it took them ages to fix widespread performance problems in FF...

This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a better one.
J is a rather odd choice for teaching functional programming. It distinguishes "nouns" (first-order data), "verbs" (first-order functions), and "adverbs"/"conjunctions" (essentially second-order functions -- not arbitrarily high order) at the syntax level. This means currying is pretty limited, common higher-order operations like composition (@:) and partial application (&) can only be done to first-order functions, putting functions into data structures gets awkward.

The article doesn't seem to say much about J's treatment of all functions as aggregate operations on arbitrarily high-dimensional arguments. Since functions are "polymorphic in dimensionality", instead of a bunch of nested loops, you write just the loop body. You control the orientation of the loop nest by changing what a function expects as its lowest possible argument dimensionality. This mechanism is what J has that isn't readily available elsewhere, and it's sad to see it left aside.
"The ruling confirms the need to bring today's data
protection rules from the 'digital stone age' into
today's modern computing world where data is no longer
stored on 'a server', or once launched online disappears
in cyberspace"

— European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding ("who has led the EU's data privacy efforts")

What—and I'm asking in earnest—is that quote even supposed to mean?
How much of CL does it implement? Which of the big libraries do NOT run on mocl?
Given that the web is only really 35 years old, that's a truism.
The cost to the user of switching off Apple hardware is much greater than the cost of switching from Firefox to Chrome.
URX and the Reaggregation of the Web
That's good. Thanks for the info.
IE contains a general purpose blocker. You just download an ad list from the Add Ons site and it does it all in browser.
Right, the evergreen of explanations by those that betray their principles and users (or, you know, voters).

They exercised a freedom of choice they had, and this is the decision they made. This is what we judge them on. No backsies, no "but I didn't want to", just pure "go fuck yourself Mozilla".
Still concedes too much to the notion that being physically present is always necessary. Why drive in every day only to drive back a few hours later?

I'd prefer something more like n core days a week w/ core hours that people can rely on a-priori for generating magical productivity gains from face time. All the other time, work as necessary from wherever and use email/chat/video as necessary when deliberation is necessary. Projects can either block off those times all the time, or as necessary.
That's very true. And as more and more people move away from Firefox due to Mozilla's bad design decisions as of late, their limited influence diminishes even further. Their 15% to 20% share of the browser market just can't compare to IE's 20% or more, never mind Chrome's 40% or more.