It's only a replacement for a centralized service like Dropbox if you have an always-connected peer (a de facto central server).

Bittorrent Sync just overwrites files based on last mod time (terrible option). What does this do? Does it support backups? Versioning?

> Ori is a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict resolution. We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow users to verify the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of replication instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other nodes.

It seems well thought out, and competitive with many of the other approaches mentioned here. It uses Merkle trees (as does Git) that encompasses the file system structure and full history.

If so, email me francis@redecentralize.org! (I couldn't see an email or contact form for you on the syncthing site)

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Does this support delta/block-level sync for large files (e.g.: does mounting a 100 GB truecrypt container, modifying a file inside the container and unmounting it cause the entire 100 GB container to be uploaded)?

Does it utilize the native OS platform APIs for detecting file modification (e.g. inotify on linux) as opposed to scanning/polling large directories looking for modified date changes?

Lets say I install this software on my phone, my desktop, and my work computer. I have 100+ GB free on my work computer and my home desktop, but I only have 16GB on my phone. If I add 20GB worth of movies to my sync folder, its going to fill up my phone.

Syncthing looks similar, and LAN sync'ing is a killer feature for those of us in offices with poor bandwidth.

But seriously, it seems promising.

https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_e...

"Then all current commercial services drop off, including SpiderOak, Bittorrent Sync and git-annex. This resulted in a clever combination of EncFS and dvcs-autosync. Because, in this day and age, you cannot trust any "cloud" provider with your unencrypted data."

I deal with a constant stream of these and want to have a distributed network - connected via the inet - that allows me to sync the drives in all locations.

i.e. I would like to setup a server in my home office, one in my co-founder's home office and another in my editor's home office.

Whenever my editor runs off a few hundred GB of data to a specific folder or to their drive, I would love for that to be auto-synced to both my server and that of my co-founder.

Will Syncthing allow me to do this easily and will it be appropriate for an application like that?

[0]: http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...

https://camlistore.org

Anyone know how it compares?

Upstream developer is very friendly and attentive & seems happy to discuss new features and use cases.

I use Dropbox pretty frequently to share stuff between mobile devices and desktops. If Syncthing can't do that it isn't as useful.

I couldn't understand quite advantages and why would I replace BTSync, which BTW, works really well already and does all this nice things. Plus works on my Phone and Ipad and Nexus.

To clarify one thing, I have home server which obviously hosts BTSync repos with ample space. Ability to fine-grained share parts of it is invaluable.

Syncany can work with any backend (like AWS S3) and is encrypted.

It is more of a dropbox replacement while sycnthing is a btsync replacement.

This is mostly a problem for people like me who use both Android and iOS devices so alternatives need to support both platforms.

- Combine devices and cloud services into a single interface.- Transfer data between computers, smartphones, tablets and clouds.- Manage and use data directly on the device or cloud it is stored.

My small business is looking for a combined file collaboration / file backup service that doesn't cost an excessive amount of money (we're a non-profit on a budget). Is there a good service for this? For example, Dropbox is mainly for sharing files, whereas Carbonite is mostly for backing up your computer. Is there a solution for both?

I am curious, though: what do people use to get their files remotely? And what's the cheapest solution for hosting your own central server? Would a simple AWS instance work fine?

  "Here's the alternative I use"  "Important question about the technology"  "Pertinent question about the article"

There'll now be a 120 day commenting period; 60 days of comments from companies and the public, and then 60 days of replies to those comments from the same. After that, the final rulemaking will happen.

It's likely that the docket number for comments will continue to be 14-28, so if you want to ask the FCC to apply common carrier rules to the Internet under Title II, you can do so here: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=r8e2h and you can view previous comments here: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment_search/execute?proceeding=1...

It's probably best to wait until the actual text of the NPRM is made public though, which'll likely happen very soon.

Edit: WaPo have now updated the title of the article to make it more accurate: "FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet." Old title was "FCC approves plan to allow for paid priority on Internet."

I have a measure in mind that won't harm consumers. Don't allow ISPs to discriminate against users regarding their already paid for internet traffic based on what they request. (Gee that sounds a lot like net neutrality.)

Anything less is open for abuse.

Perhaps "Discrimination" is a good word to tar this with, because it is. It's discrimination against companies, but it's also discrimination against users based on their tastes, preferences, and possibly socioeconomic status.

To say nothing of de-facto censorship issues.

Right now thanks to a close confluence of remarkable factors, the barriers associated with starting something are almost negligible. The steady march of Moore's law combined with visualisation has given us servers that cost fractions of a penny to lease per hour. No one has had to beg or pay middlemen to use that server and reach customers around the world. At the other end, customers can finally view these bits, often streamed wirelessly, on magical slabs of glass and metal in their hand or what would have passed for a super-computer in a bygone age... All of this combined with a myriad of other factors has allowed anyone to start a billion dollar company. If this very fragile ecosystem is damaged and it dies out, where should someone ambitious go next to strike out on their own?

Consumers pay based on speed of their connection. If ISP feels like the consumers are not paying enough, raise the prices.

Service providers (not ISPs, but the ones who run servers that consumers connect to) pay based on speed of their connection. If the ISP feels like service providers are not paying enough, raise the prices.

Why in the earth there is a need for slow/fast lanes and data caps?

I'm four years old. So please keep that in mind when explaing this to me. :)

After watching the FCC hearing, it seemed like all of the people who were "for" open internet, and spoke of it from the consumer level (including Wheeler) voted for the proposal. The commissioners that said the FCC didn't have jurisdiction to regulate and to leave the market alone, voted against the proposal.

Isn't it the case that if they had voted against this, that we would have been in the exact same boat we are in now and therefore the agreement that Netflix signed would continue unabated?

In that case, it really didn't matter what they voted.

Each cable company will then assume the role of warlord for their userbase and proceed to dictate the terms and agreements under which their users will experience the internet. All of which guided solely by their desire to maximise profits.

If people aren't worried yet, they should be. Serfs didn't enjoy medieval Europe for a reason.

The only two viable routes out of this nightmare are:

1. Enshrine net-neutrality / common carrier status in law

or

2. Radically break up the US ISP/cable market so that real competition exists. This way Comcast is free to try and milk every teat they can find. If users or content providers don't like the result, Comcast can wither on the vine and die while competitors pick up their fleeing users.

Some of my "favourite" takeaways:

He stressed consumers would be guaranteed a baseline of service Just like your internet provider says they don't throttle torrent traffic, but a few major ISP's have been caught out doing just that. The same is going to happen if this proposal goes ahead. Unless people breaking the rules are reported, they won't be caught and where will the resources for reporting infringer's come from?

Wheeler's proposal is part of a larger "net neutrality" plan that forbids Internet service providers from outright blocking Web sites I have no doubt in my mind, the reform Wheeler is pushing for is merely a door and there are definitely bigger things in store once the flood gates have been opened. The pressure will be too great to close them again.

The agency said it had developed a "multifaceted dispute resolution process" on enforcement and would consider appointing an "ombudsman" to oversee the process. The FCC has a shady history of resolving disputes, this is merely hot air to make the reforms not sound so bad. What happens when the resolution process breaks or is overwhelmed and can't cope with the number of infringements taking place?

As for a handful of key entities controlling what happens with the pipeline, China is a classic example of what happens when you let a sole entity dictate something like the Internet and even then, the great firewall doesn't stop everything.

Then there are questions about conflicts of interest. What happens when say a company like Comcast owns a stake in a company like Netflix and conspire to extort a competitor like Hulu (asking for exorbitant amounts of cash for speed). Who sets the price of these fast lanes and will prices be capped to prevent extortion? Too flawed to work.

"I believe the process that got us to rulemaking today was flawed," she said. "I would have preferred a delay.""

---------------------------------

But... she voted yes anyway. WTF?

Why the fuck are there party lines in the FCC? Or any other regulatory body for that matter?

This sounds an awful lot like extortion, and double billing.

ISP's... you have one (1) job. Deliver packets.

And who is to govern the rates (and tiers) of faster speeds? I can only assume ISPs will determine a cost based on aggregate bandwidth. But who is to say there can't be a fast lane, a faster lane, and a fastest lane? Sounds anti competitive to me (even the big name companies are against this!).

Last: "The telecom companies argue that without being able to charge tech firms for higher-speed connections, they will be unable to invest in faster connections for consumers" > Google Fiber is cheaper for one. Seconds, the telecom giants have all increased subscriptions so there is more money there. And, as time goes along shouldn't these providers become more efficient and costs should decrease anyway? Must be nice to have a sudo-monopoly in some markets.

"The proposal is not a final rule, but the three-to-two vote on Thursday is a significant step forward on a controversial idea that has invited fierce opposition from consumer advocates, Silicon Valley heavyweights, and Democratic lawmakers."

I haven't read it in full yet, but I've read the introduction, and the press coverage (surprise!) does not seem quite right to me.

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.h...

Because they've done such a bang-up job of that thus far..? It's no secret that at comparable advertised speed, Netflix on Comcast was far worse than Netflix on other ISPs.

I'm not sure if they're really so deluded to think their enforcement is super great, or if they're just delivering placating sound bites.

For the skeptics, it appears to come down to the question: which route offers better prospects for upgrading our internet infrastructure? Choice one is relying on a for-profit corporation with an effective monopoly that is beholden to shareholders; Choice two is relying on elected politicians beholden to the voters.

If you think there is a different argument that can be made on behalf of the carriers or if you can make the above one better, I would be very interested in hearing it.

The consolidation of media companies possibly served interests other than profits. Look at what Putin is allegedly doing with the internet. Maybe in a way the eventual intent of this is the same. And for the same purposes. I don't think we should let it get started just in case.

The ISPs, then, are claiming to be victims. When in reality they simply promise services that they can't cost-effectively deliver.

If I make contracts to give all of you a new pair of shoes every month. And you pay in advance. And then I run out of shoes before I can deliver on my promise...doesn't that mean that I don't know how to effectively run my business? Isn't that my fault for promising a service that I can't provide? Why would anyone feel sorry for me?

I find this quote very interesting. Currently the trend seems to be that the sticker speed on a connection bears little resemblance to the actual speed. I wonder if he has a plan to change that or if this was just an offhand remark.

So we had a good time, haven't we...

"6. Enhance competition. The Commission will look for opportunities to enhance Internet access competition. One obvious candidate for close examination was raised in Judge Silbermans separate opinion, namely legal restrictions on the ability of cities and towns to offer broadband services to consumers in their communities."

http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-fcc-chairman-tom-wheel...

Also, how can an American government organisation consider paid priority on The (global) Internet? Isn't it better to say that "FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet for those who connect to it via a US telecoms provider"?

All the ISPs will slow down all the major companies services, unless they pay up. There is no "faster" Internet. It's just "paying to get normal Internet back", like they've already done with Netflix:

http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious...

[1] - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-...

Help! More details anyone?

To be more clear, let's consider: I pay my ISP, a cable TV company, so much a month for Internet service withspeeds -- Mbps, million bits per second -- as stated in the service, maybe 25 Mbps upload(from me to the Internet) speed and 101 Mbpsdownload speed.

Now those speeds are just between my computer andmy ISP. So, if I watch a video clip fromsome server in Romania, maybe I only get 2 Mbpsfor that video clip because that is all myISP is getting from the server in Romania.

And I am paying nothing perbit moved. So, if I watch 10 movies a dayat 4 billion bytes per movie, even then I don't pay more.

Now, to get the bits they send me, my ISP gets thosefrom some connection(s) to the 'Internet backbone'or some 'points of presence' (PoP) or some such at various backbone 'tiers', 'peering centers', etc.

Now, long common in such digital communications havebeen 'quality of service' (QoS) and 'class of service'(CoS). QoS can have to do with latency (how long haveto wait until the first packet arrives?),'jitter' (the time between packets varies significantly?),dropped packets (TCP notices and requests retransmission),out of order packets (to be straightened out by the TCP logic or just handled by TCP requesting retransmission), etc. Heck, maybewith low QoS some packets come with coffee stains froma pass by the NSA or some such! And CoS might mean,if a router gets too busy (the way the Internet is designed,that can happen), then some packets from a lower 'class' of service can be dropped.

But my not very good understanding is that QoS and CoS, etc., don't much apply betweenmy computer and my ISP and, really, apply mostlyjust to various parts of the 'Internet backbone'where the really big data rates are. And theremy understanding is that QoS and CoS areessentially fixed and not adjusted just forme or Netflix, etc. E.g., onceone of the packets headed for me gets ona wavelength on a long haul optical fiber,that packet will move just like many millionsof others, that is, with full 'network neutrality'.

So, I ask for some packets from a server atNetflix, Google, Facebook, Yahoo,Vimeo, WaPo, NYT, HN, Microsoft's MSDN, etc. Then that serverconnects to essentially an ISP but with likelya connection to the Internet at 1, 10, 40, 100Gbps (billion bits per second). And, really,my packets may come from Amazon Web Services (AWS),CloudFlare, Akamai, some colocation facilityby Level3 or some such; e.g., the ads may comefrom some ad server quite far from wherethe data I personally was interested in came from.

Note: I'm building a Web site, and my localcolocation facility says that they canprovide me with dual Ethernet connectionsto the Internet at 10 Gbps per connection.

Note: Apparently roughly at present it is commoncommercial practice to have one cable withmaybe 144 optical fibers each witha few dozen wavelengths of laser light(dense wavelength division multiplexing -- DWDM)with data rate of 40 or 100 Gbps per wavelength.

So, there is me, a little guy, getting the packetsfor, say, a Web page. Various servers send thepackets, they rattle around in varioustiers of the Internet backbone, treated in thebackbone like any other packets,arrive at my ISP,and are sent to me over coaxto my neighborhood and to me.

So, with this setup, just where could,say, Netflix be asked to pay more and for what?That is, Netflix is already paying their ISP.That ISP dumps the Netflix packets on theInternet backbone, andmillions of consumer ISPs get thepackets.My ISP is just a local guy;tough to believe that Netflix will pay them.Besides, there is no need for Netflixto pay my ISP sincemy ISP is already doing what theysay, that is, as I can confirmwith Web site

http://www.speedtest.net

I'm getting the speeds I paid myISP for.

Netflix is going to pay more to whom for what?

Now, maybe the issue is: If the Netflix ISP and my ISPare the same huge company, UGE,that, maybe, also provides on-line movies, then UGE canask Netflix to pay more orone or the other of the UGE ISPswill throttle the Netflix data.Dirty business.

But Netflix isa big boy and could get adifferent ISP at their end.Then the UGE ISP who servesa consumer could find thatthe UGE ISP still throttlesdata from Netflix but notfrom the UGE movie service?Then the consumer's ISPwould be failing to providethe data rate the consumerpaid for.

Or, maybe, the UGE ISP that servesme might send the movies from the UGE movieservice not part of the, say, 101 downloadspeed from my ISP to me and, instead,provide me with, say, 141 Mbpswhile the UGE movie is playing.This situation would be 'tying', right?Then if Netflix wants to be part ofthis 141 Mbps to a user who paidfor only 101 Mbps, then Netflixhas to pay their UGE ISP more;this can work for UGE becausethey have two ISPs and 'own bothends of the wire'.

I can easily accept that a big companywith interests at several parts of theInternet and of media more generallymay use parts of their businessto hurt competition.Such should be stopped.

But so far the public discussionsseem to describe non-problems.

I have two concerns with this approach. Take everything I say with a grain of salt as one of the authors of Ember.js.

First, as described here and as actually implemented by Om, this eliminates complexity by spamming the component with state change notifications via requestAnimationFrame (rAF). That may be a fair tradeoff in the end, but I would be nervous about building a large-scale app that relied on diffing performance for every data-bound element fitting in rAF's 16ms window.

(I'll also mention that this puts a pretty firm cap on how you can use data binding in your app, and it tends to mean that people just use binding from the JavaScript -> DOM layer. One of the nicest things about Ember, IMO, is that you can model your entire application, from the model layer all the way up to the templates, with an FRP-like data flow.)

My second concern is that components libraries really don't do anything to help you manage which components are on screen, and in a way that doesn't break the URL. So many JavaScript apps feel broken because you can't share them, you can't hit the back button, you can't hit refresh and not lose state, etc. People think MVC is an application architecture, but in fact MVC is a component architecture your app is composed of many MVCs, all interacting with each other. Without an abstraction to help you manage that (whether it's something like Ember or something you've rolled yourself), it's easy for the complexity of managing which components are on screen and what models they're plugged into to spin quickly out of control. I have yet to see the source code for any app that scales this approach out beyond simple demos, which I hope changes because I would love to see how the rubber hits the pavement.

It's always interesting to see different approaches to this problem. I don't think it's as revolutionary as many people want to make it out to be, but I've never been opposed to borrowing good ideas liberally, either. Thanks again, James!

The line in the post where "You can't even do something as basic as that with Web Components.":

  var MyToolbar = require('shared-components/toolbar');

  <link rel="import" href="shared-components/toolbar.html">

A number of the other code samples in the article also have direct analogues in Polymer as well. For example, the App/Toolbar example halfway down the page would be this:

  <polymer-element name="Toolbar" attributes="number">    <template>      <div>        <button value="increment" on-click="{{increment}}">        <button value="decrement" on-click="{{decrement}}">      </div>    </template>    <script>      Polymer('toolbar', {        number: 0,        increment: function() { this.number++; }        decrement: function() { this.number--; }      });    </script>  </polymer-element>  <polymer-element name="App">    <template>      <div>        <span>{{toolbar.number}}</span>        <Toolbar number=0 id="toolbar"></Toolbar>      </div>    </template>    <script>      Polymer('App', {        created: function() {          this.toolbar = this.$.toolbar;        }      });    </script>  </polymer-element>

After all the excitement about Angular for example, I went to learn about it and just got lost with new concepts: DOM transclusion, scopes, services, directives, ng-apps, controllers, dependency inversion and so on. I can use it but need someone to hold my hand. It reminded me of Enterprise Java Beans.

But so far just learning how React is put together and looking at the tutorials it seems like less of a framework and easier to understand altogether. I suspect this might become the new way to build web applications.

Well anyway, don't take this too seriously, I as said, I am an outsider to this.

I think the key to making React take off is building a centralized repository for components that are open source. Then building your webapp would be as easy as importing the components you need:

     bower install react-navbar     bower install react-signup-form     bower install react-sso-signin-form

https://github.com/swannodette/om

I've not used vanilla React, but Om is certainly fantastic and apparently adds a bunch of stuff that's not in the JS version.

Also, a web framework written by the guy that wrote most of the language you're using? Win!

What are the other libraries out there that we can use for this virtual DOM pattern right now? I only found mithril[1] that similarly does the template rendering with Javascript but I still don't know how different to React it is in the end? Is the diffing algorithm similar? Do they handle corner cases the same (many attributes need to be treated specially when writing them to DOM)?

Simplifying it a bit: other than the virtual DOM, is the rest of React also the best way to structure apps? What would the ideal "barebones" virtual DOM library look like?

[1] http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/

For another example of a post that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of the web page, check out jlongster's sweet.js tutorial[1]. It's a tutorial on writing macros with JS that you can actually interact with (you can make modifications to the example code snippets and see your macros expand on the fly). Very cool.

[1]: http://jlongster.com/Writing-Your-First-Sweet.js-Macro

In Firefox 29.0 on Ubuntu 14.04, the left sidebar with the text of the blog disappears and is replaced with a white space. I do not experience this on Chrome.

I developed a rather complex SPA with Angular recently and I cannot go back to the ghetto that is jQuery when using server side rendering.

The best resource is to follow the tutorial (link below). The tutorial explains everything you may have a question about when comparing it to Backbone, Angular, or Ember.

http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html

I also found the IRC channel to be very, very helpful.

The only downside is that you still have to rely on other tools to make a true SPA like routing.

I thought one of the cardinal sins of web design was don't break the back button.

Developer: Hmm...I wonder how long it's going to take me to figure out where that HTML was generated in my javascript.

I just wanted a way to put templates in <script> tags that get loaded by React Components. That way, I won't be mixing templates and the behavior of the components. Has anyone done this before?

Since React claims to be super fact, has done a performance comparison to see in what situations and how much better react performs in certain cases, compared to say, angular.js or more vanilla frameworks?

(Also I hear that there is a really great speedup that using OM gives you, but I haven't seen any comparisons with om either)

I plan to expand it with a toolkit to allow thinking in terms of batches, queues and consumers, la bacon.js[2].

[1]: https://github.com/zenoamaro/honeyloops[2]: https://github.com/baconjs/bacon.js

Would you model the drag in the main data model somehow? Or would you do that all externally (with traditional DOM manipulation) and then update the model when the drag is complete?

Example: in Chaplin, components are views or subviews (because it's still an MVC framework, which is another discussion for another time). The views by default render automatically without you having to call anything. But if you did, you'd write @render() (because hey, Coffeescript saves keystrokes and sanity). That automatically renders the component in the place you've already specified as its container attribute, or if you haven't it renders to the body by default.

Whereas in React, you have to write this garbage: Bloop.renderComponent(Box(), document.body);

WHY. Can't we write a framework that intuits some of this crap? Shouldn't we use a framework that reduces the time we spend writing code?

Using a non-common ui idiom is risky. The presentation and topic don't match in a way that reader (i.e. me) had enough expectations left when it comes to what you might actually have to say.

Great read, by the way.

P.S. I haven't looked into this in depth, just throwing an idea out there.

All that ends up happening in practice is untested, messy code with deadlines up your ass and 0 developer ergonomics. Zero.

All those things are cool for social apps (a.k.a. fart apps) but for business ready platforms this is just silly.

for example, a link that i can middle click or bookmark or send to someone, etc would be much more useful even if not as spiffy as those scrolls

DRM are marketed to users (and the society, including politicians) and to artists as a way to prevent copies. Most engineers implementing DRMs think so too. And all the discussions we've seen on HTML5 are around this. People have little arguments against this because it "sounds morally good" to help artist "live of their creations".

I am the de facto maintainer of libdvdcss, and have been involved on libbluray (and related projects) and a few other libraries of the same style; I've done several conferences on this precise subject and I've fought the French High-Authority-on-DRM in legal questioning about an unclear piece of law... Therefore, I've studied DRM quite closely...

The truth is that if you consider the main goal of DRM to prevent copies, no DRM actually work. ALL of them got defeated in a way or another. Indeed, GoT-broadcast-to-top-of-TPB time is counted in a couple of hours; so why do they try to push those technologies still?

The answer is probably because the main goal of DRM is to control distribution channels, not copy-prevention. Copy-prevention is a side goal.

This post of Ian is excellent to explain this.

PS: You can see me speaking of the same point, in French, in June 2013 here: http://www.acuraz.net/team-videolan-lors-de-pas-sage-en-sein...

NB: I'm not discussing here whether DRM are good or bad.

Somehow people are more okay with paying an ongoing fee for software or some perceived notion of services, but that same does't yet apply to content in a larger way. The closest equivalent is probably the cable companies and they are taking their huge sums of money and are buying the media companies, so maybe eventually there will be just a flat $100/month fee for experiencing a company's content on whatever device/experience it's available on. Maybe even movie theaters.

Moreover, the iPod most likely would have never been invented. How about that for killing innovation?

Which I'm sure is not the intention.

Say I can't copy-and-paste a section from an eBook or run it through a speech reader? Tell me I can't skip the trailers before watching the DVD I have paid for? No. Fuck you. Bullshit like that is a red rag to a bull - you just created an army of people who'll bust off your "rights management" just to show you how wrong you are, and that YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE how people consume the things they own.

Sorry and all. But that's how it is.

The real question is what we can do to fight DRM. The only real option is to push back against the companies that promote it. For EME, the current DRM in the news, the relevant companies are Google, Microsoft and Netflix.

It's all well and good to talk about how DRM is pointless. Of course it is pointless. But unless we actually push back against those companies, DRM will continue to win.

DRM is, in fact, to prevent unauthorized usage and copies. In fact, even some of the examples in this article are exactly that.

What is more important is that DRM doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to make unauthorized usage very inconvenient - enough that a few dollars is worth the cost for most people.

And the end result? We caved for the shiny Freeview HD sticker.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406733

1. Monopolistic lock-in. DRM is more than often used to control the market. It happened with Apple in the past, and was one of the key reasons that music publishers realized that being DRM-free is actually better for them.

This reason also includes DRM derivatives like DMCA-1201 and the like. It's all about control (over the markets, over users and etc.).

2. Covering one's incompetence. DRM is used to justify failing sales (i.e. when execs are questioned about why the product performs poorly, they say "Pirates! But worry not - we put more DRM in place").

3. Ignorance and / or stupidity (many execs have no clue and might believe that DRM actually provides some benefit). This type can be called DRM Lysenkoism.

So the purpose of DRM is to make maximum revenue from those who won't pirate, for example by charging more for group viewings of the movie or viewing on multiple devices.

I have worked with MS PlayReady DRM (which is the "latest" one from Microsoft, the one used by Netflix) for some time and never stumbled upon any cracks. Not because it's impossible or even difficult but probably just because nobody cares about cracking Netflix (which brings PlayReady it's main source of "users")... Once you pay, you can watch as much as you like, why bother. Netflix made it extremely simple and accessible. (Yes some features like multicasting might be missing but it's still way better than Plesk or PopcornTime. For now at least... The main problem is clearly that the Film industry make it too difficult to have all content in one place). There is plenty of other "easier" sources (alternative VOD offerings with already cracked/worse protections, Blu-rays) to get the copyrighted material from for underground channels.

I am sure other DRM systems have a clear log for the same reason: No major incentive to crack them.

One thing that's always seemed odd to me is that the DRM use case is presented as a battle with "content providers" on one side and everyone else on the other, but aren't these content providers also users? Do they also consume DRM'd content, and if so, are they perfectly fine with the restrictions? Do those who devise DRM schemes not realise that they may also be the ones who will have these schemes imposed on them?

What really gets my gears grinding is when I see an open source browser like Firefox is forced against their wishes to implement it because DRM has somehow reached a standard.

The job of W3C standards is to protect the interests of ordinary web users and not content providers.

I refuse to purchase anything with DRM, but I don't give a shit if it's a rental or subscription service.

People pay for things that are good, easy to pay for, are appropriately priced, and not a burden or expense more than they see it worth (has to deal with pricing and roadblocks). DRM, and poor delivery services are usually those roadblocks.

>With DRM, there is no licensed player that can do this

So, enforcing some rules (via DRM) to the player manufacturing, content provider makes my experience worse as a consumer.

Again, I am a consumer, what is the advantages of DRM for me? So manufacturer must enforce me watching ads?

What? Why? Nothing would have prevented people from recording the playback of an encrypted CD and putting that on their iPod.

But if this is the case, why is there such a push to put DRM in HTML? Browsers aren't DVD players. Users are free to use software like ABP to circumvent any features like "unskippable ads" mentioned in the post. Pressure on browser makers seems much less valuable than pressure on device makers.

"DRM's purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well."

I've been investing some time in the command line on my Mac. I am moving from a dilettante going to the shell on a per-need basis to a more seasoned terminal native. It pays off handesomely! It's hard to convey how nice it to have to have a keyboard-based unified environment instead of a series of disjoined mouse-based GUI experiences.

Here are some recommendations pertaining to mastering the command line on a Mac specifically:

-You can make the terminal start instantaneously instead of it taking several seconds. Remove the .asl files in /private/var/log/asl/. Also remove the file /users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.terminal.plist

- Install iterm2. It possesses many fancy features but honestly I hardly ever use them. The main reason to use it instead of the default Terminal application is that It just works.

-Make your terminal look gorgeous. It may sound superficial but it actually is important when you spend expanded period of time in the terminal. You go from this http://i.imgur.com/cx3zZL8.png to this http://i.imgur.com/MQbx8yK.png . You become eager to go to your terminal instead of reluctant. Pick a nice color scheme https://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/ColorGallery . Use a nice font (Monaco, Source Code Pro, Inconsolata are popular). Make it anti aliased.

-Go fullscreen. Not so much for the real estate but for the mental switch. Fullscreen mode is a way to immerse yourself into your productive development world. No browser, no mail, no application notification. Only code.

-Install Alfred. It's the command line for the GUI/Apple part of your system. Since I installed it I stopped using the dock and Spotlight. Press +space then type what you want and it comes up. In just a few keystrokes you can open an application, open gmail/twitter/imdb/..., make a webs search, find a file (by name, by text content), open a directory,... It's difficult to describe how empowering it is to being able to go from 'I want to check something out in the directory x which is somewhere deep deep in my dev folders' to having it displayed in 2 seconds flat.

-Make a few symlinks from your home directory to the directories you use frequently. Instead of doing cd this/that/code/python/project/ you just do cd ~/project.

-Learn the shell. I recommend the (free) book The Linux Command Line: http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php . It guides you gently from simple directory navigation all the way up to shell scripting.

-Use tmux. Essential if you want to spend some time in the terminal. You can split the window in multiple independent panes. Your screen will have multiple terminals displayed simultaneously that you can edit independently. For example I'll have the code in one side and on the other side a REPL or a browser. You can also have multiple windows each with its own set of panes and switch from on to the other. With the multiple windows I can switch from one aspect of a project to another instantly. E.g: one window for the front-end dev, a second one for the backend and another for misc file management/git/whatever.

-Pick an editor and work towards mastery. I don't care if you choose vi or emacs. You'll be surprised how simple features can make a big change in how you type. You'll be even more surprised at how good it feels

The terminal is here to stay. It's a skill that bears a lot of fruits and that deprecate slowly. The more you sow the more you reap.

Basically it's a command-line front end to Apple's TextKit file import/export library. Works with a bunch of rich text/word processor formats, including OpenDoc, RTF, HTML 5, and MS Word. Critically, the HTML it emits is vastly better than the bloated crap that comes out of Microsoft Word or LibreOffice when you save as HTML ...

Install pandoc and multimarkdown as well and you've got the three pillars of a powerful, easy-to-use multiformat text processing system.

The Linux equivalent of `open` is `xdg-open`. I usually alias it to `op`, since `/bin/open` exists.

Another bit of terminal-sugar for OS X users:

    alias lock='/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend'

    alias lock='gnome-screensaver-command -l'

I've sorta-documented this stuff over the years, but only for my own memory. https://gist.github.com/ggreer/3251885 contains some of my notes for what I do with a clean install of OS X. Some of the utility links are dated, but fixing the animation times really improves my quality of life.

One tiny thing though, at the bottom it says

> Recall that OS X apps are not true executables, but actually special directories (bundles) with the extension .app. open is the only way to launch these programs from the command line.

Actually, you can launch them in other ways. Example

    /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome  --user-data-dir=/Users/<username>/temp/delmechrome --no-first-run

10. /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Wireless Diagnostics (with built-in wifi stumbler)

11. /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app (Built-in VNC client with hardware acceleration)

12. /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources (Command-line wifi configuration and monitoring tool)

Combine with sed, awk, and cut, and these tools can provide useful monitoring.

The original title is clearly more accurate / useful / canonical. The overwritten title is ambiguous. This is indeed not a list of every OS X command line utility.

I wrote related rant once[0] when I tried to debug an issue of a misconfigured default browser.

[0]: http://f5n.org/blog/2013/default-browser-linux/

For example, I set the letter 'o' as an alias for 'open' on OS X, and to "thunar" on Xubuntu and "nemo" on Linux Mint.

Right now I am more interested in creating simple visual interfaces on top of UNIX-y tools, for my own personal use cases. The main benefit of this is the ability to better experiment with and optimize my workflows for different properties as needed through different combinations of single responsibility interfaces and single responsibility programs.

I am sensing that there is great promise in seeing much higher APMs (actions per minute) for many tasks, even compared to the all-powerful command line. Also, there are lots of interesting possibilities for better visual representations of data to improve comprehension and usability.

* lunchy: wrapper over launchctl, written in Ruby https://github.com/mperham/lunchy

* brew cask: "To install, drag this icon... no more", as they say https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask

* have fun with "say" https://github.com/andreis/different

I like the way Fink [1] uses the /sw (software) directory.

Does anyone have a valuable opinion on the comparison between Fink and Homebrew or maybe MacPorts?

[1] http://www.finkproject.org

   ssh-add -k keyfile

That and some of the examples in that article really make it a killer platform for Unix bits.

"cmd-a" "cmd-c" (copy all)

double click on a word I'm looking for, "cmd-e" to enter it into the find clipboard

'pbpaste | fgrep --color `pbpaste -pboard find`'

I have that aliased as 'pbg'.

sips - https://developer.apple.com/library/Mac/documentation/Darwin...

osascript - https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

  $ mdf "*invoice*.pdf"  /Users/smw/Downloads/Invoice-0000006.pdf

  ~$ mdfind tag:Active kind:xcode  /Users/jn/Code/xyz/xyz.xcodeproj  ...

Try this out: say hello -v Good

This is only tangentially related, but I recently wrote a little Automator Service to gather any selected file and folder paths from Finder. I very often need to grab the path of something for programming-related stuff, and doing it from the command line or with the mini-icon drag-and-drop takes way too long. Maybe somebody here will find it useful! http://cl.ly/1a3s3g1u2Q2w

http://dotfiles.github.io/

Otherwise good article.

    ssh somehost    cd /some/dir    grep -lr foo . | remote_pbcopy

export CLICOLOR=1

export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced

I thought that was one of the most amazing things when I used a linux system, but OS X is black and white by default.

It seems like a large portion of HN is less experienced re sysadmin, but is interested in it nonetheless. Perhaps there's room to make a 'codecademy for unix' type course? Curious to see what folks thing.

It's super useful for keeping long running tasks running.

That alone might be sufficient reason to migrate from ubuntu.

  open /Applications/Safari.app/

  open -a safari

    "Select a window using your mouse, then capture its contents without the windows drop shadow and copy the image to the clipboard:    $ screencapture -c W"

    $ screencapture -C -o

My co-workers and I used to ssh into the iMacs of non-technical users in our office and have a good laugh from a nearby room.

    > Profile-driven compilation implies that we might invoke an optimizing    > compiler while the function is running and we may want to transfer the    > functions execution into optimized code in the middle of a loop; to our    > knowledge the FTL is the first compiler to do on-stack-replacement for    > hot-loop transfer into LLVM-compiled code.

I was reminded of the old story about a search engine that tried to supplant JS with a Java bytecode-clone because at the time it was widely believed Javascript had reached its evolutionary limit. How times change!

This is the patch point intrinsic documentation: http://llvm.org/docs/StackMaps.html. This is a really significant addition to LLVM, because it opens up a whole world of speculative optimizations, even in static languages. Java, for example, suffers on LLVM for want of an effective way to support optimistic devirtualization.

I wonder, however, how slow register spilling really is. I will test it when I have time, but logically, it shouldn't take up much time. Under the x64 ABI, 6 registers are used for argument passing [1], and the rest of the arguments are passed on the stack. So, when the runtime calls into GC functions, all but at most 6 pointers are already in the stack, at (in theory) predictable locations. Those 6 registers can be pushed to stack in 6 instructions that take up 8 bytes [2], so the impact on the code size should be minimal, and performance is probably also much faster than most other memory accesses. Furthermore, both OCaml and Haskell use register spilling, and while not quite at C-like speeds, they are mostly faster than JS engines and probably also faster than FTL JIT.

Of course, predicting the stack map after LLVM finishes its optimisations is another thing entirely, but I sincerely hope the developers implement it. EDIT: it seems that LLVM includes some features [3] that allow one to create a stack map, though I wonder if it can be made as efficient as the GHC stack map, which is simply a bitmap/pointer in each stack frame, identifying which words in the frame are pointers and which aren't.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions#x86-64_...

[2] tested using https://defuse.ca/online-x86-assembler.htm#disassembly

[3] http://llvm.org/docs/GarbageCollection.html

This is going to be a very very big deal.

doesnt "use asm" simply skip the initial profiling tiers that gather type stats etc? most of the benefit of compiling to asm.js comes from fast/explicit type coersion.

Hopefully the next Safari in iOS and OSX will get many more improvements

    dubbed the FTL  short for Fourth Tier LLVM

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

I imagine even writing a Ruby -> JS transpiler that used the WebKit VM would provide a speedup, similar to how JRuby works on the JVM, but native compilation would be even better.

One approach is to write the filtering engine from scratch. It is what I did, without looking at ABP's code beforehand in order to ensure a clean slate mind.

I didn't get it right the first time, I did spend quite a large amount of time benchmarking, measuring, prototyping, etc.

Once I was satisfied I had finally had a solid code base, I went and benchmarked it against ABP to find out how it compared:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Net-request-...

And for HTTPSB's numbers, keep in mind there were an extra over 50,000 rules in the matrix filtering engine (something not found in ABP).

So I think this shows clearly ABP's code can be improved.

100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?

Well, for me the whole point of blocking ads is because they are often big flash things that hog cpu and memory. If ABP is no better, then most of the reason is gone. I'd actually like to view ads to support more sites.

It's sad that the most-demanded feature on every browser, as evidenced by plugin downloads, is ad blocking. However, all the major browsers are produced by companies with their hands in advertising, and this conflict of interest has resulted in this feature request going unfulfilled for a over a decade.

Fork 'em.

There used to be a proxy adblocker that did that, but I don't think it works anymore.

The Kindle browser uses a proxy to pre-render pages on the server in order to lighten the load of the device.

Could AaaS (Adblock as a service) be a viable business? I think I'd pay for it.

-ads take so long to load and when ABP is not enabled bogs down my browser hard core

-when watching videos I have to wait 3-20 seconds for them to load, with ABP enabled I do not have to wait at all

It consistently saves me several minutes every day. If it adds a few extra milliseconds to load some style sheets I have never, ever noticed.

My computer has 12 Gigabytes of RAM.

I don't give a shit, as long as i don't have to view those terrible stupid Ads.

Advertisers, fix your practises and i will view your Ads again.

Currently this machine has been up for 3 days and 17 hours and Firefox has been running the whole time and it is using 303MB with 4 tabs open one of which is the Daily Mail (don't judge!) which is an extremely busy page. This is perfectly acceptable in my opinion. I only have 4GB RAM which by todays standards in not much either. Obviously reducing the memory footprint is great but I can't say it has ever been a problem I have ever noticed.

On a side note the past few updates to Firefox have improved performance a lot. I am really impressed by how much quicker the browser is, especially with Chrome seeming to just get slower and slower with each update.

http://www.privoxy.org/

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist_noelemhi...

With these rules firefox's memory usage only goes up from 290MB to 412MB, instead of 1.5GB for the website mentioned in the article for me.

The downside is that this list has a more limited coverage than the full version of the list.

I can understand Mozilla taking some interest in how addons behave, and constructive feedback on extensions is a good thing. However, ABP is the type of extension that is likely to have issues in those areas because of what it does. Which is very important to users, especially those who rely upon it for its privacy and security enhancing capabilities. It is those users who should decide whether the performance and resource usage trade-offs are acceptable. Mozilla shouldn't make, or try to make, such decisions.

The situation with ABP 2.6 (https://adblockplus.org/development-builds/faster-firefox-st..., https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22906) might not be a case of this, but that along with the wider pattern of platform developers being more controlling, does make me somewhat concerned about Mozilla taking too much interest in extensions. I hope my worries are for naught.

There might be an architecture problem here. Another solution is to use a proxy to block ads, like GlimmerBlocker for OSX. But I didn't investigate memory usage, though I tend to think it will be lower (plus have the added benefit of working simultaneously for all browsers).

So it's not just memory that can be at risk of hogging.

Thank you, really thank you.

Even with the memory pain, I still (mostly) love FF.

You're missing important messages from sponsors.

Pretty amazing that our tools are getting so good that someone can quickly whip up an open-source plugin and splashy, hosted website for a SO answer.

Link for visual evidence: https://twitter.com/PaulRPalmeter/status/456165443363827712/...

[1] http://i.imgur.com/5KspGyc.png

If someone has an interesting problem, let's try and figure out a way to do it. Usually the why comes up along the way, but not relevant.

Thankfully, some great folks stepped in and gave quality responses.

  .halfStyle:before {    width: 50%;    color: #f00;  }

Now, go make striped characters.

[1] http://www.hrgigermuseum.com/

The band loved it, but the record company refused to release the album. The band, placed in a difficult position, petitioned to Geiger to adjust the artwork. Geiger refused to bow to the band's and record company's demands, and in the end the record company had to hire an airbrush artist to remove it as much as possible... leading to the "shaft of light" along the neck.

[1] http://images.coveralia.com/audio/e/Emerson,_Lake_y_Palmer-B... SFW)

Also: vale. A talented artist with a distinctive voice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MBaEEODzU0

[EDIT: I mean MOST DEFINITELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!]

Only later did I read it and become fascinated with science. Guess what I do now?

It's amazing how much this man did for the world through his work. Very influential to many people in many ways.

He will be missed.

Celebrate his life today by watching Alien!

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/01777/fact...

If you have a chance, check "Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune". They have one of his last interviews talking about how he got started and how that failed movie was the seed for his ideas for Alien with Jean Giraud.

I remember being astonished by Giger's vision in Alien. For years I hunted down posters, calendars, and books, which weren't always available or affordable. Like others here, I relished the Dark Seed game for its tribute to Giger.

This takes me back to an earlier stage of my life, and makes me very sad. What a vision!

RIP H.R. Giger

https://imgur.com/gallery/SsFg0Hu/

    d3.selectAll(nodes).transition()        .duration(2500)        .delay(function() { return this.depth * 50; })        .ease("quad-in-out")        .tween("position", function() {          var d = this, i = d3.interpolate([d[0], d[1]], [d.y, d.x]);          return function(t) { var p = i(t); d.t = t; d[0] = p[0]; d[1] = p[1]; };        });

I wonder if this works backwards - given a tree could you construct a maze? efficiently?

Mozilla had no chance once Google, MS, Apple and everybody else decided to support EME. Most users don't care if they fought for open standards. They are probably just going to say that Firefox sucks.

If you ask me, Mozilla could be the most important software company in the world. The stuff they are building today is fundamental to an open internet for the future. It is important that they stay healthy for what lies ahead.

Even though non-profit organizations like Mozilla do not seek to maximize financial gain (by definition), they often seek to maximize their relevance in the world. As a result, they ARE susceptible to corruption: most if not all are willing to "compromise" -- that is, sacrifice their mission and values -- in order to remain "important" in the eyes of society.

The folks running Mozilla are sacrificing the organization's mission and values because they're afraid of losing market share. They do not want Firefox to become a niche platform.

Really, that's what this is all about... but those companies are already building fully native applications for every platform other than win32+Web. Telling them to go make a native application (or keep dealing with Silverlight/Flash) for that one last platform would be completely appropriate.

The world of software has changed - now we have major companies building applications for multiple different platforms instead of "just windows" or "just web". The web doesn't need to do everything.

It doesn't need to do this.

People have the freedom to disagree with you, FSF. Just because they do doesn't make them misguided, especially on a future prediction.

How is this any different from flash/silverlight plugins we already have?

Not everything needs to be GPL to respect people's rights to do what they want with something they bought, not everything needs to be open source just because they like it that way, and above all, people should have a right to choose to install whatever they want, and distros should have the same right to choose to tell the user about closed source software when it would be helpful to them. If the end user didn't want to hear that, they can either ignore it, or use a FSF-endorsed linux distro like Trisquel. The fact that so few people do shows to me how most people are completely fine with having the ability to install what they want.

Freedom may include giving others freedom to do things you personally don't like, but the FSF tends to think a single, ironically restricted set of freedoms to match their philosophy are all that everyone needs.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/05/14/to-serve-users.html

Eich helped found Mozilla back when it was just contributions to Netscape, and then helped break off as a fully-fledged project. My guess is that he understood the loss here. On the other hand, Gal wrote PDF.js which replaced the proprietary PDF reader, so you'd expect him to get it, too.

You could already watch DRM netflix in firefox. If they were going from no-DRM plugin policy to allowing DRM in plugins, that would be cause for uproar. But Mozilla has always allowed DRM via plugins.

  Write to Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal and let him know that you oppose DRM.

They are not like the fsf. They care about user share, market and all that. Idealists cannot afford to think that way.

I don't understand why Adobe has to be used here? Why didn't Mozilla partner with Apple, Google, and Opera on a standard implementation code for this? After that's done, then Mozilla can try to sneak in one last question for all partners, can we do it better than this?

However, there is admittedly a big caveat here. I don't know of a workable way to know that DRM is "what it says on the tin." Big business and governments could place back doors into such mechanisms, which would put us in an even worse position than where we are now.

misguided, as in, Firefox wants people to actually use its browser? I'm seriously surprised at some of these idealists failing to understand that normal people just want to watch House of Cards (or whatever) and that's pretty much it. Mozilla can't turn their back on those users.

They even spell out the case when they should adopt the lesser License[0], despite the fact that it goes against the FSF's core values and they advise not using it[1].

At the end of the day, I see this as Mozilla's LGPL.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html0. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries.1. But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together.

Its not even a revolutionary concept, as they are already requiring a click-to-accept with self-signed certificates. It puts the responsibility to the website if the black box called DRM causes problems, locks up, or cause some general havoc on the user. It highlights that the website is demanding to take control over the users device, and gives the user an option to say no.

It is easy to speak about fundamental principles in PR announcements, but code speak louder. The only bright spot is if Mozilla don't do more for the users, add-ons and forks will try to carry the principles for them.

The paper presents 2 cases, selected because they were the first 2 cases to be tested at maximum viral load. There are additional people in the trial, and they will release full results once they are available.

It included two slides showing before/after blood levels and imaging. They talk about how they modified the virus to emit a tracking signal, and how they modified it to target the cancer cells. Really, really mind blowing and impressive work. I would love a tour of that lab.

These are end-stage patients for whom everything else has stopped working. One of the patients had already undergone several experimental treatments. There is some really exciting research going on for MM (multiple myeloma) treatments, and maybe even cures.

I think this is one example of the free market working well. Typical MM treatment runs about $60k / year, and with recent developments, patients are living 10+ years. Total number of MM patients is increasing both because the disease is becoming more prevalent, but mostly because people are living so much longer with MM. In short, it's a large and growing market. But it's not a cancer you can treat and have it go into remission. You get on treatment, and you stay on it and keep those levels down. The typical treatment is biweekly therapy.

But these OVs are one-time deals. So a single dose treatment is a very interesting alternative. The only problem is, MM is extremely resilient, and the cells are everywhere. It's so hard to eradicate, unless the OV is a cure, it's just another tool in the box to manage MM and extend lives.

Weird, the PDF of the actual paper was freely downloadable a couple hours ago, but now it seems the paywall is up? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025619614...

Is there any likelihood that measles, or a similar virus we have held at bay with vaccination, was actively fighting cancer 200 years ago, thus pushing up the incident rates that apparently have gone up and dismissed with "well we weren't dying of cancer because we were dying of $INSERT_DISEASE_HERE"

From my completely uninformed point of view it seems that if it's real, it changes everything...

Dad of a child who died from cancer and well the word cancer doesn't mean squat you need to know what type of cancer. Is it sarcoma or what?http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/commoncancers

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

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amgen-provides-update-on-ph...

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

Not, it would seem, a panacea. Approach is interesting in that aspects of cancer biology make the cells more vulnerable to viral infection, eg supressed interferon production. Also a possible platform for immunotherapy ie getting the immune system to attack a virally infected cancer cell might wake up a more generalised immune response. But, medical grade virus is expensive to produce, and hard to think how a viral infection could eradicate 100% of the billions of cancer cells present in advanced disease. Also, humans get immune to viruses after infection.

It seems to me that a very high percentage of people would opt for a potentially fatal, completely untested course of action as opposed to imminent death. So who gets to try these treatments, who tells dying patients they are not allowed them, and is there a black market or large amounts of money changing hands for experimental procedures?

Ekianjo in this thread quoted 7 years at the earliest for a treatment to become available. Surely with hundreds of thousands of desperate, dying, last chance sufferers, it is better to go to extreme measures and offer the most promising yet dangerous treatments to everyone. Is it simply a side effect of the way pharmaceutical companies have to do business? If so, it's sad, and maybe a larger share of cancer research money should be put towards 'out there' attempts to cure terminal patients.

Genuinely curious.

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

Can't they circumvent this by injecting more of the virus than the body can fight at once? Though it's starting to sound like regular expressions...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coley's_toxins

That's just the impression I get from the article. I know literally nothing about this do if anyone with actual knowledge can explain properly please do!

It would be really great if this turns out to be a real treatment option because, harsh as it appears from the article, this woman's treatment sounds way easier than the current therapies for myeloma.

However, all it took from me was a call to Apple's customer service, I told them I had just switched off my iPhone and no longer got texts from people with iMessage and they immediately sent me to a tech that fixed the problem for me.

Have you been explaining it correctly when you call? All I said was "I had an iPhone until last week, switched to another phone but I'm still registered for iMessage"

Edit: According to my phone I called 1-800-692-7753 (Which is just 1-800-MY-APPLE) and my call took 8 mins 25 seconds total. Not too bad of an experience.

A lot of my friends have complained about this problem as well.

I'm surprised Apple hasn't moved faster to come up with a solution. Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

IM (under which I include iMessage) is user-to-user, not device-to-device. It can know about the recipient and whether messages are received.

Each of these things has advantages.

SMS works because the phone network is always tracking a device. It is very addressable. The receiving device is mobile, rarely changes, and is singular.

IM has a notion of sessions. The user signs off and on. It can travel over any IP connection. The device on which the user is addressable changes a lot. There may be multiple devices, making the definition of delivered a bit less deterministic.

Conflating these two makes for a confusing mental model for the user, and for failures like this.

Does anyone who works at/worked at Google know why this happened?

Were they trying to turn the telecoms into dumb pipes with the original Nexus and gizmo5 purchase, but when that failed just abandoned the idea? You'd think the success of whatsapp and facebook chat would make chat a priority. If people communicate using your platform they're more likely to use your account for other things.

Here's my update: It's been about 4 months or so since I switched.

Nothing I was able to do or Apple was able to do fixed the problem. I was able to put Messages into debug mode and I sent Apple a full debug log (Apple bug report #15966535). They marked the ticket as "Duplicate" and I was no longer able to view any updates.

After about 3 months, most of the issue has resolved.

The majority of group-texts work now; iPhones now send the whole thread is MMS not iMessage. It's still not 100% but pretty good.

Most of my friends can send SMS without failures, but quite a few still get "iMessage failed" and have to "resend as SMS".

I've completely given up trying to fix the problem. Just hoping the remaining iOS devices resolve themselves at some point, or Apple fixes in next update.

<rant>Everyone thinks this is an Android problem that they can't message me anymore. Really tough to explain to the world that it's _their_ phone that's buggy.</rant>

Just another lock-in behaviour from them.

I did, however, have to do a quick Google search, log in to my iTunes account through the web, and de-register my Apple devices. The problem was solved relatively quickly and for free.

This should be simpler, but I'm not sure how much easier Apple can make it. They can't make an iOS app to help you because you got rid of the iPhone. It seems strange to make an Android app to help you. That leaves the web. Better luck to you!

I filled a complaint with the FCC at https://esupport.fcc.gov/ccmsforms/form2000.action?form_type.... It is a form for complaints against wireless carriers for number portability issues.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3392014?start=15&tstart...

http://support.vodafone.com.au/articles/FAQ/How-to-deactivat...

TLDR; Deactive iMessages on your iPhone before switching or go here if you don't have access to your phone. http://supportprofile.apple.com/MySupportProfile.do

Sounds like that's not enough from reports below tho

Turns out, one of their iPhones recognized that it should start texting me, while the other's iPhone kept iMessaging me w/out delivering failure reports. So frustrating that I forced them to get WhatsApp!

I have a weird feeling the messages still aren't going through and a lot of my friends think I'm being an asshole.

I gave Apple a call and initially the only response I could get from them was "Just turn on iMessage" and general confusion about why I had it turned off in the first place.

Eventually someone I talked to said they could fix it, and shortly after I started receiving messages again.

The thing is, I have not owned ANY smartphone before this one. My guess was the previous owner of this number had an iPhone and registered for iMessage service. iMessage route sms through its own server it never reached my carrier's network. I tried to get help from Apple store technician, but since I am not an apple customer, past or present, employee did not see a need to help.

Problem is I really liked that number. After 2 months of struggle I gave up and changed to a new number.

I will admit I never liked Apple and do my best to purge iProducts from my life. But I guess you just cannot avoid being screwed, anyway.

Friends of mine have moved from iPhone to Android, when I send them a message it tries with iMessage - and I get the message failure exclamation mark. It then resends as a text and doesn't try iMessage again for some time. Haven't really had the black hole experience yet...

There was a fairly recent change in how iMessages are handled. In one of the iOS updates, you can receive iMessage messages on numerous devices tied to your Apple ID such as your iPad. I wonder if that's where the bug comes from.

The other option is to switch to Android at home and get new friends.

Somewhat odd - I can receive individual texts from two people that have iPhones but if one of them sends a group text to both of us, I do not receive it.

Been going on like this for over a month.

on iPhone - Disable iMessage from the settings menu. - Go back to messages and send a standard text message to the phone number. - Enable iMessage from the settings menu.

Done.

Why this exact same issue is poppup up in HN every now and then...

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts5185

A few comments here seem to suggest that this is a carrier or cellular infrastructure issue. It isn't! iMessage doesn't route over SMS-- that's the whole point. It routes to Apple's servers, which should be capable of doing a lookup to see if the number still has an associated iCloud or iMessage account.

Sometime back they were arrogant and brilliant, not just the former.

Seriously though, iMessage should have some sort of interoperability on other devices, even if its just a web interface you can log into to make configuration changes, including the deletion/deactivation of an account associated with a mobile phone number.

Edit: Or even monitoring iPhones associated with a number and disabling iMessage if said phone is no longer online with that number? Could possibly even forward unread messages, etc.

Turn "Send as SMS" so that it falls back to SMS if the destination is not available for iMessage.

It baffles me that online iCloud doesn't have a dashboard for controlling this. Doesn't seem it should be that hard to unlink phone numbers from iMessage.

When I had my iPhone, I had originally linked both my email and my phone number to the same iMessage account, so fortunately I never lost messages.

If it was tied to your email as well, you might be able to disable the service via another apple device.

It would be great to see an interoperable solution replace iMessage, but for now, it is (purportedly) secure and often more reliable than text messaging. I still pay for an unlimited sms plan.

What adds insult to injury is that all ios devices are shipped by default with the setting set to not send by sms when user not found on iMessage.

Apple should own up to this problem publicly and compensate users.

It punishes people who move away from their platform with social isolation.

It's easy for them to overlook this issue and not put any effort into fixing it, because the investment would result in a better experience for everyone who switching away from Apple.

Obvious solution.

It's not clear why this seems okay. "We've stolen contact for a year. We're working on it."

Seems like anti-competitive behavior. Stopped buying Apple 100% immediately once I found out.

Save your opinionated anti Apple rhetoric. The color coded indicator allows people to know which features are included in the service, or whether your text was delivered and read or in your case, not delivered...

It's a number you can't even pick yourself: you _pay_ to get a randomly assigned digits, at best with the ability to reroll (also not always free).

To me, it feels like someone using an `@aol.com` email in 2014. Or a rotary phone.

1. Reset your Apple ID password and do not log back in on your device(s)

2. Send a text to 48369 with the word STOP

It wont happen immediately but over a 12-hour period, you should start receiving texts on your Android device that are sent from iPhone users.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-keep-receiving-sm...

A "search for files/folders named ..." feature would be a nice bonus, too, so that you can quickly get to the right spot in a big hierarchy.

To the author (https://twitter.com/buunguyen): please add a donation link somewhere so I can send you a thank-you (or you can just e-mail me with your PayPal/other address; my e-mail's in my profile).

Be sure to tweet it at some of the github engineers Thy should bring this into their core product.

e.g. src->com->twitter->scalding->scala->test (in this example, these are all folders in hierarchy and they are the only one until the 'test' so expanding them automatically all the way through makes sense).

Press 't' when you go to a repository, it will activate the file finder. From there you can just start typing for the file/folder name you want to see and it will filter the repo instantly.

I wonder why this feature is not popular yet.

In the meantime that's a great solution. Thanks!

This extension is great for exploring but if you know what you're looking for, cmd+t will save you more time.

edit: i'm not willing to give extension access to private repos, that would defeat the point of being private

I bet Github have had this feature on their issue tracker for years - and I suspect it probably just got bumped a good few places up the list.

They were faced with a hard choice, Not implement EME (HTML5 DRM) and risk users moving to other browsers (user loss) or implement EME and risk looking like they are contradicting their core mission (trust loss).

They figured a little loss of trust is worth keeping most of the users on the Mozilla platform - which in my view is the correct decision. If users start to abandon Mozilla (FireFox) in droves then they lose their power to influence the development of the open web.

Or we could just not give the devil our little finger.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Also, a reminder about the nature of this beast that everyone should be aware of:

HTML DRM will not give you plugin-free or standardized playback. It will simply replace Flash/Silverlight with multiple custom and proprietary DRM black boxes that will likely have even worse cross-platform compatibility than the existing solutions. In other words, giving in to HTML DRM will only make the situation worse than it currently is. Especially since it paves the way to an even more closed web.

I honestly don't get it, you could make just as much, if not more, money doing something that's not 100% ethically wrong... especially in this job market! It's easy to work remotely, so you can't claim geographic entrapment. I'm sure if those who were especially financially encumbered could make a kickstarter page people would literally pay them to quit their job!

As much as this stings, it stings even more that it's "our own" selling us out, that it's the people who should know better that are killing everything so many of us have worked so hard for.

Yes I know.. I was an executive as a major record label, trust me it's hard to be on both sides of this argument and it's not as simple as everyone makes it out to be...

I can't explain how many times I tried to help executives understand that the path between the media to the human eye or ear was vulnerable to so many attacks it clearly was a fruitless goal to protect media in that way. They hear some bright young person tell them they can protect their media like it was in the good 'ole days and they have the need to believe because without that belief they are out of a job..

And artists are on their own to figure out how to make money on their work...

There is always a choice mozilla, please make the right one.

Right now if you want to lock something down, like watching Netflix on your browser, you install Silverlight. In the future, Silverlight is replaced and Netflix uses XYZ technology but maybe with DRM-in-HTML or whatever. And as a user, it doesn't matter because most people I know today use a tablet with the native app, a streaming device such as the Roku player, or a SmartTV.

Option 1) Stick to your laurels and refuse to implement DRM. Other browser vendors implement DRM, certain parts of the web become inaccessible via Firefox as DRM is implemented into more and more web services (think Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix, Hulu). Firefox's lack of DRM means its users are being disadvantaged.

Option 2) Implement DRM. Accept temporary defeat, don't lose browser share to Chrome and continue fighting from within against DRM.

Which option do you think sounds more appealing to Mozilla? Die on your sword, keep the trust of your dwindling user base or implement DRM and retain most of your user base (minus the people that will leave because of this decision). I think someone needs to create a fork and build a DRM-less browser, that's the beautiful thing about open source, don't like something, change it.

Of course, this is still bad news, because it means there is no more pressure on content owners against this DRM, which can eventually become painful for people who want to avoid the DRM.

Is it tough for Mozilla to prompt the user to do something similar with DRM stuff on first run? i.e. Telling them these are the features not supported by Mozilla in principle but are a) implemented to be in compliance with standards and b) required if you choose to use services like Netflix.

That way I would still have the option to run a DRM free browser (and voluntarily not use websites that require DRM).

When the plugin fails (and it will fail ... anything which is default deny will have lots of mysterious fails), more and more people who paid for the content will switch to pirated versions.

Personally, I can't wait. Piracy was roughly at a balance point recently with all the mobile consumption. Now, the lazy-ass social media generation is going to discover the need for it.

Welcome to Popcorn Time.

The question: will Iceweasel implement the DRM which Mozilla is implementing into Firefox?

1. The decision of whether or not to use DRM should be of the site creators. That's as "free" as it gets. forcing them otherwise by not letting them the option is bad.

2. Even without implementing it, DRM is available through flash or silverlight or any other third party plugin. The only result not implementing DRM gets is that of hurting the HTML5 video component.

This isn't great, but to the end user, it looks the same as Flash and Silverlight.

Especially if Mozilla were to add click-to-play for all such plugins, along with an explanation of what they are (think of the warnings that are currently shown for self-signed certs), they may still have an opportunity to do good with this yet.

I'd really love for Mozilla to remain as true to its mission as possible. On the other hand, Mozilla's power to do good in the world is intrinsically linked to its marketshare[1]. If Mozilla ends up being the lone holdout, it's possible that they will just lose marketshare as DRM content becomes more widespread - that would be quite a Pyrrhic victory[2].

I share in the EFF's disappointment at the situation, though (saldy) this has been inevitable for some time.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744954

[1] Perhaps not 100%, but it's a major component of it.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

End of the day, content is a commodity, and like any other commodity, prices are falling as the supply expands. Unless it's a Pixar movie, most films in DVD/Blueray are in the $10 range within weeks. Digital rights for new releases are as little as $3 when you buy with physicial media. Access to Netflix's catalog costs less than basic cable.

So I don't care about this, I do care about the trolls under the bridge (ISPs) who want to extract a toll for transit.

I think the tech community needs to come up with a better alternative, rather than just complaining.

What's the point of Mozilla?

I think the war for an open web was lost when EME became W3C standard. We should have fought it at that time.

On to the next thing!

(I'm sooo glad my web writings are in plain text files rather than in other people's mysql databases)

This is true. I'd like to see a case in Court where the law about fair use is in conflict with the law that allows something that has been DRMed to be completely protected, legally. I assume fair use would win, but I'd still like to see that case, because then it could become a lot easier to break DRM in order to "excercise your fair use right", and circumventing DRM might become legal again, in effect killing DRM for good. Then even companies like Mozilla could implement DRM unlockers in their browsers and so on, since it would be perfectly legal to do so.

> We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

e.g.: http://electronician.hubpages.com/hub/Why-We-Need-a-New-Inte...

This is what midpoint displacement looks like as a heightmap:http://imgur.com/ksETpO0,7gykFEV#0This is what realistic terrain looks like (this is based on real-world heightmap data):http://imgur.com/ksETpO0,7gykFEV#1

That said, midpoint displacement, perlin/simplex noise, etc are good for modeling terrain at a less macroscopic scale and are plenty sufficient for the use of most games.

past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3868893

http://blog.mediocregopher.com/clojure-diamond-square.html

If anyone wants to play around with Hunter's algorithm in WebGL, it should be pretty straightforward to swap out the Perlin Noise implementation for his. Note the shaders do a fractal sampling of the the height map, so you may want to disable this.

[1] http://namuol.github.io/earf-html5

http://www.playfuljs.com/demos/terrain/

Refreshing the page will generate a new terrain

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

Still, cool algorithm.

Here's the starting point on my test system, an Intel Sandy Bridge E5-1620 with 1600 MHz quad-channel RAM:

  $ perf stat bytesum 1gb_file  Size: 1073741824  The answer is: 4  Performance counter stats for 'bytesum 1gb_file':  262,315 page-faults         #    1.127 M/sec  835,999,671 cycles          #    3.593 GHz  475,721,488 stalled-cycles-frontend   #   56.90% frontend cycles idle  328,373,783 stalled-cycles-backend    #   39.28% backend  cycles idle  1,035,850,414 instructions            #    1.24  insns per cycle  0.232998484 seconds time elapsed

  $ perf stat hugepage 1gb_file  Size: 1073741824  The answer is: 4  Performance counter stats for 'hugepage 1gb_file':  132 page-faults               #    0.001 M/sec  387,061,957 cycles                    #    3.593 GHz  185,238,423 stalled-cycles-frontend   #   47.86% frontend cycles idle  87,548,536 stalled-cycles-backend     #   22.62% backend  cycles idle  805,869,978 instructions              #    2.08  insns per cycle  0.108025218 seconds time elapsed

Now that we've got the page faults out of the way, the prefetch suggestion becomes more useful:

  $ perf stat hugepage_prefetch 1gb_file  Size: 1073741824  The answer is: 4  Performance counter stats for 'hugepage_prefetch 1gb_file': 132 page-faults            #    0.002 M/sec 265,037,039 cycles         #    3.592 GHz 116,666,382 stalled-cycles-frontend   #   44.02% frontend cycles idle 34,206,914 stalled-cycles-backend     #   12.91% backend  cycles idle 579,326,557 instructions              #    2.19  insns per cycle 0.074032221 seconds time elapsed

What would it take to speed it up further? I'm not sure. Suggestions (and independent confirmations or refutations) welcome. The most I've been able to reach in other circumstances is about 18 GB/s by doing multiple streams with interleaved reads, which allows the processor to take better advantage of open RAM banks. The next limiting factor (I think) is the number of line fill buffers (10 per core) combined with the cache latency in accordance with Little's Law.

This program is so easy on the CPU that it should be entirely limited by memory bandwidth and the CPU should be pretty much idle. The theoretical upper limit ("speed of light") should be around 50 gigabytes per second for modern CPU and memory.

In order to get closer to the SOL figure, try adding hints for prefetching the data closer to the CPU. Use mmap and give the operating system hints to load the data from disk to memory using madvise and/or posix_fadvise. This should probably be done once per a big chunk (several megabytes) because the system calls are so expensive.

Then try to make sure that the data is as close to the CPU as possible, preferably in the first level of the cache hierarchy. This is done with prefetching instructions (the "streaming" part of SSE that everyone always forgets). For GCC/Clang, you could use __builtin_prefetch. This should be done for several cache lines ahead because the time to actually process the data should be next to nothing compared to fetching stuff from the caches.

Because this is limited on memory bandwidth, it should be possible to do some more computation for the same price. So while you're at it, you can compute the sum, the product, a CRC sum, a hash value (perhaps with several hash functions) at the same cost (if you count only time and exclude the power consumption of the CPU).

[In case it isn't clear, I'm referring to statements like "So I think that means that it spends 32% of its time accessing RAM, and the other 68% of its time doing calculations.", and "So weve learned that cache misses can make your code 40 times slower." (comment made in the context of a single non-comprehensive datapoint)]

But it's nice that somewhere somebody else understood, that computers are fast. Seriously, no irony here. Because it's about time for people to realize, what disastrous world modern computing is. I mean, your home PC processes gigabytes of data in the matter of seconds, amount of computations (relative to its cost) it is capable of would drive some scientist 60 years ago crazy and it gets wasted. It's year 2014 and you have to wait for your computer. It's so much faster than you, but you are waiting for it! What an irony! You don't even want to add up gigabyte of numbers, you want to close a tab in your browser or whatever, and there are quite a few processes running in the background that actually have to be running right now to do something useful, unfortunately OS doesn't know about that. Unneeded data cached in the RAM and you wait while OS fetches memory page from HDD. But, well, after 20 layers of abstraction it's pretty hard to do only useful computations, so you make your user wait to finish some computationally simple stuff.

About every time I write code I feel guilty.

The talk starts just after 4 minutes in.

I had an experiment with getting the Rust compiler to vectorise things itself, and it seems LLVM does a pretty good job automatically, e.g. on my computer (x86-64), running `rustc -O bytesum.rs` optimises the core of the addition:

  fn inner(x: &[u8]) -> u8 {      let mut s = 0;      for b in x.iter() {          s += *b;      }      s  }

  .LBB0_6:  movdqa%xmm1, %xmm2  movdqa%xmm0, %xmm3  movdqu-16(%rsi), %xmm0  movdqu(%rsi), %xmm1  paddb%xmm3, %xmm0  paddb%xmm2, %xmm1  addq$32, %rsi  addq$-32, %rdi  jne.LBB0_6

[1]: https://github.com/jvns/howcomputer/blob/master/bytesum.c

What's being benchmarked here is not (the CPU's) cache misses, but a lot of other things, including the kernel's filesystem cache code, the page fault handler, and the prefetcher (both software and hardware). The prefetcher is what's making this so much faster than it would otherwise be if each one of those accesses were full cache misses. If only cache misses were only 40 times slower, performance profiles would be very different than they are today!

Here are some interesting numbers on cache latencies in (not so) recent Intel CPUs:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/287236

Im also kind of amazed by how fast C is.

For me, one of the points that this article seems to imply is that modern hardware can be extremely fast, but in our efforts to save "programmer time", we've sacrificed an order of magnitude or more of that.

The interesting observation is that computers got so fast so quickly, that software is wasteful and inefficient. Why optimize when you can just throw CPU cycles or memory at the problem? What made that observation interesting for me was that it suggested the next 'era' of computers after Moore's law stopped was going to be about who could erase that sort of inefficiency the fastest.

I expect there won't be as much time in the second phase, and at the end you'll have approached some sort of limit of compute efficiency.

And hats off for perf, that is a really cool tool.

All the author needs is PADDB (add packed bytes).

So let's make this interesting, assuming a ground up rewrite of an entire highly optimized web application stack - from the metal on up, how many normal boxes full of server hardware could really just be handled by one? 2? a dozen?

I'd be willing to bet that a modern machine with well written, on the metal software could outperform a regular rack full of the same machines running all the nonsense we run on today.

Magnified over the entire industry, how much power and space are being wasted? What's the dollar amount on that?

What's the developer difference to accomplish this? 30% time?

What costs more? All the costs of potentially millions of wasted machines, power and cooling or millions of man hours writing better code?

Julia's article shows a good example for this. Of course, the goal appears to generate a feeling of what tends to make a program fast and slow and get a feeling for how slow it will be or how fast it can get; yet I'd like to point out that this...

https://github.com/jvns/howcomputer/blob/master/bytesum_intr...

... might be 0.1 Seconds faster than the original code when started as "already loaded into ram" which she claims runs at 0.6 seconds. Yet this last piece of code is way more complicated and hard to read. Code like this

Line 11: __m128i vk0 = _mm_set1_epi8(0);

might be idiomatic, fast and give you a great sense of mastery, but you can't even pronounce it and it it's purpose does not become clear in any way.

Writing the code this way may make it faster, but that makes it 1000x harder to maintain. I'd rather sacrifice 0.1 seconds running time and improve the development time by 3 days instead.

  python2 -m timeit -v -n 1 -s "import numpy" "numpy.memmap('1_gb_file', mode='r').sum()"                                                                                      raw times: 1.08 1.09 1.08

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR4DzHo5hz8

Anyone has ideas?

Not sure if you can do such conclusion actually, because of pipelining etc. I'd assume that the CPU is doing memory transfers simultaneously while doing the calculations.

I also think that only the first movdqa instruction is accessing RAM, the others are shuffling data from one register to another inside the CPU. I'd venture a guess that the last movdqa is shown taking so much time because of a pipeline stall. That would probably be the first place I'd look for further optimization.

On the other hand, I don't have a clue about assembly programming or low-level optimization, so take my comments with a chunk of salt.

Of course, the reason why "string ALU instructions" haven't been present may just be because most programs wouldn't need them and only some would receive a huge performance boost, but then again, the same could be said for the AES extensions and various other special-purpose instructions like CRC32...

The thing booted in less than 10 seconds and performed everything so quickly and smoothly - compiling code, loading files, playing media and browsing the web (dial up modem then).

It performed so unbelievably well compared to Windows and even Linux of the day that it made me wonder what the other OSes were doing differently.

Now my 4 core SSD MacBook pro has the same feeling of raw performance, but it took a lot of hardware to get there.

I took a CPSC course last year and for one of the labs we improved the performance of fread and fwrite C library calls by playing with the underlying assembly. We maintained a leader board with the fastest times achieved and it was a lot of fun to gain insight into the low level mechanics of system calls.

I digged up the link to the lab description - http://www.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca/~cs261/2013w2/labs/lab4.html

  I timed it, and it took 0.5 seconds!!!  So our program now runs twice as fast,

  def main(filename):      d = open(filename, 'rb').read()      result = sum(d) % 256      print("The answer is: ", result)

my 2c

> Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.

Only points to the generic page http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-filesCouldn't he be more specific?

Which is Somewhat Ok, given the NSA charter.

What is the more interesting question - Is this limited to "US servers heading overseas..?" I mean we already know that NSA intercepts Laptops, Keyboards and such routinely for special "people of interest" within the US. Does it do the same i.e. routinely and indiscriminately bug routers even within the US?

Is there a country small enough without a world domination agenda, yet large enough to not be swayed by bullying from U.S, China etc.? It's time to start a router manufacturing business there...

It converts any American worker in a spy of the Government.

He used some pretty strong words against the politicians.

Call Hillary a Neocon and corrupted, but he guesses she will win the next election. Page 5. http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201406/glenn-gree...

I mean think about how many hundreds of thousands of consumer computers come with Intel AMT vPro by default.

It's not like this is surprising, as such; it's just really bad that these chucklefucks got caught doing it.

(Yes, it's arguably morally wrong and so on, but just from a purely economic perspective, bad show.)

Unfortunately it looks like one part of the answer that's known is "not in the US."

We have only begin to feel the effects on this massive violation of trust. Unless trust can be restored, the US will become techno-provincial and only trustable with unimportant technologies like entertainment products.

What I haven't seen is a statement as to why this would have been a problem. The reason is that Q and Z were mapped inconsistently across various phone keypads. The present convention of PQRS on 7 and WXYZ on 9 wasn't settled on until fairly late in the game, and as noted, the airline reservation system, SABRE, is one of the oldest widely-used public-facing computer systems still in existence, dating to the 1950s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)

The 7/9 standard, by the way comes from the international standard ITU E 1.161, also known as ANSI T1.703-1995/1999 and ISO/IEC 9995-8:1994).

http://www.dialabc.com/words/history.html

Other keypads may not assign Q or Z at all, or assign it to various other numbers, 1 for Australian Classic, 0 for UK Classic and Mobile 1.

http://www.dialabc.com/motion/keypads.html

Similarly, special characters can be entered via numerous mechanisms on phone keyboards.

My suspicion is that there's a contractual requirement somewhere to retain compatibility with an existing infrastructure somewhere.

http://kottke.org/12/06/the-worlds-worst-password-requiremen...

I've certainly written my share of code that would look weird to an outsider who didn't know the backstory and the constraints and the evolution.

Hell, for that matter, tell users they can't use vowels so they can't make words. They might do leet speak, or whatever which is pretty easy to crack given time, but it stops things like password re-use attacks (people less likely to have the same password as their other apps) and simple guessing attacks (try top 3 most popular passwords on all known emails/accounts).

For such a simple rule set (no vowels) it forces a decent level of password complexity.

There are three popular key arrangements. English/US QWERTY, French AZERTY, and German QWERTZ. Apart from switching around A, W, Y, Z, and most special characters, they are mostly identical.

If your goal is to ensure successful password entry even if a user is unexpectedly using an unfamiliar keyboard scheme, all you need to do is replace all instances of A or Q by one value; and all instances of W, Y, Z by another. Or you could, of course, disallow these characters.

I hear Facebook had a similar approach to coping with input problems in the early days of mobile access: for each passWord1, three hashes were stored: "PassWord1" (uppercase first letter), "PASSwORD1" (caps lock) and "passWord1" (unchanged). As far as I remember, they didn't deal with i18n issues -- or publish the results of their approach.

Edit: This would, of course, weaken password security significantly. If my very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation is correct, by a bit less than 50%.

First this screenshot:http://i.imgur.com/oKKpFM1.png

Followed by the money screenshot:http://i.imgur.com/DlAlQPt.png

She redacted some of the information before she sent it (obviously). This is from Jan 21 of this year. It's just so sad.... It's incredible people still have plaintext passwords serverside....

It would make their password system slightly weaker perhaps, since freq(a) then becomes more like freq(a)+freq(q) and freq(b) more like freq(b)+freq(z). I'm not sure that's much weaker than just excluding Q and Z, though. The user experience is improved. The major downside would be in technical debt.

How? Does the TrueBlue password somehow go through Sabre's systems? The truly old business unit of Sabre that everyone is referencing is Travel Network. I'm not sure why an airline's loyalty program would intersect with Travel Network other than through the back end of a booking tool.

Has Sabre at least upgraded their storage mechanism, or do (did?) they reduce entropy on passwords?

[1] Like: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/scottm/cs307/utx/assignment5....

In the broader sense, there is a great irony in making password "strength" restrictions, like "must include" and "must not include" because they often end up making passwords easier to brute force.

If you start with the restriction that all passwords must have > 8 characters, you have basically an infinite number of possibilities, smart users will use a passPHRASE that is easy to remember. Dumb users will try to hit the bare minimum characters. When you put a restriction of 20 chars, it reduces the possibility that a persons favorite passphrase and guarantees that the set of all passwords is 8-20 characters, which means that the set of all passwords is smaller still.

They disallow special chars, which probably includes space, which further reduces the likelihood that someone will pick a passphrase.

Disallow repeating characters and you've further reduced the entropy.

Disallow Q and Z and it's reduced it further still.

I can't be arsed to do the math, so I'll reference XKCD http://xkcd.com/936/

But Sabre would do well to correct this, the optimal case is simply making a single requirement: passwords must be greater than 8 characters. The don't use your last N passwords requirement isn't bad, but people usually find hacky ways around this.

Due to the database storage engine they chose, it was necessary to put a limitation on the number of Scrabble points that a password would award.

Q and Z are both 10-pointers, so passwords with them frequently blew past the limit. You can use J and X, but that's really pushing it.

And the "cannot contain three repeating character" rule is due to that being the trigger for the stored procedure that implements 'triple word score'.

I also like to contradict myself. Password complexity and and all the policy are needed to make the social engineering not feasible. I mean a strong and secure system and with that people are using 'password1234' is a very bad practice.

etrade - yeah, THAT etrade? Yeah. They make your passwords case-insensitive.

Attempting to login to my mobile app requires me to DELETE characters from my password until the overall length is less than 21. I'm then able to login.

What does this tell us about BoA's password storage?

The only real news here is that, indeed, ASP.NET vNext is going to be developed in the open, or at least to some extent. But right now, not a lot of code seems to be released that wasn't already out there (although I did not go through all the repos).

I don't think you should expect to find many current/legacy parts of ASP.NET that aren't open yet: this seems to be mostly for new stuff.

Finally, don't forget that "ASP.NET" doesn't seem to mean a lot (anymore): it's basically Microsoft actively shipping the org chart. Anything that's web related and from MS appears to get tacked "ASP.NET" on front of it. Cause really, what does ASP.NET MVC, basically a pretty uninspired Rails port to C# (and just an open source library like any other), have to do with "active server pages"?

[0] https://aspnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=MVC[1] https://entityframework.codeplex.com/

They're building a new stack from the ground up. Which is the only way, really, to make it "cross platform".

        private bool IsDifferent(ConfigurationsMessage local, ConfigurationsMessage remote)        {            return true;        }        private bool IsDifferent(ReferencesMessage local, ReferencesMessage remote)        {            return true;        }        private bool IsDifferent(DiagnosticsMessage local, DiagnosticsMessage remote)        {            return true;        }        private bool IsDifferent(SourcesMessage local, SourcesMessage remote)        {            return true;        }

The Home repository is the starting point for people to learn about ASP.NET vNext, it contains samples and documentation to help folks get started and learn more about what we are doing. [0]

The GitHub issue list is for bugs, not discussions. If you have a question or want to start a discussion you have several options:

- Post a question on StackOverflow- Start a discussion in our ASP.NET vNext forum or JabbR chat room [1]

ASP.NET vNext includes updated versions of MVC, Web API, Web Pages, SignalR and EF... Can run on Mono, on Mac and Linux. [2]

MVC, Web API, and Web Pages will be merged into one framework, called MVC 6. MVC 6 has no dependency on System.Web. [3]

[0] https://github.com/aspnet/Home

[1] https://github.com/aspnet/Home/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/12/the-next-g...

[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/05/13/asp-net-vn...

[1] https://github.com/aspnet/FileSystem/blob/dev/src/Microsoft....

Hmm? What do you mean "they meant to do that"?

It's too much of a pain to get anything to work with a .net project, and then deploy on anything other than IIS.

Most US industries are in a similar state (plowing profits into dividends and share buybacks and mergers). What's happening is companies are seeing there will be more benefit to their share holders to borrow money against their existing capital and paying that out as dividends than to risk that borrowed capital to make new investments. This is happening because the Federal Reserve has pushed the interest rate to near zero, at the same time people are over leveraged (since money has been so cheap for so long) and don't have the money to increase their spending in the future, which reduces the chance new investments will pay off.

EDIT: This website tends to be very pessimistic, but I found the following article informative and would illustrate my point well: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-12/writing-wall-and-we...

The pixel height difference between the 78.2 and 148.8 bars is ~110px for 70.6B$. But between 148.8 and 210 it's 198px for 61.2B.

So the pixel difference increases despite the money difference decreasing. I have no idea how this can be justified. It makes the right side of the chart look more steep than the rest instead of less (except the left-most part).

US flourished as it did partly because of open/affordable road system. Physical goods and people and ideas were able to move about freely and hence the economy grew.

Now it's all about the internet access. The goods people buy are often sent over internet connection and people/ideas flow the best when internet is working.

And here we are, with the few cable companies that we have doing their best to hamper flow of idea over the internet, the lifeblood of our economy.

Perhaps they are referring to the majority of the years/graph between 1997 and 2008? Which if they were, would make that statement true.

Even by saying that investment has increased overall between 1997 and 2013 would be true imho.

I'm equally excited for the intentional mono support and "Side by side - deploy the runtime and framework with your application". ASP.NET MVC and Web API are really pleasant and mature frameworks, but configuring IIS has always been really unpleasant and clunky.

I wonder whether we will be seeing a .NET web server for mac and linux. Hosting a C# MVC app on linux will be sweet.

I recall CSPROJ files being the primary source of pain for me as I started to transition out of the Microsoft world and into the open source world, as it prevents you from using editors like vim & emacs if you're working in a team environment.

> we'll collaborate with the Mono team, plus Mono will be added to our test matrix. It's our aspiration that it "just work

This. is. superb! I love developing on VS with ASP.NET, and I love *nix tooling (ssh is pure fun), I was secretly hoping for this to happen.

Not one of the above has actually improved the product we produce and are all reactionary "we might get left in the shit again" changes.

I'm really tired of it now.

I'm typing this to delay the effort of ripping EF out of my project, and do ADO.NET Linq-to-SQL. (I guess. Maybe it'll just be raw SQL at this point.) Unless someone here can answer this question? It's worth a shot... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23528335/how-can-i-implem...

I miss Rails.

It's rich with deeper meaning that there are a number of comments here about the development of rules and laws as we comment on an article posted on Wikipedia. I am one of thousands of volunteer editors on Wikipedia (since May 2010) years after having been (1) an editor of a glossy monthly bilingual publication about a foreign country as an expatriate resident of that country, (2) an editor of a series of English-language trade magazines about manufactured products from that same country, and (3) a student-editor (usually the only kind of editor such a publication has) of a law review. I started editing Wikipedia as late as I did, years after Wikipedia was founded, because when I first heard about Wikipedia I thought its editorial policies are madness--and, sure enough, the articles that resulted from the original policy included a lot of cruft. As Wikipedia has continued in existence, it has not been able to continue an Ayn Rand anarchy of bullies but has gradually had to develop rules and procedures and (a little bit of) hierarchy and organization. Most of the articles on the topics I do the most of my professional research in are still LOUSY, and I have been interviewed twice by the Wikipedia Signpost in the last several months about what needs to be done to improve articles on Wikipedia for various WikiProjects. The article kindly submitted here illustrates the problem, with its incoherent presentation of facts and speculation from a mixture of good and poor sources.

I live among the largest Somali expatriate community in the world outside Somalia (Minneapolis and its suburbs--we can listen to Somali-language local radio here since the 1990s) and have a new client for my supplementary mathematics classes whose family is from Somalia. That country's internal conditions during my adult life have been HARSH, and I don't envy any Somali patriot's task in trying to build up a country with peace, stability, and justice for all Somali citizens. I do wish all Somalis well in adapted customary legal systems to the modern world.

I think the article is slightly misinformed however, the Sharia legal and judicial instrument which was adopted by the Somali people after the growth of the Muslim faith in the region was another system of justice and social order that arrived well before attempted European colonisation.

On a tangent, interesting things are happening with the Somali federal government now with respect to the telecommunications industry. Not only does Somalia now have its own top down domain (.so) but fiber optic lines are slowly being rolled out in the capital.

I find it ironic to think that in Australia the government is singing praises for copper network lines (after repealing the NBN) yet war torn anarchic Somali is pushing in the other direction. Somalia and Africas future really does look interesting.

But another angle, that seem to describe more closely the long term evolution and progress of human societies, is that laws and ethics have been slowly built by human societies against the law of nature. The direst way to express this is that in a natural environment, the weak and the disabled are left aside and die quickly, which we humans have decided to try hard to avoid.

So maybe a softer, more informal, "stateless" society like this Xeer could be valuable. But if it was, it would be because it would better protect us from the law of nature.

Xeer clearly comes from , or khayr, which is Arabic for good. It is good, but in the higher moralistic and religious sense in addition to the normal sense. So I wonder if it goes back to original interaction with the Arabs, 7th century as noted or prior. The general idea, consensus-based law as I see it, seems similar on the basic principle in Islam to Ijma'[0], or consensus-based formation of jurisprudence. There are varying views, but that idea is that Islamic law (despite outside views of it) is not controlled by one but must be agreed upon by popular approval of jurisprudence scholars (of course this is loosely defined, but what can you do).

Xeer is definitely from the Arabic, as are many loanwords from Somali (as an Arabic speaker, who sat in linguistics courses where Somali speakers presented, I could be wrong). So I am not sure where the "no foreign loanwords" comment in the Wikipedia article came from.

Then again, maybe I am just reading to much into this name/book cover.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijma

I'll take the English common law and equity any day of the week - flexible where it needs to be so it's capable of applying concepts of natural justice constrained by well established principle, while still providing vital certainty as to the law. This passage in the wikipedia article makes the legal scholar in me shiver:

"The lack of a central governing authority means that there is a slight variation in the interpretation of Xeer amongst different communities"

Dealing with conflict of laws without prejudicing parties in an international setting is hard enough: imagine having to pursue justice according to discrepancies between individual communities! Better have some cast-iron choice-of-law clauses in those trade agreements!

THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htmHAYEK, THE COMMON LAW, AND FLUID DRIVE: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/NYUFinal.pdf

which has been practised from way before 7th century ?

[ The Tone of the question is curiosity and not a flame-bait please]

This makes no sense, given the remainder of the article, as a modern, well-functioning economy (of which Somalia certainly does not have one) requires diversity. Xeer relies heavily on ingrained cultural norms, and is discriminatory against minorities and women. Lack of impartiality is also a question, given that you are assigned a judge at birth.

It might work well in Somalia, but I can't see what is described as being translatable elsewhere. There are some elements that aren't Xeer-specific (like reducing focus on punitive measures), but as a whole, I can't see it working somewhere else that doesn't have the same social structure.

Sounds to me like a nicer way of saying failed state, which is what Somalia is.

That kinda sounds like a problem.

An example scenario: Alice is a victim of a crime, reports the crime and Bob is arrested and goes on trial. Bob pleads not guilty and Alice participates in the trial as a witness. Bob is sentenced, the court record is made. The Daily News (fictional paper) reports on the court records of the day and has a reporter who attends the more interesting cases, and mentions Bob's sentence and gives some of Alice's statements as quotes.

In that scenario, the court record should always be a matter of public record, a statement of fact. The newspaper certainly has the right to access public record and to make a news story of the set of facts that are in the public record.

But, here starts the problems... Alice applies for a job and the employer Googles her name and comes across the news article. There are many types of crimes in which the public have great difficulty accepting a victim is a victim. For example, rape. It isn't too much of a stretch to say that the culture of victim blaming means that a matter of public record has just had the effect of defaming Alice.

Alice as a victim is never given the opportunity to move on with her life when every person that ever searches for her will find the story very quickly. She has been sentenced too by participating in the justice system, which is an open book.

The newspaper, just as in this case, will argue this is public record and cannot be silenced. Sure, I agree... but that doesn't mean that it's in the victims interest that the information be extraordinarily easy to find.

And Google are a better place in which to attempt to stop the information being found, given that they (and only 1 or 2 other search engines) cover the vast majority of searches made about someone.

Alice certainly does have the right to make information that she didn't explicitly choose to make public and that can cause her harm not be found so easily, even when that information is a matter of fact and public record.

She has the right to not be found (by that method - Google).

PS: I know a girl experiencing almost exactly that scenario, who cannot get a news story off of the front page results for her name. This isn't even a stretch scenario. The local newspaper just hasn't bothered responding to requests.

Judgement Text: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...

- Will that affect the work of archive.org and the wayback machine?

- Is it okay for a politician to "erase" something he/she said 10 years ago?

I wish the court would grant me the right to fly as well, but it's beyond their power. I guess they just need a few more decades for the judges to die off and for the new old men to have a better intuitive understanding of the way the digital world works.

Taking France as an example, a lot of content (An good example will be some old racist video of our actual primer minister, past corruption of the mayor of one of major cities, stupid tweets...) is going to be censored and removed from the internet. And this is going to happen. Don't ever think one minute, the first thousand of "forgottenness" will be for citizens and not for politics.

I think that's one of the stupidest backward law ever. Thanks for fucking up the internet.

Just ick. Ick ick ick. More ill-thought-out "feel good" legislation like the cookie law.

Google are famed for having virtually no way of contacting them, does it require the individual to jump through hoops to do so?

And no, not thinking of myself... but wondering just whether there are mechanisms available already to those who will now seek to exercise their right.

All harassing publicly famous entities will achieve, is to make obtaining available information more difficult for regular people. While those with deeper pockets and better connections, will simply pay niche providers for deeper searches and indexing.

From a privacy POV, you would WANT this kind of White Hat demonstrations of where your privacy weak points are. That way, you are aware of them and can make accommodations. While third party services can spring up to address the most widespread concerns. Rather than show up for a job interview, and have the interviewer "know" something about you, that you have no idea is available to them at all.

... and I wonder how much of the work of a genius would have been lost forever if his wishes had been honored.

Is Google to remove the search results (the link) or just their cache?

Don't they see that personal censorship is something good opposed to government censorship?

So: is it a consensus or not? Does Mr. Igoe consider PM an "attack", even though his own employer does it?

I'm having trouble reconciling the two.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.irtf.cfrg/2337

So far, the disclosures have involved the NSA and GCHQ: intercepting hardware and modifying it; strong-arming companies into "coperating"; pushing weaknesses known only to them into standards; and spending tens of billions to copy most of the Internet and have server farms sort it.

None of that seems amenable to this RFC.

The time it took from 'common knowledge' to a formal proposal makes me a little worried. If the IETF isn't really a "council of wise folks" then in the long term, doesn't their effectiveness get eroded?

Amateur radio is explicitly not for traffic that needs to remain private. It exists for limited purposes not including routine communication that can be served by other means (e.g. a phone or ordinary internet connection). It is chiefly for education and research/experimentation in radio. It is not for general personal communications or commercial use.

The applicable rule in the US[1] says:

"(a) No amateur station shall transmit: [...] messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning"

This serves to ensure the amateur radio service is not used in violation of its rules and purpose.

The rule has exceptions elsewhere in the rules. For example, remote control of satellites and model aircraft. And FCC rules as a whole pretty much go out the window when transmissions are for the purpose of protecting the immediate safety of life or property.

The rules are also susceptible of a particular interpretation: You can use encryption, provided the algorithm is documented, and you keep a record of the keys used. This has been used to block non-amateur access to WiFi access points operating within the ordinary WiFi band, but under Part 97 rules (e.g. non-FCC-approved equipment, or higher power than allowed for unlicensed users).

The rule also does not in any way prevent use of authentication and message integrity mechanisms, e.g. HMAC, because they are not intended to obscure the meaning of the message, merely authenticate it.

If you need private communication, there are other avenues available than the amateur radio service. And if you want greater freedom for unlicensed use of the airwaves than now exists, you'll have my support in principle (there are real problems with a free-for-all, but there are myriad ways FCC rules and spectrum allocation practices could be greatly improved in this regard). But this rule is not a bug, it is a deliberate feature of the amateur radio service.

[1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2013-title47-vol5/xml/CFR-2...

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T...

If you actually read the letter you can see that it also applies to modern programming and not just to "goto". Its truly a timeless article that everyone should read (and its really short!)

1 - http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf

Yeah, no.

... Except for the final one, "Packet Roundtrip". Networks have reached a physical limit of the universe, the speed of light.

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...

It's a quick, easy read. It makes a point that is important and not hard to understand, but that is often missed. And it provides a framework for dealing with the concepts you get from all those other articles you're supposed to read.

[1] http://www.kirit.com/On%20following%20rules

edit: for anyone interested, there has never been a negative leap second (it's always been something like 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Security_...

edit2: however, there are negative leap seconds in UNIX time. I wonder if there's a vulernability here? see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Leap_seconds

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09...

hahahahaaha

As far as I can see, Go is doing the same. We need a language that has some mechanisms of higher level languages, like CSP style concurrency and GC, but which still allows for low level control of things like memory layout.

I ported a partly done multiplayer game server written in Clojure to Go, and I find that I'm more productive in Go. The tooling and server monitoring is more developed for the JVM platform, but coding in Go is more fun because everything is immediately responsive, and nothing "falls over" like it can with nREPL/bREPL with Clojure/ClojureScript. Always paying that several seconds environment startup delay, or the additional management required to avoid it, does wear on you in the long run.

[0] - http://archive.miek.nl/projects/learninggo/index.html

After reading it and writing some trivial code, the advantages it has don't really help me with any problems I face being a 1 man shop. Just losing a lot of libraries so I'll probably stick to using Python for 99% of the stuff I do.

It's an easy read, and it does a good job showing what Go is like. It piqued my interest, and yesterday I started reading 'Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century' by Mark Summerfield. Does anybody know how it compares to 'The Go Programming Language Phrasebook' by David Chisnall?

If so, I've found this site helpful but "Introduction" is the proper term, it doesn't go particularly deep into anything.

https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books/blob/master/fr...

Problems:

1) Is it for noobs or the guy learning his 10th language? Starts with "what is a file, what is a folder, what is a text editor". Then leaps into a very matter of fact "and this is how you do recursion". So a noob is going to be totally lost after the first chapters and an old timer is going to be pretty bored with the "what is a folder" level stuff.

2) Strange text encoding errors on the site. ... Bullet point "Strings are" a-hat (as in a with top hat, not ahat) lowercase-epsilon c-concat-e "indexed" a-hat epsilon "starting at 0 not 1" ... current firefox if that matters (which it absolutely shouldn't)

Other than that, its a pretty good intro level book, like I wrote I'd "buy the author a beer" level of goodness.

I've heard good things about Golang, then I hear things like its lack of generics make it useless for a lot of cases.

By the way, is there a suck book?

They may make fun of this, but implementing another 2048 clone has helped me become a bootstrapped digital nomad with seed funding, as well as helping me to learn Ruby, node.js, mongodb, AngularJS (including Providers and Factories), while simultaneously embracing JSON to double my sales by 2x within just a couple of days at a recent hackathon.

> How I got my girlfriend pregnant using JavaScript.

> How we became ramen profitable by pivoting our cat consulting business to dogs.

> Mildly interesting topic (wikipedia.org)

Actually interesting topic (3 comments, 4 points)

Hilarious..

DOS still used by George RR Martin

George RR Martin talks about authoring in DOS

DOS to be killed off in the next episode of Game of Thrones

This one cracked me up.

I've noticed a welcome relief from JS posts lately, not to mention politics. The new moderation system is working well from my perspective.

Things I have learned from coding for a month

Ten ways to become a better programmer (by the guy who's been coding for a month)

:O

===SV Celebrity Worship===

"Why Elon Musk is the most perfect human being alive today"

===Political===

"A Heart Divided: How a gay JavaScript programmer feels about Brendan Eich"

"Please don't mention Condoleezza Rice. Our autism is above politics."

"10 ways we unknowingly oppress female programmers and enforce patriarchy"

===Juvenile Cliq===

"Reasons why this <obscure new non-stable language that can't even compile yet> will replace C as a system language and why you SHOULD use it if you don't want to be left in the dust."

"Why we switched to [obscure framework] and you should too."

===HN flaws===

"<userX>, you seem to be hellbanned for no reason."

===Feel Good Superior Heroism===

"Check out this TED talk about teaching node.js to kids in Africa."

===Love of Javascript===

"Have you heard about our Lord and Saviour JavaScript?"

"How to touch yourself at night without JavaScript knowing it."

"Breaking news! POP3 and IMAP written in Javascript!"

"How I ported the control software of a nuclear reactor to reactive Javascript"

"Linux kernel ported to JavaScript running in the browser. See how we did it."

"How I made a filesystem in javascript."

"How I got my girlfriend pregnant using JavaScript."

"How to avoid getting HIV using JavaScript."

"The Linux kernel doesn't have enough javascript."

"I recommended my boss to rewrite the local powergrid infrastructure to javascript and how I lost my job."

OK, seriously, it should be /g/ instead of 4chan.

> How I got my girlfriend pregnant using JavaScript

I'm pretty sure this is directly opposed to reality.

> How 2048 will make you a better programmer

Incidentally, this actually has been experience (to be clear, I mean playing it, not coding it).

Trying so hard not to lol at work...

What 4chan thinks of what HN thinks of what 4chan thinks of HN: https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/41920845#p41922057 thread currently in progress)

> How To Make Your Flat UI Flatter

> I decided to re-implement Javascript in Javascript. It failed. Here is my story.

Made me laugh!

Just skip the crap posts, and you're good.

Why flat design just doesn't stack up

Im highly moderated to the point of killing users voices.

Politically selfish when it comes to talking about YCombinator. (Politics is alright, as long as YCombinator is doing it)

I thought this was hilarious. Until I realized it's a real thing. http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspber...

I'm done with the internet.

Although, tbh, catching the right trend floats alot of startups is why that kind of content matters...

I mean that is really how GitHub 'won' the whole git hosting thing, wasn't it?

No, it's awful. But it's the only client side scripting language out there, and Web guys love to pretend they're just as skilled as systems guys. They take concepts that systems programmers discovered 30 years ago, put a fancy name on it and do it worse.

Funny, but that's exactly what people were saying about Java programmers in the 90's. Now, the Java ecosystem is full of useful libraries and well optimized systems. It's become the default language for implementing big business systems. I wonder if Javascript won't simply follow the same course?

EDIT: I seem to have struck a nerve. Please read this at face value and not as some kind of snark. What I say is factually true. There are plenty of horrible things written in Java, but eventually, that becomes true of any language, and there are tons of great things written in it. It's no accident that HFT is written in Java nowadays. Also no accident that Clojure and Scala are written on top of it.

There is also an unaffiliated app for Android called Pocket Code that is clearly inspired by Scratch. It works nicely on Nexus 7 tablets, and touch screens are clearly more natural for kids, but it is buggy and more limited than Scratch so I had to stop using it. Hopefully it will improve, or the Scratch team will provide their own mobile port (not a simple task, of course).

Also, Scratch Day is May 17th: http://day.scratch.mit.edu/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

Bit more limited than Scratch but the new editing interface they just released works really well.

Turtle Art is free software and its block language seems more powerful and orthogonal. It can be extended with inline Python expressions or by loading Python scripts. I think it's a great way to introduce young children to the basic concepts of programming with a smooth transition to a mainstream language.

While Turtle Art is bundled with the OLPC-derived Sugar learning environment, it also works on a regular Linux desktop.

Get it here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art

One thing I'd love to see is an atan2 function in the math routines. Right now if you want to do anything a little bit tricky you end up having to implement your own.

This is more for grown ups where one can integrate all kinds of cools things.

A video with Lego Mindstorms EV3 controls.

http://vimeo.com/82540943

And engineers have fun too.http://vimeo.com/89912838

[0]:http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1108096/

I'm interested in getting him into computing of sorts. I tried Doudoulinux, but it was mostly not good.

http://appinventor.mit.edu/

Seriously, flashlights are a big selling point even on simple dumb phones here in Rwanda, and I just can't imagine having a phone without it When the power goes out a few times a week, having a source of light on you is a big boon. (and no the screen doesn't count!)

Seems like a misstep to me.

In this crowd there's a lot of hate when the phone doesn't have an SD card slot (and I kinda wish it did), but the fact of the matter is you cannot get a better phone for the price (and even for double the price it might be hard).

Whatever Google changed in Motorola's approach, it's working, because that's the first two phones they've ever made that I wish to buy and recommend (including G for myself).

They say it sells very well so I hope these things are sufficiently profitable for them, we will all benefit from great phones at low price point.

(the higher priced market may be harder to breach though, since the Nexus brand is already there playing the same game)

"And with a guaranteed upgrade" == "The device will receive at least one software update to the current KitKat 4.4.2 operating system"

The wording there is confusing. I could see reading it as "it currently doesn't support 4.4.2, but it will." or "We'll upgrade to at least 4.4.3" or "we'll upgrade to at least 4.5"

I suspect they intend it to mean 4.5, but it is written vaguely, and that sort of promise sounds very much like marketing weasel words to avoid shipping anything more than minor system upgrades (which are INTENDED to not break functionality on devices).

They should be more explicit, why not just say a particular version number or later? Fear of the team changing the numbering scheme?

I think a first time budget user deserves a quality UI with a great touch experience to start with. (I'm looking at the sluggish Samsung etc. models at this price point with crappy touch experience).

The single greatest thing about the Nexus 5 is how easy it is to buy the handset with absolutely no consideration about the carrier at all, and it's sad that Motorola haven't learned this from greater Google before going off to Lenovo.

Doubly sad, as the products deserve a lot more attention. I do wonder if they're concerned about them being good enough to cannibalise vast swathes of the market.

"Moto E: Made to Last. Priced for All."

So people like me, who are (desperately) due an upgrade can buy this and sit on the fence until all the shiny new phones are available and then start a new contract. Genius!

Its a shame about the lack of flash and the non removable battery but I think this type of phone is made to be short term. Its meant to be either an interim solution as I mentioned above or as a taster to get people into the smart phone ecosystem and upgrade to something better in a year or so when it starts slowing down.

I'm sure someone can produce a better handset for the price.

What we need is 100% open-source software, hardware and firmware.

http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/mobile-tabs/moto...

Moto G had a GREAT price at $179 ($210-$240 elsewhere), and why it became so popular in the first place. It doesn't quite look that Moto E has the same type of great price for what it offers. $99 would've been that great price that would've made everyone recommend it as the default choice for the price range.

If the rumor about the price in India was right, and it won't actually be more like $150 now there, then perhaps they are trying to have a more "global" price, where it's more or less the same price everywhere, even in US, and this way they'd make little profit on the global versions, but more profit in US.

As for the specs, I'm a little disappointed it comes with Cortex A5 instead of A7, but since it's clocked 200 mhz higher than Cortex A7 would be, maybe it's not too big of a problem, especially since they claim the general performance of the device is faster than a Galaxy S4 in many situations (like opening apps, which I think has more to do with their use of the F2FS file system, which ironically is made by Samsung, but they aren't using it themselves).

I also told my little brother if he'd want one of these, and he asked me if it has flash, and was disappointed to hear it does not. I think Motorola underestimated the importance of flash for this type of phone. The screen, size, internal storage+SD, I'm fine with. I'm just hoping that whenever Google launches Android 5.0 (hopefully this year), it will be upgraded to it.

Does the Moto E have slightly higher specs than my phone? Yes. But is it "shaking up" the smartphone world? Hell no. Feature phone buyers will buy phones like mine, which are half the cost of the Moto E, and fully capable modern Android phones.

Moto does not cost 5 times less than iPhone.

http://cl.ly/image/3E3y0m083j2I

After that, I was shown options "US GSM" and "Global GSM", both priced identically. Why even ask me? All they did was add clicks between me and giving them money.