Hacker News Reader

Eiwatah4on Firefox Developer Tools and Firebug

From the next paragraph:

> An early prototype of the Inspector even included a significant portion of Firebug. Ultimately, integration proved to be too challenging and would have required rewrites that would have been equivalent to starting over.

Eiwatah4on Fix 260 character file name length limitation: Declined

    $ find / -mindepth 10 | wc -L 
    273

I seem to have some slightly longer file paths on my home computer. Do I need that? Probably not. I could move those files somewhere else. But should I really have to worry about such things?

Eiwatah4on Ubuntu pre-installed and in retail worldwide

I think it might be a support thing. They don't want people to return the computer because they couldn't figure out how to do simple task X with the OS on the computer, or because an update broke the proprietary drivers required for some hardware.

Retailers don't have the resources to fix these problems, or to help fixing them. They don't have to if the customer installed their OS of choice themselves.

Eiwatah4on In praise of micromanagement

You should also reevaluate whether you truly are an expert as time goes by. If you were an expert 20 years ago, that doesn't mean you're still one.

Eiwatah4on Don’t Slurp: How to Read Files in Python

If you read the whole file, then process that file, the program first blocks on disk I/O for the time it takes to read the file, then it blocks the CPU for the time it takes to process it.

By streaming the data, you can do both at the same time. (The OS will already fetch the next line from the disk while you are still processing the previous one.)

Eiwatah4on Dropbox disables ASLR on Windows

If you guess a wrong address, the process crashes.

With a fork-based server, you don't care much about that. Every time you connect, you get a fresh new process - with the same addresses as the older copies even.

So brute-forcing those is more viable than a browser where you probably won't have more than 1 or 2 attempts per user.

Eiwatah4on Performance Improvement with the StringBuilder for C++

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/basic_string/c_str

According to that link, c_str() and data() work in constant time. With that restriction, it's impossible to do the joining lazily - it must be done when data is added to the string.

Eiwatah4on Performance Improvement with the StringBuilder for C++

What's interesting here to me is that C++ strings are not immutable. So I'd have expected them to behave basically the same way as StringBuilders in other languages. But apparently they are required to be stored continuously, and I guess that's what makes them slower here.

Eiwatah4on Why JavaScript Will Become the Dominant Programming Language of the Enterprise

If the enterprise wanted as much compile time checking as possible, why haven't they adopted something like Haskell years ago? The checks done by the type systems of the JVM and CLR are laughable in comparison. There must be some different reasons at play here, too.

Eiwatah4on Attack-driven defense

From a pragmatic point of view, you want to map the number of days of publicly known zero days in the Java plugin vs. the popular browsers in the last year or so. If you do that, you'll find the Java plugin poses a much bigger risk then the big browsers. This isn't related to the quality of the applets written in Java, maybe (I'm not sure) it isn't even related to the Java specification but only to Oracle's implementation of that spec. But all that doesn't matter from a pragmatic point of view.

Eiwatah4on Tin Can: WebRTC that uses Persona to authenticate the callers to each other

Looks like it's here: https://github.com/mozilla/tincan

Eiwatah4on Nginx Plus

Eiwatah4on Why does this Java program terminate despite appearing that it shouldn't?

You misunderstood the part about println. The implementation of println() uses synchronized internally. You can't see it without downloading the Java source code, but it's there.

Eiwatah4on Let's remove verbs from HTTP 2.0

CONNECT is used to get a raw socket connection through a HTTP proxy. There'd be no way to get SSL/TLS to work with a proxy without it (save using SOCKS instead of HTTP to talk to the proxy).

Eiwatah4on Let's remove verbs from HTTP 2.0

> At the moment the only way for an intermediary to know whether a request is finished is because it understands these methods, and this is also true of any extension methods

I read the HTTP 1.1 RFC differently. Requests must indicate a body with a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header. Responses always have a body (sometimes of length 0), unless it is a response to a HEAD request or has one of a very small number of response codes. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.3