Hacker News Reader

anonymouson Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why

And usage from Bulgaria increased seven to eight times [1]. This is really strange, I don't know anybody who uses tor on purpose. My money is on a bittorrent client connecting automatically.

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/direct-users.png?start=2013-0...

anonymouson Graying Linux developers look for new blood

Well, it is efficient if you want to minimise the number of people who aren't star programmers with hard heads and don't care how many star programmers with manners you turn away. If your supply pool is big enough, you will have great success.

Hypothetically though - would it be that much better if Linus et al. were turning away people politely with words like "this code doesn't meet our standards of quality because X Y Z" instead of "your code is shit, see X Y Z"? Also, for people at the lead, you need those who can say "no", know when to say "no", aren't going to compromise just because the patch was sent by so-and-so and won't hold back from saying where they see a problem. You also want them to be good at communicating with people in a civil manner. The two are unfortunately orthogonal qualities. It seems to me that we should first take the people who are definitely good enough in the engineering aspect to understand and lead the project, then select the best communicator, rather than seeking someone with a best average score at engineering and communicating. You might get impolite people at the top, but you will guarantee the project won't get worse.

anonymouson Ask: Stigma of the unemployed - a better job title for a lifestyle entrepreneur?

You're a CEO, a business owner and your own boss. I'm from eastern europe and maybe things are too different here, but I don't see how that would ever mean unemployed.

anonymouson 0 to 60 in One Second: Fusing WebGL, CSS 3D and HTML

Well, I don't know what browsers you guys are using, but on my laptop running linux and firefox 22 with an Intel Core2 Duo, my browser became completely unresponsive for some seconds and then only responded extremely jerkily until I closed the tab.

I just hope this practise doesn't spread outside of artsy demos.

anonymouson According to the dictionary, “literally” now also means “figuratively”

> I'm all for descriptivist language, but there's a difference between a new word or meaning coming around because people widely use it, and a common error that does not become right just because it became too common.

There isn't. At least not in any objectively recognisable way. You (and I mean you specifically) can obviously look at a new use and say "this is a new meaning" or "no, this is an error", but that's a subjective judgement and others would think otherwise. It is as impossible as being given a copy of a movie and being asked, by only inspecting the movie, to tell if this was copied from a legal DVD or downloaded from a torrent.

Just look at the verb "to troll (on an internet forum)". It comes from the practise of trolling in fishing, where you tie a bait to a cord and drive your boat around, drawing the bait through the water and waiting for some fish to take it. A lot of people, however, connect it with the race Troll, thinking of it as the practise of a big, nasty creature coming out from under and bothering people. That's not helped by calling the people who do it "trolls". Was the original, fishing term wrong? Was the person who coined the name Troll for a race of fantasy creatures wrong? Were the people who connected trolling with Trolls and subsequently called trolls "trolls" wrong? For bonus points: if two words are written the same and pronounced the same, can they be different words, or are all their meanings different meanings of the same word?

anonymouson According to the dictionary, “literally” now also means “figuratively”

I think the takeaway here is that the literal meaning of "literally" is useless. If you are having a dialogue, you'd just tell people you were not speaking hyperbole, you mean exactly what you say. If you're writing, you're using the literal meaning of words anyway.

anonymouson I just want to say "fuck everything", hold up my hands and walk away.

It's not true cyberpunk future until we have Rebel-brand leather pants.

anonymouson David Miranda Heathrow detention: No 10 'kept abreast of operation'

Actually, to me he looks darker and terroristier in your picture, due to being photographed against a light background.

anonymouson Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?

Actually, I was presently surprised that the answer was not the resounding "no" I expected, but instead a "kind of (for a layman's definition of cure, for a certain kind of cancer)".

anonymouson Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?

If this treatment proves 100% successful against a given kind of cancer, and the procedure is developed to the mass-production stage, I would imagine we'd start getting cancer. Then you'd only get the tiny initial tumors nuked and correspondingly not suffer cytokine storms when large amounts of cancer tissue dies at once.

anonymouson Rotating Images

Wouldn't the 3 shears method take a preposterous¹ amount of memory if you rotate by something like 180 degrees? The first shear will take a w.h image and output a w.h.h one!

Why not simply use Bresenham's line drawing algorithm to "draw" a reverse-rotated rectangle over your image, but rather than drawing, you'd read pixels and write them to the destination image. You'll need to only rotate the corners of the image once and everything else is simple integer math.

¹ preposterous for the kind of device where doing it any other way is too slow

Edit: replaced stars with dots for multiplication because stars make italic text

anonymouson The True Size of Africa - Misleading Maps

Something else I'm interested in is if somebody has ever tried using Pierce's projection for texturing spheres or doing environment mapping. It seems like it would be perfect for the job - it's square so it would fit perfectly in a texture, it can be tiled and the formula for mapping a point on the sphere from spherical coordinates to uv coordinates on the texture seems simple enough.

anonymouson Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

But what about the people investing in these companies? Money don't grow on trees and you can't make money without products to sell.

anonymouson Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

Today I spent 5 hours staring at, stepping through some callback-heavy code, reading HN, browsing the web and about an hour to write, test and deploy about 20 lines of code fixing a really nasty race condition. And I'm still not completely sure things are really fixed. I might have spent even longer had it not become apparent that we have just the two options:

1. band-aid around the problem

2. complete rewrite of a large portion of the website

anonymouson Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

Did the guys at the top ever lose any money?

anonymouson How would the unprotected human body react to the vacuum of outer space?

Can't edit: It seems I just completely misremembered the previous part of that scene. I thought he was already in vacuum and pulling on the door to get in.

anonymouson How would the unprotected human body react to the vacuum of outer space?

It's still badly. You get sunburned, lose consciousness due to lack of oxygen and die.

anonymouson How would the unprotected human body react to the vacuum of outer space?

The only movie mistake was something Clarke later claimed would never have happened had he been on set that day: Bowman is seen apparently taking a deep breath before opening the pod door.

Hah, I thought that was just a tick. You would take a breath before doing any hard physical effort and I'm pretty sure you'd try to do it even in the vacuum of space just because you're used to.

anonymouson How would the unprotected human body react to the vacuum of outer space?

Maybe some sort of spray-on rubber that cures on contact with air? You'd get naked, put on your helmet and enter the spray-chamber that will coat your body thickly and evenly.

anonymouson Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement

You need C++'s RAII idiom or go's defer syntax to get the same behaviour though. I think try-with-resource in Java also would do the same thing, maybe. Just plainly throwing an exception won't release what you've acquired.

anonymouson Callbacks as our Generation's Goto Statement

for/while are themselves syntactic sugar around goto. You can in fact write them as macros or even functions (using setjmp/longjmp) in C. However, the abstraction in that case will leak - you'll need to put your label manually where the loop needs to go, you'll still need to know you're using goto and how it works and you'll need to keep in mind the exact code that's generated by the macro, or you will get bit by it. Structured looping constructs also don't change the flow in your program and even force another level of indentation, but they allow you to think about it using higher-level building blocks being sure that those blocks always work properly, i.e. they won't break because you have a typo in some conceptually far away line.

Callbacks really are just like goto. I've seen really awful callback code where you have callbacks that create other callbacks which are passed to callback managers which are themselves finite state automatons and call one of the callbacks based on a return value from another. It's the most horrifying spaghetti code you can think of. It's practically fractal - spaghetti within spaghetti that influence the top layer in an untraceable manner.

While everyone can write spaghetti in any language, few can write good code when given just goto or just lambda. In some cases it's even impossible.

anonymouson The Kickstarter Culture Wars

Only if the t-shirt is alive. They've disallowed alive genetically modified organisms, not their products or derivatives.

anonymouson Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

Can you give me some citation on that? I can believe it would be the case, but such an arrangement sounds moronically greedy.

anonymouson SDL 2.0.0 is out after many years in development

IIRC, there was a presentation by Valve where they complained that even if you don't do a keyboard grab, some window managers do it for you when you request a fullscreen window.

For an SDL2-using game, I tried BrütalLegend and alt-tab works as you'd expect when using OpenBox. I usually just run games in a separate X server with just OpenBox to isolate them from messing with my main desktop. Plus, they can't block ctrl+alt+F7.

anonymouson Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

I meant in the case when the network is saturated. If I've bought a link that only guarantees N concurrent connections and I'm over that and the link is being saturated, then I would expect to have some of my packets dropped.

I guess we're saying mostly the same thing, just worded differently.

anonymouson Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

My point was that internet is not the same as those. Generating the packets costs nothing and moving them down the wire costs nothing. Whether your router is passing packets at top capacity or it's staying almost idle, it's consuming the same amount of electricity and the same amount of upkeep. Your wires don't get damaged by the packets.

In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.

anonymouson Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

I would not buy a metered connection. It might end up costing me less than an unmetered one, but cognitively it weighs more as you said. I want a flat-charge XMBit/s hard limit, which translates to a total theoretical maximum of ZGB/month.

The power costs per GB sent/received are negligible, the money goes towards maintenance of the network and ethernet cable doesn't degrade based on how many bits pass through it. If too many people utilise the network, then just throttle them and start dropping connections from the more aggressive ones.

Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.

Edit: about "that's how all utilities are measured". They aren't. Road tax is flat, but I can drive on the road for as long as I like as fast as the rules permit. Except it's slower when too many people do it at once. I want my internet to be like a road. (disclaimer: maybe road tax isn't flat where you live, but it is in many parts of the world, so please imagine we're talking about them for the purpose of the analogy. you may also need to pay a higher tax to use the highway, but it's still flat. it may also vary per type of vehicle but it's still flat.)

anonymouson Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

I won't buy your connection. I would prefer to be more severely bandwidth-limited than total-traffic-limited.

anonymouson Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”

Your datapipe will be limited in bandwidth. You WILL have to slice pieces off it for your users. For what it's worth, all ISPs here (south-eastern Europe) word it like this:

- Xup/Ydown MBps for connections within the country (i.e. ones for which we can guarantee the infrastructure)

- X2up/Y2down MBps for connections farther away (i.e. subject to more variables)

- If you exceed N simultaneous TCP sessions, we reserve the right to drop some of them when the network is under load.

Basically, see how much you're getting from your provider and in how many pieces you can slice it and how much it will cost to buy fatter pipes when you have more users.

Give mid-bounds for speed - tell the customer their speed is usually this, but might be less under very heavy load (rare) or more when the network has spare capacity. But do sell slower/faster connections. This way you can sell better connections more expensively to people with more money.

Never put limits on how much data a user can down/upload. That is limited by their speed.

Make sure your equipment won't die if someone really does start an http server and posts the link on /. with "an experimental raspberrypi http server that can serve 100k simultaneous connections; do your worst :)".

Basically, I want my connection to have low latency, 99.999% reliability and you want me to pay as much money as I'm comfortable.

anonymouson You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one [video]

I'm perfectly fine with there being a by-geeks-for-geeks-only-because-of-required-expertise exclusive internet club. That's how it used to be.