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I must regretfully agree with this.

Hmm that device is modern enough, latest Chrome version? Any plugins?

codinghorroron The text/markdown media type

codinghorroron We finally did something about [Ember on] Android Performance

Firefox on Android is much slower in every JS test I've ever seen. We only test against Chrome on Android. The 5x perf improvement is across the board but slower devices benefit much more. You may not notice a 200ms improvement on say an iPhone 6, but you will sure notice a 1000ms improvement, or more, on older and slower android devices.

codinghorroron We finally did something about [Ember on] Android Performance

Adding insult to injury, 2015 was also an abysmal year for Android performance, largely due to Qualcomm, uh, how do I say this... sucking.

"I don't think there's any way to sugarcoat this, but 2015 has not been a particularly great year for Qualcomm in the high-end SoC business" -- http://www.anandtech.com/show/9837/snapdragon-820-preview

If you compare geekbench single threaded performance numbers, you can sure see why Google is anxious to build their own silicon.

codinghorroron We finally did something about [Ember on] Android Performance

One reason this was kind of urgent for us is:

1. The prevalance of low-end Android devices

2. The dominance of Android worldwide, e.g. http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp shows 2015Q2, android 82.8%, iOS 13.9%, everything else ~3%

We've also been working with Google to see what they can do to make Android/Chrome performance better with complex JavaScript like Ember and Angular. Chrome 45 improved things about 25% which is great, but when you start 500 to 800% slower, there's a long way to go..

Complex JavaScript performance on iOS is, and remains, amazing and stellar. Problem is not much of the world is on iOS.

codinghorroron Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

It is weird, perhaps some of the profanity in the replies? Feels intentionally buried.

codinghorroron Major changes to Mandrill, must be tied to a MailChimp account

Two months notice and a huge price increase ultimatum. This heavily affects a lot of Discourse open source installs as we recommended Mandrill as an email provider for almost two years.

Free product so they can do what they want, but this feels a bit abrupt (how about six months to transition) and cruel (forced MailChimp account plus giant leap in pricing).

Would it cost them so much in brand loyalty to be a bit more generous with time to transition and cost?

codinghorroron The letter the Feds sent to Theranos [pdf]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/01/22/clinkle-up-in...

> Clinkle had a polished demo that came before things like Apple Pay, said one former employee, who declined to be named. But most importantly that person added, Duplan “was charismatic when he wanted to be” and could “raise money in absurd abundance.”

You really want to change the world? Forget being a programmer, learn to be be charismatic.

codinghorroron It's time to build your own router

for a traditional SATA drive. It has two M.2 ports for internal SSDs.

codinghorroron It's time to build your own router

Just as a PSA, there are zillions of _very_ nice $300-$350 15w TDP Broadwell x86 boxes, with 4-8GB RAM, 64/128GB SSD, bundled WiFi, and dual gigabit ethernet ports on aliexpress. I don't know why there are so many broadwell boxes on offer, but these are a stellar deal for the price, and are fully solid state, super flexible, extremely fast anything x86 boxes.

For example: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Ba...

I initally looked on Amazon and found the fitlet-i, which is nice for a 4.5w TDP AMD box..

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-mod...

.. but these aliexpress deals are far better, and easily 3x faster if you can afford the 15w TDP budget.

codinghorroron Goodbye Docker on CentOS, Hello Ubuntu

I strongly DO NOT recommend using devicemapper as storage in Docker. Every time we have tried, and every customer who has tried, has failed medium to long term, in bad ways. It became so painful that we literally blacklist devicemapper as a supported filesystem in the Discourse installer.

We waited a year for this to "stabilize" but it never did.

codinghorroron Running costs for running a web app

It also performed a lot better, if that helps. Granted for some orgs, even a $10k per month hosting bill might be no big deal. But we package Discourse for usage, and generally speaking less expensive means more people using it.

There is a point of diminishing returns, of course, pushing down to $5/month is a lot of pain -- super low cost super low resource hosting, etc.

codinghorroron Running costs for running a web app

Heroku is very, very expensive. We switched an early Discourse setup from Heroku to Digital Ocean (using our Docker setup, which is another reason why it exists) and it saved them probably $100 per month. Everything but the largest communities fit fine on a $20/month, 2 CPU, 2GB ram DO droplet.

codinghorroron Zopfli Optimization: Literally Free Bandwidth

Yeah the smart thing to do is schedule "important" user submitted images for heavier recompression, but even then you might get in trouble for very large PNGs, and need to gate based on dimensions. For huge PNGs I am not sure the 80x - 160x time penalty is tenable, you might be talking 30 minutes in some cases.

codinghorroron Zopfli Optimization: Literally Free Bandwidth

Also font and alignment issues cross browser can be brutal. There is a lot to be said for a tiny image that works everywhere, on any device.

codinghorroron Mitigating DoS Attacks with Nginx

And once IPV6 gets up to steam, welcome to a world of people with millions of "addresses" to attack from. One advantage of IPV4 is that it was accidentally pretty granular.

That'll be a while, of course, but already we see attackers with access to a tremendous number of unique IP addresses in the IPV4 space.. they'll have many orders of magnitude more soon.

codinghorroron ReactOS, a 17-year quest for an open-source Windows, has a new release candidate

Grey market keys can be had for way less than that, if you are comfortable with grey markets -- where keys being provided to countries being charged way less are resold to consumers in other countries.

codinghorroron How I became a morning person

Yeah DST throws a huge wrench into this whole plan. Good luck waking up with "sunrise" for work.

codinghorroron Atlassian gets IPO share price of $27

I have been saying for a long time the real target of Slack is Dropbox, since it adds a ton of valuable context around files shared.

codinghorroron How to be like Steve Ballmer

This might be the best Hacker News comment I have ever read. Excelsior.

codinghorroron How to be like Steve Ballmer

Yeah the enterprisey turn of MS, which is an extremely profitable business, was definitely all Ballmer. He deserves all the credit for that.

But the Apple turn was a pure consumer play, all bottom up.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

is this even true of a typical server workload? I guess it depends on the server and the work, but certainly for a webserver, this doesn't seem true.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

Neither of our (very good IMO) sysadmins bothered to check ECC counters on our existing server memory as far as I know. We did check SMART counters and SSD wear levels, though.. It is certainly a very good point that unusual numbers of ECC errors (corrected) are a bad sign and that machine should probably have its memory replaced at a minimum.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

There were rumblings from a fruit related technology company that ECC may in fact be required in future memory hardware because the risk of error becomes too high without it. This makes total sense to me, I am frankly surprised that ECC is still considered a weird premium upsell considered worthy only for servers and server farms. Shouldn't every computer be reliable?

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

I've never had a photo or video occasionally corrupted on any computer I've ever owned going back to 1985. Crashes? Sure, who hasn't.

"Some could be.." is computing by coincidence, and I'm not a fan of that logic. You can refer to the 2007, 2009, and 2012 studies for measured data on server farms.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

yeah I was noticing this, AMD is much more ECC friendly whereas Intel segments their markets hard by arbitrarily disallowing ECC platform use on common consumer (read: not-Xeon) CPUs. Unfortunately AMD is still quite a bit slower than Intel these days, but if you are doing work that is GPU rather than CPU intensive it might not matter.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

A big part of the value proposition of ECC does seem to hinge on having thousands, and perhaps _many_ thousands of machines working together. At a large enough scale even small statistics start to matter.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

Drill into the 3 referenced studies, they are all reasonably recent (2007, 2009, 2012) and contain specifics/data.

codinghorroron Why use ECC?

If you read the comments to the referenced article, someone had a rowhammer problem even with ECC memory. ECC does indeed reduce the chance of a memory error a lot, but the chance is far from zero (at scale of hundreds/thousands of servers), even with ECC. Another paradox about ECC, it's not a guarantee, so you still need to build systems that can tolerate / mitigate statistically rare memory error states.

This commenter seemed quite credible to me, here's where it starts:

http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/377...

> Yep, these are what we had -- uncorrectable errors with ECC memory caused by row hammer. Luckily there are mitigations. Sandy Bridge allows you to double...