hosay123

That's what I find so perplexing about this patent in particular – email is only useful due to interoperability, so patenting the underlying representation of an email is a non-starter for general purpose use.

I really hope you don't have general purpose use in mind, I'm guessing you're hoping it's more for something along the lines of EDI applications between governments, or something else. I just don't get what it's for.

At risk of going blue in the face, where is the value in this patent that I'm not seeing?

Yes I saw it, it's some crazy XML schema for an e-mail message that nobody has ever used. That's like me patenting some bus ticket design I got carried away making on a rainy afternoon.

So that's why I'm asking, what makes your approach worth protecting? It looks like just another XML schema from this angle

My gullibility alarm is ringing loud..

Slideshow:

* Nobody uses this!

* It's patented!

* It's just like HTML!

* I'm not going to tell you which bits are patented!

Can't tell if (literal) troll or comedy genius

Edit: so going by the age of the domain and you having actually filed the patent, I'm assuming it's not just some elaborate joke. And having only skimmed the patent text, I'm failing to see the innovating mechanism or idea you're claiming. The language itself sounds like HTML mail or any of the plethora proprietary markup languages from the 90s (e.g. MS Exchange).

Can you tell us why you think yours is different? This otherwise seems like a textbook case of ridiculous patent.

Adding to aidenn0's comment, if you trust /dev/urandom to produce 4kb of random data, it follows that you trust it to produce 128 bits.

128 bits (32 bytes) is sufficient to initialize a PRNG into any one of 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 states (that's 1 with 77 digits). Consequently, hitting the kernel constantly for so much data is utterly inefficient in the first instance, and totally unnecessary in the second.

Blog author could improve his design's efficiency >128x just by seeding a PRNG with a single 32 byte read at the start of the subprocess

So I can see this getting boring pretty fast, but whatever.. on reading the title I wondered "why!", and on reading the article I find a recommendation for nginx. The reason for this appears to be entirely due to licensing in modern (and more comparable) versions of Apache 2.x than anything technical. The article does not make that clear at all.

Apologies if you read so much negativity into my choice of words, it wasn't meant as an attack on OpenBSD, forking unmaintained software, or whatever else, just intended to point out a correction in the way probably half or more of readers will interpret the article – as some kind of indication that Nginx is technically somehow better than Apache

Note this is about OpenBSD dropping support for OpenBSD's own fork of the skanky old Apache 1.3 line, which hasn't been officially developed in aeons, and no official security updates since 2010.

The title implies some vote of no confidence by the OpenBSD team regarding Apache, when in actual fact they're just cleaning up their own mess, due to objecting to an earlier licensing change in the 2.x line.

Program Benefits

    Notification of API changes
    Early access eligibility on select features
    Eligibility for development licenses for GitHub products
    GitHub profile membership badge

This is pretty hilariously written as if western media weren't up to the same thing. RT and BBC News occupy neighbouring channels on local TV, so over the past few weeks I've been entertaining myself by repeatedly flicking from one view to the other.

As for the BBC coverage, this is one of my favourites: http://i.imgur.com/vkFqM3Q.png . It's as if the Russians crossed the sea to invade the mainland of poor old Ukraine. Compare to this: http://i.imgur.com/BXsojhV.png , notice the magically disappearing expanse of water mostly segregating Ukraine from Crimea.

How do you usually pay for stuff online?

2226 words and not a single mention of CREATE RULE. Postgres has had something far more general than "upserts" for over a decade.

  CREATE RULE Pages_Upsert AS ON INSERT TO Pages
  WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 from Pages P where NEW.Url = P.Url)
  DO INSTEAD
     UPDATE Pages SET LastCrawled = NOW(), Html = NEW.Html WHERE Url = NEW.Url;

Just mark as spam, life's too short

As a recovering hardcore Joke Engine user, I suggest not getting too tied up on TOS minutia as arguments against App Engine when there are plenty technical reasons to avoid it like the plague, e.g.:

- Behavioural changes as a result of unannounced internal release process. Go to bed, wake in morning to app serving 500s (happened twice)

- Design flaw that ran so deep they had to redesign the datastore, insisting on people start migrating before they even had migration tools ready. Prior to that, at least one outage event required running the Google equivalent of fsck and leaving "/lost+found" folders in everyone's datastore (WTF?!?!? Not even once, dude!)

- Latency that varies according to the phase of the moon, and you're billed for it anyway.

- Continually changing architectural story around apps. Last year: Memcache is cheap, free, and shared! This year: Dedicated memcache, only $66/gb/month! 2 years ago: elasticly spun up processes! Last year: dedicated hardware thread, only $100/thread/month!

- Let's not forget the wild pricing changes depending on how much the App Engine team had packed in their crackpipes the night before

- Service characteristics you won't see on any other platform (e.g. DB query latency). So regardless of abstraction layers, your app inevitably ends up designed for a single platform

It's a platform that succeeds only at exposing users with RAM-sized datasets to planetary scale problems, all the while charged handsomely for the privilege of the self-delusion that some edge was gained through all the suffering. Seriously fuck all that. I could turn this into an essay but why bother.

Woah. Been using that combo since 2006 and never once noticed this issue. You know alt/left+right moves between words? This is why I never noticed

I love HN because it's the only site where one guy can be an authority on cryptography, politics, computer science and hitman etiquette all at the same time, and nobody bats an eyelid

This seems fairly straightforward to understand compared to the tax avoidance strategy Google employs in Europe ( http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/... )

What's sad is for a moment I thought this really might be some kind of Kickstarter for political influence

AFAIK there is no official exchange rate for EURUSD or any other currency pair.

omg does this work even with Ruby and Go!?! :O Do you have a tutorial???! The fonts suck so bad. Omg this is not even web scale

It seems like the core of Docker is little more than a helper script that should be part of libvirt or LXC proper (which btw, already has a system for building containers from a template), but that would involve less horn-blowing and web design than it would submitting boring, well-tested old patches upstream.

Are you shitting me? Docker is a horrible little Go binary that doesn't even clean up after itself properly when you CTRL+C it. It's barely documented, it does barely anything except some macro combinations of tar+wget+lxc with a schmoozy web site on top.

Who is pushing this thing? Why does anyone even care about it? Does anyone even know what a Linux container is?

You're off by 10 years..

I never became confident that my worldview had matured into adulthood until I lost my fear of death. And not only that, someday will welcome it (and all the agonizing pain it may likely entail) as the ultimate justification for everything that came before and that will occur after.

Actually, I have no fucking clue what kind of mindset wants to live forever. Reminded of the beautiful (book) scene in Ender's Game where Wiggin ponders the death of the buggers, and the essential union of death and rebirth.

So this article was presumably written beforehand and embargoed to coincide with the official announcement of Calico. While I guess there's nothing wrong with that, it does make me wonder what kind of pre-approved message is supposed to be imparted by a premeditated PR campaign.

Perhaps it is just to avoid scaring investors, going by Larry's concern assuaging in the second paragraph of his post.

One of the Google founders was also behind funding the first purely lab-grown burger eaten in London a few months ago. That also had an obviously professional PR campaign attached to it, although little of this was explicit in the press. A professionally edited HD recording of the event appeared on the BBC web site only a few minutes after publication, so obviously some PR mechanism was at play.

But that event wasn't to promote Google or anything else, it was absent of any commercial labels attached to the copy or the video itself, and no mention was made of who organized or funded it. I have no idea what the message, or the point of that campaign was either.

What are these campaigns trying to tell us?

This one copies, and it has no concept of transactions from the looks of it (not even LevelDB-style snapshots)

Looks nice, but note this doesn't appear to support consistent reads (unlike LevelDB snapshots)

This is probably a naive solution..

What is to stop creating a statically linked build of GPG, create a new user account, chmod 0700 the new uid's homedir, copy the new binary into the private user account, and perform all your encryption work in there.

So long as you're not running on a VM using tech like kernel samepage merging, pages from the binary should never be shared

Good luck finding a network infrastructure and PXE server able to boot a few hundred machines simultaneously during a power event. Yes in theory PXE boot sounds great. In reality it's a pointless SPOF.

Also most likely makes it harder to reuse most of the trusted boot infrastructure that already exists for Linux. So we can assume at least in the initial release Mallory can race with the real PXE server assuming a network that hasn't been partitioned with a crazy complex config (i.e. basically all of them).

That's only true if the sympathizer never heard a candidate say "I fucking hate gays". I'm not sure how I feel about your last paragraph yet.

Been chewing on this since you made the comment, and I don't think I buy it. The "legal issues" angle is a dirty cop-out, and it ignores the issue at hand: he's being suppressed for holding an opinion.

Right now I'm looking at the Twitter search results and being reminded why I hate people in general. Should expressing this opinion get me fired? Should I be prohibited from occupying a position of hiring people because I am prejudiced to assume they are capable of what I'm seeing in those search results?

Somehow it's not fair. A Christian or Atheist or (pre-1960s) homosexual sympathizer would present the same risks to a business as Dickinson did here. His views aren't considered progressive by any means, but 50 or 100 years ago neither would the views of an Atheist or a homosexual. I'm trying to find the difference here between firing Dickinson and, say 60 years ago, firing a homosexual sympathizer.

And I can't find that line. I can't say, without making an absolute judgement using a perfect computer and a perfect observation of the global state of the universe, whether the sympathizer was correct at the time, or whether Dickinson is somehow wrong now. All I know is that nobody appears to have been harmed except Dickinson, and I won't be hearing his opinions any time soon, and that's a crying shame.

Practically, these are great, fair, and true points, and I agree with them. Idealistically, another side of me fucking hates this. Nothing would ever change, and humanity would never progress if we withheld our differences of opinion. At what point does an opinion become too extreme to share?