mryall

Okay, I'll bite. Which song is that?

This article is just an excerpt from Steven Levy's book and it cuts out before it gets to Google's current situation in China. After these events, they redirected users from their Chinese domain name to their Hong Kong servers in order to sidestep the censorship requirements.

This situation didn't last very long, however, and China threatened to withdraw Google's license for their Chinese website if they continued redirecting users automatically. When this happened in June last year, Google restored the censorship on google.cn, just leaving a link for customers to get to google.co.hk for unfiltered results.

More details about this can be found on Google's blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html

Swedish also has a funny name for the @-sign, named after the trunk of an elephant. In fact, quite a few languages do. Here's a short sample from the Wikipedia article:

In Swedish and Danish the sign is known as the "snabel a" (literally trunk a), owning to the resemblance between the sign and the trunk of an elephant. In Norwegian the term most commonly used is "krøllalfa" (literally: curled alpha). In Greek the sign is known as "papaki" meaning small duck. In Slovenian, the most common word for it is "afna", colloquially meaning "monkey", much like in Polish. In Hungarian, it is called "kukac" meaning "caterpillar".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names

Even in your preferred case, you're typing your passwords into a closed source browser on a closed source OS. You have to trust someone at some point.

Panic also seems to be a quite reputable company. They've been in the Mac software business for a long time.

That's an interesting point. If the Erlang language can stop the programmer making mistakes like unintentional reference publishing across threads, that sounds fantastic.

> Microsoft seem to keep their habit of adding proprietary prefixes and stuff, but on the other hand, so does webkit and firefox too. Let me just say it sucks.

This is actually recommended practice for vendors supporting CSS properties which aren't yet standardised or passing testing against the relevant standard.

It is supposed to help prevent the situation where one vendor's implementation of a property becomes the de facto standard simply because it is the first one implemented.

> At the moment it still looks pretty lame I'd say.

They only released IE9 one month ago. What are you comparing it to? Is there some other browser development team that has achieved more in a single month of development?

I think it's great that Microsoft continues to be open and put their previews out frequently for testing and feedback. Rather than throw meaningless words around like "lame" and "sucks", how about some suggestions on what they should do differently?

You're judging a book by its cover. Why not try them out before you criticise?

Also, today's teens are tomorrow's free-spending twenty-somethings, so their preferences can be quite relevant for many businesses.

> Though, I'd suggest you pick a shorter domain name if this is meant to be used on phones.

Yeah, you definitely should consider a shorter domain name. Peru has a TLD for .pe if you want to shave a few characters off with http://infostri.pe. It looks like the shorter option of http://stri.pe is already taken.

Actually, Apple makes an iCal server:

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/ical-server.html

And Novell GroupWise is the server-side product from that company which does calendaring:

http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/features/#calendar

There are definitely alternatives, depending on what functionality you need.

Very interesting. I'm surprised that there's no way to limit the size of Erlang queues and therefore memory usage. Surely simple limits like that are a necessity for any production environment? Can anyone with deeper knowledge about Erlang comment on that?

> While in Java we have only common/shared memory.

That isn't entirely true. There are ThreadLocal variables in Java. However, these have some performance ramifications and have to be carefully managed so they don't leak, basically because the system wasn't designed with this kind of storage in mind.

The following should work in browsers with decent CSS2 support [1]:

    input[type=reset] { display: none; }

You might need a !important in there immediately before the semicolon if your user stylesheets aren't getting priority otherwise.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html#attribute-selectors

How does your conclusion follow from the first sentence? It sounds like you're using your own individual experience to draw conclusions about how Nginx took off across the entire world, without any actual evidence to prove that the two are related.

TL;DR:

After being dissatisfied with his earlier publishing efforts, Shed Simove found a cheap printing house online and used Amazon to sell his books directly, rather than going through a traditional publishing house.

Once he had the book printed and available on Amazon, he enlisted the help of a PR firm to start convincing journalists to write about it and media to talk about it. Together with some good photos and a Youtube video, his sales ended up taking off.

Lessons for hackers: technology is helpful, but marketing is more important than you think it is. Get in touch with people who can help.

It would be good to provide a link. I've been through the last 8 days of pg's comments which you can browse here and haven't seen anything to that effect:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

Discussions will end up quite boring if people use votes to agree or disagree rather than expressing their point of view in a reply. I tend to think of votes on HN similar to the options for moderation on Slashdot: vote up for insight, vote down for off-topic or flamebait.

You might find things have changed at a lot of big companies since you last looked. Many of my friends who are parents get a lot of flexibility with their jobs due to the workplace diversity programmes that urge managers to cater for people in different situations.

I think it totally depends on what you do there. I'd probably hire someone who has the full gamut of dev, sysadmin and customer interaction experience from a startup. Less so if they couldn't effectively describe how they'd helped get the business running.

> working at a startup might not have the same cache ...

By the way, I think you mean 'cachet': http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cachet

Great explanation on how it works. I was wondering the other day whether there was a way to tell when a tab gets the focus to autoupdate content. Now I know I can use window.focus and window.blur.

I've still seen points displayed on some comments. Is this a temporary glitch or is there some reason they'll be displayed sometimes?

Official Google Enterprise Blog: "Chrome is Ready For Business"

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/12/chrome-is-ready...

I was confused about which were actual images taken of the star and black hole. The first one looks like an "artist's impression" - is it just the grainy picture at the end which actually captures it?

Maybe if you live in a cold climate, then wearing a long-sleeved shirt and trousers won't be a problem. In Sydney, where I work for a company that permits casual dress, most of engineers show up in shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops for the whole summer. The formal suits that I see the bankers wearing to work are neither well suited to our climate, nor essential for the work most of them do.

When I walk to work in a t-shirt through a city of suits, I mostly think about how it's the freedom I like. Freedom to wear appropriate clothing, rather than being tied into wearing something to fit in, or to impress somebody.

My company tends to get t-shirts from the same supplier most of the time. So keeping a size on record for everyone would be a great idea for us.

Yes, systems can definitely fake any ID you attempt to use: MAC addresses, machine IDs, hostnames, etc. Attackers can intercept rekey attempts and clone the new key on their systems. But arguing that these improvements shouldn't be done because they don't totally close every security vulnerability in a system is an example of Perfect Solution fallacy [1]. Just because security cannot be perfect doesn't mean that steps to improve it shouldn't be taken.

The advantage of rekeying or secondary verification of the client is that it addresses the kind of attack where you can simply copy this metadata and have enough information to remotely compromise the Dropbox data later. As you say, whether that is worth fixing is up to Dropbox to do a cost-benefit analysis. But I hope they wouldn't discard the chance to improve their security simply because a perfectly secure system isn't possible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_Solutio...

Why can't the predators evolve to have the same cycle as the cicadas, with a prime number of years?

Almost all the controls at the bottom worked on the iPad but clicks in the drawing area didn't. I found it impossible to draw any pixels on. Perhaps I misunderstood how it is supposed to work, or does you JS specifically require mouse events?

Sorry, but still not getting in.

Well, it's a stored authentication token mechanism, which is the same as is used by many other client-side software. However, there are two possible ways to improve the authentication:

- use a second factor in the authentication, such as the MAC address of the primary NIC in the machine

- limit the time that the token is valid by getting the client to periodically get a new token from the server. This prevents two clients using the same token indefinitely without detection.

Both these would be good improvements to the security of the host_id data that Dropbox uses for authentication.

The title is poorly chosen. The article describes a new proposed method of formulating gravity in terms of quantum physics. Gravity is clearly not a 'force' according to the common Newtonian definition of that word.

> If it turns out gravity is not really a force ...

It definitely isn't. The word "force" implies a Newtonian model for physics. Under general relativity, gravity isn't seen as a force but a consequence of curved space-time.

The title was probably chosen by an editor without deep knowledge of the subject. It doesn't accurately describe the article's content either.