ntoshev

You can't connect two browsers directly via websockets, you can only connect to a server. A browser can't serve an incoming websockets connection.

I like the image of the self-driving car he chose as an illustration of who drives Google.

Any p2p requires a native app as the browser can't act as a server.

The same word is likely to mean different things to different people. DDG doesn't have the infrastructure to handle this, Google has (with Search History). What you get with DDG is generic Bing results, lightly filered and in a different UI.

A messaging system isn't for you unless it has bcc? No.

The lack of bcc leads to different usage patterns and can be thought of as a feature itself. It leads to more explicit communication. It means the recipients are exactly the ones who are clearly listed.

More generally, Facebook is bigger than the sum of its parts because of the social behavior that emerges there. Enabling this is what makes Facebook special.

It depends. There are two layouts for Bulgarian keyboards - "Standard" and "Phonetic", and I believe phonetic is more commonly used. With iOS 4.0 the phonetic layout disappeared, to be back in 4.1.

Actually, he does provide a solution to this, in the section "Tasklets and futures". It's not simple though.

You can compare the two styles in Tornado: plain Tornado uses callbacks, or you can code with generators using e.g. http://code.naeseth.com/swirl/

In practice everyone uses plain Tornado with callbacks. The problem with generators as coroutines to me is that you can't compose them nicely: you can't call a subroutine that yields, you must yield only from your top level. This and the fact that it's another layer of leaky abstraction.

So what is the difference between copying and stealing according to Picasso and Steve Jobs? How do people interpret this?

I can think of a possible answer but I'm not sure this is what other people think.

DuckDuckGo uses the index and ranking of Bing, not Google.

I wonder why they think a local domain is necessary for their business (and is it really). For example, Facebook doesn't use local domains - it uses .com for everything.

I think there is more than this: e.g. it's easier to procrastinate when you're tired and this theory doesn't account for it.

I wonder if RescueTime data contain really important insights on productivity. They should try to mine them, probably Netflix-prize style would work well.

It depends on what are you trying to do: if you want to change the world you need the best people, a sweatshop doesn't. If you hire great people and the job you have is not at their level, they'll run away anyway.

Front-facing camera makes a lot of sense for the iPad. I don't think there is going to be a back-facing one though, it would be pretty unusable with the iPad's dimensions.

He is saying an Emacs in Java would be 10x as big.

No hard data, just lots of complaints when I tried it.

Google trends for books?

Users get scared when a site asks them to login via Facebook or even Google. If this is the only option you offer, registrations will suffer a lot. I don't know who would use this.

In fact, BMW can't show the commercial in regular cinemas because they don't have the equipment to produce the flash. They can't reach mass audience in this way. So the end product is in fact this viral video.

Do you think a payment provider owes their users exactly as much loyalty as big are the fees they have collected from them?

Because this is what your comment suggests, and that's a rather unprincipled statement in my book, whatever your principles are. For example, if Paypal acted by this statement, they would allow payment for porn as long as it was profitable for them.

> that is going to hurt people way beyond PayPal

That's what I meant by broader and deeper impact. If service is impaired for merchants, a fraction of them will switch their payment provider.

I am not arguing this is the right thing to do from moral standpoint btw. This just got me thinking about DDoSes for the first time. Would be interesting to hear what the security experts think.

Does this mean that the language would not be Turing-complete without the second stack?

What is the retain stack typically used for?

Interestingly, DDoS attacks against Wikileaks can only delay dissemination of information a little bit. DDoS attacks against PayPal, on the other hand, can be effective in costing them real money, for every hour they are down.

If I were attacking them, I would target the APIs that merchants use instead of the main site. The main site has probably been DDoSed before, APIs are a subtler target. I imagine a successful attack there would have a broader and deeper impact.

Also, have browsers been used for DDoS before? I imagine with the popularity Wikileaks has, you can ask people to keep a page open if they want to participate, and share that page on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook. The page would repeatedly create requests loading the target urls in an iframe or as a script tag.

In this approach one would have to get rid of the referrer header, I guess. So open the urls using SSL. The SSL handshake would cause additional load.

Not sure how effective would that be compared to a traditional botnet that can delay TCP and SSL handshakes; things browsers can't do.

I am aware of the role of the stack in concatenative languages, but what about the retain parameter in the primitive functions? In most of them it is unused...

The contribution of a question is often defining a problem and framing further discussion.

Building hype and waiting and releasing information in parts also dilutes the Wikileaks brand as a publisher of important information, so there is a trade-off involved.

It's easy to be a cynic, and it's hard to argue with one. But cynics don't change the world for the better. Your opponent in this argument has done it.

If the stuff you'd write seems obvious and boring, you probably waited too much after you figured it out. I'd say write it up immediately, even if it's unpolished.

There is less difference in expectations from AWS though, probably because it's lower-level.

I think his advice is correct but doesn't matter in practice. People post stuff online when they learn something and when they are excited about it (some people try to keep blogs just for marketing purposes and usually it doesn't work). If you are a good writer and happen to be slightly ahead of the mainstream, your stuff gets popular. If you are far ahead or with the mainstream, or behind - then it doesn't.