singular

On the docker without AUFS point - we also got docker working rpi using the device mapper instead, so it's very possible :)

Awakening from a nap to see something you worked on #1 on hacker news is quite nice :-) hope people get a kick out of this!

Would a malloc (alone) work? Doesn't it typically act as if the memory were allocated but not actually use physical RAM until the data is filled?

That guy seems to have been pretty stupid, to be frank. Used the same postbox for all letters, and didn't put enough stamps on some packages. I don't think this in any way suggests somebody with basic common sense couldn't be quite considerably more secure when sending things they don't want traced back to themselves.

   "...while the Royal Mail intercepted several other packages, which had been held up because insufficient stamps had been put on them."

    "After receiving the second letter, which had been damaged by fire, police made enquiries with the Royal Mail and discovered that a fire had been reported in a postbox on Bradpole Road, Bournemouth, leading to speculation that "Sally"—the alias by which all the letters were signed—had changed his mind and attempted to destroy the letter."

    "The police received another letter from "Sally" on 7 December. Once again, the letter was traced back to the Bradpole road postbox, where the surveillance operation had continued. The operation had captured good-quality footage of all the users of the postbox that day, but, as it was close to Christmas, the postbox was busier than normal, with 172 items posted by 38 people. Royal Mail regulations meant that detectives could not open or delay the letters, so they made enquiries with the recipients to identify the senders. They eventually managed to identify all but a small number of the senders."

    "On 17 February 2001—over six months after the receipt of the first demand and three months since the last letter from "Sally"—the police made a major breakthrough. Detective Constable Alan Swanton, a junior detective on the case, spotted one of the people caught by the surveillance of the postbox who had yet to be identified. The man was carrying a fuel container, which Swanton believed had come from a nearby filling station. Officers obtained CCTV footage from the filling station, where their suspect had paid by cheque, and identified the man as Robert Edward Dyer."

> To their credit, it sounds like you should have been using source control all along.

I reply to this only so people don't think I am negligent enough to not use source control!

Yes I use source control, but there are these periods where things aren't committed, during which you can lose work if some process overwrites files. The same goes for disk failure, unwise use of the rm command, etc.

To their credit that a file you are currently editing is overwritten with an old version by their software, but hey at least that software made a copy? Are you joking?

I don't want to belabour my points, so I'm deciding not to continue too much further in these discussions (I've come to find internet arguing is somewhat pointless regardless of the rights + wrongs of the issue at debate), however as I have repeatedly pointed out, it's very easy to hit a number like that if you store code in dropbox, esp. open source projects.

And like I've also pointed out repeatedly, fine don't consider my use-case important, but add a warning or at least don't drop supporting me because I'm too much effort, or if you are, say that's what you're doing.

If I had known dropbox wasn't suitable for developers (it having originated from yc with a technical discussion on that original thread suggests otherwise) - I wouldn't have used it in the first place.

I had used it as a developer for a long long time before hitting issues, then it become unrecoverable even after a month of patiently trying to fix it, and new work files were getting overwritten by old ones throughout. That's not an acceptable failure mode, nor is then being ignored without warning by support (at least say 'sorry you're too much effort'.)

Ok, so just pop up a warning in this situation. It's been a year and a half at least they've acknowledged this problem, so prevent somebody from having a non-functioning product - wouldn't take much effort.

The problem is they hide this problem away and in no way warn you, I fully accept that they might not want to prioritise fixing this, I just ask for common courtesy - I had a month with dropbox basically not working at all. Popping up a warning isn't bending over backwards.

I wonder what would happen if this occurred on gmail - you have too many emails so suddenly it stops working without warning, completely, irrecoverably. Would you still make the 99.92% vs. 0.08% argument? Or would you find it a bit off? At least warn + give a way out...

Ok, that's fine, so what is there to stop dropbox from popping up a warning when this limit is exceeded? Or for there to be some means of deleting things from the server side without having to manually click through to delete N files at once (where N << total number of files)? Or customer support that doesn't drop the conversation completely out of the blue?

Having the system break irrevocably at any stage is totally unacceptable when you're dealing with people's data.

Presumably you'd have a problem if gmail stopped working irrevocably because you happened to have too many emails? Would that argument stand up for you then, or would you feel aggrieved you hadn't been warned and had no means of fixing the situation?

I strongly dislike the strain of negativity that seems to be typical of hn these days, but...

I don't think it's totally unrelated, as I always very much admired dropbox as a company and technically, and had the sense of them being something of a hacker's company (an hn thread in which the founder is replying to technical issues definitely gives one that impression), and I was very disappointed to have that experience. I rant here because they refuse to listen to me, I have tried to contact them a lot privately but have been ignored.

I'm not the only one to have a similar experience - just a tree in the forest of developers who are likely to experience similar if they try to put open source projects in their dropbox.

As I said, very easy to achieve as a developer (I hadn't done anything crazy), and the symlinks were working up to that point.

Even as a non-typical dropbox user (a developer, then), I think there should have been some kind of a warning a, some ability to recover from the situation b (I was left for nearly a month with a completely non-functional dropbox), and not suddenly getting dropped without warning by support c.

If I'd known up front that a deployment of not that unusual amounts of code (especially if you use git) would have led dropbox to irrecoverably fail for me, I wouldn't have used them in the first instance.

I don't think even as a 'non-typical' user the very poor, typically big co, experience I had was justified, esp. given that I am a member of the group of people who first started using dropbox.

Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might want to use them.

After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using 100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files. Ok, fair enough, perhaps there are technical limitations meaning indexing >300k files is tough (very easy to get to that count if you're keeping open source codebases on DB), so I move files out of dropbox and clear its cache. After a week of constant 24/7 100% CPU usage and dropbox failing to update anything, I contact customer support and get sent copy + pasted boilerplate telling me to do what I've already done.

After more than one email to say 'I've done that, what next?' I get told it's due to symlinks in my dropbox folder. I have several in node_modules folders, and have never had a problem with them before, so I find this weird but remove all symlinks from my dropbox folder. No change after several days.

I try deleting files on the web interface - it refuses to do so for a folder with a large number of files in, and tells me to use the desktop interface (great...)

Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.)

At this point the customer support tells me how to delete my account if I'm not happy and they simply stop replying to my (polite) emails.

Googling around it appears this issue has existed for at least a year and a half, and yet there is very little mention of it (there's a bulletpoint hidden away on their website) nor does the interface warn you about it at any point. How hard would it be to at least add a notification like 'looks like you're adding a lot of files, please don't add too many more or I might stop working'.

I used to hold up dropbox as a great example of a YC company that was technically innovative and something of a hacker's company, but this experience has left me quite massively disappointed.

Not to mention a number of incredibly nasty + negative posts I've seen on here on many occasions. I have spent time away from hacker news on 2 occasions just because I found the non-constructive negativity too much.

Hacker News might not suffer from the crude childish nastiness, but don't for a second think it's free of the passive-aggressive 'adult' kind.

Yeah, working now thanks!

Seems to be down :( getting a heroku Application Error

Yes, I tried the cocoa version and that's what I'm referring to. I recall having real issues in particular with ansi-term not having the environment correctly set + simply not being able to resolve that.

I'm pretty sure I had other issues too, but I can't remember them.

To be fair, I've not tried the cocoa version or any other for some time, so things may have changed.

However, I still think OP's point was unfair on aquamacs - other than some (annoying!) quirks regarding autofonts and tabs (I instantly turn those off), it's no different than emacs anywhere else, in my experience.

> There are other options, like Aquamacs, which are supposed to make Emacs more "Mac-like", but they're problematic in the long run because they're set up so differently from standard Emacs that it's difficult to use the Emacs manual or follow along with tutorials.

Having used emacs on linux, windows and now mac I disagree with this - though aquamacs introduces some (annoying, to me) functionality, you can simply turn these off and it works just like emacs in any other environment.

I have found aquamacs works better with ansi-term + with full-screen functionality than vanilla emacs, and I use both these functions enough to not want to go back.

When I first clicked on this I assumed it was over the blatant homophobia in Russia, but no it's over them giving asylum to a whistleblower because if he goes back to the US he will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in jail + 23hrs/day in his cell.

I'm beginning to wonder whether the US even cares anymore about maintaining the illusion of its moral superiority.

Obama, what a disappointment you turned out to be.

UPDATE: That'll teach me for not fully reading TFA. He does mention the homophobia but seemingly in passing. The Snowden issue takes priority, apparently. My points stand.

/politics

I'd be interested to read about your issues with it. It is definitely weird, but I don't think it's for its own sake, rather it's adding a new layer of abstraction which will always come off as a bit strange until you get used to it, e.g. lisp.

I've not had awful problems debugging it, certainly no more than any other js library spitting out "cannot read property 'foo' of null" all over the place with stack traces that give you no help, though I don't deny it can be a bitch.

I'm not sure I understand your point about polluting the HTML namespace - sure you can introduce new HTML tags which can conflict, but if you're careful it's not an issue (and you can choose what directives to make available in a given module.)

I think one key thing I'd say to newcomers to angular is that when it doesn't work it can be an absolute bitch to resolve problems, though you gradually adapt to its patterns over time and such pain reduces significantly.

Like I said in the grandmother* post I do think the positives outweigh the negatives. In fact, I think they MASSIVELY outweigh the negatives, easy 2-way data binding and the code/html reuse of directives alone are enough to make me love it, but hey I get where you're coming from on the painful aspects.

* A sad attempt at reducing sexism in tree analogies.

I have used both in my startup job and vastly prefer angular to backbone, however I think it's not quite an apples to apples comparison as angular provides a lot more than backbone.

That isn't meant as a criticism of backbone per se, rather I think they are actively going for different things - backbone makes it easy to achieve a client-side rendered single page website with MVC separation but lets you control actual rendering and data binding, i.e. maximal control, whereas angular allows you to do the same thing but provides 2-way data binding, code/html reuse via directives [0], local scoping of data on DOM elements [1], dependency injection [2], vastly improved testability [3] and lots more.

My experience of actually developing websites with both is that angular is a better experience and involves a hell of a lot less boilerplate than backbone and even though, when it doesn't work, it can be infuriating it is net a simply amazing framework.

Obviously I'm very biased and by my own admission my understanding of both is limited and I am certainly not the best developer ever blah, so take this with a pinch of salt. I think if you need maximal fine-grained control over the behaviour of your website while getting help with MVP you're better off with backbone, but in any other situation use angular (or possibly batteries-included alternatives like ember.js or knockout.js - I have no experience with them so can't comment there.)

[0]: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive

[1]: http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$rootScope.Scope

[2]: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/di

[3]: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/dev_guide.unit-testing

I think the creepy skype call to the guy's friend ups the probability that the guy is less than innocent. But it's not totally impossible.

I can understand (though find it ridiculous) that they didn't want to give his wife a ticket, but to propose simply leaving her outside the venue alone? What the actual fuck? Was there not a human-based moment of common sense here, or at least marketing sense from Microsoft?

When people behave like that, the umbrella of some corporate behemoth doesn't prevent me from from feeling pessimistic about people (both those in question and often generally.) Sigh!

Really fantastic hack. I love the fact you can interact with a piece of real-life hardware (and move it, too) from anywhere in the world with your phone, that adds a sort of emotional-rather-than-logical magic to it :)

Clearly here on hacker news criticising the blessed points of a high karma user like yourself is not permitted (it's costing me karma) so I ought to stop.

It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)

I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.

Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.

Say 'Why didn't you just X before jumping to conclusions?' out loud and tell me it's not rude. It also presupposes that my only reasonable response would be to read the whole report and criticise its contents, whereas I suggest you can criticise it from the point of view of who it is written by and the fact it's not a scientific article. I also clearly stated that I just didn't know. Why that justified that kind of response I don't know.

You probably find it less rude as you clearly have more of an issue with people not reading things than the issue at hand. On that point (unless I'm mistaken of course), let me point out I am happy to read TFA and do so all the time, but a 20 page report which I am simply not going to be able to reasonably assess is not quite the same thing, is it?

You assume the rudeness is in being told to read it, rather than the tone of that. Actually it was the way he went about it, like I said, without that preface to his comment it loses no content and gains civility. There was no need, and my point stood as the kind parent suggests without my having read it. So I disagree, your point is not orthogonal.

I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.

I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.

Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?

So any kind of tone is ok if you disagree with somebody? I mean I disagree with you here, so can I get condescending?

I didn't read it because a. I don't have time to read a 20 page report which I have no skill to assess as correct or otherwise (as I said repeatedly above), and b. my reading it, though it would satisfy you, wouldn't actually get me anywhere, since like I said, repeatedly, I don't actually know whether it's valid or not.

It seems like you didn't read my comment...

    >  Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.

Like I said, I'm no expert, so even if I had time to read the report (I don't) it isn't a scientific metastudy. It's a report, by a quite possibly (probably) biased organisation. So unless I had some special knowledge about the area (I don't) or time to review it in detail (nope) I don't know whether to trust it or not vs. a scentific metastudy.

A weary aside (I am not interested in arguing on the internet cf. http://xkcd.com/386/)

Your rudeness is totally uncalled for. If you excise that rude first sentence your post loses no value (in fact gains some.) I have a healthy skepticism when it comes to politically useful 'facts' like these and thus don't take government-commissioned reports even with many citations on face value. That doesn't deserve condescension.

I'm no expert, but that seems to be a report by a probably biased organisation, rather than a scientific metastudy looking at sufficient sample sizes and eliminating confounding factors. Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.

I'd be amazed if there was actual evidence that violence in the media actually contributed to real world violence even in children, as I thought this had already been covered at length with the various computer game scares.

I want to see the detailed metastudies that clearly suggest exposure to internet porn does significant damage to kids.

I also want to know why this has to be enforced by the nanny state, rather than provided for by already available software? Do the parents have no responsibility?

Actually, since this government likes to full-on lie about evidence [0] let's just wait until we have a chance to throw these demagogue idiots out.

[0]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/conserva...

This is ridiculous, outrageous, insane.

Terrorism is less likely to happen to you than a great many extremely unlikely events, I can't find a citation right now but I suspect it's less than being struck by lightning, yet the risk justifies... this?

The odds of being struck down by a careless driver must be vastly higher, yet I don't see people who text as they drive being sent to jail for >= 10 years, or those with driving licenses who are suspected of being higher risk (older people, those on higher insurance risk bands, etc.) being monitored illegally (or 'legally' based on dubious laws) and/or shipped off to a coaling station [0] where their legal rights are effectively suspended and they are tortured [1] to get information about their alleged membership of a boy-racer organisation.

Oh, and if this law was in effect in my country (UK), I'd be serving several years in jail. The irrationality of this kind of bullshit hasn't prevented people from trying to ruin people's lives over it, however [2].

What I'd like to see is the humourless 'people' who report this kind of obvious bullshit prosecuted for wasting police time and perhaps even harassment (I can't think of anything more harassing than trying to send somebody to jail + near enough ruin their life over something that is obviously not serious), the prosecutors who actually take it seriously losing their jobs and the politicians who implement these laws being publicly grilled on them.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_bay#US_Control_of_Gu...

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#T...

[2]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344