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xiongchiamiovon Chrome phasing out support for User-Agent

It actually is encouraging people to have useful user agents. By default most people end up with a user agent that's something like "libcurl version foo.bar.baz", which isn't actually a description of who or what they are; given the prevalence of curl, it really just tells you that it's a program that uses http.

xiongchiamiovon Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

Stack Overflow does not have trees of thousands of comments, or nearly as much voting going on for individual posts.

xiongchiamiovon Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

> Admins created automod

They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.

xiongchiamiovon Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation

> The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever.

Really? It seems to me that the problems come from not banning things, still: see all the complaints about racism and other "undesirable content" on the site.

xiongchiamiovon CSS changes that increased Reddit account creation by 200K yearly users

We ran some analyses and determined the rise is not due to an increase in spambots. I don't know the specifics of how that was determined, sorry.

xiongchiamiovon The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

R is awful. It's full of decisions made by people who seem to not have much programming experience, in that they seem good at the time but cause major issues later on. See, for instance, http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll... , http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-ar... , http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/02/29/parsin... , and the necessity of http://tim-smith.us/arrgh/ (I wrote up some stuff about the *apply functions, but not yet in a form suitable for the guide: https://github.com/tdsmith/aRrgh/issues/18 ) .

xiongchiamiovon The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

They're just like other default subreddits, which is to say that you can unsubscribe from them. I only resubscribed recently because I started working at reddit and figured I should know what's going on in my own company.

xiongchiamiovon The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ if you're looking for an article on it.

xiongchiamiovon Show HN: Take It Apart

> That said, it looks like a nice site, a crowdsourced iFixIt.

We're already crowd-sourced! http://www.ifixit.com/Contribute Only about half our guides are staff-created.

> (I'd me more willing to contribute if the TOS wasn't so restrictive, but since I still own my content I don't mind so much"

Good news! Everything on iFixit is CC BY-NC-SA: http://www.ifixit.com/Info/Licensing (but you still own your content).

xiongchiamiovon PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length

So what I don't get is why the function names needed to be of a certain length, since he's hard-coding the buckets.

xiongchiamiovon LXC – Running 14,000 tests per day and beyond

When do you do code review?

xiongchiamiovon Why Apple Uses Pentalobe Screws In Its Devices

> Realistically, how many people repair Android or non-Apple phones? How many iPhone users would, when faced with a broken phone, try to fix it themselves rather than take it to the Apple store for repairs?

Not enough, and that's the problem. iFixit's purpose for existing is to get people repairing their things (electronic or otherwise); this is why we make guides and sell tools and parts, why we make all our guides freely available under a Creative Commons license, and why we spend a lot of time and effort convincing people that yes, they can repair things.

So when a corporation makes a visible effort to discourage these same people, we get frustrated. Yes, most Apple consumers don't want to repair their iDevices. But they never will if Apple continues discouraging them.

xiongchiamiovon Why Apple Uses Pentalobe Screws In Its Devices

The article is from Jan 20 2011; since then we've designed our own.

xiongchiamiovon Google bot delays executing JavaScript for days

It's a call that was being made (only) when the page loaded.

xiongchiamiovon Google bot delays executing JavaScript for days

Hmm, that's interesting. I don't think so, though, because the user-agent on the requests is the googlebot:

    From: googlebot(at)googlebot.com
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

xiongchiamiovon Why upgrading your Linux Kernel will make your customers much happier

Well, the problem is that you're in New Jersey. There's a reason it's called the California Stop.

xiongchiamiovon On switching to Arch Linux

Or the even easier:

#> vim /etc/pacman.conf [archlinuxfr] Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch #> pacman -Sy yaourt

xiongchiamiovon The State of Version Control: an Infographic

GitHub's pull requests work pretty nicely for code review.

xiongchiamiovon Adobe releases Flash to HTML5 converter

2. Will Mozilla ever support CSS Animation? Last I heard they weren't too keen on it

There are some CSS animations in Mozilla's Demos: https://mozillademos.org/demos/dashboard/demo.html . They work just fine for me in 4b12.

xiongchiamiovon Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

As I understand it, Arch's pkgbuilds are similar. The nice thing is that they have the flexibility to do whatever you want, whether it be updating a svn repo, downloading a binary, curling a script, building from source, whatever.

xiongchiamiovon Why Puppet Should Manage Your Infrastructure

Puppet is not a server provisioning tool.

Unless I misunderstand you, it certainly is when using Vagrant.

xiongchiamiovon Dealing with Internet Trolls - the Cognitive Therapy Approach

No. Some people enjoy simply wasting other people's time.

Indeed. As a moderator on a fairly active IRC channel (on Rizon!), I've seen my fair share of trolling. I remember an instance a few months ago where the room was engaged in trying to persuade a naive person to some viewpoint, gradually growing increasingly frustrated at his lack of acceptance of any points. Then, after a good 20 minutes, he said something to the effect of "Gotcha! I agree with you, but was just trolling.".

In my experience, the most effective method is to mute a troll before they have a chance to stir anyone up. Unmute them a few hours later to give them another chance to participate.

xiongchiamiovon I am a postdoc and I think I just realized I have been screwed for years

Ditch Apache for Nginx, Lighttpd, Cherokee, etc.

xiongchiamiovon Should CS students be graded on performance?

How would grading on performance discourage cheating?

xiongchiamiovon Gnome removes maximize and minimize buttons from program windows.

As stated in the article, spreading windows across more virtual desktops prevents clutter. I've been using a tiling window manager for a few years now, so now that I've just gotten a new work MacBook, I don't minimize windows, ever (or use the dock, for that matter).

xiongchiamiovon Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

While the idea of Diaspora is nice and all, I'm not going to start using it until someone convinces me that I don't need to audit every code change. Removing commit access for all of the core developers would be a fantastic start.

For those who aren't aware of the issues[0] that were revealed several months ago, Diaspora's devs made some rudimentary security mistakes. Yes, it's an alpha, but as pointed out in the HN thread (which I did not save, and am too lazy to search for), this was basic security - the stuff you have to keep in mind from the start, not stick on later.

[0]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...

xiongchiamiovon Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

That depends on your traffic. It includes one worker.

xiongchiamiovon Red Hat: 'Yes, we undercut Oracle with hidden Linux patches'

The FSF actually says that, to comply with the GPL, you must distribute full source, not diffs.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributingSourceI...

xiongchiamiovon Python now uses Mercurial

Git requires that you do a "git add" before doing a "git commit". Mercurial assumes that you want to add all the changed files in your repo (or you can list the files needed in a commit).

This is one of the features of git I most appreciated when I started using it (my first VCS was Mercurial).

I get distracted easily. While I'm rooting through the code base trying to do something, I'll notice something else to fix. And something else. And something else. By the time I've finished whatever I was trying to do in the first place, I've got 5 or 6 different things I've actually done.

In git, it's trivial to split these up - `git add` separate files, or `git add -p` when you only want to stage some of the changes in a file. This leads to cleaner commits.

I've heard people decry this, saying that you should be testing each individual state of your codebase. git being the powerful sonuvabitch it is, you can do that:

* `git stash --keep-index` will store away all of your modifications, other than the ones you're getting ready to commit. Run your tests, commit, `git stash pop`. * Checking out different revisions and running tests isn't a bad option, either, whether you use `git bisect` or do it manually. With the amazing power of `git rebase -i`[0], you can easily fix any little issues without disrupting other commits.

[0]: http://schacon.github.com/history.html

You will change their SHA1 sums, so they'll become different commits. This isn't a problem, though, if you haven't pushed them up to a shared repository.

xiongchiamiovon How long is Last.fm gonna last?

The real killer for auto-correction is that it seems to require many users to work - artists in the thousands don't seem to ever get corrected.

It also doesn't help that Pandora has terrible tagging. I have a number of "Horner, James - Braveheart, Film Score"-esqe scrobbles that originate from them.