Slashdot Mirror

Hmm, slashdot doesn't won't infringing code to be posted, it removed a few lines during posting.
Here's the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951480

http://news.ycombinator.com/ is what I registered on today. I also read the various programming subreddits.

By the way, if anyone's looking for an alternative site with a good community, check Hacker News. I've been reading it a lot more recently. It's not quite the same thing as Slashdot (less generic / IT geek, more startup / entrepreneur geek) but it's a decent addition or substitute, if it comes to that.

You may have heard of it but if not, it's a little thin on summaries but other than that, while not perfect, I'll bet it's a lot like what Slashdot was back in the day.

Cue a comment about Bolivian tree lizards.

As you all know I have a rockin' tight ass, a successful project on Kickstarter that you've all funded, and a cyberstalker that goes by the name of FrankSinatraDirtyTalker1915@comcast.net.
I originally met "Frank" back in College, where we dated for a bit. I should point out that he's not an old man, as his username might imply, but rather someone who is simply obsessed with Frank Sinatra and my gorgeous rockin hard ass.
Anyway, when I broke up with him he took it pretty badly. It was our Sophomore year at Rice University and I had just discovered gravity bongs and going down on another girl while blazed out of my gord. As I've admitted, these were confusing albeit fun times for me.
Meanwhile, "Frank" was raised as a Mormon but had recently converted to Scientology. I guess you might say he was experimenting with his own hallucinogenic homoerotic drug. This drug/sex/cult cocktail, combined with my round pulchritudinous derriere, and the sudden shock of losing his ability to play his daily role of dressing up as Dr. Parnassus while gently fondling my perky nipples and supple breasts that he had affectionately named the Merry Mammary Sisters of Nippopolis, and Queens of the Breastiary - led to Frank's complete mental breakdown.
I don't blame Frank for my rockin body, just as I don't blame you for being attracted to my intelligence and funding my project on Kickstarter. However, what I do not like is being stalked. I hope you all do what I do when you see Frank's messages on any thread related to my project. Just lick your index finger, point it at Frank's username and then say, "Ooooooooooooo ICE COLD! Mama thinks you're a BAAAAD BOYYYY! OOOOOO Ice Cold..." then point the same finger back at your left nipple and make a sizzling sound "SSSSSssssssssssss" and sing this little rap
Thank you all again for funding my project on Kickstarter. You're clearly invested in a winner!

also relevant:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840589

It's very possible that this is all a bs story on her part and she's just whoring for attention.
Kickstarter may have made the right call.
Reddit uncovered some more info about her, that doesn't paint her in a very good light:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840589
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/s97g4/banned_from_kickstarter_for_being_a_stalking/c4c5j7r

Lots about this stuff in MS anti-trust exhibits, BTW:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3441885

What is this HN site you like?

My gut level guess would be Paul Grahams thing at http://news.ycombinator.com/

Yeah, I found a browser add-on that makes reading Slashdot a lot more palatable. It works in Chrome and Firefox. I haven't tried it in IE.

http://news.ycombinator.com/

From here:

Today's sysadmin todo list:

0. Get corporate membership with EFF.

1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.

2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.

3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.

4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.

I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

There's Hacker News, but I'm not sure if you'll prefer it.

If you're tired of the old dinosaurs then get going. Here's part of the solution: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html From their page: How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

Sort of. Google has access to the Flash source, and the Flash shipping in Chrome is modified from stock flash; it has different version numbers and carries various patches Google has made but not (yet, possibly) upstreamed.

And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621263 (from a Google employee) makes it pretty clear that Google is involved in helping maintain Pepper Flash.

The message in question is http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2011-October/043719.html

LLVM is only expressive enough to have C++ compiled to it if you use the parts of LLVM that are architecture-dependent. In particular, they depend on word sizes and endianness at the very least. You can't compile C++ to architecture-independent LLVM.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2499763 for some links to the relevant LLVM documentation.

Now of course you can take any LLVM target you want and define a virtual machine for that target. Heck, you could define a virtual machine whose "bytecode" is x86 assembly. Whether such things are "suitable" or good for the web is a separate question entirely.

start your own country

These protests are short-lived and I wonder if they end up doing any good.

These protests might do a little good and kill some of these bills. The problem is that the bills keep coming. How long will people protest? They will eventually tire of protests and blackouts for each and every bill. The only answer is to stop it all at its source.

This sort of legislation is being funded and pushed by the big media companies who are afraid of losing their oligarchy. If we want to do something that will last, we need to limit their funding and rethink how we get our information and entertainment. Y Combinator has already planned to fund such startup companies, and Reddit already has it's own community to gather ideas. I think that it's time to do more to address the real problem.

For a recent example of a legal expert rationalizing why all that is a good thing, check out this thread on HN/YC.

Why quote wikipedia? It was handy.

You are wrong! (stop quoting Wikipedia and do your own research.

Sigh, do I really need to do a google search for you?

Xcode 4 available to all on Apple's Mac App Store for $4.99
Hacker News | Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
What Changes with XCode 4 Not Being Free Anymore?

Do you need more? I've got a ton of results.

Exactly. This guy has been there for a while: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693599

I was going off of what some people said at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3486268 It was stated that it is in the indictment, but I am unable to view it because the justice departments website is currently down probably due to anonymous.

http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-doj-universal-sopa-235/

Using App Engine or Translate as a proxy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3461252

Citation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2138565

I was doing similar research a few days ago.

Some of these are already mentioned...

• Lessfs - v1 is stable, v2 is pre-alpha/alpha. http://www.lessfs.com/
• Blackhole - http://www.vanheusden.com/java/BlackHole/ - requires Java, which seems like a bad idea to me for a block level device, but I haven't tested it yet.
• SDFS from OpenDedup - http://code.google.com/p/opendedup/ - http://www.opendedup.org/ - looks very promising, but may have stalled
• Dedupfs for Ext3 - http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kosmatka/dedupfs/
• ZFS. You know about that.
• DragonFly/Hammer - http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/ includes dedup. Competitor to ZFS and Btrfs, also using Btree. Includes block level dedup, but I'm not sure if it's fixed block or not. Suspect it is fixed.
• Btrfs - there's a patch. Not sure if it's in mainlined yet. But without fsck btfs is not trustworthy enough. That's coming soon, but has been for a while. In case you read this as being negative about btrfs, it's not; it's an awesome file system, combining modern ideas and an excellent implementation, but it's still at testing stage for critical data.

Other stuff:

• Dext2 - an idea. No code. http://code.google.com/p/binarywarriors/
• BackupPC, the next version may have block level dedup, it's been suggested/requested. Numerous people pointed out the hard linking scheme it uses. I'm backing up VM images, which is what started me on this block-level dedup search, and when you have a small change in a 60BG file, it's a new file. (Yes, I have thought of schemes to split them.)
• Bacula have been experimenting with block level dedup, fixed and sliding. May be in future versions.
• Bup - https://github.com/apenwarr/bup has many of the ideas. It's not a file system, but could be reconstructed, I think. Based on Git store. I recommend reading http://apenwarr.ca/log/ which has more, and is entertaining. I think this is an excellent approach. Read back in his blog for details on bup ideas.
• SquashFS - for static data.
• Epitome - http://www.peereboom.us/epitome/man/ - for static data too, I think. Not fully investigated.
• I know I saw at least one Google Summer of Code submission about dedup. Haven't followed it up yet, and couldn't find the tab in my browser.
• Interesting conversation - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2932335

By fixed block I mean that the file system does not search out shared data when the blocks are not on block boundaries. So if you add one byte to the beginning of a 10 GB file, and that has the unfortunate consequence of rippling up through all the blocks that make the file, then there will be no block level sharing with the original file. Of course that's a pathological case, but you get the idea.

Original poster, perhaps you could keep us informed of your findings? There's at least me who is also interested.

This is why I suggested this:
"Actually, randomly selecting people from a state or province, similar to a lottery draw, may be a better idea. The key is to make sure it is a large variety of people."

I once proposed this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3161455

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220968 Nuff said....

http://hackermonthly.com/ They take the most popular articles from http://news.ycombinator.com/ and, with permission, republish the article in a beautiful print format.

Yea, I never agreed with everything on Techrights and hasn't read it recently. That being said, it is funny that the server version of Windows 7 is called Windows Server 2008 R2 (look up the support lifecycle of both!). I still remember when they were the first to cover the MS-Nokia-Elop fiasco (even mentioned it in this thread. AFAIK last time Slashdot posted an article from what was then called Boycott Novell was years ago.

if the date stamps here are accurate.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595056

it would seem that they've had a free 'beta' deal for a very long time.. would you trust a host that still hasn't got the kinks worked out after three years?

You may have been mistaken from the case of VLC, which was pulled because of a copyright claim made by one of the VLC developers. It was not pulled because it was open source.

You're oversimplifying...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082505

VLC for iOS Pulled from the App Store (videolan.org)

Disclaimer: VideoLAN Chairman and lead VLC developer here.

I've written the most important analysis on the matter http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2010-November/077457.html and http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2010-December/078262.html

Some VLC developers (for Mac mainly), with the company Applidium, have ported VLC on iOS. Applidium published it on the store, for free.

Some developer complained (quite lately, btw...) afterwards and quoted a FSF analysis. Their analysis was totally wrong (spoke about redistribution), and based on old version of AppStore terms.

After my remarks about changes of the AppStore terms that made this analysis obsolete and wrong, they shifted their criticism onto another part, which was the "usage" part of the ToS. They complained that the terms did not allow all uses, especially commercial ones.

Indeed, one part could be interpreted in different ways. Therefore, I've mailed Apple Copyright Agent for explanation, twice. Once in November, once in December...

Apple has refused to answer, to explain or to help in any matter. They then decided to pull the Application unilaterally from the AppStore.

Of course, they are allowed to do that, and noone can complain, but this is yet another push from Apple against VLC, that adds to the very long list of past issues. It just makes me think Apple doesn't really want competition...

> Microsoft has a history of abuse, while you are only
> weary of the domination of Google.

More precisely, Microsoft has a history of abuse and has been moving away from that, while Google is actively adding new abuses.

Seriously, I think Google is a lot more evil than you think, and that today's Microsoft, at least from the outside, is a lot less evil than you think. They could revert to their old behavior, of course.

> Google has an inherent interest in the
> development of a free Internet

No, it really doesn't. It _used_ to a few years ago, but at this point it has more of an interest in the development of an internet it controls and that is dependent on its services. You may be interested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2989550 starting at the part with "(c").

> I cited specific examples to defend my case

You cited specific instances of past bad behavior by Microsoft. I agree that they happened, absolutely. My point is that Microsoft's current behavior is very different from that. I care more about what these organizations will do tomorrow than what they did yesterday. Insofar as their actions yesterday allow me to predict their actions tomorrow, they're worth considering. But let's not make the mistake of fighting the last war all the time, ok?

> How would anyone be fooled by standardization
> efforts just after the Open Document Format saga?

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the way large organizations like Microsoft and Google operate. The people responsible for web browsers and web stuff at Microsoft are a pretty distinct subset from the ones responsible for Word and ODF, with separate goals, etc. Chances are, they're opposed to each other in the internal political infighting.

Again, in the _web_ sphere Microsoft has actually been a pretty model citizen for the last two years or so. Before that they weren't present very much, because they were too busy playing catchup.

> Collectively, people are very well informed

Collectively, people have drunk the Google and Facebook cool-aid. It's starting to wear off for Facebook, with congressional probes and all. I hope it wears off for Google before it's too late for the web as we know it.

Soulskill story submissions 100% from Ycombinator.

Dear Soulshill:

You have seriously misappropriated the use of the word "hack".

Burn in hell.

Yours In Moscow,
K. Trout

I am thinking of an idea, in addition to this, to divide the legislative branch into working groups focusing on specific topics instead of political parties.

It's no worse than Y Combinator.

We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).

I once suggested a similar idea:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3161455

I was pointed to the fact that Tor Cloud nodes are only relays, rather than guard (first) or exit (last) nodes in the Tor circuit.

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3236580

This obvious limits some of the concerns...but it's the number (and bandwidth) of guards and exits that is much more a problem in Tor than the number of relay-only nodes.

Mod parent up.

Additionally, many other carriers are already seeing IPv4 exhaustion (due to their own wastefulness in the RFC1918 address space). They are co-opting DoD /8's within their network to try to overcome the problem. [source]

I'll skip the obvious stupidity of "stealing" IPv4's from the DoD. But instead of deploying Carrier-Grade NAT, they're divvying up the internet. In one place, 28.0.0.0/8 takes you to one machine, in another place it takes you somewhere else.

It sounds like the IPv4 internet is going to fall apart simply due to negligence. How's that for an IPv6 killer app?

Y Combinator News. I haven't bothered to check to see if my guess is correct about the New New Slashdot:

Old, Old, Old.

Regardz.

You should come on over to Hacker News if you're looking for what Slashdot used to be circa 1998... http://news.ycombinator.com/

I agree with you... the comments were the big draw, and mostly it's "herd mentality" on /. any more.

Since no one's mentioned this, amazingly, let me post a link to Steve's Google Platform Rant, which might give you some insight: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876

No it wouldn't be cool. I've posted about this before and was modded to oblivion so I'll do it AC. It's hard to get people to switch social networks. G+ isn't working, Google fucked it up before it started*. Diaspora's problem was being a bunch of whiny bastards about it. I use linux and go between Opera, Chrome and Aurora and checking out diaspora for the first time and reading about how they won't work with IE. What the hell kind of BS is that? We don't approve of your browser so fuck right off?

*I hope you read the rant by the brilliant Google employee who describes what Google's main problem -- platforms.

I found the hacker news discussion of it quite informative: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071647

Isn't the Raspberry Pi the device with the Broadcom ARM soc without any public docs? The Raspberry Pi director does work for Broadcom. Does Broadcom even have a single ARM device with open docs?

The guy who made Smozzy replied to a bunch of questions on HN There is no encryption between the phone and his service (yet)

I think the training was more along these lines than "Ctrl-X cuts, ctrl-V pastes..."

This could result in another series of fuckups like this, where a bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat due to a misconfigured EC2 instance.

GEEZ I didn't know that.

I admit this is not very clear from EC2 users (that is unless you read the docs), but Amazon should have a provision where if it shuts down because of them, then no data is lost.

And btw use S3 and s3cmd, very good and very easy (even with encryption)

I don't know a lot about EC2, but I believe they lose all data when they're powered down, unless special provisions are taken, don't they?

This could result in another series of fuckups like this, where a bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat due to a misconfigured EC2 instance.

This the one you are talking about? Looks interesting...

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund by Paul Graham July 2008 ... 16. A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn't have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search. I don't know if there is, but if you do, we'd love to hear from you.

* http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html