Hacker News Reader

WALoeIIIon Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

"In the US, the police can take anything they want from you without compensation."

This is an outrageous statement.

There are special exceptions to the law, but the 4th Amendment of the Constitution explicitly protects citizens from illegal search and seizure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

WALoeIIIon Add SPDY support to your Apache server with mod_spdy

It doesn't really matter.

For simplicity put SPDY on the edge and reverse proxy HTTP to whatever you used to use, this gets you 90% of the way there.

In the future, I expect we'll see tools like Mongrel2 take over. SPDY on one end, and some type of messaging on the other side. This will become more desirable with technologies like web-sockets that will stream data back. HTTP is simple, but hardly optimized for speed, even on a LAN. Thrift, Protobuffs, MessagePack, even Erlang's Binary Protocol (i.e. BERT) are all better fits for the internal RPC protocol

WALoeIIIon The MySQL “swap insanity” problem and the effects of the NUMA architecture

Will this optimization help on virtualized machines like Xen? Or does all memory appear to be the same?

On an EC2 m1.xlarge:

$ numactl --hardware available: 1 nodes (0) libnuma: Warning: /sys not mounted or invalid. Assuming one node: No such file or directory node 0 cpus: node 0 size: <not available> node 0 free: <not available> libnuma: Warning: Cannot parse distance information in sysfs: No such file or directory

WALoeIIIon Wind Map

http://windonthewater.com/ (use http://windonthewater.com/i.htm on your phone) http://windalert.com/ (iOS app for mobile)

NOAA Point Forecasts: ex: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=20.91&lon=-...

WALoeIIIon Show HN: During the last week, I built a SPDY server.

This is great! Nice work!

WALoeIIIon Ask HN: I really need your help (resolved)

Aman Gupta.

WALoeIIIon What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

Do you use GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick? Shell out or python bindings?

What settings do you use for: MAGICK_MEMORY_LIMIT MAGICK_MAP_LIMIT MAGICK_DISK_LIMIT

Do you tune them dynamically or just set and forget?

WALoeIIIon "What I Miss About Counterstrike" - Blog authored by CSS legend JonMumm

Pick up a new sport/hobby/game. Practice.

WALoeIIIon WordPress To Jekyll And Back Again

I like that I can run my Jekyll blog for free on Heroku, and it is served entirely out of Varnish. Seems like you are paying more money for crap performance.

In addition, my blog regenerates in < 5 seconds on Ruby 1.9.3.

WALoeIIIon Show HN: Hellepoll is a blazingly-fast async HTTP server written in C++

I immediately wanted to fork this and have it just return "Allan!" instead of "Hello World".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPepCVepCg

WALoeIIIon Why We Moved Off The Cloud

You can use their CDN (CloudFront) without moving your origin to EC2/S3.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/De...

WALoeIIIon Cringely predicts the second coming of Java

The JVM is already seeing a resurgence with Scala/Clojure/etc.

What about the JIT projects? LuaJIT, Rubinius, PyPy and V8? All of these are close enough to Java to not matter.

WALoeIIIon Ask HN: Anyone know where Mark Pilgrim went?

_why 2.0.

WALoeIIIon AirBnB for dogs

It exists!

https://www.rover.com/

WALoeIIIon Are you a Facebook employee?

Some prefixes from my friends lists:

100k = Columbia 200k = Stanford 300k = Yale 500k = Dartmouth 600k = Penn 1000k = Brown

WALoeIIIon Are you a Facebook employee?

504731 - 4731st at Dartmouth. They opened it during exam week when everyone was in the library and nearly the entire school registered on one day.

WALoeIIIon ITerm2 1.0 Released

Probably lynx.

http://lynx.browser.org/

WALoeIIIon G+ invite open again

Just create a nickname on your "real" account, then sign up for a google account with it.

I use google@mydomain.com

WALoeIIIon How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack

this is MySQL specific, but we do this and it is a HUGE win for us

MySQL doesn't support descending indexes, so for a large class of problems you will have to scan the entire index to find the last 10 items, especially when sorting by items in two directions. This is really slow when you have one hundred million entries (a huge events table). Looking up by primary key is very very fast in MySQL with InnoDB. If you profile this query you can see MySQL spends most of its time figuring out the IDs, and almost no time reading them back to you. Using Redis in this manner is very memory efficent, easy to update, and gets you 95%+ of the potential performance gains. It means we don't have to keep Redis up to date with edits or changes, because the PKs are set in stone.

WALoeIIIon SSL session caching in nginx

The number of visitors you have is irrelevant.

If you have any visitors you are doing them a huge disservice if you do not have SSL session caching.

You would use external SSL caching like this if you have more than one SSL termination point (typically a webserver like nginx/Apache) behind a load-balancer.

WALoeIIIon RIM implodes: announces layoffs, 500,000 PlayBooks shipped

The important metric is dollars.

According to a random internet article, iPhone accounts for less than 3% of phones shipped, but 40% of the profits.

iPhones make more dollars.

edit apparently Apple's mobile market share is up to 4% with more than 50% of the profits.

WALoeIIIon Heroku encourages use of www. prefix for domains after DDoS

The limitation of the root can (and will, I predict) be overcome by combining host and dns provider APIs. If Heroku had a way to push A record changes up to applications using their infrastructure they would be able to deal with this sort of issue.

This is also the promise of Amazon's Route 53 combined with their Elastic Load Balancing service which I hope will be released soon. Your DNS could dynamically serve A record IPs for the ELB, and you save the client the 2nd DNS resolution for the CNAME, faster and more dynamic.

For more: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=63893&...

WALoeIIIon Netflix CEO: In Ten Years, “We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home”

How is this different than any other "service"?

Its way easier to get everything from Thai food to dry cleaning to auto parts in a city.

WALoeIIIon Useful Rewrites for Nginx

$scheme would work with the current request's scheme, so http or https. Its a micro-optimization at best to make it http:// instead.

WALoeIIIon "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"

A.) Amazon isn't a startup. B.) A lot of Bay Area companies (Zynga, Facebook, Salesforce) are opening Seattle offices to take advantage of the Amazon and Microsoft talent pools. C.) They already have a Bay Area office. http://public.a2z.com/index.html I believe some core SimpleDB guys (Jim Larson) were based out of there.

WALoeIIIon "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"

This still doesn't protect you from UPDATE statements. I suppose you could pull it off if you could be absolutely certain that you were only CREATEing. You still have the problem that replication is single threaded, so this doesn't scale your writes beyond one thread.

WALoeIIIon "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"

There is a difference between multi-master and circular replication. To me, Multi-master is that I can write to both masters at the same time, which implies there is a way to resolve conflicts. Databases like Cassandra (timestamps) and Riak (vector clocks) have this, MySQL does not. If you write to the same record on both masters bad shit happens and its very hard to sort out.

WALoeIIIon "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"

You can't do multi-master with MySQL anyways, which until very recently has been the only "engine" RDS supports. Even if you could do multi-master, replication is still single threaded. You have to come up with your own sharding scheme. This is a limitation of MySQL not RDS.