cbr

I'm imagining a test-taking skills test. You have multiple choice questions, drawn from an incredible range of domains that people couldn't possibly be familiar with most of. I'd love to see how predictive this would be!

There are actually some cases where you can gain by losslessly compressing these. For example, EXIF data in a JPEG is plain text, so gzip can help:

    $ curl -sS http://www.exiv2.org/include/img_1771.jpg | wc -c
    32764
    $ curl -sS http://www.exiv2.org/include/img_1771.jpg | gzip -9 | wc -c
    31323

In this case, though, it often makes more sense to just remove the EXIF data.

PDF files can be even more compressible, at least ones that are text and layout as opposed to embedded images:

    $ curl -sS  http://www.polyu.edu.hk/iaee/files/pdf-sample.pdf | wc -c
    7945
    $ curl -sS  http://www.polyu.edu.hk/iaee/files/pdf-sample.pdf | gzip -9 | wc -c
    4336

Yes, Coke that's kosher for Passover can't contain grain, including corn, so they use sugar.

Some history: http://time.com/3769657/coke-passover-kosher/

The FreeBSD manpages have:

    Note that the -n option as well as the effect of
    `\c' are implementation-defined in IEEE Std
    1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'') as amended by Cor. 1-2002.
     -- http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?echo

So there's probably some system (or shell) out there where -n doesn't work?

I think this article is better researched: https://80000hours.org/articles/everything-you-need-to-know-...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11323584

Plug for my (open source) project, mod_pagespeed: it can automate all of these.

> not using image sprites

sprite_images filter: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-...

> not using a cookieless domain for images and other static content

MapRewriteDomain directive: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/domains...

> not using a CDN

Once you have a (pull) CDN set up, mod_pagespeed can rewrite your resources onto it with the same MapRewriteDomain directive.

> blocking javascript - worse if it’s in the head

defer_javascript filter: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-...

> not minifying your javascript and CSS

rewrite_javascript: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-...

rewrite_css: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-...

> not optimizing caching policies

mod_pagespeed automatically longcaches everything: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-...

> not gzipping your content - most if not all popular web servers support some type of compression

mod_pagespeed automatically enables gzip compression

About half of these are enabled by default (minifying css and js, optimizing caching, turning on gzip) and the rest need to be configured.

(If I were making the list I would also have included resource combining for css and js, which mod_pagespeed does by default.)

It lets you look at things like "are women being paid less than men" and see how that interacts with location, experience level, salary-vs-bonus, etc.

Lowering the sale price to $7k only bumps the per-year cost to Uber from $8k to $10.5k.

Here's what it looks like on iphone: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160309_JW_14VA/

Well, mostly If-None-Match is used to save bandwidth by allowing the client to validate a stale resource.

Looks to me like trains are slightly safer than that 0.43 to 7.3 for cars: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~ipsavage/436-manuscrip...

Why doesn't it make sense to talk about the inherent difficulty of a language? I agree that some languages are related and this eases learning (PT to ES, PL to CZ) but why can't we look at learning speed on completely unrelated languages? For example, get some monolingual Quechua speakers and some monolingual Tamil speakers, and have them each learn the other language. Which group learns faster? The group that learns faster is learning the easier language.

I realize that this isn't practical to actually do as an experiment with all the world's language pairs, but I do think it demonstrates that inherent difficulty is a thing.

One thing that sort of shows this, though it's kind of distorted by writing systems, would be charts like this from language learning companies: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang... For example, they think for an English speaker Swahili is easier than Nepali is easier than Finnish.

    I totally believe that it's easier to learn English than
    Mandarin (and maybe easier to learn Spanish than English)
    because the writing system gives you more hints, but that
    doesn't have anything to do with the (spoken) language,
    strictly speaking.

Sorry, I wasn't actually trying to bring up the writing system at all! I put both English and Mandarin in the "harder" category, even though English's writing system is simpler (though still not as simple as many).

Let's say we pick a random person and make them learn a completely unrelated language. Sometimes they will learn faster than others, like Spanish or Swahili vs English or Mandarin. Why would we expect them all to be the same difficulty?

Why do you think most of the new housing here in Boston is going to foreign investors and staying empty?

The question of whether the physical structure is enough to preserve the information that makes you you is the key thing, and Myers is right to say we should be trying to figure out how to read the information off of very small brains.

On the other hand, if you think that the physical structure is sufficient (I don't) then figuring out how to preserve whole human brains is pretty important. There's a long time to figure out how to read the information off the preserved brains, but any unpreserved (or improperly preserved) ones are gone for good. So I see why Hayworth etc are interested in high-quality preservation of larger and larger animals and aren't focusing on the reading portion.

"I'm more inclined to believe their goal is to pocket lots of money exploiting people’s fear of death. ... Fruit flies and nematodes won’t pay them a substantial annuity to have their brains vitrified and stored, and their gratitude upon being resurrected wouldn’t be at all remunerative."

I've met Hayworth, this really doesn't fit him. He is genuinely interested in better preservation methods as a way to fight death. As a neuroscientist working in connectomics his association with cryonics only hurts him professionally.

Cool. We're working now to make this possible.

(And, in fact, to work at all when compiling against 1.9.11, since the addition of dynamic modules broke us: https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed/issues/1110 )

Sadly, probably not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11066250

Nginx doesn't really have a module API. While lua reaches deep inside, loadable modules already have to be compiled for the specific nginx version, which means this module isn't in a different situation from any of the others.

Generating all those binaries would still be a pain, but you're right that containers could help.

We'd also need to write a script that looked at your nginx install and figured out what would be the right precompiled module to download.

That's fine, and is something you'd be able to do with PageSpeed.

(But I'd really love a way to distribute binary modules anyone could just use, with no additional compilation.)

Unfortunately, it looks like it may not be something will be able to work with. Instead of an ABI like Apache uses, Nginx went with signature checking. To load a precompiled module, the signature has to match. This means we would have to compile many different binary modules for every configuration people might have, and for every version of Nginx. Like several dozen.

As it stands, though, the module system would be very helpful for OS packagers, because they don't have to worry about signature mismatch.

Specifically: http://assets.bwbx.io/images/ilVXr6BF7iAU/v4/-1x-1.png

Source maps aren't specific to SASS; you can use them with any tool.

Pretty sure it's an AdSense ad: http://imgur.com/OBy1PFR

The AdChoices icon is used by many ad networks, not just Google's, to indicate that there's per-user targeting happening. [1] But if you click on that "AdChoices" button and you get an AdSense help page.

[1] http://www.youradchoices.com/faq.aspx

Aren't they failing because of low prices, not because of technical incompetence?

> there's been very little, if any, of that

Is there anything PageSpeed is doing that you see this way? Because that's really not what we want to happen!

   compiling your own nginx is not trivial and I would
   not recommend it for everyone

Yes, this is frustrating as an nginx module developer as well. Apache has a loadable module system and we can ship binaries, but to add a module to nginx you have to recompile.

Nginx's developers have been hinting that they're going to add support for loading .so modules, and I really hope they do!

I'm sorry it didn't work out! Permanently breaking a website when removed is very surprising, since if you uninstall the module it's not there anymore to have an effect. Would you be up for explaining more?

(I work on mod_pagespeed, and if we're breaking sites on removal that's something I want to look into.)