jedsmith

Though I mostly agree, I sincerely hate this, and this isn't the first time I've seen it:

> but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently

It's a pretty big jump from coding quality to inability to run a startup. You're assuming it's the same people, for one, and history has shown us that code quality has nothing to do with startup success. In this specific case, doesn't Wordpress contribute useful high-scalability software back to the community? I'm drawing a blank but I seem to remember something like that.

> I'm not an audio person, but if the component tracks (sublayers, like audio, vocals, guitar) of a song were separate, it seems like a reasonable use.

Yeah, but not for Git. If you tried that with Git you'd basically have a nice wrapper around tarballing your work directory every morning.

You're right, it's Git's. Github did set a good precedent, though, by allowing you to see the diffs of images in a few different ways. That's a really clever feature that gives Git new functionality.

Image diffs make sense, though, because a lot of projects have images (Web sites, resources for UIs, and so on). Audio is probably present in far fewer projects, so I'd expend much less development on it.

So is Github just an excuse to self-promote your album on HN?

Git is quite useless for binary data in the general case. I mean, did you use Git to manage your audio during production? If not, why use Github -- a service built around Git and collaboration? Based on the commit history it looks like you just threw a repo together so you could host it on Github.

I look forward to the useful commit logs from forks.

    Binary files a/song and b/song differ

That's a different argument than you started with. You lost the plot somewhere, which is that I think attacking his employment over this goes beyond a line. There is only one reason to proudly put in your attack:

    Someone that works at X should know better!

What reason do you think that is? Now they need to take a hard look at their decision to hire this guy; what is he up to in his private time? Suddenly, his private actions have become publicly tied to our company.

There's a reason I don't have my employer in my profile -- I have personally seen someone take a comment the wrong way, and spend days calling the employer to report what a piece of shit the employee is, and how much he was into drugs, and so on. Merely naming the guy's employer here casts them in a bad light.

Think back to Noirin Shirley accusing the guy from Twitter of sexual assault via her blog. When the media inevitably ran with it, it wasn't "an Apache member accuses another Apache member," it was "a Google employee accuses a Twitter employee," because that's a much juicier story. Now Google and Twitter have been sideswiped in something that isn't even their business, and I wouldn't have been surprised if Twitter had cut him loose over it. I don't think they did, so that is a lucky thing for him.

In this economy, I'm just as stretched as everyone else. Anybody who goes after my paycheck is playing with fire; that's all I'm saying.

> However, if he were actually certain to get the right guy, what's so bad about "attacking his family" as you define it?

Spoken like a bachelor. Two things I firmly believe in, especially when it comes to Internet squabbles, disagreements and such:

- Don't mess with someone's livelihood.

- Don't mess with someone's family.

They're related. You're going to sit here and tell me that it's justifiable that the alleged guy lose his job over this, possibly taking food out of his kids' mouths? If I copied your Web site and someone pulled a stunt like that with my employer, I'd be out for blood. You hurt my family, I hurt you. You'll understand when you have one.

You can't parallel this to putting someone in jail, because there wasn't really a crime committed (I'd like to see a prosecution), and OP is not the law.

> Mr.Mueller has accused Groklaw lying and attacking him to get attention.

There is no shortage of irony in that statement.

Jealous? Forget what an outpouring of support feels like? Or do you just never pass up an opportunity to divide people and call attention to yourself, in a quest to remain relevant?

Full IPv4 tunneled through DNS[1] and even ICMP[2] has been possible for ages, and I've personally used ICMP-TX on an airliner to avoid paying for Wi-Fi (not because I'm cheap, mind, but because their registration didn't work).

[1]: http://code.kryo.se/iodine/

[2]: http://thomer.com/icmptx/

If someone were to pursue it further and remind Amazon that not following OCILLA means being liable for every single copyright infringement that they host, whether on EC2, S3 (looking forward to that one!), or the Kindle store, they might change their tune.

The DMCA is a law. Not following the rules of OCILLA is not acting according to law, which is identified by the word illegal. Illegal has nothing to do with criminality.

> The culprit -- whose copyright agent doesn't respond to DMCA takedown notices unless they come on law firm letterhead -- is none other than Amazon.com.

That's illegal. There are well-defined bullet points that make a valid DMCA complaint that must be acted upon, and I doubt Amazon would open themselves up to liability based on "big sticks". They'd lose safe harbor for not complying, which is extremely bad news for EC2 and any Internet hosting provider.

Intentionally altering your site so that the automated scraper pastes personal identity all over the target site is an act of vigilantism, and feeds the wild West that the author laments. Hell, digging up identity and then using it against a person is vigilante in itself -- the content of the site modification is extremely passive aggressive. 4chan calls this "dropping dox".

Okay, I'll take the alternative view: this is embarrassing for the OP.

What worries me is that the OP found the name Bart Burns on the WHOIS for the domain, and assumed (a) that's who registered the domain, and (b) that the information he found via a quick Google is actually Bart Burns. I can change the information on my domain to be whoever I want, particularly if I'm a scammer. Whatever I put in NameCheap's panel shows up minutes later. If someone doesn't believe me, I'll alter the registration on one of my domains. Just ask.

More interesting than that, however, is that the OP is completely aware that there are avenues of recourse for this and that he is technically able to determine who hosts the scraped domain. Rather than pursue those avenues of recourse, however -- said facilities have been keeping the Internet from devolving into a "wild West," at least in ARIN and RIPE regions -- this guy had to take a play from 4chan's book and attack possibly the wrong guy. If everybody did what the OP does, you're absolutely right: the Internet would be a wild West.

As an administrator at a very large ISP, I am completely aware that some people lose faith in abuse desk contacts. At my employer, we receive countless abuse complaints and we handle every single one. This is a pattern you will observe in ARIN and RIPE regions, but less so for APNIC and other parts of the world (with exceptions). Particularly for someone hosted with JustHost, a DMCA complaint gets the job done in hours. If it doesn't you can go after the ISP. I was never a fan of the DMCA, but this is a prime example of a use case for it.

Above everything else, though, even if the OP is right about the identity of the scammer, calling out the scammer's employment means the OP could be attacking his family. If I were the aforementioned company I'd cut my losses and terminate the employee for bad PR. Now the OP has potentially hurt the suspected perpetrator's family based on actions his family is probably not even familiar with. Because he copied the HTML for a site I've never even heard of. That's icing on the cake, to me, because I protect my family. With teeth.

In short, I am totally unimpressed by the OP's vigilantism and I am equally disappointed that it is so popular in this forum. Demonstrating this sort of arrogance to Hacker News is probably a good way to burn your bridges at the innumerable employers and business contacts that frequent the site.

This has a surprising score, implying that I should care. I hate to be that guy, but why should I care about this? There's no context or overview of the ramifications of this. By all appearances this is people being morons to each other on mailing lists (nothing new, particularly on -dev lists), and typically this kind of drama has absolutely no bearing on anything outside of the project...

A casual Google leads me to this, which continues to paint a nope, not interested saga for me: http://lwn.net/Articles/424050/

(Edit: The author of that URL is somehow associated with MPlayer -- he seems to do documentation. There is an interview of him on the MPlayer Web site[1]. With that in mind, discovering that he called Ted T'so a "[L]inux-loving manwhore" and a racial slur on his blog[2], I'm now even more disinterested in the entire MPlayer development team and their comings and goings. What a classy bunch.

[1]: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design5/interview-gabucino.html

[2]: http://gabucino.be/files/ted-tso-followup.html )

Presented at USENIX NSDI.

Abstract: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#...

Paper: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yo...

It was revealed [the week of March 9th] that Rovio's hit mobile title Angry Birds cost only $140k to create and has already generated an estimated $70 million.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/angry-birds-one-of-the-mo...

With a source fairly prominently displayed at the bottom. Follow along if you absolutely must know more:

    1. Navigate to twitter.com/scobleizer.
    2. Observe first tweet.

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/56062315665178624

That said, I lost all interest in the image due to the dumb focus effect.

I work on a 27" iMac with a 27" second monitor, and a third 19" on a Linux box with Synergy. My primary language is Python, so I do have a place for that shit in the real world.

You could have made that point without the personal attack.

The problem with that example is how contrived and narrow it is. All it proves is that verbosity doesn't aid loop indices.

ConcurrentHashMap<K, V>, on the other hand, says everything it needs to in the name. As does NSMutableArray, and so on. Apples and oranges, here.

Doing that is probably fine if you are working alone and nobody will ever read your code. Reading Objective-C is already enough of a challenge without having to context switch to a header just to mentally resolve symbols.

Instead of using a macro for the selector:

    NSDictionary *frob = [NSDictionary macroHere:v1, k1, v0, k0, nil];

It would probably be far more efficient to macro the entire call using C99's variadics:

    NSDictionary *frob = DICT(v1, k1, v0, k0);

Still wouldn't walk that road, personally.

I see your Java, and raise you Objective-C:

    NSString *thing = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Result: %@", [foo someoneCouldntComeUpWithAShorterNameWithZipcode:08205 name:@"larry" parcels:5]];
    NSDictionary *request = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:@"iphoneapp/0.1", @"User-Agent", @"news.ycombinator.com", @"Host", nil];

This isn't to kick off pet language wars, by the way, just to point out that my OCD tic to wrap to 80 characters has absolutely zero place in Xcode. Or Java.

I would strongly disagree that it's contentious. (Think that over...disagreement about contention. I raised my eyebrow too.)

Some of the more exotic features of what people call "OOP", like polymorphism, take a bit more care and feeding to pull off in straight C. They are most certainly possible, that being said.

Unwind "OOP" to "working with objects that contain data and methods together," and structs with function pointers fit the bill. I've had people stand in my face and practically shout that C++ is object-oriented and C isn't, and one refused to believe or admit that C++ basically compiles down to C in the end.

I never spoke to ig1 in my comment. "You'll" there was in the general.

I have a bit of experience with Xen. If you're actually seeing a whole lot of steal (how much?), that's a bad sign because it means you're on a box with a lot of contention. In an ideal world, Xen should steal very little from you. I'm burning all four cores available to me on one of my personal Linodes, and the platform is barely stealing anything. Here's vmstat -s and uptime from that Linode for comparison:

       409198 non-nice user cpu ticks
     60878563 nice user cpu ticks
       166987 system cpu ticks
    811571786 idle cpu ticks
      4486779 IO-wait cpu ticks
           25 IRQ cpu ticks
        15388 softirq cpu ticks
       766577 stolen cpu ticks

    12:06:10 up 13 days, 14:11,  3 users,  load average: 4.00, 4.01, 4.05

I've had the pedal to the floor for a couple of days on the CPU, and only 766 kticks have been stolen (total) since I booted. If you're seeing a lot more steal than that, your host is working pretty hard to schedule the domUs fairly.

Wouldn't dare to assume that I know better how to run operation than you do, just sharing my experiences with Xen. Netflix had a solution to this -- unfortunate that it was necessary, but a solution nonetheless -- which was to monitor steal closely and spin up a new instance if it skyrocketed: http://blog.sciencelogic.com/netflix-steals-time-in-the-clou...

Given the opportunity, I'd like to point out that I meant no disrespect in my original comment, if it wasn't clear. I was speaking more from a generality and not about CKAN specifically, a fact lost on those mindlessly downvoting me.

Every time something interesting that I want to read shows up on the front page, and clicking on it yields a spinning tab while the other end flaps about in agony, I can't help but wonder how many administrators know how to use ab(8). The rate of dead sites on HN is really a shocker, since commodity cloud that can stand up to HN's load -- as opposed to the shared hosting of yesterdecade -- is so widely available. I would have thought that Slashdotting would be a historical problem by now...

Is it not common sense to test the hell out of something before someone who would submit it to HN is even aware of its existence? WordPress is pretty bad for this (since most admins follow the directions and don't bother tweaking), and I've heard that Drupal can be too. Without tweaking and caching stuff, you'll fall over quick in front of this many eyeballs.

I know, easy for me to say.

Missed the connection between your reply and the second paragraph of your parent on first read. I responded initially to your combination of comments with that oversight in mind -- connected inferiority to inclined to disagree to me -- so I owe you an apology. Forgive me.

I agree with your point of view, but TAOCP isn't really a work to be completed, and I'm willing to wager that anybody who says they have completed it flipped through it and put it back on the shelf.