Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
Why would a farmer own a combine? Aren't they owned by specialized harvest outfits? I don't have any experience in the business but when I was a kid and we needed the hay cut and baled we called the guy who brought in the hay baler on a low-boy. Nobody owned their own.
Comment · 8 years ago
Perhaps, but the impression is reinforced when the police organize themselves to break the law in an organized fashion. For example, consider the police of Oakland, California. Every one of their patrol motorcycles is modified with a loud, unlawful exhaust muffler, through actions that body deliberately undertook. Clearly there are numerous criminals among the ranks of that police department, but it's also true that the department itself is corrupt and makes corrupt decisions as an organized body.

Edit: which is to overlook the most glaring examples of NYPD corruption: parking placards and get-out-of-jail-free cards for friends and family (recently reduced from 30 to 20 per officer!). It is not a great exaggeration to claim that the NYPD is America's largest criminal gang.

Comment · 8 years ago
There should be some kind of cooling-off period between when these can hit the front page and when the comments begin, proportional to the length of the document. This one is 200 pages, so the first useful comment on this report will appear tomorrow at the earliest.

The only conclusion we can draw right now is that some software company has an exclusive contract to provide the government with PDF export applications that do not generate hyperlinked tables of contents, and that publishing such a document is in fact a crime against the people.

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Linux network maintainers have repeatedly rejected attempts by Eric Dumazet and others to expose delack_min and other parameters to userspace. This is the kernel tyranny to which I refer.

Notably many of the people whose proposals have been shot down by linux netdev are currently working on QUIC.

Comment · 8 years ago
Yep, but it would be inadvisable to set it lower than the peer’s delayed ACK timeout, unless you want to just always resend every packet.
Comment · 8 years ago
Those do not affect TCP state machine parameters like RTO(min), ATO, and TLP timeout. These are internal to the kernel and are either static, or can only be set systemwide. For example the minimum delayed ack timeout in Linux is just 40ms and can't be changed except by recompiling the kernel. 40ms is a totally inappropriate number for ATO in a datacenter or other low-latency setting. Other numbers like RTO(min) are specified in RFCs as 200ms, again completely inappropriate in a low-latency setting.

QUIC also frees us from other outdated misfeatures of TCP such as timestamps in milliseconds when they should be in microseconds.

Comment · 8 years ago
This post groks QUIC. The most important thing about QUIC is it frees applications from the tyranny of the kernel TCP state machine. Today all TCP sockets (at least, on Linux) are subject to the same system-wide parameters of the TCP state machine, none of which are appropriate for any particular application. With QUIC we will finally have each application in control of its own retry timers and other parameters. That is going to be quite beneficial, especially on mobile where packet loss is so common.
Comment · 8 years ago
Yeah, it is amazing. Maps only recently stopped working on my ancient BlackBerry.
Comment · 8 years ago
This is backwards. Google rescued Deja’s archives which were going to be deleted and then expanded the archives back to 1981. Without Google’s interventions you’d all be left wondering what was in Usenet.
Comment · 8 years ago
A lot of these are pretty silly. 100% of Songza features were rolled into Google Music. Listing every phone they no longer market doesn’t make a lot of sense either. You might as well list Maps for Series 60 phones if you wanted to get down to that level.
Comment · 8 years ago
That’s not the reason. Vic Gundotra, the mastermind/moron behind Google+ would not tolerate any other Google properties with social features. Since you could share feeds and articles on Reader, and because it had followers and comments and whatnot, it had to be sacrificed on the altar of Google+.
Comment · 8 years ago
In the US you may exclude up to half a million dollars of gains from your taxable income if you owned and lived in a property for at least two years. Otherwise gains on the sale of real property are taxed as ordinary income.
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
It is pretty hard to burn 100000 acres of California without hitting a toxic waste cleanup site of some kind or other, unfortunately.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton