News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

alexbardas

If anyone is interested in buying a System 76 product and have it delivered outside of US, please take into account that the price doesn't include VAT. This has to be payed separately, which usually means that each device is ~20% more expensive (when delivered outside of US).

I ended up having to pay 400$ more for delivery + VAT for a laptop (didn't know about the VAT tax at that time). Very good performance, but rather mediocre quality (1 usb port is completely unusable).

Re:Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab on Monday January 18, 2016 @06:12AM (#10923738)
Both products are really good, but Github needs to realise that they have to be more open and listen more to their users.

There is an opportunity for Gitlab here and I'm happy that they decided to make this announcement.

The community is the actual winner of this healthy competition.

Re:Experimental browser built in HTML on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @05:59PM (#9300187)
Any idea what happened to breach? It looked very promising when it was first announced, but I can see there hasn't been any contribution for more than 6 months.
Re:Show HN: vim-hackernews on Saturday February 07, 2015 @06:40PM (#9015785)
Great and very useful plugin. Good job!
Re:Open Sourcing Our Go Libraries (2014) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @12:41PM (#8845708)
Go has a much better runtime system than Python (can spawn lots of green threads in parallel using goroutines), but it's also broken in so many ways (e.g.: type system).
Re:Open Sourcing Our Go Libraries (2014) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @12:26PM (#8845574)
It's more or less a matter of time until everything will be migrated to go. Since it has better performance and works good for them, there's no point not to do it.
Makes a lot of sense to me, Firefox is an excellent browser. I hope it will keep its independence though.
I've also added a Later Edit (LE) in the article and I hope some things are clear now.
Re:Rewriting Avira's SPA from Backbone Marionette to Angular on Wednesday April 30, 2014 @04:09AM (#7672136)
It's hard for me to make more comments here. I don't know your tech background and also how much experience you have with frontend or any kind of frameworks.

Unfortunately, you rush to make conclusions. It's my first post on medium (others will come for sure), but why this have to be the first article posted, ever?

About the rewrite: you have x features in backbone. Then you rewrite all the x features in angular and you compare the results.

e.g. https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/09/dropbox-dives-into-coffeesc...

Dropbox rewrote its javascript in coffeescript and saw a LOC improvement. They had a code in js and rewrote it in coffee. We had it in backbone and rewrote it in angular. I'll probably provide more details (with code and so on) in next blog posts, but I wanted to keep this one shorter, because it's not about how we implemented it, but more about the conclusions we reached.

In the end, it doesn't matter how many LOC you have in a certain language, framework, etc. It's more about the productivity and the quality. It worked for us very well in both cases, and I think this is the final idea.

I'm sorry that you bring the discussion to a personal level, again. I'm open for suggestions and would like to make further articles "more relevant" and share better content. If you think you can help me with this and with one suggestion or two, please get in touch.

Have a nice day!

In angular you'd never need the line with className, so you'd end up with even less code, because of its declarative style.

A good reading when thinking that's necessary to bind dom elements, events, etc is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14994391/how-do-i-think-i...

If you're really interested in Avira and its products, it's up to you to take a look into this project from time to time and you may change your impression.

I added certain links in the article (e.g. http://www.funnyant.com/), where the features of all frameworks are discussed and compared. Read it and you may understand the advantages. I'm sorry that you don't consider that a community driven project, managed by top talent from Google is not a good enough reason to invest some time into a framework.

I explained how we achieved the results: we rewrote it. The facts are pretty relevant and they may help other teams.

I will craft toy examples in next articles, so it's best to follow me if you really are that interested and would like to see more examples.

You can find more about velocity here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_(software_development) .

I'm sorry that you brought it to a personal level in the end, this explains a lot. Instead, I hope you have a good day and don't forget to follow me to see how well I code :).

It's a tech post, not an avira commercial. Maybe it will help someone make a good decision when choosing a js framework, based on real experience and facts.

You can read more about the product here http://www.avira.com/en/avira-online-essentials

Please tell me more about the fallacies you see in the article.

I think that it may be simpler to learn than both angular and ember.

Unfortunately, given the fact that it's missing 2 way data binding and it's not declarative, you end up with lots of boilerplate code and in the end you invest more time in writing your backbone application than in learning angular and writing the application in it.

To be honest, I'd only start a new project in angular or ember because they are extremely productive frameworks. Backbone was great more than 2 years ago.

We rethought the backend API calls and made all of them in parallel. Also, the websocket - server connection is initialized sooner.

So, I'd say that this part could have also be done in backbone. It was also fast before, but we gained more than 1 second loading time with this refactoring.

Re:Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year on Thursday October 17, 2013 @01:32PM (#6566820)
Great post, really made me take a deeper look into the product.

I wasn't disturbed by the short video which explains most / all the features, but I can see the need of also having them as separate web pages (also useful for SEO).

My main concern is that there is no free version at all, even for smaller teams / startups (1-2 members) and I don't know if it's possible to import data from other customer support SAAS.

While I tend to a agree to a certain degree (e.g.: you may want/be allowed to take some days to work remotely on a quarterly basis), there's a reason they saw this principle isn't working and even called back the people from large companies, like Yahoo!. Best buy is another example (http://mashable.com/2013/03/05/best-buy-flexible-employees/). Many agencies still permit this, because they may lose some valuable work force, but most of these decisions were also taken for companies to (re)build a certain culture.

One of the main reasons is that it is hard to build a team / team cohesion if you don't physically interact with the other members. Also, motivation inside a team can be much higher. For newcomers, it's also the desire to work next to the best people from the company.

I'd like to see the tool (which is still TBD on the github link) where you can achieve most of these and have more gains than losses.

Re:How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours on Saturday August 11, 2012 @07:53AM (#4369919)
Ok, I'll work then at creating a documentation and adding some tests. The project was written in coffeescript and someone only needs to extend a class and implement 2 methods and a list of starting urls. Using node cluster and concurrent connections I think it can scale very well. I introduced promises (taken from Jquery Deffered) in case someone wanted the writing to DB to be synchronous.

IMO, using kue was a success because it also offers a web interface where you can check the progress and restart/check failed jobs.

Re:How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours on Saturday August 11, 2012 @07:37AM (#4369902)
Very true indeed. I was also randomly changing user-agents (Mozilla, Safari, Chrome, IE). I thought that this will be harder to tell whether there is a lot of traffic from the same network or someone is just intensively crawling the site.

For me, it was more a proof of how efficient and fast a crawler can be. Also, a response from IMDB was very fast in less than 0.4 seconds, so not that much time was lost there.

Re:How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours on Saturday August 11, 2012 @07:23AM (#4369883)
Yes, but it's hard to tell how complete and updated that subset is. There is (was until few weeks ago apparently) also http://www.imdbapi.com/ which was retrieving their data by crawling. Unfortunately, it was shut down.
Re:How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours on Friday August 10, 2012 @11:20PM (#4369309)
Not bad at all. I build just a few months ago (not publicly released even though I plan) a crawler using NodeJS to take advantage of its evented architecture. I managed to crawl and store (in mongo) more than 300k movies from IMDB in just a few hours (using only a laptop and 8 processes), creating many processes and every one having a specified number of concurrent connections (was based on nodejs cluster and kue lib by learnboost). For html parsing, I used jsdom or cheerio (faster but incomplete), but the process of extracting and storing the data was very faster (prob less than 10 ms for a page). Kue is similar to ruby's resque or python's pyres so the advantage was that every request was basically an independent job using redis as a pubsub.

Even though your implementation is a lot complex and very well documented, IMO using non blocking I/O it's a much better solution, because crawling is very intensive I/O and most of the time is spent with the connection (request + response time). Using that many machines and processes, the time should be much shorter with node.