requinot59

No, it's not, and international visibility is obviously a good thing! But there is a problem if a PhD is published only in english, because then there might be French citizens who will not be able to read a work they paid for (remember, the public education system is funded by the taxpayers-citizens). Since most people yelling about the "language restriction" problem actually imply that they should be able to publish in english only, I did recall that this would be unconstitutional in France. Additionally publishing in english has never been forbidden or discouraged!

> I do sometimes feel sympathy for those that I talk to who realize this and (rightfully) blame the system for their lowered chances at international success.

This system is the application of the law. The French law is the consensus of all the French citizens on the way they want to live all together. If you, individually, don't like the law, you can militate for a change (possible since France is a democracy), or leave the country, if you really can't live with this general consensus. Dura lex sed lex.

In this specific case, you can also just go to a private school which will let you write in english or whatever. Sure, you'll have to pay there; sorry, you can't have the free public education with no duties in return in France.

Ideologically speaking, the French education system is very egalitarian and very meritocratic. Lots of people don't agree with it (the majority still does). That's why the private schools were allowed (after a violent public debate). But it's a chosen, working and interesting system. Yes, you can "rightfully blame the system", in the sense that you have the right to disagree, but otherwise it's not any more "rightful" to blame it than to blame any other working system (e.g: the US one). It's just a different conception of education and its place in the society.

« La langue de la République est le français. » ("The language of the Republic is French"), first sentence of the second article of the French Republic Constitution (see http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITE...).

Since universities are public, so republican, schools, it makes sense to make them apply and respect the constitution.

The idea is that any French citizen is able to have access, read and understand any published university thesis (PhD), since they paid for them (via taxes). In the same vein, students of the École Polytechnique are required to work 5 years for the State after their studies, since the State paid such a good formation to them.

French can always go to private school (or emigrate) if they don't agree with that.

Wtf?! To create static pages, I open Emacs and type there. No need of a CMS or Wordpress to create an HTML page!

Then to host it:

  scp page.html [email protected]:~/public_html/

Hosting a website on S3 is nice, but it's not simpler than what is already possible if you own a server. If you don't already own one, I'm not sure setting up an AWS account + client code is easier than creating a new VPS account. I surely would prefer to set up a Linux VPS, which is an environment I'm confortable with.

Regarding the costs, I rent one private (not virtual) server for 20 euros/month, and host several (static and dynamic) sites on it, so it's actually cheaper than going the AWS road. Uptime last time I logged: 560 days (aka reliable enough for me).

Keeping a swap partition in a 2011 computer is 1. a waste of disk space, 2. an unecessary matter of worries (2-1. may leak some infos, even if your other partitions are encrypted, if your computer is stolen, 2-2. a source of potential bugs).

Don't listen the parrots that repeat something that ceases to be true at least 10 years ago. Swap used to be a useful hack, it is not anymore.

> as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process

Well said ;-)

And you're smart to do so. Swap is useless for 99% of end-user systems. ChromeOS doesn't use any swap partition, for instance.

As for hibernation, it's not available if you use a crypted swap, which is wise to use (at least on a laptop).

As a result, I, too, disabled swap completely.

HN is not the small and unfamous news site it was 2 years ago anymore.

It's a fallacious argument in my book. Like comparing apples and oranges.

Say I run a bakery. What I care the most about is the quality of my bread. So much, I spend all my time working on that and only that. So much, I didn't ever bother to have a lock at the door. But it's not even a big deal if someone comes in and poisons one of the bread, as long as the overall quality is increasing!

> SSL is a giant waste of time for Hacker News

Yes, if by "giant" you mean that it takes like 2 hours to set-up, and a small payload for each negociation. But concerning the payload, Arc is not especially fast, so there is room for improvements there to compensate, if needed.

> modulo the fact that people might be crazy enough to use a shared password here.

Not the point, the point is HTTP sniffing.

And anyway, people could use a shared password, making it easier for them (don't overestimate human memory), if HN used (HTTPS and) a "real" password encryption scheme (bcrypt or the like). Why put the burden on the user when you can put it on the computer?

I do care about identity usurpation.

Passwords and cookies in clear HTTP are no good. Anyone here (should) knows it. Firesheep proves it. GMail and Zuckerberg suffered it.

Just buy or get a free SSL certificate, and let nginx or stunnel handles SSL and proxies HTTP to/from Arc. Total cost, being pessimistic: 150$ for the certificate verification, and 2 hours to set-up the certs & nginx.

I know, it's awesome, it's a custom Arc webserver and all, and good practices are for PHBs only, but still. For a "hacker" website, news.ycombinator.com is a shame regarding to privacy/security (see also: passwords stored as shasums (without even a salt), funny things like <img src="http://news.ycombinator.com/logout>, outdated versions of software used [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122], etc.)

Well, not as much as Haskell : "Haskell is pretty ideal but I’m not smart enough to hack the GHC. Lua is less ideal but a lovely language [...]" (at the beginning of the 2nd answer.)

> He regrets using the CommonJS module system

Yes, and this is pretty interesting. Also, he regrets using WAF as the build system ("it introduces more WTFs than necessary".)

I have a great respect for Ryan Dahl. He is not orthodox. He is not a blind parrot.

The complexity and bloat is having Chrome, Firefox, Opera copying DNS cache features and not gathering their knowledge together in this area.

Here on FF 3.6 on a 1280x1024 display, some of the labels are truncated...

I agree that prefetching however can't be done by a DNS cache program.

Yeah and in my nieztschean perspective I don't especially want others to be empowered.

Either you have to work hard to beat them, either your competitors are weak enough. Ideally: both.

"Another sort of abuse is comedy periodic tables: periodic tables of the vegetables, period table of the desserts, periodic table of the presidents, and on and on. There are zillions of them. I believe the vegetables one was the first widely distributed example.

What's wrong with them? Again, they miss the point about the one true periodic table, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. In fact, to put things with no structure into a periodic table not only misses the point of the periodic table, it misses the profound idea that some things have periods."

Where does he try to "punish" him?!

Plus it's a real legal concern, sure in practice cperciva will not sue him, but still...