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Poll: Unknown or expired link on YC

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: Poll: Unknown or expired link on YC

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they take up ram on the server. 20 minutes is standard session timeout for most session based web frameworks.

I wonder - would it be technically feasible to page the continuations out to temporary files on the server? Kind of like cookies, but on the server instead of the client!

Technically possible. There are a few Scheme implementations that have persistent continuation (all I know is JVM based ones). Also this page contains a link to the slides that talks about persistent delimited continuation in OCaml: http://logic.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/Continuation/program.html

Making continuations serializable may cost its implementation, so whether it scales well for yc.news is anothoer question. I don't know the answer for it.

Re: Poll: Unknown or expired link on YC

#25
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that's what pg's said it is. Personally, that's way too short, as I'll leave threads open for half a day without reading it, then can't comment. I don't see any fundamental reason why continuations have to expire so fast.

Because they take up ram on the server. 20 minutes is standard session timeout for most session based web frameworks.

Reason enough not to use a 'session based web framework'.

If PHP can do it...

Re: Poll: Unknown or expired link on YC

#26
Voted for #1.

Maybe a heretical opinion, but why use continuations here at all? Their drawbacks aren't worth it in a simple app like news.yc. Use URL parameters, like /news?skip=30 for paging. Make the "reply" link lead to /item?id=12345 , it already has a reply box.

In my own apps I give a lot of thought to URL design. And yeah, don't explain, I do know about closure/cont-based web frameworks - used to be a contributor to Borges back in the day, then wrote my own one ;-)

Re: Poll: Unknown or expired link on YC

#30
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder - would it be technically feasible to page the continuations out to temporary files on the server? Kind of like cookies, but on the server instead of the client!

Technically possible. There are a few Scheme implementations that have persistent continuation (all I know is JVM based ones). Also this page contains a link to the slides that talks about persistent delimited continuation in OCaml: http://logic.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/Continuation/program.html Making continuations serializable may cost its implementation, so whether it scales well for yc.news is anothoer question. I don't…

In lua at least, continuations have a 1k stack overhead in memory per continuation. I believe they are serializable as well... I'll have to double-check that. At 1k+ a pop they're not cheap, but are manageable.

Having my tabs open last for a couple of days instead of 30 minutes would make the site more pleasant for me.

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