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by olalonde 3560 days ago
> Due to their unique requirements [...] This is both plausible

I'm skeptical that Github's load balancing requirements are that different from any of the other large file hosts and SaaS companies. But it's possible and I'm not in a position to tell. That being said, the "NIH syndrome" is a largely overlooked problem in our industry and I think it's reasonable to raise concerns over new projects that may be reinventing the wheel.
1 comments
positr0n 3560 days ago
Some of the requirements they list are pretty unique to github since they serve .git to git clients as well as http to http clients (which is what most SaaS companies do). Like a very long running git clone from someone with slow internet not having its connection dropped.
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sitkack 3559 days ago
As person who has used github on totally lousy connections in remote parts of the world, it faired far better than most Isomorphic web apps. People in Nepal can use github to actually get work done. Most current generation web apps won't even load.
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contingencies 3559 days ago
I second this from China. Apple Appstore based OSX updates are literally impossible here. Annoyingly, they are required to upgrade Xcode.
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sitkack 3559 days ago
One technique I used is to download updates directly via

    wget -c --limit-rate=200K http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1833/en_US/osxupd10.10.5.dmg
-c resumes download where left off, the rate limiting can be used to match the speed of your connection or intermediaries reducing stalls, drops and angry network users. I would often keep a list of URLs in `download-queue.txt` and use the above flags with -i to load the list of urls, letting it run overnight at some much lower speed.
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contingencies 3559 days ago
A download manager would be fine if there was a non-opaque method of determining the download address, and they actually let you do that (I know the developer site for instance uses some combination of cookies/referrers to limit external access to binaries presented for download).
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sitkack 3559 days ago
I haven't tested this specifically, but I did something similar

https://gist.github.com/dbr/294151

extracting cookies out of Safari so I could download developer binaries from apple.

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