Hacker News Reader

Oculuson LastPass: Security done wrong

I'm a big fan of 1Password.

Oculuson A Look inside Google’s Data Center Networks

Here's the talk itself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaAZAII2x0w

Oculuson Announcing Starfighter

Will the CTFs be security focused or more non-traditional, like Stripe's distributed systems CTF?

Oculuson Show HN: Vulcand – Proxy for microservices and API

Found this talk really interesting when looking to learn about Vulcand: http://youtu.be/VnsA9q9hKEY

Oculuson Why Is Google Blocking Inbox on Firefox?

I don't think the issue is as much with the clients as it is with the spam filtering Google provides. The sheer volume of emails they handle allows them to have the best spam filtering in the world. Something, that will be very difficult to duplicate through OSS.

Oculuson Ask HN: How do you deploy static JavaScript apps?

Github Pages has always been good enough for me.

Oculuson Dropbox is in your Office

This is very peculiar. From past Dropbox acquisitions, one can extrapolate they're almost certainly working on online collaboration tools. I wonder if Dropbox is using this as a way to gain footholds in large enterprise.

Oculuson Ask HN: What OSS projects need the most help with documentation?

Definitely doesn't need the most help, but there's been a call to action for helping write Rails docs for the 4.2 release: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/16576

Oculuson Swedish hacker finds 'serious' vulnerability in OS X Yosemite

forced to use that "Verified by" Visa and Mastercard

I'm super sketched out by the program as it appears to be run by a third party rather than Visa/Mastercard.

Oculuson Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup?

It's actually pretty easy once you realize that you have to pay for the licences on all Microsoft technologies once BizSpark ends. It gives just enough time to be too locked in to easily adopt a different technology stack.

Oculuson Latency numbers

Earlier in the summer I decided to create a phone background with these numbers so whenever I had free time I could work on memorizing them: https://twitter.com/EmilStolarsky/status/496298288325599233

Oculuson Khrushchev visits IBM

I've been told by family anecdotes that Pepsi & Coke were a prized possession in the USSR. Whenever they were able to acquire a bottle, you would never throw it out immediately after finishing, but rather refill it with water as there was still some residual taste.

Oculuson Ask HN: Why do you guys work so much?

I recently happened upon an interview of Elon Musk on his work ethics: http://youtu.be/4Fl9LRgG3_A

The main takeaway was work as hard as you can (i.e. 80 - 100 hour weeks). Even if you're doing the same thing as the competition (assuming they work 40 hours), you'll still accomplish in 4 months what they would in a year. Hard work, tenacity, and a little luck is what separates the smart from the brilliant.

Oculuson Show HN: VirtKick – Self-hosted Digital Ocean

I feel as though this is one step above just a web page with an email box. Aside from listing a suite of popular OSS, you haven't explained what this app does. Is it similar to Panamax in that it offers you a UI, but only for one box / Flynn or Deis which is trying to create an open source Heroku / something completely different?

Oculuson Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage (2010)

In later blog posts they discuss moving over to ext4 despite the 16TB size limit.

Oculuson Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage (2010)

I've seen their hard drive reliability blog posts, but I never knew they were so open about their storage server designs. I think it's really cool how open they are about something that is definitely a competitive advantage.

Oculuson Twitpic Data Will Stay Alive “For Now” Thanks to an Agreement with Twitter

Can someone explain to me why no one has scraped all the Twitpic photos and stored them?

Oculuson Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

I don't think they mean move to a place more affordable out side of SF, but move away from SF to another part of the country.

Oculuson Docker Development Patterns

From a sideline viewers perspective, persistence in production for Docker containers is a big problem that I've yet to see a good solution for. You end up having to keep DB servers and such outside of your container pool.

Oculuson Introducing Consul Template

My bad, I misspoke.

Oculuson Introducing Consul Template

Probably the biggest feature over Confd is the ability to run arbitrary commands when a template update completes.

Oculuson Ask HN: How, if at all, do you build infrastructure for side projects to scale?

This all depends on the goals of your side project. If the goal is something other then learning how to set up infrastructure, then deploy your app on Heroku. You get most of the difficult problems dealt with and only have to focus on a couple configurations. Yes, admittedly Heroku is pricey when you start to scale up, but keep in mind that your time isn't free and that you'd need a considerable amount of traffic before it makes sense to spend a lot of time on properly setting up your app to scale.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how properly design a web application to scale, I'd suggest to get a couple boxes on DO[1]. This[2] article describes the common design for 99% of applications on the web (The last 1% is reserved for companies that have achieved enough traffic to justify hiring their own ops team). Finally, I'd suggest you read through this[3] slide deck. It goes through the steps of scaling up your application from one server to a cluster of machines.

1 - https://www.digitalocean.com/

2 - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/5-common-se...

3 - https://speakerdeck.com/modulus/planning-for-the-horizontal-...

Oculuson Ask HN: Going from Redis to MySQL. Good idea?

Twitter probably runs the largest Redis cluster in the world[1]. It's certainly doable, but depends how much engineering resources you're willing to throw at the problem.

1 - http://youtu.be/rP9EKvWt0zo

Edit: I should point out that this was before Redis Clustering was built into core. I'm trying to say the problem is solvable, but difficult.

Oculuson Cursors

You have to love the game theory behind this. In order to get through the later levels you have to be a bit selfish and take the oppurtunity of going for the green square at other people's expense. The most interesting part is once you get to the last few levels where everyone is selfish. Makes for difficult times passing the level :)

Props to the dev for creating a simple game that is a huge amount of fun!

Oculuson W.H.O. Forecast for Ebola Worsens as Mortality Rate Rises

Dr. Paul Farmer discusses Ebola: http://youtu.be/lb11QbP3tOg

After listening to the talk, I'm not as worried as this article makes me. I certainly trust the source in the video better.

Oculuson The Eudyptula Challenge

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7435220

Oculuson Saeed Malekpour, programmer and political prisoner in Iran

I'm not a big follower of Middle Eastern politics, but my understanding is there's attempts by Iran's current government to put it's darker, more aggressive past behind it. A "friendly Iran" is a hard pill to swallow when we hear stories like this. I feel worst for the people of Iran who I doubt support the extremist nature of their government, but have to suffer the global consequences.

Oculuson A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey and Cassandra

By trading away C (Consistency), we’ve made a conscious decision to design our applications with eventual consistency in mind

How does one go about writing a user-facing application with eventual consistency?

Oculuson Ask HN: Which VPN Providers do you use/can you recommend?

I would second Private Internet Access. They have a shitty billing system (need to cancel your current account if you want to switch to a yearly plan), but it I've found it Just Works(TM). Really happy with their service.

Oculuson The 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong

Thank you, I came here to express the same disappointment with the article. People who attempt to discredit the 10,000 hour rule need to realize it describes a mindset more then anything else.