Hacker News Reader

Wilyaon Atlantic.net launches $0.99 SSD-based VPS servers

I suppose that's because in they end, they want to allocate all the RAM, CPU, and network link available on each physical host. If a host has a 1Gb uplink, 32 cores and 256GB of RAM, and someone takes 1Gb bandwidth, 1 cores and 1GB of RAM, all the other cores can't be sold any more. It's easier for them to just split each host server in n VMs than to do some fancy stuff to try to maximize allocation.

That being said, some providers let you tweak everything independently. I know Gandi does [1], there are probably others.

(I don't use them, no idea what their cloud service is worth, I'm just showing the sliders)

[1] https://www.gandi.net/hosting/iaas/buy

Wilyaon Shell Shock Exploitation Vectors

I wish the official OpenVPN howto [0] highlighted this sort of things a bit more.

As it is, it provides a clear and easy to follow path to a minimally viable setup, but only mentions many additional security parameters (tls-auth, running as unpriviledged user, chroot, increasing key size) under "Hardening OpenVPN Security", very far down the page, where people probably miss it. And this, even though some of these elements vastly increase the security with little to no downside.

[0] https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howt...

Wilyaon Has LinkedIn lost control of its user email database?

Yes. I have an address which I'm sure hasn't been used for anything except registering on Tumblr, and it started receiving spam about two months ago.

Wilyaon CVE-2014-7169: Bash Fix Incomplete, Still Exploitable

Hum. Strange. I just tested with clean Ubuntu EC2 instances, and they are indeed symlinking /bin/sh to dash.

Either I have a part of my standard stack that reverts it to bash (but I have no idea what could be doing that), or it could be my provider (OVH) doing that by default when they install Ubuntu.

Oh well, sorry for the noise.

Wilyaon CVE-2014-7169: Bash Fix Incomplete, Still Exploitable

All my Ubuntu 14.04 systems have /bin/sh symlinked to bash, not dash. I'm seeing articles on the net about Ubuntu switching to dash, but as far as I can tell, it either was reverted, or never happened.

Wilyaon The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

Apart from the external-facing proxy (which is the most exposed link in this setup), these VMs don't need any sort of public presence. Unless the provider inspects processes running on all their customers machines, all they can see is a VM with opaque VPN connections to a few external ips.

Wilyaon HPN-SSH: High Performance ssh and scp

I don't think mosh-type scenarios are what HPN-SSH aims to improve. It is more targeted at high-bandwidth, high-latency scp transfers.

(say, 300Mb+ connections with 30ms+ latency)

Wilyaon Twitpic is shutting down

The upload functionality seems broken right now. The site says my upload went fine, but I can't see the photo.

Are their image file servers getting hammered? Weird.

Wilyaon The State of NAT Traversal

Even if I don't have a firewall, pretty much any competent ISP will configure its switches to drop any packet pointing to/from something that looks like private IP address space. Not to mention they wouldn't route it to me anyway.

So even if I don't have a firewall, you would probably need to physically plug yourself directly on the WAN port of my NAT box for your static route to work.

Not to say the firewall is useless, but even by itself, the combination NAT + private IP space prevents a lot of attacks. That's very different from what happens when you have no NAT and no firewall, where you are basically reachable by any kid on the other side of the earth.

Wilyaon The State of NAT Traversal

Of course you can do without a NAT. But the NAT has the advantage to make the firewall rules trivial to write.

Put "DROP all packets with destination 192.168.0.0/16 coming from the external interface", and a few other boilerplate rules of the same kind, and poof: you just secured 99.9% of the NAT-ed networks. No configuration required.

To do the same without a NAT, you need at the very least to adapt the rules to the IP addresses of the machines behind the firewall, which add complexity and increase the likelihood someone will screw up the configuration.

And, hu, please don't open ports by default. That's just a recipe for disaster. If apps really want to open a globally accessible port, make them explicitly signal that to the firewall so it opens access.

Wilyaon A Driving School in France Hits a Wall of Regulations

As far I can tell, though it's not said explicitly in the linked article, you still have to justify that you have driven 20 hours in a car with dual-command (which will cost you 15-20€/hour to rent). That might be better than going through a driving school, but that's definitely not as cheap as the US.

Wilyaon In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty

That doesn't explain why Uber is more about sharing than taxi companies, nor why Airbnb is more about sharing than the old way of renting your flat.

Wilyaon Gif.js – JavaScript GIF encoding library

Gifs work everywhere. They're heavy, but support is pretty much guaranteed. That's still not the case for webm.

Wilyaon HTTPS as a ranking signal

Out of the box, requests on Python2.7 doesn't support SNI.

It is documented, and all you have to do is install additional packages to enable it, but still, that's not automatic.

Wilyaon New AWS region coming soon: eu-central-1

Dude, chill out. I don't see how the fact that these providers don't target your specific needs imply that they need to be driven out of business.

I use both AWS and Hetzner. Both have very different offerings aimed at different use cases. AWS gives you simplicity, but everything is crazy expensive. Hetzner and friends give you much more powerful hardware, but you have to setup things yourself.

Wilyaon The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

I also get this behaviour all the time, and I have no idea how it could improve the quality of my search results.

Yes, if I search for "Windows 7 NAT", dropping the NAT keyword returns more results. But none of them will give me the information I'm looking for.

Wilyaon Twilight Princess Eyes Breakdown

The article mentions using 3D Ripper DX [0].

What I would guess from the homepage is that it hooks itself somewhere in the DirectX stack, and is able to extract the model from there. It probably monitors DirectX calls and pulls the data about the geometry, textures, etc from there. If it does that, it avoids the data format issue since it only has to understand the native DirectX API calls and memory structures.

[0] http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm

Wilyaon The Myth of the Full-stack Developer

Well, "Just do it" isn't "Do it the right way".

Learning just enough of a language or a framework to patch up a solution to a specific problem doesn't take very long. It takes a bit of experience, but it doesn't take a mythical hyper-productive hacker. The solution might not be pretty, and it probably won't scale to millions of users or stay solid for decades, but it will solve the problem. And in many cases, it's all that matters.

Wilyaon Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

About cleanliness, taxis and rental cars are clean because there is someone there to clean it between each customer. That doesn't work for carsharing, where cars go directly from a customer to the next.

My experience with these systems is that you don't find anything really dirty in the cars, but you tend to find empty bottles and things like that in them. Not a deal breaker if you just want to get somewhere, but not very family-friendly either.

Wilyaon Twitter to Release All Tweets to Scientists

Depends how much metadata there is with every tweet.

I took a random tweet on my timeline, and the JSON representation, with added metadata, weighs 8740 bytes.

With this figure, you would "only" need 500 tweets/sec to get 400GB a day.

There's a lot of people on Twitter, and a lot of bots, so that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Wilyaon Great miscalculations: The French railway error and others

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/262ymz/france_mis...

I had higher expectations from the BBC.

Wilyaon YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streaming Service Twitch for $1 Billion?

I'd guess because nobody has ever heard of Kamcord and you look like a guy trying to plug his company (not saying that's what you are, it's just what it looks like).

Wilyaon Australis Performance Post-mortem Part 4: On Tab Animation

Yes. It measures the time taken to open a new tab, in various configurations. [0]

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/Talos/Tests#TART.2FCART

Wilyaon Syncthing: Open Source Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync Replacement

That looks like a promising project in a space which definitely needs improvement. Owncloud and Sparkleshare are okay, but they are far from perfect, and there is large room for improvement.

Wilyaon Teen Arrested for 30+ Swattings, Bomb Threats

My guess would be that it doesn't matter. The relevant text seems to be [0], and it focuses on the act of publishing, not on who does it.

Being a victim doesn't give you any particular rights to publish this information. But the law says nothing about merely telling it to all your friends. And if you're walking the line between these two, it's probably better to talk to a lawyer before speaking.

[0] http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/Y-1.5/page-45.html#h...

Wilyaon Teen Arrested for 30+ Swattings, Bomb Threats

Whether he is a nice kid or an asshole has nothing to do with how laws against revealing his identity apply.

Wilyaon Searching 20 GB/sec: Systems Engineering Before Algorithms

300GB of ram might cost $3000/month on AWS. There are a few dedicated server providers that offer 384GB or even 512GB configs for less than 1000$/month.

Wilyaon Ask HN: What do you use to organize your knowledge?

Plain text files in a synced directory (I use sparkleshare, but any dropbox-like system will do the trick).

I tried many, cloud apps, desktop apps, wikis. But in the end, I was never comfortable with putting all my thoughts in documents in a weird format (at best) or in the cloud (at worst). And most apps didn't offer any huge advantage to compensate for that.

I have backups of my notes folder. I can grep through it when I'm looking for something. I can edit it from any computer. And I know it will still be readable in 10 years.

Wilyaon Chromebooks on Fire

If you categorize all desktop apps ever made as "legacy", sure, it's hard to see why people wouldn't use a Chromebook.

On the other hand, non-technical users are happily torrenting shows and movies, playing 3D-intensive games on Steam, making somewhat decent-looking documents with Word, making gifs with a pirate copy of Photoshop, etc.

A Chromebook offers (generally inferior) alternatives for some of these tasks, but not even all of them.

Wilyaon A command-line power tool for Twitter

Unless you plan to open 10K connections to twitter, for a small utility like that, it hardly matters.