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alexkon

732 karma · joined February 18, 2008

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alexkon··on Ask HN: Why does P2P encrypted messaging still suck?
The Ars Technica article on their lawsuit against Apple [1] said they advertised a product on their website but received zero revenue from that product and seemingly didn't have any engineers working on it.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/full-scale-of-ap...

Edit: Added the link.

alexkon··on Cryptographic Right Answers
Which of those answers are going to hold up in the post-quantum world?
alexkon··on Backblaze Announces B2 Compute Partnerships
Perhaps somewhere close to AMS-IX? For me, that would be network latency to non-US customers.
alexkon··on OVH CEO: Unlike Amazon, Google, “we will never be in competition with you”
Can you elaborate on Fastly exposing the origin servers to DDoS? Is there a link to learn more about that?
alexkon··on Startup School 12: Alan Kay, Part II [video]
Okay, let’s wake up and dream away. What kind of distant future would you like to be part of?
alexkon··on Alan Kay at Startup School [video]
Can anyone clarify the baseball analogy about errors? (It’s at 38:00.) I’m a bit confused.
alexkon··on Google Cloud Platform Launches Northern Virginia Region
Is Google’s us-east-1 unreliable? Would you mind to share any details?
alexkon··on Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp
Why did they avoid any media attention?
alexkon··on Njalla – A privacy-aware domain registration service
Their scheme protects the identity of the real domain owner, not necessarily the domain itself. They imply that the law enforcement wouldn’t be able to find the real owner and bring them to court.
alexkon··on Ask HN: Review my startup
How do you grow your local user base in your town?
alexkon··on On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat
How often do messages get deleted?
alexkon··on Will Spotify go public without an IPO?
What if instead of a blind auction, a company conducts an open Dutch auction? That is, everyone can see the amount of stock sold so far and the price of each transaction (the buyers may remain anonymous). The prices different buyers pay are not necessarily the same: the first buyer pays the highest price, the late buyers pay less but risk having nothing at all if they wait too long. In an open auction, bidding too high just causes the buyer to lose some money.
alexkon··on Will Spotify go public without an IPO?
A noob question: Why don’t companies just bypass the underwriters and offer their stock for sale using a Dutch auction, where the price starts very high and gradually decreases until the most optimistic investors decide to buy? That way, the company always sells at the highest price the market is ready to offer.
alexkon··on How to explain to a layperson why a developer should not be interrupted? (2011)
Here’s another take on this: http://alexthunder.livejournal.com/309815.html
alexkon··on Virtual machine escape fetches $100k at Pwn2Own hacking contest
Does escrow really work with secrets like this? The buyer receives the exploit and claims it doesn’t work. The seller claims it does. The money is still in escrow. How do you proceed? The escrow agent is getting a commission, they should not have access to the full secret. It’s really hard to find an escrow agent who has the skills to assess an exploit and whom both the buyer and the seller would trust not to leak it or use it for their own benefit.
alexkon··on A million-dollar engineering problem
How do you approach a horrifying AWS bill? Can you recommend any reading? I’m going to need to optimize a tiny fleet on GCE pretty soon.
alexkon··on Starting a real business
It looks like this PDF is the Orrick Legal Guide that is available to Stripe Atlas members: https://stripe.com/files/atlas/orrick-legal-guide.pdf.
alexkon··on Thngs – a place for every thing
Please fix the footer when you are at it. It keeps jumping away from my mouse cursor as new items at the bottom of the page are loading.
alexkon··on Instruction latencies, throughputs, μop breakdowns for Intel, AMD and VIA CPUs [pdf]
This is the fourth part of a comprehensive work by Agner Fog, which contains tons of materials on optimizing C++ and assembly code on the x86 architecture and on the inner workings of processors from Pentium to Skylake.
alexkon··on Composing Programs – Python 3 in the tradition of SICP
Has anyone read this book? What’s your experience? Would it make an approachable introduction to programming for a complete newbie?
alexkon··on Fotorama, a responsive JavaScript photo gallery
The feature I like the most because it is usually missing from other galleries I encounter on the web is the ability to slide with your mouse to advance to the next picture.
alexkon··on Google App Engine Python 2.7 trusted tester sign-up form
Once accepted, you will be given a link to the documentation page. [1] The new Python 2.7 runtime will be released by December 1, 2011. [2] See also the original post in the group. [3]

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/gaepython27testing/

[2] https://plus.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/AA3sBWG9...

[3] https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-python/brow...

alexkon··on Ask HN: Scale of real-life DDoS attacks?
I have collected some reports on DDoS sizes here: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=6...
alexkon··on Python and Django on Heroku
App Engine announced they will release a Python 2.7 runtime in several months. It's currently in their trusted tester program.
alexkon··on Building Software Systems at Google (PDF slides by Jeff Dean)
The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulBalk7Od-Q
alexkon··on Nginx doesn't suck at SSL after all
If you are exploring and testing SSL, the SSL Labs tools come in handy. For instance, see what Gmail and Github are doing:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/analyze.html?d=mail.google.com

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/analyze.html?d=github.com

alexkon··on Hacked Gmail Account
I'd be happy to use two-step verification if I could. I've been regularly attempting to enable it since it was announced. Gmail refuses to accept any of my phone numbers because the country where I live (Kazakhstan) is not supported. Tried three major mobile operators to no avail.
alexkon··on UTF-8: Bits, Bytes, and Benefits
What do you suggest instead? UTF-32?
alexkon··on Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach
See also previous discussion of the third article in the series: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184563
alexkon··on Engineering a Safer World, a book by Nancy Leveson [pdf]
This is a final draft of the book. To be published by MIT Press around fall 2011.

Related papers: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/safer-world/index.html

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