HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dedward

1,621 karma · joined February 21, 2010

submissionscomments
dedward··on Network Solutions' DNS was down
Have you thought about setting up with an external DNS monitoring service? It's cheap and really comes in handy over the years.
dedward··on Network Solutions' DNS was down
What's important is that you treat the DNS management aspect of your business as a proper thing to be managed by itself. Whether you host it yourself, or contract it out to a service that specifically does this for you is a matter of risk tolerance and budget.

A common setup is a private nameserver that you host yourself, wherever, that isn't publicly used. You then contract UltraDNS/Neustar or their brethren and set them up as your public servers, doing zone transfers from your private ones. You get the advantages of direct management of your zones, and the global scale infrastructure needed to largely eliminate nameserver issues.

dedward··on Network Solutions' DNS was down
You would.. but the business of being a registrar is bout managing zone records to be served out by the root/regional nameserver infrastructure, which your registrar may not even have much of a part in.

If they run additional business in hosting DNS, websites, email, and so on, as is common - that's really got nothing to do with the setup they need to act as a registrar.

dedward··on Network Solutions' DNS was down
To Rhizomes point: Yes, it's relatively easy to re-point them to somewhere else.. and if your business can tolerate the interruption that's fine.

Those changes, though, take time to cache out, and depending on your registrar's procedures and whatnot, you could be looking at hours or a couple of days to get things to stabilize back to normal; not to mention finding a new provider and getting things set up. You'll need ot make sure you have the zone data on hand ready to get set up with a new provider, and so on. You could have a procedure in place to do this, sure, with everything tested and validated, but at that point it's much easier to just have a DNS provider of the proper class who can handle these things for you. And keep in mind, if it's your domain they are trying to shut down, and not your DNS provider specifically, the attack will very likely just follow the change, leaving you in quite a mess.

So the short answer: self-host if it's not revenue impacting. If there is money at stake, spend a little bit for a top-notch provider.

dedward··on Network Solutions' DNS was down
One aspect of Network Solutions business is managing some of the root zones. Those are the servers that ultimately tell the internet what other servers to go look at to resolve queries. These are the "root" nameservers. So while Network Solutions is in charge of the root zones themselves, and does run a bunch of root nameservers, there are other root nameservers run by Various organizations and collectively they can handle a massive amount of work. That is not what is being attacked. If somone DID successfully DDOS a large enough portion of the root nameserver infrastructure, the internet would largely grind to a halt. It is designed suitably sized, and run by large enough players that this is not likely.

The DNS service that is being attacked is the one they offer end users, usually along with domain registration. There is no particular reason you need to use their services when registering a domain with them, although, like most rigistrars, their website will make this deliberately confusing, and may require you to use their DNS service if you also want to use some of their other value-added services along with your registration (like email forwarding, websites, stuff like that).

Unless you are using other services from NetSol that require you to use their DNS, you are free to use whatever DNS infrastructure you like, including your own.

(If DDOS is a business concern, I'd go with someone big who deliberately does just DNS.. Neustar or one of those)

dedward··on Snowden Is Said to Renew Plea for Asylum in Russia
He's a technologist; if he's allowed to work, there is obviously work.
dedward··on ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find
is there any scientific evidence for "cleanses" at all? Because the word "cleanse" sets off my BS detector like crazy.
dedward··on If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does? (2012)
Right.. but when you find correlation, you just see that two things are obviously related in some way - there is a common factor. It could be direct causation, or it could be any number of other things. The question is whether or not you have a theory that can be analyzed to see if this is a CAUSE or not... and we can't test every correlated thing out there exhaustively.
dedward··on Why is nobody using SSL client certificates?
Short answer: it's a pain in the butt.
dedward··on Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship
He was repeating every small phrase three times though, it was hard to tell if it was automated or habit.
dedward··on Eve-Online player loses a $9000 digital spaceship
It's not closely tied to real money; not by design. That's a side effect, due to the relative stability of the in-game currency, and the ability to convert in-game currency into in-game stuff, and the number of players. This creates a real-world demand for in-game stuff, and bingo, you have a market.
dedward··on Movie Subtitle Fansite Raided By Copyright Industry And Police
I partially understand it, but I can't accept it as long as I'm unable to get the media I want with the subtitles I want. I'm perfectly willing to pay, but all too often I simply can't.
dedward··on Ask HN: How does one create a fake identity?
Sure it's valid.. and in the US, if I'm not mistaken, it's expressly legal to call yourself whatever you want - as long as you aren't doing so to commit a crime.

So during day to day business and life, you can call yourself whatever you want. Others can insist on identification if it's important to them, and that gets trickier.. but using a pen-name on a book or a hotel reservation is no different than using a fake name at starbucks while waiting for your coffee.

Forging documents is of course illegal, so that puts a crimp on things - but there is no particular reason that you are required to use your "real" name except when dealing with government documents (and things that rely on them)

dedward··on The Making of Dwarf Fortress (2012)
You really should give it a shot.

What surprised me was this.

After using a quickstart toturial or two and diving right in, I was all happy that my dwarves had started doing, well, something, and I was getting used to it. I started collecting some materials, as the tutorial said, and I dug some stuff, as the tutorial said. Then I noticed the water in the map seemed ot have changed colour, and the ground, in all it's pixellated ascii glory, appeared whiter than it used to. "could it be winter, are there seasons?" I googled, letting the dwarves work. Yes, there was winter. Water froze. When I eventually got back to my game, there was a food shortage, and much worse, we ran out of liqour. We also had no water. The dwarves stopped working. Investigating their stats, they were rather angry about the situation. Eventually one, then two, went berzerk and killed their fellow dwarves in a rampage. I tried my best to guide them to gather some foliage so we could make some booze and get things back on track.. but I was too late. By spring, everyone was dead.

The next time.. I made it through winter, but not the next... overpopulation got me. With the immigrants that keep showing up, I had more and more dwarves, and I didn't know how to manage it. Hilarity ensued.. from a kobold thief stealing babies to animals mating in the bedroom to checking on the dining area to find a horse sitting at the table with a bunch of partying dwarves.

Eventually I made it a few seasons... only to be raided by goblins. I had no militia, I hadn't figured that part out yet. I hadn't needed it. Everyone died.

And so it goes...

The awesome part, and I think a critical thing most players who like the game clue in to, is that it's always like this. You won't get to a feeling of mastery where you can just hone your skills like most games. You'll always be analyzing what you see, looking stuff up, talking with others, and resolving yourself to try a new strategy next time - imagination really pays off here. There are always hippos in the sewers, or cats breeding out of control, or ant-people that want to eat you, or a berzerk dwarf baby killing his family, or some monster from down deep getting up your stairwell and terrorizing your fortress, or a magma accident, or a dwarf who decides to lock himself in a workshop, depriving you of that shop abilities while he spends his sweet time making stuff. There's dwarves that promte themselves to nobles and demand stuff, and they generally need to be dealt with. Usually by death. Dwarves must be sacrificed on on occasion for the good of the fortress.

My point, I guess, is that the funny/sad/epic stories you read about aren't really embellished much - the game actually provides you with that level of detail... even early-on. Your imagination fills in the blanks.. but there aren't many blanks.

dedward··on Inside An Illegal Party In An Abandoned Subway Station Deep Under NYC
Did I read wrong, or was he not invited to cover the event?
dedward··on Edward Snowden whereabouts unknown as US presses Russia
I think you'd find the international security area at the airport is still sovereign soil; the country just, for obvious practical reasons, doesn't insist on people going through immigration and customs in order to transit through.
dedward··on Live stream of Japanese deep submergence vehicle's 5,000 meter dive [video]
I can't help but see this like going to space... except more dangerous.

We don't have to worry about the rocket fuel.. but those guys are in that tiny little space with the sub holding back 500 atmospheres of pressure outside. Holding in less than 1 atmosphere in a space-ship is easy. Holding back 5 kilometers of water sitting on top of you is hard.

dedward··on ᐊᑕᓇᕐᔪᐊᑦ (ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ)
So... with the utmost respect, how cool is it that the glyphs for Inuktitut (if that's what those are) look just like some kind of awesome sci-fi writing.)
dedward··on NSA: Please Stop Mailing Us FOIA Requests
So.. they said please, didn't threaten you, and pointed out a few potential problems with the method you are using (like missing return addresses).

That seems.. helpful?

dedward··on Help HN: How do I stop my start-up from being bullied?
So.. am I missing something here?

You are a new startup. You are operating a closely related product to a large power player in the same business by choosing a nearly identical name. Now you are suggesting their data is so important to you that you are going to technically circumvent their block, potentially adding more legal liability, and use their service anyway? And calling them "assholes" in a public forum forum?

Does that seem at all sustainable to you?

dedward··on To all freelancers out there: 8 ways to an easy life
Was that mainly a plug for "Rebtel"?

I mean - is figuring out how to talk to a client over the phone somehow a stumbling block these days? Everyone has a phone, right? It's still an essential thing.

And if you mainly use Skype, you can just call with skype anyway... why would you go setting up some other weird phone service?

dedward··on Containers, Not Virtual Machines, Are the Future Cloud
It is silly - it's apples and oranges.

We will still need virtual machines for different operating systems, different versions of the same OS, multiple instances to span multiple VM hosts for scaling/redundancy, and so on.

Containers will cut down on the number of VMs we have to deploy within an organisation, nominally... it will be a more effective way to manage resources. VMs won't go away, or even be diminished.

dedward··on Containers, Not Virtual Machines, Are the Future Cloud
I don't see VMs and Containers at odds.

Virtual Machines let us abstract away our hardware resources. They also made deploying new instances much easier than it was previously, so we started using more instances than we would ahve without it, just to provide configuration and resource separation.

The first part is still necessary - and we still need multiple instances to take advantage of multiple VM hosts when it comes to scaling and redundancy. The second part is what containers address.

I have a feeling we will end up mixing and matching the two as appropriate.

dedward··on Amazon’s Invasion of the CIA Is a Seismic Shift in Cloud Computing
Is it a seismic shift, or just an example of a very large operator contracting another very large operator with experience in the field to do something right the first time?
dedward··on Buying the new MacBook Air
I stuck an intel SSD in my 2011 mbp, as well as 16gb of ram (it was really really cheap..).

I disabled the pagefile completely, and things are as snappy as ever - I can't think of an application I use that would use up so much ram that I need to page to disk.

dedward··on Apartable pulls back curtain on landlords' management histories
I don't understand the last line in the article:

"Would you be comfortable with having a landlord’s management history posted on your listing?"

If we are talking about rental listings... if it's my listing, am I not the landlord?

dedward··on India to send last telegram
I find the legal stuff mentioned in the article of interest - that a telegram is taken seriously by the judiciary - as if it were given in person.

This is potentially huge.

I suppose there is room for a service that notarizes (something like that, no offense meant to notaries!) messages before sending them in an otherwise very casual fashion, as well as records receipt in a somewhat official way could take it's place. There is still probably room for such a thing/

dedward··on Automating Card Games Using OpenCV and Python
It's been done, albeit a bit simpler, to cheat/assist in collusion in online poker.

You don't have an API (for obvious reasons) into the poker clients, so you have software that basically reads the screen as an image and works the keyboard/mouse.... the more sophisticated ones do it in a VM to avoid detection (some poker software actively scans your machine for known bot software or other tampering)

dedward··on Surviving under water in an air bubble
One would imagine that any escape procedure from a submarine involves some type of airlock and some type of air breathed in at the pressure for whatever depth you are at.. otherwise you'd just be unconscious from the pain instantly.
dedward··on Surviving under water in an air bubble
Nope - the impulse to exhale comes from carbon-dioxide levels, not pressure in the lungs.

You'll go from feeling fine to acute pain to very dangerous damage pretty much momentarily.

← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →