Hacker News Reader

dineshp2on CloudFlare, SSL and unhealthy security absolutism

The fact that all traffic is decrypted at their servers makes possible caching optimizations (what most users care about) and inject content,headers. This is the best example of the centralization of the internet.

Does anyone know what Cloudflare's response was regarding them treating Tor traffic suspiciously by putting up never ending captchas?

dineshp2on Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?

> That page argues against your point, even the basic plan does quite a bit to fend of DDOS. In particular, the most common and effective type of DDOS, which is volumetric and based on reflected UDP traffic, is defended against, even on their free tier.

Maybe I'm missing something here, where does it mention that the free plan protects against UDP floods?

> Using a tool like Siege to bring a site behind Cloudflare down doesn't mean it's not protected. A layer 7 attack against a site which can't handle incoming HTTP requests is still possible.

Flooding a site using Siege from a single IP falls under the layer 7 attack (correct me if I'm wrong), which is protected against in the Business plan.

> Cloudflare, or any other service, can't magically make a site scale.

Where did I mention that I expect Cloudflare to magically scale a site? A POST or GET flood falls under layer 7 protection, which Cloudflare offers in paid plans.

If it was not clear, the point was that layer 7 protection is offered in the paid plans(Business and Enterprise), but not in the free plan.

dineshp2on Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?

Could you elaborate? Which plan are you on? What was the size of the DDoS attack?

dineshp2on Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?

Tangential, but how do you find OVH? Their hardware, bandwidth, uptime, customer service? I ask because of the conflicting reviews of OVH that a quick google search reveals.

dineshp2on Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

Look at the "Advanced security" section.

I also used Siege to flood a site behind Cloudflare's free plan and brought it down.

dineshp2on Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?

The paid plan, yes. But the commonly used free plan does not do much to prevent DDoS or DoS attacks.

dineshp2on USCIS Proposes Rule to Welcome International Entrepreneurs

> I wish having an advanced degree was a criteria here. A few years ago, I noticed that Britain would give a blanket visa to anyone with an MBA from a list of top international schools.

Care to explain the reasoning? It seems shortsighted to limit this proposal to people with advanced degrees, and why only from the top 50 schools in the world? How does this make sense in the context of startups?

> That said, the proposed rule might mean if one gets into YC/techstars, etc. they would be able to get a visa for the US easily.

The article mentions that this is not a visa, but parole. And with the requirement of $345K in funding, getting into YC/Techstars would not be sufficient. Startups would need to raise additional money, unless they receive $100k from the Government.

dineshp2on The Imposter's Handbook

> I wouldn't worry too much about what's being said or not said on HN. There are great ideas and topics to be covered here for sure, but they're sprinkled on top of a giant cake made with 1-part self-loathing, 2-parts day-dreaming, and 1-part regular huff-and-puffing.

I don't understand your argument regarding why you would not pay much attention to what is being said on HN. Could you explain?

dineshp2on Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions (for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the early days of Facebook.

What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an important part of the future?

Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the case of Free Basics, they violated net neutrality principles which is clearly not in the best interest of the users.

Mark Zuckerberg also mentions that he finds it frustrating that people talk about AI turning against humanity, which is one of the things that Elon Musk, Sam and OpenAI are trying to educate the population about. Maybe a discussion about that could have been included in the interview.

If any of the mods are reading this, maybe there could be some way that future interviews can include questions from HN? We could have a discussion about the questions that the HN community wants to ask, and the mods can pick out the questions that generate the most interest from the community?

dineshp2on Airbnb Files to Raise $850M at $30B Valuation

> at least some of this money will be used to pay off initial investors with a nice profit.

To clarify, do you mean some of the money will be used to buy back shares from early investors giving them a nice profit?

dineshp2on Update on Maintaining and Running the Pokémon GO Service

Looking at the title, I was expecting them to share the juicy details of how they handled the huge amount of traffic, the hacking attempts and the engineering problems they are facing. Instead I was met with some sort of PR attempt to explain the downtime.

dineshp2on Torrentz Shuts Down, Largest Torrent Meta-Search Engine Says Farewell

The reason piracy is so popular is because it is free and because it's incredibly convenient, in that order.

The convenience factor is basically, if you want some content (movie, game) it's a simple search and download away (streaming torrents seem to be gaining traction). No legal alternative offers this level of convenience.

I suspect piracy will become harder for the average user due to three letter agencies making life harder for pirates, but it won't stop the determined ones.

Speaking of determined torrenters, Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB had something interesting to say about torrent aggregators being shut down [1]. The idea is that even though downloading torrents itself is p2p, finding the magnet links is still centralized and that is an area that needs to be decentralized.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-piracy-scene-nee...

dineshp2on Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

I was hoping Xiaomi would also launch a version with Ubuntu as the default OS. An i5, 8GB DDR4 Ram, 256GB SSD, backlit keyboard and 10 hours battery backup at $750 sounds like a sweet deal.

I know Ubuntu can still be installed on the Windows version, but I expect it to be a hacky path with installation issues, getting the hardware to play nice and the backlit keyboard to work, and finally maybe even battery life issues.

An out of the box solution like the XPS 13 at a lower price point might work.

dineshp2on Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet

PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change for the better.

As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions. If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely remain a pipe dream.

The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO, one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be far away.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

dineshp2on Techcrunch hacked by OurMine

I have been following the recent hacks by the OurMine group, and find it all fascinating.

If anyone knows more about the group, their motives and how they actually manage to compromise various high profile social media accounts and websites, please do share it here.

dineshp2on Tor veteran exits, shuts down critical 'Tonga' node and relays

> Can't be sure, of course, but I would not feel comfortable with using TOR for anything sensitive anymore.

Out of curiosity, what alternative(s) would you use?

dineshp2on Ask HN: GitHub vs. Gitlab?

Thank you for the helpful answer!

Could you also comment on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12056991

dineshp2on Ask HN: GitHub vs. Gitlab?

> I can get someone from the backend performance team to comment too if you'd like :)

Sure!

> the biggest bottleneck at this point is with the file system.

Would something like AWS EFS [1] solve the problem?

It might not be a practical solution from a cost perspective though. Eg: for 50TB of data at $0.3/GB/month

  0.3*1024*50 =   $15360/month

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

dineshp2on Ask HN: GitHub vs. Gitlab?

At a high level, what are the major areas where you face performance issues?

Does the choice of RoR play a part in performance problems?

Can performance be improved by deploying more servers?

PS: I really enjoy using Gitlab, and would be ready to replace Github with Gitlab in my workflow if the performance improves.

dineshp2on Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy, and hence it should not exist.

On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern.

There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates and the camp against encryption in the name of national security will continue.

Banning a single service such as WhatsApp is not a solution to this problem. If someone really wants their communication to be encrypted, they can easily make it happen using the numerous tools available, and there is nothing the Government can do about it.

dineshp2on Elixir v1.3 released

Great talk.

Is it hard to find developers familiar with elixir/phoenix? Or is hiring RoR developers and training them to work on elixir/phoenix a better option than specifically hiring people familiar with elixir/phoenix?

Just curious to learn about your experience, as there is not much data available on hiring elixir/phoenix devs.

dineshp2on Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Hi Alan!

From your comments, it's clear that you are not happy with the state of programming languages as it stands.

You mentioned that the current languages lack safe meta-definition and also that the next generation of languages should make us think better.

Apart from the above, could you mention more properties or features of programming languages, at a high level of course, that you consider should be part of the next generation of languages?

dineshp2on Startups and immigration

The Startup Visa[1] is designed to tackle the issue of visas specifically for founders of startups rather than having founders jump through hoops to fit into the existing visa categories.

Even though it enjoys bi-partisan support, it seems to get stuck in various committees every time it's introduced in Senate and left to expire.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_Visa

dineshp2on Zach Holman joins GitLab as advisor

First of all, it's very exciting to hear that Zach will be joining GitLab as an advisor, especially given his background at GitHub being one of the first few engineers hired there.

Given that GitLab and GitHub have similarities in terms of the technologies used(RoR, git, fileservers, cache systems for git metadata), Zach could bring a lot to the table on the technical side. Could sytse or holman clarify if Zach will also get invloved with the engineering department as well?

I really enjoy the blog posts on GitLab, but some posts tend to be light on technical details such as this[1]. Regarding the mentioned post, it would be great if you can provide more details about the exact server specifications, the amount of traffic you recieve, the size and variety of the hosted repos, basically more of the numbers. One of the things that interests me is how GitLab scales and I hope you continue posting updates about the work you do to scale GitLab.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/29/look-into-gitlab-infrast...

dineshp2on Ask HN: Fed up with Ruby/Rails; what language should I learn?

Functional programming is different from object oriented programming and takes some time to understand.

In elixir, data is immutable and hence you can't simply modify data like in non functional programming languages and that leads to complexity when you don't think in terms of functional programming. And regarding the code you posted, I would suggest using maps, then you can access values as

  arr[row][col]

and set values using the put_in macro as

  put_in arr[row][col], val

I would suggest using elixir + Phoenix framework. It should also be mentioned that given your RoR background, you will feel comfortable using Phoenix and elixir. Performance will not be an issue compared to RoR.

dineshp2on My time with Rails is up

> Go is very simple (many people say too simple) and writing a web app in it doesn't really require a very good understanding of the language.

But you do have to know to how to use the standard libraries well to write anything beyond a Hello World web app in Go.

Just because the Go language itself is simple, it does not mean web development is easy in Go. Quite the opposite, you have to write a lot of boilerplate code in Go (even with Go frameworks) to do things that would seem trivial in other frameworks.

dineshp2on AI will create 'useless class' of humans

> But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

Can't help but notice the sensationalist tone.

The author also seems to have a pessimistic view of the future and the role of humans in it. Certain roles may be replaced by AI and humans will move on to do different things, but that does not mean it will render those humans useless. What exactly will humans move on to do is of course an open ended question, but if history is any indication, it won't be bleak as the author predicts.

dineshp2on The future of SaaS hosted Git repository pricing

Where did I mention that Gitlab should allocate a 2 CPU 4gb RAM server for every user?

The point of the comment was to show that Gitlab performs well when there are appropriate server resources, hence the reason for Gitlab.com not performing well is because it has not been scaled up/out or both.

dineshp2on The future of SaaS hosted Git repository pricing

> Due to the rapid growth, GitLab.com's performance slowed down.

Not sure why Gitlab is still not able to scale the platform.

I run Gitlab on a 2 CPU 4GB RAM VM and it performs very well(even with fairly large repos). There is also the known issue with Gitlab CE itself being resource intensive, but in the case of the version hosted on Gitlab it seems to be a scaling issue.

dineshp2on Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

Can you explain a little bit about how your values don't align with YC's values? It would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

If you don't mind me asking, how would you have used the money, if you were accepted into the program?