joecode

I honestly did not expect my comment to create such angst. I recognize that the wording was a bit confusing, but it seems the main thing people are upset about is that I am spreading FUD. Of course that would be quite inappropriate if it was completely unfounded, but I have stated exactly where my concerns came from, so it seems perfectly legit to me.

Your reply is very reasonable and polite, but I am disappointed at the bulk of knee-jerk reactions to this post, as well as their passive aggressive/ad-hominen nature.

Perhaps I am just in a poor mood, but I believe I will be moving on from HN. It was one of the few excuses left for me to procrastinate, so at least I should be more productive. ;)

EDIT: This, by the way, is an excellent article, though somewhat dated, on some of the security shortcomings of EC2. Note it does not address the "nightmare scenario" that Xen (the virtual machine software) is itself vulnerable.

http://cloudsecurity.org/blog/2009/04/08/is-amazon-aws-reall...

Well, pile on the down-votes folks, I've got to get back to work.

1) AWS could be compromised, as my first friend claimed, without Amazon knowing about it.

2) My second friend is not allowed to use AWS for security reasons.

The truth of the first point is indeterminable, I think we may agree. Meanwhile, the second point may indeed be due to my friend being misinformed, if for example, you are aware of a Amazon-wide policy that says engineers can use AWS willy-nilly, so long as they abide by general security regulations that are used elsewhere.

It seems to me those are entirely different things, as one can be concerned about potential threat without knowing if it is real or not. But I do not work in the security community myself and may be using language sloppily.

I would be much obliged if you could show me where the crux of the confusion lies.

I take it you work on the retail side of things? I'd be interested to hear any more details that you can share.

A good friend deep in the security community once told me, off hand, that EC2 was "owned." I didn't take this too seriously until another good friend, who has been working at Amazon for the past several years, told me that engineers at Amazon were generally forbidden from using AWS due to security concerns.

That much said, I still decided to use EC2/RDS/S3 to host the infrastructure of my latest startup. It is just too convenient to walk away from. Once it matters, I can move the critical stuff to dedicated servers.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not suggesting that Amazon knows AWS is "owned" and offers it to others anyway. I'm only noting that, for certain critical services, they themselves do not appear willing to take the risk.

It appears he is accusing us of groupthink.

I'm not sure how much merit that claim has---certainly he has presented no "actual research" himself, but it is an interesting criticism nonetheless.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1876621

Maybe have a free option to get some traction.

And yeah, his style is bizarre, but that's just the way he likes it.

Anyway, if he says this is all much ado about nothing, he's almost certainly telling the truth.

If that's the question, then sure, I agree with you. In fact, I imagine something intelligent code be encoded with much less data.

My point was about the information content required for the human brain itself, and that seems to be what Kurzweil is talking about, at least:

The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

Perhaps the disconnect here is that Kurzweil, operating from an information theory perspective, is neglecting the possibility that the biological environment in which a brain grows effectively adds a ton of "data" to the system. That is, it's not as if brains can spring fully formed from the genome itself, and a few basic rules--it requires a very complex environment. So we're probably talking far, far more than 50MB of "data" here.

That's why I'm forcing myself to finish a book before my next startup. It's matter of self-respect.

There's something ironic about this. The thesis of the essay is along the lines of: love is a very hard road, but worth it in the end. But it is presented in such a fashion that only folks who are persistent will follow it (the essay itself) to the end.

I found the first girl on the right definitely more attractive, but I generally find slightly more masculine looking women more attractive, even though I'm quite heterosexual. I guess most men just like more feminine looking women because of some kind of dominance instinct. (Though it could also just be a flawed study, a statistical fluke of some sort.)

This strikes me as an extremist viewpoint. Portraying oneself more conservatively in less familiar company is often essential. Indeed, in some cases (private thoughts, for instance) the only appropriate company with which to share is oneself.

It's kind of like kicking someone when they're down. People in the Islamic world are sensitive as of late, and considering what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan lately, I think it's pretty understandable. The prudent, friendly thing is show a little respect.