HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nphase

1,995 karma · joined May 6, 2009

Email: ws@develtheory.com
submissionscomments
nphase··on Google DoubleClick Caught Serving Malicious Ad
Nothing new here: this sort of malware slips into ad networks on a regular basis. This time it just didn't get caught soon enough.
nphase··on PayPal: "State Department Said It Was Illegal"
“One of the signs that you’re a successful payments company is that hackers start to target you, this case isn’t anything different.”

What a non-answer.

nphase··on Why shaken, not stirred?
Let me know what you think!
nphase··on Amazon Route 53 - A New DNS Service from AWS
I take it Wikileaks won't be using this as their DNS provider.
nphase··on Why shaken, not stirred?
How do you feel about Cocchi Americano instead of Lillet Blanc? I've heard Cocchi is a good substitute for Lillet Blanc, but I've only ever had the Cocchi, so I wouldn't know how it is otherwise. I've also generally used Regan's instead of Angostura Orange..
nphase··on Here Comes The Wetware
Thank you so much for doing this. I've delayed getting one because of the cost of their "full" API. I'll definitely get one now!
nphase··on Ask HN: What non-financial ways can I/we help Wikileaks?
"When as a country did we become a place where the government gets upset when its secrets are revealed but has no problem knowing all our secrets and invading our privacy?"

http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/common-sense/maybe-th...

nphase··on Are Companies Scanning Open Source Commit Logs And Patenting What They Find?
Can one patent the method of reading open source code and patenting what's been found?
nphase··on The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet
I'm shocked and ashamed that Russ Feingold appears on this list. I thought him to be an upstanding senator until now.
nphase··on Torbit – Making Websites Faster
You know that you can reply directly to his comment, right?
nphase··on For 18 minutes, China hijacked 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic
When my Internet access is slow, I'm inclined to attribute it to Comcast. Then I log into my router, verify things are down own that link (I multihome with a slower DSL connection), and reboot my cable modem. Sadly, that fixes things nine times out of ten.
nphase··on National Opt-Out Day Called Against Invasive Body Scanners
This reminds me of all those Facebook groups telling people to protest OPEC by not buying gas on X day.
nphase··on [dead]
My favorite part is definitely the signature.
nphase··on We're moving. Goodbye Rackspace.
Those get "0wned" on a regular basis too.
nphase··on MySQL at Facebook
Maybe boring isn't the right word. Vague is probably better. "MySQL at Facebook" is a facebook page, a launchpad user, a twitter user, a O'Reilly MySQLConf talk, etc.
nphase··on Math prof challenges granting of PhD to unqualified student in court
Oh, oops! He's in mechanical engineering, and deals primarily with turbomachinery efficiency and aerodynamics.
nphase··on Ask HN: Please critique backscatter argument
Don't forget:

* Doctors dont take a picture of you nude for their enjoyment at a later date

nphase··on Ask HN: Palantir or Facebook?
Very surprised nobody has mentioned this: A Facebook internship, if converted into a Facebook job, can be extremely valuable if/when they IPO.

Of course, money isn't everything. Palantir has some extremely smart people (two of my friends work there, and I have a ton of respect for them), and seems to move at a pretty quick pace. Going there could be very interesting from both an experience and an ops perspective.

nphase··on Math prof challenges granting of PhD to unqualified student in court
People like Lukacs need to find organizations that are compatible with their irreverence. Although merit goes a long way, academia is VERY political especially when it comes to making tenure decisions.

It's funny that you would say that, because it seems there are few environments better suited to people like Lukacs than academia. The way they see it: sure, the politics is a pain in the ass, but at least they're in an environment where they can make very substantial contributions to the world. The pain of politics is worth doing what they love.

Disclosure: my father is a very well known research professor in his field, who is always complaining about campus politics. "So why are you still there?" always gets the response, "Where else could I go to do this?" If you happen to know somewhere else, let us know.

nphase··on The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket
Note to self: never bring a bullet back with me when traveling back from a country known for training and funding anti-american terrorists.
nphase··on In Quest for a 'Legal High,' Chemists Outfox the Law
Haha, reminds me of The 51st State (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/)
nphase··on Please review my distro (if you are a musician)
Awesome! Now I have another distro to play with (also: AVLinux, http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html) for getting rove (http://github.com/wrl/rove) up and running with my monome (http://monome.org/devices)
nphase··on Heroku is down for the third time today
You have to debit the cost of Heroku's downtime from the cost of building your own infrastructure.

That's silly, and also not how it works, at all. You're paying PaaS/IaaS companies so that it's their headache, not yours. Once it becomes your headache, they are no longer doing their job, and you are no longer receiving value for which you are paying for. You don't debit the cost of their downtime from the cost i would've built your infrastructure, you debit the cost of their downtime from your business' revenue and reputation.

Whether or not you could do it better yourself does not excuse the downtime one bit.

nphase··on WePay Drops 600lbs of ice in front of PayPal Conference
Cover it with black bed sheets. Attracts the sun, covers the statement. Problem solved.
nphase··on Watch – A Useful Linux Command You May Have Never Heard Of
I use watch continuously for just about everything.

watch -n 1 "ps aux | grep something"

watch -n 1 "killall some-runaway-process"

etc

nphase··on The Air’s Spot in the Lineup
How great would it be if you could pay a little more to get a MacBook Air with 3G, and the same no-contract pricing from AT&T as the iPad?

Great. I was wondering why this wasn't an option..

nphase··on 12 Months with MongoDB
There is absolutely a clear advantage when it comes to prototyping and rapid development. Specific example: Ever built a crawler that harvested hundreds of gigabytes of raw data and then realized you needed to make a schema change later? I don't want to take the time to think about every single use case and every single column I'll need and their datatypes. I just want to move on so that I can start doing things with the data.

I still think of data as rows in MongoDB, but the lack of a fixed schema makes life seriously easy. That means my schema is defined in the application (and only the application) and is subject to versioning. Want an extra column? Just add it to your application and you're done. No need to promote a slave and cycle through while waiting hours upon hours for each table to build.

nphase··on You need to use social services to understand them
I was one of the people that was very gung ho about Twitter's role in the Iranian Election brouhaha. I recently got an email from a friend linking the Gladwell post with the underhanded "Look at how wrong you were" statement.

There's nothing wrong with being wrong (albeit in a very public way), but my response was this: Even though Twitter may not have played as direct of a role as the media was portraying, it was the open, decentralized nature of new social media/communication that made it so much harder for the Iranian government to strangle what got out. These sorts of protests have been going on for a while in Iran, but those of us in the west have never had such an intimate, play-by-play look at it until the 2009 elections. That's how we got pictures of Neda shot to death, stories about the Basij wreaking terror at night, and so on, practically in real time.

Sure, most of us have forgotten about it and moved on (I haven't; most of my extended family is in Iran), but the level of coverage and fostering of connections just means the next time something happens, support from the rest of the world will be stronger (which I can personally say is extremely encouraging to my friends/family in Iran -- they've felt isolated, until now). Yes, I wasn't on the streets in Tehran, but I was helping some of them coordinate and communicate with shells/proxies/tunnels/etc.

I think at this point, a better interpretation of the phrase "The Revolution will be Tweeted" would be that in this day and age, if anything is happening anywhere, it will be tweeted about as close to real-time as possible. Iran is "lucky" in this sense, they have a fairly modern communication system. Imagine if live streams of the atrocities in Darfur or North Korea were up on Twitter. These causes could emerge from being momentarily trendy to actually being a subject of intense worldwide criticism. And then maybe something good will become of it.

</rant>

nphase··on Announcing DJJob, a PHP port of delayed_job
Gearman is especially handy if you expose your application to it. I've got a wrapper that allows the app to push any function call out to the workers for async handling. So your image processing (or whatever heavy/blocking task) can be dispatched from within your standard libraries without having to maintain a separate set of code.
nphase··on 'Back to the Mac' Official Apple Livestream
Has always worked for me on the iPad. Funny, how that works out.
← PreviousPage 4 of 7Next →