Hacker News Reader

silason Twitter's onion service is serving an invalid TLS certificate since 3/6/2023

Also noticed that the Status page linked from the logged out https://twitter.com page has been expired since Aug 29.

Not especially interesting, but probably an indication that some of the non-core stuff is getting overlooked.

silason Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads

Goodreads allows you to export your library via CSV.

silason DigitalOcean Receives $50M in Funding

Linode also charged you the $20 right up front and held on to it for the month.

silason Digital Ocean needs to start showing outages on their status page

Yeah, this is why spamming your general status page with lots of information is a bad idea. I have no idea what's going on there. At first glance it looks like half their services are having issues, which makes me think it always looks like that, which means it tells me nothing without digging into the detailed issues.

silason Digital Ocean needs to start showing outages on their status page

Linode opens a ticket for all affected users and emails them proactively, I think this is the right way to message this type of outage.

silason Lmctfy: Google's Linux application container stack

Hacked together a Vagrantfile if anyone wants to try it out:

https://github.com/silas/vagrant-lmctfy

silason Simplifying the build, test, and run cycle with Rock

This is super nice for anyone running RHEL/EL, lets you use recent versions of Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.. without having to package everything yourself.

silason Announcing iOS and Android App Testing on Sauce

Google Test Automation Conference talk on Appium if you're interested:

https://developers.google.com/google-test-automation-confere...

silason Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site

Gmail is written using the Closure library:

https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt

silason Wristwatch in only HTML/CSS

Only one (wristband texture) and removing it still produces a pretty good result: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/LmEkn

silason Ask HN: Best hardware for Ubuntu?

I've had good experiences with Thinkpads, Ubuntu has their own list:

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

silason Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"

Every scribd link is marked as private for me Hacker News for some reason, is this broken for anyone else or..?

silason Golang: bcrypt, Blowfish password hashing

I created pretty much the same thing about two weeks ago, although I think your library looks much nicer (I'm just getting into Go).

https://github.com/silas/bcrypt.go

silason Locker - the "me" platform

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2179492

silason Etsy users irked after buyers, purchases exposed to the world

Interesting bit from the linked comments via "egoodman85":

Hey, just want to clarify something as an Etsy employee. It's not your purchases that are public - it's your feedback on those purchases. I know it's a small distinction, but it's not like we have some sort of desire to publicize our members' purchases. Feedback is public by default just like it is on eBay - to increase accountability and transparency. It's also worth noting that feedback has been public since the site's launch (in fact, the option to make it private was only added recently). The new People Search feature does not change this at all.

silason Anyone use AOLServer recently?

$ curl -s http://bit.ly/test | grep AOLserver

AOLserver/4.5.1 on http://127.0.0.1:7200

silason Dropbox hits 1.0

1. Quit Dropbox

2. rm -fr ~/.dropbox-dist

3. Start Dropbox

silason Gift HN: Anybody want a subdomain of ww.com?

Sweet, I'd take: nyc.ww.com => nyc.sewell.ch (CNAME)

silason System Admin Programing Language

CentOS, Fedora and RHEL use Python for most of the system tools and as such integrating or contribute to those projects will be easier if you know Python.

That said the recent/popular systems automation and conifguration tools (Puppet, Chef, etc..) are predominantly in Ruby, so that is a good choice as well.

I prefer Python, but as spooneybarger said, if you end up using the systems version of the interpreter with CentOS/RHEL you're going to need to learn the differences between versions. Luckly EL 6 is coming out soon and you'll get a fairly up-to-date version.

silason TellHN: My Weekend Project (GAE Reverse Caching Proxy)

I wrote something similar a while back to offload parts of legacy sites on Google App engine.

http://github.com/silas/gaem

silason Ask HN: What are you working on (hacking)?

http://github.com/tidg/tyrion

A lightweight systems management tool that uses XMPP for transport and is written in C++.

silason Ask HN: what could kill Facebook?

I think in the immediate feature innovative mobile products could unseat a lot of the current platforms, many of which have been slow to (or done so poorly) implement mobile interfaces.

I think just like we've moved from desktop to web applications you're going to see a similar move from web to mobile interfaces. This is will be especially true of social networking platforms.

Google has direct control of one of the major upcoming mobile operating systems and because they host the contact/relationship graph I think they could make a confident push into Facebook's space if they were so inclined.

silason VoltDB - in memory, ACID compliant, partitioned, SQL database

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowNDA

silason Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

Might be a fun project to implement the XMPP Microblogging XEP (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) as a start. XMPP seems to have a lot of the basic features for a distributed social network (buddy list, pubsub, established protocol, etc...)

silason Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937175

silason Ask HN: Which should I pay for: Dropbox or ZumoDrive? What do you think?

I'm using Dropbox because it supports Linux and has worked extremely well thus far.

I can't speak to ZumoDrive's performance or reliability (although I'm sure its fine), but it does look like they have more pricing options if you want a smaller or larger plan.