Hacker News Reader

susi22on A first look at docker.io

I'm quite excited seeing the open source community putting so much work into Linux containers. For the most part they're a lot better than true virtualization. We've seen it in the past, what you guys can do with Puppet as a configuration system.

I just wish lxc was as secure as Solaris zones. Since containers are not secure at all, they definitely won't be used for shared hosting. The team seems to be working on it, but it will probably take a few years to get it secure enough:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LxcSecurity

susi22on A first look at docker.io

Specifically? I like this blog layout+colors a lot better than most.

susi22on Lossless decompression and the generation of random samples

I'd suggest diving into discrete probability for a few hours. That should be enough to understand this post. Huffman coding is a little advanced but you can understand the algorithm (not the theory) with just the probability.

susi22on I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

I consider myself very lucky. I did my undergrad and never struggled with money. My parent never supported me with a dime since they didn't have much. I didn't have any scholarships. I saved up some money from high school and used that for the first year of college, then started working as an co-op. How did I do it? I went to school in Germany. That's also where I'm from. Back then there was no tuition and I only paid 120 Euros of administration fee per semester. I had it easy. I could study freely, I had everything I needed and the beer at the universities' vending machine was cheap. Life was good. Back then in 2004 I never read any English/US news or community web sites. I didn't know what college was like over there.

After I graduate came to the US and I've been living in a typical college town at the east coast for ~7 years. I have many undergrad and graduate friends most of which are American. I'm _BAFFLED_ at the simple acceptance of this rip-off fucked up higher education system. It's not even a topic ever that our local University President just raised tuition by another 5% this year. And a ~40% raise in the last couple year. In Germany, they started talking about introducing a 500 Euro tuition in 2006(?) and introduced it in 2007. Students where furious, they protested on the streets, they occupied the main buildings. They raised there voices. They started petitions. The press was on our side. They introduced them and students investigated on how the tuition was going to be used (contract only allowed to use it towards better education and not for maintenance/bills) and problems were discovered. Long story short: In 2013/2014 there is only one state left that still has a tuition of 500 Euros. The rest abandoned it all.

I have asked this question many times:

Why do Americans not protest?

Take the French: they kidnapped their CEO and threatened to kill them (~2009). They burned down parts of their factory. They raise their voice. Yet, with a ridiculous policy here in the US, I see nothing ever happen. I heard there was some protest about PRISM in S.F. last week. I frankly missed the coverage about that since it may have been to small. There were bigger protests about PRISM in Germany last week. This is sad and I don't understand it.

Students of America: Stop wining on Internet forum, they do not tend to often get coverage of the media.

You want main stream TV coverage: Go on the streets and protest.

susi22on Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News

Actually the personalization is a great idea. But you'd have to not just apply filters but develop a complex recommendation system based on what you upvoted/read in the past. I.e. no more global front page for everybody but an individual one for each person.

But doing this requires quite some work (Machine learning etc.)

susi22on Programming languages to watch: LiveScript, Julia, Elixir

Agreed. Julia seems like it could really become a competitor to MATLAB (unless you rely on fancy toolboxes). I think their blog has some nice posts:

http://julialang.org/blog/

especially these seem very interesting:

http://julialang.org/blog/2013/03/julia-tutorial-MIT/

It's also a huge plus that they can pretty much call any python inline:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/jdj.mit.edu/~stevenj/IJulia%...

So we have the fall back python libraries and can do plotting etc..

susi22on Amish: The kindhearted people

Floyd is from Lancester PA but he is not Amish. He is Mennonite.

susi22on Amish: The kindhearted people

> He was prepared to molest them but an alarm was raised and it upset him. He shot the girls spraying bullets that killed seven of them on the spot, while the eighth died in hospital.

That's not quite true. He killed 5 and injured another 5. The molesting part is only speculation, though he did bring a tube of lube with him.

> Noting that the village and the school where the killing took place had become a visitors’ attraction, the Amish elders had the building razed to ground overnight

That's also not true. It was demolished 11 days later by diggers.

susi22on Mailpile: Let’s take email back

Not a question but a comment: You should add an igg link to the github README. Some people link to github projects instead of the website.

Good luck!

susi22on XKeyscore: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

One of the screen shots:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video...

says: Top Secret Comm(?) REL() to USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL

confirming the previous suspicions that many other governments are on board.

Der Spiegel actually has reported a few weeks back about XKeyscore [1] and that it is used by the BND (Germany's NSA). I.e. all this data is also available to the NSA equivalents of Australia, Candana, Great Britain and New Zealand.

Many Americans trust their government (unfortunately), will they also trust the other governments?

[1]:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligenc...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...

susi22on Standard Treasury (YC S13) Wants to Bring Banks into the 21st Century

And after the 3rd sentence you have:

http://i.imgur.com/ldrsJ8I.png

susi22on Leaked Samsung exFat driver relicensed as GPL

Correct. Link:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0312.0/0670.h...

susi22on Using ImageMagick to make sharp web-sized photographs

I would guess it doesn't even do deconv. but only adds a simple high pass filter to it. That would explain the parameter choices (sigma is the std. dev.).

susi22on Show HN: Freader, an open source RSS Reader built with Node.js and Angular

I wish it didn't have the MongoDB requirement. IMO something with a few thousand messages can easily be done w/o a full blown database.

susi22on German Federal Prosecutor's office gets involved in the NSA data scandal

An English article on these issues. Today from Spiegel Online:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/eu-officials-furi...

susi22on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

Correct, the proper terminology is Spiegel Online (SPON) and "Der Spiegel". SPON is very popular among Germans and has been one of the best journalistic sources of Germany. It's also received the embassy cables last year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...

with El Pais, Le Mond, The Guardin and NYT.

For this very story: It has received some new presentation slides in the recent days that it's currently publishing. The FAZ and other German newspapers are referencing SPON for this particular story. So for this story SPON is the first/primary source.

susi22on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

Little update at:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/steinbrueck-forder...

Politicians of all major parties are pressuring chancellor Merkel to react. One party is proposing to question the American ambassador.

susi22on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

"Aus einer vertraulichen Klassifizierung geht hervor, dass die NSA die Bundesrepublik zwar als Partner, zugleich aber auch als Angriffsziel betrachtet"

... sees Germany as a "military target".

You're right, I should've used "military target" instead of enemy

susi22on Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

Original (this is on the front page of Spiegel today):

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/nsa-ueberwacht-50...

This was also posted yesterday (was on yesterday's front page of Spiegel):

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/nsa-hat-wanzen-in...

Article says that the NSA used bugs to spy on EU offices.

Both articles, the comments of SPON (SPiegel ONline): Germans are pissed (We take privacy serious [1]). They're expecting the EU and chancellor Merkel to do something or she's going to have a really tough time being re-elected in the fall.

Thers is way more comments on this article than many other front page articles. From experience they usually accumulate around 50-100 comments. This article has more than 650 as of now. People are definitely not amused.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_conc...

susi22on Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce

http://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-and-...

SmartOS is something many people overlook. It's an awesome OS. ZFS is IMO enough reason to try it out (no, zfs for linux is not ready). But then zones make it even more awesome (there was a discussion about zones here on HN a few days ago).

This is usually how it is around sysadmins:

Those who know Solaris very well swear by it and implement some awesome very stable running high performance and secure machine setups. Those who don't, hate it because it's not Linux.

It takes a while to become familar with Solaris from a Linux background. But the more you read about it, the more you realize how well designed it actually is.

susi22on Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce

Those are the client libraries. It seems like the actual manta compute environment is primarily for SmartOS.

http://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/compute-instance-software.ht...

https://github.com/joyent/manta-compute-bin

Also probably a better article:

http://www.joyent.com/blog/hello-manta-bringing-unix-to-big-...

susi22on Advice for ambitious 19 year olds

This is awful advice. I'm sorry but when you're 19 you should go out into the _world_ (not the US) and discover it. Go book a cheap flight to South America and go backpacking for a few months. Live on $300 a month, meet interesting people. Techies, nerds and entrepreneurs aren't _that_ interesting.

But sure, if all that you care about is success and you happen to define success like most other Americans (i.e. by making the most money) then go ahead and work as hard as you can and make that million. But please don't complain about your burnout when you're 30-40.

There is way more than money and work in this live. Don't work too hard especially when you're young. If you waste a year or two, nothing will run away and your opportunities will still be there when you're 25.

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

By default it won't spawn SSH processes but use paramiko instead (python module that implements SSH).

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

Yes I needed 1.9.3 for this silly software. And I had a little special setup so rvm failed to compile. I'm also very overwhelmed by rvm,gem,bundler etc... Python has pip,easy_install(old) and virualenv. Which are just easier to understand for me. Ruby is too much magic and is trying to do everything automatically (IMO).

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

It's hard to find an O/S w/o python these days. In the env. I work in we don't have ruby at all installed (Solaris, CentOS, BSD, Windows).

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

I forgot to mention that just installing ruby is a HUGE PITA on anything but the most common OSes. It took me 3h last week to get it on a CentOS installed. And I don't even want to try to get it running on our Solaris hosts...

Point is: Python is the number one scripting language (after bash) for sysadmins just like Perl used to be.

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

The problem is most dev-ops and sysadmins don't know ruby and that's a HUGE disadvantage. In the end configuration management will often by done by sysadmins.

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

Well, ansible by default runs with paramiko which is a python implementation of SSH protocol. It will also keep connections open for multiple commands. It also has a pull mode and it also has a fireball mode which uses 0mq:

http://jpmens.net/2012/10/01/dramatically-speeding-up-ansibl...

However, you're not forced to use this. In the beginning, you can just seed your CentOS or debian with a Kickstarter or seed file and then run your inital thing with ansible simply over ssh (using all the goodies, ssh-agent, password less ssh etc..).

One huge plus for ansible is also that it used yaml which is rather simple. I've been following both project for >1 year and it seems that recently ansible has picked up a lot and will probably make the "race" (IMO).

susi22on Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck

IMO, ansible is even better:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/

It doesn't require any deamon and does all its work over the good old unix fashion way: SSH. And it's python too.

susi22on Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub

Some direct links:

https://github.com/HoTT/book

http://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott-online.pdf

http://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott-ebook.pdf

First commit in Nov '12. Most work seems to be have been done since Jan/Feb '13:

https://github.com/HoTT/book/graphs/commit-activity