Hacker News Reader

zorlemon Show HN: Automatic account and SSH access provisioning tool for server admins

I personally don't feel comfortable using your service - too much of a security risk giving Databracket LLC unrestricted root access. I guess most other security-minded people would not feel at ease as well.

Having an agent running on the servers would be much better.

First, it will not require unrestricted SSH root access to the servers. Most of the servers don't allow root to login through SSH at all.

Second, an agent restricts the harm that could be done if somebody hacks their servers. This could be achieved with restrictions (specific commands, IP addresses) to the key that is added to root's authorized_key, but there is no mention of that in the FAQ or the other docs.

Third, firewall management - good luck convincing somebody to modify the firewall to allow connections to the SSH service on all of their servers. A restricted agent will be a much easier sell.

zorlemon Contextinator: Divide your web browsing into projects

I've found the source of the problem with moving Chromium tabs between windows. It's a bug in Chrome and its WM hints and appears in Ubuntu 12.04 because of Unity-2d: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-2d/+bug/9357....

I posted a work-around as a comment to the bug in Launchpad.

zorlemon Contextinator: Divide your web browsing into projects

A really useful extension! Could be the solution to the tab overload.

I would like to have the ability to migrate tabs between projects too. For some reason drag&drop of tabs between Chromium windows (under Ubuntu) has never worked for me. Copying (or moving) bookmarks and tasks would be really useful as well.

One more thing that would be nice is a check for duplicate project names. I've managed to create two projects with identical names and now can't find a way to delete one of them.

zorlemon Some decompiling, reverse engineering, and keygen tutorials

Given the maturity of the tool, the breadth of functionality, plugins, scriptability, etc. these are petty money for what IDA Pro has to offer to a professional that has to do Reverse Engineering for a living.

I do agree that for a tool used for a hobby it is expensive, but for hobbyists there are other, simpler tools that could be used.

zorlemon Some decompiling, reverse engineering, and keygen tutorials

>Fravia died a few years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

Yes, but 4 years are a considerable time on the web. Linkrot to and in some of the external resources can be felt.

zorlemon Some decompiling, reverse engineering, and keygen tutorials

What you link to is Fravia+ previous project, more focused on software reverse engineering - http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/.

Fravia+'s last project - "Web Searchlores" was/is more aimed towards general reverse engineering and information searching. The site contains a huge collection of information, which curiously, although not updated for so many years, is still relevant today.pparently searchlores.org and fravia.com have expired and are "parked" by sombody. But looks like http://search.lores.eu/ is the only remaining official mirror that remains from

What you say about the F/OSS certainly rings true, but at least for me, software reverse engineering has always been more as a training ground for reversing in general than to cracking software copy protections.

+greythorne has stopped updating his pages and +HCU's Linux infor, but mammon_ is pretty active, and even moved to Github: http://mammon.github.io/ . Definitely worth checking out for more information about Software RE under GNU/Linux.

Nowadays there are a lot of opaque software in widespread use, so the main focus has shifted towards web platforms, where reversing is still applicable.

edit: style

zorlemon Why I still love Perl

That's why I find community initiatives like the Perl Tutorial Hub (http://perl-tutorial.org/) very valuable, especially for people just starting with the language.

They even have a page dedicated to sifting through tutorials and guides, and assessing their usefulness for learning Modern Perl - http://perl-tutorial.org/learn/

zorlemon How to serve Django Statics (and not go insane)

There is a "visit us @ SendHub" in the header of the page, just bellow "SendHub Blog" and their logo. I can see it Chromium in Linux though, haven't tried it in a mobile browser.

zorlemon Postgres Demystified

One of the best resources for PostgreSQL is the online documentation - I've hardly seen a F/OSS project with a better written documentation. The only drawback is that it is quite verbose and it's easy to get lost. You might want to start with the official tutorial [1] and might also check the dated "MS-SQL to PostgreSQL Migration" (from 2001) [2] which still provides some nice transition tips.

Make sure to check the "Postgres Guide" [3] which is a recent addition and is excellent to get you started quickly.

The quick intro by Packt Publishing [4] looks useful and concise as well, but is not as good as the Postgres Guide.

Since you're familiar with the RDBMS concepts I would suggest you take a look at the nice "PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook"[5] which has a solid collection of recipes that you can use to learn the specifics of the DB and a bunch of nice features.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/tutorial.html

[2] http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server_to_Post...

[3] http://www.postgresguide.com/

[4] http://www.packtpub.com/article/introduction-to-postgresql-9

[5] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849510288/

edit: fixed the link to postgres guide.

zorlemon Blocked Sites is discontinued

>Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown.

After you go to that link and read the notification, there is another link to download the blocklist as a plain-text file. Mine contained a number of domains I've added during the years.

It's quite interesting to see all the domains I've blocked so far :)

zorlemon Customer got hacked via .htaccess

A customer of mine had practically the same .htaccess file installed through an exploit in a custom PHP software he had written. The difference was with the URL it was pointing to, in my case it was battocletti.theroguedisc.com . The .htaccess was installed on 2012-11-21, but by the time the customer asked for my help cleaning up, the domain was no longer available.

zorlemon The Pirate Bay – North Korean hosting? No, it’s fake

It is, but apparently the upstream provider doesn't filter the ICMP reply packets (with SRC IP of the Korean ISP), which are sent by thepiratebay servers.

zorlemon How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays

I do agree with your assessment of the sizes of the talent pools in Russia, USA and China. Back of the envelope calculations don't support your assessment of the Bulgarian talent pools though.

Your assumption that the Bulgarian coaches have a feedstock of hundreds of thousands of lifters is very far from the truth - the whole Bulgarian population is considered to be around 7.3M people, which doesn't account very well for all emigrants living abroad. Out of these 7.3M only 16% (~1M) are aged 0-17 (I assume that 14-15 y/o is the usual age that a lifter starts training professionally). That means that at the moment there are around 100K teenagers (aged 14-15), out of which less than 50K are male.

During the past 20 years sports have lost a big chunk of their (state) funding and therefore the attractiveness for young uneducated kids have lowered substantially, further reducing the pool of athletes.

I consider the three most prestigious and popular sports for males in Bulgaria to be football (soccer), wrestling and weight-lifting.

zorlemon Ask HN: How can I send a package on an infinite voyage on the internet?

To the original question: no idea what do you mean by package, but you can't send a TCP/IP packet to the "Internet" that will be looped forever - there is a field in the header called TTL, that gets decremented by each host along the way. When a host receives a packet with a TTL of zero it will discard this package. Therefore, to transfer a packet ad-infinitum you need a router to modify the TTL in-transit. The other option would or to configure several routers to not decrement the TTL and loop a packet between them. But that's not "Internet" anymore.

After your elaboration: There is a nice concept by Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf) to http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/juggling_with_packets.txt make a transient storage between servers where the data will be stored in packets that are always in-transit.

zorlemon Ubuntu: What They're Doing Right and Wrong

The great hardware support is indeed provided by the kernel, but out of the box it's nowhere near pain-free. In particular when you have to setup your wireless or video drivers. Sadly, these two still often require binary drivers and picking from several options. One specific example (mentioned in the OP as well) is with the wireless drivers - there usually are at least two options that provide some support and usually one of them is better. I've had to configure some Broadcom WiFi support and there are three different solutions - ndiswrapper, binary blob provided by Broadcom and the driver in the kernel. Picking one of the three is a time consuming and complicated process on other distros and nowhere near easy and accessible to new users.

Ubuntu on the other hand, with their driver manager, picked the correct driver, downloaded the required bits and pieces, and configured them all without needing to do anything else. The same can be said for eg. NVidia support.

This in my book is a clear win for Ubuntu.

zorlemon Show HN: Followshows – Never miss an episode again

>> isn't limited to hiding their identities or living in another country

> Cause, you know, it's so hard to sign up for an account on a website in another country over the Internet. A good point you got there. Sounds nothing like FUD.

Please don't do that. Your snark is not constructive, doesn't help the discussion and reduces the signal-to-noise ratio.

If you reread jschuur's sentence with the parts you left out of your quote you will see that he is referring to the owners of the site not having to live in another country. There have been a few cases of prosecuted owners and admins of similar sites in UK and US recently.

zorlemon MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again

> Instead of writing these rants go and build a WAMP like package with PostgreSQL or other alternatives. That might actually do some good.

You mean like WAPP, the package installer provided by BitNami [1]?

I don't see a problem with a well-argumented rant, IMO it's quite helpful as it sparks such discussions, let people improve their knowledge and make better informed decissions, and, not the least important, forces a vendor to work towards improving their software.

[1] http://bitnami.org/stack/wapp

zorlemon MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again

XtraBackup has its limitations wrt to locking when you've got a mix between InnoDB and MyISAM tables.

The problem with taking a backup from a MySQL slave is that the data is not guaranteed to be identical to the master, thanks to the subtle problems and peculiarities of the MySQL master-slave replication (some of them are described in the OP). For precisely this reason I install an automated job that periodically checksums the tables and sends the results to the DBA role.

zorlemon MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again

The OP is not trying to be "a performance authority about web technology", in fact the article's main focus in not on performance, but on peculiarities in the RDBMS engine that force the developers to constantly seek workarounds and be very careful about silent (and unexpected) behavior.

There is no "web technologies" in the article, the term "web" is found only once (!) in the whole text.

zorlemon MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again

> As you described it, the query/caching strategy sounds too complicated.

But that was his whole point - needlessly complicating an otherwise simple setup to get around limitations in the DB engine.

> mysql proxy might help you out, or mysql triggers, or plenty of easy indexing strategies.

I genuinely fail to see how mysql-proxy [1] (which has a sleuth of long-standing, unfixed, problems on its own), or triggers would (elegantly) help in this situation.

[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-proxy.html

edit: formatting

zorlemon MySQL - Do Not Pass This Way Again

You should've used pgAdmin [1], it's much better than PhpPgAdmin [1]. I have not used the MySQL GUI (MySQL Workbench [2])that Oracle/Sun/MySQL sells with the Enterprise license but by its feature list I suspect that it provides comparable functionality to pgAdmin (which is FOSS). I would not put any of Php{Pg,My}Admin interfaces in the same category - they're too lacking IMO.

[1] http://www.pgadmin.org/

[2] http://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/

zorlemon Belkin Buys Linksys from Cisco

It's good that you haven't had any problem with your Time Capsule, especially overheating. Due to poor engineering and industrial design, there are a lot of people that have had issues with that and had to physically modify the case [1].

In general Apple has a solid history of various problems (I'd speculate mostly due to design decisions taking over engineering concerns) with their hardware - "antennagate", Mac Mini overheating, dust inside DVD drive slots, Time Capsule and Apple TV overheating [2].

I guess there are more, but these are the problems people around me have actually stumbled upon.

Not exactly what I would call a manufacturer of durable hardware.

[1] http://leonidas.org/2012/04/13/time-capsule-reborn/

[2] http://olitee.com/2010/04/overheating-apple-tv/

zorlemon Open Letter to Skype from Internet Activists, Journalists and Academics

I personally like SFLPhone [1]. It's developed by the fine folks from Savoir-faire Linux [2] and supports encryption. Here is a guide how to configure it to encrypt traffic between the client and an Asterisk server [3].

[1] http://sflphone.org/ [2] http://www.savoirfairelinux.com/en/ [3] https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/sflphone/wiki...

zorlemon We’re Hipsters using Node.js and Mongo, and we love it

This looks very link-baity to me. The whole linked article lacks substance and is basically summarised by: "Somebody on the internet called us hipsters because we've got this and this in our software stack. We don't know what we are, but the software is awesome. And check our kickstarter page".

zorlemon Tcl the misunderstood (2006)

This is one of the reasons I'm only a little sorry that Lua has taken over. Not without its shortcomings, Lua is a big advancement in this regard! :)

zorlemon Tcl the misunderstood (2006)

One of the biggest advantages of TCL in my opinion is the simplicity of its syntax. The lexer is quite simple, straightforward and easy to create. Properly written TCL interpreters are quite small and memory efficient. Because of this TCL used to be quite a popular choice as an embedded scripting language for various appliances (eg. Cisco used TCL for their VoIP/IVR scripts).

Nowadays Lua has mostly taken TCL's place as an embedded scripting language of choice and I must say I'm a little sorry, there are some things that I miss from TCL.

zorlemon SUSE Linux says Btrfs is ready for production use, now officially supported

I think that SUSE are trying to differentiate themselves by supporting Btrfs, which is a nice move on their part. Btrfs extensive features can be very useful in quite a few scenarios, so its wider adoption is more than welcome. I know quite a few people that have been longing for ZFS's functionality for years and Btrfs provides the most important (IMHO) ones.

For some time Btrfs has been rapidly stabilizing and I expect the other distros to jump ship and provide support as well.

zorlemon Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

For a production server I think that the opposite is a better _general_ advice - reduce the available swap, because if your server gets to a point to need it, the performance will suffer so much that your server will become completely unresponsive. Having less swap will allow the OOM to kill the run-away process and allow you to login and fix the problem instead of rebooting the server or waiting in vain for it to recover by itself.

edit: typo

zorlemon Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

Thanks for the clarification.

zorlemon Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

There was a cookie set for CSRF protection and the headers specify that content should not be cached if there is a cookie (or more precisely - the cached content includes the cookie as a cache key, so each request with a different cookie gets a cache-miss).