biesnecker

This is clearly for sites that require more than a fraction of a droplet to run. Just because WordPress can be run on a tiny instance doesn't mean that every WordPress user does -- some sites are actually popular.

You can be kind while still being critical. Even if it's kindly letting the person go with as soft of a landing as you can provide rather than the walk of shame to the lobby with security.

Yup, this. I work on (the original?) multi-tens-of-MLOC PHP-cum-Hack codebase, and writing new code is every bit as safe type-wise as C++, with none of the compile time. It's pretty great.

Dealing with the parts that aren't Hackified, though, is horrific. Complex codebases with no types are just ridiculous.

Much more valuable to have the security folks a critical part of reviewing the _frameworks_, and then pushing adoption of those frameworks. Human reviewers won't catch everything no matter what, but you can make entire classes of problems go away by making them impossible to commit.

Fair point! I suppose I should reword it to say something like "why aren't we more concerned with this, at least as concerned as we are about chemical and nuclear weapons," but I guess "they're actually not that acutely dangerous that other comments have pointed to is the reason.

Amazing video.

Question that comes to mind is how easy would it be to take the bacteria that make it to the center, and put them on a new plate with a different antibiotic in the same configuration, and then repeat until you've gone through all available antibiotics, then scoop that last batch up and do something really nasty with it?

It must be harder than it seems, because otherwise why do terrorists and the like even bother with (seemingly much harder to obtain, though admittedly flashier) chemical and nuclear weapons?

"Especially when the pain is linked to a temporary condition."

I think that's the important point in the original comment.

This is how it was when I was in Ireland. Actually not a bad compromise -- I had the meter to keep an eye on the total fare, and I paid with the app without worrying about currency.

I know of several financial companies that do that, with software developers on the East Coast, in Europe, and in India.

Yet another Simpsons' prediction come true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_Homerdrive

I'm pretty sure it's a typo, but it's fun thinking about what reverse physiology would even be.

I think maintaining old software is a known problem, regardless of the language. What about lisps make them more challenging in this regard?

I'm lucky, I have access to two really shitty, overpriced providers, not just one shitty, overpriced provider.

The vast, vast majority, though, of the Chinese internet population do not use VPNs, nor will they when most of what they want/need is available on domestic sites. The slice of the population that deals with the West is tiny, and comparatively unlikely to cause problems. The chilling effect that just needing a VPN has on exploration of accurate foreign information about China and what's happening in the country is substantial and intended.

There are plenty of running installations of Windows 95/98/2000, too.

Do they disclose them before or after they exploit them?

Show HN: RemoteBackdoor.io -- remote monitoring and "debugging" for anything.

http://i.imgur.com/2tjbLx1.gif

That's an awesome story. Thank you for sharing.

You should, because there is.

It would be nice to see jobs sliceable by median salary or industry or something like that. The part of Austin I live in is, according to the map, home to thousands of walkable jobs, but I guarantee you virtually none of them are information economy jobs.

I read this every time it appears on the front page, and I enjoy it every time. Asimov remains an inspiration.

Reminds me of setting goals for my team around "things that are not to happen." How well have we done if none of those things did indeed happen? How close were we to disaster and just didn't know it?

With, obviously, very different stakes.

"instrument of US foreign policy" != "arm of the US intelligence services"

This is such a bizarre story. It doesn't even seem like it was "the US" as much as it was an overeager and undersupervised team within USAID. It's sad, too, because USAID does good work in a lot of places around the world, and that works is undermined if (rightly or wrongly; seemingly rightly in this case) host governments think that USAID is an arm of the US intelligence community.

Good points all, bertil. I appreciate the thoughtful response!

SMS must be a bigger platform than email, no?

Ridiculously large expense. And not always all that well -- it's just that most people don't use most of the platform simultaneously on different devices / stacks / versions, so they don't notice.

And it's hard.

It's hard to imagine private insurance companies being able to actually pay out their obligations in the event of a massive earthquake in any metropolitan American city. Federal (and to a smaller degree, state) governments will almost certainly put up most of the money for recovery and rebuilding.

This is like Tongue Awareness Month [http://xkcd.com/972/] for me. Intellectually I always know the state of my backups is pitiful, but now it's in the front of my mind and I can't stop thinking about it. ;-)