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durana

196 karma · joined May 28, 2008

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durana··on Glenn Greenwald pushes back hard on latest Edward Snowden “revelations”
Anyone know the details of the encryption system that Snowden wanted set up between him and Greenwald?
durana··on Space Monkey: Taking the cloud out of the datacenter
Does anyone know the Seagate device they used for their 'Alpha Test Network'?
durana··on Ask HN: How can I scale up quickly? Thinking about trying EC2.
I'd be willing to offer advice or a hand to a fellow HNer in need. This will require some discussion so e-mail me if you want to take me up on this offer.
durana··on OneWay 0.5.2 Released – Thank you, Hacker News
Any plans to support SSH public key auth? It would be great if the app could use existing keys in ~/.ssh/
durana··on Apollo 11 Launch at 500 Frames per Second
The original source of the video appears to be http://www.spacecraftfilms.com/ and they look to have more NASA related videos at http://vimeo.com/user1634425/videos
durana··on Ask HN: Feedback on REST API for managing DNS
If I understand your comment correctly, I believe the API already works this way, except instead of using PUT, it uses POST for creating new records and zones. To create a record, a client would do a POST with the record to create in JSON as the request body.

Is there some reason to use PUT over POST in this case? By my understanding, POST is typically used to create new resources and PUT is used to updated existing resources.

Also, I can see now that the doc is pretty unclear on how the API expects data to be sent in a request's body. I'll be sure to fix that!

Thank you for your comment and yes I'm in need of more beta testers! Please e-mail me. My e-mail address can be found under my HN account.

durana··on Ask HN: Feedback on REST API for managing DNS
A link that you can click on...

http://wiki.burningbay.com/dns/rest-api

durana··on Mathoverflow.net - for research level math questions
I thought there was something with trademark laws that meant owners had to actively protect their marks or risk losing the ability to pursue legal action against infringement. So even though SO and MO are buddy-buddy, couldn't allowing MO to use their name as is theoretically jeopardize SO's trademark?
durana··on Canon to begin acquisition of the ".canon" Top-Level Domain name
There's nothing technical DNS-wise that would prevent the name 'canon' from resolving to an IP address, so http://canon could work. They could also add a MX record for the name 'canon' so @canon e-mail addresses would work too. Maybe ICANN has rules around gTLDs that would prevent this type of use?
durana··on Ask HN: Rate my site (DebateZone)
With the up vote and down vote arrows, have one or the other light up when you mouse over a specific one, instead of having both light up. It will make it clearer which arrow you are about to click.

I like the layout of the two sided debates over the debates with more than two sides. The two sided debates have the sides and results right in the middle at the top of the page. On debates with more than two sides, having the sides and results off to the right makes them easy to miss at first. The first debate I looked at was a more than two sided debate and because of the layout, I was a bit confused on what the sides of the debate were. It seemed like the comments were the sides because of their placement and the up/down vote arrows.

durana··on Nginx WebServer Best Security Practices
You can chroot any user process. Some processes are harder to chroot than others.
durana··on Querulous, Twitter's Scala library for SQL databases
Yeah that's really the best part. The other thing I really like is that it doesn't try to make you use some sort of DSL in place of SQL like other libraries do.
durana··on Password Chart
For Chrome users there's http://code.google.com/p/superchromepass/
durana··on How I reduced translation costs of 200 articles from $9000 to $46
He's posting translation jobs in Second Life. Details on how this works would make for an interesting post.
durana··on Ask HN: Psychology research on value perception of different pricing models?
I've never priced a product or service myself, but thinking about the roll over credit model from the consumer perspective I see a potential problem. If a subscriber's usage never exceeds the monthly minimum, then that subscriber is going to roll over credits every month and accumulate credits they will never use. The value of those rolled over credits that will never be used will highlight to the subscriber how much money they have paid for credits they didn't use. No one likes to know they are wasting money by paying for more than they need.

I don't know what your service is, so I can't reason about how subscribers would use it from month to month, but I would think you could control the amount of roll over credits accumulated by setting the monthly minimum low enough that most subscribers go over it and use accumulated credits.

durana··on Algorithms as a Service
This is already being done lots of places. And if you take the literal definition of the word algorithm, then all web API services are algorithms as a service. So I don't like the name, but the general idea of the post is interesting.

Thinking along these lines, something that I would find more useful would be a web service that makes a well defined managed infrastructure available to me to run my own jobs or algorithms on. For example a service I can use to submit my own map/reduce style jobs to and have it run on a big cluster of systems managed by someone else; Or a service that allows me to submit jobs to run on specialized hardware, like a cluster of systems packed with NVIDIA CUDA cards. Providers of these services could also have a library of pre-canned jobs for common tasks like text indexing, link extraction, parsing W3C logs into stats, etc. With a library like that then you've got what this post is describing and more.

durana··on Unwitting Distributed Genetic Programming via AJAX
I've always thought this sort of thing would make for an interesting way for publishers of websites to monetize their traffic. Instead of showing ads, a publisher could make it so each page view meant a small unit of work was completed.

A company could do business like an ad network, but instead of matching advertisers with publishers and serving ads, it would match groups needing computing resources with publishers and handle everything involved with serving out units of work and collecting the results.

durana··on Ask HN: A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do?
Maybe he renamed the database that way so anyone trying to extract data from his app would have a harder time.
durana··on Ask HN: A competitor stole my iPhone app content — what should I do?
Does anyone know how iPhone apps are licensed? If this Philip guy bought the app and the database was included with it, are there any terms that say he can't do whatever he wants with the database (e.g., use it for his own app)?
durana··on Certificate Authority provides free certificates
I ran into the same problem when I first used StartSSL a few months ago. It seemed like there were some cases where automatic verification would work and other cases where verification was deferred to a human. I believe StartSSL is a small, possibly one man, operation, so you might have to wait a few hours for human verification. Once my account was verified, everything after that was pretty easy and quick.
durana··on Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit
Maybe one of the really pissed off people who pre-ordered the WakeMate could take one of these and create their own WakeMate like application.
durana··on WakeMate (YC S09) Shipping Delayed
I pre-ordered the product and I did not receive this e-mail either. I forget the exact options relating to e-mail that I selected during the Google Checkout process, but I either chose not to disclose my e-mail address to the seller or I did not opt in for e-mails from the seller. I'm guessing you did the same and that's why we didn't receive the e-mail.

If one of the WakeMate guys read this, it would be good to post this on the blog or main website so people who did not get the e-mail can still get the information directly from WakeMate and fill out the questionnaire.

durana··on Ask HN: I want to learn statistics and data mining
Stanford has a Machine Learning course available in iTunes U.

Direct link to course in iTunes: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.s...

Stanford iTunes U site: http://itunes.stanford.edu/

durana··on Sysadmin mistakes start-ups make
Take #1 and generalize it to the mistake of trying to fix a problem without really understanding what the problem is. This has to be the most common mistake I've seen in the sysadmin world.
durana··on Bitbucket: On our extended downtime with Amazon
Yeah, I saw that too. Too bad it seems like it was ~15 hours until Amazon checked an interface and saw the high utilization.
durana··on Bitbucket: On our extended downtime with Amazon
Yikes, always remember to check interface utilization when troubleshooting performance issues with anything network related!
durana··on 20+ hour outage due to EC2/EBS on BitBucket
That's an over generalization. And difficult and expensive relative to what? When evaluating the cost of solutions to problems like this, the basic idea is to compare the cost of the solution and the cost of the problem (if realized) with the likelihood of the problem being realized factored in.

It's quite possible Bitbucket will cease to exist if they continue to have problems like this. I'm sure their customers are not happy. It does sound like they have plans to fix this once they get back up and running.

durana··on 20+ hour outage due to EC2/EBS on BitBucket
Everything fails. Design systems that minimize the impact failures have on your customers. Moving to another provider isn't going to fix the problem. Data like this should be stored in more than one place.
durana··on I never realized how useful netcat is
One of my favorites for quickly copying a directory between hosts is...

dsthost# nc -l 1234 | tar -xvzf - -C .

srchost# tar -xzf - . | nc dsthost 1234

durana··on How twitter helped a technology consultant escape from an evil hospital
The story really doesn't involve Twitter much at all.
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