Hacker News Reader

ecaronon Job Posts That Sell

I have a real hard time taking advice seriously from a company that doesn't have a career page on their own website. It feels like taking stock-market advice from somebody that only buys bonds.

ecaronon AOL kills AIM

According to Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5893031/aim-is-unofficially-dead), AOL's official statement on the matter is "they have no official statement on the future of AIM."

ecaronon Startups, Fix Your "From" Field

I think it depends heavily on your industry. Out of our weekly distribution to 20,000+ opt-in subscribers, on average we get 400+ out-of-office replies.

ecaronon Ask HN: Whatever happened to styling visited links?

Modern browsers have begun deprecating the a:visited because of the privacy problems that allowing it exposed. (More details on http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-com..., but essentially I could have the CSS set your visited link to a color, check that color in javascript and know if you'd been to that site.)

ecaronon Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

Yes, I get that. That's why I said "stop losing money." It seems like their only solution would be to transfer the images of the data to cold storage and then find some source to recoup the cost of the cold storage devices (which is why I thought the backblaze numbers would be interesting.)

ecaronon Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

At that price, it would only take them 150 days to stop losing money if they started building some Backblaze servers (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...). 25,000TB / 135TB * $7,384 = $1,367,407 minimum cost of commercial hardware to store that much.

"historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data" - you could say that again.

ecaronon Proposed CSS for Sarcasm

I would propose more people just become familiar with irony punctuation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation#Irony_mark), because these linguistic inflections have a bigger impacted when they're realized AFTER reading the point, not DURING.

Obviously everyone will understand how to do it on an English-keyboard¡

ecaronon IE9 pwn2owned with 0-day with exploit working back from IE6 to IE10 on Windows 8

As having personally worked to tell the IE team about a severe bug (crashie.com), I can tell you that their process, community and bureaucracy are by far the worst part of Internet Explorer. You'll get ignored, told that the problem is with your code, mocked in the forums, and then ultimately told the problem isn't a big enough deal (or in my case, too complicated) to fix.

The only way to get the IE team to fix issues is make a public spectacle like Vupen did. And I completely get only exposing bugs when there is a profit to be made, because any other route is counterproductive.

ecaronon Who do I write a thank-you letter to after an all-day interview?

There is no standard for this. Beyond that, why would you want to be standard - the point of an interview is to come across as exception. Figure out each individual person, and send as many as you can remember/find/track a hand-written, mailed thank you letter.

The whole point of the post-interview thank you is to be remembered, so if your tactic isn't memorable it isn't worth doing.

ecaronon Advanced Google Analytics for Startups

Talk about HN title link-bait. The article's actual title - 11 Google Analytics Tricks to Use for Your Website - is much more accurate (namely because the article has 1) nothing to do with startups and 2) nothing "advanced".)

ecaronon The uncanny valley of web scraping

For the last 7 years I have worked at a company that does specialized job listing web scraping. And on nearly a weekly basis I encounter other programmers who say, "pssssh, I could do that in a weekend."

It does seem disgustingly easy, but once you move from "getting" the data to "understanding" the data it becomes a beastly nightmare. So thank you to the OP for helping raise "give scrapers some credit" awareness.

Except scrapers that don't respect robots.txt or meta noindex - a pox on their houses....

ecaronon PHP: v8.js

The only "why" that I've been able to surmise is for people using PHP to scrape/interpret content from existing webpages. But I only make that assumption looking at the itches that Jani (the lead behind the PHP v8js) has been scratching recently: http://pecl.php.net/~jani/patches/

ecaronon Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

Native on Mac & Windows, Chrome-only for Linux (which just isn't the same experience as AIR offered)

ecaronon W3C Proposal from MS, Google, Netflix for adding copy protection API to html5

It is providing a mechanism to make it significantly more difficult for the end-user to directly copy/retain the video as it is being streamed to them. 7.3 in the spec is the best example demonstrating how the license model of this implementation differs from how SSL behaves.

ecaronon Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

Adobe killing AIR for Linux didn't impact/slow AIR's growth in the slightest, so I would have to assume this change will also have zero impact.

ecaronon MusicForProgramming();

I kept pushing that solution too, largely because I love the "here's another legal reason for torrent technology" proof that it gives, but it was important to datassette to be able to directly stream from the site and that isn't possible with a torrent.

Yes, both a magnet link and a direct link should be offered, and probably will be soon.

ecaronon MusicForProgramming();

When this was posted 2 weeks ago, I tried to step up and do the hosting with Amazon's Cloudfront. 72 hours and 3TB later, I sadly acknowledged that I didn't have the checkbook size to properly meet the download needs.

Since then, @datassette has moved hosting to Dreamhost and they're truly sticking by their unlimited bandwidth policy. So as much as we typically like to point out when DH is down or messes up, I think they deserve some public acknowledgement for doing something right.

ecaronon Takedowns run amok? The strange Secret Service/GoDaddy assault on JotForm

True, but what other registrar has publicly stated that they won't do what GoDaddy is currently doing? Because until I can find the registrar that makes that promise (all the alternatives I've found are just customers making that claim on behalf of the company), this seems more like a demonstration of the problem of all .com registrars and GoDaddy is just the biggest so they get all the spotlight.

ecaronon Need a Job? Learn Linux

A big kudos to Dice.com for getting such traction out of this non-story. The actual content of their infographic - http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/dice_lf_linu... - is full of revelations that would be very interesting in 2008.

ecaronon Ask HN: what's the best guide to code licenses you've come across?

For non-software products that you want to share, use Creative Commons licenses.

That selection in itself isn't easy, which is probaby why they have a page dedicated to that decision: http://creativecommons.org/choose/

ecaronon Ask HN: what's the best guide to code licenses you've come across?

I've found Jeff Atwood's article on the topic to be the most useful selector of when what license is appropriate: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-...

ecaronon MusicForProgramming();

The mirror of #4 is up: http://d2cb4q5pwp3op.cloudfront.net/music_for_programming_4-...

ecaronon MusicForProgramming();

I reached out to @datassette to see if he'd let us host the MP3s for him on Cloudfront, so fingers crossed!

ecaronon SPDY Brings Responsive and Scalable Transport to Firefox 11

This is terrific news. Now if only Apache would start bundling spdy with their new releases, instead of expecting admins to hunt down the right mod (http://code.google.com/p/mod-spdy/) and hopefully remember to always keep both up to date.

At least nginx is going to start including it: https://twitter.com/#!/nginxorg/status/150112670966747137

ecaronon One of the Oldest Trees in the World Dies by Fire

There's just something about the stories of old trees that I find riveting. The best story, though, is that of the Prometheus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29#The_cutti...

ecaronon Firefox's enterprise support version has now been released

Without the Windows version being available as a MSI, this still isnt going to get enterprise support. At least not support/migration from people deploying FrontMotion's Firefox MSIs.

ecaronon Zendesk releases a free plan

How about a plan that doesn't involve a 5x cost increase when you go from 3 to 4 users? Now that's something I'd upvote!

ecaronon If your client has a problem with a site, send them here and ask for details

The site seems very fast, so good job. Without being able to see a non-obscured application.js, the javascript gurus here can't be of much help. The cloudfront is doing a good job with the caching, but you could shave off 10 HTTP requests by doing a sprite of the background images (just like you did with sprite.png, although the download.gif could be moved in there too.)

I love seeing developers raise their hand on HN and say "I did this!" And kudos to you the project so far!

ecaronon If your client has a problem with a site, send them here and ask for details

I see this site being used heavily for phone support, and in that case your method - although perfect for email - won't hold up.

What'd be great is a a-z0-9 unique code that's presented on each load. Then the user would only need to read me that code, I could go to the site and enter that, and immediately see all the details that were stored for that user.

ecaronon San Francisco's Best Startup Coffee Shop

Someone needs to chart these on a map, and allow overlaying with a business directory of startups and VC hangouts.