Hacker News Reader

narsilon Real-Time Django: Get Started with Django Channels

This is a great summary. I considered Twisted prior to running into some of the issues you've described, and the complexity of the framework. I ended up using gevent and have been happy its monkey-patching of the socket and related libraries.

narsilon Amazon’s Echo Brims with Groundbreaking Promise

10e6 microseconds? ;)

The quote came from Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices. I feel that people in senior positions such as the person quoted are far more focused on metrics and tangible results (e.g. "reduced Q4 defect ppm by X%") so it probably becomes second nature to alter the phrases used favorably. To a passive listener or someone skimming the article, milliseconds can seem far better.

Besides, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people need to think for a second before realizing 1000 milliseconds = 1 second.

narsilon Should you fear your USB cable?

I definitely appreciated it.

narsilon The Mystery of When to Stop Antidepressants

This seemed to work for me:

    curl -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.2; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-of-when-to-stop-antidepressants-1457377316 | tee file.html

(changing the user-agent slightly on each attempt)

Used https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server to start a local webserver to view the file for CORS purposes.

narsilon Should you fear your USB cable?

A little off-topic, but I've come across 3 of your tl;dr summaries on front page stories in the past half hour. Thanks EwanGbot!

narsilon Zynga to Put Headquarters Building in San Francisco on the Market

ZNGA's market cap was 10x in 2012, when they bought the location for the 340/sq foot mentioned in the article. They occupied 65% of the building, which is a good capacity to be at if you're planning on growing.

Regarding buy vs. rent, I think at the time it made sense, if they were planning on sticking around for 5+ years, given the price per square foot they paid and the fact that they would fill up the entire space.

narsilon Facebook at Work

Considering I'm already Facebook friends with all my coworkers, being FB Work friends with them feels like presenting fake versions of ourselves to each other.

Keeping Facebook for personal stuff, and Hipchat/Slack/Google for professional communication seems to work well for me.

narsilon Twitter Web has been down for over 20 mins. Are you affected?

India (south): Up

narsilon Peach App Token Reuse Flaw

While I agree that the tokens must be expired on logout, it's hard to gain access to the token via MITM because the API requests are performed over TLS [0]! This point seems glossed over in the post. You would need access to a client app directly to be able to inspect its storage or sniff the traffic yourself to determine the token being used.

Access to an unencrypted client device is usually game over for most apps' data security anyway.

[0] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=v1.peachapi.c...

(OP: love the graphic design and appropriate color scheme!)

narsilon OpenSSH: client bug CVE-2016-0777

I'm emailing the one-liner to folks and found it helpful to just include the root subshell:

    sudo bash -c 'echo -e "Host *\n\tUseRoaming no\n" >> /etc/ssh/ssh_config'

narsilon Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin

That's a good point on the cashier swiping it again. Probably better off configuring mobile alerts to be aware of the overdraft and just letting the overdraft occur.

narsilon How to submit an app to Apple’s App Store when it uses encryption

The OP and his company are based in London.

narsilon Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin

Sure, except BoA NSF/Returned Item fees are also $35, except the transaction will be declined so you won't unknowingly rack up 4 of these transactions in a day.

See https://www.bankofamerica.com/content/documents/deposits/ser... for an explanation of their practices.

narsilon Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin

BoA NSF fees are also $35, except the transaction will be declined so you won't unknowingly rack up 4 of these transactions in a day.

See https://www.bankofamerica.com/content/documents/deposits/ser... for an explanation

narsilon AWS mistakes to avoid

> There is no reason - beside manually managed infrastructure - to not decrease the instance size (number of machines or c3.xlarge to c3.large) if you realize that your EC2 instances are underutilized.

CPU/Memory aren't the only measures of underutilization. If you require high instantaneous bandwidth throughput, then the networking capacity available to your instance roughly increases with the size of your instance. This includes both EBS as well as other Network traffic.

Table with Low/Medium/High: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#instance-type-mat...

Example benchmark with c3 instances: http://blog.flux7.com/blogs/benchmarks/benchmarking-network-...

If you're more concerned with just EBS network throughput, check out the table on this page instead: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-ec2-...

narsilon Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to you too, as well as anyone else on call tonight! :)

narsilon Show HN: Cloudcraft – Create AWS diagrams

Awesome! This is solving a real problem when it comes to visualizing infrastructure. I recently provided AWS with feedback at a focus group in SF on releasing a tool like this. So far, I've had to use Gliffy to create diagrams using Amazon's official Simple Icons. [0]

Minor note: my screen is fairly narrow, and the Preview/Export buttons hide the action buttons for EC 2 nodes. I notice the element has a z-index of 1. It might be better to ensure the Preview/Export buttons are always hidden by any boxes appearing when the user clicks a component.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

narsilon Show HN: Cloudcraft – Create AWS diagrams

The visuals aren't 3D. The OP's mirrors AWS' own architecture diagrams in their guides and case studies. It's unfortunate CloudFormations Designer doesn't create visuals like the ones AWS' own designers use.

narsilon How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over

> If you increase the accuracy, you have to increase the mass. Which makes it bigger target.

Boeing is developing compact portable laser weapons technology that could conceivably be mounted on drones.

http://www.livescience.com/52121-laser-weapon-destroys-test-...

narsilon 2015 AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition – Report and Results

The faq links for each bot are interesting. The author of the bot ranked first (Tscmoo) doesn't think the bot uses any interesting AI techniques or algorithms: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23817376/Starcraft/AIIDE...

> My bot has a variety of different strategies that it can execute. The strategy to execute is chosen randomly using weights, and the weights are adjusted based on previous match results. It's pretty simple but I guess it could be called learning.

The top 3 bots are independent entries, and beat the bots using learning algorithms such as UCB1 from research institutions. The author of the bot ranked second does think that other bots that minimized hand-crafted solutions would be more interesting: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23817376/Starcraft/AIIDE...

narsilon Parallel Sequential Scan is Committed to PostgreSQL 9.6

Dates selected during PgCon this year for 9.6 show a release in October 2016: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2015_Developer_Meetin...

narsilon Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

Their robots.txt [1] prevented archive.org's Wayback machine from crawling their Privacy Policy at https://www.homejoy.com/privacy

I would have assumed that I'd be notified if sensitive information on Homejoy was sold to a third-party or "partner", but I should have probably read their privacy policy more closely when the shutdown notice came out.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151023153644/https://homejoy.c...

narsilon Visualizing popular machine learning algorithms

Try this one: https://jsfiddle.net/752pqyvp/embedded/result

It's because of the browser blocking mixed content: The JS libraries are being loaded over HTTP but the JSFiddle is over HTTPS.

The version above loads the libraries over HTTPS via cdnjs.com

narsilon Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

Seems like dwaxe knows that and was suggesting why the OP would prefer Berkeley over a smaller school.

narsilon Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers

As a user, I hope this pushes designers to consider the aesthetics of a page rendered in a font supported by the browser. Unlike JavaScript, a web page rarely needs a custom font to function, so designers must assume users would block custom fonts if preferable.

narsilon How a $2.7B air-defense system became a 'zombie' program

Check out FCC <-> Comcast

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commi...

> Four months after the Federal Communications Commission approved a hotly contested merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, one of the commissioners who voted for the deal said on Wednesday that she would soon join Comcast’s Washington lobbying office.

narsilon Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

I work at https://kloudless.com. While not S3-compatible, we offer a similar proxy that provides a single API to multiple storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, SharePoint, etc. We've also released support for S3 and Azure and are looking into B2.

narsilon Lawsuit filed against sites that posted Ashley Madison data dump

> Can a commercial service monitor a given email address and keep track of breaches affecting that address?

https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and https://pwnedlist.com/ are two services that provide notifications when an email appears in a large data breach, as well as the ability to search for your email in the leaked data.

narsilon JPL C Coding Standard [pdf]

> There shall be no direct or indirect use of recursive function calls.

> [The] absence of recursion prevents runaway code, and helps to secure predictable performance for all tasks.

I can see the reasoning here, but wow, banning recursion..