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piramida

227 karma · joined February 27, 2009

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piramida··on ClusterK can run apps on Amazon’s cloud for 1/10th of the regular price
Amazon makes money as they monetize their otherwise unused resources. More usage -> higher bidding, better prices, not a 90% gap with on-demands.
piramida··on Diablo III coming May 15
it always has been click and hold.
piramida··on Fixing holes in EC2 reliability
It is not mentioned in the docs, but not only EBS performance is unreliable, but it is also not uncommon to get a "stuck" EBS volume, where no I/O operations go through at all. So you have to a) monitor and be ready to take action on "dead" hosts stuck on IO and b) not completely rely on EBS as perfect (it is possible to recover data, in most cases, but it is much easier if you can just create a new one and kill the misbehaving volume, automatically).

So in case of running custom data-intensive setup you could: 1. create a RAID out of several EBS volumes, maintain that - predictable speed, much better reliability 2. easier if you need a small scale solution - regular ebs snapshots and be ready to lose some inbetween snapshot data. Also, I think performance of disk is not a big issue in MongoDB case, so case 2 might be enough for your application. EBS failures are rare, afterall, so unless your data is critical and there is no way to do replication, snapshots would do.

piramida··on Ask HN: Any good Macbook Air alternatives?
but if your car looks like a toilet with wheels it is no fun to drive. everything matters, function, form, feeling.
piramida··on Poll: Are you using the G+ circles feature when posting?
G+ definitely needs a circle exclusion option. Then you could have public posts with several circles excluded (they can still read it since it's public but it won't pollute their stream unless they reply).

But they will pick it up soon, no doubt. The need is there, technical possibilities are endless, so submit your feedback as I did and wait.

piramida··on Poll: Are you using the G+ circles feature when posting?
So you still have a major disappointment ahead when your online personas (all of which are public btw) will clash with undesired consequences. At least in G+ you are controlling your privacy, not just luck/obscurity which you currently seem to rely on.
piramida··on Nobody Knows My Password; Not Even Me
run away from such sites as they obviously store your password in a database. there should be no difference which length is the password since database only stores constant length salted hash of it.
piramida··on Nobody Knows My Password; Not Even Me
Keepass is quite advanced and has exporting ability. I switched to it several years ago from PINs using export in half an hour. No problems with transition. Also lost quite a few harddrives and laptops during those years - no problems if you have a backup, and you always have because your passwords database is synced across all of your computers (or it does not make sense).

So, no, there are no problems using password managers. I don't understand how somebody can be NOT using one in this day and time, seems pretty crazy to use insecure or similar passwords.

piramida··on Nobody Knows My Password; Not Even Me
nice to see more people discover password managers, definitely a newsworthy item. wait...
piramida··on Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media
Agreed that they were first to fully implement this particular "graphical" tagging with confirmations. However the technology is nevertheless too simplistic to be patented.

Just saying that any business which is a leader in some new field comes up with similar inventions daily - not because they are ingenious or full of great ideas, but because nobody before even considered this path. It does not make them patent-worthy.

If moon astronauts would have patented their first step, nobody would have followed (example is bad on purpose :) ).

But anyway, still hoping that it was a defensive step. This whole system is so poisonous that it pushes well-intentioned companies into playing the stupid game to be protected.

piramida··on Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media
Hope they won't actually enforce this patent unless they start going out of business.

This is going beyond ridiculous now, trivial ideas with trivial tech behind them have no value and should not be protectable with a patent - it's not like there is a face recognition technology involved, or anything an intern can't "invent" and code within an hour.

piramida··on Ridiculously easy world times and meetings across time zones
it's the default message from cpanel which makes it look like you use some very bad hosting :)
piramida··on Russia's Crime of the Century
Or if they can steal some good money or business out of that. In this particular case money is relatively small and the case complicated with many high-rank officials involved, so most probably it would go to the "Never Happened" file.
piramida··on Who is affected by EC2?
ylastic.com is not on that list, is down as well.
piramida··on Amazon Web Services are down
Today, April 21st 2011, according to the "Terminator", Skynet was launched... No wonder AWS is down
piramida··on Auto submission bots on Hacker News
Always surprised me how advanced humans pretend to be and how simple-minded they actually appear en masse, with this race to "get my integer number higher" which is a basis of most social algorithms.

Really people? That is the only way to stand out from the crowd? An integer? :)

piramida··on Bash-Fu
The bash-fu is weak within that site.
piramida··on The Surgeon Who Removed His Own Appendix
now imagine the same in antarctica, when drunk, without a sharp blade (no electric razor ofc) and no light :) add extreme pain that can drop you unconscious at any moment... some serious preparation would be needed, hard to imagine what he must have been going through.
piramida··on Redesigning OSX Spaces: 45˚ Is All It Takes
Genius. I used 4 spaces for some time and stopped using them without a conscious reason why - it just felt inconvenient switching between them. But now reading this it becomes clear why - the need to scroll through all spaces and no muscle memory of a needed move to get to specific space have developed over months of trying to use them.

For more than 4 spaces, it could be a grid still, because you have to look at them anyway to actually remember where you need to switch to. For 4, this is a must-have change. So it will be the same grid as used for 9-spaces setup, just without the corner and center blocks.

piramida··on [dead]
Attempt to make some free money. Reposting on news sites is a part of the plan.
piramida··on The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks
no that means that like any ISP they have full access to unencrypted traffic, including login POST requests
piramida··on The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks
"The country's Internet service providers were running a malicious piece of code that was recording users' login information when they went to sites like Facebook."

Right, for all those pre-21st century sites that still don't enforce SSL for authorization. It should be a standard, not a counter-measure.

piramida··on Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
There is quite a lot of logic and I'm sorry that I was so brief that my point escaped almost everybody here. Both merchants and customers are "statistically" equated to criminals, forced to do any online business in a closed ghetto. Which does not leave much business opportunities.

Going to an analogy which might make it easier to understand, say you live in Oakland, CA, and by law you can not open a bank account or possess a weapon because your neighborhood has statistically higher crime rate.

I understand people usually don't care much being on the other side of the fence, you lose what, 10% of sales maximum. But please try the mental exercise of being a well-intentioned business on another side.

piramida··on Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
Thank you that was my point.
piramida··on Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
Exactly. You usually have no choice but to deal in electronic currencies which work in "3rd world" countries. And they most often serve scammers, porn sites, cialex pushers and so on. What are the chances of the legitimate online business which only can accept "dirty" payment methods?

Well, lucky for you then that Brazil is included. I really wish for the situation to change for the better, eventually. But it seems rather stupid, from a programmer point of view, to ban hundred plus countries because you can not fix exploitation of your system by several criminals. Somewhat egocentric, "ah fuck those countries who cares about them anyway", the problem can only get worse.

Internet does not know about borders, and you can't establish ghettos on Internet - it comes biting in the ass later.

piramida··on Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
Not only Nigeria, may I point out that most countries of the world, besides the very few top ones (US, Canada, Japan, Australia and Eurozone countries) are in about the same position regarding e-commerce and web acceptance in general. You can't start a paypal account, you can't pay online with locally issued credit cards, and you generally are prejudiced as a criminal.

Which must be contributing to the online crime coming from this countries, since if you are already treated as a thief, why not just be one? :)

piramida··on ITerm 2
thats my primary term for a year now, and it didn't have a single problem. I mostly work in remote shells, Snow Leo.
piramida··on Wolfram Alpha API now free and open
The reason they failed is fairly simple. People are not that smart, on average, so the usage of their service, besides initial "have some fun" period, is limited to data researchers (of all kinds), scientists and students.

It may be not the smallest audience, but I think their best bet would be working on direct deals with schools and universities instead of trying to attract small-scale developers -- why would developers be interested in a project that probably won't ever pay back but will start charging after 2000 uses?

piramida··on Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick
Thanks but I'm really not that old :) As to your point, I guess it depends on what your friends use facebook for. As a place for some smalltalk and humor - sure, they probably would never worry if the whole world reads it. But not suitable for discussing anything at all, since you have no control over the audience. And most people don't realize that their inner-circle private discussions are most probably world-readable - I'll save some space and won't list endless possible consequences.
piramida··on Inglourious Software Patents
I also find this reason for patents very wrong, but it's the current reality - even good-minded company has to have a briefcase of patents to protect itself.
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