Hacker News Reader

randomstringon Affordable, automatic sit-to-stand desk

In our office we really like the MultiTable.com tables. These were the cheapest high quality tables we could find. Ikea now sells adjustable desks, but the last time I looked they didn't show up on the US version of their site. Ikea prices were comparable to MultiTable. You can buy your table top from MultiTable, or re-use your existing Ikea table tops as we did. Our company was able to negotiate a (modest) bulk discount as well.

http://heightadjustableworktable.com/index.php/manual-modtab...

Speaking of Ikea. I stared with an Ikea hack as my standing desk. Building a combo coffee table with a book shelf as a keyboard tray, all for about $34. That sat on top of my existing Ikea desk/table. I used that until I was convinced I wanted to stay with the standing desk.

There are two drawback to the Ikea hack solution. 1) they are not readily adjustable. You don't want to stand 100% of the time, certainly not when starting out. 2) they can be very top heavy if you have more than one monitor and a workstation AND a laptop.

The electric motors look cool, but are totally unnecessary. It takes about 10 seconds to crank the table up or down by hand.

What goes unmentioned in most standing desk articles is the need for a really good mat to stand on. Here are the best I've found that are also a reasonable price:

http://www.thehumansolution.com/notrax-974-ergomat-grande-an... http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001BQR23K/

randomstringon About the security content of iOS 7.0.6

Sounds like a classic Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack.

Just a guess, but from the short description I suspect if you have control over DHCP you can get iOS to use your proxy. From there you can use something like mitmproxy ( http://mitmproxy.org/) to forge SSL certificates on the fly and intercept and decrypt SSL traffic without any warnings showing up on the iOS device.

randomstringon Apple releases iOS 7.0.6 and 6.1.6 to patch an SSL problem

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6147

This sounds like a NSA backdoor to me.

randomstringon Opt out of Google using you as an ad

Anyone else find it ironic you cannot +1 that page?

randomstringon Spy Kids

This article reads like something out of Asimov's The Foundation series.

The author seems to suggest that secrets will be impossible in the future because no one will have any loyalty to one organization.

Oh, and we can blame the Economy, the Internet, and Facebook for that.

randomstringon [dead]

https://nytimes.com/ displayed an untrusted certificate warning, a certificate for the domain syrianelectronicarmy.com

Syrian hackers at work?

randomstringon Porn Site Breaks Down Searches By Country

Having worked on search engines for over 10 years and seen what people search for first hand from the logs, these lists are the PG-13 version. Which is for the best. Some things cannot be un-seen.

randomstringon DuckDuckGo Architecture - 1 Million Deep Searches a Day and Growing

Granted, sometimes flipping bits is important. Then you write that part in C.

There is no reason to pay the development tax of C for everything else. Not when you can build it in Perl, get it working, and then find the hotspots and convert those to C.

randomstringon DuckDuckGo Architecture - 1 Million Deep Searches a Day and Growing

Uh, hello!? Blekko is a web scale search engine that is built using Perl.

It's not the language that makes handling big data slow. It's the algorithms and how you move the bits around.

randomstringon Mozilla Recognized as Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy

The same report lists the NRA as the most trusted non-profit. Not exactly the ringing endorsement the Mozilla's blog makes it out to be.

However, Mozilla should get some branding kudos for having enough people associate privacy and trustworthiness with the Mozilla brand.

randomstringon Blekko donates search data to Common Crawl

I work at Blekko and am the primary engineer working on our porn tagger. We include LGBT, reproductive/sexual health, breast cancer, bands like "Pussycat Riot," etc in our training set to make sure these sites do not get hidden from our search results.

We do not have anything against porn. However, when people are not searching for porn, showing them porn results makes for a bad search experience. So identifying porn, and only showing porn on relevant porn results is vitally important to search quality.

randomstringon Search the sites that Daring Fireball likes

Or more entertaining, is seeing what those sites think about Comic Sans.

http://daringfiresearch.net/searches/comic+sans

randomstringon Iranian nuclear program hacked, made to play AC/DC

Oops, I was wrong. It looks like AC/DC went digital back in 2007 with an exclusive with Verizon.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/02/us-acdc-idUSN01367...

I'm sure everyone who shelled out $12/album with Verizon's DRM is still rocking out to Hells Bells.

randomstringon Iranian nuclear program hacked, made to play AC/DC

Impossible because AC/DC doesn't allow it's music to be released in digital form.

randomstringon Oh Good Grep Web Grepper: A New Web Intelligence Feature From Blekko

Here is an example web grep that I ran to find the top ranked sites that used kissmetrics.com for user tracking. Last month there was a huge blow-up over kissmetrics possibly using ETAGs and other hacks to track users across multiple sites.

https://blekko.com/webgrep?page=view&id=3f469c08de300c12...

randomstringon Project Dyslexie

This project really needs to release a True Type font of their dyslexic friendly font. What's the point of creating such a thing and then net letting it out into the world where it can do some good.

EDIT: I commented too soon, after reading the auto-translated Dutch website I found links to where you can buy the font.

Minimum cost looks to be 165 Euros. For a 5 person license.

http://www.lexima.nl/school-en-behandelaar/categorie/lettert...

randomstringon GoDaddy SSL Cert Scam

Digicert https://www.digicert.com/

randomstringon Nginx sucks at SSL, here's what to do instead

Without any reference to the nginx options

  ssl_session_cache
  keepalive_timeout
  keepalice_requests

and whether or not the other webservers mentioned support such options and if they are enabled in the tests. There is no way to know if this is alarming or just FUD. Also missing from this comparison is a vanilla Apache SSL benchmark (which will suck, but would serve as a reference point).

Given nginx's track record, I prepared to give nginx the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's a invalid test.

That said, I'm going to run some benchmarks of my own.

randomstringon Comodo attack appears to have originated from Iran

This is proof that nations are hacking and spoofing SSL keys in order to spy on its citizens.

randomstringon How to Combine GZip + CDN for Fastest Page Loads

No, I understand. I implemented the first suggested "fix" in your article that you say "won't work."

You seem to think caching two copies of a file is unreasonable (it all depends on how big your site is I guess), but in our case all pages are dynamic and uncachable so this requirement doesn't apply to us.

randomstringon How to Combine GZip + CDN for Fastest Page Loads

Amazon Cloudfront does support gzip, just not dynamically. So it requires uploading two versions of every CDN file, one uncompressed and a second that is compressed, being careful to set content-encoging and content-type headers correctly. Then all the pages on your site (assuming they're all dynamically generated of course) need decide whether the client can handle gzip or not and the link to the appropriate gzip/non-gzip version in the Amazon CDN.

The real "fun" begins when you have CSS or javascript files that reference other files in the CDN. You have to fix them to link to the correct gzip/non-gzip version of the files.

With some perl, trial-and-error it can be made to work. There are some Amazon S3 modules in CPAN, which is a big help.

The big win for Amazon CDN is the low cost to experiment: Pay as you go. Our bill for the first 3 months of playing around with S3 and the CDN (this is just for internal testing mind you) was less than a dollar. Looking at SimpleCDN, they want a minimum of $500 for a month of service before you can even access the full dashboard.

All the other CDNs I've looked at require a phone call to a sales and marketing droid to setup an account. When all I really want is a trial account and some API docs.

randomstringon Google Street View Logs Wi-Fi Networks, Mac Addresses

Why stop there. They should capture the Bluetooth MAC addresses too. That way they can follow individuals.

Harder to to with the more limited range of bluetooth.

http://www.indy.com/posts/stealth-09-indy-airport-study-trac...

randomstringon The Onion cut 66% of their bandwidth by upstream caching 404s

OK, so what they are saying is that The Onion is throwing away 66% of its traffic by serving up 404s instead of serving up page views. Wouldn't they 1) have a better user experience by redirecting to the correct URL 2) have more page views and most important 3) make more money off of ads?

The Internet is trying to give the gift of free traffic and The Onion is saying: "no thanks." Most sites have to pay for traffic, and wouldn't be trowing it away.

Way to play it like Big Media. What's next? A pay wall?

randomstringon Garmin Connect team asked to relocate - this is how they declined

The team fails to mention that the deployment of Garmin Connect was over a year late and the migration from motionbased.com (which Garmin bought) was a total disaster.

It looks like the motionbased.com blog and forums have been taken down. That makes it hard for those who didn't go through that hell, like I and many others did, to appreciate just what a total cluster fsck the transition was. The new site, while much prettier with all its shiny web 2.0-ness, is functionally on par with the site it replaced.

Here is a cached forum link talking about how the December 2008 launch is slipping.

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:YnEfNC3lDnwJ:forums.moti...