risotto

Amazon is fine with it, according to the WSJ.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/29/wikileaks-using-amazo...

As it's mostly static content, they're likely just using Amazon as a CDN, which isn't very expensive at all.

Makes perfect sense actually. It'll be interesting to see what Amazon has to say about this.

ICANN, world governments and the entire TLD system are incestuously intertwined. ICANN is a US corporation mandated by Clinton and George W. Bush.

The Internet is ARPANET.

I'll play a bit of a contrarian and say that I'm not the least concerned about this.

The Internet is a grossly complicated system, and the ability to have nfljerseysupply.com resolve to your website is far from a given right. ISPs, web hosts, search engines, ICANN, governments, browser vendors, OS vendors, and more all have to cooperate for a domain to work. Each player has to cooperate to make your website reachable, therefore each player has the ability to make your website hard or impossible to reach.

It's scary if the US government has powerful legal tools to take down any website (see: China), but the US govt. has a track record of going after only a few criminals, not performing political censorship. So do all the players. Also, COICA, which would make this act easier, got gummed up in the Senate.

I don't know any details, but would you expect counterfeit websites to remain humming along while DHS raids warehouses involved with illegal manufacturing, importing or exporting of counterfeit goods?

The torrent search engine is a different beast, and by following legal precedent I'd expect the owner to be cleared of wrongdoing if and when it goes to trial. I also suspect the owner is being disingenuous, and was operating the site under a shell, making it difficult to find him and serve him warnings or legal papers.

I also interpret this as a sign that the media corporations are fucked. This is the best they can do with their global power, influence and money? Take out some counterfeiters and one lowly search engine?

Yes, we must be diligent against the government and corporations, but if this is all they have then it's nothing I'm going to get worked up over.

Basic.

TI-Basic on the TI-89, to be more specific.

And math at the same time.

Please don't forget that your real reputation is what definitely gets you a great job.

"Hey bossman, my great friend XXX, who I worked with at YYY, is getting bored over there. He's a great programmer and would be a great fit for our team and the infrastructure position we have open."

And bossman will definitely give him an interview and massive bonus points for the personal recommendation and relationship, and wisely make him a better offer than some stranger that comes in from StackOverflow or GitHub.

This cuts both ways.

As an engineer, you want a job that a colleague recommends to you, far before some random posting you see on StackOverflow Careers.

Quite fair! Google code is sweet

Are you sitting in a chair? Do you not work at Github? Then you're armchair quarterbacking. We all are. Even if you are a quarterback for another team (I'm a DBA myself)

Anyway, it's a great discussion so we can learn from other peoples mistakes. I will be triple checking my restores later today, and likely halt the project I'm working on to get cold standbys shored up asap. (but it's hard to prioritize house keeping over customer centric features in the race I'm running along side the Github crew)

After you make them, sure. But trying to predict mistakes before they happen can be difficult to impossible.

The half a million users validates their techniques, no matter how much armchair quarterbacking.

The code repos were never in danger, and they've been killing it in the market because they are racing to add awesome extra features, not racin to the bottom.

I don't disagree that they can do more in their db operations, and that it's fine for us paying customers to demand more, but the reality of startups is that it very much is a race and features, for availability or recovery or other, are viciously prioritized and many things don't happen until something breaks.

If you don't thing Github cuts the mustard, svn on Google Code probably won't have problems like this...

Disclaimer: I'm personal friends with much of the Github crew.

I wonder if this is a rails thing. It's an out of the box pattern to put production, development and testing credentials into one database configuration file.

Also from what I know Github is a flat org where all the devs have ability to do work in production. My company is like this too, and while it sometimes leads to scary mistakes, it also leads to massive productivity over having to go through a release engineering team.

Git itself handles robustness for what counts -- the source code and revision history. This outage did not affect repos as far as I have heard.

Backing up and restoring mysql is an orthogonal problem.

The fact that github can operate at all in a degraded mode very much indicates their competence. Many architectures can not operate without the entire db.

Plus I bet they'll shore up their db operations next. Github is very much a young company that will take a lick or two in their way to greatness. All the startups here will.

Yes it's a bt scary that mint stores passwords but putting this all on mint is wrong.

For one, don't use Mint if you are concerned about their system arechetecture. Wesabe stored passwords locally and did the scraping from your client side. Unfortunately Mint killed Wesabe in the market but maybe there are similar products out there.

For two, the real fault lies with the banks. Issuing that banks simply need to move to oauth is a joke. There is nothing simple about updating and/or unifying every banks online systems. Many banks run custom software and much of this is very old (but very well tested). Making any changes is a massive undertaking that most banks have explicitly rejected doing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Finally, it's strange to fear getting hacked and losing money because of a non-FDIC insured account in mint. Who is using such banks in general let alone in mint?

As a software engineer, I'm always in awe of how well mint works. They have unified a massive number of disparate services. As a end user I love the value mint provides. As a hacker, putting passwords in makes me uneasy, but I'm confident in the banking institutions I use, and Mint's security.

I've done a lot of Django, Rails and PHP. The choice always depends on what your app looks like.

If your app has a lot of non-user facing CRUD (i.e. a CMS or publishing app), Django offers some incredible shortcuts with the built-in admin app.

I also think Python is a better systems programming language (i.e. calling out to unix during web stuff), due to it's scientific background.

Otherwise RoR and Django are roughly the same MVC frameworks -- opinionated conventions about models with a database abstraction layer, and views and controllers (templates and views in Django terms).

Likewise, Ruby and Python are roughly the same -- object oriented scripting languages.

But for your specific questions, I'd say Rails wins by a long shot. There are a lot more Rails companies/jobs in the Bay area (though more Python than Ruby jobs, again because of science). Rails 3 shows the community is still going strong.

Sinatra is the most fun for simple web services and it integrates with Rails no problem.

And most importantly, you can use Heroku for Ruby deployment, which is an incredible short cut for launching a site and its impossible to go back to being a sys-admin once you realize it's not necessary.

Useless is a bit harsh. It is, after all, a big web app that is nothing but fresh screenshots and reviews of apps. Somehow my friends and I manage to find tons of awesome apps all the time.

Google can be pretty awful to find software on. Search for "os x audio recorder" on it and you get one or two direct links to modern software, and the rest are really old or link jacked pages.

A search for "audio recorder" on the App Store is a remarkably different experience. The top hits are well written and well-reviewed apps.

So what is better for "discovery"?

Who actually uses UberCab?

Taxi Magic is a fantastic app that's totally legit. Open the app, use your location to book a cab and within 5 minutes it's there. It's Luxor Cabs who are fully licensed and use computerized dispatch.

I tried UberCab once and it was a nicer car but the experience was no better than Taxi Magic, and significantly more expensive to get around town.

I hate non-metered cabs. Taxis are one place where regulation is good. We all know what it's like to deal with a shady taxi driver. The tendency is to gouge vulnerable travelers, not to set lower prices. The consistency that regulation offers is the most important.

I also can't believe the complaints about the taxis in SF. The cab companies are downright excellent when you actually call, and plentiful on the streets.

I'm quite glad WP7 is looking like a real contender. Viable competition raises the bar for all phone companies, and consumers ultimately win.

This is a really fun time to be a a gadget lover -- Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nokia, etc. are bending over backwards to give us the coolest toys ever invented.

I'll wager that in a year from now, all of these phones will be nearly perfect experiences in their own way.

Bump your price up to cover Apple's cut.

And shut down your servers / payment processor / update system, and enjoy your new found time to work on TextMate2 instead of maintaining infrastructure for TextMate 1.

TextMate is a great case study. It'd be very high up on the Top Grossing list, and therefore massively visible to many new eyeballs that are not Ruby on Rails hackers. I'd wager that it'd move a lot of new licenses if it was in the App Store.

The fact that once one user reports the malware, apple can:

Revoke the developer's code signing keys Freeze the developer's payments Alert the authorities about the developer Revoke the app from the app store Push an "upgrade" notification to every registered user to remove the application Or even more drastic, engage the application kill switch

I'm really not sure how you think a fully managed software platform will have more malware problems than the run-arbitrary-code-off-the-internet system we have now. It seems like it's actually a killer solution to the problem.

Getting a job is about networking. My little brother graduated this past summer from University with an gasp Anthropology degree and he has 3 job offers to decide from.

The big difference is that he schmoozed the shit out of his TAs and professors for the past couple years. His advisors were basically falling over recommending him to their peers.

I doubt this reverse job application will work. Networking with friends and peers will.

At least that part made me laugh...

We all love hacking, and try to make as much money from it as possible.

Making money and making your work available for mass consumption is not orthogonal to loving your work.

I don't really know how it works to get into an IPO, but I'm very interested too.

Netflix and Hulu represent the (slow but certain) change of video broadcasting.

I've been feeling this recently but had some breakthroughs about it.

A very experienced adult has strong notions of what is possible. If you're around very successful people these notions are lofty.

Sure it's possible to bang out a program in an afternoon. I used to do it. My coworker does it all the time. But I am not doing it now so there must be something very wrong. Maybe I'm too old or depressed or have ADD or ...

I found you just have to really step out of your head for a second. My managers are genuinely happy with my progress even if its slow. They know they can count on me to understand the problem and keep advancing and deliver something that works, even if that takes weeks where it could theoretically be done in an afternoon.

Furthermore, they want me to be relaxed and happy and that means it's fine to play hooky or slack off some days.

So I just focus on my personal relationship with my coworkers, and my mental health, not my "productivity." I am not a robot.

You are correct. It's generally used for illegal purposes. I'd like to think there's some grey area. If I pay for cable, and have access to Hulu, can I torrent a copy of House too? Probably not since the rip is stripped of advertising. And there is legal video distributed via BitTorrent. Yadda yadda yadda.

It's just a given that many people want a TV device that can acquire and play video from anywhere and in any format. Bittorrent would be a killer feature for me personally, that is all.

If AppleTV doesn't do this, the adoption rate will be lower. I think it's safe to say that AppleTV hasn't been a runaway success to date with the iTunes Store as the only source. The video sharing stuff in the new AppleTV indicates that Apple wants to open it up to more options. The question is how much farther can it go via 3rd party apps and it's exciting to think about.

But Roku or Boxee, as others have suggested, look a lot more attractive in their openness and integrated sources right now. A theoretically hackable Google/Android device seems quite tantalizing too. A fast VLC on the AppleTV sounds like a killer device just begging to download content too.

Not quite a real BitTorrent app, but still a nice move forward.

I doubt it's any coincidence that Apple started relaxing their grip on the App Store with the release of the iOS AppleTV.

This is too many platforms and markets to leave vulnerable to competition by a more open solutions.

For example: BitTorrent for a TV device is a killer feature for me. Will AppleTV ever offer this or should I wait to see if Google TV will?

Excellent news.

I'm still skeptical about Apple's intentions after 14 months of stubbornness, but it never ceases to amaze how quickly the phone ecosystem changes.

The corporations, developers and consumers all deserve credit for the sophisticated demands and solutions moving these platforms forward.

This isn't DHHs fault, but I think this is the straw that broke the camel's back w.r.t. my own reading of "startup news."

This advice is worthless.

Everything is possible in business. Get acquired and snuffed out, get acquired and blow up, don't get acquired and run a healthy business, don't get acquired and fade out. Get sued and go out of business tomorrow.

Nobody has any idea how the founders and employees at Doppler feel. I respect my fellow professionals enough to congratulate them for their successes however they manifest, and to trust them to seek new opportunities if their current ones fail.

The acquired founders and employees are oppressed and we should offer them condolences? People would kill to have these problems.

Wrong.

Hardware provider => platform provider => application provider. This is the hierarchy of the cloud-era Internet. Think AWS => Engine Yard Cloud => Zendesk.

Hardware is becoming a utility. AWS is billed exactly like electricity: pay for what you use, use it however you see fit. Platforms follow this model too, with a healthy markup.

Apps are what really matter, and what drive value from a platform and hardware. Money comes from customers paying for apps.

I saw a demo of Mongrel2, and it's really slick. Lots of new concepts to get behind, which is both scary and exciting.

There's no way I can use it for anything remotely close to production but I have some hobby ideas baking...