Hacker News: ddrager

New comment by ddrager in "Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)"

ddrager — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 21:51:18 +0000

Wow, I didn't realize the little article I wrote for Lifehacker would have such a big impact on this project. Also didn't realize he had passed on the project to Cloudflare. They're a great team so I'm happy it's in their capable hands now!

New comment by ddrager in "Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”"

ddrager — Fri, 29 May 2020 18:36:47 +0000

Censorship comes in many forms. Governmental censorship? Bad. Self-censorship of a platform such as Twitter, good, and necessary.

New comment by ddrager in "Please Add RSS Support to Your Site"

ddrager — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 14:09:45 +0000

I agree this could be the case. I would love for there to be a 'better way' for everyone to consume RSS feeds, just haven't seen them yet.

New comment by ddrager in "Please Add RSS Support to Your Site"

ddrager — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 14:08:32 +0000

Which analytics software uses this? We primarily use Google Analytics, the user agent from the web server log file isn't getting passed back to them.

New comment by ddrager in "Please Add RSS Support to Your Site"

ddrager — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 19:36:46 +0000

Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog:

1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1.

2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of these blogs ranked higher than mine for certain search terms. Google would eventually catch on and remove them, but it was like playing whack a mole.

3. We did not make any money from the RSS feed. Even if we did find a way to monetize it (injecting ads into the feed, for example), see #1.

As a techie, yes yes yes I would like to have an RSS feed. But from a business standpoint, it doesn't make any sense these days.

^1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

New comment by ddrager in "A short soft skills course"

ddrager — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 16:44:04 +0000

This seems interesting, but without knowing what a course looks like, I won't sink $84 into it.

If the creator(s) are reading, I would suggest making the first chapter free. That would work better to get visitors to sign up & pay. For example, from what I can see there are 9 missions, so the first is free, pay to continue.

New comment by ddrager in "Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications"

ddrager — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 12:37:10 +0000

This has been coming for a while. We attempted to create a push-based notification system based on MQTT. It worked well, then the notifications started getting lost. Turns out, the receiver service was getting killed in the background. We found out the best way to get reliable notification was through Google's own GCM (which has now moved to Firebase Cloud Messaging.

We learned its incredibly difficult, if not impossible to build an app (with reliable notifications) that do not use Google services.

You can say its in an effort to maximize battery resources, which I totally understand, but by requiring a Google service (and now library) you are truly tied in to and reliant on their systems.

BTW, as others have pointed out, there are open source Firebase libraries (https://firebaseopensource.com/projects/firebase/firebase-an...)

New comment by ddrager in "Goodbye Uncanny Valley [video]"

ddrager — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 16:56:11 +0000

Had the opposite reaction. Went in not knowing, then when I saw Tarkin and Leia I was kind of thinking, wtf? They digitally rendered their faces? When I talked to friends afterwards they didn't notice it. This must be pushing some sort of mental limit of our brains - not everyone recognizes faces/cg the same as others.

New comment by ddrager in "Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks"

ddrager — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 19:29:44 +0000

I'm curious too, since the max resolution appears to be 220x220 on a 2GB GPU in my testing. If that is a linear relationship, it seems like it would be ~ 1080x1080 for a 12GB GPU.

New comment by ddrager in "Don't Mess with Texas – TI-99/4A Megademo [video]"

ddrager — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 17:27:45 +0000

Oh wow, the TI-99/4A, I learned BASIC on this computer! If you didn't have the tape storage unit, which could save data onto an audio cassette, you had to re-type your program into the computer if the power went out or unit was reset.

It also had an external voice processor as an addon which was really creepy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPkCNcT1Yw

New comment by ddrager in "Show HN: Wallarm – Protect your web apps or APIs with fast Nginx-based instances"

ddrager — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 17:50:40 +0000

I see the primary 'Advisor' to Wallarm is the primary author of Naxsi, so perhaps this is a commercialization of the Naxsi firewall product.

New comment by ddrager in "I am burned out while still in learning phase"

ddrager — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 14:40:08 +0000

What I can tell you is that you are not alone. The startup/coding world, and even just the world in general can be very stressful. Many of us have gone through similar things as you.

It is important to figure out yourself first, and move on from there. You may sometimes try to handle everything internally and it is just impossible to do that all of the time. If you reach out to your friends and family I think they will be more supportive and understanding than you may think.

Feel free to reach out to me if you need someone to talk to - its my user @gmail.

New comment by ddrager in "VPS Disk Performance, Digital Ocean vs. Linode"

ddrager — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 13:13:15 +0000

All VPS systems suffer from the "noisy neighbor" problem. You may have been on a DigitalOcean system with a lot of neighbors with other high i/o activity, and on Linode you could have been on a server with no neighbors.

The only way to test this is to get a random sampling of servers (which in of itself may be difficult) and then re-do the testing.

That is to say, on a VPS you aren't the only customer using i/o.

New comment by ddrager in "Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins"

ddrager — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 20:24:21 +0000

I used the Bitcoin client on my phone, after the transaction went through I clicked "Confirm transaction" and it has already accepted it. I'm guessing with smaller transactions they just assume it went through, otherwise they don't ship it within the hour you get the order, so they have some protection against doublespends.

New comment by ddrager in "Overstock.com Is Now Accepting Bitcoins"

ddrager — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 20:23:00 +0000

Just ordered a mini-helicopter on Overstock using Bitcoins. The checkout process was flawless. I used the Bitcoin client on my phone to send the amount by snapping a shot of the QR code on the website. Went right through, hit confirm, and the deal was done!

Couldn't have been an easier process and can't wait to get my helicopter.

New comment by ddrager in "DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round"

ddrager — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 15:22:53 +0000

- The SSDs are a main selling point

- Their website is easy to use and clear

- Access via a simple API

I've used them for some side projects - although they aren't feature-full for bigger ones, they are great to use.

New comment by ddrager in "Narrato – a personal journal you won’t give up on"

ddrager — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:41:56 +0000

The "Get notified for Android" link just takes me to the iTunes download page. Would like to sign up for when it comes to Android. :)

New comment by ddrager in "Why was my email leaked?"

ddrager — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:44:28 +0000

What about the possibility that end-users' computers are breached?

- User/pass is saved in the 'Remembered password' area of browser (this is decodable by malware) - Email is screen-scraped by malware - Email is sniffed during login at a wifi hotspot (Password is encrypted, user/email may not be) - 3rd party apps that are linked to your dropbox account

I'm not saying that this wasn't caused by the database breach, but there are a TON of reasons that this could have happened. Some on Dropbox, some on the end users.

Don't expect your email address to stay private. That's what passwords are for.

New comment by ddrager in "Windows 8 (soon) available for download"

ddrager — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:48:41 +0000

I just purchased it, and it appears to be downloading now. Note that I had pre-applied for a reduced price offer since I had just purchased a new Windows 7 PC. The URL I used was through here: https://www.windowsupgradeoffer.com/en-US/MyOrder

It is currently downloading through a "Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant" program. This program took all of my information and charged my credit card, and is downloading the files as I write this. ETA 15 minutes total.

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/2t3T2M261P2a

How We Defeated a Proxy Jacker (Google Web Spam Syndrome)

ddrager — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 05:20:58 +0000

Article URL: http://systembash.com/content/how-we-defeated-a-proxy-jacker-google-web-spam-syndrome/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4458375

Points: 1

# Comments: 0