skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Devops VPN between servers?
Hi HN,

Does anyone have experience setting up a VPN between backend machines (web tier, database tier, ...) across both Windows and Linux machines - without a hardware router/firewall controlling the VPN?

I've investigated OpenVPN, stunnel and tinc (http://www.tinc-vpn.org/) and so far tinc seems the most suitable but needs further research on my behalf.

The requirements are what you'd expect for a production environment:

1) Private LAN IPs between hosts

2) Encrypted traffic across the VPN

3) No SPOF with regards to the VPN host

4) Routing efficient (local machines in the same data center should send packets direct to each other, and not via a "router" machine)

EDIT: This is to manage a network between cloud services (Azure) and dedicated hardware.

Cheers
A dinner plate spinning in the vacuum is not in a ground state -- it has substantial kinetic energy that is being converted into heat and electromagnetic radiation as it spins, and it will gradually slow down and stop. (Veeery gradually.)

The theory here is that you can have a system that is already in a ground state, where it can't decay further, and is still spinning (and will spin forever without gaining or losing energy.)

I don't have the expertise to properly understand the details, but it seems like it's along similar lines as something like an electron 'orbiting' a nucleus in ground state -- unlike the plate, the electron will never stop 'orbiting' because it has no energy to lose.

The electron, though, is delocalized -- it's in every place around the nucleus at once. So there's no periodic motion involved. By contrast, this experiment will tag one of the atoms in the ring so we can watch it move periodically.
Notes taken on patio11's talk at MicroConf 2013 (+ slides)
Has anyone realized that you can simply say to your employer, "No, I don't have a Facebook account."?
Some of your blobs seem to contain a lot of structured data: I would further specify a format for them somehow: perhaps as further tables that join to the main ones, perhaps as JSON, perhaps as protobufs. Burying application- or format-specific blobs in SQL fields just pushes the problem down a level.
I have no clue what any of this shit on the front page means.
> It's for giving you information relevant to right now

More accurately it is giving you a random subset of information that might be relevant right now. The behaviour is not deterministic so you can't rely on it.
Chatschik Bisdikian - IBM scientist and pioneer in Bluetooth technology dead
While I can't speak for your personal experiences I've noticed that Vine is becoming increasingly popular with my High School classmates (I'm a sophomore). Many of my friends I wouldn't necessarily consider "techie" found Vine and are enjoying it. Maybe age is playing a role in its adoption?
The examples you listed died because of marketing, more than technology.

Wave was essentially a social network that your friends couldn't get invites for if they wanted. It was a hugely hyped ghost-town. Wave was a tech preview because it was ungodly slow and made some questionable UX decisions (like badly reimplementing the scroll bar) - Google would have been embarrassed to call it a fully-fledged product. At the same time, they hyped it up like one, which led many people to pass judgement on it too soon, while the ones who wanted to use it either couldn't get access or didn't know anyone who had access to write to.

webOS, from everything I've heard, was quite good. Unfortunately, the history of Palm didn't leave them enough resources to grow it organically - it was a high pressure do-or-die launch with rushed hardware that was universally panned. They didn't have enough resources to wait for good hardware to pair with it. They also banked on Verizon covering the marketing budget, but Verizon famously used Motorola's Milestone to launch the DROID brand instead. (There's a really interesting article from the Verge about it.)

I don't know enough about Linux or Zune to comment on those, but you got excited about webOS and Wave because you saw the promise of the vision. The execution is what bungled both.
This one hits home. 25 years ago I zigged into the water filtration business when I should have zagged in the bottled water business. I had the choice and never saw that businesses would pay so much to have water trucked to them. Doh!
Wouldn't tidal forces influence Earth's orbit much more than gravitational radiation? Although I suspect both are far too small to measure on a human time scale.
>There's no way to sue //

You can sue for anything; just not always successfully. That said ...

This appears to be trespass which I think is a tort (entering a part of property, the phone, that was off limits and without consent). You can sue for that.

It's also in the same respect contrary to the UK Computer Misuse Act (crime) AFAICT [story appears to be in the UK, or is it just UK entries in the addressbook]. That would probably hinge on the consent to access the particular files duplicated.

Then there's database rights (tort?), a sort of copyright for databases. [Copyright wouldn't apply as it's not a creative work].

Harassment (tort I think) and infringement of the right to a private life as enshrined in the ECHR (crime) seem to be causes to object as well.

As the calls were business motivated then failure to check against a telephone cold-call blacklist could also generate extra fines.

Seems there's much that could be sued for.
> plight of all assisted minorities, gender-wise or racial

Is that supposed to be ironic????

What's worse in your opinion, a competition that's hard to enter, or a competition that hard to enter AND where, in rare the case you succeed, you will be denied having won on your own, by your talent alone?

That's the reason I'm somehow against all the "levelling the field" initiatives and outreach programs. I don't care about losers, the one who can't get in the competition.

I care about the winners, and making sure they get the glory they deserve.
Maybe I can help give insight into this topic to those without a physics background. Our current best theory that describes reality at the small scale is quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, each "system" -- a collection of particles that you are interested in -- corresponds to one wavefunction (literally, a mathematical function). Glossing over some details, this is a function of spatial coordinates (a vector r) and time (t). For example, if your system is hydrogen, your wavefunction is a function of two coordinates -- the electron's position and the proton's position -- and time. You can perform some linear algebra on this function to predict what state the system will be in at any future time. And you can also predict what your measurements (position, momentum, spin, etc.) of this system will be. The Schrodinger equation is what governs the evolution of the wavefunction. I'll refer you to Wikipedia if you want to know the details of that equation.

In chemistry you have what are called stationary states. These are solutions to the time-independent Schrodinger equation Hψ(r) = Eψ(r) [H is an operator; E is a scalar]. Now, when you plug ψ(r) into the time-dependent Schrodinger equation, you get Ψ(r, t) = exp(-iEt/hbar)ψ(r), where i is the imaginary unit, E is the energy, t is time, and hbar is the reduced Planck's constant. So you can see there is clearly a time dependence.

However, when you measure some property of a system, you aren't measuring the wavefunction but rather the results of some linear operator acting on the wavefunction (each operator corresponds to a probability distribution of what measurement you will get). So despite the fact that the wavefunction has a time dependence, your measurement probability distribution functions do not!

Now the other thing you need to know is that so far these stationary states all correspond to ground states. What is a ground state? It is the lowest energy level that a system can obtain. You might think that the different orbitals an atom can have in chemistry are all stationary states, but they're not. They can spontaneously decay to a lower-energy state. You need quantum field theory to prove that, and I don't even know how to do that, so I won't.

The deal with these time crystals is that Dr. Wilczek has proposed a lowest-energy system that corresponds to cyclical time-varying measurement probability distribution functions. So despite being a stationary state, your measurements depend on when in the cycle you take them! This has not ever been done experimentally, so it looks as though the Zhang and Li group are going to attempt to do so.
The article isn't about Dustin being right or wrong, it's about the regrettable way he treated a fellow enterprising young person who was trying to start something.

It's really easy to dismiss and poke holes in peoples' ideas. The funny thing is that you usually walk away from that feeling pretty smart and full of yourself because you're mostly right.

Then you find out that you called it all wrong. And if you're introspective, you'll realize that you weren't just wrong in your thinking in the moment, you'll remember that you are actually a flawed, small person who knows very very little.

Early on, when I knew even less than I know now, I had a conversation with a guy named Gary Chou who then worked at USV. He's a model for me on how to treat a green person starting out. He didn't seem to be trying to answer the question, "does this suck?" or "can this be a $100M ARR business?" When we talked about what I was working on, he really sought to find out what was interesting about it, how people were using it, and what it could mean and become.
However. Its not because its popular that its not stupid.
> and Adobe, if you are listening you should really give SQLite a serious look

I'm not in the Photoshop group, but I do make liberal use of SQLite in the projects that I'm involved in at Adobe.
The problem I have with this starts as soon as the author insists that the second step is "always" easier than the first, and implicates that first step as somehow being a time sink.

As soon add you say "always" you are almost certainly wrong, and you have most likely missed something important, or at least relevant. This article dismisses a huge breadth of ideas and processes simply because sometimes it is effective to skip them.
"Joking aside, this could be the E=mc^2 of our generation."

No, it's way less interesting than it sounds. It's interesting, but the inevitable science fiction overtones make it sound way more interesting than it actually is. It's really "just" another "humdrum" implication of quantum mechanics. It's also another interesting way of exploring the mathematical relationship between the time and space dimensions, which itself, while very interesting, isn't as interesting as putting those words in a science fiction show would make them sound. It's the hard kind of interesting that involves years of mathematics study and the resulting profound realizations about the nature of the universe that raise two questions for every question answered, not the kind of interesting that produces aliens before the next commercial break. If you want the profound realizations, they're there for the taking, but it does take the work.
I'm curious, has Trevor McKendrick ever built a business from a niche he identified using this method?
http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ ?

ETA: Or are you referring to machines you physically manage? If not, then I would just go with AWS. All the components are already there.

I'm sure other providers, such as Azure, have the same functionality.
I have node in my global path, but it still won't run.

The node process exited.
The node process you were connected to suddenly quit. Check the console for more information.

And the console says:

Error: No protocol method IDeref.-deref defined for type null
The Future of Advertising Is Ours
OpenEXR solved that problem years ago and it's supported by virtually all content creation tools. An open source implementation with a well designed C++ api and bindings to several other languages.

For reasons that I don't understand, it's adoption is weak outside of the VFX industry.
Growing an Interaction
Remember the dawn of computing? There were no women!

And no men. How did men do it without role models?

I don't know. How did they discover America without role models? Or climb Everest? How do they do anything when everyone says it can't be done?

Its a mystery. Especially if you pay no attention to biology.
That is entirely possible. I think it still comes down to how much work it is for the payoff, but perhaps the payoff is bigger as a high school student where these things can have more of an effect on social status than they do to the late 20s/early 30s set*

* I hope that doesn't come off as too condescending to HS students, I certainly don't mean it to be!
I can't help but feel this is just an uncharitable way to describe sharing ideas in general. My fiancee and I have gotten a lot of good use out of other people's good taste on Pinterest — we've found outfits to steal for the wedding, decorating ideas and lots of tasty recipes. How is this any more vulgar than sharing ideas in any other context?
I use a technique like this when I am stuck trying to write code and can't figure out how to do it efficiently. I ask myself "what is the worst possible way to implement this function?" and start writing that. Sure enough, that gets my mind going almost immediately and I start thinking of the improvements needed to turn it into good code.
Couldn't someone come up with a relatively sane schema for storing the same information that a PSD would contain in a SQLite database?

That way, you could standardize on the semantics that are already documented and familiar to other developers, but avoid the difficulties of the file format, which seem to be the issue here.

* disclaimer: I've never had to write a PSD-parser, I'm just going on hearsay.
While the first part of this article couldn't decide whether it was directed toward technical or non-technical audience, second part about security implications of such an easy way to get root was definitely thought-provoking.

While I was super-eager to get Glass before, it really got me wondering if having camera and microphone in your glasses is such an great idea after all.
Mobile devices as keys to your personal cloud
Most Boeing 747 craft run a very old, unpatched version of Solaris. Someone with user access could almost certainly crash a plane using that. The same holds true for a lot of consumer goods running embedded linux. Even my damn TV has vulnerabilities.
Google Wave didn't die because of marketing.

It died because it was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.
Of course, there is the risk that everyone thinks McDonalds is a swell idea, and then no one will ever do anything nicer for lunch ever again. Not to stretch the analogy too far, but I have had this happen both literally and figuratively.
I more often experience the facepalm of watching an uncomplicated idea turn into a global sensation.

It's 2005 (hardly the distant technological past), and someone gets the idea for a site where you can store and watch videos. This is not some kind of radical technological innovation. This is not something beyond the ambit of current capabilities. This is not some brazen insight into the future. This is a site. Where you store videos. And watch them.

This, of course, is YouTube -- a site that was eventually sold to Google for $1.6 billion dollars.

facepalm
As people have already said, this is a ridiculous case of survivor bias and to be fair, they are kind of stupid ideas. One is basically bookmarks, but with a nice UI and sharing, and the other is a kind of poorly made way to share short video clips. I met a kid making a video sharing app that was miles better just last week.
What if your Snippets just say "tried to fix stuff. still broken" over and over and over again?
A mixture of both - added clarification to the post!

Unfortunately Azure is lacking in this department, they seem to have a Virtual Network which may be what I'm after but it's overly complicated, and unfortunately I need a solution for dedicated-only machines too.

Thanks for the reply.
You can have SVG layers in OpenRaster. See: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/OpenRaster/Draft/...
Every killer idea is stupid until success betrays its obviousness. Most inspired ideas are probably stupid. And finally, many ideas are just plain stupid. The trick is to ignore your gut reaction and ask yourself, "If this amazingly stupid idea is executed perfectly, is there a real market for this?" Women "pinning" their desires? Check. People sharing incredibly easy-to-compose video? Check.

Don't confuse the dancer with the dance.
Different sorts of lessons. A lot of formal education is limited by the need to produce moderately competent fodder for cubical farms. It isn't always about producing the best individuals but satisfying the needs of society. Society needs many more Java burger flippers than it needs Turing award winners. There are obviously academic pathways within formal education to pursue individual excellence but they don't suit everyone, especially if they are more practically minded. Competitive activities like hackathons or participating in open source projects seem like a great place to pursue individual excellence. Even better if you are fortunate enough to work in a challenging area. I think our expectations of formal education are often unreasonable. It is a foundation, not the complete answer.
I got to see him speak in Melbourne last year, he has a very enjoyable speaking manner. If I recall correctly, it covered looking at things from a teleological perspective (as a tool for thinking, not as proposed fact) and then free will and morality in relation to that. I'm not certain, but I think there was the suggestion that believing we have free will is useful because it makes us act as though we have free will!
When designing a file format, it is always a good idea to plan for enhancements. There were originally 36 bytes of unused space in the 100-byte header of the SQLite 3.0.0 file format, back in 2004 - bytes set aside specifically to deal with unforeseen needs. Over the years, 12 of those bytes have been allocated to various improvements. 24 bytes remain. (I'd prefer not to use them up all at once or on a whim, obviously.)
with coinbase, I transferred maybe $600 to Bitcoin. With Dwolla, I transferred maybe $60,000. That should be an indication of the potential.

The reason is that with Dwolla / Mt Gox, I could control my purchase much better. I love ooinbase: they are a GREAT consumer service. But for large sums, I think Dwolla could have a huge win.
Couldn't get it working had a javascript error complaining about hosts and ports not matching the domain for some assets. This was in chrome latest, windows 7 x64.
> When you want to send someone an image you want to pass them a single file, not an XML file with a folder of assets. While there are technical benefits to this, it's an incredible burden on the customer.

Or, you could just zip that whole thing up and everyone who doesn't have to care thinks it is "just one file", like .war's.
Haha, I know that feeling. "How on earth am I supposed to implement this?" usually turns into:

for (int i = 0; i < alpha; ++i) {
for (int j = 0; j < beta; ++j) {
for (int k = 0; k < gamma; ++k) {
...
I like the first line on the last paragraph -
"The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present."

What we do in the present can affect the future but we can not predict what will actually happen. There's too much
variables involved.
I know the feeling. For me it was in the stock market. I had a chance to invest a substantial amount in gold about 13 years ago with someone who wanted to dump his gold stocks at a discounted price. I scoffed at the idea and thought it was stupid. Well, we all know how that turned out....
Is this whole 'tech talent shortage' just a problem with recruiters?
I was also of the understanding that CS courses were more about the "why things are this way" than the vocational "this is how you make the magic happen". In the doctor example, you can train a paramedic and a doctor to do the same emergency procedures, but when you come to an edge case, it's the doctor that you turn to for an opinion formed from deeper understanding.
It reads that way a little but as a front-end dev I've had sit-downs with a few founders trying to hire me and in some cases I thought their ideas were stupid. It didn't seem like they wanted my opinion on their idea as much as they wanted to get me excited about the future they are trying to create.

Turns out one of them succeeded in a sense.
Citing Writely/Google Drive as a "successful" example is a fundamental misunderstanding of what success is.

A loss leader does not a business make.
From what I can tell, everything's working as normal. Let me know if anything breaks though.
Keep Breathing
Hacker News does everything it is supposed to according to the CSS standard to indicate to your browser that the area is scrollable. In fact, it is obvious that the site is doing enough because the browser does in fact render the area as scrollable. The fact that your browser doesn't do anything to visually indicate when a region is an independent scrollable area is entirely Apple's fault.

You can argue that websites should be written to conform to the standards-violating behavior in Apple's browser rather than actual Web standards, but we already went through that with Microsoft in the '90s and early 2000s, and I don't think you'll find a lot of people who are eager to return to those days. Browser-makers are expected to conform to the standard, not vice-versa.

I am sympathetic to the fact that this is inconvenient, because I use Apple's software too. But it's Apple that's responsible for the inconvenience, not all the web designers who are correctly following the standard.
It would be interesting if there was some way to pop the camera/microphone off so that Glass could still give you notifications, just not collect input. Would solve a few problems.
Actually, if I read various web sources correctly (IANA rocket scientist, sadly), the Earth-Sun-L2 point is always in the sun. The earth is not big enough to provide shade from that far away, especially since the Hershel's orbit is 700Mm across. Like how a (cruising-altitude) 747 cannot shade (sea-level) me from the sun, no matter where I stand.

So it's always in the sun, which means it has continuous heating, and thus reaches thermal stability, and doesn't expand/contract/whatever as it passes in and out of shade.
Isn't this just a "straw man concept?" Just throw out some idea, even it it's bad just to get the conversation going?
Given the weight of the LHe tank, I think they'd rather send up a new telescope along with the tank.
If it backfires, then all you need to do is next time say "let's do something different".
That's an awesome list.
https://path.com/privacy

This privacy policy is a joke. It basically says "we can do anything we like with your data".

Under the "What Information Do We Share With Third Parties?" section there are some classic deceptions. This one is great (as in evil genius):

>with certain social networking services, if you allow such sharing through our services; //

Not consent, allow. As in if you don't actively prevent it we'll do it.

>with service providers who are working with us in connection with the operation of our site or our services //

We'll sell you out to anyone who we can describe as "working with us".

>"in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition, or in any other situation where personal information may be disclosed or transferred as one of our business assets."

So when doing business-y stuff, blah, blah oh yeah and any time we want to use your info as a business asset. They're covering themselves, again, to sell all data to anyone who'll buy it.