joecode

Thanks for the reply. There is a connection, of course, but it is not that Amazon knows. Statement B is evidence in the sense that it suggests Amazon does not believe security is sufficiently iron-clad around EC2, which would allow for statement A to be possible in the first place.

I honestly did not expect my comment to create such angst. I recognize that the wording was a bit confusing, but it seems the main thing people are upset about is that I am spreading FUD. Of course that would be quite inappropriate if it was completely unfounded, but I have stated exactly where my concerns came from, so it seems perfectly legit to me.

Your reply is very reasonable and polite, but I am disappointed at the bulk of knee-jerk reactions to this post, as well as their passive aggressive/ad-hominen nature.

Perhaps I am just in a poor mood, but I believe I will be moving on from HN. It was one of the few excuses left for me to procrastinate, so at least I should be more productive. ;)

EDIT: This, by the way, is an excellent article, though somewhat dated, on some of the security shortcomings of EC2. Note it does not address the "nightmare scenario" that Xen (the virtual machine software) is itself vulnerable.

http://cloudsecurity.org/blog/2009/04/08/is-amazon-aws-reall...

Interesting... so it seems resume trumps argument at HN?

Well, pile on the down-votes folks, I've got to get back to work.

Your resume is very impressive, and I see that you obviously know a lot about security at Amazon, yet this by itself does not discount my points. Those are:

1) AWS could be compromised, as my first friend claimed, without Amazon knowing about it.

2) My second friend is not allowed to use AWS for security reasons.

The truth of the first point is indeterminable, I think we may agree. Meanwhile, the second point may indeed be due to my friend being misinformed, if for example, you are aware of a Amazon-wide policy that says engineers can use AWS willy-nilly, so long as they abide by general security regulations that are used elsewhere.

I'm not sure where the confusion lies, but I'm guessing you see "security concerns" as equivalent to "knowledge of ownership"?

It seems to me those are entirely different things, as one can be concerned about potential threat without knowing if it is real or not. But I do not work in the security community myself and may be using language sloppily.

I would be much obliged if you could show me where the crux of the confusion lies.

I'm not sure how you can say that so matter-of-factly. My security friend was talking about something that Amazon does not (and presumably very few people do) know. Meanwhile my friend at Amazon was just stating the fact that he was not supposed to use AWS, or only with extreme caution. Of course that may differ from department to department, if that's what you mean.

My friend from Amazon works in the supply-chain side of things, and he said he really wants to use it, but everything has to be encrypted and some stuff is off limits.

I take it you work on the retail side of things? I'd be interested to hear any more details that you can share.

Certainly agree. Perhaps it would be better to suggest moving to dedicated servers, depending how security-paranoid you are, anyhow.

While I agree it is hard to believe, it would be even more surprising if Amazon did know about it. The fact that they do not use AWS internally suggests that---at least with their level of paranoia---they seem to suspect AWS themselves.

One potential reason not to move: Security.

A good friend deep in the security community once told me, off hand, that EC2 was "owned." I didn't take this too seriously until another good friend, who has been working at Amazon for the past several years, told me that engineers at Amazon were generally forbidden from using AWS due to security concerns.

That much said, I still decided to use EC2/RDS/S3 to host the infrastructure of my latest startup. It is just too convenient to walk away from. Once it matters, I can move the critical stuff to dedicated servers.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not suggesting that Amazon knows AWS is "owned" and offers it to others anyway. I'm only noting that, for certain critical services, they themselves do not appear willing to take the risk.

The title and tone do suggest he is making a general criticism of hacker news. Still, it says "A Hacker News Story", not "Any Hacker News Story" so the anatomy could be specific, but the main point more general.

It appears he is accusing us of groupthink.

I'm not sure how much merit that claim has---certainly he has presented no "actual research" himself, but it is an interesting criticism nonetheless.

This one is close enough to startle me, at least:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1876621

Mostly looks good, but I'd use a different font, or actual handwriting on top of the graph. And the arrow is ugly.

Maybe have a free option to get some traction.

Launch. If it gets traction and it looks like court is the only other option, make a settlement with him. Don't worry what is "fair" or about the work you've already sunk in. Just make sure it's worth it for you, get him out of the way whatever it takes, and move on.

Good advice. Beyond that, I recommend surrounding yourself with critical, intelligent, trustworthy people. I bounce all my ideas off a core group of friends, and generally don't bother with anything until they all give the green light. Besides that, it's just ROI/risk evaluation. Unless you're already a millionaire, it is best to focus on lowest possible investment for the highest likely return. Later it may be worth taking bigger risks.

Having met Dave, I can say he's one of those people you immediately trust. The guy is set financially, and is only is the investment game for the fun of it.

And yeah, his style is bizarre, but that's just the way he likes it.

Anyway, if he says this is all much ado about nothing, he's almost certainly telling the truth.

Couldn't this be an expectation issue? Washing their hands signaled to the subjects that they were in a more "proper" social environment. To fit in, they may have judged the social issues more harshly.

Maybe he should sell it in source form as a "build it yourself" product. I'd definitely pay for it.

A resume should play to your strengths, and not get too personal. If your grades were bad then, leave them off, but show how awesome you are anyway. If they ask at an interview, just be completely upfront about it. Say they were good in grad school, but bad in undergrad because you were sick.

But first, let's nail down the context, because if we can't agree on that then we really shouldn't even be discussing the topic (and I suspect the whole problem here is that Myers thinks they're arguing about something other than what Kurzweil is actually claiming) - we're discussing the amount of information that we would need to construct an effective intelligent algorithm.

If that's the question, then sure, I agree with you. In fact, I imagine something intelligent code be encoded with much less data.

My point was about the information content required for the human brain itself, and that seems to be what Kurzweil is talking about, at least:

The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

we need to model everything that happens to the brain before it becomes a brain

Perhaps the disconnect here is that Kurzweil, operating from an information theory perspective, is neglecting the possibility that the biological environment in which a brain grows effectively adds a ton of "data" to the system. That is, it's not as if brains can spring fully formed from the genome itself, and a few basic rules--it requires a very complex environment. So we're probably talking far, far more than 50MB of "data" here.

Lesson: Put a password on your router.

Indeed. The danger, however, is getting so caught up in the race that you forget why you started in the first place.

That's why I'm forcing myself to finish a book before my next startup. It's matter of self-respect.

It really depends on whether you think his argument is right. If it sounds more or less correct, drop the idea and think up something else. (Of course, if you can't evaluate it for yourself, then you are screwed anyway.)

It seems to me that a lot of the comments on here are written by folks who didn't bother reading the whole article. True, the stuff about Stendhal gets pretty thick at times---I had to skim over some of it---but it's worth it in the end.

There's something ironic about this. The thesis of the essay is along the lines of: love is a very hard road, but worth it in the end. But it is presented in such a fashion that only folks who are persistent will follow it (the essay itself) to the end.

That's an interesting idea, but doesn't that mean the government has to regulate what is and is not a real "news source"? Otherwise folks could just spend the $50 on a style magazine or such.

Same here. Actually, I'd say it's quite a compliment. Abnormal just means that you don't have typical tastes in beauty, so it means her beauty is of special kind.

I found the first girl on the right definitely more attractive, but I generally find slightly more masculine looking women more attractive, even though I'm quite heterosexual. I guess most men just like more feminine looking women because of some kind of dominance instinct. (Though it could also just be a flawed study, a statistical fluke of some sort.)

I have trouble believing this is just a display issue. Has anyone done experiments to show this is a hardware, rather than software issue? It seems that my 3GS reception actually got much worse after I upgraded to the 4.0 firmware. This would explain the widespread perception that the iPhone 4 is worse than the 3G/3GS, since previous owners would have been running the old firmware.

The real mystery is why regular coffee is so cheap in the U.S., compared to say, France or Germany. I think Americans have just come to expect regular coffee to be $2 maximum, and react irrationally when it is any higher. But iced-coffee is a different beast, where market forces work more normally, and so it is priced on par with lattes and other drinks.

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

This strikes me as an extremist viewpoint. Portraying oneself more conservatively in less familiar company is often essential. Indeed, in some cases (private thoughts, for instance) the only appropriate company with which to share is oneself.

It doesn't excuse it of course, but I think it does explain it a bit. Imagine somebody kills one of your children, then comes back and insults your wife. It's adding insult to injury.

It's kind of like kicking someone when they're down. People in the Islamic world are sensitive as of late, and considering what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan lately, I think it's pretty understandable. The prudent, friendly thing is show a little respect.