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"Care to share the code as an anti pattern?" brilliant.


We have a slack emoji for it called greenish. It's the classic AWS green checkmark with an info icon in the bottom. Apparently it's NOT an outage if you don't acknowledge it. It's called alt-uptime.


I really liked it. But when trying to add it to my HipChat group it failed to upload. Why? S3 outage, what an irony.


AWS internal lingo calls this the "green-i"


Oh ffs. I can't tell you how much I hate these self professed 'thought leaders'. s/thought leader/unoriginal wanker/g is what goes through my mind and I just stop listening. Stop talking like you are on a god damn yoga retreat.


Congratulations guys! Welcome to 1995.


Ok. Repeat after me, "I will not use Digital Ocean for production. They are not a real hosting company."

The why is left as an exercise for the reader.


Use Digital Ocean for simple production use cases. They are a real hosting company, they are affordable and they are simple to use.

Professional non-trivial usage should be on AWS/Google/Azure/SoftLayer.


Bzzzt! Wrong answer, try again. They are not good for anything remotely resembling production. Since your production should try and closely resemble everything else I'd say they are not good for anything at all. The tag line is "Cloud computing, designed for developers." They should be even more careful about good practices and sound design keeping in mind the kind of customer they are trying to get. Over the years they have done anything but that.


Could you give a few details as to why?

I run my personal server on DigitalOcean and it has been pretty good. At work we run a series of tier-2 services on DO and it's been great for our use cases. We used to run a cluster of 100 machines there and it was stable and cheap.

I realise it's very simple, and that isn't good for a lot of production services, but I don't understand the hate?


They are perfectly fine for anything production resembling a guy that wants to run 2 servers on the internet.

And they're certainly better than trying to run that on someone's home DSL connection.


Actually your DSL is probably more secure because it wasn't designed by complete muppets. Who thought it a good idea to put everyone on flat Layer 2 network. Remember the time they were handing out block devices without scrubbing. How is the new Ceph backed block service. What's the p50 latency? What about p90?


>> The risk of abuse is exceptionally low.

I call bullshit. This coming from the same guys who were mapping one night stands using ride data? What were you guys studying there. Fornicating habits of young adults in large metropolitans?

http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/blog/ubers-deleted-rides-of-gl...

I almost forgot about the time you guys were tracking journalists.

Uber has a reputation and history of being a "shady" company.


This just came out today.

"Uber said it protects you from spying. Security sources say otherwise"

https://www.revealnews.org/article/uber-said-it-protects-you...

I'd ask bastawhiz to comment given his comments above.


Looks to me that even the most specific information in that article is aggregate data over a large number of users, i.e. population statistics, something I wouldn't consider a breach of anyone's privacy.


> Uber has a reputation and history of being a "shady" company.

I'm not going to try to defend our reputation. But it's worth saying that things are locked down _pretty damn tight_ around sensitive data. I've worked in enterprise file storage in the past, and the internal security at Uber is far better (relatively speaking), and continues to mature.


>But it's worth saying that things are locked down _pretty damn tight_ around sensitive data.

Which means absolutely nothing as an assurance. Even if that's the case today, in 5 or 10 years the company could go down, or change CEO and be all about exploiting the data, or selling it to advertisers or whatever. Or it could just be a hack that releases millions of ride information (it has happened to the best of web services).

That's the problem when you store data, making whether you have some "pretty damn tight locks" in place irrelevant.


The whole point is that you are providing an all or nothing choice for no good reason. Why do you FORCE that instead of letting the user choose to allow location while using the app?


> things are locked down _pretty damn tight_ around sensitive data

Commenting, to save this little gem for the inevitable time when Uber gets hacked. Again.


Remember that not all hacks are made public.


Maybe he means the next inevitable public hack.


Would you be willing to share information about what % of Uber's revenue is accrued from monetizing user information?

EDIT: BTW, did you hear from your support that there are users who aren't pleased with the new feature?


> I'm not going to try to defend our reputation [as a shady company].

Someone well above your pay grade probably should. As far as I can tell, Uber's business model is psychopathic levels of regulatory and psychological arbitrage.


What is "psychological arbitrage"?


Stuff like Uber figured out they could charge people more when their battery was low.


So that study is their business model?


There are two sides to this.

One is where we believe, based on your words (or some random person on the Internet who claims to be an employee), Uber employees are restricted from accessing customer data...you know, like LOVINT in the NSA. [1]

The second is where we believe, based on your words (and associated caveats), that Uber does not have a firehose feeding all this information to some other entity that has a much larger capacity for "machine learning", has far lesser actual oversight than what you claim to be in place in Uber, and uses that data for many things we don't know the impact of. This point might sound like I'm talking only about the NSA and trust in the U.S. government, but keep in mind that Uber operates in many countries, and all of their governments have an interest in gaining such data and using it for their own purposes.

Post Snowden, neither of these sides look harmless. I'm talking about the world society as a whole, not just about what one person may consider ("nothing to hide") or what negative experiences that some people may never go through in life.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/24...


I don't want to disrespect you personally, but why should I trust Uber? Today it's locked down, tomorrow it's not. Is there anything protecting me?


It's not reassuring to hear that lowly engineers can't access the data, but the axe-grinding execs can.


All of our data is actually hidden inside a mountain carved to look like Travis's head, a la Mt. Richmore from the hit 90s movie Richie Rich. There are many layers of security, including a voice recognition algorithm that only responds to Ryan Graves singing Never Gonna Give You Up.

But in all seriousness, I'd imagine the execs need to go through the same process an engineer would.


> But in all seriousness, I'd imagine the execs need to go through the same process an engineer would.

You see. You imagine. You believe. You are told. You do not know. And even if it were so today it would not have to be that way tomorrow. So even todays security isn't enough of a reassurance.

The only secure data is data never collected in the first place. And until the friggin disruptive startups start to recognize this I will try to not support them in making my data more insecure.


Has there been an independent third party audit of Uber's internal data security? Or do we just have to take Uber's word on it?


I think this is as good an explanation today as it was in 1970. You are the nun in this story.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html


Not exactly. This question was posed to NASA, not a private, investor-funded for-profit corporation.

NASA is a government scientific research entity, and has no obligation to turn a profit. SpaceX and ULA do.


Quora was definitely not the first startup to do 10 year exercise period, not by some margin. My Lime Wire stock options from 2000 had a 10 year exercise with a 6 year vesting schedule, no cliff and vesting every 3 months. Here's the proof: http://imgur.com/6eTUyui

Adam's on the right track though. I just had to write a 6 figure check today to exercise my vested options at my current employer because of the 90 day clause. It makes me angry because the company's official stance is that the board wants to use stock options as an employee retention tool. I was fortunate enough to have had the cash but a lot of other people are not and there is no secondary market. So if you get fired or have to quit during a bad market you are basically screwed.


That is incorrect. My 2000 stock plan from Lime Wire had 10 year exercise period from grant. Completely agree with you about all of it but you weren't the first one not by some margin.


Lord, just please take him in his sleep. Besides the obvious stupidity inherent to the argument you could simply accomplish this by having the company buy back the unexercised options at the current FMV.


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