codelust
Joined 16 years ago
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254
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117
Member since
Nov 15
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
Common mode of infection I have seen with Wordpress is through site owners downloading premium themes that have been uploaded into file sharing sites by malware authors.
The site owners can't, in most cases, poke around to see what is in the code. And the code often contains hooks that inject various things into the installation.
The other route in is through scripts like TimThumb, which is included in a lot of themes. TT has had some serious security holes in it, the last one being fairly recent that allows for remote file execution. At that point, at least the account hosting the file is a goner.
Comment · 12 years ago
Had written about this a while ago: http://frontiernxt.com/hybrid-entertainment-free-roam-networ...
Kjellberg maybe the biggest personality, but there is a significant group of people who make a decent living out of doing this.
I do strongly believe that this will become a major genre in reality television/entertainment. And I am not taking into account the other universe called DOTA here.
Comment · 12 years ago
RSS was never meant to be a product. It is a format and a spec. Products are built around the spec: apps that push it, clients that pull it. It has incredible value where machines speak to each other. Much of the 'dying' was fed by the deluge of RSS-as-product based companies that thrived at that time. Those companies and products probably are dead, but RSS is not. And that is not surprising; not at least for me.
Comment · 12 years ago
It was also only a year ago I said “Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained.”
I was wrong, but I didn’t realize it until I took on the CEO role in January.
Find this to be really odd.
And it leads into this, which is at odds with the previous statement that they were growing as fast as they can. Did they discover any new avenues for growth that required a whole new raft of capital?
..and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster
I love the company and Matt. Met him briefly in India many moons ago when he was attending a Wordcamp here.
Comment · 12 years ago
If you have the time, there is a good Coursera course on the domain: https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking
Comment · 12 years ago
I have kind of stumbled on to the same line, though I'm in the early stages of getting over the shock of it all as it was not something I was looking to do and considering where I am located (India), I never would have thought it would be possible.
I guess there is no one right way to do this. A lot depends on your own abilities, strengths and the terms in which you can get clients. If you have leverage and can deliver well, the timing is not an issue.
In any case, I'm glad there are more people doing the same :)
Comment · 12 years ago
Looks like it uses Rails & Boiler? Why not outsource the missing bits, get it to MVP and explore options?
Comment · 12 years ago
Bubble 1.0 was greed without the knowledge on how to value digital companies properly. This phase is greed even after knowing how to value digital companies properly.
You will come off looking really silly if an attempt is made to make sense of all these on actuals and fundamentals.
Comment · 12 years ago
It has been quite easy for a few years now to put together your own setup on a VPS and run with it. IIRC, I started doing this somewhere around 2008, during the heydays of Slicehost. What has changed is that you now get pretty good and reliable VPS providers for cheap and in some ways it has kind of become a cool thing to do for everyone.
I would, though, add a few words of caution here.
1. It is one thing to put together a VPS to run a bunch of sites. It is another to handle major traffic on it. Some of you have done it, some of you will learn with time how to do it, but a large number won't. If it is critical for your site to be up 24/7 and Google is going to be your best friend in trying to understand which part of the stack is creating the bottleneck, you'll be in for some real trouble.
2. Do you know how to check for rootkits? Would you know if your server has been backdoored? These days attack vectors are so complex that even experienced hands (the main reason why I don't do this on my own anymore) have trouble saying for sure they are fully locked down. Wordpress on a public static IP represents one of the juiciest targets on the web for hackers and a big chunk of the phishing sites are hosted on servers with unpatched Wordpress installations or plugins/themes that have backdoors in them. Most of the site owners have no clue they've been owned till the hosting company takes them down. Please don't wind up being one of those site owners.
If you are going to do this own your own, at least get something like Wordfence installed, so that you have some degree of protection in place.
I run most of my sites these days on Webfaction. I believe they run Cloudlinux these days, which means you get pretty consistent performance from the server, even in the shared hosting environment. The sites with greater resource requirements are moved to Wiredtree, who provide beefier, managed VPS services at reasonable rates as long as you are OK with cPanel and don't veer too much from their standard stack.
Disclosure: I have no business links with Webfaction or Wiredtree.
Comment · 12 years ago
What is the kind of traffic total/concurrent at peak that you serve?
Comment · 12 years ago
Not on the desktop, but in Opera Mini there have been product placements on both the home screen and speed dial screens for a while.
I'm somewhat OK with it, considering it is a free product. What sucks is that they don't respect my synced Opera Link settings when on a new OM installation. Have to remove items on the speed dial screen manually at that time. The home screen ones are not removable at all, from what I can see.
Comment · 13 years ago
It is a bit frustrating to see the NSA angle in everything these days. Going by the same logic, it is very likely that they are tapping into the backbones, should we then be less enamored with using the internet?
The snooping is a serious problem and has been discussed to death and beyond in various threads.
Comment · 13 years ago
$this->app['component']->function() gives me an instant headache. Which is why I always wind up giving up on Symfony/Silex after trying it out every now and then.
OTOH, I had a much easier time with Laravel, though it uses some of the same Symfony components under the hood.
Comment · 13 years ago
Replying to the reply to my parent comment, since I seem to have reached HN's nesting limit.
Forms of control are not always very direct. Let us, hypothetically, say the big state actors jump in to take control of 80% of the available bitcoins available, under various entities, they have control and authority and little accountability.
This is already a reality in some equity markets, where retail investors are under 20% and rest of the players are institutional players. It will take much lesser than what it takes to move a large equity market, to move BT.
There is a good reason why there is no global barter system. It simply won't work at that scale. A global barter system -- that would be truly subversive.
Really kicked to see something from my neck of the woods with great potential out in the market. Congratulations on the launch.
I'm assuming it will take significant volume to make this profitable (should be easily doable).
I had noticed recently fibre now being strung from trees in Bangalore much like how ethernet cable used to be ten-years-ago and figured we're on to something big now.