bdc · HackerTrans

12 years agodiscuss

No, at some point between $0 and $400,000,000[1], negligence is no longer an acceptable excuse.

[1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.

bdc

12 years agodiscuss

Listed under "Assets": "New brand and services ready to be launched."

Just what the community needs most - new Gox-quality services, hidden behind brand obfuscation. Ready to go!

bdc

12 years agodiscuss

I love the way this API is presented on the page. It's awesome. It exposes itself in such an obvious way that it leaves no question about its capabilities and usage. Makes me want to jump right in.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

> "[The U.S. patent system] is not obliged to register change in ownership."

That I hadn't known; the implication being, if you intend to leverage a patent with lawful permission from its licensor, it's still possible to get screwed (by being misled about the rightful owner's identity, for instance).

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

  BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn
  Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash"
  Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn"

That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

It's easy to dump on PMA, but what it was built for, it did (and mostly, does) excellently.

When I used PMA for the first time I was a very young programmer, and it really amazed me that such a tool could exist. Oddly enough, this was a really inspirational piece of software for me.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

This article reads like a general argument against government subsidies in general - replace "STEM education" with "corn" or "new energy" and the argument is still valid.

Given that it was published on nature.com, best known as the publisher of one of the top science journals in the world, I would bet that the intended purpose is to stimulate discussion, not to explicitly endorse this view as written.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

Among my recent favorites:

"Hello NULL," -- from Leap Motion

"I wanted to follow up after meeting you" -- from "Developer Relations Team" (not a person!? did I meet the entire team?) at SendGrid

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

I received 15 emails in 10 days when I signed up for Full Contact. Yeah, I wanted to check out your product, so I signed up and tested it out. No, I don't need to be reminded that you exist every sixteen hours.

I had, separately, been discussing one of the less common features at Full Contact with a real person there, and pointed this out to him, forwarding all of the emails back to him as well. He apologized sincerely and helped figure out why this was happening (over email, of course :) ).

It's just an insanely reliable way to turn my opinion from 'this product is intriguing' to 'this product is irritating.'

If you're going to send email spam (and most startups have to, at some point), at least make it pleasant.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

I gotta be honest, I can't figure out how to use this.

I imported my Google Reader data (or so I am led to believe), but all I see is a generic feed full of (admittedly interesting, but not what I want) generic news stories. I see a way of adding 'interests' but not 'feeds'.

My confusion is somewhat assuaged by the awesome '/people' page.

Is this a Reader replacement, or a Reader poaching?

--

[edit: I see that this tool does not include an RSS reader, which I thought it would based on the invitation screen. This does not do anything that I use Google Reader for... which is to read RSS feeds!]

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

In Windows, 'X' "makes no sense", while in OS X, 'X' is "clear." Okay, got it :).

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

To play devil's advocate, let's consider that it might actually be important to push new icons into the public icon lexicon.

Right now I'm typing this comment in a browser window that has three icons at the top right: a little line like this _, two layered squares []], and an X. What do those do? Obviously, they minimize, 'restore', and close the window. Why 'obviously'? These symbols are not intrinsically 'obvious'. They have become a standard since roughly the days of Windows 3.1. We expect them to be there, and I prefer the icons to a little status bar that says "Minimize, Restore, Close."

Then there are three icons below that, a left-facing arrow (<-), a right-facing arrow (->) and an arrow that loops back on itself in a circle. Again, the meanings are 'obvious', insofar as they are not obvious but are part of the public icon lexicon. It can be said this is "common knowledge" that these represent the 'navigate back', 'navigate forward', and 'reload' functionalities of my browser.

How did these icons become standard? Through initial experimentation, then widespread acceptance and propagation.

The good ideas caught on, and bad ones were lost to the sands of time. There are some crappy icons out there that didn't make it.

Consider a recent example - the share icon[1]. A decade ago this thing didn't exist. Now it's everywhere. It's beginning to become commonplace. These days, many applications have a basic 'share' functionality, and few use an icon that looks different from this. So is it a standard at this point? Maybe.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=share+icon

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

Caution --

"Request access to the prototype" yielded an immediate email: "Thank you for signing up for a New York Times newsletter!"

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

On the subject of minification, I see a lot of lines that look like this[1]:

  fireToken : 1 === f.tradeTokens.data.fireToken ? !0 : !1,

Why might that be a desired output from a minifier? Why not simply

  fireToken : 1 === f.tradeTokens.data.fireToken,

[1] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5133829#file-simcityui-js-...

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

+1ed for "How To Express Your Dissenting Political Viewpoint Through Origami"

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

What are you using to determine whether *.io domains are "free" vs "taken"? It seems to be incorrect.

  http://www.usernique.com/io/x
  -- "free"

  http://www.nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=x.io
  -- The domain is unavailable for use.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

AOL Keywords ;)

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

Actually, the captcha predicate is a GET request that looks like this:

http://en.lichess.org/captcha/78pkfjgz?solution=e5+e4 which returns 1 or 0.

So the brute force captcha solution is to go through 8^4 (~4k) get requests, which you could code in five minutes and execute in a minute.

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

To paraphrase: the question 'What is your mother's maiden name?' is intrinsically insecure as a security measure; instead of answering it directly, make up some unguessable string that has nothing to do with the question.

Sound advice, but... but... but.....

This is his own website using this as a security question!

bdc

13 years agodiscuss

  > Most of us won't pay $1 for a great game, but will pay $99 in IAPs

Here's the difference: by the time you're even considering an in-app-purchase, you already know you love the app. Would you rather support a product that has given you lots of pleasure, or an unknown product that lobs a couple of screenshots before footing you the bill?

While I don't have much experience with purchases in iOS, I can say for sure that of the apps I've purchased through Android, all but one (around three dozen total) SUCKED. They had good reviews and good screenshots - that's what made me buy them - but they didn't follow through with the promise. I'm willing to take the <$5 risk to try a new game with "good" reviews and pretty "screenshots", but so far, empirically, it has almost always ended poorly.

... lending the more interesting question: how do we get out of THAT rut?

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