FridayWithJohn

Sorry but tl;dr

Cook1929, your name suits you as you are still trapped in the 1920s.

As a white South African who was born in apartheid I saw first hand just how evil the system was. As for your examples you are after with regards to " one instance of white apartheid South Africans intentionally killing women and children" here you go: 1.) Ruth First (Joe Slovo's wife) was killed by a parcel bomb in Maputo. 2.) Soweto Uprising in which about 170 to about 600 people (mainly children) were killed by police... oh and one of the first people to be killed there was not some older man, the poor person was Hector Pieterson, he was only 13.

I know that Nelson Mandela wasn't a saint, (even he said that). However he gave to South Africa what it really needed. Peace and reconciliation, something that is still sorely needed in this world.

I just read the article for the kitty! (and it turned out to be a really good read)

The one thing that has forced me keep Windows on my PC is the fact that most games require it. Hearing that such a large player in the gaming industry wants to move to Linux is really fantastic news.

Hmmm, this was rather out for me. I got: http://mapme.in/1515 however I live almost 5 miles away from there.

Question: How was this list generated, ie: how do you find out which hash number has a lot of bitcoins in it? I thought that was completely hidden.

Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is for McCain to retire. (Ask the NSA for proof of me being a good boy)

When I read the title of this article I was so pleasantly surprised. Who would have thought that McCain (an old warmonger who is power hungry) would say?

After reading that I now see that he wanted him fired, not because the NSA targeted everyone and not because the NSA violated everyone's privacy but only because the NSA boss should have had even more security protocols in place.

Completely disagree with that. That is like saying you would prefer to have your own brother punch you in your face than a stranger.

It hurts a lot more because you are meant to look out for each other, not distrust and stab each others back.

Their service was terrible? Maybe you just had some rather unlucky experience. We've been using RackSpace (I'm based in the UK) for almost 2 years now and their service has really been fantastic. To give you one example, I had an almost 2 hour phone call (no charge by the way) trying to track down an issue with our LAMP stack.

I'm busy reading "The Masters of Doom". Here is a little snippet all about patents with one of the world's best developers of all time, John Carmack. "Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect his own financial interests, but in reality he had struck what was an increasingly raw nerve for the young, idealistic programmer. It was one of the few things that could truly make him angry. It was ingrained in his bones since his first reading of the Hacker Ethic."

As a developer there is nothing more destructive than to be be told you can't do that... it is similar to what I did.

Could you imagine what would happen if someone put a patient on breathing?

@DominikR, actually your question should not be downvoted at all as it looks like you genuinely want to know how you could solve this security problem.

First off, it is important to know that all IT systems have a scale from "weak" to "strong" in security terms. There is no 100% hacker IT proof system. Generally the more secure a system is the more of a hassle it is to use. Seeing as FB has just been accused by Snowden of handing over mass data it has on various users to the NSA, it would be very foolish for them to ask for this sort of very private data especially at this time (when a lot of people don't trust FB)

As for your question, here are some of the security workarounds FB could do instead of asking for a freaking ID (which by the way can easily be forged)

- Don't lock the account, rather suspend it for just a few days telling the user that he should reset his password

- Get a friend (that has been a friend on Facebook for ages, not just a few days) to authenticate the real user (for this to happen it is assumed he must actually contact his friend without using FB as his account is blocked.)

- A simple unique "reset your account password" URL sent to your e-mail address.

- OTP sent to your phone

Those are just some ideas I thought of in a few minutes. I'm sure there are a whole host more.

@algorias, I once considered people like you to be weird not to communicate on FB... but for a while now I have really started to mistrust FB. The revelations by Snowden most certainly played a big role, but now that they are asking for freaking IDs I draw the line there. It is now time to really think about me leaving this crap... I think my boss might like that too as I'm sure to do more work now, haha

"nearly 30% faster than the nearest competitive browser." - Micro$oft. Absolute crap as can be seen here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413632,00.asp

I'm not loyal at all to any browser. I swop and change (used to use IE, then went to Opera, then Firefox and now to Chrome), but when I hear obvious lies such as IE is 30% faster than any other browser I all of a sudden want to permanently leave IE alone

@icebraining, You're right! The file has indeed been changed a lot lately. In fact as can be seen here: http://lerdorf.com/static.log.gz that file has changed in size from: 2602 bytes to 5821 to 1279 all in the space of 25 hours... that is really suspicious

This is very interesting. Thanks for the code.

It is a false positive as can be seen here: https://twitter.com/rasmus/status/393258147025932288/photo/1 Bascially it is complaining about a JS file that is actually meant to be there.

According to Twitter post by Rasmus (https://twitter.com/rasmus/status/393258264034422785) this has been like this for at least 1 day and still has not been fixed. Something tells me that Google has way too much power and the fact that they don't sort out false positives in a timely fashion is really bad.

The best IDE imo. The only extra thing I add is the Symfony2 skin. Here is a link to it: https://github.com/cordoval/Symfony2Colors/blob/master/READM...

Damnit, after reading that I simply had to buy myself a copy of that book. These two guys were my childhood heros. Although my mom hated them thanks to all the hours I spent playing Keen or Doom and "not doing my homework"

oh, thanks. Didn't know that. Won't do it in the future :-)

Had to use the good old "Wayback machine" to see what was originally on that site that warranted some citing in court case. Looks like it was all about the school shootings. here's the link: http://bit.ly/1bF1kB4

How did this reach the front page of hacker news!? This is nothing more than an advert for sending money overseas. Oh and for the marketing team running this blatant advert, here's a free tip that will help your SEO a bit, add a 301 redirection on your non-www site. You don't even redirect http://transferwise.com to http://www.transferwise.com

How much does it cost in total?

Actually I agree with that average. We've just hired 4 developers to work for us. We're based in Zone 2 London and we're paying them on average £28 000 (they all have 2 years or more in commercial experience)

Agreed! Thankfully there is something else. Ubuntu baby!

You ask three questions, I will address each of them.

1.) You are a little late as most people started this a little younger. However that means nothing as development changes so much, especially on the web side of things. For example PHP 5 (the only version you should use, not PHP4) only came out about 9 years ago. I would hire you but ONLY when I see your coding skills. (Tip: if you don't have a github account, get one now. It is free and then you can also get ahead with thousands of other developers. Also a "see me on github" on your CV will really stand out as a good thing.)

2.) It looks like you only have done HTML and CSS... both of these have changed so much that if you want to get serious with either of them you shouldn't really use them in the "traditional sense". By that I mean that you should rather use a framework that works out really nicely. Responsive design (works on all sized screens, mobile, iPad, etc) is currently a hot topic. Try out Foundation. It is a really cool framework for front end design. (and much easier to learn than Bootstrap) http://foundation.zurb.com/

3.) If you want to do actual programming, I would still recommend PHP. It is still the largest server side language... and hence more jobs available. Just some companies that use it: Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon and Apple. However whatever language you do end up using, if you want to get really good at it and get noticed in the job market find yourself a framework and get good at it. For PHP I would recommend symfony2 http://symfony.com/ as it has by far the largest community.

To sum up with, I would say that if you push yourself really hard, keep abreast with the technologies and most importantly practise coding you should be rather good in just a few years

Thank goodness I went for the HTC One instead then. I've personally bought local SIM cards in Germany, Sweden, Spain, UK (where I got it from) and South Africa.

not the best help book imo

Error establishing a database connection... that is all I get.