Kronopath

If you click on the day in the calendar to look at the details, the "Contradictory" status is when some of their test servers work and others don't. For this site in particular, there are several servers showing a timeout and no data received. So it's possible that HN is being partially blocked.

It's interesting to note that this is yet another trend that came from Asia. Like stickers, another feature that was recently added to Messenger, this feature has long been in apps like Tencent's WeChat.

And it's used extensively there. Just last month, during Chinese New Year, WeChat added a feature that let Chinese users send money to their WeChat contacts, following in the tradition where people give red envelopes of money (红包) to family members and friends. From what I hear, it was incredibly popular—I even received one myself from a Chinese friend.

I wouldn't underestimate the potential popularity of this move. Especially once they open this up to countries outside the US.

What about developers with little experience, that come right out of school, or are applying for an internship position? Are you going to cut them out of the process? If so, are you okay with the fact that you'll often be missing out on getting an early lead on good junior developers? Good developers rarely kick around on the job market, and so it's often much more difficult to hire them when they've become more senior. Joel Spolsky's take:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

This news story is way too light on details for this audience. A better description of the vulnerability is here: https://www.freakattack.com/

A summary:

The vulnerability allows attackers to intercept HTTPS connections between vulnerable clients and servers and force them to use ‘export-grade’ cryptogrpahy, which can then be decrypted.

A connection is vulnerable if the server accepts RSA_EXPORT cipher suites and the client either offers an RSA_EXPORT suite or is using a version of OpenSSL that is vulnerable to CVE-2015-0204. Vulnerable clients include many Google and Apple devices (which use unpatched OpenSSL), a large number of embedded systems, and many other software products that use TLS behind the scenes without disabling the vulnerable cryptographic suites.

It also includes a list of vulnerable websites, including sites like mit.edu, groupon.com, marriott.com, and americanexpress.com (!).

That's because you're accessing the site from HTTPS, or you have HTTPS Everywhere installed which is doing it for you. I think he's loading MathJax as HTTP, which means it gets blocked because it's coming from an insecure connection.

Okay, you're right, it is pretty nice.

The link he gives there isn't his own site, it's an online typography ebook by Matthew Butterick, a professional typographer. I expect most of the knowledge in his comment comes from there as well.

It's worth a read: http://practicaltypography.com/

Do share! I'm interested.

I actually really like the sound of this, not because of the stated benefits (though those are nice), but because it sounds like this would actually create a really good upgrade path to implementing a proper bytecode into browsers.

I mean, with asm.js and the copious amounts of compile-to-Javascript languages available these days, Javascript is already becoming a de facto bytecode for the web. But it's always been a weird and uncomfortable hack done for the sake of backwards compatibility: a higher-level language hijacked to work as a compile target, simply because it's the only thing supported by browsers.

If projects like this Emterpreter catch on, though, it allows for a smooth path to proper bytecode: for backwards compatibility, you have the Emterpreter read and execute the bytecode, but in other, more modern browsers you have the browser execute the bytecode directly. I think this would be an overall better approach than what we have now.

Thanks for the response, sounds like you've got a good plan for where you want this to go.

As for the middle-click issue, I'm getting it on Chrome v40 on Windows actually.

Not a bad start. A few nitpicks though:

When I middle-click on a game's title to try to open its page in a new tab, the page opens up in both the new tab and the current one, which is annoying.

It's also a little frustrating to click through to a game's page, and instead of seeing a bigger version of the banner image, or more screenshots of the game, the only thing you're presented with is a blurry version of the exact same image, with not much more information than the preview gave you.

In the end, though, a thing like this is as good as its community. I can see this doing well if you manage to make it a hub of activity.

This is not about surveillance or privacy.

This is a massive, well-established company deliberately introducing a gigantic security hole into all secure internet services, including the ones you use for online payments, banking, and governmental services. It's a security hole that can be exploited by anyone with moderate technical knowledge, and it was all done for the sake of showing you ads.

Question for the more legally-minded among us: Can Lenovo face consequences over this? I mean, they deliberately crippled the security systems of their consumer goods, presumably without properly notifying their customers. That sounds like the kind of thing a company could, or should, get sued for.

Surprisingly similar, actually. Many of the sentences look exactly the same.

This is the second time I've ever felt this effect. The first time was with the 2048 variant Hexagon 16384 [0]. I'm starting to suspect that it's something having to do with spending a long time staring at a set of regular circles.

I wish I knew a neuroscientist so I could ask them about this effect.

[0] http://rudradevbasak.github.io/16384_hex/ with HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7437009 and my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443465

What an excellent, approachable summary of the results of the experiment.

That's because you're seeing them after literally thousands of years of evolution and simplification.

马, for example, is the simplified form of 馬, which is traceable back through the millenia to a pretty recognizable picture of a horse back around 1300 BCE or so. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology)

Same with 女, which originally was a drawing of a stick-figure woman with breasts. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology)

From the description:

Spot is a four-legged robot designed for indoor and outdoor operation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated.

The text-to-speech is surprisingly good, but I'm amazed at one thing, and not in a good way: the Spanish voice can't pronounce the word "Español". It pronounces it as "Espanol" with a hard "n" sound. In fact, it seems to pronounce all "ñ"s as "n"s. How that kind of an oversight got into the system, I'll never know. Did no one think to check?

Edit: And to add insult to injury, the English voices do pronounce "Español" correctly!

Don't make the mistake of thinking I don't understand the humor. I've read the books, all five of them, and the humor in them is great. I just don't really care for gating that humor behind the obtuse "puzzles" of this game. I don't have the patience for that, and having to follow a step-by-step walkthrough defeats most of the purpose of it being a game in the first place.

You're right on that point. I remember the first time I came across this game online. If I remember, it went something like this:

----------------------------------------------------

You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't.

It is pitch black.

> get up

Very difficult, but you manage it. The room is still spinning. It dips and sways a little.

>slap self

Done.

---- You have died ----

----------------------------------------------------

I tried to play through it again, and then I made the mistake of taking the towel from Ford instead of saying the magic words "Ford, what about my home". My house was bulldozed and I died again.

I stopped playing after that. Maybe that means I'll miss out on the humor of the game, but I can't really get into a game that is so deliberately obtuse and actively hostile.

...besides, that transcript totally skips over the most climactic scene in the game. It's a travesty, really. Don't bother with it.

But then you're denying yourself the experience! It's not so bad, really.

Spider and Web is a work of genius. But I'll warn you: if you have any interest at all in playing it, stop reading about it. Go in knowing as little as possible, and just work your way through. You'll do fine.

You can even play it for free online, so you have no excuse: http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

I just impulsively picked up the Hadean Lands bundle after reading this article too. I look forward to playing it.

That's almost what he did—he was one of the founders of Paypal. Not exactly a "social" app, but he definitely used his fortunes from something more mundane to fund his more daring ventures.

While you may be correct in general, this is the guy who wrote the parenthetical at the end of the article who (presumably) runs Khan Academy's internship program.

If you look at the source for that example, he actually has 2 selectors that set an item to red, corresponding to the 3rd item in a group of 5 and the 7th item in a group of 9 (Formatted here for legibility):

    span:nth-child(3):nth-last-child(3){
        background-color:red !important;
    }

    span:nth-child(7):nth-last-child(3){
        background-color:red !important;
    }

That threw me for a bit of a loop too. "Wait, is that second item supposed to be red?" It would be clearer if the example and the demo matched up.

A lot of people never have that realization. Good on you for being a better person.

There are plenty of ways of being critical of something without being inflammatory. In your earlier post, which I assume is this one[0], from the banned account called "wastebook", you refer to everyone who uses Facebook as "narcissistic", imply that they're liars, and state they have no "real friends". That's a massively wide brushstroke to use given the size of Facebook's userbase, and doesn't lead to constructive discussion.

The worst part is that it undermines your own point, which is a shame, because when put more sensibly it could actually be reasonable: your argument, once you strip out the vitriol, is that social media is reducing the ability of modern people to nurture deep interpersonal relationships. That's the kind of opinion that can lead to a good discussion, with points to be made on either side, but it's impossible to have that discussion if you start it by pre-emptively insulting everyone who would disagree with you.

I can absolutely understand why the mods would choose to immediately ban you, given that it was an insulting comment, the first comment on a new account, and an account which, based on the username, appears to be crafted for the sole purpose of disseminating those insults. All that is enough to ban you, and you don't have to run to the flimsy assertion that your comments on Hacker News are going to be affecting Facebook's stock prices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852896

Edit: For the record, the comment that was deleted was a comment from a throwaway account "warning" people that anyone who would post anything negative about Facebook would get their account hellbanned because "pg and other YCombinator investors have plenty of facebook stock". By the time I hit the "submit" button it had already been deleted. Pardon me for falling into the temptation of feeding the troll, but I felt I could make an interesting point.

I won't say I was a huge fan of the series either. I only ever read the first two books, and even then have only vague memories of them. I had to look stuff up online to fill in the details of my parent comment. But it had a pretty interesting way of treating magic, and that's one thing that was memorable.