Hacker News Reader

_gd3lon Colleges and Employers Demanding Facebook Passwords

This is disgusting. But be thankful for it: if a company or school does this, they're letting you know immediately that they're the type of soul-crushing institution that you wouldn't want to associate with in any fucking way. That could save you a lot of time, at least. (have to look at the bright side!)

_gd3lon GitHub and Rails: You have let us all down.

Shut the fuck up.

How many companies get hacked regularly like this but keep it under the rug? You think FaceBook's never been exploited? TurboTax? Mint? Stripe? PayPal? Shopify? Tumblr? Pick your app that "so so so so many businesses" use regularly, and I guarantee something like this has happened with all of them.

But were they open about it?

GitHub's been open the whole time.

Your post is like saying "All criminals are stupid". This is ridiculous, as the only sample you know of and can work with are the criminals who have been caught. You don't know how many other criminals are out there getting away with their crimes, because...they haven't been caught yet.

Who knows how many other companies have had hacks like this in the past two months alone, for example? I don't, and neither do you.

But GitHub, as an open, honest company that so so so many of use regularly (which means we know right away when there's a problem, especially with a hugely popular repo like Rails/rails) has been in the spotlight since the second this happened.

GitHub, in my opinion, has acted really cool about this. They addressed the issue, explained what the issue is, patched the hole, and even reinstated the hacker's account. DHH addressed the issue in twitter, other people in the community have admitted they fucked up, and now we as a community can work on fixing this.

That doesn't sound like "Letting us all down".

Someone who expects everything to work perfectly all the time and have no vulnerabilities is someone will be let down by anything, a pessimist, and stupid. And certainly not worthy of the front page of Hacker News.

_gd3lon How to Evaluate Your Startup Idea Part 1: The Basics

No future posts/parts necessary.

Just put a price tag on your idea and give it some time; an idea worthy of strangers' money is validated.

_gd3lon Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

"For men fright at relinquishing their material goods, but shackle their time to others willingly."

This is a paraphrased quote from a weird version of the Stoic Philosophy of Seneca; I'm sure the correct quote is out there, but hopefully you get the point:

Your time is your most valuable asset. Dole it out like your employers (or clients, etc.) dole out their money: carefully.

I know people who'll complain about taxes, drive further to get to a cheaper gas station, order goods in bulk to save money, etc. all to save some cash. Rarely do these people have this diligence with the allotment of their time.

Be careful and cautious with how you use your time. View it as something being spent, and if higher dollars means less free hours then don't do it.

This philosophy, in my (albeit small amount of) experience, helps you avoid a lot of the issues OP brings up.

Be careful, people. Paper money can blow away in the wind but then be recouped fairly easily. The few seconds you spent reading this comment, for example? Permanently gone. Be wary of how you spend your time...

_gd3lon Are universities failing entrepreneurs?

Universities are failing the progression of thought, period. Few are actually encouraging people to share ideas freely; many are "open-minded" as long as your ideas are leftist and not too offensive.

I'm a high school senior and many colleges I've looked at and applied to have stricter regulations on speech than high schools and super-limiting workplaces.

Papers are being assigned with minimum length requirements, experiments involving drugs are being squashed, and political correctness is often being held higher than freedom, honesty, and the exchange of ideas.

So what I mean by all this is that, yes, to look at this progression towards bullshit and think "Maybe I'll learn to run a business there" is nonsense. I think it's good that entrepreneurs are spending less and less time with "higher" education. Get the fuck out and start actually building things.

_gd3lon Louis CK inspires Jim Gaffigan to sell comedy special for $5 online

Joe Rogan said he'd do the same on his podcast, which would be great. More artists should do this, in all mediums.

_gd3lon Bootstrap's maintainer hates the semicolon

Is this really about semicolons, or is it just that with so many fucking people watching, using, and messing around with the bootstrap repo that you're bound to find a bunch of bizarre little edge-case problems? You know what I mean?

My repos don't have a lot of semicolon-related problems, because they don't have almost 20,000 watchers and tons of people using my code.

_gd3lon Validate your startup idea by asking 3 simple questions

Validate it by making it and putting a price on it. If people are willing to pay actual money for it, the idea is valid. If not, the idea is not.

_gd3lon What Happens When You Swear At Your Users

I like swearing in copy because I don't want to take money from somebody stupid enough to be offended by "bad words". It's a great filter.

_gd3lon Narc on your friends to the FBI

Weren't tactics like these employed by...oh...the Soviet Union? The Nazi Regime?

I'm getting so fucking sick of this shit.

_gd3lon MusicForProgramming();

Matt Mullenweg's method (at least, that's where I first heard it) of playing one song on repeat really works for me.

I like short, simple songs. Something like a song off CYNE's album Evolution Fight works really well. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2ISUThbcQ&feature=youtu...

_gd3lon Y Combinator’s Short-sighted War Against Hollywood

Proposing to destroy Hollywood will also destroy the livelihoods and the dreams of these entertainers and the crews, writers and creatives that support them. That is irresponsible.

I think it's "irresponsible" that in 2012 we still have a "spot" for entertainers and artists to make a living. That's nonsense. By progressing from horse to car, a lot of horse-related jobs declined. But literally an entirely new paradigm of societal structure emerged, arguably, for the better overall (Just an illustration, I know it's rough but bear with me). Maybe if Hollywood collapses many Hollywood folks will suffer, and I understand that pain. But an open Internet acts as a stage beyond any geographical limits and can create, again, an entirely new open frontier for artists and entertainers all over the planet...and the necessary staffs and execs for them individually.

Hollywood doesn't support the Internet. Even the "young execs" who "get it" and "embrace" the thing they supported the censorship of only support it in the sense of trying to build walled gardens to preserve their last chance of money-grabbing. That's it. They support the Internet that helps them, but if something happens to zig where they want to zag, well...we know their reactions by now. 1 Don't be fooled. The article is fair and good, but the arguments inside are empty at best. Fuck Hollywood.

_gd3lon Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media uploader (http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file) which is used for js files, external css, images, etc.

Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have way more loading problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience.

Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.

_gd3lon Poll: What Type of Documentation do You Like Better?

Thanks man, that's sort of my plan right now anyway. Iwas going to rely more on video but after the surprising (to me) response to this poll I'm definitely going to lean more heavily on text with the videos and screenshots sprinkled throughout.

_gd3lon Poll: What Type of Documentation do You Like Better?

Very well said, thanks man. I agree and think relying solely on videos is a mistake. I'll still use it for my new project because for noobs I think a video is good.

_gd3lon Poll: What Type of Documentation do You Like Better?

Great feedback, I appreciate the input. My app is going to target noobs, so I think the video component will be super helpful. But for experienced people, yeah I know what you mean. It can be a roadbump at best sometimes.

_gd3lon Poll: What Type of Documentation do You Like Better?

Being able to download code is huge, and I think that should be a standard for code-related tutorials.

However, what about tutorials for setting an app? Wouldn't you rather watch a setup video than read through a pdf?

_gd3lon Ask HN: Best Consumer Hosting

Great answers man, thank you! I feel pretty good about Linode. I'm going to look more into it and shop around a bit more. Thanks for all the help.

_gd3lon Ask HN: Best Consumer Hosting

In response to both dangrossman and ohashi, sorry to not add this info to the question.

The problem with me is my app will have subdomains for each user. For example, `john.myapp.com`. These subdomains are each going to be password-protected areas with healthy amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared hosting I currently have.

You've both recommended VPS. Any input on that?

What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/ ?

The videos are embedded from Vimeo, so the concern for me is just having good uptime and reliability and not having to worry too much about running out of "disk space" and bandwidth.

_gd3lon WordPress has left the building

Glad I could help out. The Codex is in great shape, I think they just have to prioritize their time and they don't have huge human resources to focus on everything. Focusing on the Thumbnails section, for instance, might serve more people than the Transients API. But the Transients stuff is pretty neat and there are other little hooks and functions that really do a lot :)

_gd3lon Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?

A blackout would suck because I love checking HN throughout the day.

That's exactly why we should have the blackout, because that's a small taste of the nonsense that could come from SOPA in relation to many other sites we all check daily.

_gd3lon WordPress has left the building

All the things he listed that WordPress doesn't have are the reasons why I like it. With the exception of better caching/CDN integration, I like that WordPress is simple, straightforward, and super hackable with plugins and theme functions. A lot of people don't even know all the capabilities. Few know about the WP Transients capabilities, for example. They're quite powerful and useful.

_gd3lon Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

One of the sharpest changes (I guess a "point of inflection" it looks like?) seems to be at about 65, or the most common retirement age (here in the states at least). I wonder if there's a connection?

In hunter-gatherer societies, elders older than 60 have been observed as 1) looking healthy and 2) still being able to hunt, fish, trap, build, and pretty much everything else along with their younger counterparts. Perhaps at a slower pace, but they're generally far more fit than the modern world's old.

Pampered bodies grow sluggish through sloth, movement and their own weight exhausts them. - Seneca

_gd3lon How To Work From Home Like You Mean It

Great tips. Having regular workouts and other hobbies is great too, even just to keep variety.

_gd3lon IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.

This is a great help, man. Thank you.

_gd3lon How Jeff Bezos advertised for the first Amazon employees (1994)

Wow I never knew that. Very interesting... It seems to be a global thing. Guess not!

_gd3lon How Jeff Bezos advertised for the first Amazon employees (1994)

I think in the context of 1994, there probably weren't many people posting jobs like this. But nowadays, literally tons of posts on Craiglist say the same thing as Bezos.

But it's just reality to me. People often point to one thing and make generalizations.

_gd3lon How Jeff Bezos advertised for the first Amazon employees (1994)

So next time you see a job listing for a new start-up, just remember Amazon started the same way, and that new listing might just be for a company that turns out to be the next Amazon, or Facebook, or Google.

I think this is a little hopeful. Sometimes I'll look quickly on Craigslist just to see if there are any local projects, and there are always at least a handful of job listings read very similarly to Bezos' ad...

_gd3lon How Jeff Bezos advertised for the first Amazon employees (1994)

I love getting lost in cities too, but if I'm in a rush nothing beats the simple "streets go this way, avenues go that way" grid of NYC. (that's just what I say in my head with matching hand motions)

_gd3lon What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

And before I here anything about "Anerican" I'm using my phone so I can't go back and adjust the typo...