Hacker News Reader

benjoffeon Detecting Currency in Photoshop

The best solution is to just make the currency very difficult to counterfeit, eg. see Australian money which is plastic, textured and has a transparent section; alas, this software still detects Australian notes.

benjoffeon Why do programmers write apps and then make them free

I think this point (about it being good to promote yourself) is aimed at people who aren't yet in a position to get a lot of work (I made most of my free stuff when I was still in school). If someone already can fill their whole week consulting then it's a no-brainer (in which case free software is more for filling a hobbyist desire or whatnot).

benjoffeon Why do programmers write apps and then make them free

My first paid app has only got a few hundred people using it. I've gotten a lot of work from people stumbling across my free web apps, which have been used by millions of people. I'm very glad I released free software.

benjoffeon 133-line chess engine with annotated source

Ah thanks, fixed.

benjoffeon 133-line chess engine with annotated source

The article states the goal to be under 2000 characters, to state it in terms of lines of code (as the submitter has) is kinda misleading when the following is considered to be one line:

  if(*c-10){K=c[0]-16*c[1]+C;L=c[2]-16*c[3]+C;}else  /* parse entered move */

edit: can't see a way to escape asterisk characters, so this outputs slightly wrong (edit2: fixed)

benjoffeon Why Plenty Of Fish Stores Passwords in Plain Text

If is has your name then I think that's usually enough for the 'it remembers me' feeling.

benjoffeon Why Plenty Of Fish Stores Passwords in Plain Text

The seemingly apparent advantage of storing passwords in plain text is that it can be emailed to the user, as the article points out (helps with user retention). This is a bad decision and similar goals can be achieved with better means; the reason it is bad is that the password is then reversible, and hence hackable; and also the password could be sent in plain text across unencrypted protocols.

A much better way to get users back to your site who may have forgotten their password is to have links back to your site that contain special purpose unique tokens that authenticate the user into a minimal state of 'logged in' - a state that allows the user to feel logged in, eg. have visible their username, profile pic and (possibly) unread message count etc. all fields that are not overly sensitive. As soon as the user tries to make a user action such as post a message or view their own private data only then require them to enter their password.

For extra security it could also be a requirement that a cookie identifies the user's browser as being once logged in some time in the past.

This is what ebay does, and probably other sites too. You have to be very careful to make sure it's not going to comprimise any serious security, and is not suitable for all sites (eg. a bad idea for any banking site).

benjoffeon The iPad is the new IE6

> I’m saying that the iPad is the new IE6 because we are expecting it to be something that it isn’t, the same way that we were expecting that IE6 would have the same features/performance/reliability than the latest versions of Firefox/Safari.

This makes no sense, IE6 was released 3½ years before the first version of Firefox, and was really the best web browser at the time.

benjoffeon Counterfeit Game Sold on Apple's App Store

I wonder how many people visiting their site are going to take this opportunity to get the game at a discount... hopefully not many.

benjoffeon Photography - 24 hour shot

This is amazing, I wonder if most of the process could be automated and sold as a kit.

benjoffeon Ask HN: How and why does Twitter trap its users?

This problem occurs when redirects are created in javascript by assigning a url to the location object. If instead they use location.replace(href); then no extra item will appear in the history stack and the back button will work as intended.

benjoffeon Slashdot Launches Re-Design

These kinds of designs often work badly with flash, as can be seen by the flash ad on the page: http://i.imgur.com/qycS8.png

(flash in most (all?) browsers appears on top of even html regardless of specific css rules)

benjoffeon CSS3 toggle-button without JavaScript

This doesn't work in Opera.

A better approach in my opinion is to use a checkbox (hidden) with a label pointing to it, then the styling can be applied with the CSS '+' selector, though this won't work with IE6, at least it's using sensible markup.

benjoffeon What does one trillion dollars look like?

I like it better this way as it's a realistic scenario; it's the way it would appear if it had to physically be stored somewhere.

benjoffeon World of Goo for iPad Now Available

It would be neat if they allowed multi-touch to let you place several blobs at the same time, it would make it easier than the desktop version and would warrant specialised levels to take advantage of it.

benjoffeon Demo: Pure CSS GUI icons, no images (experimental).

I wonder if the results were more due to the face that the sentence itself is longer, rather than the specific words used (a longer sentence being a larger target for the user's eyes to land on).

benjoffeon The Instapaper Default.png dilemma

This is also an issue for one of my apps, which can launch in a horizontal landscape, there's no way to create two Default.png files, once for each orientation (correct me if I'm wrong, would love to optimise for it).

benjoffeon Google Does Away With “Sponsored Links” Label, Now Ads Are Labeled “Ads”

I like "Ads" much better, it conveys the same information more succinctly, and without the cheesy euphemism.

benjoffeon Protect Your Site with a Blackhole for Bad Bots

If your site becomes popular this could become a target for trolls. Eg. in some forums trolls will post a fake link to a logout page, this is why sites should use POST or private keys for logging out. If you implement this blackhole it will become a much more serious target.

benjoffeon Offer HN now at news.ycombinator.com/offers

Good point there, it is a little inconsistent, since this was just launched it should be safe to rename it from 'offers' to 'offer', and perhaps set up a 301 redirect so existing links aren't broken.

benjoffeon Single input login form

> Also, having separate warnings for your username and password matches is a bad security practice. Best to just say "username/password combination not found" instead of letting a potential hacker know he's stumbled upon a valid username.

I don't see why that's generally going to be a security flaw; most services already indicate if a username is taken when signing up so a hacker can poll for random names there instead.

benjoffeon My new game for smart people

Nice, kept my attention enough to try it twice (~2:30 then ~1:30). Why do you make the user write their own time in order to save it? Is that some technical limitation or part of the game design for some reason? I always find these games to be neat when they show detailed stats of your performance, like a probability distribution of everyone's (best) scores and which percentile you fit in etc.

Would be neat if the goods were selectable with the keyboard.

benjoffeon Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

http://www.mickjoffe.com/

Got lots of original content (interviews, 1500 of them); not sure the best way to make money out of this, in fact if you have some good ideas to monetize this stuff please let me know. Do you think ads would be best or some arrangement like 10% of the content free and pay to access the rest?

benjoffeon Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

http://pocketodds.com/

Poker odds calculator (texas holdem), the plan is for the website version to get linked around and soon release a phone version for a couple of bucks (starting with iphone, not finished yet).

benjoffeon How to make wooden gears

"..but that's no problem, I can just cut that off with an angle grinder."

I'm going to try to use that solution for some of my daily problems...

benjoffeon Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit

I worked for Opera from the start of 2007 until the start of this year, (webapps team). It's really fun seeing the company from the outside again, great people, great place to work, great product; I just wish Norway suited me better.

My main hope for Opera 11 is that they focus more on their Mac version.

benjoffeon Gift HN: Anybody want a subdomain of ww.com?

Thanks jacquesm, though oddly it has been giving an error for the last few hours:

http://benjoffe.ww.com/ Site Temporarily Unavailable

We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this. error id: "bad_httpd_conf"

Other *.ww.com subdomains are working on my machine so I'm assuming it's an error with the site.

benjoffeon programming challenge

The section under "Submission Directions" is exactly the same as the directions here: http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php verbatim even down to the exact version numbers.

Is there some standard testing package that these are both using? Otherwise it seems fishy.

benjoffeon Gift HN: Anybody want a subdomain of ww.com?

Great idea.

benjoffe.ww.com -> www.benjoffe.com

Thanks.

benjoffeon [dead]

The reason Web Workers do not have access to the DOM is because that would create a pandoras box of problems to solve, mostly revolving around concurrency and efficiency.

If you have a loop where you are setting and reading dom values, then that loop should be protected from other scripts modifying the dom, and hence there's a good chance one thread will have to halt making the web-workers pointless.

What happens if a DOM object has JavaScript values attached to it (bad practice but can happen), does the web-worker have access to these? If not then each web-worker will need a separate dom representation possibly creating a huge overhead.

The best way to take advantage of multi core processors is to allow each thread to have largely their own local memory and pass messages asynchronously between them, most architectures short of this will suffer greatly.