chavesn

Yes, that is what I am trying to say. Karunamon (above/below[1]) said it better than I did. The WSJ deserves to be compensated for their work if they ask to be (in other words, consumers should not "steal" the content), but my questions is whether they have actually asked for the payment.

In my opinion, this tactic is no different than offering it for free but then demanding payment anyway.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9534392

I think you had a branding problem. Yours appeared to be an attack on a brand that is doing good work; this one seems more to be thwarting a sinister publisher practice.

Responding to specific criticism from your comments:

> It does feel excessive or cynical or something to install an actual app to work around a paywall. The WSJ organization says, you must pay us $28.99 a month for full access to this content. That's the value they've placed on their content, that's the price they are charging, and that's what people should pay.

> The fact that they also make most if not all of the content available on a "complimentary" basis via Google suggests that they do value occasional visits from non-subscribers.

> However if millions of non-subscribers were to install a paywall avoidance app and access the full content on a daily basis, this would probably violate the spirit of "occasional".

WSJ certainly deserves to set whatever price on their work that they wish, and they also deserved to be compensated according to the value of that work.

However, if the workaround is no more in violation of the "spirit of occasional [visits]" than this publisher practice is in violation of the "spirit" of web navigation. That spirit is that users should not be discriminated against based on their navigation source.

Google search results should not be a representation of content that is not allowed to direct visitors. If WSJ wants to represent to Googlebot and Google visitors that the content is open, then it should be open to direct visitors as well.

If I, a user, did nothing special to access the content, I should be able to pass on the link to a new set of users. This practice breaks that, and, I imagine almost invariably, users will not understand why.

No, no one should be surprised that a nightly build had problems.

Yes, users should know what they are getting into.

No, the developer has no obligation to be held to a higher standard of reliability.

Yes, the developer can really do whatever they want.

With all that said, can we at least agree that this shows extremely poor judgment from an engineering and product sense? Not only is this a terrible way to achieve user trust, but it also doesn't make any users feel good. As a user, why would I want to use a product that wants to make a fool out of me and throw wrenches in a core feature for chuckles?

Nice work, love clean and simple data apps like this. (Do they have a good name? E.g., stuff like the NY Times "Upshot" interactive data apps?[1])

Two suggestions:

1. Make the bars consistently positioned and grouped across filter clicks. That would make it super easy to compare different cross-sections.

2. The use of the history API is cool; one tiny nitpick: if the click is equal to the previous history entry, navigate back instead of pushing it onto the stack. That will avoid histories filled with A-B-A-B-A-B back and forth clicks between two pages.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/upshot/ -- try scrolling to "Best of"

As an aside -- I have always found this type of sentence formulation, common with software engineers, so mystifying. It would be just as easy to understand without the sentence variables -- it doesn't add clarity but it does add length.

The alternative:

> Once in our CS department (not CMU), we had given PhD acceptance to a wrong student, since he carried the same name+surname with the candidate we intended to admit.

> Instead of rescinding the acceptance, we let both join. It turned out that the candidate we admitted by mistake performed much better than the other. :-)

Too bad the plug is on the end... my guess is that it's impossible to pick an arrangement that works for every TV, but this seems likely to be a problem for wall-mounted TVs like the one in the picture.

This is very beautiful, and it's great -- no, essential -- to think of your users!

But speaking of that, please THINK of your users and despise loading times. Hate them with a passion. As they say, kill them with fire!

Do NOT make them prettier, it only makes it easy to think it's OK. It is not OK! Your app can load faster. Way faster. It's easier than you think. And even if it's not, it's worth it.

When you have done everything you can do to speed up the loading time, NOW you can think about loading screens.

Except, don't make it a loading screen. Fake it. Make it look like you loaded faster than you did:

- Let the fastest content load asynchronously with the slower content.

- Is caching for your entire app too hard? Start by caching the entry points from previous visits and show that (although beware of unsettling flashes/jumps in data!)

- If that's too hard, fake it with a screenshot from the last view the user saw (it's been done -- iOS apps).

Once you've done all the above, and exhausted every other idea that you can think of because you know your users better then I do...

... then, only then, you can think -- for maybe an hour or two -- about making the gap a nicer experience. But remember, it must be a NICE experience. BEAUTIFUL does not always equal NICE.

And until that gap is gone, never cross this item off your list!

[Disclaimer: To the creators of this module, I'm not saying your time has been wasted. I'm only talking to app owners, not to you! Thanks for thinking of how to make bad things better! ]

10% is pretty generous for most of the work experts actually do, though.

Experts do many things, one of which is to occasionally make predictions, where 10% might be more reasonable.

But, for work like imagining how a given goal can be realized, I would guess an "idiot" could compose an achievable plan less than a fraction of a percent of the time.

Reply to EDIT: Your logical estimation was based on the wholesale elimination of several options, of which, I think "competent but wrong" has the largest possibility.

I don't think which I believe and why matters much here, but this is a "false choice" fallacy that seems to be based on personal opinion and doesn't accurately set up the question for others to answer. I think that should be called out.

In pure logical terms, why is "competent, and erroneously concluded that NK is responsible" not an option? Leaving that out seems based purely on opinion and not in any reported or historical facts.

Smart people make mistakes, too.

In fact, I'm not sure why competence or incompetence affects the second half of your scenarios at all.

Wishing for ultra-fast delivery with no tipping is NOT the same as wishing for tipping to go away altogether.

Tipping is helpful when there is likely to be a high variation in customer service.

In a small-item delivery scenario the customer-vendor interaction is 0-15 seconds. How much tipping variation do you expect there to be?

Of course there will be exceptions, and it wouldn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than counting hyphens alone, which the suggestion above inarguably is.

Interesting, though I don't know how this is really relevant to the debate about whether it's appropriate to tell a user that HTTP is insecure but HTTPS is secure (the comment I was replying to questioned that exact point).

That's because the technology clearly exists to hide the type of phoning-home you are talking about. Any move toward more HTTPS for end users doesn't seem to increase that risk to me.

I'm not sure I follow your argument. You do realize that you are talking about two different kinds of attack channels right?

Cleartext-based attacks and snooping (middleman, network peer) are simply far easier and far more likely.

You know those happen all the time, right? Literally all the time for certain users in certain places. A cleartext exploit is source-based (or route-based) and the server owner can't ever do anything to fix it besides forcing encryption (or shutting down completely to that source).

In contrast, a server compromise is destination-based and will theoretically only exist for the time that it is not known to the server provider.

> Your mother's blog post is mostly about salary, which seems to be beside the point. There's more to life than money.

Actually, it's not, it does bring up salary as one point but that's hardly the gist. Some quotes:

> Is the push for everyone to earn a bachelor’s degree so ubiquitous, that we’ve completely lost sight of the outcome of earning the degree?

> "What if what’s really at stake is not choosing which college, but declaring self-sufficiency? What if, instead of teaching young children that if they study hard they’ll have a chance to go the college of their dreams, we taught them that starting today, you will be responsible for your future?"

I thought it was quite a good post. To possible readers, don't avoid clicking based on this dismissive comment.

Hey, glad to see you're here. Let me clarify.

As humble as your position is, I'm trying to say that you should be proud of your success, because there is probably good reason for it. I'm not one to tell you whether you actually believe that or not, but I would suspect it to be true.

But, I do totally agree about "quick tips, todos, or silver bullets". Regardless of that, I'm sure there is something reasonable special about you that has driven you in particular to create at least three moderately successful businesses. Something we could probably learn from.

Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine.

Actually, I really am impressed, and it looks like Carson has good reason to brag. That's cool. But I don't feel like there is all that much substance here.

For one, I think Carson himself is discounting that the difference between doing nothing and making $450K on the sale of a business is actually bigger than $450K and the $100M business he's building now.

He's living proof that there is more to it than luck, but he's saying the opposite.

I guess what's really bugging me here is that the message here is meant to be valuable -- "Anyone can do it." But paradoxically, when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them. It's like participation trophies -- they don't really teach anybody how to search inside themselves and find the way to win.

Exactly. It's going to deter a lot of crimes of opportunity, which I would guess also make up the largest volume of unauthorized device usage.

> if you're not you say "This is way more work than its worth." Because what the hacker mentality gets reinforcement from, is overcoming the 'impossible' (or simply the 'you can't do this') not the actual puzzle assembly.

Hmm, up until this, I thought I was a hacker. When I see a problem worth solving, I'll dig in and try different tools that I've never tried before and figure out a way to make it happen. I really resonate with what you said about not being deterred by the problem seeming extremely difficult or having no obvious solutions.

But I actively try not to work on things that are "more work than they are worth". Seeming "impossible" is not enough to me to make it worth. It has to actually provide some benefit.

This is not to say I don't still get carried away and attempt something which really ends up not being worth the time...

This idea that you have repeated several times...

> A front-end developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript will never EVER need to know how to write an algorithm.

> In my 12 years as a developer thus far I have never needed to ... write an algorithm to markup some HTML

> A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever.

> Only a developer working with data or writing an algorithm to sort it should need to know that stuff.

This is either a spectacularly narrow view of what an algorithm is or it is totally wrong.

I've done both front-end and back-end/data for years. I frequently write "algorithms" on the front-end. Several of these were recent:

- Retry method for AJAX form submission

- Distribute assorted icons evenly among primary keys in a table.

- Dependency chain to check and execute asynchronously fetched scripts in the right order

- Even CSS can be somewhat algorithmic, as when I optimized by about 100X the hiding and showing of a huge amount of table rows with cascading style rules instead of JS

I don't think I need to go on, but the point is that if you think front-end developers don't need algorithms, then you are doing something wrong. I would check your assumptions about whether hiring for this is actually helpful. The companies you are talking about are leaders in both front-end and back-end technology. How do you think that came to be?

Ok, but a jigsaw puzzle is sooo not the kind of puzzle that programming is at all about, even the explicit "puzzle" questions that companies like Facebook dish out.

I can't even think of one similarity between the two activities.

This is an interesting point, but I think the source (the graduate now working at one of the "most prestigious employers in the world") may be affected by a healthy dose of the Dunning-Kruger effect[1].

First of all, as a 22-year-old it's easy to feel like 2-3 years is an eternity. It's also easy to undervalue the attributes that the more senior employees possess, as one simply can't see them.

"Brilliant" and "Best" are not necessary synonyms. The first seems to me to mean standing out from the crowd, thinking differently, challenging the status quo.

Those are valuable, possibly even essential traits. However, one can easily waste a lot of energy spinning wheels trying to do those things at the wrong times -- a mistake I am very personally familiar with.

My sense is this graduate will spend a few years disrupting things a bit with mixed success. In 5-8 years, if they are as bright as they think they are, they'll have a lot of insight on new skills that they weren't even aware of at play in their seniors' interactions. I hope also that the graduate retains most of their original brilliance, so that they can begin to make a serious difference with a matured, balanced perspective on what their peers and seniors have to offer.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Sorry, I don't have an answer to your question, but in theory, how would it detect an intrusion for automatic notification? It seems to me that detecting a bad operation from a good operation is the same thing as securing the system. A vulnerability would likely sail past any such notification system.

Probably not; seems to me like a pretty dumb thing to do if he wanted any bounty. The domain is nearly as dangerous as the URL, since it leads attackers directly to the vulnerable server(s).

> So Abbott and her husband walked into Buddy’s this past winter, hoping to replace the old sofa in their trailer, six years old, its wiring poking through the bottom, cutting gashes into the living room floor.

I once bought a couch set for about the same price, but yet, thankfully, I could afford to pay for it up front. I got two loveseats and a couch for about $1600.

Funny story -- 6 years later, all were in perfectly fine condition -- the springs were NOT poking out the bottom, not cutting "gashes" in my floor.

I split up the set and sold them through Craigslist for about $950 total.

My total 6-year cost? $650, or $2/week for the whole set.

I'm not going to draw any broad conclusions on the wealth/capital/income gap or privilege, or anything like that -- but the author does readers a disservice to gloss over the poor assumptions that lead to many believing they are "forced" to make these kinds of purchases.

Trespassing is a good analogy. Neither all laws or violations of laws are equal.

On one hand, there are the vandals, or outright criminals, who are using and abusing my property for their gain to my detriment.

On the other hand, there's a passerby who knows about the criminals in the area, knows no one else is looking for them, and trespasses my property because the trail led him onto it.

Now that guy willingly alerts me to the criminals, offers an explanation of what he did on my property and how he found the criminals -- what should my response be?

I know that technically he broke the law, and there are those who want to see anyone and everyone pay for their deeds, but in this situation, wouldn't a reasonable person possibly consider tracking down the criminals first before crying "trespassing!"

Am I the only one that doesn't get the joke about what's wrong with "Last 14 days" and "Last 12 months"?

If, as another commenter mentioned, they want every request to update all the data in an app, this is quite an elegant pattern.

They don't have to modify any of their restful APIs to fetch or serialize more data than intended. Instead, the / endpoint might act as a wrapper, which does three things:

1. gets the entire app state

2. makes an internal API call of its own (proxies the one from the request)

3. merges the two results and returns them

I like to think of "good gamification" as "help people notice the stuff they are actually getting done."

When people notice what is getting done, they'll more likely be able to judge whether it's the right stuff to be done and what actions produce more of it.

A corollary of this is "you get what you measure". Whatever you are rewarding, you'll get more of it.[1]

[1]: Wally from Dilbert: "I'm going to go write me a minivan!" http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

Are you blue/green color blind? If so, forgive my doubt, but wouldn't the movement help a lot? Not to mention that the green in question is much lighter in luminosity than the blue.