Hacker News Reader

chejazion Ask HN: What are the best practices for web authorization at the moment?

You can stuff the logic of "who can do what" somewhere else. eg:

var permissions = { "Superadmin": ["selfdestruct",...], "Admin": ["ban",...], "Plebe": ["post",...] };

function roleCanDo(action, role) { return permissions[role].indexOf(action) > -1; }

Your check would look like: if (roleCanDo("someaction", user.getRole()))

Sorry if JS isn't your thing.

chejazion AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep

Just finished watching Samurai Champloo, where I first learned about Nujabes. I was saddened when I discovered the artist died in 2010. Great music! RIP

chejazion AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep

Currently listening to intense focus. I've been casually looking for background music like this for a while. Thank you.

chejazion After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns?

Breaking the law is part of the "disruptive" entrepreneurship strategy for these companies. Incumbent companies tend to influence the law, not necessarily break it. For a disruptor to break the law, the company needs a lot of money to fight back.

Airbnb and Uber are managing to fight the regulatory hurdles with ~5x is ~13x the valuation of Zenefits, respectively. While Zenefits is ~5x the valuation of Aereo, it seems they have some catching up (read: fundraising) to do.

chejazion Uber's Design Meltdown

Haha I thought the same thing. The author probably chose to include it, since it has a promo-code specific to the site.

chejazion Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

Lost in the transformation was three solar masses’ worth of energy, vaporized into gravitational waves in an unseen and barely felt apocalypse. As visible light, that energy would be equivalent to the brightness of a billion trillion suns.

Beautiful.

chejazion Was Uber’s Branding Done While Uber High?

On the bottom of https://brand.uber.com/#our-new-look, they explain the roots of the new icon as well:

01. The Bit At the center of our app icons is the Bit—the symbol of our technology.

02. Product shape Surrounding the Bit is a shape that denotes the product and represents the atoms moved by our technology. For the rider app, this shape is a circle.

03. Grid line To convey the rider story of a trip in progress or the arrival at a destination, a single line connects the Bit with the shape around it.

04. Patterns and colors Behind the other components is a canvas of color and pattern, another representation of the physical world that symbolizes the cities and people we serve.

EDIT: The leading zeros in the numbered list above were featured on the site. What significance could that hold?

chejazion Open-Sourced Logos

I'm bootstrapping a product startup as well and I have to agree. My logo is the cent symbol, in Arial font. Lots of other things to be working on!

chejazion HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

Here's a graph of the transaction volume:

http://imgur.com/ScNqb4I

The big spike in the beginning was before we implemented fraud checks (eg, users directing botnets at the shortlinks).

Since then, the transaction volume has been growing at a similar rate, at 70% growth in the past 30 days (compared to 79% user growth).

chejazion HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

Just generated this graph:

http://imgur.com/iqnaGem

We had 38 signups yesterday, grew ~44% in the last 30 days.

EDIT, mathfail: grew 79% in the last 30 days.

chejazion HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

We've had around 2.8k signups so far (launched in October). We have about 200 users active per day. I just checked and 89 of them have been active in all previous 5 days. We have a few outspoken believers in the concept (< 10). We just solicited feedback from our base and got only 20 responses, so probably could do better there.

chejazion HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

Hi YC partners,

Founder of https://credhot.com here. We're a link shortener that uses interstitial advertising to make money. We rev-share with people who share content using our shortener, so they get paid based on their traffic.

People know about us in the Bitcoin community because we pay our users in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has benefits when it comes to microtransactions, so it's not just a marketing strategy. We think that sharing content via our service can help bring Bitcoin to the masses. ChangeTip is already doing this via the tipping model; we want to drive adoption with advertising.

First talking point: From your perspective, does paying users in Bitcoin help or hurt the viability of the idea?

chejazion Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

Haven't looked at the source but worth noting there's a Bitcoin logo on the homepage near "Browse Better."

chejazion Show HN: Mashily – Make Donald Trump Say Anything

Winning!

chejazion Apple Steps Back from Its iAd Advertising Business

I imagine Apple provided a superior experience since they manage the App development frameworks on Mac / iOS. The flop must have been inventory. A lot of advertisers are now turning to exchanges (DoubleClick, AppNexus, OpenX...) for inventory whereas Apple forced you to use iAd Workbench [0].

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924

EDIT: The flop must have been demand, not inventory.

chejazion ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

Good that it's open source, but I found this blurb from their contributing guidelines [0] to be contribution inhibiting:

You will need to complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before your pull request can be accepted. This agreement testifies that you are granting us permission to use the source code you are submitting, and that this work is being submitted under appropriate license that we can use it.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/blob/master/CONTRIBU...

chejazion Facebook's “free internet” programme hits a roadblock in India

Are you happy with the outcome? Would you make the same decision knowing what you know now?

chejazion The Product Engineer

As a candidate you might have better luck with companies that embrace Holacracy [0]. On the recruiting side, I have a hunch that the best way to get more Product Engineers is to have the Product Engineers in your org conduct interviews in addition to the pure technical ones. A requirement for this is that the Product Engineer's title is made explicit, otherwise "wtf, why is this person always doing the interviewing."

[0] http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/

chejazion The Final Days of the Bitcoin Foundation?

Thanks for offering an alternate perspective on this. Could you clarify how they make themselves a middleman in Bitcoin transactions?

chejazion The Final Days of the Bitcoin Foundation?

He's not a criminal but he stopped being the lead contributor to Bitcoin Core to join the contentious Bitcoin XT project. The motivation for this project is a debate about whether increasing the Bitcoin blocksize is an acceptable way to address scalability. In general, it showcases dissent in the consensus policy that governs the way Core changes are made.

More background on this: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/gavin-andresen-i-might-...

chejazion Fai0verflow: Linux on the PS4 [video]

Interesting. I found more about this on Wikipedia [0]. As a tech hobbyist with a PS3 in my teens, I was genuinely interested in a desktop replacement. I shared this interest with others in my cohort at the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

chejazion Fai0verflow: Linux on the PS4 [video]

> The PS3 was outclassed by generic PC hardware pretty quickly

I agree here. Running Yellow Dog Linux [0] on my PS3 was a fun weekend project, but it never came close to replacing my dedicated computer. I didn't even notice the update that removed it, which in hindsight could have been pretty bad had I used it more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux

chejazion Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin

The excerpt you mentioned sounds exactly like the Coinbase Shift Card [0] with the exception that it's via Wire instead of ACH.

[0] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/222864...

chejazion Interview with Michael Burry, Real-Life Market Genius From The Big Short

Thought it was interesting that Growth was at the center of both of the following:

> What makes you most nervous about the future? Debt. The idea that growth will remedy our debts is so addictive for politicians, but the citizens end up paying the price.

> What, if anything, makes you hopeful about the future? Innovation, especially in America, is continuing at a breakneck pace, even in areas facing substantial political or regulatory headwinds.

chejazion U.S. predicts zero job growth for electrical engineers

First thought: does this account for the emerging DIY electrical engineering community, e.g. the raspberry pi "gadgeteers" on kickstarter?

chejazion Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

> So these games usually have a bunch of people who hate the game (Griefers) yet keep playing to grief others with relatively better success.

Sounds eerily similar to a ponzi scheme.

chejazion Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

As a former MtG player, I remember the gambler's high I'd get opening every booster pack. But while my cards are sitting in a dusty box somewhere, it sounds like there's a lot of recirculation that happens within the Valve community.

chejazion Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

To take your question a step further, and into legal territory, where is the line between social signaling and false advertising? Alcohol commercials also fall in this weird conflict space.

chejazion Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

I don't play games, but my roommate does for several hours every day. I asked him about it and he said he loves being immersed in it, and finds it much more engaging than other forms of entertainment, such as watching a movie. I wouldn't call him "addicted" though. We hang out all the time, and I never see the sort of desperation that the author describes.

...

Are there specific genre's of games that have the sorts of traps the author describes? A giant achievement screen sounds like it could be in any game, but I'd be curious to hear of any patterns recognized by others.

chejazion April Zero v3

I was being sincere, and I think I identify with what you mean. A subtle (not discomforting) blanket of anxiousness has the power to snap me into focus.