Hacker News Reader

cosgrovebon Increased risk for all-cause dementia in people who abstain from alcohol

Selection bias of some sort from people who abstain from alcohol?

I explain this in a comment that's a bit further down the page but here it is in a nutshell:

* You're right that this is very similar to our previous offering. At its core, the encryption logic is the same.

* While both libraries offer an object which will encrypt your data, that's literally all our previous offering did. New helpers used in conjunction with data attributes eliminate the need to write custom onSubmit handlers, making your integration far simpler.

* We host the JavaScript, making linking directly to it an option.

These things make our JavaScript library substantially easier to use. That, plus the fact that we now recommend Braintree.js over Transparent Redirect motivated us to rebrand it.

cosgrovebon Introducing Braintree.js

Sorry to hear you had a rough time with Transparent Redirect. Having fielded quite a few e-mails on this very issue, I'd say it's possibly the biggest limitation with TR.

There are only a couple options available in the situation you describe. First, you could vault the card before you charge it. Not great. Extra code, and you may not really want to store the card after the sale (depending upon your use-case). The other work-around, while not involving the vault may even be worse. If you don't want to vault the card, you could issue a void after confirming TR if something went awry (or say you're out of stock).

This is why we're really excited about getting Braintree.js into people's hands. It eliminates an extra round-trip for the customer to a third-party which is necessary with tokenization or TR. You can validate the form data before you decide to initiate the sale. It's really simple, too.

cosgrovebon Introducing Braintree.js

Hi Michael,

Braintree developer here. You're right that Braintree.js is based upon our end-to-end encryption library. While that's been out of beta for some time, it was strictly for encryption (that's literally the only thing it did).

In this iteration we've added some helper methods to the Braintree object that make it much easier, in our opinion, to encrypt your payment form. In the past, if you wanted to use our encryption library, you had to intercept the POST to your server with a custom onSubmit handler to encrypt the data. Now, it's as simple as giving the id of the form you wish to encrypt and substituting the "name" attribute on your form inputs with "data-encrypted-name".

Additionally, unlike our previous encryption library, we're now hosting the JavaScript in our datacenter using the same highly available infrastructure we built for our gateway. This makes it easier to get up and going when you're spiking out your integration.

Ultimately, we felt that these improvements justified re-branding the library, especially since we now recommend Braintree.js over Transparent Redirect. Transparent Redirect unfortunately made it kind of awkward if you wanted to do your own server-side validation on the form data or do anything with AJAX.

cosgrovebon Reddit is down for 12 hours protest SOPA and PIPA.

The link to "helpful info from a redditor" about calling representatives is not-so-ironically blacked out.

cosgrovebon Proxy server for Siri

At least they didn't provide a one-line install from a non-https server, too.

Just use "curl http://www.example.com/install_this.sh | sudo sh"!

cosgrovebon How Google makes Google(+) fast

Either the author of the comment I replied to ninja edited his comment or I need to work on my reading comprehension. I think it was the first thing though...

cosgrovebon How Google makes Google(+) fast

Google Closure Tools is not the same thing as Clojure.

A little confusing I am sure since Closure Templates is a templating system that dynamically generates HTML in Java and JavaScript... And Clojure is a language that targets the JVM.

I have no experience with Closure Tools but Clojure is awesome definitely.

cosgrovebon Open letter to the Mac/iOS dev community regarding conduct

So not being sexist makes an industry boring? Maybe we need to throw in some racism and make things even more edgy!

cosgrovebon Racism in Tech

Well I think you're right...but this "culturism" that you talk about has something to do with the fact that Indians from India are not inherently very good at managing people or software projects.

It's not racism if it's true!

cosgrovebon The $36 soda: Overdrafting in America

I'd be interested to know the stats on how many people have had overdraft fees and never let it happen again (or seldom) vs. those who get them routinely.

It's happened to me. Once. Never again.

cosgrovebon The coffeeshop fallacy

I know a guy who was a broker on Wall Street throughout the 80's and 90's... He retired to take over the family farm, the sort of thing a lot of his peers wanted to do, and after 10 years of working non-stop to almost-not-quite break-even he's almost ready to sell it.

He says that he had no idea how much harder than working on Wall Street it would be. He's got to know everything about the domain, he's got to know accounting, sales, marketing, and just about every other aspect of running a business and it is exhausting for such small potential gains.

cosgrovebon Ask PG: Is there any chance of getting points displayed again

Would you consider putting comment scores on a user's Comments page or perhaps on the permalink page to an individual comment? That way the truly curious can look?

cosgrovebon Cringely predicts the second coming of Java

On top of Ruby we put the Rails web framework. It’s not very common to actually code anything in Ruby.

Is he really confusing programming languages with frameworks? I can't take anything serious that he writes anyways but that's pretty ignorant.

Even if it weren't an absurd statement you could say the same thing about Java, "on top of Java we put the Struts web framework. It's not very common to code anything in Java."

cosgrovebon Hacker News Front Page Snapshot from Last Night

I was shocked last night when I counted 27 articles about Steve Jobs and three about other stuff.

cosgrovebon Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation

Is satire, which often makes very heavy use of sarcasm, to be considered uncivilized?

cosgrovebon World's Most Complex Radio Telescope Snaps Stunning 1st Photo of the Cosmos

The article does mention that only 19 of the planned 66 are on-line yet. I think considering that, it really is a pretty stunning photo.

cosgrovebon Why don't developers dress better?

I see on your site that you say, "recently, I also got rid of all of my possessions through a project called Cult of Less."

That must not have included all of your nice clothes.

cosgrovebon I was once a Facebook fool

Have you ever tried to send bulk e-mail? Even if you're doing everything right with double-opt-in, watching your sender scores, managing your bounce-backs, etc, etc, etc, you will get banned by some major e-mail provider (say Yahoo or Comcast) and spend days to weeks (sometimes months) working to get it sorted out. So, no, I don't disagree with the e-mail thing at all.

cosgrovebon Don't try this at home. How credit card arbitrage funded my first company.

I don't think the fraud is really worth $50.

cosgrovebon Show HN: How we built a TTS-powered tool for learning spelling/foreign languages

Just wanted to say that my girlfriend is a third grade teacher and she loves quizlet...

cosgrovebon Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting

Hackintoshes a threat to Windows? No offense, but that's laughable. It's been awhile since I put together one but it's such a huge pain in the ass that even most people capable of putting OS X on ordinary hardware won't bother.

cosgrovebon Windows 8 OEM specs may block Linux booting

I doubt that investors would be savvy enough to care but it would be a stupid move, nonetheless.

Besides, the server is where Linux matters, not consumer hardware.

cosgrovebon Twitter's Storm (complex event processing system) is now open source

The supervisor/worker thing sounds quite a bit like OTP.

cosgrovebon Obama Signs Patent ‘Reform’ Bill

This Act changes the U.S. from a First to Invent system to a First to File.

cosgrovebon Show HN: Pulse — A simple pulsating indicator.

Well you could script it to change the rate of pulsing in JS I guess... Still don't think this is very exciting anyways. Why the png and not pure a pure css icon for instance (although that's not very interesting to me either)?

cosgrovebon Pakistan bans VPNs

Stego is detectable. They will move on to scanning for and flagging those communications eventually.

cosgrovebon Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful

This seems to happen whenever Javascript crypto is brought up. It's crazy. SSL a little bit of work and it costs $ to purchase a cert (but not very much). It's a bit more CPU overhead on the server but most people have cycles to spare. For the most part SSL should be no big deal.

What am I missing here? Are people to cheap to purchase an SSL cert? Theoretically the PKI is only as trustworthy as the CAs but that can't be why people are acting like SSL/TLS isn't even an option.

cosgrovebon Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

Have you tried renice'ing the Fireworks process while it's running on Wine? I got Counter-Strike playable at about 30fps that way on a fairly weak machine (Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB RAM). Not bad, really.

cosgrovebon What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

"A Junior-to-Mid Level Developer" ... Which is it? Pick one.

Also, "I've been out of work and on the job hunt for a year." This may be true but is not a selling point. Say instead, "I'm available for work, contract or full time, right now. Hire me."