cryptnoob

The least disruptive way for them to begin to capitalize on the money that 3rd party developers are making off of them, in my opinion, is to introduce an amazon type model, where the first 3000 (for example) api calls are free, and then they're charged at 0.01 cents per call or something. Just layer on a small api tax, so anybody actually making money can continue to do so, but those who aren't will go away and unload the system. Giving away some free api calls lets innovation and experimentation continue as well.

I use my own server side analytics code. The reason I do, is that, no matter how much people pump Google Analytics, I'm afraid of it. I've been to too many sites that were completely hung, and in the status bar, my browser is saying "waiting for www.google-analytics.com".

I usually hit refresh and it generally works, but how many people don't? This isn't something that's happened to me once or twice. It happens often enough that I'm consciously avoiding ga. I don't need to cause more people to bounce for no reason.

Amazing how a single word and a question mark can convey the idea that somebody is crazy for mentioning something.

Thanks for the link though. I had gotten a whiff, probably from statements like yours, that hushmail wasn't trustworthy, but hadn't known the source of this.

Your link, actually, is very enlightening. For those not willing to read it, it turns out that hushmail provides two services, their original one, and one that is geared for people not willing to install a java applet. The 2nd one can be exploited by hushmail to decrypt your messages, and hushmail can be compelled by law enforcement to do that exploitation.

However, if you use the java applet, you're golden.

What a wonderfully well written peace of prose. I think we can be pretty certain that the man who wrote it was not the man in that video. As for whether he actually believed an island could tip over, I give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't, I suppose, although listening to his entire dialog, it's almost enough to discount him to the point of believing that he did believe it. Bottom line, based on this dialog, I think he'd be overpaid if his salary were reduced to a quarter of the salary he's enjoying.

How very PC of you. Meanwhile, you have somebody who is afraid to date, without laying out a whole big drama scene on his perspective girlfriend.

You would rather make every relationship this guy has (yes, there will be more than one) be an 'After School Special'. You get 15 karma points for validating his current viewpoint, which he's obviously not happy with and which is keeping him single. Cool. That seems worth it to me.

I disagree that this woman will "somehow find out and be scarred for life". I reject that it's better he stay single on the hypothetical theory that she might be scarred. I have a problem with PC bullshit, but that's just me.

You've thought about this a lifetime, me, 20 seconds. That means my opinion is of little value to you.

But let me give you a 3rd option. A middle ground between never dating and putting Ms. X through the pain of your illness.

That middle ground is this. Go date. Go have that relationship. It will probably end on it's own in a few months, as most relationships do. In case it doesn't end on it's own, you have the fallback plan of ending it if you get sick. Just slip into asshole mode, when you get sick, and if she doesn't end it, then you end it. Tell her you want to see other people, etc. That will hurt her, of course, but so what? If she wasn't dating you, she'd be dating somebody else, who, statistically speaking, would also end the relationship, and would also cause her that breakup pain that we all feel more times than we would like to. So she's not getting more pain, just the same pain everybody else gets.

Once you make up your mind that you will proceed on that course of action, you can go ahead and enter a relationship with no worries. Nine times out of ten, all this soul searching will have been for not, because most relationships end, and they all end painfully. On that 10th time, you have a plan to avoid inflicting any extra pain, by making it look just like the other nine times.

If they almost all end painfully, why get into relationships at all? Because it's worth it. In almost all cases, the area under the joy curve is greater than the area under the pain curve.

I'm uncertain how appropriate it is for this to be news related. If you're doing a story on Burma, I want you to be in Burma, not in San Francisco sipping a Latte, posting an ad such as "Myanmar: $100 for picture of demonstrating anti-government crowd". That just seems like a recipe for non-trustworthy information. You are asking for evidence (pictures) to fit your theory (the story you intend to write). That isn't how good science is done, and I would think it's not how good reporting would be done either. You even go so far as make the sources anonymous, which takes even more credibility away.

However... I do see merit in the idea of a geo based Mechanical Turk type job board, that's not news oriented. If I'm a web designer or an advertiser, and I want a picture of a can of Coca Cola in front of the Salt Hotel in Bolivia, than this seems perfect for that sort of thing. If I'm a movie writer, and I want to know how many drawers the card catalog in the west wing of the library of congress has, because I'm using it for a plot point, than your service would be perfect. I just don't like it for news.

Clickable Link http://www.newsppl.com

     Firefox already allow you to disable all visited
     styling   (immediately stops this attack) by setting the
     layout.css.visited_links_enabled option in about:config 
     to false. 

I would rather they stop here. Don't break things for everybody for something that most people consider to be a non-problem.

      I own a shit ton of domains

Well, you're the expert. Who am I to argue with anybody who owns a "shit ton" of domains?

     As someone whose domestic partner ...has had numerous
     death threats

OK, on this, I'd say you're a liar. Anybody actually in that situation, I guarantee, would understand perfectly why anonymity on the net is often considered important to people. You are either a complete dolt, or a liar (or both, I suppose)

I enjoy the convenience DH offers me in keeping my name out of Google. My reasons have nothing to do with whether or not my sites are sleezy. They're not. Privacy for myself and my family is not something I should need to justify to some random git (look it up) on HN.

The ability to have my whois record anonymous (for free) by registering through Dreamhost is a big plus to me.

I have a couple of private servers on DH which entitles me to free "live chat" with support.

This story makes me wonder if I should open up another account, and put one of my private servers on it, so if something happens to one account, I use the other one to make contact with support.

I was disappointed not to be informed of the experimental method. Did he normalize the data for each time period? (Dollars/Person within 20 feet), or is it unnormalized and we could just be looking at a situation where more people came later. How long were the time periods of each trial? How much better did he do at each trial, in terms of percentages?

Also, since he apparently has the data, I'm dieing to know how much one of these guys does make per day.

No, this is a brand new site, on it's first index through Google. I'm very confident that they went through the JS. Nobody else had any link to the site at all yet. Not really on topic, here, but the parents comment inspired me to share.

Sure. When you leave passwords floating around in plain text, bad things will happen too. It's too easy to forget that an obfuscated URL needs to be treated as a password.

I just had google index my ajax directory. I have a directory where I keep ajax files. The only link to them is through my javascript ajax calls.

I was pretty surprised that Google goes through your javascript, harvesting your ajax links.

I disagree.

A password is not a magic spell. It's a set of letters and numbers that, if guessed correctly, will give me access to something you wanted kept private.

An obfuscated URL is a set of letters and numbers that, if guessed correctly, will give me access to something you wanted kept private.

Because one uses a MySQL database, and the other uses a file system, is irrelevant. They are functionally identical when directory listing is disabled, as it can be for Amazon S3.

     If you launch something like QuipTxt, make it obvious to 
     people that their images are public

Google Picasa stores images as public URLs without any such warning. Because with random URL's, you effectively have passworded each image. Even more secure than if they were all locked into a nice MySQL database, because then they would all be behind only a single password.

I think you don't have to freak out users with too much information. The images are effectively password controlled.

The problem here is that the passwords were too short (and sent in plain text via SMS).

Here's my problem with Freemium.

There is the mindset that you'll win the lottery, get bought out, and become rich. It's all about users, not revenue. It becomes a lottery, where a few get very wealthy, and the rest make nothing. That's not Freemium, of course, that's "free", as in twitter, facebook, etc.. However, to me, Freemium is almost as bad a bet.

With Freemium, I end up burning so many resources with scaling issues, trying to service all of these non-payers, hoping I'll "win the lottery", by getting enough actual payers to finance things. The examples they gave were good cases in point of services that struggled under the load of the non-payers for a few years.

I would like to just charge from the get-go, and avoid the scaling issues that freemium implies.

Sounds like I need to work on my ad copy. My CTR is less than 0.3%.

One of the things I am doing that I thought was clever, but perhaps, not so much, is including my price in the ad copy, on the premise that I don't want to pay for clicks from people who aren't willing to buy. Perhaps that's optimization that's better left for another day, however.

I'm actually a little disappointed in that 1.5M number. Mint is held up as such a success story, I had assumed, given things like Dropbox's 4M number, that Mint would be much higher.

For those of us that are in much smaller niches, and with expectations of less press coverage, etc, than Mint, we mentally discount our potential user number as some percentage of Mints (or Dropbox's, or pick your success story)

When doing such mental math, the larger the successes number, the better you like it. Say your niche is only 5% as large (Mint's niche was pretty much "anybody with money and a computer). So, best case, you're looking at 5% of Mint. If Mint is only 1.5M, of which, probably most were non-paid ... You get my drift.

There is a TED talk by a young lady just going into cancer research. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eva_vertes_looks_to_the_fu...

Her ideas about cancer really make sense to me, and match a lot of my own ideas. If she is correct, that cancer is the body's natural healing mechanism --- but for all tissues except muscle tissue, evolution never bothered working the bugs out of the code ---, then cancer approaches such as the one in this study seem a bit doomed to me.

> the religious right are simply self-denying homosexuals

You're quite the dick, aren't you? But that's OK, because you're so smart. It's OK to be a dick if you're smart.

I'm sorry you're feeling ill. As somebody who spends a good deal of time in China, and as somebody who feels that US freedoms are atrophying at an alarming rate, I sympathize somewhat with your position, but in all honesty, I really have to question the sincerity of somebody who would state what you just stated.

My wife is Bulgarian, and through her, I'm exposed to a lot of folks who escaped from behind the iron curtain before it fell. These people are a breath of fresh air to me. They understand what freedom is and how precious it is.

While most westerners are trading their freedoms for the promises of security, and smiling foolishly while they do it, I find myself more at home with my wife's group of friends, who take this stuff seriously. I think I'd get along with Mr. Brin just fine.

Cool Timing! Looks like "Go Test It" may live another day!

This is painful. You haven't even bothered to use a label on the radio buttons, so my click area is larger.

But even had you done that, it would only have been mildly less painful.

Use every inch of screen real-estate available on well defined click areas, so people can rapid fire answer the questions without it becoming a mouse accuracy test.

Better yet, Ask a single question at a time, and at every mouse click, bring up the next question (again using all the screen area available, so an over-caffeinated person on a trampoline can still hit their click points easily). After the last question is clicked, automatically bring up the next picture, and start the procedure again.

You think there's no difference between Western and Eastern Europe? Really? You insult both regions, and your pomposity is making me a little nauseated.

I don't believe that.

    To get power out of a usb port, you don't need to install 
    any software. And that's what blows my mind, why would 
    you even want to install some software to run a battery 
    charger??

You are right. The 5V and GND are right there. You don't need to enumerate the device at all. Just tap the power and be on your way. A lot of cheap products to that..

However, there are two reasons that you shouldn't do that, and why you need your device to actually enumerate itself on the users system.

The important reason, is to insure that the 500mA you think you have coming to you, is actually delivered. Technically, a motherboard can choose to assume you are broken, and disable the USB port, if you draw more than 100mA and haven't identified yourself as a high current device. Almost nobody actually does this, but the risk is there.

The 2nd reason is so you can place the little USB-IF logo on your product, reassuring people that your product complies with the USB specs. This logo, in the early days of USB, was very important. It's less so now. If you want it, you need to enumerate within $time (I forget the number of milliseconds) after you begin drawing power. If you don't, USB-IF doesn't like you and you can't put the logo on your product.

Both items 1 and 2 could be accomplished using just the USB controller in the USB device, with no driver needed ... But only if the USB controller lied about who it was. It would have to say, "I'm a hard disk", or "I'm a speaker". As soon as you lie, you're also not USB-IF compliant. Plus, it will look pretty unprofessional to have your battery charger show up on the hardware manifest as a hard drive. It would have been better to not enumerate at all, then to do that.

So, you need to supply a driver, if you're doing something that every OS doesn't have drivers for already, even if technically, it's not required.

So, really, this was Bill Gates fault. I knew we could lay this one on him if we dug deep enough. Windows should ship with OS drivers for USB battery chargers. Curse you Bill Gates, curse you.

I'm not seeing that Matt is really admitting that there's anything wrong with them. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/