Hacker News Reader

glimcaton Ask PG: What steps would you advise a company to take after leaking passwords?

My first thought is to force a password reset via email on the next login.

glimcaton Ask HN: Building a new web app, lots of content, what to use for database?

Yes, however, I'd strongly suggest optimizing for development time in the early stages of a project. This may influence how you evaluate the pro/con sheets for a given technology.

There is a significant body of existing code and tools which assume MySQL, so I often use it for that reason. It's also not always an either/or proposition; there's usually nothing stopping you from using X for user accounts and Y for inventory tracking.

glimcaton Why I stopped working on the Bongard Problems

"They’re in the remote possibility of building intelligent machines that act, and even appear, as humans. If this is achieved, eventually intelligent weapons of mass destruction will be built, without doubt."

Worrying about this strikes me as a bit daft when you can already convince actual humans to be your weapons delivery system.

It also shows some significant shortsightedness regarding scaling laws which an AI researcher ought to have more experience with. A more legitimate worry would be basement-grade Predator drones. Grenade-bearing quadcopters which use computer vision to track and target dense crowds are something which technology can do now, rather than something which might optimistically happen in a few hundred years.

glimcaton Expanding the Internet domain space

The addressing scheme is descriptive. But the demographics of the modern internet are such that a descriptive method is confusing to broken. Most users will assume everything ends in .com, or more likely, they'll just type in the name and expect the browser to perform correct addressing via Google.

Playing shell games with new TLDs will in no way make this less confusing for users.

glimcaton Why read and write tech books?

A somewhat mercenary perspective:

There is always new tech coming out. Tech workers have a perception that they must be up on the newest tech in order to remain valuable. Halfway decent tech books therefore sell like candy in a continuously renewed market. You also establish yourself as an authority on the newest tech, increasing your own perceived value.

glimcaton Kalzumeus (patio11) Podcast Ep. 2 with Amy Hoy: Pricing, Products, And Passion

Amy has lots of good points, but I'm of the opinion that her "$30x500" premise for building a SaaS ISV is backwards. You're often better off targeting "$500x30" instead.

* Most every place that publishes stats has shown that the higher-tier plans account for the lion's share of revenue.

* A good programmer values out at $20,000/mo or above. It is not hard to create $500/mo in value (~ half-time minimum wage!) on an ongoing basis. All you have to do is step away from the computer and start talking to real people who fit your target personna.

* With the reversed formula, you can get your first few customers by cold-calling and face-to-face sales if you have to. Ramen profitable is in the neighborhood of five customers, instead of over eighty.

* You can always backfill to a smaller plan if necessary. Even targeting $100/mo makes it far easier to get initial traction.

Don't make your main target the price-conscious end of the market!

glimcaton Today I made - You’re a maker? This is your diary

At a basic level, over 99% of the internet is text files and simple databases. Why would you have web pages?

The interface is often important.

glimcaton Apple rejected Flattr… and it’s not the end

My big unanswered question going into the article was "What the crud is Flattr and why should I care." Starting your posts off with a brief introduction of who you are is often a good idea.

Flattr is a micropayment system. You pay them a monthly subscription, then Like(tm) a bunch of stuff on the internet. They split up whatever portion of your monthly sub that they don't keep among the places you tag. Apple presumably flagged the app which integrated Flattr due to their well-known policies about in-app payments.

glimcaton Show HN: My Resume 2.0

It has some nice points, but I quickly hit tl;dr mode. Resumes or resume analogues should be concise unless they're actually portfolio demos, in which case they should still be concise.

glimcaton Blank Keyboards (Das)

I type by muscle memory, but I wouldn't use a blank keyboard. Brainfarts happen.

glimcaton Ask HN: What are the benefits of using PHP today?

<?php include("header.php"); ?>

Between the above and the huge range of existing PHP projects, I always install PHP regardless of what else I'm using.

glimcaton Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

> P.S. Note how I do not anchor costs around the price of coffee.

Well, neither does Starbucks.

glimcaton Ask HN: Hire me in a year?

Yes, but try to do a few projects over the next year which are strongly relevant to your top five choices. Toss the results up on Github - or better, attempt to monetize the results (i.e. never tell when you can show).

glimcaton Ask HN: Where is the best place to learn Ruby?

If you have previous programming experience, I don't think that it matters much. You can always look stuff up as you go if you already know enough to know what you're looking for.

glimcaton I sued a telemarketer and got $4,000

Can I register my business phone number or a fax number?

The National Do Not Call Registry is only for personal phone numbers. Business-to-business calls and faxes are not covered by the National Do Not Call Registry.

glimcaton Ask HN: Would graduate school make you more employable or less?

It's less about reducing the barrier to jobs than it is about targeting different jobs.

The two years for an MS is also typically considered to have a great payoff ratio in terms of both personal and career development, although that's no guarantee that it's 100% always the best use of the time and resources.

glimcaton Microsoft launches so.cl

On Microsoft scales, very little. Particularly as a share of the project's overall branding and marketing spend.

glimcaton Korean and Russian scientists plan to clone woolly mammoth

They exist. They're just expensive, dangerous, and require an expert operator.

There are also strong constraints on the altitude and maneuverability (between physical/design constraints and the increasing likelihood that you'll lose control).

glimcaton Why do airline websites suck so much?

Because the value in making it easier to use is low. Often, the value to make it more confusing is high. Not all "bad" webpages are that way on accident.

Also, factors like social media integration aren't implicitly good.

glimcaton Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

You use a series of members under tension or compression to support a load-bearing surface spanning a gap. Then you see if it falls down under a static or dynamic load. It's a common exercise for engineering students.

I hear there's a nice one in San Francisco.

glimcaton Judge Alsup learns to code and schools Oracle

I couldn't tell you the first thing about Perl, or any number of other common tools and languages - and I've been programming for about 25 years. I've just used different tools so far.

glimcaton I think bootstrapping might be impossible for non-programmers

Given that he describes it as "Hello World attached to a random number generator" - quite possibly so. But it became meaningly profitable due to the design iteration and statistical marketing that followed, not to mention familiarity with its mostly nontechnical audience.

glimcaton How To Raise A $1M Seed Round

Even among well-funded startups, having a usefully specific definition of the target customer and where you fall in relation to their existing value structure is something of an accomplishment.

glimcaton Ask HN: What is a good license for university based open-source software?

FWIW, I've avoided licensing "must cite" resources several times because the terms were worded problematicaly (e.g. they encoded invalid assumptions, etc.). But I've never had a problem with "how to cite" - in fact, it makes integrating the resource that much easier.

glimcaton Chomsky - Jobs aren't coming back

"Taking Any Rand seriously" seems to be something of a persistent folly.

glimcaton Split Testing May Cause Google to Accidentally Think You’ve Been Compromised

I usually robots.txt any big text variations anyway. A short delay in indexing isn't going to do any major harm and that way you get the right version cached.

glimcaton XOR Linked List

Why would you not just do the following?

interface LinkedList

class BasicLinkedList implements LinkedList

class XORLinkedList implements LinkedList

glimcaton The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips

"The point here is that while technical options exist to prevent premature opening of the bag, such as reducing the initial air pressure in the bag, attempting to add this to the existing processing equipment would be a nightmare. So it was necessary to increase the seal strength."

You could also reduce the air pressure in the factory, e.g. by building it in one of the aforementioned high-altitude regions.

glimcaton Ask HN: Are there any tools to help me visualize my research?

Intranet site, Wordpress install, search function.

Or internet site, if your summaries are of sufficient quality that you wouldn't be too ashamed to let others see.

glimcaton Kickstarter game project raises $10k, made using a DIY Platformer tutorial.

Here's some snake oil for $270,000:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1047510073/remee-the-rem...

Kickstarter isn't particularly thorough about vetting technical projects.