Hacker News Reader

mrduncanon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)

Yammer - San Francisco, London

At Yammer, our mission is to change the way people work, and that mission starts with us. We use our own product every day to promote and encourage our culture of openness and transparency. Yammer provides each user with a voice, empowering individuals to share ideas, ask questions, and voice concerns. We're passionate about building a great product that people love to use, and we're looking for similarly product-minded engineers to join us.

We work with all kinds of languages (Java, Ruby, Javascript, to name a few) and technologies (anything from Postgres, Riak, and Berkley DB to Rails, Dropwizard, and Backbone). We're also never afraid to try new things but not just for the sake of trying new things.

We've got all the standard perks: free food, free booze, lots of dogs, and amazing benefits.

Check our our blog or shoot me an email (mduncan@yammer-inc.com) - I'd love to talk.

http://eng.yammer.com/blog/

mrduncanon npm (Node's package manager) leaks all user password hashes and salts

CouchDB uses SHA-1 hashes for passwords - you've got to be kidding me. What is the rationale for that over bcrypt?

mrduncanon Clojure Conj 2011 Early Registration Open

I've found Lanyrd to usually be the best bet for finding conferences - unfortunately, they don't list any either.

http://lanyrd.com/topics/common-lisp/

mrduncanon Legal docs should be written like code.

It's not that easy though, for example, Jacobellis v. Ohio - how would you go about defining the threshold of pornography?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

mrduncanon Y Combinator’s Paul Graham: We’re Looking For People Like Us

Also, don't forget about Google Books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_A...

mrduncanon Square’s Disruptive New iPad Payments Service Will Replace Cash Registers

Technically, it is not at all.

Socially however, I'd wager that fewer people would let you take a picture of their card compared to swiping it. People are simply used to having credit cards swiped, they aren't used to having pictures taken of them.

mrduncanon Square’s Disruptive New iPad Payments Service Will Replace Cash Registers

The numbers on cards become a lot harder to read after the coloring wears off of the numbers. Even as a human it can be hard to read them at times depending on the lighting.

Card layouts also vary a lot, even from the same issuers (for example: the Amex PASS).

Reading the mag stripe prevents fraud and therefore is subject to lower fees by CC companies.

Not to mention, having someone take a picture of my credit card would spook me out a little (yes, even if I'm familiar with the product).

mrduncanon Mint’s Original Marketing Plan (circa 2007)

Sorry, I never realized that - it is still interesting in any case.

mrduncanon Mint’s Original Marketing Plan (circa 2007)

If you've never seen it, their pitch deck is also pretty interesting:

http://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-dec...

mrduncanon Clever CSS Easter Egg: Search Google For “Tilt” Or “Askew” On Your Smartphone

Since this article doesn't have much substance, if you're looking to do something similar, check out this article on CSS rotation transformations.

http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/css-text-rotation

mrduncanon Redis 2.2.3 released

A heads-up for anyone upgrading - 2.2.4 is now released.

    Warning, going to release 2.2.4 in seconds as I decided
    to change the semantics of OBJECT command to avoid
    problems in the future.

https://twitter.com/#!/antirez/status/55621384126201856

mrduncanon PagerDuty (YC S10) Pivot - Fixing the Public Transportation System

Care to elaborate on what is so bad about them (or, what you'd like to see improved)?

mrduncanon How to Build a Fast News Feed in Redis (and Rails)

I'm not sure what version of Redis you were using, but depending on the data you're storing, 2.2 uses significantly less space than previous versions.

Some data from GitHub: http://technoweenie-ruby-onales.heroku.com/#34

mrduncanon How to Build a Fast News Feed in Redis (and Rails)

I've been thinking about how to make better news feeds lately - here are some other interesting talks/papers:

http://blog.basho.com/2011/03/28/Riak-and-Scala-at-Yammer/

http://research.yahoo.com/node/3203

http://technoweenie-ruby-onales.heroku.com/#1

https://github.com/technoweenie/allofthestars/tree/master/ve...

mrduncanon Auto submission bots on Hacker News

From the last release of news.arc (which may have been a while ago but should be somewhat close to what news.yc is running):

    ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.  
    ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301

mrduncanon Evan Williams on leaving Twitter

While Ev certainly deserves plenty of credit for Twitter's success, I think you're giving him a little too much in this case.

Twitter actually started out as a Rails project because Florian Weber (who worked at Odeo with Jack on the initial implementation) was a member of the Rails Core team. Jack was originally going to develop it in Python, C, and Ocaml. I don't believe that Ev ever had anything to do with the decision to use Rails.

https://twitter.com/#!/jack/status/47090747706580992

mrduncanon Four JavaScript Lines to Defeat New York Times Paywall

Even easier, just create a bookmark to which points to:

javascript:$('overlay').hide();$('gatewayCreative').hide();$(document.body).setStyle({overflow:'scroll'});

Ironically, I couldn't test it since the paywall never came up now matter how many articles I opened up.

mrduncanon Ask HN: HTTPS Where can I get a cheap certificate?

If you do decide to go with GoDaddy, you can save a considerable amount of money by googling for "ssl certificate" instead of going directly to their website.

Their advertisement price is $12.99 per year (it's $49.99 per year on their website).

mrduncanon JavaScript and URLs

Another relevant blog post on the importance of URL design: http://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/

mrduncanon Tarsnap critical security bug

This is an excellent example of why you shouldn't write your own crypto code - Colin is awesome at it and even he makes mistakes.

Edit: To be clear, this isn't aimed at Colin but meant to point out that if he still occasionally gets it wrong there's a pretty good chance that your fancy custom encryption method does too.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Why doesn't HN use SSL/HTTPS for its login form?

most websites will at least require you to re-enter your password (over SSL) to change your key profile attributes or password

While that is the case for most sites, HN doesn't require you to enter your current password when changing your password (or any other information for that matter).

mrduncanon I was forced to write a blog post. So I made a code breaking contest.

The character distribution of the encoded message for the example ("THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG"):

    8: " " (note that the original also has 8 spaces)
    4: "O"
    3: "E"
    2: "H", "R", "T", "U"
    1: "Z", "B", "Y", "N", "C", "D", "X", "M", "P",
       "W", "F", "Q", "G", "L", "S", "A", "I", "K",
       "J", "V"

The character distribution of the encoded message (to be solved):

    12: ";", " ", "I"
    11: "H"
    10: "*", "-", "F", "2"
     9: "?", "S", "L", "O", "E", "T"
     8: "N", "4", "W"
     7: "3", "(", "J", "#", "/", "U"
     6: "C", ">", "<", """, "D", "A", ".", "%", "0"
     5: "9", "V", "@", "+", "$", "Y", "G", "6"
     4: "=", ":", "Z", "P", "R", "&", "7", "1", "B",
        ",", "!"
     3: "8", ")", "K", "X", "'", "5"
     2: "Q", "M"

mrduncanon I was forced to write a blog post. So I made a code breaking contest.

Given that sample (see blog comments), it is a little trickier than a simple substitution.

Edit: I stand corrected on the original statement about lengths - wasn't paying attention and was performing integer division.

mrduncanon Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

This has to be great news for Pinboard - I'm not sure how much they raise the price with each purchase, but less than 30 minutes later and the current price is already $6.92.

Edit: 7 minutes later it's now $6.94

mrduncanon Appointment Reminder Launches

The signup links are redirecting to the coming soon page.

Example: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/coming-soon?plan=small-b...

mrduncanon Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why

"Failure is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz

An awesome look back at the space program in the 1960s.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC0O7M

mrduncanon [dead]

Not to mention missing Basecamp, which spawned Rails in the first place.

mrduncanon Yet Another Hot Startup Leaves A Gaping Security Hole In Its iPhone App

Because most users could care less.

Notice that you logged into HN by sending a plaintext password.

Edit: I totally agree with your sentiment though.

mrduncanon Twitter to Sell 50% of All Tweets for $360,000 a Year Through Gnip

You may be able to get away with scraping a portion of the site, but I still would find it very hard to believe you'd be able to scrape even 50%.

Let's do some math, these are all based on numbers from this past June which have likely only gone up since then [1]:

  65 million tweets per day / 20 tweets per page = 3.25 million page views per day

Just to keep up with the stream, you'd need to do about 3.25 million page views per day or a little over 1.5 million to get half of it. Again, I'd find it very hard to believe that nobody at Twitter would catch on.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/twitter-190-million-users/

mrduncanon Twitter to Sell 50% of All Tweets for $360,000 a Year Through Gnip

I disagree. Twitter is pushing upwards of 3000 tweets per second [1], it'd be nearly impossible to scrape at that rate and go without notice, regardless of how many IPs you've got at your disposal.

[1] http://mashable.com/2010/06/25/tps-record/