HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pdubs

377 karma · joined August 25, 2011

submissionscomments
pdubs··on Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again
Swappa's great, but it still goes through Paypal. Probably a better crowd on there than EBay though and they allow negative feedback.
pdubs··on Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again
I ended up getting a knockoff XBOX game and it was pretty painless to get it refunded from ebay.
pdubs··on The Year 2512
Since this is really just educated fiction, if you like this you'd probably enjoy most of the stuff written by Alastair Reynolds. Not "hard" scifi exactly, but maybe "firm".
pdubs··on CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org
Keep in mind CyanogenMod is a community project, not some business or startup. Public and private are a bit more relative under those terms.
pdubs··on Why we have never hired an MBA
Torvalds has a masters in CS. "Never" is a strong word, but the rest of the paragraph you're harpooning makes a different point than the one you're refuting.
pdubs··on Why we have never hired an MBA
I also know of a lot of tech people with the ideas and the skills, but no idea how to successfully execute them. I'm on the tech side of things, but I've experienced what a good PM can do for a team.
pdubs··on How Much Would You Pay to Never See an Online Ad Again?
So...a firewall?
pdubs··on Surface disk space FAQ
Well at least they come right out with it and explain exactly why the free space is what it is.
pdubs··on The future of .NET
I know you mention tool support I think it's worth mentioning that if you're using the MS stack Visual Studio is really, really good.
pdubs··on Free Online Education Is Now Illegal in Minnesota
I agree it's strange and I'm not sure how the letter of the law is being applied to Coursera, but it seems like this wouldn't even let a qualifying religious program give a B.A. or B.S. in Theology, more you'd be able to get a "certificate of congrats you can be a minister for our church". Also protects VBS and confirmation class type courses.
pdubs··on Free Online Education Is Now Illegal in Minnesota
I'm pretty sure that's there to exempt things like seminaries.

>Subd. 4.Statement required; religious nature. Any degree awarded upon completion of a religiously exempt program shall include descriptive language to make the religious nature of the award clear.

pdubs··on Deadmau5 Withholding His Latest Album from Spotify
I can get the top 100 albums for free on Youtube essentially. Spotify would simply lose my $10/mo. That said, I'd gladly pay more, maybe $20/mo for an expanded catalog and an iota of dedication to improving their Android app.
pdubs··on iOS 6 and OS X 10.8.2 Now Available
> I don't need my password to update apps

As an Android user who was recently given an iPad for work, this one step stopped me from installing probably 10-20 apps. I'd be on a site, think "oh there's probably an app for this", realize I'd have to type in my 15-character password, and think "oh...well using the website's ok I guess". It baffles me that it's been around for as long as it has.

pdubs··on Stripe CTF Writeup
I spent a while trying to do a path traversal exploit to set password.txt readable, trying various encodings along the way. I head-desked when I realized I could just upload a PHP script.
pdubs··on SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shuttle successor
I have to say, watching the Dragon rocket abort the launch after the engines were firing and before the rocket left the pad was one of the more impressive things I've seen.
pdubs··on SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shuttle successor
I believe the Musk has stated that scenarios like this are one of the reasons that he plans to continue putting a portion of his personal fortune into the company, so it can ride out the (inevitable) hard times.
pdubs··on NSA Careers for DEF CON Attendees
I suppose someone with a bullshit threshold high enough to take a polygraph would do better in a government agency than someone who wouldn't.
pdubs··on 2012 Submarine Cable Map
Complete guess, but it might be harder to maintain overland cables running through the Rockies than undersea cables.
pdubs··on The bandwidth of a Boeing 747 and its impact on web browsing
>Obviously, the longer the flight, the more inefficient this transfer becomes.

However, it's a purely linear degradation with a hard upper limit.

pdubs··on EA turns hypocrite, discounts games on Origin up to 87.5 percent
Honestly EA is "terrible" gaming company, but I can't complain too much about Origin. I got it when Battlefield 3 came out and I have had 0 issues with it. There's plenty to harp on EA about without picking on Origin.
pdubs··on Yammer agrees to Microsoft's $1 billion acquisition offer
Similarly, Valve Software was recently estimated to be worth around $3 billion...and they have a money-printing machine with Steam.

"Yammer sold for 1/3 of one of the most successful digital distribution platforms."

pdubs··on The Oatmeal's lawyer responds to FunnyJunk
Since Mr. Balasubramani has some background in writing (as mentioned above), it might just be a unique bonus to the service he offers.
pdubs··on The Oatmeal's lawyer responds to FunnyJunk
Free* advertising and publicity for The Oatmeal. I found the letter quite entertaining, further embedding The Oatmeal in my mind since even his lawyer appears to have a sense of humor.

*I know lawyers aren't free, but he'd be paying a lawyer regardless of the letter's style.

pdubs··on Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains
The thing is that, according to the DailyDot article that's been posted around here, the account that lead to The Atlantic being banned was posting hundreds of links to The Atlantic and their subsidiaries. What's non-trivial about detecting that?
pdubs··on Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains
So...? I guess I naturally assume that most companies with a marketing department try to get their content popular on social media. Sure some site users may break the ToS by trying to game it...so ban the user. A halfway-decent anti-gaming layer should handle stuff like this without an issue. It seems petty on Reddit's side to me.
pdubs··on Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains
BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com are all banned sitewide?

The Atlantic is a pretty well-respected publication, as is BusinessWeek. Why a content aggregator would ban actual content is beyond me.

pdubs··on Discover Bank storing passwords in plaintext
The worst part is that it comes by email, which is plaintext everywhere.

However, "encrypted in a database" is not "plaintext". It's certainly not ideal or recommended, that's for sure, but it's not the worst way to handle passwords. If properly implemented, a bunch of AES encrypted passwords without a key are nearly as useless to an adversary as a bunch of bcrypt hashes.

Just don't reuse passwords (at least for accounts you care about) and it really doesn't matter.

pdubs··on Minneapolis Blogger's Case Now on First-Amendment Appeal
I don't get it. The jury found that Hoff's statements on the blog were "not untrue", but he's guilty of "tortious interference". Could someone with a better understanding of civil law clarify how exactly that works?
pdubs··on Groupon trading below $9
Yeah that whole computing services/cloud thing is pretty behind the times...
pdubs··on Groupon trading below $9
Amazon...and their P/E is around 175.
← PreviousPage 3 of 5Next →