pygorex

One feature that I enjoy about AdBlock for Chrome/Firefox is the ability to toggle it on/off with the press of a button. So if site functionality is being broken by the ad block OR if I want to support a site by giving them an ad impression/click-thru I can do that easily.

Since I use the toggle on a daily basis any replacement would need to emulate this feature. My web browser can easily tell which page view spawned which HTTP request. It's hard to see how this would be done at the router level.

That being said this technique would be really useful for filtering out domains serving up malware/phishing/0-day scripts. Connection-level security blocking layered on top of browser-level ad block actually sounds really awesome.

As a straight male I guess I'm the target of this type of advertising. But I don't find it even remotely sexy or titillating. This is a shallow, junior-high level male teen deuche bag perspective on sexuality. God damn it's sad and just plain gross.

What do ads like this say to me? What impression do I get of the company (Voco)? "Are you a dull, hyper-sexualized idiot? Do you treat women like trash are rarely get laid? If so you'll love Voco! Play with our V-spot, 'cuz that's the only action you're going to get!"

Couldn't disagree more. Any sufficiently advanced platform will give developers the ability to do potentially dangerous things.

How will Google manage this risk? The same way Apple does with the app store. Google will act as gatekeeper for downloading and installing packaged apps via the Chrome Web Store.

Is this perfect? No. Will some bad apps get through? Yes. But the security tradeoff is worth it to get apps that are more powerful and more useful.

Let me get this straight. The author asserts the following:

Lesser managers will try to stump candidates with horrible brain teasers along the lines of “Describe a time you got into a bad situation and resolved it effectively?” — or crap like that.

What hard-hitting, incisive questions does the author ask instead?

Which of your previous jobs did you enjoy the most?

What do you think of our web site?

Tell me about your hobbies...

You've got to be kidding me. These are all soft-ball questions. What amazes me is that the author's company already has a hiring process in place. But he feels justified in abandoning this process at the end when an interviewee doesn't provide correct responses to an arbitrary list of soft-ball questions.

As a developer I schedule "surgery time" to avoid distractions. Blocks of 2-4 hours during the day where I go dark - no phone, no email, no chat/IM. The surgery analogy is apt. A good surgeon is amicable, knowledgeable, listens to patients and applies a deft touch to fix problems. But when he's elbow deep inside a patient he sure as hell isn't going to be taking any phone calls.

    Do any major browsers have a setting to disable overriding default keyboard shortcuts

This is developer sloppiness. Google provides plenty of methods to authenticate users without persisting user credentials to disk. There's no reason an application would need to store your Google login to disk, unencrypted or otherwise.

This isn't political correctness run amok. This is simply a father trying to provide a positive female role model for his young daughter. Y'know, so she doesn't get the impression that heroism, accomplishment, ingenuity and adventure are of solely male provenance.

I'm curious - if it was a black father modding in a dark-skinned Link what would your reaction be?

They must have had some other differentiator. Looking at the product's home page it looks like they had support from Nike and several well known football clubs to promote and legitimize the app:

http://iamplayr.com/

Now, obviously, they still had to build a compelling product and plan & execute a marketing strategy. They needed to be ready to succeed. Most people don't have a personal or professional network that includes access to decision-makers in large, influential organizations. Even so they still need to be prepared for that opportunity if and when their network expands.

.... aaaannnddd it's back - what the heck happened?

YouTube is down as well

Even a cursory scan of the http://urlfind.org/?server-status list reveals scads of porn sites exposing their visitor's IP addresses:

(Note these links go to Apache server-status pages at the time of linking. This may change if the server admins wise up - to be on the safe side consider them NSFW):

  http://black-tgirls.com/server-status
  http://badexgfs.com/server-status
  http://tubepornx.com/server-status
  http://lesbianvalley.net/server-status
  ..... and many more .....

Most web sites suck - or at least implement one of the flaws described in the article.

But by the standard laid out in the article most smartphones suck, most desktop apps suck, etc.

But web sites, like smartphones and apps, aren't built by a single amorphous group of people called "developers". No, no, no, the development process is defined by executives, marketers, IT, designers and yes developers. Saying "Do Web Developers Ever Learn?" is misleading. It's like placing the blame on the engineering staff at Nokia for creating sub-par phones - when there's plenty of blame to place on Nokia's executive management.

A broken and stupid product is evidence of a broken and stupid company culture. Bad developers can be replaced. But a broken culture can force good developers to do bad things.

There's a few things you can do:

* Drop the move to London requirement and allow him to telecommute. This could especially be appealing as he's working below rate. * Hire him on at a full salary with the understanding that he will defer a significant portion of his salary. He can defer it towards equity (maybe with a multiplier and definitely with a cliff) or defer until you close another round of funding (at which point he is paid a bonus equal to his deferred salary). * Depending on how well you know and trust this person: give him a small equity stake up front with a regular vesting schedule every 6 months.

> So the Microsoft store culture is not like the Apple store culture.

Microsoft and carrier shops tend to have a thrift store culture. No guidance, no expertise and lots of low-quality stock.

Or worse they have used car dealership culture. Agressive, slick salesmen who see a commission and not a person.

I had a similar experience in a T-Mobile store a few doors down from my local Apple store. Wanted to get my hands on the Galaxy S3 to check it out, surf, etc. before purchase. Took the sales guy 10 minutes to find a demo model in the back-room. Then fumbled with the phone with the sales guy looking over my shoulder, constantly peppering me with questions and small-talk. Apparently he had to keep an eye on me, as they don't have their demo phones secured and didn't have the staff to prevent theft. No internet access on the phone either. Very awkward experience. Needless to say I did not purchase the phone.

The skepticism about PayPal is well founded. PayPal has rightfully earned a reputation of imposing arbitrary decisions on account holders. Maybe if PayPal was more transparent and actually provided some semblance of customer service their decisions would appear more fair.

While its nice that the CEO has personally responded this actually shows a far greater dysfunction. Why should it take escalating all the way up to the CEO level to get someone at PayPal to listen and advocate for the customers position?

The contrast with startups is misleading. PayPal has been in business for a long time and is a billion dollar company. They have the resources to stop making stupid mistakes, but still persist in their bad behavior. They can get away with this because they've cornered a large part of the online payments marketplace.

Sure, a startup is going to make mistakes. And they're expected to. That's all a startup is really - a machine that generates mistakes in an attempt to find (or build) a profitable market.

Is it possible to point my own domain(s) at an instance, instead of having to use a 1.ai subdomain?

Sustainability of the service is a concern, so I wouldn't use it for anything mission-critical. Still, I applied mainly so I could have a place to host and stage a few different open source PHP and Rails projects I'm working on.

The application process should allow them to rate-limit new signups. And shut down new accounts if their infrastructure starts hitting limits. Also - Hopefully they're not afraid to slam down the ban hammer on abusive accounts.

I'm glad that any citizen gets to be on a jury rather than some elite set of experts

Expert testimony is used in trial all the time and is given great weight by jurors. Experts parse out highly technical details and draw conclusions to help the jury. Now, I'm not disagreeing with your initial assertion, but am pointing out that our justice system depends mightily on technical and professional elites.

The problem with this case is that a set of very complex and technical questions (did one or more patent infringements occur?) are being decided by non-experts. Having a lay jury decide these questions is as absurd as having the jury determine the caliber of gun used in a murder. Technical questions require expert/elite knowledge to untangle.

I can't speak for other users, but I'd rather see more project launches than any of the following types of submissions

A separate, heavily moderated forum on HN dedicated to product launches and feedback. Non-constructive criticism like "Your product sucks, it's a terrible idea and you're a terrible person for thinking of it" results in an HN hellban/permaban.

Myself - I'm not opposed to receiving negative feedback. It's the worthless, non-constructive feedback that riles me. Say something positive and/or insightful. Meaningless, parroted comments are what ultimately sinks an online community.

> As entrepreneurs we have to keep plugging forward amidst the criticism and build our dreams.

Feedback is an information source. Your job is to mine feedback for useful and relevant information. Whether the feedback is negative or positive is irrelevant. Criticism can contain a kernel of truth - it can point to a market weakness or an unfounded assumption. Praise can be very dangerous - socially, it's much easier to offer simple-minded positive re-enforcement to an entrepreneur and send them on their way.

I'd rather have 10 sneering, withering, and informative criticisms over a single fawning, ego-boosting, yet empty congratulation.

For a laser intensity greater than some critical value, pair production is generated via a 'break-up' of the vacuum polarization. While the electric field strength necessary to accomplish this is immense, to say the least, recent experimental advances have raised hope that lasers may soon achieve field intensities on the order of this very critical field intensity.

As a layman this seems to me to be the crux of the matter. First, there's the the energy costs required to generate a laser that will in turn generate anti-matter from the "void". Will the energy released by the anti-matter fuel cover the costs of generating the laser?

If so, this technique would also provide a way to generate a perpetual source of energy. The laser costs X energy but produces an explosion of >X energy. Who says this energy can only be used for propulsion? You could feed some of this energy back into the laser, covering the continuous operating cost of the laser, then dissipate or distribute the remaining energies.

Of course, I'm just a layman, so I might be completely off base on proposing this perpetual motion machine :)

There's also the problem of sequestration and storage. How do you keep the proton-antiproton pairs from immediately colliding with each other? Isn't this the basis of the fuel? Colliding matter/anti-matter pairs? For long-term storage how do you keep the anti-matter suspension intact until you're ready to ignite it?

This is a point where you'll have to judge the security considerations against usability considerations. As a user I might end up hammering a web service with correct passwords but incorrect usernames. As a user knowing that I'm using the wrong username would be useful and keep me from getting frustrated.

A better solution would be to rate limit incorrect username guesses. It's highly unlikely that a user is going to try more than a dozen usernames/emails - so that's strong signal that someone is trying to leak username information from your database.

Actually, source control GUIs are excellent for less-technical team members. I've had great results using TortoiseSVN or the GitHub client with multiple distributed teams.

It's great to be able to tell a new team member: "Press this button to get everyone else's updates." "Press this button to push your updates to the server/current branch." Later, depending on their role and level of skill, we can cover branching, merging, tagging and other move advanced features.

...Steve Jobs got on stage, gave the usual state of the business update, and then he did something I’d never seen before. He killed a wildly successful product...

... and replaced it with a wildly similar product.

Here's the first generation iPod Mini:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Green_ipodmini_1stgen.jpg

Here's the first generation iPod Nano:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1G_Nano_iPod.svg

What was risky or visionary about the product change?

Title nitpick: jQuery is a framework. Seemorejs is a jQuery plugin.

I don't really see a use case for this plugin. It seems like a less useful version of toggle: http://api.jquery.com/toggle/

Wait! I know I've seen this before:

http://www.8bitalpha.com/

Ditto on Notepad. For personal todo lists I just use a text editor. For collaborative todo lists I use a shared Google doc or Trello.

If your product is completely dependent on a third-party API or service in order to function you really only have two possible exits:

  1. Get bought out by the company implementing the API
  2. Get shut out by the company implementing the API