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alexcason

503 karma · joined June 17, 2013

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alexcason··on How to make a great government website
Mandatory link to the one thing in the UK that actually works well: https://www.gov.uk

Further details: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...

alexcason··on AdFlush
Looks like this is the associated repo on GitHub: https://github.com/SKKU-SecLab/AdFlush
alexcason··on One-night stands will be illegal at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar
Maybe this is true, or maybe it isn’t but I would question any news story where the source is the Daily Star via Marca.
alexcason··on Newsrooms, let’s talk about G Suite
Shameless plug for Filewatch (https://filewatch.net), a client-side web application I made which enables you to see who your Google Drive files and folders are shared with.

Filewatch doesn't get any information about you or your files, no information about your files leaves your browser.

alexcason··on Reddit's /r/Piracy is deleting almost ten years of history to avoid ban
RIP r/soccerstreams
alexcason··on Ask HN: How do I ask for a raise?
The best way to find out if a company values your work enough to offer you a raise is to interview for other jobs, get an offer and hand in your notice. They'll soon offer you an increase if they want you to stay. It puts you in a strong negotiating position too.
alexcason··on Google One
Looks like personal accounts only.
alexcason··on Show HN: Filewatch – Find your public files on Google Drive
Any feedback is much appreciated
alexcason··on More Than 1M Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
alexcason··on Ask HN: Early signs that a company is failing?
Motivational posters
alexcason··on WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook
"The ads would come through a Facebook program called "Custom Audiences," which lets a business upload lists of customers and phone numbers or other contact information the business has collected from warranty cards or other sources. Facebook matches the list to users with the same information and shows them ads. Facebook says it doesn't give out users' information to advertisers."

What happens if the advertiser uploads only one phone number to their campaign? Will they then know for certain if the one user clicked on the advert?

alexcason··on The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it
"Even though I voted to leave, this morning I woke up and I just — the reality did actually hit me," one woman told the news channel ITV News. "If I'd had the opportunity to vote again, it would be to stay."
alexcason··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2015)
Likewise, always seems to be London. Plenty of tech companies in Manchester so hopefully this will increase.
alexcason··on Ask HN: How can I tell if I have programming aptitude?
Do you enjoy programming?

If so, you will be good at programming. If not, you most likely won't.

alexcason··on RegExr: A website for interactive regex prototyping with syntax highlighting
I've been using RegExr for years, it's the first place I go to when I have a tricky regular expression to put together. It works really well.
alexcason··on Show HN: Today We Learned
This would add another 30+ minutes every single day to a teacher's workload.

No teacher will ever use this voluntarily.

alexcason··on Gogs, an alternative to Gitlab
At what point does it become a concern when you're just ripping off the UI of a competing product?
alexcason··on How we built the new BBC Homepage
There seems to be some kind of bird theme going on with their CSS classes.

  class="distinct-component-group container-buzzard"
  class="distinct-component-group container-pigeon"
  class="distinct-component-group container-macaw"
  class="robin sparrow-container"
  class="sparrow-container sparrow-columns"
alexcason··on Sublime Text 3 builds picking up steam again
I use Atom over Sublime Text these days but there's no denying that it's much slower. It'll improve as time goes on but it takes longer to start and can very sluggish when a lot of text is being displayed. I also frequently hit the 2MB limit, far more than I thought I would do.
alexcason··on The Internet of Gas Station Tank Gauges
In my first job as a Software Developer about 5 or 6 years ago I worked at a company which connected to forecourt controllers (which managed ATGs, fuel pumps, etc) on petrol forecourts in the UK, retrieved the data and presented it to a team of analysts for reporting back to the forecourt owners.

To this day, the most difficult software challenge I have had to tackle was to retrieve the data from the serial port of a controller called the DOMS 2000. It had been replaced a number of years earlier by a new model but was still in wide service.

We had very limited documentation and I spent weeks observing the data being transmitted from the serial port while performing actions using a simulator. Eventually I managed to reliably intercept and correctly interpret almost every command.

I believe, to this day, I may well be one of the foremost experts on the DOMS 2000 on the planet.

alexcason··on Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America
If you only started this in 2014 then how do you have reports dating from 2012 and 2013 (and earlier too?)?
alexcason··on Show HN: Topic
It seems like a missed opportunity not to have the world cup as one of the demonstration topics on the front page.
alexcason··on GetWifi
No idea what this is or what service they are providing. The website is terrible.
alexcason··on Building Products at SoundCloud – Part I: Dealing with the Monolith
This is what arrogance looks like folks.
alexcason··on Mail Pilot App
For that price I'd want to test the app for a while first.
alexcason··on PointDNS / Copper.io experiencing DDoS – services down
http://www.digitalattackmap.com/
alexcason··on Follow up to the investigation results
I'm not sure what more GitHub can do that isn't outlined in this post.

It would be good to hear from people with perspective what they think the next steps should be.

alexcason··on Moves joins Facebook
cmd+f journey

Yes!

"Thank you for supporting us on this journey, and we’re looking forward to our future at Facebook!"

alexcason··on Open-source 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub
This seemed like such a fascinating project when you first unveiled it. I'm really glad you've decided to make it open source. I look forward to diving in and seeing how it works.
alexcason··on Ding.io
This looks really fantastic. I love the design and after spending a few minutes reading your blog it seems like you care a great deal about every decision you make.
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