Hacker News Reader

alt_on WebGL to add 3D hover effects to your website

This is the first use case of 3D/WebGL for actual web sites that I've found worthwhile. I could even see myself using a stereoscopic screen to browse sites like these. No flashy fullscreen effects or epilepsy-inducing adverts, just clean 3D pop-ups to highlight content.

It's just a shame that anti-aliasing isn't forced on by default; jagged edges should really have been left behind years ago.

alt_on Ask HN: Startup scene in Lisbon/Porto Portugal?

There's a free mixer each month in central Lisboa where you can meet a bunch of people from the local tech community: http://floridaafterseven.com/

alt_on Official HN repository

Discovered through the new "Bugs" link in HN's footer.

alt_on YouTube And a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

Likely like the iOS6 AV Foundation bug[0] back in November. It caused me quite a bit of headache, but the 6.0.1 bugfix was released quite quickly.

[0] http://labs.prx.org/2012/11/14/ios-6-0-devours-data-plans-ca...

alt_on Introduction to Concurrent Programming with Stackless Python

> To take advantage of both multi-core machines and distributed programming, concurrency quickly becomes the de-facto standard way of doing things.

Parallelism is the way to achieve better compute performance. I assume stackless still has a GIL and can only take advantage of one core? Does it provide any inter-process communication that would help with parallelism?

alt_on PayPal denies teenager reward for finding website bug

Original seclist discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771647

alt_on Gmail for domains has been down for an hour

Key phrase: "explaining hows, whys or anything relevant".

alt_on Xbox, A New Generation Revealed (livesteam)

There's an alternative stream at GT: http://www.gametrailers.com/netstorage/xboxcountdown/live.ht...

The official one appears to have some bandwidth issues for me.

alt_on Square Cash

Posted 17 hours ago, 72 comments at this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738828

alt_on Show HN: Need1Hour.com - Please provide feedback

Clicky: http://need1hour.com/

Seems like a good idea and I personally think the price is decent. The design generally feels nice, but the coloured boxes ("Learn more" and on Kendall's page) somehow feel wrong; like the colours are a hue off or something.

alt_on Ask HN: Review my startup

You need a larger, and sparser, id space. I found a bunch of "private" albums by just trying numbers manually.

Design is a bit plain and the button images look blurry and out of place on a retina iPad. I also didn't find an obvious way to comment - is that not yet implemented?

alt_on Ask HN: Will Blink support <blink>?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE#t=30m20s

alt_on [dead]

The problem with this posting is just that you've already revealed details on what the exploit accomplishes and how to go looking for it. Revealing the company's identity now will narrow the search enough to make the disclosure irresponsible. This makes it harder to get help with contacting them.

alt_on [dead]

A day isn't really enough time to wait for a response. A critical ticket can be overlooked by an overworked help desk for days before it reaches anyone with authority to schedule or, in the case of a contracted-out system, even hire someone to investigate the issue.

On the matter of disclosure after not receiving any reply within _weeks_, I have no personal experience (and IANAL), but I'd think a safe bet would be to set up a "Call for Assistance" blog post, or the like, announcing that you've discovered a bug in Company X's system, _without_ mentioning any details on how to reproduce it, but that you cannot reach them for responsible disclosure and asking anyone with contacts to the company to have them get back to you.

Give this a few more weeks or months and you should have enough evidence of good will to disclose the details.

alt_on Curated video lists worth geeking out about

Right url: http://www.hackertalks.io/

alt_on If you’re trying to hack/deface a website, don’t submit a pull request

I wonder if it's the same genius who tried to hack WP[0] or if we've got a copycat on our hands.

[0] https://github.com/maxymax/WordPress/commit/2fa93590c7881fab...

alt_on Rural residents' DIY 1Gbps fibre project

I helped build a couple in Finland back in 2003. The lack of bureaucracy and city infrastructure in rural areas likely helped, but the driving force was my uncle - a CS professor/farmer who retired from teaching and had to find something else to occupy his time ;)

alt_on RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping

The data seems to be based off an NPD survey:

"Data note: The information in this press release is from NPD’s “Annual Music Study,” which is based on online surveys of U.S. consumers age 13 and older. NPD conducted consumer surveys between December 14, 2011 and January 3, 2012, and the final reporting is based on 5,799 completed surveys. In order to compare music acquisition across formats, NPD uses an equivalency of 10 standalone digital tracks for each CD album."[0]

I would guess they were counting all USB storage devices as "hard drives", so a large percentage is likely just USB sticks.

[0] https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/pressreleases/pr_...

alt_on Gabe Newell Wants to Support Linux, Because Windows 8 is a 'Catastrophe'

I would be more afraid of Xbox Live than the app store.

Buying is just a one time deal. Achievements and other social features of Xbox Live are constant and, if shared with the large Xbox network, will be very desirable for consumers.

alt_on New physics takes a back seat to heat in understanding the Pioneer anomaly

No, sorry. The paper appears to have been released in April.

alt_on Test Firefox OS on a desktop computer with new B2G nightly builds

"Update: Many are wondering why they see a “black” screen after launching the B2G Desktop build. It’s likely because you havent set up a Gaia profile prior to launching. here’s how you do it. (again, refer to Gaia/hacking for better steps!)"[0]

You need a full make environment to get anything running. While I understand that this is just a developer preview, this is really not a good way to get testers.

[0] http://dknite.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/desktop-builds-now-av...

alt_on Minecraft Migrated Account Session Vulnerability Security Advisory

"UPDATE: Woohoo! Things are back up and running perfectly! Thank you all for being patient while things were fixed. Also major props to Grum, Dinnerbone, and Leo who were out of bed and in to action in the blink of an eye!"[0]

[0] http://www.mojang.com/2012/07/houston-we-have-a-problem/

alt_on [dead]

Meta discussions are frowned upon and this post will probably be deaded like the one about grayarrow.gif.

The preferred way to request a feature is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

alt_on [dead]

Your best chance at getting it implemented is posting it as a feature request[0] and getting it voted up there.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

alt_on OUYA kickstarter goal reached in under 12 hours

Title shamelessly stolen from http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/10/ouya-gaming-console-meets... and old post[0] still on first page, so might not have needed a repost, but I thought it was noteworthy.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4223627

alt_on Show HN: Hosted Graphite service (with statsd integration)

Other minor defects:

About-page is caught by a wildcard which shows a slightly modified landing page with different prices.

Flexible layout could use some more testing. Choose plan buttons escape their parent boxes on the right at minimum width. Free trial button could use some vertical breathing room at min. width. Login and sign up links change colour (gray to blue) and go vertical.

alt_on Russia to Create Internet Blacklist

I wouldn't bet on it: http://torrentfreak.com/google-facebook-and-8000-other-sites...

alt_on Caching the uncacheable: CloudFlare's Railgun

Delta encoding for HTTP has been proposed since 2002[0], but seems to have been lukewarmly received.

A fully server-side solution will probably bypass most problem cases, but might solve some, so I hope CloudFlare looks into contributing to a distributed standard solution.

[0] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3229