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bdc

105 karma · joined January 19, 2013

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bdc··on MtGox.com is offline
No, at some point between $0 and $400,000,000[1], negligence is no longer an acceptable excuse.

[1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.

bdc··on The Mt. Gox alleged insolvency document has been posted
Listed under "Assets": "New brand and services ready to be launched."

Just what the community needs most - new Gox-quality services, hidden behind brand obfuscation. Ready to go!

bdc··on A Sochi Olympics API
I love the way this API is presented on the page. It's awesome. It exposes itself in such an obvious way that it leaves no question about its capabilities and usage. Makes me want to jump right in.
bdc··on Can Machine Learning Fix a Broken Patent System?
> "[The U.S. patent system] is not obliged to register change in ownership."

That I hadn't known; the implication being, if you intend to leverage a patent with lawful permission from its licensor, it's still possible to get screwed (by being misled about the rightful owner's identity, for instance).

bdc··on BlackBerry Met With Facebook Last Week to Discuss Potential Bid

  BBRY Market cap today: $4.3 bn
  Cash: "about $2.6 bn in cash"
  Patents: "estimate [...] between $1 bn and $3 bn"
That leaves not a whole lot of value in the company's other assets after the cash and patents - their personnel, supply chains and branding are valued at almost zero in the market. I'm kind of amazed by that.
bdc··on PhpMyAdmin Turns 15
It's easy to dump on PMA, but what it was built for, it did (and mostly, does) excellently.

When I used PMA for the first time I was a very young programmer, and it really amazed me that such a tool could exist. Oddly enough, this was a really inspirational piece of software for me.

bdc··on Driving students into science is a fool's errand
This article reads like a general argument against government subsidies in general - replace "STEM education" with "corn" or "new energy" and the argument is still valid.

Given that it was published on nature.com, best known as the publisher of one of the top science journals in the world, I would bet that the intended purpose is to stimulate discussion, not to explicitly endorse this view as written.

bdc··on When a Startup Sends a Passive-Aggressive Email Every Day
Among my recent favorites:

"Hello NULL," -- from Leap Motion

"I wanted to follow up after meeting you" -- from "Developer Relations Team" (not a person!? did I meet the entire team?) at SendGrid

bdc··on When a Startup Sends a Passive-Aggressive Email Every Day
I received 15 emails in 10 days when I signed up for Full Contact. Yeah, I wanted to check out your product, so I signed up and tested it out. No, I don't need to be reminded that you exist every sixteen hours.

I had, separately, been discussing one of the less common features at Full Contact with a real person there, and pointed this out to him, forwarding all of the emails back to him as well. He apologized sincerely and helped figure out why this was happening (over email, of course :) ).

It's just an insanely reliable way to turn my opinion from 'this product is intriguing' to 'this product is irritating.'

If you're going to send email spam (and most startups have to, at some point), at least make it pleasant.

bdc··on Prismatic creates a special signup for Google reader users
I gotta be honest, I can't figure out how to use this.

I imported my Google Reader data (or so I am led to believe), but all I see is a generic feed full of (admittedly interesting, but not what I want) generic news stories. I see a way of adding 'interests' but not 'feeds'.

My confusion is somewhat assuaged by the awesome '/people' page.

Is this a Reader replacement, or a Reader poaching?

--

[edit: I see that this tool does not include an RSS reader, which I thought it would based on the invitation screen. This does not do anything that I use Google Reader for... which is to read RSS feeds!]

bdc··on The Era of Symbol Fonts
In Windows, 'X' "makes no sense", while in OS X, 'X' is "clear." Okay, got it :).
bdc··on The Era of Symbol Fonts
To play devil's advocate, let's consider that it might actually be important to push new icons into the public icon lexicon.

Right now I'm typing this comment in a browser window that has three icons at the top right: a little line like this _, two layered squares []], and an X. What do those do? Obviously, they minimize, 'restore', and close the window. Why 'obviously'? These symbols are not intrinsically 'obvious'. They have become a standard since roughly the days of Windows 3.1. We expect them to be there, and I prefer the icons to a little status bar that says "Minimize, Restore, Close."

Then there are three icons below that, a left-facing arrow (<-), a right-facing arrow (->) and an arrow that loops back on itself in a circle. Again, the meanings are 'obvious', insofar as they are not obvious but are part of the public icon lexicon. It can be said this is "common knowledge" that these represent the 'navigate back', 'navigate forward', and 'reload' functionalities of my browser.

How did these icons become standard? Through initial experimentation, then widespread acceptance and propagation.

The good ideas caught on, and bad ones were lost to the sands of time. There are some crappy icons out there that didn't make it.

Consider a recent example - the share icon[1]. A decade ago this thing didn't exist. Now it's everywhere. It's beginning to become commonplace. These days, many applications have a basic 'share' functionality, and few use an icon that looks different from this. So is it a standard at this point? Maybe.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=share+icon

bdc··on Introducing A New Article Design
Caution --

"Request access to the prototype" yielded an immediate email: "Thank you for signing up for a New York Times newsletter!"

bdc··on SimCity UI Code + DRM
On the subject of minification, I see a lot of lines that look like this[1]:

  fireToken : 1 === f.tradeTokens.data.fireToken ? !0 : !1,
Why might that be a desired output from a minifier? Why not simply

  fireToken : 1 === f.tradeTokens.data.fireToken,
[1] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5133829#file-simcityui-js-...
bdc··on HoverForMore is {text-overflow: ellipsis;} on steroids
+1ed for "How To Express Your Dissenting Political Viewpoint Through Origami"
bdc··on Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
What are you using to determine whether *.io domains are "free" vs "taken"? It seems to be incorrect.

  http://www.usernique.com/io/x
  -- "free"

  http://www.nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=x.io
  -- The domain is unavailable for use.
bdc··on Stop Corporate Takeover of New Internet Names
AOL Keywords ;)
bdc··on Chess CAPTCHA
Actually, the captcha predicate is a GET request that looks like this:

http://en.lichess.org/captcha/78pkfjgz?solution=e5+e4 which returns 1 or 0.

So the brute force captcha solution is to go through 8^4 (~4k) get requests, which you could code in five minutes and execute in a minute.

bdc··on BitInstant hacked: What and how it happened
To paraphrase: the question 'What is your mother's maiden name?' is intrinsically insecure as a security measure; instead of answering it directly, make up some unguessable string that has nothing to do with the question.

Sound advice, but... but... but.....

This is his own website using this as a security question!

bdc··on The true cost of free-to-play games

  > Most of us won't pay $1 for a great game, but will pay $99 in IAPs
Here's the difference: by the time you're even considering an in-app-purchase, you already know you love the app. Would you rather support a product that has given you lots of pleasure, or an unknown product that lobs a couple of screenshots before footing you the bill?

While I don't have much experience with purchases in iOS, I can say for sure that of the apps I've purchased through Android, all but one (around three dozen total) SUCKED. They had good reviews and good screenshots - that's what made me buy them - but they didn't follow through with the promise. I'm willing to take the <$5 risk to try a new game with "good" reviews and pretty "screenshots", but so far, empirically, it has almost always ended poorly.

... lending the more interesting question: how do we get out of THAT rut?

bdc··on If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who's Liable?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5343512
bdc··on White House Petition to Eliminate Daylight Savings Time
Aside from inertia, what is keeping DST in place right now? I could imagine some bizarre lobbying incentive, like it provides some marginal and trivial benefit to the corn industry somehow, although I am not aware of one.
bdc··on Russian scientists report new DNA under subglacial Lake Vostok
> "If it were found on Mars, people would call it Martian DNA. But this is DNA from Earth"

Yes... yes indeed.

bdc··on The New Facebook News Feed: A UX Breakdown
On the plus side, the bizarre site ux is because he's trying to do something novel, and not due to negligence, like the source of most of the internet's bad ux.
bdc··on Calling Vault - a private Google Voice (sort of)
$39 for 100 minutes - that comes out to 39 cents a minute. Even the cheapest you can buy minutes ($22 for 1000, or 2.2 cents/minute) is more expensive than comparable web-based services. Is there anything that this actually does better than normal, in exchange for those prices?
bdc··on Reviewing the $250 Samsung Chromebook as a Developer
A chapter from Henry Ford's playbook
bdc··on New Sputnik
Why can't computers have names that sound like computers. Thought this was gonna be about SpaceX or something.
bdc··on What Coke Contains
An interesting derivative of "I, Pencil":

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

bdc··on Vim users: stop using hjkl
> I like to fiddle with the cursor while I'm thinking.

That's a good point - I do that too. Also, if I've switched my attention somewhere else, then back to vim, I find myself doing "hlhlhl" to get my attention back to the cursor immediately.

bdc··on Why was my email leaked?
It is actually possible that you violate their tos by doing so - it could be construed as falsely implying some representation of the company. A stretch to any sane person, though any typical terms document contains miles and miles of cya.
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