dos1

While I understand that you do not believe this is a big deal, I do not agree. I think this is a major problem. I too am a Minnesota resident and have always felt our state was very educated and progressive. This makes me ashamed to be a Minnesotan.

If you're an employee of the OHE, and you somehow think it's a good idea to go on record defending this silly statute, then you need to be fired. Period. No one at that organization should possibly think applying a decades old statute to a non-degree granting institution is the right thing to do.

Edit: I have contacted the source at the OHE and am waiting for a response. I'm hopeful this was all a misunderstanding, but one can never hope too much for the right outcome when dealing with bureaucracy.

The SpaceX webcast has a great video of the whole process, as well as some good stills:

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Watching the video gave me a massive appreciation for what these guys are able to do. I work on a software project where we have trouble getting our builds to pass reliably, so I can't imagine what kind of teamwork and high caliber people it takes to pull something like this off :)

Imagine you hear a story about a guy whose house gets burned to the ground. All of his possessions are destroyed. My thought is that you'd naturally feel sympathy for the victim.

Now say you found out the victim was himself a serial arsonist who had burned down other houses. Do you still feel as bad for him?

In my opinion there is no difference between that story and this one. A racist man is angry that another racist man made racist comments toward him.

>I cannot afford to take white people’s shit anymore. That’s been my mantra this year, and I’m still on it, even if that means getting the law involved.

From the comment above (and several other parts of his article) he certainly appears to be just as racist as the people he's trying to demonize. Not to mention there's a crazy amount of self entitlement going on.

>I had a whole month of potential creative and community building energy stripped from me for the sake of this company’s profits. That shit ain’t cool.

A "whole" month of your "potential creative and community building energy"? Really? I have LOTS of months where I don't get to focus ANY time on any sort of creative or community building endeavors because I have other things that need to be taken care of.

I do not condone what he experienced at his workplace and that's terrible that it happened. However, his tone in the article and apparent prejudice towards white people makes it difficult for me to summon a lot of nice things to say.

I agree that the programmer shortage is overblown. I'm a contractor and am currently putting out feelers for my next gig. My resume and background are "very good" from a recruiter's perspective, and even I have issues getting in the door at some of these places. The sad bit is that most of the time I find out the job is something a junior dev right out of college could do, and the rate is $65/hr.

Along that vein, almost no place is interested in paying for talent. I consistently get incredulous responses from recruiters when I tell them my rate. Many companies cap their reqs at $90/hr or $100/hr. This seems like a decent rate, but a major part of the problem is that the recruiting firm wants to take 30% of that hourly rate. If the maximum cap is 100, that means the contractor is getting (at most) $70/hr. Companies either need to up their rate, or cut out the middle man completely. The vast majority of recruiters I encounter today have a premium LinkedIn account and just spam everyone that matches keywords. Are you telling me a company couldn't have an intern do that kind of thing for a lot less than the recruiters are getting?

Well, the last time I used OSX for daily use, it was constantly pestering me to upgrade to various point releases. Those were usually massive downloads that required a reboot. Maybe things have changed?

Along that same vein, it seemed like every time I'd boot in to OSX - iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto et all would need 100+ MB updates to stay current.

I guess my experience on the upgrade treadmill (even staying on a major version of OSX) was very unpleasant.

Apple's incessant need to obsolete their old operating systems is surprising to me. I would think this would hurt their overall adoption rates (especially long term) as people get sick of constantly upgrading their OS and dealing with any fallout that results.

I for one will never run OSX again due to the constant need for upgrades. I have one of the original Intel MacBooks (with the Core Duo) and after upgrading to 10.6 my wireless card quit working. Rolling back to 10.5 fixed it. Although, with their popularity skyrocketing, maybe I'm the only one who has issues with new OSX versions.

This looks fantastic. The "Gibson" view is also an awesome little bonus for those of us who still love the movie Hackers.

Are there any security concerns with this? Is the URL of a GET request over SSL encrypted as well as the payload? I assume it must be if they are sending credit card information that way?

Yes! Totally agree! There should never be a person whose sole job is "UX". I've encountered many of these people and have never seen one add value to a project.

As a further aside, I also despise "information architectures" which these UX people always want to hammer out. To me, information architecture is a buzzword and total crap. I want to see high fidelity design comps. No more Omnigraffle low fi wireframes. (And especially no Omnigraffle wireframes as a deliverable to developers to code real UIs!)

> I'm the security researcher in question (and author of this post). What a company does when pressured by their customer base and what they do when no pressures exist are two very, very different things

Totally agreed.

> Had I approached them with these vulnerabilities ahead of time, it's highly likely that they would have used their considerable cash reserves to strong-arm me legally into not releasing this data, and the issue would not have been resolved.

I guess we'll never know will we?

Edit: To be fair, I don't have a stake in this either way, and I'm glad the end result is that they're taking the threat seriously.

Wow look at that - once made aware of the vulnerability Onity responded with a fix.

The last post I saw on this mentioned that the security researcher did not responsibly disclose the vulnerability because he just knew they wouldn't do anything. Looks like he was wrong.

But imagine, if he had told them a year ago, perhaps the locks would be mostly replaced with a fixed version by now! I think it's unbelievable that he wouldn't disclose this information because he "just knows" they wouldn't do anything. He's not a damn mind reader. Hell, he might even be right, but you've still got to give the company the chance.

I'm not sure why SO feels the need to delete posts like this. I get that the "question" isn't keeping with their stated objectives, but I find the answers to be enlightening in some respects. I've learned about many new technologies and frameworks from the "What is the best X to use for Y" questions that get posted frequently. I don't see those as detrimental to the community like the SO mods apparently do.

Thanks for the explanation! Having never dealt with internet advertisers I didn't realize there was as much to it as there is :)

Could you maybe explain some of those acronyms you used?

Good point - I guess my biggest complaint is that companies like Facebook and Twitter pull some of the most brilliant minds. These minds, in my opinion, could be better spent finding solutions to big problems like cancer, space exploration, green energy, clean water etc. I guess it's not so much that I dislike social networks, more that I dislike the opportunity cost of having smart people go work for them.

Everything I've read about Elon Musk recently has really made me root for the guy. He is disrupting two very difficult industries.

This was posted on HN a few months ago, but I really thought this interview with him was exceptional: http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa

What's most impressive to me is that this interview was almost 4 years ago, and he's done exactly as he said. He's focused on results and he's spending his considerable capital on things likely to make an impact on the world, not on frivolous applications like social networks.

I do not like Android tablets for the simple reason that the web browsing experience on them is sub par. In my mind a tablet is a luxury item that sits on a coffee table and answers my questions of "what movie was that actor in?" or "who's leading the AL Central?" whenever I want, without any fuss. The iPad is very good at this, while every Android device I've ever used has not been.

Totally agree. I'm all for the big life changing move - when there aren't people depending on you for their survival.

Also - you're building a house? If I was going to quit my consulting gig to do startups (which I'm strongly considering doing) I would (and do) keep my debt to a bare minimum.

Edit: Based on OP's answers in reply to the parent comment, it appears as though the situation is not quite as dire as it sounded at first read of the article.

Why is Microsoft so hell-bent on destroying the desktop OS that made them what they are today? The Metro stuff is fine for tablets, but it's a TERRIBLE user experience on a traditional desktop computer.

I don't even understand this "everything must be a super simple little app" approach that both Apple and (and now because they're a big copy cat) Microsoft are taking. Is this really what the populace wants? I understand that constraints often yield the best designs, but this is a little crazy.

And as far as the dev tooling - that was one area that Microsoft was notably competent. I really can't see how this will benefit them in the long term. Seriously, what is the upside for them? A few more Metro apps? They'll win the battle but lose the war.

I'm not entirely sure that data binding is a good approach in general. I spent quite a bit of time on a Silverlight MVVM project too, and the data binding there got to be more trouble than it was worth as well. Seems like data binding separates the what (user input causes model to update) from the how (markup bindings magically translate to updated model) and that just makes an unmaintainable mess.

I can't quite tell why someone would want to use this framework over Knockout. The Knockout documentation is quite a bit more thorough and the two way binding looks to be more robust.

Also, both Knockout and Angular require that you add non-standard attributes to your markup. Whatever happened to separation of concerns? Having used both Knockout and Backbone, I find Backbone's separation of JS and HTML to be a major benefit. Not to mention two way binding is a neat trick, but often what I'm really after is a decent structure to hang my custom script on so I can keep it maintainable. A lot of the code I wrote using Knockout is almost impossible to follow a few weeks later.

I have a hard time drumming up sympathy for these guys. They're mad because they couldn't make a quick buck. Isn't a hedge fund just gambling? It's high time Wall St. learns that it's never a good idea to put more in the pot than you can lose.

The part that is most striking to me is that share price and a company's intrinsic value are seemingly in different galaxies. This guy is talking about decisions based on hype. I'm floored. Do these guys really trade based on public opinion?

I can already buy something with one click on Amazon.com from my laptop and desktop. And have been able to for some time. Adding that feature to a mobile phone will help, certainly, but that alone would not make a better shopping experience in my mind. I would still have to have that company's app, or browse their site in my mobile browser, which will always be slower than using a full fledged laptop or desktop.

I agree that if someone could make purchasing simpler on a phone than on a laptop/desktop (possibly through NFC or something) then it could be a preferable approach. But just storing credit cards isn't going to cut it in my opinion.

I love my iPhone. As an appliance it works great. But I must be in the minority when it comes to using apps. I use two, maybe three, on a monthly basis. Safari, Maps, and sometimes a weather app. I was floored when he said he spends $50-$100 a month on apps. What is he buying?

Also - is there a huge market for mobile purchases? I must be getting old, but I certainly prefer buying things online on a laptop or a desktop.

The debugger is great! Until this came along I was really struggling to figure out how to write any kind of code for this DCPU thing. I don't have a background in assembly or really any sort of low level programming. The debugger makes the code a lot more approachable for someone like me!

But why? Why drop the semicolons? What is the benefit? If the net result is exactly the same, why try and be tricky? What is the point, other than you can do it. But there are many tricky things we can do with programming languages, but very few we should

After reading this, I just want to say that I do not think semicolon-less javascript is, in general, a good idea.

Development projects are almost always team efforts. And, unfortunately, there's almost always one or two team members who aren't very good. Some of you folks that only work on startups with brilliant people might disagree, but in my experience most development teams have some bad apples who have let their tech skills rot, or won't try for some reason or another.

These people are going to have a tremendous time just writing halfway competent javascript (especially since it's probably not similar to their OOP language of choice). Suggesting they write code in an uncommon way is just begging for trouble. Most of the examples on the internet use semicolons, as do most of the frameworks. In fact, I hope that members of my future teams never see this javascript style guide or even know that it's possible to omit semicolons in many cases.

I'm quite sure someday soon I'm going to hear this over the cube wall: "Hey, GitHub doesn't use semicolons in their javascript so I won't either!" And then I will be very, very sad.

Wow, great story! I especially like the fact that Lenny realizes how lucky he is to have healthy children and be financially stable. There are so many people who are smart and work hard, but to become rich beyond necessity always takes a healthy dose of luck. It's great to see him acknowledge that and do nice things for other people. Too many wealthy people think they're solely responsible for their success and are misers to a fault.