HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

skloubkov

22 karma · joined December 10, 2013

submissionscomments
skloubkov··on Stolen credit cards and the Black Market: How the digital underground works
Pretty interesting read. Didn't know about use of gift cards, pretty cleaver.

Any idea if the "mules" (from the article, the guys who get items shipped to them) would be in legal trouble?

skloubkov··on Update on BitTorrent Chat
Isn't it better to overlay this whole security level over existing infrastructure (Skype or something) and take advantage of that?

Seems like this new protocol wouldn't work too well with offline messages, storing previous conversations etc.

Also would be easy to trace back to IP's and find origins of the messages. They should've designed a system so that messages would be hidden in echo/ping commands. That way if someone is monitoring all the messages between nodes they wouldnt be able to distinguish actual traffic.

skloubkov··on Holiday Lites: HTML CSS and JS Benchmark
Chrome - 31.0 16.97 IE - 11.0.96 2.83 Firefox 25 - [nothing showed up]

Seems like test is focusing on something that IE optimized heavily

skloubkov··on China bans new Bitcoin deposits
Ouch, that market crash: http://markets.blockchain.info

Here is another article: http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/1384688...

skloubkov··on Wordpress Bootstrap 3 Starter Theme – MIT License
Just a suggestion, but perhaps you should provide a screenshot or a demo page. Seems like it would help since its all about visuals for the project.
skloubkov··on PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length
Difficult to get as sign-off on re-write of large systems when there technically nothing broken.
skloubkov··on PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length
This. I was implying that length of the string should mean length in characters, not bytes. This could lead to broken code and would require programmers to keep in mind both.

I have switched from php long ago, but remember odd naming conventions and frequent switch of parameters.

skloubkov··on PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length
While I understand why this was done (for the sake of comparability), I feel like its better to bite a bullet and slowly phase out broken functions over several versions.

Warn initially (few versions) and then raise exception/critical errors after. If developer isn't willing to update, chances are server isnt being updated either anyways.

skloubkov··on I Flew to Lagos and Got Beaten Up Because of a Nigerian Email Scam
Someone that was trying to do money laundering (knowing in advance that it was illegal) got taken advantage of by bigger conman.

Don't see why anyone would feel sorry for this guy. Would you feel bad for a robber that got caught?

skloubkov··on Many private college presidents make $1 million
Reminds me of this: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

College presidents act as a face of an institution, paying someone extra 100,000 could mean bringing in millions extra in donations/tuitions/fees etc. Big money attracts talent.

skloubkov··on Images Now Showing in Gmail
Seems like a privacy hole.

Mailer can setup url that is composed of random words and is unique per email.

Ex: www.tracker.com/weather-dog-city-nice.jpg could identify you + timestamp of request and bam, you have record of: valid email, address isn't blocked and that user reads emails from recipient. No proxy in a world would be able to make this request anonymous.

No idea what advantage of this is apart from google eventually offering an alternative to gmail (think of comment system being replaced on youtube)

skloubkov··on First 3D Commercial Web Game Powered By asm.js
While I really see potential of asm.js couple of things about execution (including this title)

1. Brings my browser to its knees (Firefox here)

2. Security. They seem to open themselves up to a whole lot of potential hacks (I hope their code deals with cookie jacking, csrf, sniffing, etc). While this would be a problem with closed source, this is made worse by running it in browser

3. Cheaters. How would they deal with people injecting code and creating bots?

skloubkov··on Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin
Pretty interesting meeting.

Seems to cover more than just bitcoin, and includes the reasoning behind Assange's drive.

Highly recommend listening to the actual audio file (its linked in the article): http://wlstorage.net/file/cms/assange-schmidt.mp3

skloubkov··on PayPal president David Marcus: Bitcoin is good, NFC is bad
Would be cool to be able to tap to pay instead of scan to pay.
skloubkov··on PayPal president David Marcus: Bitcoin is good, NFC is bad
I think this comes from the fact that Bitcoin transactions cant be refunded, but PayPal ones can be. So buyer could cancel the purchase and keep bitcoin with merchant being unable to do anything.
skloubkov··on Can Bitcoin Replace PayPal?
>>The added bonus? No middlemen taking a cut from the transaction, he says. While low, there are actually transaction fees.

Bitcoin payment has already been used on many websites and seems to work well for them. PayPal offers much more than just payment processing however (there are refunds for example).

Bitcoin is just a medium of exchange, better question is, which payment process will be able to match PayPal in terms of features first.