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walkonon It’s Instant

I believe if you are enrolled in Instant they will spot the money for any purchases you make beyond the amount you already have in your account, up to $500 worth. So it just enables you to use Dwolla for purchases without having to wait for a slow ETF transfer (around 3 days) from your bank to fund your Dwolla account.

walkonon Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

Nice plug.

walkonon V.me by Visa Build the future of digital payments.

Their sample code page (https://developer.v.me/docs/sample_code) indicates they are using Chase Paymentech underneath. V.me appears to be a service layer abstraction (read: middleman). It will be interesting to see if this gains traction; they obviously have the name recognition.

walkonon Microsoft shoots down Google's Dart

Not an endorsement of Dart at all, considering people who haven't really learned javascript by now are going to be the same people who won't really learn Dart in the future.

walkonon $19/month cell carrier Republic Wireless overwhelmed on release day

I'm not understanding what the complaint in that is, exactly. Is it that the Sprint/cellular side of the usage is limited while the wifi usage is not?

walkonon Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share

I don't think they are referring to Google App Engine specifically, but all servers from Google running their own custom http server (where the http response header for Server = "gws"). That's pretty significant, considering how much traffic Google servers get.

walkonon [dead]

Yeah, there's no way it stays under two watts per hour if a drive (spindle or solid state) and wifi are running.

walkonon How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?

Guess how I learned about and downloaded Netscape on Windows back in the mid 90s?

walkonon How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?

You've heard of Novell, right? Microsoft didn't break it, it just wasn't that good. AD isn't horrible at all; I use it regularly and have zero issues.

walkonon The State of the Art is Terrible

Need a webserver and database setup? Easy, a few clicks on Heroku and I'm good to go.

That's a different path entirely, though not necessarily a bad one. The full stack isn't under your control on Heroku.

walkonon Show HN: BidOnMyDay, bid to have me fly to you and do anything

You could buy up all his days and tell him his job is to not fly anywhere.

walkonon Google App Engine leaves preview, new pricing

Heroku currently supports Python, or is that something that is in the works? I can't find much on this...

walkonon Rational Home Buying

Inflation plays a huge role with regard to timing and compared to the average mortgage rates of other owners/landlords. If you start a 4% fixed rate mortgage today and do not move anywhere in 10 years, you don't have to cover the cost of credit for whatever the interest rate at that time is (probably higher) because you don't have to reset/move.

walkonon What's rising faster than health care? College costs

Wouldn't that just make the cost of borrowing go up?

walkonon White House, congressional leaders reach debt deal

The analogy still works. Don't let taxes and wars confuse you. Both entities have limits to both the amount of revenue they take in and and the expenditures they make.

walkonon My Standing Desk Experiment

Do you stand in your meetings, or...?

walkonon Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years

I'm not sure how excited and fulfilled one can be by doing a simple and repetitive task several hundred times a day.

walkonon On Safety: A Word From Airbnb

When down voting, please explain (seriously).

walkonon On Safety: A Word From Airbnb

Generally, people are not "fundamentally good". Generally, most people are only good when they believe the reward for being so is >= the required effort or discomfort (rewards aren't always monetary and could be as simple as feeling good about yourself for helping the crippled-orphaned-widow-beggar across the street). An example of this is airbnb's own policy of not disclosing renter contact information. Despite what they say, airbnb believes that people are not fundamentally good as their concern of users circumventing their payment system is greater than their concern for the safety of said users (at least to the extent that stories such as this don't hurt their business more than payment bypassing would).

If airbnb believed what they espouse, they'd quit trying to outsource their trust in humanity to their customers whom they aren't liable for and instead actually trust that people in general won't sidestep the payment process.

walkonon NASA finds water reservoir equivalent to 140 trillion times the world's oceans

There's water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, because most of the Milky Way’s water is frozen in ice.

How could they possibly know this?

walkonon US debt visualized

It absolutely does not. Have you heard of the QE* programs from the Fed?

walkonon Those 500K Bitcoins that caused the flash crash weren't real

Not sure why I'm downvoted, SHA-512 is obviously better than MD5 and we don't know the details. The constant spewing that bcrypt is the only way to hash a password is getting old fast.

<edit> Ok, whatever, keep downvoting, fuckers.

walkonon Those 500K Bitcoins that caused the flash crash weren't real

True, but I think this has been fixed, assuming their new site is live:

"The new Mt. Gox site features SHA-512 multi-iteration, triple salted hashing and soon will have an option for users to enable a withdraw password that will be separate from their login passwords."

walkonon Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

When down voting, please explain.

If working as an unpaid intern is indeed horrible and so incredibly lacking in non-monetary value, then people will learn there is no reason to voluntarily engage (or continue) in such a relationship.

walkonon Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

I'm confused. Who forces people to work for free?

walkonon [dead]

At least a few of these are CS classics. Do you actually have something against these books (e.g. Donald Knuth), or are you just annoyed with the affiliate links?

walkonon GitHub for Mac

Git is tracking the changes and history, not GitHub.

walkonon How Hackers Stole 200,000 Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL

I think PCI is more of a reactive legal tool than it is an effective, proactive way to prevent security breaches. In theory it should catch security vulnerabilities, but I don't know how thorough the compliance checks really are...

Yeah, Citi's greater punishment will likely be in the form of a weakened reputation then it will be in actual damages paid.

walkonon How Hackers Stole 200,000 Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL

Has it been determined that Citi will not face repercussions for this incident? I think part of the reason PCI DSS was created (by the payment processors MasterCard, Visa, Amex, etc) was to allow for more legal leverage against the banks when determining who has to pay damages in scenarios such as this.

walkonon My Email Canary

The problem is, once such an online service is well known, the hackers could just blacklist the host name(s) to the service so no alerting messages are sent. I think this is something that would have to live on the actual Gmail servers so it is not detectable from the client-side.