Hacker News Reader

wmton Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

What we found was that a number of failed jobs were being kept by the system, which meant that these were taking up a ton of space that they shouldn’t have been.

To fix the issue, we put together a script to delete the failed items, since any retries to send them didn’t appear to work.

At this point my head was screaming "NOOOOooooo!" and made me feel bad for author for the whatever disaster would soon follow.

Not only was the problem not fixed, it wasn't even understood. Hiding the problem by fixing its symptoms will rarely get you far. I don’t think I'm even Captain Hindsighting here, as I've learned over and over that not understanding the root cause of any issue means you will be screwed by the issue sooner or later, and it likely will not be pretty.

Sure, sometimes you don't have the time to get to bottom of an issue, but even then you cannot pretend that it's fixed. It'll be back with a vengeance.

wmton Tim Cook Speaks Up

I don't see anything about any Gods hating gays. Levictus compares men having sex with other men being as big of a sin as cursing your parents or having sex with a woman during her periods, and later in Sodom God decides to murder a town for their lack of charity.

I guess you could reach and say that God hates sinners and homosexuals are committing a sin, but that's pretty silly at least in Christianity everyone is a sinner.

wmton Windows 10 will come with a command-line package manager

Good job at not reading the article! Had you read it, you would've learned that the commands work like this:

    Find-Package Firefox
    Install-Package Firefox

I admit it's not as easy as on e.g. Debian:

    sudo apt-get remove iceweasel
    sudo echo deb http://packages.linuxmint.com debian import >>/etc/apt/sources.list
    sudo gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 3EE67F3D0FF405B2
    sudo gpg --export 3EE67F3D0FF405B2 > 3EE67F3D0FF405B2.gpg
    sudo apt-key add ./3EE67F3D0FF405B2.gpg
    sudo rm ./3EE67F3D0FF405B2.gpg
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install firefox

wmton Joker – Torrents to streamable video

Apparently they are making (or made already?) it easier to sue people in Turkey for p2p copyright infringement. However, the fact that put.io is still up tells a lot about how effectively those laws are enacted.

http://adventuresinankara.com/2012/07/30/adapt-or-die-guest-...

wmton Joker – Torrents to streamable video

I would've disagreed with your assessment, but then the guy came out with his (probably) own name and picture @ https://twitter.com/ufukaltinok

wmton Joker – Torrents to streamable video

The guy sure likes superonlinealmalimiyim.com

wmton Joker – Torrents to streamable video

What's the catch? I have a few trust issues when someone wants to pay his own money to give me access to mostly illegal content.

Somebody just spent time making a torrent streaming service, and is now paying for the bandwidth it takes to download that torrent content AND to upload it to your browser. What I could quickly see about the service is that the facebook "app" of it doesn't have too many users[1], dyn.com[2] handles the site DNS (not free) and redstation.com[3] hosts the service (not free).

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&p...

[2] http://who.is/whois/joker.org

[3] http://tools.pingdom.com/ping/?target=149.3.133.138&o=1

wmton Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

The problem is not the engagement as much as trying to sit and pay attention for 90 minutes. You will way better results by having a 5-15 minute break every 45 minutes.

wmton How a lawyer, mechanic, and engineer blew open an auto scandal

The problem is not hierarchies as such, but in failing to recognize the hierarchy as an expert organization where the experts are the masters of their expertise. Managers are project managers who have the responsibility to direct their experts to solve the issues to make the project succeed. It's therefore the managers job to have a best overall understanding of the project, and incidentally it's the job of the experts to inform the manager of any serious issues they cannot solve alone, and possible solutions for the problem if possible.

Expert organisations are not hypothetical, and actually have been present in all hitech companies I've worked for. Then again it could be a cultural difference, as I'm working in Finland where social equality is a big thing, and calling your manager, director or CEO with honorifics like "mister" would be considered awkward or almost inappropriate.

wmton After 15 years as shareware, Ad Muncher is now completely free

There are a few clues in the text like "I've made a net loss running you for the last two years" and "At some point in the future, I may need to offer complimentary software products to Ad Muncher user" hinting that he thinks that bulding a bigger userbase by being free and then bundling ads into it would make more money, as paid users were no longer paying the bills.

wmton Dropbox.com hacked?

He warned about the NSA, who just have a court ordered direct access to all dropbox files instead of using something as mundane as logins.

wmton Dropbox.com hacked?

By tricking people with a droqbox.com, dropbox.com.77130.cn, "increase your dropbox size" or something similar. At least that would way easier than actually hacking dropbox.

wmton Fun with Shellshock

Note that it disabled the exploit instead of fixing it, which still is a remarkable feat. I wonder if that could be exploited e.g. by exposing an light exploit from security feature you trick the software to disable a security feature that was stopping a more dangerous exploit, a la The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds.

wmton The Toughest Adversity I've Ever Faced

It's very typical for people in demanding positions to learn that even really good ideas are quite common and not even that valuable. Good execution of good ideas is however extremely rare and is also extremely valuable.

The above recommendation is really really good. Anyone can start ambitious projects but only a rare few actually can finish them.

wmton GitHub Student Developer Pack

While the value here is nice, I maybe would not suggest investing too much of your time on learning proprietary temporarily free developer tools. There are great open source tools for many developer tasks that are not just good options, but can even be industry standards.

wmton Two birds and a liar’s game

Damn, that was complex. Would a simpler "What would be the wrong answer to 'which door goes to hell?'" solve it?

wmton Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn

Rising tuition fees have gone hand in hand with a declining number of lower income students, so can be said as a fact that lower tuition fees increase the number of students from poorer families. A quick googling found this Education Dept publication noticing the trend http://www.studyinfinland.fi/tuition_and_scholarships/tuitio..., but I imagine more data can be found by looking at countries where tuition fees have risen faster than the income levels, like in Canada or USA.

wmton Winning A/B results were not translating into improved user acquisition

"Honestly, in a website A/B test, all I really am concerned about is whether my new page is better than the old page. A one-tailed test tells you that."

No, it's the other way around. One tailed test is only usable for testing if the new design worse than the old one, because it being better than the old one does not matter as long it's not worse. If you are testing that is the new design better, you definitely need to test both tails or else you may likely switch to a worse design than the old one.

wmton Dear Rupert

That was brutal. Demolished pretty much all of the serious accusations in the original letter with facts that could not be true if the accusations would be solid.

It was also wonderfully mean to ignore the News Corp CEO who signed the letter and reply to Rupert instead, implying quite a lot about the role of the current CEO.

wmton Rethinking the origins of the universe

The Quora reply was very illuminating: the astrophysicist mentions that Einstein and Eddington already suggested the same solution as Mitra did long before him, but most people today don't think it's the correct one. I guess Einstein also lacked the CAMBRIDGE AFFILIATION to get any recognition for that solution.

wmton Email IP Leak Test

Not word for word! Unlike your website, the carbon copied site is extremely careful not to reveal anything about the people behind.

wmton Email IP Leak Test

Oh no, not the Privacy Policy!

Seriously though, the presence of a privacy policy gives little comfort when both the website and the Privacy Policy are very careful not to identify who is hosting that domain with Godaddy.

wmton Faced with change, an all-female indie dev team evolves to a higher form (2013)

Are you sure you're on the right forum? The kind of hateful comments your every comment appears to be are not needed here.

wmton Secrets of amazing teachers: What both sides of the education debate get wrong

Accountability is irrational if you are just enacting something someone told you to do, and autonomy with no feedback leads to random results.

The thing that teachers and schools need is more responsibility, more power to plan and decide how they teach, but still keeping an eye on the results.

The mentality of punishing schools with low scores will however not help. Beating the weak rarely makes them stronger. Give more resources and guidance for schools that are lacking behind, and award more autonomy for schools that work properly.

wmton How casinos get you to spend more money

Strange that adding smaller wins to slots has only just arrived, as such more complex betting systems have been proven to make playing feel more rewarding for decades.

E.g. in Finland all supermarkets and roadside cafes have slot machines, and complex betting tactics described in the article have been there at least from the 1990s. They do differ a bit from Vegas slots, as the profits go to charity and the jackpots are ~50€, but still they are carefully designed to maximise the profits on the long run.

wmton Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

I did not switch to Chrome a few years back because it was better, but for because Firefox was worse. If both would've worked fine I of course would've not changed.

I don't know about today, but a few years back starting up Firefox was painfully slow, and when an update arrived it would first nag you about it and then during restart started checking for extension compatibilies. Even using felt sluggish and was temporarily fixed by running the sqlite vacuum in it db.

Chrome for whatever reason had none these issues, and it felt even slightly nicer to use, with usability enhancements all around like more fluid animations in tab moving, and all settings on a nicely laid out web view instead of a tiny modeless window with 10 tabs.

I really hope Firefox can not just catch up, but go past Chrome. Unfortunately the last time I tried it not too long ago, it didn't start but instead wanted to show that it is checking for extension compatibilies. Didn't exactly fill me with excitement.

wmton Gamma FinFisher hacked: 40 GB of internal documents and source code published

So what OS should you use? I imagine Linux and OSX are also out of the question as they are also supported by the FinFisher.

wmton iOS first – a flawed strategy that startups have used for years

I'd really want this article to be true and that developing for Android first would be an equally good strategy. However, the claim that IOS-first is irrational is just dishonest. While Android total money spent in apps is gaining, iOS has been a solid leader for its entire history. Every decision to go for Apple first has been a correct one.

This is perfectly summed up by the first comment on the page: "All I know is that my $3.99 iOS app outsells my $3.99 Android app 5-10:1"

wmton Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

Colorado has zero poverty?

wmton 7 Reasons our app costs $99.99

They most definitely have the right reasons for why someone should pay what they're asking. The reason #1, "we need to make a profit", is the biggest reason for the price. In reason #4 they clarify that reason by having tested that out of $10, $20 and $100 prices they made the biggest profit with the highest price.

The flimflam about updating the app just means that they don't wish to fire everyone now that they have a selling app, but instead will keep developing it with the hopes that it would sell even better.