skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do security questions on a user account actually add security?
I'm not a security expert, but I just can't see how adding security questions to an online account on top of a password is anything but a nuisance that just weakens security. Especially when most answers to these questions are just names or single words that are easily researchable online. Why is there so much expert advice on strong passwords, yet the industry doesn't condemn security questions? What am I missing? Am I just wrong here, or should there be a clear message to just get rid of them? I hate it when sites make me add security questions to my account; isn't it so much better to just let me reset a forgotten password through my email?</rant>
It's not supported natively in mojombo's Jekyll but I have seen one fork with such a feature. It's on my to-checkout list.
I haven't looked closely at this site, but it seems like it is almost certain to devolve into a textbook example of adverse selection.

If you have a good strategy, you won't rent it out, you'll trade it. Why risk others frontrunning you? Of course, you might post a historically good strategy and front run it. Or they might just be risky strategies, which look good for a short time (encouraging people to rent them), but which carry catastrophic risks the creator doesn't want to take on.

I can't see a single reason why someone would post a good strategy here.
I wondered about this exact same thing and wrote in length about it this morning: http://robisit.com/mahalo-version-4/

"If you remove the video revenue sharing scheme from Mahalo 4, you’re left with a ballooning group of in-house staff members that are creating content. Mahalo version 1 started exactly the same way. Large groups of people were hired in-house to generate written articles and cull popular hyperlinks. Shortly thereafter, Mahalo 2 relied on offshore outsourcing and then inexpensive remote American labor to mill content.

When thought of in this light with a view of Mahalo’s history, it starts to become clear that Mahalo 4 is an iteration that has already occurred. Mahalo is iterating over itself. Partly due to the fact that they have enough money to do so, partly because the revolving door of staff members hasn’t experienced previous iterations and partly because online video is simply making money for content companies at the moment."
.com is a generic TLD though (originally commercial now open to anyone) not anything to do with a Geographic Area. The intention was for .US to be the USA's TLD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us
I'm going to point people to this article next time some code inexplicably starts working.
Thank you, this was a very convincing statement on a subject that I usually cannot find a solid answer to. I have queried quite a few designers on Comic Sans as to why they hated it. Most of the time the answer is "Cause it sucks". Sometimes the answer is "because it is used everywhere". However, in terms of the web, there are a couple of surveys showing the usage of Comic Sans is pretty far down the list. Why don't design schools teach designers how to articulate why something is bad? Even if the answer is "because it evokes a negative emotional response" should be followed up with some description of the kind of emotion it invokes and hard data.
Make lessons 1-10 free (20-30mins each), charge for lessons 11 onwards. Most people that make it to lesson 11 would be willing to pay going forward, after seeing the quality of lessons 1-10.
Ask HN: Paypal vs. Google Checkout vs. Amazon FPS vs. other
I'm looking for payment processor for subscriptions. Does anyone have any experience with these services?
It seems like all these services have similar offering, but devil is in details. So I would like to hear some opinions and experinece.
If this pans out, then what I've been telling people for the last few years is true - we've hit the point in time when all the failed computing and internet ideas of the mid-late 90s can work out. Voice apps, PDAs, and now internet groceries?
Finally the age-old question of "Where's the beef?" has been answered: in two other tacos.
Proper Linux driver support for 3D acceleration, video games, and multi-monitor setups?
Neat: "PS - There's a secret message embedded within the SES "hero graphic" on the AWS home page! Can you figure out what it says?"

Link to the image: http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/ses_hero_lg.png
Google Grabs Patent for Web-Based Translation
They should at the very least generate a new pin when it needs to be sent in the post though? Don't just send out the old one. I bet loads of people reuse them across cards. Just don't do it. Never send out credentials that aren't freshly generated.
Where else would you like them to send it?
You are a cynical one pclark!

keep in mind that Flickr, Groupon, Nintendo and Nokia are all pivots. Your first idea is rarely your best, and pivoting is what great entrepreneurs do while B-level entrepreneurs run their companies into the ground.

Now, factually you're a little off... so please let me get you up to speed:

1. We've been doing articles and Q&A for 3 and 2 years--so that's not being scrapped.
2. A year ago we stopped pursuing human-powered search since it wasn't growing
3. We examined what was working and it was helping people learn--so we branded the company today "learn anything." This is a great big mission and it will make us a top 50 site in the next 2-3 years.

We currently have 105 team members and are adding 100--and we hit profitability in 2010. We are the 160th largest site in the United States not counting our YouTube traffic (1M+ views per day). If you added that together we would be top 100 today in fact.

In fact, I just left a meeting with one of our investors and they are thrilled with the fact that they invested in Mahalo and that we tried hard to make human-powered search work. They love the fact that we iterated on our idea. So much so they asked if we would take MORE of their money.

You must be a young entrepreneur, because success in life is not about confidence--it's about humility and the ability to try things.

Good luck to you!
How Bob Lutz made four auto journalists his "Secret Weapons" at GM
Hah, yes, the first thing I thought of was the Daemon was asking me to join in.
Slightly OT, but I use and love Notifo. After recently getting an Android phone I've discovered that Android's notification mechanism absolutely destroys the minimalistic implementation on iOS.
This is a great example of how to spread information. No video, no live chat, just clear text and screen caps so everything is quick to sift through and obvious.
Wow this is a very thorough post. Kudos to Paul for writing this.

Funny enough, I was just looking into moving from WordPress to Jekyll myself. Blogs really should be just static files.
That would be fine if activation required calling that number and providing a token that wasn't transmitted via the same channel as the card. One way to activate though is by simply using the ATM and entering your PIN... not good.
Alright, based on your previous karma, I am willing to try this out. My $5 is yours :)
You’re working hard, but are you working on the hard things?
That might make it a viable single-identity system. As long as you only want U.S. users.
Apple already approving apps with iOS 4.3 specific features
I think that part of Comic Sans appeal to those who use it the fact that it offends "elitist" graphics designers. It is the Sarah Palin of fonts.
In a way I can see how you got there, but I still think you may have copyright issues: Say, for example, there's a Web site that likes an article another Web site has published. So that first site grabs the entire article, post it on their Website without permission, and then give source and link information back --- most publishers are going to consider that a copyright violation. Again, would be different if not the entire article -- few paragraphs and a link would be OK, but with entire article and no previous permission, probable copyright violation (at least enough to request it be taken down).

I know law changes/not everyone sees it the same/different courts rule differently, but if one accepts that taking an article in full and republishing on another site (even if sourced/linked back) without permission is a copyright violation, I'm not sure that you doing the same thing (and on a wider scale) isn't also a copyright violation, even if the final article is presented on a different medium.

I'm so very much not a lawyer (pretty obviously), just someone with a publishing background, but it might be worth you talking with a copyright lawyer just to make sure you're on solid ground before you launch it with the content/way you're currently planning.
It is quite sustainable. These APIs are central to the business models of the companies and they should generally scale up as needed. For example, SeatGeek already powers WSJ and Yahoo Sports.
rewrite is an overarching daunting task. It's so much better to break rewrites into multiple steps. I went through several major rewrites with various startups so I think it works, but take it with grains of salt:

1. Throw away garbage first. Most companies including startups accumulate garbage code fairly quick. By just throwing away old ideas that didn't work, you have achieve a lot of gains already. There are many benefits doing this alone: tests run faster, compile time reduces, awk/grep became faster, etc. As startup founders/CTO, you can even held garbage throwing party once ever few months. Every programmer I know loves throwing away garbage code.

2. Ask stakeholders what are the primary use cases. Don't write a single line before doing this because it will be wrong, again.

3. When new technology is involved, perform load tests. Even the most trivial load tests would do. Doing this will inform you basic knowledge on how robust the tools are.

4. Rewrite 1 thing at a time and run tests in between so that your confidence stays high.
I was working at E.piphany ( Steve Blank was one of the founder). I remember going through three rounds of layoffs in three months in the professional services organization, which I was part of. Good old days :)
I understand that static pages are better but is there anything wrong with using Wordpress? You didn't really explain other than wanting to learn a new tool, why leave Wordpress? I run a bunch of sites on Wordpress and you've got me worried now. What am I missing out there?
Ok, it's impossible. Now tell me how you're going to do it anyway and laugh all the way to the bank.

The fact that you can conceive of it means that it likely isn't impossible, merely very difficult and possibly non-obvious. But that's how pretty much every real success story starts. You really may be on to something here.
Ha, looks neat! And with a little hacking it might work in other browsers as well. Isn't the shadow black though? It would mean that in my case it needs to be dynamically adjusted to the font color chosen by the user (probably by generating a fresh css snippet and applying it to the page). I'll definitely give it a try later -- these jagged edges in Windows made me cringe. :) Thanks a lot!
The spamming claim on HN is one done by a secret kabbel of SEO's who I've pissed off over the years.

These guys basically obsesses over everything I do and follow me around the social web. They vote my stuff down, flame me and generally try to bust my chops.

They are known as "jayters" because they hate on Jason. I love my jayters, because they make me appreciate how lucky I've been in this life. They have every reason to hate on me: I drive a tesla, I have not one but TWO bulldogs and I get more press they anyone deserves.

Hate on!!
Most comics are still distributed that way as well.
Yes I was aware of that.
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
I am not saying that Less Accounting sucks but...
> What I think needs to be done is standardize an api for the sites like twitter, facebook, Google and who-knows-what-in-the-future to use in providing accessing to user information to developers

It is my understanding that that's pretty much exactly what OpenID is.
... This is the kind of insight talent masters drive for, and knowing their people's core talents, they then search for jobs that are the right fit, creating a job if they have to
That could really use an "allegedly" in there somewhere.
I've never read the book in my life, and 2001 is one of my favorite films, even if it confused me at first.

Kubrick is considered a great director because he forces the audience to confront film as something other, and perhaps more, than simply a narrative vehicle. A Kubrick film is a visual experience, more like a photograph or a painting than a novel, and almost any given still frame from 2001 is beautiful enough to frame it and put it on your wall. (It seems important here to note that Kubrick started as a photographer before becoming a filmmaker.) In most of his films, but especially 2001, Kubrick composes these striking images together with just enough of a narrative to form an emotional impression on the audience without making it too overly familiar.

Consider some of the themes of 2001. Do you really think it makes sense to convey those ideas in a way that isn't somewhat opaque? How do you convey the mystery and terror of genuinely mysterious and terrifying themes by turning them into commonplace intellectual concepts and making the audience fully comfortable with them?

2001 conveys more than you can simply put into words. That's why it's a film, not a novel. The novel offers a more literal interpretation of the events depicted, but I think Clarke himself would be the first to tell you they are separate works of art and should be evaluated as such.
Well, we never made low-quality content like Demand Media, but you are right that making high-quality videos with EXPERTS in them keeps us out of trouble with search engines.

Google will solve the ehow/demand media problem this year--or consumers will by blocking specific sites.

When that happens Mahalo's traffic should actually go up, because there won't be people with 11-year old spamming domains standing between us and teh top 10 results!

good observation!
>Sorry, but this is fluff. There are many companies that make specialist gaming PCs, and Alienware aren't number one. Don't get me wrong, they're good (and the vast majority of pre-made "gaming" PCs I've seen were absolutely terrible), but they're no Scan for example.

If you got the idea from my post that Alienware are the best manufactures of 'gaming pc', then I am sorry. All I was claiming is that their 'attitude' 'in building' the best pc's in the world.
And for the sake of debate, name any other company that is as consistent as alienware in offering similar products across a wide spectrum. Please don't say my 'backyard tony' builds a better one than them. One company that is accessible to all kind of people.
It doesn't matter when yahoo, google, aol and more offer openid, it's just a click on a button, what could be easier than that? I agree that entering a whole URL is horrible though but that's not how I use openid, I just click on the google button and that's it, just like facebook or twitter connect.
I skimmed the email. I found one of the lines interesting. I kept reading. It made me smile. Who would've thunk that so many people can get upset about a little fun in their inbox.

I opt-in on whimsical, fun email. "Order Shipped" => Boring.
FACT CHECK!!!
FACT CHECK!!!
FACT CHECK!!!

BTW: The page you are looking at -- http://www.mahalo.com/search/?q=fraction -- is a page we haven't built yet.

When we don't have a page built we show you Google/Bing search results.

These pages are NOT indexed in Google.

So, they can't be google spam. :-)
Go to themeforest.net buy theme, retheme website, add more copy.
Wonderful news!

I may be pointing out the obvious here, but judging by this move and the turning of the options page into a browser page[1], it seems that they want as much similarity between Chrome-OS and Chrome-the-Browser as possible.

Which is certainly great for both Developers and also Users who want consistency (read: all of them).

[1] For those not using Chrome dev version, the first screenshot on the page, Chrome's options, doesn't look like that anymore, instead its the in-browser page chrome://settings/, like Chrome-OS has.
As a (windows) mouse user, having the tab tear off and sit right where I expect it to, directly underneath the cursor where I point it to, is desired behaviour.
Intel Signs Will.i.am as Director of Creative Innovation
If on Ubuntu 10.04 x86:

Install via update script will fail. Manually install one deb package than re-run update script which fixes the problem.
O'Reilly Radar Team: Books we're recommending
It's a tax paid to Microsoft. It's a matter of principle.
Agree. I thought the exact same thing when I read the article. And then proceeded to be voted down in the comments for posting about it. It's a conspiracy! :)
I live in a country (Canada) that falls under the article's counterexamples. We have four parties in Parliament. None of them can break out of the 30s, currently, in terms of their polling numbers. In addition, no party has actually won a majority in 6 or 7 years.
Good to know. What are your plans for crawling in the future? Do you think that you will eventually move to crawling as a primary source of result data, and if so, is that time drawing near or do you plan on continuing along the current path for some time?
First release of LibreOffice arrives with improvements over OOo
So you would say "Startup Suicide -- Don't rewrite your code too late"
My last laptop was from Sager, which is rebranded Clevo. http://system76.com also sells them with Ubuntu pre-loaded. They're absolutely fantastic machines.
Our videos cost hundreds of dollars to make, are hosted by experts, shot in 1080p HD in a studio, have perfect audio and are on super clean white backgrounds (typically).

They are 10-50x better than most of the videos on YT in terms of quality and production value.

Most videos on YT don't have an expert and are shot on flipcams or iPhones with an open microphone, no lighting and background noise.

Our goal is to make HIGH-QUALITY videos that help people learn. If we do that we will be one of the top 25 sites in the US..... inside of three years.
Worst lawsuit of 2010
The only ultimate, secure, technically valid solution to single sign-on is 2-way SSL.

Unfortunately, for this to work, several things need to happen:

1) Users need to learn what a private key is.

2) Browsers need to provide flexible, intuitive, easy-to-use user key support that's not tucked away in 3 levels of dialogs/tabs.

3) We need good key-management tools so I can log on to sites from internet cafes, etc (perhaps a session-lived key cache in the browser, with support for syncing it remotely?)
I still like OpenID for smallish projects and blog commenting. While people are ok with creating a username and password for a 37signals product, I doubt they're interested in creating one for something that tell my friends on facebook and twitter what my favorite color is.
Re: Stored hashes - they can be stored encrypted while the company can still retain the ability to decrypt them. This is how you store credit card numbers.

They may have generated a new PIN and it just happened to be his old one? Could be.

Do they send it registered mail? What would happen if someoene did get to your mail before you - could they use the card? what would the bank do when informed of it?

Whwther or not it's bad for you, the consumer, depends on all these things.
https://github.com/kanru/notmuch

This has thread views. It works very well. If you look at the headers of an email you can see:

In-Reply-To:

and

References

I'm not sure that this is what it is using, but it is a possibility.
Point taken, we are going to get a copy writer to go over the site as soon as possible.
Long stacktraces for V8 (Chrome and Node.js) implemented in user-land JavaScript
Thank you for actually listening. :-)

I would like to offer you a complimentary ticket to the LAUNCH Conference as a thank you. Feb. 23/24th in San Francisco. Ping me at jason@launch.is and i will arrange.
Ugh. The length of that article (and the reliance on Disqus for comments) is why I'm still using WordPress.

I'd use a hosted service, but I haven't found one that can properly import my posts and comments. Is there such a thing? I know Posterous is close, but I don't think they import comments.

I still love Mint, too. I wish someone would build a hosted version of something just like it. If you're thinking the same thing and want to team up, drop me a line ;)
lame.

cynical.
hopefully, this improves the deliverability of email that originates within amazon's environment. the service can be easy, but if the messages aren't getting through, then there is no point and sendgrid and others will continue to survive.
Paste this into the Firebug/Webkit console:

jQuery("code").css({"background-color":"#333", "color":"#fff"});
Out of curiosity, has anyone used, or know someone who uses http://stocktwits.com/ to inform their trading decisions - and had a positive outcome? I haven't, I'm just curious.
Random Seeds, Coded Hints, and Quintillions
Lame.

Slander.

Please read HN community standards.
I don’t understand why you would want that. What’s the use case? Don’t you nearly always want all of the browser window to be on the screen? You can still drag the titlebar if you want to drag the window off the screen but when do you actually need that? I can’t think of any scenario.

Meanwhile, positioning windows with the flick of my finger instead of bringing my mouse painstakingly in the right position seems just so preferable, I don’t even understand how Chrome’s behavior could ever be preferable. It’s not so bad on Windows because there are drag areas on the left and right of the screen to quickly allow you to create two windows next to each other but this functionality doesn’t exist on the Mac. (It also seems like a lame workaround.)

(Safari creates a little proxy image of the browser tab when you tear it off – maybe 200 pixels or so wide – with your mouse centered in the middle of it. If the newly spawned window doesn’t move off the screen the new window will spawn centered on your pointer, this is the expected behavior given the visual representation. All is nicely and logically animated. Chrome would obviously also have to change the way they visually represent torn off tabs if they want to implement this behavioral change though as to not confuse users.

Here is how this looks – imagine a mouse pointer in the middle of the little proxy window, it will be spawned all the way up to the right edge as soon as I release the mouse button: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/tabs.png)
We've gotten rid of ours and replaced it with a token/reset system (online) and human verification when the online methods can't be validated. We have 80+ years of customers, and many will never be comfortable with online verification.

One of the arguments used against keeping 'security' questions was one of asking if the fields had any business or even marketing purpose, if not security. We all know how easy it is to find out someone's mother's maiden name or high school, and letting someone set their own questions and answers isn't much better. "Do we need to keep a database of 900,000 people's favorite color to be more secure?" was a good thought to start the meme.

The security questions were doing us no favours and helped bring our 43-field registration system down to three fields (email, password, membership number). Users are then sent a token via the email, and don't exist in the online system until the token is redeemed. Resets work the same way, disallowing access to the site until the reset token is used, with Devise (Rails).