skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do users log in to your site?
Hey HN, I'm working on a startup that's trying to make logging in easier and more secure. If you have a second, I'd really appreciate some quick answers to any of these questions.

What options do you currently have for user log in? How did you choose them?

Which user login option is most effective? Why?

How much money do you spend on security and keeping your users safe? Where does that money go?

What part of the login process needs the most improvement?

Describe the ideal login for your website? How much would you pay for it?

Post in the comments or email me at jpollak92-at-gmail.com. Thank you so much!
Still waiting for a joke on Firefox's version number.
Unpigmented "paint" is not white, it is usually* clear-ish. Titanium dioxide is the usual white pigment.

On the topic of why iron oxide pigments are used rather than keeping paint clear: they protect the surface from UV light.

* There are multitudes of paint bases, all the ones I can recollect are transparent with a yellow/brown tinge. One exception is acrylic emulsion paint base, which looks white but dries clear, unless a pigment is added.
This seems interesting.

The central question in my mind is about security of my data. E.g. from time to time I have to send legal documents or tax returns or w/e to some US address - even though I don't live up there.

What type of security is in place to make sure my documents are not abused?

Also...can I get a return receipt that can be tracked - so I can make sure that it is delivered on-time?
If you are the company, but the company is not you (assuming other employees and shareholders), but the company is a person itself, does this mean that you and the company are conjoined siblings?
Issues always happen. It is how they are handled that makes the difference. I've not paid close attention to Github but it appears they react responsibly and quickly.

With my issue it seemed like Bitbucket was a one man shop and I suspect that if I had thrown a fit things would have happened quickly. Jesper was attending pycon and I was fine with addressing it after that, but then it was not promptly attended to afterwards. I have no records of how long it took to fix but it was at least several weeks and may have been months. He did dispute "easily guessable". (The Bitbucket service at the time was also overwhelmed with languishing tickets.)

In my own view, private data being accessible no matter how improbable is always an immediate issue. Issues that initially seem improbable get turned into the probable very quickly by the bad guys who are far more imaginative.

But as I said this was late in 2010. I have no idea if the culture of Bitbucket has changed since then or is better.
I'm a developer. I do IT stuff for servers. I can't even get the somewhat technical in their own field non-developers in my office to try linux.

No way in hell do I want to support the desktop users of my school district.

(for reference, I've taught an intro cs/programming class there as a volunteer (using open source software, yay!), and have some idea of what their systems are and what kind of environment they're up against.)
proxmox.com has an open source mail server/gateway package.
You can make your tabs vertical in Opera without even having to install an extension, though they don't indent like they do in TreeStyleTabs.
You are assuming tabs are a stack. They aren't.
> Null references do make reading code more complex for the user since every function call must be prefaced with a null check.

Well, the Go code I see doesn't look like this, so that can't be right.
Fellow Dallasite here.

The problem is that DMN doesn't cover/isn't aware of the scene. I think they might do one piece on TWC once every other year as a 'human interest' story rather than 'hey, look at all this cool shit happening in our front yard!' story.
Meh...I have to see him doing something that Apple isn't - in a unique way...before I believe he can even look at S. Job's shoes.

He claims to be looking at TV - if they release a TV BEFORE Apple, that is as good as Apple's version (or even better) then I will stop being skeptical.

Until then, chalk me up as one of those "skeptical Westerners".
Sounds like the "gold rush" going on now for RSS readers, which are easy to build and which apparently people will pay for.
That and it being kind of centrally located. We've also got a lot of talent coming out of local-ish (UTD, UT, UNT, SMU) universities to fill the labor demand.
Or the Vertical Tabs add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
When I was in high school, I created an iOS app [1] for my school district and we made it open source (on the school district's GitHub [2] ) so other districts could benefit. Quotes from established ed-tech companies for a similar product were very expensive (especially compared to the cost of self-publishing). There certainly was interest from other districts to adopt it because they heard of the project and saw that it was open-source. The problem was getting someone to get them through the last 25% (customization, graphics, publishing, maintenance).

There's now a team of student developers at the school district who help keep the project going. I believe this makes it first the school district to create open source software in California.

[1] App (now also on Google Play): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8

[2] GitHub: https://github.com/FremontUnified/
I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons why not, but the above list of inefficiencies makes me start wondering about applying some code to one or more of the steps. How about starting to automate the 19 searches, and sell the service to the escribanos?

I visited Brazil in the early 90s and heard how everyone had to physically visit the bank and stand in a line to pay various utility bills. Mailing a check had not penetrated that economy at the time (too few people had checking accounts, whatever.) I wondered about a service that hired people to stand in line for them, but would have to overcome the problem of handling cash. Thankfully I have since heard that Brazil uses checks and other electronic payments methods now.
Well, if this is a free for all troll thread, then let me jump in.

The one on the right looks much better.
I lived down the street from this guy. Sharp as a tack.
In fairness to IBM, that's how enterprise sales usually works. Try finding independent production data on Oracle DB, for example.
AP Biology|Learn Genetics|USMLE Step 1
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The page title hasn't been shown on the window chrome for some time on Windows. I don't remember when it changed, but Firefox's UI hasn't changed for a little while.
AP Biology Review
AP Biology Review - Rapid Learning's 24-hour AP Biology Review offers image based studying at quick pace with rich-media exercises and issue drills.
How online learning is reinventing college
Police brutality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dksWliwLbvs

See how they point the tear gas gun directly at the cameraman. As a result of good marksmanship some people lost their eyes.

(NSFW) http://twitpic.com/cv3noq
The older I get, the more precious I find my free time and especially the work I get to put on personal projects. The last thing I want is the risk of that work being wiped out to a very easily avoided mundane issue such as a hard drive failure.
"by refusing requests"

So any system that can handle a split brain by crash failing successfully handles the situation?

The definitions here are so broad, and doesnt really match my experience, which is namely detecting a fully split brain is difficult for humans to do, harder for systems, and generally causes major problems.

Over-provisioning your system is one solution (eg dynamo with N=5), but that isnt acceptable to everyone...
The main Go authors come from a C background, and they despise C++ and Java. It seems that those languages are their main experience, and hence, Go does not look too different from them.

Go was originally presented as a "systems" programming language, and as a C++ replacement. It failed to attract C++ and other systems programmers, while attracting Python and Ruby coders. In retrospect, it seems to make sense.

I suspect the reason adding generics is hard in Go is a due to its weird composition system (they loathe object hierarchies too, remember?)

I concur, that we should be using and developing languages that have strong, expressive type systems. Furthermore, these languages are not "complex" to use or understand. I really admire what the Rust people are doing. They are writing a browser engine while developing the language, so they can continually evaluate their design choices, and if needed, change things as they go.

Go looks like it has been designed into a corner, but it is too late to back up now. The main driving force it has is that it has Google as a brand name behind it, unfortunately. Otherwise, it most likely wouldn't have gone anywhere.
I agree and open source is a completely different thing, in facts someone here even suggested that as a better option than working for a company for free.

But honestly, you are talking about a different thing.

If you can't afford to pay much of anything it's fine, as long as, for example, you give me a bunch of shares which would be worth nothing now, but something in case you become a billionaire.

But if you don't want to give anything back for my work, then I tend to think that you are trying to use my time.

Of course there may be a million exceptions to this, and there are. But in my experience those where the exceptions, and the usual case was just a way to get free labor.
Interview Programmers Like Your Pants Were On Fire
For some perspective on his background, Kingsoft makes the most popular Chinese/English dictionary software in China - a really great product, ahead of its time. Joyo is not unheard of either... so he hasn't exactly come out of nowhere. Furthermore, hassling someone because he uses tried and true marketing techniques or happens to wear a black shirt while presenting is a bit extreme.
I'm intrigued by Dr. Post's statement regarding electrostatic rather than electromagnetic force.

When I think of the "motor-generator" component of a flywheel-based energy storage device, coils and magnetic poles and all that electromagnetic to/from mechanical energy conversion stuff comes to my mind.

Electrostatic to/from mechanical energy conversion is known [1] [2], but not to my knowledge known for sustained high power and energy density appropriate for practical flywheel-based energy storage.

Intriguing to consider that Dr. Post's research might be going in such a non-traditional direction as electrostatic motor-generators. Perhaps there are some incremental efficiency gains or design simplifications to be had in using the flat plates, good insulation and high voltages characteristic of electrostatics instead of the big coils, cores and high currents of electromagnetics.

That said, there's no free lunch: No matter which electrical-to-mechanical-to-electrical energy conversion mode used may be, the energy stored remains rotational kinetic energy, thus limited by the same critical physical limitations (failure modes, maximal energy density, maximal power density) of traditional (electromagnetic, to date) flywheels.

--------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_motor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_generator
That would be why they're moving into actual gambling.
I had the opposite experience. I didn't mind Rally so much at all and hated JIRA.
Slot machines are a whole different beast. You are drawn in by the hope of winning big, and constantly fed small wins to convince you the big one is going to come up next. The lights and sounds are to distract you from the fact you are spending money.
Other form of energy? Like what?

Using electrostatics to pump up the flywheel is certainly interesting (I wish the article had even the slightest detail on it), but it still doesn't create energy. (Or collect energy from some untapped resource.)
The window titlebar doesn't make sense in every application. In this case, the title is already displayed on the tab. Showing it in two areas that are very close to each other is just redundant.

On Windows Vista, 7, and 8, explorer does not have a titlebar since the location breadcrumb trail makes more sense. On OS X, iTunes and the App Store also do not have titlebars, favoring other ways to show information that makes more sense in the context of the app.
Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?
Ten LINQ Myths
Previously, the titlebar would be shown if you enabled the menubar.
It depends on where you are.

In Europe free sodas are more rare.

In Italy, at least until I left, I had never heard of free sodas at work. But I heard of a lot of free work 'for experience'.
> Surely you mean the other way around?

Yes, I had it backwards. Corrected.

> Specifying whether a value is optional is less complex than the usual way of specifying whether a reference can be null — a documentation comment.

Is it? I agree there's definite virtue in having this property checked by the compiler, but I think you and I will have to disagree on the notion of complexity here.
While we've only written a MongoDB plugin so far, we have designed specifically to be work with any similar datastore. Contributions of other database plugins are welcome. The Mongo implementation is here for reference: https://github.com/share/livedb-mongo
Apparently actuarial tables put us at about 600 w/o aging (accidents, etc)
Ah, but unlike Chrome, in Firefox, you can configure your client to look exactly like it did before. I know this is extra work for you (and me), but I guess it might work better for the vast majority of users.
Have to agree that teachers are already overwhelmed, by and large; and that IT staff tends to be minimal, most certainly underpaid, and possibly under-qualified (in the case of teachers moonlighting as IT staff in their spare time).

Many people who don't use tech a lot (many teachers!) aren't really familiar with open source. They learn the big suites, because that's what they learned in school. It's a cycle.

On the optimistic side: MOOCs and the like may change things. Crafty, budget-conscious teachers who have a tech bent may change things (raspberry pi, anyone?). Clever startups may change things. I'm with Everlag: A billion dollars to the person to come up with something that helps them transition.
I think the core concept of Trac is great: automatic linking between issues, wiki pages and revisions. I think it suffers from being slow and difficult to install and configure, as well as using a very uncommon rendering engine that has really stymied theming.

I use JIRA at work, and honestly it's completely fine. It's a goddamn bug tracker. If I can make bugs and close them it's doing its job. Nobody in my organization reads email or tracks their stuff anyway. Sometimes what you have are organizational/management problems, and no amount of wizzy technology is going to fix that.
Story time. I teach high school math and science at a small school, where we have roughly 30 computers. About four years ago, our district had not funded any new hardware in 8 years. So when we started that school year, only 3 computers actually worked.

I had just started using linux that year, so I ran a class introducing students to linux. I taught students to install and maintain ubuntu systems, and suddenly all 30 computers were working again. Students maintained those 30 computers for the next year and a half. It was a bittersweet time when the district funded hardware again, and we had 30 new machines running Windows 7. I am fortunate to work in a district where I was supported in teaching students to dual-boot half of those machines.

It has been an overwhelmingly positive experience to bring linux into a school system. Many students are now running linux on their own machines. I still teach an intro to programming class that uses linux exclusively, and on any given day a small number of students are choosing linux for their everyday school work.

I also saw the politics of trying to make open source more mainstream in the district. When the district was deciding what machines and what software to purchase, we almost went with openoffice. I didn't take a side in the conversation, I just kept reiterating that both MSOffice and LibreOffice work as long as everyone in the district is using the same software. The real friction comes when people are trying to share formatted documents between systems. The district was just about to go with openoffice, but for no clear reason at the last minute the superintendent made a unilateral decision to go with MSOffice. I think it was easier to appease the few loud MSOffice supporters, knowing everyone else would move on, than go with something new and risk having made the "wrong" decision.

I've been getting more into programming, including trips to PyCon last year and this year. The more involved I get in the professional programming community, the more I see how much the open source world has to offer the education world. The obvious benefit is open software. There is a tremendous need for high-quality open software to make educational work more efficient. My favorite example is that most teachers still write their lesson plans in Word, which is like programmers working in an old version of Notepad. Programmers have had vim and emacs for 40 years, but teachers still don't have a dedicated curriculum planning tool.

I love to talk about this stuff, so feel free to get in touch through my profile.
First point one sees on the page is so India „Genuine Products“ :)
It's not a GTK issue.
The beauty of Option types is that they are mostly used as return types. Most function arguments are non-nullable pointers or references; only ones that might be None are passed as options. This makes reasoning about code much easier. I just look at the function signature, and I know the types of arguments it expects. I also don't have to litter the beginning of each function call with if !null checks to each reference parameter.

> They must also perform checks when converting values from optional to non-optional types.

There are multiple ways to manipulate option type variables. The following comment from a Redditor sums it up very nicely:

"What is interesting is that (coming from scala and haskell) you almost never pattern-match on option types. The power of option, imho, is that you don't have to care whether it is Some or None, you write the same code regardless. If you are pattern-matching the whole time, you haven't gained all that much over checking for nil/null.

Option is a container, and we can use my_var.chain(...) and my_var.map(...) to update the things in the container. And the joy of it is that these methods will automatically do the right thing, with repect to Some/None, so you can string a bunch of these calls together, and if my_var is Some(...) is will apply all of the specified functions. If it is None, it will remain None."

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ewrhz/pattern_matchin...
95 theses, huh? Like Martin Luther?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninety-Five_Theses
There is something called Gharpay.in

It looks promising.
The biggest problem is they don't store enough energy. Or in other words, they don't store enough per how much they cost.

The energy capacity goes up linearly by mass, but goes up by the speed squared. So all the effort has gone toward increasing the speed.

But the trouble is that the force on the flywheel also goes up by the speed squared. The only materials strong enough are wound carbon fibers - and they are very very costly.

If you increase the mass instead you need very very large and strong bearings, and they tend to fail. For high speed, low weight, you barely need any bearing at all - magnetic bearings are preferred if you can manage it.
This is true. Although fusion into elements heavier than iron happens both during the last stages of a star's life and during the supernova itself, the last stages of the star's life last only a few hours anyway. At that point it really doesn't make too much sense to talk of a "star" since it's no longer in anything resembling equilibrium. It's more of an "event." Heavy elements fused deep in the star's core are likely to remain there during core collapse, and heavy elements fused in the shells or in the envelope during the explosion are likely to escape.
Give it a coupe of years and won't people be commenting on how company x makes more revenue than all of Supercell with 2 games?

For these big social gaming companies that got to where they were because of hits, the real challenge is in following up and keeping the growth going.
One issue with Zynga that I haven't seen explored enough is that the cost of making a Zynga Facebook game has increased dramatically, while the potential revenue from the same Facebook game has not. Zynga tried to apply their own version of AAA quality to games like CastleVille, and the result was that they spent a ton of money and still didn't make as much as they did with FarmVille (a game which took six weeks to create). Same problem with Mafia Wars 2 and FarmVille 2.

None of the surprisingly profitable breakout games mentioned here have been particularly expensive to make - Kixeye's three released games were supposedly built with very small teams, same with Supercells' enormously successful Clash of Clans and Hay Day.

Zynga is still making money. Lots of it. They just got too big too fast and had unrealistic expectations of their market's ability to sustain their games. Granted, user acquisition costs are much higher than they were before, partially as a result of Facebook making their viral channels more difficult to use... but IMO Zynga would have had these problems regardless.
I know most people hate IE, but I like IE's UI.
It's not just the banks. The money that banks lend isn't their own, its investors. Sure they get a cut through interest rate differentials and origination fees, but most mortgages get purchased by investors.
Off topic, but I've been making that argument for years. I actually was more concerned that language would stop evolving to accommodate spell checking. I'm glad to see that text messaging has proven me wrong, but in many ways I'm more concerned about what the next generation will consider to be "language."
"Independent of his age, he has ideas coming out of his mind minute-by-minute," Yamamoto says. "He's so full of energy from all these ideas he has over the weekend, that every Monday morning he can't wait to call me and talk to me about them."

Sounds like a guy I'd like to know. Also loved the quote about him being like a college student with 60 years of experience.
Care to give, or point to, a correct characterization of those?
When using github, do you keep all of your code in a single repo? If not, have you found any solutions to the "fragmentation" problem where it's hard to get a big picture view due to issues being scattered across different repos? We're looking for solutions for that at my workplace.

I haven't used bitbucket for larger projects yet, any insights there also appreciated.