It would be nice next time to direct to a static status page with info on what is going on, if possible, and keep that site up all the time, e.g.: status.news.ycombinator.com.
I'm all for diversity on the team. Strong efforts should be put forth to hire the best person for the job, regardless of their sex, etc., though. I have all daughters, so I want them to be able to be considered, hired, etc. on an even playfield with men. I don't expect special treatment for them, just respect and equal opportunity.
And, I like almost everything in this post, except that I think the OP might be playing to stereotypes a little too much; some of these are not problems specific to women. Like not playing oneself up as much or focusing on the actual monetary results of work.
Something I experienced that wasn't mentioned related to hiring women was "same sex competition" (which I'm sure is not specific to women, but I've never worked on a team with all women where I was the only male). When only one woman was on a team with a bunch of other men for a long time, that woman was much more critical of female interviewees. After the hire of another woman on the team, this competition continued for the first several months, before they became friends.
Dad of all/only girls here. Dying to get a hold of this rom. Hoping the author will post it and that Nintendo won't give him a hard time about his homebrew, considering the attention it is bringing Donkey Kong and Nintendo.
I believe posting the ROM would be ilegal. To share ROM mods, people usually share patches that can be applied with a certain program (like a binary diff, I'd assume).
> That was a bug in Atari BASIC that I never tracked down.
Never assume it was a bug in BASIC. A bug indicates it was a mistake. Very often code of that age had "tricks" to workaround hardware/limited resources that could be perceived as a bug when it kept something else from happening as intended, but it was required. That is the difference between a hacker then and one today- they didn't bitch and complain about bugs, they just made it work. I know you were coding back then- I was too, but I have a feeling you weren't well versed with the ins and outs of how BASIC interpreters of the time were written from reading things in your blog like:
"I’m not a programmer. Or a hardware guru. I’ve come to believe myself the amateur anthropologist. I like rummaging through the midden mound of the techpress reading what the tribespeople have to say. I’m bookish."
Basic is obviously not a bug. It is the reason many of us got started, and Atari Basic is no exception. My point was that people that speak of bugs of software, OS's, language interpreters, etc. of that time have no clue how difficult it was to write them get them to do all of the things they needed to do. Ridiculous I got downvoted for that. Pfft.
Spiritually it may as well not be. They usually stand on their own and stay out of the news when it comes to politics of Western Europe as a whole, since they were kept out of the UN post WWII. The biggest tie to the rest of Western Europe recently is that of organized crime; the Garduña of old evolved into the Comorra of today, well known across Europe, especially in Italy, obviously.
There weren't many patterns presented, so here are a few of those and some more:
Some evil UX patterns are:
* Opt-in: Prepopulating option with more expensive or recurring payment. (example was a donation, but Amazon does this when not defaulting to free 5-7 day ground shipping after promising free shipping prior to putting it in cart! which is much worse since they are bait and switching)
* Opt-in, part 2: Making changes subtle changes can be evil. By switching around buttons, etc. after having it work a certain way a long time and not changing the interface enough, you trigger muscle memory to do the wrong thing. Amazon has exploited this as well with the (not) free shipping option.
* Difficult to quit/cancel: also mentioned in the OP's linked presentation. In addition to more steps or having to email, etc. they don't even give you a documented option, e.g. you have to email them so they will delete your account and they say that nowhere in the site.
* Glossing over legal: Small text or less readable font to hide details is evil.
* Hiding legal: putting legal disclaimers in an area of the site that is hard to get to is evil.
* Unnecessary login: making the user login because they might want to retain info about something, when really the site owner is getting more benefit (selling email address or lead info, mining it themselves, etc.).
* Asking for more than is needed for user to accomplish what they want: asking the user for more info than they need to provide in order to get lead info when they are not aware you will contact them is evil.
* Unintended use of data: Worked for a telecom that had page to get phone# to look up service availability and then they would use that for lead info.
* Easy to determine security questions: this is just stupid. Many are easy to find out and they do little more than make the uninformed user feel more secure. Examples: birthday, street you grew up on, etc. that can be learned even without social engineering.
* Passwords: one of the most archaic and stupid constructs ever. Passwords encourage people to use the same password across sites, so if one is compromised, they all are. An autogenerated passkey and a more secure way to reset it with a new one if your passkey was lost or stolen would beat passwords anyday. SSO only compounds this idiotic UX we can't get rid of. (And we put abusable/hackable cameras in every laptop instead of adding retinal scanners or thumbprint readers in every laptop, which could be viable alternatives.)
Passwords encourage people to use the same password across sites
I've heard this said about difficult passwords, but I think this is putting too fine a point on it. Passwords don't encourage anything on their own, except perhaps a consciousness of the basics of security. It's akin to saying that pizza encourages eating it for every meal. I don't think we've yet seen a gene that selfish.
I don’t know 95% of my passwords. Opera does, though, and so does a little encrypted text file somewhere on my harddrive. And neither of the two mind if my passwords are all of the form GgSGlIXrPE1IrbhgWFBU.
Of course, I only use one computer rather than five different laptops, three tablets and fifty-two smartphones, in which case I imagine it to be tedious to sync them (unless you trust Opera enough to use Opera Sync or some such thing).
1Password is cross-platform in the sense that it works on Windows, OS X and mobile phones but it doesn't support Linux.
Since I need Linux support I use KeePass 1.x [1] on Windows and KeePassX [2] on Linux and Mac OS X. Both versions are free software. They store password entries in a single AES-encrypted container, use in-RAM encryption and allow you to attach a file with arbitrary binary data to each password entry (handy for key files). While there is no single Firefox extension that works across all the platforms they both can emulate typing for password entry. For synchronization I keep the encrypted password file in my Dropbox. If your use case is similar to mine I can highly recommend this solution because it behaves consistently across the platforms I've tried it on [3]. There's also KeePassDroid for Android that supposedly works well with Dropbox but I haven't used it.
[3] The most exotic one being Debian PPC. Sadly, it didn't last since while KeePassX worked fine on it there was no straightforward way to get Dropbox running on non-x86 Linux and using a workaround like rsyncing with an x86 Linux machine running Dropbox or a VM introduced a large extra breaking point to the system.
I've never understood the argument against complex, unique passwords when there are numerous robust, free, and cross platform tools for pw management. It's far easier to manage one database of generated credentials than to remember even a handful of sets of simple auths.
I guess, yes, but I don’t particularly like Dropbox and don’t see the need for syncing at the moment anyways. And for my passwords text file - org-mode (and epa) come with Emacs in Debian main, 1Password doesn’t seem to be there :)
Your password rant falls on it's ass immediately considering that we don't have any way to link your thumbprint to your identity for the remote peer.
Using a service like twitter as online identity helps to some degree with having fewer passwords except that then cracking a twitter account gives you access to everything.
> Amazon does this when not defaulting to free 5-7 day ground shipping after promising free shipping prior to putting it in cart
If you have the $79/year Amazon Prime subscription, then they _do_ default to the "free" 2-day shipping on eligible orders. I don't think they're trying to optimize the flow for occasional shoppers.
How about:
* Deliberately making terms and conditions so long and verbose that no-one has the will/time to read them and is more likely to simply check the "I have read the terms and conditions" checkbox without actually reading them.
Were these bacteria living because of a heat source that was keeping the lake liquid, similar to life around deep sea vents?
Could there be life under our feet, fueled by the heat of the molten core with bacteria flourishing in fresh groundwater, or do these types of thermophiles require salt that wouldn't exist there?
