Ask HN: What to do about potential credit card fraud. - <AUTHOR>

I received an email saying that I have bought something from store X.  I did not buy it of course.
I have contacted company X about the potential fraud (they have not got back to me yet). I also asked for the password to be resent from X even though I did not make the account.  I know, but probably shouldn't know, where they are sending the item.
It's getting sent to some dodgy looking unit in the US. I am from the UK by the way.
Should I do anything more about this?
Was it wrong for me to get access to the account on X?
Are there any good resources where you can find clear information about dealing with such issues?
I hope this appropriate here,  I could not think of a community that would be as well informed.
PS I have checked my email account to see if anyone has logged in that was not me(they hadn't). I changed my password anyway.  The security on X was bad so you did not need to confirm email. <comment><USER2> It probably isn't credit card fraud if they didn't _actually use your credit card_. The most likely issue is

a) The merchant doesn't verify email addresses and

b) the customer put their email address in incorrectly

Just with a minute of checking I found a hundred accounts in my system going to yaho.com, aol.co, gmal.com, etc etc. Imagine the possibilities for fumble- fingering or misremembering the part before the at-sign.

 _I also asked for the password to be resent from X even though I did not make the account._

This is the very _definition_ of "accessing a computer system without authorization", which you do _not_ want to be caught doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> >This is the very definition of "accessing a computer system without authorization", which you do not want to be caught doing.

I realised this after the fact. I do not know if there is anything I can do to make amends for this.

<comment><USER3> Not really. Under the Computer Misuse Act you're effectively breaking the law. However there may be a potential defence that you were responding to a query and that your actions would be reasonable. That's a problem to worry about if you were ever to go to court though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The retailer is not much wiser than you, all they do is enter the number to find out whether it's valid or not. Talk to your bank/card issuer, by calling the phone number printed on the back. They deal with this sort of thing all the time, and will probably straighten it out very quickly. If you run into difficulties, find a solicitor; investigating it yourself is likely to be a monumental waste of your time.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has nothing to do with my bank card. It was only the use of my email for some account. I had no account on X before this point. I imagine if they used my bank card they would use another email for the account on X and not inform me of what they have done.

I already checked with my bank to make sure no money has come out. That was the first thing I did.

<comment><USER4> Then why did your title say 'credit card fraud'? Where does the credit card come into the story?

<comment><AUTHOR> I said "potential credit card fraud". Sorry for the confusion. The potential fraud is not being done to me. I just wanted to know what I should do if I suspected it.

<comment><USER4> OK, that makes more sense. I guess it's hard to fully explain a situation in an Ask HN post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Check your bank and card statements for entries that you can't identify or that match up to the value of the item they claimed you bought. If you haven't bought anything then they haven't got a leg to stand on. I'd politely offer to help them with their enquiries but wouldn't take any crap from them.

If you have had something taken out of your account then you need to contact your bank/card provider.

</comment><comment><USER5> Call the bank that issued your card immediately, and tell them what happened. They will probably cancel the card number and send you new card. Give them all of the information you found out about the illicit user too. If you wait, the user may max out your credit limit and it will stay maxed out until the bank settles the disputed items.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the first thing I did. I do not think they have my card details. The bank thought that too. They just used my email address.</comment></comment>


The T1 Programming Language [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://t1lang.github.io/t1spec.pdf <comment><USER2> Non-pdf link: [https://t1lang.github.io/](https://t1lang.github.io/)

"T1 is a programming language which aims at providing better support for constrained environments, especially embedded systems with very little RAM. It should provide the following features:

Embeddable within C-based application with no OS dependency ("bare metal" systems).

Lightweight coroutines with strong guarantees on maximum stack usage.

Type-safe and memory-safe by default.

Predictable memory layout for easier integration with hardware.

Portable output (T1 code may be compiled to plain C).

Very small code footprint through generation of token-threaded code.

Generic metaprogramming support.

Flexible object-oriented support.

"

</comment><comment><USER3> The project was discussed a month ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19933664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19933664).

Is this post different enough to not count as a dupe?

<comment><USER4> I have to say too the title on the previous submission made it more clear as to what the purpose of language actually was without needing to load a PDF.</comment></comment>


Memory grand master Ed Cooke gets $1M to teach his tricks at new startup - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/16/memory-grand-master-ed-cooke-gets-1m-to-teach-his-tricks-at-new-startup-memrise/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> These mnemonics techniques have been used since the ancient Greeks and Romans. But does it train your brain in the same way if the images and storylines are being given to you with pre-packaged GIFS?

Brining gaming and crowd-sourcing into memory training is interesting, since this kind of learning has traditionally been a very isolated practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great question.

In our experience, we've found that creating your own mnemonic is usually the best way to really deeply encode a new memory.

But a great mem from someone else works almost as well. And it's a lot easier to breeze along, giggling at other people's imagery, occasionally coming up with something new of your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used to use memrise, and enjoyed it, especially the gamification and the ability to put your own mnemonics in as well as see what images others used. But when they changed to a garden metaphor I lost track of what their algorithm was doing and went back to more traditional flashcardexchange.com mostly. I'll take another look though.

<comment><USER2> When did they switch to a new style?

<comment><AUTHOR> We added the garden narrative in Spring 2011. The goal was to wrap our internal model of the state of your memories in a visual metaphor to make it clearer and more vivid for you as a learner.

We've improved the underlying algorithms a lot since then. Do let us know if you still find the garden confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoyed memrise when I used it but I wish it had a couple more features for languages, like sentence building with the words youve learned. Also, I would've used it everyday if there was a mobile app. Its been awhile since i have played with it though. Overall, a great tool and I've recommended it to fair number of people :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the positivity. We have an iPhone app coming out in the next 10 days. Definitely let us know what you think of it if you try it.

Sentence building is definitely on our radar, but it's a rich and thorny domain, and we want to take our time coming up with something good.

P.S. Android is going to take a little longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Cooke says that returning to a memory is crucial, and the Memrise has > algorithms that learn when a student needs a friendly reminder, via an email > say, to recall a certain lesson.

Are these algorithms any different than the ones used by Anki et al? I'd be surprised if they were. The novel thing for the isolated case (gamification is interesting but I'm not sure how general that is for helping) seems to be thickly layering on the mnemonic tricks instead of relying on pure flash-card memorization of information, is this correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> Broadly, our scheduling algorithms are based on the same ideas of spaced repetition that inspired Anki, SuperMemo and lots of others, though the devil is often in the details.

[http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

However, neither Anki nor SuperMemo enrich and speed up your learning with mems (crowd-sourced mnemonics), which provide a huge and well-documented boost to your learning rate and retention.

Perhaps most of all though, we've worked really hard to make Memrise a really happy learning experience. It's harder to put numbers on that, but hopefully you can feel it when you try it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great ideas, would like to highlight the community generated mems/memes feature! Could use a canv.as like meme maker on the site, it could shoot up mem/meme generation to the stars.

</comment><comment><USER7> These guys are badasses and the product works great. Learned ~100 Mandarin characters with very little effort and the product gets iterated on very quickly (their support team really listens to customer feedback). Congrats on the funding!

</comment><comment><USER8> Heh I thought it's about computer memory.</comment>


Google+: 400 Million Registrations, 100 Million Monthly Active Users - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/09/17/as-predicted-google-passes-400m-registered-users-now-100m-monthly-active-users/ <comment><USER2> There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats, particularly the "active users" one.

To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at most a few people who occasionally post to it, and recently I've seen many switch to Twitter.

Secondly, although not a perfect proxy, Google Trends shows an exponentially decaying trend that is hardly in line with their reported exponential growth:

[http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...](http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

Here's a zoomed-in graph in the last 12 months clearly showing the decaying tail:

[http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...](http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0)

Let's compare for example with Twitter (~140-200M actives) in the last 12 months:

[http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...](http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1)

Regardless of how you rationalize people searching for "twitter" vs. "google plus" as a proxy for active users, the decaying trend is clear. And it's hard to think of why the query "google plus" or "google+" would be 50-70 times less popular than "twitter" other than low the popularity of the service.

Of course none of this is hard proof, and it's possible that my circles are just not representative of the internet as a whole and that Google Trends is a fantastically erroneous proxy for popularity, but personally I believe they're using an unrealistically optimistic metric for actives.

<comment><USER3> Be very careful of this one:

 _"To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet."_

There is an interesting thing about G+ which hasn't "seeped in" to a lot of users, is that 'share with my circles' doesn't share with people who are following you but _you_ don't have in your circles. To hit those people you need to share to 'public' (and yes there should be a share to followers which is less broad than public but that is only my opinion)

Consequently you don't get as much 'fire hose' effect as you do on say twitter. And the APIs that _post_ to Google+ are still not available as far as I can tell (pls correct if this is mistaken!) and a lot of my Facebook feed is not real news so much as auto-generated stuff from other apps. My point being that 'seeing it as quiet' isn't a good measure of anything.

Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it? And Google includes your G+ stuff in your search results (much to the dismay of many).

I suspect the better proxy is going to find referrals from links in a G+ post. How many links are sharing, how many links are being followed, how much traffic does it drive. That will be a better measure of its success I expect.

<comment><USER2> > _Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured > out what G+ is, why search for it?_

Same applies to Twitter, so the comparison is fair.

<comment><USER4> I think that what he means is, if you're on G+ and you go to Google, there's already a link to your G+ profile at the top for you. You just click it, instead of searching. And then if you want to find something specific maybe you do the search in G+.

<comment><USER2> If we're going to include external links we should also remember that Twitter is built into iOS, so it's stats are also severely underrepresented.

Yet their Google Trends curves are going in opposite directions...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there detailed information about what counts as a Google+ MAU? It's not totally clear what they are counting and how much of them are true MAUs of the social network versus people who have Google accounts who somehow interacted with something Google+ related while signed into Gmail (e.g. accidentally clicked on a +1 next to a search result, or the notifications in the black bar).

I'm a Google+ MAU, since I'm usually signed into my Google account, and occasionally read blog posts on Google+. I'm a Google+ MAU in the same way as I'm a MAU of plenty of other blog hosting sites. I don't use it as a social network.

I think more detailed engagement numbers would tell the true story.

<comment><USER6> Is commenting on YouTube an active G+ action?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah yeah, I'm an "active" G+ user, but all I've done in the past month is have my photos from my phone automatically uploaded to it (not shared, just for backup), and maybe shared a couple of things I saw on Google Reader, that nobody will likely see, because, well, google broke readers social interface.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like you wouldn't be counted then since you didn't visit plus.google.com or actively use the mobile app.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, I didn't look at it that way. Do you think they track it by visits to plus.google.com, or by activity? (ie, my phone uploads a photo ever time a take a picture, or I "share" something via reader) You don't think those would count as visits to plus.google.com, as my google account communicates with plus? I get notifications in my gmail thingy every time a photo uploads as well. Also, I do probably visit at least once a month and scroll through my pics as well. I suppose it would be interesting to see what counts as a "visit" or "active".

<comment><USER8> > And here too, I'm happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 > monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app)

Based on what Vic said I don't think you would be counted. They don't explicitly say what does and does not count but it sounds like you would only count when visit G+ and scroll through photos. I personally would count sharing from Reader but but instant upload from the mobile app is passive activity and should not be counted.

<comment><USER9> What if I load plus in an iframe on Search, jusy to kill that obnoxious dancing red notification counter?

<comment><USER8> It's not clear if that counts or not. Technically it is plus.google.com but from a user perspective it is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even with this G+ looks like a social service for IT-related people. A lot of programmers I know use G+.

But other people prefer to stay with those social services where the most of their friends are. So happened it is not G+ but Facebook and other (e.g. VKontakte).

Just noticed.

</comment><comment><USER11> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533055>

</comment><comment><USER12> Could it possibly be that they count users of Youtube/Google Drive and other Google products as "active" Google Plus users? Something must indeed be deceptive about these stats.

</comment><comment><USER13> Those are nice numbers, but how is engagement?

I only visit Google+ because my admin didn't bother to block it, but nobody in my social circle uses it, so I only have it to follow some funny pictures, lifehacker and stuff (kind of a RSS feed).

Reminds me of Hotmail, which I check once a month or so, much like many people I know which still has an account, but I'm sure Microsoft counts me as "active", compared to Gmail which I check a zillion times a day.

<comment><USER14> The way to properly use G+ is as a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. I have few of my RL social circle (though it's growing) but I have tonnes of people I used to follow on twitter on there and found more through circle sharing. I have them categorized and throttled appropriately and I'm never lacking new things to read, watch or discuss on G+.

The new killer feature for me is the events. This weekend it was my friend's wedding and I made an event and invited my friends that were on G+, during the event your phone can optionally go into "party mode" which shares photos and video taken to the event page when the event ends your phone automatically stops sharing. Between the 8 or so that "attended" the event we gathered over 200 photos and a few videos, it was great. Showing people that feature convinced a few more to give G+ another, or first, shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You're automatically signed up for Google+ when you create a Gmail account now, or at least I was last week. I was annoyed. I had to manually turn it off. You don't just slap my name on the public internet without asking me, Google.

I thought they'd learned a lesson about this kind of behavior from Buzz.

<comment><USER9> I am 98% certain they did learn from Buzz and did not create a public profile for you without you clicking something to add Plus to your Gmail account.

Edit: just tried it. After creating a gmail accoun in mobile firefox, I had to click through an interstitial ad page punting the Plus app, and then find the hidden Cancel button on a G+ sign up form that was prefilled, and then I got to my new mailbox.

So, it doesn't ever publish private data without consent, but the UX is definitively evil in pretending to hold your mail hostage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That needs to end with ", 2 people you actually know using it sporadically to post photos."

</comment><comment><USER17> Do I count as 'active' if I only use the photo backup from my Android phone?

</comment><comment><USER18> Google+ does have one killer feature: easy videoconferencing. It has very much changed the way our remote team works with our client.

As a "status update" social network (in the FB, Twitter, MySpace), I'm not sure that Google+ is going to change the world, but as a set of communication tools, it might end up being what Wave always wanted to be.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the tip, I'll try that one out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Im interested in knowing ehat googlr considers an `active use. the google plus screen is integrated with their ecosystem but i dont know much who actively use it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who buys into the "G+ is a ghost town propped up by Gmail and Android numbers" theory will note that they literally just announced 500 million Android activations a few days ago. And you'd expect a good number of users are buying their second android phone.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand your point.

I switched to Android, and so did everybody in my office, yet nobody feels compelled to use Google Plus.

<comment><USER20> Probably 95% of non-fork Android users create or already have a Google account at the time of activation. And probably 95% of the ones that don't end up making one because it's a requirement for the app store or gmail or whatever.

Now there's nothing wrong with that. There's not even anything wrong with defaulting G+ to "on".

What's "wrong" is to go around claiming G+ is some kind of amazing success story that's growing like wildfire. It'd be like Apple adding a new Ping checkbox to Apple id profiles that defaults to on and then claiming Ping has 400 million new users and is a runaway success.

<comment><USER11> G+ is not a requirement for Google Play, I have it disabled across my domain and still access and use the store without issue.

<comment><USER20> "G+ is not a requirement for Google Play"

Not claimed.

The claim is that a Google Account is necessary for Google Play and when you sign up for a Google Account the default for G+ is on. And again I don't see anything wrong with that. But the obvious result is that this inflates the G+ numbers with people who aren't the least interested in G+ as a service. Again if Apple did this with Ping they'd be a laughingstock.

<comment><USER11> Ah, you meant a Google account, gotcha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Do robots count as "active users"?

</comment><comment><USER9> Monthly is not "engagement", it is "barely aware of existence". What is daily or weekly?

</comment><comment><USER22> Question is What is G+:

a) social network b) New target for adsense c) annoying sh-it that is everywhere.</comment>


How to prove resource costs using type theory, eliminating the need for "gas" - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zenprotocol.com/on-resource-verification-1b3fcf1f41e2 <comment><USER2> I don't follow how this approach accommodates functions whose computational cost is influenced by input data. As a minimal example, what would the "cost" annotation be for a tail-recursive "list length" calculation?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Joining costs together isn't so simple in a language that can express loops, branching, and recursion — our language has to be quite sophisticated in order to make it possible."

In other words, did you just handwave away the halting problem? O_o (FYI: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem) )</comment>


Silk Road Accused's '$28m Stash' Found By FBI - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1159960/silk-road-accuseds-28m-stash-found-by-fbi

<comment><USER3> Last night 144,000 BTC was collected all into a single address, here: [https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN4...](https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH)

It will be interesting to start tracing back all the inputs to this and see the different paths the coins took getting there. A lot of people don't understand just how _pseudo_ -anonymous Bitcoin really is.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop - will any miners patch their code to ignore any transaction spending from this address, and orphan any blocks which do the same? I don't think it's going to happen, it's arguably not in the best interest of miners to demonstrate that level of cooperation. It's fun to imagine how that would play out though!

FBI could mine the transaction themselves with enough hashing power, but the block they broadcast could still be orphaned by the majority of hashing power.

Since only the longest chain - the chain with the most proof-of-work - <USER2> considered, it's technically possible for the Bitcoin community to blacklist these coins. But only as long as a majority of miners refuse to include or build on a block which spends them.</comment>


Japan split over restart of first nuclear reactor since Fukushima disaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/09/japan-split-restart-first-nuclear-reactor-since-fukushima-disaster <comment><USER2> Japan's CO2 emissions are up 11% relative to 1990, when they are supposedly planning to go down 21% by 2030.

"They're aware that Japan has fared perfectly well without nuclear power for almost two years." is not really accurate CO2 into account.

<comment><USER3> Which would you prefer floating in our air, CO2 (that plants breathe) or invisible, cancer-causing radioactive particles?

<comment><USER4> Your comment is becoming invisible because you are a denier. Suck it contrarian.

<comment><USER5> Please stop posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments to HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this reactor have better safeguards and protection than the ones at Fukushima? I think that's the most important point to consider here.

<comment><USER7> "Better safeguards"? 9.0 earthquake. Tsunami. Fire. Complete loss of power to all control systems.

Still didn't kill anybody.

Just how safe do you expect something to be?

By comparison the earthquake and tsunami killed over 18,000 people.

<comment><USER8> > Just how safe do you expect something to be?

Personally, I expect someone to have at least the foresight to put the backup generators on a platform.

<comment><USER7> There was a ten meter sea wall. The tsunami was 13 meters tall. How many 13 meter tall backup generator platforms have you ever seen?

<comment><USER8> I'd like to see one in Japan before they reopen this reactor. Would you argue against that recommendation? A reactor is a billion dollar capital project, I think you can include a "tall" tower into the budget without making it uneconomical.

<comment><USER7> Dude, it was a _9.0_ earthquake, so yes, I think requiring that the infrastructure be designed to withstand it would have been unwarranted.

The structure was clearly adequate to withstand any earthquake that could reasonably be expected over the life of the plant, and didn't do all that bad even when a drastic, catastrophic, unprecedentedly large earthquake struck. Once again: no one died.

What do you think is going to happen if a 9.0 earthquake hits near (say) the Three Gorges Dam in China, or the Grand Coulee Dam in the United States? I guarantee you that the number of fatalities is going to be a lot higher than zero.

<comment><USER8> The logic being since you can't earthquake proof the 3 Gorges Dam (genuinely financially impractical), therefore don't put backup power on a high tower?

I understand the "who woulda thunk?" angle, except I bet someone did think about it and likely got overpowered in the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too late: the reactor has been restarted.

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/11/japan- res...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/11/japan-restarts- first-nuclear-reactor-fukushima-disaster)

Note that the "Sendai" here is the small town of Satsumasendai in Kagoshima prefecture, Kyushu; not the big city of Sendai north of Tokyo.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a good reason to use nuclear when solar is at cost parity now?

<comment><USER11> Some big Japanese companies are in the nuclear technology business, and they export to other countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> is 2000 protesters a split?

is clickbait?

<comment><USER13> From the article:

> A nationwide Kyodo News poll last October found that 60% of respondents > opposed an immediate return to nuclear energy, while 31% were in favour.

<comment><USER12> oh, hm. thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Georgia Tech to Offer $7000 Online CS Master's Degree - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/14/georgia-tech-and-udacity-roll-out-massive-new-low-cost-degree-program <comment><USER2> To be honest, this doesn't seem like a great deal, unless you're the sort who wants that piece of paper validating your existence. Classes for an MS (at least in my experience at a top-10 US university) are not particularly more valuable than classes in undergrad.

Where you really learn a lot is from your peers, which you wouldn't be able to do in an online course. Debates at lunch, in reading groups, and at the bar all made me a _much_ better CS geek and programmer than any course I took. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I didn't learn much at all in the classes.

This is nothing against the classes, the profs did a good job and prepared well (for the most part), it's just that the sheer volume of knowledge inflicted on my by my peers couldn't have been in a lecture 3-5 hours a week + some homeworks.

<comment><USER3> The piece of paper isn't to validate your self worth, its to validate to your prospective employers that you are worth more money.

My quick Google search pegs the increase in starting salary going from BS to MS at $18,200 a year [1]. Being able to make that leap for $7k seems like a pretty good deal to me.

[1] [http://www.naceweb.org/Press/Releases/Payoff_for_Master_s_De...](http://www.naceweb.org/Press/Releases/Payoff_for_Master_s_Degree_Evident_in_Starting_Salaries.aspx)

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you. I have no idea how the market will react. However...

PhD admissions are highly selective, and terminal MS programs are highly expensive. The Master's degree means you were either a top student (able to pass PhD admissions) or independently wealthy and probably packing serious connections.

When it no longer means that, is it still going to provide the salary bump? Quite possibly, yes. I wouldn't call it guaranteed, though.

<comment><USER3> One of the most interesting things about how they are handling this is that they claim they are not lowering admission standards, they are just allowing people who meet those standards but can't participate in the regular program due to having a full time job, inability to move to Atlanta for 3 years, or whatever the reason is.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to this degree. Will it be regarded as a masters degree from a top 10 program, or will it be seen as a cheap online degree that doesn't hold the same esteem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yesterday's thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5709445>

</comment><comment><USER6> If wonder if the degree will note that it was online vs on-campus.

</comment><comment><USER7> let the online phd begin....

<comment><USER8> An online PhD would be much harder to do in a large scale. The first part of a PhD is (essentially) a masters degree. That part, as evidenced by the article, could be provided in a MOOC-style format. The second part of a PhD is doing research with an advisor. You meet with your advisor every week, and he guides you through a research project. Unfortunately, this type of 1-1 interaction doesn't scale, so doing an online version of a PhD would offer comparatively few benefits compared to doing it in-person.

<comment><USER4> I have a different take on that.

Some PhD students meet their advisors once a week. Some see them once a year. What's different about a PhD vs MS is the expectation of a unique, individual contribution to the field: something that's never been done before.

Many people can learn existing material on their own, but very few people can get to the frontier _and deliver something the field considers important_ (noting that what's considered important is often subject to fads and political trends that one needs social access to know where things stand) on their own.

It will be interesting (and exciting) to see whether we can democratize education up to the MS level.

Here's the real question, though: once we train people up to be strong computer scientists, what are they going to _do_ in a world where priorities are set and work is defined by mediocrities? Is just knowing more going to give us the power to outperform them, or is it just one of many steps?</comment></comment></comment>


Into the wild after the exit - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@darlingdash/into-the-wild-after-the-exit-478932e59e9d

<comment><AUTHOR> After your app is acquired, what next?</comment>


Translation of the Warning from Twitter to the French Crypto Activist - <AUTHOR> I've done a free translation of the warning sent to the French Crypto Activist - links in the comments here.  I would welcome and appreciate any corrections by people more qualified than I. <comment><AUTHOR> Twitter message: [https://twitter.com/chiffrofete/status/675613946078982144](https://twitter.com/chiffrofete/status/675613946078982144)

HN submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722402)

Comment with translation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722586)

Also included here:

 _As a precautionary measure, we wish to inform you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may be the target of an attack by state sponsored agents. We think that these agents (who may be associated with the government) are seeking to obtain emails, IP addresses, and /or telephone numbers._

 _At the moment, we don 't have proof that they have access to your account details, but we are actively pursuing our enquiries. We hope to have more details to give you, but we are not at present able to provide more information._

 _It 's possible that your account has not been specifically targeted by these suspicious activities but we hope to tell you more as soon as possible. We are conscious that this situation could have particular importance if you tweet using a pseudonym. If you would like advice concerning the protection of your identity on the internet, these pages ... will be of particular interest to you._

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems like tons of people have posted receiving those, in several countries (I've seen at least posts from US and Germany). No further details.</comment>


The Tor Project: Building the Next Generation of Onion Services - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-montreal-building-next-generation-onion-services <comment><USER3> What I think really needs to happen is for the Tor group to make setting up hidden services much simpler.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but there didn't seem like an easy "type a command and we will set this all up for you" kind of way to do it.

Getting it setup, getting it to run as a daemon, and getting the service to work on multiple ports (allowing you to serve :80 and :22 for web and ssh). It seemed like a nightmare to me.

It's sad because I'm very interested in hosting a tor relay/service to make sure I can get to my important documents, even if I need to travel to another country that blocks services like dropbox and google docs.

<comment><USER4> Hm, the problem with this kind of tools is that if you're not willing to read the documentation to get a good understanding of what you're doing, you might end up _thinking_ you're secure instead of _being_ secure which is the worst case scenario.

<comment><USER5> Is there a way to configure the tool to _not_ be secure? Why is the secure configuration not the default? Can a _secure_ default be easier to set up?

<comment><USER6> Because normally, the context here is that you're trying to set up an existing internet service over the Tor network. Your web server, for example, typically doesn't know anything about Tor, and will happily serve up pages to normal internet users unless you configure it not to.

Services designed for Tor don't have this issue and can be secure by default. Ricochet[1], for example, advertises itself as a hidden service automatically and doesn't communicate outside the Tor network.

1: [https://ricochet.im/](https://ricochet.im/)

<comment><USER7> Sure, but you could always have something like a script that takes a Vagrant VM or a docker container and turns it into a hidden service on Tor. The script would take care of making sure the only access to the VM is through Tor and that the VM learns nothing (under normal operations, I am not even thinking about patching side-channel attacks and escalation-to-host attacks here) about the host's identity or location. I am thinking something like:

vagrant up --provider=tor my-service

Where my-service is any Vagrant node (a config file for setting up a generic VM with whatever software / conf you specify) and the vagrant command outputs the Tor hidden service address in the last line, after loading the VM locally on top of VirtualBox or similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm very excited about a number of innovations being deployed in next gen onion servers.

The distributed random number generator is very cool.

The blinded ed25519 public keys for the rendezvous servers are also super awesome.

Funding tor not only protects people from surveillance but advances computer science.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was curious to see if it is possible to donate funds towards the operation of "safe" (eg, non government controlled) exit/bridge nodes. According to the donation faq for the tor project[1], it appears that funds are not used for infrastructure.

If there were a way to fund exit nodes without running one myself I would definitely be interested in participating. If not, this might be a great idea for a crowdfunding campaign.

[1] The Tor Project spends about $2.5 million annually. About 80% of the Tor Project's spending goes on staffing, mostly software engineers. About 10% goes towards administrative costs such as accounting and legal costs and bank fees. The remaining 10% is spent on travel, meetings and conferences, which are important for Tor because the Tor community is global.

[https://www.torproject.org/donate/donor- faq.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/donate/donor-faq.html.en)

<comment><USER10> I think the Tor project would agree with me in saying that donations are all well and good, but the best way to contribute is to operate a high-capacity node.

<comment><USER11> Really, you'd turn down say, a thousand dollars of donations toward exit nodes and bridges?

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/)

<comment><USER12> This is not about moral philosophy, but practical matters. Tor's anonymity depends on diverse ownership of the running relays. As it stands, the organizations accepting donations to run Tor relays (torservers, noisetor, etc) already control a sizeable chunk of the total relays, and that's why the Tor project would rather encourage people to run their own.

Of course, many people can't or don't want to run an exit node. In that case, it's much better to donate to those organizations than to do nothing. But the Tor exit relays are not soup kitchens, and increased security for the Tor network due to more diversified operator group is not easily convertible to a dollar value.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps the answer here is to have a donation receiving autonomous corporation on etherium that then provisions the nodes automatically.

Note: I'm aware that'd be a lot of effort to set up and might not even work, but the idea seems fascinating in theory.

<comment><USER11> The underlying hardware of the provisioned nodes would still be under the control of easily-bugged machines in large datacenters from the perspective of government level actors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How can/does Tor propose to handle government level subversion (which must surely be happening and continue to happen with ever-increasing depth) where "sponsored" computers begin to form a majority of worldwide exit and relay nodes, with modified Tor running on them that looks actively for attacks, and leaks of information?

<comment><USER15> Current evidence suggests it's doing OK for now. The slides from the Snowden leaks showed the NSA was unable to compromise the core infrastructure by controlling relay and exit nodes, excepting a few cases. However, there are attacks a government-level entity can mount that Tor explicitly does not protect against, such as large scale passive scanning for traffic confirmation. It is not believed to be possible to beat such monitoring without compromising latency.

<comment><USER16> That evidence is a few years old now, how far they've come in that time is a complete unknown.

<comment><USER17> This is a textbook example of FUD.

<comment><USER18> Since NSA core mission is being ahead of everyone else, a claim that capabilities have increased a lot in the last few years is not FUD.

<comment><USER19> Without any specific evidence, it's still FUD.

<comment><USER20> What would specific evidence for "we don't know how much progress they have made since the last time we had concrete data about them" look like?

<comment><USER19> The FUD is implying they've made significant progress. You're right, "we don't know" isn't really a falsifiable statement, in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If they're going to use random numbers to enhance security, they should make sure that at worst, if the numbers are predictable and controlled by an attacker, it's no worse than the current security.

Does anyone know if their protocol does that?

<comment><USER22> Interesting. Can you give an example of how a security enhancing protocol can be end up degrading security?

<comment><USER23> >> "RSA BSAFE is a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptography library offered by RSA Security. From 2004 to 2013 the default random number generator in the library contained an alleged kleptographic backdoor from the American National Security Agency (NSA), as part of its secret Bullrun program."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_BSAFE](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_BSAFE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Disclaimer: My knowledge of the Tor architecture is very rudimentary

It would be nice to see some new tcp/ip protocols that handle point-to-point and cross-network communication more flexibly. Take a p2p router (let's say Gnutella2), but pared down to only do addressing and routing of traffic. Then another proto on top to do handle name resolution, secrets and tunnels. Then maybe tcp on top of that just to make tunneling arbitrary applications easy. Everything written with IPv6/ICMPv6 in mind as the parent protocol to be more future-proof. In this way, we can have both a reusable framework for p2p networks (the first layer) and a repurposeable protocol for doing name, auth and secret management/tunneling.

I believe the second thing is already handled by tor, but I don't know if separating the secrecy from the routing exists currently. Those different layers could be reused for different purposes, while also being written with a "new Tor" use-case in mind.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if seif project's ideas could be helpful here: [https://github.com/paypal/seifnode](https://github.com/paypal/seifnode). I remember Crockford talking about using microphone and camera noise to generate random numbers.

</comment><comment><USER26> Running a Tor Node- should be a form of payment. A user having no talent, requesting help from a open source community, could "donate" his bandwith and machine in return. And this form of contract should come with ease of use.

<comment><USER27> Bandwidth and machine time is not the biggest hindrance for running a tor relay or exit node. The muddy legality in most countries _is_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I still really don't understand why people keep developing Tor over I2P - <USER2> is clearly the better protocol offering complete untraceable anonymity and a chance to secceed from the stigma of Tor...

<comment><USER8> Tor is a solution for both anonynmity & privacy and censorship evasion. I2P is oriented primarily towards anonymity and privacy.

I2P has an attractive anonymous service design and can run applications like Bittorrent over it. But it also developed basically by 3 people in New Zealand.

Tor has more funding b/c of censorship evasion features being attractive to funders. Successes in the anonynmity feature set like SecureDrop. A vibrant academic community with conferences etc. Lots and lots of review from the external crypto and security community. A deep well of technical talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My understanding of distributed commit/reveal RNGs is they need some sort of incentive mechanism. Otherwise, its trivial for an attacker to flood the network with lots of commits and only reveal the ones that give him a useful outcome.

[https://github.com/randao/randao](https://github.com/randao/randao)

<comment><USER30> As far as I understand, the distributed randomness will only be distributed on the 11 trusted directory servers (where you get your node manifest from). So you don't need to worry about malicious nodes killing the randomness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't access the website because it's using HSTS and my browser says their certificate is invalid. There is no option to bypass the browser security warning. I'm at a public library. Anyone know what's going on?

<comment><USER32> It works for me. The cert is issued by DigiCert Inc and the sha1 fingerprint is DE:20:3D:46:FD:C3:68:EB:BA:40:56:39:F5:FA:FD:F5:4E:3A:1F:83

<comment><USER19> I have a completely different cert, issued by Cisco Umbrella Secondary SubCA ash-SG:

sha1 - 3B:AE:49:04:9E:6A:3D:BE:96:08:60:F0:9B:6B:2F:03:4F:E9:8C:43

<comment><USER32> Cisco Umbrella seems to be some type of security product for networks. Are you using a computer belonging to your employer or with employer software installed? They could be MITMing you. It seems odd that the Tor project would be using a Cisco product like that.

What about the cert for Hacker News, or my website [https://throwpass.com](https://throwpass.com) ?

<comment><USER19> Other certs validate, it might be site-specific from my employer (I'm on my employer's network)?

<comment><USER33> OpenDNS/Cisco Umbrella is basically a DNS-level security service that analyzes your DNS queries, blocks known malware domains, etc.

For some high-risk domains - depending on some settings - it will also switch to MitM'ing the connection to take a closer look at the traffic and block it on that level if necessary. It might also just be necessary to show the "This domain is blocked" page when you're requesting a site via https. Usually, your employer would pre-install their CA certificate, which would bypass the HSTS warning, but I suppose this might be a BYOD setting (or they just forgot/didn't like the idea of Cisco being able to MitM all the things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't understand why these TOR guys can't rent like 10-20 cheap VPSs all around the world and do their testing there. They are describing getting 11 nodes like some sort of struggle.

VPSs are truly cheap now, you can get one for $3.52 per year:

[https://lowendbox.com/blog/i-83-100mbps-unmetered-openvz- nat...](https://lowendbox.com/blog/i-83-100mbps-unmetered-openvz-nat-vps- starting-at-2-50year-resource-pools-in-usa-eu-and-asia/)

<comment><USER35> Quite a few VPS providers and ISPs will block TOR services out of the gate.

Here's their overview page: [https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs)

<comment><USER36> Yep, in the earlier tor days it was obscure enough to be doable, but I haven't run an exit node in so long I have no idea who would actually host one now. On top of that, the bandwidth used can eat budgets super fast!

<comment><USER37> >On top of that, the bandwidth used can eat budgets super fast!

Bandwidth isn't expensive though, unless you need "premium" bandwidth.

Case in point, I've used petabytes of bandwidth for scanning this year and and probably spent less than $2k total on both the scanning hardware and the bandwidth. Realistically I've only spent a few hundred dollars on the BW itself.

And good luck even maxing a gigabit line with Tor, it's not easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Oregon Trail - <AUTHOR> https://putman10.github.io/oregon-trail <comment><USER2> Could not see or scroll to top quarter of the screen on mobile yet somehow made it to the end with 5 people! Is this implementation as hard as the original? Which I never played but saw referenced many times

<comment><USER3> Archive.org has a couple old versions available:

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990)

<comment><USER4> All this talk of "old" versions, but they have graphics and sound! Sherman, set the wayback machine for 1975...

[https://ifiction.org/games/play.php?cat=1&game=418](https://ifiction.org/games/play.php?cat=1&game=418)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> semi-nontechncl Nice work! Would you lower the volume on the gunshot sound effect though? I had headphones on when I pressed the "Hunt" button and the unexpected gunshot sound effect was extremely loud.

</comment><comment><USER5> Was fun. Made it with only one party member dead (by cannibals) and plenty of food and money.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1/10 did not contract disentery.

But seriously, I played this on an apple 2 emulator a couple of years back, and it seems like the logic under the hood is a bit off. I wonder if the original source code is still available.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not very mobile friendly but still enjoyable.

<comment><USER3> It seems to try to be responsive..but doesn't work. Somehow that is more annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fun little game. Consider resizing some of your images though, they are way bigger than they need to be and really chew through mobile data.

</comment><comment><USER9> Josephine was accidentally shot and killed by Dick Cheney when she wandered away from the group. Oh dear. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> that music</comment>


Show HN: Namegine – find a name for your startup or product - <AUTHOR> https://namegine.com/namesearch <comment><USER2> Quick thoughts:

-The pitch line makes it sound like it assesses the 'quality' of the name rather than it's availability/similarity. I was expecting something that would 'rate' a name based on some kind of popularity or sentiment score.

-Im not really a fan of the name, which is a problem that stands out when your product is about good names. "Namegine" parses strangely, I think my brain's looking for another "n" to complete the word "engine" and keeps wanting to pronounce this word "Namm-Egg-Inn". Honestly, I think just NameEngine would be a better name. Obviously very subjective though.

<comment><USER3> > -Im not really a fan of the name, which is a problem that stands out when > your product is about good names. "Namegine" parses strangely, I think my > brain's looking for another "n" to complete the word "engine" and keeps > wanting to pronounce this word "Namm-Egg-Inn". Honestly, I think just > NameEngine would be a better name. Obviously very subjective though.

Absolutely, at the risk of bike shedding, for a German/English speaker this parses really strangely. The parent comment nailed the problems I have looking for another missing consonant.

<comment><USER4> NameNgine?

<comment><USER5> I find naming anything where:

\- lastletter of first word

\- firstletter of last word

are the same thing gets confusing.

nameengine.com

Maybe this is just me, but I went as far as selecting my first phone number so that it's easy to remember as well

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats on the launch.

I run Namevine.com and have for 6+ years. It does much of the same thing.

Did you not consider naming clashes/confusion yourselves when creating the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's nice to meet competitors. We have run the name against trademarks databases. The product was not ready when we registered our domain, but that's valuable feedback, to look out for similar domains.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reply, likewise.

And to echo another question in the comments, how is the name pronounced exactly? On reading it, it seems "gine" is likely pronounced "jin" or "gin" as in "engine".

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the intention. It was meant as an engine for names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly related, I made this name generator that will make up words so you are unlikely to run into something that already exists: [https://github.com/kristiandupont/conkyte](https://github.com/kristiandupont/conkyte)

It uses a couple of different techniques, I'd love to add more if you have any!

<comment><USER8> Very cool, I want to dig a little deeper into that when I'm not on mobile. That was spitting out some of the best generated names I've seen, they weren't all good but they were all pronouncable for an English speaker.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the comment. Sorry to disapoint you but the names you see in the first section of our tool are not generated names. These are the names of similar names already registered as a trademark with United Stated Patent & Trademark Office. So you can check if there are any conflicting trade names (trademarks) to the one you are searching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea, but all I am getting is "Searching... Please Wait"

Even without seeing results, though - looking for an existing business name in the state you want to register your company would also be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are experiencing some issues with a hosting providing we try to figure out.

<comment><USER11> a free lambda node or generic compute instance could run this site and do everything its trying to do

it can't check for twitter profiles?

oh brother..

<comment><AUTHOR> We run it on Heroku on production quality dynos. Heroku came out to be a bottle neck. Moving things to lambda is an option we will seriously consider. Checking for, Twitter as well.

<comment><USER11> What happened then? It was able to serve the site but not do API calls, so no mem-cache in front of your database? The Redis mem-cache didn't flush itself when full?

<comment><AUTHOR> The site is served via AWS CloudFront. It is SPA app hosted on S3. The API is on Heroku. No mem-cache anywhere. To search we use ElasticSearch hosted on AWS. We bump up the specs to speed it up but that was not the core problem.

I suspect Heroku Postgres DB. We didn't used some Hobby version and I think it is the real bottle neck + some unnecessary middleware for the API that also requires DB.

<comment><USER11> maybe a mem-cache then?

DB's have limited connections and are often billed as such, the mem-cache might help if there are any repeatable things. It might not be useful for your solution though since everyone searches for their own things all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Increasing DB plan did the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems broken on mobile. Android Chrome. Cant click anyt hi ing to proceed. Neat concept. I'll try it on my mac...

<comment><USER9> don't have mobile version yet, sorry.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for following up,

I tried it on my mac ( looked good) but as you/your teammate reported, it is having issues getting data back from the API, every call is returning a 502

<comment><USER13> Not my area of expertise but it would be functional if I could just resize it. It seems locked on this zoom level. But I'm of the opinion that desktop UI on mobile is just fine because I know how to zoom, if I'm allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure what facebook availability means - the term I searched for says "available" but the account name is taken. Does it mean something else (page name? I'm not very familiar with facebook..)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It checks if a Facebook Page url for a given name is free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Idea: once you have a steady stream of users, automate some domain name squatting. Buy the cheap ones (.xyz, .website, etc.) for every name, then threaten submitters with libel blogs unless they pay up.

<comment><USER9> I think it would rather be short-time revenue stream... We aim for a long-term relationship with our future customers :)

<comment><USER16> Although I am sure your intentions are pure, he raises a valid point. I think you'd benefit from making it apparent that "we won't steal or squat you name" somewhere on the landing page.

I think it's a fantastic idea, keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That's valid point. We are against front running or black hat SEO. That's not the place we want to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You forgot to add the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to your api:

Failed to load [https://api.namegine.com/api/v1/*](https://api.namegine.com/api/v1/*): No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin '[https://namegine.com'](https://namegine.com') is therefore not allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 503.

<comment><AUTHOR> We had API cached by ClodFront. In the process of troubleshooting we turned it off and we attached frontend directly to API. There should be CORS headers though. The problem was more scalability problem. It's too soon to say for sure, but getting rid of some middleware and scaling Heroku Dynos helped.

<comment><USER18> I presume "ClodFront" was a typo, but given the frustrations I've had with it myself, I'm not certain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, CloudFront. Less typo more like Freudian slip. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hard to trust a naming product with such a clumsy name itself.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love the idea! Everybody has projects (for fun, hobby, or serious projects) and you see it all the time were the name is already used by [insert other large library/project] or it translates poorly in another language [becomes the word "poop" or something].

This is really cool! :D

</comment><comment><USER21> This worked perfectly for me with a couple of project names I've got. Was glad to see no one trademarked it and the words mean about the same thing in most languages. So thanks!

FYI: div.contactUs panel that says "Interested in Trademark Registration" is covered by the namesearch-Hintcontainer with its z-index of 500. It also gets especially screwy on narrow screen width, and obscures the footer text. So I hope you can make some quick CSS adjustments there.

Nice service.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love this. With the excessive use of dictionary words it's nice that there is now a way to search so that hopefully people will stop naming projects "Hydrogen" since there are 376 pages worth of results for it. lol

</comment><comment><USER23> having lots of problems interacting with the site on FireFox Nightly. Can't close the subscription banner for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We will look into that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If any of you guys want to get product updates, just drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.com (no spam policy).

</comment><comment><USER24> Oh how well I remember "Namerazor"..."so good it named itself".

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone else hits on the link above and gets nothing?

<comment><AUTHOR> We got stability. We had to remove a middleware, increase number of Heroku Dynos to ridiculous amount and we had to change Whois provider.

<comment><USER25> Don't see yet

<comment><AUTHOR> What browser do you use?

<comment><USER25> Chrome. Your site is still not working

<comment><AUTHOR> That's strange. We see on analytics that app works correctly. Is is mobile or desktop Chrome? What kind of error do you get?

<comment><USER25> Tried from Firefox this time. This is what I got →

"Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to namegine.com. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

        The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
        Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem."

Same public IP address as below.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 2018 and it is unusable on an iPhone SE.

</comment><comment><USER27> Using it on mobile it's a nightmare

<comment><USER8> Same, completely broken in both android Firefox and brave. Worked in brave desktop mode, unusable entirely in Firefox. Plus, it didn't seem to offer much utility over a Google search for the name under consideration.</comment></comment>


It's Not My Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/10/its-not-my-company.html <comment><USER2> This is why we asked TechCrunch during the summer if they'd please stop saying "Y Combinator's ..." in article titles and instead say something like "YC- funded ..." It is a subtle distinction, but the old titles always made me feel uncomfortable.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd really, really like my investor to feel "invested" in MY company. If she wants to use the posessive pronoun I will be the very last person on Earth to correct her.</comment>


Technological Books you should read in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l566l7ufRVI <comment><USER2> Posting a video of an article, but not the actual article?

<comment><USER3> its in his summary right at the top.

pretty bad list for books to read next year.. some are several years old others are really poorly reviewed.</comment></comment>


What UX Really Is - <AUTHOR> http://www.benedikt-lehnert.de/blog/what-user-experience-really-is

<comment><USER2> The term UX no longer possesses meaning. As soon as graphic designers just started adding UX to their resumes it was dead. The broad definition eloquently described in the very well designed blog post was nice, but far too general. Like saying Hollandaise tastes buttery. True but incomplete.

I'm going to start asking every designer I interview who has UX tacked on their resume like a piece of flair to diagram out a complex user interaction on a white board. In part because I want to enact the ritual hazing that is white board interviews on others, in part because I believe it has potential to distinguish hollandaise from mayonaise.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a convoluted way of addressing the issue, and I'm not really sure to whom this article is addressed.

Is it to people already in product / service development? If so, it's far too verbose an example. If it's not, it's far too vague; the direct tie is not drawn back to development in order to adequately complete the analogy.</comment>


Today, Y Combinator sent me a rejection letter for Startup School… by mistake - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sunnyhirai/today-ycombinator-sent-me-a-rejection-letter-for-startup-school-by-mistake-9a7966af1818 <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty big roller coaster today. Thought I'd post the reverse perspective of getting rejected for Startup School and then accepted and then everybody being accepted.

<comment><USER2> > I completely accepted we weren't in. This was like a tearful goodbye at the > airport and then running into the person again.

That's a perfect description of how I felt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So are the teams that got the reject letter and then the accept letter the actual accepted teams? Did you end up on the advisor track after all?

<comment><USER4> Not OP but I too got the acceptance, then rejection, then "Everyone accepted" email.

That "everyone" count according to the email is over 15,000. The original acceptance # according to email was just 25 applicants (out of over 15,000)

It says that we don't have access to advisor, so I'm not sure what's different from the previous rejection email which said the same thing i.e. no access to advisor, but that I can "audit" the course...</comment></comment>