Nice story, sounds quite familiar. Nowadays it's so easy to find tools and applications for almost anything that I usually don't feel the need to code stuff (I did it professionally for a while but I'm back to being a hobbyist coder). I wonder if I'm just not that interested in programming any more, or whether it's because I haven't had an itch to scratch in a while.

It's hard and really annoying to read conversations on Twitter. And the character limit means that people have to break their messages into several tweets, which again makes following the conversation harder.

There is no need to covertly adbicate responsibility, when it's spelled out clearly in every license I've ever read that the developers take no responsibility whatsoever.

They work exactly like the developers in question want.

I see. I wonder what benefits Chase sees in the system; it seems to me that security-wise there is a downside in using login usernames for payment addressing. I'm not familiar enough with US banking to figure out the upsides, but most probably the system will lower costs somehow.

Password reset process maybe, but wouldn't creating an account (in the online banking sense, not a bank account) require a visit to the branch in person? That's what I remember doing quite a few years ago when I started doing banking online. Money transfers use IBANs or a similar system of account numbers, which are separate from login usernames.

"What the hell is Nethack? Damn editors..."

Why does DSL in the US seemingly mean crappy speed?

I know that distance to the DSLAM makes a huge difference, so perhaps the commenters just don't happen to be pretty close to one. (I also find it a but funny in some American software and games, where DSL ranges from maybe 256kbps to 8Mbps, and above 8Mbps is called Cable. I've been using a 10/1 Mbps ADSL connection for several years, and not only is the speed exactly as good as advertised, I also don't remember more than one outage, so it's quite reliable for its intended ie. consumer use. I know a few people with theoretical 24/2 Mbps connections, although they all max out at around 20-22 Mbps downstream.

Anyway, around 20 Mbps downstream and an acceptable 2 Mbps upstream doesn't seem that bad to me. Unless of course you're used to a 100/100 Mbps connection :)

I haven't been following very closely, but wasn't the malware distribution related to Freedom Hosting which hosted child porn forums?

You are just reading way too much into it. Low id means one thing only, which is that he registered quite some time ago. So he's been around a long time, and the beta will finally drive him away.

Forgot to add that whether it's bad or not, or if you see any issues with it is obviously subjective, but in case the comments are wider (relative to window size) on your system I'd be very interested to find out why (and how to fix it on mine as well.)

That is not zoomed in nor out. And I don't know why you would think it was zoomed, the ratios would still be the same; only about half of the window's width is actual content, ie. comment text.

If you aren't currently blocking ads on /. maybe doing that on the beta site could help getting the message through. Hit them where it hurts, sort of :)

Thumbs down for narrow comment boxes!

I just had the displeasure of trying the beta for the first time because of the comments here. I don't like it either (and I like even Windows 8, so come on!); the worst part is that the comments are in a VERY narrow box, and all the useless framing takes up a significant chunk of space.

Also it seems to require Javascript, but I know that even on this site I'm in the minority with that particular dislike.