List of cognitive biases

I just love wikipedia.

Some thoughts on password input visualization

I've been seeing a few of these things floating around. Supposedly, they make it easier to figure out if you typed your password correctly just by glancing at a hashed graphic representation of the password.

My first thought is of the eating-your-own-dogfood type: how do you type your password? Do you actually look at the screen as you're typing? Do you click the button or press enter to submit? If the latter, do you pause before pressing enter? Can you easily override your muscle memory and not press enter if, say, you feel you see one less * than what you think you should see? Well, maybe you're a geeky freak. Ask your friends the same questions.

Another thing that I'm wondering is whether the whole thing is redundant. Why do you need to visualize your password? Did you make a mistake? Were you not aware that you may have made a mistake?

And one last thing. What was the last ad you saw about? Chances are you didn't even see it. What makes a graphic feedback icon any different? It's very easy to miss things that you aren't expecting. For example, I often miss a "check user ID availability" button when signing up for a free game simply because it's just a bit off of where I'd expect an interactive piece to be next.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't really care about hash strength and all that crap people throw around to make themselves look smart in HN or whatever. If people really wanted to get your password, they would. There are so many non-cryptographic ways to do it, it's not even funny.

What matters for an UI experiment is that it plays well with users' behaviours: I type my passwords looking at the keyboard and press enter by muscle memory. I subconsciously dismiss things as visual noise when they are not absolutely required to the task at hand.

So far, the password visualization experiments I've seen don't address any of those behaviours.

Ray Tracer in Clojure

Imma look at the source later.

Microsoft hatred is a disease

Why does it have to take a guru to state the obvious?

TCO is not that easy to implement

So I guess there is a reason why mainstream languages avoid tail call optimizations.

Bullying

What the hell was wrong that school? o_o

Since everyone is talking about their experiences now, here's mine too: Sometime in the first month of high school, I bit the guy's finger (I was actually trying to rip it off). Then life was nice and quiet.

Stanford Youtube Channel

Building your own dynamic language. Watching it later.

Online learning in Clojure

Interesting.

Why give software away?

Zed Shaw on his choice of licenses.

I still don't get why people would want to give stuff out for free. It's one thing to collaborate with random programmers who are interested in the same technology as you, it's quite another to be Mother Teresa.

What is a browser?

I should do that sometime.