YDN Blog

As we move forward with making unused Yahoo! usernames available to new owners, we’ve always thought about making the process as secure as possible.

I wanted to share one measure we’re taking to protect the privacy of our users who had an e-mail address that may be re-used, which is a very small percentage of the accounts that we will be recycling. We encourage anyone using e-mail to communicate with their users, especially for e-commerce and recovering their accounts, to adopt this measure to ensure the security of their users.

To communicate that a username has a new owner to e-commerce sites like “JoesAntiques.com,” or social networking sites like Facebook, we’ll allow them to “ask” for a new type of validation when sending an email to a specific Yahoo! user. The field, which can be requested via an email’s header is called “Require-Recipient-Valid-Since.”

We feel that our approach, which we’ve worked on with our friends at Facebook, is a good solution for both our users and our

hack_india_h_hackers

The energy at the 6th edition of Yahoo! Hack in India was electrifying as we counted down to the close of hacking at Yahoo! Hack Hyderabad, 2013. Over 250 developers from more than 20 states fought it out in the 24-hour Hackathon. ·The theme of this year’s hack event was around Mobile and Personalization. Most of the Hacks submitted used geo location, photos, sentiment analysis and SMS.

The hackers downed over 1500 cups of coffee and tea, and 350 cans of Red Bull! And they needed that fuel, as only a scant 5 percent slept through the night. From the amazing food to the perfect venue, Hack India: Hyderabad was a hit! See all the great pics from the event on YDN’s Flickr stream.

Congratulations to all the hackers, especially the ones who took home the prizes. See all the hacks here.

Grand prize winner

planman

PlanMan!

By Varunkumar Nagarajan, Arunkumar Nagarajan, Raghu Ram, Amit Bharti

PlanMan is a mobile app that lets you do workflow management through SMS and missed calls. It takes inputs

Hack India: Hyderabad is going strong! This hack is shaping up to be one of our most formidable, mirroring our current internal focus: collaboration, innovation and creating great products with speed.

With roughly 2 million developers, India has one of the largest developer presences across the globe. For that reason, and because of the enormous demand for our developer events across the region, we decided to add an additional city to our annual Bangalore event. Hyderabad is second only to Bangalore when it comes to developer concentration, so it was a natural choice when we decided to expand our India hack program.

Yahoo!'s external hack events in India have long been our most heavily attended. We received more than 4,000 applications for the 2012 Bangalore event alone! In anticipation of the usual enormous interest, we introduced a coding challenge for the first time this year as a way to simplify the selection process. Similarly to the coding challenge that we used at Hack China:

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• 25 CSS3 animated button and menu tutorials for you to use in your next project or to help you improve your CSS3 skills.
• Interactive Particles Slideshow is an experimental interactive slideshow component with math shapes and texts using Canvas.
• 8 techniques for mobile and retina devices detection so you can choose the best suitable to your needs, and give your user the best experience possible.
• Wanna do more public speaking? Read this post by @codepo8 about stage tech before your next talk.
• Five patterns to help you tame asynchronous JavaScript.
• DiagnostiCSS lets you visually detect any potentially invalid or inaccessible HTML markup.
• Thirteen tenets on the value of user experience strategy, design, and designers.
• In this WordPress configuration tutorial, Chris Lea is going to walk you through configuring your WordPress setup to withstand a Digg or TechCrunch like post.
• 45 helpful

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• The Changing Face of Web Development takes a look at how a web developer's role has changed in the past ten or fifteen years.
• is a case-study of @FiftyThree's approach of focusing on building the right feature and use tweakables to get the details right.
• Incredibox is a highly addictive website letting you create your own trip-hop orchestra.
• Instant RSS Search is a Google powered feed engine to help you discover RSS feeds around your favorite topics.
• Image Optimization is one of the most important factors for your website efficiency, here are 27 image optimization tools for you to use per your desire.
• Flippant.js is a tiny JavaScript and CSS library that lets you flip things over.
• Learn X in Y Minutes is a whirlwind tour to help you learn your new language.
• The 8 steps to creating a great storyboard, Jake Knapp takes us through the lightning-fast process he employs to get a team's

hadoop-elephantWe are proud to announce we used Apache Hadoop to set a new Gray sort record for the Jim Gray's Sort benchmark. We nearly doubled the rate of the previous Gray sort entry by sorting at a rate of 1.42 Terabytes per minute. The previous record was 0.725 Terabytes per minute.

Jim Gray's sort benchmark consists of a set of many related benchmarks, each with their own rules. All of the sort benchmarks measure the time to sort different numbers of 100 byte records. The first 10 bytes of each record is the key and the rest is the value. The Gray sort is to measure the sort rate achieved while sorting at least 100 terabytes of data. The Minute sort is the amount of data that can be sorted in less than a minute. There are two different benchmark categories. The Daytona category requires the sort code to be general purpose sort. The Indy category needs to only sort 100-byte records with 10-byte keys. We used Hadoop Terasort with slightly different configurations in both categories.

There were

In a continuing effort to sharpen our focus, today we announced that we’re shutting down several products and services. You can see the full list of closures here. Three of these closures will impact developers, so we wanted to highlight them here.

Yahoo! WebPlayer (as of June 30, 2013)

If you’re a publisher and currently using Yahoo! WebPlayer on your site, after June 30 the Yahoo! WebPlayer won’t load. Your users will continue to be able to play media files using native browser support. You may wish to locate and remove the following line in your code:

Yahoo! Local API (as of September 28, 2013)

As part of this shutdown, all Yahoo! Local API documentation will also be removed from the Yahoo! Developer Network portal.

Yahoo! Term Extraction API (as of September 28, 2013)

We are eliminating direct access to the Yahoo! Term Extraction API and as

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked.

• Videry.me is a growing repository of curate videos for Web designers and developers.
• The JavaScript behind touch-friendly sliders.
• A list of the most commonly used git commands and their description.
• MQtest.io is a simple tool to help identify which media queries your device responds to.
• Common practices for building responsive site layouts and experiences including some emerging and available techniques for site layouts that flexibly resize based on screen real estate so as to ensure users get complete experiences across whatever screen size they are using.
• 5 hints from the lazy bear on how to keep up to date on UX Design.
• The number one and most effective way to prevent yourself from being a victim to online hacking is through proper and safe coding. Infographic: Are You Practicing Safe Coding? gives all of the basics that you need to know to prevent yourself from being a victim