skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Proposal 1: There are two XML files that keep track of recently used documents. Gnome panels only looks at one - it's the one that Open Office doesn't use. Makes "recently used documents" crap. Fix that. I could probably do that in a week if I knew $1000 was there (out of a project I'm doing, I've learned a fair amount about the Linux desktop, I program c++ and I am available - reply here).

But this is the "100 paper cuts" thing. I use and curse Gnome daily. I could list ten more if I had any belief there'd be action. $1000 is a week's worth of action if you sell yourself really cheap.

Rant 1: If you look at a given "bug list" for any large project you'll find a dozen problems posted where the reply is a very curt "will-not-fix/not-a-bug/your-configuration-is-wrong". It feels generally snarky and unwelcoming, especially when I'm searching for a solution to the same bug. If someone could figure out protocol that would make bug-reporters feel more welcome, it would really help the process. As developer, I know that, in fact, a lot of things people see really aren't bugs but expected behavior/configuration problems. BUT!, BUT... you have to create an atmosphere of involvement if you want people involved.

Proposal/Rant 2: The format for menus in Gnome is the convoluted piece of trash that anyone ever foolish - how freedesktop could possibly publish it as a "standard" is beyond me. It needs to be junked and replaced with a simple approach. (And suspect this format is why panels has notable, annoying delay to be displayed even on modern hardware that should show stuff instantly).

Proposal/Rant 2: Scribus has a zillion bugs I'd love to see fixed. I have a private list I keep out of frustration. I won't bother pasting it here unless I see more interest. It's more likely that Inkscape will become a viable DTP project through supporting multiple pages than that Scribus will ever stop being a piece of total garbage - because it's really hard fix large, poorly coded project. Yes, I've used Scribus, a lot sadly.
Small number of eavesdroppers, but also more sophisticated and dangerous ones. :-)
Against Odds, [The Awl] Finds Niche
You can remove the N option and you'll get a shell.
Nicely done! It would be nice if you would allow the user to fullscreen the videos. I think adding "allowFullScreen: true" to your params object for your js embed would add this functionality.
Google actually gave up those efforts.

Was there ever a Django-related effort from Google to update the ORM?

Also, the Django ORM is pretty flexibile, and the architecture just got improvements for NoSQL in 1.2.
I used to buy tons of domains for all the ideas I have or planned to do in the future. The problem is ... most of the time, I could never get around to work on it. Either because one idea took up more time then expected, etc. Now I will just register domain once I'm almost ready to launch.

Looking at the rate startup fail, I guess it's quite alright to not get the domain I want. If things do work out, I can always rebrand it later.
L.C.D. UIs are a sign of a bad designer. Remember the Backblaze article on the frontpage from last week?

http://blog.backblaze.com/2008/12/15/10-rules-for-how-to-wri...

While the underlying logic should be the same, each UI should be leveraged towards whatever OS is running the app. It requires a bit of across-the-aisle thinking to create a decent UI for the other OS, but it's do-able.

UI design should be more like a cross-channel ad campaign (print, web and TV) than porting.
The X10 Programming Language
If you have a WLAN NIC that supports traffic injection, gathering IV:s can be done in a few minutes.

http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=simple_wep_crack
Facebook Fails at https
Hey James, appreciate the comments.

I have mixed feelings about layers. In an elaborate design I understand how they're useful, but for most website mockups I think you can get by without them. You can, for what its worth, lock elements currently with jMockups (see the property inspector), which might be a good middle ground.

The editor currently supports most of the standard keyboards you'd expect from an app (Ctrl+S/A/Z/Y) with the main exceptions being Copy and Paste, which I'm working on. I'm open to adding as many more as people find useful. Let me know.

Regarding the property inspector: Depending on what direction I take with the width of the canvas, I could add an option for docking it to the left or right of the canvas. What do you think?
Never Mind the Bullets - A Web-comic done in HTML5
so your list is http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/other/testing.html ? That's about 270 bugs at the moment.
Eclipse is cross-platform, comes with a disgusting component system (OSGi), pillages all your RAM, and yet is still arguably the most popular IDE these days.
I once sent a mail to Linus Torvalds, requesting him to bless something like this.
My justification was that corporates (IBM, Oracle, Redhat) employ kernel hackers in order to get their most wanted features into the kernel. It could very well mean the server/enterprise side of things. But how does the ordinary desktop user vote for their choice of features - maybe even through money ?

It would have been nice if he could have backed something like, a StackOverflow for opensource bugs/feature requests with payment integration.

Didnt hear back though!
That's a good point -- I hadn't thought about this.
Yes, but no one would ever use a hammer by itself. At a bare minimum you're going to need wood, nails, and probably a few saws. C isn't a hammer. Pointer arithmetic is a hammer, and there are other tools at your disposal in C.
According to mine it's differentiated by being "better than PC" and being illegal.

More confusingly it enjoys relationships with Ryan and Kyle (a soap?), "ulay culkin dead" which I'm assuming was a rumour about the Home Alone star, and "ookout pregnant again", which really confused me when I assumed it was referring to Macbooks...
I know, I've been doing it for a while. It still isn't trivial, you need to get the handshake, do the replay attack, gather enough IVs, crack them, etc. It takes 5 minutes, but it's not plug and play.
Regarding jobs for each framework, there are far more Rails jobs than Django jobs: http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=JBPFd8i2nk.

For me, I periodically use Django for content-centric sites with standard CRUD operations primarily performed by a small number of privileged users, but I prefer Rails and Sinatra for most projects. I prefer the Ruby web development ecosystem, with libraries like Haml, Sass and Compass.
I find it odd that they effectively revealed the balance of someone else's account to basically a total stranger.
Thanks.

Can you elaborate on the font rendering? Does it not currently do it correctly?

Line-heights: Good idea. Will do.

Drawing path tools: give me an example of how you would use this.

Stay tuned.
Ask HN: How would you monetize icantfindmyphone.com?
Pretty sure those are all acronyms.
"C is not like a hammer, C is like wood. [...] Knowing all about the subtle details of working with wood isn't especially portable to working with cables that carry electricity or layers of carbon fibre or blocks of solid aluminum."

All metaphors leak, but this one seems leakier than its predecessor. Turing equivalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness) tells us that any program can be written in any computer language. (Except SQL. But let's not get into Turing-incomplete languages now.) Whereas electric cables can't be made from wood.

The "hammer" metaphor, on the other hand, would suggest that you can do all kinds of woodwork with just a hammer; it's just needlessly difficult. Which seems more accurate.
Pre 1982 pennies are worth like 2 or 3 cents melted down I believe. They are becoming more and more rare because they are made of copper, a valuable resource. The federal reserve is printing money out of thin air and diluting the currency more than ever. This means that as we move forward, too many dollars are going to chase too few goods and the prices will rise. Eventually if this grand theft is left to continue without limit, the Federal reserve will print so many dollars that one day even the paper fabric of the money will become worth more than what you can buy with it.

Nickels are worth about 6 cents I recall. Don't get caught melting down pennies or Nickels for the guaranteed profit because it is a crime. However, as inflation continues, the value of the materials in the coins will rise to infinity, at that point all coins will mysteriously vanish and the mint will not make new ones. They will instead add zeros to the dollar bills.

Buy gold, it's going to $5000 an ounce in the next year. Gold is flatline, it is a stable store of value, the gold is not gaining value, it's the unit of measure you're using that is depreciating.
I don't think you will find all three present anywhere in the world: smart people, tech and unemployment
How about pushing for a system based on merit rather than government intervention.

Wealth redistribution amounts to the government taking money away from people that earned it through hard work and giving it to people that may or may not deserve it.

Sweden might be a great place for some, but it sucks when you actually want to start a company or do something against the status quo.
I think this is pretty cool - I was immediately trying to see what the exported markup looked like though and then watched the video and realized this is not your intention. It would be nice to be able to group and nest elements. Also basic alignment features ala inkscape would go a long way.
The reason none of these new chat systems have wide protocol support is because they're really trying to improve the user experience with features like inline image previews, drag + drop file upload, archived history on the server, accessibility to non-techies, etc. Existing clients just don't support that stuff. Innovation is needed in chat UI, not protocols.

Don't get me wrong though, having these platforms be open is definitely important. I'm a co-founder of HipChat.com and while we don't openly support XMPP or IRC yet we are XMPP on the backend and plan to make it available to everyone in the future. IRC support is also something we're considering: http://help.hipchat.com/hipchat/topics/irc_compatibility.

As for getting "normal chat features" like desktop notifications, we provide our own desktop clients in addition to our web interface. Having to pay for Propane just to make Campfire usable is some weak sauce.
OCaml for Haskellers
For smaller projects, I'd wholly recommend Flask over Pylons or web.py: http://flask.pocoo.org/

I'd even say consider Flask for larger projects if you have patience, a good head for package/module layouts, and are after a really "no fluff" framework.

Tie it up to Nginx using Gunicorn: http://gunicorn.org/

(Here's the instructions in the Flask docs: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/deploying/others/#gunicorn)

You will get some killer, low memory performance (many times smaller memory footprint than Django) out of that setup.
"lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."

It sounds less like luck and more like skill when it's put this way.
I think he was trying to refer to was Google's Big table integration which app engine uses instead of NoSQL.
(I'm not the creator of icantfindmyphone.com)

I ask because I have one-off ideas like this pretty often that would be pretty easy to build, but I've never realized a way to monetize them. Running a service like this isn't going to break the bank, but it isn't exactly free either[1].

[1] I'd consider a lot of projects I do pretty much 'free' to run as they run on servers I already use for other services. For a telephony service, well... Twillio isn't free.
Of course we do -- look at the mortgage interest income tax deduction, or Medicare, two giant wealth redistribution schemes.
apparently, because all the wealth somehow got redistributed to a small minority. that's what you're talking about, right?
These discussions really aren't going to go anywhere productive, it's pure politics. I flag both the ones I disagree with and agree with, though I'll comment too if the community decides not to flag because it's worth talking about.

Commenting here - there's two biases they're missing. The first is the "middle choice" bias. If you give people three options: "Do you prefer nothing, a medium amount, or a large amount?" overwhelmingly the middle will be chosen. That's before getting into the merits - when you give someone uneducated on a topic a choice, intuition defaults to the middle.

Second is the word "distribution" - wealth isn't actually distributed. It's built, mined, manufactured, planted, harvested, bartered, bought, sold, negotiated, renovated, cleaned, transported, traded, invented, shipped, developed, and many more things. But it's not distributed. The word itself is flawed, though unfortunately, the most obvious other way to describe is also flawed. ("Should people who honestly build and create wealth be allowed to keep it or have it taken from them by force?" is biased in the other direction) But regardless of questions on framing a debate and choice of words, I doubt this sort of post is going to lead to a good discussion. Someone in favor of mandatory-wealth-moving-aroundedness is going to reply that distribution is a fine choice of word. Someone against is going to reply no it isn't, and taking-by-force is an accurate description. In the end, no one's mind will be changed, and we'll have learned nothing new or interesting.
> They were wasting time and energy in spats with Gnome.

Gnome is much more than just metacity or gnome-shell. Even with Unity, Ubuntu will still depend on upstream gnome software for its desktop.
Ask HN: Independant Consulting
If I stick with my current salary position, by this time next year I should have the cash I need to settle my debts, take off work for six months, and focus on building some sort of software firm (I have plans, but they're outside the scope of this post). However, I've become rather disgruntled and burnt out with my current position and am thinking that maybe independent consulting for a few short term contracts would be a good way to traverse the mean time.

I have two questions,
1) should I really bother to settle my debts? If I build the debt payments into my 6 month cash reserve, it cuts my wait time in half. But, I'm afraid I'm being impatient.
2) I have no experience doing independant contracts. What are some things I could expect? I assume I could probably work out 1099 paperwork through my mother's LLC (where I'm ready in a year, she just jumped in a week ago). I have what I think is a very solid resume for 6 years of experience, having lead two dev teams in the past three years, but I don't have any sexy tech like RoR or Django, nor any certs for my .NET and MSSQL experience.

I've been talking about and planning my own business for the last three years. I make occasional progress, but I'm getting impatient. My last effort towards this goal was to move from rural central PA to Philadelphia a year ago. This got me the salary I needed to accelerate my debt payoff and I've been making excellent networking contacts along the way. But it's been a hard, disappointing slog at work due to a corporate culture that I (and most of my programmer coworkers and predecessors) feel is designed to undermine the employee's self esteem. I put out several applications to other salary positions to have some way to get out, but given my timeline I think the independant route has better potential. (Who wants to hire someone for less than a year?)
I am not an economist but this seems deeply flawed on several levels.

The fed is trying to avoid deflation which results when cash strapped banks start hording cash. Why is deflation evil? It causes people with large amounts of debt to fault and it causes people to treat cash as an investment which reduces job creation. The only real downside is flirting with inflation but some inflation would prop up housing prices and allows people who where underwater to sell and relocate to better areas.

Also, when he talks about U.S. households are burdened by too much debt as it is, and the last thing most families want or need is additional debt burdens. if they can get people to refinance their high interest debt into lower cost debt they can spend money on other things. Unfortunately you can't do this when your house is underwater which is why they need to get a little inflation to start the ball rolling.

PS: Debt to income or GDP is meaningless what's important is the cost of servicing your debt.
Not sure I understand how Plancast works.

I logged in via Twitter, and now I can't look at the main home page without picking a password, etc.
This is amazingly simple to do, and you get nice spam filtering to boot.

The one tricky part seems to be finding the option to get the free version.

I tried using the pro version, and did not see any real benefits, but perhaps it's worth it for large companies.
Another good rum for the price is Flor De Caña from Nicaragua. Usually around $20 a bottle for the 4 year aged rum, but the 5 yr, and 7 yr are affordable as well.
Hey I know you! Hit me up on Skype or GMail and we'll catch up.

Also, what's the inkscape alignment you're talking about?
When you want to upgrade to a solid rubber toy hammer, see:

http://baetzler.de/humor/paging_game.html
And "Manchester United Football Club is going to win the Premiership" sounds to me as incorrect as "Manchester United is going to win the Premiership"

No matter what justification you use, "<football team> is..." will sound wrong to english speakers in the UK, Aus, NZ and a couple of other places (bar the person higher up in this thread who says they never notice it :))
There's no reason that you can't use another ORM/ODM/ORM-like interface, simply import it.

Cursebird (http://cursebird.com/) is powered by Mongo via MongoEngine (http://mongoengine.org/) and Redis via redis-py (http://github.com/andymccurdy/redis-py). None of the Django apps have a models module.
Gold is not flatline, nor stable, especially when adjusted for inflation (CPI-U). Gold, like money, is based on faith. People expect it is a limited resource, but in reality, the price of gold simply hasn't always been at a point where it is profitable to mine more of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment
You can opt out of other networks in bulk here: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
I wonder if the passwords changed. You could have made your $25 back, and then some.
> He has an entire song (with some Notorious Big dubbed in) talking about never getting lazy to keep working and 'treat your last like your first.'

My 1st song ... favorite of mine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_1st_Song
I picked Django because:

* The documentation was better than Rails
* Python is more useful outside of Django than Ruby is outside of Rails
* The Python syntax seemed easier to read

Since then, I've become a big fan of Django and Python. With that said, plenty of smart people are using Rails. I agree with some of the other commenters that you should do the tutorial for each framework before deciding.

As for jobs, both Rails and Django have tons of open positions available and hot startups using them.
As fantastic as this office is, I'd hate to work in a environment where anybody can freely look over my shoulder at any time. I'll take privacy and a dull office over this any time. We've managed to satisfy this concern (http://www.mojalbum.com/popcom/popcom-office) and I'm really happy about our office.
Tools for maintaining privacy on the Web
What an utterly random and unprovoked denigration of activists.

Claiming activists primarily generate "moral satisfaction" is like claiming that the primary output of entrepreneurs is ego. It doesn't just miss the big picture, it misses everything.
I've helped people into their cars by using a hatchet blade to bend the door just enough to take a long rod and press the "unlock" button. I learned to do this on my own car, and would demonstrate to anyone who thinks that bending metal is a Bad Thing.
It's not mentioned in the article, but Loongson 3 adds instructions specifically to support Intel emulation. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson):

Loongson 3 adds over 200 new instructions to speed up x86 instruction execution at a cost of 5% of the total die area. The new instructions help QEMU translate x86 instructions by lowering the overhead of executing x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With additional improvements in QEMU from ICT, Loongson-3 achieves an average of 70% the performance of executing native binaries when running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks.
It would have been nice if the incident prompted actual public discourse of the difficult issues involved, but instead the media went for the jugular, Google went into damage control mode and the general public didn't get any wiser. I think if Google had taken the high road in this case, they would have had a pretty good chance of coming out on top, but I can't blame them for chickening out (and lying).

The reaction to the whole affair demonstrates pretty clearly that most people expect their internet traffic to be private, regardless of how easy it is to intercept, a detail to which they are oblivious. As others have pointed out, some degree of voluntary respect for privacy and property is necessary in a civil society.

On the other hand, there are limits on how far we are expected to go to respect those rights. For example, if you have no signs, fences, or intrinsic indicators of ownership on your land, it may not be reasonable to expect people not to trespass. If you leave an old chair on the sidewalk, you probably can't call it theft when someone takes it away. If you are having a loud conversation in a public place, you should expect others to listen in, and so on.

There is presently very little consensus on which expectations are reasonable with regard to info tech. There is obviously a huge rift between the technoratti and the layperson, but neither of those subsets has a stable consensus either. The domain is changing too fast for even experts to establish lasting standards.

In the particular matter of wireless data, I would hope, ultimately, that nobody will expect data they are broadcasting through the air, for 100 meters in every direction to be private, especially when that supposed privacy could be breached as an unintended side effect of various benign activities, and when the capability to encrypt the data is readily available to everyone.
I've encountered this same problem multiple times.

The fix: don't buy the domain until you are ready to launch the project. This allows you to build without having to adapt your project to a domain name. It's much easier to find a domain that describes your project after it has been completed. It also saves you money if you never carry out your grand ideas.
An interesting bug. It could be blamed on any number of pieces along the way, and it can be fixed in any number of ways as well.
As a professional Rails developer, I will try to answer all your points from a pro rails point of view. Granted, I have dabbled with Django and found it satisfying also.

* Adoption - Rails is being heavily adopted, especially with the startup community, but also state agencies, hospitals etc.

* Community - Rails has a strong community of core devs, plugins devs, conferences, books etc.

* Jobs - Tons of Jobs in my experience. We have a hard time finding good Rails/Ruby devs. I have checked the market, seems like there are plenty of Rails jobs across the country. Check out: http://jobs.37signals.com/

* Scalability - Yes, Rails can scale. Check out: http://rails100.pbworks.com/Alexa+Rankings Ever heard of Hulu, JustinTV or Big Cartell?

* Fun - Ruby was designed for programmer happiness