skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What part of Silicon Valley should I move to?
Ok so this post has been coming for sometime, however today was one of those days when I realized that I am inherently more productive when not surrounded by people who constantly call me for petty computer problems that I frankly, do not have time for and do not have the heart to charge for.

I am a 20-something (straight) white male who loves all things tech, I am not prejudice or homophobic and I love a great conversation, book or business deal more than any woman I have ever met. I feel that the valley is where I need to be (maybe more for my sanity than anything) I grew up in the south (Louisiana) and have lived here all my life but am ready for a change.

I am planning and have been planning for over 6 months now to move to San Francisco. I am a freelancer and have been developing for almost 10 years now but only professionally for about 3-3.5. I have plenty of work and customers that will continue to use me no matter the location I am in physically. I can reasonably afford to live several years without much fuss or being cash strapped.

I want to go to the valley because I cannot have a boss, I HAVE to work for myself and I want to start some new and innovative companies in the heart of SV. So I am asking you guys where I should move in SV to meet interesting, intelligent hackers who can help me further myself in my endeavors into technology? I would ideally like to be in a place where I can meet just as many great minds in a coffee shop as I can by attending tech workshops and seminars. I am cheap by nature but as long as rent is under $2000 or so per month I will be comfortable paying it without hassle. Please help me figure out what place would be the most fitting to my nature.

Thanks in advance for the help HN
GDB is great, but valgrind is even quicker at diagnosing segfaults.
That's what I came here to say. You almost might as well not use SSL at all if you're not going to set the secure flag, because the same vulnerability that makes "FireSheep" work also allows you to intercept requests and coerce cookies out of them.

Of course, there's no trivially installable exploit with a pretty UI that plugs into Firefox to do that yet, so it'll be at least another few years before anyone takes that attack seriously.
"Believe me failing sucks really bad but there are no repeatable patterns that lead to startup success."

Maybe not, but there are definitely repeatable patterns that lead to startup failure. Time familiarizing yourself with them can be time well-spent.
The labs for that course look awesome. Seems like a great way to tie together OS and computer architecture material.
Compared to you, most people seem dumb
How to Read Men's Body Language if He’s Into You
To understand if a man is really interested in you, watch his body language. You need to know how to read a man’s body language, observe him when he is around you and it can reveal if he is interested in you.
Activation Costs and Procrastination
And since everybody does it, how is this perspective naïve? How would it be unexpected to see Microsoft sabotaging web applications since they can run on every device regardless of the OS/browser and that eliminates their grip on customers?
Flask looks similar to Ruby's Sinatra: http://www.sinatrarb.com/

@OP: Personally I think Python has a lot of syntax fluff, whereas Ruby couldn't get simpler in that regard; even forgetting about the LOC and focusing on the respective DSLs:

Python:

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/hi")
def hello():
return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()

Ruby:

require 'sinatra'
get '/hi' do
"Hello World!"
end

Don't get me wrong, I sometimes use Python, it's a great language, especially for non-web things, but I always jump at the chance to use Ruby. It's not the fastest language (though compared to Python nowadays, it doesn't lag behind that bad), but it's the nicest by far I've ever had the chance to work with.
Other answers are also useful because other people can learn about the law that way. Yes, get a lawyer, but also a lot of the advice is interesting and educational as well.
There was a cautionary tale not long ago of a company that did this with their ads. Only to discover that the number of people finishing their signup page remained constant.

Driving traffic to your page that is uninterested in your content does nobody any good. You need to figure out how to get traffic that is interested in your content.
We've used Pyrit in a cluster configuration like this: http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Pyrit_setup and a bunch of Nvidia cards.
Apple plays a long game, and they're not afraid to toss stuff under the bus. Now consider what these Apple engineers might now be working on, if not Oracle's Java and JVM pieces. Some language past Java? A replacement for Objective C? Both?
There don't seem to be many. But I believe it has been used quite extensively in internally-developed applications, never intended for the mass market. The same goes for Swing as well.

So although end consumers might not see them, it will certainly take a long time for SWT or Swing to die. These are the same class of applications that are keeping IE 6 alive, after all.

Does this matter to Apple? I doubt it's significant, as most of these applications are probably running on Windows desktops already. Probably more significant is the legion of Java developers that have been vocal proponents of Macs over recent years. The numbers of such developers might not be so great in an absolute sense, but the amount of noise they create is disproportionate. And, more importantly, they are more motivated to build interesting stuff for the platform they use.
It's most of the way there, but not quite. For example, one frequently wants to do a hybrid approach to mutability where construction of the data structure is destructive, but then further manipulation is persistent. ST-backed arrays will get you part of the way there, but there's no easy way to efficiently unsafely freeze (the unsafe coercion from mutable to immutable) recursive mutable structures into persistent structures. You have to very carefully make sure the internal representations match up, and it's tricky enough that it's not done very often. I guess my real point is there is a cognitive cost for respecting the fine distinctions that Haskell makes you think about, which discourages certain styles of programming, but is good for the mind. :-)
Joomla. I have a photographer friend who makes websites on the side and she doesn't have a clue how any of it works under the hood.
It's a near certainty that Facebook knew, understood, and accepted this vulnerability, since it's as old as the hills and Facebook employs and works with many smart web security people.
A surprisingly large number of companies have their own STL implementations from Investment Banks to Telecoms companies. Often because they're doing funky things (often related to memory allocation) which would be outright impossible to do in languages like Java or C#.
We learned x86 first and then MIPS. We went in pretty deep with MIPS though, going so far as running our programs in a simulator which visually showed the states of the different pipeline stages as the instructions were executed. It was a pretty interesting course, actually. At the end, the lecturer gave us a competition where the person who could sort a list of numbers in the fewest cycles won. I implemented quicksort and I think it took something like 10K cycles to sort 100 numbers. I think the median in the class was 20K and the best was 6K. Fun :)
Hyperpolyglot: 5-way reference sheet for Standard ML, OCaml, F#, Scala, Haskell
dcancel, thanks for great post... not really optimistic, but practical and realistic thoughts.
"Crossing the Chasm" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm) is part of the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. You're expected to have some struggles as you try and go from the early adopter to the mainstream market.
While we're at it let's leave the drama alone too. I wasn't crying ripoff, I was using it in a design context. And from that POV, the drawing code is almost a per-pixel copy of the Dock's. Which, wouldn't happen by accident.
The Week in Self-Storage
MVars are for sharing data between threads. IORefs are mutable boxes.
I'm a student at Stevens Institute of Technology...

As an introductory language, you are taught Java but when you move up to higher level courses such as Algorithms, Data Structures, etc you will us C.

I've also taught myself C++ and I prefer it over C but I have no issue working in any language provided I learn the syntax.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, seems like a legitimate question to me! I was a little leery of checking it out at first, too, but curiosity got the better of me...

Maybe someone who has developed a FF extension can lay my worries to rest -- could this have, say, a built in key logger which sends that data to the author?

I downloaded the source code from github and glanced through it, enough to comfort me somewhat, but I wasn't super thorough.

All that said, EricButler seems to be an HN member in good standing, and someone like that wouldn't do anything malicious, right? :-)
Our conception of what people are is dominated by the statistical average.
Go visit first and see what areas click for you. This topic has also been hashed out a number of times here, so search the archives.
> Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no?

GNOME has never clearly defined the confines of what kind of differentiation is "doing GNOME", and what kind is "breaking away from GNOME". There's also no clear answer to the question of whether GNOME should be a complete end-user product, or a supermarket for makers of end-user products to pick and choose components from, or something in between, or something else.

Every distribution patches GNOME. Just about nobody ever uses GNOME as it comes in the tarballs, except for development and bug triage. Moblin, Maemo (now together as MeeGo), OLPC, Nokia and others have shipped vastly differentiated systems meant for different niches built on the GNOME stack, without much anybody labeling them as infidels. If people suddenly hold Ubuntu to a different standard solely on the grounds of differentiation, that's not fair.

Differentiation or fragmentation are not going to be the actually problematic parts of the switch to Unity from a community standpoint. The two worst bits of news are: 1) that as an unaffiliated contributor who intends to fix or improve a major part of Ubuntu's default desktop environment, you didn't have to sign a disturbing contributor agreement that doesn't guarantee the freedom of your code in the future until now, but from now on, you probably will 2) Ubuntu's default desktop environment is now a single-stakeholder product that one company will exert very strong control over, regardless of how well they handle the community side. The latter is also incredibly good news UX-wise, but I digress.
Life after Google: Brad Neuberg's HTML5 start-up
Coffeescript [1], Slick [2], Less.js [3] ... great hammers!

-----

[1]: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

[2]: http://github.com/mootools/slick

[3]: http://github.com/cloudhead/less.js
SO link on this type of thing: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3805772/mms-gateway-provi...

One other option would be to find a service that will forward MMS to email. Then you can write a connector to login to that email account and post the message contents.
See the comments at the bottom of http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... for a practical example. See also http://xkcd.com/763/.
Your core argument still seems to be for security through obscurity. I'd rather have a problem be widely known, and addressed, rather than not widely known and ignored.
Extending Rails with Railties
Ask HN: How do you feel about shorthand?
The age of moleskine mania has thankfully mostly left us by now; only a couple years ago it seemed like the whole internet had agreed that one simply could not get any work done unless one had a Fisher Space Pen and one of several very specific notebooks at hand at all times. Nevertheless it seems that some people still do find it useful to keep a notebook with them, and are generally still interested in the process of writing things down—even while the majority seems to think that writing by hand is a skill as worthy of personal development as, say, horse-buggy skills.

For several years now I've been developing my own system of shorthand. It started as, simply, my own system of letter shapes, because I had terrible handwriting—I just devised a single, consistent, attractive character set for myself and then trained myself to use it exclusively and always, so that my handwriting was more attractive and even.

But as these things go—informed by a personal interest in historical text systems—I started to include extra-alphabetical characters into the mix. First an ampersand, then a couple special double characters, a dollar sign; quickly I moved on to ligatures—some pre-existing in the Roman alphabet, but some of my own creation. And then characters for common words, prefixes, suffixes. I started using superscripts and subscripts and drawing inspiration from historical scripts like old Anglo Saxon writing, Tironian Notes, the Abbreviationes of the Middle Ages, et cetera. And so now I've got a relatively sophisticated system with several hundred different characters in it, and a whole set of rules of composition.

Partly this is an exercise in efficiency—my writing is much shorter and faster than plain English—but it's also an aesthetic undertaking. I do derive a lot of artistic pleasure from it, from the system of it, and from the look of it on the page.

So my question is: does anybody care about this? Of all the people I've told about it, many of them thought it looked awesome when I showed it to them, but only one person ever expressed any interest in learning it for himself, and so I don't even know how learnable it is. I wonder if there's some geeky demographic out there on the web who would find value in my documenting the whole thing, writing a couple explanatory essays, scanning all the characters, etc., et cetera. If there isn't, by the way, that's ok. Like I said, I am quite proud of it for its own sake and it's fun to trot out at geeky parties. But if I thought that I'd get any kind of response from the web at large, I'd think hard about putting in the (non-trivial) effort to really document the whole thing and try to make it as learnable as possible.
As I said, faith is what drives the value of gold, as well as money. I personally put faith in the US Dollar, you put faith in gold. This drives each's comparative value in turn. And it's the amount of faith that is reflected in the conversation prices.
I have never seen anyone mix their custom memory manager with STL. Also, who said anything about Java or C#?
FORM+CODE: A book for both sides of your brain
> The hotspots are too general. I can't see if users are skipping parts, or re-watching parts. And if they are, how many times are they re-watching.

Yes, I think you're right - that is your USP. Do you track pauses? And what do you think the significance of a pause is? (just out of interest).
Hack Harvard - an incubator for Harvard web apps
I saw the "60 Minutes" segment. The people who are looking for jobs are the same kind of folks who are out of work across the country. Think mid-career middle managers who don't have technical skills: accounting managers, sales directors and VPs of this and that.

As companies consolidated operations, downsized and offshored, many of these folks thought they'd retire at the company they were at only to have a rude wake-up call two years back.

It isn't just in silicon valley, I know a former VP of software who now is a real estate agent (specializing in short sales) and a sales trainer who's been out of work (forever it seems) and others who've been bounced around. I think the "60 Minutes" crew concentrated on SV because the tech sector was supposed to "save" us and California has one of the highest unemployment rates in the US.

The truth is that a lot of these people thought they'd retire from the job they held before the recession. It's thinking I thought had died a generation before, but there were thousands who've gotten caught off guard with stale skills.
You're being more tolerant. When you're building a high performance game engine for fixed target hardware, the last thing you want is to be doubling up the size of your arrays.
Linux desktops will never die.
Not necessarily a clever hack (nothing new here), just a user-friendly interface.
> it also prevents people with absolutely valid (but free) certificates from offering perfectly good encryption on their sites. This warning is misguided and does more to prevent the secure use of the web than anything else.

Accepting self-signed certificates would not be a good solution. Anybody can sign a certificate with "www.facebook.com" in the Common Name field. Your communication would be encrypted, but you'd be communicating with the wrong guy. SSL was designed to provide both encryption and identification. Self-signed certificates provide only encryption.

Besides, certificates are already quite cheap if you know where to buy them. RapidSSL costs as low as $12/yr, which is just slightly more than the cost of a domain name, and it's recognized by all browsers including IE6. I wouldn't consider it "prohibitively expensive" if it costs less than two lunches.

There are, of course, many other ways in which the existing infrastructure is inadequate. Take a look at the list of CAs that your browser automatically trusts. It's a mess. But it's not easy to implement an alternative that can provide both encryption and identification with the degree of reliability that the current infrastructure has. Some kind of social trust mechanism might work, but we're a long way from standardizing on anything of the sort.
Which is why reddit's use of user created and managed sub-communities (ie, subreddits) is such a brilliant way to pre-emptively deal with this before it happens.
Interestingly enough, this switch is barely usable with the iPad in the standard Apple case. Can't wait for the software button.
Ask HN: What's wrong or missing in your favorite OS?
Whether you're a Windows, Linux, or Mac person, most hackers are very opinionated about their preferred OS.

My question is what "feature" (or lack thereof) do you secretly hate about it? You know, that thing you won't admit in _____ vs. _____ arguments?
That was the dotcom bubble for ya. Everybody was swinging for the bleachers and using VC money to pay the bills. It made some sense - you had something brand new and the first-mover advantage was a big advantage. So the important thing was to take your idea to product and worry about self-sufficiency after you had customers.

At some point you have to wean yourself off the VC money. Some of these companies were set up more to land investors than customers, and even though they understood, intellectually, in the long term the money had to come from the customer, it's not an easy shift.
I track pauses by users, and pauses due to buffering. So far I'm not using. Can't yet think of how this data can be turned to useful information.
Thanks for the recap, I enjoyed solving this when it came out! I'd be interested in some more numbers if you're willing to publish them. How many people completed each level, how many people attempted it. How much email correspondence you received from people who completed the entire thing, etc etc.
SGX-ASX merge in $11b deal [Singaporean & Australian stock exchanges]
Sorry, you are correct; I should have been more specific: the memory management overhead was tremendous. For every object added and removed, the vector and all of it's data was basically reallocated, moved, deleted, repeat. Moving to a fixed size array in C++ I saw an easy 50% drop in CPU usage.

I think STL is a great set of libraries, but I also think they're sometimes too easy to use if you don't consider alternative implementations and the impact of each way.
If you have a Mac (fast Mac), Coda is very Mac-like and friendly. However it slows my 1 year old Macbook pro down quite a bit, so it's by no measure "fast". More of a text editor too, really.
Windows|Mac|Linux

http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+is...
Wow, I use one before_filter on my Heroku hosted app. Am I doing something wrong here, or is this just Heroku's awesomeness?

def redirect_to_ssl
redirect_to :protocol => "https://" unless (request.ssl? or request.local?)
end
They are doing it so that their products, from an iPod Touch to an iPhone to a iPad all have a consistent way of handling screen lock and mute.

On release of the iPad, iOS4 (which contains a screen lock software control via double-click of the home button) was not yet ready.

Therefore for the time being they repurposed the mute switch to be a temporary screen lock until they had finished implementing the software implementation. The other option they had was to leave out screen lock completely at the start (which is what the original press materials showed for a while) but I think we can all imagine the outrage in the press & reviews if there was no way to lock the screen at all, so they repurposed the mute switch for the time being.
The Hex-Rays decompiler would probably make short work of the bomb lab, but I don't think IDA Pro would make much of a difference.

For disassembling a large program, sure, but the program and the functions themselves are relatively small. They already know the basic structure of the bomb because we give them a C skeleton that calls all of the functions. The string pointer fetching would probably be the most useful, but once they figure out how to do it once, they only need to do it four or so more times.
I don't see why it wouldn't make sense. As long as it's handled in a careful way. You can pay extra to expedite all kinds of government services, why not SEC investigations?
anyone know of the main differences between setting up in the usa vs canada? is it better to set up in one or the other (if you're coming from the canadian side)?

anyone set up shop in both?
>with many smart web security people

that is exactly my point. "Web security" being treated as a separate area where only specific people specialize instead of being treated as a basic fundamental prerequisite for a web developer.
The new Rails 3 router makes it super easy to require SSL for certain routes: http://kyleslattery.com/entries/requiring-ssl-using-route-co...
expediting other gov't services = getting a few things stamped

can't work with SEC, since they have to do interviews etc
I think reputation matters, but this is a very hard switch to make.

I like and need everything Jason is offering. I'd trust him with my wallet, my house keys and my web site.

But moving my site isn't easy. Media Temple has done very well by me. McVeary @ mt has a great reputation too. And moving is a pain in the butt when there isn't a severely painful need.

What I would like is to stay put, but get some help with the management of my site. Just like I pay Sucuri $20/month to protect my site from viruses, I'd like to pay someone to figure out how to properly cache my site and avoid bad plugin and so on.
The language of statistics
Scalable Django Hosting - Tiny Flock goes into private beta