skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hell, yes!

But you miss two things here. The less important one is just that the Gnome brand, as it is, sucks. Not because the experience is bad, it is just not well defined. I.e. you cannot say "this is not Gnome" or "this is Gnome". Which _is_ hard if you want consistency.

This point is alone the Gnome's guys fault though and needs to be handled there. If Gnome can come up with a definite set of rules what they consider fine, everyone else can either agree or use the source, make it "different" - but without calling it Gnome anymore. Think the Firefox brand.

The bigger problem is something else though: The samples I gave _break_ existing applications. They are not only UI bling or moving window buttons around, they are patches to functionality - and sometimes poorly done.

Now - again: They have all the right in the world to do that. But unfortunately our world isn't perfect and this lead to several problems in the past: The (downstream only) patch sucked, causing loss of functionality. Ubuntu users empirically complain not at all (those that are less tech savvy), or in Launchpad only (which would be great for bugs that are Ubuntu specific, but only if the patch itself is maintained well).

This leads to a good share of the huge Ubuntu user base to think that this application of yours is crap - while really just someone thought that an integrated menu of some sorts would be a nice idea and can easily be tacked on to every upstream Gnome package.

Combined these two issues shine: It's supposed to be Gnome and it breaks in subtle ways -> Bad Gnome? Do what you want, UI or otherwise, but take the blame and show some respect towards the free time of the upstream guys.. You know what Uncle Ben said about great power..
Just a couple of words of warning on government contracts.

1) Some will require a government clearance. This will take time, and you will be competing against folks who already have the clearance. So you will need to convince them you are worth the wait - a notoriously difficult proposition unless you already have work with them.

2) The timeline from lead to getting paid is long. I would expect at least a month or two from when you start working on the contract until the money comes in, to say nothing of the time to actually get started on the contract.

3) The end of the year is a tough time to try to get added to a contract - everyone is running out of money. In some cases you might get lucky and find a project with a surplus that is looking to spend it before the end of the year, but in my experience those are usually the exceptions as opposed to the rule.

In short, unless you already have the paperwork in hand, I wouldn't bother if you are only looking for 6-12 months.
I hate that. It really perplexes me when things pretending to be News Papers leave off dates.
If caps are shouting, I'm good with this being shouted from the rooftops. Thanks for posting it.
Entrepreneurs: Struggling to Recruit Software Engineers
Seems like what you're talking about is a baseline grid.
The responsibility is with every admin that setup an insecure access point, not with every security researcher to stay quiet about widely known and widely exploited vulnerabilities.

This isn't new. Point and click tools for doing this existed 10 years ago. Making a firefox plugin just pushed it back to the top of the headlines. This is actually a good thing because if word spreads more people will be aware of the already existing risk and will be more security conscious.

Does this mean everyone should stop logging into their personal accounts over unsecure wifi at school or starbucks? ABSOLUTELY.

Hopefully this new attention on an old hole will motivate more admins to fix their networks and more users to realize how vulnerable they are.
Wonder what effect this will have on
1) the existing user base. Will it further accelerate the defection of users or won't matter?
2) the retained employees. What if a few "wanted" players leave voluntarily?

It'll be interesting to see how they plug and reverse the leak in traffic.
I don't think Apple's decision is going to be a death-rattle to Java on OS X, but it provides an interesting perspective.

If nothing else, it's provided the groundwork for my next software development project. The vast majority of tools my industry uses to perform a specific type of testing are Java-based, and more and more folks I run into are using Macs.
I agree with this point for sure. Frameworks are great if you are going to leverage a lot of the libraries/modules. But often in practice you never do. So then you end up taking on the issues with using a large codebase. Which is that when you find a bug, it's very hard to trace through code to figure out what's going on.

You are investing in learning a specific library/framework rather than the low level details that are on average what you'll need more because in practice you don't get to use the same framework all the time if you switch companies or projects as they tend to have entirely different frameworks or even languages on the backend.

I like how Marcin Wichiary though in this ajaxian.com article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/web-ninja-interview-marcin-wicha...

He basically builds all his libraries from scratch for each project which he can do quickly because he knows what he's doing and can of course leverage his other code for reference. Each iteration simplifies what turns out to be bloated and creates a new code base more matched to the problem he's trying to solve.
On a positive note, at least a lot of people will be updating to the latest secure version of Firefox to run it.
Without having tried Unity, it looks nice. I'd much rather use an OSX-inspired GUI than a WinXP-inspired GUI. :P

I do wish, though, there was more willingness in the OSS community to push the boundaries of UI, using completely new ideas such as 10/GUI: http://10gui.com/
Ask HN: Can anyone reccommend a good way to publish MMS messages to a web page
Hi,

A client brought this up to me yesterday. She seems pretty set on it being doable, but I can't seem to find a service that meets the client's needed criteria:

1. Client signs up for a service that gives them a number to text to.
2. Client makes text # public (on contest page)
2. User takes a photo with their phone
3. Someone then texts it to a number
(I am highly recommending that the client admin the photos)
4. The service (whichever it may be) then takes the mms and gives the developer a way to access the texts and output them on a page.

Thanks in advance, if anyone knows.
I have very very rarely used photoshop macros.

Obviously power users will be hard to make switch, however there is a whole lot of people paying for "less powerful" code editors because they have a much lower barrier to entry and do the things way want to do better, bringing up textmate vs emacs at least to me strengthens the argument.
While I completely agree, I wouldn't consider personal experience a valid data point for generalizing the whole world.
There's something called Server Name Indication that allows name-based virtual hosting with https. There's some good information here about it: http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI

The problem is browser support isn't quite where it needs to be, with IE only supporting it in 7.0+ on Vista or later (IE 6 or IE anything running on Windows XP is out of luck).
It's a legal thing. He mentioned his software was for the healthcare field. He has to, or chooses to, end all emails like that because it's common to the field.
Oh boy, there will be plenty of people and businesses who are willing to pay $50/mo for someone to take care of all technical details. It's absolutely trivial amount for any business and totally inside the reasonable limits of serious hobby bloggers (prosumers as they call them in the camcorder industry)

Based on my observations in Europe, reading blogs is hitting mainstream, the prime example being fashion blogs that already gathering more daily uniques than websites of established news sites.

It's a kind of funny, as many early adopters think that blogging is passé. But the truth is that the whole web economy and web-based marketing is just about to start. There's plenty of opportunities to just pack and serve existing technologies into super-usable servings. WPEngine will be a success.
I dont get it, why they are doing this.
I use this button all the time, it is very convenient to have this function as a hardware button as opposed to software on the screen.

You already have a mute button, a long press on the volume button achieves exactly that. This is a surprising, and IMO a poor usability choice by Apple.
I second that. I didn't have an appreciation for C until I took a few college classes that focused on developing relatively complex embedded systems in assembly -- now I really, really like C.
Exactly. I'm not a blackhat and my only "hacking" consists of forcing myself into my own systems which I've stupidly locked myself out of, yet I've managed to do much that this plugin can do.

The most un-ethical thing I have done was to take one of the OLPC XO laptops and convert it into a MITM machine, rebroadcasting the SSID it connects to while routing and logging all traffic anyone who connects to it generates. It took a weekend to setup using pre-existing tools and scripts and can be deployed anywhere I want within 2 minutes and run for up to 6 hours hidden in the bottom of my backpack. It was a fun experiment, and surely made me more aware of just how vulnerable I was outside of my home network.

Another point of interest, this weekend I hacked on a Minecraft bot for the Alpha version. In order to understand and dissect the connection protocol I needed to recreate, I used wireshark to dump and parse how the client authenticates and connects to the server. Even that transmits your username and password in plaintext.
Agreed.

David is certainly entitled to his opinion, but to assume that one email from a single recruiter is representative of an entire industry and the life work of tens of thousands of people (if not more) is simply ignorant.

HN'ers - throw down your horror and/or success stories related to working with recruiters!
if a page contains mixed content (secured and nonsecured), browsers will complain (and rightfully so). If you want to go the SSL route, then you'll have to serve all assets over SSL too.

Also note that SSL doesn't really work with name based virtual hosts (Host:-header), so every site you enable SSL with requires its own IP address.

With addresses in general running out quickly, this might be a problem for you (or your host).
There's quite a bit of C / C++ in the curriculum at Waterloo, although many of the courses that accept assignments in C++ also accept Java submissions so I don't know the actual breakdown of what students choose to submit most of their code in. I chose to write all my assignments in C (or very minimal C++) whenever possible. I might be a sick individual though.
It should be noted that Wordpress implements SSL for wordpress.com correctly, but any self-hosted blogs from wordpress.org need to be individually configured.
I imagine most STL classes still don't fit game programming paradigms. My very first experience with this was using vectors to store vertices as an intermediary before sticking them into a vertex buffer. Granted, my math was awful, but the memory overhead was absurd. I constantly find myself over using STL in my programs because of how easy it is, then redoing it to use standard C/C++ arrays, linked lists, etc. for efficiency.

Ranting aside, I'm most curious to look at any optimizations they've made.
I really believe that hacking is a good way to get students excited about systems programming and working at the systems level. I also noticed a stack smashing lab. Good stuff.
That photographer needs to learn how to use the appropriate aperture. Wrongly-focused photographs hurt my eyes.
I run VB, FF, thunderbird, adium, MS Office and also have 4GB, with no rebooting problems. It maybe Netbeans; I have no experience with it.
Thanks again Greplin for putting this on! Like other people said, I had a blast doing this on a Friday night, and definitely would love to do it again (even without the possibility of a job :) ).
A few fellow HNers created a way for people to keep track of how their politicians perform on certain issues, including Rep. Mike Pence (http://www.votereports.org/politicians/mike-pence) who was mentioned in the article.

We want to ground people in voting based on their representatives/candidates actions.

It'll be interesting to see how their ratings will change from now till 2012.
I'm a physicist, and I use Python (with scipy/numpy when appropriate) when I can get away with it (ie for small to medium-sized calculations).

For big calculations, though, where what you can do is limited by performance, there's no getting away from C++ or Fortran. Python has a huge performance overhead (I have learned this the hard way).
That's a nice app that's linked there, but has anybody made a version for android yet? That would be really fun -- and considering the number of hot spots in major cities would really take things to the next level. ;)
Orrick offers startups a package that costs nothing until they raise 500K+ in funding, and then they take their fee.
I just wanted to echo the feature request, layers (and nested layers at that) would be a huge huge feature for me, thats pretty much why I dont use gimp.

and being able to see your selections as you drag for a miltiple selection would be cool too, I think thats part of what I was talking about before with 'feeling nice'
Aaaand I just stopped using Ubuntu as my desktop distro.
Thank you, and I completely agree if I was aiming to be the next eBay execution would be absolutely paramount. However, my (working) prototype is inherently novel and specific to the extent that there is limited scope for messing up the execution, and as a corollary there is a limited number of ways in which you would use/consume it. Sorry to be vague but I'll release more info one of these days once I figure out where to go with it!
You can't talk about Turing equivalence without acknowledging the Turing tarpit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit), which reminds us that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
This is how you recruit for your stealth stage startup
Not sure if I will ever understand why anyone would sit on the floor to do anything with a computer when their is nice chairs available, and yet they designed space just for that.
I'm also a TA for this class at my university, and I think it is excellent. In fact, I think many of our grad students would benefit from taking it - the course emphasizes understanding the whole system stack in ways that other courses (such as a classic OS course) do not.

The bomb and buffer overflow labs are probably the most interesting to the HN community, but the shell project is what I consider the most important project in the course. (We have five projects: bomb, buffer overflow, shell, memory allocator, web server.) Our shell assignment is quite a bit different from the original in that we parse the command line for them (putting the commands and pipelines into appropriate data structures), but they have to do everything else, including pipes and I/O redirection.

Email me if anyone is interested in learning more about how we do our course.
Uber publishes the Cease and Desist
This is true but not relevant to the discussion because the attack in question depends sniffing clear-text wireless traffic at the local access point.

Tunneling over SSH protects your traffic for that portion of the network (and out past your ISP as far as the remote end of the SSH tunnel).

An attacker would need different tools and resources to intercept your traffic between remote hosts.
Nice UI's can be done on the mac with swing. As you mention they require passion. Take a look at what this guy has built with Swing.
http://code.google.com/p/macwidgets/
Yeah, hopefully they've made a conservative income forecast and they won't have to lay off even more people. Better for everyone concerned to do it all in one fell swoop.
I also like http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+X+...
All you need to know is right here on this DVD

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/

It's called Startup.com and shows the massive initial growth of Govworks web-site (300+ staff), but then things go South and their competitors catch them up and put them out of business. One of my favourite documentaries and gives good insight into the dot com bubble burst of 2000-2001.
> In fact when we do change up our messaging it may be split down the middle. One part newbie friendly WordPress and one part enterprise level services for a fraction of the cost.

I think that'd be smart. One page of features and benefits on why an established blogger should migrate to WP Engine and how much easier and better it'll be there, and one page on how WP Engine makes things super easy and high quality for people just starting out.

You're charging premium pricing on the low end, so you'd need to justify that with a lot of features about easy and straightforward it is, and why someone should host with you for $50/month instead of $10/month for shared hosting.

The message on the established end would have to be different - about better economies of scale and lowered money or time costs. They're really two very different market segments - I saw your service, and thought it would be suitable and good for a newbie, and something I'd recommend to a non-tech-savvy individual who wants things to just work. I didn't see the value on the high end to migrate there, but it sounds like you do have that value - the challenge now would be to communicate it on the page. It might be easier if you wrote different marketing materials/positioning for each segment. Good luck, it's a cool service and you guys all seem like very good people, and I wish you the best with the company.
I'm 26 and finished my M.S. in CompSci a couple years ago. All of my friends I graduated with from my under grad Love writing C and C++. Most of us ended up in jobs doing C and/or C++ for a living. I think a lot of this has to do with our 'upbringing'...

We went to a super small university (1500 people) and we got to do summer internships and independent study course work with one of our professors writing/modifying embedded wireless drivers in NetBSD. This resulted in a group of students that were more proficient at reading and understanding huge bodies of existing code when compared to students I've TA'd and worked with. This also means we all enjoy working in C (Though honestly most of us prefer C++). We work in jobs like embedded GPS devices. Embedded development for Televisions. Jet engine test software. Embedded signal / sensor processing and integration. It's only now, later on in life, that I realize most of the other people in these fields with us aren't CS guys but rather CE or EE.

tl;dr...
Find a student, just 1, that is really into this and then find more students from his university... It's likely the environment / layout of the university's program is largely responsible.
I'm ashamed to admit that I completely misread that title. Rather badly in fact, lol.
I absolutely agree that a control panel window is the solution, not drop down menus. Drop downs should only be used for a small number of objects and trees, lest someone move their mouse 2px north of a path and lose ten seconds of careful navigations.
It's a great movie. Also really funny and surprising just how little time/mind share/effort they seemed to spend on the actual product and users of it. Of course that could have been in the editing.
code.reddit.com
Hmm, when I complete my MSc in a few months I'll have a GAE web app to show for it. However I never expected that to get me a job, I figured I'd need to create about 5 webapps, and maybe a complex desktop app before I'd have a portfolio that screamed 'HIRE ME' (considering my lack of industry experience). I agree with the general premise but a borderline useless FOursquare app surely isn't going to impress much? (unless most graduates are a lot less able than I'm assuming)
On the web democracy does not give rise to real, long-tail diversity; it's just a quality filter.

I agree with your entire comment. I'd just add the word "currently" before the sentence indicated.

Just because it's that way now does not mean it always has to be that way. The web is either going to figure out the problem of dynamically changing due to minority opinion or we're going to have a tremendously huge social problem on our hands in a few decades.
Upvoted for causing me to learn about pleonasms.
MIPS was a bloody good processor, had SGI held their nerve they might be now where Itanic is today... Umm.
What is the best way to get an oil change at Midas? - brovise.com
I had never heard of IDA Pro before, so I just took a cursory look. I don't think it provides significantly more information than objdump does, which we explicitly tell the students to use.
In fairness, pretty much every user interface feature that isn't a command line has been copied from the mac at some point in the last 26 years.
Not necessarily. A platitude is a seemingly profound, but trite and unoriginal, even meaningless statement. They aren't necessarily useless. For example, to tell a bereaved widow that their significant other is "in a better place" is a platitude, but it serves its purpose.

I do question whether platitude is the correct word, but "useless platitude" is only a pleonasm if "useful platitude" is a contradiction, which I don't believe to be the case.
that dovetails nicely with other posts today on HN about how one can be a great programmer without knowing and understanding the systems fundamentals (ie. C, low level networking...) . Such programmers and their companies are fast in building cute web apps, yet fail to understand/model and as result correctly engineer what happens outside of the web app box supplied by the framework (for example like in this case, how it looks on the wire at transport and application layers)
Ask HN: Rate my webapp - VideoHeatMaps
I needed to see which parts of my screencastes viewers were interested in, and which parts were boring. And didn't want to pay wistia $40/month

So I wrote http://videoheatmaps.com

Would love your feedback.
clickable http://videoheatmaps.com
Some better than none: sync vs. async in ssjs
It's true, and that's sort of the point. My "argument" (as it was firmly tongue-in-cheek) was more literal than yours, just as yours was more literal than the hammer argument. The whole idea was to demonstrate that there's always a more apt metaphor. When you get to the point where you can't find a difference, it's not really a metaphor anymore.

The best part about metaphors is not the conclusions one can draw from the similarities between two things. It's the conclusions one can draw from the differences.

Also. for what it's worth, I think that quote applies just as well to human languages as to programming languages. Perhaps the metaphor itself might make a good metaphor for programming? :)
Pretty hilarious video for the new startup being let by Benchmark Capital's former Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Link seems to be dead