skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, some of the bikeshedding that goes on around UI gets ridiculous. I remember running into a quote board from very early (~2000) in Google's history. Marissa (who ended up in charge of the search UI anyways) said, "Maybe we should have a mailing list where anyone who's interested in UI can contribute" and then Amit (who came up with "Don't be evil", alongside Paul Buchheit) said "Bad idea. That's every engineer in the company."

On the plus side, you learn from many, many different perspectives this way. It's like Peter Norvig's advice in "Teach yourself to be a programmer in 10 years":

1.) Get involved in a language standardization effort.

2.) Have the good sense to get yourself off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.

Great way to learn, perhaps not such a great way to get things done.
Companies like Hover have a user/password scenario unlike e.g. an email provider: users only visit their site one/two times a year (to renew a domain or whatever).

So I wonder if they should instead allow "authentication-by-email". Basically, make it work just like current reset emails (with an embedded randomized link that allows access), but prevent the link from expiring.

Obviously that suggestion has a lot of holes in it, too, but it's something to consider, especially since it's not a new idea.

Either way, it's a real amateur move to do away with hashing.
I have a hunch (but no inside knowledge) that Facebook's big announcement Wednesday could go beyond the rumored video-chat-via-Skype to include other alliances.

If new ties to Apple are part of it – Facetime compatibility, perhaps? – GooPlus on iOS might be facing a big headwind.
Are we breaking Google?
Seems like an attempt to reinvent the _Permutation City_ argument. In any event, as formulated, I don't think it quite works:

> Since there are an infinite number of universes, an infinite number of dimensions, or an infinite number of non-identical universe “cycles”, there are an infinite number of particles and particle arrangements.

The last claim does not follow without additional assumptions about the nature of universes.
1966 prediction of the home computer
Now I REALLY wish iOS 5 had Facebook or Google+ integration and not this Twitter crap. Honestly, what percentage of people say to themselves "I have to post this picture to Twitter right now!" compared to those who want to post it to Facebook. Same applies for status updates.
As always, this is a complicated question - more complicated than probably intended.

Google certainly isn't seen as the "hip", "cool" place to be anymore. Google+ seems shiny and new, but as a whole, Google has this aura of being a place where creative, active developers get sucked into a black hole, and you never hear or see anything from them again.

I would love the chance to work with great people and to make a killer income there, but to work at Google I'd have to move to a different country, or move completely across the country I already live in. Both of those options are simply unacceptable right now - even if I was willing to jump willy-nilly, I have a significant other who has real ties to where we are right now.

I also seriously doubt that I'd get to work on something that interesting at a company so large.

That said, if Google offered me a large salary and the opportunity to work on my side projects full time - Hell yeah. You'd have to make a really good argument why anyone shouldn't take advantage of that! :)
Google+ vanity URL maker
Show HN: Anonymous functions in PHP
Trying to contain is not the same as not helping to spread.
I want to thank everyone who has replied so far. I have a huge blind spot in this regard. I was born with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth when it comes to clothes:

My mother sews beautifully and made a lot of my clothes as a child. She also has crazy mad shopping skills and routinely bought things for me as a kid without me trying them on. I would come home from school and there would be something hanging on my bedroom door and the question was not "does it fit?" it was "do you like it?" She still routinely buys clothes for some relatives without taking them with her. I do this kind of thing for my sons as well. My sister routinely bought clothes off the rack for ten years without necessarily bothering to try them on (I think this changed after she had a baby). When my sons were little, my mother sewed a lot of their clothes and mailed it to us. I occasionally took their measurements and let her know the updated measurements. She can buy you a winter coat for Christmas one year, mail it to you in another state and not see it again and buy gloves the following Christmas that are a perfect match in color (I don't have such amazing perfect color memory -- and the woman is blind in one eye).

I tend to give clothes short shrift, because it's not a big deal for me. A recent conversation with a friend made me realize that. I would like to do something, of some sort, in the clothing space. Still not sure what.

The feedback here is much appreciated.
"What the wife buys on her console, the husband pays for on his". Oh boy!
"why would your team not opt for things that ARE vetted as being secure, trusted, open, and have widespread adoption?"

It was a classic case of letting product management opinion over-ride engineering implications. Namely, on behalf of customer service, I went to bat - hard - with the engineers, to give our CSRs a completely effective way to handle inbound password requests in cases where customers no longer had access to their email account. I can't remember the exact conversation, but I could see the engineers at the time characterizing it as "being over-ruled". Long story short, brought forward almost two-years - we've got a new team on the project and I have a much greater appreciation of the subtleties and trade-offs and we've still got some work to do to fix my mistakes.

/r
Gandi is great and resilient. I know from personal communication with them that the Yes Men recommend using their domain services (they also favor joker.com, which is based in Germany -- I've had a good experience there as well, although Joker doesn't offer VPS services like Gandi).
Fort Lauderdale FL, Plumber, plumbing, services, service, company
Important features to look for in a web host
Each one of these high profile hacks makes me think we're inching closer to a non-free Internet everyday. How much longer will big business tolerate this before they start calling in favors from their pets in congress? It's going to start with something like mandatory minimum sentences for certain types of computer crimes but who knows where it goes from there.
The Hidden Damage From Waste Data (And How To Deal With It)
He doesn't actually believe it:

> I personally reject the proof because I don’t believe all the premises, but if the premises are revealed to be true, then I would accept that death is unattainable.

Most take the _Permutation City_ argument as a _reductio_ about computational theories of identity, and a challenge to figure out what computations really are since simple theories lead to such odd consequences. (This is how Boltzmann brains were received as well.)
Interesting that the only non-Anglophones seem to Chinese, and that many of those names appear to be pseudonyms.
Hopefully they don't have any Java experts on board.
My personal experience: I submitted two personal projects http://kartofel.jfedor.org/ and https://market.android.com/details?id=org.jfedor.frozenbubbl... last year (in July I believe) and both were rejected (i.e., the committee said that Google would not release copyright). However, recently (a month or two ago) I was told that the rules changed and now they were happy to release the copyright for both. In the meantime I tried to get my employment agreement altered to state that my personal projects belong to me, not to Google, but I found there was absolutely no room for negotiation there (despite the fact that my manager, an eng director, supported this). I was told by the legal department that the only person in the company who could approve such thing was Larry Page.

It is true that Google has a very easy process to open-source your projects. One practical pain is that if you want to accept patches you have to get every contributor to sign Google's CLA.
I haven't tried them either but from my first impressions there's still a wall between the conversations people are having via the support system and those that people remember to add to the CRM. e.g. the sales guy trying to up-sell someone to v2.0 may have no idea that the customer already has two open support tickets from the 2.0 beta program.

The problem here is that these are fragmented systems, each trying to solve specific needs for the company (tracking sales/prospects, tracking support queries) rather than looking at the customer's perspective.
He's the FreeBSD security officer. What were you thinking was going to stick out when you read through it? What mistakes did you look for?
I can tell you that that's the specific device's fault. My phone's capacitive screen works wet or with nitrile gloves.
Ask HN: Methods of Self-Discovery
Simply put, I'm eager to learn more about myself. And I'd rather not wait around or aimlessly look.

For example, I've recently read a bunch on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator as well as discussions on introversion. These topics have definitely impacted my approach towards life and work.

Are there are any other ideas/frameworks that may clue me in on how to best understand myself?

With regards to professional passions, posts like these (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2725893 & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2726119) promote the "go find what you're interested in and do that" approach. Seems pretty haphazard to me, especially for someone who has a lot of varied interests.
You're assuming I know those things; I simply don't care about Google enough to.

There should be a option for "Maybe, if I knew what I would be working on."
Advertising networks (including Facebook and Google) select the advertisements from their catalog to display for a particular user and page (based on information that they have on the user, the page, and the advert and competing adverts). At no point is the advertiser ever given identifying information about particular users, although demographic/summary data may be provided.
Google's new "taskbar" continues the OSifiying of the web
What is your next question?
The transfer process isn't that hard, as long as you're transferring into one of the areas that is a top priority for the company (eg. Search, Infrastructure, Chrome, or Google+). If you do get stuck in a role you dislike, I'd highly recommend making friends with the people that are doing what you actually want to be doing, start contributing 20% stuff to them, and if you that it should be trivially easy to get a transfer as long as they have headcount.

One of my Noogler classmates was assigned to doing backend indexing work when he really wanted to be doing frontend UI stuff. He left for Facebook after 5 months, which was a total manager fail, because we had headcount in Search UI and would gladly have taken him had we known he was dissatisfied with his current job.
Such opportunity for subtle funny trolling and they did this instead. Maybe someday the person behind @PeanutFreeMom will hack Fox News. Until then, we can only dream.
What is a capacitive button?

EDIT: Oh, I see now. They are buttons that respond to electric impulse from the fingers on touchscreens.

The solution the author seems to be seeking is: everyone should use the old Nokia bricks?
Democratic forms of government are best represented by the internet.

Dictatorships are best represented by television.

The internet best reflects American values and therefore, poses all sorts of problems to dictatorships. E.g. organizing protests, consuming/producing non-approved messages and images, economic productivity gains.

It is a no-win perdicament for dictators unless they are willing to be completely totalitarian and hold back almost all economic progress for their nation. It makes one wonder if flooding a country with cheap smartphones combined with a satelite based network would be a better long-term tactic than sending in an Army.

The effectiveness of the internet in facilitating change truely does make it America's best weapon.
Is it still the case that if you follow someone and they DM you but if they're not following you, you cannot send a DM back? Seems like it should always be the case where if someone initiates a DM with you, you can respond even if they're not following you since they've implicitly granted permission for the communication by reaching out first.
I like a lot of what Bob Jenkins writes, and I think(?) I may still be using his hash table library as my hash_t in my C code, but I still wouldn't use anything he designed in place of SHA256 or AES; so, just that word of caution.
> If I remember correctly we simply came around to the exact same hacks I proposed on the very first day.

Your story could be read in a positive way by an MBA class: "After much careful company-wide introspection, the smart guy's instinctive solutions were allowed to prevail."

Me? I would have given up on the process long before a year had passed.
The iPhone doesn't look like a Nokia brick, yet it has a hardware home button.

Similarly, the Nexus One had hardware buttons below the screen. On the other hand, the Nexus S uses capacitive buttons.

Hardware buttons are typically easier to press, have better feedback (even when compared to haptic feedback), and easier to find when your eyes are closed. Hardware buttons do not imply "Nokia bricks".
The Internet Brain Implant: Why We Should Say No
An explanation could be that it is not a good idea for sportsmen to say that they improved rapidly after a diet change. It is very easy to get associated with a rumor of being 'liberal' in diet choice, but almost impossible to get rid of it.

Because of that, diet, although an essential part of one's preparations, is best avoided as an interview subject.
If there was an actively-developed common lisp implementation that also ran elisp, I would be all for running emacs on that as well.

Emacs' sheer size (which you mentioned yourself) means you're not going to port it to a different language and have something comparably useful in less than a few years, assuming sustained interest and full-time development.
Project organization is your responsibility. How is this different from other modern frameworks? That CoffeeKup allows you to organize your projects as you see fit should be a point for its favor, not against.

(That is, unless you use Rails and believe in underlying organizational standards for everything. ;) )
Given the huge growth of the site in the first few years and the relative inexperience of the founding team with problems of this magnitude, I expect the story would have been the same with Python, Java, .NET, etc.

The simple Web Server -> ORM -> Relational database architecture that most modern web frameworks utilize can easily break down under tremendous concurrent load, especially if you attempt to run it on commodity hardware.
Porteus 1.0: On the Trail of SLAX
The article is basically a reprint of http://www.quora.com/What-would-make-sense-for-Apple-to-use-...
Totally true. Our stack is Java but the application doesn't have a single XML configuration file. J2EE is for IT that depends more on vendors than their employees for continuity.

http://bagcheck.com/bag/382
Never mind, found it: http://www.google.org/rec.html
Poll: Given the opportunity would you work at Facebook?
With respect to the poll asking the same question about Google (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727457) I'm wondering what you think about a Facebook.
I have worked at Facebook and I left
I work at Facebook right now
Sadly the hangout feature isn't implemented in the mobile app; it's the top feature on my wishlist. It's something I'd certainly like to be able to use on my tablet for sure.

The only "real time" group conversation feature is "Huddle," which is just a group text chat -- and this feature isn't available on the website at all, only on the native mobile app. I've only used this feature once; I might use it more often if I had more friends with Android phones who were also on Google+.
Brain implants
A Fascist Regime exist guilty of carnying out Experiments on Humans – using brain implants- to interfere with the mind- to mind control follow - Twitter as @Siriushc / Bizeso as Hiten / prefspot as Hiten Chudasama & read my pdf files and blogs – Fascsim1.blogspot.com
That is correct. Apparently that feature was made for them since few others on that list do the same.
I love this idea. 90% of the time when I use a forgot password link, I'm really trying to auth-by-email. I'm not sure how it would work for reusable links, since that becomes auth-by-URL, which seems significantly less secure— maybe putting HTTP auth in the url would be less likely to be logged at any point?
The Product Group : Gettin’ Zesty
Push instead of pull and social network effects. Once one of these pages convinces you to like/friend/+1/whatever them, they can push content to your screen by having their stories appear in your feed. Additionally, each person they get to like/friend/+1/whatever leads to friends of that friend seeing the relationship established in their feeds, which has all kinds of benefits to the brand.
Blogging platform for professionals. Which features do you miss? 
Always been uncomfortable using tumblr as a programmer. It's not just about absence decent code highlighting, I need some kind of integration with github, need a solid commenting system that integrates with twitter, fb like link posting etc.

Which service integrations do you miss? Or which features would want as a professional?
Bonus points: it works on bookmarklets, browser plugins and greasemonkey scripts.

Even more added points: it can be refactored like any other code.
Just to clarify, I believe mkr-hn means the trackpad itself, not the buttons on the trackpad. Most trackpad buttons these days are physical. The trackpad itself, however, is capacitive.
You're jumping to conclusions.

Google sees this feature as advantageous to Twitter, just as much as Twitter sees it as advantageous to Google. Negotiates to extend the contract could have failed for any number of reasons.
Those membrane buttons are more common on ovens, but I did mean capacitive buttons on my oven.

Honestly, I think there are companies and products lines which take the time and care to do the human factors engineering whatever interface is selected for the design, and there are products which don't have that attention paid to htem - blaming the button technology itself is sort of a side show to the actual focus on user experience which may lead you to optimize the interaction - tune the buttons, or speed up the software, whatever. Physical buttons can be just as bad if the user experience is ignored.
Oh totally, I had some really fun times and met some great friends in the Navy, and I'm glad I did it. I also gained a ton of technical knowledge in a very short amount of time, which was fantastic.

It wasn't the rank structure or chain of command that left a bad taste in my mouth, it was the layers and layers of approvals and paperwork needed to do something as simple as run a security audit on my servers, or set up an intrusion detection system on a spare PC, or even keep an extra set of backup tapes in a separate location on the ship.

I wouldn't expect it to be crazy like that at Google or any other progressive tech company, of course.
$11 Billion Treasure Found In Temple In Southern India
Apparently I was ill informed. My bad.
Putting it that way, it actually does sound like a good fit. Guess I'll have to reconsider my vote :)
> Based on trust, just like today. How is this different from how music, books, games etc. are produced now?

Currently, if someone violates your trust, by releasing their own version of a song you wrote, for example, you can sue them. It's not clear to me that this would be the case in a copyright-free world. You would have to explicitly have to make a contract with everyone who ever comes in contact with your work before it's ready. That would be tiresome, at best.

And it doesn't cover people who steal/stumble across pieces of it in progress. There is no way I would not be working on something before it was paid for. Before I even put an idea up for funding, I would have notes and such. If someone takes these and makes a derivative work, I get to prosecute them for... stealing paper, because I'm not allowed to claim the information content of the paper as my own.

Artists not skilled in secrecy are going to be in serious trouble.

> Not sure if you got me. No publisher required. Its direct b2c. Just like kickstarter.com works today. I'm only missing the "big fish"

No, I didn't quite understand that model. So if there is any large-scale physical production, say printing books or burning CD's, that will be handled by third parties and the artist won't have anything to do with it? And people who want the physical form will have to pay two parties?

One problem you'll run into is that everyone benefits equally no matter how much they put in, including those who didn't put anything in. That sorta sucks for anyone who put in a lot, who then watch those who didn't help at all benefit from their money. You're essentially relying on charity, and that's a worrisome business model.

I wonder if the reliance on idealism would have a positive effect on the quality of work produced.

I need to think about this more. And I should probably give Kickstarter a try for one of my own projects.
> If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income.

Are you including e.g. Morgan Stanley and Knight Capital in your pool? Because Google's salaries would have had to rise a lot more than 10% to catch up to those guys, last I heard.
Broadcasting this fact is almost as bad of an idea as implementing it in the first place. You now have a bullseye on your site from every blackhat reading this. It's your company and your customers (which I am not one of), so most of the time I would just say do whatever you want, because it doesn't affect me. Problem is, it does. It affects every developer out there, because once your security is compromised and every password is leaked by LulzSec, Anonymous, ScriptKiddies, etc... we're all at risk.

I understand you did this for your users and your product, but please reconsider. Your users are also everyone elses users, so your lack of proper security is shared amongst all of us.
What does he do with regards to organizing his various dates that are found within the e-mail notices?

Our aim is to get everything in one place and organized, so we import lists of creditors, dates, and names as well as the PDFs. Shortly after launch we will be rolling out the mobile web version (for tablets/phones) as well as releasing desktop sync clients (mac and windows) to download all new PDFs onto your workstation(s) as well as importing the dates into exchange/icalendar/etc.

Based on some feedback, we're also working on some basic work flow things such as leaving comments on people/cases/notices, passing off assignment, etc.

If your attorney friend is open to it, I'd love to speak with him sometime regarding his thoughts. E-mail is fine. I love all the feed back I can get.

The system is currently tailored for bankruptcy law, so if he's a bankruptcy attorney I'd love to hook him up with an account at no charge.

edit I apologize for the delay on getting back to you. Notifo was not letting me know about the reply, but I have since straightened the problem out.
They don't need to be playing music, you know? I got a cheap ($10) bluetooth headset and I walk around with it in my ear all the time just to answer calls.