skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would there be interest in an attachment manager extension for gmail
Do fellow HN'ers feel there would be a need for attachment management in gmail/Google Apps For Domains (GAD) ?

Gmail/GAD has no method in which you can delete attachments. The only method I have found is to load the account into an IMAP client and manage attachments.

Many people abuse email for attachments. This creates work for me to decide if I want to load the account into an IMAP client and manage the attached file by deletion, archiving, or otherwise. Do I really need to save all the images that are forwarded to me by friends? However, there may be important textual information in the email that would prevent outright deletion.

Would there be interest in a plug-in/system that scanned incoming and outgoing emails, looked for attached files, removed them, sent them to a remote secure storage, and injected a link into the email.

Outbound messages would have a semi private link so the sender could access the file at all times.

Inbound attachments would be a password protected area only the account holder has access to.

With the current free amount of gmail storage, there should be enough storage, sans attachments, to last a lifetime.

I have not looked at the gmail/GAD API to know if this is even possible. A service could do it, but would require the account holders credentials and timing of access could cause race conditions.

Am I filling a void that is not a problem, or is this indeed really a problem?
It varies drastically by country - see
http://travel.state.gov/visa/
I'm not sure what type of "documents" you're referring to

Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.

My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.
I'm just saying that you may have made a monster mistake by posting your numbers.

One of our games was making very similar numbers for about 4 months, then a competitor, a talented college kid, decided he would make a game really similar to ours and put it out there for free. Not even with ads.

Over the next 4 months, we saw sales drop to about 1/5 of what we were making in our good months. He has out-ranked us and doesn't seem to have any interest in making much money tho he as since put in an ad that shows up upon a game-over.

I'm worried that you just put a nail in your own coffin, and are about a month or 2 from realizing it... on Android at least.

I wish you good luck. You need to step up your game now and make sure you are on the very cutting edge. If there's even 1 feature that your users want that you haven't done yet, that's the one feature that gets the competition an edge-in on your app.
Actually, copy/paste makes a lot of sense. Having to frequently copy or move files from one place to another, I got used to ctrl-c or -x a file, then go to a different directory, and ctrl-v. The appeal, I think, is that I don't have to use the mouse (which employs a time-costly drag operation).

Dragging files into directories is also cognitively expensive - e.g. you have to make certain that you are dragging exactly into the right folder which can be about 15 pixels high, depending on what view you're using. It requires hand-eye coordination which becomes unnecessary with simple copy/paste operations.

BUT, for beginner users, I agree: users have a hard time grasping the concept of a copy/paste buffer anyway, and with files it gets abstracted one more level. For more advanced users, they use keyboard shortcuts, so the buttons don't really need to be there.
Here's an image from the Microsoft article for those who don't know what it looks like in Windows 7: http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-bl...

Small nitpick: "Burn" doesn't show if you click on the main options of the left tree ("Favorites", "Libraries", etc).

I find it interesting because it clearly shows something changed on the last couple of years, we still remember how important burning something was, right?
Technology In A Hurricane
I don't have a Windows system at hand now, so I can't check it... but didn't "Copy To" exist as "Context Menu -> Send to" before?
If the story is a blog link, I use Instapaper (http://instapaper.com). Highly recommended!
So help me understand...

A government agency in Iran has obtained the private key of the root certificate for the DigiNotar Certificate Authority. And with that, they can decrypt and re-encrypt SSL traffic by pretending that they have the valid SSL certificate for *.google.com.

Is that the way this works?
Sometimes it's fun just to make things better, faster, stronger. Hard to find a downside to having your template engine faster.
New evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays
+1 for Songmeanings -- the layout is simple and easy to read and the comments generally are interesting.
It's been a long time but at the time Apple had their own AOL-like community, eWorld.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld
Check out the Ruby on Rails guide on the subject:

http://ryanbigg.com/guides/asset_pipeline.html

DHH also talked a lot about it in his keynote this year at RailsConf:

http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-keynote-streaming-live-from-ra...
The intersection of web geeks and science geeks
Ironically, if you actually do ignore all rules on Wikipedia the process and policy wonks will crucify you. In fact, WP process and policy is another great example--the original purpose was to write an encyclopedia, but now it's just used as a forum to bicker over the internet.
I felt I had one hand tied behind my back

That reminds me of the first few times I tried to learn vim.
A quick check of Bugzilla didn't turn up a bug directly about this issue, but https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681902#c6 from one of the people who deals with CA issues at Mozilla mentions "the current DigiNotar incident", so they clearly know about it.
I've applied twice as a solo founder and have had no luck. If you think Sam Altman is tenacious you definitely have not met me yet. I haven't sold Obama O's like Brian Chesky and the gang but I have some stories that would be considered equally compelling by most.

I founded a company and had an exit while still in college full time. I had 13 employees when I was 19, I currently work for a well funded startup with top tier investors and ship code every day. Yet even with all that said I have not managed to get to the interview round.

This time around I have something a little more special in store for my application, so we shall see how this works.
For me (like many others I'm sure) the problem is not selling people on the idea, it is selling qualified people on the idea. I want to bring on someone who can truly add value to the team and I want a partner not just another body.

It's just finding a way to stand out on the application process that a solo founder has a hard time with, I think many solo founders don't realize exactly how hard that is when the YC staff reads through more than 2,000 apps each cycle now.
They are taking off because they are touch devices and not mouse devices.
Book on Third-Party JavaScript from engineers at Disqus (YC 07)
How does Instapaper compare to something like Remember the Milk? Is it basically a to-do list for URLs?
Your computer science class isn't a good representation of the market. + It's not because 90% knows how to use a browser that they know how to use explorer, right click & use CTR/ALT
> In fact, if I were asked to guess, I would have answered that most new users would pick up pretty quickly how to use context menus

As someone who has done a fair amount of tutoring seniors on basic computer usage, I have a large amount of anecdotal evidence to indicate this is definitely not the case for them. Depending on the person, I would sometimes try to not show them context menus or keyboard shortcuts at all and just teach them how to use the File, Edit, etc. menus.

There are people who just want to learn the correct order of incantations so that they can check their mail and do things with their photos. And that's okay! Trying to show them that that there is more than one way to do a given action often just leads to confusion as they meld them together (right click on Edit..)

I have seen a fair amount of people with a similar approach as well, but my largest body of personal experience comes from the tutoring, which is why I mentioned it.
I would say you're out of luck then. What good are those mkv files if you don't have an app to read them?

There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things.

The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be. Is rearranging toolbar buttons really going to bring delight to people around the world? How does this help the guy who is miserable at his job because he's forced to use a 10 year old PC running Windows XP? How does it help the person who lost all of their vacation photos because they downloaded a photo editing app that turned out to be a virus? How does it help a four year old that's learning to read?
If you can't sell someone else on joining up, how on earth are you going to sell someone in giving you money?

That's dramatically over-simplifying things. It's not just about selling "somebody" on the idea, it's about finding the right "somebody" AND then selling them on the idea, AND them being in a position where they're able to jump on it.

If you're willing to just take anybody on as a co-founder, you can easily have 5, 10, 15, 20, 372, or 14000 co-founders. But if you're discriminating and looking for the right match of interests, skills, experience, enthusiasm, personality, etc., it can take a long time to find somebody who's right.
You seem to like OCD SSDs. I'd be interested to know which ones you've used, and how they've worked out for you. Thanks!
My Ideal Job Description (by Kent Beck)
Lean Startups: Part 2 - The Magic Test
Still to this day, Alt-F is engrained in my head. "Alt-F-S" for saving, actually. I use it all the time. On a Mac. I always get annoyed at myself when I search for the letter "S"
In just three weeks, Facebook pays out $40K to hackers
A look at "Mobile Developer Day" conference in Ukraine.
Intrinsics tend to be incredibly difficult to read (and write) compared to hand-written assembly. For practical purposes, it's write-only code, and C simply doesn't provide the syntactical niceties necessary to easily write assembly code.

Inlining SIMD functions is typically not possible in most applications unless you're compiling a dozen versions, one for each possible CPU, since different CPUs will use different SIMD functions that are optimized for their performance characteristics.

Nevermind the fact that intrinsics generally give atrocious performance compared to properly-written code, as your average 3-year-old can probably allocate registers better than gcc.
"Herrmann said that the team’s research found that of the 90 percent of startups that fail, 70 percent scaled prematurely"

They must have had a strangely biased sample. Since the Bubble (when it was common) I've seen few startups do that. What kills startups is making something users don't want.
Ever Wonder Where the XP Wallpaper Comes From?
Oh my. That reminded me of a colleague of mine who thought I was doing "black magic" when I converted from "text to columns" in Excel. Guess what, she has a PhD in Geography. That really emphasizes your point.

For me, the problem with the ribbon has been (the times I tried to use Office 2010) that there are some more "advanced" commands (like, inserting a cross-reference to a Figure or Table) which became quite hidden away in the Ribbon. Specially, since in the old toolbar mode, I could add buttons to the actions I used most (I actually have a button for text-to-columns in Excel, or to bring the "insert cross reference" in Word, among others).

From my experience, the ribbon does not give you that ability.

Actually, every time I have to use the ribbon (my institute's laptop has office 2010) I start imaging an addon which "learns" what are the most used commands and configures the "Home" (or another) ribbon tab showing icons to access those commands. Surely, someone must have already thought of that no?
essentially, they would be MITMing the connection and presenting an SSL cert issued by DigiNotar (instead of the actual CA that issued the cert to *.google.com). because the compromised CA is in the browser's trusted CAs list, it probably produces no user-visible warning.
That doesn't change my advice to folks to find a co-founder.

Right, but you're not advocating the "stop the world" and do nothing until they do find a co-founder, are you? I guess that's my point: a solo-founder isn't necessarily somebody who intends to stay a solo-founder, but are likely someone who just hasn't found their co-founder(s) yet. And I, for one, would not advocate stopping everything until you find that person (or persons).
Interesting to see how the startup scene is developing in the former Soviet states.
Disclaimer: Purely anecdotal evidence ahead.

I've worked for two startups that failed and did consulting work for another one that idled lifelessly while the founder refused to admit defeat. In general, aside from having a clunky, ugly product that didn't really solve a genuine problem, I also noticed another trend:

The founders were too stubborn to recognize or listen to their users (if they had any). The word "pivot" was not in any of these founders' vocabulary. We'd look at the data, and see users not touching these new features we added and instead the founder(s) just shrugged and said, "No, the users just aren't using the product correctly".

No, you idiot. Your product sucks.

I, along with a few other employees tried in vain to convince the founders that we needed to stop adding useless features and start listening to the data, and the founders just decided to try to convince the users to use the app the "correct" way instead.

This, in turn, led to employees (and even co-founders) basically just giving up on trying to convince the founder/CEO of a need to pivot, so in essence the employees had already given up on the product. And when your employees (and cofounders, ffs) have given up on the product, you've already lost.

interesting read.
I think this is a very subjective viewpoint, which is understandable considering the website we're on, but it still overlooks how huge the PC market really is, along with the Windows userbase, and the nature of a lot of its users. There's a huge segment of the Windows userbase who will always be beginners at computers, and their habits and methods are usually mindblowing to any "knowledgeable" user. One such example was the mass of people who typed "facebook login" into Google any time they wanted to log-in into Facebook, and got thoroughly confused and angry when the first hit suddenly led them to ReadWriteWeb's article on Facebook's log-in, filling the comments section with cries of where is the log-in, what is this crap, shitty re-design, let me in!, etc.

Because of users like this, Microsoft is where it is. Any big revamp, and they'll just get millions of confused customers who suddenly can't make sense of the most basic functionality. It is Microsoft's own doing that they made their users get used to interfaces like this, but it's not as easy as just scraping it and throwing up something new.

It's also easy to forget that Windows has a userbase 10 times its nearest competitor (which is to say this brings in challenges which competitors might not face).
Nowhere here (or on the TechCrunch article it copies) does it mention that Samsung has it's own smartphone OS: Bada.

It, like WebOS, is Linux-based, so there are possible opportunities to merge them. But it just seems like incredibly lazy journalism that no-one even mentions Bada's existence.
When I browse, I prefer to open pages from hyperlinks in new tabs. For example, if I google something, each result I pursue gets its own tab. Doing that in ios was not at all intuitive, and only discoverable by happenstance. (And it is VERY klunky, but that's another story).

Editing is also a pain in the ass on it. It is a wonderful os for very simple tasks, but as the complexity grows it is very limiting.

Maybe that's the moral of this thread.
More than likely someone hacked or socially engineered the DigiNotar CA into issuing just that cert, or some limited set of certs.
I guess that partly explains the reason behind the single mouse button on Apple computers for quite some time.
Thank you PG, I really appreciate your reply. The person I have in mind is brilliant and picking up programming concepts quickly. We also work well with each other and he is someone I can count on to stick with me through the hard times.
I used to say absolutely yes too, but it's been a long time since I needed to mess with it. You no longer need to write in assembly to optimize speed, or even to write drivers for any but the rarest cases that hardly anyone will run into.

Does it help you understand how things really work? Yes, as does knowing things like CPU design down to the gate level. Most don't know that (I am one who does) and I never hear it advocated that they should.

I think it makes more sense to emphasize other difficult core skills that are far more useful like knowing how to build a compiler.
Either that or they've got the cooperation of someone who has access to that private key, potentially the CA itself. But a compromise seems more likely in this case.
Take comp sci. You will (should) get exposed to at least a few languages (in my case java, scheme, prolog, lisp, c, c++ to varying degrees, mostly java) but more importantly you will learn about other stuff like various data structures, logic, etc...

Once you start to learn a few languages and how to build with them it becomes easier to transition. It still takes time, but you spend less time trying to figure what you want to do and more time trying to figure out how to do it in a specific language.

That said, I honestly believe that if you just want to be a programmer you should try to find an alternative to a full 4 year program. A couple of years at a school that focuses on teaching you to be a programmer might be a better fit than a more theory heavy comp sci program.
There's also another, similar, project called Perspectives: http://perspectives-project.org/

The Syrian government was doing this recently as well:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-agai...

Oh and don't forget about the EFF's SSL Observatory:
https://www.eff.org/observatory
If you're still on the fence about whether or not you should reply, I suggest reading "What Happens at YC": http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html - that's the essay that convinced us to apply with Lanyrd, and it was everything the essay promised and more.
Is it really that hard to track down trolls and get them prosecuted? Zed Shaw, for example, seems to do this in his spare time and never seems to have much difficulty pin-pointing the pin-heads.
Disclaimer: I'm a Windows and Mac OS X "power user" and I'm going to be rather critical of Apple who are seen as at the forefront of UI design. I'm probably going to get voted down for this.

I'm a proponent of the Ribbon UI and I fucking hate toolbars in OS X.

I use Outlook, Word, Excel and Windows Live Mail extensively. All of which have the ribbon UI. It turns out that for the sake of actually getting stuff done, this is incredibly useful. I genuiely hardly ever need to use the context menu because what I need is there "in my face" and "obvious". While this fits newbie usage patterns perfectly, it also helps us power users who don't always switch back to the keyboard shortcuts (mouse already in hand) and don't want to jump through several hoops (like faffing with context menus) to get stuff done.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no fucking idea what the hell the toolbar buttons do when I'm using Finder or Mail on OS-X (Snow Leopard and Lion). The icons are crap, there are no visual cues and I always end up dropping to a terminal to get stuff done because I simply can't be arsed to figure it out or piss around with right clicking or the awful keyboard shortcut system on OS X. I don't think people usually get that far with OS X without getting "shiny I paid $2000 so it must be good Apple mental block" as I call it.

I'm fed up of so-called self-proclaimed experts chucking out blog posts criticising user interfaces while masturbating over Apple's efforts. Microsoft's UI allows you to get shit done and get it done quickly. So it might not be as aesthetically pleasing, but it works and works well for those of us with shit in our eyes.

Also, Microsoft research what you want rather than tell you what you're having (like Apple do).
I had a little project a while ago that compiled Mustache templates into C. Never was completely done, but it mostly works: https://github.com/tyler/speed_stache
Yes, this video was done by an internal group at Microsoft.
Intrinsics are about the same level of readability in my experience. Although it's annoying that compilers tend to pile on prefixes to the instruction mnemonics and thereby make everything longer. If that's a big problem for you, just use your own short-hand macro wrappers.

> Inlining SIMD functions is typically not possible in most applications unless you're compiling a dozen versions, one for each possible CPU, since different CPUs will use different SIMD functions that are optimized for their performance characteristics.

I mainly care about games when it comes to high-performance programming, so this is not an issue for me. Consoles are obviously fixed platforms, and on PC any game is likely to have high enough performance requirements across the board that you can compile your executable against a SSE3 min-spec target without excluding users because of that.

> Nevermind the fact that intrinsics generally give atrocious performance, as your average 3-year-old can probably allocate registers better than gcc.

I'm glad we agree that GCC is a pile of shit (and not just in this respect). MSVC's performance with intrinsics has also gone up and down with versions but by now it's pretty solid.
Do you have a citation for [4b]? Piracy is certainly an issue, but it's not as much of an issue as you think, particularly in the console space.

Plus, with internet-based authentication schemes (eg. Starcraft 2) plus online games (eg. MMOs), it appears that even on PC, piracy is not as damaging as it once was.

Personally, as someone who works in the Games Industry, I disagree both with piracy as a cause, but also even with the fact that 'traditional games are dying'. Traditional games - from First Person Shooters, to Real Time Strategy, to Third Person Action games are all doing very well.

I think what you are noticing is that the game market as a whole is swelling, propelled by the newer, larger markets - social games, mobile games etc. - and thus traditional games are a much smaller part of it than before. But to say that they are dying? That is a mistaken position.
You can also do cib (for inside '()') and ciB (for inside '[]') and cis (for inside sentences).