skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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?

I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?

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.

The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.
Level Up Why Social Enterprises should be more like WoW
which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.

And now even those are getting out of control:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html

Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.
100% in agreement, and notice how your argument relies on comparing with his peers. If you had just stated that Mullay is a great CEO, it would just be your opinion. But by using compare and contrast, you build a valid argument.
Assuming this certificate stuff is legit, how do we know this is being done by Iran? What makes anyone think this is Iran?
Convert Between File Types Without an App, Part I (How-To)
GhostBSD: not "just another BSD"
I don't know how much is "openness" and how much is "good PR".* Every other week you have another post on HN about how Apple's booted something from the app store with no posted reason; I have yet to hear a story about a game being booted from Steam.

*I'm fully aware that there are a lot of people who say that yes, they want it to be open, but I'd be curious in seeing how much zealous anti-app-store sentiment there would be if Apple was more consistent with their policies and verbose about why one app or another was rejected.
its easy because you have a finite,....

Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).

But I'll grant you this point if s/easy/possible/
Anyone can tell us if this is for real or a hoax? I am lacking sufficient ssl knowledge here...
There have been significant 36-bit and 60-bit machines since at least the 1960s and 64-bit machines since the 1970s. Notably, Digital's PDP-10 line that ran the early internet were 36-bit, and Crays (from 1977) were 64-bit.

However, none of those machines had 64-bit addresses. I think the Alpha may have been the first mainstream machine with 64-bit addresses, and it didn't come out until 1992, only 19 years ago. (I don't remember if the i860 had 64-bit addresses or not, but it came out a few years earlier.)
It took 3 months to get their customers transferred over to this new cert. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622589 I wonder if the CA was compromised since earlier this year, or if it's more recent?
I agree; I like the idea of Selenium for web GUIs. I remember wanting to write my own similar tester for Win32 GUIs a while back, but I ultimately did not see enough value in it. For the same reason, I do not use Selenium: you have to completely "rewrite" the tests to adapt to small interface changes. So I wrote up test plans for humans to run, and they could adapt to the changes; it was faster than writing an AI. ;)

At an old job, we had what was called "random testing". This was a time to relax and take a few hours to pound at the application with whatever we could think of. With luck, someone would go ahead and attempt to automate those tests. One of our favorite "random" tests was to start some complicated process and then shake the window all around the screen to see if it would crash -- sometimes it did! It forces people to rethink their threading approaches. Another fun trick is closing an app mid-processing; does it exit gracefully?
Here's a bug report from the user who originally noticed it: http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da...
>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

I have been seeing the same thing with research colleagues.

What a lot of us in IT or related fields do not "get" from normal users is that the way they "see" the icons and pictures in the computer is completely different from what we do. We have a "mental model" of what Word or Excel or Firefox is doing. Some of us have a more accurate and detailed model than others.

But "normal" users only know what they see and what will happen after they do something (either because they have done it before or because we told them, and they trust us). For them, there is no more meaning to "click on the File menu" than if a Scuba diver told you to "check your SPG every 10 minutes".
Don't have an idea? Don't have a startup.

I disagree with that. Some of the better startups we've funded changed their idea completely during YC.

It's the founders that matter, not the idea. So I'd say instead: if you're not the right sort of person to start a startup, don't start a startup. But of course that is a complicated matter to decide because (a) people often don't know if they are the right sort of person and (b) people change.
http://bpmredux.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/level-up-why-social...

Same thing :)
> In a way, using tests to check code is like designing two trucks and having them pull against each other; if nothing breaks, you know they both work.

('bad metaphorical thinking' Dijkstra alert)

This is wrong. If the tests pass, it is entirely possible that both the original code and the tests are faulty.
Apple: The next chapter
How Google plans to change the way you watch TV
Logitech Revues are only $99.

Logitech guaranteed that they'll be updating to the 3.x based GoogleTV when it releases.

Developers will soon be able to write apps (including games) for GoogleTV.

Wiimotes are already fully functional with 3.x based tablets for gaming.

... anyone else see where I'm going with this? If Google plays their cards right, and some very good hardware comes out for commodity prices, I think we're looking at the birth of the new breed of gaming consoles. With the so-called "casual" gaming market exploding at the pace it is, there's great potential here.
Show HN: `Nide` - open source IDE built in 48 hours for Node.JS Knockout
"Ah sure, us using this software is technically illegal, but sure, the original author isn't going to come after us" is usually not a good line to write on your corporate "do we have enough licences audit"

The problem isn't that your might get sued, it's that you can't convince $POINTY_HAIRED_BOSS that you won't get sued.
Currently Google TV doesn't allow for doing anything to the guide or TV programs either. The Program guide thing is terribly problematic since they rely on IR blasters, emulating remote control signals to do everything.

Stay tuned, if this project doesn't get killed it may end up closer to what you are envisioning.
Yeah. That's why I want to improve my focus to a way higher level. And actually focus is what I suck most at. I bet the only reason I get anything done at all is years of experience and some god given talent. Milk glass has more focus then me.
I'm surprised that you are so open that you are disrespectful, immature, and uncivilized, but thanks.
Clickable: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFZDekd...
Why Smoking and Why not to Smoking
I believe that it's only part of it. Another part is the lack of a filesystem. Many, if not most users, just don't like it or understand it. Though there are functions that are seriously lacking in iOS, I can't help but think that they're much closer to what is needed than MS.
This type of compromised-CA attack is why I never understood why browsers don't use the OpenSSH model: accept and store (prompting for confirmation) the certificate the first time you connect to a site, then throw up enormous red flags if the certificate ever changes.

The Firefox root CA list has dozens and dozens of organizations on it. Could a compromise of any one of them mean that this attack could be repeated?
I would be very interested in those breakdowns. Does someone else maybe have some info on that?
I remember the situation with Kathy Sierra. It was a shame that she was forced to stop blogging. I really enjoyed her posts. Her blog is still accessible from here: http://headrush.typepad.com/
The Thawte certificate is the certificate issued to google by request of google. This certificate is apparently being used to MITM connections to gmail that originate inside Iran. Outside of Iran BGPing a major ISP into routing through them, or setting up a standard "phishing" mirror site, no one outside of Iran should worry much.

It still is a good idea to blacklist that root certificate on your internet devices though. If this certificate is being used, who knows what other websites it has issued legitimate but malicious certificates for.
Have you wasted enough time today?
There's really no question... the screenshot he has provided is heinous. Talk about being out of ideas 20 years ago...
Ship Ship Hooray - What I've learned from launching MinuteBase
F10 and Alt do almost the same thing with some subtle (perhaps unintentional?) differences. For example, without hitting any other keys, try tapping F10 repeatedly, then tap Alt repeatedly.
It is a monopoly on installing software on iOS. Steam does not have a monopoly on installing software on Windows.
Arch Linux moves up to Linux 3.0
Why we love messing with AI bots
Is RIM an undervalued bargain?
My experience is that you're not going to have the problem as clearly defined as you thought in the beginning. If you have a capable team and a flexible strategy you can and must redefine the problem you're trying to solve as you learn more about the domain. I would add that as a form a failure in startup culture: To get so enamored with a perceived problem and your proposed solution as to ignore new evidence that should alter that first impression. Sometimes the new information leads you to incremental or 'attainable' adjustments and you adapt and move forward, sometimes you need to pull the ripcord and go back to the drawing board.
it wasn't a matter of ignoring Bada's existence, it was just the fact that the OS itself isn't doing well enough to be a competitor in the smartphone market. While Bada has plenty of apps and a solid build, when compared to iOS or Android is doesn't come close to worth, Bada is lacking a lot of things that iOS and Android came with in the beginning. Samsung might try to merge the looks and functionality of webOS and the applications and customer base of Bada, but at this point it doesn't feel as though Bada or Samsung will last very long unless they bring something new to the table.
AFAICT, this can be defeated with a suffixed domain that invites users to register.

I.e., put a message board on a specialized domain (e.g. amazoncomplaints.com, somerandombank-watchdog.com) and then harvest the target passwords as users sign up...
Logitech Revues are at $99 because they're getting returned at a greater rate then they're being sold. They're being sold at a loss.

I don't doubt that the GoogleTV device may turn into a casual gaming system, but right outside of those fire sale Revues they need to be sold at a price very close to a PS3 or Xbox,and I'm not sure why you'd get a Revue over one of those.
explorer is progressively getting bloated and nasty; there's no 'power user' version and now way to bring back useful features which have existed before.

i've been using Classic Shell to keep my sanity on W7 and the 'Super Bar' is big step back in productivity for me.

my search for seamless Explorer replacements continues...
Added the gang of four under OOP. Do developers still read this, or has head first superseded it?

Then again, a major pitfall of Design Patterns is that everything starts to look like the patterns you already know, which essentially boxes in your design process. Apply the knowledge at your own peril.
there's the official Account Chooser Working Group Charter proposal announcement - https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/workinggroupcharter/...
Not much to take home or own part of, or not much to push around on someone else's behalf? I have yet to understand. The first seems pretty unlikely, unless accounting is a much better career path than I've heard, and the second seems irrelevant.
Will Tumblr's seedy side turn advertisers off?
Tap, swipe, draw apart, draw together, click home button, double click home button, click headset button, double click headset button, triple click headset button, Press external volume button, flick mute/screen-lock button, press lock button, hold lock button.

I'm sure there's a few more buried in there that I haven't discovered. (Like swipe backwards to delete an item from a list)
But wouldn't the red flags go up when the certificate is renewed?
it will also help your good self to know what you are doing to your self
I'm sorry, but comments like this make you sound like one of the people this woman is hiding from. It's as if you're trying to discredit her story by attacking her personally. Such negativity isn't necessary.
I have yet to hear a story about a game being
booted from Steam.

Maybe they don't kick you out, but it's a ton harder to get on steam in the first place than to get on the app store.
SSL snake oil. SSL and the percieved trust around it has to die. It's a big lie, especially with broken CAs, lax security, poor encryption due to international policy and several technical and conceptual flaws.

Some critique here to back me up:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysi...
The claims reported in various places suggest that people in Iran have actively observed this certificate used in MITM attacks on gmail connections. No hard evidence yet, and no idea what original source people keep repeating (possibly the pastebin itself).
We should compliment that list with this one about free programming books
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...
"Work in support sometime."

Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none.

Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless.

The ways regular people think about technology is endlessly fascinating because it very rarely has anything to do with how I think about technology.

At my day job, we eventually decided to put our development lead as tier-2 tech support because we couldn't get this across. He receives every single piece of support mail we get and is asked to respond to a pretty good percentage of them.

It's been a 2 year, very difficult, education for him.
The 13th amendment establishes the right of the state to own slaves.

Technically, according to the text of the 13th amendment, it formally and legally establishes as a constitutional right of the state to declare people slaves as "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", which has of course resulted in prison chain gangs and various corporations hiring prisoners for cheap compliant slave labor over the years, and in the demand for such slave labor and thus the motivation of the state to imprison as many people as possible.
Yes, but as much as you and I like keyboard shortcuts, I think we're a very small minority of Windows users. I don't think I've ever seen any of my normal everyday friends use Alt shortcuts, or even Tab and Enter in a dialog or web form. Even if I have them try it, next time I see them they are back to mousing and clicking everything.
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 GPU requirements that you can compile your executable against a SSE3 min-spec target without excluding users.

The instruction set available is often not the most relevant thing. In many cases, the optimal code will differ wildly between CPUs regardless of the available instruction sets. Let's look at some quick examples of performance characteristics:

Athlon 64: Slow SSE2 unit, MMX is often faster than SSE2 for many functions.

Phenom: Very fast SSE2 unit, but missing SSSE3 support, so can't take use the same optimized functions in many cases as the Core 2 and above. Significantly higher instruction latency than Core 2, so needs significantly more pipelining.

Core 2 Conroe: SSE shuffle operations (punpck, etc) are excruciatingly slow: 4/2 for shuffles that use both arguments as input data (e.g. punpckldq), 2/2 for those that use only one argument (e.g. pshufb). Cacheline-split loads are extraordinarily painful (equivalent to an L1 cache miss, or ~14 cycles).

Core 2 Penryn: Same as Conroe, but shuffles are fast now (1/1 for everything basically).

Nehalem: Cacheline-split loads are cheap now (2 cycles), and shuffles have doubled throughput compared to Penryn (1/0.5).

This doesn't even get into the more instruction-specific messiness, like how some CPUs like movddup and movhlps on integer data while others don't. It's not uncommon to have 3 or 4 assembly functions just to cover the latest CPUs -- not even counting old ones. Fortunately for our sanity, these are usually templated from a single function, with small changes to the relevant areas created via macros.
Maybe by "scaled prematurely" they mean "started hiring and spending lots of money before they made something people want."

Edit: This wasn't intended to be snarky, I was being serious.
Chrome users should be protected from this by the public key pinning feature [http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html], right?
The 6 Principles of Happiness & Growing a Great Company
Create Your Web App Without Coding
Android bakes bitter 20th birthday cake for Linux
I'm not sure why, but I've never really gotten used to the ribbon. Especially in Office 2010 , I find it incredibly difficult to navigate and, frankly, hugely annoying. To see it brought to something like explorer is horrifying, especially considering the large amount of vertical space it takes up.

Shouldn't there be more intuitive ways of doing these things? Why is there a need for a move button or copy (one or the other) when you have drag and drop? I know it is very much in vogue to abstract the file system away from the user, and it strikes me that this is exactly the opposite, and just might be just a little over engineered.
Interesting idea! There is no indication of what "My Documents" contains. What do I put in there? What is a "document" anyway? I'm frequently annoyed by files being saved somewhere I don't remember, or into huge folder hierarchies where I troublesomely navigate into. This is just simply stuff a user shouldn't need to think about. Couple your suggestions with a proper realtime search engine like we have with http://www.voidtools.com/ and this could be good.
If you are more tenacious than Sam Altman, then you should use your tenacity to tenaciously find a cofounder.
Invisible Fence Collars: How It Works and How It Can Be Beneficial
Polyhacking
Might want to fix that to *tumblr or readers may not upvote. Interesting article though, Tumblr will likely use the "I'm not accountable for our users' content" argument to get out of any lawsuits aimed at them.
There is a "Send To Any Folder" utility that you can put in there, but it's not a standard feature.
In the abstract, obviously any bit of knowledge is worth having. For assembly, I'd even bet the value you get from learning it outweighs the effort you put in.

The relevant question, though, is it at the margins the best use of your time?

Having a solid grasp of the Wikipedia-level knowledge of assembly is very valuable, but beyond that I'd be skeptical. Sure, you could learn it--but you could also learn about other topics, like writing a compiler, the theory of operating systems, understanding the layers of the TCP/IP stack, or working in a purely functional language like Haskell. All or any of those might be a better use of your time. So might learning to salsa, building social capital by hanging out with friends, or learning to bake bread.

So, maybe? But only if you're very curious about it (a good thing!) and have also knocked off other relatively more valuable and lower hanging fruit.

Of course, I've not taken the time to learn it, so it's quite likely there are some hidden benefits I've not managed to grok.
". I also try to keep in mind that I'm not typical. ... So when I judge a UI I literally stick my Mom on it... she's 68"

Well she no more typical a computer user than you are I would think. I like to see a curve of typical computer users age distribution (but I understand it would be a little skewed if it's hard for the older generations to use computers).

I feel that ribbon is designed for a select group of new users who need that kind of help. And I hope it's easy to disable it. It's fine for Microsoft to use something like this as a default mode as long as power users are able to turn that stuff off.

This is what turns me off on OS X, there is often no way to do certain more advanced things. Or it's hidden so well it requires hours of searching on the web for what plist to modify.
Susan Linton's (tuxmachines.org) Favorite Little Games
Trading IPv4 addresses will end in tears
Nowadays it is common for YC founders to be older. One group of founders had 9 kids between the 2 of them that they brought to Mountain View for this last YC batch. Those guys also had a product already, although after YC it is a few times larger and they raised a nice seed round. Go for it!
You have the right terminology for both platforms. It's still called Finder on the Mac, and Windows Explorer or Explorer for short - in fact the executable is explorer.exe.
"Hello Bootstrap" in Opa (cloud-oriented web app framework in OCaml)
Mysterious. I can't replicate that from here, at least with some idle clicking.

The traffic has dropped off substantially since earlier today. The Rascal served around 200,000 hits over the course of around 2 hours on the front page. I've been logged in remotely the whole time, so there can't have been any reboots, or my SSH session would have been terminated.

Judging by the process id's of the servers, I don't think any of them have been restarted.

The error log looks pretty clean. There's huge pile of errors from a misnamed font file, but that's minor. Other than that, there are just two errors that look like this:

readv() failed (104: Unknown error) while reading upstream, client:
80.176.154.87, server: localhost, request: "POST /toggleEerik HTTP/1.1",
upstream: "uwsgi://127.0.0.1:5000", host: "209.6.42.115:82"
Two questions:

1) Why the anger?

2) What specific tasks are difficult for you to accomplish in Finder or Mail? The default icon set in Mail (seen here: http://i.imgur.com/zYmaw.png) do not seem to be difficult to parse. Ditto the Finder icons.