skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Socialcam is hiring an iOS Hacker -- small team, big benefits
Socialcam makes it simple to take video on a smart phone with filters and effects, add music and themes, and share instantly with friends and the Socialcam community. With 20 million downloads, we're the #1 video sharing app for smart phones.

We're looking to hire our 3rd engineer, to work on our iOS app. Particulars of experience are not important (smart people learn quickly). Things we imagine you'd work on included adding new video effects, building out new UI, and constantly optimizing our existing flows. We're looking for a generalist who's excited about hacking UIKit and learning about image processing, A/B testing, and whatever else our app requires in the future. At our small size, we're all self directed. Each person owns at least one critical project. We want you to own the iPhone app.

Our office is in the SoMA district of San Francisco, and the company covers food and occasional beers after work. We're climbers (rumors of a clandestine lead-climbing wall in the office).

We were recently acquired by Autodesk, but we're staying in our SOMA office. Really, this just means better benefits. The best health insurance money can buy? A 401(k) with employer match? Employee Sabbaticals? Pet insurance? PET insurance?! You bet!

Interested? Send us an email at founders@socialcam.com and tell us about something neat you built.
MMO xkcd WebSockets fixed by PubNub
Hello all hackers from HackerNews. We notice a new MMO was released by n01se and xkcd yesterday (September 26th, 2012) with multiple users flying around with a balloon figure. If you got stuck, you can click your balloon guy and turn into a ghost to seamlessly move through the landscape unhindered by mortal barriers like trees and hills. There was a problem however with the scaling of users on the system. The max concurrency could only be 20 users at a time leaving many wonder where the MMO part of the MMO was. We ripped out the non-scaling Node.JS code. ENJOY.

Enter the xkcd World with Friends: http://www.pubnub.com/static/pubnub-xkcd/index.html
Coming Up For Air: We Have Been Busy : Switching to Oauth
Huawei technologies is quickly becoming a world power in the telecom world
Free Android books giveaway
On that example, the syntax looks like Python with a bit of BASIC (the type declarations). That "StringBuilder" object reminds me of Java, I would prefer a concatenation operator.

Seems that doesn't use explicit variable declaration. Supporting that would be a great improvement over Python.
Hello all hackers from HackerNews. We notice a new MMO was released by n01se and xkcd yesterday (September 26th, 2012) with multiple users flying around with a balloon figure. If you got stuck, you can click your balloon guy and turn into a ghost to seamlessly move through the landscape unhindered by mortal barriers like trees and hills. There was a problem however with the scaling of users on the system. The max concurrency could only be 20 users at a time leaving many wonder where the MMO part of the MMO was. We ripped out the non-scaling Node.JS code. ENJOY.

Enter the xkcd World with Friends: http://www.pubnub.com/static/pubnub-xkcd/index.html
Did That Rent-To-Own Computer Spy on You?
Are you sure the purchase was by the Romney campaign? I suspect there are numerous other parties (like a friend of yours?) that may find it funny or somehow advantageous to redirect vladgyster to that URL.
How My Body Works App Is a Great Educational Tool
It's not online, but I've been told "The Back of the Napkin: : Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" is a good book for that kind of thing.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843065/
Full Blog Post: http://blog.pubnub.com/xkcd-mmo-websocket-scaling-with-pubnu...
Emacs Projmake-mode a Flymake replacement with Erlang example
Aren't those all legitimate usability/accessibility concerns? I can understand the "Ugh not another one of these services/apps," but when it comes to actually being able to view data on a site and get a gist of who your visitors are, that kind of stuff is important for the author to know, and often times there isn't a comments section to do so.
So do they basically work on the definition of Schroedinger's box?

"We've captured a bunch of data. But as long as we don't observe it, it's not legally going to be counted as intercepted."

Sounds to me, like a massive slippery slope just waiting to happen.
Some notes on culture
Same situation in the USA.
Yes, I do.

I don't wish anyone bad, but if one day your family too will be bomb by foreign troops and you will wake up in a hospital and see your daughter without arms and legs, you too will understand that.

Until then, God bless you!
I suppose that's possible?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor

My friends aren't political or technical.
I agree that video is a better way to communicate the surfing conditions. This is why I added Youtube videos as well to the SwellPhone feed. However, Youtube seems to have far less geo tagged UGC media than Instagram.
Curiosity Finds Ancient Streambed on Martian Surface
Local Detroit Woman Develops App For Texting While Driving
Definitely - one of the challenges with Zenbox is getting the idea across quickly on the landing page. Often times people think it's a replacement for Desk.com/Zendesk/etc., or that it 'only' works in GMail, etc.

We'll have to experiment pretty heavily with the landing page and wording to get the idea and value proposition across clearly and immediately.
I think this is helping solve a really important issue of data portability. This combined with Zapier is a pretty powerful combo.
I think he means it in inevitable that there will be something below (price-wise) Apple's offerings. If there is, Apple would prefer to see lots of suppliers. That will keep keep margins down for the low end stuff, so the suppliers will not make enough profits to dare invest in high end stuff (traditionally, that has done in workstation manufactures such as Sun and SGI). It also will force those suppliers to compete on price, so that they will not gain experience in building for high quality.

Of course, even if that happens, the risk remains that, eventually, the low end stuff becomes 'good enough'. Half the quality at a third of the price will at some stage look enticing to many.
Too much practice doesn't make perfect
Speaking of themes, how easy is it to customize the look&feel of the login prompt? It may be odd for the user to see an entirely different site when they try to sign-in to a site.
book review: yc=ivy league=lame
That's not an ugly urban cycle, that's progress! Rents and real estate prices go up, prompting new development and increasing density. Much of San Francisco, even near(south of) the downtown core is 3-5 story industrial buildings and parking lots ripe to be turned to high-density use. Right now this "ugly urban cycle" has Twitter and a VC firm moving into the shady Mid-Market neighborhood next to the Tenderloin (Benchmark Capital is literally next door to s trip club) with other startups hot on their heels. This is a good thing.

An "ugly urban cycle" is not when property values rise and people move IN to the city, it's when people flee to the suburbs (see: Detroit, or most U.S. cities in the 1960s).

That said, I agree it's annoying that people tend to pile into city in herds, because it takes on the order of 5 years for real estate to be approved and built to meet demand, and by then there's often been a reversal and you get a flood of supply at exactly the wrong time. But that's actually good for the city too - lots of new housing at low cost.

The problem isn't real estate, it's people - our herd instincts and inconvenient relocation patterns. Similarly, the solution isn't to try and divert money people _choose_ to spend living in preferable locations into health care (where inefficiency and costs are already too high) or "gadgets" (what?) but to get better ways of mitigating the discrepancy in speed between how populations shift and how long it takes to develop new places for people to live.

(PS Downtown Oakland is fantastic and still cheap. Maybe if SF rents get high enough people will get over their hangups about a demographically young downtown with bustling nightlife that's 5 minutes by BART from SOMA)

(PPS You'll notice implicit in my comments is the fact that real estate developers do NOT reliably get rich as the result of a boom. It takes 5 years or more to entitle and build an urban mid- or high-rise housing development, which means it's a crapshoot whether a boom will be on when you're done. In fact developers can go broke if they build now assuming the economy will stay hot because if it's cooled when they are on the market selling they'll miss their numbers. The people who make money in the boom are existing owners who sell and landlords who can jack up rents. As it happens these are the same people who will take a bath when things cool off again.)
Socialcast: Great Post on Unobtrusive JavaScript
May be. They said they are interested in feedback though. Request for supporting Linux already got 6000 votes. At some point I hope they'll start paying attention.
They updated the bottom of the article to read Postscript: At about 12:15pm EDT I now see referer data being passed from mobile Safari on iOS 6 via Google either signed in or signed out. I am not sure if this was a bug or something else but it does now seem to pass referer data. It even passes query data if you are signed in.
Emily and David (Jonathan Coulton)
There is no debate as to whether or not gittip should support international payments. It absolutely should and they're already trying to figure it out: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/126

I don't understand the point of mentioning the obvious economics of tips in third world countries. It doesn't matter where someone lives, if they're the best for the job then I'm going to tip them. Hopefully it helps them free up some time to work on amazing things.
Rust (0): Index and Conclusion
In the mobile app version there's an "Add to Favorites" functionality and a "Favorites" tab. You can add Pipeline and other North Shore as favorites and easily follow them. That's missing from the website though.
How can any website protect a user against key loggers, spyware or any other form of a compromised client machine? If the client machine is compromised, any login method is broken.
Yeah, but he highlights a big reason for this. Nothing new gets built. All those good old days people constricted supply and then got pissed when the demand hiked prices and they could no longer afford it.
You see this all over. Cool towns try to constrict supply through regulation to stop people from moving to their town, but ultimately just end up making their towns more expensive.
Looks like well documented: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-08-07/romne...
Right, that doesn't make sense.
I see these types of people as well, and this is probably true for most people. I guess I just don't need goals when it comes to fitness to stay motivated or make progress.
> Just to add additional perspective, a good marathon time for an amateur runner is 2:30...

That's not a good time for an amateur, it's an insanely good time for an amateur. The world record is currently 2:03:38. A 2:30 would have put you in 22nd place (out of 26,000!) in this year's Boston Marathon.
This reminds me of Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction:

http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
Amusingly, the "cost of change curve" referred to in the post at the second link is bogus too. :)
My First BillG Review [2006]
Google releases 'Field Trip' app, a location-aware guidebook
Re: real estate prices, go read "The Rent Is Too Damn High" by Yglesias. Yes, it's a problem. And regulation is a big, big part of it.

Also, there are plenty of places where you can make money working in tech and have a relatively low cost of living. Austin, San Diego, Spokane, even Seattle isn't too expensive, compared to the bay area.
Google exec detained in Brazil over Youtube case
Show HN: Turn any Android phone into a public server (3G, NAT, no problem)
One thing you left out is that people make laws to try to stop people from moving in. Those laws make it harder to build which does not stop people from moving in, but makes housing more scarce which leads to higher prices.

What would San Francisco look like right now if they'd allowed high rises to be built for the past 30 years?
Reminded me of this:

http://www.webpronews.com/why-does-this-mistyped-url-redirec...

They also were using GoDaddy. Perhaps someone is snatching up expirations and misspellings.
> "Although most software is made by teams, it is not a democratic activity. Usually, just one person is responsible for the design, and the rest of the team fills in the details."

This hasn't been the case on any non-trivial project I've been involved in.

However, a defining quality of successful projects I've been involved in is that there is one person driving the overall design and that person runs things closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.
It is possible that the NSA modified this RNG for perfectly good reasons, but, in my opinion, even the slight possibility of an attack existing is too high when other better RNGs exist.
Hm. Another fairly bogus patent, but who exactly is going to use it anyway? Even if you had the site already prepared and developed... CNAME and other DNS jazz takes a day to propagate anyway. You'd end up announcing something that wasn't there.
Or switch to more expensive but faster SRAM.
I'm guessing that the deliberate skip the HTTP intermediate page to reduce latency on mobile clients. If you are on something like GPRS or Edge, that extra hop could add a lot of latency.

It's a trade-off between ensuring a good user experience (fast page loads) and a good website owner experience (full referer data).

FWIW, I find the HTTP intermediate step a tad annoying (it makes copy-and-pasting a result from Google a bit more awkward), but I can see why it's there.
Thanks for the cogent response, not sure why I was modded down, but never mind. I've been doing a few small experiments in Go just to see what it's like and have loved the compilation time, lack of cruft like header files, and the simplicity. The standard library for Go reminds me of Ruby in many ways as it mostly works exactly as you'd expect with few surprises, and it covers a surprisingly broad range.

I agree that hyperbole on the future of computing is overblown (I wonder if Rust now feels it has to compete with Go for hype!), but there are a lot of things in say Go which are not as nice in C, unicode strings, loops, slices, etc. So it's not entirely pointless to start again with all we have learned since 1969. All of the little niggles in C can be worked around, but overall Go feels like a cleaned up version of C which took a few ideas from C++ and other OOP languages and left the rest out as unnecessary. Given the problems vast hierarchies of classes sometimes cause, and the huge and growing complexity of C++, I can sympathise with that point of view.

To say that there are no tools or libraries is exaggerating slightly, there are tools for Go (see http://golang.org/pkg/), and books, just not as many, which is quite normal for a young language which has just hit 1.0. For Rust there will be far fewer as it is even less developed, but that's to be expected. As you say if Go or Rust ever do become popular it will be over decades, not within a year or two.
'pbsd gave a much better answer than I could have.
How much of it is baked into the cost of living? If my rent is 30% of my salary, and I'm looking at a job that pays 30% more but the rent is double in the area, isn't it a wash?
If I understand correctly, the browser stores a certificate that proves you own your email address. These certificates are only valid for a certain amount of time, even if you check that you own this computer. So what happens when your cert expires? Do you have to go back to your email and re-click the link that gives you a new cert to be stored in your browser?

Also, if I'm using a public computer, is there a way for me to manually revoke a cert when I'm done using the machine? It seems that even a 1hr expiry is too long for this case.
Same goes for satellites.
The smallest would always be #1. You probably meant to only say 2 and 3. I think a toggle switch would be a good idea. That's how most services allow you to control your spending.
This seems to be a nice solution if you are on your own home/work computer and have your email open. They didn't really explain much on HOW it works but the problem I'm seeing is that if I am at a public computer and want to login I have to log in to my email account first and click on the persona link. I guess the benefit here is that I only need to remember 1 password (my email address password) but my email password is usually a 50 character random string that I don't like entering on public computers if I even could.

So if I want to log in to a crossword puzzle I almost feel like I have to compromise my email password which is much more valuable, if say the public computer has a key logger or something.

Maybe I'm over thinking. I could see how this would be useful if I have my desktop mail client running and just click a link to log in though.
Coffee, Process, and the Making of the Web
This isn't a controversy. Nobody would have used that RNG anyways. There's probably no bignum math in any commonly used RNG, let alone elliptic curve math. Not only that, but Dual EC had problems even before Furguson pointed out the parameter weirdness.

You do not need to be on guard against secret NSA Dual EC backdoors.
I only have my own antidotal experience as a consultant with probably less than 100 companies. But I would say that it's impossible to quantify programmer productivity so specifically as 10x or 1000x. It's a lot more complicated than that. One person may be a monster at fixing bugs. Another is incredibly gifted at designing object models. One person is great at the visual design. It's further complicated by the fact that 10 great lines of code may be more "productive" that 100 lines of garbage.

That being said, I do believe the spirit of these kind of statements to be accurate. Some programmers seem to be constantly inspired, always surprising you with a solid, clean and simple solution. Others seem to get bogged down in complexity and create fragile solutions with bugs that continue to pop up for years. The latter needs to be nudged in the right direction regularly. If left to design anything that is too big on their own without guidance they can and will cause disasters.

If you have ever had to manage programmers, you know that there are one or two guys who you give the really complicated problems - and then you don't have to stress because you know it will be perfect - even better than perfect. The other group you have to be more selective with their tasks and plan to check in more frequently. I spend a fair amount of my time trying to figure out why one struggles so much and the other does not - and how to help the one who struggles to become better. I don't consider myself a master, but I am one of those people for whom it seems to come easily. I'm not sure if it's experience or just a certain type of mind? I just know that I've observed it many times at many different companies.
I wonder if it would be possible to collect some prior art, then call up a patent holder and shake him down for a little "settlement" to keep you from filing the re-exam.

Its like trolling backwards.
I'm not super well versed in the inner workings of laptop webcams but how is it possible to disable the "webcam on" LED from software?

Shouldn't the LED's be controlled on the hardware side to make it impossible to turn on the webcam without having an LED show up?

Having software control the LED is only making it easier for people to keep using laptops as remote spying devices. Granted some industrious peeping tom could always take the laptop apart and disable the LED from the hardware side, but that takes a lot more work than just downloading some software that will do it for you.
> However, a defining quality of successful projects I've been involved in is that there is one person driving the overall design and that person runs things closer to a dictatorship than a democracy.

Yeah, that's been my experience too, but I keep running into people who think everything runs better if the whole team decides and everyone gets a say. OK, there's definitely merit in getting input from what one hopes is a bunch of smart people, and it also helps morale for everyone to feel like they're being heard, but at the end of the day I think there really needs to be one or at most a few people who make the final decisions.
The truth is that the difference is even more extreme. Good programmers are much more than 100 times more productive than average programmers.

Good programmers create features, designs, and implementations which are more elegant, cleaner, more understandable, more robust, less buggy, and much more valuable to the end user.

Consider J. Average Coder. He implements a feature in a typically half-assed way. The feature isn't well thought out, it barely works from a user perspective and has horrible usability. Anyone who doesn't think this is how average coders work has never experienced software developed by average coders. More than that, it's buggy and hacky and it serves as a development time sink, a tar trap for the entire development team. Bugs get reported and because of how messy and convoluted and fragile the code is it takes a lot longer to fix each bug. And in the end the effective productivity of that coder ends up being astoundingly low. Because the end result is a single feature that has taken a tremendous amount of coding and especially bug fixing on his part and on the part of his co-workers. The ratio of total end-user value to total invested dev-hours is incredibly low.

Now compare this with Dudley Code-right. He comes up with not only an excellent feature with high-user impact but he also comes up with a very elegant way to implement it. Boom, it's done, and nearly bug free. What bugs are found are quick to fix because the code is so clean and well put together. The ratio of total end-user value to total invested dev-hours is through the roof in comparison. Not just a factor of 100 different, but factors of thousands different.

There are tons of easy examples out there in the real world. Look at open source projects with tiny dev. teams, like nginx or varnish, and the value of those code bases relative to the effort behind them, then compare that to some random line of business software abomination from the enterprise trenches that has had hundreds of thousands of dev-hours dumped into it.
That's nothing compared to horrors of the first part of 20th century.
I agree with MG Siegler
Laziness to be completely honest. I have an idea, the background, the tools and eerything else ready. Heck, I even taught myself enough Python, Flask framework and HTML/CSS to build a CRUD site myself. Done a few exercises already but have not put together the pieces to be able to do a "Show HN" yet. Talk about misery.
Well, that was the philosophy that they were promoting. I know for a fact that your re-stating of it seems to be more accurate. My father was doing business in the late 80's, early 90's with Russia, and he was transferring large files across a modem link. The CIA contacted him and asked him not to encrypt his files, so they could see what was going on.
I think that's what the parent post was getting at. Originally email was just used for exchanging messages, now that most sites use it to authenticate a user there is a much higher cost to losing access/having it hacked.
Anatomy of a Performance Review
Your startup is hitting hypergrowth. You're selling so many widgets the servers are overheating. What to do? Time for an overall architecture & performance review.
Yep, you're right. Toggle switch and cost control options are now on the todo list. Thanks!