skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apps really do bring out some strange behavior. I've seen smart people waste 2 productive working days researching which $1.99 app to buy.

Suggesting that they buy half a dozen and just delete the ones they don't like is met with a look as if I suggested sawing their own arm off.

Predictably their phones are just jammed with apps that they never use but keep because the "paid good money" for.
> Maybe you'll see less of this if you drop the "less than your stupid latte, dumbass" sales tactic.

Wow, that was unnecessarily abrasive. It's not unreasonable to expect a product to cost something, even if it's virtual. And nobody is suggesting putting the latte analogy as advertisement on the front page of services.

> "What, you waste money on overpriced coffee, why not waste your money here too?!"

That's entirely beside the point. The assumption is that nobody wastes anything. It's an analogy about paying for electronic goods. And just because something does not cost a lot of money doesn't mean it's an impulse buy either.
Agreed. This is one of the unintended results of giving out free stuff in general; no good deed goes unpunished. There are enough bugs in commercial APIs and products that hitting one in something you got for free should be no surprise at all.

I always describe programming as incredibly easy, except for the part when things don't work as they're supposed to work. Very often you eventually find this is outside of your control. You have to be more calm and patient than the bug.

He's not going to win any friends or help acting like a pompous ass who's never made a mistake in his life. Maybe he hasn't because this is his first real project.
Ask HN: Web CMS vs Framework vs Custom Build? 
I am looking to build a web front-end for a database (mysql) that can add / edit / delete records. In the old days (7 years ago!) I would just knock up a ColdFusion site, connect to the database and start building pages along with a user auth, session management, logging etc. A lot of copy / paste!

This web app needs to edit content in a database which is then synced with a mobile app so in some ways its a CMS, just not a web one. A client will be editing the content so I want to make it look nice / easy to use.

I was wondering if a "custom build" is still the best approach, maybe using PHP, Python, Ruby etc rather than ColdFusion which seems to have died a death.

Would using one of the CMS (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) help remove a lot of the initial effort? The CMS seem to be more geared towards editing web content, and although you could get them to do anything are they really the best option. Or is there a more general web framework I should look at? Django etc

The other thing I was wondering if there was a smart tool that could point at a database and auto create the website for you either in code or as an application ? Kind of an Access database form from the web.

Ideally the UI would nice and clean (Google etc), and was looking to find a drupal / joomla theme that would fit the bill but not found anything quite like what I want. So guess I would need to hand craft something.

I have spent the last few years doing a lot of mobile development, and the web world has certainly moved on so any advice would be a great help.

Thanks
I reallyyy like what you've done. Similar to http://pen.io
100 Web Design UI Elements and Mobile Kits
Great Entrepreneurs Lead People and Use Technology
I think the problem is quite timely. In an early-stage startup, everyone needs to be a generalist. As the team grows, generalists need to evolve into domain-accountable roles.

For instance, my team starts with just me. I needed to push a fullstack web app out the door. Then we got more money and the team grew to 4. I can't be the same generalist anymore or else I will work myself into a bottleneck.

I still require everyone on my (web) team to be generalists or know the fullstack. This way, no one can be a bottleneck and everyone can solve problem or implement a new feature independently.

The problem is "integration", or when the projects become too big for just 1 person. In those instances, we solve a lot of frictions by having a final "dictator" for technology decisions and a "team manifesto" in term of best practices.

So far so good. Now, if I can get a ops guy to help me then I can sleep with both eyes closed :)

-V.
Same here. I donated my pis to 9th grade students (I had 5 of them).
G means choice g in this case, which helps you find the root problem. The other choices just treat the symptoms.
"Trivial sums"? This is squarely in line with what Google pays for vulnerabilities. Who is paying drastically more for website flaws?

And, because you think the thank-you Facebook offered was too low, you wouldn't blame him for selling vulnerabilities to criminals? Really? Selling vulnerabilities to criminals is itself a crime.
Also, the long record of using the same spectrum bands within the Landsat program (going back to the 70s) simplifies measuring changes over time. This is a huge asset.
Depends on whether the outsourced team includes a project manager or not. The project manager costs more but is also responsible for translating general requirements into actionable specs, and keeping the dev team on track. If you're not paying for a project manager then the project manager is you.
I hope this is it. Suborbital hops between cities would be a spectacular ride. Minimal ground infrastructure needed also.
Nobody said the BSD license is "broken", nor did they blame the license for anything. He simply pointed out that the license is not appropriate for what many people actually want, and pointed to licenses that are appropriate for those goals. If you want a totally free license where people can do anything, but you still hold copyright, then you want ISC/MIT/zlib, not BSD. Many people do not realize this.
There are and will be growing pains as this becomes reality... for example, there would be unintended consequences one might even imagine one such as:

"
you get fined for hosting ogv videos because they're deemed unsafe and the FCC decides you should be fined per video that is not an MPEG format... after all these unsafe video's hurt people real people
"

So, yeah the government could be a good vehicle for helping to secure our internet, but it could also have unintended consequences of preventing growth and innovation under the guise of "security" e.g "fear"
Yes, it is. Knowing this exploit was worth many orders of magnitude more to facebook. You can't think of the money as an absolute amount and say, "hey, that sounds pretty good." It has a market value, both to fb and to blackhats, and that market value is far higher than $4500.
My brother and I are building an X/Y plotter with one, which is either going to turn into an etch-a-sketch printer, or a CNC/3D printer hybrid.

The other one is either going to become a quadrocopter, or an arcade table (cheap coffee table, cheap LCD, and some controllers).
I thought this was going to be something about how the http spec misspelled refer(r)er in the http headers.
"Starting in the 1920s, a company called National City Lines started buying up street car lines, then mostly privately owned. In 1936, the company became a holding company owned equally by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum. Perhaps you can guess where this is going."
Ask HN: What would you do with 3D printing, if...
... you had the skills & time?

Curious about opportunities with building software that helps you fill the gaps.

Here's a great 3D printing primer to get your ideas flowing: http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_harouni_a_primer_on_3d_printing.html
Scuttlebutt Pro 1.1 General Availability
And what percent of that can we assume Paul owns? He certainly is a rich man.
I thinks it's kind of value psychology, everyone got stuck in their minds that if there're so much shitty content online for free - good content equaly should be free (however no logic or connection here), and when we talk about coffee, barely anyone can think of many posibilities to get it for free...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I don't use bookmarks, I used to put things in there and never find them when I needed them, so I've stopped doing that.
This is pretty US-centered point of view, I invite you to look upon it from distance.
Anybody have more info on this "IGZO" tech? My main interest in viewing angle, color stability, and color reproduction.
Genuine question: how much would have you charged if facebook hired you to perform a pentest or a vuln assessment?
Eh, cutting the department's budget retributively is stupid.

The most appropriate and effective punishment is to find the people who are most responsible and should have shut the whole thing down (eg, the Chief), fire them, and pursue any appropriate civil or criminal charges against them.

If the grunts take a pay cut and the cars go an extra year before being replaced, the Chief may still choose to do the same thing again. If you're the Replacement Chief for the Chief who was sacked and sued, you might reconsider...
Writing and Coding Is Easy, Editing and Fixing Sh*t Is F**king Difficult
In what sense? I'm sure you could find people who would pay $20,000 to view anyone's private photos.
Facebook is doing the right thing here. Very few companies have a responsible disclosure policy, much less a reward system.

You take a huge risk even notifying companies of a security flaw you found, since that usually implies you were doing unauthorized penetration testing and they'd have a case against you under the oh-so-wonderful CFAA. Or they'll just ignore you completely and never patch the flaw.
Nothing happens. He has the option of doing that. He can probably even use it as a negotiating tactic; without "force, violence, or fear", extortion probably doesn't come into the picture†, and my (IANAL) understanding is that courts read the "fear" thing narrowly, like, "fear or force or violence".

What he probably can't do is threaten to sell the vulnerability to "black hats"; you can't threaten to commit a crime unless you're paid a protection fee.

† Source: model jury instructions
Ask HN: Open-source software for webinars
I'm thinking about hosting a few webinars, but i'm looking for an open-source solution, that can be scaled easily. I know BigBlueButton, but it seems hard to setup a proper infrastructure for it. Any ideas?
Makes me cringe to hear someone say `|>` is the `pipe operator`.

If you're thinking operators your probably doing it wrong in functional programming.

It's simply another higher-order function that enables function composition. g |> f = λx → f (g (x))

edit: My reasoning might be really flawed as I have no idea if erlang/elixr can define functions that look like `operators` and therefore don't know if `|>` is built in. Yet, you shouldn't assume |> is some magical thing, but respect it as a higher-order function in my opinion.
At this moment, there are 33 total comments, and 12 top level comments, including yours. A rough breakdown of the 12 top level comments works out to:
1 semi related anecdote
2 questioning specific content of the book (both in regards to their appropriateness as well as technical precision)
5 pieces of encouragement/enthusiasm
2 questioning target age range
2 wanting more pictures
Honestly doesn't seem that ridiculous.
It seems ironic that Chromium should give you issues on a Chromebook. Does (non-free) Chrome work?
All data in PLN (around 0.30 USD), the first number is for 2012 Q1, the second for 2013 Q1.

Incomes on sales: 17 680 000, 27 810 000.
Profit on sales: 470 000, 4 070 000.

Incomes on sales to external customers per division:
- game development (CD Projekt RED): 1 500 000, 4 100 000.
- digital distribution (gog.com): 5 500 000, 12 000 000.
- publishing, distribution in Poland (CDP.pl): 10 400 000, 11 400 000.

Result on sales to external customers per division:
- game development (CD Projekt RED): +100 000, +1 400 000.
- digital distribution (gog.com): +900 000, +2 700 000.
- publishing, regular distribution in Poland (CDP.pl): -800 000, -300 000.

Assets in 2010-2012, 2013 Q1: 1 100 000, 1 700 000, 2 500 000, 3 100 000.
Debt-equity ratio: 2012 Q1 27%, 2013 Q1 19%.
I see some complaints about the excessive creation of media projects on the pi.

Taking a step back, from the hardware point of view, the pi showcases VideoCore and not the ARM. This is the reason why the CPU is severly underpowered with respect to the GPU. The GPU is actually a total SoC - it doesn't need the CPU at all. The only reason the ARM CPU exists is to run traditional programs. VideoCore does kick ass media decoding and can output to HDMI. In case, you didn't know, the pi actually boots from the GPU and not the CPU. That's right, the VideoCore comes up first and then gets the CPU going unlike traditional systems. From Broadcom's point of view, the pis sole reason of existence is to showcase their GPU. To this end, it has served it's purpose really well. Unfortunately, they have been terrible in releasing proper image and video decoding drivers.
I use my Pi to pee.
It's a NULL pointer dereference, not undefined pointer from what I can see. Unless someone was able to mmap that memory, it should simply cause an instant crash. PyDict_GetItemString() is guaranteed to return NULL for missing fields.
Unity tweak tool -> Fonts -> text scaling factor.

And for chromium I set default zoom to 125% in browser settings.
I'm guessing they're using the Sharp panel announced last year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1wRivEeIU8
It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution, because at the drop of a hat, some user, or someone could drop in a picture of an underage girl showing some boob, or some folder of MP3 songs or whatever, and then everyone starts shouting 'Oh god won't somebody think of the children', and you come back to your data centers are in ruins, locks cut, doors broken in, and all that is left is cat5 cables, and a 7 year legal battle (from another legal system in a different country) ahead of you.

It's because of stories like this that I keep hidden secret offsite offline backups, that only I know about and you would have to torture me to get that info. That way when your entire business is squished from the judicial system of a different country based on the behaviors of a person you don't even know, at least you can salvage what you have and try to pivot and get your stolen income streams back while you enter a 7 year legal battle where you win.

You have to plan for hurricanes knocking out your individual data centers, and you have to plan for legal hurricanes that knock out ALL your data centers. It's part of the new world. You have to be able to replicate, or else the mafia don walks into your shop, and you have to do everything they say.

With prior preparation, you can tell the don you are not interested in his insurance, and then buckle down for the legal/illegal hurricane coming your way.
If you say so. Where would you find them? There appears to be a functioning market for drive-by clientside RCE. The Interwebs seem to have interpreted this as evidence that there is a market for all kinds of vulnerabilities. I am skeptical that this is the case, and, unlike the RCE markets, I have no evidence to suggest that the website auth bypass markets are real.

I suppose the ability to generate unbounded Facebook likes or Twitter followers is monetizable.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Personally, once I have something that works it's much easier to go back and understand the entire system. It's just time consuming getting to that point.
Scala: the Magnet pattern
This is exactly what I'm trying to figure out at the moment. My guess is that the walls will be just far enough to allow the reflections to not disrupt the air immediately surrounding the vehicle, and/or there will be gaps, allowing the shocks to dissipate into the surrounding air.
IPS

https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX32V...
This was a conspiracy theory I always heard growing up in Michigan -- that the auto companies had bought up the trolleys in Detroit so people would have to buy cars. It's good to finally see the historical basis.
Have you sold a lot of vulnerabilities, then? Can I ask if you're speaking from experience here?
I've done a lot of theorycrafting regarding specialists vs generalists. If we could take a detour to the Warcraft/Final Fantasy arena...

Being a generalist is like being a Druid/Shammy/Paladin/Red Mage. They will never be as good as a pure Warrior or Mage, but the key here is that they can satisfy (sufficiently) both roles as one person. Let's say you're on a DPS-heavy team, you would most likely take up the role of healer. So as other posters have said, generalists are good at filling the gaps of whatever team they are on. Their role will be dictated by the voids created by their team mates.

Let's say you have a team of all Red Mages. Instead of having them all heal and all fight, which can be chaotic management-wise, you might choose to have one function as a healer and the other two as DPS. Treat them as a specialist team even though they are generalists underneath.

As with a real business that scales, I think specialization really is the only way to have truly high, spectacular output. That said, there may be a place, at small scale, where generalists shine, where context switching occurs more often. Maybe we could call them "micro opportunities". Let's say you have three Red Mages and no one needs healing. Great, everyone is on DPS. Let's say one round, you need to pop a heal. One mage becomes a healer, temporarily, and then switches back to DPS. Compare this with specialization. Sure your Priest/White Mage can "DPS" but the output is negligible. They are effectively healing full time. So, while there is no context switching in the specialization scenario, there is also missed opportunity. Again, not an opportunity of scale, but a micro opportunity.

Personally, I love the idea of generalists. I think it's good to have perspective on a lot of things and it breeds empathy and familiarity. I think the best would be general specialists. So not "a Ruby guy", "a JS guy", and "an ops guy" but maybe "backend dev", "front end dev". I know a lot of people like that so it's not a completely foreign idea.

See also "T-shaped" people from the Valve company handbook. They are people that essentially "implement" both specialization and generalization.
That's a damn good idea. I'd pay money to get that sort of feedback on something I create.
The criticism of ENV only allowing strings has no bearing on his argument. ENV comes from the OS environment. Code in any other language--strong or weakly typed--would have the exact same issue. And not being able to coerce arbitrary strings to booleans is fine because there is no principled way to do that except through convention. And everybody makes up there own convention: true, yes, YES, OK, TRUE, ok, ON, ENABLED, which just goes to show that there's no principled way to do it.
Incidentally, Lisp doesn't even represent boolean values as 0 and 1, it represent them as nil (equivalent to '(), the empty list) and anything-but-nil. Indeed:

* (if 0 "truthy" "falsey")

"truthy"
The tag-line "less than your morning latte" carries an implied claim that the product has comparable worth. The author of the linked post departs from that claim by relating the pleasures of enjoying coffee. That's all it is: humane writing about coffee and advertising. There is nothing passive aggressive about it.

Your comments about it, however, are straight-up aggressive, and I honestly don't understand why.
> It's associated with productivity which is a mental booster, as well as all the other trendy, bohemian associations it has.

Is it really a mental booster, or is it just that people who have morning coffee to "wake up and get productive" get their first "hit" of caffeine for the day and so fight the caffeine withdrawal symptoms? IMHO, the inclusion of caffeine in DSM-5 suggests the latter.
2. Let them beat the game without buying anything but give them the option to speed up time or skip things if they spend a lil money

That was definitely what I was thinking while playing The Blood Forge in Soul Reaver or the Ocean Hotel in vampire the masquerade or while exploring the wonderful worlds of Psychonauts. If only I could buy cheats it would have been so much better.
How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat?
> Prison has to be scary. It has to strike one as the number one place that you do not want to go. It's the other ultimate consequence, along side of death. I can't imagine this world if it wasn't.

If your theory were accurate, countries like Norway--with its extremely humane prisons (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00.htm...) would be crime-ridden hellholes.

But Norway's homicide rate is 1/10th that of the United States, and other crime statistics are similarly low: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

So it seems you are, in fact, wrong; and inflicting horrifying suffering indiscriminately on anyone who goes to prison does more harm than good.
I was born in to a multi-lingual environment, learning Dutch, Swedish and English since birth. Later in life I learned French and German due to my locality; I also took Latin and Greek in school and have been teaching myself Japanese just because I enjoy the challenge. Finally, I also have enough exposure to Spanish as well as Hebrew to be able to put together a decent conclusion as to what a conversation might be about. Each of these languages have been learnt at different parts of my life and I would say that the only one I am still fluent in speaking is English. My Dutch is rusty, but I can hold a conversation, though will stumble over words as I try to translate them (ironic since I used to think in Dutch and had the same issue translating what I wanted to say in to English). The interesting thing is, while I may not be fluent in speaking any of the other languages, I understand them. I can pick up on key words and can figure out what is being said. Due to the nature of languages and the etymology behind words - I can often pick up on conversations in other languages I have not learned.

In contrast of my multi-lingual background in the spoken form, I also try to diversify the programming languages I am familiar with. While the idea of a programming language and a spoken word language vastly differs, I still see it as just learning another language - that is the mindset I go in with. A spoken language has rules - wether they are related to phonetics, semantics or most importantly the idiosyncratic rules of gender and relationships. Programming languages have a much more defined ruleset at the core that they all share (to a certain degree) and the language itself on top of it follows many of the rules I would expect in a spoken language.

I don't know if there is a correlation to the exposure of languages at a young age - but in my experience it has helped me.
That's exactly the point. I think the $2 are an investment into the quality of the thing I'm about to consume, and if I'm going to invest the 40 minutes anyway I'd like to make this little extra investment to support the makers. Of course that's no guarantee I will like it, but you take that kind of risk with every new thing you buy.
What I meant is that the user needed to load a flash payload and be logged in properly. The data harvesting happens client-side. The vulnerability itself is server-side, yes, but computers are faster at copying data than engineers are at figuring out what's going wrong. The data you could potentially harvest with an exploit like this, given good planning and enough time to affect a large amount of people, is definitely worth quite a bit of money. This vulnerability could even have helped to make a very convincing phishing attack, which, again, properly executed, leads to very valuable data.

It's not remote execution, but I still think it's valuable.
M2M prototyping. Paperweight.