skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well I'm surprised that a "Woz caliber" person would even consider doing a FaceBook-like program in Django. That is light years from what Apple-II / Macintosh were in their day.

I'm no Woz, but if you asked me to code something in Django I'd chew my arm off to get out of the trap.

If there really is challenging work down the track, why does it have to wait? And if you do have compelling reasons for holding it off. Why not hire someone who is a whizz at Django and loves working in it to get your web site stuff happening? Let your Woz-like guy go walk-about or whatever and call him back when there really is challenging work to be done. If you truly value your co-founder, then you'll bend over backwards to keep him on-board and keep him very engaged.

BTW: do you describe yourself as a Steve-Jobs-caliber co-founder?
We could all, individually, convert to wind power right now and do it quite successfully.

Let us know how it goes.
That must be the most uninformed thing that I've read in my life. How is the map of electricity cables between chad and congo?

Are you aware that wind power needs special sites? And you cannot just move it beside where you want it?
We use http://www.opsview.org/
I realize the question could be more specific: Are there any particular annoyances or great features about your monitoring solution of choice?

We have been using munin and nagios in various setups. Munin is great for the ease of plugin creation but the alerting capabilities are lacking. It also has a few fundamental flaws such as gaps in the graph when a server can not be reached.

Nagios otoh is the kitchen sink solution with extensive alerting functions, but the UI is cluttered and configuration/maintenance tend to be pretty nightmarish.
P.S. They were talking about running an underwater power cable from Yarmouth Nova Scotia to Boston Mass.

Sounds nuts, but they said the economics were doable and provincial utility was their partner.
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Would someone with experience in Python please look at the code of this framework and say whether it is good to learn from?
I think it would be good if browsers came with an option to mask or don't mask passwords. But I don't know if it would work, since the users who would find and change that option would be the heavy users, that have almost no trouble with passwords.

If only that option could be easily showed and asked for simple users: a little icon within password boxes showing if it's masked or not, and a hotkey / click on the icon to toggle it on/off.
Reductive Labs Scores 2M For Puppet
I suggest reading http://www.withouthotair.com for a reasoned discussion of this issue. A couple of quotes:

"if we covered
the windiest 10% of the country [the UK] with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we
would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power
used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day".

"I should emphasize how generous an assumption I’m making. Let’s
compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind
power worldwide. The windmills that would be required to provide the
UK with 20 kWh/d per person amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware
of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the
entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world."
At least when setting or changing passwords, I would like an option to display them in clear text.

Slightly on-topic: I find it silly for a shopping website to display your complete credit card information in plain letters on screen, while masking your login password. The credit card info can be misused to empty your bank account, while the login password can be misused to ... what? Send obscene support requests and muck about with your digital shopping cart?
Disagree. Even bullets shouldn't be displayed while the user types the password. Why should a security camera in an office know that the user's password length is ten, twelve or twenty nine characters?
The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security

And his solution is to present passwords in clear text?

Hmmm. That seems to be a mix metaphor of a message: lets prompt people to make a more secure password (arguably not going to have much effect) but then display it in clear text.

To me that seems a true loss of security :)

EDIT: ignoring his point (b) because that is completely irrelevant - clear text password boxes are no more or less secure than copy/pasting the password. BUT your not giving the user the choice - every user has that bit less security, not just those copy/pasting.
I walk to work, bicycle when necessary. I could run my household off two of these, and be done with the whole problem: http://windgeneratorstoday.com/go/portable-wind-generators
This is very unconventional advise. But this is Jacob Nielsen talking on usability. What he says is generally backed by very extensive testing and way more usability experience than any of us on news.YC have.

You might not agree to unmask all passwords but why not this

> It's therefore worth offering them a checkbox to have their passwords masked; for high-risk applications, such as bank accounts, you might even check this box by default.

This is spot on as well.

> Password masking has proven to be a particularly nasty usability problem in our testing of mobile devices, where typing is difficult and typos are common

And on a mobile device, people snooping would be uncommon as well, so why mask passwords on mobile sites?

So please think hard on this, before you dissmiss this as stupid or untenable.
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> For instance, every time I give a presentation I usually have to login to a secure site.

To be fair, he did suggest that password masking was toggled by a checkbox that was ON by default.
Is there a financial news site that gets high tech? Everything here seems perfectly reasonable if your talking about a company making widgets and doodads, but not so much for intangible computing based products.
I agree. Facebook's data on me is not of a particularly good quality. Most of my "friends" are former colleagues or school friends. I wouldn't trust any of them to recommend a restarunt any more then I would trust 300 anonymous reviews on an independant restarunt listings site.
Unfortunately usability doesn't necessarily coincide with security. If you have to choose between the two, security always wins.
Yes I am aware of this and far from being uninformed I am speaking of things I learned from the owners of a successful Wind Power Utility. see Lingan under projects http://www.confedpower.com

They are in Nova Scotia, not Chad so I can't comment on the situation there.

Extra bonus points. This was a startup by people with no prior experience in the industry that has done extremely well from the getgo.
or c) at a coffee shop with wi-fi.
Bring a gun, but in this case they had three guys and no reason to believe the thief was a violent criminal.
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I would say, cars most definitely yes. And we should not only consider concrete objects even. There's really no principal difference in the way we learn to operate the character in a video game, or an internet browser, from how we learn to walk with our legs and body - it's prediction and feedback just thee same. That's the plasticity of the brain.

I think it's a little misleading to talk about "temporary body parts" however, as if there are some distinct conditions for when a tool is like a part of your body and when it's simply a tool we learn intimately.

"Woa, is this hand really a part of me??"

The neocortex really is an amazingly extended phenotype.
This is totally ridiculous. So whenever my colleagues or students are working with me on something and I have login to my email or whatever system I need to get to, it's not bad enough that I have to feel uncomfortable that they can see my keyboard while I type my password but they can just look at it on the screen. I guess this is what happens when you actually let "usability experts" design your systems.

As for this "checkbox," how many users will unwittingly have their online identity stolen because regular users aren't thinking about whether they need to select some checkbox before they type in their passsword. Also, that seems more annoying than more usable.

As someone else mentioend, this makes "remember password" totally unworkable; though personally I don't like that feature either.

There is a difficulty in mobile devices but that is because typing on such devices is not really great in terms of usability.

The other thing is that I don't think there is much evidence that this is really a problem. The only "barrier" problem that people have observed is having to create an account in the first place, but that is a separate issue.
rediff.com doesn't understand a thing about copyright, fair use, royalty etc
I'm not willing to concede his point yet, but even if he's right, this should be implemented by the browser, not the website. And if you consider taking his advice, I suggest masking the password as soon as the input field loses focus.
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Even if you could make it easy to find such an option, you'd just be giving the users the loaded gun to shoot themselves with.
Ask HN: What am I doing wrong here? (PR/Marketing an app)
Bit of a head-scratcher here.

I run a social news site for Chicago over at WindyCitizen.com. Since a massive redesign back in January, I've seen its traffic, activity, and influence grow steadily.

Problem: I've been really successful so far in working WITH the local media. But completely unsuccessful in getting any coverage FROM the local media that I could show to advertisers to let them know we're legit. I knew it would be tough to launch something aimed at a market without a "Techcrunch" to speak to early adopters, but this is getting ridiculous.

Here's what I mean:

1. I've hammered out partnerships to have our submission/voting buttons on the local alt. weekly site and all major local blogs. This was a nontrivial feat.

2. The local CBS affiliate has added our top stories widget to its site. Also nontrivial.

3. Journalists from every local publication have glommed on to us and are posting their stories to the Citizen on a daily basis. Of our 2000 members, I estimate we have at least 50 Chicago journalists among them, including editors and deputy editors who are posting stories and leaving comments on our site on a regular basis.

4. Last month we had over 4000 stories and events posted and reached about 80,000 people.

So these journalists are all using the Citizen and these publications all want our traffic (because it's local), but no one's ever run a "hey, check out this cool site!" story on us.

I'm beginning to think the statute of limitations for that happening is running out.

I've also had zero luck getting coverage from tech blogs. I've assumed that's because the site's aimed at Chicago.

I think part of my problem is that I have a background in journalism. The idea of aggressively wining and dining reporters at local papers, courting them and calling them up all the time to tell them what's new is pretty gross to me. I e-mail a good number of folks when we have news and have made friends with a lot of local media, but no dice on the coverage front. It's very humbling.

Clearly, I'm doing something wrong here. What?
Browsers have to store the cleantext password and you can see them all here:

Firefox > Preferences > Secutiry > "Saved Passwords" -> "Show Password"
It's just too easy to screw that up and despite the argument proferred there is no real benefit. If typing on mobile devices is hard it doesn't seem what we need to do is post our credit card numbers online.
My God, do you even know who "this guy" is? Stop and give it a thought a bit.

He is right about the point, straight on. I've been thinking about implementing it on our web app at aleveo.com like that.
Let me elaborate.

We all know that having a simple and usable register/login form increases signups. Let that aside, I've kicking out everything of our forms until really only the necessary. Among those things is the repeat password/email field, username (enough with those) etc. However, what if caps is on, or the keyboard layout is other and so on, the person will signup for your service, but next time he wants to login, if he is having issues with the form, you're done. He'll blame you, as he think he knows what he types as a password.

It is essentially wrong not to see what you are typing.
If you noticed, Mr.Nielsen didn't go into implementation. He said that the concept is legacy. A good implementation would be having a checkbox next to the password field "[] show text" or similar, default unchecked.

An older person would definitively appreciate that, but it is not only for them, as it happens to me too (24 year old) to mistake until I figure out what I am really typing in (first keystroke swallowed, typing mistake, caps, wrong layout, etc)
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Well that's actually their responsibility...

However they would appreciate the feature if they can't manage to make their password work (e.g. caps lock, different keyboard layout, etc.)
Can you manage an iPhone like a BlackBerry?
> Send obscene support requests and muck about with your digital shopping cart?

That, and if your credit card is stored on their servers, which your statement implies, it'd be easy for me to buy stuff on behalf of you. Right now, I'm buying you a new 72 inch Plasma screen which you can't afford. Have fun returning it!

Of course, I could send that plasma to myself, but it'd be stupid of me to do so, since I'd be giving away my where abouts.
He is sure right about the reset button though. I can't be the only one who has entered a dozen or more fields only to lose it all with an inadvertent reset rather than submit.

Also, how about the iPhone compromise? It displays the last character you typed for only an instant.
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I have to disagree. Who wins between usability and security depends on the application you're using/building.

Rarely there is one good solution to fit all problems.
If people who played the lottery understood math, they probably wouldn't be playing the lottery. :)
If you have a well chosen password and it is that long, knowing how long your password is won't be enough for the office snoop to crack the password. I'd be more worried about the camera watching which keys I'm pressing.

On the other hand, if I start typing my password too soon after the login box appears on my laptop, it eats the first character. I would never have worked out why I was finding it so hard to login if the password box did not display bullets. (See also dodgy keyboards.)
DARPA program seeks to evolve intelligent life
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/23/darpa_physical_intelligence/
4

Pentagon chief names "Physical Intelligence" initiative for "intelligent" electronic components and chemicals which can "self-organise" themselves.
Source: https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=eae3b7e276226b092f17fe69359f31d4

Ignoring The Register's slight trolling / spin at man 'playing god', I think this is a really interesting initiative. From what I understand, you engineer self-assembling (self-replicating, even?) components then can shape the process with various GA selection criteria / fitness functions. Interesting stuff goes in, and (hopefully) way more interesting stuff comes out. Have I got this right?

One of the major aims is increasingly autonomous computer intelligence in a Defence context, and I quote:
"This capability would find broad utility in the many defense systems requiring improved autonomy in unmanned systems and improved situational awareness and decision support in manned systems."
... part of me can't help thinking this sort of behaviour is inviting the Tech Singularity though and a new era of Robot Overlords ...
The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing

How?
If the security is only protecting my cat photos, then usability wins.
Are the security cameras trained on the screen or the keyboard?
Well, I paid some attention to it while it played in a side window.

First of all it's Ben Bangert talking at Google in 2006.

He discusses issues with various Python web dev frameworks, and what he sought to achieve with Pylons. Keep in mind: this is from nearly 3 years ago.

It's a look at how fairly low-level functions operate there - which is beyond my background. If that's what you're looking for, go for it.

Unfortunately, I found the slides UNreadably blurry. YMMY.
> The fact that HE always ...

I agree with this statement entirely, but wonder if in a mobile setting, like with an iPhone if this isn't a bad idea. There have been many times where I tried to look over at someones iPhone to see what they were doing and simply couldn't see. I'm talking as close as 2 feet away.

And since I know how annoying it can be to type passwords on my iPod Touch, I could see the value of this--but only on devices with very small screens, and WITHOUT any sort of auto-fill from the browser. Of course, it should be an opt-in sort of setting. No vendor should decide your fate when it comes to security decisions like this.
I'm keeping an eye on http://www.cloudkick.com/ (the core feature is management), but it isn't flying yet.
The Australian government apologized for the treatment of the indigenous people of Australia.

I think apologies matter a lot. Even though Turing is dead and has no family to apologize too, an apology would make a point about how prejudice warps the world.
Most prescription drugs will not kill most people in normal use. However, when combined with other heath issues or other drugs they can kill you or damage your body. Which is why you hear "don't take this if you are taking nitrates as it could cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure."

It takes a fucking lot of training to have any clue what's safe to take in what dosage once you start mixing a few drugs. Put all that stuff out on the shelf and tens of thousands of people will die every year. But hey, if you still think that's a good idea feel free to convince other people.
While this is true. In the general case, if your application is required to be secure, its not a choice.

Don't get me wrong, usability is very important, but if your application has to be secure(and not having someone look at your password over your shoulder is a requirement), then how can you choose usability over security?
Is there an online multiuser environment for coding/interacting with widgets?
People log in (to a web page), everyone sees these persistent composable widgets running javascript code, anyone can click on a widget and edit the code (if they have rights to that object).

Everyone viewing a room sees any movement or interaction that other people do on one of the widgets. Also, it would be nice if the widgets could generate other widgets (with code) so people could do dataflow programming and other interesting things just by composing and configuring widgets.

It would also be nice if you could export a set of widgets for inclusion in web pages. Since I'm mentioning things that would be nice, it would be nice if there was a convenient contextual socially intelligent autocomplete system for inserting the highest ranking (most insertions) widget matching your context (type of widget you are in?) and whatever you have entered so far.

I know if anyone responds to this they will probably just be explaining why they think its stupid, but I just wanted to check because I think about having this sort of thing all the time.
Don't forget Facebook likely tracks things like whose profiles you view and other activity. It's no secret they attempt to rank your friends to determine whose updates you are more likely to be interested in, etc (some bugs have revealed this, google for "facebook stalk list").

In that sense they quietly log things that you may not even notice. Facebook can know a lot more about you than just what you explicitly write in your profile.
Sun's Lively has a lot of features along these lines, but doesn't seem to have things like multiuser collaboration and persistence etc.
Of course, but it's highly unlikely you'd accidentally expose that page to someone. I was thinking more along the lines of letting your friend use your computer to check gmail, and whoops, there's your password already in the box.
Your site has to become cool before anyone is going to bother reporting on it. You don't get automatic reporter points just because you feel strongly that you should, or even because you work hard at it. As it stands, your site is Yet Another Portal or News Aggregator or whatever and it's just not a particularly compelling... thing.
First off, congrats on building a site that a lot of people use and respect. I've definitely heard of it and I'm not from Chicago, so it must have gotten coverage somewhere.

The first question is probably a dumb one: Have you actually asked any of the journalists you work with to get you some coverage?

Also, you may have some success following up with the many reporters and bloggers who are covering the whole "new journalism" and "death of newspapers" beat. Talk to Dave Winer (http://www.scripting.com).

You're in Chicago. Do you have any contacts at Medill? Reach out to them and do a partnership ... you should definitely get some coverage that way.
This will solve another issue related to passwords. Password confirmation. Displaying password in clear text removes the need for password confirmation field. This could be a worthwhile experiment.
Did you ask any of them to write about you?
yes atonement is difficult in this case.

A sad story indeed. If I recall correctly from the biography Turing spent time working at Princeton as Alonzo Church had independently produced the same results so it's really the Church-Turing thesis.

Statues and government apologies don't mean squat. The important thing is to never let the story be forgotten.
Would you know?
I have been programming continuously for 30 years and I've never been burnt out. In fact, I'm having more fun than ever. I can't imagine doing anything else.

I have worked in 88 companies, either as a contractor or an employee. I have seen OPs scenario (and many other absurd scenarios) play out many times. I have worked on the worst garbage code and dealt with incredibly nasty and incompetent people almost everywhere I've been. But I never let them beat me.

Only I get to decide how I feel about anything, especially work. When things have gone sour, which they almost always do, I have done everything I could to fix them, and when that wasn't enough, I have moved on. I've always felt that one of my biggest strengths was the breadth of my experience. I use almost all of it every time I do something.

There's now more hope and opportunity for true hackers than ever. It's just a matter of continually finding your best place. Maybe a small service business. Maybe that perfect job. Maybe a startup. If all else fails, keep the lousy day job and hack away at something cool at night.

If you're really burnt out, take a break. But make it your decision - don't let the bastards take your inner hacker away. Ever.
This sounds like something that should be handled by the user agent on the user's request.
Duly noted. This sort of reaction is helpful. Of course I think what I'm doing is unique (first local social news site), but if others don't get that from a quick visit, or they think that's a pretty "meh" idea, then that's good to hear.