skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any great ideas about Open Source Mini Projects?
Hi folks, I wish to start a new open source project of my own as a mini project this semester. I wish to work more on the idea and extend it further in coming winter vacations.
But the problem is - I'm running out of ideas, most of the ones that came to my mind have already been implemented!
I would like to do something in Python (preferable), C,C++..can learn new lang if proj is interesting and have got 4 months with regular 8-6 course.

Please help out!
Sam Raimi to direct World of Warcraft movie
While they sold twice as many iPhones as they did macs, mac sales are up 4% from the year-ago quarter. That means they sold all those iPhones without cannibalizing mac sales. That's the big news.
100,000 users to get Google Wave this fall
> it doesn't cause you to think or learn

Actually, centrifugal force is one of a number of topics on which my (mostly very good, thanks IB!) high school teachers told me something that was technically true or close to true (my teacher may have used the technically-correct word "fictitious") but not really very illuminating without a lot of explanation/background. There was no wikipedia then, and animated GIFs still seemed like a really good idea, so we (or at least I) just stayed slightly confused.

All of which is to say, this comic (though old now) did prompt me to learn something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_force

> I've seen better XKCDs

I think this one is my favorite. While we're both commenting on an allegedly superfluous link, care to link to some you prefer?

----------

Just thinking: When I was a kid, there was no wikipedia. If you wanted to know about something, you had to wait for your parents to drive you to the library and hope they had a relevant, understandable, authoritative book (good luck). Now in my 20s, I can get at least a foothold in almost any imaginable topic--only a couple clicks away. What generation has seen something like that happen?
We have also progressed from restrictive DRM measures on video games to the decidedly anti-DRM stance of major game publishers today.

Er, have we now? We've progressed from kernel mode drivers with disc checks to kernel mode drivers with disc checks and/or limited online activations, and most companies still never bother to release DRM-removal patches which even Starforce recommends.

The most we seem to get from major publishers is the very occasional single token game that's testing the DRM-free waters, before they scream in terror and release their next game inexorably tied to some servers they control.. which is pretty much the model described here.

I mean, just look at one of the most successful online game services around right now: Steam. It's online activation with a pretty face, and they can make your games disappear whenever they like, and yet it's hugely popular and people love it. I mean, we trust Valve, right?

Hell, I don't like it, yet 168GB of my 263GB Games folder is taken up by my Steam install; it's frequently the cheapest, and sometimes the only option.
The other problem with hiring or co-founding with your spouse is putting all your eggs in one basket. Startups are always in turbulent waters (often financially and always emotionally). A spouse whose main occupation is not your startup can be very helpful as an anchor.
In fact, I think you can tell a competent software developer from an incompetent one with a single interview question:

What's the worst code you've seen recently?

If their answer isn't immediately and without any hesitation these two words:

My own.

Then you should end the interview immediately. Sorry, pal.

It seems to me that few programmers would answer the question this way, competent or not. And it's probably not true for most competent programmers... I wonder if Jeff has actually received this answer from a interviewee.
The technology being used to power my G1's "Search by Voice" feature is really surprisingly good. I would assume it's the same stuff. Maybe it was just the unusual names that threw it.
Latest Swine Flu spam steals passwords
Consuming OAuth intelligently in Rails
New Xbox features dated
I would agree if all things were otherwise static, but instead, one of your smart competitors are going to actually change (improve) how they conduct business and make your sliderule shop obsolete. Just because the economy is sluggish doesn't mean ideas are.

"Desperation is the mother of all invention" - somebody profound.
Watch Luck Movie | Free Luck Movie | Luck Movie | Online Free Luck Movie
Luck is an action, adventure film. The only thing sure about LUCK is that it will change. Following this saying, this film traces the path of various characters and their lives of how with time and circumstances, peoples life change with their changing luck. Luck is a story about this boy, Ram Mehra (Imran Khan), who is burdened by a lot of circumstantial problems, and reaches a point in life, where he has the capacity, but no opportunity, to come out of the mess that unfortunately life has offered him. http://free-bollywood-movie.blogspot.com/2009/07/watch-luck-movie.html
That can't work because the individual methods may contain a closure to a non-threadable object (like the DOM). The reason why all of the logic is forced into in an external script is to prevent contention from occurring - your proposed solution definitely would not allow for that.

On the other hand, allowing for an easy way to call global functions of the child worker would be really nice.

var worker = new Worker("worker.js");
worker.start();

Child Worker:

start = function(){
// Gets called by the parent
};

That would be sexy and surely simplify a lot of logic surrounding message passing.
I am really looking to use V8 more then anything. Rhino is nice but the momentum is with V8. The issue with those is that a feature is Java library support and I personally would prefer native libs then some hack to make Java libs work.
In fact, I think you can tell a competent software developer from an incompetent one with a single interview question:

What's the worst code you've seen recently?

If their answer isn't immediately and without any hesitation these two words:

My own.

Then you should end the interview immediately. Sorry, pal. You don't hate software enough yet. Maybe in a few more years. If you keep at it.

I have always enjoyed Jeff's columns and maybe I'm missing a subtle point (or just taking the bait), but this may be the worst "advice" I've ever read on hn.

If someone told me that the worst code they've seen recently was their own, I'd wonder why.

I feel confident in my own ability to usually write excellent code on the first try. Sure, it may need some refactoring, optimization, and flushing out of features, but it works, it generally works well, is very well documented, and can be easily enhanced by myself or someone else. If it's not right on the first try, I will fix it before I promote it. Shame on me (and anyone else for that matter) for leaving behind garbage for someone else to inherit. I've cleaned up far too many messes to allow myself to become like that.

I'm probably not alone when I say that I love developing new code and often hate maintaining someone else's mess.

Jeff is right about one thing though, almost everything I ever inherited was crap in one way or another, probably written by someone "less than senior".

I'd rephrase the whole interview question:

"What's the second worst code you've seen recently?"

"My own."

"OK then, what's the worst?"

"Everyone else's."

That's the one I would hire.
I think there's probably a decent chunk of government or quasi-government jobs (post office, amtrak) that are pretty reliable, but this recession has certainly shaken things to their core. Who knows these days?
Not even remotely true. Steve Jobs himself screamed bloody murder in his open letter speaking out against DRM and the music labels didn't even budge.

Economic factors are the only indicators most copyright holders care about when it comes to DRM. The moment they can sell more copies without DRM than with, they'll drop DRM. And not a moment before.

Also note this nonsense is very acceptable to the majority of consumers, myself included. If you want to vote with your wallet and not buy the Kindle/iPhone/Zune until it drops DRM, more power to you. But you'll have to wait until those of us who are happy with the current arrangement have bought our fill and Amazon/Apple/Microsoft have to start looking for niche markets. Your complaining in the mean time is not likely to make an impact.
Orange Sports
Watch the Live broadcast of Orange sports. Orange sports is a TV station broadcasting from France.
They just did another GPL release to integrate their Live tools with Moodle. I think that somebody decided to change policy.
Thriller Movies
Live Thriller Movies channel,Every thriller movie you might be interested in is available for Watching
I don't really understand what you're upset about - you don't like how they look and you're worried that they're a hack? Are you familiar with the current situation of processing in JavaScript? It involves running chunks of code, split up using delayed timers, that constantly block the user interface from being usable. If you want to talk about something that doesn't look good and is hacky - that's what you should be railing against.
I was thinking that too. Those poor diddumses! Next thing you know they'll have to do their own laundry.

Harvard's demise might be a sobering economic indicator, but I wonder if there'd be many who actually mourned its passing? To me it's nothing but a old boy's club filled with entitled trust fund brats, and the only real benefit of going there is that you then get hired by the previous generation of intolerable WASP twats. And members of this little club seem to have made an outsize contribution to the ills of wall street, law, government and the current crisis.

Who respects Harvard? Who'd miss it? Not I.
Of course I was joking. I've been a *nix administrator for the past 12 years.
It makes sense a lot, since you can't have comparison in the parameters (you'll pass a boolean instead of the comparison).

I totally understand you, but, I think its the best way to go, of course this is one example, and its very complicated, most of the time you'll only need one of those parameters.
Which is another way of saying:
Harvard is still in denial.

They (like many) are refusing to admit that they made bad investments that are no longer worth what they once were. So they're trying like hell to avoid realizing those losses, because that red ink would go on their permanent record. Which is tantamount to career suicide. (Hence the blame-gaming at all levels)
Yeah but if you're a local newspaper (which is what this post makes me think of), your competition isn't the other local papers (if there are any). It's Craigslist, Google, etc. You aren't going to beat them because they aren't playing the same game as you. Being the last local paper standing isn't going to win you anything.
You mean everybody should have a name like "Bob", "Bill" ? :)
I have a feeling that the Search by Voice Feature on the iPhone works better than on the website but that might just be by accident
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10245339-37.html
Creativity can be found in all walks of life, there are creative doctors, lawyers, accounts (well..), programmers etc. To be exceptional in your field, I think you have to leverage some element of creativity to stand out amongst a plethora of mediocrity. Creativity doesn't necessarily imply the arts, design, et al.

I do believe creativity can be fine-tuned and improved over time, but my experience has been that most people don't have enough of it. I do think there is some nature/DNA involved.
Microsoft Develops Plug-in for Moodle to Aid Teachers, Students(2nd GPL release)
Why would you attach a CSRF token to a GET request? GET requests shouldn't do things, so they shouldn't need to be protected against CSRF.

(I see this is mentioned in the comments there.)
This brings up an interesting problem with the future coding of Google Voice. How is it suppose to determine whether it's someone with an accent saying bye bye or someone without an accent saying 55. Even if the dielects are taken into consideration, that is still going to be quite a difficult problem!
Interesting attack, but it only works for CSRF tokens included in a URL. If you instead place your tokens in hidden form fields (which I recommend, since you should only need to protect POST requests) this attack won't affect you.
The irony of you saying "almost everything I ever inherited was crap in one way or another" is that somebody probably said the exact same thing about your code. I bet you write amazing code, but when given a choice, programmers would rather have the joy of creating their own code than trying to interpret someone else's.
I write programs that are used in operating industrial facilities, and I used to think that iterative development was ill-advised under those conditions because it would be too easy for things to go wrong.

Over my career, I have shifted towards iterative development. I think the change in the way I develop applications has come about because I have a much better feel for where things can go wrong, and I have learned that you can never fully anticipate where problems will arise.

I still have some reservations about freshly minted developers working iteratively, mostly because I fear that there are some things they will end up learning the hard way that more seasoned developers wouldn't make. I think that risk can be successfully mitigated by having junior developers work with mentors.
I guess it never occurred to me that it might be serious.

To be honest though, I don't have a lot of faith in the healthcare system to solve a problem like that. Or the money.
Ask HN: Storing Credentials Securely
I know that storing plain-text passwords in your database is a no-no; for login credentials, the typical solution is to store a hashed password (preferably with some entropy or salt). But what about sites that store your credentials for other services or sites? I'm thinking about things like Mint (www.mint.com). Since hashing is a one-way function, they can't hash my credentials. So are they encrypting it, and hopefully somehow keeping their encryption algorithm/data safe? Is it even possible for the encryption algorithm to be REALLY safe? What's the best practice for doing this sort of thing?

I'd really like to hear your thoughts, since I'm a little nervous about giving people my banking credentials, but also because it seems like this sort of thing is going on more and more with aggregator-type services (things like Friendfeed).
I agree with you, but have to laugh at your labeling of the iTunes DRM terms as "draconian". iTunes represented the first case of DRM I can think of whose terms were so fair that most consumers never even knew they existed. 5 computers? Unlimited devices? Unlimited burning (as long as you weren't burning the exact same playlist over and over)?!

I think we're all better off without DRM, but the iTunes model was the next best thing to no DRM at all. Hardly "draconian".
Damn, seems so obvious in hindsight. When I learned about the CSS history information leakage in the first place I was alarmed enough. I clear history several times a day because of this leakage problem (and other reasons anyhow) but that's really not often enough.

I personally don't like whitelists to solve general browsing problems but noscript does allow you to only trust certain sites with possibly attaining your history information by limiting their ability to run JS. I like seeing new sites with JS magic though. In general, I am leaning towards using a separate browser entirely just for things I log in to and fully trust -- this is just another log on that fire.
Amazon is -- like most companies do, as it is hard to quantify -- ignoring the opportunity cost of including DRM.

I and I am sure hundreds of thousands if not millions more like me would already have a Kindle were it not for the DRM.
To summarize, if your business is in a positive-feedback loop make sure it's one that's going up and not down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback
The problem is not applications you code, it's ones that you use. Do you stop using a webapp once you see a session token in the URL?
Newspapers should never have disbanded their R & D Departments...
Hundreds of millions of people watch the longest solar eclipse of the century.
Ask HN: How to avoid a start-up guy?
I'm a college student and I also do freelance web dev when I find time. My brother's friend plans to do a startup in medical tourism and he talked me over to make a website for his company. He claims to be working in Barclays bank, which is supposed to pay him very well, but he always tried to divert the topic when I talked about money.

We talked over it, two from their side and two from mine (me and my partner). We fixed a meet the other day and me and my web-dev partner have decided to clarify on the money part soon before we even touch the project.

The startup guy tried all the ways of getting me excited about it, like - "You'll get to be at a good position once we start the company" and....

"When are you passing out?"

Then after that group chat was over, he called me and talked about how he trusts me and he chose me to help out for he knew me since school days n stuff like that. And, then he disclosed that what he needs from us is a dummy website to show in his presentations to investors. And he's also stating that as a reason why he wants to get it done in cheap from me.

(What the heck, a website is a website, even if you dump it somewhere after purchasing, I don't care for I put my effort in it, and you need to pay)

Now, I wonder whether I should proceed or not as my college keep me busy from 7am to 5pm. And, it seems impractical to think about being at top in his company, because I pass out after 2 years!

and then when I told we charge $20 per page, his jaw dropped and he felt as if I said something wrong.

I hope a person working in Barclays bank, gets paid well enough to spare $100 for a 5 page website for his startup!

I was learning how to contribute to Open Source and specifically to the GNOME project, how to write patches and things like source control n stuff, till this startup guy bugged me.

He's even not comfortable in giving us any advance!

He is kind of an old friend and I am wondering what would be the best way to avoid him?

And also if what I was doing (Open Source stuff) before he bugged me was a better thing to do than work for him?
Read the comments on this one - there's some good feedback and interesting links.
as google mail is. It sure killed all those nasty email apps.
Putting session keys in a GET URL happens a lot (whether it "should" or not :-)). It's an authentication scheme for access to the URL: your GET may or may not actually have "side effects" regardless, that's orthogonal.
He has his own style, which is way less dorky than boring old business suits. It works for him.
I know I've said it in a number of interviews and have gotten offers from all but one of them. I don't know if I'd recommend it unless you can follow it up with a strong explanation of why it was the worst -- and how you fixed it -- but it isn't an interview killer, IMO.

I agree with Jeff on this one. Some of my worst experiences with code has been going back over stuff that I wrote 3-5 years ago. I'm pretty hard on crappy developers, so I'm doubly hard on myself when I look back at some of the boneheaded mistakes and decisions I've made.
And enterprise Linux suppliers/users are going to just certify/install a binary blob from Microsoft into the kernel?
How to loose your argument before you've made it:

Make up Mad Magazine-esque nicknames for the subject of your argument that you (but no one else) find clever and at least semi-derogatory. See also: M$, winblows, iSheep
it's administrators' fault, not the protocols'
If they wanted to motivate that much they could have started their own YC like program for Yahoo Search/Mail etc... development.
Could you please cite sources for those numbers? Given that it's unlikely you could find millions of people who even know what DRM is, I find your claim... inventive.

It seems unlikely that a corporation with so much to gain would not have done the numbers and research here. I understand you think those with your point of view are legion, but the mere fact that a large business is successfully pursuing a strategy counter your beliefs itself argues against this notion.
You're confusing "Notes Domino" with "a CMS" which it is not. From your link:

> CouchDB shares a basic concept of a document oriented database with views that Notes Domino has.

> In this model "documents" are just arbitrary collections of values that are stored some how. In CouchDB the documents are JSON objects of arbitrary complexity. In Notes the values are simple name value pairs, where the values can be strings, numbers, dates or arrays of those.
Good point - I was thinking about this entirely from the POV of an application developer.
The Five best (and worst) BlackBerry games
Just tell him no; very clearly, very simply. Tell him what you told us: that college is really busy for you and you want to spend time developing XYZ skills rather than contributing to a startup. Thaking him for the offer might help smoothy the path.

It's easier for everyone in the long run.

From what you've said he ticks all of my "avoid this one" boxes - so I would if I were you.
Google Chrome - Pavlonian Reinforcement?
I've been playing with Chrome recently, and have decided to use it as my main browser for a week or so.

But I've noticed an apparently subtle behavior: the back button takes you back to the previous website you visited, not the previous page. This makes it practically useless for navigation.

After a quick search, it appears that most people consider this a bug - but it could be nothing of the sort.

As anyone who designs (no refresh) web apps can tell you, the back button is their worst enemy. People instinctively use it for navigation, but in a web app, all it does it take you out of the app.

By emulating this behavior on page-based websites, where the back button now essentially takes you 'out of' the web site, is Google trying to train us not to use the back button?

If they had a bit more market share for their browser, it might even work...
And it also only includes tokens that are short enough to be bruteforced, essentially in JavaScript. And it would only work for tokens that haven't already expired (isn't it pretty common practice to only let a token be used once?).

All in all, it seems like most developers who know enough security to try to stop CSRF with tokens in the first place would create an implementation where the hack is useless. Still an interesting idea though.
To be fair, the CLISP guy seemed to want to GPL his stuff towards the end of the thread. RMS was, as always, heavy-handed and mentioned legal action before even asking, "hey, do you want to GPL this"? That says nothing about the GPL and a lot about RMS' personality.

The end result is that CLISP is one of the better CL implementations, and seems to have a pretty decent following. I don't know if it was like that before it was GPL'd or not, though.
I'm not so sure about legalization(not that I don't think it should happen, but I'm more of the mind is it worth the trouble)

Steve Yegge wrote a great Article/Essay on this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... .
Seems to me that the hardest problem surrounding is actually implementing the legalization(IE// all the minuscule changes in law that surround it, taxing, etc)

(this is more in response to many of the comments on here, not the article)
Jurai?