skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great point. I'm going to have to brain storm. I might do a video or something along those lines.
I actually been contemplating this idea with Chegg, but I just don't have that much time to work on it at this point.
Maybe the NSA just wants to make Windows more secure, to make cyber-warfare harder for everyone else. But assuming the NSA is malicious, it wouldn't need to install a back door.
"Helping" with development gives it access to the Windows source code. Thus it gets a better shot at finding vulnerabilities it could exploit. They just need to stay ahead of patches.
I read "Mentors" as "Mentos". Now I'm eating a mint. Thanks for that.
Enable Expose and Spaces for the Magic Mouse
The browser would be more involved in the log in process.

It would know when you attempt to log in somewhere via your email, it would look for a login email from the site (e.g., going to your gmail account), and it would go to the login link specified in the email automatically.
Protect from what? Cash isn't a threat and it isn't contraband. $5k is only half of what it takes to raise bankers' eyebrows, and they're at least qualified to investigate money laundering. The TSA goons had no defensible reason to waste this guy's time, much less go on a fishing expedition into what's usually intensely personal affairs.
For those who were confused by the contradiction of this comment and the actual post, it looks like "less attention from men" was probably supposed to be "more attention from men".

For instance:

"So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten."

(And it's doubly confusing because patio11 refers to it as an "old wive's tale".)
I still don't understand, you want to store passwords/logins in email accounts and have the browser fetch them?
You're completely right, I'm jut not the best writer. I am hoping to rewrite that section soon as a lot has change since the launch of the site.

Do one thing and do it well.

I agree, I had all these ideas (and continue to have) and thought it would be great to have them on the site. However, after reading an article, I believe it was from 37signals, I realized that I was doing too much and that I should keep it simple and focus on one thing for now. Since then I have stop rolling out any other features, other than the ones that are currently available.
Absolutely it's true. Programmers in most corporate environments are treated like assembly line workers. Work for X hours, Y amount of work gets done. Programmers should be interchangeable units that can be continuously reorganized to optimize productivity.

In reality, of course, programming is not like manufacturing at all. It's more like creative writing, or painting, or composing. It's difficult to tell how long something will take, what problems you might face along the way, etc. Business people typically do not understand this; getting an MBA will usually teach you about organization, supply, resources, large teams, and other things that are irrelevant for software development (not to mention business connections along the way, which is just as important.)

But software is clearly necessary if you're going to be competitive in almost any field, which is why programmers are needed. Business people usually don't like you; you're just a necessary evil. They'd rather not have to deal with programmers at all. They would rather buy some software package that comes in a carton. A person who works on something all day that they can't understand and can't easily measure the productivity of scares them. "Why are these programmers all so fiddly? Can't they just do their work like everyone else?"

This is one of the reasons most corporate software sucks.

(I've never worked for any extended period in a large corporate/enterprise environment, thank god, this is just the general story I hear from people who have.)
Well, yet another one of my website ideas in action. I wish I could pump them out a little faster.

Site looks alright, I'll be sure to check it out later tonight when I get home. (on the iPhone ATM)
If you watch the end of this video http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potenti... which was posted on HN a couple of days back, you will see a lot of things that he proposes which can completely change how we interact.

He not only gives an example of virtual keyboard, he also gives example of a paper can be converted into a touch screen with a motion sensor.

Highly recommended video.
You only use a single password for your email account (e.g., on gmail). There would be no passwords associated with other sites.
http://openid.net/
It may be thin, but it's inspirational, and that can go a long way when you're starting something from scratch.

This post inspired me years ago when I was starting my own company and I still think about it today.

Thanks Marshall!
sure. my first thought was: maybe the average guys on the site are worse looking than average. who knows? the statistics here are ridiculous.
Maybe the trick is to get people to make you money without them knowing that they are working for you. What if freerice.com was for profit?
Facebook: Building a Better Photo Uploader
So even with the NSA helping secure Microsoft Windows, there's still lots of vulnerabilities being found in it all the time.

wow
Or how about just a few words on the home page along the lines of "Buy and sell used text books on your local college campus"
> you get no inkling of personality from a picture

Really can't agree with this. How people present themselves in self-chosen photos tells quite a bit about personality.
interesting. women rate men much more harshly on looks, yet a woman's attractiveness is much more important for whether they receive messages.

sounds like attractiveness is rated poorly for women partly because it doesn't speak to women.
You could theoretically make an OpenID provider that does that, I think... rather than redirecting users to a website to enter your password, it just shoots an e-mail for you to confirm.
He's talking about the dip at the extreme right of the messaging graph. The old wives' tale refers to the observation that some women on the extremely beautiful end of the scale aren't approached by very many men because they're perceived as "too" beautiful.
It's an old Steve Martin bit.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77imono.phtml

(Video of it is a bit hard to track down, sorry)
A bunch of you all emailed for invites--we're sending a batch out later this week. We'd love to hear more of your thoughts once you use it. A few cursory answers: everything is free for now (we're still trying to figure out what the transaction fees will look like, but they will be competitive with credit card), Paypal is a great comparison and as someone recced with a link Paypal Wars is an awesome read, we love the Godaddy brand too, the syntax is very flexible and constantly adapting to the way people want it to work, if anyone knows the textpayme guys would love to chat with them (i'm @kortina), Fundraiser events-YES!, and yes security and fraud are tough problems but we are eager to tackle them. Think that covers most of them. Again, thanks to those who wished us luck and provided criticism.
Similar story: shaving a 5 second build/run down to 200ms. It took 2-3 days to implement. I couldn't justify it in terms of time saved; nor did it seem I could use the article's justification that I'd tend to avoid compiling because it was too painful.

However, it did change my workflow, in that now I try things out quickly, and even using code like a config file, to test ideas instantly. Perhaps more importantly for me, every time I compile now I get a little feeling of delight, and a data-point suggesting that all problems have solutions.

details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939523
I read it as 'Mentos', too, and now I have that song in my head!! Now you do, too. Sorry.
That doesn't explain rating perfectly OK looking guys as 1 or 2, which is what seems to be happening.

I would have expected 3-4 to be most of the ratings. When I ask women if sush & such is good looking, they almost always say 'he's ok.' I concluded thought that women have a huge 'ok' range & small 'no way' & 'huba huba' ranges. What I should have concluded is that they're all liars.
Microsoft search share continues its slow upward crawl
Who's Nuron? Play on words?
You could have a login screen that emails you a logon link containing a passkey or something and you can use that to authenticate? Is that what you mean?
awesome/memorable/useful/meaningful/worthwhile

Nice thought, but that definition is so broad that only outright scams don't fall under its purview.
If you're serious about online dating you should probably be getting professional profile photos.
Funny, I was referring to the same class!

When did you take it?
To expound, men may have to retreat (when they're "retreating") to OKC because of below-average looks. Woman may have to retreat because of below-average personalities.
Yes. To make it convenient, you could have the browser automate the process.
Gives me an excuse to ask something I've wanted to ask for awhile: Is Lenovo _that_ bad? I love my Thinkpad but it needs upgrading. Is Lenovo worth getting these days?
You bring up a lot of good points. In my mind I was thinking of text (or email, or phone) confirmation for online transactions and merchant-initiated transactions. Basically anywhere you don't physically present the card. Having the card present is a pretty good indication you intended to make the payment. Online orders are done through payment gateways, or going back a bit, manually keyed at a terminal. Those transactions should be confirmed manually or white-listed before they are authorized.
I think this is a good feature. I am often on a client Linux box without root and need something trivial like mg... but end up having to "install" from source because I don't have permission to install the package. If I could do that anyway, that would be good.

I also think packages should install into ~ like this, rather than into the global system.
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Twitter a Top-10 Source of Referrals to Paper's Web Site
Indeed. 4 stars for a guy could mean "this person is average looking, but I think I might get to fuck them" rather than "this person is in the top 80% of beauty".
Ask HN: Why didn't Yahoo use Del.icio.us for search?
I was thinking about this today. Why the hell didn't Yahoo use del.icio.us to boost it's relevant searches (I am assuming that they did not, since nobody ever hinted otherwise)? I would think that having such a huge amount of data about relevant interests could be a game changer. I mean pagerank is amazing, but you would think that access to such a good repository of data would allow yahoo to have evened the playing field. I mean I don't know that much, but it seems like if anything it was almost a way of creating the semantic web, which I know used to be heralded as the future of the internet.

What do you guys think about the relationship between the two?
Really? And he didn't mention that in his post? Seems like that completely explains away the difference in attractiveness ratings then.
Thanks Josh, it's an honor to know that you like the site idea. I named it after my school's mascot, the Bulldogs. You see, initially it was only intended for my school, but then one day I decided to go nationwide in order to grow faster. Of course, that didn't happen, at least not yet. Right now I'm hoping to implement many of your suggestions, but being the only person working and having little time in my hands is tough. I wish I could find some help!
Not as hilarious when all the attractive girls ignore your messages because they are flooded with spam, however...
After being on the inside, I am convinced this is (part of) the reason why Microsoft seems so disconnected from the rest of the industry: no one here reads anyone else's code.

Sure, you might look at other code in your (probably enormous) project. And if you can swing it, you might be able to look at another group's code. But in general you can't go look at, say, random third party open-sourced code similar to what you're working on, or even better, random code that has nothing to do with what you're working on. (The license, viral or not, usually has no effect on the prohibition.)

There are aspects of serendipity, and of feeling recharged by feeling connected to the greater constellation of developers and projects in the world, and those aspects are stripped away here. I wonder if the Microsoft "culture" attracts people who don't care about reading others' code, or if it creates those kinds of people.
It's not the retrospective assessment of a business that's important here but the motivation that sets it in motion in the first place. Take a company like Facebook: those guys are really serious--almost evangelical--about the goal of making the world more connected; they also happen to be cornering a Google-size market in the process. Or think back to Microsoft before hating on them became so vogue: they had a mission to put a PC in every household which is a pretty admirable goal; it also happened to be the case that it was a damn good business move.
Money quote for me:

" Microsoft says there are still about 600 interconnected DLLs and other binaries, totaling hundreds of megabytes. None of these could be safely removed without causing other parts of the system to break. Even Mark Russinovich, widely regarded as one of the world’s top experts on Windows internals, admits that they still can’t predict what exactly would break."

As much as I like Windows 7, that kind of thing makes me want Microsoft to create an emulated environment similar to OS X Classic and surround it with a from scratch, managed, modern cruft free OS.
This is a very simple site, it's all just WuFoo forms! Must've taken less than a week to design and go live. Smart.
Close. The real story is that that the design of the s-boxes in DES appeared a bit strange to the crypto community, and there were rumors that the NSA had been involved in selecting the values. Foul play was suspected. It turns out that the values in the DES s-boxes were very resistant to differential cryptanalysis, much more than they would have been if they were selected randomly. Either the NSA knew this technique back in the 70s or the IBM researchers figured it out and agreed to keep it secret (both claims have been made); it was not until independent discovery in the 90s that we all learned why the s-boxes had those specific values.
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Because you don't want your sysadmin logging into your favorite dating site as you?

If you are going to do this right, you need email encryption. In which case, you have a client-side certificate. In which case, you might as well just authenticate over SSL with that certificate.

But hey, why do something secure and built-in to every browser (even IE) when you can invent your own protocol instead? It's the Internet!

Also, any reason why this is an "Ask HN" and not a blog post? (Not saying it should be one or the other... just askin'.)
It could be done, and pretty easily too.

To log in, you type in the e-mail. The server sends an email with a link (with secret code), which in turn sets a cookie when visited. The cookie expires in a month or so, and gets refreshed with every visit to the site. So the user only goes through the login process on a new computer.

One problem with this: it's too different from what's in place now. So users will be confused, at least initially. But this is actually an interesting idea.
If they're ignoring you, doesn't that mean your messages are spam too?
How come people are not upset that the "forgot password" protocol is not secure?
Well, the sysadmin could click on "restore password" on that super-secret site they want to steal your password to, and then check your mailbox. So this is really no different in terms of security.

Also, I'm sure I have a dozen restore password emails in GMail somewhere. And I'm sure I'm not alone.
TweetPhoto CEO Says Too Much In Interview, Gets Fired.
Except that that statement is not true. They may not be approached by numbers proportionate to their beauty relative to the population, but they are still more approached than any less beautiful.

Approaching extra-beautiful women in person, on the other hand, can be intimidating.
Closures Announced for Java 7 at Devoxx 2009
If you mean logging in via clicking a link in an email then it is too much of a security risk. Think of all the places that URL can end up in: browser history, bookmarks, etc.

It works for password reset because the window of opportunity is small (just a few minutes) and it is a once-only operation (visiting the URL again should not reset your password again).
I didn't know you could download MP4 videos of TED talks! (links below the video)

http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/PranavMistry_2009I_480.mp...
Jquery DOES offset bad lines of code.

Writing your own ajax framework or css selectors, probably not a great idea. using jquery, offset your bad LOC.. it's not as silly as it seems.
The URL would be different every time.
80% of males as less than average looking

This could be partly due to the fact that especially good-looking men can find a mate easily, so they never get around to registering on a dating site. To the folks on HN it's probably a normal thing, but I believe dating sites still have a certain 'for losers' stigma in other social circles.

And on the other side, perhaps girls that are very picky cannot find a guy to their liking so they end up on dating sites in greater numbers than the average.
Take a look at some of the ARKit stuff linked from the blog post - that's pretty impressive, too.
Anathem is written in the first person as well.
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"I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,"

Klingon is a human language! Who does he think created Klingon. And he has a Phd? Nice logic.
I work at IBM. You can't get more corporate than that.

I had a co-worker say this to me last week - "I just feel like [our manager] treats people like resources, batteries if you will."

He complains a lot and his department transfer is going poorly, but I couldn't help but agree with him here.

To say that its creative writing, painting, or composing is frankly dead on. I don't have to convince our audience here that is true, especially anyone who has seen a truly elegant solution to a problem.

Corporate software definitely sucks as a rule, I believe, because the passion and motivation for excellence has been sucked out of them. I was discussing design philosophy (as related to a structure/organization question) with my technical team lead and he said something to the effect of (not far from verbatim), "Yeah, I'm not really passionate about [design philosophy], I usually follow whats there."

This is a guy that supposed to be leading a group of developers. Over a year and a half I have determined that taking a diplomatic approach to design and programming issues isn't always the best solution. It leads to disconnected and mangled code.

Apple is different in this regard because the CEO was, and at heart (hopefully), still is a programmer (despite app store mayhem - everyone makes mistakes). The market has noticed and felt the difference. (Also notice how Apple doesn't do a lot - if any - corporate level development.)

I agree with your stance completely and am willing to make the bold statement that the only person that should lead an organization that produces software as a direct product for consumers should be someone that has developed before and still has the passion about the art.

(Edit: a quick side note to all of this - I have friends that are in the Silicon Valley area and quit IBM way before I contemplated it. At first I thought they were whiny because they didn't get to write python code but what it comes down to is they understood and accepted the fundamental breakdown between organizational behavior and the art of computer science.)
I think this is an interesting concept, but man, making a mentorship match is HARD. You have to really hit it off with the person, on more of a personal level than anything at first. Then the rest works out. I'll be interested to hear some real feedback once you've made some matches. Please do give us a followup in a few months.
Google App Engine Blog: YouTube APIs + App Engine = YouTube Direct
Fedora 12: Screenshot gallery
Calgary couple fight their children's school to stop homework
I suspect one strong reason against is because it would require you to be near your email client, or to use a webmail service for all online logins. Currently that requirement applies only when you register or forget your password. If your address is a company one, without web access, you won't be able to access any of your online resources.

What about the browser automating the procedure to openid?
Exotic Electric Properties of Graphene Confirmed
> Am I the only one scared that notepad on the latest Windows can still display a dialog box that comes straight from NT 3.1?

As the article states the reason for this is:

Because Windows Explorer and many of the components of the Shell aren't included in a Server Core install, applications like Notepad' which would normally show an Open dialog box like this: (show the original File Open dialog)

> Why the hell does it still have that DLL built in?

To display the file open dialog in Windows all you do is call the GetOpenFileName Win32 function.

Back in the days of Windows 95 Microsoft got into the habit of changing the look of the File Open dialog for every new release of Windows and they stored these new dialogs in the common control dll.

So I suspect deep inside of Window itself there is pseudo code that works something like this:

GetOpenFileName()
if Common Control DLL installed
Call New Explorer GetOpenFileName dialog
else
Call the very first every GetOpenFileName dialog built into Windows itself
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Counter-anecdote: Rackspace DFW datacenter (we have a server there) has been down more in the last year than Google Apps.
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Two people mutually rating each other 1 star supposedly generates a burn message.
A common catchphrase amongst some of my motorcycling friends is "You never see a bike parked outside a psychiatrist's office..."
I suspect "human language" has a very specific meaning among linguists.
Interesting part is that Arrington used to be a lawyer, and he used to work for the firm mentioned. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/tweetphoto-dan-caufield...
I've worked in corporate software environments (though only two years as an employee, thank god), and I think you've expressed it well. It's noticeable that your description is largely without bitterness, presumably because you've mostly evaded the experience.

It's why I left. The alternatives were: start my own thing, or get out of the industry. Of course now I wonder why it took me so long. One reason is the time I spent wishfully thinking that the problem could be addressed by agile processes and "organizational change" (the latter being a genuine fiction as far as I can tell) before concluding that they were incapable of delivering even the minimum I needed not to go crazy.