Show HN: Profile.io - Profiles for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Profile.io - Profiles for Developers

profile.io

41 pointsdannyr48 comments

Escape < and > (and everything else), and check the site for XSS. I don't mean to be rude, and I realize you two coded this up in a really short amount of time -- but before this site goes live it would be best to have it secure.

Demo: http://profile.io/foobar

[EDIT] As someone else pointed out, viewing the list-of-developers page puts up the XSS, which is even worse. I didn't know that page existed.

[EDIT2] It turns out I broke a lot more than I tried to. I also own the account 'xss' which has an unclosed '<' inside of its name, and that destroys half the page. I'm really sorry, please delete that account.

[EDIT3] I broke that account even more in order to fix it. I had an unclosed script tag, so I closed it off in my 'location'. If you fix the xss in just the profile information, then the page will get messed up again.

[EDIT4] The 'test' account was deleted, but the XSS's haven't been fixed? Updated to point to a different page I had made.

Fixed. Let me know if we missed anything.

I wish we could use Django's autoescape filter but App Engine's SDK ships with just 0.96 by default.

We can only upgrade to a later version of Django in Prod and not locally.

Usernames aren't sanitized yet. (As is visible with the '<asdf' in the 'foobar' link above.)

EG: http://profile.io/xss2

Also, you missed the login form (both in the header and on http://profile.io/login). Its echoing the username directly, e.g., "Username <script>alert(1)</script> was not found"

You really need to use Django-nonrel, it's at 1.3b and awesome. I use it for http://www.yourpane.com and it works fantastically well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzVJFv9GyJg

Seriously though, I hope you realized that the best thing to do when someone has XSS issues is to just tell them rather than EXPLOIT them.

Upvoted because that's a valid point, but I did consider it before just doing that.

I knew the developers of the site were looking here. I knew there was nothing critical running on this site. They were asking for feedback. Given that, it is much easier to demonstrate the places where it should be fixed than to give instructions on how to recreate each attack.

Testing for exploits usually requires you to actually try an exploit.

Edit: just to be clear, this is for black box testing.

"Favorite cloud provider?" God, can we at least not make it easy for people to stereotype us? The only non-silly answer is "water vapour".

Please explain why "Amazon Web Services" would be a silly answer.

Because "cloud" means nothing.

Really? To me as a developer, "cloud" means PaaS or IaaS.

It's fun to ridicule a trendy word when it is misused by marketing types. But among smart hackers, aren't we past that?

Okay, I can see how GAE is a PaaS. Is AWS? If so, why isn't linode? And, by extension, any server...

My take (dannyr and I built this) -- this is like an "about.me" but for developers. You add your GitHub account, add your programming languages, etc. And (my favorite) you add all the projects you are building -- for example when you add an Android app, it automatically links to the Android Market, pulls in the app icon, etc.

This is meant for developers to have a decent place to showcase their geek. (And the domain is cool, no?)

Thanks, love you all!

Brian and Danny @ SXSW

PS: This app was built on StartBus -- the entire site was made on a moving bus from SF->Austin :)

How exactly is this different from flavors.me?

forrst.me also has more traction, and they are both formidable competitors, so I'd love some great selling points.

What would make your service very, very interesting is to focus entirely on creating a presentable mix of a personal homepage and a resumé - GitHub, Stack Overflow, Codelesson badges(!), and such. LinkedIn isn't that interesting in many regards, and it'd be great if you found the key to a good resumé and used that to build your foundation on.

forrst.me is more of a social web discoverability tool, while flavors.me creates easy-to-make web presences.

>...so I'd love some great selling points.

They built it while riding the bus, what more could one ask for?

That makes it a good story, not a good service. :)

It's the niche.

Flavors.Me != Profile.io in the same way StackOverflow != Quora.

I don't see the niche argument applying to a service that basically isn't a community; there is no in-service exchange between the users.

flavors.me has a better design and presumably offers more service hooks than profile.io.

Saying that profile.io is a niche product in the light of flavors.me just seems like PR-ish for "less appeal". :) If it's vertical, it can't be the same as a service with a wide appeal.

From what profile.io looks like to me now, it's just flavors.me with poorer design and less traction. You can try to beat flavors.me in design (good luck with that), or you can try defining your own project and set it apart from the competition.

Information on profile.io is very scant, so I know very little about the project. I'm outlining a gap I'd like to see someone figure out and fill. I hope the project wasn't inspired by AOL's acquisition of about.me, because people in the Valley still can't wrap their brain about that. :)

You are comparing a 3-day version of Profile.io to a 2+ year-old site. We have plans that would differentiate ourselves from the other services out there but we can't build all of them in a matter of days.

It is not entirely inspired by About.me but we got some inspiration from it mainly with the design.

If you look at my previous HN submissions, Profile.io is a byproduct of my previous project - Launchset. It's just a much simpler version.

Seriously though, why the negativity? As somebody who loves to build apps, I never judge other people's app in its initial version. All ideas/apps evolve.

I have spent more than 30 minutes of my time giving you suggestions for your service and outlining challenges that lie ahead.

If the about.me and appeal remarks seemed hostile, it was because I didn't know that I was talking to one of the creators. (Like I've said before, HN need to highlight that somehow.)

If that's not positive, I honestly don't know what is. And to give you some honest advice (I know how you hate that, though), your attitude to feedback isn't going to help you succeed. Quite the contrary.

Helping people is a little like being a parent; to your children, you're a parent first, and a friend second. You may have to make some unpopular decisions, but they're in the best interest of the person.

That was my first impression as well, having recently set up a flavors.me page (which includes github, and visually looks identical to their site).

I'm all for competitors in the space though, so good luck to them.

Hello fellow HNers:

We built Profile.io as part of StartupBus.

It is currently private beta but I have invites.

You can create an account using this link:

http://profile.io/invite/HACKERNEWS

Site is pretty barebones but we will be adding more features and fixing bugs in the next few days.

Hopefully, we'll be selected as finalists for StartupBus and get to demo it on Monday at SxSW.

Thanks!

Anybody else getting anything besides "Email is not valid or empty." when they put emails in? I tried a few test ones, and nothing's getting through.

Sorry. forgot 'not' when checking is_email_valid.

It is now fixed. Try again.

Apparently there's someone called "<script>alert(1)</script>". Please sanitize this person's name before displaying it. Thank you.

Yeah, that's me -- I can't change my name, but if I could I would. I didn't realize there was the developer list and thought I would have an isolated test page.

I hope you don't plan on keeping the current URL for the developer listing, as humorous as it is:

http://profile.io/developers/developers/developers/developer...

It seems that someone has inserted javascript code in their profile. That page is full of javascript message boxes saying "xss1", "xss2" etc.

The thumbnails also seem like overkill.

This is a little similar to my new app/startup:

http://www.mightycv.com

Mighty CV is a little more free form and geared towards producing a hacker centric traditional style résumé and so not quite the same as profile.io.

Just signed up for a beta account at profile.io and it looks promising. Perhaps we could provide integration to each others services.

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 517, in __call__ handler.post(*groups) File "/base/data/home/apps/profileioweb/1.348935554744823342/main.py", line 60, in post app = Application(email=self.request.get('email'),desc=self.request.get('desc')) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 815, in __init__ prop.__set__(self, value) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 544, in __set__ value = self.validate(value) File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/db/__init__.py", line 2437, in validate raise BadValueError('Property %s is not multi-line' % self.name) BadValueError: Property desc is not multi-line

We are using StringProperty. We need to use TextProperty.

We are going to try to fix this soon.

I think the bigger issue is that your tracebacks are publicly visible.

Great point, thanks.

Did I mention we made this entire site on a BUS RIDE? :)

Sure, I appreciate that you guys hacked this together under extremely tight conditions and I don't mean to be a dick about it. It's just that this is something which has the potential to be really bad, and depending on your framework you can usually fix this with a simple `debug = false` or similar.

Thanks for the bug report! We fixed the issue.

Neat idea. Minor nits:

- Would be nice if custom background images tiled

- Not clear whether to enter usernames or URLs for accounts

- "Add an Technology" typo

- No cancel buttons on the forms

- Popup forms feel a little sluggish to open. Any way to have their HTML preloaded?

- List of tech, etc could use some typography/color to make it more readable

I got a weird validation error from your form. Apparently the text field isn't supposed to accept multi-line fields?

I'm curious about the site and if it will offer any benefits over my own personal site.

Cheers

i like it. you guys are definitely one to watch out for on #StartupBus.

Tried to register but got this http://pastie.org/1661494.

Thanks for the report! We're actively coding now at SXSW :)

Bug should be fixed now :)

this is great... But the link to the SO user profile is broken, at least for me... Methinks a SO username is not enough to construct a link to the profile

Great work!

yeah. you need an id at least (e.g. stackoverflow.com/user/1234)

Congrats guys! Was awesome watching you build it.

Unrelated: look who we're sitting next to :) http://i.imgur.com/RNSK5.jpg

(Angry birds just got $45m yesterday!)

Dude, I want one of these sweatshirts :)

looks a lot like turkish kimdir.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com