Hacker News Reader

aschobelon Charles P. Thacker Wins ACM Turing Award

Funny timing since iPad pre-orders start in a few days which is taking a different approach than the Alto

aschobelon Android On Lockdown: AT&T Removes Best Parts of Android from Backflip

It really depends on the carrier. I've had great luck rooting the G1, MyTouch, and N1.

N1 is the easiest of the bunch.

aschobelon Android On Lockdown: AT&T Removes Best Parts of Android from Backflip

Yikes, that is quite unfortunate.

Do 3rd party markets apps like Wifi Tether from anda.pk work?

http://discuss.gdgt.com/htc/hero/support/tethering-with-the-...

aschobelon Android On Lockdown: AT&T Removes Best Parts of Android from Backflip

If you get the phone from Google or T-Mobile it is trivial to root them and install your own firmware.

Hopefully Motorola won't lock down the bootloader too badly on AT&T.

aschobelon Android On Lockdown: AT&T Removes Best Parts of Android from Backflip

Tethering app was only removed from the US T-Mobile store, it is available everywhere else.

http://androidcommunity.com/google-allowing-tethering-apps-f...

aschobelon Tell HN: Best OS X Utility for programmers who use the command line

pbcopy is a great little utility

another neat trick is dragging and dropping a file to the terminal and having the filename pasted to the terminal

aschobelon Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

Lua support inside of Lighttpd via mod_magnet is quite powerful for rewrites. Curious if there is a nginx equivalent.

aschobelon Why I’ve Fallen in Love with the Nexus One

Thanks for making this! Let me know if you want any help hacking on this. [username]@gmail.com

aschobelon Google Interview Questions

Hi5 SDE used to get asked the "How Strong is an Egg?"/"Drop Two Bowling Balls from a building" question.

Not sure how this proves anything.

aschobelon Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win.

All our apps are free.

We haven't publicly announced our numbers, but we have a "nice" multiple of the daily download numbers you posted.

Sorry for being vague, I need to check with my co-founder before talking publicly about this.

aschobelon Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win.

Believe me, it's frustrating to see how much press they get.

aschobelon Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win.

The metrics Google gives you are a bit coarse, you only get total downloads and active installs. Not sure if this translates to unique users, iTunes Connect is so much nicer in this regard.

Google Market publicly give out your download numbers in brackets, 50-100 downloads, 100-1k downloads, 1k-5k, etc.

We have two apps in the 250k+ bracket.

We've been on Android for over a year and the last few months have been insane. The day of the Droid launch we saw our traffic triple, and things seem to be picking up steam since then.

Feel free to email me at [username]@snaptic.com or hit me up on GTalk [username]@gmail.com

We love the Android platform and it would be great to have more folks building on it.

aschobelon Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win.

Our founders don't get a salary, we use the money to hire engineers.

We are very fortunate to have passionate users (#1 note app on Android) and need more folk to help us make something people want.

We are especially looking for data hackers, UX, and vis design people.

aschobelon Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win.

My startup, https://snaptic.com , is trying to help them wake up by building a better note taking app.

We are on Android, iPhone, and web.

Come hack with us in SF and scratch your own itch. hn@snaptic.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089905 </shameless plug>

aschobelon Ask HN: Who's Hiring?

Android / iPhone / Web / Backend

We speak scala, Obj-C, java, python, Thrift, whatever gets the job done.

#1 productivity app on Android, and TechCrunch/MobileCrunch named us(3banana) one of the top ten apps on Android.

Please shoot me an email at hn@snaptic.com

Looking for folks to come hack with us in South Park, SF.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=953052

aschobelon How To Safely Store A Password

a cost factor of 14 isn't that high?

that's just mean

aschobelon Ask HN: Looking for interns / entry level?

^down^done

aschobelon Ask HN: Looking for interns / entry level?

Snaptic is hiring interns and full time.

We build apps for Android / iPhone, and have shiny backend goodies.

#1 productivity app on Android, and TechCrunch/MobileCrunch named us(3banana) one of the top ten apps on Android.

We speak scala, Obj-C, java, python, Thrift, whatever gets the job down.

Please shoot us an email at hn@snaptic.com

Looking for folks to come hack with us in South Park, SF.

aschobelon Node.js powers comet for plurk (100k+ users at once)

Have you used Thrift w/ node.js?

There seems to be some JavaScript support for Thrift, this would be a great way to have node.js fit in with ones architecture.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-550

Also what are you using for your base libraries?

For example one needs RFC3339 date support, can you just plug in something like Google Closure Library?

http://code.google.com/closure/library/

aschobelon If You're Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code, You're Doing It Wrong

Our UID share a namespace w/ our note IDs, we don't see a reason to limit it to 4 billion objects (especially since the objects are versioned w/ revision IDs).

We use concatenation.

It solved our specific problem.

aschobelon Android 2.1’s Best Features in Screenshots

You can start typing the second key, when you remove your finger from the first key the second gets activated.

this behavior is new to 2.1

aschobelon Cassandra 0.5 released

indeed, but http://incubator.apache.org/cassandra/download/ isn't unique to the 0.5 release.

wish there was a blog post I could have linked to

cheers

aschobelon Android 2.1’s Best Features in Screenshots

The multi-touch keyboard in 2.1 is a big improvement over the previous generation, I type much more quickly with it.

I'm a little surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

aschobelon If You're Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code, You're Doing It Wrong

We use the AES cipher for user authentication, we use the Rijndael variant since we want 192-bit block size.

Our userIds are 64-bit with a 128-bit secret.

We generate the authentication cookie as follows:

Rijandael(64-bit userId + 128-bit secret, 192-bit key) = 192-bits of cipher text

If you tamper with the cipher text the 128-bit secret won't be the same.

I don't see a practical cipher text tampering attack against this scheme.

There are authorization issues like how do expire a specific user login.

aschobelon Ask HN: So HNers, whatd'ya get for Christmas?

Sleep! Having family over is forcing me to take a break. Bah! :P

aschobelon Ask HN: What are your goals for your startups in 2010?

Thanks! we use KISSmetrics right now, i need to give mixpanel.com another look

aschobelon Ask HN: What are your goals for your startups in 2010?

Faster iterations, better analytics, happier users.

aschobelon [dead]

Ah missed it the first time around, wanted to give credit to @al3x

deleted

aschobelon Ask HN: How do you handle server security/intrusion monitoring?

FreeBSD handbook goes over some practices, treat security like layers of an onion peel.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/security-intro....

Some things we found useful

* don't have ssh bind to a public interface on. You need to VPN in first and then ssh to the private IP. we only have 80 and 443 open on public interfaces

* portaudit is awesome. it keeps you up to date if there is an exploit for software that you run, not just "is there an update". portaudit will tell you if there is an unpatched vulnerability out there so you can make a decision on what to do.

* paranoia - don't trust anything. we run WP on a DMZed box that doesn't have access to anything. we mod_proxy all requests to this box from our edge servers. jails are also great for this, give everything the least amount of permissions necessary to run

* monitor your servers, any weird cpu usage or bw. cacti is quite nice

You can also block all outbound traffic on your serves that isn't responding to a requests.

aschobelon Ask HN: Who's hiring (take 3)?

Snaptic is hiring (http://snaptic.com), we speak scala, Obj-C, and java.

#1 productivity app on Android, and TechCrunch/MobileCrunch named us(3banana) one of the top ten apps on Android. =)

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/11/09/top-10-android-apps/

Please shoot us an email at hn@snaptic.com , we used to be called http://3banana.com

We are in sunny South Park (SF), four engineers right now.