Hacker News Reader

kailashbaduon Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

All that experiment proved is early 90s was not a right time for technology like Newton. Nothing more.

kailashbaduon Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

For people who want productivity software suits like Office from lighter computers, they have online versions of Office.

kailashbaduon Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer

I can't believe Zed Shaw doesn't get it.

kailashbaduon Fixie.js - Automatic filler content for HTML documents.

don't know. But the smart folk behind should be able to figure something out.

kailashbaduon Fixie.js - Automatic filler content for HTML documents.

Like it. The only nuisance is the class attribute you have to repeat across all tags that you need to fill in.

kailashbaduon Case Study: Accuracy & Fraud on MTurk

Junk results, mostly, yes. That way they can complete more taks faster and still make money because most of the time their work is not manually approved.

kailashbaduon Senator Joe Lieberman asks Google for a terrorist flagging button on Blogger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

kailashbaduon Watch Me Make Mistakes

that's what screencasts are for - write code and annotate it with with a voiceover as you along. There is big enough niche between plain text code and screencasts.

kailashbaduon Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

when I am working on my own project I try to dig as deeper as as I feel like. If I am a working on a client project I try to dig only as deep as I need to (with limited success)

kailashbaduon Free Printed Copies of "Version Control by Example"

Was that surprising ?

kailashbaduon A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Basic Human Decency

Had the AirBnB been able to hush the victim by offering her a juicy paycheck, it would have been a textbook example of crisis management. That the arrangement didn't work out and the lady chose to divulge the details of the deal gone sour, the co-founders are being labelled cold blooded for offering the deal in the first place. I think it's just plain bad luck that AirBnB could not come up with a compensation package good enough to muffle the victim.

kailashbaduon HN Meetup: New Delhi on Friday, June 10th

Is it good time to be in Delhi considering the latest clash between government forces and Ram Dev supporters ? I guess there is a sit-in at Raajghat. It seems BJP has also joined the fray. But I guess that won't affect the usual business, would it ? ( I am not from Delhi so I have no idea how things work there)

kailashbaduon Julius Caesar's Last Breath

The problem domain may seem a little wacky but the calculation itself is interesting and could be applied to some other 'meaningful' problems.

P.S. - Reminded me of one of those questions they ask at McKinsey when recruiting new analysts. E.g. How many golf balls are in the United States?

kailashbaduon WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

really ? Perhaps you are ignoring the fact that with PHP you can be as secure as you can care to be. It's all up to you. But let's not get started on this one. It's done to death already.

kailashbaduon The daily lunch delivery of India's dabbawallahs

You are talking about prosperity not the food culture. Yes most Indians still may have hard time making their ends meet but launch and dinner are an important element of Indian culture. Launch time and dinner time are important parts of your daily schedule even if your day job is to plough your own fields.

kailashbaduon The daily lunch delivery of India's dabbawallahs

It's not your fault. It's just the difference between the culture in which dining is an important experience and the culture where dining is merely a chore.

kailashbaduon Self-Taught Programmers vs CS-Educated Programmers

Someone who is CS educated but hasn't done a great deal of self-teaching in programming is going get a heart attack when applying for his first job.

kailashbaduon Software Patents Have Got to Go

The human history have always had some goods and services that everyone needs but no one wants to personally pay for e.g. history, archeology, free community park, national defense etc. How are these services supported? Either through patronage or government funding. I guess at some point in future we'll have to give music and movies the similar treatment.

kailashbaduon Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids In Khan Academy

I see a much larger donation coming the way of Khan Academy. Gates is in a philanthropic spree and if his recent remark is any indication, he has big hopes from education delivered through web.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/

In all, it’s a well-deserved feat for Khan Academy.

kailashbaduon The Twitter Revolution That Wasn't

And you misread my comments.

I am not implying (nor the linked FP article) that Twitter was insignificant in spreading the news around the world. It sure did one hell of a job and undoubtedly helped get the world’s attention to the Iranian’s ordeal. I am just downplaying the role of Twitter in facilitating the Iranians in physically organizing the protest (It contrast to the popular perception that Twitter played a critical role especially in this regard). Twitter was nearly non-existent in the streets of Tehran. That’s what the FP article is suggesting.

kailashbaduon The Twitter Revolution That Wasn't

Being a resident of a developing country caught in political turmoil, I can identify with this story. Western media often has inaccurate perception of things going on in other parts of the world. I have found that, at times, seemingly trivial events are blown out of proportion while imperative issues go entirely unnoticed. It might not be a premeditated or deliberate exercise, but it certainly is a big failure in part of western media in grasping the ground issues.

There can be no gainsaying that Twitter did a great job of spreading the news about Iranian protests around the world, but it's very much plausible that Twitter was largely of no consequence within Iran.

kailashbaduon Aaron Swartz: How I Hire Programmers

Having experienced it myself, I can vouch that such an difference exist. When forced to write a complicated piece of code with a bunch of strange people breathing down my neck and watching every step I take, my productivity tends to slacken off when I hit a coders equivalent of writer’s block. It just doesn’t come out as naturally as it used to. In contrast, same task in a more familiar and comfortable setting looks like a piece of cake even if deadline is drawing close.

kailashbaduon Ask HN: I'd like to learn more about programming secure websites

I am from PHP background and here is the lowdown of how I worked my way from basic PHP security to advanced web application security (language-independent). I am sure it will help you in making a decision for yourself. 1. Essential PHP Security by Chris Shiflett: a light read with little over 100 pages. PHP often picks a lot of flak for being insecure. However, in majority of cases its not because of the flaws in PHP platform itself. It’s because of the certain design choices PHP made which makes it easier for a novice developer to mistakenly write insecure code. Given a little care, these mistakes can be easily avoided. All basic security stuffs are covered like forms and urls, sql injection, session and cookie security. The concept covered in this book can easily be applied for other platforms but apparently you don’t want any of these information because you already are well-versed in them.

2. Pro PHP Security by Chris Synder and Michael Southwell: Covers most of what you are looking for, namely, perils of shared hosting, safe development practices, Encryption, SSL and SSH, HTTP and HTTPS, Access Control and Authentication. Of course the book is inclined towards PHP but most of the concepts are language neutral and you can easily extrapolate these concepts to another language of your choice.

3. Foundation of Security by Neil Daswani et al.: The blurb on the first page speaks for itself What every programmer needs to know about security with running examples of web applications and stories of what’s gone wrong in the past. Mostly language neutral but sample codes are implementation in Java. Comprehensive. Recommended.

4. A bunch of videos at http://code.google.com/edu/security/index.html helped too.

kailashbaduon Redis, Memcached, Tokyo Tyrant and MySQL comparision

Is memcache a substitute for MySQL? I thought memcache was meant to ease off the load on database by caching query results. it's not like comparing apples and oranges, is it?

kailashbaduon Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination

It's a creative and fresh viewpoint. However, I am not so sure if it's going to work. for me at least.

kailashbaduon [dead]

The title says 'Most Influential' which I guess means those who are more visible and talked about rather than those with the most impact or seminal breakthroughs.

kailashbaduon PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Leaves Yahoo

Ramsus wanted to create a simple 'glue' language that was approachable and did the job done without any layers of abstraction that web framework like Zend and Symfony have. And he has stuck to his guns till today.

kailashbaduon SEO is fraud? Look at the size of these top SEO companies

No. it’s not a fraud.

SEO is not a dubious thing in itself. It mostly isn’t a scam the way snake-oil is. It’s proven and established fact that a website can employ a host of legitimate techniques to climb their way to the top of a search engine result page: on-page optimization, terrific and viral content, string of PR activities, buzz marketing etc, among others.

However, the SEO market has no dearth of companies that promise unrealistic results and rip fortune off their clients. They aren’t aware of, let alone be capable of, anything further than submitting a site to a bunch link farms and filling up a web page with unnatural keywords.

There was a time when the field of medicine was swarming with quacks. But that doesn’t invalidates the veracity and effectiveness of medical science itself. A trained physician can do wonders to an ailing body.

kailashbaduon Ask HN: Where do you live?

Kathmandu, Nepal

kailashbaduon Schneier says he was 'probably wrong' on masked passwords

No regular user would ever turn the masking off

So what is the harm there? Even if a user could not figure out (oddly) what the checkbox does, he'll continue to get the password field to behave in the way he is accustomed to.

Surely, people will have trouble figure out the purpose of the checkbox in the beginning. But that's how things tend to be when you run into something for the first time. It takes some time before a style becomes standard.