vietor

Fortunately, not everybody hates their job.

My worry about coding/hacking scenes in books is that authors usually do something dumb. That makes it all the more rewarding when they sidestep it with something amusing, as in the given example.

Having read 'A Deepness in the Sky', it is good, interesting, and not about coding. You can probably read it safely without having flashbacks to your life.

Right, and both of those involve UX tradeoffs. Which was my point and why I gave them both as options in my initial comment. Having read the first half of the article, I was expecting the second half to address the issues which these various options raise.

Sure you can "Just save state all the time", but doing so involves tradeoffs. Tradeoffs which were not addressed at all in the article.

Your MS Word example is exactly what OpenOffice does when it's been closed without saving. It's really obnoxious. I was hoping to read some UX insight into how to make those kinds of actions less obnoxious without losing their helpful functionality when it's needed.

In general I agree with the core idea of the article. But it lacked useful discussion about the hard UX problems involved, opting instead for some easy in-application examples.

How exactly does he propose to undo the closing of an application, as the application developer? It was his canonical example for the entire first half of the post, and then he jumped to trivially undo-able actions within an application when it came time for examples.

How does he feel about the UX tradeoffs of blocking state synchronization to non-volatile storage for every user action? Better or worse then usually not losing data on an unsaved close?

How about the UX of restoring state when you re-open the application? Should the user see the last state every time? The last manually saved state with an option to roll-forward? A huge obnoxious recovery dialog box like OpenOffice when you kill it without saving?

These are the questions the first half of the article setup, not trivially reversible actions within an application.

Nice link, thanks. It should have been obvious that "eye contact" and a pointing finger would be a very common theme.

> and a US bias

If you'd stuck around you might have noticed that the project is, essentially, European. The main contributers all live there, they receive funding through Eurostars, and I don't remember any of their gatherings/sprints being held outside of Europe.

In the future you might want to watch that knee-jerk reaction, it can put your foot right in your mouth.

Given the history and imagery of "Uncle Sam", it becoming the equivalent of a genericized trademark cracks me up and makes me marvel at the longevity of a well crafted marketing shtick.

Already there, already doing that. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corundum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_alumina

I completely agree that it could be an actual thing.

From a hardware and security perspective it is, as you say, all of the shelf hardware and techniques, ARP poisoning vs. MitM DHCP server have tradeoffs which have slipped from memory, but you can basically go either way.

The doubt is entirely about the hype and false appearance of a third party news story.

Maybe the intent is to highlight the problems with using unencrypted HTTP? I can dream that it's a well intentioned stunt can't I?

Is there any outside information on this? At first glance it looks like a complete hoax.

The supposed story about it is hosted on the homepage of the device in question, and I see no other hits for it on Google.

Edit: It looks like ibejoeb has the right of it. It is a hoax in the in the stunt/prank/hype/performance art manner, rather than the malicious deception sort.

A few thigns which immediately jump out:

1) "1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century." While true for the USA, it was more than offset by cooler weather elsewhere. [http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warm...]

2) There is significant evidence that the "Medieval Warm Period" was regional. http://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+warm+period+regional

3) All of the data in this blog post was from a single ice core sample in Greenland. So at a minimum the title is very misleading, and should be "In Greenland only 9100 ...". This fits with the previous errors of picking regional temperature sets which back his claims and presenting them as representative of global temperatures.

4) Temperature proxies, like ice core data, are apparently only valid when they agree with him.

I expect we'll shortly see a rebuttal where someone includes graphs of some of the many other 10,000 year temperature proxies. See, for example, the wide variability of different proxies as graphed together here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_...

Yeah, I'm aware the problem was truncation, it just took me a few tries to figure it out. My making a typo seemed much more probable than something that stupid being true.

In practice, what sort of process do you think would cause someone to implement this mistake? It seems obviously dumb to truncate something that you're hashing anyway. (To truncate it to something human relevant anyway, rather than like 512 characters).

That's why I asked if it was in some bugged library, it seems bizarre that the same totally boneheaded design would be recreated independently. It's not just that it truncates it, it's that it does it differently.

Is there a common library that's being used which causes this behavior?

I've encountered it elsewhere, and it's amazingly annoying. Nothing says fun like having to reset your password 4 times in a row because the website is silently modifying it.

The target repo itself isn't owned, but your connection is. The point is that you only think that you are talking to the correct repo, when in fact you are cloning whatever git repository the attacker would like you to.

It's obviously a focused attack as are all MITM attacks, so you can assume the attacker is familiar with the install script. So when the script then continues and performs it's next action on the contents of the repository, you will execute an arbitrary payload.

Edit: It wasn't clear to me that the problem had become apparent in the parent post. Probably just pre-coffee thinking on my part, but hopefully this will help clarify it for anyone else reading along who also missed it.

> Any tips?

Succeed, then recruit. Without a track record it's going to be hard to convince someone to be your technical co-founder. If you want to pursue your ideas, and lack the skill set to build them yourself, you need a more convincing pitch.

What would convince me that I might want to work with you? (Were I not knee deep in my own company)

1) Past success. Join a tech heavy team and do all the non-tech work that they are not giving 100% on and help the team succeed. Recruiting with a successful history will be a lot easier.

2) Sell the product first. This obviously depends on what your ideas are, but if you pitched me to be your co-founder and do the tech work, it would be a lot more convincing if you had a pile of customers already lined up and waiting to pay. (As long as the deadlines were reasonable and it wasn't going to be a complete death march)

The key is that a founding developer knows that they are going to be bringing huge concrete value to the venture by actually creating the product. You have to convince them that you are going to be bringing an equal amount of value, and that they won't be the only one busting their ass to make it happen.

As obnoxious as these type of conversations are, I'd be interested to know what percentage of their 'my Internet is slow' support calls end up being resolved by kicking Little Jimmy BitTorrent offline and trying again. (Or turning off the computer that's participating in 7 botnets, etc. Anyone who has done freelance support can tell you that the customer's computer is always wrong.)

It's why this was funny: http://xkcd.com/806/

I found that paying for business class Internet for personal use was worth it for the support and service nearly on it's own. Though on the subject of rebooting the modem, I've had it work the other way too: many years ago my 512K/3mb cable started giving me only 250k up ... but over 5mb down. (It went back to normal when rebooted. (I rebooted it because I need the extra 250K up more than the extra 2mb down)).

Exactly, it's a relatively minor technical issue that could be fixed fairly trivially. Yet rather than doing that it's worked around: "is not new, and had been a reality of the process for more than a decade." From my experience this is a fairly common approach in non-technical institutions. Issues are worked around and people are inconvenienced to a cost far in excess of what it would cost to fix the problem. (The opposite of what occasionally happens in tech startups...)

While it's just everyday paperwork for them, it's a life changing event for most applicants and the level of apathy with which they address it is maddening.

That is seriously embarrassing, but the attitude of "OMG there is no way to fix it!" makes me appreciate the rates that qualified consultants charge.

It is in no way an impossible problem to limit it by physical size if it's being printed in a standard format, but apparently it seems that way to some.

It's important to highlight and actively try to fix this because it's a bootstrapping problem. Tech is male dominated, so it is a less comfortable work environment for many women, so few women go into tech, so tech is male dominated. (There are of course many other factors in play, but this is one which can be nicely isolated and is important on it's own)

The principal problem with objections centered about "but why can't we just focus on talent" is that they are short sighted greedy optimizations which are actively trapping the tech industry in a local talent maximum.

One of the reasons I'm leery of using products made by startups, in addition to the risk of them failing, sometimes when they succeed you lose just as much as if they'd failed.

We got burned pretty bad with a product a few years ago when our payment provider was acquired and basically just shutdown without providing any means of migrating. It was a subscription based data service and half of our customers canceled because they no longer trusted us with their data after we "lost" their payment information and they had to re-enter it.

By that logic not every successful YC startup was accepted by YC, given the existence of teams that changed their product during their time at YC. Changing direction and refining the idea are a core part of doing a startup.

Interesting, thank you. It got me thinking about and paying attention to how I read things, and that I will read them very differently depending on the source.

Articles linked from HN fall into the 'fast but linear' category. Maybe if I'd ran across your article form a source I give less weight to the bold wouldn't have bothered me ...

Could you clarify what you mean by "fast reading"? I read very quickly and it was like speedbumps for my eyes. If the article hadn't been short enough to fit on one screen I think I would have been annoyed enough to not finish it.

Obligatory snopes link: http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/fedex.asp

Summary: The rough idea of using centralized switching for parcel routing was in a paper for a class, but not much else.

Key quote: "in a 2002 interview Smith acknowledged that "I don't really remember what grade I got. I probably didn't get a very good one, though, because it wasn't a well-thought-out paper.""

They did advocate piracy ... http://www.avast.com/lp-talk-like-a-pirate

More seriously, I wonder what the numbers are for the second most popular pirated key?

And more generally, what is the frequency distribution of users per key like? Is one pirated key dominant, are their competing rivals? What proportion of users share their key among only a few extra computers?

Also interesting is the approach they are taking to handling this. It will be very interesting to see what the conversation rate is, if they share that information as well.

I asked because it wasn't clear form the website. The tagline says file sync, what details there were said distributed filesystem.

So, for example, the total data stored and accessible in the system can exceed the local storage size of any individual participating node?

What's the performance like? (A sync service will be as fast, or slow, as local storage, but a distributed system can be a lot faster, or slower.)

How are you handling it when nodes which were previously added to the system are unavailable? For example, a user with a desktop and a laptop who stores a pile of data on the system, what happens when the desktop is off? Do you have control over what data is available on the laptop, and what happens when you try and access data which is currently unavailable?

Is this simple file sync service or a full distributed filesystem implementation?

EDIT: To be clear, I didn't mean 'simple' as in easy to implement or trivial or any other negative sense. But more in a functional goal sense, like 'uncomplicated'.

The Snopes page gives no evidence that it's fake because the snopes never makes the claim that it's fake.

Read the actual 'claim' statment. The claim is that the exam demonstrates a decline in education, not that the exam is real.

So this is actually pretty funny.

In my local version of firefox, the entire icon vanishes for about 5 seconds, every 5 seconds. Causing a notable visual disturbance. In Chrome on another system the eyes blink every 5 seconds or so. So yeah, my browser is being broken.

But when I asked people if it blinked ... they, of course, said yes.

EDIT: Also, as noted in an edit above, when viewed in Chrome it didn't animate unless the image was accessed directly. So for you it may blink, not blink, or really blink, depending on your browser and configuration...

[EDIT: Can't edit the top message anymore, but the problem was broken browser and amusing 'blink' vs ' blink' confusion as detailed deeper in the thread. Also in chrome it doesn't appear to animate, removing the annoyance entirely.]

Interesting. I asked a few coworkers if it was just me and they confirmed it. The actual favicon doesn't blink for you? http://www.litfuel.net/favicon.ico

It reports itself as a 6 frame gif for me. Maybe your browser is just more sane than mine (Firefox 3.x) and refuses to honor animated favicons?

I figured I was getting rightly downvoted because I wasn't saying anything about NLTK.

A blinking favicon? Seriously? I couldn't finish the article because my eyes jumped to the tab bar every 5 seconds.

Has anyone else seen this elsewhere? It's new to me and I was surprised by how obnoxious it was given that the web isn't exactly a stranger to obnoxious flashing content.

I had a brief e-mail chat with Eddy about that and it didn't sound to promising, though largely because at the time all of the existing meals were very under-subscribed.

If anyone wants to try and set something up outside of grubwithus for Saturday night, myself and my two co-founders are probably up for it. Comment here or drop me an e-mail at my HN username at zettabytestorage.com (my previous product).