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Title: The website sana.sy of the Syrian Arab News Agency has been 'censored' or 'purged' from Google search results. Even after clicking through 10 pages of results, not a single one links to Sana.sy. Contrast with the results from DuckDuckGo and Bing where it's the top result.<p>Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency<p>This test was conducted based on a post about the Syrian War (http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/09/a-short-history-of-the-war-on-syria-2006-2014.html#more) which has been posted on HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387286).
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Title: With GPG being a common destination for those concerned by the recent privacy revelations, it bothers me a little that I can't find any audit or security review of GPG's codebase.<p>The Wikipedia page says that a German IT ministry funded a windows port, the EU Agency for Network and Information Security list GPG as part of their index of tools and claim it's in use by some related parties [0] but don't go so far as to recommend it. Considering that several governments within the EU are allegedly complicit in the SIGINT scandal, I don't think their word counts for much.<p>GPG is open source, but while the code is readily available the knowledge and background to determine its security is somewhat rarer. Would you be willing to contribute to a project to fund a public audit of the codebase? If so, what sort of people would you like to see participate.<p>[0] http://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/cert/support/chiht/tools/gnupg-the-gnu-privacy-guard
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Title: Hi All,<p>I have built a few websites using various CMSs like Drupal and Joomla. Now I want to learn building something from scratch.<p>I am PhD in Electrical Engineering and can do basic programming in several programming/scripting languages including C, Matlab, Perl/Shell scripts etc.<p>Given my background what would be a good stack to learn for me ? Is it Python + Javascript or node.js or ruby on rails or something else ? Pardon my ignorance if I am just throwing some random names out there ?
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Title: Their Twitter is being flooded with complaints but DivX does not appear to care. In there latest update on Mac when clicking Ok the last page of the setup briefly shows a message about Bing but them immediately finishes the installation without allowing user interaction. After that your Chrome, Safari and Firefox will be flooded with Bing. From 404s, homepage, default search and conduit plugins. The link above shows the numerous steps to undo all of it. The one step they forget to mention is to uninstall DivX and never use them again. Even Google Chrome is marking DivX as Malware which DivX is saying is a false positive to ignore. Please everyone uninstall DivX and let them know malware is never acceptable.
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Title: http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/photo-gallery-operaton-socialist-fotostrecke-101663.html
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Title: I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++.
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Title: I am a freelance web developer from Nepal and I'm asking this question after spending more than 2 weeks to contact the registrars and discuss with fellow developers.<p>Mercantile Corporation (http://register.mos.com.np) is the only authorized ccTLD registrar of Nepal, which lets us register domains like .com.np, .biz.np, .org.np etc. for free. Currently around a hundred thousand domains have been registered by Mercantile. They have updated their service recently and all the user login details are now void - that means we cannot login to manage our / clients' domains! We have an option to call them, ask for new login details in our email which takes them 2 business days to process. Even after logging in we are not allowed to update even the nameservers of the domains! Upon asking them they tell that we need to go to their office - only one central office exists in the entire country - and write an application, and wait them to update our details manually. They would hardly do that either. It's been few months since I along with several web developers from Nepal are locked out of their domain names. It would not be the case until few months back.<p>I went through ICANN's website because Mercantile has been authorized to create sub-domains like com, aero, edu, etc. under .np ccTLD. I couldn't find a place to report the monopoly and misconduct of Mercantile corporation. That's why I chose to ask HN community for suggestion, information or even a way out to make them provide access to domains registered by ddvelopers throughout the country.<p>This is a case of urgency and I would like to know if any fellow hacker in the community had been through this nightmare and if yes how s/he solved the issue.<p>Regards,
Njsubedi
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51
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Title: W3Schools has dominated the search results for longer that it deserves, yet we haven't been able to do anything about it.
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172
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Title: This might sound like a silly question but I want to increase my knowledge and awareness of everything.<p>I've been taking courses on https://www.coursera.org/ and reading ton of books.<p>Can anyone recommend what they've done to get smarter? perhaps books, classes they've taken. I have a lot of free time and want to learn anything.
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51
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Title: Let's discuss...
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Title: If you're tired of To-Do lists and Twitter feed examples for AngularJS I can offer a variation. This is a project I did for a t-shirt site and it does quotes using a variety of variables in real time as the user interacts with the UI. I also show how I went back to the existing project to learn how to add unit testing with Karma and Jasmine and a unit testing coverage report with Istanbul. Spoiler: It was pretty easy.
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Title: The last two threads by the same name got a lot of attention (and a lot of love from patio), but seeing how its been over a year since then it would be interesting to hear from new people (HN userbase is ever growing) and also get updates from some people who posted in the previous threads.<p>Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603<p>Previous to Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487
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Title: We built a search engine that shows you the most engaging stories/topics being shared across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+. We crawled over 15 million articles the past 3 months, retrieved the total number of Facebook likes, tweets, Google+’s etc and built a search index around it.<p>Here's what our infrastructure looks like:<p>Rails/Redis: We use the Sidekiq gem as a message queue. We have hundreds of workers that do the crawling, data mining, and number crunching.<p>ElasticSearch: We built the search index using ElasticSearch, with the data imported from our Postgres database.<p>AngularJS: Front-end is built using AngularJS and Laravel 4 (PHP), which sends the requests to our Rails server in the backend.
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46
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Title: Google's upcoming birthday easter egg.
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Title: I started contributing to s3sync before hearing about the official amazon s3 tool written in python. However, after testing the official tool for a couple minutes, I decided to spend more time working on s3sync and here's the result.<p>Thanks to Michael Grosser for his support and patches!
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Title: Just learned from Venturebeat & Techcrunch that JustFab closed $40 million in a Series C round of funding [1][2].<p>It kept me wonder why a company with very questionable (I will try to avoid using the word "fraudulent") business model was able to raise big money. Didn't the VCs have to do the due diligence?<p>I didn't have any direct experience with JustFab. The victim was my girlfriend. Back in January 2012, one of her friends emailed her a link to JustFab, then she bought a pair of shoes from www.justfab.com and never visit the website again. Then 8 months later, in September 2013 she finished her Master study in the US and returned to her home country. She was appalled to find out that her credit card has been charged a $39.95 fee for the last eight months. Yes, $39.95 for 8 months, without getting anything from JustFab.<p>I then did a bit research on the internet. It turned out my girlfriend wasn't the only victim. Apparently JustFab works like this: once you buy something from their website, you become their "VIP member" without your knowledge. Then you will have to log into their website between the 1st-5th of each month and click “Skip This Month”. If no action is taken (either skip this month, or cancel your account), they just charge you a $39.95 fee every month.<p>According to article published on BusinessInsider, JustFab "generate about $100 million this year" in sales, I wonder how much of this $100 million are from people like my girlfriend who simply didn't read their entire 2,500 words Terms of Service and were unaware that they were charged $39.95 a month for nothing.<p>[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/26/justfab-sews-up-40m-to-become-global-fast-fashion-empire/<p>[2] http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/26/justfab-has-raised-another-40m-led-by-hong-kongs-shining-capital-to-take-its-fashion-subscription-commerce-model-to-asia/<p>ps. This is a re-post of my last year's post [3], hoping it will get upvoted to the frontpage of HN so that more people get to know the shady business JustFab does. Apparently VCs don't do due diligence any more, as long as scam companies like JustFab can bring them money.<p>[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4592778
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Title: Combining Department of Public Health open data records with Yelp restaurant review scores paints a revealing picture of dining our in San Francisco.
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Title: I was wondering to what degree the HN community of programmers is self-taught.<p>1) How did you learn to code? Totally self taught from books and RTFM // Self taught plus MOOCs or comparable resources // Some classes in college but no CS degree, remainder self-taught // Self taught plus a developer bootcamp or some non-degree related formal education // CS degree and personal efforts<p>2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)?<p>3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts?<p>I had been wondering about this for a bit and the discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6467914) motivated me to finally post it.<p>Administrative note: I'm below 200karma so I can't make this a poll, if an admin wants to throw some polling categories in here that'd be cool too.<p>Edit: added quotes to the self-taught in the title since I realized that with the advent of StackOverflow and various other social learning tools that there are very few who can truly claim not to have learned at someone else's digital knee at some point or benefitted from the currently robust community that exists online now.
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102
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Title: Quite expensive though and far away from being the Tesla for superbikes.
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Title: Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.<p>Also see: Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475879
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399
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Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility.
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122
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Title: What year did it fail, how long after the program did things end and what are you doing these days?
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Title: Do you think Rails and Django (and the like) will evolve to remain competitive with newer technologies like Node.js, Meteor, Play, etc (not to mention, whatever's next)? Or will they largely be legacy technologies, i.e. still in wide-use but not frequently selected for the best new projects?<p>Edit: Please note that the question is not whether or not Rails and Django developers will still be in demand in 2016. I'm confident they will be. The question is will the best new projects in 2016 consider using Rails and Django.
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Title: The tech behind the detection.
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Title: I know YC has always been reluctant to accept single founders, but now that a decent number have come through over the years, I'm wondering if this still stands? A handful of single founders are accepted with each batch - any new data points here? Can they succeed alone, or do you still push for finding cofounders?
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Title: I saw this at proggit[1].<p>The gccXllvm competition have been good for both parts, IMO.<p>[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nn6p3/libgccjitso_an_embeddable_jitcompiler_based_on_gcc/
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Title: I know these type of lists exist elsewhere. But I wanted to list some of the sites that I know where you can quite easily submit your project to get the word out initially.
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507
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Title: This may help:
http://i.imgur.com/N6XipNQ.jpg<p>From:
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1nr3oh/subtle_noaa/
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Title: I'd like to get opinions on whether going back to programming as a career in my late 30s is a good idea or not.<p>I was a web programmer in the first four years of my career; however then I thought I could make more money doing things like project management and spent the next ten years pushing paper.<p>I've done a couple of side projects in the meantime as the thought of going back to programming has kept coming back. I even attempted to do a SaaS startup but failed to get any traction.<p>Anyways, at this point I'm sick of pushing paper and want to go programming full-time. A few things are holding me back though:
* I can't leverage the last 10 years of my career; it would basically become a lost decade for me
* my technical skills are rusty; I'd have to most likely get a huge pay cut and start at a junior-level position
* I think recruiters are going to give me a weird look, meaning I'd most likely have to overcome additional barriers when seeking a job<p>So far all of the above is speculation on my part as I really don't know what I would be getting into. I'd appreciate honest opinions going either way as I have to choose my moves wisely, having a family and all.
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Title: Do you folks have a source of extra income which does not have anything to do with programming? It could be a non-tech job, or a non-tech business. How well does it pay off, and are you happy doing it? I ask because I'm also looking for ideas. I feel like I'll never make enough money just working on my full-time job (in tech), but I'm worried that getting freelance programming work will make me stressed and sick of writing code.
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46
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Title: Do you still need to see him write code in an interview and convince yourself that he is good ?
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Title: How do you manage passwords for shared services in your team(s)?
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Title: My friend Eliana and I (@eli_awry, @lilz0r) built a brainwave-controlled vibrator this weekend at a hardware hackathon! Is there a market for focus-training sex toys?
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48
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Title: I have been looking into multiple payment processors and it seems everyone charges the same thing. Why is that?
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77
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Title: A new CSS preprocessor written in pure javascript. It's available for nodejs and client-side.
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64
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Title: The golden master for OSX Mavericks is out! For all you guys who wanna try it out, but need to install it via a USB, here’s a super simple way to do so.
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56
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Title: Soyuz 11 crew was the only human deaths to occur in space.
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48
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Title: this blew my mind.
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Title: I have found some printouts. Assuming they relate to some company on the stock market how can I ensure I do not pollute my Intellectual Property / avoid sentencing for insider trading or use of unauthorized information?<p>General question - what makes confidential confidential?<p>Is it enough to write it on sheet of paper? And how about other pages that don't have this clause?<p>General, open-ended question... Thanks.
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Title: Great points from Fred Wilson. And accordingly to Pogue's NYT article, they signed up more new subs in the last quarter than the big 3 combined. But, in light of their service map and much more limited travel, curious if it's enough to make you switch? Trying to figure this out myself...
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Title: For some time now, I've been growing increasingly weary of the walled gardens I once so enthusiastically embraced. Off the top of my head, some grievances include, forced corporate policies, lack of hardware choice, and closed operating software. For pragmatic reasons, I've stuck it out with OS X for years, but do wonder if it's time to consider OSS desktop alternatives again? Will the conveniences be missed? Tim Oreilly was echoing a similar sentiment a year ago. https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/g9WdNt6yVgR
Are you in the same boat? It all just seems so daunting starting over...
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58
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Title: Google Gravity Experiment , check it out.
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84
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Title: I've read about dead users on HN that but I thought being dead also meant you cant post comments at all. It seems like I can post comments, its just my upvotes dont count. Did I do something wrong or do I just not understand the system?
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281
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Title: We've been trying to solve this problem for longer than Dropbox has existed: how can you maintain plaintext locally and ciphertext remotely, easily, with efficient changes-only (a la rsync) sync ?<p>We created a lot of half-working Truecrypt/Filevault/encfs schemes and fiddled with a lot of --partial --progress --whatever switches to rsync, but eventually we just told people to use duplicity[1][2] and call it a day.<p>Then Mr. Raymii came along and dropped this in our lap:<p>https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_encrypted_shared_storage_aka_Dropbox_clone.html<p>The tl;dr there is:<p>"This article describes my truly secure, encrypted file synchronization service. It used EncFS and dvcs-autosync which lets me share only the encrypted data and mount that locally to get the plaintext."<p>... and we couldn't be happier. Finally we (and anyone using rsync.net, or any ssh host with git on it) have an elegant way to sidestep the issues of trust and authority[3] over remote data on systems you don't control.<p>Enjoy! [4]<p>[1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/<p>[2] ... and it's still a very good solution.<p>[3] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt<p>[4] HN discount is 10c/GB/mo. Just email us.
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Title: PARTY LIKE IT'S 1984!!1<p>We're having monthly cryptoparties from 2-5pm every Third Sunday at Sudo Room, a hackerspace in Oakland located at 2141 Broadway (two blocks from the 19th St Oakland BART!). The next one is this Sunday!<p>• Learn security techniques & software.
• Understand why responsible security is important.
• Meet with other proactive residents!<p>We'll have talks on why digital security matters, mobile phone security, GPG and encrypted email, OTR (secure chat), and SSL / perfect forward security.<p>Bring your laptop! Bring your phone!<p>All skill levels welcome, from novice to expert!
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Title: I've been following one of my friends for the past few months as he is trying to pursue his largest childhood dream of becoming an Olympian.<p>What makes this interesting is that he's a 36 year old tech guy. He's worked in the video game and web industry for the past 15 years. Knowing him, it would be a stretch to call him an athlete when he started this.<p>He's approached this in a very cool manner. Instead of brute force like most athletes, he did his research. He went out and found all the sports that had more open qualifications. This led him to narrow it down to 4 sports of Bobsled, Luge, Downhill Skiing and Cross-Country Skiing.<p>Subsequently after trying a few of them he picked Cross-Country Skiing. He needed to get on the snow asap so he let his lease up in San Francisco and moved to Northern Finland above the Arctic to chase the snow. Subsequently this summer he flew around to wherever there was snow and it took him to Austria, New Zealand and Australia.<p>He knew that he would never qualify as a US citizen. So he thought to himself… maybe I can become a citizen of a tropical country. After a huge email and snail mail writing campaign to embassies and olympic committees he was able to get interest from a few. One agreed to do it and as of August he became a citizen of Colombia!<p>So I'd like to present you with, Paul, the first ever Colombian Cross-Country skier.<p>He released a trailer video yesterday and also put up a Facebook page. I personally find his persistence in pursing his dream inspiring. Please support him be sharing and liking.<p>https://www.facebook.com/teampaul2014<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO2VSdncp1o
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Title: In the HN guidelines, we ask submitters to use original titles when
possible. When they don't, we often change the title of a post
back to the original title of the article.<p>There is an ongoing trickle of complaints about this, as if we were
engaged in some sort of sinister conspiracy.<p>Titles on HN are not self-expression the way comments are. Titles
are common property. The person who happens to submit something
first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for
everyone else. This would be clearer if we didn't let submitters
enter a title-- if our software simply let people submit urls, and
retrieved the title from the page. We don't do this because it's
too inflexible. Some articles have titles that are too long. In
others the subtitle makes a better title. But the fact that a title
field is editable doesn't make it comment.<p>It's true that when submitters change titles, their new titles often
contain more information than the article's original title. But a
significant percentage of the extra information added in this way
is false. The only way we can tell if a newly created title is
accurate is to read the article, and we're not about to read every
article submitted to HN. The only option is to revert to the
original title, which is at least what the author intended.<p>(We do sometimes change titles from the original when the original
title is egregious linkbait, or false. We have also, since the
beginning when our users were largely YC alumni, put e.g. (YC S13)
after the names of YC companies in titles. But these are not the
types of changes users mean when they complain about moderators
changing titles.)<p>If we had infinite attention to spend on moderation, we could read
every article and decide whether each user-created title was better
than the original title. But we don't. Moderating HN is no one's
full time job. And frankly it's not that big a deal anyway. If
we're going to expend cycles trying to fix something about HN, the
increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments has a much higher
priority than the fact that authors' original titles are not maximally
informative.
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Title: I wrote this small client to read hackernews from my favorite editor. It's currently using an external HTTP API [0] but I'm working on my own proxy [1].<p>I'd love to actually scrape and cache all the info I need using lisp. However, my time constraints are keeping me away of that goal. I could definitely use some help here! :)<p>I'm also planning to add support for comments and posting new things. Any feedback is highly appreciated! Thank you!<p>[0] http://api.ihackernews.com/
[1] https://github.com/clarete/rhn
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Title: There seems to be an issue with Level 3 at the moment which is causing all sorts of sites to be unreachable for some people but not others. Rackspace (mail, hosting, cloud, etc), Facebook, Hotmail, Github, Digital Ocean, etc.<p>For those experiencing connectivity issues, try a different ISP/network. For example, I can't connect to any of the above networks via my regular Time Warner cable connection or via my T-Mobile hotspot. But I can connect via my Verizon hotspot.
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Title: There have been countless discussions about SaaS with tons of examples and success stories. It seems like a good way to structure new software businesses.<p>However, I wonder if there's anyone here who makes decent money selling software components or code "the old way".<p>Please share your stories.<p>(I'm also interested in hearing the buyer's side, so please mention useful code/software that you had bought).
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Title: I'm using Hetzner services for several years so far (luckily only for personal stuff and friends minecraft server), and had this problem few times. Every time I said to myself "I will get away from Hetzner ASAP", but I always stay there. I would NEVER imagine to run a business hosted there at all, and here is why...<p>DDoS is a common problem many companies are facing, but Hetzner's policy on that is really crap.
If someone starts DDoS on your dedicated, after several minutes they just shut down your dedicated from network, and send you an email like "We disabled your network because you have DDoS attack on your server. Write us an email to reenable your network". And of course, several hours later I saw that email and tell them "Okay, please enable my network", but boom, I will have to wait Monday, because their support that can ACTIVATE network on a dedicated works only from Mondays to Fridays ...
And then the person who attacked me sends me anonymous email like "lol, I bought 5$ packet at [some random booter/network stresser website], and I have put you offline for few days for only 15 minutes of DDoS, HAHAHAHA"<p>So basically yea, start small flood from random VPS/dedicated or whatever that is 100mbit or more, leave it on for several minutes until Hetzners system automatically disable network from person you are attacking, and look at them being offline for few days :)
I'm ordering a new dedicated from someone else now, no more Hetzner...
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Title: This is both a warning and a cry for help.<p>Just to give you a vague idea of who I am: I just graduated with a degree in computer science with honors at a decent school. I'm now working as a full stack web developer at a startup. I did two internships at large tech companies and a bit more mildly impressive work.<p>I'm realizing now that I made a lot of mistakes with my education and I want a change in direction. We all know that making mistakes is good, but sometimes you will make one misstep after the other without realizing until you're far from the right path. Being in school doesn't give you enough time to reflect and I was even afraid to do so out of fear of sounding naive. I'm guess I'm glad I'm having these realizations now, but I still lost out on critical time. My perspective won't apply to everyone (most programmers do seem genuinely content with their career, and that's ok with me), but on the off chance it might resonate with a few people, here goes:<p>1. Nobody cares that you work at a prestigious tech company that gives you ~cool benefits~. It's true that nobody cares about most of what other people do with their lives, but do not let Google/Microsoft/etc. sell you hard on the career. This was what drew me further into CS: I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and these predatory companies convinced me on going towards a seemingly good-looking lifestyle. I should have looked around more instead of just holding onto the first thing that looked semi-decent. I know that "software engineer" is on the top of every top ten careers list and that you have reason to believe you are subject to the same statistics of what constitutes an enjoyable job as everyone else, but you really need to do more self-exploration than that. How in love with the field are YOU - not what your peers/family/friends (especially most of whom aren't in it) think it's cool that you can land a job at a well known place?<p>2. I hated my peers in undergrad and I hated working on projects with them. These projects were frighteningly representative of what work-life is. I always excused my misgivings with group work as something that would pass in the real world. Just because you graduate you won't magically enjoy their company or your work with them: your peers don't really "grow up" and the code doesn't get that much better. (Side note, ask yourself: do you really care about good code? Good code can be great to read, interesting, and make your job a hell of a lot easier, but is it really something you want to be remembered by? To structure your life around?) If you can't make friends in your classes, consider if you actually want to like them in the first place. I'll admit that being better at things so-called-nerds said they were really good at was entertaining but it's a terrible reason to be in this field.<p>3. If you like CS because it's "math with a practical/creative edge", application development will kill that wonder dead. If you worry at all when other programmers talk about programming just being an exercise in gluing libraries together, in a lot of ways it is. There is little intellectual satisfaction to be had from contorting bytes.<p>4. Learning new programming languages is extremely fun at first but exasperating and repetitive after a while.<p>5. I'm not really sure I need as much money as I'm making to be comfortable. At some point I just became addicted to comparing salaries at various companies/jobs, but it seems to be having very little impact on my life. I'll admit that my attitude towards this will probably change, but still.<p>6. If you have any misgivings about capitalism or being involved with a business at all, don't push those feelings aside. (The company I work for is mostly employee owned and I still hate it!)<p>7. If you get into a deep discussion about programming and you're surprised by how many things you know that you don't care about, really consider what that means.<p>8. If you are trying lots of CS electives in school and you're not really enjoying any of them, don't fall into the trap of thinking that you just haven't gone deep enough yet. Get domain knowledge in something else. Having /skills/ is nice but you probably want a (more complicated than just business logic) knowledge base to apply it to. Find issues you're actually passionate about and use programming to do cool things in that area. Take courses in something completely unrelated or something you don't think will be useful, it's better than clawing at nothing.<p>9. If you can't come up with an idea for an app because you can't stand the idea of making something so meaningless, just remember that you will be making someone else's trivial app.<p>10. Startup/tech company culture is vile. Entitlement, lack of compassion, materialism, and (surprisingly) anti-intellectualism is the norm.<p>11. If you think you can survive in the software industry by simply escaping into your other interests/friends/relationships: you can't. This was probably the biggest reason I didn't realize I had so many problems with software development: I was too distracted by the rest of my fairly enjoyable college life (except of course for the actual courses I took, almost all of which were CS electives). When you start working and work becomes most of what your life is, then you'll realize just how important it is to actually "do what you love". Love is not forced, and sticking around longer to see if love comes back rarely works. More is not going to fix things. Expand your horizons in every part of your life and don't take your unhappiness for granted.<p>As for me, I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do to get out of this just yet, but I'm imagining that it means I should go to school in some capacity. If there was one thing I could tell every undergraduate CS major, it would be to double major in anything else and do as little CS as you feel you can get away with. There's so much more you can do. Don't be terrified of not getting a job, you're pretty much guaranteed to get one with that CS degree even if you weren't dedicated to it 100%.<p>I hope this gave perspective to someone, but any advice a wiser person could give me would be much appreciated.
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63
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Title: Hi everyone!<p>I'm afraid I will always be a mediocre programmer. How can I become better?<p>Everyday on HN I see some coder come up with an amazing algorithm/piece of code/software, and I think to myself "WOW, that is brilliant" and the next thought is "I will never be as good as these guys".<p>Can you give me any advice?<p>P.S My daily job involves php/js, but I'm trying to move on from them to some other language (Learning GO now).<p>Thank you.
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Title: I have been freelancing from home in Moscow, Russia for 4 years now as a frontend developer and as a self-taught UI/UX specialist. There were good and bad times in regard to work/life balance, money, clients and myself. I am not a famous rockstar freelancer, but during recent 2 years I have been earning $7-$10k per month average, making my clients quite happy and being able to support my wife and our two children. Before starting freelancing I had been working for 8 years at a local publishing house where I got from an ordinary designer to a head of IT dept serving 20+ daily/monthly editions.<p>Now I feel like I am ready to perform a next step in my life, in regard to my career. Recently I have received a job offer from a company in Stockholm doing a software as a service, for a position of a frontend developer. I had a talk via Skype with a couple of representatives of the company and in the end they offered me to visit their office to have a detailed talk as they seem to be quite content with skill I have shown so far. Surely they offer benefits, work permit visa and other things like a vacation, insurance.<p>I googled for average salaries for a position like mine there in Stockholm as well as in other Sweden cities. I have also found some more info about life there, costs, conditions, climate and so on. I know 'average salary' doesn't give much info about my specific potential salary I can get there. But at least I see the range and it's quite different from my current income knowing that I will have to pay for an apartment, likely pay more for food and other things I don't yet know about. On the other hand, may be it will be a good start for me to go networking, finding new opportunities, improving my skills.<p>So, please advise, what things I should consider while deciding? Did you face similar choice when you were offered with a job while you were freelancing? How did you choose to accept or to reject a full time job? What are important factors for you? Can it be a real move forward or more like a deadlock turning me into a small gear in a big mechanism? How can I setup my priorities properly not to say in a year or two I have had lost them?<p>I know many of the questions are subjective but I would like to hear from people who were in the same situation like mine.<p>Thanks!
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48
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Title: When new the Nokia tablet was announced yesterday, submissions made it to the front page but were promptly flagged off by many saying "this wasn't relevant to HN;" regardless of all the excitement over the new iPad.<p>So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default? Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like, even if the source is generally reputable (theverge, engadget, ars)?<p>Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft (research) and my wife works for Nokia; so ya, ouch.
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763
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Title: Kogan refuse to supply source code for GPL licensed software running on Kogan branded Android devices.
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72
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Title: Use Pandas, Matplotlib, and Basemap to extract, clean and re-arrange data, before creating a series of thematic maps.
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265
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Title: Apple "has eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk, and I honestly have no idea for whom this latest version of Pages is intended."
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84
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Title: WhiteDB is a lightweight NoSQL database library written in C, operating fully in main memory. There is no server process. Data is read and written directly from/to shared memory, no sockets are used between WhiteDB and the application program.
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126
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Title: Buffer's Facebook tokens have been used to post spam to Buffer users' Facebook walls.
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52
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Title: It seems like @buffer got hacked.<p>https://twitter.com/search?q=%40buffer&src=typd&f=realtime<p>The guys seem to be on it.<p>Last information: They confirmed they got hacked turned of publishing and they are investigating the issue.
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116
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Title: Last year I left a laptop at my parents' house with Linux Ubuntu installed. I had it hooked up to their TV for streaming movies.<p>So, this week he gives me a call and tells me that his Windows laptop battery died and he's been using my Ubuntu laptop. He tells me about how he found the Libre Office spreadsheet and he's been filling out his work documents (he works in high-end custom home construction) with it and transmitting it with Google Docs.<p>Then he tells me that he was able to add their house printer and print his docs from the machine using the instructions from Ubuntu's help system.<p>I was pretty much floored. My parents are NOT technical people. I offered to get him a Windows license for the machine but he said that it's working fine for him.<p>People make jokes about the "year of desktop Linux" but if my dad, without calling me ONCE, can use Linux productively to get things done, then, in my opinion, Microsoft is in trouble. As far as I'm concerned, their claim to usability in the PC OS world is dying.<p>Maybe this doesn't mean a whole lot in the big picture, but Linux has cost Microsoft at least one end-user license for an average computer user. For my family, I'm not sure how else you define a "year of Linux desktop."
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395
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Title: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
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100
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Title: If you are hosting on cloud, you must automate everything.
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77
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Title: YCombinator!!! We have made some sweet node.js improvements specifically to our EU, AU, and USA users ~ Check it out if you are a Linux or tech guru.
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47
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Title: Today Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein came out against spying on foreign leaders but <i>for</i> mass spying on Americans. Since she was just reelected and there's no recall procedure, we're stuck with her-- but we could get her off the intel committee with just a Senate resolution.<p>Feinstein has a faulty understanding of the Constitution and seems pro-elite and authoritarian. I'm a constituent of hers and want to start a campaign, but have never done this before. Any advice?
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65
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Title: I moved to US from India about 9 years ago. I appreciate all gov departments being corruption free ( as far as interaction points are concern). India is far from it, I do believe it's part of evaluation and India will be like this one day. but just wondering how it happened here?
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74
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Title: Hi All ,I been working on my idea , A Voice CRM solution for 2 years.When I started brainstorming the idea the only option I have to receive phone calls thru browser was a flash widget or use 3rd party providers like Twilio or Phono .<p>Thanks to WebRTC we now integrated our VoIP services to receive and make calls directly thru browser .Please have a look and give us your feedback .Thanks
Voz.io Team .
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42
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Title: On a Skype video conference this morning, I noticed the software did something very interesting. Instead of pixelating video when my crappy broadband internet connection slowed down briefly, it <i>zoomed</i>.<p>It was accomplished so smoothly I wouldn't even have noticed except that I was talking with a room full of people on the other end and suddenly I couldn't see the people on the sides any more.<p>Instead of reducing the full-frame video resolution when bandwidth grew scarce, as it usually does, instead this time Skype selected the middle portion of the frame and showed it clearly. It was very subtle. It was done completely smoothly. The effect was aesthetically pleasing, not disruptive at all, and an elegant solution.<p>Well done, Skype.
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115
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Title: I'm getting an untrusted certificate warning... DDoS attack or server issue, anyone knows?
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172
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Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility.
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118
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Title: Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.<p>Also see: Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2013) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6653426
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240
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Title: How is it considered by hiring managers? How long one should stay at one place to not be classified as a hopper? Is it a big deal to hop in our (the tech) industry for engineers/PMs? Does it makes a difference whether the hopper apply at a startup or at a big company?<p>(also I consider a hopper who's efficient and who's seeking challenges, who unwilling to settle rather the underperformer who keeps leaving before getting fired...)
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84
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Title: Many Bad Gateway and Server errors today -- any reasons why?
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123
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Title: Is this common knowledge? Pretty useful for the folks that don't know this, like me.<p>Try it yourself:<p>http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-part-about-working-at-Google<p>vs.<p>http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-part-about-working-at-Google?share=1
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64
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Title: For those of you in the HN community that get paid to work on open source full-time or almost full-time, while still making a decent income, how do you do it?
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112
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Title: Previous post 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271
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85
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Title: In light of the whole NSA leaks etc, I have to ask why we don't use PGP widely. Is it just because it's too difficult or is it because we never thought our emails were ever something to be kept private or just that there was never a need to produce tools to make the technology accessible.<p>A friend and I were discussing this over dinner and couldn't really pin point the reason. Both of us came across ideas around what could be done to make the situation better but were drawing somewhat of a blank on the question of "why is this not already done?".
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89
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Title: I'd like to start reading a couple of [academic] papers a week, but I'm not sure where to look for interesting ones. What are your sources?
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123
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Title: The person in charge of sending out the invitations to interviews is in a different time zone, so we're going to be sending out invitations close to midnight Pacific time. So please don't worry if nothing seems to be happening.<p>The good news is, we got so many good applications that we decided to add another day of interviews, so we'll be inviting 20% more groups than we planned to.<p>(No, that doesn't decrease the probability that a group we interview will get funded. We don't and in fact couldn't aim to fund a target number of startups.)
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181
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Title: My best friend and I disliked our jobs and wanted a non-awkward way to reach out to people whose work interested us.<p>We finally quit our jobs, moved into bunkbeds (http://instagram.com/p/WOPgf-rcFB/), and learned to code in order to build a community of people open to meeting strangers whose work interests them, over coffee.<p>We're now talking to companies who will be featuring their employees as "ambassadors" offering coffee meetings ("treatings") to individuals interested in working at their company. We think job sites suck and that networking/job seeking should work like online dating. Would love peoples' feedback, and an upvote!
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49
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Title: If you have a startup and a lawyer this is a must read! Avoid being overcharged!
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146
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Title: Here are the charts:
http://bitcoinity.org/markets
A screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/kW1CJz2.jpg<p>And a link to the front page of WSJ's financial section today:
http://m.imgur.com/4bcGGZG
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121
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Title: I have been struck recently over many conversations with different VC-funded startup CEOs (series A or B money, all at least $5M) at how strong the CTO/tech team rockstar/ninja kool-aid seems to be. "Our tech guys are smarter than everyone else in the world" seems to be a pervasive sentiment. Generally speaking, the CTO/tech team also seems to believe that about themselves, and usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.<p>I know that there are dark days and uncertainty within a startup, and that you do have to "fake it until you make it", but there's a real danger in drinking that kool-aid and missing out on the fact that everything reverts to the mean, and not everyone can even be "above average", let alone the smartest people in the world. The reality is that your startup that's survived to series A likely has pretty decent tech talent, but it's unlikely that they're significantly better than the tech talent at other startups that have survived similarly.<p>In particular, it is a big mistake to assume that your tech team is going to be able to solve problems that were really hard for other tech teams, unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies (and the other tech teams were not willing to do so).<p>As a tech co-founder, I am extremely appreciative of the support that I get from my CEO, but I would never want her to (nor does she) assume that I will be able to solve problems that other talented teams have failed to solve for way less money and/or in way less time and/or with way less organizational focus than they have.<p>So if you're a tech CEO who believes that your CTO and tech teams are far superior to everyone else out there, I would say: the confidence is good, and probably necessary, but you have to make sure that you spend some of your time sober enough to acknowledge reality.
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156
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Title: I think some of us are interested in this discussion in the other thread, but that's about working locations outside the U.S.<p>Where would people choose to live cheaply and work on their own projects inside the country?<p>For example, I noticed someone here promoting an incubator in Myrtle Beach recently, and it appears that one could rent a townhouse there for < $1k.<p>From my own perspective the usual problem with this is the lack of other interests, amenities, and a dating pool. (Admittedly those things can be distractions, but those are distractions I'd like to have, from a QoL perspective.)
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80
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Title: Similar to the U.S. thread, but for people living in Europe.
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132
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Title: Dear Sender:<p>There's nothing more annoying than clicking that 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom of your email only to be asked to login first. I know it sucks when people opt-out of your transactional emails, but deal with it and let people unsubscribe with one click. If you do this you may even get some valuable feedback.<p>If your transactional email provider doesn't have a single-click unsubscribe option, find another service. I recommend every developer test out what a recipient sees.<p>Sincerely,<p>Users of the Internet
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453
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Title: I'm a third year undergrad majoring in business, engineering, and math at a top public school. I have worked extremely hard to get a perfect GPA, and I thought that would have positioned me well for an investment banking internship this upcoming summer.<p>Unfortunately, I'm getting "out-networked." I understand GPA isn't everything, but it's disappointing to hear that I have a slim chance at banking just because I'm not emailing/cold-calling 3 investment bankers a day. I'm working my ass off so I can get an internship where I work 100+ hours a week doing stuff I don't even know if I'll enjoy. Note: neither the 3 emails / cold-calls per day nor the 100+ hours a week is an exaggeration.<p>I've never looked into a software development internship. I'm consistently one of the top students in my EE programming classes, but I'm definitely not as good as the kids that have been programming since middle school. But at this point, I'm sick of recruiting for business internships and seriously considering switching.<p>I came into the business school thinking it would give me a broad array of choices, but it's funneled me to either investment banking or management consulting. I feel like I'm better suited for software development or a startup, but I'm afraid of risking a safe / prestigious job at an investment bank after I graduate.<p>I know it's "never too late," but I feel like my software dev prospects are nowhere near my banking prospects with about 1.5 years to graduation. What should I do?
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52
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Title: I really wonder after complaints about Google last week what companies have same benefits but are not known as much as much Google or Facebook. There were some comments that such companies exist and some of them even have more benefits than mainstream companies.
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60
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Title: well, in contrast to the recently submitted Ask HN question about Java. I'd be interested to know how HN thinks about C++
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40
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Title: If you've been working remote (in any capacity) please tell us your story: How did you get the position you're in?, What advice would you give to others?, What's your favorite story about your remote-working experience?<p>I'm currently out of work and considering getting a remote gig (be it as a freelancer, contractor, or plain old employee) so I'm especially interested in hearing what you have to say.
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84
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Title: My feedly account is always filled with the same top tech companies. Sites like The Verge, Mashable, Engadget, ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica, The Next Web, etc seem to copy each other's topics all the time.
.
I need some variety.
Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, are not the only tech companies I want to know about.
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67
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Title: I've tried many different things in the corporate world and entrepreneurship.<p>I've enjoyed it, but I'm pretty jaded by the usual stuff. A job with social impact--something that makes someone's life better--would be the right thing for me now.<p>Any thoughts on convenient ways to find these? Some sort of board or listing?
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103
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Title: We've tried systems like OSTicket, OTRS etc, but never found anything to our liking. Most systems were cluttered, slow or too advanced. Brimir is simple but usefull.
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42
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Title: A simple Flask application that allows you to add inline feedback elements to any website and collect user feedback on-the-fly without disrupting your user experience. Just add a small code snippet to your HTML and use special SPAN elements in your code to dynamically create feedback widgets wherever you want. All user input is sent to the feedback server asynchronously via jQuery, so no submitting of forms is required. The code of the application is available on Github:<p>https://github.com/adewes/instant-feedback
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45
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Title: I recently read a lot about Meteor.js and its excellent packaging system. I went through their site also, but not my info give a holistic view on it. Do you think it's worth learning?
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77
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Title: I have hundreds GBs of photos/videos, thousands of songs, many important docs, Mac's time-machine backups, software installers... I just find it is really difficult for me to figure out an easy and reliable way to backup them.<p>I currently put the photos, videos, docs and software on two portable hard disks, some photos and docs on both Dropbox and Google Drive. But such way is really inconvenient, every time I have to grab the hard disk to browse my family photos and videos. I also don't feel the cloud storage reliable, so looks like hard disks at hand better. However, those hard disks may get older and 'wear out', so I have to upgrade the disks every three or four years..<p>Just wondering is there a better way to do the backup?
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52
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Title: I would love to hear how Google pitches G+ and the disaster that is Youtube at this point internally. How do they keep morale up?
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353
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Title: Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide "I don't want to read any of these". Where do other HN readers go for finding out about new and interesting technology or science?
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182
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Title: I am a convicted felon. No "explanation" field here. Explanation: http://pastebin.com/PfLcKyHj<p>I am also a graduate of a 4 year university with a degree in computer science. I have worked gainfully since I graduated (roughly 5 years ago) as a software developer for a variety of start-ups, and as a "contractor" whom was eventually hired full-time at a mid-sized business. Well some of the start-up jobs were less than "highly paid" as my career has advanced, I've easily bested all my friends and most of my family in pay and benefits.<p>In the start-up world it's easy to avoid the question because most small start-ups lack the infrastructure to perform regular background checks on perspective employees, and new-hires often come on a "word of mouth basis" so my attitude has always been: honesty is the best policy, when asked I'm always totally upfront. However, most don't ask.<p>My question is: I've recently been contacted by recruiters at much larger corporations (some of which I would very much like to experience and work for, internet-tech top-fivers like: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc.). I also feel that my skills have reached a level where my candidacy is viable. I would like to add a job at these company's to my resume and hopefully while there make connections in the start-up world.<p>That being said, if I submit myself to these rigorous interviews, what should I expect when I ultimately have to disclose my felony conviction and "explain" it to a recruiter / hiring manager?<p>At this time there is a remote possibility that I could apply to have my record sealed in another 2-3 years depending on adjustments in state law. Should I wait to apply to this companies until after I see how the law changes?<p>##ratelimit from HN will respond when I can
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77
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