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Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | drhowarddrfine: Off topic discussions are just that. We didn't come to this site to discuss politics so it doesn't belong here. There are many other places available to do that.Any suggestions to create an off-topic board is not a solution. These are mostly populated by those who would come to the site based on politic... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | cmos: In high school I got a job for my local Department of Public works in the Power division. I lived in a small New England town that did their own power, much like most towns do their own water and sewer.My job was as an assistant to the inventory guy, a 70 year old feisty man with one hand named Al.I was often bo... |
Worst examples of ambiguity ? | phernandez: "Ambiguity, either you have it or you don't." |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | rbritton: We set up a new network segment with multiple VLANs trunked over a fiber line. The entire thing worked flawlessly except for one VLAN. It turned out to be a conflict between a very strict media converter and bad ARP packet-generating code in the device acting as the DHCP server on that VLAN. The ARP packet... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | Ixiaus: I like this suggestion. I'm not against HN having off-topic posts and discussions but I think such an implementation would help focus the discussions and keep it's participants lined up (I like the Karma points from HN to vet new users idea).I, personally, would love to see a sister site dedicated to the broade... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | davidw: > Other places more suited to this topic are overrun with the shrieking, thoughtless, knee-jerk reactionaries that I come here to avoid.Correlation and causation and all that, but that correlation makes me quite wary of those topics. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | kabdib: Embedded OS for a consumer product; the units were freezing (very occasionally) in the field. Usually the units were in store kiosks (= disappointed and unimpressed could-have-been-customers).Turned out to be a race condition in an interrupt handler, where the OS would say "wake me up when something interestin... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | jacquesm: Ok, here's one of mine, it's only fair.Jasper L. systems administrator of an early web hosting company calls up one evening, there is a problem with the paging system.A certain host is being paged as 'offline' but when checking the machine works fine.So I go there bit by bit we check out the software, everyth... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | ashishk: I agree. If you build it, I will use it.(I'm guessing there's no API to authenticate HN credentials. Might be worth reaching out to pg) |
Leaders' avg? | icey: It would be a nice addition to all profiles, if pg is taking requests / suggestions. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | bad_user: I once did a crawler that searched the content of a couple of large websites for phone numbers.I did this daemon in Perl, using fork() to search multiple websites in parallel. When a new search was initiated, the daemon broke the search in multiple packages (of 5000 items to be searched). After initiating 500... |
Any intro guide to creating text-based games? | IsaacL: Try googling 'interactive fiction', which seems to be the modern term for old-school text-games. I used to play a few text games as a teenager (I'm 20 now, so this was only a few years ago) and there seemed to be a small but thriving community about IF. A lot of intelligent discussion about narrative, game desi... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | antirez: there is little/no offtopic here, so isn't it a bit of overreacting to claim this is a problem? Also it is truly interesting from time to time to check the HN users feeling about political/.../... issues. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | f00: Bug with the most spectacular results:As a (former) hardware engineer, I've worked on many projects where bugs have physical effects. This can range anywhere from amusing to seriously dangerous.One such bug involved a mistake in the assembly diagram and silkscreen for a circuit board. The result was that a tanta... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | gills: We were doing some early testing on this distributed system, and process A kept backing up well under it's nominal load. A had no allowance for shedding excess load (it was broadcasting high frequency safety-critical data), and the network buffer backed up under the shitty messaging layer. It turned out that p... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | ilitirit: Not so much a bug, but this incident cut my lifespan by about 5 years or so:I was fixing an account balance on a customer's master database. Any change that happens on the master gets replicated to 30 branches, usually at 10 minute intervals.I wrote the UPDATE statement, highlighted it, and pressed "Execute"... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | jokull: ExternalInterface hell (Flash-JS bridge) |
OSX Package Management | nudded: there have been recent developments over an alternative, and http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew seems to be a very nice one.it's still growing, but seems to be a viable alternative to macports |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | gojomo: Once upon a time: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/09/25/introducing-nonhackernewsco... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | theklub: Why bother with another whole website? Why not just have a few categories? |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | shelfoo: Two immediately jump to mind. One that had a massively bad impact to the company, another that might have..First, using perl a (later-fired) co-worker added a hardcoded check like the following:if ($client_id = "specific_id") { #email reports }Needless to say, we emailed reports for all of our clients to a spe... |
OSX Package Management | justinweiss: Until I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I was using fink with the unstable binary packages: http://finkers.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/fink-and-binary-dist...I could use apt and dpkg, it did't build the world whenever I wanted a package (cough Macports), and since it just used binaries, installs were super-fast.Las... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | Kirby: For a different definition of worst:I started a job recently at an ecommerce company. There was a long-standing bug with the cart display in the upper right of the page always saying that the cart was empty. People would report it all the time, and the quite smart lead programmer said it was something really c... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | hernan7: Most of the time I confess that I don't upvote the topics I comment on. I just forget to do it, mea maxima culpa.Maybe the ranking algorithm could be changed so commenting on a topic is counted as an up-vote. That would have the bonus benefit of riding us of the "this doesn't belong in HN" complaint comments.(... |
OSX Package Management | mr_justin: I don't know, I've been pretty happy just building stuff the old school way. Never been a fan of package managers and especially not macports. I just don't trust 'em. |
OSX Package Management | cschep: Yes, yes, yes.I'm glad the author mentioned pacman. It's definitely been my best package management experience. I still use macports, but it does feel pretty tacked on. That being said I'm definitely excited about homebrew [http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew]. Some initial weekend hacking with it left me happy tha... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | sgoraya: This bug was solved after the title went gold and shipped in US :/ We did not find out about it until a few users emailed us. The bug got through SONY and our internal testing...-It was a first gen PS2 game that had to get pushed out since it was considered a launch title. The dungeons in the game were seed... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | WesleyJohnson: I'm still a little new to the game, so I've only had one hacking job thus far. It spanned 4 years and taught me a lot about what to do and what not to do. I could type a small book about all the crazy things they did in that company and the nightmare of spaghetti code, the needlessly complex 3000+ table ... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | far33d: The most annoying off-topic discussion is the meta-discussion. |
Soma or North Beach | jsares: i live in the mission and a good friend lives in somato give you an idea of pricesi live in a new 3 bedroom condo building with two roommates (24th and bryant) and pay 1150/mo plus about 50 in utilsmy friend lives in an older 3 bedroom home w two roommates (sumner and howard) and pays 650/mo plus about 50 in ut... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | heed: Maybe we need to define "On-topic" submissions more clearly. It's fairly vague as stands:"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." |
Rails App takes 800ms to respond on a VPS. Will dedicated server help? | st3fan: Run it on your workstation and see how fast it is. You should get comparable speed from a dedicated server. |
Rails App takes 800ms to respond on a VPS. Will dedicated server help? | michaelbuckbee: The largest difference in performance between a VPS and a dedicated box is Disk I/O (much better on the dedicated).Given that, I think it's unlikely that just switching to a dedicated box would help significantly.A useful baseline might be to use YSlow to compare how long it takes to load your page in R... |
Soma or North Beach | haseman: If you like wearing more than one popped collar, move to north beach. Otherwise, live in the Mission, Lower Haight, or Soma. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | ja27: I worked on the communication middleware for an early Windows tablet. My part sat between a VB6 GUI app (that we customized for each customer) and a RS-232 device and handled all the communications.One customer had intermittent communication failures that we couldn't identify for weeks. I finally went on-site and... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | lalala: The worst bug is always the one I'm currently working on. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | earl: The most expensive bug that I can talk about publicly that I've encountered:I used to work on software for a very expensive (started at 70k) DNA/protein analysis hardware solution. This was in the late 90s, and our GUI was a couple million lines of MFC code. I was responsible for an analysis package written in ... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | tlb: At Viaweb, my careless use of $_ in Perl led to the name of every credit card shown in the merchant UI being replaced by a secret auth key. I didn't see it because that particular auth check was bypassed for admin users like me. It wasn't a serious security hole, and we changed the auth key afterwards. But as it h... |
Rails App takes 800ms to respond on a VPS. Will dedicated server help? | carbon8: It doesn't sound like the problem is a VPS or specifically a Rails problem. 800ms is a lot, and 300-400ms for a view with fragment caching is a lot. I have a completely unoptimized app in development with 20-item paginated lists of partials containing partials running on a VPS (linode) that renders the uncache... |
OSX Package Management | ghshephard: The fact that you can (and frequently do) copy a the .app component out of our .DMG bundle into your /Applications/ directory means that any attempt at package management will be half hearted anyways. |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | tlb: Runaway robots at Anybots have caused: - 2 holes in drywall
- 1 bent bookshelf
- 1 dent in concrete floor
- 1 frightened Jessica
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkenIInV9rI
The last one was fun because I have logs showing packets from the PC/104 computer stack (running FreeBSD) connected to the robot wh... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | tlb: Calling the least mean square fit function in the linpack library used to go into an infinite loop occasionally. I tracked it down to some very dusty FORTRAN code in the linpack kernel, which gfortran42 compiles incorrectly. Adding -ffloat-store to the compile flags for that library fixed it. |
OSX Package Management | derefr: reason that package management feels so integrated on Linux is that Everything Is A Package, including the system components. This works because, usually, every required for a Linux system is open-source and free-as-in-beer.On OSX, on the other hand, many things that people want to install are closed-source, f... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | kgermino: I agree that its very hard to determine whether the problem is the content of the sites (Politics ect.) or the visitors to them. As much as I'm against complicating HN with sister sites and categories I think that if nothing else it would be an interesting experiment. If it were developed I would certainly ... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | humbledrone: I was working on a C++ daemon process that communicated over a TCP socket. At the time, we were using the Poco library's facilities to do the standard daemon startup stuff (get rid of the controlling pty, point standard fds to /dev/null, etc). Anyway, one of our field installations wasn't working, so I t... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | btilly: How do you define worst?How about most widespread? Once while trying to debug a CPAN module I figured out that if $condition was false then Perl had a bug causingmy $foo = $bar if $condition;to leave $foo with whatever value it had on the previous function call. (The exact behavior is more complex than that, ... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | stcredzero: Worst bug monetarily:I was consulting for a multinational on a commodities trading app. I broke the stuff sending trade data to the Risk Management system that does automatic hedge trades. My manager comes down the hall and tells me I've caused $4 million in exposure in the past two hours. At the end, he... |
OSX Package Management | yason: Personally, it seems that we -- as for people appropriately inclined -- have reached the point where you just want _some_ platform to run Debian/Ubuntu: if it's OSX, cool; if it's native Ubuntu, okay then, too, as long as it works well enough with the hardware.I dumped OSX a couple of years ago and a major part ... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | alttab: The problem with creating off topic forums is that it is similar to subreddits. If people come to HN because they followed a political link thats in an "off topic" forum, we've attracted the type of discourse we are trying to avoid.Consider HN an experiment in "socialism," where it can really only work with one... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | kls: Nameless BigCo came in for PCI compliance on Struts 1.something they coded the credit card number as a member variable of a struts action (struts 1 used a singleton pattern) the last submitted person got to pay for all of the simultaneous transactions going on in the system. Fortunately my team caught it in accept... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | joezydeco: I worked on a piece of arcade equipment (manufacturer and model shall remain nameless) that used a bunch of solenoids to control the works under glass.A little race condition in the code allowed one of the smaller solenoids to stay in a duty-cycled state, effectively turning the coil into a small space heate... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | keeptrying: While I was working at Lucent, they had an builtin ftp client which was used to transfer images to the router from a server.Right after I checked in my code (a completely unrelated feature), this ftp facility broke such that you couldnt ftp an image to any router on any platform. So I was assigned this bug ... |
Using Kindle DX to read large pdf text books | berrow: I loaded it in less than a minute through the USB to my Kindle DX. It displays fine. In fact it looks very good!! |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | dkarl: I worked on a program that ran large batch jobs, sometimes taking more than twenty-four hours. This was actually spectacular performance, since we used custom hardware to do most of the computation. I wrote the code that interfaced with the hardware. When the code timed out trying to talk to the hardware, the... |
logging into News.YC on android? | bockris: I have never been able to log into HN from my G1, so I'm interested in the answer. |
logging into News.YC on android? | cperciva: I've managed to do this via Opera. It's not a solution I like -- I much prefer the built-in web browser -- but it seems to work. |
Give back original stock certificate? | teralaser: Well, take a copy of your original, their letter and send it in. There are lots of oddities like this. |
logging into News.YC on android? | mbrubeck: I assume it's because HN sends the Set-Cookie header as part of an HTTP 302 redirect and expects the cookie to appear in the redirected request. Apparently this is against the HTTP spec, and won't work in certain browsers:http://www.persistall.com/archive/2008/01/25/cookies--redire... |
We've launched and I've got $5-10k for marketing, advice? | jmathai: Clickable link for the lazy :)
http://publicitweet.com |
We've launched and I've got $5-10k for marketing, advice? | zaidf: If you haven't, read up on Lean Startup/Eric Reis(http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/) and also Sean Ellis(http://startup-marketing.com/).I particularly like the free survey tool provided by Sean Ellis at http://survey.io. Basically it gives you an idea whether you have a service that you can charge for.Bottom... |
simple computer for less-tech-savvy elders | ApolloRising: I did this recently. What i did was just get them a macbook pro 15 inches (easier to see the larger screen). Increase the default font sizes until they are comfortable. Setup USB based speakers into a hub and plug as much as you can into that one hub so there is only ONE cable connection other than power ... |
What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? | tlrobinson: This isn't a particularly bad one, but it's the first one that popped into my head, and is somewhat unexpected unless you're very familiar with how JavaScript RegExp's "exec" method works: > r = /^x$/g
/^x$/g
> r.exec("x")
x
> r.exec("x")
null
> r.exec("x")
x
> r.exec("x")... |
We've launched and I've got $5-10k for marketing, advice? | crucini: Good marketing has a long ramp-up time. Ideally you would have started your marketing program several months ago.I think the most effective marketing communications is PR. You can find a solo PR agent to handle your account for about $1k/month. This is the low end of the PR profession, and you don't get wor... |
We've launched and I've got $5-10k for marketing, advice? | charliepark: For marketing, I've found HARO (http://www.helpareporter.com/) to be a really useful resource. Essentially, you have reporters who are looking for leads / sources, about a wide range of topics. Obviously, you're going to have a lot of "Jon & Kate + 8" and "fashion week" requests, but you occasionally get t... |
Why do comments play a role in story promotion, but not in karma scores? | baguasquirrel: Probably so that it's harder for link spammers to do their job. |
simple computer for less-tech-savvy elders | ismarc: 1) What the internet is, how to use it, how to protect themselves, how to find what they want.2) Email, crafty/informational websites, getting pictures onto/off of cameras and adding annotations to pictures.3) Screen size, resolution and DPI is absolutely important. Nothing smaller than 17" 4:3. The other imp... |
simple computer for less-tech-savvy elders | cpr: http://pawpawmail.com/about/PPMIntro.html?utm_source=google&... is an interesting idea. |
Is there a way to run/port a Pygame(Python lin) to the web client ? | alnayyir: This is a non-trivial problem. |
Any good JavaScript books? | mechanical_fish: After you figure out that your criteria are too exclusive you should go buy a copy of Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts. ;) |
Any good JavaScript books? | gtani: not too many freely downloadable:http://www.free-emagazine.com/the-javascript-anthology-101-e...http://ajaxian.com/archives/eloquent-javascript--------------------http://fecklessmind.com/2009/02/09/top-5-javascript-books/http://www.reddit.com/comments/6y1km/ask_reddit_good_javascr...usual suspects: Resig. Crockf... |
Who's Hiring... Students? (Again) | yosephgilad: Are you in the Bay Area? What do you hack with?If you're a student and you want to get involved with an awesome venture that will take over the world, e-mail yosephgilad@gmail.com and tell me about yourself. |
Any good JavaScript books? | mahmud: Pro Javascript by John Resig.jQuery, it's better than some mainstream languages; use it and love it. |
do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team? | ashishk: Hmm. It's two weeks before the application deadline. Do you really think an ad hoc team, assembled just weeks before the application deadline, will stand a chance? |
do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team? | frisco: You wouldn't come into the Valley for YC, and you're not technical? Why would a good dev want to sign up for this?Regardless of the I-need-a-technical-lead issue, I think it would be missing a major point of YC to not colocate for the time it meets, given you're accepted. Part of the push of YC is to get you ... |
Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items. | roundsquare: Hey AllSeems like there are a few objections to this. I figured I'd put up a post about them all.1) Just flag them and let them die.That doesn't really solve the problem. There is a subset of people here that want to talk about "off topic" articles (myself included). The idea here is create a community ... |
do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team? | chrischen: No offense, but why do we need you? |
Who's Hiring... Students? (Again) | alexjmann: I'm looking for a technical cofounder for my company, AM Analytics. We're based and incubated out of Berkeley. Please email me if you would like to discuss details:alex@amanalytics.com |
do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team? | nikz: I think you need to be particularly careful when approaching a technical audience (like HN) for something like this.I'm not saying that I feel this attitude in particular from you, but posts of the "I'm the business guy, I need a tech guy" nature often come across as condescending to me, as a technical reader. I ... |
do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team? | adrianwaj: -- I just have to say, many of my comments are getting downmodded, I am answering legitimate concerns to a legitimate posting. If someone has a deeper problem of more than just "I don't think this will work and I don't agree with what you're doing" kindly let me know. |
Any good JavaScript books? | simplegeek: I found these immensely useful a) PPK on JavaScript b)JavaScript the good parts c) JavaScript: the definitive guide. |
An ideea about a link checker | daleharvey: this is on the list of things I have wanted to do at some point.I believe a wget -spider should help you find any 404's, but I wanted to have each link validated as well, and itd be nice to have as a simple web service |
An ideea about a link checker | timanglade: I do get the added-value of having it as a webapp for some but as a developer, I'd rather use Tarantula in my test suite. Hunts down 404s, 500s but can also do HTML validation, check against common attacks (CSRF, XSS, etc.)http://github.com/relevance/tarantula |
do you want to enter YC Winter 2010 as part of my team? | ErrantX: I do not feel overly compelled to enter YCThen I suspect you have failed before you have even begun :) (pg does read the site here btw).Incidentally I suspect I can explain all the downvotes; your language is something in the style of "corporate exec" (maximizing, optimizing, relevant learning). The kind of pe... |
An ideea about a link checker | maxklein: Do your research well. There are quite a number of such apps out there already. |
An ideea about a link checker | Tichy: Something with a spell checker would be nice.Edit: actually, no pun intended, even though there is a spelling error in the title. |
An ideea about a link checker | zen53: Yep I require a tool like this but already use Xenu http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | jackchristopher: It seemed more productive to smash my hands with a hammer than to Twitter. But I like the connections (and conversation) I'm making.When I tried using it for news, I got bogged into the day to day hysteria. |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | ScottWhigham: Fences - it's a Windows desktop tool that I installed about a week ago and it's made my desktop much better. Right now it is free - Nov 1, I think, it goes to pay but I don't know how much.http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | kirubakaran: Every time I learn something about Emacs or incorporate someone's nifty elisp code, it pays off and keeps paying.Latest: ; CSS color values colored by themselves
; http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_html.html
(defvar hexcolour-keywords
'(("#[abcdef[:digit:]]\\{6\\}"
(0 (put-text-property
... |
An ideea about a link checker | edo: Hi everybody. I'm from Linkvive and we've actually been building such a service for the last few months. We're very excited to see interest in it on HN and look forward to sharing our service with you guys soon. Signup at our form (http://linkvive.com) and we'll send you a single e-mail when it's live in the next ... |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | john7: Having someone else do my laundry for about a dollar a pound. No more buying detergent, waiting around, having to find change if you don't have your own washer/dryer, loading/unloading, folding, etc. |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | saurabh: http://stereopsis.com/flux/"it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day." |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | dryicerx: Keeping a notepad by me at all times (I use a pencil sketch pad). Great for jotting down ideas, scratch area, doodle, design, plan. End of day, I quickly write down what I want to get done the next day. Productivity++ |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | yummyfajitas: Eproject (for emacs). Basically, lets me do things like "find file in current project" or "switch to buffer in current project".http://github.com/jrockway/eproject/Projects are found automatically by searching parent directories for _darcs or .hg. (This requires some additional configuration to make it wo... |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | Aiox: http://www.autohotkey.com/
This is a great tool. You can easily configure short cut keys to do every day stuff, which would need several steps. |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | mcantor: PowerPro (http://powerpro.webeddie.com/) and ClipX Clipboard Manager (http://bluemars.org/clipx/), hands down. I've even donated to the fella who developed ClipX. The regex-based automatic navigation feature in ClipX is worth the price of admission. |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | greyman: 1. Evernote, the best notetaking software I know of - it starts to serve me as an universal "external memory". The most undervalued software in 2009.2. Live Mesh - something similar to dropbox, for syncing files between computers, while also provides online backup for up to 5GB of data3. Executor - application... |
Any good JavaScript books? | bluebird: If you want to learn correct JavaScript the only choice is "JavaScript: The Best Parts" by Douglas Crockford on O'Reilly. |
Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | barredo: I'll say 1Password and The Hit List (both OSX software). They are totally worth the money. |
Any good JavaScript books? | bluebird: I am sorry, that was "JavaScript: The Good Parts", http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748 |
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