skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it only had a heart: Can robots behave humanely? high-tech warfare
Jet Pack Dreams Take Flight
The Death of Hardware
Lazy Evaluation in Java
I'll preface this with "I used to work for an online poker company and every mofo in the planet used to attack our network"

Firstly consider what type of target are you. Most DDoS attacks are launched for a lot longer the 30 minutes and they are certainly not regular. They are looking to see if they can bring you to your knees so they can blackmail you. Is your site that valuable? If so forget everything and get yourself a cisco firewall and pay someone who knows what they are talking about. Cisco are expensive but if you have a valuable site that 1% of real traffic needs to get through.

Assuming your not in a position to be blackmailed: As other ycombo's have mentioned logging and blocking are your friends but be careful. You say it's mysql taking the time despite caching. Looks to me like you've found a bug in your code (or at least your caching). Log what these IP blocks are requesting. If it looks algorithmic then the chances are you've got a crawler ignoring your robots.txt. Contact Purdue. Call them up (they will ignore your email) and ask them what's going on.

You could chose to block these ip ranges but if you make your site weather this storm it will be stronger in the future.

Good luck
> I'm not about to give them up

Why not? Would it be detrimental to you to tell us?
Five time-wasters for the college entrepreneur
Looks like a lot of fun - a pity it only has a flight time of ~75 seconds at the moment (it does say they'll get it up to 35 minutes ... we'll see how that pans out).
How you know that there are tricks to getting written up that actually work is, I won't publish them. ;)

A beer and a solemn promise would do the trick, if you're in Chicago.
I am a sys admin at an online bank.
A slicker Numbrosia Puzzle (or my attempt at eye candy without design/artistic talent)
programmer in a gaming company
The Biggest, Baddest Security Events Ever
The top eight events that changed the course of computer security history (and two that didn't).
The Algorithms of Love
I can't get off level 1 - do I have to have cookies enabled or something?
They being Linus,et al, and the flaw being the one referenced here: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/17/201253.
A long time ago I decided, that if I were to ever have a captcha system, it wouldn't use ones of that style, which are getting so.. randomized these days, it's hard for a human to read.

Frankly, I think knowledge or logic based captchas are the way to go.

"Todd is three times as old as Jane is. When Jane was ten years younger, Todd was five times as old as Jane is. How old is Todd?" for example.

Sure, takes longer to think about, but if someone can write a script to start parsing logic puzzles like that, quickly, and use it to defeat website signup authentication methods?

I'll buy that person a pint.
People write open-source software for recognition from their peers. Our peers (other professional programmers) have no use for end-user programming software, because they aren't end-users and can use more powerful tools.

Basically, the folks who could write HyperCard aren't the folks who use HyperCard, and when there's no money involved, people will write software that they themselves want to use.
I'm on my own startup now, but previously was at a small financial software startup.
How long until one of these companies makes its database available anonymously and offers a Netflix-style prize for a better matching algorithm?
I'm a full-time student at the University of Maine, working on my world shattering thesis. I also work for the Department of Sustainable Agriculture and a software development house run by my academic adviser.
Is it continuations you don't understand or their use in web apps? If the latter then you can see them in use on this site when you click "reply". You get a URL ending /x?fnid=bU389jXsk2. That's a FuNction ID that allows the continuation to be eXecuted and run a bit further.

The site used to use them far more but because only the last N continuations were kept, at times of high load users would find the links on the page they were viewing broke on trying to use them; the fnid they referred to had disappeared because N more had been created since. One solution is to increase N. However, any trivial means of generating another M fnids means it's easy for a single attacker to cause N more to be generated.

As troels says, RESTful is the way to go. Continuation in my view are flawed for web apps. AIUI pg got away with it for Yahoo Store because they were only used in the shop design side of things where each shop owner could be given his own N storage of fnids, isolated from others.

It's been discussed before on here, in particular a post by me around end of April/start of May 2007 that caused pg to email me privately about thinking up new "ddos attacks". A while after that, most of the usage of fnids were replaced by conventional-style URLs so also some remain, M is smaller than it used to be.
I work at DentcraftTools.com as all around web guy.
How to implement a reflexive OO model in 140 lines of C (pdf)
Last year I did a lot of work under contract to build a machine learning based data web site where users would vote on people and the ML part would build up a model of what they were looking for. Unfortunatly, the site has not yet released because of trouble finding a good Javascript person to work on bits of the UI.
My favorite programming assignment in school was a Scheme implementation of the "stable marriage algorithm".

"Let's assume, for the sake of an argument, that you are a village matchmaker given the task of marrying
100 men and 100 women. Each of the men has ranked the women from 1 to 100 in the order of his preference;
each woman, not to be outdone, has similarly ranked the 100 men...Rather than insist that everyone get their first choice, you are instead charged with creating 100 stable
marriages. A set of marriages is said to be stable if there exists no man m and woman w such that m likes
w better than his wife, and w likes m better than her husband. The notion is called "stability" as m's and
w's marriages are unstable, since (albeit sordid and tawdry) m and w could optimize their sorry lot in life
by leaving their mates and running off together."

Non-PDF link:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:abZ7sCKHUmYJ:www.cs.bra...

Not the same as algorithms discussed in the article but fun and interesting.
Smart Guerrilla Advertising
Developer for FedEx Services
Yes, you need to enable cookies.
I work for a small medicial anaylsis and storage company, primary making sure that the client's data is government compliant.
If myspace used that system, they'd have about 99 million less users.
You better have a really good porn site if you expect me to jump through that kind of holes to use it.

Oh and Todd is 60.
HBS Working Paper: Peer Effects and Entrepreneurship
Freelance web developer, designer, programmer, all around technical handyperson.

Hoping to become a startup :]
e-harmony is very similar to my start up. We operate in Mexico somoscompatibles.com (we are compatible). Our approach is to find personalities and rate how similar they are. I tried eharmony for several months and I don't think they really have a great algorithm, they just make it easier for you to know some people that are somewhat similar to you.
No offense, but I'm 99% convinced you've never had a girlfriend.

Here is a blog that has links to lots of quantitative evidence.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/

For more anecdotal evidence, ask your female friends why they support Hillary for president. When they give the rational (but mistaken) response "she is against the war," point out her actual position. Ask if this changes their view. If you believe people are rational, you might be surprised at the results.

edit: I don't mean to single out women as irrational. Men are too, though in different ways (a comparable example: lots of anti-war men like McCain). But since we are discussing gender differences, the Hillary example popped into my head.
18 84 58 A6 D1 50 34 DF E3 86 F2 3B 61 D4 37 74 - iPhone Key
Can you get cp to give a progress bar like wget?
JRuby-on-Rails deployed on GlassFish - Success Story
Ask YC: So you've had that great idea..
You were in the bathtub/shower/sahara/bordello and you suddenly had that Eureka! moment. You have had an idea that you're sure will make you rich/replace {system x}/get all the hot girls.

But.. then what next? Where do you go from there?

I've no shortage of Eureka!'s, but seem a little lost on how to proceed from there on.. so advice would be nice!
I looked for the down arrow, but it wasn't there...

Okay, I should be more concrete: with respect, the article is uninsightful, and hence, 100% self referential.
I was just assuming the zyroth's example was in Java, since that is what the article's author favored. Not sure where you guys got the idea that it was C.

But, just to cover all bases, it wouldn't work as Java either. This would though.

int[] x = {1, 2, 3};
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { x[i] *= 2; }

Yet another reason to use:

(mapcar #'(lambda (x) (* x 2)) '(1 2 3))

... you don't have to think about whether array indexes start at zero or one.
I'd take you on that bet. Write the system and I'll write the solver. I drink Guinness :)

A better system would be to ask the user to identify the gender of a person based on an image to tell whether the picture is of a dog or of a cat and so on, these tasks are trivial for a person and very very hard for a program.
Consider an image-based, interactive captcha using drag and drop.

Show a map with a bee on it. Please guide this bee to the flower, passing the pond, the bear, and the scarecrow. Now bring the bear to the beehive; you would generate a hash string based on the sequence of visits. This may involve multiple back-and-forths, which is probably bad, but fairly brainless and robust, from what it seems, as little thought as I have given it.
R&D unit of a actuarial consulting firm. Problem-solving and hacking in areas where pensions, investment, finance and technology meet.
Floats may be a pain the ass sometimes but percent and em widths make my tummy hurt. Not to mention all the display: table stuff in there and so many browser specific hacks.

and LOL "float:left;" in the CSS code, sure its not on layout but it could have been left out on principal

very cool to make a layout that looks good without floats, far more effort that I would have put in
I work for Brady Corp in the world of RFID & coach basketball at Cardinal Strich University, Milwaukee, WI
Wow. It's 1965 all over again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Rocket_Belt
Was the target image in his contest password protected?
Dead U.S. spy satellite unlikely to pose danger to us as 70% of earth is covered in water
Developer incentives in social networking platforms
WiFi in Massachusetts Trains
From this xkcd blog post, I learned that Obama supports open standards and Clinton doesn't.

While I agree that sites like this should be careful about politics, ignore them at your own peril. Candidates like Obama never win elections because the young people who support them are not organized and don't vote.
The social technologist
Surprised that there was no remark on how loud it is to have a hydrogen peroxide burning rocket that close by. I was under the flight path of the Rocketman at last year's Tournament of Roses Parade. It was very cool but also the loudest noise I've ever been exposed to.

http://www.rocketman.org/events/RoseParade/
M1 likes W1 who likes M2 who likes W2 who likes M1. Can the four of them elope as a group?

(btw, it is a dull society without WSW)
was I the only one severely disappointed that this wasn't actually about aliens?
The participation threshold is too high. I was just talking to a former heavy del.icio.us user who only uses their front page now. Users always seem to prefer lower-friction services even if they're not as rich in content.
Webmynd, new YC startup, offers stark, daring 503 error
Via http://paulgraham.com
The paper is very interesting and I'm interested in where Ian is headed with this.
I just have a "to read" page in my personal wiki where I can copy and paste a link in about 5 seconds, and I don't need to type a title. I have fulltext search which makes up for the loss of tagging. And plus I don't need to type a title.
I was looking at apache-top referrers the whole time - nothing crazy there.
Top 10 reasons to be at Blitzweekend
Trulia. Someone else's startup. It's amazing, and I highly recommend it.
Harvard Business School
I'd agree with that, a terrible article. My favourite time-saving tip - doing a bit of work on your laptop whilst driving..
Natural Gas software company
Can we get in touch?
I'm working for a startup wireless carrier in Oklahoma. We're working to bring wireless phone service and wireless broadband to rural areas in connection with another major carrier.
eHarmony isn't successful because of the matching algorithm. eHarmony is successful because of the steep barriers to entry, perception of safety and privacy, its ability to attract women to the site, the rate at which they regulate match delivery, and the guided communication process.

The result is that you don't waste much time browsing profiles. You don't waste time trying to filter out spammers. You don't waste time coming up with clever pick-up lines. You don't get pestered by matches you close.

The matching algorithm definitely matters, but it's mostly a red herring. If I were eHarmony, I'd be far more worried about my terrible user interface than the matching algorithm.
Here is one detail about me, for the fun of bursting irrelevant personal assumptions:

I, and a majority of my friends, are in favor of the war.

Regarding Overcoming Bias, I take it you are referring to the studies about people being very silly, which they have. But those are not relevant to our debate. The issue is not whether people have silly or irrational personalities, but why. And in particular, whether it is best explained as due to ideas, or not.

Edit: To reasonably be so certain I haven't had a girlfriend, you must think I am quite young. What about my writing style makes you think I am young?
That's great, but Obama won't win in a national election, nor even the democratic nomination. : http://davidadewumi.com/2008/01/24/why-obama-wont-win-in-a-n...

I don't support any candidates right now, but I think people should also take a look at how Bill Clinton polarizing white and black voters, is working to HRC's advantage:
http://bernardmoon.blogspot.com/2008/01/breakfast-with-dick-...
I am doing business on my own, but am also employed by avionics company Rockwell Collins.
sounds to me like his original comment meant jobs where software development is not the money maker (for example a bank or whatever). A software consulting firm is still making money with software, that is, the developers are it's main asset.
The Hyping Point
I recommend eggmarketingpr.com.
You can get a couple press releases for under $1000, which will definitely jumpstart your SEO, traffic, and overall buzz. But as tptacek noted, it is not magic.

$1000 is not a lot to work with in the pr world, and might be better spent with a PR consultant who can show/help you how to work the machine yourself. I have a contact if you are interested.
There are already untethered jetpacks out there!
http://www.jetpackinternational.com/video.html
There are more videos on YouTube somewhere. Try searching "jet pack rose parade" or "jet pack wired nextfest"
I work at Yahoo! in Orlando, FL
There was one in gentoo a while back with a -g option... It got removed from cp source since someone didn't like it.

Man I'm a nerd.
I usually just background the cp and ls -l the source and destination files. Not as pretty, but it works just as well.
I am not a US citizen, but I found this article interesting because it reaches a wider subject, that of corruption and how to fight it, which is a serious and international phenomenon.
I wish this comment would automatically get posted into every political submission here and into programming.reddit. It would make the (online) world a much better place.
I usually forget about it. If it's a good enough idea, my subconscious will remind me of it later, with a few of the kinks worked out. I've had enough ideas that made me jack squat because I didn't have the time/conviction/confidence to work on them.

If you have lots of ideas but none of them are nagging you, you probably don't care about it enough to do a real startup. But that doesn't mean you can't use one of the other Eureka's as practice, and who knows? If you want more successes, fail more often. Make a cheap, bare bones v0.1 and find out what other people think. Now get to work!
It's great to see Google coming in and validating the market that we're in. The company's doing well financially, and continue to grow callers. It's an exciting place to work, and I'm glad to be here.

When Goog-411 first came out, I was impressed: They do Call-Completion (auto-dialing the number you called), which we don't, and I'll admit it's a nice feature.. It's just expensive to do. (They eat those minutes)

On the other hand, we have live operators, and were Google prefers automation, so there are always tradeoffs. .Our Automation is pretty great, but we know that some people won't get recognized, so we give a Liveop backup, and Google doesn't.

I'm afraid I can't really go into details more than that without breaking agreements.
Instapaper - like Delicious, but with Tumblr simplicity
My introduction to AI class required us to write a classifier for people in the news (20 different images of 10 different people). We were given the location of the people's faces, but we were able to get 60% accuracy using SVMs and the 32x32 block of pixels (nose, eyes, mouth region). This was the "baseline" system. Some systems were getting nearly 85+%. I must admit though, that this was a restricted dataset, but the faces were not all looking straight ahead the way eigenfaces are, and I'm sure with enough data, and enough features that sort of CAPTCHA could be defeated a large percentage of the time.
does eHarmony still refuse to match a huge chunk of people? i've heard about 20% or so are unmatched or something like that. which interestingly almost coincides with the commonness of a certain range of personality types in the Jungian theories

speaking of which, i'm surprised Jungian theories aren't more popular. there are specific type pairings which go very well together -- like the people you meet that you just "click" with. well, that clicking can be seen clearly in the theories by the way the types are described
The problem is that problems that are easy to generate with a computer are usually easy to solve with one. Even if you rotated through 100 different variations, solving 10 of those would give the spammer a 10% success rate. If it is just for one small site, no one is going to break it, but there are easier ways to prevent spam on small sites (comment spam bots don't understand JavaScript for instance - something that I take advantage of on my blog).

A system like that might be good for keeping commenter quality high though :).
what kind of background do you have? I'm an EE doing chip design but am looking to get into something more business-oriented.
The problem with all these web analytics is that they usually fail to take into account API usage-- I wonder what percentage of the del.icio.us userbase uses the FF extension or other widgets to use the service?
You are confusing two different tasks, identifying a person out of a small comparison group is relatively easy - just deconstruct the face & compare certain facial features. There was a ton of research on the subject and even some working commercial products (my schools AI lab uses one we built as a lock).

Identifying gender is significantly harder.

You want something a lot harder, have them click on the picture of the more attractive person, use data from a hotornot type site (just make sure the data isn't public). Good luck solving that with Support Vector Machines. If you want to generate more data just use build RE-CAPTCHA type system.
And highly inaccessible.
No. Not being able to find stuff you previously saved quickly is what killed it (at least del.icio.us). Tags, at least for me, simply aren't good enough.
I'm a full-time student, a free-lance web developer and designer and marketing consultant, working on my own startup (ratemystudentrental.com), lead guitar for Flint-based rock band, Moment of Inertia, and work at a tier one automotive supplier as an engineering co-op.
Freelance web developer.

Previous jobs: research physicist, biophysics postdoc, semiconductor product engineer, and... web developer.
"Hanging out with friends."

I tend to value the time I hang out with my friends. I certainly dont think its a time waster.
Wow, I had no idea that YC's Morris was the inventor of the first internet worm.
Is Google Censoring The Word "Evil"?
A search for "Google is evil" on Google finds an estimated 2,300 results. However, the same search on AltaVista finds 158,000 results. The same search on Ask.Com finds 7,300 results. However, if Google supposedly covers a larger proportion of the web then Google should find the most results. Could the difference be explained by differences in spidering or estimating the size of the results? Or is Google using the code which is used to censor Chinese queries?
45 Most Influential Figures in Technology Over the Last 150 Years
Boy meets Girl.

Boy tells Girl "My love for you defies all algorithms".

Boy and Girl live happily ever after.
It seems that the more accepted personality classification is the big five. We have thought about denying access to those that score high on neurotisism. Maybe cut off the top ten percent thus protecting our members.
i could write a script to solve your system 50% of the time, which is probably good enough for spammers
Regarding paying money for SEO...(you should pay me 50$ to save you thousands)
SEO is extremely easy to do and you are obviously technical enough to do it. It is just boring, it involves making sure everything is setup. Don't pay a cent for SEO.

I worked for a company that has massive sites, and they employed a few SEO folks. They did absolutely nothing except for check pages (probably with a script...I hope with a script or that is a boring job) for flaws and then they would just request those get fixed. Hell, those scripts probably exist or I should write one.

One fundamental thing for SEO is go after a keyword. I assume this is for the HIV gene testing stuff, so really go after something like 'genetic testing', or 'CCR5 test' (or both). Since you are already #2 on google for hiv gene test, you are doing something right.

Don't fall for stuff like 'you should have hyphens not underscores in your url' or similar bogus claims. You really think that someone like Google doesn't treat these the same? I would.

As always, email if it goes out of the scope of this conversation.
Good analysis.

I perceive that the biggest barrier to entry is the amount of money that you have to spend in marketing. We have been able to match most of their functionality but we don't have nor want to spent that much money in marketing. We haven't been able to come up with alternative approaches.
An article on CSS layout with overflowing text and a search box several ems too long?

(firefox 2.0.0.6 / linux)
How will press releases 'jumpstart your SEO'?

Exhibit A for SEO FUD.
Zen is boring
US recession will dwarf dotcom crash
I don't see why it'd be harder with good features, and after looking at the article again, 35% accuracy was considered a success. Obviously, I'm not as qualified as you in this sense, but it seems logical based on results I've seen (again, admittedly not the same quality as you've probably seen).
A=B, the book
Oh no he dih-ent. Bustin on my man Randall...

And Jim Davis gets a pass??!

Where is the love?
Global Unemployment to Grow this Year
$100 Billion and Counting: How Wall Street Blew Itself up
Ironically, I just added this to my del.icio.us account.