skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This of course assume that credit history is both good and the only way to do it.

In Denmark it's the other way around. You don't get a credit history you get marked as a bad payer. In other words you are not forced to take on debt to show that you can pay your rent instead you are checked to see if you are a bad payer.

I have lived in the US and had to build a credit history to rent a flat. I never understood why this is good for anyone but the banks.
The only time our lack of credit history has hurt us at 37signals is when we were looking for some sort of credit, like net-30. In that instance, we changed to net-10 and things were fine.

If you don't need credit, you don't need a credit score.
(Strong agreement, like, 'Indeed!', 'Right on!', 'Quite!', 'You said it!', 'Yeah no kidding!', 'For sure!', (or more recently, 'this!' :) ))
A re-direct to www.google.com.tw would have been interesting.
Google Offers “China Service Availability” Page
So, does Chrome have the equivalent of "Adblock Plus", "BetterPrivacy", "NoScript", and "TrackMeNot"?

Because the equivalent of above listed Firefox extensions are the bare minimum I require to even think about switching what web browser I use.

To get me to actually convert, you would have to add: shorter turnaround times on major security vulnerabilities, automatic spell-checker defaulting to on for all text fields, and the equivalent to Firefox's "Tab Mix Plus" and "Mozilla Archive Format" plug-ins.
Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right from the start by restricting it to colleges. I'm sure people wanted to open it up sooner, but the talented young leaders of Facebook knew that the next big thing would be determined by how young people choose to adopt it. Old people would follow like cattle later on, which they did. Facebook even made sure to hire young talent at the start because any bad hire would hurt the company when it was small. If you haven't made something of yourself by 30, don't think you're gonna quit your job as a career software engineer and come up with the next big thing. If you wanna do a start-up, you're only chance is to create a lifestyle business or maybe have a mild exit, which is still pretty good.
For sure a lot are spam apps. If people just submitted 5,000 public domain books and 20,000 feed readers it wouldn't make their app store any better. Throwing around large app numbers is meaningless, people should be talking about the apps that they think are quality and aren't available elsewhere.
Having not followed Friendster and its history, I found this a pretty compelling read.
I recommend removing the Adobe Acrobat plugin from FireFox. Just last night while visiting a trusted site, it tried to launch an exploited Adobe Acrobat file. The file was served from a 3rd party ad site that had been hacked. Dangerous.
Amazon S3’s Business Model is Arbitragable, and the Future of Cloud Storage
The title is a bit of a troll. I guess the idea is that now its too expensive to start a new business in the US because of healthcare.
什么意思=D?
The 37signals posts often seem rushed.
I run a Linux desktop but would like to be able to run Windows apps in a Windows guest. I'm going to try to run this as a Windows guest and see if it works (using VirtualBox).
http://www.xmarks.com/ comes in quite handy for this purpose. No Opera support, though. :/
Ask HN: Can your website be different than your LLC name?
I'm looking into setting up an LLC for my website. How do you go about including your website under an LLC that has a different name? For example, if my website is www.newsite.com and my LLC is CoolCorp? I saw something about using a DBA for this. How does that fit in?
I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. If they don't, they certainly make special allowances to make Flash easier to download and install than other plugins.

I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs, and they choose to distribute codecs or not. So I don't see the difference, really.
Not only is the comment driving traffic to their site tasteless, the site itself is a terrible, cluttered mess.
asshat.
I haven't seen anyone mention, how long it'll take for China to ban Google from Hong Kong. I understand it runs the place already (indirectly maybe), sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.
Why would anyone want to do this?
It occurs to me that the author & I are sort of making the same point: checking a bunch of points gives you a degree of confidence in the general case. I think the only way to settle it is to quantify it.
There may be some connection to HomeStar Runner, which has been a part of "nerd culture" (or some subset) for at least a decade.
Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.
China blocking google.com.tw for everyone not in Taiwan in 3, 2, 1 ...
Increased immigration by entrepreneurs won't remedy a shortage of engineers so much as it'll remedy a shortage of engineering jobs, though. Maybe unrestricted immigration of talented people isn't the best thing (though I would still argue it is) but importing tons of immigrants to found rather than to be employed can't take up any jobs that were there previously.
"Because that's what they tested" is bad/fallacious reasoning.

That is like saying males in NYC have ears because they only saw them, when all humans and most animals have ears too

Is the statement 'NYC males have ears' incorrect? No. Misleading ? Definitely.

This might apply to green consumers, but talking about green consumers is misleading when this applies to anyone that did anything good.
As chops pointed out, that was only true during the Rule of Two. Before that, there was the Sith Empire.
Probably not. China is not North Korea, I would guess nobody really cares what you are searching for.

(Conceptually it’s probably not that much different from children watching M-rated movies. The government in the US doesn’t care, even if they know children are watching that stuff. Police won’t come busting through your door. They are only interested in making it impossible for children to buy that stuff. The problem in China is of course that much more stuff is blocked and not just for children.)
Whatever this leads Google needs to stay in China even if they ban it in Hong Kong.

Supposedly one of the reasons Google's stand has been so "principled" is because of Sergey Brin's early years in the Soviet Union.

That begs the question though, if the Soviet Union had Google and the internet would it have collapsed sooner or would it have taken longer?
I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs

No, Theora is hardcoded in.
I read it as profits = freedom. We're profitable so look what we can do with our freedom:

- trust our employees b/c we're not beholden to people who insist we don't

- speak our minds b/c we're ok with losing customers who disagree with us (since they're the only people we're responsible to)

agree with you re: company runs without debt, tho. that's unrelated to their larger point.
Ask HN: Grails hosting (or is 100mbit enough?)
For django/rails or python/ruby/php based startups there are plenty of cheap hosting solutions.

What about for grails/java?
Are there any just-trying-out-my-startup-idea hosting solutions cheap enough for the just-trying-out part?

I have 100mbit at home and I'd probably be able to scrap together a dedicated server and put in my closet - would you say that would be a better and also cheaper alternative?
Is 100mbit enough?
You can sneak a lot of functional style programming into Java/C++. It's easier with C++ because they have first class functions, but you can do a lot even with Java. I think it's not optimal to do a 100% functional style, even though you can, because all the syntax junk gets in the way, but just by thinking in terms of higher order functions instead of objects it will make a lot of the pain go away.
Despite my prior work affiliation, no evil was intended --- I stand corrected :-)
My rant is really addressed to the linked article, which seems to be an abysmal description of what they're trying to do.

It would have been better to link directly to the source:

http://fluid.media.mit.edu/assets/cornucopia/cornucopia_coel...
Friendster launched circa 2002; I don't have the etymology of "Web 2.0" committed to memory, but it's safe to say the silly naming really kicked in much later.
I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download.

This is most definitely false. Why make a claim like this when you could easily verify it?
We don’t need another carrier-branded appstore for the BlackBerry platform
I have no idea. Microsoft lost this former "solutions provider" (used to get the monthly crate-o-CDs) in the mid-90s with the anti-developer trifecta of:

- Executable registry entries

- Baking-In IE into the O.S. w/o any native ability (pre hypervisors) to concurrently run multiple versions for testing purposes

- Re-Authorization/Re-Licensing for trivial hardware changes (the whole WGA bullshit)
Here's a video which shows the stickers (warning:ads):

http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/994/stand-der-dingen/article/de...
The wealthier off probably are more invested in their national identity.
"When I am feeling good, I train a lot. When I feel bad, I don’t bother. I don’t enjoy working to a timetable. Systematic learning would kill me."

I really like this approach. I find learning how to write software works the same way for me. I tried learning using a schedule, but it never worked for me. It is nice to know there is a chess grandmaster that has the same approach.
Microsoft's oData (Open Data Protocol)
linode or slicehost or rackspacecloud isn't cheap enough?
You can simply make the website a 'product' and if you want trademark the name. If it is for the LLC legally the url and product are property of the LLC. Lots of companies have many products under one company. You can trademark it if you feel it needs extra protection. If it takes off you can make it it's own LLC or corp.
I've seen the same thing. My cousin's friend (Chinese) who is in Canada for school acknowledges the Chinese gov't has problems, but is even more anti-west. And from what I've seen on the internet (www.chinasmack.com) the "netizens" don't see the chinese government favorably either.
A bit sad that he made the usual silly argument that somehow Theora is more susceptible to submarine patents than H.264.

Sure there can be submarine patents in Theora, but they can exists for H.264 too, and then you have to deal with the patent trolls and the MPEG-LA.

Also, leaving your business at the mercy of someone else's future patent licensing whims is not a very good business decision.

And of course, he didn't touch at all on the whole open source issue, which was a big part of the problem with .gif, and which in my opinion are the main reason H.264 is not acceptable: it is not acceptable to basically bar open source from a huge part of the web. (And expecting all open source projects and users to just ignore the insane patent laws is not acceptable either.)

Yes, Flash is even worse, but that is besides the point, flash is not part of the standard web ecosystem and never will be.
If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees.

This is incorrect in multiple ways:

- The MPEG-LA is a licensing body, so it's extremely unlikely to be practicing the patent in question. Therefore it would be hard to sue them directly for infringement. It'd also be very difficult to sue them for inducing infringement due to the following point.

- The H.264 license explicitly disclaims warranty that the license provided by the MPEG-LA covers all essential patents to practice H.264. This is also mention in the public FAQ: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx

Like most people on the internet, I Am Not A Lawyer.
That is awesome. www.google.com.tw would have been better.
Why in the world would this be a concern? Just pulling an example from semi-random searches, "VJM Metal Craftsman LLC" has their web site at http://www.historicbridgerestoration.com/ . I know an LLC where $NAME.com was already taken, so they had to come up with something else.

The LLC owns the domain, but one question is if you push the domain name more or less than the company name. After all, you don't go to Reckitt Benckiser’s web site to find out more about Calgon, Woolite, Clearasil, or Lysol.
Talk on the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants board is that this solution produces unreliable numbers.

Here's the analysis posted from Mike Plummer, another web analyst:

Code does not read utmz cookie from firefox but does from other browsers.
Code writes incorrect referrer cookie as the current page URL.. since the
code cannot see the true referring URL as it’s being instantiated from an
img tag, so the referring URL will always be the current page being viewed.
This means the traffic sources reports are not reliable and definitely means
you should not use your main domain’s cookies i.e. company.com with this
script as you’ll pollute your man GA profile cookie data with incorrect or
partial data.
You will get a reliable count of unique visitors and visits so far as I can
tell. I would not advise using this code to write utm cookies on your live
domain though anyway, just in case it’s corrupting the utma cookie in some
way I can’t detect. GA also throws away visits with invalid utmz cookies, so
firefox visits will be incorrect.
The pageview metrics are going to be off too. Every browser I tested caches
the tracking pixel since there is no cache defeat mechanism.
Of course the other possibility is they are with Google on this and are willing to face it out if needed.
I forgot to mention in my earlier comment about Hacker Dojo: http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/. The people there are really cool, and it's just a couple of blocks away from the YC office.
I've gotten 5-10 pieces of spam through facebook in the last year or two, but it's all been from non-techie friends who had their account phished. So at least I was able to help them clean it up and (hopefully) learn how to avoid it in the future.
I don't actually think it is better, just different and works for me. Some other attempts try to make PHP act like ruby or python with ugly results. What I've tried to do here is embrace PHP 'classic' style.

if (get('hello')){
// do stuff
}
> If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees.

This is not true, check your facts!
From http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx

Q: Are all AVC essential patents included?

A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The
purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the
same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their
convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however.

If someone holds additional patents on H264 and is not part of the licensing pool they can sue individual licensees, they even get a nice list of parties to sue at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx
Nice... How many hours did it take you to make that?
I'm in the same boat. There is programmermeetdesigner.com but it doesn't seem to be used much. I'd love to have a co-designer/entrepreneur type cohort and bang out a couple projects.
Rate my startup: invested.in
www.invested.in - leverage your social capital to raise financial capital. Totally customizable, for any type of project. Please take a look. Bootstrapped by two guys. Launched at DEMO 30 minutes ago. Using our own site to pay our DEMO bill! Thanks!!!
I read this as - "If you want real freedom, you don't just want to run a company, you want to run a PROFITABLE company"

The point being that running Twitter isn't freedom until Twitter doesn't need to constantly ask others to pay the bills.
I'm surprised it took them this long. This is going to be a huge sales boost for social/multiplayer games in particular.
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions
BTW - this is my younger brother's company (Alon) - I'm sure he'll respond to feedback here.
As far as I can tell, getting good 'de-duplication' technology is more expensive right now than just buying disks.

Also, how much would de-duplication help? I mean, how much stuff is stored on s3 that is uncompressed? (or the same compressed file?)

I mean, sure, you could sell compressed/de-duplicated s3 storage, but do you really think you could even get 50%? I mean, I've done the math and I could turn a profit renting uncompressed drive space at $0.05/gigabyte/month, even at my scale. Granted, not a huge profit, but something.

This is the thing, I think; there is much profit to be had buying disks and renting them out right now, if you can charge amazon's prices. Amazon does have a pretty massive economy of scale advantage, but they are not passing those savings down to the end users.

Costs in the outsourced infrastructure market, as far as I can tell, have always been dominated by marketing. The difference with 'cloud infrastructure' seems to be that large corporations are trying to change that, but they aren't passing down much by way of savings to the end users.
Scramjet success at Woomera
Interview: Sergey Brin on Google’s China Gambit
It is lagging a bit behind. Patience...
As far as being "anti-west" goes, can you elaborate on what specific western values/beliefs/policies the younger chinese are against?
China, (net) importer?
If you have no interest in virtualizing Windows then this won't be of much use to you. First class support for Linux is limited to Suse and RedHat Enterprise.

However, if you're a Microsoft shop and want to virtualize Windows (be it for production, testing, or development), it's a huge boon. Hyper-V even supports some awesome features like live migration (moving a VM from one host to another) with mere seconds of downtime. Similar features in VMWare cost thousands of dollars.

At Loopt we're going to be using this extensively for development.
This is potentially surprising given that fructose (used in HFCS) has a lower glycemic index than sucrose (used in table sugar).
Not sure about "easily defensible". If the city doesn't do it legally (as in police can quickly verify who is doing that), then:

1. Person A puts up a lot of posters in an obviously illegal area where other posters are quickly "cancelled".

2. "Completely unrelated" person B waits for the person adding the "cancelled" stickers, notifies the police about suspected behaviour. For more fun mentions "strange equipement" and "patroling the area for a long time". Bonus points for doing that near/on a government building.

Making it risky for other people to put the "cancelled" stickers would force the city to either stop this, or make it legal and well known.

Edit: I assumed it was US - not sure how easy it is to scare police in Belgium with suspected "terrorism".
Perhaps one assumption in this business philosophy is that you have to be really clear to everyone about why they're being given certain liberties and why it's important.

The only way I could see people not 'acting like adults' is if they think that by extension certain other things are allowed, which aren't -- by virtue of not being mutually beneficial. DHH and Jason Fried are pretty forceful personalities. It's hard to imagine them not being clear about why they're managing the way they do.

Would it ever backfire without clear, forceful personalities guiding it?

Refreshing to hear about anyway. Investment in the confidence of employees via trusting them seems like always a good investment.

And ditto what other people have said here about the advice being somewhat basic. But on the other hand, the investment strategies of say Warren Buffett are incredibly basic as well. Basic != overvalue
<i>Firefox has a public API for video codecs</i>

They really don't and they really should. Building a plugin architecture where users could decide based on their local laws which technology to use when some may be patent encumbered would be a big win for open source, standards, and freedom on the Internet.
Very interesting that you mention militaristic. Been observing similar attitudes and frankly it scares me.
I had thought of "geno-" as genetics, but Latin gēns can mean tribe or clan.
leeway -> headway?
I used to be a lot like that, and I worked on changing it. So that's my number 1 piece of advice -- work on changing what you want to change. Work on the big things as well as the little things.

I used to put my head down when passing people, to avoid eye contact. Silly as it sounds, I was able to help with that by humming the Argent song "Hold Your Head Up" in my head when passing people.

Another thing I did was to put myself in situations where I HAD to interact with other people. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't. I found that bars didn't work -- I'd mostly just stand there by myself. Then I'd go home and feel like a failure. (Note that I felt like a failure for NOT putting myself out there and talking to people. To me, that's more regrettable than anything stupid I might have done.)

Joining some clubs where I had an interest helped a lot. At first I just took it in. Then I started offering input during discussions. Eventually, I got to the point where I gave presentations in front of the group, and even larger groups. Now I also run the group (a local LUG). I wrote myself some tips on giving presentations, as well as for others, to share what I learned. My best tip to stop being nervous in this situation is: "Remember that the audience members are just like you, and are interested in what you have to say."

Leverage what you're good at to improve the things that you're not good at. For example, as I said, I was terrible at bars. But I'm good at writing -- and conversation once I know people. So I found that online dating worked really well for me. I got to meet people, but only after I got them interested in me from our written exchanges. At this point, I'd be more comfortable talking to them in person.

Another thing you can do is latch onto a friend that's more outgoing. Make sure it's someone who won't push you out of your comfort zone too far too fast. But have them take you places where you can meet people. They can introduce you and get the conversation started.

Eventually, you'll get to a tipping point where you realize that "failing" isn't so bad, and that "failures" are just learning experiences. Then you'll be able to say "what the heck" and not care so much about what other people think.

Good luck!
Very good advice. Also, if you do use adobe, make sure you are fully updated (9.3.1). The 9.3.0 libtiff exploit is available via metasploit:

http://www.metasploit.com/modules/exploit/windows/fileformat...

Adobe themselves also need to update, since if you go download from their website, they'll give you 9.3.0:

http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/9.x/9.3/enu...
Is there any public Clojure code for this?
Not entirely unrelated, part of Googles reason for leaving is that China has been distorting the market in favor of their Chinese competition - protectionism.

So getting more publicity for these acts provides political cover should the US carry out similar acts - they can claim it's quid pro quo.