skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Mark's comments here are representative of our whole industry's reluctance to recognize our end-users' right to privacy. Once privacy becomes a fundamental assumption, then TLS will be the bare minimum that is implemented. (In fact, most HTTPS stacks leak a lot of information, so additional measures are necessary.) Caching intermediary proxies won't even enter the debate because, while they are a significant optimization, they are completely at odds with this fundamental right.

This is only a debate because, historically, we've completely ignored users' fundamental right to privacy due to performance concerns. Now, the folklore of SSL/TLS performance is largely out of date, but people are still building software using those outdated assumptions. Plus, people (especially at Intel, Sun/Oracle, and Google) are working right now to significantly reduce TLS overhead. IMO, it would be negligent to build a public system to be deployed in the next year that doesn't offer users basic protection from eavesdropping.

Signed HTTP is no alternative to TLS. Most users want repudiation and privacy, not non-repudiation and non-privacy. In other words, they want their actions to be hidden, and they don't want people to have proof of their actions (signed HTTP requests) available after the fact. (TLS provides some level of repudiation because application data is encrypted using symmetric keys, so either side can forge the other side's traffic.)

Mark has a good point that using TLS basically renders (caching) HTTP proxies useless. But, really, HTTP proxies have been holding back the internet for years. It is too easy to make a HTTP proxy that works for HTTP 1.0 and doesn't work for HTTP 1.1, and so that's what everybody has done. That is why we can't deploy HTTP pipelining on the Internet today, even though it was standardized more than a decade ago in the HTTP 1.1 specification. Bad proxies are the reason that every HTTP-based protocol has to be made to work using just GET and POST, instead of (or in addition to) using PUT and DELETE. I'm not going to miss HTTP proxies one bit.
Attention, please, for UK startups
Additional features that would be nice include:
- a playback interface that allows for realtime streaming of the video as it is being ingested
- meta-tag searching
thanks! i was thinking about picking up rework - saw jason fried speak a few months back and it's been on my radar...
will we see a post on why you aren't staying in NYC? too expensive? not enough early stage investors?
Definitely his Incompleteness Theorem (I there are two of them and also a Completeness Theorem) was more general than what I mentioned but the shock was its application to arithmetic. The second order axioms are not recursively enumerable (think computable). It was the goal of Hilbert to find a computable system capable of proving (in theory) all true statements. There is no such computable system.

One can find complete axiomatic systems of the integers. It's quite easy. Just take all true statements as the axiom system. The problem is that there is no computable method for determining in such a system whether or not a given statement is an axiom.

Again, we humans can work in the second order axiom system but computers can't. So it appears there's a difference between human intelligence and computer intelligence.
Marcovici is a conceptual artist and this is satire. Wasn't sure if some comments here thought this was for real.

Take a look at his satirical illustrations about BP here:

http://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/
Ask HN: Could HN make it as a business?
Curious as a thought exercise -- how would/how well could HN be monetized?

I think PG recently mentioned it gets about 60k visitors a day. How well do you think it could be monetized, based on its audience/traffic?
I've noticed that my comments often dip immediately to negative scores before recovering. Lord knows some of my comments are worth downvoting, but it's weird that relevant and sincere comments can get downvoted to -3 or -4 within half an hour of being posted and then get gradually upvoted into double digits.
Personal: Time with family.

Professional: Obsessive software hacking in my teens and 20s combined with PhD in computer science. Basically, doing what I love and putting in my 10000 hours.

Financial: Time and money invested in startups.
For those not familiar with the Penrose argument, here it is, slightly simplified:

- Consciousness is weird and we can't explain it.

- Quantum mechanics is weird and we can't explain it.

- Therefore, consciousness and human intelligence must come from quantum mechanics.

Yeah, yeah, I know, that's obviously not how he frames it, but it's close. I read his book a few years ago, expecting some great insight but seriously, that's all there is to it.

He actually claims that mathematicians have some magical ability to "see" in to a parallell universe of mathematical answers, an ability that computers lack. How can this argument even be taken seriously?
"Most iPhone users love AT&T" ...courtesy 'Reality Distortion Field'?
New York Legislation to ban subletting like on AirBnB and CraigsList
The author tries to explain the benefits of Wall Street, but unfortunately the benefits he describes are individual in nature, "what did I learn". It's all about the skills the author gained will working in that industry, but what good are those skills for? A critic of Wall Street might think that these skills are only "as value extractors rather than value creators". Edit: I'd rather see a more detailed explanation of how Wall Street creates value in a post defending them.
Anybody know if this would this work?
Wait -- wouldn't this help the economy by creating many competing entities in any given space?
One of my previous jobs involved applications used by some banks, and I got to see how archaic some of the hardware still in use was. In one bank - to remain anonymous but is a well known name - they were still using a 25 year old computer system, which was older than I was at the time.
I say this as someone who a) doesn't know anything about the actual interaction between WordPress themes and the "core" WordPress code and b) doesn't fully understand the implications of the GPL in situations like the one I'm about to propose, but...

Instead of developing a clean-room WordPress clone, could someone write a sort of adapter library that abstracts away the pieces of WordPress needed by templates? That way, the templates could make calls to this hypothetical "fakewp" library, which would essentially just pass those calls along to the "real" WordPress code.

I'm assuming templates have code along the lines of:

foreach ($WP->get_recent_posts() as $post) {
display_post($post);
}

that could be adapted to

foreach ($FakePress->get_recent_posts() as $post) {
display_post($post);
}

(please forgive any PHP syntax problems)

Is that not feasible, for some reason? Or would the GPL mandate that this wrapper library also be released under the GPL, along with any themes using the wrapper library?
Chrome might just be the best piece of software that I use daily, and I didn't have to pay a dime for it. Big kudos to Google. Chrome is my second favorite product of theirs after Google Search (hmm, and Gmail might be tied in second place - hard to decide).
Right, maybe I should have said the republic is still working well...
And here was I thinking I was providing value by linking to a very relevant response while also delivering correct credit to the original poster. Oh well I've learnt my lesson.
Could someone clarify the difference between aerofs and rsync?
What can aerofs do that rsync doesn't?
I think if you're saying its a fail, because they couldn't handle traffic based on their press release then this is not a fail. This is actually a great validation for them , that people are interested in their product.

On the other hand if you read about how they are scraping content, and possibly violating copyright of other sites.. then this could be an issue.
Jim Shooter's Secret Origin
Aren't services already covered by most states' sales taxes? I paid sales tax when I got my oil changed recently, and my VPS provider charges sales tax if I'm in the same state.
Google, welcome to working with the government! Federal agencies can start getting absurd with their requests. This is why companies like IBM and Microsoft have relatively large teams dedicated just to governments.
I can't really take the credit for it, but when I was small, my parents started me on piano lessons. My dad always told me "The secret to life is in your music". I now have a skill that no one can take away from me. As I learn new things in music, I learn how much there is to learn. As I practice and play and perform, I learn to hone my art and to perfect it. I get excited when I learn new things (and there are always new things to learn) because it means that I have room to grow. If I look at my studies in music, they have paralleled my life in many respects: the struggles, the happiness, the pain.

I didn't choose to follow music as a career path (although I could have) but instead choose engineering. I don't have as much time to play as I'd like anymore, but I also love to write code. Each new language that you learn is like another piece of music to learn. Practicing and honing your skills in a language is like polishing that piece. You need to do both in order to grow.

So what's my best investment? Learning a new language is great. Deep dives into a language in order to get that extra level of understanding, and believe me it's there, is also great. For me the answer isn't simple, it's how you choose to balance the two that ultimately determines the best payoff.
Leaving a dead-end job and taking one that paid less but had far more opportunities for learning and growth. I'm now paid twice as much as I was then.

RBS shares. Bought when they dropped from £7.00 to £0.10, now back up to £0.43. Profit!
It's really hard to pin down just one thing, but I'll try. :)

The big thing for me, both personally and professionally, has been networking socially. Whether that meant going to Defcon last year to get away from it all (and meeting a ton of awesome people in the process), or utilizing my contacts at work to get where I wanted and needed to be to do my best.

Learning how to effectively do that has been an incredible blessing. It's also given me a ton of friendships I wouldn't have otherwise.
We don't live in a true Democracy. We live in Republic which is significantly different. We elect representatives on our behalf that we entrust to read and digest multi-thousand page bills and vote on our behalf.
Top Reasons To Use WordPress.org For Your Website
I'm not at all sympathetic to wall street. They relied on bad math and bogus assumptions, and ended up ruining a lot of people's lives in the most unprofessional manner imaginable, whilst absconding with a huge amount of tax payers money which future generations will be paying for.
It's very big. That doesn't make it anywhere near infinite.
Having put hard time into the financial sector (where most of these dinosaur descendants find themselves) I can say that nothing will make mainframes cool again. Ever.

The features aren't really anything earth-shattering compared to the z10, and I had my fill of those already. It can just handle more of the same. And let's face it, once you've seen more than 1TB of RAM and more than 48 cores crammed into one box, all bets of being impressed by hardware are off. Oh, nice. Three TB of RAM.

The energy savings, if true, will be nice. But at more than 3kW per legacy z10 unit, that's not saying much. Very few enterprises need the raw power of this platform. The financial industry uses it mostly for its ability to have zero downtime and to take advantage of the sysplex functionality.
My startup. It's hard to find a better investment for either time or money than investing in yourself.
Riak JS Lib, with implementations for Node.js & jQuery
Banking and IT: Computer Says No
Competition is a good thing. Snort has been the only IDS in the market (I'm aware of Bro) and now there is competition in Suricata. The problem I see is that Suricata folks confusing "improvement" and "innovation." IDS, IMHO, still need innovations.
Good point about the evaporating safety. In 2007 I quit my job to do a startup. People told me I was crazy to leave a job for the uncertainty of a startup.

9 months later they shut down the office and fired everyone.
How Digg does continuous deployment
It's a good thing that bank doesn't use any software.
As you most likely realize, f base needs to equal the identity function. After that, it looks like t is your iterator and g is the function you want to fold. It looks like f is an iterator-friendly fold function.
I'd say it's pretty impressive even for a human.

We also have the advantage of having some 'physics simulation' software if you will that lets us do some runs in our head before doing it physically.
I realize this isn't exactly the point of the whole exercise, but a stiff pancake that easily slides onto the pan is kind of cheating. :-)

A deformable pancake would make the experiment batter.
Well WinPhone7 seems to be heavily pushing Silverlight and XNA, which also run on the desktop. So there's some unification there.

As far as MS releasing a full .NET for other OSes? I can't ever see that happening. Why would they want their army of VB/C# "enterprise" developers being able to deploy without spending on Windows licenses?

Their support of Novell/Mono means people can still choose .NET for some projects; probably people that might not have used .NET otherwise. But at least the bulk of business apps developed will still need Windows (and probably SQL Server).
Agreed, especially the point about alternate justifications. Using a non-centered justification would make it easier to see at a glance which fonts are monospace, which would help a lot for, say, exploring programming fonts (my primary use for font viewers).
Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean people respond by "clicking" or by some measure of response via email?
Give HN: Startup Idea 404ed.biz and bubb.ly
A new bubble is forming around institutional investors in web startups. See latest posts of Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, Paul Kedrosky et all other prominent VCs about.

In response a good idea would be to showcase both sides of the table: bubb.ly (availability not checked) a site showing which startups will likely to bubble and most importantly why.

And 404ed.biz (available) alias notfounded.biz a site presenting successful companies and products doing on their own without venture capital investment
What do you mean by "HTML brochures" and what are you comparing them to to get the 2x uplift number from? Curious.
"Stop shitting on Wall Street"

No. Wall Street has not been shat upon enough. Banking and finance have a proper place in a well-run market, and that place is much, much smaller than they currently are, with much less lobbying power. Until the financial sector is drastically reduced in size and power, we need to shit on them much, much more.
Reading "Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill" from Matthieu Ricard.
I don't like this at all but if you want to attempt to take a positive spin on it you could see that this would be a lucrative area for many startups to start offering services for handling these 1099's.
Ask HN: Looking for constructive feedback on my Start-up
Hey everyone,

I posted this quite a while ago, but since have improved a few things.

I'm looking for some feed back on my start-up for algorithmic traders.

The address is: https://algxchange.com
Co-Founder near Hamilton, Ontario
I'm looking for a co-founder in or near Hamilton, Ontario to figure out a neat technical problem that we can solve together, and hopefully make some money. Let me know if you're interested in collaborating sometime. I'm a Ruby, PHP, Perl, C++/C#, ASP.NET programmer with all the softwares and hardwares we'd ever need.
It kind of reminds me of Schneier's explanation of cyberwarfare as if an enemy army invaded and all got in line at the BMV.

Except in this case it's a horrible tyrranical oligarchy that instead of making your life hell gives you a few extra forms to fill out every week.
Spammy looking site, but amazing technology.  Can anyone explain the algorithm?
Microsoft v Apple on Wolfram Alpha
>if I'm in the same state.

And that happens what, 8% of the time? Most online services are evading sales tax.
Wall Streeters are only human. If you want to fix Wall Street you have to design a system that works better, taking human nature into account. One big difference between Wall Street and startups is the heavily regulated nature of the financial industry. The public already has the control, but our government doesn't use it effectively.

I worked on Wall Street for many years before becoming an entrepreneur. My fingerprints were taken several times. No I wasn't being arrested, everybody's are taken--a holdover from the days of physical securities. I took 5 major exams over the years and many minor ones, in order to be permitted to do my job. Oh yes, the content of the exams had little to do the products I worked on, which were all invented only yesterday. Our company had offices set aside for regulators to use whenever they visited. The public never, ever heard or saw the results of those visits. Our P&L had internal and external auditors looking at it all the time. Only the internal guys were good, since it protected managers from rogue traders. Our capital was regulated, which capped our risk only in a very vague way. I could go on.

What did all this regulation accomplish? Nothing in the end. Why? Regulation pits bureaucrats against highly paid professionals. Some bureaucrats are highly motivated and intelligent (I know, I used to work with a few of them when they worked on Wall Street). But their bench is not deep and the stars show up only when there are investigations to lead and headlines to grab.

We need a system that pits the smart against the smart every day. It starts with opening up bank operations to public scrutiny. The balance sheet you and I have is open to creditors to inspect. The reverse positions, held by banks, should be visible to the public. Only then will privately employed bank analysts have a prayer of calling bulls__t in a timely manner. If you think this is some kind of socialist plot, think again. Even Friedman and Hayek knew that markets can't clear without adequate information. Where do you think all this volatility is coming from?

Will we get this kind of transparency from the new financial reform law? Afraid not. All we did was put the A-team of regulators in charge--but they will move on after a while.
Actually, this angst about the app not working might be better directed towards Twitter, who throttles API connections to maintain performance. Flipboard can't help it that the demand of users that want to receive tweets through their app is higher than Twitter allows.

This article should have just said "twitter fails" and it would be more accurate.
Sure, but that's not specific to the service/goods split is it? That's basically Amazon's business model with physical goods as well.
But realistically it's not in the realm of humanly possible things for elected officials to read all those documents so we should be blaming the assistants and clerks for not reading them right ;p
I'd like to provide a counter-example here: Ruby allows this construct, enabling me to write

x = Post.first ? do_foo(x) : do_bar # does the assignment, then evaluates the result

A nice shorthand in my opinion, so the python way isn't a cure-all :)
I agree, the better title seems to be "Stop Shitting on Wall Street Employees".

For the defense of Wall Street, a small start might be the capital marketplace argument:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973663
Google cracks open Android's closed development
If you add URL parameters, you can bypass the uniqueness requirements. Theoretically, you could submit the same URL an infinite number of times, with different combinations of parameters and never trigger the uniqueness check.
This is a classic 'follow your dream' that attracts classic 'man, face the reality' comments. However, there is no need to oppose one and the other.

I work for a company that was founded 6 years ago and grew to 130 people and 55 million pounds (85 million dollars) in yearly revenues by now. The company never took investment, was started without significant savings by one founder and is still expanding rapidly. We build innovative products, regularly receive awards and make acquisitions. Our profit margins are great. We're more successful than most other companies.

Yet, this company wasn't started as a usual startup. The business started by driving traffic to online shops using google ads. Doing this is actually hard work and it's very unsexy, techcrunch won't write about it and your friends won't say wow. But the company grew from one person to a small team, then to a larger team, the rest is history. Now that we're very profitable we can afford to innovate. Many projects that we started flopped but some survived and are either profitable or growing quickly. I have little doubt that the future of this company is very bright.

Starting a startup is like playing a lottery. Not only you have to invest some of your time and money into it, you also have to be lucky. Actually, you have to be very lucky. The line between success and failure when you have no cash reserves is extremely thin. You are free to take the risk but you should accept that most probably you'll fail.

A better way to innovate is to earn some money before you actually innovate. Our company did it by working in affiliate business, your way may be different. Our company didn't innovate when we could not afford to lose. However, once we could afford it, we opened a sizeable division responsible for innovations and it's paying off. As I've said, most projects fail but fortunately we can afford it. We learn and move on.

There's a difference between doing something and achieving a result. If you want to be a part of a startup, start one, it's free and easy, I've done it a couple of times. If you want to build a business and make money, find a way to pay for your mistakes and bad luck when it happens.

Go out and figure out how to make some money, not millions but a little bit in the least risky way. Affiliate traffic like our founder did? Maybe buying and selling stuff on ebay? Maybe something else. Just build an unsexy old-fashioned business that will generate money and then you'll be in a position to innovate, follow your dreams and all that stuff.

This worked for our founder and I'm pretty sure it's a much shorter path to success than learning to code at night or building the next twitter on weekends. If you want the result, ruthlessly minimize the risk even if it means building a less sexy business first. I guess this won't be a very popular advice though.
It's an ok environment. There is a lot of tooling around it which is to its advantage.

Once you start doing something more advanced, though, you start seeing its flaws. I've had pretty miserable time with its query optimizer and sprocs.
How Modern Marketers are Making Friends Before Making Customers
Congresscritters are constantly introducing legislation. Most of it goes nowhere. That is doubly true when it is introduced by someone from the party that is out of power.

Unless you hear about Democrats getting behind repealing this, you can ignore Republican attempts to do so. (This may change after the midterm elections. Though the most probable outcome is to wind up with deadlock because nobody can break a filibuster.)
Reddit has significantly more traffic and is having a tough time with it:

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
Or, use a credit or debit card for purchases that would otherwise aggregate to more than $599.
Realistically most new bill have a ton of shitty things in them that get fixed through other bills later on, it's always been like that and the small business lobby is fairly powerful so 2 years should be enough to kill this clause.