skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A decent place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes

Slightly earlier than WWII, but some precious quotes by Lenin and other early leaders here, it pretty much set the tone for the USSR:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_terror

"We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea [...] For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinoviev and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible." – Announcement of the start of the Red Terror on 1 September 1918, to the Bolshevik newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta

> Wow, way to take my trolling seriously. I didn't ask you to regurgitate your reagan zombie history "facts,"

I might take this a little more seriously than most people since seeing the Killing Fields and Security Center 21 in Cambodia shook me to the core. Collectivism of any stripe - whether under a banner of socialism, communism, nationalism, whatever - produces really fucking evil results. Reagan was a decent American President in some ways, did a poor job in others, but that's besides the point. Playing down or ignoring or marginalizing the utter fucking atrocities that happened under National Socialism, Bolshevism, the Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, etc, etc - nothing else even comes close. Some people like to play a really backwards moral relativism card here - no, nothing else comes close. I've walked through the jails where they tortured people. Tons of real photos, the Khmer Rouge documented the hell out of it. I saw the metal plate that they cracked the the heads of the children of the "bourgeois" into as an inexpensive execution technique. These aren't Reagan zombie facts. This is reality. When people stop being individuals and give themselves over to a collective, all hell and madness breaks loose. If we forget this, we'll suffer for it.
No Business Model, No Problem
Even aside from that very little was reaching Japan, the allies were sinking incredible tonnage of shipping. Japan would have been starving by the end of 1945. By the end of the war the allies were sinking an average of 100+ merchant vessels a month, that rate takes a heavy toll on the ability to transport even the basics needed to keep the population of the home islands alive, let alone to run the machinery of war.
Why Being a Techie is Ruining your Products
There are infinitely many Turing machines.
Hardly as amusing as Guy Kawasaki's Funny Farm (scroll down) - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/08/the_inside_scoo.html#axz...
I always found the bleating moral outrage over the nuclear attack more than a little grating and ignorant. As horrific as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the fates of Tokyo and other cities were little better.

The B-29s dropped white phosphorous, napalm, avgas, etc in specific patterns intended to create a firestorm -- a phenomenon pioneered by the British in places like Hamburg and Dresden. The flames were so intense that subsequent waves of bombers were lifted in flight, and the glow could be seen for hundreds of miles. Over 100k are estimated to have died. A million+ were homeless.

This isn't something that was covered up/deempathized, nor was the atomic bombing. Obliteration of the enemy from the air was heralded during and after the war.
Make an improved version of etherpad! This was a great project/company, that ~ended when Google bought them. Would love to see someone run with this.
I am working on an idea to increase blood donations, as a background project, and I'll be continuing on that whether I receive a free ticket or not. In our local Ruby community, one of our guys asked for blood donations for a family member, and we started discussing possibly doing a group development project to help. I posted some ideas for a social web app that could help back in May:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Houston-RoR/message/2493

The group project never happened, but I think it has some real possibilities. I started to approach the local blood banks and their social media advocates, but then I realized the idea is too hard to visualize for non-developers, and the protocol is just complicated enough that a prototype was needed. I am working on a demo, and I'm learning about the simplest (hah!) Facebook app.

The basic idea is that when A holds secret information about B, and A cannot release it, there should be a protocol for B to use a secure token presentable to A to confirm that claim. Thus, A is maintaining data security by not actively releasing the information, but B cannot lie about the information because the claim is verifiable.

My ulterior motive is by posting in this thread, I might recruit someone else that finds this project interesting, or knows details about protocols as described above.

At BoS, I'm sure I would absorb a lot of new details about marketing social software and what techniques work to help spread apps among friends.

My consulting business is slow and I'm in a pre-startup phase on a bigger project, nailing down the IP, so BoS is way out of my price range. In fact, if I got a free ticket, I'd get there but I'd also be immediately googling for a cheap couch in the area.
I can't help but wonder if this is a VC/Founder dispute. I also can't help but believe that, in some way, the MS deal is a factor in this.
You might find the cost is too low.

The app store will buy more copies of an app at 4.99 than at 1.99 sometimes.

Try a 3.99 price point for a few weeks and see if your sales drop off at all. Make sure you get a weekend in.

I suggest something like AppFigures/AppNanny to track the dailies.
I'm citing the design aims of Tcpcrypt, from their website.

Not everything uses HTTP, a bunch of things like Torrent, IRC etc. use unencrypted protocols by default, and you have to explicitly add support to each one for encryption. Either by adding SSL support to the programs themselves, or by setting up a tunnel.

That's not the same as using opportunistic encryption that can happen at the kernel level. You could also do that with SSL to achieve the same aims, but the point is that it's opportunistic and happens without further userspace configuration.
Shopkick launches "Foursquare for shopping" iPhone app with actual rewards
Is there a startup opportunity here?
There is always some conventional wisdom, even if it is not a directional view on the market as a whole.

Here is some conventional wisdom: "eBook readers will be cheap enough (<$99) that most people (>50%) will own one in less than 36 months."

So the contrarian would buy shares in physical book manufacturers?
Well for one thing the buttons are scalable, unlike images. Also I imagine that the truckload of CSS still comes in way smaller than the required image(s).

If someone's willing to take the time to figure it out, it is not wasted. If indeed it is more efficient to draw buttons this way than to use an image, it makes sense to do this.
This (FTA) would be creepy to see roaming around: http://anybots.com/
There are degrees to which that is expected, and healthy. Covering it all up and trying to ensure no one can connect together your various personas crosses an important line in my opinion.
How many people look at the 'https' part rather than the padlocks or large green bars telling you it's secure? I can count the number of those people on one hand.
Expertise, burnout, and the future of the web [2005]
I would've bothered to read to the end if not because of author's childish words. It gets very annoying very fast.
I need to support my visa =(
Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030
Then what was the VCs plan after turning down Microsoft's offer? Making > $20MM selling $40 software seems pretty unlikely.
I can't find this anywhere, and I looked in the source code as well, what is the license for this?

The Linux kernel module is GPL, however there is no license on the rest of the source code. I have no idea if I can use any part of this and port it over to FreeBSD as a kernel module for example.
Ask HN: What is business process automation?
It seems like visual AppleScript for business / apps that aren't scriptable...but there can't be an entire industry built on that, can there?
Top Agile Books Ranked
Wouldn't that indicate that you have written bad tests to begin with? My personal experience is that if you have followed TDD to the letter then breaking tests are a good thing.

If however your tests are breaking when you change unrelated things then you have brittle tests which are bad.
It's a bit of a misleading headline, as Google is hardly the only "permanent" record out there. Working in government IT though, the idea of document retention periods is quite important. With the cost of storing bits greater than zero, many of them make way as time passes.

The Web itself is quite young. Do we expect all Facebook photos to be retained for thirty years? Do we expect Facebook to exist in thirty years?

I am also surprised no one has proposed a GUID system thus far.
I completely agree that, even more damaging than what we do to our reputation, it's what other people do that can be catastrophic.

The ideal solution (for me) would be a curated response. Unfortunately, that is probably not ideal for who(m?)ever is searching for me.

[Serious question: who or whom? The phrase is the object of a preposition, but the placement is the "subject" of that object.]
Best of luck Matt, I'm sure you'll go on to do more great things
Apple Hires Expert on Mobile Payments
Have a sale on me for good design and geekery.

There are a few RPG based startups here. Consider tapping (pun absolutely intended) their audiences for reviews. RPG sites have ungodly poor monetization, so you should be able to get nice ad deals with them. They get it because gamers are poor, which bodes ill for you, but still...

SEO prints free money, in this and other niches. You should rank for iPad/iPhone dice roll within a week or two of trying for it. Might as well, right?

Get email addresses of prospects if you are staying in this niche! Next time you launch app, hit list with a blast email. App store dynamics are very sensitive to early momentum.

If you want to get better compensated for your time, I suggest making things for people who have money and enjoy spending it. Middle aged women in suburbia, for example.
Even at school in a degree that one would assume most students can write some code I am finding that more and more when I meet students program they have no skills at programming or even want to learn. I think that people who can write production code are a very small population indeed.
Interesting idea, but I wonder how many copies of my data would need to be stored across the system to guarantee that at least one copy is available when I want it?

Many people don't leave their personal computers switched on all the time, especially if they go away for a few days, then there are network outages, people deciding to leave the network, ...
You need to decide what you want to build, or at least what you want to build first.

From CSS, an obvious way to go is Javascript or PHP, or better yet both.

If you think that you don't want to build a specific thing, but instead want a birds-eye armchair view of the essence of what programming is about, don't waste time; try SICP:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

But odds are that you'll quickly find that you don't actually want to be a computer scientist. ;) You want to build something. So find an example of the thing you want to build, learn what it was built with, then learn to program that.

Bonus advice: Whenever you don't know what else to do, learn about Unix, find a new feature of your text editor or version control system, or study regular expressions.
I don't understand. If you substitute "take" with "use", which is basically what he says, what's the problem? Having Oracle DBs run on Linux is good for Linux, surely, no? Having whatever-he-was-talking-about run on Apache is a vote of confidence for Apache, and it's probably getting some corporate patches.

Where's the harm in that?
there is no difference to the browser between a TLS connection bearing a self-signed cert and a TLS connection that was supposed to bear a CA-signed cert but isn't.

As long as my browser can tell the difference between a Citibank with a CA-signed cert and a Citibank without one, why should I care about the exact manner in which the wrong Citibank doesn't have what it should? What makes encryption without authentication so much more dangerous than plaintext?

Edit: You talk about forged certificates a lot. Do you mean that browsers acts as if certificates are for a secret club only, and anyone not a member (CA) but using the technology is infringing? I could believe that, as it jives with how I initially understood the business model. The problem, then, is that non-members like to authenticate too, and it is assumed they will do so via other channels and that their users are technologically sophisticated enough to import the certificates - when the key continuity thing is actually more popular.

Since the browsers check your credentials anyway, I see no point in getting paranoid about seeing an unfamiliar signature. That's only a deception if your guards consider the mere existence of a signature as proof of authorization - that is, if they're human. If they always check, there is no point in bluffing, and so an unrecognized signature should not be considered treachery.
Finally, if you can get by with a single-threaded, refcounted, deterministic program -- go ahead. Have fun. The rest of us, here in the real world, have applications more complicated than a high-school midterm to work on.

At a previous employer I worked on a single-threaded, refcounted program that served a website with over a million dynamic pages/hour and which cleared over $30 million profit each year. OK, we parallelized - we ran our service with prefork, and a standard reverse proxy configuration, and split the load across something like 10 machines. (2 of which were able to take the load by themselves.) Nor is this close to the largest such website that I know of.

Don't knock the "high-school midterm" projects.
How does a professional masters program differ in content from a regular masters?
To all those who read the title and think "OMG Oracle is so evil," by "take it", he means "use it in compliance with its license and build business around supporting it."

I'm not a fan of Oracle but the title given here on HN is kinda deceptive.
Speaking from my own iPhone App Store experience, the US, Australia, Canada and the UK are by far the biggest customers, with the US obviously having by far the largest single installed base, and therefore the largest demand for apps.

If these countries are covered for buying Android apps, and per the article they are, then Android should be doing just fine.

For this reason, I'd disagree with the premise that the Android marketplace problems are caused by not supporting paid apps in countries that are marginal buyers at best. It seems much more likely that Android apps get pirated, simply because it's relatively easy.

I'm interested in writing for Android, but I'm holding off until I see some evidence that the Google DRM actually works and allows application writers to be paid for their work.

edited to give my reasoning on why I respectfully disagree with the article. ;)
With reference counting, those issues are never caught.
www.tryruby.org

Also, google "Learning Python the Hard Way" for an equally-excellent Python intro.
The ad was self-promotional for Entrepreneur Magazine.
Two words: student loans.
Anybots is also well known on HN for being founded by YC partner Trevor Blackwell. They even share YC's building.
Thank you for your points, they are very good. I agree that the lawyer market is hard to penetrate, and that students would be a much better target, so this is what we'll try to do.

As for your second point, due to a security vulnerability with having cached pages on the main domain, we moved them all to another one:

http://cache.historious.net/cached/354992/

I think that is much more readable, and the number doesn't really have to have a fixed number of digits; it can increment infinitely. If we ever need shorter URLs we can base36-encode it and reduce the number of digits right away.

Thanks again for the insight!
Still a great Y Combinator success story...
I'm hoping some day that he goes into more detail about the system he uses to catalog conversations. I'm actually trying to work on a project similar to that.

Wil Shipley talked about it upon meeting him at Ted in this blog entry: http://wilshipley.com/blog/2010/03/ted-2010.html
(towards the bottom of the entry)
I love that... "my instant-on system" Why isn't everything instantly on?
FutureAdvisor (YC S10) Maps Your Investment Portfolio
Presumably you have never had the experience of being a dissident, fleeing an abusive situation, or simply being embarrassed by some of your friends or coworkers.

Or, say, being a grade-school religion teacher who wants to have a sex life. Or being a counselor: Psychological counselors are explicitly forbidden by professional ethics from interacting with their clients outside of work, for very very good reasons; how this will play out in the era of ubiquitous Facebook will be... interesting. I wouldn't be surprised to see counselors adopting pseudonyms, if not actual disguises.

I believe it was Danah Boyd, among others, who pointed out that it's much easier to believe in the one-identity theory of humanity if your identity is that of a white well-off Ivy-educated professionally-successful male American. It's certainly a description that fits Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg to a T.
Yeah, I know hangul is phonetic, but I've also heard they make use of a variant of chinese characters in some limited fashion (mostly give names, place names, and academic histories).
If an analogy is the exact replicate of the subject, what's the use of it to begin with? The lottery card is an exaggeration, to make a point, which is that randomness plays a significant part in a startup's success, enough to make it almost impossible to predict or reproduce reliably.
Tests are of course very important, but when the coder begins to fetishize testing and write tests for the sake of writing tests, rather than to help pursue the project's goal, then it becomes a problem. I've been guilty of this earlier in my career and have seen quite a few other people do it too.
Yeah, I know how fast things can change.

My father got sick and died last fall. For that whole time period, my bank account (which had been monotonically increasing since I got my job) just stayed flat and even decreased a bit. Airline tickets are remarkably expensive when you're flying between coasts every couple of weeks and often don't know the days when you'll need to jet out. Plus I wasn't working for much of that period; I'm lucky that my employer has a generous family leave policy that continues to pay, though at a reduced salary.

The point of this thread, though, is that what could've been a financial disaster was merely a financial inconvenience. I was set back by roughly a quarter financially; big whoop. If I'd been living paycheck-to-paycheck, I'd have to dig myself out of debt for a while afterwards, or worse, wouldn't have been able to go home when my family needed me.

That's the type of security I'm talking about here. For many people in America, a family medical emergency means that they're screwed. Their life completely comes apart, and if they ever manage to dig their way out, it can take decades. That's not the case - or shouldn't be the case - for most people working in technology, where most jobs come with health insurance and salaries are well above the median. You can cover the vast majority of emergencies with a few tens of thousands in the bank, and knowing that you have the security of being able to do so is often worth a lot more than other uses for those few tens of thousands.
The point of an undergraduate education isn't to learn stuff, it's to learn HOW to learn stuff.

In that case, what's the point of a high school education? ;-)
Well, three startups have spun out from employees who left, two acquired and (shameless plug ahead..) one making revenue from day 1 and growing like gangbusters.

http://www.remail.com/ (employee #1)

http://www.appninjas.com/ (employee #3)

http://www.dropcam.com/ (employees #2 and #7)

I dunno if that was the plan though ;)
I think it's true that privacy issues don't have the power in themselves to drive a Facebook exodus, but I believe that a strong competitor will be given an unexpected boost by this controversy. I think this report seems to indicate that possibility.
>... the more I thought about it, the more I was like, 'If I could figure out how to get paid to sharpen pencils, I would be happy.' So I decided to become an artisanal pencil sharpener."

Talk about meeting your goals. Congrats to him for making his life happier, that's one hell of a risky job idea.
Exactly. In fact not only could you say it isn't non-obvious, you might go as far as to say it is obvious.
I looked into FreeS/WAN in the early days (1997?) and they made two architectural mistakes: You had to put some special records in your reverse DNS zone (which most people can't do) and it introduced a 30-second delay the first time you contacted each non-FreeS/WAN IP address (which made Web browsing completely unbearable). These misfeatures protected against MITM attacks, but they also ensured that FreeS/WAN would never be deployed.
It's more the rule than the exception when research is done on ideas that at the time of publication are impractical to manifest as a working machine or program. To pick just one (possibly the most well known) example: Einstein's paper on the special theory of relativity was published in 1905. The most significant outcome of this paper took 40 years to manifest itself. Einstein certainly wasn't waiting for appropriate physical tools.

Lempel and Ziv's critical insight - that modelling and coding of probabilities are distinct and separable - could have been understood decades earlier. It wouldn't have mattered that their research couldn't be immediately turned into a working tool. Information Theory would have benefitted and we would surely be further along today.

But, yes, it is certainly true that advances in technology give us an incentive to ask questions that had previously been ignored or misunderstood.
A bunch of startups that I've encountered operate that way, but there seems to be a strong negative correlation between sleeping at the office and the eventual success of the startup. The ones I know that succeed work hard, often 9-10 hour days, but their employees have weekends and aren't at the office all night long.
Credit Card Debt Relief | Relief
"I've also had systems built for me personally. One of the more important is my archiving and searching system, which includes 25 years of email (and 20 years of keystroke data), as well as searchable scans of all my archived paper documents."

What do you think he means by "20 years of keystroke data"?
chill bro
Some of it's true some of it's not. It doesn't really matter one way or another because this site is useless. Spend more time hacking in a framework that you do enjoy instead of bitching about the ones you don't.
Pick one language to begin with and spend as much time possible trying out beginner material, building small things of your own (no one has to use them), and learning how to find information for yourself online.

I suggest Python, check out these resources:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers