skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"To iterate is human, recurse devine" -Anon
Everything crypto on Debian was tainted. OpenVPN also depends on OpenSSL.
Ask HN: How does XMarks make money?
They are offering a good application for free, and are continuously updating their product. How do they make a profit? Also, were they ever a start-up? Did they ever take on investors?
Party Rounds: How To Get a Crazy Valuation For Your Seed Startup
The name is only an ingredient of your success. If you are relying on the name to make your service successful you have a recipe for failure. If everything is perfect (interface, design, backup/recovery,scalability) and the name is the cherry on top go for it. If you have any doubts and will need those resources to fix issues or get you past "the hump" wait and launch with a different domain. As you said you can buy it later at a higher price but at least you will have cash flow.
Hey, I want to be a JS intern! Where do I apply?
"It forces an early decision about what’s important in life. No matter how it appears while looking down from 25 years up the corporate ladder, we are decidedly chasing our own ideals, even when things seem hopeless."

Here's my generalization:

From everything I see Generation-Y has been protected from having to make any such decisions. It's been the only generation where it's been OK to live at home with your parents until 30. So how are you making any tough decisions doing that?

When we graduated in the 90's droves of workers were being let go during the recession, only back then we were expected to deal with it an survive without. And we didn't live at home.

When we looked for work, we'd spend everyday going door to door with resumes, or phoning every business in our phone books, but generation-Y signs-up to a bunch of job feeds and rarely do they bother spending an entire day trying.

It maybe that I am in the wrong circles, but every generation-Y I've met, can stay home and video-game in the event things go wrong.

That said, I learned a valuable lesson about 10 years back, and that is no matter how much one likes to think they're not self-centered they are - it's human nature. No matter the generation. And the statements made through-out this article, my own posting, and others, have re-enforced this for me.
The whole stealth thing (and "port knocking" along with it) is wildly overrated. If your security depends on people not knowing you're running SSH or OpenVPN, you have bigger problems.

If you want to get all cutesy, go hack SSH to add an extra round or two to OpenSSL's AES. That'll learn 'em.
we are doing that in our production environment. We use different boxes (1 on US and 2 on EU), they are connected with openvpn to serv our different needs.

Our personal development boxes are also connected to each others using OPENVPN and firewalled. All the internal code made for our app is using the VPN ips, and every application is listening on these IP only (not localhost nor 0.0.0.0)

(applications are mysql/couchdb/git/apache)

That's pretty great !
It sounds like it would be confusing... but they let you switch it off, so all the best to them.
How to fill a job nobody wants
Tips on finding a good person to take on your company's drudge work.
From a couple of web searches it sounds like they're on MySQL. Targeting a database that has working transactions has to be less work than implementing transactions yourself from scratch, which it seems everyone stuck on MySQL eventually has to do (that's what they're describing, and I know we've done similar things).
It's directly correlated to your bottom-line net income and return on invested capital. If you can scrape by on nothing and invest everything possible back into the business (assuming you have a high ROIC).

It also assumes you have enough profit to pay yourself. Thus, the 33k is prob best if you're not living on ramen and tuna (go grab a beer as one commenter suggested). Because, if you're investing back into the biz then your future salary is exponentially higher.

For example, my interactive marketing company is experiencing triple digits ROIC so we have yet to take a dollar out of the company and continue to invest not only profits buy our own outside cash (and it's been well over a year) but we're getting to the point where we need to pay some bills and feed ourselves. Thus, we're going to keep our salaries as low as possible to cover our personal expenses like rent and food. We're doing this because we know a year from now we're going to much, much more profit to work with. So you want a hard number? Less than $30k per year. Pow.
Indeed. It was, however, written in a very different period of software development and one could argue that it may be less applicable to the the "bolt things together", MVP consumer product/site sort of project that is the greatest?/primary?? focus of HN/YC/today's angels funding.

(To emphasize how different, we can be pretty sure that very few if any of the programmers studied had a memory budget even close to what's been in mainstream CPU caches for some years.)

For another example, see MIT's termination of SICP/6.001/Scheme with extreme prejudice and replacing it with Python based "bolt together" course(s) (I don't know anything about 6.02, but the initial 6.01 robot project is just that ... which is not to say that it's easy, e.g. it requires the use of differential equations and its labs are very instructor intensive, to the point the department is recruiting upper-classmen to help).

MIT believes that things have fundamentally changed....
VCs/Angels don't invest in LLCs mostly because of UBTI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrelated_Business_Income_Tax
I love HN, but sometimes I wish it wasn't so obsessively focused on tech and start-ups. We're missing out on so many great people! It's awesome that we have knowledgeable comments on web page design and computer security, but where are all the hacker biologists, psychiatrists and gardeners? Presumably, they're turned off by the NoSQL debates and the Techcrunch drama.

This site is purportedly about "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."[1] Hopefully, we'll move closer to that ideal.

Otherwise, we might have to fork HN.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When it will be Eid al Fitr 2010
Lessons learned from making Blood Frontier game
I too was intrigued by them and thought to myself just a week ago: "Those popup-at-the-bottom-of-the-page things are brilliant. I should email the Bingo guy and get him to A/B test them."
I'm curious; what do you call people who are willing to pay for lists of potential domain names they could buy, if they're not "domainers"?
Many of my habits are trending towards what's in the article as well. Specifically:

1. My todo list fits between chunks of my life, not the other way around - I keep a running diary of things I want and need to do. There isn't really a timeline because I just do them when I can. If it's written down, it'll get done. TBH my productivity has skyrocketed since adopting this. It's a bit like structured procrastination: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

2. Keeping to a regular rhythm - I find that as I've grown older, a regular light/dark schedule helps me to be refreshed and more productive the next day.

3. Keeping fit - I've cycled through many of the diet and exercise plans out there but my fitness plan has basically boiled down to "Work out every day. Eat 3 smallish meals and 2 snacks. Don't eat bad food except maybe once or twice on the weekends."
To me, "Microsoft-centric" means that I get to use C#, Visual Studio, nUnit and ReSharper to write code that runs on these tiny little hardware devices. Sign me the hell up.
Interesting, but it doesn't work on Personalized Google (google IG), so I probably won't be using it.
I don't care about Java language features at this point. The sooner invokedynamic can make it into a supported jvm, the better. Go for plan B.
Leftover baked chicken with Parmesan, baked potato, and blueberry muffins. Jasmine green tea.
I think that I'm going to puke. The sieve was the worst.
If you have a wife and kids... enough to cover expenses + some breathing room.
I'm confused. In spite of being a right to work state, Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas [1] all have teachers unions.

http://www.myaea.org/

http://www.arizonaea.org/

http://www.aeaonline.org/

Why would you believe that right to work states would not have teachers unions? It's true that a right to work state will probably not have unions the workers don't want, but that isn't the same thing.

[1] I'm not cherry picking, just working down this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_w...
There is a huge variation in the price of pot, depending on the type of pot (again, a large variation), where you are, what time of year it is, and who you are buying it from.

What the $10 is referring to are the bags you can buy on street corners in some cities. It is the same with crack and heroin, a standard and simple price, with standard terminology (a bag, a dime, etc.) all to make the street-based transaction easier and less conspicuous.

It has no bearing on the real value of pot, which can vary from a few dollars a gram through to $50+ a gram. What changes is the type and amount of pot you get in a $10 bag.
I'd grant that, while not always $10, the price of a gram (usually the smallest unit sold, other than guys selling individual joints here and there) - the reason you don't see a lot of price fluctuation is becuase this is a bottom-end price. The markup is already huge - there is lots of market fluctuation for the people buying from growers and buying quarter-pounds and whatnot, depending on quality, quantity, market, etc..... but at some point, it's weed man. It's not worth someone's time to do a transaction for less than $10 (or similar) - even if they're buying at a much lower price.
It seems a good idea... who cares who you define it in the end. Anyone who likes "release early, release often" will probably agree too.

Personally as a Ruby user I am looking forward to all the dynamic goodness that JDK 7 is supposed to bring (I am not a Java developer so that's my main concern).

But the best feeling I am having is that it feels like Java has against some stewardship: though not everyone will agree with their choices, I think it will do the platform a lot of good.
Did Google Instant just kill SEO?
Overview of parallel programming languages (interview with John Shalf)
IIRC the funding of Internet research in DARPA is in 60s.

Thanks to boomers in USA. They enable all my fellow people in East Asia lives a better live than my grandparents due to free trade.

Thanks to boomers in USA, now Rock, Punk, Alternatives, Hiphop music styles influence the music styles around the world. I hope you have patience to sit through traditional Japanese style music performance.

Thanks to boomers in USA, now we can have all cool movies from 70s and 80s to watch. All the exploitation movies in 70s are awesome.

Thanks to boomers in USA, now a homosexual/bisexual person can live life with less stigma, I think that's pretty fair to 10% of the population.

Thanks to boomers in USA, they dream about cheap personal computer that we can type rubbish into. Now we can generate so many bits that we never thought that we can capture them before.
Thanks for the feedback. I've struggled over a number of iterations to come up with a concise description for the homepage. So far, I've either come up short (as it is now), or needed way too much text to get the message across.

I've been taking the approach of trying to get new visitors to try the service, without requiring an in depth explanation first. The demo page, http://www.getaquirk.com/demo , which I should probably give a prominent link from the home page, is my attempt at that.

I'm starting to wonder whether it can be explained clearly with a good graphic. I'll be exploring wording options and potential visuals today to try to deliver the message more effectively.

I'm concerned that the FAQ page isn't effective at getting the message across. I would have thought that, in the least, the first question http://www.getaquirk.com/faq#what-is-quirk would explain what the app actually does. Is the FAQ page just the wrong place to be delivering that message? (I've been debating that over the last few days).

Thanks!
Pot of coffee and a cigarette.
Other submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 <- This has lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First
The other angle is: most of the time I use the omnibox etc to search, so I don't interact with Instant at all, but having it there on google.com for the few times I am searching for something more complex (misremembered song lyrics are a favourite of mine) is also useful.
I think what ruby above is saying is that with enough websites, urls and content, an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword.

Google auto-completes brands and keywords that only have 2 or 3 website references (I know of a site in stealth and I just tried it, and it worked. Google has indexed their homepage and title, and as I typed it in it auto-completed their name, with only a single website to reference).
Ask HN: B2B Pricing
Hello, after reading through HN and viewing a recently submitted post regarding pricing for a user-focused, I had a question.

My startup is close to finalizing a business-to-business product and has some close connections within the industry that will result in likely first sales. However, we've been having trouble pricing the service. Every competitor on the market requires a request for a service quote, so price benchmarking is difficult. Also, getting this business to say what they're currently paying is unlikely.

Without getting too specific, we're developing an atmospheric science-based technology that is extremely disruptive. For example, the "error" reading for our product is nearly 10x less than current methods. However, it seems illogical to charge a price premium in suit.

As far as cost to provide the service, it is minimal. Should we charge on the hypothetical lower end of the spectrum for hopes of easy adoption, of charge a slight premium for quality? I have a monthly rate in my head that makes sense to me, but I have no idea if it is too high or too low.

On another note, this was a Ph.D. dissertation technology, and adjusting it for direct consumer use is not possible.
It's a UI challenge, but as Techcrunch reports, this may well be in browsers at some point.
Going after Craigslist over the adult content was a short sighted political move that will make it harder to fight prostitution in the long run. To some extent it's like the music labels going after napster. This eliminates the largest network (and the easiest one for authorities to monitor), and pushes the whole internet sex economy further underground.
Sounds very similar to what we have here, except we are storing the original files on S3 to avoid replication / redundancy issues.

I guess getting the pricing right is key to working out demand.
My co-founder doesn't have a salary (though he does get our health benefits). I'm on an H-1B so my salary legally required to be "market rate", as set by the US government for my job title and location (a fact apparently not very widely known).
"he" brings up results for "heart" for me. "hello w" brings up "hello world" results.
Si -- they should have corrected for second languages and proficiency, if they were serious. My big beef is the implication that word length obviously correlates with intelligence instead of, say, pretention.
Wordpress does this, but rather than serve the images from s3, it uses s3 to store the images and populate a self-hosted varnish cache: http://blog.apokalyptik.com/2007/10/10/so-you-wanna-see-an-i... This reduces the s3 bill by an order of magnitude (http://ma.tt/2007/10/s3-news/), so you may want to consider this approach.

In fact, using this approach, you could use s3 (just storage) to undercut s3 (storage+bandwidth) on cost and get lots of customers! I'd be in! :-)
Is what you built public or private ?
My morning routine is pretty standard, today was no different: cup of coffee, hour and a half of yoga, bowl of steel cut oatmeal with fruit and nuts (today: apples and almonds) and a splash of milk. Unbeatable.
I have to say, this is pretty awesome. I've looked into doing some hardware projects on the side but haven't really had the urge to learn another language for it. Now I'm that much closer to losing some time & money on this.
It doesn't search for 'he', it searches for the first autocomplete from 'he' - which happens to be Hertz, oh well.
where are all the hacker biologists, psychiatrists, or gardeners?

Err, we are here. You'd be wrong if you thought that everyone in HN is a startup person, or even a programmer.

However, this is hacker news hosted on ycombinator.com. There is a prevailing standard focused on startups and even though I am not one of those people (nor do I wish to be), I do my bit to fit in with the community standard.

It's like you are walking in a park and there's a bunch of people having an interesting conversation. You might ask to join in, but saying "why don't you people have an interesting conversation about clock mechanisms instead?" would be kinda rude.

Saying "I love HN, but sometimes I wish it wasn't so obsessively focused on tech and start-ups" strikes me as saying "I love the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra but I wish it wasn't so obsessively focused on classical music".

[Later edits in light of comments below:]

The interesting question to ask is "why are the non-startup people here". I can only answer for myself: I came here to pick up interesting new sites (in that way I am a refugee from techcrunch - reading it felt too much like a lobotomy ). I stayed because of the quality of the discussion and because even though the startup folks sometimes seem to think they have a unique ecosystem, a lot of their issues are really common to software and even wider technical groups outside the commercial sector, like my own.

So no, from that point of view I wouldn't go to an HN fork - I just can't afford another time sink, and I would still need to be on HN for my tech news.

As for non-software stories, there are quite a lot of really interesting stories submitted, but they often don't gain enough traction for the home page. But there is a lot of really varied stuff in /new if you look.
The Unsustainable College Textbook Bubble
You can't have money worries when trying to build your business. It's distracting and could well cost the VCs more in the long run if you have other worries/can't focus 100% on the job in hand.

If your expenses are $4000pcm, then take $5500/$6000. You're running a company after all, and that precious down time you have has to be maximised (generally costing money).

If you're financially happy you'll have no need to work, but you'll want to.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=673630

(I apologize profusely, I just couldn't resist.)
Interchange qualification and fee calculation is one of my specialties. The article and the graphic are very high level but are generally correct. I would add geographic relationship of the issuer and acquirer as an important part of fee determination that is missing from the graphic. Domestic is generally cheaper than intraregional is generally cheaper than interregional. Lots of banks tried acquiring but found it difficult to pay the interchange fees and still eke out a profit from the merchant business. That difficulty is the reason fewer banks/processors do their own acquiring, preferring to invest in the card issuing and portfolio management side of the business and leave the merchant business to big banks/processors or specialty shops. If your merchant/acquiring software can successfully classify each transaction and set the correct fee level, you have a very good advantage when pricing your merchant services. It's not really all that difficult, but the number of fee programs has grown from 2 (paper vs. electronic) in the mid-1980's to dozens for each card scheme, with new ones every year. Inflexible systems have a problem with this.
What does git have to do with TDD?
tinc is really good little secret I have found if you want a true mesh P2P secure overlay network. It's open source, has a good community in freenode #tinc, and really easy to install and use, just read the man page http://linux.die.net/man/5/tinc.conf

http://tinc-vpn.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition
I know that's the talking point about prostitution, but I don't automatically agree with it. If targeting craigslist is part of a broader crackdown on the online sex trade, where craigslist is forced to adopt a more conservative editorial posture and other sites are forced out of business completely, then the argument doesn't stand.

People talk as if the sex trade can go completely underground, as if it's only exposed to the public eye through the benevolent lens of craiglist. Of course that's not true. Even among the worst offenders, the mafia-based sex slave traffickers, it's still a business, and it still needs customer acquisition mechanisms.
Thanks. I should have known they were smarter than that.
I know it's probably just you copy-pasting a link off Google without being too attentive, but please, please, please do not cite Conservapedia. Take a look at the site homepage to get a taste of why.
Ask HN: What is your online university curriculum?
Universities are offering many fascinating lectures to the public - some with lecture notes and literature curriculum, some merely video. I'm sure we all remember how hard just finding and bookmarking all these resources was - and perhaps still is.

When sites like Academic Earth began to collate the lectures, things got much easier. Now, the predicament seems to be that of resource overflow; we now need a filter to sift the hour-long lecture series to benefit from them. We are in a position where the same topics are covered by different lecturers at different universities with different curricula. As someone who's never set a foot in the US and an intermediate knowledge of my subject of college education, I don't know who's hot and who's not, but, being enrolled at a very meagre university with not improvement in sight, I'm interested in taking a digital tour of academia on the other side of the Atlantic.

Therefore, I'd love to elicit some hacker help to assemble something resembling of a curriculum. If I were to lock myself in my flat for weeks to study a subject, what would the curriculum be? I know many lectures can also be regarded as the flavour of the day: shared e-mail links, reddits, StumbleUpon links, and so forth. I, on the other hand, and from what I've surmised from frequenting HN, is that the future of online education looks more and more attractive, as Khan Academy gains recognition, and the inflationary college price keeps soaring.

I don't want to restrict the recommendations to CS, Engineering, and Maths; feel free to construct a curriculum however you want, as your experience and knowledge allows you to, as long as you can vouch for it as a serious curriculum. You could also create a broader, Brownian curriculum that includes all kinds of subjects in order to create a wholesome body of knowledge.

I don't know what the best way to structure the curriculum is, but one way would be your usual Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced; another would be Undergrad and Grad.

I hope we can avoid a big discussion about the validity of a Business education vis-à-vis a foray into the start-up world.

I'm not looking at locking myself in and getting an online education, so this isn't as much of a request as an enthused challenge to see what we are capable of with what is currently available. The potential has me very excited.
Google Instant: It Searches Before You Type