skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds good, but couldn't the applicant just copy code from the internet which he heard was good code? It doesn't prove he can write code.

This does make sense if you'd ask him to explain it at the interview, but then the applicant can also give context and explain why he thinks it's good code.
- have to do full disk encryption
- must have a great passphrase (according to NIST avg 8 char password has 2^18 bits of entropy, which compared to the keyspace of a 256 bit AES key is so very small...) the strength of the encryption is really based on the strength of the password
- must also encrypt backups
- what if you forget your password? (say at the border when they order you to decrypt it)
- what if the license runs out?
- if it's for work there needs to be another key to unlock it.
- 2 factor auth would be great.
It seemed non-obvious to me I'm also meant to activate my account for it to be visible on the map (I just noticed it wasn't showing so searched the site until I found I was unactivated).
If you are really good, are you in a position to get some scholarships / financial aid? This would lower some of the opportunity costs of going. Now...

a) In college, you would still have a lot of free time to pursue your own projects, and could always drop out if you hit it big! It gives you a safe place to work from while giving you a chance to learn more skills, too.

b) It gives you a GREAT chance to meet other people who can help you, work with you, drop out with you, etc.

c) You can learn about other life skills, too!

Those are three good reasons that you might want to consider more seriously going to college. I feel the same way about many post-graduate experiences as you do about college, and it's important to try to see things with more shades of grey and to be more open to positive experiences.

Remember, no one is going to put you in a prison for four years, but by not going to college now (or not applying... etc) you are losing on some opportunities that you might like, even in six months. So for now, relatively easy to keep more options open.
It's vacuous, obvious advice. That Atwood tops HN with such tripe has always been a mystery to me.

Counter examples will be rare because Atwood's entry essentially says "evolve", decorating the post with some ignorance about smartphones, a naive simplification of version numbering, and so on.

Who would argue with "evolve" (insert the obvious joke). His other insight was "adapt", and again...what?
If it's a b2c product (lolchat, lolcards), then yeah you can get away from it. But if it's a b2b product then probably not -- unless it is a ridiculously innovative lolcode application server.
Yet Another Photo Instant Search
I would be much more concerned about laptop being arbitrarily seized at an airport by customs or TSA personnel, or by law enforcement otherwise, than it being stolen per se.

e.g.

http://www.daniweb.com/news/story218174.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Business-Travel-Tip---Avoid-Having...

http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Business-Travel/Travel-Man...

You can lose a lot to thieves, but you can lose even more to state thuggery backed by the force of "law."
The skull and bones really sets the atmosphere.
Pretty much totally agree here.

I would be 75% OK using a service with such a name, but you would alienate some people for sure. Keep it in reserve, but might be worthwhile to keep thinking about some other names, too. You don't want to limit yourself based on your brand.
I agree with you there for sure. The more holistic the interview process the better IMO. In fact I'd prefer to see a project in addition to a snippet.

You can't tell a decent coder from a great one with a snippet, but you can get a picture of their code and their tastes.
Potential Facebook Security Flaw
A stack-based language in JS with 255 sloc
Unlikely. I know you're trying to make a joke but I'd see YC point him to one of their start-ups long before they'd hire him themselves.

And start-ups generally do not offer six figure salaries.
If you read between the lines, the reason they have tried and failed to implement this is fragmentation of the market. While more modern devices would likely support GPU usage, the older devices (or even new low end devices?) would not. So they either have to live with the current fragmentation or fragment the market even more.

Fragmentation is, of course, a huge point for Android detractors. This is a very real manifestation of that which shows that Android may stagnate in the future due to the inability to develop features for a significant number of devices.

However, for the most part, Android as it sits today has a low level of fragmentation compared to what could happen. I recently developed an Android app for 1.6-2.2 and only had a couple fragmentation issues (performance related and contacts API). Google and its partners really need to take a long look at the direction of Android and resolve the fragmentation now while its possible.
He is being down voted because the first comment of this throwaway account is a boorish redditism asked to someone who just said they value client confidentiality.
Out of curiosity: If the FBI or NSA REALLY wanted to get the data on your hard drive, is Truecrypt enough to keep them out?
quoting Lance Armstrongs mom: pain is temporary - quitting lasts forever. (in this context, pain == bore)
That jumped out at me also as a completely wrong-headed statement. To paraphrase Newton, they were standing on the shoulders of giants when they started.
Content is neat, but layout is a little bland. Especially in terms of trying to put forth a professional image, I think there is still room to improve - clarifying the header in a nicer way, making your footer cleaned up. Nothing too hard to do, though - probably minor tweaks to a lot of themes could help.

I'm not sure that moving to Tumblr or Posterous would help, except insofar as the #1 thing about a blog: would they help you to write more / better? If so, go for it, since you could have a nice user experience there as well.

In any instance, I'd say it's worth paying $10 a year to get your own domain to mask wherever you are - whether rakhi.blogspot or .posterous or .tubmlr.

One easy to implement suggestion: for a site like this, a "read my best-of posts" section can be really helpful to engage new visitors and make them repeat visitors by seeing the best you have to offer.
You know, if you disagree, you can reply instead of downvoting.
Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot
prompted lawmakers to issue new regulations, like the Sarbannes-Oxley accounting rules, that made it more costly for young companies to go public

I can vouch for this part -- having dealt directly with SOX audits for several years, the cost of regulatory compliance and audits would be prohibitive. And worse: the regulations do nothing to prevent another Enron. They enforce compliance for mid-level employees, and do little or nothing to stop executives from messing with the numbers. Yes, the CFO and CEO have to sign off on reports and cannot use ignorance as an excuse. But that wouldn't stop another Jeff Skilling (Enron CFO) from routing money to an offshore account; he wouldn't be taking any more of a chance now than in 2000. SOX regulations don't protect investors, and are a boon for only one group: big accounting firms -- the same firms that were part of the accounting scam to begin with.
Under the rules of the experiment, a participant who wishes to, or for any reason must, leave the extended experimental isolation can do so, however, he must be deemed as dead during the mission.

I wonder if this is really a good idea. Clearly it won't be an option on the real mission.
Nuggetize: Faceted search for the web through dynamic categorization
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

there are some limits to uploads
Regarding the NSA, "who knows", it's not worth any time to speculate. I tend to think the answer here is "no", but not because of any fundamental problem with the algorithms TC uses; rather, I assume there's a small battery of implementation errors NSA can exploit that private industry hasn't yet independently discovered.

Fortunately for our collective sanity, if it is the case that NSA has (several times over) the moral equivalent of the "stack overflow" for cryptosystems, there is nothing we can do about it, and there's no point wanking over alternatives that might foil them.

Regarding the FBI, "almost certainly yes", assuming you use it properly (in particular, by using strong secrets). Consider that any vulnerability in the crypto stack Truecrypt uses would have far too much value to be wasted on conventional domestic law enforcement. Consider also that unlike state secrets, domestic law enforcement uses a crypto stack that is the same or strictly weaker than Truecrypt.
It's just kind of hard to believe that there is some kind of "magic" about cancer that will make it impervious to treatment using mid-21st century medical technology. Just in the past 5 years there have been some pretty amazing breakthroughs related to targeting cancer cells with new drug delivery mechanisms, etc. Even with 20th century tech cancer survival rates have continued to rise. See, for example, pg 29 of this report: http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2004/results_merged/sect_01_...

Am I reading you wrong in understanding that you think that cancer will not be treatable in the mid 21st century, to at least a far greater extent than it is today? That seems the much harder case to make...
Well there's Lolapps (http://www.lolapps.com/), they have closed about $ 4 million investment if I recall correctly.

But they don't use that name to market their products, instead they create social games and market each product seperately I think.
How popular were you in high school?
...just wondering.
"You were sufficiently promising to pass our screening but after meeting you we can definitely do better. Have a nice day." is not an easy thing to say even in absence of legal issues. I could tap-dance on your face as an employer without getting sued here, but that doesn't mean we sent applicants home with a list of their inadequacies.

Of course, if you believe social science research, the reason is probably "You failed in the first five seconds to connect with your interviewer, he rejected you then, and he eventually found a reason to hang his hat on."
You would think that would skew the data. Knowing that you can leave would surely have an effect on your psychological state.
So it seems that the fix for losing data on hung PCs is similar to that for involuntary amputees: gather up the bits you need, shove them on ice and get yourself as quickly as possible to someone who knows what to do with them.
This is one of the things i wish dropbox did, so at least from my perspective this has potential. It'd be nice to see the website to get some information on it. :)
Not mine, but there is a CMS built in Erlang: http://zotonic.com
That was a good parody. You got my position on patents exactly right. You also accurately mocked my tendency to state my views point blank without including disclaimers that they are my views. So excuse me: morally wrong in my book.

You say there is no absolute morality. I don't know. The more interesting question is whether you disagree specifically with the moral principles I invoked, and how and why. I can't tell from your post.
Perhaps. Perhaps they will pick on the meeker instead of the stronger, the darker-skinned instead of the caucasian or the female instead of the male. Not all bullies are alike.
Cool idea! I randomly clicked on chromium (http://www.periodicvideos.com/videos/024.htm) - gotta love the guy who has "very warm feelings about it"!

EDIT: Now I watched the potassium video (http://www.periodicvideos.com/videos/019.htm). If I understand him correctly, the same guy seems to think that potash is called so because it contains potassium. Potassium is called kalium in Latin (from Arabic al-qalyah, "plant ashes" according to Wikipedia). I'm certain it's the same in English (potash -> potassium) and not the other way around.
Looks cool. What happens when two users are editing a file at once? How does it handle the merging?
You've never had cancer, have you?
The only inherent advantage in eating less is getting fewer calories; alcohol has a substantial number of calories itself, so no benefit there.
Fred Wilson further explaining why he hates convertible debt (Video)
I would certainly appreciate the sync functionality with Google Docs. On the other hand, most of the time I just use Google Docs -- I don't switch back and forth from desktop to Google Docs, like in the video.
Generally not a great strategy (far better than nothing, though).

It's hard to predict what data is going to end up being sensitive, and it's hard to predict where that data is going to end up being stored. By way of example, you haven't protected any of the session cookies stored in your browser; another user, following your advice, could lose their Google Mail account and then quickly thereafter the accounts of anything with an email password reset.

If you (a) don't keep a lot of sensitive information around and (b) are prepared to be extremely careful on a daily basis about keeping your laptop clean, yours is a workable strategy. If, like some of us, your desktop tends to get cluttered or your mail spool tends to grow without bound or your hard drive tends to mysteriously fill up over the year, you're better off with full-disk encryption.
Whoa. A bit surprised to see this get voted up so quickly. I guess people either want an alternative to DropBox or like the Google Docs Offline Sync. Thoughts?
Thanks, but I guess I can't change that now.
How good software makes us stupid
A business which depends on google can't be called startup, it's a hack!
They will let you live for a while then suddenly they will pull the plug.
there's also a pretty significant protein aggregation component to aging. Adding telomeres back on assumes that the problem is just one of genetic decay and we're finding increasingly that that's simply not the whole story.
Probably. As far as anybody knows, the FBI and NSA are on the same level of cryptography technology as the rest of the world is. AES and SHA-1 are currently the national standards for encryption and secure hashing. AES is what TrueCrypt uses (as do most SSL connections and WPA/WPA2 connections).

There are some things to keep in mind though:

Fine print: As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it's possible to extract encryption keys from RAM even if the computer has been (very... within several minutes) recently shut down.

More fine print: Pick a weak passphrase, and you may be shit-outta-luck. Also, brute forcing for passphrases up to a certain complexity is viable.

Tin foil hat: A conspiracy theorist may assert that the feds are far ahead of academia when it comes to cryptography, as was likely the case several decades ago (see the history of DES). I'm not sure that I believe that, because cryptography has a huge place in academia now, worldwide. It's possible, but I doubt they've broken AES.
I'm sure there's a portfolio that we could see.
I agree, it would be nice to automate this as much as possible. Nice article!
Cancer is not much better treatable today than it was in the 70's of the previous century, when the 'war on cancer' was launched, it's a 5% change in the 'death' rate over 40 years.

Newsflash, we've lost that war.

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

We are hoping but we do not know for sure that new directions and avenues researched for treatments will give us new tools to help in finding a real cure.

But for the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future there is no indication that we will actually find this cure. At the moment - as crude as it may sound - if you could choose between being HIV positive or having a malignant tumor I'd pick HIV, we have a much better handle on arresting HIV than we have on stopping a cancer once started, other than by surgery, radiation and chemo therapy and a lot of good will.

Once a cancer has metastasized you are living on borrowed time.

Just like cancer isn't treatable by a much greater extent than it was 40 years ago I would not bet on seeing that change in the next 40 years.

That does not mean we should stop researching or that we will 'just have to live with it' but I think it is a bit early to start putting dates on when a solution will be found.

One of the bigger problems is that the differences between healthy cells and cancerous cells are minute, in some way you could say that the cancerous cells are the stronger ones. This makes going after cancer cells and not killing the cells around them (or even the whole organism) very difficult.
Turning

<div>
<h1>Hendershot's Coffee Bar</h1>
<p>1560 Oglethorpe Ave, Athens, GA</p>
</div>

Into

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Organization">
<h1 itemprop="name">Hendershot's Coffee Bar</h1>
<p itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Address">
<span itemprop="street-address">1560 Oglethorpe Ave</span>,
<span itemprop="locality">Athens</span>,
<span itemprop="region">GA</span>.
</p>
</div>

...is not markup pollution? It's three times as big as before, and the value of this is still questionable.
The complete lack of responsiveness in the Android UI, regardless of how difficult it is to fix, needs to be remedied, and needs to be top priority.

The UI is the connection between the user and the device. When it's laggy and unresponsive, the experience of using the device is always going to be sub-par, no matter how many new features and optimizations the developers have added.

Whenever I've had a chance to test out the latest and greatest Android phone, I've always been blown away by how awful the scrolling performance and animations are, to the point where I really don't understand how people put up with it on a day-to-day basis. My iPhone 3G, at least when it's not randomly hanging due to 4.0, feels more responsive than any Android phone I've tried, and it's running on 3+ year-old hardware (it's got the same processor and memory as the iPhone 2G, IIRC).

Smooth animations, not benchmark results, are equivalent to speed to the average person, and who can blame them?
There is no such thing as an "MP5 uzi".
It's ok. Definitely don't see this as a 'startup' perse. Maybe if it gains traction Google would do a talent acquisition to continue to build out Google Docs.

Definitely not a "DropBox Killer" though.

The concept is not bad, but in the age of Etherpad and Google Wave, this kinda feels a bit dated.
There is absolutely no reason for me to learn how to program a computer. If I need a computer programmer, I will hire one. My time is better spent on more skilled tasks.
I'd take issue with his other premise as well. Though I suspect he's on a different operating system, Chrome on Mac OS 10.5 seems to be an insufferable memory hog.
If gdocs to gdocs, then google takes care of it. If desktop to gdocs, we employ a simple conflict resolution where the conflicted copy gets saved locally.
Rapportive seems to be doing very well, and is certainly a "business which depends on google" right now.
Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice
Shareholders wiped out when a hot startup in gaming space dilutes stock, grabs board control, and wipes out common stock holders in insider transaction... where are the VCs in this story?
The Innovator's Dilemma guy also talks about integrated vs. modular architectures. By integrated, he means made in one elegant piece, meshing together just so; by modular he means you can mix-and-match (eg. from different suppliers, or to customize attributes easily), with clearly defined standard interfaces. Maybe it sounds like modular is always better; while it is more customizable and cheaper, integrated can always outperform it. Which one wins in a market depends on what that market most demands at that time, with respect to where the technology is at that moment. Is it fast enough? Does it have enough functions? Is it flexible enough? Is it cheap enough? Markets tend to move back and forth between them, as they evolve over a period of years.

For smartphones, performance is still an issue (and will be for 2-3 years I'd guess, by Moore's law), and so integrated platforms do the best job at this. This is Apple's forte - but they have limited time to make hay and get as firmly established as possible.

It's limited, because once the market's demand for performance is sated ("fast enough"), the market will base decisions on other issues - such as price. And that is not Apple's forte, nor does Apple want it to be. Thus, Apple already has the iPad lined up. After that, there'll be in another market at a stage where Apple's extraordinary ability to integrate can shine.

To be clear: Android is modular.
Simple. Whatever it takes without being uncomfortable about it.

Things I will gladly do:

- phone interview with as many people as you like
- physical interview until I think you have enough information to decide
- share any of my work face to face
- on-line third party evaluation (code test, personality, etc.)
- review any of your system with you
- code for you in person
- sharing on-line information (including all hn posts)
- doing up to 8 hours of free sample work
- provide a referral if they are a better fit

Things I strongly push:

- in depth discussion about the employer's situation
- reverse interviewing employees with similar jobs

Things I will gladly do, but only after a job offer:

- provide references
- drug test
- credit check

Things I will never do:

- have a generic resume (every one is uniquely targeted)
- post any resume on-line
- pay a fee
- physical interview with a head-hunter
- provide anyone else's proprietary information
- "bad mouth" anyone else
Cool idea but the reason I use Google Docs is because I don't have/want Microsoft Office on my computer - and for the sharing/collaboration.

I could see this being useful for notes and the like, but I've been a loyal Simplenote user for over a year now and I can't see myself ditching it for this.
At the end of the day, it's about what you think will be most effective for you in order to learn better and become more valuable and create more value.

Credentials are used as a proxy for actual measurement of ability and capability, and they are becoming less necessary as we are better able to assess the same through more accurate methods.
TechCrunch: Please stop hosting your own videos
I am trying to watch the Fred Wilson interview and it constantly buffers. I leave it for 20 minutes to load and only 5% - 10% of the video loads.

What gives?

Am I the only one having this issue?

TC, please stop hosting your own stuff. Use one of the bazillion video streaming companies. Focus on the journalism, and not on the technology.

Thanks.
One thing that is useful: if you like to keep several instances configured and 'ready to go' for your learning experiments, when you are done, don't terminate them, just stop them. You don't pay for stopped instances (but then you do pay 24 cents a day per unattached Elastic IP address).
This is one reason why I am not counting out Microsoft with their new WP7 platform. Your average U.S. consumer makes their device purchase decisions in the wireless carrier store. If Android and WP7 are shown side-by-side in a showroom (assuming comparable hardware and price) my bet is that windows phone will win its fair-share of battles given its approachable and responsive interface.
Hello all, I'm one of the founders of Insync. I shared the demo with Noah not knowing he would post it here. I'm glad he did :)

I will be glad to answer any questions.
Illegal immigration: What's the real cost to taxpayers?
I've been thinking about #1 a lot - for the most part not many people need to know what comes up and it is distracting. If I were to make my own implementation I thought about adding a 0.5-1 second delay after key-up before fetching results but it obviously wouldn't be "instant".

In my opinion the behaviour of "Turn instant off" should be that the instant UI is still the same, but results aren't fetched until the user presses Enter, and have a third option for the old functionality.