skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. But with some of the FB valuations, we're talking 30x or 50x valuations -- which are not just hype, these are cocaine and ecstasy fueled hooker party numbers.

Even if, given their current revenue model, they tripled revenue tomorrow. They're still only a marginal investment with either a 10 to a 50 year payout depending. Those are U.S. federal securities time periods. If I had $40 billion I had to dump for 10 years, I'd put it into bonds before I'd put it into FB.

As I was attempting to point out, no matter the hype, once you saturate the market, you can't hype away the math. Right now at the lower end valuations, they are a 30 year investment. I don't think anybody in their right mind would take on those odds considering the population growth curve of the human species.

FB is going to have to adopt a seriously different revenue model in order to try and keep their revenue growth curve up and bring down these insane valuation multiples on their revenue -- they simply can't keep relying on new signups and ads. I have a feeling anything they do will be intrusive and along lines that won't be what people like (first 10 friends are free! $5/friend after that!).
Hootsuite is becoming a bit of a success story. Bootup Labs will have another intake in the new year, so we'll see what happens with that.

"Plug and Play Tech Center" is opening an incubator here, and the Grow Conference happened over the summer at the new conference centre which housed the media during the Olympics.

Still plenty of dopey heavily-government-subsidized green tech, but I have hope for the future.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw,
How well can Couch handle heavy textual use? does it play well with Lucene?
Sorry! I should've thought of that; that one took me a minute too.
The donation is in stock, not cash.
They likely didn't learn Rails in college either
“[Sandy and Len Bosack] urgently sold their shares in Cisco at a time when the valuation of the company was a mere $1B.” – Don Valentine (the lead VC)

From Triumph of the Geeks, the inventors of the very first router owned about 20% of the company

http://venturehacks.com/articles/cisco-founders
From 2000-2004 I was kind of a dabbler in the web dev world. Built crappy sites for many clients that really didn't go anywhere, and so I concentrated on doing things as cheaply and as fast as possible. Then the whole Digg thing happened. I learned about scaling "in anger." And keeping up with programmers that were smarter than me at the task at hand. I probably learned more in 2 years than I had in the 20 years before that. Now I find myself dealing regularly with programmers that didn't go through that experience (and managers who embrace that "cheap and fast" ethic). I try to control my disdain.
Interesting, thanks. For me on normal + fast, fullscreening on a pre-unibody macbook pro intermittently stutters something awful. Though that was on a snow world, and I booted to Windows before experimenting further. Might I be missing something?
I like that the phrase "Lil Bobby Tables" to reference dropping the database via SQL injection has entered the hacker vernacular.

What would be a nice one-page security guide would be a 'lil bobby tables' guide to databases - SQL injection for any database - (SQL or NoSQL) - the goal being to help developers prevent these attacks.
Is Y Combinator Obsolete (For the funding portion at least)?
After applying, getting called in, and finally being turned down for an early round of YC funding, I emailed Paul Graham last spring about a new project I was working on.. I already had a prototype and some Alpha testers and was looking to form a company so I asked Paul if I could get YC a la carte.. Hold the cash and the move to the Bay area.. Extra on the top lawyers and maybe sprinkle on some sage advice.. Paul said the project looked interesting and encouraged me to apply to the formal program as the YC system only scaled when done in batches..

So I applied, (lonely single founder at the time) and got back a response turning down the project.. At the end of the email was the following:
"We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes."

Now of course, I plan to send Paul that email one of these days, but the recent Kickstarter phenomenom has me wondering if it is my project that they got wrong, or is the whole idea even necessary any more?

A little networking and I got a good firm to defer our legal fees for company formation and I'm not too far removed from some pretty successful entrpreneurs who offer sound advice whenever I ask, so I think that just might happen naturally.. But now with Kickstarter, we were able to raise $6k and counting with no strings or equity lost: http://kck.st/9Kgf6O.. And this is from the only investors that really count.. Users!

What do you all think?
I'll admit, when people came down hard on them vis a vis security, I figured it was just a bit sloppy as a preview release.

I was wrong.. these aren't really security "holes" as that's not strong enough a word. I think the best way to put it is they accidentally created the first social network wiki.
For maximum effectiveness, he should probably have donated it to the Gates Foundation and earmarked it for education.
I really want to attend this but why does it have to happen on the thanksgiving long weekend? Or is that intentional since there will be a buffer day between this and the normal work week?
Picking A Co-Founder: Learn From My Mistakes
I knew Diaspora had problems when I got an email from the guy who hosts Openspora telling me that [two] other people had the same username.
Maybe that's already happened: we're sorting them. Are we sure we're not sorting them for them?
Unless it's changed in the last week, Multiplayer Survival mode is bugged (it's an alpha) so that monsters can't damage you. So most multiplayer servers are in Creative mode, where you just build stuff.

Single player survival still works, and is a lot of fun. The first day cycle is about getting a pick, a shelter, and some coal for torches before nightfall and zombies/skeletons come out. Then you spend the next few day/night cycles building up, and people usually start exploring around Day 5-10. And get horridly lost and have to construct shelter as the sun is setting to avoid monster attack.

And to get the good resources like iron and diamond and gold and redstone, you have to go spelunking in caves, where monsters can spawn in any dark spot. Even coal is only available in small amounts on cliff faces, so you have to either mine or spelunk for that too past the first few pieces.
C++ and Java is where I started, because I didn't know any better. I then pursued C++ because it is what they use in the master's program to which I was accepted.

Thanks for the links. I would love to learn what is involved in graphics programming.
I'm not sure why my parent post is getting downvoted.However, I think you're throwing a red herring here

>>But to say we should support every single non-profit by offering them a lower price simply because they are a non-profit doesn't make sense to me

I'm not asking you to do anything about your prices. Whether you offer a lower price or a higher price or the same price doesn't really matter to me.

My point is that it is not "unfair, dishonest" to offer discounts to non-profits.

You yourself concede that you choose to support "a specific charity or cause". Why is it "unfair, dishonest" for others to support a specific cause - (in this case, all non-profits) ?
It would be very cool if even a tenth of this was put towards online education systems. $10M could go a long way towards improving online education, esp. with Facebook as a partner!
37 Signals Valuation Tops 100 Billion Dollars
There's no accounting for taste.
Thanks for the link, this was a great read!
It's true. And as a result, I'm seeing more and more threads like this one. :)
joboffer

Please email me ASAP, we're in desperate need of more RoR engineers.
Great link. Thanks.
You need to give a few examples, else you make a full-stop assumption of the opposite nature.

Also, I think you mean a priori.
Thanks for the web-app security pointers in the post: the RoR security guide[1] and the OWASP Top 10[2]. These should be required reading for anyone making a public web application.

[1] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html (Well-written, like the other guides. Totally worth reading fully).

[2] http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2010-Main (Open Web Application Security Project's top application security risks for 2010)
You seem to forget how much Ebay and Google are worth, and more importantly just how much of their dollars Facebook has the potential of taking away, just by being ruler of identity, and in control of much more valuable information.
Apple, Google and Microsoft to face off for 'digital living room'
Tell HN: Searching all stackoverflow sites with Google Custom Search
I just created this custom search which search all three domains at once (stackoverflow, serverfault and stackexchange).

There is no question about the quality of the answers on those collection of sites, yet, I fond it annoying that is I have a question about ssh I should look at serverfault, stackoverflow, superuser and unix.stackexchange and perhaps few others to find out if this question has been asked before...

http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=014927534610857777870:6zn_optdtbu
Forbes 400
I personally can't believe that Arrington is getting hailed for this by some people.

Maybe he's absolutely right in his accusation. But we've seen nothing but hearsay, delivered out of a context involving Arrington's social rejection by people he keeps referring to as friends. It's hard not to wonder whether or not it's just a tantrum thrown by someone blocked from the 'NO-ARRINGTONS' secret society.

(Which is not to say that I'm claiming he made EVERYTHING up. But how much did it play into his decision to report such serious allegations with little actual evidence? That's what I'm asking.)

In any case - that's not journalism. That's not someone who spent a long time doing investigative research, gathering evidence, on-the-record testimony... it's bitchy gossip - and that's it. It's times like this that I feel that we really have lost something important with the rise of blogger journalism.

Whatever the truth, it all looks extremely childish and unprofessional from all sides.
Another important one - four planks in a box together makes a crafting table, which you need to make stuff like swords and picks and axes.

Axes are sort of pointless, since you can knock down wood with any block equipped (even dirt). Your first day's goals are torches and shelter. Make a pick, explore until you find a cliff face with coal (it looks like stone with big chocolate chips), use the coal to make torches. Then, when it gets close to dark, dig yourself a hole to hide in from zombies and skeletons. Light it up with torches and seal off all but a one-square window. Spend the night digging out a proper home, make a few stone tools, and then spend the day chopping wood or hunting or spelunking or just exploring.
I was using the term acceleration in it's physics sense "a change in the velocity vector" which means both speed and direction. Crazy meant multiple rapid changes in direction and speed, like say, falling off a bike would result in this "crazy acceleration" as would being hit by something.

Also, sometimes the reaction/result of aggressive drivers isn't catastrophic. For instance, today on my way home from work I had 2 different drivers decide to come within a foot of my bike while passing. This is a calculated move, intended to scare me and teach me a lesson. I know because in one case, I asked when we both got to the same red light, and in the other, the rude gestures of the driver. An accelerometer would have shown nothing, as any reaction on my part would probably have been worse than just hoping the driver didn't judge wrong.

It's not just "tight driving" either, other times drivers are rude, make threatening actions with their vehicles or just plain block my motion preventing me from changing lanes, making turns, and so on, which should be captured, but don't cause anything particularly noticeable in accelerometer data.

Alternately, the false positive rate is probably pretty high here too. I have at least 2 places on my daily commute where I short-cut thru alleys and make some pretty jarring curb passages. There is one particularly tricky transition from street to bike path involving 3 turns in a very short distance (30ish feet). On fast days I bet it looks more like reacting to an aggressive driver than most aggressive driver reactions (from an accelerometer point of view).
Reddit, who is eating Digg's lunch, relies heavily on Cassandra.

This is a Digg Fail and not a Cassandra Fail.
clickable link: http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=014927534610857777870:6zn_...
Are they really running very critical systems on Windows? Yes, the are :( : http://www.neowin.net/news/nuclear-reactor-isnt-using-a-lice...
And another related story from 2003: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6767
There is a big difference between forcing the dumb cut for a significant part of page's representation (e.g., by Lynx), and showing the creatively minimized images, JavaScript, and CSS files in Mini-WWW's pages.
I've always thought it would make more sense for CS degrees to be for computer scientists (ie, people who want to do more high-level theoretical work), and that software development was more of a trade school, where you learned the languages, and were soon thrown into real-world style projects and apprenticeships.

Imagine if your nurse came out of college having never stepped foot into a hospital, having only read about how to take vitals and such, but never having done it on a live human being.
Yeah, the survival aspect is the most appealing to me as well. Hopefully some more survival elements will make it in before the beta.
Visa rolling out payWave mobile phone payments in NY subway and taxis
A bit biased :) But we just launched out of Vancouver: http://opencal.com/
This is a pretty good introduction to the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bh4EexJO4I
Thank you. Helps indeed.

The breakdown is what I have been looking for. Part of my problem is I was so shell shocked from losing my job, I felt I had to know all the languages and all their frameworks in order to have a chance in the market.

Thanks again.
I was not even willing to risk my email address or set up a throwaway one. You need pictures, examples, and a much better value proposition - especially since you're inviting people to think about their assets, and death. Nolo.com is the leader in this space, and will be hard to disrupt. Sorry.
Your email isn't in the bio. Could you please reply with it?
I'd go one further and say that if you use string interpolation with anything remotely related to user input at all in a web app, you probably just wrote a security hole of some sort. I use "probably" in the frequentist sense of the term, because the odds of a given user-input string interpolation in an arbitrarily-chosen web app being in at least one of 1. an HTML string 2. a database string 3. a javascript string or 4. something else that is executable by something, without the context-relevant encoding function, are quite high. Same goes for any string concatenation involving anything from the environment or user without the conspicuous presence of an encoding function of some kind, since interpolation is just syntax sugar for concatenation.

"Don't let users interpolate, ever" is close to truth. It isn't quite truth, but it's a lot shorter than the truth.
Same dam story for me too - I'm not a big gamer, I don't have time to play normally and minecraft has won over starcraft 2 for the past week.
I'm nothing if not bull headed.

Thank you.
One aspect of this is that PG and YC have shown themselves to be very understanding investors. I would rather sell stock to somebody understanding in that way than to deal with a multitude of people who I don't know telling me what I am doing right or wrong.

The first time I raised money I made the mistake of not knowing two of the investors well enough, but I took their money anyway and they ended up being complete assholes. I will never live that decision down, because of how much damage and wasted time it caused (much more than what they themselves invested).

I have no experience with Kickstarter, but you could see some examples of that with Diaspora - people putting pressure on the company to go one way or another because 'hey, we funded this thing! listen to us!'. It sounds like potentially having hundreds of asshole investors (I know they don't get stock, but that doesn't effect some persons right to think and behave like they do).

YC is also a shortcut into the SV network, which can be very important depending on your plans for the company. The experience PG et al bring etc. doesn't need repeating.

So based on what I know and what I saw with Diaspora (YMMV etc.) I would definitely choose YC over KS if I was raising money.
How the Text Suggestion Box Makes Selecting Countries Easier
The NYTimes just covered a similar idea, in an article titled "Just Manic Enough". An interesting quote from the article, which I think sums it up fairly well, was "You need to suspend disbelief to start a company, because so many people will tell you that what you’re doing can’t be done, and if it could be done, someone would have done it already. There are six billion human beings on this planet, we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, we’re a couple hundred years into the industrial revolution — and nobody has done what you want to do? It’s kind of crazy."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19entre.html
I agree that correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

However seeing as correlation always accompanies causation, it's not the worst place to start an investigation.

And viruses have been known to cause epidemics.
Every single cyclist that I've met here in Boston, except for one, has gotten into an accident. This city is a horrible place to bike or drive in (but a wonderful place to walk in).
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Diaspora, beyond the (brilliant) points made about security.

1. When media hype provides you with $200k, you're still best served by bringing people's expectations down to earth. There was no way they were going to be able to build anything approaching a Facebook killer in 3 months, and it would have been best if they would have made that clear in the beginning.

2. There are a number of projects like Diaspora that have been working for years towards the same exact goal. The only way Diaspora could have succeeded where those have failed (or not-yet-succeeded), is if they had properly articulated where they would go right where others had gone wrong. If you can't do that, you probably don't have the perspective necessary to take on such a huge project.

3. We all need to be less susceptible to the story of the "boy wonders" taking on the establishment. Between Diaspora and Haystack+, these should be sobering lessons about the dangers of hype and a good human-interest story when the result we need is stable, well-written code.

+ http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/myth-of-boy-wizard.html

4. Open source isn't magic. Rails isn't magic. Having a good idea and a whole lot of heart isn't magic. It's true that the software world isn't exactly a meritocracy, but at the same time, we need to recognize that you have to be able to build something generally usable, and if you can't, there's nothing that will save you except for harder work and learned lessons. Some bugs will be fixed by the interest in Diaspora, but there are big architecture questions here that need to be resolved, and coordinating that democratically through the internet in a sea of strangers is a logistical nightmare. And while rails does provide a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, a project of this size isn't held up by how long it takes to write the photo-uploading code, it's held up by the big-picture stuff that rails can't really help you with. In the end, programming is programming. You need specs, mockups, user stories, documentation, all kinds of unsexy stuff.

I think we'll probably see Diaspora stabilize into something usable at some point. But I'm very doubtful that will be anytime soon, and I'm especially doubtful that it will be before the other projects (Elgg, Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, StatusNet, etc) mature into the facebook killer people want to see.

Building the kind of open source social networking software necessary to take on Facebook at it's own game is such a massive, complex undertaking, and it's such undiscovered territory, that there really is a big disadvantage to being the new kid on the block.
YC hasn't been about the funding for a while, so saying the funding part of YC is obsolete doesn't mean much. The "convincing people that it's not that hard to start a startup" part of YC is also obsolete now that people are shouting this message from the rooftops, but people are still applying like crazy.

Also, good for you that you got people to donate $6,000 to your for-profit company, but if that happens too often it's going to create a backlash.
Now that VLC for iPad is out, I've installed it and tried playing WMV files but they don't appear on the shelf. Is it forthcoming?
Took a while for me, but things got interesting when I started crafting. From there and I had to go deep mining to find metal, and then I crafted my first diamond tool. Down there I had a few scary moments, only survived because of the metal armor I did. Until now I'm not very fond of building, I just build the necessary. Tried to start some fancy stuff, but lacked a lot of materials, so for now I'm just filling some chests and crafting tools and small stuff.

Here's a good start for crafting:
http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting
well, welcome to the American Dream, where you too can become a billionaire, as long as you start from a position with massive capital and a large hedge fund happy to take you back if you fail..

This is the stuff that motivational speakers thrive on. Of course the whole 'when I am 80, I don't want regrets' framework works, as long as you assume that you are going to be filthy rich no matter what choices you make.
Thanks for the link! I'm very open for any technology questions, concerns, feature/other suggestions you all may have.
The primary reason is so we can have a lot of the space. Most tenants of the space will clear out Friday and be back Tuesday (which also gives us time to clean up after the event).

We wanted to do it the week before but the schedules didn't work out for the people helping, the space, etc. Shoot me an email (m@mikeyur.com) if you just want to drop in on one of the days.
Well, he ain't on the Quora list and no one there has even suggested him yet, so let's all be a little careful with our public guessing, shall we?
Well, I don't have a ready reference for SQL injections, but how about one for XSS? http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html If that doesn't teach you anything, well, my hat's off to you.
I agree. Server based software makes it easier to fix things in a continuous manner - ensuring that software doesn't suck over a period of time.

Also agree with the "getting involved with real users" point. One of the ways to achieve this is to build and market for smaller firms - these tend to operate less bureaucratically, and also have a good chance that the buyer and user is same. This also allows for the software to be built in a more organic manner - the most crucial aspects first and then features that are incrementally useful.
Not sure, but I do know that it would be really hard to steal :)