skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In all this , we forgot that they are here to create an open social network. This was their dream, so may be this is the way they wanted to do it.
exactly. It is not oppression when I don't let you use MY printing press. It is oppression when I don't let you use YOUR printing press.
Reporting on this story has so far been pretty crap, and light on details; hopefully a clearer picture will develop after ekoparty. But this is a serious issue. See http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2010/09/14/aspnet-s.... The machine key can be determined if you're using AES (the default). And the machine key can be used to forge forms auth cookies.

It's not about figuring out what's in the client cookies - it's about forging cookies that the server completely trusts on account of the (broken) encryption.
Honestly 3 years in, everything was fantastic for me too.

I'm a web developer / project lead. Its hard to explain why things have been negative for me lately, there are a number of compound factors over time. I got too comfortable relying on certain clients. Credit cards are pure evil. Basically any prolonged reliance on debt can snowball. At some point you jack up your rate and its hard to knock it down when you start competing on price.

But the biggest pitfall - its very easy to splurge on business overhead when you are doing well. Nice office, bookkeepers, outsourcing basic tasks, top notch CPA, lawyers, furniture, fancy computers, memberships, travel expenses etc. This stuff puts you into awful debt when the work volume shrinks. Basically when you are feeling happy and comfortable, save money like crazy and don't splurge on anything. It doesn't last.
BlackBerry Earnings Jump 68%, Reports of Death Greatly Exaggerated
London Launch48 - launch a startup in 48 hours
Launch48 is back on Friday the 24th of September at PayPal's office in Richmond, London. We have a full day conference on the Friday on the topic of "Top tips for entrepreneurs" including the following speakers:

Danvers Baillieu - Winston and Strawn
Hugh Chappell – Entrepreneur
Iqbal Gandham – Addpiks
John Lunn and Anthony Hicks – PayPal
Bindi Karia - Microsoft
Art Leyzerovich - ex Google and eBay
Julian Lloyds-Evans - Dennis
Turi Munthe and Jonthan Tepper – Demotix
Adam Paulisick - Nielsen
Julian Ranger - J Rangers Ltd & iBundle
Sean Seton-Rogers - Profounders Capital
Colin Spiller - Zenis
Paul Tarantino -iMega
Eze Vidra - Google
Kate Warwick - PR Savvy
Jerome Touze - Wayn

We are also running a Launch48 Weekend, the event that creates new startups in a weekend.

If you haven't attended the event don't miss the next incarnation of Launch48 and purchase your ticket now.
I'm a neat freak. I don't let cruft accumulate at the top level.

.git of course. Almost everything is under version control, either here or in its own repo.

.notes for my personal data. Email, chat logs.

.local for programs and configuration. In university we often had our home directories NFS mounted on linux, sun and IRIX machines. I would install say vim binaries in all three platforms and my path would include $HOME/.local/$UNAME/bin to get at the right binaries on each machine.

These days all the action is in .local/share. .local/share/scripts is where I keep my zshrc and so on, .local/share/config has my rcfiles. In particular .local/share/config/vim is several megabytes of vim configurations in their own git repo.

.runtime for generated files like zcompdump and whatnot.

I try really hard to minimize dotfiles outside of these, and to keep what is important somewhere in this hierarchy using environment variables or aliases. The one directory I can't get rid of is .ssh.

www is my homepage at http://akkartik.name.

Attic for old projects, usually git repos. Eventually they get burned to DVD and deleted.

Other than this I usually have one or two projects at any time. They are usually all I want to see when I ls. Lately all there's been here is readwarp.
BP's Shock Waves
I agree, rewriting software, even ugly but well debugged software, is bad.

(Debugging is 90% of software development).

But this isn't even debugged.

I write a prototype to learn the technologies for a given project all the time.
It is the first step in my development cycle (How the hell does this stuff work?)
I don't design it, I just start hacking.

Once I have an understanding of how the various pieces are able to fit together, then I make a design and put together the first system.

My point is that I don't think this is complete or well-implemented enough to comprise a first system.
(And it isn't, it is an alpha).
If you have to work around the clock, can't take a vacation, and can't afford medical insurande, doesn't that mean your business idea is shit and doesn't hold?

Easier to bash the whole concept of starting your own business, instead of admitting failure I suppose...
Logicly - the digital logic simulator
The "P" stands for product, not code-base.

Logically, security and privacy are secondary: they are properties of some functionality/data.
why don't you think it's the broker's fault?
That's ok, Steve gave out his contact info at TechEd 2005: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2005/06-06Tech...

Here's my question: I was a blue badge in Program Management for four years. I left in 2007 because I didn't want to deal with an atrophying bureaucracy, nor did I want to play corporate politics just to get a 5% raise each year.

I know a ton of other people who have left over the past three years, and more who are considering leaving now. I talk with ex-MSFTs who ended up at Google or Amazon, and their only regret is not leaving years earlier.

How do you stop this sort of brain-drain, and turn Microsoft back into a company where the industry's best want to work again?
Personally, I'd lump them with the technical people, especially given how common designers/front-end developers are.
Provided that most everyone else does get vaccinated, it should be fine to avoid vaccinating the small percentage of people with natural allergic reactions to the vaccine.

I don't think you should find the allergic culpable in your scheme, because if the reaction is bad enough, you're asking them to either endure suffering or die so that there is no possibility that they can harm you.
I stated using Dropbox to handle some of my needs, but I have implemented it in a slightly different way than I am seeign most peopel do it. I put the "real" directory, say Projects under ~/Dropbox/Projects, then I symlink that back to ~/Projects

lrwxr-xr-x 1 john staff 16 Sep 15 02:33 Projects -> Dropbox/Projects

Is there any reason to do it the other way? That is placing the soft link in the dropbox folder.
Quite possibly. Here's a group who are actually building one now, in Chicago, and blogging about it:

http://www.plantchicago.com/?page_id=2

Be interesting to see how that works out.
Ask HN: Please review my app:  MotoDiary
http://motodiaryapp.com

This is my attempt at making a minimalist, secure daily journaling app. It uses client-side javascript-based encryption to ensure that no-one (not even sysadmins) can read your entries except you. It's my first attempt at using some new HTML5 features, including web sql. It currently only works in webkit based browsers, but I'd like to know if others think it's worth making available in all browsers.
Without more details its hard to tell how big of an issue this is. I've been brought in on projects to fix security in the past, and in many cases, after thorough design and code review, we crafted up a modified design and implemented it in a week.

And these were in substantially larger systems.

With that said, I haven't looked at the code, so maybe the issue is more fundamental than that, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet.
you can use a standard rule set: http 80, 443 + ssh 22 for administration
Both domains are registered to pg
Steve, where did you get the $250,000 figure? Their Kickstarter page still shows $200K and change (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...), and now there are currently three mentions of $250K in the comments here, none of them questioning the $50K raise. Just checking to see if I missed another bit of funding somewhere.
Debates are rarely pointless when all parties are willing participants.
Maybe I'm completely wrong but to me it always felt like Tumblr landed on a seriously awesome name. There's just something nice about it: simple, clean, clever, cute, and very contemporary. It just feels nice. I wouldn't be surprised if Tumblr's name played a small factor in getting people to come check it out.

Sadly I think posterous's name is quite bad. It sounds like a developer came up with it (no offense guys), it doesn't roll off the tongue and it sounds intimidating.

These are just my hunches, no data at all to back any of this up, but I do feel like the right name can make a difference.
But once you've got reasonably cheap and plentiful energy, what's the big incentive for growing locally. If trucking it from Kansas to NYC doesn't pollute as much, reasons for building those towers diminish somewhat.

Of course, it's slightly different if you've got plentiful energy, but no good way to transmit/store it. Lots of solar panels all over the city to power its greenhouses. Or windmills in Chicago.
If it's that easy, why not just implement it in the first place and give people less of a reason to lambaste your application that supposedly centers around privacy?
At first it said 'day one'.
You apparently don't need the exception message at all. This was all discussed on the thread 3 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1687547
Structural issues. Adds weight, in ways buildings aren't designed to take. Requires soil, and water in the soil, which is more weight. Water causes damage to building structure. Some plants will be impractical because they'll want to burrow into the structure. It's dangerous to collect the produce. There are insurance issues around stuff falling off onto people. It becomes difficult to clean or replace windows. Once plants are on it will be difficult to change damaged trellises. Change to fire risk profile of building. Security and insurance considerations from people climbing on the structures. Buildings not designed to supply water to the plants. Freehold issues from one person's plant growing into another's area. Allergies. Bees. Rats. Effect of plants growing into air-conditioning systems. Council complications over the change to the view profile of the building from sleek thing to tentacled thing.
You're putting a lot of faith in Dropbox not to ever corrupt any of your file.
In my world 80% of those links don't qualify as porn. It's fairly classy stuff so I don't see how I should take it against Tumblr. What I do wonder about is how Tumblr makes money serving up so much content for free.
Diaspora isn't the code
Where's the evidence that Diaspora is using open core? Note that open core and dual licensing aren't the same thing.
Thank you for reading & responding.

I think I agree that yacc wasn't a great example for my purposes, but hang on. My point isn't that learning specific technologies isn't valuable, it's just that it is... specific. Even something as general as graph traversal is still not as ubiquitous as lines and pages of code. There may be more generalizable knowledge in learning yacc than there is in learning the Ruy Lopez, but either way, it's not as general as tactics.

Your fourth paragraph is a bit alarming to me, because I agree completely, and I hate to think that I wrote the opposite. I am most emphatically NOT trying to suggest that abstract knowledge is more valuable than practical work. What I do suggest is that being able to reason about code in general is more valuable than expertise with any one specific technology. Consider two coders who have both written AST generators with yacc: can they talk about the low-level, tactical design decisions they made in their code, and the implications of those decisions, and alternatives that they considered?

Thanks again.
There is no law requiring vaccinations. Perhaps there should be, but you really can't shame people for exercising their right to control what goes into their body, no matter how dickish it may be. And you REALLY can't shame them for their parents being idiots.
Oh come on. ESX isn't the shining example you make it out to be, true KVM doesn't have as nice snapshots as ESX, but ESX has snapshots that are implemented very poorly - a never-ending delta that grows and grows and grows and takes performance with it eventually too. How many times have I lose a VM while cleaning up snapshots? Not enough to count on more than one hand, but that's still too many times.
Not necessarily and I think it's one of those phrases open to interpretation.

IMO, second system effect is doing everything you've done bigger and better while fixing the problems in the first system. It wasn't tied to the elegance of the first system design, at least in my mind.
I can only speak for myself. I personally user tumblr (only started few months ago) for private ramblings about random stuff that comes in my mind. My tumblr is blocked from search engine and I have not shared the link with anyone. I also blocked out comments and whatever other social media features there might be. I would have made it password protected if they allowed private tumblers to have access to API (you can't post to password protected pages from desktop publishing software AFAIK).

I know this is not how or why most people use tumblr. But thats ok. I use it only the way I like it.

I also have a "public" self hosted wordpress blog which I share with my friends and family and open to search engine.

posterous, to me, is just yet another blogging platform. Just like I don't feel like I need to try out every single new things comes out every week, I don't feel like posterous really sets them apart is such a way from all other existing blogging platform for me to even bother.
Regarding your last paragraph: I could not agree more. I've described something similar to this to a handful of people at relatively high levels in MS before, and the answer I heard repeatedly was "not a snowball's chance in hell."

If you consider how much money Microsoft has wasted on seemingly failed or useless acquisitions, like $6B for aQuantive or $500MM for Danger, spinning off novel ideas from internal teams would likely have a greater impact at a far lower cost.
The amount of CS that Jeff doesn't know never ceases to amaze me; he should read more Hacker News ;)
found a nice online one[1]

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1702112
I suspect it has genetic components.
Although I don't think being an immigrant is a defacto stamp of approval of any sorts, the adversity you face as an immigrant kid does change you.

OR being an outcast of any sort.

The analogy I think of is you're brain is like a clay pot being formed in your youth. Hard hands (hard experiences) either create something amazing or destroy you. And then your teenage years cure you into that state.
Two things really stand out for me.

1. Please, please, PLEASE take the App Store model that Apple has used and apply it to Xbox Live. There is already a process by which developers have to get their wares certified to run on the Xbox so the review process is pretty much already in place. The barrier to entry on the 360 needs to be significantly lowered (there have been half-baked efforts, but nothing terribly inspiring). One of the most exciting rumors (that didn't happen) about the Apple TV was that it would be running iOS and allow for apps on a television. The Xbox 360 is in a great position to make this a reality. Let me write tiny games/apps for the 360, and let it be easier to get them on Live than it is to get on Apple's App Store.

2. The way the entire company thinks about User Interface / User Experience design is, if I may be impolite, fucked. What little I've been able to read regarding how MS goes about designing the parts of their software that people see and use comes down to this; We follow whatever Office does and middle management sanitizes everything. It's no wonder that something great like Courier died inside of Microsoft. Designing applications for humans is very, very hard. Designing applications for humans inside of a huge bureaucracy is next to impossible. There are probably people working at MS with titles like "User Advocate" and other nonsense, but the end product reflects that those people are incompetent, impotent, or both. A team of powerful, capable people need the ability to "stop the line" and say no to the bullshit. The company has coasted for far too long on UI/UX familiarity due to the pervasiveness of its products. People hate using MS software. My family hate their Windows PCs. The gloss and fresh paint of Vista/7 haven't addressed the common person's frustration. In a business environment people have an incentive to adapt to bad software and work around it. At home my mother just wants her computer to print a photo at the click of a button, at the proper resolution, with the right orientation, and exactly how she sees it on the screen. Experienced business and technical users have mentally blocked out the usability cruft of the last 20 years, but the consumer market is and will continue to be unforgiving. This is why Apple is eating your lunch.
Right, but you can capture the traffic between the devices that did a handshake and decrypt it.
Guy Steele on Parallelism [2006]
I love it! :) The best one so far! I'm still laughing my ass off!
GroupOn helped us a lot. They didn't really do much due diligence to see if we could handle the promotion. They did however tell us what to expect, showed us similar deals that had gone on across the country, told us to buy more phones and hire more people to work them the day of our deal. They basically told us to get ready for war.

Let me tell you. You have not known fear until you are on the receiving end of a GroupOn. Those people are animals. It was like the Mongol Hordes were coming to rape and pillage our business.

GroupOn is amazing. Like Andrew said, they breathed life into our business. We'd still be here, but they changed everything.

We get the money up front, breakage is insane. The promotion we ran in March, about 30% of people have redeemed their Groupons. And we have already had the benefit of sitting on alllll of that cash this entire time. They aren't the best customers, but they are pretty damn good. They buy things, they bring friends, they purchase 12 GroupOns and use 3 of them. GroupOn is great. These businesses complaining about being pillaged, they really have no one to blame but themselves. I am by no means a savvy businessperson, but to me this was a no-brainer.
It wasn't logical, scientific reasoning that brought them to that conclusion in the first place, so why would it change their minds?
What gives these foreigners the right to come over here and make American jobs? That leaves fewer jobs for native-born Americans to make!
> but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.

That doesn't follow. Anybody can take the AGPL'd codebase and make money off of it. It's not necessary to distribute something as closed source in order to make money, ya know.

That said, I hate the AGPL, simply because I disagree with trying to redefine "providing a service using Software X" as "distributing Software X." I'd have preferred to see them go with the plain old GPL, if they wanted a "viral" license. But whatever... it's their project.
That alone doesn't make it safe though.

DNS returns the same ip to me at least, so two plus points so far.

Still this is a red flag, they should choose a canonical url and stick with it.
It's not so much that it's hard to fix, it just demonstrates that they're either incompetent or not taking things seriously. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence for the future of the project.
The fundamental problem I see is that Microsoft's internal company bureaucracy (which is probably fairly typical of many large corporations) gets in the way of innovation.

My suggestion is to break up the company into its various constituent parts (Windows, Office, Xbox, Explorer/.NET, etc.) and spin them off as independent corporations.

I'd buy stock in MSFT if that were announced. Pretty sure it wouldn't happen though.
I swear, this might be hard to believe for some, this is EXACTLY the reason I tried out tumblr and ended up having a permanent blog there. It gave me the impression that tumblr was doing something right for posterous to try to "snag" their users.

I heard about tumblr all these years but never tried it before. Its funny how things work.
I'd be ok with the regular GPL at this point.
Nope, I just remembered wrong. I'll edit that now, thank you. At least that's not as bad as someone on Reddit who tried to say they raised $4mm...
Does Your Company Really Even Need a Blog?
D-Bus in kernel, kernel slightly slower?
ISwifter brings Flash games to the iPad. Sort of.
I was not sure what to say about designers. I had considered putting them with even a bigger caveat than with product managers, but decided that no - designers that are worth their salt are highly technical. They don't necessarily BUILD FEATURES but they are doing things that require advanced technical skills.
If you're using Java, the MS JDBC driver works just fine.
I don't see what point you're trying to make.

My point is that their problem is other peoples' expectations. Their ambition set the bar before they'd written a single line of code. Had they been more humble and waited to ask for a handout afte they had released what they have now I don't think there would be half as many articles hitting HN about how crappy their software is.

I think that they released something is great. I would never put some one down for having ambitions and aspirations to follow them. I would simply advise that they keep those ambitions to themselves and let their actions speak for them.