skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also never claimed which country, and I didn't even capitalize the P.

If people were better at grammar, the taxpayers would have slightly more money :)
If you're going to be developing a sort of API and plumbing that underlies this, you'll probably want to have at least one application that you use as your test bed for the API. Sort of how HN was PG's test application for Arc. It should be a realistic, non-trivial application.

Sharing music libraries sounds like a minefield -- maybe you'd want to start with picture sharing or something like that.
For low volume sites the benefit to using hosted DNS usually comes in an improved interface, an API or other features that make managing DNS easier than it would be through a hosting services DNS management interfaces. In many cases it's not worth the effort, YMMV.

For higher volume sites there are more reasons to move to hosted DNS. Specifically hosted DNS services may provide higher redundancy, SLAs, Anycast and GeoDNS and other services that are designed to improve DNS response times and reduce the likelihood of a DNS failure.

In the end it in both cases it comes down to specialization, and I think, although I have no concrete evidence of it, that people often prefer a specialized service as opposed to a general service.
It's somewhat of a chicken and egg problem: if you don't give programmers the ability to choose their tools, you can't hire top talent; if you can't hire top talent, you can't give programmers the ability to choose their tools. Recruiting is also a zero-sum game: if you don't hire the best, your competitors will. That means if technology is an enabling factor in what you do (it doesn't have to be your core competence), empowering programmers is a competitive advantage.

I was at CUFP (Commercial Users of Functional Programming) recently where I had a conversation with Yaron Minsky of Jane Street. He mentioned that due to their use of OCaml (and being one of the few places in their industry where software engineers are not treated as second class citizens) they have a much higher quality of not only hires but applicants. He mentioned a job listing on a caml mailing list yielding a fairly small number of resumes, but a much higher percentage of these resumes translated into phone screens, on-sites and finally hires. I am not sure I'm allowed to disclose the percentage, but it's a fairly incredible number compared to what I've seen elsewhere; even the people they passed on, were of high quality.

They are effectively choosing "the best of the best". If someone is willing to learn spend the time to learn a non-mainstream language (this used to be Ruby and Python in 2004, but now they're Haskell/OCaml/Scala, CL/Scheme/Clojure, Erlang; this may change again, I see at least one of Scala, Clojure or Erlang becoming mainstream) -- and I am talking about actually learn, beyond "fizz buzz" -- chances are they have the passion and the work ethic to be a good programmer.

Of course this isn't a bijective map: there are good programmers who aren't interested in non-mainstream languages (in many cases they have highly specific knowledge e.g., machine learning where the language used doesn't matter as much), but I've yet to see someone take the time to learn Haskell on their own (without being forced to do so for a university course) who wasn't a good programmer: they may not be best of the best or a good fit for every position, but they are certainly not the kind of person you're going to regret bringing on-site to interview.
Ask HN: advice on .io domains
I'm considering using a .io domain for a new project. In light of the current .ly scares, I thought I'd ping the HN community to see if anyone has experience with the .io TLD and could provide some insight on working with the registrar, SEO issues, and reliability.

I'd especially like to hear from HNers working at a popular .io shop (e.g. drop.io).

Thanks!
Yes, they got the IP from /.

(The Slashdot FAQ used to say, "we don't store IPs", but this silently disappeared.)
Actually, Carl von Ossietzky was awarded Nobel Peace Prize while he was in prison. At that time, Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany.
I would love to hear from anyone that read this if there was any actual point or moral?

Otherwise, it was an interesting read if a bit overdone with standard dysfunctions of the teenage youth. I say that because there was no real development. The story almost read like the beginning of a Stephen King novel without the rest of the story to tie it all together.
I think you mean TTL (time to live) not TTY, right? 5 seconds is super short, but if you're doing dynamic DNS update I suppose it makes sense.
A vesting idea
how do i start doing this
The iAd revenue from my flashlight app has continued to do quite well.
I tend to stick to one browser across my various machines. If I wanted to start using Chrome I'd just export my bookmarks from Firefox, import them into Chrome and set up syncing with Chrome.
Surprise, it's Wired. The news is that it's minimal enough that it functions on e-reader browsers, and the Kindle is the dominant e-reader.
The title of this submission completely misrepresents the (very weak) claims made by the article.

The article leads off with a single anecdote about one fraudulent company which stole $12 million from banks.

The remainder of the article is devoted to fraud perpetrated by homeowners (sometimes in collusion with mortgage brokers and others).

One of the few hard numbers the article gives claims that 53% of fraud is simply investors (i.e., homeowners) lying about whether they intended to occupy the property: Then in September 2005, [a study claims the] most prevalent type of mortgage fraud - 53% of all claims [...] involved an investor who falsely claimed on the mortgage application that he/she intended to occupy the property as a primary residence.

It then recounts anecdotes of mortgage brokers with baseball bats, homeowners lying on mortgage applications, and assorted small sample studies (e.g., homeowners lied on 90 out of 100 NINJA loan applications selected for study). Not to mention another study claiming 40-90% of subprime homeowners lied on their mortgage application, and significant numbers of homeowners facing foreclosure (in various small studies) also lied on their applications.

The article is weak. The title on HN is a gross misepresentation. Flagged.
thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep it in mind.
The National Ignition Facility - Laser Fusion Generator
L - the Little Language on Top of Tcl/Tk
I've seen some metrics drop by as much as 10% because of this issue. The drop was pretty bewildering at first, but then I A/B tested including (but not using) the javascript and saw the difference.
Ask HN: Feedback on a couple of startup ideas
For the past few weeks, I have been researching into a couple of ideas:

1) Online gift certificates for restaurants:
Currently, very few restaurants sell online gift certificates. Many sell gift cards at the restaurants but if you need to order one online, they need you to fill a payment form, fax the form to them, after which they mail out the gift card. In todays world of instant gratification, this is missing out on potential revenue. The way this idea will work is to have a link on the restaurant's website to the site which will handle the payment and fulfillment of the gift certificates. Being an aggregator is not the goal in this idea.

I have talked to several restaurant owners and most seemed very excited and interested in the concept

2) Build an iphone app that will become a visual menu for restaurants:
Currently, restaurant menus are boring. They hardly include any visual images of the menu dishes. Visual aesthetics / plating are a major component of the high end restaurant dishes. They way this idea will work is to have an iphone app and then build a catalog of restaurants and the photos of their menu dishes. When a diner visits a restaurant, they can fire up the app and see the photos of the various dishes.

The biggest hurdle that I see with the above ideas is selling to restaurants. Restaurant owners are a busy bunch - and simply getting in touch with them can be a challenge. Selling to them is a totally different beast.

I'd like to get the feedback of the HN community on these ideas. What do you think ? If you want to get in touch to discuss any of these ideas further, my contact email is in my profile.
Does Technology Help Us Be More Ethical?
I know that in the general case, passive income is a pipe dream, but it's just particularly frustrating with Wordpress how you have to be always chasing the API and fixing breakages every point-version.

My plugin was particularly bad, I supposed, since I was manipulating the admin interface with JavaScript, so every time they tweaked pretty much anything, it would fall apart.
Does page caching help? I have that setup for my personal wordpress blog.
I really don't wanna have to modify all the javascript on my page. I've got bigger fish to fry.

I also don't want to have crap slow page loads. It loads for me in under a second.
The site's purpose was NOT to shorten pornographic urls, it was described as a "sex positive" url shortener

One man's art is another man's pornography.
I have no doubt something similar to this took place, BUT if you claim this to be the primary cause of the housing collapse, then you have ulterior motives. Like looking for a scapegoat to excuse your personal financial decisions. Or having a vested interest in the real estate market inflating back up, which would require the public to no longer be wary of making the same financial mistakes...which would require a scapegoat to excuse their personal financial decisions.

Note who's publishing this article. What do you think they want you to believe?

Got an economic idea you want to incept the public consciousness with? No matter what it is, you can find an economist somewhere who believes it. Then all you have to do is hire him to write a column.
Congratulations -- but uhm... shouldn't you check back in with Patrick and make sure his needs are met? I mean, he's Customer #1, and it sounds like your reaction to that was to abandon him.

I might be misreading, or Patrick may have backfilled you, but the 1 thing I know about business to be more true than most things, is you take care of your early customers, specifically if they were good to you.
There are two popular options for Indian CS students:

1) Write GRE, apply to some good American CS grad schools, finish the Masters degree and start working for your dream startup in Silicon Valley or any of the top software shops. This will also help you with getting a work visa (having American Masters is an advantage).

2) Alternatively if you would like to stay and work in India for a while, there are some great places to work within India. You can work for top-tier global companies like Intel, HP Labs, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, NetApp. I'm not too much into the Indian startup scene but there are some interesting early-stage internet startups like Flipkart. I used to work with the Hadoop team in Yahoo Bangalore (90% of the map-reduce team is in Bangalore). Usually these MNCs have the same kind of work culture (for the most part at least) in India as their American campuses. You don't have to engage in Visual Studio/Eclipse masturbation if you work in one of these places.

Re: certifications - if you want to work for the likes of Google, they don't care at all about certs. Since you're a first year student, I would instead recommend you try to get an internship at one of these places. Getting a job offer with the same company after an internship is pretty easy.
I agree, I probably am not going to use an API that I don't see any app using. Also if you write an app that transfers between two phones you will have a much better idea of how the API will need to work.

Picture sharing is a good start... Something like Bump would also be a good start.
Very good point. This doesn't mean it is a bad investment, but there are enough factors outside of Hulu's control to make this anything but a sure bet. Digital on-demand distribution is going to be the future, but the real question is, will Hulu be the one to pull this off. That isn't clear at all at this point.
Domain registries regularly do so including all the major ones. Particularly common are pulling domains used for scams, controlling viruses, illegal pornography and of course famously the pulling of wikileaks domains for leaking documents.
Personally, I think you should be able to do whatever you want with domains that you register in your name and that you paid for

Do you not think that, really, this is the key issue and is a million more times more important for everyone than what we were doing with the url shortener itself?

I've spend a large amount of my career helping to build a free press (http:/bbc.co.uk/news) and it's something I believe strongly in.

Violet has published 30+ books on sex and sexuality and is a guest on Oprah and other outlets. I've got a good name for myself across the UK and San Francisco start-up scene even if you've never heard of me. I don't think we need to use this to get publicity for ourselves or our service (which was never really commercial, we ran it for the benefit of the community).

The reason we're making a big deal of this is the censorship angle and making sure that everyone else who has a .ly knows what is going on. We could have just let them do this and no one would have known.
You too can have a dream body – in your movies
Let's Take Back Columbus Day
I don't know. For me it seems like hulu has got significantly less useful over the last year, with the TV networks increasingly pulling their content off hulu and sticking it on their own sites. What are hulu's assets, aside from an apparently-shrinking number of licenses to stream content with a very small number of ads that nobody watches?
PadPressed.com is ramen profitable off of V1. Ironically, it started as a side project and may be the full time project over the next month.
How would you handle waiting simultaneously on multiple scripts that all want to use document.write?

I use some ad networks which want to call document.write to insert the ads. First I patch the document.write to a function that writes to the innerhtml for the first ad tag, then after that ad loads I change the function and start loading the next one.

Obviously slower than doing it simultaneously. I suppose I could look at the contents of how the function is called to determine which ad it came from, but did you have some better idea?
You may make an otherwise excellent case that lobbying is not intrinsically evil. Without judging that one way or the other, I will say that the sentence the grand-parent complained about bothered me too. It smacks of self-satisfied logic chopping, but it's complete bunk. If we can assume that some professions essentially require evil acts of people in the profession, then it's pretty natural (and reasonable) to call the profession evil. Again - whether or not lobbying falls into that category is not my concern.

For me the bottom line is that you don't even need that claim. You could have simply started the paragraph by saying that we shouldn't be too quick to generalize about lobbyists, since blah blah blah.

(Off-topic, but there's an odd typo in the first sentence of the piece: "Last weekend Eric Schmidt state’d the obvious." You don't want that apostrophe.)
I don't understand what they hope to accomplish. I can understand the (flawed) reasoning behind blacking-out news regarding certain events, such as how the Chinese government handles protesters, human rights violations in China, etc.

But this news item is a single fact. There aren't any "details" to cover up - the fact, comprised of a single statement "The noble peace prize is being given to a Chinese dissident" is nothing you can cover up. It's a single, standalone declaration, you can't apply spin, you can't really do _anything_ with it, other than simply know that it occurred. This kind of stuff is hard to "black-out" and it's rather pointless to do so.

The only way to combat news items like this would be to attack it, not hide it.
How can you hold the NIC.ly administration responsible for there not being a Libyan law reference in English?

One way to deal with stuff like this is to engage the services of a local legal expert and have them spell it out for you. That's not a thing for a layperson, even if they're versed in Arabic.

You should do the same if you intend to register a .de domain and don't have access to the German law texts and/or do not speak German. The German authorities are under no obligation to present their texts in English, in fact they would definitely not do a thing like that because it would create potential ambiguity.

And yes, I read all of the regulations, and yes, I think they're perfectly reasonable. And I would never ever think of registering a .ly domain because of those regulations.
I just updated my comment.

I don't keep my names at 5 seconds, usually I keep them at 1800. But when I did a server move recently it was great that I could lower it to 5 seconds for the change. Most registrars don't have this support, and if I hosted my own service it would be just as hard to make quick server changes.
I can't compete with surviving at $400 a month. That alone is amazing. The fact that you built a business is inspiring. Thanks for sharing your tale needmoney.

As others have mentioned, we'd like to know what your business is. Is it web based? Are you manufacturing widgets? Share the details :D
Ask HN: Web development graduate programs?
I was wondering if there are any graduate programs that focuses on web development and/or web apps
I'm no expert, but it's simple. You just follow the company until the day their stock is available on the market, and buy. An interesting IPO was Google's. Usually, Wall St. banks get first shot at buying stock initially before it's available to the wider public. Google thumbed their nose at Wall St. and allowed anyone to buy their stock directly in a kind of dutch auction. The banks were furious at this insubordination and thought this would surely hurt Google's chance to have a successful IPO. Of course, their stock has done quite well. It was first available around $85 I believe, and it's now over $500 (it previously hit over $700). I wouldn't count on Hulu taking this route though. ;) I would, however, caution any investment foray into the stock market with my standard advice: never put in more than you are comfortable losing entirely.
and 3.) thanking others for their help.
Why does anyone bother contributing to Wikipedia?
Scott Adams: Cooking by Internet
Not necessarily, no. See for example p9, which documents two famous cases involving full-time professionals. Good screening practices seem to help a lot, but as you know perfect security is an unattainable goal.
The fact that it's run by Monty Widenius is definitely a plus.
Are you sure? The most recent figures I've been able to find suggest the Nook out-selling the Kindle in March, and I see no reason for that to reverse when the Nook's update makes it far better than the original, and B&N is a mega-seller of anything in its stores.
Nice!, that's very inspiring, specially for the fact that you weren't afraid of asking for help.
Lately I've been putting my pride aside and have been asking my friends, family and people I know about my services, and they don't necessarily give me work, but they link me to other people who need it. My whole point is that being open is really crucial, at first I didn't want to look as they friend who needed work really, but know I'm asking friends to help me with some projects (web production btw).

It would be nice to read about your whole experience though. Thx
I'm pretty sure you don't need to write the element with JavaScript. You should be able to do the following:

<script async src="//..."></script>

(Use 'async="async"' for XHTML.)
Indeed. Something is not 'cheap' or 'expensive'; it's worth the money, or not.
I'm nowhere near making a living, but my "Brainstormer" app (http://www.tapnik.com/brainstormer) is making enough to pay for my apple gadgets, so it's kind of a self-sustaining hobby at this point.

I just released a free, iAd supported game called "Still Pond" (video review: http://www.appspy.com/still-pond-review) which is only making pocket change, but I haven't done any promotion on it.
I bet they're doing better with the ads now that they are asking users if they are relevant. It would be interesting to see some numbers in this area.

Occasionally there are amusing ads on Hulu which I find enhance my viewing experience. Also, the ability to purchase exclusive advertising throughout the show almost guarantees some level of engagement from viewers.

A recent episode contained Microsoft Office 2010 ads which I found to be a little repetitive/annoying and yet I now know _a lot_ more about some of the potential benefits of upgrading.
It's not a creepy stalker, you can see your friend's position only if both of you agree to. Or you can block your friend from seeing you if you regret about the agreement made earlier.
Yeah, I can see the value in that. Right now the minimum can be 1 minute at DNSimple, which I figure is low enough for most cases. :-)
I see most people my age (50) "closing off", they don't want to learn anything new. I think a lot of it is learned behavior, not wanting to be embarrassed or made fun of by their peers.
One should only count the IPOs that actually happen, I should think. One could base an index on buying a set amount of IPO stock at market a set time interval after the IPO. (3 business days?) I'm not sure how one should calculate the index in the even of a purchase. Should one "sell" a hypothetical amount of stock already in the index and use it to "buy" new stock?
During a talk [1] at Stanford, Loren Brichter mentioned that he was living off income from Tweetie (this was before Twitter's acquisition of Atebits and the rebranding of Tweetie to be Twitter for iPhone).

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewiTunes...
Evolving relationships are a fact of life in consulting. Sometimes relationships grow, or even engulf the whole business, like Lucky Strike did for SCDP in Mad Men and Microsoft has done with a number of security consultancies. Other times, relationships become vestigial or vanish entirely.

The entire point of consulting arrangements is to allow businesses to set the most flexible and reasonable terms to work under. If Patrick wanted a Wordpress theme factory forever, he could have made that a contract term. Somehow, I doubt he did.

Matasano engaged Patrick. We may be one of his earliest clients! Somehow, I doubt he'll be as available for tactical one-off projects for much longer. That makes me happy.
>I see at least one of Scala, Clojure or Erlang becoming mainstream

I doubt that, if only because they are so foreign to most programmers.

That said I would love for a Lisp language to become mainstream again.
The vb.ly story reminds me of when Christmas Island shut down goatse.cx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx#Domain_suspension_and...).