skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They've found an even more effective way to prevent unauthorized viewings of their content:

"Error establishing a database connection"
I found that particular quote to be incredibly disingenuous:

> "But unless you're willing to believe that the people in charge are always right and that their lies are therefore justified (and if you think that, you haven't been paying attention), you ought to be in favor of any mechanism that brought more facts to light."

This reeks of "if you're not with us, you're against us" bullshit. So, because I am not in favor of complete carte blanche leakage of everything using whatever immoral means necessary, I'm suddenly a sheep that believes the government is always right?

No thanks author guy, I live in a world with shades of grey as opposed to some juvenile form of black and white.
I am in love with this machine (haven't bought it yet), but I can only assume it handles all your issues.

http://www.system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=28&produc...

You need to update to the SSD, but it still makes it below the starting point of the MBA.
jDoctest - the another doctest implementation for JavaScript
Only in Silicon Valley: a conference celebrating failure
I've been saying this since I first met the WePay guys at Hackers and Founders almost 2 years ago. If there was ever a company that I'd love to have %0.1 of, it would be WePay.
dasil003, you ask "Can you think of any online discussion boards with better discussion than HN?"

I often have better conversations when I meet up with friends at a coffeeshop. For me, Hacker News is in competition with all the other things I could be doing with my time, rather than merely being in competition with other online discussions. Hacker News may be the best place online for discussing concerns relevant to startups, but it still suffers from many of the problems that all online discussions suffer from, including anonymous posting. For me, the question is whether I should engage in any online conversation that isn't directly related to work. Is it worth the effort? Every minute that I spend discussing issues online is a minute that I'm not doing other things, such as discussing similar issues with close friends of mine in real life, or writing software, or responding to personal email, or exercising, or going to a museum, etc.
How did Mint acquire 1.5m+ users?
Great ideas and feedback! Thank you so much.

Regarding the sign-in... because we're building a community of readers and writers who are really only interested in giving or getting feedback, we want to ensure that users are committed to having an identity on the site -- which at a minimum requires a display name and an email address.

Same goes for almost any popular blog -- and HN and Twitter... you cannot post or submit comments without providing a few key personal details. We do like the common suggestion here that perhaps we can implement a 'gradual engagement' model, whereby people can read a few pages without rating them.

Thanks again.
I believe it, at least the general conclusion that sitting at a desk for 40 hours a week, plus sitting in your car for another 5-10, probably ain't that good for your health. It ain't what your body was designed to do.
IBM Looks to Ease Cloud Computing Security Fears | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com
I too thought "it won't happen to me", only to have my funds frozen when I was doing a few thousand of Bing eBay cashback churning on postal stamps.
Has anyone seen this in stores yet? For $100 it'd be fun just to hack with (both the software and the hardware, since I doubt that you could get all of those components for cheaper).

Also, I love that the screenshot shows the browser with a IE-esque icon. Really shows the target market.
Three More Big Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Starting Businesses
FedCloud - AWS Resources for the Federal Government
When companies pull pranks like this, what's the risk of legal ramifications? I'm all for ingenuity in harmless pranks like this, but I've not heard much on what they're risking legally by doing so. Trespassing?
Anyone have ideas on getting it running on OS X?

One downside to some (often interpreted) languages is that there isn't always an easy way to package them up into a single binary for user consumption.
Hi Jacques, as someone who's had trouble with Paypal, what stops you from using, say, WePay in place of PayPal? I just wanted to understand your thought process regarding this?
Thanks for mentioning the technical issue -- our database was being grumpy twice last night. Should be sorted now.

We agree with you about the background image and we'll get to work on improving that.

And as for the demo, we have that near the top of our list.

Thanks for writing!
He's just saying that Facebook can deal with it much better than a small shop.
None of that would disrupt PayPal. You can't just provide the same basic functionality of PayPal. If you could, I'd have done it a long time ago. The problem is with the credit card companies.

As for debit cards, those are easy to get. Incredibly easy, and easy to integrate with as well. Again, it's nothing special. I've been there, I've done it. A complete system where you could transfer money into your account tied to a debit card, send money, receive money, automated API, etc.

It sounds great on paper, but really, none of this is disruptive.
Not at all. The expected distance between the center of an n-ball and a random point in the ball is n/(n+1) times the radius.

Now, if you look at an n-sphere with respect to orthogonal axes, you find that moving along an axis you get out as far as (1, 0, ... 0) and moving "away" from the axes you only get to (1/sqrt(n), 1/sqrt(n), ... 1/sqrt(n)); but this isn't due to the sphere being spiky -- rather, it's because orthogonal axes are spiky.
Saying "by next year" and "may have already won the developers battle" in the same paragraph really flags this as wishful marketing.

Plus there is a lot more to wooing developers than just toolkits. But Qt is still something I enjoy using.
Here's some ways to maybe not do it wrong:

* http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/553751319/mustache-at-stake

* http://mashable.com/2008/04/18/bad-pr-pitches/

* http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pitching_rww.php

But without the text of your pitch, it's hard to say what went wrong.
Continuations in Ruby via blocks and exceptions
That seems to be the crux of the issue. Consumer positive is apparently not in Expedia/Travelocity's best interests. Dredging up old Stanford-days quotes of Google's founders seems a bit disingenuous.
Absolutely. Github profile (or even knowing what Github is) puts you way ahead of many resumes.
i don't think it's very reasonable to expect a response rate greater than 10% without pre-established connections.

for that reason, i'd highly recommend creating a list of the bloggers you covet and following their twitter feeds. i'm constantly building rapports with bloggers that could one day prove valuable. i don't need their help right now, but it's never too early to start engaging with them.

my advice for the actual message:
-spend as much time on your subject line as the body of the message
-keep the message as concise as possible
-think about why it would interest them

hope that helps!

-adam
Yes, that's a good way to get payments from customers to you, but it sucks as a way of paying for auction goods and freelance work, which is how I used to use paypal.

International wire transfers are a lot harder to do without actually visiting a branch of the bank I'm with and filling out a bunch of forms, and they take much longer to process too.
Whenever people whine about PayPal, I usually mention AlertPay, and get maybe one upvote and otherwise I'm ignored.

What's wrong with AlertPay? They seem like a pretty honest business and I've never had any trouble with them, though I've only ever bought things, not sold them.
one possible way of monetizing would paid iPad app.
Funny, I created something very similar couple days ago based on rocket.js: http://github.com/k7d/rocket_todo

(only it uses web SQL DB instead of local storage)
Use your handy comm system to call several beefy buddies and take the "trash" that someone has left on the building property down to a safe location in the building, and then tell everyone that dinner is being paid by some dumb startup after a bit of ice melts...
THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube
Past climate change influenced human evolution
I'd say this is a characteristic that's fairly common among Windows applications (especially less-reputable software) but uncommon among Mac applications.

My anecdotal evidence from helping friends and family is that Macs don't suffer from "Windows rot" [1] the same way that PCs do. My hypothesis: due to differences in the developer communities for each platform.

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=windows+rot
One thing I used to obsess over when I did freelance web design was getting the design perfect. Every site had to be a work of art...just the right size buttons, just the right radius on the round corners, just the right opacity for a drop shadow. Then I realized that for the most part, users don't care. If they did, there wouldn't be so many people using Internet Explorer. And the search engines really don't care (...yet). More important than having a pretty design is having useful and relevant content.

Now that I realize that, I take a utilitarian approach to design. As long as the design is clean and the information is presented logically, I don't really stress over design. These days I use a lot of templates from ThemeForest.net, or quickie templates my team in the Philippines can do in about 3 hours for about $12.
> Could we say... revenge is a dish best served cold?

...and resolved by acquisitions?

Paypal is owned by eBay if I recall correctly,

and one of WePay's investors is Max Levchin, former CTO of PayPal
Nothing, I just have not had the need to pay someone for anything in the last two weeks. Alternatives that I can use are international wire transfers and western union. Both have their own set of disadvantages, I'm most likely going to give some other service (possibly wepay) a shot when the next payment comes up. (and that's going to be fairly soon by the looks of it).
$5 million to encourage innovation in digital journalism
The Art of Lean Start-Up: Comic Book Edition
The Modern Healthy Lifestyle Checklist is growing.

1. Barefoot running. (check for me)

2. Paleolithic diet. (nope)

3. Stand while hacking not siting. (nope)

#3 is easy to implement, just put the chair in the other room. #1 is already done. #2 is hard to do because I don't make the choice to shop for X food plus potato chips are tasty.
Notifo (YC W10) Growl for Windows plugin released
Isn't swfupload flash?

But, anyways it won't work on something like the iPhone because there is not folder structure for it to look for something. You have to build a iphone app like Facebook did.
He didn't say "maybe you shouldn't be letting anyone know," he said "maybe you shouldn't be doing it." He seems to think conformity is a better solution than privacy.
You should try popping in a recent Ubuntu disk. Older (circa 2008) distributions had trouble with the hardware, but I have a 2006 MacBook Pro that "just works" with 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04. I even Bootcamped the hard disk and dual boot Snow Leopard and Lucid.
AlertPay is often used by MLM sites. I'm surprised they're still running, considering how much fraud those sites have, actually.

Other than that, it's a pretty solid service.
Looks like the guys over at droidforums.net got one: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/off-topic-forum/89150-maylo...
Hey thanks for the comment. I have corrected the misspelling of the page title.
Jason Snell of Macworld Reviews the New MacBook Air Models
I can imagine that suing them for trespassing after dumping a chunk of ice with a 'paypal freezes your accounts, join wepay' message embedded in it (as well as a few hundred bucks) would help wepay more than it would hurt them.

More free press! And a much longer running story.
I bet using something like a treadmill desk would help.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPjN07JyVjo&feature=playe...

They say it works in the video for doing things like e-mail and phone calls... maybe it would work for things that require more concentration...I wonder if anyone has had experience doing something like this while writing code.

Looks like a neat idea either way.
Defense against the hostile intent of other humans; defense against space rocks striking us at high velocity. I should think that how much we spend on one type of protection is relevant to how much we might should spend on another.
>> Personally, I wouldn't do business with an organization that doesn't respect its competitors.

It seems every month someone is posting about their money being held hostage or outright stolen by PayPal. Most of these complaints are from well-known bloggers/engineers/HN members, so I can only imagine how many people without a voice online are getting screwed. When you're dealing with people's money, you have a strong obligation to handle issues like this with speed and clarity, because money affects people's lives in serious ways. Yet Paypal's customer service doesn't seem to care, and they often take months to reply.

Why should WePay have respect for a competitor that doesn't respect its own customers?
An interesting property of social network websites occurred to me today: the bigger something like Facebook becomes, the greater its inertia, and the less it is able to change direction and compete. What I mean is, having your grandparents, parents, in-laws, bosses, etc. all on Facebook starts to become very limiting. Many people will feel much more inhibited about what they can write/broadcast, and therefore may look for fresh social networks where they can act differently. So, yes, I think Social is just getting started. And the money making aspect of it is definitely just getting started. I can imagine sites like say a SN for hackers - so you can bitch about the Swing framework to people who understand and wont think you're a ridiculous geek.
Melting a chunk of ice that size will take a long long time.
I'd buy mine in a heartbeat.
This wouldn't be revenge unless eBay did which of course wouldn't make any sense. This more of a "taste of your medicine" sort of situation.
My e-mail is t@james.info
store it somewhere private and warm, then wait. This is why he needed the pallet mover.
There are enough homeless people on that corner to pee the ice to ice-tea. For reals.
Ask HN: Review my startup - theappuniverse.com
We're trying to solve the problem of App discovery for both users and developers.

There are a bunch of companies trying to solve this problem. We think we have something that users will like, but we need you to tell us what you really think, the brutal truth.

We've been working hard on this and are finally ready for a wave of initial users.

The site is:
http://theappuniverse.com

If you'd like to signup and try it out, you can use:
http://theappuniverse.com/?code=hn
A lot can be done with such vast amounts of information. Don't you remember the AOL search data fiasco? Or how the Netflix ratings data can strongly correlate to one's lifestyle choices? Both of those data sets were "anonymized" before release -- just think of the damage data directly attached to a person could do to them.
Thanks for the reply. Here is the text of the pitch..

Hello,
I am Samuel, CEO of Adclays Advertising. Adclays is a system built for
publishers to sell ad spaces directly to advertisers with the industry
lowest fee of 15% and it gives more control to the publishers.
Publishers can choose between CPM or tenancy pricing and have total
control of their zone. We are currently in Beta and need users to test
our system. We currently have some publishers using the system. Beta
users would use the site for free without fees and would get other
incentives when we launch.

You can check out the website and our press kit at:

http://adclays.com/company/press/kit.php

If you have any questions, please mail me.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thanks.
Enterprise Document Management in the cloud made easy
they have been selling this since july
Austin-based Riptano Lands $2.1 million Offering Professional Cassandra Support
> Let's assume I regularly search for terms x, y, z, but don't want anyone to know about it.

That's basically impossible, and that's what Eric is saying. If you're searching for something, by definition you are telling someone about it: Google. If you're telling Google, and the FBI comes knocking on Google's doors, Google will comply.

Eric is saying: if you don't want to tell everyone a secret, then don't tell us.
I thought Google blurred out all genitals in Street View?
True, though I would think Moscone would be the one with a claim against WePay for trespassing rather than Paypal.
Ask HN: Review for Thrust VPS
I am looking to rent a smallish VPS for a side project of mine. I came across thrustvps.com. It seems to be incredibly cheap. A quick search turns up mixed reviews. Have any of you guys used this service?

P.S. I currently use linode.com.
Ok, do let us know how it works out :) I'm not sure if you'll be able to use WePay though, since their FAQs[1] state that they don't allow international payments at the moment(if that's what you'll be doing)

[1] https://www.wepay.com/about/faq#thirteen
being disruptive doesn't necessarily imply success. in what way do you think wepay right now is disruptive? plus, its not like paypal was the first online payments system.

sometimes its about timing, and at this point in time, there are a lot of people who are really angry with paypal.
The Essential Paul Graham: The Best of What Paul Has Ever Written
Anyone have a recommendation for an adjustable stand for monitor, keyboard and mouse that can sit low on a normal desk but raise up 1-2 feet use while standing? I'm not having any luck finding such a product.
Look, we got off the wrong foot, and I sincerely apologize for misunderstanding your response about YC to mean YC today. In any case, your products are awesome and I remember seeing Twistori a couple years ago and I totally dug it. Nice job.
Speaking of this, when will HN allow for HTTPS connections? :P
Someone should start a PR firm that focuses only on stunts! If the press is willing to write articles about stunts, that legitimizes the method in my book. Think how much people pay to get press, and think about how cheap these gags are.
My initial reaction was indifference - but it's amazing how many remote places Google has street view for. After 4-5 turns I saw remote country roads in Europe, Georgia, a path in Antarctica, etc.

It's a fun little mash-up.
There. Upvoted. Happy now?
The implied ending to that sentence is "...on Google."

"Maybe you shouldn't do it [...on Google]. Or, [...on the internet]. Or [...in a way that people can find out].

The idea is that privacy is difficult on the Internet: your ISP knows what you're doing, your search engine knows what you're doing, etc.

So doing something online without telling someone about it is really really hard. So if you don't want someone to know about it, basically your only choice is to not do it [online].

It's not that creepy and it's not the typical privacy fallacy everyone thinks it is (the "if you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to hide" bullshit)
I think what he put in the "what I can do" category is exactly what a startup should be looking for to fill in the gaps. What he can't do doesn't seem to be the key roles of an investor (like getting your startup PR or managing the people in your company).

Here's an interview with him on This Week in Startups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWJAkjF9qnY
Cool take on the roulette theme, but as far as signing up on your site goes i can't even enter my number. For example i enter my area code but i'm unable to continue to enter the rest of the number for some weird reason the cursor skips back to the area code box.

edit: i'm on chrome.. works on IE tho.
They are in a bind over such things though; because storing historical search data helps them offer an improved service to search users.

So what do they do? Delete logs instantly and provide no you search history etc. or..?

It is a balance.
hipmunk.com and bing.com/travel are doing an awesome job with making it easier for all of us. Hopefully Google can do the same or (hopefully) better.
Thanks Adam,i have included the actual email i sent to them. What do you think?
Awesome site! Upvoted.

Signed up and imported my Google Reader account, but some feeds are taking forever to load. Some other feeds don't show up at all after a while.
So basically the author is saying what hackers have been saying all along? That even tough you can make amazing things with php (though the same can be said about almost any language), php is still a clumsy language with awful conventions. No decent programmer is going to tell you that you're wrong to use php, but that there are so many better languages out there now, that people should really open themselves to new (or old) but better technologies.

Edit: Don't get me wrong though, I completely agree with your 'review'. But you came to the conclusion that php is not that bad... which off course doesn't make it good by exclusion.
I'm curious if Google has a voluntary reporting system, such as the one outlined here: http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/06/state-action-and-4th-....

AOL apparently uses the semi-secret child porn hash database to proactively scan content traversing its systems and reports to the authorities when they get a hit.

I'm sure other large providers do this, and it wouldn't surprise me if Google was one of them.
Personally, I don't deal in those platforms, and I don't work with people trying to justify those other languages by claiming they're "object oriented".

It was really just a semantic beef I had some time ago, and really would prefer people embrace the things about PHP which make it useful, rather than trying to sell it as something where it comes up short.
Yappi - Yet Another Python Profiler, but this time Thread-Aware
Hello,
I am Samuel, CEO of Adclays Advertising. Adclays is a system built for
publishers to sell ad spaces directly to advertisers with the industry
lowest fee of 15% and it gives more control to the publishers.
Publishers can choose between CPM or tenancy pricing and have total
control of their zone. We are currently in Beta and need users to test
our system. We currently have some publishers using the system. Beta
users would use the site for free without fees and would get other
incentives when we launch.

You can check out the website and our press kit at:

http://adclays.com/company/press/kit.php

If you have any questions, please mail me.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thanks.
Disposable computing is here at last.
-Why is there a "optionnal" label besides the password field?

-I really liked the little arrow, that we can lock on a page and allow us to create a bookmark like. It's innovative.

-It's really great that you released the source to the community!

Good luck!
Yes, international only.

If it's local I have much faster and more reliable ways than any web server, bank-to-bank transfers here are online and nearly instant.

Ok, so that rules out wepay then.
Almost all  HN accounts with plain first name (peter,john etc) are Fake ?
Just check out any id of the form:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=james

For all common names like :
bob,james,john,mary,thames,peter
and many more, I could see that they had no submissions, 1 karma, and created 1250+ days ago.
Anyone else noticed this? Wonder why.
Cleaning Malware/Viruses Off Windows PC w/ Free Software (long)
Walgreens website says they are not sold in stores.

http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/maylong-7-inch-m-150-wifi-m...