skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm starting to feel conflicted about these YC deals for priority API access. Yodlee is notoriously expensive and not particularly developer friendly. It's great YC is lessening that burden for their companies, but it's starting to create a competitive advantage that undermines core hacker ethics.

What I'd like to see is YC working with the Yodlees of the world to make their APIs more available to all startups.

Don't turn YC into the next Harvard.
I'm new to (posting on) HN, so those responses are great, too.
Two thoughts:

The power users run the DNS caches.

Nobody uses DNSSEC, so it's still easy to poison DNS caches. Power users know how to do this, and can "poison" the DNS caches with the correct entries instead of the government-sanctioned alternatives.

I'm getting some popcorn. This will be fun to watch.
This entire model is duplicitous on Comcast's part. They complain when content providers dump too much content on their network. Never mind the fact that Comcast's entire infrastructure is built to deliver lots of downstream traffic. If, for example, a lot of Comcast customers started seeding BitTorrent traffic to L3 customers, generating upstream traffic, Comcast's network would collapse because it is not designed to do this.

Comcast should be thankful that their peer is sending them content directly, and that they don't have to pay transit costs from their upstream provider.

This is clearly an attempt by Comcast to put up a pay-wall for content from 3rd parties.

I've noticed more and more cable company manipulation of CDNs. For example, nothing scientific, but a few days out of each month, Cablevision, my ISP in Connecticut, starts randomly delaying traffic to Akamai CDN which serves Hulu content. It is difficult for me to scientifically prove anything is wrong, however, when the entire Internet is working flawlessly and a few random Akamai CDN content addresses, which just happen to have Hulu content, stop working, or are throttled, something stinks.
I wonder about the security of this kind of a solution, and how they'll respect/protect owned domain names. I'm assuming the idea of ownership of a domain name becomes somewhat grey using this solution.

For example, how will they protect against domain poisoning by someone hacking their client to send out fake entries which redirect a domain to something they own?
The font you use for your tag line is too silly — it doesn't make me feel particularly learned or wise or any of the things I associate with scholarliness. Ditto that wishy-washy blue color.

The "email-subscribe" widget is ugly and gray. The border is too thick on the "email" and the slightly rounded "subscribe" box feels like a parody of web 2.0.

"to get updates on our progress" should not be on a separate line from "subscribe" but in general it should not be there at all. Think of a more concise way to say what you want to say.

The "h" and the "r" in your logo font make me want to punch a baby even though said baby has done nothing wrong. I don't know what font that is but it makes me feel kind of like the bondage rape scene in Blue Velvet makes me feel.

"We're taking it back" should not be on a separate line from "The internet was built...", nor should it be in bold.

So inasmuch as "coming soon" pages go, you managed to incorporate all the things you're supposed to have while simultaneously making them all very unpleasant. But why is this posted here? Why does it matter? Is this an attempt to make us subscribe and build up your prelaunch audience? Or are you a designer trying to master the art of coming soon pages? Otherwise I don't know why you'd care enough to ask for a critique.

(Also: WAS the Internet built for universities? What does that even mean? Do you mean the old old Internet that started as a university project? Or do you mean 2005-era Facebook? I am so confused. Please explain.)
If bittorrent services centralize on this, the US will have effectively shrunk the scope of it's target space.
Rising Antivirus Free Edition 23.0,free  download
This is a very interesting project. However, I think in order for something like this to succeed, it needs to be founded in a truly altruistic goal such as education, research, or some form of free information.

"By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service"

Sadly, the acronym p2p is tied with media piracy. If this alternate DNS system relies on the .p2p TLD, ISP's will have an easy way to filter this traffic. Beyond simple blacklist blocking, similar to what Comcast is doing to Level 3, it would make more sense for ISP's to simply charge extra (a lot extra) to access the .p2p side of the Internet.

A similar conversation was had years ago around the .xxx TLD discussion. In the end, the Internet needs to be open and priced at a level where everyone can access the information contained within it. If the US, China, etc start to impose drastic, unresonable restrictions then we will have no other choice except to create alternate systems. Eventually, this will create a fragmented, disjointed Internet completely different from the one we are using now.
Really? You mean with a complete and utter lack of success? Zing!

edit: you know, when someone who is cited as a possible presidential candidate reflexively reaches for an extra-judicial solution to resolve the releasing of state information by a foreign whistleblower then ... what? i don't know, but it's very telling. the road back towards the rule of law is going to be long and difficult one.
Fell off many times; lucky to never break anything yet.

It is surprising how little we do to remain safe on a bike - strap a block of styrofoam to your head, and you're good to go! Not even wrist guards. A football player wears more, they travel far slower on grass and hit lighter objects, and look what they wear.

Even so, no way am I going to wear more than spandex and a helmet - it would vastly impede my performance etc.
I've reached out to the owner of scholar.ly, but he isn't interested in selling. This is an ongoing contention with us- do you think it'd be valuable, considering the time tradeoff, to survey grad students and test a few names?
pater familias, when one dies, another takes his place.
Fishy. From Slackerboy @reddit:

> Yeah I have seen the peering agreements with L3 and Comcast,
> this story is complete BS.
>
>> Before Level 3 Communications landed the Netflix CDN deal,
>> it sent approximately the same amount of traffic to Comcast
>> as it received.
>
> This is a flat out lie, end consumer networks like Comcast ALWAYS
> receive FAR more traffic then they send. Note how you get something
> like 5 megs down and 1 meg up... wonder why? Because as an end
> user you are not allowed to run any servers or serve any services.
>
> When you request a YouTube video you send maybe 20KB up stream
> and receive 50-200MB back. Comcast has NEVER had more then 5%
> upstream.
>
> I am smelling a Comcast fed story here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/edxjp/level_3_ou...
The answers from benihana and cromulent are correct, but the following may possibly be a useful thought experiment.

Imagine a balloon (our universe) with lots of ants crawling on it (photons moving at the speed of light). The ants can't walk any faster than 2mm/s. They can't take a message from any part of the balloon to any other faster than that. (And, let's suppose, there's nothing living on the balloon that moves faster than an ant.)

Now someone blows up the balloon; it gets much bigger. Its expansion moves the ants apart much faster than 2mm/s. But it's still true that if you have two points 10mm apart, no ant can get from one to the other in less than 5s.

Suppose the balloon starts off rather small, and then is blown up very rapidly: perhaps it grows abruptly from 100mm across to 1000mm across in less than a second. (The corresponding phenomenon for the universe is called "inflation"; it explains many otherwise puzzling things but no one knows for sure whether it really happened.) Then it may happen that the only ants that have been able to reach one particular place on the balloon (our observatories) have come from a smallish fraction of the balloon (the observable universe).
According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

Cool, so, uh, /etc/hosts?
I like this a lot. I can already think back to a number of times when I or a friend could have used this. I can't imagine it being simpler to use, and I like the nice, clean presentation of the text.
I was thinking about a sort of reverse Tor this morning, so that sites can hide their IP from users, as opposed to the other way around. Trouble is, you want it to work with existing browsers - users aren't going to install a new piece of software or a special browser to access masked domains.
New iOS app for November is Launch an App Month
I'm not sure I can see that, since the sentence following that quote is »We hope that everyone working on hudson today will do as they claim to want, and work with us to make hudson stronger.« This reads quite passive-aggressive to me, indicating that either you go the Oracle way, or you're clearly not really interested in bringing the project forward.

And even if the above were a subtle hint intended to be below the Oracle radar, it would be a suggestion or opinion of a single person, not an invitation.
MeeGo is doomed, and Nokia with it if the suits holding the purse-strings aren't careful.

Nokia are the 120th biggest company in the world ( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l... ) (falling from 85th in 2009); they have leeway to do a lot of things wrong before they are "doomed".
And on that note, the creator has made the common mistake of performing the calculation speed_of_light * age_of_universe to determine the radius of the observable universe.

Space has expanded during the lifetime of the universe so the objects that emitted light at the edge of the observable universe have moved further away since emitting the light. The estimated distance to the edge of the observable universe is more like 47 billion light-years: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#DN

The visible universe, however, is a bit smaller since we can only see as far as the surface of last scattering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_rad...
Yes, true. 'Race to the bottom' may be a bit too negative. I guess one downside is that it is tough for new players in the market, since selling in large quantities is required.

On the other, thanks to competition, Acer Laptops are now available at a little over 300 Euros. The free market made computers accessible to nearly everyone in the Western world (and hopefully everywhere in the future).
Let us C
Bush Makes Fun of Zuckerberg at Facebook
Which doctype should you use for HTML email?
The Amiga speech device had a nice phoneme grammar you could use to make it say all sorts of odd things.
> Regarding Fatzke: "zk" is not in one syllable either.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. But since it's not compound, it's not as bad.

By the way, if you want a genuine example of strange sounds in German look at Herbst or Pfründe.

Fun fact: If you can pronounce Streichholzschächtelchen, you automatically gain German citizenship.
Future Plans for Twitter
Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but the dns lookups will be built into torrent apps, which everyone uses. So rather than go to piratebay.org the user would open utorrent and use the utorrent browser.

This will not be significantly harder.
Concurrency as basis for Scalable Parallelism
I think Moblin had shipping products. Not on any great scale, but the Maemo tablets didn't really set the world on fire either.

I think fairly pure Linux plus Qt, with the heft of Nokia and Intel behind it is a fairly good hand, I guess we'll see how they play it.
Exterminate It 1.7,download link
Nobody would mind Exchange being down if Youtube was available :)
For some reason, math notation has always felt less formal and rigorous to me than any programming language. It seems very "analog" and vague, whereas you can always run a program to get a result.
When to Take Seed Funding - The "Knowables"
I see you are in Canada and in North America questions like that may get the interviewer into the legal trouble.
Nokia has always produced top notch phones. Their only problem is that it looks like they couldn't write decent software for phones if their life depended on it (randomly shuffling browser bookmarks every time I open the IMAP-client? Come /on/...)

Sent from my Nokia E sixtysomething or other.
OATV Provides $1.1MM in Funding to Makers of Runkeeper
You are a Turing machine
Maurice was a man of great humor and insight. It was an honor to have known him.
You should judge a people if they fancy themsevles a democracy (especially if they think their democracy is so good it deserves to be "exported" to other countries!)
The average user doesn't need to know about special p2p dns lookups. He just has to be able to download a bittorrent client which knows how to do a p2p dns lookup.
I really don't trust Nokia. They have a systemic internal culture that thrusts engineering into the lowest possible role. The number of engineers within Nokia who would fail at the FizzBuzz problem is staggering, often in key roles. The problem is that upper management doesn't understand why that's a problem.

Their hoping that Open Source will save them from themselves I suppose, but that rarely works. As long as Nokia is largely fronting this project, I don't have a lot of faith in it's long-term viability.

I just don't.
No, but your iPad could.
Why is it in YC's interest to do so?
This is only DNS, there's no ".p2p side of the Internet". It's only providing a lookup for IP addresses based on a name.

One can easily set up a .com or what-have-you that's also got a .p2p equivalent, e.g. "ChrisWSite.com" and "ChrisWSite.p2p" have the same IP address.
Demo is up! http://builder.bigtuna.appelier.com/
What's in the 882 patents Microsoft bought with Novell
the social divide has become as large as in e.g. The US.

Not even close.

Gini coefficient of Germany 2005: 0.28. The USA in 2009: 0.46

http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/areas/qualityoflife/eurlife/i...
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_weal...
You can now see a demo of BigTuna testing itself using the github repo right here:

http://builder.bigtuna.appelier.com/
"The defining characteristic of hacker culture is the awe of beautiful code."

Not for me. I find the defining characteristic of hacker culture to be the inventive re-purposing of things.

Google Beatbox is exemplary of this.
You were probably watching "The history of the U.S. made in U.S." and there is the difference between that and the real history of the U.S.
I believe it is just a question of the number of employees and of when the organization started. Want it or not, the state is a large and visible employer.
For the longest time, I thought about terrorism from a security standpoint. If you treat the US as a system to break, then you see a lot of weak points: bridges, trains, malls, etc (in other words, the stuff you see on 24). If you damage these, you could do a whole lot of damage to the US economy, kill a lot of people, etc. But then I realized something: destroying bridges doesn't cause fear in the same way that, say, flying a plane into a landmark building does.

I used to think that the terrorists were idiots that couldn't pull off a simple attack... now I realize just how good they are at what they do: causing fear. The point of terrorism isn't to kill, it isn't to cause direct harm in any way. Those are tools to make us scared, and we've all played right into it. I'll never forget exactly where I was when I found out about the attacks on 9/11, or any of the resulting protection mechanisms; they succeeded in their goals, probably more than they ever thought they would.
Sounds like the first step towards the Cybermen.
Compare the number of Android handsets selling versus iPhones. Compare the number of users of Ping and Last.FM. I'm not saying they're not good at what they do, or that they're not profitable at all.
My buy in - I'm a developer trying to develop taste. I'm not sure if we're going to have a designer for this project, and the more aesthetic feedback I can get, the better (as I see it).

The wishy-washy blue is being a/b tested to settle a bet- usually we're a more scholastic brown. Working on your suggestions, thanks =)
The problem of domain ownership was what jumped to my mind. How would the system protect from domain hijacking etc?

The only system I can see has to do with polling multiple hosts, taking the most popular response for a domain and routing that way, but then it is still something that can be overcome with enough machines on the network.
geee I wonder what everyone will be looking up....
Two phrases every startup should adopt
Usually I read HN comments before the actual article, and as a result I was unaware of the blog's title before reading his comment. It provided value to me, at least.
The text "The internet was built for" is overlapped by "universities"
Is kale available in Norway? According to most sources (for example, this simple comparison chart: www.wholefoodsmarket.com/pdfs/superfoods.pdf), kale is a super food, and in the US at least, grows well during the winter months.
Business Blog Review: CloudBusinessReview.com | Bizlogue.com Business TV
(Also: the old old Internet. Any ideas on how to make that more clear?)
Much Paper Clip AI potential.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

A slight mis-prioritization on the AI's goals could easily lead to spectacularly unintended results.
I disagree - the more we understand the underlying mechanisms of our body, the better we can get it to perform. It's a bit like saying changing your diet because you know what's bad for you is messing with nature.
It's disappointing that this whole article ends without ever mentioning Ken Iverson's famous Turing Award Lecture, which is entitled "Notation as a tool of thought": http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

Perhaps the most interesting modern controversy about notation for programs is the one about point-free style in, for example, Haskell; advocates claim that it makes refactoring ("calculating") much easier, while opponents claim that it makes programs hard to understand. They may both be right. A fun paper on this from 1994 is "An Introduction to the Bird-Meertens Formalism", http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/publication... --- it shows a step-by-step transformation from a one-line program that takes cubic time, but is obviously correct, to a one-line program that takes linear time. It occurs to me that 1994 is rather a long time ago now, though. What's the current status of this line of work?
Angels/VCs are about return on investment, not making it easy for other other startups to compete with their portfolio companies.
Couldn't you do that kind of thing using git submodules?

http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html
Two things:

Calling new Object[]{} directly is going to call the constructor for Object anyway, so there's no really difference in the number of method calls for either.

Also, in terms of optimization: calling new Object[]{...} makes it so that the size of the array isn't known until runtime when the initialization parameters can be evaluated. Because array length is immutable the JVM must wait until execution to create an array of the proper size.

With the overloaded static createArray() methods used in ArrayUtils the size of the array can be determined and memory allocated (based on the number of parameters at the callsite and hence which variation of the method should be called) at the JRE's convenience/when optimal.

All of this is probably micro-optimization to the who-really-cares level, and might even be irrelevant due to javac/JIT magic, just wanted to show that the existence of the new Object[] syntax doesn't preclude there being performance gains from using something like ArrayUtil.createArray().
Really that obvious? Maybe it was just a half witty attempt of judging whether you are a potential alcoholic or not?
I completely agree. I met him about 10 years ago when both he and I were consulting at Olivetti Research Labs in Cambridge UK. A most gentlemanly man! So humble for being such a giant in the field.
any suggestions is my question? Or would I be better doing this as a web based thing?
On average it matters. But for "you" it doesn't.

My problem with college is that there aren't good metrics to judge how good a college is. The only data we really have is how good are the incoming students. If you moved the student body at Harvard to Kansas State and vice-versa (allowing for differences in population), but kept the relative reputations (so the students at KState were still considered the brightest, although now the faculty was different), what would be the result? Nothing? Severly undereducated students from KState and failing students from Harvard? Who knows?

Today people use college attended as a proxy for how smart you were at age 17. Which is unfortunate, because I think I tend to see the biggest intellectual growth from people between 21 to 30 (which is largely after grad school admissions).
Isn't that the same problem as downloading a torrent ?
It would be amusing if Zynga IPOs before FB does.
Or the neural "priming" mods from Greg Egan's Quarantine - or even, perhaps more alarmingly if the changes can be made semi-permanent, focus from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
Wish that had a larger font.
Thank HN: Design for Hackers
Human brains have highly evolved empathy software that can cause a human soldier to pause before taking an action that will end with a lot of casualties. True, the process of making soldiers involves a lot of de-sensitizing these instincts. But my point is those instincts are present in normal human beings and have to be over-ridden with extensive training, vs. robots that are likely to be intentionally designed to be psychopaths.
I thought this problem was solved 20 years ago. I recall using Emacs GNUS with a collaborative filtering system to remove trolls from my view of Usenet. Maybe an internet scale kill file would help?
No... war will now be over the processors and whatever keeps them running. If all of humanity lived their lives in virtuality, whoever controls the hardware is king.
Think again. Null pointers were a "billion dollar mistake" (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3186) according to C.A.R. Hoare (no relation to Graydon).

Look deeper, there is a rich world of Programming Language history and research linked from Rust's FAQ. Don't cling to your Java or C/C++ null pointers.
Did Pascal beat C++ at the 2010 International Olympiad in Informatics?
Crap, I'd hate to be in a position where I have to say "I'm honored to have Bush today".
It's amazing how many people don't know proper asymptotic notation and use big O for everything.

It doesn't help that research papers use wrong asymptotic notation.
The offer is to Assange, not to wikileaks, so no infrastructure required.

All it takes to manage wikileaks is ssh access to a bunch of servers hosted all over the place.
I will. Is the email listed under HN profile correct ?
No, he means when you open your browser and type "www.piratebay.p2p", some program under the hood will 1) connect to a tracker, 2) get the ip from the tracker in a similar fashion to what bittorrent does to get seeds and 3) continue with the navigation as always.

By connecting to this tracker, the translation from "www.someplace.com" to 12.13.14.15 (what the machine really understands) is done regardless what the ICANN dns says. No way to redirect to a "this page is closed" server, no web page can be cut off the internet. Check mate.
> Besides that, it's really childish to hate a country.

Perhaps, but it's rather mature to hate a country's government, particularly when that government is busily taking away people's freedoms, e.g. with the ACTA treaty.