skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, I really do appreciate that. It was more difficult than I thought to actually write the story down once and for all. I'm still sitting here wondering what my mental block was at the time because it's not like I'm at all introverted or uncomfortable contacting people. Hell, listen to my podcast (TechZing) all I do is run my mouth. ;) Maybe the insight will come to me after some deep thinking or maybe even some regression hypnosis and I'll write a follow up. The post will have to be entitled something like - The Real Reason I Completely Choked. Ugh. ;)
I think your analogy is flawed in this case. Government-enforced monopolies have an implicit social responsibility to abide by social norms when conducting business. This is more akin to a subway refusing to carry a newspaper publisher because of something they published.

To the extent that a refusal of service violates social norms this creates a legitimate grievance in the absence of reasonable alternatives because of public policy.
Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering whether PG invests outside of YC if he likes a team more than his cofounders do.
>Assange is not a Swiss resident, so they closed his account, and are returning his money to him.

The timing was coincidentally close to many other "spontaneous" corporate actions against Wikileaks.
This is the internal inconsistency that troubles me about this whole WikiLeaks thing. We've railed on companies constantly in the past for being political, and now we're railing on them for not being sufficiently political in our favor.

So which will it be?

This is Amazon, PayPal, VISA, MC, etc, saying "woah hey a dangerously hot potato, not touching that", which strikes me as a more or less neutral stance.

To expect more than that would be expecting a company to make a political stand on one side or another - something we've consistently fought against in the past.

So which is it? Do we want companies to remain politically neutral and leave the democratic process up to real people (as opposed to corporate persons)?

Or do we want them to fight for our cause, and make open political stands? If so, we also have to accept that often they will not be fighting on our side, and each punch they throw will be worth a lot of real people's punches.
号召网客 - Call for Hackers - I'm opening a free hackerspace in Beijing （北京）
I know it probably sounds a bit too good to be true, but it's real! We'll be hosting v0.0 this Saturday (Dec 11th) at Yuanfen~Flow, a Beijing-based incubator that I co-founded in May. This is the realization of this Ask HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941408, where I got your advice on how to build a hackerspace.

Date: Saturday, December 11th, 2010
Time: 11am - Late!

Yuanfen New Media Art Gallery,
7 Stars East Street,
798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District,
Beijing, China (100015)

More datas: http://yuanfenflow.com/hackerlab
We're Bi-Lingual! 我们是双语言的！

What do you think? We're super low-hierarchy. If you would like to be a part of this, either as a participant or in a leadership role, please feel free to send me an email, stephen [@] yuanfenflow [dot] com!
Hi HN: I'm hiring
I'm hiring a software engineer in the Bay Area (Foster City) to work on a new application hosting platform at Rearden Commerce. I'd love to have someone with skills in Python and systems engineering who is passionate about devops on the team.

For more about the job and company, please see here: https://careers-reardencommerce.icims.com/jobs/1517/job

PS. I'm more than happy to turn this into a "Who's Hiring" thread if anyone wants to add openings. Thanks!
I agree. He seemed like a very friendly and intelligent guy when we spoke on the phone. The same goes for Jonathan Rochelle.
Damn, I'm an idiot. Make that direct investment costs of 208 startups is <$5million. (Order of magnitude error; shouldn't have been multitasking when I wrote the comment!)

Still, YC has still returned (and potentially as much as quadrupled) direct costs already, without a number of companies still to exit.
Ask a question like: How many people in Japan do you think are married?

There's no right or wrong answer really, you're just trying to get at how they come up with a number.

A hypothetical answer: Let's see, let's say Japan has 50 million people, of those 50 Million maybe 35 Million are consenting adults. Japan is a pretty traditional culture so probably a large percentage of...

You get the idea.

Cheers
Gosh, how does attacking 3rd parties advance the cause of free speech? Will the payment processors suddenly see the error of their ways? Will the U.S. State Department accept WikiLeaks as a legitimate news organization? No, DDoS will not solve your problems. It will just piss people off and conflate WikiLeaks' questionable behavior with blatantly illegal behavior.
One might answer, create a "AskHN: who's hiring?" thread using a puppet account and post your job opening there.

But I'm sure that would be frowned on ;0)>
Most of the people at Anonymous run the DOS attacks on their own computers, not through botnets.

I'm sure there are some script kiddies with botnets there, but I don't think the average Anonymous/4Chan member has one.
This is a momentary media phenomenon, like the stories about Obama around the time of the elections.

That said, it would be nice to have a way to filter out duplicate stories posted at the same time.
Someone once said to "What you have, then what you want" which made ALL of these easier to remember for me. In the case of strcat/cpy I think it still follows: I have an empty string 'target' and I'd like it to be 'source'.
Are the health records for your family members paid out of taxpayer's money? Do they have a negative impact on the lives of anyone outside your family?

Is your new product paid out of taxpayer's money?
Will it do a lot of harm to people?

The line is quite clear to me.
That may be true, but is THIS an illegal botnet? What makes LOIC illegal? What makes a determined, coordinated request from thousands of volunteer computers illegal? I liken this to a civil disobedience sit in.
A revolution doesn't ask from a permit for a city hall. Seriously, I have seen many demos banned arbitrarily for the lack of a "permit".
France practically invented modern state-sponsored terrorism with what they did in Algeria.
Because I'm a foodie-tragic, that's the first thing I thought -_-
WikiHow in Chrome
How to Describe Technical Debt to a Non-Technical Boss
Hi, his name's Micah. He's a UI/UX developer. You can learn more about him on facebook and twitter.
That's the fascinating part to me. He's operating in this international legal grey area, all the while behaving as if the law will protect him.
Why Wikileaks Will Never Be Closed Or Blocked
Both Amazon and Paypal ask you why you closed your account with them.

Now, if you just reduce your usage of their services, then you're right, it'll be hard to attribute.
Keepin' it real fake...

ln -s real fake
It has affected the payment gateways today, via their '3D-secure' schemes.

http://www.americanbanker.com/news/mastercard-experiencing-o...
Sorry about the downtime - we host our blog on Tumblr. I know, I know...
> force you to care

I prefer to live in a world where people don't force me to care about things but persuade me through reasoned discourse.
He can always do a 301 redirect to another page and send the google juice that way. He's getting a lot of advertising from this outlandishly low price.
> massive wealth transfer to the rich via dollar printing

Wat?
I thought the same thing. Twitter's asking for it.
It sounded exciting to me, until the "and pretty good with Win 2003/2008" part.

I do appreciate that you have a pretty comprehensive description of the technologies in use and the work environment. It helps everyone not waste time needlessly.
Being a government astronaut doesn't have the same allure as it once did, largely because they tend to do the same sorts of things that astronauts already did 40 years ago. Or, indeed, less interesting things as humans haven't left low Earth orbit since the mid '70s.
You're Crazy Not To Be Embedding Them From YouTube
As DanielBMarkham pointed out, it makes people notice.

It raises the cost for payment processors to do what they did. They typically respond to economic incentives.
(in other news, it looks like they did see the error of their ways: http://thenextweb.com/media/2010/12/09/caving-to-pressure-fr... )

The U.S. State Department won't care as a result of these activities.

DDoS doesn't solve problems, but it can achieve goals.

It probably will piss people off and it's not the best way to do things.
How easy is it, from electrical standpoint, to convert from HDMI to VGA?
When confronted with the situation, neutrality isn't possible: you either stand up for your users or you help the Government to censor.

There's only so much you can avoid taking sides on.
This. This This This This This This This.

This just lost all semantic meaning for me, but it's worth it.

YOU'RE SELLING SOFTWARE! How is it hard to understand that you need to honor your own business model in order to be ethical? If you expect people to pay for your software, why not do others the same favour?

To be totally honest, if you think it's OK for you to pirate software because you "deserve" or "need" it, why won't you think it's OK to pay your staff less then they might deserve? What about your customers who "need" your software but can't pay for it?

Don't shit on your own business model and expect to come off clean.
Better attack: reduce the credit card usage, and try to pay more with cash. Spread the word.
Too Big to Succeed
Who is DOSing Wikileaks?
He's got the insurance file, though, which sounds like he's not entirely counting on the law protecting him.

And I'm fairly certain the law is fairly low on the CIA's radar of priorities.
If I don't pay my employees the bonuses I promise, don't pay suppliers and lie to customers, it gives me the "Best advantage" to achieve success (for a certain narrow scope). Is that OK?

If I don't follow compliance rules because there's little chance of being found out, is that OK? After all, it helps me achieve success!
Why did you do that? Now I really want to implement a const and flip for text arguments :)
Bad credit and fraud are actually good reasons to deny a service, and fraud is, you know, an actual criminal offence that is easily demonstrable, unlike the arbitrary decision of the Department of State to not like an organization and whine about it to their corporate friends.
The worst job interview ever for software & systems developers
They had all day to prepare for this and they failed?

edit: up for me, at least.
LOIC itself isn't illegal but causing a DDoS is, however you achieve it.
All the more reason to sign up as a regular donor to EFF.org, even if it's just $5/month. If every developer, designer, software engineer, computer scientist, and new media professional who depends on unencumbered knowledge and information for their livelihood did just this small bit, EFF would be even more capable in its defense of intellectual freedom, and better able to prosecute all of these ridiculous patent/copyright trolls back to hell.

For anyone here who hasn't, here's a clickable: http://www.eff.org/

:)
Don’t write cross-platform code
A Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Have a good portfolio and gradually build up awareness. If you offer this service, link to a portfolio in your profile.

Don't compete on the same turf as elance types. I've used PSD2XHTML type services for $150-250 before and the main reasons I stopped was that the product wasn't really done to our house style and they couldn't hit deadlines. (Now I have staff that do these jobs for me.)
In practice though, is the degree of connectedness really ever that high? I was under the impression that many real world phenomena (from social networks to biological interaction networks) exhibit small-world phenomena and you tend to get more well-connected subgraphs that are connected by important hub nodes. So it would seem to me like applying some careful heuristics (and keeping track of important bottlenecks/hubs) would still allow you to do computations in chunks.

Would love an expert on the subject to chime in.
Yes, and 1984 is a book which has sold over 25 million copies for a publisher which is now an imprint of Random House which is owned by Bertelsmann (2009 revenue €15b).

That doesn't diminish its value as a work of art or as a cultural reference point.
I'm not aware of previous grassroots movements being democratically elected. Nobody elected the suffragists, for instance. That's not really how movements work.
The edit part should be fixed, we are investigating an issue with our CDN. Thanks for the heads up.
Please link to your startup (in this case, Swayable) at first mention in the first paragraph! Name is mentioned but not until the third paragraph is there a link to http://www.swayable.com.
Ugh. The person conflates not gaining money with losing money, the same rhetorical trick that the record companies make when talking about piracy.
Why even bring the 'female' bit into it? It means nothing, unless you think it's a handicap... And then it is, but only because you think it is.

As for finding a co-founder... You expect to do that without giving up equity? What would be in it for them? I'm not surprised you haven't found anyone.
I'm hesitant to liken Anonymous to revolutionaries but to be honest, almost all revolutions were started in a "small group" that was relatively insignificant (that was unelected), and then grew in size and gathered acceptance.

Again with the due process and rules: do you think when the French people stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution, there was any semblance of rules or accountability? Hell no. It was the "naked use of force". Did it have bad consequences? Some. Did it have good consequences? I think you know the answer.
Your app probably isn't running, so it's not included in their 106,000 number. They spin down apps every 24 hours, and only start them up when they get a hit.
Just out of curiosity, can you name a time when a Government has responded positively to this kind of attack? Where a protest has defied the law and the Government has reacted by giving the protesters what they want?

Because I can't. In every example I can think of the Government has doubled down on its crack down effort. I suspect we're only months away from a bunch of these people getting arrested for cyber-terrorism.

I suppose this sort of thing can be effective if the government crack down becomes so oppressive that the general public turns on them (See the Kent State Shooting). But that's a pretty destructive way to make your point.
I wouldn't rule out using a separate search engine. Yes, you'll probably have to keep the index in sync with the db manually but I found that it also gives you much more flexibility.

I personally use Solr with MongoDB and it works pretty well. Keeping the index in sync is not that big of a deal for me (depends on the application of course) and in exchange I get a full featured FTS engine that is probably more mature and has more features than an integrated one would have.
It's relatively accurate.
Just because other people don't "have the choice" doesn't mean that those of us who do shouldn't take the opportunity to do what's right.
This is faster and you can blog about it.
> http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8091/diglib/pub/slides/berkeleydl...

The link seems dead for me.
Cloudera's looking for an Operations Engineer. From our job description: Cloudera is looking for an Operations Engineer to join our engineering team. You must have a strong understanding of Linux system deployment, configuration and management. IP network design, administration and security are part of your expertise. Strong communications and troubleshooting skills are critical for success in this role.

http://www.cloudera.com/company/careers/
Sure, because somewhere inside PostFinance, a conversation roughly like this occurred:

Boss: "Hey, everyone's talking about this Assange guy's financials—do we have anything to do with that?"

Clerk: "I'll check. ...huh! We have him in our books as a client!"

Boss: "But he's not even Swiss! Good thing we noticed, I guess."
As one of their propaganda posters says, "Just say you've gotten a virus." The chances of anyone getting nailed for this are pretty low.
There's an assumption there that "illegal == illegitimate". I don't believe that is true. No more true than "legal == legitimate".
Probably someone tipped them off. What were they supposed to do then--make an exception for Assange because he's in the news?
Sure, a post like this made sense when the µSIM requiring devices were released, but now?

Every telco that ever wants to sell a wireless data plan in the world should offer µSIM cards and it is a much better idea to use the real thing than to take a razor blade, hacksaw or meat cleaver to a normal-sized SIM.
Not doing commerce would be, for example, rejecting a new sale or a renewal or such. Cutting existing service is a pretty direct motion.
What percentage of people chatted with Olark before buying Olark service? I wouldn't be surprised if it was lower than 25%. :)
They apparently have an identi.ca account too, but it's dormant:

http://identi.ca/anonoperation
This is how lots of protests work, and they get the same criticism.

If one hundred thousand people decide to stop traffic in new york or disrupt the air port in London these are a tiny fraction of citizens (they don't have to be citizens), unelected with no rules. They all might have different ideas about why they are there and it may be impossible for anyone to lead them to stop.

There may be some inherently bad things about mobs, but there is nothing inherently good about them. You could have hundreds of thousands take to the street in support of fascism just as easily as freedom of information.

Worrisome as they are though, chaotic mass protests seem to be an important part of the democratic process.
Who besides you is saying that Wikileaks organized the ddos?
It morphs into the local GUI appearance.
F.....aaax? Dull look
President Obama to appear on MythBusters tonight
Thanks. This is getting fixed now. -chris from grooveshark.
Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived
Please look up words in a dictionary before you correct people on their meaning, you will seem like less of a fool for doing so. Legitimate and legal are synonyms.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/legitimate
Presumably because you'd probably skip right past the link if it was just titled "I am a Sole Founder with no Dev Experience… Yeah, it’s a Tough Road."
On the flipside I've been checking HN more regularly because of it.
"At Etsy, we are releasing changes to code and application configs over 25 times a day."

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but 25 times a day? I'm very curious as to the types of changes. UI tweaks? Bug fixes? Do they have to make a config change every time someone creates a new store?

Not judgmental, just curious.
"right to be pissed" and "right to attack 3rd parties illegally" are two very different things.
Not charging for everything differs from never charging for anything. The latter is impossible unless you are independently wealthy; and even then, most open source developers take credit for their work rather than doing it anonymously. But more to the point, open source software is something you choose to provide to the general public, rather than at the request of a client.

Outside of the development community, commercial software is still profitable because most non-technical buyers assume that free-as-in-beer software is less good. Same thing with graphic design or video production. Working for free/cheap signals interest to industry peers very effectively, but people outside the peer group just see it as a price signal.
Unfortunately the laws of physics prevent that world from ever existing; data is growing exponentially whereas time and attention are limited.
Does this actually hurt visa? Wouldn't visa.com just Be a showcase type website eg "hey here's what visa is, here are some ringtones you candownload"

I'd imagine all their transaction processing happens elsewhere.
I think that, frankly, it probably is a handicap whether she thinks it is or not. There are going to be folks who write off the female single founder where they wouldn't a male single founder. It's worth recognizing that there is a barrier, and the fact that we don't see it is the single biggest reason that it isn't going anywhere.

On the other hand, I agree with you that the dominating factor is the single non-technical founder problem. I'm unclear about how this really differentiates from wannabe clients who have a fabulous idea for a start up: "and will you please build the whole thing for 1% of net?"
I suppose the DDOS cannon will be aimed at twitter and facebook next then.
That is not a Meat Cleaver, it's a Chef's Knife. Used for chopping vegetables. A meat cleaver is more square-shaped with a larger, flatter blade.
Her "day job" is "being a mom of twins and a wife". I doubt any man doing a startup can say something similar. She doesn't really talk much about how that impacts her work but there is substantial evidence that raising kids and running the household routinely interfere with female career ambitions but usually don't interfere with male career ambitions. So perhaps it is relevant (to her challenges with trying to do a startup), even if she hasn't made it clear why.

Just a thought.
sweet - its great to see you guys taking care of this so quickly
Statement from Datacell CEO on Visa and Mastercard legal action
So I'm some average merchant, anywhere in the world.

Because of this action, Now I can't make money and
support my family.

Actually, as an average merchant, you are interfacing to back end Visa systems, indirectly through the payment processing network via your POS terminal or through the software backing your online shopping cart.

As far as I have been able to see, these attacks haven't done anything to the back end systems. Commerce continues as normal.

Considering the volume the credit card processing system handles, especially during the holidays, could Anonymous get enough people to even make a noticeable bump in traffic if they were to go after the back end systems?

They can successfully go after a front end web site like visa.com because it is not a high volume site. Alexa.com ranks visa.com at around #3000 in the US, #10000 in the world.
I've seen quite a few similar concepts out there, but I think your functional but cool domain name is one that I would easily remember over the rest. I really don't get why startups go for some obscure fabricated name linked to some deep Latin or Greek ethos instead of a more functional engaging name.
When you have a good test suite, and automated deployments, eventually you move into the "deploy on every commit" strategy.

For more on this kind of thing, http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo... and http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/search/label/continuous...
HP on SPARC/Solaris: "Larry Ellison bought a money-losing business"
Okay, you know what you do? You buy yourself a tape recorder, you just record yourself for a whole day. I think you’re going to be surprised at some of your phrasing.
It's not surprising to me why the shutdown of Wikileaks donation channels, as opposed to TSA or any of the other civil liberties breaches, triggered such rage.

The answer is simple: People get fucking pissed when they can't spend their money where they want to.

And it holds throughout history.
Project launched to create and test a molecular-sized processor chip
Might want to check you spelling (intergration) and validate ("5 Errors, 1 warning(s)", http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://staydecent.ca/marku...) before claiming standards compliance.