skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine "social networking site"/"myspace killer" would have been on the list five years ago.

The article sketches ideas that have promise and long odds. Five years ago, most people who were trying to create "yet another social networking site" looked dumb. One doesn't now.

There is are many reasons that most of the cool ideas people come with brainstorming late at night don't work. But it's not that they are bad ideas. The factors for failure include the distance between idea and execution, competition, the need for good design, etc..

It's just a question of whether you want to make an easy bet or a hard bet.
It's terrible to lose your job but this time of year is not the worst. A lot of budgets are started or renewed at the beginning of the calendar year. You have a better chance to land a new position than in spring or summer.

I'm writing this not to lessen the raspberries for Yahoo but to offer some light to those affected.
Web Developers Get Real (Time)
> but the security and legal stuff you'd need to handle are significant enough that it really needs to be a full-fledged startup

iirc, PayPal has money transfer registrations in each of the 50 US states, and in many foreign countries. That alone must keep a team of legal types busy.
That, and the affiliate links.

I share the same love/hate relationship with PayPal but the referrer links made the entire article stink of blogspam to me (even though I understand that wasn't the intention, it still "felt" like it to me).
Virtually every consumer-facing web startup needs new users. Getting them isn't a core value-add, or at least, it shouldn't be.
Sigh, I see no language with type inference. Nor any concatenative one. Nor any non-strict one. So unfair.
I'm not sure what you think I'm arguing; that it's impossible to avoid SQLI? Of course not. All I'm saying is that parameterized queries aren't the end of the story; the teams that believe they don't have SQLI because they use parameterized queries are the ones that are going to lose their apps to SQLI.
PayPal is not a bank, folks...
if you want to download as a pdf, and object to creating account, then feel free to use the throwaway I created -
nomail+12345@nomail.com
nomail12345
pwd:12345
The US Embassy Dispatches
tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted:

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ...

the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the Collateral Murder video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ...

The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone.

... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."
Could you set up the popover to not display if the referrer is HN?
Show HN: a drawing app inspired in brite lite
The Craftsman’s Creed: are you a Craftsman?
Kill your Darlings
You don't believe that a sufficiently intelligent computer system can coordinate to reduce overuse of lines? I.e., deliver line X to 10,000 geographically separated people?

As for dating/pickup, I don't believe it's zero sum. It's not a competition for a fixed set of prizes, i.e. 5 girls at the bar, all of whom will go home with someone.

f she really likes you then she'll ignore it and pretend to play along, but then you could have said anything and it would have worked

I have it on good authority (read: "spreadsheet pickup guy", who's name I'm hiding for obvious reasons) that this is false, and conversion rates can vary 20-30% (sometimes more) based on approach and profile.
Also, related to the third point, try spending less time talking about what you want from an applicant and spend more time talking about what they want from you. In general this will attract more (and more good) applicants, but it's especially important in this case because, as you and others have said, your ideal applicant has many other options. They don't need to work for your company, so you have to make them want to.

People are motivated by more than just money too. They want to work on interesting projects with interesting people. They want to grow professionally and expand their skill-set. They want to feel important and be recognized for their work. And they want lots of other things too. You need to speak to as many of those wants as you can.
Do not keep more than a couple hundred dollars in a PayPal account.

And you should seriously consider closing the original checking account the PayPal account is tied to - they can and will withdraw from it at any time.
Even though Comcast customers already pay Comcast to receive those bytes? As others have pointed out above.
Maybe? I don't know - the linked page doesn't really have any information.
Steve Jobs: AirPlay Coming to Safari and Third-Party Apps in 2011
sounds like that aspect is a good fit for Google then, since Google is strong in tech but weak in sales and customer service.

I think $5b is overpaying. But at a much lower price point I can see how acquiring them would make sense, because of this tech-needs-sales&service fit.
> John Howard as Prime Minister had gargantuan excesses of money and spent little of it on anything except debt reduction and then when there was no more debt to reduce, he just put it in the bank and refused to invest it

As a Prime Minister, John Howard's instinct was to spend the living daylights out of every cent. Mostly in flat out cash transfers to pensioners and middle class families. He set up a churn-based middle-class welfare system that costs nearly $100 billion per year at this point, which is unnecessarily wasteful.

The Future Fund's ostensible purpose is to sock away some money for future liabilities that the Commonwealth will face over the coming decades. Superannuation for public servants, mostly. In reality it was a handy place to dump a bunch of Telstra shares and a way for Peter Costello to prevent Howard from introducing ever more harebrained recurrent expenditures.
My worry too, but comments are completely unbounded. Which complexity is worse?

It's really no surprise that trolls run rampant in comment threads. Commenting requires no social mores. By contrast, questions require consideration of another. Sure, trolls can be silly in questions but there's almost no power in dumb questions. A question is not only inherently social but brings humility along for the discourse.
Looks like Galois' blog has already buckled under the influx of traffic, so here's the Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...
Fun with Filters in Photoshop
We will run through different Filters in Photoshop and it different parameters and effects. In this tutorial, we will have a fundamental overview of the functions and effects if we use the certain filters in Photoshop.
What did you learn? Any tips/sites/references for budding online marketers?
> I think the NBN won't prove itself in the next 10 years, it will take longer. I don't know what we will be using the internet for in 2020 . . do you?

Of course I don't. But:

1. Others have had this level of service for a decade and not seen any breakthrough applications, and

2. You can't predict the future either. "Perhaps it will be useful" is not a business case worthy of $40 billion.

> This is the long haul and frankly the private sector has had 10 years to prove themselves in Australia and they have faltered at every turn.

In the last 10 years my internet connection has gone from dialup 56k to ADSL2+. Thousands of kilometres of private fibre has been laid in the CBDs, between the capitals and across the Pacific ocean. Prices per-byte have steadily fallen the entire time, in spite of Telstra's dominance in last-mile infrastructure.
Hmmm... I don't know much about COBOL, but Wikipedia tells me that she wrote the initial specification of the language, and given that it doesn't look to me as such a big stretch to name her at least as one of the main inventors of the language. Although it might be the case that after the committee there wasn't much left of the initial spec. But as I sayd, I hardly know anything about COBOL.
Personally, I would take three extra network hops and a slower internet if it meant Comcast got screwed. Having been practically forced numerous times to use Comcast as a home internet provider because there were no other options, spent days (when you add it all up) on their stupid support line and having been bit by not calling after 3 or 6 months "trial" (or actually them putting you on hold enough - like 1+ hour), I dont care. This article is asking me to be worried/sorry about the equivalent of a child molester of ISPs. Sorry. NO
That's basically how TC started
To his credit, Ramit knows business and finance to a tee, but I question his social marketing savvy. I've been following Ramit's work when his IWTYTBR blog was just starting and his bootcamp programs and Scrooge Strategy mailing lists were not yet released.

While his message is strong, I doubt he values individual readers very significantly. He runs multiple mailing lists which recycles his content between them, all of his output he turns into a commodity to be sold or leveraged to further his interests. He maximizes for the best results with the least amount of effort to achieve them. As for the content he's generated, his message hasn't changed in a long time and I haven't seen too many new thoughts from him in a while, though I've stopped paying attention, too. I'm not knocking his strategy. He's an excellent business man who has worked the 20-something niche for all its worth. I would guess he's finding that doesn't pay the bills and is simply broadcasting his message for a different demographic (seemingly ANY demographic that will listen).

Your point is appropriate, but to answer your question the policy is very ad hoc. Those with a personal agenda get noticed and drowned out by the community. It's up to the community to decide.
Serious? Withdraw at any time? I usually pull funds out as soon as they come in, but hadnt considered them withdrawing funds w/o permission.

I need to look into that more. Maybe open a 2nd checking account somewhere else and tie that in.
"It makes perfect sense that Comcast should be paid for access to their customers."
I disagree, heartily. Comcast's customers are paying Comcast for access to the entire internet, not just to the little segment of the network that Comcast owns.
I worked at a start-up in Boston about a year and a half ago. It was my third go-round in the start-up world across the span of several years, but the first for my co-workers.

I went into the whole situation telling them "I've been through this before, and I will absolutely work hard, but not at the expense of my work/life balance". They agreed, and we got to work.

Sadly, they were shocked after about a week when I actually followed through and refused to work through the night, every night (we would definitely pull all nighters when it was necessary, but they wanted me to pull 12-14 hours a day every day as the sole technical co-founder). This issue became a large reason why I ended up needing to leave the team, regrettably.

Do you know right now that you need a balance between your work and your life? Sure you do! If it's your first time in the start-up game, will you actually put that into practice? In my case (and I would be willing to guess that a lot of you are the same), the answer is no. Some lessons must be learned the hard way, and this was one of mine.
Design Guru/Intern...really?
I came across this job posting on Craigslist, from a SF startup backed by seasoned entrepreneurs and blue chip angel funding:

Web Designer/Front-End Guru Intern

• Demonstrable years experience creating consumer web/mobile applications • Masterful command of the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator • Sophisticated knowledge of HTML, XHTML, CSS • Experience with JavaScript, AJAX, and a JavaScript framework such as jQuery, MooTools, etc • Knowledge of browser compatibility issues and web standards • Embrace the practice of rapid prototyping, and working in a fast-paced environment where constant change is the norm and the bar for performance is set high. Sense of humor and a positive attitude are non-negotiable. Brownie points for: - Advanced Flash skills - Illustration - Experience with mobile application design

compensation ... it could easily turn into a full-time job

//

I'm wondering what people here think about this job posting; do you think it's fair/wise/viable? Is it possible that a Design guru can/would also be an intern? What would be their motivation? It is fair/wise/viable to ask an intern to do heavy lifting of this nature? Is it fair/wise/viable to ask a professional designer to be an intern? Discuss, please.
Thanks for the response. I got it! But the play button doesn't seem to work...not a big deal.

A tip for composers, use commas and periods for rests
It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it.

How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.

[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.
understood. thanks for the feedback
Does djangy run on-top of EC2, or something else?
If a bad question provokes good answers, then I don't see how it could have been bad to begin with.

The contrast I think of is in a classroom. If a student asks an ignorant question (is there another instance of "bad"?), isn't that a good thing? For them and for the other students?
Yes, the worker hosts currently run on EC2.
Good idea, wish I knew the code to do that. thinking about disabling it all togther...
How Comcast became a toll-collecting, nuke-wielding hydra
Mixpanel - Hiring a UI/UX designer
Mirror: http://corp.galois.com/blog/2010/11/30/galois-releases-the-h...

We're under very heavy load now.
I can recommend djangy wholeheartedly, having been a happy beta user for a few weeks now. The guys are responsive & helpful and the service is great.

As someone new to python & django, my main pain-point was deployment (haven't picked up fabric yet). For this djangy shines.
I think "comments" is a misnomer. I think of it as "discussion," and questions are a part of any discussion.
I'm in general agreement with everyone else, internet marketing is incredibly in demand because unlike all other hires, it directly drives revenues. So not only do you have to compete against other companies, but lucrative affiliate marketing pulls in the best.
How many of these bad ideas are simply nerds looking at facebook saying "you're going down"? I doubt twitter was, and I doubt that whatever eventually topples facebook will be.

My point is that this sort of philosophy helps nobody. People who are already successful already know this stuff. At least to me, this sort of list feels like it's being aimed at people who haven't "made it" yet and are still trying to figure "it" out.

When I was in High School a friend of mine named Steve Fisher said something that I doubt he remembers, but has stuck with me. He was trying to teach me how to skateboard, something that was totally not the type of activity that a nerdy, awkward, 15 year old Ryan thought he could do. So we're sitting at the skatepark and there are lots of other people around doing what I thought were difficult tricks. I was sitting on a bench just watching and trying to think of a valid reason not to ride my skateboard around because I was 100% positive that I was going to fall flat on my face and that all of the other people were going to laugh at me.

My friend comes over and says "What the hell are you doing?" "Oh, I was, err..just, uhh, tightening these bolts." "Bullshit, did you figure out how to ollie it yet?" "No, dude, I'm just going to practice at home in my room more until I can figure it out, I don't want to get in everybody's way."

He told me that I had to just go ride the thing in circles until it felt natural, and that if he saw me sitting on the bench again, I wasn't invited to the skatepark anymore. I rode my skateboard around all afternoon, probably fell on my face a few times, but didn't get laughed at even once.

A stupid story, probably.

How does this apply to startups?

Maybe it's just the communities I hang around in, but many coders are really really not like the skaters in my story. They really will laugh at the kid riding his skateboard in circles (writing twitter clones and craigslist mashups) like an idiot. How many designers have posted tirades to their blog talking about how everybody is stupid, and how they're sick of all these stuuupid people asking them to do designs? To me, lists like this are exactly like telling a kid that he's riding his skateboard in circles and to stop wasting his time doing that. If you can't show up and start doing backflips, then don't waste your time even coming. People have already figured out how to ride in circles.

Anybody whose time would be wasted writing yet another dating website doesn't need a list like this to tell them that. They know.
Paid magazines often still sell advertising space, same is true for paid cable channels, so it's not unheard of to charge both the "broadcaster" and the "receiver".
Consider Open Sourcing it as AGPL. In case some company ever does decide to customize it heavily and monetize, they'll be forced to commit upstream or purchase a different license from you.
Sure, I'll list out some of the pain points we're aware of and have tried to address.

- Not able to think logically.
There's only so much you can accomplish if you take logical thinking out of the equation, and when you do, the creations are underwhelming. Many startups set out to make creation easy, and that works to some extent, but the real solution to the problem may be to try to educate users and bring them up to a minimum bar (learn how to fish), rather than trying to lower the bar to the floor (give them the fish). This would be suicide for most startups, but the users of creative apps are more patient and more willing to learn and grow with the app. Sure, we'll shut out some people this way, but we want to lift up the right, motivated people, rather than trying to lift the entire world up.

- Can't draw/other artistic skill.
Shockingly, this ends up being a big problem, and people absolutely hate using placeholder art if they can't draw. We've addressed this by integrating a marketplace for pulling in all kinds of resources.

- Can't work with other people.
Many game projects fail due to bad communication (if you're not working solo). They start out strong when brainstorming and then die somewhere in the middle, usually when the members fall out of regular contact or don't know what's going on. We've integrated some features into our app to directly address this after observing how our users interacted with each other on several group projects.

- Set their sights too high.
No, you're not going to create an MMORPG or RTS as your first project. ;) This one isn't directly addressed by our app right now and falls more under the umbrella of general user education and progression. One idea we have is to incorporate game elements (turning game creation into a game?) to nudge the user towards making baby steps towards completing something through a quest structure, rather than trying to let them go free from day 1.

The take home point is that like any startup, what you set out to do ends up evolving as you move along and that the problem you're solving turns out to be different and sometimes larger than what you originally expected.
The incentive that has been proposed by BitDNS is that awarding blocks is equivalent to registering domains. So using the current protocol of awarding 50 bitcoins for every block generation would translate to awarding 50 name registrations. Plenty of incentive for early adopters to build a strong network.
Removed it completely..
Ask HN: Which web server to learn?
I'm enjoying Python web frameworks, Flask specifically. I've played with AppEngine but I thought it'd be nice to learn a web server such as Apache or Nginx as well.

Any recommendations?
Also good to lose the job before holiday spending ramps up.
I don't want to make people feel bad any more than you do. But there are good business ideas and there are bad business ideas, and life is tough that way, and starting a head-on competitor to Facebook with nothing but your ability to learn how to represent a graph in MySQL is a bad business idea.
this torrentfreak article links to the opennic wiki page that's within their own glue domain, which won't work unless you have opennic set up:

http://wiki.opennic.glue/dotP2PTLD

The page they meant to link to, within the normal dns root is:

>>>>>> http://wiki.opennicproject.org/dotP2PTLD <<<<<<<<<

update: what I wrote still stands, but it has been fixed in the article.
Interpol issues wanted notice for Julian Assange (WikiLeaks Founder)
Is that revocable though? Usually grants that are irrevocable will say so...
It's good that you qualified what you're saying, because the natural assumption is that you are talking about the particular agreement under discussion.