skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A nice variation on this theme is PortSentry, a portscan detector. I have it configured so that whenever it detects a portscan, it'll blackhole that IP for a few hours.
Introduction to Statistical Thought, free PDF (you will learn R at the same time)
It's a good business model but most affiliate programs ban this type of revenue sharing. You'd have to individually negotiate with the affiliate programs or operate under the radar.

I made a very respectable amount of money (and a polo shirt and hat) several years ago by paying my friends to sign up for Party Poker accounts under my affiliate bonus code. I could have made a lot more if I had more money to put up. It was debatable whether this was allowed under their terms of service... they froze my money for 6 months but I got it eventually.

I believe that all the rakeback sites that are operating legitimately have individually negotiated agreements with the poker sites. Similarly, if you wanted to set up an Amazon buyer's club on facebook, you'd have to negotiate with Amazon.
Ideally use a VPN connection to get into your internal network and firewall off all outside access.

Your goal should be to prevent anyone from ever connecting to your sshd process at all. If they can do that you're in danger. Make it listen on a different port, so you're not the easiest target and use iptables to block access to all but your office/home ip range. Various forms of port knocking to poke a hole in the iptables firewall can be used to allow mobile access, etc.
Is it easy to set up a foreign entity in india? (corp,etc)
Acc to wikipedia, if you are a multinational company, it is available to the employees of that company that have worked in the foreign office for 1 year...does anyone know anything about this?
im assuming the above code is equivalent to:

class foo {

public function someMethod() { trace("blah blah"); }

}

new foo().someMethod();

just different approaches to the same problem
New Playboy Social Network Built On Ning
That's nice Bateman.
Eggshell with romalian type. What do you think?
Our social network now has buzz.
Mark and Alex from ClutterMe.com released their "blog buzz" feature today. Their site is due to launch in two weeks.
A Solution to the High-Tech Immigrant Challenge
I suppose I will sound like a troll, but why not consider PostgreSQL?
Conjecture: I don't think Hacker News will ever have the same feel as reddit, or at least the type of banter than went on in those posts.

Why? Because I think too many people reading these posts want to get YC funding and are therefore stepping on eggshells with what they say.

On the converse side the conversation is probably more polite than other forums.
Do YC shares get diluted with funding?
Impact of Facebook platform on CS enrollment
BTW, if you think that entrepreneurs would benefit from a specialized CS degree, maybe leave a comment there to that effect?
Content-Aware Image Sizing
If you want to be taken seriously by customers or partners, I would strongly recommend against using promotional cards.

You can purchase 500 VistaPrint cards without their ad for only $4.99 plus shipping. You can design your own card for only a few dollars more. Google "VistaPrint coupon code" for the best deals. I just placed an order that way earlier this week.
I'm not having a rough day
Maybe this will make VCs less eager to kick founders out of their company.
I've personally seen Paul Graham kill a kitten with a blender.

edit: It was horrible.
totally flippin sweet, a copernican revolution if you will, vive la revolution, companeros!
This seam carving technology is so very cool.
Freebase Launches
Wow... quality of TC is so low: not even a link to PlayboyU from that article!
Then I don't see how anyone can fault the program.
Iacocca's Nine Cs of Leadership
The interesting thing with Palm, as a technology innovator, is that their main principle is the principle that's killing them. They went with a simplistic, anti-"feature creep" approach with the Palm Pilot. It's characterized by their simplistic operating system, and they never tried to innovate that personal appliance, such as an iPhone, etc. They released the Treo, and it only had minimal success. Also, remember Handspring released the Treo, and then merged to form PalmOne.

If hindsight is 20/20, then they could have made some riskier moves, and these ideas coincide with the article in some respects.

- Open up the OS. They should have made it a geek toy. Let the Linux master in all of us come out.

- Supported 3rd party software with moral support. They should have had a "killer app".

- Made it into a gaming device. I don't know if the processing power and battery-life were there, but it could have been another direction.

- Better marketing. In line with all these points above, they should made it "cooler". It should have been the province of business people to own a Palm. Everyone should own one, because you'll be cool.

Take these together and you have the iPhone. Congratulations Apple! RIP Palm.
Software bonhomie: MS and Linux
Storing Energy in Paper
I don't understand the relevance of your link???
The author overstates some of his claims. For example, European women made excellent contributions to herbal medicine -- the only medicine around -- until the rise of 'scientific' medicine, which caused as much as harm as good for much of its early history. The author claims that medicine was all men's doing.

This tendency to overstatement manifests as a pervasive one cause fallacy. There are many reasons for womens' and mens' relative different status -- some long term and unchanging (the politics of birth), some short term and malleable (prejudices relating to relative intellectual capacities), many in between these extremes. The author acknowledges the manifold causes of gender differences only to dismiss them -- and the motivating factors for women's cultural creation are left unexplored.
richardkulisz

http://reddit.com/user/richardkulisz/
Yeah, work really hard, innovate and get nowhere!
I would argue that it does. The talks about holism vs reductionism, the introduction to programming with in it, extending to writing programs that write themselves and other strange loops are all very relevant.

Perhaps most relevant of all is learning how such varied fields relate. It's all very well being a hacker, but working out how hacking is a general thing not specific to computers is quite edifying. Learning how the tenents of the hacker are seen in religion, philosophy and art as well as science is quite profound.
If anything it's even more glutted now.

Which brings this to mind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38691

"Today, there is $230 billion of private financing around private equity backed companies."
And if you have a look at the first 5 comments, 4 of those commenters have all posted in the last day (2 in the last hour). So it has not completely lost its potential. It just needs a channel through which it can bloom again.
IMHO, reddit can do the following to clean up:

1. make my.reddit.com the default and make it harder to get to the current default front page.

2. This was a while back so they may have fixed this already: Don't screw up on the cookie/log in process - I've had to log in several times to reddit despite not logging out. I finally stopped logging in. Their ip logs probably tell the story better and can validate my experience. Its a small bug and takes a while to realize the full impact on user experience. The auto-login is sacred for a site like reddit.

3. Work really hard on the recommendation engine for comments as well.
Now known as http://reddit.com/user/redditcensoredme/
Holy shit! I've been working on a site based on the exact same post. Though mine is a pretty basic take on Seinfeld's method.
Seam Carving PDF: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/imret.pdf

Higher Resolution QuickTime movie: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/IMRet-All.mov

Both links download at 5KB/s at this busy time...
Generalizing Palish's question: how would you fix high school?
There was a lot of disagreement over whether Palish's "hacker schools" could be viable, but I think most of here agree that high school in its current form is horribly broken. So, what would you do to make it less miserable, particularly for hackers but also in general?

Don't cop out by just saying "hand out vouchers (or abolish public schooling) and let the free market take care of it". If you believe that's the right first step, then go on suppose that you're the headmaster of a private high school. What will it look like?
Definitely made life-long friends through Y Combinator. You won't find a better group of people involved in what you're doing.
I've seen sites do this.. Read this post and the comments about Google AdSense revenue sharing:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006387.html
"500 - Internal Server Error"

Shoulda used Pylons. :P
Online CSS grid generator
..or you're wrong. Just to cover all the options.

We know they assembled their own hardware from day 1. We know they manage their own backend and platform. They have their own version control. They designed their own buildings at various places. They are even planning to spend 2 years building their own HR tool (but you didn't hear it from me).

Given that they have to compete in a marketplace, they can't be overly irrational. But you can bet they will try to duplicate something they care about before they consider acquiring a startup. More so than Yahoo or Amazon or even Microsoft.
The "this thread is going nowhere fast" Slope
Set up a Web server cluster in 5 easy steps with Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat v2
I've been using LVS for a while now and have been pretty happy with it. I found it easy to use and maintain. I've been using keepalived instead of heartbeat though and I'm not so sure I would recommend it; I've had a little trouble with it being too aggressive in taking servers out of load balancing, though some of it was just config. I'm curious to try heartbeat.
Also the different characteristics we would need for social networks for men vs women.
Isn't the http-referrer already available to any link you visit from a search?
How Many Machines Do You Need To Run Your Site?
[ - Redacted - ]

Alas, News.YC doesn't cope with Unicode.
> Amazon's 15-year stock gain: 4,381%

Amazingly they have predicted Amazon's exact stock performance for the next 5 years. Someone over there better hide the electric drills.
Both of you should go watch Gattaca if you haven't already:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177

_____________________________________________________
s/my.reddit.com/http://reddit.com/recommended/ in above post.
Poll ...Open APIs or Closed Silos?
So what are you doing in your current app? Hoard the data or share the love through an Open API? Vote up the appropriate comment & explain why ...
I'm sharing the love, baby ! Open APIs for me all the way !
I'd like to monetize this one day, ya know ... I'm keeping my data in a walled garden !
>"It would really bother me to think that in a few years, my successor could weaken something I've spent 35 years building, my entire adult life," says Zimmer, 58. "That would be disturbing."

>When pressed, Mason says it's unlikely that his successor will be as successful.

Of course, because no successor has as large a stake in it as the original founder. Maybe they should do it like a kingship, slightly modified -- where the successor inherits HALF of the founder's equity. You would stand a much better chance of attracting the best people if they were going to get the billions when you stepped down -- subject to vesting and performance. Why would the top people want to join an existing company when the big equity has already been taken out of it?

So, when you retire you vest half of the Founder's stock, if you've been there "long enough". Take a company from $10B market cap to $20B and you've doubled the Founder's share, so you get an amount equal to what the whole thing was when you started, and leave an equal amount to lure the next CEO.

It's late so I may well be missing obvious flaws in the scheme, but some kind of equity retention strategy seems to be needed to promote long-term vitality because the current m.o. is the original founders and investors bleed it all out.
Ok, Ok. All Of You (even YouTube) Invented Video Overlay Ads "First"
yeah, I saw it, I liked it.

I don't think it will ever be like that because it's much easier to justify the morality of genetic modification when you focus on life extension instead of appearance/intelligence.

You made a bunch of spam posts that I modded down... did the system/editor autodelete them or did you delete them?
The sad part is most CS programs have antiquated curriculum which does not involve much web development-type work. I think if courses like "numerical methods" and similar were replaced with cool web development classes which taught stuff like how to create a facebook platform app, it could increase enrollment. But in my experiences this is like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. Many (but NOT all) of the academic types do not understand startups because they themselves are not interested in them (hence the reason they are teaching rather than founding companies). Again, this is a generalization which doesn't apply to all people, but I'd say this is more often the case than not.

But generally speaking I agree that CS enrollment could increase if the curriculum incorporated more involving program assignments like facebook platform apps.
Google Founder's Inspiring Quotes A
What consulting means to me (/what I can't stand working at someone else's company)
If you're average, you fit right in. And if you're above average, the basic terms of employement and premise of the arrangement is against your interests.
:) Sorry. Wanna compare notes? Palish at gmail.
I'll let you know after we launch if this works, but we just have a single dedicated box for 99/mo.
The community it fosters is definitely the most underappreciated part (by outsiders, at least) of the Y C experience.
:) No need to have bothered. I was testing out the news.yc table width resizer, and deleted them afterwards.
Also if it's anything like real estate, their incentive is more to close the deal than to get the highest price, freeing them to move on to the next. A difference of a few percent to you the seller is huge, to the banker its a small percentage of that few percent. He'd rather just get it over with and move on.
I actually invented video ads in 2002. I have no evidence to back this up, but have already filed the patent app.
We launched our site with only one machine (dedicated host I think we paid about $100/mo for it as well) and had stories about us on the big blogs (TechCrunch, Gigaom, etc) - it performed like a champ. I guess it depends on what your app is like though.
Even beyond lack of sleep, which I think we all agree is bad in the literal sense, the law of diminishing returns sets in at some point and makes working further counter productive. The exact amount, of course, depends on who you are and what exactly you're doing, but it's probably much far lower than most people would guess.

I've done a lot of research on this, through both reading and self-experimentation, and have come to the conclusion that there aren't very many people who would benefit from hacking more than 60 hours a week in short bursts, or more than 50 sustainably. I'd take a hacker who works hard 5 days a week, 10 hours a day, and spends the rest of his time partying over one who sits in front of a computer 12 hours a day, 7 days a week any time.

There's a wealth of information on the topic out there, and studies are published all of the time. It's definitely the sort of thing one should look into when trying to increase their efficiency.
Did you write/file the patent yourself?
"... stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn't just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong direction briefly if that will help. ..." ~ Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn, 5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

Number FIVE!

Just kidding. Maybe I read too much, but I find a lot of statements pg makes are right there in essays if you read them. I particularly remember this one because of the sport analogy, dodging, weaving around obstacles to get to the objective.

"... When you say flexibility, what exactly do you mean? ..."

Guess thats why it's on the list (hidden, but there) at number 5.
Also known as, "Three things the President of the United States should unlearn" ...
It had an intelligent and interesting community that was almost exclusively made up of programmers. The submissions were made up of programming, science and general interest links. What made it great was the quality of comments; the discussion was the most interesting and insightful of any on-line community I've ever found. The links these days aren't the problem - its the comments. Sadly I've found the quality of my comments has dropped along with general trend - people tend to ignore long comments these days in favour of quick opinions.

[edit] also the size of the community helped. You got to know regular posters and this lack of anonymity encouraged a quality of discussion.
What happens to the YC applications after rejected?
Is there any change they are sold to 3rd parties?
Working on the assumption that the funding will make their remaining shares worth more.
I'm going with definitely no.

edit - From the app itself:

We don't make any formal promise about secrecy, but we don't plan to let anyone outside Y Combinator see these applications, including other startups we fund.
+1 for markdown:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783
That's an interesting point. We're working on some AdSense revenue sharing stuff at the moment, thanks for the link.
Awesome, good to know.. I was a little nervous that I didn't have a massive cluster ready to go ;) I'm just going to make sure my database indices are in the correct places and see how launch does.
Whether the affiliates would allow the revenue share is a valid point. I was thinking from the perspective of a community site. A site with even 200k active members in a specific field would have a good basis to negotiate a specific deal with an affiliate. I think it's a trend we'll increasingly see.

Fundamentally, affiliates make money by giving recommendations, but they're paid for giving those recommendations, so they can't possibly be totally objective. In a revenue share model, the affiliate is paid for negotiating a better deal for their users. Instead of the current situation where only the affiliate wins, this model means win-win for affiliate and user.

That's how I reckon it'll play out anyway... :)
Stackless Python-like coroutines in Scheme.
After some time of doing only toy tests and book exercises, I'm getting deeper into Scheme for a real application. One of the things I missed was Stackless Python's simple to use coroutine API. In Scheme you have

- raw continuations, which I find a bit too wild and low-level for my current purposes, or

- full-fledged preemptive threading systems, which seemed way too complex for my needs. Besides, these are implementation specific, and I didn't want to marry any implementation yet.

So I decided to give it a try and roll my own on plain R5RS (I'm sorry it's quite verbose as a result. I may reduce noise with macros in the future, but this is my first shot at it). It was easier than I was afraid, and great fun!

If you are into Scheme/Lisp, please tell me what you think about it. [Edit: I'm especially interested in comments on the API and semantics. This is more frugal than Stackless's, but I don't miss anything worthy. Do you?]

http://pastebin.com/ff732013

NOTE: This is just a one day hack; use it at your own risk. If you are interested in getting future versions of this, just write me at the address in the profile and I'll ping you when I'm confident it's reliable.
Exactly. All you gotta do is deliver.
How things get better
Student -> Employee -> Contractor -> Founder -> Investor
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=sshd_config
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
If you think ideas can be sold I'd be happy to sell you some great ones at very reasonable prices.
Servers are so damn powerful these days that it's a bit misleading to use the number of servers as a measurement. The standard a few years ago was dual processor PIII ~1Ghz machines with 1-4GB memory. These days it's a 4+ core monster with 8GB+ memory.

Steve Huffman of Reddit posted on their latest server stats, which is interesting: http://reddit.com/info/2gdcv/comments/c2geky

Most of the sites these days with a ton of servers just have Google envy or investors who want money to be "put to work". Server and network gear is a really easy way to go through money.
Ohh great idea! I'm excited to see this happen.
HighScalability is an insane site. Their stuff on how Google's datacentre works is crazy!
http://highscalability.com/google-architecture
"Execution aborted due to compilation errors." You didn't escape your slashes.
Using Twitter for big conversations
"I lose money every time I have a new idea, but I make it up in aggregate."
Steve "spez" Huffman of Reddit on The Total Rewrite Decision
Open

- Lock-in is Lock-Out (users are getting wary of this)

- Staying Because of the Freedom to Leave (no roach motels please)

Simon Phipps makes these agreeable observations in the "Zen of Free", mp3, 9Mb 20min. http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail1674.html
The personality of early risers
No, I'm not giving you my Google password
A year after Google released their account authentication system, why are sites still asking for passwords that most users don't even give their loved ones?
The YC RSS feed content-type header
A quick tamper data (firefox extension) shows that when requesting the YC RSS feed the content-type header is "text/html" while I think it should be "text/xml".<p>I know that the RSS feed doesn't work on my local Liferea install, I think this could be the problem because I can definitely access the feed in my browser.
It would also be great to be able to get an RSS feed for individual threads, or even for all comments (that would be a lot of data though).
Raldi's comment is hilarious.
http://www.michaelolaf.net/montessori12-18.html
Now who's going to invent a Flash video ad blocker first, that's what I'm waiting for... :)
I expected the list not to be very good because of the cheesy same-initial-letter aspect, but it turned out to be good.
Facebook Will Use Profiles To Target Ads, Predict Future
How To: Pitch Bloggers
Well duh, what did everybody think Facebook was going to do with all that personal data?
Chris's comment is interesting...

http://reddit.com/info/2h8kd/comments/c2hccv

So I guess Reddit is now on Pylons, using Mako as the templating engine.
AT&T says "No more 300-page iPhone bills"
How do I get an invitation code?
Most people don't know / care. It seems only the technically inclined & paranoid lose sleep over this. Until somebody they know gets hit by identity theft, that is ...
"Haskell Curry? Yes, I dated his daughter." -- Alonzo Church, Jr