skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I'm missing why he feels bad about it. They had warrants and pretty damning evidence. They went after people who were engaging in fraud and identity theft, crimes that cost innocent people untold billions per year, both as consumers and investors. This wasn't some Patriot Act wiretapping bullshit. I don't see this as an unreasonable violation of people's privacy though it does sound like that happened once along the way, with the pictures, but that's humans being humans and an unfortunately reality in law enforcement.

A year and a day in jail is probably not enough for people who engage in credit card fraud to be an effective deterrent. I can't see any reasonable argument as to why they don't deserve felonies on their records. It sounds as if, for the most part, this is just a case of the system actually working to protect citizens rights. I'd be happy to assist in a case like that.
Mac hackers have an easy to use interface to gain passwords.

PC hackers don't need passwords.

PS: I can almost feel my karma burn.
It's interesting to see how much a primary color (cyan in this case) affects people's initial reaction to things. I think if the UI looked more like this when they first saw it, no one would have really given it much thought:

http://screencast.com/t/NpgW6YeM

It just shows that a little bad color can go a long way. We have this a lot with our startup, too-- some people simply can't stand the color scheme we chose for our first beta. It's pretty bad, but memorable. We're working on making things "nice-looking but memorable" instead.
So are you making money now? I think you are missing the point, a lot of startups in SV are not necessary started to "make money" in the traditional sense. There is a huge amount of startups who just try to build something cool (technology wise), and either hope to find out how to monetize, or hope a larger company will buy them, and figure out how to monetize their technology.

SV is the best place to be, if what you are building doesn't have a clear market, or the market requires larger company's muscles.
It wouldn't be an internet discussion without at least one ad hominem argument.
To be honest I didn't see that many valid points. Plenty of "lol wut?" but no real criticism apart from the colour of the background.

Having said that, like a lot of those people I'm also 100% sure I can build a trip counter with a much better UI than that. Easily. Probably before the App Store opens. And like them, if I didn't have so much internetting to do I'd get on it straight away.
I agree it doesn't look nice, but it looks usable to me. I don't think it's really useful for people to laugh and point on a website about it.

It sounds like they have people using it, so they should listen to those users, and their suggestions, instead of people like you and me who haven't actually used the app.
I found that terse naming has several advantages:

* Most obvious one: it's easier to type. Especially in Erlang - the language I write most code in these days, where variables must start with a capital letter. The fewer times I have to reach for the shift key to make a capital (if I used CamelCase) or to make an underscore, the better.

* Short names help you fit code in 80 columns.

* Terse variable names force you to pay close attention and make no assumptions about what's inside that variable. Also, I found that a short name + an inline comment to explain what's there works better than an overly descriptive name.

I do the same for function names too, with the exception of public functions -- those get proper names. So I'd call the public function `integer_to_string` but if I were to use it only privately, it'd be `itostr`.
In a debate, as soon as you offer your resume, you lose.
I think his broader point is spot on: virtualization is currently being used to solve a bunch of problems that existing time sharing systems (!!) have been handling well for decades. Running a few different development servers on a single box is trivial with any modern unix, and really isn't a call for virtualization.

That said, the specifics of his problems sounds alot more to me like bad administration than they do issues with virtualization per se. Done sanely, virtualization isn't that bad. But it has to be done by someone who understands the problem. A typical IT team might not be up to the challenge.
i know some folks who'd be good to talk to. toss me an email and i'll put you in touch.
Anybody know what the deal is with Japan?

I've heard that basic necessities are expensive there, but I'm having trouble getting my brain around the idea that Japan is the only developed nation in the world that doesn't fall into the >25% category.
"Don't ask me why they do that."

Because the BBC is funded by a mandatory licence fee (TV tax) and so it must appear even-handed and balanced. If they're not, people complain that "I pay my licence fee but the BBC is mocking my deeply-held beliefs." It really annoys me sometimes ("Islamist terrorists" rather than "Muslim terrorists") but in other respects they are an excellent source of information.
If you're not interested in the criticism offered, a good strategy is to politely thank everyone for their comments, possibly briefly explaining why you made the decisions you did.

An even better strategy is to completely ignore them. Especially if the complainers aren't and never will be your users.
He definitely could have handled it much better. Such as:

"We put a lot of thought into it, and while it looks busy, we wanted real time data to be available for blah and blah reasons.
But since you guys seem to not like it, let's make this fun and why don't you start proposing some new layouts. If I see one I like better, I will send the clever person a $100 gift certificate to blah blah"

Then the group will either back down, or rise to the occasion and they can all start being harsh on each others design. At that point he is the hero.

Always be the hero, even when being torn apart.
With files, you can go quite a long way with a good naming scheme. The Maildir/ protocol/format is probably the best known and most widely used example of such, but it isn't difficult to imagine something more elaborate based on the same underlying ideas.
What's going on with ESA and E3 withdrawals? "Business reasons" or something else?
They are not complicated. They are common - that's the whole thing behind them. They are so common that it's useful to use same names to talk about them because you will see them over and over in the code of different persons. And certainly defining them exactly and having good implementation examples might also occasionally help a programmer as we're not all perfect ;-)
Companies aren't simply balking at the price to be a part of E3. More than anything, they don't want to be a part of a conference that has gone from 80,000 participants with a crazy cool atmosphere to a crowd of 4,000 journalists and industry insiders.

E3 has destroyed itself. It's ridiculous.
Ask YC: What is the url of this clip? (to annotate Doug Crockford's Javascript video)
(playing Doug Crockford's Javascript videos in FLV Player).

I wrote an annotation tool and am using Jeroen's FLVPlayer to play clips so they can be annotated.
I realized with dismay that I cannot extract the url of the video. Can you please tell me how to extract the url from the embed tag?

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111585/1027823

<object width="512" height="323"><param name="movie" value="
http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.com/yep/YV_YEP.swf?ver=2.2.7.1" /><param
name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><param
name="flashVars" value="id=1027823&vid=111585&lang=en-us&intl=us&thumbUrl=
http%3A//us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/cn/v/v0/w327/111585_320_240.jpeg&embed=1" />
<embed src="http://d.yimg.com/static.video.yahoo.com/yep/YV_YEP.swf?ver=2.2.7.1"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="512" height="323" allowFullScreen="true"
bgcolor="#000000" flashVars="id=1027823&vid=111585&lang=en-us&intl=us&thumbUrl=
http%3A//us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/cn/v/v0/w327/111585_320_240.jpeg&embed=1" >
</embed></object>

thanks,
Anil
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac.

PC: (Standing behind windows firewall pictured here: http://obligement.free.fr/images/windows_firewall.jpg) Welcome, commercial viewer #3113452. Please enter your password.

Mac: PC, what's going on? We're just doing a commercial.

PC: You can't be too safe these days, with viruses and hackers all around the internet.

Mac: Well, yes, actually. You CAN be too safe.

PC: What do you mean?

Mac: Well, with our new MobileMe (.mac) service, you don't need passwords. It's all part of our new "Mac Experience" program.

PC: Really? That doesn't sound very secure.

Mac: Actually, it's very secure. You see, in order to log in to your MobileMe service, all you need to do is contact customer service. By giving out passwords through customer service, we add an extra level of security through a human interface. That makes it nearly impossible to make a mistake.

PC: Sounds good. (As he steps around the "firewall") I thought this whole password-security thing sounded silly.

On screen: MobileMe, you could be anyone.

End
I had that same reaction. It's like he doesn't have a problem with people getting busted for committing crimes, so long as he doesn't personally have to get his hands dirty with the icky details.

Another way to look at it, though, is that he felt he wasn't prepared for such a thing. He mentions that he had no training in computer forensics and got very imprecise instructions, and the crooks could have foiled his work with very little effort.
"Ensuring that people either take you seriously or suffer tremendously for not doing so is good business. They're ensuring that in the future, any potential acquirees will be very fearful of pissing off Microsoft, which is very good for them."

Very true for future hostile take-overs, but I have a feeling that when Microsoft goes courting friendly take-overs--such as when they want to do an HR acquisition and actually want to get the company with management and R&D intact--they will get a lot of people trying to act like they were out flying their plane when Ballmer knocked on the door.

JM2C
Massive, Coordinated Patch To the DNS Released
+1 for that.

The proper strategy, referencing my own post above, is to adopt the role of Apologist. Say that you're sorry that people reacted poorly to this beta of your app. Say that you'll take the criticism to heart. Make some joke about how you should have shown the app to your art-school friend before launching it.

Then, shut up. Don't escalate. Don't feed the mob.

Then, make some fairly basic changes in the graphics. Change the color and the fonts and fix the alignments. It'll take an hour at most, it'll probably make the app look better, and it will suggest that you're trying to listen to your customers and do the right thing.

Obviously, if you want to win over a guy like Gruber (a design fanatic who spent several months agonizing over the font and color choices for his website) you'll have to do more extensive design work. But that's not the primary goal. The primary goal is to defuse the situation and avoid seeming hostile or egocentric.
Mail in general (including maildir) is actually a classic example of how hard synchronization is even in the file regime. Take a look at the source to something like procmail sometime. It's a huge rats nest of locking abstractions.

It's not something you can solve with file naming. That's just a technique for avoiding collisions.
Hastening an Inevitable
Pixar's tightknit culture is its edge
There's a very specific fiduciary responsibility with public companies. There are widows with some of their retirement savings invested in tech stocks like YHOO, and the board must act in their interests.

I suggest that with YC-scale businesses there's a very different dynamic. Imagine starting such a thing, building it to 100+ employees, and then selling out in such a way that 75+ of your folks are let go by the buying company that just wanted the technology and/or customers.

When you go to start your next venture, the VCs will ask how the last one went, and when they hear about the payday for shareholders, they will shower you with money. Everyone likes a winner.

But when you go to recruit talent, and they ask you how the last one went, what do you plan to tell them?
Quoting is hard, let's go fight in the shade!
Back in my old "employee" days, I once did something similar to this. What did I get? A parking spot in the front row for the next month.
For application-level concurrency I really like the way Lua explicitly excludes the most error-prone and system-dependent concurrency primitives (preemptive threads, mutexes, semaphores, shared memory, etc) and instead offers API's for efficient non-preemptive coroutines and states which share no memory.
Apologist usually refers to somebody who makes apologia, not apologies.
Is Your Website FUBAR in the "Other" Browser?
Ask HN: Help Get Each Others Startups on Digg?
Hey,

This idea came to me this morning. Most of us are in the same boat, or at least trying to get there. We all have or are considering perusing startups - mostly web-based ones. Promotion is obviously one of the hardest issues to tackle in the process. I've been a big fan of this community for a good amount of time - mainly because we all have the same focus, and we all contribute so much to help each other. I think, and this is not just for myself, that we should all promote each others sites on Digg - for simple, and effective promotion. Lets make it a precedent for members to post their startups and on top of the constructive reviews and criticism we offer, we can help move the site up Digg for free exposure. Why not?

Again, please don't think I'm doing this just to spam my site around. Of course I'd love the exposure but I truly think we could help each other out with this; as we do with everything else.

If you like my idea, please Digg my site below. And feel free to start posting similar links.

Thanks,
Mike

http://digg.com/tech_news/Streetread_Google_Reader_meets_Wall_Street_3
Is Perl Difficult?
LizardTech's Contest at ESRI and Win a GPS
You can enter either contest or both. Every participant will receive a special edition lizard to add to their collections. Two contest winners will be awarded GPS Systems (each valued at $400).
Google Maps and Walking Directions
I love this one, particularly since when I'm out of town or visiting a new city I tend to walk... lots!
Location-based party hopping
Oh man, where was this app when I was growing up and going to College! The youth today have all the cool stuff... imaging this - broadcast the location of your party via mobile and get free drinks in return!
I had the exact same question when I went to Japan.

Apparently, the way the Japanese government works, the rural districts are overly represented in the Diet, with each rural district having the same clout as an urban district, like the U.S. Senate. In other words, for political parties, it is much more favorable to court the rural vote than the urban one. Thus, almost all political parties want the support of the farmers and so promise lots of subsidies and protection from foreign competition. The farmer's associations perpetuate this cycle, because they drop support for political parties if they are not getting their demands.

This results in some ridiculous prices for food staples. When I was in Japan three years ago, I remember that the cheapest 5kg bag of rice was about $20. The only plant that I could afford to eat regularly was cabbage, because fruits like peaches and plums were about $10 each and were usually given as gifts instead of regularly eaten as snacks or dessert.
Waiting for Godwin's law to take its inevitable course in this train wreck.

Flickr comments aren't much better than YouTube's for constructive criticism, it so happens - put up a classic, award-winning photo with your name attached to it and prosumer asswipes will tell you how the lighting and focus are all off.
Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms, Part 2
Jason Fried sez: we'd prefer that you outgrow our software, because we still have your fucking money. Hah!

In 37Signals' defense, they don't have time to bend over backwards for each and every little customer whim, especially enterprisey-type crap like this customer wanted. You have to be utilitarian or else you're dead.
Pretty exhilarating technical prose:

"With Microscope and Tweezers: An Analysis of the Internet Virus of November 1988"

http://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/main.html

"The Internet Worm Incident Technical Report"

http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~spaf/tech-reps/933.pdf
Best to call her the "co-founder." She's the non-technical head. The technical co-founder is her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, who created the first robust implementation of x86 virtualization.

Quite impressive that these two have been together so long without the business partnership or marriage falling apart.
Indeed. I've found it worthwhile to ask interview candidates how they would implement the equivalent of the maildir protocol - http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html
Really? I deduct some of my miles, so I guess I'm in the target market, and until he explained what that app did I had no clue by looking at it.

I can't imagine paying for it.
Can you give concrete examples of something useful that's really hard to do without the features you mention that would be much easier if we had those?

By the way I agree that Lisp could be a lot better.
Metasploit 3 Autopwn
I don't think deducting some miles is the target market. It looks like the average user would be using it every day, a few times maybe.

I get your point though, you have to appeal to potential users as well, can't only rely on word of mouth etc.
Though he attempts to say otherwise, I think this is the same as appealing to authority.

I'm not saying this to brag, or to "pull rank" on anyone. I'm saying it to point out that maybe, just maybe, we know SOMEthing about software design and development after 20 years in the business, including 10 years of designing for a handheld platform.

OK, fair. He probably does know a thing or two, but he could just stick to the point. Appeals to authority always show an emotional side the argument simply doesn't need and is probably hindered by.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority
We've been using Basecamp + Campfire for a few weeks on our project, and I have to say that I really like it so far.

I AM really concerned about the amount of content in our Basecamp site growing out of control -- already, I have to scroll several pages to add a note to an old, seldom used message... we already have fifteen or so writeboards. If there's a way to archive this stuff, it's not readily apparent to me (although I am a bit of a dolt).

For those who have used (and enjoyed) Basecamp, has this been a problem for you as your project expanded?

As an aside, did anyone else find the embedded headlines for other stories in this article dreadfully confusing?
That interlude completely disrupted my presentation today when someone noticed that my search box had "Jessica Alba" in it.

I had no idea who she was, and now the entire engineering deptartment thinks I'm nuts for her.
You would or you do?

(mod my comment to 0 points please.)
I have a feeling some domain squatters will rush to register the native-language domain name equivalents of the top 500 sites for each country with a non-roman script and then resell it to the expected owners for big profit.
Unfortunately the default settings for the OSes I've tried are extremely limited with respect to multilingual input. I can read and write some Spanish and Japanese for instance, but haven't had the need to for a while now. So my current laptop doesn't have an IME set up. I'm not even sure how I'd go about doing so. (Though Japanese IMEs are pretty slick. Think code completion, but for kanji.)
It pointed out a lot of flaws in 37signals software

It pointed out the major flaw in the 37signals philosophy: they're frozen. Sure they moved apps from the desktop to the web and simplified them greatly, two very appealing propositions for many small businesses. But OP presents a clear example of the flaw: What do you do when you have grown and your app can't?

Apply all the perfume you want, but if your app can't scale or be customized, in the end all you have is what you started with: a canned package.
Where do you see any indication that passwords are stored in plain text?

The password reset options I see just give you a way to change the password, not retrieve your existing password.
If that image was the UI, people might not have objected as much. There's no horrible color coordinating that was placed in the real UI, which is a major complaint.

Also, might just be me, but those colors look much better inverted though. Short of the red button label. But that's a lot smaller of a problem then the entire UI having bad color coordination.
I think you'll generally find that Digg is a big waste of time in terms of promoting a site. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to get anywhere near the front page, and then when you do you get a crush of mostly unqualified traffic from users who are not likely to ever visit your site again.

Self-submissions and "Digg groups" rarely ever work to elevate you above the bowels of the "Upcoming" pages. One of the things that Digg seems to be particularly good at is detecting this sort of activity.

Your time is better spent improving your app and promoting it where it is relevant. Wait for someone else to take an interest in it and let them submit to Digg/Mixx/etc.
Despite the fact that I am a native speaker of a language which uses the Cyrillic alphabet, I am not at all happy about the coming phishing attacks.

How can you distinguish between Latin o and Cyrillic o?
It's not. It's usually a route to failure rather than success to begin with, but it's so culturally ingrained into the illusion of a work ethic that we've become a society of butt-in-seat workaholics.

Getting stuff done is a prerequisite for changing the world. Growing your ass, burning yourself out, and neglecting your life and that of your loved ones (if you have any left by the time you burn yourself out) is not the way to get stuff done. It's the way to get stuff dumb, to paraphrase Steve Yegge...
That seems certain to me. I don't know how to get around it though. The long-term benefit of moving beyond plain ASCII for URLs is key to continued growth and success of the internet.

In China for instance, numeric URLs are becoming prominent where English ones are too unfamiliar for many uses. That's a pretty poor state of affairs.
I agree completely, but getting there is a decent start and does help circulate promotion. Why not help each other out?
I think posting your comments as blog entries is of more service to the news.yc community than the converse.
I used to work with the typography team at Microsoft (say what you will about MS, but they've invested a fair amount of money into readability -- sadly, not all of that work has made it into their products).

The general thinking there was as follows:

- In print, serif is more readable

- Traditional computer screens didn't have the resolution to display subtle serifs, and sans-serifs typically looked better / were more readable

- With higher-resolution monitors and ClearType (and similar sub-pixel technologies), you're getting closer to the point where having serifs can make a difference

- However, a big part of reading speed has to do with familiarity. At this point most computer literate people have spent far more time reading sans-serif fonts on screen, which can skew results toward sans-serif.

(edit: apparently, i'm too retarded to know how to make lists on HN. where art thou, markdown?)
Copper Nanorods Increase Boiling Water Bubbles 3,000% Order of magnitude efficiency gain.
Has The Cafe Moved Online?
I'm assuming that the writer wasn't making things up when he said that .mac support gave someone his password.
Right, I don't see the average consumer switching from Yahoo to Google because of what they read in the Wall Street Journal.