skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- Unless tunneled over a secure socket, FTP is 100% insecure.

This is true for HTTP.

- The spec defines no way of setting the modification dates/times of files.

The HTTP RFC defines the Last-Modified header.

- The spec defines no reliable way of determining the string encoding used for filenames.

The HTTP RFC defines several headers related to encoding.

- FTP was designed to be used interactively by a human sitting at a terminal, not by a GUI application working on the human's behalf. The spec doesn't even define the output format that should be used for directory listings.

This problem doesn't translate exactly to HTTP as it isn't used in the same manner. Directory listings are typically sent as HTML and a user clicks a link which all browsers are able to handle trivially. WebDAV adds features similar to FTP, but it is much more standardized.

- The spec defines no way of dealing with file metadata, such as Unix permissions, owners, and groups.

There are HTTP error codes which indicate lack of permission, but there are no RFC-defined headers for these things. I believe WebDAV does define a method to deal with them.

- FTP requires a minimum of two socket connections to transfer a file: the control connection, which is established first, and then data connections which are created and destroyed every time you transfer a single file, or request a directory listing.

HTTP has no such requirement. Keep-alive prevents sockets from being closed and the same connection can be used to get a directory listing and then transfer a file. There are no separate data and control connections.

- FTP is not friendly with firewalls. Because it constantly needs to establish new connections, this has led us to "passive mode" which might as well be black magic as far as most people are concerned.

This is FTP's biggest flaw and this problem absolutely does not exist with HTTP. Once it is encrypted FTP is impossible to handle in a reasonable manner with a firewall.

In active mode FTP creates one connection to a well-known port for the control channel (21). For the data connection the server attempts to establish a connection from a well-known port (20) to a high-numbered port on the client. This obviously doesn't work well with a firewall in front of the client.

Passive mode modifies this arrangement so that the data channel comes from the client to the server. The problem is the ports used. On both ends the port will be a high-numbered. This requires allowing connections from any high-numbered port (withing a large range) to any high-numbered port. Some firewalls understand the FTP protocol and are able to see the port that is to be used; the server gives the client this port with a command in the control connection. The firewall can then allow that specific connection. Once the control connection is encrypted this is impossible.

Now then. How do his arguments apply equally to HTTP?
App Store is Like a Sweet, Sweet Drug: Five IPhone Applications Reviewed
I have found that to be the case too. This is ironic because (as far as I know) Pandora is powered by data that is manually entered by snobby music junkies employed by the company, while last.fm is powered by data mining.
Thanks; not sure why the YC dupe check failed...
Not really. FTP is an awful protocol, and as he mentions it doesn't really even have a spec. HTTP works quite well and has proven to be surprisingly flexible.
Intelligence hits closer to home because intelligence is more fundamental to who you are. Children who want to insult each other rarely say "You're weak!" They're more likely to say "You're stupid!"

Would you rather be a brain without a body or a body without a brain?

For a heartrending story about the role intelligence plays in shaping personality, read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
What if I don't want to "join the conversation?"
You could try reddit.com. There are sub-sections for Writing and Poetry submissions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/
Not objects, structs though. The syntax for (and ability to mix types in) Python dictionaries make them really convenient for this sort of thing.

Of course, you can have references to functions in dictionaries and use them for dispatch. I think that's how the OO system is implemented, anyway.

I'm only slightly acquainted with Lua, but it looks like it gets a lot of expressiveness out of having a similarly useful dictionary-like type. I think it calls them 'tables'.
Chatterous (YC winter '08) raises angel round to integrate email, IM and SMS
A supercomputer at home
>Feynman was known to have an IQ of 125

That's still more than 1.5 standard deviations above average. If Feynman's IQ was exactly 125, he would be ahead of "only" 95% of the population.
in short, it's called chunking. most introductory psych classes cover this, i'm surprised that john hopkins is spending their time regurgitating basic stuff like this.
The news is that even toddlers do this. Even the article state that it's been known for a long time in adults.
If I just want to write a program for my own iPhone, do I still have to get them to put it in the store, just for me to be able to install it on my phone?
Looking to hire an intern
Hey,

I am looking for some reasonably "young" _and_ talented programmer guy to hire.

First project is pretty simple and could be fun to work with — there are some chances to face with scalability issues, funny tricks, non-mainstream technologies.

I am an experienced developer, so I would like to start building own team designated to create interesting application.

Scope of technologies to be experienced (or not): Ruby, Merb, Javascript, Erlang, AMQP, Io, Lisp, ...

If interested, please drop me an email at yrashk@issuesdone.com

Thanks.
This might have something to do with [cached thoughts](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/cached-thoughts.html).

I'm wondering how exactly the cache works. Is it like a-b-c, where the brain remembers that a is 443, b is 297, and c is 9960? Or does the last number in each chunk give you a clue as to the address of the next chunk? (example: after reading the 3 in 443, my brain says "Oh, you might be needing this" and gives me the next three numbers all at once.) Right now I'm leaning towards the second one.
I am assuming most of Chatterous traffic is happening offsite.
Intergating SMS, IM and Email is one big challenge.

A mobile application could fix part of the problem and be cost effective to the user (given SMS costs).
I would say the general population disagrees with you, which is why are games of chance a multi-billion dollar industry and only a few people can make a good living playing chess.
Thanks nickb. The book looks really exciting. Waiting to go down to Borders to get it...
The World’s Oldest Blogger passes away
She was 108 and passed away this week
>I actually unsubscribed from all the default subreddits (politics, pics, etc.) and subscribed to some 20 - 30 programming subreddits (like python, erlang, compsci and many others).

Damn you! You're not meeting your time-wasting quotas!
I like it a lot. Nice game-geeky features, oddball games, don't have to load up a blob of Java to play. The bots could be better.

I agree the initial presentation doesn't have a lot of punch. To me this is pleasing. Nice to not be pestered. But perhaps a bit more salesmanship is in order. Are you running analytics tools?

I think you're going to have a real tough time making money in this niche. A few days ago Game Table Online gave up on paid subscriptions, I assume because no one would buy one. Good luck to you anyway.
This Is How We Roll, In India? | My Philly Network
I disagree. SFTP means SFTP. FTP over SSL is a different thing.

Since you haven't provided references, I will - look at Adobe Dreamweaver or other web based clients. SFTP is assumed to mean SFTP as implemented by an SSH server.

Traditional FTP uses two ports and it's a bitch to run via SSL - as a result, it's extremely rare.

PS. Moderated the article down for "This is going to sound a little weird at first considering what I do for a living, but I want you to stop using FTP."

It's 2008. You should have stopped using FTP in 1998.
epic failure right here:
$120/year - DreamHost: We use DreamHost for a bunch of miscellaneous services, and this also included our domain name.
Y Combinator’s Slinkset Launches Hosted Reddits For The Masses
Can the intern work remotely? If not, where are you located? Does the programmer have to be "young" and a guy?

IMO, the best place to find an intern like you're describing is the Computer Science department at your local University. I cold called a well-respected CS professor and ended up with the best programmer I had ever hired. She started full-time three months later.
This article is irritatingly full of stretches.

Go proverbs? Are there not chess proverbs? Similar can be said about managing companies and reading Sun Tsu's Art of War. You can extend the Art of War to interpersonal relationships. You can find meaning in every sentence in Harry Potter, if you felt like it.

And Go can make you smarter? Go, like chess, involves short term and long term memory manipulation, risk analysis, pattern recognition, psychology, and executive planning, which further involves deception and short-term and long-term planning. While Go has more possible configurations than Chess, the feeble human mind will not be using some drastically different skillset to deal with it. That is to say, I doubt children who play Chess are worse off than those who play Go. Ergo, it's not Go: it's just the training of relevant skills, which is a byproduct of learning the game.

Pardon my bluntness, but this reads like those articles that try to make something more mystical than it really is.
I see an easy way they could of saved $3,000 right off the bat.
Yeah, I'm really not sure what to expect from subscriptions.

I got the impression that GTO gave up on paid memberships to increase user uptake to pursue advertising dollars. I don't know a lot about their operations, but didn't they have very restricted free accounts? I can see where that'd seriously hamper user adoption.
You've obviously done a lot of work here. At first glance I didn't see a lot of the features you've implemented. It took me many clicks to finally see a game, but the cool part was I could see the game's history and plays.

Naturally, this could be a barrier to entry and something that a good UI designer could help fix. At the very least, I recommend checking out "Don't Make me Think" by Steve Krug (a 37Signals publication). It will give you a lot of insight on how people interact with web apps and sites.

The only other thing you may want to consider is how you're going to get noticed. You've been up and running for a year and already have a dozen games. Do you want more players? How many? What about social networks?

You may want to consider a biz guy for marketing and promotion. A lot of what he/she will have to offer may sound really strange, if not even offensive (hint: Flash people hate ads too). But they could make the difference between 200 active users, 2K active users, or even 2M active users.
Do you think that the fact that you can have entire games without a single capture, and win by a point or two makes it a more interesting game, or are those two unrelated thoughts?
The suit is back, July 2008 edition
Oh cool, I think that's similar to how JavaScript 'objects' work.

I've heard that it's not that difficult to do object oriented stuff in plain C using nothing but structs and function pointers.
I can imagine the syntax would be a pain in the ass and ugly as hell though. :P

I'll have to take a closer look at Lua.. have you used it much before?
"Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", Robert A. Heinlein.
"Citizen of the Galaxy", Robert A. Heinlein.
"The Rolling Stones", Robert A. Heinlein.
"A Wrinkle in Time", Madeleine L'Engle.

Any of the ones skmurphy recommended.
The post gives a reasonable overview of why programmers may benefit from playing Go, but there is a whole lot more that could be said. Though I've not yet mastered either pursuit, I'll struggle to put some of my thoughts into words:

Go is particularly suited as an exercise for the programmer's mind because both activities share some quite specific and fundamental cognitive skills, which people generally don't have unless they train.

The overwhelming complexity of Go demands a specific and subtle mindset, which is very much applicable to programming; relaxed yet focused, careful but creative.

Both practise mentally modelling, analysing, and manipulating a complex, evolving system, requiring frequent decisions which may have far reaching and unpredictable effects, which must balance immediate needs and possible outcomes.

Go trains a holistic way of thinking, which is unusual to the average reductionist mind, requiring an integrative understanding of a system as composed of interrelating parts, and as a whole.
This article was somewhat interesting, but I have to wonder about whether building your own cluster at home would be more cost-effective (considering paying for hardware replacement, electricity, etc.) that just using Amazon S3/EC2.

Also, if I was one of the author's prospective customers, I would be more likely to put my trust in Amazon than some guy with 3 computers in his basement.
From HN to YC to TC to HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140841
Congratulations SlinkSet team. Hard work pays off.

EDIT: I just spent more time at SlinkSet and I think they definitely have a business model in hosting their app as a HELP FORUM (excatly like the one they have on their site).

Writing a FAQ is very hard and you always leave some questions out. By hosting this feature for small businesses, they can also gather a lot of information about those businesses and their customers.
You need both blocks down there.
You might also find this tutorial interesting

http://www.linux.com/articles/49654
RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS  [google code and data]
Perfection is Possible (in Cambridge)
Good thoughts - I too have a lot to learn with both Go and programming, and I know there's a lot more going on (with each) than in my original post.
Sometimes "Launch Early" is a tad *too* early
Totally off-topic (except that it's linked from the article) but techcrunch's reddit clone is hilariously and pathetically empty.

More on topic, I'd like to see more options to customize the "editorial policy" of your site - how many votes to get promoted, how user karma works, how sites get blocked, manual overrides, and so on.

I find when I compare HN and Digg, I'm struck by how the sites have come to reflect the personalities of the people who founded them. Here it's hyper-technical and it makes you think twice about commenting frivolously, because of the potential for what seems like infinite downvoting and its effect on karma. Digg is pretty frivolous and all over the place, perhaps because karma is not visible to users, and downvoting doesn't have the same direct effect on karma.

My point being that the personalities behind the site shape the content - even if the engine is "democratic", the constant tweaking of that engine represents an editorial policy, just as much as a newspaper's.
I think that most of what I said about Go could also apply to chess. I just have less experience with chess than with Go.
Not sure where you're located and whether hiring laws apply to internships at startups, but you should consider posting the qualifications you'd like in the ideal candidate and see who shows up -- regardless of age and gender. Who knows, you might be surprised!
Have it scrape your blog/website and auto-post any new links as if they were user submissions.
Sun lays off 1000 emplyees
It already does that (I was in their beta). You just go to Settings -> Feeds. Input your blog feed. Done.
I must be playing it wrong. I've only played a couple times, but I thought it was a game of complete information. Perhaps I was taught incorrect rules.
I suppose it wouldn't be too gross to have an operator where you explicitly specified a list of variables you were going to refer to. (IIRC one had to do that in Franz Lisp.) It would only add one expr to the code I'd had before. Maybe I'll try it.
I'm struck by how the sites have come to reflect the personalities of the people who founded them

It's fascinating how companies (and other creations) tend to carry the personalities of the people who started them. In our world, Microsoft, Apple, Google are good examples... one could go on endlessly. There aren't many general principles that seem to hold up as well as this one does.
Seems to me the responses should be:

If the story is: Do this:

spam/way offtopic flag
boring or mildly offtopic nothing
good upvote
P3s and P4s? Congratulations, you're killing the planet.
37 Signals is a great example of how it takes more than good technology to succeed. Although, I doubt it's as simple as they make it seem. However, after reading their articles, it's hard not to think, "I can do that to."
More on topic, I'd like to see more options to customize the "editorial policy" of your site - how many votes to get promoted, how user karma works, how sites get blocked, manual overrides, and so on.

Definitely. We've got a lot of ideas and plans along these lines. I think you're right on about the personality of the site admins shaping the content. Though in more ways than just choosing how the engine works.
That was confusing and badly written ("This was not the first time I get entrepreneurial ideas.") so I've read it several times and I still can't figure out what he's on about.

Is his idea that somebody might want to pay to use his three-CPU, inhomogeneous, linked-by-ethernet cluster of useless old machines?

Or does he want to expand it to a bigger inhomogeneous cluster of useless old machines, until he figures out that he's going to need a much bigger air conditioner (somewhere around the 16 CPU mark)?
Hmm... Interesting.

Just a couple of days back I was wondering if I can my web apps from home with a P3 and a P4. The max internet speed in my city is 2 Mbps. Will it be enough if I have two 2 Mbps connections and bridge them? Is it enough to run a Twitter clone for my classmates? (and also my news app)

But the security is what bothers me. I plan to use linux and I am using Slackware on my desktop since a month (I refer the docs a dozen times a day). Is very high knowledge of the linux internals necessary to run a web server?
Maybe he has a plan to come up with something like Engine Yard. Every great drawing starts with a dot.
Thanks.

And, yeah, we've thought of a few options for targeting businesses. Help forums is definitely one.
sftp is not ideal; looks like the author is not aware that ssh (which is what sftp uses) is rather slow on WAN due to buffer issues:

http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/

http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/papers/i2mm-h...
I think the point here is that persistent storage is evolving.

RDBMS are fine for just about any task you can throw at them, but then so is Perl. However, neither is usually going to be the best solution.

What is implied is that RDBMS have inherent complications not due to volumes of data, but rather due to to complexities of using them (both from a sys admin, and developer point of view) particularly when HA is required.

I, for one, look forward to a more loosely typed flexible persistence layer than RDBMS however it may come.

BTW: Any form of data persistence is an alternative to an RDBMS!?
Thanks for the explanation - This is useful for those folks out there who are working with webservers that utilize continuations. There has been a ton of discussion surrounding stateless and session based web development, but a dearth of information regarding continuation based web development; especially as it relates to sites that get a reasonably high level of traffic.
Ask HN: How many Tabs/Windows open on average? 
How many Tabs do you have on average?
Desktop app?
Does it affect your productivity.
For me I find myself with an average of 6. I work best when I have 4 or 5 open simultaneously and I loose it at 12.
SFTP is its own debacle. It's a handy alternative to "scp" when you don't want to open a second connection to grovel through "find" on the target system, but it's even less firewall-friendly than FTP: you can't enable users to grab files with SFTP without also enabling them to SSH to remote hosts.

Most enterprises don't allow outbound SSH through their firewalls, in part because SSH is its own slippery slope: if you're allowing SSH, you're allowing people to build VPN tunnels.

The real-world operational problem that FTP solves is upload. There is no download application that HTTP doesn't solve better than FTP. If Apache shipped with a mod_upload with a reasonable configuration system and a simple, workable web interface for specifying what to put where, FTP could be laid to rest.
I mean unknown in the sense of unpredictability, chaos, combinatorial complexity.
It might help to substitute "ignorance" instead of "innocence" in your essay. To be innocent primarily means to 'do no harm' not "to be ignorant" of the truth.
I think many parents keep their kids ignorant (of evil) because they think it will help keep them innocent (free of the sin of committing evil). As you imply, for a time, this seems right, but eventually you need controlled exposure to toxins (ethical, etc.) to learn how to protect your self.
Why would you ever send ftp://anything when you could instead send http://anything?
Beginning My Second Life (with Google)
Why don't we make this thread more valuable than the original article then. Any community suggestions on ways to monetize?

My suggestion: terms of service that permit free individual use, but require some form of subscription for corporate use.
Are We Too Wire(less)d? | My Philly Network
I'm guilty of a "I did XX with $$ in time XX" but shared my experience during it. Not as much the expense, but more relating to decisions made. Hopefully it's interesting and helpful in some way.

http://weblog.markbao.com/2008/how-i-built-a-webapp-in-18-ho...
Ten iPhone Programs to Check Out
Unfortunately for the author, talking about the conversation is "joining the conversation".
This is great news... At first glance, the Cassandra codebase looks smaller and simpler than HBase. It will be interesting to see how it compares -- I've had data integrity with HBase, but I'm also doing weird stuff to it (storing tons of scientific floating-point data...)
I wonder if a GPU might be more suitable for his task. Even the 8800GTX is known to do single precision FFTs at more than 55 Gflops which is an order of magnitude more than even contemporary CPUs let alone P4.
When I'm in the zone, I have two browser tabs and dozens of editor tabs.

When I'm shaving yaks, I have one editor tab and 10 browser tabs.
Well, other skill based "games" include the majority (or all?) of professional sports. If there were chance introduced at key points in the game (like drawing cards or flipping coins) I don't think anyone would watch baseball, football, or soccer.

Also, board games involving skill (e.g. chess and go) have stood the test of time over many chance games.
I've had the inclination to do this sort of thing, but the more hardware you have, the more likely, you'll have a component on some machine that will fail. As one person, you might end up spending all your time replacing or throwing away broken parts to keep the cluster up.

The other this is to pay for the electricity of a couple boxes running, regardless of how slow they are at a larger scale.

This sort of thing is good as a learning experience, imo, but if one's hoping to scale it up expect to run into lots of infrastructure problems one has to solve.
Ask YC: Develop for iPhone or Android?
Which platform would you choose to learn and develop applications for the next few years and why?