skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough -- text is hard to parse. No hard feelings.

I don't see why it's a meaningless distinction. To pull off a MITM, you need quite a bit more than a Perl script, and you're pretty much not going to do it on a network that you do not control. I'm speaking from a basic knowledge of networking theory (I've unintentionally avoided dark arts), so I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong.

That's the value I see: I don't think I'm going to walk into Starbucks with Perl and successfully MITM even my theoretical browser that doesn't care about self-signed certificates. The value is that in that scenario, even a self-signed makes reading traffic that doesn't belong to you harder.

I'm here to discuss, though, and I'm willing to learn; don't give up so easily.
I bet your father-in-law wouldn't take too kindly to Government workers taking a look at his wife naked when they felt like it or recording (if you'll forgive me) their ahem marital moments.

Privacy is a human requirement, as evidenced by the deprivation of privacy as a punishment in prisons, and is much more than protection of those with something to hide.
Really depends on what I'm trying to do. Coordinate a ski trip? Email best friends. Going out for drinks? Text. Got lost to the bar? Call.

So yeah, I email my best friends.
http://getpassionfruit.com: a new take on internet advertising
I think malaria is correlated with poverty, and poverty is correlated with poor infrastructure. But I also think you're right, and mentioning malaria hurt the point I was trying to make.
Please don't use "strict" regarding a language's type checking. It's already used in domain theory for functions which rely on arguments being well-defined and computable. It is one of Haskell's defining features that by default, functions and data structures are not strict.

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

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Denotational_semantics
I have a .tel. It's almost useless--you get to publish DNS records through the registrar's mickey-mouse PHP thing, and you can only really push TXT and NAPTR and MX records.

The only reason I bought it is because I am a member of an informal organization whose name is "Shadytel", so an @shady.tel address looked real spiffy at the time.
Chrome was causing my 6-core mac pro w/ Nvidia Quadro 4000 to have kernel panics a while back, but it seems to be working fine now.
I'll add one more: as you go along, document a summary of any non-trivial discussions from the code review, in the code itself.

If the reviewer and the coder needed to talk over some aspect of the implementation at length, it's a safe bet future readers of the code will benefit from it too.
> But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.

Duplication of data.

Go to any major site and you'll see it has been registered as the same site in almost all of the other tlds or the rest of the domains are run by domain squatters.
Nonsense--- you placed to much trust on the idiot who okay-ed the damn commercials in the first place. Dodge all you want, but the ad company didn't make the decision, you did...
I think that many of the same people offended by the Quick Bar would be the same people that are willing to (and often do) pay for a client. What reasons could Twitter have for being averse to a freemium model in this area of their business? $1/month to go advertising free? I'd pay it. Since they introduced it, I've always found the trending topics area of Twitter to be the worst thing about it. I, like so many others, object to having it stuck in my face every time I open their app.
Considering other ISPs peer with AT&T this is really everyone's problem.
From the perspective of Texas Instruments?

They get the tech for free, so why not?

More importantly, it keeps MPEG LA in check wrt. to increasing the fees. Monopolies have this tendency.

If VP8 pushes out H264, TI (and others) can just switch to it and save licensing fees.

Even if it doesn't but gains a significant popularity, it'll be a bargaining tool when/if MPEG LA tries to raise H264 licensing fees.

From my perspective?

As someone who might use some sort of video encoding technology in my software, I would rather not pay the licensing fees.

Not to mention that Google innovates with VP8 faster than all of the combined H264 actors (see e.g. the constraint quality encoding mode http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/vp8-constrained-quality-...).
I disagree - my chances of success are far higher than 1% without YC, and I think most other applicants feel the same way.
"little Johnny can't visit
any website where the domain component of the URL ends in the string “.xxx”, in which case all little Johnny has to do is go to a web-based nslookup tool, type in the domain he wants to look at, and then replace the domain with that IP address."

Sounds like a good opportunity for nslookup tools to justify requiring a credit-card payment for certain types of lookup.
The attacks used against RC4 as used in WEP are not applicable to RC4 as used in TLS connections. If you do not use related keys and discard at least the first 256 bytes, RC4 is fine. It is not that they implemented RC4 incorrectly, but that they did not account for its known weaknesses.
Interesting video. The theory the article demonstrates through its video is that people don't pay attention unless you begin with the popular misconception. Otherwise, people automatically believe they know what you're going to say.
wtf does this matter?
According to paperwork leaked by Mark Klein, they have/had a "Narus STA 6400" in the room. It's described as a supercomputer that sounds, to my ears, similar to Carnivore. I doubt that they even try to collect (too much data), and instead specifically look for things to grab from the firehose.

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

http://narus.com/index.php/solutions/intercept
My dad was a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam. I'm pretty sure you won't get PTSD from doing YC.
Actually, when I said 'update', I meant the functions that in standard languages that would modify the existing structure return a new one, but it's great you found update-in. That's a beautiful function. There's also assoc-in, which is basically just a more specialized assoc-in.

I've built cyclical graphs in Clojure. The simplest form looks like

{:nodes #{:a :b :c}
:edges {:a #{:b}
:b #{:c}
:c #{:a}}}

(for non-clojurians, {} is a map, and #{} is a set)
Perhaps it was just that it was not the right time (or place)
Navy SEAL BUD/S
I'd love to hear someone from Twitter explain why the service seems to lack even basic automated spam detection. The only mechanism that seems to exist is the "report as spam", which takes so long to suspend an account I wouldn't be surprised if the process was manual.
So little looting? Hate to burst your bubble, but the Japanese news is full of scammers pocketing money "for earthquake victims", people stealing from charity boxes, and looting.

Yes, looting. I can't find many news articles other than in Japanese, but here we go. Just use Google translate (http://translate.google.com/).

Since the earthquake, there were over 250 cases of looting in Sendai alone.

http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date3&k=2011031900317

Here's a nice article that mentions people trying to break into ATMs right after the quake.

http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date2&k=2011032000211

Here's just one about stealing from charity boxes. There were probably 4 or 5 articles today.

http://www.jiji.com/jc/eqa?g=eqa_date2&k=2011032000250

Stuff is happening, it's just not getting translated into your news.
Ask PG: A Merger of Startups? - The Case of Auctomatic
In another thread you said that Harj's startup Auctomatic got hackers by merging with another YC startup. How's that end up happening and what are the implications for the two companies and equity of the employees of the resulting company? Did the founders come to that decision on their own or was it suggested to them?

I'm curious because I've never come across any other stories about two startups merging. Besides Auctomatic, has this occurred with other YC Companies?
We already had a de-facto infinite set... it was the m part. We could either buy up common variations of, or ignore the n part. Now it is becoming obvious that ICANN views n as the new m for one of two reasons: money or stupidity. I'm still not sure it can't be both.

If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?
This:

{"foo":42, "bar",123}

isn't even a valid JSON object. If you make it valid JSON and replace the comma in this with a colon, it accepts it.
Sure, but Twitter should be able to fairly reliably detect that someone like Marco isn't interested in the global trends, and serve him stuff more likely to be of interest.

What Twitter's currently doing is akin to Google text ads on HN for Justin Bieber-themed desktop wallpapers - it's completely untargeted.
Hmmm, from reading your other post, it sounds like you can create a start up anywhere, but if you want to make the 'next big thing', you will get a bost from being in SF, because, there is a bigger network of people working on startups, thats where the money is, and thats where the coders are.

Would that be correct?
They were both working on the same thing, and they each needed the kind of people the other one lacked. I believe it was an equal merger though I don't know for sure. It was my idea, but I didn't force it on them.

I believe there were two other similar cases: Reddit and Ninite. Plus Clustrix merged with another co that wasn't funded by us.
Many of us paid for $3 Tweetie (and $3 for Tweetie 2) because it was by far the best Twitter client for iOS. It's free now, but we paid for it.

The statements from Twitter that people shouldn't build new Twitter clients coming out in the same week made the backlash worse, too.
Yes. Google Quad-Band phones.
Ask HN: Working Securely from China?
I'm familiar with using a VPN but China frequently manages to block, or at least seriously degrade, VPN connections (and currently seems to actually be cracking down on VPNs).

I can set up a tunnel over SSH and use that but I don't know how effective China is at messing with/blocking that. Also, TOR is out of the question as it is dog slow from within China. Anyway, I'm not trying to hide my surfing or avoid the police... just need to be able to log into my various work servers without worrying about them being arbitrarily blocked by the Great Firewall or getting sniffed by some bad guys lurking at Starbucks.

So, are there any potent methods that the folks here on HN can suggest for working secure from within China? Set up my own instance of OpenVPN (perhaps they block specific providers rather than VPN in general and my home connection would slip by undetected)? Just go with tunneling over SSH? Some other methods? Complex, technically challenging answers are welcome (as long as they are practical)!
I think every means has a different purpose. People upload their pictures on social network and just share them with friends they want to. When you are at work, it is easier to chat/email/sms than a phone talk. CALL.. if you are after a real quick response!
How many Twitter clients support third-party API endpoints?
None of those ideas help twitter users make money, which is the ideal model for network based platforms. Except charging to vote on American Idol, which is a great example of something you could do with the pay-to-follow model. You vote by following @caseyabramsIDOL. It would have to be a private follow though because otherwise you'd know the results right away.

And sure, all content gets pirated, so what?
I enjoyed the ads and thought they were rather clever.
This isn't what the OP is asking about (Correct me if I'm wrong, OP). He's referring to valuation of the project in the sense that Google is worth $200b, not how much to charge customers of the application.

As for your strategy for deciding how much to charge (which is a different problem, again), there are two problems I see:

1. Users don't like when prices are gradually being hiked. There are subconscious effects like number-fixation (where people are attached to the first numbers they see), which causes them to perceive future prices as excessive, and there are conscious effects like the disdain of price hikes.

2. This strategy maximizes short-term revenue. There are other considerations which are more important, like profit (revenues minus costs)--with costs that are not purely fixed, maximizing revenue will not maximize how much money you make ultimately. Another consideration is the long term--charging less may cause faster adoption, which may be better for the long term.

You never want to be completely myopic in pricing unless you don't think there's a future to your app and you want to extract as much money as possible.
Why Rebecca Black is a Demon-Wizard Child Piper
I thought Andrew Mason had said essentially the same thing in gentler terms within days of the Super Bowl, when he apologized for the ad and said that even though it was created by a professional agency, he shouldn't have approved it.

The famous miscalculation in the ad was that it was too easy to misinterpret as making light of Tibet rather than of Groupon, but another thing that felt wrong was that the humor didn't quite match Groupon's voice. It was an outsider trying to speak in it, and that rarely works out well.
What about optimizing or customizing the website later and answering technical questions about your website?

This is not criticism. I'm just wondering if you hire someone to code, what do you do about the product post completion?
At the least, the ClimateGate letters contain the refusal of a lawful FOIA request due to the requestor's political beliefs and a conspiracy to get others to do the same. The emails are out there. You can read them instead of the output of the True Believers' spin factory if you so choose.
I think unfortunately for YC the noise level will rise significantly. Before the start fund YC wasn't about money but rather building great products around strong individuals / teams. The funded believed in what they were doing and YC believed in them and together they walked a path toward success. While that won't change going forward, I think there will be a lot more people who apply and aren't as passionate or haven't thought about their ideas in as much depth but see money at the start of the rainbow as a way to figure it out.
Spying on businesses generally involves spying on their people.
You'd have to be prepared for Twitter to become the Apple App Store - there would be 2 of everything. "FooAccount" and "FooAccount (FREE)", for example. The free ones would just advertise content visible from their paid one.
It's not inherent to SSL/TLS, it's a general issue. If you can't verify that the encryption key you're using actually belongs to the person you think it does, you're only protected against passive eavesdropping. Which buys you only weak protection against government mass surveillance, and none at all against someone doing something like DNS spoofing.

On the other hand, the whole top-down certificate authority model is pretty weak anyway, especially since browsers don't provide any warning when a certificate for a site you've visited before has changed before its expiration date.
In some sense, the Bill of Rights could be considered a premature optimization. Rather than waste time having the people and the government come to an agreement in an agile way, through multiple iterations, on the things the first 10 amendments cover, they just decided to preempt all that debate and bill-making and bill-overturning and list the things that were off-limits. Didn't turn out that way though.

And like all premature optimizations, maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
Probably the bit.ly API: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
I'm not sure why people are upvoting your comment.

Actually, I do know why. It's a depressing disenchantment with government.

They don't understand that government is not going anywhere, and that government can be as good as it can be bad.

The quote zmblum posted is brilliant, and it is an example of what Good Government is capable of. It is not just for your 5th grade civics class. It's for RIGHT NOW. Read the quote, understand and respect it and its authors, and take action. The government is not just them, it's also you, and sitting on the sidelines being cynical is supporting them.
I find the trends offensive; as they seem to suggest that it'd be better if I talked about a certain topic, which is often terribly banal and uninteresting. Mostly because I believe the last thing the world needs is yet another mechanism to shove popular culture into people's faces: if it was so good, it wouldn't have to be hyped as much.
Ad agencies overemphasize creativity because their jobs depend on them believing that it is important. If Groupon had a direct marketing background it would have been clear that this ad needs to be tested before unleashing it. I wonder how many signups they got from the ads?
I wouldn't underestimate the competency of the NSA. This wiretapping is frightening, especially if it falls into the wrong hands.
Trust me, I know people are buying (I've made nearly as much as or more than Amy off my eBooks other than the authoring one). The volume for something that sells well isn't the issue. It's really that people don't want to pay as much for eBooks as one would hope/think.

Part of the problem is the "I don't get something tangible for my money." Never mind you're receiving a lot of, you know, information or anything. People want something they can point to and be like "Yo, I bought that." That's hard to do with eBooks, so you have to consistently price them lower.

Also, marketing to programmers/the HN crowd is significantly harder than a mainstream crowd because you have to deal with the Nick Burns Effect: you are an idiot and I could totally do everything better than you in a weekend. Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook? Received hate mail for weeks about how I should have made it free, how I charge too much, how the book isn't available in HTML, how they could write the whole thing in a weekend using an automated script (seriously), etc. I still get the occasional e-mail about how "I'm probably going to write my own FREE AND OPEN SOURCE guide (which is MORALLY SUPERIOR TO YOURS), so you should just give me a free copy of yours to help you fix any errors." It's a culture issue that's difficult to work around.

Even worse, selling them on something that isn't essential to their job function is difficult (most people don't write eBooks for a living), and the problem with http://authoringebooks.com is compounded with the fact that I'm competing against people who are entrenched and SEO'd out the butt. I don't have time to sit around and tweak my SEO stuff all day, so my organic Google traffic is significantly lower than what it would be if I were more visible.

And also, the market for those who want to write a technical ebook may not be as big as I originally anticipated. :)

So, uh yeah, I agree. Pathological customer bad.
We weren't actually working on the same thing. We both believed eBay was vulnerable and ready for someone to come and displace them. We were focusing on improving the seller experience and Patrick was focused on improving the buyer experience. The two ideas were very complimentary and fitted together perfectly.

PG didn't force anything on us, he suggested we meet since our ideas complimented each other. We met up in London and got on tremendously well, it was surprising just how similar our opinions about eBay were so we decided to merge and work together. Everything was completely equal - Patrick, Kul and I all had equal equity and co-founder status.
Here are some common reasons people don't like Quora:

1. They don't like all the (perceived) hype, especially when they see it on TechCrunch.

2. They don't like the rules. Quora definitely challenges the rules of how we interact online, and who is an expert, and that scares people.

3. They think it's just another "Q&A website" and why would we need another one like that?

4. They don't trust mechanisms around voting and the use of anonymity to troll?

5. They don't like that its founders were able to raise Series A money at such an attractive valuation.

6. They don't like the sites plan to boost signal over noise as the user base grows, which includes vigilance among community members and ranking users.

I am a heavy Quora user and biased toward the site. I understand why some of these items above irk people, but I also believe that most of them, upon investigation, turn out to be mostly unfounded. Briefly -> TechCrunch and other tech outlets are in the business of writing about new technologies and trends, even if vocal parts of their audience hates it. The rules around Quora scares many people who already have carved out little pieces of land online, especially "experts." One of the biggest fallacies around Quora is that it's a "Q&A site" -- that is just the tip of the iceberg. I'll admit that there are ways to lurk anonymously on Twitter, but I'm pretty sure that people behind the scenes monitor for unsavory behavior and vandalism, and that those in charge would and will ban users for foul play. The Series A valuation now seems like a bargain, but what many don't realize is that the technology built under the hood at Quora is itself unique and very valuable, as well as the team and SEO juice. Finally, their most complex UX problem -- keeping signal high using humans and algorithms -- is a challenge that not many teams can tackle.
The article glosses over the most important part of Khan Academy: pairing the clear concise videos with practice/assessment. This is what engages the student "on a deep enough level" and reinforces the lesson. The only thing missing from the traditional classroom learning cycle is the possibility of something being explained in a different way if the student is still having difficulty.
At UIUC, we have a class called "Programming Studio." Each week there's a different assignment, and every three weeks or so the class switches languages. In addition to making our chops better, a focus of the class is communication.

At the beginning of the semester, we were split into discussion sections of 6 students each and a moderator (grad student or a past student who was very good). Now, once a week, we have 2 hour sections where we look at each persons code and are graded on conventions, design decisions, and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to critique our own and others' code.

I guess I kind of took for granted the usefulness of this experience. Perhaps I'll try to look forward to it a little more each week ;)
I tend to suspect these "edgy" ads are really just ads for the ad agency, not so much for the client.
The Ubiquitous File Server in Plan 9 [pdf]
Sunflower seeds
Zotes brand sunflower seeds are sure to bring a smile to your face. Zotes has dozens of unique flavores that are certain to please your taste budds. But consider yourself warned - Zotes has been known to create sunflower seed addicts!
Brother, you should include that anywhere you apply! Semper
I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake.

I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try 2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic.

1. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post.

2. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the book would be available. I would (automagically) change which part e.g. every week.

Both those tactics are meant to drive search traffic, give away some of the value of the book but not all of it, so that people have a reason to buy the whole thing, either as PDF or as paper version.
Your submission intersects with mine, but not the same. Thanks for posting.
This is devastating news to me. With TMO, my sister and I can add on my parents for free, get unlimited tethering, and unlimited family texting for $10. Knowing AT&T, I probably won't be able to keep this plan.