skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He made a somewhat interesting point around this -- that even if you do hapen to be interested in a trending topic and select it, a bunch of mostly unrelated spamish tweets will be there to greet you when you select the topic.
I think that this misses forest for the trees.

There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons.

Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.
> Politically, we should push for an actual democratic version of ICANN, and get a bunch of wise Unix neckbeard types to join and require all TLDs to get a supermajority vote of ICANN or a future counterpart to ICANN.

Karl Auerbach was the wise Unix neckbeard type who was on ICANN's board for a while. You can read about his efforts to create ICANN transparency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach
I'd go a step further and suggest that all of the new gTLDs are pointless and idiotic:

- .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't.

- .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm>

- .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it

- .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains

- .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different?

- .info: happy fun SEO land

- .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.

- .mobi: as noted

- .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance

- .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers

- .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think

- .tel: as noted

- .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough

- .xxx: as noted

Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up-and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.
My father-in-law said exactly that to me. I wanted to reach out and smack him. Unfortunately, it isn't just a "mental copout", either. He is a very intelligent person who has arrived at a conclusion that the government oversight is OK because he has nothing to hide and (I have inferred) he is very afraid of those who do have something to hide.
I agree with this comment: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/834#comment-7653

I suspect that the objectionable paragraph was written by Drayton, that the note atop the introduction is not at all overstated, and that that paragraph would not have made it into a more polished version of the paper.
I think there's a Biblical parable that probably fits here - the one with the "talents".

I just believe that those who are blessed in life shouldn't flush it down the toilet. A million dollars a week? Think of how many people could have been fed, or how many jobs could have been created!
Actually I think it might be when you start to care. When everything's going great you generally don't rock the boat. If everything's going down the tubes though, people get uppity. I.e. We start to examine what it is we love so much about our country and maybe even demand change (ok, maybe I'm getting a little carried away with the whole demand change thing).
I'm working on it (seriously :).
That happens on search.twitter.com also, so it's not limited to the trending topic bar.
TechCrunch is dead to me, and was long before AOL bought them. The AOL purchase was simply public acknowledgment that the fix was in.
The "dickbar" is offensive because it needs to be. Costello knows that we'll hate whatever sneaky scheme to redirect our attention so he's probably giving us something to complain about first so that when they release the intended concept, it'll feel less offensive. Feeding ads into the stream would cause an uproar. Adding a banner will generate banner blindness. What better than to overlap the add with something we'd find useful but still sideband?
It had details on how they exploited it.
Groupon CEO: We Placed Too Much Trust in Agency for Super Bowl Ads
Sort of. Twitter and Facebook still serve their home pages as HTTP and provide a login form that posts over HTTPS.

The problem is that I can do a MITM attack on the unsecured home page and put my own script in there that siphons off the user's password when they click the submit button.

So the HTTPS-posting form prevents the eavesdropping case, but not the man-in-the-middle case.

That's how the Tunisian government was harvesting their citizen's facebook logins:

http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/03/exposure-how-does-tunis...
Amazon's CTO Werner Vongels recommended YC posts
I don't think that it's silly to ask whether the law of diminishing returns has to kick in at some point. Not for the investors, but the founders. PG and co cannot be cloned or replicated. PG can pick winners but he cannot create more time. If you consider the primary value of YC to be PG, and accept that a YC startup founder will get a progressively smaller slice of the pie that is PG's time... then you have a function for decreasing founder value for the equity they give up for YC.

Now, given that the recent $150k situation is in effect, it means that in three years the typical YC startup will have more money and less individual attention from PG. He can continue to hire amazing folks like Harj and Paul to spread the love, but at some point there has to be a point on the graph where time and value peak.

I speculate that the peak will occur in 2011. I am hugely grateful to Paul for his contributions to my world, so I will only say that I sincerely hope he and Jessica take a really awesome vacation at some point in the near future. I'd chip in $100 for that, because I've received more value from his essays and HN than any other single source of information and networking.
No matter how many are added you will still have to assume that people who are after a site and actually type in a domain name will pick the .com, so no matter how many alternatives you own you won't get that traffic.

The exception of course is when you can build it into your website name like .io and .ly. Also browsers are moving away from domain names so being first on Google (just as hard if someone prominent is already on the .com you want) will be more important.
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Just to extend the logic for which you are arguing against .xxx - do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid?

I agree that there is risk in regulating 'distasteful' domains to .xxx which then results in blanket blocking is a bad thing, but doesnt that just mean that the core issue we have here is not .xxx or anything other than the fundamental issues that we already have?

.xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content... that does not entirely negate the usefulness of the TLD though.

Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?
Hey come on there has to be uses, such as lol.cat(taken), malay.asia(taken), steve.jobs(not taken).
Does anyone know at what point your IP would get throttled? If so, any usage guidelines if you plan on analyzing a large url set?
Is that Chicago on the homepage? Brings me right back to my Mac Plus days.
What I find as slightly amusing is that the major web browsers will throw up all sorts of fancy, scary warning messages if you're hitting a site with an expired or invalid certificate, but they don't say a darn thing when you hit a site over http.

I understand that lying about your encryption is potentially a bigger deal than not having any at all, but still.
The Levels of Emacs Proficiency
I couldn't even get it to accept:

{"OH HAI":[{"foo":42, "bar":123}, {"foo":123, "bar":456}]}
There were a lot of similar phones in 2005. The two main differences are app ecosystems and capacitive screens. Both apps and touchscreens existed back then. What we have today isn't magical or revolutional, but just evolution, and slow at that.

My Dell Axim had a 624 MHz CPU, 256 MB, wifi, Bluetooth, 3,7 inch VGA screen, TV-out and two card slots, one that could be used to upgrade it. 2005.
A Non-Sucky Twitter Business Model
E-Books Sales Up 115%, But Does It Come At the Expense of Print?
I definitely text my friends a lot but not email at all. I think it's kind of odd not to be friends with your best friends on facebook but that being said, I don't actually communicate with my best friends that much on facebook.
Are you suggesting bombing the AT&T HQ?
At the risk of being snarky, that's kind of like asking "is this new rotary sander better than my salad spinner?" :) As you learn more languages you'll find that different languages are different tools for different purposes. Very rarely can one be objectively ranked unqualifiedly "better" than another. The more appropriate measure almost always is, "is this language more suited to task X than this other language?"
One thing I see people saying on here is that people should care....and I do...but I don't know _what_ to do with it!

Can someone show/tell me what I, an average person, can do? It feels a bit overwhelming and things like this point out how powerless we really are. I hope I'm wrong and there are things we can do...I just don't know what they are.

EDIT -

Asking two more specific questions:

1. What can we do technically to be safe?

2. What can we do to fight this? Petition Government? Support EFF? Other? Very much at a loss on #2
Typically, I Google Talk with my closest friends and wife. Luckily they all use Android phones so they are always a quick Google Chat message away. Facebook is great for inviting friends to events (easy to cheat and use your friends list as a hint to make sure you don't forget anybody). Email is good for personal pictures and touching base with family. Phone calls are really only for when I need an answer now or talking to my Dad who doesn't use any social media, Google chat and rarely checks his email. I don't like the phone because most of the time you aren't really saying much anyways. Why not just get off the phone and send me a message when you've made a decision? I don't need to listen to you think.
They've taken too much investment for that to be seen as a success. They need the control because they need 9-figure revenues, and that don't come easy for social web services. It's a shame really because twitter as a federated protocol would undoubtedly create more true value in the long term, and potentially join the ranks of ftp, smtp, and http as fundamental tools. I'm sure that would have appealed to Evan and Biz, but such things are impossible unless set in motion before the business people get their skin in the game.
Anyone else find it weird that Google Maps shows 611 Folsom Street as "Jesus Christ My Lord & Savior Church"...?
Knowing nothing about it, it seems to me that you could curate a semi-automatic solution pretty quickly.

(ie. Look, this guy follows Cisco's Datacenter Twitter account... let's show him stuff from Juniper's datacenter team, etc)
No, I wish someone would help me learn how to do all this stuff. I'm not sure where I could begin with even doing a "web startup"

I'd need a lot of programming knowledge and I was not blessed with a computer when I grew up like a lot of you.
Right. Computability says that you can compute any computable function with the lambda calculus. But I'm saying something broader, which is that anything you're trying to model with computation has a type system. IOW, computability theory says that one can model any computable function, while type theory says that one can properly constrain it.

In essence you need both. You can compute if the number five is greater than the color red, but you may want to ensure that you never do.
Thanks, I think I get what you're saying. I love the story about the former enemy relationship turning into a great working relationship. :)
This has been going on with pretty much every ISP for over a decade, hasn't it? Carnivore - rather, DCS-1000?
The reason it sounds wrong the way you're saying it is because the team and band you listed have pluralized names.
Can I come along for the ride just to observe and learn?

I know nothing and have no skills.
Disappointed to see that this author doesn't really understand the issue he is writing about. The Firesheep tool would actually pick the cookies sent over HTTP rather than the username/password which was sent securely (in most cases). Also, as others have mentioned, it is possible to have an SSL cert installed on Virtual hosts. Dreamhost offers an option for as little as around $3-4 a month to have an SSL cert for a site.

Sometimes, I wish I could downvote an article on HN.
Ask him if he or someone ever had an issue with someone with power in a company or government. Then ask what does the person have in arsenal when the people with power have a ton of information combined with power?

"Who watches the watchers" argument.
You're somewhat correct in principle (I agree with the major thesis) but largely off-base in the details. Maybe 20/80. Here's why:

Since this is a mirrored copy of their entire backbone, they're also catching traffic to and from peering points. In Mark Klein's deposition[1], he testifies:

Starting in February 2003, the "splitter cabinet" split (and diverted to the SG3 Secure Room) the light signals that contained the communications in transit to and from AT&T's Peering Links with the following Internet networks and Internet exchange points: ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, Abovenet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet, and MAE-West.

Even if you're completely awesome and use SSL everything (like, say, Gmail), eventually that e-mail you sent is going to find its way from Google's servers to its final destination. That, with almost no exception, is plaintext. If the final destination's MX lives on AT&T's backbone and transits those peers (there might even be more possible scenarios I haven't thought of, such as AT&T selling transit), they are able to copy that e-mail in flight. All of the public information about this case is dated; I can't imagine that the NSA hasn't improved the facilities since.

This is a very specific example, but you get the idea. There are a lot more examples of why this sucks. It's not just your browsing they're catching; there's a shitload of traffic going into that room.

Aside: I'm really surprised this is coming up again. FISAAA mostly and grudgingly killed this story for me in what, 2008? 2009?

[1]: https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/Mark%20Klein%20Unreda...
Oddly enough, I hear rumours that it's a spy program on businesses, not people.
In the same way Facebook is a ripoff of Friendster, or iPhone is a ripoff of Windows Mobile.

Taking an existing idea and implementing it far better than the incumbent is not ripping off. It's progress.

Ripping off involves wholesale copying without adding anything original, substantial, or worthwhile to the effort.
A web application's worth is the price at which a buyer and seller mutually agree to sell it. That isn't the answer you want, but it is correct. There are a variety of factors which can increase or decrease that number:

1) Is the person selling it unsavvy about business? Just like engineers suck at salary negotiations and end up working for $45k, if you suck at negotiating sales price, that has an outsized impact on value relative to any objective factor.

2) Does it solve a strategic need for the acquiring company? For example, if you're Google, it isn't maximally relevant to you that an acquisition target "only" has 10k users, because you're going to put Google Muscle behind it and distribution is trivial to you. If it solves a problem for, e.g., AdWords adoption in a particular vertical, like say local, valuation is utterly unconnected to current revenue/users/etc. (A foreign telecommunications firm put in a fairly generous offer for Appointment Reminder when it had no customers and no revenue, with the intention of slotting it straight into their product lineups.)

3) Failing the strategic acquisition factor, some web apps (typically ones you won't read about in the newspaper) are sold as turnkey businesses. Valuations are generally based on a multiple of the last year's profits, with the multiple sensitive to the amount of risk, etc. If I sold BCC on Flippa, for example, I could reasonably expect to get ~$25k for it: a wee bit less than 1X last year's profits. $50k would be pushing it. Nobody in their right mind would pay $100k for it if they were just intended on keeping it running as it is.

4) Are there multiple prospects to play against each other? Bidding wars raise prices, sometimes very significantly.

5) Is the app in a "rich" vertical? There are occasionally examples of heavily undermonetized web sites bought for anomalously high sums of money. Some SEO friends of mine love taking people's hobby projects and bolting on effective monetization. If there is an obvious route to this, then the fact that current revenues are terribly might not necessarily predict a 1 * $TERRIBLE sales price.

6) How risky is the web app's current position? Is it highly dependent on a single source of traffic (cough Google)? Is it highly dependent on a single source of traffic and has it gotten that traffic through grey hat tactics which could be discovered at any time via manual or automated review? Is it in a declining field? Is it in a rapidly evolving field where competition could reasonably be expected to eat its lunch?

7) What are the upkeep expenses, including fair market salaries for employees for any skills needed? Just because my time is free to me doesn't mean the Rails programmers and SEOs that the company grabbing any of my sites will need are also free.
Please stop the hate and look past the Marine Corp analogy. This post described the stresses of early startup life very well, and was entertaining to read.

To anyone just dropping in on this, skip the HN comments and read the post.
Code Reviews as Relationship Builders
Clicking the resubmit button does not mark your application as late (otherwise, #6 on the instructions would be misleading). You just have to make sure you submit at least once before the deadline. The URL to the app will probably be replaced with the late app tomorrow, and then you won't be able to get back in. Best of luck to all applicants.
Joukuu Provides Centralized Management for Dropbox, Google Docs, Box.net
I was doing some load testing on a new project of ours and noticed that I couldn't break 50-60 reqs per second sending all the requests through stunnel-haproxy or apache-haproxy to a cluster of app servers that should have handled about 200ish reqs per second. This wasn't a problem if the traffic wasn't encrypted. Didn't seem like a CPU bottleneck with the machine doing the load test measurements either.

So I did some digging. And noticed that https://encrypted.google.com uses RC4_128 as a cipher. You know what Bank of America uses too? RC4_128. RC4 happens to be a much faster cipher.

RC4 has gotten some bad press as it was used in WEP encryption and was cracked. But I believe it was because their RC4 implementation had a flaw rather than RC4 at 128 bis being a terrible choice for encryption? I'm not positive and would love to hear your input.

I switched our load balancer to make sure we were using RC4_128 instead of AES_256, and bam I had 3-4 times more throughput of encrypted requests going through just fine.
Protip:

1. Use a not-100%-polished website design that inspires trust, or

2. Ask your visitor to execute random shell code from the internet, or

3. Place a non-trivial redirect in that code that makes it impossible to examine what exactly is being run on your system.

But, please, for the sake of all that is holy, do not do all three at once.

(Yes, I know there is a "Source Code" link, but that's not directly what's getting run, is it?)
ω reminds me the symbol people usually use for 'ass' on internet chats. I remember this language as C-ass. :)
I believe this is incorrect.

Many T-mobile phones support old GSM (EDGE) on 850, 900, 1800, and 1900, which overlaps with AT&T. But UMTS (3G) support is on bands 1700 and 2100, neither of which AT&T uses. 2100 is common in Europe.
Yes, I'm well aware of that. The point is that "The Jets" names an organization just as much as "ICANN" does. Americans do not apply the "groups are singular" rule evenly. British usage is actually more logical and consistent IMO.
Sounds like he couldn't get any feedback in Greece. This was interesting because having moved to silicon valley a few years ago, I never thought of user feedback as one of the core values of the area. The situation elsewhere in the US is probably better than Greece, but maybe not as good as San Francisco.
But our wallets likely won't.
OOP no longer mandatory in CMU Computer Science Curriculum
The Bill of Rights was horrible for America. It turned the Constitution from something where the people tells the government what it can and can't do, into something where the government tells people what bones they get thrown.
MITM is a type of eavesdropper.
> Smoking will reliably give you cancer.

I'm having a hard time digging up the figures, but last time I looked, only about 5% of smokers die from lung cancer, and much smaller numbers from a few other smoking-related cancers. Another chunk get cancer but don't die from it. Unless I'm badly misremembering, though, the majority of smokers — more than 50% — never get cancer from smoking.

I don't think that a mechanism that fails more than half the time, or even, say, 1% of the time, should be considered reliable.

I concur that people should worry more about smoking, red meat, and browned oils than about 100mSv exposures to radioactivity. Outside the US, I would add automotive exhaust and indoor wood fires as major causes of cancer.
Cartoonist Chris Onstad of Achewood on his hiatus and digital content
It would have been helpful to get that number on that chart - just because it would help dispel bad information about the backscatter x-rays as well. The regular amount of radiation emitted by one of those machines is 0.1µSv (according to the chart - equivalent to eating a banana). The supposed mistake would have made the emissions 10 times higher (couldn't find a real µSv reading, just the 10x statement[1]) which would be 1µSv, or the same as using a CRT monitor for a year.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/tsa-radiation-test-...
It reminded me of AIM/AOL Chat... so I closed it down.

Different strokes for different folks!
Unfortunately, fear of the "bad guys" out-weighs his fears of the government, and I suspect that is likely to be the case for most people.

After all, they have nothing to hide...
It's newly relevant with the AT&T/T-Mo buyout. Do we really want that much more traffic going straight to the NSA?
There is one theoretical advantage to having multiple TLDs: bad policies on the part of one registry don't affect all domains.

Of course, since this only gives you effectively two choices right now (Verisign = com/net and Afilias = org/info), it's not a particularly good reason.
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China intensifies condemnation of Libya air strikes
We could use GPG for normal e-mail correspondence. But I really don't know if this would do anything more than delay any problems.

In a similar vein, I've deleted all the trusted root CA certs from my computer, and am now marking individual certs trusted as I hit them. Not fail-safe, but safer, I think.
Japan's tragedy could shape policies for decades to come
Personally I don't care too much whether my tethering is unlimited or not. I do care whether my provider tries to charge separately for tethering as if it is somehow different from using the same amount of data on the phone itself.