skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> do you then agree that security through obscurity is valid?

Not if obscurity is your only defense. I think obscurity of some forms, like using unusual port numbers, can be part of a defense-in-depth strategy to foil purely scripted attacks and save your resources a bit.

> .xxx just makes it easier for regulators/high-horse 'do-gooders' to target whole swathes of content...

And here we have it. It's a temptation I doubt they will be able to resist. Giving it to them that easily is just removing one more element of a defense-in-depth against censorship attempts.

> Why not have TLDs at all? Why not just have global content tags?

This is more of a technical issue, but my first reaction to doing everything via tagging is that spammers are going to spam: If you give them the opportunity to add tags to addresses you end up with the same scenario that lead Google to ignore keywords on websites.
Americans go by what makes sense linguistically rather than the blanket usage of 'have' and 'are'. British usage is more consistent (usage-wise) but half the time it sounds wrong because "Google have employees" doesn't make sense by other rules of English.
You say that as if because AT&T was the only bunch of idiots dumb enough to get caught that it's safe or reasonable to assume the VZW and others aren't doing the same.
Shop longines,longines UK,longines,Longines Watch - Longinesuk.co.uk
Longines - longinesuk.co.uk
Bad guys never get into the government?

Seems like he believes in Us vs Them mentality: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/False_dilemma
As somebody in San Francisco, how has being there helped you get user feedback? Wouldn't the audience for most startups be either global, or at least national?

Or is it something more to do with the culture of the San Francisco bay area?
The End of 3D (with Glasses anyway)
Definitely. Current domain names have been around so long they seem natural, but they're pretty arbitrary given the way the web is used today.

Honestly, how often do you type in a full domain anyway? I generally type the first couple of letters into Chrome's address bar.
Repost. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2302278
great thought here, they have definitely made some good bets and Heroku was probably just the tip of the iceberg, IMHO Dropbox is the one to watch of the older companies right now, I think there are several others that have large exit potential, Indinero, Carwoo, notifo, hipmunk and so on and so forth.

There are a few glimpses of what the future holds for YC but I think most of us can agree, it's pretty damn bright
Perhaps it's a myth?

See: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/03...
I agree that pretty much all of those are dumb, but I still think there should be a .app TLD, if only because there are so many perfectly good .com names just sitting on parking pages (and I would totally use .app domains).

Plus it just rolls off the tongue and there's no weird confusion on the spelling.
I partly agree to what you said, but just for sake of completeness:

>> Even if I eventually need the efficiency of a statically typed language, dynamic languages let me save the time that I would have spent satisfying the type checker on code that didn't make it into that version.

This conversion does not sound so trivial to me generally. At times converting from a dynamic language to a statically typed language requires either a change of code architecture or a massive refactoring operation.

>> Do you have an automated system that corrects type errors?

Not corrects, just detects. I have at times faced issues when code runs for half-an-hour and then crashes just because a the given object could not be converted to the needed new type at run-time. My reaction: "Sigh! I wish the compiler told me earlier during compile-time!"
Besides using SSH and VPN more, the only thing I can do is avoid ATT.

I was on T-Mobile for years (out of ATT spite) until Verizon got the iPhone and I jumped within the week. I also spent a lot more money on internet using alternatives to ATT DSL (although I doubt my information was more secure from that choice).
whoa there, slow down, there's .cat?!
ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet
Hey Luke! Thank you for your comments, i am the author of the article. Which would happen to be a perfect answer to your question... Among limitless other things, you can get feedback and support on your efforts in SF... more on that on another post i made on "Why Europe Leaks Startups to US" http://goo.gl/8ijbm

But now that i am in SF i can draw you a picture comparing the two situations. When i was back in Greece, working on my Consumer Internet Startup product was like operating the Pathfinder rover on Mars. If it got stuck in the mud it could take weeks, months, or forever to get started again...

On the other hand, being here in SF, working on the same product is like driving a Land Rover on Mars with me in it! In the unlikely situation that i'll get stuck in the mud, i'll have helicopters lifting me off in less than 30 minutes.

But then again, why not have someone 'local' explain the difference? :)
If you're on HN, you're probably a nerd, which means your Twitterstream (if you have one) is probably pretty interesting. Just for fun, click on the hashtag for any given trending topic. Note the (extraordinary) difference in quality, tone, and general signal:noise ratio.

You will realize that (a) Twitter can provide amazing filtration (b) this filter is 100% necessary and (c) the filter is exactly what the #dickbar undermines.

It's like an airplane engine that fails on purpose.
There's definitely evidence VZW did the same.

I used T-Mobile for years because they were the only ones that there wasn't much evidence against, plus I thought the parent company was a bit more credible, but it's all a black box from the user's perspective.
I'm guessing those other big companies are just as bad, however. Might not have the facts yet, but being paranoid leads me to think that way....
DS Lite Bundle
Yeah? There a lot of money in astroturfing these days? What's the client list look like? They hiring?
Show HN: Tsunami-Homes. Social-Aid Network 
We had to do something after this fu*#ing tsunami hit Japan. I know it´s not perfect, and there are lots of features to be added. We thought private shelters, child spaces where kids can digest recent events and a locator for missing persons should have top priority.
Anyone interested to work with us on this one?
I don't think that's fair. Sure, the Constitution is in tatters but without the Bill of Rights I think we'd have lost even more freedom. At least folks have rallied around and protected some elements (guns, religious freedom, free speech to some degree).
There were a series of disruptions to fiber coming out of the middle east and north africa a few years ago that is probably connected to the same program. (http://goo.gl/apasy)
Coinage hacker faces the legal music
Stuff like this makes me feel ill. The notion that the domain was used as property to commit the crime is absurd. He was linking, not manufacturing/producing/etc.
YC will attract an even larger following and the signal/noise ratio of applicants will become a problem in itself. The benefits of YC are clear so people will start to make it their goal to get into YC rather than build a great company.

This is outside the control of YC. Its a side-effect of becoming too successful.

I don't think we are too far off seeing "How to get into YC" ebooks or even discrete coaching on how to do well in YC-interviews.

Please forgive the pessimism but its my honest feeling.
Yes, but that's largely useless unless they target you. If they target you, it's likely they have the means to decrypt your traffic. They also have many other means if you are targeted.

The real danger would come if they didn't have to target you and could just mass mine every single encrypted packet.
What on earth does malaria have to do with electrical power? Dysentery, maybe, since it's clearly easier to run chlorination and sewer plants on a power grid, but malaria? I mean, you can import your bed nets, window screens, doxycycline, and cypermethrin from Iceland if need be, but I don't think they're actually that energy-intensive to produce.

I agree with your overall point, but I think that if you make it in such a non-credible fashion, it makes it harder for the rest of us who agree with you.
Jed. Imagine a world in which browsers don't throw a fit when given self-signed certificates. Imagine Jedsville.com, your new startup that, to save $15, uses a self-signed certificate. Imagine me, visiting that website, getting a certificate so that my browser and your server can agree on an AES key for us to encrypt traffic with.

Tell me this. How does my browser know if I've agreed with your server for a key, or with the man-in-the-middle proxy I've transparently been redirected to?
> 俺の国語より日本語上手いんだぜ。大好きっていうレヴェルで住むことじゃねよ。なんで好きな人たちの悪口言うわけ！

KY.
"But Smith was wrong. Every successful economy, without exception, has prospered by subsidizing key industries and protecting them from foreign competition. And nearly without exception, every developed society has then, with consummate hypocrisy, preached free trade to less-developed countries."

Comeon, really? That no country has practiced complete free-trade means Smith was wrong about free-trade?
Even where that true, why the shit should anybody care?
That's a little unfair, the form should disappear or there should be some sort of disclaimer! I realised there were a few spelling mistakes and resubmitted a few minutes ago.
That's only even a problem if they target you. Danger comes when they can target everyone simultaneously and use automated means to find those who match their profile as enemies of an agenda.
youre in!
None of it is idiotic. It is just different than before.

This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear.

The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.
Google Chrome showing message 'Safari can't find the server'
My iPhone user interface tutorial site that I launched a few weeks ago has already spawned 3 book offers: 2 from O'Reilly, 1 from another publisher. I politely turned them down: I'm fortunate to have a fairly sizable audience, so traditional publishers can't offer me much. I'm not going to lie, telling editors at large publishing houses that I'm more interested in self-publishing was more than a little satisfying.
well, no, that was written by government leaders attempting to protect civil liberties from future government leaders. It just didn't work.
I'm sure there are many kinds of authors curious about entering the e-book market, and those with the most to learn would be traditionalists who don't themselves buy e-books. So I wouldn't entirely dismiss the idea of a printed book on writing e-books. (It's bound to generate a few snickers. But then again, you could use that sentence to promote it.)
I don't understand how this gets 200+ points. Has a vast majority of people not received these blanket recruiter emails before?
I signed up, looks good to me.
Catalan culture. A regional-cultural TLD. If small countries get TLDs, why shouldn't a tightly connected culture of ~5 million get one too?
im wondering what the signal/noise ratio is like now, the first batch after the start fund. will be interesting to see how big and how awesome this next batch is.
Chatting about great ideas totally beats studying for exams, so I'm definitely in!
Oh? I thought it was written by a bunch of guys (these days we'd probably call them "insurgents" or somesuch) who had recently been fed up with a government that was unreasonably searching them, etc., and didn't want it to happen again.
While not specifically about eBooks, the 'Conclusions' section of this post http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ by Peter Cooper does a good job detailing why one might - and might not - want to write a book.
Most new TLDs have been pointless and idiotic. Blame ICANN.
It's a good idea, but only if the account is posting information that's worth the fee. Like the author says: MP3 downloads, exclusives, behind-the-scenes stuff will be great for bands, but I think for non-celebrity accounts it might be tougher to come up with valuable information. For retailers, coupons are obviously the way to go, but I'm having trouble coming up with lots of other good content examples.
From my experience, you get much better generalized startup feedback, but it's frankly harder to get true user feedback unless you're building something for SF types. I tend to filter a lot of my more general consumer product ideas through friends who DON'T live in SF because I want them to not be comparing it to every other startup they've heard about recently.
They are operationally useless, yes. However, they are not meant to be operationally useful. They are meant to be vehicles for extracting money from domainers.

So yeah, something useless is getting sold to "investors" - what else is new? and in this case, it takes money from those "investors" that would otherwise be used squatting on useful .com and .net domains, causing those of us who actually want to /use/ a domain to use longer and less-memorable names. So, as far as I'm concerned, this is a net win.
I'm not sure why you condescend me by writing my name in responses to me, but it bugs me to death. That's the second time you've done it to me (you did it when I took the unpopular side in the Square credit card bonanza, too), and I am capable of communicating with you from the same level. I don't see you naming other people you're communicating with to add emphasis, so I must assume it's me.

> to save $15, uses a self-signed certificate.

Valid SSL can be had from StartSSL for no charge. Money is not the issue, it's browsers completely flipping their shit at a self-signed.

> How does my browser know if I've agreed with your server for a key, or with the man-in-the-middle proxy I've transparently been redirected to?

It doesn't. Which is why, quoting myself and adding emphasis:

> if I offer a self-signed certificate, perhaps the better UI experience would be to inform the user in that "Page Info" that their connection is encrypted, but they have no idea if the other end is who they say they are

This is the function of the big red warning, but it's the implementation of that very warning that I disagree with. However, the traffic in between you and the other end (the other end that you cannot verify, remember) is still encrypted from completely unrelated third parties, so there is still a negligible benefit.

It limits "opened Wireshark and watched you work" to "need to know specifically what I'm after and generate a certificate and poison DNS and ..." A self-signed alone raises the barrier to entry at Starbucks significantly from "really, really easy" to "need to reconnoiter the target and have significant control over the network".
Difficulty of amending the US constitution is a double edged sword.
As a data point: I'm reluctant to pay too much for ebooks, because they have no resale value. There are plenty of print books that I've happily spent $30-100 for, because I know that I can resell them for most of the cost (typically $5 less, at most) if I don't consider them worth keeping. Arguably, this makes their effective cost more like $5-10, give or take - mostly shipping. I'm quite willing to pay more for books that are worthwhile, but it's hard to tell upfront. I really like the MEAP subscription model of, "free trial chapter(s), subscribe and get further chapters as they're written, get the book when it's done". Plus, it works even better for serial fiction.

Also: I have a kindle, and I use the hell out of it (citeseer!); I'm in no way opposed to ebooks. Just, pricing them is tricky. I've bought several. I also worked in a library for several years. Make what of that you will.
2010 Music Website Heat Map v2
A video tour of Internet Explorer History.
Rob Waugh reports on the rise to near-mythical status of Jonathan Ive
Yes to Petition your government, contact your congressperson, and support the EFF.

The problem with making yourself 'technically safe' is that it realistically leaves most non-technical people exposed.

The only way to 'protect' everybody is to cure the cancer, not just your symptoms.
It's worth what others are willing to pay for it. A good (and time-tested) way of determining this price is to start low and then hike the price up steadily until your revenue starts to level off. When you reach this level, this is a decent indicator of how much to charge for your application.
First, I have never heard anyone, anywhere, ever call bats "birds." Second, the relationship between bats and other mammals is well established through genetics. In other words, that classification has been tested in ways that the personality types have not (that I am aware of, hence, my question).
haha, i like that raising a family is a good option for when your startup fails
It should also be kept in mind that the sievert is a radiation dose unit used for a variety of arbitrarily defined dose quantities. Grays and sieverts are both J/kg, but you get sieverts by using weighting factors depending on the radiation type, tissue type, organ, and which dose quantity you are calculating.

Most of the dose values reported are referring to "effective dose", which attempts to sort of normalize all exposures in terms of full body exposures, e.g. comparing a hand exposure with a chest exposure. This has a number of issues, but as you can imagine, in radiation protection situations, the exact site of exposure is not always well defined.
I remember reading that long time ago.
It actually made me quit AT&T and every time someone called me, I tend to ask or check their number and tell them you calling me from AT&T do you know about "the room"? Couple times my friends quit it for the same reason; others don't care. I guess the answer is switch to a different career.

I had a good laugh when I read (think it was Wikipedia) about that room. AT&T was sued over it... they defends themselves by 1) the room does not exist AND 2) this lawsuit should not be proceed due to Act of National Security setting aside lawsuit frames. LOOL! I dont know about you -- but to me first contradicts the second one :)) the judge only decided on count 2) -- that it is indeed NSA involved - so it was dismissed, but if there is NSA then the room exists, hahahaha!!
Does this only count public posts that "everyone" can see?
That seems awfully counterproductive, and it would take about 30 minutes for someone to start republishing paid users' content.

Here are some ideas that I think would work way better:

- In-stream advertising (ala Twitteriffic)

- Charge a couple of bucks for mobile apps (or mobile app API access)

- Charge for premium, business-oriented features (multi-user accounts, autofollow, analytics, ability to receive DMs without following someone, custom CSS on profile page)

- Charge to vote on American Idol via Twitter
seriously, wtf is up with these blog posts?
not only it's wrongly linked but it's also a dupe of TWO dead posts http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347678 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347487
I agree on the politeness observation; I've been all over the world, but Japan is the only place where an employee at a Starbucks coffee kiosk thanked me three times for purchasing an espresso.
Okay, let's say I buy the argument that there is a lot of money to be made becoming the premier "real-time" intermediary between consumers and long-tail small businesses.

I'm not entirely clear on why Groupon is uniquely positioned to become this intermediary. It seems like there are a lot of other national companies already doing business with this long tail (e.g., eBay, Yelp -- not to mention MasterCard, Amex, the big telcos, etc.)

What am I missing? What about Groupon's relationship with these vendors gives it a leg up?
Well, they could be lying, but T-mobile has claimed that they did not participate in the NSA program.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12745304/ns/technology_and_scien...

Meanwhile AT&T was up front about rolling over.

Since any telco can legally lie about this, I'm curious why T-Mobile was later added to the initial suit while Qwest was not. I looked around the EFF site but got tired of poking through PDFs and not finding anything to explain that.
this isnt true. as long as youve submitted once before the deadline you're ok.
hi! so, yeah, you were never a founder, it was a sugar title. I don't think I'd ever co with someone where there wasn't an equal balance of value and credibility.

HN sometimes has an attitude of "oh, you aren't a founder? you suck" but that isn't true at all. If you do have the itch to take on founder challenges, don't let this stop you from trying again, in a domain where you are credible and with a balanced founding team. Or, stop worrying about it now, put yourself in places where you will pick up these skills from mentors, you will wake up in a few years with the skills and credibility to found a company of this magnitude.
I'm sorry you find that condescending. I don't mean it to be.

The distinction you're trying to draw between "attacks that can be carried out with Wireshark" and "attacks that can be carried out with Wireshark and a Perl script" aren't meaningful to me, so I'm obviously the wrong person to try to persuade you about this. Sorry for wasting your time.
People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet)

People make a lot of money selling eBooks, including to programmers. (Indeed, the recent change in the market is that thanks to the Kindle you can actually do well selling books which don't cost ~$50 and/or fiction.) Ask Amy Hoy, who cowrote a fairly successful one with her husband about JS performance. Your problem is not your pricing. Your problem is that your marketing does not communicate value sufficient to justify a higher pricing.

If you hear someone on HN or demographically similar say "That's too much money!", file them away in the pathological customer bin.

Look at the difference between your site and these sites, then optimize accordingly:

http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/

http://www.startupbook.net/

http://peepcode.com/products/meet-rails-3-i <-- not an ebook, but similar
In principal it's quite wrong and scary, but in reality I have to believe the government is too incompetent to actually do anything with their mountains of AT&T collected data.
http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z60/palacepuppy/Cartoons-...
Oh come on--- I kind of like .museum. Be even better if a few more folks actually used it...
Most of them aren't even accomplishing that, though. Many of the new gTLDs (like .cat, .aero, and .jobs) have restrictions on ownership and usage which make them worthless to speculators; the rest just don't have the name recognition that the Big Three do.
Nope, it's being a good entrepreneur. Because if you don't ambulance chase, you may be end up being the next one chased.
And doesn't Japan have an unusually high suicide rate (on paper)? Speaking as a library worker who used to spend plenty of time digging in such statistics...
Under what grounds would it be challenged?

Genuine question: Obviously it can't be challenged on anti-trust grounds (unless the original AT&T settlement applies here somehow), and I don't know enough US law to know what else might apply. I know many countries have a regulator for mergers that can sometimes apply a "bad for competition" policy, but I thought in the US that would only apply if it forms an actual monopoly?