skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm thinking the single biggest change is that YC is going to land a Zynga or Groupon: a company whose meteoric rise to hundreds of millions in revenue and profit makes headlines, shakes industries, and will include "funded by YC" in every one of the numerous news pieces about it.

Who knows, it might have already happened, and we just don't know about it because they're still on the flat part of the hockey stick.
Not to be too pedantic, but little omega is not the first uncountable ordinal (it is countable by definition), it is the first infinite one.
The article seems unnecessarily harsh, frankly. It's easy to forget in all of this that Black is still 13 years old.
SNI doesn't work in IE7 (or IE8) if you're running Windows XP. This ends up leaving a sizable chunk of users unable to use it.
The AOL-ization of TechCrunch headlines continues apace.

More technically, SEO-ified titles like this are a great example of Goodhart's law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Techcrunch is going to lose its audience with posts like this over time because they are improperly using a global trend ("Rebecca Black") to attract a local audience (fairly technical/entrepreneurial crowd, or used to be).

One possible technical solution would be for Facebook to launch Facebook Trends, such that you could start cross-sectioning Google Trends by demographic. This would mean blogs could stop going for lowest common denominator stuff and start at least putting together linkbait titles optimized for their intended audience.

[Of course, this only works if the global strategy actually is suboptimal relative to the local audience strategy. Empirical question.]
C-balls?
The reason is that to achieve true security, they go hand in hand. Without identity verification, you can simply perform a MITM attack (decrypt connection from client, re-encrypt when talking to the server). Firesheep showed MITM over HTTP to be trivially easy. Modifying Firesheep to do the same MITM attacks over HTTPS with self-signed certificates would be equally easy.
This happens in every single "free" country. People should care, but no one does.
Are HBCU Students Digitally Disinterested?
> Five years from now we'll look back and one of two things will be on our minds

You are probably right. But how, in that case, do Twitter monetize their service?
I found the article a bit of a puzzle - I must admit I cannot understand his final point. The author talks about how he moved to the SF bay area, and says:

"So this is how instinctively craving for the Lean Startup’s feedback loop, i decided to leave my home country and get to the place where internet startups are built."

Isn't the internet, where internet startups are built? That’s were all your users are. That’s where all the revenue comes from. I thought the whole point of startups, was that anybody with an idea could create one without having to live in a certain place, or have lots of money and connections.

However I admit, that I live on the other side of the world from SF, and the probability that I don’t 'get it' is high. Can somebody who is in SF explain what you can do there, that you can't do from anywhere else in the world with a net connection?
Discreet SexDates
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Will nothing change at all, except for a small rise in cancer rates for people who live next to the plant?

Nothing will change at all, even for people who live right next to the plant.

Someone sitting at the front gate of the plant for the past week would have absorbed approximately 100 mSv of radiation. This is a significant amount -- equal to the recommended annual limit for radiation workers -- but too low to cause radiation sickness (symptoms of acute radiation sickness start at between 250 and 500 mSv).

The cancer risk from radiation is roughly 0.01 cancers per Sievert, so this individual would have a 0.1% increase in his chance of getting cancer. People living further away would naturally have even lower probabilities of developing cancer.

Based on the population density of the surrounding area, there is a low probability of any cancers being caused by the Fukushima nuclear incidents, even if the residents had not been evacuated.

(Does this mean that the residents should not have been evacuated? No. It means that the evacuations were a precautionary measure to keep them safe in case the situation got worse than it has in fact gotten.)
Yes, you're missing something (actually I'm sure you're not). The government has evolved to a state where they've decided they can do anything, anything they want, in the name of whatever they want to use for justification, in the rare case where they deign to justify.

They're not afraid of terror or drugs, they aren't afraid of anything.
Blog4NZ: Bloggers come together to help Christchurch
So? This isn't the equivalent to papers secured in your household, it's data sent over someone else's network. I'm not a huge fan, but saying it's the same as the government walking into your house and examining all your documents is ridiculous.

Either way, call me when someone finds out they can decrypt and examine all the SSL traffic in real-time.
Make it easy and you 'may' just make it happen. ;)
In my mind there is a significant gap between someone who get's cancer from choosing to eat red meat, and someone who get's cancer from a coal power plant 200 miles away. Each coal power plant in the US kills a little over 1 person per day yet because you can't track the death to a specific power plant nobody get's sued etc.

PS: Economics suggest the appropriate action in such situation is to tax the Externality and let the market decide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Honestly, I think the current format used by most m.website.tld makes the most sense. It immediately tells you you're going to a mobile site in the case that your screen cuts off the full URL.

Too, it's pretty consistent when a lot of sites use subdomains to indicate you're going to a different portion of the same domain, i.e. a blog (blog.site.tld) or an estore (shop.site.tld) or even a 404 page (404.site.tld). 'm' should tell you then that you're on the mobile page of the same site, especially when we're now seeing so many domains that a .com can be a completely different, totally nonaffiliated group from the .net
Literacy fail.
I see...this is all a misunderstanding based on you not having read this correctly.

"...it could easily be the Air Force, or the Navy, right? Wrong. YC is the Marine Corp...[like the Marines] You are not serving next to people who are in it for the college money."

Yet again a metaphor intended to describe similarities...a compliment to the Marines, specifically. I have met plenty of people who went into other branches of the military just to earn money for college. Nobody goes into the Marines just to earn money for college. I can't see how you turned that into an issue.

It's really unfortunate. I have had the great opportunity to go through a world class program designed to turn the most dedicated professionals from a field into some of its strongest leaders. It is not for the weak-willed and my post was intended to convey that to people interested in the program. I thought I could relay that message by comparing it to a world class training organization of another kind, in which only people of the highest dedication should consider joining. It was my way of saying that what PG has put together is the best of the best, just like the US Marines. I am sorry that you had to nitpick it and turn it into a semantic argument. I'm happy to move on, but my compliment to the Marines and to the program PG has put together is nothing to apologize for.
I try to avoid any discussion of "typing" when I comes to programming languages because I recognize both my own ignorance in the nitty gritty of language design and the general lack of consensus in the meaning of "x typing" terminology.
Being young doesn't (and shouldn't) give you a pass in life, in any industry. For a HN crowd example: just because you started your first company in high school doesn't mean it's any more or less legitimate than one started by college students. Results and talent should be the measure of success. The article simply points out the 'results' and 'talent' of the Ms. Black...
If you search for either of those terms in Google or Bing you find the appropriate resources right away. People love to regurgitate that these names are not searchable but somehow we've found a way. Cω isn't typeable, but that's a different issue.
Rebecca Black is the gift that keeps on giving. Here's another business idea...get kids parents to spend $2000 and then produce their kid's music videos.
Unfortunately, it looks precisely like an ASCII ass.
I use all forms of communications, rank them according to urgency and how distracted I want to be when I get anything back.

In that order probably:
Phone call, SMS, Gtalk, Skype, Facebook, Email
c# is easy to search for. Do a search for "c#" and your first page will be exclusively hits on the language.

.NET is the same, although probably more difficult to grep for.
> Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense.

Not really: One organization is one thing, logically speaking.

But it was amusing of him to get that wrong while explicitly attempting to sound American.
It wasn't to efficient.
I'm no iPhone user so I'm curious as to why this is such an issue? As far as I can tell it's just ads in a free app? (unless, it's not free then it makes more sense)
In which other countries, exactly, does that happen? UK? Canada? Sweden?
I work with a Japanese woman she's about 30 years-old and has been here in Canada for at least ten years (a guess) and I can confirm that she is polite and courteous to the extreme.

It's embarrassing to see the contrast of some of my fellow Canadian co-workers' manners they eat with their mouths open, talk with food in their mouth, suck their teeth, turn up the TV in the break room with others in there just because they want to watch TV, walk in front of elderly people - so infuriatingly self-centered.

Customers at work keep asking her about Japan and if her family was injured and she politely answers they're OK but day after day people keep asking as if they think they are the first to think to ask her the obvious instead of having some common sense and keep their mouths shut.

People think of Canadians as polite but Japan certainly holds the top spot for manners of all nations on this planet if all Japanese people are like my co-worker friend.

If we ever had a disaster here I know of at least one person who won't be opportunistic and rob me when I'm down.
The Internet Archive to the rescue! http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20060208140949/http://dotne...
The real problem, according to Lafon, is that with HTTPS you lose the ability to cache.

I'm fairly certain this is false, unless they're talking about proxy caching. Normal browser caching works equally well in HTTPS as it does in HTTP.
Socially Squared
The authors of the Federalist Papers were against a specific enumeration of rights because they feared that those would become the only rights that citizens had. They now seem prescient in retrospect.
Ask HN: How to do proper valuation of a web appliation?
How a web application's worth is determined? What is the process behind it? Is there any reliable tool for website valuation? How can I make sure that I'm not underselling my web application?
> Firesheep showed MITM over HTTP to be trivially easy.

Firesheep does not perform MITM attacks (the media made this mistake too). It catches sessions out of the air and impersonates them, which is session hijacking.

As you wrote yourself, a man in the middle attack makes the victim think he is communicating with the far end; Firesheep doesn't involve the victim except to catch his packets.
It is, however, the same as government opening and reading all of the mail you send through the post office. And that government cannot do.
Fair enough. I concede the point.

(Of course, I'm a nuclear engineer, so that doesn't mean much.)
I was under the impression that GSM phones support multiple frequency bands - why not just adjust the base station configuration so phones can roam between the two networks?
It doesn't say a thing about "electronic communications". Which gives prosecutors, the FBI, and the national security state a large opportunity to blow smoke.
> I can see a valid use for .xxx

All I can see is a major hook on which some damn do-gooder will attempt to hang yet another censorship scheme by trying to force all 'pornographic' websites to only have .xxx domains, and by 'pornographic' I mean 'everything the do-gooder disagrees with'.

We fought the CDA to the Supreme Court and won with the mix of justices we had then. I hope that if something similar happens again, that case is used as precedent and not toilet paper.
What I would be more interested in is not how much money he made, but what opportunities opened up to him. To me, the goal of putting out good content is leverage it to get awesome job offers, bigger projects, higher paying consulting gigs.

Anyone have any experience with this? Has a blog post or ebook created opportunities for you?
1) http://www.google.com/search?q=sslstrip

2) Do you think every CA with a cert on your system is incapable of being bullied by the US government?
That is the meanest-looking bird I have ever seen.
It gets really confusing, though. For example, "The Jets is doing really well this season," "The Monkees was awesome if somewhat cheesy." One organization is one thing, logically speaking, and teams and bands are just as much organizations as are corporations.
>. There are many better ways to monetize the experience here. AdWords-style keyword based stuff being the most obvious, and most likely to be virtuous.

Did you read the comment?
um.. what?
Bruce Sterling: Closing Keynote at Interaction '11
"Design thinking has some problems... one of the worst problem it has is user Stockholm Syndrome."
I'm not saying she should get a pass in life. I'm saying that mercilessly mocking a teenager for failing at something like this is just out of line.
> Unfortunately, it looks precisely like an ASCII ass.

In my font, it's wide enough to be a Unicode ass.
> I’ve heard that some of the Wikileaks and Pirate Bay crowd are working on a distributed alternative to DNS.

I suspect that this will be the ultimate solution to this sort of nonsense.
I think the new funding deal by Milner and SV Angel may snowball into more angels and VCs offering blanket investments to all YC acceptees on easy terms as soon as they're accepted, which will compound the rising applicant pool and place more burden on the initial review and acceptance process.

At a deeper level, I think YC is at the forefront of motivating lots of people to consider founding or working at a startup as an alternative to a traditional job at an established company, and to develop the skills to be able to do so.
It's worth observing that the title he published was one that was turned down by all the publishers as being commercially nonviable.

It'd be interesting to see what the outcome would be if he repeated the experiment with a title they were dying to publish. That would help determine if they're worth the huge percentage they take because they're good at promotion, or if all they're doing is detecting titles that will sell well on their own.
Groupon’s Secret Weapon – the local advertising GDS
there are come problems with readable url's(ex stack overflow, questions with c# in the title end up looking like questions about c).
Considering Y Combinator is already 5 years old and hasn't changed drastically, I think we can expect the same in another 3-5 years. Iteratively improving their process, using their data and experience to make better decisions, and ultimately improving their success rate.

I expect to see some Heroku sized exits for YC companies as well. Maybe in 5 years there will finally be a YC company which goes public. In either case, I don't see YC drastically changing.
I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org. Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were.

I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as sales began to slope off, I ran a $6 sale for some time (stated as a celebration of Rails 3 stable I think and then just continued on just because), and wouldn't you know, sales soared for a while. I plan on implementing a pricing structure similar to what he's done here once Rails 3.1 hits next month; we'll see what that experiment yields.

My eBook on writing eBooks (http://authoringebooks.com) hasn't sold well by most mainstream standards, and I can almost guarantee the $49 price tag is partially to blame. Unfortunately, it'd be really problematic to have a print edition of a book on writing eBooks, so I'm just going to have to figure out a better way to market it. :)

Maybe one day soon people will be willing to pay more for eBooks, but at this point I can't blame them. You don't get a tangible good that you can give specific value to. With current rights scehemes, if you delete the file on accident or something, it's possible that you're hosed for good. The medium in general still isn't a solved problem, but maybe one day soon it will be...
This is great stuff Matt. Your continued, valuable iterations of this product are inspiring! Keep up the good work.
Meh...get over yourself Marco. Just because you aren't interested in these topics does not mean others are not. That's why they are trending in the first place.
The leading browsers were fairly stubborn on caching SSL resources for a while -- specifically to disk -- but (I think) most of them now obey the magic words:

Cache-control: public

Some data here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/174348/will-web-browsers-...

I'm interested in what the state of this is, myself, but I know that one of IE 9's improvements was HTTPS conditional requests.
Well good! I enjoy Digg and would hate to see it go down like the article implies.
Theoretically I would agree with you, realistically I'm unable to think like that. I'm naturally very quick to make snap judgements (perhaps more so that other people or perhaps it's normal, I'm not sure), but I'm generally good at keeping an open mind. So while I may instantly decide I dislike someone, it's not hard for them to change my opinion if it turns out I was being too hasty. On the other hand, if they continue to act in that way, it becomes a deeper hole to dig themselves out of.

Very few people get that far. I think there's only one person whom I would call a "cunt" genuinely rather than endearingly, and that's my former boss. He was rude to colleagues, both below and above him, to friends, to waiters, to his girlfriend, and even to clients. I hated the two years I spent working for him, and there is nothing he could do now to change my opinion of him. Thankfully I haven't spoken to him in almost a year, and most likely never will again.

One person I used to be enemies with - for a few years we hated each other and were horrible towards each other whenever our paths cross (in my head he was at fault entirely, and I know he feels the same way) now works for me full time. Because of his talent I overlooked our relationship and gave him the break he needed, and in the 18 months since then we've had a great working relationship. Now I wouldn't say a bad thing about him.

The above is a drawn out way of saying: it is possible, if perhaps not common, to label people without it having negative consequences.

Actually, re-reading, your words were that if you label someone negatively, you're more likely to treat them badly. That may be the case, but for me, I'm no more likely to be rude to someone I label a jerk as someone I don't label a jerk, but that I notice acting like a jerk. The label isn't something I decide to add because of something, it's a connection my brain makes automatically - unless there is evidence that someone is not a jerk, there isn't a difference between them acting like a jerk and being a jerk.

(Written from my phone in bed so won't re-read what I just wrote, hopefully it makes at least a little sense.)
Heroku's acquisition almost seemed like it approached that magnitude, from a valuation perspective.
I must admit I did miss that part of it blush
I built the initial foundation for my Ruby/Rails consulting career on the back of my eBook. That opened up the opportunity to work some awesome people (directly, as in "I read your book, work with us") and to write a book for a "real" publisher. Of course these opportunities opened up more work and conference speaking opportunities.

And again this past year with the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook. I was invited to speak at like 5 conferences based off my work on that along with some other opportunities.

So yes, getting information out there in a cohesive way that people are interested in is a great way to open up opportunities for yourself, whether it's a blog, book, documentation project, etc.
What API/URL do you use to get the bit.ly counts?
There are issues if the stubs you use in your URLs only allow a-z and 0-9. You could just as easily escape each character in the stub and preserve the title of the post/question you're representing. This is a problem with Stack Overflow though, not the name of the language (C#).

Wikipedia has this issue solved. You can use any Unicode character in their titles and they get used as the stub by escaping those characters. Anyway, it's not like the whole world only uses the English alphabet. This should be handled properly.
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Drastically reducing that huge wall of text I had earlier:

As an African-American IT guy working for a call-center that supports nearly 1000 users, 70% of who are black, the issue isn't black employees being disenfranchised from computer technology.

The issue is that computer technology courses are completely, and utterly failing to train students on how to use a computer outside of the realm of Microsoft Office. There should not be an Intro to Computers course ANYWHERE that spends more than two days on Microsoft Office, and that course shouldn't spend any more than an hour learning how to type memos in Microsoft Word.

NONE.

When a user submits a trouble ticket saying "I just moved to a new seat and Webmail is still logged in as a previous user" I slap myself. This isn't a task that requires a quick keystroke or an unknown to the average joe command-line trick. The logout button is staring you in the face.

So here's my solution: spend less time on Microsoft Office beyond what is absolutely essential enough so that the student can make an informed decision, and then start teaching students how to navigate interfaces, understand how buttons work, think on their feet.
Actually, yes...all those minus Sweden. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all cooperate together.

See the Ecehlon program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_%28signals_intelligence...
what tool(s) did you use to create that video? I love it! very impressive!
FWIW: Being wrong abut an ambiguous grammar is not a failure of literacy.

Also, your comments contribute what to this discussion?
Heroku is a much, much bigger company than anything I have ever done or aspire to do, and everybody even remotely connected to it should be justifiably proud, but it is not within an order of magnitude of either Zynga or Groupon. Either could have done that acquisition out of their free cash flow, and it would probably have been less than they spent on advertising in the next N months.
What about the amount from those TSA machines under normal operation and the amount apparently emitted by mistake recently?