skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heroku's current network issues and Engine Yards tweets. Hmmmm...
Is it just me or does it seem a little bit of a coincidence that there's a volley of tweets publicising Engine Yards new Heroku migration tool at pretty much exactly the same time that Heroku is experiencing major network trouble....? I'm not suggesting dirty tricks, but it certainly looks like someone at Engine Yard has noticed Heroku's uncharacteristic downtime and seized the opportunity for a bit of ad-hoc marketing via Twitter.

Don't worry Heroku I still love ya but I hope you get things sorted out soon it's 4.30am here and I need to deploy before getting some shut eye.
To summarize: "Stop calling projects startups because finally I feel special in life".
You forgot the diggbar
I'd watch for a spike in bandwidth use and connections to Windows or Apple update servers -- at least to start hunting down suspects.
So, I assume instances reddit uses have instance storage root volumes instead of EBS root vols. I've always assumed the persistence of ebs AMIs was a plus without a downside. Why would you opt for instance-storage AMIs instead of ebs root volume EC2 AMIs?
md5 truncation will not guarantee avoidance collision. This does.
So you think they are parsing user agent strings out of HTTP requests? Seems unlikely.
if I had to guess I would say http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/
Eager Parameter Loading in Rails 3
How many times does this need to be posted? It has already been shown to be a bogus report that doesn't even test what it claims to.
The article you are referring to was recently posted on HN, but published in 2005: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
But the computer wins when you factoring in the far faster webpage loading it offers.
Yea I always kind of assumed they'd something like that - RAIDed everything, but then again I think that may be the difference between using one of their DBs and running your own atop EBS. EBS hasn't an actual file-system, right? Or does it? I think it's more raw, and I guess more "use at your own risk" apparently. Damn Amazon, not a good look. Also, why aren't dudes sending you apology fruit baskets or refunding money or something?
> $dec = ($num * $prime)-floor($num * $prime/$ceil)*$ceil;

This looks like a clumsy way to implement modulus multiplication. My php is (thankfully) rusty, but it looks like an affine cipher with a fixed key?

If it is, a user can obtain two consecutive "hashes" and calculate past and future hashes. If they know the corresponding plaintext for a single hash, they can calculate arbitrary hashes.
A longstanding quirk of the Android browser is that it can't handle elements that use overflow: auto to create a separate scrollable area. iOS devices handle this by two finger scrolling within these elements.

There is a two year old bug report noting that you cannot browse the android developer site on an android device as a result of this.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2118

Until this is resolved I'd have a hard time accepting that android beats iPhone at web browsing.
Just periodically run a log scanner for requests for SWFs, etc. Lots of simple non-constant log scans will reveal this information.
On the reddit thread there is speculation that they are observing the TTL of the packets. All iphones will send them out with the value of 'x'. When packets start leaving with 'x-1' then the person is obviously tethering.
Manager: I pay you to know about this stuff. Also, it's
impossible.
You: No it isn't
Manager: (Likes wasting his money paying people then not
listening to them): I am right.
You: No you aren't.
Manager: (More interested in asserting schoolyard social
dominance than running a business) I'm not
listening la la la
You: *sigh* But....
Manager: I'm the manager and you wont win.
You: When we as a company do the impossible, we all
win. We can do it.
Manager: I don't care. I'd rather we all lose than you
win.
You: *sigh*
> we wouldn't have any technology bigger than could be built by lifestyle businesses. Anyone who wanted to build a lifestyle business on the Internet, for example, would find that there was no Internet.

I think you're wrong, for two reasons.

First, this same argument used to be used to explain why long-distance telephone service is a natural monopoly — because if two people are using different long-distance phone carriers, then they wouldn't be able to talk to each other! And it's really true, in some cases. There are still developed countries where you can't send an SMS from one mobile carrier to another in the same city. But it's also obviously false in general.

Second, more generally, any relationship that is structured as a coworker relationship within a firm could also, in theory, be structured as a commercial transaction between individuals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm is a Nobel-winning piece of work about why that doesn't happen; it introduced the idea of "transaction costs". But it might turn out that transaction costs can be reduced to a low enough level that services that formerly required big businesses to provide them could be provided by "lifestyle businesses".
Most mobile web access systems run through an explicit or transparent web proxy to downgrade image quality (=> reduce size) at least. Filtering on user agent would be trivial, though easy to work around.
CoolPlanetBiofuels Draws Google Ventures Investment To Make Gas From Grass
StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp On What It’s Like To Buy Back Your Company
http://www.10millionapps.com/lol-studio-ios/

http://www.10millionapps.com/space-gremlin-mac/
How to make fewer errors at the stage of code writing
One reddit user suspects that they are looking for TTL's on packets that do not match what iOS uses. I would love for somebody more knowledgeable about TCP/IP on HN to evaluate the likelihood of this...

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/g62wv/i_woke_up_...

If this is the case, user agent spoofing will not work, and it would be quite a bit of hackery to trick iOS' IP stack into spoofing TTL's for packets from tethered devices.
They have to use in app browsers, on wifi, to non-mobile sites to get those numbers. When they compare non-mobile sites, or browsing speed over 3G, the gap is non-existant The phones are even in every other metric.

I understand they want to get traffic, and sell their website optimization, but they are taking the editorializing a little too far.
Two million million dollars is a lot of money.
Songs of another war
Savvy marketing on the part of EngineYard, but I'm not leaving heroku either :)
The second factor is called a "PIN" in the RSA documentation, but the details can be configured by the administrator in a particular deployment. The administrator can set an allowed length range (with minimum and maximum between 4 and 8), and can choose to allow alphanumeric "PIN"s.

RSA's recommendation is for alphanumeric PINs of at least 6 characters.

Note also that a small number of tries with an incorrect PIN but correct tokencode will lock the account as "token stolen".
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...

A former employee is not quite as nice to Amazon.
This startup actually has me more exciting than a lot of the other ones here, even though I doubt I'll ever use it. Games are rarely about being novel, they're about being good. And if if pg tells the truth about funding people, not ideas, then I'll be very interested to see how this turns out.
Kevin's response via Twitter: http://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/48593910083239936
You could live a comfortable lower middle-class life in fly-over America for more than a decade on 300k. I think I might take a 10 year vacation and just work on all of the little projects I've always wanted to get around to trying.
macbook air is core2duo, Samsung's is i5 .. big difference.
Well I guess I won't apply since I'm male.

Apparently only women are welcome to apply at OATV.
I tend to agree with you, but don't just take it from me:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/6735

I don't think it's fair to say the original dissertation is the final word on REST, but I do think almost all of the discussion on REST is way off target. It feels like almost all the discussion is about the construction of URLs.

REST has become a buzzword, people use it just to project credibility.
Being that EBS booting only became an option in December 2009 I would not be surprised if Reddit had not migrated their instances to that boot/storage method. They acknowledged in the last two years they hadn't even had time to move one of their databases from a single EBS volume to striped EBS volumes.
> Find out where he gets coffee in the morning, ask the barista for an introduction.

Uh that's stalking.
While there are a lot of cases in which I'd agree with you, this isn't one of them. While a thing is gonna do what it's gonna do regardless of the name, a lot of time semantics can have concrete implications on how something is largely percieved and, therefore, how it operates or interacts with the world at large.

A project and a startup are two terribly different things.
Just to brainstorm a few possibilities for people to rule out:

* They don't know, and the SMS / e-mail went to everyone using more than a certain amount of bandwidth.

* They sniff HTTP User-Agent: headers, Accept: headers, or similar.

* They look at the TTL and other IP header fields to see if they are as expected for iOS.

* They fingerprint TCP window size behaviour to see if it looks like traffic is coming from the iOS TCP stack.

* They inject Javascript into occasional HTTP responses to query the navigator object and screen.height, screen.width, send it back, and sniff for the response, or have a deal with some sites to include the Javascript for them. If the screen size is too big, it triggers the tethering detector.

So there are lots of possibilities - and they could combine more than one of the above.
Matt Cutts: The Greenspan of Google
PHP's modulus operator is broken for larger values.
http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.php#9...

True about consecutive hash calculation. Notedly it's for obfuscation, not encryption.
When Diogenes was asked which wine tasted the best, he replied: "That which belongs to another."
They were acquired by Twitter about a year ago. DabbleDB's been in export-only mode for the paste year.
I've noticed a strange frequency with which Apple users use the word "cripple."
I find nothing wrong with an entrepreneur not wanting to shoot for the stars. Some people are simply not interested in changing the world, and maybe would prefer to spend more time with their family, should that really be discouraged? Calling it "disgusting" seems a step too far: https://twitter.com/al3x/status/48558660552630272

Personally, I'm in it to change things, but I'm not going to discourage someone who is in it to provide a good living for their family. Going all out when you're supporting others just isn't an option in some cases, in fact it could be downright dangerous.
So here's my bug report:

- Quest completion progress doesn't update until I manually click through into the details.

- A retreating pet is referred to as {{pet_name}} (problem in the template layer?)

- Using just about any special character when naming a pet <, &, \, ', (, will make the AJAX call fail and a pet will end up with untitled<hash> name instead

- A blank name will be accepted (I expected it to revert to the default name) and used as such.

-- "What would you like to call this monster?" alert box message is about as descriptive as "Would you like to perform this action?" (The offending part being just "this")

- If I'm allowed to try to use a capture card just once, this mechanic is not apparent. It just looks like the inventory disappears.

- switch pets screen appears to be cached on first view of the battle. Subsequent switches will not show damage to HP of any party members.

- sometimes the battle will just stop at "You have chosen to use Bash" message. Presumably the client has missed a response from the server and there is no retry logic?

- at some point it would start refreshing the page after every battle move is executed

- is successful escape (run away) supposed to be titled "you lost this battle"? (it also seems to have killed the in-play pet that escaped)

- after the battle, the pet graphics are always fixed, but the experience bars are sometimes re-ordered.

Some other observations:

- it's annoying to go to the dashboard after every single battle.

- the "weak bash" (0 energy move) is not available unless a pet has little energy (what if I want to just tap a wild pet , in a capture attempt?). At that point the UI is very un-intuitive, as regular bash becomes weak, and all the moves (including weak bash!) are greyed out.

- I wasn't able to figure out where pets beyond the 4th captured one are at. No apparent way to select or re-order the party.

-- as such the game quickly becomes nothing but a low-level grind, as first weak pets take up all the available slots and make it impossible to move further into the game.

- do I _have_ to explicitly click on "aquire[sic] reward" if it's only gold (presumably this is always wanted)
I was going to just leave yet another comment here about what a pointless and inconsequential rant this is. The title "out of respect for people actually launching startups" is incredibly narcissistic. I don't give people respect because what they do fits some meme, it's about specifics.

But all that aside, I actually do agree that calling projects startups is a bad idea because it's not a subtle semantic difference—they are completely different things! A project in this case really means an application, and a startup is a company. Calling an application a startup is like calling the internet a series of tubes, it just betrays a fundamental imprecision that is anathema to the engineering instinct.

Note that this distinction has nothing to do with raising capital or how self-important you are. You can run a business part-time, and if it's early-stage then call it a startup. However if you're just putting some app out there without any kind of business plan, then it really does sound silly to call it a startup.
Silicon Valley Backs Effort to Help Foreign Entrepreneurs
Hopefully they'll figure out how to tell the difference between San Francisco and South Bay before they IPO.
The team behind it was hired by Twitter. Not for the technology, it was purely a talent grab.
Please rename to "Unusual Things I Didn't Know About Google (also: the worst VC decision ever)".

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I appreciate that you are participating more on HN.

Edit2: To those who are downvoting: can I ask why?
Thanks for the link! Somehow I'd never come across that site before (I guess because I've got a good densi jisyo. The only times I check out words online is when I want more context; in which case I go to the Japanese Wikipedia).

The question left open, though, is whether that's the word reporters normally would use. It's not clear in the examples whether or not the word is being used hyperbolically. I mean, just because you can say "Muhammad Ali annihilated his opponent" doesn't mean that "annihilate" is a synonym for "defeat".
It's shotgun marketing.

If you try to sell a crappy product to enough people someone will buy it.
The interesting part of the email was where they said they would enroll you automatically into the DataPro plan. Can they really change your contract without your permission? Would this be grounds of canceling your contract for free? I know that when the iPhone first came out, I was on Sprint, and people would watch for when they would change their contracts and you were allowed to cancel your contract free of charge.
Actually, the Wikipedia definition is also pretty useless. What's a "limited operating history"?

Steve Blank put it best: "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model"

You could be searching for a repeatable and scalable business model in a week-end, which would be awesome. Most people don't, and I find it really irritating that these projects get called startups.
Yea, that would be nice. But he was looking for investment/business ideas. He's in his mid 30s and I don't think is ready to retire just yet.
That took me more than five seconds. Maybe I'm a slow reader.
this is the kind of question you should do on quora...
This looks good, too. I especially like the fact that it tells which words are "Common word"s.
You know what the difference between an author and a writer is? An author writes.
Assuming for a minute that Amazon deserves as much blame as ketralnis is heaping on here, why would the Reddit guys be so reluctant to point this out? Professionalism? Kindheartedness? Even professionalism and mutual respect have limits.

The community loves both the site and the admins, but there are limits to the patience of users, and those limits are being tested by these outages. I would think the Reddit guys would be happy to have a scapegoat to direct the community's rage towards.
On a related note, I've been trying to figure out a way to encode MongoDB ObjectIDs ( a 24-char hex string, like `"4d82a373aeb4b69aec000001"` ) into a shorter Base64 string usable in URLs (eg, `/posts/{id}` ). The problem is, it still takes a 16-char Base64 to represent the same number as a 24-char hex string, and the Base64 one is even uglier.

I've been contemplating a way to generate my own ids, similar to this, but was running into trouble on how to make sure its always generated unique, on distinct machines.
I can see how it would be better for you. How would this be better for the startups?
Your comment is not only Offensive, but it is also ignorant. Boring? "lifestyle business?"

have you built the next Facebook (which also happens to not be a "change the world" service anyway)?

Disagree with the post...fine, but no need to drag everyone through the mud in the process.
it was already on there, unanswered:

http://www.quora.com/How-does-Airbnb-handle-payments

there are a number of variations of the question on there as well - all with 0 answers
How to promote a Windows 2008 server to a Domain Controller
I would hope that the requests/ideas would be informed by the people they are building relationships with at the school level. So perhaps more along the lines of "here are some things we are hearing again and again" rather than "these are ideas we think are good" but I wouldn't want to exclude either kind.
Great idea! I like that model.
This is covered in section 1.3 of AT&T's Wireless Customer Agreement: http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/index.j...

Basically, being able to get out of your contract without paying an ETF is only possible if they change the price of services to which you subscribe. Since tethering would not be a part of the data plans of the affected iPhone users, this would not apply.
Ubisoft re-selling torrented music?
Amazon is having problems, it's impacting Heroku and many others.
I think every person who has built a product has the right to call it a startup. And honestly it doesn't matter what you call it.

It is definitely better to call a project a startup than to call a startup as a startup, which has never delivered a product.

Your LLC with no product might be a startup but it is far away from being a real project. And real project with real product is what matters to me.
Yeah, that was pretty nasty swipe. Exactly what the article kind of gets at: big shot dismissing with a sniff -- he's "disappointed" with us -- something that's a very nice goal for the little people. There are hordes of people making 6 or 7 figures online that are "duping" people worse than Amy Hoy -- who is duping people none at all.
Programmable magnets
But that's a basic internet manipulation trick.

1) Have problem
2) Find related discussion forum
3) Post problem, state or imply it's probably impossible.
4) Get much more interest and better answers than a plain question would have.
> We could make some speculation about the disks possibly losing writes when Postgres flushed commits to disk, but we have no proof to determine what happened.

If you read between the lines, this says that EBS lies about the result of fsync(), which is horrifying.
Your flying car? Well, where did you last see it?
I am very glad they got Seaside out before the sale: it has really helped to revitalize Smalltalk.
This is how startups should be made.
Despite the other comments, I think you make a very valuable point. Take out the "customer" angle and I think they'd also agree. It's really thinking about the problem, working the problem and solving the problem. Thinking about and working on your toolset is not solving the problem. Whether the problem is yours or your customer's makes little difference.
I had the core idea of this in 2006 (binary coded patterns of small magnets for position and orientation sensitivity), but... didn't follow up. Looks like they are doing some interesting stuff with it (and piling on the patents).

The original application I imagined would be very simple arrays to be used in kids' tile puzzles where you could have square-peg-in-square-hole style thinking but without hole geometry (choosing something more semantic instead). Puzzle tiles would only have strong attraction to their correct location and all other locations would be relatively neutral.
Part of why I try to avoid SAYING I told you so, or even giving smug looks. IME you don't have to say anything and if you don't rub it in but keep quietly trying to be correct, you can start to make headway.
Because the whole site is hosted on Amazon, and it would be non-trivial to move from it. They also may or may not be receiving special pricing due to their size?
Why not just use an algorithm that is less than 2,000 years old, such as AES (usable through the http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.openssl-encrypt.php API):

> openssl_encrypt('asdf', 'aes-256-cfb', 'a password', false, 'initialization v');

returns: 4kavvg==

You get the same direct mapping of inputs to outputs but you don't have to re-invent affine ciphers and make guesses about its security properties. And since you're just using it to turn a small integer into something bigger to make clients/users happy and not to protect data, Mr. Ptacek won't flame you out.
"Most doctors now recommend honey for babies (older than one) as it actually appears to be as effective. "

Here's something I don't understand. In some cultures, honey is the _first_ thing they give to a newborn. Out of the womb, into the doctor's hand, and the first thing they give the newborn is honey. I don't know why in the US they prohibit honey.
I had a few outages with 2 AWS EC2 instances, (one small, one micro) both in eastern zones today.
Blaming a third party lacks class. The Reddit guys made the decision to rely heavily on EBS, and it came back to bite them. They show a lot of character by taking responsibility for an outage they had very little control over.
I'm working toward this goal with my own startup. Thanks for the inspirational comment!
"Shlimazl" sounds to me like it could be translated pretty easily into Japanese: 「ついていない」. The phrase uses no noun, though, so would that disqualify it?

I get sick of hearing foreigners going on about how there's no translation of the word "should" in Japanese. Well, yes, there isn't a word for "should in Japanese. The concept behind the word is conveyed through a grammatical construct, however; not having "a word" for "should" doesn't impede a Japanese from expressing "shouldness" in the least.

Piraha is a language that people love to bring up in these kinds of discussions. You should keep in mind, though, that what's been said about the language (and culture) are not without controversy.
False history.

The Applied Semantics software was not needed to "generate 99% of its revenues at IPO time". They owned the trademark "AdSense", but the actual software used by Google was written by Google. Also, the product known as AdSense (at that time) was just for content targetted ads, not the search ads which produce most of the profits, so his bit of trivia is actually double wrong.
What was that even supposed to mean?