skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being a victim does not make you an expert.[1]

It gives you a different perspective, an emotional perspective. There are surely lessons and warnings to be learned through such anecdotes and experiences. But the heightened emotions accompanying a victim's portrayal of an event should give them no more credentials than any other informed, researched perspective.

All that said, I have severe sympathy for Natalia and all the other victims and sufferers of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

[1] Being victimized can motivate one to become an expert on a topic by way of thorough research after the fact.
Red vs Green: The Musical, A Startup Odyssey
Y Combinator Startup Demo Day Winter 2011.
Totally agree with shortlived and iworkforthem, in fact that's what I've been doing for several months now. Increasingly though, I find myself thinking "you know I'll bet there is an easier way to do this if I had a deeper understanding of the language," and that's what I'm looking for.

Thanks everyone for your comments, they've been immensely helpful and insightful.
Banned article about Jay-Z's great champagne robbery
Yelp adds places to their database, and they have had mixed success with Mechanical Turk.

http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2011/02/towards-building-a-h...
He once discussed NULL pointers. He made a well-reasoned argument about how a proper language should use some other method to properly distinguish between NULL and "I really do have a pointer here", such as ML's option types or Haskell's Maybe types or something. Basically the "million dollar mistake" argument.

He then went on to say something basically like, "Thus, there is no such thing as a NULL pointer. It is a myth. It simply doesn't exist." Which is patently false, and I find rather funny. Languages do have NULL pointers whether they should or not. I can assign a value of NULL to my pointer in C -- they exist. They are not a myth.

A friend of mine, who is a TA for our operating systems class, whispered to me, "Hm, NULL pointers don't exist?! I guess I'll go tell my students that."
Well, with elaborate replies like that ...

Perhaps you should bother reading what I wrote first, instead of doing screenshots to prove me wrong?

Take a look at the phrase you yourself quoted ...

you can't search your history and delete items
in the search results

Do I really need to elaborate more on it?
Beware Social Media's Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO's
But that wouldn't be visible in a standard 80x24 terminal, and since the month of November would be visible, there would be no reason to scroll up and check. He probably saw something more like this: http://pastie.org/1702013
Three finger scroll up and down for home/end in OS X is really nice... I wish this worked in chrome.
What a crazy story. If the timelines are accurate there was an extremely small chance of this happening. Bad luck all around.

My site is still down, guess i'm in the unlucky 1%.
Mozilla folks are looking into fixes for this:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/M4IBj...
I'm looking forward to writing a bunch about that. I'll be drafting a series of blog posts over the next little while that will cover our choices, problems, and experience developing the app so far--and, more importantly, going forward.
The project templates aren't there yet, but should be any day now. In the mean time, everything else works -- compilation, Interface Builder, etc. You'll want to grab MacRuby 0.10 from source or nightlies.
The idea of an entrepreneur powered YC clone is excellent.

This could be even taken to the next level: to foster investment within the community itself; enabling a platform for established entrepreneurs to invest in up & coming entrepreneurs.
I don't believe so. Look at the Makefile.am. It only declares a libtool library (lib_LTLIBRARIES = libsnappy.la, which causes libsnappy.so.x.y.z and libsnappy.a to be built), and a unittest (TESTS = snappy_unittest,noinst_PROGRAMS = $(TESTS)).

EDIT: I'm wrong:

> Actually, snappy_unittest is more than just a test, despite the name; in particular, if you have the gflags package installed, it can be used for benchmarking. Thus, it's useful to have it built as part of make all. I'm closing this one (but thanks for all the others!).

http://code.google.com/p/snappy/issues/detail?id=11&can=...
Yeah, I tried to post a similar suggestion on the group. Stuff like developer tools, native client, gpu, themes, and extensions might be able to get lazy loaded.
Any idea how long it's been in development?
Ask HN: Does HN favor YC companies only?  
During my time checking HN religiously for the past few months, I've seen mostly YC companies on HN for their coverage on TechCrunch and the like. What about companies from other prominent startup accelerators like TechStars? What about other international startup incubators/accelerators?

Still a noob around here, but I had to satisfy my curiosity.
A similar extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/oolicfpkpnpbaonk...
Dropbox is a killer application if you have multiple computers or don't want to care about keeping backups. It's completely removed my need for flash drives, caring about which computer I have documents on, and so forth. I wouldn't underestimate that; I recall hearing that they've hit $100M/year in profits[1], and I expect that they've got quite a ways to grow. However, saying that they'll be the most profitable company in the world doesn't make sense to me - that would just take too much growth to be realistic.

For some context, the most profitable company in the world in 2010 was Gazprom[1], the largest exporter of natural gas in the world, with 24,555.7 million.

EDIT: Gazprom was the most profitable in 2009, not 2010, as pointed out below.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/dropbox-revenue-2011-3

[2] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/perfor...
It is unlikely they will ever get close to energy (oil) companies. and by the way they need to IPO so that we can know what their revenue and expenses are.
A free state on Quebec's border?
Some of the missing ones were featured on hn and other startup publications. It would be nice to have a list of all of them, but if they choose to be in stealth mode, I guess it is only respectful not to mention them.
It's a shame the previous site didn't work out. I remember seeing a frustrated comment by the person who set it up that hackers didn't care about education.

Hopefully this one goes better. I've already registered.
I was recommended a new mapping program for my iphone yesterday, and when I went to download it, it said that I needed 4.2GB of space to install.

Also as a "haha, crappy bandwith!" aside: I found it strange to think of most people only having -700kbps in the states. I have a 100mbps line for 50USD/month and regularly get around 60mbps. I have to install chrome on various computers for work, and I've never even noticed more than a few second delay between downloading the binaries and installation.
Republicans Introduce Legislation Redefining Pi as Exactly 3
The radiation levels are getting a lot of public scrutiny - because the information is public. I don't see how this compares to a Chernobyl-style government coverup.
I did something similar WikiReader – bookmarklet for Wikipedia reading http://www.vcarrer.com/2010/02/wikireader-bookmarklet-for-wi...
I've deleted my Meetup account on two occasions because of the amount of spam they sent me.

I ultimately had to rejoin in order to attend certain events but I still lost trust for the service.
I agree entirely. I'm a recent grad and I know I spent more than $2,600 in a year across all types of alcohol, but I was purchasing for parties, not for myself, and insisted on quality booze. Your average student is most definitely not purchasing top-shelf alcohol in party quantities. And $1700 for a computer? I paid that for the three computers I had, even including all of the upgrades on the desktop. Never paid more than $500/year on books. I'm willing to bet most people are not paying all three of lab fees, music room fees, and Greek dues. And a number of other costs here are simply ridiculous, representing upper bounds more than averages in many cases.
Y Combinator’s best startups ever? Here are my favorites
Goes to show you why the DRY principle (I might be stretching that analogy here, but bear with me) is important here - if you have old stuff lying around in production that was cloned a long time ago, you might forget about it and open yourself up to unfortunate incidents like this.

PHP Fog is doing great work to make the PHP ecosystem easier to work with, and I hope they didn't suffer too much from this mistake.
I feel really bad for the phpfog guys. But given the situation, I think they handled it admirably well - kudos to them. No software is secure and this could have happened to anyone. Especially startups who have to take shortcuts at the very beginning.

I know the attackers were just kids but I have to admit pursuing legal action sounds very tempting - even to just act as a deterrent to others. If they had just put up phpfogsucks.com, it might have been ok. But tweeting trash from their twitter account, redirecting their root domain to phpfogsucks, etc - are all not cool at all and should have some consequences.
I agree that IE is a bad product, and that this marketing campaign may even have been counter-effective. I still don't see how a bad product or a bad marketing campaign are "evil". That being said, my life as a web developer would be better if IE disappeared off the face of the earth, but I don't forecast that happening any time soon :(
Websites will benefit indirectly from this through packages getting better performance (like databases or caching systems). If this algorithm is as good as Google reported a few years ago this is big, big news.

Note: have you seen the LZO code? I bet not.
I understand completely why travelers would want this. I've often had a need for something like this but i'm not sure what locals would get out of it.
Actually phpfog is built on Ruby
Hot Pink Heart Charm 
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They're actually a Ruby shop according to the leaked codebase.
Would love to know the backstory here.
great to hear all the details so quickly so that others building similar systems aren't in the same situation. as fellow PHP'ers its also great to hear that you are not blaming it on PHP somehow (no fuel for the php haters).
I'm surprised there hasn't been more of this as Groupon has hired and grown so quickly.

Remember when Facebook was a revolving door for execs? :-)
Is there a way to sort by nationality of user, i.e. see what the Italian users are posting, etc?
Can you give us more details at help.phpfog.com please? (apologies if I'm breaking HN etiquette)
Hire the hackers. It's what the CIA would do.
Well they aren't especially tech-savvy, but I share files with them so they have it installed because of me.

My point is that at the rate at which it is growing, it literally is just a matter of time before all your coworkers and parents are using it.

It provides a peace of mind knowing that you can easily access your files - that is difficult to find elsewhere.

As technology continues to proliferate and more lives move online, people will likely use dropbox.

The more people that use Dropbox, is the more profitable they will be.

That is to say, their profit margins increase with the number of users they use - and that's not just because their unit costs decrease.

It's much more than that.
For pure speed, check out QuickLZ[1]. While it probably doesn't compress well as Snappy, it does hit 300MB+/core. But, it's GPL instead of Apache.

1: http://www.quicklz.com/
Only if they demonstrated great skill - which I don't think happened in this case (but I'm no security expert either)
Throwing bodies at a problem can help, though.

[Piling] bodies at [the door] can help, though.

FTFY.
Ideally you should be in same location, I find that face time is crucial. I can relate to you as I'm the business/SEO/marketing/product guy as well.

I had to fire my technical co-founder because it turned out that he wasn't all that "technical" after all and lost my faith in him.

It took me months to do it, even with my mentors/advisors telling me to do it. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and let it drag on for too long, when in fact it should have been an easy decision to part ways.

Long story short, trust your gut.. if you're not feeling it, pull out the axe, don't waste your time and hustle to find a suitable replacement. I know it's easier said than done, but it CAN be done...
Mozilla vs. Chrome/Safari benchmarks since August
Who cares? Pick one that sounds fun, and do shit. Even if that trend flops, you'll have some transferrable skills. The language/technology itself isn't as important as the domain knowledge and experience with concepts that the language/tech embodies.
php... a language by amateurs, for amateurs. phpfog... a service by amateurs, for amateurs.
So what do you do when the site doesn't allow hashes? Or special characters? Or letters? And yes, there are lots of these http://troy.hn/dJbdTU
I mentioned this last time, but I don't think anyone was interested, but the "John" guy is compwhizii (same handle on Twitter) who runs the forums (facepunch.com) for garrysmod, a very popular game. I will be curious to see how garry (owner person) responds to this, or if he already has.

Elliot is apparently VERY scared and blames John (compwhizii) (edit: not john, he blames someone else called supersnail1): http://www.facepunch.com/threads/1071855-A-member-of-Facepun...

Here is (compwhizii) Johns reply: http://www.facepunch.com/threads/1071855-A-member-of-Facepun...
Wow, offering an equity split when you are already so far along. Makes me think, why start my own company. I could just jump on a promising startup that has already done a good deal of hard work. Easier and less risky.
"We have hired professional white hat hackers with government level security experience to attempt regular pen tests on our system..."

I guess whenever I read this kind of statement from now on I'll be thinking of HBGary and chuckling a bit inside.
Whoa! Highest ever upvotes on Programming, Motherfuckers
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355427

~800 upvotes by 5:37 PT Motherfuckers.
Your argument could also apply to the Linux kernel.
It's great to see an idea that isn't just a clone of some other popular tech service. This looks pretty original; what are your plans for success? How does this scale up?
Actually, the article explicitly mentions that problem:

"Undoubtedly, much of this problem is related to poor security implementations on websites. It’s very, very easy to build websites with fundamental security flaws."

But obviously this is not within the control of the end user.
Murphy's extended laws:

* It will go wrong at the worst possible time.

* If there are 4 possible ways for it to go wrong and you prevent all of them, it will go wrong in a 5th way.
Lucas and his team are amazing. Everyone makes mistakes, and no system will be perfectly secure. So in my mind the best parts of the entire post were these:

"We have hired professional white hat hackers with government level security experience to attempt regular pen tests on our system, both as regular users as well as giving them special access and seeing if they can get through."

and

"If you find a security flaw and report it using the Full Disclosure Policy to security@phpfog.com with notice, we will help strengthen your security reputation in a very public way and reward you generously."
The phpfog guys really deserve praise for being so open on this issue. As a fellow engineer, being able to learn from their mistakes and see exactly what they could have done ahead of time to avoid the disaster is priceless.

Just goes to show that those with the time to spend are the most likely to break your stuff, even if you pay "professional white hat hackers" to test your system.
I didn't mean it as a straw-man criticism, just an observation that scrum is very rigid and prescriptive; it's all about the what and the how instead the why.

I'm a big believer in trying to persuade people to keep feedback loops short, make teams small and cross-functional, and to design/code/test/ship in the smallest increments possible. At this point, calling an approach agile/scrum/xp carries a lot of baggage.

If people don't get the why (e.g. the team isn't small and cross-functional, and people aren't working on tiny increments) it kind of doesn't matter if you get everyone in the room at the same time every day.
This is not something that will happen over night. You meant to say that Gazprom was the most profitable in 2009.

Exxon did $30B profit in 2010. - http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:XOM&fstype=ii

Exxon did $30B profit on $375B revenues. Net profit margins of less than 10%.

Of course we won't know until Dropbox releases their financials, but I strongly believe that they will be a bombshell when they are released. Nothing like anything we have ever witnessed.

I would not be surprised if their Net Profit margins are 30% - 50%.

At those rates, all it takes is for them to be doing revenues of $100B to exceed Exxon's profit take in 2010.

I know it seems a bit far fetched now, but so did every other technology giant when they were in the budding phases.

I think it would be foolhardy to bet against them.
Never? I would be cautious about issuing a challenge like that.
backstory is simple: Rob was brought in as adult supervision in case Andrew Mason couldn't handle his shit. Everyone was worried about this with Andrew early on (this is why so many VCs passed on Groupon in '09). Now Andrew has consolidated his position and at least proven he can handle rapid growth. No need for Rob. Therefore, Rob (who doesn't like Chicago anyway) has no reason to stay because he's not going to be CEO.

That's all the backstory you need.
So what do you do when the website doesn't allow those characters in your password? It happens frequently: http://troy.hn/dJbdTU
Building eBay for Lawyers
I prefer WordPress, it's super easy to install, manage, and run and you get a bunch of free services from WordPress.com even if you host it on your own server.
I've placed a ceiling at 5-10 programmers, because most tasks can be broken into modules such that only 5-10 programmers are working on a module, with decent separation between modules.

Beyond ~7 people, someone needs to begin to coordinate, which is the logical introduction of management and process. But again, avoid large teams where possible.

Linux, Windows, Microsoft office - all great examples of a huge number of modules working together. For instance, the programmer writing the font rendering doesn't need to work closely with the video driver developer, they interact through a carefully designed interface.

But if you are in a startup, odds are you are slinging many large libraries and iterating quickly on new code (that often only you consume). In that case, you're better to "Program, Motherfucker"
A really good point. Much risk has been taken out, but I feel pretty strongly that a really strong core team is created when there is real equity in play. I've put in plenty of time and money, but they're not worth anything until we win. I like my chances of winning better with a well incentivized team!
Reading through those forum posts, I have less and less sympathy for these guys.
I suspect you're searching in the wrong branch of the solution tree. Brains, you see, work in strangely similar ways to that of other muscles in your body. You can certainly get "quick fix" improvements, but over the long term, they will never, ever get anywhere close to organic incremental gains built under exercise, and regularly pushing your limits.

However, just like with body building, there are instruments for accelerating this growth:

-Lumosity (www.lumosity.com) is to brain building what a bench press is to muscle improvements. In a 30-minute daily session, your brain is exposed to 5 different games, each exercising general brain plasticity, and specific muscles (speed, flexibility, memory, whatever you think you could use). I'm using this for 2 months now straight, and their pricing is terribly, terribly off compared to the returns I'm getting.

-If Lumosity is for building the general hardware, Spaced repetition is the enabler for installing software for long-term instant recall. Supermemo, or other SR products can help; specific areas usually have their own SR solution already.

-Language: of all the disciplines I've sucked up so far, nothing has changed my mind, and worked on my brain more, than acquiring a new language (preferably from a conceptionally different linguistic branch -eg. I'm learning Japanese; Chinese could also prove to be profitable in the near future)

Hope this gets you started, and feel free to ask any questions (my e-mail's in my profile)
Architects of Deception
Talking to your computer (with HTML5)
- Smugmug Premium (Photos + HD Video)

- Jungledisk+S3 (for off-site backup)

- Skype minutes

- Pinboard.in (as of 12 hours ago)

Being in a non-US location (Aka "Rest of the world") a lot of online content offerings including iTunes, Netflix and Hulu, are off-limits to me even if I wanted to pay.
Example of a Term Paper Must be Well Structured
It is natural for students to consider an example of a term paper if writing their own is difficult. However, when going through examples students need to ensure that they are good examples. Ensuring that the example of term paper is well structured is one element.
At the risk of that comment being taken as a joke, I've done a lot of work with the federal government, and I can assure you that while the level of hilarity that HBGary has generated, the typical level of talent in government cleared individuals is not necessarily great.

I don't mean to impune the capabilities of the people involved (I don't know who they are,) and it isn't to say that you can't find some AMAZING talent in the government realm, but as in all fields, it's the exception, not the rule.
I know the point you're trying to make, but it's a weak one.

75% of the kernel is written by corporate employees.

http://apcmag.com/linux-now-75-corporate.htm
Oil's pretty magical too!

Seriously, Dropbox need >200 million users paying $9.99/month to match the top oil companies even if their costs per user were zero. That's more people paying for Dropbox than using spectacularly good mature free services like Gmail.

Not that I'd be too downhearted by Dropbox's reported $100 million revenues if I held their stock.
Yes.

I have seen many projects fail in big companies because management are frightened of programming. The "risk mitigation" is using large teams of people with the right "skillset" who don't need to think very much because they are doing things according to the "industry best practice" using expensive third party software so that the in-house programmers don't have to make hard decisions.

If you work in an environment like that, and you're reading this, you are probably part of the problem because you are keeping the stupidity alive by struggling through the process and letting management get something delivered. Best to step away from the stupidity and let it fail.

Now I'm going to go and do some programming.
What are your thoughts on an option/setting for partial fade on the navigation elements? I like the general thrust of the idea, but removing them entirely puts navigating wikipedia a little too close to mystery meat.
Not ever, but in the recent past anyway. /best seems to go back a few days at most.