skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you referring to my DNSSEC remark? You'll want to look at their NXDOMAIN alternative, which says "there are no domains with hashes between 0xCAFEBABE and 0xDEADBEEF", where the 0x... stuff are hashes.

Note that running through a dictionary and looking for hashes "near" the domain you're interested in works if the DNS server is nice enough to hand out responses of the above form; unfortunately, this can also be used to find which host names are valid for a domain (host names aren't exactly crypto-strength passwords). At least djb advocates giving out answers of the form "there are no domains with hashes between 0xCAFEBABE and 0xCAFEBAC0" (that is, exactly bracketing the query), in which case you'd need to do something more clever.

Unfortunately, I'm not intimately familiar with DNSSEC. I'd be happy to learn the answer, though; if you find it, could you post it as a response, or, if takes a while, e-mail me? (E-mail in profile.)

[EDIT: improved wording, make it clear that actually sending the whole dictionary to the DNS server is not necessary.]
Show HN: Clean Up Your Mess, a Guide to Visual Design for Everyone
I understand their position. Basically, if you want to play with the "big boys" then you need to have a defensive patent portfolio.

(I am in no way implying I agree with this, just that I understand.)
Ebook Fraud
Definitely. Particularly given that new tech will initially be costly and not necessarily fit in a car.
Ask HN: How to pick between 2 amazing ideas?
Let’s say you’ve got two really, really great ideas. I know that “ideas don’t matter” and that “your idea might not be as good as you think it is,” but, for the sake of this thought experiment, assume the opposite is true. Both ideas are amazing and will change the world in mind-boggling ways. More importantly, you are completely capable of executing on both of them, and neither is super complex or overly difficult; it’s merely a question of which to work on.

How do you pick one? Or, preferably, how do you (successfully) start both simultaneously? Is it possible?

Seeing that many startups are bootstrapped, also assume that you have to work on the startup(s) alone or with a small team until launch and for at least 3 months afterword. IE, you can’t hire a bunch of people to do the work for you, at least at the beginning.

Some possible lines of thought:

Which has a bigger market? Which will impact more people?
Which will make more money?

+ Add your own.
What does Colombia have to do with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez?
Google can be ideologically pure about patents being evil and subsequently get sued to oblivion, or they can acknowledged the current reality and fight it while staying safe themselves. I'd know one I would pick.

For example, I disagree with marijuana laws, but I am not about to light up in front of a cop.
No, it is entirely filled up when I click on it, but the text is >30px and each icon is gigantic. I'm not talking about filling whitespace, I'm talking about making items reasonable sizes. I've already set my font sizes, just adhere to that or give me another config option. Similarly, let me adjust the size of the icons and either put more icons in there or shrink the size of dash.
Pros and Cons of joining a start-up incubator
The user who posted this to HN decided to use the title "Commentary on Microsoft's stand that Tablets are a passing fad"; this is an importantly different connotation than "Microsoft: Tablets are a passing fad", which was the actual title of the article being linked to.

The former's usage of the word "stance" is much more direct: it implies that Microsoft has officially made firm statements on this matter. Instead, you get to the article and read commentary (no matter how well informed or interesting; I do not wish to comment on that) about "mixed messages" from the guy who runs Microsoft Research.
Germany is the only place I've ever lived where a couple will sit in their car outside their friends house for 10 minutes (having arrived 10 minutes early, of course) in order to be precisely on time.

As I recall, we'd consistently horrify them with our American-ness by walking out to their car to invite them in early.
Show HN: RocketSendIt
You're really treading on Aphex Twin's turf there.
It results in much better consistency and depth.

Look at Star Trek (at least TNG+): when they were talking about fairly real science, it was rich, consistent, and added to the story. When they went off that track, they ended up giving the same phrase multiple inconsistent definitions. "Phase," I'm looking at you.
Well ... the welcome page says

>Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."

Seems kind of weird that you'd instantly downvote such a comment, but eh, who gives a damn about karma
My first software as a service project, this is the MVP launch of it.

Basically it is an abstraction that sits on top of Amazon's Simple Email Service that allows programmers to quickly leverage cloud email without having to worry about daily send limits, sends/sec, or an other details of the Amazon API.

Thanks for the feedback in advance. :)
You should be able to. Once you are logged in, when you hover over any book on the shelf view, you click on 'Shelf it' to immediately add it to your shelves.
Ask HN: Please review my project - Present.Me
http://present.me
We launched this last week into public beta and would be really grateful for any feedback. The idea is that online presentations are boring, if you want to make them more interesting you need both the presenter & their slides. We developed the site to make it really easy to record (& share) your presentations. It’s still a little buggy in places but we’re working through those as quickly as we can. What started life as a side project soon became an obsession - please help me decide if i’m completely insane for pursuing this or if it really is useful.
Which can you get to the point of launching the fastest?
Ian Bicking: My Unsolicited Advice For PyPy
So this original Smalltalk MVC he's talking about, is that basically the same as the Javascript console you get on Developer Mode in Webkit browsers?
Loving the simplicity of the idea. The simplicity is worth a higher cut (though maybe not 30% ;-)) and makes it a lot more attractive to use in small situations. One thing you need to beware of, though, is the filing requirements.. you might have to start issuing tons of 1099s and that process will cost you.
Venezuela -> .ve -> Hugo Chávez

Colombia -> .co -> Juan Manuel Santos
FitFeud allows companies to set up, manage, and analyze on-line fitness and weight loss competitions for their employees. In short, it's "The Biggest Loser" for companies.

FitFeud uses competition as the motivation to help people reach their fitness and weight loss goals! It's an easy to implement, low-cost service that will improve employee health and fitness and, in turn, reduce company health care costs.

Get motivated! Start COMPETING!
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand that part either.

If this really is possible, you'd have to create a user who is somehow whitelisted to get the linked item in question.
We All Scream For RFID Ice Cream
I think people who use Gumroad won't really have that as a concern - but if enough people bring it up, I'll see what I can do about it!
This is my 9-month project. From idea to product in only nine months! My hope is that it's useful for developers, as well as anyone else who thinks he/she doesn't have the design gene.

It's on github, too: https://github.com/flyingmachine/clean-up-your-mess
What do you plan on doing about fraud? Seems like it would be way too easy to move money around with stolen credit cards.
clicky https://rocketsendit.com/
That second formulation is how I thought of it in the first place.

You could get around the link-sharing problem for those that wanted to avoid it by offering single-use URLs, and provide Gumroad either with a way of generating a new single-use URL for your resource, or a way to pull a new URL from your site. Both of these methods would require some degree of control over the resource, however (you wouldn't be able to do this for content hosted by third parties).

For those who aren't fussed about security, you could offer it as a really easy way to optionally pay for content - eg a rapid "Donate" method.
Rands in Repose: A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start
Proof, if ever it were needed, that it's execution not the idea that's important. No doubt there are others too, as I have a half-backed prototype of pretty much this idea (including Amazon integration), however it's nowhere near finished (it was a Rails learning excercise), and even if it was, would never have looked half as good as this. Nice work!
There's lots of criticism in this thread regarding the practicality of the design, but this is simply a link bait post based on a simple prototype by a design student done as a personal project.

I've been following Andrew Kim on his blog for some time now and I think he's an excellent designer who likes to regularly challenge status quo thinking through his designs (i.e. http://www.minimallyminimal.com/minimally-minimal/2010/3/15/...).

The kid is still just a student, but has a ton of potential. I'm looking forward to what he produces when he finishes school and goes out into industry.
What is a Discount Web Hosting?
Most of the times web hosting services occur in free tools which are in the form of traffic analysis or building tools for the sites. The free tools are very useful to the site and they can help the site owners to increase on the efficiency of the site and this amounts to discount.
I think a lot of this has to do with the cultural starting point in the U.S. The idea of American exceptionalism is quite common amongst the political punditry. Say something often enough and it begins to get believed.

There was a time when it was common amongst the Chinese intellectual class to think China was the best. In the 1400's Chinese emperors acquired a very anti-foreign attitude and Chinese exploration declined rapidly. Roman citizens thought Roman civilization was the best. My point is, imperial arrogance is common.
I cannot bring the page up. Looks down to be.
What does Stripe's fee structure look like?
> the hero is disintegrated by a laser cannon behind his back, scanned and transfered to virtual reality environment

That bit always made me laugh. Tron leads you to believe that the exciting/magical part is the virtual world, while I always thought the laser was the real world changing invention.
Hugo Chavez rules Venezuela, not Colombia. In fact, under his leadership Venezuela has been at times close to going at war with Colombia.

I think you have a point, but using such an example makes you sound a snob western who divides the world in "countries I am fond of" and "countries I am not fond of".
The Next Generation of Neural Networks - Geoffrey Hinton
I love the idea! This makes it really easy to sell scripts (e.g. your own jQuery plugins or whatever) for $5 where it would normally be too much work to set up some payment processing.

The 30% cut is way too high though. Especially for higher priced links - I wouldn't want to sell my $99 game engine[1] through your service. I think something like "5%, but at least $0.30" would make more sense. But maybe having such "highly" priced links wasn't your intention in the first place?

[1] http://impactjs.com/ (Can't mention it often enough :))
This looks like a really expensive way to get Rick Roll'd :)
Stick a pin in it: Economist reports on Pinboard.in
Neat!

What does pin/unpin do? (I clicked it with no obvious effect on playback.)
Just a lack of time, really. I actually wrote most of the library last summer, but then I quit my job and went back to university, whereupon my free time dropped precipitously. I'll see if I can rustle something up this evening.
Irrational Atheists On The Loose?
You can tell clients to check the http referrer for your domain. That would (mostly) stop people from posting now-useless destination URLs online.

http referrers are easily spoofed, of course, but it'll be enough to prevent most people from sharing secret urls on twitter. You could also pivot and allow people to upload files to your own server, but that's a different story.
This item was posted on HN before, without the unnecessary editorial: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506718
> But the funny part about that is that piracy has destroyed the market for them (...) and people aren't as willing to pay for music.

That line of reasoning flies in the face of facts. You assert, ``one can't compete with free'', but every day shows that's not the case.

While the data itself is free, or very cheap indeed, the services (here: public performances, endorsement of commercial products etc.) are paid for. The brief period (less than a dozen decades) when the vinyl/tape/CD was the only way are over. No longer media and distribution costs dwarf the music costs.

Look at IT for a moment. For nearly every commercial IT product out there, you see free alternatives. Yet the commercial stuff turns decent profit. Some companies sell services for the free product and make a decent buck. And, perhaps surprisingly, developers of free software also manage to get jobs and gigs. Both ecosystems thrive. Musicians can -- and sometimes actually do -- follow that way too.

--

As for the ``First it was because you couldn't sample music'' -- look, capitalism 101. Distribution and demand only set the price at the value point if there is information parity between the seller and buyer. Should there be any information disparity, the price will diverge from the value. And given the huge amount of advertising popular artists receive, there sure is a lot of information disparity.

Now you were telling us the album prices weren't inflated? And don't even get me started on product bundling -- where you'd have to buy an album with a dozen songs to get one or two decent.
Cool, and I wish you guys the best of luck. I'm not an uber-collector myself, but I'm somewhere between "beginner" and "serious" -- I guess we'll call it "enthusiastic" about collecting. So I'm just trying to help out as a consumer in this space, and as someone who's probably not terribly far away from your target segment.

Thanks for listening, and best wishes on the startup.
Google Bidding on Nortel Patents
Well, in my experience at least, the people I'm griping about are pretty far from "off the boat". They see themselves as natives, and their ancestors left europe 150 years ago because it was a totally different place then. Not much to do with their current viewpoint on, say, Brazil or China.
I'm sorry, the USG? The US Government? Has HN really nose dived now into general blanket statements about how the US government is a big bad monster and everyone with a little bit of power and money is the devil? This is Hacker News, a news site run by a startup accelerator. Startups are trying to become big business. They're trying to become the devil redditors love to hate in their never-ending circlejerk of naivety. This is a site dedicated to technology and capitalism and you are very, very lost if you're posting here to hate on with your obtuse and unrealistic politics.
At least here in brazil, where punctuality is generally disregarded, classes start on time (at most 5min tolerance) and people arriving 45min late to a scheduled appointment shouldn't expect to find anything waiting for them.

At the same time, social events in general happen always an hour or so later than announced, except for small gatherings and things with a fixed timeframe such as going to the movies. As a naturally punctual person I've arrived in birthday parties thinking I was being fashionably late and found everybody still pre-shower and the place a mess.
How To Set Up A Wireless Network At Home
wireless networks are fast becoming popular due to their hassle free operation and lack of wiring. This article will guide you through the steps of easily setting up a wireless network at home.
Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists
By Asian standards, particularly Chinese, Americans are outrageously selfish. But it's true that Europeans (and perhaps most cultures) would find nothing unusual in Americans' value of self vs. family.
Interesting concept -- how do you deal with the legalities?

If I buy something am I buying it from you or from the original owner?

How long do you hold onto the funds to deal with any potential chargebacks?
Definitely true. This is my main concern with things like Facebook ads. I've seen folks buy them by the dozen, and rarely see their money back.

I'd say try your next $30 on Google adwords like "package holidays" etc and see how that traffic performs.
You really should simply try it out (A/B testing) and see what happens...your own data will help you decide.

1) Initially don't require the contact form for some time
2) Then, require contact form for some time
3) Finally, try having an optional contact form -- they can still download the trial even without filling out the form.

One of the reasons to try this out instead of relying out info from others is that the behavior may be specific to the kind of software you are selling and specific to the target niche and so generic advice won't be suitable.
I think that's taking the trend to a consumer-focused extreme that might not maximize the benefit to the author. I can see opening up your process for 50-250 "beta-testers" who need the information yesterday and are willing to put work into it. But for the most part, people willing to wait for and pay for a technical book are people who will trade money for decreased time cost. Hence a nicely packaged, structured, edited book. The bar of quality and trust is pretty high, because if either of those are compromised, then the reader is wasting time and might as well have self-taught.

I'd probably buy at least 1 book/week at that price!

I'm subscribed to the ebook deal of the day for O'Reilly (http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday), Apress (http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal) and Manning (http://www.manning.com/free/dotd.html) and I've purchased about 1 ebook a week this year for between $5-20 each.
It is coming: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/the-coming-software...
Very nice idea. As btilly says, you will probably quickly fall afoul of various gambling laws, so that is something to investigate.

Re. the site design:

* personally, I find your main font off-putting and difficult to read

* you should stop appending a full stop to the tweets on the home page - it looks odd when they end with punctuation (e.g. "Gentleman's Agreement?.")
Paypal already takes $0.30 plus a small percentage. I think the service is a neat idea, but microtransactions are not a solved problem.
No, that's definitely a good point. I'm going to switch to a .30c + x% (tiered) model - aim to make at least $70-80 of that $99 if you use Gumroad.

I'm also thinking hard about "Preferred" accounts. Basically, you send an email to sahil@slavingia.com in the next 24 hours, whenever I do your balance at the end of the month you get as much as I can give without losing money on the transaction. ;)
This.
Some friends of mine ran a payment startup. However as soon as there is a money->thing->money option, you get a LOT of fraud, as they found out.
how are you using stripe already?
Maybe it's a European thing. Our companies feel the momentum (perhaps push) to get to Customers and Revenue pretty quickly. Several are at $1M+ in annual Revs. Most in the $250K-$500K and a few getting to repeatable sales process
This is a big boy move: like the spectrum auction, it's win-win: if they win, they have a defensive portfolio; if they lose, they force higher bids from others, meaning that others are going to have to outlay a lot more cash just to get into a position where they can sue Google from, so that once they do, they are doing so from a weaker position. Being able to spend billions on win-win moves that invariably weaken the field without any of those billions going towards improving client/consumer experience? Maybe Microsoft's got a valid point about abuses of dominant positions by Google.
I just ordered a .so domain, which is Somalia. I wouldn't trust that country's government with a quarter, but a domain name seems like am okay deal. The site is actually better than the dutch registrar authority's... http://soregistry.so/
> this algae seems to only help with one kind of isotope

Not quite. This organism metabolizes one atomic species. (Actually, two, if you read the original paper, you'll see that this algae metabolizes barium much more readily than strontium. And I suspect it spends most of its life cycle metabolizing calcium or magnesium since those are much more abundant.) Very few organisms are sensitive to isotope, and then, not very strongly.

That said, you are probably correct in assuming that the authorities there will rely upon "natural attenuation", which is the fancy term for "waiting for it to dilute on its own".

Of course, you, too, could have chosen much less cynical language... "Wake me up" ... really? Are you a 12-year-old?
It could be worse: data caps around the world
We appreciate it! And we'd love more feedback if you have it. We're working on narrowing that customer profile some more and need all the help we can get.
Network Solutions Spokesperson Lashes Out at GoDaddy CEO on Twitter
IST: "Indian Standard Time"

When a family member invites us over for 7:30, they mean 8:00. If you actually arrive at 7:30, they're still getting ready themselves.
Yes, and it can be disabled by navigating to chrome://plugins and disabling "Chrome PDF Viewer". Opening a PDF will just initiate a download.
Gaming and a girl gone wild:Sony Ericsson looks to the past to define the future
Careful, that limb might be thin. I live in NYC, remember? Just looked around my immediate office, there are 4 people from 3 different countries within 10 feet of me. (well, one of them's out today, so 3 from 2 countries unless we expand that radius to 30 feet, but you know). They all know the difference between 1st and 3rd world.

Most Americans do have quite a slanted and often factually incorrect view on the situation in Palestine (been there, seen the wall, the checkpoints, the very blatant racism and the total lack of opportunity). Not to say that the typical Iranian is likely much more enlightened on the subject, but someone else being dumb doesn't make you smarter. (also, on your tu quoque in regards to Iran, there's not a lot to defend about that country but at least they give equal legal status to all people within their borders, kurdish or baluchi).

Any viewpoint that starts off with "Americans are so much more enlightened than any other nationality" is probably an extremely unenlightened view, is all I'm saying. The chinese guy upthread got it better than I did.
I didn't find any negative tone to your post either. It was pretty matter of fact.

I'm glad this was reposted, since I wasn't aware of the original link (even though I do read coding horror every now and then), and thanks for posting the prev discussion thread.

This post makes me feel better about my horrendous code from 10 years ago. I was learning, and maybe this was the best way to go about it? I think almost all programmers go through a period where we produce huge volumes of software. There's one big difference, though. In a ceramics class, nobody has to maintain your mountain of crappy plates, vases, and ashtrays.
Turning Plastic Back Into Oil
Tips for introverted bosses
Well, I've often liked your posts so I presumed you are a rationalist. Let me keep my delusions, please!
News will get around if there's no money to be had for future projects. That said, don't focus on the bubble, focus on your ideas. Distractions kill.