skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is actually a serious issue which is finally getting traction to fix at the management level.

I'm guessing that 'version control' is just one symptom of other underlying problems. I just don't buy that you're not creating a good product because of version control.
Thanks for being a part of the discussion, Sam. As a startup founder, here are my privacy concerns.

-- I'd like internal details of my startup to NEVER be released without my knowledge (including ownership breakdowns, investment amounts, number of employees, strategy/expected launch date, revenue/traffic numbers, etc.), under any circumstances - even anonymously. (If you released info on a "video startup in Minnesota", but left out the name, that would be potentially be enough to be traced back to http://zencoder.tv.)

-- If you want to use my information in the aggregate, that doesn't bother me as much, and I understand that you may use information about my company as a part of your predictions.

-- Obviously, you should take data security very seriously and go above and beyond 99% of companies in this area.

-- I should be able to cancel my account with a click of a button, and this should remove all of my private information from your system.

These would make me comfortable with YouNoodle, and if I felt certain that you'd follow these standards, I'd probably try it out.
"The fact that people come when capacity is improved shows that you're lessening the load on other roads!"

False. There's a concept called Induced Demand. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand)

There are many drivers who stay off the roads because the cost of congestion is too high. For instance, people who won't take a given trip if it takes longer than 20 minutes. By increasing road capacity the trip time goes down to 15 minutes. This induces demand from the crowd that desires <20-minute trips. As they join the crowds on the road, they bring congestion back to its equilibrium level of a 20-minute trip.
There's a lot of conformity in the US as well. It's often harnessed by marketers.
The purpose of an API is to provide a way to build an application. If you build your website on top of your own API, then you've already shown off what you can do with your API, which is great.
This is stupid and that case is a sad joke. I don't see how the idea could have been stolen since Friendster, Myspace and probably some others existed before FB.
In both directions! Where's Escher when you need him? :)
I think Starbucks is trying to bring some of that back. I got a free coffee in a Houston Starbucks a few weeks ago.
Anyone going to SXSW?
I've never been but am seriously considering making the trek.

I've done a few Barcamps, etc. but was wondering, what are people's thoughts on SXSW Interactive? Any advice for getting the most out of the experience?

PS
You can vote on panels by going to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/
To play devil's advocate here, smaller shops tend to not have as many customers so they can lose a few cents on every transaction. If every Starbucks or big name hotel started giving these freebies, it would go into the big bucks. I guess one can blame shareholders for that.
Most of the tv here is subtitled, and by now I cannot _not_ read them. Even if they don't match what's being said or they just read "sorry, due to technical differences we have no subtitles". That last one is super annoying because every time the image changes abruptly it triggers a 'read-subtitle' response in me. I can understand English just fine, but reading subtitles is hardwired somewhere.
Agreed.

As for stereotyping Mac users as "creative" types, though, that has been part of Apple's marketing. I definitely agree that it was a cheap shot, but it's not exactly coming out of nowhere.
I'm looking into making the trip, my first time. Arranging to get tickets, passes, hotels, and flights right now. From what I hear it's always been a kickass time.
"Our research shows that one can write software that will generate cards of any value up to $655.36"

2^16 =)
I will be this year, for sure. (first time)
Context: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/injunction-requ.htm...
There's another post for the New York Times story on it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=271709
"Gates has a compelling point — largely because the shortage of Americans holding or pursuing advanced degrees in fields like computer science defies conventional market explanations. The average annual salary in the field is more than $100,000. Meanwhile, we have a robust supply of high-IQ baristas and college graduates with jobs that a generation ago would not even have required a high-school diploma."

Where? My first offer was for 50k, increasing to 60k after six months in LA County. Is this a PhD average salary?
Interesting to re-read this article in light of recent HN submissions on VC and startup valuation.

Old, but still good.
The Apple "platform" is not 100% free (you can't do yet voip or tethering), but for the first time, mobile software developers can deploy easily applications without asking permissions from carriers.

Also, your web browsing experience on the iPhone is independent from the carrier. For instance, on any other carrier, they cram their links and "preferred partners" on starting page.

Again, I agree there are limitations. If you are looking for complete "freedom", have a look at openmoko.

"everybody wants a phone tied to a service contract so that the cost of the phone is subsidized"
disagree. look at prepaid phones.
Epic. That's all I can say.

The amount of work that went into this is awesome. They're hacking real life.
How to install Ubuntu on a MacBook
Oh, there are absolutely other problems. I'm not trying to pin all the problems on CVS. It's just a major pain point which can actually be addressed with a technological, rather than a cultural, solution.

The root problem is probably extreme conservatism coupled with an unwillingness or inability to sensibly delegate responsibility, which adds up to systemic paralysis when it comes to actually getting things done. It is not a Hacker-friendly place. I'm fortunate enough to be in a small team which manages to bypass a lot of the mess, but I'm still not sure how long I actually want to stay here.
Brilliant! Like the warcart, particularly the smoke grenade!
Incredibly cool. How could they possibly think they could just put the stored value on the card itself, unencrypted? I always assumed the card was just a token that refreshed some database on their end, instead of stupidly storing it in hex right there on the card stripe.
Awesome social and software hack.

Just hope the media and security services (and alarmists) in general don't use it to go on about anti-terrorism and how we are all under constant terrorist threat (and push more anti-terror measures).
From the Wired article:

"Among the documents the MTBA filed with its declaration to the court today is a vulnerability assessment report (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/vulnerability_assessm...) that the three students gave the MTBA about the flaws in its system. The document is dated August 8, the day the MTBA filed its lawsuit against the students, and is essentially the information the students declined to give the MTBA before it filed its lawsuit."

I can't help but think Wired got this wrong. Knowing who the students' advisor is, I find it pretty hard to believe that the students refused to give the assessment to the MBTA before publishing this presentation.
You could also create a Netvibes universe. http://eco.netvibes.com/universes
Smartcard security is notoriously bad in the vast majority of deployed systems.

The people designing these high human traffic systems are usually much more concerned about other factors (low latency at the turnstile, minimal number of network connections to wire, card reliability, etc.) than they are about security.
hey nice site... why do i have to login, though?
Yeah, god forbid Osama and his ilk get a free ride on the subway.
Has anyone managed to get a fail out of YouNoodle (whether for a present, past or hypothetical startup)?
It seems as though if they could just mitigate government interference they could easily surpass China economically. Why don't the elected officials realize that?
Is there an area where this has actually happened? It's a weird version of the standard gentrification fable. It is incorrect in most situations where it could be descriptive because the gentrification "success stories" did not happen in african-american neighborhoods. For example, Williamsburg, Brooklyn was an industrial area surrounded by Polish, Puerto Rican and Hasidic communities.

Also, the story doesn't work if you take into account the actual locations the article mentions. No adventurous young gays and art students will ever be moving to Antioch or the suburbs of Salinas and Mobile, Alabama.
That information can be derived from multiple observations.
Kudos -- especially for the RFID work. Decidedly non-trivial.
Done and done. :)
Because no one is really competing with Twitter on the exact same product category at the moment. Pownce and Friendfeed are different to Twitter.

I think the idea of traction is very dangerous. It gives an excuse for losing competitors to sooth their fragile hearts. But if you believe market is efficient and ruthless and if you agree that users vote with their browsers in Web 2.0 world, then the failure of the competitors should be attributed more to failing to give what users want than the winner has more traction!

Case in point? Google Search vs. Hotbot Search vs. Alta Vista Search vs. Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search in U.S.
@pg I've started checking out Gnip, http://www.gnipcentral.com. Their API makes it very easy for sites to publish their data to the gnip service. They are pretty hardcore about "hit us as much as you want" to get data. Twitter, Digg, Flickr, and a number of other services are publishing to them.

Might be a good way for HN to avoid getting hammered by crawlers and still let the hacker-types slurp the data.
I'm thinking of picking up something similar for traveling. What model are you using?
Well, other points still hold to some degree. Just consider the political instability most countries around India are going through right now. That is not a decent sight. India is still lucky in that lots of high profile companies have offices there but it's yet to happen in Pakistan. There are very few, if any. Microsoft has presence in Pakistan but it's mostly dealing with Government contracts and selling to Enterprise. No development offices of Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and alike. Overall, situation is more complex than one could imagine.
If you are referring to "they" the MBTA I doubt they knew how it worked and the only party who probably did understand ie: the company selling them the system was just interested in keeping costs down.
The name of the game is expectation management. It's best to exceed the expectations than to fail them.

For example, Apple guides on 10 million iPhones sold this year. This is a laughably low number as it represents less than 70% YoY growth, well below typical 100% YoY in smratphone market. Add to that world-wide distribution which wasn't there last year and which is not a part of 100% trend. You can bet there will be headlines like "Apple roars, sold double the iphones it expected" in a year from now in every single news paper. And Steve jobs will be on stage saying "well,iPhone was pretty popular this year. In fact, twice as much as we hoped - we can barely keep up production. Sorry about all the lines. ;)"
Auto-Generating Test Stubs From a Design Document with RSpec
Strategy: Drop Memcached, Add More MySQL Servers
Memcached, but do you need it?
I spoke too soon; I hadn't seen that. However, I'd like to point out I have no idea whether that's true. I only now it doesn't seem very amicable (at least to me), so in that regard, you're right.
This is what I'm doing. I don't mind living cheaply. I do like the feeling of watching my runway lengthen with every paycheck.
Thanks for the link. I believe it was this episode that influenced a lot of how I drive (merging, staying slow but consistent in stop-and-go traffic, &c). It should be required watching for new drivers.
The attacker in this scenario appears to be able to deliver 40kpps to the target before the legitimate server's response lands. The writer says he's on a GigE link --- presumably, he means "on the same GigE as the target resolver".

In the real world, attackers with that vantage point have better ways to hijack the DNS; for instance, they can usually reconfigure the target server.

Your LAN is way, way more owned than the Internet at-large is. Pretty much every network attack devised since 1992 still works on an internal network. The reason this doesn't kill you is, you don't let strangers on your internal network.
Because I'm not a communist?

I don't even use Emacs as my REPL, even though it does a decent job for Python and Ruby. I want my up-arrow to work the way it does everywhere else, and I want to be able to cycle the interpreter process in less than a second. My .irbrc will load a per-directory .irbrc for me, so while I'm testing, CTR-D up-arrow enter will reset my test case for me.

Making Emacs does this was just too much of a pain.

As for hexl-mode --- have you ever used Hex Fiend? For that matter, have you ever used hexl-mode? I don't use hex editors only occasionally. I would pay money for a great hex editor. I would pay twice as much money never to have to use hexl-mode. Luckily, I don't have to do either; Hex Fiend is free. It is awesome. You can pull a 15 meg firmware image into it, and it won't even blink; you can search for a symbol table signature across that whole binary in sub-user time.

I'm not one of those people who wants their Emacs to do everything it can possibly do. I read my mail in Mail.app, and my news in NetNewsWire.

What do you get out of running your terminals in Emacs? I'm genuinely curious.
Question for anyone who has dealt with angels:

Is it normal for angels to take 600 hours to complete a deal -- from first meeting to signing on?
That's a two-way street, dbosson.
He will probably need it now that his driver has been jailed?
That's a two-way street, dbosson. I wouldn't hasten to silence him, nor chasten him for opening his mouth "in the presence of a person who has an abundance of knowledge," as you put it.
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The claim against Zuckerberg by CU is that he stole code, not the idea.
JS/PHP front end for GNUPlot
Provides a easy way to plot functions without firing up graphing software.
Benchmarking Wordpress and Django
It all makes me think terrorists must be really incompetent if they can't pull off these same hacks. I neither respect nor fear Osama.
Right. For example, say you have a street network with a main street at capacity (IE, stabilized at crowded, but endurably so), and four outlying streets that eventually lead to the same destination, but have a less appealing route (slower, toll stops, plagued with potholes, pick one). The outlying routes may not be crowded at all, but if the main road is widened, it will probably absorb even more traffic from the outlying streets.

You could make this into a graph problem, if you like, or draw analogies to finding parking.
Apparently, "Linux Foundation releases a compatibility tool" was too subtle.
Venture Capital Legal Document Standardization and Costs
Peter Cohan also offers a good overview in this webinar http://www.glance.net/custom/Webinars/PeterCohan_20080711/We... that's appropriate for enterprise / office 2.0 applications. He has a number of good articles on preparing for and managing the demo/sales process on his website at http://www.secondderivative.com/
People tend to act more selfishly in cars than they do outside of them, much like many people do with the relative anonymity of the internet. I suspect it is because drivers are in semi-protected pockets of their own space, and they're essentially sitting still - there is not much they can do to discharge physical frustration caused by traffic besides yelling, giving people the finger, or driving more aggressively.
Wow, a feature that comes standard on other high-end phones? Unbelievable! http://maddox.xmission.com/putty3.gif

After waiting several months for developers to write and release code, you might be able to cobble together a bunch of apps that make up for the iPhone's flaws. The situation is identical to that of Windows.
If you could make it a desktop application and store data locally I'm sure you'd have a lot more takers. I'm sure you want to use information from your users to improve your system -- so let people send in anonymized information (and let them see _exactly_ what's being sent and remove anything they're uncomfortable with).

I'm guessing it's unlikely you guys will do that. But if someone else does I'd be happy to try it out :-)
Not exactly confidence inspiring.
Advertisers pay for a well characterized audience (which Google infers from the search terms). Who is in the audience matters quite a bit, which is one point of attack on Google: when you only have 1% (or .01%) of their audience share starting out, you are better served if that 1% represents a significant fraction of a particular market or type of buyer instead of a representative cross section of Google's total audience. That's also a potential point of attack on eBay: you have to take a niche approach. This is often a more reliable way to gain traction than "first/early" or "get big fast." Even better if the niche is initially non-customers or customers whom existing players don't find attractive so that are less likely to mount a competitive response.
Aurora... really? that's the future?
A discussion on ixda is sorting out the pros (and barely cons) of the Adaptive Path and Mozilla efforts on a new... browser? OS?

I feel alone thinking that it's all preposterous.
Sometimes I wonder why they even bother collecting fares. Fares rarely cover the cost, so paying money to develop an expensive fare collection system that's easily hackable doesn't make much sense.

Oh well, at least the politicians can give their contractor buddies my money!
Most of the plans I have are, indeed, based on GET commands. However, I do have ideas around post commands e.g. sending back an assessment of the quality of a recommendation.
The outcome for morningside heights is positive, but I see no reason to believe it is related to Columbia. Columbia didn't improve morningside, Rudy+good economy improved all of NYC.

As for the work skills of the poor, there are 7.7 million working poor, compared to 24.2 million poor adults. "Working poor" == "in the labor force (working or seeking work) 27 weeks/year or more".

So less than 1/3 of poor adults spent at even half the year working or trying to work.

As for children, it may or may not help. It's not obvious to me that a good school can overcome the effects of a bad parent.

Sources for my figures:

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf

http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/2006-SUM.pdf?...

(Yes, I subtracted 2006 numbers from 2005 numbers, but I expect they didn't change much between years.)
It's nice that they used the GNU Radio for their attack. I was planning on doing this with Chicago's "Chicago Card", but didn't have the money for a USRP when I was in school. (And, there was no research budget for undergrads.)

I am seriously tempted to buy one now, though.
Stunningly Awful Web Demos: Ten Rules for Inflicting Pain at a Distance
News? Hacker News?
Warcarting: the low-cost alternative to wardriving
This was the most interesting point in the article for me:

"If your product is valuable, don’t dicker with a free model. Go for the subscription model straightaway.

Games publishers get away with this; everyone else seems to have stopped trying. When Hong asked the hundred of so people in the room how many of them used a subscription model, you could hear the unmistakable din of crickets...seriously."
Holy Cash Cow, Batman - Content Is Back
I think, in practice, that your example still doesn't work.

First of all, that's an argument against not divulging trade secrets, rather than forbidding the worker from working in the same general field. There aren't a lot of cases where somebody can reproduce an important new product from scratch without bringing over mountains of documentation.

If somebody can take the bare idea, go to a competitor, reproduce a product, and get it out to market faster than the original company, then the previous company was probably doomed anyway. This does happen from time to time but let's face it -- this is a GOOD thing.
My experience as well. The Starbucks I go to often is constantly giving me free drinks/snacks/extras.
Traffic jams may have complicated causes for any fixed number of cars on the road, but it's worth noting that they don't often have traffic jams in rural Kansas. The fundamental problem of traffic is that there are too many cars on the road, and that's because road usage is priced too low. The predictable result is queueing, i.e., traffic. Most of the fancy investigations into the psychology of drivers, etc., are simply higher-order corrections to this basic 0th-order result.
That's hilarious... the guy who uses windows...
It all makes me think terrorists must be really incompetent if they can't pull off these same hacks.

What's to say they can't or haven't?
That only shows that employers value non-compete agreements. I agree that non-competes are valuable to employers, because they can provide leverage for future shakedowns.

The question is whether non-competes are good for the worker or innovation or society in general. I think it's clear that they only hurt these things.
Also I disagree with the point that demoing google would have been as simple as "enter text press enter - wow results."

Exactly. Everyone's a retroactive genius on this one. But what would a cynical elevator pitch look like for Google in 1998? How about "We've built yet another search engine, in a market that has never shown even the potential for profit. Now give us some money."
It looks like people are finding a lot of creative ways to use slinkset. A lot of niche markets and companies could benefit from a site like this
Even so the case is a joke. He stole the code he wrote himself? I think allegedly he didn't honor a verbal agreement to write a site for the connectU founders, that is very different from someone "stealing the code" and it's silly to even consider FB's success and CU's lack there of is due to the fact that they launched a month or two earlier.

In any case, I was responding to jrockway's comment
"someone who steals his employer's idea and makes billions off it".