skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once they get their hardware prices down I think these guys will be rocking. My Mom would love me for a million years if I got her one of these.
Key Legal Win for Open Source
Congrats guys! Great idea. Looking forward to getting one for the fam for the holidays!
Key continuity is a fine answer to this problem. Just come up with a way to provide it on every device every user might reasonably want to log in from, for every site on the Internet.
Very true. It wasn't until I went to university that I learnt my first interesting maths. It was literally mind-expanding, suddenly a whole class of things I couldn't even think about before was, not easy, but certainly possible.
Global Popularity of Programming Languages
T-Mobile to be first to use Google's Android
In my case its a iPhone app review site, but I'm sure others would be interested in learning more general information as well. Just from initial thoughts, potential advertisers would be mainstream iPhone publishers, smaller iPhone developers, and companies looking to advertise towards those who own iPhone or iPod Touches. I haven't done too much research on iPhone owners yet, but it is also my understanding they are generally more affluent. So therefore, if you can't find advertisers to fill the categories above, you have a back-up market of companies who wish to advertise to affluent consumers.
Tutorials to give your site a better iPhone interface
I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might mean taking a break.

If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will step up, that's the power of community, it's bigger than just a web site. In the case of couch surfing v2 seems to be going strong.
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ - Google webtools have been incredibly helpful for us. Also http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/ (no..it is not an adult site!) is a good blog on SEO
(1)

An attacker in Estonia manages to compromise a single DNS cache serving a residential cable ISP in Tuscon, AZ. Without SSL in the way, she now owns several thousand bank account logins and Yahoo Mail passwords.

(2)

An attacker in Estonia manages to compromise a single DNS cache serving a residential cable ISP in Tuscon, AZ. With SSL in the way, she now owns several bank account logins and Yahoo Mail passwords.
I wonder about the DBAs they hired. It would be interesting to hear about some hiring lessons based on this.

At some point you have to be able to trust people, and unless you are already an expert in that area how do you really know?
"While Google Docs is free (as in beer), it is not free as in freedom. Some people will not use software because of that."

The correct inference to make from that is "and those people will miss out on certain opportunities as a result," not "so everyone else should bend over backward to accomodate their self-imposed restrictions."
Which is good, because without that dropoff, your customers security would be an externality to you.
Interesting that they say Apple is the one to beat

Well, no, it's obvious really. OSX is ultimate proof that you can take Unix (BSD in this case) and put an interface on it that ESR's Aunt Tillie can use. The Linux community has invested squillions of hours in improving the desktop and given it away for free, and people would still rather spend $$$ on OSX. Why do you suppose that is?
If you've got an extra 9 minutes, there's an entertaining clip over at ted also about our safety craze that I just watched last night with my parents, who got a kick out of telling me about all the dangerous stuff they had when they were kids, which of course they never let me near until I was quite a bit older.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangero...
A self-signed certificate does not establish a secure connection between Alice and Bob, because Alice can't verify the certificate. Bob can send his certificate, Mallory can trivially intercept it and replace it with her own, and nobody will be the wiser.

Let's not encourage people to adopt security mechanisms that provide no real security. Let's make the security mechanisms we have today, which are strong enough to stop many governments and all of the largest corporations, cost-effective and easier to deploy. Let's solve the right problems, instead of trying to make ourselves feel better by sugarcoating browser warning messages.
VMware: Don't shut down that virtual machine
I could get one for my mom too, then take pictures and have them show up there so she will bug me about my life less often ;)
China Raises Taxes on Big Cars, Lowers Them on Small Ones
Autocomplete Form Fields (with jQuery)
Commercial certificates are not a scam. You're paying for a company (the CA) to certify (via the SSL cert signature) that an identity belongs to someone that has provided proof that they're who they say they are.

You can absolutely do what you're requesting by creating your own CA and signing certs for your sites and distributing your CA cert to your users somehow.

If you can figure out how to reliably provide this service for free you could revolutionize crypto on the internet. You might start by looking at what cacert.org has done to see what problems they've hit and why it's not as easy as it seems.
Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media
McCain's Tech Policy: H1Bs Good, Net Neutrality and Patent System Bad
Y Combinator Challenge #19 - Application and/or data hosting
It'd be interesting to hear what 37s make of this, as it seems like they went for revenue rather than growth.
Personally I agree with the growth then revenue strategy, but I guess it depends on what you want to create, and what size market you think you could get.
Here's an interesting solution. CMU just put out a tool called Perspectives that runs public notary servers. The servers probe sites periodically to get a history of keys. This can go a long way toward determining whether there is a man-in-the-middle sending you a fake SSL certificate (because it will not match the history).

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/

(hat-tip Lauren Weinstein)

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000414.html
33 Brands That Suck on Twitter
You are absolutely paying a premium based on the market persuasion tactics Verisign and Thawte have employed against the world. It's true that there's no good reason to trust Verisign more than Mozilla, Microsoft, and OpenSSL --- if Mozilla fucks up, you're just as screwed as if Verisign does.

The business model behind certificates may very well be a huge scam. Unfortunately, the technical model behind having a small number of trusted certificates shipped with your browser is not. Until that link breaks, you don't get security without paying Verisign.
http://www.seomoz.org/

http://www.seobook.com/

Not really SEO, but I love this book:
http://www.calltoactionbook.com/
Acquisition/Investment vs. Bootstrapping
These should really have a webcam and mic, too -- albeit with a physical shutter/switch for total confidence in its on/off status.

Then it'd be the ultimate for keeping-in-touch-with-distant-relatives.
Surprised they missed Debian OpenSSL --- a majority of Linux app servers had their SSL security effectively negated, for months.
I had to google that. Were you trying to argue for or against his point?
SMP support postdates distribution primitives. You could still have many thousands of threads, but they weren't stretched over multiple physical CPUs until recently.

Still, what I was referring to is that the code is very mature and also the process is designed to give you more reliable results. The entire architecture of the libraries and the language itself are built around the notion of fault-tolerance by people who know what that salsa should taste like.
It's amazing how many people still think Verisign are the only CA out there. There are a lot now, and if you hunt about, you needn't pay more than $10-$20 for a cert that's trusted in most browsers (granted, they are domain-only validated, but that's a whole different issue that needs to be fixed, I won't bring it up here...)

The reason you 'trust' Verisign/Thawte/Comodo/Geotrust/GoDaddy is because their roots are in the OSs & browsers. You can't get in those root stores without a hell of a lot of hoop-jumping. I know this. The money you pay for a cert does go to covering the costs of the background checks you have to pass through before you get the certificate.

Trust has to start somewhere - why not with large companies who have undergone rigorous procedures that also have been vetted by the companies you're implicitly trusting by installing their software?
But it's not the top few percent of any sub-population. It's the top few percent worldwide, regardless of where they are. If all of the Chinese PhD students in the US went back to China, then they (China or any other country) would be a lot better off. As long as a majority of the top students are studying, working, and researching at US universities, labs, and companies, America will produce the best innovations. If they go back to their home countries, well, we're in a heap of trouble.
Every time someone quotes Friedman in seriousness my jaw opens some. I am continually shocked at how many people take this simpleton seriously.
Encryption is nothing without identity assurance.
If you don't know who you're sending the encrypted data to - why bother encrypting in the first place?
It's mostly interesting because its concurrency, parallelization, and distribution primitives are the same thing semantically.

Speed is something we can work on, eventually everything can be natively and efficiently compiled if there is enough interest. What's more important is its ability to flexibly deploy to a variety of configurations. Your 8-thread piplelined dataflow in Erlang could easily be moved to a 8-machine EC2 deploy, with minimal code modifications. That's far more interesting than an order of magnitude in performance, which could easily be addressed.
You can't. Seriously, try it.
You can't get a 'proper' cert unless you go through the background checks.
You can't get a domain-only validated one unless you control the domain.
Sure, but the point is to say, "This small body of code gives you a naive but fully functional mapreduce." You have a lot of time to give it all the trimmings while other possible implementations just get off the ground and get tested.
"but it is just too risky to assume that a single person can prevent the creation of as many bugs as a pair can."

Bug creation is not inevitable, it is a product of the developers. I can just as easily say, two people are twice as likely to make bugs and extol the virtues of solo programming...

Writing code is about forming a generative model of the computer in your head so that you can imagine what the code will do before you write it. This allows you to build a good model of your problem and solve it. Depending on how fast the programmers are, they may have to slow down significantly due to a second person.

What are the odds that two advanced, experienced, intelligent programmers able to put themselves into a state of flow independently will produce twice as much code working together as they would separately? I expect that if there is an advantage here, it is less than 30%.

I think this article is a clear example of reasoning to a conclusion.
That's interesting. If I ever met any kind of scientist I'd be like "Wow, that's so cool," and ask questions about what you're researching, etc.

Are you a cop?
"Short of coming up with a way to create a trustworthy CA that runs for less than $20 a year, there is no great solution to this problem."

Good point. You won't find it - performing proper background checks cost more than that.

That's not to say you can't get cheap certificates - they're the domain-only validated ones where you only have to prove ownership of the domain.
These are bad because they appear the same as properly-validated certs when they shouldn't. Kaminsky's recent work shows the DNS system can't always be trusted, and so certificates validated on that weak system cannot be trusted either.

However, until GoDaddy and Geotrust stop having lots to lose from DV certs being marked-down by browsers, I doubt they'll let MS, Opera, Mozilla and the rest do such a thing.
Is the US failing at math and science? I don't take a metric like test scores or diplomas at face value. Maybe I could entertain international patents granted, but not without some more detailed analysis.

I don't think I've ever seen a proper analysis of the question of whether the US really is all that poor on math and science.

I think the huge US military industrial complex may play a big role in confusing the issue. An enormous amount of US scientific prowess is busy serving the pentagon. The casual observer sees the technological output of, say, Japan more readily because it's in consumer goods.
My typical solution for how to pull an all nighter is don't, unless there is some horrible deadline. Life's a marathon, not a sprint and those extra 8 hours of increasingly less productive time (~6 hours @ full capacity) will cost far more than this in lost productivity working off that sleep debt. The author also talks about the 6 hours he spent prepping it and that 90 minute talk and a couple hours playing cards... everybody could just put in 2 extra hours a day for a week and nobody hoses their days? I think all nighters feel more productive than they are.
I wonder how long rendering time was
If someone on this board wanted to argue that GoDaddy and GeoTrust haven't really seen "vetting" that makes or breaks their security, as a practitioner in this industry, I don't feel I could win that argument.

What you and I are really saying is that a company like Thawte has staked their business on those pubkeys, so that we at least know that if they screw up, they stand a good chance of losing the company.
What about the freedom of organisations and individuals to profit from their software-writing efforts?

'Freedom is good' sounds like a tautology, but freedom to do what, or freedom from what?

Some freedoms are a good thing for people to have, others not (e.g. freedom to escape the law (assuming the law is good)).

For RMS, the freedom of the many to use, see, modify and distribute code always trumps the freedom of the individual person or organisation to keep their code secret and restricted to the end of making money for themselves.

Unfortunately, I get the impression that RMS tries to equate 'freedom' with 'the freedoms RMS is in favour of'. But there are other freedoms which one can argue for, and which conflict with RMS's preferred freedoms. (Which he does argue for, but my point is that there are good arguments for other views too.)
Six words: Automatically updated photos of their grandkids

Picwing's potential target market: Grandparents. Go after it!

My brother-in-law and myself did this (for my parents) with the then best-of-class Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame. Once we saw that a Wi-fi picture frame supported RSS feeds we were hooked - despite the high cost and painful configuration (RSS + picture frame). I am hopeful that Picwing will make the picture frame grandparent friendly and not try to extort annual subscription fees.
Thanks guys! I'm Edward, one of the founders of Picwing, and we're really excited about finally telling the world about the product!

Judging from the number of orders we've been getting, it seems like people have been waiting for something like this for a while. While there are other wireless digital photo frame products out there, we really feel that we've been the first company to tackle it from the software perspective.

Thanks again!
Wallflower,

Grandparents or even parents are exactly who we had in mind when we built this!
Tom Mendoza, Vice Chairman of NetApp - Key points about business
We'd have to count those by hand. Every time someone suggests that, I just hear Florida in my head.
So, who cares?

This is hacker news, not techcrunch!

Are we being silently invaded by M$ drones who report everything wrong with google, yahoo and apple but never their own fuck ups?
If only there was a way to normalize the data over programming population. Seeing that Python is most popular in CUBA makes me doubt how useful these distribution charts are.
East Asia also has a pop music industry that surpasses the USA in manufacturing and promoting disposable celebrities. If you combine J-Pop, K-pop and "C-pop" music there are dozens of new asian Britney Spears equivalents on the scene every year who achieve at least minor levels of success.
> amongst the people who make purchasing decisions

I think those sorts of people care about many other things more than complexity, first and foremost: ass covering, and being able to call someone if something goes wrong. That's the kind of target they're aiming at. The period when people bought servers because of bright, shiny, 'uncomplicated' guis was relatively short lived, in the late '90ies with Windows NT.
Let's say that I'm doing Monte Carlo work in a one-in-one-out datacentre...
yup... software licensing... it's buggy!
Looks cool!

Are you assembling and soldering these frames from scratch? Would love to hear more tech details on this..
How is that 'worse'? Having those people busy inventing cool stuff will make the whole world better, rather than having them working in rice fields, or locked up building nukes.
I would hope the founder of a company with a successful community would at least try to pass on the name and membership to community members or other entrepreneurs who would try to continue the community. I'm sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses who would have been happy to get nothing but the domain name and member list to try to start a new couchsurfing (though it appears that the service came back just fine on its own).
An embarrassment that solves no problem, not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data?

Surely you jest. In the real world, well, my world anyway, the problem of how to transfer bits of data around in a file format wildly different systems can understand is a major problem indeed, even if it's not a terribly sexy one, and the, admittedly ugly, representation of data in some sort of HTML-inspired fashion may not be anywhere near a solution for the data representation problem, it's most definitely better than not making a stab at solving the problem at all.
Fair enough, but the thing I like about REST is the consistent API and (ideally) proper handle of request types via mime type information in the header.
I'm curious how they optimized for this. Perhaps some sort of linear programming or variation of the "traveling salesman" problem?
It took me a while to get what you are saying, but you are right. I didn't know what I was talking about.

Unless you have a means of verifying the public key fingerprint I you are SOL. Wish I had more modpoints for you.
I think you miss the point of free software. The thing free software people are trying to _avoid_ is restrictions. Lets remind ourselves of the 4 freedoms the Free Software Definition states:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Cool! I worked on these a while ago, but then we moved back to Italy...

http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/336/C2154/

It was pretty cool - the guy running it scored a deal on a bunch of old HP laptops that he took apart and reassembled into frames.
Thats exactly the long-term direction that we want Picwing to go. Pictures are really just the beginning for us: We would love to enable applications like email, video conferencing, and more that your Grandma would be able to use in a really non-intimidating way.
" I don't think you can get much more succinct than that and still express the idea of a list."

What matters is: a list of what. Telling me (5, 7,11) means nothing.

<sizes dress='5' pants='7' shoes='11' />

is what's of value.

Would an sexp be terser? Sure. But not enough to matter.
That's pretty awesome. Is there a priority waitlist for YC alummns :)
the super-wicked bar is a respectable addition. it works like just the all-hyped instant search technology (e.g. of google, copernic, etc.) by (instantly) finding any url (which includes descriptions) containing the relevant search phrase. it's super-wicked. and the greatest part is that it learns!

i could see why someone might want to disable it, but i find it supremely useful. i don't have to search through my history...the super-wicked bar does it automatically for it. it's like my whole history is instant-searchable in the url ("super-wicked") bar!

more and more software is continually making use of instant search technology (e.g. application launchers like Launchy), and it's a great thing indeed.
Do sexp, out of the box, have a standard notion of ID and IDREF, transclusion, and schema?

There's more to XML than just annoying angle braces.
I dunno, I did this (right hand turns whenever possible) like 20 years ago in my first job, when I had to drive around Toronto. So I doubt I am the only one who thought of this before ...
Here it is: http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engi...
They call it the beginners guide but unless you're thinking about running an seo firm its more than you ever need.
" Paren-matching and auto-indentation makes writing S-expressions orders of magnitude easier, and at least a constant factor easier than writing XML."

Funny; I find that the tag matching, auto-indentation, and auto-completion in vim make editing XML pretty easy.

Maybe S-expressions are slightly easier. Maybe not.
Agreed. Same thing with Russia being on the top three of most charts.

Also, from the comments:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=haskell%20...
Presumably, the most efficient delivery path to take must include left turns... right? I wonder if the efficiency gained by only turning right is greater than the efficiency lost by taking a less efficient route?
IP is basically one solution to the problem of provisioning 'public goods', which is what software would be without artificial restrictions, as it's definitely non rivalrous, and difficult to 'exclude'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions

It is, however, very much an artificial construct, created and enforced by the government with the intention of striking a balance that benefits consumers by encouraging producers. So, while I disagree with RMS, I don't know that I would call intellectual property a very natural 'freedom'. More than anything, it's a compromise that has worked reasonably well until now, with some obvious defects (software patents).
>For RMS, the freedom of the many to use, see, modify and distribute code always trumps the freedom of the individual person or organisation to keep their code secret and restricted to the end of making money for themselves.

If you don't want your code to be free as in free speech, use a different license and keep it to yourself. You have the freedom to do that.

You can make money off of free software by the way. It may seem tougher to do, but it's still possible.
This one is amazing: http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hacks.html#item154
If there is any way you could do this with a dialup connection, then you have yourself a real golden opportunity... especially if there was no monthly fee for 5 pics/month or something. I would buy one right now if it did this.

My recently widowed grandmother doesn't have a computer, let alone a wi-fi connection...
Hakmem: classic programming hacks
More like lack of an article... (I got a 404. Mirror?)