skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been coding for about 12 years now. I do not have a CS degree. I am working on building startups. My major emphasis has been buiding 3-tier web sites with .NET, mostly because .NET is what you find in large corporate environments. I belong to a mailing list in Seattle that has to do with tech entrepreneurs. One of our recent discussion has been on what "stack" you use to build out your website. There are basically 2 schools, the first is the LAMP stack (linux, apache, MySQL and PHP) and the second is .NET/SQL Server. You just need to pick one and go for it.

If you are using csh is sounds like you're already in the linux camp, so I would recommend the LAMP stack. One thing that is quite popular right now amongst tech startups is Ruby on Rails. That would be a good thing to learn. Not only to build your startup but if you get good you can contract yourself out to others. Here are a good set of tutorials to learn RoR.

http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top-ruby-on-r...

hope this helps
Nick
Wardialing is over 40 years old? Learn something new every day.
The Curse of QWERTY
It's an interesting point. Obviously, if they had you working for the toll system, they'd be able to come up with some interesting countermeasures. Of course, they don't have anyone like you or I working there.
Another similarity between chess and startups is that the game can be lost long before checkmate, without you even knowing it, especially if you don't know what you're doing.
When I was in china, such games were very popular in all the net bars. The had some type of internet cafe system in use by most internet cafes, and this jam legend style music-making as well as some dancing girls thingy - based on the same concept - was quite popular. So it's certainly a good market to be in.

In china, they have these scratch cards that you can buy at 7/11s and other convenience stores. You then use the credit on the scratch cards to buy dresses and so on for your figure. Several of the girls I knew were obsessed with making sure that their avatar not only looked good, but that she always had new clothes. So games in that style, though free initially, still make loads of money just selling add-ons and things to individualise yourself.
You can get flac rips at private music trackers like waffles. The library is comparable to if not better than itunes. There are some 24 bit rips out there but not very many.
I've always wondered, do you really have as much decision power with 51% of the company as 100%?
Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server
Public Relations in a Downturn Economy
Disclosure: I work here but thought many of the hackers here would find this post interesting and valuable.
No, a downvote is not a valid answer...
Agreed...I walked away twice from a fledgling startup that wasn't willing to offer me fair terms.

The first time, they offered equity that was barely in the single digit range ;-) Neither of the other two founders are technical people, and they can't afford to hire someone, so I found this pretty laughable.

They came back with a much higher percentage, but they wouldn't agree to me getting the same vesting arrangement that they were getting / would get in a future round.

So far, they've not really gone anywhere since I walked.
Very well said! The reality is: be agile, stay focused and keep your eye on the prize...success.
Android to Get Its Own App Market
Hey… You forgot to tell us how to get the most out of this guy
Wierd, I thought war dialing (at least by hand) came about around the time of the Strowger Switch? I read somewhere (sorry, no link) that as telephones became popular people would ring numbers sequentially to see who was at the other end.
Jaiku Uncaps Invites, Migrates to Google Infrastructure
Humungous banner ads coming to YouTube?
In theory, yes. Having said that, leverage can be achieved through means beyond shareholdings and it's worth remembering that if you're heavily dependent on your VC for assistance.
Clearly the house painting analogy fails. All analogies do. My point was that the two extremes are fixed-bid and hourly.

For the sake of a client, a programmer with some expertise should be able to give a reasonable estimate based on a set of requirements.

I would say your house painter analogy fails as well. Fixed-bid contracting for software development is nothing like painting a house sight unseen, with only vague descriptors. Analogies aren't really the point though...
I might be violating the first rule of Fight Club or something, but nickb is more than one person.
ASK HN: what screencast software do you use on a mac?
Camtasia Studio has some great features but is not yet available for mac, what software do you use?
The first thing anyone looking for venture capital needs to understand is that the primary objective of a VC company is to turn every dollar they invest into your idea into $10 over a 2 to 5 year time frame.

Once this fact is understood and understood well, then many of the emotional issues just sort of go away.
This definitely has viral potential. Very cool and well implemented so far.

Lots of monetisation strategies (buy songs you like jamming to via the site or affiliate, advertising, selling gig/concert tickets and merchandise for featured bands, premium subscriptions, etc.) and growth strategies (unsigned/new bands put tracks people can jam to and discover, myspace-style user profiles, youtube-style self jamming videos/webcams, facebook-style friend-sets and widget sharing, xbox-style achievement goals, etc.) too.

Good luck!
I'm not sure it is. When someone asks for a large, but reasonable rate, like $75 or $100 an hour, you generally know that they're good at what they do, and that they're worth the cost.

There's kind of a sweet spot in there- less than $35 an hour, you know they're amateur and you feel like you're getting substandard service. Much more than $100 an hour and you know you're getting fleeced.
another reason for companies to not store your data forever.
Cool site... I liked looking up my site :)
Snapz Pro does a good job.
"Hacker" is a bit like the term "witch" in the Wizard of Oz.

"Are you a good hacker, or a bad hacker?"

The techniques and thinking styles are the same, either way.
"Internet Explorer 8 includes a Compatibility View feature that displays Web sites that were created for older browsers as they were designed to appear. You can enable Compatibility View in Internet Explorer or on the Web server."

Thank goodness for that!
Later. I'm working on a set of strategies that will allow me to be clear about my needs and limitations with people so I can be more productive to the people that matter to me and/or pay me money.
The Forer Effect
Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly
Ooooooooooooooobviously.
LG Ke990 Viewty SILVER Unlocked
Lg has upped the ante with the KU990, a phone that features the tried and true design of the Prada phone but adds substantial aspects that the most jaded cell phone user will appreciate. The Prada phone’s sleek form is untouchable.
The Hardest Sales Job Ever
World record ($100,000) prime number found?
Look no further than ScreenFlow.

http://www.varasoftware.com/

For quick and dirty screenfast, the TechSmith folks have the Jing Project

http://www.jingproject.com/

I have used both and quite happy with them.

There is IShowU as well
How about rather than asking web designers, server owners and IT staff everywhere to add some hack tag to their code, you force IE8 into compatibility mode unless a designer specifically enables IE8 rendering on their page by adding said tag? That mediates the issue pretty easily.
It went from "genius" to "worst team member evz"!
If you're successful, a 25% capital gains tax is not all that onerous. What's the difference between $20M and $15M? Sure, it's $5M, but what can $20M buy you that $15M cannot?

After the fact, yes. But a 25% capital gains tax reduces your expected outcome by 25%, so if you are thinking of starting a business that within a year you suspect has a 10% chance of being worth $1 million, and a 90% chance of being worthless, your expected return goes from $100K to $75K -- and that might rule it out for people who are already making a decent amount of money.
Wait, you mean developers will be able to write apps that take full advantage of the OS through background process and system hooks, then distribute them without paying for keys or being vetted by a capricious bureaucrat?! AND they'll give users a choice as to what to do with their own phones?! Quelle Horreur!

I've always maintained that Apple's iPhone restrictions are bullshit political decisions and have nothing to do with the protecting users from viruses and malicious apps. IF Jobs and his defenders are correct, then surely Android will succumb to horrible attacks, viruses, scamware etc. Well, the handset is shipping soon, so I definitely look forward to proving (nearly) everyone wrong :)
"hosted elsewhere."

Such as @ FriendFeed perhaps?

Thanks for pointing that out. I had assume that a business hosting its own feeds would want to host its own SUP feed too, but maybe there are some compelling reasons for not doing that.
Another alternative is Dia:
http://live.gnome.org/Dia

It is (or was last I looked) less polished than OmniGraffle, but open source and cross-platform.
But those are sold to doctors, not patients.
It's like a disease endemic to us nerds. Honestly who looks at the word "hack" and thinks hey i'm gonna make a white hat form of this? An OS called GNU?? Linus was lucky he had a buddy in marketing to help him name the kernel otherwise we'd have something like the clusterfuck in gnome & kde packages.
Definitely go with hosted. Every account you force people to sign up for will drop your user base by a ton. Would you be posting on Hacker News if you also had to sign up for S3 (or give your current S3 account) in order to provide storage for the comments?

In addition, storing their S3 credentials has all its own problems. Remember that the AWS credentials are pretty powerful. If your database is compromised, those keys could be used to drain peoples' bank accounts via Flexible Payment System (FPS). Handle AWS credentials as you would a credit card number, which means avoid at all costs!
I thought you were on your own already - or is this a contract?

Dealing with people is difficult - perhaps you could setup some sort of emailing ticket system where the minutia can go into queue. This way it will not interrupt your important rewrite or other pressing matters.
Nope: http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

Having said that, it's not at all clear what Greenspun really wanted VC money for in his cash-generative services company. Perhaps he shouldn't have bitten off more than he could swallow.
Erlang is like Ruby in ‘02?
It seemed like such a promising train of thought before it finally tanked. Argh.

There's a thesis in here somewhere....
Also: First usage of a masculine pronoun when discussing hacking! Gotta protect 'the boys'.
What will you do if the carrier won't let you run all these nice programs?
Time for the Mozilla IPO (Again)
Too bad it's not reliably implemented cross browser.

It's a great idea, though, so we go ahead and throw httponly onto every cookie we care about, even as we implement other measures. We had to hack together something, though, since Python's SimpleCookie class doesn't recognize httponly as a valid cookie attribute.

edit: When he says he's not sure if Safari implements it or not, what he means to say is that Safari doesn't implement it. At all.
Unnecessary I agree. Hurtful was the part I still disagree with, but your point about pipelining http requests is a good one.
Just remember: Veoh had the deep pockets necessary to fight this in court and take it all the way to a decision. While that may be the case for larger sites, it's totally different for the small sites. If you can't afford the court costs to defend yourself, you lose as soon as the suit is filed.
IIRC, they were originally planning to do exactly what you said, requiring a special tag to enable standards compliance in IE8, but there was a gigantic backlash from the web development and standards community.

Why? Because then we get nowhere; all the clueless web designers never find out about the special tag to make IE8 comply with internet standards, and continue making webpages for the broken IE rendering model for the next 10 years.

We need to make all those old websites break, because otherwise they'll never comply with modern standards. We need to have standardsbased rendering be the default because then the designers that test against IE8 will be making sites that work better with other browsers.

By forcing developers to realize that their websites are non-compliant (either from angry users or specifically forcing quirks mode) and by defaulting to standards-based rendering, we make the web design future a much nicer place to be.
hahahah.

Exactly. Specifically, Linus' name for Linux was "Freax"
If you want to pseudo-replicate this effect using css only, here are some examples and tutorials:

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-to-recreate-...

http://css-tricks.com/3d-parralax-background-effect/

The effect is only visible when someone resizes the browser window, but it's kind of neat nonetheless.
That is not much of a change, really. The Manhattan Project should be as legendary for the genius wrangling as the results. As seen over previous years, the Dream Team formula for olympics basketball is not just 'put all the superstars together' -- and that's a team sport, where a superstar is inherently a team player. The genius is held up as an individual's ideal, but they are generally identified... because they're standing alone.

Why does everyone assume the genius label is a positive? (Because it also gets applied to people who pulled ahead of the pack). Objectively applied, though, it is as often a curse. Watch Errol Morris' 'First Person' biographies (or at least read the wikipedia bios of) Christopher Langan and Rick Rosner. These are 'geniuses' who I wouldn't want to work with or be.

Heck, post-Enron, the phrase 'smartest guy in the room' often sounds like an insult or a character smear.
I suspect that folks who have an S3 account today are sophisticated enough that they'll undervalue your value-add. Moreover, folks who don't have an S3 account don't know your storage costs.

FWIW, "control my own storage" is overhead for almost everyone; it is overhead that they'll pay to avoid.
It's unclear to me exactly what's going on, but

"'brute force techniques' - mass dialing until something 'interesting' is found"

Sounds an awful lot like war dialing. Not sure what was on the other side though and what got done.
That was Microsoft's original plan. The web standards community pitched a fit, and MS caved.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#The_2008_Do...

It's good news IMHO. Either way it's an interesting sign of Microsoft's waning power in the browser world.

---

Sorry, cross-posted.
37signals Affiliate Program Update
Because by default IE8 will try to render sites in a standards-compliant way. If you designed your site to work around all the quirks, bugs and non-standard stuff in older versions of IE, then your site might not work properly in IE8 by default.

This is a good thing because getting your code to be cross-browser compatible should be a lot easier now.

Microsoft just does not want to leave behind all the people who worked hard to make their code work with their older, broken versions of IE.

I'm no MS fanboy but it seems me that IE8 is going to be a pretty big improvement. I hope. :-)
CSS Parallax Scroll Effect
also see: http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-to-recreate-silverbacks-parallax

cf http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html which is the cool looking javascript
Because Mazda enthusiasts (aka rotorheads) love them, and they are actually really good sports car powerplants.

But as other people have mentioned, they have some downsides, pretty much all due to their hard-to-seal and oddly-shaped "combustion chamber".

But nothing drives a following like an unusual design with inherent impracticalities (Cf. 45-degree V-twins, late-90's air-cooled Porsches, and Lisp ;).
A lot of countries use related curves of constant width for their coins. It makes it easy to tell, say, a Loonie from a Toonie by feel, yet they can still be automatically sorted by sliding them through a slot without them needing to be oriented in a particular way.

I've never seen a triangular coin like that though. That would be pretty cool.
Not entirely true. The US runs completely on case law, so having a precedent like Veoh helps you out a lot. People will be less willing to even take you to court if they see that it's likely they'll lose under a similar ruling. And if you do get to court, your burden will basically be to live up to whatever Veoh did.
I don't understand all the flak about Google copying Apple by opening an app store. The idea of a central repository for the applications isn't a new one, and it is hardly unintuitive or creative.
academia still doesn't trust the Internet.

Partially because the internet is academia's competition. For centuries, academia was able to keep their knowledge locked away because, while many knew a little, they were the only ones who knew enough (both in breadth and depth) to really teach you anything. Today, the internet's communal nature makes up for the fact that most of us don't have the breadth or depth that they have - we each contribute a little and it becomes more than the breadth or depth than they have.

Is it surprising that they don't trust the internet? "Wikipedia is unreliable!" That's because people who use Wikipedia have less reason to buy knowledge from you. "Open source is fraught with patent liability problems!" That's because no one will pay for outrageous licenses from you if they can get it for free. "Automation creates inferior products!" That's because no one is going to pay your high union wages if they can get a machine to do a better job than you for less money.

All of those statements have the potential to be true. I'm sure they are true in some cases. In the majority of cases, it just isn't true. But your way of life is potentially on the way out and there's a catalyst of that change that you can campaign against so you do.
Volkswagen: Seeing Things Differently
Couple comments about this post:

(1) HttpOnly makes cookie harvesting harder, but it does not protect you against cross-site scripting. An attacker that can inject JS into your browser can still force you to perform actions in that application under the cookie. This is a patch to the exploit, not to the vulnerability.

(2) As implemented in a bunch of places today, it's just a speed bump: you can read HttpOnly cookies directly out of headers from Ajax responses.

(3) The "best practices" response to XSS isn't just filtering and neutralizing input (by encoding metacharacters to HTML entities); it's also consistently filtering output, so that no matter what garbage ends up in your SQL rows, you still aren't corrupting the DOM with it. Note that filtering (in both directions) is notoriously easy to screw up: for instance, lots of apps catch script tags but miss event attributes.
Ask HN: Best place(s) to find datasets to practice ML and DM?
Anyone know of good websites with collections of datasets that are good for practicing datamining and machine learning?

The netflix prize, www.netflixprize.com is one obvious one, but only 1 set.

Project Gutenberg is another where you can get large amounts of text.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Datasets for medicin would be greatly appreciated.
I'm not so sure. It seems more like astrology, in that it's vague enough to apply to someone who wants to think of themselves as an absent-minded genius, than thesis material. Apply the context of programming and you've got a sure hit, albeit lacking real content.
Magnolia M2: Free and Open Source Social Bookmarking: autonomo.us
No, Apple obviously invented that, as they did the MP3 player. Now please mind my reality distortion field.
Sequence is super simple: http://macapper.com/2008/07/15/sequence-simplified-screen-re...
The genius thing. Ok, so this INTP class is capable of tackling intractable problems through wild abstraction. Independent of raw intelligence, when these abstractions come together in a structured and relevant form, solving problems that were previously impossible, or maybe even did not exist - we view it as genius.

But, this same individual is capable of of abstraction in the wrong way too, they are not super-human, just really different than the norm.

Darwin, Newton, Einstein, etc - beautiful ideas, but also ludicrous ideas sprinkled throughout their careers. Would they be considered geniuses if they were living today, in this age of information and knowledge explosion? Maybe.

More important than the label of the individual is knowing that these ideas can manifest. More important than calling someone a genius is realizing that someone may be capable of brilliant ideas. The INTP class, is perhaps more capable of generating these genius ideas just because of the uniqueness in thought. However, they are also more capable of generating ideas that fail miserably.
Quantum Weirdness: Two times zero doesn't always equal zero
When you first meet, you will become his “pet project” for a time.

So it's not just a coincidence that every woman I date has more baggage than an airport? Then I figure that out and keep dating them anyway, perhaps even more resolutely.

Welp, if I'm doomed to date women orders of magnitude more insane than I am, they at least better continue to be exceedingly attractive.
Billing by the hour may be way too granular for some projects. Contractors should also consider day-rates. It can be a good compromise between hourly billing and fixed bids.
FWIW, OmniGraffle is the commercial solution on the Mac that pretty much everybody uses. If you're going to be doing diagrams more than every great once in awhile, it's worth investing in something good.

I've been using it for years and it's what I do all of my hand created diagrams in.
We paid 50 bucks for this and it was an awesome investment. DO IT.
10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You
Would freebase work for what you need?
I would have gone with, "Like, well, duh."
Your eccentric programmer genius also responds well to ego-stroking articles explaining what a precious, unique little snowflake he is!

Don't show this to him though, as reading it would cause a mental context switch, and make him feel all sapped and drained!

As we all know, your eccentric genius worker ant is at least 30 times more productive than Joe Average, so making him reattune the universe with his humming inner harmony would result in billions worth of lost productivity!
To render watermarking useless, pirate_0 only needs to periodically buy a new player+LCD with cash. Any scarcity created by discouraging amateurs from being pirate_0 will only encourage professionals to move into the sector.

Even if it costs $1k to get each movie release out of protected form, it's cheap for a (dubious) advertiser wishing to get a message out to a huge audience.

And further down the road, I suspect there will be an anonymous market for such content. $1k is only a penny from 100k people.
Nice stealth-brag there, but maybe a bit unnecessary. After all, everyone knows that programmers get the hottest chicks!
Capitalism, dude. Carriers don't control apps on smartphones (BB, WinMo etc) the way they control apps on feature phones. Were a carrier to do it, it would place them at a HUGE disadvantage against all other carriers that have Android devices.

In other words, not gonna happen.
I on the other hand, would have been like, "Whatevaaar...."
I agree very well done. A lot of fun, right from the get go.

key press timing seems a little buggy but suppose that's to be expected given it's a beta.

I had this same problem. I can actually anticipate the slowdown and the inevitable note miss that is coming.

I think it is just a matter of dealing with latency a little bit better when things go awry.

Or maybe it's a problem of resources since I have 20 apps open on my computer. Either way it's minor compared to the fun from playing.