skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Escaping is important for all text fields, and I never use user text to build SQL strings without using some kind of typed parameter API.

But I'd like to let the user submit formatted HTML via something like FCKEditor and have it checked against a limited whitelist.

I don't trust my own knowledge of browser-specific HTML rules to do this on my own. It's got to be a common enough scenario, right?
I agree with this comment on that article: "when a man of true integrity comes along, he doesn't need to motivate people."

How can a start up have true integrity? Easy to say, hard to do: Make something people want -- that they really want to use. And never forget that you're a company of people, not people of a company.
As long as you're diligent, it's not that difficult to deliver e-mail successfully. It really depends on what kind of e-mail you're sending and how frequently you send it. That being said, monitoring bounces, watching junk mail reporting programs, etc can quickly become a full-time job.

The answer isn't do to one or the other -- it depends on the situation.
Idiotic title, but interesting article.
If anything this article shows just how exagerated the whole "cyber war" has been.
so in other words, try to be like maddox. though maddox is a different beast, and actually has sensibility
He's right. The odds of actually making millions of this startup game are pretty low.
The "excluded middle" of technical books
I kind of agree. He can be a very good (though uneven) writer. You couldn't possibly take the vulgarity out of his best stuff without rendering it, uh, flaccid.

Great satirists can be witty, vulgar, and highly personal all at the same time and yet come across as hilarious rather than offensive. But you'd better be saying something good or true. If you miss the mark, you're just an asshole. The trouble with this piece is not that it's vulgar but that it's mostly unfunny and drab. And the trouble with the swipe at Paul Graham is not that it's vulgar (or even that it's personal) but that it's gratuitous.

Edit: incidentally, your last sentence strikes me as a shrewd observation.
Wow I had no idea Mapquest was owned by AOL. I'm sure there are alternatives but usually thats the service I use...I don't think I'm so shallow as to switch services just because its AOL though. A good service is a good service.
How about it?
The last bit was to rename it with a .BAT extension, instantly converting it into a file that Windows recognizes as an executable program.

My e-Molotov cocktail was ready to go. I just had to double-click the file...

Yeah. Let's roll!
Seth's Blog: Policies, biases and conflicts
This article is empty and the title is misleading.
This question of free will only makes sense if you believe in god. If you're an atheist then the question just doesn't make sense.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
WoW is a very boring game. I wish somebody would create a more interesting MMORPG.
This article was obviously written by someone who saw the support for the Paul campaign, but didn't understand the message and wrote it off as a transient meme. (While concluding that the enthusiasm could be bottled and marketed)

In reality, it's about having integrity and being principled in your words and actions over time, regardless of who is listening. Ron Paul has it. Dennis Kucinich has it. Mcbama, Occain, and Barr don't have it.

In technology, these qualities translate into openness and transparency. Allmydata has it. Wuala does not. Openmoko kind of has it. The iPhone doesn't. Openmoko is certainly clunky (probably how many describe Ron Paul), but so was Linux in the 1.2.13 days.
My word. To quote from a personal favorite (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9ByyMd_qDA): that is how you review a book.
It would be an interesting statistic to see the range of ratios, from those who get their most points from articles to those who get the most from comments and raw points.
Not only are film-based cameras not expensive or hard to find, they actually outsell digital ones in the form of disposables. I read somewhere not too long ago that they outsell non-disposable cameras by over 25%. (I'm assuming those sales figures meant discrete cameras, rather than including cell-phones. I'll try to find it to check.) Interesting anecdote: my wife and I bought 25 of them for our wedding, and it seems unlikely we will buy 25 digital cameras combined in our lifetimes.

A lot of the reason for their popularity is cost. Disposables are dirt cheap. There's little upfront investment. Most people who can't afford a computer (and therefore would probably not spend $200+ on a picture frame) like that.

So right away, I'd just not worry about lower class families. You aim gadgets at middle class +. I guess my argument is that I don't see much market for a $200+ digital frame amongst people who don't have broadband. There are probably a number of people who have broadband but not wifi who might like the product, hence my suggestion to offer a bundle with a cheap, preconfigured router. (Supposedly only around 40% of broadband homes have WiFi).

I know what you mean about assumptions, but startups are all about making them, building toward them, then narrowing down as you collect feedback from customers. There's simply no way to collect the relevant facts, you have to start from assumptions. They could maybe do some market research, which is slow and expensive, and at least narrow down the assumptions. Or they can just aim their product at the people who can afford it and are likely to want it, and work from there.

So if I were them, I'd focus on building a kick ass wireless frame. Most people who have digital cameras and have experienced sharing them online will probably get it.
Poor Ted. He spent all that time trashing other people's startups, and now he has to cope with his own startup problems. It must be Paul Graham's fault.

Perhaps PG's advice isn't all perfect, and maybe it's not for everyone, but the fact is that he has helped a lot of people, including hundreds of YC founders, and they generally seem pretty grateful. Who has this guy helped? What has he done to make the world a better place?
Gosh, send me your links on everlatty@yahoo.com!
"he's content with the notion that free will exists only effectively (not theoretically)"

I don't understand that; how can something exist in reality but not in theory? That implies to me that the theory is wrong
whoa. rarely is so little analyzed so much.
It can be done, I just can't see doing it yourself being worth it until you have a large number of people to whom you are frequently mailing.

Someone else said "it's really not worth it to go third-party unless you're sending heavy HTML newsletter type e-mails to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. "

My thought is the exact opposite. When you're small, it's not worth committing the resources to doing all you need to do yourself. Third party services cost $10 or $20 a month and save you hours of work, and increase delivery rates greatly. (At least they did for us and the few other startups I've talked to about this.) When you're large, the cost of third party services exceeds the cost of doing it yourself, and you can get better quality in house.

If you are doing it yourself, I hear good things about Return Path, but have no first hand experience.
It's a way for people to recognize that determinism is all we have while simultaneously saying that your decisions are still real.
Ok two of those remarks can be said about engineers too.

4. Failure to Show Respect. Business execs show little respect to developers because they think they know what is the clear path to the next million dollar. They also do not want to hear complaints and simply want to see that new breakthrough feature appear on screen 5 minutes ago. Engineers on the other hand pretend to listen to execs but they are only hearing blah blah blah...They think business execs are idea guys who talk a lot and think their plan to reach that million dollar makes no sense and they are here just to drive the company to the deadpool (In most case they do)

1. Failure to be humble. My friend, my friend. Developers are usually quite, and they can pretend to listen, but that does not mean they give a rat's behind about what you are saying or even think you are worthy of their time for that matter (I mean this inside the office), hence they say "yes" just so you can get out their way. Not talking does not mean, Humble. Engineers can brag too and in fact they do. I asked a CTO last week "I heard you launched an open source project last week and got x downloads"? That was it. The guy who did not even know my name after 3 weeks, sat there for 20 minutes telling me about this project.

The Fact of the matter is that as individuals we usually think people who are different are less this or that than we are. This problem goes beyond engineers and business execs. It is the same between PHP guys and Ruby advocates, Young and Old, Nations etc...

We should simply learn how to accept differences in and outside the office and be open to learn what others have to offer instead of going to through life with a "I got to defend my position" attitude.
And what's unreadable about it? Or maybe you want me to (attempt to) read it to determine what's unreadable about it...
The notion that determinism has something to do with free will is a common misconception.

In fact, indeterminism would not help with the free will situation in any way. Indeterminism just means part of physics is random.

The best way to reconcile free will with the various attacks is to say that it is an explanation -- the best one we have -- and to reject reductionism.
Should be well-received by the worse is better, gets stuff done crowd.
Huh? If anything, the existence of God threatens the concept of free will. It's kinda hard to feel free if there's some omniscient, omnipotent dude who knows and controls everything that will happen ahead of time...
Quantum Mechanics always blows my mind and I only ever end up frustrated that I don't know the answer to how it all works.

Even "basic" stuff like the Double-Slit experiment keeps me daydreaming for awhile.
Maybe it has something to do with emerging behavior?
Look,one model can take care of different growth/funding scenarios, no need for laborious replications. I spent a pretty amount of hours building both my solutions and product financial model (really, my forte). Just frustrating attracting angel investors to such a business model that has proven (competitively) to generate lots of revenue. Being on the finance side, I tend to have a disdain for middle tier VCs. Sorry for some of the angels who don't understand, that's more acceptable. But VCs, many don't know what they want: liquidity or high market valuation.
I hope my first points answer your thesis: "The challenge here is having several funding plans up your sleeve that show different growth rates and also stack up together."
I define the person who gives you your income as the customer, the VC is your customer if without there funding you would be out of business.
That guys startup, pressflip has a sweet logo: http://pressflip.com/ !
Shouldn't 1000 requests per second coming from a single IP address trigger a firewall rule?...
Really looks like an ad.
Definition of "free will" is the ability to act free of the will of god. What do you mean by "free will"?
> If you're an atheist then the question just doesn't make sense.

Sure it does.

But feel free to disagree if you like. Or can.
Then how is it different from counting angels on pinheads?
Project Management Tools & Methodology -- What are you doing/using?
What I'm managing (context is important): We develop a hardware appliance running Linux (we buy the hardware and write the software); this involves config changes to open source stuff and a number of our proprietary programs that must work together. We have six developers, and a number of artists, writers, etc. whose work mostly isn't but sometimes is a dependency for the stuff I'm managing.

What I'm doing: Currently, we use FogBugz to track features and bugs, and I have a wall of color-coded post-it notes (each one represents a FogBugz case or milestone). The post-its are organized by week, and every Monday I get rid of closed tickets, move everything up by a week, and reprioritize what's left.

Because a wall in my office is a poor communications medium, I also capture the "wall of post-its" in an Excel spreadsheet, which I save to an internal Wiki page. (PDF and Excel versions.)

Frankly, I'm finding all this a bit clunky. I like having the physical post-its, because it makes it easier to rearrange stuff without over or under-scheduling people, and -- there's just something tangible about the post-its that I like. Still, transferring that to the spreadsheet is a pain, and I'm not convinced I'm doing all this in the most efficient, effective way. Among other possible problems, dependencies between cases are currently tracked largely in my mind, although I've just added a dependency column to the spreadsheet. (I'm thinking that something like Microsoft Project or Omniplan is probably more than I need, but am I right on that? I've never used either for a real project.)

What do you think of my system? What are YOU using to track this sort of information?
Wow... Very cool indeed. Occasionally I read articles like these that make mashups of simple service like RSS feeds and Yahoo pipes to make a very useful app.

On a side note, I have found Yahoo pipes to be increasingly used... Now, onto my own tumblr music site... :D
Why not?

If Eve can take control of DNS and redirect bankofamerica.com to an IP on her servers, and it goes to a webserver with a ceritficate signed for "bankofamerica.com" by a widely trusted CA, then the browser will load it without complaint and show it as a padlocked site.

The only guard seems to be whether she can get any certificate company to sign a certificate for bankofamerica.com. Since it's cheap and easy to get basic SSL certificates from many places, this doesn't seem a very difficult obstacle for her to overcome with a bit of forging, social engineering, insider access, bribery, etc.

(I imagine that she could go to the real bankofamerica.com, save the certificate details it presents, and pass them on MITM style - but hope there are replay-prevention techniques involved. This doesn't affect the question above, though).
Free will is the capacity of an individual to make his/her own choices and either to act or not act on those decisions. It really has nothing to do with God outside of theology and philosophy of religion.
"John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably."

I think there is a big equivocation here. Free-will does not mean "unpredictable" -- which as a human trait, is a consequence of free-will not its essence. More to the point, free-will is a property of human consciousness not atoms, etc. If the authors have (unwittingly) proven anything it's that QM commits the mind-projection-fallacy as specifically identified by Edwin Jaynes in "Probability Theory" or more generally a form of Ayn Rand's primacy-of-consciousness error in many of her articles.
Free from whom or what is it then?
Shaw is a builder who also rants. Dzuiba just tears down.
You don't need the notion of mass here, it's purely kinematics. From the Lorenz transformation you see that if something traveled from A to B faster than light, then there is a reference frame in which the arrival to B happened earlier than the departure from A. If you want to do the math yourself, which is actually quite illuminating and only requires high school math, then consider a reference frame moving very fast (but slower than light) in the direction from A to B. So, traveling faster than light would lead to the problems with causality similar to time travel.
I think when you're small it really depends on your application. If email isn't an important part and you aren't sending high volume, then I definitely agree it can be a huge time-sink and very tough to figure out.

But if you really want control of your email it's not that difficult to do if you follow best practices.

WRT Return Path - I'm pretty sure Twitter turned to them when they had trouble delivering mail. Part of what they do is email whitelisting, which I fundamentally disagree with. But if you read the paper on how they helped twitter out with best practices there is actually a lot of good stuff in there (things that you can do on your own if it's important or you're at that scale).
By this definition any control system will have a "free will".
In other words, a dose of reality sorely needed around here.
Because to admit that there's free will is to admit that there's something above physical laws.
Yes, there are a lot of these kind of issues in and around the concept of free will, which is why there's a whole branch of philosophy dealing with it. But the point is that free will doesn't require God. You can believe in a perfectly deterministic, godless universe (or fluctuating quantum field universe) and also believe in a compatibalist form of free will.

UPDATE: A brief summary of compatibalism: http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT1
reading this just hurts.
Surely you don't mean that you spend all of your time at school doing thins with no productive value. I assume that you were still able to complete basic chores, personal hygiene tasks, etc. I spend more time on non-learning tasks while I'm at work, but it is feasible to work hard for a while, stop to learn things, work hard for a while again, etc. You seem pretty smart, so it's surprising that you'd doubt your ability to ever save up enough money to take some time off from working.
Nothing is above physical laws.

That's not an assertion, that's a definition.
My product is based on a monthly subscription, and to give me some time at the start I offered my first customers a discount for paying in advance, the minimum advance I got was 3 months. Gives the initial cash flow a healthy boost, saves the customers a bit of money, and lets me worry about credit card processing after all the fuss of the initial launch.
I don't understand that; how can something exist in reality but not in theory?

That's kinda the point of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which prove that there are definite limitations in formal (read theoretical) systems.
Is it just me, or do the people waving their fists and getting all excited about tinny blips comming from a Gameboy look utterly ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, it's cool in a sort of hackish way, but worth a scene?
"human beings are sharply marked off from dogs by their capacity to act for reasons that they explicitly take to be moral reasons."

According to them dogs do not have free will but people do. Probably talking about ethics and moral side of "free will" question, not physical or religious. But even there "free will" is just an illusion in your mind.
This kind of statement is just as absurd as saying "God did it" for everything we don't understand.
Only if you arbitrarily limit your definition of "free will" to mean something non-physical.
I don't know...I think that people who are wildly successful have a right to have a bit of an ego. If you do something ridiculously difficult and succeed, you should feel proud and let people know that you're proud.

Can you imagine the New England Patriots without a Super Bowl swagger? A rock star who is genuinely humble? The president of the US acting like he's just an ordinary person?

I think if you sell your company to google (or better, start the next google) you almost have a responsibility to act accordingly. Walk around with your chest out and your head held high! Talk like you know something! Or else what's the freaking point? If you don't act like you're at least supremely confident, you're almost doing a disservice to everyone else who is trying to get to be where you are.
yeah its a crying shame, cause it is very impressive. More for "classic" type of productivity apps though.

I thought the cost we per developer and pretty reasonable? for commercial licencing?
There are 3 aspects of "free will": religious, ethical and scientific. In the scientific case "free will" implies that the actions of the body, including the brain and the mind, are not wholly determined by physical causality.
There are generally problems between tech and business people and two or three person startups as well. The biggest cause of this in my experience is a business person expecting a technical founder to be a wizard who can defy the laws of physics to make a crazy idea happen.

Business Guys...please try to do a little research. You don't need to know how to implement a solution to a problem, but 15 minutes on Google will usually tell you what's possible and what isn't. There is nothing I hate more than the implied "Well if you're not good enough to figure this out just say so".

There is nothing I love more than coming up with a truly innovative solution to a problem, but it just isn't possible every day. There is a difference between lack of ability and an improbable solution.
Science isn't really concerned with things that aren't wholly determined by physical causality. I'd say the scientific approach to free will would be neurological: e.g., what physical processes within the brain give rise to the emergence of free choice (be it an illusion or otherwise).

UPDATE: There are cases where a patient experiences loss of brain function leading to an inability to make decisions. They require a guardian to make even the most trivial choices for them (e.g. what to wear, in what order to eat the items in their meal, etc.) What exactly have they lost? An answer to this question, scientific or otherwise, would be relevant to free will.
But that was the best part! (Anyway, that's how Ted writes.)
Very nice logo. Simple and elegant. Also works well in black and white.

Ideally, it is good to have a logo that works in monochrome (for laser prints, photocopies, embossing/engraving, etc.) and if possible includes the company name.
Sorry but I stopped reading here...

System.exit(0);

It's hardly going to be fair and balanced with things like that in it.
For two contrasting examples:

You have about 3.1 comment points for each submission point.

I have about 2.9 submission points for each comment point.

http://searchyc.com/user/davidw

http://searchyc.com/user/parenthesis
Remove the pg name-calling and this is exactly the "Random Musings of an X Programmer" post that he mocks, that no one would have read.
Deja vu.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260014)

p.s. I thought a dupe post got credited to its predecessor. Is there a time limit on this check?
And how do you know if the individual is "really" free? As opposed to being controlled the environment or god or some unknown factor? Set up an experiment & you'll be far ahead of all the useless philosophizing.
The community keeps HN alive not the point system. I don't really get why there is a point system in the first place... It's not because someone is considered as a troll on some subjects that when he post on a topic he know and is right that is post should automatically lower on the page.
That'd be Game Neverending.

And a truly wonderful game it was. Me and many others still miss it terribly!
Pandora's "Last Stand" thanks to royalty pricing
Hehehe...By the 90's it was. Amigas and STs had awesome sound capabilities...chip tunes were kickin' it old school.
PayPal are convenient to start with but are too expensive compared to a merchant account or other card processors (protex et al).

Also, PayPal offer little or no protection to chargebacks (even blatantly false ones) so I would be wary of using them for higher value items or non-physical services (e.g. subscriptions) that are exempt from its seller protection plan. I am not sure if using FreshBooks (which is an excellent product) will buffer/protect you.
FTA Money can be made elsewhere, without nearly as much bullshit: Wall Street, the court room and the operating room, to name a few.

He just named the places where bullshit lives. I'm speechless. And I liked Starcraft dammit!
the URL is different