skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like this concept.

Top-tier firms do little in truly protecting the consumer. Fax a letterhead to them for proof that my business exists? Anyone can do that in 60 seconds with Microsoft Word.

The problem is that browser would need to be updated with this change. And how do you explain it to consumers?
You don't need (want?) to launch an exchange these days. What you do is launch a so called "dark pool", an opaque matching engine, to provide liquidity.

Then there are ECNs like http://www.batstrading.com/. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_communication_networ... and google for Island, Instinet or BATS.
Do I have to remind you people that Nokia is 160 years old?
Throwaway idea with sinister aspects: SOS pics
Now on cNet WebWare
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9995938-2.html
Thanks. Worked like a charm (as charming as rebooting my phone can be)
I thought he was saying that the Mac has the same amount of OSS software available for it as Linux.

If it doesn't, and you agree with the OP, fine. Stop trying to say it does.
Ask HN: Good finance books?
In a recent post by Don Dodge, he says: "Diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $2.12 to $2.18." I'm a compsci guy, and have no idea what something as sexy as diluted earnings per share is, let alone why it is important, what the other metrics exist, or why I should care.

Googling it brings up a lot of definitions, but its hard to grasp the big picture with these. The finance section of the book store is an intimidating section at first glance -- can anyone recommend a good book that will bring me to a level where I can comfortably read a financial blog post or the WSJ?
Ask YC: Thinking of Launching Coworking in Silicon Valley, with a twist 
Myself (ustream) + Roommate (Publictivity) are thinking of starting a coworking space using extra space in our house (it's a three story townhouse) in Palo Alto. We're thinking of turning the living area + garage into a coworking space for hackers, entrepreneurs,etc. in the next month. Thoughts?

a) it's our place, so different than most coworking. b) we've never done this before. what are the downfalls? c) what would make it interesting to you?
I would not invest too much time optimizing a site that hasn't launched. It's premature - you don't know how popular your site will be.
A perfect tablet like this would go a long way toward solving #2 on the YC idea list. Also see Canonical's UMPC GUI.
This theoretically works for passive observation attacks but is not helpful against the threat outlined in the article -- the Man In The Middle attack.

As a hostile AP owner, I could intercept all SSL communication, originate it myself from the AP to the remote site and present my own forged self signed certificates to the AP user. The user would see a self signed certificate, not suspect that the AP was doing anything bad, meanwhile the AP could be harvesting all of the data in the connection, or even change it if it was somehow beneficial to the bad guy.

SSL keys work because there's preexisting chain of trust between you and the site you're visiting (because you trust the root CAs, and the site gets their certs, possibly indirectly, from the same root CA provider). With a self signed cert there's no preexisting chain of trust and the communication can not be secured.
As a 7 year old I wrote to "Jim'll fix it" (UK TV program), asking to go and see a Lego factory. They never replied :(
Glad to have finally seen how it all gets made!
Sometimes it's best to leave things to the experts. Security is one of those times.
"If you want some positive PR, rebuild Twitter, and do it before 2010"

Twitter is already done:
http://twoorl.com/

Without all the users of course.
Who do you do these monthly valuations with? Investors? Co-Founders?
the obvious answer to the downfall question is security and liability. unless you know and trust everyone as a friend, you're going to be taking on a serious risk both personally and financially.
The science is pretty clear at this point: global warming is caused by human activities. What we should have done is "proven" that human activities such as overreliance on carbon fuels wouldn't be a problem, before we caused this kind of havoc.

And dumping lime in the oceans? An ounce of prevention will be worth a ton of lime cure.
Yes. A few degrees of temperature fluctuation are already having a significant impact on marine ecosystems (coral reefs). Making all of the world's ocean water more alkaline is pure insanity. It is extremely likely to cause mass extinctions of organisms which evolved to live at a specific water pH level. These extinctions will reverberate through the entire food chain, all the way up through commercial fisheries.

Ecosystems are complicated, and no one fully grasps all the variables. Climate change needs to be addressed, of course, but drastic interventions are likely to have drastic and unforeseen consequences.
http://cert.startcom.org/ offers free ssl certificates and they do some basic validation of domain ownership before issuing a certificate.

encourage more vendors to import their CA certificate into their browsers and you won't have to deal with the insecurity of self-signed certificates.
PostgreSQL isn't going away anytime soon and with the MySQL acquisition Sun is in an excellent position now to offer the best paid support for both the #1 and #2 open source databases as well as offer some unique product bundles.

However I'm still wondering how they'll ever make back the 500 Million they spent to get MySQL.
@iigs

Very true. I don't think this is the silver bullet that will end all attacks but it's one additional step to something better.

With Firefox 3, a huge error is displayed if I use a self-signed certificate which makes the user think this is not secure and they may leave.
Hi,

Why would you do that? Actually I did something similar in my garage, but with a very high selection threshold, and very short term stays. If you are recommended by someone I trust and needed a place to stay for a specific purpose, then I would host you.

In that particular instance, I believed in quality vs. quantity.

Now, for the good news: it's a great way to meet amazing people and you'll be glad you have done it, 5 years from now. In the short term, you won't be so glad. It just takes a very long time for these things (karma) to come back to you, but it's great.

Alain - fairsoftware.net
You can't "prove" global warming in the sense that you prove other scientific theories, because you can't set up a controlled experiment in which you have one planet just like the Earth be subjected to massive carbon emissions and leave another exactly identical planet alone.

So unless you deny that there exists the possibility of major climate problems that could seriously damage humanity's well being, what standard of proof would you have climate scientists meet before agreeing that there is a problem serious enough to address?

We can have a whole big endless debate about the various studies and climate models that point to one scenario or another, but we won't get anywhere unless we agree on these ground rules to start off...so what standard of proof would you propose?
Based on his golf-derived username they should get along well.
Ruby, Python, "Power"
nokia is not heavily identified with its ceo. nokia didn't slump into a decade of decline when its founding ceo was ousted, then perk up into a darling of the tech world when that same ceo returned. and so on.

apple is going to have a real problem on its hands when steve steps down.
"I'm a nokia, I'm an iPhon....<reboot>"
Obviously the part about valuing the work was referring to work performed by the founders.

Investors were involved in the process as well. It is easy to "value" an investment--it obviously already has number associated with it ;-)

I can obviously forsee issues arising if investors are not on board with this sort of valuation system. We were able to dangle the carrot of giving them some additional rights in our operating agreement, which seemed to make them happy.
Ask YC: Heroku for Django?
I'm not a web developer but there's a chance I'll need to help someone I know do some Django work soon. I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is an equivalent to Heroku for Django/Google App Engine.
The rise of the mobile platform-device, and the decline of the operators
Yep. Three words: "Openmoko Train Wreck":

http://www.vimeo.com/1366042?pg=embed&sec=1366042

After I saw this video, I really appreciated the time and money the Apple engineers must have spent in designing the iPhone keyboard.

I've got a new policy: I refuse to get excited about open-source vaporware. Talk is cheap. Design is expensive, and having one thousand people work for one hour each is no substitute for having one person work a thousand hours.
.. and also tasteful and relevant to the purpose of the site.

A long time ago I helped teach Unix classes using the "Unix Made Easy" book by John Muster. The silly jokes here and there definitely helped non-hacker students remember the material.
A succesion plan would really freak out shareholders by making them think the plan is necessary. As of right now Steve plans on being CEO forever and it is a minority of people concerned about Steve's health. It wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't continually brought up for no reason other than the eternal quest for pageviews.
While I agree in principle that #1 is correct - that OOP is not necessarily less performant than procedural languages, the argument provided is a bit of a strawman. No OOP-antagonist that I know would consider that a proper argument.

The arguments that I see are this:

1. Encapsulation makes code less performant because large, overdesigned objects are created to pass around information rather than designing the code to the data. Consider sending XML around (SOA) rather than a pointer to a struct, for example, because of proper encapsulation.

2. Inheritance tends to be poorly used in OOP, causing poor performance without gaining many rewards in maintainability except for an ideological category system. This ties into complaints about polymorphism and inversion of control systems and the words "bloated piece of shit Spring" come to mind. :)

3. OOP encourages architecture astronauts due to the ideological supports. Further, it hides poor algorithmic decisions because it separates a processing function into multiple files and functions.
Plurk | My Philly Network
This isn't going to happen for $200 until http://www.pixelqi.com starts selling their second generation screen.
Oh awesome.. I've been meaning to look into Seaside for ages already. I'll definitely check it out.

From what I understand, that super-impressive Dabble DB demo used Smalltalk and Seaside. Have you seen it?
How-to block unwanted traffic from any country.
Hey, This Tastes Flammable | My Philly Network
I just lost my music hard drive to the click of death, so this is really hitting the spot right now.

Two things that would have made my first 5 minutes better:
1. Giant play button
2. Giant playlist link, or playlist always visible in a column, or something.

Have you considered hooking into a service to pull more thorough album information so stuff could be organized a bit better than just a list of songs?

I'm really enjoying this. Thanks.
Could you disable double posting? I mean not to allow duplicate content to be submitted.
Don't Eat the Peppers,wait Maybe Eat the Peppers... | My Philly Network
Why Union Square Ventures invested in 10Gen
AJAX for n00bs
Rate/Review my startup - Zendo
The site is pretty slick. Though, I have to admit that there are many sites that do pretty much what you have done. Nevertheless, I guess it’s a huge market and there is room for many players.
Question to agentbleu( I have used myplaylist.biz, interesting!)
•	How do u monetize such service- Google ads?
•	How do handle the legal issues with music companies. This scares the shit out of me. I was reading about Michael legal issues with music comp and how they were targeting his car, house and everything.
•	Though u don’t store any music files, why would legal folks come after you
Can someone point out a successful open source hardware effort? I'm tracking bug labs, open moko, and some router efforts.

None are mainstream. None come close to the appeal of Apple products.

Hardware is really hard. Most people reading TechCrunch probably don't understand this.
good point about patents, thanks!
My name is Jonas. I'm a Swedish guy and the creator of Zendo - an Application Launcher for the web. I'd be so grateful for any creative criticism the HN community would offer.
If it's just an API term then why don't they just call it a "user thread"?

Because that might be confused with other user thread implementations? It is also significantly more awkward than "fiber".

Microsoft calls their implementation of a LDAP server "Active Directory" even though they are essentially the same thing.

Not really; AD does a lot more than just LDAP (e.g. Kerberos, DNS).
I'm betting Apple has a patent on just about every part of this thing. I hope someone can tell me I'm wrong.
a) Should I prefer working in your house to a traditional coworking space?

b) It's been said by noodle, but 1) security, and 2) liability. There's also the risk that more people = more distractions, but that's a risk in any coworking environment.

c) Is it priced competitively with other coworking options? Is is in walking distance to good food, bars? How big is your place (which is to ask, is there plenty of space for every person/group you invite?)? Will you include an application to assure the quality of those in the space? Will you give a break to YC-funded companies? What's the length of stay... is it plenty of time to start a company?

Lots of questions, but it's an interesting idea.
Watching things happen and writing about it IS important. There's no shame in admiring startups but not spinning one up.

Of course, he HAS spun one up. He's got a big blog network in lots of countries, built up Crunchbase with a team of great devs and a reportedly cool API, etc. TechCrunch has tons of custom software. And it's profitable.
Do several authority sites have a monopoly on blogging?
Lessons from Custer's Last Stand
Admiring's fine, it's criticizing that I have a problem with. It takes all of half a second to say "Twitter stability sucks," but it takes a LOT more work to actually make a Twitter that is stable. Anyone can say what's wrong with the world.
Fine on FireFox 2.0.0.16/WinXP. Which Firefox are you using? If you're on 3.0 make sure you upgrade to 3.01 as it's a lot more stable.
Read: Thin client.
you don't seem to know the facts correctly.

Nokia was about to be destroyed before a new CEO came and decided to go for the mobile industry.

Also earlier in their history in the 70s they were saved by entering the digital network switch industry.
Facebook defines an active user as any user who has logged in within the past week, at least for Facebook Apps. This arbitrary definition depends on the application though (e.g. an active user for email would probably mean every day).
In 10-12 years a 200$ cellphone is probably going to have a faster faster CPU, more memory, and more disk space than the desktop / laptop your using right now.

and it will be powered and cooled by what? I wouldn't want to hold a phone that gets as hot as my laptop does.
I didn't gather from their explanation that it's charity. I could be wrong, but my impression's that they're "selling the sawdust," or making the most on every piece of their businesses (in this case by creatively subsidizing their housing expenses).
Tilted Twister - a Lego Mindstorms robot that solves Rubik’s cube
Well, the storage will be all memristors, so that will make the storage significantly larger, smaller, lower powered, and faster. I can't wait. HP says the first commercial memristor memory will be out in 2009, here's hoping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
True Renegades Walk Alone
Um yeah-- valuation (as most people refer to it) is the process of valuing a company. And no-- valuing an investment doesn't have a number attached to it until you negotiate one (which is the hard problem that PG refers to). If I invest $100k in your company, sure-- I've invested $100k. But at what valuation? Is your company worth $1m post-money, thus giving me 10% ownership? Or is it worth $200k post-money, giving me a 50% stake?

That's the hard part.

Regarding investors not being on board... I'd go a bit farther and say that your system is likely a fundraising death-sentence unless you are already a runaway success who can make the rules. No one is going to invest in a company with a shifting cap table and no formal vesting.

I'm all for innovation, but I don't think you're buying anything here other than additional risk. In this case, the convention method actually works pretty well.
this thing is awesome... i was just hoping someone would build this exact app ... how many times have I had to paste back and forth between pastie and my editor when collaborating on something!

Great job github guys.
Not to sound like an asshole, but how is this different from inputting the url into the address bar?

On your blog you try and compare Zendo to Quicksilver. The difference is, Quicksilver essentially introduced an address bar to your computer. You're reintroducing the address bar for the internet. And if it's a tool I'm already using, I'll just have it bookmarked or stored in my history so that, say in FF3, I can type in 'Hack...' and 'Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com' will come up.

As far as design, stick a tag line in there explaining what Zendo does.

Perhaps there's a greater purpose that I'm not seeing, and if so, let me know.

Congrats, though.
10gen - Open Source Stack similar to Google App Engine
FWIW, PG seems to believe that there was a correlation between people who spend lots of time/energy/thought on stuff like this and failure.

I think you'd get similar value by setting an initial partnership allocation (50-50 or 33-33-33 is best-- if they don't bring equal value, find a partner who does), vesting it over 4 years, and meeting every quarter for a "Do we all feel like everyone's holding up their end?" meeting.
what's up with the "dude, you have 1 options"?
It's unclear what your startup / the site does. I took the bait and typed in a letter and got a couple options of sites to go to. But I get the feeling I'm missing something and need more explanation. Jonas, can you explain?
The splash page is impenetrable. That kind of minimalism worked for Google because you can type in anything and get results. With your page, it took me minutes to figure out what it did and anytime I typed more than one letter, I got a confusing error about merchandise. I thought it was shopping search that couldn't find any product.

First impressions aside, I wouldn't use Zendo myself because my Firefox "Smart Bar" has better website launcher features:

- Doesn't need to be customized: remembers what pages I visit automatically
- When I type in something it doesn't recognize, it still takes me there
- Takes me to the subpage I want, not the top level splash page.
It would be nice if we could add tags to gists so we could add some meaning to the code. Plus it would make it easier to search and find related gists.
Back at the 2001 Comdex, Bill Gates announced that by 2007, such devices would be the most popular form of PC in the U.S. Although his timing was off, I think Gates was definitely on to something.

Yet as brm notes, it's probably going to take more than just the open source community. Open source seems great for advancing the bleeding-edge; but honestly, unless money is on the line, how many devs are going to cut out their cool feature that they spent hours developing, just because it's hard to use or might make the device more complicated?

Perhaps, a team (but not necessarily a large team) of hackers devoted full-time to making a successful interface / kiosk for this might make it big. Perhaps, such a business might make a good fit for Y Combinator. ;-)
New addition to our family - Must see pictures of my new baby
I started to write "what the hell" in the field because I had no idea what the site was for. The message I got was, "Sorry mate, we don't carry that kind of merchandise here." Which added another "What the hell?" to my internal figuring-this-website-out stack. That was too many for a site which consists primarily of a single text field, so I gave up.
Name your kid (um... project?) something trendy
I think it would be interesting to see quantitatively how the community was impacted by your list.

In retrospect a less strange question would be How many logged in visitors who saw your story upmodded it? But, that is a harder question to answer.

I hopped my alternative question would be easier to answer.
... but only wants to pay $200 for it.
i thought it was a shopping search too. I ended up typing shoes, iphones and all those merchandise.

It is a pretty much broken now.He has to improve it. best of luck.
if i type in a "g", i get google, google maps, and twitter. why that last one? (i haven't used twitter, so maybe the 'g' has some meaning i'm not aware of)
Facebook Redesign Mimics FriendFeed
Huh, wouldn't be able to comment on that. Of course this being Hacker News my interest lies more in changing the way things work through technology, I thought you had ideas that way. I was fascinated by "straight through processing" which can basically cause chains of deals to be executed automatically. It lowers the cost of transactions dramatically, and lowering the cost of transactions has had a broad effect in many other businesses.
Sounds like an Asus Eee PC with a slightly different form factor or a Nokia Internet Tablet to me
Got the visitors, just can't convert them into customers
MySpace To Join OpenID, Bringing Total Enabled Accounts to Over A Half Billion
Awesome video! I have a really old book that illustrates how legos were made back in the day, but this factory looks serious! Lego is still as big as it ever was.
Thanks for the input guys. I can see from your comments that I should've been much more clear on describing the purpose of the feature, but I guess I was just so happy to have created something that at least works (me not being a programmer at all).

My long-term aim for Zendo is to intergrate a lot of features and I'll take Google Docs as an example; from Zendo you should be able to:
- Open up a clear new document.
- Search your existing documents, and open them.
- Find a document, and export it to PDF or Scribd.
- Amend a document with another line
-....etc

Basically all of the things Quicksilver can do on a Mac, plus some of the things that a right-click on a file can do in Windows.

I personally see that I would have a need for these things as more and more of my stuff moves over to the cloud, but I'm really curious of what you guys think?
What problem are you trying to solve? It seems like a bookmarking system that adds at least two annoying steps to my browsing experience....and it took me awhile to figure that out.
Well, perhaps the storage may be better but I can't see how memristors will change the CPU heat equation. Why will memristors actually require less power to do the equivalent of what conventional CMOS transistors do? They both seem to require power to effect changes of state. Can anyone explain what it is about memristors that allow them to use much less power to operate at the same speed as CMOS?

Also the wiki page itself says

Although the HP memristor is a major discovery for electrical engineering theory, it has yet to be demonstrated in operation at practical speeds and densities. Graphs in Williams' original report show switching operation at only ~1 Hz. Although the small dimension of the device seem to imply fast operation, the charge carriers move very slowly

Woah. 1Hz is once per second, or twelve orders of magnitude slower than current CPU speeds, so unless we're talking about some radical alternative to Von Neumann I wouldn't expect them to be viable for CPUs for a few decades.

Caveat: I have only a minimal understanding of hardware and semiconductor physics.