skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree.

It's far better to address the root of the problem rather than just treating the symptoms on the surface.

The symptoms on the surface are that monopolistic broandband providers discriminate against traffic or websites.

The root of the problem is that there are monopolistic broandband providers rather than a competitive free market.

Why are there monopolistic broandband providers? Where do we get our Internet from? Generally, either DSL or Cable. DSL comes via the children of another monopolistic (or at least oligopolistic) industry: telecom. And cable comes via yet another monopolistic (or at least oligopolistic) industry: cable television. Monopoly breeds monopoly, ever expanding into new industries to monopolize, more often with the government's blessings than not.
So the purpose is to run off a usb disk or some other portable device?
Just to see your thought process. That's why they recommend to think out loud so the interviewer gets a sense of how you think.
Startup ideas are just the beginning of my plot. These ideas are really just my way of getting some attention prior to the release of my new site: ClubbingBabySeals.com. Once that IPOs, I should have enough money to buy a really, really, really big laser that I can use to etch the Windows logo into the moon.
But you must admit a part of enjoyment is the act of reproduction.
Lessig: How the law strangles creativity
Not legal in what sense?
Yes. It is. I do have more in mind but that is a start.
One of the main competitors for this new service/site will be woot.com. I've been fascinated with their traffic since launch and the loyal fan base that they have. The simplest of ideas: sell one product at an amazingly cheap price, for 24 hours, until it goes out of stock.

How do they get these items? How do they manage their vendor/supplier relationships?

They probably use drop-shipping since they are only selling one product at a time.
This is exactly what I planned when I left school. Cool! My plan was to work for 5 years at a job I at least LIKED- put away enough to live for 1-2 years without doing anything at all- and then work on whatever startup idea I figured would be best at the time. Why did I choose 5 years? Honestly, it was because most companies vest employees in their retirement plan of choice after 5 years.

Fast forward to 5 years later (last June 15th) and I'm ready! Money saved, credit card balances at 0, no debt, no obligations! I've even started to work on some of the code for my idea. The only thing I didn't count on was the housing market... so now I just have to hang around my current job until my place sells. anybody want to buy a condo in Chicago?

Seriously though- from where I'm sitting, it's a great plan. Give yourself the opportunity and ability to do something amazing, and chances are you will! Not to mention, if you are at least managing your money successfully, and not going in to debt- you're doing vastly better than many Americans already.

Good Luck!!
:cross posted from comments:
How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle: "$100 per window"
So how do you evaluate and incorporate that magic factor when making the decision on which startup to join? The regular factors being a combination of market, people, product, personal value and financial?
You are thrown into an empty glass blender, the blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? "Stand under the blades"
Good point.

But then, by the same logic it is better to wait another year...and yet another year...etc. You have to start some day, don't you?
I think this is very much a generational thing. Spolsky writes a trendy blog that anyone reading Hacker News will be familiar with. Kapor, like Gates, is one of the titans of the early PC world. But that also means his most relevant work (Chandler being only famous for failing in an interesting way) happened before many of the readers here were born.
What happens when the queen says "At least one man has cheated" - "Every woman immediately kills her husband".
Then that's an excellent opportunity to check whether anyone here knows of a technical way to achieve your goals. Its a good discussion of the platform, and of your business goals. Do you need to specifically use Adobe AIR, or is is just currently the best solution. What else could you use, or how could you get the user's permission to install first using a technical workaround (ie, such as asking from the main software on the computer, with users knowing it will be installed silently on a USB drive). I'm not too technical a person, so I can't really give great ideas on the subject, but you should ask around.

On the legal side, I'm not sure how much they'll bother you as a small entity, but growing a business on this does seem shaky. The more well known you become, the more you might get noticed
Facebook to let employees sell some stock — at internal $4 billion valuation
Lets hope apple won't sick the lawyers on this one. NDA is still very much in effect and the recent iPhoneDevCamp really suffered because of that.
Meta-comment:
I find it interesting that perl related posts tend to generate so many comments. I attribute this to the fact that:

a.) A lot of people really like perl
and
b.) A lot of people really hate perl.
> "But did they work 10 times as hard as a teacher on £30,000 a year or, in the case of some lawyers and bankers, 100 times as hard?"

> It's not about how hard you work, it's about how much free time you have left AFTER work.

Your suggestion-- that income should be justified based on how much of someone's life is eaten by their job-- smacks of the same kind of moralistic posturing for which you criticize the author of the original piece.

Rather than try to morally justify or attack these inequalities (which I regard as silly as trying to morally justify or attack a rainstorm), I'd like to explore ways that the aforementioned teacher might slice himself a bigger piece of the pie.

Imagine that teachers were all free agents. Self-employed contractors free to negotiate their own rates for their services, and free to choose their students from the applicants they consider most promising.

The better teachers would probably make more money than they do under the current system, but still probably nowhere near as much as the successful banker or lawyer.

The exception might be the exceptional teacher who already has a track record of producing Nobel laureates, world leaders, curers of disease, self-made billionaire inventors, etc.

By the time this teacher could command the truly huge rates, he would be pretty old, and might well consider this new windfall to be merely the capstone of an already satisfying and distinguished life.

But the banker and the lawyer sink or swim based on goals that are directly measurable in the short term, so the same cycle that I've postulated for the old teacher (perhaps several lifetimes old!) can happen on a scale of months or years.

So, to achieve parity with the world-class banker or lawyer, the world-class teacher needs not just free-agency, but fine-grained, objective, fast turnaround metrics of performance that directly correlate with economic return.
... because 90% (or more) of their customers don't even know that Comcast has done anything wrong, let alone has the real ability to understand the consequences of what they've done or why it should stop.
Soon to be replaced by the L language.
This is why I stopped using Perl. I think this

entire_file = open('file').read()

is how it should look like. You can comprehend it without knowing the language.
Congress passes Higher Education Act: Tells Universities to Stop Illegal File-sharing
It's unclear why living abroad would do much to broaden one's dating gene pool. Certainly you can avoid white, suburban Americans in Japan, but good luck meeting someone who isn't Japanese. Outside of the USA and Canada most countries are very monocultural. For example, if you are moving to Sweden for dating purposes you should be sure you are into Swedish people before you go. It is far easier to date outside your race/culture in the USA. I'm white, and haven't dated a white person since I was in high school.

In regards to your ideal number, 6 at age 30 would be a minimum. Lower than that and your potential dates will wonder what's wrong with you.
FTA:

It turned out that relational databases were in the right place at the right time, and the “good enough” implementations and uses took over the world.

Yeah, that's what I've thought for a long time too. It's nice to see that in writing.

But I guess the rest of the essay leaves me a little cold. If the relational model is fundamentally flawed (rather: fundamentally mismatched to the overwhelmingly popular application design paradigm) then isn't the solution just to chuck the SQL database in the trash and start over?

So what has us tied to SQL and afraid of using the filesystem for storage directly? What are the other things we get from a database that we want? As far as I can see, the real need is for atomic transactions and consistent backups (or replication, which is the flip side of those features). No one cares about the "relational" stuff at all, really, as proven by all the awful ORMs out there.

And yet, if that were true, we'd all be happily using Berkeley DB. So what else am I missing? Some part of me thinks that there's a great startup idea in this space, but I don't quite see it yet. Tools like Google's App Engine seem to be attacking part of the problem by at least tweaking around with the SQL assumptions, but they're still fundamentally relational at their core (and they're still services, and my gut tells me that most of the world will never trust their data to someone else's service, no matter how well-justified it might seem).
Worth a read if anything for the concept of "social currency."
Border Security: We can take your laptop anywhere we want for as long as we want
There's more than one way to do it, and this is a more deliberate path. good plan, seriously. I quit my job early this year, have enough savings to last for a while (it's easy when you live like a grad student), and am exploring ideas.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_i...
I wouldn't count on them using drop shipping though. It means putting your customer's info in the hands of a third-party. and relying on them to ship it correctly for you. If you're supplying a different product all the time, that might be a lot of people to rely on. I'd guess they just get a giant delivery of the good's and take 'em off the pallet as they're bought.

Now, where they get them is a mystery. They could have connections to close-outs and liquidators or distributors that could get these items in bulk.

For some software ideas, you might actually want to check out this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232958
Python's closures are basically read-only in the 2.x series. 3.0 will offer read-write access via the nonlocal keyword: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3104/

It still won't be exactly the same, because Perl uses `my $foo` once to declare its lexicals; Python will require `nonlocal foo` declarations in all scopes that will use `foo`. The final result is the same, though: using variables from outer scopes.
A demo day in Boston, and then everyone flies to San Francisco for two more days of demos? Wow!
There is no better way to encourage new and innovative file-sharing techniques than to ban them on campus. Foot, meet bullet.
"The article is shit."

..is it? I find it hard to believe that you think the quotes admirable. That leaves "liar, liar pants on fire" as an argument.

Furthermore, the assertion that "[rich people have] easily 10 times less [free time] than a teacher" as some sort of justification for making 10 times more than a teacher is patently absurd; people in all walks of life end up with little or no free time, bankers cause they work long hours, the less well paid because they need to commute from where they can afford to live. By your assumption these people should be paid in the millions, no: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...

I can only assume that you consider that you'll be among the rich and ignorant soon, and that when you do, you'd rather keep the cash yourself than share it. Of course, if you live in the US, the chances of you actually becoming rich if you weren't born into money is the lowest in the western world (check social mobility figures)
Maybe you didn't understand what 'being with your spouse' means. I was trying to be delicate.

I was trying to say that because it's enjoyable, simply being with your spouse is encouraged, even if reproduction is not going to happen (not the right time, already pregnant, too old, etc).
thanks. Adobe air is the best available solution to me.
I guess I have to work on prototype.
I highly recommend Phd::Simple
I think office alternatives will have to gain traction on other devices (read: low-cost browser-only computers, fancy mobile devices), and from there attack the regular consumer market. There is just no reason to use a web based alternative if MS office is accessible.
It's not but oh so funny.
Post it HN. I dont think HN readers are biased(even if some of them are your friends) :)
Just an observation, but societies with vast disparities of wealth tend to be poorer overall and to have flatter economic growth.

PG makes a good argument otherwise. Read the last paragraph for the concise version of the essay.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
I don't think so. It provides an insight into how rich people in the UK think. There things like the NHS aren't considered "unquestionable Marxist assumption".

Maybe once the US gets rid of its current president, it too will enter the civilized world, where people aren't left to die because they can't pay.

"The greatness of America is in how it treats its weakest members: the elderly, the infirm, the handicapped, the underprivileged, the unborn"
Does Perl run on Vista? That would be an implosion of uncoolness :)
Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

[...]

DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies — which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens — are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism.

[...]

The policies cover 'any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,' including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover 'all papers and other written documentation,' including books, pamphlets and 'written materials commonly referred to as "pocket trash..."
Does no one write code in their head before putting it in the editor?
Short answer: Don't write $a->[0]->[0]->[0]->[0]->[0], write $a->[0][0][0][0][0]. It does the same thing.

Long answer:
As for writing code, however, you don't need to write $a->[0]->[0]->[0]->[0]->[0]. After the first dereference (if any), you can omit the '->'s because arrays and hashes only store scalars so perl knows you're talking about a reference. You can use all the arrows for backwards compatibility.
scribd should do this. they have a big opportunity if they do it right.
I won't mention my political opinion on this, that's for Reddit, but this has some implications for what you ought to bring across borders on your laptop. Basically this prevents you from carrying sensitive documents such as businessplans, patent applications, source code, etc. Clearing this from my laptop would be a major hassle. Having it available securely online for when I arrive would be an even bigger hassle.
Wait. You're suggesting that a fast algorithm allows a real-time comprehensive dictionary + variant attack with modern hardware?

My understanding is that a Xeon 3 GHz proc can do about 4 million hashes per second, and a quad core intel core2 can do about 4.3 million hashes per second, so for a potentially mixed case, alpha numeric password of 8 chars, that's at least 2 years. Figure that you'll find it by the midway point, that's 1 year of CPU burnt on a single account.

I'm not sure what you mean by the attack that happens in the real world. Do you mean instead of doing lookups against a rainbow table, people just brute force the password with billions of login attempts? Or something else?

I know people who have used rainbow tables for attacks in the real world using either password files that weren't protected, or db table backup dumps they gained access to. Those attacks would have been useless with any sort of salt. Without a salt, they were trivial (in my personal experience with large corporate databases, 2-3 out of ten m5d hashed passwords can be found by Googling for the hash (and hence finding it in someone's rainbow table).

Can you further explain what you mean by a real world attack, and how a salt doesn't help?
getdropbox.com?
A Standard for Bootstrapping Rails
which leads...to the dark side.

of course, now it all makes sense.
As I mention in my other post, with current hardware, my understanding is that that type of attack would take on average one year per account.

Obviously strict password rules (minimum length, etc...) shrink the attack space dramatically, but it's still a long time per hash/account. Given the number of sites/applications out there that don't use salts, and hence ARE vulnerable to a 1 hour attack using an existing rainbow file, I'm not sure why a cracker (who isn't targeting your site/app over every other site/app specifically) would bother.
Prefacing a one-liner like this with "I don't know Rails..." is just begging to be downmodded, but damn... -3? This is a rough crowd.

I only have cursory experience with Rails and Catalyst, but the first thing I noticed is that Rails is much friendlier to Ruby novices than Catalyst is to Perl novices. Still, Catalyst is pretty nice if you're a Perl developer looking for a Rails-like framework.
And PGP
I think I agree with you: as benevolent programmers, we should pick the best tool for the job, without consideration for the platform, or the libraries. This would advance the art of software faster in the long run.
Unfortunately, we are forced to make decisions based on the ecosystem of our tools, because of short-term constraints.
A big part of the reason for Relational DB's continued supremacy, is that it's become a part of the back-end language of business IT. Even though an OODB might be a better fit for an application, it's a handicap that your app is not on top of a relational database. SQL has become a kind of protocol for data exchange. Unfortunately, it makes for a very loose and sloppy protocol that completely spoils encapsulation.
Truly successful products (including the iPhone) happen without this stuff all the time

Which products are you talking about?

And, if Apple is dying, pray tell which of its many competitors is killing it? They don't have to outrun imaginary competition, after all. They only have to outrun the competition that physically exists.
Sure, but if someone has a password of 'tim5RaWk5', you'll waste a year trying to crack that one account.

With out any salt you could have 30-50% of all the accounts cracked using an existing rainbow table in about an hour.

Also, most sites require minimum password lengths (while this does shrink the overall attack space, it dramatically increases the minimum attack space per password). So brute forcing a salted password of 'a' seems like an unreasonable example. I agree, salted or unsalted, a password of 'a' is a bad password. The differnce is when it's a salted or unsalted password of 'my1pass' or 'T1mmy' much less an actually secure/random/long password.
This is artwork, not engineering.

All of the weight of the rider is being borne on the tiny pivot joints between the circular bits and the "boxes". The rear circular bit would have to be hollow to contain some kind of drive chain, and I I can't imagine how you would get any kind of gearing to fit in there. There are no handbrakes.

And it doesn't steer! I guess you're suppose to lean left or right? But even then, the forward wheel will be reverse-castering, making that an unstable process (the bike will try to steer harder the more it tilts).

Definitely cute though.
These aren't Google interview questions.
Sure. I'm not expecting something new to displace SQL at a Fortune 500 IT shop. But the question is why are otherwise-groundbreaking technologies like Rails still wedded to the ORM stuff, when clearly there isn't any conservatism at work there. Anyone willing to bet the company on some weird language from Japan isn't going to blink about changing their datastore.
Software demo widgets?
what are people's favorite software demo programs? i'm looking for something that lets you output flash or a widget i can embed on my site (w/ screenshots, text, optional voice-over ?)
More like Not Invented Yet
I want to down vote this article.
I could not agree more on this point. It seems like this comes up all too often in design discussions, and it is difficult to get around in a productive manner.
I worked at Yahoo! "out of the box" Symfony does NOT power any of the above; their own "ySymfony" fork does.
No, they sound an awful lot like old Microsoft interview questions -- in particular, ones collected in a book called How Would You Move Mount Fuji? I wrote an article about the book for Wired News back in 2003...:
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/06/59366
Not focusing on ideas that interested me, but rather ones that interested others.
There are two seperate issues, keeping your data secure from the government reading it, and making sure you have a copy of the data you want on both sides of the border in case they do take your laptop. Both require different solutions. The first takes heavy encryption, the latter a cloud service.

Mind you the government does not have a right to your password - since it is stored in your mind and you have to basically testify to the password it is a violation of the 5th amendment. However if you have a physical key, they can get a warrant for the key, so use a password and some solid encryption and take multiple copies of data.
As a one time ultra-heavy Perl programmer, when I returned to programming this year after a hiatus of several years, Ruby just made the most sense to me, and you do a good job of listing why.

I still use Perl occasionally, but essentially for *Nix sys-admin stuff.
The part you're missing: /usr/share/dict/words is 234,000 (thousand, with a 't') "hashes" long.
Actually one of the most interesting things at RailsConf was MagLev, which applies the GemStone object persistence engine to Ruby. Apparently there are some pretty big Smalltalk apps out there using GemStone. http://chadfowler.com/2008/6/5/maglev and http://ruby.gemstone.com/
"What's a profoundly useful library in CPAN that isn't easily matched in Python?"

Moose.

I haven't been so happy programming since I first discovered scheme.
Lenovo Dives into Sub-Notebook Computing
The space of passwords consisting of two english-y words, possibly encoded in one of several elitespeak alphabets, seperated by a non-alphabetic character? Still much smaller than the 2^56 you get from fully random isprint() passwords.

Again: we can go back and forth about how likely it is I will crack your excellent passwords, and I hear you, but from 1991 through ~2004, iterative password cracking was the only way it was done, and it was and is freakishly effective.

Salts don't do anything at all to slow down iterative cracking tools. bcrypt kills them completely.