skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This clear incentive you speak of is not in evidence on the actual Internet: find a site any of us have ever heard of that takes a credit card over a bare HTTP connection by default.

Self-signed certificates are "insecure", if you want to use that word, because there is no way to verify them. If you're Bob sending your certificate to Alice, Alice has absolutely no way to tell if she's seeing your cert or Mallory's.

Self-signed certs get used in non-HTTP apps, and in internal apps, because an out-of-band mechanism (thumb drives, key continuity, etc) is being used to distribute the certificates. If Alice already has your cert, and all you have to do is prove you hold the privkey for it, you and Alice have no problem.

Of course, if you think about this for 5 more seconds, you quickly realize that nobody on the Internet has your cert already, and without Verisign to break the tie between you and Mallory, you're totally fucked.
Our Weekend Social Experiment
The security of the DNS and the security of SSL are unrelated. This is one of those Reddit memes that won't die. You can claim to be bankofamerica.com all you want, but you cannot complete an SSL exchange with a signed certificate that says so.
I would guess that an SVD/SVM feature extraction of the movie script could be of predictive value.
Would you like to bet your social security on that statement? I'll win that bet. If I can watch your packets on the wire, I can inject my own packets, or redirect you to the middleman of my choosing. If I can inject my own packets, I can sub in my own certificate. You won't know, because you're using self-signed certificates --- meaning, meaningless certificates.
Please put something more into it to make it different than d-link's or any other wireless picture frame that can also pull stuff from facebook/etc. Is there an ease of use advantage?

Just saying its "social" is played out and only works in the valley. Everybody is doing that these days. Hardware is normally a different game than software and is played by different rules. The marketing is totally different as well. That's awesome that you guys have been able to put a solid piece of hardware together. Don't let all that work, and all that future work, go to waste by falling into a web 2.0 trap. :)
MySQL does have built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster! They should have enabled binary logging and use that to make low impact backups. They also could have used replication (also built in) to avoid all these problems and have a hot backup.

The only reason they retained the 'Gold Support Service' is because their own database administrators obviously had no idea what they were doing or how to use the software correctly.

There are always companies that will make use of commercial support for FOSS but MySQL will probably never make any money from me.
Give me a break. This is like saying all online security is a sham because I can always physically break into your office. You know how many times a real CA has fucked up and accidentally issued a Bank of America certificate to organized criminals in Estonia? ZERO.
I posted a bunch of machine learning video courses here:

http://www.datawrangling.com/hidden-video-courses-in-math-sc...

videolectures.net has a ton of material as well

Hastie and Bishop are good books to start with, assuming you have a reasonable mathematics background.
You can't have one without the other. The first icon doesn't mean anything. You might as well add a third icon for "this connection is compressed". Attackers can't read your credit card number out of a compressed stream either.
I like how the favicon distracts me every 5 seconds. Classy.
Communicating Ninja
Anyone interested in this will likely be interested in:

Bit Twiddling Hacks - http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

The book Hacker's Delight by Henry S. Warren Jr and published by Addison Wesley - homepage at http://www.hackersdelight.org/
They have collectively invested squillions of hours, but I question whether they have done so "improving" the desktop.

My stock answer to this, and I am picking on them somewhat unfairly but it feels representative enough to make a point, is Linspire. "Come on baby, run Linspire" they sang at me. "We have photo organisers and music players" they advertised.

And showed a picture of LSongs Media Player.

http://media.linspire.com/mailers/mm/lsongs-shot.jpg

Need I say more? Is anything else needed to tell you why people are willing to spend $$$ on OSX?
Yeah, Debian if anything has always had a reputation of being a little more of a purists distro, which is well deserved. It has a large commitment to the ideals of free software, which is personified in the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/social_contract).

It has also had a reputation for being a harder distro to use... But I think this is nowhere near as true anymore as it used to be.

It's also worthy to note that along with the various BSDs, Debian is one of the most widely used operating systems for web servers. It's very stable and very good, due mainly to the excellent policy that Debian maintains in relation to how packages move through their experimental, unstable, testing and stable branches.

I will never use anything else as my main distro.
Gmail leaves Google Apps admins nervous
How to build a network
Twitter Implements Threaded Comments, Sort Of
License servers suck. Most of VMware's customers are banks, telcos, and other large firms running ESX farms. They have the money to pay, and they will. Don't fuck them up by breaking their VMs for licensing screwups.

If they wanted a better, but still harsh, solution, print a large alert saying the server is reverting to trial mode and will expire in 30 days time.
Hah. Can you...

- Play your music online?

- Play your video game online?

- Type papers online? And no, google apps don't quite cut it :P

- Watch a dvd online?

- Do your taxes (in a Turbotax) fashion online?

Well, none of the above, really. So, whoops! Guess the browser isn't the next operating system!
This is a pretty decent summary, I think. It uses Ruby, and it's worth noting some of the procedures are also known by other names:

map -- Perform a function on every value in a list individually, as a transformation. As an easy example, map square [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] -> [1, 4, 9, 16, 25]. This is usually just called "map" (it's short), but is different thing than a key->value map. The sequence of execution here is deliberately unspecified, and for potentially expensive/time-consuming operations this can be an easy operation to parallelize.

list.each -- Iterate through a list, doing something for each value. AKA foreach or List.iter. This is different from map in that it discards the result; it is just used for side-effects.

select -- AKA filter, called remove-if-not in Common Lisp. This returns a list of all values in a list meeting some criteria (a predicate, a function that returns a bool, is passed in): filter even [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] -> [2, 4].

reduce -- AKA fold - Starting with a default value (often the identity for a function, e.g. 0 for adding and 1 for multiplication), successively apply a two-argument operation to the current total and the values of the list, reducing it down to one overall result: reduce * 1 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] -> (((((1 * 1) * 2) * 3) * 4) * 5). NB: Some languages make a distinction between a left fold and a right fold, which refers to whether it starts at the beginning or the end of the (potentially infinite!) list.
I disagree with the comments so far--I think he makes a solid point.

The bootstrap model requires you to be good at both innovation/experimentation and sustained management/maintenance. He's says people have different strengths, and therefore it pays to separate out the business lifecycle into the creation stage, when the entrepreneur thrashes the company into something valuable, and the growth/maintenance stage, where the goal is to take a working company and make it better.

With the startup experience he's had, he's in a good place to share his opinion that dividing people into those two camps via the funding/acquisition model makes the entrepreneurs happier and the companies more successful.
Actually, the opposite. Pioneers are only interested in the early part of a company's lifecycle, so the investment/acquisition path is ideal. Almost everyone participating in YC is a pioneer, so most of us follow that route.

Settlers want to stay in for the long haul. Bootstrapping - the kind that David advocates, where you focus on building a long-term, sustainable business - is thus more suited to their temperment.

Which makes it badly suited to the pioneer temperment, which I discovered when bootstrapping: I got bored after three or four years on the same venture. But if you want the upside, you have to stick around, because it only pays out over the long term.

Though perhaps settlers are probably better off either working within an established organization, or buying an existing business to run. In which case I can see why the point of the second half of my post might have come out a little muddy.
> Play your music online?

Yeah, provided you have the bandwidth. If you don't, any OS has music management software.

> Play your video game online?

You got me there - not yet. Half life doesn't work in Flash.

> Type papers online? And no, google apps don't quite cut it :P

You can, but if you don't want to, any OS has productivity software.

> Watch a dvd online?

Yes.

> Do your taxes (in a Turbotax) fashion online?

Yes.
CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know
Software licensing - the worst invention since tangled cables.

I don't want key infrastructure to have license keys in it and need new license keys to unlock more features. ESX Server? Firewalls? Routers? No! As little code as possible, as high quality as possible, please.
And just where could you store this music? ;)

And you can't type papers online. Google apps are so crippled.

You can't watch a dvd online last time I checked...

...And I know of no way to do (Turbotax style) taxes online.
Switching From Feedburner to Feedburner.Google
The story is from 2006. CouchSurfing is alive and well. :)
Try http://www.sphinn.com ... social news site specifically for SEO related topics.
A fabulous article! As someone who has raised $11.5 million from 148 angel investors (including this week's raise where $2.5M came together in a single night), I can attest to the truth of every word here.
I wouldn't worry too much about the subset of people who presumably have broadband (since they know what flickr/facebook, etc are in the first place) but not wifi. You could just sell a cheap router with it in a bundle for that.

Grandma's have wifi these days too.
try OpenBSD, it's simpler

fast install: ~5 mins default + ~5 mins untar my-essentials.tgz + ~5 mins mercurial sync ... my box is production ready (sans user database)

easy upgrade: untar the tgzs, kernel, sync /etc from newer OpenBSD

no automatic update: it makes default install uniform, when $hit happens, just order another colo server with default install, ftp my-essential and resync

package & port & source: complete freedom ... for contrast, try to build (then patch) vim from source in ubuntu (you can't)

now the 'bad' thing:
few forums: but most questions are answerable from OpenBSD's FAQ, afterboot and man pages

less new driver: good luck installing bluetooth (can't)

older software: only firefox 2, no ff 3 in packages and snapshot port (ff3 site lists binaries for xp, osx, and .mar? source ... no idea how to compile .mar)

i use OpenBSD as server (colo) and desktop ... then vnc my mac mini for ff3+firebug (i don't bother with linux emulation, dual boot, vmware etc)

old simple vnc works across OS/arch ... i avoid fancy newer tech. Can you run i386-ubuntu and powerpc-tiger in one desktop?

i had enough of ubuntu, can't install from source, auto-update always break things (i finally quit after my ubuntu retarded to 800x640 and failed attempts at xorg.conf)

oh wait, did i mention about the quality of the OS by OpenSSH maker? Last time my colo lasted 4xx+ days without reboot
> I got bored after three or four years on the same venture. But if you want the upside, you have to stick around, because it only pays out over the long term.

I would call 3-4 years long term, especially in the internet world, and hence expect to see a payout in this period. The same applies to most bricks-and-mortar business.

Also, if you got bored with the venture, it was obviously not growing fast enough. Fast growing businesses always present a variety of new challenges that easily occupy you (at least for a few years) and can keep you entertained, exicted, puzzled, stressed, etc., but never bored.
i'm alway wary about 'great support' ... it implicitly means the product is broken people always ask for help

and to be fair
less / no support may mean the product is so good that noone complains (it just works TM) or it's simply dead

on topic: contrast ubuntu and openbsd
When is Mother's Day again? One less holiday present I have to worry about.
I think they're already doing a good job of encouraging outside search innovation: http://www.netflixprize.com/
Yes, XSLT written in XML itself is abominable. It's easier to read if the program and data have different formats (lisp notwithstanding...). But it's escaping less-than signs that got really me: (i &lt; 5).

But transforming trees with a functional programming approach (not PHP) is a natural fit.
This is a really cool idea too, and it's def on our feature list. We would also keep in mind that all your pictures on facebook are not necessarily the pictures you want on your grandmas photo frame =)
If that's all you want to do, you can just use any MRSS-capable frame with OurDoings.

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01

It sounds like PicWing has a lot more ambitious things in mind.
Yeah, I doubt it would make a difference at all with a small fleet. The point is that UPS has TONS of vehicles on the road every single day, so shaving a fraction of the costs related to each becomes substantial across the company.
> But convincing investors of the viability of your idea - enough to place a monetary wager on it - provides early confirmation that you're on a viable path

Is this really worth a big chunk of your company? Your users should provide course corrective feedback, not investors. They don't have any better idea of what will and won't work than you do.
I suppose that's because it didn't result in a user-visible 404 error screen or similar.
Interesting. It looks like you're going after "2. Simplified Browsing" (but not just browsing) as well as "27. Hardware/software hybrids" plus at least one of the 30 different subtypes of "9. Photo/video sharing services"

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
Google Launches AdSense for Feeds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research

This is one of the things that Industrial Engineers actually do. In my opinion the pay is much too low for how hard the math is. Lots of linear/dynamic programming + statistics and all sorts of fun algorithms.
1996? Don't you remember DOS copy protection?
>You see it seems that some analyst at UPS got some modeling software and came up with this plan.

This was a little beyond "some analyst"... even if it was originally the idea of one person, the actual plan took many, many people to implement. Solving real versions of the traveling salesman problem takes a lot of manpower. UPS hires more Industrial Engineers than anyone else.
Are You Successful? at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Technology and the campaigns: the battle to master new media
Thanks for the recommendations guys. :)

Have a great weekend!
Winners Never Quit? Well, Yes, They Do
Sow Seeds Now
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/
yeah, if you have memory inside the frame, then you only need to download pictures once and cache, so gsm sounds like a great idea.

if you get grandparents and family involved, then it could be a great driver for photo taking, maybe kodak would be interested.
MV On The Spot » Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair: Reason 423 to Visit MV in August
No, it's not. If a man-in-the-middle attack is possible (certainly the ISP could), then encryption without authentication is as insecure as no encryption at all. And in fact worse if the user has a false sense of security.

The MITM pretends to be the bank's server (or whatever) when talking to you, and pretends to be you when talking to the bank's server. Both channels can be encrypted, but the attacker still sees (and can modify) everything that you think you're sending directly to the bank's server.

This is the key point that most people seem to be missing here. If browsers didn't warn about self-signed certificate, the entire system would break down because an attacker could just use a self-signed cert in a MITM attack, and the user would have no idea.
How U.S. banks sold home equity loans
cool! We're glad that Mike used Picwing to power his social experiment =)
Nice article -- I think the first thing one would tend to apply it to in a startup context is a startup as a whole, but I believe in a successful startup quitting often, and at the right time is critically important. It seems foregone when going into something new that your assumptions will be wrong a lot of the time. Figuring out when to give up on some strategy, despite having invested time in it and go to try the ones that are working seems to be one of the rules of engagement.
No doubt, I've been doing it too for a while (although my reasons are safety-based). But not everyone has access to a modeling tool (and the data) to create a business case that convinces a big multinational to make it into corporate policy.
Through a Glass Darkly: the world of mathematicians
Of course, one of the common knocks on Ruby is that naively referring to a function executes it, and to pass functions around avoiding

list.map { |i| process i }

one must write

list.map &method(:process)

or, as the Rails guys have done [1], open up Symbol#to_proc so that

list.map &:process

works. This will be part of core Ruby in 1.9, but last I heard it's slow [2].

[1] http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/activesupport/lib/...

[2] http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/161089
Twitter documentation hacked
I'm not sure which surprised me more -- that OCaml is more popular in the Russian Federation than in France, or that Haskell is most popular in Jamaica, by a landslide.

By his method, Forth is most popular in the US, then Canada, then the UK, then it flattens out.

Brainfuck is most popular in Germany and the US. :)
Congrats to the PicWing team. They're building the true next generation of the digital connected home. It's rare to get a team together that is so talented both on software user experience and hardware design.
RTA: expose your program statistics as if it was a database
The whole point is convenience; signing up for S3 would be inconvenient for the user, so it would be the provider's account.
IKEA Invests In Solar Technology Startup Companies, will eventually sell panels in store
This is really a sad news, feel sorry for the founder of Couchsurfing . Hope they recover. Best of Luck.
Pass It Deep
Is the Apple App Store Helping other Mobile Apps?
Inside NASA's Plan to Bomb the Moon and Find Water
I wonder how much fuel could be saved by avoiding unnecessary residential deliveries. How many delivery attempt notices does UPS leave every day?

If shippers provided UPS with an email address for the recipient a notice could be sent by email the day before a package is to be delivered. This notice could provide options to let UPS know to wait a day or two to attempt delivery when someone will be there or redirect the package to a commercial address (e.g. the recipient's place of employment).

I recently had a package delivered that required a signature. After the first attempt I called UPS and had it redirected to my work address. Unfortunately they already had it on the truck so I was told they would attempt delivery to my home address the next day before redirecting it.
Freebase is a truly awesome idea...but I haven't seen a lot of useful ways to make use of it, to date. Now if only it covered Mountain View...
Big corporations that have software everyone wants to use can treat their paying customers as beta testers. You know this drill as Microsoft pioneered the practice a long long time ago.
> S-expression syntax are optimized for lists of names and numbers.

Nope. Structs, tables, vectors, and arrays all work just fine.

And there's also support for dags and circular structures.
And strings, I forgot strings. (For some reason, XML folk often confuse strings with sequences of atoms. They also confuse numbers and numerals.)

And numbers in different bases.

S-expressions predate unicode. However, unicode support was added in. It's not that big a deal.
Distributed Computing Economics: Computing economics are changing
number 27 definitely matched what we are doing. The beauty of hardware these days is that its not as scary as most software people thing. Hardware these days really just means low-level software.
Another great resource from SEOmoz that some might miss (b/c it's not exactly easy to find on their site) is their "Search Engine Ranking Factors" report (it's free).

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

The report tries to identify which SEO factors have consensus among a panel of 3-dozen or so SEO experts (as well as which factors are deemed dubious). It's a great way to get a large number of opinions on specific topics and try to focus in on a few high ROI factors (if you've got limited resources/time like I do).
Specialist investors (e.g. technology angels or firms such as Sequoia Capital et al) usually have a very good appreciation of what will or will not work. They possess sophisticated, and often surprisingly accurate, tools/models/instruments/processes to aid decision making. Hence, they are able to evaluate your business and model in ways you often will not, and provide a more rounded view even at the extremes of optimism or caution. Even for more general investors, if you make a lot of investments, you get a feel for things and eye for talent/business, and develop a good understanding of the markets you play in.

Whether it is worth a (big) chunk of your company really depends on the value investors provide. If they are able to give practical help (e.g. business advice, access to markets, distribution) and/or leverage important and influential networks/connections to aid you, and basically increase the bottom line while leaving you largely in control, then the answer should be yes (the early days of YouTube is an example that comes to mind, where they saw little growth until the investors came on board(?)).

I would rather have 70% of $10M in 2 years than (possibly) 100% of $1M in 5 years.
The consensus of 37 experts in SEO
First Encyclopedia API bits up.
Is it ok to use adsense in a widget?
Any ideas?
The best job interview questions from Microsoft, Google… and IKEA
Laconica’s Not the Only Cool Kid In Town - Introducing OpenMicroblogger
Startup Idea n+1: Fix IMDB.
IMDB is in need of a truly better interface and we all know they won't change a thing. The search feature is not all that great either, in fact it sucks. By the way finding a good movie online and its related information is very very painful.
Wow, really seems like there's an awful lot of "tea leaf reading" going on.

The human neural network being imperfectly trained by Google's algorithms, which probably have some sort of network learning involved. Funny stuff.
Firefox Could Pass IE by Next Summer
Congrats on the launch guys! Awesome product.

One simple suggestion that seems to be missing and can add a lot of value for very little cost...

Allow the frames to be personalised with custom messages engraved on the wood/glass. Finding a good engraving service is easy enough, but if you had a web-form for personalised messages (with preview), these would make excellent presents for weddings/birthdays/anniversaries/etc.

Everyone loves personalisation, and the sentimental value add-in is immense.

Just ordered mine. Look forward to getting it soon(ish).
At least The Dark Knight isn't the #1 movie anymore...