skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similar to many other companies operating on the internet these days, CloudFlare operates on a freemium model (free vs paid products). We also have some other opportunities to make money with other product integrations & will be launching enterprise products in the future.

We're not going anywhere:)
Social influence undermines "The Wisdom of Crowds"
Call me paranoid, but that just made my stomach drop.
So you're saying that (eg.) security patches 1 to 83 download
eighty-three slightly different versions of file X, only the
last of which is used. Presumably versions 1 to 82 shouldn't
be saved -- and I don't see evidence in XP that they are
for security updates.

The original article -- here, by the way,
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.47.html#subj8
says that the final result is 6.5GB of hard drive space
for a patched XP install.
I don't think reading "War and Peace" is in itself a metric of serious thought so much as it is a test of literacy and of attention span.
Show HN: Sleepwiththefish.es "kill" your friends on Twitter
200 million views is somewhere around $400k - $600k ($2 - $3 CPM).

It's crazy how many people are earning a good living off YouTube. Not a lot in absolute numbers, but when you compare it to the number of TV show hosts on cable/broadcast TV it's quite impressive.

The dream of independent niche content producers finding an audience and making good money is actually happening.
Thats not a documenting test though, thats good choice of names. You don't need tests to have a good choice of names. If I said:

slope, yintercept = calculateLine(x1, y2, x2, y2)

You wouldn't be using the test as documentation at all. Those names are so goddamn good you don't even need documentation. You would just be using the interface, and basic maths knowledge. (Note: it doesn't actually do that, I just thought of that as something that fits the argument/output count)
Certainly true, I am not arguing that communications platforms are not able to find productive uses. It's more than for every twitter, there are hundreds of failed or carbon-copy twitters which do not focus on any sort of productive solution. They simply copy eachother with the idea that more noise is better.
I absolutely agree. I don't comment all that much, but comment where it's impossible to get clarity -- or comment at a higher level to explain the rationale for the code.

Commenting what code does -- is either 1) pointless or 2) indicative you should rewrite your explanation-requiring code in a more straightforward fashion.
What's the line between anti-intellectualism and being able to recognise an argument from authority fallacy? Sanger does not seem to be able to draw it.
Obviously great news. It dampens my enthusiasm a bit to know the same company funds development of JRuby however.

EngineYard really should clarify their vision behind maintaining two VMs. Going beyond the obvious "JRuby is for integration with existing J2EE infrastructure" angle would be nice.

Under what circumstances would they actually stand behind Rubinius as the better choice? Is the MRI C extension API compatibility an official feature now? Is it that I could switch from REE to Rubinius without having to worry about finding alternatives for all the libs I'm using that carry C-extension baggage?
Certainly - I'm always keen to increase the ratio of geeks in Australia :-) My email address is dhgbayne@gmail.com.

If you'd like, & if you don't mind your questions being public, you could always put them together as an Ask HN? submission. If you do that, email me anyway, & I'll make sure to reply to your submission.
but them you will be called traitor, terrorist, etc
YC is not a need based program. That kind of thinking is good for charity, not capitalism.
Dunbar's number rules the Twitterverse
Scambook - Fighting Scams, Complaints, Fraud Class Action Lawsuits and More.
Homeowner Foreclosures on Bank of America (Yes, You Heard That Right)
wasn't that all done before when you connected your game boy to your game cube?
Return on investment: investing in a known quantity is lower risk.
I don't think you are giving enough credit to the companies and services that never were (because of Microsoft). Infact an uncharitable reading of what you've written would be that you assume no microsoft means some kind of industry void.

It is certainly pretty disputable that computing adoption was in anyway accelerated by the exsistence of Microsoft since they have essentially been rent collecting and pushing up prices for everyone to join in.
I'm speaking abstractly, not literally. HTTP is still the destination for anything sent from the server (unless you're using SPDY), but that's literally. Abstractly, I'm referring to the fact that we used to build web apps that output HTML web pages, which were streamed over HTTP. The "application" was entirely on the server. The browser was, in effect, a dumb terminal. Nothing "interesting" was happening on the browser. Heh, tell that to the early browser developers :)

When you get down in to the details, it all seems so obvious, but that's kind of the point. Step back and stop thinking about how all this stuff happens. Sometimes, a detailed understanding is a hindrance. There's a saying, "can't see the forest for the trees," that applies very well here. Step back, ignore the details for a moment, and look at things broadly.
Christ, I remember reading that when I was really young, and getting told off for it. I think my dad must've just read the first few lines and freaked out. Thanks for the flashbulb memory there.
Interesting analysis. Nothing will ever happen or be investigated though. The banks run the WH.
What's Twitter's Identity Now That It Is Apple's Identity Provider
"They are absolutely in it for the money"

Not so sure about that.

This is what I think motivates Steve Jobs: His insane passion for consumer computer electronics. Juicy and illuminating supporting fact: Jobs's first job was at the HP factory in Palo Alto at age 12. <http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-steven-job...;

"I remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at Hewlett-Packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, "To fuck!" [Laughs] I learned a lot that summer."

Every day he works, he energizes that little kid inside him. Not a bad life.
Try AdMob. Of course our audiences might be different, but for me it's performing 10x compared to your mobclix screenshot.
the companies and services that never were

BeOS. Sweet lord, what BeOS could have been...
For my year of the Google Summer of Code(2007), they gave signed copies to all the students. This should be required reading for all CS students IMHO.
"iMessage, on the other hand, replaces SMS. It's the one and only way to send text messages on the iPhone and it will avoid SMS whenever possible. Users won't even think about what underlying protocol they are using."

Now that is a great point. I wasn't aware that iMessage replaced SMS entirely. I assumed that it was a separate app.

I don't think the impact of it being the default method of sending messages can be understated.
Good point. But that needed two separate systems and a cable you had to buy separately. Thus not a lot of games took advantage of this. Difference being is that the Wii U comes this way, so every game can take advantage of it.

Plus, of course, all the bells and whistles. But that's the big difference: execution.
Heyzap (YC 09) hiring ridiculously creative engineers for iPhone/Android/Web
Any supporting links for this argument?
In CloudFlare's Features page ( https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-services.html ), "Denial of service attack protection" is marked as not available now or even soon.

Not sure how this stands against a DDoS.
So if Apple does it, they're "evolving" an existing project... but the vast work that the Chrome team has put into WebKit is just nothing?

Your bias is showing. Hard.
Ok, I'll be the curmudgeon here.

In recent software development efforts I have run, I have put for the rule that "All comments are bugs". Comments get separated from the code, make statements about obsolete activities, and often mislead the reader, and even sometimes the author.

In place of comments, write code that is as self-explanatory as possible.

I refer to Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" as a way of trying to increase my authority in the matter.

However, I do back off from this extreme position and put comments on individual methods. Sometimes. What helps is using longer method/function/attribute/variable names than pg or tptacek would.

I think the TomDoc example is particularly poorly chosen for the author's thesis, as, more often than not, one is likely to just do "text * num_duplications" inline, no? So why is this even a separate method? Certainly not to save lines of code.

As noted in other comments to this submission, the real value of comments is the why of doing something unusual, not what.

And who was it that said that the Ruby community should spend more time on documentation rather than tools for documentation? A case in point is the doc for EventMachine. This is an insanely useful tool, yet every time I look for the answer to a question about how it operates, the auto-generated documentation leaves me disappointed.

If you are going to spend time on documentation, there is the place to spend it. Make your code readable in its own right.
In banking we have a common - perhaps trite - word to explain this phenomonen: "precedents". We price/measure almost everything against precedents or "comparables." The fact that 95% of underwriting spreads have been 7% for the last 20+ years will ensure that 95% of future IPO's will continue to be underwritten at 7% for the next 20.

Is what it is. The law of unintended consequences tells me that should the govt try to mingle with this practice, the outcome will likely be that bigger/more desirable companies get preferred treatment (like Google attempted to do) at say 6-7% while the relatively smaller companies pay a liquidity/desirability premium to make up for it. Same thing happened to credit card rates, which are now at all time highs...
IPv6 Day Has Started
I can't keep FaceBook (or most other social sites) in two tabs, each in a different account. As soon as you log in with the second account, refreshing the first tab will send you to the second account as well.

Most sites just don't support multiple logins.
This is confusing. JRuby is a great and important project. It's how a several very large Rails apps ship deployable versions of their product; it's the easy way to get a Rails app deployed in shops where the normal mechanism for getting deployed is "submit a war file", and it's how you get Ruby access to a zillion Java libraries.

Rubinius is a native implementation of Ruby that seems, over the long term, to have a goal of being the best single implementation of the language all other things being equal.

Why would I ever want to penalize a company for funding both of these awesome projects?
So you are estimating 100% click through rate on those pre video commercials? They are not even shown every time.
Sadly, you will find that HN tends to be very anti-Android from a UI perspective. Haven't you noticed the praise of the notification system and other changes to iOS that have existed in Android for ages. Or the obsession with iMessage despite the existence of Google Voice.

At one point in time, iOS was prettier than Android. Too few HNers have actually used Froyo or Gingerbread to understand the UI improvements that have occurred and too many use Android as a dev platform or played with a phone in a store to understand the power of actual multitasking or the power of the back button.
The most recent breakthrough in my coding style has been naming methods and variables so that documentation of anything other than input expectations is largely unnecessary.

In your example something like textByRepeatingText(text, times)
Can you explain your technology more directly? Your web site doesn't have a lot of technical detail, perhaps because people who would understand the technical details aren't your target audience.

For the HN crowd, understanding what pieces are in play would help a great deal. I figure it's probably a nice cache + CDN service?

I'll admit that I don't get your security claims -- it seems like entirely the wrong layer to deal with security issues.
Not having heard of the service before, am I correct as characterizing this product as a WAF (web application firewall)? That also as a consequence of its architecture acts as proxy/CDN for its customers?
Bullets that we’ve dodged as a species
Husky & HD (another StarCraft caster) both have a healthy revenue stream from their Youtube Channel. There are at least 12 other casters/players in North America/Europe making a living casting StarCraft II games.

Husky wasn't the first to cast. Guys like Day9, Artosis, & Tasteless cast too, and are quite popular. But HD & Husky were the first to focus mostly on "Virtual" tournaments. The other successful casters focused more on "Real life" tournaments. Artosis & Tasteless even went to Korea for a year to comment StarCraft II games on GomTV. Day9 regularly travel to big tournaments.

And yet, none of them make as much money as Husky & HD (supposedly, I don't have hard numbers.)

It shows the power of the web. The old medias are here to stay, but most of the creativity & growth today comes from the web.
I thought loose coupling was a feature.
Someone said some time ago: all people use only 5% of Word features at a time - the problem is that these are DIFFERENT 5% for everybody.
Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan
Oh, 'talent Wars' not 'Talent Wars'. A war makes me think of competition over obtaining the big name tech talent, not statistics about the volume of kids hopping around the west cost to the current popular thing. Thanks TechCrunch.
The only reason you would want to do this is if you use the same password for multiple things. You may have signed up with some website a year ago, used it once and then forgot all about it. If they get compromised you might not even know it.

If you change your passwords often then you don't need to worry about this as much.
Windhistory.com - Showing directional wind data across the US
maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, but this event happened today, so it's pretty current. You can also get "the sun right now" at the SDO site[1], and it looks like they update those every 15 minutes.

There are also several probes that are keeping a close eye on the sun these days, from the more venerable SOHO to the newer STEREO probes and now SDO, of course.

[1] http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/
Thanks for the feedback. I must say buying a bike online is like trying to buy shoes online. It needs a zappos. Did I just give myself an idea?
Intellectual Property, Federally-Funded Research and Ownership. Oh My.
Steve Jobs showing off an entirely different kind of PDA at WWDC
> But my documentation runs during the hourly and never raises any red flags! That means its right, therefore better than a comment.

Your words, not mine.
I wish that too. I'll see what I can do to improve the code font size in the next edition.
[Android Word Game] Le God of Words
You know NOTHING about where the daily deal industry is headed
Microsoft long ago lost the mindset of developers. It's been a long time since I've met someone doing Windows-desktop software. All innovation appears to be happening outside of Microsoft technologies. MS fought for years (using IE) to make it as difficult as possible to build web applications and I'll spit up my milk if developers fall for it again by developing HTML/JS-based Windows 8 apps.
The ongoing attacks on academia have little to do with geek culture in particular. Academia is under attack primarily for cynical political purposes. Specifically, because the political right wing sees institutions of higher learning as bastions of left wing political ideology and because the employees of these institutions are largely unionized. What is happening is fundamentally a political battle dressed up in the guise of "concern" about tuition costs and the value of a college education.
Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain
Would be very interesting to hear what the HN folks' experiences are with the whole v6day thing. Hopefully it should be a non-event, but interesting to know anything otherwise.
That's not a particularly good choice of names, actually:

> slope, yintercept = calculateLine(x1, y2, x2, y2)

It is, in fact, a place where a test would be quite helpful. A test might have prevented the typo for the second argument to calculateLine().
No, that's not what he's talking about.
The MRI C extension API compatibility is very much an official feature. Except for a few gems we can't make work (because they tie directly into 1.8's execution model) most work fine. If you have one that doesn't work, please just open an issue and we'll figure it out!
At Torbit, we make websites faster... intentionally. :)

http://torbit.com
Betting against predictions of exhaustion of this or that natural resource seems to be one of the smartest ways to bet.

http://www.perc.org/articles/article588.php

http://globalgeography.aag.org/PopulationandNaturalResources...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
My web site has been open for ipv6 business for a while. At home today, I installed tunneling software on my openwrt box, and it's working with comcast. Once I found the right set of instructions it went smoothly (https://wiki.xkyle.com/Comcast_IPv6_on_Openwrt). I can see unicorns now: http://ismyipv6working.com/
Game of Thrones Season 1 Episode 9 
Although it absolutely was against his can, Robb rallied his father’s northern allies against Tywin Lannister and headed south to war.Also,
I admit I'm working with hindsight, but the cancer prediction just seems like, well, a bad prediction; can we really call it a "bullet we've dodged"? Does anyone know how credible this prediction was considered at the time?
If there are only a few options for a variable, could you have them be expressed as part of the object returned by
http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=...
Example: Type. Although it is a string, it isn't really a string field. It is a binary choice between two preset strings (comment or submission).

It would make using the schema for things much easier.
"The server (enterprise) market is the ONLY area where linux competes head-to-head with MS (or anyone really)."

Linux as Android is killing MS in mobile.
Günstige Acer AS07A52 Akku, Versand in die ganze Europ
4400mAh Acer AS07A52 Akku, Acer AS07A52 Li-ion battery replacement, 1 Jahr Garantie, Versand in die ganze Europ
Nice to see you on HN; I was wondering if you had any comment in regard to the huge surge in attention (mostly great reviews, from what I've seen) thanks to LulzSec using your service?

Like many others, I hadn't heard of CloudFlare until it started showing up all over Twitter (and the Internet in general) in relation to LulzSec.

I'm glad you guys got some nice exposure, and I might start using your service myself soon!
How to make Angry Birds – part 2
How to make Angry Birds – part 1
staunch's estimates were using CPM, not CPC, so click throughs are irrelevant (CPM - cost per 1,000 impressions displayed).

That said, $2-3 CPM sounds high to me. But I don't know anything about the YouTube ad market.
Or on IRC :)
Meanwhile iOS is ... (wait for it) ... killing in medical:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/75-Percent-of-Physic...
1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s Future (2008)
Do more with Cotton Swabs
Sure, it would have been different, but in how many of those parallel universes would it have been better without MS? Keep in mind that the biggest competition for MS in those early days was Apple and IBM. Apple of that era coming out on top would have resulted in far fewer people gaining access to computers and far, far slower rate of innovation, especially in hardware. The same would have been true for IBM coming out on top as well.

Microsoft was one of the few companies which pursued an open platform for computing hardware and a licensed OS. That very much accelerated innovation in ways that most of MS's competitors did not.
I think the internet is, for those who can take it in, very humbling. The anti-intellectuals are the people who react badly to this overwhelming sense of one's own smallness.

In 1900, colleges decided what it was important for an upper-middle-class person to know. One set of writers and texts was in the canon; the rest were not. Sometimes the selection was based on quality but it was often political as well. It wasn't actually possible to have "all knowledge" but one could get all the "important" knowledge in a few years of study. Any thinking person in 2011 realizes that this is no longer true (if it ever was). There's a million times more genuinely valuable knowledge out there than anyone can take in in a human life. Also, the authorities once trusted to decide what was important have been disrobed by technology; the increased power of technology has allowed us to discern that they aren't much smarter than the rest of us.

Anyway, the result is that a lot of people get really insecure and overwhelmed when they realize how much they know nothing about, and there's a tendency among some people, as a defense mechanism, simply to declare large sectors of knowledge useless, unimportant, or outmoded.

It's not just the less intelligent who have this attitude either. I've heard an esteemed computer scientist (someone with a name, but I'll withhold it here) argue that the only useful literature is science fiction because everything else is "just the seven deadly sins, over and over again".
wow great to see another mallu on YC!
BeOS seemed like a very cool experiment but from what I've heard it was sunk by its own faults, most especially from being nearly impossible to develop for.
I thought the second part of his conclusion was a bit hasty:

"... and change all your logins every six months at least."

Does he have any idea how impractical this is? If I could even remember every login I ever made, it would probably take more than 12 hours to do the manual labor of changing the password for them. No thank you!
When is the next Zelda coming out btw?
Absolutely. It's totally not an area I plan on working in, but it was a fascinating insight into the field. I ended up respecting it quite a bit more, there was a lot more thought in the field than I had expected.
Lovely - thanks for the link! added it to my mini-directory on ipv6-test.net
>A test might have prevented the typo for the second argument to calculateLine().

If the compiler didn't puke on it in the definition, or if that was the line in the test it would just be a bug in the test. Of course that all depends on the time honored development tradition of running a hastily written online comment in production. As far as the assumption I'm knocking tests for their utility at testing, I'm not, I'm knocking their utility as documentation.
A CDN is always going to have DDoS mitigation as a side-effect.
BTW in case it is a non-event, you can post fun IPv6 addresses that you notice.

Here's some. Check the AAAA for:

www.facebook.com
www.luns.net.uk
www.cisco.com

EDIT:

I meant, check the literal IPv6 addresses that correspond to these hostnames. I'll put emphasis so it is more visible :)

2620:0:1c08:4000:===face:b00c===:0:1,
2a01:8900:0:1::===b00b:1e5===, 2001:420:80:1:===c:15c0:d06:f00d===

EDIT2:

And while you're at it - maybe enable AAAA record for your site and give it a whirl! (and come up with some more creative IPv6 addresses in the process!) Thanks to guylhem for reminding about this.