skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The last reason getting the perfect .com is less important than it used to be is simply because others have proven you can succeed without it.

This seems to be the core thought behind the idea that domains aren't very important. It's the worst reason of them all too.

You can succeed with all kinds of hindrances. You don't need great design, technology, marketing, or anything else to succeed. There are really no prerequisites to success. There are examples of success in every permutation.

The job of the entrepreneur is to increase their odds by doing everything they reasonably can. For 99% of startups that means getting a high quality .com domain name.
Confidance is dengarus.
I'm not sure "programming is hard" is the right counterargument - I personally find farming hard, and I'm sure most Westerners do too - but for millennia it's all people did to survive.

Also, have you seen what non-programmers can do with Excel? I'm often blown away by the technical skill demonstrated by people who don't see themselves as technical.

On robots, I suspect general purpose robots are not so popular for the same reasons that the industrial revolution didn't happen in Roman times - human labor is too inexpensive. Factory labor in China and other developing nations is much too adaptable and inexpensive for robots to be worthwhile. But that will change.

I agree with you that it's a pretty long way out!
No photoshop filter involved. It was manually created by a pixel artist.
SocketStream: a real-time web framework for Node.js
I am not panicing, just resolved that MS is probably deprecating .Net, it's obvious by the messages they are sending.

Hell they can't even settle on a single UI technology, .Net has 3 right now, looks like a 4th coming in Win8.
thomas, another programmer in the office just asked this question which I haven't a good answer for: Instead of using a known salt stored in, say, a config file, or prepended to the stored hash, why not derive the salt from some substr of the supplied password? His example was, salt would be concat(left3chars, right3chars). And so when the user inputs his password into the system, you just derive the salt using that same consistent algorithm, and supply both that derived salt and the password into the algorithm.

My only answer was "It's always a bad thing to be clever with crypto, just do it by the book" but he asked for more and I couldn't give him a sound debunking (or an authoritative endorsement).

I build systems -- and do it very well -- and all I know about crypto is what I've had to learn to implement other peoples crypto systems.
As a former English-major nutjob, I do see some problems with how those sentences are constructed. The "internal activities and externally" is very awkward phrasing.
When you wrote "this fictional hash" I read that as talking about the SHA-4 I made up, not the one you did.

I then didn't respond to the rest of the post because when you said "for password hashing, it's a good start" I again assumed you were talking about my hash function, which is not good for hashing. Yours would be perfectly fine.

I apologize.
Teleology was used somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The older literature was problematic because it aligned too neatly with anthropocentric ideas of goal-oriented evolution, and gave rise to nonsense objections like "Where is the missing link?" and "Why are apes still around?"

I don't doubt the integrity of the scientists who were involved with the earlier literature, but in hindsight it looks an awful lot like a teleological bias.
This is ridiculous. It's like saying hammers should include screwdrivers. Just know your toolbox and you won't have a problem.

PHP is great. What's with all the hate? It's a good tool for a certain kind of job, not the right tool for others. Big deal. There isn't a single language that you can't find bones to pick with. It's all about what you do with it and how you like to code. If you're comfortable writing server-side script in brainfuck, more power to you.
Reflection is simpler than any other language?

Here's an example from the PHP docs on the reflection API, in the comments:

$a = new A();
$reflector = new ReflectionClass('A');
$properties = $reflector->getProperties();

$i =1;

foreach($properties as $property)
{
//Populating properties
$a->{$property->getName()}=$i;
//Invoking the method to print what was populated
$a->{"echo".ucfirst($property->getName())}()."\n";

$i++;
}

You have to instantiate another object to inspect the first one! Here's Python, just as an example. (Most languages would be simpler. As with most things, it would be difficult to find a language where reflection was more clunky than in PHP.)

a = A()
for i, key in enumerate(a.__dict__):
setattr(a, key, i)
f = getattr(a, 'echo'+key.capitalize())
print(f())

On another thread somewhere, someone once suggested that PHP is actually Blub -- a fictional language whose immense and inherent superiority cannot be explained, only experienced.

As a long time PHP dev, let me assure anyone who thinks that this is the case: in no way is PHP Blub.
It would be more difficult for an innovation like driverless cars to get a start in a country like France where almost any change in the laws requires the involvement of the national government. (In the U.S., most legal cases, including the laws of the road and most serious crimes like robbery, rape and murder, are handled by the individual 50 states.)
Hah, that's a great quote. :) Pithy and to the point.

One some level, we've already reached that point - though we're not programming directly to communicate with McCarthy's servants we are already on that path.
Take the usual "I want to build the ______ for ______" and add "for India" or "for Africa".
How do you not get caught for an illegitimate claim
FTC to subpoena Google in antitrust probe 
and so it begins ladies and gents: "U.S. antitrust regulators have been concerned about Google's dominance of the Web search industry, and the giant Internet company has been under investigation by the European Commission since last November.

Complaints has been filed with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, many from Google rivals who specialize in vertical searches like price comparison websites, which are widely seen as a threat to Google's position as a key gateway to online information. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat
I consistently prefer running a Linux terminal in a virtual machine to running Cygwin natively. And it is faster, too.
I still can't get the full download, even after the update. I've been trying all day. It gives it a good try, but cuts off about 1/3rd of the way through. I'm still very much wanting a copy.
People can't even give unambiguous driving directions to other rational human beings, and we expect them to be able to instruct computers on what to do.

("Take a right at where the barn used to be", "Go until you see the house with a big tree in front of it, you'll know what I mean, it's pretty big", "Take a left at the dog")
I can definitely feel 'trapped' when people invade my personal space, especially if they smell or have a cough. Those experiences are horrible for the extended amounts of time required for a commute. I still ride, but driving really isn't an option.

Sometimes I wonder why public transport doesn't raise the prices during rush hour to create an equilibrium where the trains don't become sardine cans. I guess economically and somewhat ethically it might be harmful.

I pay $10 to get to work and back in rush hour. Parking is $12 for the day, plus gas and wear and tear. I would gladly pay some extra cash if it made the trains emptier, cleaner, and more reliable.
Obligatory quote: http://bash.org/?244321
yet another reason to make regular backups of your site.
Which is okay in my book. Why shouldn't they be able to do that? It's not like Google search is a public service or that our tax dollars are funding it's operation.
it belonged to instapaper. that's what leased means. if you lease a car or house or server or anything else, it belongs to you for the duration of the lease. and more importantly than the hardware, all the information on the server belonged to instapaper.
"Note: SocketStream will be announced at the Hacker News meetup group in London on Thursday 23rd June. We'd appreciate it if you don't tweet/blog/post about it until after the announcement. Thank you."

I read about it on Twitter from a socket.io contributor, so I guess it's safe to publish this.

[edit] here's a racing game demo, powered by SocketStream: https://www.socketracer.com. Impressive
The lack of commenting and downvoting means this list will lack any kind of real curation. There's several large blocks of text on the popular list that should have been submitted as multiple items.
For Those Persons Who Desire The Best Start Email Marketing Tips
Why? The same people who "lyKe can0t bELIEVe jim wud do dat to me" aren't going to be writing drivers for x-ray machines - they'll be giving "good-enough" instructions to machines that'll be smart enough to understand them.

People's dumb blogs get the job done for those people, and the people who choose to read them.
PHP needs a champion, a Douglas Crockford and book entitled "PHP: The good parts".

PHP faces a lot of similar discrimination that JavaScript did for the longest time. Sure, there are still criticisms for JavaScript but for the most part people have settled and realized that to make JavaScript good you have to write good code. Which is exactly the case for PHP.

The trendiness of PHP bashing exasperates the actual issues of PHP which can easily be abated with good practices.

We need a call for someone to get up and preach the best practices of PHP. And with that, a call for PHP Lint based on those best practices. There are a few individual attempts at providing JS Lint type analysis for PHP files but nothing from anyone with clout. We could use an official analyzer supported by recognized field leaders pushing quality coding practices.
This is Mike from card.io. That's a great suggestion - we'll be watching the user experience very closely and will give your idea some thought!

Based on developer interest, a common use case will be scanning your card from an app on your own phone - in that case, you're scanning your own card, and you're in control. But this us a great suggestion for retail usage.

Thanks!
Someone domains names maybe like cheapgreenshoes.com, but shoes.com is rocking.
$32k is an awful lot of money to have handed over for something like this, on the scare of it being potentially a lot more. That's what I mean; on an arguable point, the cost of defending the lawsuit and facing costs - let alone the potential damages - meant that the smaller party simply rolled over. That's the scare tactic.
Absolutely, if PHP has good parts, I want to know what they are.
Triangle-based Oxygen Biotherapeutics raises $4.6M
We already have robots designed for games that drive cars, even besting most of the people skill-wise, and we have a nice traffic congestion example out of the network and medium access protocols too in the telecommunications science. so I guess that those problems are already almost sorted out.

Video-game bots are a nice research field for artificial intelligence which can provide solutions for the real world.

Unrelated: Check this out if you're interested in the topic, it's a nice read http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/quagents/QuakeIII.pdf
Possibly.

I like to think -- informed by my own experience -- that PHP collects a disproportionate share of bad programmers because it's the easiest for bad programmers to use. Chiefly, it is possible to start writing scripts with not even a modicum of planning and forethought; you only need to know what your filename will be. So it stands to reason that they would move on to the new easiest language for bad programming.

Or maybe they would rediscover their passion for something other than web dev, go back to school and get English degrees.

I can hope, can't I?
Really? Could you point me to a United States DSL/Cable provider that provides meaningful 'raw numbers' in their advertisements? Last I shopped for broadband the best you could get was a vague "up to x mbps" number, without any information as to reliability, not to mention minimum speeds.

(And with a wired connection you ought to be able to say pretty easily what the minimum speed is going to be 90% of the time.)
Steve Blank on what hackers are teaching us right now
Toddlers get difference between faulty hardware, operator error
Any language that lets you mix it in among standard HTML is going to generate spaghetti a lot of the time, because page order display and logic flow are inherently contradictory. Logic flow should be hierarchical and static, while page display is a text representation of visual UI choices having little or nothing to do with the logic of the data behind them. But for generating models, it's nice and quick. And for writing form/json/flash service code it does certain things extremely well; you can take a json object, parse it, escape it, run it through a mysql query and return a nicely formatted result object in about five lines. Again, it's whatever you want it to be.
Public transit-only travel is workable in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. as well. Although in Philadelphia, you would have to take the buses quite often to compensate for the gaps in the subway system.
Facebook Appoints Netflix’s Hastings to Board
There is an existing discussion regarding this topic here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2688270
Touché.

A message to other search engines: "Step your game up!"
Sorry if this is going to sound harsh, but nobody makes 7 digits in 3 years by asking for things on a plate. Also, statistically speaking, you aren't going to just stumble upon a gold mine.

Your best bet is to close your browser, get off your chair and go start something that resembles what you see in profit 100/200 websites.

Don't waste time with stupid Bitcoin/IPO-scam/whatever-the-latest-get-rich-quick-fad-you-see-on-hn me-too crap.
Well if you can refer anyone willing to pay that, let me know :)
I think it is just because it is on the front page of HN. I had more hits today than in the last year! Just wait a couple of days. It's not going anywhere and there hasn't historically been a problem with downloading it.
NASA - Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication
It looks really good. Seems like a great concept and good design. One suggestion I would make is have something about the app on the front page such as a video demonstration or a slightly more detailed explanation of what it does.
Maybe just a paragraph above the part where the random reviews appear.
My state of Michigan is known as the birthplace of the automobile. We had the first stretch of paved road in the world as well as the first stoplight.

But we've abdicated our leadership in the automotive industry by turning our back on this development. Michigan rightly should have been the first state to legalize this technology.

It seems as if the auto technology breakthroughs are coming from Silicon Valley. Bob Lutz said the Chevy Volt was developed in response to the Tesla's embarassing us. Now its Google's turn to embarass and challenge Detroit's engineers.
Definitely seems clearly to be a derivative work and a copyright violation.
Can anyone comment on the state of autonomous vehicles with regard to their ability to operate in mixed, human traffic? I would think that human drivers would be dangerously erratic and thus extraordinarily difficult to account for.

And what do you do, as a passenger, when your driverless car induces road rage in a human driver?
How To Contact Journalists
You think it's a coincidence they nabbed Whitey Bulger this morning, after 16 years on the run?

His Instapaper account was probably full of stories about Santa Monica.
It adds a bunch of useful stuff to the Path including select, sort, and ls. The lack of utilities in the standard cmd is my major gripe, what's yours?
That's not the way to look at it.

See creative destruction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

e.g. the car being invented did mean less work for horse-carriage "drivers", but eventually everything was better than before.
When Sudanese Refugees Come To America
Tribe meets white man for the first time
Adobe dumps AIR on Linux. Does it really matter?
> What's with all the hate?

Some people want every language to be just like Java, so they can switch between languages with little to no effort -- never mind we'd have only Java in the end.

Some people want everything abstracted out, so no implementation details have to pe paid attention to -- nor leveraged, ever.

Some people won't believe a language supports something until there's a class explicitly named after it (``proper unicode support'' my ass -_-').

Some people believe an object wrapped around something will magically make it better (``a core object that represents the HTTP Request and Response'').

The list goes on...

Please let PHP remain PHP, at least let it retain the good parts :-)
It looks like the book for that is already out: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804381
You are asking the a question to achieve a preconceived and, IMHO, wrong solution. If you achieve your solution, you will very likely find the solution is the correct answer to your question (how do I avoid work), but is the wrong solution (no happiness).

The correct goal is not the avoidance of work, but the enjoyment of life.

Your proposed goal has a lot in common with winning the lottery: work for 3 years (buy lotto tickets), accumulate (win) $3MM, then never have to work again.

Looking at people who won the lottery, we find many of them go on to have an unhappy life:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16449-lottery-wins-no-...

http://www.uky.edu/~swhank2/research/lottery_bankruptcy.pdf
I guess it's what happens when people who are not programmers set out to jobs involving code implicitly via WYSIWYG editors.
It'd be great if trial by combat was an option for this sort of thing. I'd like nothing more than to hack the arms off of people who raise these lawsuits.
The EDM crowd is exactly the type of people I'd see targeting with this. As you suggested clubs could have their own "rooms", as well as individual DJs. Streaming live (if possible), and saving to an archive. Fans/listeners could obviously mark as favorite and get notifications when live or a new set has been uploaded from the club/DJ. Real time chat for discussion and requests. Frontpage with featured up and coming DJs, the most favorited and so forth.

As you remarked though, proper execution and probably contacts so as to get some sizeable DJs in from the start would be key for this to work.
> If you're willing and able to test and deploy a new browser every 3 months

I'm not, and I don't think a lot of other people are either. The version number is irrelevant. The frequency of releases is the problem here.

> So don't deploy on day 0. Breaking changes can be, and sometimes are, introduced in minor version increments.

OK, fine, but now everything is effectively a minor version increment in Firefox and Chrome, and anyone who doesn't update within 90 days is apparently going to lose all security updates. That is not a viable combination for any users who value a stable platform they can build on more than cutting edge toys.
That's what I half expected the page to be, much like http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com
We're working on a video that will explain the usefulness of the service, like someone having to aggregate multimedia content for a specific purpose and using it. But probably a simple description wouldn't hurt.
FirstData is king. Huge market share.

There's also FaceCash by Think Computers/Aaron Greenspan[1].

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thinkcomp
I agree with that. Lawmakers should be a lot more accountable than they are now. Either that or we need a mixed system between what we have now and the public being able to vote on some laws, even if the final decision is not taken by the public. But it would be great if people could have a more direct influence on the laws being made, even if it's just only a few of them where the public can participate.

For example it could be a 2 step process where for laws that could be very important and they think the public might want to weigh in on the matter, they could vote whether the law should be voted by the public or not. And even then if say 60% of the public vote NO and are against the law, the politicians could still decide to pass the law, but obviously they could get a lot of bad press if its considered they didn't respect the people's wishes.

I think a mixt system like that or something similar, could be better than what we have today because then we wouldn't have politicians do everything regardless of what the public says, and it also not go to the extreme where you'd have a completely liquid democracy and all votes would be voted by the public.

I'd like to see a system that takes the best of both worlds. I don't know what the exact balance should be, but it could be debated and eventually we could come out with a realistic formula. For example it could be decided that if 51% says NO, then the public has the final decision. But we'd also have to consider a minimum number of voters to make sure the decision would be statistically correct for the whole population.
They mention bit.ly as a success and helping popularize alternative domains for startups. But isn't this a bad example? There have been domains seized by the Libyan government (http://www.circleid.com/posts/libyan_government_has_seized_v...)
I was thinking that driverless cars would be a boon for people who cannot drive (for whatever reason -- visual or otherwise).

I do wonder, however, if laws will require driverless cars to have a person who is able to drive. (For legal or liability reasons in case of an equipment failure.) I do hope that doesn't happen, but it's possible.
It's cool, but I can't imagine normal people being able to use this. I struggled with it myself a bit.
This is my preferred unix-in-windows setup as well. Free VMWare player and your favorite distro of linux and you're good to go.
The C reference implementation is here:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libc/crypt/

Its from OpenBSD and implemented by the developers of the algorithm. It is what the Python/Ruby/Lisp/PHP etc. versions are derived from or wrap
The demo crashes Safari on my iPad :( too heavy for lightweight hardware?
My guess would be that it was built up by several of the team members and they just pasted the links from where they found them, which was probably Twitter.
DHS and DOD

Hence my note Vision system to seek and destroy on the other hand...
I think the question was more, "Do you consider pull requests?"
Can you scan the back to get the CVV2 code? All the information you need from the front is embossed so you can read it on the back too.
The best example I ever heard of that was a friend of mine giving instructions on how to get to his OWN house, where he'd lived for at least 5 years. He didn't know the names of the streets around his house, and just told us to turn right after the "lighthouse mailbox".

For what it's worth, whenever I'm in that area, I always notice the lighthouse mailbox now.
Believe me, on a lot of examples of real-world code, valgrind &co. will find false positives and miss errors. I've been there and done that. And then you can't pick out the signal from the noise. Again, if just about every team on the planet has trouble with this, then it's not a question of just running some tool.

And of course we use valgrind and a bunch of other standard and custom tools. I said myself that valgrind will help here, so it's not like you need to read me the whole kindergarten primer on this.
Sounds a lot like Mixlr http://mixlr.com/