skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a developer, but this is related. I'm pretty surprised by how many companies in SV ask me to do design exercises for them.

I've won industry awards, built giant sites that millions of people use, endured some of the toughest board meetings on Wall Street, had to endure killer hours, won millions of dollars worth of work for my old company, shown you my portfolio, and you want me to do work for your funded company for free?

My old company in NY hired me at a competitive rate for three months before bringing me onboard full-time. How difficult is that? Just hire me for a day or a few days to get a glimpse and then make your judgement. Otherwise, it's just spec work and absolutely insulting. I don't get my mechanic to fix my car once for free to test his expertise, nor get free first-time haircuts from hair stylists.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
Of course. For many people "buy American" is a mantra. People from car makers to American Apparel try to tap into this sentiment. (obviously the degree to which something was actually "made in the USA" is not always clear)
Romantic dates with Zipcar, Groupon, and AirBnB
Uh? Aren't Bitcoin wallets encrypted?
However, it is simple and it is zero-configuration - exactly your definition from your title.
Excuse my ignorant question: if I buy one of these is there any (vaguely legal) way I can use it to watch movies on long flights?

edit: Never mind, I found out for myself. Rip from DVD to some wacky format, obtain app to play it. Perhaps I'll consider it, now I find myself flying (bleh) United with its severe lack of video.
I just did it, champ! I think your idea is good! Power to you.

Sidenote: let people optionally add notes to each answer - it's not A/B (when I travel for work, alone, with my fiance the answers are VERY different).
The concept of Assembly language is not that hard, provided one starts with simpler processors, simple said it's mapping processor codes to 3 letter instructions.
Processors nowadays are way more complicated than the ones of yesteryear, my tip is when one really wants to understand is to start with a beast like the 6502, it's a straight forward processor and there is tons of documentation for it, also there are many emulators of the machines that used the 6502/6510.
In the process you learn concepts like memory mapped graphics and IO.
You can use that knowledge to explore and build on modern day processor concepts like segmented, protected and virtual memory and things like OS/User separation or floating point processing.
Compilers are mainly programs that translate higher level languages to Assembly language.
A lot of today's languages like Python, Perl or Ruby are not compiled but interpret and bring yet other advanced language concepts like automatic memory allocation and garbage disposal, but also higher up algorithms like sets, dictionaries and collections etc...
Start in the recent past like the 80's and work your knowledge towards the present, there is not much use to go further back than the 80's because before that era there were not that many standard solutions for these concepts, only historians want to know about things like mercury delay line memory, crt scanline memory, core memory, programming panels and so on.
Doesn't mean that PayPal is invincible. It's been hacked before, and being centralised and insured doesn't mean anything.
There are many different kinds of people that drink wine.
I'm not at all an expert to handle details about the security of WebGL. I have no idea on that front.

I do know Chrome and FF just fixed a timing attack vector where you could apparently intuit the content of a crossdomain image by interpreting what hues were based on it via the application of shaders. Which means hypothetically you could read text. Like a crazy-person's OCR.
They will be in the coming version.
While facebook and twitter may not be intended to "save" the world you'd have to be naive to not admit they have definitely changed the world. You have no idea what the founders intentions were when they started either. To interconnect people is a noble idea in itself. Aspiring to be the next Mark Zuckerberg as long as its for the right reasons isn't bad either.

And the idea that you should start working at any company because you want to save the world is a stretch. You could make this argument for any company that is not involved in National Defense/Renewable Energy, or some other field that is so obviously necessary for our future. Enhancing people's quality of life, even if its not completely necessary to survive, should not be looked down on.
"I think price is going to be key in the long term."

I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).
You could use a cron job that removes the "deleted" files after some period, such as 30 days.
Given that Napa is so close to the bay area, it might have made more sense to partner with a local company from YC etc. than one on the east coast.
Great SVG tutorial
Looks like a great way to make it ON the list.
Can you no longer look at completed auctions?
(I'm not a Linux user, forgive my ignorance)

Is there no way to prevent bugs like this at the source, by modifying Linux, rather than hoping there isn't any extra white space in a command that might delete your usr directory?
I wonder if age might not have something to do with it. When I was in high school, drinking lots of coffee and staying up all night put me in the right state of mind to churn out A-quality essays at the last minute.

When I was in college, I sometimes used Adderall to the same ends. It used to make me into a writing goddess. Seriously, that's what it felt like. Even though I was pulling all-nighters, the words just flowed and I rarely needed to edit. I felt great and my performance was excellent (at least according to my professors).

Now, I'm 30, and stimulants just don't help as much. If I take them and then try to get some work done, I make significantly more mistakes- like leaving out little chunks of sentences. At this point in my life, adequate sleep seems to be the most effective mind hack for me.

Maybe wakefulness drugs just work better for young people?
I'm very confused as to what exactly happened in the first story (what was or wasn't changed vs. what was or wasn't supposed to be changed).
CairoPlot
The fact my 13in MBP has a lower max resolution than the air models, and the air has no backlit keyboard.
It wasn't meant to be a "slam dunk". I was trying to illustrate that some people define "win" by sheer volume, some define "win" by panache and polish and things like that.

Depending on how you want to measure it, Chevy or Bentley, Android or iOS, both "win" for some definition of "win".
Accepting Guest Posts: How and Why
I can think of use cases for wanting a quick simple, easy to configure http server.

I can think of use cases for wanting to be able to serve >1,000 requests a second.

I can't think of any that fall into both categories ... am I just lacking imagination?
"I grew up maybe a 10 minute drive from TMI. You wouldn't believe the number of times I heard crap like that"... although with three ears I do hear more than most.
I'm not saying its invincible at all, I'm saying comparing PayPal and Bitcoin isn't appropriate considering they're very different.
Paypal regularly "freezes" peoples funds, and there is little legal recourse in those cases since Paypal cleverly has avoided making itself legally a bank in the US (even though it clearly preforms functions people usually receive from banks).
Have you worked those other fields? It's something I've thought about, trying to bring more automation to the wetlab world, but I'm not sure my advances would be greeted kindly.
I had a hard drive crash on me once, and I wasn't that worried about it, because I had setup network-based backup to the server in a different room. I remember thinking, "Restoring this backup will be sooo much easier if I can just connect it directly to the PC." Que me walking with the backup HDD towards the PC in question, when I drop it on the floor. When I plugged it in, it literally bounced inside of the chassis (platters fell off motor or something).
the absolute overhead is linear in the number of elements, sub-linear in the size of input
Air jordan shoes
Soccer Jersey, Replica Soccer Jersey, Cheap Soccer Jersey, Wholesale Soccer Jersey Supplier, all the products are sold nearly at its cost and free shipping. It is really a good chance for shopping. just grasp the opportunity, Now or never!
don't let Zed's online persona (they ZSFA type one) fool you. He's actually a brilliant coder, has done all the things that it sounds like he hasn't and is one of those who I think has actually given more to the community than the "community" has ever given him (I'm making reference to the phrase "give back to the community")

Sure, he has a fairly unapologetic and somewhat confrontational nature (much like DHH) that seem to irk people, but (also like DHH) his walk matches or exceeds his talk.
Wow, kind-of depressing (but I still love it).

Apparently I'm extremely average in every way. About 3 or 4 times in the last year I said something worth reading.

1% interesting, 99% average. Hum.
If I were Eric Schmidt, my plans would involve enjoying my many billions of dollars and private 767 and occasionally dropping into a Google board meeting to say "Good job Larry, keep it up".

They would so not involve moving to dreary old Washington DC to take up a thankless bureaucratic job in an administration that is as likely as not to be over in eighteen months.
Is it more of an ugly hack than forcing arbitrary sites to https based on a list that's partially hard-coded, partially user-specified, and partially added through an HSTS header in which case the entry also has a limited lifespan?

Ugly hacks to make the web even marginally more safe by encouraging or forcing use of https (in places it isn't explicitly specified) may be worthwhile. The thread's chrome hack alone reduces the usability of https, to the point of (I would guess) encouraging sites to use http and disable https so that visitors can actually see embedded content. Average web users know nothing of https, but if they happen across a site using https and embedded content doesn't show up, they'll blame the site. Certainly _that_ is not good. If this google hack is truly worth the pain, and even a small fraction of embedded content works with the uri changed from http to https, that's a benefit because it makes https more usable.

Would you think the same about simply changing the HSTS header so that sites could tell a browser to force loading all embedded http:// content through https://?

It seems to me like Google's long-term goal is to encourage tls everywhere. If all sites that have user accounts (thus logins) are using https, and all content embedded on those sites has to be referenced over https (or another secure protocol), that's probably the bulk of the web.

So the long term costs (in the far future) are an irrelevant cruft of a hack that ends up doing nothing because there are no http:// resource links anywhere. A hack which could, at that point, be removed with no impact whatsoever.
Done, good luck. Kind of like a personalized hotel experience? To be honest, I only care about price vs star rating. Might want to start with a very specific niche - like honeymoon packages and move from there.
Or like virtual Van Eck phreaking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
You sound hugely naive. How old are you? I would suggest not worry about the legalese for now, or even looking so far ahead.

Just start your project, try to get a few customers, and go from there. Those steps alone will take you far longer than you'd expect, and teach you more than you can learn in researching how to start a company. You don't need lawyers, you don't need T&Cs, you don't need to incorporate. Just build out your idea and get to market as fast as you can.
I've always thought that companies should have emphasized how perfect it is for college students.

Use cases:

-Torrent textbooks. Now you have all ten of your heavy
textbooks in one thin compact device. Also, they're now free.

-Sitting in lecture and the professor says something that you'd like to wikipedia. Why haul out a clunky, sleepy laptop when you can do it quickly on your tab. Also, you can read hacker news quite conveniently when the professor is 5 minutes late.

-Write notes. Also, there's got to be some app that let's you draw on your screen so you can record diagrams as well.

-Physically convenient. You can almost completely replace a full backpack with a one-handed 7-inch slab. It also plays music so you can turn on that rain ambience mp3 while you lay on the campus lawn reading any of the millions of ebooks that are now at your whimsical disposal.
Courts have found in the past that copying a game design closely enough is a violation of copyright (http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Atari_v._North_American_Philips) and they've also found the opposite (http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Data_East_USA_v._EPYX).

Also see this discussion on misc.misc, circa 1990, re: the Lotus 123 spreadsheet wars:

If the plaintiff cannot show that
the target customer audience is UNlikely to recognize that the defendant's
product is not the same as the plaintiff's then recovery is barred. Mere
similarity between plaintiff's and defendant's products is not sufficient
to support a successful lawsuit.

Zynga may have a case here if they can prove that there was intent to make users think these were Zynga's games.

(i am not a lawyer, i just cut-and-paste from USENET)
Debugging in Ruby - Ruby Rogues Podcast
No snarky tone here, 2 honest questions:

If you don't use an Android device as your primary device, how do you know it well enough to develop for it? How do you use your own app?
But the demand is a major confounding variable.
> ... being ... insured doesn't mean anything.

Uh... it means there's minimal risk that users will lose their money if PayPal gets compromised. That's pretty significant.
Electrolytic capacitors are capable of popping violently should they become internally shorted by excessive overvoltage or reverse bias. The aqueous electrolyte destabilizes and produces hydrogen, which builds up pressure inside the casing until it leaks or blows. Dramatic video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToWsF3HcQUU

I can vaguely imagine a charging circuit being designed to have what amounts to a current source rather than a voltage source, but I don't know enough in detail to confidently associate that idea with the story in question.
NSA allies with Internet carriers to thwart cyber attacks against defense firms
I built a simple zero-configuration FTP server that runs in a browser some time ago (http://ezyftpserver.com/). Been wondering if I should do the same with a HTTP server?
It's absolutely an ad hominem and a logical fallacy. The study itself is given. We can evaluate it without any knowledge whatsoever of the authors. The only time such a claim is not an ad hominem is when the target of the ad hominem is arguing from authority rather than from facts.

Not ad hominem: "I'm a godlike scientist and I'm certain X is true. Trust me." -> "No, he's a poopie head. Don't trust him."

In this case, the only reason we believe the speaker is because we believe him to be a godlike scientist. If he is not, we have little reason to believe him.

Ad hominem: "Here is a study. The methodology and data are available. It claims X." -> "Don't trust him, he's a poopie head."

In this case, the poopie-headed nature of the speaker is irrelevant. His methodology is either valid or invalid. The ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy in this case.
Indian e-commerce startup Flipkart raises $20M
Ask HN: How to celebrate my project's first anniversary?
A year ago next week, I started my project, a "learn something new every day" email newsletter.

The list has grown to over 5,000 people since, and (again) I'm celebrating one year next week. I'd like to do something to mark the occasion and do something cool for my readers. I really have no idea what, though. Any ideas?
I don't know about IE, but in Chrome you'd have to work at it to actually search for "facebook" rather than going to facebook.com.

Try it. Type "facebook". Heck, on most folks' machines you can just type "f". It'll auto-complete the URL. If you want to actually google for "facebook" you'll have to type "facebook " with a space.
>People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect.

That may be a bit exaggerated, but...

>People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

This is quite true. I'm involved a bit with a few circles outside the whole web-tech sphere, and it's quite different. Someone who understands the web and technology can create things that others cannot. Being involved in a certain field gives you knowledge and social contacts in the field. Put those together, and the business ideas you can come up with can be ones that can really change things.
but with autocomplete, would they be going directly to the URL? or would it complete a search first?

If you aren't sharing your browsing habits with Google or Microsoft, would this behavior show up?

Also, this won't show a 'change' in behavior over the last few months or a year because the address bar has acted as search for some time already.
Hardly 'false' - this is a generalisation of his point, not a contradiction.
Hi Eric,

Have you tried approaching Google to discuss it?
Facebook Seeks Failure by Challenging Apple’s App Store
If it is an investment then we need to look at ROI and determine the point at which this investment becomes cash flow positive from a net tax expenditure standpoint. Chinese, Korean, Indian, Russian, Persian immigrants are throwing off cash in generation 1 -- wait and see is not required. But 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanic immigrants have not achieved significantly greater economic success than the 1st generation.

If it is an investment then we do need to look at these bottom line metrics.
Ask HN: How long before we're profitable?
One mistake that I, and I suspect a lot of first-time entrepreneurs building SaaS businesses make is just HOW LONG it will take before we will make a profit. Not 'first revenue' but actual profit - enough so that you can stop burning savings or other people's money to pay yourself or your employees. This means successfully and repeatably finding potential customers, and getting them all the way down the line to 'paying customer', and enough of them (say 2000) to be actually paying you money.

I think most of us follow DHH or Tom Preston-Werner and convince ourselves that we can build a real business overnight while consulting/juggling on the side. While clearly this has worked for them, it seems to me now that stories like this are the exception not the rule. The rule is closer to a long, slow grind to eventual success that can take years.

Obviously "How long before we're profitable" is a very subjective question, especially when we're talking about an idea which is sufficiently novel that the size of the market (and therefore the cost of reaching it) is unknown. It's almost pointless to even guess in the early stages.

But at the same time, getting the figure right is the difference between success and failure for most startups. Having some good idea of your distance to profit informs if you need to raise cash, and how much, and from whom (and on what terms).

Rather than try and build complicated models to try and predict profitability on essentially unknown quantities, I would much rather just see more data points from existing companies to help make an informed decision. Frustratingly, this is the one thing that already successful entrepreneurs seems reluctant to talk about.

My actual question then is a bit simpler - who can provide examples of how long it took for a number of SaaS businesses - such as those that frequently come out of HN - to become profitable? What was their revenue at that point (eg. did they have 2 staff or 200), and most importantly how long did it take?

Share examples, if you have 'em, here.
You do know RIM is headquartered in Canada, right?
IBM's First 100 Years
Leave Nothing To Chance With Your Descriptive Essay
A descriptive essay is an interesting choice of essay to write. Out of all the different types of essays, this is the easiest. This is because it requires the writer to use his five senses and describe an event, a person or an object. However, taking great care when writing is recommended.
Here's some ways to fix this and why it won't be a problem:

- Add encryption of the wallet and a password to the Bitcoin client and daemon.
This is already being worked on and there is working prototype. It should be in the mainstream client very soon.
Wallet Private Key Encryption: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8728.0

- Start trusted centralized institutions that hold your Bitcoins and protect them (maybe even give you a bit of interest growth).
There are already numerous online eWallets that you can use—if you choose to keep your cash on your person then it's your decision and you should acknowledge the risks.
List of eWallets: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:EWallets
One does need to keep in mind the target audience, especially when targeting niches. If you doesn't have personal experience or a good advisor who does, it's possible to miss the mark culturally. Products that do that stand out as contrived, or simply puzzle those who were intended to use them.