skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Community Elf
Community Elf (www.communityelf.com) was founded by Jon Pastor and Geng Wang in late 2010 as a way to bring business to a wider online audience through social media marketing. Community Elf creates and customizes Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger marketing campaigns, and seeks to bridge the gap between traditional marketing firms and businesses focused on rapid expansion. Community Elf is based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and serves auto dealers, property managers, and growing business throughout the United States.
I can think of a few drawbacks:

- Extremely commoditized, people shop around for hosting providers based on price and included features, so you better have a good offering

- Your service must be top notch and you need to be available to fix things pretty much instantly

- Reliability when reselling services is not in your control, so... good luck with that

Best of luck!
Andy Tannenbaum presents Minix 3 (video talk)
I had issues with the Posterous API (though I shelved that work a while back):

* The basic authorization didn't follow spec. Some frameworks handled this well (Perl's LWP::UserAgent), while others didn't (Python's urllib2 and httplib2). Apparently you're supposed to try the page w/o auth, get a 401 response back, then send the auth credentials, but Posterous' API was not doing this.

* Once you have an auth token, the API wouldn't allow me to authorize with it. I ended up sending basic auth for each API call for non-public calls.

* Some of the API calls would return 500 errors (namely the subscription related ones).

Granted this was prior to them releasing their snazzy new interactive API test page. I haven't gone back to touch that project since then, though I imagine that issues like this are common to a lot of APIs. How many of them are found and patched depends on how many developers are using the API and how responsive the API dev team is.
This is correct -- I have no idea where I got 20% from.
I hope the world runs out of ideas for social networks soon.
I'm the first to notice (or care)... "HIV virus"? Department of Redundancy Department?
Yet another person that doesn't find value in something and thus thinks it should have no value for anyone else, either. -sigh-
Heello is Twitter for Pretending
I really like using 1password. I have a long passphrase as my unlock key, easy to remember, then do the randomly generated codes as long as is feasible for each different service.

1) Nothing written down
2) Unique per service
3) Adjustable difficulty & char set per service, to match their stupid requirements.

Seems like the best of several worlds.
Ask HN: What are your thoughts of a Perl-based startup?
I have been offered to join a Perl-based startup as Product Manager. As far as I know, Perl is no longer very popular, especially in startup circles. My issue would be the future hiring of good developers... would it make it harder to attract them?

Also, if I do take on this position I might have the possibility of switching to a different language, transitioning slowly over time. Python would be my first choice for a number of reasons. What are the best arguments in favor of python over perl?

- throwaway account
That's not the point. The attack relies on some nonconforming decoders exhibiting a many-to-one mapping of bitstreams to codepoints, changing the semantics of the bistream.
FastSpring here. What's the problem?
Yes, I hopped in my time machine and read xilun0's comment 13 minutes before he actually posted it.
tl;dr - No update.

WHY? Why post this?
It's a lot easier to piggy back on the success of actual innovative startups.

"hipmunk for car insurance", "heroku for mobile apps", "etherpad reborn"...
Doesn't the library just have to perform a simple search-and-replace on the entire page's HTML for the blacklisted characters to remove them?

Normally blacklisting is bad, but we're only targeting the few text-direction-changing characters that exist.
Nanode - ATMega with Ethernet built in for $40
I think you misunderstood -- it's not a goal but a measurement.

The actual statement, if you read the original source[1], is

>Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less.

[1] http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/09/firefox-7-is-...
More comments here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873604
> Ending the war will cut onto spending but what are you going to do with all the soldiers out of a job.

The money that you save by not having a military, can go to buying other goods that those ex-soldiers can provide.
Just call them drug monopoly certs or something.
Wasn't UPenn banned from receiving federal funding for gene therapy research after the whole Jesse Gelsinger controversy in the late 90s? How did they receive funding for this?

Also, 3 patients isn't statistically significant. Having this in the national media is going to cause mass confusion in the general public. There needs to be many more studies on this therapy before it's actually used as a treatment.
The link to the actual list: http://arunshroff.com/2011/08/10/8-reasons-why-google-will-b...
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Viral_vector

This idea has been around a hell of a lot longer than 10 years. Looks like you were late to the party. There also isn't a particular need to use HIV to do this in the general case either, the purpose of virii in general is to inject DNA into existing organisms.
My head aches and my mind boggles. I don't know what the heck the patent text actually describes but I see vague visions of linked lists, skip lists, and graphs. I can't imagine what it would say to an USPTO officer or a judge.
As a bit of a speed writer myself (it takes me ~12 minutes to produce 800 words of thought-flow and about 30 minutes to produce a proper 500-600 word blogpost) the main advantage of speed writing I see is just vomiting out content onto the page. It produces a sort of flow that people find easy to read and I don't get stuck in the details too quickly.

Then, after the speed writing is done, if the result is to be published, I usually spend another 30 minutes poring over every word and polishing it up.

The result is something people find reasonably pleasurable to read and I don't agonize over for hours wasting time.
Thats how I can remember 25 character passwords with symbols and mixed case. I am not thinking "43#gj(eO3%". I'm thinking "4-4-shift3-g-j-shift9-e-shifto-3-shift5". So basically you have about 47 keys with nice characters and they each have two of them.

Just use a random password generator with those 47 characters and type it 25 times into a notepad to pound it into your muscle memory. (and if you're paranoid, clean up your memory and swap file)

For the ones you don't use every few weeks, keep them in a password database like KeePass with 2 factor authentication and keep the key file on a thumb drive on your keychain.
that's a pretty good analysis, nice work
After I saw the pie chart, I am wondering the proportion in the chart corresponds to usages of APIs.

So in fact, it is not Facebook API is the worst API but it is most widely used API. And this also shows how much power Facebook has now due to its tremendous data relevant to an internet users.
IMO the real moral is any information that is repeated on the public web can be linked.

The fact that images are used here is pretty much irrelevant, the same process holds true for reusing the same textual name or 'handle' or even reusing the same set of small bits of information of sufficient uniqueness to "fingerprint" you (say, 'list of favorite movies plus zip code' or whatever).
Airbnb allows users to remove their public listings/profiles from search engines. Under profile, go to the Privacy tab: http://cl.ly/452M0b0V1c2w0F1p1Z1i
Thanks for that.

Can you compare it to any other chairs? Most of us (myself included, with the Aeron) love their first ergo-chair, making it hard to compare them. :-)
Sorry, but Linked List is class of similar things -- Single-, Double-, Multiple-linkings are all part of the Linked List genre. Just because you associate Linked List strongest with the singly-linked list does not mean that other forms of the same thing, all of which qualify as linked list, can't be called it as well. You are just being disingenuous -- stop it, that is not cool.
- higher productivity
- better ecosystem
- more talent available
- code doesn't make people vomit
According to the New England Journal of Medicine article, those white blood cells are still targeting and killing the B-cells. From my (non-biologist) reading of the article, they crafted a virus which targeted all B-cell, of which, some were lukemia. Apparently there are treatments to restore B-cells in a person, so the article seemed to imply once the T-cell count (the "serial killer" white blood cells) went down, they would treat him to restore his normal B-cell count.

Like you, I'm unclear on what exactly the side-effects are here. If they boost the B-cell count in the patient, do they risk re-introducing lukemia? Are these "serial killer" white blood cells a general immunosupressant? There was a part of the article about a developed resistance in the B-cells that I didn't understand.

Either way pretty amazing, and it sounds like while the patient had the worst flu of his life for five days, it's way better than chemo
Why did this not work - Bezos and O'Reilly Patent Reform (2000)
That may be true, but we still end up better off. The compute time for the password cracker has gone up quite a bit, making it a more expensive endeavor (they've got to build dictionaries for both WKP's and passwords with fuzzing). It doesn't solve the problem, but it's a start in the right direction (away from fuzzing of dictionary words, which is clearly bad for human memory, and good for password crackers efficiency).

However, when using randomly chosen dictionary words to build phrases (not well known), the entropy shoots well above the level of being reasonable to crack in a lifetime.
No. You're exactly correct. Wrote a comment, directly related, on Google+ the other day in this thread: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/LHVVz5e3...

Here it is (can't figure out how to link directly to a comment):

--------------------------------------------------------------

I sort of blame this on shoddy journalism. There is actually broad bi-partisan consensus from economists and business on what policy steps need to be taken.

There is an important ratio that is largely being ignored:

Debt-to-GDP

~ This is a fundamental measurement for determining credit risk.

~ Economists agree this ratio will grow too high in the future.

~ Economists agree we must spark GDP growth in the present.

~ There are two ways to improve this ratio:

(i) Shrink the debt (cut spending &/or raise taxes)

(ii) Grow GDP (invest in economy &/or cut redtape for business)

Both long and short-term concerns can be addressed by investing & tax breaks now, and legislating cuts & revenue for later. The question is how these should be balanced, but they will all help.

Planet Money probably does a better job of explaining sovereign debt to GDP ratios in this recent podcast: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/20/138518262/the-tues...
Good point, here are some market share % along with absolute numbers:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/11/apples_ios_and...

Calculating from that, Microsoft has plummeted from 3,041M units to 1,724M units. In other words, Microsoft is now shipping almost half the number of phones it was shipping last year.

That's much worse than I had imagined.

Another datapoint, Bada has doubled in marketshare and now exceeds that of Microsoft.
Facebook: We’re Not Giving Out Your Number
I came here to say the same thing...Is this a social network for business reviews? Because that's all I'm getting from this title and that doesn't sound very enticing to me.
Thanks for the info. I added my npm module (https://github.com/srveit/mechanize-js) to Travis
Actually the Facebook API has been pretty impressive functionality-wise, over the years. At the initial launch in '07 I remember being blown away by how much you could do with it (FQL, FBML, etc). It was an order of magnitude more impressive than any web API at the time.

The big problem has always been stability as they have continuously developed it and deprecated and removed things at a breakneck pace. The documentation never kept up, and there was a lot of breakage along the way.

I still think this was the right decision for Facebook at the time. They had a lot of growth to do, and were plowing into new territory. It was more important to grow quickly and push greenfield developers in the right direction than to satisfy the long-time developers who were always smaller in number than the incoming batch.

Now, however, Facebook has hit an inflection point in growth, and I think they need to adjust their culture to serve developers and existing users better. I believe Facebook has found the core of what it is, and should now be building new functionality around that core and stabilizing it in order to maximize lock-in rather than breaking shit all the time and just asking people to migrate over the greener pastures. Of course that's just my frustrated developer perspective, it's probably not in Facebook's let alone Zuckerberg's DNA.
I don't think it's the same at all.

I think one of the advantages that Apple has over every other platform is that designers use Apple for work which builds brand loyalty to its products and platform. Thus, a good portion of the people who are creating will do so for the platform that they care about, especially one that prioritizes industrial and interactive design. And before, I would've just suggested it's just designers but over the past few years years, I've witnessed plenty of SF/NY developers who use Apple computers and iPhones for the same reasons.

The fact that it is a closed-system IS it's advantage: there is quality control across the board from the apps to the phone the user is viewing it on. And quite frankly, I prefer designing for the iPhone and iPad because of the consistency of sizing and proportions.

But there doesn't need to be a clear winner. It's great that there is a choice for people who just want complete freedom and those who just want stuff to work well in a very polished fashion.
Settlements might make it easier to bully others later, but they do not provide legal precedent. Only an actual court ruling does that. And as senior/superior a court as possible.
"closed systems/walled gardens and proprietary stuff will always lose out against open systems that does not restrict users and developers."

Do you have evidence for that?
very helpful! thanks mate.
You should be able to use graphical tabs over ssh with either X11 forwarding (ssh -X user@host) or by using vim's remote file syntax: gvim sftp://user@host/path/to/file (see :help netrw)
Experience The Exotic India Before You Have Kids
I'm in the same camp, more or less. I can speed write well. Sometimes even very well. At the same time, I'm under no illusion that I'm churning out Shakespeare when I speed write. And I think it's important to keep that in mind, so that I later go back and place almost as much emphasis on the editing as I did on the initial "burst."

Also, I find myself doing a lot of in-situ editing, as the article suggests. But rarely have I found that it's fully sufficient for work I really care about. And therein lies the rub: for 99% of my daily writing, the burst method works near-flawlessly. But for anything that I want to stand the test of time, a.k.a. publishable fiction or academic work, I will give the revision its fair course (and then some).
Yes, especially when there is no actual court case.

Let's talk again once the owner of the patent successfully sues over it, making millions in the process.

Never going to happen.

Software patents are not the problem, patent trolls are.
This should be higher up. It's scary to see people — intelligent people, I'm sure — saying things like "And that goes even higher when you add punctuation!"

No, it doesn't. All of the reasonable punctuation you could add to a sentence adds only a few bits of entropy at best. It also makes the sentence harder to remember— was there a comma or not? Adding unreasonable punctuation or symbols is even worse— you get slightly more entropy at the cost of a password that is way harder to remember.

The crucial point here is that four random words, separated by spaces, selected at random only from the 2000 most common English words — EVEN IF your attacker knows that your password is four random English words from the 2000 most common separated by spaces — already is a very long random string. If it's not random, each common English word you add adds 11 bits, and is only marginally harder for most English speakers to remember. Conversely, choosing "random" extra characters to add in makes it slightly longer, very slightly more random, and way, way harder to remember.
A few days ago, all our Graph API calls used to return errors. The error wasn't very verbose. It was a JSON object saying "Something was wrong". After pulling our hairs for some time, we realized that they removed the trailing slashes from the URLs. They are back with both forms(with and without trailing slash) now. But, it really wasted a lot of time because the error wasn't clear and the code needed changes.
Funny you mention it, Israel is going through some serious protests right now about the ridiculous living costs [1].

This thread is too small to encompass the entire debate, but basically taxes, social security, mandatory health insurance and employee participation in 401k equivalents end up chewing away about 40-45% of said salaries.

Living in Tel Aviv is roughly 70% the cost of living in NYC (measured by rent prices). And remember that we make much less than NYers. Living in Haifa, for example, is practically impossible if you want to commute to Tel Aviv. Public transportation is horrible in Israel.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_housing_protests_in_Israel
Cable customers dropping at record pace. See you soon, Dr. Death?
Memory is cheap. High UI latency and cross-browser crashes aren't. Sorry.
Ask HN: Coffee in Boulder, CO
Hello! I'm in Boulder until the 19th and would love to meet some people in the tech scene here. I just quit my job at NASA (working with Satelite Laser Ranging) to move west and work at a start up. Email is in profile if you'd like to grab coffee!
Always assume the attacker knows your scheme, but not your random bits.
I haven't studied the details of the vector they used, but as a general comment HIV is a very well-understood virus, so removing its potential to infect a human should be easy to do in theory. Practice is another matter, since molecular biology is quite messy.
Ask HN: Review my startup
Map Reduce Graphical Interface for easy Hadoop development. Watch the demo: www.strax-data.com/demo
I still have pages of fiction at home that have more red than black on them (I really like editing by hand when I want something to read really well). Unfortunately the red is very discouraging and that novel will likely never make it past the first two chapters.
The implication of what the change in the "from" affordance meant to the user.

When we switched from "no-reply" to an actual address (help@artistdomain.com), and we couldn't respond, people got angry.
Like GPS System? The acronym takes on a life of it's own as a 'word'.
i talked to a guy at google who said python was worse than perl because "everybody knows perl code is an unmaintainbe mess. python gives the illusion of being better, but in practice it's just as bad."
Thanks. By the way, $(seq 4) is enough.
I am not ready for Bing as the Default Search Engine on Firefox
Finally I got around to figuring out where they opted me in to receive these weekly digests that started showing up last month.
The problem is that this phenomenon (funding research where you know there is a good probability it will work before you even start) is not limited to medical research, it can be found even in fields where there are no commercial interests involved.

Opinions differ as to why that is - I personally suspect the grants system that is used for funding science.
Well, well, well. I am gonna to patent data structures:
"Comprising but not limited to: the said node or nodes, containing one or more information items, equipped with one or more pointers, the said pointers pointing to the said nodes...blah blah blah"
and I will OWN all your asses. Buuaaahahahahaha!
It is the title of the patent located on the upper left in google patent. If you search for linked list patent it comes up on patent storm. This does not seem to be a case of deception.

Can you provide other examples of the "anti-patent crowd" being deceptive with their examples?
Great post! I have my whole team reading it.
The Architecture of Disaster
Introduction to Economic Analysis.R.Preston Mcafee
The comparison doesn't include examples using Amazon's reserve instances - which offer a nice savings.
I went to the first startup school in Cambridge with my then girlfriend (now wife!). Flew to NYC for cheap tickets and took the chinatown bus to Boston. I was already working at a cool startup then but it started me along a path of several iterations of trial & error which led to RideCell. Now I am on my third year leading a fast growing, cash flow positive company that makes a real difference.

Had some great discussions with edw519 about pawn shops, with tlb about remote receptionists, with Scoble, some guys from loopt, and one of the Lockitron founders in 2010.

Startup school gives me a boost every time I attend. Hope to do so again this year.
Some people run other apps alongside Firefox and some of those apps also want to provide low UI latency.
Realize that you can't compete on price. There are thousands of bargain hosting companies that spring up every day offering $3-$10 hosting and unlimited storage/bandwidth/domains. Of course, many of these go out of business, or kick out customers who actually get a fair amount of traffic. You have to approach from a different angle.

Look at wpengine.com. They are targeting the WordPress blogger who has outgrown shared hosting but doesn't want to get into the server admin business. For $50/month, they handle caching, scaling, database replication, backups, CDN, and staging.

Your best bet would be to offer better service and scalability at a higher price point. There is a big market out there for site owners who are in between shared hosting and running their own server. Just because I get 100,000-300,000 unique visitors a month doesn't mean I know my way around a Unix command line. That's also the market that can afford to pay $50 a month for hosting.

WordPress/Joomla/Drupal are good targets, because if your customers are running on shared hosting, they are likely putting stress on their overloaded servers, and seeing outages/slowdown/threatening messages from the hosting company. You can give them a huge performance boost simply by moving their database to a separate machine.

The next step is to put a basic cache in front of the app server (Varnish, Squid, nginx). Watch your server load drop when logged-out, anonymous users hit the cache instead of an overloaded Apache machine pulling double duty as a MySQL box.

With Apache on its own machine, look into an opcode cache, and you can also offload static file serving to a CDN. You can do this easily by giving your customers a static path to change in their code (e.g. cdn.yourhostingdomain.com). You can cname this to Amazon CloudFront or MaxCDN, and then set the origin to a dedicated static file server (running nginx, or Varnish+Apache). Store the source files on Amazon S3.

You could run this whole setup with a handful of servers on Amazon or RackSpace, Linode, etc. for a few hundred $'s a month, and handle a few hundred to a few thousand clients
paying $30-50 a month for a nice profit.

...until your cloud provider has a big outage...
If you are ok with bad software patents but not patent trolls what is your solution for limiting them?
States Copy Silicon Valley's Job Engine
Motorola plans to collect patent royalties from Android competitors