skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MCI's Bill McGowan Proved That Telephony Competition is Good for Consumers
No plans to support untrusted languages as yet. Too many foot-guns built into that. You couldn't even believe some of the evil, insane things that we've done with that.

Trusted languages are far more likely. This one looks really, really cool: http://code.google.com/p/plv8js/wiki/PLV8
here's how I learned Python without noticing it:

(I had a background in PHP, JS, C++)
1. Off hours on 2-3 days with dive into python 3.
2. A month later - 'oh let's do this in python!' on google code jam
3. 'python challenge? that's cool' - one night hackathon a month later
4. 'I hate php, I'll do this new web app in django'
5. Two days messing with django
6. Five days and the app was done.

I don't know if I write 'best practice' python or django but it's about x6 less code than in PHP. I can rewrite my app completely in 2 days.

For me, the biggest problem in learning a new technology is finding the balance between cowboy hacking & analysis paralysis.
I wanted to apply just for the experience this season, but there's absolutely no way I could move to SF. I started filling out the app, but don't want to waste their time if there's no way I can attend.
Google had a service (6 or more years ago) that would search TV shows (that they were recording themselves) and provide back the transcripts and thumbnail images for any matches. I suspect this was used as training data.
Delivering version 1 is very different from delivering version 2, 3 4... That's when the real test of engineering is.
> Continental will be soon begin boarding by seat position: first window seats, then middle, then aisle

That's great news - next time I fly Continental, I'll be sure to be the last person in line, I love the aisle seat.

> In a forthcoming paper, Jason Steffen of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, argues that the fastest way to board a plane is to have passengers line up beforehand in a very specific order. In Steffen’s chart (at right), passengers who will be seated far apart board the plane around the same time

This assumes that people can follow these kinds of directions quickly and effectively, doesn't it?
That would be the problem then, that you haven't used CFML in a decade. I would cringe at using 2001 CFML too, just like I would cringe at using 2001 PHP. It's a whole different beast now.
VMware is going full speed in multiple directions
Particle physicist devises fastest way for airlines to board passengers
When the internet was just beginning to show up on the collective radar (ca 1997, let's say), most people saw it as an isolating, anti-social influence. You could order a pizza over the internet without ever speaking to another human being! (Except the driver, but that was a minor detail.) The internet was obviously the thin end of a wedge. Today AOL says "you've got mail," tomorrow we're all living in one-person bunkers underground, getting all the necessities of life from Amazon's delivery robots.

In 2001, I read a rebuttal by a former IT consultant in a contrarian magazine. People had the same worries about the telephone, she explained. But the urge to connect with other human beings had survived somehow, eking out a meager existence on the fringes of society. No amount of advanced technology would ever be able to kill it off completely.

If our social instincts can survive suburbs and the telephone, we'll probably find an excuse not to drift off into the ether.
your sites look great; best of luck to you!
Tucson Real Estate
There were no other males, born on october 8th 1990, in Lakeview, Chicago. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be frank.
Even if it's only 3 months? I know of a lot of people from NYC/elsewhere that fly in for three months then move back after YC finishes.
> Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels.

Sure they can - they did before the internet. (No, the postal mail is not secure.)

> Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jong-il?

Pretty much every "world leader" in the last 100 years (if not longer) has shown that s\he is willing to give up some economic development in return for control and other benefits. (They arguably give up more than they think that they're giving up, but that's a separate issue.) Disagree? Name three exceptions.

Besides, the effect on economic development in the short term will be almost unnoticable.
I seem to remember that, at the time, one of the partners was unnamed on the website. Was that you, or someone else?
Since Dropbox was valued at $4b, I'd love to see what Amazon Web Services is valued at
We've done a lot of tuning focused on web applications already, our experience is that mostly people with problems just need to add an index.

Performance depends on where you are querying from. We've found that if you are inside EC2 network overhead is typically <1ms.
Java + super-intelligent octopuses + underwater robots... what could go wrong?

(Sorry guys, couldn't resist.)
Most people do, but taking it as a calculated risk rather than ignorance or denial seems more honest. If you have no customers, and the worst case liability is not too bad, then a calculated risk is just that. Not something I would choose, but it is arguably rational in some cases...
These pictures are a testament to how much you can get done in six years of work. They're also a great reminder that YC was itself once a startup.
Does it work 99% of the time though?
I disagree with the spirit of this comment.
You don't need to ban all communication, to remove privacy in practice.

Crypto is currently usable in practice. Its a bit hard for many users, but its doable, especially with modern VPN implementations.
If any encrypted tunnel is allowed, you can put all your traffic through it, and no one knows whether you are surfing banned websites, or working on the corporate VPN.
And you can be pretty confident your modern crypto implementation isn't going to be broken.

But steganography isn't really usable, in practice.
If nothing else, the government can do traffic analysis, and see suspiciously large traffic volumes going to a small collection of servers (which are accepting the steg'd communication, and proxying your requests, presumably).

And even if the traffic looks like normal HTTP, with images in it, that's simply not good enough to use, in a regime where the secret police can arrest you if they suspect you are trying to hide your traffic content. And they will be able to find users, because eventually the servers accepting steg'd traffic, which the population are using, will become known.

So, while I think it'd be very hard to remove the ability to send small amounts of text data, from the Internet, I think it'd be possible to make private communication unworkable, in practice, for most people.

I don't see how this would be worked around, without building a massive distributed network of computers that all accepted and routed steg'd communication; something like if every webserver would accept, and onion-route, incoming steg'd traffic.

That doesn't exist, so I think their initiative will work, if they push it enough; hopefully rules like this remain isolated to relatively repressive regimes, and not gain widespread adoption; the widespread commercial use of encrypted communications is probably the best defence against global crypto bans.
Awesome piece. Having great cofounders is certainly ideal, but scrambling to find them unnaturally because you think you need them to satisfy a requirement is a bad idea. Most successful founders seem to find each other naturally and work together over and over. It's pretty hard to find people you genuinely like, respect, and want to work with.

In my experience the best way is to start alone and actively promote your work to others. Pretty soon people who are serious about working with you will present themselves.
A PR guy wrote this, what did you expect?
The current lowest Buy it Now price at Ebay is $230-240. That means that's the price at which people will buy them -- but not so much that people will snap them up instantly, or the price you could see them available at would by higher.

That suggests that they could probably move units pretty well at $199 -- it's below another psychological barrier from $230, and definitely still seems extremely affordable compared with the iPad or even the Asus Transformer.

I'm not sure if they had a reason for marking the units down to $99 (e.g. "we need to get these things off the books as soon as humanly possible to get a clean slate") or if they just made a huge mistake.
Yes, the Maritimes do get good service. I've also had luck in the plains as well; Telus claims that they have caps, but they are not enforced. Shaw has caps on some plans, but not on all of them.

I do find it curious that the most densely populated region is the one with the worst service.
Oh please. I'm not building anything that requires a credit card, or anything sophisticated. When you have literally just a hundred users, YES I will skip paying lots of attention on injection attacks because the chances of that happening is very low. To you techies, it sounds like a huge deal, but the priority in any business to make profit first.
IAMA Jon Finkel
List of HN members on Tumblr (work-in-progress)
I'd like to make this list definitive, so help me out with any details you can.
Actually, Postgres WAL support helps mitigate this reasonably well, and a well tuned application has something like a cache hit rate of >99% during normal operation.

That said, yes, EBS can have unstable performance. We monitor for several kinds of related problems and in the most dire of straights can perform a hardware migration to a quieter node which generally clears issues up.
The Creativity of Anger
Ah, good to know. I haven't got around to creating a Cedar-based app yet
I think the jury is still out on the Motorola deal. That is a lot of money just for patents. Even for Google's checkbook. And if Google intends to spin off the hardware business expect it to take an even bigger loss on its investment.

If Google+ stemmed defections to Facebook that is a good thing. But hopefully a lot more is in store than what Google+ delivered. It was not nearly enough to undo Facebook's market dominance.

Eric might have found another solution to the Motorola merger if he was heading the company. But who knows if it would have been better. He already passed on both Palm and Sun. Together they would still have been much less than Motorola and probably twice as useful.
What an amazing person.

If you haven't been to Bletchley Park to see Colossus (and the other fascinating things there) you have an absolute treat in store. Last time I went they were using it to decrypt German Naval codes from the 1940s - lights blinking and tape flying everywhere. Incredible.
More importantly, it has no effect on the vast majority of users who are not using Google DNS or OpenDNS.

This is a workaround for a specific problem with public DNS servers, and while it's not a bad one, we shouldn't pretend it's going to help everyone.
Lovely. Thanks for sharing them. :-)

I remember reading about YC as it started, hooked I was to paulgraham.com's essays. A link to "Beating the Averages" I forwarded by mail is what made a couple friends of mine who had just started a company decide to build sites with Zope and Plone instead of more mundane technologies. It had a deep impact on the Brazilian Python community.
Ok, I’ll pretend to be a VC. So you make a WebOS game/app. What kind of users do you expect to have? A whole bunch of cheapos who bought the tablet because it was $99. And how much do you think those people will pay for your app?

Next question. Word of mouth. If those people like your app, they’ll tell friends. Will those friends have WebOS tablets?

Let’s talk about the lifetime value of your code base. How long can we expect to make sales of your app? After we have saturated the market of existing Touchpads, will there ever be another piece of hardware running WebOS to sell to new customers who might buy your app?

=====

Right now, I’d say this is a cherry-picking exercise. If you can port an existing app to WebOS and make money on a short-term basis over and above your porting costs, fine. Otherwise... Android and iOS are the two front-runners with Windows-Phone-whatchamacallit a distant third.

IMHO.
Link building? Meh. Try building "Super-Links" instead.
How to Use Perlin Noise in Your Games
Ask HN: Looking for an easy and cheap-ish way to create t-shirts for my startup
Ideally there'd be a way for users to order online through the site directly rather than me having to buy a bulk of them and sell them myself. Any recommendations?
I have a couple of books I bought at library book sales years ago that are over 100 years old. I enjoy them more for their possible history than for the actual stories. The penciled-in notes, the owner's names before they were donated, the library stamps, etc. All these things give the books a sense of being "things" in their own right, with their own history, and that gives me pleasure.

Make sense?
The offer they mention:

We are grateful for your patience and loyalty and to show our gratitude, we are offering you an exclusive one-time opportunity to save an additional amount on all of our products, valid through the end of the day tomorrow, Wednesday, August 31, 2011. You'll save 25% off all printers, ink, HP accessories, and PCs starting at or above $599.

Not bad, if there's something specific you want.
Sorry, you do not understand the meaning of "first class". You mean "included in the standard library". First class is as in first class functions, ie you can assign them to variables.

And for a second I was excited by first class transactions.
Dammit! itllneverwork.com and itwillneverwork.com are both taken :-(
Show HN: groups.io
> Why did the OP take an entire blog post to say what could have been posted to Twitter ("you darn kids and your twittin'!")?

How many blog posts couldn't be boiled down into a twitter post? The fact that something can be transformed into a 140-character blurb for teenagers with short attention spans does not mean that it should be.

> The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance.

You whole comment really comes off as a bit short-sighted at best. The whole point was to share the way he gets stuff done. The fact that you do things a different way does not make his way wrong. Automatically assuming that your way is best is a sign of professional immaturity.
I don't find that number surprising. DOB along with zip is pretty good data.

What I'd find amusing would be how much of the population is uniquely identifiable by browser+plugins+os+resolution.
Exactly. The sort of people that are buying a Touchpad right now aren't the same type that will buy a $500 device and spend several hundred more on apps.

Heck, I'd like to buy a Touchpad at $99, but only because I'm interested in getting Android to run on it, which is probably the last thing HP wants.
i guess it depends how you look at it ... for $100m they are certainly going to get huge mileage for their Brands - its like marketing drive for HP, WebOS, WebOS App catalog etc. + they will make some money by selling apps. Also one has to remember that this brand value creation will help them fetch more $$$ when they decide to sell their h/w business and WebOS business (either the whole OS or licensing it) - All in all $100m is worth loosing (spending) :-)

In fact they should turn this accidental success into super-success by creating HUGE WebOS ecosystem for at least a year and then decide what to do with it - they can get more money by selling or licensing the whole ecosystem with millions and millions of users worldwide than wrapping things up pre-maturely ... also can you imagine how much they could make if they start streaming & selling music, movies, ebooks etc. thru their ecosystem ...
Silver Bullet JavaScript Library
Big Discounts on Infosec Training and Certifications
groups.io is a project I made in my free time to create permanent private group chat with an easy way to share files, links, albums.

I'd appreciate your feedback.
Not exactly. If you have the premium ($9.99/month) version you can enable 'offline' mode on playlists which will download them to your phone/computer/tablet and not use your network.
This is awesome. I love that its only a few pictures, with descriptions. The stories behind YC and all of its companies (and co-founders) are incredible.
I wish more people knew about FreshBooks' rewrite. They had horrible code. And they slowly morphed it into a php-python-ruby mix which is (from my dev friends there) pretty damn good now. It's ok to have a setup or tools that are fucked, but FB would never be able to hold onto developers or iterate quickly on their product if they hadn't sunk at least 9 man-years on the clean up. A million bucks for a slow rewrite is worth the price when it mitigates the risks of a failed from scratch rewrite.
Are you selling them or giving them away? If selling, do you intend to use that as a main source of revenue?

I'll assume that you want to have your customers buy shirts with your logo/brand with the least amount of bother for you. Also, I assume you don't intend to make serious money with the sales. In that case, it's best to use a site like cafepress.com (or a competitor) where you just upload the logo, and they'll take care of the rest.
You'll notice I didn't make a specific suggestion regarding technology. I merely suggested that what he is strongly advocating is archaic.
AnDOSid the DOS tool for Android ~ THN
The Local-global Flip, Or, "the Lanier Effect"
I find this really annoying. I already wasted too much time trying to get one in the first round. Now I am supposed to waste time again?

I actually considered setting up a web service for companies doing such a thing. I think the proper way would be to create a lottery where everybody could register in peace and there would be a couple of lucky winners.

A similar thing happened with sparkfun electronics when they offered shopping up to 100$ (or something) for free - except it was impossible to get the order form to load, resulting in lots of wasted time.

In the end I tend to be angry at the company for wasting my time. So companies, if you want to be generous, at least do it in the right way.
http://www.groups.io/chat/57

Hacker News group.

This is a pretty neat project. I can see a lot of design influence coming from FB, wise thinking, as users are afforded immediate interaction clues from an interface they're already familiar with. Well done!
The EFF has done some research on that question: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
I've worked with Kohana a lot and I really don't like it, besides how skinny it is (oh, and the H in HMVC). Weird thing is the best programmer I know recommended it to me.
The model could work like the console market. Sony and Microsoft both initially sold their core hardware at a loss with the hope of making up the difference in game license fees and big margins on peripherals.

However, it'd be a pretty tall order to get $200+ dollars per person out the HP App Store especially when Apple has pushed the expected price down to $1 for most apps. Also, with a device price so low I'd have to think you're already targeting the cheapskate market to begin with, so there is no reason to think these particular customers would be willing to buy tons of apps.

Clearly you'd prefer to be Nintendo and sell the hardware for a profit while also collecting generous license fees.
Not yet - we do have a web site: http://www.globalenergyinitiatives.com

As we are in the midst of funding talks, we don't have much public info to share on a blog right now. Once we close on funding, I intend to increase our social communications.
Selling (I'm also planning on giving some away but I figured I'd just buy those myself and hand them out), but no, not a main source of revenue. So yes, your assumption is correct.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check them out!
People Are Sick of Daily Deals Sites
AVG Removal Tool
No. ChromeOS is actually Gentoo Linux (surprise! Didn't you know?) and it uses a relatively standard method of grabbing DNS nameservers from DHCP.

You can't even change this without mucking around in the internal read-only filesystem. You can certainly assign new DNS nameservers after you've DHCP'd, but in that case, why not pick faster DNS servers than Google's?
You can't set spotify itself to offline except on the phone app. You can however set a specific playlist to offline mode which will 'sync' the music to your HDD and plays it from there.

[edit]: BTW, you can do this on all devices.
Why would nurses, who have been given the phones in the first place (and do the billing) not be able to run 24/7 GPS on their own phones? Also, it wouldn't even have to be 24/7, if they work from 9-5 then its only during those hours.

Also, why would this be a no-no? How do you think map applications work? And 'local recommendations' apps?

EDIT: Add link to Apple / Google tracking GPS on phones
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/google-apple-track-users-lo...
sensationalist (headline, article, author, etc.).
So, where in Cambridge was the original YC office?
Thanks. The FB design influence was intentional because of the reason you mentioned. The groups are private for now I am planning to make that optional.
That's what makes it so paradoxical!
Forgive me my ignorance, but why is it such a disadvantage having a single founder? Think about it: if the founder is a Jack of all trades, gets the product out and hires specialized staff when the startup gets revenue, why would he need a cofounder?
Yes, many governments (including the US) are setting up funds to support renewable energy projects. However, we are finding more support from developing nations, who are not as entrenched in fossil fuels as the US.
Putting it to a non-scientific test, where I grew up is within the zip code of 98632. From the 2000 census there are 47,202 within that zip code. This is probably a good average city for America - not too big, not too small. Based on the fact that there are 366 possible (year excluded) birthdays (I'm including Feb. 29th) and only two genders, just about the best I can do for uniquely identifying people in that county is 1 in 64. Add in the year and what I would assume is an even population between the ages of 1 to 50 and that gets you closer to 1:1. Not bad.

A zip code with large populations probably are more around 50% than 87%, and obviously the reverse is true as well. I wonder what the population size for a zip code would have to be to be really close to 100%. Just throwing some numbers in a calculator I'd guess at 15-20k people would be damn close. So 10k is probably just about a unique identifier.
Panopticlick (EFF) tests browser uniqueness. https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Edit: Beaten like a dead horse.