skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This. Files and folders are not an optimal paradigm for this stuff. Partly because even real files/folders are not a "civilian" thing, especially now. Plus, there's typically just one level of folder nesting in the real world.

The actual user story is always: find what I'm looking for. Google got it right with GMail and informal searching - screw manual organization. Power users should be able to set up structures, but typical computer folks don't need that.
TF2 public games turned into constant trade for goddamn hats and metal.
The irony here is, if you want "web of trust", you already have it; just remove all the certs from your browser and trust sites selectively.
1) 2 days with Lion and ten years of Apple fanboys whinging in my ear like angry wasps.

2) Just about everything from the awful toolbar icons (the labels are turned off by default on my MacBook) to the fact that it makes an awful mess of the messages and it's impossible to stick an image attachment in it without it trying to rape you in the eye socket with iPhoto.
Thanks Michael. It is definitely going to be a long journey and we will learn and improve over. This is only the beginning :)
Building and maintaining trust is probably your biggest issue when focusing on businesses.
Cleverbot vs. Cleverbot. Two chatbots talking to each other.
I'd really like to see this happen, and have cell phone providers start going towards the direction of cable companies slowly losing monopoly over their content.

Unfortunately, it will be quite some time before several major hurdles are removed before carriers are out of the picture:

* Infrastructure. You would need a major WiMax installation covering your city. I'm lucky if I find a reliable hotspot now at Startbucks.

* 911 access. It will be some time before WiFi is reliable enough to handle all 911 calls.

* Standard messaging/SMS platform. Most non-carrier messaging methods need the same platform running on both ends (BBM, iMessenger, WhatsApp, etc.). While it's overpriced per MB, but does work pretty much everywhere.

Unless law forbids it, carriers will get creative and
charge extra for these essential services to keep their bottom line going (i.e. AT&T $2 forced long distance fee).
people who aren't expert users deserve security too. And they deserve functionality.

Well, SSL certainly isn't giving serious security in the "My ISP has been intruded" attack model.

You can't have both security and ignorance. If you really want to be secure, you're going to have to learn how to be secure, and then to know how to implement it.
Well, that's at least 2.8741 × 10^(-8) percent of users!
So you don't like the way SSL/TLS is configured in your browser and therefore we should throw out 15+ years of intense study for whatever flavor-of-the-month protocol is most popular when everyone agrees with you?

How about instead of "SSL sucks!", you propose things that will (from your vantage point) improve SSL/TLS? What, so you don't like that Mozilla gets to dictate what all the trust roots are? Neither do I. But that is not one of the worlds great compute or UX problems to solve. Propose a solution.

It's a virulent misconception that the SSL/TLS security model depends on Verisign and Thawte. The only place in the whole model we have that dependency is your browser's configuration and that stupid dialog it shows when a cert doesn't check out. You can replace just those two parts and get virtually any other trust model you want.
Is it possible to increase the range of the circle determining my location to an entire city (or even more)? Great idea.

EDIT: by range of the circle I mean radius/diameter.
FWIW, I've had jobs in e-discovery/computer forensics where I was something very close to a "professional file-doing-stuff-with-er". I was a heavy power user of Explorer, along with cmd, powershell, cygwin, in-house tools, third-party tools, third-party Explorer add-ins, etc.

I think if I still had that kind of job now I wouldn't care much about the command/menu bars vs. the ribbon - the former were pretty useless, so at least there's not a lot to lose - but I'd be very happy to see them implementing drag-and-drop from/to the breadcrumb bar.
Maybe I was unclear in my earlier comment. The best way of implementing file handling is likely some full full-featured filesystem under the hood. My point is that this can be abstracted away to something more user friendly than a tree containing hundreds or thousands of folders and files. Transfer off a device obviously needs to be considered, but exposing a device (e.g a USB drive) as a hierarchical filesystem is usually unneccessary (and, IMO, counter productive from a usability standpoint).
+1 - fun is the best reason to make something better, faster or stronger.
What does a website cost?
What are the implications of this? It is potentially unsecured to visit gmail.com from anywhere? Is this web-interface only, or is IMAP/POP access also vulnerable?
Under such conditions it is obviously unsafe to trust any private communications on the open internet (including sites that use SSL to encrypt data on the wire). You should ONLY use systems that ensure your content is encrypted for a key that YOU (not your browser) explicitly trust. This means using GnuPG and exchanging keys in a reliable offline medium with anyone with whom you want to communicate, basically.

Alternatively, you can use i2p and i2p outproxies, but i2p may be vulnerable to similar poisoning attacks if the government had an interest in perpetrating them. That said, it's probably much safer to use an i2p outproxy for your browsing anyway, and definitely much safer to use eepsites.
have you ever considered this one person hates you, sorta leaving gender out of it all together?

You are not prominent on the internet, get over yourself and call the police like a normal person.
I'm confused about how this was detected. The original report provided this screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/hs0H4.jpg

If it is a case of a root CA signing a cert for someone else, this shouldn't have actually produced an error. What did the MITMers screw up here?
How to unsell what you have sold during validation in Customer Development
Some background:
A lot of startups follow some kind of Customer Development model or similar, where the idea is to iteratively
1. modify the product
2. try to sell it (validate it)
until the business model seems to work. Often it does not make sense to build a full version of the product during each iteration and sometimes even a power point presentation is enough, showing what could be built.<p>When you try to validate, you probably want more than one customer to buy. But what should you do if too few buy during each pivot/iteration. If you have signed the contracts with those who bought during previous pivots, you still need to deliver. Having a lot of custom solutions to build at the same time as the real product will easily take up all resources.<p>What do others do? Is it possible to somehow unsell what you have sold, or try to convince the old customers to take the real version instead, or is this just a risk that every entrepreneur has to live with?<p>Thanks for your help.
As I understand it, SSL (or TLS more properly) is fine, it's the HTTPS system and it's trust model that are broken.

</pedantic>
Thanks! I know that IV buys patents up and then doles them out to litigation-only spinoffs, but I didn't know how far down the line Webvention was.
I'm going to assume a couple of things while answering. Feel free to point out which of them is unwarranted.

1. You won't write the code (ref. hiring developers)

2. Webapp software, not desktop

3. You have time or developer constraints (basic economic choices to make)

If the industry does not need "innovation" that does not mean that the software itself will not be fairly complex. For example, a simple undo feature can be a complex thing to implement, regardless of how fossilized the industry the software is being written for is. Building software that scales, and especially software that contains lots of social linkages is a complex problem.

Risks are ever-present and must be balanced. You should consider:

A) Time to write the software

B) Hiring new developers

C) Buyout risk

D) Platform risk

E) Social risk.

IMHO, and speaking as a Clojure developer in a startup that uses it almost exclusively:

A) Platform risk is negligible. As someone who has done plenty of Common Lisp programming, I can confidently assert that the Clojure platform is way more accessible, and moving faster. It's the JVM after all.

B) Hiring: plenty of new blood. Apparently at ITA, it was quite easy to onboard newbies to Common Lisp. IMHO Clojure is easier. It even has fewer parens than idiomatic, equivalent Java.

C) Time: I believe time is highly correlated with LOC. Clojure clocks in with the lowest LOC, most elegant solutions I have yet seen. Haskell is no doubt similar, though it's sweet spot / domain is likely different.

D) Buyout risk: I believe perceptions will change. Several large companies are now Scala shops. They're like the early adopters who bought into 8088 PCs. The Mac-like era of Clojure is yet to come. We've already seen one or two buyouts of Clojure shops.

E) Social risk: lots and lots of new libraries, access to all the old java libraries. Almost no risk here, imho.

Now, a lot of your risks may actually fall into the class of "good problems to have". While I cannot speak to Haskell or other languages as much, my feeling is that Clojure is a better bet in comparison.

Of course, if the use of niche languages is not your choice, you should ask your developers why they want to use it. They should be able to explain their reasoning.

Also, at least in the webapp domain, a lot of complexity arises from the interplay between webservers, javascript, backend code, hosting providers etc. Clojure has a lot of nice features here which help, but it's rather more the interplay which contains the complexity. IOW, this aspect of complexity is outside the domain of the backend language. Clojure has a secret weapon here too, clojurescript, but its implications are not yet well understood. It has a lot of potential though.

hth, and btw, if this is my boss trolling me, well, /me starts scheme-ing
I've owned 4 SSD's: 2 Intels and 2 OCZ's.

The first OCZ was a Vertex 2 180GB and failed after 1 month. I got it RMA'd and received my second Vertex 2. That one failed after 2.5 months.

Both intels are still running strong. I'm also surprised to see the OCZ's so strongly recommended. The RMA process sucked both times and the second time is working out to be a refund. I haven't received the refund yet, but at least there is a process.
So build one. Your preference actually has very little to do with the X509 CA architecture. Today we have a complex little forest of fiat CAs. No part of the TLS architecture prevents you from replacing that with an even more complex and more full-featured web of smaller CAs.

I'm not being sarcastic. Your decentralized reputation scheme could very well be better than our severely compromised system of central CAs.
Limit the need for Explorer/Finder/etc. altogether. For those cases where it is needed limit top level UI elements to the most commonly used items. Move the rest to either a toolbar or a contextual menu.

You know, I just checked Finder and realized that not only does it not have the things showed in this mockup, but that I have never missed them.

Strange.
From my experience of entering YC as a single founder, you need to find a key and simple differentiator that separates you from all of the co-founded companies applying. It should be super clear and concise why you are going to succeed when other's aren't. Statistically, single founder companies fail a hell of a lot more than co-founded companies, you need to give them a reason to take a chance on you.

Also, don't place too much importance on the idea, they know you'll figure it out eventually.
My wife and I split the cost of an iPad last month, and we absolutely love it. There are a few things that really make me shake my head in frustration, but whatever, no product is perfect.

And last week I managed to score 2 32gb touchpads at the $150 price -- with the thought that we'll play with one for a week or so and see if it fits in our family. If not, we'll give both away at Christmas.

The touchpad just made me love my iPad2 more. It's nice enough, and will be a great gift for my mom and her dad, but it doesn't hold-up to the iPad2.

All that being said -- I sorta think of my primary computer as an oven to my iPads toaster-oven. The iPad can do a lot of the same things, and several things it can do far better than my oven and far easier.

And apple doesn't even want me to replace my oven -- they're producing toaster ovens by design.

What that means to me is that there's a lot of design decisions that work on a toaster oven that just don't make sense on an oven.

:) Now please forgive a somewhat clunky analogy.
Don't you think that some people would be hesitant to join a startup as a cofounder with a product already in development?
In Iran Fraudulent Google certificate points to Internet attack
the cert patrol add-on for firefox can be configured to behave that way:

http://patrol.psyced.org/

normally it just shows you a horizontal bar alerting you when a host's ssl certificate changes, and whether it thinks it was for a good reason like the old cert being near its expiration date.

annoyingly, google has a number of different ssl certificates installed on different servers/load balancers (some wildcard, some not, some signed by different CAs, some signed by google's root) so nearly every time i would use a google service, the add-on would be throwing warnings at me that must be manually clicked to be dismissed. eventually i gave up and stopped using the add-on.
http://www.diginotar.nl/Aanvragen/Lopendeprojecten/DigiDMach... They have this listed as an active project, so they are definitely involved. Could still be on a different CA though. And of course _if_ they were hacked.
Wonder why they didn't put such a button there in the first place?
The consensus seems to be that Iran is poisoning intra-country connections to attach this certificate to gmail.com instead of the real certificate, so this would only be occurring where Iran controlled the network infrastructure. Since the certificate is signed by a trusted CA, no warning is provided to the user that the certificate may be unsafe.

GMail still shows a certificate issued by Thawte for me (in the USA).
Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?
2. Sell your magic. Fill your landing page with
minimal, succinct, and powerful content such
as: "Hate paying your bills? Then don't do it
anymore! Sign up to be on our beta list." The
key here is to identify the problem you're
attempting to solve, making it clear that you'll
solve it (not how, just that you will), and then
giving them incentive to "sign up".

I'm getting really, really tired of pages that promise a service and then say "Sign up and we'll let you know when it's ready!"

I know it's a technique for trying to validate an idea before you spend time, money and effort implementing it, but my reaction now is "Screw you!"

I've signed up several times and never once has it come to anything. I've spent time filling in boxes, clicking through pages, being promised the solution to a problem, and nothing has come of it.

My reaction now is "Fuck off and come back when you've done something."

Just a data point for the next time you consider wasting the time of everyone who might otherwise consider being a customer, instead of using yours to actually build something.
Wait what? How could a reasonable person possibly be offended by what you quoted? There is entirely too little context there and the sentence is worded very politely.

(L)GPL certainly is draconian (in the sense of strict) and all he is saying is that he personally is not very happy about that. How anyone could not see this as a reasonable statement boggles the mind. (I’m not saying that you have to agree with it.)
I would say the same reason many established companies have. For the connections and learning that only YC can provide.
How could one technical individual protect himself is one thing, having a secure-by-design communication channel is another thing. Whole country is being spied like that and most people dont even know/care about it. They just want to use Facebook or some 'cool' service.
Shergill Games: The Best Open Source Android Games
Really? I can't say I read the comments comprehensively, but the main poster called her a 'bitch' a couple of lines in, and there was a lot of discussion about her breasts.

I suspect this woman's trying to deal with her detractors in entirely the wrong way - death threats are illegal, and instead of feeding the trolls, she should immediately take what she's got to law enforcement.

That said, this thread is a lot less sympathetic than I would've expected. No one deserves that sort of abuse. Let's say she was a con artist. There's also legal ways of dealing with that, and none involve discussing any part of her anatomy.
If your code is that hard to test, it's also a sign that it will be hard to maintain.
For the love of God, take your time to find a co-founder. I entered YC as a single founder, and ended up finding a co-founder half way through, it'll happen when it's the right time.

YC looks for amazing teams, they can tell if you just joined up with someone last week and have no clue about one another.
Chrome feature, as noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938905
Ask HN: Learn Ruby by Reading Source Code
Hello HN,

I'm learning Ruby and I was looking for some excellent open source code to read.

I'm already writing some code (following tutorials, etc.) but I would love to see some real world examples. I would like it to be simple enough for a beginner to follow along, while demonstrating the best practices for the language.

Thanks for your time and if you have any other suggestions to improve my skills with Ruby, I'm definitely open to hearing them.
Your ISP can be completely compromised and SSL/TLS will continue to work, even in its broken incarnation in your browser configuration.
How on earth can you write a compiler if you don't understand anything about assembly?
The idea of having a distributed certificate mechanism over a peer to peer net seems like it might be a good starting point. Essentially, you'd self-sign and serve out your certificate on your ports; possibly connecting to some sort of super-node. You get connections from other members of the net, and they'd send you some certificates; you'd cache the certs and their IP addresses. Then after a timeout, you'd broadcast your certificates to all the interested IPs.

Part of the intrinsic concept is that there's no authoritative identity service. Without an authority, you can't crack the authority.

Of course, this is just a sketch of an idea; it has the usual issues with peer to peer nets such as "evil majority wins". Plus, it has the potential to eat a good deal of bandwidth.

Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea to explore, probably in an academic setting first.
When the authentication server went down my second week of trying out Minecraft, my copy kept working (with a dialog on startup letting me know that auth had failed).

I agree that it is embarrassing for a company demoing at a conference to have a protracted outage on their website, but the impact on current users should have been nil.

Have they made the DRM stickier since I last played?
A more general description for the same idea is "key continuity".
The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.

New technologies tend to be adapted by first world countries first. This was as true of the original IBM PC as it is today for the iPad.
Paul Graham's version on what kills startups: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
The myth of marginal pricing
I'm an Excel geek - and yes sorry I've done far too much VBA in my time.
The ribbon has all but destroyed Office for me. The commands are randomly scattered about the sub-menus of the ribbon, much of the content is stuff I will never ever use and it takes up a ridiculous amount of space.

While it seems a large step backwards to folks like me who were expert users, the ribbon apparently makes it easier for "average" users.
However in helping the average Microsoft seemed to forget about the power users, with the result that my speed in Excel is slower now than it was in 1995.
Indeed there is almost no tangible improvement in Excel for over 10 years. The basic functions are the same, the program still crashes frequently and now the usability is worse than it used to be. No wonder I turn more and more to Google Docs and Scirvener.
Most likely. It would be pretty impressive if the Iranian government were able to MITM every Gmail user in the world.
Tim Cook: 5 things about Apple's new CEO
First project name I've seen that made me gag.
An amusing quip, but the comparison only serves to beg the question. McDonald’s is ostensibly in the hamburger business, but the engine room of the company is real estate. See http://money.howstuffworks.com/mcdonalds2.htm.
So, why not recruit small teams of awesome founders -- comprised of the right kind of people -- and "assign" them ideas?
The way we've defined premature scaling, "making something users don't want" is included. For example, on the customer interaction metrics, which is what is used for "actual stage" a startup would be in the discovery or validation stages (stage 1 or 2). On the behavioral stage if they're making something people don't want, they're probably focused on streamlining their product or making it more scalable, which is a stage 3, or efficiency stage action. This would cause the startup to show up as a Behavioral Stage 3 / Actual Stage 2 and be labeled as premature scaling, just not the drastic kind, that for example WebVan exhibited — "Behavioral Stage 4 / Actual Stage 1". They had a team that was completely scaled up without even having shipped their product.
Update: (Simple)Chrome plugin to enable GPG in Gmail
But the iOS model of syncing everything to the cloud or whatever is simply incompatible with the current realities of those countries. Microsoft's taking that into account rather than just shrugging it off.
Because that security model means that a compromised ISP can permanently MITM you the first time you visit a site on any computer for the first time. In exchange for losing the single points of failure, it creates a constant stream of opportunities to break the trust model.

You may think that's a good tradeoff. I don't, but reasonable people can disagree about it. However, it's completely untenable for financial information, because attackers after financial information aren't laser targeted and are perfectly happy with a constant stream of compromised sessions. Remember what TLS was designed for in the first place.
With DNSSEC when you request google.com you can verify the answer is actually google.com. (Edit: You can verify the validity of the DNS answer.)

No cryptographic system is perfect.
Sending the path to a shared network drive file on chat...
(I don't want to send the file)

Also, how do you drag and drop to a terminal that's fullscreen?
paste from visual mode
If You Cite Compete Or Alexa For Anything, You're A Moron
Not (intentionally) spammy (or a dupe).
The last version lacked auto-update. The new version includes it (and some quick fixes)(including running only on mail.google.com)