skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A man in the middle attack won't defeat a signed "cart" object stored in the client's browser. The signature's private key is stored on the server and never appears on the network. This requires no per-session state on the server, just a single key pair.

SSL, on the other hand does nothing to prevent a cross-site attack. Anything that can run code in the client browser can in principle cause it to send a fraudulent shopping cart "securely" to the server.
Ahh, my bad. I think I see where you're going with this now. You're basically just remembering the last visit a particular client makes on every request, and then resetting the ticket for the next request correct?
Don't you know? The only people who visit this site are from CA/MA.
well thats the thing in most cases the teachers will talk about the concepts without really touching on how to apply them in real life. So sure you might know what an integer is and know what that does in all languages, but that won't help you program competently
Are half of Pandora's listeners on the iPhone? No
Incorrect. See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325417
This is not a startup...it's a small business. Nothing wrong with that, of course. A small business is awesome, and generally better for your finances and emotional well-being than working for someone else. But, it doesn't have the same end result as a startup, and the way you build one successfully is very different.

I've done contract work for a few small businesses over the years, similar to the business you describe (though I charged more than Geek Squad, and provided somewhat higher end services...like Linux and UNIX administration, network infrastructure buildouts, etc.). The yellow pages got me two jobs in the two years that I ran an ad (and a helluva lot of crazy people who wanted me to tell them how the government kept finding out what they were doing on their computer, or tell them how to find out what their spouse or child was doing on the computer, and for free). So, that's a non-starter. Advertising on Google AdWords, with very specific targeting might be the ticket. It's how I found the dog walking and sitting service I use, and probably other services.

Check Craigslist for people looking for some work in your areas of expertise. It'll be bigger projects, of course, but it'll help with word of mouth. If you do a good job, it only takes a few customers to kickstart a good career as a contractor. If you always plan to increase your rate and the complexity of services you offer, you can definitely get to $100-$150k/year in a few years, at which point, you can either start hiring other techs and build your own Geek Squad (maybe even turning it into a startup!), or just keep working, and tucking away 20% each year. I know several folks who retired in their early fifties on this plan, and with a couple million in the bank (I inherited a few of their clients).

Personally, I found the work...ummm...frustrating, and draining, and far more stressful than I was comfortable with. I was really good at it, and I kept cranking up my rate until I was making $150/hour, and clients were happy to pay it. But, it just wasn't my bag. You won't know until you try, though.
You're almost there. Why stop now? It's not all that bad and you've come so far. It's like giving up on a marathon when the finish line is just coming into vision. Suck it up. Put your head down and focus on finishing.
Leading geneticist Steve Jones says human evolution is over
You've put in the time, and you haven't seen the rewards yet, so you're naturally discouraged. Tim Ferris covers it well on his blog (link below). Mostly everyone goes through phases where they are unmotivated or feel like they can't win at what they are doing. It's part of life. The important thing is not to give up on it before it has a chance to even take off. You'll hate to be asking "what if" later on if you decide to move on.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/10/03/harnessing-e...
Motorola EM25 Unlocked
The Motorola EM25 ROKR is a basic slider phone that has the features of the more advanced phones in the line. This dual-band GSM phone prioritizes its music capabilities to ensure that the user has hi-tech capabilities in the palm of their hand. The look and design of this phone is meant for the club where its standout shiny finish will surely draw attention and its easy to use slider mechanism is a blast to use.
Ask HN: Is there a state-by-state guide to IP assignment issues that affect startups?
I've been talking with some friends about doing a startup, but there's a concern about the potential IP minefield we might be encounter. In short, one of us has a contract with a software company that makes an extremely aggressive rights grab. According to the contract, all work done by this person, even outside of work hours and without using any company resources, becomes the property of the company. This seems like it might be overly broad, but I'm not a lawyer and I know that the law varies considerably from state to state.

Is there a resource somewhere online that discusses the issues in state IP/employment law for startups? For example, I've heard that non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California, and a clause like that described above would be unenforceable in Minnesota. Something like a table showing the differences would be great.

Alternatively, since the usual response is "talk to a lawyer," can anybody recommend a competent yet affordable-enough-for-a-bootstrapped-startup attorney who could answer similar questions? I'm particularly interested in the law for California, Minnesota, and New York. Thanks!
Good point. In that case, anyone who needs a CSS guru/frontend development expert...
Fair point, I missed that.
You do realize that meteor impacts affect more than just the immediate area, right?
Ask HN: Can I survive the rest of my life only knowing Java?
I work for a huge company in the Midwest writing Java server apps (not J2EE). After seeing the front page post enumerating the top three things that programmers hate, I realized that my environment is completely saturated by them. One of the things my manager suggested I look in to is training to think about something else for a while, so I come to you guys.

What kind of stuff should I be learning to expand my horizons and learn new and interesting (marketable, too!) skills? Where should I go to learn them? Are conventions worth the travel/admission cost?

Thanks!
Excellent. A post that teaches me something about hacking and about how to become a better entrepreneur at the same time.
Learn how to utilize your java skills in making Android Apps!

just a thought... :D
(b) Bring in a 3rd Party.

Importantly - Someone you both agree on - Not because they agree with you individually, but because you both recognise they can add value. Someone complimentary to your skills - maybe totally different skills - maybe a customer, or someone who's been in the business for years and can give advice.

They don't need to take a third of the company, or even be full time - they just need to be another invested person. A hands-on angel investor might suit this bill.

Having a third party with a different perspective will help you smooth over disagreements and deadlocks. As always - absolutely critical who you choose to go into business with, so not a decision to take lightly.
I used to love a small business in my local town that used to do this. He sold cheap, korean PC hardware and charged by the hour to fix problems for people. He had a real store front and was in business for at least 5 years before Best Buy moved into town and took his business away. I think that small companies like this are a dying breed and sorely missed. I like Best Buy but only because they seem to be the only game in town. If you do a good job with your little mom-n-pops place, then work will travel around and you'll probably do ok, but the main thing that you need to worry about is losing business to the big-box retailers who do service as a second business.

Perhaps advertise using huge signs on the front of your storefront telling people that you're a better Geek Squad than Best Buy or something would help you out.

Small car repair places still exist and do well against the dealerships in the automotive industry, but they do it via undercutting the service price and doing a good job and advertising using local media and word of mouth.

If you feel like you will get enough clients to support your business, then more power to ya!
Agreed 100%: Launch, launch, launch. It's easy to get demotivated if you're working on a piece of stale software on your laptops.

Get some ants in your ant farm, watch what they do -- it may be what your co-founder needs to start believing in the product as well. If you quit now, you will _always_ wonder if something could have come from these TWO YEARS of your life.

Seriously, launch. Don't debate, don't discuss, don't send resumes; launch. What's the worst that can happen? If you prove that you can't get traction, at least you will have seen it through.

Again, LAUNCH.
I don't think it's spam. You get to keep the device if you take out the contract. That said. I wouldn't buy this thing I'd just go get an actual wrap board.
For a moment I thought "~5 m" meant that it was going to be around 1/3 of the "15 m" asteroid that hit earth and caused dinosaurs to go extinct.
"Where should I go to learn them? Are conventions worth the travel/admission cost?"

The Internet and no.

edit: If your employer is willing to pay for you to travel to some great location to attend a conference I wouldn't turn it down. Not a wise use of your personal funds though.
Well there are still people making a living writing FORTRAN.

Can you survive? Yeah probably. Will you be happy? Are you happy now?

Conventions can be cool for social purposes, but if you want to learn something new that is substantial, that's not going to happen in a week. There is only one way to learn code, and that is to write code. No shortcuts :(
Why isn't anyone talking about Google's spam problem?
Another problem - change for change's sake.

They wanted to push a new product, so they changed stuff that was perfectly fine. A lot of this ended up being cruft and eyecandy that was just unnecessary and annoying.

Microsoft is laden with this problem now - Windows and Office are technically very stable. How they break away from this will be difficult/painful.
you'll always be able to survive on one language. especially such a huge language that will leave a giant legacy footprint if another language becomes more popular. the question is, will you, personally and financially, prosper. you want to do more than survive.

it won't be easy, but its possible. check out grails and seam to push yourself into the rails-like environment running on java. i really like grails.

or, you can just do like others and learn rails or python.
I read this and thought - why not just use sessions?

His client example is riddled with security and integrity issues. People don't like accidentally closing a tab and losing everything.

His server example is just another way of doing sessions.
When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods (Alertbox)
TCP over HTTP using Javascript
talk to the corporate lawyer for the company that the one person with the tight contract works. or, at least, request to do so.

at my company, we had a terrible contract, and the employees brought it up and got it changed. bring it up, see if you can get an exemption clause drafted and signed.
Sometimes, the answer is no. Some boilerplate code (like exception catching) is an overhead that can not be avoided

[...]

I’m still looking for my “Lisp Enlightenment” with respect to macros

That enlightenment is just this: "boilerplate code that cannot be avoided" is an oxymoron. If it's boilerplate, it's macro-able, and exception handling is no different.

I don't know your code, so I can only suggest that you take another look at those boilerplate segments you think "cannot be avoided". Find even the smallest thing they have in common - whatever makes you call them "boilerplate". Now invent some fantasy syntax that would make that overlap go away. Now write the macro to make that syntax work. Rinse, repeat.

Warning - Once you're used to thinking like this, it is my experience that returning to a language without metaprogramming will become considerably more painful...
How much do your users/customers love what you have? If there is a glimmer of user joy, that's not worth tossing aside lightly... It's rarer than you think, and having something that customers like enough to pay for is a GREAT thing to have in this market.

In, short... Are you onto something? If not, certainly bail.

If you are, you've got big challenges with your partner. I'd try to find a new one if you can't make him an asset (a good way to separate is to give both partners legal rights to the code and flip a coin for the brand).

This is SUCH a huge problem- you aren't alone. More startups fail due to lack of interest/motivation than anything else, IMO. User happiness is a HUGE motivator and lack of it is a huge de-motivator... So launching would be a good step if you're looking for motivation or a final nail in the coffin.

Read "The Dip: When to Quit and When to Stick" by Seth Godin.
I saw this a couple days ago in _why's github.

http://github.com/why/mixico/tree/master

You can install it and try out mixing in and out different modules
I think the author meant "some boilerplate code in C++ (like exception catching) is an overhead that can not be avoided."
Are You a Computer? The Turing Test Can Tell!
If a drop of 6% is $300 (according to the article), the average mint.com user is spending $5,000 a month. That seems way too high to begin with, and secondly, a suspicously round number. Perhaps all the numbers were rounded off when told to the reporter ?
I agree that PHP's superior usability for newbs begins in the first five minutes. But I don't think that's the whole story. You can also embed Perl, Ruby, or (I presume) Python in a simple HTML page. (Though I believe that there is no canonical, preinstalled, universally accepted way of doing so, which is a big usability problem.)

And I don't know of any technical reason why Perl couldn't come installed on a $3.99 web hosting account. (Perhaps it did, back in the day. I no longer remember. I did web programming in Tcl back then.) I've also heard that Python is fairly easy to host, and even Ruby is getting there -- Heroku gives you Rails, for perhaps even less effort than it takes to use your cheap webhost's PHP. You don't even have to figure out ssh or FTP to use Heroku.

But, alas, the problem is bigger than that. It's not just the first five minutes of Perl that are tough. It's the twenty hours after that. And something like Rails, which requires you to be familiar with databases and OOP, is on yet a higher plane of difficulty.
Lisp isn't just a functional language. Yes, you can write functional code in Lisp, but you can use other techniques when functional is awkward.
WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, WAKE UP SHEEPLE
I think the author meant "some boilerplate code _in C++_"

It's possible. But once you've acknowledged that boilerplate code is inevitable in one language but not the other, that was The Macro Enlightenment(tm) - you just had it.
Windows XP: the invincible OS
Explain, for us astronomically-challenged, please?
Google Has Changed Political Debate Forever
7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design
Yeah, it's "free" with a $3k support contract. Yikes!

Based on those stats (wait, only one ethernet port?), you would probably be better off with something like a Soekris board (http://www.soekris.com/, esp. a 4801 http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm). They run OpenBSD quite well...
What if you need state for users without username and password?

For instance let them add things to their cart and only require registraton/login once they buy.

What if you want more than one basket?

What if baskets are shared among users.

Replace "basket" with "state" for above.

How is http://example.org/shop/users/johndoe/basket different/better than http://example.org/shop/users/johndoe/?sessionkey=123456 or http://example.org/shop/baskets/123456/

"differ from storing the cart in a user session" I never store anything but sessions in user sessions, carts go in the cart table/whatever. Carts may have a session_id they are associated with, but they are probably keyed to user instead(depends). Probably stored in a cookie(state on the client).

Not saying author is wrong, I just don't get it.

And how come rest folks don't end their resources with a '/'. like http://example.com/users/bob/ The "root" resource ends in a slash. http://example.com/ Having that be inconsistent with other resources always bugs me. I tend to have verbs not end in slash. http://example.com/users/bob/delete Very consistent and orderly to my obcom mind.
Free US state county, city public records search
Free US city, county and state public records search, state public records, marriage and divorce records, birth and death records, business information, property records, court and criminal public records, Complete Public Records.
I'm echoing Fyodor!

"My opinion on disclosure is simple: put up or shut up! If you go the full-disclosure route and announce the bug and full details immediately, that is great. Or if you want to coordinate disclosure with vendors and keep the bug secret until a patch is released, that is great too. But if you go with the coordinated approach (which vendors refer to as “responsible disclosure”), there is no point announcing and hyping the bug before a patch is released and you're ready to disclose details. I don't tell people how to report vulnerabilities—disclosure has long been one of the most personal and political issues in the security community. So I let them decide for themselves. But when people decide on the partial disclosure fear-mongering approach, I reserve the right to speculate on the issue as I do here. I recognize their vague description of the attack and results because I've written and used a similar DoS tool. I was not the first to do so, either."

And I was around at the time of synflooding to teardrop. The botnets already have the power to DoS the whole Internet for a while by attacking key infrastructure elements. The question is why they don't do it or perhaps why would they do it. Ransom won't work. And zombies are valued assets to use for more profitable tricks like spamming, installing spyware, or 419-style scams.
It's true that we should be wary of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. In this case, I think the right lesson is that markets are so robust that they can tolerate a lot of abuse before buckling. For example, to bolster agricultural prices during the New Deal, the federal government paid farmers not only to stop growing crops, but to plow perfectly good crops under. Frédéric Bastiat himself (of broken window and candlemaker petition fame) couldn't come up with a better reductio ad absurdum, and yet it was implemented as real policy in a time of mass hunger. Nevertheless, America, and the world, survived and prospered. Recall also that even the Soviet Union, with an economic system about as bad as you can imagine, still lasted ~70 years.
New Technology Roundtable series
No, I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying a small sample of failures (assuming failures are significantly less likely than non) gives you more information than a large sample of non.
I disagree. The first list is. The latter list:

# Initially sells to the enterprise for branding, credibility, awareness and early revenues

# Can get to revenues within 6 months, tops

# Is sold on the basis of ROI, e.g., helps generate revenues or reduce headcount/costs

# Integrates easily with existing platforms and/or programs

# Either leverages existing open source programs or can itself become partially or fully open source

# Has multiple revenue streams, e.g., software, maintenance, services, etc.

That's all describing a particular kind of business. It actually seems like it's describing a reasonable sepcific area: tech/service hybrid focusing on large-ish b2b clients.
This little asteroid will be 5 m(eters) in diameter, quite a lot less than 15 m(iles) in diameter. :)

Note that if we're talking about the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater, most references seem to have the size a bit smaller, ~6 miles in diameter. Still, that's a big rock.
Nokia’s First Touch Screen Phone “Nokia 5800″ Is Now Coming To Market
nokia 5800's feature media and contacts bars to allow easy access to these features. The touchscreen will respond to both finger and stylus input and also includes hand-writing recognition, in addition to on-screen keyboards, for text entry.
Forget App Center: BerryStore Beta Launches
I've been working on my startup full time for almost a year in my room alone.

If I feel antsy I hop on my bike and head over the bridge. =)
It sounds like you haven't ever actually done what you propose to do. I think you'd be better off getting a job with one of the outfits you intend to mimic, first.

Like SwellJoe, I've also been contracting for a number of years.

Early on I went to the homes of computer users and fixed their problems. Let me just say, those were some of the worst experiences of my tech career. Don't get me wrong, if going into a stranger's home, often into their bedroom or other intimate space, and mingling with their pets, breathing their smoke or other noxious odor is your idea of a great way to make a buck (I use that term loosely), then this is EXACTLY what you should be doing. I personally can't stand it and will never do it again. I often get employees of my clients asking me if I make housecalls. The answer is always no.

If you ever intend to make money supporting businesses then you should be employed with a company that does that in order to learn the ropes and truly identify the needs of that market. It sounds like all you have right now is your anecdotal opinion of what Geek Squad is, or does. If you think you're going to make any useful amount of money visiting individual homes, you're likely in for a rude awakening.

The way I did it was to consume all things tech while I had another job and occasionally help friends, family, and referrals with their computer problems. That never did anything but give me occasional lunch money. I then took a couple of MCSE courses because I got them cheap. With those courses and some confidence that I knew wtf I was talking about, I got a job with a company that had a larger company as its client. I worked for that company for a year fixing 5-10 computers a day (I was one of several supporting 800 users). I left that job straight to contracting because I actually knew something then. I had actual experience in the corporate support world.

I was an employed contractor for 3 years after which I went completely solo. That was 7 years ago. Today I (me, solo) support about 80 computers across 4 clients and I do web development as it comes, by referral. My rate is $95/hr. and I've been told I could/should raise it many times.

Hope this helps.
I mostly agree. The single most important thing you have to do when starting a company (esp. without funding) is to choose the right customers.

How efficiently can you reach them? How well can you turn these leads into customers? What is their willingness and ability to pay, i.e. how much would your service be worth to them (e.g. in otherwise lost productivity)?

The last point kills a lot of consumer market segments for smart small business startups, because the ratio of customer acquisition costs and overhead to revenue is too crappy, aka profitability sucks, aka you're in the red too long and growth/scalability are limited.

Good luck!
Might I suggest you do more then skim the big red words and instead read the paragraphs below said big red words before commenting. The first thing on the list is YSlow, followed by the text"…which makes use of the popular web development tool, Firebug…"

Also, I'm partial to Safari/WebKit's Web Inspector. But thats just me.
Cool, it's nice to see credit where it is due.