skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do see value in restricting redundant apps: it encourages developers to expand the platform's potential. It also means that a number like "3000 apps available for the iPhone" carries more weight, as those are 3000 unique capabilities added.

However, the onus is then on Apple to provide extensions to their "standard" applications. Don't want me to recreate Mail.app? Fine, but give me some APIs to expand Mail.app with new behaviors.

Apple's already done this on the Mac to an extent, e.g. allowing programs to integrate with the iLife suite. I don't know what the iPhone offers in this area.
Microsoft's stack adds a not-insignificant cost to a 3-4 person bootstrapped startup's budget.

Up to you whether or not you're getting enough of a productivity gain to justify it.
> Huh? You said that there was a growing anti-American sentiment. While I agree, how does what I said prove that?

Well, I'll give an example - theres is/was fairly popular show (I don't watch TV all that much, so I'm unsure of its current status) here in Australia called CNNNN that satirised fox news/cnn. The guys who created it have since gone on to create a tv show called the Chaser's War on Everything"

Here's one of the more popular clips from CNNNN entitled "Stupid Americans"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp4iI59BfpQ

What I gleamed from your comment was the attitude of "Americans dont need anyone else, fuck the rest of the world"

In the above clip, particularly pay attention where they're placing pins in countries that these people want to invade.

These people more than likely vote and apart from 2 of them, they don't look like political radicals or crazy people.

>> For the record: I thought the Americans and the Aussies were allies?

> So?

That is the exact attitude I am talking about.

Semi related - A little anecdote I thought was absolutely hilarious (but also tragic) at the time was that in the early stages of the Iraq war the media was doing lots of broadcasts from that media center they set up.

One of the popular media outlets (I forget which, it was Fox or CNN) had a large map of the world which their reporters stood in front of to make broadcasts. It was just a general outline of continents.

They actually removed Australia from the map because it was where the reporters were supposed to stand and it was interfering with the shot. What a fantastic way to treat one of the 2 allies that sent military support :)
I'm not seeing what you can do with Common Lisp or Scheme in 4 lines of code that you can't do with Python and Ruby.
Hey, everyone, let's use this content-free comment to vote on how much we like ASP.NET!
* If your company comprises a few founders/consultants, a great idea, a solid business plan, a working prototype, but none of you have a proven business track record, your typical pre-money valuation will be in the very low millions ($1 million to $3 million is typical). You should be looking for a seed round of $0.25 to $1 million. This is a difficult environment for you, and you should try getting some experience on your side

* If your team has a successful start-up track record, and if you have a 2-5 person management team with significant e-business or technology experience, your pre-money valuation jumps into the high single or low double-digit millions. $6 million to $15 million is the typical valuation range, and you should be looking for a first round of $3 to $10 million.

From:
http://oz.stern.nyu.edu/startups/vc.html
Don't do this: do what Colin said. Let k be 32 random bytes (using your OS's secure random number generator), store AES-256-CBC(k, [user, pass]), send k in a cookie over HTTPS with the "secure" flag set (that "k" is password-equivalent, and can't leak over an HTTP connection).

Repeating Colin's caveat: the fact that you had to type "A-E-S" into your code to make the scheme work is strong evidence that you are doing something bad.
(format nil "I have~{ ~(~A~)~#[~;, and~:;,~]~}." '(red green blue black white yellow))
Is there really a moral hazard here?

Does the bailout really remove disincentive for failure? Sure it lessens it, a bit. But this article is describing a gross moral hazard. I don't think this is comparable.

AIG shares have lost virtually all of their value. The bailout rescues some of it, but it's probably less the 5%-10% (please correct me if I'm missing something). Imagine AIG's morally hazardous executives a year or more ago (share price = $65 - $75). They know that while their desicions could cause a collapse, there's a $3.50 floor. Does that have much of an effect on their desicions?

What this article shows is how "moral hazards" & close relatives exist within organisations to a much larger extent then they do between them.
I think that Mnesia is one of the most compelling reasons to look at Erlang. Having a distributed, in memory database is really cool, and has the potential to solving a lot of scaling problems.
HBase | An open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after Big Table
> Moreover, why should librarians be the last word on book selection? (Librarians are political creatures too.)

Realistically, for a country who holds some core ideologies such as the freedom of speech and the seperation of church and state, having a politician want to ban books because of religious views supports neither of these ideologies.

The reprinted article was removed from the Frontiersman website (the newspaper that ran the original story in 1996) but Google's cache still has it here.

http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:kJ5GvRlb5GQJ:www.fronti...

> Palin fired the librarian for supporting a political rival.

The point isn't that she fired the librarian for supporting a political rival, the point is that this woman has views that could be considered ... damn whats the word I'm looking for... it's like counterproductive. Non-progressive would be a good fit, but its not the word I'm looking for.
Creationist campaigner has Richard Dawkins' official website banned in Turkey
That's a good point, the person in question could also have had their computer compromised and are being framed...
I'd point out that they are no longer at the "prototype" stage, and have very respectable traction. Having users acts as a great substitute for "business experience". Thus the first category and valuation suggestion isn't really applicable.

Of course, it'd be even better if they had revenue. Revenue trumps all, and means that you're unarguably in the control position--no answer the investor can give can shutdown your business, if you have revenue sufficient to keep it rolling.

But, I think they've already proven they have a lot of the stuff investors look for...so, they're somewhere between your two suggestions even if they have no prior "e-business" experience.

It also sounds like they're very well-placed for a low-millions acquisition. Partners are the most likely acquirers, and there's a lot of websites that'd like to partner with a cool product like StormPulse (though it's cyclical, so this month it's hot, and it'll drop as the hurricane season dies down).
Son of Rambow is a good movie. Really really good. A feel-good movie if you will. I can't believe you didn't want to watch it!
Halleluja!

Now things will really get cracking!
I also liked the paradigm shift discussion.

Also, great section on assumptions and how sometimes disbelieving the most commonly held assumptions - the value of the triple A paper in this case - can lead to extraordinary profits.
I am curious what do people think is Stephenson's best book?
I completely agree - the kid should be punished and political persuasion should not come into it whatsoever.

It also shouldn't have mattered if the kid broke into Palin's account or your corner shop owner. The fact is he did so, and put that information out there with malicious intent (posting her login info was seriously bad form).

If he had done so with and then alerted Palin about the security hole, then sure - I'd have a lot more sympathy. Even if he had broken in just to see if he could do it, then left it at that - that might have been acceptable, but the way he handled (I thought) was wrong.
This (more stupid bullshit) was my initial reaction but it's ultimately a very subjective thing. Tim O'Reilly's piece the other day reminded me of that. Only the people who make something can tell you whether it was worthwhile for them to make it. We may not like it and we may think it's a waste of time. But the creators might not.

On the other hand, it's sometimes hard to be honest with yourself about this. There is the pet rock mentality which says "if I can just build something stupid that everybody falls for, then I can make a lot of money and it will be so easy." Looking at Web Kare, I actually don't think this was their approach at all, but I hear different versions of this all the time. If you ever catch yourself saying something similar, then it's probably worth examining whether you really think it would be a worthwhile thing to build.
On Friday there were a lot of short-sellers being told they had to buy NOW to cover their positions. That caused an immediate spike upwards in equity prices which will soon arrest and slide back down as people get out of Dodge.

The dollar is held in place by Chinese Treasury purchases, and the flush of money out of various stock markets into what is considered a safer short-term asset. Currency inflation is a longer-term risk than market collapse.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/allcited.html

Who is "D. Johnson"?
If nothing else, the kid committed some kind of fraud by telling the system he was Sarah Palin when in fact he wasn't

I've also never heard of a case where someone told a computer they were someone they weren't and prosecuted on that alone or any sort of 'fraud' in a circumstance like this (though if you want to split hairs, Identity Theft that leads to punitive damages such as credit, or finances is another thing, but still doesn't fit the mold of this particular circumstance)

It's a perfectly fine defense, all things said. He retrieved the information he needed, he used the system the way it was built to be used and the system did what it was supposed to do. There is NOTHING illegal about lying to a computer system in this situation.

The burglar analogy only makes even a bit of sense if the burglar illegally obtained a key, made a copy of it and THEN gained access to the home. For the intents of this discussion, that's all this rubico person did. He obtained a key to the home, used the key to it's intended purpose and gained access.
One variation of this usage that has survived is "industrious".
No, this is why you should hate it:

"Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Please folks, call your congress-people. This is the kind of tyranny that caused the United States to form in the first place.

www.senate.gov
www.house.gov
I just looked at the PoweredBy section in the wiki and I didn't see any entries. I'd love to find out who is using this in production. The docs are rather thin at this point.
FriendFeed presentation from MIT/Stanford Venture Lab
This is more about over-leveraged institutions crashing out as growth in the derivatives market reverses than problems with the construction of actual houses.

You can buy and flip a home without building one. You just need easy credit and a rising market.
My Role in the Collapse of Lehman Brothers
the market does not share your pessimism

The market is pretty good at ignoring things that it doesn't want to see. Regardless, I'm not too worried. Every time there is a recession, the media tries to make it look like the sky is falling. Remember the Savings & Loan "crisis" that was going to ruin the economy for decades? Yeah, turns out that it didn't happen.

Even if the dollar is weak, there is still a lot going on in the US. The world can't really write the US off, and the US isn't going to be a "loss leader" like China... so eventually the economy will recover.
I'm not so sure that he should be prosecuted at all. The equivalence to this is breaking into someone's house.. by asking their two year old if they can go inside and for the key.

It's an equivalent level of security.
Stalin didn't hate smoking...

http://briarfiles.blogspot.com/2008/06/featured-pipe-smoker-...
First, I think the idea of you making API requests using your users' credentials is a bad one from the start. If the third party in question wants to allow requests-on-behalf-of, they should provide a proper API for it; if not, you shouldn't be working against their wishes by impersonating your users.

This is true, but unfortunately we live in the real world, and hacks are sometimes necessary. Look at Mint.com, for example. Give some site all your banking details? WHOA THERE. But it turns out the service is very useful, and it works with pretty much every bank. If they had waited for proper APIs to exist, someone else would have beaten them to market.
Interesting article and source. Lots of material.

I've seen this criticized by both the left, right, and populists positions.

I DO think this article mischaracterizes the situation. The situation, as I understand it, is a crisis of confidence and liquidity. The impact was described to senior congressional leaders as being able to quickly spread to the entire credit industry. That means retail credit, auto loans, bridge loans -- everything that makes our system work was at risk of shutting down.

That's why the blank check: to buy unknown risk now and then auction it off later. I'm not getting into the politics of it, aside from simply stating I doubt Paulson is going off to buy his own country or moon base (which he could probably afford!) and that the more complicated you make the deal, the more you start defeating the entire purpose of an executive branch in the first place -- some things respond better to a single-decision-making point instead of a committee. But if you're worried, call your congressmen and by all means tell him/her how you feel.

My concern is I'm just not sure the fundamentals of the problem are being solved, and I wonder how you can fix something while keeping the system in place that caused the problem in the first place. In my opinion, this problem is just another normal swing in the capitalist system, whereby people looking to game the system figure out something that can't work long-term and the system eventually stresses out. We usually tweak the rules and we move towards a new excess in 10-20 years. I'm concerned that I'm not hearing anything about the "tweaking". As I understand it, Congress is going to be working through all of that.

It's going to be really hard for a committee made up of political hacks to publicly figure out what went wrong in the middle of an election cycle without degenerating in schoolyard name-calling. Oddly enough, it's much easier just to authorize Treasury to spend some money. That doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but I do think immediate action is necessary and I'm at least happy that Congress can come around to getting this one thing accomplished.
Visual studio express editions are free and a windows vps is cheap.

Even if you decide to spring for the full developer licenses you are looking at less than a week of a developers salary for some really good tools.
"... What's a good book? Harry Potter? Shakespear? What's good music? Beethoven? T-Pain? ..."

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
The Sonnets, 18.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/wssnt10.txt

Shakespeare not "Shakespear".
Bail Out the Drunks, O'Malley, and Arrest the Usual Suspects
Facebook Kicks Off College Recruitment Effort
America is Bleeding
That was really outstanding (as Mr. Stephenson often is).

Good move substituting his argument for yours, as I didn't think you had much of a point, but now I think maybe you do. :)
From Capitalism to Socialism to ?
Tech firms fare better than most in jobs slump
I thought that spelling was not standardized in his day, so that any one of a number of variations would have been acceptable?

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/name1.html
There's a need to have a logical argument. One that can't be drowned with 'but he smokes.'

There should be no difference between 'he knows' & ' he's had it pounded into his head daily.' But there is.
I think its more her epistemology that scares me than any one or two particular stances. It would be yet another President who thinks it better to make decisions based on their interpretation of a 2,000 year old book than through science, logic, and reason. We've seen what 8 years of rabid anti-intellectualism can do to us, and the ill effects might start compounding rapidly.
in his day, probably.
OpenGL 3 and DirectX 11 - The war is over (apparently)
So it wasn't Anonymous, since he was posting as 'Rubico'.
How Google's downtime hurts your business (not what you expect)
This may sound odd, but 300k-500k is about the hardest amount of money to raise. You're still too small for institutional investors, and you're large for an angel round. A typical angel might put in anywhere from $25k-$100k. I'd guess $50k to be the median, meaning you're looking at having to find 6-10 people.

You're in good shape given your traffic and revenue, so I'm not trying to suggest that you won't be able to do it. Just be cognizant of the fact that it actually may be easier for you to raise $3 million than $3 hundred grand.
Money is in some respects like fire; it is a very excellent servant but a terrible master. When you have it mastering you; when interest is constantly piling up against you, it will keep you down in the worst kind of slavery. But let money work for you, and you have the most devoted servant in the world. It is no "eye-servant." There is nothing animate or inanimate that will work so faithfully as money when placed at interest, well secured. It works night and day, and in wet or dry weather.
I'm voting you up and asking you expand your observation.

We've seen what blind rationalism and blind belief both can do in 300 years of having people attempt to run their own governments. Your concerns are hardly new, and there's a lot of history to draw upon.

A moderate balance of faith in something greater than ourselves, humility, and the ability to hold reason as the highest of all virtues seems to work best -- or at least it has in our country's history.

Pure faith and pure logic alone are funny things -- they tend to bend to the emotional and cultural currents of those espousing them. And usually without the person's awareness.

We've had radical swings between rationalism (such as when we were founded), to faith, back to rationalism again, and back to faith. Each generation feels like it is the first or the only one going through something. We've been here before, and we'll be here again.

Hope I'm not trolling for an argument. That is not my intention, anyway.
This is more a story of one nation’s sensibilities and attitudes to free speech. Nice understated response from the Dawkins site – the introduction of a simple “Banned in Turkey” banner.
Top 10 Most Famous Hackers of All Time
Ouch. Guess I'm the only Kids in the Hall fan here.
Building a Brand Takes Balls
Woops, trying to avoid a double post here--I left a comment on the "first" thread about this.
Many thanks again to Brett and company for speaking at the event!
This was such an awesome dialogue. Awesome interviewer, and an awesome hedge fund manager.

It's hard to read as an entrepreneur because I think there's a difference between financial people, such as hedge fund managers or venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs.

Most entrepreneurs that I know are highly optimistic, and almost willing to look beyond risk and uncertainty. Of course, that's not to say entrepreneurs are stupid with risk, or don't take calculated risks. But I would say investors are much more risk-averse.

What I took away from this article: the housing market was too good to be true. You took Triple-A credit, and stuck it in the same pool as Triple-C credit. And you bet on the whole thing. I think that was pretty risky, and maybe it would have worked out if you rolled the dice a few more times, but most people just can't afford these houses. And now we're seeing the burst.

I suppose it's a bit sobering to read. It reminds you not to be stupid about risk, but definitely take risks. I better just stop there ;)
JamLegend - the browser based Guitar Hero
You're correct, but it is becoming more common for institutional investors to do a seed of $300-500K. Union Square and Charles River come to mind. This way, they don't miss out on early stage opportunities.
Ask HN: laid back, but still interesting jobs for hackers?
I'm a serial startup engineer who has had a few health scares this summer and am re-evaluating my lifestyle and career goals.

I am looking for suggestions for programming jobs that are relatively low stress, but also at least somewhat interesting. A bonus would be tuition reimbursement for master's degree courses. Pay is somewhat important but not as important as lower stress (doctor's orders.) I've created a short list of employers I am investigating. If any hackers here on news.yc have any other suggestions, I would very much appreciate them. I am located in the Bay Area and would like to stay but am open to all suggestions.

- LBNL (lawrence berkeley labs)

- SRI (stanford research institute)

- staff programmer on a research project at Berkeley, UCSF, Stanford, UCSC

- NASA in Mtn. View
Big fan. Unfortunately, only over-the-hill Canadians (or near-Canadians) would catch the reference. I'll reimburse you one karma point.
One hundred years ago Manhattan's population was around 2.3 million. In the 1800s, there were still cattle drives near Broadway. These images are a reminder of how much culture and technology can change in just a few decades.
Great reading. I recommend it heartily.
Hadoop is a Yahoo project, so it's likely that they are using something like this.

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/hadoop/
This is a nice interview and left me feeling warm and fuzzy about being a more altruistic capitalist. But, I'm still wondering what exactly Hamilton's extended business plan was. "Selflessly Make Helpful Tool" + "Patience" still doesn't lead easily to finding investors, let alone getting rich.