skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was also going to add that I would say for B2C relations this doesn't seem to matter a lot. In fact, I prefer it, as it makes us seem more single point-of-contact and personal (for some reason I have no confidence whenever I email a support@xyz.com, or even feedback@xyz.com). Presenting your customers with a Mom and Pop shack even when you're a Wal*Mart isn't a bad thing. It helps them feel bigger if you seem small.

As far as B2B, I haven't seen any negative responses there either, perhaps because we don't deal with many middle-management MBA-types. Most of the fans we've heard from are either low on the totem pole, helping us get in the door at their mother ship, or so high on the totem pole that @stormpulse.com might make them think of us as a large cockroach at best.
They will probably crash and burn in 2009 or 2010, however if they have 265 million / year in revenue they should be able to cut back staff 6months before they run out of money and significantly extend their runway. However, doing so would reduce their value to future investors which would make raising money harder and significantly impact morale.

The fact they are looking for money now is a good sign they understand the problem, but if that does not quickly pay off they need to think about cutting down their costs. Even if it damages their growth.
Check your passwords against brute force attacks
I've thought about the trust issue many times... I think there might be a market for a "new" secure/encryption technology/business model focused on securing the cloud.
Maddox called, he wants his writing style back.
That interview incident has always seemed at odds with a subsequent book by the reporter - http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Micr... - which is quite a sympathetic view of the Windows NT deathmarch.
Quite a handy benchmark.

I used it a while ago to work out what to consider "strong" in terms of passwords for a web app we created.

Working in security I'd consider some of the calculations bull and I know it doesn;t take into account advanced attacks (like rainbow tables) but it can be a good rule of thumb IMO.
I got it....didn't think I did at first. The email address I have on my Y Combinator account is different than the one I put on my application. Maybe some of you did the same????
Software Can Duplicate Your Keys Using a Photo Taken From 200 Feet Away
Microsoft gets patent for real-time f-bomb bleeping
This is a great article... you think facebook will ever charge us to keep our profiles?
The article says what it is but how about a real example of how it's useful?
I'm starting to think that this is a universal truth that the best classes never count towards your major. If the only people in there want to be there, including the prof, everyone learns more.
The One Thing in Life You Can Control: Effort
I'm not sure how you are answering your question: Who contributed?

I didn’t expect to see names because you may not get them, but at least something to indicate who contributed: Small donors, deep pockets, age range, price range something I can't see on any major news web site.

Give me a reason to look at project and learn something new.
Things I wish I’d known when I was younger
I'd say now is a good time to hide yourself away, work like crazy then emerge into the sunlight when the storm clouds pass - as inevitably they must - with something amazing, shiny and new.
Spectrogram - iPhone audio analysis in your pocket
My ~2 year old daughter was completely fascinated by that, when I showed her... of course, she thinks all big spiders are tarantulas; she calls the daddy long-legs spiders that.
Cool, what is it?
"since it cannot interace with an output product larger than or the same size as itself."

For some reason, a geodesic dome comes to mind as a possible remedy (or at least a component of a remedy) for this limitation.

http://www.acadia.org/competition-98/sites/integrus.com/html...
I hate this "f-bomb" phrase. It puts a minor expletive in the same league as h-bombs, a-bombs, 500lb bombs, cluster bombs and roadside bombs. For fucks sake...
The "200 feet" metric is silly.

This is a question of resolution. Give me a good enough sensor, the right lens and clear air and I could copy your keys from the moon.
Hm. That's an interesting observation, but I respectfully disagree.

It comes down again to the quality of the comment. Is it a good humorous comment (e.g., not cliched, satiric, perhaps humorous and insightful, and so on), or is it a bad humorous comment (e.g., stale, not actually funny)? Right back where we started.

As Homer Simpson says, "When will people learn? Democracy just doesn't work."
This reminded me of Cory Doctorow's great story "Themepunks", which includes self-replicating 3-D printers. You can read it for free on Salon.com, but the links between the chapters are a bit broken, so here they are if you are interested:

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/09/12/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/09/19/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/09/26/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/10/03/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/10/10/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/10/17/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/10/24/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/10/31/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/11/07/themepunk...

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/11/14/themepunk...
Effort is good, but it's like a road. You can keep walking up the road, and at some point you will get there. But sometimes, you are walking the wrong direction. Sometimes, you are walking in the brambles. That's were the real difficulty lies. Constantly considering and making sure you are going in the right direction.
Wireless worked on my 3945 machine, and although I may have not used it much, there is no reason to panic.
While I agree with the sentiment in the article, I think the title is a little off... Technically, patent trolls are entrepreneurs -- just not very productive ones.
BIND 9, the security-based rewrite, is relatively recent. Sendmail X, the same, isn't in widespread use at all yet (I'm not 100% certain it's even out).

The worm (as worms do) exploited vulnerabilities, which means it wasn't exactly intended to have the consent of the people whose machines were exploited.

Also, unverified from Wikipedia - "The worm was released from MIT to disguise the fact that the worm originally came from Cornell." Which seems to indicate that Morris indeed knew what he was doing would incure someone's ire.

Though I do agree the worm, like so many telnet password sniffing attempts later on, raised awareness of security.
Try unetbootin:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
I installed the new ubuntu on my 2GB USB flash drive in less than 15 minutes. Sure is handy when you don't want to burn a CD you know you are going to use less than 5 times :-). Plus it boots fast, unlike the sluggish livecd's. You can make your choice from about a two dozen distro's including LinuxMint (which I intend to try very soon), Fedora, Puppy, DamnSmallLinux and other great ones.
I'll save the madlibs for the kids' menu...this is non-linear and tough on users.
"Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates."

If you are just using error rates from the requests that make it to the application then it seems this measure of reliability doesn't account for a lot of infrastructure at Google (ie, load balancers, switches, etc). Service interruptions and downtime with infrastructure like this should definitely be accounted for by a measure of reliability for Gmail since the end-user needs all of it to work to use the app.

One solution could be factoring in some sort of availability monitor at the border of Google's networks that polls/uses the Gmail service like an end-user.
No. Social networks are worthless without a large volume of users (or a critical mass in a niche). Charging money cuts down on the number of users and lowers the value of the network. Plus, people would just go to providers who didn't charge money - who either found a way to monetize effectively like LinkedIn or a new contender who is simply naive and has no business plan as well, but will offer free everything in the meantime.
Do you actually need the legalese? Unless it's absolutely necessary for what you're trying to do I personally wouldn't even bother.

The only times T&Cs have bothered me are for certain applications where privacy is vitally important (e.g. Mint) or when I feel they're so utterly atrocious I wouldn't dream of using the application with those terms (e.g. Tumblr).
I think this is supposed to be what Joel talks about in section 4 here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

But I'm not sure, and Joel's version is definitely better written.
Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?
I run a niche social news site in the part-time, and it has a very small community. It's growing slowly, but I'm fine with it. What I'm worried about is - how to control spammers by not submitting irrelevant stories on my site.

Adding CAPTCHA is one option, but then I was wondering, YC News also doesn't have any CAPTCHA protection. Then how come spammers don't submit advertisement based non-relevant news to YC News?

Does YC News algorithm detects such kind of links? Or is there any manual intervention? Or it's just that the community is so good that nobody attacks it.

In anyway, your input about how can tackle this situation will be very helpful. Currently I manually go and delete all those irrelevant submissions (Daily there are atleast 5-10 such submissions.)

-Aditya
this article fails to mention that Obama has spent a lot of time talking about how small businesses and startups are the driving force of our economy, and his tax plan shows that he believes it.

Fail ABCNews.
As I wrote last time this topic came up http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295880

Building stuff is cool.

Universal machines / replicators are cool.

Early prototypes of things that will be better in a few generations are cool.

However, Fab@Home and RepRap are sad, and make me embarrassed for them.

I'm hugely interested in self replicating machinery, metalworking, and other forms of constructing items (I launched http://SmartFlix.com based on these interests).

...and I've done a fair bit of reading on RepRap (I was considering building one a year or so back).

I am dramatically underwhelmed.

The construction is shoddy, the technique (basically hot-glue extrusion of thermoplastics) is hackish and has poor tolerances, the concept of "self replication" is grossly dumbed down (a very very large number of parts are not constructed, even from high quality inputs, but just store bought), etc., etc.

In short, I was fairly embarrassed for the RepRap folks.

Their toy is somewhat cool (although nowhere near as cool as, say, the Gingery lathe that is cast from aluminum melted in a cast iron cookpot, and machines itself as construction progresses), but to claim that it represents any important step forward in self replication ... not so much.
He wasn't "caught." He turned himself in.
These slides are fantastic! They also contain little bits of insights for general Cocoa or ObjC development, which are very welcome.
Underdog Advantages - By Sanjay Anandaram
Basislager.cc Topaktuelle Information zu den Tourenverhältnisse in den Bergen.
Context Over Dogma - Choosing to ignore the status quo
I'd love to see a graph similar to this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/PVeff(rev110707)d.png but for PV cost per Watt. Anyone have a link?
They are. We currently get about 30-40 spam submissions a day. Turn on showdead in your profile and you'll see it all. The reason we don't get more is that we're very aggressive about killing spams. Most spammers give up eventually when they realize that submitting here generates near zero traffic.
I just don't see advertising revenue scaling and sustaining Fb. They need to generate hard cash, probably something along the lines of a subscription-based. Perhaps they should consider making Fb apps relevant again, except structured in a way that generates significant revenue similar to the AppStore. But I still don't see this sufficing.

Promotional leverage aside, the freemium model seems to frequently drown in a big hole of gluttony. And the point at which you try and change your model, often creates negative backlash from unappreciative consumers.

Certainly in retrospect it's easy to point out Fb's faults... but I feel like they should have limited free accounts unless you were a subscriber. Only paid members can create groups, pages, etc... but free members can join as many as they'd like. The social benefits still remain in tack, Fb is compensated for all this data storage, and helps curb pollution in the Fb community.
I agree. That's why I stopped going to slashdot. Every time I wanted to read a person's opinion about a tech subject, i would have to wade through comment after comment trying to be funny. It's annoying after a while.
Prime Minister ‘doesn’t recognize’ IT failures
I'm not so sure I agree. At least with our relatively benign government, there are certain checks and balances on the use of our data. Under "Little Brother", any crackpot with a bizarre agenda would have carte blanche to observe and record your movements for whatever odd reason they saw fit. Imagine, for example, a web site with the names and photographs of everyone leaving a political meeting or an abortion clinic. Not nice.

And in another Simpsons-related note, I wonder if Mr Doctorow has his own "Cory Hotline"...?!
MTV bleeps out file-sharing sites
Facebook Spends $1 Million a Month on Power
Interesting post. It seems the guy was inspired by the breakup with his girlfriend into putting the hours in. I would argue that initiative is as important as effort - no one wants the world to fall down around them in order to force them into action.
Games firms 'catching' non-gamers
Pretty good description of the typical YC startup.
Google Apps has SLA with "three nines" monthly uptime guarantee
Giant Lego man appears on beach
Ask YC: Is [dead] censorship excessive?
I just noticed we have some new properties of dead stories, like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348974

Not only is the once-top story dead (hidden from people who haven't opted into seeing dead stories), but my upvotes seem to be disregarded, new comments are disabled, and the story URL has been stripped out.

Isn't this a bit much, considering I've opted into seeing dead stories?
Whereas a former employer with an IP dispute is likely to just want to shut you down as a potential competitor (in their mind) the University just wants a piece of the action. At least, that's the sense I got from the IP agreement I signed when I started working here.
I don't think word frequency is a good estimator for the likeliness of passwords. Many frequently used words -- like connectors or adverbs -- are unlikely to be used as passwords. I expect proper names (of people, places, or cultural works) are the most common passwords, which are at a relative disadvantage in word frequency lists.
"It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed by while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results."
Thanks PG for your advice.

BTW, when you say "aggressive about killing spams", you mean killing manually, right?
Why the Google Book Search settlement is bad news for readers
CSI: Miami: Wrecking Crew
Click here for more information
Why VoIP is essential for mobile carriers
Foosball won't play itself you know!!
No. I don't know percentages, but I'm guessing a majority of their users, especially the ones hitting it a lot, are college students, who are generally poor, and high-schoolers, which don't have credit cards and won't get money out of their parents to get on a site to complain about their parents. As soon as they charge these groups will go somewhere else as quickly as they came to Facebook.
Facebooks strategy has to be monetizing events. Create a cinema trip event, everyone who RSVPs gets their ticket booked automagically, Facebook gets a commission. Create a LAN party event, order pizza at the same time, Facebook gets a commission. Or sports or travel tickets or whatever. The scope here is vast, but to get there they have to be the de facto social calendar.
We don't have control over effort. We think we do because that is one of the functions of consciousness. Even looking at it from that perspective, there are factors like energy level and passion that seem to exist in some people with the rest wondering how to get it. Still, this article is useful as a motivator, getting some people from the latter to the former.
While this is good news, it is hardly the end of the matter.
Man! these kinda news only arouse my interest to combine my programming knowledge with some yet-to-learn microcontroller stuff. Both seem like a deadly combo that would make me wanna stop sleeping for 7 hours and situp and start learning electronics.

Astonishingly, this RepRap is based on Arduino!!! The Arduino Decimelia board has 16KB of memory(!). So it seems like the arduino serves for temporarily storing variable data while the computer does the processing. Wouldn't the printer be more faster if it uses a BeagleBoard or something like that? It would enable faster calculations locally and would help in saving the processing power of the computer for some other purpose(maybe to be to do further calculations since printing 3D requires more calculations ofcourse).

The http://parts.reprap.org site is a great idea. It gives those who wanna build reprap a great idea about prices and parts suppliers and what to specifically buy. It even supports creating your shopping cart on Digikey and Amazon etc :)

A cool idea with a really cool and helpful resource site.

And IMO, it wouldn't be too late before we seen an IronMan. I remember a scene in the movie in which Stark selects his colors for the suit and the robot paints the suit while Tony waits. Now its more possible ('realistic') to even design the suit and wait for the printer to print it.

Don't be shocked if someone comes outta the dark shouts I'm IronMan in a few days :D
No, it's not too much. Discuss politics elsewhere.
I also don't understand why people keep posting Seth here on HN.
I followed your guys advice and made an iphone webapp. It was surprisingly easy to do with iUI. Please give any feedback: http://iphone.saddegeet.com
From Arrows and Text to Yahoo's Modular Innovation Expansion
iTunes for books - iBooks? And maybe Google could become a direct publisher...

Libraries can buy more terminal accesses (I mean, they buy hardcopy books - why not online books?). It is a shame about those abandonware/orphaned book. I agree that the agreement might need some tweaking, given Harvard's objections - but it seems like great progress to me.
Google protects itself from zombies
Facebook Hemorrhaging Cash, Runs To Dubai For Money
Why the Tech Crash May Have Been a Good Thing
We have a problem with comment spam on our site (a news and prediction market site, using Drupal). We introduced captchas, activated nofollow, all to no avail -- there are some very persistent spammers who will still go through the trouble of entering captchas just to have their stupid links show up at the bottoms of comment threads. It's not a huge issue, but it's definitely an irritant and added cost, in terms of the staff time required to clear it out.
get.off.gr a porn site?
I think a lot of it also has to do with the community itself. A site of this size would probably get 300-400 spam messages a day if it weren't for the fact that it's audience would see right through it. Tech people are so concious of Spam that they ignore it out of principle which means spamming a tech site pointless.

As for suggestions...

1. Obviously CAPTCHA. It just makes sense
2. I find keyword blocking very effective. So, for example, if I was running Hacker News I'd block any news item containing the word Viagra that was submitted by a user that is under a certain feedback level (like, no feedback, for example). With one caveat which is to give them a way to manually verify it (say an e-mail sent to them that allows them to verify they are an actual person and have the item approved)
3. Use E-Mail Spam Block Lists. Lists like SBL, CBL and XBL give IP addresses that generate massive amounts of spam. Many of those same IP addresses generate web spam.
4. I've never been a fan of this paticular method because I think it's discriminatory to an extent I'm uncomfortable with but many places have special requirements for countries that are famous for spam generation (Russia, China, etc...) Like making users from those IPs jump through special registration hoops.

Hope it Helps!
Parenting as a Friend - Free Ebook on Parenting
Most of this is insightful, and even got this 45-year-old (who should know everything by now!) thinking.

I objected to this, though: "However hard you try, you can’t avoid being yourself."

That's a semantic trap. Who you are changes, and can change, and you can be the creator of that change.
If they can cut jobs rather than raise (too much) more money then they probably should.

Spewing money that fast is BAD all round (and no amount of shoring investment will help long term). Either they need 2 or 3 years capital or they need it fixed now...

Cut hard and deep now, refocus, reassess and build on current revenue streams.

But they wont....
Can facebook possibly make as much money as has been invested in them?
I think the will to eschew manipulation of others is an admirable one.

You've reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately and feel like writing down.

If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground. You haven't gotten rid of X; you've fragmented your consciousness so that you're no longer aware of X, which makes you think X is gone when really it's continuing to operate. And X can work a lot more mischief now that it's autonomous from the part of you that wants to regulate it.

A straightforward example is the religious fanatic who suppresses his "demonic" impulses. We all know what such people tend to really be like.

Perhaps a more meaningful example for this forum is the kind of person who wants to overcome his fear by motivating himself to think he's not afraid and by executing certain actions to prove it. The trouble with doing this naively is that you can end up not with an absence of fear, but with unconscious fear, which continues to prevent you from doing things, only in ways you can't explain.

Of course, literature is replete with examples of this dynamic. The bottom line is that you can't minimize X in yourself by trying to eliminate it. It seems that a better strategy is to stay aware of X as it is happening. That way X and the part of you that is against X remain in the same field and there is a possibility of integration.

So, counterintuitively, if you really want to minimize something in yourself you have to accept it.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a story about politics... the example was just the latest one I saw. I'm just curious why an opt-in system for dead stories isn't enough?
Best Start up advice Writer
I would not say they are entrepreneurs as much as they are arbitrageurs. Personally, i find this type of arbitrage quite distasteful but it is legal, and will eventually come to an end. This is because whenever there is a loophole, it is the most exploitative and conspicuous arbitrageurs that result in its closing (think Enron).
Have you dealt with Salesman, he is under pressure to perform and will say all the things you like to listen, at the end of the day his interests are at the forefront and not yours. Think again. How do you know he is not all the talk and no walk.
It's because of the differences in personalities between early adopters and the masses.