skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with sanitizing all possible XSS exploits in all HTML accepted by browsers is similar to being the outlaw vs. being the cop. As an outlaw, you have to make good your escape every single time. The cop only has to catch the outlaw once.

Admittedly, this is confusing because Jeff, be being an HTML cop, has put himself in the position of outlaw.
I don't know about common sense.
Consumers Want to Use Mobile Banking, But Few Actually Do
I don't think taking out firewire would be a mess up. I am pretty sure quite a bit of thought went into this decision. Apple brings changes into its products quite slowly. I am not surprised at all that Apple is letting firewire go.
Confidence on amounts matters
in most cases N=0
It's no surprise they want to build Facebook for Enterprises, where they might actually get their product to pull in profit by turning it into a license-based cash cow.
Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker
25% Layoffs At Seattle’s Zillow
$20 Business Plan wanted.  Nice.
Totally agree. I meant putting it in might have been a mess up.

Apple was really pushing firewire hard with the early generation iPods. If I recall correctly, they only accepted firewire. I don't think that worked out too well, because they eventually accepted USB as well.
I should also mention I found this one a little more engaging than the Google Tech Talk one.
pg - once again - you're right on - i might add though that passion is also an ingredient that founders need to survive a nuclear winter - if you don't love what you do or love what you are building you wont survive the best of times and you're doomed at the worst of times as every passing day will test your will power to stick with it and make it happen whether its sunny outside or raining fire.
FireWire Isnt Alone: A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed
It's hacking.
The title for this advertisement for Mathematica would be more accurate, and much less surprising, if it were "Floating Point Arithmetic Is Hard—To Get Right."
Men call Mars, Women call Venus
In conversation with... a computer program
Gigashift - File Sharing With a Business Model
I think this was a necessary transition for Macs to take. There is no reason to have so many different ports serving the same purpose. You can do everything with USB 2.0 that you can do with Firewire. USB has essentially won the war, supporting Firewire would just perpetuate this unnecessary battle even longer. In the long run, this is better for the consumer.
it is necessary for making a liability shield if one of your customers sues you
Buffett was heavily invested in the Euro. When the stock market crashed he simply took his Euro's, cashed them in for dollars, and bought US Assets that were down. Most regular US citizens were invested at the top of the market and just can't afford to go buy more.
Luck has nothing to do with it. The point was that we'll have a better society when we filter aggressively for morons. Wealth playing a role in the selection process weakens our ability to do that.
Yeah, I guess I was thinking more "civilizations" than "empires".
A child who skips grades usually faces worse problems. Skipping a grade retards your social skills badly, and that's worse than not studying enough. It's not a good idea to put a child together with other children a year or a year and a half older than him.

There are millions of accomplished people in the world today. 98% of them went through a standard schooling experience, and then ended up accomplished. If you have a problem with your work ethic, don't blame the school system - it seemed to have worked for all those other succesful people.

There is something I realised - there is no point blaming anything in your past for any of your current problems. Because the moment you realise that there is a current problem, you can fix it, irrelevant of where it came from. If instead of fixing, you go casting blame, that is really your problem then.
build out an entire featureset, get a ton of people to use it

Bingo - if you can't identify an appealing, useful subset of your features that is too small for enough paying customers, then you should not do freemium. You can't unring "free" once you've taught it to your customers.
nice, solid review.

if only there were some sort of wiki where all these ad-hoc Rails security guides could be coalesced. hmm, what to do.
$4 for 3 gig
FBI nets 56 in Darkmarket Sting
Right. It is a trade off. You either

- get along with the way most of the world is organized and wake up every day roughly at the same time, and work/think/decide/learn below your capacity; or

- You do what is best for your mind, at the cost of an eternal impedance mismatch with the rest of the world.

We can't have both upsides at the same time, unfortunately...
Wow, I justed took 20 minutes of my life looking into that, and you know something, I won't get those 20 minutes back.

Here is the answer tho in roman numeral form where * means "times" :

DVL * M
"People who don't work with their hands are parasites" and other truisms by Jenny Holzer
With "faster DOM graphics", I meant to include SVG. I can't believe IE still has no native support for it :-( I see that depending on your requirements, there are partial SVG and Canvas implementations for IE in JavaScript, as well as higher-level JS APIs that work across the browsers.

http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2006/03/svg-in-ie/

http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/

http://www.liquidx.net/plotkit/
In one of the many what if discussions that we've, trying to nail down how we'll respond to situations in the future in the case of them getting bad (I think a good idea for any set of startup founders) we both agreed: we're the first ones that stop getting paid. If its our salaries missing a month or someone we've hired, we're the ones that have to bite the bullet.

I think if you want to play with high-stakes, as is true in the startup game, you have to be willing to lose with dignity. Holding onto your shares, screwing your employees and still paying yourself just makes you a jackass.
The only thing I use FireWire for, Target Disk Mode, cannot be done with USB. This omission has made the new MacBooks a lot less appealing.
Good point. And in Japan the government responded with massive public spending and rate reductions.
Just for a little while. Google will index this page soon.

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000
I think that government doesn't work, merit is often overridden by connections, too much greed is pointless, in time we're (almost) all forgotten are all common sense things to say.

What's odd is that he would use Linux as a metaphor, who but a hacker would get that?
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Those "real CEOs" generally have a high net worth to begin with, something that's not true of (I would guess) most startup founders.
Passion Party Catalog
The first time South Park aired an animated image of the prophet Muhammad no one seemed to notice.

And if I recall correctly the Danish cartoons had been printed quite a while before someone took notice there.

Would anyone have noticed lyrics in the background music of a PS3 game?

How do you even effectively protest that?
How is Freemium different than Crippleware?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware

I've been quite successful, as have many others, at building "crippleware" products.

Am I missing something?
There are countless "business plan templates", $20 appears to be reasonably price.

On sites such as elance or oDesk many people will give away work to get a better ranking. So why not "MANAGEMENT"
I agree with this and I don't know why it's getting modded down. I can understand the CEO taking a huge pay cut, but how is one supposed to live off of $1/year without any other source of income?
OK, I'll be the one to ask... how is that ironic?
Hey: they asked to be the CEO. They're the ones who walk away with a 7 figure payoff when the company sells for $5MM. They get 100x the payoff of a developer because they accepted the risk.

Is it hard to live on $1 a year? Well, it's not harder than living on $0 a year. But OK: how many of the Valley Layoff Heroes even took a pay cut down to sustenance wage? Note: normally when people do that, they tell everyone --- it's a morale boost.
Ask HN: How to offer equity to a marketer?
Hey,

I've been having an surprising amount of difficulty get any decent coverage for a financial web-app of mine; an app I think people interested in finance and investing would love using. Because of the type of app it is, I feel like paid advertising is a poor approach for it. I've been considering offering some equity to someone who is an experienced internet marketer - someone who can get writers, and bloggers to provide good coverage.

My question is, how would you go about offering the equity to someone? I couldn't give it away and hope the person will be successful, and I can't have them do the work and hope I'm satisfied enough to give them a share, etc. So what is the appropriate process here?

Thanks
Ever seen whiney children lawyer up?
Google hedges against foreign currency swings
Where can I track political contributions as well as voting records? I'd like to see which politicians received the most contributions from various industries and compare it with their voting record. Is anyone doing this already?
I2C or SPI Serial Communication, which one to go with?
Until just recently, camcorders work off firewire ports. Firewire audio interfaces are much more advanced than their USB counterparts. And users with lots of money wrapped up in firewire (like me) cannot substitute USB in.
Before adding serial communication to your design, let’s say adding a serial eeprom, you should have an understanding of the different types of serial communication that you can use. There are two main protocols to consider, SPI protocol and I2C protocol.
The author bemoans the fact that he was handicapped in his early life by his unlucky (un-wealthy) circumstances. Being born into money, or with a good intellect, sporting ability, or looks (to name a few other valued traits), that isn't luck?

Being born into money is somehow different from the others?

Wealth is a proxy for one of the other talents. Wealth has always played a role in our selection process. Smarts, at some point, lead to an accumulation of wealth. Wealth signals, a lot more often than not, good genetic material that was awarded in previous iterations. Wealth offers the carriers of this material a better chance at survival, even if the current generation has regressed to the no-good-frat-boy mean. And if the chances are not availed, wealth is squandered in a few generations.

The idea that the wealthy, but dumb get a free ride, ultimately jeopardizing the entire system is foolish. There will always be smart people around to either guide them and their finances for a percentage, or fleece them and penalize them for their ignorance.

Enron filtered aggressively for morons. A fat lot of good it did them. A society is only a larger collection of vested interests.
Like the 'no images of Mo' rule it's all cultural bull. Go into the vaults of Egypt's museums and you will see Arab paintings of Mohammed from the 12th century that were cherished like the Mona Lisa is now.

I think you'll find many many Muslims will be shaking their heads thinking when are these idiot's just going to shut up AND when are the non Muslims just going to start ignoring them.

We offer these cultural extremists the oxygen of publicity and starve the normals Muslims.
Great Article...

Working on a site web2.0fuckedcompany.com if you want to help....
True.

There's an old newspaper rule: if it bleeds, it leads.

A small number of people willing to do violence can get and hold much greater press and political power than a large number of people simply trying to get along. Sucks, huh.
Markdown doesn't even try to solve the HTML sanitation issue because it was designed for use when you have complete control over the content, so it passes all HTML through in the clear so that you can use Markdown to make the usual/trivial stuff easier, and leave the complex stuff to how HTML designed it.

Because it ignores HTML altogether, you need to have a separate sanitation process if you only want a subset of HTML to be usable.

The story is the same with most other simple markup languages, like Textile.
Took me a while to find the link again, but this work to implement Silverlight in JS and SVG is closest to flash I've seen for building RIAs: http://github.com/toshok/firelight/wikis/home
Nokia 6131 GOLD Unlocked
The Nokia 6131 phone comes with all the features you want, including a brilliant 16.7-million "true color" main display and 262,144-color outer display, ideal for use with the 1.3-megapixel camera.
argh, Rosenstein is soooo not facebook's #3, more like their #103. The press loves to mess this up over and over again with facebook and other companies.
About the dividends (http://www.focusinvestor.com/brkfaq.htm#Q7):

"We feel noble intentions should be checked periodically against results. We test the wisdom of retaining earnings by assessing whether retention, over time, delivers shareholders at least $1 of market value for each $1 retained. To date, this test has been met. We will continue to apply it on a five-year rolling basis. As our net worth grows, it is more difficult to use retained earnings wisely."
Source: Berkshire Hathaway's Owner's Manual

Mr. Buffett:: "We will either pay large dividends or none at all if we can't obtain more money through re-investment (of those funds). There is no logic to regularly paying out 10% or 20% of earnings as dividends every year."

Charles Munger: "If you went to the leading schools, they wouldn't teach dividend policy this way."
Source: My notes from the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting
MBTA to roll out free wifi on all commuter rail lines (Boston)
PhoneGap on Android
Nitobi hacker Joe Bowser has PhoneGap ported to Android.
In the pilot program ssh worked too. :-)
Can we trust the authorities to use deep packet inspection appropriately?
Kentucky judge allows case to censor domain names to proceed
We will know the tubocalypse has truly arrived when someone suggests that "Congress should work like Digg"; and they get play in the mainstream media.
Well, the paper-based displays may be used in e-books, thus eliminating/reducing the use of paper.
I seem to remember hearing about something similar this past weekend at http://conference.freeculture.org in berkeley, but I can't recall it.

If you're interested in the area, I'd ask Joshua Tauberer, razor.occams.info, who made http://govtrack.us/. He's really into it and I think could quickly give you a complete overview of what's been done and what hasn't.
Intelligence is a capacity, not a trait. You don't get opportunities in life simply because you're smart, you get them because you've built upon your intelligence, applied it, and in some way proven yourself. Inherited wealth exists irrespective of effort.
Stumpedia Launches Paid Content Platform
I think you'd be surprised.

What many people on HN consider common sense (e.g. Open ID, use complete sentences, use simple design for consumer sites) is not common sense to the general public (e.g. MOM, USE GMAIL INSTEAD OF HOTMAIL - CHRIST).
Adura Brightens With $5M for Lighting Management
How hard it is to live on $1/year clearly depends on how much money you have in the bank, or other resources you might have. In absence of that (or if your net worth is actually negative--say, you have a lot of student loans), then it's just not possible to work without a salary.

You could do some consulting on the side, I suppose, but that would defeat the point of having employees. And as an employee, you're probably better off finding a job somewhere else than working at a company where the CEO has to spend part of his time working on something else just to get by.
Can anyone find a question/answer on SO that uses this supposedly crucial feature of allowing HTML?
I wonna help
Just like with the elite hacker group "Anonymous".
I'd take diet advice from Scoble before I took startup advice from him.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297101

To his credit though, this appears to be more of other people's advice aggregated than his own advice.
The author may bemoan it and may secretly (or openly) want all the unfair advantages he can get but that has nothing to do with the point he is making regarding meritocracy.

It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it.
To his defense, he didn't actually say "fuck you" - that was a gracious editorial spin.
What Happens to Our Social Profiles After We Die?
I think early in the week is the best way - at least when firing people. If you let someone go on Monday or Tuesday they can immediately start looking for a new job the next morning. With any luck maybe they can start getting callbacks or a phone interview before the end of the week. That goes a long way toward boosting morale. The weekend makes it a little more difficult. Sure, they can update their resumes, apply online, etc., but that kind of ruins the weekend and leaves a lot of time to start feeling hopeless or really pissed off.

Plus, some people might not mind so much if you tell them first thing Monday morning that they have to go home. :)
Gawker's Example Of A Good Layoff Post
android is going to take over the world!
I completely agree. I cant wait to outwork everyone in this market. I have a feeling that this is the time when the brave, bold and smart rise to the top and that is fully what I intend to do.
* It's detailed and meticulous.

* It's no-nonsense: ad rates are going to plummet in '09, and they need to re-org around the properties that make money.

* Denton accepts responsibility for the layoff; it's "his commercial judgement" that's at fault.

* Everyone he's laying off is praised; the layoff isn't an "opportunity to upgrade staff after the economy recovers".

* Explicitly says he's not going to bullshit his audience about why this was the right move or why they should feel good about it.
Ask HN: What tools and methods do you use for software testing?
Other than unit testing, what tools and methods do you use for software testing? Do you even do any other type of testing? Do you use commercial tools?
Rspec is my current favorite for testing. I still do unit tests, but rspec is so semantically intuitive and helpful when running the suites against large apps.
Very timely. And it's great to read a "glass half full" approach with some keen insight and advice.

We're certainly planning on your main thrust to be true with our new platform. To that point - here's our latest blog post: http://tinyurl.com/6blrvl

Potential investors welcome!
Redfin also laid off around 20% of their staff a few days ago: http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/10/a_very_tough_day.html
I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this, but here is the difference as I often see it:

Crippleware will sometimes omit or restrict features that are needed for basic operations in the application. Freemium tempts users to pay who like the basics but "want more."

Definitely not always the case, but that could be a distinction.
Bad advice. By the time your recession-proof product is built, the recession will be over.
An alternative is to use an ethernet cross-over cable and just use standard file transfer methods.

Or perhaps someone will write an os x driver to take advantage of usb-usb (aka usb bridge / networking) cables that work for PCs.

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-compu...

The advantage of these solutions is that you can work with other non mac os x computers.
Elements of Ruby Style
CampusBuddy Hands Over Campus Grading Records To Students
Target disk mode saved my ass just last night.

But I'm all for progress. Also, if you consider the waste that went into fitting almost every single mac since 1999 with unused firewire ports, it makes you cringe.

If you have a pro audio interface or pro camcorder, you probably want a macbook pro anyway (just a shame they don't do one in 13")
this is unfortunately a part of the game.

good luck to those that have been let go.
FAIL

(writer overlooks "FTW" as meme partner...)
Damn. I was going to offer to do it for $25 but "The wage is not negociable."

TicketStumbler is my third business and I've never used a business plan unless you count the YC application. I certainly understand their purpose for very large projects but for the vast most startups...meh.

What does everyone else think?
Man, Muffin gets around.
+1 for rspec. I use it in a Rails project and it integrates seamlessly. I've been doing unit testing with all sorts of xUnit frameworks on and off for several years, and I've never found anything as enjoyable to use as rspec.
It is better to lay people off on a Friday. Studies show there is less chance of an incident if you do it before a weekend.
I'm not sure I understand how a lack of badness equals "making investment decisions based on altruism", or how they can be conflated in any way.

The way I'm reading the "debate" here is ca98am79 saying, "Buffett has no history of investing for altruistic reasons. He invests to make money, and is the most successful person in the world at doing so." And you're saying, "Stop calling Buffett a crook! He's a value investor and a philanthropist!"

He, obviously, didn't call Buffett a crook. He said that Buffett is a successful investor that invests to make money.

It's like two totally different conversations where both are true, but they aren't talking to one another.
Money hasn't existed long enough for it to have any hand in human evolution. Social and economic Darwinism don't describe the real world, they describe how some people feel the real world should operate.

Furthermore, the fact that inherited wealth is a longstanding tradition isn't a qualitative judgment one way or another, post facto rationalizations notwithstanding. Not everything that's existed for a long time is necessarily some happy equilibrium that benefits all sides.
I stopped reading after:

"a man can't know what it is to be a mother"

That's true at a precise level. But more valuable is:

"a man can know what it is to be a parent"

and I think that's a much more valuable statement.

I pretty much recall this exact discussion happening during the VP debate.
Cabel Sasser recounts Coda’s development back-story
Bad crippleware definitely works that way.

Good crippleware lets you try everything.
We have Hudson running continuous tests on svn checkins. Which is unit tests and some other tests run through junit and junitperf etc, sort of functional testing.

We then also do full build performance tests using the grinder at night. This is currently not very automated at all, and involves doing processing in the morning. These are short runs, multiple samples averaged. It would be good to know how others are running there performance testing automatically, and also how they are monitoring the systems during the exact times of the test.

We also prior to release run some serious stress testing, again using grinder. Then soak tests using grinder at expected load for 1 week. This gives us the data we need for a release.
They're just buzzwords that can mean whatever you want them to mean. When in doubt choose the one with the positive connotation.
This is awesome. I really enjoyed having Wifi on my rides into Boston from Worcester. Hopefully it gets a little more reliable; I had trouble with it a few times.
Shake, Dictate and Scroll Your Way Through Mobile Menus
Borland SilkTest. A good "industry standard" by this point.
Most people live within range of a few different schools. Why are they all the same?
Have you found the test case maintenance cost (updating test cases to deal with changing code) to be acceptable?