skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying that one solution avoids the need for setting up things in a sane way. In both cases, you need to configure things properly or you can shoot yourself in the foot.

However, depending on the systems your company uses and your configurations, one solution might be simpler than another. Network topologies tend to be very static. You might have a public subnet, and a few private subnets.

Over time, you might add or remove web servers to the public subnet, or add various services to the private subnets. Especially if you are using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), you might have many different services that need to interact with each other, but not with the public internet.

When you are using security groups, you need to make sure to have separate SG's for each category of machine (public, private) and then manage them at a service level, and manage the interaction between multiple SGs. For example, Web should be available on port 80 from the internet, but the DB should only be available on port XX accessible from the Web SG. But also accessible from the same port from a Service SG, etc.

So as you continue to iterate on your services and deploy new ones, you need to be constantly tweaking the security group configurations. With VPC, once you have a sane public/private topology you can forget about it.

Additionally, most SOAs try to provide some form of high availability. For us, that means cross region / cross AZ replication and availability. Doing cross AZ is fairly simple in both EC2 and VPC, but doing cross region in EC2 is a pure nightmare. You cannot apply a security policy across regions, so you have no simple way to allow your nodes to communicate.

Since VPC acts as a distinct private network, we can simply use site-to-site VPN configurations between our regions, and nodes can easily and freely communicate with each other. There is nothing to worry about, since the private subnets are connected over VPN, and are using hostnames that are only routable within our private network.

Don't get me wrong, security groups can be properly used to provide a totally secure environment where only trusted nodes are allowed to communicate. You can add monitoring and configuration testing easily as well. But once you try to scale up past a few servers, move to a SOA, and provide cross-region availability, VPC becomes the simpler alternative.
Unfortunately, they do not offer Linux so I will not be using them. One thing they have definitely failed to learn from Dropbox's early success is that for services like this Linux support is very important.

File sending services are usually first adopted by tech savvy users. The service then becomes more popular as the tech savvy types recommend it to their less tech savvy friends. And Linux is actually quite popular among tech savvy users.

So here is some free advice for Kicksend -- create a Linux app asap.
I didn't see any mention of beta on their front page - they probably should explicitly say it there.
On an unrelated note, if you highlight a portion of the article, you can listen to it. Very useful for listening to articles while working, instead of listening to music, or just to rest your eyes.

It is powered by http://www.readspeaker.com and AFAICT is the best sounding Text to Speech implementation, I have heard so far.

If you just listen to the text, it sounds like a human news reader, much better than Siri. Wow. And the cherry on the top is that it highlights the text which it is reading as it's being read.
I think YC has a very strong brand among first-time entrepreneurs, in that pg has removed a lot of the intimidation surrounding VC firms. There's a lot of goodwill out there in the startup community for YC. Plus YC may just be the most succesful VC firm out there from the last few years, save for Accel
Bad behavior and Akismet combine to do the same thing (WP).

The trouble is, you've made life more difficult for your users. On blogs, non-image "CAPTCHAs" are trivial. (e.g., "Put 42 in this box -->"), so long as your site is low enough traffic that no one cares to write a bot targeting you.
This statement is bait.
No MVP here - they went all the way the first time. Be sure to switch to 1080p and go full screen, it's breathtaking. But it makes me wonder, what is the ROI on this? Will they really make back the wages of 30 people for 22 months, and how long will it take?
Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?
I don't think terms provide too much assurance - maybe they're only really useful if legal recourse ensues.

There will always be the possibility of a rogue employee who goes out of his or her way to read data that doesn't belong to them.

In the case of Dropbox - to prevent this possibility - we can encrypt our data if we choose to (I've successfully used 'encfs' in the past). In the case of Google's email and document services I don't think this is possible?
Sweet! I was hoping they would break this part out into its own bill.

This is true economic jet fuel. Most of the jobs package was not terribly exciting but when I came across this bit I truly got jazzed about the possibilities. I hope the SEC doesn't drag their feet after this is passed.

Even if we end up with a ton of failed companies from this and a lot of burned investors the individual risk will be low and the entrepreneurs that come out of the other side will be that much better the next time. It really opens up the game to a huge number of people that otherwise would not have much hope of even getting 'friends and family' seed money.
The behind the scenes video shows details of the process. I found it fascinating: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIH4MJAC2Tg
Can't Turn it Off - Pure HTML5 game
oops, yes, i think my brain saw "invite code" and automatically interpolated "beta".
NYSE OpenMAMA: Wall Street Won’t Share the Wealth, But It Will Share the Code
It's tennis courts?
Can Yahoo Be Rescued? Don Dodge, 'Cut the Losses'
The ROI is creating something incredible that you can be proud of forever. This is art! I hope people will always have the courage to create amazing things without worrying about the financials.
Maybe it was ping-pong table "courts".
I still wish there a sort by date option, for when I'm trying to find the oldest occurrence of something...
Fluid Baseline Grid - an HTML5 & CSS3 development kit
Android's Back Button - Tim Bray
It's worth considering that they may not be making money on Prime. They might be losing a ton of money, just to get consumers hooked on the Amazon "ecosystem".
Does end to end email encryption get any traction? I remember PGP supposed to do it. Not sure how far that went.

It seems for company using third party email hosting, it shouldn't be too inconvenient to set up a company-wide encryption on its emails.
Makes sense, do you have an average figure of the companies that have exited, what the YC percentage ownership is when the exit event occurs?
I think if that ever happens, we will basically have iOS X on our hands. Unless they want to completely merge the two operating systems, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Apple pushes back sandboxing deadline as devs struggle with tradeoffs
Right but where are the pencils and rulers?
I really appreciated this comment, not because of what it says about Unity, but because of the analogy you used. It's like this girl I dated for 2 years, saying "What, you want to take up yoga? Is it just because you want to start at other girls' asses?" Pretty glad I got out of that relationship.
5 Proven Secrets To Build Your Long-Lasting Business
Could the stats be wrong?? Come and find out why you might haven't told the whole truth...
It's actually not as hard as you might think. It's a lot simpler for Facebook then it would be for most people, as they control their own hardware.

The problem with automated builds comes in when you have lots of different hardware configs, and lots of different software configs. If you just have a few hardware configs, then your task is much, much easier.
I love stories like this, they probably have a huge moat due to the capital costs of the machines. The vertical integration means the designers likely know exactly what can and can't be made, so it sounds like a great value add. And no one would ever think of going into a biz like that.

A friend of mine worked for a company that bought mud from the ocean floor, it cost something like $5000 for a 5 tonnes of it (mostly for the dredge operators), which they would removed the seaweed and other large particles, and package into 50 mL bottles for around $10 wholesale via an MLM cosmetics company. They had an exclusive contract and guaranteed sales. It was pretty much risk free money.
I've been doing the hidden field trick for the best part of a year now and it's still working brilliantly.
Obviously the ease of programming any given task in MR corresponds, to invent a word, with how cross-talky the task is. If it is no-communication parallelizable, then it's very easy to do. The more communication or the more data striping you do, the more interesting it becomes.

In any case, tons of people would like a simple sql like language for hadoop. There already exist some examples: pig, sawzall, etc. Unfortunately, the inefficiencies hurt. Say pig takes 2x as much data processing as hand coding java. At large scale, that can eat you alive. To get some intuition about scale, review Ron Bodkin's, former vp eng at quantcast, slides: [1], page 9 and on. Obviously if a 2x penalty means going from 4 to 8 machines in your cluster, it's not such a big deal. But if you buy clusters a datacenter's cage worth at a time or more, its painful. We haven't escaped the tradeoff between programmer time and computer cost.

People would also love something as easy to program as R or matlab that magically scales to large data. Nobody has written such a thing despite quite a lot of demand, which makes me think it's even harder than I thought it as, and I believe it to be a quite hard task.

For the tools: I'm not a qc spokesperson and none of this represents the opinion of my employer and wasn't endorsed by them. If you want qc's position on anything, ask our spokesperson.

[1] http://qconsf.com/dl/qcon-sanfran-2010/slides/RonBodkin_Larg...
Oops, yah that is great feedback, we're going to change that now. For some reason, I guess we just naturally assumed people know we're in Beta.
Perforce Chronicle (Concurrent editing, Versioning with MongoDB etc.)
This looks like a quite impressive solution.
I heard from someone over at Perforce that it's probably going to launch tonight.
Why the West is losing out to the rest
Or use SpiderOak, Tarsnap, or Wuala, all of which handle encryption natively.
As people have suggested, on some people they probably make money off prime (the small time users), and on others they make it up in quantity of stuff purchased. For instance, Amazon Prime (Student) was free for a year last year, now it's free for 6 months. From this we can guess that a year was overly generous and they didn't make enough money off of that through the increase in purchase volume.

Additionally, Amazon has significant deals with their shipping carrier for the mass quantity of things they ship out. This reduces their shipping costs.

The other component that reduces their shipping cost is the warehouse locations. Newegg used to (still does?) aim to get their packages delivered in 2 days. Their warehouses were strategically set up for that, and even if you ordered 3 day shipping you could get it in 2 days, it just wasn't guaranteed. I'm sure Amazon's warehouse layout is similar where most items reasonably get to their location in 2 days via cheaper shipping, and they can just pay for the extra SLA for the packages that might not.
It is also interesting that he phrases it never as a Stanford degree but as a degree "of Stanford quality". It is going to be interesting to see how they will leverage the Stanford brand without discounting it.
I think there is a basic disconnect.

There is no way for a computer to anything with an email (save it, give it to you etc) without 'reading' it's contents. So the only meaningful thing for people to worry about is decoding the content which IMO means a spam filter does not qualify as decoding. Nor does displaying adds for tires if the word cars shows up in your email.
It's better with this than with a CC. You get a notification on your phone immediately, so they are likely to get caught at the moment they do it. You could walk up to the manager and say, "Hey, someone just charged me for something I didn't order. With a credit card, they might take the credit card nimber when you buy something legitimately and then skim it and use it later. It's hard to know which time you used the card and it was skimmed and who purchased something later. This sounds more secure.
Why would Google bother redesigning a product they're planning on deprecating? It seems fairly obvious to me that this simple math is currently in play at Google: Social is important, G+ is a pan-Google social product, and social products live or die by network effect, therefore all effort shall be directed toward driving up the userbase of G+. Hence the black bar. Hence shutting down Buzz. Hence the + operator in search. And hence the obvious integration of Reader.
This looks like a quite impressive solution.
I heard from someone over at Perforce that it's probably going to launch tonight or very soon.
I meant mainly that it isn't done. I'm not sure if there would be legal obstacles as well. E.g. we're not a C Corp, but a collection of LLCs.
Free video training
Two-faced surprise from Spain
What about Facebook?

A few weeks ago I had a situation where Facebook contacted me about a job, and it appeared that Facebook may have been reading (or at the least mining) private messages related to my startup (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035376). A Facebook employee replied to the thread but wouldn't provide details.
It's federal law that Google needs to hand over everything they have when the FBI comes calling on these cases. So Google's only choices are hand over the content or wait 30 minutes until people show up and start dismantling their data-center and then go to jail.
Groupon Set to go public tomorrow at $20 a share
5 Best Free Siri Alternatives for Android
By investment firms I meant VC funds and the like. I've never heard of a VC fund being acquired. (About 10 years ago a fund of Ron Conway's was acquired, but I believe it was fully invested then. I.e. the acquirer was buying a portfolio, not a business.)
The tracking should ocurr when the user performs the +1.

It shouldn't track the way it does, and it certainly shouldn't track HTTPS. It is not even an issue of privacy, it is simple courtesy and common sense.
Thank you. I understand that office space, personnel, and financial benefits are big advantages in startup company. The other points you are making might become disadvantages, especially for those that do not have good outside guidance.

My understanding is that organizations like YC help you "trim" your ideas and stay focus. One might even think that YC is something like a board of trustees or senior management. Obviously, without the part where if everyone thinks your approach is really bad idea they will not let you do it.
AOL still has 3.5 million dialup subscribers
I came across this one yesterday when I was looking for more information about something mentioned on HN:

Search: carmack +zfail gpl
Date: 2011-11-02
Result: Bad autocorrect; Plus operator broke
"""
Showing results for carmack fail gpl
Search instead for carmack zfail gpl
"""

Because the plus operator is broken my final search ended up being `carmack "z-fail" OR "zfail" gpl` because different sources included or excluded the dash. Note that I think it's good that quotes are still exact and they shouldn't do the synonym search, but this is something the plus operator would have worked on, if I remember correctly.
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But famous Hollywood studios do get acquired, making that an odd analogy. For example, Pixar was first part of Lucasfilm, then sold to Steve Jobs, then sold on again to Disney, and still seems to be doing well.
Armed With Social Signals, Google Moves Back Towards Real-Time Search
That (they had to have a good time making it), and the purely promotional reason of this is in their portfolio! If they we're bidding on a job for me and they showed me this I would throw money at them. Dedication, quality, and creativity.
(I am neither a Facebook employee nor can I speak for them.)

I really think that was just coincidence. Considering how many people talk about startups over Facebook messages and how many people have been contacted by Facebook recruiters, there's bound to be at least one person who was contacted by a Facebook recruiter a day or two after talking about startups. It'll seem mighty suspicious to that person, and they'll blog about it. Congratulations, you're the lucky one.

Companies that big just generally don't do things like read private e-mail, because they know it'll get out somehow - disgruntled employee, whistleblower - and the damage to their reputation is totally not worth whatever they can gain from it.
Does anyone have any real data about the reading habits of the "average American?" I know several people, including my parents, that read many books a year but do not have Kindles. I also know several people who own Kindles but do not read many books a year.
I used to be quite skeptical of Kindle and a dedicated book reading device until I was gifted a Kindle. My wife got tired of my buying hundreds of books and having it fill up the house and the Kindle TV ad did the trick.

Now that I've used it for a few months, I'm a Kindle convert. I carry it with me all the time - conveniently fits into my coat pocket and weighs so little - and I whip it out whenever I'm a line or at an airport and all those otherwise wasted time.

It has remarkable battery life - I normally get 2-3 weeks between charges - and more if I turn off WiFi. The more I use it, the more I like all the small details which while quirky and not quite upto iPad levels of overall usability adds up to a very convenient book reading experience. I used to lament the space wasted on the physical keyboard but I'm not such a fan of the new touch Kindles.

Now I wish I had all my books on my Kindle.
If the FBI comes knocking on Google's door and says they have a terrorist under surveillance, and they need to read his email in order to save a busload of schoolchildren from a bomb, should Google let them do it?

From the Policy:

[When] We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request

About how and when they access your information:

We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it on our behalf. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.

That "need to know that information" seems to restrict casual access, with the threat of termination to back it up. All of these are more specific declarations in line with a general "don't be evil" policy.
Well this would make our lives easier. Vote up if you agree.
It's federal law that Google needs to hand over everything in the scope of the warrant. No law requires Google to give the FBI "everything they have", especially if there isn't a court order.
I think Mills and Boons titles are probably generated by a very simple grammar: The [Nationality] [High-powered Profession]'s [Asdjective for Sexy] [Synonym for Lover]. Eg The Turkish Millionaire's Sultry Mistress, The North Korean Cadre's Sleazy Hooker, etc.

But I think your project could be AI-hard - to write a compelling story you'd need to have a virtual world with virtual characters with virtual psychologies. You'd need to be able to model complicated stuff like "Romeo knows Juliet thinks he is already dead", and simple stuff like "If Romeo is under Juliet's balcony, he can't see her until he climbs up". Interesting project though.
If the extension doesn't send the URL to Google anyway, then it can't know how many +1s the page already has (and from whom). That's why it triggers on every page load.
How could they? They have ~24,000 employees and 260 million Gmail users.

http://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-does-Google-have and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail respectively.

(Although off the top of my head, they do say they will automatically scan all email for the purposes of advertising, spam filtering, etc. and the debate used to be "does this count as reading if no human is involved?").
The thing people don't realize is that when contacted by a big company for a job, usually it's a bot that just sent hundreds of emails.

Receiving an email from Google or Facebook is nothing special.
I use event data a lot, but I didn’t even realise you could pass a string.
Anyone have the documentation on jQuery.Callbacks?
I can think of many ways how to make this whole process much much easier. The amount of unnecessary work they did is just insane.
The ROI is probably poor, but then again, many artists aren't in it for the ROI. More power to them.
The same can be said about any IT department. One of my friends sent made the news papers over sending a racially shared joke through the email system to the "boys joke list" in a rather large and respected company.

Turns out some people in the IT department where also helping themselves to the list as a source of entertainment, one of them took extreme offense to the joke and reported it.

After the thing went through its investigation process it was uncovered that the majority of disliked staff in the department where infact reading everyones email. Most of them had set up notification filters to flag emails with there names to see what people where saying about them.

Now the question is how common is this considering how easy it is to do... and how the whole system more or else runs off trust?

I'd say if you have sensitive stuff going through your email that you don't want external parties to see, set up your own server and find someone who isn't petty to look after it.
We assume that in the biggest exits (which dominate the returns) we'll be about 3x diluted.
IOS 5.0.1 New Features (Hands-on)
You have to try "stationery" for that.
My grandparents had an Advent when I was a kid. That thing probably spat out more radiation than I ever would care to research.

It was a beautiful beast though and could heat a room.
The fact that they had to finish shooting the whole thing to have something worth showing makes this even more impressive. They couldn't just stop halfway through and say good enough.

For nearly two years they kept working on it and she couldn't really put on any weight, couldn't really age too much, etc. It really is dedication!
Goteo: Spanish crowdfunding / open-source
Agree. But that's what Art is about...
You're in luck! I ported all of Telemetry to OS X (including the visualizer) a few weeks ago, and next week I'm planning on porting the run-time to iOS. With those two big pieces finished, that should give iOS developers a full solution. There's going to be a pure bugfix/stability release early next week, and the release after that should have the iOS goodness.
Has there been anyone working to make a comprehensive locally-hostable webmail/weboffice suite that replicates Google's functionality? I can imagine that this would be quite poular. Sure, some of the features like Priority Inbox might require complex heuristics, but things like labels should be easy to add support for.