skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the 100,000,000th uploaded file was actually named Startup-Revenue-Forecast.ppt or 2011-Tax-Return.pdf I'm fairly certain that the name or contents wouldn't have been mentioned. I think the fact that it was cat.jpg spawned the idea of referencing it at all, and honestly if I were in their place I would have made the same joke. I think most people would have. But good on them for pulling a reverse Streisand Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) which frames the discussion in a positive light ("how can we change and do better?") instead of a negative one.
Absolutely... the spirit of reducing waste and consumerism is admirable, but this guy is being ridiculous by claiming that he only owns "15 things". Not only is he missing the point, but his hyperbole is out of control. A toiletry kit is 1 item? Right.

Bike Snob NYC has a hilarious post on Hyde if you haven't seen it: http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2011/05/paring-down-and-pair...
First of, no one here is bashing anyone. We're talking about how to get people access to the content. Second, you're attempting to take this even more off topic with your meta rant.
> those born in rich countries seem to take richness for granted. It is very valuable to those being born the country for the country to be rich. Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago

Most of the so called rich countries were little more than bombed-to-stone-age hellholes 50-60 years ago. Before WW2, Singapore was fairly wealtfy and important harbour state for East and West.

It's super-impressive what Singapore has built up, but I would be careful to say most people in rich countries take it any more granted than Singaporeans. E.g. Germans are still working hard to unify the country after WW2 and the Iron Curtain.
Well done. I wish more companies would own up to mistakes instead of weaseling out of them.

To DHH if you are reading these comments: Since 37signals is such an industry leader why not take this opportunity to release a "trust manifesto" that other SAAS companies can learn from instead of just updating your privacy policy? Present it as a few straightforward bullet points instead of paragraphs of legalese.
Well, I am just being irritated a bit, it's not like I'm making plans to leave AWS.

It's the same feeling you have when you see your mobile provider has great offers, as long as you are a first time buyer or if you are switching providers. But existing users... not so much.

I know what the end goal is for Amazon, but in the mean time I've just paid last month about $250 to reserve an instance for an year while new users get two micro instances for free.
Jeff Jarvis: Rupert Murdoch doesn't understand how the Internet works
Hey guys,

About three years ago I built and launched Domain Pigeon, a web app that listed available web 2.0-style domain names each day [1]. The site did fairly well, but it was my first foray into web apps and I lacked the experience to grow it into something bigger. Eventually I moved on to other projects and closed Domain Pigeon down, which has been one of my biggest regrets.

My original vision for Domain Pigeon is what Lean Domain Search now is: you type in a search phrase and the app would pair it with hundreds (in this case 1,000) keywords to generate domain names and show you which were available. I lacked the technical skills back then to do bulk domain search quickly, which is why I settled on simply generating web 2.0-style domain names. Fast forward a few years and I've picked up those skills so I decided to take some time off my other apps and finally build this tool.

Hope you guys like it. Let me know how I can make it better.

[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=domain+pige...
The iPad: Apple's blueprint for success
Show HN: Vesper, a plug and play Ruby web framework (Sinatra + Rack + Plugins)
And you can be fined if someone spots you walking around in your house naked (in your own 4 walls, mind you!).

In the U.S., this could get you jail time: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6406...
Well, I kind of think this is playing right into the problem at hand. I mean, I believe what got us into this problem in the first place is an organization with motivations. Playing the same game is not what needs to be done, something else needs to be done. What that is? I don't know. But THIS game is not working, there are too many citizens getting hurt/left behind as a result. Think different. Hackers may not be the brightest in the world, but they sure are some of the most creative.
After building a lot of apps with Sinatra, I decided to pull out the code I always end up using (the framework) and package up the code I almost as often use (the plugins), then write generators for everything and wrap it up in a gem.

There are still a few plugins I'm writing now (DataMapper REST services, Stripe boilerplate, user accounts, URL based commenting, Linode stack script, etc.), but since the whole project is moving along nicely, even getting a decent amount of downloads, I thought I'd share.

It's my first gem and my first public project.
A Design Primer for Engineers
I love Tron
There was also the XSS flaw in Feb last year that allowed an attacker to retrieve your email address, your password reminder, the list of sites you log into and the history of your logins, including which sites you logged into, the time and dates you logged into them, and the IP addresses you logged in from.

https://grepular.com/LastPass_Vulnerability_Exposes_Account_...

Their reaction to this flaw was exemplary though, and LastPass is a lot more secure now because of it.
"It just feels good to be free of stuff"

I would agree that there isn't much point having stuff that you don't use - but I like having stuff that lets me do activities easily when I want to (bike, skis, assorted mountain gear...). I don't feel a huge amount of attachment to these items as possessions - only for what they let me do.
A better and more concise statement:

If a technology is critical to your success, then you must either thoroughly understand it, or you need to maintain a tight professional, and preferably also social, connection to those who do.
I think they developed Javari in most of their European markets and logistics are handled by Amazon themselves.

Zappos is operated completely separately from Amazon so in order to expand internationally they would have to roll their own operations internationnaly.
As a MeFite: even the favouriting isn't necessary. It can polarise discussions and turn them into a back and forth where each side tries to get higher scores. I'm hiding those, and idly wish they hadn't been introduced.
Wireless Penetration Testing Series Part 2: Basic concepts of WLANs
Kickstarter is nothing more than a web hosting company? Pardon?

I recently raised more than $38k from Kickstarter. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I wouldn't have been able to raise nearly that amount by throwing up a website and going it alone.

Here are some stats (for this project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky-hyperl...)

1) 32.26% of our funds came from visitors who found our page through the Kickstarter newsletter.

2) In total, 56% of funds came from visitors finding us via other Kickstarter pages (their home page, category sections, etc).

3) 44% were referred to from external sources.

But here's the thing: the external links were primarily due to the publicity we got from Kickstarter's promotional efforts. We got mentioned on Wired, Fast Company, the New York Times, and CNN.com -- not because we reached out to them, but because of the large number of people talking about us after finding us on the Kickstarter site itself.

In the end, Kickstarter enabled us to raise tens of thousands of dollars and in return took a measly 5%.
Write an absurd policy, debate it, offer an alternative and jam it down citizens throats

I don't think that was their tactic. I believe they intended to get the bills passed pretty much the way they wrote them (with, of course, the canonical juggling that goes on in these things). "Screaming from the sideline" was, in fact, effective. I'm just not comfortable using it as a long-term strategy.

We do need strong organizations in support of net freedom and neutrality. I would very much favor an organization whose only focus was on the 'net, and didn't also try to be anti-software-copyright/anti-software-patent or take on some other personality as well. It's easy to dilute your support when you try to take on too many causes that most folks don't really understand. Thost that may be inclined to give to one cause may shy away from a group that supports several.
While the tone of the post is fantastic, I can't quite believe that anyone would be as offended as they suggest. I would like to believe that people can apply common sense to this situation and realise that they disclosed 'cat.jpg' exactly because the name was entirely inoffensive and anonymous.
At a large scale, it approaches $0/user.
I'd steer clear of the 250x100 and other odd sizes.
Stick with IAB sizes 160x600, 300x250, 728x90, which are the predominate adsizes. You'll be more likely to get into rotation on websites as a default ad with these size.

Also on corn_41 edit2: you're going to hear the word transparency a lot in the digital ad space. Everyone wants it and expects it so the more information you can put out the better.
> having an answer at the drop of a hat on anything

I don't mean in a debate, or even being asked a question. I just mean having a conversation, small talk etc.
I just created a MS free tier instance and found it was using Windows Datacenter edition. If I recall, with DC edition, if you buy a DC edition licence for a physical server and run only Hyper-V hypervisor role on it, you can have unlimited number of virtual servers on it for free. I'ts possible Amazon is using this licencing clause to their advantage.
Ask HN: Etiquette for open source bug reports?
So I've been working on a few projects in which I've found a number of bugs. It turns out I found 3 in the time span of 20 minutes and I sent them merrily along to the developers ...

Is this bad etiquette? Should I be waiting a day / a few hours between submissions?
SDL and PyGame available for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan on Nokia N9
A cautionary tale for the Drupal community
You could send an e-mail that has a single use one-click autologin deal that takes them to their account preferences so they can do whatever they might want there.

EDIT: To address the original question, if I got a plaintext back from a web site I know it's bad, but I don't reuse passwords, so for me it is not the end of the world (assuming it's not my bank or something!) Hopefully this is generally true of more technical users.
I've noticed the same thing. Here are two comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3414355
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460773

The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.

The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.

How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.
App programmers are turning into like recording artists, where tunes are at 99cents a pop. The only way to survive then is to have hit app, like in hit songs. Maybe there will be a billboard type of chart for apps soon.
[tl;dr] Money is fungible.
It's definitely business - back around the time Gawker got banned from YC for being trashy, there was some amount of opinion that TechCrunch stories should get the boot too - but it was never going to happen because of the exposure TechCrunch gives YC startups.

PG is not going to do anything that increases the quality of news.YC if it in any way could negatively impact YC's bottom line.
corn_41, there's a new one! :)
How are you bulk checking now? I've been in the industry a long time and it's always been a pain in the ass to do anything in bulk. I've had lists so big registrars didn't want to run them for me :( Using APIs really isn't an option when you have a million names and 1 per second limit. Automating a bulk checker, most of them disable/play with it after a certain number of times (so even at let's say 500, i might be able to get 20 tries in there before they mess with it).

The best solution I've found is checking against the zone file, but I am curious what you're doing.
5 sitios web de cocina que harán ti un mejor cocinero
She can’t be faulted for thinking that “for instance” meant she could try something else. Yet, she got an “Oops, try again.” message.

I did exactly the same thing when I was checking out Code Academy - in fact I think I even typed the same math she did.
Honestly, people are decisional if they don't think this happens everywhere.

I've seen tens of thousands of pieces of private data across all the companies I've contracted for. Data guys need to explore, they need to learn what types of customers use what type of features and why.

Heck, I talked to a guy online (didn't know his real identity, or I would call him out personally) that wrote a script that automatically checked his employer's database against outstanding warrants in the US (fuzzy matching first name, last name, city, age) and pulled in 2 to 3 times his salary just by the rewards. That is how bad some people are.

What you can trust is that a company almost certainly won't intentionally leak your data to the public, but rest assured that they do flip through it. Some awesome companies will obfuscate the email addresses or company names so that it is much harder to back calculate who owns what, but honestly unless a company is promising full encryption on their side I would just assume they can see everything.

If you want real privacy use encryption (or some other zero trust protocol) it really isn't that hard to use.
I donate $20/month. And they're a US 501(c)(3) organization so my donation comes off my taxes. Win win.
It's called a marketplace. They bring people with "stuff" together with people with "money". That's the business concept, not production, not advertising, not selling webspace for 4 pages as this article suggests.

Is it a scam? no, not directly. The scam "sellers" on kickstarter take 6-months to a year to be found out, at which point, few people care if they get their product or not, and since their is always the implicit understanding that some of the kickstarter projects will not deliver, few complain.

Hence, yeah, kickstarters customer base is ripe for a good scamming and you'll likely never be called on it. Free money.
This article was written over 2 years ago, before Apple introduced in-app purchasing. Downward price pressure is a lot worse now than then. It's more accurate to say Freemium is the new $5. But bundling, and try and buy is now available.
This is the very real danger with companies like Nokia failing. Although I'd love to see Nokia return to success, I would rather see them get bought out than have to sell of their valuable patent assets to troll companies.

It's the same reason that, despite all that's happened, I'm still OK with Palm being sold to HP.
I'd be very happy if we come up with a good privacy policy that it could help others revisit theirs. Most policies, including ours, talk about shit people generally stopped caring about 5 years ago (what do you do with my COOKIES?!?!).

These days people care much more about the privacy of the data that they actively share through uploads etc and much less about the tracking. At least on apps like ours.
> That never happens in a static language. It does in dynamic.

Er, says you?

> Or perhaps he just doesn't use IDEs and that's the actual revelation?

I'm guessing you're either relatively new to the industry, or have lived in the Microsoft and/or Java worlds during most of your career. Use of IDEs outside of those contexts is much rarer, and for much of history, even well into the 2000s, bordered on nonexistent. To this day, many of us do not use what you would consider an "IDE" at all for any language in our normal routine.
You miss the point. The point is with regards to privacy. If I'm paying them for their service, and I upload files, I can limit who sees them. If that can be circumvented, this is disconcerting. What if I had a file named "How to beat 37Signals.docx"? Or "Next iPad Specs - Official.pages" uploaded? And then someone reviewing the logs happens to see that. And they get curious.

The idea isn't that cat.jpg is bad. It's that over at 37Signals, someone was browsing the logs, reviewing the file uploads, and did see "2011 Financing Report for X Public Company - Unreleased" or something akin to that.

I understand your point of view. But the people offended by this are in the right. It's not what happened, but that it happened, and what it shows.
From Buffer Overflows to "Weird Machines" and Theory of Computation [pdf]
Is Facebook IPO on Track for Late May?
Thanks. Fixed. :)
People really got that upset over them knowing the name of the 100 millionth file? They're not going to look at the log anymore? I don't know how they operate on the server side of things but if no one is going to look at logs anymore then why have the log at all? I look up to 37Signals a lot but I think they were a little too apologetic this time. Why not apologize but explain that the log files tell you basically nothing about the contents of your files? How does anyone not make the connection between the cat joke and the file named cat.jpg? I mean, they even spelled it out in the original post! I'm not trying to be critical, I'm just kind of left wondering how something like this offended a single person. Weird.
Show HN: SEOTweets.me - SEO links from Twitter
Sometimes I feel like 37signals should change the name of their blog to "Much Ado About Nothing"
If you find bugs, then you find bugs. Just make sure that the bug hasn't already been reported, and that it is actually a bug (not just you expecting something to behave differently - the unexpected behaviour may be intentional, or at least documented)

Other than that, though; bugs are bugs, and waiting to submit them to spare a developer's feelings doesn't really help anyone.
While they do get "+1" for this, they haven't provided any further details of what exactly they did with the passwords. Did they use a salt? Was the hashing algorithm MD5, bcrypt, or something else? If they used MD5 with no salt, your password may not be much more secure than a clear text password unless it's particularly complex.
If the bugs are new it shouldn't matter how quickly they are filed.

Do be sure to search existing bugs before adding more however. A unique bug report is helpful but a duplicate can be a nuisance. Sometimes the duplicate will be a closed bug too, e.g, "we found this and decided not to fix it for the following reason:".
I don't think it has to be this way. We often run internal reports on usage of certain features, but it's always aggregated, and never looks at the individual data. I feel bad enough looking at a customer's account when they've specifically asked me to do so from a support request.

I would certainly terminate any account with a company that willfully was reading my private data and opening files for the mere sport of it.
Just a quick note - this site was a weekend project almost a year ago. I'd been taking a more active interest in the area, this was an easier way for me to digest a whole load of tweeters. I redesigned it this weekend to make it a little cleaner and faster (slow queries!), and added a Twitter front end to tweet stories that have had a certain amount of retweets.

See the site (or ask!) if you want a little more info on how it works.

Submitting now (following the redesign) as some of you may find it as useful as I do. Enjoy :-)
HN Discussion of the incident a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456819
MoodPanda.com interview on BBC Radio
I agree, Jason. While it's unavoidable that we at times will see things through log files in order to ensure the performance and uptime of the system, it certainly shouldn't be for these causes and it double certainly shouldn't be in order to reveal anything publicly.
Or "this has been fixed in a newer version".
The idea isn't that cat.jpg is bad. It's that over at 37Signals, someone was browsing the logs, reviewing the file uploads

Rather, they did "SELECT filename WHERE row_num = 100000000".

Honestly, if you're concerned about something like this then you should not be using a third party solution to store your files. Of course 37 Signals can look at the names of the files you are storing- they could probably hide that information from themselves, but then they'll get a support request saying "we can't open file-x.jpg" and they won't be able to do anything about it.
FWIW, there's an Italian startup called Iubenda trying to do something around privacy policies, so that it's easy to have a good one:

http://www.iubenda.com/en
> A toiletry kit is 1 item? Right.

Pft. I only own one item. A house. In fact, I'm married, so I really own half an item. Pretty minimalist, right?
10 things that happen once you leave your fulltime job to start your own company
Keep in mind that the original post said "it was the picture of a cat". It implied they looked at the content of the file.
It's situational. Outside of a major emergency, taking an extra 15 seconds to get your cellphone, wallet, and key's would probably would probably be worth it, come home and your house is on fire just let it burn. Also, as long as the fire is contained in a single room simply closing the door can do a lot to save your home.
In May 2011 I sold nearly everything I owned and traveled for 6 months with just a small backpack. My list was similar to Andrew's with a few more clothing items.

I should write a blog post but DL;DR version is that it was well worth it. I don't want to live that way continuously but it made me think a lot more about consumerism.

For the most part I lived in hostels and cooked my own food. My living expenses stayed about the same since I wasn't paying rent or maintaining a car.

The biggest problem with owning so few items is convenience. You sacrifice the convenience of doing laundry once a week (or less) and having everything you need at hand.
Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther (the) King Jr.
"you're right, as is the previous commenter who speculated that I have a copy from work (no one considered GIMP? :) )"

I did consider it, but I saw screenshots of the Photoshop toolbox in one of the chapters of your publication The Bastards Book of Ruby [1].

I could never get used to the GIMP, though. I've worked with Photoshop since 1993, I'm stuck in my ways. I have often wished for a leaner program that would let me do simple tasks that I usually do in PS – GraphicConverter satisfied some of those needs for years. Then, Pixelmator 2 [2] came out, and nowdays I find myself using it about as often as Photoshop. It's lean, has a gorgeous UI, and it works almost the same as Photoshop. For web graphics, it has all I need. For print, I still (have to) use PS.

[1] http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/chapters/image-manipulation/

[2] http://www.pixelmator.com/
does anyone know if it's compatible with backbone like zepto can drop in and replace jquery on mobile?