skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They also, like any other CA, have the ability to generate keys in your name any time they like. That would have consequences - but so would abusing your private key.

If it's for something where it's that much of a concern (and it IS a legitimate concern, no argument there) then you need a paid certificate anyway - you'd likely want a business name, not a personal one, etc etc......

If we're talking business, you wouldn't be using a free cert from them anyway.
"Drew Houston, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Dropbox, last fall pocketed $250 million from seven of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms."

Well, that's quite the accusation.
Came here to say something like this. While the site is a bit of a pain, and the certs are free, make damn sure you have your site configured the way you want it before you generate the certificate.

It's $25 to revoke a cert, i.e. free up the name so you can use it again elsewhere. I used part of my domain name for an XMPP cert that I later wanted to use for a web subdomain with the same name.. nope. Stupid.
> wants to start working out but doesn't know anything yet?

What's there to really know? The average person just looking to be healthy doesn't need a gym or any instruction. Buy a $3 jump rope. Jump over it 4,000 times every couple days. Do some pushups, pullups, and situps on the other days. 20 minutes (at most) and done.

"The Gym" as used by most people is a way to create the illusion of effort. "Hey, I'm spending six hours a week there and using big expensive machines, so I must be getting something done." It's just a waste for most people, who'd be better served by a jump rope in their driveway.

I use a gym because I lift and have no space, but if I had a garage I'd set up my own power-rack. All the machines at "the gym" are idiotic. You only need a barbell, a bench, and a rack.
While Dropbox is a great service (I can't imagine life without it!), it's a bit delusional to think it could be the next Google or Apple. As Steve Jobs himself said about Dropbox, it's a feature, not a company.
There's no need to play the "would mean" game -- this is the system that already exists today. I described the rationale behind the current trademark and UDRP system... a system that has been in place since 1999. Is it "bullshit"? Do you see domains getting stolen left and right?

Anyone with a trademark, a pen, and an application fee can take anyone else's domain -- IF the actual use of that domain is creating a likelihood of confusion with the mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliate or endorsement of the website.
SOPA author involved in copyright infringement claim
Note: "tedious, unpleasant task" != "impossible task".

Back during the first internet bubble, I was playing around calculating Pi and drew the attention of some VCs: "distributed computing" was big. After asking if I was interested in starting a company (I wasn't -- I was going off to Oxford to do my doctorate) one of them asked for my opinion on the technical feasibility of a business plan.

My advice (which I provided for free, being a foolish 19 year old) was "it is provably impossible to solve these problems as stated without transmitting information faster than the speed of light". They funded the company anyway, and $10M later the company died having never produced anything.

Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".
Review: How I Used Fiverr & What I Got For $50 (10 gigs)
If nearly every service on the Internet uses the Dropbox feature, it will likely be as big as Apple / Google
One of the big differences is that if you do wish to use some crazy new HTML5 that is unsupported in most browsers for a niche app or demo, you can ask your users to update their browsers and they can do so for free. Unfortunately most android device owners are locked in by device manufacturers.
I wish MG would get educated on what he is talking about..

MAcOSx application developers also face fragmentation so do BB app developers WM developers, etc.
Find a gym that isn't boring. They exist. Flip tires, pull a sled, climb a rope, throw a heavy ball...

Doing a bodybuilding routine is incredibly boring, but finding something you like at the gym can be very rewarding. Like anything else though, you have to work a bit to find out the good stuff amongst the crap.
Boing Boing will go dark on Jan 18 to fight SOPA
>no-one is stepping up to propose a real solution that is more technically and ethically acceptable and still does something about the original problem.

To do that would be to accept the premise that there was an original problem. I think most people here would agree with me when I say that the current laws are entirely adequate to deal with online piracy. We've already compromised. Current laws restrict our free speech a little bit to protect the profits of copyright holders. I'd prefer if current laws were relaxed or repealed, Hollywood would prefer if my rights were infringed upon even more. In what way is the status quo not an adequate compromise?
Right, because when one political party has already figured out how to buy the votes of 47% of the country, there's no chance they'll ever figure out how to get four more points.
that's amazing, can you share some names/links of recommended warehouses?
WTF? I had assumed that it was a simple sort of file access which allowed anyone in EC2 to read the data without having to import all of the storage. Then again, PubChem is only about 25 GB and inbound data transfer is free, so this is only about US$4/month.
Maybe they should continue to work on being the 'first' instead of the 'next'.
Agreed. There's room for more than one payment-provider-that-doesn't-suck™.

And let's not forget stripe hasn't even launched in europe, yet. That's quite a market still waiting to be schlepped.
Unfortunately for many, joining an incubator is a schlep itself. I'm obviously not talking about the programs themselves but instead the application process and relocation requirements.

There are plenty of problems out there that people are trying to solve outside of the bubble area. Sadly it also seems that not moving to some 'hot spot' is a handicap these days.
In reality, it is better not to depend on impromptu discussions (meaning not grabbing people to discuss something with as soon as an idea hits you). When a person comes up with an idea and wants to discuss, you are almost always better off notifying people you want to get together with and set up a time. This will have the added advantage of not disturbing the flow of the other person, as well as give you sometime to re-iterate over exactly what you want to discuss. In that case, a remote worker will most likely be factored in.

Also, I was talking about the case where ALL employees in IT are remote and not just some of them. In that model, you all adjust to working in a virtual environment, highlighting actions that maximize interaction and minimizing those that dont.
In the late 90's, I remember talking to a guy at a company that was solving a similar kind of problem. I thought it would be almost impossible to solve and that even if they did solve it the payoff for their potential customers would be relatively small.

By the time I talked to this guy they had already raised something like $100 million dollars. When I mentioned that I thought their problem was impossible to solve he said "yeah, that's what we discovered too, so now we're winding down the business."

$100 million dollars on something I had doubts about in the first five minutes! And it's not like I'm some kind of computer genius. Anyone with a decent working knowledge of databases and analytics could have seen this.
Yes, I've never heard schlep defined as an unpleasant task, except in that schlepping your suitcase all the way to Newark airport and back (or any other schlep) is unpleasant. The main conclusion I draw from this article: Paul Graham is not jewish. Either that or I don't know what schlep means.
I started there a few years ago, progressed past that to his other book, "Practical Programming for Strength Training", and now I'm all over the place. I went from more of a distance person to competing in strongman. I compete in a lightweight division, but still only doing 4 or 5 exercises consistently I'm at a 550lb deadlift, 450 squat, and 350 bench. I think when I started I was about half at each of those. Do a few exercises, do them right, and do them with extremely high intensity and it'll get you places!

Plus, I solve most of my bugs while lifting!
I agree with you 100%. I briefly looked into fulfillment for a previous business idea, and, I think if there was a stripe for fulfillment, there would be more innovative companies coming out that would ship physical products.

Sincerely and PicPlum are two more examples of companies that have to deal with this pain.
A coder who can do sales and management work are worth their weight in gold. I would look at the situation in two ways:

1. Your value in the startup is far greater as you get better at all those different roles.

2. Even in the worse case scenario if the startup doesn't take off, your experiences place you in a super elite group of developers that can manage and sell.
Cracking a few jokes--within what common sense would allow. Celebrating your crime--not common sense.
Can you extrapolate on what you mean by feasibility, I use positive SSL on a few domains it works fine with no issues and isn't that hard to setup (basically you just need to be able to receive email on your domain).
Maybe have a deal where if they pre-pay some number of months, you'll include that equipment with their first order?
It's already happening - for example, as mentioned in [0], there are several apps / services which provide abstracted flashlight functionality across phones.

The comparison is quite valid, in my opinion - in much the same way that modern web browsers exist which have fixed many of the irritating API issues and abstraction mistakes of their predecessors, new Android versions provide corrected abstractions and a cleaner API but are rarely available.

[0]: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=9213433&p...
If you did exactly what Stripe did but charged less, there is no reason you couldn't completely replace Stripe. You aren't being judged on novelty here.
I don't see much long-term growth for Dropbox in its current state. Right now, they're a stopgap feature. They've been successful so far because they fill a niche, but the niche that they fill is temporary. Old computing is having your files on your computer and accessing them with local applications. New computing is having your files in the cloud and accessing them from applications in the cloud. In a fully cloud-hosted architecture, there is no need for dropbox. Dropbox is a halfway point in getting us into the cloud, and as more and more apps move into the cloud they will become more and more unnecessary.
Dynamic JVM Language Complexity
For me, "talking to a lot of people who work for banks" is a lot less scary, but it is also so unimaginably boring. It would be difficult for me to imagine something more boring that talking to a ton of people who work at banks about banking.

That's exactly why Stripe is so valuable.
I know nothing about taxes in Austria, but my point of view over here is that you would simply be earning income in Austria from a US company. You pay Austria taxes on income earned in Austria.

I am in the US and get affiliate commissions paid from an Australian company. This does not subject me to Australian income taxes.

You may be imagining things are more complicated than they are.
My bit was a little off-topic, but you should look up extraordinary rendition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_...

It almost always involves abducting someone from a country and taking them to another country. If it didn't have anything to do with location, then why would they do that?
Broncos vs Patriots live stream NFL Divisional Round video coverage.
January 18 is shaping up to be my most productive day ever.
Another plus for young founders - older people have solved more problems by brute force (often just paying a specialist to solve it for them) and don't consider them problems anymore.
"Dropbox engineers even hacked their way into Apple's file system to make the Dropbox icon appear on users' menu bars, a bold feat that blew away Apple's cloud team and caught the attention of none other than Jobs."

I have never made an application which does it, but I know of plenty that do (e.g. Evernote). Is it really that difficult?
Sensationalist headline, interesting article.
Why stop at HTTP? You could even say it's SQL-over-HTTP-over-TCP-over-IP-etc. "We expose an API that let's users execute raw SQL statements". That'll do pig.
I'm sure many people have gone through the same thought process. The problem is many people don't know they want something or realize they have a need until they see a solution. The whole, I'll know when I see it mentality in a way.

Instead of a request for proposal we need a request for startup. But people want their solutions now because they have the need now.
These all require upfront payments in the 6-figure range, right?

As far as I know, good 3PL services are at best like Braintree, not like Stripe. That is, they work well but don't lower the barriers so that it's easy to start using them.
StartupRage
No. Not at all. And it has nothing to do with "hacking Apple's file system". There's an API for it.
The problem here is domain knowledge. Everybody understands what a To Do List is.
Everything that China blocks with their national firewall is considered "illegal" in China.

Yes, but the statement refers to existing US law, not Chinese law. In the US, speech is protected.
What is the company afraid of? Is there some competitor poaching talent? The idea of locking you out just before firing you is very peculiar.
I was not aware of this, it looks promising
I'm not arguing that 30 minutes of exercise isn't healthy - the parent post to which my comment responded was two hours a day. I'd be dead in a week if I tried that because my spouse would kill me.

So much exercise advice is disingenuous:
30 minutes exercise != 30 minutes out of one's day

Change cloths, warm up, exercise, cool down, shower, change clothes: there's significant overhead even if one doesn't have to travel to the gym.
The iPhone 3G is stuck on iOS 4.3, which is last year's OS. The iPhone 3GS runs the latest iOS. If you target iOS 4 as the lowest common denominator, you will reach everyone but the iPhone 1 buyers, which was discontinued July 11, 2008. I guess there might be a few in the wild, but good luck getting the battery changed.

Targeting iOS 5 may be less wise. But even then, you will only be missing the customers who bought the cheaper 3G instead of the 3GS (about 2 and 1/2 years ago), or customers with 3 year old phones. Or people who haven't upgraded their OS, which will probably be more significant.

With Android, you can target 2.2 (SDK released 20 May 2010), 2.3 (SDK released 6 December 2010), or 3.0 (SDK released 22 February 2011). And you won't find many customers with an early 2010 phone who've been able to update to 2.3, and few with a late 2010 phone who've updated to 3.0, the 2011 OS. Seriously, WTF?

We might look back at this as time when Google made advances in the OS, but not a time when developers reached a large market. Kind of like the iPhone - iPhone 3G transition. Remember the hacks and jailbreaks then?
How do you cater for both the Awareness and Purchase phases on your landing page?

For Awareness, the single goal of your landing page is to ask for email address in exchange of some freebie.

For Purchase, you want to show testimonials and the call to action will be the Buy button.

How do you layout both in the same page? Any good live examples I can inspire mine from?

EDIT: For example this landing page doesn't have the Buy button but ask for an email address while saying "Try for $1) which mixes both phases in one: http://www.trafficgeyser.com/
Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".

Why be either guy? If you know that something really isn't possible, just say so. Hang onto your self-respect and reputation.
The case mentioned "R v Rock & Overton at the Crown Court in Gloucester (T20097013)" (http://www.obs.coe.int/oea_publ/legal/reginavsrockoverton.pd...) is interesting. It discusses the site TV Links which did exactly the same as TV Shack, the only difference however appears to be that TV Links attempted to remove any links reported as copyright infringing (a la DMCA protection). A few interesting snippets:

"In summary Mr Bridge contented that the prosecution of the defendants amounted to a breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Mr Overton's right to freedom of speech. He said that The Guardian newspaper had carried an article dated 24th February 2007 describing TV-Links in detail. TV-Links did no more than any other TV listings site or indeed The Guardian newspaper. TV-Links merely expressed the fact that films could be accessed on other host sites."

"It was argued that TV-Links was in a similar position to Google or YouTube in that all of the material could be accessed by persons who used TV-Links could also be accessed through their use of those sites as well. ... The essential difference between TV-Links and sites that directly provide pirated material in breach of copyright (it was not suggested that Google or YouTube fall into this category) is that those other sites store the illegal material and make it available to users of the site. TV-Links did not store any such material. It was simply a sign post pointing the way to where such material could be accessed by those members of the public who chose to do so."

"The prosecutor in this case, he said, had a cast iron case against the viewers of the material accessed by the use of the TV-Links site and against the broadcasters of that material. He did not however have a case against the middle man, namely the defendants and who had not made available this material. The defendants themselves were not making available the copyright material."
Seth's Blog: Declaring victory
I don't think anyone is arguing there are mobile OSes that have zero fragmentation, unless there has only been one release. It's about the degree of fragmentation.

Makers of iOS apps can safely develop for iOS 4.2, since more than 97% of iOS devices have at least that version installed [1]. IOS 4.2 is little over a year old. Can a full time Android app maker afford to solely develop for Android 2.3 (which is also a year old)?

[1] http://www.marco.org/2011/11/30/more-ios-device-and-os-versi...
Competition will drive prices down such that even if Dropbox corners the market they won't have the revenue of Apple or Google.

I mean, Dropbox is revolutionary, but it's not that hard to replicate.

In the end, they're selling storage, not their technology. Which is another factor that will drive down their revenues: storage is reliably getting cheaper.
He does realize he essentially already won the startup lottery at a relatively young age, right? Good luck...
Absolutely! I had never heard of Start before and I honestly thought for a moment that maybe this was spam that had somehow got on to the front page as a fluke. I'm serious. I'm not used to seeing a company website make it on the front page of HN or HN at all without there actually being some kind of article on the page you get to.

SSL certain are important and I don't think their design is helping them look like a legit business. I trust they are after all the comments here but on first glance I was skeptical and thought it was too good to be true. I know we all pride ourselves on being smart, critical thinker that can look past a site's design and see the true value behind it but I think in some cases it's perfectly normal and acceptable to react this way to a design. Superficiality be damned. I'd rather run from a poorly designed, non-legit looking site and be safe rather than risking it and being sorry later because I gave in to the PC, "don't be superficial" side of me.
Is there any certificate authority with a clean UI? Every single one I have come across has been fairly horrid by today's standards.
I agree. Perhaps this particular 'problem' is something that I will work on.
The Finder, not the menu bar. I think it was a pretty impressive hack.

Mach Code Injection!

(talked about at 15:30)
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-how...

https://github.com/rianhunter/mach_star
Poll: What Type of Documentation do You Like Better?
Hey all, I'm launching a new app soon, and I'm curious about what types of documentation for websites/apps/learning things you like better: written (i.e. pdf eBooks of documentation) or video (i.e. screencasts).
Written Documentation
Video Documentation
Anything would be better than sitting at your table waiting for your waiter to wander by so you can ask for the check, then wait to get it, then wait for the waiter to come back for your credit card, then wait for the stupid slip of paper you sign that nobody will ever look at.
It does only mean a "an arduous journey" or, when used literally, "to pull/drag" but it isn't used to to mean a arduous task in general.

I guess, In an effort to find a Google-able/SEO-friendly unique phrase, pg has overgeneralised the term.
I only recently bought a domain with Gandi after seeing it mentioned here.

This feature has just convinced me to stick with them for future purchases.
portions nsfw
I suppose I'm talking morality more than legality.
OO in Node.js
The idea is that a simple "like Stripe, but better" doesn't cut it, you need to define "better", which then becomes what makes you NOT Stripe. And it's not too late if you can figure out how to do something that they don't do. In the spirit of the article, find a schlep they didn't tackle: availability, pricing, payment devices, support for legal revenue tax evasion strategies... :) whatever.
They do not have full rights to dictate how that film is distributed. This was Sussex out in the early 20th century, when Hollywood studios dictated which theaters could purchase rights to show their films.

Studios have to, by law, distribute their films to any theater willing to purchase the right to display their films. And they can't price it differently depending on which theater chain is purchasing the right to display.

For more on the fight between Hollywood and theaters, read 'The Master Switch.' I'm mobile or I'd link.

Why the same provision isn't extended to digital streaming yet........
I wonder if this is a mistake. I thought the hack was not the menu bar but messing with the icons in the finder so they have a status icon on top of the normal file icon (so a checkbox if they're uploaded to the server). That's quite a bit less common than menu bar changes and I think when they first did it, there was not an API for it (not sure if there is now in Lion).
Gosh, filling out a YC application takes a few hours at most. If that seems like a big hurdle, definitely don't start a payments company.
What worked for me as I became more serious about refereeing was reframing exercise as training. My initial goal was not to collapse running up and down the field with the players. They have progressed from there.

Reframing is a useful strategy in general, increasing physical activity and improving nutrition don't carry all the baggage of exercise and diet carry for many people.
I think Dropbox can remain relevant by getting cloud apps to save their files on Dropbox accounts. This actually also helps the end users, whose files won't be locked away by whatever apps they use.