skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what if my registrar turns evil?

Google has an incentive to be nice: they only make money and continue to exist if people use their products. If they suddenly take everyone's gmail address, the backlash would be incomprehensible. There would be Senate hearings and an infinite amount of Internet Hate.

But registrars are smaller and probably wouldn't face any financial consequences for stealing your domain name and selling it to someone with more money. You would be mad, but since it only affected you, there would be very little you could do. No hearings. No Internet outrage.

Alternatively, someone could sue you for your domain name, and you'd never be able to afford to mount a reasonable defense. Google, on the other hand, could afford to do that.

I think once a company gets to be Fortune 500 in size, they probably aren't going to do anything too drastic. It's the smaller ones that can be bought or do something unethical because they don't have shareholders or a board of directors. (Then again, that didn't stop Enron. But they fucked over their employees, not their customers.)
Re: Dogpatch / Potrero Hill

The area around 3rd and 20th is actually pretty well connected transit-wise (near 22nd st caltrain, the T line, and three or four bus lines), is a 30 minute walk from soma, and is still pretty cheap. And although the real estate prices are going up (along with the rest of the city) there's still a lot of underutilized land to expand into that should act as a buffer on rent prices. If I were looking for a place to start an office I would look there first.

google maps: http://g.co/maps/dqmrn

walkscore: http://www.walkscore.com/score/3rd-and-20th-st-san-francisco...
wow that is a long list! what time period are we talking here? Some of the ideas seem like they would need at least 12 months if not more to successfully bring to market. Are you sure you aren't jumping to the next big thing before giving the last a good go?
TCPLock, A TCP/IP Semaphore Built in Node.js
Why I stopped using Gmail
I see this problem among less experienced developers who have a lot of talent. These devs exude 'know it all' and can back it up on some narrow set of knowledge/skills. Part of maintaining this impossible image requires not asking questions that might show cracks. Pretending to know everything is a sure path to not knowing much of anything given enough time and I've seen developers go down this path.
Ask HN: OAuth, OAuth2 or public/private key
Some new code we're building at work requires two back-end services to communicate with each other as well as a 3rd service that delivers content to the front-end. Obviously, this all needs to be secured and encrypted. Functionally, the front-end service uses one of the back-ends to verify user identity, the other back-end to store and retrieve site content, and the two back-ends need to communicate occasionally as well. The back-end services have no front-end interfaces at all, being REST services and delivering straight JSON or UBJSON.

I had thought that OAuth2 might be the way to go, but the spec is, to say the least, confusing. It also seems designed more for front-end sites to communicate through a back-end channel (eg. Facebook and Twitter), requiring a client-side redirect so the user can authorize the connection.

Oauth, on the other hand, doesn't seem designed with that redirect in mind, but it will be the "old" tech in a year and I prefer to not have to rewrite the authentication system then.

Public/private key is the way Amazon does it, and it's simple to implement, but there is a pile of articles telling me to use OAuth instead.

So, finally, the question is: with OAuth2, is it "legal" to hide the interaction from the user completely - the three services can communicate securely without the end-user being aware of the existence of the services. Specifically, the user logs into the front-end website, it can check Back-End #1 to verify the user's identity and return his information, then call Back-End #2 for the content that needs to be displayed for the current page. The user is not redirected and does not see any popup requesting authorization.

Thanks HN!
Vote for a 25,000km bike ride for charity
I would be greatful if you guys would vote for the Mission oz challenge.

They're undertaking the challenge for two UK charities and giving up a full year of their lives on their bikes around the World.

One minute of your time guys!
"The way you were raised, namely with wealthy or less fortunate parents, also plays a role. Gladwell explains that when wealthy parents drive their children to the doctor, they tell their children things like, “Johnny, now if you have any questions, be sure to ask the doctor. This is your opportunity to talk to him about any health problems you’re having….” And so on.

Disappointed that, in a thread about asking questions, no one has asked whether this Gladwell anecdote generalizes (especially since Gladwell is king of "anecdote == universal fact.")

Can anyone comment on this quote?
Aside from being just interesting, Does this have and applications? It seems like it might have some applications in data structuring but is this just a math problem or are there actually people who are waiting on the solution?
Cross-training the mind
Lego Robotic Arm
Whitney Houston's Star Spangled Banner
One big one is high school. (I'm in high school right now) If I ask one or two questions, it's fine, but if I ask more questions, all of which are serious questions that I truly want to know the answer for, the teacher usually gets annoyed. It probably is due to the fact that there isn't much time in the class to cover all the material and answer questions, but it irritates me nonetheless.
What the article doesn't mention is that the smartest of people perpetually ask themselves questions regarding what they believe they understand. It is remarkably easy to convince yourself you understand something - a mathematical proof, the Halting Problem, advantages of some programming framework/style/language, when you're really just going through the motions and remembering what others have said, kind of memorizing the proof rather than reproducing it. "Of course I understand how genetics work, there are genes and codons and RNA, and DNA helicase, etc" - I can say that, without any ounce of extra understanding. Often I see this in mathematically oriented people who know how to perform X data mining trick, but have no idea how it works. That's perfectly fine - you don't always need to understand everything to use it - but sometimes it breeds an arrogance. When people have a lot of success without knowing the inner workings, they'll sometimes view questions about them as pedantic at best.

But the article does hit dead on that smart people don't just ask questions about things they don't understand themselves. They ask questions that challenge what the world believes to be settled, 'obvious' and extremely clear.

My favorite How-To-Be-A-Smart-Person-By-Asking-Questions story, about Wittgenstein, from Bertrand Russell:

When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G. E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, ‘I think very well of him indeed.’ When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures. [1]

Incidentally, on the same page, I found perhaps my favorite genius quotation:

The genius is always puzzled by answers, it is the fool who is satisfied by them.

[1] http://readingmarksonreading.tumblr.com/post/2565799967/pg-4...
> If you asked the same question to a "newbie" on HN I'm not sure they would be so secure to admit the same because they wouldn't know how ubiquitous the company was. And they would be afraid of showing how clueless they were.

This would only hold true if they were conditioned to fear the reaction of them not knowing. If someone had never heard of Google and they admitted that, if someone simply said 'it's a commonly used search engine' without much negative connotation, they will not be afraid to admit not knowing something similar in the future.

However, if you laugh, point, call them a 'newbie' and make them leave the room with their heads hung in shame, then yes, they may be more careful next time.

It boils down to respect. If you respect people, even if they don't know the obvious, then they will have an opportunity to learn and thrive.

If PG acted immaturely every time someone admitted they did not know something that was obvious to him, he quite possibly would not be able to do what he does.
I built this library to deal with OpenOffice's PyUNO service hanging, leaking memory, and not being thread-safe. I think it could be quite useful for people running into similar problems.
Yeah I hear that and it's a fair point, but even then there can still be an environment that discourages it.
No, sir, the "reading" analogy is not FUD at all. Reading e-mail or whatever other text algorithmically has only one aim - to extract VALUABLE information. It's the nature of the information extracted that defines its value. And the more context this information defines, the more valuable it is. Spam filters also "read" emails but they don't care if it is you or me that the e-mail is directed to - the information they gather is not valuable. SMTP servers "read" mail headers in order to route the message and pass blindly its content - still no valuable information. But Google is building a highly specific profile of you. It doesn't matter if they do that algorithmically or there is a real person involved reading your mail. Google gains higly contextual information (and the context is YOU) with every message you receive or send. Their algorithms know more about you than you do yourself.

I don't mind if AdSense shows me ads for computers when I browse a computer related site. I mind when AdSense shows me ads for computers on every site I visit just because it have learned that it's me - the computers loving guy that happens to have a Gmail account... That's intrusive and Microsoft nabbed it right in their video. Btw, I don't like Microsoft too.
Google isn't in the business of legislating either. Ideally we would hold our government and institutions accountable for protecting our civil liberties, and not rely on corporations to do it for us.
Uh, I just looked at rentals on CL/Trulia in Potrero/Dogpatch. $4-7K a month for a 3 bedroom? That seems crazy to me, even for SF.
Lots of discussion from when the challenge was issued a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968577
I think that another company brought to light during the last week was not using https. This may be adding to the confusion.
At our company we do devops and the main thing that frustrates me is the total violation of DRY that occurs. For us its not just monitoring that sucks: its also application configuration, failover, and documentation.

For example, email. Our email sending library requires various references to internal ips, external ips, and/or domains it can send to/from/through. Then our cfengine files have the same exact references in multiple locations: sendmail settings, dns settings, and network settings. Then our nagios alert system, again, has references to many of them. Oh, then we need to have a wiki for human readable format rather than having to dig through these scripts. And that's just for email. Nevermind databases, caches, app servers, etc.

We have health checks within custom developed applications for failover, and Nagios health checks. Sometimes Nagios will rely on the app health checks, but the app never relies on ops related monitoring. It just seems like there's quite a bit of effort being wasted here as we're doing the same thing twice in two different places.

The frustrating part is when I change one, I have to go through and change them all. It seems like there could be a much better system than this. I would imagine many come up with custom scripts for all of this, but there has to be a better way.
You can solve problems in any space, as long as you think about the problem first, and not about the exact kind of solution you want to make. I can't think of any problem space where the lone programmer can't do something useful if they have the domain knowledge.
It's dishonest because they adjusted their price to be under the self-hosting price, then cautioned that these studies should be done apples to apples. As if they'd just corrected it. What they neglected to do was point out that the self-hosting analysis focused on buying hardware instead of leasing as you do with AWS.

Here's why it sucks:

131 x amazon extra large: $56k after Amazon fixed the pricing

- 524 amazon cores

- tons of crap io

- 2tb of ram

131 x bought servers: $61k

- this includes colo and bandwidth and amortized cost of buying

- excludes labor which Amazon makes mention of

131 x $289 leased servers [1]: $37k

- 524 real cores, each with hyperthreading

- tons of dedicated disk io (raid 1 SSD and raid 1 SATA!!)

- 2tb of ram

- server breaks someone fixes it

These dedicated servers are obviously going to shit all over EC2 virtual servers if you're doing anything that involves disk or cpu so you could in all likeliness shave another $10k - $15k off the hosting bill to match the AWS capacity.

[1] https://hivelocity.net/cart/configure/13c6f96e41#50a2e-82f3f
I'm glad to hear someone who likes to negotiate talk about the downsides of getting too good of a deal. It's a dimension too often ignored by people who forget that if the other guy isn't happy you might end up with far worse of a product/service/employee, etc.

There are even times when it makes sense to pay more than the asking price for better service or for the long term sustainability of the deal.
A lot also has to do with comfort. If I'm the smartest person in the class I feel a lot more comfortable asking questions. I know that if I have a question then a good percentage of other people do too.

But if I'm not the smartest in the class (or simply not familiar with the material) I may be more inclined to look on Google or follow-up afterwards with the presenter. I don't know if the question I have is worth the time of the 20 or 200 other people in the room. I just don't have the context to know.

So to me it's unclear if smart people ask questions because they're comfortable or because that's what they naturally do. A good experiment -- take these same Turning Award winners to a basketball court and have them run through some plays. See if they start asking questions like, "OK, I go left here, but what if someone is setting a pick, should I switch?" or do they nod their head...
I live a block away from there and pay closer to $3k for a 3 bedroom.

And soma looks like $6-10k for the equivalent thing (although soma tends to be 1-2 bedroom places).
I believe, in general, no one wants to be stereotyped/labeled/put in a tidy little box but people do want to be noticed.

The Barnum descriptions are extreme in that they juxtapose contrasting personality traits/behavior (shy v. gregarious). However, almost every interesting conversation that I can recall - was about something that the other person wanted to tell other people that was not readily apparent. Related: If you want to make it easier for people to talk to you, stop hiding behind cliches (weather, sports) and talk with conviction on something that you have conviction on (e.g. if you don't like/understand why are football players paid millions - talk about that v. that was a good first down)

Whether being "cold-read" or having an interesting conversation or talking about "Community" or just living their daily experience, people just want to feel like they matter...

> Because a part of the shared human experience—which is basically what the entire show boiled down to—is that we want to leave our mark, so that people know that we'd been here. (I mean, that was the point of all the different shit, like the statue, and hieroglyphs and the empty Dharma barracks. They were all just footprints of the people who had been on the Island before.) And a large part of that, of leaving a footprint, or a mark, is to establish a basic need: To know that we matter.

http://jezebel.com/5546559/lost-finale-recap-case-closed
Any feedback guys?
Well spotted! Fixed, thanks.
It's interesting that he didn't include the Financial District. I know of a number of startups there, including some YC startups. He did make this a couple years ago though, and it may be that that's a more recent expansion as it's gotten harder to find reasonable options in SOMA.

I worked at Cloudera's office in FiDi over the summer and liked the area a lot. Super-convenient via BART (less convenient than SOMA via Caltrain, but one could always transfer to BART at Millbrae). Right in the middle of everything. Good food options. Felt pretty safe walking to BART after dark because there's enough people around.
As an electrical engineering student, and having Tesla as personal hero, I love seeing people talk about him in the mainstream. A movie was made about Tesla and all the crap he had to go through from his childhood to his death. Check it out: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079985/
> Well, I don't want to give too much information because that's a very well known hospital in a major US city,

and the reason why you dont want to warn everyone against the hospital that seems to be prejudice and unlawfully asking questions it shouldn't is?
I don't know if anyone has been waiting on this specific result for an application, but in general graph coloring has lots of applications[1]. Also, mathematical advances often predate their applications (sometimes by a very long time). Not to mention that we know something know we didn't know before, and that's always worthwhile.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_coloring#Applications
You're assuming they're only sending from one phone number.

Hrm... that's probably how it would work in most cases, as it would be confusing to end users to sign up from one number and get a text from one they don't know about (even if the footer text indicated who it was from).

This pricing issue is one of the reasons I could never justify pressing forward with my initial idea of getting in to this market. Someone will end up being the "constant contact of sms" - that seems a logical market to pursue, but I'm not sure how to get there with the current pricing models (I mean in general, not specifically sendhub).
Not asking questions may also mean that we're losing our contact with teachers (in this case specifically), not meant as those trying to teach you how to do something, but as people who can teach something that's not written inside a book.
I mostly agree with you, but my issue is that they were not using the hash of the emails. You can still match friends and alert users when a friend joins by only storing the hash of an email. Why store the whole address book unless you want to use it for other reasons? Would path take on the privacy flack and security risks for storing personal data just for friend matching?
Temporary credentials are used specifically to reduce latency, since you get a token that is valid for a period of time and doesn't need to be checked against the auth service on every call. Since the credentials last for 12 hours the work to retrieve them should be negligible. Because they don't need to be checked against the auth service on every call it seems like they would more resilient to API failure than standard AWS credentials.
Asking questions and knowing what you don't know and being honest about it is super important. But so is moving forward, getting things done and leadership and sometimes constantly questioning your world with fresh eyes every morning can mess with these things. It's also exhausting.

I find folks who have been surrounded by extremely smart hands-on analytical types most of their lives are slow moving and not great leaders because they question absolutely everything. It's a reflex that develops because if you're working with 20 other engineers building a rocket you don't want to be the guy who said "lets just assume" or "screw it, lets just get it out the door".

Sometimes though, it's useful to have an arrogant ass around that makes a few assumptions and keeps kicking the can down the road. Steve Jobs comes to mind.
Love this article, but I find it a little odd that Paul Graham essentially seems to have said: "I've never worked in restaurants, and I really don't understand their needs or business model, so let me tell you how to make a customer facing piece of software for them!"
> What the article doesn't mention is that the smartest of people perpetually
ask themselves questions regarding what they believe they understand. It is
remarkably easy to convince yourself you understand something... when you're
really just going through the motions

This reminds reminds me of a good quote from Charlie Munger:

"Above all, never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool."
This reminds me of a semi-famous quote attributed to Bob Martin at AT&T: “Don’t include a sentence in documentation if its negation is obviously false”. I use this as a quick way of deciding whether I’m being informative.

I imagine that learning cold reading would help people with mild autism-spectrum disorders connect to others. A lot of casual conversation comes down to figuring out what people want to hear and (authentically and non-deceptively) telling them that.
It seems like a lot of the reasons for jumping ship were because there was no market for the product. Maybe it's just that he's making his brainstorming and market research phase sound like a product when it isn't yet, but it's strange to me that one would get so far as a usable product, funding, etc for a something that they hadn't yet done an ounce of market research for.
Build something that can expose any LDAP to any web app safely and you'd probably make millions.
Google hardware manufacturer is working on a streaming player
> You're not supposed to mix code and value declarations in ANSI C

You can in C99.
Whenever I find myself thinking that I'm the smartest person in the room I like to take a deep breath and look around me more carefully.

Always a poor assumption to make, in my experience.
Ask good questions instead of dumb ones.

In an academic environment, for example, there can be prerequisite knowledge for particular courses, and within a course, you are expected to form a foundation of knowledge upon which later material is based. Questions that betray lack of prerequisite or foundational knowledge rather than topical are often considered unhelpful.

More generally, there is the matter of social context, and the relevance of your question to the people who will be listening to its answer. People value their time, and dislike spending it in a Q&A they consider to be without any value, either informative, personal or entertaining. If you can be pretty sure a question is only relevant to you, it's more appropriate to ask in private than in front of a large audience.

Beyond that, I wouldn't worry about it.
Why? This is the most useful post on the HN front page at the moment.

Negotiations are performed almost in every area of human life. Negotiation and rituals around it are actually quite fascinating if you think about it. Two or more parties, who often don't know each other, try to exchange information to find an agreement that all parties are happy with.
I agree and I've written about this in 2012: http://lukas.zinnagl.com/2010/12/asking-questions/