skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does reputation have to do with anything? I'm not saying the lockout would be based on an IP database but rather the # of attempts would be scoped by the IP address it was originating from. At some point you could completely lock out attempts from that IP. Sorry if that was unclear.

This means that there in almost all cases the IP used by the bona fide customer would not be in locked out mode or in exponentially backing off mode yet.

I understand relying on different IPs is not going to work 100% of the time, spoofing and NATs etc. are a (small) problem in this scheme. In such cases, the "locked out" message will be displayed and the bona fide user will get his email anyhow. (I guess if the attacker was just trying to be annoying to someone, he could hit the 'locked out' button over and over again, is that the point you are trying to make?)

What I am saying is that I do not want the user to have to bother with resetting their password until the last moment. The fact that this is not a "bulletproof" solution is not an issue. Getting things down to much less likely is a win in this case because it means the customer's experience has been enhanced (or rather, has not been un-enhanced).

"The sites that are going to get targeted are the ones that don't do lockout. The ones that do will be worthless, except to get your bots killed."

I don't get the reasoning here. I want a system that both discourages getting specifically targetted like you are saying -- but also one that has a contingency plan if there is an attack.

What we seem to be disagreeing about is the contents of that contingency plan? You want a simple one and I want one that will try to avoid the customer needing to even know there was a problem if possible.
I have no idea. _why is like a super hero hacker with a secret identity and everything.
No, I didn't need a clone specifically but was not aware the code was available. Do you know where it can be found?
i still think the general web doesn't have enough faceted browsing (or something) ... like does youtube have tags yet? are we all overspamming tags? regardless, when it comes to really finding things on a non-regional site, you feel like the needles in the haystack are just that much smaller...
Is Microsoft Giving Up On Vista?
Thomas, I'm debating the usefulness of registry as a centralized, binary storage of system/application configuration and I'm much less interested in yet another Windows vs Unix war.

My previous post could be shorter: if you want a binary tree-like storage, it already exists and it's called the file system. Each OS has one, and it is standard, comes with a bunch of tools, is familiar to users. Thus I just don't get why Microsoft felt the need for implementing yet another proprietary FS (registry), especially when it's inferior to NTFS or Ext3 in every way, including security, reliability and performance. Perhaps it made sense in FAT/Win16 days.

But I hear you, good tools can be misused and bad ones can be improved upon
Highly recommended for changing your Windows or Caps Lock key to a control key, and it works flawlessly. It makes moving onto Windows from a Mac much less painful (literally, if you use Control-Z and Control-Shift-Z as frequently as I do in Windows).
Just Wow.

I don't even care that much if it will run traditional PalmOS software...
great, wow
If it was just his personal life, then sure. He uses his blackberry for far more than just personal stuff though.
... Through Canadian servers :).
Yes, thanks, I should have mentioned I thought about that - but the unruliness of the community turned me off. I assumed this is the case because anyone can downvote. Likewise I assume HN is more polite because only more established members can downvote. That said, I suppose I could use the reddit code and tweak the downvoting feature to only provide it to users who have established some credibility in the community :)
To clarify, I work for a software consulting company. The potential investors would be the directors of this company. They themselves, have sold a startup for millions... What would u do?
What if you rebate the cost of your software to customers for a trial period? Do you think that counts as revenue or as nill?

What if you prepay for a year of office space before the end of your fiscal year to show no profit in a year? Did you make a profit or not? These are different ways to interpret the same numbers.
Palm WebOS, Palm Mojo Application Framework, and Palm Mojo SDK
If you have an internal planning business plan document and things don't turn out the way you said they would. You should be 100% accountable to yourself, your partners, and your employees about why your projections were wrong.
You can't deny that Crispin Porter has some brass. They come up with some random ideas, but if it will get people talking, they dutifully see through to completion.

I still can't believe they actually commissioned Burger King video games for the Xbox for a store promotion and made a full book for their Angus Diet campaign.
Not to sidetrack things, but there is a bunch of cool stuff in the source for Lua. Whether or not it gets used directly, it is going to have a huge influence on the implementation of new languages.

It has a bunch of novel ideas* (e.g. the register-based VM, the table optimizations) that have paid off big, it's very portable (due to being written in strict ANSI C), and it has a surprisingly small code base. It's pretty readable (http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/), full of examples of simple-but-efficient garbage collectors, string handling optimizations, etc. The designers have worked hard to keep it small and simple.

* See "The Implementation of Lua 5.0" (http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf). It's 16 pages, and is a quick - but quite thought-provoking - read.
Palm wows one crowd for sure: Its investors
They're giving up on Vista like Apple gives up on previous versions of OS X. Which is to say they aren't, they're just moving on and improving upon the base OS.

Which is a good thing in my opinion, as the old methodology of releasing an OS and then waiting 2-5 years for a follow up is not going to work anymore. I've long looked at Apple's strategy of charging roughly $130 for each new version (not matter how small the changes) every year as superior to selling a $200-$200 license every few years and releasing new features and updates for free.
Things to consider before launching a startup (or) Sometimes it's not so fun
If the sexual-harrassment allegations are true, then I hope the folks being harrassed get vindication in court and appropriate compensation for their damages. But I don't think anyone is arguing that AA is making lots of money because the boss sexually harrasses female workers. And even if you weigh AA's management in your moral balance and find it wanting, you can still learn something from the non-repulsive things that the company does.

If your high-school calculus teacher turns out to be a child predator, that doesn't invalidate everything you learned about calculus.
"Like it our not this brand does represent us."

What single brand does? American Apparel is a single clothing brand out of thousands that are exported from the US, and they are all different.

Certainly American Apparel represents a portion of the US, whether you like it or not.
Can Disqus allow me to comment on websites that don't have Disqus installed?
I too almost never have, and when I do it's usually a rare occurrence. For that reason, yes, I'd happily buy a laptop with a built-in battery, especially if the battery gives a 17" laptop 8 hours of charge!

And I'm sure it won't be long before ifixit.com has a guide explaining how to replace the battery yourself.
I'm not sure I even want to know. I think the mystery is part of the appeal.

I admit, I'm a Romantic at heart.
I could really give a crap whether or not he keeps his friggin' Blackberry.

I'm a little more concerned with how he handles pressing issues like our failing economy, safety, and health care.
Yes its all this story, because the millions of dollars he made before any of the stories came from nowhere.
Ron Paul: Social Security & Fractional Reserve Banking are Ponzis that Dwarf Madoff
I think you missed "I'm not attacking them".

It's an interesting marketing strategy. Most startups here don't do it. Maybe they should.
> After all, when your neighbor turns out to be a child predator, are you going to say, oh well, that's ok because he's been a good church-going fella for the past 30 years?

A good deed doesn't undo an evil deed, surely - but the opposite isn't true. All the bad deeds in the world doesn't make your good deeds less good.
Ruby people on Twitter, and other ways to keep up with the community
hmm...I'm not sure Chad Hurley's case is a good example because he had some excellent connections. His father-in-law is Jim Clark of Netscape/SGI fame. I'm sure that helped open doors, and let them be taken more seriously.
Ask HN: feedback on my trip and travel planner site
Because there was no API common to all Windows applications that reads and writes structured key-value configuration, and without a central registry you have to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of figuring out where to put your configuration files in the first place. And, obviously, the registry predates NTFS on mainstream Win32 platforms.
... while they play their Xbox 360...
I think he's making a distinction between "classical" investment and Wall Street-style investment (for lack of better terms). There's an ideal that an investor puts money into a business that he thinks has potential to succeed (e.g. VC funding), and reaps his rewards through the success of the business.

Then there are others who invest purely as stock price speculation, and is generally disinterested in the actual goings-on of the business beyond what is likely to impact short-term stock price.
My Balls Are Fuzzy Today
I don't think it's too silly of a concept. You can imagine a company having several departments: some which lose money, and some which make money. The departments that don't "generate revenue" per se can still be beneficial to the company as a whole, perhaps they provide publicity, they're good PR, they good morale, etc...

Those departments, even though they lose money, have value to that company.

With start-ups you can make something profitable, and surely that's preferred because you get your money back sooner, or you can build something that has value to someone else. In the end, you need just need to build something with value.
First, taking OSX as an example desktop Unix (desktop Linux has the same problem), if you own my UID, you also own my ~/Library, and thus my account and arbitrary code execution under my credentials.

Second, the registry is privileged the same way; write access to one part of the registry doesn't give you write access to all of it.

Third, it is notoriously hard to keep permissions straight on configuration files, especially when you're trying to manage multiple roles (for MySQL, qmail, and root, for instance). So most people screw it up.

But I mean, I don't think this is a huge problem. I just think I can knock down a lot of arguments about how the Win32 registry is an abomination. There's a lot not to like about it, but it isn't crazy.
sendmail.cf.
sam.from.hackernews@gmail.com
I've run across this problem several times. I now recommend to my clients (and use in my own projects) AuthSMTP: http://www.authsmtp.com. I've been using them for a few years and I have never had a single outage or problem with their service. I also use them for all of my personal and work email.

Their FAQ states their system is configured to allow a maximum of 50 recipients per message, though they recommend you keep it to 10:

http://authsmtp.com/faqs/faq-20.html

If you contact their support team, they can answer any questions regarding limits. The few times I've had to interact with them they were very knowledgeable and helpful.
Old drug slows cellular clock, treats multiple neurodegenerative diseases
Wow, this looks great. Just signed up.
I know the guys who made this, they've been working hard on it for over a year. I'm curious what news.yc thinks.
"Reputation" is what the banks call this same solution, although it's just as silly there.

My reasoning is, your solution is weak, and my solution isn't. Most user accounts are rarely or never used. IP based backoff is a speed bump for a coordinated attack against those accounts. Lockout completely stops it. And lockout is much easier to implement, which was my original point: people are wasting too much time thinking about this problem, and coming up with weird results.
Try (as much as possible) to stick to GAAP standards and you'll be fine.

Choosing how/when you depreciate certain assets, or if you use a FIFO or LIFO inventory process is all well and good. But you would still have 1 single set of accounting books/data.

I never enjoyed the accounting part of the companies I've started, but I've learned there are things you could do, things you should do and things that you shouldn't do. There is not a whole lot of room for interpretation, especially if you want to try to raise money or sell the company at any point.
As a part-time, wannabe musician, I am loving this concept! My music has been on myspace for a year, and even my friends have a hard time navigating to it easily. I can't wait to check this out!
Ask HN: What would you want (or Not want) on a dead-simple free niche jobs site
I"m interested in creating a free job listing site for a specific industry that currently doesn't have one.

What should it do? What should it not do?

Things I'm fairly certain it should do:

-Popular listings should be visible immediately on the front page.
-No images, just text and very few graphics.
-Listings should be free.
-Users should be able to flag iffy-looking listings.
-There should be search.
-Jobs should be browse-able by location, type of job, experience level and compensation.
-Users will be able to tweet out a job listing, e-mail it to a friend or bookmark it using other services.

Things I see on the pay sites that should be left out:
- letting job seekers post their resumes
- message board
- industry news and gossip
- industry event listings
- weekly news letter with editorial content on the industry

Things I'm on the fence about:

- RSS feeds for sub-sections of job listings
- E-mail alerts for new listings in keywords the user wants to track
- A customizeable widget that people can embed on their sites with the latest listings.

There are 3 sites currently focused in on just this industry. One charges $80 per listing. Another charges $250. The other is $150. When I talk to friends in this industry, the default that everyone goes to is the $80 site.

Thoughts? Am I already doing too much? Too little?
arclanguage.org

It's part of the arc distribution
Looks really cool. I don't travel much, but next time I do I'll give it a try.
The CLI is more than just the shell's capabilities. Microsoft expected people to use PowerShell with the same horrible cmd.exe, and ignore the multi-second startup times.
You definitely need a tagline on what the site is doing straight below the TOP LEFT corner. No many people will click into the "what is zipalong" link.

If I didn't get to the site from YC news, I will think that it is just another photo site rather than a travel site.

It's clever that you put the logo at the top right corner. But, it may hurt the usability because users tend to think that logo should be at the top left corner of the site. It is good to innovate but sometimes it is even better to follow the norm since most of the sites put the logo at the top left corner.

Anyway, I have no time to review the site now. I have to leave my office now. Will let you know once I get back to my home.
Trotting out "fanboyism" is just lazy. It's just like if anyone disagrees with anything Obama says ever, they'll be labeled by some a racist.

Yes, I remember the iPhone 3g launch. I've had no issues with the iPhone apart from that 2 hour period or so waiting for them to fix their servers so I could activate it...
I had no idea. Very helpful. Thank you.
Brian Adairme - CoHost of in Your Band Shirt

Thanks. We are still pretty new, which is why you haven't heard of us before. As for your comment that you like some of the bands, that is great. We are being very specific in who we feature on the show.
Seems ironic that robots in science fiction were envisioned as menial servants able to do physical tasks too hard or unpleasant for humans, whereas this robot, with it's sleek 35lb body and advanced communication ability yet with no arms seems better suited to play the role of master in a world in which many cultures have regarded abstinence from physical work as a mark of superiority (for example, in asian cultures, very long fingernails was a mark of class because they could only be maintained by a person who didn't have to do manual work.)
Very, very recently, this wasn't true. Even as recently as two years ago, you paid a massive premium for something in the netbook form factor.

The netbook revolution isn't because suddenly there were these notebooks in that form factor, it's because someone managed to make small and cheap notebooks.
Looks cool. I signed up. Going to have an API?

I like the icons/graphics.
Apologies. Lawyers should not have to know how to repair MySQL databases. Should be fixed now.
It sounds like one of the more overlooked parts of that story is his use of SEO (From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000). 10K is enough to cross the chicken-egg chasm, which is probably a make or break for this kind of site.

I wonder how hard it would be to do something similar today using SEO.
Allow people to use your site before signing up. This is a recording.
I think it might be just the right amount, in the nick of time.

The things this appears to do well are better than the iPhone's -- there appear to be fewer walls between data, and the Synergy stuff is a very nice touch. The OS is built on JSON data sharing, and the webapps are installed locally. For all the sorts of things I do with iPhone apps, a local browser w/local data would be sufficient. What's more, since lots of people are making custom iPhone webapps anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to go a bit further and make them Palm-native to boot.

Games are going to be a big question, however. CSS+JS? Hm.
BCC Report Card: Could Do Better
This looks like a very cool way to find good new music. They filter to make sure you only see "good" bands. That's pretty cool.
I think the most cogent (and only) argument for nationalistic job protectionism is the fact that others are doing the same thing. If other countries are reluctant to export their jobs to you, you would obviously avoid exporting jobs to them in the vain effort to keep employment in your country alive.

I do agree though - I dislike the "Buy American" argument. Other countries are out-doing us in many industries; instead of pledging allegiance to buying inferior goods and services, we really should be fighting back by innovating and simply making our stuff better.
who uses myspace? I'm from the east coast and here about it's facebook.
An acquisition could pay back investors as well, unless you think nobody would dare buy a nonprofitable company. But I do think there's some credence to this; they are huge and the economy has sunk quite a bit since their famed $15b valuation.

Still, you don't think they could sell for $2b right now?

My point about Facebook Connect is that it's the one thing that can "lock them in" as the social network of the internet... the place where everyone has their real profile and shares what they really do on other websites. If leaving facebook means screwing my account on 10 other sites on I use, then I'm not going to leave, even if you do slam ads down my throat.

How to monetize. Well, if I was a website using facebook connect, which we have to assume they'll be thousands, I'd surely pay facebook to serve up meaningful ads that use information I've sent them: eg: "4 of your friends recently visited Hackernews"

Another thing which I haven't seen a good implementation of is showing off what people buy. If I bought something online I wouldn't be against sharing it with my friends if, for example, it was a cool product or on sale. Facebook could make money from that. With FBconnect, services might start doing this, and facebook can get a piece of the action for showing news feed items that boost sales.

By the way, are Facebook's numbers even public? How do you know they're losing money?
It would be lazy without support. But some people do disagree with Obama mainly because they're racist.
I don't see how anyone can read this blog post by Markus from 2006 about faking site traffic rankings and not think his current traffic stats are severely manipulated.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/competitive-int...

I'm not saying I don't respect what Markus has done. I just don't think his stats are anything near what is reported.
Yes, we are considering providing an API.

We just added "trip embeddability" which allows you to create a trip on Zipalong, and then embed it (a-la Youtube) inside other web pages, such as you blog.

Of course, that's not really an API, but it's a start. We'd be interested in use cases for the API, it would helps us build a more useful API.
I could possibly be inclined to be interested in an alternate keyboard layout, but the prospect of adapting my Emacs keybindings makes me curl into the fetal position.
I agree with your post, but I think it's disingenuous to say that $15 is unacceptable because the rest of us won't accept it. My first job after moving out was $15/hr (though not in NYC, makes a difference), and while things were tough it was survivable.

Would I go back to that job? Hell no. Hauling literally tons of crates around a factory floor each day, climbing inside freezing semi trailers in the dead of the Canadian winter... all for that kind of pay? No thanks.

But that doesn't mean the pay is necessarily bad for someone who, unlike my fortunate self, has no choice in his jobs.

I do agree though - in the context of NY or LA, $15 is not a survivable wage. It's the kind of wage that keeps you alive, but also keeps you trapped in your dead-end job forever.
He also misunderstands evolution; That's a greater offense.
It's been wondered before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=371897
_Why is a very clever and subtle fellow. And to add insult to injury, he gets things done! Huzzah for _Why!
Depends. What does he put in it?
Have we just witnessed the second coming of Palm?
"I wonder what obvious things I don't know that might save me countless hours."

I recently learned about open in OS X:

$ open filename

This opens filename using whatever the default application is for the file's type.
Having worked in the manufacturing industry I can tell you this with utmost confidence:

Wal-Mart clothes are precisely as expensive as they should be.

All other clothes are also precisely as expensive as they should be.

There's a very good reason why Wal-Mart clothes are 1/3 the price of other chains, and that word starts with a capital Q. Most people who've never worked in manufacturing call bullshit on this, but they really, really don't know the reality of things. You do get what you pay for.
I agree that it's useful if there is a way to customize a program's "markup". Once the markup is there, though, anything can display it.

For instance, in an xterm-color or linux terminal, you could type something like ":colo darkblue", and you'd still see custom colors. This is using vim's color path (e.g. "/usr/share/vim/vim72/colors", "~/.vim/colors").

But the colors are there because the text includes things like "make this bold", or "make that green". And in a terminal, I might have customizations for this markup that apply to everything, which can be nice. For instance, maybe I make all bold text red, and that holds in everything from editors to man pages. It's convenient to not have to make these settings in every program that I run.
> colon ... right next to shit

Funniest Freudian slip I've encountered :-D