skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most users will only use encrypted/signed email if encryption and signing is done automatically. If the automatic encryption/decryption/signing/verification is done by the server (e.g. GMail), security gurus will complain that it isn't secure enough.

If the encryption/decryption is done in the "totally secure" way on the client, users complain that they are locked out of their email too often (can't access it from a secondary location and/or lost their keys).

Average users don't have an effective method for exchanging keys.

Email security doesn't really work without a signing mechanism that results in nonrepudiation. But, a lot of users don't want nonrepudiation for the messages they send; they want nonrepudiation for the messages they receive and 100% repudiation for the messages they send. To implement that, you need some kind of expiring signing keys, separate from the encryption keys, which S/MIME and GPG UAs don't natively support.

Consumer-level email services are mostly webmail at this point. There is no good solution for securing webmail beyond TLS encryption between SMTP endpoints (e.g. between Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo, and between the browser and the server). However, your email is still just a subpoena away at every endpoint.

Server-side spam filtering doesn't work with encryption. As soon as spammers start using your encryption key, the spam will pass right through the filters. That means you need to keep your encryption key private. But, that makes key exchange and revocation checks even more difficult.

Online certificate revocation checks are important for email security. However, the process of doing the revocation check leaks sensitive information (who you are corresponding with) if it is optimized for performance. The current means of revocation checking that is optimized for privacy has unworkable performance issues. A new, nonstandard, mechanism for doing revocation checks is needed. But, everybody hates anything proprietery, so it would have to be standardized, but the standardization process will take years.

Everything related to internet email has been free/open source/public domain since the beginning. Any solution that someone comes up with will have to be opened up and freely given away--including the specifications and reference implementations--before it has any chance of being adopted. This limits revenues. Yet, you need a costly infrastructure to implement the service levels that users expect from email (99.9% uptime and high performance and pennies a day or free).

I have been working on a solution to most of these problems but I don't have the resources to move it forward. Please email me (brian@briansmith.org) if you are serious about coming up with improvements to everyday email security so that we can compare notes.
The semi-social, semi-user-generated porn site fantasti.cc was created by a group of popular dot-commers (I know who but I can't tell) who have so far kept their names off the site. One of my partners at Boffery (a pre-alpha visual diary for sex lives) did some work for them, and that partner and I agree that the site would benefit from the name brands of the dot-commers.

In a supposedly enlightened modern world, and more importantly a world in which every man with a computer uses it several times a week to view porn and nearly every man and woman masturbates daily, is there really so much shame in being the person who provides those services?

I have no data on who the most financially successful sex aid and porn makers are, but we certainly all know of some success stories, and we know them by their legal names: Hugh Hefner, Sasha Grey, Larry Flynt. The founders of JimmyJane (a high-market sex toy maker and seller) are out in the open, as is their investor Tim Draper.

Sex sites aren't exactly parallel to porn sites, but it's the closest comparison I have. In its early days, Boffery will need every advantage I can give it, and one is my small amount of notoriety online (both as Nick Douglas and as "the first editor of Valleywag").

I've heard a few stories: FriendFinder calls itself a "social network" when talking to money people. JimmyJane has a different corporate name, but one still assumes Tim Draper knows exactly what he's investing in.

In short, if you don't want to be associated with your industry, you're at a huge disadvantage (your competitors will profit from risking more of their personal reputations) and possibly even have some moral questions to ask yourself. Why do you want to spend time profiting from anything if you feel it would taint your name?
Used Godaddy for about 4 years now. Never had any major issues. They pick the phone, they help you and they are cheap.
The real lesson here is to always make a large claim OR conversely, always lend large sums. Either way, with this sort of "all-in" mentality that the tradition apparently espouses, is it any wonder that (aside from Hindus), Jews are one of the oldest continually existing cultural groups?
Also remember: There's rarely money in the most glamorous stuff. Simple supply and demand there: Everyone wants to run an airline, no one wants to run a sanitation company. If you're in tech, it's cool to play for first-mover, but don't forgot about markets people don't want.

"What are other people unwilling or unable to do?"

That's your play. After social networking has been firmly established, everyone wants to Lord over the next Facebook. "Yeah, I could see myself running a social networking empire" they say. Yeah, you and 150,000 other people. Good luck with that.

Things other people are unable to do - because you're better, or think "outside the box", play on. Things other people are unwilling to do - sanitation, rehab, WYSIWYG website creators for people who are bad with computers - play on. T-shirts, coffeeshops, airlines, social networks? Might want to go back to the drawing board there...
First, I'd make sure there is a cell-phone friendly/SMS version.

http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/2005/05/nigerian-cell...

Do Freemium for now, with or without adsense. Monetization may later jump out at you. Maybe it won't be real estate or dating or jobs.

Finally, if you don't stay local, then it might also make sense to take the international angle -how many choices does a European or US company have for advertising a product to the Nigerian market?

Good luck!
Tell me about it. A Stanford buddy and I have been wrangling about how to deal with the sky-high rents that are currently pushing out to EPA. EPA used to be a halfway ok rent refuge.

Apparently one of the big apartment leasing companies there, Woodlawn Arms or something, that he leases from, has been facing legal action over some practices that involve shoving out older tenants so that they could reset the rents from ~700 to ~1100.
The difference of magnitude between the revenue of the proposed wifi charges and the revenue of BART ticket prices is so staggering that a comparison makes little sense. It's much more likely that money could be taken from another area of costs than that the cost of wifi would affect ticket prices.

I'm not saying the money will appear out of nowhere, but it's certainly not staggering if the current charge structure is expected to create a profit for the company that installed the network.
Except that they can always get a loan to cover it from the Fed. Back in the day, it took 10% of depositors to make a run on a bank. Now it requires a large number of depositors in the same area to run on all the banks to cause an issue. The reason for this is that banks can a) lend to each other and b) borrow from the Fed banks. This means that more money is just a shipment away. And since the Fed is the government, it never runs out of money. It can just print more to cover the cost.
Well, the launching part is fairly easy. It just happens that launching and gaining traction to a massive user base aren't quite the same thing...
Introduction to Statistical Learning Theory
The kill ring is something I've always meant to figure out, but never bothered to. I can't believe I've been missing out on M-y all this time.
GoDaddy has the most horrible and confusing site design that causes me to waste a lot of time doing something as simple as trying to lookup which hosting plan I'm on.

However, I'm still a customer for all of my .ca (Canada) sites and hosting for my girlfriend's business because:

1. Prices are very cheap

2. They are the most credible and inexpensive .ca domain registrar that I've found

3. Customer service is decent

For my own startup it's AWS all the way...
A new reference article for those who want to know the difference between a startup and a small business?
Because when you search through your email, it has to be already decrypted, so why bother?

On the other hand, I cryptographically sign all of my email, so those who use the web of trust have a reasonable assurance it came from me.
I came to a similar conclusion a while back (graph oriented programming languages are the future) but my line of reasoning was that while we have object oriented languages and relational databases surely there should also be relation oriented languages. I toyed with this for a while totally stoked (still am really) to prototype some of these ideas and then somehow or another discovered prolog and it was like this big "ohhh" moment. My long winded point is that while I agree I think the author should check out prolog to add to the analysis.

lisp, smalltalk and prolog have been the three languages that blew my mind instead of just introducing a new syntax.
Davos Interviews: Etsy Founder Robert Kalin
I can't tell you how glad I was when, instead of a link to scribd, I got a link to a pdf when I clicked the topic.
I should clarify: technically this is the case. However, it is technically illegal to purchase/receive stolen goods (and you can't really argue that you were under the impression that torrented files were legit, at least for the most common torrents).

I oversimplified because it is tiresome hearing the "But it's not stealing because you don't deprive them of anything" argument.
These guys do heatmaps: http://crazyegg.com/
More Semantic Apps to Watch
I watched this video a while ago, so I don't remember it exactly, but there is clearly something dubious behind the money-creating power governments give to banks.

As a society, we do want to grant promissory notes to encourage growth. However, banks, as commercial entities, quickly run away from simple, society-uplifting investments to derivatives and subprime credit.

As rational businesses they are motivated to grow, so the value/paper ratio goes steadily down as they expand.

There is clearly something missing in the equation, and I think the video hints at it nicely. Something is wrong when the rules of the business encourage banks to make increasingly lower value loans over time.

And bailouts make them even less likely to be prudent with the power we give them.
Since I'm not a prescriptivist, I'll point out that there's a subtle difference of meaning between "speak good English" and "speak English well", and the meaning here is better reflected by the second phrase.

Consider the similar phrase, "Did you eat good pie", versus "Did you eat pie well". In the pie case the former is correct because you're referring to the quality of the pie. In the case at hand, we're talking about the quality of the speaking.
Only 25% of Britons believe Darwin's theory of evolution
Kind of old. I enjoyed the article (and realized that coffee shop == lifestyle business) when I first read it back in 2005.
And only $65/month.
Super Ad Bowl: 2 decades of ads on a timeline
"GIMP is a perfectly decent alternative for people who don't want to shell out money for Photoshop"

It _can_. It really depends on the features that you need. I can hardly imagine myself doing some professional Webdesign with Gimp. Im a Photoshop user and i tried hard to learn Gimp to do some serious work on it. I think that it may not suit every Designer's needs. But for Illustrator, i think there is a valid alternative: InkScape. I think it's one of the most promising piece of open-source software for graphic designers. I liked it. But i dont use it since im more comfortable with Illustrator. ;)
did this guy piss off Arrington somehow? Why is he being an asshole to the guy?
I have no moral qualms with it, but I wouldn't because it's just not a good investment. In my travels I've bumped into some people who've succeeded at it (one of whom writes a fascinating blog about the industry) and it's not easy.

For one, there's serious capital outlay. Producing porn is not cheap. Good female performers charge $1k-$2k per scene. Males are $300-$500, but significantly less reliable. They're really more important too, since their job is much more demanding. Thanks to lubricants, a female can pretty much phone it in so any hot model will do. But good luck finding a guy who will show up, not be coked out, and be able to get it up and keep it up, and pop when and where you tell him to. You're going to have entire shoots largely wasted due to this.

You have to rent locations, camera men, lighting people. You're easily looking at $4k-$5k per scene. To get people to pay money, top sites put out 10 or more scenes per week. Can you fund this until reach the critical mass needed to break even? If so I suspect you wouldn't be considering doing this in the first place.

You have to move to L.A. pretty much. That's where all of the adult modeling agencies are, and California is the only state in which shooting a porn does not constitute illegal prostitution.

You have to design the web software, which is not trivial. You're delivering videos so your incremental costs are high. You have to deal with payments, which usually means a very expensive third-party provider. The rake is high because of the very high rate of charge backs (which usually occur when the wife sees the charge on the monthly statement and the husband suddenly can't determine what it is and decides its bogus) which in turn makes credit card companies often decline those purchases, so the processors play a game of cat and mouse (much like companies that process payments to casinos, which is how I know this part) by changing their business names and category codes. In fact, you need multiple processors, because each one on its own will fail a large portion of the time. It wouldn't be worth your time to try to process payments yourself.

You have to set up and run an affiliate program, which is the main way these sites get traffic. That will require networking with some of the millions of free sites. You have to find a good way of getting content to them, running promotions. The major sites pay up to 70% in affiliate fees.

People tend to think that because the industry is unsavory, it therefore is less competitive, but really the opposite is true. Just like selling drugs is way more competitive than selling tires (to my knowledge Goodyear employees don't run drivebys on local Firestone plants) porn is way more competitive than most other industries.
This also answers my longest-standing question about cafes: Why are there so few fun ones?

San Francisco's Valencia Street (with its immediate offshoots) supports hundreds of interesting businesses. Many of them are cafes. Only two of those cafes are any good: Ritual Roasters, and Four Barrel. Four Barrel was founded last year by a disgruntled co-founder of Ritual.

While the rest of Valencia's cafes are grimy, poorly lit, deathly quiet, or all of the above, RR and FB are sunny, friendly, and loud. That noise is all the foot traffic (and some David Bowie). The people sitting in Ritual for five hours on a laptop aren't paying the (staggeringly high) rent. It's the constant in-and-out of to-go cups. Mercifully, Four Barrel has no wifi and thus a more talkative, flowing crowd.

Ironically, because RR and FB have coffee that makes people come and go quickly, they can afford to make a pleasant space for people who stick around. Their solution to cafe economics was to make their own high-markup product.

Of course there are other solutions. Cafe du Soleil in the Lower Haight offers an extensive sandwich menu and gets its baked goods as part of a chain of boutique cafes and restaurants called the Bay Bread Group, which also sells bread to bigger clients like the Ritz Carlton. For all I know, Soleil is riding on the profits of the Bay Bread Group as an indulgent loss leader.

But I suppose there's a lesson there for any startup with a boutique aspect: Make your own supplies, and you might have a business plan to support your dream. In a way, wasn't that the model for Reddit and Justin.tv?
Although I get a lot of email, I don't really send much and most of what I send is that I can't meet $person when they want because of $reason and that I would rather meet at $date. That sort of thing
isn't really sensitive.

That said, I occasionally exchange details that could be covered by an NDA and for those cases I'll just send an OpenSSL encrypted attachment. Most people I work with don't have a problem with that
and the few that do are easily helped by simply reminding them of the syntax:

% openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in document.pdf.aes256 -out document.pdf

The biggest problem I have is that people rarely think about the sensitivity of things they send to me unless I explicitly remind them to.
The U.S. is a LOT more than a couple years behind you, and the trend isn't going in the right direction either.
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The biggest issue with this contention is that no one knows how far AI can go. Furthermore, I posit that there are people who will never accept what AI does, viewing it as always lesser to human development. Someone (I don't remember who) quipped, "What is AI? Whatever a computer can't do".
Tucson-area cable TV broadcast porn during Super Bowl
While there have been many good ads that debuted at the superbowl, only a few have been great superbowl ads, that is, that have taken advantage of the context.

I think that the best superbowl ad was the e-trade ad at the beginning of the 1999 or 2000 superbowl that had a chimp dancing in a garage.

The caption was something like "We just blew $2 million on this ad. What's your retirement plan?"

The following year, after it was clear that the dot-com bust was real, e-trade had another superbowl ad. In this ad, a chimp led a horse through a ghost-town of dot-com mascots. (Yup, including the sock monkey.) The end shot was of a rocket, presumably taking the chimp into space.
Very impressive. These are ads that ran during super bowl.Interesting facts:

- Humor has been the winning ingredient. However celebrity involvement has considerably raised over years.

- Beverages have always had a lot of ads.

- Check out the ads in 2000 - the year of tech/financial ads. 17 companies had their coming-out launches during super bowl. Traffic soared.

- check out the tech ads of 1984 - 85. Apple the creative king, out shadowed IBM ads then.
I'm not sure where I'm at on the current fractional reserve banking system. Backing paper money by having people base their promise to pay to keep their home isn't such a bad idea. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect

"The endowment effect is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established."

So, people do anything to keep their home usually, and work hard. Creating a note payable secured by someone's house seems like a valid way to build things for people who haven't saved for years for them.

Various governments who change the currency rules constantly to manipulate the money supply seems like it might be an outdated idea, though I'm not sure how we'd create an alternative.
This is just as theoretical as every other monetization scheme they've come up with so far, all of which have failed. The problem is that people on social networks just want to hang out and maybe play games. They don't click on ads much, and when they do, they don't buy things at the places they land. You can show them polls all day, but they'll mostly ignore it.
This could also be a pain for users who are used to checking the front page. If the states are listed alphabetically, everyone can find their state every time.
zuck will end up back at harvard...as an mba school case study..."most popular product in history to ever go broke".

the mideast bankers won't front them money, that tin-can-banging trip was a wash

the VCs keep pouring money onto the fire...i guess you gotta keep hope alive

fb only has one option: charge users $10/month if they want any features whatsoever. for free, all you will get is a single pic, one-time status message, and the ability to make friends (this is to keep the social graph from imploding)
Its a good read but its kind of heavy on theorems and math with lack of application / algorithms and background, which makes it dry to read.

To serve the field of statistical learning justice, "The elements of statistical learning" is an excellent book on the subject.
>so their service has to be superior in how it targets specific demographics

I think you are mistaken. You are taking ideas from the old magazine world of advertising. I don't think demographics, appealing to a certain demographic or any such thing. Google's success has nothing to do with this. In fact, in many ways it is the opposite of magazine advertising.

The normal ad model is distribute a magazine & plaster ads on it or create an event & plaster sponsors on it. The ad has nothing to do with the thing the ad is on. Google's model is different (for search anyway).

For some businesses, being found on Google means business. They are willing to pay for Google to do what they do anyway, send searchers to web pages. They're genius is that their ads are not ads.
GoDaddy is scum.

They are known for selling domain searches to squatters. It goes something like this:

1. You search for a domain
2. Praise Jesus! It's available!
3. You come back in 24 hours.
4. :( sorry, a squatter has taken it because GoDaddy whored out your search to them.

They are complete sleaze. Their mascot is a girl with big tits. They try to offer every imaginable rip-off feature with a domain registration. They are the car salesman of domain name registrations.

I can't believe nobody else managed to get the "place where you buy domain names" brand. It's sad.
Funny how the last line of the article says,

Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

This in spite of recent conversations here discussing "doing what you love":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449295, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449457

Why didn't doing it for love work for the author? I suppose if I were to answer the question myself, I'd say either a) they didn't love it enough. or b) They did some bad math.

Why not just sell the crossiants for $3? Why not sell the cold house coffee for $3 instead of $1? Raise the price, let your customers keep you alive. If they like what you have to offer, they will.

If their dream was to open a coffee shop, why /not/ work there full time? Why not make it work? Other coffee shops have figured out the formula and do survive. Maybe their owners loved it more?

Every business struggles in the beginning.

Do /not/ give up. Keep going. If your formula isn't working, tweak it. Don't close up shop. That's what you don't do if you love what you do. You don't give up on something you love. You can't.
So, you're chugging along but don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. Are you supposed to keep chugging (don't quit!) or "be very quick to change"? Hm.