skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are no more interesting domains left.

He who comes up with a solution to that problem will become filthy rich.

Time to drop the addressbar and use a wordbar with disambiguation?

Who is in charge of pushing the world forward?
Sure :) I wasn't imagining anyone would md5/sha1 without salt etc
Empirically, the Ruby is far from death. There is an active community, more publications than before, and an array of frameworks (Sinatra, Rhodes, RoR) to choose from. Saying Ruby is dying is like looking at a single tree in the forest, noticing it's diseased, and claiming the entire forest will fall to that disease.

Also, it's being forked for individual reasons, like Ruby Enterprise, thanks to sites like github.
Github: Making Code More Social
Patterns: Great self promotion
It's totally dying. I got the memo, maybe you're further down the line than me. Wait a year or two, the memo will arrive at your desk soon.
Here's the most useful and relevant nugget from this article:

I am not a lawyer so I can’t pretend to be giving any legal advice.

Edit: I had missed the last paragraph until now...apparently this guy is pushing an alternative to incorporation and is advising against incorporation, but has no legal expertise to be doing so. He's going to wish he had incorporated when someone sues his ass :)
Meh. Nothing I don't see on my Google search. And they didn't find my email address.
> Rest assured, however, that we will give more money to corn farmers for ethanol, despite the fact that it is neither environmentally or economically sound as an energy source. Obama comes from a corn state.

Cue the Corn Cartel. Did you know you can use corn syrup to melt snow and ice on roads? No need for salt. No more salt-induced auto body rust. All praise for corn.

But seriously, now. I do hope corn ethanol does not get promoted.
Sounds like that line in Bridget Jones: "I'm very busy and important."
I like the look. I thought that clicking on one of the domains felt a little slow. After clicking and waiting, all the info I got was 'This domain is available', with no further action items. Do you keep a blog or feed that we can subscribe to for updates?
Which means I probably won't remember to try it again :/ Bit of a waste of time...
Ties that don't suck, on Etsy
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=58778
These guys are a local company out in Boston, and I know a few fellow students who have interned with them. The beauty of the system, as many people mentioned, lies in the simplicity of it. It has two uncommon traits for robotics - reliability and affordability.

Another neat feature of the system that is not clearly shown is that when the shelf is brought to the employee to have the item picked, a laser pointer mounted at the human station points to the item on the shelf to be picked. Quite impressive!
Yeah, please wake up everybody.
(The generic and superficial american optimism doesn't help here and now, and is actually part of the problem.)

We had the year 1929.
Sure, quite none of us lived it, but we don't seem to have learned the lesson, we did even worse with our new and sophisticated economic systems...
It sounds like you have experience here. Do you have more networking advice or information referrals.

My startup is based in Boston. We have some MIT and Harvard professors on our board of advisors, but we don't have other connections to networks and investors, and our advisor board hasn't been able to give us good leads. We've engaged in fund-raising efforts through letters and applications, as well as by going to relevant conferences, sometimes on the schedule, sometimes just passing out stickers on the side (or the street when they kick us out). We talk to a lot of people and have a vibrant but fluxful volunteer community. How do we find investors? (or grants; we're currently a non-profit, but we have revenue models and would be ok with employing a for-profit partner model)
thx (diN0bot @t bilumi org)
No. You might think that (seems logical), but in fact having one word instead of two means you always think of the context. So, he definitely didn't think of this offer as of humanitarian 'aid'. My assumption, is that the message from Dell was to make some sort of business (profitable to Dell, of course) and Russia did not actually need this offer. I guess, Putin replied like that because he was asked a question in the same manner (using this 'help' word instead of 'deal' or 'business').

And, btw, Putin speaks english more or less. At least he knows the word 'help'.
This is unsettling, the creepy future is here to stay I'm afraid.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. That section he is referring to in Apple's patent is just the part where Apple describes possible ways their invention might be used. In fact, if you read the intro to that section in the patent, it says "However, it will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details." The patent claims are what's important and most of them don't hinge on whether or not the gesture area displays a visual output.
Still less silly than sweatpants and slippers.
Hmm, maybe your spin was better for drawing upvotes. Well, I thought it was a cool story.
Beautiful 404 Error Pages
THIS IS NOT MY COMMENT.

I don't know what happened, but there must be a glitch somewhere in the software. I doubt someone has bothered to crack my account, Most likely there is a bug that attributes other posts to my user.

This is the second post that is not written by me. Does HN have a place to post bugs?
What was the old login.. It used to be pretty standard fare on websites with free registration.

cyberpunk/cyberpunk ?
cypherpunk/cypherpunk ?

maybe plural?
No offense to the poster asking for feedback, but WOW this has to be one of the best, and most honest, reviews I have seen in a LONG time. I think many times when people post looking for feedback not everyone is as frank and honest about the website, app, or business model. This only ends up hurting the poster in the long run as they are given false hope about the possibility of success.

Maybe this game IS the next big hit, but without honest feedback like this the poster will never be able to take it to that level.

To the poster, the best advice I have (since this comment hit pretty much everything I was going to say) is never get discouraged by any feedback (good or bad) you receive and take the bad feedback as the best feedback and driving force behind making your app/website/business all that much better. I can't say if you will succeed or not (some apps I thought would never make it went on to make millions and others I thought were a sure thing went on to fail), success is what you make of it and if you are willing to take the advice and feedback gained from HN your chances will only increase.

I wish you the best of luck!
Sorry, I should have realized the OS would be very important. I want to try writing a couple of Mac apps.
Bugmenot Firefox plugin, so on any login form on the web you can right-click and select "Login with Bugmenot": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349
First automated-check-in hotel launched by Premier Inn
Engadget had a really great analysis of both companies' patent portfolio... their conclusion was Apple has a handful that may put a squeeze on Palm, but with a bare minimum of research into Palm's portfolio they came up with four that the iPhone is a near-direct rip-off of, with hundreds more they hadn't even delved into.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454118 (News.YC)
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-dept... (direct link)
re mailing lists / newsletters:

I've had good luck with campaignmonitor.com. You can pre-test your send against ISP loopbacks for both spam filtering and final rendering checks. API for list mgmt, plays well with design staff. And one hopes their email standards project gains traction: http://www.email-standards.org/ .
If we could only squeeze oil out of them.
Why are you not making money off the sale? For example by using a referral code to a domain registration service?
Perhaps the author should try using an iPhone for a month or two.
eibrahim,

your comments are getting down voted pretty bad. you're probably a nice guy, and i hate seeing so many downvotes because, you know, that can feel bad.

i have to admit that i downvoted some of your comments, too. hopefully there won't be a trainload of down votes.

anyway, i'd like to at least explain what i think is going on: i bet most of us went to your blog post with an open mind about services that are worth paying for. it's definitely a topic of conversation my partner and i have pondered before. some aspects of the blog post are a little...vacuous. the angelsoft one sounded particularly ridiculous to me. where's the meat of the advice? the affiliate links makes things seem even more slimey.

ok, so those comments are made here, hopefully not to harshly (critical is good, mean is not so good). your responses are defensive and, IMHO, unthoughtful.

for example, this disclaimer doesn't address my concerns of bias at all. in fact, it makes them worse!

> "Don't worry, that didn't affect my recommendations or integrity (what is that?)"

ok...you don't value integrity and don't have a reason for why your recommendations have substance, which is bad in itself but somewhat insulting in your view of readers.

i'm not sure i've communicated my point very well. ultimately, good luck, and i hope by thinking about your comments they'll fair better in the future.
Toyota iQ drives through 18 UK cities on one tank of gas, 59.4 MPG
I found Boyd via Greene, check him on the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)
I think we're talking about different things : )

When I consider a search engine obscuring the IP addresses for its search records, I assume the "enemy" is the government. It's governments who want to know who's been searching for child porn and bomb-making instructions. They want the IPs, and they can get the algorithm.

Now if you're talking about someone with less resources, who can get the obfuscated records but not everything else, your arguments make perfect sense, but I can't imagine who'd be interested other than governments.
Ask HN: Hacking Mail Server
Whats the best way to setup and configure a mail server for your application so that you may parse incoming messages and perform some functionality accordingly.

For instance I have an application in Python/Django for sending free SMS to your friends in Pakistan. I wanna add mail capabilities in it so that every registered user gets an email address like <phone>@isms.pk and any mail sent on it is processed and sent through my SMS gateway. Surely, I wouldn't want a "Mailbox" for each user and periodically check all the mailboxes using IMAP/POP3. Some hacking of MailServer to put some hooks would be a much better idea.

I'm on Ubuntu Linux and my preferred language is Python. Which mail server is the best choice in such scenarios?
Everything except the first sentence is right. Normal people have always used computers mostly for document-oriented work. Just the consumption of text on the web is probably dwarfing actual real productivity in GUI applications.

Sure, web-based application sacrifice A LOT. But in return you get dead-simple, cross-platform, accessible (sometimes), no-install apps. What would the GUI developers of 20 years ago trade for those benefits?
I signed up and it dumped me on a page that looked like a blog. Lots of buttons I could press to do things but no idea what they do. And this page was clearly not fun. Why does it look like a bad blog and why aren't I doing something fun at this point?

So I disable the tutorial because it's the most prominent button on the page (I'm thinking that maybe it gets me into the FUN part faster, although if I need a tutorial it isn't a good casual game). Aha - now I see that activation is required. Genuine wtf moment. I can take a tutorial without confirming my account but nothing else? Honestly, if you are going to insist on email confirmation, do it BEFORE you show people your actual game page. Right now you are making a bad impression and then pushing people away.

Review: I need to give you my email address. Then you want me to LEAVE YOUR SITE and go to a more addictive site. Now I am wondering why you need to verify my email address at all? If you really need it and I gave you a bogus one then give me a way to change it. Have I just signed up for daily spam? Trust meter starts tilting downwards.

If you have a free service it doesn't matter if your users are anonymous. Why harass them? And if you ARE monetizing traffic you STILL shouldn't worry about authenticating email addresses. Not unless you want to send a lot of email, in which case you send the authentication note but don't send anything else until they've confirmed. It's a tinyint field in your database (email_authenticated). If people have fun they will do it.

We run a paid site where authentication actually matters and don't care as much. Every now and then we have a payment come in from someone who is not in our system. It is sort of a problem, so we write the person who pays and say, "which account did you want to upgrade?" Email authentication is a good way to prevent yourself from spamming innocent third parties. That's about it.

All that said, I think this could be a cool service. The concept is fun. I want to like it. But I have no idea what I should be doing after signing up and you are pushing me away from your service and haven't thought through how to get someone INTO actual gameplay. Instead it is WALL, WALL, WALL. So I leave. I've got about 6 tabs open and when you sent me away to Gmail I didn't come back.
Alaska volcano expected to erupt soon
Seriously???

Well, half-seriously. History makes it very clear that you can't tell in advance what someone will be remembered for... often the thing that everyone thought was the biggest deal is just forgotten. Certainly it doesn't matter what Linus thinks about it.

I'd say git is a lot more than an ok-ish version control system because of two things: its design (hashes and all that) and its efficiency. We were using darcs before, which is fine, but after using them both extensively I can say that they are two systems that aren't in the same league. Even their leagues aren't in the same league. Git is so much more powerful that you begin to have new ideas - that's the point of my original comment.
What browser are you using? That usually is most of the problem. Chrome chews through even the toughest javascript-based apps, including gmail, greader, facebook. It's way faster to load a web page than to open an application on my own machine.
Karma whores.

But seriously, mostly we care more about talking to the HN community than we do about adding value to your article. When you say "more helpful," you mean more helpful to you and your readers. "More helpful" to me might mean more accessible to Hacker News.

Get used to this. The more your startup gets covered, the less control you'll have over the conversation.
Sorry, I'm the guy in charge of pushing the world forward. I accidentally fell asleep.
I’m Attending MIT, Stanford & Harvard
59.4MPG isn't remarkable.
Its not a clone....its a different perspective of managing online identities. Coming soon!
Windows 7 seems like warmed-over Vista to me. The days of Microsoft innovation -- if they ever existed -- are over.

What's most notable about Windows 7 is the ideas they've taken from Compiz, which are certainly great on Linux.
All the salt means is that you can't use a so-called rainbow table. Assuming the salt is known, and it must be for the system itself to be able to look up its own records, you can simply recreate the salted string and start from the beginning with that.

There are 4 billion possible combinations. A single nVidia 9800GX2 can try 608 million of those* per second. You do the math.

Sorry to pick on you mate : )

* md5, http://www.elcomsoft.com/lhc.html
A lot of the suggestions here seem to follow the philosophical advice from generals meme, like the people who read Sun Tzu to learn how to better manage their sales team and etc.

The best book I know of in the "detailed stuff, like how to use tanks, planes and so on" area is James F. Dunigan's "How to Make War". It's a little cold-war oriented but still pretty applicable, and the first chapter is helpfully titled "How to Become an Effective Armchair General". Given that wars are usually massive economic and logistical operations, it has a lot of charts and tables to that effect, showing the number of shots per soldier killed over the centuries, tonnage of explosives per plane, etc.

Just by glancing over the charts you can see the basic history of military activity -- the Civil War being the first "modern" war in terms of slaughter, economic mobolization, and etc; then a period of regression to small wars, before WWI and so on.

As far as "how to use tanks" and so on, that is often considered tactics not strategy. There are books written on that stuff, however; how many people should be in a small platoon and how they should move, leapfrogging each other so one moves while the other keeps the enemy ducking; how two tanks can use their light machine guns to clear each other's close-in areas that they can't see or shoot at themselves; the strategy of having a tank attached to a platoon of infantry so they work together; etc.

But I don't know of one single book that collects all that. If I had to find them I would probably look at the some of the publications of the Army War College, and I would go to a gun show and find that guy who is always there with a lot of field manual publications, and ask him.
Amazon is eating their own dogfood. They have been beta testing a product called "Actual Turk". With Actual Turk, people show up at a defined location and perform menial tasks for a few cents each.

Any product you order from an Amazon warehouse has been picked and packed by an Actual Turk over the last 3 months. In between product pick/pack jobs Actual Turks also perform other jobs on demand, such as making hand-shadow puppets in front of a webcam, reading bedtime stories to children over the phone, or seeking out specimens to ship to a child for their school rock-collection project.

This offering was also alpha-tested in front of many Home Depot locations in the Southwest.
Funny, the company making this software is incorporated. So much for eating your own dogfood.
Not the first -- Cuil also claims not to log IP addresses.
For-profit activism startup in SF
It doesn't sound like it would be that hard to combine the two. Both are open source projects ...
What are you up to?
This is something every software security services firm has embraced since the 1990s; we're lucky, because we have a series of professional conventions and research venues to demonstrate our work in.

It was one of the most frustrating things, coming from a security research/startup background and going to work at a relatively large network security software company like Arbor Networks, that we had no venue to "show off" that didn't involve pitching our actual product. One of the great things about leaving Arbor and starting up with my friends was that I got my name back; instead of writing white papers and designing product demos, I got to work on and talk about stuff I was doing for love, not money.
JQuery("#drink").imbibe();
Desirable dress under $100
If you really want to know how to find a prom dress under $100 that makes you look your absolute best, you need to know your body type and understand how to accent your best features with the right dress style.
Campaign Monitor looks awesome, but, like SendStream, it's for 1-to-many email broadcasting. I need something more like a listserv.
Public Service Announcement: the "P" in "HTTP" stands for "protocol"
I'd love to see how the presence of a phone number affects web-only conversions.
I think "fad" is a little strong. Plenty of folks are using gmail and Google docs, for example.

I do think there are limitatations to running in a browser; World of Warcraft isn't likely to do so anytime soon. But I don't see any reason to believe that more apps need a desktop environment than don't. Rather, I see web browsers gradually getting more and more capable (especially within organizations that can make the choice to skip IE compatibility).
If you're interested in the intersection of tech startups and social entrepreneurship like I am... check this out. (Disclaimer: I work here)
The 33 Strategies of War (Robert Greene)
"Time to drop the addressbar and use a wordbar with disambiguation?"

Aren't you roughly describing the way Chrome works? (Maybe not the disambiguation part, it defaulting to a Google search doesn't count.)
Thanks for the constructive criticism. Actually, I am not offended the slightest bit. I was just being sarcastic and funny but I guess I didn't do a good job.
Reinventing the Tech Incubator
I'm no expert on this - I'm in Cambridge, UK and seeking investment. Just my experiences on what I'm doing :)

There's a few guys and girls, three or four - that I'm actively seeking. I found them from networking with cool startups and seeing who they recommended. [If you're curious, I'm looking for some guys at Index and Cambridge Angels]

I think then you have to really get "out there" and go to every business/startup/investment meetup/conference with a fistful of business cards. I've met some really interesting people who have offered various introductions.

I dont want to make it sound like you should "use" people for their contacts. Meet awesome people who are interesting and help them out - and just hope they'll repay you the favour. :)

Linkedin & YouNoodle are really great for this stuff - just be as sociable as possible.
It's funny, I must have changed it about fifty times. It's amazing how many variations you can get on the same phrase. For example:

- "We help you find an unregistered domain name for your website"

- "We help you find unregistered domain names for your websites"

- "Find an unregistered domain name for your website"

- "Find unregistered domain names for your websites"

- "Find a great unregistered domain name for your site"

Etc etc. I think I'll get rid of the "We help you", as that was something I was indecisive about.

Thanks --
And we all know that Java on the desktop has been such a great success..
German Government Adopts *Flawed* CO2-Based Car Tax
This has been removed. Thanks, guys. :)
If they were made over the internet, it might take a Federal Law Enforcement Officer (FBI or U.S. Marshal) to make the arrest or get the arrest warrant. I believe interstate death treats become a federal manner.

And with all due respect to TC and Mike, it often takes "pull" to get Federal law enforcement involved. They handle all the "big fish". For example, if your start up was hacked, they would be the ones to call, but they won't move on anything less than $50,000 or $500,0000 worth of damages.

Disclaimer: IANAL and IANALEO.
Thanks. No feed available yet and because of the way the site tracks popularity, that may never be an option. At some point I will add the ability to sort by specific dates and for people to "mark as read" domains for that date, allowing you to make sure you're not looking over domains twice.

As for the speed, well, that's a function of DreamHost and Verisign... what are you gonna do...
Along with the Anabasis and Caesar's Gallic Wars, I particularly recommend Johnnie Johnson's Wing Leader, Hanson's Western Way of War, and Oman's Art of War in the Middle Ages.
Heh - spin doesn't matter, I was just hoping it could spark a discussion.
Unless you've looked through all of the current 10K+ domains on the site, you can't really say that :) There are actually a lot of decent ones out there...