skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Didn't we have this discussion about password hashing already a few weeks ago?

If someone's snooping on your email, I think you've got bigger problems than a lost password, tbh.

As for hashing, again, if someone can get on the server and download the whole database, you've got bigger problems than password hashing.

I'm not saying this is a good practice, but I just don't think it's as big a problem as this guy is making it out.

Also, there's a balance between security and usability. For some kinds of users, not being able to tell them their password is actually a problem. Sites that are able to do that will have a competitive edge in getting those users. So the question is one of balance between usability and security, not just one of security.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook is just fine for me.
That's what I've heard. My point was that at least at some point he was calling himself a "Ph. D. student" -- his goal was a Ph. D., not a Masters degree.

And while I'm on the subject, Sergey Brin also still has a Stanford web page (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/), which helpfully informs us that "Currently I am at Google."
Interesting stuff. I think if people just learned to use multiple classes (ie class="box large blue-bg"), they could drastically reduce the size of their css and reuse more styles.
I'm really impressed by the performance monitoring features FathomDB offers, especially the ability to sort the most processor and disk intensive queries over the last couple minutes/hours.

I've done a little bit of googling and there seem to be a couple of open source MySQL performance monitoring tools that offer the same kind of features (Nagios, Cacti), but this is something I have very little experience in. Any DBAs care to comment on how they monitor their DBs?
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Check out five reasons why he should send her to a wellness vacation.
I disagree that not being able to tell someone their password is a usability problem. Having a password reset system is just as usable and significantly more secure than having to store passwords in plain text.

And both of your arguments about having bigger problems are fundamentally flawed. Sure, if someone does get your db, you have a big problem, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions so that if it somehow happens they can't read it like a book. It's kind of like you're saying cars shouldn't have airbags because it's harder to honk the horn and if you do get in an accident, you've got bigger problems.

And someone snooping on your email is as easy as you accessing your webmail on an unencrypted wifi connection. Do you think everyone in the world makes sure they use the ssl version of their webmail in public? Because if not, sniffing packets is trivially easy.

My point is that the situations you mentioned only become bigger problems when you make no effort to protect these things.
Picking startups based on the investments of eminent angels would protect against most gaming. They're not going to change their investment criteria based on what's happening downstream of them.
Warren Buffet's Letter to Investors
One of the biggest problems with using Canvas to render graphs is the lack of exporting functionality. I built a reporting tool over the summer that used Flot, but ended up having to switch it with Google Charts because users couldn't copy/paste results into Word.

Image rendering may not be as dynamic as Canvas rendering, but the ability to export images and the widespread browser support still make it a very viable solution
Interesting to see how formats progress: back when CDs were made, they could hold more than vinyl so they became the norm. Now that storage is best handled digitally, a lot of people are going back to vinyl because there's no need for a go-between format.
It uses a different philosophy than the other space managers. It's all about trying to emulate physical space. I like that a lot: I don't use enough windows in a day for it to be necessary, but that's the philosophical concept that makes the most sense to me.
Ask HN: Anybody Using ZK? (AJAX + Mobile framework)
Then there is Fiji water... Probably the most egregious bottled water (in terms of energy costs to transport)

http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/askpablo-exotic-1.php
I'd buy them for, say, five cents each. Bottles are useful.
A couple months ago I built a reporting tool for a client using Flot, only to have to switch over to Google Charts after users started complaining.

Flot, and all other Canvas-based JS charting solutions, are really impressive applications of Canvas, but until browsers start supporting Canvas copy/paste better I'm hesitant to use them for graphing apps. Image-rendering graphing solutions support most browsers and can be easily copy/pasted into other applications, with little additional overhead.
> Do you think everyone in the world makes sure they use the ssl version of their webmail in public?

I know techies who don't use GMail who don't bother to explicitly using https://mail.google.com - I don't know why.
Try books by Jared Diamond about world history:

"Guns, Germs and Steel"

"Collapse"

They are not just informative: they change the way one looks at the world. And their prose is excellent.
Yeah, I think that video is an example of (good intended ?) sarcasm gone wrong. I'm sure the creator wanted to convey a feeling of "fun-ness", but instead I feel that it just diminishes the validity of his app.
What You Must Know About the New Safari 4 Beta
Very creative idea.

However, I'm not convinced that mainstream users will get comfortable with it (because it looks "different"). This, plus the fact that enough problems can exist from creation/sharing/clicking that it's likely just not worth the hassle.

Maybe it's just me, but lack of compatibility is a high price to pay for a character (or two) shorter URLs.
Max Levchin's favorite new startups
I'm working on the API for a moment-- someone else reported a bug. I'll edit/respond when we get it sorted.
Which, I guess, is a bug.
Use Anyvite.

http://anyvite.com
"It came up with the idea of prototypal inheritance and dynamic objects itself."

Hehe. Not itself, the language Self: http://research.sun.com/self/papers/papers.html
Google is constantly trying to create the real time web search.
I also experience problems.

Microsoft Windows 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236: Service Pack 3)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.48 Safari/525.19

Reading from the front page of Hacker News. The links work but all of the fancy pants unicode stuff shows up as square boxes. This was also a problem when http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ was making the rounds.

I'm almost certain it's just a font issue since the Unicode Snowman takes advantage of a font embedding feature specific to IE (and works properly there). I'm not sure anything can be done about this, short of pushing browsers to install fonts.
It's more of an experiment than anything else. It helps get browsers and tools up to standards and gives us a little fun/toy while we're at it.

And the URLs are dramatically shorter than a character or two-- for example:

http://➡.ws/껻 (6 chars after protocol)

versus:

http://tinyurl.com/aqehn8 (16 chars after protocol)

http://ri.ms/9i0 (9 chars after protocol)

It only beats our own ri.ms shrinker by three characters, but that's still something people might consider. And because it uses unicode, it will be a very long time before it moves beyond even 2 character suffixes.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. :)
I went through similar crap when re-installing QuickBooks after a PC-Upgrade / Windows install.

The registration key wasn't accepted by their server (different hardware) and I was instructed to call their support line. After a brief time on hold, I was then subjected to about 10 minutes of up-selling and scripted 'intelligence gathering' ("[customer name] what is it your company does [customer name]?", "[customer name] what is your annual revenue?" "[customer name] we appreciate your business and would like to offer you [some crap-assed product] at a discount.")

After declining to answer all questions and (politely -- mentioning to the call centre staffer that I knew it wasn't their fault) asking for them to just give me the damn validation code for installation, I was then allowed to use the software I paid for.

It would have been easier to pirate the product, which is what I made clear to them in my (ignored) letter of complaint.

Idiocy.
It is, after all, one of the nation's healthiest water supplies -- so fresh that in 2007 the Environmental Protection Agency said it did not need filtration.

Shouldn't all tap water not need filtration? Have I been assuming too much?
When a good startup compares two funding offers, it does not automatically pick the one that gives the highest valuation. It has to consider the other intangibles like VC advice, contacts, good PR etc. Given this, a city offering just money is like a loser VC who's really desperate. Why would a good startup want to take that?
I really dislike these abbreviated URL services. I prefer a moderately sized and human readable one. I always type URLs into my address bar, also.
Because they need the money. There are plenty of really good startups who struggle to raise money.

It would be better than taking money from a loser VC, because you wouldn't be stuck with the loser VC on your board afterward.
What To Do If Your Startup Is About To Fail
The only problem is most people cant dictate or type the URL. Otherwise, A link to my blog is 1 character and thats awesome!
Someone should start doing this in San Francisco.

People shouldn't be surprised by the bottled water phenomenon. You are buying the bottle, not the water, and a bottle is often worth $1.
You don't really get into why mmap is an unpopular choice. It's not as if other programmers just forgot to read the man page. Traditional RDBMSs dislike the OS's buffer cache because the dbms has information that could better drive those algorithms; e.g., streaming data should not be cached, and should not compete with useful items in the cache. The page replacement algorithm is similarly blind; yeah, madvise exists, but it rarely has teeth. mmap is convenient, and performant enough. But if you found yourself driving hard to get the last 1% of performance out of this system, I would argue that you'd end up doing explicit file I/O and manual management of memory; e.g., the only way to use large pages to reduce TLB misses on popular OS'es is to use funky APIs like hugetlbfs on Linux.

Also, a pet peeve: mmap != "memory-mapped I/O." The latter refers to a style of hardware/software interface where device registers are accessed via loads and stores, rather than magical instructions. If you're not writing a device driver, you don't know or care whether you're using "memory-mapped I/O". mmap is ... just mmap.
I maintain a fork of flot on github. The graphs function correctly in IE (barring some here-and-there bugs which you can report). The only issue is speed (always an issue with IE), and as a result I wouldn't try too much of the interactivity... But on the whole it works great.
At 16, Zucker started a business enticing people to pay $1 to take a swing at a golf ball. The prize for a hole in one from 150 yards: $1 million. He rented space from a driving range and persuaded an insurance company to allow him to pay a premium for a million-dollar policy. No one made it, but Zucker made some extra cash.

This is one of the best ideas i've ever heard.
If you can figure out a better filtration system than your competitors here: http://coffeetea.about.com/od/water/tp/waterbottles.htm -- you may have a more viable idea than you think.

Tucson's tap water is pretty bad. It's chlorinated mineral water combined with a highly mineral ground water. I drink brita at home, but it's a pain on the road. However, I drink the tap here. When I go to Phoenix, I have trouble even drinking the tap, it tastes so bad in areas.
Time to Hang Up the Pajamas
Go to Phoenix. It may or may not be safe, but it tastes quite foul.
If you ask me (I maintain a fork of flot on github) there is no reason to use a client-side library for graphing unless the graphs are dynamic. Requesting/rendering/etc tons of images is painful, flot can add and remove data on the fly and re-render -- and that's not even getting into the potential for hovering effects and the like (flash-style).

Flot also supports all reasonable browsers (including some unreasonable ones, like IE6). If you find a bug in either the 'official' flot or my fork (or any of the forks of my fork :)) then you should be able to report it and have it fixed quickly enough (or, fix it yourself, the code isn't especially complicated).
Actually, Clay Christensen's definition of disruptive innovation is new technology that has fewer features than existing technology. The new technology finds uses amongst a previously under-served constituency, and then improves in features until it serves existing users better than the old technology did.

I seem to recall an interview discussing with Ward Cunningham his invention of wikis.

What is interesting to me is not the fewer features but the intelligent selection of only the important ones. I am still amazed by the prescience of Cunningham and Williams.
> Shouldn't all tap water not need filtration? Have I been assuming too much?

"If you don't use a water filter, your body is the water filter"
12 million people in USA still use dial-up
Is it likely that someone cares enough about a specific place to to altruistically transform it into Silicon Valley?

There should be a quite large pool of people that have spare $30 million [1].

Creating new Silicon Valley sounds like a much better vanity project than, for example, space tourism (one trip is $20 - 28 million).

-----

[1] It seems like there is ~95,000 people in the world with net worth $30 million or more (out of which 1,125 are billionaires with accumulated wealth of $4.4 trillion).

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire
You're buying easy access to the water.
There are many hundreds more lines in the background of the sinatra example the OP lists (the 7 lines, that is).
Exactly. We'll all die anyway :)
The Fun Of Programming (Functional Programming pearls)
I would go further than just saying "reasonably efficient and powerful". More like "extremely powerful and optimized".

No offense to the grandparent, but that comment strikes me as a direct result of the hype around these key-value store DBs. The idea that you could build out a relational database using a key-value store as the backend and the end result would somehow have the underlying system's scalability properties needs to be shot down with extreme prejudice.

The philosophy behind a key-value store DB is that, if we don't need 99% of the powerful features and ad-hoc queries of a relational database, we can build something that scales much better. There is some (growing) subset of relational functionality that can easily be implemented on top of a key-value store, but the developer better know what that is.

Emulating a full-on relational database is not going to perform at anywhere near the level of a real relational database. You'd be better off working on the problem of better ways of replicating and sharding regular relational databases rather than conflating two different models with competing assumptions.
Sorry, I missed your request.

http://roamatlanta.com/
http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInAtlanta
http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInRoswell
Kevin Kelly: The One Universal GoogleBook
This is one of the best posts I have read on start-ups in a while.

I have been through all 12 directly or indirectly. Not as a founder (rather the sole founder doesn't call me a co-founder) but the founder was blanking out. It is definitely testing time. We shut-down operations. Ran into debt and paid off with consulting/free lancing money in 4-5 months. After all that I was drained out.

- Do I know the reality?

Yes very much. Your time and effort in a startup can't be matched with cash even if u exit for few million dollars. It is just the satisfaction that stays.

- Do I fear of starting again - Will I sign up to go through that again ?

Inspite of going through hell, now i know what I am signing up for if it goes wrong and I am better prepared. But would I do it for a startup which is not mine, No.
I prefer 1 way hashed passwords. But why assume they are doing it in plain text? Why not a two way encryption?
Should be working fine, and I added a basic bookmarklet to the main page. Thanks!
It depends on what you want to do. Do you want full-disk encryption or just one encrypted partition/file? Personally I use full-disk encryption. From what I've read its recommended to encrypt the whole system and not just a partition if you don't want important data leaking into the non-encrypted parts of your system.

On Ubuntu Server I selected full LVM encryption during installation. Everything except the /boot is encrypted, which works great without too much overhead even on this aging 1,3 Ghz machine. I heard good things about TrueCrypt as well, which should work with OS X and Windows but I haven't used it myself.

Btw I did use Filevault on OS X for my whole disk and the experience was less than pleasant. Especially with resume and hibernation. This was with 10.3 (Panther), so it might be better now.
I added a basic one to the main page. Thanks for the feedback.
Keys to Entrepreneurial Success: Building the Onion
ah ok, I see, so how much is federal ? Any other taxes ?
True, two way hashing is better than nothing, but it's still less secure than one way hashing (with a per-user salt) for passwords. All you need if one rogue employee and they can decrypt everyone's password. It's just difficult to justify the added risk when there usually isn't a need to retrieve the original password.

Edit: by "two way hashing" I meant encryption, not hashing. not sure where my brain was on that one...
Youth asks, "What were arcades like?"
It doesn't work at all for me in Firefox 3 on Windows. I get the same response after clicking on all links (feed reader, HN frontpage, this page):

Page Load Error
Address Not Found
Firefox can't find the server at www.➡.ws.

This is the same trouble as with Unicode snowman domain.

In one discussion here on HN I figured out it's probably because of some security measure to prevent phishing. There are some Unicode characters that look like normal ASCII letters (for example in Cyrillic alphabet), so if Unicode worked in urls, you could create malicious sites that would look like real ones:

http://EXAMPLE-ВANK.COM (fake)

http://EXAMPLE-BANK.COM (real)
You seem to be considering only cities in the US because it doesn't seem practical to ask startups to move across countries, especially if they are very different. As a corollary, a city might benefit instead by exploiting the local peculiarities to espouse a startup culture.

For example, in the city I live in, it's perfectly acceptable to live with your parents all your life. And that's a perfect fit for lowering living costs. There is also an obsession to live in or close to your hometown, which might force college grads to start up instead of working for a big company in a big city. There is a strong sense in society of admiring entrepreneurship as opposed to employment because of a (convoluted) communistic ideal. There is a lot of investment money readily available from expatriates from the Middle East that they cannot use in their country of residence.

This might mean that there is a different route to becoming Silicon Valley and it is all the more difficult to determine because it is not generic.
It's a really big problem.

If you lose your whole database to an attacker, you have a big problem.

If you lose your whole database to an attacker, and you stored recoverable passwords in it, everyone has a big problem.

There'd be something to debate here if fixing this problem wasn't 5-10 lines of code. But that's what it is. 5-10 lines of code to keep yourself from compromising tens of thousands of (email, password) pairs. There is no debate to have here.
It's not often that I think Paul is flat out wrong, but this is a case. I agree with sachinag that it is culture. When the "contest" between SV and Route 128 started, it appeared that Boston had the edge. Slightly better in the university ranking and a vibrant electronics industry. The big difference was the corporate culture/climate. Boston was closed and secretative. Think DEC and Ken Olsen. SV was open and cooperative, even among competitors. Think Hewlett and Packard. Maybe even more important was Frederick Terman of Stanford who pushed industry/academic cooperation. The SV culture grew from that. An engineer could talk to his buddies at other companies. If you left HP to form a company, they were probably your first customer. My first customer in my first startup was a former employer. In SV the money came because of the successes.

Now SV has this huge infrastructure of talent and money. High tech angel investors invest in SV not in their own communities, because of the decision support here. One of the real difficulties in investing in Kansas City, for example, is winnowing out the 99 crappy ideas/teams to get the one that will succeed, and investors having confidence that they can do so.

The best approach for another area is to pick an industry with local advantages: new energy sources, manufacturing for wind or solar, biotech, robotics.

I think public funding of startups will fail, because problems with mindset. What a community can do is streamline the business permit process, build out the infrastructure like fiber, assemble a volunteer group of professional advisors, and promote the startup culture. A 10K grant to an entrepreneurs' club that promotes mixers and speakers for entrepreneurs, angels, and support types will probably help the climate more than $500K to some random startup.
Thanks for posting the link to that essay, it's one of PG's that I missed and I enjoyed it.

I like the observation that marginal space matters. That is one of the reasons why I left the Boston area, after staying there a while after school. I would add that other factors include "marginal time" and "marginal income" -- places where people work 80 hours a week, and places where rent is half your income and no one saves any money, are also unlikely to produce revolutionary startups.

You can heat a leaky garage in Chicago for less than it takes to rent a garage in balmy California. You will probably have to spend $100 on insulation -- get the rolls encased in plastic by Johns Manfield so you don't fill your workspace with itchy fibers -- and you will still have to wear a sweater in there. The garage door itself will basically be a seive, but there is this blue colored, flexible foam sheet product, that they use as a house wrap like Tyvek, that you can staple over it on the inside. If you really want to do a startup, a Chicago garage can be made "good enough".

Or better yet, if your startup does not involve hardware assembly, just rent a 3 bedroom house in some other part of the country for the cost of renting a garage California, and work inside.
As a practitioner in this space, I'm going to tell you that I don't know what this "two-way hashing" is that you speak of. There's a right way to store passwords and there's a wrong way. The right way is bcrypt. The wrong way is anything other than bcrypt.
Another really thin book was K&R's The C Programming Language.
Or if you are so pressed that an entire weekend is impossible, watch the 1 hour video. It’s worth it.
Buamai an images/design aggregator for inspirational purposes
He'd make a killing in LA selling NY water.
Buffett Remains Optimistic About America’s Future
Broadcast TV Struggles to Stay Viable