skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's because the attitude in the startup community is ridiculously egotistical. It's a problem around development community as a whole but amplified with startups because there is a ton of get-rich-quick hero worship.

The fact that someone can build a piece of code doesn't mean that it solves a problem. The fact that it solves a problem doesn't mean that they can get money for it. The fact that they can get money for it doesn't mean that the lifetime revenue it generates will exceed the cost to develop. So on and so on...

Achieving these is as much about luck and timing as it is about skill. For most startups there are a few others also working on the problem including legacy providers and other startups. Succeeding and growing in the marketplace is about a ton of factors.

Now we get back to the hero worship. The startup community, from what I can tell, pays lip service to luck and environment and honestly believes that the marketplace is meritocratic. This is compounded by getting hounded by recruiters because your skills are in demand, it definitely helps your ego.

Ego breeds arrogance. Arrogance that is painfully annoying. Arrogance that makes this schaudenfreude so, so sweet.
It's a problem with the phone. Apple offered a free solution, put a case on it. If you don't like that solution, what do you want them to do about it? Re-engineer the phone just for you and give you a replacement? It's not like this was a 1-off problem, like Joe's phone was defective so we replace Joe's phone. EVERY phone was made the same with this problem. You can't just "fix it" for Joe. It isn't a matter of customer service where they can just fix the issue.
Sounds similar to uservoice. The utility of it really depends on the quality of the users. For example, if they're entering bugs and voting on each others' bugs, it can be useful.

But if they're suggesting things for which there are difficult tradeoffs without considering the implications, then it's not very useful. For example, requesting that stripe make their credit card processing free is not very useful feedback, but you can get a lot of these 'I want a pony' kind of requests.
Funny... I was confused when I saw an already visited link when I opened up HN for the first time today. I found this last week after that Dune II post.
You got my up vote just for being from Ottawa.
Yeah I was going to ask the same thing. It seems very likely there was some OS option you could have used here.
No, there's no phone tech going on here: https://support.twitter.com/groups/34-apps-sms-and-mobile/to...
Looks like a nice, lean service, kinda reminds me of iWantMyName's approach to domain names: clean & straightforward.

If you guys are interested in hosting CraftStudio servers (my Minecraft-inspired collaborative game-making platform for gamers), I'd be happy to provide some guidance. You can hit me up at elisee@craftstud.io - http://craftstud.io/
MySQL zero-day exploit yields shell as user "mysql"
He doesn't request a "pony from apple now" but a working phone. If you don't see the difference here, then sorry, but I don't understand your point.
First direct picture of DNA double helix captured
Switching from Wordpress to Jekyll
Is the UN trying to take over the internet?
I like the conference room example, that one's actually pretty useful for when you can't Skype.
Why Do People Buy?
> "What environment are you using your laptop in that's allowing condensation to form inside the device?"

I can think of a pretty easy hypothetical--have the laptop indoors, powered down in a very cool air conditioned room for enough time to make it cool. Then take it outside in a high humidity region like Florida and turn it on. Bam, condensation inside the device.
Had my first-gen Intel white poly MacBook for 5 years. Could've run it longer but a friend needed a new laptop so I passed it on.
Damn. That sucks.
From the attached file in the link:

MySQL Server exploitable stack based overrun
Ver 5.5.19-log for Linux and below (tested with Ver 5.1.53-log for suse-linux-gnu too)
unprivileged user (any account (anonymous account?), post auth)
as illustrated below the instruction pointer is overwritten with 0x41414141
bug found by Kingcope
this will yield a shell as the user 'mysql' when properly exploited

This user has also posted a number of other zero-day exploits in the last few days:

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/5

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/6

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/7

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/8

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/9

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/58
Streaming video is YouTube's core competency, so I would expect them to do it better. That said, IMDb is an Amazon company, and Amazon offers streaming video, so I expect better.
Well, I think monetary policy is more a symptom of a larger trend than the cause, but since the massive deleveraging (or Lesser Depression) the world has been awash in excess savings looking for somewhere to go.

A good explanation is here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/liquidity-prefer...

[edit: wording]
Funny you mention that. When I'm motivated, I just close it.
Selecting the outliers as exemplars of what is typical doesn't make much sense. What about the 100,000+ non-Googles and non-Facebooks that very much fit into what the author is stating here? Poor businesses funded by poor investors supported by a poor media is the problem here and all that the "Series A Crunch" will do is "expose those who were swimming naked" as so eloquently stated by Warren Buffet [1].

Companies with good business models or great technology or great ability to persevere or the ability to iterate will always survive. The point of this article is that the clock has already run out for the ones that don't.

[1] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/warrenbuff383933....
The "general point" that is "correct" in this article is someone everyone commenting on this thread already knew; it's a point almost every credible technology has been making for years. A well-known Google engineer made news simply by moving from "cat picture" projects to "meaningful" projects. Anybody in the world could have made that "correct" point.

The problem is that the specific points Lyons builds on "don't sell cat pictures" are either useless, false, or both. Getting a real job and learning engineering aren't a solution to the problem of selling cat pictures. When you take someone whose first instinct is to build a cat picture app and train him on type theory, the CAP theorem, quorum commits, compiler backends, and linear algebra, guess what you get? Thermonuclear cat pictures.

In the end, the only actionable advice Lyons has that you should consider taking is "avoid long bus rides with Scoble".

To answer your question: which person at 37signals do you think built Basecamp for the love of project management? And how many entrepreneurs can we name who are passionate about dumb problems?
I bought it specifically for the quadro 2000, for volume-rendering and cuda. Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't realize the W series was created post-IBM.
If one of your key metrics is rate of returns, surely this would show up in an A/B test. You could also check for it in usability testing by making the task something where the user would be interested in the "fine print details" if they were visible enough for the user to notice.
Intel 'preparing' to put an end to user-replaceable CPUs
One of the things I love about HN is that a scathing article criticizing startups and tech entrepreneurs can make the front page.
You see with Windows, Microsoft targetted (or at least went WAY out of their way to accommodate) the trailing edge. hell, they even held support for many DOS programs for a long time. This pattern looks like it might be changing with Metro though.
Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans' text messages
There is an OAuth1 module[1] that is available, but not only is that not the version of OAuth we built in our provider, but liboauth conflicts with certain packages our servers need installed.

If there were an OS option, I would have used it :)

[1] https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_http_oauth_module
I don't understand this ranty article...

Aren't startups called startups for a reason? Some aren't going to thrive, some really suck, others can't pivot their talent and drive toward something grandiose and earth shattering for their next round of investment but all should be better because of the experience, investors and entrepreneurs alike.

The failure rate of startups has always been high, especially over time, right?

"There are also different definitions of failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghosh's research." via Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044372020457800...
Certainly the name has value, and smart founders will use that, but if that's all they are after, then they're missing the most valuable bits (and are therefore probably not very effective founders, and a bad investment).
Youtube is more distributed, has more hardware, more available bandwidth and can be served from closer to you. So probably they can't change that quickly. But the whole experience is probably related to your location. It's not the fastest service around, but for me trailers stream faster than the playback speed. (I'm guesstimating the size of their network since the was the only thing they did as youtube itself, then google could only add to that - does amazon has enough spare capacitly to top that? I don't know, but wouldn't expect it - not as distributed as google at least)

Maybe you're just too far from them (from the network topology point of view).
I would use openresty rather than building your own nginx Lua bundle. It has test frameworks and releases and so on. And you could ship an oauth2 module with it.
Loading happens instantly for me regardless of stream quality (just tried watching the Django Unchained trailer). I would imagine IMDB is serving their assets with EC2 since they're owned by Amazon these days.
I personally think you hit the nail on the head when you say " The most promising startup founders I know have 5-10 years of experience in an industry". Yes, there are exceptions, like any other thing in life, but experience in a sector is underrated by many of the recent graduates I meet who want to start a company. The problem I think is that youngsters only read TechCrunch and other similar blogs, which to me is like Warren Buffet trying to read insurance/risk management news on Seventeen magazine - flashy headlines with irrelevant information, in a world fuelled by cotton candy and hairstyles.
All the music is on Spotify as well. I have created a shared playlist here: http://open.spotify.com/user/iconfinder/playlist/20cY7KpZVsk...
Funpacks sound awesome, I'm looking forward to reading about them and the new backend services.
Isn't it already, though? From how the media uses it, pirating software/ebooks/etc. is copying without permission, right? So in this case, the use of the word "pirate" is a bit ironic, since it isn't really possible under the CC license, but I would think it is still basically valid.
While I agree with the quote "build something useful and charge money for it; it's not rocket surgery." I think it over simplifies things.
What exactly is "useful" anyway? How do I find a useful idea? Who do I charge for it? How much should I charge?

I think the real trick is finding that idea.
I understand it perfectly. The foundation of that hate is seeing an incredible amount of money, time, and energy devoted to a particularly brutal and inefficient way of finding the next startup that becomes Facebook, and getting in early.

There's a saying: "Lotteries are a tax on stupid people". I would extend that to the 'circle jerk' in the Valley. You have people with money throwing it at people with ideas, hoping to win the lottery, basically. Along the way, you get a thousand crappy startups burning out ten thousand 19 year olds who dropped out of school because Zuckerberg did. It's wasteful. It generates companies like Flooze. It's a massive hype machine sucking up all the oxygen in the room, depriving other, more sensible, but less glamourous businesses of resources.

The first comment on the article really captures it: "And you know what also sucks about this whole craziness that went on during these hard years?"

"That minority of mid-career people like me, with both real-word business experience and multiple engineering degrees and realworld P&L and people management experience, who started companies this past 3 years with good solid ideas that can make money but couldn't raise much money due to a combination of age discrimination and the fact that the money was going to young, inexperienced entrepreneurs with stupid but frothy sexy ideas like Gourmair."

Indeed. Lyons also identifies another real cost to the startup mania: "Meanwhile our country is facing a crisis because we have a shortage of students in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peeer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it's easy and you might get rich quick."
Another "Boot" here, graduate of the Spring devbootcamp cohort. I was accepted almost exactly a year ago.

That post was a major turning point in my life, as it was exactly the kind of thing I had been looking for, to transition to what I really wanted to do. Eventually it led to my current job.

Edit: Interestingly, looking back at the comment thread for that post, I see this comment, where someone responds to a skeptic by saying that he picked up Django and got a job using it from 10 weeks of self-study.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3268469

Similarly, after the 8-week DBC, which used Rails, the job I got used Django, but I was able to pick it up quickly enough.

No offense, Shereef, but I prefer it to Rails ;-)
I'm going to kill this article as a dupe. It's just other articles rewritten in more colorful language. But it's giving this thing too much credit even to call it a dupe, because in the process of making the language more colorful, he's now describing something that is definitely not the case. The other articles are talking about a trend that's happening as slowly as global warming. No door has suddenly crashed down, cutting off series As. It's just gradually getting harder to raise later rounds. But the tightening up is so slow that even I, who am arguably among the best positioned to see it of anyone, can barely notice it. Which means for sure Dan Lyons has no evidence of it himself.
Have you tried the new Basecamp? I never got to appreciate the old one but the newest version I've been a happy user for a couple of months now. It supports all the things you need and I personally think the UI/UX is amazing.
There's no need to do the @-sign thing, we can tell who you're talking to.
I simply enabled the nginx-lua - which comes with the debian source - in our custom package. Adding the other stuff would have been nice, but also unnecessary bloat.

I did do some investigation into openresty, but decided against it because it would not confer benefits.

The other thing is that we custom compile other modules into nginx - tracelytics[1] being one of them - and it was simpler to decipher the debian packaging than it was to do the same for openresty.

[1] http://www.tracelytics.com/
In very old industries you often have players who have a monopolistic status. Markets either become price efficient or competition deficient over time. In the case of telecom there is stratified warfare.

At the consumer level, competition is scarce. In the SMB Segment competition is fierce. In the Datacenters world competition is fierce, but at the core of everything you have to go through 721 Folsom street to get out of the left coast.

This fight is particularly interesting because it's one of the first to cross the Commercial-Residential boundary. On the one hand, consumers pay for access, on the other, large ISPs peer networks. One is a contract, the other a handshake.

In this particular case, ISPs argue that since usage increases so should rates, but in order to arrive at such a conclusion, the large ISPs would have to ignore their monopoly.

Let's take this a step further though; there's a really big problem with everyone building their own network. That is, no one wants thousands of wires running to each residence, but that's what a competitive last mile would look like.

The answer is municipally controlled networks with private operators. The infrastructure would be owned by the state, but operated by competitive virtual operators.

Unfortunately, this vision is impossible in America, and that's why we can't tackle this problem straight-on and instead have to operate through layers of abstraction.

TL;DR: public networks, private operators is ideal. Impossible in US.
Thanks God I click on it while on Linux :)
Government regulations are MADE by the feudal e-lords.
It's just that some e-lords have more weight than others, and corruption advantages some more than others. And yes, companies funded before the Internet are also eligible to be named e-lords of their own.

If Google had more control over the government (and how know, they eventually might 10 years from now), we'd have similar problems with them.
It's also noteworthy that neither FB or Google were ever what could be termed a startup. FB was a college website first, then expanded gradually, it didn't try to instantly be huge, and I'm pretty sure zuckerberg knew that it wouldn't make money for a while. Google was a group of genius guys who had come up with a brand new method of web search (the pagerank algorithm) that had never been seen before, they had a legitimate product already.
In the Retina macbook's case, the premium seems worth paying because no one else has a laptop with comparable hardware. It seems like the Nexus line has similar dpi as the retina iPads, though, so hopefully this is simply a case of Apple having it first, and everyone else will have it in the next year or so.
Minefold is something you wouldn't assume would be hugely lucrative unless you are the parent of a 10-13 year old kid, in which case you are kicking yourself for not putting sane pricing on top of on-demand Minecraft servers that don't require you to tech support a colo machine.

I'd be a customer right now, except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him. But for the problem that colo solves for him, it's hellaciously expensive.
It's very easy to fake the test and then say - look, your screen is within tolerance:

- provide a black & white pattern for 3 minutes

- provide a gray pattern _with compensation_ for the black&white for 1 minute

If your gray compensation doesn't fall through the minute, you are within tolerance. If not, then the compensation was not enough and your screen is way off.

Either way, your screen is toast.

Since, by definition, only people with defective screens will waste time to go to service, only they will see the test and risk to see the compensation on a good screen.
Is the plan to still support an Open Source version of the cloud hosted app, so if you wanted to run your own you could? Do you also sell support/commercial licenses?
None of the reasons in your post would lead me to believe that Perl will 'rot your brain.' I didn't consider the majority of your post to be a flame/troll, just your honest opinion. It was the "Perl eats babies, and you can't convince me otherwise, nyah!" at the end that sort of irked me.
For everyone criticizing the app name, you are aware that domain names are a finite resource that cost very little to sit on forever, right? Often naming your company comes down to what memorable domain name you can snag, even if you have to commit a spelling/grammar crime to get it.
Google launches new Maps API with better tablet maps, new layers and more
What is considered good code to read?
MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager
If they have Plingm...
Success in the startup world is too narrowly defined.
C&C:RA Hell March. Such an awesome awesome song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6PxkeOIMA8
The idea is great! But why all the people I connected to are at the same distance? I'd expect to see closer to my node users with a strong relationship with me
I wasn't picking on Rails specifically, and I do really agree with DHH on selling as opposed to "social traction".

You get to a very real point (kinda counteracts what I literally said, but gets to the heart of the point I was trying to make): don't play the startup lottery. Real apps, the apps you generate real revenue on, are those that don't require Series A.
New Google Maps Android API
on the settings page (https://minefold.com/settings) there's a curious display issue. Not sure if it's the fault of Chrome (on Windows 7) or a style setting, but I'm missing the bracket opening for my username and the coin amount for Facebook invites: http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png
Forget Google, Verisign and ICANN. Any of these people can generate certificates that completely eliminate the MITM protection of https:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/certs/included/
You're missing the point. It's not about benchmarks. That's like buying a car based on horsepower or quarter mile times. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think.

It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.
Intranet Users Stuck at Low Productivity
I think the thing is that the two statements aren't really at odds.

Apple has always bent over to resolve issues for customers if they acknowledge the issue. For example, I had a pre-unibody MBP that the power button pushed through the top case. Apple very promptly took it back, replaced the top case and a few other cosmetic dings I hadn't complained about, and got it back to me.

On the other hand, Apple also has a long history of refusing to acknowledge some issues and giving the customer the run around on them, which is the type of complaint in this article.
Indeed, tumblr is a good example
Profiling Vimscript performance
IPhone Instagram users vulnerable to hackers - Hacker News , Security updates
So I've never really understood why landlines should charge per data transferred. I mean, after all the communication lines have been run and hardware has been setup, the only additional fees are for power, right?
It uses it's own protocol/port/programs it seems.
Too many people rely on email right now. Else, we could just use XMPP.

Thus the solution should work over email, and with our current email clients. S/MIME/GnuPG/PGP do, but their implementation is far from friendly.
Static Compilation - That is the point
Now almost every Social Network can make voice call. It may be Twitter's turn.
So then appearances are important to you, but you have a different sense of what looks better. That's a lot more reasonable than insisting appearance doesn't matter.
Lenovo's service and support is superb. I have had screen repairs from both Lenovo and Apple this year, and Lenovo completely impressed me with their speed, courtesy, and follow through-- they sent a repairman to my office with a brand new screen, all fully covered by warranty.