skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@vaksel

You're also right that if you're reasonably comfortable with planning on a 200%+ return on an ad, your founders will likely agree to invest in the ad rather than take the split. But it's best to have (and propose) that clear use for the money opposed to making people sacrifice out of principle.

The later point of my post was that founders should be able to agree to their "buffer" and shared expenses. What you don't want to do is reserve money based on the philosophy the company COULD use it better, but not actually execute on that. You can quickly demoralize quality people by saving up a war chest for ads, while people are trying to do their best work on "ramen" draws after the release (and reality sets in).

When intelligent people know they get a percentage of the profit at weekly checkpoints, they can do the math on how their time is being spent in the present (opposed to thinking it will rain money at the finish line; which maybe it will, but it's rarely that easy).
Hmm, are software startups really high risk to founders? Does this argument even matter?

Liberal industry culture lets founders move in and out of startups, consulting and full-time arrangements. High compensation lets founding teams take sabbaticals often. If one has a reasonably low cost of living and a solid hourly rate, working 1/3 of the year vends 2/3s startup time.

Given that PG has said many YC founders are older, I'd expect they've moved into the low-risk category, extra responsibilities of life included. And the cost of software startups keeps coming down.

Edit: ignoring non-software, here.
Yeah, on TrailBehind.com proper, I have an auth system in place, and a bit of javascript to let users log in mid-action.

For this demo, there is no auth, so a bot could definitely spam it, but it will work ok on your site if you have some sort of auth set up.

Later, I also want to integrate captcha with this, and I'll release my login ajax as an add-on.
really enjoyed that. loved the bits about being decisive, why angel investing has not taken off in NY, and during a recession startups will take money at any valuation, which is good for all of you because your already rich.
The security incidents you can imagine with this service are mind-bogglingly awesome. Don't let 4chan find out about it.
That is true, I had forgotten about the high performance market. Their compilers generate faster code because their engineers know their respective architectures better than the community at large. But, that's a relatively small market.
I think that might turn out to be even worse for the school. The small claims limit for Pennsylvania is 8 to 10k. And I don't think the school would have gotten anything close to $8000. Most of the modular office buildings are being offered for around $6000 to $7000. But the most expensive one is going for $25000.

My first impression when I saw the article was that the school got ripped off, and so if I had the chance, I would not have bought it.

The buyer might have thought that he was ripping off the school. So if he still wanted to rip off the school he could do a few things.

1. Sue the school in small claims court for cash. By the time the case has gotten to court it has probably been at least a month. And it looks like transporting those are really expensive. So it might be reasonable to argue that the buyer can't profitably move it and sell it at that time and so deserves cash.

2. Argue that he would have been able to get around the limit for small claims court lawsuits because the most expensive are going for over 24k, so 8k to 10k in damages might be reasonable.

So basically if the school didn't sell, they could be sued in small claims court which means a quick and inexpensive court case. And they might pay out more money than they would have gotten selling it.

Ebay:http://shop.ebay.com/items/__modular-office-trailer

PA small claims court: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/consumerism/small_pa.html
OR, just steal a bunch of bases. /
It would be so cool if you keep allowing users to comment without login... or even with their Facebook account - Connect.

You can work around this to prevent automation, by IP detection... like each IP can't submit more than 10 comments in an hour at the same domain name, and such similar techniques.

You can distrebute it, to let anyone use it at their websites.
Well, then you could call him "a leeching douchebag that is a cancer to the legal system" and be right. So its win-win either way.

</sarcasm>
A hooker can marry a millionaire and get loaded, the "cap" on consultants / lawyers can be pretty high, a dentist could patent a new tool / technique, write a book, or just be happy with a pretty good wage.

I find most of the talk like this pretty irrelevant, do what you enjoy, then if you really want money, figure out the best way from there. I would much rather be an expert in the career I chose than be a "Career expert"
Link to the original article being summarized and discussed in this blog post:

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/03/dont-try-to-dodge-t...

And the overall bullet points:

1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood.

2. PhD programs are pyramid schemes

3. Business school is not going to help 90% of the people who go.

4. Law school is a factory for depressives.

5. The medical school model assumes that health care spending is not a mess.

6. Going to grad school is like going into the military.

7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.
If the OSS competition being better (in both of our opinions) and more popular than previous giants means that the old option is then no longer "legitimate" or "valuable" then your argument is kind of a tautology.

Plenty of people get done what they want done and walk away satisfied with the paid alternatives such as IIS or in the case of Linux another server platform (SSI, mainframes, Windows, etc.). How are these things "illegitimate"?

I agree with your point overall, I was just pointing out exceptions.

Another one is Xen vs. VMware.
BGP MiTM attacks
Surfing the web, I have found a nice article about BGP weakness. This document, entitled “Defending Against BGP Man-In-The-Middle Attacks“, was presented by Earl Zmijewski during Black Hat DC 2009 (Hyatt Regency Crystal City - February 16-17 - Arlington, Virginia).

The slides focus on four points:

BGP Routing Basics - Enough to understand and identify the threat
BGP Update Messages
BGP Attributes
Some real examples
The Man-In-The-Middle Attack:
How BGP MiTM attack work
What are the techniques used by an attacker to “tune” the attack (Obscuring the MITM attack with TTL adjustment)
Detecting the Attack - Methods for observing the attack in the wild:
Traceroute
Latency
BGP Alarming Services (BGPmon, IAR, …)
Case Studies - Analyzing historical data for attack evidence
Drat. She's not on LinkedIn.com. I was going to invite her to this forum to have her tell the other side.
I'm 10 minutes in so far and I'm beginning to lose patience, not only with the interminable history lesson, but also with the unbearable level of smug.
Not much in this that you couldn't get by reading The Black Swan, which has a lot of other interesting content.
You're missing his point. He's not making a 'closed source is better than open source' argument, he's saying that each of these areas are easily exploitable competitive advantages; ones that people will pay for.

Don't let fan-boyism cloud your ability to form a rational argument.
Wifi locator
Linus' strength, I think, and this article is pointing out one particular instance of that strength, is in spotting the right problem...not in any particular brilliance in solving the problem (though he's pretty good at solving the problems, as well). I suspect Bram is as talented a developer as Linus, but in chasing down elegant solutions to esoteric problems while Linus spotted and solved the problems that most effect developers, Codeville has missed the boat. I suspect the revision control wars are pretty much over for the next few years, and git won by a large margin. That, in and of itself, is an interesting indication of Linus' genius...he built something that had dozens of competitors, some with major backing like Canonical's bzr, and within a couple of months it was apparent to just about everyone that git had the mindshare for next generation revision control. His solution was ugly, just some C and Perl scripts thrown together in a short period of time, but it solved the right problems at the right time.
I'm looking for text, not video. I can't be bothered to watch something that I can read in a fraction of the time.
Thank you for this advice. I gave him my ideas, now im going to see what he says.
Have Smartphone, Can Travel
yeah, maybe if you added in a comment rating system, or at least a spam button, it could sort itself out.
And I just want to chime in here and state that I'd be miffed if I had a domain up, generating clicks for Google (in the story the author claims there was no click fraud, and i choose to believe him) and they shut down your account, without reason, and refund money.

Then, two days later, the TOS violation he did is okay, but through another program.

The crux of this, is that the clicks he sent to advertisers (and the eyeballs) were real. If I'm selling a product, I don't care if my customers find me from search results or a squatted domain. All I care about is closing the sale and increasing my business.

But that's just my $0.2
Your right, but a catchy name does help. Like I said, I have no money, but right now I do agree I should run with the idea and buy the domain alter from him.
It would be a lot cooler if you added default CSS styling that made the comments look aesthetically pleasing. And documented the API for changing it.

Right now it looks like the basic functionality is there, but it would catch on a lot easier if it looked unobtrusively snazzy.
I think the reason that people today don't care about validation is that perfectly valid code can render differently in the three different rendering engines.

This is exactly true and the reason is that web standards aren't real standards by the textbook definition of the word, mainly because they lack what's called a "reference implementation".

I forget where I read it first but the overall gist is that in other fields, say industrial design, a standard typically isn't ratified as finished until the governing body creates an example for everyone else to refer to, the reference implementation, rather than just relying on the written descriptions of how the thing should work. For example, Firewire has a reference implementation that's certified by the IEEE and that hardware makers would refer to when building out the first versions of it. You could grab the example version, plug it in the way it's supposed to, test out the data that's flowing through it, measure what speeds its capable of, etc.

Since web standards don't have that reference implementation by the W3C, browser makers are left to their own devices to parse the insanely complicated technical language on their own. And it's only getting worse - the html5 spec is something like 10x the amount of writing as the last version of html. This is one of the biggest reasons why rendering engines have effectively stagnated in the last few years - things are "good enough" that they can wait around until the spec makes sense and there's working examples in the real world, and/or they are spending a gazillion hours trying to figure out what the new specs actually mean.

This is the problem with functional specs that 37signals rails against when they say that "Functional specs only lead to an illusion of agreement":

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch11_Theres_Nothing_Functio...

This is a super sad state of affairs, and not just in the theoretical sense of how fast the pace of development could be for browser makers today if things were more streamlined, it's also a huge hindrance for developers in the trenches like me. I haven't thought about this for years but I used to relish reading the CSS spec and exploring new ways of pushing my work forward. Trying to read the W3C docs now is like speed reading pig latin - you know there's some cool stuff in there but it hurts your head just to even try hunting for it.
Ohpan - Personalized news, ticker-style
On the Web, No One Can Hear You Scream
Yeah, I definitely need to add a nicer CSS default.

For now, you can just override the CSS in comments.css to skin the widget. The CSS is very simple now - just four different classes.
Can someone explain to me why people keep posting mozilla google start pages, among others?
Not sure about Google, but Yahoo dropped IE5 and IE5.5 support long, long time ago.
Just don't tell people stuff is available for public judgment that isn't.
If you're downloading things from their website anyway, they could include a driver for whatever FS they wanted. They could build on top of FUSE so you wouldn't even need admin rights, probably.
It's a poorly written and titled article. The trailer was around $46k when new, plus $14k in transportation costs. I'm sure the school isn't including transportation with the sale, so it's silly to include the transportation costs in the original price.

The article says that auction "enabled something like the BuyItNow feature with a $1 bid", which is a terrible way to describe not including a reserve price. The auction ran its course and BuyItNow never came into the picture.
Ask HN: Why don't you ban the dead link forever?
Hey,

I notice that dead links can be submitted over and over again!

For example, someone out there keeps sending the Google mozzila homepage. Like here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505915

If an entry is submitted as dead, do you block the link forever, or you just allow it to be submitted over and over again, and abuse us?

Thanks!

EDIT: If someone submits a link, and you mark it as dead because it's spam, then why don't you make a technique that in case another user submits the same link again, the entry becomes dead automatically?

Also why don't you monitor a "high risk users" with many spam entries? Such users are more likely to be posting spam, so monitoring them - maybe automatically - you will reduce the spam flow here.

Also consider users with no history record as a potential spammers.

Thanks.
Quantitative easing: The uncomfortable truths
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Rock bands are scalable careers. They don't get paid a wage, and the income between the top performers and the mass of wannabes is huge. Being physically present is not a necessary nor sufficient condition for non-scalability. To serve a marginal customer, rock bands essentially don't have to do anything, but doctors need to put in time for the new patient.
Members: 5

Emails Saved: 1803

You wouldn't think that five people who knew so many people would have time to write hundreds of farewell emails.

PS: The number of stats on the homepage change everytime you load it... doh.
I suspect that 99+% of people who pursue a PhD will end up disappointed and bitter.

Your chances of success are probably better with startups.

Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of research done in CS is about improved implementation -- not new applications. The main exception here is HCI + MIT Media Lab, which are more open to new apps.

Of course, if you do get accepted into a top 4 university in the US, then you might want to think about it. That's an impressive accomplishment, especially for international students.
Baahh... Its the old Risk v. Rewards thing all over again. Also easily explainable by standard economic theory. If some career/job/etc... carries a high risk of failure then those who succeed have to be richly rewarded to main the expected value at about the same.
It says a lot more about the author's bias than anything about grad school in general.

In the median case, grad school is probably a waste, certainly most PhD's in the humanities are. But with a PhD in economics you can get a job working for all of those interesting sounding NGOs that advertise in the back of The Economist. An MD or PhD in biochemistry/subset is required to do serious medical research.

An MBA from a top tier business school (the more technical the better, personally I'd rather get an MBA from MIT than Penn) dramatically increases salary compared to people without an MBA. Could you have done better laddering up in the corporate world? Maybe, but it's a lot riskier, and the author forgets that pointlessly delaying adulthood is fun! Perhaps the author has forgotten that.

A professional graduate degree also provides you with a risk-free way of transitioning careers. Did you do an undergrad in business? Do you want to program now? Get a master's degree in software engineering.

And the comparison to joining the military is just insulting.
This is basically logic programming. If you really want to do something like this, you are far better off just using a logic language like prolog and saving yourself the trouble.
Like all of the previous discussions about school/no school, it really depends on the person or the field. Some people need the structure of a university environment to learn and some jobs require a specific degree. Other people and other jobs just don't.

As far as the recessions goes, in the sciences and engineering, I would be slightly concerned about funding for students, even once you get admitted. Even before the current recession I knew too many grad students who had to TA or switch groups, etc. due to funding problems. Not something I would have imagined before I spent time in grad school.
You nailed it on the head. The correct thing for Google to do was to tell AG why they disabled his account, not give him the runaround. They deserved to lose that suit.

Maybe if enough people with canceled accounts file suits, Google will start taking customer service a little more seriously.
When I was reading this part in the Black Swan I realize how fortunate we are to work in software. It's one of very few fields where you can make a decent non-scalable income while at the same time (sometimes via the same actual product) being exposed to potentially huge scalable rewards. Guess we're just lucky :)
What you say is true enough for geeks with an interest in such things, but the wider world has a much shorter memory. A certain type of person, very common unfortunately, feels safe and comforted by the idea of using MS anywhere they possibly can. For them, it's a question of "yes, but what have they done that's bad .. lately?".

This case could supply that. And it's a nice talking point for any debate about OOXML or even mono. Suddenly attacking companies that had foolishly relied on a decade-old Microsoft-supplied "industry standard" certainly makes their new efforts at establishing "standards" easier to undermine. Even the most rabid MS Fanboy will have difficulty claiming, with a straight face, that FAT32 is some kind of proprietary high technology that deserves patent protection.

Plenty of downside for MS on this one. I wonder what the rank and file employees think of it.
Amazon Should Buy Twitter
Apache Module mod_cdn
Granted, this is a hacking forum and not a political forum, so I won't go on about postmodernity, the media and rationality. However, it is important to note and remember that human beings are not rational. Instead of ignoring the irrationality of individuals, we should attempt to understand it.

You're right, though. His being an immigrant and being Indian likely plays to people's biases and preconceptions about outsourcing and H1B program.
> "Career experts generally favor scalable professions."

Says who? In my experience, "career experts" want to make sure their advisees get a decent job. If 90% of people who follow your advice fail at their career, I'm betting you don't stay a "career expert" for very long.
There's a problem with being litigious: it closes doors for you, and you'll probably never even know what doors they were...if someone does their due diligence, sees you're litigious, and decides not to contact you, it's quite unlikely they'll contact you to let you know they decided not to contact you.
It's funny how many of the comments on your site are people trying to break your security with <script> tags and the like. Good work so far in resisting them ;-)
I'll try to let the author of the article know. I was sharing this article and I am not the author of the article.
I think an Bram errs when he thinks that his experience in studying and experimenting with merge algorithms gives him deeper insight than the apparent newcomer to the field, Linus.

What he's missing is that Linus has spent a large part of nearly two decades doing merges using a variety of inadequate tools which no doubt frequently forced him to hand-edit many thousands of patches in order to get successful merges. When Linus sat down to start his two-week project, he brought with him an incredibly rich base of experience with real-world merging of changes in a significant, complex codebase with large numbers of contributors. Also, he's an insightful guy. So while he may not have spent as much time in formal study of the esoteric intricacies, Linus had great insight into the day-to-day issues that merge-heavy development processes create, and how to solve them.
I don't get it, when do you pay?

The question is will the website die before you die?
[pdf] Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
I don't have much appetite for commentary on internet pissing matches.

However, I don't want to sound like a complete curmudgeon! I think the "What Git does right" section is a nice read.
You might be interested in this talk Torvalds gave at Google where he talks about how Git came about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
WikiPock Will Put An Entire Copy Of Wikipedia In Your Pocket For $10
> If 90% of people who follow your advice fail at their career, I'm betting you don't stay a "career expert" for very long.

Does the compensation of "career experts" actually depend on the success of folks who they advise?
A hooker can marry a millionaire and get loaded, the "cap" on consultants / lawyers can be pretty high, a dentist could patent a new tool / technique, write a book, or just be happy with a pretty good wage.

Let us, then, limit this discussion to the average career person. The average Wall Streeter was making $300,000 a year 2005 - 2008. The average software developer is making, i think, 75-80,000 a year. And so on.
Ask HN: An inexpensive, reliable DNS solutions?
Would you guys choose to run a DNS server on your domain or get a 3rd party (such as DynDNS or EasyDNS) to provide the solution? If so, why?
If latter, do any of you have a recommendation of an inexpensive, reliable service?
Gittop on the App Store
Has git really won? It'd be interesting to see some real stats, also how far has it actually penetrated businesses etc.
And more importantly he had seen so many thousands of conflicts that he realized the futility of a smart algorithm significantly reducing the pain. Think about it, a bad automated merge probably causes as much pain as is alleviated by 10 trivial merge resolutions.
Similar to LastPost.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494475

Also:

Youvebeenleftbehind.com (Christian site)

http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com/services.html
Maybe let users login using their Facebook ID. Integrate with Gravatar. Really nice job.
Academic Hacker News
"IMHO, attitude towards PHP is a great way to tell if someone really codes or just quotes the current hype. People that actually build stuff appreciate PHP's ease of deployment and scaling"

I don't agree with this. Yes, everyone knows PHP is easy to deploy, and it's faster than the ruby/pythons etc. But it's an ugly mess with a long history of security problems and a design that flows against the principles of well designed architecture. I know plenty of people who "really code" and abhor PHP.

I know what you mean about "trendy" language snobbishness being a hallmark of someone who doesn't actually know what they're talking about, but in PHP's case I think there is a case for informed people having strong, negative opinions.

Doesn't excuse the Reddit behaviour, of course, I don't miss that one bit. Just sayin'...