skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. I would be extremely uncomfortable knowing that I might be enabling access to child porn.

But you might have problems legally if you take any responsibility for the kind of traffic that goes through your node. If you try to block anything, that might be implying legally that you have some responsibility for the traffic that goes through the node.

So a whitelist would be best, and you better be sure that every single thing on the sites on your whitelist is legal in your home country. For example, Australia has censored a wikileaks page. So you wouldn't want to allow access to that wikileaks page if you were in Australia.

Right now, you can use Google to find pirated material. You can even limit the file type to torrents. Google's main defense is that it has legal uses, and it is not responsible for policing files on other sites.
I've worked with a 10x coder and he does everything moe mentioned above, even including hardware. He is disdainful of those who program, but can't maintain their own systems. One guy is not much of a sample, but many times I've seen him find solutions in hardware, OS settings, network configuration, etc. that you would never have found if you focused only on your application.
Yes, however a library you didn't write is likely less well-suited to the specific problem you're trying to solve than the one it was originally created for. Also, you won't understand it as well as its creator. And it's likely not written in the same style as you'd have written it.

The benefit of using a library written by an above-average 3rd party is often offset if not negated by the above concerns.
All proprietary Perl.
I don't think it's NIH exactly, but a certain laziness and unwillingness to try anything but the simplest(even stupidest) solution. My observations and personal experience indicate that a 10x will reuse formats, languages, and protocols, and they'll use libraries for the purpose of taking advantage of those things.

What you won't see reused is more high-level functionality. That's where a lot of assumptions have to be made about the program's internal structure, and it's where getting too generic and open-ended makes things very complex very quickly.
>I've seen him find solutions in hardware, OS settings, network configuration

I've done the same but I am not a 10x coder. I'm just a generalist on steroids who happens to take a fancy to asm, security, arch, and abstracted programming languages.
Hack your Oxygen [video]
Remixing the bits doesn't really change anything.

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506986
It's funny to see this discussion popping up here, I've been thinking about this quite a lot. I've never really made any progress: coming up with good answers requires a lot of cross-discipline knowledge that I just can't bother to track down in my spare time. Geology, chemistry, materials engineering, mechanics/industrial design etc, etc. It stands to reason that all the science and engineering disciplines would be involved.

Machine tools are the foundation of just about everything, but there's a lot more to do once you can produce and shape metal. Chemical production is a big task once you have the handling of basic materials out of the way, and energy is important right from the start (electricity!). You'd have to have easy access to clean, and hot water to maintain good hygiene and a decent standard of living, which is important for morale. Which questions do we consider - just the technology part, or the kinds of social precautions you would have to take? A struggle for resources causes all sorts of difficulties. How would the economy work? There's no way to maintain governments like those we have today when there are no means for fast communication.

What is the easiest way to bootstrap technology from scratch? It would probably be a lot easier in temperate climates where food is abundant; in many parts of the world too much effort would have to be spent on just staying alive. The focus would have to be on tools right from the start: gather resources to build stuff and then use your new gear to build more stuff. Even if everybody knew exactly where we were going, it would take decades at the minimum. There is just so much to do, and so much of our technology depend on things we have developed already.

We could write books about this stuff. You could probably dedicate whole academic careers to the question, especially if you really want to try out the practical aspect. I'm disappointed about most of the posts on this story, there is so much interesting stuff to explore here.
My laptop battery only lasts about 25 seconds. Microblogging it is!
You use what you know rather than switching to the language of the month every, well, month.

I've been using the same toolchain for a decade now. I don't have to futz with the configuration: I learned it 10 years ago.

There's a balance there, between keeping on top of technology and focusing on solving problems.

It's been interesting for me doing a little Ruby of late because coming from mostly C++ (with bits of Java and Perl) I find myself fighting with the interpreter a lot. It's not that C++ doesn't have its quirks, it's just that I've known them all for so long that I work around them intuitively.
Well, experience goes a long way.

After having built software in different languages for different targets on different systems a few times, you start recognizing patterns.

One of the strategies I use to become comfortable with new environments is to build a piece of software (usually a prototype) using only the core language, standard library and maybe one or two 'mature' pieces of third-party library code.

This takes a bit of time and I usually end up with a codebase that is a bit crufty (especially when I'm learning the language as I go). However, this usually gets me to the prototype stage with a lot of newly acquired knowledge about performance of the language, best-practices, etc. As well as a lot of testing code.

After that I'll start looking into third-party libraries and start factoring out my own code with third-party libs where appropriate.

For Java, for example, I've found that a lot of the language helper/util code I write can be replaced with code from org.apache.commons.

For interacting with crufty stuff like webservices in all their non-standard glory, I usually build a few classes in Ruby with breakpoints so I can interactively analyze and poke at them. Much, much faster than going through the 'change code'-save-recompile-run cycle with breakpoints in C# and Java.

When dealing with loads of XML config files, I'll quickly do a git init and also keep all the files open in vim buffers. (Vim and Emacs are excellent tools for working your way through XML junk). Then I'll put print (or equivalent) statements in the code so I can run the app from the command line and filter the output through grep or even some custom scripts that'll filter the output for me and provide some basic analysis or correlation points.

The list goes on and on.

You have to realize that apart from the code that operates solely within your codebase (and not even then), you are always dealing with third-party code. The OS, compiler, the VM, the windowing routines, the threading model, etc.

As you go on you have to learn techniques to handle this. And one of the first things you already seem to have learned is that you should never be quick to voluntarily add to the pile of third-party software you're already dealing with.

And that 10x programmer working opposite you who generates mod_rewrite configs like there's no tomorrow? Yeah, that person spent about 3 days getting to the bottom of that engine and testing the hell out of various configs a few years ago. There's not much of a short-cut for these kind of things.
Whether the distinction in the UI is clear or not depends on how much experience you have with it. For me and presumably you, who have been using Google dozens of times a day for ten years, it's crystal-clear. For my neighbors who go to the locutorio down the street to use the internet because they don't have computers, it's not clear at all, according to some studies I can't be bothered to dig up right now.
And if the cops have to monitor all your internet traffic, phone calls, and track your location 24x7 with CCTV - to prosecute one bad guy?
In short, you could live in a bottle with these 3 plants and still have enough oxygen to live :

-Areca Palm (the living room) 4 per person

-Mother-in-law's tongue (the bedroom plant) 6-8 per person

-Money plant (the specialist plant) dont mention the numbers
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but this seems most relevant now considering how much people make the same claims about lack of business models (and refusal to use the most obvious ones) for Twitter and Facebook.

Sacrificing short-term revenue for long-term gain worked great for Google. Its unlikely, but seems possible that either twitter or facebook could be the next to come up with a new and improved way to convert activity -> money.

We'll see in a few years who is/isn't eating their words about those companies not focusing on revue soon enough.
We use Braintree (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/), and I've never had a better experience with a service provider. They're consummately professional, know their product and category inside and out, and are eager to educate people on the ins and outs of credit card processing. I had heard at one point that they had a higher rate for services billing less than $1MM a year, but I've since heard that that doesn't apply to SaaS companies that are using Rails (I'm not sure what the definitive answer is on this; I know they were the best price we could find, and I looked extensively).

For recurring billing, we use a Rails-based billing framework called Freemium (http://github.com/cainlevy/freemium/tree/master), and have been very happy with it. It integrates with Braintree flawlessly. Also, its primary developer is a freelancer (http://cainlevy.com/) who is available for hire, if you're looking for someone to help you get set up. We hired him, and couldn't be happier with his work.

One thing to keep in mind when you're looking for a payment processor is this: How transparent are they with their costs? Do they complicate their fee structure with hidden costs? Credit card billing can be a really complex beast, and having a partner who's interested in helping you make sense of it is very valuable. That's what we found in Braintree. I'm sure there are others that are good, but I'm glad I haven't had to look for them, and that I've been able to just focus on building my business.
Hubris makes me sad. :(

Sorry to hear that, I was merely trying to provide a frame of reference.

I smell a proud C/C++ programmer.

Way to read something into a post.

waves ASM coder over here, we (??) asm coders can write parsing libraries that spank yours seven ways to Sunday.

That's fine and may get you a nice job at a hardware company. I don't see how it's related, though.

Does it matter? No. That's not how you "get things done (TM)".

And where did I say anything to that tune?

The point I was trying to make is the opposite: As long as you consider yourself a programmer, or worse a programmer of a particular language, you're probably not a "10x coder" [who keeps coming up with these idiotic terms anyways]. It doesn't matter whether that language is C, asm, Java or Lisp.
The pennies in the tray are explicitly put there for you to take one. The DNS server is not there for you to avoid paying for the internet service you're using.

It's a small thing, and I don't personally think it's a big deal to steal wifi, but the idea that because something is easy to steal means it's not theft is ridiculous.
Yeah, I think I'd prefer not to have my IP address downloading "portions" of child pornography, thanks.
RTMFP or proxy all communication through the server, probably using Comet.
thx for the gingery series link

i'm also interested in how-to-make-stuff-from-chemistry series (candle, soap, pulp, paper, ink, oil, nylon, plastic, etc) preferrably from the same author(s)

not necessarily from scratch (burn tree to get ash etc)

if you have links please post, thx
I have read the act for myself. I am not so naive as to take it at face value, because the politics surrounding it are plain-as-day, as well as the debates held in Congress on it. The focus on neighborhoods is to make it pass Constitutional muster, not to change who it was intended to help or the fact that it was very well was designed, virtually by definition, to force banks to make loans that they did not want to make.

What you cite is the fact that second-order effects allowed abuse.

Look up the activities of ACORN. Not just what they say or what they are accused of, but what they actually do. If the CRA is not intended to work as I described, they sure did manage to turn it that way.

"Always get the data on your own kid."

Fuck off with your slur.
> I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.

That's like saying you just woke up in a Blacksmith's shop, with the anvil and fire ready. That's the last mile, which isn't the hard part. Compare it to destroying all traces of CPUs and computer hardware/software. Okay, now go fabricate a processor.
Go ahead and get this guy to give you a full copy of your source code as it now stands. Since he did not finish the project in two months as specified in the contract - you have a written contract, right? - you can terminate the business relationship on the grounds of breach of contract. There should be no need to reverse engineer software that you paid for. The nature of the business relationship here is that you own full rights to the software. Best of luck to you as this sounds like it will be a real pain to resolve.
From what people say, the police are remarkably unsuccessful at prosecuting CP producers and distributors. They're good at prosecuting consumers, but I think that's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. (Of course, fighting crime is always like that...)
Okay, now go fabricate a processor.

Step 1: Go and build a glassblowing shop.
Idea: site to match hackers with short-term one-off gigs
I alternate between being a lighting designer for a band and writing software for money. I get most of my work off of Craigslist's computer gigs section, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult, and I don't think it's just a matter of economic conditions.

Sites like Craigslist, Rentacoder and Elance are flooded with posts offering unreasonably low pay, as well as responses from offshore sweatshops that produce exceedingly bad code[0]. Posters have taken to hiding "put foo in the subject so I don't have to read spam" on Craigslist due to the overwhelming response to ANY ad. I think there might be room for something a little more exclusive.

My initial concept for this is that hackers would be screened for membership. It wouldn't be a high bar - a link to a HN account associated with a few sensible comments, a blog, a github account or similar would be enough to establish credibility. The site would also be policed a little more as far as postings go. One idea is to use a flagging system that can cause posts to be moved, and to have sections like "work for equity" and "work for pay".

[0] An example from an actual project I fixed after it was initially created by such a sweatshop can be seen here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/76132
But doesn't that give Google an even better chance of succeeding? Unlike Firefox, they're not blinded by competition - all they want is a superfast browser. And that's what most users want.

As for Adblock and Greasemonkey, neither plugin is particularly complex. Once plugins for Chrome get big, I'd give it 3 weeks before we see a working version of each.
Alan Kay: Inventing Fundamental New Computing Technologies
Or they die before reaching 5 years old.
Yes reverse engineering is trivial (unless a very good obfuscator is used) if you have the binary jar files.

However, like others have mentioned, its highly likely there is nothing there of value - so you there is a pretty good chance you will have to write it off.

I have heard of similar things happening to this - commonly when the development is done in SE asia (have heard of several cases in the Philippines of this exact thing happening, interestingly).
How hard is it to engineer scripts like that? Won't those come pretty quickly to Chrome?

The OS X battlefield will be interesting because Safari is so prominent. If Apple/Webkit decide they want to compete with Chrome, they're in an excellent position to do so - and they already have Javascript disabling, ad blocking, and GreaseMonkey support in Safari, not to mention a browser that's incredibly fast.
How many Firefox users care about plugins versus the ones that only care about tabs and speed? In my department in college, the number of people using plugin'd Firefox is pretty slim - and we're a department of hackers and designers.
YouTube was "flickr for video", which turned out to be gross understatement of the community potential. Even in good cases, they are horrible analogies.
One of the hardest intermediate steps would be developing a sufficiently large cooperative social unit. Right now I'm typing this on a computer that was made by people I've never met in a number of different countries that I've never visited; structures like international trade agreements and currency exchange mechanisms make it possible for us to have a mutually beneficial economic relationship. (Size of cooperative unit makes a pretty good benchmark of progress, extending past 1900 to the present.)

If technology disappeared, our social and economic organizations would suddenly extend no further than the tribal level, i.e. the number of people we could have cooperative relationships with would be limited to the people we saw in person on a daily basis.

Even assuming we still had the necessary schematics to understand what we were trying to build, it would take a long time for us to get sufficiently well-organized to manufacture it in quantity. Of course, it's possible that in this starting-over scenario, technological progress would outpace the rebuilding of social organization, to the point where we'd have all the same electronic goods, for instance, but each region would make its own. Or maybe we'd have to duplicate the transportation-technology revolution of the early and mid-20th century before we could get anywhere with the communications-technology revolution of the last 20+ years.
I'll second this. Paypal is a huge hassle to develop for. Their sandbox goes down very regularly, and it's one of the most annoying things, because you don't know if it is a bug with your code or if it is Paypal.

They are the biggest, most popular, and probably most trusted; but if you're going on technical merits alone, Paypal is one of the worst.
Speaking of writing books about stuff, communication equipment would be probably of an equal or even higher priority to sanitation since efficient information transfer will greatly speed up the re-engineering effort. Furthermore it wouldn't be terribly difficult to do early on. You don't need too much metallurgy to cast type, and the rest of a basic letterpress could be made of wood. Paper isn't too hard to make. Neither are batteries, so as soon as you can produce wire efficiently you can set up a telegraph. Telephone, radio, typewriters, Linotypes, and lithography would all require more mechanical sophistication, so they can wait a bit.
I think people speculating in this thread would greatly enjoy Earth Abides by George Stewart.
I'm 24 and I've never owned a TV nor do I ever plan to. There's very little on TV that I want that I can't get in a much more convenient way (according to my own schedule, for example) online. A lot of my friends are the same way. I'm not sure if it's just me and my peers, or if in general people my age group and under are simply finding TV obsolete. I suspect it's the latter.
You'd hopefully get pretty far while current experts are still alive. Otherwise, you'd better at least have a plan for getting printing and libraries up and running pretty darn quickly so they can leave instructions for the next generation...
The four stages of programming competence
He did not put the "enterprisey stigma" on it. He only talked about how some enterprises are locked in, and appreciate updates. It appears you misread something.
I don't think I am explaining myself well.

What I mean to say is that once you know about an invention, reproducing it is much less difficult than actually inventing it. Do you disagree?

In high school, I was obsessed with metalworking and built several forges. I played around with melting metal and forging blades. I created charcoal. I read everything I could get my hands on about blacksmithing. I read a lot of fiction books about rebuilding post-apocalyptic societies.

I guess I have a different perspective.
$50 IS low. Think more about your costs. If anyone tells you anything less than $200/hr is low (as a freelancer), leave them behind you.
Since you have the money why don't you just hire someone to do the programming work for you? Then you'll own 100% of the business, you'll be giving an unemployed programmer a job, and you'll never have to deal with the issues that come up between co-founders when they see things differently.

Personally I think the only reason for a co-founder is if you don't have the money to hire someone to do the work you cannot or will not do yourself. Or if you're such a lazy person or so unfocused that you cannot just get the work done yourself without someone else pushing you all the time ... although if this description applies to you then I would suggest that you're not cut-out to be anything other than an employee anyways.

I've been self-employed for almost three decades and I have never missed having a co-founder for anything I've ever done. But I'm highly self-motivated and seldom second-guess my decisions, and with so many years in business I have more than my share of experience doing all kinds of different work -- including programming. So maybe this is why I never missed having a co-founder.

I guess if you want to get funding from Y you'll need a co-founder since PG apparently doesn't fund companies without one -- not many of them anyways. But since you said you don't need the money I cannot for the life of me figure out why you would even want a co-founder ...

Do you really think it's an intelligent move to give away a huge chunk of your future business simply to find a competent programmer???

Regardless of your answer, I think you should hire a programmer instead of trying to partner with one (unless you really don't have as much money as you suggest) ... and there are lots of places to find programmers other than the Bay Area.

I also think you're going to have to get over your fear of someone stealing your idea, and start explaining it in more detail, before you'll find the person or people who will do the programming that makes it a reality. I'm willing to bet that you're not even the first to think of your idea. You might even be surprised when you explain it to learn that other people here already know of similar services, either currently in existence or in the process of being developed.
3D printing isn't just used for making models, there's plenty of other applications.

There are times when a personally customizable object is more suitable than a mass produced one, and that is what 3D printing allows.Eg, a small plastic component breaks, its better to just fab the little part up than replace the whole thing.