skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a bunch of good alternatives, apparently. A lot of people point you towards 'Nodaddy.com' when you get sick of godaddy. It has a bunch of horror stories and list of alternatives. Check it out for a big list of alternatives and reviews.

I switched to Dynadot and havent had a bad experience. Their interface is simple, quick, and clean. The pricing makes sense, and their people are friendly and helpful. YMMV.
I would say that no problem is ever "solved". So, while "me too" offerings are ever abundant, it's always gonna be a few that offer something that resonates on a greater level, and offers yet a better way sometimes in arenas that we don't even see as problems.

I also think that beyond the login issue -- the whole social network concept ultimately has to be pulled from being site-centric into being web-centric. The web itself in its entirety is my social network; and I bring different friend combos and profiles with me to the different places I go -- gracefully evolving these rather than constantly recreating them.

Certainly there needs to be a "lightly branded" API for friendship/profile but beyond that I think the missing piece is a best-of-breed UI that sites can be "inject" to leverage the API. Should only require a few lines of Javascript code to add a friendship system. FB Connect can be learned from in this ... paving that road -- it's limitation in my opinion is the heavy branding and assumption that we only will need 1 set of friends or 1 profile and. Of course ...the challenge is adoption... without the easy add injected UI, complete coverage of friendship and profile management ...a simple API alone or universal login system is not enough.
Perhaps noon local time.
Yeah, he seems to think that everyone who is a pen tester or a security researcher also writes malicious viruses on the side. Here's a clue: botnet writers are not also working for the security industry, because they don't have to. They're making enough money to just sit and improve their botnets.
I moved my handful of domains from godaddy to namecheap perhaps a year ago. I've had no problems, so couldn't comment on their support, but I've been happy.
Some AIG bonus babies return bonuses; death threats help?
What people like the author of this piece don't get is that security isn't the end goal.

The job of an IT professional is to insure the availability, usability, and safety of services to his or her users. Security is a very important part of that, but you can't let it stifle your users' ability to do their jobs.
You know what is most amusing about this? I have more doubts about Facebook's long term business plans than Twitters. Twitter seems easily monetizable, and the fact that others are already doing it outside (twitpay, etc) is some validation. Facebook seems to be monetizable only through ads. Annoying, annoying ads.

Both companies have potential valuation issues, however.
It's very Merchant-of-Venice-ish - Antonio owed Shylock money via a legally valid contract which permitted Shylock to claim a pound of flesh in case of default. The court ruled in Shylock's favor - he could claim the pound of flesh - but said that if Antonio died that Shylock would be tried for murder.

I'm starting to read more thorough explanations of the bonuses - they were approved 1Q 2008 to encourage retention during the 2008 year, with payment at the end of the year. As such they're probably legal, but the proposal to tax them 100% - or better yet, scrutinize the actions of the bonus recipients during the last year and hold them to a high standard of responsibilty - seems appropriate to me. Holding highly-compensated executives to high standards is what we should be doing anyway. With rewards come responsibilities.

EDIT - It wasn't threat of murder - the court ruled that Shylock couldn't take any of Antonio's blood on pain of forfeiture of all of his (Shylock's) assets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice
9am PST. Noon EST.
"If you're prototyping, think at a higher level, and prototype with native language objects, or if you need to use a DB, use an ORM. Writing raw SQL is only fast the first time, and then you're no better than assembly-coding your database."

Yes, good job, part of my point.

"For string encoding, just take out non-alphanumeric characters, unless you're dealing specifically with non-English, and then expand your target audience once you can do it safely."

No, the real solution is to learn what encoding actually entails and learn how to do it right without a lot of fuss. That approach is actually harder than doing it right, because it's "only one regexp" in a quick HN comment; in practice it'll blow up in your face. That's just a panic response brought on by not knowing what you're doing with encoding.
Just curious, why was the article killed? This is so strange. I thought the content was very cool, only to find that I gave a huge endorsement to an article that was apparently so bad, it had to be killed. Maybe I'm not a hacker, or at least the right kind of hacker.
Matrix ozik
Golf components including manufacturers like bang, alpha, matrix, fujikura.
It does sound like a bees nest of problems.

I much prefer just splitting 50/50 and having both founders kick as much ass as possible. This does force you to be able to rely on your cofounder, but that is probably is a good idea (and unavoidable) anyways.
Even if things are important, and the person executes well, and that business unit could get crushed by something unforeseen. To align interests, employees should have the whole company in mind, not just their personal goals to get equity.
Besides Aviary, what sites would you recommend for finding artists? I have a project where I will need to commission a couple hundred art pieces over the next year or so but I have no idea how to go about it.

Some early googling turned up DeviantART and ConceptArt.org. I've added Aviary to the list, but any other artist community sites would be great to know about.
This is frustrating for me. I've become very accustomed to the speed and interface of Safari, but the security-conscious part of me says the only rational response to this article is to stop using Safari for general surfing and switch to Firefox, which seems to be lacking any major crash holes right now.

But every time I fire up Firefox my entire body cringes at the sluggishness. For many Mac users, myself included, this is going to be a real test of discipline.
There is a study that suggests that equal equity among founders leads to more stable and successful startups: http://founderresearch.blogspot.com/2006/12/equity-split-res...
Wait... there are people who wrote their own framework... in the year 2009?
Computer Experts Unite to Hunt Worm
Have you used Rails or another MVC framework? How does ASP.NET MVC compare?
In general it appears that it's just roads that aren't publicly accessible which one can't go down. It's not just Downing Street, for example, but a bunch of pedestrianised places, presumably for the obvious reason that the Street View car couldn't go down them.
Street view is also live in the Netherlands today:
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Edam, & Groningen are all I can find (the last two being a bit odd to begin with).

Still waiting on "Canal View" :)
50% of twitter users aren't even using the twitter UI. Half their users aren't monetizable (By them).

Is the same true about FaceBook?
Well, 2007, for me. But I built it over web.py, so I upped both.

(Edit: and I've since mostly switched to PHP)
Internet Explorer 8 available today
I wouldn't think so...pretty much everyone on FB is using the FB ui, either web or mobile.
If you haven't tried using an Intel optimized build of Firefox, give it a go, it's pretty snappy:
http://www.latko.org/2009/02/04/firefox-31-intel-optimized-b... (Still not as fast as the Safari, but very close)

And I use the Grapple Delicious theme (very mac like):
http://www.takebacktheweb.org/
Considering that Dell is still shipping computers with IE6 installed as the default (My Mini9 arrived 2 days ago, and came with Service Pack 3 and IE6... wtf), we will have to support this beast quite a bit longer... But... I think it is viable now to create marketing sites that support IE6, but web apps that require IE7 or higher.
I'm not happy with Godaddy too. I've got some names with them, some with Enom, and one through Google (as a reseller for Enom.) I'm happy with Enom except it's more expensive ($30/year). Google registration is $10/year and has an easy UI; I may switch to them from Godaddy.

Forcing periodic password changes is a terrible solution. Most people just increment a counter each time: mysecretpassword123 -> mysecretpassword124. I'd much prefer to instead give users access to a log of all of their activity.
If Twitter is "monetizable" through twitpay, then Facebook is much more monetizable through something similar.
Namecheap has been great for me, too. I recommend them.
my local time?
But isn't it trivial for Facebook to offer Twitter's functionality (or do they already? Not an FB user ;)) and instantly have about x30 (AFAIK) larger userbase?
But I am sure that dictatorship will lead directly to failure ;) Conflicts between founders must be resolved by good arguments not by outvoting...
Realistic 3D Foosball Game for the PC
I use joker.com and have been very happy with them for many years.
Yea, that's the post that made we get the SSD to begin with.
Vizeddit: Visualization of Reddit
Chess | chess queen
Alexandra Kosteniuk World Champion Video. The story of how I became the 12th World chess queen Champion....
Favorite quote: "Sanford Bernstein’s bearish approach is based on its belief the Web 2.0 model of building something and then figuring out a way to make money is no longer valid."

IIRC, that was supposed to be our lesson from the dot.com bubble :) The early hype about "Web 2.0" was that this time around we're doing it for cheap and with a revenue model...
ConceptArt has a pretty good reputation. DeviantART does have some good artists, but they're rarities.

The problem is that from what I know, there still aren't many good art communities, if any. The best artists all have their own sites for that reason: there's no good common grounds.

That's a wide-open, exposed field for possible startups: even Aviary focuses more on hobbyists and doesn't have plans to create more polished portfolio pages, from what I'm aware. It's one of those things where I figure if nothing's happened three years from now, I'll give it a shot myself: it would make a lot of artists very happy.
Very nice work! Good idea and love the implementation. Still some work to do, but you've probably noticed this as well.

It's better to group synonyms, like "IE8" and "Internet Explorer 8", but how you would implement this is a mystery to me.

Also some content are duped stories on different sites, maybe a filter could fix this.
I am interested what the HN group's opinion is on Grok. It sounds interesting, but I'm not advanced enough to make proper comparisons.
Ask HN: Feedback on my idea?
I couldn't really compile the idea into a good title for this. I just wanted to see what HN would think about the idea. Its nothing too special or new, but it seems like it would be useful given the state of things currently.

Basically, I don't like the state of Techcrunch and similar sites. A bit too much of a biased focus on VC, big names, sensationalism and the twitterati.

I was looking to create something in a similar conceptual vein, but with a more HN-oriented overtones. More information on bootstrapped/unfunded startups or side projects. A new and hopefully more accessible channel for these types of projects to get some sort of public recognition (if its deserved). More in-depth information on the technical side, not just pageviews and funding data. Perhaps some interviews with successful (and unsuccessful) startup founders. Etc..

Thoughts? Good idea or bad idea? Things you'd like to see? Things you wouldn't like to see? Is it already being done? Questions you'd like to see asked to founders? Anything.

Its already a work in progress, but I'd like to tailor this to fit what people would actually like to see as best as possible.
Don't game theories mixed strategies solve this problem?

After all nobody can beat random selectian at paper-scissors-rock.
can somebody write a plugin to port Chrome to other OSes?

Note: i'm being sarcastic
good luck with the uninstalling part.
yeah I agree, that is a good idea to help clean up duplication. Thanks for the comments, let me know what else you can think of.
The new design is very twitter like. Your facebook homepage is essentially a "life feed" - kind of twitter on roids.
They don't offer exact functionality (they're not aimed at the same market), but they've got something close.

Facebook already has ads, though, and they're evolving a business plan constantly. Twitter has nothing. So they have less experience with raising money and they've got more to lose.
The issue isn't being able to make money - its the ability to make profits.
That strikes me as a terrible idea. His plan would have the founders constantly second-guessing each other over reaching milestones, and would take ordinary disputes ("You never start work before 11AM"; "The design work is taking 3x as long as the development, you're a bottleneck") and turn them into knock-down drag-out brawls over equity every few months.

I'm a fan of splitting things up at the beginning, attaching a vesting schedule, and having everyone work as hard as possible.

You also shouldn't have this conversation until everyone's committed to working full-time on a business. Trying to give equity to someone who has a day job and promises to leave "when the new business is really underway" is a disaster in the making.
I have submitted this because this is the result of my latest project. Any opinions are much appreciated.
don't you have to assign 100% of ownership when you open a company in US? I mean, in my country, the company contract has to sum the shares up to 100%... there can't be a '90% floating', it's not legal...
Grok's main value, to me, is to interact with larger Zope applications without having to deal with all of the mental overhead that Zope entails.

You can also reap the great benefits of the ZODB very easily with Grok alone. Grok is very easy to learn, and was designed by people that really know what they are doing with regard to Python web app development.
many others are monetizing over facebook as well - how is that a validation for twitter?
Guillaume Olivrin On Open Source, NAP And Sign Language In Information Systems
I recently has the opportunity to speak with Guillaume Olivrin about some of his work at the CSIR/Meraka. Two specific topics I found really interesting was the National Accessibility Portal as well as the work that is being done to bring sign language to information systems.
Ok, so you agree with 1 and 2, and as for 3, where users feel free to break things 4 teh lulz (cf HN exploit), there's a non-zero chance than a normal user will become an attacker.

4. Dissecting a slug, making slides, and examining them under a microscope is cool. Sprinkling a family of slugs with salt and watching them die is not cool. The end result is the same, that the slugs die, but it's fundamentally a social problem, when people feel empowered to break breakable things.

5. In growing up, why did you not talk to strangers as a kid? Why did you look both ways before crossing the street? Our parents and friends teach us convenient behaviors so that we don't have to make the same mistakes. If all of your data is now going to live in the cloud, you'll learn pretty fast, and educate your kids/kid siblings about what not to do on the internet. No one who's ever been phished is going to make that mistake again (my friend in undergrad did), no one who's ever downloaded random video codecs from Eastern European nations is going to make that mistake again (my bf did); we'll learn what not to do so that messing up really merits a techno-darwin award.

6. Yes, the "senior IT executive" calculated the risks and rewards, and for an enormous corporate network with large institutional inertia, it was cheaper to hire a guy who learned on someone else's dime. It's like "cutting-edge accounting", or changing your house's plumbing. If your business isn't accounting, just follow industry best practices.
Man Says He Has USB Drive in Prosthetic Finger
Yep. My workload just went up another notch. I'm sure my clients will be grateful for the opportunity to fork over more money to work around Microsoft's refusal to embrace an open standard.

Incidentally, I've been using multiple VMs to test multiple versions of IE. But it is now apparent (well, more apparent) that this method cannot scale. Has anyone had luck with these tools that can install multiple versions of IE at the same time, like this one: "Internet Explorer Collection"?

http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm

Is this what I should have been using all along?
Sony, Google Challenge Amazon
Add WebWare to the list.
Maybe they can ask for all of the CCTV cameras to contribute to google so not only do you have street view but you have building view.
I've been happy with name.com so far. They have decent prices and a clean interface. Before name.com, I had domains registered through Dreamhost and Godaddy. Dreamhost, however, doesn't offer many of the top level domains. Godaddy was a horrible interface that tried to one-up you and market to you at every painstaking step.

My only wish at this point is that name.com had an API like Enom.
I think this depends on how you implement it. I've been a part of several startups that have issued shares to founders on Day 1, and every single time issues have arisen down the road.

* The partners were equal at the beginning, but down the road, their value and contributions weren't equal

* Passive partners were given the same share as active partners

* People were brought on out of loyalty, not because of their value going forward

All three of these problems can lead to instability and conflict.

Partnering is serious business, and it's important to do it right. If people are bringing money to the table, it's relatively simple - value the company and issue shares. But when a company has no value, or if you aren't even sure where the company will go, it's important to vest ownership progressively, based on contribution. Not to say that this is easy, but it's better than just issuing everyone 1,000,000 shares at the concept/seed stage.
A more interesting (to me) and less dangerous was a belt with an array of motors and an internal compass such that there was always a light buzz from the North. Apparently after wearing it for a few weeks you develop an uncanny sense of direction.
You're right that there is a difference, I don't argue that point. The thing is, I don't want a good CEO as president, I want a good commander in Chief and running a business with the primary goal of being profitable is vastly different than running a country where the primary goal securing the country and upholding our values as a country as defined by our constitution.

Having been in the military, there's just a certain difference in the way you look at your job when you've worked in a place where you completely divorce pay and work. Pay... that's the finance department on the other side of base, it has nothing to do with your job or your performance, only with your rank.

At work, you just don't think about pay at all, you think only about your job and being good at what you do out of pride for what you do rather than how much money you can make. Every one knows exactly what everyone else makes, it's printed in the stripes on your arm and a standard pay scale. This allows a commradare that generally doesn't exist in the private sector because jealousy over pay interferes with it.

It's totally different than the civilian world where most keep their salaries secret, or lie about them, and everyone is stepping all over each other trying to make more money than the next guy, by any means necessary, quality of the work be damned because manipulating people seems to work better when climbing the ladder.

The last thing I want in a president is a guy who thinks the seeking of profit trumps all else, because it doesn't. This idea that seeking profit automatically results in the most good I just find absurd. Frankly, the idea that being a great CEO somehow prepares you to be a great president I also find silly.

Great CEO's != great person, in fact more often than not being a great CEO requires being ruthless. That's not what I want in a president, I want a great person as president, someone who I can morally look up to, someone who takes responsibility for his actions, is honest with the public, someone who leads by example, not by privilege of power. Someone I can point to and tell my kids, that's how to be a man.
Third edition of the Rails book, updated for the latest version of Rails, is now shipping
Using Prosper and Mechanical Turk to figure out if people who are shifty look shifty
> Mark-to-market applies only where the value of an asset is at issue.

The value of bank and insurance company assets are always an issue.

> Suppose I offered you $10,000 worth of stock in AIG as collateral for a $10,000 loan.

That's a different situation because (as I understand it), the "collateral" was performing loan portfolios.

I agree that the market price for those porfolios is relevant but does it really make sense to immediately declare an institution insolvent and all that implies when buyers take a holiday?

There was some stock involved in many of these cases, but it was the stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The US govt gave tax and other preferences to regulated institutions that held Fannie and Freddie stock as assets. This pretty much guaranteed that a lot of them would take a huge hit when Fannie and Freddie went down.
That's an acceptable "solution" from OCZ's point of view, but it's a much worse solution from my POV.

In order for me to get around the simplistic marketing of MB/s, that leaves me paying 50% more or voiding the warranty.

I'd rather they fought simplistic marketing with honesty rather than profiteering.
Global images of the recession
you are correct that I know nothing of what's in their contracts. and you know nothing of if they committed fraud...or do you?

The real problem is AIG is an INSURANCE COMPANY, not an INVESTMENT BANK. At least the part that the gov is bailing out is about its insurances. An insurance company is only supposed to invest its moneys in very low risk investments. The reason is they are supposed to constantly monitor the costs of covering their underwriting and keep enough funds on hand to cover their bets. They have not done so. This is the root of the problem.

Is it fraud for an insurance company to not have enough to cover its underwritings and to continue to take on more? I think so...and that's the core of this problem.
WebWare
I disagree. The lesson from the dot.com bubble was that anything put on the Internet could be monetized and would become profitable. That was (and is) silly.

The "Web 2.0" mindset, at least the mindset I've seen most often on HN, is build it fast and get it out there to see if it has value. I also think there is some thought to how the solution can be monetized, but plans change in response to changing environments.
Just compare IE 8 to IE 7. It's much better browser now. You cannot have an overnight progress. And as for me I would rather prefer having IE 8 released now than keep waiting for another year.

Besides I've never felt it's necessary to have a canvas support in Browsers. If you want a richer interaction within your application why don't you make it a separate download? You can use whatever programming language and runtime you like!

And don't tell me about installation hassle. Just try to install Chrome any other day. No questions asked, no admin account required! Your app can do that, too!