skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Point of interest.

Wachovia FELL because there was a SILENT run on the bank. More than 5 trillion dollars got taken out of the system which was largely owned by Wachovia.

Look for the day they increased the Fed Savings from $100,000 to $250,000 and you will know the preceding day was the "Silent Run".
I will. Mark Shuttleworth made his massive fortune by creating Thawte and selling it to Verisign. He created Ubuntu using that money.
The author addressed this in the article.
This guy suffers from the "schools are job training" mentality that I've noticed has grown in popularity recently. He expects students from the university to be able to work on his development environment without significant retraining, when he is not using the development environment that the universities are teaching.

The fault here is in the business owner expecting freshman grads to be skilled in highly specialized software development specific to their business. The schools are pumping out students who are perfectly good programmers, and if he actually trained them to use his tools, they would be good programmers for his environment.

Edit: To be clear, if the were a university teaching only Java to the students, it would be a bad university. Such a university doesn't exist. If he wants formal methods, he needs to higher Masters students or higher -- or optionally donate a few $$ to a CS department in exchange for adding the course to ugrad.

Edit 2: I'm going to stop editing this now.
US Navy Laboratory Scientists: Possible cold fusion breakthrough
It reminds me of the Bohemian Grove logo:

http://imgur.com/ZN2I.gif
How much are they down these days? I thought they had gotten past the massive reliability issues they used to have.
The UK, USA and Germany are large enough markets for them to sell ads in. If anything, over the last few years, ad sales in those countries has been subsidizing everyone else.

Hulu, Kindle, GrandCentral, etc. It's not like this is a new experience for Canadians. It sucks, but I don't blame the companies for being forced to realize market realities.
Ask HN: How do you know what you want?
Randy Komisar (catchy last name huh, do you think is his real last name? lol) talks about "How Do You Find Your Passion and How Do You Pursue It?" on http://academicearth.org/lectures/how-do-you-find-your-passion-and-pursue-it

I haven't yet heard the ending because the streaming keeps going dead.

I am in my last year of university and this question, how do you know what you want is so very perplexing. You see I believe that if you really want something, anything, as improbable it may seem, you always achieve it. Therefore to know what I want was the starting point for me towards striving to achieve it.

Anyway to get to the question of how do you know what you want and how do you know what you want to do with your life. I have been thinking about it over the whole year and I have concluded....

You see we always hear people talking of doing something you love, however we love doing many things, which should I focus on. How does one know that they want to do law instead of being a scientist unless he tries both fields. Trying everything however may not be possible. So I have this theory that people simply chose something either because of the circumstances, through blind faith, like mini miny..... or just go with it and once such a choice is made then they grow to love it. Hence it is an acquired taste rely, I mean I have read somewhere that our mind does not care what we do as long as we do something and we don't bore ourself.

With my mate yesterday we were talking about peer pressure in respect to clubbing and drinking excesivly. I put it to him that everything is peer pressure. Society provides us things to do and we are pressurised either by society, i.e. adverts, or by our own self to escape boredom. Society provides us with the choices, we simply pick one, wanting, or passion, perhaps has nothing to do with it.

In the spirit of discussion, what are your thoughts on how do you know what you want?
yes, just swapped out some images.
thank you for the well thought out insight. i agree with how important the "marriage" of partners is.

also, i mean no disrespect to the hacker community. a tech company is surely nothing without the stud technologist.

it just seems to me that if i have operational experience and some capital i would be a good fit for the right hacker that is considering keeping an unfulfilling job or going to grad. school because they lack the money to take the leap.
I wonder, if the switch had been made now, it they would have switched to Clojure instead of Python. It's a lot closer to Scheme, and its connection to the JVM gives it a lot of practical power. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
I don't understand why people still try to correlate value to difficulty of producing something. That was never the case, especially in a service economy, or else we wouldn't have people on the entire gamut of wealth.

Pro sports players don't get paid per effort dedicated, but by the amount of value they generate. You can complain about baseball players making millions all you want, but in the end, they sustain a huge economy surrounding sports.

If SSL certificates were pennies (which is in essence what it takes to generate them), then they would lose almost all value they provide. They need to be somewhat expensive to not dilute the amount of valid certs. But that is superficial; authorities take on responsibility of verification and they assign their own name behind the validity of a third party. That's valuable.
Yeah, it looks like it. Written by the same guy, even.
For a quick answer, go to http://www.sce.carleton.ca/dept/departmentNews/ranking.pdf instead of this link.
It has a ranking of software engineering scientists based on publication metrics. Obviously it isn't the only metric to trust but there is enough information for further research.
> If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open project will maintain dominance. So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will naturally prevail anyway.

That's my understanding of ESR's argument too. One counterexample is Apple's OS X. Another counterexample, in a different way, is mySQL which offers both GPL and proprietary licences; if MySQL used the BSD license, their business model wouldn't work.

I think it's good that there are different open source licenses. People writing open source software can then choose a license that's appropriate for what they want to achieve with the software. It would be stupid if there were only BSD-style licenses, or only copyleft licenses.
As as Canadian, I think there should be a market for this kind of thing. For Hulu, I wonder if using a proxy would be a major performance issue.

Limiting content based on geography is terrible but you really can't get many people to care because American's get everything and they're the biggest market.
> If you can convey 95% of the basic ideas in Python

But you cannot.

Some of the ideas in SICP can nearly be conveyed in Python (like lexical scoping, closures, data types, streams). You'll use built-in language features in Python (classes, generators) instead of implementing the functionality. I think that implementing these things is important if you want to really understand them.

An example, cons, car and cdr from nothing at all:

(define (cons a b) (lambda (f) (f a b)))
(define (car p) (p (lambda (a b) a)))
(define (cdr p) (p (lambda (a b) b)))

You can do this in Python in theory, but you can't throw this into a Python course.

Other ideas, like interpreters, require a lot of effort. Try writing a metacircular interpreter!
> there are all sorts of articles that tell you that cofounding a company with someone is like marrying them

You're responding to a guy that just told you that he launched and grew a co. to $9M/yr.

I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's smart enough to hire well.
We do this with Chatterous.com, and it works perfectly. We set up a group, added our monitoring email as a member and have it email the group when something goes wrong. We get alerts on our phone, IM, or email. The best part is that one of us also can respond (via phone or IM) to let the others know someone is taking action on the alert.
One trick is to watch what you do. If you keep inexplicably being drawn to something when other people wouldn't be, you probably like it.

You can also try standing apart from yourself and just watching what makes you happy. That's a bit complicated because your happiness is usually a function of the "trailing average" of what you've been doing lately. E.g. if you're happy having a beer in the evening, is it simply because you like beer, or because you like having a beer after having gotten something done that day?
ALA allows its authors to republish their work providing they wait 2 months to do so. Mr Boulton obviously ran out of fresh ideas for thinkvitamin this month ;)
He was looking at wildcard certificate prices. GoDaddy is still $199/year for those, and Namecheap resells RapidSSL wildcard certificates for $148.88. Sure, both of those are way lower than my monthly bandwidth costs, but it isn't exactly commodity pricing.
I'd echo the other comments about pricing. It seems quite expensive given what you are providing.

For example, I looked up the Google App Engine pricing for sending emails and it's $0.0001 for each email.

Additionally, it's unclear to me how your system handles things like bad emails, twitter being down, etc. From a custom standpoint, handling the messaging exceptions is nearly as important as actually sending the messages.
If you've got passion for your business, and understand what needs to be done, you could be well on your way.

You may get into the YC, you might not. But one good thing about it is that if the idea is sound, and they think you've got the right stuff to run the business, then YC could probably do some introductions to hackers to get the technology built.

I am assuming here that you have some understanding of the technology, it might be a tough sell if you have no technical abilities at all.

As a bit of inspiration, I wasn't a hacker two years ago. But when Pandora was blocked from Canada I built a replacement service (took about 8 months - i had to shutter it 'cause it was costing too much). But with the resouces online, if you have the drive, it can be accomplished.

After shutting the music service, i created a live music search engine www.hearwhere.com.

I wish I had the skills of a designer ;), the point is don't give up, if you love your idea, you can do it.
All I can offer here is a personal observation:

Many times in my life when I've asked people for advice in choosing between several options, I've found myself secretly hoping they'd guide me to a certain option... hmm...

When I was a teenager, I'd ask my dad for advice and find myself asking leading questions and almost arguing to get him to advise me to pick a certain option. He would get annoyed and end the conversation with "if you already know the answer, why are you asking me?"

As I got older and our conversations got calmer, he would often end with "well it sounds like you already know what you want to do."

I find that when asking for advice (or venting about a tough decision), this pattern persists.

Now I try to have that conversation with myself, knowing I should trust my intuition. It saves a lot of time and frustration! Then, when I ask for advice, I'm actually ready to listen to it.
i do what i know i enjoy doing until i don't enjoy doing it anymore. lather, rinse, repeat.

it usually is just that simple. your list of things you enjoy doing will shift as you grow, experience, and learn. you're wasting your own time and energy worrying about the "what if"s. either give something new a shot, or continue doing what you're doing.

"what if i'd like being a scientist better" or "what if i'd like starting a startup better". either go find out, or stop worrying about it, because its wasteful on many levels.

its been working out for me so far.
I hate philosophical fiction qua philosophical fiction. Any idea can be made to work in fictional form; the interesting question is whether it works in real life, and fiction has a way of obscuring that extremely heavily.

The work that really solidified my opinion of this was "The World of Null-A". It is based around the "General Semantics" philosophy (which, if you've never heard of, the name doesn't really help you know what it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics ). I like to characterize such works as: "Masses don't do X, aww, sad, it fails. Hero does X. Wow! Masses try to hold the hero down, but the mighty power of X shall prevail! Wow, X is awesome!" In the context of a fictional world, this is an entirely specious argument.

It is somewhat ironic that my final rebellion against this form was in the context of a work on General Semantics. It could be argued that rebelling against being manipulatively fed the ideas of General Semantics is in fact General Semantic's moment of glory. In fact I think they are good ideas, I just didn't think the fictional treatment of them proved anything.

Consequently, I have no interest in something like Atlas Shrugged, and I have simply read directly about Objectivism, as a for instance. (I am making no claims about it either way here, just using it as an example; actually I'm not particularly taken with it specially vs. more generic libertarianism.)

I can still enjoy such works on their own (the first sentence of this post is carefully constructed, it does not mean I hate all fiction that contains philosophy); the Dune series would still be in my top ten very easily, and in fact I agree with many of the ideas in there, including the ones tbray mentioned in that piece. I just do not consider them very good arguments or demonstrations of that idea; instead I enjoy the works simply as coming from an author that is aware of the ideas, refreshing in much the same way it is refreshing to read a work where the author actually comprehends economics, or military strategy, or science in general. (Star Trek being my canonical example of something that stands in opposition to all of those...)

And yes, personal bias too. Not trying to claim everyone should feel this way, except that I will make a weaker claim that if your only exposure to an idea is a fictional work, you probably should examine it much more closely before adopting it.
I'm pretty sure you're allowed to move to Philadelphia.
Exactly... and therein lies the difficulty: "standing apart from yourself." I guess that's why vocalizing your thoughts aloud to a confidant can help you "see" your thoughts outside your head.
The government can't just make up laws as it goes along.

You are right, and I'm glad you are saying it :)

But didn't the Fed fail in it's regulatory role over the commercial banks to whom AIG was counterparty on swaps, when they allowed valuation of Tier Capital assets based on the 'quality' provided by swaps from AIG and friends? With any due diligence whatsoever the banks would have known that AIG didn't have the capital to pay those contracts. From that angle it looks like some or all of: The Fed was asleep, AIG misrepresented itself to CDS customers, or banks were complicit in the misrepresentation (or they didn't care because they could hedge the CDS with short CDS from a different counterparty -- now that is systemic risk). Go a step further -- the Fed accepted these CDS-wrapped assets as collateral for TSLF/TALF loans -- so the same statements about banks could be applied to the Fed, they either didn't do the due diligence on the collateral or they are complicit in breaking the law. Right?

Edit: for God's sake, I despise economics. I just want to get back to work and create stuff!
I was just looking for an easy way to set up my website monitoring to call me when it's down. This may be it. It does seem a little expensive though, and I don't like credit systems, they just seem slimey for some reason.
Tomato, potato.
I agree. You have something that many founders here don't - the experience of founding and exiting a successful startup, and of course the assets that go with a successful startup.

It just seems to me that you would do best in an angel/mentor position to a star hacker team. You obviously know your way around a startup, and you can find opportunities and network. This way, you are free to do what you do best, while the hackers are free to do what they do best. Then again, that might end up being the role you play as the non-hacker founder of a tech startup anyways.

Regardless, let us all know how it works out for you!
Watch the whole Cosmos series on Hulu
I'm guessing it's your site, since the name 'Jacob' is all over it. Why didn't you post a comment about it in typical Ask YC style?

Anyway, outside of the marketing-counter thing, I would suggest that the initial layout for a user's start page is the same as the one that is so prominently displayed on the sample images (with the grey background and color bars). Not that it was difficult to change, but it was a little disappointing when I found just a simple white layout with my single forlorn link to HN on it instead of the stylish advertised one... I almost took off right there. Perhaps selecting a layout could be a more prominent initial setup step?

Why do you need my email when I sign up? The signup doesn't ask for a password re-entry as well, which I found strange.

What do the ampersands mean?

Nice work. Looks great, too.

[edit]
Why should I use it? Chrome and Safari (and FF in the near future) offer close to the same functionality.
You need to remember that 6.001 is an /introductory/ programming course. Presumably most of the people taking it at MIT have done some codework before : ] but an intro. course is an intro. course. The question of what language to use is a pedagogical one, not a question of thoroughness.
I wouldn't worry about that deadline. Take the time to find someone with whom you can work well, and take more than 32.5 hours to think about it.

(from the YC FAQ: "Teams thrown together for the purpose of starting a startup usually fall apart under stress. You need some kind of personal connection.")

You'll get more and more interested responses if you say something about your idea. No one's going to steal it: even if they did, the magic is in the details.
Clojure is still something of a small hype. Python is a 18 year-old programming language.
On the point about pricing, I took a sec to figure it out, because I have no idea what a penny is. Maybe just change it to cent?
Absolutely. I'm just saying that finding a cofounder within 1 day of the YC deadline is going to be difficult, and might be detrimental. Also he doesn't need a hacker employee, he needs a hacker cofounder. That's why I suggested waiting until the next round and meeting someone he's sure will be good to work with.
My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.
it is a rip-off of: http://quintura.com
The amount of value you provide, less transaction costs, represents the maximum that you can charge for a product or service even if you are a monopoly (and there are no viable substitutes).

In a market economy, competition drives prices down towards the product's marginal cost to produce. Consumers then get to keep the 'excess' value delivered. The lower price also brings in consumers for whom the product delivers less value.

So when you have a product, like SSL certificates, where the marginal cost of production is nearly zero, it is fair to ask why the certificates aren't nearly free.

(And since the certificates are not free, and so the providers seem to be printing money, we have to ask how all of us missed out on this business.)
I work for a CA, a large public one.

As someone mentioned - please don't equate the cost of the certificate to buy against the cost of the certificate to produce. Signing costs nothing (well, ignoring the expensive HSMs!).

Most of the cost is performing the vetting/validation.
Then there's support costs.
Then legal costs (insurance, warranties etc).
There's often inherent costs with owning/controlling the root certificates - WebTrust annual audits just to get in the major browsers, plus any fees that some manufacturers charge for root-embedding.
Infrastructure costs - CRLs and OCSP responders. CRLs may be tiny files, but we can serve TB a day in a 160KB file :)

Ask any questions - I'll answer as best I can.
If what you say is true, that was not indicated in their announcement.

As for market realities, it's a reality that they've offered this service worldwide. Hulu, Kindle, etc. have not. It's unrealistic to not expect a huge backlash against a service that's restricting itself to only those markets where they think they might make money. As some commenters have rightly indicated, losing the scrobbling ability of the whole wide world will inevitably degrade the service of the "special" ones. And trust me, I've already stopped feeding them information. Also, come end of March and I will take my business elsewhere.

I don't mind paying for a service. I do mind discrimination and senseless discrimination I mind even more.
Can anyone point to a case where a SSL issuer has been sued successfully?
For one, they list prices. Zuora seems like they are going for a different kind of customer than Spreedly.
Ask HN: Which Bank
I'm completely unsatisfied with my current bank. The online interface is poor the range of services is narrow.

Can anyone recommend a decent small business bank? I'd prefer a bank with at least a west coast presence.

Credit Unions have nice terms, but don't always have the best online infrastructure or multi-state branches.

I'm not really that picky, but fed up with the surprise fees and time-cost my current bank sucks from me.
Keyword based searching definitely has limitations. If a search keyword does not appear in the context of any "good" documents you're searching for, the search engine will not return any "good" results. In the example above, a search for "bull terrier" and imgcolor=red only returned 1/20 "good" result. And "bull terrier" has high semantic relevance. This is because the authors of the "good" documents I was looking for (e.g. the Target dog) rarely use "bull terrier" in the document context.

Plus keyword based search engines can be easily hacked to associate garbage with certain keywords.

I guess a color parameter would be considered semantic search? Here's a cool link (new today) about google integrating more semantic search features. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161890/semanti...
There isn't one. I very much doubt there ever will be.
Think of it as bookmarks combined with a very simple RSS reading technology.

The RSS reading is a little spotty. Some sites update when there are no updates. Additionally, sometimes Start.io just doesn't recognize an RSS feed, and there's no option to manually input one. I also find I can't delete links, so I have a thin column of "about:blank" links that are painted white so I don't see them that I get from removing bookmarks.

That said, this really takes the pain out of RSS. It's comfortable and functional and all the themes look really, really good.
Is moving every two years somehow implied if you choose renting? Many people rent and stay in the same apartment or neighbourhood for decades.
(Disclosure: I was present on the Etherpad when this happened.)

Fave quote from the interview:

"If you want to do [some tricky thing related to grouping photos] the code looks really messy. It’s not rocket science, but it’s painful. Macros hide that pain really nicely. I actually enjoy grouping results. I have fun doing database-driven web programming. A lot of good things don’t get implemented on the web because they’re not fun."
I didn't know about this until I saw this great contribution by Aaron: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/margo