skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's disappointing that as of now there isn't a single worthwhile, quality comment in this thread (edit: except for mechanical_fish's). The article is, in my opinion, high quality, if not excellent. It thoroughly explains how the authors (or rather, scientists, at least in this context) approached the problem of maximizing human body performance within incredibly short timespans. At least two ingenious hacks were meticulously detailed: using hot baths to (counter-intuitively) sweat out large quantities of non-essential fluids, and consuming hand moisturizer to maximize the quantity of reabsorbed water. And let's not forget the method of breaking down large clusters of water molecules in their drinking water to ensure that the digestive system will be able to absorb all of it into the bloodstream.

In addition, the negative commentators appear to have either skimmed the article or don't understand the implications of the techniques presented, specifically of hyperhydration. It is a legal and relatively safe way for athletes to reach peak performance levels for their competitons.

So naturally, it's mistifying why this article is being condemned by a group of hackers, puzzle-solvers, and limit-pushers. Most of your concerns seem to be about safety. And yet, the article goes to great lengths to explain all the various pitfalls of their techniques, and why their instructions must be precisely followed to ensure safety (such as the method of preventing potentially lethal water intoxication). So if you have safety concerns, kindly detail why you are concerned, rather than saying "this seems unsafe!" ... Rock climbing is dangerous, which is why you take appropriate steps to mitigate the risks.

It would be awesome to hear your thoughts on these incredible body hacks. I spent 45min typing this out on an iPhone keyboard. Please, put in 5 to give your comments some substance?
Poll: Pythonic startups: what web framework do you use?
We wrote our own
Twitter / hackerwatrcoolr (includes HN stories reaching #1)
Reason #3 That You Need File Virtualization
The same guy also claims to describe how he gained 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks, "with two 30-minute workouts per week, for a total of 4 HOURS of gym time." The kind of results he describes might be unique to his own body.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to...
To solve your problem you could agree that a person has to give back his/her shares if he leaves the company before a certain time has passed (a few years) or if she/he doesn't live up to the expected level of commitment.
Godaddy now requires you to change your password every 6 months
DeviantART got huge back when nobody else competed. Now, it's got such a userbase, and such an immature userbase relatively speaking, that it spreads entirely through word-of-mouth. If things go wrong, people don't leave for other sites. They just sit back and wait for things to get fixed up.

That all happened before 2005, with Jark. The site has been on a plateau for several years: no growth whatsoever.
Thanks for posting this. I'm curious to see if this is the final straw or not as well. Personally, I may install it but it'll only be briefly.
This is stupid as hell, if someone steals your password they'll go and exploit it right away. They won't wait a few months or even days.
its my understanding the client was just the beginning. AU is implementing a full-on China-style firewall that sniffs packets on the fly. Welcome to the People's Republic of Australia!!!
Lending Club Gets A $12 Million Credibility Boost
This a great framework, i've been using it for over a year now. It's been iteratively released (to public) 10 times, which is a new way for MS to develop, and they have really listened to the feedback from its users.

Visual Studio + asp.net mvc is a highly efficient dev. enviroment.
Evidently so. Sorry.
This AU firewall is most likely going to end up being what China has in place. China's is a solid packet filtering beast that allows the government to control whatever info it wants!!!

For a country like AU that supposedly has similar citizens rights as in the U.S., its a sign of things to come for many developed nations.

This is critical Hacker News. Not rumor and gossip.
Any list of milestones you draw up when you start a company is likely to contain things you mistakenly thought would be important, and omit things that turned out to actually be important. Doesn't sound very workable to me, agreed.
C.P. Snow's Two Cultures: Hardware and Software, Discovery and Creation
Nice and insucre one.

Anyways, the fact it is hacked drove some nice traffic to HN from reddit :)
GNOME team migrating to GIT
I was wondering exactly this last night and did some napkin calculations.

Assuming the "10,000 writes" commonly claimed for SSD's is accurate, 5 year lifespan = 4.37 hours between writes on one page.
Origins of twitter: Started on paper (pic)
This is a computer science riff on C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" Rede Lecture of 1959: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
We can hope. IE6 still makes up about 17% of justin.tv's visits though - there's a long way to go yet.
Stop arguing about the value of something that doesn't exist and go build it.
DSL interview with Martin Fowler
"Recruiting", in this sense, just means encouraging them to apply. These colleges want lots of applications, because it makes their acceptance rate lower, and they'll occasionally find a diamond. That's already common knowledge.

On the other hand, encouraging people to apply with almost no chance of admitting them is not "recruiting"; it's playing a numbers game. I say "no chance of admitting" because it's nearly impossible to clear the extracurricular bar at the socioeconomic 15th percentile. At that level, the "right" extracurriculars are not offered, but you're not so poor that you can pull off an "overcoming challenges" essay (that was the admissions schtick du jour ca. 1998-2003) or that a college can brag about admitting you.
Using Machine Learning to Predict March Madness Results
all businesses are the same once you remove what they actually do

no offense, but this makes almost no sense. I mean, I guess when you remove what reader's digest, ycombinator, and my local model train shop all actually do, they're "the same" in that they have customers and exist to make a profit, but that's hardly a practical or helpful piece of information.
So who "owns" the stock that's in the pool? Suppose a company is purchased before everyone is vested, who get's the cash?
Just about every startup in the web scene since 2004 has been banking on the momentum of the scene.

Its pretty proven that niches can gain substantial visibility ie, a twitter, and the hope is that alone can break off and big a big cash cow, and you better do it while the trend is hot.

Most really good ideas are based around perfect timing around the convergence of technologies and mindsets. Your right about the endless signup fatigue people experience but openid tackled that and still hasnt caught fire probably because its trying to change the behavior of the user, and it hasnt integrated itself into every angle where a user could use it.

Lately I've been seeing web2.0 startups like art. They are expensive art. People are addicted to going to gallery hops to see all the new artists and their related works. Its a big show off fest. With the barriers to create and maintain so low, these pieces of art could be around for a long time, even if they make nada, they can still be there, we see that now. Eventually they will fade or other artists will snatch them up either to destroy that piece of art or to play off of it.
After you spend a few more hours being ashamed, get MAD!!!

I would be highly surprised if the "bill of goods" sold to the AU gov is dissimilar to the well proven Great Firewall of China. This means you have major companies (you know who they are) profiting from the mega-routers needed to employ this solution.

Find out which of your politicos is profiting from this..I'm sure some are. Everything points to money!!!

For those American's that think "this would never happen here"...think again. This AU firewall-in-progress is a serious battleground for freedom of speech of all developed nations.
Ask HN: Would you employ someone in exchange for equity?
I've been approached by someone interested in joining my startup in exchange for equity. Obviously I can't afford to pay him a salary at this stage and he won't be investing any cash. What are your thoughts?
I cannot comment on whether or not foreign regulators were superior, but the critical thing about what AIG did was allow foreign banks to look better/less riskier than they actually were, in essence fooling the regulators:

"The regulatory arbitrage was even seamier. A huge part of the company's credit-default swap business was devised, quite simply, to allow banks to make their balance sheets look safer than they really were. Under a misguided set of international rules that took hold toward the end of the 1990s, banks were allowed use their own internal risk measurements to set their capital requirements. The less risky the assets, obviously, the lower the regulatory capital requirement.

"How did banks get their risk measures low? It certainly wasn't by owning less risky assets. Instead, they simply bought A.I.G.'s credit-default swaps. The swaps meant that the risk of loss was transferred to A.I.G., and the collateral triggers made the bank portfolios look absolutely risk-free. Which meant minimal capital requirements, which the banks all wanted so they could increase their leverage and buy yet more 'risk-free' assets. This practice became especially rampant in Europe. That lack of capital is one of the reasons the European banks have been in such trouble since the crisis began."

More details here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/business/28nocera.html?ref...
Another thing people aren't factoring in is the rush YC gets from being the "great uncle" to all these startups. Incubators are in, they are popping up all over the country. They themselves are a biz model thats attractive to investors. Seed money into multiple projects, get a window seat on all the advancements.

YC is in the biz of banking potential IP.
It may impact IE7 more than it does IE6. In fact I believe IE7 usage will fall below IE6 in relatively short order. Those who have not left IE6 are mainly in situations that prohibit them from moving on to IE7/8 without major pain (operating system, intranet applications etc.). As long as these are not remedied by IE8, IE6's share will not drop drastically. It will just continue to decline, perhaps at an increased slope, especially if web devs start leaving IE6 behind as well, but no funeral invitation just yet.
Ask HN: Review my site TweetBoss (www.tweetboss.com)
A few months ago there was a lot of postings about a Yahoo engineer who mashed up Yahoo BOSS with Twitter to create a search engine that ranks links based on how popular they are in Twitter. I liked the concept, but I don't want to search, if I have a few seconds I just like to see what is popular and read an article or two about it. So thats what I did. I created

TweetBoss: http://www.tweetboss.com

Basically it takes the most popular search terms on twitter and searches Yahoo News for articles about them and then presents in a simple format. The idea being as I said you have a few seconds to catch up on some news. It is just another way to present the news. It is very first cut but I would love your feedback.
I think with very very intelligent dogs. Hey it's like programming, do it enough for long enough and you get very very good at it. Do it for longer and then you start fiddling about with it until it breaks. Then do something different.
> Last year, Microsoft began to perk attention in the computer community releasing a beta of Internet Explorer 8, which featured innovative browsing modes like InPrivate, which were quickly copied by its competitors.

Didn't Safari have "Private Browsing" mode long before that?
What do they bring to the table and how badly do you need them?
The user interface isn't very clear. There is no labelled link as you get for satellite/map/terrain and even hovering over the little pegman doesn't bring up a tool tip letting you know what it does when streetview is available. You only get a tooltip when streetview isn't available and the pegman is greyed out. Small changes could definitely make it better.

The route selection also seems a little odd. For example nothing available for Princes Street in Edinburgh but some of the most obscure backstreets are covered.

Having said that the odd route selection did mean I was able to locate my car so it's not all bad.
I don't agree with much in this article. My thoughts on Marcus' list of "dumb ideas":

1. Default Permit - this one makes sense, getting "fail open" vs "fail closed" right is important in lots of places in engineering.

2. Enumerating Badness - isn't this is just the typical method for implementing default permit?

3. Penetrate and Patch - yes, it's always better to design a system to be secure and to code it with good security practices in mind, but any system with more than a handful of lines of code will be too complicated to guarantee correctness. "Penetrate and patch" can still find errors in well built systems. I do think that different ways of doing the "penetrate" part have different value. For example, I much prefer "white box testing" (ie testing with access to source code) to "black box testing". Extending this concept, when writing code with security in mind it can be helpful to consider common approaches an attacker might take (ie simulate the "penetrate" part of the process mentally), and use that insight to write better code (ie "patch" the code as it's being written).

4. Hacking is cool - well, the truth is, finding flaws can be intellectually gratifying. Sure, maybe the "coolness" factor has an impact on how many script kiddies exist, but there will always be people who like to "hack" stuff. Some portion of those people will stray into gray and black areas.

5. Educating Users - sure it's hopeless, and designing systems and processes to minimize people's impact is a win, but the prediction that users who need education will not be in the high tech workforce in ten years... not gonna happen.

6. Action is Better Than Inaction - From the article: I know one senior IT executive - one of the "pause and thinkers" whose plan for doing a wireless roll-out for their corporate network was "wait 2 years and hire a guy who did a successful wireless deployment for a company larger than us." Not only will the technology be more sorted-out by then, it'll be much, much cheaper. What an utterly brilliant strategy! Ugh! How about looking at risk vs reward. How much did that conservative "pause and thinker" put his company behind by waiting two years to adopt some new technology? Yes, sometimes that's the right choice, but sometimes high rewards merit taking big risks! This is as true when thinking about security as it is in any other business decision. A blanket recommendation to avoid risk does not cover all situations.
Hasn't this been hashed out for the past 18 months?
Do you want this individual as a co-founder?, because that is essentially the role they would be stepping in as. At minimum you would need to write a solid vesting plan of some kind, to prevent the individual from quitting in a month and taking the equity with them.

That said, I would be somewhat suspicious of the situation where someone is willing to work for only equity. Are they already independently wealthy? Are they having trouble finding paying employment?
Hmmm.. I seem to have stumbled on Valleywag, I was looking for HN.
by one of the folks at CanSecWest :)
Actually, most people don't hate work at all. I hear they love it and they couldn't even imagine life without work and the satisfaction (also spelled "exhaustion") it gives. At least that's what everyone says when I make it known that I hate work. Still, even though everyone loves to work, I can't get anyone to pay for my survival. (In fact, there are those who condemn welfare leeches because that makes them have to work more!)

But seriously, are these romantic articles doing us any good? I expected something a bit more cynical with a title like this. Instead, all I got was more you-can-do-it peptalk, telling me that there's a wonderful job somewhere over the rainbow where I won't even notice the restrictions, responsibilities and captivity inherent to jobs.

Admittedly, I'm making the same mistake as the author of the article by conflating doing work with having a job. Doing work can be great; I absolutely love programming. However, there are no jobs where you can do whatever you want all the time. It's no use to pretend otherwise.

Perhaps if we admit that jobs suck, we can find alternatives. (And I don't think founding startups is it.)
My anecdotal evidence tells me otherwise. At least in math. The professors presented the material as simple as possible, but not simpler.
The 100 Degree Data Center
Do you have any more concrete info on flat growth? From what I saw on compete and google trends, there's been quite a bit of growth.
UK data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/interactive/2009/jan/21/u...
At our company we're building an entirely web-based product that will be used more by businesses than consumers. Early in development we decided to exclude IE6 from the supported browsers list due to the extra development time and associated costs required to make it happen.

I'm all for a simplistic web (I prefer plain-text sites myself) but I think the more sites stop supporting IE6 and instead move towards standards-compliant designs, the sooner IE6 will disappear (and the sooner the big corporations who haven't upgraded will feel the pressure to upgrade).
Looking at streets in London that are not included I wondered whether they're not included for security reasons. Maybe there are government buildings on Princes Street that the authorities don't want "them" to have pictures of..
farming, e.g.: http://www.ruralmfg.com/mall/GS02_OutbackS2.asp
Facebook's Lousy Facelift, or how Facebook is playing catch-up to its runner-up
Math skill will make you a better scientists.

Programming skills could also be useful, but then again maybe not. Read about Richard Dawkins' dangerous addiction: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/feb/03/weekend7.w...

The danger I see in teaching biology students how to program is that they are not, and don't want to be, good software engineers. And that's often worse then not knowing a thing about computers.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Combine a little programming knowledge with a lot of intellect and no small amount of arrogance due the proudly earned Ph.D in biology or chemistry or what ever and some VERY bad things can happen.

I've seen databases where 99% of the data was NULL, because the Chemistry Ph.D author couldn't be bothered with trivial details like what's a one to many relationship. Naturally it was MS Access.

Beware of bad software engineering, even more so if the person coding is otherwise brilliant. That's the most dangerous type.

Software is a very sharp sword, you should use it carefully not try to swing it as hard as you can.
Noon where? Does that somehow go without saying?
Hm. It seems like I misspoke: it's been on a plateau for the last year, but earlier it grew in size quite a lot. However, I don't know how much of that is through smart business moves and how much it is through sheer inertia spreading the site.

I have an admittedly biased point of view. I'm developing a site that's somewhat of a competitor; I interned for Aviary, which is another competitor (though it's much more professional). DeviantART is a huge site, but that's largely because when you think of art online, there's no other site to think about. People have so completely abandoned focusing on artists that there's nothing really dedicated for people that paint, say. As a result, if you want to put your stuff online, there's no real other choice. It's a terrible site, but it's the only site.

My anger at DeviantART stems at the fact that it calls itself an art site, when it's not. It's a social site. The focus is on smiley faces and talking and drama rather than on people who want to make good stuff. Angelo Sotira embodies that: he isn't an artist at all, and yet he runs the site. He can't write, he can't draw, he can't take photos. His online journal looks like the journal of a bright-but-immature 20-something kid. He's thoroughly unprofessional, bans users who dislike the stuff he does, hides moderator corruption, and generally is just an awful CEO.

I used DeviantART when I was younger, thinking it would make me better. I was lucky because at a really, really young age I got to talk to a professional editor and she really got me on the right track, writing-wise. Five years later, there are people at my college, sitting in the classroom I'm in now, who are less progressed as writers than I was at 14, and that's because their writing circle is DeviantART, and that leads to no growth.

But that's a totally different argument. As you pointed out: I was wrong regarding the site's earlier growth. I still don't think that was the result of excellent business decisions, I just think the site itself is in a good niche. And it bugs me that the article cites Angelo as the founder, when he wasn't, and it bugs me that they praise the site he made, when it's so thoroughly reprehensible.
Is there a good alternative for GoDaddy for registering domains? I've been sick of them for a while now but this is the straw...
My fiancee did study systems biology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology). That new field goes into the direction you mention. But with more focus on engineering in general not just programming.
Absolutely not. That's only the case when you have nearly optimal usability and nearly optimal security. Then you are on a Pareto optimality frontier.

However, I almost never encounter such systems; usually they fall short on both counts.

Consider: How much usability do you lose to close a cross-site scripting attack? How much usability do you lose to close an SQL injection? How much usability do you lose to close a buffer overflow?

Now, how many security vulnerabilities fall into one of those three categories? Probably more than 90%.

Until you close off the obvious, huge attacks, there's little point adopting two-factor authentication.

Coming at it from the opposite point of view, how much usability do you lose from adopting two-factor authentication on top of a secure system? That can greatly add to a system's security, but you pay the price ("enter a number from this fob") once per login, hardly something to cry about.

Only once your system is very secure and very usable do you actually, truly get into tradeoffs between security and usability. But there's nothing special about security and usability here that bears any special attention... when you've optimized sufficiently any two interests start being in opposition to each other!

I mention this because the same fallacy that leads people to think that security stands in opposition to usability leads people to misinterpret decreases in usability as security increases. Like my bank, which uses "two-factor authentication" (note the scare quotes) consisting of a password and the answering of one of three questions that would normally be used to recover passwords... in other words, first it asks me for a password, then it asks me for a password. Two-factor my ass. But it is mistaken for security because it lowers usability.
Ugh. This combined with their forced 60-day lockin after contact change is pretty bad.

I'm so glad I switched all my domains away from godaddy 6 months ago to Dynadot. They've been awesome, their interface isnt cluttered to hell, and the people respond to emails quickly.