skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience it is likely a business with

1) extraordinarily little capital or collateral

2) no or low revenues

3) no physical location

4) little documentation attesting to the nature of the business (leases, franchise agreements, written quotes for proposed capital purchases to be made with the loan proceeds, that sort of thing)

5) a founder who does not have a successful business background

6) a founder who does not individually have a very strong credit history (true of many of the young'uns here, largely as an artifact only recently starting work)

etc, etc will have a bit of difficulty getting through. I respect that your experience may be different. Most of mine comes from shepherding startups through the Japanese analog when I worked at a technology incubator here -- one of our main skills was, ahem, learning how to describe high-tech realities in terms of words responsive to requirements tailored towards industrial businesses.

(You don't have "no" capital, you have source code. How many man months in that? Seven? Great, we'll value that at the $10,000 per month chargeout rate for an intermediate engineer in this neck of the woods: you have $70,000 worth of intellectual capital. So we'll fill in $70,000 in this bubble here. How many suppliers do you have? Zero? Well, OK, you use electricity, right? So Chubu Power is supplier #1. Do you take business calls? NTT, #2... OK, 12 suppliers.)
Do humans generally beat computers at this game?
Life is not that complicated. You get up, you go to work, eat three meals, you take one good shit and you go back to bed. What’s the fucking mystery?! - George Carlin

Seriously though, the freelancing thing isn't all that hard. Get really good with a particular framework or get good at customizing your favorite open source software or building a certain type of site. Find a few good clients who consistently have projects who are willing to pay you around a 100 an hour, work about 20 hours a week, keep your expenses low, live in Texas and you'll have all kinds of free time and money to support yourself. It takes a while to find good paying clients. Sure, freelancing may not be ideal, but ultimately you need some income to pay the bills while you are developing your passive income source.

Unless there's more to the story, it sounds like you had a bad experience with one client, took on a project using a framework you weren't experienced with, didn't finish executing on a music site, and are now sad and talking about dying at the age of forty. From the age poll, it looks like you are 21. You have all kinds of time and it will probably take many years and lots more hard work to get where you want to be, and yes, it might even require working a 9-to-5 for a while. Keep chipping away.
The Django Book version 2.0 now available
It's good to see hadoop getting some press attention, it certainly deserves it.
I figured it was pg trying to prove a point, but now I'm not entirely certain...
So, out of the box, will I be able to click on terminal, run ps, emacs, apache, mysql, etc?
From the photos, which is all we have at the moment, it just looks like a thin laptop with a glossy screen and ports at the back.

I guess tomorrow we'll find out if there's any reason to be excited about it besides marginally better aesthetics.
Awesome! I loved the SR-71 as a kid and have been wondering what the replacement (Aurora) can do. I'm sure my son (now 3) will be fascinated!
Think maybe someone confused hacker for cracker.

Edit: I believe this story used to link to http://ycombinator.com/party.html .
Double-click edit will is on the todo-list -- will be implemented somewhere in the next week or so.
Yeah, I've been noticing the link name changing a couple times in the past few minutes, so it's obviously being worked on.
As many of the commenters pointed out the summary becomes a part of the agreement. I think it would even trump the legalese if there is some inconsistency between them.

What people fail to understand is that the contract/agreement itself is not the written text. Rather it is a legally binding relationship between 2 or more parties.

The better each party understands the terms and duties the less likely disputes are going to happen.

Legalese is a kind of legal FUD, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Unfortunately most people are still scared of changing it.

All those legalese clauses you see in most agreements can be trumped by plain English or actually even common sense. The common law contract system allows judges to invalidate extremely unfair terms based on common sense and common practice as it requires both parties to perform some sort of equal exchange for a contract to be valid.

I believe that a well written plain language contract is a lot less likely to have disputes. I also believe that judges like the rest of us are perfectly able to read English as well, so I can only conclude that legalese is FUD.

See these two posts to learn more about how contracts work:

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2006/08/17/pragmatic-contr...

http://blog.extraeagle.com/2007/10/09/contracts-are-relation...

If you are interested in the history of legalese I warmly recommend the book http://www.partyofthefirstpart.com/ which is probably the funniest legal book I have ever read.

I'm on a bit of a crusade against legalese myself and at http://agree2.com we've tried to write our user agreement in plain english. We had it for public review last year (http://blog.extraeagle.com/2008/05/20/public-review-of-agree...) during a major rewrite and even allow you to propose changes to it during your signup.
From the SR-71 wikipedia entry:

"A defensive feature of the aircraft was its high speed and operating altitude, whereby, if a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate."
What is the optimal solution for PHP-based sites? Is Apache w/ mod_php faster than Nginx with FastCGI?
Great comparison with cobol. I love it.

There is a burgeoning "agile" movement amongst some (albeit very few) lawyers to improve things.

I wrote this rant about it a while back about how lawyers really should learn a bit from the agile movement that has so revolutionized the startup world:

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/11/12/is-the-time-rig...
i hate this, can we go back to hacker news?
"hackers" and "crackers" are not mutually exclusive terms. A safe cracker for example has to have a lot of knowledge of locks and safes.

I think some of HN's superiority complex is contributing to the negative attention it's getting right now. Maybe it would've been better to just admit that some things aren't being designed here as well as they should be, considering the focus and audience?
If you like that sentiment, you will probably like Burt Rutan's talk at Ted ( http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_futur... ). The theme is a lack of progress in aerospace and how to resolve it.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/12/how-to-make-lots-of...

Disregard the title, read the content and make sure you understand what it means "to create and deliver value". Then you will undestand how to spend your time productively.
Err, that's my point, it's not ironic if you don't use your definition of "hacker".
Information World
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Delegate Your E-mails to Gmail
Five simple steps to SEO goodness
Pretend that you will find meaning in the future, and between then and now you need to make some money so that when time comes you can pursue it unhindered. Works for me.
Hackers are people too [vid]
Ask HN: Has Hacker News been hacked/cracked?
It seems like you can change the about field under PG's account http://news.ycombinator.org/user?id=pg using this appjet app
http://notabank.appjet.net/
Maybe this should be stopped ASAP. Links like these seem to be replicating all across HN
Certainly seems like it.
How To Get a Pulse For Your Industry or Interest
um I think there's been a bug for this particular post
Ask HN: Best site for Photoshop tutorials?
I'm mocking up some dummy ads and need to brush up on a few Photoshop skills that I haven't used in a while. I'm finding that Google's completely useless for this. Nothing but pages and pages of spammy results. Any good Photoshop tutorial sites out there that you'd recommend?
How do you conclude "Facebook users are on the whole technologically illiterate and conservative"? You don't even qualify it with a "probably".

Facebook have really messed up with the latest change. People were confused by the last release, but happy overall. This is quite a different reaction.

I never heard of anyone disliking Facebook video by the way. What did they dislike about it? Don't you mostly use Myspace anyway?
Know who knocks over a sand castle? A dick.

I'm sick of security. I wish we could make things without worrying about the myriad ways there are to destroy a thing?

What did xach have to gain by doing this experiment that he would have lost by emailing PG quietly, beyond the childish feeling of destroying a good thing?
Please stop this Mr. "Hacker" sir. I like this community and you're damaging its real use. You have made your point now kindly go away.
Well, now I know how light the text can truly go.
Expecting people to research how the Mac works just to install software is asking a bit too much.

Instead of taking my comments as an attack on the Mac, why not view them as first impressions that may be shared by potentially many other people?
How do you conclude "Facebook users are on the whole technologically illiterate and conservative"? You don't even qualify it with a "probably".

I don't qualify things that are obviously opinion. In any case, I'm right about this. Most Facebook users don't care for technology, and they want things to work the same tomorrow as they do today. They don't like change, even when it's for the better in the long run.

Facebook have really messed up with the latest change. People were confused by the last release, but happy overall. This is quite a different reaction.

Then you weren't around for the last redesign, which people hated. Search for "old Facebook" and you'll see groups that protest every single Facebook that ever launched since the advent of groups.

I never heard of anyone disliking Facebook video by the way. What did they dislike about it? Don't you mostly use Myspace anyway?

Me personally? Have you not seen my weekly pro-Facebook talks? I'm an enormous Facebook fan. My MySpace account is deleted, I think. I don't remember if I bothered.

In the first few weeks of Facebook video, people thought it was stupid and wasteful and hated that their friends didn't have it yet. Two months later it was huge.
Yes, you really can do just about anything with Python. And there's probably a library for it.
Not an epic work of fiction, actually just the opposite, but in case you haven't seen it, check out the complete nonfiction by David Foster Wallace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AaronSw/David_Foster_Walla...
There are a lot of bogus links showing up on the front page with obviously falsified vote counts (numbers starting with the digits "1337"). I'd say, yeah, it's been seriously compromised.
I don't expect you to. I expect you to intuitively understand it, like pretty much everybody I've seen using a Mac does. The spatial metaphor is pretty easy to grasp, unless you're convinced that the executable is the only way to go, in which case your viewpoint is twisted.

Instead of taking my comments as an attack on the Mac, why not view them as first impressions that may be shared by potentially many other people?

Because you're not making useful lists. I'm sorry if this offends you, but from my perspective you've been writing little half-posts about small things you don't like, without any backup. You're not giving screenshots or any sort of information, you're posting small snippets, and I don't consider that to be worth an HN post - even if you are using this site for your blog.

Furthermore, I'm irritated that you posted this as a new post rather than as a comment on your last post, which could have been posted as a comment on your post before that. If you've got gripes, take your time and make a single good post, get pictures, phrase your ideas in a good way, and then post it all in one, so we can have one single discussion rather than a fractured one across a bunch of posts that come close to being flag-worthy by my standards.
Yes, it has been. Looks like the site had some major vulnerabilities.

I emailed PG, if he didn't know already, and slowly some of the things are being fixed back. PG's account is still vulnerable as of this posting. EDIT: No it's not.
I caught it here:

http://skitch.com/pelle/beksu/hacker-news-hacked
FYI, I still think dmg files are a bad idea.

BTW, vista and windows 7 won't let programs mess up the OS without your permission. And most programs -- properly written -- don't need to access any critical parts of the OS.
Ask HN:SMTP Relay EC2
Has anyone setup an smtp server in EC2? specifically, a stand alone SMTP server without using a smart relay host such as AuthSMTP. As that is what we are doing right now. If so, what are the proper DNS changes that are needed (DNS,SPF.. etc..etc). We are currently using qmail and will move to PostFix very soon.
http://source.notabank.appjet.net/
This is a myth. Most contracts are not even written down and are perfectly legal.

For example if you're in a restaurant and order food you have accepted a contract to pay for that food once you finish. The contract does not include any legalese it isn't even written down, yet is just as valid if not more so as any 100 page document filled with legalese.

If this is so you can also write it in plain English. Anything that can be written in legalese can almost always be rewritten in more concise plain readable English.
Funny, because my family Vistabox got pretty badly virused in a month's time. We thought we'd try to run it without antivirus.

Meanwhile, I'm nearing my year anniversary with my Mac, which has no viruses and still goes as quickly as it did on Day 1.

How are DMGs a bad idea? They do no wrong.
Whoever did this, please post a Tell HN or otherwise an article on how you did it. I'm sure others are curious (and would make a good starting point for patching Arc)

From the source, it looks like there was a vulnerability in which the fnid (I'm guessing a string that authenticates a user to edit an item?) was searched for on PG's profile page (using the regex /<input type=hidden name="fnid" value="([^"]+)">/. Then a POST request was made on the standard profile saving resource news.ycombinator.com/x, with the fnid which authenticated the user's permission to edit the page, along with the about text, as parameters.

Edit: PG says the fnid just points to a closure on the system. See above. Which means... all you needed was a randomly generated fnid, and that's all that you needed to edit anyone's page. Apparently?

Clever, or just poor authentication design. But that's only one half of the exploit. How were the points done? I'm going to rule out millions of accounts created.
Yes. I made an unbelievably stupid mistake in the code that generates forms with labelled fields. It was basically functional programming taken a little too far: I generated the same form whether the fields were editable or not, and then later if there were no editable fields I just omitted the submit button. So anyone looking at the source of one of these pages could find a fnid that would work to modify the object displayed on it. (There's still a fnid, but it no longer does anything.)
apache is perfectly capable of saturating the outbound connection on static content on any reasonable setup. you may save a little on memory with nginx but you aren't saving on speed (how can you deliver more content than the outbound connection can carry??). this is why the in-kernel http servers went nowhere. in any case most people use CDNs these days for static content.

note that by not using apache you give up a lot of security hardening, add-on-modules, and mindshare that nginx does not have.
I'm going to disagree. Chances are it was XSS or - shudder - simple injection. It was a basic vulnerability and it got fixed. We don't need to know the details - though I'd like if whoever did this got banned for a while for being an obnoxious jerk.

(When you think about it, this was pretty simplistic. All anybody did was edit text fields on the site. That hints it was injection.
I love Robert Morris' crunchbase bio: "... He has published extensively on wireless networks, distributed operating systems, and peer-to-peer applications. In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."

I think we know that the "discovery" of a vulnerability is never enough to get the general public interested...I didn't hear a peep in the MSM about the huge Debian/SSL debacle.
Yes, it was hacked. Here's the original post from a lesser hack earlier today with pg's response containing the "not a bank" quote:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=518752
Macs are great if you don't want to deal with viruses. No need to even run an antivirus program.

On Windows, you should run one and there are some excellent commercial ones you can use.

I've already explained why DMGs are bad. They are confusing and cause clutter.
That would suggest, then, that the comment points and submission points are also controllable within some form, since they were tampered with also. Is that the case? (I'm not asking because I don't believe you - I'm just wondering how those numeric fields were altered.)
Re: 1337 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Agh, I wish HN would at least show me dupes when I submit.
Almost sounds like SQL Injection, perhaps no escaping on fnid?
Do DMGs cause more clutter for applications than Program Files does on Windows? If I want to find a specific program's exe then it's extremely time-consuming, versus opening either a DMG or the app folder and clicking the icon that's very prominent. No app has two app icons; some programs have multiple exes.

I'd argue that the need for commercial protection on Windows is a bad thing in and of itself, but I'm a little tired of this argument. We've each made our respective points.
This is a good point. Also, you can avoid the large public crash-and-burn that happened here. Growing up from a few people lets you test out ideas without failing catastrophically.
Just in case the original app gets taken down, I copied the source to pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/f1a67398f
Edit: I'm wrong, see below.

If I'm not mistaken, that had nothing to do with SQL injection. The fnid basically was the authenticator that allowed a person to edit a page, regardless of who was logged in.

What about other HN-powered Arc sites? Are they vulnerable as well? I won't name names, because I'm guessing they are indeed vulnerable.

Edit: Yes, they are.
Any field of any object could be changed this way.
Not quite. A fnid is a hash key pointing to a closure on the server.
I found PSDtuts to be most excellent - http://psdtuts.com

You can also find some gems on Smashing Magazine's site http://www.smashingmagazine.com - while not photoshop specific, there are some good articles like http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/10/adobe-photoshop-t...
How do you do process management? Do you have a static or dynamic number of app server processes/threads?
Finding stuff including executables is very easy under Windows. Just search for it just as you would with spotlight under the Mac. No need to browse through a start menu.
for those who missed it, this comment refers to the hacking of this story. hacker news was briefly hacked, and this story was altered to link to a website (hosted at appjet) that let users edit the text of pg's profile. it was fixed within a half hour or so.
Okay, trust doesn't work as well as correct security measures. That's sad, but true.
http://psd.tutsplus.com/ - has a mix of free and 'premium' tutorials.

Also, smashingmagazine.com frequently has good links to tutorials.
Ah, okay. Wrong guess. Everyone can downvote me now :)
The Revision3 podcast, Pixel Perfect, is also a fairly good resource:

http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/
You don't own the IP address your EC2 instance uses, even if it's a "static" IP. It will be difficult/impossible to get the reverse DNS (aka PTR aka IN-ADDR.ARPA) record set up.

But even if you did have a proper PTR, SpamHaus (which Hotmail relies on) blackholes the entire EC2 address space. I can't blame them; I would do the same in their shoes.
You fixed the hole with impressive speed. I've got to give you that.

Out of curiosity, why did you take the site down two times before applying the fix?
I'm glad no major damage happened.

Anyway your mention of fnid prompted me to learn a bit about arc and the arc web server which looks very interesting. Might have to play with it a bit.

http://arcist.com/doc/srv.html
Code jams (game or otherwise) are great.

When I was in Pittsburgh, I help start up the Pittsburgh Coding Dojo [1]. Each meeting was split into two parts. During the first part, we broke out into groups to solve a previously selected "code kata." The second half was a show-and-tell in which everyone got to explain their solution.

Sometimes we switched it up and instead of breaking out into groups, we used a single computer with a projector and coded the kata round-robin with everyone looking on.

It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that group.

[1] http://www.pghcodingdojo.org/index.php/Main_Page
And are the YC application forms secure(d)?...
Beverly Hills Vein Treatmenet
Practice that provides spider vein and varicose vein treatment in Beverly Hills.
C Compiler Errors
Musicians' brains keep time--with one another
If you choose to try out slinkset feel free to contact me (email in profile) and I can help you with any questions you may have.
Kiva Han was our place to hack at. So much so we even named our then startup inkiva.com!!!
Ok Sir, I will not submit advertisement type of links. Thanks
All the ones mentioned are good. Here's some from Layers magazine: http://www.layersmagazine.com/category/tutorials/

If you're willing to pay, www.lynda.com is great.
So, how does one nominate a post for the "Best of HN" list? :-)

(Great Post - you might want to edit it down a bit for clarity though - Particularly around things like "DMG" - "A DMG is a disk image", "..a Finder Window", "like inserting a CD into your computer", "a virtual disk", "like putting a CD to run a program, only virtual","disk that show you both the application and the folder it out to be in","LIKE the shitty fucking programs...difference is ...fullfills..userful work metaphor")

Regardless - great article. And yes, I absolutely ADORE .dmg files - though, I'm embarrassed to admit, it took me, with some small sysadmin skills, about two years to realize that finder window with the arrow clicking "DRAG TO APP FOLDER" and an actual arrow pointing to a folder was actually representing a graphical symlink to the Application folder - and I was supposed to actually drag the .app bundle into that folder - For a long time I used to run apps out of their container .dmg :-)

Also - don't be too harsh on the parent - there is something to be said for "double click" on setup.exe for simplicity. Lots of bad things as well (As in, who knows what is about to explode into your system) - but I'll admit (as a Die Hard Macintosh User for at least 15 years) that I've always been a bit confused as to the various ways of installing an application on my system. I wish they could all be "copy app into application folder".
http://www.vunkysearch.net/ is a more visual search, links to other tutorials... find effect you want, click.
The point he was trying to make is that if they want to call themselves journalists then they need to do reporting and investigating not merely parroting things they are told.
For ny site based on user feedback, solving the chicken and egg problem is going to be your biggest hurdle. Can you bootstrap the initial reviews from some other source?
999 points? User for six minutes? What's going on here?