skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Precisely. So the right solution is vesting, which is a way to say:

a) today we both accomplished only 5% of all the work that needs to be done (that's Seth's point of view)

b) there are many things that still need to be done (still in line with the article)

c) we can't predict what else will be important, but we'll work on whatever needs to be done (that's where vesting beats Seth's proposal)
Am I the only one who likes CherryPy?
Right... which means FaceBook has far better chance of monetizing users than twitter does.
'Minor' head injuries can turn serious rapidly
Last numbers I heard for FB were 800+ employees, and 10,000+ servers. Both just a tad excessive, although I guess you have to spend the VC money somehow.
The Pros and cons of delaying college for a year during hard times 
What you decide, plan carefully.
Our stuff in python is all on top of werkzeug :)
What we need is an environment in which it is possible to actually IPO. Until then flipping for a buyout is the only exit that is feasible. Depending on if you need an exit due to being VC funded, anyway.
FriendFeed has an in-house framework inspired by web.py and Appengine's webapp. It was written by Bret Taylor, who was the PM of appengine when it started, but is now working for FriendFeed.

He mentioned that he might open source it, but hasn't done so yet. I encourage people to put some pressure on him to do this =)!

http://bret.appspot.com/entry/experimenting-google-app-engin...

EDIT: I'm not sure who wrote the framework, so I was wrong to say that Bret wrote it. In any case, it was written by FriendFeed developers.
comparing apples and oranges. google has way more expenses than the coffee shop next door, but that doesn't mean it's harder for google to earn a profit.

my personal opinion is that facebook users on the whole are a lot more engaged than twitter users. i know an awful lot of folks on twitter who use it as a broadcast medium rather than a place for conversation and connection. facebook seems to be a place where people actually connect with each other more. granted, this is all anecdotal.
I tried to write a convincing argument why vesting is a must for all startups, bootstrapped or VC-backed: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/02/11/reward-performance-w...

I have enough stories to tell and frankly, as a founder, I want to have vesting in place for myself and everyone else. It's the fair thing to do and it will eliminate a lot of headhaches down the road. You know that startups never turn out the way they were planned.
Hello Gimmicky Shopping Cart :D
Those are not ads. Those are just little promos for twitter features. By this logic, every link in the topnav and footer of twitter is an "ad".

http://www.itworld.com/business/64445/twitter-house-ads-appe...
From what I've heard it's going to be around till the 10 year mark. Basically MS is contractually obligated to support IE6 until 10 years after XP first shipped. Basically when it's shipped as part of an OS, it's required to be supported, and the problem is lots of corporate IT managers won't let it be upgraded.
While password hygiene is good, forcing you to change every 6 months is ridiculous.

As others have mentioned, I've always hated the complicated forced 60-day lock-in with GoDaddy. I"ve tried to avoid them like the plague and use BlueHost.com instead. Zero hassle, great customer service (and no, I'm not affiliated with either in any way)
I was just responding to your comment, which sounded like you were making the point that, like twitter, half of facebook users don't use the FB ui.
Zed's rails is a ghetto retraction is a ghetto.
>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?

None of course. But these aren't philosophical security factors (like the OP). They could actually be classified as "security bugs" or just "bugs".

>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.

Considering normal users - a whole lot!!! If I put in a system like this, I would expect a whole load of problems.

Consider: Delivery of fob, recall of fobs, damaged to fobs, lost fobs, stolen fobs etc etc. Not to mention about 20% of users would just hate learning how to use it.
It's very hard to use such low-temp heat for anything useful... except possibly heating the rest of the building and (pre-heating) hot water.
When first reading the title my first thought was, "Wow. A data center so hot that water will boil." I felt cheated when I realised it was only 100 degrees Fahrenheit and not 100 degrees Celsius.

Having said that it still raises some interesting implications. As data centers get hotter how will humans work in them? Will there be redundant cooling capacity which is only used when people are working in the data center? Will people be limited to 20 minute shifts? Will special suits with cooling be used?
Why some of us choke under pressure
Zed must've had fun writing this...
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.

Sadly, this is not the Web 2.0 mindset. If it was things like Twitter and Facebook would have been "monetized" a few months after their launch, when it was abundantly clear that they offered value to people.
Did you ever know a kid who would say something mean and then quickly follow it up with "JK!"? That kid was annoying.

I don't think it was a sincere effort. That's my point. Zed just wanted to be able to say mean things about people and not experience any consequences for it. And that's silly.

This fumbling around now is annoying. If he wants to be a mean person he should be a mean person. If he wants to be nice he should say he doesn't want to be mean anymore and be nicer. Changing his behavior and saying it's because I wasn't smart enough to handle his persona – and by the way don't criticize him for anything he said... What is that?
About 'republish filtered content to any number of their own services' - isn't this something similar to widgets. Or, are you talking about Curated Widgets?
within vesting agreements there are change of control conditions. For outright sales, it usually works out that those who are over the cliff have their vesting accelerated. In a merger (which a lot of acquisitions technically are), the acquiring entity will usually lock the employees down with a new agreement that includes the requirement to further vest out.

In other words, it depends. The best thing to do is to find a good law firm, pref in the valley and pref a firm that works with startups. Get a fixed price (or fixed price + options - some firms do that) for incorporation docs and establishing the pool and agreements etc. Setup a decent employee pool plus some for advisors and board members down the road. If you do eventually get funding, the VC will have a hard time arguing that you should wipe the slate clean if everything is already setup. VC's use pools and allocations to squeeze you further on a deal, usually without the founders noticing.

Don't use off-the-shelf agreements that you find online, do it properly. It should cost you $1-3k all up for the lot.

I am not sure what YC do as part of their foundation docs, I would be interested to know.
The fact that we have invented the term "monetization" to delineate the point at which fun web projects try and become true businesses only underscores the fact that much of Web 2.0 is about getting rich (relatively) quickly, rather than building sustainable businesses.
Thanks for the info - I am taking 70% of the split, thought before I take the gig I was thinking of trying to extend it to 85%. I am also a little surprised that consulting companies get 60% of the hourly rate a consultant is billed at - that is mind boggling to me.
No partials? Or no subcontrollers? What's wrong with RenderPartial() and RenderAction()?
Don’t launch? But the New York Times is on the phone
Mint.com making good money in downturn
Use SubSonic if you want ActiveRecord.
Let's take some of the piss out of this story.

The "computer experts" who have "united" to take on Conficker:

* Rick Wesson, a DARPA malware researcher affiliated with ICANN. Due respect, but I've never heard of him, nor can I find advisories by him; he's a "researcher", but the #1 Scholar hit for him is a Markoff NYT story.

* Phil Porras, who I have heard of, because I worked with him on an academic intrusion detection project in the late '90s. You may not have heard of him, because he's an academic security person parked at SRI.

* Jose Nazario, who I know well, and who is the official Arbor Networks designated talking head on malware and worms; without making any comments about Jose, we can safely assume someone at Arbor made their quarterly MBO by getting him placed in the NYT.

The article's money quote:

“I walked up to a three-star general on Wednesday and asked him if he could help me deal with a million-node botnet,” said Rick Wesson, a computer security researcher involved in combating Conficker. “I didn’t get an answer.”

How you know a NYT story is unhinged from the reality of computer security: it makes a money quote out of the reaction of a "three-star general".

Here's another choice quote:

The researchers, noting that the Conficker authors were using the most advanced computer security techniques, said the original version of the program contained a recent security feature developed by an M.I.T. computer scientist, Ron Rivest, that had been made public only weeks before. And when a revision was issued by Dr. Rivest’s group to correct a flaw, the Conficker authors revised their program to add the correction.

Presumably this translates to: the Conficker authors, being total fucking amateurs, chose to use the NIST competition MD6 sample code instead of SHA-1, which sounds less cool. The MD6 sample code had an overflow, because it is sample code, not production crypto code. When Fortify's PR story about the MD6 overflow was plastered all over Slashdot, the Conficker authors noticed.

And yet you should care about this story. Here is why:

The inability of the world’s best computer security technologists to gain the upper hand against anonymous but determined cybercriminals is viewed by a growing number of those involved in the fight as evidence of a fundamental security weakness in the global network.

First: No it isn't.

Second: The expert opinion this graf is based on appears to consist of third-stringers affiliated with research organizations.

Third: If there really was a growing movement to address the "fundamental weaknesses" of the end to end principle, Markoff wouldn't have to weasel-word this graf with "a growing number of" unnamed experts.

You can safely assume that any "redesign" of the fundamental protocols of the Internet will not work in your favor, and you should be hostile to any story that attempts to build an argument about the necessity of considering those kinds of changes. Unless you want to "start up" a business unit at a telco instead of your own company.
If two semesters of calculus are relevant to biology students, then surely at least one semester of programming is as well.
Synopsis: he redacts the sentiment of his earlier rant but says nothing about whether or not his opinion of the ruby/rails community has changed or why.
you are more right (I bought up vesting below). Hopefully hackapreneurs reading this thread will ignore SG and take on the comments instead.
Perhaps they could take this to the logical conclusion and just require you to go through the Recover Password steps to access your web page.

I know on every site I have to do this with I end up forgetting the password (somehow they seem to be coupled with strange character count and type requirements), and I have to rescue my password anyway. Might as well just have a login page that says "enter your email address and click 'send' to log in" and then have it send the cookie to you you continue with.

Site security can not be stronger than the weakest attack vector. Now that the login vector is so difficult they might as well remove it and just use the "Change Password" vector as the only way in.
What I mean is that you do not need to modify Django. You can just write a routine that duplicates whatever you are writing to the database manually. The Django process is easy to break out of from within your app.
Fair enough; I've never had call to do that in my own GM scripts, but I can easily see the use.
Django has had low level, undocumented hooks for talking to multiple databases for ages (Malcolm talked about these at DjangoCon, the same conference that hosted Cal's excellent keynote). A very recent checkin makes those hooks easier to use: http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/10026
And you really think they're not going to use that piece of prime real-estate for text advertising? Wake up and smell the coffee :-)
That's awfully short-sighted - no science is just about the accomplishments of an individual, but rather the health the community, and I see this problem everywhere. Even technical meetings are dominated by the most influential person, not by the most intelligent argument. People have no idea how to disagree - both on reddit, and in architecture meetings, ad hominem attacks are far more common than logical arguments, and mistakes are made because of it.

So although I didn't care much for Zed's original rant, this one, if it makes an impact, might do more good to programming than all of his technical accomplishments combined.
I use Dreamhost, since I have some domains hosted there. No issues, but it's mindblowing or anything.
that is essentially what vesting does - except it is more legally sound.
You're making it into an economic question when it isn't one to the author. He likes making games like this, so this is what he's decided to do.

I bought one of the games recently and emailed him a bunch of usability/interface suggestions. He thanked me but mentioned that he's making a living so somebody must be enjoying the games. He's got a point.

It's a labor of love. I'm sure there are a million things he could do to add the potential to make more money (like an investment in better art or another programmer), but it looks like he's not interested in that kind of risk.

It doesn't seem like an ambitious plan, but he seems happy so what's wrong with not trying to experiment with business models and whatnot?
It will be in my next workstation too. computers are cheap, even the io drive is cheap compared to what fast components used to cost.
hehe I should have been clearer :)
Fortunately there are a lot of electronic components that can't take the kind of heat you allude to (100C), and it would cost a lot to engineer components that could. 100F is a hot day in the southern US, and nothing compared to some of the warmer climates of the world. Compared to digging ditches or doing brick work, standing next to a rack loading code onto a router is small potatoes.

I'll just be happy to work in a room where I can expect to be in short sleeve shirts instead of having my fingers get numb when near a cold air vent.

If heat were ever to become that much of a problem I'd expect that we'd start seeing more solutions like HP's thermal management rack, where the racks are closed to the environment, take in cold water, and circulate hot water out.
Yes, but how do you judge if it has value? It seems that, as in the dot.com era, it's still not judged by income, but by number of users (or just level of hype - Twitter only has ~6 million users).

Current technology does make this valid in some sense - you can launch very cheaply and, if you attract enough interest, get bought by a larger company. As I understand this is YC's general approach. But it seems that Twitter tends to refuse buyout offers, so I they are more of a classic dot.com.
VC Firm Zombies
Deploying PyQt applications on Windows and Mac OS X
You have a point. On the other hand, people are contradictory. I think it is quite possible to think to yourself "heh, heh, I'm going to create the most ridiculously aggro coding blog ever" but in doing so also express the worst aspects of your own personality.
If they'd done that, they wouldn't even be in beta yet, let alone out of it. Look at how long Netscape 6, let alone Firefox, took to materialize. Remember that most of the Chrome team are ex-Firefox-luminaries: these are not stupid people, and you probably use their other products all the time.
The 60-day thing is an ICANN policy, so you can't really blame GoDaddy for that. You can, however, blame them for their awful UI and constant upselling during checkout.

I moved my domains over to NameCheap. They seem kind of amateurish at times, but they get the job done, and I haven't seen any major horror stories about them. I was using Dynadot for a while, but the recent 3-day downtime with no status updates rubbed me the wrong way.
Why would that be a blessing? If PG&E comes and puts in a digital meter for which their little gadget doesn't work, they're back to page 0.
Questions I've been asked today:

1) "If we have no email encryption software (which we don't), is there any reason we would not be able to receive encrypted emails from a customer?"

2) "We think someone has stolen one of our databases. Can we have a system where people have to put a password in to copy a file or print?"
I don't doubt that they are, but these are not ads.

HN has a lot of prime homepage real estate to the right, but if they put a link there to the submission form, it's hardly an ad :)
The X25 comes in 160GB varieties too, but I understand the trade-off at comparable prices. With a technology that changes so quickly, I set myself a couple requirements before I'd buy an SSD:

-Performance had to be equivalent or better than a WD Velociraptor across the board (the OCZ Vertex achieves that with firmware updates, the Intel is slightly slower on max sequential writes, but makes up for it in every other benchmark).

-It had to be at least 120GB for my personal laptop.

-It had to be around $300.
I assume any SSD purchase made now is going to be replaced in 1-2 years, so purchasing anything more than necessary is hard to justify.
Wow, Zed can't win with this crowd, can he?

I've never been a fan (mostly for the reasons he points to in this post-- his works often read like "jock speech"), but I have to give him props for trying to move in a different direction now, and own up to the negative consequences of his earlier post. He doesn't want to be mean anymore (or pretend to be mean, either), and I don't think that's a bad thing.

One small step toward civility, one giant leap for Zed. Good for him.
Want your own Github? Check out the open source Gitorious.
> how come none of these startups managed to get a single dollar out of me? Am I alone asking myself this question?

Count me in. :)

> Dropbox is one that immediately comes to mind that has solved a very hard problem that I pay for.

Not really... It is not so hard to setup SVN, Apache, WebDAV, and NetDrive, and you got your own Dropbox...
At first I thought he was serious about the "so fucking awesome" bit. After observing people like Linus Torvalds(and his "masturbating monkeys" rant) I didn't feel at all that it might be a fake persona, it was over the top, but i didn't think it was that much, when compared with all the other colourful personalities in the software world. I want to thank Zed for reminding me that although some ego in not bad, its not the thing to look for in a hacker, you have to look beyond his "persona".

The "neon strippers" Zed Shaw was fucking awesome because he said "fuck" all the time.

The "real" Zed Shaw is fucking awesome because he plays guitar, writes code, does electronics, and is a nice person(sort of).

I knew this since I was a child, but I needed Zed to show me that "masturbating monkeys" is not that cool, Kernel hacking is.
It seems that its support for SQLAlchemy isn't really first class. I'm sure its builtin ORM is workable for simple web apps, but if you are doing serious database work in python, there is no substitute for SQLAlchemy.

Of course, you can use whatever other libraries you want in your own code, but at the point where you are not using Django's ORM and you have left its lame template system for something like mako (or maybe genshi, especially if you are generating XML), then what is Django really giving you?
Here is a link on the subject:
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t19707.html
Why squid instead of varnish?
Uh, I have? Also, I am half Indian, half mix-of-all-European-countries-Canadian, so I know what North American families are like as well as Indian immigrant families.

In Indian families, children obey and rely on their parents well into adulthood. At pretty much all levels of society. I am a committed Western-style individualist, so I actually think this is a very bad thing.

So you're right that not everyone is a careerist, and that immigrants are self-selected for ambition. But, the thing I was drawing attention to was that an Indian parent can and will suggest a long-term career like going to medical school, and many Indian kids actually do it just because their parents said so.

This is changing -- today, Indian kids assert their own choices more and more -- but it is amazing to me that there are Indian bachelors I know in their 30s, even some living in North America, who still expect mummy and daddy to find them a bride.
Interesting -- it seems to be worse in non-urban areas.
Microsoft opens Azure to PHP developers
I know you were joking, but that's kind of an interesting idea, using e-mail as a login solution. To log in to Hacker News for example, you would type your e-mail address on HN and in response get an email with your session link in it. With a good enough e-mail reader it might not be as painful as it sounds, and it would eliminate passwords and there would be no difference between registering for a site and logging in to a site.
I don't get Groningen either, but I'm not complaining. I can see my house! The city of Groningen tends to lobby for these things quite a bit though I can't see Google being influenced by these things.

As an aside, the pictures are from September last year as far as I can tell.
IPhone OS 3: The moat strategy vs. features-fetishism
I don't see much value in this essay. What makes sense is rather old hat, and points like #3 are downright absurd, boiling down to, "You can't make a system more secure by finding weaknesses and correcting them - you must make the system magically devoid of weaknesses to begin with."

Somehow, if there was much of a way of doing that with non-trivial programs, I don't think we'd have security exploits anymore.
Please add GAE's webapp.
They use the same Indilinx controller that the OCZ Vertex uses. It would be interesting to see a comparison between the OCZ Vertex and the Super Talent drives, it would essentially be a comparison of firmware.
Bacterial Chemotaxis Modeled in JavaScript
Your off-world investments in artificial dumbness have paid $150 in dividends.
Sir, I would pay good money to have you kick the piss out of articles like this.

Now all we need is a tptacek equivalent for all other topics journalists fudge up. (That's the vast majority of topics they cover.)
Last graph I saw, digg was miles ahead of reddit, so I don't think it's that far off.

Also, agreed with not just the font but the whole site - one of the prettiest I've seen in a while.
Yes, and so my point is, this is a masterful approach to pave the way for placing ads there.

The standard way is to place ads and juggle them about until you've figured out where they attract the more clicks. Twitter's way appears to first manufacture a high-interest area (by putting cool twitter stuff there), then, once people are used to seeing nifty stuff there, start selling that nifty space to others.
The Startup Myth