skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Case of Google and the Surly Ex-Designers
This is a very interesting question with no possible answer. That is due to the fact that every single minute what you think you want is changing.

What could help is to make a distinction between the material things we want (house, cars...) and the things and the other things we want (a family...).

As an exercise I sat out to write down the things (material) I convinced myself I have to have before I die. To my surprise my list include between 6 to 10 items and the total cost did not surpass $200k-$250k.

I then realized that I was working too hard while what I wanted (or think I want) could be easily achieved.

Writing what you believe you want is a great exercise. You may be surprise that what you think you want on a daily basis is very different from what you really want inside.
Pirates of Silicon Valley
Dedicated to all Pirates :)
Why would customers with 2 or 3 transactions a month lose them any money?
I don't believe this is what Maxmind does; I have no direct knowledge but I believe their data is based on IP registry data (location of the registering org) along with inference from per-user registration data (surveys, social networks, panels, etc.)

Akamai has a (much more expensive) geolocation product that's based on doing triangulation, since they have a lot more information on routing (all those edge servers) but I'm not sure it's appreciably more accurate.
What's the experiment? Does anyone have a link to the paper?
Thank you! I like the site you have.

We do have a little technical side to us but nothing like what you possess. Just the basics and we know how to play around with code, but not write code from scratch.
I think this is a great idea. I will be on the ground in SV May 1st. Have to catch YC next time around.
"When you see a GPL notice, you can feel warm fuzzy feelings of sharing certain beliefs with the authors about freedom and sharing."

this reminds me of this email conversation:
http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...

especially:
"I had to put CLISP under GPL because libreadline.a was something I wanted to use and I didn't want to write myself. libgmp.a is similar in this respect, and it may therefore help putting some new packages under GPL.

Building libgmp.a was just too hard work. Other people shouldn't get it for free."
YouTube Being Blocked in China, Google Says
[Reading from "The Hackers' Manifesto."]
Agent Bob: "This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud. We exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias. You wage wars, murder, cheat, lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto." Huh? Right? Manifesto? "You may stop me, but you can't stop us all."
What appeals to you will change over time. You're sounding like you want to make one decision that will last your whole life. There isn't one. There can't be one. The teachers at your uni have probably pointed out that you'll have 5 or so completely different careers during your working lifetime.

I believe that if you really want something, anything, as improbable it may seem, you always achieve it.

There are a lot of people who want immortality. A lot. And they're not going to get it. Everyone is going to get old and die.

I really really wanted to design integrated circuits. When I graduated with my BSEE, there was a recession and all the major players in the IC business were laying off tens of thousands of engineers. So I ended up at GM. And when I tried to get into the IC fab part of that division, my machiavellian manager ended up pushing me out of the company completely (if I transferred, he lost the "headcount" permanently, but if I quit or was fired, he could replace me).

Desire doesn't get you want you want.
I'm a long was from being unfair. I think given the site this article is posted on my statement shouldn't have been hard to follow the context. There is a lot, and I mean a lot of PHP code being written by designers and very inexperienced 'developers', this article is geared towards /hopefully/ correcting some of the common mistakes the original article was promoting. I also don't think it's unfair to say most PHP users fall into this category.
From page (quoted in some other comment below): "Very accurate. The database is updated during the first week of each month."

This is also the frequency at which Maxmind releases updates. So...
Apple Putting The Squeeze On iPhone Developers
I'm optimistic about practical fusion in the near future, which is unusual for me because I'm pessimistic about most new technologies. There is almost certainly a way to initiate fusion reactions with much less equipment than the NIF (which is still a worthwhile project). I don't know how soon it'll happen, but long before our 200-year supply of coal runs out. And then lots of people will feel silly for working on electrical energy conservation, which turned out to be pointless. I think I'll turn on some more lights.
It is really really hard to believe that games could live with the network latency, If the lag between pressing a key to move character on screen is over 50ms, the user experience will suffer. Often round-trip lag is more than 100ms which is clearly unacceptable - and it cannot be fixed with prediction.
Margo Seltzer
Steamworks Makes DRM Obsolete
Yeah, I think I actually agree with the overall point. I got my first experience of programming using BASIC to get various Sinclair computers to paint stuff on the screen and make funny beeping noises. I'm all for instant gratification.

On the other hand that was when I was 9. By 12 I was learning Lisp, and by college age I'd written my own little Lisp compiler.

I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?
The article states that "owning" is not the right solution for everyone, but what it omits to state is that in most of those countries where the majority of the population can afford to not own a home, their social security takes care of individuals once they reach the age at which working to fork that rent out is not possible anymore.

In the US, that is not currently possible. So the solution indeed is to buy a house and hope that by the time you reach retirement and cannot work anymore, you at least have a home and maybe the tiny bit of money you were able to save will suffice to pay your bills and food.

The solution in the US is not to fix social security and ensure those who rent today will have enough to rent when they retire, it is to reduce the cost of home ownership, so by the time you are 65 you already own a home you can afford to live in because you own it after only 15 years of hard work, not 30+.
Yeah, a "penny" is also GBP 0.01 or AUD 0.01 or CAD 0.01 -- I was confused as well.
When it's not a code word for that it's often a code word for something bad. Not always, but often.

People defending what's right can say one should do it because it's right. But people defending something they know is basically wrong can't say one should do it because it's wrong. So they look around for another word, and "practical" is usually the first they find.
I don't follow the last sentence.

I do think last.fm is worth it, had they 1) made these rules from the get-go; 2) applied them equally and with no discrimination (I think this is where CBS's xenophobia fits in?)

Am I on the right track? If not, please feel free to correct me. :)
This DB has close to six times as much location as GeoLite:

wc -l ip_group_city.csv
1195012 ip_group_city.csv
wc -l GeoLiteCity-Location.csv
238957 GeoLiteCity-Location.csv
For me, this was not as interesting as Part One from a business/startup standpoint, as there wasn't much more detail. But my inner "game creator" is always excited to see a small player succeeding in this crowded arena. We should all be so lucky to earn a living doing what we love - and not get sick of it after all this time.
Thanks. We've added a mini-menu so that you can control which one of the views you want to see. In addition, once you click on one view, it will stop the auto-changing all together.
It's not worth adding. As others have said, there are useful cases where the code is cleaner, but the potential for abuse is great. I dont know PHP, but if it has break and continue (particularly with labels), then there is little use for goto.
I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.

Don't tell that to us here. Say that in a convincing manner on the homepage.
It's interesting that in New Scientist's article on the same thing (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16820-roomtemperature-...) Krivit's views seem rather less optimistic than presented here, while they have an expert to seemingly confirm what has been shown.
Wow, that's so l33t!

Though if you really want to brag effectively about finding an exploit here, you should probably just shoot an e-mail to the developers first and then, if you feel the need, mention publicly that you found something.

That way you look more like a white hat and less like a script kiddie or a troll.
Those fees are on top of the cut that Authorize.net/PayPal/Protx take, right?
So with Paypal Website Payments Pro for example the total cost would be $49/mo and 4-6% + $.30 per transaction.
If you have the ability to fund substantially, and the experience to build $9,000,000 in revenues, why would you sell ~5% of your company for $15,000?
That's because last.fm gets paid for spins:

http://musicmanager.last.fm/help/faq?category=Promotion
"I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?"

6.001 from my experience does not in any way imply a student's focus on computer programming or software development. I've heard horror stories about people in completely unrelated majors ending up in that class and having their brains thoroughly melted. In my personal opinion, Python will be considerably more humane in that department.
Citation?

I thought the '5 trillion' silent run was fluff?
Saasy is an open source alternative for Rails: http://github.com/maccman/saasy
Is that something they finally tell you after you sign the NDA? Getting that information was like pulling teeth, and I didn't even have it until you posted it on Hacker news. :)
How Not to Get a Job Via Twitter
It'll probably slow growth in a good way. It's really a pretty low bar for anyone who's even half serious about doing recurring billing. It seems like a pretty good way to cap who you're providing support to, and it's a small enough monthly fee that people won't even think twice before paying it... assuming they're half serious, again.
What do you do when Twitter is down?

Why not use pingdom for monitoring like Twitter does.

http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?...

We use pingdom at 3b and love it.
A few hidden commands
> I've always had this image of MIT students that doesn't quite mesh with them needing a gentle introduction to programming, but maybe that's not really the case?

If it leads to more (non-CS) students taking a programming class, I'd call it a big win. Other fields can benefit greatly from programming skills. I'd almost go as far as calling it a new form of literacy.
For those of us with non-jailbroken iPhones, it's not yet up on the App Store:

http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/

Hopefully soon...
I believe the y comb. experience is well worth the equity. In fact, many of the company's who try out for y comb. don't need their seed money.

Paul Graham(ish) tech. wisdom, networking opportunities, mind-sharing with past YC founders and VC connections if/when time arises are all huge.

And for me personally all of the above are important X 10 because I'm a tech & SV outsider just beginning to build my shere of influence in the sector.
Tables are, in my opinion, a good way to learn web layout quickly, but I strongly believe that there is value in XHTML which reveals the document's semantics, and tables should be used for tabular data only. While the semantic web is in its infancy, we should try to do our best to create documents which give the future's data miners the best chance of creating linked data from our articles, essays, and appilications.

Furthermore, for developing big sites, CSS saves a lot of money and man-hours because sitewide design decisions can be made by editing a single stylesheet.

And, if he's going to do web dev in the future, and presumably add this project to his resume, his potential employers are not going to be excited to see that he thinks TD's and TR's are the way to go - most professional web dev shops use CSS/DIV based layouts.

Plus, CSS as a language, along with its support in major web browsers, is steadily improving. Old school table layouts, not so much.
Thanks for reply.

>What makes you think that it's going to be easier to get a dedicated, driven hacker with cash (which you don't have yet), rather than with stock (which you could issue right now)?

I don't think anything we're doing is easy. We have no experience in business or programming. This is a big risky move on our part that we're willing to take. Just brothers with the same hobby and looking for help from YC. Good point though, I would issue stocks now that I think of it.

>As each of you individually (meaning the hacker gets 33%), or as each of you together (meaning the hacker gets 50%)?

The hacker will get more than each of us not together.

>Besides the design, what are you and your brother going to contribute, going forward?

Everything else that doesn't require programming but is essential to get our company known. Marketing, press, interviews, etc. Also sharing ideas and suggestions with the coder. Oh yeah, more designs and concepts.
What makes you think it's not accurate? I just don't show it increasing in real time for caching issues. Also, I figured it would make more sense to devote my programming time to making the site and not figuring out an accurate stats counter.
I've always preferred Postgres because of its stability and solid construction.
Ask HN: Why do Unix groups still require re-logging in to register changes?
Why does a user have to log out and back in again before they appear in (or dissapear from) a Unix/POSIX group they've just been added to (or removed from)? How hard would it be to calculate the the list of groups the user is in on the fly, or have a command that refreshed the user's list of groups?

I can understand why it didn't work this way when Unix/POSIX groups were designed and first implemented back in The Ancient Times -- when CPU, memory and disk were at a premium. But times have changed.... Is there a technical/architectural/security reason why this hasn't changed?
"Texas Shouldn't Mislead Science Students"
Noah Stokes - For Hire
Because a company the size of Verisign isn't just one guy at a shell prompt generating keys for customers.

Trust is expensive. It's probably the most expensive thing you can buy in modern society. A thousand bucks is a deal, if you ask me.
Thanks, this is a good suggestion, I'll pass it along. I don't have any experience with CSS frameworks myself - it's just easier for me to do it by hand at this point - but I could see how they could significantly change the learning curve for beginners.
The thought on a different homepage is you will go change it, and in the process discover the fact you can change them at all.

Email is for password recovery.

In that theme, ampersands mean it has updated content. That's just part of the template language. Some have bullets, some highlight the text. It's up to the theme.

It's simpler and you can access it from other computers [and your iphone (i.start.io/jacob)]

Sorry about not putting a description. Forgot! Looks like everyone else sort of did for me though :)
Shouldn't the article be rather called 'How people who make poor financial and investment decisions go broke?'

I don't think the fact that they are athletes is the deciding factor in their financial problems.
Because no one has hacked together a good solution for it, presumably.
They're getting beat up in gym class.
I think ESR has an excellent point, and interpret his saying that to mean that it is not mandatory to release under the GPL if it hinders what you are doing, because actual market conditions have proven that the closed source model can't compete in many ways, thus it is not as large a threat as it can be perceived to be.
It is a risk management thing. What is the probability that humanity figures out a way to cheaply and safely generate enough energy that we can afford to pull global warming gasses out of the air and stop burning fossil fuels? It seems to me that unless you peg that north of 95% you'd want to manage the risk that it doesn't work out.
Seconded. Anyone else have info on this? From personal experience in creating a networked 3d graphics application, latency is a huge issue even for synchronization ... never mind rendering + trying to get it to the client in 1/30th of a second.
exactly. people are starting to share them, which has the benefit of others seeing the service and maybe signing up, but i never intended them to be shared. it's for you to make and then you to use.

there's a few annoying bugs with the RSS bot that i've been meaning to get around to. and i swear i've fixed that delete bug like 5 times!
Choosing a business name
I think at least for the initial startup period it would be a good idea to rely on Paypal or some similar service. The hassle of getting a merchant account might in some cases eat up too much of the founder(s)' precious time. Some successful retailers (like this indie game one: http://2dboy.com/games.php) continue rely on Paypal though they have a large user base. I think the best time to get a merchant account would be once the sales start rising above something like 10K/month or so. In that way, you'll (hopefully) have an account before your sales (again hopefully) hits 100K or so.
Wow.... for what it's worth, I was laughing out loud.

He'd get better traction over at reddit, though.
3 Reasons Why I Wouldn't Do Agile Software Development
Agile software development isn't necessarily appropriate in all circumstances...
Built something very similar and showed it to HN: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=362906

Its tough for a startup to attract big players to use their messaging platform or service because it is difficult to guarantee uptime, reliable service, etc. Might be perfect for mashups and hackers, but they won't pay.

Cool stuff though; I had a lot of fun playing with it.
Any proof beyond the "A friend of a friend" rumor mill excretion?
Just an example. I was imaging something like http://➡.ws/詫 when I said it.
The product is for developers, though. I don't think I've met a developer who uses IE6 in the past, oh, 6 years.
gah, what is with the 800's ms average response time?

is it safe to say that's pingdom's connection?
KHTML is LGPL. WebKit, according to Wikipedia, has WebCore and JavascriptCore licensed under LGPL and the whole WebKit under BSD, which strikes me as slightly odd because, IIRC, LGPL could not be just re-licensed under BSD unless the re-licensing party owned all the copyrights of the parts and I am quite sure Apple does not own all of it.
I took his (Dewar's) programming languages class in the master's program at NYU, and he certainly knows other languages well. He does have an Ada bias, but he had quite an uphill battle getting the master's students to write simple Ada programs during the part of the semester devoted to Ada. His basic complaint isn't about Ada specifically, and was well supported by his actual students' performance in Ada and Lisp, if I recall correctly.
No. You've got that wrong. There are 3 types of valuations for assets:

"Level 1" which means that there is an observable price (a market and price) for this asset - such as a stock market. This is called "mark to market."

"Level 2" which means that there is no observable price. It takes an observable price and uses it as an input to some formula to produce a value. This is commonly called "mark to model" and derivatives are the most widely known products in this area.

"Level 3" asset valuation is where the asset holder makes up a value. Many call this "mark to make believe." Most of the profits in the past couple years in the financial industry were "level 3 profits."

The FASB's view on valuing the balance sheet of companies is to use "level 1" (if it exists), before using the other valuation methods. If there are enough CDOs sold that there is now a price for that CDO, then the only rational thing is to use that price - not the one that was made up. Until FASB 157 came out, if a company wanted to claim that their level 3 assets were worth what they said they were worth, then they could. Now, if there is a "street price" for the assests, then you have to use "mark to market."

http://www.fasb.org/pdf/fas157.pdf
Can you please explain how what you propose differs from Academic Earth? Obviously it has the lectures, and found this link on the page for the first lecture for the Stanford Machine Learning course:

http://see.stanford.edu/materials/aimlcs229/problemset1.pdf

With answers here:

http://see.stanford.edu/materials/aimlcs229/ps1_solution.pdf

I think the readings are available, too. So, we're missing help forums, is that all?

I'm still stunned that all these great lectures are available for free online. All I'm lacking is the time and energy to digest them all.
I did send an email afterwards - forgot at first - hey, I'm new at this.

Ok, it was a 5 min exploit, but I still lolled for most of the evening.
Didn't they know C# has a garbage collector before they started using it?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/185934
Because each process belongs to a set of groups (set via setgroups(2)), and that set of groups isn't necessarily the same as the set of groups to which the process' user belongs.
Brain quirk could help explain financial crisis
It's a big bar if you just want to test out the service to see if it actually converts better than whatever solution you are currently using. Because anyone who is half serious will have other solutions he is already using.
Engineers show off "no jailbreak" iPhone keyboard hack
I've bought numerous certificates in the past and there's rarely been any serious form of vetting. As for the 1 TB / day, I would hope that at $100/client/year you would be able to afford that without even noticing the costs...

Can you give us a breakdown of roughly how much each of those activities costs, or is that private information?
$19 a month is less than I'm paying now with Cybersource.
Demonstrations of future Web technologies
"The OV and DV sadly appear the same to the user."

AFAICT, OV and DV certs appear differently in the newest versions of every browser. Usually OV certs are blue and DV certs are white where EV certs are green.
I find it highly ironic that the same bill that was largely responsible for our banking crisis actually REDUCED ACORN loans, and yet talk radio blames those loans for the whole crisis.
I think the "Freemium" project on Github would also be a good alternative. It builds off of ActiveMerchant and focuses on a subscription model.

http://github.com/cainlevy/freemium/tree/master
To be fair, McCain's top finance guy was Phil Gramm, the author of the bill, and Democratic President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Both sides of the aisle became convinced that less regulation was always a good thing. It was a mass hysteria.

Is this the same bill as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization... ?

Interesting followup by the NYT on Phil Gramm and his policies that led us to crisis: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/economy/17gramm.h...
Development notes: http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/wolfdevelopme...