skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
7 Easy Ways To Avoid Password Theft Online
Here are some tools and simple steps to reduce the chance that your personal information will be stolen via one of your passwords.
Great interview. I didn't mind the one mic, just get a longer handle. :)
Online Reputations and the Limited Value of the 'Website as Medieval City-State' Model
While I'm not familiar with how to sell to corporations here are some things that can prevent a company from doing business with you (I've worked for several large companies and it's been interesting to watch some of the smaller vendors screw up in interesting ways).

1. Some large companies won't deal with you if you aren't profitable or at least well funded. A big concern is what happens if you go out of business. Be prepared to answer that question.

2. Some big companies deal with really big data sets, make sure your application can handle it. For example some companies deal with numbers bigger than 32bit integers. Make sure you can handle that.

3. Make sure there are no memory leaks in your application. I've seen more than one vendor saying that their product requires daily reboots. That's usually a sign of crappy code and business with decent IT staffs can tell.

4. Sometimes being cheaper than the competition is a bad thing. Make sure to have some pricey versions and support plans for companies that feel better when they spend more money.

5. Depending on the companies you sell to and the types of products you build you'll get questions about security compliance of your application / service with things like SAS-70, Sarbanes Oxley, etc. This is particularly important if you keep sensitive data and your client is a public company. Some big companies request a right to audit in order to do business with you (which means they have the right to come over to your business and check things out whenever they want). Be prepared to deal with all this mess.

Hope that helps.
People who steal computer equipment, and probably just thieves in general, tend to be pretty dumb.

A friend of mine had his laptop stolen. A few days later, the thief fired up AOL Instant Messenger on the stolen laptop using my friend's screenname and started chatting, taunting him and so forth.

Well, my friend called AOL and the police. AOL cooperated, his IP address and other info was given to the police, the police found out where he was connecting from, and he was arrested. It turns out he was living in a house with 4 other people with arrest warrants.
Well, I live in San Diego and I didn't use any of this stuff. My first thought when this became a big problem was not to look for mashups.

I didn't even know the Union-Tribune was blogging, I didn't see a link anywhere on the home page because I just came there looking for updates to their map.

The map itself is pretty interesting because it makes heavy use of GIS data, which is orthogonal to Web 2.0 cutesyness.
I've been wanting to try Mercurial for a while now, but I've not gotten around to it.
Finally, IMAP for GMail
No, it turns out basically everything he said was wrong... no serious mental health worker puts any stock into anything Freud said.
I rank distributed version control as one of the most significant advancements in software development in the past decade. Why?

1. Ease of branching and merging.

Branch as often as you want, merge as often as you want, from as many different branches as necessary. The importance of isolating stable releases, bug fixes, experimental features, etc can't be overstated and DVCS makes doing so very easy.

2. Offline use.

All of the popular DCVS provide full functionality within each local repository/branch/whatever. Being disconnected won't keep you from branching or merging, which gets back to #1. It's also very easy to share branches between two laptops for instant mobile collaboration.

3. Ease of sharing changes.

Most DVCS support easy sending of local changes to a project maintainer. This really does make it much more likely that a user will grab a copy of the source, make some improvements, and submit those back to the community. No more messing with diff formats, finding the maintainer's email address, etc.

--

Of all the DVCS, I recommend mercurial (hg) for the best blend of ease of use, performance, portability, etc. Darcs is my real favorite, but currently has issues with conflicts. Bazaar-NG (bzr) looks promising as well. I avoid git like the plague... far too complex and unwieldy for my taste.
I'd recommend darcs or git. Check out Linus' talk on git, he basically spends 70 minutes talking about why a distributed VCS is vastly superior to any centralized system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
I am happy git user
You should add a menu bar. Definitely a menu bar.
Men age faster 'because of Stone Age sex'
This must one of the most serious cases of picking the wrong career. He should have been a fiction writer.
Making development environments for non-programmers that are useful to non-programmers and possibly flexible enough to create real products seems pretty hard.

I know a lot of programmers are very skeptical of anything like that for various reasons.
I thought he was being facetious with "...using modern technologies including Java, Solaris 10, and Oracle..."

He wasn't so I stopped laughing and started worrying for Ning.
Definitely not in the same way. Sex is not a bodily necessity, vs eating and sleeping. We only feel it is because our culture is way oversexed in a very unhealthy manner.

Plus, STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and single parent homes are horribly epidemic. Safe sex is not safe. And, the relational impact is not to be ignored. Sex functions as an important element in preserving a couple's relationship, and flagrantly misusing it undermines yet one more of the few effective bonds between a couple. With all the broken homes in our country, this is not something we want. Finally, restricting sex is an essential part of focusing energy in a society in a useful manner, and today's 'free love' has very much dissipated our cohesiveness and diminished what we can accomplish. Make no mistake, the sexual 'revolution' has messed up our society.
> Finally, restricting sex is an essential part of focusing energy in a society in a useful manner, and today's 'free love' has very much dissipated our cohesiveness and diminished what we can accomplish.

You had a reasonable amount of logic until this point.
I've had a little experience with stuff like what Reddit did. Companies saying "Can I license your product, so I can run it on my own servers?". So far that's been from them contacting me out of the blue, so I don't have experience with searching them out. I think that's a lot tougher and I'm looking forward to this thread.

The best advice I have is to follow-up really well and be super responsive. Be flexible and tailor yourself to the client. Don't be afraid to charge big sums of money, as cstejerean pointed out, larger organizations frequently equate price with quality.

If you've done any professional contract work there are a lot of similarities to that I think. Networking, referrals, not flaking, charging "what you're worth", making happy customers.
Verizon: can you just hurry up and buy AT&T? AT&T has made it plain that they'll never invest in FiOS, and we need it here in SF!
Why Living a Life of Gratitude Can Make You Happy
I was starting to wonder what 16,000 people were doing over there.
Even if all you care about is yourself, this isn't true. Plato explains this in the Republic. Indulging in extreme pleasures dulls their effect, while making us want more extreme pleasure. This makes us more dependent upon the changing world and at the mercy of our bodily desires and others. Not a recipe for a fulfilling life.
Does anyone else NOT see the IMAP options in the settings tab? Is this a feature that hasn't gone live yet?
The article is based on analyzing a birthdate lie on a public forum. I actually always "lie" about my age on public forums where that information can be seen to avoid identity theft. A birthday is a key piece of information for identity thieves.
Why the mod-down?
I confirm, I do not see this option in settings yet.
Respect C Programmers
Recently I just got fed up with unfair criticism of C...
I have the IMAP option (and using it on my iPhone and Mail.app), so it is live... though only to select accounts - dunno how they decide which ones get it first though.

Labels are seen as folders on the mail client, starred messages as flagged, etc... Google did a good job.
Do you remember the name of the startup that you said have tried this a few years ago?
I use mercurial and am very happy with it. All you need to use it is a python implementation.

I haven't checked out the other distributed revision control systems.
Startups need to bother about scaling and automating ops at the right time. Can't be thinking about scaling ops from day one. Choose a reasonably sensible setup/framework that will help postpone large-scale automation.

BTW, don't put ops on a pedestal. In one of the startups I worked with, the ops dept became powerful to the extent of dictating what software could be hosted. Ops is important especially when you start growing, but make sure they don't supersede the dev team.
I don't think dev and ops should be separate at all. Most people's instinct seems to be that once things are big and rolling you should spin new development off from the day to day maintenance. To "Get the developers out of firefighting mode". I think that's when bad things happen. Ops can't really make any fundamental changes and dev is too out of the loop to know (or really care) what the real problems are.

I think the solution is to have the dev team spend lots of time making make things run so smoothly that they can run it themselves with just a few helpers to handle what little work can't be automated.
Just checked and it's there... "Forwarding and POP/IMAP"
Meaning = Data + Structure: user generated structure
Follow up post to earlier one about how adding structure to user generated data increases its usefulness
PBS Station Invokes Google Maps To Help San Diego Residents Flee Fires
The nice thing is that tags are folders and so you can use POPFile (http://popfile.sf.net/) to do automatic tagging.

John.
Why was this post down-modded?
A lengthy treatment of the abortion question:

http://www.isteve.com/Freakonomics_Fiasco.htm

It's too late to give a good summary right now, but basically, it comes down to the question of "who gets abortions?" and counter-intuitively, it's not the thoughtless, last-minute-birth-control people, but rather people who take a careful look at the cost:benefits of unwanted pregnancy, and so terminate--and they are usually smart, non-criminal types.
Do you use either one?
I'm working with a client whose chosen Mercurial. I like being able to group relevant changes into one commit, comment it and then move on to the next commit, without interfering with the trunk.

Mercurial leaves much to be desired in the efficiency of it's copies -- it's file backed, not db backed, using copy on write for copies; whereas Subversion delta encodes everything. While cheap storage is not such a big deal for managing source code, it does matter when using version control for art assets.
now I just need to figure out if there's a way to do multiple label over IMAP
Incorporate in Delaware; bureaucracy is still time-consumming in RO. You could work like that for a while and nobody would bother you (or even know you exist for that matter).

Eventually (i.e. when you have profits and want to take dividends) you're supposed to register your business with Romania. Or you could just go back to the US. At that point you probably have enough money to have lawyers and accountants take the hassle out of doing business.
The MQ extension for Mercurial lets you manipulate and version control the _patches_ as well as the actual code. It's kinda weird -- "higher-order version control".
Not Your Average Summer Camp
Spiritual truths can be so saccharin.
15 Facebook application developers tell their story
I have a totally uneducated hypothesis that women are more prone to casual bisexuality and it's inherently more acceptable because they were kept in harems in prehistoric time.
Nice interview.

I just added a link to a whole bunch of videos of Facebook app developers telling their story complete with presentation slides (from the Community Next conference).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71986

Disclaimer: they are hosted on my site :)
"Unfortunately there is no software which will test the card, and ensure that it's genuine."

Market Opportunity?
"Executive Summary": Hiding the tough realities
Like I said, I support the free movement of people, goods and money. I'm american and live in Europe, and being able to stay here legally was actually quite a hassle, so I have an inkling of what a problem it is for some people.

The practical problem though, as I said, was the large amount of people in a small amount of time that could potentially happen if you completely threw the borders open. 1 million people in India or China is a very small percentage of the population. In a country like Denmark (just as an example), it would represent 20% of the population. That's not likely to happen any time soon, but hopefully we will keep moving in that direction over time.
What are you talking about?

Could we leave the "sheeple" talk on reddit, please?
i think that yelp has one of the best designed sites around. it's really nice to see an AJAXy web 2.0ish environment that i can go to and find voluminous amounts of info about things in my direct real world life.

there aren't many apps out there that bridge the gap between the net and the real world, and they really do a great job.
god i want FiOS sooo bad.
Sounds good, but I'll take a wait and see attitude, let the dust settle, and see what has emerged. The benefits to me of using one aren't enough to justify being on the "cutting edge", so I'll just stick to subversion for now.
I'm not sure I buy it. Most hunter gatherer societies that still exist don't really have harems. Maybe two or three wives in some cases, but my understanding was that big harems didn't really come about until the dawn of agriculture.
Not very convincing.
1. Why do men reach puberty later than females?
2. Men can have children even when they're very old, women can't. This should promote longer lifespans.

Here's another hypothesis. Quoting the Wikipedia article on the Medawar theory of ageing:

"Nature is a highly competitive place, and almost all animals in nature die before they attain old age. Therefore, there is not much motivation to keep the body fit for the long haul - not much selection pressure for traits that would maintain viability past the time when most animals would be dead anyway, killed by predators or disease or by accident."

This is particularly true for men, who were (and still are, to an extent) usually doing more dangerous jobs than women. Thus, they die from accidents or predation earlier, so there is less selective pressure for genes that promote healthy organs in old age.

Another possible scenario: there is more variation in male traits than in females, and age is more than linearly dependent on these traits. Thus, even if E[X] is the same for males and females, for some trait X, the average age E[X^n] will be lower for males.

Evolutionary biology is full of reasonable-sounding explanations for just about anything. As far as I can tell, Occam does not often apply, unfortunately.
yahoo muses of a platform
Imo.Im, offering easy video chat through IM
Ex-Googlers Ready to Start a VC Fund
Nothing frees us from judgement of course. But science is about giving us tools to make better judgements. I don't see how Kant's imperative does that.
Why the iPhone Will Beat the Blackberry
The accidental "fact"
Mozilla's 2006 revenue: $66.8 million
I've been working with brilliant people who don't know how to program. They have been very valuable and very capable of building a business. But in a typical startup you get to that phase where everyone is working full throttle and then what happens is that these brilliant people do stuff like manual data cleansing work for weeks on end simply because they cannot bring themselves to learn how a loop and a regex works. That's a shame. Trouble is that sometimes that kind of work cannot be outsourced because it requires intimate knowledge about the project to do it right.
Thomas Edison ideas
great Interview, we don't give a sh.. about the mics of the cam, what is important is the content! keep going!
Really?!

So you would not have read The Tipping Point, The World is Flat, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and other seminal business works. You would have missed some great memoirs, books about current leaders that might be useful in making valuable decisions on who to elect to lead our country, and a hell of a lot of well written history; all for the sake of being different.
Wolfram: The Simplest Universal Turing Machine is proven by 20 year old student
Top 10 Bootstrapping Tips
<plug plug plug>
Maybe he would have got the gist of some of them from Squeezed Books. Big Idea books are often padded a lot to turn a 10 page idea into a book.
</plug plug plug>
The dawn of agriculture was somewhere around 10,000 years ago. Even assuming that you're right, that's (conservatively) over 300 generations of polygamy.
Sure, but their argument centers around the stone age, which ends with the development of agriculture.
Marvin Minsky: Symbolic vs. Connectionist
I agree that an ops dept. without dev inputs is not good.But the developers usually have little or no say in this. Once you get past the 2nd/3rd round of funding, you will notice management acting like, well, "management".You get an ops dept, and worst of all a 'HR' dept.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ has more articles (some science fiction as well)
Don't slight the entire field of evolutionary biology just because you don't like what you read in a tabloid newspaper. I hope you realize that there's usually a bit more to these stories than you'll find in a four-paragraph newsprint blurb.
Did anyone else read that as Rand Paul?
The only place the stone age is mentioned is in the first paragraph of the newspaper blurb. The study itself is much more limited, and says only that sex-determined differences in lifespan appear to correlate with polygyny across a large number of species.
I believe in reading the whole books because when you read an entire book you remember the gist of it even weeks or months later, but if you read a summary (unless you really memorize it) you hardly remember much of anything after a few weeks.
He proved that sometimes being wrong in an interesting way is very worthwhile.

He was the first to come up with concrete hypotheses of human motivation, that he did not then investigate those hypotheses with a modern scientific rigour is a failing; but he did ask the interesting questions.
That's an interesting observation, and not something I'd thought of.

My hope with the site is to balance out the 'lesser involvement' that comes with not buying and reading a book, with discussions of books so that people can discuss the application and nuances of the Big Idea, especially as it applies to their own lives. I'm not getting much traction with that though, so far.
Do you have a link to the original somewhere? What I've seen elsewhere (I think it was Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, which is probably out of date at this point) is that male/female size ratio is also an indicator of polygyny, and that in comparison with other species, yes, humans are, but not to the large degree that some other animals are. That would fit in with the 2 or 3 wives sometimes seen in the hunter/gatherer societies more than big harems.
Special ones for freelancing. I had good results with Jobserve, but I am not sure how popular they are in the US? I did not upload my resume on Jobserve, only contacted a few agents who were searching. They took me on file and that was it. I uploaded my CV on Gulp.de, and got one contract from there, but it took a while.
Yeah, I know. I meant to say that the article is not very convincing and thus that it (arguably) shouldn't deserve much attention. I feel the same way about most science articles in the mainstream press.

Unlike all the other hard sciences I know, it is very hard to demonstrate or contradict anything in evolutionary biology. Thus, one should be especially careful when reading about it.
Porn Set Free: Age Record Keeping Deemed Unconstitutional (Title 18 U.S.C. 2257 Struck Down?)
Google signs deal to buy Nielsen TV data
It is not that simple.

I've found there's set of tasks, particullary administration of *nix boxes, that are too boring to be made in day hours, so I schedule them to the night.

On the other hand, I don't think that any startup can waste their founders' wake up hours. They're simply too effective to be spent on crappy things.

What's interesting, most of the time management techniques tend to overlook this aspect.
Funny. Seems that programmers wish they can design. And designers wish they can program. And both parties feel bad.
A Google Reality Check
Point of interest: The Telegraph is not a tabloid but a broadsheet.
Most startups _do_, don't they? That was definitely the case at the company I worked at over the summer. My normal hours were something like noon-2am... all-nighters weren't too uncommon either. Sometimes you're too tired to be productive, but other times it seems you're just tired enough to really nail it down... sort of like Ballmer Peak (http://xkcd.com/323/)
Debuggers Considered Harmful?
Sex is not a bodily necessity

On the contrary, from a biological/evolutionary perspective, it is the only reason we exist (i.e. to make more of ourselves).
Businesses in general are not looking to buy products or services. They are looking to solve their own problems. This is NOT a discussion about your product or service. It is a discovery of the thing that bites them in the ass (that they would do just about anything to get rid of).

As you meet people (and you need to be out there in order to do this), you'll have to let them know what you do or have in order to get the discussion going. After that, the discussion is entirely about their problem.

"What do you do?"

"We have a web service that does <your offering>."

"Interesting. We've never been able to <their problem>."

"Really? Why is that?" OR

"Really? Tell me more about that?" OR

"Really? Then why don't you <something you know works>. We've had a lot of success helping <whoever> do that."

You get the idea.

Once you help them identify and articulate their problem, one of 2 things will happen, either you drive the dialogue into the next step in the process or you turn and run the other way. Either way, you both win.
I wonder why this post isn't getting any love?
Scientists Generate Powerful Antimatter Ray
Encouraging words for designers.
iPhone Mystery: 1.4 Million Sold, 250,000 Never Activated
I don't, but I seem to remember that they were European and at their release wore all white or something flashy...
Would it be too late if you buy from a shady source and if they know that they are fake? They might not accept exchanges or returns.
After major projects fail, Wi-Fi reborn as cities refine approaches
If I thanked you for posting this article, does that mean the advice works?
Web 2.0 & The California Fire Crisis
Whatever the case, it is a rag.
I gave it some love.

I especially like the part about "You see, most of you Haskell/Lisp/Erlang gurus are true intellectuals and are very capable. You write very well: many great 'functional-style programmers' like you have nicely written blogs filled with sacks of good thoughts and ideas.

However, when I look around I rarely see any results of your work."

It seems his argument is that there is some evolution at work in the marketplace. Instead of arguing the "bestness" of language X or Y, simply look around and see what is thriving and what isn't. That would be a great discussion to have here. I'd add more, but I think I'd sound like a troll. Good article.