skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a purely technical point of view, I agree that it's more secure.
But from a psychological point of view, isn't this system somewhat similar to security through obscurity? That is, isn't it an incentive to not care about the rest (keeping the software up to date, monitoring the logs, etc.) because you now think that your SSH server is in a safe place, out of reach? Because, now, you may tend to think that nobody will seriously attack it (whereas you just filtered out the harmless, mass-scanning attackers).

I know you wrote "Of course, this doesn't replace making sure that the SSH server is up to date [...]" at the end of the article; but, well, most programmers will also tell you "you must document and test your software, brush your teeth three times a day, etc." :)
Hi, I'm in Central London currently working on a start-up part-time and looking to pursue it full-time from early next year. I would be really interested in meeting hackers to share ideas, if you guys at Songkick organise something count me in.
I share the concern about security through obscurity. But this isn't intended to be obscure (it's not like I change the port to 12222 and hope no one finds it). It's a technique like port knocking which relies on the algorithm being totally open but the underlying hash being unpredictable. All the security here comes from the passphrase + hashing combination which is designed to make the actual port difficult to determine.

John
I had the same idea but I tried approaching them and couldn't get them to try and test my algorithm. Cold calls in that industry are very difficult...

I don't want them to take my word for it, just supply me with more test data and I could send them my results.
You are right there are quite a few problem types in ML and a lot of different algorithms but because my idea is a basic insight into something that is missing in existing algorithms, I've been able to incorporate the change into several different algorithms.
Copyright isn't forever. It originally expired 17 years after the death of the author. Unfortunately Disney pushed for extension of copyrights every time their key copyrights (Micky mouse & friends) were about to expire and have been able to push extending them quite unreasonably.
Added my email to my YC news profile.
Lets try to stick to something ethical with either a positive impact on the world or at least without a negative one.

Don't want the spam in the worlds Inboxes to be on my hands.
There seems to be a group of people intent on submitting everything that appears on reddit or digg and it's sad.

Can't we get more unique links rather than this whole sloshing around of whatever's going around as email attachments?
If my memory serves correct, back when DOS was around it was a Zoo of many Oses, basically each hardware platform had some variant and very incompatible OS. So I think that part of the analogy holds.
Nice... PG, you should open source parts of News.YC so people can add features to it :-).
The PayPal mafia
interesting, as a user, I could swear that the Windows Mobile people hate my guts. Never been a developer of it though.
Usually done using:

(function(var1, var2) {
// var1 and var2 are now bound within this block
})(val1, val2);

Why use this instead of...

var var1 = val1;
var var2 = val2;
// do stuff with var1 & var2

It's because if you have any closures within the block, they'll capture the bindings of var1 and var2 instead of their values. That means that if you're inside a loop, your bindings will be overwritten each time through, so you could end up creating a dozen closures that all do the same thing.

Here's an example from a JQuery patch I did a couple weeks ago:

http://dev.jquery.com/attachment/ticket/1737/bug1737.patch

Before it used an eval statement to directly write the value into the source code of the closure. After, it captures the value with a let-binding and then returns a closure over the current value instead of the current binding.
ML is a very interesting field.
Great resources can be found on:
http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/machine.html
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ai.html

Start by reading and completely understanding a few of the simpler machine learning algorithm (Backpropagation neural networks for example), how&why they work.
and continue from there.
Never said it was a search algorithm.

That is what I am trying to find in this thread ideas on where the solutions are most valuable and how to pitch them.
I know there are people who trade algorithmically (I'm one of them). I just wanted evidence of one person who had made billions from it.
I stopped reading on page 3, because it seems to me that the "physical grounding hypothesis" is complete bullshit. Where is the "physical grounding" aspect if I want to build a search engine for the web? It's all just information.

Not saying that getting physical can not yield interesting results, but to state that it is the only possible way to program intelligence seems just wrong.
Is it related to a Wide Stance?
Thanks very much for your feedback man. We're aware of the issue that occurs with a few bands (e.g. Underworld) and are fixing that. Imagine my horror when I was listening to one of my favourite London producers Burial and got recommended bands like Grave, Funeral, Resurrection. That'll be fixed soon.

We're also going to make the recommendations much more tour focused as you suggest. The goal is to really separate the signal out from the noise so you know which of the hundreds of small gigs going on are most likely to interest you.

We're also going to have user preferences for the recommendations (particularly how obscure you want them to be and whether you only want to see artists on tour. RIP B.I.G.)

Really interested to talk more at the hacker meetup. I've got a ton of emails so should be a good group.
Try the specific kdd people there as listed on this paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1233321.1233326

I'm sure an opportunity to prove your algorithm will pop up. Its the sort of field where you can fool yourself sometimes by not being careful enough with training and testing data, so random people off the internet generally don't seem worth the trouble to an established researcher.
[SF] Weebly is hiring!
Interview tip: noisy, poorly lit bars are bad interview locations unless you have very good equipment and editing skills.
Ian

Gordon from Project Playfair (now hypernumbers.com) - we met at Seedcamp...

We have an alpha SDK out at the moment - we should show it to you before I head back to Scotland in a couple of weeks...

Just used Songkick - stuck in an obscure artiste and it turns out he's playing in Edinburgh 2 weeks after I get home - you seem to be serving some tasty dogfood there son...

Drop us a line at gordon blah-blah hypernumbers.com

Gordon
Gordon

Hypernumbers.com just gone into alpha...

Linlithgow/Edinburgh
Real Geek Heart Beats in Xkcd's Stick Figures
Q&A with the Operator of TheFunded.com
From the article:
"Robert Stein made, in total, about $250,000 on Tetris. He could have made a great deal more, of course, but Stein had trouble getting Atari and Mirrorsoft to pay him royalties for the (bogus) rights he sold them....In 1996, with the financial backing of Henk Rogers, he [founder Pazhitnov] organized The Tetris Company LLC, and is now finally getting royalties for his creation."
What does this mean for songkick?
Looking at the all the positive responses to the Hacker News post "Are you a UK- based hacker..." posted by "dood", it seems readers of this site might well appreciate a forum area on the site for networking other YC readers or YC seed companies. There is a huge amount of goodwill amongst YC readers and this may be better accessed through a new part of the YC site rather than "Hacker news", eg perhaps you can build something in to allow readers to describe their skills/ideas and the type of YC readers they are either hoping to contact or happy to help etc.Just a thought.
The puzzle was fun. So what are people supposed to do with the secret code, email it to you? Or is there a place for it that I missed? Anyway, good way to make it interesting!
Inbox 2.0 Makes Me Sad
Number 1 might just be due to the falling dollar.
Does anyone know if Xobni patented any concepts they use in their application? It will be interesting to see how this plays out and if it affects them at all.
I Joined A Startup To Help Bring Some Simplicity To Our Complex World
hypernumbers.com in Linlithgow - drop me a line...

gordon blah-blah hypernumbers dot com
Is There Economic Sense in a WSJ-Digg Marriage?
I just use non-dictionary-based passwords and denyhosts.
Are you saying that if someone releases a good new Lisp dialect, then it will become popular?
Mitchell, Norvig, and "Probabilistic Robotics" by Thrun.
Modern-day tech startups tread carefully
Very knowledge intensive, isn't it? Sounds as hard as passing the Turing test, to me.
ImageMovers Digital gives Bay Area's film image another dimension
Who knows, maybe in a few years: the Y Combinator mafia?
Lessons Learned from Facebook Start-Up Widget Makers
As businesses with eyes on Facebook, MySpace and the like look to take advantage of the social networking economy, they should be sure to heed the advice of widget makers who have already succeeded.
You've taken my comment on a personal level in that you think I'm talking about an individual. I would form a company around the idea and target investing.
Linear algebra will not help you fine tune many algorithms. The best math to know for fine tuning algorithms is how big O notation works, and be able to calculate how long things take to run.

The second thing that will help you is studying data structures algorithms. What is the average case for a search over x items? How long does it take to insert into a linked list? This way you can begin to identify bottlenecks, and get an idea as to how to approach solving problems with performance.
Yup, niche market for mining and quarrying: quarrysell (dot) com. We are based in Loughborough (outside Nottingham/Leicester)

Join out network on Facebook if you are around:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6710636524&topic=3...
I was trying to eliminate the one counter to make it faster, but I see your point ...you just saved a bunch of lives, and got yourself an up vote!...I looked at the other possible solutions and they all seem to take a while, but I am planning a escape, are you in?
The Biggest Social Graphs
Hi, I don't think I'm a hacker (unfortunately I'm a lawyer) in Birmingham UK, but may be looking for any interested hackers to collaborate with me in overhauling the provision of legal services to people via a personal startup. If anyone wants to share any ideas or comment,I'd be grateful.
This is interesting. I personally think, my phone book and email's address book, (some people might want to add their IM here too), show my most accurate and complete social graph in the world, and no FB, or combination of any other sites for that matter would do justice
Could you rename the title to "still consumes my memory" or something like that please?
"Humans are very good at detecting patterns, but rather poor at detecting randomness." This is so true.
Statistics on Google's OpenSocial platform end users and Facebook users
Bigger Station, Bigger Income
Bebo Launches 'Open Media' A New Vision for Social Media and Entertainment
Respond Quickly To Follow-Up Questions From VCs
VCs will often ask you to email them your PowerPoint slides, a business plan and a financial model at the end of the first meeting (if you haven't already). In order to keep the momentum of the process, you should prepare these materials before the meeting so that you can send them immediately after. Doing so will create the perception that you are organized and on top of everything...
Nice, especially how you track the comments together with the posts.

My way is more compact (http://www.seeksift.com/asp?act=relatedsrc&id=index&...) but I'll look at keeping the comments up-to-date the way you do.
Angel Returns Outpace VCs'
A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails
Scientists Find that Low Self-Esteem and Materialism Goes Hand in Hand
YC summer startup, Splashup launches (formerly Fauxto)
Read access to the raw data would be great. If we can get it as JSON, that would be awesome!
Recorded Music Sales Hit a Downbeat
Will GMail become an OpenSocial Container?
There were a lot of these industry insider, self-congratulatory articles floating around the media back in 1999. The only difference then was that the Sopranos was only in it's first season so it was not yet considered cool to do a photo shoot in which you posed as an organized crime figure.

GIVE ME A BREAK.

Articles like this make me think that the latest tech boom is already over. This is just a trailing indicator.
Hmm, but wouldn't it be annoying if it loads stuff on top while you're reading/clicking something? You'd lose your place on the page. I suppose I could create gmail-style update messages you have to click on. That loses the medusa-head character, though :)

I'm using page load as a surrogate for 'mark all as read', which keeps track of the state of the divider and so on. Keeps the UI simple.

follow is intended to be something you periodically focus on. With auto-reload stuff flows past you so fast I'm not sure what the dashboard-like view would convey above the fold. Especially since even new stuff vanishes below the fold on many occasions. Making something you can just glance at is much harder, I think.
My wife and I have watched the trailer several times and we love it. Two of our friends are also excited about it.

I don't know how you will distribute it, but remember that you have four customers willing to pay kronor here in northern Sweden!
I think if you are doing something you are passionate about self-discipline will arise naturally. You'll want to be better at what you are doing and so you start waking earlier, focusing more, turning down potential distractions, etc. Maybe most importantly you start meeting successful people in your fields and start to replicate their more productive habits.
Facebook exec grilled on creepy ads
Hey Ian

You'll like this;

I've been in talks with a London-based investor. At the end of one of our meetings, the investor was checking his emails and pulled-up the Songkick powerpoint via an angel network they'd signed-up to! Then the following week you guys hit TechCrunch! That was pretty exciting and inspirational for me!

I'm eager to meet some fellow founders & hackers - so I've got to make OCC London and these hacker meetups...
I'm with you. Hell, even 1000 days is a long time, I'd give 'er after 800. If I'm wrong, such is life.

If I'm right, I saved myself 22 years in solitary confinement.
Purple on black hurts.
This article also gave me an eery 'deja vu' feeling, even though PayPal is not a startup anymore.

I would also consider it a bad omen having it featured on CNN and Fortune.
Beautiful web design, excellent execution of the app!

Small bugs:

File -> Exit still says Fauxto

I couldn't capture an image from my webcam. I'm using latest Firefox, Flash & Macbook Pro... tried all sources listed and all I got was a black image.

Feature request:

Ellipse tool... make it like PS so that I can constrain it to a circle.

All in all, the best image editor I've seen so far. Congrats.
Hosting recommendations for startup
Hello,

Can anyone recommend good hosting services for a new startup?

An older post here mentioned Rackspace and Serverbeach. Are they still recommended?

I've actually had good experience with GoDaddy as an economical service in the past, but am interested in current opinions on hosts suitable for a startup.

Thanks!
A VC: My Facebook Ad Stats (complete failure of FB ads)
What kind of a stack are you running?
What are your memory/CPU requirements?
How much bandwidth will you need? Are you serving video or just text/images?

Anyway... it all depends on what your req's are...
Didn't yc also fund Pixoh/snipshot?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78815
Look good. Can you make it so, one can read the comments as well?
No, it's not about size. Of course not.

I was referring to performance and ease of adapting the JVM's way of doing things internally to very different languages. This is quoting a number of parrot and jython developers. I have the links around here somewhere..

Why do you think jython et all are so terribly far behind? It's not for shortage of interest, more because the likely possible outcome of this could only be sub-par.
3 Serial founders share their Success Hacks
Ah, so your server only accepts 1 connection at a time on a given listening port? That is good protection.

I didnt realize there was a TCP standard for the max acceptable amount of retransmissions. But yeah if you can account for this with a pad then you should always be safe.

If you ever opensource your network code I'd love to see it.
Hi nickb,

Thanks for your response. I was going to get into details, but figured my requirements are so typical it wouldn't be worth the extra description.

This is for a standard LAMP-based app with a minimum of graphics. I expect traffic volume to be low for the near future and have no heavy-duty requirements for video and such.

Basically I'd like to find an economical service that can scale with my user base.
Same here regarding webcam. Webcam didn't light up. (MacBook)
How to Email a Stranger
I plan to open source it once I get it a little cleaned up :-) It's on my TODO list.

John.
How about D. E. Shaw? I'm not sure how much he's made, but it's surely quite a lot.
http://linode.com/
I wouldn't be shocked if it becomes the example app provided with Arc.
Hi Cibermole. hows about meeting in London. I'd like to show you some cool sw that you're gonna like. need a little of your time.
H
Top 100 Business Blogs
Every similarity between today and the tech bubble does not necessarily indicate we're doomed for a bust. There are self-congratulatory articles in nearly every industry (economics, sports, politics, etc), but that doesn't mean you're on the tail end of a bubble.
American Hacker: Frank Lucas Waxes Poetic on the Dangers of Outside Investment
I don't know if your referring to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64795 as the older post, but it is only a month old. The web hosting industry is pretty cyclical, but within a month, the data should still be relevant.
"I couldn't capture an image from my webcam. I'm using latest Firefox, Flash & Macbook Pro... tried all sources listed and all I got was a black image."

Go to fauxto, right click the window and click settings, then the webcam tab, then select your webcam in the drop-down list. On a MacBook Pro you need to select "USB Video" to use the built in iSight.
I am the affiliate coordinator over at Vidoop and just wanted to mention that we have an affiliate program as well. It is a simple sign up process and is basically the same as myopenid.com's affiliate sign up. Another point to make is that offering users a few recommendations to a few "good" OIP's is good practice and let's them know you are helping them select a reputable OIP. The sign up is at affiliates.vidoop.com
If Elected, Barack Obama Would Name a Chief Technology Officer
foodawg,

Thanks--that looks better than the thread from 148 days ago I had bookmarked (whatever date that happens to be):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29011

Is there a search function here I'm missing? I did search for search to parse prior posts but withdrew without the words of the most.
i found a form to submit this but when I went again to "contact us" i didn't find the feedback form

bug: when creating text if the text box is empty and click somewhere in the image new text layers are created with the previous textbox remaining active.

also simple users wont be familiar with the layers concept so if they try to create some text and right afterwards try to paint with the brush because the background layer is not selected it will seem to them it doesn't work because they wont be able to paint.

other than that its obvious it's great work

* oh and i was impressed when I even found layer effects
Just curious: how does Adobe's plan to release the web-based Photoshop play into your strategy?
"redacted"
The canonical place to find hosting recommendations is http://www.webhostingtalk.com .

If you're looking for information about where YC-funded startups are hosted, here's the latest numbers from wikipedia's list of non-acquired, non-defunct YC companies:

4 SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
3 Layered Technologies, Inc.
3 ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.
2 NoZone, Inc.
2 Rackspace.com, Ltd.
1 Amazon.com, Inc.
1 BitPusher, LLC
1 Carnegie Mellon University
1 Columbus Network Access Point, Inc.
1 Global Netoptex, Inc
1 ServePath, LLC
1 Simpli Hosting, Inc
impressive, although i dont think i'd ever really use it. its surprisingly advanced, which is good - but being an advanced user, theres NO reason to NOT just get photoshop.
All that ass kissing aside in the article, it really is amazing how many people blossomed from that one startup. It's cool to see people that make a ton of jack and yet are still very young and idealistic about the world. Thiel's singularity ideas may sound "off" in mainstream media but the fact that he can still manage the money and resources to support those ideas in a meaningful way is sweet.
Delicious Junkies Unite.
I was wondering if we can exchange delicious ids here.(mine is bstk2000) It will help in finding out what other stuff we are all interested in besides startups. It was discussed here recently that this community could not be launched in that direction even after startup news became hacker news. Perhaps delicious can give the final push.
Exactly, Ruby Isn't An Insurgency
OpenID and smart cards in Estonia...
http://billaut.typepad.com/jm/2007/11/do-you-know.html
Nice job guys ... but why is Posterize in there? Having been a hardcore photoshop user since v2.0 I can't ever find a reason for that filter!
But it was a noisy, poorly lit bar in Detroit!
Those are proof of the "untapped potential" thing, because how many people really install apps on them?
hmm i have a joyent accelerator. It is rock solid, except trying to get a recent version of python is a royal pain (python 2.3 comes installed, you have to wrangle a bit with pkgsrc to get python 2.4..).

If you use python, and don't mind burning hours trying to just get your environment up, but really want solaris and their nas storage (which is really nice), this is a good option. However, there are alot of really cheap ubuntu/xen based vps's out there that are Really affordable and ready to take on your application in its early days. From experience i would recommend that for python developers.
"Initially, it was easy to dismiss this widget economy as a microcosm for another Web bubble. ... But in reality, analysts say widget makers are not only creating innovative, user-friendly products, they're also making a bunch of money--real money--from ads."

Let's see, 7000 applications for FaceBook, and over 100 are added each day? I'll just pull a number out of the air and say that only the top 100 or so are profitable to some interesting degree (and if I remember correctly, that's being generous.) Assuming all applications are equal, that's like a 1-in-70 chance of making money. And even if you do kick-off a hugely successful application inside of FaceBook, the goal is what? That you've got a great solution to users and can now spread to other solution areas? Or that you're just another reason for users to use FaceBook?

I must be missing it.
SV would be the ideal. I've lived there, loved it, and found a huge melting pot of talent. But tech has to be grown everywhere - there are VC's everywhere, angels everywhere, talent everywhere. It still takes the right people with the right progression of ideas...anywhere.
..alex.
Thanks for letting me know!

Look forward to meeting you soon.
Heard about this at a meet-up in SF;
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/hosting.jsp
Apple outsells Vista with Leopard in Japan
tongans. lots of them.