skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How so?

I think that users do need to be educated to not enter their passwords until they're redirected to their identity provider (and to confirm their "SiteKey" if the provider supports it). But it hardly "teaches users to fall prey to identity theft".

The fact is that most users end up using the same passwords over and over again. Most websites (ecommerce and banks excluded) don't bother using any sort of encryption for logging in at all.

OpenID goes a long way to lessen those risks. Additionally, integration into browsers could eliminate the risk of phishing.
Two points.

0) I've always been extremely strong in English. I tended to get high marks in it, and according to IQ tests and the SAT, my greatest strengths are in language. Pointers gave me some trouble, the * in declarations strikes me as a terrible syntax, and corners of C syntax in general often strike me as poorly chosen. Despite this, my experience does not mimic yours, either in the trouble I had with pointers, or the eventual resolution. One day, it just clicked, and I rarely made mistakes with it again. It came to me naturally after I took a break from C and picked up Python: once I was confident in the difference between a, array[a], array[a][b], etc, in both construction and accessing in python (I originally did a mental auto-squashing similar to that in Perl, despite not knowing Perl), pointers were no longer problematic. For what it's worth, I was a self-taught newbie at this point.

1) Pointers are not ints. Casting between pointers and ints is BROKEN, as they are not the same size on many platforms, including my primary one, amd64 with linux+gcc. Please, please don't advocate doing this, or thinking about it this way.
Eat your heart out Timothy Ferriss.
Secrets In Websites II
OSAF in Transition - Mitch Kapor on Chandler
Why Software Careers Suck
The Apple Product Cycle (it's that time again)
I'm a buffoon.
I'm not entirely sure playing the lottery and speculating are such good ways of making money. Someone who's in it solely for the money is probably going to start a business before doing either of these things.
Yeah, I hate it when I reorder my quotes and periods and people get killed. No, wait... I don't think that's really a good analogy.
One Laptop per Child in America
Actually in England the rule is the other way around. It is arguably more consistent.
Max speed is 70 Kilometers per hour.
Agreed. The fix being the "Print" link, of course:

http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...

Though it's silly to have to jump through that hoop, as tucked away and hidden as it is.
Those product design quotes are fucking great. Read 'em.
I suspect we're missing some context. :)
The power of SEO...
I've always found the idea of living each day[1] as though it were my last to be odd. If I knew that a day was going to be my last, there are potentially fun or useful activities to choose from which carry a very high risk. That day would be the day to do things that have a significant chance of killing you any time you do them... and by "significant", I mean greater than five percent, say, not things like skydiving.

[1] Some versions of this idea use hour, and I've heard someone say "second". How do you live each second as if it were your last? No one who does this would last long; there's no point in doing most of what we do if we're going to die in the next second, right? But maybe people who say "hour" or "second" are just betraying that they don't really mean it.
Maybe I slightly exaggerated.
File under: people with no taste who don't really deserve to be successful.

Even if you don't think "doesn't deserve" applies, still file under no taste.

If you want to be tasteless and really big, try getting an executive position in Wal-Mart or something.
"As a Rails programmer, the more popular Rails is, the more worth are your Rails skills."

This is still subject to the laws of supply and demand. Your Rails skillz will be valuable at a time like now - where there are a healthy number of startups using the framework for development, and a sufficient shortage of experienced Rails devs to hire. However, if Rails became popular enough that everyone decided to learn it and the number of available jobs didn't shift in proportion, you'll find your skillz less of a commodity.
[x] #00FF00

It's not easy being green.......
I think there's two separate issues raised by Dreamhost's post.

1. Should Rails have better shared hosting support?

2. Is it nice for a business that wants to make more money by having a new feature implemented to demand that an open source project make their desire a priority, without any offer of quid pro quo?

I don't see much room for debate in either. 1. Of course 2. Of course not.
I agree this is an issue with the C syntax. I always used to write my pointer declarations as:

char* p

instead of

char p

That way there was no clash with when you are dereferencing p -

p

Admittedly this approach may not help entirely with more complex examples, like a pointer to a function that returns a point to a function that takes two pointers to void...or something. Indeed having languages that create less accidental complexity is a huge win.
hmmm... apparently some of stars got removed. Point was that the star goes with the type, not with the variable name, except for dereferencing
I think it's important not to confuse OAuth with OpenID. I think OAuth might be very useful indeed, and I'd like to see it succeed. Tying it to the Titanic will not help.

I have finally found one clear use case for OpenID: sending out login passwords to newly hired consultants without using cleartext email. Of course, this isn't the kind of killer app that will make OpenID a household word.

Among other things, OpenID is: confusing even to geeks, not especially secure, not solving a particularly important problem, an open-ended set of external dependencies on provider code that you do not control, very poorly branded (because, you know, everyone loves having their ID checked), poorly marketed, and often assumed to be something it isn't.

From a site developer's standpoint, OpenID solves the wrong problem. Nobody is avoiding your site because they have to remember a password. That requirement hasn't killed eBay, Gmail, Amazon, PayPal, Facebook, Plentyoffish, HotOrNot, news.yc, or any other site in history. Frankly, if people are avoiding your site, it's probably because it sucks. Spend your time making your site suck less.

A good way to make your site suck less is to eliminate the need for signups at all, to delay that need as long as possible, or to get the user so excited about the site that they barely notice the signup process. OpenID doesn't do these things. The problem with signups is not the typing, remembering the passwords, or even securing the passwords -- it's the mental overhead associated with deciding whether or not you want another relationship in your life. Can you trust this new site? Will it waste your time? Will it spam you? Will it hit you up for money, forcing you to feel embarassed as you say no over and over? Will your friends find out that you signed up on the site? Will the site plaster your Amazon purchase history all over the open Internet?

Signing up for a site is exactly like making a new friend, and if you think it would be great to automatically be friends with everybody in the world, find a recent multimillion-dollar lottery winner and ask them what that's like. Managing your relationships takes thought, attention, and judgement. Nobody's automated that yet.
"I wish him [Bill Gates] the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
Reddit Comment: YCHN Comment: On learning and C pointers
Support Indie Mac Developers and Charity.  Save $.
The fact is that most users end up using the same passwords over and over again.

I'm not sure, but it may be better to take the chance that the user has only one password, than to give that user an OpenID account and remove all doubt.
Here's that Stanford speech quoted in the article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
2. is of course as well. Rails stands to benefit from having hundreds of shared hosting services promoting their product. The original post wasn't "Rails should support Dreamhost" it was "Rails should support shared hosting."
That is most definitely the case now. The supply is greatly outstripped by the demand.
I think it is explicitly their point to be a studio. They aren't a tech startup.

E.g. "Virtual Artists will offer professional writers deals to develop and produce films"
The developers are probably not getting much money, if last year is any guide.

http://daringfireball.net/2006/12/iniquities_of_the_selfish
MacHeist groups a bunch of small Mac software publishers together, they each put one application into a discounted bundle, and then they give 25% of all sales to charity. You get to choose which of 10 charities you support (or you can split the money evenly between them.) A few of the apps are "locked" out of the bundle until sales quotas are met.

The publishers get extra exposure and incremental sales, the charities get a sizable donation, and the customers get a deal (assuming, of course, that they were going to purchase any of the software titles at full price.) It's a neat marketing scheme, especially when you factor in the "Locked" software aspect which promote a slight viral effect. I bought the bundle mainly for a new copy of Snapz Pro X, which is still locked...which is approximately 5% of the reason I'm here pimping MacHeist (I said it was viral, dammit!)

I doubt this is completely new to most people, but it may serve as a reminder to some. It may have even been posted here already...? I personally missed out on last year's bundle because I kept putting it off and then forgot about it until the promo was over. I thought I might help others avoid the same fate this year. (I bought my bundle early this year, just in case.)
Yeah, wouldn't blowing your savings on hard drugs be the rational thing to do in this situation? I agree the saying is kind of weird.
Remind me not to invite that dude to my party. One math trick and all of the women are out the door.
Awesome. Thanks for the tip.
His attitude seems to be that it's his framework and he can do what he wants to.

No. His attitude is that it is your framework, so get to work!

People seem to think that Rails would run just fine on their $5.99 web hosts if the core team would deign to assert its magical force of will. Well, as my old boss used to say: "them" is "us". If you know how to make Rails run, profitably and reliably, on a cheap-ass shared host, go start the business and enjoy your profits. If you don't know, stop assuming that it's because DHH and Ezra Z. are holding out on you. They don't know, either.

Rails is all of four years old, and (unlike PHP) was not designed with the explicit goal of supporting shared hosting. I like Rails, and am glad you like it too, but stop expecting miracles.
Unix clock just rolled over from 1,199,999,999 to 1,200,000,000
I appreciate the link wmf...I read Gruber's blog, but I missed that post.

I agree with John's premise that "Just because someone is satisfied with a bad deal doesn't mean it isn't a bad deal."
I'm not, however, going to get morally outraged over another person's business decision to participate in a transaction just because a third-party doesn't think the remuneration is equitable. The indie developers that are participating obviously liked the deal they were offered well enough, right? Otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to participate. I think griping about a deal that you agreed to after the fact is unprofessional. If you were a schmuck and agreed to a bad deal, you just have to suck it up and learn from it.

I can think of one great reason I would personally consider participating in this "inequitable" arrangement if I were a Mac shareware developer: any future revenue from upgrades are not shared with MacHeist. I don't see where Gruber takes that into consideration. I had never heard of a few of these applications until MacHeist promoted them, yet I'm likely to upgrade any of the apps I actually like as they release new versions. MacHeist is a form of advertising, and all advertising is somewhat of a calculated risk...this promotion will probably pay off for some of the developers and be a waste of time for others. Either way, it's not my job to count my neighbor's coins for them.
Funniest comment:

"This is why you want to make sure to get laid in high school."
TEDsters build site to track Kenyan violence
Why do you say that? Did he do a lot of SEO? Anything questionable?
I could swear that POF used to spam the craigslist personals. Does anyone else remember?

I vaguely recall a lot of fake profiles, with POF links.
You're right, he most certainly doesn't deserve to be successful.

I love this line from nyt: "Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience."

You have to have a really screwed up interface to make someone call it "visually painful."
As open social will gain more popularity these kind of solutions will be necessary. OpenID is for your users, OAuth is for other sites and services you wish to communicate with, and DataPortability is for the whole thing being portable from one service to another. I don't believe the world will remain in the chaos it is at this moment and a unified open-standardized platform will be a must. Don't look who don't, be a pioneer and implement it. The major players will follow.
I don't think anyone is expecting miracles, or for DHH to make it his personal goal to adapt Rails for the shared hosting environment. The original blog was simply pointing out that if Rails wants to see the kind of widespread adoption PHP has, that's what the community is going to have to do. It's correct.

People keep misinterpreting or misunderstanding the argument.
So there's a 27 year old guy who was a COBOL expert 10 years ago (that's 1998 at age 17). He's frustrated with the corporate treadmill but never quit. And now he feels let down by Paul Graham. Something's not quite logical about this.
Rails stands to benefit from all sorts of things, but who's going to put in the effort to make them happen? Open source is all about scratching your own itch. If shared hosting support is itchy for Dreamhost they should be scratching it, not blogging about how they have an itch and someone else should scratch it for them, for free, and now.
Again and again, the question comes up, but no one ever asks "Might space exploration be a BETTER use of all of the money that we waste on all of the other crap in this country?"

What if we as a society could just get together and call off the NFL and britney spears for a year or two and use all of that money for more worthwhile endevors. And yes, of course, "the war" (whichever one we are in at the moment) goes without saying.
it warms my heart to see that someone else noticed this, and that further it was posted to news.yc and upvoted.
What happened to the fink website? Does anyone know?
I think you guys should give him a bit more credit. True, the interface is horrible, and yes, luck was definitely involved, but when you look beyond that, he managed to deliver a service that, in my opinion, filled the needs of many - a completely free of charge dating site. Many other dating sites are extremely limiting with respects to being able to contact people, often times not even letting users message each other without submitting to a monthly fee.

It may look like crap, and he may have used shady tactics to gain traction, but the guy is making $10 million a year. I'm sure most of you would put up with much more if the reward for doing so was so delicious.
It hasn't really happened to Java, though, even though it has been popular for a while.

So how much does a Rails developer earn at the moment? Anybody want to hire me, for twice the salary of a Java developer?
While we're quoting Drucker: The goal of business is to create a customer.
onhnoes
That's the point. It's inevitable because we're human, we can't remember hundreds of different passwords. Why not allow the user the connivence of logging in once using a single password, and at the same time improve the overall security?

With OpenID, your password is only ever entered in one place: the OpenID provider's login page. When another site wishes to authenticate you it redirects you to your provider where you enter your password then get redirected back to the original site along with a token proving you have authenticated and granted authorization to the site.

The most important thing is that you use a provider that you trust.

A good OpenID provider can actually help prevent phishing and identity theft. For example, myopenid.com (and probably others) lets you select a personalized image that is displayed whenever you're prompted for your password (much like Bank of America and other banks' "SiteKey") and you're supposed to train yourself to never enter your password unless you see the correct image, to prevent phishing (though most of us are smart enough to look at the URL too). They also provide a comprehensive log of every site which has authenticated using your account, so if your password has been compromised it is very easy to find out.

By the way, OpenID doesn't require you authenticate to your provider with a password. It could be done via a SecurID token, or even biometrics. Passwords just happen to be the simplest and most common method.
ff8822 is the one true YC orange.

The orange in the logo is ff6500, but it looks darker on the larger nav bar and with black text on, so you have to compensate.
Taste is not universal. This not PC, but there is a correlation between class and taste in design. The clean, uncluttered design appeals to the 'elite', but the masses just have different taste in things. There are reasons why CNN and Fox News look the way they do.

http://www.graphpaper.com/2006/09-04_class-and-web-design-pa...
You obviously don't know the right kind of women.
I think we're too quick to attribute what we don't understand to just plain luck. I wouldn't underestimate Markus - running a site with 300MM page views per month single handedly is pretty impressive.

One quick observation: it's not an accident that some of the ugliest websites on the internet (MySpace, Craigslist) are also the most popular.
"David Heeneymeeneymeineymoe Hansson"

I enjoyed that.
One thing to note is that he ALWAYS looked at the business case. He realised that to be a "me to" wasn't going to work and so his model was to offer a completely free dating site and make money from advertising. Whilst others obsess with creating great design and how cool they are, this guy just created something that works. I think rather than being negative towards him, we should learn a lesson from him.

On some of the comments below regarding shady tactics, I can't speak for this as I don't know anything about the company. If this is the case, then it's not great, but from Rockerfeller to Steve Jobs this has sometimes been the way of it. I think if we can take some lessons from the good side - ie quick to market, novel approach to making money, and apply them to what we are doing ourselves then that's a good thing
Well said. There is some research out there (sorry don't have time to re-look) which covers "Bad Design" and how it has worked well for some companies. Often I think people like these sites as they appear to be amateur and not run by some slick corporate
Remind me not to invite you to my next math-party.

By the way - about half of my fellow math students are women. Geeky - but female.
It appears to be back up:

2008-01-12: Fink website down
The fink website is not functioning correctly at present. (You may have noticed that many of the links on this page do not function correctly.) The fink team is working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

...but I prefer MacPorts anyway

p.s. I don't think news.yc is the place to ask about a down website...
Database of VCs: how they treat founders
I don't know, what about criminals? They make money, too, but do they make meaning?
Well said.

Reminds me of the broken window fallacy (http://jim.com/econ/chap02p1.html).
Or ffbb88
It's just that people have a different opinion of what good style is (a lot of people love Comic Sans MS and websites with animated, blinking stuff).
I've noticed that, over time, programmers (including myself) tend to break some punctuation rules. I guess it's because we don't write:

char *foo = "bar;"
I don't believe he was ever a COBOL expert, since COBOL is basically stripped-down English with the added requirements of syntax, logic, and correct spelling.
If you do want to play with free tools, try haXe and swfmill.
Thats a good thing to learn for the companies. Reputation of high qualified it staff is often very bad. Time to change that as long as the market allows it. (No, I am not among the 18-30, I am 43, and still the youngsters are right!).
---- My advice for anyone in their 20th and 30th working in this career is..MAKE MONEY, as much as you can, so you can quit as soon as you can,

--- ... and all that bullshit Paul Graham writing about.

Hmmm...
Ask YC: how do you work for 8 hours straight?
I currently consider taking on another job, but to be honest, I am a bit daunted by the prospect of working 8 hours straight, every day. I have times when I work more, when I get into the flow, but what if I don't? Recently I have read more than once in popular blogs that 2-3 hours of real work per day are more realistic.

In previous jobs, I found 8 hours very hard to do. Maybe it is only my problem because I frequently don't sleep very well and on some days am almost too tired to work. No idea how other people consistently pull 60h work weeks, though. Except perhaps if most of the time is spent in meetings, which is not so taxing (many people doing overtime seem to be managers or team leaders, which might indicate many meetings).

Also, in all previous jobs I ended up surfing the internet a lot. I don't really like that, though - I want to give employers their money's worth. Or do I just have the wrong attitude towards employment?

I suspect surfing the internet is a bit like coffee, news sites are small little excitement spikes for the brain. But maybe I am addicted, and they say coffee makes you more nervous and less able to show consistent performance over an extended period of time. So perhaps if I could wean of the news while at work, working 8 hours would become possible? Or would my brain deteriorate completely (I should add that I usually work as a Java developer).

Edit: one thing I liked about consulting and billing by the hour is that at least if I went home early, I would just charge the client less, so I did not have to feel too bad about it. Maybe I am just not cut out for regular employment?
I'd rather pg working more on essays or other features than on something like that.

Isn't the point of CSS that people can customize it in their browsers anyway?

Another idea: create a proxy that modifies the CSS, then all your computers could go through that proxy for your modified version of news.yc.

With Firefox, also check out Greasemoney.
Only about 30 years until it overflows, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Coffee.

Failing that, charge an on-site per-diem, or a higher on-site rate. Then the client will all of a sudden really not mind at all that you're doing nearly all the work from home, and you have much more flexibility with your hours and working conditions.
I think the ontology goes more like this.

Meaning is the metadata people derive from experience. It's always there, but it's representation becomes significant when people communicate.

Money is an efficient representation of a promise, which is a special kind of communication between people.

Money is the embodiment of a specific kind of meaning.
That is an interesting idea, thanks!
Being 23 years old is a neat trick, but you can only do it once.