skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apologies for using the word "hacked" -- I meant the system was hacked, not necessarily the database. Durn title was long enough already.

I wasn't trying to do a Digg, honest. My point was that as sites grow in popularity, there's this huge arms race that goes on. In addition, as the internet goes everywhere, you can pay a thousand people a buck a day to do the hacking for you. It's a huge problem, and some thought has to be given to it even as a startup, imo.
I found a good text for Javascript from another thread. Anyone knows similar text for flex/ActionScript?
I have an idea: a website that just keeps a friends list. OpenID-compliant, no additional functionality. Open API. Everything else feeds off it.

No money-making strategy, though. Maybe it should just hide under the umbrella of an already successful megacorp who wants to use it for their own service, like Yahoo or, like you mentioned, Facebook.
eBay: Skype wasn't all that after all
Ohh... shiny - but not all that useful. I'm sure ideas from this will end up in future UIs that people actually enjoy using, but as shown it takes away many of the advantages digital information has over analog storage methods.
It might be an overloaded "killer", with both the idiomatic and literal senses in mind.
There's a lot of ways you can trick or "hack" Google. I can think of 2 or 3 right now that might work, and I'm sure there are others.

This looks like something that involves a lot of resources. We may be seeing the beginning of a sort of economic Web war, where one side spends tens of millions to break into and use a trusted system and another side spends tens of millions to prevent it. We've seen a lot of little petty stuff with botnets and DOS attacks over the years, but it could be that the game is scaling up to a even higher level.
Introducing YUI - The Rising Giant
I truly think that Microsoft knows their market. Web applications are great for the general consumer market, but not for the corporate market. I don't think corporations want their confidential documents directly accessible to another corporation (Google) or to anyone that could guess/crack the password to the service. This is why desktop software is still relevant. For example, the large corporation that I work for has denied access to Google Docs to ensure that it is not used.

Though, Google Docs could be useful to the corporate world if it were possible to install it on a local server in the corporate environment. That way the access to the documents could be directly controlled.
Lately my parents have been complaining about certain search results on Google linking to completely different pages than what they clicked on (like car part search results linking to travel websites). They are using a combination of Windows, IE, and AOL so who knows what the hell is going on. I've gone over it with them step-by-step on the phone and there is definitely something there. It must be some program running locally because the same search result on my mac goes to the right page.

To deal with the problem... my dad reinstalled Windows.
"...such as the centralization of files..."

This one is huge. Edit your files at any time from any computer. Your friends, co-workers and collaborators can edit the same documents, even at the same time from different places. With a single history of revisions. Backups taken care of for you (maybe you don't trust google on this but they probably do a better job backing up data than the majority of the computer using population).

This one thing alone changes the entire paradigm of document creation, sharing, etc.
It only lists things that you have explicitly shared, such as delicious bookmarks, youtube favorites, blog posts, etc.

View my feed to get a better idea of what that looks like: http://friendfeed.com/paul

It's just the handful of things that I chose to share with friends, and not all of the AMAZING pics off of reddit or anything else embarrassing.
They did not want me, so they raised their standards since 1869.
The author makes a claim but doesn't cite a single example of this. This is BS until I see proof.
It only lists things that you are already sharing on sites such as delicious (and only if you add those services).

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61675
Give me a fucking break.

If you patch any part of the software stack on an embedded device, and then are dumb enough to apply a vendor software update to the device, you get what's coming to you. Your phone is fine: it's the same bundle of components and ICs and wires and transmitters you got when you forked over $599 for a phone. You decided to take over the software, now you figure out how to make it work after you mangled it.

Doesn't anybody remember Black Sunday? The DirecTV hackers patched the software on the H cards, just like the unlockers did to the iPhone. They got free PPV TV from it. Then, a week before the Super Bowl, DirecTV ("Dave") sent a software update over the public airwaves that burned "GAMEOVER" over the whole H card, permanently. They literally broke the hardware.

Short of not locking their phone to a specific carrier at all, what, exactly, do people expect Apple to do here?
As a general interface this probably isn't the way to go, but I think this idea could be applied to more specific areas like presentations and product demos.

In any case it would be a lot of fun to play with.
A rare sight: a genuinely useful post from Guy Kawasaki. (It helps that he didn't write it.)
Skype rains on eBay's parade - Skype's financial performance horrible
Feed Each Other
PG didn't accept this idea for YC funding because he was afraid of Google (wimp ;).

We just launched it last week. It's a new type of social feed reader. It would be great to hear what you all think. Thanks!
I think Dasher is more interesting. Not sure about the memory requirements, though.
Those are great tips. They're suitable for printing out and sticking near your monitor.
YC turned this idea down because PG was afraid of Google Reader (wimp) ;
Nailer, I was just expressing one point of opinion. I cannot support the fact that something looks bad.Its an opinion. Both me and my friend are looking at the same monitor (ubuntu fiesty) and he thinks "its just fine" and I think the fonts blow. It probably has to do with my extreme and acute sensitivity for colors and shapes. My screen resolution is 1920 by 1300.Anything less and I become irritable. Notice my news.yc id?

I love Linux, but the fonts blow(till fiesty standard installation). I have to check out Gutsy yet.
I am not ready to believe that "foreign to them" aspect. As I said, it seems when women look at men in business, they only see the successful men (just like in dating - other men are invisible? ;-) ). There are books for men in business, ie "how to speek before people", "how to manage", etc. But they are not labeled "business for men", and men wouldn't say they need to read those books because "male culture" is foreign to them. Business culture might be foreign to them, and to some women, but not because of their gender.

I don't claim that discrimination against women does not exist - probably it does (I haven't seen it where I have worked so far, only read about it, hence the "probably"). I just don't think it does women a good service to attribute every problem to being a woman.
In this case as in most there were several reasons.
I know, just kidding around. I'd love to hear feedback from everyone here.
Only 9.6% of YC News Readers Use IE
Don't forget that he's talking about VPS. Typically a VPS run up to 15 virtual machines on one box.
We've Launched...
Fantastic job with the simplicity of it all. Only suggestion I have right now (after about 30 seconds) is to change the move block of text icon. I think it's a "paw"? But it was not intuitive at all to me what the "paw" did. I kept asking myself "how can I move this block of text?" Only after several guesses did I figure out it was the "paw" icon.
He does have a point. But what still bothers me is that if even a single important part of my app does something computationally expensive (which is typically the case in my apps), I have to interface with C. Writing C code is fine, but the interfacing stuff is no pleasure at all. So I would be glad if Ruby could run, say, 50 times as fast as it does ;-)
Some Gas Saving Tips Are Full Of Hot Air
Back when "TheFacebook" was limited to whatever universities were added that week, there was a guy at my school living on campus and pretending to be a student for at least 3 months. He didn't get caught until one of his friends got suspicious about him using someone else's e-mail address to get a Facebook account. The fact that he never seemed to do any actual work didn't help either.
Digg: http://digg.com/tech_news/Easiest_website_creator_on_the_Int...

Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/2vgiy/comments
I think this is a nameserver problem. My girlfriend's parents' computer did this, too, and there was an entry in the registry which I needed to change in order to fix it. Obviously, the problem originated from some type of malware changing the registry, but after that, it doesn't require a program to continue running. What happens is that the request for a website is sent to the malicious nameserver, which returns its own malicious IP. The address is then scanned for certain information (e.g. Google search information), and if it finds anything relevant, it redirects the user to their own ad-riddled site; otherwise, it redirects them to the originally-intended site. Obviously, this is a security issue in that all information you are transmitting is going through a malicious site. I would recommend trying to do something about this problem ASAP, even if it involves re-installing the OS.
You got a good name and it matches the message you're trying to convey. I think that's very good. I'd suggest putting snapshots of the sample web sites so users get a real sense of what can be done on your site. Having the sample links as text links might not get many to click them.
Very cool. But that default font has got to go.
Ambient Billboards - New types of billboards are coming out
Took me a while to figure out that the front page isn't tied to a cookie or something. I was compiling a bug list, and then it became clear that other people were deleting things. :)
Thanks for the stats! Very interesting indeed. Most people here are technology trend-setters and are influencers. Usually, you can forecast what people will use in the next few years by looking at what "alpha geeks" use today (Tim O'Reilly's term).

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail716.html
Might I suggest Common Lisp? SBCL is 50 times as fast as Ruby (standard disclaimer about generic language speed comparisons not being very accurate or meaningful).
For Actionscript: Essential Actionscript 3.0 by Colin Moock is a great book. There's also a book on Actionscript Design Patterns that is okay.

For Flex: I used Total Training's DVD training and then just used Adobe's docs.

Total Training also has a new online training option that is cheaper than buying the DVDs. I'd recommend the online library if you have a high-speed connection and don't mind NOT being able to download the vids. (You can get online access to ALL Adobe training products for about the same as one or two Flex DVDs, roughly $200. I just gave away and sold a bunch of access codes to the online library, and everyone reported they were thrilled with the training and service. I've just used the DVDs.) Send me an email if you're interested in buying any Total Training DVDs...I have a bunch of new ones still in the shrinkwrap and some that were opened and viewed once. I'm out of the online access codes, though.
just found a bug...if you click Options->Widgets, check off a new widget and try to save without logging in the Cancel button stops working. same thing goes for trying to change the background without logging in.
Interesting... I'm working on a similar concept with SeekSift.com, but I'm approaching the user discovery/sharing from a different perspective.
http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-inciden...
I think I was editing the splash page while you were looking at it.
We're trying to get more intuitive than that. You don't really have to use the paw, just click and drag.
I am a woman
that actually looks rather nice.
Most of the clients claiming to be IE were probably email address harvesting spiders.
I've seen it. Unfortunately, I can't remember the query phrase but I remember being confused about the pages and pages of .cn sites with no other results. It didn't reoccur on subsequent searches so I forgot about it.
When I started using it, I thought "Holy G------ S---. That is F------ Awesome!" Pardon the language, but I was excited. I mean, it needs work, but this could become THE de facto site for any novice looking to put together a quick website. And it gets an "A" for mind-blowing usability.
How to Survive on Minimum Wage
Agreed. http://www.bancomicsans.com/
Even though I absolutely hate Comic Sans, I think that Comic Sans is used correctly in this case: text for speech bubbles. I'd use something else for bigger paragraphs of text.
Ruby has a fairly complex syntax. Why would you prefer it to Lisp's simple syntax? The nice thing about Ruby is message passing and dynamic method lookups, not its syntax.
We're a bitch in IE though.
Seems like an interesting personal wiki, with a very cool ability to WYSIWYG create and move things around. The main problem I have is I can't see how it would be anymore useful than a personal wiki. Also while the WYSIWYG it doesn't add to the usefulness of the site, and I had problems using some of the design features. So I like the concept, and some of the ideas are really cool, but I don't know what I would ever really want it for.
Tired of college food, undergrad opens restaurant in his dorm
I wrote this as a response, but it's awaiting moderation:

I think this article is pretty irresponsible. Your making some weak excuses for Ruby's poor performance that, frankly, speaks more about your laziness as a developer than it does about Ruby.

One just needs to point at Friendster for an example of what happens when your application is too slow at the wrong time. When Friendster started hitting it big, a long time ago, they couldn't deal with the load and they lost a lot of marketshare because of it. On top of it, they undertook a huge effort to rewrite it in something faster, but it was too little too late.

Furthermore, when application availability is crucial to the success of your application, you had better be thinking about performance well before it becomes a problem. Throwing more "metal" at the problem isn't a solution, and you even point it out in your article, "if you can't afford a cluster of Opterons just yet, you're just using some average VPS slice and you're on a tight budget for the first month". Well, if you're on a tight budget how are you going to afford that extra metal to throw at it?

"Good enough" doesn't cut it, and if I'm an investor in your company and the first spike in traffic nearly kills the application and we lose market because of it, well your laziness is going to be the first thing I evaluate.

Note that I'm not promoting any language in response, because it's not really a language issue. Anything you bring to bear on the public, performance should be a primary concern. As a CTO in a company, it's my chief concern, to be honest.

An ounce of prevention ...
This is totally cool. Well done.

Don't worry about the Comic Sans haters, of which I include myself. I think it's great for this site because it communicates being approachable and homemade. I think the very fact that it's used so much more widely by individuals than advertisers or corporations gives it that kind of "a person made this" feeling. Then again, this weekend I saw a church whose sign out front was in Comic Sans... sigh.
It depends what page you're looking at. There are 3 versions of the splash page we are trying out. Speech bubbles appear only on the third one.
"Short of not locking their phone to a specific carrier at all, what, exactly, do people expect Apple to do here?"

It would be nice if, after paying for it, it became "my" phone and not "their" phone.
...at work?
I've got ff 75% vs ie 13% vs safari 7%, my app isn't specifically directed at hackers.

http://www.marioromero.org/browserstats.png

site(app)
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2354684299
So easy my girlfriend could do it.
It&#8217;s official: YouTube to pay 5000 bucks for competition winner
you must be kidding then, women aren't less motivated by these things at all, women don't care about status?? cmon!, it's only the "common" or expected ways to achieve these things that differ between the sexes.. a lot of women acquire status trough their marriage, it is not as common the other way around.
I know I accidentally loaded YC News with IETab a couple times (have it installed in Firefox for browser testing). So those stats are definitely inflated... chuckles
Really needs a "save" button. I'm guessing to save the page you just sign up but that's because I'm used to this sort of thing, your average web user is probably not going to understand.

Very nicely done though, I'm impressed.
I'm a big Rails fan, and have pretty much been using it exclusively lately. However, I've been around the block enough times to know someone trying to cover for a language's weak points when I see it.

I think the honest analysis is: "When considering all the tradeoffs in creating something, the slow speed is not a deal breaker for the kind of app I'm writing. On the plus side, I get something that's very fast to write apps with, a big, helpful, smart community, and the prospect of a faster language in the future".
It is your phone after you pay for it. But if you want it to work, using Apple's software, you have to abide by their license terms. They weren't secretive about them.
Interesting. Although, I would guess that among Google Reader users, a very high percentage are tech oriented people.
WTF is this? Can you explain in three sentences or less what you guys are doing with clutterme?
indeed, I'm not sure and I don't remember the exact number but I think that in that leaked? google reader video, the browser stats for their users were mentioned and ff was at the top.
It's automatically saved even without signing up.
A new top 100?
Sample site: http://www.clutterme.com/vlad

You guys should have a demo site. You can use mine.
"Google is freaking because a lot of folks are vesting soon and these greedy, restless bastards..."
Guilty as charged. I was a Vista early adopter (need it for dogfooding at work), and back when Firefox was doggedly slow in Vista, I went with IE and never switched back. IE7 isn't too bad.

I realize making Firefox slow on Vista was probably not a deliberate marketing decision by Microsoft, but it certainly worked on me.
"... Can you explain in three sentences or less what you guys are doing with clutterme? ..."

Agreed. But I'd settle for either

- Text description of medium length - yuk!"

- Here's a picture of how to make something with text - Sort of ok

- Watch the video- Best

Since this is a tool it's probably better to create a viewable demo so you can get an idea BEFORE you start. Especially for people who are not really sure what is going on. One other thing that annoys me a tiny bit is there is no menu so I can't really navigate anywhere so I can find out who made it, instructions, blog, etc.

One other point. It might help users to have a graphic indicating where they can click to edit an object. You run your mouse over an object and the controls appear, move it away and the controls disappear. It is not immediately apparent where to move your mouse again.

A bit later...

Yep it's a pain to find the edit point. I would have liked some visual clue (outline, dotted text around the control) where it is until I accept the edit. I know the page is an "in-edit" page but I'd like some visual clue to controls I have edited, and bits that still need work
Hehe - Xobni recruiting video
I didn't call them dishonest, and nor did the original post. Both of us note that they're being foolish, and not adhering to common standards.
I think Windows could be over-represented in that data because people might visit from work, where they're forced to use Windows.
EBay's $4 Billion Lesson in the Value of Hype
High quality on Blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/405285

Blip videos look so niiiice
Lessons learned, according to the article:

1. Just because a company has a huge and growing audience doesn't mean it can find a huge revenue source

2. It's almost impossible to pay for a deal through "synergies"
> 1. Just because a company has a huge and growing audience doesn't mean it can find a huge revenue source

How does this fit in with "make something people want". I don't think it invalidates it, maybe it just means "make it, then sell it in the hopes that someone else can find a way to make money from it"?
Plotr: a CSS / Javascript Graph framework based on Prototype
If your sysadmin skills are good and you're willing to try Solaris - Joyent's Accelerator is a good alternative

http://joyent.com/accelerator

Just remember that no other host's ui is even close to MT's... except for one based in Europe (and the prices are really high)
Fake. They don't really talk like rappers. :(
That German guy sure has a nice suit.
Review at readwriteweb here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedeachother.php
"Make something people want" is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

I read "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...) this weekend, and based on that, I would rephrase it "Make something people want and will pay for".
The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, Part 2: Skills and Education
I was about to post the same thing.
Good points.

I should have posted the video link.

Here's the video Demo of our site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og7GBtFLZhA
What's really missing is strong cross platform encryption that can be performed on the browser (from javascript). That way the data can be stored encrypted in a centralized location and decrypted only on the client side. This is harder to do for things like email because Google needs to target ads, but for google docs this should work.
How can it be avoided? The gold rush is quite unlike the golden age. The pace of creation is geometric, while the pace of improvement is linear. Creators and maintainers have different motivations. And so on.
I am not so sure. I still think in 5 years time Windows will be the dominant desktop/client platform (yet the "alpha geeks" generally avoid it).

I hope that isn't the case, but I know that it is just hope.
I'd be interested to know what percentage are using IE 7 vs. IE 6.
Well, make something people want first and find a revenue source later works just fine. It's not that Skype didn't find a way to make money and became a failure despite of it's uesr base. The problem is simply that Ebay paid way more than Skype was worth. $90 million in annual revenues is a decent amount of money and at a lower price it would have been a good investment.
"... I should have posted the video link. ..."

Thanks. If you can add the link it to the demo page.

Had play with it and it does work and made a sort of messy myspace inspired page. Couple of things I found.

- it wasn't obvious you needed widgets to type stuff in but once I found "options" it was

- background + profile image upload worked fine

- text resizing ok but as you increased the size to say 72pt the edit outline
stayed at old size

- no problems moving controls around screen but noticeable delay (but not unworkable)

- worked as advertised but a bit slow but not too slow.

- thought I would have needed grids so I could nicely lay stuff out but realised this really not needed.

One question on style. Why have you chosen to have Ajax style edit dialog and not say a plain html page on a separate url? I'm noticing this on lots of sites (for me it's a pain but livable) why is it chosen?

Another Q? How do you make a hyperlink?

A bit later ...

Had some trouble with the login on the homepage. Logged in via the main page ~ http://www.clutterme.com/bootload