skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We ran into this, too, and have been dealing with it on some level for the past 6 months. It's probably not the content of your mail; this year, many major providers have gotten very aggressive with their anti-spam tactics, especially Microsoft.

1) You'll probably need to get a dedicated IP for sending mail if you're going to send at any volume; pretty much all the major operators calculate some sort of "score" based on your IP's record of delivery. The "score" includes: how many mails you send, how many are to "real" recipients (not deactivated users/nonexistent accounts), how many people complain about your mail, whether you not you hit any spam "trap" accounts, etc.

2) SwellJoe is right about a reverse DNS record that points to your mail server; it's basically required these days. A valid SPF record (http://openspf.org) is also basically required. You can also use DomainKeys or DKIM (http://dkim.org/) to improve your deliverability to Yahoo! accounts. If you're sending invites or other user-generated mail, read this in particular: http://www.openspf.org/Best_Practices/Webgenerated

3) Process your bounces. If you keep sending mail to a deactivated account, this looks very bad. Microsoft in particular has been super-aggressive about this. Set up a script that listens to incoming mail to your postmaster account.

4) Enroll in Microsoft's JMRP and SNDS programs (http://postmaster.msn.com/) -- there's a bunch of other stuff about Microsoft's practices there, too. SNDS lets you know how your mail is treated by the Hotmail servers, but you need to send at least 100 mails on any given day to get the data. JMRP forwards complaints from Hotmail users to you so that you can unsubscribe them.

5) This is the only guaranteed way to get into Hotmail --If you're serious about your site and you can cough up $400 to apply (and $1000 a year), Microsoft maintains a whitelist through a company called ReturnPath (http://returnpath.net) and a program called Sender Score Certified, which has some pretty intense requirements. The process can take a really long time, but we just went through it, and it's not too bad once you get the process going. (http://www.senderscorecertified.com/)

And finally, a bit of speculation -- I was doing some testing a few months back, and it seemed to help to have both an unsubscribe link and a postal address at the bottom of the mail, particularly for Yahoo!. Not sure if this is still true, but it might have something to do with CAN-SPAM filtering.

Hope that helps.
No Aristotle in the philosophy section?
2007 In Numbers: iGoogle Google's Homegrown Star Performer This Year
Only if Photoshop works live, in person.
This Is the Sound of a Bubble Bursting
First-person video from a radio-controlled airplane
Spontaneous chain reaction: Coffee Drinkers' 1,013 Good Deeds
Is the NSA taking over SSL hosting services quietly?
Damn Cool Algorithms: Anagram Trees
This wouldn't surprise me at all -- the NSA has a large budget, and (now that strong cryptography is widely available) wants as wide an array of tools as possible. Buying access to data, stealing it by exploiting security flaws in software, snooping on it via EM emissions, obtaining encryption keys via side channel attacks, and (with the assistance of the CIA and/or FBI) capturing passphrases using keyloggers are all techniques which the NSA is believed to have used in the past.
How the legacy of a dead mathematician can make you a better programmer
Ask YC: Can a site copyright their Javascript source code?
I came across some code today that I wanted to see how it worked, and even though majority of it is open source, some of it is their own and is copyrighted.

Decided to check out their terms of use

"RECOMMENDED READING grants you a limited, personal, non-exclusive and non-transferable license to use and to display and to make one copy of the Materials and to use the services, this Site solely for your personal use. Except for the license set forth in the preceding sentence above, you acknowledge and agree that you have no right to modify, edit, copy(ok), reproduce(ok), create derivative works of, reverse engineer(didn't know that), alter, enhance (also didn't know that) or in any way exploit any of the Materials in any manner. This limited license terminates automatically, without notice to you, if you breach any of these Terms. Upon termination of this limited license, you agree to immediately destroy any downloaded or printed Materials. Except as stated herein, you acknowledge that you have no right, title or interest in or to this Site, any Materials."

This is Mixx terms of use.
This question doesn't apply to them alone, but to all sites.I'm just wanted to know if copyrighting JS code is a normal thing.
My Votes In The Crunchies Awards Contest
Copyright, yes. This "license agreement" is another matter, and seems dubiously enforceable.
After decades, why haven't programmers figured out a way to accurately gauge the time it takes to complete tasks? Even the Mac OS X Leopard installer is horrible about it. Starting every installation by saying it will take 2.5 hours is stupid when it really takes thirty minutes.

Also, because no one would ever need to start a copy that would take a year, why does the Vista copy timer even go that far? It should switch to "calculating" or something more friendly and less absurd.
haha - I enjoyed reading the article, but I was always thinking: "but......... java..." Then again, with the right design Java isn't so bad... if you simply _have_ to use it.
"I believe later that day I went to Old Country Buffet with my family and kept thinking about it. After loading up on food, we were walking back to our car and it hit me..."

Old Country Buffet = hacker fuel. Nice.
samson, I like your idea of a minimalistic design. If you would rather not have any fancy ajax or flash, then may I propose for an easy way to search for tags and tips etc...

My apologies if I sounded too critical, but I certainly hope the input helped. Again, Good Luck.
thanks for all of the help everyone; this is great stuff
Alpha testers for our new product - interested to help a fellow hacker?
We're pushing hard to launch an alpha version of our product hopefully by Jan 1. Do any of you want to help a fellow hacker do some alpha testing and see what's useful in the product, what's not and help us get a sense of how you would use it or if you would use it ? I think it may be a couple of hours of digging through and thinking of what you like and what you don't.

Please leave your email in the comments or if you have it with your profile, please indicate so.

We did not want to just leave a blanket site here for review, because most people just give a 5 minute look and focus just on the look and feel so it does not help too much.

The site is (yet) not specific to a niche so almost anyone can help, we want to discover how people would want to use something like this.

Thank you so much.
Spectacular idea. Just a bit late to get one for this Christmas.
So is there a post somewhere with actual evidence? Or is it equally likely that the aliens in the employ of the US DoE's Paranormal Task Force have bought and backdoored Verisign?

10 bucks says this conspiracy theory finds its roots in some company owned by In-Q-Tel, the gasp CIA's gasp VC fund.
Sure. kbeshay@gmail.com
"You could put out a casting call for a snuff film and a hundred people will show up, and no one will ask who is getting snuffed. It's that kind of town." :)

Sure, I'll check it out: Carlos at Bueno period organization.
If You Want My Trust, Give Me Control of my Data
Shoot To Kill: The Market thirst for better graphics hardware
Email's in my profile.
Our methodology: How O'Reilly tracks trends
Erm.. unless otherwise specified, any code is copyrighted. That's how copyright works these days (at least in the US).
Great post, so true. One point I'd add, though: when you're writing code, make it readable by commenting well! Sure it's obvious to you why you used a ternary operator expression that uses a postfix-decrement operator and raises an exception, but that's not clear to me. Until you tell me that you're testing to see if an object reference count is zero, decrementing it if not, and raising an error if so.

Good comments are tedious work and seem pointless at the time, but just wait until you're reading your own code two weeks later, or even worse, someone else's. The time you spent explaining yourself frequently makes up for the time you'll waste later reimplementing what you did the last time around.
IANAL (yet), but here's what I think the answer is.

1. Yes, it's copyrightable, just like anything else that is written.

2. But if they took any of that JS from something else that was GPL'd, then technically their JS is GPL'd too. (Assuming the GPL is enforcible.)

3. Nothing stops you from reading their code and rewriting it yourself, so long as you don't just copy. Copyright extends to "expression," not "ideas." The way an algorithm works, the way a program is organized, the interfaces it uses: these are all ideas, not expression. So if you rewrote the algorithms in your own idiom, you could take pretty much as much inspiration from the original as you'd like.
:) - thanks.
sorry - i did not see an email in your profile.
Sure, I'll check it out. Email in my profile.
sure thing ... bredeche at gmail.com
Agreed. Sometimes I think the best judge of your code is the poor sap who has to maintain it a year later.
> Now what about wrapping an arbitrary language (ie, is there a "swig" equivalent for wrapping python, or any generic language X?)

Sockets! ;-D
Fantastic Fixes Help Your Sad, Pathetic Cubicle
Not to mention this...

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
NetSuite auction doubles IPO price
"Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.

Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart.

'I drink, therefore I am.'"
It's not spam. The first paragraph is typical blog babble...
-m
Or in any country that's signed the Berne Convention.
People have suggested languages, but I think they (and you!) are missing out the most fundamental first step. What do you want to achieve! You need to make a high level overview of what your site will do, and from that sketch out a rough mid-level idea of the technologies you will need in the implementation. Then ask which languages have libraries or built-ins which facilitate your design. And only then, pick amongst the languages which are still in the running.

It's hard to learn a new language, but it's harder to write a library/binding for video frame decoding, if your favored language doesn't already have one.
Sure--profile.
I think I'd say its more like Chuck E Cheese than a nightclub.
Very cool, although I could do without the music.

I guess that's one drawback to hacking on software instead of hardware: you can't make a cool video your family and friends could watch about coding modular interpreters in Haskell with monads. :/
A BS buzzphrase.
Have a great idea? Here's how to protect it
No it was that Ask YC was capitalized strangely before an editor fixed it. It wasn't that funny.
of highly theoretical books..
Please, ask it on reddit. I'm very curious about this.
A very sane assumption is that the NSA has extensive monitoring capability that they poor an assload of money into expanding every year.

The only rediculous idea here would be to assume that this is something new.
Drugs to build up that mental muscle
This would certainly enhance this startup idea:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.models.rc.air/browse_frm/...
Mozilla Expands Its Universe With Weave
New Year Will Come 2 Months Later This Year
With the Lunar New Year the actual new year starts on February 7th. Learn how this new date is being used by businesses and entrepreneurs.
Three paths of B2C startups growth: ads, free ads, and viral
Ads are best. Free ads are cheapest, but unpredictable. Viral is often misunderstood.
The easiest thing would be to sign up with a third party email service that has an API. They can handle all the deliverability issues, so you don't have to worry about it. I hear that Bronto is pretty good.
Oh, and the other thing you can do, if you aren't sending tens of thousands of messages, is use Gmail to send your emails, and script it through a POP code library.
Idea! $_$
Sounds like a soul-sucking corporate cesspool masquerading as a startup.

If you want to do us all a favor, name them here explicitly so that we may all avoid those assholes.
Wow, I can't believe this is here! I was just thinking that and then I thought "No one is going to care" and there you were, caring. Thank you!
The company had used Struts for several other projects and had programmers experienced in it.
Interesting, but much more complicated than it has to be.

In Chaosium's BRP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Role-Playing) system, each skill is represented on a percentile scale. Whenever a player does (tries?) something with a given skill, he gets to make an "experience check" (usually at the end of a game session), and that skill's value increases a bit (usually one point, IIRC) if the player "fails" the check (i.e. rolls higher than the skill's value, whereas in normal gameplay, a successful action happens if the player rolls equal to or less than the skill's value).

This creates a learning curve that naturally levels off, only advances skills that are actually used, and can be calculated easily on pen-and-paper.
Stop wasting time making your cubicle acceptable.

Put that time and effort into getting out of cubicle land.
> Until you tell me that you're testing to see if an object reference count is zero, decrementing it if not, and raising an error if so.

But that won't tell me why your code is doing what it's doing

> Good comments are tedious work and seem pointless at the time,

Good comments should make you think about your code, not be some pain point you are compelled to endure.

If you think it's tedious and pointless, there is a good chance the reader (quite possibly yourself not to far in the future) will consider the comment tedious and pointless as well.
When did this anti-Design-Patterns meme start, again? Was it the most recent Yegge novel, or was it earlier than that?

I'm not completely sure what raganwald is saying, but I think he's saying this: knee-jerk opposition to the use of Design Patterns is just as silly as knee-jerk opposition to most any other technology.

Part of the job of a good developer is to sort out the BS from the hype, from the long-term, useful information. And for better or worse, Design Patterns (just like Java and C++ and other things that have survived long enough that they are no longer flavor-of-the-moment fads) reflect real-world needs, or they simply wouldn't be as well-known and widely used as they are.

Said another way: the problem isn't Design Patterns; the problem is the bad developers who don't know how to use Design Patterns.
I've flown a real plane. Boring after 2 minutes. Just like that video.
Gmail has a 500 message limit as far as I know from tests.
How can a third party service handle mail sent addressed from a specific domain? I thought that was the issue this thread was trying to solve.
This is really true. Whenever I'm designing a system, I have to remind myself not to think just, "wouldn't it be cool if I knew X about everyone else," but also, "would I really want everyone else to know X about me." You can't have the first without the second.
sure - profile
> But that won't tell me why your code is doing what it's doing

Indeed, that's what the rest of the comment is for.

> Good comments should make you think about your code, not be some pain point you are compelled to endure.

Fair point. Yet the fact is that many people enjoy neither commenting nor thinking about their own code, and that's not going to change. The question is how to convince people to write good documentation in the face of intrinsic motivations not to do so, and I think the best persuasion is a reminder of how they will use that documentation later.
Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early 90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out of college, and Microsoft software was crap because executive decisions and backward compatibility made it crap, not because their hackers were crap. People who read the Windows 2000 source leak said that it was fairly uniformly well-written code, whose comments indicated that its authors knew they were making everything ugly and klugey, but couldn't do much about it and preserve compatibility.

So I somewhat doubt that good employee hackers can steer a fundamentally really evil main guy away from being evil.
And my mind didn't even buy the list dinner first.
james.m.aaron at gmail dot com
a lot of the (old school) large online retailers (ie. macys, williams sonoma, ...) use http://www.yesmail.com/
Apple Lawyering Up On "Fake Steve Jobs"
This seems to be the first quasi-confirmation that Think Secret's settlement involved Apple paying the Think Secret guy money.
Python is a great language... my only concern with it is Python 3000.

from http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/#timeline:
"Python 3.0 will break backwards compatibility with Python 2.x."

how do people using python account for this? (I think the timeline mentioned 2008 for Python 3.0 final)

this is really the only reason I'm hesistant to use Django beyond just experimentation
The only reason companies do drug testing is because insurance companies will cut them deals. By the time your company is big enough that you can save millions of dollars in insurance costs by drug testing your employees, I hope you still have a soul.

Having said that, anyone dumb enough to fail a drug test is probably not a good person to hire anyways. Drug tests are easy to pass -- don't do any of the following drugs for a week and drink a lot of water, continuously, on the day of your test.

1. Cannabis
2. Cocaine
3. Amphetamines
4. Opiates
5. PCP
Ask YC: recommended code reading?
what good code is out there that we should read to make ourselves better programmers?

(inspired by 2 recent post: "It's Harder to Read Code than to Write It" and "Alan Kay's list of recommended reading")
How do you manage CPC/CPA ads on small sites without an advertising network?
Has anyone here ever advertised on small sites without using an advertising network? The easiest way to do would be to pay a fixed monthly cost to the site. Are there any free or cheap software solutions that would allow CPC or CPA ads?
It's harder to read bad code than to write it.
Wow. Just reading the summaries makes my head spin (in a nice way).
WTO ruling gives Antigua right to pirate $21 million of copyrighted materials
Israeli Extricom on the CMP Channel's 2007 Product of the Year List
Extricom has announced that CMP Channel's CRNtech, the IT Channel's handbook for technology products and services, has named its Interference-Free&#153; EXWO-404 WLAN Switch to its list of 10 Best Products of 2007, winning in the wireless category
2.x versions will be around for a looong time.

It's not like suddenly everyone is going to switch to 3.0.
i've been driving for 5 years and i still love it. Somehow i find what you said unbelievable. Then again most pilots are alcoholics so there might be some truth to what you said.
I wish i was in "that" market because i would hire that guy in a heart beat.

Keep in mind the "magic" is in the software.
Neutral organization for alternative havens
Side note if you were to mount a camera on the hat/goggles and show the stream on VR goggles others could "share" the same experience.
No, bad code is really easy to write.
I'm so glad that my work doesn't include being a lawyer and getting paid extremely well for going after people in the most heinous way.
I'm generally a prude when it comes to drugs, but I wonder how much this would increase cognitive muscles. I say this because I would expect the brain would, after a while, become used to this externally induced effect and therefore disregard internal mechanisms to do so. This is pure conjecture, though.

It would, however, be interesting to momentarily feel what it's like to obtain that kind of concentration in order to try to mimic it without the drug.
As a programmer I especially care as the epistemology in Aristotle's Organon lies at the core of how our startup models concepts and logical relations between them. Fred Sommer's work on extending that is also extremely helpful, not to mention H. W. B. Joseph's incredible book on logic, the best I've ever read (and I read many) _An Introduction to Logic_.
The "magic" is in the man, but not in the software. I guess it only takes a knowledge of the low level Wii remote protocols and a good grasp of linear algebra to execute this. Most people that have that knowledge still don't come up with this coolest stuff.
about a wide variety of topics...
For those that can't be bothered flicking through all of the posts, be sure not to miss the "totally medieval" one:

---

This is followed by a recommendation that I retain an attorney to represent me. And then, I swear to friggin God, there's a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they've got a pretty thorough list, which means they've been doing some research on this and the offer didn't just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

Damn. And right at Christmas. I am going to go make myself a drink.
The same, minus control over your view. It's a very important difference. That's why you can get dizzy in a car when others drive, but not when you drive yourself.

Some people report motion sickness when using VR glasses; I think sharing the view would only make it worse for all but the guy in control.
I did a few Google searches like "Lisp company site:news.ycombinator.com" and "scheme startup site:news.ycombinator.com" and then read through a bunch of long, old conversations. While I was doing it, my question of "Why hasn't anyone done this yet?" was answered very clearly!
DMAE. Not a drug, an over-the-counter "food supplement."

I was introduced to it by a programmer in Florida. Apparently it increases oxygen availability in the brain. What I found was that it was pretty much a 30 minute cure for programmer's burn out, like a cup of coffee that actually worked by making you clearer and fresher, rather than just more restless and agitated. I wouldn't refer to it as performance enhancing, only performance restoring.

Worth reading up on. I don't remember there being any contraindications, but YMMV.
Satire perhaps?