skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your bank has a liability agreement with Yodlee, you're probably ok in the event of a data theft or break-in.

But if not, your bank might not do anything for you, because in their eyes, it's your fault for trusting an unauthorized (to them) third party.
Typo: Should say, "Build your store for free!" under the grey "Coming Soon" button.

Also, your demo sites don't seem to be loading.

Edit: They just took quite a while to come up.
The Robert Pirsig books are excellent: Zen and the Art of Motercycle maintenance, and its sequal Lila.
The Common Craft (http://commoncraft.com/) video linked from the article is pretty awesome. I love the style. Incidently, I noticed this presentation company for the first time yesterday -- they did one for Google about Presently:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentat...
Think about it: gmail is an interface through which people read their mail. It won't be a problem that at some previous stage the mail was encrypted.
JPU - JavaScript CPU Monitor
By not providing it on the web, I hate sitting in queue on the web. I hate chatting about my personal crap on the web.

I like calling the service provider, it feels safer.
yters, you're thinking from the customer's point of view, which is great. Looking from a cynical business point of view, they are weaknesses to exploit. For example, one could create a discussion site and attract a lot of eyeballs by posting contentious comments, raising peoples' wrath (also known as "trolling"). Envy is what high-end consumer products exploit.
Rich is not enough. The value of Silicon Valley investors is that they're also experts in startups.
Techcrunch40: Conference Review, How did Mint win? and many Thank You's!
I'm in Austria, and I quite often ssh into servers in the US, with no problems at all. I've been having lots of issues with the EC2 tools timing out, though.
Device and Desires by Stephen Fry
How does Xobni relate to this research?

http://tlau.org/research/papers/kushmerick-aaai06-nectar.pdf
Exclusive: Facebook to Offer Data Storage
I have to heartily disagree. A bubble is something that can pop (hence the analogy). There is nothing in this current situation that can pop. You don't need VC or angels. If you fail, you can always give up and go get a job.

The market could crash, but the state of the stock market is wholly unrelated to the state of the internet industry at this here particular time.
On your feedback page is this sentence:

"Your opinion is very important for us since it help us to build a better preZentit for everyone. "

Proper grammar would be <i>since it helps us to. . .</i>

Just some feedback.
Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down
What's the main difference on the quality of itens classification using a voting system that allow only up votes versus up and down votes (digg vs. reddit)? YC.news changed from up and down to only up. Why?
I'm a bit confused. Is the DC term always in the center of 2D frequency image? If so, how does that provide any information about varying levels of background luminance?
I _also_ can't wait until we have rocket powered children's toys.
That post ("Amazon EC2 + S3 Doesn't Cut it for Real Applications") contains a false statement which the author has not corrected, even though commenters there quickly pointed out its falsehood. The falsehood is: "There is no persistent storage in EC2 so if your virtual server goes down for any reason such as taking it down to install security patches or a system crash, all your data is lost."

Instances can reboot, under operator control or due to a crash, and still retain their existing hard drive storage. Only less frequent 'instance termination' causes a loss of hard drive contents.

True, there are no guarantees that any instance won't be terminated by Amazon or other system failures at any time, so you're supposed to have your own backup and persistence strategy. But in practice, full terminations are rare, and Amazon has even given warnings when system upgrades mean large instance turnover is expected. (Though, there is no guarantee they will do so.)

So the falsehoods above are "[data is lost] if your virtual server goes down for any reason" and both concrete examples given, "taking it down to install security patches" and "system crash".
Having a central server to run everything seems pretty key to the entire operation. Is that where you store your data, or do you just hope to be able to fix things from backups to S3 if you lose a server?
reportroll
TVByDemand does not now or has it ever had Malware associated with it. Nothing in the link forces anyone to do anything. The only .msi is from Unreal Media which is the free media server that is used for our videos. The links go to our forums which have NOTHING to do with the video section of the site.
The first version of the Terminator hunter/killer. SkyNet will be pleased.
There is definitely some of that. After all the book is targeted towards a popular audience. But that being said there are a couple of remarkably original ideas.

For example, going from least to most intersting:

1. Statistically speaking a child is much more likely to drown in a swimming pool than be killed by a gun (of course, corrected for socioeconomic status and all the standard stuff.) Yet we see countless campaigns against gun violence with the argument that x number of kids get killed due to guns, and none for "swimming pool safety" or a host of other things that are far more likely to kill you.

2. There is a study of a daycare center where a problem they were dealing with was parents picking up kids late. So the daycare instituted fines. The result was more parents picking up their kids late. Why? because after conducting interviews they found that the guilt associated with being late was more of a motivator than the small fine. Having paid the fine, the parents no longer felt as bad about being late. That's a very conterintuitive result if you ask me.

3. The famous abortion-crime link. The idea being that the legalization of abortion in the 70s is what caused the massive decrease in violent crime in the 90s. Very convincingly argued. And certainly presents a better theory than The Tipping Point.

Anyway. There's more where that came from.
I just came across this old jwz article that is somewhat pertinent:

http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.htm...
We're announcing a product that manages EC2 instances in the next week or so (along with Solaris Zones, Xen, and vserver instances). So far we're seeing pretty good results with the people who are using EC2, but reliability is currently less than ideal. If EC2 were on the various hosting reliability charts I'm pretty sure it'd be down in the bottom half of the pack (and given some of the podunk three-server operations out there calling themselves "hosting providers" this is pretty dismal). As far as I can tell, you can expect several minutes of downtime every month, and sometimes longer. Most of the top tier hosts average a couple of minutes per year downtime...but the fluid nature of EC2 should make it possible to get near 100% uptime...when Amazon takes a network segment down, they can theoretically do a live migration of your instances. So far, they don't seem to actually have the capability to do so.

The S3 piece of the equation brings it back up in usefulness...but I don't know that I'd want to rely on it exclusively for my web applications just yet, unless high volume storage was a core part of my problem domain.
Though if people were really to move towards encrypted mail, it'd threaten the whole webmail industry. It does no good to encrypt your mail if it's then sent in plain text over the web. Even if you used https, it's a little nonsensical to let a third party decrypt your mail and then re-encrypt it for transmission.

That said, I'd bet that this threatens encrypted mail more than webmail. Have consumers ever chosen security over convenience?
Hm... the toy app you ported took about 5 seconds to respond. Slo-o-o-o-ow. Is that EC2 overhead?

This is the kind of thing we were trying to avoid and ultimately (again) decided on our own servers in a data center.
Revenue Model Alternatives for Book Publishing
News can't be an online-only business
When I read Joel's article, I was imagining in my head a JS-prime => JS + (maybe) CSS compiler, where JS-prime feels just like JS, except it makes it impossible to write something that doesn't work "the same" in all browsers. I think that this would be huge if it existed, except after reading your post, I'm thinking maybe it does already exist. Yes?

Also, could you clarify your statement: "The most annoying limitations are imposed by the browser (meaning that no JS library is going to fix them)." Do you mean the there are things that browsers simply can't do (e.g., your "file uploading that doesn't suck" example)?
Here's a toy that's close enough. A group at Waterloo made one of these things autonomous, and had it navigating GPS waypoints.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/rc/79c7/
I know this topic is really already past, but what about a fully up to date web browser. Full CSS standards compliance, JIT javascript, nice developer tools, memory models, full garbage collection, just the web browser we all want right. Pay attention because here is the interesting part. Sell it to Microsoft. This is not a web browser where you are trying to capture the market. No just sell it to Microsoft because they aren't going to fix their browser anytime soon. I imagine they can't. It's too old, and maintenance has become a nightmare. That's why their browser is so behind the times. So, they got a problem, a big one, so someone should fix it for them.
Was wondering if anyone would notice. You just won 6000 boxes of instant noodles.
Also pick up a game-theory textbook, which puts those formal terms in even more formal terms. ;-)

My course used Prajit K. Dutta's Strategies and Games: Theory and Practices (http://www.amazon.com/Strategies-Games-Practice-Prajit-Dutta...), which seemed fairly good, though I don't have much to compare it with.
I've never in my life gone through a more bureaucratic, more inefficient, slower experience than any flight I've had on Alitalia.
Sure. Most complex ideas can be simplified into succinct, formal mathematical statements, but that doesn't mean I would prefer reading the formalisms in place of prose.
RC heli's are plagued with stability issues. I suppose what I'm looking for is the performance at a toy's price. Considering the MUAV costs probably around $60,000, this might take some time.
Also, try to narrow it down into 5 lines. I'd be curious what you come up with.
I don't know what's going to happen to encrypted mail, but I can answer your last question.

Burned once, consumers will choose security over convenience. They'll even go so far as to choose inconvenience on the assumption that it makes them safer. Witness people's acceptance of inconvenient airport security, even as baggage went on totally unscreened.
"Note: This will take you to a page with a java applet.
It may take some time to load, so please be patient. "

That's all I need to know (thanks for the warning).
And that's why Distrowatch is invalid as a measurement tool. Nobody uses PCLinuxOS. It's like five guys for whom Mandriva (the Linux distro seemingly designed by 14 year old boys) is a little too grown up and serious and Gentoo (the Linux distro designed for people with way too much of that pesky "time" thing) is too hard to understand.
The article failed to mention Shoutlife (http://www.shoutlife.com), probably the biggest Myspace-act-alike Christian social networking site.
"I realize that many of you don't use Outlook anymore and have moved on to Gmail or some other better way to do mail."

For me that says it all.
Maybe it'll be useful in corporate environments that force people to use outlook, but beyond that I'm not so sure it has much of a shelf life.
I would concur with Xichekolas with respect to both Ender's Game and the Economist. Also, The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century (Paperback) is excellent.
I bet most of that response delay is from the autosuggest lookup against the dictionary. It seems to be querying every time you enter a letter, so if you quickly type a word, you'll be initiating multiple GET requests, each of which hits the DB.
Art of the Deal, by Trump
This is a good document. Signals and systems was one of the more interesting courses I took back in the day.
One thing I noticed from K5 is that having both options leads to lobbying and information cascades. That is, if one or two early voters post comments saying the article is really good or really bad then that hugely affects whether later voters hit +1 or -1. With only the option to vote up, people might point out flaws in the article or praise it, but the comments are more intellectual and less designed to influence the voting of others. Of course K5 is much worse because the design strongly encourages people to vote one way or another, whereas on this site the bad articles will quickly disappear if people just ignore them.
Does Digg Want To Be Facebook?
The product spec for this thing says it's automatically stabilizing, but I've never played with one so I can't vouch for it. I've seen some demo videos and it looked really impressive.

In any case, you can always buy one of these for a mere 90-450k
http://www.moller.com/videom200x.htm
IDEA #75 - Where I Hang Out (dodgeball as a facebook app)
RubyForge vs CPAN - O'Reilly Ruby
Some can be really good.

Another big difference is live video from the heli. That means you can tele-operate it beyond line of sight if you have good enough radios. GPS waypoint following is also essential when going out of line of sight.

You can see how the platforms grow in complexity and cost just to be useful at all.
Corporates don't mind paying money.
Way back when Akamai was starting up, I figured it wouldn't have much of a shelf life, because people would soon start writing cache-friendly pages, and cache servers would make Akamai's core service obsolete.

I still think a cache network would be superior, but Akamai isn't going away any time soon.

Similarly, I think you're in for a surprise as to how slowly change spreads. Corporate environments will likely use Outlook way past its shelf life.
I don't think the rest of the world is "catching up" with the U.S. They're simply going to jump over and skip ahead without having to deal with legacy systems...
I noticed that on reddit the voting on my essays always had a higher proportion of downvotes after 10 minutes than 10 hours. I know there are reflexive upvoters as well as reflexive downvoters, but from the way the ratio changed over time it seemed that a higher percentage of downvoters were reflexive than upvoters. If so then the downarrow injects more stupidity into the system than the uparrow.

Shorter version: downvotes are more likely to be thoughtless.
The Unexpected Uselessness of Philosophy, The Unexpected Usefulness of Mathematics
"Hey, if it gets them laid..."

Good luck with that.
But Rhino has nothing to do with browsers.

If you want cached, compiled JavaScript, try Flash Player 9.
Plato is crap: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57000
The power of self-organizing hackers
Nerds: The Unexplored Cornerstone of the Modern World
Guilty on #1 --> http://www.writertopia.com

I designed the UI a while ago and figured Amazon was a "best practices" site.
Avast ye mateys! Today be talk like a pirate day!
"I can guarantee that you won't go in the order or at the pace you expected. You will need to adapt the pace of the presentation to the needs of the VC."

-- This is something I can relate to based on our YC interview last year in Boston. We actually prepared a pitch thinking we'd actually have time to parrot it out. How wrong we were :) Well, at least we know what to expect if we get called again.
Pratkanis & Aronson: Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion

http://www.amazon.com/Age-Propaganda-Everyday-Abuse-Persuasi...

It helped me to filter politics to save more time for coding.
they've passed us a while ago. we are the ones that need to do the catching up. go check out the speeds they are getting in japan, europe and the likes...
We have a long way to go before we reach Loopt's success. Loopt is making some serious dough. We have a lot of work to do, but it is great to hear from users how much they like what we have built.
f is the focal length.
The DC term is always at the lowest spatial frequency (DC.) So, if you plot your FT so that the DC term is in the middle, then the DC term is in the middle :)

It provides NO information about the varying levels, it tells you something like the sum of all the pixels / number of pixels. If you have a 10x10 uniform image, all pixels=1, the DC term will by 1/100.

Again, the DC Term is the absoloute lowest spatial frequency, hence it's DC.
If this stuff excites you, read the first chapter of Joe Goodman's book, Introduction to Fourier Optics. That's the book I read to really understand fourier transforms.
I know... I miss my 1 Gbit/s fibre to home connection...
Retarded Iteration
Yahoo Mail Innovates, Gmail Stagnates
How Handset-Maker Palm Lost Its Punch in 2007
I like this quote:

"To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.)"
Global Wireless Data Market Update - 1H 2007
I think "Speaker For The Dead" which is the second book in the Ender Series is better than the Ender book itself. The first 10 pages which is the authors introduction is the best introduction to a book I have ever read.
Examining rich datasets: spiderweb science and click trails
Rate YC Hacker News Interface
How much would you give it out of 10? I am not impressed with the user interface or home page of many startups. As a test of how the hacker community thinks, let's rate the hacker news UI. Mine: 9 out of 10.
Funny but Real Linux Commands
Does that apply to DETS storage as well?

It says on this page (http://erlang.stacken.kth.se/faq/x1197.html) that "Dets uses 32 bit integers for file offsets" and "In practice your machine will slow to a crawl way before you reach this limit."
OneWebDay 2007 (Sept. 22, 2007): "Celebrate the Web and what it does for each of us"
Explore The Connections Between Related Websites (Cool Java App)
Septendecillion and other big numbers
"...the Economist is probably the best (IMHO) news source out there..."

I'm also always impressed by how evenly they cover the globe. There are sections for Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc. of roughly equal weight. And features often cover the economic impact of an event around the world, not just a specific country or region. A great way to get a feel for what's really happening outside your little part of the planet.
"Having paid the fine, the parents no longer felt as bad about being late."

It became paid babysitting.
Pseudo-GPS hack for the iPhone (triangulates between cell towers)
TFA is credulous and deceptive.

Can something be an 'exclusive' if it's been on a well-trafficked wiki for over a month?

Also, if they'd looked closely, by 'data store' Facebook mean a loose database of objects (consisting of key-value properties) and typed object associations.

That's very very interesting, but not as a bulk data drop competing with S3, which is how it's spun. I mean, you could fragment and base64 your photos into the 64K text blob properties offered by this 'Data Store', but that's clearly not its design goal.
More coverage here: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/iphone-gps-hack-works-and-i...

The implications of this could be huge for iPhone application developers.
It is near instantaneous for me and I am in Seattle,WA,USA. I've heard from many sources that AWS is slow if you are outside the US. Someone even brought this up in the AWS dev conference and the Amazon guys just dodged it and gave a generic 'things are being improved' response.

If http://www.instantwordsearch.com/ look up is painfully slow but http://www.instantwordsearch.com/backstage.html (statically served 103KB text) is very fast, then you can conclude that the problem is with my app. Otherwise it might be safe to blame EC2.
This news.yc meme sucks.
you will need to come out of silicon valley to get that answer - way more people (at least in the enterprise) use desktop email than web email ...
IMO EC2 lends itself very well to higher availability by redundancy - if that is what you want.

My current approach is more exploratory coz I am learning as I go. But, to answer your question, if the instance were to fail right this moment, I'll get a notification and I'll run a recovery script that I've set up. I won't have this manual-intervention method for long though.
The enterprise market is:

(a) mind-blowingly huge;
(b) totally accustomed to paying serious money for software;
(c) almost universally dependent on the Microsoft stack for supporting end users, and that means Outlook for optimal integration with Exchange, Active Directory, etc.;
(d) totally addicted to e-mail.

Admittedly, it's also
(e) resistant to change and chock-full of drones content with maintaining the status quo. Still, if the Xobnis are persistent, if they keep working on this thing, they'll have a gold mine on their hands.
I graduated this past spring and after reading the stuff on this ladies site, I finally get what all those classes were about.
related question: i've seen comments here that have, say, -2 points. if you can only vote up, how is it possible for a comment to ever go below one point? my guess is maybe you get a down-vote button once your karma goes above a certain score?
20 points
Whatever the definition of 'social network' I don't think it should include facebook apps and video sites.
You've got it, but you can only downvote comments. And you can't downvote replies to your comment.
Could always have a downvote, but weight it as far less than an upvote.

Personally I miss having the option of a downvote. Yes I agree downvotes can be an uninformed reflex, but removing any voice of disagreement seems overly harsh.

I'd say have upvotes that count as 10 points, and downvotes that count as 1 point or something like that.
Are you disagreeing? I wasn't saying that the current situation is or isn't a bubble (I'll only know that in retrospect... :]); rather, I was saying that bubbles can form in markets other than stock markets. One of the most famous was the tulip bubble, in which the involvement of stock markets lagged the formation of the bubble by some time.
Won't it be better for ycnews to allow downvotes and silently not count them against a submission but use them for other purposes like measuring thoughtlessness of a user / analyzing the impulse-response of the crowd here etc?
Doesn't seem to be working correctly on my browser then (ff 2, XP). Commenters do not always load correctly and sometimes requires clicking back into one of the links. In the end, I'm not sure I'm seeing what you are seeing.
The entire up vote/down vote thing needs to go away. Voting on a story should be related to an action that the user is taking which implies an up/down vote.

For example, in my Facebook application Wildfire stories are up voted only if you pass then on to your friends. As you mentioned to me yesterday, delicious/popular is interesting because it's based on pages people bookmarked for themselves.

John.
I wanted to downvote 'funny linux command lines'. When I couldn't find the downvote arrow my first instinct was to upvote everything else.
Article title makes it looks promising but actual content fails to deliver.

Better to read 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences':
http://euler.slu.edu/~srivastava/wigner.pdf
Thanks. I've heard that many non-US users have problems with EC2.
What do you think of your YC idea?
What do people think about their YC idea?

Do you feel your idea is THE one? Or are you unsure of your greatness?

No need to specify your idea, just whether you have confidence in your idea and team or not.

personally: I feel my idea and team are great, but I am not sure if it will Fly with YC.