skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit of salt defeats MD5 hash google searches and rainbow tables. Not that I'm saying anything about these guys. :)
That's true. I'm just saying you shouldn't pick a language that forces you to solve interesting problems you otherwise wouldn't. But I don't think we're in much disagreement, if any.
2008 Predictions from CenterNetworks
Probably a hit. Most people outside our paranoid (hacker) demographic don't seem to care much about online privacy, so long as it doesn't involve them losing money.
Poor Daniel Gilbert: (Author of the beautiful book Stumbling On Happiness)

[ Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: "The human being is the only animal that..." We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished "The Sentence." We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with "can use language" were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with "uses tools." So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I'd like to do so now, with you as my witness. "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." ]
6 Business Startup Strategy tips
useful tips for startups
I agree it depends on the cost. If it literately meant I would lose my home if I did not pay the thief then I definitely would pay him/her.

But as to your argument about "everyone", it's more about diminishing this market rather than effacing it. I doubt any market can be completely effaced. But the real tipping point comes when a majority of people believe that they can or cannot affect this market. If people accept they cannot alter things, the market will flourish through acquiescence. If people accept they can affect the market, and encourage others to do the same, then they will; If you can get enough people to believe they can do something, then they will do that something through the sheer force of community action.

If the web community accepts they more or less must pay thieves who do this then the market, fuelled by the thieves' acknowledgement of this, will flourish. If the community decides they will not pay thieves who have managed to do this then the thieves will eventually realise that this market has diminished.

Of course, this requires a community effort and most people will not think of the wider implications of their, albeit beneficial to themselves, actions.
You should not get downmodded for difference of opinion, but frankly, I think thinking in these simplistic terms (good vs. evil, us right, them wrong) has led us into military adventurism and disasters, including the current one. This is not 1938, Saddam was not Hitler, and dissenters were not Chamberlains. They were thinkers.

How people who were alive and had a front row seat to Vietnam let this happen escapes me. It was very clear from the mixed reasons given, along with the silencing of dissent and rush to attack that there were ulterior reasons for invasion.

Coupled with the quotes from senior admin officials "cakewalk", "oil will pay for it", "done in a few weeks", and the end of this fiasco was as clear and predictable as day to me.

But I digress. And feel free to disagree.
It's a cute quote, but what about the inventor? The "genius" can't steal stuff if no-one invents it :)
Dissenters were not Neville Chamberlains. They were thinkers. I agree. I spent many hours pouring over various arguments on Iraq before we went in, and I was deeply emotional about the way things turned out. But I also digress.

But the other side were also thinkers. Thinkers can disagree. The wonderful thing about both startups and politics is that if you are wrong, somebody else will come along and be right. The parallel extends in that sometimes we work on incomplete information. Additionally, traction on the ground is all that matters, hence the reason why we should all know a little more about COIN (COunter INsurgency) today than one year ago.

I was too young to remember the politics around Vietnam. I had an uncle who volunteered in the Marines, only to be sent to California instead. He was very disappointed. I know that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese left the communist invasion to go wherever they could. I feel certain that South Vietnam could have held against the North had we not cut off all of their support in Congress. But I am not a military expert, so what do I know?

Communism is not bad, as in moral terms. It is bad in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. More people are happy under capitalism. That doesn't make Capitalism right, it just makes it more "right" than other systems. "right" is a term that needs further definition before you can comment on it.

As a side note, I would have not supported the invasion of Iraq had I not felt that we as a country were in it for no matter what it took. Fighting a war is a horrible thing, and if it is necessary, it doesn't become "not necessary" once the bill gets too high, the deaths get too high, or the newspapers start trashing your political party (not that I am a Republican.) Wars are not football games. Nobody wins in a war. But yet the applied use of physical violence seems to be a constant in the reality I live in. It also seems obvious that it is a duty on each of us to determine the rules by which such violence should be fostered on others. It is not sufficient to make blanket statements -- each of us owes our society a reason when and why we would or would not use violence. I think this responsibility for analysis is missing. Perhaps because most people feel more like spectators than participants.

We use terms like "bad" "good" "right" "wrong" to signify some serious and nuanced opinions. It makes sense to take the time to explain ourselves. Thanks for calling me on it. Apologies if I continue to offend folks and get down-modded again.
There are more YC news comments on this article here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92136

There was also an article in Nature this month called "Professor's Little Helper" folowed by an active forum discussion that covered some of the same ground as the LA Times article

"Professor's Little Helper"
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7173/full/4501157...

Nature forum discussion
http://network.nature.com/forums/naturenewsandopinion/816
Sounds like they need a good dose of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92745
I've actually seen people use mobile devices to order food thereby avoiding lines.
Smart Languages and Dumb Parsers
The Megapixel Myth
i wanted to add in, 'there needs to be workers'* as a correction, i suck at typing on my phone sometimes.
I would add nanosolar to that list, but their big announcements may have been too recent to make it to press.
Scientists and Engineers for America 
Issues of science and technology policy are seldom vigorously debated, and our elected officials are not being held accountable for the actions they take in these areas. As a result, elected officials' positions on science and technology issues do not get the attention and energy from policymakers that they deserve.

SEA has developed a system through which elected officials' positions on these and other important science policy issues can be easily tracked and presented.This is a first of its kind organizing tool that engages citizens in science and technology issues and helps them hold their elected officials accountable.

By bringing these elements together and allowing users to contribute information to the site, SEA will enable the electorate to more fully evaluate their elected representatives, allow individual members to share information on elected officials, and ultimately provide a forum for elected officials to communicate with their constituents on their science policy positions.
I think for most people, someone else having their social networking passwords would be mere annoyance, so if any product were at all compelling, they'd have no trouble giving them up. I know that's the case for me. It wouldn't be anywhere close to them getting my email or online banking passwords. The worst they could do is leave obscene comments on my friends' walls.

That said, this product doesn't seem very useful, and I wouldn't expect it to catch on.
I went back to work yesterday, fighting traffic and putting up with annoying coworker habits.

Working hard to make someone else rich doesn't scale.
A Post-Google Fraternity of Investors
Why don't you try it and see if you're able to put it together?

If you can't get it to work, you need to go back to the drawing board and either try something else, hire someone or learn how to work with Drupal's code.

That's the deal with being a "Hacker". You fiddle with something, and if it doesn't work you learn about the problem and tools and fiddle some more. There's no magic bullet to this, only hours of trying to get something to work.
It also seems obvious that it is a duty on each of us to determine the rules by which such violence should be fostered on others. It is not sufficient to make blanket statements -- each of us owes our society a reason when and why we would or would not use violence. I think this responsibility for analysis is missing. Perhaps because most people feel more like spectators than participants.

If only our elected leadership thought like this. At least you went through the process and were willing to accept the consequences.

We were led into this as if it were a football game, and the public bought it. I remember arguing with people about the cost in lives, and they were pissed at people like Susan Sarandon because "they don't have to pay high gas prices. What are those stars worried for?". The whole "shut up and sing" anti-analytical thought process in the run-up showed me how amenable the public is to control with fear. I counted at least 4 changes in the rationale for war within a week by Bush during this time period, and it didn't seem to matter to anyone but me.

I figured, "maybe I'm too skeptical and they know something I don't". If only that were the case. Due to the football game cakewalk mentality of our leadership, we have had 5 years of hillbilly armor, extended tours of duty, an insurgency, thousands dead, etc. It didn't have to be this way.

Again, thanks for your opinion and glad someone else is thinking.
Yes, Taleb and Spitznagel. I don't know if that fund is still around. I couldn't find much information on it.
Tip 2: Hire A+ engineers who love coding

is Wrong!

You're better off hiring a team of engineers who work well with each other to get things done. All of them do not have to individually be A+. In fact a team of A+ rockstar engineers is almost guaranteed to be dysfunctional.
Great idea. What would the site's revenue model be if not taking money from startups to hype their offerings?
Science on a Napkin: Virtual Drawing is to Drawing as the Telephone is to Speaking
3 things you'll still hate in '08
Are there enough attempted terrorist attacks to demonstrate which techniques are and are not effective in stopping them? There are a lot of cancer patients to test potential remedies on, and for control groups, etc. What is the corresponding methodology for terrorist attacks?
I have no proofs; I don't think very many proofs exist with regards to this topic.

From what I've been able to gather, I think the cardinality of the normal and non-normal numbers are the same, even though the non-normal numbers are measurably greater because of probability distributions. This is a paradox that I don't really understand. http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4270
You really have about three decent choices here:
1) PHP, 2) Ruby & Rails, 3) Python & Django

Of these three, I believe that PHP really is the best choice. While you could learn either of the other two technologies, you can find a number of books just on 'PHP and MySQL' and a heap of online documentation on the same. Additionally, there are hundreds of 3rd party modules and programs written PHP you can either integrate directly into your site or use to learn from. PHP will scale better than Ruby on Rails and is just as easy (some would say easier) to work with. It will have a much shorter learning curve than any of the Python frameworks and is also more forgiving of programming mistakes.

Beyond those three, several exotic choices exist such as Smalltalk/Seaside or PLT Scheme. However, documentation and third party modules won't be as readily available.
Top 10 Bizarre Mental Disorders (check Chapgras & Fregoli)
Why do that when they've got the time and inclination to educate themselves on what's required to build the site?
Dissecting Boredom
Interesting robot chair concept
Ha, I'd heard of just about everyone at the top of the Quantcast list, which, btw, is highly suspect. I clicked on four sites I hadn't heard of, and two of them were porn.
You don't pay to be featured in TechCrunch.
This quote "One needs about a doubling of linear resolution or film size to make an obvious improvement. This is the same as a quadrupling of megapixels." is not only subjective, it's flat out wrong. Theres a remarkable difference between a DVD (480p) and HD at 720p, and that's only a 50% increase in linear resolution in one direction (and only something like 15% in the other).
If you're worried about security when eval'ing js, check out: http://www.hedgerwow.com/360/dhtml/js_safe_eval/demo.php
And it was so much more rewarding afterwards. I've heard. cough
Amazon Sold 17 Wiis Per Second In 2007
This article is old and the chip is useless; it's virtually impossible to program.
Yes.

Relax. Don't fret. Use Drupal. :)
Agreed but the article said otherwise. It said japan and northern Europe achieved the highest marks for non-thar-ness. The US was criticized for minor thar. I merely asked whether a little thar was such a bad thing. Esp when two common traits of non thar countries are an inability to defend one's borders and two of the biggest US military bases outside the US.
"In low tech warfare, the fiercest and most cohesive side wins..."

That is true of modern warfare, as well.

"If you have guns and your opponents have spears..."

Sure, in an extremely asymmetric war, the folks with the missiles can relax the fierceness a bit.

"Industrialization changed the balance."

As war becomes more about tools, the economic efficiency of the underlying society matters more. However, very early in history it was the case that he with the best toys wins. Swords were never cheap, nor was the time it took to learn to use them. The importance of technology in pre-industrial societies can be understood by the frequency and severity of arms control in China and Japan. A bunch of motivated peasants with hoes are in a bad place vis-a-vis a few gentlemen with swords and steeds.
US/WTO Online Gambling Drama Continues: U.S. copyright waived in Antigua and Barbuda
Both the code of Bushido and the less culturally specific "Texas Justice" mentioned in this article arose in similar circumstances -- cultures that are war-like, family-centric and deeply conservative. Bushido, however, likes to put on the face of self-censure, and therein lay the real difference.

Neither seppuku (suicide with a helper) nor harikari (the solo version) were matters of "killing yourself if you get super pissed and can't find anybody else to kill" (as per Real Ultimate Power). They were a means of averting the wrath of an indiscriminate government, which would punish your entire family if you failed to make up for your shame in the appropriate way. Of course, your family would not be happy about this -- the option of "do it yourself or your family gets it!" drives a wedge between the family and the individual, strengthening the position of the central government by a large margin.

With a government so strong that it can even make people kill themselves, who needs to go around enforcing one's honor by wildly killing people? The strength of the government encourages order, both discouraging revenge and the slights that lead to it. Disputes go through "official channels" and people have confidence in their resolution.

In lieu of "the rule of law", people are more inclined to take justice into their own hands. When there is no law to cover a certain trade or group, honor killing often reasserts itself. Consider Asian gang members in San Francisco who traffic in narcotics -- when one cheats another, they have no one to turn to for dispute resolution, so it's killing time!

So many things are bundled up in that article -- misogyny, honor killing, notions of honor, backwardness, privilege -- but it is important to acknowledge that "Texas Justice" (lolz) is present whenever the sheriff is absent, weak or corrupt. Take a bunch of "Enlightenment" people, put them out in the middle of nowhere with some guns and, voila, you've got Thar!
good article

one of my coaches used to say 'only boring people get bored'.
bullshit.

the author either knows nothing about the subject or never saw the experiment deployed
Flickrfan : in Public Beta
...anyone who thinks Japan's is a culture of Bushido does
not know Japanese history. The Bushido code was written
by samurai who never saw combat...

It was formalized in Tokugawa times, but goes back to the 9th century in Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido) and bears a strong resemblance to the warrior ethic described in many Chinese folk tales. (These
tales were collected, very late, into the
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms).)
What formatting directives are supported on News.YC?
We have italics and what else? What is backing it? Where are the docs?
There seems to be a common assumption that building things for people in SF is a mistake. Targeting early adopters is not bad -- almost by definition, your first users will be early adopters.

The important question is: Is this something that can grow to include the larger population, or will it remain forever niche? If it's something that will eventually spread to the rest of the world, then living in the SF "echo-chamber" is actually a big advantage -- you get a clearer view of the future. This also one of the reasons why many innovations come out of universities -- they also have a "future world" aspect to them (for example, I was using the web in 1994, but "regular" people had never heard of it and had no use for it).

Unfortunately, answering that question is very difficult. Early cell phones provide a wonderful example of this -- the market predictions were off by orders of magnitude.
laziness vs paranoia

typically for most people laziness wins
It would nice to know what exactly you disagree with, and why you disagree.
I am curious how many people who writes here are actually involved in some form of modern 'warrior culture'.

Among my martial arts friends, we have a description of "Old Man Powers". What we mean by that is described in this Kung-Fu Magazine article: http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/ezine/article.php?article=74...

... that is to say, the survivors tend to be very, very crafty. Whether or not there is social sanctions for 'thar' behavior, I think that insults to honor and blood feuds often used by the immature, adolescent male more than the older, mature male. 'High-tech' may prove more as a means for killing people with more expensive equipment.

I've had some interesting times reading the comments here over the past couple days and thinking about them. My conclusion (for now) is that the author of the article has some insights in a very broad sense while overlooking some things. He says things that can be mistaken for racism because he did not provide specific examples to the contrary. Having looked through some of his other articles on the site, I see that he also has some very strong opinions. However, at the end of the day, his opinion is more or less irrelevant to someone who is living a modern warrior's life (as archaic as that sounds) -- whether that person is a martial artist, or a hacker. I find I have trouble taking his opinions seriously when I have doubts that he has been at the sticky end of violent conflicts. You cannot intellectually stop yourself from pissing your pants and vacating your bowels when your body is screaming in mortal danger.

Culture shapes us the way, say the Ruby on Rails framework shapes a web app. Conventions may be the results of hard-won experience, but the truly mature human being walk that path of evolution and learn from their own mistakes. One's whole life is an iterative process of development. Evolutionary scaffolding. Technological superiority does not entitle us supremacy any more than our ability to deliver violence. Hack your own life and make it better.

Good coding folks.
The Death of High Fidelity : In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
Developing at the speed of thought
The Ghost of Tesla: MIT researchers demonstrate wireless electrical power transfer
The Semicolon Wars (Language wars and Lisp)
All these words. Show us pictures of different solutions side by side and let us compare on our own.
Reading On Lisp: Then and Now...
Too many files: Reiser FS vs hashed paths
Optimized pow() approximation for Java and C / C++
Strange I'm getting it for free. I found it on Paul Phillips journal a couple days before it was posted here.
Any good tax accountants for startups in SF?
I'm about to start doing taxes for my startup - can anyone recommend any good and economical tax accountants in SF?
Django and Comet: a recipe for the next killer app
Boo. Apparently lots of people agree with you. I'm curious about your reasoning.
PR 2.0 (PR advice for startups)
This already exists: it's called the print media. It's easy to write about startups once they have numbers. The catch is, they may not have meaningful numbers for months.

What makes Techcrunch unique is how early it judges startups: often the very day they launch. At that point there are no numbers, only features, and features don't speak for themselves. Considering how hard it is to judge startups that early, it's surprising Techcrunch isn't wrong more often.
Great Finish! Now Start Running: The hard work that follows a product launch
You can defend territory with guerilla techniques, but not conquer it. An aggressive warrior society has to be ready to fight pitched battles. And if you try to run away in a pitched battle, the cavalry rides you down and you get a spear in the back.

The best book I know of on this subject is Hanson's The Western Way of War. Though frankly for such a basic point any book on ancient warfare would do.
Affiliate Marketing Video Tutorial
Silly code comments you've left to yourself
# MD5 TESTING - Adding time salt to passwords won't work, it isn't reversible!

echo 'MD5(): ' . md5(date('ymdHis', time()) . 'password-is-yummy-salty-safety-' . $pw);

A very silly, what-the-hell-was-I-thinking-when-I-wrote-this note to myself.