skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So basically the algorithm is in the code, so anyone who has ever seen the code knows the algorithm, which you can't change after you have actual users. Any ex-employee could take a copy of the verify function and a dump of the database and hack it home. Similarly a cracker who gets a DB dump of the passwords will probably get your code too.

Running sha1() in PHP on each of the 98569 words in /usr/share/dict/words takes 1 second on my laptop. Appending all of the numbers 1-100 to each of those, not surprisingly ups the time to about 1m40s. You'll probably get quite a lot of users with passwords like that.
Startup Life. Corporate Life. Choose One?
Except there is no way for merchants to prove themselves - they can do phone authorisations, take copies of driver licences, get signatures and more and they are still out at the end of the month. What's more, Amex will either withhold the money, or if a late chargeback debit it straight from other money Amex owes the mechant before even settling the situation. Merchants shouldn't be penalised because Amex doesn't have a sufficient authentication mechanism.

Visa (or your bank) manage to reconcile the situation first.
And that t-shirt inspired an essay.

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
I used Caker's Linode back when he was a startup with only 4 nodes circa: 2002 :)

Good luck to you!
Why Ugly Teams Win--Scott Berkun's Essay from Beautiful Teams
I would love to say but I'd have to ask them first as the sales probably aren't public knowledge.
Don't Listen to Slate: Use your RSS Reader, Just Better. Like this
This is a follow up to this posting (except, I wrote about this almost a year ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590135
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/golf/masters/2002-09-27-augus...

He got in.
Not a bad point but he says: "Steve Jobs wanted to build a computer that could show the beautiful typography that he likes so much."

From what I've read this wasn't the purpose at all - he (or perhaps more Woz) liked the technology and so wanted to find a way to make a living making great technology.
I like the gist of the article, but disagree with the opinion of dumping the RSS Reader. It seems to me that it's a mental shift that the author finds possible when using Firefox, but can't do with GReader

The "neutered RSS version" of the content is exactly what I want. I don't want ads. I don't want to see other headlines in the sidebar. I want to get through the content as quickly as possible, pick out the gems I like, and share them with friends. Opening up 15+ tabs is not my preferred method, though I can understand that it may work for others.

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

I also submitted it to HN just now:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591690
"Most of the time, this leads to the well-known case of solutions looking for problems - beautiful technology that can’t become a profitable business."

OP dances around the solution, but never gets there:

Find a customer.

They're everywhere. And they need everything (or so it seems sometimes). And they're not bashful.

Once you have a half dozen customers in any industry, identify something they would all love. Pretty good bet building a business around that, not what you love.
(Just upmodded your question, a decent one.)

"Does reading comments you think are misguided make you sad?..."

Yeah, kind of. I mean, it's pretty context dependent. First of all, outside of HN, I'd be much less sensitive to stuff I feel is off-base, after all, that's why I'm at HN, it's different, a refuge from a world I'm used to feeling out of place in. (Don't mean to make that sound so dramatic/emo. I like plenty of things outside of HN, but in terms of general-subject tech news, it's pretty unique.)

I guess it stings more at HN because there are many people here I highly, highly respect and am inspired by, and a few posters here who I try to follow very closely, as if their HN posts were a feed I subscribed to. When these folks say certain things, it makes my heart sink a little, because in my fantasy, I want to imagine there's room for somebody like me in their view of the world.

I wrote something related above,

" when you read/hear something about you described as an Other, or somebody who should/does have traits different than you do (example: I don't like fashion.), you feel out of place, something I'd otherwise never feel at HN, a place I usually feel right at home at."

I don't want to change the tone about my overall feeling about HN. I think it's great. It's my extremely high opinion of it that gives it the power to make me feel sad sometimes.
Agreed.

However, I'm not sure if keeping the 'gender thing under wraps' is the best approach. It yields this mentality of 'well, I never see women on the internet being intelligent and competent, therefore, there must not be intelligent and competent women on the internet.'
In fact, the best books often have all 1s or 5s. Boring books have all 3s. The variance may be more interesting than the average
Likely people who heed Steve Blank's "customer development" approach.
Top 5 Quotes from Berkshire's Annual Meeting
These hypothetical studies would not contradict an explanation which emphasized upbringing, rather than income or genetics as a determinant of success. Parents bring their time and perspective, as well as their money, to the table.

For such an explanation, I'll note that as the article mentions re. savings plans, much of the behavior which perpetuates poverty tends also to be associated with a short time horizon, or a high discounting of the value of future income. It may be that these practices are largely adopted for lack of educating and training the child of the alternative: that sacrifice and current effort can lead to greater happiness over time. Parents would be well-situated to impart such a lesson.

But my explanation need not be the only factor at play, it only serves to show that the view that income begets income (and thus needs to be equalized) is not the only conclusion supported by the facts.
Howard Schultz: The Gray Area of Perseverance
Has anyone played this? How are you supposed to operate it without being able to see when your cursor changes?
It's a nice, glib quote, but really anyone with common sense would ask why do you want a faster horse. Ask "why" a few times and you get to the root of the problem and then you can think of a solution.

I am always amazed at how many things "regular people" want that I would never have thought of because I don't have insight into their jobs/hobbies/needs. Hang out on a few non-techie forums for a few weeks and you'll probably find tons of ideas.
Meta-object protocol linting
and I'm pretty sure Larry Page did not design pagerank to be used for ranking academic papers, it was for the web since the start. There was actually previous work on a similar ranking system for academic papers that was referenced in pagerank iirc.
There is a reason to be technology driven. Most markets are mature and hard to break into. The only good time for startups to break into a market is when there's a technological disruption they can take advantage of. Otherwise, GE or Microsoft can do it better than you. So it is actually a good bet to take brand new technologies and find a use for them.
auch, the current numbers (764 male/37 female) is worse then my school's comp.sci enrollment numbers!
You are kind of comparing apples and oranges here. I don't think Alpha would be really hurt if the majority of people found it useless.

All Wolfram has to do is to allow developers access to the API. I'm just not totally sure how he will allow access to the program right now.

Google's search engine isn't incredibly useful to the person who doesn't like using it. But Alpha has the possibility possibility of being useful to people who wouldn't even visit the site.

At the very minimum, it has a lot of potential for search aggregation. Let's say that someone wanted to create a site that aggregated travel information. It sounds like a developer could basically create mini-travel guides on demand for specific regions or towns. So you would quickly get info on crime, cost, food, weather, and tourist attractions. Or you could actually just rank travel places based on certain criteria. So if I wanted to find a cheap place that currently had warm weather, beaches, and low crime, I might be able to get a lot of useful information. I wouldn't need to use Alpha myself, somebody would have just had to develop a site to aggregate the results.

I have no idea what it's killer use will be, but this has the potential to be very useful to developers. So once developers start taking advantage of it, I believe it would be successful.
I wish I could call them up and ask, I stand corrected
The articles I've been reading about it give horrible examples. Like how typing in "how high is Mount Everest?" into WA will get you the exact answer. Only problem is, if you type that in google, the first hit is the exact answer.
1. Launched personal computing revolution
2. Got overtaken
3. Learned lesson
4. Launched iPod revolution
5. Not overtaken despite the predictions of many articles like this.
6. Launched iPhone revolution
7. Still no sign of competitors catching up. And oh yeah, making up market share in the PC business, too.
Google's power-hungry data centers
Facebook pays 150 employees ~$50K to keep the site clean
It's the colonial mentality.

We lost the entire period of industrial revolution to these imperial tyrants.

They just can't be happy without being patronizing about India and Indians.
Possibly, they were promoting crossing the chasm at the time I got some mentoring with them.
Anyone who cares about FreeBSD already knows this, or will find out on their own. Since there isn't anything surprising or groundbreaking about this release, all this story is doing is taking up a valuable slot on the front page.
I have to say I'm not entirely suprised - Reliance Group companies (owned by either brother) continue to lose their sheen - they became big players entirely due their father, Dhirubai Ambani. He's known for his ability to bribe and corrupt an entire political system and with little competition in the 'Licence Raj' days (where you basically had to get a 'licence' to start any business from the govt, often riddled with red-tape).

Now that those days are on their way out, and MNCs giving stiff competition in virtually all the industries they are involved in, it is time for reckoning, I guess. Though, it would be remiss to write them off. They're still very rich, and very powerful (politically).
So, a push for more Flash-based apps inside Facebook?

Looks like my use of Facebook is approaching nil even faster than I thought.
I don't know the numbers but my understanding at the time was that many people went to MySpace and later settled on Facebook when it came out.
Lots of people want YouTube and it is on track to lose nearly $500 million this year. The fact that Google bought it doesn't mean they've created a business.

Build something people want. That's not good enough.

Build something people will pay for. That should imply enough want and will keep you around long enough to keep providing it.
Is anything beyond ramen profitable no longer considered a startup?
BrowserShots… no longer excellent
Um.. my startup is not formal and I am working on games as a "hobby" with some vague business model ideas.

I planned to put up ads on my site to recoup cost and then make it break even into profitability.

My first game site(an encyclopedia) has already achevie "break even" status.

So...how should I vote?
I can think of 2 reasons for this. One, like you said, people don't seem as quick to post the "first thing that comes to my mind" sort of comment, which tend to be fairly shallow, or pun or meme-based.

Also, it doesn't take much for a story to get to the top, if only briefly. 5-10 up votes on a story shortly after it was submitted can get it near the top of the front page. It takes many more votes to get to the front page of a site like reddit, so more likely one of those up-voters commented as well.
First, I'll echo other people's advice: just file the forms yourself. Yes, its annoying having to handle physical paper and envelopes.

However, since you have a partner in this LLC, the really important thing is to set up your "operating agreement". This will decide how the company is controlled, revenue shared, what happens when someone leaves... etc. Don't wait until someone wants to leave or you're making decent $ before trying to figure this out. You can file the agreement with the state, too.

If I were you I would write down in your own words what you want in the operating agreement and then take the money you saved from NOT using legalzoom and have a lawyer codify what you have into legalese.
That's why you read the comments.

The best rating systems I've seen looked something like this:

# of stars (1-5): __

If not 5, the #1 thing that would get more stars:
_________

or

If not 5, the top 3 things that would get more stars:
_______________
_______________
_______________
I don't believe so. If you file in person you have to pay an extra handling fee. If you want expedited filing i think it costs an extra few hundred dollars.
The NPS question: how likely would you be to recommend ___ to a friend or colleague?
"The fact that Google bought it doesn't mean they've created a business."

A business can lose money and still remain a business, even a great one. Companies go public all the time while in the red.

And that $500M figure you have for YouTube is the epitome of fuzzy-math.
Taking the article seriously, perhaps your statement could be rephrased "I cannot live with caffeine withdrawal."

BTW, taking one or two caffeine pills (50mg) per day can see you through the withdrawal period with no headaches.
Well you can't call them but here is their paper on pagerank
http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/

There is a short mention of previous work done with academic citation analysis and there is also a bit at the end about the original purpose of the algorithm (displaying ranked backlinks.)
For more info check out "Business Law for Entrepreneurs"
Try using one of those Gyration mice. That's what I do anyway.
I am shocked by the Japanese HR practices
Controversial Web ‘Framing’ Makes a Comeback
Wow, I really botched that up.

header("Location: " . $final_destination, true, 301)

In my defense, I generally wrap this call into my own redirect function.
Yeah. Caffeine wakes you up when you start taking it, allows you to function during the period when you're taking it regularly, and makes you drowsy when you withdraw from it.
Self funded. Sold a previous incarnation of the company, and went to reinvent it to something completely different. Previous buyer wants to buy it again, but I have bigger eye-balls now, and on them are bigger dollar signs :-P
Amazon.com lost money for 7 consecutive years before first posting a profit in Q4 2001.
That's utter nonsense; you stop being a startup when you start paying dividends and living quarter to quarter. At the early stages all your "profits" are just put back into the company.
It certainly is. However, don't discount the corresponding hangover period.

Since there is no time-averaged gain in pleasure, presumably the benefit lies in being able to time the pleasure, say to compensate for mood changes due to other factors.
Why do you feel that way? The top flash-based apps on Facebook are of much higher quality than their html/js couterparts.
Adult Games 
All types of interesting games for when you are bored!
When I started out, I pitched a technology solution to my (now) advisor.
He answered: "What problem are you trying to solve?"

I learned a lot from this question, and ask it any time a newcomer pitches me a technology solution.
This is actually a really good idea and I wonder if Wolfram and Co. have considered this.

Additional note: I get super pumped when I read something on HN and I think to myself "Damn! That is a fine idea." It always makes me grin.
VPSFarm, unlimited bandwidth and awesome staff. I called them from Cambodia and told them I wasn't be able to pay this month since Paypal locked me out of my account (I logged into paypal from 3 different countries in less than 48 hours, and they didn't like it.) I didn't get around to paying them for another month and a half. My service was never interrupted.

I love a business with a human face :-)

[Currently on linode, for the easier resource upgrades since I'm getting steady increase in users. Also amazing service.]
Where's "bootstrap + straight-up profitable"?

I'm not ok with eating ramen.
Firefox'a Hoş Geldiniz
Well I think it has more to do with Apple being somewhat exclusive. Take their laptops for example. Do they want to be just like Dell and such? If they did, their laptops wouldn't be so damn expensive. It's their own fault if they get upset about not having market dominance.
Ask HN: Nerd - Climbing; what mountains to start with
After watching "Touching the Void", I have been inspired to go mountain climbing myself.

I'm posting on Hacker News as I've been a programmer for the past 10+ years and have no mountain climbing experience (nor the physique).

I'm wondering -- have other programmer types gone mountain climbing? And if so, what was the process? What mountains did you start with / what lessons did you take / etc ....
I think that would be relatively easy to estimate from Amazon's rating since they break down the votes. It's a safe assumption that 1 or 2 star votes would be equivalent to a down vote, and 4 or 5 star votes would garner an up vote.
comments that aren't at least reasonably well thought out tend to be voted down. in a community where more points = more features/access/privileges/etc., it hurts you to post mindlessly and helps you to construct good posts.

content is king, etc..
"When these folks say certain things, it makes my heart sink a little, because in my fantasy, I want to imagine there's room for somebody like me in their view of the world."

Interesting. So let's invent a measure called "distance from text", if such a thing does not already exist.

Let's say a five on the scale equates to, "I view comments as documents handed down from on high from people who cannot change or who I cannot change."

And let's say a one on the scale equates to, "I view comments as an invitation to improve someone else's schemas."

I'm guessing you would be closer to a five on this scale, whereas I would be closer to a one. Of course this scale is just made up off the top of my head, but it would be interesting to find a similar concept with some validity and then go out and measure people.
Isn't that what he's doing? I took the article as a piece of marketing, written so that someone who identifies with that problem will pick up the phone to have a talk with him. I like the cut of your jib, young fellow-me-lad!
HN is officially a sausagefest.
Hi Xenophanes.

I would like to remind you of my theory, which stems from the fact that boys and girls are born with slightly different brains (due to genetics).

You will say that that doesn't matter: brains are universal computers. Well, yes. However they are also a key part of the environment of the developing mind. Our environments influence what choices we make (by controlling the options and their relative costs, not by making the choices).

For example, if I am born near the sea then I am more likely to learn to swim before my cousin, who lives far from the sea. He lives in the mountains, and thus he is more likely to learn to climb first.

In the same way, boys and girls may have different susceptibilities to various memes, because their brain environments have differentially influenced their choices.

Under this model, average male and female behaviour will eventually converge. How? Because, assuming one progresses and lives long enough, parochial theories are replaced by universal ones. And one's biological sex and the memes I referred to are parochial factors.
I'm planning to sleep in the car if something happens. And I can't work on a laptop, I'd have to bring my large 22'' display here, and keyboards, so I'd end up walking around with a very very huge backpack :)
My iPhone and Django Application Beginnings
I think Linode really needs to make their website more appealing. I know it shouldn't really matter, since as a customer I would use their slices not their web design skills, but it does. Their site has been getting better, but it still seems like they don't have someone there that gets how to tune a website to increase conversion.

https://www.linode.com/signup/
https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new

As a comparison take a look at their signup pages. Which one of those pages would you rather fill out?

Another area where I like the Slicehost approach better is the way the prices are displayed. $20 for Slicehost vs $19.95 for Linode.
I dig the clearly-visible 2600 shirt up front. Nicely done.
Let's hope this isn't true...

I mean, according to the article, more websites are doing it, but that doesn't mean it's a good practice. I hope, if it is coming back, that it is coming back in the way bad fashion comes back, so it'll go away again soon.
I actually added that later to make it clear to our customers that I am not talking about the product they're paying for.

But I like your train of thought =))
I guess it stings more at HN because there are many people here I highly, highly respect and am inspired by, and a few posters here who I try to follow very closely, as if their HN posts were a feed I subscribed to.

Why would you think they are talking about you in particular? People who excel will always stand out no matter what group they come from. So why do you care about what people say about other members of your group?
Ask HN: Unique usernames in educational software
I'm working on a web based educational tool (university level, non-IT students) and I'm wondering how others have handled this.

Students belong to a group, which roughly equates to a class, and I'd like to keep usernames unique in each group, but allow duplicates with other users in other groups. ie group+user is unique.

Questions:
1. Is this a stupid idea? Should I just stick to the standard 'you have to think of a username no one else has thought of'?

2. How would you implement the logon screen - Three boxes (username, group and password) or combine group and username (eg group.username)?
I've never had a fraudulent charge on my Amex. I'm talking about "disputes", like, "you wouldn't let me get on the next flight out after you canceled my previous flight out, so I bought a full-fare coach ticket to get the fuck out of town and then charged it back to you". That has worked for me with Amex, and so they have me for life.
"'If [Facebook] got polluted as just a place for wild and crazy kids, that would destroy the ability to achieve the ultimate vision, which is to create a service for literally everyone,' Kirkpatrick says--and then its potential for profits would disappear, too."

So this is what Facebook views as the real threat to its future viability. Interesting.
Google Voice Fail
In two days my users will start getting real ads with the opportunity to pay to get rid of them. I can hardly wait to see what happens.
I'd much rather know about something like this than "are you male or female" or what Warren Buffet thinks (both of them are in the top ten at the moment). This story is about as pure as "hacker news" gets.
Bootstrap + very profitable
As opposed to Chicago or Missouri? They're way more off the beaten track than San Jose.
I am deeply disappointed with their selection criteria.
The dude is wearing a 2600 blue box shirt, and he's on porn patrol?
Facebook Opens a Door and Startups Rush In
I thought you stop being a startup after you finish starting up.
FYI the original iPhone was available only in the US in June 07. Selected European countries had them only in November 07. Way to skew a "report".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#History_and_availability