skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comment from the user end: I am not the greatest fan of OpenID (try talking your grandma through getting one) but I agree that as long as you don't have a site where the user might have a real need for unique authentication information (eg. bank account), you should really consider something like clickpass.

I always try new sites if I can get in with existing authentication - and I don't always if I need to register. So it depends how much you care about uptake.
Hurrah for nostalgia!
My company went through this recently.

We listened to the advice of experts (PG, Venturehacks, VCs, etc.) who told us that nobody cared about your idea. Seriously. Nobody is going to steal your idea, for the simple reason that it's not original.

Just focus on the execution and strategy. Don't waste your efforts thinking you have the neatest, coolest idea ever.

Also realize this: if/when you submit to a VC, it's likely that they have another, similar, company in their portfolio. Are you going to worry about them sending your idea to a potential competitor? Because no VC will sign an NDA.

You're going to have to share your idea sooner or later. If it's later, then you're relying on your competitive advantage being the 6 month head start. Which isn't really that much of an advantage.

There's enough for you to worry about right now w/o concerning yourself with secrets.

(note: this doesn't necessarily apply if you're in a biotech industry, or something that really protects trade secrets. Most IT/web tech startups aren't like this).

edit: and, if somebody DOES copy your idea, look to it as validation that the original idea was a good one! Now go out-execute them!
"I want to build something exciting to me."

I agree there. I use power tools, but I don't build them. OK, I think about building electric motors sometimes, but I haven't tried yet. What I really want is a nice table with tapered legs, so I use the best tools I can get to do that job well. Someone else might use the table to help them build something else.

It's the same with code, we keep builing things and sometimes those things are used to build something else. Sometimes that's obvious, like libraries or frameworks that are dedicated to being part of some other software solution, but often the softare helps someone build something else that isn't software.
Often, yes. Reading code very rarely induces me to understand what I'm reading (and I'm pretty undisciplined, so rather than being able to force myself to think deeply about it, I often just reread until I "get" it). However, figuring out how to build something like it myself promotes understanding much faster, in my experience.
This is something that's not familiar to me. Do you mean as a sys admin, or do you get called during the nights because of program crashes?
Well I think we've identified the point in which our opinions diverge.

1. Company makes profit.
2. Company invests in more people.
3. Profits rise, company grows.

Step 2 is not a prerequisite for step 3.

And what you state is my hypothesis is not what I'm saying either.

How about this:
1 - Company makes profit.
2 - Company figures out how to grow profits, regardless of increase or decrease of headcount.
3 - Profits rise.

What, do you work in HR or something? (jk)
A slight spin on this concept: if you're in line watching someone get harassed by assholes, be extra nice when it's your turn. It's an opportunity. In Vegas at Black Hat a few years back, I watched 3 or 4 consecutive parties harass the person at the check-out counter. My turn, all I said was "wow, rough day huh?" I got upgraded to a suite.
The main reason I hate the registry and much prefer /etc is that I can do `tar -czf backup.tar.gz /etc/*` and have a backup. I can also fix my machine if things are so bad I have to boot into single user mode. Scripts can easily look at system settings. On the plus side, the registry is more consistent; you don't have to figure out each program's config language.

I think you can export pieces of the registry, and if Windows had better command line tools, scripts could easily look at settings. But as it is now, it's a lot easier to backup and restore /etc than the registry.
Why not call it Make Something People Want News. It might focus the mind of the posters and reduce off-topic posts. Also "Innocuous News" has the feel of an inside joke; it might lead to a recurring Ask-HN thread about the name.
That's true, but I made that statement about XML parsing based on my own life experience: I love working on version control tools, I'd work on them even if nobody else used them. They have this internal beauty to me, but most people have just decided I'm a little nutty for liking that kind of work.
It's far from speculation, very reasonable in fact. The genetic diseases were all related to fat metabolism. There have also been studies that show the quality of insulation on neurons (from fat) correlate strongly with intelligence. It's not a very big leap at all to see a connection between those disorders and increased intelligence.
I have a list of stuff here:

http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users

Which, as the link suggests, is all about trying to make Windows tolerable for users of more advanced systems when said users are forced for whatever reason to hold their noses and use Windows.
I like Innocuous, but you could always give "hacker" a weird web 2.0 spelling to solve the problem.
How would you build a Rubik's "sound" cube?
This would be like a normal Rubik's cube but with the same color on all sides.

So the question is how would you use sound (and perhaps touch sensors, an accelerometer, etc.) to make this work exactly like a Rubik's cube?
And continuing the amateur psychology, is this part of a pattern? You talk about starting hundreds of projects. If you generally have trouble finishing what you have started, it may not be the fault of the project.

I'd say given how close you are and given your commitment to another person, the mature thing to do is suck up a bit of boredom and finish what you started. If your partner is right and it takes on a life of its own, you can hire somebody else to maintain it - either way it won't be a slave sentence.

In Belbin-speak, you are a plant and you need to team up with a completer finisher. But whatever your natural inclinations, you still have made a commitment to your partner and need to deal with that responsibly.
consider "Asians don't like to code"

... can we plz stop making big generalizations? Different people like different things.

Programmers are not all alike.
And so, AngelFire had finally triumphed...

Is it me, or do all portal-type services seem to go through the same curve, since CompuServe to Facebook? Unified interface and handy tools excite early adopters, interest scales in sigmoid fashion, plateaus, and diminishing returns set in as the signal-to-noise ratio declines, followed by profitability.

It seems to happen over and over again, like waves on the seashore. Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community...much the same way people like suburban tract housing with homeowner's associations. Every few years someone makes fat money by finding a new way to cater to these people, few of whom want to maintain their own domain or pages. Numerous me-too sites grab a small slice of this (like facespace.com...really). 5 years later, it's like that nightclub down the street that used to be so cool.
Funny they don't mention that the exact same arguments were made about the VCR in the 1980s.
RubyPAN (like CPAN except for Ruby)
I think it's a bad idea. Threads basically "die" for me when they fall off the bottom of my "Comments" link --- or, at most, when they get one or two "More" clicks past that page.

This is helpful, because after a few days of participating in a thread, the quality of my responses degrades, and the number of people reading it declines.

I feel like time-limited discussions are part of the culture here.

(I'm aware of the irony. I just saw the timestamp.)
Done.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576066
Progressive Caching In-Depth
Counterpoint: if we had a "history" link, we'd just be encouraged to talk about what appeared on it, and that kind of navel-gazing discussion is something we're trying to avoid, right?
if passwords are randomly generated, I agree with you completely, and everything I've said is crazy talk.

But most passwords are not randomly generated. Most passwords are dictionary words, or two dictionary words. You don't need to search the hash space; you only need to search the password space, and if everyone uses the name of their dog, well, that's not a very large space.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/realworld_pass...
This article makes me wonder if the web industry is like the local strip club.
Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor
Markov chains are one of those things which I have an unreasonable fascination. They're such a powerful concept and are continuing to become even more and more impactful. Awesome stuff.
I'm not sure what his point was, because he kept sticking to the provocative "programmers don't like to code" line.

If he said "programmers don't like to write code that's not directly related to the problem they're solving," I'd agree. But if that's what he meant, then he should have said it.

I find the practice of starting out with a provocative statement, then redefining the semantics of the discussion until the unqualified thesis statement is true both annoying and disingenuous.
Programmers can like to code and solve problems.

If all I liked doing was to solve problems, I could be fixing that broken toilet.
Yahoo shutters GeoCities — my eyeballs are grateful
Welcome to every awesome security vulnerability ever found.
Ask HN: Contact info in profiles
There have been plenty of instances where I wanted to contact a reader after reading his/her comment on HN. But there are an incredible number of user profiles that have no contact info whatsoever.

I can understand if this was digg, but on a strong community site like HN, I was surprised to see this.

Is there a particular reason why many people don't have any contact info listed in their profile pages? If not, maybe now would be a good time to update with a simple email address perhaps?
PG and/or other investors:

Can we get an opinion on those terms?
The way people treat others they don't have an immediate incentive to be nice to speaks volumes about them. If somebody is rude or manipulative to waitstaff on a date, for example, you know that's going to come out later in the relationship.

When somebody is acting nice for purely selfish reasons, it tends to be quite inconsistent.
Less taxes for Michigan residents and more efficent schools now that they're private. A win-win situation.
The Evolution of Virtual Currency
Which? I'm only familiar with ed and ex.
My preferred way to explain my stance on operating systems is thus: "I don't hate Microsoft. I love Linux."
Absolutely not. The financial crisis was an inevitability from September 2007. If anything the oil crisis slowed down or even softened its impact in 3 ways:

a) it vented liquidity from the dreadfully overheated mortgage market
b) it deflected attention onto oil companies even though most of the change in oil prices was driven by merchant bankers looking for somewhere to park cash
c) it created a high degree of demand destruction, slowing the economy down significantly

This didn't drive us (or any other country) into recession, but rather caused us to take a closer look at the drivers of the economy and realize that the real estate bubble had already peaked. My personal opinion is that if it hadn't been for the oil shock the financial crisis would have come 3-6 months earlier and been even more stabilizing.

I did a lot of research into this last year for a documentary, but shelved it due to inertia and changing events. I feel strongly that the oil crisis happened because of the deeper financial crisis, but still can't decide if it was a naturally emergent symptom or a wholly engineered plan B which succeeded in staving off total collapse. Or somewhere in between.
I wrapped my web app with an error handler that sends an email to myphonenumber@bigtelco.com and I get a tidy tiny error report as a text message, wherever the hell I am.
Thought about brining this up with your landlord? Seems like too much available supply. He may comply without y'all having to worry about moving and the associated headache (think of all your "behind-the-desk" cabling).
"(2) There's a reason that no mainstream consumer application actually does this: as soon as you lock a normal user out of their account for an hour, you probably lose the user forever."

I don't know, it seems to work pretty well for Microsoft
I'm always on the lookout for that sort of thing too, but I don't think you're right here. I get annoyed when people say "ellyagg likes to program" because it's dismissive, like I'm some strange creature who finds the task of putting various glyphs in parallel lines soothing. I don't enjoy programming for programming's sake. I enjoy creating and I enjoy my creations bringing value to other people's lives.
Your article is great advice. As I worded it, I'm providing practical advice to a new web developer. Let me elaborate on my position:

First and foremost, don't write the password handling yourself if you can avoid it. If you do it yourself, I'm only firing the developers who put the password in plain text, and I'm not even going to give grief to the ones who at least use a rainbow-dodging salt and hash (like what most major web frameworks include by default for user auth management). I.e., if they use django defaults or Code Igniter defaults, then they're not in trouble.

Any senior engineers on the team are going to get some whining from me if the framework supports crypt/bcrypt and they didn't enable that, but if they forgot and the site launched without it, I'm not going to die.

It the team is making an authentication package for a web framework or especially for a native framework, they need to consider heavily using bcrypt (or other state-of-the-art approaches) for password handling unless there's some major compelling reason we cannot or should not.

What I'm trying to be is realistic and give the guy a side that's non-religious.

I agree with you as a hacker, but on the practical side, no coding decision is all-or-nothing with me.

If you're a new developer and have read this far and want to know where to find decent bcrypt packages for your favorite language, Google's AWT page has a good explanation and handy links to those (scroll down):

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/wiki/L...

Also here's instructions for using crypt with Django auth:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#changing-p...
"Monty" Widenius on Oracle and MySQL
I'd argue that there are a lot of different breeds of programmer who fall at various points on this spectrum. Some programmers like to rewrite things because they are perfectionists, other programmers find any working code (for some value of working) to be "good enough" and move on. Many programmers don't fall neatly under any single label.

In particular his distinction between a preference for "problem solving" or a preference for coding obscures a much richer diversity of attitudes. An understanding of the subtle gradations between these various different kinds of programmer is probably one of the best tools available to the truly thoughtful software manager.

Personally I am really only enjoying myself if I'm tackling a "hard (for me) problem", if the ratio of typing to thinking is high then I'm "working".
An excerpt:

"The biggest threat to MySQL future is not Oracle per se, but that the MySQL talent at Sun will spread like the wind and go to a lot of different companies which will set the MySQL development and support back years.

I would not like to see this happen and I am doing everything I can do to keep this talent pool together (after all, most of them are long time personal friends of mine). I am prepared to hire or find a good home (either at Monty Program Ab or close to it) for all core MySQL personnel."
There are clearly different types of programmers. For me I think it would be more that I like designing and seeing concepts become something. Some people don't get that programming is actually a very creative process.

There is some problem solving, but if it was problem solving that I enjoyed I would have enjoyed math (more).
I still think this marks the end of an era. Websites and web presence in general have become so ubiquitous that the need for Geocities no longer exists. That is in and of itself amazing. I grew up on Geocities, and to be honest, that's where I learned HTML.
Wow...I've had a GeoCities site since 1997. I think the last time I updated it was in...2002?
When the program does anything unexpected.

It could happen anytime, but I added the "during the night" for dramatic effect :-)
I've got a very close friend that was a game developer at EA for about 4 years. He went through a very similar experience. He eventually burned out, moved back home, went back to school and is now a Chiropractor.

He more or less quit gaming when he was a game developer. After about a year off he returned to gaming and now enjoys the occasional MMORPG or strategy game. He returned to gaming but I don't think he'll ever return to coding.
Considering it's the basis behind science and pretty much all analytical thought, can we please stop pretending making generalizations (yes, even big ones) is a bad thing? This generalization was interesting and contains a large degree of truth; if you'd like to disagree with that, or explain where the generalization falls down, do so.
other than the fact that the homeless guy in question is a programmer, the article in question does not seem to be related to 'hacking'. I went in looking for details on - how to find free space to sleep in, tips on avoiding the police/getting out of jail easily, finding _healthy_ food etc...

The article focuses on other aspects that are important, but is not hacking.
What's the probability that HN does not cover two topics of some class of some student in one week? < 1%.
If passwords are two dictionary words, then even with the system dictionary, a single 50ms hash takes 889,251 hours to crack. 8 million if people put a single digit at the end of it. You won't win this argument.
Your profile doesn't have any contact info either :).

The email address field is not public. Only PG/YC can see it.
And to think I just implemented x-debug yesterday. PQP blows its socks off. Good work guys!
The Dream Scheme Operating System
Virtual Purple demo virtual world for business training: Be CEO for a day
The Funded doing YC-style incubator
Very fast, very easy. I have been checking this out the past few days and I like it-- Have yet to move any of my actual project teams over, but I intend to try. I have used zoho, google docs, and huddle in the past. Currently using Huddle for its LinkedIn app, but this puts all of these to shame with simplicity and usefulness.
Oh wow, I had no idea. I thought it was visible to everyone.

Fixed it.

Thanks :)
Two responses.

First, we don't have pages and pages of comments and discussions because the topic isn't cut-and-dry. The topic is cut-and-dry. It just takes 5-10 round trips to explain to someone why clientside Javascript crypto is a bad idea.

Second, I agree with you. I'm not firing someone for using SHA1+nonce. But I will bitch if you recommend it, because even though it's not a game-over mistake, it's still a mistake.
Future-Proofing Your Apps
Well, they get paid a lot more money.
Conveniently, I don't have anything that's inaccessible from the main page, so a simple

wget --mirror http://www.geocities.com/my/path

was enough to get everything I needed.

Stripping out the auto-added ads was easy enough to not be a big deal. But hey, if you can actually remember your passwords, more power to you. Maybe if I get bored, I'll try to figure it out and see if I had anything I had uploaded there for posterity, but I don't think so.
I guess I don't interpret "like to program" that literally.

I think it's accurate to say "I like to program" because it goes beyond problem solving for me. I enjoy solving the problem, yes, but I also enjoy expressing the solution. I enjoy the process of figuring out what is the most concise, elegant and natural expression of the solution, and I find the result pleasing.
I love Mechanical Turk. We used it at my agency where we were having a big problem with time clock fraud (a.k.a. people were asking their friends to punch them out and then leaving hours early)

So I built a very simple add on to our timeclock (which is essentially an ELO touch screen and a PC) and had it use a web cam to take a picture of each person punching. Then we created a program that showed turk users a person's badge picture and then the picture taken at the punch and asked "Is this the same person?" (with answers of Yes/No/Maybe) Doing that virtually eliminated the problem overnight.

I agree with the author that M.T. won't completely change the market. But what it will do is allow people to monitize their spare seconds and in doing so make a lot of the "no-brainer" grunt work that companies have to do a lot cheaper
"If programmers liked to code, they wouldn’t value a language by its libraries."

Yeah, that's why I spend 16 hour days coding in Common Lisp and Mozart/Oz.

"If programmers liked to code, every last one of us would be overjoyed to write our own HTTP client."

Because HTTP clients are a stupid display oriented and bug-tolerant little things. HTTP SERVERS on the other hand, those are more tractable, since you can be responsible for following the specs yourself, and a treat to work with for all the interesting engineering possibilities they offer, which is why more people have written web servers than web clients.

“I just want to update this field in this file, why do I have to write an XML parser?”

Oh, he is talking about that programmer: the corporate data janitor. That sentence is just laden with idiocy; first, if your data is in xml and you don't have established tools to perform "CRUD" type operations on your XML files, you're doing XML wrong (lack of established process). Second, if you have to write an XML parser to edit an entity in a file, you're doing it wrong (refusal to use established tools, NIH). Third, if someone has to enlighten you on how to update one of your data files (inability to RTFM) .. Dear Neo, the salve of Hackingkind, you're doing it wrong. No wonder you hate programming then.
I've always thought that coding kind of came with the job. I don't like repetitious tasks in my coding life any more than any other, but I still enjoy the man vs machine aspect of coding.

And since when did 'Programmers' become such prima-donnas? I like whatever it takes to continue a career in developing software, sometimes that means tedious stuff, and sometimes really interesting ah-ha moments of coding.

Its all part of the CS experience.
DeWolfe out at MySpace
There's another factor that the article doesn't mention explicitly: DVRs erode some of the benefits of pirating TV shows. People pirate TV shows (that are available on air where they live) largely because they want to watch them when they want, they want to be able to pause when they need to, and they don't want to sit through five minute blocks of the same advertisements they've seen three times already in the program.

I suspect Hulu exists because someone noticed this and wanted to erode more of said benefits.
GeoCities was my first site. Being given a chance to play with HTML (4.0 was still cutting edge) is what drew me into the tech world and led to the career I now have. I'm sad to see it go, but it's function has been replaced by numerous other sites and Yahoo! doesn't have any reason to keep it going/growing.