skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're always going to be doomed. A talk we did recently for a friend of ours in Chicago was entirely this: instead of the OWASP "Top 10", which is rapidly getting outdated, a list of top scary features. It sounds at first like we're saying "you're not allowed to build these!", which is the effect we're going for, but really the value of knowing what these features are is:

* You can intercept them in the requirements phase and either refactor your design so you aren't as exposed to them (maybe you don't really need file upload, maybe you can use S3, etc).

* You can make sure junior devs don't get assigned the scary features (a big chunk of the stupid flaws we find are accompanied with the "oh that was the new developer who did that" excuse).

* You can triage those features in code review and QA.

There is a big but apparently subtle difference between "encryption you rely on" and "rubber chicken encryption" (you can see now why I'm not in love with our Indie SDLC yet). Yes, you never want to dick around with encryption for your single-signon tokens --- use GPGME or Keyczar or something. But once you've secured your app, you can add obfuscation to reduce the likelihood that people will jump on your mistakes.

And yes. If you sell a web app commercially, you should own a copy of Burp. For what it does, it's amazingly cheap (like $150). It is the industry standard web pest tool.
Awesome, I'll shoot her an email tonight!
It seems like the 'Cappuccino' of the GWT.

Edit:
It even has a multi-platform 'nib2cib':
"WYSIWYG user interface editor under Eclipse"
A common belief is that U.S.-born
tech founders of technology
companies tend to be young.
We found that about 1 percent
were teenagers when they started their firms.
More than twice as many were older than
age fifty than were younger than twenty-five.
Many, in fact, were in their sixties when they
founded their startups.
The vast majority of U.S.-born tech
founders were older than twenty-five.
The average and median age of key tech
founders was thirty-nine.

Source: http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/Education_Tech_Ent_061108.pdf
> Not all fp advocates are like this, if it were so, we wouldn't see so much real world solutions to the use of fp in non academical languages

There is the possibility that FP gets wins despite the actions of FP advocates.
Education and Entrepreneurship [pdf]
With all due respect that seems like an awfully sketchy reason to not apply.

Why wouldn't age be important for a YC applicant? If I'm ponying up some cash for your startup that is undoubtedly a factor I'd be crazy not to know. Furthermore, the comment from 'Jessica', whom I do not know, sounds tongue-in-cheek.

Are there other reasons, or is this the only factor you took into consideration?
I saw a kiosk at the mall selling these. I didn't stop to take a look, but I've never seen a kiosk at the mall with so many people crowded around it.
Is it a still just a belief in a myth if you've experienced it first-hand?
Is Hacker News potential treatment for those with Asperger Syndrome?
More generally, it seems that social news sites would be a great way to treat people with Asperger Syndrome.

Voting would give immediate feedback that would help develop a theory of mind.
On Domino's pizza tracker for online ordering, you can now "share it on facebook" with a button. I'm surprised at how popular that thing is.. and it definitely social proofs domino's and leads to viral behavior patterning
So, there are a few things that make me think you're not a startup...which means VCs are not your ideal source of capital. VCs don't generally do "retail", and they don't generally do "niche", unless "retail" is something entirely novel (like Amazon.com was in 1994 or whenever it started), and "niche" is something with huge growth potential (like Cisco when they started, the market had nearly zero demand for "ethernet routers" at the time, but within a few years demand was astronomical and Cisco profited from their prescience). That doesn't mean you shouldn't get additional funding...it just seems likely you shouldn't waste your time on VCs or tech angels, which is what most folks around these parts talk about.

Other kinds of funding might be appropriate for your growth plans, though, like bank loans, lines of credit from your suppliers, etc. One reason startups don't fund through loans is that startups are too risky. A four year old retail business that has consistent sales over a long period is not risky. It's generally quite predictable from a risk perspective, and banks will trust you to use their money wisely.

There's also traditional friends and family investment, or you could bring on a new partner who brings money, expertise, and business relationships. The latter is probably what I would be thinking about, if I were in your shoes. It sounds like you need someone to help you grow beyond your current vision and into something larger.

Or, if you're making enough money right now to live on, and hire someone to take away the day to day processes of running the business, you have some other options that don't involve loans or giving away equity. You could try thinking like Amazon. I don't mean "imitate Amazon"...I mean, start thinking of new ways to leverage your existing technology and infrastructure and customer base. Did you build your own shopping cart software and inventory management tools? If so, can those be used for some other purpose? Could you open sister sites selling other products? Could you partner with local companies that want to sell their products online? Could you build out an affiliate system? Could you use it to sell virtual goods, like ad inventory? Can you make your customer base worth more? Amazon sells ads on their site, lets other retailers sell through their site, and has dozens of ways to make every customer worth more. Again, don't imitate Amazon (because you can't beat Amazon at their own game)...just start thinking like they do...always evolving, always figuring out new ways to provide additional value for your customers.
Are you a startup founder, and would you recommend crossing the chasm? I saw it referenced in an excerpt of steve blank's four steps to the epiphany.
Did you just write that most web-apps aren't I/O bound? Because that sounds completely backwards.
Get your filthy hands off my Kernel methods
Thanks for that newsio. As a 24-year-old I can't relate to a lot of the challenges you're facing, but I draw a healthy amount of inspiration from your passion and drive. I wish you the best of luck.
Why does it matter if there is growing inequality if everyone comes out better? I'm so sick of this line of thought. Bill Gates having $50 Billion dollars does not make any poor person worse off. In fact it is quite to the contrary - the services that Bill Gates makes money off of makes poor people better off by improving the production of goods and therefore lowering the costs for basic necessities.
I am not an IP lawyer, but seems like copyright infringement to me. Starting with the name. I don't think it matters if twitvid.io is not a .com - if they are providing services under the twitvid mark, they own it. The design elements might be web 2.0/twitterish, but the placement on the screen and wording screams knock-off. It is twitvid.com who should change the name, if .io guys were indeed to market first. It will be interesting to see if the .io guys take this to court.

Having said that, I agree with the comments about making sure to grab a .com. If anything, to avoid a situation like this. Does anyone know, did del.icio.us buy delicious.com right away, or after they became popular and got some cash in their pockets?
No. Obviously, any individual request/response is I/O bound. But the server doesn't have to be I/O bound.
I doubt it took them just a few days, considering they have an API, flash plugins, design elements, etc..
Indexing a Billion Documents With Google Search Appliance 6.0
Beyond the Golden Rule
I feel civic pride in knowing the government is committed to fixing any problem that can be expressed in 140 characters or less.
House of Troy GP14-7|House of Troy Grand Piano Lamps
Here's a lamp that delivers light without sitting on your piano! This new lamp has a 44 lateral reach and a maximum height of 54; you'll be able to target the music without marring your finish.
I worked briefly on a C FastCGI that matched routes to function pointers, sort of like Sinatra.

I think the "real" way to do it is with Apache Axis2/C, though.
This looks great. So far I have used ext-gwt, but I stopped because they changed a year ago their license. Felt like a bait and switch. This sort of product is badly needed on GWT to completely kick ass. Also take a look at SmartGwt.
> Public utilities like the police and water

Lots of places get water from private suppliers.

And, you might notice a lot of private security. They don't have extraordinary arrest powers, but ....

> We cannot leave the protection of free speech to companies, or other groups of citizens: they would inevitably suppress certain bits of knowledge from becoming publicly known.

How does a private entity suppress what I want to say? (They may refuse to pay me to say something, refuse to help me say something, or refuse to say something themselves, but that's no suppression.)
Why? I mean, this is stupid... wouldn't you want more info about a problem than 140 characters?
The red and blue jammed together remind me of this page I stumbled upon: http://www.wired.com/wired/scenarios/
No, that's easy. It's a shower in french.

Right?
True, but that cuts both ways. Twitvid.io xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx see below xxxxxxxxxxxxx hasn't been in existence very long, so there is no way they can argue their domain is an established mark. Twitvid.com could point to the early registration (and possibly the date of their purchase of it) as evidence that they planned to move into this space and had to move up their launch schedule in response to twitvid.io.

Trademarks are quite different from copyright, where proof of authorship is all; given the relative youth of both sites, I wouldn't rely on a legal remedy if I were twitvid.io. If nothing else, one would have to ask whether the cost of defending the mark would exceed the cost to buyout the .com, and indeed if/why not this was budgeted for.
"Except for the extraordinary fact that a single person can accumulate 1 billion"

Are you jealous? Bill Gates accumulated a whole lot more. So did Buffett. What's extraordinary about 1 billion? The guy is not even among the world's top 100 richest.

"The scale of debt should be applied equally to the scale of wealth"

Should? Why? The rich can move their assets to another country at any time of their choosing. Just because America's blindness led to a huge debt, I don't see why the rich should pay for it... after all the Iraq War, the government's stupidity, the energy inneficiency, the over-consumption and lack of savings are not to be blamed on one billionaire alone, but on the entire American people.

It's time for people to realize that the post-WW2 superpower status was an anomaly, not a birthright. The next generation of Americans won't enjoy the same standard of living as their parents did. Learn to live with it.
Actually a netbook package with just enough smarts to connect to Wifi, plus VPN + Sun Ray software, would be great at expanding their Sun Ray installed base. Sun Ray users who use them at home say everything is zippy even over 256kbps connections.
When dealing with the government, I always believed that emailing was the most ineffective approach to being heard because emails are so easily ignored. Voicing complaints via twitter is a sure fire way to let gov't officials know that you don't care enough to actually do something about a given issue, like go to a demonstration, and your complaint will not be taken seriously.

SF is just getting good publicity from being "more open" and using in vogue technology, but they are actually making it easier to ignore people.

City of SF in the eyes of the public: +1

People's power to be heard: +0
I actually saw an ad for these yesterday and did some research and ended up buying them for my dad. On the other hand Health Canada has already 'banned' E-cigarettes in Canada citing possible nicotine poisoning, and addiction. (http://tinyurl.com/pqmmnm)

I decided to buy them anyways because my dad has already been smoking for years and hasn't been able to quit. The only issue is whether they are similar enough to normal cigarettes to act as a replacement.

At the very least these devices will allow smokers the hit they need without consuming a majority of the toxic chemicals normally found in a cigarette. In fact the regulation is almost hypocritical since its hard to imagine how these devices could be as bad as normal cigarettes (maybe plastic, and water turn out to be lethal carcinogens).

One issue I foresee is taxation, these devices as they are now won't replace nicotine patches or gums (theoretically they could incrementally lower the nicotine content over time), but they could replace cigarettes since they mimic a lot of the sensations.
I'm looking deeply into solid frameworks for developing rich cross platform apps. So far this looks promising as well as Capuccino. The killer feature for me is this table widget implementation http://demo.vaadin.com/sampler/#Components/Table%20%28Grid%2...

Here is the HelloWorld tutorial:
http://vaadin.com/tutorial
Bing Is Now Your Default Search Engine On IE6, Whether You Like It Or Not
The top line in a gprof profile of an evented C web server had better be select() (or equivalent) or read() (or equivalent). So I don't follow you here.
I googled for his name and, as far as I can tell, he doesn't have a web presence, he's not an academic or has published an academic paper and he doesn't have any quantitative studies up backing up what he's done.

Not saying it won't work, just saying that he seems like an outsider and so I'm going to be sceptical unless he demonstrates something a bit more substantial than a puffed up media piece.
Since I am not a programmer, I am going to apply for YC as a TV show producer and cover YC startups in the making. The name "In Search of the Next Big Thing." or "Founders at work. The Beginning"..
So, bad methods of code review are bad.

To be fair, it helps junior developers much more than senior developers, but I remember one team of good mid-level developers that did peer review for every change, and QA had to work hard to find bugs because developers caught more corner cases because multiple developers were looking at the code. Further, at least two people knew all portions of code, which was a lifesaver when someone left. Finally, it helped developers get better because we learned what others were looking for in their own code.

As the most experience with shell scripting on my team, I'm asked to review most changes right now. I do them on down time, and I've noticed that their scripts are getting better because they know what to look for. Further, mine are getting better because they're using different methods than I learned.
We live in a World where ads are the only mean to make money for newspaperes, maybe they better die.
I would have said that immunity to social conditioning was the problem, rather than lack of social conditioning. Speaking from a position of extreme ignorance.
I'm guessing most people smoke because they are addicted to nictone. I can't see the be someone motive extending far beyond 10th grade.
It doesn't make any sense to me. On a touch screen, you would have the touch point and you can see which key center it's closest to.

Here's my suggestion for improving touch screen keyboards:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=519052
I'm not gonna defend git, but it's pretty damn hard to google for libraries or code written in Io.
This is downloading awfully slow for me. Anyone got a mirror?

(Might explain why it hasn't shot up to the top of HN yet)
Boy, there is some fabulous choice of words in that Vanity Fair article. For example in the part telling the story of an Airbus 330 that ran out of fuel over the Atlantic. Both engines are going out, the flight attendants have instructed passengers to don life vests, the main lights have failed, the PA system goes dead and then finally "as the cabin pressure leaked away, the oxygen masks automatically dropped, and this caused another round of fussing."

Yeah, I bet those passengers were "fussy" alright.
I'm a freelance music producer on the side, and I've worked on tons of top albums as well as with random indie people who think they can make it big. Here's a general overview of plugin formats:

RTAS - this is the Microsoft of the industry. Pro Tools is big, ugly, painful, and frustrating, but everybody uses it. Every song ever made gets run through a Pro Tools rig somewhere down the line. The interface and features have basically been frozen for ten years (I believe v8 changed some colors, which apparently enough of a deal to be a marketing selling point), because everyone's learned to use it. Like older MS products, the good people avoid using it when they can (only real innovative feature is Beat Detective), although it's extremely stable. Runs on all platforms; requires custom hardware.

VST - This is fairly well-supported on Windows stacks (Sonar, Audition, Steinberg, FL Studio). Nobody seriously uses Windows for real-time audio (not a fanboy comment; actual market conditions), but kids in their garage and/or that rundown "studio" downtown, or some part-time DJ playing clubs in Chicago make it work. VST is painful to use on OS X and of my two dedicated mac recording rigs none of the software I run actually supports it. Steinberg's DAWs are cross-platform, and I am told people actually use them, but I have the vague perception that it's used more with TV (network jingles and applying post-production to commercials, etc). I do largely recorded music production and occasional movie scoring work, and I've never used a Steinberg DAW. I have used Audition and Sonar on a few projects from indie clients.

AU - This is the new kid on the block. A mac-only standard, powers GarageBand, Logic, and DP. Your younger, hipper bands have all switched to Logic for day-to-day use, which kicks ProTools' sorry behind, although it's less stable. Most of the "cool" big-name bands that I work with (i.e. write their own material, actually play things live, actually competent musicians, etc.) run Logic themselves on some mac portable that they take to band practice (no external hardware). They take it to me for primary mixing (still Logic) and then pawn it off to some sound engineer for final mastering (Pro Tools). All the kids use GarageBand. I've seen DP used both in live settings and in recording studios although it's kinda fringe. AU is a joy to code if you know C quite well.
Ask HN: How does one prevent their start-up from being knocked-off?
Although this question has been on my mind for quite some time, the situation with twitvid.io
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638526 prompted me to post it on HN.

I am posting this as a separate item because I didn't want to take attention away from the twitvid discussions, and I feel this particular topic deserves its own thread.

I know the obvious, generalized answers: patents, copyrights, trademarks, creating a strong brand, creating a following, blog, PR, SEO, making the product complicated, trade secrets, etc..

What I'd like to discuss instead, are unique ideas for barriers to entry. Also, real-life case scenarios and stories from YC founders and HN users, who have successfully spun-out their start-ups with competition high on their tails, about what they've done to leverage and to keep their first-mover advantage.
They are not making it easier to ignore people per say, since they are not closing older ways to contact them. Still, they are not making it harder either. A good change would have been providing some way to follow-up and track progress of a reported problem.

Effectiveness of a government service is not in how many different ways there are to report a problem, but in how well it manages to fix it.
When dealing with the government, I always believed that emailing was the most ineffective approach to being heard because emails are so easily ignored.

This is true for big issues like giving the schools more money and re-legalizing gay marriage. That is not what this service is for, though; it's for "there's grafitti at the intersection of Foo St. and Bar Ln."

Twitter makes it easy to report problems like this, which means the graffiti-removal crews don't have to drive around looking for things to fix. They can be dispatched directly to a problem location. (Of course, email and phone calls would work just as well... but when you are just wandering around, tweeting from your phone is easier than sending an email or calling them up.)

Even Chicago gets things like this right (call in a problem, crew comes and fixes it), so I'd be really surprised if SF ignored these tweets.
I don't understand why you need obfuscation for this. With customers of this size, you can have them sign a contract that protects your IP. Price in what you think is the risk, and insist on a contract.
It makes sense in terms of having a stable platform to deploy apps to. Java has worked pretty well on mobile phones.

Imagine a netbook which just runs a java O/S. Maybe it has a java app store with all the apps you could ever want, and a kick ass browser.
Just noticed that twitvid.com (not .io as I mistakenly noted above) actually has an active trademark application on the name Twitvid. Specifically, it's their parent eatlime.com, an existing video-sharing service that has done the filing. So I don't see much hope for twitvid.io leveraging their < 1 week launch advantage into a defensible trademark.
I think people with Asperger Syndrome just need more obvious feedback. They don't pick up on subtle cues.
Last time I looked yes a few, Also tons of <4 letter>.net available if you don't mind who has the .com version.
Well, you can send a link to a picture there, it seems reasonable: "pothole @ 345 Bryant Street http://bit.ly/9879809
Actual URL, http://tinyclouds.org/node/
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635786
I think the OS itself was built with this in mind, so the default apps are probably fine. The real question is going to be the 3d party apps. I know apple is already having to deal with this to some extent with some of the resolution independence features in 3.0, but I'm not sure what google's plan is.
Hmm things will get interesting if the Android netbook distribution is closely compatible (or totally) with the phone version.

If you can easily run apps built for phones on a netbook and vice versa then I'd totally whip out Eclipse and start hammering out cheap Android apps. The problem will be if this fragments the Android SDK to a point where end user's cant tell if the application is going to work correctly on their device.

And of course another blow to Linux on the desktop because here is another platform to help you avoid the perils of the Linux GUI.
Not at all. The Sun netbooks will be beige, with purple corners!

And they will run on Java http://electronicdesign.com/Articles/ArticleID/4841/4841.htm...
Yes, when I'm programming alone, which is a microcosm example of why I really like pair programming.
FTA: Once you submit a DM to @SF311, you will receive a service request number. Apparently, there is a city staff member devoted to handling and responding to @SF311 Tweets.

San Francisco is also using CoTweet, a Twitter business platform that acts like a CRM, to manage and track these conversations. CoTweet’s platform supports both marketing communication and response-driven customer support via Twitter.
If you have a lot of money just create the need rather than make a better product, most corporations do that, especially pharmaceutical ones.
related threads to this discussion

picked up by venturebeat:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638769

I started a separate thread for discussing barriers to entry here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638892
Ha, burnouts, stress, jobs, efficiency. It's just a ride.