skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"RoR in C" is intriguing; another one: "Sinatra in C".

They are partly a systemization of lessons learned in webapps, and this particular aspect should be transportable out of Ruby.
Agreed @ anecdotes on here.

In terms of Mibbit, advertising has been extremely stable for the last 6 months (adsense). (In absolute terms it's been growing, along side mibbit).

I used to do a lot more affiliate marketing on another site, but still see a fair amount of commissions from it, even though it's "dead". I think online advertising is pretty healthy.

Anyone else have any interesting data/thoughts?
Sounds cool, but why post about something that isn't available yet?
I'm sure having to register before checking out is a big factor, but if you want to know the 'biggest' thing that scares me off - it's the web design. If they don't have a nice web design, I immediately get the impression that it's a low-quality business, maybe even a scam.

What is your website, by the way?
This article has some good insight into people who succeed later in life (late bloomers): http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html

It does happen, and it's not as rare as most people think. The article also makes a pretty strong argument that late bloomers tend to approach things differently than those who get an early start.
https://www.dallasshootingsupplies.com
Actually, the case has been made that the current economic crisis is a good example of the consequences of too much government involvement. I'm not sure I agree, but the fact is that both sides are using this crisis as an example to backup their ideological viewpoints, and there's evidence on both sides. The truth is complex. To characterize one side as just sticking their head in the sand reveals your own bias.
Also, most people outside the US have pretty much no idea what a 'douche' is.
How Not To Make A Fool Of Yourself When You Pitch VCs Like Me
One way around using food grade pumps is to seal the container and pressurize it with air so the pump never comes in contact with liquid. You can have some problems with pumps outgassing and contaminating the air, so I wouldn't rely on that method for a commercial product.

A much simpler way is to gravity feed the liquid. You can make pinch valves (like on school cafeteria milk dispensers) from a solenoid or a small R/C servo motor and only the tubing that comes in contact with fluid has to be food grade. That stuff is easy enough to find (and cheaper than food grade pumps).
Working with the python shell alot? Check out bpython
Both blogs run WordPress, of course, so they're hardly representative of their respective positions.
Break into my email: get $10,000. Here is my username and password.
Latest Trends in Digital Asset Management
the email/password combo given in the blog is invalid. i get an error.
Um, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4088702.stm
The client wants the new part done in Flex.

The Customer is always right - use Flex.
I worked on something similar in the 90s. One of the problems that we found was that people dislike having to answer their phone late at night. (Or making phone calls, for that matter.)

The biggest security risk we found wasn't the second form of authentication; it was making sure it was just as hard to add other phone numbers. Then there were instances of disconnected phones, dead cell phones, etc to deal with.

If these guys can make it all work successfully and be profitable, more power to them; it's an uphill battle for sure.

I'm not working on it any more, so I'll offer some free suggestions to them:

* Offer other means of authentication - biometric seems pretty popular, but you lose mobility. Rolling keycode generators are also nice (and not terrible to implement).

* Double-check your security at the data center. I was working on secure data storage, not email, so the problem set was slightly different. However, there was some technology we were looking at licensing that used a physical air-gap on a router to remove data from the network when it wasn't authorized to be online. Probably not economical for individual email accounts; but possibly useful for bigger clients. As an example, years ago I was talking to someone at a Proctor & Gamble research facility. All of their computers used detachable hard drives (well, Iomega Jaz drives, but still) and at the end of the day, every drive got removed from the computer and locked into a safe. That way if there was an intrusion, the data was totally inaccessible.

* Add an sms interface that would just text someone a keycode (similar to a rolling code generator, but would just require a cell phone).
Sounds pretty much like JSP.
I would say its unlikely as Google is not the top search engine in China. Baidu lives with the same (possibly more) monitoring and censoring than Google and the Baidu content is more in Mandarin.
Axod, I don't think it's that bad (linkbait, wise), and:

I like to know about such things because I'm also an app developer. I also think it should be publicized because it's outrageous bull.

Even if I wasn't an app developer, I'd think this was interesting on grounds of knowing how people get content, and who can/does censor that access.

Also, there wasn't any whining in the EFF article.
But what if traditional webapps are on the way out?
I'm interested in your claim that "the success of a business relies much more on the quality of your original idea than on anything else". Naturally this is absurd, and in comment threads not targeted at a favorite villain, no one would agree with that. Indeed, in a successful business the "original idea" often gets contorted out of any resemblance to the original.

At any rate, success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, I seem to have heard somewhere. Or, as a soft core porn actress once said in The Jade Goddess, on Cinemax late one night, "Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's what you do with them that counts."

I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea. If only ideas count, doesn't that make them even MORE important? Or, are you claiming that success is just luck?
Scala is not a scripting language.
This is out of my field, but how do you all think this will be compromised?

My guess would be by spoofing the CEO's home IP & cookie to bypass the verification, based on this paragraph from the site:

"Plus, users only need to receive a verification call when they are logging in from an unrecognized computer. When logging in from a home or work computer, a cookie can be stored so that no verification call is required."

Does that seem like a big hole to anyone else?
And hemlock.com is a printing co. :/

Please don't make XMPP be the next buzz word :(
It's more profitable for Google to self-censor in China. So they do.
You are right that this task is not solved yet. You may read about our technology at http://www.music-ir.org/mirex/2008/abs/cbms_cover_song_id.pd...

Our tests showed that 92% of the time we show correct chords, which is obviously not a 100%.

If you will have a time, give it a try, it works really well.
CGI is an interface, not a library or a language.
What's next after OO?
I am surprised Object-Oriented <blank> is still the dominant methodology in computer programming. Is the art of computer programming standing still for the last 20 years? Please enlighten me.
at work I read hacker news until something clicks... kindof like staring our a window ;)

at home I just swear at my computer until things work the way I want them to.
I seem to recall at the YC meetup in Cambridge last summer (http://anyvite.com/events/home/tmokjxuwai/) that there was a question asking why the application asked for age.

I recall that you said "... age is a high bit in characterizing someone."

And Jessica yelled from the cheap seats that "... we need it to know that you can sign stuff legally."

I remember it vividly because it confirmed my decision not to apply to YC.
Thank you for information. We hadn't considered this path.
Firstly, Wal-Mart is hugely successful and their business does not scale at all. If you find yourself in such business you have to be very good at controlling costs, but you can still be very profitable.

In the case of Apple I perhaps should be more accurate - their business has parts that do not scale well and parts that do scale well. The stores and the app review parts do not scale, therefore Apple must be super-diligent in controlling costs there. Result of cost-control is of course less trained and less well paid personnel. Hence the gaffes with review process are to be expected. Apple's fault is in not designing a proper escalation process (other than the "Techcrunch PR egg-on-face channel") .

By the way, the jury is still out on how much the app sales are bringing to Apple and what are the costs of the review process. I've seen analysis (can't find it now) that has shown Apple is barely breaking even on the apps themselves and make all their money on hardware. Which is nothing new - they used to make next to nothing from iTunes music store and make a lot of money with iPods. So the more reasons to control costs.
I'm way more interested in using Flash only for communicating with XMPP and rather do the rest in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Also with a fallback to BOSH, so it will work for those without Flash too.
"Here’s the thing, in order to get into a StrongWebmail account, the account owner must receive a verification call on their phone. This means that even if your password is stolen, the thief can’t access your email because they don’t have access to your telephone."

Great. Users will love receiving calls at all hours as script kiddies in Russia try to log in to their accounts.

"Break into my email: get $10,000. Here is my username and password. Username: CEO@StrongWebmail.com Password: Mustang85"

Great! Let's give it a go:

Error Logging In

We could not log you into your account because of the following error(s):

The username or password you entered is incorrect, or your account has been suspended/closed.

Guess the $10,000 is safe and sound.
How many people on here are not aware that:

* Apple censors stuff
* Apple aren't consistent
* Apple take random time to approve/deny apps.

I'd be surprised if many people aren't aware of those facts by now. It'd be news IMHO if any of the above changed.

I personally don't find it outrageous in the least. It's their platform to do with what they wish. Developing on top of someone else is a big risk. Just as if you build something on top of twitter, they could and might cut off access if they decide to.
Sounds like a fun way to launch a DoS attack on someone's phone when you only know their email address.
Intel thought the same about their treatment of AMD. Now Intel is out several billion dollars.

Turns out that anti-competitive business practices are not legal.
users only need to receive a verification call when they are logging in from an unrecognized computer. When logging in from a home or work computer, a cookie can be stored so that no verification call is required."

1) Compromise targets computer using some known exploit

2) Retrieve cookie

3) Profit
Thanks, Matt. That's enough for me. Ticket closed.
Meetings are overrated, but code reviews are quite useful. If you use a tool like Code Collaborator to asynchronously do code review (rather than pulling everyone into a synchronous meeting) you get something close to an optimal solution.
A brazen ripoff of Twitvid
I often think that about stand-up comics. Then I remember that they're supposed to be funny. Blog posts, on the other hand, should never try to be funny. Especially if they have to do with programming. Programming is a very serious business.
Also people have cracked telephonic networks in the past. Why can't they do it again?
Incidentally, the company I work for is hiring, and if someone wants to tackle the JWT challenge, I'd be really happy to see a resume, too. Email address is in the profile.
Thanks. He wrote very useful comment.

Don't know him personally, but based on what he wrote sentence "found it do an 'interesting' job determining the chords of the song" sounds like we are doing pretty good in chords extraction, right? :)
Ten THOUSAND dollars.

That's literally, like, an entire FRACTION of what an application penetration test costs!

They must really be serious!

[quick edit: I really hate talking about numbers here, because if you have some bootstrapped YC-style company and you're worried about security, I'd love to think you could reach out to us and not have us try to get into you for tens of thousands of dollars --- but for an actual security assessment with a public statement at the end of it this is way, way south of what the market pays]
This is worth repeating: only small part of request lifetime is spent in application code so you should worry about performance of the programming language only if you profiled your app and saw, that this is indeed a bottleneck.
Oh God yes.
If it were me, I'd probably go to work on the database that stored the phone numbers first.
Wait, you have to receive a phone call every time you want to check your email from a different computer than usual? This sounds incredibly annoying - especially if someone's actually trying to break into your account.
Definitely. I read recently that a certain model of Nokia from a certain German factory are in high demand because they make it so easy to clone numbers. So I'd imagine cloning the number is one way through, but I wonder if there's not an even simpler way in.
You need the correct password as well. The phone verification takes place after the username/password authentication.
This feature is really underutilized. I render these bootscripts on the fly with ERB to bootstrap clusters on EC2 with a few config vars, the script then determines node type at boot from the security group then pulls full source code from github, which handles mounting drives, NFS, etc.
But look at how much free press they are getting.
Nice to finally see a visionary in charge of Sun.
It looks like the server-side stuff will be in Ruby (the About references Ruby inspirations), but I couldn't find anything specific on what you'd code other than XMPP and Flash.
The demographics here are kind of straightforward.

If you're over 30, you're more likely to have a family.

If you have a family and you can handle starting a company from zero, you're less likely to need YC. If you can't handle starting from zero, YC doesn't help you anyways.
Assuming that they use a strong enough cookie (eg, containing a randomized unique key that's verified by the server) and all connections are made over SSL, it should basically be as resistant to remote attack as the person's cellphone (eg, SIM chip spoofing to get two cells on the network under the same call number).

I say that here, the weak points are the user and the cellphone; I think that the barriers to usage that the site sets up will most likely deter all but the most paranoid users from using it.
I'm aware because these stories get posted here. I like them.
>> "Plus, users only need to receive a verification call when they are logging in from an unrecognized computer. When logging in from a home or work computer, a cookie can be stored so that no verification call is required."

So all an attacker needs to do is get access to your home or work computer...
Indeed! Since the username and/or password are invalid anyway, why not make it a cool million dollar contest? Or for that matter, a billion? Perhaps it would be a trifle TOO obvious.
Low quality distributed penetration testing is cheap :).
If you look at many tech startups, you will notice that the age of the founders is closely related to the nature of their business. For instance, YC startups do mostly web software, so the founders should be young because the barriers of entry aren't that high. After all, a smart kid who spends his teens coding in his spare time will be at his best by the age of 20.

On the other hand, I know startups which were founded by guys in their 30s and 40s. Their business areas were chip-design and laser tech for optical networks. The barrier of entry in these fields is huge.

To cut a long story short, if you're 35 you may be old by web-app industry standards, but you're still young by semiconductor industry standards. Since you're on HN I suppose you're into software, not hardware, so what I have just written will most likely be irrelevant to you.
Yeah I would like to second this... I'm no expert on web apps or frameworks, but I've heard enough that they're generally more I/O bound instead of CPU bound.

Now if he were to propose writing JUST a web application in C that has a custom HTTP server designed from sockets up to HMTL... you can streamline the sh*t out of that.

Much luck to him. Success or failure, he'll still probably be learning...
It could be worse: the plants could be tweeting.
I don't think it makes sense either, but it's not that far off from any other CSS 'framework'
The amount of yak shaving he'd do in order to web-program in C would be astounding.
I've done a lot of webapp development in both Java and Rails. I would agree that the iteration cycle is shorter in Rails, but it's not as bad as your description makes it sound. If you have to redeploy a jar file as part of your development process, then that's a problem with your process, not your language.

When I do Java webapp development in Eclipse, it compiles and hot-swaps my code in the background without requiring any restart or redeployments. Works pretty well.

I do have to restart occasionally because the hot-swapping has limitations, so that does slow things down a bit, but when you consider the time saved by having good compiler integration, then I don't think there's a big difference in productivity.
"It wouldn't have any positive affect at all."
Really? You mean you are saying it is impossible that because someone high profile like zed shaw pointed out some factual deficiencies in a product, that it would never light a fire under their ass to fix them....because the manner in which he did it was rude? But, if he was polite about it, it might get fixed?

I can see how politeness would be more successful, but I am comparing causing visible public scrutiny while being an asshole vs no public scrutiny.....and you say this approach never could and never has worked?
And if you look at my original point, you'll see that I was trying to point out that not everything can stay free and ad-minimal forever.

I was simply using YouTube as an example of something that, absent of Google deciding to run it at a significant loss for 5 years (far from certain), will have to change its operating methods to something less pleasant to the consumer.
Annoying in a good way -- you need to change your password ASAP.
Still, based on the article, it's pretty clear he is looking at Wikipedia, or open source in general, rather than the State.

Could we build such a thing? It'd be as unlikely as a noncommercial, volunteer-written encyclopedia. It would require vast resources. But it would have one gigantic advantage over the proprietary search engines: rather than relying on weak "security through obscurity" to fight spammers, creeps and parasites, such a system could exploit the powerful principles of peer review that are the gold standard in all other areas of information security.

Peer review is a critical element in open source software, and less so in governance (though, theoretically, it is supposed to be).
Since when was the EFF competing with Apple? You're mental.
Right, hence crowdsourcing.
Probabilistic programming in OCaml
Sure, they have similar UI elements, but everyone knows it's a terrible risk to take not having <your product name>.com
I don't understand why anyone would do it.

I'd hate a world where people claim they "own" certain UI layouts. It reminds me a little of when 37 signals were up in arms about huddlechat copying campfire, because both of them looked like chatrooms :/

Definitely if twitvid.io have a legitimate claim to the trademark, they might have a case, although afaik owning the .com counts for a fair amount. If it was me, I'd just change the name, knuckle down, and out maneuver the competition.
He'd be a pretty good target if you were looking for someone to mug. Steal his cell phone, collect $10k.
Windows 7 to launch October 22
Visionary? That's a nice way of putting it. I'm wondering what the hell's he smoking to give him this vision of Sun flogging the lowest of low end, low margin commodity PCs. How are they going to make any money and what good will it do for the positioning of the Sun brand?
The initial page log in with the filled in username/password is also a lame setup.

There is no data sent to the sever when you enter a test authentication code, it just automatically says "Invalid code"...
That looks legit enough. My only other concern would be the selection - I know I prefer to buy things from a place where I know I can get everything else I'll need. But like you said, you're working on it, and as was said above - I think the registration is probably more of a nuisance.
Maybe I just have a newer model? The fans run silent for me. If they were noisy that would be aggravating, I agree.

Also, needing to have the disc in place to play HDD games is ridiculous. No question about it.
It sounds like you were reading a lot into what we said. Jessica's remark was obviously a joke. And all I meant was that when you're trying to judge someone's achievements, you need to know how long they've had to achieve them. Would you hold a 20 year old to the same standard as a 30 year old?
40 ft UNIX timeline banner
The Revenge of Smalltalk
This is something I've wanted to work on for months, but I lack the EE experience to do the physical side of things. Great to see it happening though.
All cars look more or less the same in the sports car segment. Yes it sorta looks like an Aston, but there is enough difference for it to be its own car. As far as its own brand, most of the "branding" is done on the front end of the car. Shouldn't be that hard to design a brand new grille that is your own.
They seem to support texting: http://www.strongwebmail.com/images/howitworks_main_choosePh...
So you enjoy news saying "Yup, Apple still reject random stuff, nothings changed"?

We have different definitions of 'news' ;)
I don't understand why Twitvid.io didn't buy the .com version first?
Thanks -- I really enjoyed that article. I could relate to the line "I felt like I'd stepped off a cliff and I didn't know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life..." The discussion about the importance of a support network for "experimental innovators" is spot-on, too.
Good start on a great idea. You could add a signup for email updates option on your homepage to keep those of us who would definitely buy a more developed version (ie more exotic chord recognition) &/or different format informed about new releases - I'd signup to that. I actually browsed the apple app store in vain for something like this yesterday.
ha. that was my idea.
I agree, but here everyone can do it.

EDIT: it seems that the login/password thing it's fake so probably nobody can do it (or he was receiving too much calls)
I bet he tell good code from across the room as well.
FTA: (The Twitvids couldn't afford the price the owner was asking for twitvid.com, so they had used twitvid.io.)
Yeah, that's just what I was thinking. Extremely nested div's are as bad or worse than tables.
And he posted his office address at the end of the blog post!
I suggest also asking someone like http://www.KarenDeCoster.com/

Never met her, but she is computer + gun savvy. She might be willing to try out your website. She is a writer, gun enthusiast, savvy shopper, etc. Here is one of her gun articles to give you an idea of what she knows: http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster152.html
I stand corrected - there are 26 E85 stations in Arizona (according to E85vehicles.com)
Okay it makes sense now. I was reading it wrong.

They couldn't afford twitvid.com so they launched with twitvid.io. Then someone else bought it and launched the clone.
Was the .com just parked when they bought the .io? I hate that... Finding a good name is either a) nearly impossible or b) expensive.