skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You mean the one who had his identity stolen multiple times?

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200805172662
"I mean no offense to those over 30 who did sign up but I'm a 25 year old and I wouldn't pick up and move for $5,000 bucks"

No offense taken (I was 32 when we accepted YC funding). But it wasn't for $5000. Nobody, at any age, (except for rdouble) is applying to YC for $5000. The reason to move is because you probably should be in the valley, if you're starting a technology startup that is going to need to raise money or build partnerships with existing tech companies.

Anyway, the money was not at all a motivating factor for us in applying for YC. If we could hire pg, tlb, rtm, and Jessica to work for us for some amount of money, I would happily give them money. But that's not the way they wanted to play it, so we took some money from them instead. You're entirely missing the point of YC, if you think the money is the primary motivation for anyone working with YC.

Edit: Parenthetical added to cover outlier.
To me, the only thing that makes twitvid.com wrong is choosing the same name. Some of the features and accompanying copy are the same, but the layout is basically a combination of any ugc site and Twitter. These two both look a lot like justin.tv and okcupid.com.

Also, twitvid.com looks better, which makes this situation more painful, I'm sure.
Great, now we're going to have 30 twitvid clones.
Twitvid.com on Venturebeat
In a lot of states TM gives you very little leeway to enforce your rights (to the point of being inneffective at times). R is leaps and bounds better.

Also remember federal trademark law gives a lot of weight to "first file" rather than "first use". So if another company files a registered TM on the same name YOU have to fight to stop them (and lose pretty much all legal rights over the name for the duration) & there is no guarantee to win - even if you used the name first :)
On the other hand, if the EFF has its way, Apple won't be able to use the DMCA to sue you for jailbreaking your iPhone... an option Apple would really like to have.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/unlocking-iphone-...
YouTube - El Abecedario de Gilles Deleuze. U de Uno
I think late night phone calls are a lot more palatable now than they were in the 90s, when phone calls for many people meant loud noises in rooms all over ones home instead of a subtle vibration in ones pocket.
Trademark protection doesn't apply to names themselves, but to names used for particular purposes. You could start an apiary called Apple Honey Co, and you'd be fine. Start a computer company called Apple, though, and you'd be infringing Apple Computer's trademark.

The mere registration of a name means nothing.
Good point. Thanks for the tip! :)

That said, I don't need no stinkin IDE integration for .psps. Being able to log in remotely and edit something with vi is kind of handy.
I've never felt comfortable talking about this here before because I have zero interest in trying to make money off companies that need to conserve every dollar they've got. Been there. Recently.

It's really kind of tricky. I've been working with my team for the past couple months on an "Indie SDLC" (SDLC is the industry's jargon term for secure development); we gave a talk on it at C4 last August. Rentzsch may post the video someday, and I'll be sure to post it here.

I have a shortlist of things I think every company should be doing now on security:

1. Stop talking about security. (Don't be a target).

2. Train every developer on SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting, and --- if they're writing C code --- Integer Overflows.

3. Avoid a set of "features that always doom dev teams", including encryption, password storage, browser plugins that inject into the DOM, templating, installers, network listeners, and file upload/download.

4. Deploy the "rubber chickens" that make users feel safe --- SSL, big long random URLs, little lock icons, and if you really need to, something like Hackersafe (which is snake oil, but whatever).

5. Screw with amateur web pests --- use your own magic version of base64 with some of the characters swapped, use 3DES for something with swapped-around s-boxes, etc.

6. Make time in QA for every release to fuzz. Fuzzing is all you really need to do for security QA. Buy a copy of Burp Suite and run the "Intruder" on every page. Write your own fuzzer for any custom formats you handle.

7. For god's sake have a security contact and a /security URL on your site. Post a GPG key. Publish advisories when people find things. Act like you've handled this before.

(Obviously we fleshed a lot of this out, and the fact that we haven't posted it yet tells you that I'm not totally in love with where it is now).

Getting someone who bills N x $100 an hour to look at your app for free, even if it's open source, will probably be tricky. With the good firms (I like to think we're one of them), advice is free, so by all means reach out with lots of questions. If the question is "how can I get my app looked at without spending $50,000", well, that's a good question! There's probably something creative you can do.
I disagree with the analysis. They imply that Sony's console is lagging due to its lack of embrace of the social media, while it is misguidedly focussing on "pounding out the games".

In my personal experience, the problem with the PS3 is not enough games - at least not enough games in all genres. Sure, there are a gazillion racing games, but have you tried supporting an RPG habit on the PS3? I am a big fan of the hardware, but if I had more time to game on a console I would have bought an Xbox 360 by now.

There are other much discussed reasons for the PS3's poor relative performance, eg. the price point. I really think the lack of Twitter is not what is killing it.
Is there a compelling reason not to use BOSH in the first place? I don't have any practical experience with it.
Type systems have been getting better - more nuanced, more accurate/helpful static checking, though the mainstream is proving very, very slow to go away from the C model.
Retel looks pretty interesting.
Another note:

A vulnerability in Google Mail that would let you break anyone's account? A six-figure finding. High-profile stupidity (like people with trivially guessable password reset questions) aside, nobody has more incentive to protect your email than Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft do. They're probably better at it than some startup is, too; they've sure spent enough on it.
Larger version : http://ycombinator.com/arc/arclogo.html
I'm cynical, I figured they just hadn't gotten around to implementing the censorship feature before they launched. It probably says more about China not wanting to take chances with a search engine it hasn't had time to vet, more than a principled stand by Microsoft.
While you're correct, it isn't mandatory to have two cameras for decent depth perception. However it would require a new sensor type.

Humans are capable of sensing depth with only one eye, this is due to the shape of our eye. Camera's work by receiving a 3D image on a 2D sensor. Our eyes work by receiving a 3D image on a 3D sensor. Our focal point is akin to a 2D sensor, but our peripheral vision wraps around a huge portion of our eye, which gives us the ability to triangulate.

While I doubt they'll have come up with a 3D sensor, I wanted to make it a point that depth perception with a single sensor is difficult for a computer presently. It would be entirely possible to design a more complicated camera, to compensate for the algorithms.

From the video, I'd guess they're either using two similar resolution cameras. Or they might be cheaping out. Using a 12MP camera would give you amazing picture resolution, however for 3D recognition, you could probably get away with amazing resolution for a project like this with something less than 1MP as the companion. This is essentially how one of our eyes work, we have incredible resolution in the focal point, but our peripheral vision is rather poor, but our brain superimposes the images scanned (quite literally our eye scans the environment using the focal point) and fakes everything.

I'm sure using a small, cheap companion sensor would provide 3D extremely well for movement recognition.
Someone posted a correction and I guess they've deleted it; but Matt's last name is "Maroon", not "Moroon".
Unless you're incompetant, cookies aren't compromised by guessing them or by scooping them off the wire. They're compromised by cross-site scripting and XSRF attacks.
You could go low-tek and print off hundreds of copies and have them post all over universities, physically mailed to people, etc and then blasted on YouTube, and so forth.
Interesting idea, instead of attacking StrongEmail itself, you target the CEO's ISP. If this is legit, I could see some network engineer at the CEO's ISP making a few routing changes, logging in (since from the text, it appears that the IP would be allowed, and a re-login would be required since the proper cookies aren't being presented) to claim the $10,000 prize, then fixing the routing changes.
Haha...a couple days after the story on TechCrunch was first posted about Twitvid.io, these comments appeared:

http://img.skitch.com/20090602-jyfihr2g3x4rnhgeui63s7nikk.pn...
daniel,

Those .com people are really shady. I would never give my password to them. Once the big Tech blogs write up about this, the credibility of the owners are definitely gone. Who would want to work with them?

Nevertheless, why didn't you guys just change the name?

By sticking with twitvid, you opened the door for people to take advantage of you.

Similarly, if you have a domain name, buy both the singular and plural versions. You should even buy the misspellings as well. A good example is RealityPicks.com which redirects to RealityPick.com.
Kinda makes me hope that the person who does find this vulnerability just publishes:

"I have found a critical vulnerability in this application, which I will demonstrate under NDA to any reporter who requires verification. I will under no circumstances reveal this vulnerability to the vendor or to any other party."
Do either Sun or Oracle have the design know-how to pull this off?

I get the feeling they're making products that are as sexy as a boxy volvo. Reliable but... boring.
Marketingwise, well done. Otherwise, there are lots of "v8 standard library" projects out there: k7, v8-juice and many more.
Are Node people going to reimplement event-driven MySQL client from scratch or what?
Diving into the code...
Right. But surely you also have to be able to demonstrate that you have been active in that space for a while, and that people associate that name, in that space, with you. And, that the issue is causing widespread customer confusion.

I'm just skeptical that can be done when both services launched within days of each other. Seems like not enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions.

If bing.io had launched a few days before ms unveiled bing.com do you think they'd have a hope in hell?
True, but it does make it much easier to make the case that they registered the domain a year ago with the intent of launching that brand and have been working on the idea ever since, while we know that Twitvid.io just spent a few days throwing this together a couple weeks ago. Hardly an airtight case for trademark protection.

I'm not saying what they did is right, as it clearly isn't, but I agree with axod; Twitvid.io should just change their name and move on. They're going to fight a losing battle otherwise.
Jeff Greene thinks so anyways.
Are there still four letter .coms available?
My webapp now works flawlessly in Internet Explorer
Okay, so you're going to quibble over a questionable definition. Fine.

Google censors themselves.

[ADDED]

And since the brigade on this seems determined to dull the impact of the statement that in order to achieve higher profits, Google has chosen to censor itself, and thus is an excellent example of problems of self-regulation, here are some references:

"Google enters China, but censors itself" -- http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=54...

"Google's decision to set up a self-censored version of its search engine in China this year aroused a storm of criticism in America." http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=685...

"Google censors itself for China" -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4645596.stm

"Google has agreed to censor its search engine in China. In return for blocking politically sensitive terms, Google gains access to the world's No. 2 Internet market." -- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/cyberspace/jan-june06/google_...

Wow, can't believe this. Neither can I believe the claims also here that it's somehow debatable that too little regulation had nothing to do with the economic crisis we're in. Sigh.
For a while I wanted to write an app that'd send you reminders when it was time to water your plants (based on factors like the plant type, the weather, etc...) but there are just too many vagaries to make accurate predictions. IE, your house may be particularly dry due to your particular AC unit, and so you may need to water twice as often as someone with higher humidity.

This, on the other hand, makes a lot more sense.
For better or worse, I blogged about Chords!
http://slapstart.com/2009/06/chordsfm/

Now I'm wondering if this isn't a start-up at all, as per the CBMS Networks comment. I was wondering about that too.
Agreed, the devil in this design will be the camera. From the video it looks like they're using two. My guess will be one high resolution to produce reasonable pictures and live video (as they show) and a lower resolution companion to triangulate from. I'd also guess that the companion sensor will be placed further away from the main sensor in the final project.

Who knows, they could have a secondary sensor that you place on the side of the TV, away from the main sensor module. Distance between sensors is usually the key to reduce processing requirements.

It's their project vision, so who knows what they'll have to do to get the job done.
Email rumors are so 2001.

If he wanted to do it correctly he should've hacked into his roommate's Facebook account and changed his sexual preference.
Think about what you said for a second. You start by saying that zed is "high profile". You then assert that if he were polite there would be no public scrutiny.

The truth is that one must create these false hypotheticals in order to justify zed being an asshole.
That could describe a lot of Smalltalkers, couldn't it?
That doesn't really jive with wikipedia's history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube

According to wikipedia a few months after they launched they were extremely popular.
I'm a strong believer that any system that contains anything meaningful to a user should incorporate reasonable two-factor authentication.

The problem is that folks in security tend to forget that they have to pay attention to the business side of things. It's e-mail.

A certificate plus pass-phrase, and a three attempt fall-back to mandatory phone authentication would be way more than enough assuming that everything under the hood was sound (DNS, SSL, etc ... which have all been shown to have weaknesses recently). Why hammer your way through a steel door when you break open the single pane window in the basement.
Excellent checklist. Several things I never even thought of.

3. Avoid a set of "features that always doom dev teams", including encryption, password storage, browser plugins that inject into the DOM, templating, installers, network listeners, and file upload/download.

We're doomed. All but two of these are present in every one of our projects. (I kid about being doomed. Mostly. We do have 11+ years of being a prime target for attacks to give us some confidence that we're doing OK. But we do unavoidably have to handle most of those features that always doom dev teams.)

5. Screw with amateur web pests --- use your own magic version of base64 with some of the characters swapped, use 3DES for something with swapped-around s-boxes, etc.

Isn't fiddling with the encryption, without understanding, what got Debian into trouble a while back with OpenSSL? Perhaps I don't even know enough to know what you're suggesting when you say "3DES with swapped-around s-boxes".

Buy a copy of Burp Suite and run the "Intruder" on every page.

I'd never heard of Burp Suite before. I had no idea there was an automated tool for this stuff (and at a reasonable price). Awesome.
Seems a lot of people commenting are concerned about why they didn't buy the .com and how easy the app was to copy.

That's fine, but don't leave it as analysis done. twitvid.com is blatantly copying twitvid.io and that's wrong, end of story.
It looks like the .com (http://twitvid.com) belongs to someone else, does anyone else see this as a pretty big hurdle to adoption?

Someone doing this was my first thought when I saw they weren't using the .com when they launched. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=621435)
Ask HN: I could really use some business advice.
I co-own an online retail business in a niche industry (prefer not to mention the company name here). We started from scratch with no real funding about four years ago (savings and credit cards), and are doing about $800/day in sales now (on average). We have a couple of part-timers to help ship product and handle customer service issues. Our site is in the top 10 on Google for most of our keywords, and we’ve recently started doing Adwords fairly seriously. Question is, how do we get to the next level? Where can we go for funding? Do we even want funding, or do we want to keep limping along and growing organically?

I’m asking these questions to the larger community because we’re completely in a vacuum.
That's damn good for off the top of your head, axod. Mind if I mibitt you for some names concerning my area?
I know XSS and CSRF are security issues for the attacked site (had to deal with that stuff with MantisBT somewhat recently), but can you enlighten on how XSS or CSRF can compromise your cookies for a third party site? I didn't realize that was possible.
Global business network with workspaces for members
...and <productname>hq.com <productname>now.com get<productname>.com do not qualify.
It is human nature to speculate. But at least the article was an attempt at a thorough analysis rather than "it was lightning! It was a bomb!". I have nothing against instructive speculation, even if it turns out to be wrong.

And anyway, there is very little opinionating really, all he really said is "turbulance was almost certainly a contributing [my emphasis] factor".
My main point was that the application appears to have requested it, so the data is there for the analysis.

I interpreted Jessica's remark as an attempt to head off concerns of any sort age-based discrimination rumblings.
True, if house building was business-driven (instead of solely architect-driven) then it would make more sense to use materials more suitable for iterative process. Like cardboard boxes...

When requirements change weekly and by the projects end your original project description is only useful as a piece of history - then using concrete would mean lots of demolition work in the process.
I don't think is argument is predicated as much on spreading through word of mouth as it is on the efficacy of marketing something people don't care about.
It's not pretty and round.
HuddleChat wasn't a rip. It was a tech demo, demo'ing a very small set of general features. There's only so many ways you can build a simple chat app. A text box at the bottom and a list of users on the side? Must be a rip. /rolls eyes.

And yes, it does say something if your product is 'ripped' as a demo for someone else's service ;)
the domain twitvid.com was created earlier but may have been bought from the original owner just recently.
I smoke and although I haven't really made an effort to quit yet since I actually enjoy the activity (or act) of smoking rather than the cigarette itself. This is actually the first product (solution) I'd be willing to make an effort towards using in order to quit smoking cigarettes, if not for my wallet but for my health as well.
I don't think that the fact that Google bowed to the chinese government's demands of self-censorship (or whatever you may call it) can be used as evidence that private companies are untrustworthy.

If anything, it's more evidence that governments shouldn't meddle with what should or should not be allowed in search.
thx, and sure. I'm on #startups :)
Idle observation: The argument that avoiding Windows would lower the cost since there is no license cost to pay Microsoft seems flawed in practice. The psychology does not work in favour of it.

It would be interesting to instead see a strategy where it costs more just because it is not an old boring Windows system, but a cool modern Android system on it. Actually charge the customer slightly more. Signal that "this is value added, it is the premium version".

Of course, then Android needs to meet those expectations and be awesome.
"That's usual competition ... Just a fact of life"

Not really. Some of us choose to operate ethically, helping others in our business communities and the public at large. There are plenty of things you can do without screwing over another small business.
Somebody once said that the first 1000 hours of flying are the time you're most likely to kill yourself -- especially in the 200-400 hour range, and especially if you let your skills lapse by a few months.

I believe you're talking about The Killing Zone, by Paul Craig. Highly recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Zone-How-Why-Pilots/dp/0071362...
I say this somewhat blindly, as I have not spent much time with the Android code base, but trying to scale an operating system from mobile phone to netbook seems a tad ambitious, no?
I think this could have enough uniqueness to stand on its own. You're right that the general shape of coupes or sedans is the same. But the long hood of the Fisker (and this RF coupe) is significant, and could be a brand indicator. The entire design language should be a brand indicator. I think GM had a similar thought: that a brand is a marque and a grille. They built the same cars w/ subtle changes and cannibalized Chevy and Pontiac. Not saying that is what you are doing here, but I am saying that a brand extends far beyond a grille.
Makes sense in what way? I don't see any special synergy between Java and netbooks, certainly nothing that needs championing by Sun. If you need Java on your netbook - and most people don't - it's there already.
Regardless of whether you go the YC path or not - you should know that there are many, many examples of extremely successful companies being founded by people in their 30's and later. Cisco, Qualcomm, Amazon.com, Bose Corporation, LinkedIn. etc.etc.etc.
From their FAQ page, "When you click on "Follow 311," you will be taken to a Twitter page to enter your Twitter ID and password." Can't they find a more acceptable way to block spam and bots?
The copycats must have made the calculation that if twitvid.io couldn't afford to buy twitvid.com, they wouldn't be able to afford lawyers either.

I hope twitvid.com finds out they are wrong.
I don't they they are meant to help you quit. I bought the starter kit from blucigs.com last week. I'm waiting for it to arrive. E-cigs are for people like me who like nicotine a lot, and not for people that want to quit using nicotine.
And you could totally claim the $10,000 that his company is offering without revealing your identity as the mugger!