skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is simply a re-application of device fingerprinting and voice verification that many banks are using to secure online banking.

There are many things that can go wrong here, based on my previous experience dealing with these systems, but most require client-side subversion, whether it is malware, cross-site scripting, or cross-site request forgery. (For example, finding a CSRF vuln that allows you to update the phone number to your own and compelling your victim to visit the link through a variety of techniques.)
SF woke up a bit around the time Google Code project hosting was released. But with GitHub and BitBucket kicking things up a notch, it's definitely a bad time to be SF. And despite all their changes, it still feels like a pain to use SF.net.
How G.M. Went from Prosperity to Crisis
PC Touch-Screen Technology Moving Beyond Curiosity
self-censorship is "Self-censorship is the act of censoring ... without an authority directly pressuring one to do so" (quoting the wikipedia).

needless to say, this is not the case of google in china.
Judging by the number of blog posts, articles and books about scaling this or that Ruby/Python/PHP framework, people seem to be very busy with "premature" optimisation right from the start, exactly _because_ those frameworks and languages are so horribly inefficient.

Why would I want to run and manage and design for a server cluster just because each and every Rails process needs to load the entire language runtime, the framework and all the libraries using 100MB of RAM for no application functionality at all? Not doing all that work is premature optimisation?
nice to see that ads are making their way into HN.
Google Cash Machine Pays the Bills
Here is my blog detailing progress using the Google Cash Machine System. Although this is not a get rich quick scheme, it has helped me earn some extra cash.
So what Strongmail is essentially saying is that if you want to break into anyone using strongmail, break in at their home or work :-)
So when naming a variable, I have to remember all other identifiers in the project? Seems impractical, especially for large projects.

My guideline is to use descriptive English words, not abbreviated. I take a minute to find the right word, check the dictionary or Google when necessary. If the same identifiers are used across the codebase, then they're used to describe similar feature. A little extra typing saves lots of debugging time. Not that my code has any bugs, mind you :)

The other guideline is to spend more time choosing names for interfaces than for implementation variables, but that's just part of the general "interfaces are more important to get right."
Bob Cringely has an interesting opinion about this (http://www.cringely.com/2009/02/power-to-the-people/).
People say that, but it's really not. There's still reasonable 4 letter top level domains untaken, and plenty of good names. It just takes some thought, and a fair bit of time.

Off the top of my head, untaken domains:
tweevio.com viotwit.com vitwit.com vittler.com twiveo.com tweeveo.com twoovi.com twoovy.com twitvy.com vidatweet.com vidtwid.com

I'm sure there's tons of better names out there, but I think a few of the above names are 'good enough' to be successful, and best of all, they're all free.
$5 for 100mb
$7 for 1gb
$9 for 10gb

Anyone else thinking someone that needs that much security is going to have a lot of mail?
Having recently discovered smalltalk from a seasoned developer (with quite a personality to match!), I've come to realize it's an amazing language, and certainly not dead. It's got some very interesting applications in finance, and other high traffic fields, and it's got some really neat tricks that you can carry over to other languages as well. I still don't totally understand the notion that it is dead. In fact, I'd say it might be time to start learning it.
I can see some of them ("the easiest way to share videos") -- others seem to just be based on common Web 2.0 elements. I can see a lot of Digg in the color schemes, and there's an obvious rip-off of the Twitter layout as well. My biggest problem with it is the name; I think the sites are sufficiently different to avoid confusion besides.
Actually after I wrote that post, that's something I've been tossing around. So many of the current crop of web superstars, like facebook, twitter, friendfeed etc. are built around streams of data as opposed to serving more traditional static(ish) pages.

Perhaps a new type of web framework is needed to address these breeds of apps.
Triangular buttons key to touchscreen typing success
The private ticket is one of the most exciting things I've ever done. Follow it up with some more training, like an instrument rating or some aerobatics (Emergency Maneuver Training)

Aviation Safety magazine, in my opinion, has the best crash reviews and safety material. I think by reading those reports they can keep you alive -- it's a very good habit.

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 really wish that technology would learn lessons like aviation does. If we had the same feedback and crash analysis as aviation, perhaps so many projects wouldn't waste so much time and money.
Brute force it. 5 chars... all numeric. There can only be 100,000 possibilities. Of course, they may have logon limits to prevent this. 10^5
From a twitvid perspective, a knockoff certainly hurts. As long as twitvid gets better initial users, it can iterate faster and deliver a better product, that should certainly help.

This also poses a much larger question: Once a YC company launches, and clones pop up, how well does the YC company fare wrt these clones? What are the short term & long term consequences?
I wasn't able to figure out how to do this with feedburner....can you link to an article that goes over it?
I definitely see what you're saying and still remember 37signals' outraged people are outraged ordeal. But...look at the Twitvid.com before and after shots, they changed to look like Twitvid.io.

I don't know if Twitvid.io has a case or not, but Twitvid.com is treading in the bush league.
I was interested to read the documentation, but it's not online yet.
Supreme Court to Review 'Business Method' Patents
Is creating documents the responsibility of the file manager or the application?
Building A Solar-Powered Data Center
If you work with other people, the odds of their C++ code being utterly broken, inefficient and dangerous is 99% ;-)
Self-censor, or be blocked. They self-censored.
YouTube for TVs (YoutTube XL)
This is to be epxected when you don't own .com name. Just ignore them and concentrate on building/seo'ing your brand so that you can rank 1st on google.

PS: maybe a domain hack like twitv.id makes sense ?
Yes, the art of computer programming has been standing still for the last -30- years. Why? The industry got rich and implementation became king.

There's some good work going on here and there. Check out Alan Kay's team at Viewpoint Research and Charles Simonyi's at Intentional Computing. (And yes, these are both PARC guys still carrying the torch.) I also have some exciting discoveries in this area; if you're interested, my email is in my profile.
>> " they changed to look like Twitvid.io."

That's usual competition :/ Company A does something, company B copies. Just a fact of life :/

The websites are different enough to avoid confusion IMHO, and the .com holds the .com name so has a fair advantage. To the unaware, they'd likely consider .io to be the ripoff, as users trust .com
Awesome job, PJ and team. I first heard about this at Startup Riot 2009 when Chris came to speak.

Although, my initial concern is how this is being spun to customers in terms of customization. One of my design clients is a SaaS vendor that had a large potential customer request an on-site deployment of their big product. Along with packaging up their software for a remote deployment, the customer was asking for all kinds of modifications to match up with their very particular needs. This was sort of spreading them thin on what they could work on for the customer and for the core product. So, my question is are you going to provide customization options for purchasers, or is the product just a rebuilt copy of whatever state the GitHub code is at? I'm a fan of what you guys have built, so I'd hate to see it suffer.
People may vote this up because of fondness for Smalltalk, but there's not really any content in the linked article unless you're in/around London.
The reports of Smalltalk's death are greatly exaggerated...
The CEO username and password work for me. I've checked the obvious stuff and they have that covered, so it won't be an easy $10,000. But I'm sure no system is 100% infallible :)
K310 Mouse Joystick Ways Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
This is Cory Doctorow, I doubt very much that he means 'government' when he says 'public'.
Something about this says "klingon" to me, but I can't find a good screenshot of the UI I'm thinking of.
Anyone know a way to emulate a Scribd embed in Silverlight? Maybe someone should start a site that does that. TXT in PDF in Scribd just isn't convenient enough.
How To Write Unmaintainable Code? Write maintainable code in Perl.
That looks pretty cool. I've been toying with buying one of these for months: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001ELJKLE
Are they connected with Twitpic (http://twitpic.com/), or are they ripping them off as well?
It's just a raging asshole move online. If you were talking about cars, it might be okay for GM to copy something by Toyota, feature for feature -- because they'd still have to invest a billion dollars or so in reverse-engineering, designing, manufacturing, distributing, and advertising it.

But if you can just apple-C, apple-V your way into stealing someone else's brand value, it's a sleazy trick that adds no value. At best, this means that the next time someone has an idea like this, they'll be more likely to go after the dot-com -- and if they can't afford the dot-com, they may move on to their second-best idea instead.
Outside of 3rd party app integration, I think this will be a big determining factor:

http://www.google.com/search?q=twitvid

And in a funny twist, neither twitvid.com or twitvid.io are showing in position #1. If people really want to help out, they should link to twitvid.io with the anchor text twitvid.
Chase Bank does something similar. If your computer isn't cookied, then you are required to perform some sort of identity authentication (voice, text, email, etc). I'm surprised more important utilities like email don't follow this concept... it would at least weed out the brute force attacks.
There are times when I wish my mailbox had a built in shredder.
Yes, last week I spend a lot of time to decide what name to use for a method and some vars. The bad thing is that I was extending the system and the existing names for related methods where... wrong.
Sounds like this guy likes to smoke some reefer before he codes. I highly recommend that strategy.
That's going to be a losing battle IMHO. Also google likes .com and so do users. Change the name and take it as a lesson learnt.
You probably want a "[pdf]" at the end of the title so the scribd-haters among us don't twitch and ignore the article.
Which would lead us to the obvious question, why didn't they change their name in the first place?
It means that something "performs well". The specific criteria of performance depends on context.

Both "fast" and "efficient" are more specific than performant, but are related concepts. Note that "speed" and "efficiency" are also often related, but not quite the same thing. They fill a different linguistic need.

Performant is pretty widely understood, in my experience.
Oof. From the article:

"I don't see why some of those devices shouldn't come from Sun," said Ellison, who runs the world's third-largest software maker. "There will be computers that are fundamentally based on Java."

My first reaction: the Java environment will attract more enterprise devs than consumer devs. These netbooks won't be popular with consumers.

My second reaction: enterprise netbooks? Sounds like a lot of money to be made, and the margins could be lifted by support contracts, bundling with expensive software, etc. Oracle netbooks as remote consoles for DBAs, for example.
A Clear and Quick Reference to HTML Symbol Entities Codes
It's easy to make the keys look far apart in a landscape mode. Go back to portrait and talk to me then.
basically no. with a virtual keyboard the liberated "space" in between serves no purpose unless you make that space not register as a key, which would be limiting the area you're giving to a key which will make it HARDER to type not easier.

not to mention it's fuck all to look at.

seriously hard on the eyes
Is this for elderly people that can't see? I'm sure my grandfather would use this if he knew the difference between youtube and a u-boat.
And totally ineffective.
If they copied HTML code, or graphics, then sure. But if they looked at the site and incorporated similar elements and wording, which seems to be what happened, I'd say "meh - it happens".

IMHO not getting the .com is a really bad idea. The best case scenario is you start paying adwords a ton of money to get the traffic. Worst case is probably what happened here.
I guess my point is: if you find a security hole in this service, why would you give it up for $10,000?
"Scripting language" is a stupid term, but it's the term the article used.
Ask HN: Any other HN'ers attending the VC Investing Conference tomorrow?
The one tomorrow in SF at the Palace Hotel

I would like to meet fellow HN'ers if any of you are going to be there.
can you explain why this made you decide not to apply to YC?

we can make inferences from your remarks, but it would only be fair to you if you explained in your own words.
HN is quickly becoming the place to air out inter-startup grievances.

hmmm... that gives me an idea for a startup
This is basically the same thing as MobilePass, which hasn't been broken to my knowledge, so I wouldn't expect a direct attack. Your suggestion is a possibility.

There are also a bunch of unknowns. Are there any direct attacks (SQL injection, privilege escalation, etc) on the StrongWebmail site? What sort of datacenter is it in (alchemy.net, which are HIPAA compliant, which should be pretty safe)? Are the challenges generated in a cryptographically secure manner? How secure is the CEO's home machine? Does the CEO purge cookies at the end of the session? Does it count if I can manage to redirect his e-mail elsewhere instead (which can be done with well-known DNS exploits)?

Part of the defense here is that the prize is small enough that it's not worth trying many of the more elaborate tricks (like attempting to break the PRNG for the keys, if any).
Wii Xbox360 PS3 and PC Wrap Up for E3 2009
I have an even simpler rule of thumb. Try as hard as you can to think "how long should this take". Then double it and a half.

It's never let me down.
Twitter Turn Streaming API on
>I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language

My experience (and most everything I've read) says that the development speed is generally shorter for scripting languages, all things considered.

You seem to contradict that? References?
Fastest solution: pick-pocket your target and take their phone away.

edit: I wonder what ELSE the CEO uses this password for...
Care to cite that? Just based on having read BoingBoing for the last however many years, all of his books, and pretty much anything else of his I come across, I would never have called him a socialist, but what do I know?
Twitvid.io was already launched when Twitvid.com came out.
So he's trying to patent the use of triangles for keys? I wonder who nailed that lucrative square key patent. He must be worth billions by now.
So there's no need for a password then.
Yees, but these folks aren't early adopters. A lot of the people here don't even use (or approve of) key based SSH logins =/
Usually I first get a high level model working either in my head or on paper/whiteboard. I don't really care about the details, is more a general idea of the algorithm (iterative? recursive?), data access (I will need this, go to a cache or database?) and fitting it in the current environment.

Then I start working to code it. I start with the main functionality, I wrote it as I want it to be inventing the required methods. When I'm happy with it I code the required extra-methods. Write tests for them. Write tests for the main functionality. When it works as excepted, a couple iterations of reviewing and re-factoring.

I'm not sure about the details about how I code the methods, it seems I'm so focused doing it I cannot recall the how. (I guess many of us have the sensation of "OMG! How I did it?" or seeing we've wrote much more code than we thought).
Ellison was a visionary with Network Computers in the 90s, although that failed to take off.

Netbook's are a much safer bet now that many companies are already manufacturing them. It might be a good business move but I'd be hesitant to call that visionary.
Flippant replies to "controversial" posts that made it big on HN always seem to do well here. People on HN like a catfight as much as anyone else, and if someone wants some free pageviews off the back of that, good luck to them.

If anything needs to be fixed, it's the idiots on HN who vote up response posts like this, but that's democracy for you.
It's simple, you just sign in with your Google account (don't tell me you don't have one!), and enter the URL in the field below "burn a feed right this instant".

It should work for most sites, though many are not rssable
I'd think there would be more of a drop off with opportunities like Y Combinator than there would be with other Angel investors. I'm surprised there are any at all.

I guess it's still an excellent opportunity to meet people so 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. I always thought part of the lure of Y Combinator was that young folks had nothing to tie them down. I can't think of a 30 year old I know who has no obligations.
Real web programmers use butterflies.
ASK HN: How to get a Trademark?
How do you trademark your web app?

Do you have to get it trademarked in different countries?

Is it important to get one?

Do the YCombinator companies get them?
I haven't seen any evidence that extensions matter one way or the other. Backlinks/keywords/content play much larger roles.

You're right about the user part. However, Twitvid could end up like Twitter in that the majority of people end up using it via 3rd party apps.
This is gonna end in tears :P And it will not the hackers... I love these publicity stunts that claim: "We're unhackable! Best security E-V-A-H!".

BTW, has anyone heard of those awesome Medeco locks? I heard that they can't be picked. That is so cool!
This thread (and the link to the Gladwell essay that someone submitted to it earlier) are interesting. I'm 39 years old, and want to start my own company and change my career from journalist to news technologist/entrepreneur. Some readers might chuckle at that, but I am very serious.

In my mind, the question of the age of YC founders has much to do with the threshold for risk. Age definitely plays a part. But age does not crush vision, and brings some benefits in terms of experience and understanding of target markets. In my own case, I have an idea for a mobile news platform that I believe will change the way in which a lot of people get information. I think it would be a product that people want, but the only way to find out is to build it and see what the market thinks.

But I recognize that there are a lot of barriers to achieving my vision.

First, I'm not a hacker, and I don't have a co-founder (yet) who is. I think in pg's view, this would preclude me from starting this type of company (based on some of his commentary in Founders At Work and in http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html). Nevertheless, I have a lot of experience with the technologies that would drive the platform, and insights into the way people consume information, and I think this will be extremely valuable in driving product development.

Second, I have a family and a mortgage. Others have noted family-related issues, but the situation really depends on the specifics of your family. My wife is not working, as my youngest is in preschool only for three mornings a week. This makes it impossible for me to take the risk right now to drop my day job and the health insurance that comes with it (I live in the U.S., in the Boston area) and work full time on my product. If my wife was working in a professional position, not only would we have the salary and insurance to fall back on if I stopped working at my day job, but also we could afford day care.

So, what I am doing right now is plugging away at the business plan and some of the technical concepts in my spare time, usually for two hours per day after the kids go to sleep. I'm trying to bone up on my understanding of the platforms that I think I will need to grok in order to get this thing off the ground. I've stopped putting money in my 401k to build up some funds, and I'm considering how I might tap other sources of funding -- not to mention considering various revenue streams from the product itself.

Would I ever apply to Y Combinator? I couldn't do it on my own, but I might, if I had the right team and could consider taking off for a few months (I wish YC still had the summer program in Cambridge!). The family-related concerns are real, but there are ways to address them (for instance, COBRA for health insurance and enough funding to cover my mortgage and living expenses).

Edited: Changed first sentence to add Gladwell ref
Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.
Has anyone else actually looked at this guy's code?
http://github.com/joelmichael/memereap/tree/master

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it shows no awareness of SQL injection, buffer overflows, or concurrency. These seem like things a web framework might need to deal with...
So, based on the edit, how should small startups (or Open Source projects) reach out to security pros?

Some Open Source projects have millions of users, and so security is obviously a concern...I've noticed in our own project that we occasionally get penetration testing reports from security companies out of the blue (I guess because Webmin is high profile enough, and is potentially dangerous enough, to be on everyone's radar), but how would one get a new project or product onto the radar? Obviously, Open Source projects generally don't have 10k*N dollars to spend.

I ask because I've recently thought of doing something along these lines for our own stuff. Not because I want publicity, but because we really want to know about any issues.
best quote from the article:

"Our representatives, unlike our Founding Fathers, see politics as a career. As a result, they are focused not on the next generation, but on the next election."
twidvid.com was already registered when twitvid.io launched :/
This will never be popular. Buying e-smokes is admitting defeat -- it's saying that you don't have the willpower to rebel or to quit.

Can you imagine the Marlboro man riding into town to buy batteries for his smokes?
Historical view of browser usage
Acer to start selling netbooks running Android
I hope people don't take this as a rip but ...

Says a lot when your product is cloned in a couple of days. Not that complexity means a better product, but you should at least expect this type of thing if you're app only took you a few days to implement yourself.

And not picking up the .com? Regardless of price, that'll be a decision that will come back and haunt you for quite some time.

It's the high seas out there.
City of SF now accepting complaints via Twitter