skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's right the whole thing is a scam, but his solution is not correct. What needs to happen is the domain owner should be issued a wildcard cert for their domain when they purchase the domain. The public key goes in the DNS and is itself signed by the registry (this prevents DNS spoofers from injecting valid certs).

So if I bought example.com I'd get a cert for * .example.com and its public key would sit in my dns somewhere signed by the master .com cert.

This would be more secure than what we have now and get rid of all the overpriced ssl resellers (really, you're charging me $100 a year for your thin wrapper around openssl?).
He's right and he's wrong. He's right that it's a race to the bottom. He's wrong that developers who choose a moral high ground will do better. They won't. Developers who take the short term money can parlay it into long term money by dumping people off onto their other apps, buying ads, etc.
The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good Luck.
Thank God for this software. I had started using my brick-sized Creative player just to play audiobooks in my car because iTunes made me want to vomit every time I had to use it. Maybe now I can dust off my Nano.
They're not suggesting click is bad. It's the equivalent of link-bait: An excuse to get you to try their mouse-over.

...which I consider annoying eye-candy. Eye candy that melt and drips uncontrollably for that matter. For me the reaction is more like the other who complained of motion sickness. For this user, please leave menu bars static (unless you're expanding content: like drop-down or slide-out menus). I'd rather have flashing, hopping ads in my peripheral vision (which I can tune out), that menus zipping around like eye-floaters.

[Sorry, maybe you caught me in a bad mood, but my mood tends to become bad when purposeless complexity (especially moving) intrudes.]
correction: http://madebysofa.com
> And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick

Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? I'd argue that his Real Programmer protective stance towards Linux was more helpful to it taking off than being a really Nice Guy.
DOSBox works well on the Mac, is free and plays those game that ran on DOS very well. I'm pretty sure at least some of these games only require DOS, not Windows

[Edit: Monkey Island 1 and 2 run under DOS, but 3 requires Win95]
BitTorrent, by Bram Cohen. Napster. Ruby on Rails (maybe; I'm uncertain how much it was just dhh in the early days).
The failure rate will skyrocket as all these startups compete for users.
10 things you (probably) didn't know about App Engine
How about:

11. Not having a business plan means all the tech blogs (coughTechcrunchcough) and journalists in other media keep banging on about you. Read one theory that it's because Twitter make's no money that it seems so perfect: if it made $10 million a year, then if it started to earn $15 million a year it would only have increased by 50%. However, since they're earning nothing at the moment, any profit would be an infinite increase in revenue. To many, this gives them the appearance of unlimited potential. Most of the other points in this article are basically "how to build a web 2.0 hype machine".

Since Twitter doesn't yet make money, and doesn't even seem to have any clear plans on how to make money, I'd hesitate to call it a business. It's a cool project, I'll give it that.
This is just silly.

Ignoring the fact that YCombinator probably wouldn't know what to do with $40 billion (a lot of rice and beans?), the jobs created by such an investment would benefit about 1% of the country -- smart, risk-taking, well-educated young men who are willing to live in California.

The point of saving GM is only nominally to save GM. The point of saving GM is to save the industrial base of a big chunk of the US population, and hopefully keep places like Michigan from sliding into permanent and irreversible poverty. The benefit is greater than the sum of the jobs saved.
This is just senseless Microsoft bashing from someone probably incapable of original thought. The irony of saying "It's those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience." to bash a company that owns 95% of the OS market is clearly beyond him. He clearly understands little or nothing about economics, marketing, consumer behavior, etc.

Saying Microsoft should invest in areas not owned by Google is like saying GM should build planes because Toyota isn't.
I'm as much for promoting startups as the rest of you, but is a massive, blind infusion of cash the answer? The thing about YCombinator, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, DFJ, etc., is that there just aren't too many of them. There was an article on here just the other day heralding the end of VC as we know it, because the vast majority of the industry wasn't producing good returns.

Investing in startups is the most difficult capitalistic resource allocation problem you can get into because you have no "reputation" to go on. When you're investing in public stocks and bonds, you're usually dealing with companies that have an established track record, or an area of the economy where the variables are known. But that is by definition not the sort of thing we're interested in doing here.

The real question should be, how many startups can PG and team invest in and coach if money were not the limiting factor? Is money the limiting factor right now?
The sudden lack of scarcity would cause the quality of the investments to plummet. YC uses its money carefully because the supply is not unending.

When you only have one shot, you aim.
The Lisp Machine wasn't simply a piece of hardware which happened to run Lisp:

http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/dev...

http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-info/doc...

The Android OS is not written in Lisp. The turtles do not go all the way down. Therefore it is not and will never be a Lisp Machine in any reasonable sense.
What? The story had nothing to do with WWDC.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Well, right now it's like this (maybe they'll change it?):

"You can add your certificate from our panel’s Manage Domain area."

And that panel won't let you "add certificate" until you get yourself the unique IP address for about $50/year; nevermind the strange feeling of setting up a domain through the panel which you never intend on hosting there. They still setup all the server space and resources, but you (the certificate buyer) just never gets around to pointing DNS at ns1.dreamhost.com...

I think what he means by "You can use them with us or any other web host..." is that, should you choose to move to a different web hosting company, Dreamhost will make it easy for you to take the certificate with you.
Which leads to "putting out fires" syndrome ... preventative care is often more cost effective than emergency care, but people don't like the idea of giving free preventative care in a capitalist society. So they spend more on emergency care.

Which is another problem with treating healthcare as a business: the better you are at it, the less often your customers return.
I must agree. Most of what Apple has produced has been brilliant, but iTunes is one of those pieces of software that I only opened up when absolutely necessary. I'll give this third party ware a try.
I'm curious what the poster of the awesome http://www.matasano.com/log/1749/typing-the-letters-a-e-s-in... thinks of SSL on shared-host webservers!

Like probably 5,000 other people have SSH accounts into the same dreamhost server where http://juliusdavies.ca/ lives!

:-p

(This is not in anyway a response to tptacek's comment. Just a tangent.)
Ha right, how the government allocates money, "Paul Graham" would spend $39,999,999,992.07 on coke and hookers and the founders would split a frappuccino.
It didn't, but the first part of my comment did.

The time and place of this stunt was definitely not a coincidence.
I'm on a plane that's about to close its doors so can't write more, but what a great guy. In school, I used his Randomized Algorithms books which was great.

I met him randomly, but he helped us meet the ultimate acquirers of our startup and gave us a bunch of great ideas about algorithms, software, and who to meet. Invaluable for two kids who had just moved to the valley.

Wish I could have worked with him more--was actually hoping to on the next startup.
I think a lot of you are missing the point. I could be wrong but I think the gist of the message is to look at what 40B into ycombinator would mean in terms of value added, employment created, etc. (with the wild assumption that it all scales). His point is to heavily criticize the 40B bailout of GM.
If someone wanted to give us that much money to invest, I'd probably do it, just to see what would happen. We could probably cook up some schemes for scaling. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a lot like scaling software. You run into a lot of unexpected problems, but you also end up finding ways to solve most of them. Plus you get unforeseen effects of scale, some of them good.
Miami Traffic Ticket
The Traffic Ticket Office is a law firm located in the Miami, Florida area that offer their clients quick and affordable solutions to stay on the road with a minimum of hassle.
Put thine code where thy mouth is.
YouTube - How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And...
Cool....
Well yeah this idea is silly, but his original point about saving GM (that it's also silly) probably still stands.

His figure for GM employees is old (2005). Last I saw, the current unionized hourly workforce is 60k employees (see link below). If you simply gave those employees $125k each, it would only have cost the government $7.5 billion. That kind of money should allow all those employees plenty of time to find other jobs or get training for a new skilled career. Then if you gave the retirement/healthcare VEBA what it needed, that would be another $20 billion, for a grand total of $27.5 billion... we've already spent more than that just keeping it afloat the last 8 months.

If they let GM die, of course some parts makers would have to scale down too, but the parts industry wouldn't collapse, because they still have the other car makers to sell to.

Link to employees figure cited above: http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2009/06/...
The Great U-Turn
Apparently it has been taken down (or so one of the commenters on TechCrunch said).
Unicode is tricky in Java and might be impossible in C++ (2006)
Old, but the MacRoman issue in Java bit me today so I thought someone else might benefit.

MacRoman? In 2009? Really?
I'd prefer the US government revise the operating practices of agencies like the SBIR[1] to work more like the Grameen foundation[2] to help entrepreneurs of all kinds establish or expand businesses (not just the tech/media companies which are YC's focus) and then put a few billion dollars into it. Extending 40 billion dollars of microcredit loans would make a lot of sense to me in any kind of economy.

1- http://www.sbir.gov

2- http://www.grameenfoundation.org/
I haven't had a chance to use this library but I have used boto: http://code.google.com/p/boto/wiki/SimpleDbIntro
I had some unicode issues the last time I used it and since replaced SimpleDB with something else.
Where does a Frappucino costs $7.93 ?
This would work a lot better if the mouse pointer was hidden when not in motion.

The problem I had with it was when I moved my mouse to read the text underneath the pointer, I would occasionally leave the target area and have it disappear out from under me.
http://markmail.org/

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amarkmail.org
I've been bothered for awhile about the disconnect between email and IM (and phone, but that's another matter). I went as far as looking at CRM systems (Salesforce.com, etc.) to see if any of them had any magical ways to slurp up history and associate it with a strong notion of person-ness. It either didn't exist or looked too complicated. This is what I saw in Wave -- a single point of reference to track relationships.
>>"the past - their operating system crashing and dying. It's a necessary evil for them (Until they discover linux/osx if they ever do)."

Don't intend to start a flame war but this is ridiculous.
How do you explain ~95% of desktops in the world running windows? As far as discovering linux/osx is concerned, it isn't for the common computer buyer yet. It is the computer scientists/hackers who discover them. Most of the common people probably haven't even heard of linux.
Like vimperator? I use it, and I love it. In fact, I'm thinking about moving to a windows manager such as awesome or Xmonad for a completely mouseless experience.

Vimperator - http://vimperator.mozdev.org

Awesome - http://awesome.naquadah.org/

Xmonad - http://www.xmonad.org
Meh. Control via safari on iphone using http://cre.ations.net/creation/webvnc---remote-desktop--vnc-...

Free. Source included. I've hacked some process control into mine. Works great.

I guess if you're power user enough to want remote control, but not quite power enough to keep track of your own ip and make a port forward, you pay for that service with something like this.
not really applicable, since YC invests in 40-45 companies at a time

edit: I was talking about the "one shot" comment
Looking great. Though I find it amazing that they haven't implemented command-arrow hotkeys for forward/back. That's approximately the 2nd feature I would implement, after the actual browser engine.
Does anyone else have a problem with assumption #1?

"First off, let's take out 25% for running Y-Combinator. This leaves $30B of cash to dole out."
Good find. Thanks for sharing.
Or with Bing, for that matter :)
"I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less information,"

This is a matter of information theory. It is an objective fact that only moving a mouse provides less information than a mouse that can also click. That is also why using this inferface is slower than using a conventional interface; you have to convey the same number of bits, but you have a smaller bandwidth to do it in. It is also, now that I think about it, a relatively decent explanation of why I consider this demoware; cutting down the bandwidth from human to computer certainly does have the effect of simplifying the interface, but only by slowing the user down and constraining the amount of information that can be extracted from the user. Throw this interface at a real problem with even more bits needing to be extracted from the user and the problems and slowdown will only compound. I don't think that most of us are looking to be slowed down.

In that entire paragraph, only that last sentence is opinion. The rest is a very simple application of information theory.

If you feel like you have to argue with that fact, I suggest brushing up on your information theory first. I'm not kidding about the objective fact bit. If you'd like to argue that interfaces should be based on reducing the amount of information extracted from the user, feel free, that is a conceivable argument, but it certainly flies in the face of experience and current interface developments.

(By the way, why am I being so harsh? It's education, albeit more for the audience than anybody else. Liking this interface as art is great, heck even I think it's sort of cool that way, but thinking it's actually a useful revolution is a sign that you are applying very weak thought processes to the idea, and it's helpful to see things like the simple application of information theory to the topic.)
I suspect many medium to large tech companies would come grinding to a halt as 1 million engineers left to start their own companies...

But perhaps I overestimate such employees' desire to give up job security for the excitement of a startup.
The argument about GM is the silliest part. I think it's somewhat plausible that YC could find a way to use $40Bn productively.

Again, the point of this bailout is not just to save 60,000 current GM jobs. The point is to save the GM, the GM supply chain, the local economies of several large industrial states, and the millions of people in an economic ecosystem that has built up around GM. Looking at only the 60,000 jobs at GM is taking an absurdly narrow view of the situation.
Successful projects are not determined by the quality of the code, but the utility of it. It's quite possible to have a very successful project, that a lot of people use, made up of embarrassingly bad code.
for 40B, people will get into starting up for the salary.

don't start a company to make ends meet, start it to execute a haunting vision that you can't get rid of (ever wonder why people quit their jobs, often to their financial detriment, to startup? yeah, it's a curse.)
3 clever ideas with very poor implementations, heavily refined by many others over years.
Good point about a cease and desist letter, but I do think you'd run that risks with a lot of hosting companies and even bandwidth providers.

If your business/project is on shaky enough legal ground that you really have to worry about cease and desist letters, then I'd say you would need to look into some sort of offshore hosting. If so then your argument is against most normal hosting not just google app engine.

As for the transition path, that is a good point. Google has open sourced the spec and sdk, so someone could feasibly reverse engineer something that behaved just like app engine -- in fact I wouldn't be surprised if a serious attempt at this happens fairly soon.
Surely Paul Graham does not need that many hookers.
This is insane. I took his class on Automata and Complexity Theory (cs154.stanford.edu) two years ago, and I have friends who came out of the final exam for the class only a few hours ago.

I remember really enjoying this class, despite not having much of a knack for deeply theoretical CS. I was introduced to the concepts behind automata, turing machines, deterministic and nondeterministic computing, decidability theory, NP-completeness, and so on. I enjoyed this class entirely because of the way he taught it -- he took great care in the precision, concision, and clarity of his lectures.

What a deeply talented, smart, and clearly influential individual. My condolences go out to his family and friends.
Please do not try to "cook up" small start ups. It's better people juice their own ingenuity on their own time, when they have something big at stake.

I grew up in a communist country and I remember how the state gave allowances to housewives in order to invigorate women's businesses. It didn't turn out that well; most women, like most men, are not interested in the ungodly effort and the labor of love that goes into enterprising.

[Edit: specifically, there came up a cottage industry of document fixers who could get you bankruptcy documents so you get to keep the federal investment AND get compensation. People looted the fund.]
This is terribly stupid. Along with the fact that the participation ratio of anything tends to look like that (web forums are close to completely useless! HN is close to completely useless!), don't you have to be a member of twitter to get your own custom following feed? A twitter account's value is not simply the ability to produce, it's a customization hook too. At least, I can't figure out how to follow two people from Twitter's home page without logging in.

Yes, if you make up a terrible definition of "useful", some obviously useful things will turn out not useful! Hooray for you! ... simply fiddling with semantics like that is just a way to try to look important, not to say anything actually important.
It's more than a question of the fact the stimulus doesn't seem to be working - it should be downright alarming what's happening in the credit markets. Because of the spending, world governments and investors are seriously questioning the US dollar's place as the world reserve currency and it's already lost its lustre by many as a "safe haven" currency (as judged by yields - higher yields means that fewer people want to hold your bonds).

Interest rates have jumped up especially on longer term Treasuries - and because things like mortgage rates are based on this, this means not only is deficit spending going to be more expensive (and there's a lot of that being projected) but that mortgages for everyone and the cost of debt for businesses could soar. 10 year treasury bonds had a yield of 3.83 up from a low of 2.07 percent per Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/treasury-bernanke-economy-b.... This will mean it will be more difficult for businesses to expand and for people to start spending because they're going to be spending more on just meeting their interest costs.
Actually I didn't, but that more or less answers my original question. Now I realize why you (or rather, your character) said that it didn't matter that md5 is broken in this case.

In general though, I'm still convinced that putting a hash function in a loop will increase the probability of a collision.

Or maybe I misunderstood your point about the loop? I assume by putting a loop around the hash you mean something like this:

key = SHA1(password)
1000 times do
key = SHA1(key)
return key
Ask anyone who's ever submitted a YC application (and been rejected!) if they think that the selection process is in any way trivial.

YC invests in 40-45 of the best companies of thousands that apply. Even trying to imagine a selection process that chooses 40Bn worth of YC companies makes my brain hurt.

I think that no matter how hard you tried to stand it up, it would flatten out like warm jello to "anyone who writes a few coherent sentences on the application gets some cash".
Oh please. If you can't walk a little further and find the stairs and open a door you aren't going to climb 3 or for 4 flights. The lazy are lazy for a reason.
And all of them were "innovations", not inventions. None of them were original ideas, they were just rehashed ones that were right for the time in which they became popular and widely known.
Miss indonesia 2009 winner
Here is a better link to the article:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=print...
And so the government would own 70% of YC, just like GM?

And then, they'd rebrand it to GC - Government Combinator.
I believe this has been tried before. Its called a centrally planned economy. How did that work out last time?
How many jobs do you think 60,000 employed consumers can create?
Holy shit. The article is not even entirely correct - he was teaching classes as recently as 3:15 this afternoon, when I took his CS154 final. I saw him yesterday, in a meeting. I didn't know him well at all, but he was a very good professor...he was going to be on sabbatical next year. This is a complete shock...I don't know what happened, but it must have been sudden, because he seemed perfectly healthy yesterday afternoon.

My deepest condolences go to his friends and family.
Probably for the same reason we're still using that 3000-year-old state of the art known as "place-value": we haven't really found anything fundamentally better to replace it... yet.
Introducing RobustThread for Ruby
Don't worry, the scenario is a hypothetical one, to put it mildly.
It's not users you compete for, but needs. And those are effectively infinite. The limiting factor would more likely be the rate at which technology can evolve. But it would be kind of cool if you ever reached that point.
cross-instance testing!