skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inexperience, and a tendency to be a "saver". I've since learned how to read between the lines, ask a lot of questions hiring managers aren't expecting to be asked, and to request interviews with team members if it isn't offered (and refusing the position if my request is refused).

Additionally, you'll hear enough horror stories if you talk to those who work in IT departments in regular companies that aren't doing anything interesting because no one's been able to present a solid business case as to why IT can add value or affect the bottom line. Though sometimes the works is simply gummed up by political battles and everyone's afraid to go to HR or to make an attempt to knock down those walls in fear of losing their job. What you read about on HN is what you'll see at the right-end of the bell curve, and often isn't representative of your average company.

Most of these issues were driven by politics. In a lot of situations (electronic hand-crafting, manual bug-tracking) I was able to drive change from within. Granted, they took months. However people were afraid of opposing the head of QA because A) she was a lifelong friend of the founder's life B) she was predisposed to think all developers were idiots C) they weren't equipped to traverse that delicate political minefield without at least losing a leg in the process.

The scalability/performance issue one? This was at a private sales-oriented company with a billion dollars in annual revenue. Again, mired in politics. Their entire e-commerce system was built by guys who were completely green at the time, and they hacked it together. He was best buds with the CIO, and was... a pretty passionate guy, and very defensive. The average person with a spouse and kids to support didn't feel it was worth risking their job to improve the architecture if they couldn't present a decent argument and it came across as hurting his feelings. Me? I spent far too many lunches talking with developers, guys in network ops and analysts to come up with ways to cache data and partition functionality so the thing could handle the existing load and scale in the future. It took buy-in from stubborn developers who normally pointed the fingers at the database or the servers, network ops guys who pointed fingers at the developers, and a testy data architect who had a serious row with the development manager.

I've learned a lot from those experiences, especially the social problems that can exist in team-based development, and how to present solutions where even the most stubborn-minded individual can "get it". I've also learned that these problems exist nearly everywhere, just more so in some environments than others, and when you can solve these problems and when it's instead best to learn and move on.
I find adverts (in the U.K.) at quite entertaining more so than the programmes sometimes. If advertisers could emulate that on the web they would be onto a winner I think, which I guess is what viral adverts already do.
Yet Another JavaScript Testing Framework
Use your network ? - from what I've seen the social network among startups is pretty tight, most people on HN are probably only a couple of connections away from Ron at most.
looks interesting.

A lot of competition though. Will have to give it a try before making a switch.
Also consider the Npost.com events, Saturday House, Startup Drinks (seattle.startupdrinks.com), Andy Sack's Open Coffee, the East Side and Six Hour Startup events.

Also Seattle Barcamp is next weekend (http://barcampseattle-09.pathable.com/ )
MacIrssi looks pretty cool. XChat Aqua is very linuxy... too much for my taste :)
Excel spreadsheet for version control
well, that didn't take too long. good thing they didn't make it a larger prize.
I have to agree. My work laptop came with Vista. I tried getting along with it, but I didn't like it as much as XP. When working on a project, everything worked fine on XP and Ubuntu but not on Vista, so I had to switch to Ubuntu.

It was easier (at least for me) to come to grips with it even though I've never been an avid Linux user.

By now I've started working on a new project and decided to give Vista another chance. Two days later... I'm back in Ubuntu.
Get an intro from one of the many startups he's already an investor in. There are literally hundreds of them.
No, that looks like a squatter pretending to be them.
My thought is that WWDC is on soon and Apple will get on digg (probably several times) and everywhere else.

It seems some companies have already got themselves into a position where they don't need to pay to access that audience, where as EA and Intel clearly do.
Our company spent US$50K on an Oracle database and my boss forbade me from using triggers, because he wanted the application to be database independent. Never mind that we used Oracle syntax in our queries.
Hackers claim $10,000 prize for breaking into StrongWebmail
It sucks yes, but working at a place where there are a groups of people that commonly access the database to do operations that cannot be done from the front end you definitely want procedures. They use different tools for a variety of tasks and when the business logic isn't in procedures its very easy for them to break things and they have and do.... Our DBA however wants all procedures for all access which I find to also be an extreme example for the reasons you mention as not all data needs this level of control as its just simple CRUD operations and tables they should never change anyways.
2626 No Display Lcd Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
This is price-fixing in the labor market. Collusion to keep tech wages low by artificially limiting competition. Of course, white male tech workers are are the beaten wife of industry. They take what they're given and shut up about it. I expect the case to go nowhere.
Angel investors generally don't publicize their contact info. They rely on referrals; they don't have the infrastructure for dealing with a high volume of unfiltered proposals, like a VC fund would.
Introducing Page Speed
And integration with Google Calendar, which is a godsend.
Looks like it might be worth trying to get to Brian Pokorny of Baseline Ventures first.

More info here: http://www.thefunded.com/funds/partner/17407?name=Ron+Conway
Yeah, beer + coding worked okay pre-kids, but with 2- and 1-year olds now my brain starts shutting down around 9pm.
I look forward to seeing some comparisons of this to YSlow
Did a meteor bring down Air France 447?
FTA:

The IDG attack did not work initially, but succeeded when security software called NoScript was disabled on the Firefox browser, running on a Windows XP machine.

Oh my.
Most of those are probably "models."
BitchX
The alternative 'if(str=="hello")' is so much more common as to be a de facto standard, and if a shop decides to enshrine this common convention in their coding standards and enforce it, I don't see that as unreasonable. Certainly not something you should quit over.
Speaking of how close is too close, I've never understood why anyone uses sites like Farecast or Kayak or Expedia at all. I've been using ITA's QPX directly for years — it's at http://matrix.itasoftware.com. As another commenter mentioned, ITA supplies the backend for a number of these sites. QPX had a month-long search way before any of the other sites, which is useful for me since I rarely have to travel on specific dates. And it doesn't try to sell you hotels or rental cars. In fact, all of the so-called "value adds" that distinguish the sites relying on the backend data are things that I find incredibly distracting and useless. QPX also doesn't have a habit of showing fares that don't actually exist, which happens on every other airfare search site I've ever used. Note that I have nothing to do with ITA Software, although from my love for them it sounds like I do.
I think simplicity is the key here. It is going to be useful to masses and not constrained to just big companies. I personally used it as soon as I saw it and will be using it again and again.
Does the video mention Lisp?
Yeah, Perl shops can be weird. I was told not to use map or grep because they are "too hard to understand". How?!?
No, it's mostly about what founders can learn about startups from reddit's experience.
Blue text makes me want to click it. The three blue headings next to your screenshot and the 'adopt' and 'author' list items under "two ways to use utilium" specifically feel like they should be clickable to me.

Make them link to a more detailed explanation of why this is more engaging, why it'll cost less, etc.
The frustrating thing is that most designers really WANT to make interesting, artistic, beautiful ads. The types of things that people seek out.

This doesn't happen because, often times, the people they're designer for look at it and don't "get" it.

Look at the "think different" ad that TBWA did for apple way back when. The one that starts out "Here's to the crazy ones, this misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers".

What does that have to do with apple computer? Absolutely, positively NOTHING, but you know what? I have that typed out and hanging on the wall in my office and I've watched the ad close to 100 times.

Why is this? Because I love apple computer? Because I love TWBA?

No. It is because this "ad" is art.

This ad is the type of thing that happens when you turn a creative team loose and tell them to gasp get creative.

Howabout the ads during the superbowl? Granted these are usually very very expensive, but my point is that if you create your ads as something that people WANT to watch (like movie trailers or music videos), they will.
Your point 2 is far from ridiculous. We do it that way so the business logic exists and is enforced in one place rather than being scattered around this desktop app and that website and so on. Only the most trivial applications can afford to put all their business logic in the middle tier.

But of course, the middle layer that applications talk to need not be the database. A simple RPC server between the apps and the database makes maintaining the system significantly easier. Your procedures are "normal code" that you already have a toolchain in place for dealing with. (Testing, libraries, version control, etc.)

The environment is richer, which means the middle tier can handle caching, sharding, replication, auditing, and anything else that you might need to add. And, you can add these things incrementally, without touching the apps that speak to this server.

IMHO, stored procedures are a quick hack that are barely viable for even the simplest tasks. Many people seem to disagree, but I doubt they have ever considered any other way.

(A notable example of this system is Flickr. Their internal apps, like the public web interface, use the Flickr API to do their work. In this case, the web app that powers the API is the "middle layer"/"RPC server". I think this worked out pretty well for them, and it made it easy to expose their database to third parties.)
I wonder if they have a viable business after this. Seems like this could be a deathblow right off the bat.
Since NoScript just lets you block javascript, I'm guessing their powerful security system was nothing more than a few lines of javascript code?
So many people think they know security, so few people do.
Well, think of it as your friend, not a babysitter :)
No. The likelihood of someone seeing it, remembering it for later, going to your site, and using your product is slim. I can't see a decent (read: any) ROI coming out of it.
I'm guessing they used XSS to perform the man-in-the-middle attack and snatch the username+password+security code, but initially it didn't work on the journalist's computer because he had NoScript installed.
Mull Over Competitive Postcards Printing
If there is a no-hire gentleman's agreement I very much doubt that female and/or non-white engineers are excepted from it. And by all appearances H1B workers have things worse, partly because the government actively participates in making it harder for them to switch employer.
80 characters per line limit....ridiculous when we live in the age of cheap widescreen monitors.
I believe they probably found a way to inject some data that wasn't properly escaped.

When the CEO (or anyone else) would receive the alerts that someone was trying to break into their accounts, the XSS or javascript (or whatever) would be included in the alert and executed ... That's probably how they broke into it and why it didn't work with noscript enabled.
IIRC the telephone authentication is not used if the machine has already been used to log into the account. Since the company gave away the username and password, all that would remain is to steal the cookie used to identify a machine that has already logged in.

That could be done with an XSS attack using JavaScript to access the cookie and divert it.

I considered doing this but would have needed to sign up for an account and that required giving a credit card which I didn't want to do. Well done to the people who made it work.
<?="I","smarty pants"?"don'tget":"see";?>it.
I thought the title was flamebait. ARE YOU KIDDING! science is more important than football. But once I went through the article, he does make some valid points.

I just wish that he hadn't inserted so many pics from his new book - now the article smells of a sales job. His argument should stand independent of his book
There's no way reddit copied digg. Sure it's feasible that they were inspired by the idea, but the sites are fundamentally quite different. Digg.com is just a chronological feed of stories that have fulfilled the front-page promotion requirements. Reddit, on the other hand, is an actual ranking of stories, so an extremely popular story stays on the front page longer and gets higher up on the page.
From what little I could glean, it sounded like the attackers used some kind of CSRF attack that required the target account to log in.

IDG probably logged in with NoScript enabled, preventing the attacker's script from being run by IDG's browser. Disabling NoScript allowed the CSRF attack to work properly. The website was merely an unwitting pawn.
On my first read, I thought it was just shoddy editing, but I think you're definitely on the right track with this.
I am really amused by how the 1337 h4x0r attack on Palin's e-mail always comes up in these security articles
It doesn't matter how good the lock on your front door is if the hinges are on the outside.
I would if you were Leah Culver: http://leahculver.com/laser-etched-laptop/

I expect that one was viewed a lot.
Since everyone is venturing a guess, here's mine:

They used XSS (cross site scripting) to send a mail to the target. When the email is viewed a CSRF (cross site request forgery) is executed to add a new device (phone) to the authenticated devices list. Next they log in, receive the SMS on their phone that is now in the list...bam!

[Edit: I didn't mean XSS to send the email, I meant inject an XSS attack into the email and send it. I'm thinking something like psuedo: location.replace(/link/to/add/device/?phone=555-1212 ]
That sounds like a role for a new kind of super-associate, someone who helps filter companies for multiple angels simultaneously.
My dad can beat up your dad.
Looks interesting idea, after reading your FAQ I still didn't quite get everything your doing. Maybe a video demo or link to some content on the homepage.
Lua scored pretty well in that shootout, IIRC.

disclaimer I've never even coded in Lua.
I've also been using it to compile technical notes. The iPhone client is pretty slick too. Comes in handy when at the command line of a server without internet access in the datacenter and you need to remember the format of some config file.
This is a fine way to get started looking for vulnerabilities, but a very bad yardstick for testing software by.
As jgrahamc pointed out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=642280

They probably sent the mail like you said, only used the CSRF to jack the cookie, which would be easier than adding a phone to the list.
Yes. This is the proper way.

(Correction: TechCrunch just published a news about Ron Conway and the fact that he is leaving Baseline)
My comment is off-topic but related. Different people have different learning senses. Visual, audio, and kinesthetic among them. I'm a kinesthetic learner and the act of writing something helps me internalize it in a way the other modes don't. I wouldn't be surprised if Seth Godin was doing different visual and audio things as well. Whoever commented on the Moleskine is probably kinesthetic and that stuck out to them. Just a thought.
I worked at a place that for the most part banned vowels from database column names.

I hope you feel better knowing that you probably bank there ;)
This paper is pretty cryptic and (I think) unhelpful, for a couple reasons, not least the fact that protocol breaks kill far more systems than block cipher analysis. But it is still an interesting challenge.

Worth mentioning here is that there may be 5000 full-time vulnerability researchers worldwide, and fewer than .1% of them will ever even do protocol crypto. Not that that those 5 people aren't awesome.
Right. Lets return to my original Google Search analogy. Google Search costs Google a fortune to run, theres all this indexing and bandwidth and serving infrastructure thats just being wasted. Remember at the time most people were looking at Google's enterprise search boxes to be the money bringer.

Sometimes what works is a sideways shift and not "monetize what you're already doing".
glad to see the advertising program on HN working as planned
A weird comment, since this isn't a web issue, it's an issue with a software library.
This is kinda lame, but I use it regularly because I cannot remember regular expression syntax: http://www.addedbytes.com/download/regular-expressions-cheat...

The perl regex cheetsheet.
In the context of SSO, you could probably get away with not even encrypting it. Just take HMAC-SHA256 of the cookie contents and tack it on.
That works great when apps can find each other, talk directly to each other, or share storage.
New iPhone to be called "iPhone Video"?
Hackers love a challenge. And more than that, they love cash.

Strike that, reverse it.
I really should start trying harder to mention Lisp in every interview. Heh.
Yes; for me the test has always been that a web app has something equivalent to File->New.
I can understand that having a strict hard limit is pretty stupid - having to split a printf format string just makes grepping harder. But really, long lines do make code harder to read. 80 is the default width of basically all text editors, it just makes sense that if you are going to limit it, it should be 80.

Would you really ok a code review where every line (hell even one or two lines) took up 200+ chars?
The loop has nothing to do with the probability of a collision. If your key comes out of /usr/share/dict/words, you have a 2^18 search space, not a 2^160 space. If you have a 2^18 search space, you better hope your constant factors are very high. Hence the loop.
any idea how to contact Brian Pokorny? You would think Baseline would have a website.
Especially since modern compilers will warn about the problem you are trying to prevent by putting the constant on the left side.
Ask Microsoft.
What is it you do not like about Colloquy? That will probably lead to better answers to your question.
While a speed boost is great and all, don't you have the added concern of making sure your blocks don't wear out on an SSD? Because log structured file systems commit metadata and data in large sequential writes to the hard drive, they have background processes that constantly move data around to prevent massive fragmentation from files that are later deleted. It seems like there would just be too much writing going on if what you want is a long-lasting SSD.

They do mention in the article that it would be a bad idea to use NILFS on your root partition because of heavy traffic, so lets say I decide to use it on a volume where I store all my media (where I pretty much write once, read a lot, and never delete). Now, a) why would I use an SSD for this given that they're so much more expensive and b) wouldn't I get comparable performance using an HDD here since my files will be laid out pretty much sequentially given my workload? Doesn't the same apply to companies storing mounds of data? Where is the middle ground where I would want to use NILFS on an SSD? One where I a) won't be sending enough write traffic to my drive to wear out my SSD too quickly and b) will be reading a lot of random blocks?

What am I missing? I see the merits in using NILFS, but I just don't see the purpose in comparing its performance against other filesystems on SSD's.
While I highly doubt this, I do wonder why we rely on black boxes for crash investigations. Airbus already received some data from the plane after problems developed. Why not develop this technology further to make black boxes redundant?

And if you really do want to keep black boxes, why not develop an ejection mechanism for them so that they would separate from the plane at the last second and float in the ocean?
It would seem to me that you're in the worst possible place as a power Windows user who is not a programmer: you're efficient and productive on one system and are going to lose most of your tricks, but can't take advantage of the parts of Linux where it is better than Windows.

I still haven't figured out what the key combination is to reproduce Windows-M on Ubuntu (minimize all Windows so I can see my desktop). It's really annoying when I think "Oh, crud, need to SSH into my production server but I have an IDE and 12 windows sitting on top of the shortcut."
It's definitely not production ready, but I still hold out hope. Two things right off the bat to increase its functionality would be to make the columns sortable and to provide ability to set the column headers equal to a particular value.

For example, if I run a search on San Diego restaurants to get an idea of where to go for lunch, I'd like to be able to set cuisine and price and build from there. I could see other comparisons working similarly.
check out this filmstrip, Brian Dewan on innovation: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9638211...