skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startup Law 101 - Why a small-business setup is usually wrong for your startup
>A versatile low-volume manufacturing facility might have greater value than a specialized high volume one in places with mediocre industrial and commercial infrastructure.

I would imagine you are correct. However, conventional manufacturing practices are not solely high volume operations, and can be implemented with fewer resources.

>[T]hese are basically the same arguments people made about
cellphones and they turned out to be better option than trying to deploy the simple and robust technology of landlines.

Cellphones don't cost $15k per village, nor do they require training to use special computer programs, or a constant supply of raw materials.

If they did, you can bet that they wouldn't turn out to be a better option ;)

>I suggest ad-hoc communication and manufacturing technology may be the best thing in an ad-hoc economy.

I agree, provided the technology becomes sufficiently inexpensive and robust.

But for today, use that cash to leave the community with an extra pallet of parts, instruction on how to maintain the well, and the rest to educate the people.

Ultimately, I share your optimistic view. The technology will be there someday. We just can't force it in the meantime.
And this is precisely why the most recent Firefox install I have is from the 2.x series. It used to be that Firefox (then Firebird) was the lean and mean cousin of bloated Netscape. Alas, age has taken it's toll and the amount of built in crud in Firefox that has nothing to do with downloading had display HTML documents is overwhelming...
Dude, I wrote a whole page about it, and put it on the main polyphasic page of my site with the link "Polyphasic Sleep and Sex"! What more do you want??!

;)

It's here: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/index.php/about-polyphasi...

PD

(P.S. Yes, girl, and married. And pro-nookie. ;)
Seems like a case of raising too much money too soon and getting kicked out by the VCs. But I could be wrong and I am curious to know the founders side of the story.
Yeah, I know. I was basically trying to find the highest reported cost for the stimulus bill and show that even that was not enough. $3.27 trillion is over 10 years, but really it should be considered as the majority paid upfront, even it is not exhausted immediately. I really did pull that $3.27 trillion number out of my ass -- I was originally going to use just the amount of cash from the stimulus bill (shocking, I know), but I figured I'd get a lot of flak for ignoring other spending (even if it's not stimulus). You saw my point though: the stimulus is horribly low for what we need and, if I may so myself, is an absolutely awful bill. I disagreed incredibly with many of the choices they made and was disappointed with the entire lack of regulation. I have no idea what caused this, Democrats fracturing or compromising, but it was disheartening.

I am liberal and call myself a Democrat, but I really hate the Democratic party. I feel like half of them are only Democrats because to be a Republican is to be unelectable. I would like to see some actually liberal policies put in place for a change.
To summarize for those who have less spare time than I:

Some firefox developer had a Very Bad (tm) idea to seed a random number generator by scanning the Windows Temp folders, which is now causing a 30 secs to over a minute pause in start up for a lot of users (particularly those that use IE, which creates a LOT of temp files). Yikes.
Yes, hi, only myself and my best friend were the first ones that I know of since Bucky Fuller to do it and write anything about it, and we're both women.

After you get done going to the store and buying some Google-fu (you'll need a lot, it seems), you can also check out the post I wrote in January about polyphasic sleep and sex. Enjoy!

PD

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/index.php/about-polyphasi...
Stanford’s iPhone U: The rise of the armchair coder
Why are you worried about how people with cameras could eventually brute force your password from that tiny, fuzzy smear of colour on the screen, when those same cameras can see your fingers typing the whole damn thing in, in plaintext?
So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian? I find that a bit offensive and I'm a Californian and an Agnostic.

The article itself is an undeserved defense of California. I love California and I do believe we have some of the most inventive people in the world but when you add the projected shortfall over the next couple years to our current debt you get a number that's getting close to Google's total market cap.

I don't know how you invent yourself out of a mess like that
A startup is disruptive and highly scalable.

A good entrepreneur is concise.
Ten lessons in bootstrapping from the founders of Urbanspoon
Right, at a glance you could see if someone used the same password in more than one place. Of course, you could circumvent the whole issue by pairing the url with the password to generate the hash.
I have read vast swathes of the "first" stimulus bill. I invite you to read it and come to your own conclusions about exactly how much of it is actually Keynesian. I didn't find much that was unambiguously Keynesian, much that was unambiguously not, and a lot of other things that are basically slush funds that seem pretty unlikely to go to Keynesian things.

Couldn't agree more. My post was an advocate of a Keynesian stimulus -- this was certainly not one. As to politics, I have had enough. The Democrats could have made a stand, but didn't. Probably because half of them don't even believe what they're saying and are just trying to get their hand in the pot. I don't know what it will take to implement some actual liberal thought, but I have a feeling it's not coming soon.
Cfront? I'd completely forgotten about using that. Here's Stroustrup's own history of C++:

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf
The 8 Laws of Pain
It's mostly used to eliminate the confusion between the long and short scale of numbers. Although no confusion should arise for Million, 2mmm is instantly recognised as 2 * 10 ^ 12, or 2 billion by Americans, or 2 milliard by Europeans.

A side effect is that it forces people to think in powers of a thousand. Not so long ago a show interviewed people about the economic crisis, and the value of a trillion, and how much more it is than a million. Most people weren't even close, and believed a trillion = a thouand million. So I like the more scientific notation of 2mm, or 2mm mm, becuase it shows people instantly that 2mm (two million) and 2mm mm (two trillion) are mm -> a factor million apart.
This is neat, I like it better than the last one. I would try to come up with a more lossy version. Maybe something that hashes to one of 50 animal icons. The algorithm should be good enough that any one-letter-off typo never results in the same icon. More secure, and easier to remember.
Really great read. I started programming BASIC and Logo at a young age as well, but I don't recall the details nearly so clearly as the author, and my path was quite different taking a massive detour through HyperCard (and HyperTalk!) then web design and finally back into programming by way of a CS degree, PHP, Ruby, and the desire to actually write decent Javascript.

Although I think working through an MIT-based CS curriculum allowed me to short-circuit a lot of the early challenges he mentioned, the "learning to read" part might be my next step. Pair programming with a team of better programmers sounds like the perfect career development move.
Brandon Watson talks frankly about his startup and its investors
Yes, he is.

My dad has been an antique (primarily 1920's and earlier, authentic) car geek for a long time, and he and my mom bumped into Jay Leno at a car meet years ago.

While there, he was just one of the guys, just there for the cars, and he definitely knows his stuff.

I think of him as a car guy who got a job as a late-night host so that he could pay for his true love.
Well, as the author, I feel I better defend myself here.

A: It only uses the first 20 bytes of the hash. You could narrow it down from this if you were really determined, but you'd not be able to reverse it.

B: The visualization of the sparkline doesn't have the fidelity to determine between characters 6 and 7. So you'd have a range of possible characters.

C: The alternative being suggested by Jakob Nielsen is no masking at all ( http://www.useit.com/alertbox/passwords.html ) - which is less secure? I know this isn't the best argument, but it still is -an- argument.

With that out of the way, my paranoid mind agrees with you in this context: just masking the passwords is the more secure solution. But that doesn't mean that experiments to provide a more usable approach with (arguably) equal security should be avoided.
Reading comments first would have spoiled this wonderful practical joke.
Fortunately I read it some time ago uninitiated. Sure I was lured into seriousness for a while. Then this-can't-be-true of course set in.
I wouldn't want to have missed that experience. As any practical joke, it makes one think about the capability of ones skepticism. A capability worth keeping in good shape.
Because those cameras can see my screen easily, and not my fingers typing on the screen? Because my fingers aren't perpendicular to the floor? Because even if I was going to concede that the image of the SHA graph was going to be fuzzy, just getting the vicinity of the color reduces my search space by 1/2^(16..24)?

I love "cameras could eventually brute force" in your sentence, as if we were actually talking about some crazy hard feat of image analysis and cryptography, rather than running a dictionary through SHA1 and comparing colors.

Got any more arguments, sho?
This is a very simple article that I wrote aimed at one basic purpose: if you as a founder use an online filing service to save on costs, at least be aware of the special needs of a startup that the canned kit won't deal with.

What you do with the information is up to you - but at least be aware of it.

So the focus is really legal and not entrepreneurial but the broad entrepreneurial difference between a startup and a small business is what dictates special legal handling for a startup.
One bug is a "fiasco"? How about the 15 years the web has been set back by supporting broken browsers like IE6? Oh, well at least it starts up quickly...

The real issue here is how hard it is to be a consumer of open source software on Windows. On Debian, if I wanted to fix this, I would just "apt-get source" the relevant package, make the change, and have Debian build me a new package with the fix. On Windows, this is apparently not possible, as there is no package management system to install the compiler and source code for you, and the apps check themselves to make sure that you don't modify them.

(I also like how the virus / spyware situation is so out of hand on Windows that you can't even recompile libraries without your own computer assuming you are hacking yourself. Nice.)

Why do people still use Windows?
I've found a download link in case anybody would ever want to play with it:

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/cfr...
Hmmm - looking back, I'm not sure why I'm on 3.0x. Were there new features? JSON backups - whoopee! Other than that, from a user's perspective, I'm not sure there is anything better. 2.x was fine by me too.
I think so, though I couldn't tell you how common. If you asked me to guess I'd say about 7.5%.
I don't understand. I thought the point was that unmasking would make typing more accurate, not that after you had already typed it, you'd be able to confirm what you had typed. I don't see the point in that at all.
War destroy capital structures(roads, farmland, power plants, etc) in addition to lives. So it would be pretty much an unviable option for humanity.

In order for a war to happen, it would need to be a zero sum game. Given that the sun produce more energy in one hour than all of humanity consumes in one year, it would be a really long time before scientists run out of way to get more energy from the sun.

A greying population, like other said, will have the anti-aging cure. This allow the elderly to be in their prime as they grow older, so that won't put much burden on the younger generation.
Point taken. I can also see how my comment reads -- I certainly did not intend to suggest that you were not a good entrepreneur. I was trying to be tongue and cheek.
http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/d...
My grandma hacks debian and changes source code all the time. I don't get why people use Windows either.
Trying to parse this headline, I ended up with something like "Firefox hires a guy in a real jetpack.. to monitor time square's traffic?!"
line-height: 0.1em ftl

(gross exaggeration)
This guy is not your grandma. His blog claims he is a "most valuable professional", so executing a Makefile should not be too difficult for him.

I have different expectations for professional programmers than I have for 80-year-old non-programmers.
(a) This sentence doesn't make any sense. You can't "reverse" full SHA1 any more than you can "reverse" truncated SHA1. And SHA1 hashes are only 20 bytes long. Reversing isn't the attack.

(b) The goal of the attack isn't to magically conjure the password; it's to magically conjure a searchlist of several tens of passwords, which is a game-changing improvement over a searchlist of, say, 72^8 passwords, or even tens of thousands of dictionary words.

(c) The alternative suggested by Jakob Nielson is manifestly and categorically asinine.

Good on you for a finding an application for visualizing a SHA1 hash. You score maximum points for cleverness. But now you should retire this idea.
1. Submit link with affiliate thingy to HN

2. Get people on mechanical turk to upmod your submission until it takes off

3. Profit?
The "awesome bar" (updated address bar) was added in 3.0 I believe.
That would be infinitely cooler
Of course, as a lawyer, I am by definition not a good entrepreneur. But I like to work with those who are. I actually liked your comment, and it helped me see the need to clarify for others my reason for the posting.
Well, it's basically a memory dump. Disk space is cheap.
Agreed. I thought Ferguson's book would be interesting when I saw it at the bookstore last year, but quickly decided that it wasn't worth it after checking out reviews.

I don't have links to specific reviews I read, but my impression of the author is that he's turned away from research in favour of writing popular and shallow books on overly broad subjects. Apparently a couple of his earlier works were quite well regarded, but since then he's been dumping out a book a year.
Man, look at the "team" page: http://www.tokbox.com/view/team

Why the hell do they need a "VP of Human Resources"? A "Community Evangelist"? I count 20 people on that team, I would have expected a third of that.

Good lessons here for startup hopefuls. First, don't take $14m for your fairly simple flash video app. Second, if you do, don't waste that money on feeding your ego with a large headcount. Third, if you do, don't be surprised when you're kicked out and someone else is in control of your baby.
At least the good news about the Bad Idea(tm) is that this should be a very small fix for 3.5.x.1 - as opposed to some competing browsers invested development that ignored/contradicted standards, requiring complete re-do's.
Good to know that not dropping out of school to work for them 2 years ago was the right choice.
On bicycle day he took about double the standard dose (250 µg), not 100x. I don't believe there's any documentation of him later taking mammoth or very frequent dosages of LSD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#Bicycle_Day
If you discover that smart people will not recommend your application, the problem doesn't lie in the marketing.

You're barking up the wrong tree.
California is certainly at the end of the road here. There's no way around a reform at this point. I think in the next few years it will be interesting to see if we chose well when asking for deep cuts in spending.
>> model it against an adversary with a camera.

Which can record your hands? :)

I figure that the offline dictionary attack could be foiled if this was a Firefox extension that generated a random salt on installation. (of course, this doesn't work if you want to play WOW on an Internet Cafe)

My main reaction to the experiment is that I don't know many people who touch type (at least when it comes to their password): I've had people accidentally type their password on the username field in front of me countless times because they weren't even looking at the screen.

I don't see why I should worry about big brother FUD when I could embarrass myself any time by accidentally pressing caps lock instead of tab.
If the attacker had a video camera and the victim was a slow enough typer (I'm thinking hunt-and-pecker), brute force wouldn't even be necessary. You could incrementally build up a string that matched the password as each letter was typed using the hash generated after each letter is typed.

Fidelity of the graphs wouldn't matter at this point, you would just take the closest match and backtrack if necessary.
In other words, you need both a Jobs and a Woz.

Even in the rare case where one singular talent is both a brilliant sales man and a brilliant technologist, he is probably better off focusing on one and finding a partner to handle the other, just because there are only so many hours in a day. At the same time, it is still a good idea for the sales person to understand the product and for the product person to understand the customer.
that and it killed visual voicemail for me
If someone is trying to learn your password from cameras nearby, they will make sure they can see your keyboard. Of course. If you're in that kind of hostile environment, nothing is safe except biometric or card authentication. Your concern is misplaced.

You should have raised the scenario of, say, spying on a screen through a window from the other side of the street. That's a much better example and in that one, you might actually have a point, although I understand it's against the rules in many organisations to allow a screen to face a window. But the "in the same building" one was ridiculous. Why bother brute forcing your squiggly coloured blotch when they can just put a tiny camera in every light, or whatever?

No, no further arguments. I agree it's a bad idea, of course.
maybe not a fiasco but a serious bug. Im using IE8 at the moment till a fix appears - it's just faster.
Chief Executive magazine, to take just one example, has ranked California the very worst state to do business in for each of the past four years.

Not the rosy picture of California and the Bay Area that is usually talked about on this board.
Ask HN: Steve Job's Net Worth?
Doing a quick Google search shows that Steve Job's net worth is about $3.4 billion. That's an absurd amount, make no mistake, but why is it smaller than Sergey Brin's ($12 bn), Larry Page's ($12 bn), or Bill Gates' ($40 bn) net worth?
I wish it were that simple. If you had joined them two years ago, even if this is where the startup is today, you would have learnt a lot. One could make a case that it may even be better than school.
"For years, stations have paid royalties to composers and publishers when they played their songs. But they enjoy a federal exemption when paying the performers and record labels because, they argue, the airplay sells music."

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/21/business/fi-radio21
I agree...a web app would be better. Although, I'm loving Firefox 3.5 and not inclined to complain, it would greatly expand the reach of this particular tool if non-Firefox users could use it.
Another thing I love about this discussion is the intimation ("big brother") that in order to get a picture of my screen, you have to be the NSA. And not, you know, some jackass with a camera.
(a) I wrote in haste. Obviously it's a one way hash and unreversible. Additionally, I meant the first 20 characters, which is half of the full hash.

(b) Obviously. Still extraordinarily difficult given this implementation IMO. But I take your point genuinely.

(c) Agreed.

If you weren't so friggin inflammatory I'd think we could come to a conclusion here. I could definitely be using a more lossy visualization to be more secure. This is something I'll look into, even though I'm sure you'll still consider it 'retarded' even if it helps your grandma login to her googles more often, making you get less phone calls to fix it as a result. She's got that palsy you know.
Amazon Kindle Digital Publication Contract Review and Annotation
In defense of the user ......
sometimes the user may not know the exact domain name and a google search makes more sense.

To extend the TalkingPointsMemo example used in the article,consider the fact that the TalkingPointsMemo logo says "TPM".
A user who has heard about tpm will be better off typing in "tpm.com" in their search bar. The second google result is for the talking points memo website.
oth typing in tpm.com will take you to some other company's website
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 93 – Vee Eye
CSS and html both support rgb(), rgba(), hsl(), and hsla() colors in addition to hex...
I knew it was a joke, but the funny thing is that most of it is true...c++ IS a jumbled mess, IMO. Sure, it made OOP popular, which paved the way for newer languages to implement it more cleanly, and make it easier to use/think about. C++ is good for generics, and native performance/compilers, but for some reason i've just always used plain old C for performance/system stuff, and another HLL like C# for OOP. I guess java is cool too, if you're on that side of the fence, but I think its a jumbled mess as well...but that's another story :-)
2.x has at least one rendering bug that was fixed in 3.x -- whatever rendering bug it was that I discovered the other day but can't now recall.
Hell, I won't even pay free. I have an account and I STILL just leave the page when it tells me I have to sign in to access free content.
Who knows, you might have been their new CEO and you might have kicked some serious butt in that position...

Alternative universes have one small drawback, we don't get to experience them.
Oh wow, I didn't even notice that it generated graphs on a keystroke/timer (though, I mean, duh). Wow, is this bad. Number of mask dots, 2 midpoint colors, and the final color; how many passwords in any dictionary does that reduce to?
I think the author addresses that point. You can't fix that bug yourself because the code needs to be signed by Mozilla (security layer).
What's the next phase? What else does he have to learn?
11. Be featured on an iPhone commercial, because if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be reading this.
As soon as I see eye filth like that I go right to my readability bookmarklet:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

80% of the time, it works every time.
I'm not sure how you say the free views online did very little to help his career. Soulja Boy would not have a career if there weren't so many people interested in crankin' dat Soulja Boy via Youtube.

The Arctic Monkeys may not have made money from their free promotion, but the free promotion got them the contracts that finally got them money.

It may be true that once established, free promotion will only do so much for sales. So then what?

Stop whaling and start catching tuna. Instead of signing artists that established their own fan bases, sign more, newer artists and don't spend so much money overengineering all the audio into flat loudness. Then, offer access to the catalog on a sliding scale - the more new, unestablished artist impressions, the cheaper the licensing fee for the time period. So you get paid a reasonable fee for a site that enables 24/7 Michael Jackson, or you drum up cheap awareness of new artists as sites like Pandora seek to institute thesixtyone-like rewards and incentives for listening to new music.