skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking for interested open source developers (Ajax IM)
Hey there, everyone. I'm the owner of the open source project, Ajax IM (www.ajaxim.com), in addition to vistrac and everything else I have going on.

Unfortunately, I haven't had time to work on Ajax IM lately but I am determined not to let the project wither away into obscurity and uselessness. Thus, I thought I would put out a call here at HN to see if there are any interested developers and designers with some free time on hand to help move the project forward. I will continue to manage/direct the project, but most of the code would be from you, the contributor(s).

You don't need to be a frontend, Javascript, or PHP developer, as I have plans for the project that could certainly use Python, Ruby, or any other languages, and designers are also readily welcome. What you absolutely do need, however, is some strong experience in whatever language(s)/parts of the project with which you would like to work.

Understandably, this is a tall order, but I know there are some great designers and developers here and would love to have some of you assembled as a team to make Ajax IM much better.

If you're interested, you can find my email in my profile, or leave a comment as I'll be watching this post closely.

(Footnote: Right now, the script has a very awkward "modified BSD" license that I implemented a couple years ago, but I would like to change it to a standard BSD to MIT license for future versions, so please don't judge the project by the unfortunate current choice of license. As well, all code will be moved to a proper repository.)
see, we are the singularity. It's happening now. It started with the printing press. I can't imagine what this world would seem like to someone born 100 years. I bet we will see that kind of rapid change in the next 50 years; then 25.... I mean, this has been happening for a long time now.

/humans/ are the machine that can make better copies of itself that can make better copies of itself.

Edit: this has been happening since before the printing press... but I think the printing press was the beginning of our rapid acceleration.
Clickable links:

Ajax IM website: http://www.ajaxim.com

Ajax IM demo: http://www.ajaxim.net
Ironically applications that bypass HTML entirely and use JavaScript to build up the DOM (e.x. Cappuccino apps) are largely immune to XSS attacks (as long as you avoid innerHTML and such)
It's probably better to disable the JavaScript engine based on certain heuristics, for instance when there is invalid character encoding in attributes.
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I'll do a follow up on 'excess demand' & other issues you raised 'PVG' above - (you really thought it through) Steve.
A few years ago I did some consulting for a datacentre provider that you've almost certainly heard of who were giving serious consideration to buying a utility and operating their own power station, to get their power and cooling at cost. They'd already contemplated and rejected moving their entire operation to northern Alaska/Canada/wherever and just paying to plumb in the bandwidth (customers wanted to be able to get at their kit if they needed to).
The problem isn't that 37S tech support doesn't know how UTF-8 works. The problem was that security reports were routed to tech support in the first place. Again, the solution to this problem is a single web page with just a couple pieces of information on it.
Revisiting PG's New Reality, 7 Months Later: Ticketstumbler vs. Fansnap
Based off this post 7 months ago, where PG compared TicketStumbler ($15k in funding) to FanSnap ($10.5 mil): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925

This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
This is a great tip. Need more of same on HN.
A modernized, preferably static version of perl's taint mode might work. You need two types of strings, one for trusted and one for untrusted strings, all your output functions accept only trusted strings, all your input or request parsng function return untrusted strings, and all naive string manipulation functions return untrusted strings if at least one of their arguments are untrusted. Then the possibly vulnerabe code is limited to a few statically identifiable routines that take untrusted strings and return trusted ones. They still may be buggy, but at least you know which parts of your code may induce vulnerabilities and need special attention.

And with modern type systems, these types might even be phantom types incurring no runtime overhead. Athough things like the differences between "safe for passing to a browser" and "safe for passing to my SQL-server" might compliate the architecture.
Based off this post 7 months ago, where PG compared TicketStumbler ($15k in funding) to FanSnap ($10 mil): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925

This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
It would be easy to defend if being an airline passenger is even vaguely analogous to being an application service provider who charges money and promises you your data is secure -

http://37signals.com/security

Compare this to what your airline likely promised you in the event of damage to or loss of your luggage -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Convention
Dude, welcome to the status quo.
"College Algebra" always seemed like an oxymoron to me.
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As interesting as the idea is, I don't think the analogy with Darwinian evolution quite holds. In order for something to act as a selective pressure it needs to actually exert pressure. That is, just simply saying, "Well, if it weren't that way, then certainly someone would jump in with an alternative" doesn't work as an explanation because it's never happened. Taking it back to biology, it's as if someone asked "Why don't we have 3 eyes?" You could come up with all sorts of reasons why 3 eyes might be worse than 2, but until someone is actually born with 3 eyes and has trouble surviving because of it, none of your reasons would be valid selective pressures.

Edit: As to the original question, I imagine the right answer is something more along the lines of: where to place the fuel door is considered rather unimportant, and so left until last. At that point, it goes wherever it will fit...
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why the PGP key?
I wonder who funds "research" like this. And where do they do studies of this sort? The "duh" school of research?
Hello kettle, this is pot. You're black. :)
His thought experiment had the opposite of its intended effect on me. He describes a bug in a framework that could very plausibly have been used as a vector for a XSS attack. If browsers implemented strict parsing it is far more likely that this bug would have been noticed sooner. The bug might never have made it off the original developer's machine.
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"Crazy Mustafa's" doesn't have quite the same ring to it
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Hmm, I wonder if this happens if men are trying to impress women with their intelligence. There was an article on HN a little while ago about how women are attracted to intelligence.
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Shouldn't an RBF kernel be expected to perform better than a 2nd degree poly kernel since, technically, it is infinite-dimensional? (I.e., the radial basis function can be expanded into an infinite-degree taylor series)

I think (not a ML expert by any means) that RBF should probably outperform most fixed-integer polynomial kernels, but it does so at the cost of introducing more structural risk into the model.
Thanks, it was an interesting article and it'd be great to hear more.
Hrm, interesting. I didn't know that Microsoft was leading the industry in security. If we're talking about the commercial OS market, I suppose that makes sense because you're pretty much only comparing them with Apple.
Gopher, are you kidding me? We would have loved to have something as nice as Gopher when I was a kid.

When I was your age, we didn't need any stinking search, because if you couldn't find the file you needed on a single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk you wrote it down wrong on the label, and you had to find the right file your floppy was on.

I also the delirious joy I experienced on getting my very first 1400 baud modem. It took me weeks to figure out the right protocol settings to get it to dial and connect to the local BBS. Within days of figuring that out, my father stormed into my bedroom because the phone line had been busy for 3 hours, and I was banned from using the modem for weeks.

He'd just seen the movie War Games and was worried that I might try to hack NORAD or something. Sigh.
If we're going to revisit what PG linked to, should we revisit what Dan said about having a long way to go?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458946
Startups are a lot of work. I'm guessing it's fairly indisputable that $15.7m funding can really help your growth. Case in point, employee count: FanSnap 21, TicketStumbler 2.

Given that tidbit, I'd say TicketStumbler is still doing a very respectable job by comparison.
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For simple classification tasks, naive bayes performs surprisingly well, is very easy to setup and run, and is relatively computationally inexpensive. It's excellent for getting a good baseline performance approximation because it's just so easy to use.

If you have a lot of training data and computational power, an SVM will almost always outperform naive bayes, but they take longer to train and tune. Try naive bayes first.
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Why not have the fuel door in the center - either in the front of the car or at the back?
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TicketStumbler might still be the better business; that's a lot of funding to earn back.

But really, I wonder what happened in February-March that gave FanSnap such a traffic boost.

Looking on the two companies' blogs for that period, the only thing that sticks out as a possible major traffic driver is a FanSnap partnership to list eBay tickets.

Or was it some promotion associated with the NCAA tournament that drove awareness and continuing use to a new level?

Or maybe FanSnap is just buying the traffic with advertising dollars -- ROI and longevity TBD?
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Self-consciousness lowers competence.

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might,' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbour; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing. - Oliver Wendell Holmes http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/topics/ability_and_ach...

OTOH, A simpler hypothesis is that the blood supply available to their brains was reduced by the interaction.
re 2 - I disagree. On a powerful computer flash is OK, but on let's say a Core 2 duo 32 bit and an intel i950 graphics chip, almost any flash will take one of the cores to 100%...
Side note (but interesting): I noticed that people here barely know who Google is (not the techies, but common Internet users). I noticed that several times. One example: Other day I had to talk to the apt manager, and her English is bad (and my Chinese is worse than her's English!). So she uses a translation web site on her office to communicate with me. She goes to a Chinese portal, does a few clicks and so on... To my surprise, I noticed the translation service she uses is actually Google, but it was inside an iframe on this Chinese portal. I pointed to Google's logo right there on the screen, and she actually didn't know what that was!! For her (and I bet for a lot of people) this translation service is actually provided by the Chinese portal, and not Google.

There are other instances that I noticed too (this was not an isolated case), but in summary, I think Google has a loooong way to go here in China.
Agreed. I'm generally a believer in applications being "strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept" which seems to be what this guy is advocating. However, after reading it, I immediately equated this with an XSS attack and was re-evaluating the benefits of the strictness-always approach.
The case in favor of strict parsing is always that you'll catch bugs sooner.

The point of his argument is that you forgot about pesky humans, and real life software - where strict parsing means a computer that's much less useful.

(In his particular example, which is just an example and not the whole point, you could parse trackbacks strictly, and still give people browsers that just work. And strictly parsed but poorly filtered third party HTML will give you XSS attacks, too. And his example happened to be buggy filtering of charsets, and not specifically poor parsing. So I don't really see the objection.)
I appreciate your self-awareness and frankness. Thanks.
Yeah I'm certain that you can, but I'm not sure how well it would convert though. I've read that pdf's won't convert well if there is a lot of graphics in the file. And I would expect that some of the text would be treated as graphics since I'm not really aware of any common text format that handles mathematical symbols well.
There is such a huge variation in sites estimating visitor numbers.

http://www.cubestat.com/www.ticketstumbler.com

http://www.cubestat.com/www.fansnap.com

I think it's pretty obvious that given the variation and low absolute numbers we are talking about that it's impossible to tell the two means apart given the data.
I've wondered why different cars have fuel doors on different sides, but have always believed that car companies just never agreed on a standard. I'm glad that's not the case and that there really is a reason.
Google's approach to copyright has been, since day one, "Our engineers are faster than your lawyers, and scale better, too."

Question: is making a copy of every page on the Internet, and then data mining the link graph (and other information) to commercially exploit it, industrial scale copyright violation?

Answer: Maybe! However, it will take years for that question to be resolved in your favor in court, and by then we'll be the world's most influential Internet company, you'll still just be some sap with a web page. After we're a billion dollar company, if you disagree with the way we do business, you can just opt out of being findable by the customers we gained using your data.

P.S. If you opt out, and somebody reprints your content on their site next to AdSense ads... well, rest assured that if you send us a DMCA notice we'll treat it with the all the care and responsiveness that Google's paying customers receive.

Question: Do we owe you for the profits we got from those AdSense ads?

Answer: Maybe! However, it will take years for that question to be resolved in your favor in court, and the effort will cost you many thousands of dollars in legal fees to recoup far less in damages. You will not win a judgment of willful infringement because we'll just blame it on the computer. We can't be expected to check every result, naturally -- there are only 10,000 of us and even if we spent all day every day policing abuses of our system it would never be enough. So really, you should just suck it up and let us keep the money. That's what everyone else does: we have the numbers to prove it.
Oh, I see your point now. I hadn't viewed that slide show yet and thought it was more like the paper cutting pitch. I think it could work, but more likely licensed and sold to a store like Claire's.
I just tell people "I make stuff", and then if they're interested in details I tell them.

I much prefer lazy evaluation.
Brian, I'm on the receiving end of security@37signals.com and @rubyonrails.org. I read your post with great dismay, to put it mildly. You're understandably pissed: we whiffed on our response to you by changing venue to Rails security without keeping you in the loop.

This is my fault. I identified it as a Rails issue and requested that you forward your findings to the Rails security team so we could investigate in concert.

Craig here at 37s narrowed down a root fix with Michael, Rails' security ombudsman, who then enlisted Manfred's help to track down and repair the root cause. What you see today is the end result of those efforts. The security process worked, but you only saw the Rails arm of it. The apparent 37signals arm of it amounted to runaround. Completely not OK.

We now have a security-only email and PGP key at http://37signals.com/security. Next time, no runaround.
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For our site, Cubestat's "Estimated data" is completely and horribly wrong compared to compete.com and alexa (which are only mostly wrong).
It is pretty sound to be sceptical of any open-source offering from a company like Adobe. I'd much rather spend time learning some skills in an open source project where the full stack is open-sourced future proof.

I'm sort of wary learning to code iPhone programs as well -- it seems cool, and there's lots of interesting ideas there -- but do I really want my hard-earned development skills to be dependent on the whims of Steve Jobs?
You have a comma out of place on slide #10. Just saying. :-)
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The answer to your question is in the price comparisons that Backblaze provides. If you compare the price of something you imply that it fills the same or similar needs. Since there is no explicit caveat, and they don't explain why their solution is so much cheaper, competitors will come out and provide that explanation for them.

I'm pretty sure that the Backblaze solution is actually cheaper and that they are cutting some of the right corners for their particular application scenario. But it remains an open question how much cheaper it ends up being.

I think their price comparison is a bit misleading since it doesn't include replacement costs for the desktop grade hard disks they use and it doesn't include any of the costs incurred by the software/labor/maintainance required to make this a reliable backup solution.
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i'd just write code. in fact, we used dropbox as our version control system for a month or so in the early days. you'll need to figure it out eventually, but get your bearings first.
> What is their incentive to fail people that do not learn the subject? What is their incentive to even teach the subject properly?

Keeping their job?

If a company like StraighterLine wants to be taken seriously, they'll need to ensure people that they are giving quality classes and only passing people who learn the material.

My guess is that they'll end up some how auditing the professors, maybe randomly looking at tests to see if the people understand the material, etc... Maybe they'll find some other mechanism, but as long as a good education is valued by employers, StraighterLine will need to find a way to prove it is giving one.

To be honest, my only real issue with treating these courses as accredited is the difficulty in validating who took the class (e.g. making sure someone didn't ask their friend to take the exams for them).
Actually it still happens a lot to me. :(
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Can't talk about details yet, but there is something in the works along these lines. More info in a month or so...
They are actually busting ass on several fronts-- lots of bizdev effort going on there and that stuff DOES pay off. I know some guys on their team and from what I understand, they aren't spending money in an entirely stupid fashion. :-)
But I don't want to live in Rome (actually i would like). And I need a car that works the same in Rome AND in Paris.
At one point Red Hat paid to get one of their releases "officially" tested as conforming to the POSIX standard, and passed, and was thus able to officially call that version of Linux "Unix(TM)". I may be mistaken, but I haven't heard them pushing that any time recently, and the market doesn't seem to care, so I doubt they've continued jumping through that hoop.

Now, if you want to take a deeper interpretation of the analogy of "clone", as in duplicate DNA, then Linux is less of a clone of "Unix" than BSD, since it was independently written, and a judge has pretty much declared that it contains no copyrighted content that originated with "Unix". Read the SCO travesty timeline at groklaw.com. Meanwhile, the Berkeley (Berkeley Standard Distribution - BSD) folks actually worked from a copy of the original Bell Labs Unix - but worked so hard on it that in a much earlier court case, a judge made a (sealed) declaration that BSD had only a handful of lines left from the original code, and that Berkeley could distribute their work, with the exception of that handful, on their own terms. Berkeley quickly replaced/removed any infringing content, and that became the basis for the *BSDs.

For the glorious history of Unix, read Peter Salus's "A Quarter Century of Unix".
I wondered when somebody was going to bring this up.

For the record however, Fansnap has spent a significant amount of money purchasing traffic. There were ads on finance.yahoo.com at one point. The fact that they only amassed 94k uniques is almost laughable, poor retention/use of money--imo the whole ticketing business is a tough sell if you're just aggregating--

Tom and Dan have definitely put in a heart full effort--I think they probably understand the business just as well as fansnap (if not better) and spent much less money learning about it at the end of the day. Kudos to those guys bootstrapping an idea.