skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't seem like the author has much experience with security, which is what you'd expect from a technical marketing manager - it sounds reasonable but the real goal is convincing you to buy Ronco spray-on-security appliances.

Log files have never been intended as a security measure in the same way as a firewall, but it's naive to claim that they don't improve security. The concept the author is missing is that security is a process, not a software feature. Log files address several key parts of the security process:

1. Damage containment: if someone does compromise a system, logs are your way to catch that as early as possible - the difference between, say, someone at your bank getting malware and their authorization credentials being stolen. Identifying failures can be done close to real-time so it's realistic to be able to do things like quarantine desktops which suddenly acting like botnet nodes.

2. Verifying normal functionality: things like security updates being installed and services restarted, whether your admins are following correct policy, etc. This stuff matters a lot in any large-scale environment and while you can get a lot using a security scanner, logging is faster, safer and easier in many situations.

3. Identify anomalous behaviour: the classic example is adding firewall rules to drop traffic from hosts which attempt noisy attacks but this can also apply to things like banks notifying their customers that their browser is outdated, showing signs of being compromised, etc. Having actual data makes many security decisions a LOT easier.
Doesn't seem to work atm? (No results for "Microsoft")
Dilbert on Patent Trolling
Yeah, I don't know what their cost per watt is. Here's to hoping its good.
This article does not touch on speed that much, but saving your database from reparsing the same SQL over and over is a great thing. Bind variables should be used in the place of literals whenever possible.

There is a gotcha with this though. Say that you have a table with a column having three distinct values with the following distribution:

"John" - 80%

"Sally" - 10%

"Mary" - 10%

If the first time your database parses a statement where the bind variable has the value of "John", then the shared SQL will have an execution plan optimized for values of "John". Obviously, in this case, using an index to search on that column for values of "John" would not be worth it. However, you absolutely would want an index when searching for values of "Mary". So beware! Your prepared SQL can be suboptimal!

(Note: I speak to the Oracle DBMS of versions 9.2 through 11 only)
£23 ≈ US$38. At 18W that's US$2.11 per watt. That is indeed about half the price of silicon solar panels last I checked. I have no knowledge of these properties of melanin, so I don't know if this is a hoax.
Turn on revenue? Did I miss the point where they actually discovered how to make a profitable social networking service?
Clean your data: What programmers can do to remove 'dirt' from databases
Ask HN: Please advise on my Twitter clone idea
I have two questions to Hacker News. I'm not a programmer or an engineer but inspired by reading HN I want to start a simple web service. What can be simpler than a twitter clone! My idea is to change the question to What did you buy today? The business model is one time registration fee of $2. This will have two purposes: to make sure that the user is female, because the service will be limited to female shoppers who want to share their shopping experience; and to eliminate spam. What do you think about the idea?

I found two twitter clone makers http://www.floopo.com/ and StatusNet (used to be Laconica) http://status.net/?source=laconica. Floopo appears to be simpler to set up. Which one would you choose?

Top 250 twitter clone sites
http://www.honeytechblog.com/top-250-list-of-twitter-clones-sites/

There is a blog called "What did you buy today?" http://www.obsessiveconsumption.typepad.com/ but I couldn't find a twitter clone answering to this question.

Of course, Twitter is already used to share shopping news: http://twitter.com/#search?q=bought so there may be a use for a specialized status update for shopping.

Thank you.
You can just pass the directory, no need to specify finder.

open .
open /Applications
Step 1: Find a hotel or bed and breakfast with a horrible website.

Step 2: Offer SEO work, fixing typos, implement webervations or custom online reservation tool, general clean up in exchange for free nights.

I've found most proprietors of mom n pop hotels/bed breakfasts have no clue how to find a good designer/developer to help them with their site.
Legal path clear for Hobbit movie
Red Hat's comments:

"The Open Invention Network (OIN) learned recently that Microsoft was planning to auction off some of its software patents, which we understand it marketed to trolls and some other non-practicing entities. It also used marketing materials that highlighted offensive uses of the patents against open source software, including a number of the most popular open source packages."

http://press.redhat.com/2009/09/09/microsoft-and-patent-trol...
Since the movie studios only release slightly older movies (3 months or so after release), the piracy market has changed so that only the latest movies are pirated and are normally of low quality. Also, a lot of the pirated movie DVDs are compilations, stuff like 3 movies-in-one or multiple movies of an actor.

This is valid mostly for regional movies. Legit English DVDs of popular movies from western studios are sold for around 600-700 rupees (around 15 dollars), so the market for pirated copies of such movies is pretty large.
There's a certain amount of internal competition within the iTunes market that prevents this working across the board. Also, the 99c thing is pretty sacred - if it went up to $2.50 across the board, there would be a huge backlash, which Apple (being teflon coated) would just redirect to the RIAA/record labels - who everyone already 'knows' are evil anyway; ergo (even more) huge PR disaster for the majors.
That's the price of the parts, but does not take into account the cost of labor to manufacture it, or to acquire the hair.
I also find it useful to have multiple instances of certain applications sometimes:

open -na safari
The company has to decide whether or not to turn revenue on. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a real decision. Once revenue is on, how the company is valued by the market can change dramatically.

So when Twitter talks about turning on revenue, it isn’t such a small decision. They have no idea how much money they can make off the service. Selling data to search engines, display ads. Search based ads. Premium/business accounts, etc. There are no comparable revenue streams at other companies that they can fully rely on.

I think the more accurate revenue dilemma is how any of those items mentioned above are going to generate meaningful revenues.
I know I'm going to burn Karma, but, Parametrized SQL queries on HN's front page? really?

BTW, Does anybody knows why the question mark is used instead of something more descriptive? Oracle's JDBC driver allows the use of ":param" syntax and I can't imagine why is not the JDBC's standard way.
To the OP: thank you so very much for linking to this list all on one page
I use CloudFiles as well, and I've been 100% satisfied. They use Limelight for CDN, which is amazing for the price.
Hasbro's Monopoly on Google Maps
Cars are sold in many different countries. Having a single "Icon" helps reduce the costs of internationalization.

Still think a "Defrost" button would make more sense to me considering how often I use it, I never can find the bugger when I need it.
For Certain Types of Students, an Ever-Receding Finish Line
Guys . . .

The hope is that you won't need programmers in the far future!
So the lesson is ... don't earn revenue?
Too few details.
One advantage that SimpleCDN has over Cloudfront is that it support http pseudo-streaming of flv and h264 video. I wrote some notes on it here:

http://www.brightyellowcow.com/blog/Video-Streaming-Be-your-...
Became the next Guido Van Russom, Matz... with just reading a book? Seriously?

Edit: it looks like a good website but I'm still skeptical.
Assuming this isn't a hoax...

That price is the prototype price. It is pretty safe to assume this would be even cheaper when mass produced.
Measuring when you have a florescent light so close to the wires is cheating - the ballast will induce current in them.
Realize that in a confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins-- not through strength, but rather through perseverance. The definition of perseverance is simple because it means to try and try again. Never give up. Life is far too short in the big picture to participate in anything without being fully engaged. Partial engagement cannot exist because it is associated with fear. I am sure that many of you feel as if I am speaking directly to you with the message that I am trying to convey. It is almost like my voice is echoing through your mind because I have addressed a challenge that inflicts everyone. I consider fear of failure a disease, one that can only be overcome with a dose of perseverance. It comes down to hanging on when others let go. Do you ever find yourself giving up simply because it is uncomfortable to continue onward? If the stream decided not to persevere when it approached the rock, then the river would never reach its end destination. This holds true in life as well because when we are faced with adversity, and it stops us in our tracks to the point where we are paralyzed with fear, we will not reach our end destination.
Where do you get your panels? http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solar-panels.html lists prices from about US$3 to about US$10 per watt for panels in the 100-200W range and nothing below 100W, and http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm has this lovely graph by month up in the US$4.40 range. I see http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm lists some panels for US$1.85 per watt, but the discrepancy is worrying.
It's a parody of "Vitamin Water", I believe.
Maybe. The article asserts that, but it says that's the material price. So mass-production will involve paying people for their work (price goes up) and perhaps using less material (price goes down). I was just verifying the calculation, because I found it dubious at first.
Great site & interface! You might get some flak for the use of flash but it works well for this interface.

I thought the scrolling was very smooth, but there was something up with the progress bar, it always bounces back to the initial position when I scrub it.
Internet Manifesto -  How journalism works today. Seventeen declarations.
It looks like just a small amount of hair on there. I wonder about the watts per area.

I bet it would take a massive amount of surface area compared to regular solar cells.

It's a very cool demonstration/proof of concept, but it's not practical for actual use. (But might have a niche in places where other sources of electricity are non-existent.)
The title is trollish. As explained in the first sentence of the article, logs don't provide "real-time security", this is very different than "they do not improve security". Sure they do.

One pretty standard way to classify security counter-measures is in the three areas: Protection, Detection and Response/Recovery. Logs play a very important part in the detection area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfes_law
I don't mean to be harsh, but I think your idea is bad.

You want to become the 251st clone of an unprofitable website with no clear revenue path? Your spin is that by asking a different question (and ignoring the fact that 98% of the posts on Twitter aren't exactly answering "What are you doing" anyway) you will somehow establish a worthwhile site?

Then, let's say that you managed to obtain 1 Million active users, meaning you would have collected $2,000,000. You would quickly find that your overhead to scale and support such a site would probably take you about $8M US to get there (this is VERY rough guestimate on my part from some direct related experience). Ads aren't going to make up the other $6M.

Again, not trying to bash you, but I don't see the "business" in your proposal.

If, however, you want to get some experience with all the variables and moving parts in scaling a web business, this might be a worthwhile exercise to sink a few thousand dollars and a year of your time into.
"...downloading heaps of blog data, processing them, and looking for the misspelled words that occur the most, and adding them to the dictionary."

That's awesome. Tools like MS Word have vocabularies that somehow seem devoid of any geek terminology. Your tools fixes that. Cool.
Small batch businesses
Exactly!

In olden times, this is how new villages popped up. Someone would dig a well and find water. But if he tried to sell this water, a village wouldn't grow over there.

But if he gave away the water for free, a lot of people would show up. And he could then sell the land surrounding the well to these folks and make the money.

So the best way to make money off twitter is by charging for API access.
Waterken Server: capability-based security for the Web
Window.name Transport - alternative to JSONP
I think its great that we've reached a point in technology that we have people (rather than teams or large companies) creating languages that people can use.

However, if you are looking at books to learn HOW to create a new language you likely haven't answered a more important question: WHY.
Querying "MSFT" works: http://freerisk.org/viewtables?ticker=MSFT
Direct from the manufacturers and/or their factory reps. This is for panels in the 50-100W range.
A while back, someone (here, I think) cited an article / blog entry wherein the author describes his log reading process as first filtering out all the... I'll use the word "typical" entries. He identified patterns for these and lets a script strip these out. As he continues to identify those types of entries, he adds patterns for them to the script.

He then focuses on what remains. At least as described, it sounded like an effective way to focus attention on the needles in the haystack.

Note that this doesn't mean shrinking your logs. It means an automated process for extracting an interesting subset. You still have the complete logs for other work. I'd also regularly audit the extract process both for sufficiency and as a reminder that its output is not the only thing you should be paying attention to.

It's not my idea, and I'm probably not doing it justice. Maybe someone else recalls the article / blog entry and has a link. It's also not something I need to do; perhaps if I did, I'd see shortcomings in the methodology.
I definitely feel there's something wrong with the current state of affairs. All my colleagues (in live in Europe) are white middle class males with a university degree. I'd love some more variety...
Right. Nature cares neither about fairness nor work ethic. Wealth distribution is driven primarily by social networks, both at the small scale (getting work or financing through acquaintances) and the large (selling a million albums). Profitable niches open up in the network unpredictably, and are quickly filled. We look at the winners and rationalize their success, ignoring the long line of losers with virtually the identical story save for the outcome.
What do you mean, why? How many reasons do you need to write code that does something cool?
A statistical look at when the express lane is faster
I think it makes sense when viewed another way. Only a select few, about 3% of this country are wealthy, even though one can create their own wealth here. I think the reason is two-fold. First, it's remarkably rare for a person to actually act on their ambitions. Next, when you consider that the default for startups is failure (as PG wrote), and that even smart people fail, it seems to indicate there is something more the people with self-made success have. If all were not born with these valuable qualities, some likely gained them through conscious self-improvement.
I particularly liked the analysis on the impact of patents. Essentially, no important software innovations have been patented.
Seems like the "book" (44 pages in PDF) is a walkthrough to using compiler building tools and the like. Not a bad idea.

A lot of what surrounds it sounds way too much like a mix of spam and infomercial for my taste. Then again, I am most likely not the intended audience. I must say it makes me smile seeing this marketed as a "cool thing" tough.
The Dragon Book!
When Is A Good Business Model A Scam?
OMGLOLUSHOULDPOSTTHISONDIGG
Actually, lone people developing languages is not that a rare occurrence. It probably dates back to the beginnings of programming languages.
How to Make Your Client's Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger
Nope, they certainly won't.

Let me also mention the "4 million stdents took an online class" line. The vast majority of these students took one or two classes At THEIR school during summer/winter.
Mobutu was a brutal despot ... I don't see the comparison.
If all of the economists say that economy will break down next Monday, guess what? People will sell stocks in hand, and the economy will go down indeed, besides what is in truth. Since people are adaptive, they make decisions according messages they collected.
Dublin, Ireland???
I imagine the startup/VC|Google relationship to be like my first girlfriend: neither of you is sure what it is exactly you're doing. She knows if you want anything to do with her, you've got to come take it. So you're going for it, but you're pretty sure if you act like a normal dude, she'll pass you up for that scene guitarist. The only option, therefore, is to be totally aloof, so as to create enough mystery that she'll bite.

EDIT: btw, it was a pretty mediocre strategy in the long run. Not sure what that means for Twitter, however
I agree that learning how to create a programming language is a valuable lesson in and of itself -- I may even buy the book to see what it's like -- but claiming that you can create a "revolutionary" programming language within a few days conveys the wrong message.

Creating programming languages is not difficult but designing good programming languages is.
Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse--Part III
About dubiousness: I am also skeptical. It feels almost too good to be true.

As for mass production: it also takes advantage of economies of scale (price goes way down), automation (price goes down), and "side channel" revenue streams -- open your own barber shops/salons and charge half of what others charge.
I was wondering the same thing :)
Also:

Broke the alphabetical brand index control. (too much non-functional whitespace now).

Just way too much header stuff in the redesign too. Pushing content down the page is crazy.

I did like the way the phone number was given a better call-out.
It's a dangerous business going out of your door...
The part I liked was how he pitched to 12 people and then fixed his product to overcome all these objections. But it sort of goes against how Steve Blank prescribes the process of Customer Development.. oh well.
Hmm. Are you sure this is not some tongue-in-cheek prank?
Well, you expect the prototype to be more expensive. This should be trivially easy to test.
I feel the copywriting of the site is a little over the top. The subject matter is interesting enough that most geeks should want to have a look.

Is this a sign of the times? (See also: http://perl6.org). Sure there's nothing wrong with dressing tech up and making it look fun, but at some point it becomes a turn-off, which is a shame. 2600 et al did not need fancy fonts and bright colors to appeal to hackers.

tl;dr - get off my lawn!
As a marketer, I can write (or at least identify) good copy. I like to think I have a grasp on what works and what doesn't. You can make a website that's both aesthetically pleasing AND converts well. Insane, right?

I get where Andrew is coming from here. Zappos' website feels insanely old and I'm sure many people get turned away because of the design and never get a chance to know how awesome zappos as a company really is.

ie. My mom would sign up for Facebook.com before she touched MySpace, even if she didn't know the difference between them, just because of the better facebook design and execution on the sign-up page.

On the other hand, they're really well known and continue to grow and what the majority of you are arguing is 'why touch it if it works?' Which is the wrong way to look at it. You should be asking 'how can I make this a better experience for my customers?'
If CNAMEs worked I would be sold.
Cross-reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813139
Cross-reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813172
Writing something cool is one thing. writing a language is another. What I'm saying is if you are using an ebook to create your language (on the jvm no less) I expect there are several other languages that people have spent YEARS on that I bet would solve most of the issues you could ever have if you learned them a bit better

* The JVM is awesome. But there are lots of "hosted languages" already on that platform that likely will suit most peoples' needs.
If it's possible to build something this rich without Flash, I have yet to see how.

The logic for the scroller bar at the bottom is fairly complex. We've done many, many hours of usability testing with this and it actually hasn't posed a problem. But I know exactly what you mean. It's actually not bouncing back to the initial position, but it probably looks like that if you have tens of thousands of products displayed there. Try filtering to see the difference.
So ? For that you need a kick under the butt and a bit of a talking to. Something along the lines of: You CAN do it. Now go out and try.

For that you do not need an equity partner.

Personal coaches get paid by the hour, they usually don't take equity.
If you are lucky enough to control both the server and client then this isn't a big deal. You can just distribute the public key along with your client SDK. Granted, this is a specific case.
Agreed that part is excellent. Whatever you do, do not give up too quickly.
if that API results in crashes due to bad drivers on 0.5% of machines

Ahem. I have yet to see a linux machine where flash doesn't crash constantly. I strongly doubt the platform inconsistencies are due to a willful decision from either Macromedia or Adobe. I'd say there is simply incompetence and neglect at work here, "who cares about that 1% linux users anyways".

Speaking of which, if you want any specific feedback forwarded to said Linux maintainer, I can do so ;)

Adobe needs to learn that a significant portion of developers (not end-users) do all their work and testing on linux machines. By denying these developers a reasonable flash expirience Adobe is negatively influencing more platform decisions than they can probably imagine.

Flash is completely out of the consideration for most linux developers because for them it's not the fluid expirience you see on Mac or Windows, for them it's "that nasty thing that always freezes and crashes".

Pissing off the top 1% of your most important target audience (developers!) like that is, well, not exactly smart.
HTC Tattoo Android Powered Mobile Phone To Lauch In Europe in October
It seems these patents were mainly 3D graphics-related: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/08/microsoft_sgi_patent...

So these patents probably don't apply to the Linux kernel, but may apply to other open-source software.
I think the key word there was profitable, but at least FB actually has some turnover.
Formula Three Environmentally Friendly Racing Car Powered by Hemp
Were SQL developers never taught the importance of reducing code duplication?

Seriously, I see it a lot "in the wild". Databases that are filled with duplicated data, duplicate procedures, duplicate views. It's a bit sickening.
yeah the marketing is too traditional!, but hey it didn't mention "become the next programming rockstar" :-)

But I mean, if it is a walkthrough then for people interested in the JVM it could be useful.