skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about easy-to-install software that makes it easy for Bad People to ruin the Internet and to compromise your server (and potentially your entire organization)?

That is bad too. If I had to pick between "secure + customizable but hard to setup" and "easy to set up, but is a one giant gaping security problem", I think I would rather have the first.

Software is about collaboration, like a relationship; one person shares their ideas (qmail), another shares his (your site's configuration), and both parties do better than the sum of their parts. Easy-to-install software that doesn't require thought or communication is a one-way conversation; nice in the short term, but not something you want to be with for the rest of your life.
Does flash run well on 32-bit Ubuntu nowadays? I have a hard time with it on my 64-bit PC. Ubuntu and Hulu didn't play nice last I checked.
An open letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski from 27 CEOs and founders
He also explains in another blog post that he is no longer an employee (which I found as news, I was under the impression he was running the place always), and that he'll post more about it soon.

http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html#co...
Through a friend. and now im addicted!!
Mine would be the first machine upgraded. :)
Considerably more than that even, but the point is that in 2001 or so when they still had a company they could have made a go of it instead of doing a sleazy deal with Microsoft to become part of th FUD campaign against open source.

And at that pint there were still plenty of people on board, including of course their employees (the non-sleazy variety).

Here's the graph:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOXQ.PK&t=my&l=on&#...
Or is it the other way around. Whatever. I'm Indian, so I grew up under the shadow of the British Monarchy, coupled with the modernism "invasion" of the 'Mericans. That's fucked up English for you. More fucked up than the Brits or the Americans. Did you read the text on the site, by the way? Took me half an hour to write.
At the risk of being downvoted out of existence, perhaps I should clarify.

I'm definitely not advocating his actions in the least, just saying that there are other companies that may not be doing well on the market and would be interested in someone who can take risks. More than anything this entire endeavor has been a warning to us that we haven't seen the last of this sort of behavior -- whether or not from McBride remains to be seen, but there are others who will also take these sorts of risks.
I agree with you. DJB wrote secure code that works very well and donated it to the public domain; if you want it to be Perfect For Your Needs, you are going to need to do that yourself. You are a unique snowflake, and your needs differ from DJB's.

"You suck for not doing enough work" is no way to treat someone giving you free software.
A CEO’s job is to hire people to do different tasks, tell them what to do and make sure they get it done.

So a startup CEO is a regular company's project manager with hiring powers added? That doesn't sound right...
qmail does not target your system.
Thanks a million. You made my day by saying that.
A comment to the dvd/blueray and modern technology: my kids prefer VHS tapes to DVDs since they know DVDs get scratched and have never had problems with VHS tapes. Of course they are only 4,6 and 8, but still they see the problems with modern technology that I have just ignored or just carefully avoided.
I think you should reconsider those statements.

Just because you wrote it doesn't mean it's doing what you think it is.

And users really can not be counted on to report errors. Even if they do, the average bug report reads something like "So I put in your address into the google, but when i got there nothing came up! I tried over and over, but every time I clicked on the google, nothing happened! I asked my brother's boss' kid, who's a real whiz with computers, and he told me I should 'eat my cookies' or something, but I'm lactose intolerant!!"
Your simple arithmetic is either a human definition or a part of a discovered system that we can't prove to be consistent and complete in itself.
Hasn't it always been like this? The wording of that FAQ was almost identical back in Feb 2005:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050207024116/http://www.flickr....

The following FAQ also seems to imply that even you won't be able to access your old photos if your Pro subscription expires.

This isn't news. This guy has just been confused about the way Flickr worked from the beginning.
Are there are any well-written overviews of the aspects of qmail's design that you're referring to?
This has to be the most underrated witty comment here. +1.
> I don't think anyone would claim Gates should win prizes for minimal or beautiful code
You could even say that people are downgrading their hardware to run XP with the advent of netbooks.
This is precisely why the desktop OS market represents a huge opportunity right now. If not an opportunity for startups then for significant innovation by the existing players. Our usage has changed so much that the standard patterns implemented by all popular desktop OSes don't even come close to meeting users' needs any more.

I blogged about this recently (http://shoptalkapp.com/blog/2009/10/15/the-real-web-os), but I really hope that OS vendors are coming to the same realization. Creating an OS that is only useful for firing up a browser, which basically cripples the applications that run inside it, is pretty obviously a broken model. Yet that seems to be exactly what Google is working on with Chrome OS (admittedly, no one knows for sure what Chrome OS will look like at this point).

If I had the resources to make an OS that actually embraced the web, I would totally do it... hmm YC application time?
How I'm Anonymously Getting Feedback on My New Website with Rypple
The Wave
amen.

Also, the comparison is really flawed, see above.
If you register you can choose the celebs you want to see.

Target audience is anyone interested in following celebrity news. Readers of tmz.com etc.
Really? Never been big on customer service?

Every time that I (or anyone else that I know) has ever had a problem with an Apple product, they've taken swift care of the issue. They've given me a brand new iPod on the spot when an old one broke before. Apple's customer service is one of the main reasons that people buy Apple products.

Not that the app queue doesn't suck, don't get me wrong.
Guys, I registered for your service but please don't spam me with messages from people I don't know.
HN: Were spelling tests worthwhile?
I was helping my nephew with his weekly spelling test, and I began to reminisce my years of spelling tests. Not only were they stressful, but I would proceed to forget how to spell the words within a week.

These days, are spelling tests at all important?
Looks like T-Mobile is in the midst of creating almost exactly what you want. $60 / mo for unlimited data, voice, and messaging and no subsidies on the phones.

http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=15776&news=...
Life With TED - Micromanaging Your Carbon Footprint
Beware the halo effect
You're guessing the implementation here. It's only a bad idea if you're doing it wrong :) The source/conceptual tables can be normalized, while the join views can be materialized/implemented with Bigtable like sparse columns, which are dynamically updated if the joins happen a lot. Any subsequent join queries hits the views but the source tables. Manual denormalization should be allowed but not required.

GAE has nothing to do with this, it's a shared cluster, such that any benchmark is not reliable and comparable. It also has nothing to do with the SQL discussion, as it doesn't support joins either.
Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction?
So now they realized the same thing the linux kernel programmers realized earlier: building _really_ efficient things requires a more precise stance towards 'best practice'.

While data encapsulation is neat for datastructures which might be accessed by fools who might break something, it is a performance killer and utterly uneccessary if no fool ever touches the datastructure.

While gotos might be old and too powerful for most people, they do have the ability to reduce code duplication in C and even have use cases where a goto is simpler than no goto.
For example, as I suspect any answer will be centred on criticism of a Judaeo-Christian world view (just a hunch) could you also give an example from another religion. I can't think of any of the top of my head. It's a good thing to base share price manipulation on though.
How does it handle printer, camera, other devices requiring drivers?
Actually all Digsby users are told up-front during the install process about Plura. And you can easily turn off Plura from Digsby.
It works fine on firefox with 32bit ubuntu.
Augmented Reality Could Be Coming to Your Contact Lens
We've actually been good about hiring in proportion to revenue growth (and not getting too far ahead of it). One of the nice things about SaaS businesses is that the revenue is reasonably predictable.

Also, margins are improving as we continue to scale.
When America showed up on a map, it was the universe that got transformed
"Design Patterns are the disease, Clojure is the cure..."
Apple 4Q Profit Jumps 47% On Higher Mac, IPhone Sales
A browser is a desktop application
Because vista's drivers were not solid during release.

Bsods killed it

High spec requirements killed it

People selling pcs with less than 2 gigs of ram killed it

And the gains the user got were overshadowed by shitty performance, bsods, and the software they need not working. Not to mention the whole upgrade to a priucier version to get the nice ui feature you want.

Also the netbooks can't handle vista so that entire market died.

Also harder to priate = noone using it at home = not evangelizing at work :P
His visualization demo application didn't work for me: "Access denied"

http://seotests.writer.gr/googlevis/events/
The point was the Microsoft is releasing what is going to be another failure due to their ignorance about what people are using their computers for. Have you heard the ads? "I created a photo album on windows 7!" Did you? Are you sure you didn't just upload 100 photos to facebook and tag your family members in them?

Also, the periods for whitespaces are because of the way that markdown (which is what the site uses) deals with newlines.
Very interesting development, but it has already been discussed on YC.
How soon before we see this meme evolving to "Every developer deserves more L1 Cache"?
...and even a backup service would delete your data if you stopped paying, right?
Apple's Most Profitable Quarter Ever
jacques,

I'll try to get everything.

I didn't benchmark the 2 examples since they run about 8 hours each. I mentioned the next JVM release, only to highlight that some improvements are being implemented for BigInteger, which currently is a slow as can be.

Regarding the 2.nd example and linecounting. Firstly, if I counted blank lines with Python I apologize, I must have been a bit too fast going over it. Generally the line counting was not meant to be viewed as THE indicator for quality, as I obviously compressed the Clojure-code more than what was optimally - The irony didn't come across though.

Your speed on the webcrawler is really quite amazing. I hit it at 2200 here, which is around 4 o'clock on the east coast of the US if I'm not mistaking, using my 4Mbit line. It took exactly 1 hour and 53 minutes, so if yours run in 6 minutes ... Something was horribly wrong.

The fact that my gain is from opening several connections is not masked in anyway - I knew that was the key to speed, that's why I did it :)

Anyway, putting line counting aside I suggest focus be given to the clarity and expressiveness of the samples - where Python is not lacking. Line counting is fun for golfing.

/Lau

ps: Out of curiosity, did you get 8200+ something tasks from your crawl?
I know you are. Pretty much anybody with any ear for Reddit drama knows who you are. But you're sounding here like a child.
Ehm. Whatever problems you may have with DVDs. Compared to VHS they are superior in every regard.
It looks like Apple did the right thing here. They stopped the app from using a term copyrighted by Nintendo. They also communicated the rejection reason to the developer clearly.

Ultimately, this is probably going to be a win-win for both sides. Apple does the right thing. The app description and keywords don't mislead users (and as a result of the blog post complaining about Apple, the app also gets a lot of free publicity)
I agree that this method might work for statsheet.com, at least in its current incarnation, but it's a bit of a special case. Just because you can rely on spot-checking and only reacting to critical errors when you're strapped for resources doesn't mean it's a good model.

It's like writing a post talking about how you've eaten beans and rice for the past four months. Maybe you needed to do it that way to keep your company afloat, but that doesn't mean that the post constitutes advice.

When bootstrapping a startup a lot of exceptional circumstances occur. Not having resources to test a massive web of pages and data is one of them. The last paragraph of the post makes this clear.
Indeed, I was aware of this back when I first got a Pro account and this guy should have been too. It's not a new change.
Thanks - quite a few sites on there I didn't realize could rank high
I should stop to continue to live with 2GB I guess. can I install any kind of DDR2 SDRAM in my macbook, right? I hope I don't need to get super overpriced Apple RAM.
What other incentive would teachers have to teach kids to spell?
Yeah, I don't think past generations of men worried about whether the books their sons were reading were manly enough. If there is one thing that has been considered traditionally "feminine" (rightly or wrongly) it's reading.

The only thing to say to this author is, "dude, grow a pair."
Google already says you "own" your data. But you don't really own it if you can't take it with you to other places.
Can you have a view that shows the last tweet of each celebrity you want to see? This might be a good alternative to getting spammed by one prolific celebrity (or one who is paying someone to twitter for them). This might go against the real time grain though... maybe use AJAX and sort the a celebrity who just tweeted to the top?

Also, reach out to some celebrities and see if you can get them to tweet you. I know some maybe receptive if this will help them get more users. I.e. if you know that users who followed Martha also likely followed Newt Gingrich, you could build a suggestion engine. (you maybe able to scrape twitter for this data?)

Hopefully this feedback was of nonzero value. Unfortunately, I don't think HN is the same demographic as the one you are targeting :)

Edit: Oh I just had an interesting idea. When people sign up for your service, give them an opt-in to also follow celebsutra. Whenever someone follows a celeb through celebsutra, you RT their action. (@biggestcelebfan just follow @bigceleb through @celebsutra) This could be a kind of discover engine for people to find people with the same interest. I know it's a little spammy, make it an easy opt out but it could easily create a viral loop.
Is it you who are writing the program or "IBM or Oracle"?
People rush to upgrade macos the day it is released. Upgrade is cheap for em too. Oh and no need to format (yea beat that microsoft)

Trying a mac os upgrade is not a big deal, you can rollback and all works fine. Do that with windows let me know how ot goes. I never upgraded because I didn't feel like formatting I'm just lazy and if I don't like it I gota spend another day installing xp? Aaaagh.

I used it a bit it is actually quite an improvement on xp in terms of simple administration like setting up wifi and getting meaningful error messages. Not a big fan of the new start menu. Performance on 1gb of ram is attrocious. Why would they even sell it that way?
I agree that desktop OS vendors are out of touch with their users and that the browser is the most important app on your computer (for some people it's basically the only app). However, how can that possibly mean "the end of desktop OS development"? To me, that says that there is a ton of room for future OS development.

"Native apps" still get a lot more support from desktop OSes than web apps. If web apps are taking over, this needs to change. In fact, the distinction between native apps and web apps needs to disappear. All apps will involve some amount of client-side data/computation and some amount of server-side. The OS needs to change to acknowledge that.

There's plenty of desktop OS development left for the future.
Every developer would like and enjoy more memory. But if you're developing applications for normal folks, it is very important that you experience what life is like on a more limited machine.

That is why, more often than not, I've deliberately worked with hardware that was a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. Yes, it is a PITA. Yes, I'd enjoy the bright and shiny. But it keeps me honest about what is going to work in the wild.
Well, do you have something like this?:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/top_hosts.php

BTW, how do you ensure somebody is not submitting a malware (intentional or not) that can DDoS someone by crawling the same host at pretty much the same time?
Has anyone tried to setup an affiliate program with Apple directly. That way, developers can get the 5% commission themselves and also track sales conversions (without going through a third party that pockets the 5% commission)
How to name a chicken sandwich: thoughts for branders
Nope. Shortsighted. A better analogy might be "hi-fi" audio. We reached a level of audio quality that the majority of people are basically happy with some decades ago. (I'm talking about amplification and transduction here.) What "progress" we've made in the meantime that hasn't had to do with new formats (both in the sense of media/input format and output format) has had mostly to do with making sound amplification and transduction more convenient. So big stacks of components are now tending to disappear into convenient all-in-one forms. A very high-level diagram of this progression could be:

Innovation -> Optimization -> Standardization -> Convenience

With audio, standardization was instrumental in optimization. Since one could swap-out their crappy amplifier for a better one, standardization enabled competition in audio components. So perhaps these are better represented as happening together.

In the convenience phase, standardization doesn't go away. It just becomes invisible to the end user.

Seen this way, it's obvious that there's a lot of desktop development left to do, even if OS are already seen as commodity, just like audio equipment became commodity decades ago, but still came in rather inconvenient forms. A lot of the desktop experience is still quite far from being completely seamless. Users still have to be aware that one program does their IMs, another does stuff on the web. Yet another might be used to publish their blog. Another one lets them read PDFs. Another lets them edit their photos. It's just like the 80s and 90s when a lot of people still had to puzzle over the manuals and plug dozens of cords to hook up the 4 or 5 components of their home theater. (Instead of buying some all-in-one thing and just plugging in 6. Soon, it may get to the point where no one plugs in anything at all on their home theater, except to power outlets.)
This somehow isn't good enough for some folks.

Because free is still available?

I had the same experience as this guy. The problem is I couldn't figure out how to recover my photos without paying, not even with FlickrDown. That somehow seems wrong to me. Hide all but 200 photos if necessary. Don't let me upload more. But don't make me pay a ransom to get at them privately.

After I paid that ransom? I too moved all my photos to Picasa. Even better that it's a smoother integration with my desktop experience.
I just wanted to note that Mollom is free for small sites and takes no more than ten minutes to install (maybe two minutes if you know what you're doing) so yeah, I agree, it's more of an excuse for closing a small site.
not any RAM modules, but SO-DIMMs. they're about half as long as what you'd plug into a normal desktop PC.
Like most language advocacy, this piece implicitly compares the beloved language to one other. In this case, Java.

"Java sucks, so use language X!". Problem is, this argument works for many values of X.

I think the elevator pitch for Clojure is more like: "Java libraries without Java verbosity". Or: "Lisp finally meets the real world".

(I've played with Clojure, and found a startling contrast in seeing Java objects inside such a friendly, dynamic environment.)
A good reason to alphabetize is that your text editor can alphabetize a group of lines. So it's easy to get a group of properties back into order, as long as "order" is what your tool does.

Similar to "our code formatting standards are whatever <local code beautifier> does," and then move on.

If you can get your tools to order according to function, then great.
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=884462
Their terms -- keeping your data around forever, just inaccessible to you, as long as you log in once every 90 days -- is actually pretty nice for a backup perspective.

You could conceivably get a Pro account, upload tons of stuff, then let it lapse, logging in periodically to keep it active, and only paying the $25 to upgrade again if you need to recover something.

I doubt this is what they have in mind, which is why I don't think for a minute that they ever seriously sold Flickr as a backup service. But you could do it.

I wasn't a fan of Yahoo's takeover of Flickr (I would have much preferred Google, and Yahoo could have taken that pit of dreck called YouTube), but they have managed to keep their hands off of it for the most part since then. I'm pretty sure that the current business model predates the buyout, or at the least has been around for several years now.
Ask HN: Image API for searching by color
Are there any public APIs available that search for images by color, or that conduct a similar image search by a supplied image?

We are looking for public APIs that offer similar search functionality available at http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/ and http://labs.ideeinc.com/
I remember at the time thinking they were a prime company to short. Their case was absurd from the get-go... it's amazing it took so long to implode.
From the article:

Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube.

That doesn't really make sense to me. Apple has strict quality control for the exact reason that they don't want their store to turn into YouTube. Turning down apps is how they maintain quality.
(Not your target market, but I'm sure with some work your site could be interesting to some.)

1. As someone has already said, feature the photos more strongly in your layout. Otherwise what you've put up is a little too like Twitter Lists, right?

2. Maybe make their name and photo larger (even if it means using a stronger photo that isn't their current avatar).

3. Upgrade the design - it's pretty bland and not very "celeb". Needs to be brighter and bolder.

4. You'll want to have more countries represented before plugging it to the public - I'm sure you could do a country per evening for a couple of weeks, just find a list of movie and sports stars, track them down online and get them into your database.