skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may not be the case that the industry as a whole is locking out Flash on their corp desktops, but it definitely is the case that there are security-conscious F-500's who're getting Flash out of their standard desktop build, so that their internal machines can't be infected simply by browsing the web.

I can't give examples, for obvious reasons, but you can probably take my word for this.
I don't think you understand what "Not invented here syndrome" means. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here

What I mean is that Google always has to do things the Google way whether that's an improvement or not. Whether this turns out to be a valuable contribution to the field will play out over the next few years. We'll see. But a company that makes their own DB, their own phone, their own programming languages, etc. is pretty much a prototypical "not invented here" company.
Spongebob squarepants kraft dinner is better than the regular as long as you don't cook it too long.
Your people and their knowledge have real value. The code alone has limited value to anyone else, without the associated expertise. And if it does leak, normal legal protections can mitigate the damage. (For example, the threat of a copyright or trade secret lawsuit may be enough to keep competitors from using or even looking at your code without permission, depending on who they are.) On the other hand, accidental breaches do happen (whether outsourced or self-hosted), so you should probably keep your secret keys and passwords even more protected than your source repository.
Tell HN: With Regret & Surprise I Say Good-Bye to HN
BACKGROUND---Nearly 6 months ago I moved my wife and 3 kids to silicon valley to start a new life and pursue a tech. start-up. I studied and planned for nearly two years, eventually arriving in Palo Alto, CA the first week of June.

My background is not in tech. hence, due diligence was key. My best resources were techmeme, PG essays, JL F@W and pmarca's blog. PG's essays were very significant and one of the reasons I chose to move to the valley and compete on the most fertile start-up ground on earth.

CURRENT---Yesterday I posted on HN a question addressed directly to PG/JL (read: Ask PG/JL). To my surprise I got an email from PG that said "don't ever do that again."

My question was simple and professional. I want to be clear, it would have been perfectly within reason for PG to write that he didn't respond to personal inquiries or something along that vein. No harm, no foul. But instead, just "don't ever do that again".

Like many of you, I've been asked often over the years to share a thought or provide counsel to others of like-mind. I can't imagine greeting a sincere request the way PG greeted mine.

Perhaps it is wrong to let this affect me as personally as it has, after all I have never met the man. On the other hand, when you spend hours with an author's words an odd intimacy develops.

END---I am an optimist and believer at heart, my great hope is that PG just had a rough day and typed me an email without thinking it through.

The great Andrew Carnegie used to say that there is nothing worse than attending an empowering motivational event only to see that after the performance the speaker is chain-smoking cigarettes and chugging whiskey.
Staying around would be akin to buying a Mac after discovering Steve Job's uses a PC.

This is how PG made me feel. I've lost respect. I wish him, and all of you, the best.

GOODBYE
Needing to have readable code is a problem is every language.

If you find that disingenuous, fine, I don't care anymore.

Edit: you consider badly indented code readable? You must be great fun to work with. :^)
The arcticle is blogspam. The right one is here.

Okay that took nine.
I believed that until a post about a hamster in a tutu falling in the LHC outranked a post on an async i/o python engine.

This is just slashdot with a different frontend/theme and less sci-fi.
Product design tips for startups
I think you're going to have to either re-evaluate this at some point in the future, or be forced to deal with claims of censorship.

It's obvious that you don't care right now, but your current algorithm clearly creates a diminishing market for "unsafe" search users, until they're forced finally to buy themselves fixed IPs which hopefully haven't been locked by the previous owner.

I'll stick my neck out here and say that, dammit, I ought to have the ability to find pictures of naked people, and that someone else should not be able to make that choice for me. And, furthermore, that there's nothing wrong with that.
Would you (do you?) trust your company's source code to Rackspace/Slicehost/Linode?

They're equally likely to suffer the kind of failure that would directly expose your code.
They've recently made it to Colorado.
Entrepreneurs Who Have Made a Difference
You may need to factor in the "minimal viable product." A few years ago, an mp3 player could be consider enough for a high-end (read non-knockoff) product. However, fast forward a few years and you now need a mp3 player, video player, and app store driven device.

So I think you need to factor in the minimum requirements of the device (or foodchain) and then execute with the highest level of quality.
Hell yes I would.

My current boss would rather die and take us all with him before letting code out of our network. But he is actually slowly killing me and the other devs each time the svn webserver takes a dive, by having me maintain the ACLs, and by preventing us from using git until we build out our own infrastructure.

We're not in the business of SCM. If I was in charge, I'd pay the experts to do SCM, especially the ones like github that make tools that make developers very happy. Furthermore, I have more faith in github's security team and model than the network and servers the junior sysad that was let go 6 months ago put together.

As far as protecting intellectual property...

I know it seems like the world to a software company or a developer, but your raw code is actually worthless. Your team, and how the use, integrate, improve and sell the code is where the value is. Not `server.py`.

Any employee can walk out any day with a copy of the repo and knowledge of how it can be put to use. But the chance of him putting this to work for himself, putting you out of business, is practically zero.

In short, I would do what's easiest for everybody and relax.
Microsoft Silverlight VS Adobe Air - Survey Results
So, that makes two flags, it's still there. Similar sentiment on the flag by the way, it's a good thing he did but I feel it does not belong here.

I've been wondering for a while now if this flagging is useful or not, it doesn't seem to have too much effect, if any.
live link to slides: http://www.slideshare.net/zeynel1/swimswith-demo
You might want to factor in karma density as well. Maybe something like:

w = ln(k * m)

w = weight of vote
k = karma of voter
m = median points per comment by voter

Instead of feeding into the post's score, it could also feed into the 'buoyancy' of a post (how long a fresh post gets to stay at the top of a page before beginning to sink to the bottom).
Sorry, I'm in America where it is Veterans Day. My comments are not applicable for countries where the holiday is treated as a memorial to World War I.
I flagged that article, but I guess I don't have enough karma for it to matter yet.

I properly also triggered the spam filter, because I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.
> On a whole, what are the hardest/most boring parts of building web based software? What are the easiest/most enjoyable parts?

in general, for me, the best part is the problem solving and building out the thing you created in your mind's eye. the hardest and most boring parts are everything else.

> How important is developing with efficiency and scalability in mind?

depends on your goals and what you're building. for you, you should be more concerned with building something that works, and learning about things in the process.

> What should I dedicate most of my learning time to?

decide that you want to build something, and build it. take baby steps, build a small version of your final goal, and add to it.

> How do I know if I am producing spaghetti code? I can’t tell good code from bad code.

spaghetti code is like art. its hard to define, but you know it when you see it. in the past, it was used to refer to code that makes use of GOTO type statements, where its tough to track the flow of the program. that still exists, but its much less prevalent. now its more used to refer to "bad" code in general.
Can you help me out here because I can't understand what message a $100 refund would send.
But far, far less likely to be the target of anyone looking to acquire an absolute ass-load of proprietary source code (and github is probably the largest concentration of it today).

(Just trying to continue to run the skeptic's argument, here. I agree with the point quite a bit.)
I would counter-argue that it is a trait of successful entrepreneurs that they would be successful whether they did it alone or as part of a group.
I think some cultures might not appreciate entrepreneurs as much as other cultures. This may lead to family pressure which may in turn lead to students seeing big companies like Google and Microsoft as the ceiling of success. In contrast they might see entrepreneurs as risk takers, who aren't thinking about their family. I'm saying all this because I've observed that the ratio of races in computer science is extremely difference from the ratio among entrepreneurs.
be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them

No. If signal:noise gets too low, good people will leave.
Like they sign the EULA for software?
Like most 37signals articles, this presents a platitude backed by two examples. There are thousands of companies that succeed with the opposite strategy, and thousands that do something simple and fail.

It's not even clear that Pinkberry succeeded because of its small product offering or due to some other factor. In fact, the first time I heard about it, a fan was raving about the incredible selection of toppings to choose from.

A whole economics thesis could be dedicated to a controlled study of which strategy is actually preferable. This being the internet, simple narratives tend to win over rigorous results.
For added poignancy, the author of the poem, Wilfred Owen, was killed one week before the end of the war, and his mother (apocryphally?) received the telegram as the bells rang for the first Armistice Day.
Nice run-down. I'm pretty relaxed, BTW, but making sure i's are dotted. :-)
Do the support emails have a few general patterns? Or are they all unique? If it is the former you can have a few canned responses and use a keystroke program to expand a few words into the support email. (e.g. something like this: http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/ note I have not used this program so I cannot attest to the quality but I am sure there are others out there that will fit the bill if this one is lacking.)

Another way to reduce your email overhead is to have a good search feature on the website with an indexed FAQ.

Just a couple ideas for you. Not sure how intense your customer support queries are so this might not work for you in a cost effective manner.
McDonald's bought into it early, expanded it, then spun it off as an IPO. They don't own a majority stake (if any of it) anymore.
I survived a speaker’s worst nightmare
SpecFlow: Pragmatic BDD for .Net. Version 1.1.0 released.
SpecFlow is a simple tool that aims at bringing BDD, ATDD and Agile Acceptance Testing to .Net.

SpecFlow allows to bind business readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.

SpecFlow is free and open source.

Version 1.1.0 of SpecFlow now supports MSTest as the execution runtime (on top of the existing support for NUnit) and allows specifications to be written in four spoken languages (English, German, French and Hungarian). Another area of improvement is reporting.
Maybe it you should hope that some rich company does use the exposed source code, and then sue them for all they are worth. Make sure there is a copyright notice so the legal situation of the code is clear.

Just because you can play a CD does not mean you can make a fortune on covers without permission.
At the risk of being moderated straight in to the pits of hell, Raganwald, why did you decide to post this here ?

Much as I can sympathize with the material it feels to me like it is decidedly not hacker news, and even though it scored an astronomical number of votes I still feel that way and can't seem to find a reason why this should be here at all.

The problem I have with it is if this is so much in vogue that opens the door to lots of people whose posts got killed (past and future both) to point here and say, look: this is hacker news.

I flagged it pretty much when you posted it and am quite surprised to see it still up, I do sympathize with the sentiment of your post, I just can't make the connection with HN.
Do I think that Facebook will be relevant in 10 years? Probably.
Here's something that is more likely to work: PG gets more voting power than anyone else. Moreover, his voting gives/takes away voting power to/from submitters/commenters, and their voting do likewise, and so on.

In this way, ultimately PG determines the character of the site by spreading voting power directly and indirectly via his voting.
Indeed, and I would dismiss this out of hand, but someone fairly recently made a similar argument along the lines of "hey, our previously-obscure programming language existed in some form before the popular language was announced, so we have as much of a right to the name."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924510
"Do I think that Facebook will be relevant in 10 years? Probably. I'm not willing to bet much on it."
>> The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

How about using your ideas from your antispam series* to limit maximum karma points awarded to a comment? Would it trigger too many false positives/negatives?

I remember someone applying a learning network or something like that to filter HN articles a while back and it didn't turn out that bad.

*http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html
Hewlett-Packard to Acquire 3Com for $2.7 Billion
That might work, but why give them the ability to post stories initially? That way, to get karma they would have to be able to impress the insiders with what they have to bring to the table personally and can't just find some good stuff made by others.

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.
Maybe they should go and buy a cookbook and cook their kid a proper meal every now and then ?

McDonalds and Spongebob Branded food ?
The voting scheme should bring good to the top and send trolls to the bottom.
I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

Please keep us updated as to your thinking & actions. It has been consistently interesting to watch you manage HN's evolution and growth.
What I think is most telling about that is McNamara's response to Morrison; rather than attempting to paint all dissent as traitorous, or to claim (as would surely be claimed now) that Morrison 'hates the troops', McNamara accepts the moral responsibility for the killing being done and attempts to come to terms with it.

I think a day like today has as much room for Norman Morrison as it does for the soldiers currently suffering and dying on our behalf. I'll remember both, if I can.
In all fairness, the last paragraph read as if you didn't want to be in a position of having to eat your words, as the entire blog post was about how Facebook is super-duper important and no one can ever ignore it.
> But every In-N-Out I've ever been to has a line out the door.

That could also be explained by the fact that there are far less In-N-Out locations than Taco Bell, so one store has to handle demand from over a larger area than Taco Bells.

If In-N-Out has the same density of locations as a Taco Bell, the per-store revenues will be quite different.
Board Meeting Lessons From The Supreme Court
Didn't mean to scold; was just explaining my terseness. :)
Do you actually intend to use other github features? (apart from git hosting itself) If not, then what exactly are you trying to achieve by putting your code there?

- as you said git is relatively easy to maintain locally (at least compared to the standard customer-facing stuff)

- there's no difference in reliability / backup security really imho - unless you trust your local hardware less than "some random host in the cloud"

- not sure what your code does / is, but if you don't publish it, you don't even have to think about information leak (apart from standard host security)

- does the hardware cost play that big role for you? you didn't mention any other gain

- tbh, I'd be more worried about someone discovering that you host your public services' code online and starting to look for security holes just for fun - normally you don't need to think about the security of some one-off utility that you commit, but when it's online, it can tell more about your internal arch. than you want to show

So if you have a dedicated host for git and want to get rid of it, sure - even the private hosting will be cheaper. But is it more important than the other issues.
Isn't this an SQL view/ presentation on couchdb?
Are there any disadvantages for using it this way?
"'Go!' pronounced 'Go bang'"?
Would it be helpful then to have a special type of comment that can't be voted up (zero points always)? So, for the troll rebuke, have the rebuke marked so that people couldn't vote it up.

This way it would appear in the users's comment's page, but would be down-modded to the bottom of the page, with the trollish comment?

Maybe just include a "no points" button or checkbox on the comment edit screen?
Now that is one crazy experience. I'd expect better from BlogWorldExpo, but messing up on your talk's summary is usually a killer.

I guess the survey (show of hands) was the right approach to immediately know what to do. What if you had had about half and half? What would you have done then?
I've never seen an online "petition" actually accomplish anything. Why do people keep trying them?
It is some what expected for posters on HN threads such as this to explain their response in a concise fashion giving other readers a clear handle on the pros / cons of the situation and in this case helping the op to come to a decision.
It might also be a function of being in the Valley. Everyone seems to know each other here.
A dupe?
Computers are imperative to the core!

The silicon in your CPU implements the mechanisms of executing instructions which in turn manipulate data in registers, memory and persistent storage.

Everything else is implemented in layer upon layers of abstraction on top of this imperative core. With a bossy human and a subservient sliver of silicon the imperative is "imperative". All that which gets in the middle can either smooth the way or get us tied up in knots.
Recruiters in the US routinely target the poor.
I'm sorry but isn't this just a regurgitation of a press release from an organization that sells a commercial version of an open source project they didn't start and also canned a bunch of their people just over three weeks ago after completing their B round?

see here: http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog/2009/10/start-the-rev...

Could someone enlighten me about how this post is apropos for HN?
I live in Tucson and occasionally choose to eat at Chipotle none the less. There isn't a taco shop around that makes a veggie burro anywhere close to Chipotle's guacomole burrito. While a caloric load in itself, half a burrito is a good sized meal and is lighter than the comparison.

Is it Mexican? Not quite. Is it pretty tasty? For fast food, at least.
Does this offer have a trick? Can I host non-image files? API access for read and write?
First, I think there is a difference between a language that one would call "bare metal" programming and a systems programming language. A systems programming language gives good performance, and gives you good libraries, and makes it feasible or easier to write large programs, such as, say, a compiler.

Second, while we always think of C as a "bare metal" language, there are two things that I would count as important in that category. Bare metal programming would have some cache consciousness, perhaps. And a bare metal programming language would make it easy to write coroutines, such as BLISS did and was actually easy in languages like Sigma 5 assembler. C does not do these things for me. Also, how many would agree that a "bare metal" language would have GC?

Another thing I would expect from a systems programming language is a little more confidence that my program is correct than I get from raw C. Lack of pointers, array bounds checking would be plus features here.

And I disagree a little with the assertion that C lacks a controlling body. Nowadays there is not that much disagreement amongst C compilers. C++ is quite another story.

I like the thrust of GO, particularly in the context of the systems programming area, where C++ is usually truncated by internal coding standards (see exceptions in the google coding standards), and templates are often limited by internal coding convention.
Ask HN: How did you and your cofounder meet?
I've heard it many times: cofounding a startup is like getting married. So, like the stories that couples tell, tell us your stories: how did you meet? From the first time you exchanged words, to the moment that you fully made the plunge .. what happened?
I'm trying to get the common case across. I understand both can be used as both a verb and a noun, but most commonly effect is a noun and affect is a verb. The people who will mess up basic homophones won't be writing anything that'll require the alternative forms.
First-come first-served is fine when there's consensus about the price. A lot of, if not most of, trading comes from people disagreeing about what a fair price is though - the buyer thinks it's worth more, the seller thinks it's worth less.

Consider 3 orders: Bob bids $9, Sam offers $8, and Sara offers $5. If they're entered about the same time, you may end up with a matched price of $5, $8, or $9 with either Sam or Sara getting to sell - all depending on which order the match engine processes them in.

Same orders, same time, huge variation in what is determined to be a fair price with no good reason. All those prices are wrong too. You can debate about what'd be right, but eBay's pricing system is at least an improvement here (one minimum price increment past the next-best order).

It gets worse - consider if one of them entered their order well ahead of time, it probably gave them the worst price - penalizing them for exactly what people want - a quote to see and trade against.

There's tons more examples, but they can get pretty complicated.. email me if you want to talk about it more.

If you're still having trouble imagining a fairer way, work out what would've happened with these three traders on the old NYSE floor system.
Definitely coming in version 2.
We were mostly going for true homophones, but we're considering a lot for version 2.
I still remember as a kid walking down the cereal aisle and looking for which cereals had the best toys. That was the entire basis for how I chose cereal at that age.