skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that local ISPs (or national/regional like Comcast) are poisoning the well by resolving non-existent DNS entries to their own advertisement-laden web servers in an attempt to increase their bottom line. At least open DNS servers exist like Level3 (4.2.2.[1-4]) or now Google (8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4)... (and to a lesser extent OpenDNS, which is 'open' but tries to pull some of the same advertisement stuff).

In general, the distributed aspect of DNS was to reduce latency and network traffic. While this might not keep network traffic within your ISP's internal network, it can severely reduce latency even if you're on a large ISP like Comcast/Qwest/TimeWarner. My only guess as to why this appears to be true, is that most ISPs don't really give a crap about their DNS servers just so long as it's still running and hasn't imploded.
If Google deletes all of its personally-identifiable data within 48 hours, then the risk to current users of any future privacy policy change is small. The real problem is when a service collects -- and never purges -- data under the guise of one privacy policy, but leaves the door open to adopting a different privacy policy which could be retroactively applied to the data already collected. I'm no lawyer, but the OpenDNS privacy policy does appear to fall into that category: "Your continued use of our sites and services after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change." Right, and if I stop using the service when the policy changes, will my old data be automatically flagged so that it still falls under the old policy?
Some comments get clouded in politics and suspicion. If this move has a commercial reason then perhaps it's easily explained as to compete with OpenDNS.

Complaining that a search engine collects information seems crazy: surely that is a sign of a good company. The important thing is choice/competition. Google is a good competitor, whether you like them or not.
Eva Mendes | Celebrity Blog
I suppose it's just too much to ask that you ignore him?

For fucks sake trolls are just people who do things. They aren't magical beings that need to be warned off or they will eat you.

In Adult World we deal with simply don't give attention to attention wanters.
I'm not sure how much of a concern that is for most users, who use Google to get to all the content on the Internet anyway. Having DNS records wouldn't buy Google much that they don't already have from search queries and results.

It's getting to be a very rare (non-technical) user who actually types URLs directly into their browser; most people go through Google, even to get to sites where the domain name and site name are exactly the same. They're hitting Google for every single site they visit already.
" ... and using fear to convince people to use OpenDNS."

Is the fear justified? Is it plausible enough that people should take it into account when picking a DNS service?

Google's self-interest is a legitimate factor to consider.
Regarding API docs, I'm certainly not saying I have all APIs memorized, or that you're approach is bad. Its just that the comment you posted sounds like past employers have asked you to learn things and you've resisted. I suppose its actually the "I don't see the value" part of that sentence that bothers me more. Also, I was saying that it sends a bad signal, not that it necessarily means you're not intellectually curious.

I absolutely agree that some things are timeless, and the breadth of knowledge an experienced programmer has is their primary advantage. It just seemed obvious, and you were more interested in disadvantages.

Anyway, just some constructive criticism from a 27-year old business owner. Best of luck.
Paypal's new "X" service supposedly fits your needs exactly:

https://www.x.com/index.jspa

I haven't tried it yet myself, but am keeping an eye on it and would like to hear anyone's experiences.

I am currently working on a project that uses a traditional gateway (Chase/Paymentech) to collect funds, and then uses a payroll payment card provider for payouts. It has pros and cons vs. using Paypal. Biggest plus for us is nearly total control over the process. Biggest customer plus is fast turnaround and immunity from Paypal Purgatory where funds may not get released and you're suddenly at their mercy.
But if a 3rd party billing "package" means paying higher fees long-term, doesn't it make sense to write your own billing system?
I honestly don't think they would be that evil (and the privacy policy as currently stated would forbid that), but they can collect aggregate data and infer what sites are popular at what times and from what geographic/network locations. That's useful data. I bet you could use it to create web stats that are at least as good as Alexa (admittedly a low bar).
I don't think any existing DNS providers have other sources of data like Google does. It's when it all comes together (search+analytics+adsense+Google Account reporting your trail, indexed website content and your email for profiling you) to make a dataset with potentially unprecedented cleanliness/completeness that it becomes interesting/scary. They can likely draw much stronger conclusions than most.

Not sure if their privacy policy lets them exercise their power fully in this field, though.
We already knew this shit over 30 years ago.

Dijkstra said it, tests can prove the presence of bugs but not their absence.
Harvard Law School Suspends Program Giving Students Free Tuition
E-Reading, in 2 Authors’ Eyes
Um, they already have Google Analytics and their search toolbar. I rather doubt there is much they don't see.
Maybe the point is it is an /internal/ yardstick. You get to decide which one suits you!
Assume you are logged in or you have a gmail cookie, hell yeah they know.
> What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do?

DNS redirection affects ALL programs that are trying to access a network address (obviously unless directly by IP). So when my Jabber/XMPP client tries to contact doesnotexist.example.com, being redirected to an advertisement page doesn't help me very much, does it?

Google Toolbar and Google Chrome defaulting to Google as a 'landing page' of sorts only affects your web experience and only when using those pieces of software. This is a far cry from Comcast's DNS servers resolving ALL DNS traffic that should return 'does not exist' to their advert-filled web servers.
Ask HN: Please review my webapp: Playlistr
I've been a Python programmer for years, now, but web frameworks have always given me trouble. Over the past two days, I became determined to learn a Python web framework once and for all and came up with Playlistr. Playlistr is a small webapp for generating playlists of internet radio stations, something that I've always found to be tedious to manage. It's essentially a webapp version of a similar script I wrote about a year ago.

It's (obviously) lacking in the polish department, and the current selection of stations is small (for development purposes). Planned features include Google account support for saving your selected stations, caching of stream URLs for each station to speed things up a bit, and more output formats.

http://playlistr.appspot.com
Thanks for your help!

Callbacks and credit cards are the top two problems with the existing API. At least callbacks are a problem with a clear solution (HTTP postback, aka webhooks).

As for credit cards through the API, we debate about that one extensively. The concern we have is that ideally, our customers would prefer not to touch credit cards because of the liability of credit cart theft. That's why for now we take on the risk of managing credit cards by letting you punt the customer to our invoice page.

What's preferable to you?

1. Never touching the credit card ever, but redirecting the customer to a good payment experience

2. Taking the credit card on your own sign up form and sending it through our API

3. Taking the credit card through a FreshBooks https iframe on your website

Or any other solutions?
The comments on LtU are often as valuable as the article itself.
Don't know. I usually set them as the default DNS servers for my router to hand out through DHCP.
Although most of this post is over my head, it's nice to see smart folks open-source stuff like this.

Out of curiosity, does YC have a say in what tools their companies open-source or not?
NTFS supports symlinks... it's just that Windows doesn't (or didn't, I don't know about now) include an easy interface for setting them.
I'm on a machine without sound at the moment, so I didn't get a chance to try the resulting playlist, but the interface is very easy to understand, and useful to throw together quickly.

Are you going to extend it to other genres later on?
Since this is sending a standard m3u file, would it work on the iphone?

Sounds like a fun app.
Yep, I'm only going to pay attention to the ACM's stuff rather than IEEE. Look at the obsession with percentages and pseudo-mathematical formulas like this: "User satisfaction = quality product + meets requirements + delivered when needed + appropriate cost."
Exactly. A lot of people don't remember domain names anymore, they remember the words they need to type into Google in order to bring that site up as the top link.

E.g., if they want to get to Dell's website, rather than typing "dell.com" into the URL field, they type "dell" or "dell computer" into the search box and then click on the first result.
They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens.

Well, the reason this works so well for airplanes is that the airplane used to work, and everybody knows exactly what a working airplane is supposed to look like.

In general, nobody has any idea what a working version of a failed startup would have looked like. There are too many ways to succeed, and so many chaotic events that affect the timeline in profound ways (imagine if the inventor of CP/M hadn't been out when IBM came to call...) that you can't really think about the various alternate histories without quickly running into a combinatorial explosion. So I think your metaphor is not very useful. ;)
I was specifically addressing his post, not every possibility. He was claiming this was bad because Google has access to the content at each of the servers you lookup through their DNS service. My point was that so does everyone else on the internet, including other DNS providers that you might use.

(i.e. If I go to sws.example.com which hosts a Secret Warez Stash, unless it's password-protected everyone has access to it, not just Google.)
I agree. I got way too excited seeing multiple articles about Go in HN, but started wondering a moment later why there would be more than one such article about a board game, as wonderful as it is.
The primary "user" for a TV show is the advertiser. Doe that mean they don't care about ratings?
It seems more worried/scared than anything to me. If I was openDNS I would be worried also.
Instant rendering of markdown sounds like a good idea, if users care to invest time to learn it.
This is off topic, but are there any mailist that archive nothing, anonymize every poster's ID except spam or uninvited, delete unnecessary headers, and do not log anything?
Good effort sli! I was all set to hear some drum n bass when I clicked Generate playlist. But was surprised when Winamp popped up! I had even forgotten I had it on my computer.

I think you should have an embedded music player. There are tons of free swf's out there.

It's good that you've identified a problem - managing playlists of internet radio stations - but it's not clear what your proposed solution is.

Keep us posted on the developments.
I understand, from looking at this when I first came across twitter, that there is a well established protocol for using multiple text messages to send a single message.

Couldn't they in any case have a convention of putting a hash mark (#) for the URL when texting and then sending URLs in subsequent messages, each message being serially (by time of sending) matched with a # mark?
These rich text editors have control keys for linking. It's easy to link text without leaving the keyboard at all. Select text with arrows, press control+L, enter url, press return. You can also jump through words by pressing control+arrow. So, control+shift+arrow, control+L, url, return. It's basically what he's asking for with the last suggestion.
Well, that used not to be the case, but the industry matured because they started doing that.

My uncle is an aerobatics pilot, and he says that the main reason aviation is so safe is due to the meticulous and ubiquitous use of check-lists. Every time there's an accident the intent is to analyse it so we can update the check-lists to prevent it from happening again.

You're right, we don't know what a successful startup should look like, but they didn't used to know what a safe 'plane was like. Because of the unrelenting analysis of crashes, we do now.
Actually, my original plan was to organize the stations by genre. But after fleshing out the idea a little more, it started to seem either a bit subjective, or way too generalized. For example: do I group electronic into breaks, dubstep, house, trance, etc? Or put it all under electronic? In the end, it was easier to organize by sources.

New stations will be coming once I finish the Google account and cache support.
I wonder how hard is it to change their policy? Suppose some day the investors insist on monetizing this asset to its maximum potential. Can they just come up with a new privacy statement?

In order to stop them from doing that their change would have to be a clear criminal violation of something. Nobody would be able to sue them, and even getting them in a clear criminal violation would be tough (in the US anyway; recall the debacle of v. Microsoft).
World's Shortest URL Shortener http://to.
But I guess that's still a shortcut for each formatting option? i.e. you need to remember each shortcut key (L for link, etc)? (If I read what you're saying correctly); whereas the blog is suggesting a single formatting shortcut that then shows more 'novice' users what the available options are, relative to what they already know (the buttons at the top).

Something like that! I'm still thinking it through (I wrote it...)
"Google will kill your startup if you’re doing text-based search".... That's probably the most pessimistic way of looking at this. I don't understand why journalism is so hell bent on mixing emotions with what they report. Just tell what happened. We'll interpret it on our own.

As far as Google and text search and Bershad's comment go, he's 100% correct. A more interesting way to look at is as an advice to entrepreneurs to explore different fields. Google's already doing text search. If you want to build anything out of text search, Google with their huge market and brains are probably already thinking/doing it. Don't waste your time with it.. Explore something else.. Images/Videos/RSS Feeds/Social Information... There's a huge plethora of data out there.

"Killing a startup" and "Just being simply better" are very different things.
I'd prefer to have both #1 and #2, actually. #1 for quick implementation, #2 for later when it's worth controlling the signup flow more granularly.
Here you 'go': http://golang.org/src/pkg/sort/sort.go

http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html#Type_assertions is possible, but it is costly. Basically, you either have to go through the tedium of writing "convenience" boiler plate (per above sort.go) or bite the runtime hit.
It's like the new War on Swearing. Fucking nazis!
It depends, really, but I think it would take a lot for the long term fees to outweigh the opportunity cost of spending time on something that's not really your product.
The idea is you visit Playlistr once in a while and download an updated version of your playlist, in case the station has added and removed servers. It will be a bit more user-friendly when it starts remembering the stations you've selected, which will reduce the workflow to a mere:
1. Visit Playlistr
2. Click 'Generate' button
I'm experimenting with this as well as I'm layering TinyMCE over a wiki for my side project, Bibdex (dev image http://bibdex.org:8080). I have tried extending TinyMCE with a wiki syntax parser. However, I'm unconvinced there is real value in confusing the text with magic syntax, with one exception.

Wiki markup is mostly cosmetic, so you can throw all of it out--except for auto-linkification. Linking makes the wiki.

This was easy with CamelCase links, but much harder for free links or other types of links.

I do wonder if it's possible to train people to use exactly one syntactic form, the square brackets.

[words] -> free link
[http://url text] -> descriptive link
[http://url] -> escaped link (useful to pick up trailing punctuation)

Presumably when you write a left square bracket, a floating div could appear with contextual help and auto-suggest.

If others are interested, I'm happy to share my efforts.
Own a piece of Beer History
Other? What was the first one?
You need a tagline. My first reaction was "what does this do? something about music?". Obviously with more effort I was able to figure it out.

"Custom playlists in 3 steps" would do it.

Also your "Generate Playlist" button doesn't immediately read as a button. See this article to see what I mean: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/13/call-to-action-bu...
Chargify vs. Spreedly vs. Cheddargetter: Subscription-Billing Service Prices
But who here lives in Adult World?
Here's another good article on button design:
http://www.getelastic.com/cta-size/
This is why I’m proposing that Librelist be run similar to freenode.net in that it should be developed by the same community and a not-for-profit operation.

What else do you have?
Cool. I'll bookmark it.
VirtualBox 3.10 brings teleportation to Linux - Linux Critic
Interesting stuff. I definitely think there's an important balance to be struck between adding efficiency with keyboard shortcuts, while still making it accessible to novices (which I'm not sure wiki syntax is). But for power-users, this could be very interesting.
Nothing to allow tyranny of the minority or majority. It’s all about free speech and open communication.
However, this is balanced with the above spam marking, and potentially a “troll rating” that’s similar to a spam rating.

How do you reconcile these two when an unpopular opinion can be marginalized as troll or spam?
"in part because almost twice as many students as expected signed up."

Well that's not a surprise to anyone, why was it a surprise to the big H?
FlipBox: 3D Flippy Photo Gallery in JavaScript
You think so? If your users measure in the thousands, it seems even half a percentage point or a large monthly fee would add up.
Could you give some specifics?
Given the references to "boobs" and a "man in a raincoat", no.
So Where is AdSense for Newspapers ?
Now this is an environment for development
The real question seems to be "how is this different than dropbox?"

Looks like they are targeting it more as a way to share data among a myriad of devices, like PCs and Smartphones, vs. dropbox's more limited focus on just PCs.
Ah, thanks you! It's obvious that I'm a programmer, and not a designer. Haha.
Incanter blog - Data Analysis and Visualization with Clojure
Challenge everything. That is the basis of our legal system (not to be confused with EA who's motto is "Rip-off Everyone".) So if you feel something is unjust challenge it. And sometimes you just have no way around it other than to be taken to court or to go to court.
Is this new? I used to play squash semi-competitively, so I can't judge. Do people here not know what it is?

I could never beat my University's number 1, but I could take a couple of games off him before being so tired he ran me ragged.

It's an interesting game - more strategic than you think.

Not sure it's "Hacker News," but I haven't flagged it 'cos I like the game ...
Functional Objects
As with the other story just posted that 4.3.2.1 is a Google DNS server, it also seems to be hosting on Level3.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=975227
Download Your Own Robot Scientist
Google public DNS: these guys scare me.
They do... That's why you will get ads in the middle of the most popular shows. (advertiser's business over user experience again) Ratings are per show, not per channel really.
I think the issues raised in the post are interesting but not the biggest slowdowns people face when using web-based rich text editors. The biggest issue is simply moving around in the text. emacs / vi allow you to skip almost anywhere without leaving the keyboard once you're familiar with the method. That's the biggest save.
Its a blog post. What other form is there?
> Not monetizing this? Where do you think their motivation is coming from (to make the world a better place?)

One thing I like about Google is that they research and share infrastructure technologies. Why is there any reason to think that they would not be interested in improving DNS if it makes the Internet a better place for applications?

They would likely benefit if more applications are moved to the Internet but that does not make this an "evil" or deceptive tactic. What other company today would improve an Internet protocol or create a new protocol (Wave) and release it openly in an effort to move the Internet forward?

Sure you need to be mindful of how data is used and the services you sign up for but that applies to any service, including OpenDNS.
Uncomfortable moments in business history
I imagine you could just trace over an existing picture then type X's over the tracing paper, with a typewriter.
"I'm David Ulevitch. I have a website at http://david.ulevitch.com/
I am the founder and CTO of OpenDNS. I also started and run EveryDNS.Net. You should be using both of them."

via: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidu
University turns iPhones into musical instruments
Much discussion already at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974111
Evaluating Translation Quality Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Well, CheddarGetter would be ~$170/mo for 10k customers, while Spreedly would cost us $1000/mo for 10k customers (we paid for the Spreedly kickstarter, so $.10 transaction fees). We use Spreedly, but I like both.

If you wanted to be really, really cheap, the best course is probably to take something like Ubersmith or Modernbill and bend them to your will. They're both designed for hosting companies, but can be contorted into other business without too much effort. Both have 1 time license fees that aren't insane.

Even the most expensive option (Spreedly) is $12k/year. If you're billing $10k customers even $5/mo, that's really not much money.