skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just a college student that codes, so I don't know much about if age is an issue.

However your backing seems to be because of one specific case. Memorizing ever changing APIs. Just wanted to say I have the exact same thoughts and I'm young. I have been asked this type question. My response is usually well I'm that that familiar with this API since I don't use it, but if I where to do this with Cocoa (something I am more experienced with) I would do etc.
To be honest I just wanted to see if I could get a few good stories out of people on the other side. I expected some good advice to come out of this regardless, but certainly had no intention of making it about me.
I'll do a blog post about this later today for those interested in my perspective on them entering the DNS space.

:-)

Edit: Here it is: http://blog.opendns.com/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns/
Quick setup: the DNS servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Kevin Hale of Wufoo (YC W06) at LessConf 2009 [video]
Don't write your own billing system. :)

To elaborate, these recommendations are backwards. They're business decisions that are being influenced by technical considerations for a non-core product. Users might prefer to be billed on the same day every month than every 30 days. Choosing not to prorate in favor of waiting 'til the next cycle is basically throwing money away. Relying on the gateway to handle refunds takes a crucial part of your data out of the system that otherwise reports on your money. Freemium vs free trials isn't a decision anyone should make based on the capabilities of their billing systems.

Billing is a pain in the ass and it's not a core feature for most companies. And unlike most things, it's reasonably uniform between companies, making third party billing packages fantastically useful.
Actually the whole point of this is to not redirect error pages. If you read the blog post, you'll see that they address this (and privacy concerns). DNS redirection is pretty evil and I'm proud of Google for working against it.

(Disclaimer - I'm a Google employee, I didn't work on this and my opinions are my own.)
There are no error pages when a domain isn't found.

If a DNS server presents an IP so you can show people a web page ( like Verisign did intentionally a few years ago [1]) instead of returning 'no such domain' (NXDOMAIN), you break DNS for all apps that expect a host that's not registered to not resolve. Verisign's screwup lasted 20 days.

I doubt Google would do this.

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder
Thanks, that AMA in reddit was an interesting (and humbling) read.
Something that I did not know - most unpaid internships are technically illegal.

You are not allowed to have an unpaid intern "If the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees . . . "

Good article outlining the gov'ts position:

http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi...
No need to build a new one every time; services like http://totally.awe.sm let you set up a URL shortener on any domain. (Disclaimer: the founder is a friend of mine)

And before you say "it's trivial, I could build that in a weekend" I suggest you try it; there is a lot of hidden complexity in something so simple, especially at any kind of scale.
two reactions:

Wow!

Nervous :(
You can fill the stench of paranoid conspiracy theory already in the first paragraph.

Global warming deniers are the new creationists.
So it's freedom, just not for the list manager.

Can anyone provide a defense (from Zed or anyone) for the idea that a healthy community needs trolls? I can understand the need for dissent and argument, but it seems to me that trolling is categorically different from those.
Awesome, thanks for the tip! I'm looking at the 530 too, and I was wondering about the transitions. I was on Amazon reading reviews since they seemed to have the lowest price, but your tip is better. The main concern I saw was a frequent need to clean the brushes, especially with pets that shed fur, but the only pet my parents have is a parrot, so it should be great. :)
It shouldn't be, but it absolutely is.

There's a stereotype of what a "good developer" looks like and it isn't someone over 40. I also think lots of people would feel uncomfortable supervising someone much older than themselves.
The Cloud Is Your Friend: Answers to Misconceptions of Cloud Computing
8 is a lucky number. 7.7.7.7 is owned by the US DoD. I love the idea of vanity IP addresses.
I'm a college student and I'm looking for an internship at a startup or small business. I do not care at all about accumulating resume buzzwords. None of the good programmers I know have any trouble filling their resume with actual accomplishments.
I was wondering what you'd think :)
Something to remember be it Google Public DNS or things like Open DNS: Most CDN's use DNS to map you to one of their servers.

E.g.: Assuming your physical location is in Asia/Europe, and let's say you use Open DNS, IP anycast will map you to their London DNS servers (Last I checked that's the only location outside of N. America OPEN DNS has servers). Let's say the website you visit is delivered by a CDN, this CDN's servers in London will deliver content to you even though there might be CDN servers in your ISP.
They told a story, but it was about the rover, not Mars. If you're trying to appeal to non-scientists, that's probably the way to go.
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4?

Even solely for the fact they are so easy to remember I bet this are going to be the most used DNS resolvers in the world in a few months.
Another source of interesting data about internet usage for google.
You can find their privacy policy here:
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

Quote from "What we log":
"In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage."

Even if without any reference to the user that actually visited those sites, mantaining information about the "cluster" of urls visited during a browsing session could form a useful source of data not only to optimize ads and searches, the most obvious use could be build something like a recommendation engine (something that some kind of internet users could like, but i admit that something like this could be useless from the google point of view).
I wonder what advantages they have over OpenDNS
3 Main Causes of Computer Related Discomfort
Putting "Windshield Wipers" on the probes to another planet isn't exactly like going down to Auto Zone and picking up a few strips of black silicone.

Wipers would have to survive the extremes of space and the surface of Mars. They would need motors, which require heaters to keep them from freezing (increasing the amount of energy the probe needs). They would increase the weight of the craft, increasing costs or requiring them to leave off other features. They would have to be extensively tested, like the rest of the craft -- especially the mechanical elements. Imagine the press if they got to Mars and found their expensive wiping mechanism had jammed and would be useless. Finally, if the dust of Mars was charged at all, the wipers would have just rubbed the dust around on the panel, so they could have ended up with functional wipers that did no good.

The mission was designed so that it could complete its high priority scientific objectives in three months, and the probes were engineered so that they had a high probability of surviving for three months.

Dust accumulation was not expected to be a problem in the high priority part of the mission, and since it was a hard (expensive) problem to address, it was not addressed. It was happy circumstance that previously unknown phenomena on Mars meant that it ended up not being a problem at all.
1. Quite true

2. I think it's always important to be explicit about, and have backups, of the packages used in these scripts.
App Store Data Mining Techniques
IMHO, I think the Nook makes for a better product than the Kindle (disclosure: I haven't used either one). But the post-Christmas ship date means that it'll only make a good gift for a nerd who's already excited about it but hasn't pre-ordered one for themselves.
All is not lost. FTA:

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.
Exploring China's Online World
A not-very-good-but-still-fun argument:

Trolls are the predators of internet communities. They prey on the sick, the weak, and the perennially outraged (mostly this last group) and, if they are successful, drive them away from the community. A community without perennially outraged people is better than a community with them.

The question is whether this benefit is worth the potential cost, which is probably something that almost entirely dependent on the nature of the community and the personalities of the trolls involved.

Edit: By "perennially outraged", I am referring to people who are constantly angry or miserable for no reason other than that such an emotional state is "what they do". They aren't trolls themselves, any more than a particularly unpleasant customer is a troll. They're just constantly unhappy and vocal about it.
If you're looking for a job as a Java programmer, then I think it's reasonable for the interviewer to expect you to be able to give some sort of answer to "what is your favorite Java class". Being asked the signature of a specific method is pretty bogus, though. If you're getting a lot of questions like that, then you probably don't want the job whether you're 60 or 20.
That's assuming DNS based geolocation, though. Some CDNs (including Cachefly, who we use) are anycast driven, so it doesn't matter where your DNS servers are located.
This worries me a little too. What about the guy who posts several messages an hour all consisting of only of swear words or who posts answers to newbie questions with links to Goatse or any of the infinite other ways I'm sure exist to totally disrupt a list if there's no way to control anything.

Of course presumably there will still be people with the authority to remove really bad examples like that. But will they have the time to look after the many many lists which will probably soon exist?
Tell HN: Don't use this affiliate programme
Some background info: Saw another site using this affiliate programme, so I joined up, but never implemented it. They basically allow you to access their catalogue of cell-phone ringtones, backgrounds, games etc., using an API. You can choose what you put on your site and clicks go through to their site to conclude the sale.

Today I received an e-mail notifying me that they are stopping the South African affiliate programme tomorrow. That's one day's notice. There are sites using this programme actively. Which means these sites will lose income until they find and implement an alternative. And have to urgently remove affiliate content to save users some frustration.

Guess the moral of the story is to avoid doing business with Fox Mobile Group if you can. And to not rely on one ad / affiliate network. And give clients some notice if you need to shut something down.

Here's the full e-mail (I love the superfluous PR spin of the first paragraph):

Dear Affiliate,

I would like to inform you of an important change to the Jamster South
Africa Affiliate Programme.

With regret, we have decided to permanently stop all Affiliation in South
Africa as from Friday 4th December 2009 at midnight. This means all
existing and new affiliate links to the portal will cease to exist
thereafter.

We will of course payout on all successful sales generated on or before
4th December to any affiliate. In light of this, please can you remove
all links to Jamster after this date as they will not be active any
longer.

This decision was not taken lightly and we hope it does not cause too much
inconvenience. On this occasion, I would like to take the opportunity to
personally thank all those affiliates who have participated with the
Jamster South Africa programme and wish you all the best for the
future.

Kind Regards,
Natasha Braganca,
Online Marketing UK,
Fox Mobile Group,
A News Corporation Company
Ask HN: What do you call your "users"?
In my organization we are moving away from the term "user" in favor of "client". How do you refer to them in your organization?
I'm 28. I've been working fulltime for 11 years now and make great money in the environments you describe.

I would kill to be starting out now: not for the sake of youth, but for:

* top-tier CS courses using dynamically typed langiages.

* English-like languages being considered a 'grown up' solution

* Microsoft not being seen as the solution to everything

* The end of the packaging dependency hell that a lot of
Linux distros had

* Element trees for XML

* Not having to repeat the logic in my database and app,

and more.

You might not get the jobs you're applying for, but consider: do you really want to work at these places? Thousands of people in their early 20s are working at newer, large-but-rainmaker places like Google and Facebook, or starting their own great efforts, taking advantage of today's technology not yesterday's.
Is displaying a "that domain doesn't exist" page considered redirection? Otherwise what would you see in your browser?

I wouldn't say OpenDNS is evil. Offering an ad-supported free service is how many things are allowed to continue existing.
Things I may buy for people this year:

* Super Mario Brothers Wii
* The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
* Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against!
* Bluray player
* Netflix subscription / renewal
* Lomography film camera(s)
I believe the justification was so they could use unified cookies across all their properties -- they set the cookie for "com.com", and then it was available to news.com.com, search.com.com, downloads.com.com, etc., in the same way that yahoo.com cookies are available to news.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com, etc.
That doesn't make any sense. Making money somehow causes less focus on user experience?
I always talk about "Tarsnap users".
Getting access to sell all .tvs for $4MM/year is a steal, IMHO.

Not to mention the manner in which they sold them is unique. With most TLDs, all domains cost the same price, and its first come, first served. With .tv, the domains were priced according to their value, with many costing $25,000 or more per year. So for instance I have no idea what mlb.tv cost Major League Baseball, but it was a lot more than $49/year.

Now that .tv seems to have hit its tipping point, $50 million over 12 years is a bargain.
i would love read an article that answered the question posed by the title. sadly, this isn't it.
For one, they correctly return the expected DNS error when you make a request that cannot be resolved.
Trolls drive away the GOOD people, not the weak/sick ones. They're more like a fungus infection than like a predator.
This is why it makes more sense to run your own URL shortener, and make it discoverable using a pattern like rev:canonical:

http://sites.google.com/a/snaplog.com/wiki/short_url
I guess the premise is that they are (objectively speaking) a valid part of any community.

Perhaps in some way it is better to have "troll trolls" than people who appear to be normal but are actually very trollish. I remember a community where a bunch of people would just answer all questions with:

"OMG WTF? NOT THIS AGAIN. Use the search FFS."

Now this was more or less encouraged behaviour as Admins and Mods did this but these guys took it too far. So it eventually was trolling all but in name.

To be honest i'm not sure I believe all that but at least he has a "troll rating" system.
The browser's built-in handling of names that don't resolve
I was an internet at Microsoft in college. They paid me better than most full time programmers back home.

That said, so did DuPont and Math Forum where I also interned.

Unpaid internships are just wrong. College students are adults, who have the same expenses as any other adult, on top of accumulating student debt.
Yes, because the primary "user" for a company like Yahoo! or Google is the advertiser, not the mailing list user.
Most of these providers, like Open DNS, have location based caching as well. If you go to OpenDNS' support page you can see the different caches they have and what IP is currently resolving for each region.
I have a very shedding prone cat, a wife whose long hair is deposited all over the place, and a newer Roomba. The brush cleaning can get old, but the thing to remember is they built them for it. Included in the box (should be) a circular cleaning tool, though if you don't read the instructions it will look like extraneous plastic. The brush roller pops out, and the sides pop off the roller such that getting pet and wife hair out of it isn't all that bad if you do it every couple of runs.

The nice thing is that if it ever does get bound, or stuck the Roomba knows when to quit. It'll start dinging and whining until you fix it up.

Pro-Tip: Don't leave Roomba alone with cords and/or fabric. It will try to eat it, and it will get stuck under your TV unit all while crying for help only after running out of juice. :)
"I don't expect you to agree with all these facts; "

Well, not unless you provide links to references.

In fact, here's one fact that was left out: merely asserting something in a technical article does not make it a fact. It's opinion until you back it up with data.
I can't believe no one here seems to be using http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/
I know, which is why I said Most CDN's.
Daily Vim
Your browser has a built in page for "domain does not exist". Google cannot place ads on it. On the other hand if you set up OpenDNS and then go to "doesnotexit123411452345.com", it will likely redirect you to something like "ads.opendns.com/?search=doesnotexist", which breaks DNS, life and the Universe. OpenDNS provides an option to turn off this type of redirection, but if you have a residential connection with a dynamic IP, all of a sudden that setting might just disappear.

Avoid OpenDNS and IPS's that do this.
The plan is to do it craigslist style. Each email will have a "hate" link you can hit to go mark it as spam or troll. Too many of these and the sender is blocked (for spam) or throttled (for trolls).

On the inverse side, I think I'll also track your voting rates, and if you tend to rate too many people as trolls or spam then your voting will also be throttled.

But, it's also just a plan. The goal is to create something that lets communities moderate themselves without too much tyranny of the majority of minority. That's why the code is open, so that people with ideas about how to do that can help make it happen.
http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com
URL shortening service for Twitter
After working at Amazon I'm still in the habit of saying "customers," even outside of the retail context. (For example, the users of an in-house development tool are "internal customers.")
>>Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch?

Heck yeah, I would sell it as a weight control device.

>>is there such a thing as unethical programming?

Sure writing a program that by design, or through gross negligence, does unethical things is unethical programming.

Is car manufacturing unethical because people die using your product? Is farming unethical because people come to harm (choke, get fat) using your product? Everything has a risk of harmful use that doesn't make everything unethical.
A DNS I can actually remember.

A Quick comparison with OpenDNS (shameless plug)
http://chanux.tumblr.com/post/267873772/googledns-vs-opendns
For what it's worth, I've been using Level3's DNS servers for a while now, due to the fact that they have insanely low latencies:

4.2.2.1... 4.2.2.6 (or thereabouts). Not sure what Google's going to have on those. Are they gonna be even more super-duper-fast? I mean, if you look at the line-up of the best DNS servers out there, they're pretty damn fast already:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19982548-DNS-Fastest-DNS-Se...

Also, for what it's worth, I've never quite understood why you'd use OpenDNS when level3 have open DNS servers that don't redirect you to their own pages when there's a missing record...
There's advantages and disadvantages to older coders. The biggest disadvantages are that you have a family and responsibilities, and your health insurance is a lot more expensive.

If you're a great programmer, who's interested in learning new technologies, that's not such a big deal. But honestly, your "when google is one click away" comment is not signaling those qualities.
That's not what your post said when I responded. :)
Meant to hit the up arrow. Hit the down arrow by accident. My apologies.

I agree completely. There are now so many subscription billing providers, writing your own, for such a small service none the less, is a big waste of time.
Unsecured Business loans are a cup of tea for  Jade Rock Enterprises 
I just wanted to let everyone know that EZUnsecured.com is the best company in business as far as I know . These guys are specialized in Unsecured Business Loans and Lines of Credit and they were the only one to help me get my Business Working Capital of $55,000 to start my new Business. I
4.2.2.2 (and 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.3) have worked for many years.
I have asked foreign clients the following question many, many times: in case they come into conflict, would you prefer me to choose the path which preserves your ego or your business interests?

Most get the hint.

(A close variation of the line works on Japanese people, too.)
Missing: motion detection

Also missing: any interest in what's missing. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but if it's been thru Reddit already you'd think they would have a way to submit additional requests.
Correct, which is why I picked the Asia/Europe example. Open DNS has servers in various cities in the US, but only one outside of the US.
The Generic Dilemma in Go
Title should be fixed so that it doesn't make one think that New York Times is the social network in question.
I've commonly used 4.2.2.2, for exactly this reason. It's an easy IP to ping, and to resolve DNS from.
Ditto that. In a fairly calm environment I have pretty good hearing. I regularly pick up faint sounds that other people around me don't.

But add any chaos, say in a bar, and I'm pretty close to functionally deaf. I can give a drink order to a bartender and not even hear myself actually speak it, let alone hear them tell me how much the round costs.

I run tabs a lot.