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I think a separate /offer area for the Offer HN posts would be great, if they continue appearing on a regular basis in the future. (I voted in support of Offer HN posts, if that matters.)

This is a surprisingly creative bit of Halloween flair from Sears, of all companies. If you didn't notice, you can switch the language to "Zombian" in the top right corner of the page. The following link should work to get you there directly - http://www.sears.com/shc/s/dap_10153_12605_DAP_Zombian

"What are you doing?" is not very ominous. What were you doing, out of curiosity?

I would have actually paid a small fee for that sort of service from a non-US based provider recently, to avoid MLB blackout restrictions on their online playoff coverage. (Except a free proxy in China was easy enough to find.)

You mean guerrilla (thanks, edited the original).

That's very true, but "taste of your own medicine" and frozen/cold didn't have a funny punch line. However, it could be considered revenge by proxy -- WePay assisting with consumers' revenge against PayPal for freezing accounts.

That seems to be the crux of the issue. Consumer positive is apparently not in Expedia/Travelocity's best interests. Dredging up old Stanford-days quotes of Google's founders seems a bit disingenuous.

I too thought "it won't happen to me", only to have my funds frozen when I was doing a few thousand of Bing eBay cashback churning on postal stamps.

The funny part, as TC mentions, is that PayPal pulled a similar guerrilla marketing stunt in its early days by paying people to wear PayPal t-shirts at an eBay conference. Could we say... revenge is a dish best served cold?

I've considered doing a VPN startup before; however, it seems that the market is pretty small and margins are low. Your customer base is basically: number of people who are concerned about privacy AND frequently use insecure WiFi AND don't already have an existing VPN to use.

I've found J.D. Roth's personal finance blog to be one of the more well-written and interesting blogs around: http://www.getrichslowly.org

Have you had kangaroo meat? How is it? (Hopefully you won't say "tastes like chicken".) There is a great butcher I visit who often has frozen kangaroo meat, and I've considered trying it.

Although that's true, I would guess there is possibly far more competition for those jobs from a larger quantity of Rails programmers than Django programmers.

Wrong. Google has a vested interest in protecting the information (whether or not they internally exploit it for contextual advertising is another issue). External auditors have more incentive to leak the information to increase public outrage at Google.

Of course. I agree that it shouldn't be illegal to access it; however, simply being trivially accessible doesn't necessarily mean people don't care.

Isn't that like saying "if you don't lock your mailbox, then by implication you don't care if people read your mail"? Or, "if you don't lock your telephone junction box, then by implication you don't care if people tap your phone"?

Although I don't agree with your quoted statement, I don't think Google's capturing of data should be considered criminal, either.

There are several comments below the article which noted that Google had turned over data to external French auditors, who reported finding passwords, emails, and other sensitive information in the WiFi data captured by Google. Personally, I would be more worried by external auditors having access to the data than Google.

If you're a Trade Joe's fan and are in the mood for a more Autumn-esque beverage, try their spiced apple cider.

This is the first long term support release of Asterisk since version 1.4.0 was released in 2006, and there's >200 notable new features. A few important features that stuck out to me were Google Talk & Voice support, improvements to SIP handling, calendaring integration, and less noise on conference calls. For a good writeup of some of the new features, also see: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/asterisk-18...

Agreed, although I took the slightly longer Digg->Reddit->HN path.

Western Digital just released a 3TB drive (~$239) - that would only require 24 drives to net 72TB.

Disable prefetching. In Firefox, here's how:

1) Enter about:config in your Firefo address bar.

2) Type network.prefetch-next in filter text box.

3) Change the value to false by right clicking.

Definitely. Just about anything Jordan makes is probably worth checking out, actually.

If you become successful at <random common, unimportant thing>, you can leverage that to pursue <really great idea>. One example that comes to mind is Andrew Mason's Groupon talk at Startup School. Before Groupon, the Groupon guys ran "The Point", which tried to organize people to solve societal problems, including such ambitious, world changing ideas like building a climate dome over Chicago to avoid the brutal winters there. Obviously, the climate dome was never built, and "The Point" pivoted into Groupon. Although I don't think Andrew Mason has enough leverage/money/etc. to build that climate dome, he's certainly a lot closer today with Groupon's success than he was previously.

Amazon EC2 micro instance for free? http://aws.amazon.com/free/

I couldn't agree more. Nginx and HAProxy will seem like miracle workers after seeing Apache's performance.

+1 for loggly -- check out logstash http://code.google.com/p/logstash/

There was a defined number of Startup School attendees, which means the amount of pizza needed is easily calculable (X participants * Y slices each.. maybe + Z "extra, just in case"). From hosting numerous events, I would definitely expect YC to have "how many pizzas do we need for X people" reasonably well figured out. I would think the greater danger is from people eating Y++++ slices each rather than a group of 3-4 sharing a box and having 1-2 slices each. As limedaring mentions below, we also handed out a few slices to others.

To your point of the "better hack", we advocated the "use both sides of the table" for breakfast, but with pizza it is unwieldly because the lids of pizza boxes only open one way. Yes, reconfiguring the tables would have also probably improved things.. but is much more difficult with 25-50 people trying to access the pizza boxes, and no readily available unused tables on hand.

I thought pg's comment on "naughtiness" was interesting, as I was tempted to use a shorter version of the story I'll relate below in response to the "hacked" question, as it was a very recent experience. I ultimately shied away from using it as my answer, as I thought it might be a little socially unacceptable ("naughty").

At Startup School, there was a line of several hundred people waiting for lunch, which consisted of a dozen or so different kinds of pizza stacked in piles of 7-10 boxes each. We had a group of 3-4 people, looked at the line, and someone said, "This line is ridiculous. How can we hack this system?" Someone suggested going somewhere else on campus to eat, but we wanted to stay and mingle. Someone else in the group knew people farther up in the line, and suggested skipping ahead in the line. Ultimately, I simply squeezed through near the front of the line, grabbed a whole box of pizza, and took it back for our group to share.

This kept our group from further clogging the line and seemed much more efficient than 3-4 of us waiting to select our 1-2 pieces each. Hopefully no hungry Startup School attendees were upset by our line hackery, as we thought it was a pretty win-win hack.

One of the most interesting things about Amazon is how they have iterated their business over time - from a website selling stuff to a marketplace to becoming a platform (in multiple areas).