skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But, with a political coalition, people join the coalition in order to promote the mission of the coalition. With a corporation, people join the corporation in order to get paid, not in order to promote the viewpoints of the corporation. When you conflate the two objectives of profit and social decision-making, you're implicitly encouraging people to sell out their values. That's not democratic.

You are also downplaying the difference between a group of people and a corporation. A corporation is when group of people place some of their rights and responsibilities into an artificial entity, in order to promote its own interests and shield the creators from a certain amount of responsibility. Why must this political-economic golem be given the right to free speech? My contention is that the right to free speech of the creators and shareholders is completely sufficient. Giving the controlling shareholders access to non-controlling capital to promote their own viewpoints is troublesome because it causes several interests to conflict that don't need to.
My point is that, from a very literal standpoint, since they didn't say "you must be a person that ... to be a Representative", there's no actual restriction saying that only people may be Representatives. It just says that certain restrictions apply to people who wish to be representatives. If you're not a person, then " No Person shall be a Representative who ..." doesn't restrict you.

It's splitting hairs to the max, and I'm sure a court would find some way around it if it ever got there.
Unsolved: Perfect Numbers and Mersenne Primes
That's a shame :( At least we all know who came up with the idea.
With car as pricy as Roadster, I dont think Tesla will be able to make all that money they put in into the development of Roadster because there is very little market at that price.
The lights out Denver actually sounds like a better Denver -- Bravo! No more wasting water on grass. We are facing a real water crisis in the world. No more redundant street lights to pollute the night sky. My car already has headlights and I'd rather see stars and fewer wasted kilowatts and less pollution in the air..

Insurance protects people against loss due to fire and if you are relying on the fireman to save you, you're not very wise. I've watched homes burn to the ground right along side the fire crews. We've already crossed the line into police state, so reduction there probably will have little effect. If you want to reduce the need for cops, make fewer things illegal. Isn't dope already legal in Denver?
So, why not name those. It would benefit everybody else, and lessons learned can be shared.

Or do you think that there may be a reversal of your judgment in the long run?

I can't see how they could sue for libel as suggested elsewhere, either they backed out or they didn't.

Another possible downside of naming them would be that if you named them it might make other VCs skittish of doing business with YC for fear that if they mess up they'll be told on.

All that it would do is to make people prioritize differently, after all, since a termsheet isn't a contract there is no 'backing out', there is simply no follow up.

It's just 'not done' but that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

I do believe that the term sheet not being a contract works the other way around as well, and I've seen quite a few cases where entrepreneurs got cold feet and decided to backpedal at the last moment, and that should definitely be held to the same standard.
I found this interesting, especially in light of an earlier topic that made the front page about micro rewards and monetization: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097996

I find it interesting that through very simple rewards we can possibly drive not only conversion, retention, and use but also monetization.
@jacquesm: At least from my perspective, "God wants everyone to go to Heaven" and "God wants some people to go to Hell" are further apart than "God wants everyone to go to Heaven" and "there is no God, and the universe developed through chance and emergent patterns."

Calvinism had _huge_ practical consequences -- in social policy, it's the difference between ensuring that the poor are fed and sheltered, and kicking them into the street; and you can only imagine what it meant for the laws of war...

Edit: And the joke you mention is only too recognizable, but it's more like the Catholicism-and-Orthodoxy situation, where it's a matter of tribal loyalties more than views of the world...
"A human" is different from "A group of humans".
The argument is that when corporations speak, they speak with the voice of the owners of that corporation, and that the amplification the corporation provides is somehow unjustified.

Not that this is any different from anything a company does. No matter how much freedom each employee has, they have no freedom to act against the interest of their employer.
How would communism solve this? Even if it would solve this problem it creates lots of other problems. Capitalism may not be perfect but it's worked well for the U.S. so far. Before we decide to completely change our economic system we need a better reason than money problems for one city.
You're wrong. A company's management speaks on behalf of the company. And not always in the interest of the shareholders, and definitely never in the interest of all the shareholders.
Does Italy acting like an idiot affect startups in the rest of the EU?
If your offering news that is being reported by 2000 other sources and your not a big player then you are really asking for problems.

The problem I see with Google news is that a long thoughtful, drawn out opinion/ investigation piece gets lumped into the same pile as paragraph summaries in the 2000 sources. What needs to happen, and I think the best way to approach this is a combination of software and community, is that the straight news piece i split from the further investigation and opinion pieces and the best quality piece rises to the top.

I've also though about the possibility of making money from ads on a news aggregation site and then passing part of the profit onto sources based on the clickthroughs they generate, so basically it would be another incentive for content producers to produce better content.
It's been tried and it didn't work. It fails to take into account some basic human nature such as the fact that humans care about themselves more than they care about society, and that noone will work without incentives.
Does this mean foreign corporations can also run for our Congress?

That would be fucking insane.
I would hate the web to be the same way.

I would like that. Then I could use the extra gigabyte of RAM that the code to handle these cases uses for something else.
... and people still don't want to hear that Adobe's Flash client sucks.
I'm with you on the grass (there're movements to use water-saving native American foliage instead of grass, which is suited to a wet England-like climate), and MAYBE with you on the streetlights if they intelligently do it so that pedestrian safety is not impaired.

But not firefighters (but they only cut 3 fighters, so it's probably going to be OK). Fire insurance premiums assume the presence of a firefighters. W/o a good firefighting force, a fire that burns down one house will probably end up burning down 100.

You watched a house burn down but did you notice that none of the others burned down?
Even better, try to live off the income from your capital, rather than just your savings - http://www.wisebread.com/join-the-rentier-class
Or, maybe, it's a move by a number of officials that are as frustrated by the situation as everyone else, and doubly so since nobody else really knows the situation as well as they do.
OK, so we have "management" and a "company", but no humans?
In most instances maybe, but here the mayor and council jobs are part time and pay $6250/yr (vs $89,000 yr avg for city worker).
Yep any example blogs you can point us to? Very cool idea!
"The argument is that when corporations speak, they speak with the voice of the owners of that corporation, and that the amplification the corporation provides is somehow unjustified."

I wish people would honestly make that argument instead of resorting to the prior ridiculous rhetoric.

"Not that this is any different from anything a company does."

Or any organization.
1. Compuserve invented GIF. Not Unisys.
2. Unisys never said "You can use this for free" and then changed their minds.
Maybe there is another side to things. I know that creating a new programming language isn't the easiest way to earn money but if you are successful there are lots of interesting ways to make money. Even an open source language provides possibilities for books, conferences, advocate positions, merchandize etc.
Ahhh.

So your fundamental objection is to political organization.
> They have the right to lie, and if they are sued for liable / defamation, etc... they are a corporation that can be disbanded.

I'm not familiar with the exact legalities, but I'm pretty sure it's not legal to flat-out lie.

Also, there's only so much money can buy. If huge advertising budgets was a silver bullet, we'd all be running Windows (and loving it!) while chatting on AOL and drinking New Coke.
Controlling the masses communication has been something governments have always tried to do, they always will.
Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy
One of my favourite "micro books" on business. Very awesome.
Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People?
ArcLite - Arc Ported to JavaScript
Business Advice In Three Words  by Neil Patel
I lived in Colorado Springs for 6 years. I highly encourage anyone who cares about parks there to put up some money and buy the land from the city.
That already exists today, and has existed for a while. McCain Feingold did nothing to stop it. If anything it made it worse by restricting direct contributions to candidate campaigns.
Or finding ways around the legal hoops.
"Fire insurance premiums assume the presence of firefighters."

Excellent point. I highly encourage any insurers in that area to hire some firefighters to reduce their liability.
I purchased and setup a MiFi a few months back. Changing the SSID and WPA Key was easy. Done via web interface into local server on the device.
Did he play with Heisenberg? "We knew where both people were, no idea how fast they drew."
s/communism/guns/
Some of the folks involved are part of this as well:
http://jellychicago.com/
No, they couldn't decrypt anything.

They'd need the private keys. And the passwords for the private keys.
The second mouse gets the cheese.
For the curious, a quick search yields claims of 2025 and 2028 as the last patent expiration date. This announcement shouldn't please anyone.
The link here should probably read: "Why Google News is bad for the newspaper business."

Finally, we are starting to see some of these media companies and investors start to be a little more precise in their attacks against Google! I don't care if you agree with the attacks or not, at least now we know that what Mark Cuban is really mad about is Google News, not Google Search results. For awhile there I was legitimately confused as to why Murdoch and the bunch were threatening to remove themselves from Google's index, when I thought what they should really be mad about is Google News.
What are your rates? Hourly or per Job? How much do you pay for overhead (rent, etc).

You state that they bring their systems to you so I assume you have a storefront.

Those numbers are impressive for just starting out, but it would be nice to know the full story such as your expenses regarding the running and the upkeep of the business.
If this is as good as the argument gets for avoiding open courseware, the argument is over.

It's like when arguments against female workers started to revolve around toilets.
UK computer pioneers family tree
There's a few "competency-based" universities that don't test you on your ability to sit in a classroom for four years but instead test your actually competencies in the field. Western Governors University is the one I'm most familiar with. There are many people who've been working in a field for some time that can get a bachelors degree in less than a year by just taking the required tests.
Climate code rewritten for clarity
It's the same in [association] football, rugby, volleyball, netball, [field] hockey. Presumably true in other sports too - so is that really why you love playing basketball?
yeah, I built from cvs specifically for those commands.
Flagged

What is it today with these troll bait stories -- there is no interesting discussion about this topic.

Votes decide not to enact tax, government cuts services that effect citizens the most -- this has happened throughout history; it's called the Washington Monument Strategy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
Not trying to be a dick, but make sure you proofread and have someone else proofread your documents before they're sent out.

Errors tend to stick out, like conference in this case.

Anyways, be patient and persistent, and good luck!
You could just sell enough fake tells--produce enough false signals--to throw your opponent off of whatever actual tells you have. I wonder if this is similar in concept to the "drunken" kung fu style.
How is that really different from half the class not showing up, figuring they can just read the lecture notes and text book later? If it makes the students lazy and they fall behind and fail, then those students have learned a valuable lesson for next time they take that class.
he may meant "it is not as CPU-bound as in the case of rendering or en/decoding video".
Not that ironic considering Mahalo is not primarily a big-brand news organization. His frustration is with Google News, not with Google Search.
How can that be if the standard was ratified in 2003?
and yet oddly, you don't hear much bewailing of "union citizenship"

Right, and it takes about half a second of thought to figure out why. And no it's not because of the "liberal media";
it's because unions don't typically have billions of dollars they can use to further their agenda.
Nice comments:

/* shutup.css
* web - peanut gallery = bliss
Heh, back in the '80s I worked at that Garden of the Gods biz complex, for Hewlett-Packard.
I think I was pretty open about the fact that it's obviously going to be our viewpoint that we don't think people should do NoSQL. However, it's also because I genuinely believe SQL is the right decision. There may be use-cases out there where NoSQL is a good fit, but there are also use-cases where Windows is a good fit, but I'm still going to recommend Unix systems in general. As with all things, if you don't know why the general advice doesn't apply to you, then the advice probably holds!
It is also personal. Berlusconi has a huge, and still growing, number of legal problems. He successfully hides them on the media he owns or controls (6 tv channels out of 7). The few newspapers that are not aligned to his policy are read by an handful of people. The only way truthful news about his misbehavior reach the Italian people are social network and similar. So it makes sense to shut them up.
I'm curious. Are people more offended by the expletive than they are concerned about the possibility that foreign companies can run for actual seats in Congress?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TANC4VI8vF4#t=1m18s - draws and shoots and returns gun to holster in 0.02s.

I don't feel lucky!
The New York Times is a corporation. Planned Parenthood is a corporation. The NAACP is a corporation. How do you decide which corporations have a right to speak and which don't? You may think it's easy to say, but the reality is that once you give any group the power to muzzle one corporation over others there will inevitably be abuses of that power due to the biases of the people wielding the power.

Better not to give government that power at all. It may leave room for people you don't like to do things you don't like but freedom is messy.
Really? Then I don't think you'd be running it very effectively. That's like Apple saying, "we're selling tons of iPhones. Let's stop marketing them." Or a better analogy is Harvard saying, "we have a lot of applicants this season-- let's not market or recruit". If Harvard said that, they'd slowly watch the quality and quantity of their applicant pool drift towards the other ivy-league schools that WERE marketing.

YC has a HUGE marketing advantage in PG (and his amazing and linkworthy essays), Jessica (and her amazing book) and the success of the portfolio. But it's not an unassailable position.

edit: Duh-- news.yc is another incredible marketing asset that YC has!
...as almost nobody cares about absolutist interpretations.

I apologize for what must be a failure in my writing, but that's exactly what I'm trying to convey. In my comment I tried to show how silly the logical conclusions of absolute interpretations look. I tried to avoid saying anything about the political side of the issue. You'll note though that as of this writing an absolutist interpretation is still the highest voted comment for this article.
"Why must this political-economic golem be given the right to free speech?"

Why must this political-economic golem be subject to specific laws, regulations, and taxes beyond the ones all the people in a corporation are already subject to?

The answer to your question is because it's subject to special government attention, the people involved with such a device have a right to use it in the political process to protect their interests and involvement with it.

As for selling out, people make decisions all the time. If you don't like the politics of your company, try to do something about it or find another you like better. (Realistically, this isn't much of a concern. Corporate donations tend to be remarkably even-handed so as to not give the winner of an election the impression they preferred the other guy.)
And to go full circle, has anyone checked to see if it works on Daring Fireball With Comments?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097490
Ubuntu is already working on integrating commercial software. Of course payment is one aspect, but the aspect of usability and "unpolluted computing" is another one. I mentioned in the article that apt is not perfect yet - but neither is the App store.

Also there are high quality apps that are free, so clearly developers being able to charge is not a necessary precondition for good software. I have nothing against charging for software, and clearly it helped with the explosion of the App store. But the point is, the app store is not the only way.

Also, which commercial applications that cost money from the app store are essential?
The OP is making a (toungue-in-cheek) argument against corporate free speech. You said that corporate free speech rests upon a century of precedent and that without it, we couldn't have corporate immunity.

But "corporate immunity and corporate free speech come from the same legal doctrine" is a lot different from saying "you can't have corporate immunity without corporate free speech". The latter is what you said, but your argument supports the former. Are you sure I'm the one who is confused?
That's twisting the story quite a bit. Compuserve made GIFs (unaware of the patent) and Unisys had been charging companies for the patent for a long time (but were unaware of GIF). When Unisys found out, they started charging. It was hardly bait and switch. At no point did Unisys ever tell people to use GIF because they had no plans to charge for it.
"catholicism is " and "christianity is " both produce the same results... "buddhism is " is actually slightly more positive. anyone for an infographic?
[edit] just saw that tptacek beat me to the punch. cheers.
For some number of home owners n it will be more economical for them to all chip in and buy a fireman or two than to pay the additional premiums that result from the cut.

Capitalism can work here. Taxes don't need to buy firemen.
That is a good question, and worthy of an upvote. My first inclination is to say it is not, because if Ruby really were the "worse" to Lisp's "better" in some measurable, objective sense, then presumably Matz would have created something like Clojure rather than Ruby.
I always yell at people who blame themselves for not being able to figure out a technology, whether it be the UI of a program or the physical interface of a device. People tend to assume stupidity on their own part; instead, I tell them to blame the designers. After all, most people would blame the manufacturer if confronted with a car that was hard to use. Interesting how simple interfaces (a wheel and two peddles) are expected in some areas and not in others.
Some of the patents may have been applied for, but not granted until after ratification.
Git from the bottom up [pdf]
Taxation of certain viewpoints or topics but not others would, indeed, be a violation of free speech. I.e., a ban or tax on film reels would not be a violation of free speech. A ban or tax on film reels containing "Hillary: The Movie" would be.

I also don't understand your "hostile takeover" argument. Who is being enslaved? The corporate officers who are free to quit at any time? The shareholders who voluntarily sell to the person taking over?
a lot different from saying "you can't have corporate immunity without corporate free speech"

I'm not actually saying that, despite your misunderstanding.

Beyond that, I'm not interested in discussing built-from-scratch legal systems.
Nice area no? The sky is always so blue there (literally).
What I initially wrote to replace The Printf wasn't exactly pretty; it was a PHP function containing mostly HTML, with a few snippets of PHP interspersed. I consider that sort of thing excusable, especially if there's external time pressure. There's not much of an excuse for using an impenetrable 22-arg printf call to generate a table row though.
I think the book is worth reading, although voluntarily provoking, to say the least :)
What does high taxes have to do with anything? I'm just saying that it's irrational to think that MPEG LA's plan is to sue consumers. Us being "hackers" does nothing to change those odds.
You're getting close to the truth of our own situation up here in the mountains. We have a volunteer fire station down the road several miles. However, our fire rating was still fairly high because fire trucks would have to make many trips back and forth to grab water and come all the way back up the mountain.

So the property owners' association purchased a big water tank on top of the mountain. Now the fire trucks can refill locally without making long trips back down to the lake to refill. So that helped a good bit.

Also, all of the roads up here are privately owned and maintained by our property owners association, and our annual dues have not increased in 9 years.
The UAW takes in about a third of a billion dollars a year in union dues. So does the NEA. Currently unions are prohibited from contributing directly to candidates due to being tax exempt entities, but that doesn't stop them from spending tens of millions of dollars during election campaigns to support the candidates they favor.
"there is no interesting discussion about this topic..."

Well you just provided some good insight that I've never heard of before.
Yahoo sells HotJobs to Monster for $225 million
If the management is not speaking in the interest of the shareholders, they are violating their fiduciary duty and should be fired by the board.

If the board does not fire them, the shareholders can fire the board.

As for the minority shareholders, they agreed that their property (their portion of the company) would be bound by the decision of the majority subject to the restrictions of the corporate charter.
>"For your claim to be true money must in some way be related to the ability to exercise free speech."

Do you think a law that forbid spending money to criticize government policy would be compatible with the first amendment? By your reasoning Congress would be restricting money and not speech.