skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote down a few tips I'd collected a while back: http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2008/02/press-for-startups-10...

The landscape may have changed on the embargo bit (TechCrunch claims not to respect them), or not -- they still seem to respect ours and most startups I know.
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I think this article presents an interesting argument, even though much of it is anecdotal. Some of the author's points are very interesting:

> He says he’s an empiricist and that data have convinced him he was dead wrong. He now says that the idea of giving away intellectual property as advertising bait is unsustainable and will have dire consequences.

It's too bad the author doesn't go into more detail about this. I'm curious to see his "data".

>It’s OK for a potter to sell pots, but a musician should not sell music.

I think I agree with the author - why should a musician not be able to sell their music if they choose. Those who choose to give their music away for free can do so, but suggesting that it's morally wrong to sell music seems, ironically, morally wrong itself.

Not that I necessarily agree, but just to play the devil's advocate - there a really easy solution to the fact that it's so easy to copy intellectual property. The solution is for our governments to disallow it. I'm willing to bet that if the government began criminally prosecuting those who pirated music, movies, and software the problem would significantly decrease.

I'd argue that the real problem isn't that it's too easy to copy intellectual property, but that it's too easy to copy intellectual property over the internet. Intellectual property has been copied for thousands of years, it's only very recently that it became _so_ easy to do it though. 15 years ago there would have been a lot more effort required to copy music than there is today. The problem is that today anyone can copy intellectual property from everyone else on the planet in a matter of seconds. In the past copying intellectual property would have required a much more physical connection to the source: For example exchanging cassette tapes with a friend, or going to the library to checkout a book and photocopy it. These barriers were enough to prevent casual piracy. The barriers today are so insignificant though that casual piracy has become a real problem. I don't think piracy by those who are motivated enough will ever be stopped (just like crime by those who are sufficiently motivated will never be stopped), but I think that curtailing this casual piracy would be enough to solve the problem.

After reading that article I'm very interested in checking out Jaron Lanier's book. Has anyone read it yet - is it a worthwhile read?
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It's like a command line for the browser. See some commands here: http://quixapp.com/help/.
Kelo is an abomination. Hopefully it'll some day be reversed like the Supremes just did with Austin and the first case that largely upheld McCain-Feingold.

I have no trouble with Citizens or Garcetti v. Ceballos (how is that a "corporate interests" case???), but which Exxon case are you referring to (Google comes up with a lot of X v. Exxon cases)?

(I'd also note that I believe in the principle of the rule of law vs. the rule of man, but that would probably be pointless.)
To keep track of my running workouts, I bought a Timex Ironman Datalink watch which has a USB interface, and I wrote a plug-in for it for SportTracks[1]. It does the job, but it's missing some things.

For one, I'd like to capture ambient temperature too, which this TI watch has, so I took a closer look. The manual states, "The temperature is measured inside the watch right inside the CC430 device. When the watch is worn, the temperature of the watch may be different due to the body heat. For accurate temperature measurements, do not wear the watch and allow a sufficient amount of time for the watch to adapt to the surrounding temperature."

Great feature, poorly implemented. No thanks.

Eventually I'll get a GPS watch, but not until Garmin releases one that has decent battery life. A temperature sensor would be nice, too.

[1] http://www.zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/
Only problem I see is anti-aliased fonts. Those didn't get added until ClearType came along in Windows XP.
Where's QBasic?
Great news. Gotta hand it to Sony and their partners though, that hypervisor security sat in place for a good long time considering how long it's been out.
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If that's the case then why haven't smart people figured out a way for game developers to make money while releasing their software as open source? Point me to an example that illustrates how this is possible and I will concede that you're right.
Yes, and there exists javascript libraries and user agent hacks to fix that already. My point was that this isn't an engineering problem.
Hey, Internet Browser passes the Acid 3 test!
Minesweeper doesn't end after you beat it, timer just keeps going.
Accountants are relatively talented people and should be doing useful work, not makework.
Wow. That brings back memories in a big way. Just needs trumpet winsock, mIRC, and a nuker.
this is the first i've heard of the govt intercept backdoor and he doesn't give a reference. a quick google is turning up only references to this article. anyone have more details?

edit: from reddit: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/google-and-c...

"Google's security team managed to penetrate one of the servers being used by the attackers, which was how the full extent of the attack—more than 30 companies—was revealed."

and that points to this article: http://www.macworld.co.uk/digitallifestyle/news/index.cfm?ne...

"Right before Christmas, it was, 'Holy s*, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems]" which seems to be the source of the "backdoor" details.

that's also the source quoted here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100114_google_china_and_lawf... (nice article)
Ah, but, it is possible to call the national tax hotline and find out exactly how much income has been reported in connection with you via W-2s and 1099s. In fact, many people who don't keep good records have to do this every year just to find out how to start calculating their AGI.

It's a rather obscure feature, but it can be done.
Wow! I really like the attention to detail. You can change the desktop wallpaper with the genuine Windows 3.1 tile images, you can create and save files (which download to your actual computer), wildcards work in the file selection dialog...

Of course not everything works, but this is a lot of fun.
Who said anything about opensource? The issue at hand is closed source and profit.

And check out 2dBoy.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/10/20/world-of-goo-sale...
This is great. I was one of the disgruntled customers but this mail has turned me into a happy one again.
Clearly you must work within the boundaries of what you find ethically acceptable - either by staying away from certain things or by expanding the boundaries. Just remember that other people have boundaries drawn in different places and arguing about the one right way to draw them is not very productive for pretty much any definition of productive we should care about on this site.

You're right in that there is more going on here - the fact that you can't imagine what is clearly going in in front of you suggests that you project your system of values on other people to such an extent that it deprives you of empathy to those people. If you don't get this under control this will seriously hamper your (future) business in pretty much any area other than serving people who are exactly like you. This blindness is not likely to be confined to narcissism. People revel in all kinds of crazy stuff, but you seem to think that one kind of crazy stuff is more worthy than the other.
There’s an anti-intellectual thread running through these arguments. It’s a primitive way of thinking, valuing only tangible artifacts and not ideas. It’s OK for a potter to sell pots, but a musician should not sell musics.

It's a poor ad hominem that this thinking is "primitive" and "anti-intellectual".

People like the economist, Mike Masnic explains and then build on freeminum business model and the nature of non-scarce goods for years

* http://www.techdirt.com/rtb.php

Two economists wrote an entire book on why intellectual property is flawed. It's also quite a history lesson in itself since it cover century of IP history.

*http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...
Yep. The government showing its hand creates information asymmetry; the citizen then knows which assets and income to declare, and which ones to keep off the books.

And also, they're can use the list of "liars" as a sieve and focus their investigative efforts on those, instead of the docile, ball-playing masses.
Not really - it's only easier to catch people that try to hide things that the IRS already knows. Nobody that was actually trying to cheat would ever do this if the IRS was up-front about what it knew going in.

What might happen more is that people don't correct the IRS's assumptions when they miss something and it's in their favor (accidentally or not). Whether or not this would significantly affect the bottom line, I have no idea, but I'd consider it vastly preferable to have them put more resources towards research before people are accused of cheating than to spend on enforcement after the fact.
Nostalgia!
The user string for the browser is whatever browser you happen to be using at the time. In Firefox 3.5.7 I get 93/100 on acid 3 from the internet browser in the app.

It's odd that the address bar in the browser reverts to 127.0.0.1 no matter where you are. Does that happen to anyone else?
I made a little bit of money writing open source game.

Some people, like Jason Rohrer, made his living based on donation from the public and patronage. http://libregamewiki.org/Jason_Rohrer

Also, lot of people are probably buying Wesnoth on the iphone judging by tons of iphone reviews that I have spotted using google alert. http://wesnoth.repositoryhosting.com/trac/wesnoth_wesnoth/

Game developers DOES make money while releasing open source software. I just hope you don't move the goalpost in your next comment.
> It does not "take two" to make an assault.

Actually it does :P
Interesting. How safe is this hotline? does it log callers and automatically mark them for eye-balling?

Gonna have to ask around about this.
One of the big problems with lisp (and other such languages) is library support. Being on the JVM and making java easy to access makes that a moot point.

So yes, the JVM does make it cool.
Getting the current URL of an embedded frame showing a page on an external domain is (or at least should be) impossible due to restrictions on cross-site scripting. This is the same reason why when you view a page that's trapped in a Diggbar-style frame, if you click a link inside the framed site and later close the "bar", you get redirected back to the initial site. Try it: http://digg.com/u3L7UJ
I think that the article implies that subjective confidence levels may be tied to objective testosterone levels, which seems completely reasonable to me.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/131764/recursive.png

Well, somebody had to. I could get it to nest 10-fold, but after that the innermost browser window was unresponsive.
Requiring taxpayers to file returns without being told what the government already knows makes as much sense “as if Visa sent customers a blank piece of paper, requiring that they assemble their receipts, list their purchases — and pay a fine if they forget one,” said Joseph Bankman, a professor at the Stanford Law School.

Agree.

The problem is that the "big box accounting shops" like H&R Block, Jackson Hewett, et al. throw their weight around and complain. Paper tax returns are horribly inefficient, but that's how the big box accounting shops make the majority of their income.

Given that taxes (withheld) are essentially an interest-free loan to the government, it seems more than logical that the government could pay a "dividend" of sorts to people by simplifying the filing process without the use of some overpaid H&R Block agent, a CPA or tax lawyer.
Pressing a button does not change the abysmal performance of Flash on a Mac, why would one expect it to change this problem on a iPhone? The positions being taken by Mozilla and Apple in these cases are similar, but Apple's technical justification has merit while Mozilla's political stance has no technical merit to hide behind.
I wonder if this applicable to city planning? Constructing a plexiglass landscape in miniature, scattering a few flakes in the right places, then letting loose the mold... let nature calculate maximum efficiency for you!
Back in the "old days" you had, in my opinion, even worse issues with Media Metrix and Nielsen. They were the real gangsters - and it was really expensive. Comscore was the new kid on the block and tried harder to get good data out there. I don't recall any extortion from them.

When someone is running a business I think it's a good idea to focus on the business and not on various crusades. Whenever I see someone behaving like this I'm glad I'm not an investor with them. Watch what happens with Mahalo - all these shenanigans and the ceo's focus on angel investing tell me that the level of his interest in his startup isn't all that great.

Or he's magically talented and can do it all while building a great business.
This tool looks really interesting - and I love the idea that it can be programmed using python. I've used a number of GUI automation tools in the past like autohotkeys (which I can also highly recommend) - this one looks like it would make it easier to do certain tasks that are difficult in autohotkeys, for example: interacting with webpages or other applications that don't have standard interfaces that can be examined with system api's.

The screenshot approach this tool takes is very unique. My only criticism is that, judging by the video, the image processing approach seems slow compared to an autohotkey's script.

What I'm really waiting for is a tool that can take this one step further and do OCR on any on screen text. This would make it easy to interact with gui's that present text that can't be read using system api's - imho that would be the holy grail of gui automation.
> In most modern stock markets there is not tiered access.

It seems if you are the broker and also trade for your own company, you would see your clients' orders before they go in. You can send in your order before theirs, thus creating a tiered access.
In this case the browser market share doesn't mean much. It is mindshare among the people providing the videos that matters. The way this particular battle is going to play out is that Mozilla will stick to its guns for a while and will continue to lose marketshare to Chrome, video providers will encode in HTML5/h.264 and Flash and eventually Firefox users on video sites will start seeing messages similar to the ones IE6 users see on some sites. The wildcard in this is Microsoft. If someone over there develops a clue they will jump on the h.264 bandwagon just to hose Mozilla -- IE8 will stop bleeding marketshare and this will provoke the video providers to move hard and fast to HTML5/h.264, forcing MozillaCorp to eat the costs of buying h.264 licenses and sticking a sharp stick in Adobe's eye as icing on the cake.
> Tighter car efficiency standards are almost free.

Really? The folks who design cars disagree, so clearly you could make a lot of money by showing them how, or by producing your own cars and putting those bozos out of biz.

What? You can't do it yourself? How about you invest your money in folks who you think can? If you're right....

> Better transit options are available for a tiny fraction of what we spend on highways.

And yet, the folks who actually do transit don't manage to provide said options. Morons.

> Aluminum recyling more than pays for itself in energy costs

And we do it. We also do steel recycling.

> We can barely get even the most pathetically meaningless measures through our governments.

You don't need govt's permission or a mandate to be more efficient.
I suspect if there was no government intervention, "invisible hands" would take care of this guy soon enough.
who knows, they are mostly institutionally owned, a single guy at Fidelity agreeing with you, and their stock can tumble
Have an upvote :) Unfortunately, this happens all the time.
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I'm glad to see WakeMate doing right by those who have pre-ordered. Are those who say pre-ordered today going to see the same sort of deal?
I agree. The best thing about Java was the library ("One library to rule them all..."). The language was so, so, mainly a better C++ + GC. I never liked it, but Swing, threading, BigInteger, AWT, man! coming from C++ it was a boon.

The next thing I moved to Python, there I found the library and the language fun to use.

Now I am starting to look back at JVM because of Scala and Clojure.
Eighteen years. Wow. You are basically a professional dancer. Professional dancers should be able to 1) be able to perform or compete at a high level 2) teach and 3) dance socially.

One thing I left out in my earlier comments is the people who have been dancing for a long time can inadvertently intimidate newbies - particularly for ballroom - because at the dance club they see these really experienced dancers glide across the floor - and they think - how can I dance with these people who are so good and/or dance on the same floor. The nicer dancers will ask newbies to dance because they remember when they were starting out, in simultaneous awe and intimidation.

Another dance hack, especially for Latin dancing, is understanding the structure of the music so that you can predict changes in the music with good probability.

For example, in Salsa music, listen for a change in the music, count 8 measures and anticipate a break, and if there is no break, count another 8 (16 total) and anticipate the break. Sometimes it gets to 24 before there is a break and followers love it when you can predict these breaks (dance to the music).

It is actually a lot, lot harder to do this when you are social dancing and trying to protect your follower (crowded dance floor) - but it is doable.

The other part is tempo changes - vary the speed of your moves to the tempo and feel of the music. Slow things down, speed things up.
$100 for a calculator is monopoly price, and the fact that every American high-schooler is required to have one just adds insult to injury.
Thanks! I've apparently been misusing that my entire life.
Any legal issues hinge, as the author hinted, on a court inventing a relevant market here. The Clayton Act (and specifically 15 U.S.C. section 14 on tying), like other antitrust laws in this country, requires that the tying either create a monopoly or "substantially lessen competition...in any line of commerce". Simply lessening competition is not illegal, it has to be on the scale of affecting the entire line of commerce, aka relevant market.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/14.html

If a court decides that in dealing with App Store sales, we're talking about the software market, then the App Store is such a tiny piece of the software market that literally no policy they set can SUBSTANTIALLY lessen competition in the entire market. It's a private company so they're free to set whatever policies they want. If they want to tie their browser to their phone and prevent you from using anyone else's browser, that's completely legal.

A court would have to really stretch and define something very narrow, like a smartphone application market, to even begin arguing any antitrust case.
Directly from the article: "Programmers should give away their software and make money from consulting."

I read that as meaning open source, what do you take that to mean? Maybe my requirement that it be open-source is too restrictive - I'd be just as happy to see an example of a freely available closed source game that earns its creator a decent living.

In regards to 2dboy, while I think it's certainly an interesting economic model, which has a lot of potential, I don't think it's a counter-example of what the article is arguing in-favor of since it's still not free.
I wondered about that, too---how fragile will this be in the face of minor GUI changes? (A fuzzy-match parameter would be a nice addition to the API.) One encouraging sign is that the screenshots are stored as .pngs in the file system. If an app update does nothing but change button graphics or text, the script could presumably pull new graphics from the same place.

That just leaves the other 90% of GUI changes that involve moving a setting to another screen, or changing the way an entire interaction works. ;-)

All the stuff you said about GUI automation being klunky is true. Still, this thing could come in handy as a kind of "GUI batch file," or perhaps as a tool to help produce screencasts.
If you read product reviews for Intuit's software on Amazon, you'll find that it's horrible and most people have to suffer through using it because they have no choice. A huge market exists for tax and accounting software, especially for small businesses, until the IRS figures out how to do it for us. eg: http://www.amazon.com/Intuit-409578-QuickBooks-2010-for/prod...
The few times I've been out to a gay dance club I've noticed that the vibe is really fun - most of the guys there are dancing without inhibition, even if they aren't great dancers (compare to the hetero club dance floor).
I Agree. My father is an accountant and hate doing taxes. He would much prefer a more simple method like this where it would be harder for errors to occur and avoid lengthy audits. He makes much less from those government audits than from other type work.

The complexity of the Tax code is also stupid. A lot of it could be simplified but that would eliminate government jobs quickly. Accountants won't care, there's a lot of lucrative work that still needs be done. In fact, most tax returns aren't done by CPA (or CA in Canada) anyway. H&R Block and others might be pissed and try to block this but they charge too much anyway.
Common Lisp has two strikes against it: it's old and its community is dysfunctional. A lot of people attracted to the idea of Lisp, but repelled by one or both of those attributes, have found a home in Clojure.

It's much too early to tell whether Clojure will prove a technical success in the long run (let alone a worthy successor to CL, which, for all the things people say they don't like about it, is one of the magnificent achievements of computing).
Personally, I'm male and, sexually speaking, I like women.

I'm glad we established that.
Can you provide a link to your games or more info? I'd be curious to see.

I'm still not entirely convinced. In both of your examples it's not clear that it's possible to make a sustainable income, 10k is not imo a sustainable income, admittedly that's partly my fault though for not making my original question clear. I upvoted you for your examples though, since you did technically meet the requirements I asked for.
Calacanis rubs me the wrong a lot of the time, but I disagree with your assessment. All else being equal, yes, personal crusades are a distraction, but he's only human. The type of commitment necessary to succeed in a startup isn't necessarily 80 hours a week with a laser focus. It's hard enough to keep most people focused for a solid 40 hours a week. And also, it's very easy to appear totally dedicated but actually be mentally spinning your wheels and not performing well for a variety of reasons. I mean, you maybe right, but I just think it's hard to judge by looking at outside indicators like what someone rants about.