skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most startups need to have barriers to entry if they are to have the capacity to sustain themselves beyond the initial phase of their existence.

This is one of the first questions that potential investors will ask any founding team: assuming that you initially succeed, what is to prevent big players from attacking you. More often than not, the answer lies in the IP protections that protect such a startup's development efforts, whether this takes the form of patents, copyrights, or whatever. It is true that such startups can also be prejudiced by threats of infringement from large companies and in this sense IP rights can potentially work against them. In my experience, though, for every oddball situation (easily less than 1%) in which IP rights threaten a startup, there are many, many situations where IP rights work in their favor and in which they would clearly be prejudiced if such rights were scaled back or eliminated.

Thus, from my subjective perspective, I can attest that IP rights are a spur to innovation because many of the startups I have represented would not have been able either to start or to fund themselves without a business model that ultimately depended on proprietary advantages afforded by IP rights. Perhaps they are wrong about what does or does not promote the best interests of their companies but, in the real world, this is overwhelmingly how most founders see IP in relation to their companies.

Can't speak to the broader societal or cost/benefit issues raised by the author (and would agree that patents in particular are in need of reform). By the way, as I do not do patent filings, this is not a livelihood issue for me - just my viewpoint as a lawyer representing startups for over a quarter century in Silicon Valley.
Lessons of life from an uneducated man
Thanks, I'm seeing a common theme now that screenshots aren't enough.
Yes, I should have been more thorough in proofing my post. Demand doesn't change because of elasticity; the quantity demanded changes.

If calculated, they may not have been able to see the full effect of this change as the calculations (like you state) do not take into account customer perception. Although not seemingly a large change, the $15 change in price can make a huge impact in such highly elastic markets.
there's a lot more data in pdf form at http://www.heritage.org/index/
I'm an avid user.. but stuff like that is also hurting me..
Ruby might just need a better implementation with more time spent on optimization. http://maglev.gemstone.com/ is going in this direction.

But also, Lua was always designed with cleanness and simplicity of implementation in mind. Its developers have strong backgrounds in both theory and engineering, which you can see in their interview in the book Masterminds of Programming. They've been very conservative about the design of the language. In contrast, Ruby feels much messier and more "evolved" - look at its Yacc grammar[1], for example, compared to the grammar of JavaScript or Lua[2]. Even the Ruby lexer is full of weird edge cases. Much of MRI is like that, and for years it was the only "spec" for the language; now its decisions have been reverse-engineered and inherited by all other implementations.

[1]: http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/10/27/visualization...

[2]: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8

[By the way, I've used Ruby for years and like it at lot, while I've written only a few lines of Lua code and like it but am not deeply familiar with it.]
What I find amusing is this argument I've heard a few times coming from the labels that goes along the lines of that we need their expertise in order to produce and discern the "quality" music... Because they do such a good job of that usually.
Where can I get unbiased news?
The laws do support the notion that copying is equivalent to stealing. Thus the $600k+ verdict that our current President's administration is apparently standing behind.

Does that mean it's right? Not necessarily. Maybe the laws do need to change. But in the meantime, they are the laws. Taking the laws into your own hand just because you don't agree with them is wrong. And if you're fine with that, then be fine with accepting the consequences when you get caught, too. We need to consider all sides of the story here. File sharers are very selfishly saying "well the law is wrong anyway, so who cares?" which is just their way of justifying stealing. File sharers don't care about what is right or what's wrong, they just want free stuff.

If copyright law needs to change either on a moral ground or a grounds that current infrastructure makes our laws unreasonable, fine. That's great. But let's do this the right way, which gives us the best chance of all parties maintaining their rights.
A method for JIT'ing algorithms and data structures with LLVM
What industry would that be, time travel? :)

Here in the present, IE6 is around 2-3% of visitors.
The importance of teaching your clients and being the boss
Marketing - Joel Gascoigne's miniblog
This guy is actually a friend of my co-founder. Amazing story.

For general amusement, read through the comments on the Wired article. The guy is accused of lying because "a DSLR flash can't light a pitch black room" and "his iPhone battery couldn't last 65 hours".
Secret Rituals of American Idol Auditions Exposed
(and would agree that patents in particular are in need of reform)

That's not the correct characterization of his position.

His position is that of abolishing patents and copyrights in accordance to libertarian ethic theory. However, from a practical perspective, he notes that abolishing IP laws is not possible.
Is Bitly Bigger than Google?
Time to Stop Procrastinating and Make a Career Change
How would you serve 100,000 simultaneous comet requests with Node.js?
It's a cut and paste from some sample file, so this doesn't indicate anything much.

google search for the text in the comments ( http://tinyurl.com/ygtuanh ) has 49 hits, there would be more if I had not joined the lines together, I'm sure.
Yeah the reason.com article didn't highlight that as much as it could have. I can definitely see how you missed it.

The original NY Times article has more detail. In particular:

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

"Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch - someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal," Mrs. Hicks recounted. "A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyregion/14watchlist.html

With that context, its a lot easier to understand her frustration.
The article earlier about NYT preparing to charge ("Prepare to charge!") for access got me thinking (again) about the same questions that cstross asked in his post.

I say good luck to NYT in their efforts, but as the OP says, it's a dead business model. I don't care if it works for the NYT or not, and if it does, great. I probably won't subscribe, but that's another tangent.

What does concern me is how or whether good journalism and writing will survive. I buy and read a few fiction and non-fiction books per year, far more than the average American although probably far less than the average HNer. I assume that ereaders will be made to my liking RSN, at which time I will buy few if any paper books. (I will greatly lament the loss of large and odd format books, much more profoundly than I currently miss vinyl album art.)

I assume that the trend will continue, and production of content in and of itself will be decreasingly lucrative. So trying to rely on selling content, or access to content, is going to get harder. Books will probably last a bit longer; if a news article is paywalled you can probably find a similar article elsewhere for free or cheaper, but in most cases there is no substitute for reading a particular story by a particular author. But in the end, even books won't be enough to make a living.

So what do you do if people won't buy what you're selling (access to)? ... Anything else!

In the case of journalism and books, what you can do is make those things the attraction to something else that people are willing to pay for.

In the case of newspapers, I'm not sure what they would sell besides advertising, but it'll have to be something. Maybe more in depth coverage of the same story (but attracting with mere summaries won't work). Maybe video about the story or related subjects.

Maybe instead of selling advertising for stuff, they'll sell the stuff directly. "Nice car Bob." "Like it? I'm leasing it from the New York Times."

For some authors, they might sell editing services, book design and similar to other authors. 100 years ago miners went broke and died looking for gold, but the hardware stores and outfitters made a good living supplying the miners. If you're an author that other writers like, that could be one way to make a living.

Bottom line is revenue is being siphoned or disappearing, and you'll have to change.
I don't understand how you make the jump from "I want to support this company" to "everyone should be forced to support this company". If you want to support them, there are ways you can do it currently, so if you really want to support them than you would have done it already. Are you saying that you want them to be supported, but you want other people to shoulder the cost?

I think charging or not for their services is definitely the NYTimes's prerogative. That doesn't mean that it's a good choice. Personally, I think it's a bad choice, because they're going to alienate some of their most loyal readers. I, too, wish that the neswpapers could find a sustainable way to remain profitable, but I don't think this is it. But if there is no sustainable way, I guess that means that newspapers actually aren't as valuable to us as we like to think, because otherwise we'd be willing to pay for it.
I wonder if we can get some posts about death panels on HN while we're at it.
They have places to talk about solutions where only people who already solved the question can see them - it's just that they close the discussions relatively quickly - 100 comments or some time limit? And you can't really discuss solutions on their regular forum, because that's likely a (deletable) spoiler. So to openly discuss & share, you really have to go elsewhere.
Ouch .. now that is a problem. I will have a look.
The technology is already here. The bluetooth watch you talk about is in the stores. As you and others have mentioned, it's not a tech problem, but style problem. We have to stop throwing engineers at the problem and start throwing fashion designers.
I prefer to quickly look through some screenshots than sit through a video. Definitely use both if you can but I wouldn't have video without a screenshot alternative.
The index is mostly useless, just a collection of random quantifiers averaged together with little apparent thought put into variable selection, weighting or statistical methods. It is useful as a collection of data sources though.
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism
"You data is accessible anywhere with internet access."

s/You/Your

I found this typo elsewhere in your website so make sure it's corrected ;) But apart from that, nice job.
Slate.com is my ultimate procrastination tool - I intentionally haven't bookmarked it, so I only go there when I'm really bored and remember to (ie, a few times a week). As such, I've always seen it as a guilty pleasure.

Now I know that Bill Gates hangs out there ... well, that doesn't really change anything in my life. But I'm ever-so-slightly more smug.
From what I understand, the iPhone doesn't use sub-pixel font rendering either, because of the high pixel density (which is not even as high as the Nexus One).

Since the display rotates, normal desktop sub-pixel rendering algorithms won't work anyway.
I agree that overall price level increases are hard to swallow, but they seem indicative of a stronger airline industry that has newfound price-setting power.

Perhaps the issue is that Orbitz and others haven't incorporated the number of bags one plans on checking into the "total cost" figure presented in their summaries? If I know what the pricing structure is at the time I make my choice, I'm probably happier.
everyone should be forced to support this company

They're not trying to force anybody to support them. They're changing their business model in order to allow their customers to support them.

Nobody is forcing you to read NYT, if you don't want to pay, don't read it.

(I probably won't be paying, and I disagree with this, but it is their company to do with what they please)
This is a cool idea...but WOW! There are some major no-no's in that code.

1) You shouldn't lock on a type, because it can deadlock the entire CLR process (Type works like a multiton in .NET, so you get one actual instance per distinct type loaded into your AppDomain). MSDN points this out, in the docs on the Monitor class (I think) -- which is what lock() uses internally.

2) If you use Delegate.BeginInvoke(), it executes on a threadpool thread. Since you only get a limited number of these threads per process (by default), if you run a long-running calculation, you might end up freezing some other parts of your code. This is of particular importance in ASP.NET, since it makes heavy use of the ThreadPool.

3) If you loop over the EndInvoke() calls there, you're going to end up blocking on each one to wait for the threads to complete. While you obviously need to wait for all of the threads to finish, you might be tying up ThreadPool threads if some threads are stuck waiting to return results.

Here's some more info on this: http://www.lukepuplett.com/2009/05/using-delegates-oh-for-f-...

Also, I remember reading that the CLR team had to make some major changes under the hood to the ThreadPool and other related classes in order to get the parallel extensions to perform like they should.
Batch file to lock access to a folder on your desktop without using NTFS
Interesting to see where Bill goes for news. I may not be Bill Gates (I certainly don't have his bank balance), but people interested in unbiased news should check out the "No Agenda" podcast at http://noagendashow.com

Dvorak and Curry may not be everyones taste, but they do point out many instances of mainstream media fail
Thank you, I found it a couple of times as well. All fixed.
>..before they start charging "boarding pass handling fees"..

GBP 40 for turning up to a Ryanair flight without a boarding pass: "http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/may/14/ryanair-online-c...

And it's GBP 5 to check-in online at home: http://www.ryanair.com/en/questions/table-of-fees
Correlation != causation.

Failing airlines added new fees and then continued to fail. Not sure you can blame the fees for that.
Interesting. I'll have to see if devices like these can trigger my Canon's shutter.
... unless the discussion for that question's already gotten 100 comments, in which case the discussion's read-only.
Can you refresh or something? It did create your account.. :-(
Doesn't validate for HTML or CSS and has to include IE specific fixes for proper display of PNG.

Wish he'd had to code it to spec for himself.
No RSS feed? :/
Just a guess google power meter? http://www.google.org/powermeter/index.html
We will improve the interface for the video tours using the feedback you and the others (below) have provided. Thank you!
Also, "The Evolution of Lua" — an interesting paper that shows how they came to this fast and somewhat elegant language: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.... [PDF]
Do you have an example of someone using both well?
Probably about the same amount. The aid and money started flowing before the first reporter set foot on Haiti.

How many reporters do we need to tell us the same stories about Haiti? How many reporters in Haiti right now are actually reporting legitimately worthwhile stories and how many are taking part in filming disaster porn where Haiti is nothing more than a stunning visual backdrop for their hackneyed monologues?
I'd expect most visitors to be [so-called] technorati and hence less IE than other browsers.
I'm in the small business space and took a look at your app. What I'm not getting is, who is your customer?
We will definitely reduce the number of fonts. And I though we had the number of fonts under control! I forgot to check the home page, though :S Thanks for noticing it!
LAMP: Processing Language Performance
The Death of Tag Clouds
I wouldn't judge any city by what I find in a hotel bar.
Well, once you collect the data, you just list the countries in roughly the order that you want them in for unrelated ideological reasons. Then the weightings work themselves out - it's plug and play!
Southwest is 90% union.
Haiti Earthquake Survivor: “My iPhone Saved My Life”
I get the warning with Chrome 4.0.249.64 on Windows.
I think it maps rather closely to, "If I were really, really rich, what would the ranking of countries look like based on how much I wanted to live there?"
Indeed. The objective is to under-promise and over-deliver ;)
Unique selling proposition - For one it's going to be free and for small businesses that is always a really key thing. The other is that it completes your move to the "cloud", Google does your email, documents, file hosting, presentation and we do the accounting for a small business you don't need anything else.

So trying to market it to the 1 million+ Google Apps users already out there first that see the benefit of having everything online.
The seasonality of fashion probably isn't that big a problem. Many people regularly buy new watches, handbags, sunglasses and the like for hundreds or thousands of dollars every time the fashion changes, so there is clearly a market. Also there is enough margin in most mid to high end fashion items that you can throw in some cheap electronics without it having too big an effect on the price tag. You're going to buy a spring/summer jacket, a fall jacket and a winter jacket anyway, now they all come with a wearable computer built in. The huge problem is to make them fashionable in the first place.

As for air travel I fail to see the problem. Take off your shirt and send it through the x-ray machine together with your shoes and jacket. Problem solved.
Amazon hikes Kindle royalties to 70%, with a catch
7-Day Forecast for Latitude 45.74°N and Longitude 87.08°W (Elev. 626 ft)
"at Intuit" just a little bit in my space :).

My customer is a small business who use Google Apps.
I should point out that read/only file sharing is the ONLY reason I left and I would come back if they added it.

From the responses in the votebox it sounds like its not a priority for them, so thats why I left.
Or maybe he has a teenage daughter.
It's not about security. It's about perception. If something makes people more comfortable with web applications than with desktop applications (and a "Windows is inherently insecure and broken" perception would do a lot for that) Microsoft will have a problem they probably will not be able to deal with in time.

Remember Google has deep pockets and less legacy to protect. They can move fast.

Microsoft has a very complicated entanglement of obligations and expectations they will have a hard time compromising. The perception of a rule-changing development is incredibly dangerous for them, and giving mixed messages about which way their corporate clients should go with their IT infrastructure won't help either.

Why do you think Microsoft would end up in advantage after such a confrontation?
I would expect some hits to profit margin as well. I'll take an airline with a baggage fee if I don't have baggage, typically a short flight / overnight trip. I'll take Southwest for long haul flights when I typically have luggage. The long haul flights have higher margins than the shorter commuter/feeder flights.
> We're happy to pay per-lb to ship stuff via UPS, but we don't want to pay per-lb for the bags we check?

I went on a trip recently. The combined weight of me and my luggage was perhaps 225 pounds. The combined weight of the young lady standing in line behind me and her luggage was probably 165 pounds. She had to pay substantially more to check two bags instead of one.

As I understand the reasoning, luggage prices increased due to the fuel cost increase of a couple of years ago. Yet somehow me being a foot taller, weighing 70 pounds more, and checking only one bag is cheaper for the airline? I don't understand it.
Older brains make good use of 'useless' information
Weirdly, it was owned by Microsoft until not too long ago.
What is computation?
Cultivating Failure
Also good: "The Implementation of Lua 5.0" (http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/sblp2005.pdf).

Past discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617278

If you want to learn Lua, Ierusalimschy's _Programming in Lua_ (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/) is by far the best book. Lua is one of my favorite languages. While it's good on its own, you'll get a lot more out of it if you're comfortable with C. Lua+C is an excellent combination.
All large businesses try to predict their future revenue. An airline that predicts a future drop in revenue is more likely to add baggage fees to boost revenue.
For current events I follow thedailybeast.com. The comments are filled with trolls though.
What file-sharers or the law say is irrelevant to the fact or non-fact that copying is stealing. Nor whether or not file-sharers want free stuff have anything to do with the non-fact and fact of copying and stealing being an equivalent. Authority and intention doesn't matter. What does matter if it logically make sense to make equivalent the crime of copying to stealing.

To steal is to deprive someone of their property.

To copy is to make duplicates of something. There is no deprivation of property occurring.

Therefore, copying is NOT stealing.
The design's pretty cool.
"... Lots of words about how newspapers are overly verbose ..."

I would have trimmed the title as well: "Cut This Story!" to "Cut This Story".
Dumb question: can you still follow (and post to) Zoho Discussions using e-mail, like you can with Google Groups?
Well, the issue is that Xbox controllers are already USB, they just have a special end.
Is it possible to quantify the level of respect governments have for property right?

Is it possible to quantify the level of regulations and rules made up by government?
In my opinion: The Daily Show and/or Colbert Report. I guess you could say their only bias is toward comedic pessimism. Is it sad to say that a comedy network has become what I believe to be the least biased news? Or is it just our modern evolution of what has always been the place of good satire: to criticize, under the guise of comedy, that which "serious" outlets dare not discuss?
It'd be interesting to see how fast Ruby would run "cached" (i.e. with the AST already assembled in memory,) to see how much of the time is really spent in the parsing and lexing phases.
Does not exist as a single source. Try news sites with diametrically opposed points of view and draw your own conclusions.
Comments that set a positive example for how to discuss things without necessarily agreeing. Most online disagreements get pretty acrimonious, which isn't really necessary.
Your startup looks great, but do tell what the test-case startup on your home page is selling: they've made $94,600 profit from $94,600 in sales!
One of the features we offer at Broadersheet that I'm really proud of is that we can offer "all the sides" of an article to our readers. We can show you the same article from a number of sources.

It's live right now, and I've been sketching up some pretty mad stuff influenced partly by what ^joshu worked on: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/delicious-upcoming-foun...
That is very interesting - thank you.
Any that aren't about US politics?