skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of these "flaws" are actually flaws.

That's not to say HN doesn't have flaws. But these aren't the droids you're looking for.

The droids you're looking for have to do with solving the problem of growing a community and keeping it intelligent. Inevitably, the tyranny of the majority will prevail, people will leave HN and go to some place smaller and newer, as did those who came here from reddit who came here from digg who came here from slashdot who came here from John Carmack's .plan file.
It wouldn't be fraud. Reread the bill.
I'm not sure this is the same case I have heard of before, but let's assume this person was torrenting some popular songs.

How much does it matter that he was distributing and not just downloading, if there were hundreds of others seeding at the same time? Other downloaders would have been inconvenienced just very slightly by him not being there. Did his contribution lead to an appreciable number of extra downloads, or did it just help the same number of pirates download faster?

With which I just mean to say that there are gradations in distribution...
Anything that lets in more people who will make a positive contribution (as long as they aren't criminals) is fine by me.
I'd suggest 3 methods that might get you a good result:

1) E-mail pg@ycombinator.com, taking note of his advice from http://paulgraham.com/info.html

Since you're in Boston, ask if he'll be here anytime in the next couple of months, and if you could buy him a coffee before / after whatever he's doing. Or, since pg's super-focused on the valley, you could plan a trip to San Francisco, try to pack it full of meetings with other people to maximize value, and ask pg if there's a time during one of your trip days when you could swing by for a chat.

2) If you're more patient, setup Google Alerts / Twitter search RSS feed for "Paul Graham Boston", "Paul Graham speaking at", "Paul Graham scheduled", "Paul Graham presenting at", "site:eventbrite.com Paul Graham", etc. to try and stay aware of what events he's going to, and see if you can attend.

3) Network with some YC founders, and see if they'll introduce you. Surely with as many startups as YC has funded, there are people working on things that you could provide value to, and would be interested in what you're working on.

Good luck!
Actually, I retract that. I just checked the app engine message board again (my post had been delayed for moderation yesterday), and a google engineer responded and offered to look into everyone's apps, and he'd resolved the issue for the others.
I'm guessing fnid, like me, wants those people in too. I'm not sure the candidate pool is the real objection here.
I am a huge fan of the 37signals content. As opposed to failing fast, we are attempting to do it right quickly. Some failures are the nature of the business but we are doing are best to take all parameters into consideration when making decisions.

Thank you very much for your response. We truly appreciate the perspective and reminder that building products for and engaging customers is more important than the framework.
Ask HN: When did the Internet get so slimey?
In the old days, say between around 1994 and 1999, the internet was largely unheard of. Then the dot-com boom and it went crazy. The ideas during the boom were still relatively legitimate, though often crazy. Online pet food isn't a good idea, but they weren't trying to scam people or extort money.

But then the crash came and things started getting shady. We invented "Web 2.0" and then it was all down hill. What happened?

Why are the popular internet companies now, like farmville and zynga and yelp and even google doing absurdly ... wrong... illegal things to people to take their money or further their business? And investors in these scams just sit back and laud their great investment decisions -- their "finds". A lot of these people would be in jail if they were running brick and mortar businesses. They'd be taken in for fraud.

It's really gotten bad and I wonder if we can turn the tide on these kinds of disreputable businesses. Why did it get this way and when and how do we stop it?
$675,000 divided by $1.29 comes out to 523,255 copies distributed, which is ludicrous.
Keith Barry does brain magic
"The guy's obvious error is to apply this approach to the scientific realm"

Which is, of course, the point. As a rule, new scientific theories must match the data better than old ones. Over long periods of time, then, science becomes less wrong in its explanation of those things which can be scientifically investigated. The English Lit major's approach may work well with religion or philosophy, but it doesn't translate well to science.

There is a minor problem with the "less wrong" approach, though: it depends upon your metric for measuring wrongness, and that choice of metric may have a philosophical basis. Consider a small set of points that nearly follow a quadratic. One might say "this appears to be quadratic with small errors"; another might say "this fits a higher-order polynomial with even smaller errors", yet the first might be conceptually/philosophically a better description of data that was quadratic but measured from a sinusoidally-vibrating platform. A poorly chosen method for measuring wrongness could actually make it more difficult to discover underlying explanations of phenomena.
The objection seems to be that it's imperfect, which is almost certainly true. It would be good to push them to improve it, but when all is said and done, we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> 11 M KWH (>11 GWH), according to a slide shot on engadget's coverage
really not wanting to click on any pdf these days.
> Don't relocate, it's the easy way out, change the country.

I guarantee you it isn't easy. It's still better than the alternative though.
You did mis-interpret the gist of the bill.

The gist is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is what it actually says.
This article glosses a very important piece of subscription revenue - churn. Just because a customer paid last month doesn't mean they'll pay this month. This is why it's important to understand "Lifetime Value", i.e. customer lifetime X subscription price.

It turns out that high LTV is correlated closely with high customer acquisition cost. That means getting people to convert to your service is -hard-. I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the "disadvantages" part.

I also think it's silly to write an article on subscriptions as a business model and then mention examples that don't use subscriptions at all.
8 West 40th street now
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl
I'm curious about the law here. What is the threshold for extortion? Seems to me that despite Yelp being pretty shady, modifying the appearance of UGC on their site seems like it might not rise to the level of extortion. After all they are not writing these reviews or encouraging them in any way. We don't even necessarily know if they are deleting them or just reordering or what.
I'm ambivalent about his points. What annoys me are two different, purely technical flaws:

1. Comment formatting is too limited. I want multi-level quoting and lists.

2. Unknown or expired link.
You're saying the same thing. To put it plainly, what I think tptacek is saying, is that after 3 years, investors have a strong upper hand in negotiating a round, knowing that "Homeland Security" has set an artificial bar for how much a company must raise if the founders are to stay in the country.

Edit: he said it explicitly here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148789
This site times out more than any other site I visit regularly. I wish they would fix that first.
If there's some topic that's worth reviving one could always write a blog post and submit it.
I agree with the last 3 points, I was only responding to your previous post.

Take a look at the original studies, or the Scientific American article for a quicker read. (I read it in paper form, so you can probably find it as easily as I can).

As for deliberate practice, the idea sheds some light onto the right and wrong ways to do it. It seems to come back to the theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Deliberate practice is paying attention to the quality of the practice, and continuing to improve the quality. If this is accurate, then it should increase the differences in skill, as the individuals address their own various physical limits. It seems that the difference in the quality of the practice is one of the reasons people pay more for experts to teach them. I think the Olympics can just as easily be used to support the idea, as everyone's practice routines will vary.

Furthermore, studies of conventional wisdom often reveal conventional wisdom to be wrong, so I can't dismiss them. If the results make it easier for people to successfully perform "deliberate practice", then they will probably be well worth the money spent.
There are a ton of startup incubator programs and investor lists and VC blogs and tech meetups out there that could connect you with mentors and advisors.

If you think a 5 minute conversation with PG is going to dramatically affect the success or failure of your venture, I think you might want to broaden your search - there are plenty of other resources out there for new entrepreneurs. You should probably be looking to talk to anyone out there who will listen to you about your idea -- PG is just one guy.
The whole series so far ( http://yuiblog.com/crockford/ ) is, as you would expect, excellent.
given enough time, you can do just about anything, and I suspect that is what's happening.

(this is especially true of software, where you don't need money- only time)
There are many, many links from the discussion when this was submitted just a day or so ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144390
Why exactly do people refer to the DNS as 'distributed' ?

The internet needs a better naming system, one under which removal of an established name cannot happen.
Speaking from a country's self interest, don't rich people benefit the country more than poor? Isn't the US better off tax-wise, and wealthier, if it is able to tax a millionaire than a cab driver? Is there something morally objectionable about trying to attract "desirables" or is it just that we need to see the visa process in some way as "fair?"
For all we know, the fact that this lawsuit was coming could have come out during the acquisition talks and could be some or all of the reason they were called off.

If the acquisition had gone through, this suit - regardless of merit - would have been a huge PR black eye for Google. Similar anger/distrust has been leveled at them by small businesses regarding search results placement and AdWords.
Woah! Are you sure that pownce got attention solely because of "Leah's looks"? or do you think its more likely that its because it was founded by Kevin Rose, who has had much bigger press (cover on Business week, TR is peanuts in comparison) and web exposure (like running one of the most popular sites on the Internet)?

(Will grant that ESR is a pretty good example, for Atwood I dont see the attacks reaching as low a level)
Strange. This made sense to me immediately.
I use a heat pump. It's 55 degrees outside right now, so I'm not using much electricity. I doubt I'd save any money heating with gas.
I lived in Nairobi for a few months in 2004, staying with host families. What amazed me was how resilient the people are. The obstacles they have to overcome on a regular basis are things we take for granted in the "West." Yet the people don't complain and keep going forward. I thought that if ever the infrastructure could be advanced to reduce those obstacles, we would see places just take off.

At that time, there were lots of Internet cafes popping up all around the city and cell phones were becoming quite common.

Since then, I know many Kenyans are now using their cell phones for mobile banking and sending payments across the country to relatives and friends. Technology is playing a big role in circumventing slow bureaucracies. Many of my friends are now on Facebook when some of them didn't even have email in 2004.

I'm pretty confident we'll see some economically strong countries in Africa in my lifetime.
They store all the passwords encrypted (not one-way hashed which is the recommended), and they can only be retrieved and reversed after a member of the security team opens a ticket and explains the reason for using the password (like to investigate malware)

They got root access (at least most hosts I know do), why would they need to reverse an encrypted password that would give them less access than what they already should have? Seems like BS.
HN is written in the 100-year programming language Arc using the first Unlimited Scalability tactic of keeping everything stored as serialized hash tables. Any performance problems you may experience are due to your lack of ability to perceive perfection.
If the permission granted allows it to post something to my feed, that's enough of a deterrent to me.

Reasonably descriptive? Was there something I missed on the two pages prior to the login request? I counted about three brief lines of text and one of them wasn't descriptive at all.

Edit: Please note that when it was first posted to HN and when I viewed the site, there was no screenshot and no bullets. It was just two lines of text that didn't really explain things very well.
On my own online journal, I appear to have picked up a few commenters who take a dim view of freedom.

http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/02/24/google-execs-convicted...
Brilliant patent troll?
Voting on features on the HN Feature Requests page is the best way to get action taken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

For searching HN, http://searchyc.com is a fantastic service, much better than the HN Search linked at the very bottom of HN.

If you're interested in more discussion with startup folks / if you find that Ask HN posts are usually your favorite, you may also enjoy: http://answers.onstartups.com
Agreed. Someone should not have their life ruined for downloading (and distributing) a few songs for no profit. If the RIAA sued people like this, I would be fully in support of it. Of course, the problem is that they would probably lose money on each lawsuit.
Banks, Businesses, Viruses and the UCC
For downloading, he should pay as much as a radio listener pays: nothing.

For distributing, he should pay the same fees that radio stations pay.
How RAF jets gather 3D intelligence in Afghanistan
I think the fact that conversations go stale quickly is a feature. It keeps things from becoming too unproductive, and makes "the last word" in a debate arbitrary.

If you want to continue a discussion that has gone stale, you write a new blog post about it and post it. Discussion continues.
Maybe if "incorporated" cities are thought of (private) corporations rather than as government. That's my best stretch. I suspect, however, that the actual explanation is that capitalist is a synonym for bad/evil on AlterNet.
> don't rich people benefit the country more than poor?

Questions like that cannot be answered in any definite manner. If the rich use their capital to create wealth, then it benefits the country. If the rich use it to alter public policy to their advantage, then it harms the country. A new visa process should not enable the rich to game the system unfairly to their advantage at the expense of other prospective applicants.
$38.70 is also ludicrous, but for the opposite reason. We can't get to the place where we start to ask "how many copies were reasonably distributed and what might the actual damage be?" until we clarify what the actual accusation is.

To the typical user, who thinks that all that is in question is $40 worth of downloads, $20,000 and $200,000 are equally ridiculous damage demands.
Quick glance and please correct me if I got this wrong:

This only affects immigrants with permanent residency status who have been sponsored through this bill/law. You stated:

"This is a bill that proposes to give US venture capitalists the overt ability to terminate the residency status of founders and their families."

True in the sense that if the sponsored entrepreneur was unable to fulfill the job creation, capital investment, and revenue generation terms, then they technically were unable to create a successful enterprise. Any foreign 'entrepreneur' worth his salt should and must know of this requirement and in the awareness of it, must have prepared himself and his family for the consequences.

As for part (A) "...the qualified venture capitalist or qualified super angel investor who sponsored the entrepreneur failed to meet the investment requirements..."

I think this refers to the initial requirements that needed to have been met before the foreign entrepreneur is approved for residency. It could be that the VC committed to the investment (That IS a bitambiguous, but from experience, immigration officials will approve an application and give you a chance to fulfill a financial commitment some time after the sponsored entrepreneur has arrived, provided they are satisfied with whatever guarantee docs you've filed with them.) but was unable to fulfill it, so Homeland Security will start the process of terminating the permanent residency status of the sponsored entrepreneur.

Can this be twisted around by an 'evil' VC? I believe any system CAN be abused around given enough motivation. In this case, if I were an evil VC who convinced Mr. Chatroulette founder from Russia to come to America to blow his idea up 1000x through me, I'd bring him in, dupe him into signing his life away in a 'partnership', promise Homeland Security that I will fulfill my financial commitments, squeeze everything I can from this naive new sponsored entrepreneur in the 6mos-1yr that Homeland Security will take to enforce my commitment, then not pay up. Back to Russia goes 'sponsored entrepreneur' and his concept/resources stay here in the US.

Bottom line for all parties, due diligence. I believe the bill is being put forward in good faith. I believe that they believe it can create jobs. I believe that it is possible it can.

But all things considered, I'd rather concentrate resources on finding the cream of the crop in the US and helping THEM.
i've been thinking about this....

take three coins, arrange them from left to right. i will show how to select one of the three coins with probability 1/3.

toss all three. repeat until only one shows heads. select that coin.

so i think you are wrong :o)
Yeah, though I got one possibly good one from direct contact.
Yeah I should have clarified. I actually do have a handful of smart advisors that have helped me out a great deal. I probably wouldn't have any chance of succeeding if I didn't have their help along the way.

I also have competitors' SEC filings, my usage/conversion stats, etc. that guide me in the right direction at a granular, day to day level.

But I've been reading PG's essays for some time, and wanted to see what he'd think. I definitely don't think a 5 min convo would have an adverse "affect" [sic].
A few labels are doing this. I think it's a fair approach. It ends up being about $10 per song. I don't think they even make you delete the files -- just stop sharing them. You're basically just paying a 10x premium/penalty for obtaining them in an illicit way. Here's what it looks like:

NOTE TO ISP: PLEASE FORWARD THE ENTIRE NOTICE

Re: Unauthorized Use of Copyrights Owned Exclusively by the Zappa Family
Trust
Reference#: XXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXX PST

Dear Sir or Madam:

FFS Enterprises, LLC ('We') represent the following 'copyright owner(s)' The
Zappa Family Trust ('ZFT') by agency agreement.

ZFT are the exclusive owners of copyrights for Frank Zappa musical
compositions, including the musical compositions listed below. It has come
to our attention that {ISP Name} is the service provider for the IP address
listed below, from which unauthorized copying and distribution (downloading,
uploading, file serving, file 'swapping' or other similar activities) of
ZFT's exclusive copyrights listed below is taking place.

This unauthorized copying and distribution constitutes copyright
infringement under the U.S. Copyright Act. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 512(c),
this letter serves as actual notice of infringement.

The ZFT will pursue every available remedy including injunctions and
recovery of attorney's fees, costs and any and all other damages which are
incurred by The ZFT as a result of any action that is commenced against you.
Nothing contained or omitted from this letter is, or shall be deemed to be
either a full statement of the facts or applicable law, an admission of any
fact, or a waiver or limitation of any of The ZFT's rights or remedies, all
of which are specifically retained and reserved.

The information in this notification is accurate. We have a good faith
belief that use of the material in the manner complained of herein is not
authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or by operation of law. I
swear, under penalty of perjury, that I am authorized to act on behalf of
the owner of the exclusive rights that have been infringed.

While The ZFT is entitled to monetary damages from the infringing party
under 17 U.S.C. Section 504, The ZFT believes that it may be expeditious to
settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation.
In order to help you avoid further legal action from The ZFT, we have been
authorized to offer a settlement solution that we believe is reasonable for
everyone. please copy and paste the URL below into a browser and follow the
instructions for the settlement offer:
Seems like a very superficial article, not much meat, especially considering it's such a potentially interesting topic. Shame, I think there were better articles on this blog before.
Nivi, above, is part of VH.
I think they just announced a highly-efficient natural gas electric generator. The question is just how efficient, if it's as efficient as the large centralized power plants we now build then we don't have to waste money on building and maintaining power transmission lines.

If I remember my thermodynamics correctly, the efficiency of a heat engine is constrained by the internal temperature of the engine. The higher the internal temperature, the more efficient the engine can be. This is the basic reason why we build as large power plants as transmission loss allows. With a smaller plant, the engine temperature is much lower for practical reasons, hence the loss in efficiency. (Many other economies of scale reasons.)

So if this device can really beat the efficiency of our current centralized natural gas burning plants, then this is revolutionary. If not, too bad for Colin Powell.
UK shopper accused of being a paedophile for photographing own son
Any idea about the relative efficiencies between this chemical reaction versus a thermodynamic process (say, Sterling Engine)?
But they do not know how much he has distributed. How much should he pay if he distributed 1 song, 100 songs, 10000 songs? Shouldn't Capital Records say how many songs were distributed & that be tied to the verdict?
To Lynch a Child: Bullying and Gender Non-Conformity in Our Nation's Schools
Cryptome.org is Down
Presumably you meant: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
That's actually so good I'm just going to repeat it:

With which I just mean to say that there are gradations in distribution

That's exactly what this whole thing is missing. No one has stopped to calculate what the impact (in monetary damages, even hypothetically on the download==lost sale metric) of a bittorrent client running for x days at home connection upload speed.
I believe this bill was conceived with the best of intentions. I believe everybody advocating it, including venture capitalists, are advocating with the best of intentions.

But their intentions don't matter at all. What matters is the law that the bill will create. And, as I read it, the law that this bill creates will have unintended negative consequences both for immigration and entrepreneurship.

Your last sentence? I absolutely, 100% agree.
Your link doesn't work. This should do it:

http://goo.gl/HGVl
Many Happy Returns, Apache