skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That isn't quite what I meant. I think it goes beyond lack of "technical savvy" or attitude towards web presence. Some things that come to mind:

1) Local vs. global audience. I have noticed that websites for local resources tend to miss the fact that their audience on the web is global. If they have a brick and mortar presence and they aren't in a tourist-oriented industry, they seem to just not think about how to talk to a global audience. They often do a poor job of clearly indicating on their website exactly where they are (as in city/state, never mind street address). This probably also influences the lack of "hours" listed on the website. A lot of places have a certain local culture and "everyone just knows" that all restaurants are closed by 11pm (or whatever), with the obvious exception of a few places like Denny's which "everyone just knows" are open 24/7.

2) Staging. On the web, colors, layout, and architecture of information are the equivalent of "staging" of a brick and mortar business. But people who do staging are unlikely to immediately grasp this about web design. I bet there is little or no real communication happening in most cases about how to match the web design to the physical staging so customers get some kind of intuitive feel for the place from the website.

Basically, I think the mindset/mental geography of someone with a brick and mortar business is going to make most small business owners not just technically unsavvy but actually put up road blocks to the kind of thought process and presentation necessary to make a website that would serve their business well.

I hope that's a little clearer.
There is a saying that every man is a coin viewed from a fixed position. The face of himself that he sees no one else can see, likewise, he sees the face of everyone else that they cannot see. And thus, no man knows another as that other believes himself to be.
Report: Jobs disses Adobe Flash as 'CPU hog'
Nooka Augmented Reality Accessorizer
Google Voice Launches A Series Of Videos To Explain Its “Awesomeness,” Gibberish
and that would be why I said "suggests".
you will want to take a look at how wikileaks does it thing. you will need people in asset havens like bahamas/etc uploading you stuff on the sly, as my understanding is a lot of the way this works is simply information hiding by having an official registry that is text only, having legal standing, not searchable in any electronic way. when a crime is committed you get to initiate a legal proceeding that will eventually unravel the paper trail in the bahamas or wherever, but each step takes n amount of time, and when you have shell companies under shell companies the stalling strategy can be quite effective.
I really liked
"VC's generally don't support subsequent changes to the business plan. A self-funded entrepreneur is constantly making major course corrections, to the point of driving his colleagues crazy. VC's will deny this, but a VC investment is basically a ballistic missile launch, without course corrections."
It was pulled even before the FBI request. The original pull text said something along the lines of "This page has been removed in light of the events in Texas earlier today". Later it was changed to mention the FBI request and gave the link to the smoking gun mirror.
I think the arbiter is quite relevant since a split-brain makes durability impossible.
It seems quite obvious he wasn't going to be paying his hosting bill anymore.
I believe this post is against HN etiquette.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
isn't this the purpose of patents?

... prepare for grotesque oversimplification ...

NewCo creates some innovation and spends a bazillion dollars creating a new market for it (and fails because creating new markets is expensive).

NewCo ultimately runs out of money and dies. VCs retain the assets (including the patents).

LaterCo comes along a few years later with new funding and taps into the market NewCo created with a similar product. LaterCo succeeds.

NewCo's VCs send in their lawyers and LaterCo pays up.

Perhaps the article should be about why VCs have quit taking long term bets.
I really respect this guy. Once you realize your life is over, you might as well take a few other people with you.
The second paper can easily be found via Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=eppstein+convex+and+concave+c...
http://www.cs.ust.hk/mjg_lib/bibs/DPSu/DPSu.Files/p546-eppst...
+1

they are after us! (putting my tin foil hat on)
I store my photos on Flickr. Everything else... yeah, replaceable crap. Nobody can ever steal the contents of my mind.
This blog would hold no value if it were not pinned to this story of "terrorism".

If you look deep and examine what is happening here, 106 comments later, you see that people are thinking. A great thing.

Another question I stop to ask myself: His method was poor and for a lot of people that disqualifies his perspective. But should it?
How to Be Lucky
Great idea. I think I'm still too self-absorbed to actively ask for critiques on my personal character though. Maybe I'll be mature (brave) enough to do this in a couple more years.
I agree. Life isn't fair. That doesn't stop us from seeing a small percentage of people who believe everything should be fair and just going postal, though.
"UNIX already has a standard for storing configuration. It is simple, text-based, scriptable and standardized."

False. Go ahead and cat a few files in /etc/:

nsswitch.conf: key/value, separated by colon. Lists of values are space-separated

fstab: per-line record-based, 6 space-separated fields

passwd: per-line record-based, 7 colon-separated fields

fuse.conf: key/value, separated by equals sign

hdparm.conf: hierarchical, using curly braces; inside that, key/value, separated by equals sign

What "standard" are you referring to?
Printing body parts: A machine that prints organs is coming to market
I'd say smart, disgruntled people aren't as smart as they think they are.

The societal problem is convincing everyone that they're a genius. When life hands them less than the best and they have to overcome it, they just get disgruntled, because "they're too smart" to deal with it.

Parents, remind your children that there's always going to be someone smarter/faster/stronger/etc than them, and that they should focus on doing as well as they can with the circumstances they're given. There's more good in being the best you can be than there is in being the best; for a lucky few, those things are identical, but for the rest of us they aren't.
OK, I see it. If you'd like to communicate over email you can reach me at noblethrasher@gmail.com
I think that's how Google Reader works, or at least I hope that's how it works. They do the polling for the feed and then store it somewhere to serve to anyone who's subscribed through Reader.
I know what you mean regarding communication. And I also agree that one of the biggest problems is filtering. This is something I have looked into quite a lot in the last couple of years, as I have been trying to improve upon my own ideas. I think that filtering gets easier if you have better quality ideas coming into your filter, so that's what I have focused on more in the last year or so. But "quality" is a hard quality to define, especially when it comes to ideas.
As for the sexiness factor: Fun to generate, boring to execute, but shit, nothing is as satisfying as an idea that's done, successful or not, its great to sit back and look at a finished piece of work.
As for selling ideas, I would also love to sell them. I think that is going to be a no go for most of the reasons you state above, hence the idea to give away the ideas. Also, some of my ideas aren't products so to say, but thoughts and explorations, meant to be expanded upon by others. I hope to inspire people and be inspired back.
Which is why I put this question to HN. There are a lot of smart people here who always trump execution over ideas. But they also realise that ideas are necessary too. I wanted to hear how you guys would argue for or against being the idea guy.
Hopefully it will give me an idea how to overcome this problem.
Post up your worst enemies.
It's going to be quite difficult. I am also concerned about the legal issues I may face. I don't doubt we'll get C&D's and other legal threats for defamation or libel.

I really don't know what I'm getting myself into here, but I feel drawn to it.
> I just want to say that there are other routes to explore before taking it this far.

Yes, but they are much less effective. E.g., I have never ever heard of him or his protest before.
What about JS server-side programming? ;)

I imagine if you were a front-end JS programmer by day but doing your fair share of Python / Django then the JS would be a bit easier.
CodeOrgan.com: Translates any webpage into music
Having not played FC2 I don't really know what story that is told so well by the game mechanics is! Any one clear that up?
Let's not confuse 'Hacker' with simply being a 'Geek'. I'd hate to improperly elevate one, or reduce the other. Static HTML?...maybe even the term 'Dork' is more appropriate.
Check out:
ShareASale.com
MyAffiliateProgram.com
CJ.com
Here's info about a documentary film not wanting to get pay performance rights simply to include a ringtone of one of the students sounding.

I had thought there had been a recent change in law or at least that the consensus opinion on this (which I disagree with) is that the use in Mad Hot Ballroom (see links) was fair use (incidental) and didn't require rights holders consent.

My view is that if the ringtone (building in your case) is incidental then you can film without it or use a non copyright soundtrack edit (different building) and it won't matter.

It bothered me that I couldn't remember the details so I looked it up and found "copyright law"+"amy sewell" turned up these:
http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/06/fair_use_use_it.htm...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/06/26/1422248/Copyfraud-Is...
CardPool (YC W10) Wants To Buy And Sell Your Unused Gift Cards
DRM from hell.
But this is perfect for the self-absorbed! It gets everyone thinking and talking about you and your imperfections.
In the old days of LiveJournal (decade ago) there was some brutal honesty meme which was supposed to be 100% anonymous. I made like 50 (exaggeration) different surveys and then made 50 different "private" posts of the link to each individual friend. Of course to everyone it looked just like a friends-only link and they assumed everybody was going to the same anonymous /aggregated survey.

I told them all pretty quickly afterwards about my silliness and put only mildly incriminating questions in the survey, just enough to make them worry about the other memes they'd been filling out.

Of course I also confirmed that one friend was head over heels in love with me. I so happen to be married to that darling girl nowadays.

Moral: If you're filling these out, don't assume it's 100% anonymous to the person you're writing about. They could be sneaky.
The Ideagraph is THE solution for world peace
Nicely done. I've needed this countless times. This looks like it'd be a perfect fit for the mac dashboard... do you know if something like this exists, or how hard it'd be to make?
Ah, I misunderstood your question then.

The connection isn't to Apple's prices: they made it, they get to decide pricing (and features).

The connection is between my previous purchase, and my next (considered) purchase and the connection there is me. Buying doesn't happen in a vacuum, though 'cost to me' is perhaps a better way of looking at it.

The 'charge' occurs when Apple omits a card slot though it is their right to do so. This locks me into their pricing structure, which means I have to pay their prices. I already have 16-gigabytes that I could use in a device with an SD slot, but the lock-in requires that I pay their prices, and if I want the 32-gigabyte iPad, then I have to pay what Apple charges and I cannot use my previous purchase to offset that cost.
Worth noting that these labour shortages are localised to the coastal areas. There are no shortages when you consider all the people in interior regions (according to the article, anyway).
I don't think it's that simple. First of all, risk cannot be measured, so the fact that a person takes as much risk as they can bear is incorrect, it's all an illusion. I think it's easy to look back at let's say, Facebook, and say that they were a risky bet with a huge potential for growth. But the fact is that this kind of disruption cannot be predicted, in other words, no one in their right mind would have predicted Facebook to grow this big.

What I am trying to say, is that there is no point on investing in a company simply because they are risky/unpredictable and hope that they happen to be at the upper end of the tail and give back huge returns-- that would be a terrible strategy.
Examples? Uh, pretty much the entire Gnome desktop? Pretty much all Gnome applications? Gedit, Nautilus, Gnome Terminal, Metacity, Compiz? Yeah so GConf isn't a standard for the entire system. So what, does it need to? GConf has never promoted itself as a system-wide standard, just as a standard for Gnome.

The point? As someone else said, GConf provides change notifications, something which is an integral part of the Gnome UI experience: instant-apply for all settings. If you change a window manager hotkey in a config tool, Metacity/Compiz will immediately notice the change. If you change some Gedit setting in a different tool then Gedit will immediately pick it up. Firefox doesn't use GConf because they already have their own cross-platform config storage system, and they suffer for it: if I change the fonts (font settings are stored in GConf) then every GTK app immediately picks up the change, but not Firefox - I have to restart it.

You said GConf is a reinvention of the registry, and for some reason you apply a negative label on that. None of the technical reasons on why the registry sucks, as mentioned in the article, is true for GConf:

- GConf does not store settings in a big monolithic file that tries to reimplement the filesystem. It stores each config directory as a separate XML file on the regular filesystem. These XML files are parseable and editable with standard XML tools, which are plentiful.

- GConf has pluggable backends. The XML one is just the default one. You can write a backend that stores settings in an SQlite database, a MySQL database, or even the Windows registry, or maybe as files in /etc if that's what you really want.

- GConf is completely open. There are no weird file format glitches. The default XML files are portable between machine architectures.

Basically the only reason you hate GConf is because it looks like the registry, and because the registry is bad, everything that looks like it must automatically be bad regardless of their actual design and implementation merits, right? What is this, 2002? I thought people were finally over this nonsense but apparently not.
I think you've misinterpreted the OP or the purpose of svn-git -- that programming language metaphor doesn't work at all.

Rather, everybody at his job uses Notepad and he'd like to use vim. It improves his performance and affects nobody else.
I think there is a communication failure here.

Redistribution in this context would mean using ones copy to create further copies. If the number of copies you bought is the number you sold then you're simply further distributed the originals (allowed by First-Sale). The draftees would need to add a note in the interpretations section of the legislation to avoid such a discrepancy.
Before we make fun of the webkit folks for not doing the proper work because "it's too slow," remember that these are the same folks that we praise for making the fastest dang HTML rendering engine on the planet. (Or near enough.) Their culture of performance has significantly raised the standard of web browsing performance, and that's not something to take lightly.

I imagine it would have to make a fairly significant difference in rendering quality in order to make any speed losses worthwhile. Death by a thousand cuts and all that.
Rewinding the Clock for Aging Cells
For me javascript is harder. Actually server-side is javascript too. Client-side js is harder because of browser issues, and the fact that client-side js I worry about more things like performance because the client can have a piece of shit pentium 4 workstation with ie6.
People have the same kind of misconception about GPS. Lots of people think a GPS receiver sends signals up to satellites so the satellites can know where it is. [sigh]
What's the point of the createid fields? And why do you hardcode two related companies instead of going for a N-N relationship?
What happens at absolute zero?
How Skype Is Changing the Job Interview
People who think /etc is a standard don't know what they're talking about. Almost every app has its own config file format; some of them just superficially look like each other but really aren't. I can give more examples:

- Apache: hierarchical key/value, separated by space. Hierarchy can be started and ended with XML-like-but-not-quite syntax, where the hierarchy container itself can contain a value.

- Nginx: hierarchical key/value, separated by space. Hierarchies can be started and ended with brackets.

- screenrc: key and one or multiple values, separated by space.

- nanorc: key/value, separated by space.

- /etc/network/*: shell scripts.

- inittab: ??? no idea what the formal syntax is.

People who complain about GConf with the reason that "/etc is superior" usually have no clue how things really work, yet they still behave like they're experts.
I think unladen swallow is going to be a boon to Python and dynamic languages in general. The additional work the unladen swallow team has had to do to get LLVM into a position where it could support a dynamic language has slowed them down, but I'm confident that the effort will end up producing substantial speed boosts while also leaving behind an awesome general purpose VM in LLVM for other people to build on. It's not there yet, but it will be.
The conceptual problem with patents is that they grant an artificial monopoly on something, just like copyright does. That's a distortion of the free market, so if you believe in free markets, a priori they shouldn't be allowed.

To argue otherwise, you will need to show that a practical system can be created that will do enough good to outweigh the artificial monopolies created.
You do realise that KDE and Xfce both have their own configuration storage systems that aren't compatible with gconf, right?

(Disclaimer: I wrote Xfce's current config storage system.)
Making the Old Way Count
Anson, you should have gone with cardly.com.... what were you thinking!!
almost, but not really.

it is closer to transcribing a video
That's my point; we can't control the climate today regardless of the fact that the globe is heating up, cooling down, or staying the same. Who cares? Its bound to change at some point, we might as well learn how to control it to limit those changes.
Find "friends with benefits" using facebook
I'm a back-end programmer by day who dreams of doing embedded work. Hacking the DOM in js is not my specialty.

That said, I've hacked around with node.js.
GDial Pro developer pulls app over issues with Google Voice API
And just a few days after Valentine's Day too ;-)
We don't do a lot of flashy animations or anything like that at my place of employment, so generally it's a, "get it working, get it working reliably" priority order.

Server-side js is something I'd like to do more of, but I rarely have an excuse to whip it out, at home or work. I'm in the process of learning rails with an old friend at home, simply for a change of pace.
He's absolutely a terrorist according to 18 USC 2331:

(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

His explicitly stated goal was to affect the conduct of the government and coerce the civilian population via mass destruction.
KDevelop - probably yes. The rest - probably no. Why do you ask?
IMO the "standard" of /etc is an explicit non-standard. It consists of free-form text and a filesystem - and all the tools that existing for dealing with those things.
>This week, it released the first of these reform ideas (PDF) focusing on the principle of fair use. In addition to "criticism" and "news reporting" and the rest of the items in the fair use preamble, the CRA proposes the addition of three more: "incidental uses, non-consumptive uses, and personal, non-commercial uses." They might sound minor, but these suggestions are bound to provoke controversy.

As you say it is "and personal, non-commercial uses.". This drafting fails as it is not clear if the last clause is a disjunct or not. The article's author misquotes this through out as "personal and non-commercial". There are differences between his version and the draft quoted.

Bear with me.

If activity denies a business of revenue which they otherwise rightly would receive then it is arguably commercial.

Hence a "personal" use could be format shifting, say. But if the business offered (or were going to offer!) the work in that format then the personal use would not be "personal and non-commercial".

tl;dr the wording is subtly ambiguous and needs clearing up
> You could create a library to read the setting, and everyone could just use the library.

You've just described the registry conceptually.
Oh, sorry. I think maybe these are ones that have full text available if you arrive via a google search? I don’t think I’m currently logged into anything special.
I created an account for you. Should see the email soon.
That reminds me of another bug in US copyright law: apparently there is consensus that first sale does not apply to "pure digital" works that are not delivered on physical media. There's some argument that making a copy and deleting the original is different from selling the original.
I surmise his software ventures never succeeded because he hated the IRS more than he loved programming. In 1987 alone, he says, he spent at least 1000 hours railing against the tax code -- about 20 hours a week.

His obsession with, and resentment of, the IRS started when he and others tried to create their own religious organization, ostensibly to draw attention to the capricious laws exempting religious organizations from taxes. How this plan was supposed to work is unclear. L. Ron Hubbard saw the same opportunity and was better at exploiting it.

People don't respond well to acts of violence directed against them or those with whom they empathize. Timothy McVeigh's act caused shock and anger yet achieved nothing. Whatever message Stack wanted to convey has been utterly discredited by attempting to murder people going about their day. And if he wanted to give the government a way to dismiss him, he couldn't have made it any easier.
He states in the final paragraphs that his goal is to affect change in the government and coerce the public to change the government, so he very clearly did have an objective.
Video Commerce: The Quiet Revolution in Online Video[video+transcript]
It's terrorism because it's directly in line with 18 USC 2331:

(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.