skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The damage done by US and European agricultural subsidies goes beyond this; developing countries end up worse off than they'd otherwise be if their peoples could profitably sell crops to richer nations. I bluntly say end all subsidies.

However, the USAID thing is just one of those sucks-to-be-you situations. People in a disaster area need food, and in the middle of a disaster, getting them food so they don't riot and/or die is more important than not undercutting local businesses.
Let's be honest, this is one of the most meritless C&D's ever.

Unless Shankman's lawyers are totally incompetent, there's no way they would ever seriously pursue this, since it's obvious to anyone they have no case.

Personally, I would just drop all references to Shankman and HARO from the website and politely send back an email letting them know you did so, and politely point out that there's no legal basis for any of their other absurd requests.
damn, that is clever - I think it may have usurped the django pony in terms of magic ;)
> 400,000 in New York, 200,000 in SF
But they do that anyway. There is always a hot button issue, and your opponent always voted against it.

Bush deserted from the military and used cocaine, and that didn't affect his presidency at all. So there is probably some factor other than voter outrage here.

And anyway, the Patriot Act has very little to do with terrorism. Let's not let idiots run our country.
Welcoming a new school rating
No need for downvoting this comment.

The title ends in "What Now?", the OP asks HN if it's legal to post the C&D letter, and no where in the OP's blog does it say "Of course I've contacted my lawyer".

earle's advice is the best advice posted yet.
Yahoo Learning to Rank Challenge -
Yelp's response: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/02/lady-justice-needs-a-la...
I may just be strange, but building tools for a clearer mental model of language, math, etc, sounds like really cools stuff.
I consider that to be a perfectly legitimate question. The author of the article might be surprised about how many people will flat out derail when asked such a simple question. Given that he was talking to an HR representative, such low-ball questions are to be expected; they are just screening for train wrecks before the real interview. Yeah, it is kind of a bummer to talk to a non-technical HR person, but is it really that bad? Does the author not realize what the job market is like right now? There were probably hundreds of applicants for the position, and there needs to be some kind of high-pass filter to choose which candidates are valuable enough for the real technical people to spend time interviewing.

FTA: "I was speechless. I was literally unable to find the words to respond [...]".

Here's my suggestion: drop the arrogance, and either answer the question, or respectfully explain that the interview is over because the position is not what you expected.
My current (2007?) MacBook Pro laptop battery dies in the arse at 78% if I leave it disconnected. I always leave it connected so I guess that goes to show. My previous iBook G4 battery also had some problems, but it died closer to 20%.
PZ's comment on the study:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_your...
Even magazines have the decency to print "Special Advertising Section" at the top of their faux articles.

I don't know the specific statues, but I believe these are required by law.
If you haven't noticed, the Republicans and their mainsteram media lapdogs are going to attack the Democrats as being "weak on national security" and "weak on terrorism" no matter what they do.

Of course they were going to get attacked on that point. What matters is if there is a public perception about a candidate or party that the attacks can use as leverage to rise above the level of standard electioneering and actually influence a voter.

The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama.

You have obviously confused these people with some idealized version of the world that you imagine might have existed -- they were elected and get to do what they want to or are able to do, not what you want them to do. They are all doing pretty much what they campaigned on and what would be expected of them given the circumstances.
Maybe guelo meant London, Arkansas and Rome, New York.
"Rather not" isn't necessarily the same as "unwilling".

If it's work you'd simply find unpleasant or boring but would still do if it had to be done, delegating it is not a bad thing. (With perhaps the caveat that you should do it at least once so you fully understand it.)

If it's work that you would not do under any circumstances, the proper question might be: why are you allowing your company to do this? Or why are you working for a company that does this?
> A more apt example would be twitter providing a list of people who have been recently followed by people that you are following, with the option of clicking the news item to also follow this new person.

How would that be more apt? In twitter you can make your account private, so only a few selected people can see your actions.

Also a retweet, a reply or even a tweet are all actions (the action to retweet, reply and tweet ie say something).
Why don't most photo sites support HTML5 drag and drop uploads yet? That would reduce complexity in the user experience, and no plugin required.
How long ago was that put up?
Picurio (YC W09) unveils camera-in-browser for Mac/Safari

If it's not going to work as advertised (and it's advertised as being a quick and painless plugin), then what's the point?
As a Flash dev myself it's exactly this idea of the possibility that Flash provides that made the platform appealing to begin with and continues to do so. Sure, you can make some horrible things, but the sheer number of things that you can make is so huge. Is it a good idea to make a 3D visualization of live sound data from the user's microphone and run facial detection on their webcam to overlay the visualization over their mouth while they talk? No, probably not. But I can. And because I can I'm going to experiment a lot more. And out of a million experiments that are only possible with Flash, maybe one is going to produce something truly innovative and unique. That's the power of Flash.

New capabilities of HTML are going to open similar experimental doors, and we'll all be better off in many ways because of it. I believe anything that expands what we can do is inherently a good thing, even if it allows things that should never be done.
I'm pretty sure porn can switch to HTML5 <video> tags anyways. Not quite sure why Flash is a requirement there at all.
Remember, the majority of the debate is about the cause of increase in temperatures, not the existence.
as far as i understood things, a cabinetmaker made "fine" things like, well, cabinets, tables, chairs, while a carpenter made things for construction, like window frames, or flooring.

[edit: well, wikipedia has a whole pile of different things listed under carpentry, so perhaps i remember wrong, or this was a local thing (my grandfather was an odd-job man in leeds, uk)]

[edit2: ah, perhaps the distinction was between carpenters and joiners, which is explained here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joiner - and is a uk-only thing. certainly "joiner" is a word i remember, but that you don't hear any more...]
However, I think there's a pretty big difference between Google and Digg in terms of the service they provide. Digg is way more reliant on their user's participation in order to be relevant. If Digg alienates their user base somehow (perhaps with camouflaged spam?), they're toast.

I actually think google's advertising is significantly less annoying than any other company that provides even less value to their consumer.
>"Also, what's intrinsicialy wrong with someone looking at porn on the train? What makes it more wrong than, say, reading the Bible?"

You're missing the point in the most spectacular possible way.
There is one area where Flash doesn't suck: it provides a great toolset for creating rich interactive audio visual web experiences. If you're making games or animations, it's a great choice.

However it's always (with a few rare exceptions) the wrong tool for making web sites.
Yes, I mean this very sarcastically. Liberals (like myself, I'm as far left as you can get, basically) think that Republicans are Pure Evil and that the Democrats are sent by God to fight those evil forces. In reality, they're all politicians, and they and their friends come before their constituents. I think a lot more Democrats are doing the right thing in general, so I'm willing to support them, but I also realize that they are causing plenty of problems.

A government-by-jrockway would look very different than our current system.
I agree. And like the article says, I have no problem listening to people bitch about things they can't change. Sometimes, the world can suck.
Sheer possibility, sure - but look at what people actually do. The biggest uses of Flash appear to be "show video and audio", followed by "games", and then "make an annoying portfolio site full of pictures that that you can't give someone a specific link to".
So many things are wrong with this rant.

1. "You don’t have to follow convention anymore." Generally, convention makes it easier for visitors to figure out the website and get how to interact with it. The prototypical example is having links in blue with an underline. Form elements that look like other forms' elements are also important.

2. Innovation: Flash is a tool that has created a lot of innovation, yes, but so has Javascript. I'd argue projects like jQuery are promoting innovation much better: it's Javascript that runs on pretty much any browser without the need of a CPU-sucking plugin.

3. Rain City bikes: the author needs to brush up on SEO. Firstly, the page has quite a bit of content that is NOT flash, as cached by Google ( see http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:ggNvi1Rjd3UJ:www.raincity... ). Secondly, the anchor text of a page will make it rank higher for queries that match the anchor text; this is regardless of the contents of the page. The extreme examples of this are called Google Bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb . For Rain City, this query shows you how much the anchor text is helping them: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=allinanchor%3ADutch+Bikes .

In short: nothing in the post is really arguing why Flash doesn't suck.
I agree that we don't need any more Hoovers but that's all we have. If you read about the scope of Hoover's interventions into the American economy in 1929 after the crash until he left office you wouldn't suggest that he left the economy alone or did too little.
Bloom Energy Set to Unveil “Miraculous” Micro Power Plant
What keeps me out of church is the fact that the Bible could just as easily have been written by Satan, and that following Jesus would condemn me to hell.

Now, granted, global warming is more likely, to me, than hell, but not nearly as hot, so it's a lot more worth considering the costs involved :)
"They are all doing pretty much what they campaigned on and what would be expected of them given the circumstances."

You must be joking. Did Obama withdraw all combat troops from Iraq? Did he close Guantanamo? Where are all those "green jobs" he promised? Funding nuclear power plants doesn't exactly qualify. What exactly has he done that was promised during the campaign? From what I can see he's backpedaled or even completely flip-flopped on what he promised.

But it's not just about Obama. The Democrats have been heaping on the rhetoric to seem like an opposition party during the whole Bush term, but when it came time to actually vote against his policies they virtually always caved (with social-security being the only notable exception) and voted along with Bush and the Republicans, whether it was on the funding of the Iraq war, or on the PATRIOT Act, on torture, on habeas corpus, on wiretapping, etc.

It's not some "fantasy" that they were against these things. They were, in word. But when it came time to act on their rhetoric they caved.

Now that the Democrats are in power, they have more of a chance to effect change than ever. But what are they choosing to do with that chance? They're choosing to support and extend Bush's policies (by keeping the Iraq war going, by expanding the war in Afghanistan, by fighting to keep innocent people in jail without trial, by continuing to send prisoners to be tortured in other countries, etc..).

This outrageous behavior is not making them any fans, except among the neocons, who have heaped much praise upon Obama's cabinet nominees, and must be very pleased with what they've accomplished.
I think this misses a lot of points. For every person that lost money in savings accounts and smart investments (me), there is another person that got to buy their home with 4% financing instead of the 8 or 10%. So if your article wants to count losses from low interest rates, it should also offset them against gains from cheap loans. (Also, TARP probably didn't have much to do with this. It just meant that the name on your bank account stayed "Bank of America" instead of "Bank of the United States of America".)
That's some JavaScript kung-fu skill.

Excellent comment, thanks.
Here's a cool video made by some nerds in this group:
https://tjackson.blob.core.windows.net/videos/GymOfTheFuture...

Linked from this blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/familyhealthguy/archive/2010/02/22/mag...
Those are large numbers but few people in those cities vote in U.S. elections :)
Evidence that shake, pinch, spread and multi-touch are non-obvious UI features that average folks would not discover quickly on their own and likely need help understanding? Please. At the very least, they'd need a short video clip or a getting started guide to explain these features. They're cool and valuable, but not intuitive.

I'm a relatively smart guy, and the first time I picked up a new iPod shuffle (with the controls on the headphones) it took me quite a while to figure out that:
1) The area between the volume up/down buttons was a separate button
2) How to use that center button.

Apple has gotten very good at forcing people to learn new, unfamiliar interfaces. To say that these interfaces are better is a matter of opinion, and to say they're easier than a mouse puck on the desk with a corresponding screen cursor and a "start" menu or icons on a dock is laughable.
The big problem with these type of review sites is that it's pretty difficult to guarantee review authenticity. A competitor could post a bad review of your business, you could post a shiny review of your own business, nimrods who've never purchased anything from you can write a bad review, etc.

When there's more money involved, and when the business community being reviewed is more specific and defined it has proven to be very useful and successful. I.e. Angie's List.

Anonymous web reviews were useful once upon a time before the web grew up, and marketers started gaming the system en masse.

What I'd pay for is a sort of premium search tool that guarantees the authenticity of everything it serves up.
The PR push on this is amazing. Over thirty Hacker News submissions in just four days?

http://searchyc.com/submissions/bloom?sort=by_date
So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack.

Or, the courts knock it down as unconstitutional.
I think you mean s/contentious/conscious/. But you're right: self-posts are definitely acceptable. At least, given my submission history, they had better be. ;-)
Defend Against Malicious PDFs
Precisely. This is the point I try to make. Flash gives life to the experimental web.

Anyone care to tell me why web devs should want Flash dead? No, not a dumb blanket statement regarding open source. Think.

Flash sets the stage (no pun intended) for innovation on the web.

What if a developer wanted to introduced a new approach to video conferencing / VOIP and allowed developers to play with the experience among multiple audiences?

Why is Flash the spooky village witch, to which we must burn at the stake?

We'll wait on the W3C to "standardize" innovative processes into browsers. Good luck with that.
SeaWorld Shuts Down Shamu's Twitter Feed (yes, the killer whale)
I think the article makes a pretty poor case for Flash with it's examples. Blizzard's marketing sites are the de facto example I give of Flash used right - incredible and unintrusive layering of audio and animation on top of a website. Flash makes the difference between good and great.

I'll leave these here:

http://starcraft2.com/

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/

http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/?rhtml=y
Betting on the midwest in the same breath as looking down on Roulette and Craps? Are you sure you're not a gambling man? Having grown up in the midwest, let me tell you that beyond the fact that it's cold (it is), except for Chicago, it's rather desolate and depressing. Even Chicago is pretty miserable in the winter. I know dozens of entrepreneurs from Illinois and Indiana who moved to SF as soon as they graduated university.

I'm fairly certain nobody has ever attend Berkeley or Stanford and said "Oooh I can't wait to move to Cleveland when I graduate!"
At the moment I plug in my camera, iPhoto opens, I click 'Import All', go back to my browser click Browse, click Media, click iPhoto, click 'Last Import' and click the photo I'm after.

Whilst you are saving a few clicks out of that routine, you're also asking me to install something that ties me to Safari so that I can save a couple of clicks and not have a local copy; so I haven't bothered trying it.

I think I understand the value you're trying to offer but I'm not convinced that what you have is sufficiently better than what already exists (at least on OS X).
I don't understand why it's a 'shitty move on his part'. You started a fight and called the guy out by name. Why wouldn't you expect him to react?

How would you feel if instead of offering to partner, I borrowed the concept of your business (after you had spent a few years proving the model) and started a competitor while only crediting you for the inspiration?

I bet you'd be wee bit annoyed, no?
Out of curiosity does anyone know if Flightcaster use this type of data in it's analytics ?
Well, I know you're not going to like hearing this, but I'd first remove any mention of his name. Then I'd contact an attorney immediately. HN and blog readers are not sufficient sources of legal advice when facing a lawsuit. (They're more harm than good even when you're not, and now that he's spent legal fees you're not in Kansas anymore).
I wonder if this could've garnered any interest at all if it wasn't for Peter Seibel's name attached to it. I don't mean just the hn submission, the website itself.
Of course the difference is that tea partiers are upstanding Real Americans while the Iraq war protesters were dirty fucking hippies so they don't count.
If you're under your competitors' radar then you're probably under your potential customers' radar, too, right?
Hardly a strawman

>> Basically, I don't see how being employed by 'the public' means that contracts that you agreed to and signed can be ripped up at will by the other party.
>Because "the public" can't take their money elsewhere if it doesn't like the decisions made by management.

I also don't see where you are referring to when you say
> As I wrote, I think that public employee contracts should be limited in ways that private employee contracts aren't limited.

In any event I find it hard to grasp your position. You don't think that being employed by the government means that you shouldn't have the protection of a contract, and you do think that public employee contracts should be limited in ways that private employee contracts aren't.
Just a quick point, you do not need to own a car and pay for car insurance in SF. I've been car-free for two years. Whenever I need to go somewhere that isn't convenient to my schedule or by public transit, I use zipcar, which is very convenient (at least in my neighborhood). Between car payments, insurance, maintenance, fuel, parking, and parking tickets I used to pay an average of $1,500/month for my vehicle. Now I spend about $70/month on Muni/BART/Caltrain, and between $100-$400/month on zipcar.
while it is ertainly not good idea to intentionaly deep-cycle Lithium based batteried, there is also another good advice: remove battery when you intend to use laptop for long time (more than sy 3 hours) on mains power. Althought lithium-based batteries tend to lose capacity with age, this effect is strongly correlated with temperature and running laptop produces heat that will increase battery's temperature. (this requires wall suply that is able to cover laptop's peak power usage, which is nowadays not always the case)
I don't think it would help my case if they knew the referring site was called Hacker News.
How to Avoid Trademark Infringement When Selecting Business and Product Names
Using a direct competitors name without permission in a commercial application, where it could be construed as an implied endorsement, is not a good idea.
> Oh really? How did forcing "loans" on Wells Fargo and other banks that didn't need money save us from anything?

Part of the force in economics is psychology. If enough people think the dollar will crash then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know if you were paying attention when, after Congress first rejected TARP, the stock market shot down severely again. There are many people out there that believe the dollar will crash - something Ron Paul has warned for a long time, long before our current economic crisis (a big reason for his sudden popularity). Many people still believe it's not a question of if but when. The scary thing is just how much everything flipped upside down, and Dr. Paul went from "kook" to genius, while at the same time Warren Buffet tells us he also noticed the shift, while attending a birthday party of well-to-do friends, where many started asking if their money-market investments were safe: "When people who drive Rolls-Royces are worrying about their piggy banks, you know you've got a problem" - Warren Buffet (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126056572135687829.html)
Interesting that Hacker News folks jumped to the qualitative ideas that boil down to:
1. Dude! You built something cool! He's after you! Cool! You might lose it! Not cool.
2. You need a lawyer.

My immediate response to the "What Now?" was do some research on this guy. Five minutes of Google searching and Ryan is in a much better position knowing who he's dealing with...

Note that knowing about Peter's past legal stuff doesn't change the options:
1. Give up, give in.
2. Stand up and fight.
3. Get a lawyer and decide to do 1 or 2.

That said, here are some links that may be of interest. Please note I have no vested interest in either party - just was curious.

Wonder if I'll get a C&D too for sharing information:
1. The lawyer representing HARO, who's done some 9-11 related work: http://www.andersonkill.com/attorneysprofile.asp?id=5141
2. WIRED coverage: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/tag/help-a-reporter-out/
3. Past domain arbitration for Peter's LLC: http://domain.adrforum.com/domains/decisions/1259290.htm
4. MediaBistro coverage of a conflict between Shankman's LLC and a PR agency: http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/agencies/former_haro_pr_...
"... I was originally inspired by Peter Shankman’s HelpAReporterOut (HARO) service, and I mentioned that on the about page ..."

When honesty gets you into trouble.

I look at this and think for a journalist, reporter or PR hack this could be a defining point in how your company can make it. So tread carefully. Having said that, what you have done is validate the idea by identifying a competitor who wants what you have have - but paying as little as possible, using the lawyers as bullies. This is where YC as opposed to NYC might be able to give advice. Would it be any good to shoot pg a very short email with attached url?

Get legal advice.