skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were a memetic engineer in the pay of the rightsholders I'd probably try to coopt the term 'leech'. As it has connotations of parasitism and failure to contribute; and it's already in use in the community for people who download but never upload (almost every bittorrent tracker will report the number of leechers and seeders).
s/opinion/spit-test/g
I don't have a reference to back this up, but I seem to remember that the word piracy was deliberately chosen but the industry to make it sound like a real crime. Copying and sharing were the words used by ordinary users usually.
Then you'll need patent reform.

A sane patent system is a requirement for a flourishing economy.
Exactly. I think Gladwell -- citing that study -- uses the term "deliberate practice," where it's not the same thing over and over, but going beyond what you did the day before or at least doing part of it differently, in order to stretch and acquire more skill.
Rather rediscovered british algorithm independently
* keep trying
I know, but I was being pedantic :)
readwriteweb.com is wonderful website that promotes latest & exclusive news..

www.diolt.com
Facebook & Twitter Sit on Sidelines, MySpace Jumps Into Bulk User Data Sales
MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.
hangs head ... check, check, and check.

Although I prefer gorp (good old raisins and peanuts). ;)
The thing that fascinates me about psychopathy, along with ASPD, autistic-spectrum, etc, is that many of these "disorders" or "syndromes" are just different ways that minds can work. Humans come in so many flavors! In some ways, it's the closest thing we have to interacting with alien intelligences: people who can communicate, process information, make plans, but who don't line up with our deeply ingrained expectations of eye contact, trust, low-risk behavior, or empathy.

While I suspect that normal human behavior has significant adaptive advantages in promoting the success of the species, I frequently wonder about a society of people who are all autistic-spectrum, or who all exhibit schizoaffective disorder, or are all manic-depressive. Would their psychologists form diagnostic handbooks for the clearly maladaptive trait of aggressive interpersonal contact, or trusting another person to watch their children?

Bonus question: if you're religiously inclined, do the deities of your choice love and respect these societies? Is there something morally superior about normal human behavior? What spiritual beliefs might they form for themselves?
The euphemistic treadmill runs in both directions!
Why do we assume that higher house prices = good?
He also misses that a website is not the only aspect of most businesses. A web only company might be able to get away with a logo from 99 logos, but a brick and mortar store would likely have some problems.

My experience is that there isn't a lot of good cross over between print designers and web designers as the skill sets differ greatly. If I need a logo for my business I expect that it's going to cost me about $1k or maybe more. I will be able to use the assets for the web, print, video etc. This has been pointed out before, but I would also want my designer to take into consideration how the logo looks away from the screen. Is it legible on a business card? Would it scale up to a billboard or signage for my storefront?

The other issue with things from 99 designs is that they are often built from templates and you could run into licensing problems later. That could be an expensive mistake if you attempt to register trademarks or copyrights and submit anything with those designs in them. Overall the article is simply short sighted.
You don't have to "be Google" to benefit from caching. An e-commerce site that is more responsive sells more.

One reason for using caching in a website is having less load so that you can serve more visitors. Another is simply to give each visitor an experience with a faster website. If you can cache entire pages and bring a response down from say 300ms to 30ms that makes a big difference.
The problem is that the businesses are trying to hold Yelp responsible for its user's behaviors. The fact that nobody clicks through when the business has a 3-star rating is not Yelp's fault, it's the collective-userbase's fault.

Yelp is being sued because it's an easy target for angry business owners, not because they did anything wrong. (If they didn't exist, they wouldn't push any traffic to the restaurant. The problem is that they do exist and that users trust them.)
I thought he meant PICK as in <insert language here>.
Ordinarily The Daily WTF is good for a chuckle, but this was actually insightful. I find that it applies to the HN user base, since we're (or we think we are) the employees most likely to "evaporate" and leave the job security types behind.
Ask HN: How can a non-technical/non-CS graduate enter the high tech business?
Hi, since almost all of HN population are coders that are involved in high tech ventures, it seems to be the perfect place to ask this question.

I am a college student on my final premed semester, and I have several startup ideas tickling. I'm thinking of taking a time off from school after graduation (before taking MD) to pursue my idea.

The question arises when I figured out that it seems that tech startup founders are expected to be coders and CS grads. I am a hobbyist coder myself (have been programming since my IS class on highschool) and I have developed a (very) rough prototype of several of my ideas but certainly it ain't as pretty when compared to a code written by a guy that wrote their own kernel on assembly for CS class.

So what do you think about this situation? Should I just continue and deal with the non-technical founder dilemma? Or is going back to college for a CS/engineering degree worth it?

Ohh and even on the non-startup field, I still wonder how many non-coder are in the high tech industry. Guy Kawasaki took psychology, Tom Anderson took literature, and of course Ray Muzka from Bioware is an MD.
You could scroll down to where they break it out by ethnicity. :)
All very valid points. I don't disagree, but I was certainly interested in being more simplistic, namely because the article was.
I suggest splitting what's right from what feels good. You need a healthy dose of the latter to keep motivation (especially if you're a single founder), but it's crucial to act on what's right.

So then it's a matter of wearing different hats - when you need to make a decision wait till you're rested and in a neutral mood and put on your "what's right" hat. When you're bummed out reach out for "what feels good" bucket and indulge yourself.

Here's my personal bucket of "feel good": http://appcomments.com/app/GeeTasks__the_Google_Tasks_app
Need to Vent? Hello, Facebook.
Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine... And Fighting It
Case in point: Blockbuster versus Netflix

http://www.onlykent.com/20100318/blockbuster-bankruptcy-2010...
The oldest tree on the Earth was cut down by a grad student to measure its rings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29
A speculative point further in this outbreaking Future:

Jipi and the Paranoid Chip, by Neal Stephenson

http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html

(Submitted as its own HN item at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1201806 ).
You have learned a lesson all of us learn at some point - cheapskates are low-quality users.

Raise the price to attract a better audience, or get out of this market segment if you can't.
I use Python quite a lot before I try Scala (on JVM). I have to say the slow Scala interpreter startup (due to JVM, again) really pisses me off for scripting in Scala (otherwise it's a nice language for scripting).
Your argument begs its conclusion. You say that someone in the music industry must understand "the fundamental difference between X and Y." This implies that there is such a difference and takes it as fact without asserting it as such. That is normally fine, but in this case that's the exact point you are debating with the music industry.
that's how it works in Mercurial, if you make your branches by cloning.
The problems I have with "distance [1,2], [5,6]" are:

0. It breaks the fundamental OO convention and doesn't encapsulate logic and data.

1. It's not clear what it means unless you look up the docs.

2. It's implementation is complex, making it more difficult to understand and maintain

3. It fails to separate concerns, making it less extensible/modifiable. e.g. What if you wanted to override the setting behavior? You couldn't do it in one place.
Merging Lucene and Solr
At the day job, they run an all-MS-windows environment. So i use IronPython to write administration scripts for the database and to do some calculation or migrate datasets or things like that.

It is definitely slow, but I am willing to deal with that because Python as a language shines with such tasks.(or any dynamic language I guess)
All demographics had an increase in obesity, but it is increasing faster in black and hispanic populations (at least for male children):

http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood/prevalence.html

I should add that I find something subtly unpleasant about the phrasing of your question, but I'm having trouble articulating it.
* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help

I saw a few "taught myself [such and such]" in this thread and wonders what that means exactly. What do you mean by "from scratch without any help"?

I wouldn't believe you didn't read anything at all about the languages because you can't just guess stuff like that :), but did you pick up a book and learn? did you read the documentation? If so, isn't that some kind of help?

Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"?
I agree that companies should be more aware of the fact that people leave jobs, and that it's an essential part of the economy. However, using biglaw (Cravath system) as a model for workplace culture is a really bad idea. Go here-- http://www.xoxohth.com/ -- if you want to see the personality traits that this work culture attracts and encourages.
Here's my explanation of Monads, assuming one knows the basics of modern imperative programming, and knows what a first-class function is (even thinking of it as a function pointer will do, if you don't).

Monads are essentially a design pattern, an abstraction, for dealing with items of some arbitrary type (call it "a") in some way.

Instead of working with values of type "a" directly, you work at one step removed. You hand the value of type "a" off to the monad, and it hands you back an opaque box (of type "M a") which logically contains your value. Now, instead of operating on the value directly, you instead hand the box a function that's supposed to apply to the contents of the box, and in return you're given back a new box with the function applied to the contents of the old box. That's basically it.

The interesting bit is that the monad - the box - sits between the function you're trying to apply, and the value it's supposed to apply to. That gives it the opportunity to do clever things. For example, the Maybe monad can keep track of whether the box is empty or not, and only apply the function you pass in if there's actually a value there. The List monad lets you apply operations to multiple values as if it were only one value (i.e. it's like an implied map). The IO monad takes in your function that's supposed to be applied to (e.g.) whatever was read from input, and hands you back a box that appears to contain the results of that operation. The catch is that the box is opaque - you can never look inside it - so there's no way for you to tell, from the outside, whether or not there were any side-effects. The IO monad can be looked at in another way: you can think of it as queuing up all the actions to perform on I/O, but actually building up an imperative program inside the box, which only ever gets opened up and evaluated after your program has finished its whole pure computation. (This is just a mental model for IO in the context of pure functional programming, with no side-effects.)

Putting a value into the box is the unit operator, also called return in Haskell. Passing in a function to the box and getting a new box in return is the bind operator, spelled >>= in Haskell, but simplified by do notation.
That is not it at all. The lawsuit claims (from what I read in the article) that the issue is before turning down an offer to advertise on the site for $300 a month, the company had a 4.5 star rating. Two days after the refusal, the company claims that six out of seven 5 star reviews were removed (by Yelp).

This is about being forced to pay to keep your good reviews, not about page views. The company is just saying that with a reduced rating they saw less traffic, which is to be expected.
"Rightsholders" sounds too respectable. They should be called Information Monopolists (IM).
She could also have given him her boyfriend's email address, which would not have been too much harder than making a phone call. Numbers are harder to remember because it's a string of numbers. Email addresses are easier since the letters form actual words and names.
IMHO, the businesses are suing Yelp because it appears that not buying advertising results in negative effects. While that may not really be true and it could indeed be Yelp's ranking algorithm automatically removing the reviews, the fact that most of Yelp's salespeople apparently seem to be parroting the "buy advertising and you'll get good reviews" line makes this look all the more suspicious in the eyes of the business owners.
yup.. seriously why so many points? common editors/superusers...
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ can be a fun thing to play around with. (You can write agent-based simulations in logo)
Monads in Scala
That link appears to be a list of discussions of law school admissions, not personality traits.
This was one of the most insightful posts on Daily WTF. Unable to find much online about the Cravath system - although having seen it pop up in other references to why the starting salaries of lawyers was so messed up - I started the wikipedia article on it.

For a privately published 3-volume history of one law firm, I was surprised that so many libraries had a copy of the history of the Cravath law firm. Not a lot of them are available on interlibrary loan.
Wow, I did not read this, I just started a thread very similar to this one. I am a self-taught coder myself, and since I dont live in Sillicon valley, I really wonder how is the attitude to non-tech founder in valley? From what I read in HN it seems that PG hates them with passion; how bout other early stage investors/VCs?
Oh man, the lobbyists are definitely the superheroes of democracy. 1 lobbyist has the power of something like 1000000 voters.
But if Yelp differentially applies policies to nudge a business down to 3 stars -- then what?

Anecdotal evidence continues to emerge that Yelp's black-box filters against 'suspicious' reviews have a strictness dial controlled by ad payments.
You have to ask yourself what a CS degree would make different. You have an idea, you have a prototype. That should be enough for angel funding or recruiting a more technical co-founder.

Also, a pet peeve of mine is when people call their programming code "a code". My poem isn't as pretty when compared to a words written by a guy that is related to Shakespeare.
Speeding up Terminal.app or iTerm startup on Mac OSX
Ask HN: One startup at a time?
I have a friend who's asked me to work on a startup with him and several others. They have secured 10s of thousands for this new venture. The idea seems ok but nothing has been executed yet.. Just a lot of talk basically at this point.

I have also been working on another web startup that is about to go into public beta within 1-2 months. That startup has no funding, but it does have a nearly finished and well fleshed out product with a few private beta users already and it's only 2 founders instead of 5 or 6 which the other one has.

My friend has indicated that I would only be involved part-time but I am the most technical guy on the team so I know my involvement would probably require a lot more than that and as anyone who's done a startup knows - it ain't easy..

It's tempting of course b/c of how well funded they are but it would be really hard for me to distract myself from something that I put a year of my life into and is nearly finished. I also realize how great a divide there is between talking about building a product and actually building a product even if you're well funded.

I wanted to know if anyone out there has had a similar experience and/or has been successful dividing their time between 2 or more startups or if you think the idea of doing multiple startups at a time is just plain crazy.. What would you do?

thanks
It's interesting to see the seemingly strong correlation between the highest obesity rates and the highest diabetes rates. I would have guessed, sure, but this looks like fairly strong evidence there's a correlation
so according to your experience, does going to college and getting an IT degree worth it? or should non-tech founders self-taught and continue with their startups anyway?
I have a terabyte of zeros in a zip file somewhere. Virus checkers don't really have a problem with it, though.
Read it. These people are representative of the way professionals in Wall Street's "up-or-out" jungle think. Some of the things you'll read on that site will appall you.

This is what the biglaw partners produced by creating a professional environment in which only a few percent have a chance at making partner, and the rest have essentially wasted years of their life for nothing.
Google Flu Trends
Yes I could do that ... but I left the F1-12 keys on my MacBook to its default, which controls dim the screen, volume and stuff like that. So to press CTRL+F2 I actually have to press FN+CTRL+F2. Try this combination on a MacBook (with only the left CTRL) and see how awkward it feels ... It completely screws the experience of "shortcuts".
While research might show that in some cases, I'm sure it's not true in all industries. And whatever anyone wants to call it (a rather silly debate), copyright infringement isn't right. Site designs, indie music, the written word, photographs, open source software: it's not just big industry.

But back to the research, I'd be interested if they focused on the industries, or rather, simply the medium (TV, Movies).
I know that you're thinking: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". But when I use caching, I don't consider it premature at all. It's just a best practice, like not writing O(n^2) loops. Why wait until your site starts to "bog under load"?
The flaw in your argument defending NPEs is that even if the physics is correct there will be countless engineering challenges to overcome between the theoretical invention and the actual working billion dollar device. I put forth that the form of the invention after it has gone through that process of building a real protype will be qualitatively different than the theoretical one the NPE designed. So, the patent for the theoretical device will be next to worthless to society because it doesn't represent the form of something that will actually work. Yet, under current patent law the NPE would be able to extort money from the company that did build the actual working form.

One problem IS that NPEs should not be allowed. There should be several requirements for a patent: 1. You must produce an actual, working prototype. 2. If some period of time (say, 2 years) elapses during which you're not physically producing copies of the device for sale, you should lose the patent right and it becomes public domain. Trademarks have to be defended to be kept; patents should have to be backed with production to be kept. 3. Patents should be non-transferable. Companies should not be allowed to own patents, only inventors; the inventor can give license to a company to make his invention.
How does this make him a psychopath? This is just common sense business/ money making.
That's what I wanted to know myself. I don't live in the bay area, although I have plans to move there if I started my venture. The problem is that from what I read in YC, angels and VCs such as PG seems to hate non-tech founder with passion.
i don't really agree with your assertion about great devs. i would word it such that great devs will write their own tools from the ground up only if there aren't already tools out there that will do the job. DRY etc etc
Abandoned Salt Mine in Romania
ComputerWorldUK: Zeus 1.3 comes with hardware-based anti-piracy protection
Is there a need to state the obvious? Both copyright infringement and theft can be economically damaging to the victim, but this does not mean they are equivalent.
An uncached system is easy to understand; things happen when the code says they happen. A cached system is much more opaque when it comes to understanding performance. You want to opaquify your system after it is broadly correct, not before. "Spend" your caching dollars on the good system, not the bad one.

IMHO, this is not a fundamental truth, but an accidental one. If a framework or codebase was designed from day one to avoid this effect, it might be possible to dodge this problem. But I haven't seen one really get this right yet, and I think you might have to go strongly functional to get there.
There is also this excellent PDF from the Melbourne Scala Users Group:

http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~bjpop/slides/scala_monads.pdf
> I'm even more interested in trying out tarsnap!

I'm even more interested in maybe considering trying out tarsnap!

:)
Is web design becoming a commodity? In some cases it has been for a while, but like all professionals, a good designer will learn new skills and adapt to the changing world - like crazy jquery kung fu or iphone samurai.
Ask HN: Buying a Patent and forming a business around it
I'm interested to here stories, anecdotes, etc. from people who have bought the rights to a patent and formed a business around the patent.

Perhaps it was the product or just a process to make the product. Also would like to hear about experiences with using patent brokers. Good idea?

Even if it's not first hand information any links of the sort would be appreciated.
Where will this all end? Is plagiarism theft? Is copying your neighbour's garden design theft? Is copying a competitors phone design theft?

The digital rights for both sides need to be worked out. I'm all for investors making money, but paying copyright holders to sing folk songs (long after the initial money has been made) can't be fair either.

Some of this is just greed over sales that would never have happened really, and a want to make content scarce when it's not.
MJ == michael jordan
Definitely not.. I have a CS degree myself but some of the best coders/entrepreneurs I know did not get a CS degree.. I might add that it's more important to understand what the technology is capable of than how to make it work. You can always find someone to help you make it work later on after you've fleshed out your idea.

Excessive education seems to be at odds with a lot of successful entrepreneurs.. If anything, going back to school to get a CS degree will just slow you down. I'd dive in head first. I think the best entrepreneurs are doers and not passive learners.

Build to learn, don't learn to build as the saying goes.
what did you use that for?
YouTube Defense: Viacom "Secretly Uploaded" Content, And They Tried To Buy Us
Ask HN: Who's hiring? (march 2010)
It's that time again!