skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a programmer myself, my first reaction to the headline was, "Oh no." Programs are simply tools, and I assumed this story would be similar to indicting axe manufacturers because of the proverbial axe murderer.

However, after reading the story, it appears that these programmers may have been involved in covering up or performing illicit activities. Their trial will determine if they are culpable. Overall, though, it's not something to worry about professionally or as a threat to an industry.
There are still more Python libraries out there than there are Ruby libraries.
I was going to say... watching the financial and power elite push through a pet bill is hardly that inspirational.

Let's see hackers push through some real patent or copyright reform before we start passing around the cigars.
Yeah, but as much as the spam/crap can happen, I actually believe in the community here enough that it gets cleaned out fast.
I absolutely love it. I don't know how quality would scale outside hn.
That's true and it's a valid point, but when you're from a non-waiver country the US embassies look for reasons you'll leave the states and your business is going to contribute to the list of reasons you'll come back. Certainly there's no guarantee though that some people will ever get into the US.

My point really is what on-going reasons are there to be based in the states or specifically SF ... most of the time you're not going to be meeting with investors or other entrepreneurs or hiring, you're just going to be working and that part can be done anywhere.
Douglas Adams Talk - Parrots the Universe and Everything
The one thing that is constantly overlooked when it comes to the practice debate is the reason why they were working hard in the first place. It is rarely a case where two competing parties just put out x amount of hours on practice just for the sake of working hard. It is often the case that the person putting in long hours really love what they do and want to get better at it and hence they practice. The long hours is just an after thought.

And the Google had the better idea argument makes very little sense. In hindsight of course their idea was brilliant but in the beginning they were the only ones that believed it and as a result worked hard for it.

Lets find some people in the tech graveyard that felt they were working on a bad idea for 80 hours a week.
Does HN get a lot of these types of posts?

I'm actually surprised that I haven't seen more of it, but maybe they're just getting flagged\killed early.
Strange he doesn't mention that the CM-2 added the floating point hardware (one stock FPU per 32 processors)...
The patent system now accepts different filing fees for the size of the organization. That's why the percent revenue. And to say that raising the price will do nothing is not true. Raising the price always does something. We won't know what will happen until they are raised. It can be a progressive fee system to protect individual developers who don't have the money of the big corps.
Very true. I occasionally walk over to the libraries when I need to hunker down and do some work/research.
Fortunately, I look like a student...
Yeah, to their credit, it was all fixed when I checked it again a few minutes later.
Actually, the way David wound up on the program was that I invited JasonF to be on and DHH happend to be in Los Angeles before JF.

What a great debate..... DHH was a fantastic guest who brought it in spades
New MD5 Search Engine(20 remote databases)
The space ship Enterprise Star Trek fabricated on a one-billionth scale
I find life mostly very easy and the majority of people in the world mostly very difficult as too many emotions cloud their minds. That would make a Yes, I guess.
Any system will be gamed. The question is whether or not it is preferable to push startups that would be founded out of the country, or destroy them. None of your arguments describe why the startup visa is a worse idea than the status quo.

I know literally dozens of foreign residents, working at tech companies, who would love to create a startup here in the SF Bay -- here particularly in the SF Bay, which has advantages and friends of theirs and frankly should be their prerogative, but cannot legally do so because of visa restrictions. This actually kills those startups outright.

As for the remaining very important portion of immigration reform that needs to happen, I am not sure that as a country the US can get over its xenophobia enough to change soon.

The time is right to make it easier to start companies: we're still in a recession, the political winds are in our favor.
I would post an insightful comment on this debate, but I think you summarized it perfectly.

Workaholics can take it too far, and often do. Solving real problems--small or large--is virtuous. 37signals has an amazing approach, as do companies which are in dogfights with competitors and need to burn the midnight oil for a sustained period of time.

different situations call for different strategies. This debate is long overdue and I'm glad we are all having it.
I got to admit, even though it was interesting enough, the captcha was more interesting to 'decode'.
First post in this thread: "Dedicated mobile hardware is a necessity".

The post I replied to, by a different poster, had taken this one step further and decided that Theora's lack of "a hardware decoder" was going to melt the ice caps.

Who knows exactly what these people meant by "hardware" or "dedicated mobile hardware" but the generally accepted meaning isn't something that can be created by writing software. Writing software for already deployed hardware is considered one of the strengths of Free and Open Source software developers. Creating fabs to build silicon chips with 3 year lead times and magically placing them in devices that have already been sold isn't, and I have repeatedly seen this factoid cited as the reason why Theora is hopeless, regardless of all other considerations.

Here's a quote from the latest Daring Fireball piece:

"There are no hardware decoding chips for Ogg Theora. If you want to send video to mobile devices, H.264 is the only practical encoding for the near future."

If this point is now made and widely accepted and the discussion has moved on to "Theora is an inferior codec: worse quality, worse encoding options etc." then that's great. Inferior is pejorative, and I find "worse quality" to be highly misleading, as if every Theora video will look like something on Youtube, but I'd happily admit to "lower quality per bit" (in fact I do in the post you replied to) which is okay because it has other advantages and room to grow.
why is codec support even a browser issue? the system is supposed to manage my codecs, and the browser is supposed to use system APIs to play any and all videos i have a codec for.

i'm guessing this is because linux doesn't have a single video codec API, but everything has to explicitly link against codec libraries...
Sorry, your points made no sense to me. Prohibition means prohibited which means illegal. Marijuana has been used throughout human history over thousands of years, and all of a sudden in 1920s its illegal. Legalizing and regulating things is actually quite practical. The government regulates tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical drugs, our food, the toys our children play with, etc.

You don't see organized crime killing each other over the alcohol and tobacco markets, thats because theres no profit for them, big companies scale better. Illicit drugs however, pay well.

As for the incarceration numbers: "According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 -- more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent -- some 696,074 Americans -- were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.

These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged."
Too Smart to Become the Chess World Champion?
It's a classic death spiral scenario.
But they define dealing as having a smallish quantity on your person. I believe the phrase is intent to traffic.
What a great interview. I find myself going back and forth agreeing with both of them. Calacanis makes a reasonable argument. DHH says something crazy-sounding and unexpected. Then, DHH goes on to explain it in more detail and sounds perfectly reasonable.
Devotion to duty
The immigration problems for entrepreneurs is shared by practically every nation I've looked into. It is a local industry with local advantages and global consequences. The only place I found that seemed somewhat better was my home country of Canada, which I strongly considered but ultimately declined to operate in. There's a greater pool of technical talent living in the USA than anywhere, (except perhaps the EU, which is nearly impossible to get into as an entrepreneur who's a non-citizen), there's easier access to funding -- and in particular smart money (which if you listen well is a lot more valuable than dumb money), world-class universities, and better weather than Canada. I could go on.

So it makes sense to improve immigration from an entrepreneurs standpoint.

And there's a good argument it makes sense to improve it from the government's standpoint.

And there's a good argument that it makes sense from the VC's standpoint.

The only good arguments against the startup visa that I've heard are that in its current incarnation it displaces the H1B queue, which is way too long already. Furthermore, it isn't the overarching immigration reform that the country will eventually need. I don't know what the best approach would be to put large scale immigration reform in, but I really doubt that a recession is the time...
Hah. Now there's a surprise. Just business as usual for Microsoft.
How would Apple be shafted in this scenario? Sure, there are no On2 hardware decoding chips in the iPhone, so battery life would suffer a bit, but... is there anything more than that?
I'm sorry to say this, but the life of your company, and by proxy your residence, is always subject to factors beyond your control -- random disruptions you need to get around. You could be hit by a bus. It's not all that uncommon. These constraints are a matter of degree.
The salt controversy
Digg and Reddit Have Joined the NoSQL Camp
Mixpanel (S09) hiring Software Engineers
I don't get why people are upset that IE9 may not run on XP. Did they think that running XP is a perpetual entitlement to be able to run all future Microsoft software? What can IE9 do that's so important that IE8 or any of the competing browsers can't do?
What's there on my bookmark bar?
Sorry, but what's the point of this blog post? Maybe this article is somewhat more valuable (for a start-up). http://online.wsj.com/article/S60519BORZO.html
"Software tools and online services that ... generate[s] sales leads without the usual legwork and the often-inefficient cold calling. "
There's no good fundamental reason why it wouldn't work. The only reasons are cultural (people like getting things for "free", especially on the internet) and technical (you have to dig out your credit card, sign up with it, and trust Facebook not to screw you, in order to pay them a dollar a month.)
>> "And just like any addiction"

shrug I think most workaholics are workaholics because they enjoy their work.
not wanting to sell your business for any price does seem stupid and insane.

If someone offered $2bn, there's probably a lot of good you could do with that cash to make the world a better place.

But saying they'd never sell obviously fits with their PR of having contrarian viewpoints.
I don't know about Django, but take my advice and don't use Rails 3 just yet. It's not ready (for development mind you, albeit for production).
My point is only that are many reasons a business owner would deny ever taking a buyout. True dedication to not selling is just one reason. To me, this make JC's torturing DHH's adversity to selling not that interesting.
open letters are so lame
Happy Birthday, Gnutella: Pioneering P2P Protocol Turns Ten
I disagree. The reasons are more straightforward. If there's a choice between a paid website, and a free website, the free one will win out. And advertising means you can offer users something for 'free'.

So lets say google switched to charging users for access to their search engine, a competitor would just popup that was 'free', and everyone would use that instead.
Marnaps - Home
Consider Flash vs Apple. There's nothing stopping Apple implementing Flash, they just don't want to.

If Flash becomes indispensable for the mobile web Apple will be forced, eventually, to support it. But up until that point (which may never come) that it becomes inevitable, and probably for a long time after that point is reached and Apple actually caves, all that Flash content will not be accessible to users of iPhones or iPads, which reduces their value to consumers compared with Android equivalents that do support Flash.

So the same as that, but with Google codecs and web content in them in place of Flash, but worse because in this scenario Apple probably wouldn't support them on the desktop either.
I don't think it's people running XP who are disappointed. If this news means much to you you're probably tech-savvy enough to have installed a more capable browser.

Developers must be disappointed because this means the millions of non-tech users running XP (and not interested/capable in upgrading to 7) won't be automatically upgraded to a browser that can run websites built on modern technologies. Consumer-oriented HTML5-powered webapps will continue to require kludges or hacks or concessions to work for many users, and will keep requiring these until a critical mass of grandpa- or aunties-owned computer machines break and grandpas and aunties go to the Best Buy and get new ones.
Thanks for checking it out! I'm going to try to make it easier/more apparent to add items. Right now there is a link at the bottom of the page to do this, but it isn't very obvious.
The random button pulls out 2 items from the database, and the text box allows you to search for any particular item in the database. I'll probably be adding a search button to make the use of the text box more obvious.
From what I can tell, Starbucks are smoke-free even in countries where smoking is a cultural norm (like France and Japan).
I think both of them are making decent points. I don't understand the community's desire to have one of them win or "rip apart" the other. Seems just like a well balanced debate to me.

Calacanis seems focused on DHH's interest in having complete control over a smaller business with continuous revenue. He keeps pushing DHH with scenarios where DHH has a huge payday, DHH says he wouldn't do it and Calacanis acts surprised. I totally understand DHH's perspective. I can't imagine not working, that sounds so boring, so DHH has found what he loves to do and is doing it. Why is it surprising that you'd choose valuable, profitable and rewarding work over one big pile of cash?
Ignoring the spew of vacuously snarky comments, the point about the back-tick quotes is valid (aside from how poorly it was expressed).

I think some people use some blog tool that likes to make things "pretty", so it replaces assorted characters with things like smart quotes and such. This pretty much hoses things for anyone trying to cut and paste code.
There is no proof that Nature behaves a certain way. We observe how nature behaves and then induce that Nature will continue to behave that way. Induction has it's own problems -- it's little more than an educated guess.
Well, that's just not true. When I don't have an ad blocker, I click on ads just by accident once in a while, since many are so intrusive. Also, ads are often tremendously misleading, and will try their hardest to fool you into imagining that they are useful without actually being useful; that's how they make money.
All they need is a flag which says 'This is XP, don't use those features'.
The NY Times map from 2005 that first revealed to me that we were in deep shit
I don't understand why Confusion's comment is being downvoted -- was there some faux pas that I'm not seeing?
50 new companies launch on Monday
Are we supposed to forward this article to our moms?
I've also been told that heroin is enjoyable- but that's no excuse for that addiction either.
I've always thought we should have a "best of the week" category for some stories.

If this isn't the best of the last week, it's easily in the top ten.

Lots of little details and nit-picking that should be done, but bottom line is that nationally-advertising on TV is not the impossible thing it used to be for young startups.

Very cool.
Wikipedia has a nice chart of gender neutral pronouns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Summary
Setting a max page count is a good plan. I'm sure that had never occurred to anyone at Wrox, where books were routinely at the 1K+ pages mark.
Heroin is extremely detrimental to your health.

I read quite a lot of autobiographies (business people, media), and pretty much all of them involve obsessive hard work. That's kinda why they're successful.
It doesn't seem like editing is scaling so well or at least I'm not able to add an entry. Any ideas?
So on the one hand, I (hypothetically) have a business that I run every day. This makes me immeasurably happy.

On the other hand, I have two billion USD, which may make me happy but I'll lose my business, which does make me happy.

It's not stupid or insane to keep something that makes you happy.
Particularly that one.
There are a bunch of different proposed gender neutral pronouns... which is part of why no one particular set has caught on yet.
Well, I agree. That's what I meant to say when I referred to the cultural reason; since free alternatives always appear, people always expect a good free version to be available, and are even more hesitant to pay. However, I don't think that's a good place for us to be.

Firstly, it remains to be seen whether it's technically sustainable; if ad blockers continue to become more mainstream and more sophisticated, ads will start bringing in less and less money. Secondly, I think that many non-ad-blocking users are making a poor choice when they choose an ad-supported free version, because it's very hard to evaluate the costs to you of having ads on content. It puts a mental burden on you, wastes your time, and may (invisibly to you) cause you to make poor purchasing decisions later. Those are all real costs, but it's impossible for you to put a dollar value on them.
"Word has it"? This is an open source project, you can find the reasoning on the bug tracker and the mailing list. I would like to call 'bullshit'.
Running a Software Business on 5 Hours A Week
Maybe I'm jaded, but I like it the way it is.

Too many features and we will soon become reddit :/
Tho, I only watched 15 minutes 47-62, I did not find the interview very interesting. If anything it reflects the biases and cultures of the countries they were each raised in. The comment about having a steady job and income stream is exactly what you would hear from my father, who also bootstrapped his own construction consulting business in India from working during the evenings to owning it full time. America is a nation of excesses and trying to grow you wealth in excess of what you require is based in American cultural roots.

Digress: It is what makes American the richest nation in the world that cannot afford a health care policy for all its citizen while much poorer nations provide better health care for their citizens.
So, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox can run on XP and support HTML 5, but IE 9 can't? Wow. What a kick in the nuts. 10 more years of IE6.
Flash is provided to Mozilla as a third party plugin, so Mozilla doesn't actually have to deal with the licensing fees. If they use H264 for the video element, Mozilla has to license it for their own software.
That kind of fallback provision is exactly what the video element was intended to eliminate.
Another solution: An account, shared by multiple HN users that posts short comments on stuff that seems to merit "best of" consideration. Then you just check the comments feed for the account. Thoughts?
Google tv is easy, but bad for a startup. Converting brand new users from TV to the web when they don't know who you are is VERY hard.

I spent about $15K with my last company on google tv ads. It was a sports site and we got on espn etc. I poured over server logs and google analytics and didn't see any value from these ads - no spikes or noticeable conversions whatsoever.

CPM was super cheap so we got a TON of impressions.

We had a pretty decent ad too I think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUfTjtOQ8fM

It ended up being more of a vanity thing of having our ad on TV - total waste of time and money for us.
You know you can just fly to some where else than Britain.
You don't think you'd be able to create the circumstances to be happy again with $2bn?

I'm also extremely happy working on what I work on day to day, but I'm also extremely confident that I'd be able to come up with other stuff that'd make me just as happy if not happier in the future :/
The whole point is to have a video element that any browser that implements html 5 can play, regardless of the system codecs.
Please, he's not just "writer Peter Watts". He's "Dr. Peter Watts, Ph.D".
If you are just targeting locally, say going into individual markets at a time. It can be surprisingly cheap to run a TV campaign.

You can go through the local network stations or the actual cable providers. Both will help you put together the ad (cheap if not free, quality depends on the idea, ie horrible car ads)

You can also pick your channels and general time frames that you want your ad to air in. So if you are targeting parents who own their home, you could select HGN, DIY, etc. and set the time frame to between 5 pm(afterwork) to 12 am(pre-sleep).

Same with radio in terms of dealing directly with the radio stations. You can write your copy, tell them you want one of the on air personalities to read it to some music. In a couple hours you can have a few different ads to choose from. It is surprisingly cheap to dominate any given radio station if you are in the right media market(not Boston or the likes).

When it comes to internet startups, the real problem with TV, Radio, or offline advertising in general is the bad conversion and lack of metrics like we are used to in the online world.

We are already used to single digit(or less) conversion rates for online advertising campaigns. You can imagine how much more that drops when your ads are reaching people who might not even be by a computer and are expecting them to remember your brand/product next time they are.

As for metrics, the easiest thing you can do is have control and variable zip codes. See how registration/purchases fair for zip codes outside of the market you are doing media buys in(but still relatively close geographically), compared to the rates for the area that you are advertising in.
I disagree.

Lets say for the sake of argument that people only clicked on ads by accident. Then no clicks would convert, advertisers would pull the ads, or drastically reduce payouts.

Advertisers only pay, when advertising works - eg converts to a sale/signup/etc
Ask HN: Is this true?
We were in the process of hiring a CTO. One of our programmers suggested that server guys are not normally good coders; and programmers are not normally good server guys. He suggested that, in general, the fields have bifurcated and it is uncommon to find people who excel in both domains. Would you say this is true? mostly true? or BS?
I have given up writing the Android version of Flaboo The reasons?