skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's both serious and facetious.

You're right, about 80 million bands played there, so in one sense it's not such an amazing feat.

OTOH, it's just fucking cool. :)

I played there a few times; not sure how many bands got asked back. Getting that first gig was easy. Walked into the club, ran into Hilly Kristal, said I had a band. "Can you bring in 300 people?", "Oh, sure", I lied.

I found out we were playing when I was looking through the Village Voice to see what bands were around and saw Chinese Forehead[0] listed for the next week. :) Apparently some big name act canceled and they tossed together some showcase thing, and neglected to actually tell us. Pre-cell phone days, I guess.

It was a rush, and it was real accomplishment for me. It also cemented my desire to not be a spectator, of trying to get off my ass and get on stage, whatever that stage may happen to be.

It's not the same as becoming a dot-com millionaire or climbing K2, but all the same it I'm quite proud of having written and performed my songs at a world-famous dive. :)

So, for people looking at the list of amazing accomplishments listed in this thread, do not be discouraged.

Pick a goal; work until you reach it; repeat.

[0] For the curious: http://www.jamesbritt.com/chinese-forehead/
You really think so? I walk down the street in the west loop, and I do not see a lot of Pentagram-grade design in signage. Most people get by just fine with crappy design.
Each color goes from 0 to 255. It's not a sum.
yep I read this.. I still don't think it's exactly fair though. Should there be a ballot screen for windows media player next? Or paint? Or notepad? Or minesweeper?
I'm actually somewhat surprised at how managers react to JSON. Every time I mention it, I can sense that they want to say something along the lines of "take a shower, hippie".
Acute pancreatitis
Acute pancreatitis should always be considered in the differential diagnosis of patients with acute abdomen. The clinical presentation may vary considerably and is influenced by the aetiological factor, age, other associated illnesses, the stage of the disease, and the severity of the attack.
Keep going! We're all with you!
Ask HN: Monetizing Facebook Apps/Games
Hi guys,

Was wondering if anyone had experience or knowledge about monetizing Facebook Apps. We're launching an app soon, but aren't too familiar with the FB app economy.

Typically how much money does 10k daily active users bring (DAU)? 100k DAU? For games with currency vs other social apps? Who are the big ad publishing companies, or who do you use? Thanks a ton.
"most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization"

Is this true for all organizations, or just bad ones? It feels like the best devs are not on the market long, and tend to "nest" too once they find a good situation.
The Best Business Model in the World
I had to laugh when read "dead simple" . Someone complained about it on HN a few weeks ago and it is true. Tech Crunch abuss too much of this term..
"Skulpt surely isn't done yet...I'd call it something like 0.12 alpha if it had a version..."
You missed the point: it would be like a software company where one department distributed the tools on the internet and then the legal department tried to "defend" their IP by suing the people who had gotten those tools.

Come to think of it, it sounds a lot like the Monsanto case. Since they won, I guess Viacom can win here, too. Common sense is absent at these levels.
'"Flash and arrogance" are not the same as skill, but they're not inversely correlated either.'

No kidding. I don't think anyone could argue that Linus, for just one example, is unskilled... It's a pretty well established fact that he can also be arrogant.
How pretty your code is has little to no impact on how successful you will be.

All of my early projects were horrendous code-wise. Nevertheless they included a game with a decent number of installs (>250k) and one of the biggest social networking app websites (this was pre-facebook era so only ~300k users). The later was a huge mess hacked together in php full of global variables and flat files.

Keep coding, keep learning and find a co-founder.
GTD for Programmers: Short, Fun Posts that Teach You About Mylyn
I'm curious...can you describe a servlet-based component that you might want to reuse? As I've been doing Ruby mostly for the last few years, I'm struggling to think of an example.
A Review of Fred Wilson's Blog (AVC) from an entrepreneur's perspective
I can't wait to get my copy of Murdoch's Newspeak Dictionary: 2º Edition. Doubleplusgood!
Evidence Show That Paul Graham Is A FRAUD, PHONY, FAKE... What do you think?
Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software
Is that really a defense, outside the court of public opinion? Not every Daily Show clip was uploaded by Viacom, and it's not infringement when Viacom does it.
Note unpaid internships are illegal in many countries as they breach employment regulations (i.e. minimum wage, etc.)
Online Application Deployment: Reducing Risk
Oy.

"To settle the question, I called a well-known astronomer who had recently published an article on gravitational lensing. After a brief explanation of negative mass, I asked him if he had ever seen background galaxies distorted into spokes in the absence of luminous foreground galaxies. He said he had seen the phenomenon, but he said it was caused by "something else." I asked him what else could cause that, but he refused to answer and abruptly ended the conversation. So until someone can explain to me what that "something else" might be, I consider this prediction to have been proven correct."

That's a couple of classic psychoceramic shticks, right there. Unnamed "well-known" scientist who provides evidence to support the hypothesis, and hinting at a cover-up.
I've successfully conditioned every manager I've ever worked for to accept rolling in around 10:30 as normal.
Microsoft must love these cases. Sure, they lose some money each time. Much more important is that ambitious small competitors will be discouraged from entering the software industry at all. What could be better for the monopolist?

Aren't Microsoft lobbyists working hard to support bad software patents and patent trolling in Washington? The best thing for our industry would be that M'soft lose billions every year on these cases and shape up to support reform.
For a hilarious usage of this stuff, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
The subtle but essential difference is what the Viacom marketing team was perpetrating just a small subset of the claimed infringement.

To reiterate, I don't think the original claim has any merit, but I'm wondering whether this parallel action to the claimed grievance legally sinks their case.

Put it in front of a jury and Viacom would probably get blown out of the water, but the rhetoric makes it sound like this one action renders the whole thing legally frivolous (which I'm not convinced of).
How do they achieve this?
At that point, those people should be driving the direction of the company. The self-actualization motivation becomes implicitly linked to the success of the company. I think that's the only time it really breaks out of what this article is talking about. But that is effectively "becoming partner" when you look at it.
I can see some defenses, for example, "We uploaded the content to verify the validity of assertions that filtering and content protection mechanisms were working as stated."

Or, "We were uploading content to quantify viewers and calculate losses due to copyright infringement."

Regardless, tons of users were uploading viacom content and youtube and then google profited off it, so their case is just as valid -- if it is valid at all.
Google's Nexus One heads to Sprint
All public information about Larrabee so far
I've often thought it would be cool to port LOGO to an AVR or other microcontroller so you could build an "actual" mechanical turtle that would move around the floor in response to the commands. NoteToSelf("Add LOGO to project list");

Someone, somewhere has to have done this already. I should look it up!!
Somehow, I suspect people going to "a little shop in the mall" would do other shopping on the same trip.
Following the legal definition of extortion, I don't see a case.

It's unethical, certainly, but the action you take against unethical journalists or their publications is to stop reading them. The legal system does not provide a remedy.
I would have said "$language", but would that have biased things too much toward Perl?

Or if you want to suggest Lisp, try "insert-your-own-language-here".
The ISP is simply raising the speed cap on accounts for a specific URL (http://www.youtube.com/ipl) during a specific time period.

Their expression "no buffering" is simply marketing speak for "you won't notice if it buffers for 2 or 3 seconds".
I want to sincerely punch whoever wrote this article. It's not true, it's linkbait for a shitty book that is even farther from the truth, and it does a disservice to startups. There's no "formula" for selling to Google and promoting stuff like this further encourages the "quick flip" mentality.
hehe, I only clicked on the comments for this thread because I wanted to see if someone would comment on "dead simple" again.
He specifically answers the concern about negative inertial mass!

He proposes that to make negative mass make sense with regard to inertia, the equation F = ma should actually have been F = |m|a.
Google Is In A Hiring Craze...Find Out If You're Qualified.
* I've met the following videogaming luminaries: Shigeru Miyamoto, Alexey Pajitnov, Ralph Baer, Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, Stephen "Slug" Russell, and Steve Jackson.

* I found unreleased Atari and Colecovision games at a flea market in 2008 on bare EPROMs.

* My writing has been used to teach at Harvard, yet I flunked out of college.
Facebook upgrades internal search engine
Exactly my thoughts: neither of the two characteristics ("exceptional-ness" and "loyalty") are binary qualities. Both exist on a continuum, and more importantly, they're orthogonal. But the article assumes everyone is either moving up or moving out.

What ABOUT the really good engineer with a family, who's content to stay even if the work isn't bleeding-edge exciting? Are they ignorable just because they don't fit into this model? Do we stigmatize them because they're neither churning nor making partner?
How in the world could anybody prove these allegations? The YouTube statement claims

It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. ... It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom.

It seems they've got their bases covered, that any upload vector might plausibly be from Viacom themselves. But how could they conclusively prove that this is what happened?
Source: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi...

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division created a test to determine whether a “trainee” or intern is considered an “employee” based on a 1947 Supreme Court decision that evaluated whether “prospective train yard brakemen were ‘employees’ within the meaning of the Fair Labor Standards Act.” The test requires that all 6 of the following statements are true about the intern’s time with the company.

1. If the training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in a vocational school;

2. If the training is for the benefit of the trainee;

3. If the trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation;

4. If the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and, on occasion, the employer’s operations are actually impeded;

5. If the trainees are not necessarily entitled to employment at the completion of the training period;

6. If the employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

This is the law. If any one of these six statements is not true about a given internship, then the interns are considered “employees” and are subject to the monetary provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. That means that the interns are entitled to minimum wage and overtime compensation.
If you somehow obtain their source code and run your own server, that would be copyright infringement.

If you manage to use it on their servers, with the associated running costs (disk space, CPU and RAM usage, support if you're a clever cracker) then you are in fact a thief - you are stealing their resources.
I am calling clicking twice a pain. There is a lot of useful information that Github surfaces on main project pages that Google Code and Sourceforge do not.

There's no reason why Google Code's very sparse right information column should not be supplemented with a 'last activity' row.
Note the relevance to HN and the y-combinator, since this represents a fixed point for the zip function.
How to Improve Your Cold-Calling Skills
Right, I think my original comment was worded badly. I'm not trying to say that Google deserves blame for the choice they made. It's not what I would have chosen but they can chose anything they want. I don't like that a lot of people seem to be mad at Mozilla for not being willing to support H.26whateverhtheeheckitis.
I'm going to tell you a secret: good design = good usability.

Shhhh... don't tell anyone that a gradient or a shiny button doesn't mean having a good design. A good design might be as simple as text over a white page. Good design is about getting out of the way, making the use of the website or application easier and intuitive (and of course making it look good while doing that). Design is about aesthetic and functionality, you can separate them.
It reminds me of surgical needles, which actually is still continuously innovated until today!
I've tried epoxy and even superglue too :)
> given that the most likely reason for Apple's stock price to experience a significant and long-term drop is the death of Steve Jobs.

Isn't that an argument he should sell now, while he is sure he is alive? How does Jobs benefit from holding onto $5b of stock while he's alive until he dies at which point his estate sells it off for $1b or whatever? Jobs's risk of dying is not insignificant; besides the fact that it intrinsically goes up each and every year, he has had health issues, shall we say?

I won't run the numbers, but he plausibly doesn't have too much longer (he's 55) and the drop in value would be significant (by half or more?); combine that with the usual discounting of future expenditures (2-8%), and if we believed he was holding onto his wealth solely to grow it for future charitable spending, then we must also believe that Jobs expects massive growth in the future.
Very respectable that apple would change their whole homepage to pay tribute to someone they care deeply about passing away. Image how much money they are losing by not promoting their new products such as the iPad.
SXSW 2010: Highlights and Trends
The limits of statistics is build right into statistics..."all models are wrong...but some are useful.."
1. I have no idea what obligations Yelp has, legally or otherwise.

2. Legal definition of extortion (IANAL):
The use, or the express or implicit threat of the use, of violence or other criminal means to cause harm to person, reputation, or property as a means to obtain property from someone else with his consent.

Seems like (to my untrained and uneducated self) that this would be Yelp damaging the Company's reputation because the Company refused to pay Yelp.
He does not answer the concern, he just throws down absolute value bars to make all inertia work the same way.
> Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"?

Essentially, yes. Although, I've seen people who "learned" how to program from taking programming classes, and I'm starting to believe that, ultimately, the only way to learn to program is to learn it of your own volition, outside the context of an official class.

I've seen code from grad students in computer engineering (!) which was buggy, uncommented, poorly formatted, unindented, untested, poorly designed, and sometimes meaningless. Meanwhile, people who went out and learned how to program instead of having the knowledge taught at them manage to produce much better code, consistently.
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail
The problem from the opposite perspective: I found myself outgrowing jobs faster than would look good on my C.V. (I hear job hoppers aren't popular as employees).

I ended up going down the contractor/consultant route; for some reason, nobody seems to have a problem with job hopping as long as you call it consulting. I guess there are no false pretenses and it avoids the legal baggage that comes with being an employee (notice periods, arbitrary holiday limits, etc.). It also makes me more money, at least now, ~2 years later.
http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/Clear+Only+If+Known
I'm guessing 3 is the tricky one for most startups. The uk has somewhat similar legislation, and it's generally considered that if the intern is doing work which otherwise would have to be done by a full employee then it's displacing a regular employee. Which in practice means you can't give interns "real" work.

edit: tptacek below is right that 4 is probably worse
Mozilla seeks to tame your address book
Ok. I think we're both right. A middle ground is for the app to scroll vertically. One of my favorite guitar tab sites does this and it works beautifully. I thought at first that it was just the scrolling but now you've made me realize it is the scrolling combined with a fix width so I can still chunk.
I remembered Martin Odersky said it was publicly available since 2004.
I'm not actually the person who made the first statement. But as I see it, he made 2 statements:

1. Stated (as fact) that there is a fundamental difference between copyright infringement and physcal theft.

2. Expressed dismay at the apparent lack of understanding of the above fact by the music / movie industries.

Expressing dismay because someone else seems unaware of something you hold as a fact is not a logical fallacy in and of itself. It may be possible to show the fact is incorrect and the dismay therefore unnecessary, but that doesn't make it a fallacy.
Untangling Mexican technology for global markets
I will head up there sometime soon. But just for the sake of completeness, I will note that Intelligentsia would do the same thing. Every time I walk in, I feel like I am in Seattle. And for coffee, that's a good thing.

(One time, a friend of mine who is from Seattle ended up behind me in line. I wondered for a second what city I was in :)
Oh, yeah, it's still going on, but at least the tide of "in the future everyone will use disposable cell phones and computers" articles has died down a bit.
It may not be a defense against infringement, but it certainly does speak to the determination of damages suffered. You can't claim that youtube owes you $1B when clearly you saw positive value in having those clips up.
All things considered, "someone" could probably toss together a simulation to check the results in well under a week with modern tools, and run it on a modern processor. A modern processor could do much more finely-grained deltas.
Sorry for not making myself clear. What I meant was without any classes, courses or people to help. Google was my best friend :-)

Basically my approach was to find a project I wanted to do, then simply do it, and ask Google as I went along. There were a few problems along the way, primarily in the beginning where I didn't have a clue as to why things didn't work and didn't have sufficient knowledge to know the right search phrases. It took me a long time to find out that your indexpage has to be called index.html for instance.

Later I found out that the project I was doing was actually much more complicated than first anticipated (it involved the entity-attribute-value model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model and was rather ajax heavy) and I had some problems finding out how to tweak code, use objects properly, etc. It was a great learning experience though - and maybe a good product will come out of it.
Software:  Plumbing or Mad Science? re:Whatever Happened to Programming?
It is, if we're still debating whether a YouTube clip is "Fair Use". One of the tests of Fair Use being the effect of that use on the material's market.

It's difficult to argue that YouTube clips kill the value of your product, when your promotions department clearly believes the opposite is true.

It might also be of legal relevance, if Viacom were complaining specifically about the clips it uploaded itself and moreso if they tried to use the presence of those clips to pressure a favorable business deal.
haha only just noticed what you done there, good post.
> Apple has no patent on the general concept of "unlocking a device with a gesture". They have a patent on their implementation. You can't patent a concept.

You're right, but:

a) I didn't say the word concept (or the word implementation for that matter).

b) the standard wording on any modern patent is 'this is but one embodiment of the concept' meaning other implementations that meet the language described (which is designed to be as broad as can pass a patent examiner).
Crying for Comfort: Distressed Babies Need to be Held
So does this make it 3 companies so far filing suit? If I do the math (well, do I really need to?), if this were a regular business practice Yelp was involved in, wouldn't you think that there would be wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more businesses chiming in? I actually can't fathom the number of businesses there are in their database. Couldn't even venture a guess.

Even if what these businesses are saying is true, I would regard them as extremely isolated incidents that could have been done by individuals within the company with a vendetta. But again, I would more likely consider the chain of events coincedences.

I'll need to see way more companies accusing Yelp of this before I would even consider Yelp at any fault.
That's how it should be. It seems to me that some of the software patents have crossed that line, as have the "business method" patents.
Best Free Music Creation Software
Maybe the employees that did the uploading have come forward.
Moral Relativism leads directly to logical contradiction - how can an action be both evil and not evil at the same time?

Imagine if our judicial branch worked that way, would that lead to a sustainable society? Absolutely not. You couldn't legitimately punish anyone for a crime because what is a 'crime' to you may not be a 'crime' to the perpetrator. And so on, and so on...

Bottom line, if an action is evil, it is fundamentally evil. The nature of an action doesn't change according to who commits it. The day humanity stops "cringing" when faced with apologist behavior is perhaps the day when humanity dooms itself.
(4) looks worse. Really, though, who has time for any of this? Just pay your interns.
Toyota Prius Probe Suggests Driver Error
Also of note: http://twitpickem.com and http://twitbet.com from HN posters.