skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why are there these restrictions (the existing, lower ones) in the first place? The Wikipedia entry for accredited investors seems to suggest it's to "protect" people from losing all their wealth through high risk investments, but that seems spurious considering casinos aren't limited to the rich.
The reversal of the "extends" paradigm is interesting. It seems very natural. What made you go with that?

(I know I'm not really responding to your comment but I think it speaks for itself).
> Standard work flow for me includes c-t, google.com, <misspelled word>, c-w, <correct spelling from "did you mean">.

This might be quicker: c-k, <misspelled word>, alt-enter, c-w

alt-enter opens a new tab with the search.
We are both on HN so if anyone has specific questions, we would be happy to share anything else people are curious about from our experience.
I have been an eFax user for many years. I completely overpay for the service (monthly charge) since I only send a receive faxes occasionally. Neverthless I still need the service for the sending of fax from my computer and the receiving of faxes into my computer. I no longer own a fax machine. I would like to see a side by side chart comparison between your service and eFax to help make a decision to switch.
How do trade secrets even enter into this? They're planning on selling these phones all over the world. How could just possession of one be regarded as violating trade secrets?
This is so non-sensical it makes my brain hurt. How on earth do they not think that this would explode out of control if they started contacting individuals directly?
This has been covered elsewhere, but I don't have a current link to it.

Essentially, there is a California law that says if you find something, you're compelled to either return it to its owner, or turn it over to the police if the rightful owner can't be found. So the very fact that he failed to turn it into the police converted it from an act of "finding" to an act of "stealing".
And thus, making money out of a legal problem they created for their own employee.

So we can add fraud to the potential charges, which requires a material misrepresentation of fact (his potential personal criminal liability), made with scienter (a reckless disregard for the truth), justifiably relied upon (by an employee listening to the company's self-identified legal representative, Gaby Derbyshire, who is not qualified to practice law in the US), and which has resulted in an injury (the confiscation of all his electronic stuff).

If I ever end up in court I want you there too. On the other side.
Courts around the world have ruled that the sex lives of celebrities is in the public interest.

Reference? The ones I have been aware of have been very narrow, and there have been many public cases of the opposite (such as the recent Max Mosley case in the UK).

Generally the law seems to take a line similar to that of Wikipedia - that "public interest" means "general welfare". Note that this does not mean you can't publish details about the sex lives of celebrities, but you can't use public interest as a defense if you have participated in a crime to do so.
We currently don't do that, but its in the pipe for us at SWIX ( http://www.swixhq.com ), those types of metrics and many more.
Good question - I was inspired heavily by Dean Edwards' original Base Class library, it seemed to make the most sense when I was using it.

The original code:
http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2006/03/base/

The current code:
http://code.google.com/p/base2/source/browse/trunk/src/base2...
They bought stolen goods, period.

Sorry, at which point did the theft occur?
FTC Urged To Crack Down On Social Sites by Senator
If someone found my lost phone in a bar, I doubt any search warrants would be served.

Apple has something to do with this case.
Well, total reach might be tough to pull off, but it would be definitely feasible to poll the Twitter API every hour and count the tweets with that hashtag that appeared in that time span.

To justify cost to brands it might be easier/more 'sellable' to insist on actual, measurable engagement (links clicked, tweets retweeted, tweets favorited etc.) around their own tweets. I'd worry about unrelated tweets (i.e. sharing the same keyword but about something else altogether), or either bad publicity being accounted for.
Gizmodo:
"Weeks later, Gizmodo got it for $5,000 in cash. At the time, we didn't know if it was the real thing or not. It didn't even get past the Apple logo screen. Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing, so we started to work on documenting it before returning it to Apple. We had the phone, but we didn't know the owner. Later, we learnt about this story, but we didn't know for sure it was Powell's phone until today, when we contacted him via his phone."
Sony Announced Death of the Floppy Disk
Aliens exist but they may be dangerous: Hawking
Yeah, but in Pidgin you just disconnected. And told your buddy/chat room that you did.
Author has good points but picked only bad things about Android and ignored the developer discontent with Apple.
Did anyone else open the page in a new tab and forget about it, and then later on wonder why the heck every link on the HN front page went to archive.org?

It was crazy confusing until I noticed the address bar.
> "normal people are willing to suck it up for the sake of staying in the social graph, while nerds don't."

I think much of the problem for nerd kids in particular is that they're both unwilling to learn truly boring stuff (like celeb gossip), and not socially adept enough to steer conversation to interesting common ground with others (that's hard work for introverts.) This leads to the social ostracism you noted previously.

Given the tradeoff between "pretend to care about truly boring stuff" and "have a small social graph", I'd take the small social graph ten times out of ten. I would not recommend "suck it up and learn boring stuff" as a solution. A better solution is learning to find true common interests, maintaining a large social graph because everyone has some interests that are worth learning about.

As a moderately extroverted nerd, I didn't have that hard a time growing up, nor do I have a hard time now. I've always participated in people's interests, it's just that I've known how to participate in their cool, real interests instead of their boring, fake ones. But for those few people who I couldn't find common ground with (for whatever reason), I made the choice not to invent boring common ground. Yeah, that means "not fitting in" with them is my fault -- but that doesn't make it a bad thing.
I still remember using my 5.25" floppy disks on my Commodore PC.

I haven't seen a blank pack of 3.25's in a while and thought they were already "dead".
I just signed up for an account. It seems fairly nice, but the big issue with shell accounts is whether or not they stick around. Their manifesto page (http://devio.us/manifesto) seems to indicate that they're taking this seriously, so let's hope they stay. (:
If I ever end up in court I want you there too. On the other side.

Hah, deal. If you run for District Attorney, I will vote for you.
Same old story. Same old BS. I've heard it for over ten years.

1. Oil companies have a variety of categories for reporting reserves. 15+ years ago companies used to regularly report liberal reserve numbers for the sake of stock price boosting. Since then the regulators have pushed companies to be conservative in their "findings". The historical shift makes it look worse than it is -which doesn't look bad to me (33 years of known resources is so much frikin oil).... There are so many companies sitting on thousands of drill opportunities and they simply don't have the upfront capital or even people to work on them.

2. Even if CONVENTIONAL Oil is harder to find there's plenty of Natural Gas and Non-Conventional resources to move towards without it being a big deal. This is how the market works - when the price of oil is too high due to supply constraints then technology/infrastructure will shift. This seems fairly normal to me - certainly not a panic situation. And quite frankly it's great for our economy to make these shifts - more jobs, new jobs.

3.
> "Although there are large deposits of "unconventional" oil such as the Canadian tar
sands, most are making only slow progress at development and consume as much or more
energy in their production as they can generate."

What a load of Malarky. There's absolutely no truth to this what so ever. Canadian Oil Sands are the most poorly understood commodity on the market. It doesn't consume more energy to produce - there's no substance in the article for me to even bother counter stating (and all the environmental concerns, relatively speaking, are just completely unfounded).
I won't condemn him, but I won't vindicate him either. At this point there is no proof either way, but the circumstances as presented so far do seem fishy to me.
I agree with the intent, but I can't see how this would be run through the FTC. Sounds like a nightmare to me.
Can you imagine the FTC as web usability mentor/monitor?

I suppose it is lucky for the Senator that Facebook is a US company.
Because in hardware IP travels with the machine. Opening one, potentially reverse-engineering it, or even just looking at it revealed quite a bit of information (for exemple the famous forward-facing camera, that we were waiting for on the 3GS last year), which were trade secrets of Apple until they were publicly revealed by Gizmodo. That's clearly against the law.
Try zooming in by one click in Safari or Chrome. The whole Masonry layout totally falls apart. This seems like a showstopper to me ...

(FYI, I'm not just bitching -- I reported this as a bug six weeks ago.)
Rebase is useful. Someone said it was like a boomerang with a chainsaw on both ends. You better pray that it doesn't miss it's target and come back to get you.
I think latency is the un-written, default assumption in all of these cases. High-latency, strongly consistent, shared nothing distributed relational databases are over two decades old (starting with Stonebraker's "a case for shared nothing"). Problem is that they're unusable for OLTP workloads (without non-commodity hardware appliances, using SSDs and connected over Infiband e.g., Exadata) even if you don't "CAP" into account.

Latency isn't a "tunable" variable in the same sense as C and P, in that there's multiple ways to lower latency. With eventual consistency you can use smaller quorums to lower the latency for either reads, writes or both. You can also use strong consistency, to avoid having to do quorums at read times but at higher latency writes. Higher latency writes may be acceptable, at least with 2PC. I am not sure many systems use Paxos for replicating a transaction log on every write due to the costs: I believe Scalaris may be, but I can't find the information right now.
I, for one, welcome our new hypermedia overlords.
Unless of course the merit badge covers a concrete skill: I learned a great deal by completing the Rifle Shooting, First Aid, and Wilderness Survival merit badges.

I agree with your point, though: some are the equivalent of 'read the book, regurgitate the contents on a test'.
I honestly don't buy that. You find an iPhone lying on a street-corner? Then maybe you go through your own methods. You find an iPhone at a bar? The first place that person is going to look is at that bar. The sensible thing is to turn it into the bartender, not take it home, attempt to track down the person, then explain why exactly it is you have their iPhone/wallet/etc.

(EDIT: Put another way: according to the original story, the finder claimed to think there was nothing special about the iPhone at that time. If you're at a decent bar in the middle of Silicon Valley, do you really think it's that sketchy to turn an iPhone 3G into the bartender or management?)
IF you tweet, can you use the same legal argument as being protected under "Free Speach and Journalisim?"

Therfore giving you legal immunity regardless of the content that you are tweeting?

Illegal drug use, felony activities etc? Or blind ignorance of common ethics and civil code?

Would be an interesting outcome and an explosion of online journalisim if this proves to be the case... Don't you think?
Game design for web designers: IXDA'09 Talk
I actually downloaded CleverCSS (similar to Sass) a few days ago and it's been working great so far. I'll need to figure out loops though. Although it is all written at the moment so it's no big deal (probably quicker to Ctrl+V 30 times and go through it, than writing a generator).
Does every TechCrunch post appear on HN now?
n.b. no offense, OP
When the guy who found the phone didn't turn the lost phone in at the bar or a police station.
Steve Jobs advice to Nike CEO: "Get rid of the crappy stuff"
Essential legal tips for startups
I'm pretty sure this is old and well known, but here are some highlights. This is from the founder of Epic Games, which makes Unreal Engine, which runs tons of modern games. Thus, it's from someone doing real-world work with high performance requirements.

Here are some highlights:

- "Gladly sacrifice 10% perf for 10% higher productivity"

- "Never use assembly language"

- 50% of bugs are array indices, null pointers, integer overflow, uninitialized vars

- Suggests dependent types to solve array bounds issues

- 90% of integers are array indices, 80% could be dependently-typed

- For loops: "40% are functional comprehensions, 50% are functional folds"

- Gameplay code is hard to make concurrent - thousands of mutable objects, updated tens of times per second, each update touches many other objects

- Suggests transactional memory: 2-4X perf overhead is acceptable if code can scale to many threads

- "Garbage collection should be the only option"

- "Syntax requirement: Must not scare away mainstream programmers"
About time, wouldn't you say?
In the startup world, we always talk about the difference between ideas and execution. I can like the idea, but I shudder at the execution.

This won't end well.
That's why it's the capstone. Merit badges are like a mix of exit requirements and gen eds, to give scouts a taste of many things, and ensure basic competency/familiarity with important things. I don't believe it's intended to help you learn a ton through the requirements; rather, to put you into a situation where you can pursue further knowledge.
From 2005, so you'll have to add a zero onto the end of stats like "Current GPUs are 16-wide to 48-wide!"

Wonder if this is still true: "Factoid: C# exposes more than 10 integer-like data types, none of which are those defined by (Pythagoras, 500BC)."
It wasn't about cartoons though was it. It's a power play, can muslims begin to establish sharia law by claiming they are discriminated against - and it seems they can.
If I had found the iphone... I would have walked around SFO asking people if they lost an iPhone prototype. Starting on Market Street and working my way down to San Jose.

Being that the iPhone is very popular, lots of people would have wanted to see it so... I would have charged them $5 no wait... $20 each to hang out with the iphone for 1 minute, and $50 each for a Polariod of them and the Prototype. I would have continued this pattern until I:

1.) Talked with everyone in the SFO area
2.) Could not carry anymore money
3.) Ran in to Steve Jobs and returned the lost prototype to it's rightful owner.

Eventually I would have found the owner and could sleep easy at night knowing I did everything I could to return it, In the end I would have made way more money than $5000 and returned the iphone.
Nope, just every iPhone 4 story.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/court-self-i...

That page has a link to the District Court ruling in Boucher.
California law says that if you find lost goods and appropriate them for your own use (e.g. selling it to a news site for five grand), it's theft. The proper response would have been to make an honest effort to get ahold of Apple and/or Gray Powell directly (e.g. call the company switchboard), and, failing that, turn it in to the police.

Instead, he sold it for a profit to a company (Gizmodo) who believed that it was real. Misappropriation = theft.
Do we know what the guy that called Apple actually said? Just imagine if I called Google and told them I had a lost Nexus One.
Sorry -- you're right, I guess I've been trolled a bit too often as of late.
this article just reeks of self-importance and conceit

Whoa, TechCrunch is a blog?
> the people that were against the cartoons helped show them to tens of millions of more people.

And let me tell you, it was a good thing. Many of them were very, very funny.
This was a sticking point for me in my last job as a programmer, where the owners had actually instituted a punchcard system I routinely ignored. I'm more sensitive to it now that I'm running my own business and hiring people though. The problem isn't generally having a single person come in late. It's that this can affect social perceptions of what general work effort should be. Especially in a small office it is easy for working hours to creep down and soon everyone is starting work an hour late and leaving half an hour early.

It is easy to say, "I'm only going to hire self-motivated people and if they can't get the work done they're fired." But the reality is most people aren't like that. And it's a hassle to have to fire people if they can be productive with more management.

So I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is, but I think HN would be better served by an actual discussion of practical solutions rather than rants by disaffected programmers howling with rage at being asked to keep regular hours. On the employee side, I still believe doing really good work solves pretty much all of your problems if you can effectively communicate what you're doing to the manager (and put in the required time). On the employer side, giving people a bit of slack (30 minutes), a fair degree of autonomy and coming down on them hard if/when they miss their deadlines is the best I've been able to come up with. I'd welcome a better discussion of this since as a manager I don't want to have to waste my time micromanaging this stuff either.
I wonder if the police would search a house if it was an iphone of a normal citizen.
Don't forget the best part of going to college: meeting girls.

- PSU Junior working on his own startup.
as a side note is plancast down.. i just tried going there, and nothing happened.
"Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real interest in the topics at hand."

Teaching students sucks when students aren't engaged. It sucks to teach students who don't actually want to learn something; they just want to fulfill a requirement, or put the class on their CV. You're exactly right to say that "If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well."

That is, when teaching sucks, it sucks because students are participating in the exact same behavior that colleges are: bolstering their perceived reputations. Students do this because they have been taught (by colleges and the schools that prepare them for college) that reputation is what counts. So, if you fix the reputation-seeking system, student and professorial engagement in learning should increase, too.
Or you could just have gone to Apple's HQ.
Their 'legal staff' is their COO, Derbyshire, who is a British barrister. Hardly the expert on California law you want on your side when being investigated by the DA.
I've remapped caps lock to ctrl on my personal laptop, so whenever I use another computer, I end up typing half of my commands / text in uppercase.
I agree that paying for the phone is the one sticky point here. If no money changed hands, this would be a much more solid case to enforce bloggers' and journalists' rights. The money taints things... but I still think this could go either way.

(I would argue that the person that found the phone was an employee that discovered the phone in his normal course of work. Then the money is for "being at work" rather than "selling us stolen goods". It's like escort services -- you pay for the escort service; the sex afterwards is free. Or something.)
Isn't that covered by the 5th Amendment (not 100% sure, I'm not American)?
To be fair, the expectation of privacy tends to lock up a lot of information.
My guess would be that they want to stop pyramid schemes and the like with this kind of legislation. Not that I agree that the government should be controlling how you invest your money, but people can be naive when confronted with a good swindler.
I'm surprised you lasted that long -- there is no reason for anyone to scream at anyone unless they do something incredibly dangerous or careless; you only do this so they understand the severity of their action. For example smoking next to flammable materials, improperly handling chemicals, etc...
US newspaper circulation drops 8.74% during last six months
I don't understand the stances these fringe groups take

I think you understand, but you don't agree. Big difference. As soon as you disagree, you lose, because you'll never challenge the extremists the way they challenge you to be more like them, because they'll win. Hence you merely say you don't understand, which in this respect, is a lie.
> Jackasses making veiled threats and TV networks obliging the jackasses by censorship.

Yeah, well: it's all fun and games until someone gets knifed on the street, as happened to Theo Van Gogh. I'm sure the guy who did that was a jackass, too.

My point is that we shouldn't equivocate or relativize on the jackassery of the various parties. What the TV networks did was lamentable but, in light of recent events, comprehensible. What 'jackasses' making veiled threats and those that carry them out do is utterly reprehensible and doesn't merit the lightness of the word you chose. The two types of jackasses you mention are totally different. Ass-covering is surely not so big a sin as killing or threatening to.
Shoe power generator could charge GPS devices, cell phones
Shoe power generator could charge GPS devices, cell phones http://is.gd/bJ6Rt
Ask HN: Anyone else need to stop and smell the roses?
I'm working on my own startup (as a junior in college) and one of my close friends told me to slow down.

I've definitely thought this a couple times in the past. Being an entrepreneur, and goal oriented, I sometimes forget to stop and smell the roses. There's more to life than this and sometimes I forget.

Anyone else feel the same way?
Smart Prey: Mergers & Acquisitions
>They are not giving up the ability to exercise that right for safety, they are choosing not to exercise it for safety.

To make a hypothetical analogue: You're saying that if I threaten you with death if you leave your house then if you choose not to leave the house so as to live you aren't giving up your right to leave the house only choosing not to exercise that right.

In other words you're saying threatening to kill someone doesn't restrict their rights it just means that if they want to exercise them they'll die. You then appear to be using that as a basis for saying that it's OK to threaten death to someone?

I think you misunderstand the notion of restricting someone rights.
The qualified-investor concept provide a way to short-circuit a lot of investor-protection legal rigmarole. If I want to offer an investment to the public, I need to undergo a lot more effort and expense than a private placement from a "qualified" investor.
That's very true. They make great products that are very well thought of down to the last pixel-perfect detail. They draw on many years of experience and hard work to make the products they do.