skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It falls into a bit of a gray area in the TOS.

Just using the satellite images alone wouldn't be allowed, because they're not obviously from Google. Using the satellite images with the Google streets displayed on top probably would be okay because it's obvious where you got it from (though you have to include the attribution too).

This is mostly just the satellite view but they also use a honking big Google speech bubble and little red place marker, which possibly brands it enough to pass muster.

http://www.google.com/permissions/geoguidelines.html (see print section)

Your right this wouldn't be an issue with OSM as they're much more open, but then they're mostly maps not aerial photos.

There was http://www.openaerialmap.org but I don't think it's live anymore.
Startups Through Business Plan Competitions?
Hmm. I just looked through my last 170 days of comments and I found the word "Turtle" exactly once. And it's in this thread.

I don't believe I need to explain the joke. +7 kind of hints that some people agree.
growthworks has one of the lowest rates of return of venture funds,
Photos are composed, planned, things you would frame and hang on the wall. Pictures are random things that might end up on facebook.
A lower tide sinks all boats.

I hear you when you say it's bad to slight individuals you don't know anything about. I am very familiar with Boris Wertz (through multiple friends of friends) and the good he has done for the small Vancouver tech scene. However, this is a massive blow in the effort to encourage tech companies to establish a presence in Vancouver (effecting the Vancouver VC recruiting pool). Some other city will be drinking Vancouver's Milkshake.
Why accountants don't run startups
When does it reload the web app every time? That's a memory limitation, not a task switching one. I've noticed Safari tends to keep loading pages and rendering them in the background.
One contracts HIV from high risk sexual behavior, whether homosexual or heterosexual.
Copying Is Not Theft
Video by Nina Paley about Copying...

the FBI "warning" at the beginning is particularly great.
That's great when it's someone else's industry, in this case farming. What happens when tomorrow, the government mandates that all computer code be registered, digitally signed and closed source, for safety reasons, of course?

I WANT my computer to be safer. If that means only large companies can compete, so be it.
Solid ground? Give us a break... they're turning on the reality distortion field, again!
Israel bans imports of Apple iPad
I got output like the screenshots. In http://swtch.com/plan9port/screenshots/macosx1.png, the lack of smoothing is most noticeable in the forward slashes. I tried all the things you suggest except that I mailed 9fans, not plan9port-dev. Bad setup strikes me as extremely unlikely because I tried twice (p9p on Linux, then 9vx on OS X) and because the responses I got on 9fans were two hacks which add text smoothing to Plan 9. (The two hacks were unsatisfactory, as the characters had inconsistent spacing and artifacts surrounded the glyphs sometimes.)

Again, if all the text I look at during a session at the computer were rendered by Plan 9, I could probably get used to it (since I ran Linux in text mode for years, and the text mode on my video card had no smoothing unless I am very, very much mistaken), but that would be impractical because Plan 9 does not have a satisfactory graphical web browser. You're not going to contest that last statement, are you? Heck, even Russ Cox does not use Plan 9 for browsing the web.
It's hard at first but it's definitely worth the effort of going cold turkey. After a month or so the next time you try a soft drink your stomach will feel all gassy and terrible and the drink itself will taste pretty bad.

Or at least that's what happened to me. I used to drink 3-4 cans of pepsi and maybe 1-2 of mountain dew every day. I went from that to nothing and two months later I had the above experience. I've had soft drinks maybe a half dozen to a dozen times over the past year and it's never a particularly pleasant experience.
Exactly...my startup has some funding from a great seed program to work on this. Any suggestions on what a great social recruiting web app would look like?
The immorality does not lie in having sex outside marriage; the immorality lies in scaring people shitless that they'll burn in hell if they choose to protect themselves against the contraction of a disease.
Dear Japan, I love you.
I think there are VERY different standards for startups applying to seed accelerators, versus companies trying to get VC. A lot of startups who do seed accelerators are, in a large part, going full-time DIRECTLY because of promised investment. That's certainly been true of a ton of YC startups.

They go full-time because a reputable business promises them funding, and signs an agreement to that effect. They wouldn't go full-time without the funding.

When founders are leaving behind their jobs to take part in a program due to a promise from a seed firm, the partners of that seed firm should be mortgaging their homes before they completely fuck four companies by dropping them like this.

And, on Bootup's side, their reputation is irreparably demolished- just google 'Bootup Labs'. How does a budding VC firm recover from that?
Are you looking for a snippet of CSS for the @font-face declaration like this http://kernest.com/fontconf-com.css ?
I would be the last one to defend IE in general but have you had a look at the Developer Tools of IE8? I think it's pretty decent stuff.
Right! And where is the investment support from all the big name, successful mentors?? Guess they're either free-riders or store window dressing...
Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows
You analogy assumes that open source developers are all working under the same banner, creating a singular suite of applications (e.g. OpenOffice).
Flagged for paywall
"Supply and demand" doesn't explain anything until you recognize that what universities sell, is prestige.

That's the key point of the article.
I've found plenty of research that concludes that patents hinder innovation.

I have been able to find any studies that conclude that patents help innovation. Can somebody provide links if there are any?

I only see the number of patents mentioned as "evidence" of innovation.
Regardless of the validity of this or other arguments against the current patent system, how viable would an effort to reform the system be? I think it would take a tremendous force to do so. Something on the order of a developed (not even imminent) and undeniable disadvantage relative to other countries who have a different system.

An analogy would be that you'll never be able to remove government entitlements unless the nation faces bankruptcy because the recipients will fight tooth and nail to keep them.
Do you have an idea of how many companies have adopted this methodology?
Gödel, Escher, Bach and Smartphones
Parties were fun, the rest was just meh. Too much time self promoting and no real resources to really build companies. Not having the right management team is a critical flaw. Look at the track record.
Your source to show the accuracy of any of these estimates is?
A tweak to increase the likelihood of profit might be to go from, "build something that you wish someone would build for you", to "build something that you would pay someone to build for you." The "pay" filter might be good at killing unprofitable ideas.

For example, Wozniak's idea meets the pay criteria. Facebook, Twitter, and most social apps don't. So they need more funding to bootstrap.
Could you foresee some limits of this methodology? If yes, what are they?
Linux Graybeards? Yes, But Also A Wisdom Circle
Pharo Open Source Smalltalk Release 1.0
I haven't, I will test those out for sure.

IE8, of course, is the least troublesome but it's good to have options.
What are the main strengths / advantages of Lean Startup?
Why do they need to outlast countries? At that point the only relationship between University("today") and University("100 years ago") is the bricks in the building. None of the professors or students that made a university whatever it was 100 years ago remains; "greatness" is then a happy coincidence.

Why not have throw-away universities?
How to build your multimedia empire on the cheap
You can work around the system until it becomes irrelevant.

For example, patents are not prevalent in software. There is hardly an innovation crisis in software.

Hardware design is also becoming more like software design. Same with business processes.
I was not posting this to have this community evaluating it but to get advise about how to move forward.
No, not really. What I had in mind was questions like:

what's your average length of headers?
what's your average number of lines per paragraph?
How many paragraphs do you have per page?
How many columns do you have per page?

And then the app would offer me combinations of fonts, line spacing, etc for h1, h2 and p tags.

Snipppets like on here:
http://www.3point7designs.com/blog/2008/06/10-examples-of-be...
If your web site has this, then I hate your website
I really can't believe I'm having this argument in 2010.

You stated that it was confined to Gays and IV drug users. It's not. The statistics show heterosexuals contracting it. Whether they get it because they're sleeping with an IV drug user, someone who is homosexual, or another heterosexual who is classified as "high risk" doesn't matter: they're straight and they have HIV, therefor it's not "contained" to gays and IV users.
I don't understand how the task switcher makes a difference for one-handed operation. Either you hit home once, swipe, and tap to open an app, or you double-tap home, swipe at the bottom area of the screen, and tap to open an app. It seems to me that not using the task switcher is more one-hand-friendly, since you can swipe wherever you want?
Has anyone had a chance to check out "Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts"

(http://j.mp/9SxXza)?

It was just published today according to Amazon.
I don't know about VAT being more complicated than our income tax system, but other than that, darn you for posting what I was going to post.

VATs and sales taxes are regressive. I'm continuously astonished that people seriously talk about replacing our income tax system with them.
Makes it worse! Think about it... would you let your name be used this way, and/or associate with a company that you wouldn't put your own money in when it was badly needed?
I hope people notice this and vote it up. A great success story. (Usual disclaimer: I'm not part of it.)
http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
I frequently see "think outside the box" on many job postings on craigslist as if you can either have it or you don't type of attitude.
likely little meaningful assistance when the fund manager is in panic mode scrambling to raise money...
I don't think making semantic distinctions is what the copyright discussion needs.

The video says that theft leaves one less thing behind. Copying a song leaves one less sale (or one less potential sale) for the company that owns the song. That copying a song is not a physical act resulting in one less song in one place and one more song in your possession is an irrelevant distinction.

Copying may not be theft, but both copying and theft are ways of acquiring something through inappropriate means at someone else's expense.
> I would try to be more realistic about it. Even Microsoft or Google sometimes have trouble building the type of buzz that Apple does.

That is quite true. Seems like no one else yet can beat apple at two things UI and Buzz.
That is not meant no one will in the future. Besides, I care more about market share than buzz.

Making this movie seems like the right thing to do and it is actually what I am going to do very soon.
I thought this was an elegant defence of open source:

> This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
I don't think it is your responsibility to apologize for bootup labs or on behalf of all vancouverites or canadians for that matter. I've interacted with the bootup labs team on more than one occasion and have never gotten a good impression from them. They are the kind of middle men who take too much from entrepreneurs and give too little. I feel bad for anyone who is convinced to enter into their system, both entrepreneurs, and the investors who give them money.

Furthermore, Canadians do not apologize for everything. I know plenty who never apologize for anything.

Also, a little more ranting about Bootup labs, there are way too many programs like this that are actually credible. I encourage all who are thinking of applying to their program to strongly consider otherwise. If you can't get into another better incubation program, it means your idea needs more work. I haven't seen anything positive from bootup labs and I can't say anything positive about the leadership behind bootup labs -- this was true way before this very revealing incident.

Any entrepreneur considering joining the bootup labs program is better served to keep their day jobs and bootstrap their company without bootup labs. Please, stay far far away.
A one-sided, unresearched, fluff article.
>There is hardly an innovation crisis in software.

Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people.
It's worth noting that the task switcher is probably more important for the iPad. I very much intend to write blog posts and the like on my iPad and being able to quickly switch between a couple of different applications while doing so will make the task much more pleasant.
This is from a documentary called Objectified:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1241325/
I applaud you for aiming high, and for the confidence you exhibit with your idea! Best of luck on it.

However, you definitely have a problem with the scale / scope of your product. As byoung2 points out, there's only 1 ipad, and there's really only one company in the world that could produce it. So it's not out of the question, but it will be difficult.

I heartily recommend that you undergo Steve Blank's Customer Development model. Read his book "4 steps to the epiphany", as well as his blog. His philosophy is very straight forward, and it will show you the steps that you need to use to get going on this project.

First, I'd recommend you do some more Customer Discovery/Validation. Don't believe people who tell you it's a great idea. Go TALK to your customers, ask them point blank if they would buy it, and for how much. As he states repeatedly, "no business idea survives first contact with customers." It's very true. Go talk to them. Get people to sign a piece of paper (non-binding), saying that if they had your product with features X,Y,Z, at price point $N, they would purchase one. You will learn a LOT doing this.

Once you know who your customers are, and what they want, you start to develop your product through an iterative cycle. Build your "minimum viable product", which is the smallest product that you could sell and still consider it your product. As a hint, that won't include the SDK or any of the app store type stuff you discuss above. What is the ONE thing that defines your product?

Then build that one thing. I suggest you read the Paypal story in "Founders At Work" and learn from their initial demo. In short, Paypal was to be a way to pay other people by beaming virtual currency through cell phones / PDAs (use case: split checks at restaurant). They didn't have the cash to actually build one on a PDA, so they made a little interactive website that would demo the functionality.

The interesting conclusion is that so many people actually tried to send money through the webapp that they realized their entire product was wrong. So they pivoted.

To sum, think big but work small. Cut EVERYTHING out that you can. Talk to your customers. Realize that your original idea probably will need modifications (pivots) to succeed.

Once you get through all that stuff, you will have a better grasp on the potential for your idea. If you do Blank's steps well, have a good idea, you will be in good position to raise money / find partnerships for anything you want.

It's a long road. Best of luck!
Here is the paper they cite:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1502864

One of the authors of the research paper has a lot of work on innovation and open source in general:

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm
>One "failure" scenario (to use "failure" loosely, since it's subjective) is, I think, the math one: CS becomes a narrow discipline of theory-of-computation, systems, and PL type theory, sort of like pure math.

I had a conversation with a friend only yesterday where I proposed exactly this. Some of the things that are now CS but I don't think will be in the future: graphics (as you said), HCI, robotics, and maybe eventually AI. I wouldn't be surprised to see both theory and systems (OS, parallel, etc) remain under the CS banner, though.
I wouldn't call that a defense of open source because I didn't realize that people giving things of their own will needed defense.

In fact, I would refer to open source as an attack on the rationale for the patent system.
> Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people.

Yes I will. HTML5 (and thus HTML5 video codecs) are still very young in the grand scheme of things. It's pretty innovative stuff and it's evidence that patents slow down innovation via collaboration.
In reality there's a spectrum. If the patent office would actually enforce the non-obvious clause rather than running as a cash cow then a lot of problems would be solved off the bat.

I think of drug companies and software companies as the two extreme examples. Drug development is basically a money-losing proposition without patents, because it takes millions to get to anything useful, and once you do it's distilled down into something that's almost trivially easy to copy.

With software on the other hand, innovation happens in tiny steps. Often patents are granted to ideas that took someone a few days to come up with. As software is built, hundreds or thousands of these ideas come together to (hopefully) create a high value application. Once you have a high value application as long as you don't release the source code it's not easy to copy. The patents don't help someone recreate it. They have to pour blood and sweat into the codebase to come up with something that actually replicates the value. In other words the patent helps no one but the trolls.

Of course this is obvious to any software developer which is why we reflexively assume patents are bad. However in between software and drugs, in the space real physical inventions, things are quite a bit grayer. In the case of physical things, the "obviousness" test is a little easier to apply because everyone has some familiarity with tools and objects, and R&D can be fairly expensive for a lot of simple end products. It seems to me that the underlying theory of patents is fundamentally sound, but just has absolutely no applicability to software.
You probably are not aware of this, but when used in this context, "progressive tax", you are referring to a tax system advocated by the progressive movement from the late 19th and very early 20th century. The progressive movement is the father of modern day liberalism, and actually was a tarnished word for awhile, resulting in it's adherents beginning to call themselves liberals. It's interesting the pendulum has swung back, to where "liberal" is considered tarnished, and "progressive" is the preferred term.

My point is that, the opposite of "progressive", in this context is not regressive, it's conservative. Calling it "regressive", obviously sends very clear signals as to which one is "good" and which is "bad", by those who wish to send such signals, which is how this all got started. However, it has now come into use by those who may not mean to imply those values, which may, indeed, be the case with you.
7 things I'd love to change about meetings
Interesting, I don't have a paywall, but that could be because it's WSJ Asia and my IP is China-based. Sorry, didn't know.
The differences is that the YC founders are successful entrepreneurs who made money for their investors before YC and since.

Google the history of Spinway, bankruptcy, then sold, Peerflix-a VC fire sale, Bryght-private sale for loss then shut down.
Statement from Elon Musk
Actually, you are right.. I bought the upgraded 13". My mistake.
Sorry and no offense, but your opinion is blissfully ignorant. It's a simple matter to trace obesity and other health issues to the increase in processed foods. Foods which are mostly created by the companies who influence this kind of legislation. Just a few seconds of research should convince you of this...

This bill places just one more issue on the small farmers plate. I grew up farming and ranching. As rampant development (causing increased traffic, trespassing, liability, etc) encroached on our SE Pennsylvania farm, we were forced to downsize. After selling our cows, we turned to buying milk illegally from another local farmer. Why didn't we just buy it from a store? If you'd ever had fresh, raw milk, you'd understand.

Most farmers I know, farm for the lifestyle. They're an independent lot and regulations like this is only one more reason to sell out to the highest bidder, aka, a real estate developer.

Increasing regulation in this area doesn't only hurt small farmers, it hurts communities, businesses, health, and in the end, the human spirit.

Sure there must be safe food. But I'd bet, given the food I had as a child (fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, pork and beef) along with all the 'contaminants' they must have had because they weren't irradiated, pasteurized, or processed gave me a much healthier foundation than most. You don't need your own farm for this, just go to a farmer's market. If you think it's expensive, compare it to your long-term health costs. Pretty damn cheap in the long run.
I like this. I'm getting tired of sites that tell you what they are, it would be nice to see sites move to /showing/ me what they are instead.

This seems like a more difficult task though, so good luck.
IE6? Wow!
You can play with most improvements coming in JDK7 right now ... http://download.java.net/jdk7/binaries/
So totally true. "Just do it" is the key. Hanging around the "clubhouse" for parties and beer is just not the point and clearly is not working...
I'm kinda floored by the comments on the story on NPR. Even if you don't like'em, they're managing to pull off something not everyone can. I've enjoyed Pomplamoose for a while now. Glad to see they're doing well.

Then again, I guess it's just as shocking that I'm still surprised by the vitriolic tone of commenters on the internet.
It's not surprising if you posit that most the "talking class" in the country is in the higher tax brackets. (Not to say that everyone in those brackets is against our progressive tax system. I'm at 28% myself and still think progressive is the only viable option if we care about a middle class in this country)
First sentence (for those who can't get through the paywall) is a good summary.

"China's manned space program aims to leapfrog the U.S. by deploying advanced spacecraft and in-orbit refueling systems as early as 2016, when American astronauts still may be relying on rides on Russian spaceships."
From the point of view of nature, nobody deserves anything. Shit just happens. It doesn't make sense to layer morality on top it, which is what the title of the article can be read as doing.

There are lots of ways to be stupid an irresponsible, but there is a very human tendency to treat ways of being stupid and irresponsible that involve sex as wicked rather than foolish.

It's a blind spot in our rationality that we have to compensate for, and the tone -- if not the substance -- of the article seems to fail to do that.
Portland pitch day: April 22 pitch True and/or Funding Universe CrowdPitch
Tell HN:  add your thoughts to the html5 next generation additions spec