skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still welcome (and need) emails from startups -- I just want everyone to understand that if I don't get around to them, this is why.

As for persistence, it can work for you and against you. Knowing when it's a good tactic and when to back off... that's a fine line. =)
This is why we have a court system.

This is also why my local ISP claims to have a "Three Strikes" policy regarding infringement complaints. Through scientific experimentation I've discovered they don't enforce this policy. The point of the little performance is to try to avoid having the law interpreted in a court, where evidence trumps accusation.

The idea is that the accusation alone will be a deterrent. It's bad leadership and it's out-side of the letter and spirit of the law.
More to the point, illicit downloading is not piracy. Equating downloading with armed robbery(or worse) at sea is silly.
The trickle-up approach definitely works. Look at The Next Web and Inside Facebook... they break so many cool apps that then get picked up by RWW, TechCrunch, or Mashable.

Also, if you catch a night or weekend writer/editor, you could be in luck. There have been so many times -- especially at RWW -- when I was absolutely starved for something to write about on a Sunday night. I would have killed/maimed to get a pitch email then, but everyone was waiting until Monday morning to flood my inbox.
Funny - this post and these comments brought me to import my family wordpress blog into posterous and pitch it to my wife. We'll see what she says.
I don't usually say things like this, but...

`hahahaha, buuuuuurn`

That said, we're the kids of the world by most standards (median age).

You think Thompson or Pike chill on here?
I understand your university's position ... and yours also. If they do decide to make the code publicly available, I'd appreciate a reply to this comment. I'll check back occasionally to look for updates.

Enjoying you're thesis, btw, especially the section on Bollinger bands. The Turtle Traders (http://bit.ly/by1j2M ) seemed to have used this successfully with commodities. Did you reference any of the Turtle traders stuff when you were designing your system?
I wasn't thinking so much conspiracy theory...just marketing overreach, I didn't think there's possibly a technical explanation that holds water, interesting.
You forgot these actual reasons apps have been rejected:

- Is it a picture frame?

- Does it include political cartoons?

- Does it include an ideograph of a clock?

- Does it do the exact same thing as the previous version, which was accepted?

- Does it include legally licensed song lyrics that mention sex (with the appropriate "adult content" black mark)?

- Does it display an unoffensive screenshot from a Mac?

- Does it allow access to the Internet through public APIs?

- Does it mention the price of the Voyager spacecraft?

- Does it use the extremely popular OpenFeint network and the reviewer happens to be in a bad mood that day?
Apple policies are not 'harmful' to general consumers. They're unappealing to certain tech-savvy consumers, but those people are a niche. The average phone buyer has priorities more in line with what a curated app store provides, and that's why other companies are following Apple's lead.

Even if Google decides to focus on making Android appeal to a broader audience and starts following Apple's strategy, the market will still exist for open devices. Either someone will cater to it (which I am confident Google will continue to do), or the market has become so small that no one will bother. Either way, it's just the free market at work, not some evil conspiracy.
Children can be taught to handle weapons. In Somalia, boys as young as 9 serve in militias and handle automatic rifles. That's abusive and wrong of course, but they're evidently responsible enough with them to be useful to somebody. And in Switzerland, children routinely take part in shooting competitions at 13.

And of course, kids handle kitchen knives and pocket knives from a very young age. It depends on the household, but six or eight isn't unusual; it can be as young as three in some cultures.

Even in this culture, early elementary school kids are taught serious things like when to dial 911 and when not to. Learning when to use a weapon isn't that much harder.

If rape is a serious problem, arm the dang girls. Or at a minimum teach them to fight and run.

http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/article-knabbenschiessen/pic1...
That sounds about right... but doesn't that scare away lots of good ideas? Don't develop an idea that would be a great selling point for the iPhone, cause Apple will see that as a possible future dependency, stall your app from getting in the store and do it themselves in the next update. If Layar really gets moving, how long till Apple "does AR right" and then kicks them off for "duplicating built-in features"?
Yeah, and a phone call is analogous. I'd retract my comment, but it's too late.
Agreed. This reads like the ranting of some fossil that clamors for the 'good ol' days' when everyone used to be married to their job. This is apparently one of the best places to work in the country, according to ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/349873/No._52_Best_Pl...
Really? Because I can still buy a brand new computer with a brand new copy of XP, from Microsoft.

XP was the most reliable operating system from Microsoft, and I really don't like Windows 7. In this, I am not alone. I see absolutely no benefits in getting 7, and I have having to use it at work. I have found 7 to be less reliable, and more annoying to get simple stuff done. It really seems Microsoft keeps moving things around for no reason. The only thing I like about it is the improved task bar, and I can install that on XP (and have done.)

Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera still work ok on XP, Microsoft have just decided to leave XP alone.
Gillard to be Australia's 1st female PM
It's not that simple: If I choose not to buy an iPhone, I'm choosing not to buy a good smartphone. There simply aren't any others of comparable quality.

Like I've said before, the choice here is not between "open" and "closed," but between "open" and "good." That's the part that annoys me. If there were a legitimate platform that's just like the iPhone only without Apple's ridiculously oppressive policies, I'd be all over that. But there's not.
They didn't. They hedged the long positions with credit default swaps, assumed that they couldn't lose (which was true if the counterparty could afford to pay the swaps) and thus didn't declare them on their balance sheets as they were viewed to be without risk.

What ended up happening is the counterparties (most notably AIG) had taken on far more in credit default swaps than they could pay out, meaning there was lots of risk hiding off balance sheet. This is why Uncle Sam had to bail out AIG. (The Fed could have bailed out all of the people AIG owed instead, but that would have been far more work for no clear gain.)
Pacman original game design document?
Why do you think smart people can't make stupid decisions now and again?

I doubt he's getting full and accurate data and I doubt he's really had time to spend on the issue that this needs given the other major issues that need to be dealt with.
My company employs 14 people and counting. It's created most of those jobs in a recession. It buys goods and services that total up to a lot of money which then employ other people.

The games provide enjoyment to thousands of customers. Don't get me wrong, I'm not curing cancer, but yes it does benefit humanity.
I don't believe MPEG-LA offers indemnification, but that's why MS has been planning this for literally years. I've talked to people that say MS has spent millions just in due dilligence around this specific codec. Plus you can go to every vendor in MPEG-LA and you'll get the same response, that it looks safe so far.

What about WebM? If it were me at MS, I'd do exactly what they're doing. Support the codec if its there. If it turns out that this codec looks good with respect to IP (start investigating now, knowing it will take a while) then add support in IE10 or IE11.

There's very little upside to rushing adding this in the box. And they're not blocking its use. They're simply saying, we don't want to ship it right now.
Now I know how the diehard American soccer fans felt, crying after the US beat Algeria.
Is this the most global World Cup yet (in a business sense)?
What I found ironic in the post is that the CEO wants to implement a time-card system, but also wants his employees (probably a lot on salary) to work extended hours. I'm not sure how it is in the US, but here this would result in the company paying a shit-ton out at year end in banked time.

Forcing your workers to do overtime and work a half-day on saturday would land a company paying near to two-months wages at year end for all its employees if they weren't careful. This would have killed an IT company for sure back in 2001.
While this was a very incisive and accurate article in 1999, what on earth is it doing on Hacker News in 2010?
They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it.
All this will do is get women killed.
Naked Cowboy sues Naked Cowgirl to protect IP
> What we need is blanket protection from the federal government akin to the civil labor laws that grew out of the industrial revolution.

I don't want to be protected from doing voluntary transactions by the federal government - they have a pretty bad track record of making citizens' lives worse when they do that.

And besides, laws like this are started as a shield, but eventually get turned into a sword that's corrupted and hijacked by entrenched powers in the various industries. It's the nature of the current political situation with lobbying and a public that cares about the hot button issue, but doesn't follow up on the regulations a few years later to see how it turned out. Once people no longer care, the lobbying starts and you get all kinds of asinine things. Thanks but no thanks - the federal government isn't the answer.
Wow. I think their prices are really good. How's the stability and support?
My problems with your analysis: 1) Content strategists happens to be a very low competition, low volume search term. It shouldn't be especially hard to make the first page. 2) You did in fact optimize your URL for the page that ranked for the target search term. (As well as your H1 tag.) This doesn't support your argument that one can rank well without attention to these items.

Meanwhile, I am interested to know how a new blog got links from Boing Boing and O'Reilly Radar. That would be more interesting and useful if you are willing to share.

Edit: By the way, low volume is not bad if well targeted, so I'm not disagreeing with your strategy, just with the conclusions drawn about SEO based on this data.
Absolutely brilliant. Everyone needs to be designing this way.

In the late 90s as higher resolution monitors became prevalent users gained the ability to have more usable workspace. Unfortunately we saw greedy webdesigners simply grab more space and browsing the web remained a full screen experience. We should be able to tile multiple web browser windows but due to many websites' designs this isn't really possible.

Hopefully this is the start of a new trend in space saving options in web design.
Twitter can't really stop them. If I tweet out "I love Pepsi" twitter doesn't really know if I was paid to say that or not. The existence of the "(ad)" part of the tweet is just a courtesy.

Selling out is probably as old as society. :-)

They could try to block ad.ly from the API which I assume they use to get metrics about users, but ad.ly could just then buy those metrics from some other company or scrape them themselves.
>>The principle is simple: just as you get to choose whatever after-market modification you want to make to your car,<<

I'm sorry, but I stopped reading beyond that bit. There is no functioning government regulatory body in this world that would allow exhaust systems without catalytic converters or external wastegates, for example.
Clearly you should set up a mail filter that forwards emails with "From: Mom" and mail body containing "tell your father".
I'd say you'd have a bright future as a copy editor waiting for you if you desired, but I don't think there are any bright futures left in publishing.
Actually they do. Most every blog service has both an import and and export, and even though the resulting XML isn't formatted identically, usually an export from any major service will import successfully into any other major service.

FWIW: I've done imports between blogspot, movable type, and wordpress a number of times with rarely a problem.

I suppose it's sort of diabolically evil of Posterous here. They're really just releasing a feature every other blogging service has had for years, but doing it in a way that's great PR.
One of my aunts got my grandmother a computer 10 years ago or so. She had actually operated old IBM machines for accounting back many moons ago, but hadn't used a computer otherwise.

When I went to her house I got on her computer and said, "where's the mouse?" She didn't know what I was talking about, of course. She sewed a lot, so when I discovered that she thought it was some kind of foot pedal, I guess that makes sense.

These things are always illuminating. "Scroll up" gets a confused expression. She initially just tried moving the mouse. Click the scrollbar. What's that? How do you click? The button on the mouse? Which one? Do I click and release or hold the click? etc...

It's amazing how many minor details we can't help but take for granted.
Programmatically setting images as thumbnails in Magento
I've long suggested that iTunes isn't a media manager as much as it is DRM Software.
I guess that's kind of my point, I mean, shouldn't this information been posted somewhere more obvious (the official posterous blog perhaps?) or even better, as an email to registered users?
Indian govt will decide Rupee Sign today.
Assertion Injection : Unit Test Design Pattern
Hey, I'm no interventionist. Nevertheless, we have a government, we have laws and we have certain protection enshrined by law. I think this is a perfect opportunity for the feds to do something right.

Why can't my data be my data, backed up by law? Why is it that I can't get my data back from facebook anyway and anytime I want to? Why do I have to rely on the benevolence of facebook? Replace facebook with any other social site or entity.

I can get my medical record, by law - not based on which doctor I see.

I can get my credit report, by law - from all the agencies.

I can get a prospectus from a publicly traded company, by law - from all of them, not just those that think it is a competitive advantage to do so.

Cars need to adhere to certain minimum emissions standards, by law - not just because their engineers care about the environment.

I can go on all day. Do you think that any of these private/public entities would provide such niceties on their own volition? Perhaps some. But why do we need to rely on their whim.

Again, as for protection from voluntary transactions I agree with you. I want to smoke and drink all day till it kills me without the government being involved. Nevertheless, both smoking and drinking are regulated and for good measure. Who can disagree with that?

At some point in the not to distant future everyone will have a smart phone. Everyone will be on some sort of social network. Everyone will use Google or an equivalent. Everyone will have at least one device that can track their location on their body most of the time.

There is no feasible way that this will not be regulated. We can only hope that when it is regulated it is done as a shield and not a sword.
Why Modern MMOs Suck, And How We Can Stop Them From Sucking
Is there a pressure read on the leak? Do they know the strength of the materials in the pipe? I find it difficult to imagine the answer to both those questions is no. That being the case, isn't that why a lot of people are saying the only way to fix this is to drill relief wells?
Had to disable my flash blocker. Couldn't load it in Firefox - seems like my install of flash is borked there. Tried one flash demo, not bad. Tried another, it was loading for too long and I left. I have better things to do with my bandwidth than wait for flash.
How audio engineering helps tone down Vuvuzela disruption.
What I find most useful about Posterous is how dead simple it is to share media from email for virtually painless hosting! The only way anyone could beat that is to use Dropbox!! <wishful thinking>Now, imagine if you could just post to your blog by putting something in your Dropbox folder. Hmmm, I hope you posterous guys are listening.</wishful thinking>
I came in at 1:00 PM today, and then left to go see a movie (ending my workday) at 5:00. Of course, yesterday I came in at noon, worked until 11:30 PM, then worked some more at home until 4:00 AM.

I don't understand the people who let their bosses push them around and then complain about how much employment sucks. Anymore, at least - at my first job, I thought that way, and it was miserable. Then I left to found a startup, and then rejoined the working world after it failed.

The best thing the startup did was give me perspective. I realized that if I took a job and hated it, I could just do whatever I needed to do to make myself not hate it. And if my boss had a problem with that, the very worst thing he could do is fire me. Which would put me back in exactly the same position I was in before I took the job, except I'd be somewhat richer, more experienced, and would have accomplished more.

There's no such thing as "permanent" in this economy. I don't really understand this either/or dichotomy, where you're either a salaried employee or an entrepreneur. Most really good hackers I know have done both. Take the best opportunity open to you, regardless of whether it's your own company or someone else's.
Is that similar to how they were not blocking Netscape back in the '90s, because you could use it if you decided to install it? (I mean, ignoring the fact that a computer user in the '90s was vastly more likely to have the knowledge and inclination to install Netscape on Windows than the average consumer is to install a video codec nowadays.)

The fact is, bundling MPEG-LA's wares and not Google's is the same thing as supporting MPEG-LA over Google. Microsoft can wave their hands till the cows come home, but merely allowing a user to go through the difficult and technical process of installing a video codec is not "support."
Feature wars are so trite.
"A technology emerges that magically makes it easy to copy my SaaS app and use it in its entirety without paying the monthly subscription."

Before such technology existed it would make sense to pursue such a business plan.

But suppose such technology already exists, and you know it. It would be sort of foolish to plan a business that assumed such technology would not be used.

Now suppose that this magic technology was not invented for the purpose of copying SaaS apps, but was an inevitable side-effect of other good, useful, desirable technologies.

A side-effect of the technology that allowed you to build your SaaS app in the first place. Oh, and your app helped shut down other existing businesses that were not using this new technology.

That it can copy your site is simply one of a million things it can do.

Do you fight this technology? Freeze it? Criminalize it?

One of my gripes with the IP industrial complex is that there are companies that lucked out on a transitory scarcity because of a particular stage of technological evolution.

Tools existed for mass-producing physical copies and transmitting virtual copies across large distances (i.e tape and CD production, and radio/TV), but there were still sufficient financial and technical barriers to constrain its application.

These businesses were based on the assumption that cheap reproduction and mass data transfer would never become so cheap or so easy that just about anyone could do it with the push of a button.

Bad assumption. And now the cat's out of the bag.
You're quite right, that was uncalled for and, well, a dick move. For some reason I didn't notice it this morning.

On the other hand MS don't treat their own workaday programmers much better by calling them "Mort".
"You're supposed to be helping OUR people! What about our stockholders? Who's looking out for them? HUH?!" --Gilbert Huph
Internet Explorer 9 destroys Chrome 6 in HTML5 speed test (video)
No, I'm just saying that it's a very vague way of defining a customer/vendor.
it's nice to see the very beginnings of things.

all great ideas seem to start either as a fuzzy notion in someone's head, or a crude sketch on a napkin.
Tell that to the millions of World of Warcraft subscribers.
The app store review process wouldn't catch a hidden trojan type of malware.
Sometimes they really go out of their way to actually emphasize the lack of features, as in "It only comes in black", sort of like giving you the finger. Then there will be a a blog post or two about how it helped them focus on the experience and integration and what not and how Apple like they are. Then another one on how creative users had to be to work around the limitations. Fast forward a couple months and then:"Draft! Now with colors!"
Maybe they should implement an 'import posterous to posterous' tool if they continue this way.
I don't think that's a great idea. A mum/mom could always send an email saying "DON'T tell your father!"
> I can go on all day.

Sure, and you picked decent ones, but you left off all the inane bureaucracy like Sarbanes-Oxley with the time, hassle, and money it wastes.

> Do you think that any of these private/public entities would provide such niceties on their own volition? Perhaps some. But why do we need to rely on their whim.

Consumers have more control over companies than they do over the government. It's a lot easier to quit Coca-Cola than it is to get the government to stop subsidizing corn syrup. The corn subsidies are incredibly unpopular, yet persist, whereas I quit Coca-Cola and now don't drink it. Problem solved by individual choice.

> I want to smoke and drink all day till it kills me without the government being involved. Nevertheless, both smoking and drinking are regulated and for good measure. Who can disagree with that?

Well, me, for starters. Should you be able to smoke marijuana in your home? Choose your own medical treatments and practioners? How about not letting a English doctor practice in the States for... no good reason? Does that bother you? Should you be able to eat fatty food? It's your life, I have no right to vote to place controls on it. And you have no right to vote to place controls on me. It might happen, but if it does, it's wrong.

> At some point in the not to distant future everyone will have a smart phone.

If it matters to you, choose the most open options and protect what you share. Be intelligent and use your own discretion. I believe in your capacity to make good decisions for yourself, I believe you're smarter and more well-equipped to make the right choices for you than politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats. Likewise, I want to be able to make my own choices about my own life, and the idea of well-meaning politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats affecting my options is a very unpleasant idea.

> There is no feasible way that this will not be regulated. We can only hope that when it is regulated it is done as a shield and not a sword.

See, I'm not going to hope - I'm going to look at track records. Specifically, USG's domestic policies over the last 50 years or so. It's not a pretty track record.