skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't referring to the US govt debt, I was referring to all the bad loans on banks' balance sheets. Particularly all the subprime and alt-A mortgage debt still packaged into CDOs and whatnot.

We're Japan in the 90s all over again. Either force the banks to mark it all to market (require them to sell 5% of it for a market price), do capital structure cramdowns to preserve the banks that can be preserved, let the others go out of business, then continue economic growth, or suffer a 'lost decade' or worse.
There's a company called 'Domain Registry of Canada' that looks for .ca registered domains that are about to expire and sends a form letter telling you that you should renew, and to fill in the form, check the box, and enclose a cheque to make sure your domain stays active.

What the form ACTUALLY is is a transfer request, which will transfer your domain to them, at a rate of likely twice what you're paying already. It says this in the fine print, but if I didn't know who my registrar was already I might not have noticed (good thing I don't send cheques to people).

It's the shadiest kind of business, and while I believe it may be technically legal, they're taking advantage of customer confusion. I'm sure they make a ton of money with this sort of thing.
Ask HN: How to sell eBooks etc without the hassle?
I have some ideas for some side businesses selling ebooks, clip art collections, that sort of things. I'm a web developer, but I don't want to write all the payments handling, sending files stuff myself. Can the HN community recommend any site that current does that? I'd like to be able to send them a file of my finished product and have some way to redirect the users to that site to buy stuff.
They also have an open-source code repository for some web applications that they are trying to build.

http://code.google.com/p/khanacademy/

I daresay that they could use technical help from all the web/javascript gurus out there.
I haven't watched this, but I'll note two facts:

There are about 100,000 full auto weapons legally owned by civilians in the US.

There are 3 known crimes that have been committed using a legally owned one, but two don't exactly count: one was by a cop and the most recent was that insane case of criminal negligence where a pre-teen was handed a Micro-Uzi and allowed to fire it without an adult helping.

I wouldn't fire a Micro-Uzi without slowing working up to the point where I was sure I could handle it. One parent on a gun politics mailing list that I'm on who owns full auto weapons and who let his kids fire them emphasizes how he makes sure he has a "death grip" on the weapon to ensure it stays under control.

That said, the large number of people who've fired rented or borrowed full auto weapons at events like Knob Creek without incident shows it's not terribly dangerous.
www.chargify.com
Nope, the "Lautenberg Amendment" makes ownership etc. illegal for those convicted of misdemeanor domestic crimes.

That's not exactly correct:

The act bans shipment, transport, ownership and use of guns or ammunition by individuals convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, or who are under a restraining (protection) order for domestic abuse. [1]

Logically, then I think that the latter part (about the domestic restraining order provision) ought to be vulnerable now. However, I really doubt that Court would be willing to reexamine this in the current context, since in Emerson it was judged Constitutional. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_Violence_Offender_Gun_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_Violence_Offender_Gun_...
Out of curiosity, what's it like on/from the east side of the Bay? I have a standing invitation to be a roommate in the Concord area. BART to downtown I'm familiar with, but I don't know what to expect if I have to head south.
Measure progress by what has been accomplished, not by what is easy to measure.

(product and business dev, not the timeclock)
Hi there,

if you get a chance, check out a book by 'Bruce H. Lipton PhD' called 'The biology of belief', it was recommended to me by a cellular biologist friend of mine, and it delves further into this topic.

very interesting indeed

cheers
URL invalid. in the signup form :(
does it mean the name was taken? or do you have a special format?
Note that this is only true if your host is running PHP using mod_php or similar, and they don't have safe_mode configured properly.
Lawnchair (http://brianleroux.github.com/lawnchair/) is similar to this, but you have to pick an adapter (see http://github.com/brianleroux/lawnchair for browser list).
They do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_payment_number

I use it all the time.
Evernote does parse the text out of photos of my home whiteboard.
Aggregation with HBase
Great! Would it be possible to invite other people from within the interface? I have some non-techie friends who might be interested in the site, but I don't want to scare them off by giving them the "hackernews" invite code :)
the unscattering of published content from multiple sources sounds like a great idea to start. I wouldn't get into the topic based searching right away as you are diluting your brand. Do one thing REALLY well to start, then move into other things.

Since I suspect this is a product that would be used by businesses, rather than displaying an end-user type page where you have a search box, how about building a few examples of unscattered media.

I'd suggest taking a few topics which will be in the news for a bit, such as the gulf oil spill (I wouldn't unscatter the BP stuff, but maybe the gov't action), maybe greenpeaces media, stuff like that, and show a demo of what the services can do for businesses.

That's the best way to get people to get it. And if you build a demo for these publishers, maybe they'll install your widget on their page bringing you more customers.

Don't talk about it if you can show it.

Congrats on being a father, and best of luck with the new indeavor. Really an interesting and useful idea i think.
IE6 has userData behavior, which can be used to store data on the client just like with local storage
Are you sure that April 20, 2010 isn't 0 BP? :)
Given that restraining orders are handed out like candy and have been used to strip future victims of self-protection, it indeed ought to be vulnerable now. We'll see; that and the ex post facto nature of Lautenberg really need revision, since the prior regimes for both didn't take into consideration that a restraining order or misdemeanor domestic violence conviction would strip someone of a fundamental right.
Yup, it works in IE6.

I don't have access to IE5.5, would love to have someone test it.
The analogy of a DSL isn't really an analogy -- it is a DSL. Legalese is a subset of English gramatically speaking, but the entire goal is to minimize ambiguity as much as possible. It really is a DSL.
Invincible Apple: Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere
With this, and the rumor of Google starting a new Facebook competing service, is the war between Google->Facebook heating up in the same way that Google->Apple has?

Why does Google feel the need to dominate every corner of our Internet experience? Is it because their eventual business model is to wrap ads on all content everywhere? Facebook's business model is to add every physical item to the social graph, so I suppose there are natural conflicts there.
Look at it like a refactoring. Sometimes it is desirable to stop and reorganize a bit. The fact that there is a good reason for using both pi and tau may not be immediately obvious to some people, so they tell us about it. I for example, would never catch on to what tau is, and why it is useful without this. Now that I read it however, I can understand it well. Further, I have gone back and re-examined some things I have been learning lately that contain major sin and cos components. Suddenly they make much more sense to me -- using Tau gives me an intuitive understanding of how cos and sin are related.

To put it another way: If I, and other willing but not genius types, can't understand the results of scientists "finding and confirming important things" why should they do it in the first place? [Edit:] I mean can't understand in a way for use in engineering and other practical ways.

A final note: there is a strong resistance in the math, science, and engineering communities to the idea of "lets look at what we know and reformulate it in a consistent way". They think it is intuitive as it is, even tho there may be ways that people can learn it faster and to as deep of an understanding if a different formulation is used. This results in a lot of stupidity in the world like teaching physics in the order it was discovered, rather than some order building on concepts, or teaching physics by expressing velocity as a fundamental concept instead of as a derivative of something else.
> I think 'irrational' matches up with intuition better, even if it's described as 'non-terminating.'

well, counter example, 1.22333444455555..... is an irrational number, but it's somehow easy to understand rationally. LOL

Also it's worthy point out decimals are heavily related to positional notation. Another fun example is we can use base-e number system for maximum calculation efficiency. Or better, base-tau. So 6.28 in base10 equals 1 in base-tau numeral system.

see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_representation#Base...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial_number_system
Python implementation of the WHATWG HTML5 specification
Lulu.com and CreateSpace.com are both good for this.
Yeah, this simplifies matters quite a bit.
Freakonomics: Is Divorce Contagious?
"I have no recourse because we split the venture 50/50 (no vesting). If I want to continue on the project without him, he can block it. I've tried buying him out and he insists he's committed and will not sell under any circumstance. My only recourse is to quit and block him from taking the idea and running with it. Neither of these are admirable outcomes and I'd rather run the business as far as it can go with a lazy co-founder than end it in such an ugly fashion."

I'm sure someone here would absolutely love to work with your "co-founder". Hell, they may even give him some common human dignity as well as an interesting project.
Sweet. How long will Facebook be able to delay the IPO to steal/keep the best talent in the industry?
Dominate or be dominated.

Facebook is increasingly becoming "the internet" for a lot of people. They interact with businesses there, communicate with peers, keep up on what is new, enjoys games and entertainment, etc. Facebook, without doubt, wants to be your internet. They want to wrap their ads around everything you can do.

Google is the same. As is Microsoft. As is Apple. As is everyone else.
I mention torque in the manifesto, but I wasn't specific enough in this case, and I've added an example addressing this issue at http://tauday.com/#sec:four_arguments. The short version is that when necessary you can easily add a subscript to avoid ambiguity, such as tau_R for rotational torque. (Superscripts work, too. Particle physicists deal with pions, which are represented by the letter pi, but all the symbols have superscripts indicating their electric charge. As a result, no one ever confuses them with the number.)
I could be wrong – it’s been a while now – but isn’t that what forth’s “immediate” is?
Well who died and made you all-knowing?

Let me guess. You're an MBA. You've probably spent lots of time polishing your presenting skills and becoming a good salesman, and polish and presentation are important to you.

Here's the thing - all that polish and poise is useless unless you actually have a product to sell. In order for that to happen, someone has to be creating something of value.

Welcome to how the other half lives.

Is he getting the job done? Do you have a product? Is it progressing? If you can answer yes to these questions, then please get over yourself. You're one of the founders - not the founder. No offense, but suits have a tendency to be seriously arrogant and think that the entire company revolves around them. It doesn't. Stay up until one in the morning trying to work around an obscure, undocumented bug in an unstable library sometime, and then see how you feel about coming in later in the day.

Also, at the risk of wandering into dangerous territory, from the name I gather you're Indian, and I'm going to guess you're Indian in the sense you actually where born and grew up there.

Guess what - you're not in India any more. Business is done differently around here. Unless someone is working in sales or customer service, or works hours so incredibly bizarre that they can't communicate with anyone face to face ever, there's absolutely no call for this overbearing, you-will-work-when-i-tell-you-too attitude.

He's a programmer - an educated, trained technical professional - not a floor sweeper. Treat him like a programmer.

You have an opportunity here. Please do the world a big favor and don't become yet another prick CEO.

See Also:
http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html and
http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html
I agree with the point you're trying to make, but I don't think it's a fair argument to discount the negligent pre-teen. The fact that you and other responsible adults would never allow this to happen really doesn't change the fact that someone did allow it, so it's an honest data point.

Even so, 2 out of 100,000 compares quite favorably to the proportion of automobiles that have been used in violation of the law, or 1040 forms that have been used similarly.
Please add this. I need to be able to sync my salesforce tasks with GTasks. What I don't understand is how are there mobile and iPhone gtasks app without an API? How do they work?
I would imagine that is the part that prevents forgery.
Honestly Google's bifurcation in supporting both Chrome OS and Android was, at least to me, a perplexing decision, as they seem fundamentally (competing UI's, similar market) to be incompatible roadmaps.

If touch tablets ends up upending the netbook category, then Chrome OS won't really have a home. It doesn't have the capability of taking advantage of advanced hardware, and netbook functionality might be fully accounted for by Android tablets. Chrome OS was an interesting bet in the direction of computing (smaller, inexpensive notebooks as the norm for Internet consumption and light office work), but things might not pan out the way Chrome's founders had thought.
I might be wrong, but doesn't HTTP require the Expires header to be set a date less than or equal to one year in the future? If so, the test might have hit undefined behavior.
Wonder why I got down voted for an informative link to a similar project that I have no involvement with?
So, all hopes for cross-domain user tracking are still doomed. sigh

I would certainly hope so...
Yeah, right now it must be 5 characters. Thanks for the feedback!
"Hidden?" Give IE some respect...its rendering may have been crap, but it had plenty of features like this for building robust web applications years before the cool kids realized that might be a good idea.
The Supreme Court Punts On Business Method Patents
Clickbank does exactly that, but their fees are pretty high.

A few years ago, I wrote a custom script for ebooks that takes a PDF and watermarks every page with the buyer's Paypal email address after purchase, and offers email and download delivery options.
Then draw a line in the sand. Decide whether it's better to alienate your IE5 and IE6 users so you can get the newer features into your customers' hands faster.
Getting a Job Interview using Google AdWords
Doubt it, they release annually anyway.
Why does Microsoft need to be in the gaming market?

In short, because they can expand there and expect to succeed since the fields are closely related, and any short comings can be fixed by throwing money at them.

Yes, Google is trying to own the internet from the power lines it runs on, the air waves it transmits on, to the machines used to access it.

Why do you think Henry Ford owned a steel mill? Do you think that he shouldn't have entered the steel market and just bought steel from the existing mills?
It's a relatively simple question whether a certain trait can be 'ascertained' by these systems, and to what accuracy, in a given context.

There are a number NLP programs that can detect a writers gender from text at a much greater accuracy than raw chance, especially in a limited domain. The problem is that the world is a big, messy domain.

There's no reason in principal that other traits wouldn't be 'detectable' (although I doubt sexuality), but the problem is getting a good set of training/test data in context, and what your acceptable threshold for accuracy is.

I'd be willing to bet that people whose text messages contain lots of U's and L8R's probably have worse credit than those who text in proper English, but there are much better ways of doing a credit check. If that's only accurate to, say, 100 FICA score points it's probably not worth using it.

I wouldn't be too worried about big brother(s) using semantic analysis to read your mind, but don't discredit the fact that language patterns encode certain cultural information that is identifiable, or at least correlated with behavior.
N.A.D.D. - Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder
I guess when robots get too good at replacing humans (reasoning, mobile, perform skilled work).
I was actually reporting the equality as expressed by the manifesto. See here: http://tauday.com/#sec:euler_s_formula
This might have kept me in math
I'm completely unconvinced that cross-domain local storage is even remotely a good idea. I can't think of any data I'd want to store in a clientside database that I would want other sites to be able to see/modify.

So, all hopes for cross-domain user tracking are still doomed. sigh

Um, this is a good thing. I don't want the sites I visit to be communicating my use patterns to each other.
I discount it as a "true crime", it wasn't someone using his weapon to shoot someone with malice, it was a criminally negligent accident. E.g. if you bundled someone of the same age into a running car and let them have at it on your own property we wouldn't say that had anything to do with driver's licenses, if the vehicle was properly registered with up to date license plates/tags, etc.

Heck, a Micro-Uzi is essentially a big handgun, you should never give a handgun to someone that young without intense training and supervision. I started shooting long guns in kindergarten but was a teen before my father started me on handguns (other more handgun oriented parents have started their children on handguns earlier; Massad Ayoob's daughter was winning competitions as some insane age like 7 or 9).

And that's 100,000 over decades; the law dates back to FDR's first year or so in power and the number was frozen by another law in 1986.
Why on earth would you imply that cross-domain user tracking is a good thing?
could just set up a simple front end w/ shopfiy or something similar. i think they have support for digital goods.
So, the original author's point was that the discount rate thing applies differently than you're applying it.

They're not choosing less satisfaction now rather than more satisfaction later. They see things as hopeless (too many bee stings), throw their hands in the air and say screw it. A 0% chance of a high-paying job in the distant future discounts to 0 utility at present for any discount rate.
Give IETester a whirl. IE 5.5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 preview render engines in a single executable.

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
That is a lot of talent, seemingly in stuff that Facebook doesn't really do. Any ideas on what they're up to over there?

I don't know if the world needs another browser, but maybe Facebook is working on one?
According to the article, it has been tested, but only to see if psychologists also agree if the text was written by someone that was depressed.

No one actually looked at the author and determined if the author was depressed.

In otherwords, the program agrees with psychologists 78% of the time if a sample of text may indicate the author is depressed. We're not close at all to a magical diagnosis machine...
Vignesh- I think you're jumping the gun by assuming he's lazy. As you're reading here, a LOT of developers are not normal when it comes to hours. Instead of jumping to conclusions, why don't you work out a dev schedule that you can both commit to and judge him by that alone. I suspect you're making the morale issue out to be more than it is. You are being too self-centric and not really understanding how developers live. Give this another chance and do some serious self-reflection, and ask yourself if he's truly lazy or if you're just being inflexible and anachronistic in your assumptions about work time and productivity.
Wow, someone needs to calm down. Stop calling people Karl Rove because they aren't seeing the same argument you are. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe it's not, in either case the accusation looks foolish.

After using both, the noob experience in Ruby is better than in Clojure. I've had cases where more "advanced" library/package management was easier in Clojure (really, Maven) due to system local vs. project local package lookup. It's entirely possible that says more about my knowledge on the subject than anything else.
I'm amazed that in none of the reviews I've read is there any complaint about the horrible sound quality. I bought a pair of iPhone 4s for myself and my girlfriend and we returned them the next day. We each sounded to the other like we were in a cave. This is with full 3G signal strength on both ends.

It's surprising because the 3GS and 2G always sound great. Never any hint of this hollow, echoey sound.
Some time ago, a friend of mine trained a Bayesian spam filter on the Livejournal latest posts page, and bucketed posts into "angsty" and "not angsty". It worked surprisingly well.
I give all of you Cheryl Taggart: http://mikecane.tumblr.com/post/746571170/cheryl-taggart
"Throughout the article they have only demonstrated how a particular community is more comfortable with using double pi."

The manifesto explains why using tau is better mostly for non-mathematicians. Especially, but not limited to, children learning about radians for the first time. You may disagree, but I think helping explain mathematics better is incredibly important.
I read the post to mean that the computer program correlated highly with the opinion of a panel of human experts when both are given the writing to study.

What hasn't been established is the correlation between the program and the mental state of the authors as measured using more conventional methods.
Well I am disappointed but not surprised that SCOTUS didn't throw out software patents.

The patent system has been the foundation of the business processes in many industries. It's natural that a lot of powerful stakeholders expect this to continue into the information age. Despite this, when production in general is going towards information, patents are doomed to become more pathological and more a rent-seeking activity as information processing expands.

There is simply no even slightly objective measure for determining whether X algorithm and Y distinct algorithm are "the same". The existence of such a measure is essentially a mathematical impossibility. Among other challenge, a sameness measure would probably have to solve the halting problem (otherwise you substitute an algorithm with the same results for any given patented algorithm). More generally, any "sameness" criteria must really be based on a "close enough" measure and closeness itself is a characteristic of the three dimensional metric space we humans live in. Closeness doesn't exist and can't meaningfully exist in an infinite dimensional space of abstract algorithms.

So "sameness" is going based entirely on subjective and arbitrary judgments of juries and judges, who naturally know little of the situation (indeed, ignorance is something of a necessary condition for having an honest opinion on the similarity of algorithms). Thus, software patents give any given patent holder of any algorithm an unlimited terrain to sue people on.