skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody likes going to court. It's expensive and contentious.

Matt made an impressive effort to appeal to law, ethics, the golden rule, economics, majority opinion, and more, and for the vast majority of the interview, he did it politely.

Chris essentially said, "There's no way I'm going to change my mind no matter what because it's my opinion. Why don't you sue me?"

Matt cited IP lawyers and organizations. He also cited that large corporations have wanted to challenge but decided not to.

I found it to be a lopsided argument in the most complete way possible.
yeah. I'm considering working on a way to make Wave more usable.
VC's have a better understanding of customers and markets than entrepreneurs. Often the assumptions a founder makes about how their product will be accepted are fundamentally incorrect. The best way to make sure that the premises upon which you are basing your theories aren't false is to run them by people who know better than you. No question is so stupid that it will disqualify a founder from receiving funding.
This is one of the areas of programming language conversations that fascinates me. The area where differences in how people think bubble to the surface.

"It's harder to understand at first, often un-intuitive"

I always felt that way about VIM. With programming languages, 'the lisp way' has always been the best expression of how I usually think about solving problems.

My brain naturally gravitates towards solution that involve macros, recursion etc. I can remember the first time I came across Common Lisp's condition system- my brain immediately went- 'this is so much more logical than exceptions in java/smalltalk etc'.

I know people who find Haskell's pattern matching and guards completely foreign but are entirely at home with switch/case and if/else whereas to me they seem very close to one another.
You make good points. My wife also agrees with you. I know she agrees with you because the Old Spice body wash appeared next to my shampoo in the shower the day after she saw the first ad in this series.

Apparantly, I should be on a horse.
One more item: in a work environment, it's really useful to have single cups of coffee on demand. A pot is usually too much, and is only really good for a short time (even in a thermal carafe). So my office sprung for a super-automatic espresso maker. We got this one - http://www.amazon.com/Jura-Capresso-13185-Impressa-Espresso-... - but there are a few dozen models that are similar.

It makes really good espresso (freshly ground, brewed at the right temperature, etc.), and you can dial in your desired strength by tweaking the amount of water. An espresso with a few ounces of hot water makes for great coffee. Not cheap up front, but with 5-10 people using it for a few years, it isn't that expensive either.
It's actually a matter of proving it was copied and not written like that on account of, you know, good coding practice.
"Clojure (and possibly other Lisps) feels kind of like Vim to me."

Which is ironic because they keep suggesting to learn Emacs alongside Clojure and other Lisps!
Idea: Real-ID/Trust/Rating Network
I am contemplating a few ideas for a start-up, and this one in particular sounds really cool to me, however, being in the HN community, I know better to ask for opinions before rushing out and coding the idea.

Here are the basics...

1. Create a site that would allow users to login via each of the following networks (Paypal, Facebook or Linked in) to create an account. The more sites that are logged in to be authenticated, and compared to the other hashes, the "trust" factor increases. The final step would be to send a registered letter to the address of the account.

2. Depending on if the details of each account match, and the registered letter is received, it would issue a real-id factor (the more, the more likely it is that the user is indeed who they say they are).

3. Users can up-vote other users based on personal transactions, or even recommend with a comment. There would be no down-votes or negative comments allowed.

4. There would be a back end-api to get a rating/trust factor for other sites to implement it.

5. Users with a certain 'rank' could have dedicated email addresses with the site, as well as hot links, that would take people to a secure page to send a message to the user. I believe the second part, along with captcha would eliminate the worry about potential spam from any site.

Is this a good idea? Would you use it?
You have a point, but what really matters to iPhone and Wii users is how they look/how they'll feel when using said product. If the Wii was essentially a $150 xbox I don't think it would have appealed to its intended audience nearly as well. I agree that aesthetics aren't as important to the Wii as the iPhone, but the solution to the iPhone issue (at least, the case; not the duct tape) is less ugly/cumbersome.
Why would the teachers in an area be any different than parents? They're often parents themselves.
because i prefer the 'meta power' that smalltalk and lisp provide me.

plus, i hate managing memory when i don't have to.

if i still wrote stuff that had to snuggle up to the hardware, i would probably still be using c or c++ but, i'm not writing that type of code anymore so i don't have need to use c or c++.
Exactly - if you need proof that equity of tech companies is a different investment than equity of staid, ordinary companies, look at the capital structure of successful tech companies.

Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple...No Debt.

The existence of large cash cushions on these balance sheets is insurance against a rainy day, and changes the risk profile. If these companies had been levered during the 03-07 expansion, they would have exploded in value.

They didn't, because it makes no sense to lever a tech company to the hilt, even if you believe it makes sense to lever a manufacturing company to high heaven. Cashflows are too variable and too prone to disruption.

It takes a special kind of tech co to go public, and many (i'm lookin' at you pets.com) weren't that kind.
What does the coordinated next to Reddit and Digg mean? Coordinated voting up amongst network of members?
Wait until the link-farms hear about this.
Yes, I've used an obvious exaggeration to convey the severity of the hit. The actual number is closer to 60%
Jesse Eisenberg sounds more like Jesse Eisenberg than Zuck.
I got that; my objection is to giving a 'silly season' story undeserved further momentum, implicitly endorsing its novelty. Of course, publishers always need some standby material to fill the 'news hole' between the ads - 'slow news day? No scandals? oh well...run a teen panic story then.'

This over-reliance on filler material is one of the things I dislike about old media. Since newspapers and broadcast news are anchored in time, recycled and anniversary stories have some utility in that they'll be new to enough of the audience to justify occasional repetition. But on the internet where information is mostly persistent, it's high time to abandon this capsule approach and move towards extending and updating a single story - a bit more along the lines of Wikipedia, but preferably without the opaque editing fiefdoms.

Part of my grumpiness stems from ongoing annoyance at content farming and a degrading signal:noise ratio. The internet feels constipated to me now in a way that seems to happen about every 6 years or so.* So I've got a spiffy new beta interface for Google News - yay; but their deployment of Caffeine means that my news feed contains more and more populist rubbish (like this i-dosers story).

Oh, and get off my lawn :-)

* the good part of that is the opportunities for disruption. Past information logjams were broken up by the arrival of HTML/Mosaic; Google search; and client-side web apps.
Although I used Learning Python in college and really like it,(our project was awesome, xmpp bots ;p) I think it's a good idea that they seem to be writing their own textbook to be better adapted to an intro to compsci class. Learning Python wasn't exactly targeted for that application.
The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock
That could be a bad sign -- I pasted in my lasted blog to the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514016 from a few days ago, and got Dan Brown. Surely a bug! Then the next two also came up Dan Brown. Doh!
No, this is one example of code that appears to have been copied from the Wordpress source. I wish the author had posted the rest, but this isn't the only one.
Well, okay. What I meant was that your criticism implied that he didn’t understand/address implicit tags, while he clearly actually did, but just suggested they be dropped.

I also hope his examples were more like a sketch than a careful proposal – otherwise, as you said, there’s a lot of ambiguity.

Anyway, there are clear advantages and disadvantages to both models. I’m not personally convinced that either HTML or S-expressions is an especially good document format, at least not as far as a human trying to create a document is concerned, but fortunately these kinds of languages are easy enough to generate that the original source language can pretty much look like whatever someone can imagine.
Here's a direct link to the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUuPPC9YaVo
or my favorite gaming site, http://www.giantbomb.com/
Alan Kay interview
Does anyone think this will have a negative impact on Facebook's reputation or slow the rampant user growth?

I'm inclined to believe this is going to have a huge impact on the masses and their perception of Facebook.
Where's the "furious hate" in noting that you're not just having to learn the language in question, but also an environment that's built around another language entirely?
Feel Beats Features, Stop Being Surprised
Orbitz isn't part of ITA. They use ITA, as does Bing and several others, but they aren't part of them. They could potentially switch to SABRE or something else, if Google actually went so far as to pull the rug out from under them.
Yes, the signal/noise ratio on this site is going to be brutal. Gaming forums typically reduce the cognitive load by having single threads/boards for discussions about one game. The StackExchange model is just going to blitz you; I'd be surprised if questions stay on the FP longer than 2 minutes, let alone get answered.

The gamedev StackExchange beta seems to be doing OK. I've never really jumped in to answer questions on SO, but I have been trying here. I'm surprised that people seem so compelled to answer, it's terribly unrewarding to put time and effort into a response and get no reply or one or two upvotes. It hardly seems worth it. I'll stick to forums where actually discussion can occur.
True, but I think he appears to do a pretty good job in the little snippets we see. I can't think of a better actor for the role, can you?
I'm very impressed with Racket.

* The documentation is fantastic. Insanely easy to browse around, very well formatted, and interconnected nicely.

* It comprises of multiple languages, and they can all interoperate - r5rs, r6rs, racket, etc. This has always been a major pain point for me when it comes to Scheme dialects - lots of implementations clinging to r5rs and using incompatible module systems.

* PLaneT has a ton of libraries covering many fields, and it's great that it's integrated into the language (requiring something from PLaneT will automatically download it).

* The community seems nice enough.

I also love that the new site immediately shows off the language: http://racket-lang.org/
I never said it wasn't weird!! I just said that it's not really a practical problem in most cases. Perhaps you do have to be extra careful and I'm just so used to it that I don't give it a second thought.
Ask HN: Using 'Daytimer' in a dot-com name?
Would it be bad (legally) if someone were to use 'Daytimer' in a dot-com name, seeing as this word/phrase is made up from a company name?
That's exactly the sort of question that gaming forums thrive on. I'm going to have to go through some of the meta-discussion on this site to see what they actually think should be there :/
hardware is currently disposable because this is how manufacturers have decided to make money. not so long ago, it seemed common to upgrade your PC: swap in one component, put in another. you're arguing to just buy a new device completely.

why do you think throwing away, rather than improving, something that so much energy, material and other resources went into creating, is a good idea?
BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code (How UNIX lost the lead to Linux.)
Off the cuff, catch all answer, You want to file an S Corp there are tax benefits to doing so. The better answer is talk to a tax professional.

As for damaging your ability to find a job, initiative will never hurt you and if it does you do not want to work there.
Ask HN: How to get started contributing to open source?
By my own estimation, I'm at an intermediate level of my preferred language (happens to be python, but not central to what I'm asking): I'm capable of understanding most of what I read, and of writing what I want, but I know there's a lot of learning still to be done (not that it ever ends...)

I think that contributing to open source projects would help me learn a great deal about being a better programmer - and especially about programming as part of a larger project.

Another reason for doing this is just to contribute, to give something to the community. But I'm not at the level of making my own useful things for people yet, so I'd like to help out on existing things.

So, how do I start? Is there any central 'help wanted' noticeboard, or do I have to go to every project I might be interested in and check out what they need doing? And if the latter, what are some good ones that might need some help? (For me that's python projects - but feel free to add others as replies for other readers' usage)

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.
I get what you're saying that this is how it is and that it's an insignificant thing. I'm opposed to making hardware disposable and I see this move as another step in that direction, thus I disagree with what MOTO has done.
The Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009
Palliative Care For Mesothelioma Patients | Cancer 24h
I'm impressed. The author starts with this disclaimer:

> I’m not a lawyer, I’m a developer. My views here are my own and are based on TECHNICAL knowledge and experience with the GPL, not on the law (which astute observers will note often does not reflect real life)

I was not expecting much, therefore, in the way of accurate legal analysis, yet a couple paragraphs later he goes on to show the errors in the SFLCs analysis, and then goes on to correctly state what is required for something to be a derivative work, and then analyzes the theme in question to see if it is a derivative work.

If he had left off the disclaimer, and tossed in a couple of direct case citations in proper legal citation format (instead of just citing another blog that cited a major case), I'd have not guessed that he wasn't a copyright lawyer.
Isn't this the point of tags?

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/world-of-wa...

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/starcraft
Cool, so now a virus can potentially destroy phones on hardware level.
Thesis itself can be fixed by removing any infringing code, but the developer's reputation might be more difficult to repair.
New York Times Goes Nuts, Says Govt Should Regulate Google's Search Algorithm
The solution is if you don't like GPL, don't copy GPL code from WordPress when you make your theme.
Did they really include a shot of him writing formulas on a window at Harvard? That cliched "genius" shot is getting worn out. Of all the smart people I've ever met, I've never seen one write forumlas on a window.
Should You Be Allowed to Know What’s in Your DNA?
Idea? Good. Try it? Yes. Use it? No.

1. Why? It's just another Web of trust (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust). While absolutely great in theory, the actuality is unless you can get a significant number of people to use it -- regularly -- it won't work. (Hackers don't count. You might get enough to make it worthwhile to other hackers, but we trust each other already, right? ;-) )

2. Why no negative comments? One user who had 100 good experiences and 1000 bad would look good, while in reality not.

3. If you end up deciding to build it, good luck. I'll probably sign-up, and hope for the best.
Is the book you were referring to "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" by Simon Singh?

Amazon link - http://amzn.to/dlNAeO

It's on my reading shelf right now, but I have not gotten around to reading it. I think your comment just might make that happen. Thanks for the recommendation
..which he disclosed clearly in the first paragraph of his blog post.
Its Official Software Will Be Unpatentable In Nz - NZ Computer Society
For most people I talk to and for myself as well the hate is not for Java the language per se. It's for Java the Standard library and ecosystem. Java the language doesn't suck.

However java's standard libraries seem to have been designed to make you write a metric ton of code to do the simple stuff and a planets worth of code to write anything actually useful. I used to joke that someone needed to write a java.lang.{python,perl,ruby} namespace where sane people can use code to just get stuff done. Then along came JRuby,Rhino,Jython, and now Clojure so I guess in a way that's exactly what people did.
I think the point here is that Chris is one of the first people to stand up and challenge the assertion made by Matt that the GPL automatically applies to all WP themes and plugins. Everyone has just sat there and accepted it up to now. Everyone on HN and elsewhere that is just telling Chris, "Oh, just follow the rules, why are you fighting this?" — why should he follow rules that may as well be arbitrary?

Even if this does go to court and it turns out that Chris is indeed in violation of the GPL, I still applaud him for having the courage to stick to what he believes in. In my opinion, the GPL needs to be tested either way. I think at this point we can all speculate, but no one really knows what will or won't stand up in front of a judge and jury.
Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
Just signed up. Seems pretty cool. Requested a mentor, we'll see how it turns out.

Would love to see some testimonials on the homepage though.
Considering a few million dollars' worth of Thesis licenses have been sold in the last couple of years, we shouldn't be whipping out the Kleenex just yet :-)
I've tried CamStudio for recording webinars but would like to hear your suggestion for Windows, thanks!
That cover of Radiohead's Creep by Scala & Kolacny is awesome.. listen to full song if you want http://grooveshark.com/#/s/Creep/2sx1OB
Is this for real? "Dire Disaster Realities .. In The Gulf Of Mexico"
Just curious, as you seem to imply that Clojure is no longer on that list. If this is the case, why not?
Sell the stock of its competitors short.
For me, the Stack sites rely on gentleman-like behavior - from the no need to sign up through to collaborative rather than discursive/bitching nature they are trying to foster.

Gaming seems to be at odds with that - most game forums seem to be infused with pre-pubescent tweens and teens discovering the 'art' of griefing for the first time. Sure there that isn't everyone who uses game forums, but these people shout the loudest.

I very much doubt this will work in Stack. But then what is the cost to them in trying out a few new verticals? I would like to see them try 10 risky verticals with the aim of shelving 5-8 that don't work after 12 months.
I'm being petty - but that's an obnoxiously large Obama '08 button.

I literally thought I was on the wrong site.
Ask HN: Startups/Businesses in China? What worked, what didn't?
I'm writing a research paper and need some personal experiences, anecdotes, opinions.

The topic is conducting business in China, especially for Americans working or starting a company in China, what things worked for you? What didn't?

What sort of business practices are unique to China? Cultural influences? Barriers to entry for foreign (i.e. American) businesses looking to expand into China?

What sort of obstacles have you come overcome? What were the biggest issues you had to deal with?

Thanks! Feel free to email me at ysh4u@virginia.edu
Don't you have to borrow stock to sell it short? Can you do that for 6 years?
If someone acts like that I don't consider them part of this community. There's more to being part of HN's community than registering for a username. At one point one of the trolls had written "who thought it would be a good idea to make this doc public?" which IMO shows you their level of mentality. We've had several successful public Google docs on the front page in the past. In this case I believe the people who are doing it are mostly people who ran out of things to click on Reddit.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's not a much more extraordinary claim than that of government oversight with minimal impact.

The editorial proposes to involve some government oversight commission or editorial board, even while acknowledging that government involvement could very well be a noose around Google's neck as a company whose primary value is derived from responsiveness.
ECMAScript 5 Still Does Not Allow Subclassing an Array
Taking a short position in the competitors is troublesome because you need to time it right. If you think apple can win, you can go long any time the stock is low and end up a winner.
Right, otherwise we have moved into software-patent area (and correct me if I’m wrong, but there are no software patents that apply).
See

http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/6/24/apple-ip...

from

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459728
"How DRM can hurt sales." He didn't say DRM does hurt sales in general.
Perhaps Apple reads pg, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy...
Choose a project that you use yourself and implement something that you would like to see in it. Or go to its bug tracker and start fixing stuff. Subscribe to the mailing list, hang out in the irc channel. Let them know what you want to work on, to find out if anybody else is already doing it. Get feedback on your contributions, and give feedback on others. But work on a project that you use. Easier to stay interested.
Maybe the "gentlemen gamers" haven't had a suitable forum to congregate. Wasn't there just a study that said most gamers were adult men? If so, this will be tailored to them much better and give them the tools to deal with the tweens.
Binaural beats
It depends. Obviously, there are more communities of tweenagers yelling into the Internet well than there are those of mostly adults than software engineering, but it doesn't mean they are the only game communities.

The Penny Arcade forums, SomethingAwful's gaming forum, ElitistJerks, Quarter To Three, NeoGaf (to some extent) and other places are all renowned for decent discussion.
Part of our team uses Atlassian's tool Crucible for accomplishing this. I don't have a ton of hands-on experience with it, but they love it and it does look like it does a pretty elegant job at capturing a living code review online. http://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/
Leverage and buy stock. The only thing that stops you from increasing the size of your bet is the risk of the downside. To some point, this is manageable, but after that point, it becomes pure insanity. YMMV.

Shorting the competitors because you think a company is going to do very well is actually a bad idea -- it's entirely possible that Microsoft would have been able to open another very profitable market.
There's a bigger problem. There's always going to be a spot-on prediction ex post. But you need to know which prediction is spot-on ex ante.
This is all spot on. The art of making the perfect cup of tea is fairly analogous: buy fresh, loose leaf tea, pour the right temperature water over the right amount of tea for the right of time, and then enjoy some great tea.
Cloud is Defined, Right?