skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most of what you said and, as one whose business hosts websites, I'd probably do the same as Rackspace.

However, the "business relationship is a two way street" theory has some caveats. While many of us are familiar with the "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" signs in brick and mortar stores, it's not always that simple.

Take the wedding photographer who was sued (and lost) for refusing to photograph a same-sex wedding:
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/357084.aspx

Obiviously, these examples aren't entirely analogous, but given the litigious nature of American society, any time you refuse/halt service to a customer, it has to be considered. I could easily see this Quran-burning pastor suing on the grounds that he was discriminated against.
To be accepted, the 'backup plan' needs to be similar in implementation to the 'YC plan' — if you wouldn't have proceeded with your startup in some form if you got rejected, then YC will almost definitely reject you.
Social networks are a new inhabitant in the web, so there are chances that a new way of interacting with people beat facebook, so keep making social networks, but not copying old ideas.
It rules out downloading any type of app or media from iTunes that is greater than 20 Megabytes over the cellular connection.

Presumably this is in place to try to keep AT&T from falling even more over under the load.
@mattdeboard

As a sincere answer... not really. All it makes me is better for me. And people who have a concurring viewpoint are also better for me inasmuch as we have shared values and my idealism (my self-righteousness?) makes values important to me.
Just curious: Are there any others from previous sessions YC classes?
I agree! This could be made more interesting. Although maybe they want to avoid getting too controversial...
I only used the word "violence" when it involves physical harm. I find words are most useful when they have narrow meaning (http://lesswrong.com/lw/ic/the_virtue_of_narrowness/).

Regarding your second point, also note that I am not advocating making their speech illegal. What I'm recognizing is that others might not want to be associated with it, or enable it in any way. If, for example, I had a venue of some kind, and I was approached by Neo-Nazis to hold a rally, I'd refuse. I can't maintain that position while also faulting Rackspace.
My thoughts went like this:

Enroll your credit/debit card today.
OK yeah this is going to take some trust.

It only takes a moment to sign up with Facebook.
Oh wow I don't want them anywhere near my credit card.
I agree completely with what you said (e.g. the BCM5700 driver was rewritten as tg3), but in this case it's much better to have a crappy vendor driver than to have nothing from the vendor, which was the situation yesterday.
New Like Button Features Mean More Opportunities for Liking
Right, so is the main problem with the burning act itself, or with the reaction to it?
On an Internet in which I can easily watch the video of Daniel Pearl's beheading or any number of other beheadings, stonings, or floggings in the name of Islam - I have a slightly different threshold for what constitutes actual "hate speech".
Haven't rats taken over the planet? Ants too. Birds also. We just live in different ecosystems.

You might say but they do not have consciousness. I do not think we actually know that. As for intelligent, they manage to survive and live in groups and communicate and have structures.
But, are you sure that the "impractical" degree programs are actually doing any better? Perhaps at top private schools one can get a good liberal arts education, but my observation going to a public school was that the science and engineering students generally seemed more well-rounded and more broadly educated compared to the vast hoards coasting along in psych, soc, and polysci; who were mostly interested in the party scene.
I think this startup would be a great partner for the Biggest Loser TV show. The show could provide the contestant with money and each week the contestant would make money if he/she lost weight. You could incorporate the original idea by forcing them to give some of the money back if they regain weight.
The most destroyed iPhone we have ever seen. By far.
It's 2010; is there any valid reason why a web page announcing a change to another document doesn't link to that document?

Assuming this[1] is it, what exactly counts as a "private API" per section 3.3.1. Isn't any code I write a private API, thus calls to it a are violation? And how is that compatible with the allowance in 3.3.2 to package an interpreter into the app?

[1]http://developer.apple.com/programs/terms/ios/standard/ios_s...
As an infinite set atheist, I think it's important to distinguish people who say "infinite" when they want to talk about the limit of unbounded finite behaviors ("a Turing machine has an infinitely long tape") and people who say "infinite" when they want to talk about big collections ("the cardinality of the collection of real points between 0 and 1"). A smarter language would have different words for these.
Point 2 is more or less what the courts use to decide whether the government can ban some certain speech. I read that as saying that you cannot encourage someone to commit an act of violence. The fact that If someone else gets their panties in a bunch over what I say and wants to be violent towards me, that is not inciting violence.

That is, a website encouraging people to murder abortion providers would be prohibited, but no reasonable person would consider the church's actions in the same category.

Does Rackspace have the right to pull the plug on anyone they want? I don't know -- that's a contractual issue. It looks like the last point does give them that right. I know I will never consider Rackspace for hosting any news or political website. Is supporting CA prop 19 in violation of their AUP? I don't know. It seems to depend on whether enough people get worked up about it. Would Rackspace have pulled the plug on Craigslist when state AGs start calling them sex traffickers?

Rackspace is now unreliable to anyone who can ever anticipate any controversy.
It seems that you're right. I did some further digging, and it seems that at least in the case of GNU Go, the FSF held the following opinion:

"the particular license violation that FSF brought up with Apple was section 6 of the GPLv2, which states that a redistributor of the licensed program may not impose further restrictions on the recipients to copy, distribute, or modify the program. Apple's App Store terms of service do impose several restrictions, such as limiting usage of the program to five devices approved by Apple."

http://lwn.net/Articles/391423/

Looks like I was wrong!
The only worry is that the same "experts" could review his application. It's worth a shot, to get a score and feedback, but it is a 12 to 18 month process. Investors have to be an additional source of financing.
Is there any evidence to support this contention? Or is this complete speculation based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever?
Love how Amanda's advice was all generic, also. It shouldn't make a difference what gender or species you are for YC, and it doesn't.
Fair point, I guess if a movement to burn the Koran "...contains harassing content or hate speech" I have to wonder what other ideas and writings, in Rackspace's considered opinion, might violate that clause in their TOS? As this isn't a legal or constitutional issue, one presumes they aren't using the legal tests for hate speech/hate crimes. Is this a 'I'll know it when i see it' sorta test?
But did the actual website contain hate-speech? I know these guys are clowns, but internet-archives only has an old page from 2008. My google cache has some crackpot pages, but nothing that rises (in my mind) to the level of hate-speech:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7AmrruJ...

Anyone have a cached copy so I can decide for myself if there was actual hate speech on the website itself?
At the beginning of the article, he specifically mentioned the assumption that "if it’s not the iPhone/AT&T deal". In other words, assuming iPhone is available on multiple carriers.
> The shorter and more classic example is the [lack of] right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre [when there is no fire].

This is nothing like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. It's not also profanity or improper conduct in a one-to-one conversation.
Good point. We heard this before. Prob will have to change the signup process! Thx for the feedback :)
I agree completely! I mean, it's not like anybody's ever toppled the market leader before, or made money in a niche that the leader doesn't cater to, or made enough of a dent to get bought out, or...
I've read about it in a book called "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" by Andy Hunt.
VideoLAN chairman and VLC developer here.

This is exactly the point. Porting VLC from MacOS X to iOS is more or less just a rewrite of the audio and video outputs (sinks). Plus an interface, of course...

Porting to Android is taking longer and is, of course, on the way...
Is there a http://withings.com integration? If not, why? That seems mind-numbingly obvious. I would consider doing this if there was an integration.

Note that the user experience would be much better too. Rather than need to upload photos, I would just use my scale normally.

Also, you could incentivize the photos by reducing the amount you lose. You could lose less of your bid when you miss a weigh-in by, for example, getting people to join the service. They could then follow your progress to make sure you don't miss your next one.

Finally, I'd make this about a charity and only take a cut of the losses. There isn't much reason you deserve hundreds of dollars for lazy people. This might decrease the success rate but increase your signup rate.
Not sure this biz model is sustainable. Especially considering how much FB is changing and will continue to change.
Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio, 'Military City USA'.

But for now this takedown will only give the church more attention -- it's the news hook for another cycle of coverage. So I think this is a matter of Rackspace covering their own ass, not doing a favor for anyone who truly wanted to squelch the church -- because the suspension doesn't even effectively serve that purpose.
Sure, civil rights laws were enacted to ensure that discriminatory practices that are patently hateful don't enjoy legal protection.

Still, this is not that. This isn't a guy quietly practicing his faith and sharing it peacefully with others. To hear some people say it, he's honestly inciting violence. He's being willfully, dangerously provocative.

Wouldn't be surprised if he did find a lawyer to buy him a few more minutes in the spotlight. Interesting angle, and one I hadn't thought of. Ugh, dealing with people: at once the best and worst part of business.
The motivation to visit your website is 17/200 $, so this is a crucial information. You can't use this sample for inference about the real population of readers or customers.

A better approach for those 200 people would be to ask them:
i) who do you think would be interested in this site and why.
ii) What other services are related to this one.
iii) Can you tell a source of clients for this site?

Anyway, a crooked sample doesn't allow a straight thinking or inference. The number of people 200 is not related to the 17$.
Disclaimer: VideoLAN chairman and VLC dev here...

VLC on the iPad doesn't have any GPU/DSP because there are no APIs to to so...
So, forget playback of 720MKV for now.
But to decode DivX, Xvid, or DVD rips, the CPU is more than enough...
Google Instant, behind the scenes
I wouldn't bet on Flash CS5 apps being accepted anytime soon. You're still required to adhere to the iOS look and feel, apps that behave differently will be rejected.
I think this may be because of in-app purchases. So you can distribute a free "full but locked" app, and then just add functionality with in-app purchases. Maybe they're trying to promote that?
I think the companies he copied should have had the vision to add money.

All they seem to be doing is simply find a game that has gone viral and copy it and add money so the viral effect can be much faster.

Point to note: When you have something viral garner more investment to get it even bigger, quicker.
I'm sure Bing is handing cash over to Verizon for this. Bing buys its users.
Disclaimer: VideoLAN chairman and VLC dev here...

Exactly.
+ http, mms, rtsp and other protocols.
I upvoted because I really hope to hear from someone who knows this stuff. Off the top of my head (as a non-expert), this sounds like a horrible hash function that is vulnerable to a plethora of attacks, but I don't know for sure. Why not just use the built-in hash function, or some function someone smarter than you has written?
I really like the idea though I won't register. I'd like to have a central password repository, but I want these features:

- ability to store passwords for non-web services

- automatically generate passwords based on certain rules (ie always 6 digits)

- have an API to fetch/store passwords

- have a browser plugin instead of a bookmarklet (I don't use the bookmark bar in chrome)
It's absolutely, positively horrible. My real comments are on the blog itself.
Say someone made a site that produced these snippets. How would they become super rich off it?
Surely you've heard of the old saying that "freedom of the press is limited to those who presses", right?
Many of the design decisions in his software make a lot of sense for the design of an environment that could fit on a floppy.
I don't think many people realise that using an internet service is like stepping onto private land. So, they then don't realise that rules on hate, copyright etc. apply to them while using the service.
New ARM processor: 2.5 GHz, quad-core, with virtualization hardware
My app runs 20% faster now. Thank you, Mozilla!
They also didn't anticipate various mediums of expression being supported by very few individuals and even as a private owner of something you are still going to deal with other people using whatever you own to express themselves in some fashion and if the government chooses not to limit speech on collective property then as a good citizen you should do your best to emulate the states best practices because after all those servers are powered by some kind of electric power plant that is supported by the people that are participating in the collective political process. Anyway my point was not whether this should be framed in terms of free speech and how a group of fear mongering, hateful, hypocritical xenophobes were having their first amendment rights curtailed but that Rackspace did the right thing by knocking them down a few pegs.
As I mention in the blog post, this is not a statistically valid sample. They can, and did, provide me with food for thought nevertheless. That said, your questions are all good suggestions for follow up tests (keep in mind that you need to phrase them in a A/B format).
I've had a lot of luck at American Eagle, which is the only store I've ever found adult-sized clothing that was too small for me (their shirts sometimes go down to XXS, their pants and shorts to 26", though not every item comes that small).
Maybe my experience wasn't typical, but my liberal arts classes in college were a joke. They were crowded, hurried, narrowly focused, and taught by professors that didn't seem to have the time or the inclination to provoke the students into new ways of thinking at all.

I suppose it's different at schools that can afford to staff these classes at 1:15 student teacher ratios with good teachers but the money that was spent on making me a "well rounded" student would have gone a lot further if I'd just been given a pile of books to read and some time at a quiet desk.
it solves a problem for pretty much everyone who sells things online. maybe you could charge 1% of transactions or something.
Counter-example: You own a bookstore located in a mall -- leased space. The mall's managing company says you are no longer allowed to sell Bibles.

Now I'll apply your logic.

"The Constitution doesn't give you the right to use that mall space in the first place. The mall owns it, and has the understandable perception that it's their choice how it gets used, not yours."

Hopefully you can see that something has gone wrong, regardless of legal compliance. Freedom is neither bestowed by a piece of paper nor by men with guns or gavels. It is a cultural trait manifest in our actions. We're not free unless we live like free people.

Would you call yourself a musician if you had no instrument to play? How can you claim to have free speech, if your medium of communication is removed whenever you try to say something unpopular?
I've not down voted you. It's a matter of survival. I sleep on the ground under a tree until I get a sleeping bag, and then maybe a cot. Before I buy a nice soft comfy mattress, I need a safe, secure structure for it.

Think of the liberal arts in this way. Once we have what we must have to survive, then we can go after the things we want as humans to enrich our lives and those around us. I love art and English majors... I just can't enjoy Rembrandt when I need a place to live or clean water to drink or a sewage system, etc :)
My research has led me to believe that only an adrenaline surge can produce this.

The thing to note about this is that it essentially impossible to not seriously hurt yourself when you do this. You will tear the muscles. They are operating at their highest power before the wheels start flying off, and you'll tear a lot of fibers.
I think hypocrisy means stating a certain position while acting out different position.

The need for stating a position comes from social or political correctness (or misdirection in which case it doesn't work) which are unnecessary with anonimity.
So when you are anonymous you are free to give your true position, the one you act out.
Nice UI, I like the simplicity and familiarity quite a bit.

As for your questions:

- Do you see a use for this in your daily life? If not, is there additional/different content that will get you into using something like this?
Yes, but it only pulled up one concert for my area (Little Rock/Jonas Brothers, yay), and I know we've got more going on than that. So you need a little more depth on your tails before I'd start using. Probably not a problem for users in bigger markets, but still.

- What sort of events are you most interested in (I understand HN might not be the representative audience, but its still quite a big one in itself)?
The only type of events I can think of off the top of my head that I'd want to search would be concerts, shows at the theater (which I frequently miss out on b/c I never think to check), and local MMA fights.

- How do you go about planning to attend events with friends (phone/IM/text/emails/facebook)?
My main group of friends is stuck in the email chain loop for organizing things.

- What time frame of event search would you be interested in? This evening? Weekend? Next month?
Depends. Seems like this should be a third search parameter.

Also, I know we all hate IE as web developers, but if you don't want to throw away 60-70% of your potential traffic, you MUST support IE.

Overall, nice work.

Edit: Geez, how does a guy do a single line break in a post?
It's an internal hash for hash tables and the like. It's not for crypto.

It's main issue is that it turns large tables into an O(n/10) linked list. It was kinda painful for a few things 10 years ago, and it was a reasonable hack 10 years before that when it was likely originally written. Iirc, there was one pathological case where all the items ended up in one bucket, but that's lost to the sands of time.

Fwiw, md5 has been available in his system since 98 or so, and any security related stuff would have been using that.
It's not clear to me from the page: does C-x v v commit all modified files (like git commit -m), or just the current file? I'd like more information about how this interacts with the git index in general.
i used to own a lotus exige that had an all-fiberglass body (weighed about 1950 pounds wet).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/3644817217/

its chassis was made from aluminum that was bonded together with what was basically glue. the entire chassis under the fiberglass body only weighed 160 pounds.

http://www.puresportscar.com/elisechassis

it had airbags but the small size and weight of the car usually meant that crashes didn't end well for the occupants. not so much because of the car itself, but because every other car it might collide with was twice its weight and size. by comparison, here is a lotus elise next to a pickup truck:

http://www.gotapex.com/images/apex/elise/size/ford.jpg
That's an awful hash function. The largest bucket has more than 4X as many items as the smallest. He should pick another function that uses all the characters in the object name. Whatever language or libraries he's already using probably has a better function for strings handy.
Cool. Thanks for the reply. Any details on why the Android port is taking longer or why it's so much easier to port to iOS? Maybe a VLC blog post or something?
The whole Koran burning business reaks of violence and provocation. Let's take the high road and give the terrorists a better example than that.

I am sure Rackspace thought long and hard before doing so. They may have wanted to pull the site out of ideological conviction but I am sure they did once they were convinced they were legally alllowed to do so.

Freedom of speech is only good as long as it doesn't turn into a violent provocation match in my opinion.
>Can you imagine a 17 y/o trying to make a dynamic haptic UI? (what the hell was I thinking?)

That might depend on whether you live in a region stifled by software patents, or need another market that is. It's sad that many may not even attempt projects because it can be a minefield out there. Even when it turns out you're first, you can still burn through your capital defending it.
Copyright should be enough.
How are they gonna replace WPF with HTML5? I don't get it.
Yeah, I kind of feel this way, too. I loathe Jones and all he stands for, but ... pulling a site goes against my own grain.

I'm not too happy with Rackspace on this one.
> (A mile is a mile, in California, Colorado, Liberia or Burma)

I see what you did there.

(nicely done)
I hate to be the bad guy, but:

Investors get excited, refer him to experts in the ceramics, who reply "no way."

How do you know they are not right?

Patents in and of themselves are not proof, as we all know.
Not at all. Windows isn't a walled garden, Windows doesn't have a history of killing off applications that Microsoft doesn't like or sees as competition, etc.

I didn't say they shouldn't have an iOS release. This in-between-the-lines reading and putting words in my mouth and downmodding me for it is disappointing.
I read that headline and straight away thought of md4 versus md5 performance. I need to take a break :)
Great to see this. Broadcom also came out with drivers for its CrystalHD decoder chip a while ago (http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/) and they are actively involved in community development of the driver (http://groups.google.com/group/crystalhd-development)
Stop making donuts. Krispy Kreme won.