skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since this indeed is a first-class firm for this type of litigation, it bears noting that litigation such as this very likely has cost Mr. Arrington a quarter million and up by this point.

The unusual thing here lies in the fact that Mr. Arrington is choosing to expose details of the discovery to the public view. Since discovery normally is a matter of public record, as long as it is not subject to a court order sealing it or otherwise protecting it from disclosure, any party is free to do this but it is nonetheless rare that anyone would make such a disclosure in such a public way. Among other things, there is a serious risk that statements made about the case, or about specific evidence, would be deemed defamatory and would expose the disclosing party to major legal claims and even to punitive-damage risks.

Hence, I would observe / speculate about this as follows:

1. Whatever else might be said about him, Mr. Arrington has guts. He is a fighter.

2. He is using this litigation not to recover any monies from FG (likely a hopeless task) but to figuratively put FG and its founder into the town square, locked in the stocks and made a spectacle for all the world to see their shame. One must admit that his perseverance has yielded some pretty damning evidence against FG.

3. I disagree with those who say that Mr. Arrington is some sort of poor lawyer for not having documented this relationship in a binding legal document. These parties had all sorts of back and forth in what was a very fluid relationship and it seems that Mr. Arrington, for his part, was pushing for maximum advantage on terms without wanting to tie himself down to a premature deal. What he didn't anticipate was that FG would blind-side him as it did with its own power play pulled at the last minute. This was not stupidity but a calculated risk on Mr. Arrington's part and it wound up backfiring on him.

4. In addition to wanting to shame FG, Mr. Arrington wants to send the world a message saying, in effect, that anyone who tries to pull this sort of stunt on him will pay the due penalty for what he does, even if it costs him a large sum to exact the punishment.

5. As an incidental matter, in making himself the center of the drama, Mr. Arrington also derives publicity for himself and for TC, which is really his stock in trade and likely worth more to him in the long run than the out-of-pocket cost of the litigation itself (worth more in the sense of reputation, not in the immediate publicity value itself).

6. The lawsuit itself is otherwise not worth pursuing, as it seeks money damages and injunctive relief over what is essentially a dead product. If the other factors above did not apply, it would be absurd on economic grounds to pursue this any further.
What Diaspora really needs now is some startup, some well-known developers, or the Diaspora crew themselves to stand up and say "Okay, now we're going to use this framework to build a very real social network." Until then, it's just some people building out some cool ideas. Don't get me wrong, that's great; it's just hard to rally around it without getting something concrete behind it.
Sure, but using the menus is just the starting point on the learning curve. After staring at 'em for a while you figure out what "C-x C-f" means and pretty soon you're playing pinkie twister with the best of 'em.

That's the way I learned emacs, anyway. Of course there's many, many hidden depths I've never learned after nine years.
> "Observation isn't science."

Fundamentally, science is simply this:

Observe. Theorize. Repeat.

Many of the observations in science take place in a controlled, repeatable laboratory setting. Many do not; astronomers can't exactly drag other galaxies into the lab.
It's not that bad. It was a typo in a file template. Of course it's gonna propagate quickly.
Clojure is Fast (Simple Optimization of Numeric Code)
And why not? That's the whole idea behind patents on stuff that does not require years of research being nonsense.

I've come up with plenty of stuff off the cuff like the GP writes, sometimes it works, plenty of times it doesn't. I only brag about the times it worked ;)
Sad: Why Haven't Other Internet Companies Stood Up For Craigslist Against AGs?
I also thought it was going to be in PHP - they definitely mentioned that at some point, but once I saw their website was written in Ruby, I suspected they might be moving in a different direction...

Good to see they hit their release date, and I look forward to messing around with it, even though I know more PHP than Ruby ;)
> He is the richest man in history.

Small nitpick, adjusted for inflation, no he isn't, not even close. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt were all much richer. Also, it needs to be said that these were the richest Americans, not necessarily richest ever worldwide.
Well I believe heroku includes ImageMagick by default, so it seems the only dependency would by MongoDB. Has anyone ever used the MongoHQ add-on? http://addons.heroku.com/mongohq
Maybe you could attach a wiki and have users add them in? With 500+ listeners im sure someone would consider doing this.
That's a bullshit answer. In the real world there are deadlines that arise for many reasons:

- any external event like getting a product out before Christmas

- change in circumstance like a coworker quitting or getting sick

- the problem is harder than anticipated (I know it always is, but sometimes it's much harder)
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I am not sure what "real" means but, I use programming tricks in my non-programming job.

I make big and obvious the important things that I need to remember in a hurry. I hack away at removing stuff that isn't necessary.
How to download and use china mobile software and games
"In order to run Diaspora, you will need to download the following dependencies (specific instructions follow):

Build Tools - Packages needed to compile the components that follow.

Ruby - The Ruby programming language. (We're using 1.8.7. It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X.)

MongoDB - A snappy noSQL database.

OpenSSL - An encryption library. (It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.)

ImageMagick - An Image processing library used to resize uploaded photos.

Git - The fast version control system."

Wait a sec.. I thought this was going to be a desktop app. Are they going to wrap all of these tools into a binary for eventual consumer distribution? This sounds like end clients are going to be running a web server and mongod and all sorts of things. The resource usage overhead.. =|
Deal aggregating sites do this I am pretty sure, slickdeals.com for example.

If someone clicks on a link that your widget provided (a link that would not have otherwise been there) it seems like you are actually providing value to the company.
5 Trends Shaping the Future of Social Good
Yes there can be, because people who hop in and out of the HOV lane don't traverse all lanes every time they do it.

For example, Alice gets on the freeway and merges 4 times (after the initial merge) to get to the "fast lane". For ease of explanation, the lanes will be referred to like this:

| HOV | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Onramp |

(So lane #5 is the fast lane in this example)

Traffic starts slowing down, so she merges from lane 5 to the HOV lane in order to pass a few cars. She's in this lane illegally so she doesn't remain in this lane. After a few passing a few cars, she merges back into lane 5. She repeats this 3 more times before she gets off the freeway.

So, in this limited example, this is the "transaction count" of Alice's lane changes:

Onramp <-> Lane 1 : 2
Lane 1 <-> Lane 2 : 2
Lane 2 <-> Lane 3 : 2
Lane 3 <-> Lane 4 : 2
Lane 4 <-> Lane 5 : 2
Lane 5 <-> HOV : 8

The problem isn't people just getting over to the fast lane, staying in it and leaving, the problem is the number of transactions that the HOV <-> Fast lane pairing have due to it being relatively empty even during crowded freeway conditions.

Similarly, lanes 1 and 2 have higher transactions due to people getting on the freeway for a mile or two and exiting shortly thereafter. This may be limited to AZ freeways since the exits tend to be regularly spaced about a mile apart. The other problem is that there are quite a few people who will merge on to lane 1 going 45MPH, which causes many drivers to pass them in Lane 2.

Chronic lane changers seem to use all lanes roughly equally, so their habits mostly cancel out.

Another thing that may be different depending on where you live is that AZ allows entry and exit from the HOV lane at any time. It's not like CA where there are specific entries and exits to the HOV lanes.

Let me know if this still doesn't make sense.
Most of the discussion is over here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696396
I'm guessing they should have just called aspects "groups".

From what I can tell, they are just groups of users which you can publish particular content/updates to.
It's funny, since hearing about Diaspora I understood it as your own portable web app that people run on something like Heroku for non-developers.
What on Earth are you talking about "there's no conversion between them"?!? You can't trade dollars for food? You can't trade food for dollars? What are dollars good for if there's no conversion between them and food?

The lack of an abstract market selling and buying abstract "calories" at some price doesn't mean there isn't a conversion between them, just that it isn't clean and has a lot of other moving parts, just like everything else in the real world.

Hie thee hence to a microeconomics textbook forthwith, I've been enjoying http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC... but heck anything would do.
You're right, in the literal sense, but your criticism can be applied to all aspects of advertising. In a perfectly rational or perfectly ethical world, advertising would simply be a fact sheet informing consumers of your product's relative advantages.
check this every one
Please comment if you know any other ways for this
I've noticed something like that recently, although I hesitate to call it a trend from just a few observations. I suspect some people upvote/downvote based on personal feelings alone, or whether they agree/disagree with a post. I prefer to be a little more disciplined with my voting. I like the way stackexchange et al works in this regard, where negative votes have a cost to the voter and voting is rate limited (everyone has a maximum number of votes per day), this ensures that most voting is taken seriously.
http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/yves_k...

Wow. That is some blue blue. And that's not even it.

http://training.sessions.edu/resources/interviews/interviews...

Apparently it's the same blue used by the Blue Man Group.
They are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site.

I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress.

Now if a lot of people really seem to love Diaspora and demand for Rails hosting increases dramatically, I'm sure hosting providers will take note and increase their commitment to Rails. That would be an ideal situation, but not a likely outcome.
Yep. It's easy to get started. I wrote a lightweight logging system on top of it before I switched to logworm.
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I thought they were doing this so people (other companies, entities) can setup their own social networks that interoperate with each other, like email providers, but in this case social network providers.
I'm not so sure about the name. I understand how it conveys their mission exactly and it does that really well: leave facebook(or twitter or wherever), come here. I can see how setting themselves up from word 1 as opposition to facebook has a huge amount of importance but what happens to that branding on the off chance they win?

(I know this is like planning where to put the swimming pool in your 1 bedroom apartment in the event that you win the lottery but I think the choice of name does/did have a lot to do with just how long the view of the founders was when they started.)

That said, it is currently my only quibble. I'm glad to see that things actually got done and out the door. It sure seems to have gone a lot better than anything I worked on this summer.
if you're writing simple webapps, which most people are nowadays, you don't really need to know what a linked list is. Your programming language of choice will abstract it away.

You still need to understand it at least well enough to know that you really shouldn't try to access random list elements. Just like you need to understand arrays well enough to not try to insert things into the middle of them.
I was kinda of expecting more with a funding, an office, and a semi large team.

I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. (http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if anyone is interested, its our public testing site, we have not launched). Anyway I guess my point was if 2 people with zero funding and no office can accomplish that, I certainly expected more from them. But to be fair we been killing ourselves slowly by working as hard as we do, maybe they took a relaxing approach. =P

Also for something that is meant to be distributed Rails does not seem like a very good choice.

Just my 2 cents, hopefully open sourcing it will pick things up.
I've gotten in and things are loading, but slow.
That the thing is still running at all seems nice given the ass-kicking I suspect their servers are likely receiving.
But in the time period when there was a headcount freeze, Google was not hiring "lots of people".
the whiter-than-white, bluey whiteness promised by Daz laundry detergent

Random trivia: In order to combat the fact that clothing gradually turns yellow as fibres are damaged, modern laundry detergents contain dyes which fluoresce blue under ultraviolet light. The "bluey whiteness" really is exactly that!
If this was really your idea first, thanks. I have used this technique to recover data. I didn't bag the drive though. I got the data off, and the disk lasted about 20 minutes before dying forever.
So instead of one company to trust doesn't invade your privacy, now you have to trust a bunch of inbetweens?
first time I ever saw a "-4" comment and laughed out loud
Quick initial comparo btw CityMax and Orbs (might as well...)

AKA: Challanger (Upstart) vs. Incumbent (Traditional)

1. Orbs throws you into the workflow without asking for anything. That is quite attractive compared to the traditional (CityMax) model. I really prefer to divulge my information if and only when I like the product.

2. I have decided: "Free" is the new 4 letter word. I don't want to see it until I decide I like the product.

3. Both have wierd names, it is tough to tell what either does from the outset.

Anyone else?
Has anyone set it up yet? I have to say that this is a little scary to go ahead and set up on my server; especially because I am not really sure what it is going to to yet.
Try googling
You may want to use http://unshort.me api service to unshorten the links.
Burnbook - anonymous everyday people gossip site
I'm sorry, but for $200k+ funding you need to do more to impress me than throwing a bunch of gems together and putting it on MongoDB.

I like the minimalist design, though.
Thanks for the input. The whole thing is def a work in progress. I put it together in about 4 hours, and that function in particular was some copy pasta from a project a few years ago. No worries, updates to come :)
Several independent game developers do this without the payback system. World of Goo and Machinarium are two examples of games available through all sorts of bundle packages and pay-what-you-like experiments.

They're also examples of developers who have declared 90%+ piracy, so I'm not sure that this anecdotal evidence has any value.
This was about as entertaining as a formulaic television sitcom: it's got one person who refuses to understand the other and who escalates the confrontation any time he gets an answer he don't expect, which is every time. And the other person doesn't seem to grasp the obvious fact that he's dealing with a scared, irrational, angry little child and as a result fails to make himself understood. In the end, there's a transparent Deus ex Machina, followed by a short feel-good make up session to end the story on a positive note. Yet, in the end, you can't help but feel sad about how hard basic communication can be. The writers of Full House couldn't have done better.
What made you think it is a desktop app? Diaspora is supposed to be an OpenSource Facebook clone.

When was the last time you used Facebook as a desktop app?
That's a problem they're going to have to fix. But I guess they can always make it so that certain data doesn't leave a provider. And if you can't export your data, that's a major problem too.
What? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floating around the interwebs?
Interesting interview, and thank you for taking the time to produce high quality audio. Production quality is frequently overlooked but it takes your podcast to a higher level and got me to listen for almost two hours to Gabriel's interview and subscribe for future episodes!
I'm glad you find it interesting/useful.

I plan to add column types further down the road. But first, pluggable format support, importing, and cli interface will be written.
I was afraid the minute I saw ImageMagick. I have had numerous problems building and getting that working in the past, especially on OS X. To be fair, it has been about two years since I had to deal with it, so maybe things have improved. Imaging libraries always seem to be a bear though, so I'm not sure there are many alternatives.
I may try setting it up if I have a chance, I'm assuming the packaging of it all will take time before it becomes something a layperson can just run on an extra windows machine.

If possibly, I want to start a project/patch to do full-screen photo slideshows (a la flickr).
Be Inspired (By Everything) 11
So this is the eleventh edition of Be Inspired and boy did I have a lot of bookmarks to get through, I’ve reduced them down as I always do when I have too many, quality over quantity and all that.
Visually, IE9 is one of the most gorgeous browsers I have ever seen. It had the wow feeling I had after installing Chrome for the first time.

The amount of new features in this release is amazing. I am blown away at how much has changed.

I think the whole speed issue has become a moot point now. Shaving of milliseconds off of already fast browsers doesn't impress me anymore.

To everyone who complains about standards compliance, IE6 etc. etc. remember that when IE6 came out, it was the greatest browser ever. It was revolutionary for the time and it doesn't deserve the hate it receives. MS Shouldn't have let it stagnate, but look at HTML4, it only recently is being updated.

Say what you want about ActiveX, but it was MS attempt at updating the browser, because the standards bodies weren't.

I love chrome, but right now there is no reason for me not to switch to IE9. I use minimal addons (StumbleUpon/Lastpass), I could care less about tiny speed improvements. People who have switched away from IE, may find it hard to go back, but people who haven't, will really have no reason to switch after this release hits final.

Great work Microsoft and IE team.
If possible, I want to start a project/patch to do full-screen photo slideshows (a la flickr).

I may try setting it up if I have a chance, I'm assuming the packaging of it all will take time before it becomes something a layperson can just run on an extra windows machine.
Can anyone explain to me what an "aspect" is?
it's not like 200K has gone into what they're releasing now. 200K needs to last them for a while :)

in my book, it takes balls to release something this early. so, kudo's to them.
i don't think the end goal is to get everyone to be running their own server. the data will be distributed among many different servers but surely there will be providers that come along to host data for large groups of people.
No they aren't. They are based on the laws of physics with all sorts of wild assumptions tacked on to make them tractable. For instance, water is typically modeled as having the consistency of molasses in the x-y directions, and some even more viscous material in the z-direction. Many important components of climate modelling are simply not derivable from simple physics (e.g., biological effects, cloud formation), and these are just made up to fit historical records, if not ignored.

Scale separation and statistical pseudoequilibrium (forget the exact term) are just assumed in order to "get results". I.e., if you didn't make those assumptions, simulations would require so many data points that they would be impossible. Nonphysical energy damping is added, since without it, most simulations blow up. Lots of important parameters are just picked roughly at random, just to calibrate the model to historical data.

Stock market predictions also tend to have one major advantage over GCM models - their proponents admit their limits.
Internet Explorer superseded Netscape only when it caught up technologically
A diaspora isn't just about leaving a place and going somewhere else; it means roughly "a scattering" in Greek and means that a group of people are leaving one central homeland and going all around the world. Even if they win, the distributed nature of their network makes the name perfect.
Sorry, it's back up.
Good job on the cool stack checklist: Rails 3 (check), Haml generated HTML5 (check), nicely laid out Rails app (check), uses MongoDB (check).

As long as I am praising, I'll add a thumbs up for using AGPL: IMHO a very good license choice.
i don't understand their vision and sifting through their blog posts and faq for 5-10 minutes did not teach me.

can anyone articulate it?
Ah, thanks for the clarification. The way the page phrased it made me think you just needed to include that Javascript and it would work. There are language implementations like that, so it seemed plausible. That's too bad.