skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where you find widespread poverty, you also find an absence of both the rule of law and freedom from expropriation. And you people trying to get to places that have those things.

The vast majority of people are inherently capable of meeting their own needs, figuring out the needs of others and trading with them for mutual benefit...if they are allowed to do so.
Why I Switched from Wordpress to Posterous
I'm not going to bother to track down the source of every contribution to this effort, so I may have a few of the details wrong, but doesn't it seem like you could also write this article exactly the other way?

* The mining company is essentially bankrupt and relied extensively on multinational government efforts to extract the miners, provide logistical support, etc.

* The Chilean government is now providing physical and mental medical care.

* It seems like one of the first stories that broke about this incident was the company saying "we can't afford to pay these guys while they are trapped. please help". The Chilean government (or possibly a miner's union) likely provided some of the money the miner's families lived off of the past 70 days and that they'll use in the coming weeks as the miners recover.

* The escape capsule was designed, built and contributed by NASA.

* NASA advised the Chilean government (who was coordinating the rescue effort) on how to keep the miners physically and mentally fit.

etc.

That's a fun headline and all, but the Worker's Weekly News could run a similar story under the heading "Collective Action, Big Gov't Saved the Miners".
All good comments.

Western Roman empire fell in 476.

Wasn't available until after Rome fell? That was my point - it was there all the time (perhaps since 200AD, certainly at 500AD).
I am runing small winery. (4500 bottles of wine/year)

It is fun and if business go wrong you can always drink your end product. Ask anything if you like.
I'm not, but I know a handful who are.

Actually, of the founders I know personally, it's pretty much an even split.
I've absolutely no idea why I own this domain, but if you want it you're welcome to it (send me an offer). Email is in my profile.

fissh.co.uk
Investors only see the color green. Are there any Green Founders/Co-Founders?
Agreed. Technology put them in, and technology got them out.
Rock Band 3 New Features: Pro Guitar (Real Guitar)
I like Receives.org, but it's kind of the opposite of what it sounds like you're doing.
Possibly useful personal experience: I had sell-out.com registered for about 10 years. For the past five years it pointed to a stale blog.

I was contacted about a month ago by a company that wanted it, and they offered $1000 US, which I rapidly agreed to.

I wasn't intentionally squatting it, it was one of those domains I registered on a whim for a personal project that I grew moderately attached to over time, but never did anything with.

The company I work for spent a bit of money protecting the namespace around our most recent product, and based on our CTO's experience buying unused and squatted domains, I say: walk away. Leave off with an email "If you ever want to get rid of it for $x, I will pay you that afternoon." Either they're willing to sell and will take you up on it, or are more interested in a cash grab and won't.
Ask HN: Where do you find Blackberry Developers?
Hi! I am one of the co-founders of Fast Society a super slick application for creating temporary teams. We built a great iPhone app, but want to port it over to Blackberry. We would love to find someone to bring on full time, but no one seems to code for BBs. Where do you find BB developers? Does anyone even code for the platform in the US? I really, really don't want to offshore it.
I'm trying to get a couple (not video) games made and onto store shelves. I'm past the playtesting stage for one game and I'm looking to hire art from some locals artists, because I need a good-looking demo to show to publishers or distributors.
I'm not so much a startup as a messy desk and closet for now, but I'm making slow progress because I'm pretty much feeling around in the dark and making my own mistakes.
I very much enjoyed this, especially the part on compare with the best person in the office, no one else.
If you consistently deliver what the business needs most, and you do it well, it’s impossible not to get promoted. People tell me this isn’t true, that it’s all about the people you know and about “visibility.” I have no idea how to consistently deliver impactful business results without becoming visible as a side effect. I hate it when developers ask me how to become “more visible.” They hate it when I tell them to “do great work.” They think I’m mocking them.

You can think this way if your idea of "what the business needs most" is "what currently has the sales guys in a tizzy." Forget about everything else. Oh, and if your code only works for current customers, and has to have a bunch of tweaks and fixes applied for each new customer, then people will think your code is what allows them to sell to new customers. No kidding. If you write code that doesn't handle cases A, B, and C, then later you get credit for adding "support" for A, B, and C and making it possible to sell to customers X, Y, and Z. That's "visibility," because people from sales and marketing will mention your name appreciatively at high levels.

And for God's sake don't do any work on scaling or reliability, because a salesman never calls up your boss's boss and says, "It's been a long time since the scalability of your systems scotched a deal. I just want to say that's awesome and thank you." Wait until it breaks, make everyone thinks it's impossible, and then fix it.

EDIT: In a healthy organization, none of this will affect who gets promoted, but in an organization where people worry about "visibility," this is what they're talking about.
Thanks for that. Related to your reference was a link to "Fallacies of definition" which I think might also be a feature of this article.
Pawn shop owners don't expect the customers to pay back the pawned item. They usually judge how desperate the poor sucker is and make a lowball price offer. Their business works by making way more money by selling the pawned item for way more than they purchased it.

At the heart of it, they offer less money to those who need in the most. That's scummy, any way you want to slice it.
I fully agree with you that this writer's argument is a logical no-op, but I don't think the writer agrees.
Is it time for a web crawling code of conduct?
{stuff_I_hate} put the miners into the mine.

{stuff_I_like} got them out.

Yay! I've scored the most political points, I win!
Also, that guy running the drill was flown in from Afghanistan, right? I suspect he is likely to be a government contractor (capitalist/state partnership) and was probably brought back on military flight.
I could have gotten long-winded and torn this marvel of political propaganda apart at many levels, but the author did the bulk of the work for me in a few short sentences...

"Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive."

Wait! He didn't CHARGE Chile for the use of the drill?!?! Where's the capitalism here again? Sounds more like humanitarianism and generosity to me.
My first iOS game was approved
>Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities.

One possible explanation is that the student's evaluation of the prof is based on how well he understands the course material (since the prof's job is to induce that understanding) - which, of course, also impacts the student's grade.
I'm bemused by him implying that charity doesn't create employment or foster entrepreneurism amongst the poor.

It surely can't be seriously argued that wealth is better channelled through a single person's business empire representing nearly half of the country's stock exchange and 90% of its telecoms provision...
My first "multimedia" computer was a Pentium 120mhz bought in 1995...Maybe he meant a 166mhz or 266mhz. I think the 266mhz was first released in 1997.
Do you think a .com domain is absolutely necessary? I spent hours yesterday trying every possible combination of words to find an available .com with no luck.

Finally I said screw it and registered a one word .io domain that describes my product perfectly, as well as the [word]io.com domain. I hate to be too trendy, do you think users could learn to use a .io domain?
Don't forget PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
I got out of computer programming a few years ago hoping to do something more tangible. From my interest in food, I ended up starting a sorbet business: http://screamsorbet.com.
After two years, we're up to about a dozen employees, running about break even, and we're starting to get some good press: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/we-made-it-our....

Our strength is definitely product quality, stemming from our attention to detail, knowledge of theory, and direct ingredient sourcing. Our weaknesses are primarily lack of sufficient initial funding, launching a gourmet product into a weak economy, and our general lack of business savvy. Did I mention that the product is good?

While there are definitely overlaps between the thought process of programming and that of business development, every time I have to deal with a regulatory agency I definitely long for the orderliness of a xterm. Many days I hope that "spend time working on your weaknesses" turns out to be a good long-term personal strategy.

If you're in the Bay Area and like good food, do check us out. We're opening a store in Oakland in the next few weeks, and are at Farmers' Markets from Santa Cruz to Marin. Or if you're a frozen dessert fanatic somewhere else, we ship overnight on dry ice, although the shipping costs can be rather steep.
This is a very strange article. It seems to be mostly a generic rant, with a very thin topical hook to give him a reason to republish the rant today. Pretty bad even by the standards of the WSJ editorial page; reads like the mirror image of a DailyKos editorial, with generic political invective and a poor command of the facts.

edit: Looked up his past contributions, and... he has some pretty unusual views. One of his previous columns seems to be arguing that atheists are destroying capitalism, because capitalism needs the morality that religion provides in order to work. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122714101083742715.html)
I don't see what mining gold or dangerous conditions have to do with this. You could have both without capitalism.

The reason I used communist countries as an example is that they're the main recent instance of industrialized societies that didn't have the profit motive to drive innovation, and they support the point made in the editorial.

I'm done with this conversation now. This seems likely to turn into the sort of thread that's more of a lawyerly style debate than a collaborative search for truth, and I have a lot to do today.
logstrosity.com - was going to use it for the non-nice version of a game backlog app I’m working on, but have no interest in that anymore.
if you have teenagers, add a combination lock.

If your children don't know how to respect your stuff and use hand tools properly by the time they're teenagers, you have failed as a parent.

I have to disagree with the recommendation for the DeWalt drill as well. Black and Decker makes a comparable drill that's half the price. The DeWalt is better - perhaps twice as good, but you don't need it if you're reading this article.
I bought a bar
I agree, a job is much better than a handout. Regardless, infrastructure and education are two things that do help people create jobs and exit poverty.

Charity != giving people money.
Ask HN: What is your SSO preference?
Is it worth setting up SSO for Google, Twitter, Facebook? Would you prefer just a normal registration? I know there is the option for both, but it seems like annoying to have that many options.
Indeed, by the same logic, capitalism also gleefully murdered all of these folks:

http://www.infoplease.com/world/disasters/fatal-us-mining-ac...

And continues to kill people in less noticed and spectacular ways in all manner mining-related work:

http://www.wvminesafety.org/fatal97.htm

I'd love to see that op-ed, as a person who enjoys both capitalism and gallows humor.
Interesting data point for you. First, Break All The Rules found that average managers put most of their time into their worst performers. Great ones put most of their time into their star performers. The reason? Both groups can improve, and a 10% improvement in a star is worth a lot more than a 10% improvement in a dud.
Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest coming to iPad by HTML and javascript
> [A] lot of the technology used in communist countries was copied from capitalist ones. Communist countries would have been even poorer without capitalist ones doing R&D for them.

But the "communist countries" you are talking about were largely economic backwaters to begin with. That's the same as saying "2nd/3rd world countries would have been even poorer without 1st ones doing R&D for them. Look to some of the "social democracies" for counterexamples to "communist == poor" and "communist == not innovative".
This article is foolish.
From a previos thread on HN:
NASA Helped the design the escape capsule. (Government)
Chliean Navy built it and so on... (Government)

lots of things had to happen for this rescue to be successful so claiming that any economic system has more success because of it is just stupid.
Questions to ask yourself when debugging
Congrats. Launch day for games is always awesome... until the players roast you.
Rapleaf needs user's email address and Twitter doesn't provide user's email address because of security reason.
Presumably it would affect the amount he is actually able to immediately use to support those in need.
Probably the longest resignation letter I’ve ever seen
microcredit seems hopeful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank

While the love of profit can be evil, if a business is actually creating value (eg. a windmill saves the labour of hand-milling flour; division of labour; technology in general, including methods of organizing labour), there's an opportunity for the bigger pie thereby created to benefit everyone.

Just shifting money around (which includes theft as well as charity) doesn't help except in temporary emergencies.
For people interested in this kind of thing, also check out Politifact (http://politifact.com/) if you haven't already. It's very good, and has been doing generally the same thing for years. Won a Pulitzer for it.

It looks like Perpetually might aim to be a more comprehensive database/search engine of all politicians, and will be a nice complement to Politifact.
You may disagree with the colloquial usage/meaning of the word "preventative," but in the context of health care, I'd argue it's a worrisome sign when the scope of that word expands from lifestyle changes (which even doctor friends would often argue for) to also include drug interventions. Though certainly the pharma industry would love that being true.

Disagree with your other analogy: I don't think anyone outside the oil industry would confuse the word "search" to mean surveying for oil. Oil-men have their own vocabulary for that anyway.
Yeah I'm very nervous about the players, I hope they love it as much as I loved making it.
This is what I've found.

Even the Insane AI in SC2 (which gets cheat advantage to minerals and gas) can be beaten 1v3 with just a 10 population protoss.

AI vs humans is rarely the standard 'Starcraft game' so much as its a puzzle game. The winning thing vs 3 insane AIs in SC2 was merely to forge-rush. Once you knew how, you could never lose to that AI again.

I'm sure the same is true of these AIs.
- cy-5.com cy-5 phonetic for sci-five , thought it had a science fiction vibe
- decadentdystopia.com a notion that societies begin to decay from their abundance
- digitalstorms.com maybe a national weather report for cloud services
- hackerweekend.com
- hanashikai.net japanse romaji for ( hana - speech/ speak, kai - group) or conversation club
- lumiscript.com
- musicbasin.com basin's are the fertile mouths of rivers pouring into the sea
- phasecortex.com was thinking about waves and brains, just sounded cool
- probelion.com what you call something when you lead a movement to create something from a loving passion. this is not an act of change or to counter something like in rebellion.
- socialhelix.com the idea was social data that adds structure and binds us together
- startup-wisconsin.com
- whatson2nd.com a reference to a joke
- whatson2ndstreet.com
- whereson3rd.com
- zombiespotter.com was supposed to be a location demo app for myspace
Facebook, behemoth that it is, is still a startup. We get a little carried away calling every little personal website project a startup and perhaps that's just right for the forum. But don't get tunnel vision. Facebook is a startup.
Should I do another Rails tutorial? - zugumzug's posterous
I don't know what part of Houston you are in, but I know there are a lot of REALLY bright guys that get together over at the G's and Z's on Alameda in the Third Ward. I live down Sunset by Rice Village but I was in that coffee shop one night when they got together. I have to confess that I was shocked actually at how bright those guys were.

They felt pretty inclusive too... I mean hey, they let me sit in. So I don't think it is necessarily, a "black" group.

Only issue was that I only met one of them who was into software/web startups. Most were in energy modeling or global scale logistics. Think Houston Halliburton, not San Fran Twitter.

The one I met in web startups made children's iPad games. Math if I remember correctly. Pretty cool guy though, he spoke a lot of languages. I'm looking up a couple of contact emails for those guys and I will direct them to this thread...maybe you can drop in next time they get together.
Jason Schwartzman demonstrates the New Yorker iPad app
The article is trying very hard to imply that Obama is an anti-capitalist who, by wanting to shut down all privately owned companies in the US would, if he could, have stopped the innovation needed for the rescue.

It is ridiculous, but that is why he is only alluding to it - if he were to spell it out, the insanity would be too obvious.

(but I did learn a bit about the operation and the technology used in the operation, and for that I am grateful)
Rate my startup: Qwerly, a whois for Twitter
I'd love to know what you guys think: http://qwerly.com. Sample result page: http://qwerly.com/twitter/parislemon

Positioning is as a people search for the social web. Queries can currently be done for a Twitter username. That results in a page with other social networking links for that person. Long term vision is to build an open "DNS for people".

I'm wondering where we should take it next. Open to all suggestions and ideas.

P.S. API documentation is here: http://qwerly.com/about_us/api
So, just to follow up... I quit today.
Why in God's name would I want to see Google's stock chart here on a hover-over?
I guess I get paid some kind of fee from your subscription :-)

Haven't seen that website before- pretty cool.
And this technology was developed how? People did it, and they did within a very specific context, without which their achievements would not have been possible. One very important element of that context is the presence of a system of social organization that protects their individual rights, leaving them free to think and act. Without these rights, that technology could not exist.
How easy is it to get information out of GitHub? Not just the repositories -- cloning a git repo is easy -- but the issues, wiki pages, and so on. If that's made as easy as possible, then escaping from GitHub-gone-wild shouldn't be too hard.

That in itself should provide an incentive for GitHub to avoid alienating its users. It's like bringing an umbrella so it won't rain, in a world where such things actually worked.
Upstanding crawlers already follow this and more; rogue crawlers won't be influenced by such a code-of-conduct.

Furthermore, unless a crawler is trying really hard to disguise itself, site owners have the ultimate 'self-help' available to them: just block bad crawlers entirely.

Any formal code-of-conduct beyond what are already customary practices (like following robots.txt rules) thus strikes me as superfluous.
What is your favorite login screen?
What is your favorite login screen?
https://login.mailchimp.com/

http://vimeo.com/log_in
>3. I can build and test an app idea for free. If it gets traction it's already to be scaled.

I think this is huge reason to go with GAE. For instance I'm trying to launch a service to allow people to see deleted reddit comments (unedditreddit.com). It's a dinky little idea and I have no idea if it will get traction or not, but if it does get traction it will have to bear the load of the massive reddit userbase.

I could deal with this by trying to solve the scaling issue on my own from the beginning, making implementation take a lot longer and more complex. Or I could do a simple implementation not solve scaling, and try to panic patch as the site starts to break under pressure. Or I could do a GAE implementation and have the best of both world.
Scourge snipe valks since they cannot move between attacks #1 and 8.

Valks also cannot fire once there are too many sprites/actions going on. They may have been excluded because of that if you didnt see any.
Windows browsers benchmarked: October 2010 edition
The book includes a chapter on building a crude web server and then uses it to build a graphical HTML5 game as a finale.

I considered options like SDL, but the fact is that there's so many graphics APIs in the world (and in the Lisp world) that I didn't want to force the reader to learn one they might not ever have practical use for.

Knowing how a web browser & HTML5 work, on the other hand, is universally useful.
twiddit.com

Twitter sorted with a ranking algorithm. For people that don't read everything in the stream, the good stuff gets voted up and hangs out at the top, the bad stuff gets voted down and falls faster.

Twitter search actually kind of works this way. If you search a popular term, things with many RT's are always at the top. The whole site could be that way.

You could also use the in_reply_to ids to make a Reddit-style comment tree. (Even #newtwitter doesn't show conversations well.)

Thinking about it now, it's Reddit with a 140 char limit, except you don't have the chicken-and-egg problem, since you're using the firehose to pre-populate with content.

Let me know if you want to do this. It may be our next pivot if our current [shameless plug coming] startup, Heyo (http://heyo.com, coming soon) doesn't work.
Then how do we categorize a startup if not by age (Facebook is already 5 years old) and size (hundreds of employees, billions in stock)?
Ask HN: How to get User's info based on their Twitter Id?
I posted this question earlier but looks like it was not the right time to post and unfortunately didn't get enough responses as I was expecting. So wanted to give it one more shot.

So, the issue is, I want to get user's info based on his Twitter Id, like.. GitHub, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, Facebook, Flickr, HackerNews, etc.

I looked at Rapleaf but it needs User's email address which I don't have since Twitter doesn't return that info.

Rapportive is doing good job but not sure what service they are using. Also they use user's email address to get more info.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks :)