skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, the individuals had initiated the suit, having been (in their view) taken advantage of by the lender. When they lost the case, they got nothing on their claims for damages and then got stuck with the tab for the lender's attorneys' fees on top of that. In this sense, assuming that they were actually right on their grievance with the lender and that the case was incorrectly decided, they got what might be called "doubly screwed."

I don't think you can have a rule that potentially awards fees to one side but not the other without creating the potential for great unfairness.

This item is of course anecdotal, as noted by others, but it is typical of cases I have been involved with in a career in which (apart from my transactional work with startups) many of the litigation cases I undertook involved commercial matters where the "little guy" had been, in effect, stabbed and left for dead by others, often a larger company. These cases are incredibly difficult to prosecute, in part because the client is often left with few resources with which to fight (for example, in one such case, which went for three years before reaching trial, a founder had his company stolen by disloyal board members who granted themselves, in serial votes aimed at avoiding any formal "conflicts," large amounts of stock so as to gain control of the company, who then proceeded to terminate the founder's employment, and who then used the company's cash flow to fight his attempts to challenge the things they had personally done wrong - I took that one on hourly but wound up $400K into it before we won at trial and got the client restored). In these sorts of cases, the fight is tough enough and, if a client of this type also faces the prospect of paying the other side's fees on losing, the burden can become crushing.

All that said, I will grant that this is a difficult issue and, unlike many members of my profession, I do believe that major components of the litigation world are abusive and desperately in need of reform. My reason for highlighting a couple of examples showing the real-world impact of the loser-pay rule is not to say that it might not be a good reform but to underscore that a blanket shift away from the current rule might have unintended consequences that need to be considered carefully. After all, the ultimate goal of a court system is justice and not any ideological aim of helping anyone arbitrarily at the cost of fairness, whether it be big companies or the "little guy," institutional defendants or consumers, or any other class of claimant or defendant.
Not to be too critical, but some of the trailing comments brush on this - are you turning joining a startup into a strawman cure for a lack of structure, motivation and focus?

I'd grind any bullshit for 22 hours a day if it was heading towards something I wanted badly enough. A change of product, codebase or setting isn't going to suddenly change your internal drive or other subjective factors. Even if you hit a startup thats on cool platform X, it will become background noise to getting something delivered / ploughing through the bug list / etc etc.

Your decision to quit isn't progressing because its arbitrary - you're not leaving your job for any specific reason or because you have a clear goal in mind. If you have a strong reason (eg, passion for a project, monetary goal, cancer, whatever), decisions like this normally happen pretty fast.
jQuery 1.4.3 Released
From the jQuery blog:
There are a few areas in jQuery that have seen extensive changes since 1.4.2 was released:
* .css() and related css-handling methods were all overhauled.
* Logic for determining element visibility and toggling of display in animation code.
* Much of the traversing logic has been improved and changed (is, filter, closest, find).

Why are you still reading? Go update your sites!
They offer a minimum loan term of 2 months, and I can't find anything saying you're allowed to pay it off early to avoid additional interest accrual.
From the jQuery blog:

There are a few areas in jQuery that have seen extensive changes since 1.4.2 was released:

* .css() and related css-handling methods were all overhauled.
* Logic for determining element visibility and toggling of display in animation code.
* Much of the traversing logic has been improved and changed (is, filter, closest, find).

Why are you still reading? Go update your sites!
The problem with bending over backwards for non-js is that you double your dev cycles

I would think you are being generous. A marked advantage of JS based RIA is rapid time to market, it is a simpler development model that provides superior usability when done correctly. The old page post model is a considerably slower development model. Hence all the server side frameworks, people have been trying to crack that nut, in the page post model, since someone bolted up CGI POST to a script and spit out some dynamic HTML.
C is a terrible language for writing an OS in.

No, just no.
>And you wonder why Facebook only allows you to take your personal data in the form of a downloadable .zip file rather than an ongoing stream you could simply hand over to someone like Google.

Facebook definitely doesn't have a publicly-accessible API for querying every piece of data a user has put on Facebook.
Xkcd: Tech Support
It's a cost you can hedge against by owning shares in companies that use patents aggressively. (If you can stomach that morally.)

I read a study one time that suggested patents did not stifle innovation in the macro because you typically have to be large and successful before you're targeted for infringing on them. The real cost is that many lawyers and judges are employed in the unproductive pursuit of resolving patent litigation when they could instead spend that in other professions making something of value. I wonder if anyone has any numbers on the total value of labor employed creating, licensing, attacking, defending, etc. patents and patent lawsuits in the world today.
Web Accessibility Initiative releases more WCAG 2.0 Techniques
I can't speak for England or Europe but here in Australia it's typical for judges to 'award costs' to the winning party. In other words, the judge determines whether or not it's appropriate for the losing party to pay the legal costs of the winning party. It is not mandatory for judges to award costs but it is so common as to be expected.

In principle, awarding costs is 'fair': if Party A has caused Party B to incur legal costs in enforcing their legal rights then it's only fair for Party A to compensate Party B for their legal costs. A positive consequence of 'loser pays' is that there is far less litigation - and certainly less spurious litigation - in Australia than there might otherwise be.

On the other hand, while the practice seems fair in principle it can be very unfair - and financially crippling - in practice. You can imagine a situation where Party A is actually in the right, tries to appeal the judge's decision, but can't do so because they are financially in the hole because of having costs awarded against them!

So, while I still favour the idea of awarding costs, other mechanisms are needed to account for situations where parties are appealing decisions and the like.
Like obneq suggested, ImageMagick.

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/annotating/
It suggests that the awesome people with backgrounds in crappy jobs got out of the crappy jobs because they're awesome, rather than being awesome because they did crappy jobs.
Loser pays can work when the amount the loser is liable for is the minumum of his legal fees or his opponent's legal fees. That puts the maximum he is liable for under his own control.
PyPy is a very interesting project, but I suppose there's just no "killer feature" for me to start using it at the moment.
Naruto 514 RAW & Predictions
What do you think will happen in Naruto 514? Share your predictions, spoilers, analysis and theory about Naruto 514 in the comment section. Naruto Chapter 513 ended when Tsuchikage makes something like a cero in his two hands (TN: for non-bleach fans, a cero is like some bullet of light).
The focus of this piece is on VC-funded startups (and larger companies) in the Valley. In the earliest stage startups with which I work, it is overwhelmingly the norm for founders and others to work for equity and often for equity alone. Such early-stage equity can be valuable if the company succeeds and is to be sharply distinguished from the "one-tenth of one percent" option grants that come later, after funding.

So, yes, at the early stages, the Valley remains enamored with "options" and perhaps more so than ever in the 25+ years I have been doing startups. Beyond the early stage, the lack of an IPO market has taken the luster away from the equity grants that used to excite so many in Silicon Valley and the article makes a good point that a noticeable change has occurred at that level.
Are there any practical and tested ways to tie company success to employee compensation?

Could tie a bonus to a metric or give out a percent of revenues... but there is a much bigger tax burden there.
One Piece 601 Spoilers and Predictions
Have you looked into PayPal? Yeah, they have their fair share of horror stories, but they have a decent API, pretty good docs, and they're quite reliable, too, in terms of uptime. Their rates are competitive ($30/month, $0.25 / txn + 2.9% of the txn). I use them for my startups, never had problems.
Your mp3 player and calendar need raw access to registers and the memory allocator?

No, just no.
This works great if you're plugging away on an existing system, knocking off bug reports. But it doesn't work at all for prototyping cool new stuff on a clean sheet of paper.

Ingenuity and Ticket Systems don't combine very well.

There's no list of action items for Truly Cool Stuff. You just dive in and start messing around. You can probably externalize some context as you cross off ideas and concepts that won't work. But there's no game plan, thus no concept of a "Next Action". You're on a blank sheet of paper with a head full of context, and any distraction will kill that.

So yeah, there are circumstances where you can survive interruptions. But there are also circumstances where they'll kill you.
WM isn't all bad. In their effort to drive down prices they actually provide the least expensive option for fresh fruit, veggies, and other healthy foods that lower income people typically forgo because of the cost. Studies have found that when given less expensive options for healthy food people will pick it over the junk.
Well, Macromedia Director with Lingo (the software used to produce most of them) was released in '88. (Director is older, but had limited interactivity authoring capability before Lingo.) It definitely had image rollover effects when I was working with it in '89. CD drives may not have been ubiquitous at the time, but deployment via stacks of floppies was going on.
But, at the same time, claiming to like something doesn't (for sure) mean that you do like doing that something. We can be lying to our partners, to the world, to ourselves.

Especially bittersweet are the times you predict your partner's taste in something, they deny it, and a few months later it turns out you were right after all.
There is more information available, from the previous frames.

Its likely that more work is being done than just simply applying a similar algorithm to Photoshops re-synthesise to each frame.
Been following the meetup for a while now, and I'll finally be comeing to this one.
In this particular case, we're talking about an online service, so no unscrupulous employees to get ripped off by or physical dangers to navigate. They also claim to be using advanced models for approving borrowers, and putting in place a bunch of methods to ensure higher payback. All of that implies lower risk, so why aren't the rates themselves significantly lower?
Understanding Business Development
While some minor details are off (the GUI -> Xemacs thing was probably more accurate several years ago), you're basically right. Emacs Lisp is kind of a crappy Lisp dialect, but it's a very accessible way to learn the basics, and if you use Emacs, quite immediately useful.

I wish I had a better suggestion for learning elisp, but I mostly picked it up from the Emacs Lisp info file included with Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/elisp.htm...). I'd been reading SICP already though, so I already understood the fundamentals of the Lisp family. The best intro I've seen to Lisp is _The Little Schemer_, but keep in mind that Scheme is the "clean and minimalistic" dialect (for better and worse).
Amazing how many of those on the list have been implemented/are in some stage of implementation.

I suspected there would be some of that but not to this extent.

More proof of the value of ideas ;)

As for this particular one, buglabs is in the right direction but the granularity is all wrong.

I see a brick costing no more than a buck or two, $5 tops.

Buy them in bags, not fancy boxes :)

The only slightly more pricey ones would be the ones capable of displaying something or having complex inputs.
Stephen Fry: What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 18
> You can afford to grandfather old accounts if you can still at least break even on those accounts.

They could have grandfathered the existing accounts for at least 6 months or so, but giving any user -- whether a paying customer or a free user -- only 30 days to start paying $100 a month when many of them expected to be paying little or nothing for quite some time? Well, I think that is the height of arrogance and disrespect for the customers on which your business is built -- and an exceptionally effective way to alienate all those free users who MIGHT have become paying customers if only they had been given a reasonable amount of time to adjust to the change ... or even a reasonable new rate for small volume users.

Why not offer something like $5 a month for up to 10 subscribers instead of basically kicking all their free users in the groin? Most small businesses would not bat an eye at such a small charge even if they had only 30 days to start paying or abandon Chargify. But did they offer such a service?

No, the fact remains that the guys at Chargify appear to be way too naive for any serious business to trust or rely on them at this stage of the game. They didn't "get it" when they made their blunder and from what I have seen they still don't "get it".

But no worries, there are others that will pick up the slack ...
I wonder what could be some real world applications for this technology.
I am getting lots of reactions!

Mostly by mail, but plenty here too.
This might be the ticket: http://inventwithpython.com/ . I haven't gone through it really, but the goal of teaching through making games is similar, and I do know he wrote a pretty good clone of gorillas (http://github.com/jesusabdullah/gorillas is my own copy, if it interests you).
The NCAA publishes their data as batch feeds for use. We're starting with just using that. In addition to the current data they do that for ( 2000- ) a lot of old data is available dating back to the 1800's in various formats. ( I'm speaking of college football here in particular ).

However, I believe there are certain restrictions surrounding the real time access of data. We haven't come up against that obstacle yet, since we're first attacking historical archiving of data after the fact, even if it's only 1 day after the games have been played.
The point about credit cards was made because it's advice given to middle class consumers. I assume if 30% is too high for people with money, it's even more so for people without. From the perspective of the business making the loans, of course they're different models. I don't see that as the most important perspective, though.

And the fact that ZestCash is competitive with other usurious lending companies really does nothing to improve my opinion of them.
> ...ZestCash’s own rates, which run between 242% and 462% APR (not a typo)...

Yeah, and a 5% APR on a 30 year mortgage would look ridiculously large if you quoted it as an MPR (Millenium Percentage Rate).

The only utility of using a standard such as the APR is to compare loans with the same term. Quoting a one week, single payment period loan in terms of an APR leads readers to compare its magnitude with that of other much longer term loans; this is a wholly disingenuous attempt to appeal to emotion over basic mathematical reasoning.
Alzheimers Disease - Medications That Can Induce Poor Memory
If good copy can result in even a 10% increase in sales for a mass market product, that could be worth millions of dollars, much more than $15K. This isn't for a blurb, it's for several thousand words of copy(think something like a 10 page salesletter, or all pages on a website).

Keep in mind that writing the actual text is a very small portion of the work. 90% of a good copywriter's time is spent researching your competitors, customers, and target market...understanding your product in great detail to fully highlight its benefits...finding which psychological hot buttons exist in the specific segment of the market you want to target, and how to push them in just the right way to create a red-hot burning desire in your prospect's minds to buy your product NOW.

To write good copy, you need an absolute understanding or a market, basically all of the steps of a comprehensive market research project. This takes time and money.

You can definitely find someone to write you an article for a few bucks. It won't convert, and it won't represent your product/startup in the best way.

That's why I recommend startup founders learn the basics and write good copy themselves, You already know your product and customers best- you can skip the through research a copywriter would have to engage in.
You should add "that's the challenge: also doing well despite constant uncertainty"
Copywriting has nothing to do with general text writing -- it's about salesmanship in print. Paying a one-time fee of $15k and a small percentage of all future sales generated by the copy isn't expensive if you compare that to what it would cost to hire even a half-decent salesman, working full-time, for a year.

In some cases, a good sales letter can be used for years and years. Take a look at this classic two-page direct mail piece that was used -- with small variations -- during 28 years and made the Wall Street Journal ridiculous amounts of money: http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/wall-street-journal-lett...
Is it a crime to hustle at pool or poker?
Only one I remember is Kalzumeus, which I think was a rental property management webapp for targeted for single-family residences as opposed to apartment buildings and the like. Was going to have awesome integration with Paypal. I could be wrong, that's from memory and I could be confusing you with someone else.
There's a rule that says that any sentence will offend someone somewhere. But that does not mean those sentences should not be spoken, and I think that even in jest there is some wisdom in here.

If I had an insurance company and someone came to me for life insurance and was a patent troll I'd find a way to shoo them out the door without a policy.

I definitely see those that antagonize the most powerful companies on the planet in a head-on battle over these silly patents as riding a very fine line. No doubt people have gotten killed over these things in the past and it is not all bad to have a reminder flash up that your presence on this globe is 'optional' and that if you piss enough rich and very powerful people off you just might find yourself having an accident.

Those people that are already heavy criminals have no remorse about this, those that are not rely on the courts to do their thing. But what if the courts no longer function? No doubt a larger number of people will take matters in to their own hands, if only out of frustration or desperation.

That's one of the motivations that judges have to try to get things right, our whole legal fiction depends on the courts being perceived as 'working'. If that goes out the all bets are off.

Some science fiction writers have gone to some effort to depict the kind of world that would result from that.

There are no bad words, there are bad deeds.
To me the cause is obvious - the longer you're together, the less you try and establish what you like and dislike. Your partner puts a plate of bacon in front of you and you eat it : they assume you like bacon. You might tolerate bacon but not like it, but you eat it because it was prepared for you and there's no reason to say 'I don't like bacon'. Same goes for movies : you just accept watching movies with your partner that you don't particularly care for, but you do it because you're spending time together. The partner assumes you like that movie because you went along and didn't complain.

In other words, it's likely that the study miscontrues 'like' for 'doesn't actively dislike'. I can watch romantic comedies without complaint, I don't like romantic comedies as a genre. It's just easier to eat the food, watch the movie than it is to start a federal case over it. After all, if you've been in a relationship for a while, chances are there might be kids, and you probably just relish the ability to watch any movie in peace and quiet.
Blackberry. Had an iPhone, but I use it as an iPod now.

I use my phone to 1) place phone calls, 2) BBM, 3) Email, 4) Twitter, 5) Calendar, and 6) Contact List.

Blackberry does it all without the fluff. And as someone who is easily distracted, I am glad to not have the fluff. I'd much rather interact with the world around me then with my phone.

Interested in hearing some other lines of reasoning...
It's another case of one size fits Google, and nobody else.
The first thing he said is that payday loan shops don't charge a huge APR, they charge a flat fee for getting a payday loan, often $20 or $40 on a $500 loan.

That's 5% to 10% of the loan amount, however, if you average that to APR you get a crazy %, something in the low thousands, like 1000% or so.

In the case of ZestCash, they offer a minimum 2 month loan term. Their fee on $500 in that period isn't $40, it's $219.12, and I can't find any indication on their site that you can pay it off early to avoid accruing additional interest. It's similar to a credit card that forces you to only make minimal payments.

Edit: I also don't think enough attention is being paid to the two other major points I tried to make in the post, that ZestCash is using some shady tactics to try to convince the unsavvy consumer that they're getting a much better deal than they really are, and that all of the coverage from major blogs was surprisingly positive given such a controversial space, and that none of it mentioned ZestCash's actual rates despite implying that their model represented a significant improvement over payday loans.
Ask HN: Creating screencast to raise funds?
Hi. I am trying to launch a startup but I have no coding skills so I decided I would hire someone to code it for me, but to do that I need money.

The only skill I have is creating videos, and so I am thinking that creating screencasts and intro videos for startups would be a good way to go.

I am looking for advice on how to get screencasting gigs, and how much I might charge for them.

For example, say I can create the intro video on dropbox.com, how much should I be charging for that?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
Ask HN: Let's create the largest database of browser usage stats.
HN is a huge community of people building web startups. If we can share monthly browser share statistics, anonymously or something, we can create a most reliable browser usage stats. This will really help in deciding on what browsers to support, what features to be enabled. How does it look ?
what's up? :P
This article says nothing about how lifespans are far longer now, as the comments section points out. Cancer is what you die of when everything else fails to kill you. Cancer is only "purely man-made" in the same sense that increased life expectancy is "man-made" too.