skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...the law's assertion that corporations are legal entities in as much as humans are.

No they aren't. In coding terms, this is a LegalPerson:

interface LegalPerson {
public void signContract(Contract c);
public void enforceContract(Contract c);
public void sue(Lawsuit s); // Plus a few more
}

class Human implements LegalPerson, HumanRightsHolder, etc { ... }
class Corporation implements LegalPerson, Property { ... }

LegalPerson is just an interface. Whenever you deal with a LegalPerson, you can use the enforceContract method, etc.

Since Netflix implements LegalPerson, I don't care about their implementation details. We have a contract - they owe me 3 DVDs and I owe them $14.00/month. Because of legal personhood, I need not worry about Netflix corporate structure or other implementation details.
Apple exploits this very effectively. Related HN thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244967
I guess if you're the kind of person who thinks that art can be a worthwhile and meaningful part of someone's life (and I do), and that games can be art (which hopefully most people recognize by now), then they can be seen as changing people's lives to some extent.

I can't argue that a game could be more effectual than something like Google, obviously, but I think games are a lot more than a way to pass or waste time, and definitely can provide a lot to people.
I'm not sure about "removed", but I believe CSS2 specified an algorithm for generating numbers (think automatically numbered headings, paragraphs, etc) that was so poorly specified that only Opera managed to get a coherent, working algorithm out of it. CSS2.1 changes that algorithm to be more sensible, and of course it no longer matches what Opera did.

WebKit came up with a proposal for specifying gradients in CSS, implemented and shipped it. Later, Mozilla came up with a simpler syntax, and the CSS working group adopted Mozilla's proposal.
An automated taxi service is certainly one of the things we ought to get out of this navigation technology (but you don't want to call it a taxi service, because you don't want to be subjected to the limits and fees placed on taxis by municipalities), but apparently if you look at commuter rail systems, you find that people tend to commute from suburbs to downtown in the morning, and back out in the evening. Commuter rail systems usually want to have separate overnight layover facilities on the outbound ends of routes, vs mid-day layover facilities in the downtown areas. You can force the cars to rack up empty miles, but it's probably more energy efficient to have separate mid-day and overnight parking.

The other thing the automated taxis should offer as an option is cars with multiple compartments, where if you wanted to get from one compartment to another you'd have to get out of the car. People who are impatient but don't care too much what their trip costs could request that they get one compartment of the car and it get routed so that they aren't delayed by other people in sharing the car, and then people who want cheap transportation and don't care so much how long it takes could book the other compartments. You could also have a hybrid option where the impatient would allow up to 5 minutes (or any number of minutes of the rider's choosing) delay to allow others to be picked up/dropped off, and there could be transfer points along major roads, and people wanting cheap travel could express a willingness to deal with N transfers. That could go a long way towards increasing the number of people in the average vehicle.
Big interesting games are put together by very large, not so entrepreneurial teams these days.

Hacker news is much about entrepreneurial things done by small teams. That is a much smaller intersection these days.
extract:
Floyd Kvamme, a major VC player in the development of Silicon Valley defines venture capital as “the search for good engineers.”

Across Asia today, 21 percent of university graduates are engineers. Across Europe, 12.5 percent of university graduates are engineers. In the United States the number is 4.5 percent.

So why hasn’t the United States already been steamrollered? The answer is clear. We have addressed the engineering gap by attracting remarkable talent from around the world to study in the U.S. and have been fortunate that many have stayed and become leaders in industry, academia, and entrepreneurship. Large numbers of such individuals still aspire to stay and contribute to the U.S., but our visa policies increasingly make their path difficult. We must fix this post haste. Furthermore, this gravy train is slowing down. Larger numbers of engineers and entrepreneurs are returning to China, India and elsewhere. Vivek Wadwha’s surveys indicate that their primary reasons for returning are that their professional careers or the companies they wish to found can be built much faster back in Asia or South Asia.
Same here. Spent 5 seconds trying to figure out where to click (I clicked everywhere). Sorry, meh.
Have you considered redirecting IE to the mobile version of your site? Surprisingly, when using IE6 at school I have found that more and more websites are doing that for at least older versions..
Do you know which of the justin.tv links features Tom's talk? I'd love to watch it, but there are over 10 videos from today, several of which are over two hours long. Any idea which one has his talk?
Was it weeks/months/years until you felt comfortable writing an entire Web app with basic functionality?

Felt comfortable? Probably months.

Looking back -- was actually competent? I'm not sure that I am now but I'd wager 2-3 years before I knew enough to both code an app, debug said app, and secure the app.
it can be accurate, I think it just depends on the circumstances. I blew over 300 messages just yesterday. As for age, I just barely turned 18, but when I was in high school I would easily text at 2x or 3x that rate. Reasons it was so high can be attributed to not being challenged in school (so text in class), i could easily talk to all friends through the same medium (and multiple of them at a time), and its fairly easy to mass message to figure out plans.
Does anyone have suggestion on good practices to make an Ajax page crawler friendly? Since the anchor url (#) are generated on the fly by Javascript, how does the crawler know what anchor urls to follow given the parent page?

Are invisible urls (for archor urls) still frown upon by Google?
The way Brian is running away with the votes says a lot about the hopes and dreams of the entrepreneurs that heard him. PG's advice that he "talk about when he was hopeless and obscure" was spot on.
This is really weak. Does anyone really think we don't have enough kids going to college? Or that too many people are starting new businesses?
I like reading long posts, and it makes me sad to see people I like to read, like yourself, Steve Yegge and a few others start to write as if you're embarrassed and you're wasting our time. You're not, and here's why:

You write well, you're interesting, and (for me, anyway) reading is an experience; I enjoy it. Sure, I'm learning things or being exposed to different ideas etc, but I also enjoy reading it. The shorter your writing, the less time I get to spend reading it.
other thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1797389
Film is a perfect medium for delivering a political punch to your face, after which you can wash off the gloss that was deemed necessary for the film to be seen my millions, evaluate the facts you were offered in the light of new or existing ones, and make up your own mind. That's the whole point of good, biased political documentary, as summed up by Michael Moore at the very end of this one.

There are enough millions of people who are completely oblivious to critical issues that a well prepared, biased, flawed, powerful punch can wake them up to, who do not otherwise stand a chance of forming a stance for or against and getting involved in those issues. Delivering punches and sitting down calmly and evaluating sophisticated issues thoroughly in an impartial manner should not be mutually exclusive; there's room for both.
Don't forget webGL. The best place is here http://learningwebgl.com/blog/
Under the covers of the App Engine Datastore
Sorry guys, whatever you are saying: cancer is a product of the cellular replication system and the faint, yet existing possibilities of errors in that system. To our best knowledge, the are mostly associated to DNA mutations and certain other physio-chemical states (e.g., epigenetics) associated to it. However, the longer you live, the more likely you will beceome prone to incur these genetic state changes. This state change is mostly related to the fact that we live longer than before. Obviously, there is hereditary cancer and all its implications and we can trace that, but the increased occurrence of these genetic issues leading to our cells to behave in discord in modern society is undoubtedly linked to the greatly increased lifespans. No scientific study has come up with other evidence - and if it would have, I can assure you it would be on the headlines of Science, Nature, and other scientific journals.
Someone actually asked him that specific question. His answer (paraphrased): "Find a small company that you think is going to be big and join it. At small companies, you learn a lot about many different things. As they grow larger, you learn about scaling issues. Throughout the process, build your personal network."
Anyone have thoughts or experience on using prices divisible by 5 versus 4s/9s? (Plans of $5, $10, $25 a month vs. $4, $9, $24, etc. )
To all the Y-Combinator folks, and all the speakers: Thank you for a fantastic event. I had a great time today.

Also, thank you for all the free and tasty food. I guess you really do understand what motivates founders!
Sachin Tendulkar
As a teenager who uses texting a lot (16k sent last month)... here's some thoughts about why this isn't so extreme:

1) Texting works like IM for most people. It's a back and forth conversation where each message generally represents one line of conversation. A conversation on IM can span 100s of lines easily; having several long bits of conversation to different people throughout the day quickly adds up even if it is not especially consuming.

2) Further, on some plans texting can include other things. Somewhat ironically considering what I said above, Mobile IM on many Verizon phones counts as a text every time a message is sent or received. So if I'm using AIM, MSN, etc on my non-data plan phone, I can rack up text numbers quickly.

3) Twitter. I don't use it on my phone, but I know some who do. If you get Twitter texts every time someone you follow updates, you can have a lot of extra traffic being sent. The same goes for Facebook status messages and whatever other traffic can go through a phone.

I don't really consider myself a super heavy texter, but it's my main conversation with some people for even longer conversations. I also used about 1200 minutes on the phone; it's not just for texting. But when you're limited to no data plan, and you have a phone that has a default keyboard and so forth (I have an LG Voyager, chosen simply for having the best phone keyboard for me), it can look like a lot.

16k is only about 500 messages a day. Check your last IM log.. I looked at one on Skype text chat and it was at 650 from just a few of hours of off and on talking to a nerd friend as he messed with some stuff on his Droid 2.
I agree. The spelling and grammar errors are flags that this was written by someone who does not pay attention to detail. Someone who does not pay sufficient attention to detail has no business making the kinds of demands made in that job post.
Just start playing around, The last few weeks I have been browsing a load of sites like http://html5tutorial.net/ just mess around with bits and pieces then consult Google and Stack Overflow if you get stuck. I recommend getting stuck into some CSS3 first though, its surprising how much you can do in the style sheet.

Also its worth checking http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ MS have some interesting sandboxes you can play with there. Learn your way around.
If you skip to 1:08:40 his talk is here:

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272002787
Not sure if this exists, is feasible, or even possible, but: What about some sort of framework or markup for converting a webpage to speech?

Edit: http://www.webtospeech.com is free btw.
Reminds me of the blue-eyed islanders puzzle.

http://www.xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html
Sorry to write such a long blog post, but I didn't have time to write a short one.

Another solution is an appendix, as a sort of purgatory for zombie passages. Or a short and long version of the same blog post - your own tl;dr.

Perhaps best is the idea of chapters: treat the first blog post as an introduction or introductory chapter (or even as an abstract thereof), and the cool sentences you think of - that in reality are expansions of the main point - can move to a chapter, where they become first-class citizens, being directly relevant to that chapter's own thesis. Each chapter is a blog-post (and named, and linked to, as such). If you don't yet have enough material for one of these chapters, leave it as a draft for a while (or publish it as a skeletal chapter).

Read over your com­po­si­tions, and where ever you meet with a pas­sage which you think is par­tic­u­larly fine, strike it out. aka kill your darlings
tl;dr :)
This would explain why I have had to wait for a teen to finish texting while they should of been working at a Best Buy, a local ice cream place, and a carnival I took my kids to just in the past month. And in two of the cases they seemed to think it was rude of me to interrupt them.
...the correct answer would be "EVERYONE might pay me on a Friday in 2013"

;)
Learn the JavaScript language and browser/DOM programming first, then the actual HTML5 stuff is a few simple additions. Dive Into HTML5 seems pretty good.

* "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Crockford

* "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" by David Flanagan

* MDC's "A Re-introduction to JavaScript": https://developer.mozilla.org/en/A_re-introduction_to_JavaSc...

* Resig's "Learning Advanced JavaScript": http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

* MDC: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

* Crockford's website: http://javascript.crockford.com/

* YUI Theater (especially Crockford's JavaScript talks): http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
well that's a clever way of framing the issue in code, but i think the point of the movie is that your comment '//plus a few more' is a grey area wide enough to drive a feature film through. law deals mostly with edge cases (in that the easily decided issues aren't interesting in terms of new law)

your other point, that you don't have to worry about implementation details is true until someone tries to bill you for your tap water or shut your factory down without regard to the human consequences. if you have an abstraction for dealing with those situations i look forward to it.
'Eureka moments' and other myths about tech innovation
Reference

http://www.w3schools.com/html5/default.asp

http://www.html5rocks.com/

http://simon.html5.org/dump/html5-canvas-cheat-sheet.html

http://diveintohtml5.org/peeks-pokes-and-pointers.html

Tutorials

http://diveintohtml5.org/

http://slides.html5rocks.com

http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial

Demos

http://html5demos.com/

http://studio.html5rocks.com/

http://lab.simurai.com/css/buttons/

Sandboxes

http://css3please.com/

http://playground.html5rocks.com/

Tools

http://www.modernizr.com/

http://www.contrast.ie/blog/speeding-up-with-modernizr/

http://css-tricks.com/examples/ButtonMaker/

http://labs.thecssninja.com/font_dragr/

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

http://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-brows...

Compatibility

http://caniuse.com/

http://html5readiness.com/

http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html

Detecting HTML5 Support

http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html

http://www.modernizr.com/
Of all the talks I watched, I miss the one I complained was lacking :x

Thanks for that.
Does it bother anyone else that [copyright infringement] would force an arbitrary low price point for books?

I see no reason to let the inevitable outcome of economic realities bother me.
I think you'd better serve your client if your PR machinations were a little less obvious.
It seems to me that without modern medicine, it only makes sense that fewer people died of cancer. It's not that it's become more dangerous. It's that there were simply more things to die of.
Great post, good points (had a good laugh about the loop and arithmetic assumption ;-)) and I mostly agree - although probably 1/3 of [academic/scientific] programmers [at least] really can't program (although that is much less than what got you about to post). [see Nature Oct 14, 2010] However, that is definitely less than the "majority".
Any reason why this post was downvoted?
Good in the aesthetic sense. Bad in that this can be easily gamed.
Though I wasn't able to attend this year, I did stream some of the live talks on justin.tv, and I plan on watching the rest tomorrow. What I saw and heard was very motivating, not to mention fun! I really wish I could have been there, but maybe next year. Anyway, I'd also like to say thanks to all involved!
Bear in mind that I say this in the most respectful manner possible: Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?
That's kind of annoying. Is this some kind of code injection countermeasure?
I wish those videos were broken up by speaker
Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
I just got into Tasker and I set up a late night silence behavior but it only is silenced when I let the screen go dark.
I started running regularly in VFFs. Previously I didn't run much at all. After a couple months I started running in my old sneakers (I forgot the VFFs when traveling). The transition back was unpleasant (ie knee and ankle pain), to the point where I kicked off my sneakers and ran barefoot on the treadmill, which stopped the pain. This doesn't imply the VFFs are better for me, as the reverse transition could have caused pain as well. FWIW I'll probably buy another pain though.
Groupon's Founder on How to Get Super Rich
My wife and I started running in them, starting with walking only, then running only a bit at a time (1/2 mile run, then walk another 1 or 2 miles). Now, about 3 weeks on, we run about 2 miles straight at a time (we've never run at all before, which is supposedly ALOT harder with VFFs than if you had started out with cushioned running shoes).

At first, we had pains in places we'd not had before being on elliptical machines or my wife doing aerobics, especially in the shins and forefoot and midfoot. I got some slight blistering on the big toe the first week as well, but it's all gone away over the subsequent weeks.

The verdict? It's about as fun as running as a kid barefoot on a summer's day. We actually look forward to doing 5k in them. Then, we go trail running, which I'm sure will be a blast. It seems to feel alot better underfoot on soft dirt than paved surfaces, anyway.
Sorry, I'm intentionally being vague at this point.

If it ever amounts to anything, I will let you know.
I helped develop http://adbubbles.oneriot.com as an IE9 Beta Launch demo, with much inspiration from mrdoob. The site is now broken since OneRiot just changed their business model away from real time search and shut off their API. I worked a lot with canvas especially. diveintohtml5 was really helpful as was the mozilla developer reference.
Corporations have a lot of the same rights as people though. That was one of the big deals about the supreme court striking down campaign finance reform: the idea that corporations have the freedom of speech to influence elections.

The case is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...
The Electric Lamborghini Concept from Andrei Avarvarii
Throw a PDF up on Amazon S3, generate unique links for people that pay for it. Or, you could not worry about unique links, and just trust people. Like others have said, piracy will happen, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Just wanted to point out that the query string var is "_escaped_fragment_" with a leading and trailing underscore.
So, far every article I've seen from uxmovement.com has anecdotal advice with no sources, and no numbers to back them up.

Also, when creating the tiered plans for your web-app, I highly recommend NOT having anything that is "unlimited" in any of your plans. It is very hard to go back and un-unlimit your plan. Don't leave it open-ended.

Sure, make the limits high on the top plan, hell make them higher than anyone could possibly need, but still have limits. If someone needs more than that, you can work something out. If nothing else, have a per-instance-pricing plan ($50/mo for 500 things + $0.05 per additional thing).
Contract the UX design. Have a UX designer provide you with wireframes and functional specs. Have a artist (it may be the UX designer) provide you with a PSD comp. Hire the programmer to implement the UI as designed.
Interesting Tony Buzan book, just ordered it - thanks; love the videos of him on YouTube.

I agree, taking breaks makes working efficient; I liked the reminder of this article on willpower and pushing ourselves even harder sometimes. Sort of like endurance in running.
Ask HN: Entrepreneurs prizes and contests lists?
There is a list of entrepreneurs prizes and contests? Intel, Microsoft and Cisco have startups contests. Dou you have a list?
How about an explanation instead of just downvotes. This is a totally reasonable statement given FB revenues (yes I know this is not equal to earnings) compared to Google's in 2003.
>All of a sudden the headline is: X out of Y Applicants for Positions Advertised By My Company Can't Program

Theres an important point here that he didn't make. The ones that aren't remotely qualified to even apply for the position? They applied to all the positions at every company they could find. Of course they seem to outnumber the remotely competent programmers; they sent out far more resumes, and by all the non-scientific metrics they get counted that many more times.

In particular, this line bothers me: 'How much time did you spend making sure your ad was sufficiently attractive to the star developers and a sufficient deterrent to the crappy ones?' Making the ad attractive to 'star developers' is not the issue here, making it less attractive to resume-spammers is.
Benefits of Inculcating the Habit of Exercising at an Early Age
Traditions about Thesis Writing
There are many myths about thesis writing which will lead students astray. These myths will not only hamper the students’ capabilities but will misinform them as well. Therefore, understanding some of the myths which will not benefit your thesis writing will enable you to submit a good thesis.
I watched most of the speakers on Justin.tv as well. What an incredible group of individuals. I wish I could have been there in person and there is no doubt I will be next year. It is amazing the impact YC has made in just 5 years. I hope you guys keep it up, you truly have a wonderful thing going all the way through. benevolence and kindness will surely pay off in cash as well for you guys (I think we all know it already has).

Kudos to PG and the YC team!
I think Jessica deserves most of the credit. So thank you Jessica and crew!
danny.ww.com --> http://www.dannygagne.com

Thanks :)
Ask HN: How important is it to have a "lite" version of your mobile app?
I've just released my first paid app into the Android market and I was wondering how important it is to have a "lite" version of your app.

It makes sense for games but what about other kinds of apps, such as my MeterRec app? http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2010/10/17/meterrec-released/
Only somewhat on topic: am I the only one who's thrown off by version numbering like this? If it's mongrel 2, I expect that the software is at version 2. Just like python 3 is python v 3.x.