skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For example, let's take the scammer in New York City whom we will call L. V. At the end of 2006, he went on a two-month buying spree in which he purchased ten investment properties in south Queens by obtaining 20 mortgages from ten different banks putting little or nothing down on any of the purchases. Apparently none of the banks was interested in checking his other purchases to see whether he had the means to handle 20 mortgages. Of course, L. V. never told the banks that he had no intention of making the payments on any of these loans.

One by one, L. V. defaulted on the loans. By the end of 2007, eight of the homes were in foreclosure. Undeterred, he continued to collect rent from tenants whom he had put into these two-family homes. When the article about his scam appeared in a December 2009 New York Daily News article, he was trying to evict tenants from two of the properties for non-payment of rent even as foreclosure actions against him were proceeding.

We need some sort of system to deter Evil landlords, such as this one. It is such a one-way street. Landlords / Property Management Companies (PMCs) almost always require credit checks, background checks, first month + last month + deposit + "fees" to move into a place they're not even getting any ownership on, just for a freaking lease!

Why shouldn't renters be able to check out their landlords, or PMCs similarly? Not just BBB stuff, but seriously comprehensive and detailed records of assets owned for passive income.

Real estate is SUCH a screwed up industry.
Perhaps you shouldn't have built your business on a Libyan domain in the first place then...
Load Balancing For Developers: Improving Application Performance With ADCs
So, pretty much all businesses? That's quite a market..
What's the mechanism that would allow a company to attract highly qualified late-comers via equity- even in the 23rd hour in order to help make the exit happen- without upsetting the fairness? (not saying this is a flaw- just would rather you spell it out since you're a math genius) (seriously, he's a math genius- I saw his CV).
From Patrick:

> I'd be able to give you one project a month for $400 until you either got sick of doing them or decided to move upmarket.

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171663]
Yep, this is definitely the post I was referring to.

FWIW, I fundamentally believe that smart people tackling brick-and-mortar-businesses-using-spreadsheets will make obscene amounts of money over the long term. (Not only are my products examples of this but, few people know this about me, I actually bought a gas station earlier this year to force myself to feel the pain.)

For anyone thinking about doing anything like this, feel free to reach out - I want to help you. :)
Just to establish the baseline and not to over-excite everyone - how many side projects you had that did not work out? :)
You make the mistake of trying to impose your own worldview and morals on an entity that has absolutely no stake in that and has fairly clearly indicated that your views and theirs are in conflict, and likely will remain so. You are not going to convince Libya, the Liberian government or NIC.ly to change their mind on this, and here on HN you are preaching to the choir.

Of course censorship is bad. And editorial control by a registrar over the content of websites under their TLD sucks. But that was spelled out up-front.

You may think that that is the key issue, but in reality the key issue is if you're going to wise up to the fact that you're fighting windmills here and that if you don't move on, and fast that all your work on this will have come to naught.

I fully understand you're upset, but frankly I don't care one bit how many books your s.o. has written and how often she's on TV, the censorship angle has nothing to do with it, unless you were purposely doing this from the beginning to create a case to show that censorship from sexuality in Islamic countries was what you had in mind when you registered that domain.

Personally I have a hard time believing that, I think that that is something that only came about after you found your domain taken off-line, in other words, you only started to care about censorship after being censored.

Sure, censorship is bad. That's why you stay away from dealing with government entities that will allow themselves the right to censor you.

See Google vs China and many other examples.
$400 USD is quite prosperous in many parts of the world. Not in the US, or the wealthier nations.
Carbonmade http://carbonmade.com was a side project of our design studio before gaining enough traction to work on full-time.
Yes, but Babbage didn't ship.
Employees want to balance options vs. salary vs. time. They need fixed numbers to calculate this. With your approach, they get penalized if your company takes too long to sell/go public. If I have a four year vesting schedule, I know that if I commit four years to your company, I'll be fully vested. But if I bust my ass for four years then it takes you another four to have some sort of liquidity event, your company has actually put less value on my initial four years (in fact, reduced it by 50%). That won't fly with most people. I think that's why fixed vesting schedules work best, and issuing new options to retain employees after they're fully vested makes the most sense.
This is a common misconception: they make money until somebody else comes by and beat them with tech that outclass their own.

The issue isn't that using better tech is better, but that it is better for the job security just to go with whatever everybody else does - then if something goes wrong, you can't be singled out for blame.
Failed it? Did it only have one question on it?
http://binaryage.com

my first commercial app TotalFinder seems to be covering my living expenses soon (launched a week ago)
ThatHigh.com - started in February as a joke, now it pays my rent in SF.
Page caching doesn't matter if you're making a request to an external server.
Not that simple, won't work on most browsers. Also if script has document.write inside - will fail.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1834077/browser-support-f...
Get Longer Rewards With Cheap Pocket And Wholesale Invitations
Both custom wholesale and pocket invitations are productive products. That is why they would immediately boost your returns for long time. Company offers you discounted pocket and wholesale invitations globally.
Rat Brain Robot
How so? The wing has to exert a downward force on something if it wants to go up? If not air then what ?
Just re-read this (8 Best Questions We Got While Fund raising): http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-bes...
The problem isn't lobbying. The problem is that by offering them lucrative jobs, politicians and their staff can be captured by particular special interests and wielded as unfair advantages in public policy debates.
now I want to see someone write a COBOL interpreter in Fortran
It's too bad that this guy misses the point of the phrasing. People do not think money is evil because they themselves cannot make it, money is evil when people get that money without earning it and usually end up doing bad things with that money. People that cheat are not going to do good things with the items they cheated to get.

If you understand that money is the way that we interact with other people by having a currency to exchange effort then you realize that the 'love' of money or the wanting of money that you have not earned is evil. That trying to fake the amount of effort that you have created and trying to interact with other people on the basis that you have not contributed your part, then that is evil. Money is the root of all that is good because it allows people to interact with each other without ever feeling obligated to a person for doing too many favor's and never getting a favor in return.

For instance, if someone asks you to do something and you and you ask for a few dollars to do it, then once the task is complete, then everything is balanced. If on the other hand, you do the favor without getting a few dollars, you are then in debt to that person for a favor. You might take pause at this moment but consider that the other person might come back and ask for another small favor, and another small favor. At some point, you begin living for that person. You might think that doing that favor makes you feel good and that is enough to balance the interaction but how any favors will it take before you no longer feel good doing them? Money resolves this situation by allowing people to trade effort and not ever worry about the favor situations. If you ask me to mow your lawn, I'm going to ask for something in return either through an appropriate level of a task or money. There is a system of trade with built in honor. Everyone knows that the money that the other person has is earned so it's fair to make exchanges. Where it becomes evil is when lazy people cheat their way to money and try to engage in the system.

If you think you might agree with this statement, check out Objectivism and 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand for a great breakdown on why money is not the root of evil, money is the root of all that is good.
I spent 24.8 years in a big company (sold three times "up the food chain" during that time - after the last sale, I made it a serious goal to not make it to my 25th anniversary). I've lived in an "enterprise" as it went from fairly entrepreneurial (founded by Bill Lear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Lear) to stifling (PCs weren't locked down, but having unauthorized software was grounds for firing... and getting software authorized was a like a byzantine quest for the Holy Grail).

And its simply a cop-out to say that if what he suggests then hire better programmers (because practically, you probably already tried to hire the best programmers you could).

That is dead on in my experience, but from a different angle. The best programmers aren't interested in working for a locked down stifling enterprise - witness the exodus from Sun - so enterprises cannot hire them. The enterprise I left lost a lot of good engineers over the past couple of years and have not had much success replacing them.

As companies morph into enterprises, the Japanese proverb comes into play: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Japanese_proverbs The result is they lose most of the above average people and only retain average and below average people. The result is their average is below average.

pg talks about this in You weren't Meant to Have a Boss http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html (skip forward to two paragraphs before the section "Programmers").
I guess this means that a startup with a focus on online growth without much print advertising could choose a cheap .co which has a corresponding, not too popular or powerful .com, grow fast and then buy the corresponding .com when they are big enough.
Fork-A-Twitter-Client
Go vs D
Is it possible to know who proposed Xiaobo for Nobel?
Short Film About Desks
But then there's this bit:

Starbucks told Ethiopia that geographic certification, which certifies that a product is made in a certain place, was more appropriate. But, Ethiopia knew that certification would accomplish little, since Starbucks could still sell Ethiopian beans, as long as they were grown in the advertised region.

which seems to imply that the Ethiopian Government wouldn't have been happy with geographic certification which would nonetheless have prevented Starbucks (or anyone else) from selling "Sidamo" beans which weren't grown in the Sidamo region of Ethiopia.

It sounds like the Ethiopian Government wants a trademark on "Sidamo" so that it can step in between Sidama coffee farmers and Western coffee buyers in order to demand a cut. That doesn't sound like "score one for the little guy" at all, it sounds like "little guy gets screwed by government".

But the story is written confusingly, so I may be missing something.
Hah, score one for the ambiguity of the English language, I meant 'also' as in 'just like jrockway'.
I don't understand why they didn't instead drop the next few leap days. How impatient can you be when cathedrals may take centuries to build?
"Prove it."

What? You're the one with the extraordinary claim. I've already repeated several times in this thread that unlawful use of something doesn't change the ownership of that something. Someone who, on purpose, destroys or damages other people's property is held to compensate for it. What's the incredulous part in that?

"That is a structural problem with your legal system."

Well I on purpose used "our", since "my" legal system is also the Dutch one. Also, I'm one paper away from finishing my degree in Dutch law - not to argue by authority, and I'm certainly no expert on criminal procedure, just pointing out that I do have some basic knowledge of Dutch criminal and property law.

Anyway, "Here (.nl) cases that rely on evidence gathered in illegal means get thrown out with some regularity, even if the rest of it is ironclad." is, to put it mildly, open for debate. Sure, blatant violations like fishing expeditions (which was the case in the license plate scanning) will be dismissed. Smaller infractions (like retroactively applying for a warrant) much less. And don't forget that the Dutch 'reasonable suspicion' threshold is quite low. An anonymous phone tip will do. And hey, if that phone call happens to come from a phone booth across the street from the police station, who cares.
Long polling is possible in every browser ever, basically.

In my case, it was less intermittent events and more low-latency streaming data (position/GIS stuff), so I went with the forever frame. It really is splendid for pushing data to the browser without the nasty lag.
I used TotalFinder a while back and remember enjoying it. Installing again.

Small bit of feedback: the handwritten text on your homepage is difficult to read and looks a little out of place with such a cleancut design.
Personally as soon as I see an ad I just mute the sound and switch to another tab. The helpful "Your program will resume in N seconds" message tells me how long I have to wait, and I can always skip back if I do happen to miss a few seconds of the actual program.

I suppose some people watch hulu while not sitting with the keyboard and mouse, though, so the ads may reach them.
You're right. But Patrick indicated to me that he was happy for me and that he would understand if I couldn't go on. I'll be totally honest, I should've kept in better sync with him and I felt terrible that my 2nd project fell behind schedule, but I really found myself totally engulfed in putting out fires in my personal business. Nothing went according to plan. I didn't abandon his project though, I finished it and got it to him a little late. I was just looking at it again today and I saw some problems I hadn't noticed before, so I sent him a patch.

It's really only now that I'm starting to get back a bit of time where I can do things like write this. I sent him an email telling him about this thread, but I'd bet he's asleep now.
As I write this the above comment is 31 points! Please don't view this as a complaint, and to eof especially, I'm not saying the comment isn't worth that value. It just seems like an anomaly to me. Is it because everyone wants to know what the business is?
I like number 2. Maybe you could entice the restaurant owners by providing a professional photographer.

There is potential to do cool stuff with the data you would collect like A/B testing different plating styles of the same dish.

On the other hand, my wife says she is grossed out by restaurants that have pictures of their dishes (maybe this speaks to the need for better presentation).
Making the Glif: Rundown of an atom-based startup
Really, the OP is complaining that she thinks people want the wrong things. There's nothing here particular to web apps.
Jeff Atwood recently commented on this comic http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email that they left out the "Thanks" email. This article and my own opinions makes me wonder why wouldn't you say thanks.
like it, added to my blog :) as a page, thanks!
I'm confused by the title, what does this have to do with atoms, apart from the rather undistinguishing fact that its product and indeed its founders are made from them?
Citation needed. I actually did the above (single stepped through the generated assembly from a few modern compilers) and I haven't noticed too much of a bad code, given most of the default assumptions (i.e. to have a reasonably compatible code for different processors, to have the live entry points to the functions that are exportable etc.)

Maybe you looked at the code produced with the optimizations off?
OK, but when you're considering whether and how to fight a fire in a burning building there's no court to make the decision for you; and even afterwards, all the expert witnesses are going to be firefighters talking about the particular risks presented by the particular structure.

If the insurance policy draws a distinction between whether or not lives at risk when a non-subscriber's call is answered, then the insurance company may have a case as you describe. But your comment seems to assume this is the norm, whereas the questionnaires I've looked at don't make that distinction.

Remember such insurance policies (issued to a FD) are upon life and limb, rather than on department revenue stability. An insurance company would challenge a payout if they felt the fire department (perhaps because of bad training or staffing policy) foolishly ordered a crew into an impossibly dangerous situation resulting in injury or death, even if the property owner was a paying subscriber. In reality, fire crews sometimes have to let a property burn and just try to stop the fire spreading, because the presence of chemicals or an unsafe building structure makes it too risky to enter.
Are all of those 8 friends using the same network? Are you on the same network? Are the texts affected from within the network, or ones being sent from other networks?
More and more support for it every day:

http://webkit.org/blog/1395/running-scripts-in-webkit/

So there's also "defer," which is better-supported. The document.write issue is also an issue for JavaScript element building, but the assumption is that you won't blindly use these methods without testing, first.
http://www.olark.com was a side project: http://www.hab.la for a few years.
The biggest problem with this that I can see is logistical. You're trying to define how many shares of stock an employee earns for a month of work now by something that may happen in the future.

How many shares of stock do you issue when an employee decides to exercise his options four years in, and will a court uphold you trying to rescind a third of his stock when you exit in another two?
Although i don't 'live' of it's profit, I have been making more from it the last two months than my 'real' job... 'Stick Golf', - iPhone/iPad game. http://noodlecake.com
As I said in the first thread; I think there is just a cultural misunderstanding over what is pornographic, obscene or overtly sexual.

It is very hard for our extremely liberal modern society (especially the subset of it that uses the internet extensively) to understand a radically different culture.

So while that image and the wording seems entirely innocent to us in such cultures it is a very uncomfortable thing (a combination of uncomfortable things in fact).

I'm not saying I entirely believe this is the reason for the domains removal, but if it is then the complaint seems reasonable to me.
Videos from Startup Bootcamp 2010 are now online
I think it's jargon to distinguish the Glif's niche from the usual 'startup' fair (software development, etc.)
I have used pugixml (based on PugXML) for very fast parsing of very simple XML and I can highly recommend it. The speed and (IMO) interface improvements are very large. http://code.google.com/p/pugixml/

In AsmXML's benchmark, ASM was 14x faster than Xerces (http://tibleiz.net/asm-xml/benchmark.html). In pugixml's benchmark, pugi was 11x faster than Xerces (http://zeux.mooo.com/pub/pugixml/table.html). Not bad for ASM vs C++. Both systems only support a limited subset of XML features.
I am particularly concerned with these things:
1) Does this idea make sense to you.
2) What core services do you expect it to provide.
I just want to say great job man. I have been doing a lot of traveling lately (for iOS development) and I play this a lot on the plane. As a fellow iOS developer, good job.
Yes, i'm referring to their map service (the original article was in reference to google's map service). It looks that unlike google maps you can't use this commercially without paying for a service plan.
I've always been confused by why Columbus Day wasn't seen as the "hispanic" equivalent of Martin Luther King day (and why they needed to invent Cesar Chavez Day as a substitute). While Columbus himself was Italian rather than Hispanic, his expedition was basically a Spanish one, undertaken by Spain for the benefit of Spain, and which led directly to the Spanish dominance of the southern half of the Americas. If there's a good day to celebrate Hispanic heritage it's Columbus Day.
Pretty good statement in my opinion. It's sad that western media portrayed this entire incident as a "crazy muslim country that does whatever it wants in the name of Sharia law." Seriously?

The communication could have been better (or perhaps it was nonexistent), but if they have regulations not allowing adult and NSFW content on their domains, they are well within their rights. There are many US hosts that have similar regulations and its absolutely understandable.
Ask YC: Advice on learning programming in 9 months
I am tempted to quit my job and move to the bay area to spend 9 months focused on learning programming and a bit of web design.

I already know a bit of programming, one college course of Java worth but not much.

I am an aspiring startup entrepreneur and want to get to the point where I can start creating cool stuff. I could probably get by depending on others to do the technical stuff, but I feel like in the long run learning programming is really important for my desired career path.

I know it takes longer to become a great hacker but I hope to learn as much as possible in 9 months.

What advice would you have for someone thinking of doing this?

I am thinking of starting with HTML/CSS and Javascript and working on some simple browser add-ons, so I can start creating stuff that applies what I am learning relatively quickly.

I wish something like Ars Digita University still existed today but it doesn't. I am thinking of joining something like the Hacker Dojo or something similar.
BUYanihan.com Beta -- Philippine's Groupon version
Ask HN (Poll): What browser do you use? 
Please indicate your primary desktop browser for personal use (not development).

The recent news of IE dipping below 50% market share globally was quite popular (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759693). However it's at least as important to get a sense of where the market is going as where it is now. The HN crowd is a pretty good sample of internet trendsetters - I would think that the distribution of browser usage among HN users more closely reflects the global distribution 2 years from now than it does today. Please help us peak into the future by voting for your primary personal browser.

For browsers not on this list, leave a comment to be upvoted.
Other interesting date facts:

February 30th actually happened. In Sweden in 1712:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30

Friday followed Friday. In Alaska in 1867:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line#Histori...
Ask HN: How to contact why the lucky stiff
One of our TechZing listeners just requested that we try to interview _why to ask him about his unusual views/approaches and why he disappeared so suddenly, and while I think it would make for a great interview, I have no idea how to actually get in contact with him. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them, or if anyone knows how to get the word to him directly then please ask him to email us at podcast@techzinglive.com.