skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://yubnub.org is good for this. e.g. to compare german and english versions of a wikipedia page: "split {url wp topic} {url wpde topic}"

something user-friendlier would be nice, though. better still, something that would try a few tricks for finding (human) translations of whatever page you're looking at -- going through sitemap files, following wikipedia translation links, whatever other schemes there are out there.

There are plenty of other things you could do in the same field. And could charge money for: many people's jobs consist of reading online information in a foreign language, and they would pay for any help they can get.
Yes, we are building to to be bought.
People have been complaining about the extensions of copyright law ever since the 1978 extensions. That hasn't slowed them down a bit. Congress is too beholden to big businesses who benefit from the laws. Though if this new set of patent trolls that have sprung up over the last several years keep going after bigger companies that may change, but I'm not holding out much hope.
"Already, lawyers will offer to work for free unless the plaintiff wins."

In the US, yes. Not in Europe. Here in the Netherlands, it's actually prohibited by the rules of the (loosely translated) National Bar Association to take a case on a 'no cure, no pay' basis.

This article is misinformed and misleading. The legal culture is very different between the US and mainland Europe. The claims that are being made in the article are largely misrepresentations of what actually happens; for example, her in the Netherlands the amount a judge can (but doesn't have to, and often does only in part) award the loser to pay for the legal costs of the winner is based on a quotum, i.e. not on the real costs, but on a fictitious per-hour amount, which is lower than actual commercial rates (one notable exception is for IP infringements, where the full cost can be claimed).
I assumed he meant "I wish I were religious and believed hell existed, so that I might be able to believe there will be a terrible punishment waiting for them for having committed these acts."
Ask HN: Small Venue Ticket Sales
Is there anyone doing ticket sales for small clubs and little venues? A friend just told me about an acoustic music venue being quoted $25,000 for a system coded in PHP. That sounds steep to me. Are there turnkey solutions to be had for less?
Amazon.com's 1-Click patent survives challenge in Canada
Facebook and Skype deal to dial friends and family
Yes.

Weather is a crucial input toward supply.

Supply can be constrained (as in your example) and output will be lower. Lower output can cause decreased profits or any other host of things that can lower stock price.

Another example could be a drought affecting a publicly owned fruit producer.
Since a lot of startups rely on Ad revenue, a big surprise in earnings means Google is selling a lot more ad space.

This means that advertisers are spending much more in the online ad markets, which means much more revenue for Web properties in general.

Speaking from my own experience, I've seen a very positive upswing in our own ad revenue from Google.
MD in cardiology and writing a lisp book? Would you mind sharing your story with us? It sounds like you might have had an interesting life!
Patents never were about secrecy. Patents are published.

Trade secrets are about secrecy (hence the name ;) ), and with patents gone trade secrets would go up in value as a means of protecting business interests.
Capital moves to specialization
Cell phones have easily been in use for 20 years, and handheld radios have been in use for far longer than that, at far higher power levels.
Okay HN'ers, don't get your hopes up. This is a very good marketing ploy from someone very smart on HN. But I don't have all the facts; all I know is that "Annabelle" created "her" account 2 days ago and has no history of participating on HN.

Annabelle, if this was your idea, how did you execute it? Did you write / design anything? Outsource the app? Who are your partners?

It looks like FIPLAB produced the app (http://www.fiplab.com/). The website describes the product as "Need advice on how to reach out to that amazing new girl you can't stop thinking about, or taking things further with that girl you've always had a crush on? We hear you, and that's why we've created 'Dating: Ask a Girl'."

No mention of any Annabelle the character and co-founder, which is a pretty significant piece of the marketing puzzle.

So what I'm guessing is the geniuses at FIPLAB built and spec'd out the app, and got an attractive girl to join their project after the fact (or some variation of this). I'm not saying this to be a dick, your marketing tactics are great, if you carry it through it should pickup some decent press coverage. But come on, this is HN here, you weren't going to get off that easy :D
I had a similar history. My startup was beset by the fact that 90%+ of the time I was alone. I was the only one doing the coding... and to be honest, it got hard to stay focused. Working with someone, especially who is depending on me, I can work huge days for weeks at a time. Drifting alone for a month at a time... not as much. The experience raised my respect for pair programming tremendously, if nothing else.

Since you mentioned lack of focus/tendency to get distracted - do you ever wonder if you're not "startup material"? I mean this not as an insult, but an honest question, since I know I wonder it. I figure the "startup people" who are stuck in faceless corporate jobs are still working at the insane pace necessary for startup life - if not at work proper, then at home. Is there any truth to that?

What does someone who is "motivated enough" look like when taken out of a motivating setting? Are they typical overachievers throughout life or do they seem lazy without the tremendous urgency of that lifestyle? Some mix of both, something else?
Porting one of the fine Plan 9 based filesystems to Linux seems like an excellent operating systems project. This would directly benefit Glendix as many applications require these synthetic filesystems provided by the Plan 9 kernel.

/net is a good example of how sockets are done away with, and /dev/draw provides a useful graphics API. You could argue in your project thesis that filesystems sometime provide a better abstraction than traditional programming-language based APIs; and prove it by porting one such filesystem over to Linux.
I'm thinking from a startup's pricing standpoint, not necessarily from the customer's perspective. As someone starting a web service does it make sense?
Contrast with basecamp's $1.60 per project on basic and $0.99 per project on premium.

My opinion is Basecamp's pricing is much more stable, and makes sense, while chargify still needs to figure things out.

Also, I've been using Google Checkout for my startup's billing so far and it works reliably. They do have a subscriptions api and it works well. I absolutely agree billing systems do take a huge amount of time to make, and it'd be silly to concentrate on them instead of the product.
Doesn't this have downsides? Say I want to sue the government for some legitimate reason (denying my FOIA request, etc.). They rack up their legal bills on the taxpayer's dime, and then I lose. Then I owe the government eleventy billion dollars. This possibility means that it's not worth the risk to sue the government, even when I don't want its money. And if you can't sue the government, it can do anything it wants to. Everyone loses.

s/the government/a big corporation/ and it's the same thing. Really, it's bad both ways. Legitimate lawsuits should be free.
> So, the strongest and most common objection against the English rule is that it would prevent the poor from suing even if they had a good case; they just couldn't afford a 10% chance of owing thousands of dollars. I am very sympathetic to this objection.

That is very unlikely. Courts are not generally required to award costs to the winner of a case here in England, it is more of a default in most cases instead of adopting "everyone pays their own costs" as in the US.

I am not a legal expert, but I doubt a court would award crippling costs to a little guy who brought a case with genuine merit against a big guy but lost, where the little guy incurred only modest costs but the big guy brought the whole legal team to bear.

Likewise, I doubt a big guy bringing a punitive law suit against a little guy and incurring lots of costs when they could have settled things in another less expensive way would get much sympathy, which is why the US seems to have certain Big Media organisings effectively extorting settlements from innocent people for thousands of dollars, while such behaviour is unheard of in this country.

> Already, lawyers will offer to work for free unless the plaintiff wins.

I guess you're referring to so-called "no win, no fee" agreements? If so, it's not quite as simple as that (the lawyers also stand to gain more if they win than they would in a regular case), but your general argument still works.
Look at the recent case of Simon Singh, a science writer who said homeopathy is junk.
He was sued for libel by the quacks and ran up $200,000 in fees defending himself before the other side withdrew the case.

And since it never went to trial they can of course sue him again and cost him (or anyone else) the same amount next time he writes anything.
Hat bey
saaley
"Your employer denies you a promotion because of your race, sex, or religion? Complain to the appropriate government agency and they deal with the problem. Landlord won't rent to your kind? Take it to the bureaucrats."

If you're claiming that it works like this in Europe, no it doesn't (with exceptions here and there, and I only know about Dutch and a bit about Belgian law, but I can draw broad parallels to other systems, too). You still have to bring suit yourself. The government agencies can also sue and/or sanction the involved party, but in a separate procedure (well actually if the government sues, in some cases you can get 'attached' to the case as a person who has an interest in the outcome of the case, but it's a bit of a mixture between penal/administrative/civil procedures that mostly exists to make the system more efficient, and not so much to favor the party being wronged). The basic rule is that a civil party brings suit itself.
For example, imagine an enzyme that was designed to (a) receive microwave radiation

You can't possibly design such a molecule unless you can come up with a way to make it several centimeters long. (Folding doesn't count; a folded structure doesn't have anything close to the same electrical properties as a straight one.)

The reason why non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause cancer at athermal levels is just that: physical size. To receive EM energy you need a structure that's a substantial fraction of the wavelength.

But I am saying that physics cannot tell us that "low energy thing X" cannot do "high energy thing Y."

It most certainly can.
There was a session at WWDC 2009 given by a couple of Intel engineers comparing the two. (Session 131, if you have access.) In their benchmark - parallel pipelined face detection - they were within about 1% of each other. GCD scaled up to more cores slightly better.

Because it was initially built for TBB, they had to use some additional logic when moving to GCD so that frames would be rearranged into sequential order before certain stages.
IPhone App Design: When an Awkward Interface Makes Sense
This Entrepreneur Made $2.5MM By Age 21, Then Blew It All By 22
Yeah, when I read the headline I thought it was my idea, was disappointed to read that it wasn't quite as good as I'd envisaged. I have no immediate plans to implement this idea though, as I don't think I really have time. But if people keep talking to me about it then I'll probably be convinced to think about it some more. At the moment what you see in my post is as far as it goes. I don't know how much more would be required to get a proof of concept going. I suspect it'll be pretty heavy work.

edit: thanks for the encouragement by the way. I thought it was a cool idea too.
Basecamp is not critical to the success of your startup.

Billing is.
BetaBrand Does Serious Business
You're good enough if they pay you without complaint.

Here's a hopefully useful anecdote from the early 2000's. I had a friend who had worked as a secretary for a few years while getting her BA in Business. Along the way, she somehow took a single class in Statistics that involved learning to program the SAS statistical analysis package.

On the strength of that one class, that wasn't even a programming class, she found a contractor job programming in SAS paying $45/hour which for a former secretary was a fortune. She asked me the same question and I gave the same answer: "if they'll pay you, then you're good enough." And from that week onwards, she happily deposited the paychecks! She confided in me that she felt guilty because she barely had a clue what she was doing and "was taking their money to learn on the job." Welcome to software development! Felt guilty enough to tell her boss who just shushed her with "oh, we know you don't know much; you'll learn."

If you think you can do the job, then apply for it.
Post your ideas on HN and see what gets upvoted.

Tag: HB HN (half baked hacker news)
This reminds me a little of the kid who "hacked" into Sarah Palin's email by guessing her easily guessable security questions. One on hand, if someone is sufficiently careless or stupid, it's unfair to punish you for helping yourself to the fruits of their carelessness. But on the other hand, you have to respect people's desire not to be exploited. If you leave laptop in a park for 10 minutes, it's wrong for someone to hop on and use it, even if you should have known better than to leave it unattended.

I have less sympathy for this exploited bot, though, since you go in knowing the stock market can be a ruthlessly zero-sum kind of place.
Of course C will also let you treat pointers as integers and vice versa, especially if you explicitly tell it to, by casts. But in the general case, it will whine and, in fact, reducing unnecessary whining is one of the reasons to not go hog-wild with useless typedefs. I'm not sure how we got here, I think one person here doesn't know C very well and the rest of us got into a little and completely tangential C nerdfest.

Hmm that's fair. I also think I started entering kernel-dev mode where you have to carefully watch everything that you do, whereas most people probably have C experience with the benefit of things like the C standard library.

For whatever it's worth, I was seeking to reference the idiom where you store an address as an integer in order to do some hardware operations. You have to keep semantic knowledge of that integer as really being a pointer even though it's, for the moment, stored as an integer. In cases like this the C compiler is no help whatsoever.
Yes, but I will work that out in a separate posting, that's too much for a comment and will take a couple of hours to document.
I thought they are really poor marketing tactics. Its obvious from the first few sentences what it is.
Yeah I think you're right. :)
turn it into a pyramid. A famous musician plays the first track. Then it goes multi-player. Dozens or hundreds of copies are made. On each copy, a user adds her own bit, and then it's passed on to another (at random? team-based? grouped by style or ability level?), and another. You end up with dozens of pieces of music on the same basic framework. Vote on which version is the best; the winners get to record it properly alongside the rockstar who made the first track.

Bonus: you now have many variations on the same musical theme, each of which can be decomposed into tracks for each instrument. Give them to a DJ, see what she can make out of it.
I'd like to put forward the idea that what the anti-(software)-patent lobby needs is more and better patent trolls.

Is it possible that the situation could get so bad that a couple of the big guns would swing behind patent reform?
In the first event you describe, it sounds as if the lawyer has a good incentive to take the case on 40% contingency and eat the fees in the unlikely event he loses:

0.9 x 40% x $110,000 + 0.1 x (-$10,000 - $10,000 (his own opportunity cost)) = +$37,600 expected gain

In fact, the "lower pays" rule works in favor of the poor person (and their lawyer) in this example.

Of course, if the case were a lot weaker, it wouldn't help. As for your question regarding insurance, I know nothing about the European legal system besides what I learned from this article.
Isn't the fact that you are guaranteed to pay legal fees, which the poor will always find expensive, to be the greater obstacle to suing? I think the 'English rule' would encourage many poor people to litigate if they believed their case was strong.
EMC shares jump on Oracle buyout speculation
Might be helpful to point out your alarmist statement assumes the scenario you have described. FWIW I've never seen a user:account setup using nested attributes in this way.
It will be available as a PDF, epub, and mobi.

The epub and mobi versions tend to lag about a week behind the PDF because of conversion time, but we push those files out to your account as soon as they're ready. (Assuming you pick the book up from No Starch directly: http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm)
Love that burning man pic man!
We already do spam and malware filtering at both of those levels...how is this different? I'm not saying that seizure alone would be enough to intervene at these levels, but if Libya decided to hijack these links for nefarious purposes, then yeah, I don't have a problem with it.
or, doing it live: chatroulette for jam sessions.
Ah it appears I just suck at reading. Thanks :)
I completely agree with you. Worse, if at some point you actually need a pointer of the object to do arithmetic you end up grabbing a pointer of the reference which just puts everything to hell.
You can't possibly design such a molecule unless you can come up with a way to make it several centimeters long.

One would think that liquid water, which absorbs microwaves, would be a sufficient counterexample to your claim.

I'm assuming that your last sentence is merely snark, or perhaps you didn't finish reading my post in its entirety. If you don't feel that the sentence immediately following the one that I quoted clarifies things, let me know.
There are times that I wished I was a Catholic so I could condemn types like this - and mr. McBride - to hell.

FYI, we're specifically enjoined against doing that. Final disposition of all souls is up to God. (We think we know roughly what he is looking for because He told us a few times and we can reason through the rest, but the list of people for whom final dispositions are known is really short -- off the top of my head, saints, martyrs, and baptized infants who die prior to reaching the age where they can be held morally responsible for sin can be safely declared to be in heaven, and that list is exclusive. Many people are under the misapprehension that suicide is an auto-fail. This is not the case: quoting the Catechism, "We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.")

Returning you now to your regularly scheduled topics of interest to hackers.
> Second, fashion survives without patents because names matter.

Have you heard "nobody got fired for buying from IBM"?

> What incentive is there for a couple guys to build a time machine in their garage when, as soon as they try to mass produce their invention, any number of larger companies better equipped to manufacture things at scale will just make their invention and sell it for less?

How does it change with patents? They produce and patent a prototype. "a large company" starts making their own copy. If the guys sue from their garage, the "large company" sends in their own lobbyists and 1k$/h lawyers - the garage guys lose.
What are Google's Traffic Acquisition Costs?
Their latest earnings release - http://investor.google.com/earnings/2010/Q3_google_earnings.html - shows their Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC) @ $1.81B for the quarter.

What type of traffic is that? Is that the cut they give Adsense partners? Or is that the various deals they cut with a variety of third parties (e.g. Firefox search bar, and desktop manufacturers, etc.)?

Or is there something else I am missing?

I know that startups usually have TACs, which many times consists largely of dollars flowing to Adsense. So just trying to wrap my head around what type of TAC Google could have.

Thoughts?
I realize this is all intended to be in jest, but I really don't think it is appropriate to joke about companies killing people. There's really nothing funny about it (especially because it is an event that could very well happen in real life -- and I'm sure it has, even if no one was caught). Business can be extremely competetive, and not everyone in the game has the same convictions that most people do. I just don't think it is appropriate to joke about -- my two cents.
Man Bites Dog: NY Times Objects to Revenue for its Blogs
"Do you know if this kind of case-specific insurance is available in countries with the loser-pays rule?"

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're suggesting something like a fire insurance that you can buy when your house has already burnt down? If so, no I know of no companies who offer such a thing, and I would be quite surprised if they existed.

This sort of legal cost insurance works the same way as other insurances. The one I took out a few years ago stipulated that it didn't cover any existing disputes, not disputes that would arise in the (I think) 3 first months of the insurance; just like some insurances don't cover existing problems.

This sort of insurance is also not as common as the article makes it appear, and it was even quite rare when the article was written (1995). In 2008, under 50% of Dutch households had a legal assistance insurance of some form (I think this number includes the optional parts of car insurances where you are insured against claims arising from accidents, but I'm not sure on this; I suspect the majority of insurances to be in this area, and thus the amount of insurances against civil cases to be lower). The last 10 years there have been double-digit increases in the amount of people who have such insurances, so it's really something of the last decade.
It might be more appropriate to use the older couples as a baseline and say that young couples pay an abnormally high amount of attention to one another's preferences. Same findings, just a different way of putting it.

The level of attention young couples pay to one another is probably just so high that it's unsustainable and fades with time.
I think this is a risk, but Facebook and Twitter both have very large ecosystems of startups having success on those platforms. (See: Zynga and Twitpic)

The lesson here is more of proper strategic planning. Just because you have access to a firehose doesn't mean you should just start waving it around.
Conventions: excusing language design flaws since 1956.
Assembly instructions from hell
This is the 5th time in 3 days we've been informed of how big Africa really is .... pretty sure we have some idea by now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780004 was the main one.
It's ironic that the USPTO's own site technically violates this patent, unless they've paid the royalties. ;)
http://www.uspto.gov/siteindex.jsp