skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess then I know how to contact you if I need something regarding prgmr :P
This makes me wonder if Apple has a redistributable license for Java that allows them to build the Java binaries with OS X, or if Sun was the one that built the binaries that have been included in OS X install discs, but allowed them to be shipped out under Apple's control. I can't find any Java code on opensource.apple.com, so I'm assuming the latter.

My personal opinion on the issue is one where Apple and/or Oracle decided that Oracle should control the release schedule of their own software, just like they do with every other platform. I really don't understand why this is such a big deal. Apple decided to not do something completely different and adopted a "normal" behavior and everyone freaks out, just like they do when Apple does something different.
Interesting follow up question that I have no particular answer to: If you accept that it is unethical to invest in companies that are behaving in a manner you believe is unethical, is it ethical to short them?
The co-founder of Flipboard Tweets: http://twitter.com/edog1203/status/28446907171#

"Lazy, uncreative and pathetic."

I was pretty shocked by his reaction. I would think that other people copying a new paradigm his company created would be a complement. At least, that's how I would take it.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Yeah, I hope they don't really put a lot of emphasis on it. I submitted my application about an hour before the deadline and couldn't really think of anything at the time. But later I thought of a bunch of better things I could've put down.
>Over time, the shape of your nest egg would resemble a bell curve, growing in the early years, and then declining as inflation required you to withdraw more money to maintain a lifestyle equivalent to $300,000 in 2010. The $12 million would finally dwindle to $934 when you turned 100.

My bank is offering savings accounts that pay, like, .01% these days, so it's not so much a bell curve as just the right half of a bell curve. You can get a bit more interest from investments, but your risk goes up too. It would suck to be 50 after 15 years of not working and find you don't have any money. Would you even remember how to tie a tie?

Anyway, the big wild card is health care. Nobody will insure you as an individual if you have a health problem, and the bills you can rack up at the hospital are almost open-ended. I went in for just a couple days last year and they billed my insurance $26k.

It's not at all clear to me the changes the Democrats made last year will survive the next. I'd want at least 4-5 million in the bank just to feel secure on medical.
Because the current model makes them more money? If you can't sell your eBook to your neighbor then your neighbor will (probably) buy it for full eBook price. Boom two sales.

(Hey I don't believe it'll work, it's only what I think the publisher execs are thinking.)
Personally, I find no use in people with just ideas. Not even if they have drafted their site down to the T.

This is because I'm at an advantage. I can easily learn and do whatever it is they know and do. Things such as marketing, refining the UI, feature ideas, user interaction, etc. These are things that are MUCH easier to do and learn than programming.

I would not start a company with anyone who wasn't an EXCEPTIONAL programmer. No, a weekend programmer will not do. Honestly, you'd have either provide funds, or something of extremely high value for you to receive equal ownership of any company I spend my valuable time and work on.

The only time I would recommend you spend your time learning how to program is if your roadmap includes hiring programmers better than you to improve or redo the code. You'd have to build the prototype yourself, get funds, hire good programmers and take off from there.

Other than that, I wouldn't automatically join your project, even with a prototype.
The MS-DOS Security Model
I agree with patio11 but with a caveat: lending, in the way it is to be implemented on the Kindle, and is already implemented on the Nook, is a feature demanded by pirates more than customers.

Why? Because books can only be lent once. Ever.

This makes the feature almost useless for legitimate consumers, but for non-DRMed files (on the Nook anyways) the lending feature is non-crippled, and (rightly) can occur as many times as the user pleases.

Personally I think it's a load of crap that the lending feature is crippled in such a way, but the fact of the matter is, the only people happy with the existing way lending works are the people who aren't encumbered by it - i.e., the people who never actually deal in purchased/DRMed ebook material.
Same goes for TornadoSocketIO though, so this isn't unique to node.js.
I'll always take functionality over design. I don't care how many rounded corners a notification has, but I do care about it not demanding my immediate attention, and waiting in line like everything else.

If apple designed the most beautiful volume control menu that you've ever seen, would you give it up for hardware volume buttons?
Hey man! I met you guys at Seedcamp in Zagreb... Glad to hear you're doing good!
Cambridge apparently has quite a good culture. There are a couple of groups which run events/weekly lectures/brainstorming things:

http://cue.org.uk/
http://www.cutec.org/

In particular, Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge is being held in a month and should be quite large:

http://www.svc2c.com/

I went to the cutec recruitment event and according to some metric the area is ranked third best in the world.
I'm sure if you ask Jessica why she wrote founders at work, it was more about sharing knowledge than making money.
Beyond websockets, I've found that SocketTornado.IO works great out of the box and supports multiple transports with ease.

http://github.com/SocketTornadIO/SocketTornad.IO
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not at all about money or that she could have even feasibly done it if she didn't get paid at all.

For many people, while writing may not be their only job, they still need that part of their income.
There is one situation when you can ethically invest in an unethical company - to use your investor power to change their behavior.

Most probably that's not easy unless you happen to have a couple billions lying around (or a particularly undervalued unethical company at hand).
Hacking the iPhone App Store's Ranking Algorithm
I'd love to see this broken down by major, GPA, toughness-of-curriculum and prestige-of-university. Assuming the claim isn't extrapolated from a single janitor.

Not all degrees are equal.
If you don't trust the FSF, then try the EFF:

http://www.eff.org/issues/coica-internet-censorship-and-copy...
I actually grew up in a small town that was built around a factory that made one of the featured products. When the factory closed, unemployment was really high, and a lot of people were upset. I see the same sort of response from IT folks to IT outsourcing too.

I have to wonder though: when a company is getting big and globalizing (and it seems to make sense that a company with an iconic product would be big or getting big), is it really that unexpected that they would move operations? I understand the patriotism behind "Buying American", but when the company has facilities and does business across the globe, it's bigger than America.
> "I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail"

I dislike this argument - it assumes that products ought to be priced according to their cost of production, which is patently false in reality. The price of a product is whatever the market will bear.

Does this means MP3s aren't overpriced? Nope. The monopolistic cartel-like behavior of the labels does seem to prevent the market from reaching a natural equilibrium price for music; that being said, the notion that digital things should be almost-free because they're almost-free to produce IMHO is BS.

> "$9.00+ for digital DRMed media is a total ripoff."

None of the major digital music stores have been DRMed for a long time. Both iTunes and Amazon MP3 are DRM free, and in fact the only real place you'll find DRM on music these days is the Zune Store - but that's more because you're on a all-you-can-listen subscription plan, there's no confusion about whether or not you own your files.
Tell HN: My tonight's project - Instapaper - Kindle importer
Instapaper is a cool bookmarking service. Kindle is an awesome reading device. But I was frustrated, that instapaper can't deliver articles to kindle via @free.kindle.com email address.

So I did what every hacker would do - hacked together a small script to get articles from instapaper and send them to kindle via email.

I hope somebody will find it useful.

http://github.com/mantas/instapaper-kindle
That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of interesting problems to be solved out there offering the use of better tools than PHP.
Shooting at Linux - Olympic airgun target systems
If you can find a copy of Murray Kempton's _Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events_, there is an essay "The Confusions of Conscience" about just this. (I mention this mainly because the book is well worth having--the man had a way with a sentence.)
In my opinion, an advantage of Unicorn over HAProxy is that it doesn't require another moving part in your deployment.
I figure I might not be the only one slightly confused by the different names and what each does: PadPressed is the WordPress plugin that makes any WordPress blog into something that looks good for the iPad (including homescreen icon, fullscreen and splashscreen on launch), using Apple's special meta parameters for the "original" web-apps.

CoverPad is a new feature of said product that adds the Flipboard-like page flipping and layout.

Neither is a native iOS app.
As someone who has spent three years working with kids who grow up in economically disadvantaged situations, I have to say that it takes more than parental encouragement and talent to be able to qualify and successfully complete a high level academic degree. There are so many obstacles for kids growing up in economically depressed areas. Anyone who survives the environment of growing up very very poor is ten times more valuable as a member of society over someone who was "legacied" into a university.

When people like the Obamas or any of the other successful people who grew up in disadvantaged situations actually make it, they inspire many more people who are currently struggling to keep fighting until they accomplish their dreams.

A big motivator for me to get off my couch and chase my dream was because of my experiences working with these kids. Many of them are so talented and work so hard in spite of the difficulties they face. It made me realize that I had no excuse to just sit by and watch somebody else build my idea.
Don't tell me you're learning C first? Good luck!
Minor nit: I could be reading this wrong, but you seem to be using an a definition of 'moral hazard' which is backwards to the usual one.
definitely... in the middle of a large rewrite to address server side things as well as front facing speed/usability issues.

after the dust settles and we get the fridge humming we should be able to have some meaningful data...

not sure the fridge is "another" social network but rather clusters of networks where people follow interests rather than other people... eh, semantics i guess but feeds into how we are growing the product.
So what you do for a living is provide (consulting? programming?) services related to open-source software, not write free software.
Larry Ellison worrying about people not liking him? I have the impression he revels in it.
They could fairly easily add a 'take back' feature for those cases where you've lent a book to a deadbeat who can't be bothered to dig it out of his digital bookshelf and explain why there are virtual coffee stains on the pages.
Razorfish's site background is a low-res, live, web-cam feed
The true scarcity is the clever/creative author, which was previously monetized by selling less scarce physical artifacts of the author's work. This doesn't decrease the value of the author, however they are stuck finding another way to capitalize on their ability.

Software did it by putting software behind services, not allowing copies to be distributed to the end users. Perhaps authors can figure out something analogous.
> I'm just thinking that even in the worst case scenario if the
> bill is passed it shouldn't be completely crippling.

True, but that's also justification in some people's minds for taking no action. "Someone else will take action to prevent it, but if they don't then I'll be able to work around it."
If your library is anything like mine, supporting it would mean that Amazon would have to add support for Adobe's "Digital Editions" DRM scheme- which strikes me as somewhat unlikely, unfortunately (and by "somewhat unlikely", I mean that I'll be able to write a Duke Nukem' Forever review using TextMate 2 long before the Kindle supports ADE).

This was actually a (small) part of my thinking when I was trying to decide whether and which eBook reader to get. I ended up going with one of the new Sony models, in part because I knew it would work with my library's eBook system.

For whatever it's worth, though, breaking Adobe's DRM is trivial, as is converting the resulting unencrypted ePub file to a MOBI file, which, if I'm not mistaken, can be read on a Kindle. Your personal legal or moral mileage may vary, but from a technical standpoint it's pretty easy.
Now all that living without working stuff is not quite right, i think. What if you don't work at all. Sure you can work not, and be non productive. But what does that mean for your life?

I want to work and i want to learn constanly. I don't want to be rich. If i would be i don't want to life on the money by myself. I just want to life and money is by far not everything.

What the hell is wrong with the persons that brand their lifes to "getting rich is everything"? I think that is actually what anoys me most with startup culture today. Its all about success, high exits, getting rich. Make as much money as you can in a short time.

But what for? What did you really gain from that? A burnout? A million? A few millions? And then you probably end like a austrian millionare and donate all your richness, before you really retire, just to life again and don't have to worry about all that richness.
I also run http://www.startupshiring.com which scrapes jobs directly from startup job pages (not job boards).
I'm not sure that there is much of a difference in an "open source" startup vs. any other type of startup venture. The same market forces apply.

In the case of MySQL and JBoss, they have a free (beer and speech) offering that met a huge need in the developer community, which got them their necessary ubiquity. Once they had market share, they could start charging for services and other things (didn't JBoss charge at one point for documentation?, I forget)

Redhat is interesting in that in my opinion, they just showed the power of business development. Customers like their software to be "guaranteed to work on X", and software vendors like to keep X to a small number to reduce testing cycles. If you look around at large software vendors that "certify" their product on Linux, it's almost always on Redhat enterprise linux. This is a business relationship, not a technical one. Redhat builds a rigorous release process and helps companies certify, sure, but anybody could do that. They had the vision to build relationships where they could pay off.

I'd argue that Github is an open source startup. They use, advocate, host and inspire the open source community across every language and platform. They also happen to be very successful. Tom's recent post on "Optimize for Happiness" is a fantastic read, and would be something I'd read over and over again if I were to start up a company anytime soon: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...
As a Canadian (though currently living in the US), that last sentence is both astonishing and scary.
activeCOLLAB. Open source alternative to Basecamp. I'm certain that they're doing well over a million dollars a year now.

In a presentation, the CEO of activeCOLLAB(Ilija Studen) mentioned that they were pulling in 50k Euros a month, this was back in 2007 *

----

* Video Lectures.net(unfortunately it's on Croatian): http://videolectures.net/webstart08_studen_sks/
> I've heard this manifesto used many times to defend behavior that is just as wrong.

I am not sure it applies here.
Are there any people in the world that want headlines to be alerts? And not even very important headlines.
"Popular digital books and MP3 albums could cost $2 and still be profitable..."

Reproduction is a very small part of the cost of a book or album, as a share of the per-item price.
> I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount?

This isn't exactly true. Most of the 'overhead' of a CD isn't physical production, it's record labels. They give a band a lump of money to sign on, and then they bill the band at every opportunity. They charge you to use a recording studio, they charge you to hire a producer to make it sound the way they want, they charge you to hire an artist to do your covert art, they charge you to do the music video, etc. Once it's all done, they handle all the distribution as well, which has become relatively cheap thanks to economies of scale.

This is the same reason studios have always been against digital distribution. Once people realize how easy things can be, they'll realize that they, as an institution, are far less valuable. You don't need to get airplay on the radio if you can preview every song in an album, lend music to your friends wirelessly, etc.

The price of digital goods won't come down until we eliminate the actual overhead - the profiteering middlemen.
Eastern european here. I graduated from high school two years ago. Ditched university for going after my dreams. Now I'm working on my startup and may launch another (seed-funded?) startup soon.

Silicon Valley is not a place. It's state of mind.

Of course, some things are easier in US/SV. But my burn rate is 5x smaller than in Silicon Valley...

If you really want to do a startup and have an idea for it - just do it. Wrong place is just an excuse.

>while being an eastern europe citizen and a non-technician, how to start a career in the startup world?

Launch your own startup!
Speaking tours and the like make money if you're an established author, and it's about as likely as it is for your garage band to make millions on tour. Sure, it happens, but it's hardly a good career for the other 99.999% of folks who yearn to do that.
Nice. I haven't heard of them, too bad they don't get more press, sound like a promising company! Unfortunately, I don't speak Croatian...
It's bigger than America, but it's also America that suffers when process outsourcing puts thousands out of work.
AWS infomercial of the most boring kind - not a single figure in the entire thing.

I'm starting to suspect big customers get a discount in exchange for adding their name on the dotted line of these PR Lorem Ipsum's.
How Google TV Could Hand Netflix the entire streaming universe
I can supply you with the current conditions, daily forecast, hourly forecast, and severe alerts (US only) for nearly any city in the world for $0.02 per API call. I have access to more weather stations than any single source in the world. I can return the data to you using the conversion and format of your preference. If interested, you can find my email in my profile.
I can't help but be sympathetic to local businesses though - lack of sales tax probably pushes a lot of their former customers towards online shopping; and to be fair, it is an unfair playing field (after all, the brick and mortars can't very well stop charging sales tax).

I for one order all of my expensive hardware from out of state...
Just as a counterpoint, risking godwining this topic:

What would you think if we were in mid-1944 and these documents detailed the operations of Nazi Germany and listed several people who helped German occupation forces?

The morality of this war is at the core of this discussion. If you feel this war is immoral, then those who helped occupation forces to commit war crimes deserve no sympathy.

If, however, you feel the US liberated Iraq from a bloody dictator and the people who help US troops to combat insurgents while risking their lives are heroes, you will have a completely different take on this.

The truth, probably, lies somewhere in the middle. We may or may not find out.
Every failed Google search means fewer ads served and advertisers charged

No, I just hit refresh a couple times or try again later. Same number of (successful) pageviews, same number of ad impressions.

every item a user can’t add to their shopping cart means fewer items sold

No, I try again later. Just like I do if something is out-of-stock.

every unprocessed credit charge risks a regulatory fine

So what just happened to that 24 hour window you mentioned for banking transactions?

The choice of availability over consistency is a business choice, not a technical one.

Right. Because it's safer for Citibank to approve a transaction that they shouldn't, than for them to process it five minutes late.

Given this economic context, it becomes clear why most practitioners at any interesting scale meet their business needs using highly-available, eventually consistent systems.

I thought it was because consistency usually costs a bit of performance, and at "interesting scale" that translates into significant hardware costs. Plus of course "interesting scale" apparently comes with "rockstar programmers", who prefer eventual consistency because it's a fun exercise in minimalism.
As long as there is more than one lawyer on the planet it won't be that simple.

Amazon has fulfillment centers in Texas and a subsidiary as well. This may be sufficient to trigger Texas' state sales tax laws.
Amazon could always come up with their own system for libraries to lend kindle books.

Which would probably make a lot of sense at this point, given all the free reader apps they provide on various devices.

Hell, the system could be pretty sweet. Look up a book at Amazon, and Amazon could determine your local library system based on your address, check the ebook 'inventory' of that library, and if a copy is available, offer a library loan as an option. You wouldn't even have to go to the library website.
puts 'What do you need to build your startup?'
reply = gets.chomp
while reply == 'a technical co-founder'
puts 'learn to code yourself, bitch'
end

That's kinda what I was hearing lurking around HN for the past 6 months. I've never written a line of code in my life but 3 weeks ago I stopped looking aimlessly for someone with skills, and I'm back to the drawing board learning Ruby. Of course, I'll almost surely still need a technical co-founder in 6-10 months. But I'll be in a better position to see if he's good and I'll understand what he's doing. Also, I'm meeting lots of programmers this way. If all I get out of these 2/3h per day is a great co-founder, it'll be very well worth it.

As a noob, I find the stuff suggested on the post a tad intimidating. It was good for me that my first contact with ruby was the very soft http://tryruby.org/ and the second one was Chris Pine's book http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=00
It'd be nice if the video player let me skip to a different place in the video. I accidentally closed my browser after watching for 14 minutes and had no way to go back to where I was at... I guess I won't be watching the rest of that...
Depends. If you scale out to multiple servers then you will need an extra reverse proxy in your architecture.