skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of my written work was once pirated by a coporation.

In 1984, when I was 13, I wrote an article on revising the AD&D combat tables, sent it in to Dragon magazine, and it was published the following year. Before it hit print, I was given a contract to read and sign. The contract specified that I was selling "first serial rights" only, and retained all rights for republishing, putting in anthologies, etc.

I signed the contract, and got a $100 check.

20 years later, Dragon released a CD-ROM compendium of all content. My article was included, without my permission.

This was not "initial" serial rights - this was a republishing.

I sent an email saying "you owe me additional payment".

They wrote back saying "no".

I filled out a small claims court form in MA, submitted it along with a $40 processing fee, and waited.

A few weeks later I was given a court date.

I showed up. The Hasbro magazine rep (Dragon was published by TSR, which had been acquired by Wizards of the Coast, which had been acquired by Hasbro) did not show.

I won the case by default.

The court mailed the judgement to Hasbro.

A month later Hasbro mailed me a check for $2,000, in accordance with the judgement.
May I ask what ISP and speed your parents have? I'm also abroad and while I could set a proxy up their house I'm worried that it would use up all the upload bandwidth. They are on DSL 800kbit/7Mbit up/down
GoDaddy. Come on.

I agree on Amazon, they do their upsells in a great way that isn't distracting. They don't say "Hey, fuck you, user, can't complete the transaction until you consider this offer!"

By and large, though, don't split hairs with me, how many people are doing upsells right?

edit: Bidet complexity is significant, but the benefit is that your asshole is clean and fresh without needing a shower. Which is extraordinary, but obviously only for power users. But that's a different UX kettle of fish.
I love the idea of an overseas subscription. It seems like living in another country makes it depressingly difficult to buy content from your home region (DVD regions, game regions, iTunes/Amazon/etc. are regionalised as well).
I came here to post this, there's nothing more to say. This is all very sad.
I was working on a game in my spare time, with an eye to eventually release it on XBLIG if I ever finished. This and a number of other niggling things, such as this (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/10/12/xna-game...), have prompted me to basically drop the project and switch over to making a Mac/PC/Linux game instead, focusing on Mac first.
Ask HN: I accidentally unlinked my clickpass login with my google account. Help
So I created an account at least 6 months ago using clickpass which then used my gmail account. I was snooping around gmail several months later to find that "some service" called Clickpass was authorized to use my gmail credentials. At the time I couldnt find out what website it was actually linking to. So, I unlinked it not realizing it was used for HN..doh!

I tried to link up a new account with the same name
- Using same name -> Says name already taken
- Using new name -> Asks for password...never had one due to Clickpass! Even if I try I get an error that says "Unknown"

Please help to relink my clickpass account! Thanks!
And that is properly why we have a standard of living today that is so high as it is.
Thanks, I wanted to know that! I thought I recognised the tune from a piece of dance music—I think it's the tune in Resurrection by PPK, who covered it according to wikipedia.
"Opt out over here! I'm not going through the strip search!"
The Business of Botnets
I am a 15-year veteran of PHP and am still using it to build apps. Why? Because I have 15 years' of experience, and nothing surprises me anymore. I can fix nearly any bug in a very short time. Also, it's fast, mature, proven, and rock-solid, and I don't spend much time worrying about the surrounding infrastructure.

I haven't switched to Ruby personally yet because I am too busy to worry about having to spend hours/days dealing with issues that are new to me. OTOH I am allowing developers on my team to found new projects in Ruby since they already know the stack and I certainly have no aversion to learning new things.

PHP isn't a great language for applying the latest metaprogramming techniques and other modern patterns that make life easier. Although PHP 5.3 makes that much better with the addition of lambda, it's still tough to do certain types of patterns or write easily testable code in some circumstances. Mixins are also still a bit tricky since there's no language built-in for doing them.

However, some of the RFC's on grafts and traits are very promising in this regard, and frankly I think these patterns are better than doing the same in metaprogramming b/c the compiler can help you instead of delaying all errors to runtime.

In any case, if you don't already have lots of PHP experience I would recommend choosing a different language to build your knowledge base on. Ruby, python, clojure, javascript any of the other "hot" languages of today that attract lots of attention and offer a clear path in the future built on a solid foundation.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the types of users here on HN. My suspicion is that this place has far fewer founders (or people who will make the jump to becoming a founder) than it does just plain old smart people looking for intelligent discussion.

Someone in this community has done what I'm asking about, guaranteed.
Thank you for your tip. You are right my comment has to many paragraphs in it and they are often misplaced.
I will try to improve that.
"Otherwise, they will use your code and report 1) that your code does not work or that 2) their code is better because they did not use your code well."

This x 1000! This is a topic near to my heart as I've actually had people use models & software we provided to them, not making an effort to understand fundamental concepts and theory behind it (or just being incapable of understanding) and then publish papers saying our models are crap! (not even providing better ways, nor comparing to anything else, just saying 'I put in some data and the results were unrealistic, this model is bad).
In moderation. Some people consume more calories than they burn by chugging sports drinks during a workout.
We moved from CVS to Git over the summer. It was a pretty easy transition (we only have seven employees) though it took some explaining about the local-vs-remote copies.

The founders originally wanted to upgrade from CVS to SVN. I pointed-out that not only would they have transactional commits in Git, but that they could recover from anyone's copy of the repository, since everyone has a local clone. That, plus the first check-in (which ran blazingly fast) ended the argument.
Agree with everything said there. The question left unanswered is where to draw the fine line between focusing on a predefined strategy and react to what your competitors are doing. Example: today Facebook announced Deals, should Foursquare just keep doing what it is doing or do something different to counter Facebook's invasion?

(I personally believe Foursquare should just keep doing what they are doing but let's discuss this anyway)
That doesn't make it any less nifty to see.
Happy Kinect launch day
Dells buys out Boomi
I think we sold about 50 or 100. It was sold in one store and I recall getting a check from them, but they kept the lions share of course.
Everything they can to prevent raw data being available, up to and including posting it freely on their own websites:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
Apple confirms MacBook Air bugs internally
Note that I am not claiming that "The set of all UX professionals who are also experts is non-empty," just that if someone is an expert, then certain things apply. So you may not need to apologise :-)
SponsorPay Facebook Adds "Unlike Page" Button to Page Stories
Hopefully it will help reduce spam in the news feeds !
Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.

I would also say that having a poor User Interface and poor User Experience is doubly bad for business.

I'm reminded of the recent article posted here to HN about Expedia removing a single field from their checkout form that resulted in $12MM to the bottom line.

Better UI + Better UX = Better Business
Russian-Armenian botnet suspect raked in €100,000 a month
Lost Book Sales
I worked on mostly console of the years, but you'll find my name on Spec-Ops and Majesty for the PC. I went from a programmer to producer in 1990ish.
And yet iPhone gaming is flourishing because developers discovered what the device is fantastic for: tower defense, puzzle games, Scrabble, 2D platforming, on and on. Games and genres that would be throwaways on a burly console like the PS3 are perfect on the iPhone.

Those games would be popular on any mobile platform. The iPhone is flourishing because it's the easiest way for developers to make money, not because the accelerometer is making gaming any fancier.
Orange runs out of Windows Phone 7 mobiles for pre-order
The only way that UX can be globally optimal is if all users share the same goals, the same skills and understanding, the same capabilities (browser caps, etc.).

In the real world, where people have at least slightly different goals, are more or less sophisticated, and sometimes use IE6, compromises -- sometimes deep ones -- must be made.

For example, on our ecommerce site, we've got at least two very different user personas. One is what you might think is typical -- an end-user who browses, trying to figure out what to buy. The other is a purchasing manager, simply working his way down a purchase order. In many parts of the process these two people have very different needs. Obviously we want to try to cater to both of them, but multiplying the options in itself has effect on the UX.
Here's the article -
Expedia on how one extra data field can cost $12m (silicon.com) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859871
Speaking as someone who's been sucked into that hole: It's very cozy in there and very difficult to get out.

Just remember, you can spend a lifetime finding the optimal path, but you can only make a step now.
Ten Ways to Differentiate Your Customer Service
> It's a simple matter of incentives.

Incentives are difficult to get right.
Sharp to Launch Two 3D Android Handsets
I know OP meant well, but I hated this. I hate the beads. I hate the jars. I hate the thinking behind all of this.

For the record, I'm almost as old as OP and this is all the opposite of how I think. I cherish every day. I can't wait to get to work. And to play. And to eat good food, drink good beer, and hang out with good friends and family. Yesterday, I jogged through the woods, emailed 15 friends, had cake and ice cream with my mother, hung out on hacker news, and wrote some really cool code. Today will probably be even better.

Moving a bead from one jar to the other is not only depressing, it's sick. Throw out those jars, OP, and get on doing what you love.

I don't care how old I am or how old anyone else is. I don't even want to think about my death, I just want to keep on living my life.

I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather did, not screaming and yelling like everyone else in the car.
Sadly, when trying to get on a console as an Indie developer, this is far better then Sony's or Nintendo's options.

I'm almost thinking a new business venture would be to be a middle man between best of breed indie games and platforms with high barrier's to entry, but I guess this is called a "publisher"
"Mostly you only concern about the criticism from within scientific community"

Ha. That doesn't apply to climate scientists. And there was the case of Andy Schlafly of Conservapedia (a creationist lawyer) demanding all sorts of nonsense from a scientist who documented evolution through many, many generations of bacteria.

At its worst, you get ideological cranks ganging up and demanding information, possibly through FOIA requests, pretty much for the sole purpose of using up all the scientist's time responding. Then when they don't respond, and/or it turns out they aren't subject to FOIA requests, the cranks freak out, break into a server, steal emails, and declare a conspiracy.
Wouldn't Google's UX be better if there were no ads? In the short term, maybe. In the long term, it would kill the company, so there wouldn't be any UX at all.
Ask HN: How many people know the "secret sauce" of the Google search algorithm?
A friend asked me this the other day and I have been unable to come up with a reasonable answer. It's curious that it hasn't come up on HN, at least recently, so feel free to enlighten me.
Shocking: Did the W3C Sell Out to Microsoft?
Mark Zuckerberg: The iPad Isn’t Mobile
Latest Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant
I am not talking about beliefs there. The main point why discussion about the need of change started is this:

> "To me the fundamental problem was that when the error
> was found it was handled in a totally and utterly
> atrocious manner<…>".

IPCC is a political organization, not scientific.
WordPress Celebrates 1 Million Mobile Users
Expressive C++: Fun With Function Composition
Conservative is probably the better way to characterise referendum results, because conservatives are generally better at mobilising themselves to vote.
I doubt Apple should spend any significant fraction of $51 billion on the next CEO. That kind of money won't attract many people with something to prove.

Purchasing a media catalog would make sense given their increasing use of access to content as a major way of differentiating their products and Steve Jobs history in the media industry.

Edit: They could always pay a dividend.
Awesome. Sadly, this person is getting advice to "lawyer up" when it's really unnecessary to even get a lawyer involved. In these types of cases lawyers would just complicate things.
Come on, nobody? Ok I'll do it...
"In Soviet Russia, image edits you!"
Reasons why you should switch to Vim for Django development.
I'd find a bidet confusing and awkward.

Seriously, can anyone tell me what is the correct way to use a bidet? Do you sit facing the wall, so you can control the temperature and volume of water? Or do your try to adjust all that first, and then sit facing out as with a toilet?
yeah... until we have VR helmets... no gamers care about motion controlled shooters. i doubt that shooter in the move commercials is any good; much like the wii shooters. some people may say the metroids were nice but my impression was meh.... back to tf2.
This Brave New World is More of the Same
Anonymous DDoS Attacks Crash U.S. Copyright Office Website
It's also interesting to think about how to use social networks/networking if you're the owner of a store or service that people may not want to promote across all of the networks.

eg: Debbie probably wouldn't have any trouble recommending a new burger joint she found (except if she was telling everyone she was on a diet, perhaps). But now that Debbie has realised her contributions to social networks leak out further than her intended audience, it's going to be really really hard to convince her to 'Like' that gay bar were her friends work.

As someone involved with a few different 'gay bars' (ie, services people like using, but in a lot of cases don't want all(/any!) of their friends/family to know about) it's an interesting problem... And I have no idea what the solution is.
ANC Youth League vows to trace 'white Twitter reactionaries'
"And the only reason it's coming out is because some people -- for whatever reason -- have a bug in their shorts about climate science"

On the other hand, scientists have spent decades fully aware that they'll have to build their own labs, obtain their own equipment, get their own animals if the work requires them, and follow the described procedures.

They can't use the other guy's mice or zebrafish or monkey. They probably can't use the other guy's lab. They might be able to use the same telescope for astronomy, but it's better to use a different telescope to control for some fluke of the original.

So given all that, it hardly seems a huge deal to not be able to use someone else's code, as long as you know what the code was supposed to be doing.
Oracle Submits Cloud Management APIs to Standards Organization
I am seriously tempted to find some metal tape for the next time I have to fly, "mark up" my t-shirt with a suggestion as to where the TSA can shove their body-scan machine, and walk through side-ways.
That's incorrect, just check libdrizzle.
Convergence of scientific results could be validation of the theory. But it could also be because people are anxious to publish contradictory results.

From Richard Feynman's1974 CalTech Commencement:

"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis"
If it could all be written down and specified in detail, running businesses could be outsourced to India or Vietnam or somewhere cheap.

My sneaking suspicion is that for many bits of cheap, generic business advice, there is some equal and opposite bit of advice.

Edit: anyone remember this one from last week?

http://steveblank.com/2010/11/01/no-business-plan-survives-f...
Just points to this Slate article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868782
latent semantic analysis? Stat friend told me this...
Facebook’s Android App Sucked Because “Obnoxious” Google Bought The Developer
> GoDaddy. Come on.

I don't use GoDaddy. I wouldn't know. Why bring them up? As evidence that upsales can be done poorly? I never contested that. You did say that upsales are annoying complexity, obstacles to a purchase.

> By and large, though, don't split hairs with me, how many people are doing upsells right?

Most every place I frequent does upsales well, whether offline or online. I find good upsales a reason to frequent.

People doing upsales right? Apple. Amazon. Ebay (considering your not just buying something, but customising a service). DomainSite, the company I purchase my domains from, does the upsales easily without impeding the checkout process. Choose domain => shopping cart => checkout => Payment info. Along the way, options are provided, but nothing that gets in the way. Also, just now checking, those steps all fall in the same visual area on the page, so you're eyes are already where it needs to be for the next step. Not sure if that's intentional or not.

Regardless, upsales aren't bad. Bad design is still bad, however, one has nothing to do with the other.
no, you're confusing UI and UX... without ads, the user interface might be better (less ads, less clutter, etc) however, it could be argued that without the ads the user EXPERIENCE would not be as good... as very often ads are highly relevant to what the user is searching for on google and are therefore of value to the user.
Where are you finding out about all the events in the DC area? I just moved back here after 8 years and feel like I know nothing about what's going on locally. I am signed up for DC Startup Digest, any other suggestions?
It's odd to me that you wouldn't have browsed wikipedia or come across a better explanation of global warming than "here are some graphs"
> this is far better then Sony's or Nintendo's options

Hell, Nintendo is practically hostile towards indie developers. But this just goes to show, without competition MS will only treat customers/partners as good as the bare minimum they have to, and no more.
I mitigate this by doing my main browsing in Firefox but always doing Facebook in Chrome, in Incognito mode. No cookie cross-pollination.
How is that necessarily a charitable supposition? If a scientist believes in his or her research, it would be positively inhuman of them NOT to advocate for the application of it.
>Oh, and there isn't a single good pizza place in a 30-mile radius of the city.

Have you tried z-pizza or Lost Dog Cafe? If not, give them a try. Lost Dog has a fabulous beer selection as well.
"I was sickened at the negative focus of broadcast news. Each and every morning hundreds of millions of Americans are watching and listening to these messages...."

Each time I see things like this, I can't believe people don't seem to see the irony. People now do this with twitter, reddit, facebook etc. Even Hacker news has its fair share of gossipy rumour "Mike doesn't like Jason any more!". It's even worse than TV. We're turning society into school kid gossip mill mob rule idiots.

It's like the people who laugh and mock people who get most of their news from Fox news, and then get most of their own news from Reddit and the daily show.

Whilst the internet has replaced TV for a lot of society, is that actually a good thing? Is the internet really that much better for society than TV? I'd argue that on balance, no it's not. You get hyperbole stories everywhere. A large amount of Reddit type websites etc is "You should be outraged by this!!! (Until tomorrow by which time you'll have forgotten)".

The argument about TV will vary massively with where you live though. I'm in the UK, and would happily pay the BBC a far higher license fee, simply because the quality of programing they put out is fantastic. They even employ real journalists who investigate, ask tough questions and provide balanced information. (We do not have any of that sermonistic preaching that seems to happen all too often in the US which personally creeps me out)
My father told me to be really smart. When I was a child I read volumes and volumes of histories of the united states, children's encyclopedias, regular encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc, etc. At some point the reading has to end. The learning has to end. You have to do it.

Also, smarts don't matter. You can be the smartest person in the world, but until you do it. It doesn't matter, because you're just like the kid who hasn't read it all. Stop being a theorist and start being the guy in the arena[1].

[1] http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html
I've been using BNPP (*BSD, nginx, PostgreSQL, Python) for a while now, works like a charm :)
Baltimore Washington Intl. airport and
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport both recently got body scanners. They both changed their process to close all lanes not equipped with a body-scanner and funnel everyone through the one or two scanners they had.

At BWI they would make every 15th or so person go through the scanner, or anyone who volunteered by walking up to it instead of the metal detector.

At Atlanta the scanners weren't even operational yet and they still only opened the metal detectors with scanners beside them and had an army of TSA screeners standing around doing nothing while a huge crowd of travelers waited in a very long line.

The processes have indeed changed.