skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool idea and I agree that the site looks awesome.

Something sort of annoying though: If I sign up for a free plan, I don't think it should automatically redirect me to PayPal to try to get me to upgrade. I think having it redirect to the account page is a bit more graceful.

Cool work! I can definitely see myself upgrading to a paid plan at one point.
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For lawyers: If you don't have the contacts for referrals, contact your local bar association, and they'll either help you find one or get you in touch with someone who can.

As for interviewing a lawyer: Interviews tell you diddly squat about a lawyer's legal skills. All you will learn is how well they interview.

Avoid lawyers who use "I" a lot; this indicates they don't work well in teams or collaborate well with clients. Avoid lawyers with corner offices (unless you have VC funding), b/c you'll just be a small fry to them; your work will be assigned to an associate.

Any lawyer can review web/software projects, but you may want to look for a lawyer with an IP or programming background. The legal advice won't change, but the dude will have a better understanding of how to structure his advice to minimize the changes you need to make.

Any lawyer can review a privacy policy/TOS. Unless it's one of your selling points, you don't need to pay a premium for a lawyer who has experience with this.
The conversation in space is going to be much different when private enterprises get their rockets (and laser canons) up there more efficiently than 99% of soverign nations. The 97 other countries without a space program could kiss my ass with their feelings about my claim of lunar rock.

Im partly being facetious but serious all at once. This is going to become a major issue in the coming decades.
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What are the advantages of this over something like the GNU Autotools? In particular over Automake which seems to handle a lot of what this does?

Don't mean to criticize, just curious. :)
The Durbin Amendment only applies to banks with >$10bn balance sheets.

I don't have the latest numbers, but in '08, the large banks were making closer to 45/55, not 80/20.
First Ever Successful DMCA Conviction for Unlocking Cell Phones
C#'s `var` too weaksauce?
Wouldn't comment moderation be a simple way to avoid this?

Although I can understand that for larger sites that is not feasible - but for personal blogs, avoiding the $109 would be nice...
WikiLeaks Founder Added To The Interpol Wanted List
Also, I like your idea of product vs. store. That's a delicate balance that we're working on right now. At this point, I think the product perspective makes more sense, so we'll see what we can do to make it more product-centric. Thanks!
You'd think, but in an online forum it doesn't work that way.

For an example of this, see below for my intentionally contentious comment "questions aren't a contribution". It evoked some high voted comments, and yet the comment itself has been down-voted as having "no value".

The irony of this is that it kind of proves my contention in the first place. The value of a comment is more about the response it generates than the comment itself. As you say, an ignorant student may start a worthwhile discussion, but it doesn't make the student (or their question) any less ignorant.

My comment was rightfully down-voted for not contributing value to the discussion, even though the comments that stemmed from it do. The OP contends that if a question generates a vigorous discussion, then it must have it's own intrinsic value....which clearly is not the case. If it did, my worthless comment would have the sum value of it's child comments and therefore be the top rated comment of the thread. Quite the paradox.

Every comment is (and should be) treated on its merits. A question with interesting answers doesn't mean the question itself was interesting or worthy of praise. "Why is the sky blue?", "Why do stars sparkle?", "What makes a rainbow" are all pretty dull kiddy questions, but they all have interesting answers.
Thanks!

Oh, that's a bug then, it shouldn't be redirecting you unless you click a paid plan. Did you click a paid plan and then go back and click free? Will look into it.

Glad you like the concept and can see the value, hope you enjoy using it :)
I think the general site layout is good overall format, but the design could use a lot more polish.

I would suggest maybe a subtle texture for the background, a tighter color scheme (see http://colorschemedesigner.com/) and sexier typography.

From an e-commerce perspective, I might suggest you put your main product more prominently on the front page with and add to cart button or view more button, instead of the slider.

also, the area below the slider is a bit cramped in my opinion.
The Future Search Engine
That actually is fairly similar to a webapp I built in 30 minutes a few months ago. I had the idea to build a webform that lets you type in some text, and the computer reads it back.

If you are using OS X, you should be able to use the `say` command to create a recording of a voice speaking a sentence. You could likely take that, pipe it into a file and serve it up in an <audio> tag and play it from javascript that way.

I might try hacking my project to do exactly that. However, I think a sane solution for you would be to make use of system accessibility options or screen readers. The downside there is that you can't call into those from a user's browser.
Ditto. I ditched Bank of America and switched to Schwab, it's great.
It's more an experiment on chaos theory and dart throwing than "Predictions". I recommend you look at the fundamentals and aggregate the EPS forecasts in relation to the ROE to get a better idea as to where they should be in a year's time. On top of that you need to factor your economy and China's.
The interesting thing here is to see whether a community of opinionated elite nerds can do a better job of predicting the future direction than the general public / analysis / whoever. Speaking of which, have you logged your predictions yet?
I looked at the source. Apparently they are writing NE2000 drivers in Haskell. It appears that this is more of a platform for writing an OS in Haskell with the help of Xen and not really for web apps.
What recent books should I be reading?
I remember the big impact that books like "The pragmatic programmmer", "Hackers & Painters", "SICP", or "PoEAA" cause in me.

What recent books about computers, hackers and entrepreneurship should I be reading?

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that we are talking about books published in the last 2-3 years.
Nice, thanks for the tip on color schemes. I agree with everything you pointed out. After we get it redone, I'll repost as a Before-After. Thanks for the help!
i don't think it's really a fork, but rather a django database engine that supports "datastores" + related tools
Feature requests go into: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
One of the hard lessons I've learned is to try to put timestamps in every table unless absolutely not necessary. :)

Edit: I'll post aggregate values to my blog in a few days' time. zacharyburt.com. I'll cc the link to @zburt on Twitter.
True, but the aggregation function is a bit complex.

I'm curious where we'd wind up with something more transparent or democratic.

Sadly, we aren't able to make any beta-neutral or relative value bets!
The article talks about 5 times increase in volume of the traffic.
Wouldn't it mean Comcast gets to make extra bucks even though number
of Comcast customers who access Netflix will not increase that much?
Right or wrong, Comcast wants a cut every time Netflix (or any one
else) changes CDN provider.
Yeah, me too. And when I've called customer service, it has always been fantastic. I've never felt like the rep has just been reading a script.
Definitely a good idea, I'll be adding a checkbox that will strike out the items so you can essentially "undo" them as well as permanently delete them as you like.
3. Bonus (how many didn't get this one?), Perl (everything Perl mentions Larry), and Ruby (because his name is Japanese).

Huzzah!
Good work guys. A few text/spelling errors you might want to fix. On the careers page after clicking for more detail in the "smart and talented?" section, there are about 5 places where two words are getting smushed together. Maybe a line break problem or something. And then in the thank you email after signing up, the first line, "thank you requesting ..." should be "thank you for requesting ..."
You seem to know what you're talking about. I hope you submit a prediction. I doubt you will, though.
I used to take 3000IU in the morning and 3000IU in the evening regularly (but not for a long time - for a few months, maybe 4-5). I can't point and say "i felt better here and here" though. I didn't feel any negative effect too. I'm still taking Vitamin D3 regularly, but often forget, so on average I may take about 10000IU a week.

I don't remember the source, but I think a lifeguard on the beach would produce about 8000IU of Vitamin D during a day.
To be fair, he did this in a couple of hours.
You could also use bitcoins to buy access to restricted torrents and to get leach credit on p2p sites as well as to pay opennic dns providers.
If there is a minimum physical length, that is a planck length, does that mean that nothing is technically continuous? Or, is it possible to imagine 'half a planck length'?
Wikileaks founder on Interpol's Most Wanted List
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy
From a Times.com article on the hackers behind BitTorrent, Gnutella and libdvdcss - http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html
Go is the product of people who's work automatically gets attention and is backed by Google. You still might be right, but Go is probably not a useful example.
Thanks for the insights.

1) And yeah I mean full width fluid layouts w/ no scrollers.

> The key is to test it on slow machines and connections, and optimize for that delay.

That's harder. My current machines are a Westmere MP and an i7 MBP. I don't currently have any slower machines setup to test on.
Personally, I've bookmarked him as sleazeball. His "easy wins" usually come about because he exploits weaknesses in the system. Yes, completely legal, but - IMNSHO - completely unethical.

So, while it might work for him, I want nothing to do with it. Made the mistake of reading his book and felt dirty for it.
Is there particular reading you'd suggest?
Just to be fair to everyone entering things into this form: After you're done, you don't get to see any aggregated predictions, only a "thank you" message (which I found disappointing)
> Would love to hear how everyone else deals with Makefiles

I use SCons.
Iran admits that Stuxnet worm damaged nuclear plant
LinkedIn Pages vs Facebook Pages
He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open, and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications be much more difficult to achieve.

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents.

This is a very different motivation than journalists have.
More info about the Stuxnet worm (fascinating):

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/26/secret-agent-cripp...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944403
Not exactly. Technically, if you serve a page which has copyrighted material you are guilty of copyright infringement. So if the copyrighted material is on your page even for a little bit(i.e., before you discover it and delete it), you may be guilty of infringement for those people that have accessed your page before you took the content down.

Also it is very hard to decide what is and isn't copyrighted material on your own.
Suppose the author aggregated information from many doctors and wrote it down an ebook?

And what makes your doctor the authority on sleep? They inevitably get their information from scientific studies not conducted by themselves, and the author of an ebook can do the exact same thing.

There's no reason to disparage the ebook just because it doesn't look like the conventional form of authority.
Presumably you would only have to trust the network in full. Similar to how bitcoin operates. You might have to trust the 'tracker' to give you a legit network, but once you are in the swarm, it is easy to tell if any of the nodes are lying to you.
Ask HN: What do you look for in freelancers?
I'm building a side-project website that will be a database of freelancers people can consult when they're looking to hire freelancers or outsource part of a project. Kind of like LinkedIn but without all the bloating. I'd like to know what you, entrepreneurs and/or freelancers, what you look for in the people you outsource to or hire temporarily.

Obviously, you'll ask the freelancer to know the language your platform or application has to be programmed in. Are related skills (HTML for PHP developers for example) a necessity? What about availability? Hourly rate? Past realizations? Experience?

Let me know, and thank you for your time.
I got a message from BankSimple telling me that I was going to get an invite soon and asking me for feedback. I got really excited and responded with an e-mail, but never heard back from them. I'm not sure if I misinterpreted the original e-mail, but this was a huge letdown.

Did this happen to anyone else? In any case, best of luck to BankSimple. I can't wait to actually get to try the service. :)
I also noticed that right away and sent a heads-up to @al3x on Twitter about an hour before I saw the story hit HN.
I have not followed all the previous Wikileaks, but I definitely disagree with this latest one.

I don't see what purpose is served by releasing internals memos about what some diplomat located in Germany thinks about certain German politicians.

There's nothing evil in having a negative opinion about German politicians and communicating it to your boss. The People certainly don't need to know such micro level details. OTOH it does harm your diplomatic relations.

-

This is kinda like somebody hacking your Gmail account and releasing all your work emails to your startup's investors, because, after all, they're your investors, they deserve to know what's going on?
The figures I've seen are much higher than that. By the end of the day, the lifeguard should have produced 20,000IU, but that is mostly because after the concentration reaches about 20,000, the sunlight begins to break down any excess, so it cannot climb higher than that. Interesting chemistry.

So it begs the question - where did the "4000IU max intake" figure come from?
But as he points out, the objective of WikiLeaks is not to foster popular opposition, as Assange believes that occurs naturally. If public outcry was his intention, he probably wouldn't have bothered with banal diplomatic cables. He is of the opinion that consistent leaks heightens intra-government paranoia. As each conspirator becomes more fearful of information being leaked, s/he shares it less, thus depriving the conspiratorial machine of the information it needs to survive. I'm not sure I agree with him (this will require some thought), but I think your analysis might be off.
Doh, I was going to change it to "closer" look or something but I'm out of time. I think closer sounds safer, no?
There are plenty of reasons not to publish on CPAN. Not everyone has time to "babysit" all the modules they write (and deal with people's complaints that they're misnamed, aren't complete enough, etc).

Also, lots of people who were once productive on CPAN years ago have "gone dark" in recent years. Generally has something to do with having a life (fulltime job, family, that sort of thing).

So all in all that's a pretty snarky question to ask. It's definitely a plus to show that you have the sense of civic engagement to go through the full-fledged publishing process on CPAN (including processing testing reports, RT issues, etc) but it should suffice to provide code samples with clean coding style and decent enough documentation (even if it's a well-written README).
The 12 Days of Holiday Revenue Maximization for Your Online Store
That's a really good point about the size issue with the Durbin Amendment, so in that case, then yeah - interchange fees should be a great income stream for Bank Simple.

I don't know too much about how it works for an affiliate debit card like Bank Simple is proposing -- obviously they are partnering with large banks for the deposits, but I wonder how the process works for the debit cards.
Yfrog should maintain usability for porn stars to maintain site traffic
Money already speaks volumes in elections so I would rather have a human being actually show they can have an effect beyond that. Not to sound like a paranoid, but how can the government follow the consent of the governed when those in power do not live like those they govern?
Sure, but the fact is that nobody actually needs a "word-sense disambiguator", they need a search system with better accuracy, or a classifier with better accuracy or an information extraction system that turns text into facts.

Many areas in NLP are like this. You can get 92% accuracy in a few hours of work, and then you can get 93% after a week or work, and then you can write a whole PhD thesis about how you got 94% accuracy.

To a certain extent, there are approaches, such as the Support Vector Machine that are "unreasonably effective" but once you get past that, you often have to confront issues that everybody wants to sweep under the rug to make a real breakthrough.

For instance, there was that NELL paper that came out a few months ago; NELL extracted facts from text but it had no idea that "Barack Obama is the President of the United States" was true in 2010, and that "Richard Nixon is the President of the United States" was true in 1972. If you can't handle the fact that different people believe different things and that statements have expiration dates, no wonder you can only get 70% accuracy in IX
How exactly are you proposing example.com turns into an IP address in this system?
Ah i see. It's an interesting navigation concept. :)
I think that this is completely true- the best innovation comes from new people looking at a problem in a different way. This is most marketable right now while people are so disenchanted with the financial world. There are a lot of people who may not trust this at first- but those are not your intended early adopters. I know that in my group of friends no one interacts with a bank ever. Our only physical use of finance is at ATMs
Have you ever been to public school?
Yeah, and I kept guessing Clojure on all the ones from the 2000s that I didn't know.
Who Builds Linux? These Days, More and More Mobile Devs
Presumably the webapps could come in after there's a normal socket interface (which could also be written in Haskell, atop of a Haskell TCP stack, atop of the NE2k drivers).

I'm curious to see what Galois has done with it so far.
I really meant the original posting to be light-hearted.
You're responding to a summary of a summary of Assanage's essay with a rhetorical (did you mean hypothetical?) suggestion of killing him? I don't think this is the kind of writing I expect on Hacker News...
From the point of view of those getting spied on, I doubt there is much difference between getting spied on by a diplomat or by a spy with diplomatic credentials. Either ought to mean the guy gets a bullet.
I implement Conway's Game of Life in order to get a feel for the language's merits and its warts.
WePloy: WePay's Deployment Tool
Got em all except BASIC, Groovy, Scala, C# & Fortran. Not very interested in those languages anyway. I would have liked to see Haskell & Smalltalk on there. Apparently I do as much reading _about_ programming languages as I do _of_ them!
Another happy Schwab customer here. I've got secondary accounts at ING and they're great too.
I use to wrestle (highschool level, and trained with university level). I've heard of people who've dropped and gained 10-15% of their pre-cutting body mass like that. His claim is definately on the top end of things. The rehydration process is every bit as dangerous as the dehydration. You don't do it right, you just end up puking all over the place, which is no good when you're already dehydrated.

I'm REALLY suspect one pound of muscle per day. If you want an idea of what that means... look at a 1 pound steak. You're adding that much to your body every day.

I'll give him that there are probably genetic freaks of nature out there who can pull this stuff off (maybe he is one), but it's simply not a realistic goal.
I think the state would rather keep their communications secret, but in the event that they cannot, they will continue business as usual rather than change what they talk about. Really, what is the effect of transparency? So what if Russia knows we don't consider them a democratic country, so what if Iran knows that the Arab states want to see Iran isolated and neutralized? These are open secrets. Like a sex tape of a man having sex with his wife, they're embarrassing not because they're news but because they're supposed to be kept private. Nobody is surprised that a man has sex with his wife, and nobody is surprised that the Arab states are adversaries of Iran.

If secrecy becomes impossible, as Assange desires, will Arab states stop calling for the U.S. to be aggressive with Iran? Will the United States start believing in Russian democracy? Will American policy wonks stop openly discussing with each other what reasons might persuade the public to support policies that they support for other, less popular reasons?

Well, if every human being on earth suddenly had X-ray vision, would people stop having sex for fear of their neighbors seeing? Of course not. Life goes on.
No "groupware"?

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
I've been using premake4 (after trying SCons and waf). But to be honest, I'm never happy. Here I really love the simplicity of just including a single file. I'll definitely give lazymake a whirl next time I make a small project.
And the bullshit part about this is that most of Comcast's customers have little choice in being a customer. They're trapped and have no ability to choose.
Unfortunately right now it is a fork -- django-nonrel makes some internal changes to Django. I'm hoping to reconcile those changes with core at some point so that -nonrel could indeed be just a backend, but we're not there yet.
Epanding into what???

This is what I cant wrap my head around... into what is the universe expanding?

What if the universe is not a balloon - but a doghnut where the outer edges fold back into itself, the overall space it is in can be finite yet the surface is curved away. The light would travel along the curved surface of space-time and thus travel a greater distance than is linear.