skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Securities regulations. As soon as you're issuing stock, there are many legal requirements, and you can't just advertise/issue stock to the general public without the same complexity that accompanies being listed on big stock exchanges.

If all you want from an 'investment' is warm fuzzies and perhaps some token product/service or swag – like Kickstarter campaigns offer – then Kickstarter itself can be the Kickstarter of donating to risky startup projects.

If you're an accredited investor and savvy about angel investing, you could see about joining a dealflow-matcher/community of angels like AngelList (http://angel.co/).
I have had a moneybookers account for years, and it's on a unique email address. I've never received any spam to it, or email at all other than from moneybookers itself.

Parent comment, please do supply some more info.
Simple: because India is a developing country? It needs all the help it can get?
General IT: Sales of MSFT's Kinect will surpass XBOX sales.

Web Development: Python will get a library/framework that is a paradigm shift in writing apps for real-time clients. Something that ties together Twisted's reactor with Django's approachability with socket.io.

Personal: I will finish building my house, then focus on shipping a single side-project.
Flickr is far from dead. Photographers use it religiously.
It seems to me the challenges would be that a) it'd be a mecca for fraud b) attract people who shouldn't be making such risky investments c) make it hard for startups to stay under 500 investors for public disclosure purposes and d) be sued into the ground due to a) and b)
the problem is that Walmart doesn't put it's suppliers out of business. They have low margins, but the volume more than makes up for them, while Groupon requires their suppliers to operate at a loss, because they've been tricked into thinking they are getting something with high LTV.
My employer, Netflix, has a much simpler policy: whatever I create that relates to Netflix's business belongs to Netflix, and whatever else I create belongs to me.

That's literally how the contract is worded.

We have very few written policies, but the ones we do have are typically short and simple like that. Take the expense policy, for example. There are no lists of things you can or can't expense. The policy just says, "act in Netflix's best interest." It's up to you to act responsibly.
Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design
The issue is whether there is speech that is objectionable, and whether free speech has some sort of nearly universal limit if properly considered (yeling fire in a crowded theater, for example) and whether creating a law-free zone might have unintended consequences.

Child porn isn't speech, it's evidence -- evidence of a crime that has already taken place. This crime, like other crimes, can and should be prosecuted without any sort of totemic obsession with inanimate copies of the evidence.

In general, censorship of kiddie-porn-as-speech is the greatest favor we can do these criminals. We've already taught them to hide in the real world, and hide well. Now we're teaching them to cover their tracks online.
I had mine in 2005 and have spent long hours in front of computers since.

Since the surgery, I have always had a slight starburst/glare effect around lights at night

In early 2009 I started to notice very slight deterioration in one eye. Now, two years from noticing and 5+ years after the surgery, my right eye is noticeably worse when reading text at a distance, and especially driving at night. Depth perception and the starburst/glare effect is worse. It's even worse if I've been staring at a computer screen. (I have astigmatism in that eye, so that's probably a factor.)

Was it worth it? The jury is still out. I have a lifetime guarantee of "enhancements", so we'll see how those work if/when I get one. I just had an appointment -- they said it wasn't bad enough to justify, and I got a prescription for glasses :-/
I've read a few claims like that.

Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic, but assuming he started when the procedure became FDA approved in 1995, doesn't that imply that he does 4.5 operations a day, 365 days a year?
Wireframing Effectively on the 970 Grid System
Working on something similar.
The business plan is coming this February. In fact, I'm looking for financing to get it started.

http://miximum.ca/en_newProjectPage-kiosk.html

gallerytungsten, I agree with you that it's part of the race, but I believe Facebooks approach is fundamentally different.

What's important in this idea is that the content has to be geographically significant to the consumer. Some apps focus on other things, like game mechanics, search, etc. As mentioned in the FT.com article: "Facebook’s application can “check in” to a physical location, such as their local coffee shop,". Significant geolocalized information is key. For example, this concept clearly works a lot less well on a PC. Has to be on mobile or in my case a well localised kiosk.

The objective is to make it significant. Adding friend metadata to the info makes it more important to us.
"During his presentation, Zuckerberg uses words such as 'revolution' and 'disruption'."

Fun to contrast this with Jobs thoughts from the interview that was on HN recently:
"What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver?

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. "
Actually, no. Contribution and copyright are two different things. In the United States, every word you write is copyright by you. However, you can assign your copy rights to another entity. This allows copyright and authorship to become disjoint, even though they start out as the same thing.

Here is an example: The Apache Software Foundation requires copyright assignment on all contributed work. Developers who contribute code must assign their copyrights to the ASF. Their name is still in the contributor list, because they are a contributor of code. However, the Apache Software Foundation is the sole copyright holder of the works.
Thanks for the replies, guys! Seems I might not benefit much (yet) then. I wear my (quite thin and light) glasses from seconds after waking to getting into bed and have no issues with them so it sounds like my advantages are few, especially as I don't play sports or swim.
I didn't interpret that to mean they actually glow in the dark, as in produce their own light, but rather they appear more red "when the sun is a bit down".
There sort of is: Profounder. More info here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/30/profounder-launches-to-help... and interesting thread of whether this is actually legal here: http://www.quora.com/Is-ProFounder-in-violation-of-any-secur...
It's time for IPV6.
I worked hard to spin this cocoon. I'm fine where I'm at.
Yet no mention of lambda calculus (or combinatory logic) anywhere in the article.
There's nothing stopping you from entertaining pitches from smart folks on Hacker News. Hell, I'd be happy to go first, if you invited it.

The nice thing about this strategy for you would be:

- even the dumb jerks on HN are generally really smart and working on cool projects

- taking initiative will make the story about you, which will bring you credibility and a higher quality deal flow

If you end up posting an "Ask HN: Why should I seed invest in your start-up?" let me know, and I'd bite.
No such thing as a random failure
The ophthalmologist that I went to said that some people experience better than 20/20 vision after the surgery.

The information that I received from the doctor mentions a clinical trial in which "70% of patients could see better than 20/20" after the surgery. However, the pamphlet does not provide information on how to locate that clinical study.

I could not find any hard and fast statistic, but this article mentions in passing that some patients can see better than 20/20 after surgery: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/22772.php

I would say that if glasses have become part of your "brand" and you actually enjoy wearing them, then definitely do not get the procedure. Some of my main motivations for getting the procedure (keep in mind I have not undergone the procedure yet) are: wearing glasses is annoying, glasses get dirty/scratched/bent/etc, contacts are a pain to put in when I wake up, contacts dry out my eyes sometimes, playing sports with glasses is difficult (I snowboard quite a bit; glasses and goggles don't go too well together) so I have to wear contacts.
If this becomes a common trend in American Football it could cause the game to evolve back towards Rugby Football. A good example of how fast rugby is played is this game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ZU4GKmOoQ

Particularly at 3:15 where the ref gives a player a yellow card for slowing down the game. (Note that this isn't just a minor game, its an International Test between the worlds two top ranked teams).
Google's Groupon groping reveals the shifting power in the web world
I had mine done here http://www.elliseye.com/ in 2001 or 2002. At first my vision was 20/15 in one eye and 20/10 in the other and I felt like the bionic man. This over correction lasted about a year before it started to degrade and I am now worse than 20/20 I imagine. I can still pass a driver's test, spend hours everyday in front of a monitor, see well at night etc. My only complaint is the slight starburst effect around bright glowing objects at night but I consider that a small price to pay. To this day I consider it the best money I have ever spent.
EDIT: The last sentence of point 2 should read, "once I had looked like a fool quite a few times." Foolish of me to have left that out.
Has anyone had just one eye done?

(While both my eyes could use some correction, I currently work fine without contacts or glasses, relying mostly on the stronger eye. So as a last-stop bit of natural insurance against things going too wrong, I'd prefer to leave one eye untouched.)
Canada has a similar program called the self-employment benefit. The requirement for application is to have been in receipt of employment insurance benefits in the previous 36 months.

To get in, you have to meet with a case manager and formulate an application which includes a 'business concept' document (kind of like a very short business plan).

I'm in the program right now and it's been pretty good so far. They provide a living wage and I get to work on my business. Part of the program involves attending workshops, which are pretty helpful if you don't have much of a business background.
They can do that already now.
Has GE stopped lobbying to have their competitor's products banned?

Has GE stopped lobbying for preferential treatement of their products?
Machine Addictions
Optimize your images using jpegoptim in ubuntu
Now a days people are more fond of uploading the images in Facebook. I used to upload lots of images in Facebook. But the images captured from my cam is not less than 3 MB. Finally I found useful tool in Ubuntu, which can optimize any number of photos at one instant using one command.
I didn't downvote, but to offer an alternate theory to silverstorm's, it might be because "think of the children" (and kiddie porn in particular) is possibly a worse debate-killing cliche than invoking Third Reich. It's essentially a fearmongering tactic most of the time, and I really think it should be ejected from intelligent conversation unless strongly justified.
In a variation on the original topic, I am also thinking about getting the procedure done (I currently wear glasses, and love how they look) but in addition to programming I am a passionate amateur photographer.

Specifically, I specialize in rangefinder and TLR medium format cameras. I find that focusing is incredibly difficult on a parallax viewfinder (bright line) system. If it's even slightly dim, forget about it; I can't make out what's in focus. Plus my glasses get in the way, get smudged and sometimes get scratched.

My concern is that presumably Lasik is optimized for near-sighted (distance impaired) vision. Nobody can give me a straight answer on whether (assuming the procedure goes well) focusing will be any easier, or possibly even harder. I know that the surgery won't give me super-vision, but there's a very practical physical limitation to how close I can get my eye to the viewfinder before my glasses are pressed between my moist eye and the eyecup on my camera.

What I'm trying to figure out is whether when I'm focusing, my eye is focusing on something an inch from my eye (or less) or if it's focusing on infinity (in the optical sense). I suspect that it's infinity, which means that distance vision support would be kick-ass.

Any optics experts want to chime in?
I wore glasses/contacts my whole life, and I had lasik about 1.5 years ago. Super easy procedure, great financing options, and a lifetime guarantee in case my eyes change. I can easily say it is one of the best decisions I have ever made. Eyes strain while programming has gone down for me for sure. You don't notice all the time, but when you're doing stuff like snowboarding, jetskiing, or anything that would bother the shit out of your contacts, you will be SUPER grateful
People coming from most other languages don't realize that atoms ("symbols", in Lisp) can be used for many things that would otherwise be done with strings. This really helps - pattern-matching on atoms is niiiice. Like much of Erlang, it makes lots of sense to people with Prolog experience, but ... who has Prolog experience? (lone hand) Oh.

Many of the performance issues (++, etc.) apply to any language with immutable strings, or any other immutable data structures. Clojure, Haskell, etc., but nobody harasses Clojure about being "bad for strings" - There's just a FUD meme about Erlang going around.

You can also do string handling via a port (an external program in C, or any other language), if it's a major performance issue - Erlang is happy to pass messages to an external program in any language. Lua has a similar design* . It focuses on doing certain things really well, and for the rest, there's an easy escape; no harm, no foul. "You want to run some eeevil code? Just run it in another process, we'll send data to it and handle the results if ze sleazy bastard doesn't crash..."

* And immutable strings - In Lua, all strings are atoms by default.
> Their slogan was "reliability for many years" which was an understatement as they actually ran for 20 or 30 years no problem.

You say that like it's something odd or distinctive.

My family has gotten that kind of lifetime out of bargain-price "American" washing machines. The only exceptions have involved operator error and "but I want a new one NOW,I've waited long enough for it to die".
I'm not sure what they're up to these days, but I remember when they got started (by some guys from K5, IIRC). It was an alternative root, and not any more decentralized in the technical sense than "regular" DNS. More responsive to users and democratic, but the structure was exactly the same.

There were a bunch of other alternative roots that have taken on ICANN at one point or another, although it's been a long time since I've tried any of them.

It strikes me as a doomed effort unless you can get some ISPs somewhere to buy in and point users towards your root rather than ICANN's. Most users aren't going to change their DNS settings (most probably don't know how), so it seems difficult to achieve any sort of critical mass of users.
I think the copyright statement is just plain wrong currently. It should say "Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc. and Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)". Google owns only the parts made by Google employees, other parts are still owned by their respective authors.
Thabo Mbeki to mediate in Ivory Coast president crisis ~ A News Fuse
Reminds of the joke...if you are talking to woman in IRC chat they are most likely a guy, the FBI, or John Stossel :)
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970216
Has anyone done Orthokeratology? It seems cheaper than lasik and still fairly effective in what it does. Any thoughts on this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthokeratology
Freelancers and Training- The key to online success in the New Economy
Ghosts of Unix Past
Actually, Wal-Mart does sometimes force suppliers to sell at a loss. There were a lot of articles on the topic a few years ago when hating on Wal-Mart was cool. And if Groupon isn't beneficial to some customers, they shouldn't buy. I know businesses around here that run regular Groupon offers. They clearly aren't unhappy. What you're talking about is poor decisions on a business owner's part, not Groupon scamming people. There are real scams aimed at business owners, but Groupon is not one.
They charge ~$130 for a consultation, unlike private lasik centers. Can you elaborate on your comment? There aren't actually that many reviews of them online.
Seems Yudkowsky should really should update the page...

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

...to reflect the 3-2 record revealed in this essay, rather than the 2-0 record declared on the page, given how much pride is expressed in the results, and the qualitative difference between 'undefeated' and 'winning-more-than-losing'.
Wal Mart has put suppliers out of business too.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

It's also made many suppliers rich. I wouldn't be all that confident about suppliers being tricked. I'm sure it works better for some than others. I'm sure there are ways of making it work better. The businesses that did well with Groupon will resign and the others won't. I would want to see some evidence the Groupon are having a hard time selling before assuming what you seem to be pretty confident of.
Metaphors, models & theories
Make your own the old fashioned way - just buy a bag of whole frozen sweet cherries, put them in a mason jar, and cover with Maraschino (Luxardo). After three days you'll have a mason jar full of delicious Maraschino cherries.
I already own the book, but I wanted to let others know that it is the Manning 'Deal of the Day' today (12/05/10.) You can get it for $25 if you enter promotional code dotd1205ccb when you checkout.
Thank you, I've added the link into the post.
Crack.

That's what Fred Wilson and Dan Lyons are smoking. It has to be. No one could seriously be suggesting that we're in a bubble.
looks more like a microfinance operation like prosper or lendingclub than actual investment. profits above and beyond repayment go to a nonprofit.
Senator Liberman may not agree with what you say but.....
Senator Liberman may not agree with what you say but he will defend to the death his right to prevent you saying it.

How's that "freedom of speech" thing working for y'all?

Is there some way to connect bittorrent and web browsers to create a web that can withstand not only nuclear strike but government censorship?
Honey is made from nectar, not of nectar. It's pretty likely that what these bees are producing is not that unlike regular honey. It just happens to be artificially coloured and likely has a different makeup of sugars.

What I don't get is why these people are so appalled that bees would do this. Bees don't know shit about nutrition, they just dig sweet stuff and stuff with bright colours. "Mother nature" doesn't "know best", it just does what it has evolved to do. These bees evolved to use what limited computation power they have to find bright stuff that's sweet. Most of the time this means flowers, but apparently not always.

If anything, I'd be excited. This is interesting and new stuff, not horrifying!
Follow up: Disabled add-ons to see if one was causing trouble, and it's Flashblock 1.5.13. Usually it shows a placeholder you can click to allow the Flash object to run, but it doesn't seem to show for me.
It really depends on what units of data your chain (in this case, an n-gram model) is dealing with. You can increase or decrease the granularity and modeling depth to get different kind of erroneous data using the same training data.

For example, given the same corpus, if you have an n-gram model of english characters, obviously some[1] of the words will be erroneous. But if that model is over words, none of the words will be erroneous, but the grammar will still be broken in some cases. Extend that to an n-gram over collections of grammatical phrases where the words, grammar might be correct, but it may have a nonsensical meaning in some cases, etc.

[1] Obviously "some" is dependent on the amount and diversity of the training data, model detail, etc.
A Guided Tour of Computing History
Is there some good micropayments site?
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/090310groovesharkumg
Only about three seconds here. Located in San Francisco.
There are many ways to raise money without selling company's shares: specifically, issuing securities (bonds are the simplest examples). There are many legal issues indeed but I still see none that cannot be resolved.

Example from profounder:
https://www.profounder.com/term_sheets/profounder_public-rev...

The distribution of commitment (money and time) vs number of people who are willing to give it for a startup project has a valuable tale that is underestimated in my view.

It seems to me that there is a big market for such projects and it is an opportunity for someone alert out there.
4) #dnsissexy - the average user doesn't even know it exists.

it's amazing how many people i see who use google as their primary resolver, by only using the search function even if they're entering a url.
No, it's not a good idea for Google to let business owners buy these pages to increase their own ranking - willingness to pay isn't a useful signal for page relevance.
I learned that the hard way with my last car. A speedbump took off my midpipe! (pushed it up and the bolts snapped.. still intact just not connected) There was a good month when I was driving around Atlanta with a straight header V8.. surprised I did not get pulled over with how loud that thing was.
Chris is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google. He handles open source matters and policies for Google, among other tasks. He is not a developer.
The other books spend more time easing the reader into concepts like immutability, pattern matching, supervision hierarchies, and the concurrency model. This book is for when you're sold on Erlang-the-language's overall design, but still not sure about how to set up a real project on Erlang-the-platform.

I'd recommend getting all three, or one of the other two and this one. I like the Armstrong book's personality more - Cesarini's seems better organized, but a bit too serious.

Also: ErlangCamp was indeed fully awesome.
I just posted an update so that you can add and remove entries directly (instead of from a file). If anyone feels like testing it on something other than Linux any bug reports would be appreciated. But now I'm going to hit the sack...
Sorry, but I have no expertise to comment on that.
Hadoop 101 - BarCamp Chennai
Nor that it requires untyped lambdas.
As an Aussie brought up on Rugby, this is the thing which most gets in the way of me enjoying US football - its so stop/go! They seem to only play for about half a second, then they stop - there doesn't seem to be any flow. I keep on wanting to yell 'Get on with it!'
Tridge (of Samba fame) reviews a year of remote peer programming
Hell - in my town my GTI scrapes all the time... I can only imagine having something lower. Porsche has the courtesy to put a replaceable black lip for the scrapes.
Sorry that it's not clear...

3.5 is not a part of it at all. They don't need to link to legitimate websites in order to be a nuisance - they just have to rank well and therefore push legitimate sites down.
Surely inbound links have no bearing on your search ranking...that would be a remarkably stupid way for Google to empower the worst citizens of the web to hold the rest hostage. It would become trivially easy to outrank any legit site by bombing them with links from your spam farm.

Where YOU link has an effect on your ranking, but surely not who links TO you.

Right?
"most" of these people hating on Paypal have never had a real merchant account. Obviously not all of the people have.