skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So what's your definition of "free"?

I believe FSF code, as in GPL is free. There are four freedoms that come with it. The only restriction is that one can't deny others the same freedoms. You're also free not to use it.

I find it interesting that so many criticize RMS for his character and style. I find myself very tolerant of people who are very talented programmers. I think RMS is a pretty decent programmer. Emacs, GCC, ... have added a lot of value over the years.
I posted it mostly for nostalgia reasons. I read this years and years ago when I first started programming in QBasic.
The article itself hasn't aged well (it's all over the place).

I'm not sure why, but recently I was thinking about it because I've been unable to get anything done on my side projects.

I still wanted to ask the question: Do you suffer from programmer's apathy?
yea, i agree on that - but it's still way powerful than the ones that are in current use. so thought that would be interesting to post the link here.
I'd never be happy on a calorie restricted diet. And I need all the happiness I can get!
Hey, everyone: I made a comment above, calling this a publicity attack. Disregard it. Dan has the goods on this one. Patch now, questions later.
Find a way to make women as fascinated by men as men are by women? Also, I think the comment on 'rich guys' is likely onto something - advertise on ladders.
"I hear that I've been blacklisted, and that Apple reached out directly to Newsweek to complain about my hiring" Dan tells us.

Wait, is Fake Steve bad "press" for Apple? If anything their PR department should be reaching out to him and letting him try out their new products. Most of the people I know that follow him are heavy Mac users, so if anything, Apple should be praising Newsweek for hiring him. Bad move I think.
5 word summary:
Programming is hard, payment motivates.
Oh dear god. I can only hope this is an attempt to crack idiots servers, rather than a serious service. I love the "it's your responsibility to secure your key in transit" disclaimer.
Collaborative research website
Hmmm to be honest nothing screams "Plan B" more than a dating site. Honestly I have never used the service because most of the women I date are from referrals from friends and family. So there's that element of trust right there. Made me feel safer! Maybe if you could build dating site that applies that element of trust. Maybe you could have the said "dater" try to earn some sort of "trust" points. Make it so that the more trust points they have. The better partner they are. This is just off the top of my head though and it worth experimenting.
These stories, as a whole, exemplify why I'll always have the majority of my money in a low cost, no load, diversified fund.

Good call:
http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/best-investment-advice-youll...

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/fortune.pdf
Hey Ivan and Eric,

Does the document re-appear when you change the zoom level? If so, this is a known issue and a fix should be deployed soon.

In any case please feel free to email me if you ever discover a bug we may not be be aware of (ed at scribd.com). Thanks, guys!
As my data structures professor would say: "Bipartite matching is a hard problem, specially when it involves women!"

Seriously, though...

IMHO the most successful dating site would probably start off as a Linked In like social network, where you could have matches based on the people you know. Matching algorithms of any sort (like Match.com Chemistry.com eHarmony.com, etc use) could be used to improve the matches, but I think that having a "recommendation" from people you already trust would be a very big plus. This is probably why pre-existing social newtworks like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, et al usually end up being used for such purposes.
The biggest problem is that the incentive of the dating site is to make money, not to help people get together. If your service is really good at getting people together, boom! There goes your userbase as they all hook up and log off.

Financially speaking it is better to give users the ILLUSION of someone out there being for you, while stringing them along and milking them for as much cash as possible.
Thanks. Works now in FF3 - so I can't really be of much help.
Entrepreneurs' Organization coming to Boston
Coming on July 23-27...
"It will hinder legitimate law enforcement, and create insurmountable legal bills for small businesses asked to cooperate with government investigations."

Your argument is flawed because the telecoms weren't obligated to fight the government's attempts to receive a warrant, but rather to inspect the warrant before giving the government wiretapping ability.
I used to work at OkCupid. I could talk to you at length about the ups and downs and ins and outs of online dating, but the moral of the story I gleaned from my time there can be summed up pretty easily:

People just want a ton of attractive/dateable people within a keyboard's reach, and if your site does any filtering on their behalf, people need to trust that it actually works.

Most of the variations in online dating sites focus on optimizing pieces of that. The big guys (Match.com, eHarmony) make sure they get huge user numbers by campaigning on national TV, and they apply some simple internal filters that are 'approved by a doctor.' Smaller sites can't compete with that, so concentrate more on making sure you only run into people you'd actually be attracted to (see JDate). OkCupid's on the smaller side, and focuses on community building (for numbers) and uses mathematically semi-sound calculation coupled with quiz questions to create a user-driven but rigorous-feeling people filter. Basically everyone that's successful fits somewhere in that model.

If I were you, I would focus less on specific features or trying to build a better datetrap. Instead, figure out what it'll take for you to get fifty thousand people signed up, approximately all at the same time, and then how you'll keep the site growing over time. If you get big numbers, the dating stuff will follow (MySpace...).
For what it's worth: I retract much of this.
Yah, this is too true. The worst thing you can do for your bottom line on a dating site is make a real, long-term match. There go two really happy users, and whatever ad revenue or monthly subscription fee they were making you.

But if you don't care about your site making money, this is a non-issue. And if you're growing faster than you're connecting people, it's a moot point anyhow.
Ask YC: Providing Incentives to Evangelists
We are a seed stage startup (havent raised money) in the bootstrapping phase. So far, we have relied exclusively on writing to/contacting individual members of the target community to get them on board our website. Now we feel like we have enough content/activity to take our marketing efforts to the next level and are thinking in terms of recruiting a team of evangelists. These people will be well known members of the target community who will generate "buzz" by blogging about us, pro-actively help us acquire users and try to contribute towards greater levels of activity on our website.

A real world comparison would be the paid reviewers that Yelp used. The emphasis on evangelists draws from the fact that the target market is India where viral marketing has not been a factor in Web success stories so far.

What would be the way(s) to compensate these guys? Equity is the most obvious choice. If so how much? Are there other ways?
Ask HN: Review my FF Extension
BooYarr is a firefox extension that makes search easier.

BooYarr packs all the search goodness you need into the sidebar and then gives you a range of easy to use shortcuts to access it super fast.

Its lightweight, its fast and it does not take over your browser.

Search and navigate results allot faster.

BooYarr has entered the extend firefox 3 competition, go you good thang!
Actually... I have read it and that was my understanding of it. If I've misunderstood it then I'm open to corrections, I'm not a lawyer.

This illustrates yet another reason I dislike the GPL3--understanding it requires reading not only the license itself but also reading explanations and interpretations. This is made apparent by the thousands of search results leading to content that attempts to explain the license.
That's part of it, sure, but multiple sources use language like:

"Quality raters apparently spend their time checking search results, deprecating spam, moving the best results to the top of the search result stack, and (possibly) testing experimental Google features."

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/06/behind_the_alg...

and

"They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet."

http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Se...

"moving the best results to the top", "avoid spam" and "get the right sites at the top of the listing" suggested human manipulation to me at the time.

Of course, none of the several sources that talked about the rater hub project were Google itself, so determining the truth is difficult, but that was part of the reason I raised the question.
Is Google Building a Media Empire Based on Your Searches? Of Course.
Flickr users get chance to sell photos through Getty Images
Ask HN: How do you know if you're any good?
I started building a web app a few months ago with zero prior experience in software development. It started as weekend hobby, and now I'm trying to make it into a business. It works, and potential customers like it.

But, I have no reference point for what good code should look like, or how long it should take etc etc. My questions for the group:

In general, how do you know how good you are? Could you come up with say 10 questions that sort the wheat from the chaff? How long does it take to get 'good'? Do people think about it?
MISC: A homoiconic language based on maps
Doc Searls: Saving the Net III - Understanding its frames
I, for one, enjoyed the article, even if it's not the type of stuff I'd want to see on the front page all the time. Even if none of the tips apply to the 1337 folks here, I think the problem of apathy developing toward projects you supposedly started for fun is worth thinking about. I've certainly experienced it. A couple random thoughts:

Pseudocode is the ultimate high-level language. I can think of a few recent problems it might have have helped me think through.

The article advocates focusing on one slice of the program at a time to avoid apathy. While nowadays vertical slices are trendy, this advocates horizontal slices, A.K.A., the Waterfall Model. Is this the answer to apathy?
Apple is a secretive company by nature, and Jobs is a private individual. He tries to thwart many books and articles written about him. I'd be willing to bet that the unflattering parody articles in the fake steve blog rubbed him the wrong way.
You could call them prolapsed titles.
Actually this is not correct. The perfect unbeatable game theoretical model actually doesn't take into consideration the history of the other player. There's maths and stuff by John Nash to prove this. The game theory perfect model will always play as if it is playing a perfect opponent.

In way you could say that the mathematically perfect player is so on guard against tricks by an opponent that even after 20 consecutive raises by an opponent it still doesn't alter its strategy. Of course the strategy will not lose just because a player raises once and consequently it also won't lose to a player who raises all the time. However by doing this the algorithm will miss out on substantial chances to exploit an imperfect opponent's weaknesses (in this case being way too aggressive). As a poker pro there is a (small) chance this 'perfect' player wouldn't even beat the rake against fish. However it would not lose (on average) to the best player in the world (and would probably win).

This might all seem to go against your intuition and experience as someone who is probably a really good poker player but it has been mathematically proven as part of game theory. Of course finding/creating this 'perfect' playing strategy is probably more complicated than 'solving' chess which most people believe to be impossible.
A niche play? Really? You might want to take a break from those bizdev2.0 blogs for a while...
I think of it like this: GNU's "free" is really "the freedom of software." That is, it's not what's better for the users/property owners (think fascism) but what's better for the software itself, as an entity (think democracy.) Your right to freely use the software stops where the software's own right to not be "jailed" begins.

To put it another way, the GPL is definitively the license that will apply to AI entities in the future, who, I suspect, will be their own copyright owners. ;)
Perhaps, I don't know that much about it. The overall problem though is with legal precedent, as I feel it puts businesses in a no-win situation. What if you're a small business owner, say of a video rental store, and the White House asks you for records? Your options are:

1. Comply

2. Start spending serious money on legal advice.

Suppose your lawyer says not to do it without a warrant (which he probably would.) Then what? You risk fighting the White House in court? You could suck up a lifetime of a video store's revenue doing this. You'd probably waste a couple weeks of profit just to pay the retainer to get that advice in the first place. You, a small business owner, the keystone of our economy, with a family to feed and kids to put through college, should have to pay a significant amount of money to help police our government?

Even for a large telecom that can afford the legal bills, they're putting shareholder money at risk to fight an ethical battle by refusing to meet the White House's demands. They might be risking shareholder lawsuits for that. Either way, they're screwed.

The way I see it, we as a society have two reasonable options.

1) This sort of oversight should come from the government itself, or at least somehow be publicly funded. or

2) Corporations should never be penalized for following a government issued order. Of course, if it turns out that order was illegal (as in the case of this wiretapping) the government agencies and employees involved should be the ones held at fault. Not the business that merely complied with the government.
network of trust?
Web Application Mania - Cool new Web App gallery
This seems to be a failure of imagination.

It seems to me that a successful long term match should be your best advertising. But I haven't seen any web sites capture that or use it at all effectively. Or feed it back into their site/algorithm design.

I'm not saying this lightly: I got married about 6 weeks ago to an amazing woman that I met (thanks Aston!) on OKCupid!

I'd be more than happy to do testimonials and such, but no one's ever contacted me.
A huge number of interesting ideas. High points for me:

An elegant system for metadata which can be used to implement documentation, pretty printing, types, debugging, logging, and other such meta things.

Keyword arguments are baked in for free.

Direct read/write access to the environment as a map.
The only restriction is that one can't deny others the same freedoms.

Ah, good. Progress. We agree that what FSF calls "free", and what RMS so piously lectures us all about, has at least one substantive restriction. My definition of "free" (as in speech, as the Righteous and Holy FSF puts it) includes no substantive restrictions.

I think the Stallman's definition of "free" basically amounts to extortion on some level. I also refer back to my point about puerile bitterness.

As a side note, when you feel the need to enumerate the freedoms, then the implication is that there are lots of non-freedoms.
I think he meant Word was the best product. There are, of course, very many different reasons why one might use the word "best", but I would say that there are definitely many reasons why one would call .doc the best format.
Searching online I eventually found one on Amazon for $12 - about the cheapest I saw (lots on Amazon uk, starting at about 15 pounds) - from Powell's.

If you found pg's cities essays interesting or clueless, read Jane Jacobs's trilogy on cities:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The Economy of Cities
Cities and the Wealth of Nations

The quality of the writing, and the thought, more than fully justify the hubris of the last title.
I think it's actually a pretty good idea.

If your goal is to scam clueless people, of course.
After turning over control of their companies, entrepreneurs who stay on face challenges.
ABE is the place for used books:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=bovill&...
Congrats, man.

OkCupid loves testimonials and was for a period of time collecting and categorizing them for some vague future use as publicity. You should send something their way just in case.

As far as using that stuff for algorithmic purposes goes, I think they mostly are interpreted as proof that what exists is actually working (and thus doesn't need tweaking?). Also, depending on your demographic, certain types of testimonials are less appealing. Not sure if OkCupid is still courting the youngsters, but if they are marriage stories (as awesome as they are) may serve to scare away a profitable demographic, advertising-wise.
TeX may have had superior output, but its input methods have always sucked. At the period of time when word came to dominate there were no wysiwyg TeX tools and it was a real pain to include figures and images. Output formatting mattered if you were submitting a conference paper, but the other 99.999% of the population cared more about being able to get simple tasks done easily.
there's 1 problem with your argument. these weren't small businesses. they were telecoms with hundreds of millions of dollars with nice big legal departments
I think OkCupid has a pretty good solution to the question. The book "The Game" classifies personality quizzes as "chick crack," and that's the majority of OkCupid's pull right now. ImInLikeWithYou's approach was not bad either; let the girls be the center of attention as guys fought over them.
Can you work in babies to the dating site somehow? Babies are like candy to them. Also shoes.

shoesbabiesandboyfriends.com?
What's a green screen? You mean like a terminal with green characters?
States Focus on Uninsured Workers at Small Firms
how about the simple fact that it doesn't work?

1) In the real world, you compete for the woman's attention only with people she sees throughout her day. Out of which maybe 5 will initiate a conversation.

On the net, same woman, you are competing with every single guy within 50 miles. Out of which almost every single one will initiate a conversation.

2) In the real world, you see the woman as she is.

On the web, you see myspace angles, copy pastes of likes/dislikes. And lets not forget all those bots and guys pretending to be a girl .

3) You gotta remember that if a woman is good looking, there is ABSOLUTELY no reason for her to go on a crappy dating site. Its not like she doesn't get offered dates everywhere she goes.

Same goes for the guys really, you'll have much higher chances if you start asking women in the real world.
I think the key to a successful dating site is both privacy and safety. Women want to know that they are not going to get raped or be caught off guard with someone who has obviously lied about themselves. If you could establish a method that would allow people to feel secure with the site, it could go miles.

The other issue is privacy. By joining these sites, you are opening yourself up to not only your personality and private information but revealing your real identity online. If people could trust that the information about themselves or the interactions they have with other members would never be made public, I think you would see a surge in rates.
Segway Troopers.... Attack!
Jonathan Lee Riches Strikes Again: Targeting Loopt CEO
I think this problems stems from safety. It would seem as though women are more reluctant to meet people online because they do not want to find out that their date is a loon. Someone could come off as completely charming online and in person be a total crazy. If women knew that their safety was not in jeopardy, I think your would see the numbers even out.
The only restriction is that one can't deny others the same freedoms.

The GPL is more restrictive than that. If one puts code online and says "do whatever you want with it," everyone has the same freedom to use it. No one can deny anyone else the freedom to use it, short of blocking access to the server.
> Don't underestimate the utility of perl one-liners. You can't do them in Python, both because of the whitespace and because in practice Python is too verbose.

The value in doing something in a smaller amount of lines is lessened by the lessened maintainability of unreadable code.

Where do you think the effort in maintaining software goes? Typing? Or maintenance?
Walt Mossberg: Newer, Faster, Cheaper iPhone 3G
Interestingly enough, W.P. Montague's book The Way of Knowing,
had a post-sesquicolonic explanatory subtitle:

The way of knowing;: Or, the methods of philosophy

at least in early editions, the sesquicolon seems to have been replaced by a mere comma in the latest reprintings.
Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telcos
I don't think this post is a good way to frame the argument. In particular, it's pretty hyperbolic when it comes to the effectiveness of Gates' philanthropic efforts. Like, what kind of madman would oppose the greatest giving campaign the world has ever seen?

America's earlier robber barons showed similar changes of heart. It seems incredibly misguided to frame an abusive monopoly as a triumph of laissez faire economics. Adam Smith would not approve.
I just generated mine at Starbucks!

Is that bad?
In Hunter's defense -- word on Wall Street is that after Citadel and JPMorgan bailed out Amaranth in 2006, they made a killing on Hunter's positions. Hunter had made ultimately profitable trades; Amaranth just wasn't able to withstand the temporary loss.
The point about all else being equal, Matt would choose the free over the proprietary is a good one-- that's more or less how I feel as well.

Matt, if you're listening: do you pirate a lot of software? (I don't mean this as an accusation; I'm genuinely curious. If I had to guess, I'd guess no, but who knows? (Uh, you do). I also realize that there's a reasonably good chance that you won't want to answer "Yes, I pirate all of Adobe's products," or whatever, in public, even if it's true.)

Most people I know don't mind pirating software and don't think about DRM until it stops them from doing what they want. I think that's one reason that free software has, in many cases, failed to beat proprietary software.
What the hell is wrong with a legal pad or a $1.50 mead notebook? Moleskine is a silly fashion accessory. I was ready for him to recommend never writing in your moleskine with anything but a montblanc.
Even iminlikewithyou's somewhat novel approach ultimately failed - they've switched to casual gaming:
http://gigaom.com/2008/06/26/iminlikewithyou-gets-vc-cash-fo...
http://cryptofile.com/yep.php
dating sites are too complicating. Most of the dating sites which I have seen lately make me sick to be honest. How can I find a match in the middle of a smog? I want less complex and more fun. Illuminate the complexity and you'll reach your goal.