skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charge uploaders a fee to cover the cost of licensing. Keep track of what's played and how often, then regularly approach the appropriate organization:

http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Arts_and_Entertainment/Music/Li...

Also, consider having preloaded songs available to choose for a lower fee.

http://www.youlicense.com
http://www.magnatune.com
http://www.zoomlicense.com
HowToLearn
You exercise the options before they vest and the company maintains a right to repurchase the options that expires over time.

From the perspective of the company, it is like reverse vesting.

Talk to a lawyer for the myriad details but if you ever hire someone who knows his stuff, he will want to exercise his options immediately.
I'll grant this. However, I'm willing to say that most literary criticism is based off of imagined rather than real symbolism.
Shoutwire.com Serving Up Trojan Javascript
Screen resolution bookmarklets
It will be great to refuel our vehicles from the electric grid. Next we need a dynamic pricing scheme where the price of electricity varies in real time, based on the instantaneous demand. Then add a protocol for devices to learn the current price and reserve and purchase their own electricity.

That will let our cars recharge their compressed air tanks in the middle of the night, when electricity is cheap. It will also let our refrigerators and air conditioners use cheap electricity to store up "coldness" in ice for use during the day. Single-compartment washer-dryers can wash and dry our clothes when electricity is cheap.

And once realtime energy pricing is widespread, we may even see companies shipping their large computing jobs to run in datacenters that currently have cheap electricity.
Text Data Mining: Theory and Methods
He doesn't have a computer at home and plays 12 hours online-bridge per week. It seems like he is playing games at the office. No wonder he is tap dancing to work... ;-)
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Code name "Q" - Private Alpha Launched
I hope it is not the future of search. There should be a better way, learning from users actions instead of querying them directly.

In fact I think Google already has these ways, with Google Toolbar, Google Analytics and Adwords tracking users behaviours among other things.

So I suspect, if this voting stuff comes, it would be more psychological than technical? Maybe people are happier with a site if they are allowed to "vent".

A bit like the escalator engineers who placed mirrors next to the escalators so that people would not notice the waiting time so much. It doesn't improve the technology, but makes people happier.
10 questions with Rob Walker
Online vs. offline word of mouth
Blogging's Dead, Long Live Blogging
Precimark: An open source stripe ad network
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I think Google already is a human filter search engine.
We thought of Google as good guys in a mean world, We felt good with Google's success in the early years. I have personally recommended Google to at least all the people i know of(ball park figure might be around 100). Our loyalty was very important for Google's success, which they might be glad to deny now.
For the first time, Microsoft looks like a better company than Google when it comes privacy issues(they don't go around selling personal details of users),openness and being truthful to users(they accepted they made a huge mistake with Vista).

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people(Google) into thinking they can't lose.
NZ teenage hacker charges dropped
Wasn't .name meant for this? Seems just another way to sqeeze some money from people.
Channel Intelligence Sues Just About Everyone Who Offers Wishlists
Rent-a-ranter
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmkenney/
The father of cognitive neuroscience discusses free will, human condition, The Interpreter
Is this the first of the new TLDs under the new ICANN regulations?
I agree with you, and the name of the concept is "uncountable noun":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_noun

One of the funnier differences between Italian and English is that in the former, you say "hairs" - it's not uncountable, which to us sounds pretty funny, as I'm sure we do when talking about our "one hair". "My hairs are all messed up!"
What they wanted was to have the same display code driving both screen and printer. Literal WYSIWYG. X doesn't (and can't ever) work like that. Which is not a knock on X, it's just the reality that Apple have their own priorities which are not necessarily the same as the traditional Unix world.
I'm going to try to grab some porn-related domains (I don't think I have to give examples), sell them to pornographers, and donate whatever I get to charity (except the $40 investment).
I did exactly this when I joined justin.tv - it's not very difficult to arrange. The hardest part was actually finding a CPA who had any availability to work with me, and who I felt I could trust (he came recommended by a friend).

It's obviously important to keep in mind that to exercise your options you'll need some cash. If your share is big and the company has been well funded already, you might need a lot of cash. And you need to be prepared to lose it all if the company fails.
hey, i submitted this first:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248295
Fuel Efficient Cars
Commentary on the most fuel efficient cars on the market.
There isn't a workable system yet because each company tries to make something proprietary. Micropayments will catch on when there's a simple protocol for it, like SMTP is for email.
Totally irrelevant. The article is about whether Apple contributes back to the open source community, not whether or not their platform is "open".

If you believe the two are unrelated, then we have widely differing beliefs about why Open Source is important. Open Source and Free Software is about freedom to do what you want with the software you use...Apple is not fond of that idea, and never has been.

Sending money, and/or some snippets of code, to Open Source developers is wonderful...but it doesn't make a company a friend to Open Source or a friend to freedom. Apple is not an Open Source friendly company. They're not even an open standards friendly company, except where it suits them.

And, I guess I need to point out that WebKit is not some generous gift to the world. Apple was required, by law, to release the source they produced. That they did so is not something to be praised. It's just doing business legally.

So, sure, Apple contributes to some Open Source projects...and that's a good thing. But Apple is hostile to openness on many fronts, and that is a bad thing.
Can You Hack Your Own Site?
No. It is the TLD for the newly independent Montenegro. Hopefully, we can expect a TLD for Kosovo some day.
Tara Hunt on building social capital
Most verb.me names are reserved for auction.
Aside from the other good advice, one thing I've found is that if you are doing interesting things, interesting people hear about you and are interested in talking with you. So, while you're networking at the tech meeting/etc mentioned, be interesting.
Ask HN : Robot kits other than Mindstorms?
Looking for a programmable robot kit.
Cost is one concern : something under $600 preferable. Focus is on the "programmable" part.
Any suggestions?
I've had a lot of fun with the Parallax Boe-Bot kits.

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/411/Default.aspx

I've been working wit the Basic Stamp (and other micros) for probably the last 12 years or so. To me, it's a good mix of powerful and easy to get up to speed on, so the initial learning curve isn't so steep as to be discouraging.
>but Yahoo search existed way before Google search

Not to be pedantic, but it didn't - Yahoo didn't have their own search engine for years, only searching of their traditional hierarchical directory and using a 3rd party's search engine, and one of the key reasons Google grew so fast is that they partnered with Yahoo to provide their search results.
That'll give us some knock-out domain names, truly.
This is very evident if you are customers or airtel, lousy customer service, clearly there is no perfection here.
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Amazon To Debut Streaming Movie/TV Service Today
Complete List of Q2 2008 Web / Internet / Tech Acquisitions
IPhone and openness: Haggling over the price of a closed system
Scribd Platform for Teacher Resources - works great
Want to clear your viewing history on YouTube? Good luck
Actually that makes more sense.

It also makes sense with their view on antialiasing fonts (eg look at iphone DPI, it is close to print DPI).
Installing Dansguardian With Multi-Group Filtering & Squid With NTLM Auth (Debian Etch)
Was anyone else tempted to give that forum a taste of its own medicine!

It's such a shame that they're spending this much effort trying to ruin something so useful for short term gain.
fair game
It's a little apples-to-oranges, but it's not "wrong". Lots of IPC problems really are solved fastest using a socket or pipe. Writing to a shared memory buffer doesn't clue the kernel in to the fact that there is new data available, which means you need a syscall anyway to transfer control. And it makes the application responsible for all the buffering that occurs, and applications don't have a "big picture" available to properly optimize things.

Don't diss the pipe. It doesn't do everything, but if you're going to pick just one IPC mechanism, it's the one.
Cairo can, and does work that way. There are current cairo backends for X11, Postscript, PDF, flat image buffers, OpenGL, SVG, win32, quartz, and no doubt a bunch of others I'm forgetting. The whole point of the thing was to have a robust, path-based imaging model that works everywhere.

This is now 4 year old technology. Please flame with more current criticism. :)
ah, well fuck.me.
Ask HN: Anybody outsource their startup?
So here's the deal:

I'm a consultant. One of my large customers is having a problem with X. So I wrote out the database specs and a few screens around how to fix X. The customer is interested in trying out my program on a few users.

Now I don't have bandwidth to both finish the program and hand-hold the users AND continue consulting with this customer. Needless to say, in the customer's eyes the consulting part is what they want. In my eyes I'd rather be working on this small start-up opportunity. If I leave the consulting part, I'll lose my first customer as my start-up.

It just occurred to me that since my data model, my DAL, and my screen framework is complete, I could hire out the rest of the coding. After all, I could pay somebody to work full-time on the project. Even if they weren't as effective a coder as I was, there would always be sombody on the other end of the phone for the customers (in addition to having me personally on-site from time to time)

Anybody else do something like this? I know as hackers it's best to be close to the solution, but isn't there a point where you can hand off things like bug fixes and trivial data entry screens to somebody with more bandwidth?

Interested in your opinion.

And BTW -- anybody with C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and Telerik experience who wants in on the action is welcome to respond.
8am PST...
Matt Mullenweg on Wordpress
I've done just that and it's worked spectacularly for me. If you have a good job, don't drop it for your startup -- outsource the components instead.
These things I believe
Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk
Apple must win its case against Psystar -- or else
Companies Shifting Online Ad Budgets From Publishers' Websites To Their Own Websites 
"Spending on total US advertising and marketing will grow 3.9% in 2008 - compared with 5.8% in 2007 - to reach $412.4 billion, with the advertising portion reaching $249.1 billion."
You could always take an X screenshot and dump it to the printer :-P Cairo is more analogous to say Qt or wx than it is DPS/DPDF.
Your implication seems to be that Cairo doesn't work on an accelerated backend? That's not correct. It is correct that the primitive assembly happens client side in Cairo, which I'm not sure is a misfeature. The IPC overhead of DPS was always one of its biggest problems.
Minda ICT: Resetting root mysql password
Actually, there are other devices, like the Openmoko Neo 1973 and Neo Freerunner, which have much higher DPI screens. The iPhone has a resolution of 480x320, at 3.5", for 160dpi; the Neos have a 2.8" 640x480 resolution screen, at 280dpi. It's really nice to look at and read text on. :)
yeah, sure, otherwise why display that feature?
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You are describing object recognition, which even on just a 2D static image is an insanely hard to get working correctly (I have experience as it was my university project).

However in a 3D context there is no way a computer can infer what an object would look from a different vantage point, since not even a human can do this.

For example, looking at a CRT and an LCD head on, would give you the same image - but would give you no information about the depth of the monitor. Multiple view points would help the computer figure out the full three dimensional object, but then again, object recognition comes into play, which object is which?

This system works with humans because we have good 3D object recognition and a huge database of experience with which to compare it against, all of which is calculated in an instant.

Replicating that behaviour in a computer is still a long way away.
In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic
In Sync to Pierce the Cloud - Pogue's review of Me.com
Minda ICT:  Different Tricks To Download YouTube Video
The reason being they are Big now, big things don't take change easily. Bigger you get, slower you get. So be small, be agile.
I don't know which venture funding they are talking about. This article is like a mini-biography of Matt Mullenwag and Wordpress.
Minda ICT: Top 10 Yahoo Mail Tips and Tricks
You say grid, I say cloud
I don't think it's quite that binary in reality.
Zendesk: SaaS Help Desk
A 12 year old explains jQuery at Google:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mwKq7_JlS8
Of course, outsource if it makes sense. Don't drop the ball though, manage it. 80/20 rule still applies, take full advantage of it.
Why is complexity easier to charge for than simplicity? Is it because consumers mistake accidental complexity with real complexity? Does simplicity make a product or service appear of less worth?
How did you find the people?
It's easy to make a big chart with lots of features and checkboxes. "Look, we have more than the competition!".
Any comments as to why it's better than Prototype? I've been dabbling into that for some simple tasks.
The complete guide to setting up Starling
UK hacker meetup tomorrow in London
Hi,

The next UK hacker meetup is tomorrow at 7pm, in Shoreditch. If you're interested there's a bit more info here (http://www.songkick.com/blog/2008/04/24/hacker-meetup-2-photos/) and a Facebook group to get notified of upcoming meetups here (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6677098162).

Hope to see some new faces tomorrow.

Cheers
So how many here have succeeded through laziness rather than hard work?
That's a striking case.

But about that 21-23% figure.. Here in wikipedia is a map that shows <5% illiteracy in USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Literacy_rate_world.svg
Anyone registering these other than godaddy?
YouTube Coming to a TiVo Near You
Design in the age of intelligent maps
"I am feeling excited/happy" that I got to listen to one of Kathy Sierra's talks with slides and all! Thanks for posting the link and well done of experimenting with one of her ideas ...
I have my own more literary version (hat tip to Tolstoy). "Crappy websites are all the same; great websites are each unique in their own way."
I have one, and the software isn't very stable, but the device itself is great, and the display is amazingly beautiful and crisp (640x480, 280DPI FTW). Some things like waking up from suspend is hit or miss (just like on desktops/laptops), wifi setup is not yet integrated with any of the software, and there seems to be a lack of coherence on the development front.

However, it's a very promising platform, and the hackability of the device is out of this world. There are already people who have put Debian installs on their SD card to boot from, and use a full XFCE interface to run it more like an internet tablet than a phone.

The device allows developers to create applications in Gtk, Qt, or any other widget toolkit, using any of a wide variety of languages. Users can ssh into their phone over USB or Wifi, and update/upgrade packages, add new package repositories, and do anything you could ever do on any other "normal" Linux system.

While the current software array is lacking, there is a driving effort to create an overarching D-bus framework (freesmartphone.org) that will allow any application in any language/toolkit to access the same system functions, data storage, and more, as a single set of consolidated D-bus APIs.

Overall, I don't consider it stable enough for an everyday phone, so I have a secondary prepaid SIM in it for testing and development until I feel that it can fully replace my real phone. However, I know there are also a lot more people that already use it as their only cellphone, and they are very happy with it. I wouldn't yet recommend the device for anyone who isn't a Linux junky/developer, but hopefully the platform will stabilize soon enough that I can change my mind.

All hail freedom!
I say cloud, you say grid (problem with original post resolved)
Same problem. I imagine a user reacting negatively: "This isn't about my emotional state; it's about your byzantine site navigation." Putting the feeling question into the context of my site eliminates that.
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Scientist at Work - Edward O. Wilson
Why Google Slows Down Acquired Companies
Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the mouse in 3-5 years
Google Docs Blog: Templates bring Docs to life
Gestation period for new users based on time/comments/karma:

A lot of spam/spammy submissions are submitted by new users, users that create an account just to submit these links. I guess a lot of them do it to generate google juice since google indexes the site in minutes.

In addition, the number of relevant submissions are not see on the new page thereby reducing the quality of the content on the forum.

Can you introduce a gestation period for new users -- this could be based on number of days since they created their registration or the number of comments or their karma. Once they pass this threshold, these users can submit stories.
In Sync to Pierce the Cloud
Let me second that. A few months ago I was looking at Ruby, Python, and MzScheme's GCs, and I found that Ruby code was hardest to read and badly commented. Python, on the other hand, was very nicely written and commented.

Lua too, but Lua also has the advantage of being so tiny it's easier to read.
> 5. Can I exercise my unvested options early?

Your answer here is completely unclear to me. I understand you don't want to give out legal/money advice, but can you at least explain the capital gains thing you were talking about.

I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, so I don't know what the tax/legal issues are with cashing out and/or capital gains, nor it's "clock". But I do have stock options that are vesting and I do have to decide if I want to exercise them early, or not. When this issue first came up, no one knew or seemed to think there was any difference between exercising the options and not exercising the options. I did it because everyone else did it. Probably a bad idea, huh?
I think Pandora also betters last.fm in the PC "music war". For me at least, Last.fm hasn't really been able to consistently find songs I like, and after a while strayed off into stuff I didn't. Pandora on the other hand, caught most of my preferences within a day or two and actually gives music I like.
How does phone verification work with customers who are deaf? Does the API could provide an option where the computer calling the customer plays Baudot code [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code] instead of speaking the numbers in English?
Can you please write a post that covers this? Thanks, Nivi!
Here Come the Featuretisements
Lately, biology and neuroscience have been doing amazing things. Somehow I feel this is a start of a breakthrough as big as the invention of the computer, not just because it allows people to do so much more, but also because it opens up whole new branches of science. (Such as, for example, genetics as a first).
SCO vs Novell case judgement: SCO owes Novell $2.5M plus interest
I'm not a lawyer, but I can help to answer this. Culled from:

http://www.efmoody.com/planning/options.html

Here's the deal: you want the gain in stock value to be taxed as "long term capital gains", which is a much lower tax rate (~15%) than as income tax (~30%).

To do this, you need to sell the stock that you purchased with the options at least 2 years after you received the options and at least one year after you exercised the option.

What many people do is purchase options to 'start the clock' on that one year window.

A much more complex way of doing this, which I've been on the receiving end of, is to grant your employees their options immediately upon them joining and have an agreement where the company can repurchase them (at no cost to the company). The amount that the company can repurchase is reduced each month.
This reminds me of the classic "Form and Function" ideal

> He admits that every stable object is really a “fiction” posited by the operations of imagination and sentiment. We always “bestow on the objects a greater regularity than what is observed in our mere perceptions”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-aesthetics/
Tolstoy!
Then they wouldn't have data form non-graduate hires, isn't it obvious?
I believe that "lottery ticket" thinking is really dangerous.

It leads to making really awful financial decisions. At many companies, people don't do enough math to realize how little their options are worth. And so slog it out for years thinking it is a good deal.

And many companies will argue that paying below market is justified because they're giving you options. If you do the math, you might find out that the lottery ticket, spread out over 4 years, diluted by liquidity preferences and successive rounds don't come close to the aggregate bonuses from a 'regular' job.

True story:

At my last startup, as I was leaving, I created a spreadsheet that took everything into account (liq. pref., multiple rounds, etc.) so you could plug in the options you had and an acquisition price and see what you'd make.

I went and showed it to some folks to make sure I'd done all of the crazy math right. It turns out that

a. No one quite knew, because

b. No one else had done it

and that

c. Everyone wanted a copy of the spreadsheet
I stand corrected. And since I corrected the original, I'm noting here that I originally had "Dostoevsky."