skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Female hacker/startup looking for copyright advice
Hi all - I'm working on dance choreography site. My vision is in the slogan, "Take a Choreo, Leave a Choreo": users will upload their original choreography, and in return, be able to freely user others' dance choreography - for recitals, dance workouts, small productions, etc. I'm a dance enthusiast and teach a few Zumba classes for fun; I started this site because I wanted something like this for myself.

Here's the link to my rudimentary prototype: http://choreoshare.com/ . There's no choreography on it yet, because I haven't figured out the legal issues...

Specifically - for the videos to really be useful, most of the choreography will need copyrighted audio in the background (Livin' La Vida Loca, for instance), so that people can tell what's happening on particular beats. There's a TON of choreo, with audio, on YouTube; I'm not exactly sure how they do this legally (or if they do).

So, a few questions... one, does anyone know of a way to legally include copyrighted audio in choreography videos, short of paying giant royalties? Is there a chance this falls under "fair use" laws, since the videos are meant for teaching purposes? Finally, does anyone have any experience with or knowledge about altering tracks to make them legal? For instance, the choreo could still be useful if it were synthesized somehow, or missing beats, and had just enough of the original structure to show the user how the choreography is intended to line up with points in the song...

Or, does the burden of providing legal videos lay enough on the user that I could start to promote the site before resolving all the potential legal issues? Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission and go forth boldly, or watch my back?

Many thanks for any advice you can give me. (: - A female hacker
Initial thoughts:

- show me some functionality or it didn't happen

- no examples of how it works?

- generally hostile atmosphere (you're priming with words like "sucks" and "argue", which are negative) - doesn't look fun
Twitter as well. Craigslist is the only one that I can find that styles itself in lowercase text outside of the logo, and even this is ignored by the press.

My advice: don't get cute with styling. Yahoo! may look clever the first time you write it, but most people outside of the company are still going to write it as Yahoo anyway.

If you want some funky styling in the logo, go for it. But when it comes to written text, stick to the basics.
Creative Candy Packaging
Creative Candy Packaging
Mapfaire redesigned with HN feedback, now back for more
I own a Galaxy Spica (i5700). I honestly dont like a "Big Screen Android".
Castletown Donkey Derby 1994 - a time now passed & quiet funny to boot
As I said earlier: Email me if you really, really need to know more.
Missing Google Exec's Last Tweet From Egypt: "We Are All Ready To Die"
> as long as you have your email

Email is exactly the same as OpenID in this regard. Your forgot-which-OpenID-was-used could be compared to forgetting which email address was used. And this is, actually, popular. It's just a hype that everyone's talking about OpenID - totally forgetting that traditional systems have the same problems.

If you're doing it right - by having one primary OpenID URI (per identity) - you won't really forget what your OpenID is.

> Most users aren't going to read that stuff.

Nor passwords, nor OpenID were ever intended to work around this kind of problems. And I doubt there's any solution at all. Users will always forget all sort of things, use and reuse totally insecure passwords, keep their backdoor open wide with silly "password recovery" questions anyone could guess, leak all kinds of sensitive information and whatever else they could do wrong.

Sadly, "OpenID sucks" became a meme. And this is the main reason why OpenID suck now.
Ask HN: Are we using too much internet? (Bell & Rogers seem to think so)
After reading this short article, the last paragraph really stood out to me:

"The CRTC has agreed with arguments from large ISPs such as Bell and Rogers Communications that usage-based billing is a way to encourage heavy users to reduce their usage. The major internet providers, including cable giant Rogers, had argued that it is needed to deal with booming online traffic and increased network congestion as people do more online — including downloading music and watching movies and television programs."

http://bit.ly/i9R1NP

So are we (Canadians) using too much internet? Or have Bell and Rogers just found another way to make us pay even more for for an essential service? (well at least I'd consider internet "essential")
This was my fault. GitHub was never messed up.
It turns out that GitHub didn't lose any of my commits. All future readers should ignore my comments on this.
http://mattswanson.org.nyud.net/corporate-stereotypes-and-wh...
2RedBeans Is A JDate For Chinese-Americans
Natalia Oberti Noguera PipelineFund Building Community for Female Entrepreneurs
If the author wants the traffic to go through his site (once he gets a mirror up), just leave a comment and I'll delete the above copy.
YC isn't accepting this money. YC doesn't seem to be saying 10-20k is not enough to startup. This money is being offered directly to YC companies and if I've followed the news correctly there is no contract or formal agreement between these investors and YC.

That being said, I think YC has probably funded startups knowing that they would need far far more than 20k to properly startup. That's what demo day is for.
The "solvent..." part of that assertion isn't severable from the "... without changes to..." part.
I think a better question should be "Are you applying to YC with a non-web idea now that there is 150k on the table?" YC has experience with some hardware projects, but most are web-based companies that have low overhead. The previous 17k was barely enough to fund web development, let alone non-web software.

I'd expect to see much more Wattvisions and Wakemates in the future, and more B2B software with a longer, difficult selling curve. The founders will likely be drawing the same thin salaries at first in these situations, and the extra cash will go to product and customer development.
Cloud Government
I think HFT is quite hard and challenging for individuals. I won't feel comfortable trading huge amounts of money that can disappear in a second because of an algo mistake.

I'm looking for some tutorials and may be strategies to make money from Forex. Anyone know a good blog or book?
is the failure rate of startups so high because a lot of the people involved are inexperienced?

will the 150K improve the success rate by motivating more experienced people to join?
The contention is that Netscape was part of the last bubble and Facebook could be part of a new bubble, but that the constant focus for developers should be on achieving their goals and not getting sidetracked by the power of these trends. Seems pretty coherent to me.
Identity Theft - Solutions and Insurance
Identity theft is an enormous problem, so what are the solutions? Who's working on something that practically everybody who uses the internet should consider looking into?

Dave Ramsey suggests that as far as he knows the only real insurance is of course the one he worked with Zander Insurance to create: http://www.zanderins.com/idtheft/idtheft.aspx

What are the options for people looking for protection and awareness regarding their identity and how it's used worldwide?
Windows Mobile beats Windows Phone
Heads of states say a lot of things they never do.
YC isn't accepting money.

They called a meeting to tell their startups that Yuri will be offering this deal to each of them.

I don't think this changes much. Most YC companies get funding anyway after the program. This is yet another great opportunity YC's startups.
Site went down for a moment there...bluehost to the rescue.

The main issues revolve around some topics I hadn't seen elsewhere.

1) Will Paul's talent filter function work as the influx of applicants grows? One poster suggested he doesn't think a 3x is possible. I disagree.

2) What happens when older, more seasoned folks see this? Will they see this reduction of risk as the opportunity they have been waiting for to start something? Don't underestimate the power of "what if" and "what could have been" for people who have been working for 10+ years, but kids/mortgage got in the way of starting something.

3) What will the angel response be? Offering more money in the next go round isn't the right answer. Yuri have removed the risk premium from angel investing. That's huge.

4) Is it possible that there is too much of a choke point, now, for talent selection for YC? Will the ecosystem continue to flourish, or does it run the risk of stagnation, because the selection criteria doesn't allow for random mutation?

5) Will financial engineering take hold? With a few players doing this, things could get messy.
I second tptacek. This is one of the most effective places we have found candidates - we just hired our 3rd person from HN. Every candidate that has approached us through HN has been thoughtful and intelligent - although obviously not everyone is a match for what we are working on. Certainly I can offer anyone from here a actual person to talk to about your background and interests and what we are working on.
Ask HN: Why do startups need so much money?
Before I get downvoted for this, let me explain myself. This is an honest question that has really been bothering me - especially lately, with all of the Yuri/YC hype. When I think of a typical tech startup, I picture of a handful of brilliant fresh-out-of-college guys that are passionate about making things and solving problems [I know this may not describe the majority of startups these days, but it's all you hear about in the media so let's stick with it for the sake of this discussion. Obviously the expenses are significantly higher when founders have families to support, mortgages to pay, etc.]

Anyway, I happen to be one of these guys (though a single founder), so I know exactly how much it really costs to get by on your own - here's some perspective. I live in a cheap 5-bedroom apartment on a college campus (Champaign-Urbana IL) and drive a gas guzzling SUV (approx 11mpg). Entertainment is negligible since I don't drink and rarely go to movies and such (that's all there is to do around here). My combined expenses for rent, food, gas, and bills sits right around $600/mo. I don't have a job, so for now, all of this is being paid for with the remainder of student loads and whatever I can scrape up. I am fortunate enough to have supportive parents that are covering my insurance and phone bill (family packages) for the time being. Even then, my total expenses should come in below $1000/mo.

So, back to these other young startup founders. I think it's safe to assume that their circumstances are similar to my own, though I realize that cost of living is higher in the valley - especially rent. I am only focusing on living expenses because they account for the vast majority of expenses for young startup founders. Most YC startups say that almost all of their YC seed money goes toward rent, food and bills. They rarely outsource work, do almost everything in-house, and usually wait several months or even a year before hiring other employees. Server costs are minimal and offices non-existent.

Knowing that, I can't imagine the need for so much money. Every day I read about startups that ran out of money and just couldn't keep going, but honestly - how much money do they really need? Maybe I am naive, but young founders have the extraordinary advantage of minimal expenses and plenty of time and energy, so I don't see how this is possible. Why do founders need hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to "extend the runway"? I'm pretty sure I could live on that kind of money for several years.
Intel recalls Sandy Bridge chipset after flaws are found
Though my 'spam' tends to be of much greater quality than what most of the stuff BHW sort of people produce

You threw a vitamin pill into a bucket of mud?
Whew. It's working again!
The first? LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/) forked away from OpenOffice, it has released 3.3 LibreOffice, and is slated to replace OpenOffice in many distros' next releases, including Ubuntu.

I just replaced OO with LO, and had the pleasure of answering the uninstallation survey when I uninstalled OO. "Reason for uninstalling" was my tiny, tiny fist-let shaken at The Man.
Graphene transistor with 1000 times higher on/off switching ratio
The formulae themselves are not visible, so it takes a lot of mousing around to convince yourself the cells do what you think they should

To toggle formulae visibility in Excel hit: ctrl+tilde(~)
the things like olap and intentional denormalization is not that dba are against of.

by denormalization i didnt mean keeping xml in a clob, but keeping the values in a row as if several tables are already joined into one wide table, thus eliminating the need in joins.
Performance benchmarking a node.js backend
Yeah, but Skype launches by default on system boot up (on Windows, at least, assuming a next->...->next->Finish install)
The Perfect Cubicle
My understanding is that seeking funding was taking up large amounts of time at YC, and that the belief was that the time could be better spent improving the products, pivoting, gaining customers, etc. It looks like providing funding will allow PG and company to focus more on nutruring and improving entrepreneurial teams than connecting them with funding.
Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) is hiring across all organizations: http://www.salesforce.com/company/careers/

But we have an immediate need for a badass developer on our Product Marketing Demos team. We regularly use the latest technologies and platforms to build product prototypes, demonstrations, and visualizations that effectively communicate our product line.

To give you an idea, in the past three months alone, our team has used Ruby, Coffeescript, Backbone, Raphael, Java/Android, and Obj-C/iOS to build apps demoed across the world in front of over 30,000 people at our global events.

So if you like experimenting with upcoming technologies and want to make that part of your job description, email me at gopal.patel@salesforce.com

...And we work in downtown SF right along the embarcadero -- some of the best views of the bay and city.
1M/1M: A Policy Suggestion To President Obama
How to Read a Paper
Touch screens suck in those environments.

We used to use a fancy touchscreen gadget in mining - where everything is covered in water, oid, dust and you wear gloves - genius idea!
YC isn't accepting anything; YC startups are accepting the investment. Pg addressed this in another thread [1].

It is quite obvious that, assuming your desire is to quickly scale your startup, $10-20k isn't enough. That's why YC has always had demo day, the goal of which is to secure investment. Even still, that day will remain important; Yuri didn't change that.

As an answer to your second line of questioning: Have you ever considered the cash value of "free" resources offered to YC companies? YC could just invest a lot of money, or they could provide mentorship opportunities and resources. They chose the latter (obviously), and have had clear success in doing so.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156560\

[edit] Haha... three other posts in the time it took me to find pg's response...
Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so eventually the bananas go bad....

What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that will yell at you to east the tomatoes before they go bad.
So the hoster doesn't actually need to take the content down right away, but within 72 hours? That is, if the customer files the DMCA challenge within 72h, then the content will have always remained up? My questions here are with regard to continuity of availability.
You mean "Time Trax": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106154/

Timecop was a Van Damme movie.
Kammeyer Development is looking for iOS, Android, and Java developers to help us work on transforming physician to physician communication. Must be local to Austin, TX, and we will start on an hourly contract basis. Contact kammeyer at kammeyer.org.
Charting iPad interaction with fingerprints
I don't know much about browser-side javascript, but unless they're doing something really weird in the event loop I believe the comments

// this might execute before the $.get() above is complete

and

// something additional to execute upon success, which might, or might not,
// have fired by now. With $.ajax deferreds built-in, it doesn't matter.

are misleading. In fact, the first comment should read "this will execute before the $.get() above is complete" and the second one should read "which will not have fired yet".

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on this.
because document stores store documents ready to be consumed by an app. these documents are tree-like, not tabular: jsons or xmls
Maybe not H&R Block, but Intuit (TurboTax) sure does...

Why Can’t the I.R.S. Help Fill in the Blanks?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/business/24digi.html?_r=1

Intuit's end-run
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/21/opinion/la-oe-ventry...
But you have to remember that out of that bubble came a lot of companies that also provided value. Google came out of it (Google was from the last era, not this one). Akamai came out of it. VMWare came out of it.

The more things seem different, the more they're the same.

The big diff between now and then was that the first era was all about IPOs. Now its all about acquisition. I personally think the acquisition route is more ethical, since presumably the companies buying understand that your company may never be worth $X on its own, but strategically may be valuable. Whereas the IPO route seem like more of a Ponzi scheme.
Sorry, I mean if your local ISP was cut off, your satellite isp might not be. Eg if you were in Egypt now and the government cuts off all Egyptian isps, then you can still use your satellite phone to dial into your American isp. Satellite isps mean you could be on the different side of the planet from your iap
Nick - congrats on getting something out the door. We have a nanny and I don't think we would use this application for her. It's possible that we are in the minority, but we have had her for almost 5 years and she knows what needs to be done. It's pretty rare for us to ask anything out of the ordinary - certainly not prevalent enough to require an app to manage it.

HOWEVER - as a family, we could ABSOLUTELY use something like this. We have a big family - and a lot is expected of each of us. We have kids that aren't in school yet, and kids that are in high school. Keeping things straight is a real pain in the arse.

My wife should be able to view my schedule, or a family schedule, etc... Each member would be responsible for updating their calendar. Todo's can be tasked to whomever - and tracked - just like reminders. Heck, I would even like to see a chore-chart type thing in an app like this where it creates some todo's based on recurring chores.

So, this doesn't really answer your question - but maybe it could expand your market a bit!

To answer your question: How about a different approach. Our nanny doesn't have a smart phone - so mobile or iphone/android is out of the question. But she can get sms messages. How about making adding sms support to what you already have using a library like twilio to support uni or bi-directional updates/notifications? Nanny gets notified and can reply to txt or whatever but the website is always available for additional interface/views/etc...

Well, just an idea. If you expanded into the "family" concept, I would definitely recommend an iphone (smart phone) approach over mobile web because of the enhanced notifications and alerts and whatnot offered by native apps.

Hope this helps a little.
These kinds of things are why I hate papers with undetailed methods sections. Being too explicit in the methods section is obviously unnecessary (e.g. restating Bayes' theorem), however your assumptions and probablistic methods should at least be detailed in supplemental notes.
Github's Refreshed Pull Request Discussions
Anyone can offer that deal that Milner did. There is nothing stopping other angels other than that fact that nobody else seems to think it's a good idea. There's a fundamental disregard for risk in Milner's approach. They are paying the same price as later investors, but taking more risk. They are basically building in a down round just to get in the deal. Since when is a seed round worth more than a Series A?

I get that they're trying to get into every deal that's been prescreened, but the valuations are totally upside down by design. I may be missing something, but I the only way I can see this working out is if you're going to deploy lots more money on top of these notes, which are basically an expensive marketing scheme. That's a pretty big gamble. Perhaps $6 million is play money to these guys. In any case, I'd be more worried as an early stage VC than as an angel.

I can't put my finger on why I think that's a bad idea, but there problems just seem to follow people who are this free with their money. It smells of hubris, but it's not like these guys are pikers.
Also, the "powered by" link is taking up a column of space the whole height of the page. I was clicking on one of the fields, and it redirected me to the Wufoo home page.

If you can add inline CSS to the "powertiny" link element ... specifically, position:absolute;right:0;bottom:0; it should get it out of the way.
One of the things that most puts me off from using spreadsheets is the difficulty of validating calculations.

A very good friend of mine worked for a major aerospace company that used Excel spreadsheets for almost all engineering. I'd say the biggest problem is that if you're doing important calculations in Excel, then you're completely ignorant of the last 40 years of research into defect reduction and detection in computer science. That ignorance is not completely unintentional either: there were a lot of people who literally pride themselves on not being like the dumb computer folks.

Plus, if spreadsheets are your tool, you likely have very bad tools. So when you make a spreadsheet to run the power budget for satellite A, the obvious thing to do when satellite B comes up for development is to copy the spreadsheet containing the analysis from sat A, change the filename and bury it somewhere on the shared network drive. Then, if you find a defect in the spreadsheet, you have no way of tracking which copies have that same defect because they're scattered all over the shared drive.

In any event, my friend found tons of bugs in spreadsheets, many of which were actually important. Probably the best bug involved a power budget for satellites that inverted electrical current so instead of comparing current to a max theoretical current value, it compared 1/current to the max value.
My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.
Google Executive Missing in Wake of Egypt Protests
you updated your post and i am waiting people here at hacker news to criticize your benchmark setup.

maybe i missed smth but i still saw only the suggestion for you now send your benchmark to mongodb guys.

edit: please discard, now i see there they say you should include joins to your clustrix benchmark. waiting for the reply