skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks! I didn't find out about Subsonic until just recently, but it looks like it needs native apps on mobile. I was trying to go as close to a pure web browser based application as I could. Scratching an itch, I guess :)
History is a good thing to study. As I mentioned in a previous post, JWZ was one of the few at the time that were prolific in writing about their experiences.

I haven't seen anywhere near the same set of stories in "modern" companies like Facebook, Google, or Twitter. We do get the occasional nugget like how Instagram started or how Flickr came about as not being the original idea.

John Ramey w/ iSocket is one that has been good about talking about his current process. But a lot of times, stories of "start up experiences" aren't much more than "lolz, i was up all week hackin' on some ruby, can you rate my site?".

Fact is, writings like JWZs should be brought up now and then. I wonder who the equivalents from the last couple of years would be.
That would be excellent. How can I confirm this?
I'd go one further .... it was the first post on TC in a very long time that was genuinely interesting full stop.
Yes, and thank you so much for doing this pg!
FYI: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gs...
And the new QtScript, and a bunch of awesome vector drawing stuff behind the scenes (IIRC -- not sure when that was exactly).
I don't know the answer to your question, but it may be worthwhile to post it on Quora as well.

Good luck finding your answer, and congrats on the funding offer.
I wrote this on another comment of yours. This would be great. How can I confirm this?
This combined with MicroXP resulted in a ~500MB VirtualBox image with IE6,7,8 -- very impressive.
Internet, Facebook blackout hits Algeria as protests gain strength
One of the biggest problems running a software company is getting hoodwinked by a developer, because they might handwave a problem away.

The second problem is one of scalability.

How does a leader make sure that the technical decisions are correct without having to learn very deeply about it?

One is by constantly probing for weaknesses and see if people have difficulty defending their choices, and seeing if the trade offs were reasonable.

The second is to develop a fierce reputation so that the person is sufficiently prepared before presenting his thesis.
Eighth Circuit declares RAZR a computer under federal law
- Is the investor a high net-worth individual?

- I would not get a friend attorney even if he has experience with start-ups. Talk the the established law firms and they may be able to defer fees. That way you can be sure that you got the 'gotcha's'

- Follow up with portfolio companies that the investor recommends but also others whom he invested in but did not recommend. you might learn more in the later case
IP disputes are drain on innovation in the sense of opportunity cost. When Google spends money on lawyers, it can't spend that money on engineers. Also, patent attorneys are smart people who, instead of being employed to create new technology, are employed to argue about existing technology.

>> I don't see any evidence that the US is failing to innovate . . .
We're discussing how innovation can happen more efficiently.
Glad to see the folks at SEOMoz getting a hat tip, albeit indirectly. This is the tool that the researcher used to discover JCP's links:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses - Amar Bhide
You get what you pay for. Google 'pays' for links; that's what they get. Lots of links. Substituting an algorithm for human judgment in determining a page's value works until its used long enough to affect and skew people's behavior. Competition in the search and ranking field is desperately needed in the short run, and AI that can directly recognize what we actually want to measure: content value, in the long run. When an AI can only be fooled by spam pages so good that humans like the pages, too, we're there.
Telerik Razor View Converter
Guy commits his genome to Github, smartass forks and issues a pull request
they're just propaganda to support what is essentially a government campaign to poison the elderly and chronic pain patients.

The government is trying to murder the elderly with drug programs? This is almost a Godwin, but much more silly.
Excellent group of advisors and some super smart talented teammates. Looking forward to seeing this as a success! go Bjoern and team!
I'd be very interested to know how he got it in the first place.
"This is almost a Godwin, but much more silly."

You want me to link to the obituaries?

Almost 1 in 3 Americans die from drug use or drug-related causes, and I really don't find that silly at all.

500,000 from tobacco and second-hand smoke. 106,000 from adverse reactions to prescription drugs in hospitals. 85,000 from alcohol and alcohol-related fatalities. 17,000 from illicit drugs. 7,500 from NSAIDs. 4,000 from HIV acquired from needle sharing, etc.

That means if we keep doing what we're doing now, if we don't change our policy on drugs, then of the 310 million Americans currently alive, at least 93 million will die from drug use.

Given the average US lifespan of 77, that's a full holocaust every 7.5 years. Obviously not every last death is avoidable, but the overwhelming majority of them are.

The ONLY solution is real education based on science, not propaganda. The drug war makes this completely impossible by A) banning science B) banning education C) banning treatment.

The fact is that drug addiction has nothing to do with the molecule, and so the way we are treating 'addiction' actually makes the problem vastly worse:

http://www.wpr.org/book/100307a.cfm

http://www.nijc.org/pdfs/Subject%20Matter%20Articles/Drugs%2...

So if this sounds like a Godwin argument, that's probably because the war on drugs is responsible for vastly more deaths than the holocaust.
While these games can be fun, you have to avoid the "empty universe" problem. Minecraft-like play, where you have a sandbox in which you create all sorts of crazy things is good, but for any game where you're trying to put a story in there, the sheer emptiness and banality of games where the content is spread too thinly will ruin the good parts of a game.

Players are really good at spotting patterns, so you have to be careful of the drudgery of having them quest to kill X tribbles for $reason all the time.

Anyhow, good luck with your game. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to make good procedurally generated content that haven't been fully explored yet and I hope you find some of them :)
I see your point, and agree that you can't copyright an algorithm.
After having read the production guide for this, it seems like the sort of book that paper (or perhaps a full blown desktop app) was designed for. The printing process is pretty special with photographic levels of DPI (as compared to typical book printing).

I'm seriously considering buying a copy ("copy" sounds like a ridiculous word for a book like this, no? ;-)) even though I'm not particularly interested in cooking..
I deleted it because I didn't think it was worth expanding on to sufficiently make the point in this place. I don't claim to be an expert in this field, I simply wanted to point out that as I understood it, grellas was not fundamentally misunderstanding the fundamentals of the law, as alexqgb claims. In this sense, the existence of a contrary view (putting aside whether this paper is contrary) would in part be a contradiction to alexqgb's point about grellas. If an article in a respected law review did agree with grellas, alexqgb would certainly be in error to make the claims about grellas that he does. I will accept that I may have made an error in my analysis. Although I'm not convinced I misread the above paper, I don't wish to spend the rest of my night defending this in some likely to not be read comment thread :-). If I was unfair to you, alexqgb, I'm sorry.

To provide a brief defense of what I wrote, the paper I cited heavily relies on Lockean property theory in defence of IP, which goes against the idea of IP laws being designed to give intangible goods with commercial value. Like tangible property laws, intangible property laws are designed to protect that which is rightfully yours as a result of your labor, as I understand it.

For example, "If a man establishes a business and makes it valuable by his skill and attention,
the good will of that business is recognized by the law as property. If he adopts and publicly uses a trade mark, he has a remedy, either at law or in equity, against those who undertake to use it without his permission." (2022, quotation of 1984 court case). The man running the business created the commercial value, which is then protected by the government (and therefore, yes, more valuable).

And, "he need not argue that the right of the inventor is a high property; it is the fruit of his mind—it belongs to him more than any other property—he does not inherit it—he takes it by no man’s gift—it peculiarly belongs to him, and
he ought to be protected in the enjoyment of it." (2023, quotation from 1824 in the House of Representatives)

"Circuit Justice Grier and District Judge Dickerson found Webster’s argument compelling because they and other jurists agreed with the Lockean principle that the patent laws secure an inventor’s right to “enjoy the fruits of his invention.” " (2024, referring to an 1871 court case). And what are the fruits of his invention if not, at least in part, commercial value?

Interestingly, the author then notes that the use of identifying patent infringers as pirates "who stole from inventors the valuable fruits of their labors" goes back to 19th century courts.

To me, this does not sound like "IP laws are designed to ENDOW intangible goods with commercial value by creating artificial scarcities via sanctioned monopolies." But perhaps I'll leave this to the legal experts now.
Completely off-topic, but: There is a better review in the WSJ today but I can't link to it.
With music and books, there is always the analog hole and then once one good copy is made, it can be duplicated forever. Also they are both naturally suited for self contained offline access which is less costly and cumbersome than requiring a network connection. So I think the parent poster is right and copy protection will not be successful in ebooks just as it was not with digital music files.
Matt Cutts tweets out that Google algorithm had started to work after he was notified about the SEO practices by NYT.

What I dont understand:

1) Since the search results disappeared after it was brought to Google's attention, this was a manual effort. Matt makes it sound as if the automated algorithm removed the offending sites.

2) What is the world does 'started to work' mean ? Was it 'not working' earlier ?
Mimeo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig

Code Rush documentary from PBS. Details 98-99 when Netscape released their source.
A UK supermarket was banned from selling liquor chocolates outside licencing hours!
"The thought of Gates and Allen as the godfathers of a hacking subculture that has cost Microsoft and the world overall hundreds of billions of dollars does indeed boggle the mind."

Lulwat? Talk about somebody not knowing their history.
If copyright doesn't play into it, then I would agree Sony shouldn't be able to prosecute.
The Kindle is soooo much better for reading. Less eye strain, much lighter, amazing battery life, it's frickin $140, free news subscriptions with Calibre open source software. The 3rd generation has lots of nice improvements, most importantly in page turn time and contrast. At least try one if you haven't already.
Narrative Essay Writing Guidelines
Writing a narrative essay is an easy task. It is a simple telling of a story. Therefore, when students are assigned the narrative essay they should concentrate mostly on the manner in which they will tell their story. This will make it interesting to the reader.
Its not at all silly. Its an example of the law of untended consequences.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Unintended_co...
The intent isn't to "poison the elderly and chronic pain patients" but it is the effect, and has been going on long enough, that like all the other unintended consequences of TWOD, are ignored by the Federal bureaucracy that benefits from it.
Personalized Marketing is Changing, Are You Ready?
Depends what role obviously. If your doing research into compliers, or programming language semantics or something then programming will be required.
Very nice, I'll be setting this up on my server later tonight.
Dwarf Fortress is one heck of a game.

You can build a microcline "bathtub" with ramps made of cat soap, have an insane noble who demands nickle silver statues in their bedroom, or have a dwarf go axe crazy because you couldn't supply the silk cloth they needed to complete their artifact earring.

Someone killed the most fearsome monster in the game, a Bronze Colossus, by throwing a fluffy wambler at it (essentially, a rabbit-like creature), people power complex traps with perpetual-motion waterwheels, and one guy walled off the entire map and did a mess of complex undersea engineering and trapping to capture and breed the only two sea monsters in his world, so that he could slaughter their children to make items out of their very expensive bones.

Another person built a fluid-logic CPU (using magma as the fluid), and there's a calculator with a nice numeric display (again, using magma) set so that if you trigger an overflow, the magma literally overflows...

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/User:BaronW#The_Almighty_D...

He says it took 75,368 mechanisms and 40,000 power to create that.

I should mention, too, that it has a procedurally generated history for each world, that each dwarf has its own preferences, the world itself is generated randomly according to certain user-controlled parameters, etc. Not many roguelikes can legitimately stress a modern computer's CPU in spite of having reasonably efficient programming.
XHPy: XHP for Python
If you're reading HN on an iPhone, I built an app with a better experience:

http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews
Texas Governor's call for $10,000 bachelor's degrees stumps educators
Sad to see an HN thread full of conspiracy theories and so little actual science.

Believe it or not, acetaminophen is an effective analgesic, and combined with hydrocodone it provides synergistic pain relief without any increase in side effects over the use of either agent alone. Here's a peer-reviewed 1980 study from the UK showing just that:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1430165/

Private drug companies didn't pursue testing & selling hydrocodone/APAP in combined form because the government hates drug users. They did so because they can market a highly potent form of pain control. Not everything in life is a government conspiracy!
When Democracy Weakens
Groupon and Facebook valuations: A new paradigm or return to insanity?
> There is even some research suggesting that up to 50% of all infant mortality may be the result of marijuana deficiency.

I was going to ask what you're smoking, but then I realized that was a dumb question. :-)

I'm all for using pot for medicinal (and recreational) uses, but I think you've crossed the line from advocacy to cheerleading. Believe me when I say that if pot did all of the things you claim, I'd be in perfect health.
Patient-Derived Heart Cells Mimic Disease
I agree that it was obnoxious for Amazon to choose the mobi format instead of epub, but in practice it's not a big deal. I use the open source Calibre program. Among other things it will translate among mobi, epub, pdf and a bunch of other formats. There is really no effort involved. You just hit OK when it asks whether to convert the book before transferring it.

You can also email an epub to Amazon and it will come back immediately in Kindle format and this method also works well. There is no charge for wifi but there is a charge for cellular delivery.

I think the Kindle is admirably compatible with third party publishers or self published material, much more than Apple's locked down and toll collected ecosystem.
This is something a lot of people don't always see. For example, I spent 20 hours building a website and doing all the SEO, link generation,etc and then just let it sit. It had a bunch of fake products and now 2 or 3 months later people are now trying to place orders.

Now I can start devoting time to it and build out the infrastructure to support the website and business. I didn't jump and quit my job to see if it will work.

At the end of the day, when the money runs out you have to get a real job. The goal should be to take small-risk big-reward plays and lots of them until something catches.
On a more serious note...

I'm in Seattle, and I've worked with a lot of ex-Microsoft people on various projects. I find that they are often committed to the Microsoft way of doing things, which is often appropriate for a huge software company, but wildly inappropriate for a small startup.
The safest change to make to a stable system is the smallest change possible.
The Official Web Site of Physics Ball 3
Sony's private key is, essentially, a random number.

Apparently not random enough!

They essentially used this algorithm for their key material: http://xkcd.com/221/
Peter Alexander (84) gestorben
Peter Alexander (84) gestorben
Wien (dpa) - Entertainer Peter Alexander ist tot, berichtete die österreichische Agentur APA unter Berufung auf eine Sprecherin des Künstlers.
JWT: Java rich web framework (like Vaadin but with graceful degradation)
Webapps are ruining you life: Or, the future is micropayments
Originally submitted as .pdf.
California is a big place. Some parts of it are nice, but I definitely believe that "eight out of 20 spots on the publication's annual list of America's Most Miserable Cities are in California".
Yes. James Clark's most impressive work was nsgmls, which was a correct and comprehensive SGML parser (one of the few that ever existed). The annotated SGML standard was 688 pages long, and it was still missing huge amounts of critical information.

I know some truly amazing Lisp hackers—some of the most productive programmers I've ever met—who considered nsgmls an amazingly and slightly disturbing feat.
Here is the widgets gallery: http://jwt.emweb.be/jwt-gallery/gallery

Test it with disabled javascript too :)
Looking at the opportunity cost lost by four minutes of downtime without comparing it to the increased cost of not doing continuous deployment doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

Also, with huge monolithic deployments, the risk of much longer downtime is increased. If you can get deployments into non-events, you don't have as many catastrophic problems.
In borderlands, they generate content randomly: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Borderlands_%...

I gather games can be procedural by adding graphics and storylines. Simple missions like escort is easy with random positioning but complex linked ones can be created in tangent with name changes, speech style differences but encapsulating each quest part. Programming can largely go towards procedural generation.

The best part is that if a procedural generation game can be encapsulated pretty well, it can be a different game by supplanting different content and stories. Lots of potential. IAAWG :)
It was always really easy to "recover" these around the web, I've had all their old VMs for a couple years - including old Chrome and old Firefox.

IETester may be a better way though http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

But find me a better way to run IE9 though on XP than a vmware box running Windows7 ?

Two gigabyte image just to run IE9, yuk.
In what way might you host your OSS that would be more optimal for marketing yourself?
Hello…Hum Lallan Bol Rahe Hain 2010 Hindi Movie Watch Online
This thread is probably a good place to point to perhaps the best resource on the web for personal genomics today, the Genomes Unzipped blog http://www.genomesunzipped.org/

The authors have not only released their genetic information into the public domain (http://www.genomesunzipped.org/data), but also developed a custom genome browser (http://www.genomesunzipped.org/jbrowse), have an API, and a github repo for code they will release (https://github.com/genomesunzipped/genomesunzipped).

These are early days in personal genomics, so it's great to see others jumping in. Hopefully they all do so with some awareness, and folks like Genomes Unzipped do a great job in creating that awareness, and never forgetting that there is difficult, evolving science behind our understanding.
> Common misconception... a vacuum is actually an incredibly efficient insulator

Yes, it is even a very real problem for EVAs and spacecraft. One of the first things the Shuttle does is open up its radiators to help get rid of its internal heat. The astronauts doing EVA have a problem with heat too, they have to wear an internal cooling suit with fluid piped around their bodies.
Sounds like the Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland. There's a documentary about it where they talk a bit about the difficulties of marking the site in a way that won't just pique someone's curiosity after it's been forgotten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk

Unfortunately it's not a very good, or enlightening, documentary. Has its moments though.
very solid - Its important that this doesnt become SV-centric, or it will be flawed, given the immense startup activity in NY, CO, TX, WA, etc...
mixergy interview in the works?
Am I wrong, but are most leaks on Wikileaks US-centric information, or are they the only leaks that get press? We're talking about leaks that don't do much for freedom. Leaks that are a small part of a bigger political game.

Can Anonleaks or Anon people actually get and publish information about oppressive regimes, atrocities and cover-ups (maybe publish on wikileaks itself)... stuff that is unlikely to leak by whistle blowing attempts alone? Maybe content from the UN HRC, which they don't do anything about, and instead focus on Israel. Ugly corporate activities would be interesting: environmental and human catastrophes in mining, arms, energy and pharmaceutical businesses.

Imagine all the shit going on in China right now, or conspired manipulation of global financial markets, or rigged elections in supposed democracies: to me this is much more important than Aaron Barr's emails or the Stuxnet source.

It is clear that Anonymous are potent, but how can that be directed so that the Anon mind can be a powerful force for good: white-hat hacking with less ego and more conscience.
I've been doing continuous deployment (multiple production deployments per day) with an ajax-heavy application and have been doing a sort of rolling API change, where both the client and the server still function using the last generation's contract, so I rarely get a client request that the server can't deal with, or send a response that the client can't deal with. It doesn't work with every kind of change, but it has helped me.

Something that you could do (and I may wind up doing) is just having the page ask the server if it needs to refresh itself every so often.
> Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview

I wasn't sure wether it was the real name or a joke until I cliked on the link... For the record: it is the real name.
That was a great read. It gave me the desire to add my own information to the Net using the point and click interface on this hypermedia document.
Post a Copyrighted Picture, Face a $150,000 Lawsuit
It seems like you're creating a false dichotomy between rigorous QA and continuous deployment.

If you have a working and stable production system and multiple layers of test automation, rigorous QA gets easier, in that they only have to validate one change at a time.
Tofu roll, a basic framework for command line applications