skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FYI I'm in Canada and use Canadian Netflix. I have a 175GB cap on my cable internet (it's the biggest I could buy). This month I was sitting at about 120GB transfer with average netflix watching (several TV episodes a night and 1-2 movies a week), with about a week left.

Then I acidentally left the live.twit.tv stream on for about 12 hours. I haven't checked, but I expect to either have to heavily conserve bandwidth until my next bill, or get a friendly letter from my ISP. Offsite backups like carbonite or mozy are totally out of the question obviously. I had planned on downloading MS Server 2011, but I'll have to put that off until the next billing cycle too. I also rent and buy movies and TV shows off of itunes, but I have to balance that and my netflix watching so I don't go over.

Everything I do is 100% legal, yet without vigilance I could easily blow through my cap within two weeks. The phone company offers a slightly higher cap (you can get up to 250GB) but it's much slower. Welcome to life in Canada...
Where is the PiratePad fork code? I've been looking for a while because I am interested in the wiki features and can't find it.
Unsurprisingly, its author worked at Forth, Inc., long ago.
But if we don't use Pi, then how can the international brotherhood of Eta Beta Pi exist (hint, say it fast)?
... XMPP is a federated, distributed system

I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned SMTP. It's even more widely used than XMPP, and it's a great example of a federated system (as well as the big issue one has to deal with with open, anonymous federated systems: abuse/spam).

Setting up a SMTP (or XMPP) server is not easy, but no "average user" is going to do that. They'll use their ISP, or Gmail, or their work e-mail.
Have you ever heard the song Your Friend Wil by MC Frontalot, nerd rapper extraordinaire? Your post is basically a perfect two-line summary of the lyrics!

http://frontalot.com/index.php/?page=lyrics&lyricid=68
I'm flattered that the author thinks that Kongregate is one of Portland's great web companies, but that's only partially true. Our headquarters are in SF, and our engineering team is (largely) in Portland. Our investors are all from Silicon Valley or Seattle.

Which is more evidence for the author's point - there's not much of an investor community in Portland. I've idly wondered whether that's an opportunity - so far all I've done is set up an angel.co profile that says I'll talk to Portland startups.
I think that's the worst OpenBSD screenshot I've ever seen. Just look at http://www.google.com/images?q=openbsd+screenshot - OpenBSD will happily run pretty much any unix software including WMs. The only real issue is a lack of blobs like nvidia's X driver, and that's not only a disadvantage...
Moot at SXSW 2011 - the video
Happy PI day (in QiII, the future Lisp)
Ah, I read "any key" as referring to the delete/backspace keys. In retrospect it makes perfect sense.

To be honest, I still consider this efficient and consistent. Deletion and replacement are both operations that can be applied to selections. For that matter, so is applying a regex, but I'm revealing too much about my editor preferences to have any stake in "sensible UI". ;-)
Droolworthy indeed! This point completely took me by surprise. For so many of us stuck in immigration limbo, this should make taking a leap well within reach.

I was always of the opinion that there are thousands of talented could-be-entrepreneurs (grad students et al) in our own backyard who have no way to start a company. There had to be a way to make it easy for them, without reliance on employer visas and green cards.
Spinner Optic Illusions
I'm not sure you're actually being honest in your examples. Carl Sagan, sure, but Feynman was rumored to be extremely arrogant in his technical discussions. Linus is known for his giant flames on the mailing list. Dijkstra was impolite at best.

Maybe we just think our idols were always nice and helpful because we want them to be?
A senator takes blogger's opinion into account and revises the legislation? That's how a democracy should work.

I'm really impressed (and the revised conditions seem very reasonable, too).
From the looks of it, the CSS3 and NSColor/UIColor formats.
Well, the default X installation really does look that ugly. I don't think anyone doesn't customize it at least a little, though (it's fvwm, which can actually look totally fine if you tweak it a little.)
I bought this app. Here's why it's better than DigitalColor Meter:

* The ability to have a global shortcut to activate it, and it hides nicely in the menu bar when you don't need it.

* The magnification loupe follows your cursor, so you don't have to keep swinging your head back and forth to see where you are.

* You can adjust the size of the loupe.

* You can set two formats for color copying, and use one with Cmd+C and the other with Cmd+Opt+C.

* It keeps a history of colors you've copied.

* It works properly when you screen zoom with Ctrl+Mousewheel.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to expect someone to use an available library for parsing dates.

It's not a terribly good example.

There are cases where "reinventing the wheel," is simply an ignorant statement. Perhaps the system in question has developed semantics for working with date-based data that the grammar of the existing date-parsing library's API doesn't match well with. This extremely contrived example may force the developers to write a lot of code for working around those inconsistencies which themselves can lead to bugs and maintenence headaches in the future.

What if your lack-wit developer who wrote his own date-parsing library saw these problems and wrote a library whose API resolved them? Or perhaps in another scenario the existing libraries are simply inefficient for some metric of acceptable performance in your system. Maybe this ignorant developer simply writes a better library that allows you to do more.

Either way, there is reason to believe that either scenario is valid. It is likely that writing a date parsing library is not going to be terribly useful. That doesn't mean it's impossible and so one must be willing to evaluate evidence and draw conclusions rather than hide behind blanket statements.

What I'm really talking about is the attitude people have when they think someone is "reinventing the wheel." While some people are helpful and will politely point out that there are existing date-parsing libraries, there are a great many more it seems who will assume that the person who is "reinventing the wheel" is a clueless loser who wouldn't make such a "stupid mistake" if they were worth their salt. That kind of reaction isn't helpful at all.
Great - We'd love to hear what you think. Email us at support@tellfi.com with questions or suggestions.
Great way to unlock innovation. No more of spending your 20's trying to get a green card.
Bon Jovi slams Jobs for 'killing' music‎
While I generally agree with the statement, my personal experience says that hardcore drilling is the most effective way of teaching sometimes.
> So they replaced a generic roff system with a specialized man page viewer? Why?

Because no one uses roff format for anything other than man pages any more. And even then, it's extremely common to use it only as "object code", output from some higher level/cleaner input format (perldoc, pydoc, docbook/asciidoc). I like that they have high level output formats (pdf, html, ascii) and hope that the package becomes an option in Debian at some point.
I've been thinking about building an analytics package geared towards SaaS. I've found it very difficult to track different types of users and their associated revenue in tradition analytics packages (GA, GetClicky, even MixPanel). I've always envisioned a simple analytics package based entirely on user types. Think visitor, free/demo account, paid account 1st level, paid account 2nd level, etc...

I think this is an important missing functionality in many of the existing solutions and I would definitely pay for something that made it dead simple, would HN agree with me?
Eval?! In all my years of writing Scheme, Javascript, and Clojure, I don't think I've ever written "eval" without later regretting it.
.. which I've lately found out the hard way: Code of mine randomly crashed and valgrind told me it's due to use of unintiliazed memory. An awful lot of time later (i.e. one valgrind --track-origins=yes run) I know that it's from function foo's stack space. Which contains one local variable which is clearly assigned at the beginning. _Much_ later I find out that the problem is in bar, tail-called by foo.

At least now I know that latest gcc can do tail-call optimizations.
Off-topic (somewhat) but related to your Edit 2, anyone know if it's possible to disable the "install to dock" functionally of the App Store? I only have applications I want on the dock.
I had hoped they mentioned the two leading open source Analytics options as GA alternatives:

http://piwik.org/

http://www.openwebanalytics.com/

Regardless, GA works in most situations at present and will continue to dominate the market. It is due for some much needed upgrades though.
Colors by Matt Patenaude is my favorite color picker [it's free!].

http://mattpatenaude.com/

Supports these formats: http://grab.by/9tc3 and also copies to your clipboard with a button http://grab.by/9tcg.
I think Amazon has a better understanding of the digital content space than Apple does, it shows in the way the market Kindle, MP3s, and now video with their rental channel.

That being said, if they did do an Android based tablet, the smart thing (but the hard thing) to do would be to kick Google to the curb.

The one thing that has differentiated the iPad from the TouchBook or the original Microsoft Tablets has been application speed and application focus.

If you look back in history you will find the Apple Newton Message Pad, another "magical and revolutionary" device, which had, at its core, a tightly written OS and a poorly implemented handwriting recognition algorithm. If you look further you will see that it had its ass handed to it by an upstart company called Palm which created a device which capitalized on two key design concepts : focused and fast.

The Palm Pilot was focused on the things you needed, calendar, address book, short notes. And it was fast, fast, fast. Turn it on and Bam! ready to go. Further it lasted plenty long before needing new batteries or a charge.

Apple took that lesson to heart.

If you look at failures in the tablet space which preceded the iPad they were all slow, had poor run time, didn't know what they wanted to be, and clumsy to use, especially without a stylus. Apple attacked not one, but all of those problems at the same time.

So back to Google. Google doesn't know what it wants because its a hydra of competing ideas. Now that Google is in the "product" space that churn becomes visible to folks outside the candy factory.

What is the best tablet solution ? If you said Chrome as a front end to a high performance kernel, you would find that a third of the internal folks at Google would agree with you, if you said "A really big phone" then the Android team would congratulate on how clearly you saw this space, if you said more dedicated device where OS branding is irrelevant, well there would be supporters for that too. It's healthy to have internal debate, it's toxic when you cannot move past it.

So can you build with Android and tell Google to take a flying leap at a rolling donut? Sure, but they won't license you the Google Apps then now will they? This is clearly Google's right and they have grand visions.

But it takes a special kind of set of conditions for a company like Google to see something that is outside their ability to imagine, I know that those conditions don't exist. And to date they haven't shown any ability to imagine and iPad killer, so I don't look to them for an answer there.

An iPad rival will arise, eventually, but its going to take someone other than Google to do it. It will be interesting to see what WebOS brings to the tablet market, and it will be interesting to see what the next generation of entrepreneurial folks push in this space. There is also the distinct possibility that Apple can push folks to an alternative with extortionate pricing and intolerable terms.
They need to remove all ads from this domain, otherwise BofA can easily take the domain for trademark infringement.
Well, leaving aside any personal issues on whether it's a good idea to use drugs while in jail, it's still a tremendously dumb idea - as illustrated by the fact that not only did he have to fill his rectum with a variety of uncomfortable objects (a whole syringe? kudos, but ouch) but also got caught and presumably caught extra time for it as well.

I'd imagine that the public shaming will discourage him and others from doing something self-harmful again more so than an added jail term will.
'Genius'- Inteligence + Conscientiousness + Associative Horizon
Check out the Votizen page to send your support to Congress: https://www.votizen.com/issues/startupvisa/
Well, there were naysayers saying Vivek was just saying this to keep himself in the news and what he writes is useless, he keeps repeating the same thing etc. etc. and got some nice upvoting on here too. Interesting what their take on this would be.

See these two threads.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294552

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294385
The Wandering Book: Zeitgeist of the Software Craftsmanship movement
I tried Colors for a while (and Pochade, and others), and the part they all suck at is the loupe. They all use that horrible, tiny, OS X default color picker. It barely magnifies things at all, and half the time the mouse pointer is still inside which makes it even harder to use.

This app's loupe is pointer-free and customizably large. It's fantastic!
I've toyed around with a lot of the Analytics packages this article mentioned. None of them do an absolutely great job in the SaaS market, imo.

It's a shame with the rise in popularity of web apps. As crowded as the Analytics market is, there's definitely room right now for someone to turn things upside down.
INSIDE AL JAZEERA: The Hottest News Network On The Planet
I'm an Indian entrepreneur, and much as I'd love to see #3 see the light of day, I have this sinking feeling it's just way too ripe for exploitation.

Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.

A ton of companies that aren't really startups could easily misuse this clause. And even if there's fine print to guard against the same, due diligence in each case will translate into a ton of paperwork and enormous bureaucratic delays, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid in the first place, right?

That said, no one hopes I'm wrong more than I do right now.
On the hand one I love this. On the other hand, this means it's going to be harder for a startup scene to take off in any European city.
Why You Should Never Order Water with Lemons
According to wikipedia, he was worth 6,5 billion. So probably the $60 million just didn't matter to him so much.
Anonymous Leaks internal BofA emails
I just moved back from SF, just spent 5 years in Portland. I love the city and the tech scene is awesome, but Portland has a capital problem like Darius mentioned.
Why You Should Build Your Next API Using JSON
Microsoft & Google – the most sincere Internet Giants [Japan's quake]?
Disclaimer: I am and have been for decades, a huge Bon Jovi fan.

I think Jon is sorta right about the experience of music being different now, and I think you could argue that something has been lost in the process. But I'd argue that the changes in the music industry (not just the ones related to Apple and iTunes, mind you) have a positive side that outweighs that loss: simply put, more music is more accessible to more people than before.

I mean, I grew up in the 80's, buying Bon Jovi and AC/DC and Motley Crue albums on cassette tapes, and the occasional Twisted Sister album on vinyl... and as much fun as that was, I appreciate that now I can jump online and have almost immediate access to millions of songs, by bands that I never would have even heard of (living in a rural hick town in NC) before iTunes / Napster / Shoutcast / Pandora / etc.

Compared to the experience of going into the local pawn shop or Wal-mart, or driving 35 miles to a town big enough to have an actual "record store" and still having access to only a tiny selection of material, I'll take the current model over that any day.
Open Source at Highgroove Studios: We're A Rails Shop
For some reason, when I click through to the live stream, I get only audio and can't see the video. Anybody else?
This definitely makes Erlang more approachable for me - I've managed to develop a strong dislike for the syntaxes in a lot of functional languages including Lisp and Haskell. From my perspective, the syntactic choices documented in https://github.com/josevalim/elixir seem rather reasonable on the whole, but functions are a tad odd. Is there any specific reason why it's "-> (x, y) x + y"? I always thought the motive for the arrow notation in the form "(x, y) -> x + y" was an obvious cognitive mapping into "x and y becomes x + y". Seems a bit bass ackwards as it is. I also have a minor issue with the atom prefix (to me : would have been more distinctive), but that's admittedly more of a personal thing.
I just quit my job Friday. Should I move to SF, instead of Austin?
Yes and yes. A formula is better if it reveals more of the math behind it, in a compact form.
Tell HN:  Text "Startup Visa" to 894546 to support the Startup Visa act
I have no connection to Votizen, or the Startup Visa act, other than being incredibly frustrated as the founder of Hackers & Founders at how many amazing entrepreneurs have to leave the country, or can't start businesses in the US because of visa issues.

So, I'm throwing as much of my weight behind this as I can.

Votized has come up with an amazing system of verifying if you're a registered voter by text messages. If you are, your text will get hand delivered to your senators and representative in congress.

It's amazing. I think incredibly effective, and finally a way to for geeks who care about political issues to do something about it instead of just complaining on forums.

So, support entrepreneurship. Support your future cofounders. Text "Startup Visa" to 894546 to support the Startup Visa act.

I think this issue is a no brainer.
When asked six weeks ago whether the Yuri Milner / SV Angel offers would affect which startups YC accepts, pg said "No, of course not."

I would imagine that, if this legislation does pass, it might change his answer to that question, as all of a sudden that extra $150k becomes the difference between foreigners being able to get a Startup Visa to be accepted into YC or not.

If you read this Paul, care to share any updated thoughts on how this legislation and the $150k offer will/won't impact who you can accept to YC, and possibly who will apply to YC?
Maybe they should try to get rid of immigration limbo.

The quota numbers are laughable and the rule that no country should get more than 7% per year is even worse. See Employment based section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_(United_Sta...

Since pending immigrants can't vote, I guess no one cares.
Analytics data is only useful if you intend on reacting to it. The same goes for real time Analytics. Its only useful if you intend on reacting to it in real time.

The usage scenario most people fall back on when I have asked them about it is a blog post or something going viral. They don't want to wait the couple hours that Google Analytics sometimes takes to update. Great, you know something is getting a lot of traction with social media or maybe gathering some links... what do you do with that?

If you don't have a plan for how to react in real time, there's no sense knowing your Analytics real time.

(The other usage case often brought up is knowing when there is an issue with your website. In my opinion, this isn't the job of an Analytics package to detect.)
I've been _soooo_ frustrated by this, running http://www.hackersandfounders.com . I can't tell you how many amazing entrepreneurs I've seen come into the area, and then have to leave because of visa issues. So, even though I'm way oversubscribed right, now, I'm burning a bit of bandwidth on the startup visa movement.

Votizen (I have no attachment other than knowing the founders) is coming up with a crazy cool platform to mobilize people about this issue.

Just text "startupvisa" to 894546. They've build a hella cool twilio app, that texts you back, verifies that you are a registered voter in the US. If you are, they_print_out_your_text_message and hand carry it to your senators and representative in congress.

It's friggin genius. Please, pass the word.

Hell. I'll start another thread specifically for this. If you are a voting US citizen: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324232

If you are a foreign entrepreneur who wants to get a visa to the US, please help us promote this issue, so you can get a visa.

Craig Montuori set up a tumblr to tell stories of Entrepreneurs that haven't been able to start companies in the US because of visa issues. Contact him at http://startupvisa.tumblr.com/, or cmontuori@gmail.com .
Definitely looking forward to this one too, for personal reasons. Especially the second category.
Ask HN: What are you trying to accomplish?
Title says it all. What are you trying to accomplish in life? Big scale (make a billion dollar) and small scale (eat healthier). Also, do give advice to others on this thread whenever you've got experience.

(I've seen 1 thread similar to this. It's been a while though, and I think it's an inspirational topic.)
Who is Banksy?
But both are personal. A better take would be "This solution/process/method is wrong and here's why". Make it about the issue, not the person.
Hey Jim. I think it's worth it being a partial truth to include you guys as a Portland Startup :)

I in fact live in SF too, and most of our investors are in the bay area.
Things are different != things are worse.
TRON Soundtrack website keyword shortcuts
This is fair use, so the author's copyright wishes are not applicable. The copyright info applies to republication in full, not use in meta-analyses.
Story previously submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321408
Yes, of course. That is the root of the problem. This bill is a good effort to augment legal immigration reform.
Essays
Provides you with the best written projects you'll ever need.
While this data is not specific to "explainer" videos, it is data compiled over the viewing of business videos.

http://wistia.com/blog/does-length-matter-it-does-for-video/

Bottom line, keep it as short and as punchy as possible.
> What do you do on the weekends?

Also, what does his/her spouse think about it?
it's much more barebones than evernote. our goal is to enable you to save just the takeaways, and not to be inundated with many options, notebooks, etc. We also have a public by default policy, which creates a social space for posting these takeaways.
JSON-LD, more specifically. Then your API can be widely understood by various RDF tools

http://json-ld.org/
Jim Clark, probably the greatest serial tech entrepreneur to date, was 37 when he started SGI, his first startup.

And he outdid himself when he founded Netscape at the ripe age of 50.
The attack surface of "there is groff in /usr/bin" was never very substantial.
Actually, browsers do have network effects. If you're not important enough that web developers test their sites against you, you are going to suffer. See Opera.
Yes, please kill them. You're trading long term value for a (very) small amount of short term value.

Go long term, all the way.
This is not new in Rails world with today crazy talent price. Even my small avrg rails consulting shop was approached for buyout 2 times. We didnt agree on price that would bind us to one project for yrs so deals didnt went thro.