skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lawsuit nastiness aside, there's an interesting and important legal-technical question that this exposes: how should websites specify acceptable uses of crawled data and other fine-grained restrictions in a machine-readable form.

Motivated by this incident, I got together with Pete (the author/victim) to write a piece on "The Need to Reboot Robots.txt" [1] but it went nowhere.

Any suggestions on how to give our proposal legs would be much appreciated.

[1] http://33bits.org/2010/12/05/web-crawlers-privacy-reboot-rob...
That deck is so full of gold. "But will people want to know Ashton's favorite color? You bet your almost certainly white ass they will."
Coca cola doesn't need a superbowl ad too but they still do it.

Though I share your skepticism in accepting this argument. Since Sequoia is already on the list of most startups looking for VC funding this kind of advertisement can only attract many worthless startups just to try their luck, making the process of identifying the next big thing even harder.
Craigslist & eBay Alternative Facebook Apps
SwapSquare & CollegeSwap help Facebook users swap, buy, and sell merchandise and services within their social media network and community.
Google can mine the data and do whatever they want (and I don't doubt for a second that they run analysis on it), but this guy can't?

Facebook wants to have their cake and eat it to. They want free Google publicity but god forbid some dude starts downloading pages for research. It's legal, but it's wrong.
Way cool! This must be the best way I have seen for new artists to get their foot in the door. A great way to build a community around it might be to let users vote on future artist/book pairings.
How to remove third party ads from using personal info from Skype.
Before a bunch of people comment on how useless this is or why would you want that, think about the next time you are walking through a mall. See how many TVs and LCDs you see. Now imagine all those powered by the ambient light in the mall instead of conventional sources. That's why this is going to be cool and useful, not for your living room.
Yes but the loophole of funneling money through PAC's and other interest groups needs to be closed. If you want to get money to a rep but don't want to disclose it directly or have to comply with finance laws, atm all you need to do is register your own PAC

I otherwise have no problem with funding and don't think public financing of campaigns is viable. As long as we know where the money is coming from, in theory there can be accountability.
Love it! Not sure if I'd remember to come to the site everyday, but I'd definitely follow a CaptainObvious twitter account if it tweeted newly submitted ideas.
I notice they have updated their robots.txt to only allow user agents they have approved.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php
Another problem that Android has is with the availability of the Market. Right now there are not many countries where you can purchase apps. Which is irritating for a lot of users who buy these phones, only to find out that they cannot purchase apps. So most try to find free apps. Some root their phones and pirate them.
What's happened in the last decade and a half is technology (information technology) has fully colonized the popular culture, and popular culture tends to be shallow by nature -- not because people are shallow, but because people are alike in their shallow, base tastes and dissimilar in their deeper, more refined tastes. Mobile/social technology is coming to play the role in our society that television played in the second half of the 20th century. (Interestingly, the best TV has become quite a bit smarter and deeper, largely because of the same underlying technological developments.)
What do people think?

Justin
Thanks for this. Photography and CouchDB are two of my favourite things. I've been looking for a Flickr replacement, so I might try a similar setup to yours.
What do you use for accounting?

If you use something like Xero.com then you can use their API to poll for the data whenever you want (though likely daily unless you're also performing reconciliation via the API).
CSS Prefixer - Adds vendor specific prefixes to your CSS
For those who are too lazy to look it up:
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

The Onion as always is on top of things.
That's what I think. If you look at this quote:

"The more you interact with someone, the more persistent that connection becomes."

Facebook already has been doing this for a couple years, but if Color sniped them on the patent by a few months then that would justify the valuation alone. Plus they have a solid team with at least a decent chance of building something themselves, which is basically just gravy if the investors have a guarantee of at least getting a 2x return by suing Facebook and a couple other companies.
There's something similar in Google Maps, with geotagged Panoramio photos stitched together into a 3D scene.

If the photos are dense enough, there's enough information to stitch together the photos into a scene you can jump around. It's really cool!

EDIT: Here's a scene in Sydney:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
I peck with eight and keep my thumbs on the trackpad. I end up having to move my hands less.
The pragmatism of free software idealism
Facebook Filled to the Brim with Poisoned Links
You might care to read the extensive discussion from when this was posted 11 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243159
That is true, but the idea that programmers can use macros to force the compiler to emit optimal code is wrong, too. In the early days of C, that was (almost) true, but those days are over.

In theory, a compiler could uninline common code blocks, including macro calls, into functions to decrease object code size and/or working set size, thus speeding up the program (example: functions f and g with inlined function h each take 2 cache lines; without inlining, each of f, g and h fit a single cache line)

In practice, using an inline function will give the compiler the opportunity to weigh different objectives (code size, execution speed, debuggability, etc) against each other, and do the better thing.
Great article. Worth reading, if only for the "Gödel, Escher, Bach" reference.
There must be prior art for this.

Coca cola used to have a variant of their logo and jingle for adverts at Christmas. There must be stacks of other examples.

codeproject.com have a alien logo that they dress up for special events. (Although admittedly I'd guess Google doodles probably pre-dates this one)
Because you can go faster.

The point is we want people to continue doing pinch, zoom and click so that padkite is used only when needed. In fact outside the circle you can do all that you already do.

It is not padkite OR the other thing, its padkite PLUS the other thing, which is very handy. What is good has to be kept.

But if you want to fly.....you just invoke it.

Thanks very much.
See the [Arch Way](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way), notably #1. Having a barebones system installed allows you to shape it any way you want (LFS style, without the hassle of bootstrapping and lack of package management), and sticking with as much vanilla packages as possible allows you to just use upstream doc, and makes bug hunting easier to report upstream too.

Ubuntu is the antithesis of that (no judgement here, I am fairly marvelled at the "pop the CD in and it just works" result of Ubuntu).
Regarding the hand-wavy title and explanation:

Maybe there's some magic in the bits I'm not seeing, but I see no "tech" here that can't be churned out by a few ramen-eating guys on HN and almost zero expenditure.

Even if you've lost it and you feel the need to provision for a million dollars of DB hosting to handle the load, my plan still saves 40 million dollars.

I'd like to think there's no bubble, but then I see this...
Similar project: http://arborjs.org/

Cool Demo: http://arborjs.org/halfviz/#/the-abominable-snowman

I used arbor.js a a few months ago to make a graph of my facebook friend's connections, and it was really easy.
Experimental soup animation
They react fast only in such useless matters. For real problems like corruption, infrastructure, pollution and population they don't have any time.
Engineers without Borders: failure reports
honesty counts
I assume they'll mine the logs for URLs (and prioritise by the number of reports and prominence of the site) and mine the comment section for common phrases such as "login" to see if there are widespread problems affecting multiple sites. (I'm guessing it also passes on other useful info like platform and version that you don't need to type in). They're the type of org where you could probably find out exactly what they do with these reports.

Since Firefox devs actually post here, you'd have a good chance of getting interest (though perhaps a more informative title on the submission would have helped that).
Yes it is. That's all the beauty of capitalism :)
The way I look at the $41m investment is not that Color is worth ~$100m. There's no way it can be, with no users. Rather, I think the investors are betting that in 5 years' time Color will be worth $10b. From the investors' perspectives, they could be 95% sure that Color will flop and the bet would still be worth making.

Of course, you could say this about any "social startup" that thinks it will be "the next Facebook/Twitter". The investors have some reason to suspect that Color's team will be more successful than most, and those reasons include those mentioned in this article (previously successful team, new technology etc.). With the large amount of capital they are even more likely to succeed. But the chance that they will is still small, and yet it doesn't matter.

From this single data point you can't conclude anything about "the bubble". The investors' bet is that Color will be huge, not moderately successful. The chances that it will be "the next facebook" may be small (I won't put a number on it), but the potential ROI reflects it.
Blog in less than 10 minutes using Ruby on Rails
I think he/they were targeting the wrong companies. I know of big government companies that are moving to the cloud with their mail infrastructure in Europe. It's not so much trust, it's more about who will take the first jump. Lead and follow. "This big company is doing it, why shouldn't we?" But then again, maybe I'm wrong ;)
The first thing I thought of was http://mit.edu/

It changes every day and is very elaborate.
Used Daihatsu Move 2007 For Sale In Japan
Price: USD 12,852. - Only
Quick Interview with Dan Shipper from WhereMyFriends.be 
WhereMyFriends.be is a very cool and simple web app that shows all of your Facebook friends on a Map. The app was featured on Mashable and on CNN.
We wanted to ask him who did all start and what are his future plans.
Jay Leno Santa Fe Tickets 
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Upvote from me, I similarly don't care if I get karma burned on this one. This tripe can barely be called journalism and certainly doesn't belong on HN.
Apple's iPad 2 hits overseas stores after U.S. sellout
Hundreds of customers lined up outside Apple stores in Australia and New Zealand on Friday for the international launch of the iPad 2, which has flown off the shelves in the United States leaving the company struggling to meet demand.
Maybe it would help to increase the proximity radius dynamically so you always get results. It probably would have made your first-run user experience better, even if the photos had been taken farther away (same city, same state, or same country).
My preferred alternative to OCaml is definitely F#. The stdlib rocks and it has all the type inferred goodness of OCaml.
Doesn't any app that uses the iPhone camera API to take photos need to have permission to access GPS data because the iPhone embeds GPS coordinates of where each photo was taken in the EXIF data. If it didn't it would be a back handed way of accessing a persons location w/o them realizing it.
This is a very cynical use of the patent system that I hadn't expected of Google.
Elizabeth Taylor’s True Reason for Death Emerges
"...on 32-bit [systems]" is the operative part of his statement. I'm pretty sure 'tricking' a client into opening connections to a server is trivial regardless of TCP bugs.
Ok I just watched all of your demo videos again. Like others have pointed out, this is for power users. The basic usage is complex enough, you have a TON of other features.

A good demo video of someone using an app in an everyday situation, clearly showing them holding the phone in one hand (not keeping it on a table), will really help showcase padkite's power.

You've clearly built some amazing tech, but you need to educate people on how to use it. You should seriously consider making a game which uses these gestures, so people learn the gestures while having fun.

The Wii primed people for the Kinect.
Surprise deals for the month of March 2011
hmm, They are keep blocking everything, still India's population is raising higher than any other country in this world.
How often does the typical startup founder get nervous or depressed?
You can set the SyndicationRight directive for OpenSearch.

"Contains a value that indicates the degree to which the search results provided by this search engine can be queried, displayed, and redistributed."

The default is "open" meaning:
- The search client may request search results.
- The search client may display the search results to end users.
- The search client may send the search results to other search clients.

http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#The_...

That would give you more fine-grained control over what search agents do with your data. I don't know how broad the support and adherence is to the OpenSearch spec (IMDB uses it).
r/jailbait has had a long and storied history on reddit. It's non-nude, and certainly a lot tamer than stuff you can find with a GIS. It's a grey area morally, but it's legal. violentacres is the mod of quite a few raunchy subreddits [1], and jailbait is one of the more kosher ones. He works closely with the admins to keep illegal content out, and apparently has a fairly good working relationship with them. Hell, there's more illegal content on r/trees than any of his subreddits.

Reddit's made it pretty clear that they don't intend to censor legal discourse, although it is their right to do so. Censoring r/jailbait might make some people, or even most people happy, but it's a slippery slope. Once the admins start deciding which legal (non-spam) speech is and isn't allowed, it ceases to be a website whose content is dictated by the community.

Personally, I'd like to see http://www.reddit.com/r/niggers gone, but I don't want the admins stepping in and deciding what is and isn't acceptable. Short of illegal content, they leave it to the mods to decide what they want in their respective subreddits. I'm fine with that system.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/violentacrez/comments/apofz/reddits_...
Github screws up Google snippets (www.https??)
G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether
Name isn't on both sides. They missed the most important part :)
Blackberry Brings Support To Android V2.3 Apps on Playbook
I think that it is possible (tho unlikely) for an alternative to Twitter to emerge but it would require:

1) All clients start implementing the "open" protocol next to the Twitter. So send each message twice.
2) Someone takes the Twitter firehose and screws it into the "open" protocol.

You would have a bit of noise but you would then have a legitimate choice: "open" or twitter. If the number of people using the "open" alternative/protocol achieved critical mass you would have something.

Maybe this is why Twitter is clamping down on clients. Undermining the popularity of clients prevents the first item.

And Twitter would never allow anyone to use the firehose for this purpose.

So, pretty unlikely.
Its hard to believe alexa as most of the people browsing reddit won't have alexa toolbar installed
Audi R8 V10 Spyder launch on 25th March
The most famous Lorenz probably is the ethologist and Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz. Another famous scientist is Edward Lorenz, who discovered the Lorenz attractor, which is often regarded as a starting point of chaos theory
Perhaps if they left it unblocked it wouldn't be raising so fast :)
Hi revorad,

Absolutely right about the video with the showcase. We are already working on a new script for it. These are the things that we will take care of before we launch. Thanks lot for the comment.

As regarding the game, I have already thought that but its a very drafted idea yet. I think this type of HTML game could help http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/ball_pool/

We will also put more tiny links on the home page to pay with in order to both enhance the concept and provide useful data to the user and small ads.

What do you think?.

Superb feedback.
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Tu-154 takes off from abandoned runway after emergency landing
nah, viruses would be novel. They'd throw random images of people running across the road in front of you, instead
Lawrence Lessing on that:

http://www.thenation.com/article/how-get-our-democracy-back?...

TLDR: Congress as it is now is a money-to-law converter, minor changes won't fix that.
HackerNews, please tell me why you couldn't just create "PlaceBrowser", an app that shows you all geocoded photos on the INTERNET within 100ft of you?

Pull the photos in from Flickr, Google. You don't get the initial "no content" problem, and you can just store the photos on your own server.

Right?
I'm really only interested in the legal question. And I genuinely would like to be convinced that the legal system would allow scraping like this. I just don't see it.
"Jailbait", in the 4chan and reddit lingo, typically refers to non-pornographic images of underage women, often culled from social networking sites. If it was porn, it wouldn't be "jailbait", it would be "CP".

It's not "borderline-underage" (it's definitely underage), nor is it porn, so the title is rather misleading.
You know it's fascinating how prudish a culture seems to be ties in to the levels and statistics of sexual abuse. In india words like sexual expression are a sin and a culture has emerged based on the obsession that sex is dirty. Which is centered around the glory of men and the purity of misogyny.

At the same time India by some statistics ( http://www.icrw.org/publications/international-men-and-gende... ) has the highests amounts of sexual abuse amongst it's peers like Brazil (which when compared to india is far more liberal and words like sex aren't dirty things that should be accompanied with rinsing your mouth to get rid of the impurity... ). It's just hard to believe that 25% of males surveyed have committed sexual violence compared to 2% in Brazil. This also jives with my observation that women aren't viewed as human beings over here by most people, but sex objects that are to be used for pleasure. It's just sick.

I wonder if there is more than just coincidence going on over here and if all of this feeds into one another...
Another interesting question would be, who has learned NEO or Dvorak layouts and actively use them.
Ask HN: Creating an App for Fun. Need Advice !
I have a small web-app Idea which I want to implement for fun (actually, I am too bored with my day job). I want to do this for learning purpose. No strings attached.

The thing is I am ok with PHP/MySQL. With this app, I want to:

- Learn how to code in MVC architecture.

- Learn to design/implement very basic design using CSS/jQuery (no Photoshop. i am no good at it, and my job does not give me time to learn that)

- Making it scalable (that is it should withstand high traffic). (I am not saying it will receive traffic, but I want to learn to implement it in minimum resources and optimized as far as possible)

Can someone guide me where to go from here for above three? I get roughly 2 hours of time daily after my job and weekends (Sat/Sun) are free. Although I love to spend them with family and friends, but you can consider 11-12 hours free time in weekend.

I want to finish this thing in 2 months. Coding is not too complicated, the thing I want is to implement it with elegance.

Where to start? How to proceed.
How does this factor into the fork (or whatever) to libav?

I can see some of the same people participating on both lists:

http://lists.libav.org/pipermail/libav-devel/2011-March/date...
The Difference Engine - Wild blue coffin corner
Thanks for the explanation & please report back on how Acme and p9p worked out for you!

My attempt at being funny [1] fell flat, meh.

----

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=updog&def...
" I think technology and late stage capitalism does something strange to culture, leaving a void where religion, music, or some sort of dialog traditionally exist, so young people are following the logic of consumerism, going to whatever gives instant gratification and a semblance of meaning."

I think humans have an inbuilt desire to worship, or believe in, something higher than themselves. Even if such desire is deeply subconscious. It manifests itself in all sorts of ways, including Apple fanboyism. Just a theory.

Btw, I think "social" is an utterly over-hyped fad, and I've predicted this on HN in the past (I'm 24, to give perspective). We could even be looked back on "social" ten years from now, the same way we look at the internet bubble ("what were we thinking?!?").
So why aren’t they? Because of a perception – not a reality – that their data will not be safe if held on a data center outside their own local jurisdiction.

I'm not really convinced just yet. If you have the data on-premises, you have control over the physical hardware. There can be reasons to trust your local authorities to not simply seize it, or spy on it in name of your competitor, but not those of the remote country. Also, jurisdiction is not that uniform in Europe.
> 1) They're not going to actually enforce it because that would damage their image significantly.

The motto again? They are a public company. They have a silly motto on a wall and laws they must obey. When the two are in conflict with each other which do you think is going to be followed?

I have to say though, if this whole thing has taught me anything it's taught me that every business I make from here on out is going to have some sappy stupid motto. That way, even otherwise intelligent people like are found on HN will give me the benefit of the doubt every time I do something that is in my interests and against everyone else's.
Errata-sleuthing for fun and knowledge
Doesn't sound like you read the article IMHO.
PHP Zend Speeds Up Custom Web Development
Custom web development is the catchphrase of web/software industry. It has its own merits and empowers web developers to craft client oriented web solutions. The advancements in the software/ web technology and changing tastes of the end users are creating new development challenges for the web developers.
It's not (borderline underage) porn, but it's definitely borderline (underage porn).
Search Engine Optimization
High in number of entrepreneurs even though, they are well aware of online marketing and its power, but still posses least interested for online marketing ways.
Read the comment by Dan Weinreb. It is much more insightful than the article itself.
Issue faced by International Entreprenuer in Siliconvally. 
Good Movie.