skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to have to blame the schools, then. Anyone who bases their view of nuclear power on The Simpsons obviously needed a better education. ;p
The level of taxation is not important per se, the only important thing is how the collected taxes are distributed and what they're used for.

Low taxes have helped somewhat (mostly by indirectly expanding the tax base) but the current economic situation (not very much affected by the global financial crisis) is a somewhat coincidental effect of the still large disconnect between the Romanian economy and the global markets.

What I'm arguing is that such a loophole will only create inflation by directing the indirect tax cuts to spending.
Or he spends the next year producing design document after design document, always being sure to fully discuss the implications of each new requirement, but never writing any code.
Facebook application Scrabulous shuts down, as it faces Hasbro lawsuit
I'm going to have to blame the parents, then. They sent their children to schools that bad. :(
When an email bounces, do you flag it in your system so that you don't continue to send emails to it? Not speaking from personal experience, but I've read that certain major webmail companies will penalize your server if you keep trying to deliver mail to an invalid account within a certain time frame.

You seem to have everything else covered, that's the only thing that comes to mind.
However, people are people.
Intellectual Property and Open Source. It is a must-read for anyone starting a business or working on an open source project.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960/
Oddly I didn't expect the "property/object" one to be the most contentious! Who knew? Perhaps that one suffers more from brevity than all the others.

The observation stems from seeing reams of web app code that take in form data (or raw database data) and then proceed to move it around the app without encapsulating it in any way. The result is functions like:

function display_user( user_first_name, user_last_name...user_valid)

Look at twenty or thirty functions like that in an app and one starts to think "perhaps you need a user object?"

I certainly didn't mean to suggest we should all start tightly coupling all our classes together willy-nilly.
If you're going to troll, I want disclosure. How many times have you applied to YC and been rejected?
Suing over the "copyright" for games is nothing new for Hasbro:

http://boardgames.about.com/library/news/bl000208a.htm
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=867
I'm not convinced that this is useful as a webapp data store.

What is needed for a webapp datastore? Well, in my opinion, it needs replication and reliability above anything else. Drizzle doesn't offer that.

Drizzle offers a MySQL that will scale up a little further sot that you don't have to worry about replication when you have 1M hits per month, but 2M. That's not useful (to me). Partially because at that 2M point, you're in trouble and I don't like that. Mostly because even if I don't need replication for performance, I do need it for availability.

I don't mind if a datastore even removes joins. I want highly reliable, highly available, highly redundant, highly scalable data storage. I guess that's why CouchDB is more interesting to me.
What "service" are you using? I've always just done a linux/sendmail server in a datacenter somewhere and manage all sending/receiving/lists/etc from that.
Lithium Iron Phosphate Breakthrough = Better Batteries
Yet another problem with string theory.
This article is like writing about white and black and pretending that there's no such thing as grey. Ninety-nine percent of hackers/developers would have attributes that put them in both categories to varying degrees (by almost any definition you care to give the two terms). By the way, since when did "hacker" start meaning "no real-world development skills"?
Or they could skip the hassle, negotiate a royalty with Hasbro, cut a little into their margins, and get on with it.
Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
Hacker News seems to be going down hill if a link to a mass media explanation of a clever gedankenexperiment suddenly becomes a design (!) for a "warp engine".
So contrary to the initial sentence, you're actually saying it isn't impossible just that you're just against funding it for other reasons...
I wonder if this is being upvoted because of a subconscious need to heal egos after the "YC is Cult" post - a comforting sense of "oh, right, there is a reason why we love PG/YC/HN".

(or did I just overthink that?)
I'm okay with paying higher taxes if I'm getting something for it-- cheap transportation, universal high-quality healthcare. It's paying high taxes to support Bush's war and tax cuts for the rich that I have a problem with.

The problem with the train system now is that it's dilapidated, expensive, and slow, which leads to low use, leading to disrepair... and so on. However, air travel is going that way right now, and something will fill the void. Trains at 80 mph are not competitive with airlines, but maglev trains are capable of 250+.
"Great fiction expands your emotional repertoire..."

This is an excellent way of putting it. Good novels I've read have elicited emotions that are unique from any other life experiences I've had. I would say that expanding your emotional repertoire helps with creativity.
I'm astonished. The internet hordes usually have impeccable taste in film and music. "Beverly Hills Chowahwah" is not even in the top 20?!!
Well anyone voting Godfather at 10 and Dark Knight at 1 should also be nixxed then.

Why not just let the two cancel each other out?
Thanks for your feedback!

Letting the people to create their map before signing up is an option we take into consideration but finally dismissed. Perhaps it's time to rethink about it.

The mobile integration sounds great! We had thought about making an iPhone app in the future but I think that there are more mobility options to explore.

You're right about showing the photos of the people who have visited a place. It's great for places with a few visitors but it becomes too much information for much visited places. We are going to remove that ajax for the next version but I think we should keep looking for an information design which would fit both cases.
Indirectly, yes, since they didn't have to pay the social security contributions affixed to salaried positions - and since those contributions are considerable (depending on the job function, to the order of 30% up to 80% of the pre-tax wage) it was easier to do this than to avoid paying them at all (also a common practice since tax collection, alas, moves incredibly slow...)
I just finished "The Pixar Touch"... pretty good read on the evolution of Pixar
Yeah, I coughed when I read this too. The reason a May-over-May comparison is made is to take out the seasonality; Memorial Day is irrelevant to May08/May07 (or, as they would say in finance, 07K-08K).
MySQL Performance Tools
We are using qmail
wtf does that have to do with anything.

I have no idea. This whole conversation seems like a big tangent, and perhaps I'm having a bit too much fun following it off into infinity. Shame on me.

Anyway:

Yes, Boeing has a more difficult task than many startup founders. Of course, there are also more engineers at Boeing, and they've been working on the problem for a much longer time.

Yes, it would be possible for a Google or Facebook design error to get someone killed. Leaks of personal or financial information are potentially deadly. Bad information can be deadly.

No, I can't give you a specific example of a design error (as opposed to a user error) that killed a Google or Facebook user. That's partly because Google and Facebook engineers -- like Boeing engineers, and most engineers worthy of the name -- take their work seriously and don't make many consequential mistakes. But mostly it's because our standards are looser, and reasonably so: The internet is a twelve-year-old invention, and when planes were twelve years old people crashed and burned all the time. They were experimental, and nobody expected anything different.

Standards will change. We're hearing stories of users who followed a Google map off a road and are now suing Google for damages. Right now those stories serve as hilarious examples of lawsuit-happy, stupid people, but perhaps in fifty years middle-class people will expect digital maps to be perfectly accurate, just as today they expect to have clean water and lead-free plumbing, and to always be able to reach an operator by dialing 911 on their cell phone.

Finally, I don't think this sentence is correct, in general:

The fact that people misuse something doesn't make it the engineers fault.

The problem is that there's no bright, shining line. Your kitchen knife example is far to one side of the line: Because kitchen knives are a very well-established technology, most knife accidents are caused by people misusing the product. On the other side of the line is, say, food that's been sweetened with ethylene glycol. That's pretty obviously a design error. And in between is a huge grey area, in which most software falls. Is Boeing responsible when a confused pilot pulls the wrong lever and fails to lower the landing wheels? [1] Is the guy who built the buggy online spreadsheet responsible when the civil engineer uses it to design a bridge that falls down? Well, that's why we have courts -- and why your startup needs to have a lawyer.

[1] I do know that planes used to have a little wheel-shaped lever to guard against this very problem. Maybe they still do. I forget where I learned that -- was it from Donald Norman?
Hum, we haven't done so explicitly yet... but since we just launched, and our email traffic isn't that high, I don't think the chances of 2 random people typing in the same bogus email address. I have the list of all bounces Emails and I will take a look at them.

Will also take the recommendation to implement this check soon. Besides that, any other recommendations? Is this just a Hotmail issue?
Yes, I should work on that idea of letting the people try the app before singing up.

For sharing their map users have the option to embed it in their websites and blogs. There are two versions of the map: an interactive one (with Google Maps, which can be zoomed in) and a static image (which can be embed in places which doesn't support iframes, like Myspace or Flickr profile).
Good Lord.

If anything, having YC people there to walk you through that debacle is worth the price of admission alone.

Paul, how much of that document did you actually understand when you signed it, and how much was blind faith in your lawyers? (Serious question actually)
Never applied, although encouraged others to do so.

If people working insanely long hours is actually mythology, that actually hurts YC: sane people will avoid applying in the first place.

If the long hours is really true, then people aren't being productive, also hurting YC.

Either way, call me a troll but this is something YC should be making clear.
It's just the classic hacker username convention: rms, jmc, rtm, pg, gls, esr, tlb.
Digital Millenium Copyright Act
Edit: Sorry I didn't understood at first. Anyway, Yahoo has a $1.03 Billion Net Income now... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=YHOO .
It suffers from resembling a bikeshed ;-)
Interestingly, the number of shares given outright for Viaweb (393,591), not including options, would be worth only $7,915,115 today.

edit: (not taking into account splits)

Considering the four splits since the end of 1998, the total number of shares would be 6,297,456 (393,591 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2) equivalent to $126,578,866 at a price of 20.10 (as of 2:04pm edt today).

From June of 1998 to the height of Yahoo's stock in December 1999, two splits had occurred making the total number of Viaweb shares 1,574,364. With a 108.17 price per share, Viaweb's shares were potentially worth a total of $170,298,954.

(Assuming they only held on to the 68,210 escrow shares, that still amounts to 272,840 shares after splits and a total of $29,513,102.80 on the day the escrow period ended.)

Uh, wow.

(This is assuming the numbers I am getting from Yahoo Finance are not corrected for splits, and I think they are.)
only... (!)
I see your point, but that's a bit extreme.

The example in the article is obviously stretched, but getting feedback on your work isn't always a bad idea. Getting feedback from users, other hackers, or from business people can help you understand what your customers want. I'm not saying you should always follow their advice, but you should definitely listen and make your own decision. If you're at a small startup where you don't have business people, listen to your users instead.
Is programming art?
Apple design guru Jonathan Ive to appear in 'Helvetica' director's next film
wow what an awesome app. I love it! I'm a slow reader cos I subvocalize and re-read words all the time. So many times I've stumbled on an interesting article but gave up reading cos it took too long. Now I can just blast it into this app and get it done.
Hasbro reportedly offered them a large sum and they turned it down. Serves 'em right.
Yes, NYC is the standard to which all other cities are compared.
On-time guarantees will never happen, given the miserable shape the airlines are already in. This would further increase their costs.

I was stuck on the tarmac at Amsterdam's airport for 8 hours and got a EUR 50 voucher from Northwest Airlines toward a future ticket (yeah, right). I tore it up in front of the woman, and told her that anything less than a free ticket was an insult. This was in 2003, and if airlines weren't going to offer on-time guarantees then, they certainly won't do so now.

Frankly, I don't think it's high oil that is hurting the airlines, because they can (and almost certainly do) hedge against this by buying oil futures. I think the collapse of demand for first-class and last-minute seats is hurting them. The fussy rich people who used to demand 1st class, and were willing to pay 4x the regular price for 50% more space, now prefer to fly chartered or private planes. If you have a pilot's license, taking a family of four in a small plane is comparable in cost to 1st-class commercial. Also, the growth of videoconferencing is causing a massive decline in short-notice business travel, formerly a source of demand for overpriced late tickets.
Some of the most important work is done by people working quietly on mundane problems.

For some reason, this excellent comment reminds me of my visit to the sewers of Paris (they've got a museum down there!)

There's a quote from Napoleon in which he proclaimed that the redesign of the Parisian sewer system (which was commissioned during his reign) was one of the most important things he ever did. It's surprisingly hard to argue with that.
Does their marketing project open? I've never seen that. I have seen millions of people wondering what product was going to ship at the next wwdc, and all of the crazy (sometimes legally enforced) silence around that.
At Yahoo's height, December 24th, 1999 (hilariously, almost the exact date the options were released from escrow after Viaweb's purchase), the share price was 101.81, which would have made the 393,591 shares worth about $40,071,499.

That's more than a 500% increase over today's value, representing 32 million dollars which could buy at least fifty Lamborghinis or seven million Caramel Frappuccinos.
Are you considering splits?
So Say We All.
Oh, I know. It's just not often you hear $8M used with that qualifier!
KDE 4.1 review: "KDE marks a triumphant return to full usability with the 4.1 release"
This is a thoughtful piece. The provision really does open the door to a far greater invasions of privacy. That eBay powerseller, for example, will also have their Social Security number and other personally identifiable info stored in this database. And because it only tracks gross revenues, it won't work as planned, leading to lots of IRS audits just because of a high gross. So the next step, around 2015, will be collecting transaction details.

Its also a new business risk, since any breach of this data will expose critical operational details.

The worst part: Congress never had an up or down vote on this provision...it was thrown in the housing bill at the last minute for procedural reasons.
Ahh! I am not. That's why it seemed so low...
The money won't spend itself, not in any useful fashion. Usefully spending money is work like any other, and is in fact exactly what a CEO/founder does.
Ask HN: Rate My Startup
http://www.bzplnr.com

The first step toward creating what I am calling an ecosystem of startups - broadly related, semi-dependent startups that together will form a comprehensive whole covering a wide range of market segments.

Thanks in advance for the comments!
Ok PG's response seems almost like flamebait. I had to respond and try to voice my disagreement.

I think the test of the importance of your work is not how much people will be hurt if you screw up, but how much people's lives are improved if you succeed.

I notice you leave out the Manhattan Project. Through which nuclear power was discovered. And later those same researchers discovered Quantum Electrodynamics... which will likely be the next hardware solution for computer science.

Judged by the standard of how much it contributes to people's well-being, Google probably does more for the world than the Apollo missions did.

As for Apollo versus Google - come on. Search (PageRank) & improved web mail (GMail) versus safe commercial air travel, radio and satellite communication, safe structures, better roads, GPS, etc. Maybe there weren't advancements to Computer Science. But, there were major advancements in civil, construction, electrical and mechanical engineering.

The program spurred advances in many areas of technology peripheral to rocketry and manned spaceflight. These include major contributions in the fields of avionics, telecommunications, and computers. The program sparked interest in many fields of engineering, including pioneering work using statistical methods to study the reliability of complex systems made from component parts. The physical facilities and machines which were necessary components of the manned spaceflight program remain as landmarks of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

Separately the Apollo program had a cultural impact on the students and engineers of the time and even today. I know I am inspired by what the program did with such limited technology.

[EDIT: Some details and another quote]
I'm one of the authors of the paper. We're planning on releasing an online demo website at some point where people can submit photos and see what kind of replacements are generated. The process is indeed fully-automatic.

The non-real looking photos have mostly to do with the mixups in gender/age/race, that we do not explicitly guard against currently.

Here's the project page describing things in more detail:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/face_replace/

The video linked from that page explains the whole process from beginning to end in under 5 mins.
It's paying high taxes to support Bush's war and tax cuts for the rich

Paying high taxes to support tax cuts for the rich?

I'm okay with paying higher taxes if I'm getting something for it-- cheap transportation

You do realize that "paying for something to make it cheap" just changes who pays for something, yes? Like...I'm in favor of YOU buying ME a nice present, like cheap transportation. At gunpoint.

Basic stuff.

A train passes by my office occasionally. I don't think it is subsidized. It carries coal. Now...if it was practical for that train to carry people, it would do so, without subsidies. It's not like government is actually needed to make trains profitable.
Memorable Utility. Convenience and the future of the Web.
I consider deal documents to be object code, and my lawyers' explanation of what's in them to be source code. I inspect the source code fairly carefully, but I do generally have blind faith in the compiler, in the sense that I don't read the documents myself to see if the lawyers' interpretation of them is correct.

From what I've seen, I'd guess this level of understanding of deal documents is the norm.
Actually, the page loading is pretty good. The important thing about that is you show a loading icon, so I know to wait a bit.

Some of the slowness seems to be the initial loading, because the responsiveness improves after the first visit. Since the background images seem to mostly be eye-candy, you might want to think about removing them. They also make your first visit to the site more confusing (in my opinion).

I also see some slowness in the hover and zooming, and that seems to stick around so I don't think it is a loading issue. You might want to reconsider the amount of animation that is done by the hovering; I already know where my mouse is, and some of the actions seem to simply highlight that.

I hope this helps, and thanks for putting your stuff up for us to play with.
So you're claiming that processors behave exactly the same way as resistors?

It's not true that a processor conversts ALL of the energy it consumes as heat, because things like transistor flip-flops consume energy in addition to producing waste in the form of heat.

Their use to waste ratio might be low, but it's not zero as you implied.
what if Scrabulous releases their code like Reddit! :)
Well, the norm is clearly working very hard for two and a half months before demo day. But most people realize that working past a certain number is counterproductive. I don't know exactly what that number is, but it's below 18 per day for sure. I'd say we probably worked 70-80 hour weeks.
agreed. textmate is the golden standard.

the #2 would probably be eclipse or netbeans
... since we don't pay any taxes towards our road/highway system.

Private transportation is subsidized just as much as public transportation if you factor in the cost of all those eight lane interstates. It's all a matter of priorities.

I'm not saying that rail travel is a better solution... I'm just pointing out that no matter what way we go about it, the government will spend significant amounts of money. The Federal Budget allotted $67 billion for transportation improvement projects this year.[1] Add to that a huge amount spent by the states and local jurisdictions (I know my state roughly matches it's Federal grants with it's own money.) Contrast this with Europe, which spent 125 billion euros on road projects, and 73 billion on rail subsidies, and has three times as many people.[2]

You can't end a debate on rail travel by saying it's not profitable without subsidies. Roads would not happen without massive government subsidies either. Witness the need for the Eisenhower Interstate project to kickstart decent long distance highways in the 1950s.

Air travel benefits from the same things. If airlines had to build their own airports, ticket prices would be much higher. The airlines benefit from billions of dollars spent annually by states and municipalities to build nice airports, add runways, and run air traffic control.

All that comes out of your taxes too.

[1] http://www.dot.gov/affairs/dot1507.htm

[2] http://reports.eea.europa.eu/technical_report_2007_3/en/eea_...
> How many employees does Berkshire Hathaway have again? Something like 12 at HQ, I think. That would be a lot of tax revenue to disappear.

How much does BH currently pay in taxes?

I note that Buffet's estate will go largely untaxed, so it's no skin off his back to argue that for estate taxes.
We already give Amtrak over $1 billion a year in tax subsidies. The problem is that the company is a monopoly with no incentives to improve service or reduce costs. Passenger rail and subways can make a profit...the New York subway system was built by competing private subway companies, as was the initial national rail network. The problem is the unions and the government now have a stranglehold and there's no competition or innovation.
In Absence of Fiction