skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a huge asymmetry in the power of HN users between those that can down-vote and the rest. The problem is that many of the "powerfuls" use their privilege to punish other users based on disagreements, whims, or simply to silence opposite opinions. It is OK to indicate the popularity of a comment by moving it to the top but it's wrong to silence an unpopular comment by fading it away. That should be reserved only to comments that violate the rules: spams, trolls, shameless ads, etc.

Put the unpopulars at the bottom or indicate the degree of popularity with a number, but don't disappear it. Fading away honest unpopular comments is a big turn off that ultimately harms the debate.
Digital Currencies, Crypto-finance and Open Source (beyond Bitcoin)
I thought that fees and such were only incurred when you ran your debit card as a credit card transaction, with signing your name and such - I was under the impression that using your PIN number and using it as debit didn't incur those costs.
Uh huh. "I was thinking about changing banks, but Dave Fayram left the banking startup I was thinking of using, so I think I'll stick with Chase".

Pretty sure this is a popcorn topic and nothing more.
As an aside, using "USAians" in your writing is probably not what you want here. Intentionally mangling the name of a group/nationality because you don't like the standard naming convention or because you want to get a little jab in to show your distaste for the group just undermines your credibility.

If I were to write a valid political commentary but use "Dumbocrats" for Democrats or "Republitards" for Republicans it would be hard to take me seriously, right? When someone online writes "USAians" it's very difficult to regard the rest of their writing as legitimate and not trolling or intentionally smug/antagonistic.
LinkedIn's initial public offering: Social sizzler
Anonymous or Transparent: Which Side Are You On?
The skewed screenshot is kinda weird... why not have that visible and full size? Have it show a rotation of different "best of" images, to make it really apparent what the site does.
That is sweet!

It would be great if I could upload a lib of my own images as well! that become elements I can drag into the mock.
There's money in carbs and not in fat.

This answer may sound glib, but not if we consider the facts surrounding the issue.

- The propaganda for carbs and against fat has been overwhelming over the years. Most people are not likely to believe anything other than what they've been taught.

- Our economy relies heavily on what we can generally call "the carb industry." If people are being harmed by too many carbs, they'll take medicine (like they're trained to) and that builds another industry. Why would anybody (politicians, industry leaders, corporate science) want to change that?

- Besides, carbs are beautifully packaged, cheap, and readily available. Why would anyone want to re-think that?
About 125-150k per month.
But from what I can tell, the smartphone deposit feature requires that you be eligible for the auto and property insurance.
DF is the deepest game (really, toy, like SimCity; there's only one end state within the game and that's getting wiped out, and most of the rest of the game is very open ended) I have ever played which pairs it with a terrible interface and a learning curve like a brick wall (no joke, I only figured out how to get doctors to take medical jobs promptly a few weeks ago after playing the game for months). The DF interface problems aren't just that it's console oriented; there's no straightforward way absent external tools (which I generally can't have, because I play on a Mac) to get a list of e.g. which dwarves have a certain labor enabled, or which dwarves have skill levels in a certain labor. Also the way the game is played today is very stuff intensive which means you tend to have between a quarter and up to half of your fort on full time crap hauling duties.
I agree with your last sentence.
Anybody know if Lodsys is targeting and Android, WebOS or Windows 7 developers?

Clickable link to the patent http://www.google.com/patents?id=nA2AAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...
Why are you embarassed by the first one?
Targeted specific criticism is fantastic and hard to come by. The world needs more "this is bad -and heres why-" and less "yo Dawg I'm just not feeling it Dawg"
Success (like getting a startup off the ground) takes a lot more than just personal skill/intelligence/hardwork- there's fortunate timing and circumstances, the hardwork and contributions of others, time and monetary investment of others, plain old chance luck. Recognizing that some part your achievements depended on others and things beyond your control both requires humility and can humble you.

That's not a bad state of mind, and it doesn't have to be just false modesty.
It's not anyone's fault but your own that your entire readable library lives in one physical device. Asking to change copyright to allow you to "photocopy" someone else's work and give it to a friend is unacceptable.

Now that I've played devil's advocate, I'm not a big fan of the technological measures that attempt to prevent piracy. I believe that the solution is pricing digital media so that it's more 'disposable' - that is, price it so cheaply that pirating and even lending is too much trouble.
about 150,000 people have downloaded the bit.ly preview add-on, which tells bit.ly everything you visit: http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2010/05/bitly-preview-add-...
the free part will be totally useless. we've seen so many sites trying to do this for free. none of them work. imageshack closed it down, put.io didn't even try, torrific is so slow, you can write data faster by hand
We're glad you see a lot of value in our app! The $30 price is for a limited time, so Hype will cost more eventually.

We debated quite a bit over the price. Even our own opinions would sometimes change on a daily basis! (And every single person we asked seemed to have a different opinion, too... the only common answer seemed to be "I dunno, pricing is hard".)

Based on beta feedback, Mac App Store trends, prices of similar apps, and the desire to quickly grow our user base, $30 seemed like a reasonable starting point.
Can we just suffice it to say that I think the scores on these two comments should be --- at least --- reversed?
One article says that it was a new program. Apparently they chose to rewrite it, for some reason.

I wonder what the bug was though - They mention that 90% of those selected are from the first two days of registration.
You don't think the Lead Engineer leaving a company not long before it's launch is not something to be worried about?
They do have a free tier:
http://www.pagodabox.com/pricing
It says it's an introductory price. It's low enough that a lot of people & companies won't care if they don't go on to use it, especially compared to pricing like the Flash IDE.
Interview with Miguel de Icaza
Broadening the definition of ‘disease’ may be good business, but bad for people
I like it how the screencast didn't use a terminal; not even once. This is very different from the other Heroku for x initiatives.

That, bundled with their absolutely gorgeous design is a huge differentiator from the alternatives.
Grandview is a new “distraction-free” writing environment
How did you reintroduce meat into your vegetarian diet? Was it a gradual process? Do you eat the same meat diet (dishes and frequency) as before you were a vegetarian?

I've been a (ovo-lacto) vegetarian for 12 years for the reasons you describe. After reading Gary Taubes, I am conflicted. Taubes has little advice for vegetarians or vegans except "eat some cheese and eggs".
> 5.) edit: Here's another: Karma is directly proportional to how early you post in the thread (by virtue of time being linear and people only visiting a thread a certain number of times).

Though not perfect, an incomplete solution to the timing issue you mentioned is already in place. A new comment can show up at the top for a while, but the karma and age of the account may be weighting factors to prevent trolls from getting the top spot. The position of the comment degrades over time, and of course, how fast it degrades depends on points it receives. This doesn't work perfectly, but it's better than nothing.
So you're saying make it very hard to install, very hard to maintain, and run on very expensive hardware.

Yep, that sounds like the business model we all know and love. Apache proved it works.
This sounds great. Props to them if they can disrupt banking.
The fact that they're not a real bank but some entity that works with partners to provide FDIC insured products is reassuring from a customer point of view. Not sure about how they will do their marketing though.
Now, I hope that we, non-American customers, won't have to wait too long for this service.
Bugzilla gets actions - Eudora Forums
Didn't Feynman do a talk on this, that mirrors are actually reflecting from inside out thus the reversal. The basically show you the inverse projection of rays of photons, so it is impossible for them to turn it upside down.
FYI my dog likes to play this game too.
Elections in Spain are not rigged, but the quality of Spanish democracy is very low. There are three main points:

1. Electoral Law: In Spain votes are counted according to D'Hondt method in regional demarcations. It favours big parties while penalizing small parties. It makes votes in less densely populated regions more valuable. Both things are perceived as very unfair by many Spaniards. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method)

2. Separation of Power: In Spain, Congress is very powerful while Senate is mostly decorative. People vote once every four years for Congress, then they elect the President. There is no separation between Executive and Legislative. In the U.S. or France you can have a Democrat President and a Republican Congress. That is not possible in Spain, Executive and Legislative are always in the hands of the same party by design. Judicial power is not independent as judges are appointed by the party in power. Older judges (some people may remember Garzon, the guy who tried to incarcerate Pinochet) are independent but younger ones ALWAYS vote whatever is decided by the party that granted them the seat.

3. Political regeneration: In Spain you cannot vote for a person for Congress, you can only vote for a party list. The party will put whoever they want in the list in whatever the order they want. This system has led to a progressive degeneration where only friends and family of powerful party members are listed. Many of the candidates in the upcoming elections (22nd of May) have been found guilty of corruption. Many more are awaiting trial. Almost all of them have no leadership qualities at all. Their only quality is to be a disciplined party member with connections. Parties in Spain are not democratic themselves. Primary elections within a party are almost unheard of. Candidates for any election are decided by the senior management.
In Spain, when a candidate loses, they just wait for the next election, or the next, or the next... until they finally grab power. It is a case of "waiting your turn".

In Spain we frequently use "partitocracy" (rule of parties) and "fingercracy" (rule of those who have been chosen by a powerful party member by pointing at them with his finger) to describe our political system.
Sadly it appears so.

I had a very emphatic "Either cancel your contract, or keep your apps on the store" response from their helpdesk yesterday.

This is a shame, such heavy handed tactics will keep myself and a great many other developers (see billswifts link below) away from their store.
Bored with bitcoin.
One technical flaw and your 'currency' vanishes.
It's a fun app to use and kinda neat the tricks you can learn from it. One issue I have is that the markup/css is not the cleanest in the world but it definitely gets the job done. Go Hype!
Hype makes an effort to support everything back to IE6. Of course, there are some effects that simply can't reasonably be replicated on older browsers. Hype lets you choose which browsers to support and, when you do something which will cause compatibility problems, you're warned inline in Hype's inspector. You can get a quick demo by watching our Exporting video: http://tumultco.com/hype/features/#exporting
The PHP Fog web designer could learn a few things from the Pagoda site. I found Pagoda much more informative and has better usability than Fog. The graphics and images on Pagoda aid the user in understanding how Pagoda works and why it's better than traditional hosting, instead of hitting you over the head with over-the-top beautiful graphics that ultimately don't say or mean much as on Fog. The typography also makes the copy easier to read. The video demo is very slick.
> A low carb diet is predominantly fruits and vegetables

Aren't fruits (and fruit juices) verboten for most low-carb diets? Fruit is mostly water and fructose.
The emphasis on Archiving.
I can't imagine it's possible to successfully sue someone for damages that were caused by a court decision.
The overwhelming majority of my customers are on the online version now, since I've exiled the downloadable version to electronic Siberia. If no customer ever found it again I would be happy.

With regards to marketing, see my blog (www.kalzumeus.com), but the short answer is I use organic SEO and AdWords. My one trick pony for organic SEO is scalable content generation, and what a beautiful, loyal pony it is.
exactly. it's the cheapest content distribution method on the planet. even amazon s3 supports it. i think a service utilizing this is totally justified
We're always happy to help, and we absolutely appreciate your referrals! If anyone wishes to chat in-depth, I can be reached at ryan@tumultco.com.
Because, no way is a message board full of geeks going to come up with a way to justify drama!
Hungry apps driving mobile data consumption
I'd argue that violating the GPL is a form of piracy.
honestly, I hate gmail. I can't exactly put my finger on why though. I'm definitely not a fan of the threaded view.
Ahah, in most places that's 51% of governance - which will appease the macro-scale proportional-representation folk, but is not without issues.

Let's say you are in a rural district with a great deal of natural lumber resources. There's a party that's for clearcutting, and two parties adamantly against it. The party for clearcutting gets 35% of the vote and wins the election - is it democratic that governance power in the local district is handed to the minority vote?

Of course, the "easy" solution to this is to do things California-style - i.e. put every major controversial issue up to a popular vote, to remove the association of specific issues to party lines. That has its dangers also - here in Seattle it's resulted in deadlock on major issues and just a complete clogging of government.

Even if we ignore local governance, the drawing of district boundaries can also be used to disenfranchise certain demographics. In one city I used to live in, they redrew the districts to carve up the urban-center population and mixed them in with the suburban voter base. In this way, pro-urban issues didn't have a chance, and urban residents couldn't win representation effectively. Is that democracy?

etc etc. These issues never end - "democracy" is hard to define.
I agree that there isn't a proper correlation between score and quality on most comments, but it's comments about specific topics that I don't know a lot about that I would want to see scores. How am I supposed to know if you're talking out of your ass or actually saying something useful if I know nothing about the topic? The scores allowed me to quickly determine the trustworthiness of a comment.
>Usually it's got some modified permissions which allow it to run as another user (commonly root). They should be designed to be secure against an attack but nothing is bug-free. So you know what you do? You remove those permissions. Suddenly it's just a normal executable with the same capabilities as any other executable on the system (of which there are many even on a minimal system).

Or you don't even leave it on the system, which means that it can't exploit the hole. If you're aware of the hole, you don't put it on the system in the first place, and if you don't know about it, it's impossible for someone to use an exploit that doesn't exist.

That's rather simpler than leaving it on there, and hoping that permissions work. Nothing's bug free, so why take the chance?
Except that most 'closed' companies use open source software to build, host, or maintain their product. If everyone kept their software under wraps, their would be no giant's shoulders to stand on.

I think an acceptable (business-wise) middle-way is to open some components that are valuable to the world, but does not immediately make everyone a potential instant competitor.
It's clear it solves a problem for you and granted as one person already said they would just create their own. The thing is people don't. Keep iterating over it and decide what is the one thing it does well. Keep that one thing and make it better. Good luck.
Slow motion, massive landslide that is moving at only 50cm per hour
I think you just missed the whole thread of people explaining why scores did not allow you to determine the trustworthiness of a comment.
The point of this is that users' wants & desires are really hard to dictate. The desired outcome of ditching points was to see if it could generate better discussion. The thing is, there are a certain sub-set of users (personally, I'm ambivalent) who really, really want the point system back, and don't necessarily agree with the assertion that HN was on the decline to begin with.

I have a tendency to use HN in a few ways:

* As a tech industry firehose: I review headlines in RSS (Reeder) and only 'v' through to headlines that really pique my interests.

* As a means to directly interact with smart people whom I would not otherwise meet (I'm in a small town in Florida).

* As a means to understand how people feel about the ideas I'm reading.

That last use case has been more or less squashed by the removal of visible points. I can only know how much the community agrees or disagrees with what I say, not those in disagreement with me. What's ironic is that agreement/disagreement wasn't the purpose of the karma system at HN to begin with. That's just how it was frequently used.

You can blame this on the fact that the attribution of karma points on HN was supposed to be driven by causes that many people simply don't think about. Put another way, voting the way we're intended to isn't intuitive to most people. This situation is made worse by the fact that virtually every other site with a similar voting system uses it to express agreement/disagreement, rather than conversational contribution/detraction.

The benefit of transparency is offset by the many well argued counter-points. The perception of this issue has a lot to do with one's personal use case. I'm happy to keep two out of three, but for someone who plays more of a spectator role, I'm sure the loss of the point system is a big hit to the utility of the site.
Your definition of "fun" does not match mine.
I'm just guessing, but if he's from Canada he could be described as (North) American and perhaps he wanted to make that distinction. USAian is hardly a slur, it's entirely different from your Dumbocrats/Republitards example.
I read his post, and the use of USAian didn't bother me. It is not offensive, unlike the examples you gave.
I think it has to be because my Macbook is old as dirt. It's 5 years old, and runs okay, but not great. I'll give it another run-through with my iMac at home.

Frankly, anything other than Flash would make me happier.
What are you talking about?

"USAian" is an abbreviation of "United States of American", use by folks who believe that "American" refers to the entire pair of continents.
So the issue is only with DOM elements in IE 6, right? If I write:

function foo(huge) {
some_global_thing.call_later = function() { 42 }
}

And call foo with "huge", huge is not saved in call_later's closure, right? And it doesn't change if I do:

function foo(huge, x){
blah_blah_blah.whatever = function() { x + 1 };
}

We're still only closing over "x", right?
I like the idea of Pagoda pulling from the github repository, but what happens if github is for any reason inaccessible and you need to make an update to your site? Is there a backup method?
Following that logic, people with different tastes would conclude that carbs are worse than fat.
Below are my ideas. Not a legal advice.

Is this a good approach?

Depends.

Also is this legal?

Probably not. To totally legally work for the LLC you need to apply for and get another H1B. Of course, it is not illegal if you get another H1B. Consult a lawyer and preferably set up an Inc, not an LLC.

Are there better approaches?

I know this is far out and you may not want to do it, but if you are really determined to work on your own apps, you can always work from another country and still sell apps.
Compare the margin between ING Direct savings and BofA checking. If you were to offer rates slightly above and store all your money in an ING Direct savings account, you would be able to make quite a profit.

It's conceivable that a large institutional client would get even better rates than an individual ING Direct savings account, so there is plenty of money for BankSimple to skim off the top, as long as they have enough capital.
Not all large companies feed you kool aid, force you to attend pointless meetings or use shitty tools. And re: tools, this really has little to do with the company size, and sometimes you have to take shortcuts and use inelegant solutions to satisfy the customer - which actually happens a lot in startups. It is true that working for a large company can hurt your creativity, but on the other hand there are classes of problems that can really only be solved at a big co. If you enjoy working on these problems you might not have much of a choice.
Definitely. A good middle ground is for companies to open source tools and side programs they write that make their work easier. Many other developers would probably derive benefit from them, and who knows, it could turn into another stream of revenue for that company.
> How will overdrafts work? Will the check just not go through?

That's how it used to work, so sure, it's an option. A second option would be automatically taking the money out of your savings account, if available. A third option is, if you have a credit card with them, putting the overage on you your credit card. A fourth option would be to generate an automatic overage loan at a reasonable interest rate, without assessing a ridiculous fee.
Why would that be a good idea? What advantage would a just-in-time parser generator have that a static parser generator does not?
halts all Colorado cases...
Very cool, thanks for the update.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that restaurant owners think that the website should not have flash/pdf menus/no mobile etc, why? Well, look at all the crappy websites that exist out there, right?

However, I completely support your endeavour because I hate all those restaurants.

Could I get your email? I'd love to discuss this further and see if my product can help out.
The Mac App Store is an excellent distribution channel that, even with its drawbacks, still removes a ton of friction for us as well as our customers. We'll certainly consider other distribution channels (especially for site licenses or bulk purchases), but the App Store has been good to us so far!
The few times I've made small utilities in OCaml have proven satisfying (quick to code up, correct once I made it past the type checker). I wonder if the Jane Street folks ever use OCaml in the places people usually stick python or shell scripts.
I agree --- people don't. And there's a wide world of people who couldn't, even if they wanted to.
Thailand's Kasikornbank Launches "the Debit Card Foursquare Limited Edition"