skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Everyone knows the correct way to get copyrighted content from the internet. You use iTunes, or Amazon's MP3 service, or NetFlix, or Hulu, or any number of services. Everyone also knows that when you get a legal copy of a copyrighted work there will be a 'payment' or a 'subscription' involved.

No. No they don't know. And no, no there isn't payment for every legal copy.

You mention Hulu. Lets look at that real quick. What if someone sets up a website that mimics hulu's free video system, with a different brand but just as legit looking and with pirated material, hell, lets say they even run ads. No one would know if the website was legit or not, especially not if there were no news articles about it.

Furthermore, look at youtube. The version of video X uploaded by hulu has no copyright violation, the version uploaded by hulo does violate copyright. Congresspeople upload clips from CSPAN. Are they breaking copyright? Did they get authorization from CSPAN for every single clip? Really? How do I know that?

Don't act like that the user knows. I still find myself explaining to the less technologically inclined that getting songs with whatever p2p software they're using is illegal. Don't even pretend that you can put the burden on the user to determine what websites are kosher.
I'd say that ideas are not worth a dime unless it's actually implemented. I mean, if a person with a fantastic idea doesn't know how to implement it, or doesn't even try to- that idea's useless.

However, no matter how bad that idea is- as long as a person tries and implements it- that idea becomes priceless. I say priceless because every idea that you can turn into reality means that you've gained experience, and more in-depth knowledge about that particular idea. As cheesy as it sounds, knowledge is priceless.
Of Courics and User Experience
It's ridiculous to draw a conclusion in this form (as rottencupcakes did):

"Local-oriented company is losing money globally, therefore, they must be hugely profitable in at least one locale"

There's absolutely no evidence to support that claim (at least, none that has been presented in this discussion).

You've actually taken ridiculous one step beyond with your assertion that, "they will become extremely profitable as the market leader." Market leadership has absolutely nothing to do with profitability. The two concepts are 100% unrelated.

What is their plan to become profitable? If they can grow revenue by thousands of percentage points and still not achieve profitability--how do they do it? They've got great plans around achieving revenue growth--but I contend that have no idea how to go from revenue growth to profitability.
Which format and scheme, with which doctype did you use to get invalid results in the validator?

Microformats should never invalidate any doctype as they are just class-names.

Microdata can be used in valid HTML5 doctype pages.

RDFa can be used in valid xHTML+RDFa doctype pages.
Maybe your pipes are a lot fatter than mine.

kb/us == mb/ms == gb/s

On the other hand, I agree that a even a kilbotye of extra data to have fundamentally better search result pages is a big win for everyone.
The fact that they aren't turning a profit and have an indefensible business model is concerning to me. There's no reason why a Groupon customer shouldn't use LivingSocial or one of the dozen other competitors.
No, I think they should license it to HTC and all the other Android handset manufacturers, giving them one more bullet point in their long list of features that the iPhone lacks.

There's a patent. That much is (apparently) fact. Everything else is speculation. Is it really worth getting worked up over things that haven't happened and may never happen?

Finally, if this were to come to pass, there's a very easy solution: a filter. You will see cases that cover the lens with an IR filter. Problem solved. Yawn.
Ask HN: How do you quit your (good) job gracefully?
I'm a web designer & developer working for a small 5 person web shop. The job itself is great - I can work remotely whenever I choose, the owner and coworkers are all great people, no complaints except the boring nature of client work, really. That said, I can't tolerate client work much longer and have been waiting for the right opportunity to join a startup (or similar) company.

However, recently my boss came up with a "revolutionary idea" for a project/task management type app and is gung ho that it's the next big thing. He's already got "investors" lined up and has me spending half my days building an MVP by myself. As great as this would seem, I don't really believe in the idea and it's definitely not the true startup type environment I'm seeking, as I'm still stuck doing BS client work on top of creating the MVP on my own. I'm starting to be overwhelmed with work, have little time for my personal projects, and am generally becoming much less happy every day. Our client work pipeline is starting to run dry, and my boss is starting to bank on this app as the future of the company.

I've got some savings (~4 months of living expenses) and I'm turning down freelance work every week. I'm starting to realize I need to make a power move soon to change my situation.

Here's the problem: I'm the only one who can program (php/mysql/js) in the company, we're knee deep in a couple large client projects, and the MVP is far from finished. I have such a great relationship with the owner and I want the best for the company, but not sure how much longer I can take it before breaking down.

How do I exit this situation without completely screwing them over?
Installed. Bonus points if someone makes it automatically flag any bitcoin-related story, since they won't be visible for me to flag anymore.
The [good / bad] news for you is: you [won't have to / can't] use the AppEngine High Replication Datastore.

It's also worth mentioning that unlike AppEngine the Heroku stack is a unix based environment (call "heroku run bash" and boom, you have shell access) and its components are all open sourced, so it should be relatively easy to move from there to a VPS if you ever need to.

Other than that, Heroku comes from multiple years of supporting Ruby (and some Node.js), their main page still states "Agile deployment for Ruby and Node.js", there's a lot of Rails/Sinatra/Rack specific stuff in their docs, and the Heroku command line tool is a Ruby Gem. In other words, this is not an "Heroku for Django", like Djangy was, it's become more like an "Heroku for anything, with a strong culture of Ruby", and IMO that's extremely exciting: we're talking about access to multiple languages and tools on the same easy-to-use cloud.
Just sticking to restaurants, how many of those restaurants are potential customers for the groupon product as it exists today, let alone repeat customers?

Off the top of my head, I'd say the top 10-15% of restaurants would have no interest in trying Groupon because it cheapens their brand.
Then account for chains who don't really need Groupon's reach to offer such promotions (or rather will find it more cost effective to do something like this themselves).

As for the rest of the restaurants, once the novelty of groupon wears off, how often will they come back to give the general public 50% (actually close to 75% off, because Groupon takes half the cut) off meals ?

The Groupon Now idea is a bit more interesting but I think it's something that's going to be best captured by a less physical method of scaling (i.e. not emplying 4000 sales people)

Disclaimer: I'm currently working for a startup in the restaurant space though it does not have any element(s) of a daily deals/groupon clone.
"Overrepresented" is a judgement call. You think bitcoins are overrepresented, but I think startup stuff is overrepresented. Neither of us is right or wrong.

(Disclaimer: I do not own bitcoins)
Legal Pyramid Scheme, nothing more.

The founders and early stage investors build something semi-viable, then spend all their efforts on marketing. Some of helps to grow the product, but most to convince bigger investors to buy them out and assume the risk.

Why on earth would investors do this, you ask? Well, because they know that given the marketing, there will be other investors that will allow them to exit.

Repeat until IPO, then ride the wave until the explosion. Time it right you make a fortune.

Unfortunately, a minimum of effort goes into creating a lasting product with a proper valuation, so the moment that most investors realize that they aren't going to make their money back, ka-boom.

Dot bomb all over again. Groupon is not a billion dollar company.
Depends on how much you value your own time and your risk-aversion.
BTW, I found that interview very enlightening.

I hadn't realized how nice you are. Your real-life persona completely contradicts the caricature I had developed in my mind after years of reading your essays.

I was expecting Vulcan (hyper-smart, non-sentimental), but instead got Camp Counselor (humble, encouraging).

You should do more on-stage stuff.
What mistakes do people typically make when designing landing pages?
On the main page:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON my_database.*
TO 'my_user'@'localhost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'my_password'
WITH GRANT OPTION;

Couldn't have shown a better example!
Time Warner.
Ask HN: How do I short a stock?
I'm ready and willing to put my money where my mouth is. LinkedIn wasn't worth $95 a share and Groupon wont be worth what it closes at the day of its IPO.

So, I want to start shorting tech stocks just after their IPO's. How do I do it? What trading programs/companies/services do you use that actually allow you to short stock and what are their rates?

Edit: Pandora isn't worth that much either in my humble opinion.
The HN voting system is working. Whether your favorite thread receives enough votes or not is not the issue. People are obviously interested in Bitcoin. I know I am.

I'm not sure if Bitcoin will become a new currency or if something better will come along and blow it out of the water, but I do know that it is highly likely that some crypto currency will be in use in the near future, Bitcoin or not. The reaction central banks and governments have towards Bitcoin will be interesting to watch. I'm going to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch the disruption.
Army Tests Smartphones, Tablets for Combat Use
Read the VC's website first to answer as many of these questions as you can, and if you have remaining questions then ask those. But asking "When where you founded?" to a VC may only show you didn't do your homework.
Not related to +1, but related to Google going social.

If I were Google, Android would come with an app called something like "Google Friends" and it would connect with your friends that have the app on their phone.

Easy app, message, video and photo sharing between friends.
Microdata, why? Compared to RDFa (or even Microformats), I don't see a single compelling reason to use microdata.

At least RDFa has a well documented way to define and extend your own schemas...
what? we're not gangsters, we're businessmen. If you choose your own ego over the best business decision, you will lose every time.
You need to communicate how unhappy you are. What would break your relationship is if you quit without ever voicing your discontent - it coming as a complete surprise is what will make it seem like you "screwed" him and the company over.

Communicating how unhappy you are, the reasons why, will make it so that the hope of a friendly exit is possible.

You can also communicate that you're looking to leave in the next X months, and that you're willing to invest the time to help find a replacement (and interviewing that individual, etc).
Bitcoins don't have to be tradable to dollars to represent nonzero value. Their utility is in and of itself valuable. It might not have value to you, but that's different than suggesting that it has no value at all.
Is Apple About To Merge iOS & Mac OS? WWDC Schedule Points That Way
The Trouble With Groupon » OnMedea
Information in specific types — including reviews — exposed using microformats, RDFa or microdata has already been used by Google for over 2 years, they call it "Rich Snippets", and it does improve the quality of experience for users, assuming that you equate an increase in clickthroughs to mean that the user percieves that page to be more useful compared to other SERPs results (and anecdotally I always go for results which include rich snippet information gleaned from pages with the required semantic enhancements).

This announcement is not the proposal of a new technique, but rather the extension of one which is already working and is a good thing for the web.
I wonder if it has anything to do with who they bought their infrastructure from when they moved into a market. For example, in my area Comcast took over from AT&T, and broadband immediately went from Not Available to Hell Yeah.
| edw: No, I think they should license it to HTC and all the other Android handset manufacturers, given them one more feature bullet point in their long list of features that the iPhone lacks.

What are you talking about? To follow your absurd scenario, you think if Apple gave this bizarre patent away, but none of their others, that the EFF should then turn around and backstab the inventors and license it to their rivals? Yeah that's real classy and makes a whole lot of sense..

Why do so many people see the world in these binaries? Good/evil, black/white, red/blue.
As I mentioned above, Bitcoins value relative to the dollar is irrelevant, because its value is found in its utility. So long as there are goods and services to purchase with Bitcoin (and it seems very difficult for a government to stop such services from existing), the utility of the currency remains valuable, regardless of its exchange rate to the dollar.

EDIT: The fact that government would have a very difficult time shutting down the Bitcoin economy is yet another example of its utility and value.
Fuck yes.

This isn't about GB/$.

This is about IOPS/($ x density) and Throughput/($ x density). Databases and datastores used to be limited by iops, and SSD's are altering the balance of where that bottleneck occurs: we've already seen absurd 9x SSD systems[1] and 24x SSD systems[2] running off three or four SATA/SCSI cards; this offers those levels of performance in a single package.

3GBps is 24Gbps. A mere two of these will max out the IO Hub on a Nehalem, which is good for 40Gbps[3]. As for getting that data into the CPU, the top of the line MP Xeon offers four QPI links good for 25.6Gbps a piece. That's 100Gbps, which four of these could provide, and it stands as a fixed upper bound for how much data an SMP (4-way in this case) system can be fed (and thus crunch) at once (and uses expensive 4-way cpus to do it). The throughput limit is now (erm, will be) the platform, not the IO storage. This is huge. Wait, no, strike that, it's incomprehensibly small, small and fast.

References:

[1] "Battleship mtron" http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/

[2] "Samsung SSD Awesomeness" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22

[3] "Building a Single Box 100Gbps Router" via http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/
Does the phone market forgive failure?
I don't know what link bait is. It's not a repost, we just published the article today. It's... just plain legit news from Tokyo.
And they fail at both.
Your conscience says that property ownership makes one complicit in all the thefts and violence that came before; mine does not. Seeing as you have no problem threatening further theft and violence, it seems "a good conscience" is out of reach for you, but I'm doing just fine.

> if you simply measure ownership as possession

I do not. I measure ownership through the legal mechanisms under which I reside; "possession" hardly plays into it. I consider it appropriate to transfer ownership through those mechanisms, and not appropriate to worry about whatever violence may have happened prior to the establishment of those mechanisms generations ago. I also consider it appropriate to use the mechanisms provided by that legal system against those who attempt to illegally take possession of others' property; breaking in to my house and changing the locks makes you subject to arrest within this legal context.

Of course, as I said before, you can try to create your own context of communal ownership through voluntary donation and persuasive means. Or you can try to change that legal context through force of arms, and deal with my side shooting back at your band of violent assholes.

> you've failed to make the case for private ownership of resources.

I'm not interested in making the case for private ownership of resources. I'm just making the case that I'm OK with the context I live in (and I'm OK with you voluntarily living in some other context), and that you'll probably get shot if you try to violently overthrow my society.
IIRC, SLC NAND has ~100,000 write cycles and MLC ~10,000 (enterprise-level SSDs almost exclusively use the former). I'm not aware of any recent studies specifically on durability, but given that there are no moving parts I'd imagine that SSDs last at least as long as mechanical drives. There's also this bit from the press release: "[The] 700GB drive [is] able to write 28 terabytes of data every day for five years."
Probably pretty tough right now -

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43098403/Why_You_Cannot_Short_LinkedI...
Shorting stock isn't necesarily a trading software issue, it's a broker issue. Brokers don't allow just anyone to short, they evaluate your account and decide what ammount they'll let you short for. (This way you can't short more than you own, and then leave them on the hook for the difference if the stock rises past what you own).

I use Schwab, they have a great trading platform, easy to use, and easy accounts to set up.
I wish I could hide all of the stories about startups, for example, but instead I just ignore them. People can do the same when it comes to bitcoin articles.

Using an extension to hide the stories is ignoring them. It's just automated and highly efficient.
> The state does this, but people already get around this by conducting cash transactions. Bitcoin creates another option for this.

Govts tolerate a certain amount of black market because it costs too much to reduce the black market to 0. However, that toleration goes away when govts are seriously hurting for revenue.
Maybe having it so when you submit a story you can apply to have it "pinned" would make sense for stuff like job postings.

Don't need to demote Bitcoin, or other subjects people want to hear about, just need to promote special features.
Hear hear. This space is so small, Google should buy it just to consolidate it and clean up the available options.
Wifi Stealer tries common passwords on nearby networks
At first it was embarrassing, now it's just absurd.
>>Andi said that ignoring the cost for future generations was the issue. He wasn't arguing against all technical progress. It's not just that one sentence I referred to, it's his entire comment

AGAIN, "In addition, I note that you made a claim -- but didn't present any other way of reading that sentence".

You just made another claim. If you want to show a thesis, then quote the relevant part and show it. Here is what he wrote:

>>You are stuck in a view that energy needs to be cheap and that energy must be available despite the costs of nuclear reactors for nature and future generations. This is the classical view of people who see technical progress as a kind of god given fact or as the natural direction humanity must take.

From the rest of his comments, where he seems to think that natural resources will disappear if they are used, he has no clue about anything. (Hint: People are mining scrap heaps, etc.) He was against cities -- where each individual use less land and resources than people living in the countryside (or maybe he just want to kill everyone in cities -- where are they going to go, otherwise?)

>>Pumping nuclear waste down old oil wells is not enough, what if someone nasty decides to make plutonium?

First, you changed the subject. I assume you yield on Andi's "point" about cost to future generations.

Second, nothing are going to stop e.g. Iran, Pakistan and North Korea from building nuclear power plants and getting bombs. That cat is out of the bag. So that is irrelevant.

>>There is no rule that states pollution and energy usage reduce with better economies

Afaik, western societies pollute less and less over the last 50-60 years. I gave examples. (The energy use is increasing, but less and less for each additional unit of GNP.)

>>go check some statistics for pollution during China's booming economy over the last twenty years

When the economy reaches a certain level, countries start to invest in clean technology, etc. China has already started. The dirtiest phase is industrialisation -- it is still better than what was before.
Adding a few tags to your HTML templates is "expensive"? With Google, Bing, and Yahoo all supporting this, I don't think it will be long before formtastic-like plugins start popping up to make this really easy.
I wanted CSS selector support, and so I just copied and pasted in Zepto with some minor hacks to prevent conflicts with pg's $ function. I'm sure there are easier ways to do this, but I've never written one before, either, and wanted to spend as little time as possible writing it.
I bet they are registering the subreddit domains to have them redirect to the subreddits. All of them seem like pretty established subreddits. Perhaps they want the subreddits to function more like stand alone websites?
Enloop Writes Your Business Plan For You (And Tells You If It's Crazy or Not)
Agreed. My mix of subreddits is article heavy and awesome. I'm always a little surprised when I find myself logged off on the default front page - about 85% imgur links at least.
This one isn't quite a complaint, but it's my favorite corporate customer service exchange. The logical gymnastics are brilliant and hilarious. Enjoy:
http://www.27bslash6.com/blockbuster.html

Update: This one might be even better: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
Frustratingly, I couldn't find the actual widget from the blog announcement. Is it in Labs? Even googling the widget took me to their announcement and not to the widget. Certainly I'm missing something. Does anyone know where the gmail people widget is?
The patent was filed December 2, 2009 when the 3gs was the latest and greatest iPhone. I'd be surprised if you see this on an iPhone near you anytime soon. And if the powers that be try to use it to repress Apple users, there are tons of other devices out there. No need to get alarmed.
Windows 8 - In with the old & new
Rage comics, advice animals, scumbag x, etc have bled over into virtually every subreddit now. It's basically part of reddit's culture.

I've said it before, but you can unsubscribe from a subreddit, but you can't unsubscribe from a culture.
on the theme of Rapportive: I played today with it to build an HN raplet and I realized something slightly scary: whenever I installs rapportive, or any raplet, all of my contacts's email addresses get broadcasted to the builders of the raplets plainly.

Was this discussed previously on HN, or on some of the Rapportive public comunications? It seems a moderately bad thing to me, although I have not pondered the alternatives (hash a-la gravatar for example).