skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Greece and other sovereign nations "contractually" borrowed money from others yet they may still default.

Where should this universal contract be drafted and who should be responsible to honor and uphold it?

I think that is the point of Bitcoin. There is not one set of legal rules that can control it. It doesn't need contracts, only possession.

If you own them, you can give them to others, trade, or buy things. If not, then you can't. Simple.

Fiat currencies are backed by their governing nation's word. That is it. Like in the case of Greece and others, that word can be easily broken.
A hard call. Actually audio story is not the main problem, those paragraphs are confusing.

The header is pretty clear "audio stories, every week,
to enjoy on every commute". Enough to guess what the audio story is.
I get to the first paragraph, "audio service", "sync", perhaps it's something else?. Then I get "audio programmes from independent DIY audio makers" sounds like sophisticated something.
Third one finally clarifies it, somewhat.

Even after reading all of it again carefully now I have no clear idea on what the app might look like.

I'd say make it dumb, cut straight to the chase.
Just an FYI - the Web Developer Toolbar extension for FF and Chrome has this built-in.
As is clear from the Amazon statement, they are not against sales taxes in principle and would agree to pay one if it were uniform

As lsc pointed out above, that's not the case at all. Amazon is refusing to collect taxes on behalf of its customers, not refusing to pay its own taxes.

By law, citizens are supposed to tally up what they bought from internet retailers over the course of the year and pay any remaining sales tax on April 15th. Shockingly, this isn't happening, and the sales taxes aren't being paid at all. So these states want Amazon to behave like a bricks and mortar retailer, and collect the tax at time of sale instead.

Amazon doesn't want to collect sales tax because not doing so makes their prices look lower than competitors like Barnes and Noble, which does collect sales tax. Nothing more, nothing less.
I have a question..

Out of all the websites with supposed infringement, Best Buy, etc why no targeting of Microsoft?

Given IV's history it does cause some wonder
It depends on the number of months since you signed up. It goes down quite significantly.
My weekend project - AES encryption for Gmail or anything else
Formatting like this is helpful for things like...

if cell < 0 make entire row red

This isn't currently possible because the conditional can only check the value of THIS cell, not others. As the other comment indicates, it also helps expand what values you can evaluate. I use excel heavily and this is one of the largest gaps between it and google docs for me.
The ride is often more enjoyable than the destination. I'm not talking specifically about Outliers but in general, I think the essence of any good book could probably be distilled down to a paragraph.
WTH is happening to Rails? I'll tell you.
What is stopping companies from maintaining fixed numbers of shareholders, perhaps with interceding intermediary entities. Example: Company A owns 1% of Facebook and the only purpose of Company A is to be a vehicle for Facebook ownership. Thus, another 500 entities can own Company A stock, in turn owning Facebook stock privately.
LET’S MAKE FACEBOOK RED, WHITE & BLUE TODAY
But also not far from the truth.

iPhone's gross margin is at about 60% and the average price is at $629
Properly implementing hashed passwords with challenge-response will protect your login, though your session information can still be sniffed.
I believe it will work on 2G with T-Mobile. I use the 3GS in this capacity frequently.
Why Facebook is Losing US Users
I suppose he was right. They didn't release them on wednesday.
... and it feels really natural. Amazon identifies me easily, but if I do anything that feels like I need my password, it asks for it. Apple's App Store has similar logic, although it bothers me in one place where they ask for your password when downloading free apps.

And then there's Windows Live. Click on anything remotely related to Passport? You need a password (followed by 17 redirects, which is hilarious when managers have sound turned on and you here the "click click click click click" as IE bounces around).
Relevant: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

Simple visual tool to show what percentage of web users can see different areas of your website without needing to scroll.
Some easy photo tips for Geeks
I'm not quite sure I understand your analogy unless you mean to say that asciiflows core principles include not using IE.
from a brand awareness standpoint, facebook is definitely the way to go. if you're trying to drive sales, people are a lot closer to a purchase on google.
Criticizing a game review primarily because it's not funny seems like a non-sequiter to me.
Brewster Kahle is great: here is someone who has a track record of achieving material success but has turned his energies to filling a public need.

In a delete nothing world, where ideally URIs never change, new material == a new URI, it is easy enough to assume that digital material will last forever, but I am a bit pessimistic here. For example, what if a systemic software error invalidates most of S3?

I must agree with other people here that collectible books will probably always exist. I have a 50 pound tome of da Vinci's total corpus of work a customer gave me for Christmas - thumbing through that is simply a different kind of experience than accessing the same material through a web browser, even without rich media like video.
But the car you can buy has more safety and comfort features than the one your dad could buy back then.
I didn't act quickly enough to delete it but I did resubmit it with the "Good link"
Second, as far as I can tell, if you wanted to find the real political story here (since this is a story with both tech and political overtones) is that the big box retailers are looking to put the squeeze on their competition, and using government to do so.

I think this is a fascinating issue for many reasons, but specifically for this one -- the fact of the matter is that big box retailers like Target are at a huge competitive disadvantage when competing against internet-only retailers like Amazon because of state sales tax laws, so it makes perfect sense that the big box retailers would say to the government: "Hey, this company found a loophole in your rules that I can't exploit!"

Also interesting is the fact that the case that Amazon always leans on, Quill v. North Dakota, took place in 1992 -- before the internet era even began. Yet another instance of the government not keeping up with this whole "internet" thing and changing laws to reflect that reality.
BigCorp Agile and Feedback Loops
Unlocked iPhone 4 Officially Available in US
I am Australian and didn't go through the UK education system but I lived in the UK from 2001 to 2004 and I was somewhat shocked at the state of the education system when I was there.

At the time there was a show on Channel 4 called "That'll Teach 'Em". The idea was to put (then) current GCSE students through the old O-levels in a 1950s boarding school environment. It was of course (like any "reality" show) done up for TV but there were some interesting tidbits, which were news to me (as an expat):

- Grade inflation is rampant, so much so that they had to invent a grade above an A (the A<asterisk>) because too many people were getting As.

In the US I believe this to also be a problem but it's hidden behind scaling of results. At least I see so many people who have 3.8+ college GPAs (which, as I understand it, basically means 80% As and 20% Bs) that I have to wonder where all the C students are.

In Australia--at least when I went through the education system some 15+ years ago--it was nothing like that.

- Students who were getting 11 GCSE As couldn't pass 4 O-levels. Granted the curriculum structure is different (eg it once relied on more memorization) but still...

- Current education philosophy in the UK seems to emphasize creative expression, which to me sounds like the educational equivalent of moral relativism in that there is no wrong or right. The idea is to simply make students express themselves. Nevermind actually knowing anything or being able to critically formulate or deconstruct an argument.

- Students who were getting As in GCSE French couldn't even conjugate the verb "avoir" (to have). If you've never studied a language this means coming up with the French equivalent of I have / we have / you have / he/she/it has / they have (j'ai / nous avons / tu as / vous avez / il/elle a / ils/elles ont). This is as basic as it gets.

In case you were wondering why there was 6 for French and 5 for English, the second person singular in English (thou hast) has fallen into disuse.

From what I remember the exams were largely take-home translations, which in the Internet age typically meant getting someone French to do them.

- Maths was incredibly weak.

But the UK seems to have a similar problem to what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind of target. The uncomfortable truth is that not everybody belongs in university or will get anything out of it.
This is especially irritating considering the numerous other languages that the JVM supports now. Oracle needs to fix this limitation along with bringing in correct Generics support - not the way it is today.
This project can also be use for learning from other JavaScript libraries.

Example jQuery Object: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2111778/AutoObjectDocumentation/demo...
Apple Settles iPhone Patent Lawsuit with Nokia
You're always going to have options.

http://www.archlinux.org/
CSS calc()
"More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day"

I love pseudo-statistics. They might as well say that 99.9% of their highly-active users log on to Facebook every day. Unqualified qualifiers lack quality.
Maybe I'm weird, but I would hate if the engines weren't loud.

I find the sound soothing, and the white noise is way better than listening to unpolite people talking loudly or babies crying.

It would be impossible for me to sleep on a plane.
> If I say "I like German food", I'm not implying that I'm not liking Korean food or something.

Except, that's not what the original quote said.

> I am a proud German, I love Germany above everything, and I do everything in my power to improve the image of Germany.

I am a proud German, I love German food above everything, and I do everything in my power to improve the image of German food.

Apples to oranges.
Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD
A possible solution implementable by a client:
Have the second column be position: fixed; until you scroll to the end of the 1st column - only then start scrolling the 2nd column (and so on to the 3rd column).

I find multiple columns in pdfs very annoying to read as you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page, then back up to start the 2nd column, then scroll down to reach the end of the 2nd column.
No recommendations. Although buy a wireless one. I have an old, simple one from Cateye that works like a charm.
You must not be Canadian.

The whole "I'm proud to be X" would sound a bit rude or ignorant in my circles.
Under XMonad, tiling windows won't be resized.
DennisM - how much that AWS EC2 solution did cost to you in terms of time spent on setup and testing and hosting fees?
As an embedded systems developer I'm well aware of the very low power processors with ARM cores but I'm wondering how this really transfers to the server world. It seems to me that large DRAM, cache and fast disk drives and I/O peripherals must be the main issues driving power consumption. Those won't go away, will they?

The Calxeda guy said that lower clock speeds and higher core counts are the key factors of his product, which isn't necessarily something only ARM can do. I'm wondering why Intel couldn't build servers along the same lines.
I used to think 'No', but after 3 years in a job I really enjoyed daily, I realized that I did need a vacation... And I've been taking one about every 6 months since then, even if it's just a stay-cation.

Your body and mind need some down-time to escape from the stress at work. And there IS stress, even if you enjoy it. I have never yet come back from a vacation and wished I hadn't taken it.
Maintain Inbox Zero and still read every email
Wal-Mart wanted $30 for a 10 foot USB cable. I got the same cable down the road for $10 at Radio Shack. Wal-Mart should be cheaper due to larger bulk discounts and their famed logistics. A $20 difference can't be accounted for with a 6% sales tax. And it was still cheaper than online once I added shipping.
Arithmetic, Population and Energy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
The Top Passcodes You Should Never Use On Your iPhone
Sounds like a neat little idea that might work for a while given his PR, but nothing that's going to disrupt college. Actually I can see a lot of college students using such a website or even them being the user base.

In fact I doubt there will be any significant website/business/education system that will kill/replace the current higher education system.
When the last tickets for the latest eclipse "release train" are given out, even showstopper bugs are forced to wait until 3.x.1 ;)
Just after I read this and I went to another site (http://smarterer.com/) and I got reminded of your owl doodle.
> says that ads don't work as much as expected

He's talking about ads elsewhere pointing to your app. He's saying they cost way too much for getting enough users in. You need to get people to talk about your app from liking it.

Ads work FINE in apps to make you money, especially non-app based ads (ie, one's not about apps).

Professional 3rd party iOS developer here:

You can monetize it by putting adds in. I suggest something like AdWhirl as iAd is in that service as well as ads from many other sources including your own ads you make. iAd is very nice when it's there, but its fill rate leaves something to be desired at times.

AdWhirl lets you sell ads directly. This is where the big money is. You make far more per ads sold that way. However, sales teams are expensive, so you will want to work with organizations already selling ads or know of people buying ads like crazy in the market

Other ways to make money:

Pointing to products that people can buy and get affiliate cash. Cars and Real Estate are high per item affiliate fee items, books and apps are high volume affiliate free items.

Sell a pro version or subscription based enhancement to the free app (freemium, a la dropbox).

License your app to third parties as a whitebox solution for something or other (either functional or branding)

Use your app as a marketing channel for other things. For instance, The Heist gives away other people'e product.

If your app delivers certain types of product, you can collect and reuse personal data. That can be sold (with user consent).
I heard this idea somewhere else recently, and I think it's brilliant. Instead of limiting sizes of political donations, just make it impossible to track who gave 'em. Oh sure, you can still tell your favourite politician "Hey, I just gave you ten thousand dollars" but they can't possibly check.

Closing a few obvious loopholes: you should only be able to donate in certain nice round numbers ($10, $20, $50, $100, ... $10,000, $20,000) to avoid situations where you can tell a politician "Hey, the $15433.33 donation is from me" and have them confirm it. And it should be fuzzy in time, too -- politicians shouldn't know when a donation came in with resolution greater than a week or so.

It's great, because people are still free to support their favourite politicians as much as they like, but with greatly decreased possibility for corruption.

Politicians will, of course, hate it, so it'll never happen.
Debt Release Direct
Debt Release Direct offer debt management advice, debt help, debt advice and info on debt management plans, bankruptcy and ivas
I truly understand the points you give and I like the fact that rails has a proper process for all of this.
Fact is though that 90% of projects that I didn't start myself involve FTPing stuff to a server were all the developers muck around writing over each others files.

Horrible yes. State of the art in most web consultancies also yes.

Passenger allows one to basically work this way with ruby too and it is sorely needed because there are 'developers' out there that seemingly haven't worked with Sourcecontrol in their entire career. If you need to give them access to some templates it is nice if you don't have to bring them up to speed on git first.

I wouldn't hire those people but I was forced to work with some.

My point: Allowing a less robust but easier deployment method is a pareto improvement because I can now choose. It is also a path towards sane practices used by experts when you start with a big pile of unmaintainable crap.
http://www.palisade.com/precisiontree/
Doesn't seem to work in Opera, and the attempt to open a new window just opens a new tab (which of course, is the same size as the rest of the tabs).
I have to say that there was interesting thinking going into the Groupon model.It seems that the business may use it as a lost leader to show and showcase other products and services. For the business warm bodies mean opportunity.Each system has flaws this one has been very well pointed out in the article and the risks seem worth it for many companies.How to eliminate abuse. That is the question
Don't MS already have a licence? I thought that was part of the problem, the big software shops had just ponied up the dough when the patent was owned by IV or whoever it was.
Ask HN: Who will be at Echelon 2011 Singapore?
I am going, curious to know if anybody else from HN are there...
it looks totally different at home. 100% looks more like a cloud. 100% still think that's silly.
The SEO Puzzle: Do You Have the Pieces?
I saw one of Amazon's UX team at a talk a while back, and the way he described it is they have a set of actions/permissions for people who are totally logged out, a set for people who are "sort of logged in", and then a set that require full login.

It's definitely tricky to implement (how do you determine whether a user is "sort of logged in"?), but once you get over the conceptual hurdles it's a pretty awesome user experience.

However, I would argue that like much of what Amazon does, it's not necessarily appropriate for the majority of sites.
Dave McClure:Sexuality is a bias issue in funding [video]
It's cool!

One little thing, the iPhone 4 doesnt respond to neither css nor js resolution of 960*640, instead it has the same resolution as the 3GS but with -webkit-device-pixel-ratio: 2
Tips for Conducting a Link Audit
This guy is ignoring the twin elephants in the living room: the unbelievably massive amount of energy that we obtain from fossil fuels, and the reliance on the modern financial system on continuous growth simply to maintain the status quo.

These are linked issues.

All fossil fuels will peak this century. It's not politics... it's physics. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. Actually, I suspect they will all peak before 2050. Many knowledgeable people think oil has already peaked.

Peaking doesn't mean running out, it means exponentially declining EROEI (energy return on energy invested). There's plenty of oil left, but when it takes a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil we are out of oil.

Nothing except maybe nuclear has the muscle right now to fill the gap for electricity generation. Just try to sell that now, post-Fukushima. Nothing except biofuel can presently fill the gap for transportation, and it is dubious that biofuels can scale to those levels.

Does this mean apocalypse? I'm actually not a "doomer" per se. But consider this: as we pass peak on all fossil fuels, the vast majority of our surplus energy and labor will have to go to simply treading water and maintaining our standard of living in the face of rapidly declining energy availability. There's also going to be a lot of demand destruction: people buying less, traveling less, using less.

All that does spell doom for our financial system. Even a short interruption in growth results in financial catastrophe, since without continuous growth you get a wave of debt defaults.

It could be a very chaotic century.

Edit: but on the upside, there's going to be a ton of entrepreneurial opportunities around saving energy, making energy, and storing energy. Personally I think IT isn't where it's at... if I wanted to get back into entrepreneurship now (and I might in the future) I'd get into something energy-related.
"a government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind of target."

I'm pretty sure the real motivation for increasing the number of places in higher education was simply to keep the unemployment numbers down.
I'm a little surprised that there weren't higher concentrations in areas that I usually associate with ultra-conservative views, e.g. the rural South.
How good is the carrier participation internationally? I'm relocating to Buenos Aires in a couple weeks. Anyone have an idea how difficult it might be to get connected with this when I arrive?
Apple always knew it would be paying. It was arguing the amounts that Nokia wanted were excessive (like 10 bucks a device).

So, I've read the compromise was a large, one time payment by Apple. (But the agreement is confidential and the reports haven't said their source, so take that with a grain of salt).
Plus there is always all the fun you can have with something like the arduino kits that in some small way let you relive those days plus do so much more.
I wonder how much it cost them to buy this bill.
Much nicer alternative: http://browsersize.com/
Well, my personal annoyance with that is that it is often used to say: "See the problem will resolve itself by itself, or someone else will do it so we don't have to work on it".

The other thing is that while its true that in the past, the problems eventually became irrelevant, I don't think it is predictable and I don't believe we should make a law out of that. Maybe it is a fluke or maybe the timing could be off next time. I don't believe there is a a force that gives us a right to exist, a magical mechanism that makes us pull out ourselves out of any trouble. We have to do it ourselves. I understand we should hear this as "Just don't throw yourselves around like headless chickens" but what I hear is just "Don't worry, do nothing, don't care" and that is not at all inline with being an entrepreneur.
Should I buy stickers?
Very nice website!

I tried to do the same with a 28x4 canvas with unicode for twitter, but client and host unicode rendering differences turn it into an unintelligible mess most of the time (www.draw140.com)
A bookmarklet can probably perform this.
The pressure difference between the interior and exterior of the aircraft causes considerable stress on the aluminum. One of the advantages with composite fuselages is their greater durability. This will allow for pressurization to an equivalent 6000ft altitude, as opposed to the current standard of 8000ft. This will help with numerous things, including but not limited to: air quality, ear popping, humidity, etc.
MVP is "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional", which I believe is what he meant. I believe the later use of MVP (instead of MVC) is a typo.
I think they mean that HN's core principles include not using IE.