skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've followed a lot of your posts on HN and Quora and created an account just to ask this question: Why do you think you deserve any credit whatsoever for Facebook's success?

Social networking isn't a unique idea. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg and you both created social networks. Yes, he may have borrowed some ideas from your creation. But the most significant innovations which have driven Facebook's success - newsfeed, platform, open graph, likes - came well afterwards. By your own words though you were ready to sell HouseSYSTEM to Harvard. It's unlikely you would have had the vision to make Facebook what it is today.

I know the movie is dramatized but this quote resonated with me: "Look, a guy who builds a nice chair doesn't owe money to everyone who ever has built a chair, okay? They came to me with an idea, I had a better one."
I found myself surprised to agree with the USPS position that online-services are a bad idea (for the USPS). I mean generating a postcard from your mobile picture just seems like something that a tech-company will do a better job at.

I can only imagine how much money the USPS would spend on some of these applications, only to have a startup with $250K funding (or, you know, Facebook) steamroll them.
Why wouldn't neutrinos fit?
Geek Corps. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Geekcorps

Not sure if the group is still active though.
If you want to do something meaningful, do not start a charity. Charities will not give all the unemployed people jobs. Start a company.

It doesn't matter if the company makes frivolous garbage, as long as it employs 30,000 people in Detroit. People in Africa are not starving because you don't have a charity that gives them free medicine. They are starving because there is no one in Africa starting a company that employs 30,000. It doesn't matter what that company does, as long as it does something other people want to pay for, and it is able to provide employment for people.

Innovation feeds the economy. Even if that innovation sounds as frivolous as web advertising. That frivolous company may be the next Google, they may employ 30,000, and they may even help people who don't have clean drinking water.
It's the usual story: capture of the USPS by its unions, such that 500k employees are getting raises simultaneously with their reports of "We're dying!!!"

America in 2011 simply doesn't need to set aside half a million lifetime sinecures to deliver two pieces of mail a week which actually matter. The nation receives no value from a civil servant whose full-time job is literally to convince BoA not to go paperless.

It's a cool institution. Let's remember it in a small museum somewhere.
That's coming as part of DailyPath.
Perhaps even more famously (for law school nerds): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitex_Co._v._Jacobson_Produc....
What kind of maniac downvotes such a comment?
Kids Roller Backpacks For School
How many problems are there? The first one is quite simple, and I'd like to know how long I'll need to complicate the entire challenge before I begin.
Hi.

Unless you think I'm going to hunt you down in the middle of the night, you know me in person but secretly hate me, or you work for Mark, I can't think of any reason why asking me a question would require a new throwaway account.

Your question is leading and based on numerous false assumptions.

I offered to sell Harvard a license. From the beginning I wanted to expand the site to other schools. That's why I spent a ton of time making the photo module on the home page (http://housesystem.thinkcomputer.com) modular: so that users could eventually upload their own photos to the photo album of whatever place they were at. I was inspired by the model of the Daily Jolt, which my cousin at Brown showed me during my sophomore year (2002-2003), but I thought it lacked important features. Your assertion about my lacking vision is therefore incorrect, not to mention a little insulting.

I decided not to keep going with houseSYSTEM because I thought I could come up with a better idea than an integrated network for students. And I did. It's an integrated network for businesses, and as beneficial as houseSYSTEM was to the student population, what I'm working on has far more potential when you think about things on a large scale. That requires a bit of vision, don't you think?

I deserve credit because I worked day and night for months to write code for a product called The Facebook that was part of an integrated environment for students, and every feature I created is available in some form on http://www.facebook.com now, which started as an integrated environment for students with similar or identical integration. It's not about inventing social networking at all, and I've never once claimed that.

But as you argue, maybe that's all just as common as building a chair. Even if Mark had never met me, he was influenced by houseSYSTEM. As Harvard tries to teach you from the minute you get there (because it's common sense), it's proper to acknowledge work that has influenced you (as I have in this post, for example). It's improper to plagiarize or make false claims.

It's true, I never had the vision to make Facebook what it is today because I wholeheartedly disagree that what Facebook is today is a good thing. My Facebook would have been far smaller with fewer users, but far better. That's the vision I still have, but I'll have to call it something else when I get around to it.
Toroid!
And with threaded code attacks you don't even need to download an executable. You can run "script level" code by repurposing existing executable sequences.

Security is hard.
Eh, why not just use a flood-fill type algorithm?
This quote summarizes what is wrong with the Post Office: "They are supported by junk mailers, greeting card manufacturers, and magazine publishers whose businesses are, in some cases, subsidized by the post office's generously low mailing prices. Never mind that their benefactor loses money on some of their products, most notably magazines and some junk mail.

If you are "los[ing] money on some ... products" then just maybe you need to increase the cost of delivery of those products until you are no longer losing money...
The aesthetics of steam turbines fit right into the Apple ethos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dampfturbine_Laeufer01.jpg
The people who a piece of property should own wants under it. And those willing to invest the capital required to remove it, as well as those who know how to remove it deserve something for their efforts.

The problem in these countries is that people really aren't allowed to keep what they earn and buy and keep land with their own resources.

In the US those who ultimately controlled large oil companies had to buy the mineral rights from thousands of individual land owners.

In many African countries, getting control of the oil requires killing your political opponents.

I'd much rather live where people have rights. Its not perfect and people don't always know what their windfalls may be worth, but its vastly superior to the alternative of deciding who owns what through political means.
> Netflix apparently has a chaos generator that randomly kills machines as a standard process.

This sounds pretty neat, but a quick Google didn't turn up any information about it besides this post. Do you know of anywhere to get more information on what they're doing? It sounds like a sensible idea, although I can only imagine trying to implement it would be ... challenging, for most companies/organizations.
Do we ask the highway system to be profitable? If we eliminate the rural routes and only leave the profitable ones, we might as well get rid of the entire thing - the profitable routes could easily be privatized, but as it is, they offset the cost of the rural routes a bit.

I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good, not a profit center.
Very cool. Maybe I'll work on a chrome extension that marks whether a site is blocked in google search results
I nap at work, on the floor under my desk. We're in CubeLand. I simply told the intern who sat across from me this summer "If you see me on the floor in the early afternoon, I'm not dead."
What is going through your mind when you type "gm" and then hit autocomplete? It's a memorized task.

Do you wonder how DNS resolves? Do you wonder how the certificates are validated? Do you know what's in your .pem file? Who cares? It works, right?

Maybe you could make it more efficient, with some launcher program. But tasks that are memorized are easy to do (from a cognitive perspective), so you don't bother trying to improve them.

The human brain can be the laziest organ in the body. Well, it can be hard working, but in many cases it gets crazy blind spots, and gets stuck at a locally optimum point.
Parent could have just quoted the slogans without further comment and it would have implied the same. Let us not be nice simply because folks work hard, a certain Adolf had very good work ethics. Even though I think parent has a point, I do not think said YC start-ups are obliged to give a fuck about what I, or parent think. I hope they succeed.

Criticism and even a spoonful of cynicism does not kill dreams. If they do, it was a lousy dream.
They're observable particles. They probably wouldn't fit unless it somehow turns out to explain the entire Standard Model. What I'm getting at is that it might explain some dark matter, but it is unlikely to explain all dark matter even if it turns out to be a correct model.

That whole thing about neutrinos oscillating between flavors still freaks me out though. One of the weirder things in quantum mechanics.
I also gave her a chocolate bar. I was thinking of doing something weirdly passive aggressive like making a donation to charity in her name.
The problem with postponing optimization is that getting really good performance out of a system sometimes depends on picking a particular underlying model, which may subject your system to some unexpected constraints.

For example, who remembers DOOM? The distinctive 2-1/2 D level designs were done that way to simplify rendering, as an optimization. That's how the rendering engine could run at a remarkable framerate on the hardware of the time. If ID had started off with a full 3D rendering system and said "well, it runs at 2 FPS, lets go design some levels, we'll optimize the rendering engine later" ... well, the game would have worked out quite differently.
Hackers the heroes of the computer revolution
Here's what I don't understand about the USPS situation. They deliver 200 billion pieces of mail per year. So if they're short 2 billion dollars, then they just need to raise the price of a stamp by 1 cent. Problem solved, no? Can somebody tell me why I'm wrong here? Would volume really fall that substantially if they raised the price of a stamp by a few cents?
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Klein_Blue
For those who feel groggy after a "nap" I think there's a misunderstanding.

In this context taking a nap means: closing your eyes, relaxing your brain/whole body, and trying to empty your mind of all the thoughts that are usually racing around in there.

Most often you don't fall asleep in the first 15/20 minutes; and if you do it won't be a deep sleep that makes you feel groggy.

Practical tip: I use a timer App to make sure I know when to "wake up".
The same subsidies which "keep the country folks connected" act to systematically encourage people to be wasteful and pollutive in their lifestyles and habits. http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37986?in=28:46&out=30:1...

If we did ask the interstate highways to pay for themselves (e.g. by raising the federal gas tax to fully cover the cost of the interstate highways), we'd go a long way towards putting various modes of transportation on even footing and enabling people to choose the optimal solution for each trip.
I was thinking about nintendo the other day. It boiled down to this: If they produce a new original zelda game on a new console, then I'd pay $300 for it. They have me by the nostalgia balls so to speak.

If they made a Zelda game for iOS for $9.99, then I'd buy it.

Why would they sell something for $9.99 when they could sell it for $300?

What about secondary markets. Not everyone has an iPhone. Some kids are just getting game boy advances. It's going to take a while for Nintendo's brand to die off, and they have time to wow us with great games.

Fools like me will give them money for a chance to reconnect with my childhood.
"Dark" is a typical label for unobservables (see also, "Dark Ages").

The fact that dark matter is specifically unobservable via electromagnetism just makes it funny. Well, a little bit, if you're a cosmologist.
Or maybe I've posted twice total on HN in the past and have never bothered to remember the username/password?

Maybe you should also go after Google+. They are also copying many of features you claim as your own. Larry and Sergey surely owe you just as much attribution.
There is a place for handheld game consoles. Hopefully people won't abandon them because lower-quality phone games are cheaper, but in short- there's not a single game I've ever played on a handheld that would NOT be MISERABLE on a phone, touch-screen or no.
The USPS needs to come to terms with the shift in communication mechanisms. People don't write letters as a common means of communication anymore. I believe there is some value in maintaining the Postal Service but its role will need to shift dramatically if we expect to see any sustainability from there.
I don't think cutting mail service to 2 days a week would disconnect 'country folks.' Anything time sensitive could use email, fax, or (more expensive) private delivery services.

Plus, it's managed horrifically. What sort of real company would have a union contract that categorically prohibits layoffs and mandates rich pensions for basically unskilled workers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_nap#The_caffeine_nap
Case in point, look at the recent final fantasy ports (I, II, Tactics). The controls are terrible. Absolutely terrible. I nerd raged and wrote some code to verify that multi-touch state machines are not that hard.
This would be the stupidest thing Nintendo could do. Ever.

There's a market for phones, and there's a market for consoles and handheld games consoles. The games on each platform are also completely different -- as they should be. Casual gaming is great, but the market for real games is also great.

Not everything is a zero sum game.
Firstly, I'd say it's debate able whether a corporation can disconnect public use communication services they've installed without notifying the public prior to disconnection.

However, that debate is moot. BART is a government organization. Disconnection of communication services by a government organization for the express intent of preventing public demonstrations is a rather blatant violation of the 1st Amendment.
I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good...

I support having country folk subsidize the rents of people who live in cities.

I'll then attach the word "public good" to goods which are rivalrous and excludible in order to confuse the issue with ideological feelings.
OP here - my noprocast settings wouldn't have allowed me to post until tomorrow.

I have a little RSI but I have taken steps so that it doesn't bother me anymore (switching to Dvorak layout was probably the best move).

Actually, my health problems are with my skin. When I'm sitting at a computer, my skin seems to get itchy - maybe there isn't enough blood circulating or my posture is too stressful.

A couple other people mentioned standing desks. I tried a make-shift one for a couple days but didn't really like it. I might give it another try though.
1. Ignore

2. Focus on your what you're doing and innovate

3. Market better and faster
Your diet would be the first non-obvious place to start (i.e. if you stay up really really late, that would be a more obvious reason, but you probably already know that.)
Cowboy millionaire review
Alas, that's not how it works for trademark law, or common courtesy. The relevant standard is whether use is likely to confuse.

By calling this "Jonathan's Card 2.0", and their explicit references, they're clearly trying to portray this as an official successor from the same agent(s). If Jonathan Card "1.0" cared about this, he could object on both legal and ethical grounds.
OP here.

I don't see why it's worrisome. This is just one place I am asking for advice. I don't see why people on the Internet assume you will only be asking strangers. This is more of a way to get ideas. If someone says "taxi driver" I'm not going to go out and immediately become a taxi driver.

It's tough to think of jobs that don't require being in front of a computer nowadays. One time we were discussing the olden days of computers and it came up that I asked "What did people do for work before computers?" Then everyone went silent - "Yeah, how did people work before computers?" It's amazing how ubiquitous they have become in such a short time frame.

I've tried the standing desk before for a couple days but didn't really like it. I may try giving it another shot.
> Why would they sell something for $9.99 when they could sell it for $300?

Because there could be hundreds of other people who don't act and think like you for every one that does.
I guess whatever line of argument you thought you were laying out, it got lost in the attempt at snark?

Because I don't follow this even a little.
I certainly agree that the nature of games/gaming devices (especially portables) is changing, but I question whether it behooves Nintendo to be a follower.

I'm constantly annoyed by the fact that I can't use my Wii as a networked media interface to my TV and that it doesn't support HD. But I've never regretted purchasing the Wii, since there are so many games that are just plain fun, many with nearly unlimited replay ability (Wii Sports:Golf).

Much like Apple, Nintendo has a legacy of software-hardware tie-in. It's worked well and I can't see why they would easily cede the hardware aspect to Apple.
Comparative essay-How Do You Compare Two Things
An essay is normally a short piece of writing that is written from the author’s own point of view. It is a literary device, which conveys almost everything about anything
Crossfit much? :)

I think what he's talking about is the subtle differences between working out and having a job where you're always physically moving. It's the difference between "working out" and "having a healthy lifestyle."
I think Microsoft and Sony currently dominate "real" games. Most of what runs and plays on DS units can run and play on iPhones.

I think the one leg up Nintendo has over Apple is that no one is going to buy their under 14 year old an iPhone. But for anyone older, a iPhone would make more economical sense.
Hands-On With the IBM 5150, Thirty Years Later
In the instances I've seen the BBC use Twitter/YouTube media, I would say it'd fall under fair use.

That's fine but the thing that's most concerning about the post is the complete nonsense inside the auto-generated reply. If there was any official dispute on the BBC's usage of media from the social networks, I doubt this will help them.
Pessimizer is advocating having people in cities subsidize private goods purchased by "country folk" for no apparent reason. He also misleadingly referred to delivery services (which are rivalrous and excludible) as a public good.

I was doing the same thing, but swapping city people and country people.
The full story is more complicated. The USPS is in an unattractive position of being supposedly independent of the taxpayer's money, yet any major operating issues are at the whim of Congress. Predictably, it goes like this:

USPS: "Volume is down, we need to raise prices."
Congress: "Nope, sorry"

USPS: "Uhm, ok. We'll have to cut Saturday delivery then..."
Congress: "No can do, sorry"

USPS: "Well I guess we have to close a bunch of post offices at least"
Every member of Congress in unison: "Sounds great, but not in my district"

etc...

I'm a big fan of the USPS -- I've found them to be more reliable than UPS and FedEx by far and they're amazingly inexpensive to boot. They know what they need to do to fix themselves, but sadly it seems to take a crisis before Congress will get out of the way and just let them do it.
Another really fantastic way to get healthy is to own a horse, and take care of feeding it, schlepping hay bales, cleaning it, cleaning tack, riding, the whole bit.

There's other animals, but not any I can think of that demand the physical activity that a horse does.
Much of the mail is bulk (aka junk) mail sent by companies and organizations that have lobbyists. These lobbyists make it very difficult to raise postal rates as you suggest.

Add this to the Mephistophelean bargains that they have made with their unions over the years (because they too are politically powerful) and you can start to see the predicament. They're being squeezed dry.
Chuckling at the thought that TV news is only "controlled" in a time of crisis. Sure, if we've got 24/7 crises.
Simple answer: Scale.

There are maybe 1000 people like you. About 80 million potential customers at the 9.99 price point.
Cheap cartier sunglasses sale
Hema Malini Becomes Showstopper at the Age of 62
I think that people in the USPS definitely realize this, but they are unfortunately prohibited from doing any of the obvious things that one would expect them to do in response. They can't close unprofitable post offices, lay off redundant employees, increase prices, or decrease the level of service being offered.

All they can do is let it blow up and then hope Congress gives them enough leeway to put the pieces back together into something better and more sustainable ... hopefully using profitable semi-privatized Western European services as a model.
The abundance of bulk mail sent is a clear sign that the market could very easily sustain higher rates.

Demand is there and it's strong. Raise the prices.
It's the usual story: capture of the USPS by its unions

Except, you know, not really. You might want to read this: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial-page/viewpoints/article...

Especially this bit:

What about those news reports of multibillion losses? Well, the $20 billion in losses over the last four years has nothing to do with what you’ve been told about a failing business model or obsolete mail. Here’s the real skinny: In 2006, Congress mandated that the Postal Service prefund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years, and do so within a decade—something no other public agency or private firm does. The resulting annual payments run $5.5 billion a year, costing the Postal Service $21 billion since 2007. That’s the difference between a positive and a negative balance sheet, as it would be for virtually any entity facing a similar burden — if any did.

Remove that unreasonable obligation and the Postal Service would have been profitable.
Where has your dollar bill been?
You might want to get your vision checked, adjust your screen resolution, color balance your monitor, and try and find a healthy relaxed posture.

Mine is feet resting on my lower desk frame taking the weight of the back of my thighs, with my back supported by the chair, i.e. not unsupported.

This is a big change in posture from how I used to be, and much less stressful.

I'm getting into my mid-40's and I'm still pulling 4 hour programming sessions at night with not much but some stiff legs and tiredness to show.

Also, if you have dry itchy skin, get a RadioShack temperature and humidity device and if the air's too dry, try a humidifier.
This screams for an app that does OCR on the serial numbers.
Microsoft may have just been too early. Once they recognize the success they can clone the usability in no time. Or patent troll Dropbox off the map. Very risky investment if you ask me.

That said, Dropbox is a great product and the free version is good enough for the small number of documents that I have that are not somewhere else in the cloud.