skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ran a BBS in the early 90s in Chicago called Mad Macs. It ran on a Mac in my bedroom running Hermes and then later on NovaLink Pro. NLP was one of the first systems to offer a GUI (special client software required). That's where I got my start designing visual interfaces for the web.
Exactly. I can ask for opinions without seeking approval or being showy.
The financial crisis (and gambling losses at legitimate sites) weren't the result of bankers diverting investors' funds into their personal bank accounts, as is alleged here.

That's illegal, and easily prevented at a regulated site where deposited funds are required to be accounted for (and preferably held in escrow). Regulation in banking or in gambling doesn't make it impossible to lose; it makes it possible for winners to get their money and impossible for the company handling the money to simply pocket it.
There are two groups of players at poker sites.

The largest group is bad players. These players typically deposit money on the site, play until their account is exhausted, and then deposit again. For them, the amount they put on a poker site is not a deposit, but instead an entertainment fee.

There is also a group of professional players on the sites. These players make a deposit (say, an initial $1000), and in the course of playing (better than the bad players) their balance grows. They periodically withdraw small portions of their balance to cover living expenses. Their deposit is an investment in every way. Go hang out on some poker forums and research bankroll management, and you will see a lot of terms that are common in investing.

So who here is making a bank-like deposit? The bad players almost never get their money back, and the good players have far more in their account than they initially invested.

A good site, like PokerStars, will segregate player money and always have it on hand. But in an unregulated market where everyone is relying on the goodwill of the poker sites to manage their funds, there is no guarantee of anything. If a country destroys that goodwill (by seizing funds and issuing indictments), why should we be surprised that the money is no longer available?
>>G+ may look pretty busy right now because they opened it up for everyone but I think most people will have the same reaction I did -- it gets old quick.

We'll know by the end of the year how it works out. However, a lot of Nokia,blackberry customers used to say similar things about the iPhone when it first came out, and look what happened. So, lets not discount G+ just yet.
Bank run in 3, 2, 1...

From the full tilt poker homepage:

"System Update

We apologise but the system is currently down. Please check back later. Please direct all enquiries to support@fulltiltpoker.com."

wsj article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190410670457658...

Layman explanation: Full Tilt Poker runs a wallet system, the sum all the users money is smaller than what they have in their bank accounts.

The 'Ponzi' element comes from their ability to attract new players at such a high rate that they can pay the withdrawals.

What makes it doubtful that this really is a Ponzi scheme is that - a bank run excepted - they probably would end up not paying out a very large percentage of the money they owed if operations continue, simply because most of the those playing online poker get fleeced incrementally, every dollar placed as a bet has a rake associated with it and that rake could cumulatively be a large percentage of the total money deposited. I don't run an online casino so I have no clue how often a given deposited dollar passes the tables before being withdrawn.

If there was one part here that is sloppy/criminal then that should be that they overpaid their affiliates.

A typical Ponzi scheme does not have affiliates taking a bunch of money of the table.
Why is it a desirable goal to move up the Kardashev scale?

If you believe the transhumanists, our brains will live in computers long before we'll spread out across the solar system. We'll be using energy and space more efficiently, not just using 'more.'
Great Resources for Responsive Development
You're right. You have to purchase from someone with a class III license and have to get a tax stamp.
"Since I was running Windows on a Mac with Parallels it was uneasy to hit "printscreen" while the game was running. I hardcoded the '*' from the keypad to produce the same"

Umm.. educational, sure, but can't you just:
alias +shift "bind 8 screenshot";
alias -shift "bind 8 whatever_was_bound_to_8";
bind shift +shift;
"The next IMHO-blindingly-obvious step in computer evolution is that your tablet/cell phone becomes your desktop when plugged into a probably-USB-based dock"

The idea is obvious, yes, but USB? Thunderbolt is, IMO, much more likely to be _the_ connector. It has the speed to do the video that USB (even USB 3) lacks (power requirements may be a problem, but I think USB 3 has the same problem)

I also think that the parties building those docks will want to include a 'cloud connection', for which they will charge whatever they can, because, in general, hardware is not a business to make money in anymore. I am not sure whether they will get away with that. One thing that will depend on is what the economy will be doing.
That post was impossible to read.

Netflix, thanks for doing this to your customers.
Calling people monkeys is rather abusive

I disagree. "Code monkeys" is a common term used for programmers, and it is not at all derogatory. (If anything, I think it implies a certain level of respect.) "JS monkeys" is simply a derivative form of code monkeys.
...but at least they're not stuck in a car/bus/train for two hours like those who work less than and hour per day in the office.
What to Include in API Reference Documentation
Will it handle teams out of the US?
Ikea introduces Mänland
Great ideas! I'm meeting with several VCs this Thursday and may suggest those as additional market possibilities. Thank you!

I'm really glad you like the design but I can't take any of the credit. I lucked out and got Colleen Palmer from 12 Spokes to do it.
Facebook Subscribers CTR
The cover says "How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Companies". That means:

- There exist at least two entrepreneurs today
- At least two of them use continuous innovation
- At least two of those who use continuous innovation create radically successful companies
- This book will tell you how they do it
Very cool. A few weeks ago my friends and I put together something like this using google docs for a friend's 30th birthday and had it printed. This would have been perfect!

A few suggestions: 1. It wasn't clear to me what you do right away. The book image is what helped me. Then I still wasn't sure if this was a digital book or not till I read the "How it Works". 2. I think having an example for a wedding book would be useful.

Good luck!!

Edit: Just found the examples :)
By keeping one brand it becomes more difficult to sell-off the silver disk business without impacting the download business negatively.

Better to make a clean break now.

The only way the Netflix Classic plan makes any sense is as a staging post to splitting the company in two. This would have been good PR as well as a sensible internal business step. It lets everyone get used to the idea gradually.
Twilio Fund Finalists Presenting at TwilioCon
Waterfield Designs iPad Case Includes Space for Apple Bluetooth Keyboard
true, I may have been a bit harsh. More what I was going for I guess is that there are several larger problems than just some american amazon warehouse workers. Both larger problems in america of which this is just a symptom and larger problems in the world where this is rendered unnoteworthy.
We need to attack those problems, not do something too focused like harangue on Amazon specifically.
I loved my Intergraph. I had a TDZ-2000 but for monitors I had a Sony GDM-F500 monitor, which was amazing and weighed a ton.

For a bit I had SGI 1600 LCD, but it required a special video card which died.

The Intergraph TDZ-2000 was a great computer though. I bought a floors model after Siggraph in 1999 or 2000. They were pricey: http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Articles/intergraph_g...
> "The incident illustrates that not even Wikileaks' former media partners are safe from the wrath of the organization's radical, pro-transparency agenda."

Wait, pointing out a clear conflict of interest and censorship is being "radically pro-transparency"?

I don't believe in WikiLeak's mantra that all information, regardless of context, should be transparent, but since when is releasing information about a clear abuse radical in any way whatsoever?
Great idea, just wish it was at a store I like less than IKEA. Bed, Bath and Beyond maybe?
Merging Glam and Ning
I'd say it's unfortunately accurate.
The 'rush poker' innovation was relatively recent and likely inconsequential. It definitely was only a tiny amount of their revenue stream

(It also seemed rare to not have your credit card blocked for making deposits. So I wouldn't express it as a commonality.)

The industry has been lacking credibility for some time. Players have been pushing to get it regulated to avoid something like this from happening.
What do you think would be a good anecdote? Been noodling that for a bit...

-Books of advice for the people in your life

-Books filled with the advice and wisdom of family and friends

-Books of wisdom from family and friends

Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Ask HN: Where to find a good UI designer?
I've tried finding people on Craigslist but the quality of the candidates is not up to par with what we need. How did you guys find your UI designers? Any particularly good sites that you have used?
Having sympathy isn't going to fix things, though.

How can we get people in this country to be capable of doing jobs that people willing to work for next to nothing in other countries can't do just as capably? If we can retrain a bunch of them to be great software engineers, our own wages might drop a bit from their absurdly high peaks, but currently the demand for people able to write good software is underserved, and it could be much larger, as software enters other facets of life and needs to be maintained and rewritten to deal with changing demands.

Having more engineers would enable a greater range of software to be created.
Ugh. Dear intarweb, please stop trying to outsmart safari on iOS. It works just fine as-is. We don't need your fancy-pants JavaScript-based paging implementations.
This is federal tax law, and it applies in all 50 states. Contractors also must provide their own equipment (i.e. computer) and be able to make a profit or loss on the engagement. Absent these conditions, you are an employee as far as the IRS is concerned, and your employer is responsible for a great many taxes and sometimes overtime pay.
Resolve Firefox Flash Issues in Ubuntu with Flash-Aid
Great thanks!

Any ideas for what I could do to make what we do a little more clear?

Also, there's a wedding book example but you have to access it via Book Examples on the home page. Is it too hidden?

Thanks again!
"Bank run in 3, 2, 1..."

People have not been getting money offline really since the Department of Justice handed out initial indictments in April.

The messed up thing about this is they had a sustainable money-printing-machine that only became an unsustainable ponzi scheme due to the greed and corruption of the owners.

Affiliates and paying affiliates had nothing to do with their downfall. Affiliates are a standard throughout the online gaming industry.
Thank you mturmon. that was super insightful. so if read this correctly (and the theorem) is ok to stop as long as the stopping is not dependent on any other variable (like results of the experiments or time). correct?
I've studied economics well, I just haven't come to the same conclusion as you.

Piece of unsolicited advice, take it or leave it:

I would suggest that, if you want to be taken seriously, you present your ideas in a way that demonstrates your understanding of the nuance involved. When you say things like "all a subsidy does is X" and imply simple A-B causal relationships between the public and private sectors, it's hard to believe that you have considered these issues thoroughly, as opposed to merely another axe grinder.

These are real-world systems, which deeply impact the lives of millions of people. To simply dismiss them or force them to fit into Platonic molds is silly.
Users voted for best KDE-based Linux distribution... again
The whole thing hinges on how fast a players deposit can be converted in to rake. If 14% or less of the deposits ever made ends up being paid out then they're actually still in the black.

It would require some insider knowledge to know how much the cumulative rake is in an online poker game, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the players played until they ran out of money rather than withdraw. A few really good players would probably take money off the table but those would be the exception rather than the rule.
Can you point to a webpage/book discussing "the ideas of Le Corbusier in light of the findings of Christopher Alexander"?

Google didn't really help, and it sounds like you have something specific in mind.
It isn't true. There's no limit on the length of time a legitimate contractor can be engaged, but if you are a business walking up to the line of the law defining employees or contractors, one way to limit your risk is to engage the contractors for a limited duration.
People often think of the less extreme act that more people can get behind as being more extreme. It's the same reason that the person who risks death to save 100 people is more heroic than the person who risks death to save 2 people.
Google+ Adds 9 New Features, Opens to the World
Yeah, the real solution is OLED tats.
Asking people what they think of themselves is just 1 input. It is not a binary decision. Rather, you need to get as many data points as possible on whether the person is very productive or not and then make a call on whether to hire them.
EFF details post-Bilski confusion on what is too "abstract" to patent
Since the dawn of time. Standing up to power is an act which takes courage. Not many stand up to power so it is radical.
Probably Intergraph.
Excuse my ignorance, but isn't this quite similar to how banks work? I was under the assumption that banks don't have enough cash on hand to pay out all clients if everyone decided to withdraw.
I was front row at his talk during Strange Loop (he did an amazing job on the talk; watching Storm and friends be open-sourced halfway through was fantastic) and tried to write fairly detailed yet correct notes. I was typing pretty quickly though, so I can't guarantee 100% accuracy, but hopefully they go along well with the slides.

http://mschade.me/notes-storm-twitters-scalable-realtime-com...
> The obvious choice of language was JavaScript.

I hate to be a party pooper, but the only reason JavaScript is so popular is because it has a monopoly on browser scripting. Because (1) the language has significant design flaws and (2) heavy client-side programming is becoming very popular, it's inevitable that it will be replaced by better languages (plural) and 5-10 years from now JavaScript will be seen as a cumbersome, clunky, unfashionable old language.

So you will regret having the tattoo.

But on a positive note, in 15-25 years, JavaScript may be seen as "hip" and "retro", kind of like 8-bit graphics now.

So you will regret having the tattoo removed. :)
Thanks for the correction, I missed the earlier announcement.

Affiliates being a standard or not has nothing to do with it, anyhody that takes money out of the deposits will accellerate the process, and affiliates took a substantial portion.

Typically if you deposit $100 a large fraction of that is immediately paid out to the affiliate. You then enter the game and if the total rake on your account ends up being smaller than what is left in your account after the affiliate has been paid then you were a net loss to the company.

Without an affiliate that would be much harder to achieve.

That said, I believe that the players are stupid enough to play until they are bust so that's mostly theoretical, so I agree that they were quite possibly sustainable but it would need some inside figures to be sure.
I worked as a developer there, conditions weren't much better. Frugality means cheap, and the turnover rate was just insane. A lot of the ones who stay are only staying because the stock price is so high right now making their options worth a lot. Really depressing, because upper management at Amazon is very very competent - they have a long term vision, and they are executing on it with a ton of energy. They just seem to have forgotten about the peasants along the way.
As a mobile game developer, I am super excited about the future of gaming on mobile after looking at the spec sheets for this chip and the new PowerVR series 6 GPUs. I am in constant amazement that my phone-shaped pocket computer is a more capable gaming device than my PC of less than tens years ago.
Click-through experiment by kevinrose: Facebook vs Twitter vs G+
Hm. I could see which people were in my friend's "friends" circles, and which other "friends" circles my friends were part of. I do appreciate that Google was trying to make this less intrusive than FB is, and I've read a lot about it before I tentatively hit the "Join" button.

But it seems obvious to me that, in one or more ways, the people I don't really want to talk to will end up figuring out that I'm ignoring them. Let's put it this way. My status on Skype and Google chat is always "invisible". Always. It didn't seem like there was a way to do that on google+, and I didn't want to risk it.

As a matter of providing a constructive criticism, I don't see anything wrong with posting this to a public forum. This is the same note I sent them to explain why I deleted my account. I would like to start off invisible. I'd like no one to be able to see me unless I choose to see them. But that's not how the site operates (I'm not even sure it could function that way, if everyone did it) and so I'm making myself invisible in the only way I can.
"Don't Assume WikiLeaks Brought Down Al Jazeera's Director":

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/09/dont-assume-wi...
Another angle is that players might not even legally be considered depositors.

There is a payment processor whose funds were seized where the government even put on a display of the giant check of funds seized. These funds ultimately belonged to players (good or bad). The situation is still unclear, as information is limited, but it appears that players will not be legally entitled to any of the seized funds.

As far as poker sites go, they may also not be considered depositors. Some sites/casinos view it this way: you're buying chips.
It will be interesting to see if Full Tilt has a solid defense behind how they handled the cash. Full Tilt (and most other poker sites) make their money by taking a rake (small percentage) of every pot. Theoretically, over the long run (i.e infinity), almost all of the money would end up in full tilt's pockets. If deposits were outpacing the withdrawals, then they could possibly argue that they didn't need to have much cash on hand to cover future withdrawals. Additionally, considering they are a poker site, I doubt that banking regulations apply to them.
The person who risk deaths to save 100 people is indeed more heroic than the person who save 2 people.

Are you saying there's no difference between 1 or 100 people?
That's a whole bunch of dangerous assumptions.

Companies that treat their people like crap will reap what they sow, sooner or later.
Announcing Twilio Fund Companies Presenting at TwilioCon
Startup Raises Capital For Giving Consumers +5 Mana
Ask HN: What's currently the best way to get global phone service?
I'm looking to upgrade my dinosaur-age mobile phone to an Android. I'm currently living in the States, but I'll be in Puerto Rico for a couple of months during the winter and going to Hungary for a year or so in the spring. I don't know when I'll be back in the States. Never, maybe. Or maybe next fall, just depending on how life turns out.

The question: is it better just to get new service in Hungary, or is it practical to have a global service of some kind?
Taking a page from TI's OMAP processors I see [1]. I expect that AMD will go this route sooner or later by putting a Bobcat and Bulldozer core on the same chip, but I've heard that while the Linux scheduler can deal with that, Windows can't yet. Don't know if NVidia will have trouble with that with Windows 8.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAP
(And of course I could always just do everything through Twilio. I think I'm in love.)
"Genius steals"
Ask HN: How do you programatically deal with forum/blog trolls?
Trolling is the age-old annoyance on the Internet, but the latest feature request I received for a forum that I am the technical lead on has me scratching my head.

Scenario: users are creating new accounts en masse just to troll other users. They post inappropriate text/links/pics that disturb other users.

Proposed Solution: the admins/mods would like to see general users* unable to post any links/pics. They can still create threads and post replies, but that data is just going to be text. In order for them to elevate their privileges, they must show some entitlement (i.e.: purchases on their account).

My take: This smacks of elitism because I need to purchase something before I have privilege, but from a technological perspective it also ties me to another service that I don't control. Accounts may be easy to create, and entitlements less so, but I don't think that will stop trolling (possibly just the image trolling).

So what tricks have you used to stop trolling on forums/blogs/etc.?

Edit:
I neglected to mention that this forum runs 5,000-10,000 concurrent users throughout the day and over 3k new accounts per day, making any sort of manual moderation of users difficult.
Thanks. I don't know the law specifically, IANAL.
For background, Bryan gave this talk at the excellent Strange Loop 2011 conference (https://thestrangeloop.com/).

Abstract: https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/running-a-startup-on-has...

He also gave a workshop on Sunday (which I unfortunately was not able to attend): https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/haskell-functional-progr...
If you want to dig deeper in my personal beliefs then I would tell you that I believe that the initiation of the use of force is wrong. And that this principle is universally applicable. You may or may not agree but if you do then you cannot also logically find that taxation is legitimate.

Also, I think it is a valuable mental exercise to ask someone who in fact owns the fruits of their labor. If you spend some time thinking about the implications you may find that the possible answers are not so "simple" as you may at first think.

On the other hand, some find that the question produces a fair amount of anxiety and so they may resort to verbal devices designed to diminish the value of the question, rather than trying to answer it.
>4. Let them get sick

Never use preventative care I guess
You Can’t Buy Word of Mouth
Merging Glam and Ning : pmarca