skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reply By Senator Schumer To My Opposition of the Protect IP act
Dear [Redacted]:

Thank you for your contacting me in opposition to S.968, the PROTECT IP Act. Like you, I believe that consumers should have access to a vibrant and innovative online community to discuss their ideas and opinions. At the same time, we must not let the internet become a haven for intellectual property thieves.

The threat to intellectual property owners over the internet is clear. Every year, the US Chamber of Commerce estimates that copyright theft costs our nation about $58 billion in lost output, 373,375 in lost jobs, and $16 billion in lost employee earnings. These numbers present an unacceptable burden to US businesses. In addition, companies may be less likely to innovate because their products may be stolen by intellectual property pirates, creating a drag on the US economy.

The PROTECT IP Act addresses the problem of intellectual property theft online, but it also contains important due process protections to ensure that legal activity over the internet is not disrupted. As you may know, the PROTECT IP Act would allow the Department of Justice to file a claim against a website that 1) has no significant purpose other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement, circumventing technology controlling access to copyrighted works, or selling or promoting counterfeit goods or services; or (2) is designed, operated, or marketed and used to engage in such activities. A judge would have to find that a website is intentionally violating intellectual property rights of an American entity before he could issue an order against that site. I believe PROTECT IP Act would provide law enforcement and intellectual property holders additional tools to protect American intellectual property from websites while still ensuring the constitutionally protected rights of free speech and due process. The PROTECT IP Act currently is awaiting action on the floor of the Senate, and I will continue to monitor this bill as it moves through the Senate.

Thank you for contacting me on this important issue. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can ever be of assistance to you on this, or any other matter.
I'm sure I missed something, but this doesn't guarantee unique keys across the database does it?

What if you have two tables with the same autoincrement value being updated at the same millisecond by two users with the same UserID%NumShards?

Or is there some relationship between physical and logical shards that makes this impossible?
They get paged 2-3 times within a 24 hour period to.. restart an instance? Why isn't this automated? I get annoyed when I get called once a week to fix something.
Indeed! :) breadpig.com too. I've given a couple classes on Making Something People Love that hits on a lot of these. So happy to see more people talking about building brands with personality.
Valid questions!

We're on EC2, which has its set of limitations but means we can run a 10 million + user system with two-and-a-half engineers (and no ops team / overhead). So while we hear about more and more folks using SSDs in their DBs, it's not an option in our near-term future.

For SQL vs HBase/Haystack, we don't really have to worry about the photo storage itself, since S3 handles all of it. The data we shard out is more suited to an RDBMS, and since we're way more familiar with that world than with HBase and similar, it was the choice that let us make the most progress in a short time with a small team. Hope that's a helpful description of how we thought about it.
Workflow between Monitoring and Ticketing
And can you imagine doing that for hundreds of hosts?

This is why you:

- Always provide redundant, network-local LDAP servers so that LDAP doesn't go down.

- Wire up remotely accessible serial consoles that provide emergency-level local root access.

You can attach a modem to the serial console systems, or a hardline (which is what I did at a previous job) between your data center and offices.

We had a fixed 'role' account for the serial console systems, but it existed only for the purpose of emergency access, could only be accessed from specific local networks (we divided different classes of employees into different VLANs), and the knowledge of the password could be constrained to those that needed rare "server fell over" access.
Last I checked (2+ years ago), iTunes on Mac uses an XML format that describes the layout of the page - pretty close to HTML.
This is probably a good idea I wanted to focus on the cities in Oregon first since that is where I am and want to grow from there.
I sorta agree with you about the hurdles but there has a been a bunch of very sucessful startups in Canada. I can't name you a google but Softimage, Ubisoft, Bioware, RIM, ATI, Desire2Learn... and on the non tech side Cirque Du Soleil(Founder just went to space last year) All pretty big successes. For 1/10 the population as the US you can't expect the same level of output.

On the talent side, Montreal and the Toronto area are pretty big recruiting grounds for Microsoft Google and other tech companies. Tons of Game companies have established themselves in Montreal to draw on that pool. There is a lot of talent here and a lot of people would want to stay here instead of working in the US.Montreal's 2 english universities and a lot of French ones around help keep replenishing the supplies. Toronto has some very good schools too (Waterloo being one of the best Comp Sci program in the world).

There are a bunch of ways to get government money but it does involve some major red tape. It be cool to find someone who's gone through it and could make a writeup on it.

EDIT: I should also mention that there are other good cities in Cananda ;p I did not mention Vancouver
The least emphasized, and I think most important, point here is that the application will help you better define your business and why you're doing it with your current cofounder(s). Much like an AngelList profile, I'd say it's worth a few hours of your time, if only for the exercise of thinking hard about your business rather than just executing on it.
The payment must be fulfilled by the different users, but as users are rated it is supposed to make them somewhat more credible than just a random person off of craigslist.
I would add that while the U.S. government took quick and massive action of first bailouts then stimulus measured in the trillions of USD, the euro story seems to be one of hesitation and deliberation.

From an American perspective, somebody--Germany, most likely--needs to step up and take decisive, perhaps even unilateral action, and do so sooner rather than later.
The prompt label is an image, hence it's not copyable. We experimented a bit with various copy-friendly approaches, but couldn't find anything that was cross-browser and did not damage the look/layout we were going for. To share a session, click the save button on the top right - it'll generate a shareable link with the editor content and the whole REPL session in replayable form.
Common Lisp is mostly over 20 years old and thus any patents would have expired. Advanced compiler or GC techniques could infringe recent patents, but that doesn't have much to do with CL per se.
Most of us still use pen and paper
Thanks for the info, I updated the post to mention that the write bottleneck isn't an issue at Flickr.
High Tech: Download µTorrent Stable (3.0) Free
Absolutely, I should have emphasized that more (maybe an edit). Being forced to confront each of the questions in the app is an amazing exercise for any startup and will do wonders for you direction and understanding of the business.
Thanks!

I like that you guys are using your database's stock features to accomplish this. Most of the time you don't need complicated systems to get things done. Reducing that mental overload of YET another system is huge.
> There is also "sudo su" (unless explicitly disabled by your admins) to avoid repeated invocations of sudo while you are performing a long admin task.

You can also do 'sudo -s', which keeps you in your normal user's shell. It's pretty slick.
Hydrogen lighting as well. I've heard it's very efficient for for UV grow lights.
I guess I'm going to have to add "entreposeur.com" to the list of domains I wish I'd thought of first.
Third Party Ariix Health Review? Should You Join This New MLM?
I used to work at Meebo, which hosts a large CouchDB system , but when it came time to choose a solution for Instagram we went with PGSQL. There was a lot I really liked about Couch, especially for the analytics system we built at Meebo (where the map/reduce views worked great), but I wouldn't classify it as a low-Ops-burden technology--like any newer db solution, there are some rough edges and more 'unknowns' at scale.

Also, we'd still have to write the middleware to assign data to shards and fetch data from shards in our system (unless we used something like BigCouch), so having a more tried-and-tested solution that we already understood well was more appealing.
I'll take a 5 billion year lifetime on my fuel supply over a couple hundred years. Just sayin'.
Upside-down skyscraper proposed for Mexico City
Dropbox Easter Egg?
Yay. Downvoted into oblivion by the Android fanboy army!
Since Mexico City is built on the (mostly dry) Lake Texcoco, I can only assume the water level is pretty high. This seems like a bad idea.
Ask HN: Founder vesting & initial stock
Hey guys,

Been reading up lately on Founder vesting - as it is something my startup (www.setkick.com) needs to start thinking about.

I read Jessicas great article ('Note to Founders: Have Vesting') - but was also wondering if anyone had experience or advice on how to give any "initial" stock - before starting the cliff.

For example, we have 5 founders (quite a lot ey?) - and we were thinking of giving each founder a small amount of stock (for our previous 8 months of work) - and then starting the 1 year cliff (then dividing the remaining stock over 4 years)

Does anyone see any inherent problems with this?

Cheers,

Chris
Introducing Reference.me
you will need an invite code. Use use: protoref
The mp3 for America the Beautiful must have been on the same drive as the rocket designs.
It helped me reduce carbon emissions when setting money on fire for three different people now. (n.b. All were trying to get direct sales, which many people would say FB is contraindicated for.)
Hey Ken, (author here)

There's a 1:1 mapping between the user's hash modulo the number of shards, and the table they're writing to. So, if we had 1000 logical shards, we have 1000 schema/tablespaces, with the same tables in each. And the database's own 'nextval()' feature makes sure never have the same ID twice. Hope that clarified things.
Yeah the underground city is pretty awesome and useful. There are days when you might have to carry a shovel with you(don't think I'm kidding it's not an uncommon sight) when walking outside in the winter but last few winters have been pretty mild (ok last year had a good amount of snow). Global warming's helping ;p
Watch,Take Shelter,online,megavideo
watch,Take Shelter,online,megavideo
Following his acclaimed debut Shotgun Stories writer director Jeff Nichols reteams with actor Michael Shannon to create a haunting tale that will creep,
No, just ridiculous hyperbole.
Most of the time I have received poor results when measuring on a CPA basis, compared to conversion through other channels (cost per registration in my situation). I have had a few great successes of bringing CPA under $2 for a very targeted key words. For example a recent advertisement for a campaign we were running on the artist "Ray LaMontagne" worked superbly, probably because the keywords weren't extremely popular and we happened to be giving away VIP tickets to his show the same weekend. So it was very low friction.

As with any advertising channel, your mileage will greatly vary depending on what you're marketing, what you expect in return (branding, sales, site registrations?).
صور احمد فتحي مع نجوم العالم - الصور
Are we just supposed to spend 20min coming up with random classes to make the function return 'true'?

This seems to be more busy work than something that requires a lot of thinking.

Maybe I'm missing something...
This site is awesome. To try it out, I made a quick one page app, uploaded it, made signing keys, and got it to the Android Marketplace, all inside of a few hours. My first mobile app ever.
Interesting. During long conference calls, I recently discovered that if I play angry birds, I'm better able to hold attention to the call. To add some context, I've already spent countless hours with the game. It's somewhat challenging, but I don't find myself thinking too hard about the game itself.
How about an authentication that doesn't require a 3rd party service?
I think I heard next week sometime the 1.0 ready ripple will be out. As others have said all clients will work with riak 1.0, they just might not support all of the new hotness.
Read Male Extra Review
setup 149,00 EUR (seems to be negotiable)
monthly 19,00 EUR
per transaction 0,25 EUR + 3,45% (Visa, MC)

that was pricing in 2010, may have changed for new customers.

just ask their customer support and tell them, that you will use recurly.com which means less technical trouble for all people involved (PCI compliance etc).
1.8 subscribers isn't much to crow about
You will need an invite code. Use: protoref
nope, before compiling, you can just read the code and guess what's trying to say. It's a joke, I'm not really asking people to compile random code.
Questition
is it efficient yield
I wish Windows would queue multiple transfers occurring between the same two drives, rather than executing simultaneous transfers (in order to reduce the time spent seeking all over the place).
One way to reduce outages and bugs would be to put an incentive plan in place that pays bonuses to the folks on-call for each time they fix a problem while on-call.

This would have two effects:

- Management would strongly encourage the design and implementation of systems that fail less, which results in less payout of these bonuses.

- Employees would want to more willingly be part of the on-call process.

Imagine a group of your workforce eagerly waiting to fix an impending failure while another opposite group is eagerly making sure those guys don't get paid a bonus.

And, you could tie it all together with bonuses for everyone when you meet certain performance levels.
+2 for UK
It can. It's not as good a DR channel as paid search, simply because you're buying demographics and interests rather than intent.

However, for list building and 'softer' DR actions like a whitepaper download or a lead form fill, it can work very well.

There's also a lot of off-the-wall targeting things you can do, like advertising your blogger program to mommy bloggers, targeting reporters at techcrunch and mashable with your app launch, and other things that fall outside of the scope of traditional display advertising.
Hey Chris,

I can just imagine you working out of a starbucks ;) I did the opposite & headed out to the bay area. I do miss the Reno community though, small as it was. Unfortunately about the same time I made the decision to move, all of these really good communities started to develop and make themselves known. If you do perchance remember a Harold once upon a time, I'd enjoy the chance to catch up. If you aren't perchance chris, then wrong number, enjoy hack-week-end.
Drone Kills Top Al Qaeda Figure
Isn't that exactly the amount of stuff they would already have to guess?
Assuming that computer has finitely many states to be in because of finiteness of its memory, we can model it as a very large deterministic finite automaton. You cannot model a real computer as a LBA, because you don't necessarily have as many read-write memory as your input takes. If you think I'm wrong, please, tell me what makes you think that you can model real computers as LBAs.
> They should have waited until their economies were already on the same page before conjoining their currencies, but instead they tried to force a unity that wasn't there yet.

Exactly. By having a single currency weaker economies were propped up at the expense of stronger economies, (yep, this is Germany, esp now); in essence, promoting economic mediocrity. Had the respective economies been similar in strength in regard to each other it would have been more feasible. But now it's too late for that. The Euro happened. In the long run, the Euro failing could be a good thing. By this I mean that those economies more capable might fair better however those that aren't, not so much. If they can escape debt (a Grecian default for instance) and then focus on rebuilding a sustainable economy, that in the long run would be more healthful. For now it's been put off, left for tomorrow, so to speak.
Did you get the last email I sent you?
Any demand for adding a panel session "tips for applying to YC" to the startup conference (next one is in Los Angeles)?
For those not on Mac OS, it pops up a window that shows you all the Dropbox founders (and maybe some other engineers or something) and then sends a message about how they love working on Dropbox, and then some platitudes like "be yourself" and "love thy neighbor"... all animated between scenes, etc. like old Demo Scene stuff.
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I find that I often need an avenue in which to dump excess bandwidth if I'm going to be focusing on content which is primarily auditory. For instance, playing TF2 or Minecraft while listening to lectures actually really helps me listen to the content, though I usually score badly in the game since I primarily just need something to hypnotize my visual processors so that bandwidth is available for auditory (instead of idle visual processors which then scan looking for something to process, causing high potential for distraction) and don't involve myself too much in what I'm doing in the game (or else focus shifts to the game instead of the lecture).

Interestingly, I've gotten in trouble both in school and at work for doodling during classes and/or meetings. I didn't care, I just quit both and started my own company. :x
Please, let's not be pedantic.

Yes, CouchDB is an Apache project and Couchbase Single Server is a Couch One product. Except that they are almost exactly the same. Couchbase Single Server is already pre-built into easily installable rpms, it has GeoCouch integrated, but not a whole lot more compared to CouchDB trunk (Am I wrong?).

So as a developer you want to play around with Couch. Which one do you pick? ... Exactly. Aside from terminology there is basically a fork at the moment and I understand that CouchOne Server eventually will combine membase + CouchDB in it, and it is a great step forward but currently it makes it a bit harder. It is also not exactly easy to find a comparison of exactly which features are in which. So it is sort of a guess work.
Fluid (uses WebKit, Mac only) or Prism (based on Firefox) allow you to create standalone apps from websites. Both have separate cookie storage for each website.

http://fluidapp.com/
http://prism.mozillalabs.com/
Basic macroeconomics is a refutation of the Gold Standard. The only people I've ever heard who promote it are those (usually libertarian) who object to the very existence of the Fed on ideological grounds. I've never heard a serious, mainstream economist propose it.

Interestingly, it's also a refutation of BitCoins as a currency. They actually make a very good commodity, but they're useless as a currency. The very scarcity that gave them perceived value in the beginning has led to the hyper-deflation that now makes them unsuitable for commerce. If they could be granularized (so you could pay 150 mBC), then they might be worthwhile. When the smallest transferable amount is $10, however, they kinda suck.
Or they've failed to understand exactly what the SLA says.

It may exclude all manner of things so that it says >99.5% but really doesn't mean what you as an engineer might think. These are legal agreements...
Vitamin-C does virtually nothing for the trip. It's all placebo.

Now, if you grind the mushrooms up and let them site in lemon juice for 30+ minutes. That will definitely accelerate the time you reach the peak of the trip. The acids in the lemon juice break down the mushrooms so the stomach can digest them more quickly.
Yep, that clarifies it. Thanks. And thanks for write-up. This is the type of stuff I love to see posted on HN.
Ann Lee: Imagining a World Without Banks
And employees would also put bugs in to reap the reward.
Teardrop Skepticism
Yes. She also pokes fun at Bill Gates.
I think you are saying wealth == happiness. And from the vantage-point of someone without wealth, that may seem true. But any person with wealth will tell you that wealth does not bring happiness or ego or confidence -- all of those are only achieved from within.

You can purchase more things that take a lot of time to make, and you can not worry about money issues, but you can't buy happiness.

I'm not sure if there is more global happiness today than there was in Sumerian times; I would imagine there is. As you mentioned though, happiness seems to be relative, so it's pointless to complain about since it's a fundamental human limitation.

"The fact that most people imagine it would be paradise to never have to work does not make the experience any more pleasant in practice." -- http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...
It depends. I was in a similar situation with a company about 7 years ago (except there were only 2 of us, and we had a little over a year in before we formally incorporated).

Here are a few things to think about:

1. If you take traditional VC investing, they may ask you to put these shares back in and vest normally (our attorney & angel warned us of this scenario).

2. If you don't plan on taking outside investment for 12-18 months, this may not matter.

3. Let's say you agree the amount is 10% of the company so far. If your other 4 co-founders literally walked away the day after receiving the stock, do you think they earned 8% of the company for what they have contributed to date? If you go down this path, you need to be good with the numbers here if this ever did happen. (I realize it is unlikely all 4 would walk away, but one may).

4. If it were me, I would probably take a hybrid approach. I'd go with "time served" so far, and make the one year cliff ~4 months from now (you can even agree on separate dates for each co-founder that aligns with their agreed 1yr anniversary of being involved in earnest).
No.

They are interpreted the same way other commercial agreements are. They're also generally very lengthy and specify what they mean (i.e. what counts, what doesn't). They also set out what the consequences of breach are (maybe you want $, maybe you want something else, etc.).

There's no magic to writing "SLA" or something else. What you put in the contract is what you'll be held to...
It only seems to work once so make sure you wait and watch the animation. I was going to record it to put on YouTube but couldn't make it happen any more times :-(
How To Get Rid Of Period Cramps
I couldn't detect a value judgment either way from your comment, but I agree, and I think that's a feature, not a bug. I've got plenty of utility apps on my Android phone that I interact with very rarely to change some setting on the phone or run some background service. I'm glad that the developer of each of these didn't feel the need to divert resources to making a beautiful UI before releasing or improving the functionality.

Not to say I don't appreciate beautiful UI design, but I think there's room for beautiful apps and ugly but functional apps.
Battlefield 3 PC vs. Console Graphic Comparisons
CompuCast: Computer science podcast
You mean like all the areas that iOS (v4&5) is now copying or taking an inspiration from Android now?
Unfortunately the first law of thermodynamics says that, eventually, the sun is going to die.

Tangentially related:

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2033

With an infinite business lifespan, the chance your service goes down due to ANYTHING rises to one.