skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article certainly appeals to the "Yankee Ingenuity" in all of us, eh?

But one could substitute "copyright infringer" for "unlicensed peddler", and the gist of the argument remains intact. Heck, you could substitute "mild drug dealer" and the gist of the argument is still true. I live in Denver, Colorado, we've legalized "medical marijuana", and it's definitely a growth industry, same as the "unlicensed peddling" probably is.

So, if we allow "unlicensed peddlers" to succeed, and I'm actually all for it, where do we draw the line? With "unlicensed marijuana peddlers"? With "copyright infringers"? Do we just say the heck with it, and let all companies do whatever they want to their workers and their customers?

I mean, it seems fairly obvious that we need to regulate some industries (mining) which have an amazing history of abusing workers, and other industries which have an amazing and nauseating history of abusing customers. But where do we draw the line and say "This regulation is bizarre and counter-productive"?
Also, do any companies exist that are trying to make the whole lifecycle of ebook self-publishing dead simple for non-techies? It seems that it's "not that easy"(1) even for techies and that non-techie authors can be overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to do that isn't writing a book(2). The only relevant company I know of is http://leanpub.com, but they state in their manifesto that they are only interested in the very specific and (I'm guessing here) relatively uncommon style of incremental self-publishing.

(1) http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/e-book-publis...

(2) http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-aut... around 5:30 in the audio
You can put your super into a huge variety of places, or even run your own fund. Iirc there are about half a million or so such private 'funds' in Australia.
I wouldn't code for Android simply because I don't like Java. It's just shameful that C,C++,and Obj-C will have closures before Java. Java is a ghetto and I don't want any part of it.
> See the problem?

No. Must be because I actually use the language instead of trying to bash it to advertise another language. :-)

I'm still excited to see another language solving the problem mentioned in the article. At the moment it really looks like as Scala gets bashed for the complexity of something not possible in any other language out there.
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Show HN: Just re-launched my design company
Everyone,

I just wanted to take a minute to share with everyone my recently updated and expanded web design business.
I started Masswerks in 2009 and since then it has grown tremendously. I've done work for Remax, Chitika, CrazyEgg, Spinback (acquired), Frid.ge (acquired) and more.

I recently re-designed the site and added some designers and developers to my team to handle the work load.

I wanted to share the launch with you all and also would love to hear your feedback on the current design and approach.

Thanks!
Being the pragmatist that I am: Why bother with public social media if you want to say something in private? Also, from a social behavioral view, this is very rude. It's the online equivalent of 2 or more people in a group switching to speaking another language so someone else in the group can't understand the topic.
Free logo/brand work
Hi HN,

Myself and my cofounder are offering an opportunity to have some free logo/branding work done.

Whether it be a full logo, brand guidelines or a even slight revision or review on your current brand.

Obviously we can only take on a limited amount of work and we're doing this for 3days only.

Why are we doing this? Because we love functional and meaningful design! Especially in logos.

Just send an email with your request and as much information as possible and w'll get right back to you.

Email is in profile.
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Hedge funds typically cater to two different types of clientele. In Bernie Maddof's case it was probably mostly private wealth management. The other is institutional money.
Based on some of the screenshots, it might just be the case that the author doesn't know how to upload the kernel to the Nook correctly.

Moreover -- correct me if I'm wrong -- GPLv2 doesn't require that the device manufacturer support software upgrades anyway. It's only v3 that introduced the "anti-TiVoization" clause, and the kernel isn't GPLv3.
I just do not understand why documentation continues to be a problem. There are plenty of API-as-platform models going around, and there will be more in the future.

We are developers creating a product (an API) for other developers. We know what other developers are going to want to understand and the details they're going to need when implementing against an API. It should be crystal clear what information needs to be provided.
All the languages he suggests apart from Scala are or are pretty close to being pure functional languages.

I'm not convinced that I would be more productive developing say a web app , database app or game using say Haskell rather than Java or Python especially since a large amount of programming is all about state and side effects.

I'm not against learning a pure functional language as a way to improve your programming especially for concurrency or to solve specific problems.

Are there any large pieces of software outside of academia that are written primarily in functional languages?
See also: Widespread use of Comic Sans.
I suspect that the author of this piece is taking a very optimistic interpretation of the GPL and Barnes and Noble a very conservative interpretation.

They only GPL'd code on the Nook as far as I can tell is the Android kernel. So if they distribute the patches they made to the kernel to support their tablet then they are done. They have no obligation whatsoever to distribute source to their book display application, their UI, or their other 'user land' applications.

Its the same with Google, the 'Google Experience' applications (mail, maps, Etc) are neither GPL'd nor 'free' for manufacturers to put on their boxes.
> I believe if there is straightforward evidence

As far as I could tell from that thread, there isn't, just a lot of ignorance. B&N has no legal obligation to tell them how to get a custom kernel to boot on the Nook.
There are a handful of resources you might find useful:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

http://swombat.com/founders_library

http://www.businessinsider.com/document-center

http://www.quora.com/Startup-Documents

among others.

Also, as a founder, what do I do about the non-compete agreement everyone has been asked to find. I'm not thrilled about it, especially as it requires no competition for 5 years, around the world.

Get a lawyer, review it and understand the implications. If you don't like it, come back to the other guys with a counter-proposal. Be prepared to walk if you really can't reach an agreement that everybody can live with. But do understand both sides of the non-compete thing... each party in an agreement (ideally) is just trying to protect themselves from getting screwed over.
Quite a few nonprofits and foundations had money invested with Maddof, and he was a rather sketchy money manager.

Many (most?) universities have some funds invested with hedge funds (as well as VC funds and PE funds).
> Is it really necessary to look at friends in terms of "ROI"?

It's not "necessary", but why would you keep friends who aren't "worth it", however you define both "worth" and "it"?
"pseudonyms generally tend to be long-held identities - a lot of people think that pseudonyms are just throw-away identities used to gossip about your employer safely, instead of identities that persist for months, years or even decades."

A fact too often forgotten. This is the same ignorance that keeps me from using Google+ while I'm prolific on Twitter.
What math preliminaries are necessary to understand machine learning? I'm taking a basic linear algebra and probability course in the Spring...I'm wondering if that would be enough.
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I'm a Lisper and am usually firmly in the Java-hater camp, but I downvoted you because of your last line, and because of your claim that C will have closures before Java. That's simply too much of a stretch.

Java already has inner classes (and anonymous inner classes) which are much closer to closures than anything in C. They are syntactically clunky and using them like first-class functions is only kind of idiomatic so not many libraries leverage them for their full effect (although see the Google Guava libraries for examples of interesting usage). But if you squint they are pretty close to closures. I find the whole closures-in-Java debate very tired because of this.

Also, writing Java for Android isn't that bad, although I'm not qualified to compare it to Objective-C for iOS. I would like to become qualified though, because I love my Mac and I love my iPod Touch. My point being that I'm a bit biased but not a fanboy.
First of all, make sure B&N is violating the GPL. GPLv2 does not require them to make it possible to flash a new OS into the device and boot off it. As long as you can compile the sources into an executable that can possibly run, they are compliant.

I too would like Linux to be licensed under GPLv3, but a lot of companies wouldn't. I seriously doubt my TV manufacturer would be OK with me running my own code on it. Or my cable box.
> I don't know enough to be sure one way or another but when Bernie Maddof's fund collapsed it did seem like it was mostly just rich people who lost money.

What definition of "rich" are we using?

I didn't look at every story on the first page of the google serp for "madoff victims stories" but the ones that I did read mentioned folks who I don't consider rich.

For example http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/madoff-... .
Gangster rap believe it or not. Lately i've been listening to the Rick Ross mixtape "Forever Rich".
> B&N has no legal obligation to tell them how to get a custom kernel to boot on the Nook

Nor the obligation to make it possible. Signed boots are OK.
> Hollywood invests as much as $100M in a single movie

I seriously doubt any single copy deprives movie producers of $100M. Most probably, they haven't even lost a sale - if someone finds $10 too expensive and opts for a free copy, they wouldn't buy the DVD either.
Ask HN: What should I spend my $150 monthly education expense on?
My company lets me expense $150 dollars a month for computer science & software development education. What should I spend the money on? I've considered the ACM, IEEE, conferences, books, etc but would like an opinion from you guys.
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I applaud his efforts, but he's aggressively misspelling Barnes and Noble's name in that post, and that lack of attention to detail makes him much harder to take seriously.
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I've been working from home for eight years now and every single item on this list is spot-on.

- Like it or not, your spouse or significant other's days off will become your days off, so plan accordingly.

- Invest in a good chair. You'll touch it more than anything else in the world and long after you've ditched your current computer, you'll still be sitting in the same chair.

- Join a gym, preferably with classes that you need to schedule in advance so you can 'commit' to your entire week's workout schedule so it doesn't slip.

- Have a spot in your house that is always for work.
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Just saw this one: http://www.missilebases.com/denver

It was flooded for years (isn't currently), and would be insanely expensive to refurbish.
1) I am not surprised by the findings considering that it came from disqus
2) Posting more doesn't mean better. As a reader, it's often more helpful to have better comments than to have more comments. A good example would be the drop in trolling comments after TC switched to the facebook commenting systems.
It might also play well to the other reps who have not yet committed to either side.
Why was Scott Thompson chosen as Yahoo's CEO?
This looks like a total turnaround on policy, announced in a low-key two paragraph note to LKML.

The last official kernel.org "stable" kernel release was 2.6.7 or 2.6.8, I've forgotten. Since then, kernel.org has made a policy of doing whatever the heck they like, and letting distributions sort it out -- this is the reason for the lengthy tenure of the 2.6 series. (A number of non-distributors maintained their own "stable" trees, but they weren't official.)

It appears the kernel.org crew is now reverting to the old policy, wherein odd number releases are "unstable." I don't know whether that's good or bad or unimportant, but it sure is surprising.
In statistics in college, a I and a bunch of my friends (CS students) took cooperative notes in Google Wave (which, by the way, I still maintain was amazing). Generally, a friend would be taking notes as quickly as possible, and I would follow him and replace his ad hoc notation with the correct unicode mathematical symbols to make everything look really nice. But then we found all the homework solutions and sample tests (by looking at the format of the URLs of the previous ones he gave us).
What loss exactly does that copy cause?

My guess is that people who like movies so much as to go through the trouble of copying them also goes a lot to movie theatres.
I'd be interested in reading about this, but not interested enough to waste my time giving you an email address.
There are lots of professionally produced albums that are utter crap, just like there are lots of professionally produced books that are utter crap.

To think that an intermediary is necessary to create a long-form work is demonstrably false cargo cult thinking. Books were printed for centuries before publishing companies came along.
Yes, the poor performers who pay their employees more than they contribute go out of business -- or get bailed out and stay in business.
B&N was right to delete his worthless request/complaint. It contained no information that would actually help them resolve the problem. All it said in his post on their forums was that:

1. He could not get the source they released to compile.

2. Quoted a GPL violations FAQ.

3. Told them they are doing a bad thing.

4. Told them to fix the problem.

How about actually giving them DETAILS about what failed to compile. From his complaint they have no idea if the problem is because they made a mistake in the source release, or if there is something wrong with his environment, or whatever.
Can you offer a better approach?
I'm building a framework some what like this but maybe better for some use cases.

It's still a work in progress but it's part of my tinderbox application.

https://github.com/zbowling/tinderbox

It embeds a node.js server in the background (soon it will embed a custom Node server were I forked libev to use libdispatch on the mac and run behind inside a secure XPC server that launchd will manage on the Mac). Then using a Unix socket, it serves up through a custom webkit protocol handler. Two way communication to the frontend from a custom webserver written in Cocoa.

Instead of going down the road of trying to write Cocoa code with Javascript, instead just surface what you need as you need to your own backend. It's abstract so that it can be reused in other applications on other platforms in the future. Node.js was a good solution because it offers sandboxing and eventbased IO which for my first use case (Campfire) made prefect sense.

Doing this kind of binding with a generated kind of interface is always going to keep fighting an abstraction. (Like fighting some C++ lib you wrapped and are trying access through SWIG). My approach you just use the tool best suited for the job and embrace both Cocoa and Javascript.
Why force the email? Sounds very interesting, but I'm not invested enough to give you that much yet.
I just recently was impressed by how nice looking their docs are and confused by how bad they are at actually explaining what to do with it, so I can certainly relate.

I think what they really need is to figure out what calls people make most often and mark those very clearly at the top, along with a human-readable description. Like for example "HERE'S THE CALL YOU CAN USE TO GET A USER'S TWEETS', or 'HERE'S THE ONE YOU USE TO GET TWEETS ABOUT WORD OR HASHTAG X' -- Isn't this the case for everything?
It seems that this sensational headline (and the subsequent article) leaves out a main point as to why this would be happening: performance fees paid prior to 2008.

Assuming the 2/20 fee structure, HFs would have taken 10 years of 20% fees on their performance before 2008 knocked out (according to the article) all of the returns for the previous 10 years. That would leave the investors back at 0, minus 10 years of 20% performance fees and 2% management fees. Given the time frame, I'm surprised the fees aren't greater than the realized gains.
Applications and Appliances: A Conversation with Jonathan Zittrain
If you run your server in offline mode it won't validate the username with Mojang and you can add any number of bots. Just add this to your server.properties file:
online-mode=false

I doubt Mojang have any sort of anti-bot policies. Individual servers can ban users though. But hopefully people are writing bots for fun and not war right? ;)
I'm not sure your argument is valid. How is the decision made to convert x/y to fraction form? Is it white-space/punctuation+whitespace on either side? If that's the case, then: xxx/yyy will never become fraction form; however, x/y and x/y. (as in the end of a sentence) will.
> we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods.

Wake me up when such methods exist. Right now they don't and politicians who represent a small group of copyright owners instead of a much larger contingent of content consumers are proposing bad laws to protect those who feed them.

The analogy also breaks because murder or theft deprive someone of something (in the case of murder, something irreplaceable) while content piracy only deprives content owners of a sale they most likely would never make.
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Is .xxx Is Just Another Form of Internet Censorship?
Many people claim that .xxx domains are just another form of internet censorship. Not to mention the impact these domains will have on search engines and porn SEO.
Emoti: Windows Phone 7 meets with long waited Emoji.
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I get that. I like DJ Khalid, Wale, and Wiz Kalifa to get me on my grind sometimes.
Yeah, I'm sorry about that. That was not my intention. But you're right, I have grown disillusioned with Scala, partly because of stuff like the examples in the pop-quiz section of the post, but mostly because of the other things I mentioned.

But I don't agree with your analysis. I won't go into the question of whether or not the feat mentioned in the post is possible in other languages or not, but I do know that if I came to a rather experienced Scala programmer and asked him off-hand if the tasks attempted in the post are easy, I suspect that the answer would be "yes". Scala is just... surprising like that.
There are those who disagree with you. :)

Valid point, I don't think a good case can be made for putting a lead whistle in your mouth.

But I wouldn't worry about the fumes. It's likely no worse than SnPb solder fumes, which don't contain any appreciable amount of lead.
Maybe if you stated what you think the actual issue is in clear, unambiguous terms instead of being pissy and snarky about it this discussion will not degenerate into chaos.

No, CL is not statically typed. And your point would be...?
Curious question, what are the problems of Titanium Desktop?
So Gruber's conceit is iOS has "wider and deeper support from developers" despite less market share, so market share isn't everything to developers. But I don't really see iOS having wider and deeper support, at least anymore. Any major company has an Android app to go with their iOS app. I can't think of any smash iOS hit games that hasn't been ported to Android. Rockstar, who at one point released GTA: Chinatown Wars for iOS only, just released GTA III across iOS/Android same day. This is entirely due to market share.

The only place where "wider and deeper support" still holds true are niches that tickle iOS users' sweet spot. Things like Instagram, Instapaper, Flipboard, music creation apps, etc. And these also hit Gruber's sweet spot, so of course he senses the iOS environment is better. But there are also niches popping up for Android. Stuff like Tasker, Minecraft, AirDroid, etc.

So, yes, I think market share is everything and people can be reduced to numbers. iOS just happens to have a larger number of design focused people (like Gruber) who like a certain subset of apps. We've gone from an "iOS only" to "iOS first, then Android" to now, where I think things are nearing 50/50 when it comes to what platform you release to first, if not at the same time. And if the numbers tip too much in Android's direction, I wouldn't be surprised if the fable repeat of Windows vs. Apple happens. Apple for the designers, Android for the rest of the world.
Not sure honestly. I can't imagine looking up or down for long periods of time is good.
Here is my app for WP7 users that want Emoji like Iphone...
It seems people get better at what they practice. I suspect anyone (barring genuine mental disability of some kind) could master calculus and thermodynamics if they were sufficiently motivated.
> Are there any large pieces of software outside of academia that are written primarily in functional languages?

If you're asking about places where FP is often used, I know it's big in finance (though I have no idea what those guys are up to).

The haskell web development space has also gotten to a pretty mature point. I think you'd have no problem building a web app with Yesod or Snap.

http://www.yesodweb.com/
http://snapframework.com/

You could also check out http://cufp.org
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I have similar sweat equity in my tech company, and have to pay income tax rates and payroll taxes on my earnings.

No, you have to pay income tax rates and payroll taxes on your salary. Sweat equity is taxed at capital gains rates, much like the sweat equity of hedge fund managers.

(Except for the various special cases when it is not. I've only gotten equity at the stage of founding the company, I'm told it's taxed differently if you get it as part of your comp package when you work at google.)
If you're interested in this subject and are looking for training in Cascalog, one of the authors (Sam Ritchie) is teaching a 3 day class prior to the Clojure/West conference - more info here: http://clojurewest.org/training-cascalog
I don't know how far over to the functional paradigm arc leans but hacker news is programed in it. I know it's built off common lisp so there is that linage.

The naughty dog game studio used a form of lisp in their games starting with Crash Bandicoot until they got purchased by Sony(I think). Though, the language was much more imperative in nature instead of functional.

Autocad had autolisp built into it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

I don't know of any others off the top of my head.