skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a really good violin, quite likely. My daughter has a cello that she obtained in High School years ago, and it was easily three time that, and it was not considered to be anything extraordinary.

You can spend $2500 on a bow.
What a well-timed post, particularly since reading a bizarre takeover of another thread by a single person who comes off as a bit paranoid:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420845
Same number of English words of French origin as Latin
Yes and yes, to both findings with both brands.
Agreed... they are not publicly traded, but they shouldn't be pointing any fingers.

As for the politics, shouldn't one who cries fiscal foul be judged for their own fiscal idiocy? I'm suggesting you consider the messenger when you look at their purely marketing-message-related website.
c: "But my main goal in writing to you is to prevent PayPal from ordering the destruction of violins" - sorry but that type of "moral superiority" is done (in my experience) by people who know they are morally wrong, but are trying to claim the high ground.

I have the same (perhaps irrational) emotional attachment to musical instruments (and rare antique computers, old books, etc.) as the GP. It seems like a "sin" against music and the labor of the instrument's creator to destroy an instrument. I also think it would be wrong to destroy a counterfeit painting, for similar reasons.
Thanks for the quick summary.
The key words here are "in our sole discretion". Those words are legal kryptonite.
No, you're wrong. Nobody is forcing you to use Paypal, you accept payment that way because it's convenient for both buyer and seller. You could advertise on Craigslist, but would you feel comfortable if someone says, 'I will send you a check, please ship to this address'? No, because the check may be bad and you could have a big financial headache. Likewise, many buyers would not be comfortable sending a check or taking a large amount of cash to buy something from a stranger. Finally, eBay allows you to reach a much wider market than you could through local classifieds, and takes care of almost all the administrative overhead of the transaction.

As a buyer, you want this security so that you can pay a few thousand $ without the fear of getting nothing in return. As a seller, you have to treat the 21-day float period as a cost of doing business, or else impose less generous terms of your own (and see less interest from wary buyers who do not want risk). In the business world suppliers are often expected to provide 30 or even 60 days of credit to commercial customers, and dealing with this is the essence of cash flow management.

It seems you want all the benefits of having your money instantly, but that someone else bears all the risk. The opportunity cost of the 21-day wait is the risk premium you pay for access to a large marketplace.
Google demotes Chrome in search results over pay-for-post promo
The problem with this analysis is the writer defines quality as stable, easy to use OS but neglects the fact that the phone manufacturers define quality slightly different. Sure, it's great to have a nice OS and a phone that does not crash but if the OS ties their hands (design-wise), they may not have room to innovate as they would see fit.

This reminds me of the story about when then phone companies wanted to get into web hosting. They decided that uptime was their competitive edge (when last did your land-line go down?) and thought webmasters would see that as valuable. However, for many webmasters, cost was the big issue but the phone companies could not deliver at the same cost as lots of mom and pop webhosts who had (comparatively) horrendous uptime.

This is a classic strategy mistake. Value is in the eye of the buyer. The maker cannot decide something is valuable just because it is good. The buyer decides what is good and then the maker follows suit.
MS has lost its smartphone brand credibility

I've seen this even among (otherwise) loyal Microsoft employees. When I remarked on a friend's iPhone he rolled his eyes and said "I've spent literally thousands of dollars on Windows Mobile Phones. I wanted to like them. They were all shit. All of them."

I'm intrigued by Windows Phone 7. I keep hearing it's great, but "Windows Mobile" and "Windows Phone" have so much negative brand affinity, I have a hard time seeing who will buy them. XBox fans, maybe?
The Essence of Knot Sealer when Applying Lace Front Wigs
PLoS paper generates visual of 1B academic paper views (clickstream)
Reflection in C++, Part 2: The Simple Implementation of Splinter Cell
" Best article: I'm nothing until the Hacker News community comments on me."

Well, sometimes the article is better than the discussion. Sometimes the discussion is better than the article. In my experience, the trivial articles sometimes have the best discussions, and the best articles seem to often have trivial discussions.

It'd be fun to get a list of best HN discussions (highest karma average per comment perhaps) ... anyone know how to do that?
I think they mean for 2011 (more precisely, Q4 2011), as we don't have data for 2012 yet. This doesn't inspire confidence in the accuracy of the numbers.
Aside from searching, I tend to move by word, too. The position of those on Dvorak is analogous to the jk position. Hadn't noticed that.
The point of posting was simply to show that a database of this information exists. Nothing more.

EDIT: If it bothers you so much that this information is tied to the AFLCIO website, I'll pull the proxies myself along with the companies' change in market cap for the period the pay figures represent, and I will throw it up into a website. Then it will just be a database of CEO pay and stock performance.
Air Jordan Shoes 2012 for Sale
Lateness to market and image of Microsoft are thoroughly valid points, much like the reasons WebOS never worked out for Palm. There is a broader reason though:

Metro is a bad UI. It looks impressive in screenshots, but its usability is dismal. It relies too much on trying to guide the customer and be exciting rather and too little on creating a sensible and memorable logic that the user can intuit.

The implementation on WP7 is bad, all squished and uni-coloured (and on Xbox it's even worse). It does not bode well at all for Microsoft that they can't seem to remember that software is supposed to be used. It's like they've only learned the lesson of typography from Apple, and not the elegance of actual use.
Lansing DemoCamp company pitches (recordings)
That's really shitty. It would be interesting to know what sole discretion or reasonable belief constitutes. I doubt ebay/paypal sent experts to 'investigate', they more likely said "If you, the buyer, believe it's counterfeit because of <whatever>, then it is. Seller won't sue anyway."
Loderunner on C64.
Great stuff. When you say "freelancer" do you include contracts for BigCorps? Obtained through Recruiter'du'jour?
I agree that this was not a specific case of PP choosing to be vile and destroy a violin but it's still inexcusable to have a one-solution scenario and keep robotic, unquestioning staff incapable of providing the human element to problem resolution.

This is a case of a corporation dictating legal policy based on their legal interpretation. I am not even sure if they are masking it as legal policy really.

I am really wishing/waiting for a responsible company to be able to enter the international online payments arena but I don't see this happening anytime soon.
> determined that there's a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues

Minority Report?
Actually, the windows binary installers work perfectly with virtualenv, and is perfectly simple:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3271590/can-i-install-pyt...

(It is, however, poorly documented.)
Is there a reason not to sue? That's $2,500 in losses. And the principle of it...
Two options for getting around the MLB local area blackout regulations. Both require the MLB.tv subscription, which is $25 / month for high def. (BTW, if you haven't tried MLB.tv, it's really a great product. Many PS3/BlueRay type players have an app for it, too)

1) MLB.tv experimented with a local area only package here in San Diego last year. $20 / mo for just the Padres.
2) Rather than that, I simply used one of my VPS' in another region to create an SSH tunnel through which to route the MLB.tv signal. They use your IP, not your billing address, to determine access.
You could definitely do this. But only a few times. Ebay / Paypal is all reputational. They'll side with you at first, but you'll be banned / blocked if you repeat this operation a few times.

Credit card companies work similarly. I've known people who've racked up huge bar tabs and then called their card in stolen.

In reality, most business is run on the honour system like this. You can dine and dash, but only until the wait staff start recognizing you.
Paypal's destruction of counterfeits policy is intended to combat counterfeiting of designer items. It's application here seems lame-brained to say the least.

I'm curious how it got into Paypal's dispute resolution process however. In the only other original post I could find on the matter the seller says she sold the violin through eBay http://paypalcomplaints.org/paypal-told-buyer-to-destroy-ite.... Normally this would have gone through eBay's dispute resolution process first.
Flipboard seems a good fit :)
Nike Air Jordan XI Retro Concord 2011 Mens Basketball Shoe Cheap Sale
The violin in the article supposedly made it through WWII.
More importantly IE8 is the latest that can be installed on XP.
To be fair, Apple did literally bury OS9 and start anew

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aByby6FFR3M
Often, it's because the real world is complex.

"Deliveries are not made on Tuesdays, unless it falls on the 9th day of the month, but not in June for tax purposes in 2013, 2014 and 1998. Our Nowheresville office is excluded from the above rule."

You get rules like this. And there's reasons for most of them. Sometimes very good reasons.

Often, what simplifies a business process on the surface actually doubles (or worse) the underlying code. Because managers don't want you to throw away old data because it doesn't fit the new schema.

The "happy path" is always simple. And it tends to wind up being a fraction of the actual, evolved production code.

Unless you work in large organisations with long-lived systems, this will never be part of your worldview.
It took Toyota decades to enter the established american market. You might not care today who was first, but you are talking about a relatively ancient business. If you are arguing that 80 years from now, it won't matter, then I agree.

Also, you are missing that my two points intersect. Toyota has an strong brand, especially when it came/comes to reliability/quality/value. For most people buying cars, these are important qualities. So yes, they took the #1 spot because of the product they built and the brand they have. Microsoft's brand is so tarnished that it's way more of an uphill battle.

I find it hard to understand how people don't see the importance of brand loyalty in the face of Apple's extreme success.
I've been a long time lurker here. I lurked for several months before creating an account and then I lurked quite a bit longer before participating. Groups of intelligent people are intimidating at first but please don't hold back if you have something to add to a discussion. New voices are incredibly important for preventing groups from merely becoming echochambers for established members.

I especially agree with the original article's point about talking about your work.
If you are doing something interesting, please share it. I'm always keen to read about amazing hacks and unique projects and I'm sure many others are too. I'm very slow at writing up my own projects, so I probably should spend more time doing that.

If you are working on something that feels like reinventing a wheel for a company that has a core philosophy of Not Invented Here, share that too. I'm sure many of us have been there once and could give you some advice on ways to improve your situation (even reinventing wheels can be done to a high standard and be great practice coding), empathetic support or perhaps a way out into another job.

I implore you, dear lurking readers, participate.

Edit: fixed some pre-coffee writing.
You (and many others) fail to realize that Anonymous isn't an organization. It's an anarchistic collective with an extremely loosely defined set of common goals and values which anybody can consider themselves member of[1]. Anonymous doesn't have official positions, affiliations or representatives[2]. Each member acts on their own, and on many occasions they form groups and cooperate to start projects or operations, which sometimes become big (like Operation Payback for example).

In other words, I can assure you that members of Anonymous are working with or for the EFF. But Anonymous isn't something you can just declare to be supportive of the EFF. Nobody can.

[1] Member is actually a bad word for this, but I can't really think of a better term. There's no "membership" for Anonymous technically, there's just people considering themselves part of Anonymous.

[2] Neither are there some ominous "masterminds" behind Anonymous, as some people wrongfully assume.
DeCSS3: A bookmarklet for testing your graceful degradation
Have you ever tried arguing against this quibble of yours?

I don't mean to sound snarky; that just feels like the best way to express my reaction to your statement. I don't disagree with the sentiment; I just don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.
Here's another suggestion: flag sparingly.

A lot of long-time HN'ers are frustrated at the "flag patrols" -- people of one group who don't like such-and-such author and flag them and their submissions. I've heard several people complain to me about having normal articles flagged and I've done my share of complaining. Don't be the guy who takes out your personal grudges in the form of flagging. Let the votes work.

The system will not work with punitive flagging. My policy is that I flag only when I'm convinced an article is going to take the board off the rails. That's a tough call anymore. With a large enough audience, people get emotional just about anything.

But remember that HackerNews is defined the most by what the people don't do. They don't comment if they don't have something interesting to say, they don't flag unless absolutely necessary, they don't criticize unless it's in the spirit of discovery, they don't vote down unless it's really a trivial comment. Do less and you'll enjoy it more. With the crowd as large as it is, I'm starting to see good comment X which has ten sub-comments, nine of which either didn't understand the main comment or don't understand the issue yet want to score karma points by making somewhat snarky remarks. We all need to fight that tendency. We do that by doing less.
Already submitted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3418080

Can someone explain why that one did not make it onto the RSS feed, but this later one did?
Quantum Wipeout with floating CARS
The above clause of the TOS is the reason not to sue. The seller agreed to a TOS that says that if PayPal decides that it is counterfeit, they refund the money and the item is destroyed, without any restriction on what care PayPal has to take to decide that it's counterfeit. So PayPal acted within the terms of their agreement.
tell them "I don't work in hourly increments; if I spent an hour on your project in a day, I can't effectively work for any other client that day, so my minimum billable increment is a person-day"

You don't need to go through that whole song and dance. Simply make your hourly rate higher than your daily rate.

Alert clients will prefer to hire you by the day every time. As for the less alert clients, if you are in a kind mood you could tip them off to the savings they'd enjoy if they hired you by the day instead.

Modify your hourly rate upwards depending on just how averse you are to working more than an hour a day even for the least alert and/or deep-pocketed clients.
I could understand this if the job was something like assembly line worker, where there might be no potential upward job growth, but for cops can't they advance from street cop to detective?

I'd think you'd want detectives to be as smart as possible.
When faced with incompetence, always ask for another rep. Two employees at the same company will often give you two different experiences. This is true of all the contact I've had with AT&T, and others, and no doubt the same is true at Paypal. Just don't even waste your time if you can tell the person you are talking to does not comprehend your complaint, just hang up and call back and keep calling back until you reach someone with half a brain.
On my reading, there's nothing sufficiently different about the Tilera architecture that would prevent them back-porting the multi-threaded demultiplexer to x86.

It's not a meaningful test in a scientific sense. While I suspect that Tilera would perform better, it's not properly controlled for. Some of the recorded difference will the software changes.
CUBRID Manager 8.4.0 patch 3 is now available
Ask HN: Naming an Article Marketplace: WordAVE.com or ContentAVE.com?
I've always wanted to sell articles I've written but no one really operates a marketplace that sells them so I was thinking of creating one. I've got 2 domains registered and just want to ask you guys. Which sounds better?<p>WordAVE.com
or
ContentAVE.com
I can assure you they do not do it to earn interest. PayPal loses far more money on chargebacks, fraud, payment reversals, dispute resolutions, etc. than it makes on a measly 21 days of interest.

Further, "hold backs" (aka "reserves") are very common in bank-operated credit card merchant accounts.
Interesting perspective. What data led you to that conclusion?
Unless you're in the App Store and $1.99 is apparently their whole life savings (and in some cases it probably is).
This certainly isn't the Silicon Valley demographic, but I'm not sure what the demographic _is_. I'd be interested to see a breakdown of what kinds of companies were surveyed.

That being said, the numbers given are for CXOs, and not specifically founders (though there's obviously a strong overlap). Founders in Silicon Valley, even after raising large rounds, will typically own much more than 5% of the company.
Thanks for the answer. A system that allows for this kind of abuse might need checking over, can't say I get why that's allowed at all. Anyone ever seen this used in the right manner? (if such a way to use this method exists.) It just makes so much more sense to send the item back.
When it comes to new markets, I agree that Apple is an non-player. Android will be the dominate player here, and I think Microsoft can certainly do well. However, there's little margin in these markets (which is what Apple is all about). So while it might look impressive that Microsoft has 30% of the India market (as an example), it won't change the fact that Apple will still be making well over 50% of worldwide profits.

As for #2, it's still too early to see how Nokia plays out, but I agree that it could change the landscape..or it might not at all. I won't be surprised either way. And if it doesn't, maybe they'll try do do something with RIM. So ya, they'll throw a ton of money at the problem.

But it's still an uphill battle and it isn't like the current leaders have become stale. So I guess until Apple AND Google start doing serious missteps, I'll continue to be skeptical.
>As a PHP dev, I look over the fence at python & ruby examples and wonder why my application/framework is so complex and ugly

Why wonder? Have a look at the source of the different frameworks and try to understand how they work. Maybe there's some inherent characteristic of the languages that makes it this way. Maybe it's just that one is better thought-out than what you're using and you could propose or contribute a change.

Unless you're a contributor to a language or framework, it's probably not a great use of your energy to hope that it competes well with others. A better use of your energy might be to learn a few so you can pick the most appropriate tool for a given job.
I've been investigating this question recently as well. I am not a great programmer, so take this with a grain of salt. Also, I might ramble a bit, but I'm still trying to figure this out myself.

I think the biggest thing is to work on continuously improving/rewriting/refactoring code. You might even start by studying solid code from someone else and try to rewrite it from memory until you can match or improve the original. After each iteration of rewriting from memory, compare to the original and see how it measures up. What did they do differently and why? Obviously, this has to be code of a manageable size for your current ability. Ben Franklin did this with writing he admired, and Steve Wozniak did it with circuit layout.

Beyond this, I found a couple of papers/articles that might be useful.

http://web.coehs.siu.edu/units/ci/faculty/pfadde/Research/De...
The first is about deliberate performance, which is a combination of deliberate practice with your typical work requirements. Try to make predictions about how things will work or how long they will take to complete and write it down. Check the accuracy of your predictions. What threw you off? How could you do better? If there were different constraints, what would that change? I've found writing down my thought process to be useful in problem solving. What do I know? What am I trying to do and how might I do it? What are the implications of that choice? Test driven development could be a useful tool in this process as well.

If there is someone who is more skilled, try to imagine what they might do. If things don't work as you expected, explain your thinking to them and ask what went wrong. Have people evaluate your code. One of the reasons really good programmers crop up in open source is that they have quick feedback on code quality, so contribute to a project like that.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_...
This second article is by Atul Gawande, it describes how coaching can be applied to medicine. If you can find someone to fill this role for you, ask them.

Finally look at these links from Quora/Stack Overflow...
http://www.quora.com/How-does-one-systematically-go-about-be...
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-tips-for-advanced-writers...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3605461/how-does-a-progra...