skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of all these the only thing I do is tip well. When you treat the help right, they will often times be more loyal to you than to the management. From tipping well, I've had the following experiences.

1. I was out at a bar with a bunch of friends maybe 8 or 10 of us and we had been tipping her pretty well for about 45 minutes. I told the waitress she looked like she was from the 1880's. A couple witty banter exchanges later, I convinced her to give us shots for 'two bits', which is a quarter, but she interpreted it as being two quarters. I wasn't going to complain and we got shots for the rest of the night for fifty cents. I had never been in this bar by the way.

2.I was out at one of the nicest restaurants in town with my new girlfriend of few weeks and her friends. I had tipped one waitress pretty well a few times earlier. I got up out of my seat and approached her privately and told her that one of my girlfriends friends was having her birthday tonight. Her friend was really into pink princessy stuff and wondered if she could bring her a drink. She brought out this giant glittery goblet drink thing on a plate drizzled in iceing with whipcream all over. My girlfriend and her friend were impressed.

2. The same waitress above and my girlfriend and I went out on a beer tasting trip. I knew the couple three beers I was interested in trying, but my girlfriend didn't. So my girlfriend got to taste all the beers in the place that she wanted before she ordered her beer.

From my experiences tipping well is really what you should focus on.
Non-commercial file sharing and piracy are two different things. I hate to get pedantic, and I know what you mean but I have to preface what I'm about to say with this disclaimer lest some other pedant starts mincing words with me.

Anyway, our opinions on what should be legal are totally irrelevant. Fact is, piracy is illegal and there are laws already in place and enforced on it. You can't just break the law en masse and call it a protest. The opposition just ends up marginalizing you as "a group of bad apples" no matter how many people do it.

I favor copyright and don't much like piracy only because I wouldn't want my work to be pirated, however I do see the danger in SOPA and the extension of copyright so I would definitely protest with you guys here. The problem is we can't make change and be comfortable at the same time. If you want to see a change in policy you have to imcomvenience yourself a little in this case. Sitting on your computer and downloading torrents all day them writing a blog post about it doesn't do anyone but preach to the choir. You have to get active and get out into the streets. Protest in front of the offices of Universal, make t-shirts, formally organize, and start talking to the non-techie public in a way they understand. Unfortunately, us nerds seem to be terrible at doing that. We're all so pedantic, we argue amongst ourselves over the little things, and when we do try to educate the public we all spew out different, non-unified messages that the public doesn't see a reason to care about. We're all so enamoured with our ability to disrupt systems and do things our own way that we think we can always play by our own set of rules. I think thats hubris on our part and it's hurting us. In this case I think we need to play by their rules in such a way that we turn their own rules against us. Let's start a PR war. The kind of PR war that uses bumper sticker slogans and tactics the other side uses. We may think its beneath us but would you rather be right or would you rather win?
I'm sorry. I don't have a list of innovations that happened because an underprivileged person joined a profession and used their world view. I could say the rise in Facebook/casual gaming proves there was a market going untapped, but I'm not sure if that was done by a woman/casual gamer, so I'm hesitant to use it.

I was hoping it would be apparent that bringing in a different perspective would help a brand or profession appeal to a wider audience, but if you would like hard evidence this happens, I'm afraid I don't have the patience to research it. If that means my point is null-and-void, so be it.
Also seems to be a surge in people editing in complaints about downvotes and baiting people for downvotes.

The pity with the ass comment was that a lot of its content was well written, its just the first line spoiling it all.

I think a lot of people need to look at their comments before they post them, take a breath and try and self moderate better.
Ask HN: Including a demo with your pitch email. Good or Bad?
Hello, Recently I've been emailing local VCs with accelerator/partner programs (With only "contactus" and no application forms) in order to apply.

The mail was the standard small bit a of background about myself, a paragraph pitch about my start-up and a meeting request where I told them that I can show off a detailed demo of my start-up.

The only reason I don't attach the demo into the email is that it contains intricate info about my webapp including every page involved, the functionality etc. and someone can easily duplicate it without much effort with this info in their hands.

Was it a good or bad idea not to attach the demo in the email?

Note: I realize that for well known ones outside my country that request a demo in their forms I'd probably have to include it.
No "guru meditation"?
Your compliance claim, to me, is absolutely false. I've dealt with both Megaupload and Filesonic with DMCA requests. Megaupload not only disabled them promptly but went a step further and would remove links to identical files that I hadn't even found yet (and would tell you about it).

I just checked and I've sent 15 DMCA requests to Filesonic and had them all removed within 24 hours.
I'm a political junkie, but I'm also a long-time HNer; I urge caution with stories like this.

As an systems architect and somebody who consults with large technology organizations, I am extremely interested in how systems of people interact -- hence the political junkie thing. But as part of watching that interaction, I've noted that we all we have a tendency to become very tribal, especially when the topic of our favorite "teams" come up.

So yes, I think it's very important to learn facts like the number of Republicans that jumped ship and the fact that Al Franken was a sponsor of the bill. Just like it's important to know that many members of the Democrat party hang on to the idea of the bill and that the administration was in support of it before they jumped ship as well. These are facts -- if you care about PIPA/SOPA you should know this.

But once we move into political analysis, which side is doing what for which reasons, I think the article becomes much more shaky as a topic for HN. Whether or not one party may benefit or not touches directly on what you already think of each party, so the comment thread could end up with just so much posturing.

As a libertarian, to me the interesting things are 1) that both parties supported the bills by large margins (or they wouldn't have been reported out of committee) until they got caught and 2) many years ago there was some general bipartisan agreement to freaking leave the internet alone. I'd like to know what happened to that. But because that's going to be a "team story" that's probably a topic for a different board besides HN.
More like having the freedom to be distributed when it makes sense to do so.
The easier way to determine if humans are the only species who have empathy...

Talk to any dog owner.
Which languages are you talking about?
Sure - dropbox exclusively monetizes the uploader, not the downloader.

Megaupload, filesonic etc. actually pay the uploaders who upload high-demand pirated content that attracts downloaders who can then be monetized.

Very contrasting business models.
The proposed responses are kind of funny, but I sort of like the idea of having a new status code range in development mode, or at least a standard set of headers for stuff like stack traces, etc.

A lot of times when I'm consuming a REST API that's in development, I'll get HTTP 500 responses and then I have to get with the API developer and repeat my requests so he/she can watch log files to see what went wrong. It would be great to be able to hand over more details in a reliable and consistent way.
I haven't watched the video, but viewers should understand that the Federalist Society, organizers of this convention, are firmly on the right wing of the political spectrum. That doesn't make them right or wrong, but this isn't an insight into what the average lawyer (if there is such a thing) thinks or understands about IP.
Is it just me, or is the title an allusion to the Biblical name 'Methusaleh' (meaning, when he dies, the flood comes)
For those wondering how dropbox is different...

Dropbox exclusively monetizes the uploader of the file, not the downloader.

Megaupload, filesonic etc. actually pay the uploaders who upload attractive pirated content that attracts downloaders who can then be monetized aggressively for faster or no-wait downloads.

Very contrasting business models.
id also suggest not referring to them as "the help"
My question is: why don't we show more empathy towards animals? The experimentations and vivisections, urban sprawl and deforestation, the abandonment of pets when they become inconvenient - we as humans don't consider the cruelty of our actions.

We figure as long as it can be profited from or paved over, it's justifiable. It's not.

One day mankind will grieve because of the suffering we have caused animals. But by then it will be too late.
To challenge the model, you need to find a way to reduce distance between story-telling and the audience.

In the late 90s, television became a good place for creative people to work, because the industry gave writers freedom to break moulds that had contained them before. e.g. Buffy finished high school and went on to a next stage of life.

I'd focus on finding a way to deploy compelling stories so that they could be consumed for portables, browsers or airline screens on long-haul flights.
As a counterpoint I'll offer that I'm from Europe, lived in the States, came back home, and have no wish to return stateside (not really even for a visit). I can work remotely.
Is something happening to the quality of this community lately?

I opened up my username account here 1161 days ago, after lurking once in a while for at least several weeks beforehand. As far as I know, NO ONE has read every Hacker News comment exhaustively for years, although some members of the curating team and some of the high-karma participants may come pretty close to reading most of the most active threads. My general impression is that there have always been some instances of incivility here, and there has definitely been an increase in just-plain-dumb comments since the participation on HN greatly expanded, but on the whole HN still stays way ahead of most online communities in civility and in level of information on the part of the regular participants.

And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?

What I have seen as most helpful is users who observe breaches of civility pointing that out to users who perform such gaffes. That reaffirms the forum culture and identifies which overt behaviors are not helpful here. I have to acknowledge that from time to time I have learned from other participants pointing out my less-than-ideal comments, and I appreciate people taking the effort to help me learn from my mistakes.

Here are some links to earlier discussion (initiated by pg) about efforts made beginning in March 2010 to improve comment quality on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271

One way to get a reality check on how HN is doing is to look at the bestcomments view of the community

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

to see if all the most recently highly upvoted comments look like civil, informative comments or not.
This is what Netflix should do. For the cost of one large budget HBO style series, they could produce two or thee films or series a month, and then build on the ones that are most successful.
This is what's so odd about US customs. They seem to think most digital materials coming into the country are physically carried over the borders.

Nope.
Can we please not do this? The Megaupload employees were conspiring to commit piracy. These weren't trumped-up charges. They were accused, among other things, of attempting to copy Youtube 1 for 1, and knowingly conspiring with users and sites dedicated primarily to pirated content.

It seems a little banal to compare all this to, you know, genocide.
By that logic, nothing can ever exist without some way to measure it, yet we know of things like emotions and attractiveness. Would you then say that "hatred" or "love" cannot exist because there isn't a hatred/love-measuring machine?

Just because you have not seen it does not mean it doesn't exist. I don't have any experience with higher mathematics, but let's take programming. Would the existence of a women-centric programming club be proof enough of the discrimination women face? What about the blog posts of women in CS courses expressing their disdain for their male classmates/teachers? Or the attempts to attract women into the field?
Indeed, it is interesting that the focus is on these web-based file download services, yet NNTP services like GigaNews (http://www.giganews.com/) continue to make money while falling under the radar. And let's face it -- most of their traffic probably directly comes from pirated material from alt.binaries.* groups. These NNTP services even boast large retention times for binary groups and offer anonymous VPN access.
Dropbox sharing doesn't always suit me, especially when I need to sent really big files to clients, these files tend to linger and take up Dropbox space.

Dropbox is brilliant for teams working together though.
Also, what computer books should attorneys read? Obviously, if an attorney had a big IT project they should hire a professional, but they could probably get a good head start if they read a few computer books for background, right?
False. Did you even read my link? "Social insurance, or payroll, taxes are attributed to households paying those taxes directly or paying them indirectly through their employers"

The bottom quintile also receives things like EITC, which dramatically reduce their taxes.

It's true that US corporate income taxes apply to US investments. Similarly, Irish income tax applies to Irish investments, Japanese income tax to Japanese investments, etc. So what?
Studios inflate production budgets so it appears the films lose money in order to cut out investors/producers/etc from net profit participation. The studios make their money on distribution and by charging exorbitant rates. A lot of money goes from one pocket to the other of the same company at these exorbitant rates. Here's how to cut:

- Studios charge production overhead fees in excess of 35% reducing significantly the amount of money spent on the actual production

- Studios charge interest in excess of 20% on all expenses incurred in development, production and development

- Producers are required by the studio to contract with vendors they either partially own or have pre-negotiated rates with the studios

- Example, Technicolor pays Universal $25 million at the beginning of the year to be the exclusive lab for all Universal productions. Then Technicolor charges inflated rates to Universal. The $25 million offsets this and the result is the production budget is artificially (i.e. criminally) inflated.

- Example, studios may make a producer pay 40 cents a foot for negative film processing vs 15 cents normally, or up to $4 per foot for release prints vs $1.50. (this data is old)

- A fair system using digital cameras and related technology (e.g. visualization, digital 3D mapping), along with digital distribution to cinemas, should reduce the production and distribution cost of a major film to a few million. +advertising

Same things happens with marketing. The studios will advertise a film through their TV network, all while controlling the prices and limiting net profit participation for the outside investors and producers. All this is a clear case of financial fraud and is known as - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
I've suggested that statuary licensing for video streaming[1] would be something that all tech companies could agree to support, and that Hollywood would hate.

I think it fits well with the "0.99c/view" model proposed here.

[1] http://nicklothian.com/blog/2012/01/18/why-the-tech-industry...
There should be a karma or seniority threshold for upmodding. And it should be high.
Or MediaFire, or RapidShare, or even Box.net.
On average I will make more money than any other 4 year degree at my school (According to our schools alum association).

I am part of a profession that has created a significant amount of recent world wide change, like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and almost every innovation on or related to the web since it's beginning.

There is a different between programmers (Like the ones Microsoft hires), and people who can program (Like the ones a small website will hire). A programmer knows more than just programming, he knows data structures, algorithms, programming language theory, how operating systems work, and a lot more, because it makes him better at his job.

If that isn't elite I don't know what is. (Lawyers and doctors can change the world, or they can practice their craft on everyday matters, and there is a wide variance between full on doctor and nurse/physician/ect., it is the same with programmers [We just haven't labeled the different tiers yet])
Obie goes over the DueProps concept
And what is to say that Dropbox doesn't get the fear and disable sharing too? After all, if a user is sharing a file, they could be pirating a movie and for that Dropbox could be shutdown.
No. The First Amendment applies inside the US, but not at the border. Customs has latitude to ignore the usual Constitutional rights. (I don't agree with this, but that's what the courts say.)

The good news is that this only affects physical media. Posting a video on YouTube has the same effect as shipping DVDs across the border, but is out of Customs' reach.
Wouldn't your individual risk be lessened by leaving the other rat trapped, so that it is easy prey and more likely to get picked?
I use kicksend. It's like email, but just for files. It has an inbox that you use to look at read / unread / sent messages.
/r/askscience
/r/business
/r/programming
/r/python
Hah, the only reason I had it off was because I was testing my own website's "you require javascript to view this site"'s page and had forogotten to turn it back on.

I never surf without javascript, it breaks almost every web page I frequent.

I have javascript as a requirement to use my service and nobody complains.

Cheers.
I understand. =)

I've fought back against this very thing (and was fairly successful with the results). It required a lot of force and careful wording.

"No, you didn't send anything _to_ me. You did copy me a message you sent to someone else, however."

I went out of my way to filter all emails CC'ed to me to another folder called review, and I would review it at the end of the day, or maybe the next day. It took a lot of standing ground and being blunt with people, but eventually it started to work. Before I left, there was discussion on improving email communication, and making it clear to everyone in the company the difference between CC and TO, and how to use them, when to use them, and what to expect.

I'd hate to think what I'd say if I was in the middle of your situation. I don't play the political game well. =)
I'm one of the founders from #7 (EventVue) and we had paying customers from the beginning. We had people who would pay, just not enough money and not frequently enough.
An easy fix would be to add a 'Rude' link beside the 'Flag' link, and just make it do the exact same thing.
Only with a one-time pad?

A small key does not contain enough information to make the data decrypt to any arbitrary thing.
What goes around comes around. We delivered streams for DEN [1] over a decade ago, and any number of new "studios" since.

The problem we see is wrong headed thinking around distribution. Everyone wants to be an event, to drive TV or blockbuster sized audiences for a quick big win. The Internet isn't about that. The Internet (see amazon.com and books) is about breadth and depth of choice, made available to a wide enough audience that the quality of choice makes financial sense. Monetize that, and you've defeated Hollywood.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
I asked for a full refund on my lifetime membership.

--------

I subscribed to filesonic when sharing of links were allowed. I am no longer interested to have this account if there is no sharing of links allowed. The functionality of the service that I signed up for has signifcantly reduced. Thus I would like a refund of my subscription fees. Since my membership was for Lifetime $149. I would like a full refund of this amount please.

---------------------
Wait until customs outsource this policy to the file sharing companies of this world. Say goodbye to your ROI Dropbox investors.
The thing about Kickstarter is that it fosters the unhealthy kind of competition instead of collaborative creation. The point of our studio is to grow creators. Set up a playground where people can run free, where taking risks and falling on your face are encouraged. Kickstarter often rewards projects that look like something that already exists - things on there do well if they're slightly novel versions of proven projects. And the thing about truly new ideas is that they don't look like anything you've ever seen before. Our studio would chase those ideas, and the people who dream them up.

EDIT: My big thing is that a kickstarter like project wouldn't be geared around in-house talent. That's what made Roger Corman (and the golden age studios he modeled himself around) special. All the talent was under one roof.
An interesting take on the file sharing service that I've used occasionally is http://justbeamit.com/ which opens a direct connection between you and the recipient. If you close the window before the file is transferred, the transfer gets cut. It may not be great for large files because of upload speeds, but it can be quicker and easier than Dropbox for transient one-offs.
Using Bayesian filtering on your Twitter timeline
Use bittorrent.

I am very serious, it is well designed for that, especially if you are sending to several people.
Sign up landing pages as MVP? Never. Sign up pages to assess interest may be valuable, but they aren't MVP. MVP is "this is most stripped-down version of our vision that we think anyone would actually pay for". It's drawing a line in the sand. It's not expected to be profitable or grow quickly, or anything like that, but it's expected to be something that you can actually sell to someone. If you make the MVP, and no one buys, and you go through a couple cycles of "who's our target market", and there's still nobody buying, you need to kill it. Give up on that product, take anything you've managed to learn from your prospective customers, and build something else.

In other words: MVP isn't a catch-all for everything you could do to interact with your customers before you validated your vision. MVP means the "minimum" (stripped down, only the core features) "viable" (you must believe someone will buy it as-is) "product" (it must actually do something and provide value).
This idea clearly presents a lack of understanding of how the film industry actually works, and in turn, is presenting nothing new. Making movies isn't part that needs disruption.

Regardless of what your thoughts are about Hollywood, it's filled with a bunch of very intelligent, and very well connected people, with very deep pockets.

Iterative improvements here and there is not going to cut. Posts like these are obtuse show a general lack of understanding.