skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with Paul's comments here, and think they hold true far outside the bounds of this conversation. However, there is something about the context in the original post that doesn't seem clear to me. It relates to what qualifies as "being hard to talk to."

It sounds like the label is being assigned to those who don't jump at something, take a ball and run with it, or whatever metaphor you'd like to insert. And the summary reaches a point of "hard to talk to yields lack of resourcefulness." And as evidence, those who weren't hard to talk to were those who closed funding, grabbed users, or some other metric. And those who were hard to talk to were the ones who didn't.

Those who succeeded at something were easy to talk to, but those who didn't succeed at something were more difficult? Not really a surprise, but what's smoke and what's fire? Seems to me there exists the possibility that failure in those areas may be the cause, and hard-to-talk-to was merely a symptom representative of a point in time.

I imagine this is contextual in the relationship of YC to its member companies, but from an outsider's perspective I could see this working out differently.
I checked into Canada's immigration laws, specifically regarding the question of what kind of residency they'd give us if we located there and did our startup. (some of us are US citizens, but one of us is from a commonwealth country, so canada seemed like a reasonable choice.)

Canada does not make it easy, to say the least, to come there and build a company and, eventually, hire canadians. (Not that the USA is much better either).

If you want more immigrants to come and create jobs, allow people to immigrate.
Would be interesting to hear the Obama administration's take on this ... but they will most likely just keep quite.
Stopping SOPA/PIPA isn't enough; some suggestions for real copyright reform
That’s the legal side.

It’s still possible to be disgusted by this for purely moral reasons. Apple is pulling some vile bullshit here and they shouldn’t.
Maybe we can score a jury nullification, where they are found to be rightly accused, nonetheless no crime has been committed and are free to go.
DMCA takedowns must be "expeditious", which I don't believe has yet been clearly defined by the courts.
Apple's new apps revealed, potential student reaction?
Or in the case of foreign sites like Megaupload, the Attorney General can just say "We don't like you" and impose a censorship order on all US-based ISPs, ad services, and payment providers.
We're talking about large-scale sharing of movies and software, not 'stealing'. It isn't desirable or practical to have the government regulate the Internet and punish offenders to stop this sharing, so content owners are going to have to adapt.

A more suitable analogy would be to a bookstore owner who's struggling because of (legal) Kindle downloads. Sucks for him, but time marches forwards. Perhaps he should partially convert to a coffee shop or similar.
Good point my statement could be taken out of context. Would not have brought it up if it had not been heavily implied by AlexMuir and others, you can read my critical response to such:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3486750
Following this logic, if someone really, really rich creates intellectual property, it's okay for the rest of us to pirate it? It's not like they're creating it to make a living.
Silicon Valley woman's plan for out world vacation not so crazy?
To be fair, the reason Perl, Python and PCRE (which all use pretty much the same regex syntax) don't use the linear-time algorithms is because they can't. Features like look-around and matching what you've already matched (/(\w+) \1/ to find repeated words for example) give you more expressivity than regular languages, but also takes away linear time algorithms.
Do me a favor, wouldja? Please cast this particular tenet of your moral code into the form of the golden rule. Exactly what are you doing to others that you would have them do unto you?
Based on the extremely slow loading of both sites, it seems to be a DDOS.
D2L: That was the one, thanks :) It did a lot, but we also had to do an enormous amount by hand because it was simply impossible to automate <x>. And rather mind-numbing pain whenever someone got married, and their name and/or email address changed.
The key difference is that, unlike text editors, version control systems have substantial network effects.

The popularity of GitHub has made using Git a bit of a no-brainer, in the literal sense - a lot of Git users never really thought about the decision, they just needed some code from a Git repo and picked up Git along the way. I just don't see where people would be having the same experience with Mercurial. I've picked up several books recently where Git was taught in the first few chapters as a necessary precursor.

It appears to me that Git is the new SVN, the new version control tool that we're just stuck with whether we like it or not. I can think of much worse things.
So, based on two unanswered, unsupported, and unproven allegations, you are willing to claim that "he is a man of dubious moral standards", and that this behaviour has hurt Wikileaks?

Are you not slightly more disturbed by the clear political machinations behind the case?
The Tablet and Reading the Future (2010)
This? http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/jinex/shower_to_go/
I was actually arguing the moral point. There's nothing immoral about setting the terms upon which you will trade your labor. Its the same as an employee deciding they want a higher salary or a lower one. The people who made this software give it away for free, under the understanding that it could be used by others who also give their work away fro free. What's wrong with that? But if people want to profit form it, then the people who made this software want to participate as well.

Are you saying that Apple should make this tool for free, give it away for free, and let it be used for any purpose, for free, and that to do otherwise is immoral? (you brought up being disgusted "for purely moral reasons")

How is giving software away for free to support an ecosystem you're building "vile bullshit" that "disgusts" you?
Nope, you won't be charged if you remove the URL associated with that number
Certainly great news! This unfortunately hits close to home though.

My own son who is just 1 y/o was just diagnosed with leukemia (ALL pre-B) a few weeks ago 2 days after Christmas and it has been a very rough road. I really hope we won't have to find a bone marrow donor since we have cord blood but that blood could be 'tainted'. Hoping to avoid additional drugs for rejection.

Good to have someone else to follow along with. I've posted a similar blog for my son over at (http://www.noahkeck.com). Would appreciate any prayers and positive thoughts, etc.
So what's their strategy now? -- A bunch of high-profile busts to raise the profile of the issue among the general public in an attempt to build support for SOPA and friends?
It's probably not completely accurate, but the publisher does provide some context as to how he estimated that. http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
Finding code with the regular Google Search is nearly impossible though.
It looks like they were not hacked exactly. They just left some backups in the open:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:videogamesplus.ca+inurl:...

Edit: wow, it was not only the customer database. It was everything:
http://www.google.com/search?q=qbsm_export+filetype:sql
Report: Sen. Harry Reid won't whip Democratic votes for PIPA
I think this _case_ can be seen as an anti-SOPA posterchild, because it shows that existing laws can already be used to successfully prosecute piracy.

There are some other comments about precedents that this may be setting (i.e., _stretching_ existing law). I'm curious to see how this plays out -- will SOPA-like provisions be "read into" existing laws by the courts?
I don't get it either. I used to love it :(
I agree with your thought process-- however, there is no reason to talk about what % of the service was used for piracy and what % wasn't. Non-owner/operator users should be viewed as completely separate from the owners and operators' and their actions. It doesn't matter if 99.9% of the users are pirating content, as long as the owners & operators were not engaging in illegal activities (including knowingly aiding pirates). The issue is that MegaUpload does't have the ability to determine what a user legally owns.

With that said, even if MegaUpload complied with legally-sufficient take-down requests, I imagine those who were arrested could easily be nabbed for simply having pirated content on their personal/work boxes... that's probably the fallback plan.

Side note- Google hosts a lot of pirated content on Gmail. It would be interesting to know how much pirated music is sent through Gmail in a day.
Please see libgit/libgit2
How many are "engaging" by doing a Google search while logged in, and seeing a Google+ result?

Maybe I'm just getting cynical..
Ah I see where our difference in opinion originates from - you look at the book outputted by the tool as a derived work. I must admit I never conceived of this possibility, and I am still trying to digest it. I wonder how many authors who use Apple's product will realise that after two years of hard work to create a manuscript, just by hitting publish the outputted object will not wholly belong to them.
This is somewhat off topic, but a friend of mine is working on something that sounds similar to what you described. I don't know their regulatory hurdles though. It might be worth it to contact them:

http://crohnology.com/
I'd be interested to see what they define as "daily engagement," for it's a fairly ambiguous term. Clicking on a personalized result in Google search is far different than actively going to the G+ home page and engaging in a conversation. Likewise, starting a hangout is far different than merely +1-ing a foreign page on the internet.

Although all of these actions interact with G+, only few are true metrics of social network success. The key is to drive _social_ interaction, to be the #1 resource of where you friends and family interact. I think G+ still has a wall to climb in that sense.

Let's not forget their average visit length:

http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/6a00d83451b36c69e...

I have a lot of hope for G+ but this reminds me of the premature "Mission Accomplished" banner.
They should be found guilty in a court of law before the site is taken down... Not before. Innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of a great and lawful nation.

Let the due process begin. Luckily they didn't screw up the global dns to pull this stunt.
Regardless of precedent or merits on this case, the fact that it exists at all makes it harder to justify the existence of SOPA or PIPA.

They didn't need either act to be passed to arrest a bunch of people in New Zealand, after all.
WAN optimization market shakeup predicted
I disagree. Distributing copyrighted material to unauthorized parties is an issue. Storing it doesn't seem like an issue to me. 100% of cloud storage companies are grossly violating all sorts of copyrights if this is the case. Storing it but removing the ability for the internet at large to leech it seems legit to me. If someone distributes the private URL to such files, I think that counts as them distributing it, not megaupload.

It's not a straightforward issue though.
Hm, that’s just not how I view the world. Of course they can, of course they should be allowed to – but that doesn’t mean I won’t judge them harshly for it.

When Apple praises their education initiatives and then turns around and puts such restrictions on their authoring tool then yes, that’s some vile bullshit. They are not in it for the eduction, they are in it for themselves.

They don’t have to give the tool aways for free, I would be perfectly happy with Apple selling it. But putting such a restriction on it? I’m not ok with that.
Thanks a lot! Playing with the code explained it well.

I think geoffschmidt's otherwise great explanation explained the score calculation a wrong-way around: checked score radio buttons start with zero height and when they get unchecked they grow to their 93px height.

I learned a few new things that were necessary to understand this:

1) States of radio inputs can be connected by name attributes and connected inputs can have an inverse state to each other.

2) Transition effects can be connected to checked/unchecked states (at least with "all" property)

3) Using a wrapper div with overflow:hidden you can create "a window" to a larger content that moves "behind" the window. I've seen this in some scroller effects, but as my CSS skills are quite bad, I couldn't yet write one without googling for some help.
IPv6 proposal: allocate country-wide address blocks (easy censorship)
Google+ Has 54 Million Daily Active Users, 90 Million Total
Being upset at this restriction is perfectly reasonable. It is intended to keep authors/editors artificially locked into Apple's products and distribution system. Imagine how you would feel about similar restrictions on other production tools (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Word, Garage Band, etc.) and you would immediately see this is shitty behavior.

Though I do agree with what you are saying: people have a choice not to use these tools. However, the rules of this product are somewhat hidden -- to the point where you probably won't know your restrictions until you've already put in the work. And also Apple is leveraging their platform dominance in an uncompetitive and unfair manner and should be admonished for it.
What's missing from this question/answer?

> Do you think governments should be allowed to keep some secrets?

> This is a question that is much more interesting than the answer. In some cases – tracking down organized crime, say – government officials have an obligation to keep their investigations secret at the moment that they are performing them. Similarly, a doctor has an obligation to keep information about your medical records secret under most circumstances. This is a question about obligations. It is absurd to suggest that simply because a police officer may have the obligation to keep secret certain information relating to an investigation, that the entire world also must be subject to a coercive force.

I don't think you can get much more specific than that. It's a fuzzy issue.
Apple Intern May Have Inadvertently Aided in the Creation of Apple's Textbooks
Google made a mistake in killing code search. Indexing the world's source code and making it searchable is so obviously part of their core mission that I wonder how this decision even got made.

Yeah, code search is a niche market numerically speaking, but intellectually and economically (considering the economic impact of software) it is vital. Google was doing so much better a job of it than anybody else that they completely owned the space. How could that not be worth what it cost them to run it? And now we are bereft of anything good.

I used to use Google Code Search like this: encounter an unfamiliar language or API construct, go to code search, get page after page of real-world usages. Or like this: wonder how to do X, imagine what code that does X might say, search for snippets of that until hitting a working example of X. It was a powerful learning device that I am sad to lose. I sure hope a startup comes along to get search right for the world's source code. Github ought to, but their search sucks.

In any case, congratulations Russ Cox et. al. on a brilliant piece of work.
Anonymous' revenge for Megaupload takedown
Yes I understand the law, my protest is in the fact that it is now being used as a technicality to back door legislation that is against the people. My personal feelings on government is that they should act as a framework of government for the citizens interests first. Which is not what we have, we now have a government that finds every loophole available to act in direct contrast to the interest of the people. I don't think I implied that what they where doing was not available to them by the letter of the law. Rather I believe that I stated that I am sick of the letter of the law being a tunnel for anti-rights legislation. Again I go back to the UN small arms gun treaty. Given that they cannot deal with guns in the current domestic framework available, they are position the UN small arms treaty to help them deal with it, through this same backdoor. While it is technically legal, it is totally corrupt.
I don't understand the mind of Ron Paul in the slightest, but if I had to guess, I'd guess he's thinking something like "everyone and their dog has criticized me for the content of my old 1980s-era newsletters and the handful of times I've let myself be photographed alongside some Klansmen -- if I want to put that line of criticism to bed, I'd better come down on this racist hard, with both feet."
For better or worse, why do people continue to be surprised when Apple does these things? They make good stuff, their users don't care and developers still flock to them. It's like raging at Adobe because Reader sucks, even though plenty of decent, light-weight PDF readers exist.

If you don't like the EULA, don't agree to it and use something else.
Earn rewards for helping your friends
I'm of the opinion that asking that question is almost akin to asking what technological solution should be used to give Russian organized crime your credit card numbers, if malware with a keylogger in it is bad. I don't think the problem SOPA purports to address is a legitimate problem, and to the extent that it might be, plausible solutions to it that don't involve setting more reasonable priorities would be bigger problems.
I believe AlexMuir's implication was that things which are illegal are automatically wrong, since it's obvious that HN, in particular, has lots of users who don't believe filesharing is wrong.
I think your comment would be much stronger without this statement:

But you have to consider: would Bill Gates or Steve Jobs really have smiled and nodded or would they have said "What the hell are you talking about, that's stupid." (We know what Jobs would have done anyway.)

That's a straw-man argument. pg didn't say or imply that they want people to "smile and nod" or who don't challenge them when they're wrong, you said that.

I've had over a dozen meetings during which my cofounder and I have challenged things pg has said. But we listen and try to understand what he says first.

YC wants people who are flexible and who will honestly consider feedback, but they don't want sycophants.

EDIT: Typos.
Of course there is zero incentive for anyone to do it. And if everyone chose to link the way Quora does, you get a Google Analytics dashboard which cannot tell you what all URL's are sending traffic to your site/blog. I find it really difficult to imagine.
I don't see how this is substantially different from EULAs that restrict usage to non-commercial. It's basically "non-commercial, except" so you have strictly more rights than with e.g. the non-commercial version of CadSoft eagle.
Feds take down Megaupload, Anonymous takes down Feds
Five lessons after five years of Punchbowl
Can we just take a moment and note that Kim Dotcom had two Mercedes ML63 AMGs seized in the raid. One had the license plate 'Guilty' and the other 'Mafia'. He knew what business he was in: working around the law to facilitate massive scale copyright infringement.

If we want this anti-SOPA sentiment to stick, we need to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Even on a free and open web there are going to be some people who are just plain-old criminals. I'd prefer the line to be somewhere between me & Kim.

http://torrentfreak.com/images/megacars.jpg
Refusing to move to the back of the bus.
Sitting down in the middle of the street to block the movement of troops from point a to point b.
Walking from Montgomery to Selma.
Downloading the Inbetweeners.

One of these things is not civil disobedience. In fact, trying to cast piracy as a form of civil disobedience is insulting to the people who actually got arrested, beaten by police, attacked by dogs, had the firehose turned on them, were tear-gassed, run over, and suffered any number of real consequences as they publicly defied laws and a society that were unquestionably wrong.

To cast content piracy as civil disobedience, one must accept that the act of murder is an act of civil disobedience because the murderer believes the law against it is unjust.
The sopa fight is about forcing Congress to use court proceedings and due process to take down sites, not to justify any possible site. The important thing is that guilt is being determined in a building before sentence is given. With sopa all you see now would have taken place without anyone but the users of the service and the censorers knowing.
Could you please share some specific details?

Your reply is the best comment in this discussion, because it demonstrates what PG is talking about and tells the story from the opposite viewpoint.
Why does the delay matter? They have to wait for a response regardless of whether it's an AJAX request or a full browser redirect to the record/redirect URL.
Me? Serious.
Its been interesting to watch the score jump up and down as I respond to comments. I agree with you about the down votes. I've up voted several responses today from people who disagreed with me (particularly where they made a good point or pointed out an error of fact I made, but where it didn't seem appropriate to respond further since their statements stood on their own.)

I think part of the reaction is that people are used to paying for creative software. Imagine if Adobe had terms like this in Photoshop that required you to use their stock photo agency for any photos edited with photoshop. That would be outrageous and I would be right there with everyone saying it was wrong.

The difference is, Photoshop costs $600 or something (don't know or care, but they charge for the software) while iBooks Author is free.

What if iBooks Author had no other output modes-- just published iBooks to the iBookStore. And that's it. No PDF export, no epub. (Assuming in this example iBooks were more proprietary than they are- say like kindle's proprietary format is.)

Would people be upset about that? It would be a free tool for publishing to a proprietary formant for a specific store.

How could you complain about that? Apple's offering a tool specifically for their publishers. (I'm sure some tool exists like this for iTunes Album content. Another example of this is the iAd Producer software Apple makes which only works for iAds.)

If this product only working in a proprietary format would cause people to not complain--- because obviously the product was built to support the iBookStore-- then really the outrage is that you can use the product for other uses as well, Right?

So, Apple gives you the ability to produce ePubs and PDFs for free, if you want to. They add this feature, and now this product is somehow unreasonable?

Sorry, cek, if you aren't interested in debating this, that's fine. You didn't give reasons for why I was wrong, I just thought of this argument while responding to you. You don't have to engage on the topic further, no biggie, as I may not be responding at all to the reasons you think its wrong.