skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
welcome to the real world. i can't tell you how many times people have taken UI and concepts we spent a ton of time developing and copied them directly, even some of our well funded competitors. even yahoo (they completely ripped off our theme choosing interface). hell, we've even had direct feature-for-feature copies of weebly commissioned in india. life's not fair, and neither is business.

coming up with an idea isn't going to get you ahead, it's your ability to keep coming up with good ideas, execute on them, and make the right choices that steer the company that will. and eventually, some day, you get a big pile of users that becomes increasingly hard to lose, even if you try to fuck it up (just look at geocities. yes, it's still the 124th biggest site on the internet...)
How Dr Nic Packages His Ruby Code With RubyGems
This is kind of like finding out who Deep Throat is-- H.M. is in every psych textbook but has never been named publicly.

There are no (as far as I can tell) Google results for his name that predate his death. (! I would have said this was impossible...)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls...
Calvin wonders why movies are rated R for Adult Situations, eg paying bills, going to work, etc.
Android 1.0 ported to Nokia N810
No.

It's not on my blog because we are in stealth mode and not talking about what we are doing. Even interview candidates who get to the final stage have to sign an NDA.

I know it's a pity not to be able to talk about it, but we have very good reasons (mostly around not awakening some large competitors who might try to rush through a project to make it look like they are doing the same thing) and are planning to launch everything (including the company name, web site, product and initial customer stories) at the same time.

But if you are interested in doing Java server work handling terabytes of data, or really cutting edge Javascript work, or close to real time data visualization in a web browser using Flex then please contact me.
There are some interesting questions about net neutrality that shouldn't be dismissed off the bat, but "google doesn't pay their fair share" isn't one of them.

Internet connectivity and bandwidth are now largely commodities, and hence not as high-growth or profitable as, say, Internet advertising pre-crisis. It's only natural that telecom companies want to cash in, and I personally think that all such companies* should be able to regulate packets as they see fit.

*that are not taking advantage of government-mandated monopolies in their infrastructure
Actually I am surprised "failure" would even be considered a taboo in a place like the valley. Ofcourse it is not sweet, but is it considered as bad (in the valley) as this article makes it out to be?
"Raised IQ does correlate with improved quality of life but the poorest people in the world have more serious problems we could be helping with first such as actually staying alive."

Did you read your own sentence? You say that raising IQ will improve quality of life, but you don't want to do that right now because it's more important to first raise quality of life.

Hu?

Yes I changed what you wrote. But that's what what you wrote means. You can not keep people alive without simultaneously increasing their quality of life.

That should be obvious: people who can't stay alive are extinct in a generation. People who die after having kids would benefit from increase in quality of life, which pretty much means living longer.
Gosh, doesn't Google know that the internet is not just something you can dump something on -- it's not a big truck!
Everydns.net is free, and run by an (occasional) HN user.
Tuaw - the only one so far =/

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/28/actiongear-simple-yet-powerfu...
Using the 10, 100, or even 1000X better rule leads to some interesting, dangerous thoughts about how to solve some of the world's toughest problems. Kudos to Ganauer for mentioning Qliance- a dangerous new model for treating non-catastrophic health problems that might just mortally wound the fat-cat insurance companies.

Here in Canada everyone gets free health care, and Scandinavian countries are even more progressive than we are. Residents in some Scandinavian countries attend university for free. Free university and health-club-style medical for everyone!
Venture Capitalists Hunker Down
> If you're going to do any processing on the data you're going to need to decrypt it [...]

You underestimate modern cryptography. Or to give a simplified model: Imagine you just had blobs of encrypted data that you served and the requester would do all the processing.
"Can you provide some examples of how you might write "non-imperative" programs in a mainstream object-oriented language?"

Go back and read my post -- I drew a distinction between "mainstream" OO languages, and pure OO languages. If you want to genuinely understand object-oriented programming, don't look at C++ or Java. Look at Smalltalk or Simula.

"A functional program is not a "sequence of steps"; in principle, it is just a mathematical expression that can be evaluated (via some means) to yield a value (think of a SQL query or a Prolog program)."

I know what you're arguing -- the platonic ideal of the functional program is stateless, and methods within that program have no side effects. In reality, all programs store state somewhere, and even "pure" functional languages store state (albeit at a higher level).

What I'm trying to explain is that object-oriented programming doesn't require side effects. Where functional programs use closures and monads to pass state around, you could just as easily use a functor to do the same thing. Thus, you aren't compelled to write object-oriented code in an imperative style. The difference is that OO code tends to be more explicit about the location of state variables, and calls them what they are. Functional programs, in contrast, just tuck the stateful bits into closures, and pretends that they aren't really state.
at work we have a few users who never take their laptops anywhere - they're constantly plugged in.
Nothing kills batteries faster.
I am all for helping people. I am just not sure who could be trusted - I don't necessarily trust the government to make the best choices for the people. And in this crisis, there is too much scapegoating going on for my taste. And calling for regulations seems to be an extension of that.

If you call for regulations, first tell me why the market failed to regulate itself (that is weed out the crooks, if the crooks are to blame)?

If you are calling for more transparency, maybe I can go with you. But I don't think complex rulesets about who should give credit and who should be allowed to get credit are the way to go forward.

I don't want to claim to understand what pg wrote, but my understanding would be he wrote among other things about something exactly like that: more regulations means it becomes more costly to give somebody credit. Therefore there will be less firms giving credit, and "smaller people" will have more problems getting credit because they are not worth the bother. In the end there will be a monopoly of a few big firms who handle credit.

Also, what if housing prices really would have risen forever, and regulations would have prevented people from gaining from it? Who is to say in advance what course of action is right? Or would you say everybody who took out a mortgage was a crook?
Yokum, I would recommend that you re-order the category headers in the top to make it more linear for the various stages of a startup: Incorporation and Founders to the left of Series A and Down Rounds, as examples. It would be helpful for me when I recommend your site to others (which I do constantly).

Also, I'd also recommend that you add something about "how to hire me/WSGR to incorporate/represent your company" in the FAQs or Contact Yokum sections. This is not obvious, and picking up the phone and calling a partner at Wilson is scary. Some semblence of the process and ballpark fees would be very helpful. As you say, an experienced attorney is no comparison to one of those online legal form mills - and people would be surprised to know how affordable quality advice actually is. Of course, if you're not interested in new business, I understand. :)
This is why sites like Amazon won't show you a price when it gets below the certain level. Because of MAP. Right?
本文中文版请参考：http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/pestwave/19240

A Chinese version of this article is available at:http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/pestwave/19240
Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged
Great jewelry gifts for the holidays
Beautiful jewelry and rings for men and woman
Argentina's peso has been around for only 20 years. Before that, no currency lasted more than 30 years in most of the last century.
Don’t Be a Grinch - Throw a Party
No, I am not interested in the TIOBE index. But it was used in the article to show that Perl is losing relevance. I just felt it was not a very significant indicator for that particular conclusion.
Response to phone companies' "Google bandwidth" report
Gee, after reading some of your comments, I almost feel like giving up on and going off to live in the woods.
The original article's HN discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386468
This is kind of politics/economics, and has a bad title to boot.

If you wanted to "get libertarian" about it, you might say that companies ought to be able to put whatever they want in contracts with other companies. Maybe they don't want their stuff sold online, maybe they want to promote local resellers that will then be able to provide service and support. Or maybe they're just greedy monopolistic bastards.
Voted up for coining the phrase "a book I tried to read once" ;-)
From the title, for a moment I thought the article was about some new result in machine learning that would make Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory obsolete...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapnik-Chervonenkis_theory
Screw wizard I'd rather have a Sorceror with Charisma 18. That way he can cast spells and do sales at the same time.
This is a major feat and all, and I think it's absolutely wonderful, but this is what Android was designed to do--be portable across devices. It just so happens that Android is new and the main focus was getting it to run on the G1 (or whatever the devices real name was). But porting it to run on another linux compatible device? I'm sure this isn't news at Google HQ.

On the other hand, the brief sentence at the bottom, and the news from the weekend? that Android is running on the iPhone--that's news. Very interesting news.
This was a bit of an emotional moment for me. I'm not an amnesiac, but my memory is unusual, so I have a great interest in the research on the subject.

I just registered http://henrymolaison.com . I'm using it to post links to new info. about the guy. Anyone want to help out? It's wordpress, so I can easily give you an account.
It would appear (IANAL) that time banking could be considered a form of bartering which is covered by the IRS here: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

"The fair market value of goods and services exchanged must be included in the income of both parties."
Great. Which pretty much guarantees that what little musicianship is left in today's music will be flushed down the toilet and what we'll get instead is some Hello! news story about how Rock Start X got spotted wearing Gucci at Nobu in London.

Remind me again what was so bad about paying for the music that you listen to? It seems to me the most economically efficient way of doing things: you pay for the good you consume. What you're suggesting is that record companies monetize music indirectly, and if you monetize, for example, by selling clothing apparel, are you going to want to have Beyonce on your artist roster or Ray LaMontagne?

Be careful what you wish for.
The actual description of the various things they did is interesting reading:

http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2892720865.html

Yeah, it's supposed to be portable, but it's often not so easy to deal with a different device/CPU/storage/drivers and so on.
How many blogs one can read in a day?
I was thinking about writing a post about this since long but somehow never worked out. But I think this place is perfect to ask this question.

How many blogs one can read in a day? Especially when you are a programmer or co-founder of a startup. I have tens of blogs subscribed in my google reader starting from Techcrunch to PsyBlog. It does give me a feeling of knowing it all but how much it is really useful in day to day life? Does all this time worth spending behind reading them?

Whats your opinion? How much time do you spend everyday to read blogs and how many you are able to read in a day?
Get your Gmail stickers
summary: bootstrapping is easy when you only weigh a few pounds.
Posted with the heading "If you suck at math, posting more of it will not make it better". Hopefully you approve of the headline I gave you.

Now let's see if it goes live.
SOAP vs REST: The war between simplicity and standards
There's little correlation between cruelty during wars and cruelty during normal operations. Most successful empires were borderline genocidal when fighting, and mostly benign and well organized at home, as this combination allows expansion and prevents internal failure.

I cannot really think of a good counterexample, Rome and other ancient powers, British Empire and successful colonial powers, and USA all fit here. Medieval Catholicism (which wasn't really a country, but it can be considered an empire of sorts) also expanded by genocide, but was rather benign inside. Soviet Union was very brutal inside and fell quickly due to inside forces.
Does the author of this junk really think there would be a internet worth mentioning if everybody had to pay the same inflated bandwidth-rates as consumers does?

If anything, this is a (flawed) argument about how consumers should pay less and not how google should give extra free money to net-providers all over.
I'm assuming from your profile, that your bingo card creator is what we're talking about and have to say that I find this discovery fascinating, but am not surprised. When ABC ran it's Primetime Bingo TV show last season, my wife was printing like 30 cards to follow along from home. She loved it. And, not for the chance to "win fantastic prizes" either (1. Math Degree, so she knows the Odds; 2. The "everybody wins" prizes were like $5 gift cards if I remember).

I would have guessed that "Married with Children" just made up the Peggy Bundy loves Bingo part of the story, but no--Girls apparently dig Bingo.
A Pleasant Elsewhere
Can you explain?

I genuinely thought that was how these currencies worked. What am I missing?
This will probably be a good test for Android as a platform.

If all the existing Android apps breaks horribly on the Nokia, we can pretty much declare Android the new J2ME, just in OS form.

This sure as hell don't sound promising:

"McDermott cautions that his Android port is only the beginning. To get Android applications running on the N810, they plan to add support for the Android Debug Bridge, fix an intermittent system crash, and try to enable battery charging when the power supply is plugged in."
Great news qhoxie. And yes I agree that the wiki, docs etc have to be made better.

IMHO it should be started from the basics instead of being a plain collection of cookbook recipes
Website Designing Company
Speed Limit Studios is a professional full-service web design company. We specialize in web design and development, but we also place a lot of focus on marketing web sites and businesses. That's because we know that having a great web site isn't enough. You have to be able to market that web site so that Internet users can find you. That's why we don't just create a good-looking web site and then wash our hands of it.
I've got 99 subscriptions in Google Reader right now, but over 1000+ stories unread. I'd say half are from sites that post 30+ items a day. These I won't necessarily read but instead will just skim the titles for key interest words.

The rest, I'll eventually skim through and read maybe 30% of, but over the span of a few days.

With Hacker News though, on a good day, there's potentially 30+ great posts that I'll try to read throughout the day (the headlines of course go through my interest scan filter), from many blogs that I don't subscribe too.

I'd say I do the Google reader thing for about an hour daily, and reading Hacker News stuff another 1 or 2 easily.
Not so seemless. Things need to be serialised to transfer them. You need to specially craft code so that it is pickle safe... things don't just work automatically.

Also serialising 100MB or so worth of objects around is really slow. So the process module is not good for many cases of use.
The problem is that if the record companies actually go after the worst perpetrators they get pilloried by the press for being nasty, when all they're actually doing is protecting their property and means to livelihood. I can just picture the reddit/hacker news stories: "I was sued for sharing music, my mother has no job and has five children and lives off welfare, and I was tasered by the cops to boot..."

The record companies are in a very difficult position; the market for sold music has shrunk by half in seven years - this during a period when actual consumption of music undoubtedly increased. This kind of event would be cataclysmic for any business. The charge that they have mismanaged things certainly has some truth, but they would be bleeding even if their industry was led by Jack Welch. I suspect that more than a bit of this hand-wringing over the failures of record companies' management is self-serving: by saying that the record companies "were slow to adapt", it provides a justification for me saying: "fuck it, I'll just steal the music". But 1) the days of music not being available on a paying basis are now largely over. If you want to pay for music, you no longer need to walk into a store to do so. So I'm afraid that's no longer a valid excuse. Also, 2) two wrongs don't make a right: the screw-ups of the record industry are not compensated for or negated by us stealing their content. So there really is no excuse for downloading music illegally nowadays. I would personally prefer if they engaged in some PR to explain the plight of all the sound engineers, A&R guys, mixing engineers, musicians -- in short, the entire ecosystem of jobs that form the music industry -- how these guys are getting mercilessly whacked. That and then go after the guys who share music, whether on college campuses or elsewhere; but that would require that internet providers are on board. I can just hear the howls over the infringement of privacy.

But make no mistake about this fact: if people don't directly pay for the music they consume, the quality of music will decrease.
Why Good Developers Are Not Getting 10 times the Pay
Things didn't "turn south" for Rome after it stopped its conquests. Rome pretty much stopped conquering in 27 BCE, and lasted five centuries afterward (or 1480 years if you count Eastern Roman Empire), the first two being very peaceful and prosperous.

Plunder was never a large part of any country's GDP in the long term, there's simply not that much stuff to plunder, and it's a very inefficient process, with a lot more value destroyed than transferred. Taxation and trade are much better ways of extracting money from people and that's what Romans did.
The applications likely run just fine, and 'porting' them should not really be necessary.

The problems you list are kernel/system level issues. For instance, the battery charging stuff is probably a driver they didn't get working/integrated 100%.

Getting an OS up and running on new hardware in 18 days isn't that bad, really.
I live in Waterloo, and all my friends from highschool / college are pretty much in Toronto or other areas so hanging out with them is pretty tough but generally:

Friday - Sit at home with the girlfriend, relax, watch a movie, just appreciate that you've completed a good week of work. Oh wait, too bad we both work on Saturdays! She works 100% of the time, I work every second Saturday so basically Friday's are a way to relax and go to bed early as usual :)

Saturday - We like clubbing on late Saturdays as it's close + good music. Sometimes invite friends over, or go out to a restaurant, or try to check out any events going on in the city (sadly, good night-time events are rare here)

Most of my outings in the past year have been during the week. Concerts and other events which I go to a lot during the week. Geek meets on Mondays, etc.
You need to include "Global warming denying athiest" in there somewhere also.
In my opinion they are mocked because they have not introduced any groundbreaking features. They have a lot of cool features that can be found elsewhere. They are recreating what others have tried but doing it better.

Their accomplishments are execution (making a lot of features work together without crappifying the site) and scale. This is still remarkable but it does not help you avoid mocking.
The ratio between a cab fare and a bus ride has been more or less constant for decades.
Interview with Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm (video)
Domain Transfer
I've struck a deal with a friend to buy a domain name from him. What is the best way to execute the transfer.

Trust, Price negotiation, etc is not an issue here
Whoever Dave Ramsey is, his integrity is not Hacker News. That's why the comments here tend to focus on his point, not on his celebrity status.
I'll have a crack at auto-converting all gems into debian packages if someone can point me to the "this is what debian packages need to look like" spec. Or the CPAN module->debian package converter that I recently heard about @ OSDC conference. Email drnicwilliams at gmail.com
Ask HN: Customer Service Ticketing Software
Hi Guys, after a fair few hours Googling ticketing software to manage our customer service department I am hitting dead ends.

Can anyone recommend any open source or good software to implement as a ticketing system. To give you an idea we are looking to be able to record client tasks performed and completed.

Look forward to hearing any ideas.
If trust and price are not an issue, I fail to see what you need advice on.
Memorable photos with Canvas Art
Are you looking for a new and unique way to show off your favorite photos? Every one has photo’s sitting around in frames. Just plain old prints that they either got from their own camera, digital or film, or prints that were done at a studio. We keep them in single image frames, multi image frames, digital frames and the list goes on. We make buttons, t-shirts, cups and plates from our favorite photos. All of these are wonderful ways to show off our favorite photos. You, however, want to have something new and unique that will hold a lasting beauty for years to come.
I've used Trac, which is pretty customizable and does a nice job (though it is a bit more project-oriented).

I have also heard many good things about Bugzilla.
How to I transfer it to my name?
How many times will people try variants of autarky before they learn?
Let me know what you find. Every time I've tried to look into this I hit dead ends as well. I ended up writing a "hack" about 6 years ago that has turned into a fairly robust system that I've used at 3 different companies now. I would share it, but it's 2000 lines of perl with about 6 comments :)

RT always seemed like a good approach: http://bestpractical.com/rt/ I had problems getting all the right perl modules together an installed last time I checked it out (5 years ago), could be better now.