skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we are hitting semantics here. Seems obvious to me that 'a genetic or cultural disposition' that is being opposed in the comment you quote is referring to an 'a priori' disposition: a deeply engrained cultural element that isn't going to be changed by a few generations of poverty, prosperity or political instability.

I think the reason it is being so vehemently opposed (by what seems like a large minority here) should be obvious. It's fairly obvious that cultural elements are involved. The fact that people take & give bribes is a display of culture. But people from places where corruption is less rampant & the conditions for culture are less then ideal, are dismissing this as a genetic disposition or cultural equivalent of 'genetic disposition'. That's a smug sort of a conclusion to come to.

Sure there are cultures that would be more resistant to corruption. But that is probably dwarfed relatively to other factors. Certain colonial practices for example, layed foundations for corruption - especially in certain parts of Africa. There is no reason to assume that Americans would be more resistant to corruption simply because it is now a functioning country.
And to boot, Google Apps dont share cookies. I have 3 accounts, one @gmail and two under apps. I can have both the apps accounts open with no collision. Makes sense, but it's nice.
Voting up this feature request might help: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280852
The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle
John C. Bogle: Why we lost faith in Wall Street
There's is also a feedback effect when it becomes so entrenched that everyone has participated in it. It's one thing to pay a bribe to a cop to avoid trouble. It's another to seek out someone to put a stamp on something so that you do ABC. When corruption is the system, most people reach that point. A large number of (basically decent) people also reach the point where they are actually accepting black money. That would definitely accelorate tolerance.
What are your thoughts on Joomla?
I work extensively in .NET with some background in PHP on the server side. I've never worked with Joomla before and I have a close friend asking me what my thoughts are -- some firm is trying to sell it to him as a CMS that is "as easy to update as a blog". Assume he has zero technical knowledge and is a business guy trying to get a website up. I know he needs a hacker, but focus your comments on how you think the Joomla experience would be for a non-technical user once set up by someone who knows how. The guy is also touting it as a SEO miracle, bringing search results up several ranks just being installed.

Thoughts?
How a game company burned through 400 million and went bust in less than two years
Facebook hands classifieds service to Oodle
YouTube Gets a Little Less Sleazy
As a European I found this article pretty interesting. And true.

We Europeans are academics - we love a good argument just for the sake of it, we think before we talk, and our products (usually) don't crash. But we can't sell worth shit...
Generate Rails Apps from Templates
Creativity under pressure
Interesting, considering that high-quality rips are readily available.

What's iTunes charging for this?
IPhone single-handedly driving smartphone growth
This is amazing. How creative!
This technology is also common in cruiseships.
I don't think there's an African tendency towards corruption or a European tendency towards a lack thereof. Neither of those continents has a homogenous cultural (nor socio-economic) landscape.

But I do think there are cultures which tolerate more corruption than others. For instance, Italy, despite being a wealthy European country, tolerates much more than, say, Belgium. My Sicilian friends have indicated that this is because the government in Sicily, for instance, was long seen as not having a public mandate and constantly shifting allegiances while the mafia was a constant, much more predictable entity: "cosa nostra".

I would venture that corruption as such is as much a function of the view of the government as legitimate over a period of multiple generations as economic conditions. And Africa's modern history of imperial and home grown despots hasn't done well to legitimize the rule of law.
He didn't mention what his contribution to the world is.
Ask HN: LiveScribe pen?
Has anyone here tried or owned one of the Livescribe smartpens?

The specs make it sound pretty impressive, but I find it hard to judge just from them whether it would be pleasant to use.

Anyone here have any experience with them?

(http://www.livescribe.com/)
I don't see where it talks about guitar tuner
Where are they getting their data from?
Ask HN: what tunes are you working to at the moment?
To start the ball rolling...

Debut by Ini Kamoze
Sponsored by The Answer to Number 4a is Concave Up.
hahaha, woops... I thought it was a link to this article which I had just read.

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2008/12/02/apple-announces-top-1...

:)
The new Kanye West album.

But this is between coding; I can't concentrate on code while listening to music, especially with lyrics.
White Space Devices are Coming
The obsession over who's making the most money in the app store reminds me of Patrick Bateman's obsession with Tim Price's salary and the Fischer account in American Psycho.
This may be only tangentially related, but something about AV has never sat well with me. For the record, I fall into the: "don't really use AV software, read mail in Mutt, never use IE under any circumstances, etc."-category so many of my attack vectors may be closed; I've never lost data from any sort of malware.

Going back to what I was saying before, something about the approach of AV seems inelegant. This article[1] (point #2) sums up my sense of AV. With it, you're always playing catch-up and that seems weird. I just wanted to get others to weigh in on that idea.

[1]: http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...
"... what tunes are you working to at the moment? ..."

♫ Prairie-wind blowing through my head - trying to remember what daddy said ♫ Prairie Wind, NY ~ http://www.last.fm/user/bootload
So established players make the most money. Hardly a shock...

Here's what bothers me now. During the Stevenote announcing the iPhone store, Steve specifically mentioned a portion of the 30% that Apple takes went to 'marketing'. Well, that's a strong statement given Apple hardly markets the app for you. Perhaps in the first month that was valid, but the gold rush has brought in waves upon waves of pollution. That said, I think it should be readjusted to 20%. We just signed with a PR firm because we know this is all coming back to a marketing game... and that's an additional expense cutting into our 70%.

http://www.grabup.com/uploads/0f673dceb68ac4e5d8110d318370ea...

http://www.grabup.com/uploads/8831a14d263cb1fde1a50406d896f2...

For each feature or chapter, they make a different app. Are you kidding me?! Crap like this is why we've been in the "publishing process" for a full month, IMO. And this brings about additional phantom expenses when you're bootstrapping your company. :(
Fucked Up's 'The Chemistry of Common Life'
the same goes for me with the lyrics issue. which is why i tend to listen to techno/trance/electronic when hacking around
Even #5?
http://www.thesixtyone.com/stammy/collection/#/stammy/collec...

http://hypem.com/stammy

http://thefeelgood.com/paul/favourites

although i don't use the latter as much as i used to

and as of late, "Alaska in Winter"'s latest album "Holiday" - it has lyrics but its more of electronic alt rock to me
Poor Seth, just can't get it right.
http://www.last.fm/user/jonursenbach
Ah, my favourite vanity topic. This week I are mostly listening to Survival of the fattest by Prince Fatty.
Listen to some post rock. Explosions in the Sky, Do Make Say Think, Eluvium, Tortoise.
You've responded to a totally different proposition than the one he presented! He argued that the abolition of child labor laws wouldn't cause a return to ceaseless child labor, and you're arguing against the notion that child labor laws in the past were not beneficial.

Please don't erect strawmen in your arguments.
I like to read Bruce Sterling's works, fiction or non-fiction. I own every single one of his published works except the first, which is rare. Sometimes he is cheesy or stupid, but overall he's probably one of top sci-fi writers now living.

I once saw him eating lunch at the southern Threadgill's, I ignored my dinner partner to watch him from afar. He switched between talking and listening too intently to eat, and some point dove into his backpack to haul out an Apple laptop. I'm not sure he ever ate any food.

I like science fiction that is a genuine and credible attempt to describe the future as it will be or could be, not the swords and dragons or physically impossible faster than light travel or such nonsense. I think Bruce Sterling comes to the closest to actually guessing at and describing where we are going, and I wish he would write more. During the last year, 3 or 4 times I have read news stories about the election or economy and felt a chill go down my back because I recognized stuff from Sterling's "Distraction" and "Heavy Weather", which are years old at this point.

If you are doing a startup or business that in any way is involved with the intersection of technology and law enforcement - and with privacy issues and secret supenoes, who isn't - I highly recommend you read Sterling's non-fiction book "The Hacker Crackdown".
Nightwish Radio on Pandora. Mostly Nightwish, Within Temptation, Evanescence, Edenbridge, Leaves' Eyes, etc.
Amie - Counting Crows (Pure Prairie League Cover)
> Is it really illegal for a 14 year old to make money mowing lawns in the US without paying taxes or establishing a business?

Certainly.

> this is just handled by gov't looking the other way.

Also true.

> I can support the laws that banned using children to climb into hard to reach areas in coal mines without supporting onerous restrictions on mowing lawns.

But the question is, do you support blanket bans on child labor? You clearly support workplace safety legislation, but that's completely irrelevant here. The question is about bans on child labor.
Forgot the music was even playing...

Feed on Me by Judas Priest
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Hurry up!
The homicide rate of modern Washington D.C. is 40X that of London during the great depression. Let me repeat, that's a 4,000% difference. Do you think modern Washington D.C. is 40 times poorer than depression-era London? Source: http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....
Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
Healthy-habits-for-developers
Tell me by Ron Sexsmith
the entire saturdays=youth album, specifically:

m83 - graveyard girl

http://www.thesixtyone.com/M83/collection/item/35995/?autopl...
I dismiss your "arguments" even more swiftly (you're not making any, you are merely making tired, unsupported assertions).

The answers to your "questions" can all be found here, which 30 seconds of googling would have found for you:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

You're welcome.
Joomla is great. I personally like it as it is sexy for clients and extremely usable. The look of the site should be custom thought, in my opinion, and he needs to make sure the developer isn't augmenting a template that thousands have already used.
So the crux of it is not really religion, so much as it is principles. People gain their moral compass from somewhere - whether it is through religion, culture, or any other source, is irrelevant.

What matters is if people are willing to stand up for these morals and principles, and how much force it takes to break them. A group of people with strong moral fiber will obviously resist corruption better than a group of people without.

As a Chinese-Canadian immigrant, I've witnessed this first-hand. Where I grew up as a kid population density was extreme (all the people of Canada on a single little island), opportunities were consequently much harder to come by. It was entirely culturally accepted to sneak a little here and there to get an edge on your competition - such were the things you had to resort to if you wanted a crack at getting out of poverty and making a good life for yourself. If you cheated on a test and got caught, your friends would lament you getting caught instead of you cheating in the first place.

Compare with Canada, where cheaters are absolutely not tolerated. In my first semester at college, a group member I worked with slacked off, and even decided to copy some other members' work verbatim. We turned on her immediately and came together to get her kicked out of school. This would never have happened where I came from in Asia.
Behind Blue Eyes - The Who
Ford's Restructuring Proposal to Congress [pdf]
Developers Can Now Issue Free "Promotional" Copies of iPhone Apps
How to Use Twitter as a Twool
AppJet: Another cloud application framework
Can't we leave this to Twitter? I don't visit a news site to hear what music you're listening to right now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=367418

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212682

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139901

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132026

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936
I meant that sort of sarcastically.

I know that a lot of display advertising is based on pageviews, but I don't think there is much of a business model in pageviews.
Another Bogus Yahoo Takeover Story - The WSJ Gets It Wrong
Common's new album
I don't buy the corruption thesis for explaining lack of development. New York in the late 1900's was unbelievably corrupt, yet it had one of the fastest growing economies in the history of the world. Read this book if you want to read how corrupt it was: http://books.google.com/books/pdf/Satan_s_Invisible_World_Di...

The same applies for modern China. It is very corrupt. Greasing palms and making connections is mandatory. Property rights are still quite shaky. Yet it is growing at a stunning rate.

Bribery is not a huge obstacle to a determined entrepreneur. You just pay it like any other tax.
Is this true? Could some of you with awesome but expensive apps send me a promotional code to try it out? I promise to return the favor when my apps are ready.
Explosions in the Sky is great. I also just caught Mogwai in DC two months ago.
christmas songs - motown christmas
Biggie...Large Professor...Big Daddy Kane...Rakim.
You can concentrate while listening to that?!
The Wedding Toccata Theme by ModeSelektor - very minimal kraftwerk-like beats.
There is something very smart going on here, but it's not the idea of using DNS to store contact information. What's smart is the ability of Telnic and its affiliated registrars to convince everyone (ICANN, NYT, probably most HN readers) that they're trying to do something vaguely cool but naive, when in fact they're just going to cash in a huge gift from the internet.

Here's the secret: new top-level domains are virtually guaranteed to make tons of money for registrars. Every medium-sized to large company is going to buy a domain in a new TLD; it's worth the cost just to avoid having to deal with a squatter later, even if it is (gasp) $400. If you can convince ICANN that you have good intentions, or that you need a country code even though you're part of the United States cough.prcough you are going to get a lot of easy money over many years.

And yet, we'll still look back at this in a few years and say "yeah, those .tel guys must be really pissed that nobody adopted their cute little standard."

How naive indeed.
good luck charging the generation-FREE
A Funny Thing Happened When I Cut My Ad Spend -- Nothing
> appalling timing (in the tail-end of the great depression, just before the second world war),

Isn't that awesome timing? Depression over, cusp of giant government spending and demand for innovation whatever the cost due to war.
When you listen to the same music you end up being bored and need recommendations. This is a problem that needs a startup to solve it.
Yeah I saw them in September with Fuck Buttons. Show was bad ass.
No. The topic of programming music certainly "strikes a chord" in the Hackernews community judging by the number of comments left on each topic...and I don't use Twitter. :)

Plus...I've been reading Hackernews for the past year and this is the first time I've encountered this topic. The issue may be tiresome for you but not for others. Those related topics have moved off the first two pages of Hackernews never to be seen again.
there's a reason this topic comes up so much.. it's because it is a daily issue faced by hackers alike. you need to get work done but you need some good background music.
If this were _strictly_ a news site, Ask HN or discussion posts wouldn't exist.
We don't even have to mandate what it's used for. Just open it up. People will come up with good uses for it. And by people I mean hackers and Google.
Everything by Zappa. I discovered him this month, and he's quickly become my all-time favorite rock musician, and one of my favorite composers in any style. Today I listened through The Yellow Shark and Grand Wazoo, and "G-spot Tornado" more times than was probably healthy.

Other biggies for me are Stephin Merritt, Sufjan Stevens, Bach, and Charles-Valentin Alkan, who's the best pianist nobody's ever heard of. (I listen to the Jack Gibbons recordings of him, for the record.)
This would have been good for the person asking us to review his app yesterday.The limit of 50 seems pretty arbitrary though. Having a secret free iTunes link would seem to make more sense to me.
A fool and his money are easily parted. True for consumers, true for banks.
Fuck Buttons were excellent also. Great show all around.

I saw NIN four times this year, dragging parents to one of the shows. The Lights in the Sky tour is amazing.
I certainly can, in fact I've found it to be rather good coding music.

Then again, I also find Lighning Bolt, Slayer, and Merzbow to be good stuff to listen to while coding. Merzbow especially helps me get in "the zone".

Also: Shpongle, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Q and not U. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai, American Analog Set, Fugazi, Fuck Buttons, Radiohead, and a million other bands / musicians I can't remember right now.
From what I remember, when I was 14 I also worked for a large landscaping company (35-70 employees) they would have been happy to let me run the big mowers, however they weren't legally allowed to.

I spent as much time mowing lawns as most of my classmates spent playing sports. That isn't outlawed. I still went to school
Simple Search Engine Monitoring | AuthorityLabs
Sweet. Last, and only unfortunately, time I saw NIN was in 2005 at the tour opener in Fresno, CA. Scored 8th row tickets the day before the show for $60. They rocked the place so hard, plaster from the ceiling was falling down. Quite an experience.
The National - Boxer, Virginia EP

Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Dr. Dog - Fate

Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

Britney Spears - Circus (jk)
you say that as if taxes aren't huge impediments.
Gvke - SEO Friendly eCommerce Websites
Great album. "Kim & Jessie" is my favorite track.
A good credit score does not equate to the ability to repay debt.

This seems to be a recurring theme across the world. I tend to be left of many debates on this forum. But this is a strange thing to have settled on: It is the lenders' responsibility to make sure that their customers can afford repayment. Consumers will take as much credit is offered to them. The complaint is rarely about making information available to consumers. It's about making the correct decisions for them.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming media or politicians for taking this line. It seems true. People do not seem to be able to manage their debt. A stable solution will effectively put the decision of how much to borrow in the hands of someone else: Banks, Governments etc. not consumers.

Then this article goes on with the assumption (again, seemingly correct) that consumers are incapable of resisting the banks' marketing. Since many desicions are essentially made at the bank, they make a decision on a high credit line at a high interest rate. He suggests correcting this by making unsolicited direct marketing illegal. Supposedly, consumers would then actually look for a card with a reasonable interest rate instead of accepting whatever is given to them.
With respect, you've been here for 2 months. I think it's a bit premature of you to predict the demise of YC.
At the same time though, you get several bright people who work together really well and suddenly there is no need to stick to one "great idea". Business plans change all the time. What matters most is the ability of that team to adapt to the changes around them.
The Penny Gap
Subversion is not terrible at this. It stores binary diffs.
Battlestar Galactica Soundtrack.
Do you like Broken Social Scene? They are probably my favorite band. They have members from Do Make Say Think, Feist, Stars, Metric, Kevin Drew, Brendan Canning, etc.

I saw Explosions in the Sky in Denton, TX at Hailey's in 2004. Best live performance I've ever witnessed. I saw them again last year in Austin, but it wasn't that great because their new stuff isn't as good.

I need to get Eluvium's latest album. I hear it's pretty good.
DNS is in Trouble
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-SSVxsH7vw
http://www.last.fm/user/ninternity
Right now, I'm listening to Other Lives's self-titled album. That's for my college radio job, though. For programming, I listen to Brian Eno's Ambient albums.
Yeah, Broken Social Scene are the shit.
I think the Jobs quote you're referring to is "We're here to make a dent in the universe". I think it was during the development of the original Mac, but I'm not sure.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-SSVxsH7vw
Wonder why the limit is set at just 50 and not letting developers give out as many as they want. Apple shouldn't give a shit. If it's a revenue problem with not getting cuts, then make those developers who use up a gargantuan amount of promo codes (i.e. 500+) apps free.
Legal help forming a C Corp (or converting an LLC)
Hey all. I formed an LLC earlier this year as an easy way to start a company without all the formality of a corporation. However, we are now in the stage where we want to raise money, and it's clear we have to be a C Corp.

Can anyone recommend a good, inexpensive, lawyer to help us form a C Corp and help us draw up some documents including Founding Employee Agreements, etc.

We ultimately want a vanilla boilerplate that's low cost and will protects us when we get to the funding stage.

Thanks for your help in advance!
Yes, but taxes are not unique to African countries, which is what the article is trying to explain. All developed countries have taxes too.
Google Gears Down for Tougher Times
I really like to have mixes on, so I like http://www.mixriot.com for electronic/dance music.
A better write up without the hype

http://www.motorauthority.com/michelins-active-wheel-technol...
The unsprung weight is not that big a deal, really the inertia from the rotating tire is so great that the addition of some stationary components in the middle don't add that much.
Exactly right. Email is private and will never go away. But twitter is useful. They're just different.

So different, that we created posterous to bridge the gap. =)
http://www.awdio.com

Live DJs from the worlds best clubs. If you like house, lounge, downtempo, trance, electro, or even rock... this is for you!
Well, that's the end state - ultimate entropy.

There's a lot I want to do before we get there though.
So what happens when you have a flat tire? You're extremely screwed?