skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's actually humorous to me how many people here are expressing firm opinions about whether or not this is legal despite the fact that they clearly have no understanding of the complexities of gaming law in the United States. This is why I always tell people "ask a lawyer". Non-lawyers think they know far more than they really do.

As someone whose startup has spent huge amounts of time and money on online gaming legal advice, my guess is that this is legal in at least 44 states, and possibly the other 6 as well. It's certainly not gambling, since there appears to be no random selection of the winner, but it may fall under the sweepstakes header. It may merely be an auction (legally, though maybe not morally).
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For the first time in weeks (months?) it's cloudy and rainy in the valley :(

At least it was clear out last night.
hrm strange I commented on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396485 with this. bug? It is a list of top 100 urls ever registered. I just though stargate.com was odd being #20.
I was lucky enough to get Kenichi Yoshida (http://www.kenichiyoshida.jp/). He does excellent stuff, check out his portfolio. Not too expensive either.
No. Capitalism is a system of decentralised decision making on resource allocation, ultimately leading to increased productivity and innovation.

I have no idea how a ponzi scheme that makes "simple" people overpay fits this description as it leads to incredibly bad resource allocation.

You could argue that such failures are part of capitalism and I would agree. But they are still failures. Capitalism depends on such failures being fewer than those cases where funds go where value is being created.
Isn't that endemic to any auction site? eBay knows your max bid and could easily have bots forcing up the incremental bids to earn themselves more fees. Perhaps all auction sites should be audited, but I don't see how this one is any worse than the rest.

And sadly the licensing requirements for online casinos are a joke. Read up on the Kahnawakee Gaming Commission some time, you'll get a kick out of it. Until we legalize and regulate them, they'll never improve.
That's really weird -- that's twice now in the last couple of days I've had posts upmodded and then downmodded without any really obvious reason why they got downmodded. Can someone who is doing the downmodding please explain their rationale?
The Europeans may be out to lunch, but at least they're living a decent life while they're eating.

It takes huge balls to look at the US right now -- banks in collapse, citizens teetering on the edge of bankruptcy -- and claim that we're a model for the right way of doing things. The French may not work 60-hour weeks, but at least they have the good sense to make the most of the time they've been granted on the planet. What do most Americans live for? Buying cheap crap at WalMart? Buying better crap than the guy next door?

I could care less that the "best" web2.0 companies are based in the US, when those companies are laying people off right now. Their former employees will have to enter the worst job market in nearly 30 years, without health care to protect them if they get sick, or basic social programs to keep their children from going hungry. I think that's an awful, brutal, unfair system, and I'd gladly trade a little bit of "competitiveness" for a bit more compassion.
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That's one thing that is often missing, some kind of quick process listing. People would eventually associate their battery life with the list of programs running or installed, and would be able to make more informed choices about which apps to install and/or use. It would also give an incentive to app programmers to not be so aggressive, as their aggressive app will be associated with low battery life or unresponsive UI.

An app that uses GPS could tie into the time of day and week and change its polling frequency based on a pattern of past movement behavior. If it sees a pattern that everyday between 11am and 1pm it has bigger changes in location than in the morning or afternoon, your lunch trip would be updated more often. Or with accelerometer support could detect that that is not moving and poll for location less frequently. I'm sure some apps are already doing stuff like this.
As an American living in Europe, I think there are things to be learned on both sides. I completely agree with things like health care, or things to protect people to some degree if they lose their jobs. What doesn't work in "Europe" (please not, however, that there are different systems within Europe) are some of the rigid labor laws, and the high barrier to entry for people wishing to create new companies.

... a little bit later ...

I wrote something about it myself, as it's a topic that's quite important to me:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/13/startups-and-work-euro...
Perhaps some sort of interaction history that shows the last few threads you commented in if they've had any responses.
Someone who can see the slot machine's internals and understands how it works will be able to predict the outcome, so in that sense it's not "truly" random. The reason it's still legally random is that it's as good as random from the point of view of the player. Same applies here. No?
I'm not sure it's despicable, but the difference to gambling is that gambling is sold as purely entertainment. The fun _is_ the product. Swoopo mentions entertainment as well, but they also make people believe that they are buying a product for a good price, which is clearly not the case.

So as a (potential) customer I'm taking note that this company is using deceptive tactics, claiming one thing and structuring their system to do something else. Yes they do it openly, so it's up to everyone to not buy from them and to remember not to buy from this company and the people behind it ever again.
However, when a person is dead, the general consensus seems to be that the consciousness has left the body

That's a silly consensus. Of all the billions of people who have ever lived, there's no evidence of anything leaving, or anywhere for it to go, or any reasonable sounding conjectures of what it might be made of or how it is powered or how it interacts with living brainmatter during life or any reasonable sounding suggestions for what happens in the event that the body dies with advanced alzheimers or as a foetus or in the fires of a nuclear bomb detonation or trapped in an inescapable airtight diving bell...

If the materialist explanation of consciousness is correct, then it's plausible that "someone" will awaken when your body is resurrected and will have your memories, but it won't be you, because you won't exist to be experiencing it.

Of course it will be "me". If the materialist explanation is correct there isn't anyone else it could be or any way for it to be anyone else or any separate "me" that could not exist to experience it.

But it isn't quite right to say it will be me. Rather, I will be it. I wont waken when my body is resurrected, when my body is thawed and jump started, the processes that are me will be running again. An animated body is a thinking body and this particular body is me. I am not a thing that exists separately from my neurological processes, "I" am the result of the neurological processes.
Notice that Apple.com is on here, but no Microsoft.com.
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What does the parent comment contribute to a civil discussion?
Yes that is what I mean - it seems "expected value" is not equal to real value.
Don't watch the vid. It's a bunch of boring people exchanging well rehearsed arguments about nothing more than cliches.
YC Tracker does this for single pages:

http://www.selfdebugging.com/2007/10/09/yc-news-tracker-a-be...

However you have to remember to run the script first time you see the page to be able to compare later. This kills it for me most of the time.
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... the other take-away:

"I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from each other's work"
"No burger_king.com either."

I find it sort of amusing people thought we would be using underscores in place of spaces in domain names.

Also amusing:

"The guy in registration? One person is responsible for assigning domain names on the Internet?

Actually, "We have 2.5 people doing it," Williamson said, meaning that the half person is really a full person doing it part-time."
Not bad for a two-year old project in my spare time.

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
java: 37239 (62.27%)
cpp: 22390 (37.44%)
sh: 159 (0.27%)
perl: 10 (0.02%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 59,798
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 14.67 (176.09)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 1.49 (17.84)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 9.87
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 1,982,269
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

(Gah, I can't figure out how to get the output to appear verbatim in the comment)
in Chrome, clicking "Download" in gmail, it gives me a "Save File as" dialog. it can display PDFs alright. it's just that gmail tells it to download all attachments when choosing "download" instead of just displaying them.
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Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic: 29367 (70.03%)
asm: 9186 (21.91%)
sh: 3124 (7.45%)
perl: 257 (0.61%)

I've always found those cost estimators to be rather useless (they are often off--literally--by orders of magnitude). A far better estimate would be to look at the actual development cost of competing commercial products with a full-time development team.

It also depends heavily on how the program is designed: it's possible for the same amount of "effort" worth of code to vary by a factor of ten or more between two programs that serve the same task. Some programmers naturally write extremely terse code that makes heavy use of abstraction, while others tend to be quite verbose.

Plus, it's one thing to write code: it's another thing to have that code become good. My project above has not changed significantly in code size in almost three years, despite the fact that every year has had more development than the previous one.

Such metrics would state that the value of the above project has merely doubled since it was originally conceived in a personal CVS repository by original developer Laurent Aimar, despite the fact that easily 95% of its value has been added since the original bare-bones framework released five years ago.
Oops, I didn't even notice there was a video. I pretty much completely ignore videos online unless I'm actively looking to watch something on youtube. I see 99% of them as a waste of my time.
As a US-educated entrepreneur based in Europe, I disagree. Their entrepreneurial culture is what's going to save the Americans, since they have the means to innovate their way out of this meltdown; be it through web 2.0 or greentech. Generous welfare state that we have in Europe presumes presence of a stable economy generating enough surplus wealth to sustain it. If we get outcompeted, it'll be the first thing to go unfortunately. We need to figure out a way to combine best of both worlds.
> "Okay, so what‘s the catch?" ... Cilk++ doesn't support producer/consumer, software pipelining, or message passing. ... we're giving something up ... less is more. The ... advantages ... make up for any loss in generality.

well, there was this joke about a dog, an octopus, and wooden legs.
The parent article states that it has never been published (to the dismay of Garfield and de Vries....)
I know WWII was the most complex story ever in terms of ethics. Members of my own family died in the nazi death camps, so how could I be against fighting that war? However, no amount of complexity and evil could make me drop an A-bomb on a city.

At some point I have to say, whatever the consequences, I'm just not going to do this. You don't torture. You don't kill indiscriminately. Otherwise there is nothing left worth fighting for anyway.
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Using eBay buying Skype and Sun buying MySql as proof of the superiority of the US system seems a little tenuous, since both those American companies seem to be headed down fast (while the European ones produce actual quality products), and the ease of buying out foreign competitors was largely due to the availability of easy money that's at the heart of the current credit crisis. Meanwhile the larger trend, due to the US's status as the world's largest debtor, has been the other way - foreigners buying up US companies, despite significant regulatory barriers that the US government has put up.
The next big bubble = greentech.
Maybe Europeans are out to lunch, but Britains are not. It's a completely different culture.
> The French may not work 60-hour weeks, but at least they have the good sense to make the most of the time they've been granted on the planet.

France is the number one country in the world for antidepressant drugs consumption...
I was talking to skmurphy this week at the Hackers and Founders meetup this week. He said that his business is booming (consulting for early stage entrepreneurs). His quote, "We're working with a lot of guys who had no idea they were becoming consultants."

There's also going to be a lot of pain and suffering, but there's also a lot of people who start businesses from the ashes of their lost jobs.
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Bubbles are a great way to build infrastructure: http://www.slate.com/id/2165929/nav/tap1/

Build a smart energy grid during boom, and it will spawn a great deal of innovation during bust.
Were there any restrictions on what you could register? (i.e. only domains related to your company)

I'd have thought people would have registered generic words first...
http://whois.domaintools.com/nordu.net
You might also consider:

Let the server remember when a user has last opened a thread. If it is re-opened by the user, show only (or emphasize) postings with a newer timestamp.
> I think that's an awful, brutal, unfair system, and I'd gladly trade a little bit of "competitiveness" for a bit more compassion.

As I see in your profile that one of your goal is to live outside the US, let me tell you that I'll gladly trade my French passport for your US passport. In France, you'll have as much compassion, fairness, equality and socialism as you want (and probably even more!)

edit: to be honest, you are on the right track to experience this brilliant social system in the US...
Sounds a lot like believing in Christ because it might be true, and good God what if it is?

Also, what if the revival process works but not perfectly, and you come out on the other end severely disabled? (Maybe they've gotten it to work on some people but not everybody, and they don't know which is which until they try). Factor that into the equation.. I don't know. I think I'm just going to try to make it to the singularity or at least to when this tech is more feasible.
You are clearly not part of the target market for Seesmic. Although I'm not sure who is, to tell you the truth.
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Is that because people are actually depressed, or because it's easy and cheap to get the pills?

Interestingly (well, in a grim sort of way), according to this, the suicide rate is pretty high in France, one of the highest in western Europe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...

That's surprising to me, I would have thought France would show up somewhere between places like Italy and Spain (which have low rates despite being relatively a bit poorer), and more northerly, gray places like Germany. Belgium is quite high up there too.
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Just did some napkin math for this site (please bare with me, there are a few assumptions based off the figures I could actually find)

They say they have 50k users, and in 2008 their revenue was $28.3 million USD (from wikipedia).

Theres also a comment on a related Crunchgear article from the "CEO of the company" (linked at the end), which states he is shipping about $1.5 million (presumably) USD in value of goods each month which totals $18 mil for the year.

So thats around $10.3 mil a year profit (roughly) making around $26 per user.

Although, I'm wondering how many of their users are actual active users.

so they're making about $26 per user (roughly)

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/09/24/swoopo-entertainment-sh...

EDIT - actually on quick reflection, I wonder if the value the CEO stated was retail or wholesale value of the goods (I expect retail) and if the value listed on Wikipedia is correct (which it might not be) then that number may be higher.

These also don't take into account their advertising budget, but I wouldn't think they'd spend close to $10 mil a year in advertising.

These guys are definitely making a tidy profit thats for sure.
I am sure you did not understand Taleb at all. Actually I think it is possibly his mistake that he believes common people without n iota of statistics or mathematics can understand it. Let me explain, almost all of the equations that the Bankers used are based on a bell curve for a distributed event funtion. Now its called a bell curve because the be represents the average and assumes that an event of infini value would have zero chance to happen. That is ok general continuous function because that is a theorical contruct; but in a distributed function and which by definition cannot have zero occurance (because it is distributed) and event with infinite value can occur atleast once. The whole base of mathematics, therefore which is being used by the Banks is flawed and should be removed.If you udnerstand this thing, I would say Taleb is to Banking what Einstein was to Physics. He is asking you to change the foundation. Do you understand it? I doubt you do.
I think it's more that you two have different opinions on percentages.
Since Objective-J is JavaScript (plus a few features) then by learning one you'll learn a good portion of the other.

All JavaScript code is valid in Objective-J, but typically you won't use the prototypal inheritance stuff, since Objective-J adds classical inheritance (which is entirely what Cappuccino uses). Likewise, a large portion of the Objective-J language is just JavaScript (all of the operators, variables semantics, built in types and functions, etc).

The major additions are code importing (@import <FrameworkName/FileName.j> or @import "relativePath/FileName.j"), class definitions (the "@implemention" keyword and method declarations like "-(ReturnType)methodName:(ArgumentType)argument"), and method calls/message sending ("[myObject methodName:argument]")

My suggestion for learning Objective-J would be to pick up Crockford's book, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", and skip the parts about inheritance (unless you also want to learn that). It's a short book anyway. The nice thing about this particular book for learning Objective-J is it only covers the language, not the browser's APIs like the DOM, which you should never really need to know when using Cappuccino. (though I would recommend "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide", aka "The Rhino Book", as well to anyone doing JavaScript in browsers)

Once you have a feel for the core of the JavaScript language then it's just a few more syntax additions for the main features of Objective-J I listed above.
nice, i'll gmail myself my pdf ebooks
He has a good point: CSS can only define the appearance of existing HTML elements. Sometimes you need visual elements which doesn't correspond to any semantic HTML element. I think SVG would be a good approach for designing these "unsemantic" visual elements, and you can use CSS with SVG. SVG would also be a good way to extend CSS beyound the built-in properties, eg. if I want to design a wawy border to apply to some elements.

He also has a good point about the need for calculation in CSS. However I am really worried about the possible manitenance nightmare of a turing-complete CSS! It should be designed very carefully. A constraint-based sublanguage for CSS would perhaps make sense.
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I find it insightful that just two lines down from this post (currently) on the front page of HN is a post "I don't want to work very hard" and it has a score of 188. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394609
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Plus you'd need to enable about 20 or so script domains to even load techcrunch videos... seriously, why so many scripts? xss to boot.
Of course it would! Streaming their at all was a very poor technical decision. The very obvious technical and economic solution would be self-contained files shared over BitTorrent. This was and is a pointless waste on the scale of pets.com. The difference being it's not just sucker VCs money, it's every taxpayer's.
Matt, you seem to know more about the legal framework than most other posters here. Which 6 states would you avoid? I have an important reason for asking since I'm working on a startup that uses a similar system -- very different in some respects, but certainly similar enough in others that your insights are valuable to me. You can email me privately if you prefer, my email is owkaye at gmail dot com.
That's a great argument that I haven't heard before. Thanks.
If you were a better programmer, you could charge 1000€ per day...

No seriously, I don't know Mantia, but maybe he is famous or really especially good. It is maybe harder to become famous as a programmer, but on the other hand it is easier to make an acceptable income as an unknown programmer. But think about it, would Linus Torvalds, or dhh, or Rod Johnson (of spring framework) or some other famous developers work for 400€/day? I highly doubt it.

So just market yourself better, and hit those 1000€/day.

Oh, also another consideration: if you are consulting for telcos or whatever, you are typically hired for months, earning 400€ each day. The same telco might just commission 10 icons to Mantia, equaling 10 days of work.
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This is going to sound harsh, but if you still this SLOC counts for anything, you're in PHB territory.
>>
Games of skill with monetary prizes are legal in all states
>>

That's just false. First law I checked (for my home state):

"A person commits [the offense of] gambling when he :

1) Plays a game of chance or skill for money or other thing of value, unless excepted in subsection (b) of this Section"
Yeah, people used to care back in the day, like whether you were commercial or nonprofit, etc. .net was reserved for infrastructure providers, organizations who actually owned and operated the physical bits of the network. Nowadays it's a free for all, tho' I think .edu still maintains criteria for registration.

There was a long-running saga of people trying to register fuck.com and being told "no" too.
From the comments:

"Bundling all europeans into one category has never been a sign of smart to me. "
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Dropbox, why it rox and how I (and others) use it.
Off topic but still relevant: can we have thread folding for comments?
do what u love and u wont have to work a second of your life..