skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"owes me about $50"

By my calculations, you owe him $150. Why? It's not like Facebook has done no work. The infrastructure and code required to allow you to poke, like, and chat with your friends isn't something simple. Also, bandwidth isn't cheap.

In addition to all of this, Facebook is free. To even think that you would deserve "a cut" is just another example of the entitlement mentality plaguing society today.
Recruiting Beginner Web Developers Interested in a Mentor to Learn and Improve
Poll: How/Where do you purchase books?
HN, what format and method do you use to purchase books?
book/ebook from cheapest online store
book from local brick and mortar store
ebook on ibooks
ebook from google eBookstore
book from other store
ebook from other ebook store
It's a really complicated question.

My dad went the other route - he had an MIT Ph.D in nuclear chemistry and gave up his career to be a dad. He was always, always there to play LEGO with me or take me to the playground or drive me around to after school activities. And I really, really appreciated that - I probably appreciate it more now that I'm grown and he's dead.

The thing is - he still had something to prove, and because he had given up his professional life for me, he transferred that need to prove something onto me. And so for most of my childhood, I felt like I had to do well in school, and when I grew up it was up to me to win that Nobel Prize that he never had a shot at. And it went like that until I was in around middle school, at which point I basically said "Fuck that shit" and started sabotaging myself just to prove to everyone that I wasn't this super-genius who was destined to change the world.

And that wasn't really fair to me either.

I don't think it's really a matter of outcomes, of affording the big mansion in a gated community. I think that every kid deserves to have a dad who can be proud of who he is and what he's accomplished in life. If you can honestly feel that you're not giving up anything to be with your kids, but rather gaining something, then you should do it. But if you would otherwise be bitter and resentful for what you couldn't accomplish in life - it's better to have an absent dad than a bitter one.
It'd be cool if you could tag divs with a value of parallax so you could do transitions between scenes with multiple 'layers' of parallax.
1. Please let people prop even if they're not logged. I'm not saying to let every feature for no-member, but saying +1 to an artist is important in a new social network.

2. I hate it when the page loads and I'm aiming at a video in the screen, but it then randomly starts to scroll somewhere else, and it'd make me mistakenly click on the wrong video. To use the website, I had to let it load the page, count 1-2 in my head (while it'd scroll I don't know where randomly), and then I'd click on the video I want.

3. About the connect with facebook and share with facebook. For some reasons, it really scare me the way it's done. It should somewhat tell me what action does what. For instance, after registrering, there's a popup saying "Now share your profile on Facebook" [share] [cancel]. Will [cancel] cancel my registration? I had no idea.

Otherwise, great job! I'll use it and look forward to it :)

About the #1, I think it requires maybe a bit more explanation. I wanted to say "This artist is good", but didn't want to be involved into all the facebook connect, creation process, etc. Would be good to have the user helps promote the video but only force him to create an account if really necessary.
For those of you who'd like to check out geeklist: http://geekli.st/
Want your mind BLOWN? Watch this video Illuminati going down
During a demo for a group bittorrent client project in college, the person running the demo chose to use the link on the piratebay with the most seeders (because we had some bugs that made it not work reliably with non-seeders). The file? A windows keygen program. Fortunately, the prof didn't notice what we were downloading.
Google Launches Developer Page for Google+
A modest proposal for legalizing bribery
Used Lens
like any self-respecting hacker, PG cares a lot more about having fancy expiring hashmaps of closures than having fast code ;) what do you think 'fnid' means in http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=5DHNoqDkUn ?

just kidding.

or am I? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099372

haha.
99designs sheds light on its cloudy crowdsourcing platform
All money issues aside, 4 years is also around the time you tend to get really sick of working on the same problem with the same codebase.

Four years, incidentally, is also the length of time a PhD used to take, in both the sciences and the humanities. Now it's stretching towards six - seven for the sciences and ten for the humanities, which may contribute to burnout.
Nice. This is pretty standard practice for larger companies (TOS's), and I look forward to seeing how this idea grows.
Photostream does photos automatically, but not video just yet. Could be implemented via an app, but you'd eat your iCloud and 3g data limits pretty fast.
Woah, didn't expect to see this on the frontpage!

I made this some time ago and have been using it ever since. The script is pretty simple but makes HN a lot more pleasant for me personally. I'm glad other people are finding it useful :)
Brilliant comment. Couldn't agree more that the culture of "us against them" that has been prevalent since 9/11 has played a huge part in propagating hate and laying the foundations for a bring "them" down culture.
In a startup, the number of people who are coding exceeds the number of people who don't.
CD Baby had a great e-mail that they sent users after an order:

"Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby"
Imagine a GoPro-style camera which transmitted wirelessly to a nearby smartphone. From there, the receiving app would sync it to a server ASAP. If you knew you were entering into a situation where video you were capturing might be confiscated, you could tape the phone to your thigh with a lot of duct tape. By the time the police organized themselves sufficiently to cut the tape off of your body, the important video likely would already be uploaded. Could this scheme be expanded upon by some sort of steel lock box around one's waist/ankle/etc? That would give the phone a lot of time to do its work. Furthermore, the box could contain an additional microphone which would continue recording after initial camera seizure. In cases where groups of protesters feared arrest, could Bluetooth be used to create a Tor-esque upload-to-the-cloud network which would eventually reconstitute everyone's video? I'm imagining a bunch of phones talking to each other in a mesh and trading blobs which could be reassembled server-side.
A/B Testing a Light vs Dark Design on Lean Domain Search
"The sheer amount of obvious non-innovations that the patent office accepts is staggering."

You'd almost think that they were getting money for accepting patent applications...

<Edit>This is a perfect example of mismatched incentives. The patent office has a lot of incentive (in the form of attracting user fees) for issuing dubious patents, and no real disincentive for doing the same.
> sentence first, trial afterwards

I didn't realize that the Megaupload employees had already been handed sentences. Could you point me towards this information?

> It means the accused had an open trial in court
> at which they were allowed to defend themselves.

All of this 'due process' talk comes across as to me like:

"Officer? Why are you arresting me? I haven't been convicted yet! Where's my trial? Where's my due process? I'm not supposed to be arrested before my trial, right?"

The Feds seem to be treating this like any other illegal business and busting it up prior to taking it to court. The only difference here is that whether or not the business is illegitimate or not is in a bit of a legal grey area.

If the Feds think that you're using your storefront to smuggle drugs, do you think that they'll wait for a trial to bust you up? Busting your business up is part of the process of taking you to trial.

> Generally speaking, "due process" does
> not mean that a lot of policemen came to an agreement

It also doesn't mean, "my life can continue completely uninterrupted until a court hands down a verdict."

> It means the accused had an open trial
> in court at which they were allowed to
> defend themselves.

That seems to be the plan. Could you point me towards your sources claiming that the Feds don't intend to bring a trial against MegaUpload + employees?
Could make the same sort of point about music, movies and TV these days. What is the artistic merit of Desperate Housewives, The Transformers, and Britney Spears? Hell, much of that is sold on titillation alone. Sounds like artless porn to me.
POINT-KNOW-BUY
The saved page is actually already provided by HN, but pg decided to bury it inside your profile where most people don't notice it. All my script does is prominently display the saved page on the navbar.

And yes, it will indicate new comments on the "saved" page. The script basically stores a last accessed timestamp and number of comments. On the frontpage (and saved page, etc), it just checks to see if there are more comments than the last time you accessed the page.

Unfortunately, it does not markup the "threads" page at all.
Fork this project and add fucking awesome songs
That's what record companies do, isn't it? Well, OK, they do a bit of marketing to fluff it up a bit, but, you know...
Well, yes and no. It's a lot easier to tackle the profile interoperabilty issues if you're the gateway between the ZigBee and non-ZigBee network. The energy providers don't quite have the same experience at being "user friendly" at a customer level.

Not that the company I work for really cares either way. Power companies are looking at smart grids, white good manufacturers are looking to include network functionality, and several people want to be the bridge between you and all of this. But as long as most people building ZigBee devices use our chips, we're happy.
Last week I met with a friend of a friend that owns a commercial door distribution and installation business. He's been in the business for 20 years, but is clueless about anything internet related. I went over his monthly bills for advertising (all of it) and web hosting costs. Turns out, he spends about $3,500 per month on hosting and advertising. Most of the advertising is for DEX, and his site is a crappy little static site.

I don't think the average small business owner really understands the internet, and I don't think the average HNer really understands small business.
I didn't mean things like NICs. Instead I was talking about sensors and such.
There is a link in the "About" section to the developer page:
https://developers.google.com/+/
Apple’s great GPL purge
Which ads? Those rectangular ones in the bottom middle? I checked and I just got one. Maybe it only works in full screen mode?

I've tried to go without Flash a few times in the past and my subscriptions would have problems. Things seem quite good these days.
It's definitely possible. I have a full time job, a girlfriend, work out everyday and after all that I still manage to run two startups on the side. It's mostly about cutting out non-value-added activities while at the same time optimizing every free minute you have.
The user-swatches are a good idea. I've been toying with a similar concept but applying it across the whole site. I really dislike how HN doesn't have avatars...I visually recognize avatars a lot easier than reading usernames.

I made a "highlight user's comments" script (https://github.com/polyfractal/HNHighlightUser), it'd be cool if you could incorporate something like that as well. Sometimes I want to quickly identify all the posts by a single person in a thread.

Very nice work :)
Simple, just use a livestreaming app.

The Bambuser app is my favorite one, it's available on Android and iPhones and allows people to view your stream on the web. You can also review and download any clips you've streamed in the past, so it would work perfectly for this. In a really serious case, I imagine the company could provide evidence to prove the video wasn't tampered with too.
The code is on github, here: http://github.com/CarlQLange/fit
Some excellent advice that I'm going to take it to heart with my startup
Indeed. Let's hope it's not just strange, or our lives will resemble the Borges line:

> "He died in exile: as with all men, it was his lot to live in bad times."
Appeals court denies Google bid to keep email out of Oracle trial
I have basically lived in hacker terms what you describe for about two years, accidentally (e.g., no new gadgets, happening to fit similar terms.) Developing more and more, I've recently been planning my entry into Appledom (from old T510/N900). Then I heard the This American Life piece linked on this page and was pretty struck by it for some personal reasons as well (nothing to do with heritage). So, back to the pressing need--justifying consumerism as it is. My best friend is a business PhD and the staunchest libertarian that I know, so I knew that he could settle me down. What was the root of it?:

This is better than the alternatives where it takes place. Nobody holds a gun to anybody's head (okay somebody can probably cite examples and that would be valid but this is not what we are discussing I believe). Yes, it sucks. Development is painful a lot of the time.

Could it get better, faster? Sure. But the current situation, while it may be sad and horrible and caring people should enact change, is not occurring by force. Somehow, during the time while I consumed media on this topic, my mind had unknowingly removed the significance of that bit.

Edit: sp
Web companies beg Congress to "step back" from IP legistlation
Just in time for it to become more and more irrelevant. I say this with an amount of snark that may be frowned upon, but Flash has very few legitimate uses remaining. Though it's an enormous hack (that HLS will fix), I have live transcoded video streaming to an HTML5 video tag and I just got a minimal Skype clone working natively in Chrome. I rarely use Flash and the cases where it's required are quickly diminishing.
> I wonder how much of the documented improvement is placebo effect?

I'm sure they controlled for that, as it is stupendously obvious and common to control for, and easy to do - just don't turn on the battery, or measure the effects of the current direction reversed (damages performance according to the other article).
I agree, it will depend on the courses, but if the courses cover content that would make one a good fit for the team, the student has demonstrated the mastery of the content, and they have a good portfolio, I do not see why I would not consider hiring them.
Is It or Isn’t It? [Is the iPad a PC?]
Visual app building tool (iOS, Android, HTML5, etc.) adds "Portal Blocks"
T Shirt Maker
MVP is not an excuse to make shitty software
Wireheads are quite different, and also scarily practical (read, for example, http://www.wireheading.com/ ).
>..a 5 hour a day commute

Wow, and I thought my 3 1/2-4hour commute was bad. If you live anywhere near a big city I suggest switching jobs. If you're a programmer the market is amazing out there. It has two weeks of very lazy job hunting and have found a new job that is closer, more pay, way better benefits and environment.
One day when I worked at Rockstar Games I was walking through the lobby and bumped into the technical director's wife and kid. I said "hi," and the wife was very apologetic, explaining that she knew their daughter couldn't see her father for yet another night in a row, but just wanted to spend 15 minutes with him. I just remember walking away thinking "I'll never be that kind of father." I left a few months later.

Outside the games industry, though, the usual response when a company grows, and you can't give significant equity to new hires to justify crazy hours, is to change the company culture to have closer to 40 hours a week. Both ITA software (which PG mentioned in Great Hackers) and Endeca, two successful pre-liquidity-event companies when I joined, had normal working hours. Is that only true in Boston, or in SF too?
I'm tempted to put up a website, try and start a petition, or something. I don't think this will fly much, but I'm not going to stand idly by. Is this a reasonable response to the working conditions in China?

No. It's a lacking response. Read the award winning "Nickel and Dimmed" to see how those very conditions, or very similar to them, also occur "at home":

http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...

Then do something about it, like denouncing any race-to-the-bottom for wages, and any lax attitude toward working conditions, and refusing to buy from the cheaper place.

Also don't take crap from neoliberals, including supposedly "progressive" nobel prize winners like Paul Krugman, that, from his comfy chair says that having the chinese workers work in dire conditions is better than not giving them work at all --as if this is the distinction that matters. How about giving them the work ALONG with the respect and pay they deserve for doing it? How about demanding that they get paid better and work in better conditions, or fine all and any companies that employee them (actually fine, like in "sanctions", not just individually refusing to buy their stuff)?

As an aside, next time your boss wants you to work unpaid overtime for long stretches? Just say no. Be warned though, that unlike some token feel-good action ("I won't get an iPad 3"), this might/will have real consequences. But if enough people do this, and insist of properly enforced regulations on the matter, it will stop the race-to-the-bottom in US workplaces too. Competitiveness has nothing to do with being a slave.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I think I'm looking for something more scientifically demanding. I'm basically trying to convert a bunch of kids pursuing medical school, most of which probably do not have the chops to get in. I would love to teach them some basic data mining that has to do with health science, or dig up some data startups to talk about. I'll keep researching.
I worked at Matchcraft, which has the best tools out there for buying ads for local businesses and provides the software for a lot of Yellow Page/directory sites. Most of their revenue comes from the directories, but originates from small, local businesses. I got to know the "local business" business and the players quite well, and this doesn't surprise me. We always tried to get the best conversion rates for the small businesses, but the sales tactics of some of the local listings companies are not in good faith and their customer churn rates reflect that.

WRT reasons to not get into local, it's not that the big sites like Yelp and Groupon are sucking their small business customers dry, it's that they can't help it. The only way to reach these small businesses is with large sales forces. The process just can't scale. "Local" is an absolutely horrible business to be in and I doubt anyone will ever crack it (hasn't worked for the past 15 years...). If you want to sell software to shops and restaurants, sell to franchises.

You might say OpenTable is an exception and cracked "local", but it's not - they effectively built their own franchise network of restaurants by giving away turnkey reservation system terminals to restaurants.
The problem with HN comments is that you may make a very thoughtful and lengthy reply to someone...and no one ever reads or sees it because stories scroll off the frontpage so quickly. And it isn't easy to check up on old discussions you participated in, so your thoughtful comments are buried.

I think it is detrimental to the community and encourages all the wrong kinds of behavior.
Well done for seeing a problem and trying to fix it.

But ...

Could I use an NHPL-licenced editor to criticise the Church of Scientology?

Could I use an NHPL-licenced bulletin board system to post content critical of the Westboro Baptists or Wahhabi Islam?

Could I use an NHPL-licenced chat program to criticise National Front neo-NAZIs?
> What is to stop the VC from firing you the day before your options mature?

Perhaps they'd like people to actually consider taking investment money from them in the future?

Your "cliff" is typically one year, anyways.
I'm curious -- what are the limits? Is it okay to say "Christian Only"?

What about 1st amendment rights with respect to companies?

Can I say "No homos"? If he can say "homos" I can say "no homos"?

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\PILGRIM.TXT

, I shall never desert my old principles, since
they are harmless and profitable. If I may not go with you, I must
do as I did before you overtook me, even go by myself, until some
overtake me that will be glad of my company.

{249} Now I saw in my dream that Christian and Hopeful forsook him,
and kept their distance before him; but one of them looking back,
saw three men following Mr. By-ends, and behold, as they came up
with him, he made them a very low conge {conge'}; and they also
gave him a
The First GPS
Joel Spolsky's farewell to Jeff Atwood
I have not yet been a part of YC, but know a fair number of YC founders. But among all people I know, I found Sam to be probably the smartest and also very helpful. But more than that, he is both nice but still nudges you towards the right path- which is incredible in my opinion.
"Why L.A.'s Start-up Scene Beats All Others"
Maybe they were referring to the MRI/YARV GVL? (even so, their claim is still not technically correct)
Are you aware of the discussions about this topic from ~15 years ago? A lot of people disagree about the definition of hate speech, making interpretation of such licenses pretty subjective. It also opens the door to additional causes like "no nuclear weapons development" and such.
I'm trying to parse that abomination of a website. I'm not sure if it's an "anti-Obama", anti-Chinese, anti-Democrat, or what it is.

But yeah, the racism posited is reminiscent of the "Japs" shown in movie shorts of the 1940's. I guess it's a form of NIMBY; They aren't from my backyard.
Ask HN: Looking for hackers/designers to join our education beta
We're building an education product (http://whatispolymath.com) to help users learn programming & design from the best resources around the web in a fun and engaging manner.

Our private beta just went live and we're looking for early users to join & engage in our community and give us some honest feedback. We're trying to cultivate and grow this in a controlled manner (think early days of Quora) and would love for some smart, motivated hackers/designers who are interested in education to join. Perks include pleasant UI, conversation with similarly motivated folks, and the chance to share your knowledge with the world :)

If that sounds interesting, drop me a note at harish@whatispolymath.com or enter your email address here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dFFLakVaOTdZYWkyRnRCM0tkaVhPY0E6MQ#gid=0
Those are some extreme examples, what about just making fun of dumb people (think http://failblog.org/ on steroids)?