skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other hand, when the question you're facing is the existence of your company or your product at your company, that decision is a lot harder than "might this patent be used unethically in the future?"

I think James Gosling has a blog post about the huge number of defensive patents they started filing at Sun after losing some lawsuits over low-quality patents to make sure they would be protected in the future. Now all of those patents are owned by Oracle.

Of course, if Sun had been more successful, those patents might still be a net positive in the market, so it really isn't that simple. I do agree that the market incentives for companies are perverse (in terms of the constitutional purpose of patents), which is exactly why software patents desperately need reform.

Incidentally, Red Hat is a good example of an actively anti-software-patent company with a number of patents. It's unlikely that their policies will change, but it is possible. I don't, however, think it's a net negative when Red Hat employees file for them in the system we are unfortunately stuck with.
Can't agree more. I thought we all agree on contract law, and respect each other's work. Apparently people here ignore it completely just for the convenience of watching some stupid movies and musics for free. Really?

The way you hurt media people will eventually hurt software people. If you don't like the authors' terms, please don't be a lazy consumer, be a producer yourself, and offer your work for free, if you think that would be better to society.

Greedy people sucks.
You don't "do business with startups". You do business with other businesses, and expect them to be serious about their propositions.
I think Hollywood calls this a "sequel".

E.g. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093857/
Why it's Hard to Launch Dating Websites
That's a huge opportunity... software to make infographics... lol. What are VC's thinking and what were YOU thinking. How Not To Launch 101. Site is unusable, 15 seconds are up.
Software, like music, is a performance art. People will always pay for you to make something new. If I solve a problem you have, you will be willing to pay me for the benefit of having it fixed, even if it soon solves the same problem for other people, too. If every single piece of software ever written was open-sourced, there would still be more software that needed to be written.
Do you need a PhD?
What about violating software licenses? I guess the restrictions of the GPL are moot then. I can just do whatever I want as I'm really not depriving anyone of anything they didn't already have.
Really great article and solution!

This is a company I would invest in today. These guys know the game and are playing it accordingly.
My Journey to Hackerville
Cheap Adidas Adipure III TRX FG Blue White Cleats on Sale
This is generally not a bad thing, though. From my slight applied linguist background: These fillers are generally used in order to establish that the speaker's turn is not yet done. In a conversational situation, having pauses instead of fillers gives the listeners openings into the conversation to become the speaker.

In presentational speeches, fillers aren't so bad, but long pauses IMO are worse. It's a natural thing to have fillers. If you want to have less, just practice more and be more comfortable with what you're talking about.
Unlikely, you typically raise investment to give you an 18 month runway, any shorter than that and you don't really have time to build the product before you're fund raising again.
What does "you can do evil" even mean? Evil by definition is doing something you shouldn't do, so banning evil is as silly as passing a law saying that breaking other laws is illegal.
Any proposals on how a startup can fix that?
Ask HN: I need to talk to a mobile developer
Hi HN,

I'm in dire need to talk to an experienced mobile developer. I'd love to take half an hour of your time and chat over Gmail or Skype.

I can't offer too much in return, but if my idea is possible on mobile phones then I'll be looking to hire a developer for a month of full-time work in April/March.

Thanks!
I'd love any feedback you have. I haven't focused on performance much yet (although I think I've made reasonable design decisions in general). I think there's some caching I can do on cubic splines which might be beneficial, but I'll obviously need to do some benchmarks to see if they're worthwhile.
18. His advisors simply jerked him around too much.
19. He never really finished writing the thesis paper. He just up and got a job and left everyone hanging.
This is just awful.

"They've made it very clear that they consider digital copies of physical property to be just as valuable as the original."

What is an "original"? With food I understand. smell:food::sound:coins. Or even smell:food::picture:money. So in this case, picture:money::torrent:??

What is the 'original'? The physical medium containing the footage original? A live performance?

If you were to pay for the movie - just as one might pay to eat actual food - what would you pay for? If not a copy of the movie's bits on your hard drive, what? Or do you think nothing at all?

The original article was saying that there used to be a scarcity in the act of watching a movie: you had to go to the theater. Now that scarcity, the problem of "how shall I procure this entertainment" has been solved.

But movies themselves still cost money. Movies themselves are scarce! We can watch movies as easily as we breathe air. But we cannot make movies as easily.
I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential. In libertarianism, the government is the objective enforcement of contract laws and the defender of rights. Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

That is the _opposite_ of libertarian desires for freedom from the desires of others. Why would any libertarian desire this?

I'm going to speculate, as I'm not well versed in the history of libertarianism, but I suspect it grew out of anarchism inasmuch as it was a righteous rejection of government abuse. You see this occurring today with the Occupy movement; the government has failed and rejected its duties, therefore they reject the government. I consider this throwing the baby out with the bath water.

With regards to the NAP and force, the American founding fathers regarding the 2nd Ammendment did not even believe the government should have a monopoly, but instead the whole of the populace should hold its propensity for tyranny in check with its own force so to speak. This is consistent with the libertarian value of the right to defend oneself. Force is therefore permissible whenever necessary to rectify the violation of one's rights (contract law being subsumed by this). As far as whether violating my (property) rights is an initiation of force, according to the NAP[1] it is:

Specifically, any unsollicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property, including that person’s body, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficiary or neutral to the owner, are considered violent when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination, as based on the libertarian principle of self-ownership.

So at the end, the obvious glaring disparity between socialist and libertarians is whether the right to own property is in fact a right. Socialists as you see here (comments), obviously refuse to acknowledge the assumption of this right. Unfortunately, the natural progression of having no right to own property is the socialist value that everyone else has a right to your own mind, sweat, etc... Or in other words, we are all beholden to the desires of others as all that we own, even ourselves, are community property.

This in my mind is the most unimaginable tyranny of all, and thus I see socialism as fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle
Ya, we basically agree. The whole system has awful incentives and is in desperate need of reform. Unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon. One can certainly hope though!
("Make every button use the same CSS class so we can keep it DRY!")

Maybe DRY should also stand for "Don't Reduce Yourself." (As in avoid excess reductionism.) Not only should every significant idea only be expressed no more than once, every significant idea also needs to be clearly expressed at least once -- and not expressed as an oversimplified caricature.
I agree. I'm not suggesting there's no merit to the argument that the RIAA/MPAA have an antiquated business model, but the way we usually get there is odd. People don't want to pay for it. Now they have a way to not pay for it. Thus, the old business model is broken. Of course, if the business model is broken and you want to make a principled stand, you shouldn't consume the content. But that's rarely what happens. Instead, it's just used a scapegoat to do whatever it is we want on some whacked out moral high ground. I wish people would just be honest about their intentions. At least then we can have a philosophical disagreement.
Tumblr is definitely very successful but Posterous had a lot more 'serious' content. From my perspective, Tumblr is mainly for 'cool kids' showing off and a lot of it is only 'reblogging'. Posterous had actual 'blogs' and 'articles'. Sure that reputation/standing has some kind of value too?
"...long agonizing will-they won't-they suspenses about killing off the service"

I think this is the main differentiating point between 'failing' and 'acquihires' (from a user's perspective).

If a company is simply shutting down, there's some sympathy for the team and it's known that the service will stop. With a talent acquisition, nobody really knows what's going to happen to the service (maybe even the founders don't know) and that extra level of uncertainty is off-putting. [1]

Eventually, that extra level of uncertainty transfers over to the List Of Reasons Not to Work With Startups(TM).

[1] This is also true of straight acquisitions but there's a reasonable expectation that the acquirer is purchasing the product as well as the team.
As one who has showered under a faucet -- there are definite compromises involved!
Bypassing Gogo’s Inflight Internet Authentication
Noticed this wasn't mentioned in the subreddit anywhere, so I posted about it. Thanks for the heads up!
>a cost imposed by the state solely for the benefit of a private party //

Copyright is a [not so] limited-time state sponsored monopoly.

It is not rent-seeking.

Whilst copyright in the jurisdictions I know about is pretty much broken by over-extended time periods given to the monopoly rights holder at the [highly undemocratic IMO] detriment to the public domain it is nonetheless still given for creating new works. By definition copyright is granted on works that didn't exist before, new intellectual property has been created - how can this then be rent-seeking.

To recapitulate, using the Wikipedia definition thus (my emphasis):

"Rent [...] is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party."

Works would not be otherwise accessible if they were not first created.

I'll probably go along with a charge that extension of copyright terms (already granted) to the detriment of the public domain is rent-seeking behaviour however.
What's the advantage of using a MacIvory against using the emulation method in the linked article? Aren't the physical machines slow by today's standards (+cots of maintenance, failed hardware etc)?
You can directly record an actual guitar on an iPad (or iPhone, for that matter). And some of the new features they added to the iPad version of Garageband make it easier to use than the MacBook version. A few geeks are recording songs on iPads now; more are likely to do so in the future.
If the option for purchasing an extension stays out of the way, and doesn't just sit there begging to be clicked by those who click on everything, then and only then it's fine.
I guess the part where it emphasizes how cheap it is compared to comparable resources (which is true mainly because the others are school textbooks) and then throws in the "free" word. That could set off too-good-to-be-true alarms.
really cool. recently was frustrated doing similar interpolation- this is a cool api though, wish i had done it this way. would be fun to support other data as well, ie. hex math for gradients. thanks!
Good old Adam Smith teaches us that value in exchange is often the opposite of value in use. (His example is that we pay very little for water, which is vital for survival, but lots for a diamond that has very limited value in use, in comparison.)

That's because, as brilliantly as Smith was able to demonstrate his ideas, the concept of marginal utility wasn't among them. Nearly a century later, Jevons, Wenger, and Walras brought about the "Marginal Revolution", which gave us the understanding that the reason water is so cheap for us is because we've already got so much of it. And this, in turn, allows us to understand that both sides of a transaction are unloading something they hold in (relative) excess for something that would increase their total utility function.
I can't give any really strong justification, besides to say that C-style constants make me feel warm and safe. My weak justifications are that I find having my constants declared in one place helps me to remember to handle all of them, and that it helps slightly with auto-complete.

But there is a good reason in the case of the cubicTension constants: those aren't enums, but actual values. You can put any cubicTension parameter you want between 0 and 1.
Sure. It's trivial to arbitrarily reduce the probability of this one issue by throwing N times the hardware at it.

Now you have to deal with the problems of:

1) Buying, powering, managing, etc N times the hardware. When you buy hardware by the warehouse, this will be a big bill :-)
2) Since you are now increasing your network traffic, power, etc. by at least N times, it is very likely you will hit another problem that produces latency spikes.

Or, as Chris Colohan likes to say: "If you think solving problems is massively parallel computing systems is easy, please come join my team" :-)
Outch..are there any other Lisp OSes? I remember finding a list sometime ago but none of them showed any promise AFAIK.
This was a subpoena, not an NSL.
Well, the voting system in HN is friggin broken. It's too easy for fan-boys to push you down and out of a conversation. I've experienced this many times. It's sad only because these are generally good discussions. However, if you don't tow the "company line", if you will, you'll get punished with down-votes. All this promotes is a uniform culture of fan boys or, what is worst, an audience that does not participate due to the futility of it all.

Down-vote away.

It'd be easy to implement a set of rules that could make it fair. For example, limit the rate of change on any given post so that it can't be attacked by a barrage of down votes by fan boys. This would open up a post to a wider non-ideological audience and allow it to float or sink on its merits rather than whether or not the author pandered to the fan-boy culture's point of view on all fronts.

Further to that, nobody should be allowed to down-vote silently. That's chicken-shit. If you down-vote you need to state why you are doing so and subject your view to the same peer review, if you will.

Another interesting idea is that down-voting costs you a significant amount of karma points. And, if you go below a certain number you are ejected from HN. Now people are likely to think twice before down-voting on ideological basis because they'll stand to loose something.

All said, HN is still tolerable but it really is frustrating to be down-voted when purely on ideological basis rather than on based on the merit, accuracy or veracity of a post.

Anyhow, the PayPal, Google, eBay, etc. problem is not likely to be solved by yelling and screaming on blogs and HN. I firmly believe that massive legal action, and, more than likely, in the US, Congressional action, is the only light at the end of the tunnel. They are too big and just can't be hurt or bothered with any other approach.
> hex math for gradients

Ooo that's a good idea. Of course, you can use 3D vectors for rgb values to get much the same effect.
You can't will away the extra risks carried by immature businesses. This isn't a moral issue. Some companies mature and stabilize around viable businesses; most don't.
I feel like the .js suffix is meant to imply this is JavaScript code, but it is actually CoffeeScript. They are not the same.

Why is it not named Smooth.coffee?
It definitely makes for a more wrenching story, but it's hard for me to see how failing outright is somehow better than selling the team and keeping the service alive for 6-9 more months.
Cool. You may want to add more interpolants, for instance a Fourier (for regularly spaced points) or (even better, but not regularly spaced) Chebyshev interpolation would be useful, highly accurate, and can be computed fast (N log(N))
Leon Theremin: The man and the music machine
I bought the book, looks good for now.

First impression: The book was last updated last year but the movie provided with the book is from 2009.
Heh, PEP 404. Nice.
The blog post that should have been a book: Steve Yegge on computer games.
Are you guys down under the load?

It cycles on the "uploading bookmarks" page for a couple of minutes (I only have 50 or so!) and then

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
Having a pool of pre-erased blocks helps absorb spikes in write activity, but it doesn't let you escape the fact that, on average, an SSD will need to perform an erase operation every 128th page write (assuming 128 pages per block).

If the device is kept at or near full utilization, eventually a fast operation (read) will get delayed behind a slower operation and your tail latencies will suffer.
The iPad is just a tool. It depends on how you use it.

My personal experience (Android Tablet user/iPod touch user) here.

a) The iPod touch keeps my daughter occupied whilst we are waitig for food. Do I really want my 3 year old daughter getting restless in restaurant and annoying everyone else? The parameters are set such that i) iPod touch usage stops once the food arrives and ii) Drawing only (because there is no sound). It allows her to explore her creativity

b) Flash cards - My 3 year old plays this on her own and learns how to spell through this

c) Photo albums on the iPod touch - She proudly takes her own pictures and has a great time relating her pictures and experience to other people. IMHO, this is great way for her to open up her otherwise shy nature

d) Learning the motion of writing letters and numbers even before she can hold a pencil properly

e) Nursery Rhymes on the iPod touch. She loves it

There are no-no of course. Some of them are
a) No TV shows on the iPod touch
b) No games on the iPod touch (except Angry Birds, which is for the father's entertainment)
c) No pop music
No, this is not accurate.

Overture sued Google in 2002. Yahoo bought Overture in 2003, at which point Google settled. Google's IPO was in 2004.

Yahoo did not initiate the lawsuit against Google, and it was two years prior to their IPO.
Based on the FAQ, I'm going to guess that you might be thinking about this already, but you need gift cards! I would throw $100 at this right now to allow my broke college student brother and I to play for the next year without having to convince him to pay.

Secondly, can you export your world data if you chose to leave?
nice post, Wax. can't wait to go on one come the summer!
True. I guess only using what happens when a, shall we say desperate, person uses a sink as a shower would be a "safe" way to make the point. It is possible to combine the functions, but not desirable.
> I didn’t even know the difference between “via” and “hat tip” until today.

I still don't know. What is this hat tip?

Frankly I never understood the concept of 'stealing' links. Once ago a friend on fb got very offended that I posted a link which was on his fanpage without 'via', like everybody is obligated to advertise random sources for stuff that already have thousands of views/shares. Maybe back in the day linking was worth something and I remember all those linkblogs like halfproject, surfstation, k10k, etc., but today with all those tumblrs and other tools to aggregate, suggest, reshare, cross-post, I don't see any particular value in clicking 'share/repost/+1' that needs to be credited. I'm with Marco on this But regardless of how much time it takes to find interesting links every day, I don’t think most intermediaries deserve credit for simply sharing a link to someone else’s work.
I once asked a merchant account provider how larger companies (airlines, for instance) operate by selling stuff way in the future (booking at ticket 5 months in advance, for example), when they were giving me grief about selling a magazine subscription for a year in advance.

"Big reserves on deposit" is what I was told.

It's probably not quite as simple as that, but I suspect being able to demonstrate a degree of financial solvency (airlines? really?) and having funds in reserve would go a long way towards paypal working with you more. In fact, I think paypal ends up holding some of your funds for you as a reserve against chargebacks after certain conditions are triggered, no?
>LOL. Great, anyone got a spare Alpha lying around?

IIRC, there's a Linux version that owners of Open Genera for the DEC Alpha are allowed to download.
We don't have enough countries to control for economic conditions, culture, form of government, etc, etc.
Ah, but I didn't say anything about the reason why water is so cheap. (Smith would explain it takes little effort to procure it - not that different from the marginalist argument.) What matters for the issue at hand is that its utility can be a very small factor in its price.
Yes, but I bought the book.
> but not so clear if Barney just copied the exact design and made his own

Actually, I think it was quite clearly a good thing if Barney made his own copy and they both had dry heads.

This remains true until everyone decides it's better for Fred to spend all his time designing hats rather than hunting, and we need a way to be sure to feed Fred. For this to happen we need technology to advance to the point where we have a surplus of the more basic needs, but also the cost of producing hats has to be cheap compared to the cost of designing hats. Otherwise a significant part of Fred's value is producing the hats, which is something he can easily get food for since it would require force to coerce him to produce a hat, while it requires no force to copy a hat's design.
Ask HN: How to find a remote developer
I've finally decided that I can not, in fact, do everything. Because of this I'm looking at hiring a remote developer to maintain some projects of mine. These vary from products that are being used by customers to tools I rely on for my own productivity that I want to continue adding features to.

My problem is I've never hired a freelancer before, and don't know what to look for or where a respectable place to find them is. I've hired writers and artists before but it seems easier to be able to see someones artwork or read their print then to find a good developer.

Where would you start looking for a freelancer developer? I am hoping to rely on geo-arbitration and find a developer who will cost less than hiring someone in the Bay (these projects do not warrant a large budget).