skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are always those subtle little details that get missed in these discussion.

For instance the site is, right now, taking pre-orders, not orders. There is no published timeframe when they'll actually ship the books that I can see. Paypal only allows you to accept pre-orders up to 20 days in advance of shipping the product to buyers, and even then they can demand significant additional proof.

Because, unfortunately, pre-orders are the classic setup of too many scams (which some random agent probably won't easily be able to eliminate), and it's the domain where PayPal ends up holding the bag. 5000 people pre-ordered some cool internet controller and then maker disappears, etc.

We've been hearing these sorts of "horror" stories for years (wow do people not understand how hard and exclusive the payment process used to be!), yet despite PayPal still being relatively small -- especially compared to the banks and credit card companies -- no one is credibly doing what they do. Maybe because they're doing something rather hard?
Kent Pitman wrote a pretty good posting in a comp.lang.lisp thread, in which he described some of the tight integration that made Genera so good: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/... .

This was one of the things that convinced me to buy one (I have a MacIvory Model II). I've found it a bit difficult to get into, mainly because I don't have the time to spend immersed in it long enough to make the things I've learned stick. I also suspect that a number of the real benefits come from things that aren't immediately apparent, you really need to work with people who know the environment to show you these tricks. I know that's the way I learned Smalltalk - if I'd learned it from books on my own, I'd probably have not realized all the advantages that could be gotten from such an interactive environment.

If anyone can suggest any features like the two that Pitman describes above that I (or anyone else) could investigate, that would be great.
I wonder what will happen to YC's posterous[1]. Pg usually twits all that info, but it was nice to have a less ephemeral source of info.

[1] http://ycombinator.posterous.com/
i loved the content, but i think that he could use some coaching on how to give presentations. i did find the 'um's to be distracting.
Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't stop thinking about taxes (and its collection) while reading the article.
Really perplexing. While I was at Yahoo! they bet the farm (so to speak) on Facebook integration across their sites. Of course it was more or less a flop. I guess the next best thing is litigation?

If you can't beat them, join them. If joining them doesn't work out, sue them.
I've always worried about the same thing.

In a world where software and easy-to-copy "bits" can not be owned, would a viable business model be to hack into Facebook, steal the code and the user database then set up my own social networking site using their IP?

I mean, if they can't own bits then I haven't really stolen anything by hacking into their system. Maybe I'd need to pay them back for the cost of the download?

Just wondering.
I know you feel like everyone is being unreasonable about this, but instead of trying to change their minds, consider it market research: parents on hacker news overwhelmingly distrust iAP, and maybe that means some other form of try-before-you-buy would be more appropriate for kids' apps.
Megaupload boss: Site popular among US government users
this has been our fastest campaign to break $5k so far (2 hours).

not saying a whole lot since we just launched last month, but pretty awesome to see (and is a cause we're really glad to be a part of)..props to alexis and the reddit community.
RBZ irons
This has nothing to do with the quality of the text, and I appreciate someone using not-computer-modern for a TeX-ed text, but the capital T's are just strange.
That's actually a very good point, don't know why you're being downvoted.
I'd argue we are already being taxed if they charge us the same price for kindle vs print.
Not a big bug, but... after login, it said it was uploading my bookmarks, and then said I didn't have any. Though, going back to the home page, it showed me my bookmarks. Just a heads up. Otherwise, looks cool.
Control for economic conditions, and then you may have a case. Policy matters like this are a tricky.
If you are looking for a technical article check Cubiq'a excellent series of articles on the subject. http://cubiq.org/hexagame-the-making-of-an-html5-game As a bonus you can play with the source code as it's all open source.
I think many creators of GPL software see it differently, and wouldn't be ok with people making proprietary modifications to their code, even if anyone was free to disassemble the modified code and try to make sense of it.
>dorkburlger.

I don't engage with people who are begin dishonest, as you are, or people whose only form of "debate" is to characterize their opponent, or call them names, as you have.

Elsewhere several people have disagreed with me, attempted to show contradictions in my position, and surprisingly enough, they didn't need to resort to ad hominem or dishonesty to do it.
Show drop down list or menu above of a flash in webpage
But there are two opposite concepts of morality that people apply to property relations: in one view, the moral 'negative' is attached to depriving a person of what he has justly earned or created; in the other view, the moral 'negative' is attached to obtaining the benefit of what you have not yourself earned or created.

I'd argue that most libertarians would adhere to the first view, which roots the moral principle in a manifest social context - i.e. the the harm one does to others - as opposed to the latter view, which roots the moral principle in a more solipsistic context - which I assume the be the psychic or spiritual harm one does to oneself. (This is expressed in consequentialist terms, of course, but I'd expect there to be an equivalent deontological dichotomy).

It's probably valid to describe the former as a Lockean view, but I don't see how it could justify the extension of property rights to non-rival and intangible goods, such as ideas, since it's literally impossible to deprive anyone of them in the first place.
EDIT: I just realized we might have crossed-wires, I was referring to the loss of Garry Tan and not the loss of Brett Gibson.

Obviously you have more knowledge of Posterous than I do, but generally a founder leaving tends to have negative implications (it scares potential investors, damages momentum).

I use both Tumblr and Posterous and from a user perspective when Posterous pivoted to be focused on "spaces" it seemed like the decision was panic driven. The reason that Tumblr was succeeding over Posterous wasn't due to the feature set of Tumblr but rather the community that Tumblr had.

Posterous had advantages over Tumblr and in many ways it's the better blogging platform, but rather than playing on those strengths and improving them Posterous instead went after the social aspects that Tumblr was succeeding in without fully appreciating that it couldn't just take a social feature set and foist them onto it's user-base.
As someone who had to single-step through this kind of code in gdb, and who had to use the series of fgreps because the cscope is not smart enough to digest these constructs, I can only suggest - weigh the pros and cons before using this technique, especially the fancier parts of it.
Startups that start off being run by well-intentioned people you trust can turn into places with management that has no problem diluting or otherwise devaluing your equity.

Also, most startups use a little trick: they tell you that your equity is enough to make up for the difference in salary. Some of the clever ones will even do this using the valuation at the last fundraising event. VCs will agree that startups are a risky investment, and they seek 10x return on their investment because most of their investments fail. If you know that most investments fail, then you should really be compensated at a risk-adjusted amount of equity (ie: you should get waaay more equity at the current valuation than the discrepancy with the market rate to compensate you for the risk that the equity will be worth 0.) Additionally, there is the chance that after starting employment you discover the personality fit isn't there or you otherwise have to leave before the first year is up; if you don't reach your one year anniversary you take a 100% loss on the income discrepancy because you have no equity. To add insult to injury, you ARE NOT BEING GIVEN THE AMOUNT OF STOCK IN YOUR PACKAGE; an "option" is just the right to purchase at a set price. So really, people are "paying" you the difference between the current valuation of the company and its future growth, so you are getting a much worse deal than the last round of investors.
I thought it was a jsmin "do no evil" analogy. Even Apple ships GPL code
This is called "natural selection". You are currently observing an app-store customer in the wild, seeing its habits and preferences. You can't get another, domestic, customer because they die out in the cages from severe ADs overdose, so you are left with only two choices:
1. Do nothing new;
2. Learn how to interact with existing, wild, customer population, who, oh blasphemy!, doesn't like IAPs.

Your apps. Your choice.
I've run servers for friends and I only see one huge problem: 90% of my friends wouldn't pay for a Minecraft server. They play, but it's just not how my servers ran. I paid for it, and a few others who understood what I did and what it cost, would help as well.

But 90-95% of my players were not paying members. They were great people and I loved having them on my server. I wouldn't kick them or demand they pay in an instant. But they weren't paying players. They were casual players, friends and friends of friends.

This model forces all of your friends to pay, instead of just a few.

If I sent this server to my friends, and they found out they had to sign up to play (or only get 10 hours free a month), they likely wouldn't make my server their home. They might come and play, but they won't make it their home. They're not paying players.

I wish these guys luck and the best but I will tell you right now, most servers don't have an everyone-pays system. Even the big servers and themed servers, the 100+ servers, most of them have rewards and incentives for paying, but few require payment up front.

This seems to fly in the face of the realities of this industry. I wish them the best but I imagine that this is going to be a constant source of background issues until they open up an option to let one person subsidize the cost of a single game world so there can be free players (unlimited hours) on it.

EDIT: No bukkit support? Only vanilla servers? That's rough, all of the big and popular servers run Bukkit, and every server I've run uses Bukkit. There's not even any coherent anti-griefing or administration tools in vanilla! Hopefully this is a huge priority.
Safari 5.1.4 update promises 11% JavaScript performance boost, fixes other bugs
Recently Read Articles On Facebook
I'd say it varies widely based on the resource in question. Open-source software and wiki data have a nearly perfect lack of scarcity; bandwidth and server disk space are just slightly scarce; other resources like oil (or the ultimate scarcity, human time) follow conventional rules of economics.
Post-scarcity has already arrived for every resource that has a marginal cost of production equal to zero. That includes every digital product.

That's not to say we're living in the age of post-scarcity. Most of our resources are still limited, and you're right that non-digital resources are likely to retain scarcity for a very long time. Furthermore, post-scarcity will never arrive for inherently limited resources, such as time.

But PG's essay addresses industries selling digital products, and within that realm, post-scarcity has indeed arrived.
First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Second, 'libertarian' means 'anarchist' in the same way 'Republican/conservative' means 'fascist' and 'Democrat/liberal' means 'socialist'. Anarchist/Fascist/Socialist are extremes, and libertarian/conservative/liberal are regions along the spectrum. IMO.
Beautiful service - I've wanted this for a while. My bookmarks all show up, but when I search for anything I get no results. Looks like you guys still have a few kinks to work out...
This is one of the more important Hacker News submissions I've seen in a long time. It seems that there is, potentially, a fundamental disconnect between what "px" is supposed to mean and what it means in practice. Given the incredible importance of the web, particularly the front-end of the web, and the extraordinary increases in screen resolution (today the iPhone 4 and iPad 3, tomorrow most computers), it's very important to resolve this discrepancy.

Personally, I'm disgusted at the W3C standard. It's a great idea to have an angular measure (really great) but to call it a "pixel" is horrible. A pixel is the smallest controllable dot on a physical display, and nothing else. Call it an "aixle" abbreviated "ax" and short for "angular pixel" but don't overload the term "pixel".
You built it up over 6 yrs... if you went from $1k/mo to $1k/day fairly quickly, say even in the first year, you would have had to do some explaining.
Thanks! It's probably still indexing you're bookmarks, we're working on it.
I'm not sure what you mean by sidestepping, and I'm also not sure what you are trying to say with that article. Blizzard sued and won based on current copyright law, which I'm arguing is FUBAR.

Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.
>"Why are they always worse? A very contrived example:"

Thank you for providing an example, but your example is not of someone violating the NAP. I was saying that if you violate the NAP the result is worse than if you don't. An example: Minimum wage laws increase unemployment, by preventing jobs that would otherwise exist from being created.

Your example of a company discriminating in pay is, unfortunately, consistent with the NAP. The NAP doesn't ensure people make the best choices, it just draws a line between moral and immoral. I believe that a company that discriminates in this way will do worse than companies that don't.

I'm not clear what the point you're making about optima is... I don't think that discrimination is optimal, even if it is moral.
All communism or socialism directly imply is that the means of production is not held privately, but by some kind of collective communal or social entity. This is often the state, but was often imagine to be some kind of community council or representative entity.

The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.
What if instead of suing Facebook, Yahoo proposed to Facebook a greater partnership and deeper integration of its products with the social layer?

What if Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News now had an advanced social layer that managed contacts autonomously (like GMail) and becomes official curator of news on a social level? (Not like, here's a lot of news, and then a commentary section. I'm talking a brief abstract with link of rest of article and just a ton of commentary)

That would actually make me consider leaving GMail (Really). And for once I would give a dang about the things being posted in my feed, rather than filtering out the majority of my contacts and likes.
"I told her that the money generated by the pre-orders taken through the web site effectively pays for the production and distribution of the book [...]".

Same post as most of the time. Someone takes money through Paypal for a product that does not (yet) exist, without reading Paypals terms, then money gets frozen, then people start to cry.

PayPal Acceptable Use Policy:
"(d) are for the sale of certain items before the seller has control or possession of the item [...] collecting donations as a charity or non-profit organization"

Paypal terms (and here my English might not be good enough):
"Initiation of transactions considered to be cash advances or assisting in cash advances; [...] and listing items for sale that have a delayed delivery date of 20 days or more after the transaction list."

I also found that interesting: "Use of an anonymizing proxy;"
how did we ever manage to transition from MS-DOS to Windows in the first place? I tried Windows 3.1 for the first time yesterday and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get to the command line. I don't see how I can be productive after the first 30 seconds. WINDOWS FAIL!
After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?
Tattooed? Sorry, but this comes across as a rant.
> You purchase a copy of Open Genera for the DEC Alpha for $5000 from David Schmidt.

LOL. Great, anyone got a spare Alpha lying around?

> This Wikipedia entry does a good job at explaining the impact this part of history had on RMS

I'm looking at this line: "Unfortunately this openness would later lead to accusations of intellectual property theft."

That doesn't really capture the acrimony iirc. I was just a youngin' at the time, but I remember overhearing rms get a phone call; I believe it was from someone at the Symbolics legal team. They were trying to explain to him how he had violated something-or-another because he built some LISP feature from scratch.

They went round in circles for a while, finally rms tired of the conversation and ended it. It was a very bizarre conversation for an academic environment like the AI Lab.
Introducing The Entrepreneurial Hackers Group
I am starting a company. I am 27 and I have no idea what I am doing.

Does that sound like you? Well its happening to me, and I need and want help. I want to know the right answers to things and I want to know them now instead of later, well because I am in the process of starting my company.

So what did I do? I created a Google group. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/the-entrepreneurial-hackers

This group has been done plenty of times before, but only in select locations around the globe, that are local to that city. Here is the solution. This one will not be local. It will be world wide. I am tired of trying to rely on my questions being answered on Hacker News and Pleas for help. I want real solutions and answers to my problems.

I did this because YC does it, so why not? Did you know YC has a network of people they could ask on their own group and within minutes, have it answered? I want the same thing. Im tired of this exclusivity, and I want to fix it now.

So here it is. Go ahead, ask the first question. Its up to you to see this place grow. We as entrepreneurial hackers don't have anything yet like this that isn't open to the general public. So here is my first attempt.

My 10 cents.
I know it's Microsoft, but why are they using Windows Media for web video in 2012? I don't want to install Flip4Mac just to watch the demo.
You're mixing patent ("idea") with copyright ("property"), but perhaps that's not a bad thing. I don't think copyright is hopeless (as pg implies), but I do think patents are fundamentally broken. So bear with me:

The copyright debate should be reframed in the context of expanding the notion of Fair Use. The definition of "property" isn't shifting, but people's behavior in regards to what they perceive to be Fair Use of property most certainly is. When a fan posts ("NO COPYRIGHT INTENDED") in the description of an infringing NASCAR clip on YouTube, that's what he's trying to say. It has nothing to do with piracy or property.

Likewise, there's no such thing as Fair Use for patents. But some reasoned debate there is likely to achieve change far more quickly than any attempt to blow up the patent system.
Yes, see the debable with the JooJoo successor tablet where preorders were not fulfilled.
I like this essay for using a brilliant analogy to illustrate a hard problem. Despite painting such a pretty picture, though, it winds up not really addressing any of the issues it brings up.

What the essay proposes is the replacement of one nebulous standard ("property") with a few others: "not warping society," "when it works," and "common sense".

From the point of view of PG or anybody else in the Valley, what the AA's are doing may feel like forcing everybody to breathe through tubes. And this essay will easily appeal to anybody else that has grown up with the internet, simply for eliciting such a colorful depiction of our emotions when confronted with end-user-hostile DRM and bills like SOPA.

From the point of view of a media conglomerate, "warping" society is sort of their M.O., although they might more comfortably describe this as "advertising" and "developing consumer loyalty". It isn't common sense that a media company shouldn't change society to make money, because they've been doing this since radio and movies and television were invented. This goes double for new media and the internet. For instance, isn't Facebook undeniably trying to change people's expectations on what personal information they should be sharing with the world?

So all that's left is the essay telling us what we already know: that technology is making certain kinds of property irrelevant, and society needs to adapt to this change. How, and when, and what we should actually be doing, are all left as an exercise for the reader.
Also consider the paradox that business software is often more freely available than personal software. To use almost anything from Oracle, I can just download it myself! But to use Netflix there's all this DRM stuff that gets in the way. Why? Because Oracle can sue businesses that illegally use their software--anti-piracy is enforced.

It would be so much better for society if I could use quality personal software on my personal information. If I could freely redistribute media, make mixes to distribute amongst friends, mash stuff up and make original art without having to pirate or crack DRM...

It's funny, because you first say "Business software is cool because it isn't controlled by DRM, which is because piracy is minimal". Then you say, "I wish more software was like business software, so I could pirate it more easily".
Except that Kantianism is by no means the only form of deontology, and in fact has nothing to do with any of this.

I do _not_ mean deontological in a derogatory sense. I mean it descriptively in contrast to consequentialism.

Edit: To quote your own source, "The non-aggression principle, also known as the non-aggression axiom and zero aggression principle, is an ethical stance which states that any initiation of force is illicit and contrary to natural law. It is the basic moral axiom of deontological libertarianism, most upheld by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Non-aggre...
what about copyright on ebooks? how would that work since a book can be published in both a digital and a physical format?
Yes, do that. The court will dismiss your case as you did not read the Paypal terms and user agreements.
A better way to program