skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you give the canceller the 3 phone numbers of the other 3 people? I'm not sure if I'd want my number to be given away...

Or do you use another number that temporarily redirects/connects them to the other people anonymously? If so, I'm curious to know how you do that.
It is not a children's toy anymore than a laptop computer is a kid's toy. The software on a machine doesn't change the delicacy of the hardware. People who want rock solid, well-tested toys for children are better off buying a LeapPad than handing their 4 year-old a $500 iphone or iPad.
Who's going to help negotiate your release from some 3rd world prison on trumped-up charges, and with what leverage? And who's going to fight your extradition to some random country whose laws some judge deems your service to be infringing. Sometimes having a real country behind you can be a good thing.
If this is ever a customer objection that actually prevents a deal, the prospect probably just does not want your service that badly and is reaching for an excuse to not sign.
A Molecule That Can Unfold To A Football Field Could Make H Cars Take Off
Sure (some) startups have workable business models. Even posterous had a workable business model (if they had been able to beat tumblr). The problem for the companies getting acqui-hired isn't (generally) a lack of business model. It's a failure to succeed in executing on that model so acqui-hire is all they have left.
Example Moon in px: https://gist.github.com/2025080
Darpa Director Bolts Pentagon for Google
>are going to these customer-service-destroying efforts at fraud prevention because the regulatory environment forces them to do so.

I'm pretty sure there's no fraud prevention regulation that requires you to stonewall your customers.
This is very much in line with what Alan Kay says about current chip architectures compared to what was available when he was coming up in the field. He often talks about the Burroughs machines and how much more advanced they were compared to our current CPUs and laments that for all the gains that Moore has given us, we have lost incredible amounts of speed via our architectures being aimed solely at C.

One anecdote that he likes to use is to compare the speed of Smalltalk running on the Xerox Alto computer with Smalltalk running on a current CPU that is 50,000x faster than the Alto. He notes that benchmarks run in both systems are only 50x faster, claiming that this means we've lost a factor of 1000x in efficiency just on the basis of using inferior architectures (at least inferior if your target language isn't C).

Part of me is thankful for the relentless push of x86 and the speed gains realized, but another part of me really regrets that all of the crazy architectures from the 70's and 80's have been lost.
In fact, it is specifically due to Amazon Payments simple mechanism for getting a pre-authorized token that can later be captured that allows Kickstarter to run that business

(PayPal now supports this through PayPal X, but did not at the time that Kickstarter was being first released. Getting access to this API from PayPal requires more authorization than from Amazon, but the result is also more powerful: you can hold tokens with no expiration and seemingly no cap.)
محمد عبد الوهاب - Mohamed Abdel Wahab
This reminds me of a really funny image I saw recently. It depicted the perceived consequences of a status update against the "reality". At the top, Obama was presenting to a cheering crowd and just below, Tom Hanks sat marooned on an island screaming desperately at his inanimate volleyball. It's easy to feel like the master of the universe when the whole world is there to cheer for you through digitally mediated approval metrics. But people are not toys sitting idly to provide us a convenient hit of oxytocin when we need it. It's crucial to be reminded of that! Providing a number to call someone and apologize for bailing on them is a spark of genius. Using all this digital stuff should enrich interactions in meatspace, rather than allow us to decouple from it. Bravo!
> Pretty funny nonetheless, more people should add these little clauses in :D

No they shouldn't. To you it's cute. To anyone who's serious about using JSON it's an arbitrary field of use limitation that could be construed to mean anything. In other words, it makes the software unusable for Real Work (TM).

(Disclosure: I am not a lawyer.)
Employees are bound by contract. You don't need IP laws to prohibit them from sharing the code.
And to open a file under the cursor in a tab you can use:

<C-w>gF

I map it to F9 along with a :tabm to make the new tab the last one in the list:

nmap <F9> <C-W>gF:tabm<CR>

It's worth noting that if the filename has a colon followed by a line number on the end of it, your cursor will be placed on that line. E.g, <F9> with the cursor on the following:

~/.vimrc:40

Would open ~/.vimrc in a new tab, make it the last tab and place your cursor on line 40.

Grep and ack (and I'm sure other tools) use this line number format in their output when searching across multiple files. I often make use of this by piping the output of such a command into a new vim buffer:

grep -Hnri 'some string or other' * | vim -

Then I use vim to search, further filter and open the files in tabs with my <F9> mapping, jumping straight to the specific line that matched my original search.
Those are practical professions superceded by other professions/products/whatever that could do the same thing, better.

"Producers of information goods" is a far broader category, including authors, musicians, movie and software people; and one not superceded by something more practical, unless you consider twitter a good replacement for books.

And government protection to create a market is a fine idea - it's in the US constitution, for example. It just needs rebalancing.
It also has the profoundly sad impact of occupying entrepreneurs and investors who could be inventing job creation machines.
I'd be willing to bet that completely ignoring your customer is a business practice that goes above and beyond the T&C. Unless the T&C says "In the event we flag your account for fraud, we will not touch you with a ten foot pole..."

Again, the problem isn't the automated risk prevention system, the problem is the complete lack of customer service if/when it happens to you.
Books are not interactive

Kids books often are. Many of my daughters favorite books have lots of flaps and pull tabs that make things move. Opening the flap on the third thing and seeing the number '3' or guessing which item is in which box based only on the shape of the box and then opening the box to see if you where right is endless fun if you're into that sort of thing.
That is merely your distro trying to be cute. Ubuntu?
So far so good. Although could we get a more logical hierarchy? I would like to see my 'favourite' bookmarks at the top somehow.
Roundtable Recap: March 12 – Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships
Yep, it's definitely not their real a number. We built a simple Twilio app.
Right - but I am curious about how Stashmarks handles conflict resolution, if it does. I naively assume it simply de-dupes URLs, meaning unexpected things could happen with multiple Chromes that aren't running sync or have updates queued while working offline. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

(I also agree with the comment below that it's an edge case for most users, especially Chrome sync users.)
Jony Ive gives rare interview on the design process at Apple
It may be an imperfect analogy, but to call it "rude" seems like a stretch.
I don't really understand this. I'd rather have a 10h of actual fun game vs. hundreds (or thousands) of hours of meaningless grinding for tokens. I think I am exactly the opposite of what she thinks is the motivation of a game player.

I do like games with "completion mechanics", but not open ended token counters. But the only reason I'd play Borderlands is for the story -- it looks like a horrible game from a mechanics standpoint.
Yeah, that'd be Ubuntu... too lazy to use the other distros; and, I love apt.
I know girls that talk faster than they can think

Heh, I'm the other way around.
The notion that pre-orders are scary or generally disallowed has nothing to do with "scams": legitimate people just trying to get business done, who have established names or even good track records, don't always come through on these orders. It is not appropriate for those companies to be mitigating that risk using the credit from their merchant account; in this specific issue, PayPal can even get in trouble for allowing pre-orders to happen using their card providers.

As for Regretsy's continual lack of ability to get CS from PayPal, as someone who has often spent egregious amounts of time talking to PayPal, I honestly think Regretsy is doing something wrong. I also personally feel like PayPal should just ban them from using the service: they don't seem to understand how online payments work, and their reaction to normal procedures is to raise a public shit storm... it's just lame, and it shouldn't be getting play on HN.
Facebook's Old-School Business Model Laps Twitter
> This is the equivalent of the kid with the bat losing at a match of cricket, so he leaves, and now the other kids can't play. They generally aren't impressed. Note that if the kid had to leave because it was dinner time, or his parents were calling him, or he just broke his arm, the wouldn't be any drama. I suspect that many people feel that someone pulling code from an app store for ideological reasons is more like sulking than leaving because it was dinner time.

What if the kid leaving with the bat found out that the people who control the playground had imposed some rules that are not agreeable to him, and in his opinion are not favorable to the other kids at large?
The consumer perspective of Kickstarter is very important for Kickstarter's business model. Kickstarter isn't just a place for producers to go when they need funding- It's a place where consumers can go to purchase edgy gadgets and goods. Over half of my friends that know about Kickstarter view it specifically to find cool & new products to buy.

By creating a new startup that caters crowd-funding to science experiments, Petridish is capturing a whole new segment of consumers who are specifically looking to fund cool & new science experiments.
Sony BRAVIA XBR Review
Here is some low fidelity ascii money: http://www.retrojunkie.com/asciiart/money/bills.txt

Think of it as mp3 money.
> One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles.

How is that not a government?

> Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

> Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property.

This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

> Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves.

This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.
We call these "no-shows" and, fortunately our no-show rate is less than 0.2%. In other words, both groups show up more than 99.8% of the time.

This will likely be the topic of a future blog post...
Top 40 best free legal movies you can download right now
https://www.backupify.com might be close to what you want though they don't appear to support Path yet.
Ideas are fairly different than books, or movies, or Emacs, or MacOS X, though, aren't they?
Yeah I remember that post and it definitely doesn't apply for my family at large. The majority of them are happy as luddites. They are happy to be in their locked down and limited Apple post computer device that "just works".
So Yahoo is in such a bad condition, that it decided to turn into a patent troll?

R.I.P. Yahoo
Show HN: AnyPerk provides affordable employee perks to startups for free.
I certainly think that's a possibility but I think you're overstating how much they are rationalizing in your analysis.

There is certainly an extra lack of confidence in startups because of the "find a big exit!" culture and the growing trend for aqui-hiring.

As if it wasn't hard enough as a startup to attract customers, this perception is certainly not helping.
well, nothing tricky, really, but I think what Joel said about pointers ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... ) applies to callbacks (although the starting base would be the 20 students left behind after the pointers apocalypse)

"In first year computer science classes, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their PCs when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol’ time learning C or Pascal in college, until one day the professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don’t get it. They just don’t understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes Political Science majors, then they tell their friends that there weren’t enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that’s why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers"
Path actually did what you said, supposedly. Dave Morin reportedly paid the staff through some rough times, since then they came out of it better with a new product release. Their team is very experienced and doubt they'd do that kind of move.

Also as someone else said they've turned down very large offers.
What is the worst thing that can happen? I know they are called Lisp ninjas, but they are 40-50-60 year old guys with neck beards...
So if someone did get access to your source and data, by whatever means, it'd be fine to spread it at will?

And for that matter, why should there be information security laws if there's no intellectual property?
Ask HN: What blogging services support blogging via emailed markdown?
I've been using Posterous, and enjoying how simple it is to blog via markdown, submitting via email (and in emacs too.)

Near as I can tell, markdown is not supported by tumblr, blogger, or wordpress.com.

What are some posterous alternatives that support markdown, and posting via email?

Thanks!
Our 17 month old is similarly into imitation. Kids have fantastic imaginations. Our 17 month old couldn't care whether it is a phone or an old cardboard box that he is holding up to his ear. The advantage of a cardboard box is that it seamlessly transforms into a car or a ball on demand!
> 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.

How can we debate the necessity of the existence of government when we can't even decide what a government is?
It's extremely rare (see above), but when it does happen we do everything we can to make it up to the other group (free drinks, free Groupers, profuse apologies, etc.) and lay down the law on the other group (including removing them from the community).
No return on opened DVDs/Games usually.
For American protestors it would be better if Silicon Valley were located in an Arab country. Just like it is helpful for Arab protestors that Silicon Valley is located in America.
Assuming you are the same person who emailed me about it, sorry for any confusion. I wasn't trying to mislead anyone, the entry button clearly states "Enter Contest!".

As far the HelloBar that you mentioned, I have now changed to "win a year of dropbox pro".
In that case history really does repeat, rather than only rhyme.
>However, if I were to copy that book with a scanner and distribute it online for a cost of $0 it would be copyright infringement. Thus the words and ideas themselves must have some form of economic value. (Or at least perceived economic value.)

Percieved, perhaps, but keep in mind that copyright is nothing more than a government granted monopoly. There is no requirement that something have a certain value (or even positive value) for copyright to apply.

After all, just because I perceive my blog to be worth $1,000,000 doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot, even though it's copyrighted ;)
Hahaha! I love the "don't click the hook" image on your web site. Brilliant! Did you guys create that yourselves or is that some sort of plugin?
Not really. I'm using "ideas" here as a substitute for the term "intellectual property", which includes copyrights and patents. The term encompasses a range of abstractness, but how abstract an idea is doesn't change the fundamental lack of natural scarcity or the property of having more value when more widely disseminated.
So what would the right approach be, and who would be best to approach Twitter, to convince Twitter to open source the Posterous code?
It is very, very common to wait until just before an IPO to sue. The strategy is that the defendant will be more willing to settle just to get the lawsuit off the books before the IPO. It usually works against smaller companies.

Google was the recipient of borderline frivolous legal action just before the IPO, but Google didn't bite. In the case of Facebook, I don't expect anything to be resolved pre-IPO, as Facebook has the momentum to deflect nearly anything at this point.
> It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

A government can only exist when it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in most situations. How can that, where only one group can use violence without being punished for it, possibly fail to impose a hierarchy?
Vocal pauses are natural, and they happen. Our brains can handle them. Why is it even considered personal betterment to expend energy replacing them with whitespace?
> "It seems, as you say, that the only distinguishing feature is its size"

No. Well yes, but it's confusing to say so, the point is in the location of the government in the "pyramid" if you will, it's the "top dog". If government is not such as to allow competition and is willing to enforce such position, and it's reach is far and wide, the rest of the environment is doomed. In such an environment, there will be no competition for government-like institutions, and they will suck forever and ever.

That is to say, there is no hope in those institutions getting better if you don't have the environment fixed first.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with those institutions existing, since in a competitive environment they do not have the force to compel you. They may fool you with fashion and fads and reality distortions, but fundamentally they can not compel you with force. And that force to compel is something the government has and does use, in fact it asserts a monopoly on using such force.

If some government-like institution has such a force, you can dig down and see that the force is actually granted to it by the government. (this follows from the government's assertion of monopoly on such force)

Since most current governments allow some kind of limited competition, things do usually get a little better very very very slowly, speed depending mostly on the amount of competition allowed. Obviously culture has an effect on how bad it will get if the government's power is great etc. etc.

> "Now that works for most modern libertarians, but I think it would not work for Ayn Rand"

To me Ayn Rand is more like romance novels for libertarian leaning people. Her points are seductive but ultimately lack rigorous substance "in the real world", fun to read though (or watch the movies, or listen to, since there are some songs that have some quotes in the lyrics). So I don't really care if some argument would work on Ayn Rand or not. It is my understanding, from n = a small number, that similar positions are not rare. Very cautious attitude is also exercised towards other cult-ish stuff like stefbot.

> "More interesting are the libertarians who take a doctrinaire opposition to the government, but it really requires, as I said earlier, an anarcho-socialist vibe of ... those are already Initiation of Force in some fundamental sense"

To me, that has an anarcho-capitalist vibe, granted this is probably because of difference in social scenery. I do know that the anarcho-socialists have similar arguments, I'm mostly familiar only with Chomsky's. Btw. anarcho-capitalists are infuriating and interesting to talk to.

Wow that's a lot of text for a point that is so clear in my head. I hope it gives you a plausible explanation why some reject the government but not the government-like institutions.
Badges live examples are here: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html#badges
I agree with you but this is really a business issue not a startup issue.

Apple killed newton, clones, xserve and other products. I'm sure you can think of more.

Sun killed cobalt servers.

GM killed Oldsmobile, Pontiac etc.

Survival of the fittest. All the warm fuzzy folksy stuff (that you don't see in traditional business - you know things like a dog at the office or free food) means very little in the end. They will do what they need to do to survive.
I'm sure there are all kinds of models out there that could be played with using prizes as an exchange of value for leads.

Most people don't like it when they realize that while we are all human and there is merit to each personal connection.. we are also still just a number on someone's excel sheet when it comes to scale.
I guess Apple had a little different technique http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
I am bummed, I liked the Posterous interface pretty nicely.
What if your code gets "snuck out", and you don't know who did it. Should it still be free to copy and distribute at that point?
They were only referring to officially disliked tyrannies, not ours.
Is this something that you would see happening on a regular basis though? how often do you bookmark the same thing multiple times in different instances of Chrome where at least 1 is offline? I agree that this is a theoretical issue that these guys should deal with, but in all practicality I can't foresee this ever being an issue with a real life user...
Ha thanks!

We hand-rolled it with jQuery and a hook image from iStockPhoto (what can we say, we couldn't avoid the the easy fish pun), but if people are interested we could release it as a jQuery plug-in.
Loopt once had a 500m valuation, and then sold for 43m, one of these days... Why couldn't Path (or anyone) go down the same route?
A simple script to archive your tweets
As someone who grew up in the suburbs of Southern California, It's been my experience that 'like' it's used to introduce a paraphrase that includes non-verbal communication and/or tones that introduce not-so-subtle comments regarding the paraphrase without directly commenting nor limiting yourself with a direct quotation.

For example, I could say "kristianc was like, OMG it is NOT a pause or a tic, it is SoCal dialect!" in a sarcastic tone and roll my eyes.

edit: This form of communication doesn't translate well into digital form - email, texting, etc. - unless both people are familiar with each other's body language and the dialect to visualize (at a conscious or subconscious level) the meaning.