skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are there any decent alternatives to Paypal btw?
Congrats Posterous! IMO, this is one of the best teams around and Twitter will be lucky to have them on board.
This makes it easy to find scientific research for those who are specifically looking for it. I'm not very experienced with kickstarter, but I cannot find a "science" category in it. And searching for it will find lots of unrelated stuff. With petridish, by just visiting the website you'll find only scientific relevant projects.

There's plenty of people who believe are taxes are not being properly distributed. Who believe we should put a much bigger enphasis on science. With an easy way to direct people to crowd funded scientific projects. You open the possibility for us to choose to do justice with our own hands. You can take a small amount of money and reserve it to invest in science every month. Just as if it were a tax for science that you're doing out of your own will. It would be very hard to do that on kickstarter because you have to sift through all the entertainment stuff the something, petridish makes this simple.

A few years ago I never imagined that I would help fund scientists to find an exomoon, but now I just did :)
Re edit #2, that exact reasoning was applied by Lord Mansfield in the famous 1772 ruling in Somersett's case[2] that slavery was never legal under English common law:

"The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it's so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law."

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somersett%27s_Case
Images and <canvas> and <embed> use actual pixels. It's hard to make things look right when you don't have the same unit in CSS.
Alright, that figures. I am just out of touch with that product area.
Maybe this is a stupid comment, but I always use my middle-mouse button (wheel) which opens a link in a new tab. Why wouldn't that be the solution, instead of an extension?
From their acquisition FAQ: "We’ll give you ample notice before any changes to the service and we’ll share clear instructions about how to move your content to other services. In the meantime, your Spaces will remain up and running without disruption."

Sounds like posterous is not long for this world. This is a bummer, I really like posterous.
For 99% of the people out there UI consistency is a non-issue, they care more about being able to do-X/run-X than having every app look the same.
Twitter has acquired Posterous
ClojureScript is precisely a Clojure-in-Clojure implementation. All the AST analysis and code generation is done by Clojure, not by antlr et al.
I just follow the rule: no ad-based apps, ever.

If I can't buy it or get it free without ads, it doesn't go on the iPad (I test with my iPhone if I'm unsure), and thus my kid isn't exposed to it (device is locked down tight to prevent purchases/etc, and I sync the apps on there after they've been reviewed by me).
If you live in a tech-heavy area, you could probably setup (or join) a Toastmaster's chapter that was comfortable and interested in technical speech.

The typical meeting is:
- brief welcome / introductions
- Table Topics - a 20-30 minute activity, where one individual asks questions of various group members who must respond with a brief 1-2 minute speech
- Three planned speeches by three speakers
- Three spoken evaluations of the three planned speeches
- Some closing formalities.

It's a good, supportive way to get some experience.
Whoa there. People, especially children, die every day because they can't afford food, clean water, or vital medical care [1]. So, are all of those suddenly communal property in your world? Who gets to decide how much of each of those resources each person deserves? Saying a commodity is "invalid" just because children are dying from not having it quickly leads to absurd situations like making organs communal property. What should be communal vs privately owned is contested every day at every level of government--this is a complex issue with no simple standards that can be universally applied.

[1] http://www.globalissues.org/article/715/today-21000-children...
Apologies for the way, way off topic post, but we'll be announcing pricing soon. Hopefully in a couple of days, and we'll be sure to 'tell HN' when we do. It's likely to be between $30/month and $200/month depending on volume.

Yeah, shameless linkbait. Sorry. :)
From my experience with a couple health related start-ups, I would suggest that the lack of good health apps has much more to do with the current state of the health care system, and less with entrepreneurs familiarity with healthcare. The main problems that make innovation difficult are:

1) Government regulations - healthcare is and has been an important political issue, and because of this there is a mountain of legislation that must be accounted for when operating in the field.

2) Healthcare bureaucracy - The interlocking relationships and ecosystem of healthcare from Patients to Doctors to Hospitals to Insurance Companies to Government is even difficult for insiders to navigate.

3) Fear of liability/litigation - Healthcare is a scary place for "bleeding" edge technology, and few institutions are willing to be operating there.
I'm all for it on one solitary condition; no taxation without representation. All brick and mortar retailers must carry all the costs for my ebooks to be sold as real books in their stores, including a small inventory in all their stores ensuring that the hardcopy is always available for any customer to buy at any time.

I think it's entirely fair. If publishers and book stores want to be paid by ebook consumers, then the consumers should have a reasonable expectation for access to any and all hardcopy versions of any ebook they could otherwise buy from a major reputable ebook retailer (AKA amazon) and have no expectation to wait for a copy to be mail-ordered in.
Unfortunately, traditional identity 'theft' is automatically noticeable when someone apply for a loan / get's a credit report / receives a bill for services rendered to someone else. What your describing is closer to someone using your hair style / an Elvis impersonator walking around and generally those on not considered a crime. Your credit score is a finite resource your haircut is not.
And that principle differs irreconcilably in NAP and Kantianism, so using "deontology" here is not helpful.
tl;dr

Yahoo is a social network. Facebook did not get there first.
I'm also not seeing the pricing in Chrome 17 on Windows 7.
Which is absurd, because antialiasing exists for that very reason. I should be able to render a single-pixel-thick vertical line between two columns of display pixels, and get two columns of display pixels at 50% (apparent) brightness. Subpixel rendering would be even better.
Tumblr "won" the space.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tumblr_reels_in_big_tra...

WordPress.com figured out how to monetize with VIP hosting/support.

Not to cheapen the work done but sometimes it's just how the cookies crumble.
The line immediately before that in the blog is "Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption."

Sounds more like they're answering a potentially frequently answered question, not hinting that they'll be shutting the service.
>...it's not French you need to learn, it's Canadian French. It's not Spanish you need to learn, it's...

Is that level necessary? It's not as if a Qubequois would _not_ understand Standard French, or that a Cuban would not understand standard Spanish/Castillian. At least, I would hope it's not like that. It would be as if we'd need some translation to understand British English (coming from NAm). There is a bit getting used to an accent and some lexicon, but nothing that isn't overcome within a few interactions (with some exceptions).
> I also learned a tremendous amount about an important but obscure part of the history of computing, a history that I think is actually a vision of what our future is.

Could you expand on that as well?
Upvoted CodeMage. Also,

"Try remembering when you heard a special song for the first time. You won’t be able to, but you’ll sure remember the circumstances—the point being that the art is essential for technology innovation. You won’t be able to, but you’ll sure remember the circumstances—the point being that the art is essential for technology innovation"

First, I don't even slightly understand the inference in the last sentence. Second, don't the circumstances include the time?
I bet Garry Tan could write a book about all this. A book that every startup should probably read.
You're trying to sidestep rather than confront the issue.

s/google/some company that runs on AWS

Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...
Not only is the definition of pixel unexpected, but 1in is now defined to be 96px in CSS 2.1, because this was the default in Windows for so many years. In retrospect, given whole page zoom from Opera and high-resolution displays from Apple, probably CSS shouldn't have had units named "in" and "px" at all but instead should have had a single unit like SVG.
I'm 29. The first used Genera a few years ago.

The "Help" button the Symbolics machines blew me away. I've used software with great built-in help. It's impressive to see it system-wide.

Another thing that I still find really impressive is how (aside from the bootloader) all of Genera is written in Lisp and can be edited, live, while the system is running.

A lot of the things that I see people doing with JavaScript feel very familiar. It's exciting to see how the things that people are doing with JavaScript are approaching the capabilities of Genera, but in a way that will be much more accessible to the "kids these days".
Posterous has been acquired by Twitter
Give it some time, touch is only a few years old. Dragging definitely needs to be improved, no question.

I don't need to take the eyes of the screen, but maybe I am not the everage user. If you take a look at how less tech oriented people use a PC, a touch interface would definitely be a plus, though. Its like stylus against finger.
My apologies, please let me know how it should be done? You're right, though, all of my other technical knowledge has become null and void because I goofed this part up.
The great thing about the internet is you don't need a passport...
I think you have to be more specific with your question. If you are you dealing with international funds, or you are outside the US, I don't think there is. Maybe Google checkout?

But I know the answer to the question "Is there anyone else who can match PayPal feature for feature?" The answer is a clear and resounding no.

But Sweet Moses, I wish there was!
1. You don't need a compute to use an iPad anymore.

2. It doesn't matter if it's apples-to-oranges as far as touch vs. mouse/keyboard - the key issue here is how understandable the UI is. Windows 7, if you know how to use a mouse and a keyboard, is completely understandable. Windows 8 makes absolutely no sense.
A big part of the problem is that fraud prevention is HARD.

Worse, it's prone to expensive scaling laws, and more so if you want to catch edge cases, and much more so if avoiding false positives is critical.

Any PayPal successor which is successful enough to become an interesting target for fraud will have to deal with exactly the same problems, possibly causing service to break down in similar (or equally problematic) ways.
>True. But that's saying the future is the past? That's not so much transformation, as devolution. I was trying to think how they would transform into the future, not "can they survive by looking back".

Do you have a reason for not looking back? I don't find platitudes such as "devolution" to be in any way compelling to discount going to what worked.

>Live performances, I think, would create a strange situation where the listening was scheduled to the artist's performance, rather than being on my (on-demand) schedule. Even if I could schedule it to fit into my time, what about someone else in a different time zone. What woud I do about curating songs into a moody sequence?

I did not intend to say that music recordings would disappear. Only that the revenue stream would shift from selling recordings to live performances. A more easily enforcible way to make money without imposing draconian changes to law to force payments out of citizens.

>My take on the musical profession, before the advent of recordings was that it was more a matter of survival, for most musicians --even good ones. That is to say, they barely survived on their musical income.

This is actually how most of humanity currently exists. The artists who sell recordings are, again, an aberration. Think Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, or Jimi Hendrix still making money decades after any work stopped. I think it is reasonable to think performers move from a career of capital to one of labor. Actually the inverse. I find it unreasonable for laws to change to coddle the music industry by letting them create ethereal capital rather than work by actually performing music.

>That's not unlike lots of amateur musicians, but the difference is there was no "up" unless you were a virtuoso performing for a royal, or something similar. I would like for musicians to still be able to make a decent living from their art. Not necessarily millionaires (alto not against that).

I don't see why you think performing is a way in which musicians can't make a decent living.
I like this post and most of your posts. You have full freedom to spend your time in whatever way you want. That being said: I don't understand why you feel the need to respond to a silly analogy that someone wrote 429 days ago in a comment responding to a comment of yours. I doubt you are reaching anyone that would agree with this analogy and if you were, I doubt you would convince them of their silliness. The analogy makes no sense whatsoever (at least, it is completely incomprehensible to me and I don't understand how anyone could come up with it) and the clueless are usually so unconsciously incompetent they wouldn't understand your retort if it was covered in chocolate sprinkles. I feel I've been cheated out of a more insightful post by this 'oslic'.
Interesting. I checked their guess of keywords against one of my apps. They guessed 13 keywords for my app. 5 of their guesses are most assuredly not in our keyword list.

However, of the remaining 8, 5 of them are pretty general keywords (that most of our competitors use.)

But the really interesting thing is, three of our keywords that were guessed are ones we consider "proprietary" as they relate to unique features of our app, that our competitors are not using.

That's a pretty impressive result. You got some that I think no human would likely figure out. But you also had some guesses that are way off the mark.

Very interesting!
It's not that they need to understand me (which I doubt they would have a problem with), it's that I need to be able to understand them. If I'm introductory in a language, all I'm really going to be doing is listening for keywords and piecing the meaning together with a small amount of grammar knowledge. That doesn't work when their words are different or sound different than what my brain is looking for.

Also, there are some people in the world who will pretend they don't understand you if you don't speak their language perfectly (looking at you, Finland!)
Bitcoin is the final solution to all your payment problems. It just takes some 10-20 years to develop the necessary services etc. around it.
Good to know. Will look forward to it.

I also see you've been firefighting today. Hope it's all been a learning experience, and mostly positive :)
First off, and I write as somebody who is about to walk to a bookstore, No.

Second, trust me, Amazon is about as shy as John Rockefeller when it comes to squeezing suppliers.
I'm a hacker by nature and have been bettering myself through Toastmasters for years. I didn't find the comment dismissive. Public speaking is a skill that takes a lot of effort to develop and maintain. I agree it's impressive when someone who spends lots of time hacking (and communicating 1:1) can also deliver an effective speech in front of a crowd, even if that speech has flaws.
Facebook is the defacto. About.me along with its slew of clones are the long tail.

Think about it... certain demographics around the world all recognize the Facebook logo. Certain demographics will recognize the utility of a Facebook profile. Certain demographics will accept your Facebook login to exchange for access.

Month by month that legitimacy will only grow.

Your "hood passes" are different.

Who's the custodian of how long you've been on Reddit? How much karma you've gotten on Hacker News? How much influence you have on Twitter? How many followers you have on Tumblr?

Some roll their own with their own domain name while most others end up using About.me.

oAuth has a lot of your data too, maybe it's a matter of timing before someone takes that, make it into a legit passport service and sell it Google. Or Microsoft.
> Why should our tax dollars fund that legal framework? What's in it for the rest of us?

Isn't it contradictory to want to copy what a content creator produces and then deny that the content itself has value?

Which is it, does the thing have value that makes others want to copy it so it's worth respecting that content as property of the creator, or is it valueless and there's no need to copy it in the first place?

You can't really have it both ways. If the content is worth copying then it obviously has value so it's worth it for society to protect that value. Not protecting that value means dis-incentivizing content creators.

What is that value? Well, like with everything else, that's a negotiation between the buyer and the seller. For mass-market products, that means that the seller sets a price and the buyer makes a purchase or no-purchase decision based upon the price and the perceived value of the thing being purchased.

Once again, we're talking mostly about entertainment content here.

In weighing the societal benefit of the content creator vs the pirate who wants to have a system that would deprive that content creator of any means of earning money from his work -- guess to which party society will probably always attach more value.

So as a person who funds creation of content that I enjoy, I have to ask you: Why should my tax dollars fund your legal framework?
So I got halfway through reading the XKCD cartoon but got distracted by the infinite grid problem, caught myself, and managed to finish reading the cartoon before going off to google the solution to the infinite grid problem. It was some time later before I cam back and realised I hadn't actually read the blog post. Oh the irony!
I tried to contact him to ask that exact question. He didn't answer my email.

I've thought of just calling him. But I'm intimidated of him to be honest. He wrote the webserver that ran whitehouse.gov during the Clinton administration, I can barely program in Lisp.
This simply means that Twitter will fill its own void of 140 characters and above space. I think it's a win-win for everyone. Without more-than-140-characters, the Twitter remains simply the link sharing platform. With a blogging service attached to its hip, they (Twitter) can compete with FB and Google Plus.
This is a bit odd to me as an acquisition. It's unlikely to be a talent acquisition given the userbase/brand of posterous, but the two product doesn't seem to mesh at all IMO. Does anyone have a theory as to what's the synergy behind these two companies that could justify an acquisition?
The FAQ was reallly difficult to gauge the overall direction that Posterous is headed.

I use Posterous for my personal and startup blogs.

Reading the Posterous FAQ, they barely use any "exciting" colloquialisms. Everything is cast in a shadow of uncertainty. In fact, I would probably go far as saying this is one of the worst acquisition FAQ's I've read.
I'm very pleased for the Posterous team, but you haven't truely given any insight as to where you plan to be in 6 months from now.

Some startups are just "aqhirisations", and from a cynical reading this sounds all too familiar.

I could be wrong, and perhaps the author of that article just never read Shakespeare, because right now I can see the clouds overhead.
The Way of Node
Nice to see chapter 4 on setting up a dev environment early on, many clojure tutorials (and even a book I have) leave this out, or until the end. Working within a project is how you'll write real-world code so you might as well start with it.
Really? So if I used Visa or Amex and I got a sudden run of orders they would suspend my account? I hardly think so!
Begin countdown until shutdown...
how much do you guess they were acquired for?
No, the regulatory hurdles are too high. We're working on it.

http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716056
The last act of a dying company.
TED offers channel and searches for best teachers
I'm not so sure if young people believe in the idea more than they just want to work in a start-up because the media (and HN) have been painting the negative picture of BigCo/establishment and positive, bright, and exciting pictures of start-up.

It's almost as if people will get jeered/booed for working in establish companies.

What do people love? Building software? you can do that anywhere though, doesn't have to be in a start-up. I think people tend to be choosy these days: they want to work in a company that is young, hip, quirky office layout/design, get a lot of attention, and use cutting edge (sometime unproven) technology.

Don't forget that there are plenty people out there that build software on their free-time (i.e.: side projects).

I'm having a little bit difficulty to understand of what you can learn in a short amount of time that you can't outside start-up. If the start-up moves too fast, you're bound to cut some corner, you're bound not to use the best-practices, you're bound to "hacked it up". I think we all have been exposed with the Mythical Man-Month book that explains some of the properties of software.

And if it moves in an even faster speed, I'm not sure how you can learn so much more as you'll get tired and just go to sleep after work.

Yes, you can definitely learn a lot from failures, assuming you know what went wrong. Not a lot of people know what went wrong though. Some people would stick it to "bad luck" as oppose to "we don't have enough skill to pull it off".

There's some truth to the old wisdom of learning from failures, I'm not dismissing any of it. There's that difference between actually experiencing the failure and learning from other people's failure. Sometimes it instils discipline and better work ethic.
But I think you can take a 'natural law' perspective to make a reasonable case for distinguishing copyrights/patents/trademarks from the traditional notion of property. I attempted that argument in an old HN thread[1], based on the distinction between conventions that arise 'naturally' from an emergent social context, such as traditional physical property, and those that require top-down design in the form of legislative action. I think one could regard physical property as belonging to the former category and IP as belonging to the second.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284636
Show HN: We made an awesome way to browse and search your Chrome bookmarks.
I get what you're trying to say but I disagree that you can conclude that from this story.

Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and many others who are "getting profit from doing anything useful" sue each other every other month.