skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
0. You seem to have ignored "the more free and open an economy is." which recognizes both that there are degrees "more free and open" and that these are factors that help it go away. The south to some extent lacked them.

1. In the south, racism was going away. Maybe not as fast as people would like, but it was going away.

2. Much of the racism in the south was perpetrated by governments, not by businesses.

3. The south was, after the civil war, subjugated to the will of the north in a form of (probably racist) enslavement of the entire region. The avoiding of this subjugation is why many free blacks in the south fought on the side of the confederacy during the civil war. (while its notable that the north enslaved people via conscription to fight on their side in the civil war.)

At any rate, I wouldn't call the south after the civil war until the 1960s a completely free and open economy.

4. These authoritarian civil rights laws perpetuated racism, they didn't end it. In a way they codified racism by saying "black people can't compete on their own in the market place" which is a racist perspective.
There's a big difference between "Um... ah... we'll tell you before we delete everything" and "We've received assurances from Twitter that they intend to support the project for the foreseeable future", though.
Anarchism is not predicated on the lack of government. Anarchism only requires non-hierarchy. It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.
Why our schools lack technology education
Can't reply to the comment below. About "tattooed" word - this is usually called irony. And it is a common phrase about "remembering things", I don't see what's so bad about saying that.
According to the decision, Bayer must license the drug Nexavar, or sorafenib, to Natco Pharma, an Indian company. In exchange, Natco must pay Bayer a 6 percent royalty on its net sales and has to sell the drug for 8,800 rupees ($176) a month, about 3 percent of the 280,000 ($5866) rupees that Bayer charges for it in India. Natco’s drug is for use only in India, the decision said.

In 2011, India's GDP PPP per capita was $3,703 and actual per capita income was about $1100.

So the monthly cost of the Bayer drug was nearly twice the GDP PPP per capita and over five times the actual per capita income.
The Hidden Gems of Pivoting Your Startup
I edited much of that out of my original post... but let me respond. The point is that the solutions to piracy treat fair use as though it's just as illegitimate as piracy, with the paradox that you sometimes have to commit piracy to get fair use.
>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.

Nothing concrete. But here are my thoughts. I don't think artists nor people who enjoy music would be easily convinced of having to enjoy music the way people used to over a century ago. No time shifting (for listening); Relatively low income (for the artists). In other words the solution to the problem imposes greater problems (in my view) than it solves.

>I don't see why you think performing is a way in which musicians can't make a decent living.

Beside superbands, how would unknown artists develop a following without the groundswell usually provided by broadcast media? I'm sure Byonce, U2, Madonna, Springsteen and Bieber would keep doing well in a concert only economy. how would unknown bands develop that following if there is no way to sample them before going to a concert? It's not as if music is the only entertainment in town (as may have been the case 100+ years ago).
It's hard to keep posting when polite, helpful posts like this only gets you references to Pinker and Gladwell, but please do.
I'd love to talk with you more about this offline :)

I looked at your site and noticed you don't make your email address available (which I am sure is by design), so could you ping me at chris {{{at}}} chris.to ?
I could argue with you. But I've decided to raise the price of air and not do business with you.

--sole proprietor of MoonAir Inc.

(I counter reductio ad absurdum with reductionem aeris...)
they know their target audience: the 2006 Lara Croft model was from BG
http://www.itsvery.net/laracroft-karima-adebibe.html
That's a very different statement than saying someone's departure put you on the path to success. The way you originally stated it implied fairly heavily that the departed founder was a negative influence holding you back.
"you are now at the mercy of the customer service representative, who is asked to make “a judgment call.”

Wrong, the CSR never makes judgment. This is for services like Account Review. So you can yell at or sweet talk to the guy on the phone, it won't change much.

Anyway it's sad that PayPal shows almost no progress year after year to handle legitimate "small" business, especially when they cancel transactions of goods already delivered. But people need to READ THE TOS. We're talking about MONEY, being on a shiny Internet website does not change that fact.
JqMobi 1.0 released, pretty smooth HTML5 JS Library
Going even further, it is the stated position of most credit card companies that at the time of purchase you are only allowed to take out an "authorization" (hold) on the funds: you cannot "capture" (get) the money until you are pretty much just about to (within 24-48 hours) ship the product.
This is pretty cool. Does it work on safari?
Perhaps Twitter wants to own all things micro-blogging (that's the term Twitter's Chinese competitor uses), whatever that means.
To ease the logistics, perhaps someone could just send the RIAA/MPAA a torrent containing a lot of dollar bill images? I can think of no more fitting way in which to spread out the bandwidth costs.
Don't bother trying to load the MPAA's contact page if you reject their cookies. It just loops a reload. I'm not exactly surprised that they value tracking over usability.
Darpa wants on-demand satellite imagery for smartphones
that reminds me - I can't find the link now, but - someone had counted the vocalized pauses of college professors and averaged them by subject. They found that professors of math and hard sciences used the fewest, and that professors of philosophy used the most. Presumably, because, when there's less of a definitive answer to a question, you must work harder to come up with words to describe it.
Well, in the ordinary "enterprise", people put throughput first and could case less about latency... With disasterous effects on user experience.
Chinese online video rival merge, deal worth over $1 Billion
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think this is correct; the browser should scale everything. See http://joubert.posterous.com/crisp-html-5-canvas-text-on-mob... for example.
Looks cool, thought of doing something similar myself. Why don't you charge like pinbord?
Apple and Microsoft are notorious software patent aggressors who consider patent protection racket an acceptable "business practice". Google on the other hand tries to avoid anything of that sort, and uses patents only for defense against patent aggressors. At least Google used to up until latest Motorola acquisition which mixed their policy up. Didn't really look into what Samsung is doing in detail, but they usually just fight back (for example to Apple) as defense, and don't act as aggressors.

Yahoo didn't engage in software patent aggression before. So whatever the case, acting as a software patent aggressor shows deterioration of company ethics and usually signals that they can't compete on merit.
sorry, it's Chrome only atm. But if enough people ask for it, we'll build a Safari extension.
I'd like to also recommend Hazlitt's book: it is an extremely well-written exploration of commonly-held (even today) economic fallacies. Hazlitt's display of circumspection alone is worth the read.
> a pet child of Ronald Reagan in the cold war

Funny side note: In the AI Lab, the names of the Symbolics machines started as dead rock stars. (Sinatra too, I think.) After they ran out of those, dead movie stars were used for names. RR was not too popular in those parts (he was president at the time), so he was one of the machine names too.

It was all fun and games until some D/ARPA reviewers walked through the machine room and put it together.
> First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Simple: anarchism refers to the belief that governments are unnecessary and/or unjustified; socialism refers to the opinion that the means of production ought not to be owned by private individuals or entities.

> 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.

Depends who you ask! These words all have different meanings across societies and cultures. I don't think these ideologies can be collapsed into points or regions along a spectrum.
The Mythical Version 1.0
I know girls that talk faster than they can think so every third word is "like". In this case it's not a pause but more of a tick. Sometimes I am in awe of the content density. They can talk for hours and say absolutely nothing.
this.
At first glance I assumed "talent acquisition" but I was only thinking today (uncanny timing) that twitter really needs more content distribution channels to gain more mainstream usage. This together with the Summify acquisition point to the possibility that twitter is going to change it's content distribution model from pure streams of content to more curated, blog style channels.
I think there's huge potential in this. Let's see what happens.
Kickstarter seems to have interestingly set itself up as a workable intermediary for that: you can set up a Kickstarter that is basically a glorified way of taking preorders, people can pay for them via Paypal, and generally Paypal doesn't cause trouble in those cases.
Any idea when?
Ask HN: How desired is working at Apple?
I'm a CS student looking for full-time employment (as a software developer) for after I graduate in May.

I'm strongly considering Apple. A couple of pieces have shown up over the past few weeks about the culture of privacy at Apple, and that's left me a little concerned. When people talk about large companies ideal for developers in the valley, I usually hear Google/Facebook/Twitter, and I'm wondering why I don't usually hear Apple on that list.

I'd really like to get a sense of some of the following from current/former employees or just people in Silicon Valley that have heard stories:

- is Apple desired more or less than Google/Facebook/Twitter?

- how selective is Apple compared to Google/Facebook/Twitter? i.e., is getting a job at Apple considered a big deal in the tech industry, or do people consider Google harder to get into?
Equity is not a sure thing, by any means, but it's worth something. And that something means that on average startups will pay less salary than big companies.
I believe that Paypal (and judging by the comments above: banking institutions and credit card companies) are going to these customer-service-destroying efforts at fraud prevention because the regulatory environment forces them to do so.

If so, lets put aside the question of whether it is "right" to put the responsibility of service abuse on the service provider, but instead ask the question: is any of this really in our best interests? It seems to me that a consumer population would be better served by not being artificially protected and thus completely off-guard when they do get caught in a scam. Any payment processed online should be done with the same amount of wariness and forethought that a purchase at a brick-and-mortar retailer would be.

Now, it's possible that I'm wrong here and Paypal is actually doing all of this as some sort of verification service to provide a fraud-free environment for payers (i.e. paying with paypal will never be a scam). If that's the case , then this is a really ineffective way of going about it. It seems like a great deal more upfront investigation and analysis would be appropriate. I would take some of the peer-to-peer lending services as a model.
I don't buy it. I've done suspicious transaction monitoring for a very long time, and no, it's not that hard.

Certainly not hard enough to prevent your CS people from even giving out a phone number to call for support. Most certainly not hard enough to not be able to address quickly.

Financial transaction analysis is an old science. Experienced people are hard to find, but not exceedingly hard. Systems already exist to mine the hell out of data to tell the scammers apart form the genuine people. An of course, you can build your own system and whatever analysis you want.

And how big do you have to be to be able to afford this? Not large at all. I think you overestimate the difficulty of catching bad guys.

You should note that the recurring complaint is NOT "PayPal froze my funds". The complaint is "PayPal froze my funds and then refused to communicate at all with me". This points to incompetence and lack of consideration much more so than "This shit's hard, yo!"

So, no, financial transaction analysis is not hard enough to screw over your customers.
30 Comments Environment Why gas prices aren’t likely to decide the 2012 election
Yup, that one.

I'm not saying it was a hard problem to diagnose - I mean, the file was right there in the home directory.

Figuring out how to turn it off, by the way, was a little more involved.
With an established account, it is a non-issue because they have the chargeback history. New accounts are monitored differently because of the potential for abuse. Had your chargebacks spiked, your merchant bank likely would have withheld funds.
I don't think the dichotomy is as extreme as you make it out to be. What will likely happen, and what is already happening in Apple world, is a merging of elements between the pointer model and the touch model. A touch-oriented UI can work just fine with a touch pad, as OS X Lion hints at. Meanwhile, you can buy a key board for your tablet, and for typing up documents while out and about, that works just fine.

What is really likely to go the way of the dodo, at least in the office productivity area, are mice. There is pretty much no good reason for mouse-oriented UI's these days.
Simple Rule: You can't take pre-orders (be it for physical products or events) via any kind of credit-card payment system without pre-agreement with your credit card processors.

If you fail to deliver the product then whoever processed the credit card orders is going to be on the hook for payments when the consumers run chargebacks. Obviously they don't want this risk.

So if you want to do this you need to come to an arrangement with your credit card company before-hand (for example letting them hold onto all the cash until you've delivered the goods).
Believe it or not I wrote the first draft of an essay about this yesterday. (I went on a one-day trip to NYC and wrote the first draft of one in each direction.) So stay tuned.
I'm afraid this boat has long sailed. The "pixel" term is in the CSS 2.1 Spec. It's set in stone.

Personally I've made peace with it. I say either "CSS pixels" or "device pixels", depending on what I want to express.

And although the high resolution screens have only made the difference between the two more visible, it was there since Opera featured full pages zoom many years ago, and when Mobile Safari introduced the "viewport" meta-tag in 2007.
Fraud is hard especially for a small eCommerce store because of chargebacks. Unlike a brick and mortar store who can show the credit card association physical receipts with signatures, a video recording of a customer purchasing an item from a store, or ask a customer for an ID, online merchants can only show shipping receipts. These are often not enough. Chargeback policies are skewed towards buyers. The funny part is that this is only mostly true in the US, Canada, and Europe. If you're a credit card owner from another country (especially in Asia) it is very difficult to file for a chargeback.
I have also faced this type of problem with pay pal before.I don't know why they are repeatedly doing this with their costumers.Its totally injustice.
Or 5) Just give them money, like I do with my local college radio station every year.
Hi weavejester. Thanks for the feedback!

Regarding Emacs, yes, I guess I'm a bit behind the cutting edge. I'll probably revisit the section of the Guide once I make the upgrade to Emacs 24. Meantime though, I don't think the instructions are too onerous, and --- as I mention at the top --- if you've already got a favorite editor, you safely skip the whole section.

Re. the "Other Libraries" vs. "Finding the Libraries you Want", thanks for pointing that out. I removed some duplicated info and feels better now.

Re. `lein deps`, it could've been clearer, so I made it so. Thanks.

Re. group-id, thanks for pointing that out. I'll get that clarified soon.

Re. lein-clojars, I like the instructions as is, because I think it will give new users a more concrete feel of what's going on when they upload packages to Clojars.
SOMEBODY wants to get acquired! ;-
Why not check the "Best Workplace" list?
Maybe I'm off my rocker here, but this sounds like "suing your way into being acquired".

Is Facebook buying Yahoo not something Yahoo probably wants at this point?

Yes, I'm sure there's lots of reasons this might be a bad match- I didn't say I thought yahoo thought it was a good match. Yahoo might be really expensive (even today) for FB to buy. But it just smells that way to me.
I've been using Windows for many, many years now. Never encountered anything like it.

In addition, I don't think it's a random bug. Having a standard error file that programs are supposed to write to, without any sort of automatic control by the user or (better) the OS is not 'being ready for prime time'
Release Histories for all Major Browsers
Does anyone else see this as a YC/VC-success but a business-failure? I'd be far more impressed if they grew Posterous into a profitable company. And so this team is moving from one unprofitable company to another. Disappointing :(
Ex-Yahoo here as well. I think most of the people who grew tired of this sort of flailing have already left.
> That said, Jefferson was one of the framers of the Constitution

Nitpick: he wasn't. Jefferson was in France during the constitutional convention.
What ASP.Net MVC Developers Can Learn From GitHub’s Security Woes
In a small way, every talent acquisition poisons the well for future, bootstrapped startups.

It erodes the confidence of users and potential customers. People put their company blog on Posterous, they add their business to GoWalla, they gave AdGrok a few hours of their time, etcetera, etcetera.

I'm not saying I would turn down the offer. But I fear the long-term effect of all these acqui-hires is my potential customers saying "No thanks. I doubt you geeks will be around in 18 months" when I market to them.
The difference is that when this happens you have someone to call and tell you what's going on. If you ask nicely, maybe you can even get a ballpark estimate for when something should happen next. You know, people acting professionally and such.
Mashable is essentially a low-quality content farm. Certainly no place for a self-respecting geek to get tech news.
It's not bad if all your image assets is locally on device. It become difficult when your assets are remote.

If your image is remote, you'll need to put loading the image on a separate thread, and create a nonblocking http request to fetch the image. The problem is to draw the picture you have to use the main thread, so to make scrolling smoothly become quite a challenge.
It was the head of Yahoo research (http://allthingsd.com/20120304/exclusive-yahoo-labs-head-rag...) and it seems likely that he left because Thompson will be making deep cuts to the research department
That is awesome!

Where did you host this?

Submitted to Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/qtie0/new_campaign_to...
Most Children’s Books for iPad Don’t Work
I guess it's a good thing to have someone in this situation on the inside who can voice his concern to the (former) owners about this.
freely redistribute media

Is that really fair use?

Yes, I see now you edited that out of your post.
Xfire Partners With Twitch.TV for Live Broadcasting Game Play
Exactly. And how exactly did this post get on HN?
In my mind, Spaces was a pivot to a completely different market. My primary Tumblr is a photo blog, but my Posterous is a place where I share things privately with friends. Posterous has become a sort of Facebook alternative for me, and I really don't look forward to seeing it shut down.
Get out now. If this follows the pattern of, say, every talent acquisition ever, they'll shut down the site and delete all user data in 3-6 months.
This reminds me of a blog post from Maciej, the creator of Pinboard, regarding why sometimes free services aren't all they're cracked up to be: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
Brilliant Talks on Software Engineering
The irony here is it's a much worse federal crime to photocopy US currency.

You can get around this by making sure it's (much) smaller than the original and only copied on one side.

http://www.secretservice.gov/money_illustrations.shtml
I agree with IP being a messy and (currently) necessary compromise. The problem is that it requires retro-fitting an economic incentive structure based on scarce and defensible atoms to a good that is none of those. It's like asking what kinds of rail-roads we should build for our cars to drive on.

Sure, we can continue to limp forward with the mess we have now, paying the huge legal overhead, as well as the opportunity cost of the economic activity which is hindered by this environment (patent trolls, remix culture, etc).

But I don't think we should be content with that. I'd much rather we explore new incentive systems which are oriented specifically toward knowledge work. We already do this in the form of new business models: commoditizing your components, freemium, gift economies, etc. But there is still a lot of unexplored space in creating new ways to profit from the creation of data, either by creating new business models, or drafting new social conventions (government-backed or otherwise).
Paul Graham's Top Tweets Over The Past Two Years - paulg
I hate to go off topic, but what browser were the screenshots made in? I love the clean border/top bar.
I'm worried, can I click on the "like" button underneath the document without infringing on a patent?
IANAL. Is it illegal to photocopy money and send it? Or, is it just illegal to use the photocopied money?
What do you think would happen most of the time if these acquihires didn't happen? The companies would just go out of business and the services would be shut down anyway.
Simple: anarchism refers to the belief that governments are unnecessary and/or unjustified; socialism refers to the opinion that the means of production ought not to be owned by private individuals or entities.

Hmm... I had forgotten about that particular definition of socialism- but, if the means of production are not owned by individuals, they must either be commons or government owned. In anarchy there is no government, so the means must be "owned" by all, but how do you maintain such a structure in a government-less society...
The best english teacher
I am going to tell you and show you what is the best way to learn english very easy.. It is proved that a language could be best learned while a person is still a child...
I think that's a sign of greatness. Mark Zuckerberg has, um, the same trait.