skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a real beef with this "reasoning from axioms" stuff when it gets taken as a dogma. Maybe you don't take it as a dogma. I am also yet to see a working libertarian society, so it's all just academic posturing as far as I'm concerned, much like all this atheist utopianism I keep hearing about. Frankly, I don't see anything intrinsically immoral about forcing other people to do or not do things using force. You can't opt out of society with the numbers we have now.

The problem as I see it is not adhering to some principle or another it's that everything is too big and too centralised. I like a lot of what people like Ron Paul are saying, but if we were to give them a free run for a few decades we'd need a new reactionary movement to undo all the problems resulting from their own excesses. People need to let go of the idea that a person can "crack the code" of society and figure out the right ethics for all time.
Student Loans & The Student Startup Plan
I know many creators of GPL software would absolutely see it differently, but they still wouldn't get to tell me how to use my own computer. Restrictions on your freedom to express yourself is what the GPL was designed to fix, even though it itself is a restriction on your freedoms.

We can't oppress the poor DRM artists:)
It provides that much greater of an opportunity for startups that stick around.
Really awesome writing.A true example of libertarianism. Thanks for explaining the definition of freedom so well,
Yeah, this is one of those things like joking around in the airport security line where it just isn't worth doing.
Bootstrap 2.0.2 released
I think you're right, but aren't these acqusitions transparent to most of these customers? Posterous stays the same brand for a huge portion of its userbase.
Nice work guys! I'm getting some error though. I think you guys should pump it up the dynos :)
While I have no particular training, this does not match my experience or intuition.

I think the best thing to do, when the situation permits, is to clearly think through what you want to say before you start speaking. Then you do not need filler. If you find yourself reaching for filler, then I think it is better to stop entirely until you clearly think of the next cogent thing to say.

(Note thought that filler is different from a transition phrase. A transition phrase, which might include "on the other hand" and similar phrases, don't add meaning per se but do clearly indicate you are shifting arguments slightly which can help others follow your reasoning. But that is meant to transition, not form filler, and even then transition phrases are often overused.)
Searching, killing apps, setting orientation, etc, aren't core functionality necessary for using the device.
There is a link to the iPod (MP4) version in the MSR page, I'm watching it right now from Chrome/Mac:

http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/160725/dl/160725.mp4
Isn't Kickstarter sort of like an escrow service in that case? Not sure how that would work, but do know that here in the Netherlands most companies accepting payments on behalf of others (i.e payment providers), have some sort of trust/foundation that owns the company or holds the money.
The problem of arm fatigue with vertical touchscreens is not a new thing. It's old enough to have an entry in the Jargon File: http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
Intel Wants to Start a Web-Based TV Service? [Iptv]
Providing content by means of distribution is not adding value. It's only that: distribution. The creator is adding the value. Why should he not be rewarded? With your line of argument you are in line with the entertainment industry who effectively monopolized the distribution channels for a long time.
Kudos to Kerem Suer for releasing this awesome freebie those shots were based on http://dribbble.com/shots/395812-Chrome-freebie-PSD-
Do you work at a company that tells its employees that "patents will only be used defensively"? If so pay attention to this because it is your future.

Do you work for a company that gives bonuses for filing patents? Do you use the "only for defensive purposes" assurances as a way to soothe your troubled soul when you take the money? If so, pay attention to this times two.
Intro to Social Hacking: How we lowered our cancellation rate by 90%
I'm pretty sure that i was forced to use amazon payments when Tim lured me into supporting that adventure game :)
By no measure is EU "pretty democratic". I never voted for anyone who matters in the EU bureaucracy, nor was I given an opportunity. We have people running the EU like baroness Ashton who has never been elected in any elections, ever in her life, not just for her current position. The democracy deficit is painfully obvious.
This is so awesome! I am not a scientist but I know a quite bit about astrophysics that I have a hunch that you can accurately predict a supernova explosion (of massive stars) by simply knowing how much neutrino the star is emitting and the rate of change. Of course you would need to know its exact mass, and the only way to do that is to figure out its distance which at this point are just rough estimates. Maybe I'll try to raise funding for it one day through this.....
I wonder if the name posterous was a poor choice? Sendblog or zenblog might've been better.
Amazing, a top 500 global site (roughly), that appears likely to just close up shop. What the hell is that?

Hey Twitter, how about you give me the platform, we'll split 50/50 anything I make with it, I'll assume all the downside liability.

Posterous can go a lot further. This is a failure of imagination.
This is indeed big news.
Perhaps ubuntu is getting closer to being ready for the desktop for some users, but I find that for the last few releases, each new version takes me further from my ideal environment. For me, Ubuntu peaked at about 10.10 (or maybe 11.04)

Each time a new release comes out, I give Unity another try, but it just doesn't work for me. For a while I was just reverting back to Gnome, but now the default Gnome is Gnome 3 which is (purely my opinion) very much a regression in terms of UX from Gnome 2.

I know this is Linux, and I can install whatever I want, but I don't want to have to. When I was younger I was happy to spend hours (and days!) tweaking stuff to make it work just the way I wanted it to. With all the other time sinks that growing up entails, when I get the chance to sit down at my computer these days, I just want it to work. I don't want to have to invest time I don't have learning a new way to do the old thing when the old way was perfectly fine. (Probably me just getting old and curmudgeonly I know!)

Due to computers getting older and being replaced etc, I can't even reasonably keep using Ubuntu 11.04 - my latest laptop will not work correctly under anything less than 11.10 without hours of manking around compiling and installing wireless and graphics card drivers. (I blame the laptop for this, not linux). Research before buying indicated this laptop was reasonably well supported under linux. After purchase I found this model of laptop used a number of different chipsets for wireless and the one I ended up with (ath9k) was poorly supported at that time.

So, after having linux as my sole computing environment since 1996 (and using Ubuntu as my main distro since Breezy Badger) I have just this month packed it in and bought a 13" Macbook Air to use as my main computer. I'm still using Ubuntu 10.10 server edition at work, (virtual machine running under xen) for development and as a production server - but I can't see Canonical breaking the command line as bad as they did the desktop any time soon!

Ubuntu may be finally ready for the desktop for some people but definitely not for me.
Illegal to photocopy money. Also illegal to mail cash, but if it is fake they probably can't charge you with anything there.
One of the things even the high-powered public speaking trainers tell you is that the only way not to be nervous is if you no longer care. Any time you have an audience you actually want to learn something or be convinced to take some action, you should feel a bit nervous.
While this may be true, this also doesn't always hold. I was treasurer for a student union and if people signed for it, we would take the money directly out of their bank account ("automatische incasso", very normal over here). Doing this requires a contract with a given limit and number of transactions. I tried to get the limit raised, but they refused, so I just went over the limit and no one ever ever complained. Had no chargebacks, but still, doesn't seem like a very safe situation.
It's illegal to mail cash?
"Like" is increasingly used to introduce a quotation, particularly in SoCal dialect. It's not necessarily the most elegant use of language, but it's not a pause or a tick.
It also has to have some effect on lowering the costs to launching a new startup by limiting the downside risk, particularly to technical talent. Surely some people have though "Sure, I have a good job now, but if it doesn't work out we'll just get acqui-hired by the big guys in 18 months, so why not?"
I think it's good that Linux is for geeks. I mean, what other options are there for geeks? I would much rather have Linux optimize for geeks and leave the fluff for OSX and Windows.
Video Shows TSA Full-Body Scanner Failure
absolutely - david crockford has the same problem, and I just simply couldn't listen to his entire javascript series

had brilliant university professors who were the same.

people need to realize that this is fixable, and is very important to fix if they want to share information more effectively
Domain takedown in 3... 2...
Maybe with a partnership, or alone Microsoft. They tried it before, a buyout with premium would be around 25B i assume.
Facebook is strategic important for MS, so it would make sense to sue them.
The devil is in the details:

How do you propose we give someone the means to make a living writing books, for instance? Someone who is at the margin, not Stephen King ( http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin )?

* Commoditizing components doesn't work very well with books. This might work ok for saturday morning cartoons, where there are toys to be purchased, but it's a fairly limited model, especially for most authors, who don't have much else to sell.

* Freemium means that you still make people pay for the goods and they are not allowed to freely copy them.

* "Gift economies" is very hand wavy and, by and large, does not put food on the table as far as I can tell.

I suspect that there are new business models, but ultimately, it comes down to a question of scarcity. If information goods are, by law, not scarce, but the time needed to produce them is scarce, then they will be underprovisioned.
Very good question. That's probably one of the largest sources of division between various anarchist schools.

One way to tackle the problem is to separate governance from the state, and say that we want a governance structure accountable to the workers, and populated by workers, but no associated state apparatus—no police, no army, no state lines, etc.

Many forms of anarchism turn into a kind of pastorial agrarianism because of this. It really is hard to come up with a governance structure beyond a certain size that meets the accountability requirements for the kind of society socialism wants, and so many socialist anarchists see the answer as the self-governance of communities small enough to manage some kind of general council.
To me the main argument was that the algorithms don't scale, and not even SSDs can help to alleviate that. This is true since you are always bound to the worst time. By spreading the load as described, you aren't anymore, so the problem which the SSDs were supposed to solve simply isn't there anymore.

And even if you would like to avoid those SSD latency spikes, said algorithm would work wonders (given that blocking due to erase occurr randomly). You can then wait for first successful write for example.
It's fair use if you don't abuse it!
I don't think so (though I'm not sure). Cloudmine looks like it is aimed at mobile app backends, and the amount of code used for this project would be too custom for what is afforded on those types of services.
I'm not 100% sure although if you email hello@izettle.com they will probably give you a better idea regarding timescales or may let you in on their testing in the UK - which I know they are doing right now
As you say, that refers to printed copies, photocopies etc. That isn't what the article is suggesting.
I am totally agreeing with this.Its true that you have to find your potential consumers first and then ignore completely the non-consumers because all visitors are not the same.So you have to think differently about how you attract your each and everyone of your potential consumers.
Very creative and thought provoking, but wrong.

A DVD version of avatar sells for say $20 and Riaa gets some percentage of that. Joe blow downloads avatar for free from google or some other website, ptp or sneakernet. Joe blow sends the riaa some percentage of $20 in photocopied money. That does not provide the same utility for riaa as the avatar.mp4 did for Joe blow.

Whether or not Joe blow's download of avatar for free is unfair against the store that stocks the DVD, the trucker who moved it, the actors, producers and supporting staff or the media ads that promoted it is another question. The question comes down to how much Joe blow WOULD have paid for avatar.mp4 had his only option been to purchase a DVD, wait and rent it, or watch it at a friends house.

When we replace avatar with "schematics for a 3d printable car/computer/cup" then we will have to deal with this problem of rewarding the creators of valuable data according to how badly people want it, preserving our freedom from censorship and preserving net neutrality. Yarr!
Simple Trumps Complete
Basic things should be easy. What is the most fundamental, basic action in a UI? On an iPhone, it's calling someone, which can be done by touching the green icon with a phone on it, and dialing like on any other physical phone. That's easy. Rearranging icons is not basic--many people might use an iPhone happily for years without rearranging their icons. Requiring some extra hunting around for that isn't a huge problem.

The big flaw of Metro is that you can't do anything without figuring out the non-obvious edge of screen elements. That's not a learning curve, it's a learning cliff.
IP here means "IP laws". Access to the source is a completely different issue. You don't need IP laws to protect your source: just don't distribute it.
(In agreement) It is tough to imagine the mental investment of another if-statement or more setup/teardown exceeding what's required to notice, understand, and debug one of these structures. You get slightly prettier code at a tremendous possible cost.

It feels like making people aware that they can use bazookas to kill butterflies. People are hopefully reasonable, but it can go very wrong.

All that said, cool.
I did business with paypal about 10 years ago. I had a similar bad experience with them. Despite me doing nothing wrong, and my customers being quite happy with what I was delivering to them, paypal decided to get involved and screw things up.

Attempting to resolve the issue with them resulted in an unending series of demands, many of which were asinine (e.g.: show the original manufacturer invoice for this used piece of clothing you sold on ebay, or show us a contract with the creator of the software you're selling proving you have the right to sell it-- I was the creator, and obviously, of course, a contract from me, signed by me would not be acceptable to them.)

I sent them endless amounts of documentation, but they demanded more, and they lost half of it. Their CSR reps are complete and total assholes-- after all, according to them, I was committing fraud otherwise I wouldn't be dealing with the fraud department, right? (this despite not a single chargeback or dispute on paypal from customers.)

The sad thing was, I did many tens of thousands in business thru them, payed them thousands in fees, had very few customer complaints (and issued refunds when I did or otherwise resolved it)... but they don't care.

I think that my experience and others experience has been out there for over a decade. I'm shocked that people actually use this company-- they are not trustworthy. As far as I'm concerned, they are straight up thieves. (and I'd LOVE them to sue me for saying so-- I'd love to go to court on that issue.)

You do business with paypal, you do it at your own risk. They are not a reputable business.

I don't like Amazon (for a variety of reasons) but at least they are a reputable business. I have my beefs with other companies, but they aren't criminals.

Paypal is a criminal organization, as far as I'm concerned.

In the end, they managed to steal about $600 from me. (I was lucky it wasn't more.)
Umm, no:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/67469618/
Would You Invest in This Kid?
http://www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp
>It seems that the audience that uses Kickstarter is the one you want for Petridish

I just donated to the exomoon project. I've never given Kickstarter the time of day - I find projects there mostly frou-frou. Frou-frou is fine, we all need it once in a while, but I don't want to donate to support it.

The focus on science is compelling. More interesting is the potential for this to evolve into a distributed clearinghouse for research funding.
I wrote the post back then, not today.
Announcing Ribbot.com - build your own Reddit/Hacker News style discussion forum
I don't think anyone is saying get rid of copyright

Sorry, but many people are. Personally, I'd like to at least try it too.
No idea, the following is all speculation:

I'd guess somewhere between $5m-$10m.

Given the number of employees and the amounts they've raised I guess their burn rate was around 250-300k/month (that's probably on the large side). Their series B was only raised 6 months ago so based on their burn rate I'm assuming they've still got 3m-4m of that in cash so that would be the lower bound for the acquisition.

Given the company probably had 12 months of cash left I suspect the Series B investors would only have agreed to a sale if they got all their money back (they'd have liquidation preference anyway so they'd get their money back first), so that probably means a lower bound greater than $5m (the size of the Series B).

Anything over $10m would be high for a talent acquisition so that's probably a decent upper-bound.
I'm assuming (possibly incorrectly) that Posterous shuts down their blog system within a year.

That's the context I'm referring to (acquire -> integrate engineering talent -> shut down original product). When that happens, it's the users who get the short end of the stick (VCs may lose $ or break even, but that's an expectation in their world).

Software–however niche, crappy, or "beta"–gets used for a lot longer than developers realize. Somewhere out there, a secretary is using a Word macro that's older than my teenage daughter and she'll stab you with her letter opener you if you try and take it away. But, in a Web-app/SaaS world, we developers can shut things down with a simple keystroke. That doesn't mean it has no consequences.
Privacy and property are not the same thing.

If Rick Santorum has genital warts, as an example, then he doesn't own the phrase "Rick Santorum has genital warts" nor does it become property even though using that phrase could be a violation of his privacy and could even violate certain laws (such as HIPAA).
How long are you going to be able to stick around without funding and no customers?
I predict a sharp up-tick at the point where the audience starts to peel all their clothes off.
I would have paid for their service. What happens to my blog now? Will all those links get /dev/nulled? Or are we gonna get to set up some 301's?
Great job. Looks like you're getting hammered with traffic right now, but I'm curious how this holds up with a few synchronized instances of Chrome.
AMD 8085 die shot and first layer images
I think filing patents defensively makes sense. I witnessed this firsthand at Google on the Android team as the patent wars started and because most Googlers are anti-patent, Google was at a severe disadvantage to MSFT, Apple, etc.

Ideally, we would just reform patent law to mitigate this but outside of that, I think it makes sense for companies to incentivize their workers to file patents "defensively".
So, tell me, how do you use your Macbook? Are you a console junkie and live in the terminal anyways? Do you see value in the strictly commercial Mac App Store? What do you miss from Linux?
Excellent work. I've wanted to have better bookmark management in Chrome for a while now. Plus the design is beautiful.
Very good point. Thank you.
What are the odds that two articles at the top the front page of HN refer to the same obscure (?? I hadn't heard it before) tale of Ōoka Tadasuke and the stolen smell?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694672
over 700 million monthly unique visitors!That's impressive
This is something that can be curbed with practice. If you give your presentation to someone, they should point this out. To get better at public speaking, you should try to curb any behavior that detracts from the message that you want to deliver.

I remember listening to RMS talk at the HOPE conference one year and it was painful to watch him talk. He obviously needed very long breaks when he was speaking, using them to take sips of Pepsi. The pauses were at times in his speaking were almost planned for some sort of applause or at best internal agreement and reflection on the idea. It was all very awkward, if you can't tell.

It was RMS, so nobody cared, but I'm sure that he could have gotten his message across better with some effort.
I don't mind logging in with Facebook. It saves me from having to sign up for Yet Another Thing, but:

> "Publish games and app activity
Minefold may publish scores, achievements, and other activity to Facebook."

That's unacceptable. I have not begun to use your service yet, I have no trust for you, and you haven't told me in any way whatsoever what sort of activity you intend to post.

No deal.

Many sites have begun telling users exactly what user actions will be posted to Facebook. Others use a very simple "we will never post anything without asking you first" prompt to head off these concerns. Both ways work.

But as it is, I have trouble seeing how a hosting service has any business posting to my FB feed.
Kickstarter doesn't use PayPal, actually.
Dear god kill it with fire!

The last thing I would be interested in is the husk of Yahoo imbued with facbook/social anything powered by bing search.

I've been here a long time - and I havent visited a yahoo site/page for probably 6 or 7 years.

I let my @yahoo.com mail die years ago and never went back.

Sorry for anyone who still likes Yahoo - I just find them completely irrelevant.

I stated several times on HN that if they had any wisdom - they would go on an investment spree in the valley. However, they are taking the opposite approach and going trolling.

:(
My first start-up was almost tanked immediately because of a crappy merchant bank (Cynergy, if you're wondering). We got our first large order, much larger than we ever had before, and it exceeded our average daily balance in our bank account. They froze the funds for 6 months since that's the potential chargeback period. Meanwhile, we had to foot the bill on the material as we were a hardware company and had to float those funds for a while. Our margins weren't so high that this was a simple matter for us.

We ended up switching to a merchant bank that was better for online transactions. Cynergy ultimately released the funds as three different disbursements after we closed our account and decided to charge us account activity fees for those three months as well. It was frustrating to say the least.
What part of that, exactly?
Google search quality meeting, uncut (annotated video)
So now when I tweet, will it push that tweet to Twitter so all my Twitter followers will know that I tweeted?