skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think part of the problem is that "artificial intelligence" is always being redefined upward toward areas we don't well understand. If you don't know how a computer plays chess, it certainly appears intelligent. Once you do understand it becomes purely mechanical.
It bugs me that we haven't moved past "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations" in these discussions. It's an extreme strawman. No one -- not Graham, not Richard Stallman, not Julian Assange -- is interested in making it impossible to make money from creating stuff.

Copyright is simply one means of accomplishing the end goal of paying creators, and certainly not the only one. I'd like to hear an argument in favor of copyright-exactly-as-it-is that doesn't involve this logical fallacy.
As Bruce Waria says in a comment on his own Music Think Tank piece, by Graham’s logic he should force all the companies he invests in to open source the code which he funded, or allow anyone to embed their technology without compensation or conditions attached.

This wouldn't actually follow PG's logic. Using code does not necessarily require the end user copying it, especially for web-based software which is mostly run remotely. Consuming media necessarily requires copying it to somewhere - to your nerve endings, at the very least.
I see a need here, and if contactformify is dead simple to use, then I think you have a big market because not many companies seem to get it right (Wufoo notwithstanding).

Best of luck, and I will use your service!
He just said where.
Pretty much everyone I know is addicted.
Draw Something is everywhere and it's an awesome game. Good move for OMGPOP to cash out. It's a lot of money to throw at a studio that has basically only produced one hit game. Or maybe I am too old to recognize any of their other games ;)
I am sorry if I implied that I was considering leaving the US because I was disgruntled with the US, that was not my intention, while I do have grievances with some of our policies it was not a factor nor would it be a factor in my consideration. Rather Iceland has always held a fascination for me and given their recent changes it is even more of a draw.
Wow, good for them. I've been with them since they were "I'm In Like With You," a fun but pointless "social flirting" site (at least, that's my memory of what it was) before they turned to social gaming. I didn't think they were going to make it for a while.

Congrats to Charles and the team at OMGPOP!
Great for OMGPOP, even better for Zynga. Price seems low to me.
For a long time, Redis didn't even have a configure script; you just typed "make" and it worked. It's scrupulously portable code.
It's actually surprisingly fun. My girlfriend spends like 10 minutes drawing these elaborate pictures for strangers.

The only thing that infuriates me is when people know what it is but can't spell the word and then give up.
>they're free.

but you didn't pirate the apps. my point exactly.
I know I'm not doing anything wrong by searching through all these domains, but it certainly feels wrong.
Your analogy is flawed. Air doesn't cost anything, but sound waves dont cost anything either. The data that's embeded in it (whether it's a smell or a song) has a cost to produce. It costs money and experience to cook the food. It costs money and experience to produce the songs.
Detour from the main point: as a programmer, I'm pretty OK with programmers and programmer-employers coming to blows over software patents. Programmers are still in a bit of a weird spot with respect to the rest of the working class. Get fired from your job as a cashier at Walmart because of your opinions, you'll be lucky to find another job. Get fired from your job as a programmer because of your opinions, you'll probably find a better one even before your blog post on employer X firing programmers who are opposed to software patents gets a thousand points on HN. As a programmer, I just don't feel the same employment-insecurity a lot of non-programmers I know do.

The main point of the matter is, the interests of employers and employees are not well aligned. Employers do not want employees to know what their coworkers or colleagues at other companies make. Employees benefit from having this forbidden knowledge. Employees would prefer to only be fired for direct, active malevolence towards their employer. Employers would prefer to fire anyone they think is a liability to their business.

Employee beliefs matter because, as much as employers would prefer otherwise, employees are not cogs or robots who perform mechanistically. If you don't believe in software patents, how will that affect your performance at your job? Even if your employer isn't a part-time patent troll, but is extremely concerned about being sued by them, will you generate your fair share of defensive patents to be used as a shield for a few years? Or will you knowingly violate software patents you believe are bullshit, opening up your company to 10x the penalties should you lose in court?
I would never want work somewhere where the CEO had a large office. Unless maybe CEO was owner and is buying the office with his own money.

At my last job, I had a bigger windowier office than the CEO, and our company had millions in revenue.
Openright: the public's right to buy a copyright from an author
I disagree with the point of the blog post. While it doesn't make sense that we people would charge for air pipes to be dragged to earth from the moon in order to use the smells produced (because of legislation), it is perfectly analogous to what the RIAA and MPAA do when they try to influence legislation to stop pirating. Instead of targeting the root cause of the problem (cost and quality), they chose to legislate away rights (SOPA) on the internet. This is similar to the smells example because instead of allowing you to breath the free air, we are going to make you breath our air because we feel its better. This makes no sense, and is hazardous to not only open enterprise but the freedoms that we have.
'When you're abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that's ipso facto evidence you're using a definition of property that doesn't work.' - PG

Brilliant. I was expecting something controversial. But, I assume, that at least within this community what PG says here, is the opinion of the majority.
Here's more detail on the price: $180 million plus another $30 million or so in employee retention payments, Im told.

Is this typical? It would seem that the employees are getting the shorter end of the stick on this deal.
The same reason no one reads Forbes anymore :D
That's at this moment in time for one product, which is currently at the top of the iOS charts.
I really like the direction OpenTok is going. I'm working with an eLearning company which currently uses them for some international classes but we're now evaluating UStream's Watershed now because of the need for higher quality streams. It's been difficult to find a good white label video streaming platform. (with programmatic access to server side recordings)

Keep up the good work.
Zynga points. You can use them across Zynga games to get e.g. exclusive pumpkins in Frontierville. There's a cap which resets every day, so you know when you can stop playing.

What.

[edit to add: Not currently playing any Zynga games. League of Legends pushes my buttons much better.]
The same reason for using any editor: it helps you get things done. Other editors also help you get things done. A lot of these "You should use VIM because of x, y, and z" posts seem to follow a standard pattern: claim that VIM is good, give examples of "how easy!" it is to delete or paste text, show some advanced features ("ooh, macros!"), and then claim that it's the best editor. It's a good editor – I use it, too – but any editor that lets you be as productive is just as good.
Can Spacebase support locations which are Parameterized in time? For example, could one have a solar system whose planets move according to equations based on GMT?
A couple years back one of the people on the Writing Excuses podcast described reading science fiction as a skill and used as ancedata his friend who spent the entire length of a space opera book wondering how the teleporter worked.

Similarly my mother (not a dumb woman by and large) got tripped up because there was a line in the movie that the dream machines were military technology, instead of taking this a handwave she spent the rest of the film assuming that it was a secret CIA sting operation.

Basically not recognizing which parts of a universe you're supposed to just roll with and which parts you're supposed to puzzle out yourself.

Possible side effect: you spend the whole movie/book trying to solve it through a completely broken lens and nothing ever adds up or you're too busy (mentally) to notice the real- straight forward- breadcrumb trail and you come out thinking it was much twistier than it was.
There is a difference between a prescriptive argument and descriptive (and I just made these up on the spot). A prescriptive argument admonishes others to do something. So for example he would admonish people to pirate because information is like smells. A descriptive argument describes what the situation is without necessarily telling others what to do. This is the argument that I see pg making. Basically the idea that information is easily distributed, and that it will be distributed. Trying to contain it with more antiquated laws is like trying to plug all the holes in a sieve. In other words the future is looking this way whether recording companies want it to or not. And then he proposes thinking about a different way of distributing music.
Cuz nothing says yummy like a company pronounced "Mondo Lays".
I design toys that use magnets.. I end up carving my own tools out of wood so I can epoxy them in proper places.

They are super annoying to make stay where you want them.. I would go crazy if I had one inside me.
On the plus side, warm water is virtually free in Iceland, even when it is freezing outside. Because of that, there are quite a few outdoor baths, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lagoon_(geothermal_spa)
Maybe the author equated the 2 because in most large organizations both are unsolved. This is part jest and part industry veteran talking.
Cure for Social Profile Disfigurement Syndrome
See the comments of the article:

http://www.iamdann.com/2012/03/21/my-magnet-implant-body-mod...

http://www.iamdann.com/2012/03/21/my-magnet-implant-body-mod...
On the other hand, mixing multiple monads is sheer hell, and lazy evaluation makes speed and memory usage difficult to predict.

Try Disciple sometime, or Scala!
Vimdb - explore vim's defaults and your customizations
Reminds me of shiply and uship http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=312997
> Doesn't it cost money to produce the smell?

The author's point on this is that there's already a paying customer who covers the cost of producing the smell (by buying the meal).

Which just goes to show you can't push a metaphor too far. I still agree more with PG's conclusion. It really is a strawman to claim that copyright is the only way to pay creators.
What about copies of software?

Hype (which is great) for example. Can he really tell his investors that people downloading it from TPB is no problem? In theory his thesis is fine, in reality not so much.
Does this analysis apply to pilots and surgeons as well?
Show HN: Play any version of any song you want in under 3 seconds.
A channel-specific app on a phone beaming it to a set top box, which sends it to the display? No thanks, says a huge majority of consumers.

An all-in-on smart TV with content provider agnostic search and play on demand takes this convoluted media pathway to school.
I've almost completely stopped reading /. since I was turned on to HN last summer.

1. /. has too much Popular Science-ish golly-gee-whizz hoax-level never-gonna-see-the-light-of-day crap that seem to only be vehicles for sucker investments.
2. /. users are more from the video game playing IT nerd in his mom's basement crowd that has very few life experiences outside of Azeroth. The comments sections are almost always a poorly modded, troll filled mess. Ugh, and the politics threads are particularly bad.
MBRequest — A simple networking library for iOS and OS X
There are proper places for sexuality, objectification, etc. A professional / workplace environment isn't one of them. It makes people uncomfortable and can contribute to a hostile work environment. The fact is people don't have as much choice over their coworkers as their friends, and they can't easily avoid unwanted interactions as easily as they can in choosing their social circles.

As far as sexism goes when you make assumptions about your audience, you make anyone who doesn't fit those assumptions feel unwelcome. It doesn't mean you should never make assumptions, but always be aware who you are excluding and if you have a good reason for excluding them.
They wrote two apologies. Their first one was pretty terrible and did not show that they had actually processed why what they did was so offensive.

Their second apology was a bit better. But they claimed that their comment was "aimed to call attention to the male-dominated tech world through humor and intended to be inclusive."

Do they honestly expect us to believe that their comment was designed to be inclusive, so that's why they offered women serving male coders as a perk? (And this isn't just me reading into it. That's very literally what they said.)

I would have much more respect if they just came out and said that, in an attempt humor, they had made immature and sexist remarks and that they understand that their comment was harmful not only to women, but to non-straight men, and to hacker culture as a whole.

They're embarrassed, and rightfully so, but trying to BS around what they were doing doesn't help. Admit your faults directly and people will be much more forgiving.
It was bound to happen -- Now they have to pay a premium for having failed to launch a game in this genre. The model was proven by Newtoy with Words with Friends (which they acquired) and Zynga has since launched a series of others based on the same model (Hanging with Friends etc.). All they need to do is look at the biggest existing markets for board games, console games, etc. and apply it to the WWF model. Pictionary should have been a no-brainer!
what's wrong with Darwin?
> Is this typical? It would seem that the employees are getting the shorter end of the stick on this deal.

Which deals do you think they get the long end of the stick?
Feature phones show less uptake of apps. It's a rare iPhone user that hasn't purchased a dozen or so apps in a year. I'm sure they exist - but there's a lot more of us who've purchased 30 or more apps to balance them out.
There was a project from Mozilla Labs called Raindrop which kind of sounds like what you are asking for. However, the last update to that site was quite some time ago (August 2010) and I doubt the project is still active.
Moving someplace you've never been is generally not a good idea if you can help it

I have more bad ideas than good, of that I am sure, but whether bad or good they are always an adventure. You would have to know me on a personal level to understand that I am a guy that lives a minute away from making a decision that fundamentally changes my life. I may choose to move to China tomorrow and by the end of the week I will be these. It's just the way I am, that being said, I am a little more settled now, as I am married and have children and I have to contain my nature. But I will say, in all my life, I have never regretted the times I packed my bags in the middle of the night and fundamentally changing my life, by the time the sun shined. I have however regretted the choices that I thought about and never made, as I am left with the wonder lust of what could have been.
Streak.com (YC S11) Takes On Salesforce With A Simple CRM For Gmail
Despite the rumors, this is not really competing with YCombinator.
The emails in profiles are not visible to other users. This is a UI issue here that's bitten everyone.
"cleaned"?

I think the target population matters. If you're selling to teachers or dentists, then you should speak to teachers or dentists to learn what they will do or not do.

If you're offering a jQuery framework, then HN seems pretty relevant as far as the people susceptible to subscribe to your services.
> What’s more stunning still is that most of the $7,000 budget was film stock. Because it was filmed. On film. Ain’t nothing like the 16mm look, truly.

And what's even more stunning is that most of it was done in one take because, well, they only had $7,000 to budget on film stock.
With EveryArt (YC W12) you don't have to be afraid of commissioning art
Thanks for the pointer. A hack, indeed.
It spins the fans on my i5 2011 air like there's no tomorrow, kinda like if I open a badly programed flash file. No crash though. And the whole thing is kinda slow when you scroll.
Maybe it will take less than half an hour for a move to be sent to my friend's phone. Hopefully it won't take too long for Zynga to move this game over to the zCloud and fix all the push notification bugs too.
Does anyone else question Zynga's growth model? http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/03/21/welcome-to-...
I've been trying to think of an elevator pitch for this. "Kickstarter for copyright" is close, but it loses the sense of responsibility that copyright owners should have to the public (due to the costs their work imposes on society).

Also, as far as logistically, Openright can be implemented publicly or privately. I think the private route would be the way in which it could be tested. If (when?) proven as a "socially responsible" way to sell infinite goods among communities that care about this sort of thing, it would then make sense to convert it to a public implementation (write a law).
Deploying digital cross-connected systems
NYC Startups To Watch
> Cooking smells are a positive externality ...[snip]... But commercially released music is produced specifically for the purpose of being heard, and paid for ...[snip]... The true equivalent would be someone standing outside the fence of a music festival, enjoying the sounds without having paid.

It depends on what you mean by "being heard". Some people think the only acceptable business model for music is for musicians to perform live. If we were to follow this line of thought, what's the difference between listening to music outside the concert grounds and listening to music stored on a digital device? In neither case are you participating in the live performance. In neither case have you reduced the artist's net worth by a single penny, provided that you never intended to attend the live performance anyway.

> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it.

And maybe that would be a good thing, as some other commenters have already suggested. Maybe it's not a morally acceptable business model to charge money for making copies of existing code. More companies should be charging money for the value-added services they offer, like making it easier for us to access music and apps, and offering subscriptions. If you don't want people to copy your code without paying, don't release it publicly in the first place, and only release it to people who sign NDAs. That's how business secrets work, right?

I'm not sure if I want to agree 100% with these lines of thought, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

Edit: Added paragraph.
Music existed before copyright did. I remain unconvinced that music costs money to produce. Art gets produced for the sake of art, not for compensation. Specific forms of art (say for example big budget movies) may be an exception, but then the argument needs to shift accordingly.
Man, how didn't remember to use that! :)
A $200MM talent acquisition? This meme needs some suppression.
We should just write the laws in Prolog and call it Prolaw. Then we no longer would have to call the web site optimization peoples by the disparaging term "spammers" but could instead call them by the marginally less disparaging term "lawyers," and they could command much higher salaries.
The hard route? OMGPOP was incorporated in 2006, Zynga in 2007. They've been trying their hand at online games for a while now. This isn't an overnight success.
Wow. Charles deserves a whole lot of credit for sticking it out over the last six years - my impression until recently was that they were having a hard time staying open. Congrats to all involved!
I was thinking of lining up a list of AMA, but its difficult to understand whoswho from the handles.
I may have my version numbers mixed up, it's been a while and I was relying on memory so it very well could have been 4. The point though was there was a point in which IE was clearly out in front of Netscape.
I don't think I've ever worked someplace where the CEO didn't have the biggest, nicest office in the company. Although in both cases the CEO was also founder and owned upwards of half the company.

In any case, it doesn't really bother me as long as I have the resources to get my work done. It's just an interesting observation.
Inside a Russian Billionaire's $300 Million Yacht (Video)
Code emails like it's 2012 with Fractal
This also has ramifications for government inner workings, if carried right. Imagine if this extends to pretty much all branches of government, and you can actually inspect all the code. It cannot get more open than that.
That's a fascinating read.

This kind of control and capability makes me wonder if they won't someday become common in a preventative/health monitoring role instead of only for cardiac defects. The risk during installation and problems with MRI seem pretty serious, so I doubt it could happen soon, but it's not impossible.

I wonder what some sort of self-assembing/modular device that can be fed in chunks through a vein catheter or keyhole surgery, and built in-situ could be plausible.

Not sure what to do about the MRI issue though. They're only going to get more common as we figure out superconductors, and they have none of the radiation downsides of CT. Maybe non-metallic construction, or perhaps when milli-Tesla MRI becomes a reasonable alternative?

Is the battery in yours single use, or recharged via induction loop?
I don't know why this is upvoted so much. PG's article seems pretty clear.

The problem I have with this article is the association of investment with a 'right' to recoup that investment. There is no inherent right to recoup investment money of this type. NONE! It doesn't matter how hard something is to produce, there is no inherent right to make a profit based on that effort. People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind.

The argument that creators must be compensated to keep creating is a bit of a straw man. The idea that someone can spend some time writing or making music and then deserves compensation seems to be strongly held, but the ones who vastly profit from the copyright law are not the creators. Disney, for instance, has been dead a very long time, but his company defends copyright extension into perpetuity.

Right now, there are far more people unable to create because of copyright/patent law than there are people getting compensated for their creations.
http://koding.com looks like it'll be your best bet.
Not commenting on this particular situation, but to answer your question in general:

If a company has an IPO, there are no "employee retention payments", so it's better than that :)

Employee retention payments are actually a way to give employees a somewhat better deal than investors, though typically they will be subject to vesting.
To get most like HN: http://hubski.com/tag?id=programming
Yes... it's idolizing women... as sexual objects offered as a perk to male coders so that they can serve the men.

As a female coder, I'd rather not be offered as a perk to male coders. So, yeah, this is belittling.