skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that civil litigation can be a terrible method of enforcement, however it's like the criticism of democracy being a terrible form of government but better than the alternative.

The problem with "ex ante" regulations governing conduct is you force a lot of wasteful work on a lot of people and companies that becomes a drag on the economy, productivity, whatever you want to call it.

Let's make an analogy that's appropriate for this time of year. Some people cheat on their taxes. Some cheaters get audited and caught, some don't. Since we know that some people cheat on their taxes and an audit will uncover it should we force every tax filer in the US to submit receipts and other documentation for every deduction claimed on their return, at the time of filing?

Can you imagine how much time that would take for filers and the IRS? Can you imagine the outrage on the part of filers?

The Taibbi article sites to a Bloomberg opinion piece that baldly states that people can lie in their pitch and get away with it. However, if you read the legislation (or at least credible legal analysis of it): A) the pre-prospectus presentations can only be made to qualified investors and institutions (meaning you are supposed to be a sophisticated investor, not the general public and will read or pay someone to read the prospectus when it is filed) and B) the actual regulations that will enact the law haven't been written yet.

There definitely will be (and need to be) reasonable regulations to enact this law, I don't argue that at all. I just think the whole tone and content of this article is over the top and biased. I enjoyed reading his evisceration of GS, but I do think it has influenced his writing about anything having to do with the securities markets or finance in general.
Non-optimal returns are very different than being screwed over by scammers. One of the reasons that the US has such strong capital markets is that common investments are rarely out-and-out frauds. Whether that's due to the nobility of bankers or our relatively strong regulations is left as an exercise to the reader.

I think you vastly underestimate the costs of real businesses. Looking at BizBen.com, maybe 3% of car washes for sale are under $100k. The average McDonald's grosses $2.2m/yr and is reported to have profits in the 7% range, which would be ~$150k/yr. There's no way you can buy $150k/year in income for $100k.

You also don't account for the opportunity cost of the time and energy, or the increased risk. If I'm taking my investment money and buying myself a job, then if my investment fails my job is gone too. For a lot of people it's better just to put the money in a (tax-advantaged) 401k and spend their energy on what they're actually good at, which is probably not the evaluation and operation of small businesses.
The 200 billion company that can not fix a simple credit card processing problem
After early-adopters, regular people will join only if their friends are already there.

Any user metric going upwards says "look, it's not a ghost town anymore" and drives future adoption.
I'm sure it does. However don't assume housing is worth nothing. Right now housing in Shenzhen is more expensive than Hong Kong.
These Breasts Nailed Anonymous Hacker In FBI Case
Just a quick heads up - I'm not actually a woman.
You've never used floats, have you?
To be fair to herf, ANY queries might produce this information in one query. (Then again, they might silently omit all or part of the answer. Also, querying "bare" domains like example.org will produce unneeded records like SOA/NS/MX.)
The picture with the signatures...?
I have a feeling that the JOBS act could actually be a very, very good thing if the right company (or, better yet, marketplace of companies) came around to offer a gateway service to these micro-investments.

Personally I would implement - or would purchase an account on - such a site where companies would advertise for investment, and would be required to provide a certain minimum of disclosure. The site would provide avenues for that disclosure (basically, a feed of reports issues by the companies themselves and perhaps also relevant news stories, a'la Google News) as well as investment portfolio tracking.

It would (still) be up to the user to verify the disclosure and make sure they are looking at companies that are disclosing the right quantity, quality, and purview of information - but the site would hopefully make it very clear what is and isn't being disclosed and how that compares to other companies.

Of course another key feature could be investor/analyst reviews, but this would need an extremely well-engineered system to prevent or discourage astroturfing & other social engineering schemes. Personally I doubt anything less than only allowing authenticated professional journalists (affiliated with reputable publications) could be acceptable, at which point you wonder about the real utility of such a thing.

I feel like this would make an excellent Startup, actually, and might do some work in that regard. I think step 1, though, is spending a lot of time reading about the ins and outs of the law. It would be very easy to grab a 'legal third rail' with both hands with this project and expose yourself to a lot of liability. I find that intimidating, but maybe not too much so.
See my analogy above to income tax filing requirements. It's not an argument against any law but rather reporting requirements. If you lie, cheat or steal, it's against the law. However what you have to do to prove you have not lied, cheated or stolen(prior to any accusation being leveled against you) is the point of reducing the regulatory burden.
I disagree with Taibbi on this one. Making it easier for startups to raise money does not equate to fraud on Wall Street. Yes, there are some who will take advantage. But it will also means that the engines of the economy, small businesses and startups will get a massive lift off.

In the end, you have to balance regulation with ease of doing business, raising capital, etc.
Years ago there was a job title at Microsoft called "Web Developer". I refused to give people this title or hire people into this role, because it was clearly a dead-end job.

The era of "Web Developers" -- people who can make an HTML page work but don't have fundamental software development skills -- lasted only as long as the Great Wheel of Client-Server Development took to make half a revolution.

Now the client has software on it again, and...surprise, you have to be a "Software Developer" to work on it, not a "Web Developer".
Many cities like to claim this, but NY barely makes the top 10. For example, Dubai has way over 75% foreign residents. And cities like Toronto and Sydney are both statistically and anecdotally more culturally diverse.

I'd be more interested in the number of fashion/wedding startups in NY and the percentage of females who run said startups. Huge stereotype and completely unfounded, but it wouldn't surprise me either.
and the "i'm a dad, you wouldn't understand" isn't ad verecundiam?

> NOT already running his own business

He had ONE customer, according to the video. Maybe he might get some more? Who is to know?
Those bastards.
It likes if ( (x = y) && p ) return -1;

(No, I don't have the exact statement in question handy. It was more complicated than this example.)
Thanks! It really means a lot to hear that.

I'll take a look at the overlap soon, and fair point about the about us section. We'll work on revising it.
> Cost of stocking it; running it; repairing it; etc.

also known as "learning to run a business" which is probably pretty valuable.

> But does he really want to be someone who owns an arcade, or does he want to be a design engineer creating tech

this is a value judgement on your part.
1. the only time the pre-prospectus info can differ from the prospectus is before the prospectus is filed.
2. the only people that can legally receive the pre-prospectus information are qualified investors (accredited) or institutions, who supposedly can take care of themselves.
3. if you don't want to read the prospectus but want other information that's "guaranteed" to match the prospectus and you are an individual investor, just read the information that is provided after the prospectus is filed (which is all you should be able to get your hands on anyway, absent the above exclusions).
Just don't do it everywhere. Use it in moderation, PLEASE.
oh they found it hard so gave up - as some one who used to work with OSI protocols ad having looked at some the google proposed standards it doesn't surprise me.
Very intriguing but I personally can't stand watches that 'get in the way', and looking at the prototype it sure looks like this thing would get in the way a lot.

I haven't worn a watch for years, so this may be just a personal gripe.
If your solution to a problem is DNS TXT records, now you have two problems, as they say.
Apparently third time's the charm for this story. See also:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3160-lets-ride-this-bull
You just hit upon by far my least favorite bug in Excel. Any integers around I think 40000, which are quite easy to come upon in various datasets, are automatically "detected" as a date. It makes Excel very dangerous for reading CSV files.
That's only true until they launch a public product: at that point you can get access to or modify their data. It is downright irresponsible to launch a service like this that encourages people to use an insecure design for their service: security should be built in from the beginning, not tacked on afterwards, and even at the level of "this is a tutorial" it should be clear to the developer what they need to do to make it secure (not thrown into the advanced level of documentation, for example, like some companies do).
> Isn't "post-factum civil litigation" an even better mechanism for enforcement?

I'm completely in favor of more civil litigation, but I'm reminded of something Ronald Coase,[1] wrote half a century ago: "The fact that actions might have harmful effects on others has been shown to be no obstacle to the introduction of property rights. But it was possible to reach this unequivocal result because the conflicts of interest were between individuals. When large numbers of people are involved, the argument for the institution of property rights is weakened and that for general regulation becomes stronger." Ronald Coase, The Federal Communications Commission (1959).

In that paper he was talking about property rights in spectrum, but the principle is generalizable. Legal action is a great way for a few individuals to enforce claims against a few other individuals. When large numbers of peoples' rights are violated, however, general regulation becomes a more efficient mechanism for enforcement.

[1] An economist whose theories are a bedrock of modern conservative thinking.
...... if you can link it in clojure, you can link it in java.
Some would say the same thing about cars.

Or, laptops.
>Making it easier for startups to raise money does not equate to fraud on Wall Street.

Eliminating independent accounting requirements is as close to equaling fraud as makes no difference.
This has actually got in the way of expected functionality for me. I've often right clicked on the logo to try and open the github homepage in a new tab.
This is possible to do, but you need click on the icon in the top left corner and then properties. Full instructions here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/319317/478893.

You can also do this by running a third-party console app.

As a post earlier in the thread indicates, you can often do the same things on Windows but it requires a little extra work.
Taking it a bit too seriously?
Really complicated? While I'm sure some of the deep details are messy, the overall architecture is textbook standard.

A search engine (SOLR), a load balancer (HAProxy), an app server (django), a replicated/sharded database (postgres) and a replicated k/v store (redis).
Here's how I would improve this:

The lightbox that opens up asks, "Looking for the GitHub logo?"

But it doesn't let you answer no. It just presumes that your answer is yes, and supplies you with what it thinks you actually want (or, more cynically, what it wants you to want).

I would suggest adding a "No thanks -- just let me right-click" link at the bottom. That link would close the lightbox and prevent it from reopening for the rest of the session, which would be in contrast to its current behavior, where the lightbox pops up no matter how many times you right-click.
Correct! If Groupon started today we would still be at least a year and half away from having any chance at all to discover their fraudulent accounting, and their stock would probably be at $1000/share.
I'm the same way and have thought about this concept... I'm not even completely sure exactly what Firebase is but it sounds similar to that idea just requires more coding experience.
Sure, but you can come up with real analogies that cut the other way. And you don't even have to go to hypotheticals.

Take food. The US has reasonably strong food laws. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that we go for China-style food safety laws (mmm, melamine infant formula and "meat" made from whatever fits in the grinder) and then hope that suits from individual sick people fixes it.

Also, you're ignoring half the costs. I have confidence that I can buy pretty much any food in any store or restaurant in my city with very low odds of getting sick and zero odds of getting poisoned. Complying with food safety regulations may be expensive for the producer, but removes very expensive burdens from consumers.

Moreover, a well-regulated market is more friendly to consumers via increased competition. If our food safety laws were poor, then I'd only buy from producers who had very strong reputations. The risk of trying a new product or a cheaper competitor would be much higher, so innovation would be lower and overall prices would be higher.

I think investment in the US is closely analogous. Well-regulated markets can help all participants, buyers and sellers alike.

Also, Taibbi's skepticism of Wall Street is well earned. The recession we are still working out of was mainly caused by financial shenanigans, but nobody is in jail and regulatory fixes have been minimal. Anthony Mozillo, for example, made north of $600m; his eventual punishment was to have to give back 10% of that. Lesson learned, I'm sure!

The JOBS Act could be entirely innocuous, but "once bitten, twice shy" seems reasonable to me.
Max DeMarzi on Using Sigma.js on Neo4j
We’re going to create our graph and group our nodes into five clusters. You’ll notice later on that we’re going to give our clustered nodes colors using rgb values so we’ll be able to see them move around until they find their right place in our layout. We’ll be using two Sigma.js plugins, the GEFX (Graph Exchange XML Format) parser and the ForceAtlas2 layout.
I know that in some cases it is not an option, but middle-clicking will open the link in a new tab. One of the best shortcuts I ever learned.
I think the lesson there is that numeric types should only be used for things you actually want to do arithmetic with. An account ID that just happens to be all digits should still be stored and transmitted as a string.
Yeah I'm pretty excited when DDG gets to a point where they can start hiring the engineers to build a crawler/indexer, that way they can really start to kickass.

As an aside, I still use blekko everyday, and they obliterate google and bing in certain intent queries. If you search for some intent query in these categories: travel, jobs, real estate, cars, finance, legal, medical, services, and merchandise sales AND one of their blekko/user curated slashtags fires/autofires, blekko destroys. ( eg. cure for headaches )
Ex-Apple patent exec joins buddies at Nest to fight Honeywell infringement suit
count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction

Classic nature vs nurture debate. You have no evidence to support the claim that women are inherently less inclined towards tech (instead of say, conditioned by society to be tech averse).
There's a well-known and very good Black Hat talk from I think 2007 that attacked cold-start entropy on embedded devices, but you could rephrase that as an entropy estimation problem.
Note - requires you to load javascript from akamai.net. Didn't notice a thing different until I enabled that through noscript.
I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years.

I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.
BBEdit has been my goto editor since 1995. I own copies of many other Mac based text editors (Alpha, TexEdit, TextMate, vi, etc), but to my tastes BBEdit has always been the most feature rich, powerful and clean editing environment. And of course, I have a huge muscle memory investment in how to use BBEdit.

Other editors that I use regularly have some additional strengths in a given domain, such as CSSEdit or MultiMarkdown Composer, yet nearly everything I do starts in, passes through or ends in BBEdit.
So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?
I really liked YC's Privacy Policy from their original legal page

Privacy Policy: We're too lazy to look at log files, and haven't yet written any software to do it.

Terms of Use: When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050324100821/http://ycombinator...
Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?
Right way to express an opinion on the parent comment:

"That's a nice thought. Have you considered ${XXX_OTHER_GIFT_IDEA} instead? That would better nurture the tinkering impulse this kid has!"

HN way to express the same opinion:

"You don't get it and probably don't know what it's like to be a dad."

One dad to another: you'd do your kids a favor to teach them to default to the first kind of response.
The actual images aren't quite what I would call "hi-res" - 512x512px at 72dpi for the Octocat, for example. Seems like if they are going to all this trouble they should include a few sizes, not just a few formats...
On the other hand, these terminators also have problems with the split-first-record fix to the TLS 1.0 BEAST vulnerability, and that problem has to get fixed.

Do you know if Google is going back on that as well? Can't tell from the article.
According to [0] "...new research by the Treasury Department finds that small businesses — defined as those with income between $10,000 and $10 million, or about 99 percent of all businesses — account for just 17 percent of business income, and only 23 percent of them pay any wages at all." It's pretty hard to argue that makes them the "engines of the economy."

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/opinion/small-businesses-a...
Not sure how you'd "go back on that". It's a vulnerability; it needs to be addressed.
Make your own monolithic kernel: The best material on the web
CMD+click WFM
HNSummaries.com - algorithmically summarized HN articles to your inbox
Would love to get people's feedback - built this for myself over the weekend as a way to accelerate and limit my reading of HN (and being inspired by the NLP course from Stanford).

The NLP is pretty basic and takes a ratio of the original article, so you do get some longer listings.

Big thanks to Wayne Larsen of hckrnews.com for providing me with some insight on tracking top stories and letting me use his ranking data. Also, I recommend http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ for a human-curated version.
> The problem with "ex ante" regulations governing conduct is you force a lot of wasteful work on a lot of people and companies that becomes a drag on the economy, productivity, whatever you want to call it.

You're asserting this based on religious beliefs; you've read and heard this statement a lot in the popular media, and it's part of the Republican catechism. But it's false. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite - a heavily regulated environment is the BEST for business, the economy, and productivity. The United States is a good place for business precisely because it is heavily regulated. Nobody steals your plant equipment because there are lots of cops and Marines. People pay their end of the contract because there are lots of courts. Banks don't steal your deposits because the bank regulators are strong, well, that one may be inoperative in 2012 but it used to be true.

The closer the United States comes to non-regulated countries like Somalia, the closer its economy will be to Somalia's.
I've used both Blekko and DDG when trying to look for some reviews of laptops, and Blekko was much better than DDG and even Google. I went back to using Google all the time now, but I'm surprised how DDG got all this attention and Blekko gets none, when I think Blekko is better than DDG, at least relevancy wise.
Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.
I wrote my first website with BBEdit. It was a Dragon Ball Z website. Both I and BBEdit have matured a lot since then!