skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you read the article? As it says, there are multiple varieties of contest regulated by law, with games of chance being only one of them, and sweepstakes being only one of those. Your Wikipedia article is quite explicit about sweepstakes not involving skill, with reason.

The article agrees with you that design contests are not sweepstakes -- they are another type of contest which is subject to different laws. And while the article's truth would benefit its author, that does not mean it is untrue.
In this case, the "old" stuff you're talking about never really got "old". There's fundamentally not much of a difference between a proxy server and an edge overlay network fed with traffic redirection; in both cases, you're getting content from a middlebox.
They probably didn't make it up. I watched on Hulu and it had real problems for me, too. And CNN was impossible. It's possible most Internet users have never even heard of Hulu, and they were the best case.
I'm actually curious what a haskell version of this would look like.
The future of Lisp...
Good question. There's probably a way to link directly to github's representation of the post, in which case you can read it in markdown syntax rather than look at the fancy formatting.

TBH, what I like about how much github sucks as a blogging platform is that it discourages words and encourages code. There is a "pages" feature that publishes things as HTML pages with templates using Jekyl, but that is a slippery slope. I know this doesn't solve your problem, but keeping it raw and nerdy encourages me to maintain a certain words-to-LOC ratio.

Sorry about that!
I don't think it matters whether the customer is a geek; rather it matters only if the service is "mission-critical" for the customer.

For instance, our apps serve niche business customers (photographers, realtors). We get questions about uptime from only about 1-2% of realtors for the website tool app, but probably 10-20% of photographers. This jives with "only matters when it's infrastructure" as mentioned above. We are the deliverable for the photographers...
I personally prefer docbook SGML. Its much more forgiving when it comes to end tags which can be inferred. Also, sometimes the case insensitivity is nice.
Not when you consider that with any success/fundraising, you can just dilute him the 5% owner into virtually nothing without batting an eye. ;-)
> The network graph things look like cool technology, but I am not convinced - perhaps you're looking at things from too much of a github centric view? That's easy when you live and breathe something. "The Google" is where most of us still start looking.

I concede to that, and we're interested in attacking that problem, too. It's easier for us to start with GitHub though.

> That's not necessarily true. DHH or whoever could add the datanoise people as committers on the RubyForge project, where they could happily continue to work on the 'canonical' version. There are plenty of projects where that has happened, with the torch being passed, and the code moving forward.

But he didn't, and that's the point.

Everyone could also maintain their projects indefinitely, reviewing and merging in all the good patches. But they don't. DVCS answers the "but they could have..." hypothetical situations in the classic model with real solutions. datanoise could have continued development without DHH's permission, and he did. Someone can, in the future, do the same to him.
Best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history
Ask HN: First freelance job. Any tips on contracts?
I am talking with a small company for my first freelancing job. This will be my first chance to work (paid) outside of a large company. The most intimidating part about it is the contract and terms. I am wondering if any of you have any tips or know of any good books on that subject. I have a pretty good idea of the terms that I want. Should I get a lawyer for this? There's a chance I could sell the product to other companies, but I'm not sure about that, and I don't want to mention it to the client in case it doesn't work out that way. However, I want to protect myself if I can sell it. Thanks for your insight.
I'm at work so I skipped the YouTube video, but outrageously expensive? An iPhone is what, $200 bucks?

If it saves you from having to shell out $17,000 for a new car (base model Honda Accord used as estimate here) because you can get to and fro using this service, it seems like its worth it.
By some definition of "modern".
I would move on... don't see too much future on this idea only, as fun as it is
You're entirely right, of course. But I don't think Camping designed to be used for normal applications. Camping is Camping partly because its unusual and hacky. It's a little more like an experiment than a business solution.
I think SSM solves that problem.
I love the irony in that you've likely taken out some words in paraphrasing.

Also, Antonine Saint-Exupery said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Codon Devices, the Constructive Biology company™
Killzone 2 for PS3 Lives Up to the Hype [with Exclusive Pics]
Not in my case, I gave the new two points.
No, SSM reduces an explosively intractable routing problem to merely an intractable routing problem, by guaranteeing that video streams will only have a single sender (which is not even a win when you're competing with edge overlays).

You still need to have every upstream router maintain awareness of every piece of content being viewed by every downstream user.
True. But types 2 and 3 are working hard, just without focus.
Old and cranky: remember failures with a single 'fail' bit.

Old and wise: remember failures in context, with a mental model of what factors could change to make them a success.
What if there was a "chrome"-less view for Markdown files? Just a quick Firebug mockup: http://skitch.com/defunkt/bb6p7

Btw, the raw is pretty readable:
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/raw/master/2009-01-21...
Microsoft should not buy Zend
Drag&Droppers vs. Console-Freaks
Are developers that frown upon Drag&Drop editors really from the stone age?
I had the same thought, its less the entrepreneurs and more the population as a whole. I do think most people are capable of at least trying to start a company. The biggest obstacle that keeps them from "doing anything" is intimidation (of how hard it is) and comfort in their current routine.
Though not the focus of the topic, I did catch this comment.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, an old saying that seems to be even more relevant in the age of the Internet.

Honestly, from my experience, the complete opposite is true of the internet. Though I guess the type of flies you are trying to catch does come into play, more of than not, you'll get a much stronger reaction from a more heated, confrontational approach than a mellow and reasonable one. Not that I endorse the "linkbait" approach, but hey, the word exists for a reason.
Java mobile platform to get widget apps
That would be seriously cool. Imagine one-click then rearranging a site on the fly.
I am confused - how do robotic prosthetic limbs relate to faith or any deity? Furthermore, in the possibility that there is a god, what does furthering human knowledge and easing human suffering have to do with knowing or becoming god? Just kinda confused on this sentiment.

All in all, I think that the limb appears to be promising - their website (http://www.touchbionics.com/index.php) has some interesting literature and examples of the product. What will be interesting is when the feedback from these devices more accurately mimics "real feeling".
Well, I wouldn't let that get you down. It's certainly not very sexy, and you're not exactly going to get YC investment out of it, but as a nice lifestyle business, it certainly has potential.

Good Luck.
RestfulX Framework
It's interesting to consider Lisp as an Algol equivalent. It says something for the staying power of the language if these sorts of opinions are just now starting to gain prevalence.

I like CL, but I do think that its age is a distraction; people have a hard time getting past that sometimes.
Career Advice from Eric Feng, Chief Technology Officer of Hulu
Hm I'm not trying to discourage you from finding work in these difficult times, but isn't stuff like this better suited for craigslist or something...
It's weird that at least 8 people modded this up. We should post a complete gibberish story and see how many votes any story will get "ambiently".
I'm a type 2... I feel like I don't have the influence, following, or energy required to promote things after launching so I tend to give up and start something new.
Reminds me of my idea for an XML image format:

<image>
<pixel x="0" y="0" red="255" green="255" blue="0" alpha="0"/>
<!-- etc -->
<pixel x="1023" y="767" red="0" green="0" blue="0" alpha="0"/>
</image>

I think it would gzip pretty well.
Biden was sworn in publicly, at 11:45am. Its the part where Joe Biden is talking right before he turns around, shakes Obama's hand, and kisses him on the cheek. (Super awesome).
Sun could've been EC2++ 2 yrs before Amazon even has a clue.
another angle of this same story was submitted here a couple of weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421521
it's one thing for founders to pluck valuations out of the air, and an entirely different thing for us to value the company.

You're quite correct. What if they don't exit? Whats 5% of nothing?

I'd take the cash, thanks
I certainly don't want to see a flood of "Job wanted" posts on here, but craigslist is not exactly the best place to go for interesting work for a smart hacker.
Lisp's age is not an issue. The fact that the Common Lisp standardization process happened prematurely and effectively killed the language is a problem.
Thanks [deleting YC application info ... ]
The difference between this and various screen shot addons is that it outputs each piece as a photoshop layer, so they can be easily hidden/moved around.

If you take a screen shot then load it into photoshop and move around a window, you'll get a big white box where the window was, because the screenshot app didn't record any information 'underneath' the window.
I wrote a bookmarklet that would capture all mouse events and let you rearrange elements on the page... I'll see if I can find it.

edit: I can't seem to find it at the moment, but it was fairly simple. Intercept all mouse events, determine the clicked element, record the initial position, start dragging, etc. I think it did some fanciness for non-absolutely positioned or non-block elements too.
I remember when Sun announced this. I don't know if it was ever open to walk-up credit-card customers, like EC2.

The price was absurd even then. But further, you had to purchase exact blocks of time in advance. And if you bought 12 hours, but then only needed 2, tough cookies.
So at 12:01 Condi Rice, who actually is a black belt, takes out Biden and Obama, immediately pulling out a presidential pardon for herself and signing it. Thus she would be #44 (and the first black, woman president)

Make a great Kung Fu/Ninja/Steven Seagal movie. I'd probably watch it. If I were drunk and left in a room with nothing else to do.

I was fascinated at how full-of-holes most laws are. You'd think if the Congress passed a "Presidential Succession Act" then that would be the end of that, but no. Turns out, as opposed to what we learned in civics class, simply because the Congress passes a law doesn't mean that it will ever be applied the way they wanted it to.
There must be some reason that arrow keys and the space bar don't scroll on GitHub. It's probably not a very good one, though. This makes scrolling tedious for many users, including me.
As someone who does a lot of UI mockups, something like this would be extremely handy. As someone else pointed out, if this saved me an hour of my life, it would pay for itself. If it saved me two hours, it would be saving me money. And an hour of set-up time occupied by taking and assembling selected separate shots of various tool palettes, settings windows, and main editor screens, for instance, would not be out of the question.

It's the "one fell swoop" aspect that is appealing. Just being able to open every possible window in an app and then hit "capture this to Photoshop" when starting on a UI clean-up pass mockup, or for creating a master document of all windows when taking a desktop app from 1st pass programmer art to shipping resources, and sorting them into Photoshop layers and folders, would skip a lot of currently requisite document setup/prep time.

The suggestion to use this to more quickly build manuals and tutorials is also spot on. Grabbing the current state of all windows in an app at "step 3" of a tutorial, and then being able to nudge them around to best facilitate the required tutorial/manual text, without having to manually capture all elements separately, is pretty sweet.
It's a bug that snuck in this afternoon. We have a fix we'll deploy soon.
Making Friends: LinkedIn vs. Facebook vs. Twitter [cartoon]
I've mentionned it on the Clojure thread, but I think the major distraction of CL isn't age itself but rather all the dead websites, the libraries documented by a bunch of 1998 Usenet posts, etc.

I can't even find a fairly complete and maintained GUI library. I know a lot of people do web programming, but desktop software is still alive and well. Even wxCL, which is pretty much the most complete available, has been updated on May 20, 2006, and its documentation page says "Coming soon". And the mailing list is nothing but spam. You mean this is what I'm supposed to use to build a GUI in CL?

Personally, that's why I don't use CL. It's not because of Emacs (which I use for most programming), it's not the cruft... it's the fact that I feel like I'm stepping in a graveyard and won't find anyone to help me if I try to use one of its libraries.

On the other side, I really enjoy Clojure. I know I'll always have access to the libs I need, there's help easily available, and I can really see it going somewhere better.
It sounds in the article that the laws in this area are a mess of grey areas. There are some obvious no-nos that need to be avoided: plain gambling, fraud etc. The former is terrible difficult to really define. The latter leads to heavy bureaucracy.

In this kind of a case, I guess it's a matter of testing to see if they are enforceable. They obviously aren't being targeted for prosecution. But that doesn't mean they can't be.
Thank you for playing. I'm a little surprised more people aren't responding. I wonder if they haven't seen it, or if they don't like the answer they got ...
HN could make better use of the jobs section by opening it up to non-YC funded companies.
Tip: having truly "extensive experience" in 7+ languages is probably overstating your knowledge. It would take a couple seconds for an expert in any of them to confirm this.
Obama Inauguration speech as a TextFlow
"SocialToo complains that Twitter should let it pay for heavy access to the API if it won't allow it for free, but Twitter apparently isn't interested.", this is at least interesting. What is Twitter up to? In what way will they monetize it then?
Equity in a company though is only worth what a company is worth. He's open in saying that this is a part time project with no real focus/push behind it, other than his desires. In other words, it isn't worth much at this point.

So, to relate:

2) in exchange for a professional service from a top firm to file articles of incorporation, trademarks, and advice on setting up bookkeeping,

I'd put website design on that list, as I'm sure you would. Of course, top firm is only relative if you can get a "top firm" to consider your company worth the investment. In this case, I think the owner realizes the value of his company, and just wants to present an option to someone who may find it acceptable.
I readily await the fate of a scientist who's google search results only turn up an entire blog of failed results...
Why? My opinion is just that. Who knows, maybe PG disagrees.
The problem is, it's tough to distinguish "time to quit" from "giving up too early". In fact, I'm not sure there's always a difference between the two. That's why the rewards are so high for a success.
Perhaps you need to find the Steve to your Woz?
Makes sense. We serve photographers primarily too–and yes, they tend to care about uptime quite a bit.

We don't publish uptime stats, but we do work our butts off to have a good reputation in general. In my experience, photographers rely heavily on the recommendation (good or bad) of other photographers. I'd say don't publish uptime data but give a general outline of your server/data center/reliability/backup procedures and why they're awesome. Treat the customers you have like gold and they'll recommend you in forums, blogs, etc.
"We are here to provide a source of entertainment for any sort of drinking game/activity. We wanted to provide the best place to find any activity for drinking so feel free to look around and add a game/activity or two."

This is not as concise as it should be. Cut it down to like 7-8 words.
What is the best place?
showing the non-technical owner what you mean when you want a navigation like 'x' or what 'x' would look like on our current site
$3B Rumored for NSF
They may have a strong built-in bias, but what about the point they're making? Seems like there's something to it.
Oh lord, my company is a java shop. Some asshat is going to hear about this and want to implement it right away. God help us all....
I suspect that entrepreneurs fail because they don't ask good questions.

Lack of focus is an unexplored question. Lack of motivation is an unexplored question.

Hitting a stinging low after the great initial launch highs are an unexplored question. ("How could I make this process more enjoyable? What did I do wrong that got me here?")
I find it disturbing that the authoress seems to be motivated primarily by money, and does not mention this kind of motivation as the reason for a lot of startup failures.
Researchers Try to Cure Racism
I really like the idea of this software. Using time and pacing for public speaking purposes, using certain transitions to emphasize the speed at which something should be spoken. Great idea.

The only thing I think that needs to be added is punctuation. It can be hard to know when a sentence is going to end, and what inflection to use if you think a sentence is continuing on the next transition when it's not, so your audience might get wrong impressions.

Otherwise, awesome appplication.
I am not an attorney, but I have negotiated both sides of freelance software agreements in the past.

Has the company you will be working with hired any freelancers/contractors in the past? If so, they may have an agreement they've used in the past. Starting with their agreement may save you some time because it will usually already include the stuff that is important to them so you know all that upfront.

In the case that the company doesn't have a preferred agreement, here is a pretty straightforward work-for-hire agreement template that is well annotated and may be helpful:

www.jian.com/software/Contracts/Work-for-Hire-Website-Development.pdf

Things get more complicated if you actually want to retain IP rights (i.e. be able to sell the product you are building to other companies as you mention) since your contract will need to clearly lay out who owns what. I would definitely consider consulting an attorney if that is a route you would like to go down.
Did you notice that the cereal contests have a bunch of legal text? Void where prohibited, etc? Also, those are not "contests of skill".
sometimes i get no upvotes on interesting essays. i don't think stuff gets upvotes by accident. look at the end of the 'new' page, for stuff about to fall off, and you'll see plenty with no upvotes.
this kind of thing is good to write a blog post on, but when else is it useful? I think it is irresponsible to choose "_awesomer_" over "scalable, readable, fully tested" for anything that is supposed to be production quality (don't know the status of the particular project in question).

You may end up with non-scalable, unreadable, and/or untested code in a production system for a number of reasons. Some I can think of off the top of my head include performance and schedule pressure. Introducing it for fun sounds like bad news bears to me.
Coders' Recession Guide
Ask HN:  What would you want to be if you couldn't work with software?
List your dream job for an alternate universe.
The problem with this article is that it doesn't immediate demonstrate, in code, what the problem is.

Here's an example of a nested hash: "XXX". Here's what normally happens in Rack: "XX". Here's what we want to happen: "XX". Here's a couple solutions.

Ding, now everyone is clearly on the same page, instead of reading the article twice trying to figure out what's going on.
As someone in the education field, I found Alan Kay's talk really, really inspiring:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerfu...
stop reading hn and get back to work.
How does ASP.NET MVC work?
Agreed, and I don't care how many languages you know. You can't be an expert in 8 languages. It's impossible.

Tell me what you are passionate about and show me some of your work. Forget using a resume to sell yourself, use a blog, a series of articles, a viewpoint, something.

Otherwise, you are forcing me to do the work digging. Make hiring you easy.
My name is Mark Giuliani and I am one of the developers behind X#.

I do agree that the language is verbose at the moment, originally it was designed to be programmed visually but we kept extending it to the level where it is now. In less than 3 months we are releasing a new version of X# that will include a C-like or Java-like syntax. So in addition to doing > you would do if( expr ) { ... }.

For those who think X# is a joke, please take a look at http://www.snapcrm.com which is a CRM and Collaboration Suite far superior to all open source CRMs and it was coded entirely using X# in 4 months. Also, take a look at Fusion (http://fusion.codeglide.com) which is a Data Integration Platform superior to anything available in the market today -- coded in 5 months.

Try doing this in other languages!
I'm guessing there is at least one person who espouses the theory "Everything is art." Then you would have to agree that everything is art. But then art loses its utility as terminology. I think you should at least accept that some things are not art. For example, I claim the number 13589999047 is not art, because I just typed it randomly and it has no meaning whatsoever.
"the community is not making an effort to make CL seem cool."

Sorry if we value being over pretending to be...
"authoress"

Seriously? "author"
Quite, and my main problem with it is that although "best" may be well defined, the path to "best" may be very uncertain.
Tried it out, neat idea. But i don't know how you will be able to compete with Kongregate and Addictive Games. Anyway congrats on the upcoming sleepless night, have to be lucky. :)
Unfortunately AFAIK it seems OS X's Terminal.app doesn't support 256 colors.
you could probably call those 'good hearted' up votes from one hacker to another... i would however not want to be the second person trying this exact method (they are coming...) and hopefully wont make the homepage
I logged in to post the same comment. I'm missing the practical application of this.
The Emotional Ignorance Trap
I just wanted to get my facts and grammar right :-)

Facts: http://jessicamah.com/blog/?page_id=2

Grammar: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authoress
Filmmaker :)...and I am already learning about this.
Is Apple going to sue Palm over multi-touch?
Where Are the AB Testing Frameworks?
I suppose if your only goal was to get traffic then a confrontational approach might work - certainly enough blogs out there attempting to do such a thing. That's about it, though.
Idle rich.
That's the BMP spec you're describing right there, except with ASCII bloat. So, no thanks.
Fix copyright and/or copyright for streaming radio...

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.html