skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is silly. Imagine a world where this would be enforced.

There is no way to know in advance that your look and feel doesn't accidentally resemble some of the existing millions of websites.

I agree with you and so does the law.

The first required element of proof in any copyright claim is that the alleged infringer had access to the plaintiff's copyrighted work. Basically if you never saw the copyrighted work you are not infringing if your work is substantially similar or appears to be a derivative work.

For another reason why copyright probably (I say probably because you can never predict how a jury will decide) does not apply is the merger doctrine. That is when an idea and the expression of the idea become one. That is not copyrightable.

For the UI to have a trademark, and it could, the 37S UI would have to cause a person to recognize that the UI is by 37S. This will be very difficult for them to achieve. The Nike swoosh is trademarked because it immediately causes a person to know that it is by Nike. Same with the Reebok symbol. A person knowing who designed a UI on a web app by its colors is a stretch.

Also, functional elements cannot be trademarked. So an excellent screen layout that improves usability cannot be part of a trademark. But the colors and artistic arrangement could be.

Lastly, yes, you do need to register your copyright to sue. No, mailing yourself a copy does not work at all. Do not do it. Read 17 U.S.C §412 for the reason. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode17/usc_sec_17_000005...

Then go read §504 and §505 for more reasons.
I'm not really familiar with the DC school district, but LA Unified gets a bad rap for being an awful school district. If you take it on a whole maybe it is, but the wealthy neighborhoods produce very good schools because they are outspending neighborhoods in say South Central Los Angeles or East Los Angeles. Do you think that this is solely because in the richer neighborhoods the parents have more time to spend assisting the students or in the classroom? Also it would be interesting to know how much more the richer schools receive in funding than the poorer schools. It seems like they are getting a two fold advantage. They have more funding available and parents who have more time and/or more involved.

Edit: just to clarify I didn't want to come across as calling you a right-wing Nazi baby killer and hope that I didn't in the original post.
I was going to post this same reply. Honestly, the fact that "Web 2.0" is listed so prominently makes me almost think they cut and pasted this from one of last year's lists.

I mean, call me crazy, But maybe a trend built around an ad-based revenue model isn't the best advice for the coming year.
Well, the extreme case of non-upkeep is the vacant buildings in NYC, etc. When nobody can make a profit from a building, it gets abandoned. This isn't an overnight process. It starts by using a tarp on the roof instead of fixing the roof, and it ends when the building is abandoned and nobody has to pay any rent or fix any broken pipes, etc.

I agree that the public would rather "force evil landlords to do x" than achieve the social goal in a minimally economically distortionary way. It similar to how politicians give handouts to people who drive hybrid cars while at the same time fighting a hugely expensive war to prevent oil prices from increasing to the point where people would just buy electric cars because they were cheaper!
Isn't extremely high liability insurance costs a structural part of the aviation industry? I'm sure many of the same forces drive companies away from the nuclear power industry.

Regardless, I can hold both thoughts in my head at the same time: that we need punitive damages to ensure that companies don't factor in predictable loss-of-life liability into their business plans, as they do with many other liabilities, and that we need to consider whether punitive damages are out of control. Greenspun apparently can't.
I like how social networking is apparently a big deal for enterprises now. Yeah, that and offshoring to Zambonistan.
Good Lord thats scary sounding.

I believe the app engine datastore has been stated as being built upon bigtable. I suppose the index creation is "newer" code than the core of bigtable, but I'd like to hope that the Google bigtable code is bugfree at this point...
I'm pretty well married to software and enterprise security at this point, and if a week goes by where some loony unrelated idea doesn't force me to reconsider my field, I worry that I'm losing my inspiration. I totally buy the idea that temptation and grass-is-greener thinking is a major risk for a new project.
Well, yes, hence my explicit mention of GCC and the java compiler. :)

In general, as long as the compiler is bug free, you should be fine. Its just that never running into a compiler bug is much less likely when you're using very new code. Code is often buggy after all ;)
I agree that DC public schools misspends its money. But I am not very interested in how can we fix the problem in just this particular time and place. I am more concerned about what incentives of the system cause this problem, and what new incentives would keep this problem from recurring in other times and places.

It is easier to look at a particular district and point out what they are doing wrong (cronyism, graft, etc.) than to build universal policy that improves the system as a whole. "There are a thousand people cutting branches for every one striking at the root", and all that.
1) Get a modem, 56k will do. Connect to the internet with it.

2) VNC a windows machine somewhere.

3) Understand in a new and wonderful way why this is a terrible idea.
That's a strange question; 37signals is a 7-8 figure business with perhaps tens of thousands of customers all driving monthly recurring revenue; they're profitable, they have an infrastructure to build new products faster than their competitors, and they have one of our industry's great brands. And they remain a "small business" (they're, what, 15 people now?).
Solve the halting problem, $300-$1000: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376238

I don't want to work very hard: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394609
This is absurd.

I can't believe the comparison between the Internet and tubes ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Come to think of it I find this pretty much impossible to believe. Unless the data set was many, many terabytes of data, surely there would be some sort of copy of the database somewhere? Even the schema with some reference data...
To be sure, the closer the two languages are, the less impedance mismatch there is.

But no matter what, you brush up against the fact that when the languages are just plain different, you have to be careful. And if you know Javascript is different from Language X, and can debug the difference, why are you writing Language X and not Javascript?

Honestly, most of what Lisp does that makes it unique (first class functions that aren't ugly, macros), are either availabe (first class functions), or something that the compiler can take care of for you, so it seems that Lisp is actually a scarily-good-fit for language to compile to JS. (Assuming no encountered bugs that is ;))
Agreed, a bit too much chest-pounding for a technology nobody has vetted or even has a demo too.

When you "download" a video to your "virtual desktop", it still has to move bits from the video's source along ole' Internet 1.
So, that makes sense, but your original argument appeared to be something to the effect of, "money isn't the solution; we've tried money, for instance in DC, and it hasn't worked". That argument is wrong. It's akin to saying, "penicillin isn't the answer to infection; we've tried it, for instance by putting it on an altar and praying to it, and it hasn't worked".

I'm not engaging with the rest of your argument.
1943 "viral marketing" manual -- OSS -- Development of Psychological Warfare
Then write a blog post about it and submit it?
Use zamzar to convert the youtube files.
Thanks, I meant that but got distracted by "oh! optimization opportunity!"
Another option is Shopify (shopify.com) if they want to create more of their own store, but have their own brand. Etsy is pretty awesome, true.
Great resource. Why didn't you embed the videos instead of linking to them? Embedding makes it easier for people to see them all in one place?
>"Edit: just to clarify I didn't want to come across as calling you a right-wing Nazi baby killer and hope that I didn't in the original post."

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying that you did. I was just commenting on my frustration with the general state of public debate in the United States. People who support market-based policies are generally vilified right now. I think it is just a hangover from the Bush presidency, since he is widely disliked and supports market policy in his speeches. Debate will probably become more reasonable when he is gone.
Launch: Are My Sites Up?
Stan Wagon writes interesting books on experimentation with Mathematica.

I'll look forward to hearing more comments about this.
Looks like Zuckerberg and co. aren't waiting to become profitable before embarking on legal excursions. Do they not understand that services like this one can only help them in the long term by doing work for Facebook to satisfy users, thus keeping more people on the social network?
Fresno needs more tech editors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyxc9Pb8sog

I like his website: http://powerbandinternet.com/

I also like how without telling you what you get you just checkout via a PayPal page: http://powerbandinternet.com/products.php?id=2

The copyediting also hurts my brain: http://powerbandinternet.com/howitswork.php
The evidence that I've seen suggests the correlation between school spending and educational achievement is weak. There may be specific districts that we can target as being underfunded, and money might help those districts. But untargeted increases in education spending seem unlikely to help. After all, there are very well funded districts in the United States that are horrible.

That would be my main argument. Then I wandered a bit.
I can completely agree with you here. A more universal policy that improves the system is better than pointing out particular problems of a particular district. I think ultimately though property tax is the wrong way to fund the school system and that needs to change.
Ballmer’s big moment
When school children start paying union dues, that 's when I'll start representing the interests of school children

Albert Shanker, AFT President
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Isn't it a bit late for Christmas ornaments?
Amazon Web Services Blog: Bits For Sale - The New Amazon S3 Requester Pays Model
Vector Arrow Icons
SAS Institute is the world's largest private software company with over a billion in revenue and no stock options (http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/...)
I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument.

For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school districts are teaching overcrowded classes in doublewide trailers and spending their own money on books and classroom supplies. And then I think your argument is awfully abstract, counterintuitive, and unpersuasive.
His ideas about schools and education are incomplete. One reason we have teacher's unions is to help avoid good teachers being fired due to ignorant complaining noisy parents (and students). And by the way, even with unions a female student can ruin a male teacher's career with a simple "he touched me" lie.

Smart parents will do their best to send their kids to private schools, but the less fortunate kids will get stuck in public. If it were even easier/cheaper to send your kids to private, then there would be an even greater separation between the kids who's parents care and the kids who's parents don't give a damn (the haves and have-nots).

The answer isn't to make more private schools, the answer is to fix public schools. And the problem with public schools is not the teachers. The teachers are working within a system that is broken. Rather than go into the details, here's a quick example: you're a teacher. You cover the material in class. You're inventive, dynamic, clear, withit, the whole nine yards. You assign homework on the material, go over the homework, and then give a quiz (on that material). Students fail because they didn't study and don't care (and this stems from most parents not giving a shit about school as long as their kids are out of the house and having some fun in sports). You go over the quiz in class, and give a test later in the week (on the same material). The students fail because they don't care and didn't study. You have a choice: do you fail a bunch of students and bring down a shitstorm of parent complaints and administration complaints? Or do you yet again make things even easier and maybe even curve the grades so only the very least prepared students fail?

If you fail a bunch of students, administration will claim that you're a bad teacher. You'll have constant visits by "guests" (from administration) in the back of the room evaluating you. Parents will complain loudly that you're inept. Everyone will turn you into a scapegoat. If you're not tenured, you're gone.

Let me give you a hint: teaching is just a job, like any other job except that you're helping kids and so you try to go the extra mile if you can. But it's still just a job, and its not worth all the shit you get to make it rigorous if no one else is doing it, if you get no help from administration, and if you in fact get severely punished for it.

You want to fix education? Let the teachers teach, and let them fail students who fail. And for Pete's sake, get rid of the fucking standardized tests. They turn education into color-by-numbers.
Good analysis. One point though about Sweden. Almost all of Sweden's large successful companies were created and grew during a period of very small government.

Sweden's current face of big government didn't start until the 60s when all the companies except Mysql were already large.

For more see Johan Norberg's writings on this:
http://www.johannorberg.net/?page=articles&articleid=45
Well, going back to the original argument that we need to spend a greater percentage of GDP to achieve higher educational achievement, I think we could both agree that the problem is less straightforward than that, that the United States spends more money per student than other countries even in some of its worst schools, and that unnamed structural reforms that encourage schools to be better managed can increase educational performance in the United States without necessarily spending more money.
It doesn't work like that with the right Terms of Service.

You can't get a VPS account or machine on slicehost/EC2 etc., download kiddie porn and pirated movies all day, and try to hold the company giving you the access accountable. It is (or should be at least) just like your ISP agreement.
Yes, yes, a million times, yes.

It's stupid to give any service any credentials except those created specifically for that service. (This dictum includes the common practice of using the same password for multiple services.) This is not an issue of paranoia. Fraudulent or malicious services are, of course, a concern, but not the only one. You are not only trusting these people to use your credentials appropriately, you're trusting them to store/transmit/manage those data securely.

The problem is that this advice will never sink home with users. So Twitter needs to step up and protect its users by implementing OAuth (or something similar). People will do dumb things like this so long as the risks seem remote (and they always will, until it's too late) and there's even a minor benefit to be had. The point is: Anyone that wants to could steal a bunch of Twitter users' passwords right now with hardly any work.

Twitter should regard this as a gaping security hole. It doesn't matter that it's not technically a vulnerability in any of the code they've written.
Apple market share tops 10%, Windows share lowest since tracking began
Much of the promise of thin clients was that the network traffic of displaying the data is less than the data itself. Unfortunately, the opposite usually turns out to be true.
I've noticed that Etsy's success is attracting competitors, some of whom are kind of appealing.

* 1000markets.com
* silkfair.com
* mintd.com
* dawanda.com
What about a meta-app that handles changing your Twitter password at all these other apps? :-)
Which just goes to show why the AFT is an idiotic idea to begin with.
Perhaps the term "startup" is, at least in part, partly a marketing term these days just like Web 2.0.
Is this targetted at rural users? For $40/month on top of dialup costs, wouldn't an investment in cable/DSL be a better decision... ?

Uploading a lot of data seems like a better problem to attack, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415460
It is astonishing that a site with years worth of User-generated content didn't have any sort of backup plan. Or just years worth of data in general!

RAID isn't a backup solution, period.
Cambridge MA (and even Cambridge+Boston) is a a small provincial town compared to New York City.
Sure, although the same logic doesn't preclude simply spending more top-line dollars and sucking up the fact that there's too much overhead.
The only problem with this approach is that you cannot de-provision individual bad actors. It's an all or nothing approach. There's a lot of work involved in re-provisioning the good guys, and where there's work, there's psychological resistance.
That's entirely possible, but if the data is years old or simply reference data, what's the point? They just lost years worth of peoples' blogs (or whatever). That isn't really something that can be recovered from. Would you go back? Would you recommend it to a friend?
I'd give Tumblr a shout-out in your about page for design inspiration.
Predictions are irrelevant in risk management. You don't want to know what will happen, you want to know the worst thing that could possibly happen. What you need is a theory of probability for price movements. Financial theory uses the normal distribution, which underestimates the likelihood of big crashes.

Mandelbrot says fractals give a better picture of market behaviour. They can be used to generate scenarios of price movements which give you different values for your portfolio. This is the probability distribution of your portfolio. It tells you how much debt you can take if you want to be able to pay it back 99.99% of the time.

He makes an interesting analogy with the likelihood of a storm. Ships are built to survive waves of a certain height, and the highest probable wave is also calculated with a probability theory. The theory of waves had to be revised because a lot more ships were sinking than was thought to be likely. Someone came up with a better theory, and now safer ships can be built. In the same way, fractals could help build better portfolios.
"eliminate government-owned housing so that these properties can be returned to the tax base and used to their full potential"

Would the government really make more ongoing income from taxes on rent rather than rent? That seems unlikely.
Reminds me of something my dad taught me: "optimize at the center and innovate at the edges"
Simpler for whom? The user who has to manage N passwords for N services, instead of one password? I'd rather Twitter's staff suffer a moderate amount of pain once than have every user suffer lesser pains continuously.

Programmers (myself included) too often fail to consider whether "technically simpler" is "actually simpler". It is one of the things that ensures the poor quality of software. We'd do well to understand that our job is, first and foremost, to make life easier for the people using our software. This may require martyrdom from time to time.

Besides, OAuth isn't all that complicated. Distilled, it's similar to your idea but with several additional benefits, not the least of which is that there are existing implementations to help you on your path.
And no wayback machine either, ouch:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://journalspace.com

"We're sorry, access to http://journalspace.com has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt."
Well, Fresno _is_ the center of the states brain drain.

Glad I got out of there when I did.
I can't _ever_ see Netflix using UPS/FedEx due to the logistics on the shipper side. The mail is already going to your house, so having a movie dropped in your mailbox isn't going to make a difference. However, if Netflix were to use a shipper like UPS or FedEx, then they would need to drive their truck to your house just to drop off a disc. That's ridiculous.

All of these people balking at the high carbon footprints of these companies would have a fucking field day.
In California the public schools are funded mostly by the state with some additional money for wealthy districts grandfathered in. Still we have the disparity. Wealth districts have volunteer parents, fund raising, and voters willing to approve special bond issues. The poorer districts tend to be poorly run, wasting more money. They have less community support, fewer volunteers, etc., etc. There are individual schools in poorer districts that do extraordinary things, but usually it's the case of an extraordinary principal.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417610
"Real men don't take backups, but they cry a lot."

That said, it's really hard to do backups of lots of data.
If it's in Facebooks TOS that you need to access their site specifically through them then yes, Power.com is in the wrong.
Pressure - The Mother Of An Entrepreneur’s Motivation
$53 million in compensatory damage against a carburetor company for the crash of a single-engined 2-seater due to an exhaust valve failure? (Because the carb was recently replaced, and thus was within the statute of limitations.) http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/torts-damages/8890265-1.htm...

Granted, that's only one case, but how many $500 carbs does that company have to sell to cover $53mm in exposure? How many more times than the tiny market for those carbs (that engine is no longer in use in a production aircraft)? I've left explicit instructions to my family that if I should pass crashing my airplane, that they are not to sue my maintenance facility or anyone else in the aviation industry. I hope that never comes to pass, but if it does, I wouldn't want to be part of perpetuating this ridiculousness.
early!
Sell Your Web App: Lessons I Learned From Selling DropSend http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347381

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=246606

How to go down with style http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330689

Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and Good Luck http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335815

Cities and Ambition http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201373

Looking Back on Selling Gravatar to Automattic http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345531
C lets a lot of exciting things happen inside an if statement. I once spent a couple hours cleaning up a big, ugly and unfamiliar codebase with transformations like that before I realized I was ignoring some side-effects and was therefore introducing bugs willy-nilly. (Isn't version control great?)
physorg will publish anything (case in point they published a GaTech press release about me http://www.physorg.com/news148062997.html ) and everything so just be sure to look where it's coming from.