skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem of property ownership is inherent in any society that (obviously) permits ownership of property.

Most property in the world can be traced back to an original owner, from whom it was stolen (war, colonization and similar events). That original owner might have stolen it from someone else.

But that is a completely different point, that really has nothing to do with libertarianism, or any reasonably capitalist society, where property ownership is permitted. It's my impression that a symptom of a mature capitalist society is that historical property disputes are settled in a sense that can be considered fair. That someone might not accept property rights is an interesting discussion, and it certainly rules out any form of capitalist system, but it doesn't really apply in this discussion.

Nobody is born with a right TO anything, but rather a right to NOT be coerced. The consequence of this is that you have the right to do whatever you want with your property (which includes your body and anything you do with that, i.e. work), as long as you don't interfere with other peoples right to do the same - i.e. coerce them.

One important distinction between libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism is how to resolve conflicts that will inevitably be over property. A-C doesn't accept any state-like structures like police and courts, but libertarianism does, and the only people that get to coerce other people physically are the police, answering to the courts.
The Cortex-A8 is pretty spiffy (SIMD extensions, extra compressed instruction mode, ~GHz clockspeeds), but looking down the road, the Cortex-A9 intrigues me. All the same goodies of the A8 but it goes to 4 cores instead of 1.

The other change to look for in the next few years is cheap OLED displays. A 1 watt CPU, bridge chip, and a fractional watt display will change the battery life equation dramatically. Current displays make all the light a display could need to all white all the time and then throw most of it away. OLED displays only make the light you need. Say hello to the '80s and green text on black to stretch your battery for coding.
I've never had a laptop battery that I haven't replaced in a year, which reminds me, I need to order one. (I traveled a lot though until recently, maybe that will change.) I've never seen a laptop's battery life claim that was anywhere close to reality either. If Apple (or any OEM) says 8 hours for 5 years, it means 4-5 hours at first sloping down to about one hour in a year. There's sort of a nuclear arms race there that forces all OEMs to lie similarly, because if they didn't the other guy would sell better, though I guess if one were in a position to break the standoff, it might be Apple.

However if I liked the laptop enough, and if I were able to find out via the internet that the battery held up in the real world for a couple years, and really got good life, and was replaceable with a trip to the Apple store, then yeah, it wouldn't be a huge deterrent.

Still, overall I'd consider a user-replaceable battery similar to cruise control on a car. Not 100% necessary, but really nice when it's usable and would I really want to buy one without it?
What I've found after many years is this: If you have something negative to say, and don't have any idea what would be better, then just shut up. If you see an ugly flower, do you rip it up and leave nothing in it's place? If something sucks and you don't have any idea how it could be better, keep your mouth shut.

If you have a better idea, then tell the person straightforward - I think this could be better like this, that could be better like that, then let the person take what he wants of your suggestions. Don't defend your points, don't argue it. Just give your opinion and leave.

If your opinion is strong, and this particular part of the item affects you DIRECTLY, then first of all make it clear that you would like to argue a point, then make sure that the other person understands that this is not personal. Then lay out the points you dislike with suggestions on how they would be better, and then try to come to a middle ground on which items should go your way and which items should go the other way.

Keep the primary rule in mind - finding an error and pointing it out does not show you are clever. If the thing you see is not relevant to you and you cannot play any difference in getting it fixed, then don't say anything. Just let it be.
xp, mac, linux. most enterprise customers are on xp, not vista.

Yes I've used vista, only moderately, someone wanted a new computer and even though I advised against vista, they bought it anyways.

most likely everyone here knows vista's garbage. providing the same criticism repeatedly is generally futile. If you didn't get through the last few times, what makes you think it'll change now.
Someone should make something closer to the form factor of the Radio Shack Model 100, with the same instant-on capability and ability to run freaking forever on ordinary alkaline batteries.
Gola di Lago
It all comes down to the fact that dealing with the Gregorian calendar (and time in general) is not easy. And that's because our system is based on the position of the planet in relation to the sun. Let's get on with implementing Metric time already.
Thanks. Every article I read mentioning the Porsche/VW affair simply said Germany didn't require large shareholders to disclosure their ownership, which surprised me. Now it makes a little more sense.

I figure one could buy deep in-the-money options and practically own the stocks, but nobody (except one's counterpart) would know.
JQuery pageSlide: throwing content around
Paste:"Japanese Firms, Flush With Cash, Step Up Deals " into Google news, click link.
detenc: a fast low-memory character-encoding detector
When you read, what percent of the information do you think you actually retain?

I acknowledge that might be the wrong way to look at it though. The unconscious mind probably picks up a lot more than we think and that knowledge enables us to make connections that we previously would be unable to do.
Using memcached to rate-limit dictionary attacks
1000 charges on a $3000 laptop doesn't sound like very many to me...
My visit to American Apparel
> Giving thought to what you're doing does not necessitate a business plan.

No, it IS a business plan, just not written down. It's not a given that a business plan need to have 15 pages of black magic numbers pulled out of anyones ass.
I wonder if Chad and Steve from YouTube had a business plan, or Craig Newmark, or Steve Jobs ?

Don't write a business plan.

Instead spend the time you would have spent on the plan putting together a kickass demo, or working on the product.

Having been approached, you're operating from a position of strength already. You should work that to your advantage - if you don't need the money then you can afford to negotiate more on your own terms.

If some documentation is required put together a Powerpoint of 5-10 slides explaining:

- Your product, and why it is unique (and defensible to competition)

- Your team's credentials and experience

- Your market, it's size

- Your competitors (including SWOT analysis)

- Your funding requirements (including salary)

- Your best and worst case scenarios for growth
Electric Cars Driving the Revolution (pics)
I too kill people and do a lot of very nasty stuff in video games. But for some mysterious reason, I don't do them in real life.
I'm in the same boat as you mazer. A few weeks ago I ordered a Kinesis Advantage keyboard and used the opportunity to switch over to Dvorak.

The first 2 weeks were really frustrating, particularly since I was a relatively fast Qwerty typer (125wpm). About a month and a half in I'm hovering somewhere around 50-60wpm.

The keyboard itself is a lot more comfortable than anything I've ever used.
The Dvorak layout makes typing as a whole a more efficient process but on the down side some common shortcuts are a pain to use. Although the Kinesis allows you to remap the keys I have not yet taken the time to do so.

I do see myself gradually improving as time goes by, but it's a long process and requires a lot of patience.
For anyone interested in switching over make sure you give yourself at least a week to adjust. In the end it's all about practice.
Ask HN: How important is Posix?
Today I found myself reading through accounts of the Microsoft keynote from CES, and while I'll admit they have some interesting ideas, I still found myself thoroughly unimpressed.

Now, I've worked with people who did or do work for Microsoft. A few (Open Source, interestingly enough) projects I've worked with have involved engineers at Microsoft. My general impression of the talent in Redmond is rather good, and yet I'm still completely turned off from Windows.

What it comes down to, for me, is the lack of out-of-the-box POSIX compliance as a first-class feature. The fact that I can't sit down at a machine running Windows, open a terminal, "cd /etc", "ls -F", "less <your_favorite_config_file>", and instantly know something about how the machine is configured bothers me.

Am I abnormal? I feel like Windows 8 could promise Unicorns and Rainbows; if it isn't POSIX compliant, I'm not interested...
Microsoft seems to be on the path of making their OSes both less powerful and more difficult to use, while Linux distros -- what Vista forced me to switch to -- seems to be on the path to making that OS both more powerful and easier to use.

Given that I won't pay the Apple tax, it's Linux for me for the foreseeable future.
Your salary should be basic, covering your costs and giving you a bit of spending money. This assumes you're working full time for the startup. Remember that the bigger picture is equity.

Some good tips here:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/07/how-to-write-a-.html

Whatever you do don't spend a month writing a 60 page document. Keep it short and sweet. Use lots of bullet points / bold highlighting to ease readability. No complex multi-idea paragraphs. And most of all, just answer the key questions.

Good luck.
The Printed Blog: Twice-daily newspaper made out of blogs
I love dvorak, cant live without it. When i switched i bought the cheapest keyboard i could find and i rearranged the keys. I still have a spare qwerty keyboard if someone wants to use my pc.
To those that claim "dealing with dates is not easy", a really simple unit test would have caught that bug - like feeding the function integers from 1 to 1000 and testing that it did not crash for any of them. Bonus points for testing that it returned something sensible each time.

Sadly, this code probably wasn't unit tested at all.
Not if you want to live in a reason-based society.

Exploitation as an effective maneuver is dependent on a society unpracticed and unconditioned in the use of reason. It may be a practical move in the short run, but invariably has terrible consequences in the long. A society that remains vulnerable to such exploits will be swayed by the best exploiters rather than the best arguments (which is how it is now).

In the long run, our best strategy is to cultivate cool, calm, collected, and charitable discourse.
I tried changing the url of the link here to that, but alas the WSJ seems to check the referrer.

(Could a plugin change the referrer?)
No, it's known as being a socialist.

//not that there's anything wrong with that.
If you don't want Vista why would you buy a laptop from Office Depot? If you have enterprise customers then you can downgrade to XP when buying from Dell, or presumably HP. I think it's more of a positive note that Microsoft is softly breaking from some of the Legacy requirements that people complain of so much.
I've been using Dvorak/Kinesis for about 4 years, and I agree mostly with what's said. After a while, I found I could still use QWERTY, at least at a decent enough level that I could just grab someone's computer and not bother remapping (though sometimes I do that too).

The funny thing is every time someone grabs my laptop, they are totally freaked out.
I'm an analyst and strategist, so the answer is yes. Otherwise, I'm not doing my job.
Not available till friday.
Amazon's Holiday Miracle: Spending-Per-Customer Up 17%
Who checks the spell-checkers?
Can anyone here who has used it provide a review?
It's not just tying up threads you want to avoid but any unreasonable resource consumption you can. You maybe for example want to make sure the delay timeout you store for that account (by comparing current time to a "notBefore" timestamp or what not) is not going to cause a DB lookup each time, etc.
47 Google Products That Don't Make Money On Their Own
This dictionary attack thing is getting a little silly. Most sites do not go through contortions to solve this problem, but aren't especially vulnerable --- just lock users out for a couple hours on the Nth bad guess, and let the real user override the lockout with the password reset mechanism, which is a risk you're accepting already.

What happened to Twitter was a failure of policy, not a failure of technology.
Well, let's see here, I've been using Dvorak fooooorrrrrr... 12 years now. I think I've got everyone else beat! ;-)

I even remember having to write my own custom key layout files for Unix and DOS...those were the days!
This guy confuses Mercantilism with Libertarianism. Libertarianism is about maximizing freedom, not empowering big corporations.
MOTOROLA MOTO VE66 (UNLOCKED)
Motorola Moto VE66 their second five megapixel packing mobile phone, which is a slider design with WiFi connectivity. The VE66 also has FastScroll touch-sensitive navigation wheel, which according to Motorola should allow
He really should have just resigned and tried to leave with a bit of real money to have a comfortable (you know, by normal-people standards) retirement. It's sad to see heinously rich people kill themselves over money.
Libertarianism is fundamentally about liberty, not efficiency or anything to do with government vs. corporations. The "unstated goal of most libertarian doctrine" is to prevent people from getting bossed around or stolen from at gunpoint. He can't even comprehend such an approach from his "let's tinker with society for optimal outcomes" political vantage point.
Ces 2009: Sony Vaio P Super Don't-Call-It-a-Netbook Hands On
See this thread on the feature-request perma-story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229095

PG previously added a fix I suggested that, at least in FF2, had the nice quality of clipping
PRE areas to whatever your browser width is, while enabling a horizontal scrollbar
for the PRE when you moused in.

Unfortunately, this never worked quite right in other browsers, and doesn't work in FF3.
In my experiments, the only way to get the same desirable effect in FF3 is with a DIV-based
layout. (There might be some DOCTYPE voodoo that would make it work with TABLEs, but I haven't
found it.)

So as far as I can tell: the best fix requires a change to the News.YC/arc HTML generation.
There are probably too many Twitter apps, esp in the "me too" category, but Twitter is worth that effort in general. It's rare that any web-based service platform changes the way you function and Twitter has definitely done that not only for me, but for a lot of people I know and not just the tech crowd.
100 Great Sites to Celebrate Black History Month
Whether you want to educate children about important figures in the past or just learn a little more about a person whose life has inspired you, there are a number of great resources available to you on the Web. Check them out...
You cite a single author as a representation of a vast political ideology and quickly drop in some fluff that guides the rest of your comment:

But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different...

Libertarianism is a slightly more detailed political idea than convervatism. It represents the desire for smaller government that only acts when necessary. Another core tenet is that you're free to do as you please until your actions infringe upon the rights of others.
It depends on the person. I'd much rather people were straight and honest with me, rather than wooly and said the dreaded "That's nice".

Also it depends on experience I guess, if you're just starting to learn something out of your comfort zone, you don't really want harshly honest critique of your (probably lame) efforts. You want mainly encouragement. Once you become more confident though, and believe in your own abilities, you just want the truth.
http://searchyc.com works pretty well; as does searching Google with [site:news.ycombinator.com YOUR_QUERY].
Microsoft server worm can spread via USB
Some of those are pretty big companies - clearly they're not using it for everything, but have decided it's the best choice for some particular problem domain. Sure, it's a general purpose language, but where's the "sweet spot"? I could write scientific number crunching stuff in Ruby, but that's definitely not its forte.
Hence, we need to change up our notion of government as fixed institution to government as agile organization.
Is your website http://www.sendible.com/ (your first HN submission and the only one that isn't a question)?
But for some mysterious reason people does that in real life.
And exponential backoff is fine but not when it gets to be too much, it turns into a DoS problem. You could try to key it by IP and never let it go past, say, 2 minutes per source IP.

i.e., if me simply knowing someone's account name lets me disable their account for the next day or longer, that's a big problem.
This is probably the first time since adulthood that I've ever been called a socialist (I was a socialist for a short time during my teenage years).
+1

We talked to about 20 investing entities (maybe 5 or 6 VC firms, a mess of angels, and a few angel groups). Exactly 1 asked for a business plan and they were the lowest quality entity with the least success/experience.

Fred Wilson (one of the top consumer VCs in the world) said that 17 out of 26 of his "successful" investments (with exits) utterly changed their business model between investment and exit. In other words, a business plan has a roughly 60% chance of being obsolete.

Planning is good. You should rough out some numbers. Build a spreadsheet or two. If it's ad supported, get a sense of CPMs in your market and try to figure out how many ad views you'd need to support a real business. If it's a B2B offering, rough out what you can charge, investigate low cost distribution angles (SEO, SEM, etc). In short, prove to yourself (and others) that your business has some legs to stand on.

Write this down in an executive summary and be able to talk about it in some more detail... But writing a formal business plan? Chances are you don't know what business you're really in yet. And if you think you do, there are pretty good odds that you're wrong.

Of course, if you have a mature startup (a year or two old, a pile of customers), then some more structured planning might be appropriate.
One of the main reasons I stick with QWERTY is because it is not uncommon that I will switch to a German keyboard layout when talking with German friends. Dvorak and Colemak are English-optimized and so switching to or from them has a much higher mental cost than switching from English QWERTY to German, which closely resembles QWERTY.

I think I'll try it out, anyways. There's already a bit of re-learning that has to be done when switching from English to German, so maybe in practice it will be easy. I already notice that I sort of context-switch, so maybe my brain will seperate the layouts sufficiently so that it's no harder than switching like I already do.
I am sick of stories of how American Apparel is such an ethical company because they pay above minimum wage and make their clothes in the US.

Yes, the clothes are manufactured in LA and the workers get above minimum wage. However, at $25,000/yr that doesn't put them anywhere near a livable wage, and the fact AA makes and promotes what is essentially child porn far outweighs any benefits.

This guy said it best (with actual photos):

http://www.cracked.com/blog/american-apparel-ads-make-me-wan...
Instead of writing a full-on business plan, which is a huge waste of time, consider coming back to them with a set of spreadsheets. I've had to do business planning work for products I managed, and what the CEOs wanted was Excel. You might look more professional for not coming to them with a three-ring binder.

With that said, and with the huge caveat that while I've done this before, my advice might not be the current hotness:

(.) You need a table for revenue growth, quarter by quarter, in your case probably based on users and conversion rate scenarios.

(.) You might consider a seperate table for pricing; of all the things you write in the plan, pricing is the most likely to change, but do a couple scenarios, keep conversion/close rate in mind.

(.) If it makes sense for your product, segment the market and get that in a table; you might do, "home office", "small business", "enterprise", and have a pricing/phase-1/phase-2 revenue scenario for each model customer based on your pricing. Include a SWAG total addressable market size (there are, say, 2000-4000 "enterprises" to sell to).

(.) You can do a schedule table, quarter by quarter, and use it to set a conversion rate for each market segment, to chart featuresets in your product, when they'll be released, and what releasing them will do to your cash flow.

(.) If you have significant marketing expenses, break them down into line items quarter by quarter, showing some things kicking in later. You can break this down by outreach mechanism (direct mail, blogging, AdWords, research).

(.) You need a table for headcount; we just SWAG a common (somewhat lowball) fully loaded cost for everyone from management to QA; remember fully loaded adds (say) 30% for taxes, health insurance, and equipment/office/overhead.

(.) You need a table for all your expenses, quarter by quarter, which should include headcount, a line item for hosting/bandwidth/server/etc, marketing,

(.) I'm probably missing something, but with all that, you should be able to do a final seperate sheet, call it "use of proceeds", broken down by engineering, opex (hosting etc), sales, and administrative costs, quarter by quarter, against revenue.

Of all the things you "plan" now, pricing is the most likely to change, so don't get too hung up.

Lowball your headcount. Don't include anything you could reasonably outsource (like accounting, HR, graphic design).

Do you want to take a salary? What I think is, lots and lots of people pitch investors saying they'll forego salary; it's a cliche. You might look more serious if you're up front.

This is all going to sound over the top, and that's because it is, but on the other hand you're not going to do any of these things (price a product, figure out how many people to hire next month, allocate dollars to anything but AdWords) without these spreadsheets. A bunch of this stuff is optional (don't do a marketing plan if your marketing plan isn't crucial; maybe don't do a product schedule if long term product vision isn't a huge part of your pitch --- the schedule will embarass you 2 months from now).
I think this is the funniest comment I've ever read on Hacker News. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
No, actually, that goes double for me showing up for an interview as a feudal swordsman. Replace the sound of screeching tires with galloping hooves.

So lack of preference is a strictly tactical precept then. Well, who cares? If someone's supposed to sacrifice their body for your cause, is it because you use the best tactics? Hell no. It can't be passion, nor excitement for change, nor desire for something greater -- he's already disclaimed those.

The presumed motivation is strictly honor, which takes us back to "do what is expected of you," which even then was hardly a new message in Japan. These precepts at best struggle to transcend their cultural trappings.