skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Sued (UK) over alleged defamatory user generated content, what to do?
I've just received an email with a scan of a legal letter (which has apparently been dispatched to me in physical form) basically stating that one of the websites I run has defamed and harassed a person, and that I'm to 1) apologise and retract, 2) supply a written declaration to say that it won't happen again, 3) pay his legal fees, 4) pay £10k damages.

My policies have always been to say that the users are liable for their content, but this doesn't sit well with me. I like my users.

Obviously I can do #1 and #2 (by promising a filter on content), but #3 may hurt, and #4 (damages) would actually destroy the website, and my startup. I'm a bootstrapped solo founder on a dry pasta existence, so that number seems astronomical to me.

The incident arose as a result of the WikiLeaks BNP publication a few years ago. At the time, web sites popped up that offered a search interface; type your own postcode in to see which members lived near you.

The results of these searches were posted on various forums (including this one that I run), and usually with comments by the people posting that content (not always positive as you might imagine).

That is in essence the issue, though this has been a slightly longer journey as the individual asked for content removal, and whilst I did respect that I run the forum with transparency and so I publish when I remove content and why, and this resulted in another member posting another comment elsewhere. The person in question then registered to call the member a paedophile, and so the original removed content was re-iterated in response by other members (Barbara Streisand effect). It is this which is the subject of the notice of pre-action.

I'd love advice on what my options are. They've timed it impeccably as it's a very long weekend here and the email arrived at 6pm.

If anyone on here knows a good UK lawyer for dispute resolution of this kind, especially one who might make a little time this weekend, I would love to be put in touch.

Otherwise, if anyone has their own experience from the trenches about what they've done in response to such pre-action notices in the past, I would love to be able to learn from them.

I realise that there is a difference between what they request and what any deal might eventually consist of, but as it stands their requests if delivered would be the end of my startup... so naturally I'm concerned about it.

Any other advice appreciated. Email is in my profile should it need to be non-public.
Web Age Corp is looking for developers in Shanghai, China.

We're a small company doing mostly consulting in Ruby on Rails and Python in order to fund our own products eventually. Most of our customers are new startups that want to build an MVP and test the market, so it's pretty exciting! We get to see a project from the very beginning.

Our work environment is relaxed and flexible. Working from home is ok (although we do think that meeting a few times a week in the company is helpful).

When it comes to technical decisions, you get a real say and we will really listen to you, we don't just want drones that take no initiative and are content to follow orders when they really think it's wrong.

What we're looking for:

- You like learning new technologies, when you see a new framework like Meteor or Derby, you get excited and try to play with it to form an opinion.

- You like to be given a lot of freedom and taking initiative. You don't expect someone to tell you everyday what needs to be done.

- You've got experience in Python or Ruby (but frankly if you don't and have a lot of experience in Clojure, OCaml, Lisp, Go, Dart, any other language, still contact us)

- You can show us some projects you've shipped. It can be anything: a fun weekend project, an open source project, ...

If you're interested and want to learn more, contact us at jobs@webagecorp.com

We're also interested in Interns.
I also work for an AV company, but unlike Mikko - I do not think Flame or Stuxnet should be focused on. They do not cause malicious behavior to our users, therefore our time will be better spent addressing real threats that steal credit card numbers and ruin OS's.
http://www.coda.fm gets many things right when it comes to music.
hopefully this wakes some businesspeople up.. read it!
This is something I don't agree with Peter Thiel on - at least for your first startup.

Elon Musk couldn't have started SpaceX and Tesla right out of school, he had to build up skill, credentials, and connections first.

I agree with your point, but "your first startup" is not necessarily "right out of school." In my own case, I'm working on my first startup, after about 15 years in the IT world. And it's been those years of IT experience that has led to me (and to some extent, my co-founders, both of who are younger than I) to develop those beliefs where we feel like we believe something that everybody else doesn't.

For your first startup, make something awesome but try to fly people to Mars. A small acquisition or a business with nice revenue might be the better goal.

Yeah, we're thinking IPO, and eventually acquiring Microsoft. If you're going to dream, dream big, I always say. :-)
Ordering by date is a good idea, although maybe unpractical? ('relevance' is the criterion right now).

And, agreed, relying on tooltips for critical info is not good. But, again: how do you separate beginners (who would be confused by the release name) and seasoned users (who are pissed that it's not there by default) ?

Linking to a release site would be over the line. There's a lot to do for user-curated content, watchlists are a first step, but we're going to go a lot further. We just have to think carefully about it: just enabling comments would result in a whole lot of garbage. We'll try to do something smart instead.
Open-source medical devices: When code can kill or cure
Hey everybody. I made this thing. Thanks for posting, xbryanx! It's so cool that my first web app is on the front page of HN.

ADDENDUM::

I'm somewhat new to all of this. Right now I'm learning BDD principles. So, I'm going to use A Better Queue as a learning tool and blog about BDDing new features, like an 'add to instant queue' button. I'll probably blog here: http://abetterqueue.blogspot.com/

After that, I'll re-write ABQ using BDD principles and then I'll open-source the thing.

Cheers,
Dave
Except I'm obviously not THAT kind of SEO consultant who is trying to cram stuff you don't like down your throat. If you read my other stuff on there, you'd realize that I'm all about cool things and providing as much value as possible. That was exactly my issue with these examples I gave - they provided nothing, so why should I give them anything?

Same with marketing. If I don't provide you value, I don't deserve your attention or your links or whatever.

Lumping the sheisters with the legit ones is unfair. I could just as easily say that developers are the scum of the Internet because some write programs that hack sites and steal credit card information. But then I'd be lumping all developers into the same category of scum, making the same logical fallacy you're making.

Just my two cents.
Show HN: schemafreedb.com - new, dream database service for web developers?
Hello, I'm Eric, developer and co-founder of Xornet, Inc. the company behind our new service, SchemafreeDB.
This is a 2nd submission... we removed some obscurity from the original submission title.

SchemafreeDB was designed from the ground-up to enable Rapid Database Development for web developers.

SchemafreeDB's unique combination of features include:

* Creation of free-form data structures on the fly at insert-time.
e.g. Simply add an attribute 'phone-extension' to any phone object, without disturbing your existing phone objects, all without visiting a schema design stage.

* Full SQL support for querying across disparate object structures.

* You don't have to worry about issuing UPDATE TABLE on large data sets. In fact, we did away with the entire concept of UPDATE TABLE.

* Support for complex, nested data structures. Objects can contain simple attributes (String, Int, etc) or other Objects.

* Familiar SQL query language.

* Simple join-free, dot-notated syntax (e.g. WHERE $s:person.address.city='Rochester' AND $i:person.income>50000).
This is familiar to the ease of working in an ORM, but without the impedance mismatch between in-memory objects and database objects.

* Free indexing. Delivers fast index-like queries without index configuration, AND at the same time delivers inserts at fast no-index speeds.

* Lightweight, consistent, platform-neutral connection library - JSON over HTTP.
Access your database the same way from from any network-enabled platform.

We are currently in Alpha.

Please check us out at http://schemafreedb.com
I think they felt honestly wronged by what Google did

On the contrary, "Jonathan Schwartz, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, praised Google and others for incorporating Java into Android back in 2007" - http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110723095928839
I'd suggest probably downvoted for telling the truth rudely is a more accurate explanation.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=manufactured+homes&l=1

less snarky answer: mobile/prefab homes are more common where the land is cheap, and places where a lot of people live, the land isn't cheap. I've never seen one where you can't tell (or have I?!? but seriously, probably not,) but I've been living in the city for years.
Countries or terrorist groups rarely justify military action (even if it's cyberwarfare). At best, they explain it.
Why should it be irrational to love somebody after their death? You can still listen inside of you and discover more things about that person - what you missed, what you would wish to do with them now, whatever. I don't think that requires some mystical belief that the dead person's spirit is somehow still around (other than in your own neurons).

Humans are no "classical computers", we have emotions and desires built in (for a purpose, but still). It is not necessarily rational trying to suppress those and aiming to become as much as a calculator as possible. You could as well just go for the ride and see where it takes you.
I'm confused. If you're not located in the US, why do you need to be DMCA-compliant?
Good content, I enjoyed the article.. Definitely learned some things..

But I had to force myself to get over the default wp theme :)
Someone would sure enjoy golang!
The paper i linked outlines a GC that uses bitmap marking, which is i believe the same technique you use in arenas.

The main innovation consists basically of having separate heaps for different objects sizes. It starts with a size of i, and has heaps for sizes i^1, i^2, ..., i^n for bounded n. An object that has a size of m > i^n goes into the i^n+1 heap.

It does thus waste memory at the end of object blocks, but they seem to indicate this is on par with memory wasted by fragmentation (this of course needs to be proofed).

The very big advantage is basically costless deallocation and cheap maintenance of free lists (you just mark the block as unused). It does also trigger several optimizations idea regarding lost space at the end of objects.

I don't know if you'd consider it battle proofed enough though, but i really think it's an interresting idea ! And the benchmarks seem to indicate very good performance.

Anyway, congrats on the 4-colors algorithm, and thank you for this article, it is actually a quite thorough explanation of mark & sweep techniques, i enjoyed reading it !
Thanks. I'll add it to the queue :-)
Positive Momentum: How Do You Generate Your Forward Thinking?
I can understand why behavioral techniques might not detect this stuff in the wild, but what about honeypots? Anything that shows up on a honeypot should be detectable as malware.
San Francisco (Union Square) - Full Time

Run Marketing / Developer Evangelism at Mailgun (YC W11)

Mailgun's growth to date has been entirely organic. We are now looking for someone to build and run our marketing efforts.

We are looking for someone that:

- Knows how to sell a BMW to people who think their Ford Pinto is good enough.

- Has a technical background and wants to make the world a better place for other developers.

- Believes in data driven decision making over intuition.

- Has experience building scalable lead generation channels.

- Can write engaging content about technical topics.

- Enjoys attending meetups/hackathons/conferences and discussing hard problems with other smart people.

- Likes traveling.

We offer:

- Competitive salary and benefits.

- Meaningful equity.

- A complete marketing greenfield with the freedom to create your own strategies and implement them.

- The confidence and satisfaction that comes with marketing the best product in the field.

- The self-fulfillment of knowing you were essential to the success of Mailgun and all of the fame and fortune that comes with it.

About Mailgun:

- YC W2011 company, funded by SV Angel, Paul Bucheit, Yuri Milner and other top-tier investors.

- Located in San Francisco (Union Square).

Email jobs@mailgun.net if interested.
Passworded torrents? Dear god, where have you been?

As for poor quality etc. here's our stance: by default, the first search result should be a release of 1) reasonable quality 2) reasonably well seeded.

For power users, we're working on user settings to adjust your preferences for release groups, etc.

Of course, working from a .avi/.mkv/.mp4 file would be optimal because we'd be able to get a lot of codec info from there, but we won't go so far.
Stating failures first can also be considered analogous to input validation, preconditions, or declaring the domain for which the function is undefined. Some related discussion on here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuardClause
"Manufactured homes" are widely available, but have a reputation for low quality and are viewed as one step up from a trailer. I'm sure the industry could benefit from more more automation, but the focus has to be on design and longevity to change a deeply held bias.
Creator responds quickly to resolve issues!
I am afraid that is not even close to accurate. If you define "95% of problems" to be "reading and writing data such that data is read and written" sure, great.

However, there are two little, minor things that file systems care about: performance and safety. FFS/ext2 have neither of things.

Neither ext2 nor FFS contain a journal nor do the copy-on-write metadata. Heck, if you "upgrade" to ext3, you get the journal but nothing that protects you from bit-rot.

If you look at most drives on the market, you will see devices capable of corrupting data for certain after three years. Your journal'd filesystem does jack in this case, all it can do is ensure proper ordering of writes to metadata, no guarantees that the data will be any good once written.

How about performance? Well, if you look at FFS/ext2 they are essentially terrible. Block-at-a-time allocators with no extent configuration. Good luck getting the most out of your storage media when you have your block tree data-structure. Granted, ZFS suffers from the same issue but btrfs's extent tree configuration certainly does not. IIRC, the state of the art ext[23] implementations use read ahead to ameliorate the problem but does not fundamentally cure it. If you look at ext4, they have adopted extent trees via their Htree structure.

A filesystem like zfs/btrfs is pretty imune to bitrot, they can easily mirror their metadata and avoid overwriting their metadata like FFS/ext[234] making torn writes non-issues. They avoid the many pathologies that your "simpler" filesystem and trades the complexity for not needing a fsck mechanism in the face of data-corruption, one should only be needed in the face of implementation bugs (you should note that ZFS has no fsck, btrfs just recently obtained one).

Oh, and if any of you think soft updates work, they don't. While it would be great if they really did work but in a world where drives actively reorder writes and do not respect SCSI/SATA/misc transport commands to flush their internal caches, then you do not get safety. This set of drives is considerably huge.

tl;dr You are oversimplifying the complex.
Unions haven't really impacted the residential home building market. I don't think onsite automation will help much. Most of the easily automated steps (foundation laying, framing, roofing, sheetrocking) are actually outsourced by the general contractor to specialized subcontractors. They can frame out a house in a week easily and are very efficient. It's simply not worth all the effort of programming computer manufacturing instructions and setting up a machine to automate the construction of a house becuase it doesn't take long. The painful/expensive/time consuming part of building a house is the 'finishing'. Hanging windows, installing the kitchen, doing plumbing, etc. Making a machine do all of that just isn't worth it.

(Some offsite automation like bringing in pre built roof supports or foundation forms makes sense, but that is already happening.)

On the commercial side, unions are heavily entrenched. You absolutely can not build a sky scraper without heavy involvement from the metal workers trade union, the electricians union, etc. There is a lot of waste there.

I could see automation on the commercial side, but not really on the residential side.

Also working against you - construction workers are cheap right now. The unemployement is due to lack of demand, not the cost of building. We can't even fill already built buildings.
Eh, perhaps. Either way, I think Dale puts my feelings into words better than I would have, http://www.digitalbond.com/2012/06/01/ny-times-historical-fi....

Misreporting or being given a specific leak that the administration would like to see published? Lots of incentives for the powers that be to pseudo-claim credit for this in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink sort of way.
The article is interesting, but assumed you get to pull all of the arms at once, and see all of the results. That's different from the website optimization problem.

The book looks like it would take a long time to work through, and they don't get to the multi-armed bandit problem until chapter 6. It goes into my todo list, but is likely to take a while to get off of it...
Rottentomatoes uses the netflix API, so I don't think it's anything you can't do.
I would sleep like a baby in there.
"but rather the unhealthy manner in which he'd internalized his grief."

I look at it differently. I just think he didn't want to be annoyed by a bunch of standard "sorry to hear about your loss" that many people receive when someone hears about their loss.

He said:

"I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about the death of Arlene. "

To me "long faces" is the key. The long faces make him feel uncomfortable. Just like many people are comfortable singing in front of their parents and friends and showing emotions and others are not.
If you're interested in doing this, two things that have previously helped me:

Stashboard - Open source status monitor for elements of your infrastructure, run it on AppEngine

http://www.stashboard.org/

GeckoBoard - Dashboard as a service - Can be coerced into creating whatever kind of charts/graphs you want on a slick looking board, but is set to do polling of data which is less helpful for system operations stuff, but nicer for marketing, MAU/DAU monitoring, signups, etc.
Your website is pretty, but you you need to inform the user of three things.

1. How to pay for the service. (I looked around the page for "buy" then I looked at the source page for "buy", I didn't find it. It wasn't before I came to the comments that I knew where to look).

2. How much it costs. It should be bigger and easier to read.

3. Details on the service. Monthly cost, one pair sent each month, only available for US residents.

---

I suggest making a short summary in the graphic that stands a bit out with a summary of the service, as well as putting the "buy" or "subscribe" alongside the home/now/view/read/write.

Also, if the rest of the world is excluded because of too high shipping-costs, how about offering a collection? Say every half a year, for an additional shipping. No reason to not take money from those willing to pay :)
Send something you own to space and back...
We get a much higher benefit from it. What used to be considered huge house, multiple cars, tons of gages, vacation in France another one in Mexico in winter etc.
NextPunch / B2B SaaS / Sales [Manager] (first sales hire)

San Francisco, CA.

NextPunch (http://www.nextpunch.com) is a product for businesses with mobile service employees to keep track of where their employees are working from, what they're working on, and the hours they are working.

With 21 MILLION mobile service employees in the US, our market is an extremely large and fragmented SMB market. We're looking for our first sales hire to help educate the market about our product! We've gotten great responses from our early [paying] customers and eager to go get more.

About the job:

- Work directly with founder (me) to build sales process.

- Heavy focus on one vertical to start and then build sales process for different vertical markets.

- Expect to start hiring for sales team in the next 4-6 months.

- Set compensation structure, quotas, and operational process for all new sales hires.

About you:

- A couple years experience in selling B2B SaaS products.

- Experience with SMB market.

- Managed a team of 2-10 sales people.

- Experience with setting compensation models (nice to have).

send email directly to vladik at nextpunch dot com. Thanks!
I believe that ZFS clocks in at fewer lines of code than competing filesystem + volume manager combos. That certainly was touted as a benefit of ZFS's "rampant layering violation" when first introduced.

end point: ZFS packs a huge quantity of functionality into 80K lines of code (probably closer to 90 or 100 now), which is quite a bit smaller than the combined size of (less featureful) file system + volume manager implemenations that it replaces.

See [1] for a comparison of ZFS vs. UFS+SVM. See [2] for Jeff Bonwick's discussion of the complexity win in ZFS.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg0...

[2] https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/rampant_layering_viol...
Bitcoin: The Cryptoanarchists’ Answer to Cash
Consider answering questions on stackoverflow. I have nowhere near the schooling you do, and basically spend 30 minutes a day clicking through questions and just reading them - even though I can't answer, I'm finding it to be a valuable experience.
Our galaxy on a collision course with another: NASA
I'd like to be able to set a minimum quality for torrents that appear in the RSS of my watchlist. This allows me to add it to the watchlist when it's widely promoted when it launches, and watch it when eventually a good torrent appears of the movie.

I've been looking for an aggregator that does this for a long time, but still haven't found it.
SEEKING WORK - BC, Canada, Remote, up to 30% travel

Certified, incorporated Project Management contractor/consultant.
I mostly work with US clients.

My dream client is a smaller start-up-ish company that has a product (or products) available in the market.
Your clients need some assistance and oversight when deploying/installing/implementing said product.
You need a gatekeeper between the client and the development team - someone who can set their expectations realistically and tell the difference between a bug and a PEBKAC error.

Projects never go as fast as they should, right? From my experience on software implementation projects with Massive Fortune 500 corporations, I know what to expect and can help them plan realistically to avoid those surprise scrambles :)

I'm a technology loving geek, but not socially awkward (or so I like to think).
Incorporated, professional, funny and adventurous.

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jessicaevans
If you added TV shows it would be better. Finding movies isn't hard, finding episodes of TV shows is tedious and error prone.