skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, sweat of the brow is irrelevant, which is why it is irrelevant that their process is now automated. The copyrightable aspects are in the collection, selection, and presentation of data, which is not required by law to be performed manually.
Thanks. Our db isn't that big yet. We are adding books & ratings every day though!
Good to know. I thought this might have been a place where you figured the voting system sorts it out in the end.
Have you tested whether this is effective in eliminating jailbroken hacks? [1] In my experience, this has been the bulk of illegal transactions being made for in app purchases and its tough to validate server-side. I agree though that making the IAP process less complex is a win for developers.

[1] http://blog.off-by-one.mobi/2009/10/in-app-purchase-and-stat...
Functional questions:

1) If all products are priced at-cost, and no employees are paid, is that to be assumed there will be no products sold that aren't at least, in part, developed using third parties?

2) If everything is priced at exactly their cost, what costs are factored in to pricing? Do you factor sunk cost, or only COGS?

2.a) If everything is priced at cost, and there is no added price for value, do you expect that every product will sell past its sunk and production costs? If not, who covers the loss when a product doesn't sell enough to meet its cost of production. (For example, some products require a minimum quantity to purchase/build before they are priced at a point the market will accept, to achieve pure cost parity without loss, you'd have to sell every unit in the same fiscal year.)

2.b) If 2.a can be accepted as some products will fail to meet their objectives, who makes up the difference? I.E. who put their money up-front to manufacture the products, and absorbs the loss?
Craigslit does not claim ownership. Craiglist claims it has a license. They are completely different things. Craiglist is enforcing its license to the post. Ownership of the post itself is, and always has been, with the original poster.
Copyright doesn't apply to data. Only the text posted to CL is protected, and Padmapper isn't using that.
This is probably more because new Xbox360 sales are going to be low.

It's been out long enough that the majority of the people who want a 360 already have one.

There's also going to sufficient on the second hand market to cater to demand from people who want them.
Its kinda scary, but they are supposedly financed by "advertising" which means they are selling your financial data or derivatives of your financial data to potential advertisers....
Not that much different from Mint i suppose, but something to think about.

http://waveaccounting.com/features/un-pricing/
In other news, PCs outsold PS3s last year
@abecedarius -- quite. We've tried targeting the general home-buyer (who usually put 3.5% - 20% down, and takes out a mortgage to cover the rest).

The decision mechanics for someone in your (or such a) situation are completely different, right?
They meant the imagery was unprecedented, not the melting. NASA is more about cool space cameras than pushing climate change. (imho)
Can you list them? The one I'm familiar with is Goodreads, but if there are others, I'm interested.
Alternatively one might conclude that websites from across the spectrum use linkbaity headlines to drive traffic. Even my daily newspaper screams it's headline at me in all caps, the horror!
That is not what the Righthaven court said.

Righthaven did not have a copyright, it had a "right to sue" on behalf of the original copyright holder's copyright. The court deemed that insufficient to give Righthaven grounds to enforce the copyright, because Righthaven did not have any copyright or license therein. A right to sue is not considered a "copy right" because it involves no right to copy the material (i.e., by distribution or reproduction).

Craiglist does have a license to copyrighted content. It can actually "copy" the content. Ergo, it has the right to enforce its license against non-licensed users.
I think that's covered in the essay, actually.

He claims universities are increasingly judging professors by their ability to get funding. And, due to budget cuts, funding is only going to areas likely to pay off. "Too risky for academia" would be too far off the beaten path to get funding.

That said, I don't know if it's true or not.
>> (1) immutable data is great, but what if we have to delete some past data, for privacy or regulatory reasons? Does this screw everything up?

I recall reading about the ability to clear out old transactions, to account for fast-growing databases. For example, "delete all transactions and facts older than 2 months". 2 minutes of googling didn't yield any results though, sorry.

>> (2) can we modify values as-at past points in time? Example, an electricity company records usage monthly for customers, but sometimes past usage is incorrect and needs to be edited. What would be the best way to structure this to get the "updated" view as-of six months ago? And also the "original" view as-of six months ago?

If I understand you correctly, you do this by adding a new fact with the correct usage. Your queries will now return the latest number, and you can use `as-of` and so on to get the old value.
Just because they have competitors doesn't make those competitors viable. Apple and Linux still existed when Microsoft was prosecuted by the DOJ.

The vast majority of people searching classified ads are searching craigslist, therefore if you're trying to list something in a classified ad, you're forced to use craigslist.

Sure you could use another service, but Netscape could have also just sold browsers only to Linux customers. It's all about the numbers.
Craiglist provides links to Google and MQ, which is the basis of how the Internet and WWW works. Craiglist supplies the actual address data.

It would be different if Craiglist embedded the maps from GM or MQ, but in such case CL would probably do so with permission from those companies (possibly even--gasp--paying for the right to embed maps).
Vote Ron Paul
I'm perfectly fine with the ads... So zero dollars for me too
If you're in San Francisco tonight it looks like there's a hardware meetup at 6:30pm:

"Special Hardware Event: A Night with OpenROV"
http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/events/72306272/

(via the link from @nickpinkston)
http://opro-demo.herokuapp.com/oauth_docs/oauth

version 22 of oauth2 spec
Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average

It's not a 150 year cycle, it's a random event with a low probability. AKA 0.66% per year ~ 10 events per 1500 years but 3 of them could have fallen within 10 years of each other.
Mars One plans suicide mission to Red Planet for 2023
Your sentiment seems to echo this: http://whowhatwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/395940_8421...
Thought #23: Making it easier for non VC’s to invest in startups
Translation: you need someone who thinks like an engineer but applies it to these other tasks/positions
In a number of oo languages + is a method(smalltalk, ruby, python)(possibly using some sort of special casing of addition for integers/floats to speed up the common cases)/
It's a huge mistake to think that talent in any field is anything but normally distributed. So while it's fantastic to experience greatness, holding out for the 1% solution is often totally counterproductive. Given my druthers, of course I'd only hire the best of the best. But that's not how the universe works.
"Satellite imaging in 1889 was severely lacking, so the imagery is unprecendented." But I guess we will never see that line in an alarmist global warming report.
Thanks, I understand (now).

I made my first comments under the assumption that this aims to be a general purpose database, but multiple people have made clear now that this is not the case.

Obviously it makes no sense to argue for an intermediate QL (and one as half-baked as SQL) when the project is ultimately aimed at Lisp-purists[1].

[1] This is not meant derogatory, it's just a critical distinction from a DB that, say, my junior-admin who knows his SQL and Python and not much else could be expected to get along with.
Wow -- he's contradicted himself so blatantly here, it's almost stunning. Ignoring issues of selection bias, let's just take a closer look at the sources he's citing here:

>In 1961, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT invented the concept of wide area networks in his paper "Information Flow In Large Communication Nets" (1).

As the "peacetime" successor to the famed RadLab, the RLE, where Kleinrock worked a did his PhD research, appears to have been in essence just another post-war Big Government appendage. Quoting from WP:

"On January 1, 1946, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, the RadLab's Basic Research Division continued work at MIT as a transitional organization. ... On July 1, 1946, the Basic Research Division was finally incorporated in to the new Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT."

>In 1964, a RAND employee by the name of Paul Baran...

Umm, RAND? You'll hardly find a more illustrious poster child for the post-war Military Industrial Complex than the RAND corporation.

>The National Physical Laboratory in England that created the first wide-area packet switching network in 1967. [emphasis mine]

Enough said.
It sounds to me like any other kind of specification writing, simply from a marketing perspective. I can see the benefits, but eh. I'm not really convinced.
>Cragslist is completely automated. There's absolutely no creativity involved.

Whoa whoa whoa, the coding of the site didn't involve a species of creativity?

If you mean that the content of a posting didn't involve creativity on Craigslist's part, you'd be on firmer ground, but even there they made design decisions (however questionable...) about how to present it.
Hi, looks like we need to make our assumptions clearer. We assume an approximate 6% cost on selling a home (changes regionally). You will be able to flex your ROI shortly.

Not sure I understand the point about 4% vs 4.65%. If you see a rate of 4% on our site you can execute at that price. If you have problems with the bank, let us know and we'll go to bat for you but everything on our site is actionable.
Yea, I'll be there! It's at TechShop San Francisco - so you can check that out as well. Great stuff!
I have to admit, I'd always sort of dismissed "bizdev" and the like, but this summer I'm working for a small, three-person startup that's one developer and two sales/bizdev and it's completely changed my mind - they're absolutely fantastic.
It is important to understand that datalog is not a new query language. It is an old one, with a strong pedigree. It has power equivalent to the relational model plus recursion.

SPARQL is cool, and they did a good job making it look a little like datalog.
What's the accuracy needed to obtain 100%? Matching color codes or what?
I think this is a great concise view on the numbers. 23% revenue growth vs Google 21%.... http://www.splatf.com/2012/07/apple-jun12earnings-charts/
One Hundred Years of Laziness
This might be meaningful, but there are other factors to consider:

- you are assuming the Galaxy sales will keep going at the same rate for 6 more weeks. certainly possible, but let’s wait two more months.

- most companies talk about shipments to retailers, not sales. Apple is talking about real sales to customers.

- summer iPhone sales slow down because a lot of people are expecting a new model in the fall.
I like your initiative on the product. You need to improve the design of your homepage. I am not affiliated with Simplicant (http://www.simplicant.com/ ), but I think they have a good homepage design that could serve as a starting point for your redesign.
Are you talking about http://thedata.org/book/about-project? Maybe http://www.dataverse.pitt.edu/? Thank you.
He's not wrong, but this is a self-sealing argument. If the guy you hired just isn't really rocking the boat, well... it must be because he's not a TRULY GREAT <insert role>.

To give a tired example: lawyers, wherein yes, lawyers as a profession is needed and useful and meaningful, but it's also true that they obfuscate unnecessarily and generate make work and so on and so forth. And it's entirely possible that this can come from the same person.

You can make the same argument about virtually every single role ever.
Is the Galaxy S III number "sold", or "shipped"?
I've given up and started modifying sites directly via the Stylish plugin, if I must use them, or simply ditching them, if I needn't.
"I wonder if mathematicians recite beautiful proofs as fourplay ... "

I see what you did there.
16 magical pieces of tech that need to stop
You've reading way to much into the "150 year cycle".

Core samples aren't accurate to the day so we really don't know if this exact event is what's happened in the past. What it really sounds like is that we know there are similar melting events that happen every century and a half or so. But unlike Winter coming every 12 months we have little idea why these events might occur or whether that's all there is and we can pack it in for another 120+ years.
Because that's what they sell... Look at the revenue figures. Yes they make two operating systems, but they produce little direct revenue (iOS updates are free, the next OS X version is $20).
Excellent rejoinder from Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times today:

So, who really did invent the Internet?

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-mo-who-invented-int...
I see two problems with your argument:

1) You are comparing physical media to a web service

2) You are confusing content with access to content

Since you mentioned Phonebook, let's take yellowpages.com This site has much of the same information that a phonebook does. I would argue that it would be illegal for company B to scrape yellowpages.com for this information in order to make money without express permission from yellowpages.com. However, if Company B found another way to access the same information (ex: scanning physical phonebooks or asking people to sign up to their site) then I'd say they're within the law.

Craigslist is 100% within their rights to control who accesses their service and how. If CL users want to register for Padmapper and post the same ads on both services then that's their prerogative.
Temple Run Online Demographic Exposed
Stephenhogan.com.au Private Wealth Management in Australia
A NASA link with a graph without any reference/legend whatsoever (it's easy to manipulate data by playing with colors and putting a threshold in white and another in red, but if we dont know exactly what is means it's just like snake oil marketing), this is very disappointing for a agency that is supposed to produce science. This is tabloid level.
But also
1889+150 = 2039
2039-2012 = 27

So if this sort of melting was noticeable in 1889, and we notice it again now, then maybe we are 27 years too early.

What is the variation in the melting cycle? I can't find data.
You guys are well on your way to getting the experience down and I certainly wish you existed when I was working through the purchase of my home. Excited to watch the product develop.
How to Create Viral Infographics
Yes, the title certainly is misleading based on that final paragraphs. However considering we have numerous alarming data points across the globe in 2012 related to climate (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-te...) perhaps that context means events like this are viewed in a more pessimistic fashion.

The sentiment you express: that we don't know for sure, our models are not fool-proof etc is a very particular, unscientific line of reasoning pumped out to convince the layman that there is no real scientific consensus, which is simply false. There is scientific consensus, climate scientists never state that the test for scientific theories is 100% certainty, nor do they claim their models are completely accurate (every model is wrong to a degree, by definition!)

The climate scientists and meteorologists in my family have moved on from debating with people now, seeing it as about as valuable as arguing about gravity with someone.

It feels like the 'global warming conspiracy' is the '9/11 was an inside job conspiracy' for right-wingers: http://whowhatwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/395940_8421... Both utterly absurd to the core.
Greenland Ice Melt, Measured By NASA Satellites, Reaches Unprecedented Level
The Chinese Dragon!
Your startup idea should be something that can solve a problem.
I never understood review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and the like. Don't sites like Amazon, where you can actually buy the product, already accomplish this? Unless you have actual authors or news critics writing critiques for a book, there isn't much that makes it different from sites where you can buy the product.

Anyway, why no technical literature section? Why isn't there a genre on text books? Novels are fine, but I like learning something when I read.
A better comparison would be to a quarter introducing a new phone model - Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones in Q1 2012, the fiscal quarter during which the iPhone 4S launched.
> 1) anecdotal self praise. That a startup (one!) that got acquired used Lisp doesn't prove anything. Many many more succesful startups did not. And its not like it was the most intriguing technologically or acquisition-value wise.

That's not the point. The point was that they had a product that they could improve more rapidly than their competitors; a fact that they readily attribute to it being written in Lisp. Just about any other working Lisp programmer probably has a similar story.

And I do not put forward elisp as a "good" language. It is a Lisp, and the success and longevity of Emacs is a testament to its Lisp underpinnings.
I honestly don't know -- it's unpleasant to sort through all the info and advice from sources who all want to sell you something and I end up bookmarking a few things and putting off any decision. It sure could be lucrative to be the kind of person who gets as interested in finance as I do in, say, compilers.

Good luck with your startup.
Are you seriously comparing the sales for a device just launched (Galaxy S3) with one about to be replaced (iPhone 4S).

Because that would be dumb.
Most Newsstand apps are made by larger media companies because they have the money to make them. Indie developers aren't on Newsstand too much right now because we can't figure it out. My own magazine is just an app for the iPad without Newsstand support, and I know a lot of other magazines masquerading as apps when they really should be in Newsstand.
I think if you were to simplify things you would find a large market. Almost every magazine I've seen handles Newsstand the same way, its very standardized, which is perfect for you guys. Despite being standard, the code is frustratingly complex and difficult to implement. You might not see it now because the people that publish magazines aren't necessarily the coders you talk with every day. But small publishers, indie e-zine publishers and other periodical publishers (online and off) know the future is on places like the iPad, they just can't find someone experienced enough to code it from scratch for a low price. They live in a print or online world and iOS developing is a black box.
I actually love this, found myself unconsciously clicking through on a few books to learn more. Sometimes all I want is a simple browsing experience to spark my interest and take me down one path or another and I feel like this provides it. Keep on keep'n on!
Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but I started studying minimalism and the art of less last year, and there's almost no product I look at and think that I need immediately.

If you're interested in that same mindset, this site is a fantastic read:
http://mnmlist.com/
"The seller says that he's unsure if it's in working condition as he doesn't have a power cord with which to power it up..."
bah, measurements without standard deviations are next to useless...
Love the announcement. But a followup question: if WP Engine has excellent built-in caching and optional CDN, why meter so strictly by visits?

It reminds me of A/B services that scale similarly: by the time you get up to 100k or 250k visits per month, you also get 50 domains and 1000 simultaneous tests and all sorts of unnecessary stuff.
That's not fair, both wheels and engines are hardware ;)

In all seriousness Apple isn't either. They make better software than any hardware company I know of, and better hardware than any software company I know.
> It's not something the guy looking for "data store, alternative to SQL, meeting requirements X Y and Z" would choose.

Actually it seems like it's something that this hypothetical guy would be very interested in, given that Datomic is being pitched as an alternative to SQL.
I almost feel like this doesn't matter because none really stand out. Grabbing mind share as "the rotten tomatoes for books" I feel like is ripe for the taking
Zencoder is hiring engineers for Dev Ops, Integration Support and Dev Evangelism
Imagine a manufacturing process, and a transformative invention that makes the product 10 or 100 times cheaper to make than any method that does not use the invention. The invention is used in-house, and there is no advantage to be gained from licencing the invention. Distributing the process to be closer to raw materials or customers conveys no advantage over centralized production. Given such a situation, the company with the invention is likely to bet they can keep it secret longer than the term of a patent.

Of course I cannot give any specific examples. They are currently secrets, or they are secrets that died with the company or died with the obsolescence of the product.
For starters, you ask your initial contact for referrals. Then you ask anybody and everybody that you know, for referrals. If you don't know anybody or if no one you know can help, you join LinkedIn groups that are related to your targets, and you post a message to the group saying:

"Any (CEOs|CIOs|Accountants|IT Managers|Whatever) willing to help a startup with some product research? Will buy coffee to pick your brain" or something along those lines. You'll probably get a few nibbles if you do enough of that. Meet those people, buy them dinner (or beers, or coffee, whatever is appropriate) and then ask them for referrals.

Post on HN, and solicit connections that way. For example, email me about what you're doing, and link to me on LinkedIn and I'll probably be willing to forward introductions to anyone I know. I wouldn't be surprised if other HN'er make similar offers. Make sure you have an email address in your "about" section of your profile (your profile email itself is hidden to users, it's only for YC staff).

Search Twitter for people talking about something related to what you're doing, and then reach out to those people.

If none of this turns up anything, consider an $89.00/month subscription to Hoovers, and start cold-calling / cold-emailing people. Except, don't really make then "cold" calls... buy the book "Smart Calling"[1], read it, and use the advice therein.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Calling-Eliminate-Failure-Reject...
The millions of people who use padmapper every month seem to think it is a preferable experience to going on Craigslist, trying to figure out if Mountain View is a "Peninsula" or "South Bay" city, and then discovering the wonderful diversity of places that humans will call "Mountain View" one listing at a time.
This is a treasure trove. Where were you when we needed you during this discussion?

http://workplace.stackexchange.com/q/2249/1279
Astray: Will the be sued by Vitamin Water?
could try what metafilter does. It seems like a nice community.
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I actually scored 100% on coca-cola on first try </brag>.

Admittedly that was probably more luck than skill, though.