skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would certainly defer to your much superior knowledge of physics. Mine is only that of an MIT student who was thoroughly indoctrinated with Special Relativity as part of MIT's general science education, and who sat in on an undergrad course on GR taught by cosmologist Max Tegmark.

If I understand Bob Geroch properly (much of his paper is Sanskrit to me, but I think I understand the parts that are in English), he acknowledges that FTL particles would seem to allow you to set up "closed causal curves" (i.e., violate causality in a way that would allow you to try to generate a time paradox), but he asserts that you would never actually be able to achieve this goal due to something like the "Novikov self-consistency principle", although he doesn't mention this principle by name.

This is similar to the position that many physicist think about the existence of closed time-like loops in GR. Sure, in some sense they are possible, since GR shows you how to set them up, but something like the Novikov principle would either prevent you from setting one up or from doing anything nefarious with one.

So, if I understand things correctly, Geroch's claim doesn't really different too much from assertions that I made elsewhere in this thread, that sure you might be able to build an FTL drive, but if the universe lets you do this, it's not going to let you make good use of one, like, for instance, creating an FTL space-liner fleet, because if it did, you'd generate a time paradox soon enough. Or if the universe were so kind as to let us do that, we'd end up finding ourselves in a very strange world where Novikov's principle was mucking with our daily affairs in a very creepy manner.
They claim it will have "exponentially more bandwidth than any other product in commercial aviation today". I know that's an incorrect and meaningless use of the term "exponential", but the bottom line is they're claiming it will be a lot faster:

http://www.jetblue.com/flying-on-jetblue/wifi/
I make dice...
The LED bulb doesn't generate heat, it's the AC to DC converter which creates heat.
Example:
http://www.timeforzen.com

(Resize your window and you'll see how everything re-aligns for desktops, tablets, and smartphones)

I chose responsive css because I can code it once, and it'll work on all devices. No bloat, no separate versions to maintain. Why wouldn't you want that? Especially with more and more consumers buying mobile and tablet devices. You increase your potential audience with a few lines of css code. Why do it through server-side code and have seperate versions to maintain during each and every update? As long as you plan ahead, your design can be responsive with literally a few lines of css code.
This was my thought as well, I imagine we'll start to see devices like that but optimized for a specific task: a $100 tablet that is preloaded with 20,000 recipes along with pictures and videos and comes with a magnetic bracket for attaching to the fridge.
like flatline said below, I was wondering if you did any concurrency. I recently scraped another site and I found a "sweet spot" of about 10 different sessions each trying different chunks... maxed out at about 200kb/s from the site.
Why not jump into ecommerce feet first and buy a turnkey store selling 3,200+ digital downloadable products?

https://flippa.com/2817900-turnkey-3200-digital-download-pro...

You can easily spend 10k building an app no one wants, or buy an existing brand and inventory.
Yes. They only take "top developers", who are "25 times more effective than the average developer". Which is precisely measured by looking at what school you went to, or what gigantic tech company you have previously worked for.
Interesting that Level3 - yes, that Level3 - is a 50% owner of the patents.
Why the 47% Won't Vote for Romney and Why it Reflects Poorly on America
Really? Because nothing in that bio points to that. Actually the whole thing is unbelievably vague and opaque.

And these kind of cutesy oneliner descriptions of one's skills make me cringe: "Simply: I make beautiful things with data".

OK, she works as a "chief scientist" (that's not even a job, for us, old time folks, but anyway) at bitly (a URL shortening service, i.e as far away from a real business as you can get, that aspires to be a "bookmarking service" also.
We're currently using Google's Geocoder and Yahoo's Placefinder, which work okay, but they both have numerous flaws and various TOS policies we're ignoring for the moment.

Would happily pay for this service as well.
http://freemoviesite24.blogspot.com/2012/09/tim-and-erics-bi...
http://freemoviesite24.blogspot.com/2012/09/tim-and-erics-bi...
To be fair, the diamonds at that site are from/the result of a meteor crash, and most are small in diamond terms.
Well it's different to sell a profitable company than a speculative company. Valuation of a start up is based on speculation while an operating and profitable company would go for around 110% of gross annual revenue in cash.

Since it used old school valuation we can assume a few things:
* GeekNet content traffic is growing very much
* There was no other bidder and no 'bidding war'
* GeekNet was highly motivated
Missed an important class/lecture/lab because you were sick or too busy taking care of some more important stuff than attending class? Introducing a not-so-innovative but pretty useful (and crowdsourced) course video/audio sharing platform! Students can upload materials such as videos and audio of a class, so people who missed the class can browse through the archive to see what he/she missed.

I myself believe this is a good idea. Even if it fails to validate itself in a certain market, I still want to build it because this is at least what I desperately need. I only have an one hour class today, but it takes me around an hour and a half to get to the campus and another hour and a half for me to get back home. It's extremely tiring.

Concerns would be:
1. What if recording a lecture is illegal in some places? Or if it's against the rules of the university?

2. I'm a student myself, so I don't have a lot of money to invest in content storage if people start uploading a lot of videos and audios. I'll be hosting the site on webfaction on the most basic plan, so the resource is fairly limited. It would be great to have a service that I can direct all the upload to their site via an API or some sort, so the users are uploading to the service from my site.

YouTube Direct is great, but there's some problems associated with it:
a. User has to log in first, which is a hassle, especially when people don't necessarily trust me, yet. I would totally accept anonymous uploads.

b. I want to make it as simple as possible. Having a YouTube widget to handle this really doesn't feel right. It makes the process less intuitive.

That's it! Please give me some feedback.
I think this is an excellent post. But perhaps not for the reasons jws thinks it is :-).

Look at that Phillips bulb, isn't it neat? When they won the L-prize for a bulb that could do 60W equivalent for 10W input, some of the coverage said that they had spent just over $28M developing that one bulb. They didn't open source anything they discovered in that process about making LED light bulbs. And granted LEDs have improved in the last 3 years since the Department of Energy ran its $10M 'kickstarter' campaign, the bulb linked is a 12W for 60W equivalent, and its only one color.

So one has to wonder, if it seems easy but the only one company was even able to complete and entry for the L-prize, what did they know that I don't?

I wonder if it is a form of suspended disbelief, if its far enough away from your direct expertise but seems practical and one really loves the concept, one can invest a level of belief into someone saying they can do what you want.

The one that will be interesting will be a Kickstarter to bring an herbal supplement to market that stops aging. I'm sure its coming, or a perpetual motion machine, maybe a project to get the Rossi cold-fusion machine into production. They keep saying if they have a million dollars they can build a functioning power plant.

[1] http://energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces-phili...
GitHub Launch Page
Not since the grand redesign(s). It's been pretty much maddening to use for at least a few years, so my readership has gone down from 10+ PV/day to <1/wk. My uid is 115xxx.

Couple this with their editorial mechanism posting the same 30 word blurb for the same news item everybody else is posting, only two days later after every body has said their piece, what's the upside? The commentary there is no better than other places.
That's much more about momentum than someone starting from scratch, looking at SF and GitHub (and Bitbucket, etc) and choosing SourceForge.

> Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity.

GitHub is huge everywhere, especially with open source. It's absolutely not a HN thing.
"are actually selling anything"

As others have pointed out they are selling something. Nothing indicates that you can get the "thing" simply by sending an entry to the address and there is no obligation to buy anything. As happens with contests that don't want to appear to be a lottery. In other words you can't have someone pay for a chance to win something (in many legal jurisdictions particularly in the US not sure about anywhere else). But you can have people both buy things and enter with a very clear "no obligation to buy" as we have all seen (once again in the US).

So it is very clear and obvious that in exchange for paying money you are expecting to receive something in return.

Now of course they could probably work around this with the proper wording somewhere.

"We hope to produce this lightbulb. There is no guarantee we will succeed. Here is a complete list of our qualifications. Be aware that if we fail to deliver you will loose your money. Here is our record with other projects. Etc."

In that case the "game" becomes a little different and it is apparent and visible that you stand to loose just like paying to enter a marathon you pay money and are not guaranteed to win. (Not a great example but anyway..)
Why would lawmakers care about something that doesn't affect them at all? It's going to take a lawsuit against a company that actually affects them to have any action taken, and I can't think of anything off the top of my head that is actually in danger of that.
Diamonds: Betting on De Beers
Speculation drove up Instagram's "value". As did a likely bidding war with Google.
> If anything it sounds like maybe Git itself violates this, but I thought that Git hashed the difference between all the changes of a commit to get the hash. Some of the others sounds equally obvious at first glance.

Git creates hashed objects for individual file revisions, as well as tree objects referencing many individual file objects and commit objects which reference those tree objects.
Odd; I read improper fractions differently.

100 2/3 - One hundred and two-thirds.
102/3 - One hundred two over three.
It's a fairly common way to do advancement in large companies, and is usually based on experience. "Software Engineer I" is entry level, "Software Engineer II" has 3 – 5 years of experience, etc.
Exactly. Funding is only a means to an end, and all too often startups forget that. Even if you look at the Google, Facebook, and Microsofts of the world you'll see that they were very lean to begin with and proved their market before scaling up with funding.

The money line in his post: "The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains."
this has been created 4x over that I know of. Search HN you will find them. Why not make a Facebook page, so people don't have to visit a specific site - just follow the discussions via FB?
From having a read through the claims of - 6415280: Identifying and Requesting Data in Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data. - It appears they have patented using hashes as identifiers for the data that is hashed. Which is a bit like patenting the use of a shovel for digging.
My 10 random Ideas (updated here for clarity) (original:http://decodedenote.tumblr.com/post/18942589572/10-random-id...)

1. A simple one tap add note app for android. All the ones Ive used till now are shit.

2. Peer to peer text and image browser. Torrent like? Why and what? Don’t ask. Like diaspora.

3. Original Color.com app done right.

4. Karma styled instead of performance styled company employee review system.

5. Personal interests and likes on Facebook change. Also circles of friends change. New social thing utilizing this phenomenon for data mining.

6. A real time crowd sourced transcription/fact checker for streaming video. Handy during political debates.

7. Course discussion Reddit like group. Can add equations as generated images like web assign. Break topic into meaningful things.

8. Make sexy furniture using trash. So much awesome stuff is thrown away each year. I bet itll look better than shit at american outfitters.

9. Webapp that sees who up voted who (in a reddit like system) and word cloud into tags and interests.

10. Calvin and Hobbes comic generator. Seriously. If I type anything, it should generate a comic based on that and embed it. xkcd works too :)
When I saw the photo caption: "Welcome back, Graham. My, what big eyes you have" I thought this was about PG! Alas..
PHP RFC: Consistent Escaping Functionality For Killing XSS
Jurisdiction is a huge factor when filing suits. IP lawyers do their best to move cases into Tyler, TX (or other backwoods cities) where the judges don't understand technology whatsoever. A popular tactic is to shake down porn companies for money using nuisance patent suits.
Equity offers to employees (past, say, the first ten) are usually at joke levels and used to try to negotiate your salary down and prevent you from leaving. Sometimes they'll even throw in a statement about "keeping you connected" or "making sure you're motivated". It's all crap- at best, the money you'll get from it will be equivalent to the bonus you'd get working for a larger company.
There are 52 weeks in a year -- minus 2 weeks vacation (USA) and 1 week holidays, yields 49 weeks. 49 * 5 days = 245 days. So if you take one day off to interview, that's 0.4% of your annual pay. So DA should ask the companies to pay the candidate 0.4% of their bid to bring the candidate in for an interview. In the current system, making a bid doesn't mean the company has skin in the game (since they may not make an offer), but it costs the candidate a lot to take a day off.
It steadily becomes more user-friendly, but there will always be a lot of problems with different devices, and mostly with their screen size
ITC to investigate Google’s complaint against Apple
The way I read it, you did seem to draw a line in the sand - that people should have stopped implementing new features a few years back.

My point isn't an attempt at a gotcha - it's a comment that if this is how you really feel, then the only way that companies are going to take any notice is by putting your money where your mouth is and buying the more robust and optimised versions of those things that do the basics well rather than buying the models with the advanced features.

And it's not an attack on you specifically - it's something I see time and time again. My parents complain that the new TV they've bought, which is internet-ready, has apps etc, is too compicated for them to use. Meanwhile the old TV that did nothing more than show TV programs got thrown out a couple of years ago, despite still working fine, because they wanted the new model. They complain that the new version of Office that they use is too complex, but they've still got the Word 95 discs sat around somewhere (and they've rarely got any need to share documents with anyone else). And they are far from an isolated example.

Some people want the shiny new stuff - I know I do - but I accept that if I'm going to be on the bleeding edge of tech, I'm probably going to have bits of it that simply don't work properly. And as long as both you and I are out buying these things, rather than the boring but stable stuff, then this is what the market is going to build for.
Archiving in the trash: The Instapaper UI
Isn't it pretty obvious that they would avoid suing a larger company like Amazon because they would be able to afford a good defense. A startup, on the other hand, is much more likely to settle to avoid spending a lot of money, even when it may seem that eventually they would win.
I've been there. We had a new person in the office who didn't believe that such scams could exist, so for the lulz they were assigned to deal with the person. They could say whatever they wanted as long as they didn't agree to pay.

The salesguy ended up screaming at our person who was just playing dumb.

It's also the "Who's Who" scam, where they print your name in a book of important people and sell you the book, or the "You Won A Poetry Content" that Dave Barry had so much fun with. http://www.miamiherald.com/2007/07/22/165002/poetic-license-...
I can't speak for these guys, but assuming they have good intentions I'd like to think that "went to a brand-name school or worked for a brand-name tech company" is essentially just the MVP of a system for verifying credentials that will eventually get more nuanced and less embarrassingly-biased.
No but it could be prime for an Amazon acquisition.

GKNT is already public http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GKNT
50,000 Downloads in a Day
Jaap Van Kampen talks about his successful utility app, EasyMeasure.
The more lawsuits the better for the lawmakers, who get campaign cash from both sides of the issue. Frivolous patents is somewhat a campaign finance problem.
While it was an interesting article, I wish it would explain why 570MP is needed, and how exactly taking pictures of galaxy clusters will help resolve the dark energy mystery.
Endless personalized (/-able) photo&image stream.

I want my screen full of an endless stream of images, which I can customize both by "liking" or narrow by keywords, such as "now I want to see artsy black&white photos" or "show me men's fashion". I expect the images shown both in general and in specific cases to cater to my taste.
A 3% bonus? I guess it's better than traditional recruiters, but I think the real (financial) value lies in being offered a larger salary (which could be worth substantially more than 3%).
Android Video Codecs Ate My Homework
great app idea overall. Let's make a prototype and shop it around. It could be fish, plants, poaching, shellfish, etc. PM me.
I'd thought about this as well, turns out there is actually a thriving marketplace for pre-owned diamonds on Craigslist. It kind of blew my mind that at any given point people are selling ten thousand dollar diamond rings on Craigslist.
That would be nice. daniel [at] 2 color [dot] me
Personal Genome API
But if you've done all the hard work of building your business, proving your market, and crushing revenues or hitting profitability, then talking to investors becomes more like a partnership discussion than it does one where you're a poor, starving founder begging for money (you bring zero value to the table).

Github is my favorite example. They bootstrapped themselves all the way through, and in the process, they maintained their own identity and culture, built a great product and killer team, and were minting $$$. Then when the right time came for them to scale up to the enterprise and move fast, they decided to take VC money.
For what it's worth the US stage this year was a pretty professional production. Just viewing the pitches was worth the money. Notably, many of those that pitched -- including some competitors of ours, did not receive the award.
You may as well start sleeping in the office
Maybe just get rid of the validation altogether?

Fixed -- how's that look? put the 'using' before second drop down
EditorConfig - maintain consistent coding styles between different editors
Dice buys Slashdot and Sourceforge
I doubt Microsoft is targeting the consumer market. Most of these tablets will probably be bought by businesses which then force their employees to use them in their already fully integrated Microsoft ecosystem. So...I guess it depends on what Microsoft's priorities are.
Rackspace is no startup. They had more than a billion in revenue last year and they've been around since 1998.
Well no, that argument does not work. Apple is the monopolist supplier of iPhones. And it charges whatever price it wants for iPhones. If DeBeers is a sole (or near sole) supplier of a product, then Apple certainly is.

Further, DeBeers must face the same competition that Apple faces. In these comments, we see lots of people looking at other gemstones (sapphires, etc) in place of diamonds. The other gemstone producers compete with DeBeers in the same way that other smartphone producers compete with Apple.

I'm not sure it's helpful to reason from the fact that something is illegal to why it is wrong. Sort of like the joke about the three storekeepers in jail: The first charged higher prices than everyone else and was convicted of price gouging. The second charged lower prices than everyone else and was convicted of dumping and cutthroat competition. The third charged the same prices as everyone else and was convicted of collusion. Laws will be made against all kinds of things, and there are many incentives (e.g. law firms revenue) to make laws against very profitable enterprises.
Advice on getting into YC from Adioso (YC09) founder Tom Howard
I don't necessarily disagree with this assessment but you can easily create functionality in C that requires looking at multiple source files to understand whats going on.

x = foo(bar(), baz());

Now you have to look at the definitions for bar and baz to understand the cost of this line.

I guess this is the trade-off with using a high level language. Expressivity vs transparency.
Japanese Coast Guard: 2 Chinese Ships have just entered Japanese Territory
Do you share these over email? I had an idea to create a Gmail based file browser _just_ for attachments because of similar problems working with people that refused to use Dropbox or Github.
This is the same path I took too. It must be a really obvious cycle we're all participating in. When a community gets to some set size, the number of cock-gobbling assholes who post mean things that contribute nothing becomes larger than the smart and thoughtful people.

I swear, this almost always occurs right around the same time that these news sites start complaining about not making enough money...
Do you think that other startups would be interested in this type of in-house counsel-as-a-service?

This would give teams the benefit of having single source that knows all your issues and goals, but could also negotiate effective rates with specialists.
> I guess the goal was to sober people up for Monday's workweek.

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law

Still enforced where I live, in Bergen County, NJ. A suburb of NYC. All retail outlets (other than groceries and restaurants) must be closed on Sunday. Definitely no alcohol sales.

> Anyways, he vigorous enforced this law.. playing into my original observation that he wanted this law rolled back.

The laws are still vigorously enforced and I don't think they're doing it because they want it repealed. Although they're enforcing them for entirely different reasons.
To be clear, I'm not knowledgeable about online advertising. I do understand that the incentives of the advertisers and the users are often opposed, but I was highlighting this as an example of poor product design likely due to optimizing click-throughs, not product experience. :)