skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you're right. But in his fight for what he considers right, he is actually producing something of value (ie, the GNU software suite). RMS and the FSF are well regarded not only because they're fighting towards making technology more open and more accessible, but because they're producing a bunch of great software to prove that they are right. What they said was, basically, this: "You think only large corporations with multi-million research budgets can produce good software? Here, take this compiler, this OS, this text editor and all these cool utilities. We built this in our spare time.", and people went: "Hell, the guy's got a point.". TPB, on the other hand, goes: "Hey! Your business practices are flawed. We'll just steal your stuff until you give up.", and people go: "Yeah! You show them who's boss!".

People seem to love Robin Hood. I prefer John Galt.
The most striking thing about this list of signatories is how none of them seem like open source leaders. The actual letter is here: http://consideropensource.blogspot.com/

As I read down the list I nodded my head when I came to John Newton of Alfresco but for the most part my reaction was "Who?" and then I'd look at the company names and go "Who?" and finally there's Unisys.
He's Scared Shitless
There's a ton of info on the web. Google things like "picking a brand name", etc.

From a trademark perspective, you don't want to be "books.com" - it's too generic.

From a mindshare perspective, you also don't want to be "wrejiorgsdf.com".

The sweet spot is just off-center of the topic. E.g. Amazon - the world's biggest bookstore. Your brand is distinct from (and hence more memorable than) the thing you sell, but it is EVOCATIVE of a trait that you are bragging about.

Many folks go with Latin and Greek roots (because they are the basis of much of English) to play the "evocation" game.

The names of my two startups are decent ,but not insanely great.

SmartFlix - the "smart" brings out the educational component (and also reassures customers that it's a wise decision to rent a video from us), and Flix has been a synonym for movies for almsot a century.

HeavyInk - the "ink" references the artwork and the history of comics, and "heavy" has a slight outsiderish / authentic connotation (heavy metal, "deep" , "profound", etc.) that also helps make the subtle point that we carry every comic that's available (far more than your typical bricks and mortar store).

And, of course, the important thing is that both domains were available in the .com TLD.

Travis J I Corcoran, President
SmartFlix

--
http://SmartFlix.com/
web's biggest how-to DVD rental store
http://www.domainpigeon.com/
Would it spoil the party to point out that Facebook's original terms of service were insane? [1] That they promised something that Facebook was unable to deliver? They allowed you to post content to Facebook, wait until that content was quoted, copied, pasted, or remixed by others, then pull the content off and sue Facebook if any of those quotations, copies, or remixes persisted anywhere on Facebook's site. Ask the MPAA how well that would have worked out for you in practice.

We all know that removing something which has been posted to the web is like removing the proverbial drop of food coloring from a swimming pool. With their new TOS, Facebook is stating something that's been true all along: They're running a swimming pool. Once your content is exposed to its userbase you can't take that content back.

I am reminded of a passage in J. Michael Straczynski's screenwriting book where he talks about how important it is to avoid sending unsolicited manuscripts to movie or TV producers. They will send the manuscripts back unopened [2] and refuse to deal with you again, because:

One individual I encountered had written a spec Terminator 3 script, hoping to either send it to producer James Cameron and later sue Cameron because this person was sure this would be the next story or tempt Cameron to sue him, which would force Cameron to read the script, after which he would be so thoroughly blinded by the script's brilliance that he'd buy it instantly. (No, I'm not making this up.)... Unsolicited manuscripts are the constant nightmare of any producer.

Perhaps Facebook has become large and old enough to have had its first encounter with such a copyright troll. The solution to this problem, as employed by every producer in Hollywood, is to require a release form before you'll read anything.

---

[1] Note that I am not a lawyer. The lawyers in the audience are welcome to explain that I'm wrong.

[2] "It will be returned in a larger envelope, unopened (although there will often be a tiny tear in one of the corners of the original envelope, made by a secretary to verify that it contained a script)." -- JMS
Toulouse has a similar scheme... it's not the bikes that seemed to get stolen, it's the shopping baskets on the front that either get unscrewed or simply cut off.
If you run your own company - are you covering a salary/living expenses for yourself?
"You're generalising from one data point."

No, I'm not. I'm sharing a general observation with wide validity associatively triggered by one person's post. It's a conversational thing.

"Generally in Scotland you can switch to your minor at the end of the first year without losing anything."

Do you mean this as some sort of evidence against my point? (Honest question, I'm not sure.) It's evidence for it.

"And of course just because people can switch doesn't mean they do. Whether it's in someway normal to switch seems to play a larger role (generalizing from two data points...)"

Culture. Even if there are no technical barriers, if the culture forbids it, or makes the thought unthinkable somehow, it causes friction.
How is FB a monopoly?
Plastic Logic Reader: Kindle killer?
Unfortunately this probably also means that people are buying and consuming less organic and healthy foods, as they tend to be more expensive than your highly processed crap. It probably also means that sales of fast food are rising due to the perception that it's cheaper than a local family restaurant.

On a related note, I just dropped $100 for a Valentines Day meal for two at a locally owned restaurant. Support your local economy!
Failure to save East Europe will lead to worldwide meltdown
There's a conversation with the developers on TWIT's FLOSS podcast: http://twit.tv/FLOSS

The thing that's sort most interesting about this is CoreObject, which is modeled off of the ideas of SmallTalk images.
For the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class
I disagree. What he says is totally and absolutly irrelevant compared to what he actually does accomplish. The purpose of a system is what it does. Reduction to the barter system is what application of Stallman's philosophy accomplishes. THAT is his purpose.

According to Stallman, one should only be able to trade software artifacts for other software artifacts. This is even worse than a barter economy. Its as if an egg producer could only trade his eggs for other eggs or a potato farmer could only trade his potatoes for other potatoes. This in one simple step eliminates a division of labor economy with all of its attendant benefits and multiplication of productivity.
All the wildly optimistic and unfounded claims of Palm having pulled off a "mini-revolution ... implementing a full SDK in HTML/CSS/JS" or of WebOS being more than "just a WebKit browser" can now finally be laid to rest. WebOS is exactly a webkit browser, and the applications one builds for it are indistinguishable from locally-run ajax web pages.
This really needs a video of some sort to show the desktop in action. From just reading things and looking at screenshots, it looks like it provides a better platform for developers but is a quantum leap backwards for users. I assume applications have to be specifically developed for the platform, so that cuts out 99% of the applications users are going to want to use (Firefox, Gimp, OOo, etc.).

Still, if it's really a nice platform, I hope it would become popular enough that popular applications could be easily coded to work with it.
Here's a quote from related email discussion (Jan. 2009):

"Here's an indisputably real-world example: AutoCAD. Most of it is written in a customized LISP; the C part is the LISP interpreter core." -- ERS
What people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions
Large Area of USA below Avg. Temps last 12 months
"An interesting possibility, which I think should not be dismissed, is that a "true" fundamental theory exists, but that it may just be too hard for human brains to grasp. A fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims; certainly it has no intellectual powers to comprehend that water consists of interlinked atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The microstructure of empty space could, likewise, be far too complex for unaided human brains to grasp."

That's a distinct possibility. Further mathematical research might still allow considerable refinement in describing what a correct fundamental theory does NOT imply.
HyperSpace: Emergency OS for notebook
Student; I aim to become a hacker, but that's some way off even if I motivate myself better.
Ask HN: Rate my startup: EditConf - wiki style tech events, aggregation, and search
He's missing the main reasons why my company is going forward with a Jabber server: privacy and reliability.

We are a geographically distributed company that uses ICQ for a whole lot of communication, so when it goes down for any reason, work just about halts. Also, we routinely discuss very sensitive things (but we call each other if we need to discuss root passwords), so a dedicated eavesdropper could learn more than we'd like him or her to.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482717

The automated filter for detecting duplicate submissions doesn't always work.
Entrepreneur, designer, and tech proficient, a former hacker in my youth. Switched to design during web 1.0.
Pidgin + OTR FTW
Well...
Facebook is not worth the $15b... but I think it was made just for propaganda purposes..

They wanted the press to keep a spot on Facebook!
I have no idea what this about, who he is, why I should care, or what the title has to do with the "content".

Flagged.

I'd be happy to unflag it and/or delete this comment if someone can explain what this is about.
Dup. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482106

Turning crack dealers into chief executives (bbc.co.uk)

4 points by RiderOfGiraffes 22 hours ago | 1 comment
"In China, for example, $3,000 a year may be enough in Chongqing or Chengdu, big cities in the west, but not in Beijing or Shanghai. So defining the middle class in absolute terms is hard."

Which is why articles like this are mostly crap.
More context needed. What is their relationship to you? What do you want from them? What do they want from you? How will the meeting benefit them?

And please either split the line or convert it to italics.
Any chance of a version (or even a separate project) aiming at binary compatibility with Mac OS X? I think a Wine-style project for Mac OS X would more a more interesting and popular development than a niche platform.
Casinos on alert for card counters using iPhones
They can say what they want but such changes to the contract is not enforceable in the US. If you sign up and they change the TOS you can use the old TOS and force them to remove your account.
I think it's only partially about the desktop and more about the experience. I'm fairly certain they're looking for help, you know, if you'd like to make it look like something in 2009, or maybe something for the future!
On the website they actually claim it is at "NO ADDITIONAL EXPENSE" (caps are on website). So effectively it is free marketing opportunity for the company buying it at no additional expense to the buyer. Since the barrier to change (for the buyer to their box) is so low I have a hard time imagining some pizza shops doing this.
Call For Applications: TECH Fort Worth Impact Awards
Hacker. About to become an be entrepreneur, looking for a co-founder...
Don't conflate "organic" and "healthy" - foods raised purely organically (without pesticides, fungicides, etc.) have more natural contaminants.

Also, using organic fertilizers (manure, etc.) opens up a few contamination pathways that are not present with synthesized fertilizers.
He's the new US Secretary of the Treasury. Under the circumstances, if I were he, I'd be a little nervous too.
What Went Wrong with Fennec?
Facebook TOS Change: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit
> Support your local economy!

Why?

Seriously. This is the mantra of a certain sector of society, but why should I discriminate against one perfectly good set of humans who live 100, or 1000 miles away, in favor of another perfectly good set of humans who live 1 mile away?

This is reactionary, regressive medeival thinking.
I couldn't agree more.

Forcing oneself to do tasks is a pretty sure way to shut down creativity.
When a small area is 0.1 degree above average, that's a symptom of global warming.

When a small area is 1.0 degrees below average, that's "just weather, not to be confused with climate".
But you'll have to do that recursively..
I'm confused, sarcasm?
The name refers to the kernel/OS part of the project. Like if I would call my project DIND (DIND is not DOS). Not TINT (TINT is not TurboPascal). If somebody says to me: let's make a free | punk | whatever operating system, I would think of a kernel and maybe a shell or windowing environment. Not of a compiler, an editor or some 35 utilities. (I realize the UNIX distribution contained more than the OS).
Oops, am on a Mac and have no budget. Any other solutions? Surprised if this isn't already done, if not it sounds like a great startup opportunity..
Voted up bc I'd like to know, too.

I'm also in the process of finding a name and so far it's been both painful and fruitless.
I've tried to look for Greek and Latin names but most of those I tried were already taken.

I even used a Hawaiian online dictionary: http://wehewehe.org/
but again haven't come up with something decent.
Hawaiian can sound pretty childish very easily...
It's just a fundamentally different structure - LLCs were invented in the 80s, so the conversion is a huge PITA. If you want the benefits of incorporation, you should strongly consider incorporating as an S-corp (if you qualify: must be US citizens, no more than 75 shareholders, all of whom must be natural persons).

To change from an S-corp to a C-corp is just one piece of paper. You're already a corporation, not an LLC, and you get the flow-through benefits and limited liability.
I got an Unhandled Exception on http://bilumi.org/Main/node/221/

I guess you build this using Django.
Currently in Evanston, IL. Before that in Texas.
I don't know how you're getting that from this first chapter. It fairly clearly states that it's only talking about the underlying OS, and the Mojo Application Framework overview is in the next two chapters.

Granted, what they're talking about below isn't necessarily even revolutionary to web app development (SproutCore/Cappuccino), but considering it's an entire mobile OS built specifically to run applications written in this framework, I think that does change things somewhat.

From http://developer.palm.com/webos_book/book5.html

The framework provides a specific structure for applications to follow based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. This allows for better separation of business logic, data, and presentation. Following the conventions reduces complexity; each component of an application has a defined format and location that the framework knows how to handle by default.

You will get a more extensive overview of Mojo in Chapter 2, and details on widgets, services and styles starting in Chapter 3. For now, you should know that the framework includes:

Application structure, such as controllers, views, models, events, storage, notifications, logging and asserts;

UI widgets, including simple single-function widgets, complex multi-function widgets and integrated media viewers;

Services, including access to application data and cross-app launching, storage services, location services, cloud services, and accelerometer data.
Solves the encryption problem, but doesn't solve the reliability problem.

Also, if your company needs to be able to log the IMs for compliance reasons, that doesn't solve that either.

(Disclaimer: I work for a company that builds IM servers for companies. But... the above isn't exactly controversial.)
The new interface actually looks fantastic, but "Windows Mobile Marketplace" will fail, unless it is shoved down users' throats in Windows 7.
A kernel is part of the operating system, but the operating system is not composed by the kernel only. Take MacOSX: it is an operating system, its kernel is XNU. Linux itself is a kernel, not an operating system, etc.
Funny, I heard the same argument years ago.
Just remember, if you boot one of the guys with whom you are tinkering, and end up with a massive success, and that guy sues you, a significant number of people will always assume you were a selfish asshole who screwed the guy over. Journalists are likely to leap onto the story, and social news sites such as HN eat up the tale of the wronged "entrepreneur." (Who might even be one of those preppy douchebags at your college who spent more time acting pretentious and preparing for a failed bid at Olympic rowing glory than working on creating economic/social value, but I digress).

Legal contracts aren't warm and fuzzy, but they keep everyone honest; as you can gather from the scenario I outline above, this isn't even about money -- in the Internet age, reputational risk is everything. You never know when/why you might get spit upon, or by whom.
Crack dealers are entrepreneurs.

Most crack dealers work in large organizations with only one or a few entrepreneurs at the top. Does working at Microsoft or Google make one an entrepreneur?

As the article said:

Felipe Dias is one of the convicts Catherine plans to redirect into a legitimate enterprise.

He was once a lieutenant of the Mexican Mafia gang and made tens of thousands of dollars a month importing drugs and selling firearms and stolen cars.

A lieutenant is not a founder.
IPhone card counting app comes under Las Vegas scrutiny
Why not just an irc server, with SSL and passwords etc?
Any less likely than satellites colliding?
The discussion is old and tiring because this problem is like drugs. You can't solve it by fighting against the "torrent".

Pirate bay or no pirate bay, p2p filesharing is here to stay and any truly effective measures to stop it will do more harm than good. So instead of battling it, accept it and find ways to minimize the damage.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442314
brand name != product name
Should businesses be transparent and honest, even when it might hurt them?
I consider myself to be a hobbyist more than anything else. Unprofessional ;).
The expansions of the luxury market to include more and more of the middle class was a major story during the 90s and 00s. I wouldn't be surprised to see that reverse during the recession.

Who knows, people might even start shopping at Target for clothes instead of expensive boutiques.
Google images of the Secretary of Treasury is void of Hacker content.

Please move to Politicker News.
Man, that's one of the painful parts. Lots of time, lots of thinking, and lots of reading through dictionaries for Greek/Latin origins of words.

Then, the name just hits me.
Well, if sharing copyrighted content isn't illegal, then obviously nothing I said matters. Go ahead and do it in the light of day and post stories about your exploits to the internet.

I just find the argument "we weren't really doing anything illegal, we were just helping you do something illegal by getting you 90% of the way there; so we should be legal." to be tedious and unconvincing.

No, this is not about "freedom of speech".
Am I the only one who has trouble categorizing himself a "hacker" and "entrepreneur"? For some reason, I have an easier time just saying that I am a computer programmer and I have an interest in business opportunities. I am increasingly running into blogs of twenty-something folks calling themselves "Millenial Serial Entrepreneur" because they started a web design business and have some other source of income, and for some reason it comes across as a bit over the top.
Where did anyone say anything about multiple choice? Math tests for instance are often not yet are still totally objective.
TJIC's comment was everything I'd suggest and more. So here's a list of not what to do (somewhat sarcastic, but everyone knows a ton of people do this)

Drop the E, Add an R

If the domain with a c isn't available use a K

Find obscure country TLDs to represent the last two letters

Doublee the lastt letterr in the domainn.

If all else fails, start with the name of your favorite Star Wars Character and work from there.
This is, I think, great advice. I'll add my thoughts because I think there are a couple of other things to think about. This comes after doing one project with a name I now hate (Openomy) -- even though I love the story behind it -- and with having just named a second project.

* SEO. Along with the fact that being too generic means you won't have access to good trademark protection, it also means that you'll never get anywhere in search results. A fantastic amount of people still type the name of what they're looking for into Google (instead of just <name>.com). So, if your bookstore is named "Books", you'll never be found. That's not a battle you likely need when first starting.

However, if you run a site that is going to depend on Google (search engines) for traffic, you also might want to think hard about including some terms people will search for into your domain. Search engines weigh domain names heavily, so it does help. You can overcome this by getting linked to early and often, but if you really need Google, you might want to think about this.

The flip side is that using a made up word will ensure you are the _only_ result in Google and don't have to fight for position. So, if you're planning on getting your traffic elsewhere, don't want to focus on SEO, and just want to ensure that you are at the top for your name, making up a word can be good.

* Spell-able. Making up names leads me into my second thought. If you make it up -- or even if you don't but it's not a commonly known word -- make sure it is spelled how it sounds. Think about Google. Correct spelling: Googol; but no one would've ever done that correctly.

Openomy was the perfect example of what not to do. No one has any idea how to pronounce this word correctly, let alone spell it. Links would get botched, people couldn't get to the site, every time I talked to someone about it they would ask "how do you pronounce it", etc.

3. Don't be afraid of prefixes/suffixes. With domain availability running thinner every day, you will have to be creative. This will probably mean some combination of splicing words together (NetFlix) or using prefixes/suffixes. Don't be afraid of this, just careful. Some suffixes I like are -ly, -ware, -ish, -ize, -er, -it.

4. Talk about it and sleep on it. The way I came up with my latest project name is by writing down all the words that I could think of which were either directly or indirectly related with the field, as well as all the prefixes and suffixes I could remember. Then I went to town coming up with combinations of these things until I found a few I liked. I took that short list to my partner and we decided on one. We preemptively bought the domain name, but we didn't necessarily settle on it. We kept using it as our "name", making sure that even a few days later we liked it. Sleeping on it and using it as if it were real, without being religious about it, helps ensure you actually like it.

Then I started asking a couple friends/family about it. (1) Did they like it, (2) could they spell it for me, (3) what did it mean to them? If you can pass these tests, and you're happy, you've probably found a decent name.
Windows Mobile is so far behind iPhone it has a ways to go before it's playing catchup