skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But torrent files don't aren't in themselves illegal, even if they point to illegal content. TPB doesn't host illegal material. It only hosts the files that point to them. So technically, they're not being illegal.
Interesting that Guido didn't want to have an explicit "self" variable initially. Turned out to be a good idea in retrospect, in terms of clarity. When I head back to C/C++ code, I often find myself adding "this->" all over the place out of habit.
ha... I like that picture.
I use yelp when in a new city to find restaurants and have been favorably impressed with its ability to weed out the wheat from the chaff. I would definitely be concerned if Yelp were strong arming content to make money.

At first when I was reading this, I couldn't help but think why Google's Adwords (which I heartily love) doesn't strike me as seedy, but I guess it comes down to how the service is sold. Adwords is opt in without any pressure and a lot of tools that at least make me feel like I'm optimizing my buck. I think if I were called by an Adwords rep and asked to spend more cash or else my pagerank "might go down," I'd feel just about the same as I do about the hypothetical Yelp sales practices.

That said, I'm with you dpifke, it doesn't help the credibility of such an incendiary article that it appears in a lesser-known publication.
There's that legalistic nitpicking again. Google is a general purpose service. People actually use it for lawful purposes, maybe even most of the time. On the other hand, the whole point of the Pirate Bay is to violate copyright. I've never seen it used for a lawful purpose, though I am sure it is occasionally. That's a substantive difference. It would ring a lot more honest to me if the defenders of Pirate Bay said "I like to download things and I think current IP laws are wrong".

Defenders do say that. I say that. The point I was making is that TPB isn't breaking the law. Even if they're helping other people break it, they themselves are innocent.

To use your gun analogy, if, rather than selling guns, you're the guy that gives directions to people looking for guns, then you're innocent. You're not touching the guns. You're just handing out directions.

That's a valid position that can be argued. This position just seems childish to me, and not a brilliant defense as some say.

A bunch of amateurs are beating powerful corporations in court. That's maybe not brilliant, but it's certainly impressive.
I know. But when you bring up the same show on TV using over-the-air/satellite/cable you see more ads.
Core Principles: How science can help form a theory of design
I'll assume this was a serious question. While recording a show yourself and downloading it both produce the same outcome, copyright law cares about the path that bits take. Even if the TV networks are distributing something for free, it isn't legal for you to redistribute it for free without their permission.
Yeah, and there's a separate argument for that, but this isn't the place to argue it. This is the place to congratulate him on his incredible site.
Your problem is that you are being rational, and copyright law is anything but. I don't think there has been a definitive ruling on the matter but I think torrenting is illegal because you never own the show, you have a license to view it in one way and viewing it in another violates that license. For example, if I get the show in HD on my package and you don't, me giving you a copy means you have an experience that you would not otherwise have and therefore are violating the copyright.
I agree, I could care less about the comments. Nothing but drivel in here anyhow. I'm here for the articles. :)
Facebook Blinks In the Face of EPIC Compliant (to FTC)
But every technology that lessens freedom comes with technology that increases freedom even more. Citation: the Internet.
Now he knows how business owners feels to receive a bad review.
Those numbers or per thousand so it doesn't really matter I would think. Personally I would think that the Hulu ads are more valuable than the TV ones because it is 1 advertiser per show and there is less signal to noise for the viewer. When I watch football on Sunday it is sponsored by Ford, Toyota, Miller, Budweiser, Verizon, and 10 other companies I will never remember or care about. When I watch the Daily Show on Hulu it is 1 company a few times and actually leaves an impression.
ShareThis vs. AddThis
I am currently using ShareThis on my site but are there any differences between ShareThis and AddThis? Which one should I use?
Good point; any such auto-sizing shouldn't override user zooms.
Which of the activities would be illegal? The article concludes that while these activities may be unsavory, they probably aren't illegal: "So is it legal for Yelp to do all this? Probably, according to Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation."

For reference, I'm a Bay Area business owner with positive reviews on Yelp. I recently received solicitations for advertising, and noticed that our most negative review (non-recent, low votes) appeared to have been moved to the top of the list just prior to the advertising pitch. The sales agent was asked about this, and responded: "The review algorithm has a number of interesting caveats in it. Some of which are best match and relevancy issues."

We did not receive promises of special treatment or the repositioning of this review, but I felt this was implied. While I don't feel that Yelp was acting illegally, I lost a lot of faith in their business practices as a result. I did not participate in this article, but I believe it is accurately reported.

For what it's worth, that negative review (which was from a customer with a legitimate complaint) is now back in a more neutral location, without any further action on our part. Perhaps (and I hope) this was a few rogue employees on the sales team, and the company has now cleaned up its act.
When you argue against his point, cite his writing. When you argue writing, talk about the writing and nothing but the writing.

As the book Lies My Teacher Told Me elegantly shows, many history books that have existed for decades are thoroughly incorrect and yet are still used by teachers. Length of use can be a good sign, but it isn't necessarily. "the book has been used in writing classes (and has been constantly in print) for 33 years so I think the criticism that there's "isn't much content" is unfounded" is an ad hominem argument.

If you're going to tear him apart, do it. We won't mind. That always leads to good discussion. But don't say you could and then don't.
I think the problem comes from schools and universities. They force students to think in volume (6 pages, 12 pages) when writing. Who is a better writer: Julie, who wrote 12 pages of coherent paper or Mary, who stacked the same essence in 4 pages of superb writing?

According to the guys who teach -- Mary should receive about an F on her paper while Julie will get a B+.
Great concept. It gives me a very enjoyable way of signing up.
You guys actually make us re-consider some aspect of our own registration form. We might borrow some of your idea. Thanks a lot.
That’s sort of where I am.

I’m not against the site. I think it’s great that someone thought to do it. I have nothing but praise for the people who put it up.

But I have no interest.

The question I have about the Stimulus Bill is "Will it Stimulate the Economy?" If it does than I can bring myself to accept the pork. If not than it's failure is the bigger issue to me.

Bottom Line: There is Pork in every bill out of Congress and it’s a problem. This site just draws my attention to a problem which I already know exists and which I would already fix if I could.
It's funny, because I have the exact opposite reaction. I think he makes good points, but ruins it in that his own style is cluttered and more complex than it needs to be. It's still great advice to follow: I see it as "do as I say, not as I do."
If my compiler gave errors for things like "invalid syntax in IF statement: 'if (true)' -- REQUIRED SPACES ARE MISSING, SHOULD BE 'if ( true )'" then I wouldn't consider it any sort of technical achievement that my code compiles without warning.

Just look at the worthless output for news.ycombinator.com: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

137 warnings, 5 errors. Let's take a look at what expert advise the validator offers, so that our webpages will be forward compatible (or whatever the supposed purpose of this is for).

It complains about every href that has "=" or "&" in it, claims you must put an ALT attribute on images, says <tr></tr> is invalid... etc. It essentially complains about things that have no effect on anything, but for some reason or another the W3C decided to put into their standards and enforce it.

W3C: how about you come up with something useful... like, for instance, allowing me to center a fucking DIV with CSS. With tables, I can simply... just kidding. But seriously, I have qualms with W3C.
Step 4: Discover that you need a feature that's impossible on App Engine and give up.
There are many, many flaws with the school system. This is one of them. (The other problem is that there are a lot of people who think they're Marys when in reality they're just writing short, crappy essays.)
The Willie Lohman of Doom | Cogito Ergo Blog
The question, then, becomes if you gain more than you lose.

I get pissed off every time I open my last-gen MacBook Pro, because I don't like the button. This is an anal mindset. I don't like the plastic outline of the computer, or the buttons and lines that I think shouldn't be there. It affects me a lot. So for me, sacrificing something that means I'll be annoyed one time for a device that's superbly beautiful is wholly worth it.
I think this is a great idea. I have always thought hacking and open source development could be more organized :-) This looks like a great first stab. Here are some comments:

On aesthetics: although I like the StackOverflow nod, I think the color scheme is a little too 'grey'. Background is grey, headers are grey, tags are grey, buttons are grey. Don't know if other HNers have the same sense.

Specific improvements:

- on the "Add Project" page, you could make the text fields a little bit bigger

- rather than picking the # of hours you think it would take for 2-3 people, why don't you use the fibonacci-like sequence used in Story Point / Planning Poker estimation. E.g., it's a scale of complexity: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 25, 50 100. See planningpoker.com. You could also consider using a 'slider' here.

- After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature? How about editing existing submissions? (I understand this is early stage :-))

- The mistake I made is that I thought that links that are on their own line should be linked automatically. I guess this isn't strict Markdown, but seems like a common enough convention in most text-to-html systems.

- Since this is code-focused, you could make google-code-prettify available for syntax highlighting (or something similar):

http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/

- The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project

- Speaking of, I think you should move "Project Controls" to the top of the project page. It's hard to find them on the right side.

Some "pie in the sky" new features to consider:

- Someone mentioned integration with code hosting services like Github: that could be very cool

- Having the project proposal be a Wiki rather than an original proposal with comments

- Google maps (or similar) integration to schedule meetings

I'm definitely going to keep visiting. It's a great idea. Keep it up. And if you're interested in working on a Python project, I've proposed one!

http://clusterify.com/projects/list/pixelmonkey/11/
Agreed. It was interesting to see original Twitter sketch, but it provides about as much insight into the company and as the first mock up of the Google homepage would about them.
@endtime:
"But the article (and some of the other comments here) seem to be in agreement with his general ideas."

It seems that many have not read to the end of the blog entry where KK argues against the Unabomber's most basic premise of his manifesto.
When playing a game on your iphone, do you almost always have internet access?
Is it a bad idea to build an iphone game that depends on constant internet access?
Practical Motion Capture in Everyday Surroundings
I said "Google maps," but I obviously meant "Google Calendar" :-) Was playing with geodjango today, had maps on my mind...

But that made me think of one other thing. When I first saw this website, I thought that you might have been focused on in-person meetups for hacking sessions. Obviously, a local meetup has limited appeal until you have a more diffuse userbase, but I still think it wouldn't be a bad idea to support 'local' clusterifies in some way. I'm going to try posting one and see what happens.
The remarkable thing is that this story isn't really all that unbelievable or surprising. Those lawyers, always add value...
I really like Write to the Point by Bill Stott. Agreed that every hacker should work to improve themselves as writers.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

-Thomas Jefferson
If V8 gets threading support and auto-vectorization, then if processors-graphics cards ala Intel's Larrabee take off, it may be a non-issue. Developers can just do a 3d engine in pure javascript and get roughly the same order of magnitude of performance as a GPU.
Motorola RAZR MOTORAZR MAXX Verizon
The Motorola Razr Maxx offers a large range of features, civilized call quality, and a better design. The Motorola RAZR MAXX combines sleek style with 3G connectivity to deliver Verizon’s VCAST music, videos and applications as well as Mobile Web 2.0 for emailing. Fortunately, tactile ridges between the personage buttons ridges give them definition.
Hey pixelmonkey, thanks for the great feedback! google-code-prettify looks like a cool idea.

> After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature?

You can just edit the project idea -- there's a link to do that on the project page.

> The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project

This is by design for now -- we want people to actually read a project before voting it up.

> Google [Calendar] (or similar) integration to schedule meetings

After seeing the feedback here, supporting events & in-person meetups is something we want to do. We're thinking about the best way to support this, and should have something new for you guys before too long.
Easiest answer: If you're using neural nets (his example), you could just write the backprop algorithm. Chances are performance matters, so you can hand tune your code to generate the best assembly.

Most of machine learning work involves huge data sets. You divide your time between cleaning up / massaging your data until it's usable, coming up with models, deriving properties of the models, implementing inference for those models, and, most importantly, tuning your code so you can actually get meaningful results on huge datasets.

Doing the differentiation is, by far, the easiest part of all of that.

Also, in many cases, your model won't have a tractable form (like, say, requiring you to sum over all permutations in your data set at each step of your training). You have to come up with ways of approximating these results, often using sampling techniques.

Being able to find a derivative to a function that takes O(n!) time to calculate exactly isn't exactly useful - for gradient optimization methods, you'll often have to calculate the value more often than the gradient.

Basically, when finding a derivative is feasible it's more useful and not much more work to derive it yourself.
my ex-roommate worked at coghead. he says the company hadn't been doing well for a while (funding issues) and him and few of the originals had been running it on their own time.
I don't think they have an API, but www.voip.ms has been phenomenal for us. Really great design, great customer service, and CHEAP. Live chat them and see what they say, it would probably be easy just to hpricot a homebrew API with them.
So if I get the gist of his argument, when an aspiring tyrant-king decides to take over a democracy "due to the unsual structure of [congress]," the new structure "is not [a fascist dictatorship] because of the mechanism through which [it] occurred."

(By the way, I support taking over the banks due to their unusual structure, the systemic risks they represent but do not properly account for due to a tragedy of the commons problem--where the commons is the system they are a part of--and for other reasons. I just don't think its not socialism.)
If you haven't read this interview with Ev:

"His specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. "He's like a master craftsman," says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. "There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn't one before." If Williams's art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d'oeuvre."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080301/anything-could-happen_P...
Ok, reading that article left me with one important question: wtf is automatic differentiation?

Luckily wikipedia exists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation
The business owner gets to put one (presumably excellent) review on top of all the others, and hide the display of competitors on some local search pages.
There is no such thing as rogue people on a sales team. In most of the phone jockey shops I've ever been in/around (mostly in the credit card industry) they teach you what is in compliance, but then set unrealistic sales quotas. The idea being that the brighter employees will learn the underhanded tricks they need to get ahead, and the straight arrow ones will fall behind and either quit or get fired.

Running telemarketing shops like that lets management have plausible deniability in the case of a lawsuit yet maintain a status quo that would be out of compliance with any industry regulations.
msie, please learn how to reply properly on HN; we use threading, not @.
Ask HN: Just cashed out for 2M. What now?
I'm posting this from an anonymous account, for obvious reasons. I just sold my company and have 2 million dollars in the bank. What now? I basically have nobody to consult. It's a business I bought for 90k that just kind of swelled up really fast, and I'm really not set up to manage this kind of money. I'm canadian, the economy seems to be going to hell down south and I'm sure it's gonna hit here soon and I have no idea who to take advice from.

My bank is trying to get me to put all my money into money market mutual funds while I wait, my accountant tells me I should diversify, get some cashable GICs while I wait, and start looking into stocks, as well as investing in insurance companies since they usually guarantee your investment (so long as they don't go bankrupt). I used to just put all my money into a high interest savings account at ING and collect the 3% (which is good enough for me to live on at this point).

Any advice to offer? Any good reading (canadian-specific would be good)? Any good software for mac to manage all this? :)
This is what they get for trying to mix advertising with user generated content. There are too many conflicts of interest between Yelp, advertisers, and anonymous users. Who would buy an ad for a page that can be easily defaced? No one who isn't promised censorship. It's a shame because Yelp is a great service. Maybe they could become more like a search engine, with links direct to vendor sites and user reviews in a separate section on Yelp. Then ads could go direct to business sites, eliminating the bad review issues.
It's funny, I ordered an Apple TV to install Boxee on for the bedroom TV today. Hulu was going to be one of the major sources of content for Boxee, however now it sounds like it'll simply be tvtorrents + rss + rtorrent. It's just as easy for me, but it means zero ads. Seems like NBC is the one losing out by this move.
Grrrr. It's a phone! It's always connected to the cellular network and thus the Internet.
>"As usual, I’ll voice my dissenting opinion and say that Hulu is doing the right thing."

Aren't you arguing that they are doing the smart thing, more than the right thing?

Also, I think your analysis is spot on.
This article failed to take into account Eric Schmidt's connections to the Obama Administration. Wasn't he part of his economic advisory team?
Scoble Just Doesn't Get It
I hate this planet.
We'll just leave all the same.

This hypothesis is testable and, from personal experience that I regrettably can't show you, the data do not support it. There is no reason you should take my word for this -- try it for a week or two on a site you control.

Increasing user investment in the interaction is one way to cut down on abandonment -- for example, if you're doing comments, asking for a name/email address BEFORE they write the comment will decrease the number of comments you receive markedly, but asking it afterwards will decrease it very little, because people have emotional investment in seeing those two paragraphs they just wrote actually show up.
So you liked the prodigy solution better than email? Sure there was less spam.. but you couldn't talk to people
Their rich text editor is finally usable. It stopped generating extra empty lines and producing crap on Safari. It also has gotten a lot faster, highly recommended. Load times are blazing fast: they serve it off their own CDN with very aggressive cache control and you can "bundle" multiple components into a single JS file using their "download builder".

Who else is using YUI? Their forums aren't very helpful, where do you guys hang out? Recently I had a couple of trivial questions and couldn't find answers online:

* How do destroy a control (RTE or anything else)

* How to put focus on RTE (not on startup, but later)
Who are the competitors?
MIT-Trained Entrepreneurs Create Businesses With $2 Trillion a Year in Sales
Agreed. Very cool:
http://gyu.que.jp/jscloth/parpevision.js

Even on my relatively beefy comp, though, the miku animation was enough to get my fan going full blast. Papervision otoh has the potential to build a real, high-quality, 3d game. I don't see JS getting there any time soon, but nevertheless an interesting proof of concept.
hmm, how about a clusterhack?