skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really is a shame for NBCU, and company, to ask Hulu to cut Boxee off. If I recall correctly, didn't content from Hulu that was piped into Boxee still have ads?

Hopefully someday they'll realize that when they cut off people from having legal access to their content, people will go back to their illegal methods. When will old media learn?
Now I'm not so sure it's worth paying $30 for PlayOn; I'd hate to see it crippled at some point in the future.
That last part about the law firm representing them for free because it would allow Google to have some control over precedent seems, if true, very ethically questionable to me. Lawyer have a responsibility of undivided loyalty to their clients. Just because the work is being done pro bono does not nullify that responsibility.
I can do both, but it took some time to get used to shifting with left.

Even now every now and then my hand will hit the doorpanel really hard when I'm no longer thinking 'right hand drive'...

As for the poll, I actually had to try it to see what I'm doing because I really couldn't have told you if you asked me without a keyboard in front of me. Weird how that works!
MediaTemple Reboots Impressive Virb Social Network, Launches A Venture Fund
656 iPhone Developers to Follow on Twitter - Add Yourself Too
As Some Businesses Dig In, the Venturesome Set Out
This is what a criminal looks like
Actually that is not quite the most effective way to do it. You want to start out rewarding randomly, and keep rewarding randomly. Basically you want to set up a lottery where on average, every x times the person is rewarded once. But you should keep the chance of getting rewarded constant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Simple_schedules

This is also the most effective way to combat extinction. Near extinction, there is usually an extinction burst. And to keep the person or animal motivated, you want to up the rewards when they are about to quit. Just think of someone addicted to drugs or alcohol. When they are trying to quit, they get cravings, and can binge on the substance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)
Your comment made me give this a second look. If its meant to be satirical (which it very well may be) then its really horribly done.
I'm interested in using this to meet hackers near me. I'm also interested in doing summer YC if anyone is interested.
How about this one, demanding compensation from being blocked in Denmark and using that to start a grant for danish artists.

http://blog.brokep.com/2008/04/14/maybe-a-grant/

Hey brokep: How about doing something similar with the cash from all the porn ads?

I also find it unreassuring to see he isn't interested in proposed flat-rate compensation schemes:

http://blog.brokep.com/2007/12/06/the-problems-with-a-flatra...

Maybe he thinks artists should only be compensated for live shows. Those who can't should probably tend bar or something.
Thomas Friedman, the Pollyanna of Globalism
Facebook Shares Best Practices On Making Money On Platform
Compress Time
Stumbling to a Longer Life
Law firm sues to force startup to make anchor text contain the full url
Horse Sense For People - Monty Roberts
Remember...Use Consistent Patterns Of Positive Behavior. Positive Consequences Are Due For Positive Actions; None For Negative Actions. Persistence Here Is Of Paramount Importance.
If they would just think of the content as syndication ala RSS, or YouTube embedding, they'd recognize that we Boxee users see the same pre-/post-/middle-roll ads that appear on Hulu.com actual.

This is especially frustrating for me because I set up my HTPC with Boxee expressly to have an easy-to-navigate interface for Hulu via my remote control.
Harvard President Letter to the Harvard Community on "Discipline and Sacrifice"
You can fullscreen Hulu onto your TV with a PlayStation 3.
The real goal of it is to have mathemeticians available to translate journal articles into english for the curriculum-setting elder mathemeticians =P.
Yelp's response: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2009/02/kathleen-richards-east-...

Also, their founder has been active on twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremys
I just tried Gosmore (found about it on the OSM wiki). installing it on my ubuntu seems to be a bit tricky, so I haven't yet installed it (some errors).

Rana and Pyroute sound cool to me since they are in PYthon. And the software requirements to run rana or Pyroute match my system (linux). So I'll choose one of those after trying both.

Thanks for the tip
http://NaijaPulse.com - Nigerian Microblogging Service
I'd be happy if you take a look at http://naijapulse.com.

It's a microblogging service for the nigerian online community to share updates about themselves and what is happening around them with friends, colleagues, family and fans.

It is based on the open microbloging protocol and powered by laconica, the service provides all of twitters' features and a little bit more.

I'd be very happy to have your views on the website.

Thank you in anticipation
The 1 download = 1 lost sale is totally flawed. It is probably closer to participation rates online for anything which is less that 1%. Probably closer to 1000 downloads = 1 lost sale or even 10000 downloads = 1 lost sale. Some people have re-downloaded content that they have previously bought on multiple formats.
People are more complex than you give them credit for. Axod is an ace coder, a smart business guy, a talented musician, a great dad... and yes, dead wrong about prop-8.

I wouldn't be so quick to write-off someone for a single flaw. We all have them.
"This is just the SEO community upset at me for saying that "seo is BS" back in 1995!"

I think it's more of a case where they are upset at you for gaming them for knowledge and advice, then beating them at their own game, which, by the way, has resulted in me having a tremendous amount of admiration for you...

You've 'scaled' SEO and kept the product quality. Kudos, J.

Edit: Oh, and it was 2005, not 1995 - since you seem to appreciate people correcting you ;^)
> ...this mentality...

I'm saying not that git shouldn't be used because it offers power. (Quite the contary: I use git-svn at work exactly because it's more powerful.) I'm pointing out that, "Oh shit, I better be careful with this different and more powerful tool," is a reasonable attitude for Sink to have.
Or maybe someone can explain to me why helping people break the law should be legal.

Does Google break the law because it makes it easy for me to search for mp3s to download? Or are they providing a useful service, and in doing do creating functionality that makes it possible to do illegal things?

ThePirateBay is an extension of that idea: if you make a service, even if that service breaks laws you are not to blame. And TPB is pretty much at the limit of that: they mock the people who've been stolen, they openly admit they help pirates - and yet, they themselves have done nothing wrong. They provide a service. They're allowed to call attention to the laws broken by their users and it's still not breaking the law.

Arguing minutiae might be a good way to win in court.

It's not minutiae. I find it a pretty repugnant attitude, this assumption that things ought to be black-and-white simple. They haven't broken the law. That's why they're winning. It's like this: if somebody asks me where they can download an album for free, because I know and they don't, if I tell them I'm not breaking the law. I'm merely being useful. That's what TPB's done. They don't steal movies. They don't host stolen content. They merely make it easy for people to find it, and that's shady, but not illegal.

But outside of court, the term "legalistic" has a negative connotation.

For me, "legalistic" has a pretty positive connotation. It implies that there's thought behind a process, and that logic is being used. It's a lot better than "impulsive judgement," which is what you're using. You don't defend your points. You just assume that they're bad and wrong and that we're all stupid to be defending it - that despite the many, many stories posted here that explain very specifically the rights that ThePirateBay has.

I don't understand why they seem to convinced so many people with such a legalistic defense.

Partly because a lot of us like free stuff, yes. But partly it's because a lot of people care about this stuff, and we think the RIAA is just as shady as ThePirateBay, and we want to see a new method come in that doesn't allow a bunch of legal-minded people with no appreciation for music and music distribution to cheat bands out of money, to deny a lot of musicians the right to profit, and to pursue draconic punishments for the people who speak out against them.
This is some shoddy analysis.
Experimental Engineering
Considering the insane amounts of traffic they get and the kinds of ads they serve, I'd be hard pressed to believe they weren't making a small fortune.
I understand (b), and in fact I considered it a potential weakness, but why does (a) matter if you're selling from a single site? Even if you got multiple simultaneous orders, storing the last license generated in a DBMS should make it multiprocess-safe.
I think he's 100% wrong, but in the spirit of HN, I'll upmod the story.

CNN, Yahoo, BBC, ebay, there are tons of major sites the use a fluid layout.

He is wrong that you have to deal with ANY size. You can assume the browser will be at least 800 pixels wide, you can assume it won't be more than about 1280, because people with larger screen typically shrink the browser.

It is harder yes, but not that hard to make a fluid site - especially if your designer actually makes websites and not flyers (as so many seem to).

And as a bonus you are a good deal of the way to a mobile version of the site if you make it fluid.

And a fluid site does not mean you need to have extremely long columns of text - max-width to the rescue (it can be made to work on all browsers, including IE6).
Did I miss it, or did the author not mention doing usability testing to find out what the actual users of the site will do with it?

(As it is, it was troubling to me that his examples of what he doesn't like are all big, profitable businesses while most of the examples he likes have yet to turn a profit.)
The old-media guys who made this decision almost certainly don't have a clue what RSS is. I share your viewpoint, but there are (still) many dinosaurs running this industry.
SmartMarketers: Launching your Product: What to Avoid
He's dead wrong about a bunch of other stuff too..

But then, so's every great person, no?
You're misinterpreting his comments. He's saying it would be impossible for his site to find out which artists are being downloaded the most to compensate them. That's a reasonable thing to say considering how many musicians get torrented.
I mostly agree--many of the posters do deserve to be punished for what they said, but I think incidents like this one (and other somewhat similar stories like the fuss over JuicyCampus last year) point to a more fundamental societal problem than a dozen trolls trolling away; the only reason why sites like AutoAdmit are able to become headline news is because too many people take garbage gossip seriously that they should rationally be dismissing.

This has always been a problem for human society, but the ease with which information spreads on the internet has heavily increased the amount of damage that it can do.
Actually for IE6/7 do:

width: expression(
document.body.clientWidth >
35 * parseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize)
?
"35em"
:
(document.body.clientWidth <
15 * parseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize)
?
"15em"
:
"auto"
)
;

(Hope the indenting is readable.)

http://www.gunlaug.no/contents/wd_additions_14.html for some caveats and other notes, in particular you can not specify a font-size at all for the body element (if you do, then do the math yourself and not in the expression).
By that logic. People who make cars should be charged with same crime as those who use cars to commit a crime, shoes too, near about everything in fact.

"You honor there would be a 10x reduction in robberies if it was not for the defendant's complete disregard for civil order and their criminal insistence on making available dangerous technological gadgets that enable and facilitate criminals escaping with their ill-gotten gains at speeds upwards of 100mph!" <optionally slam hand on desk and stare at jury over top of glasses for effect>
Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design (includes Hacker News & Posterous)
Macromedia (before the Adobe takeover) had hardware 3D support years ago with their Shockwave plugin, yet its install base never got close to Flash which is installed on the vast majority of browsers.

There have been countless other plugins that have tried and failed to get critical mass, but Flash is the only one that's made it. Adobe Reader and Java are the nearest competitors and the install base is much lower.

Why? Initially - download size. For several years (while most people were still on dial-up) the Flash plugin was kept under 200K. Macromedia deliberately kept the plugin as small as possible so that it wasn't a burden to install it. They did internal testing where they artificially increased the size of the plugin and there was an immediate drop in download numbers. At some point as the size increased, the numbers would drop dramatically and they'd know that was the limit they had to work to when adding new features. Upgrades and installation was always kept as easy as possible.

They then cemented the install base with video playback that didn't act like it was stapled onto the browser. Prior to Flash with video, all the web based video options were clunky and almost completely closed to customization. Until there is an open standard for video playback, supported across all browsers, I think Flash will remain ubiquitous.

I can't see Silverlight taking over. It's not cross platform for a start. 3D isn't enough reason for people to install it and, other than Microsoft, no self respecting web site wants to risk alienating users by forcing an install.

Disclosure - I used to work for Macromedia. So I'll freely admit some bias!
Maybe it's that The Gimp has an even worse interface? I'm an amateur, and I can at least comprehend Photoshop. The Gimp terrifies me.

Pixelmator's got the sort of interface I wish other image apps had. That's my standard, and it's payware.
They must not know about how the code formatting messes up the entire page.
Doing hard things
THESE ARE NOT DANNYS THEY ARE SUPER HEROS INSTED OF DANNYS
AND HOW DO I FIND DANNYS YOU RETARDS IV BEEN LOOKINK TO FIND THEM ALL OVER THE PLACE
Wow, congrats, that is a lot of extra advertising dollars that will be coming in.
In response to the preview global license and 1 download = 1 lost sale. I'd argue that the buzz created by the torrent release of Lost increased it's viewership/ratings and the owners in fact owe my clients a percentage of show's profits for their marketing efforts. I'd point out that my theory has just as much evidence as their theory on lost sales, Actually since Lost was profitable there is more evidence for preview torrent increasing profits than there is for it costing sales.

And you should not be able to claim lost sales for something you are not currently selling or plan to sell in immediate future.
I KNOW IT IS ALL EXELLENT ISN'T IT
I'd be hesitant to call it a "mistake." I, for one, like the small comment-number areas because it lets the front page be information-dense. If I did have to pick a gripe with it, it'd be nice if posts with no comments were visually distinct from those that do have them.

I end up using the single-quote shortcut in Firefox and just type the number of comments in the article. For instance, the first post in the screen shot has 18 comments; typing: '18<enter> is usually enough to get me to that page.

Even if I used the mouse to click, is it really that hard to land it on that link? I never saw it as an issue.
Antitrust Pick Varney Saw Google as Next Microsoft
KK on Unabomber: pounce on [technology] when it is down and kill it before it rises again
Just to be clear, I don't really take issue with anything they said. Everything quoted in the article was the same locker room bullshit and wishful thinking that's been around since forever, and I don't buy that moving it to a permanent medium necessarily makes it a scourge on society.

But it's just plain dumb to give self-important law students a chance to flex their legal muscles. I don't think the fallout was warranted, but it was obviously coming.
Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool
If a link is surrounded by whitespace, it makes sense for that space to be clickable (this is a common mistake). But that isn't the case on HN; the only way to make the comment link targets bigger (at least vertically) would be to add whitespace around them, thus reducing density and requiring more scrolling. This case does not seem clear-cut to me.
I can think of ways of estimating even what personal play-time different artist get. Maybe something voluntary a la audio-scrobble.

That post isn't just about the technical problems though, for example:

"We’re paying a tax to a system not needed anymore. The record industry is passÃ© and we do not need nor want them anymore."

I'm not one to defend the decrepit record industry but that's just avoiding the real issue. Is compensating artists considered passe now too?
With an eye made of tin -- the result's poetic
didn't google answers let you put money on questions years ago. i don't know why they dropped that feature. they are the first to do it as far as i know.

i don't think you can do it any longer, but there are still plenty of posts on the internet where people talk about it.
Great post. I would like to add to skmurphy and physcab comments here.

skmurphy bring up the point about networking, and that networking is about aiding other to succeed, which in turn will help you succeed. Keith Ferrazzi's book "Never Eat Alone" IMO is a great read and he brings up some really good topics.

physcab talks about presentations as a good way to sell, and I admit, I agree. I just finished reading (and am still digesting) Garr Reynolds "Presentation Zen" (He also lives in Japan). This is a phenomenal book on some good ideas and tips on how to give a great presentation. Its a quick read, but his lessons are invaluable.

I wish you well. Is there anyway I can follow your lessons learned, perhaps from a blog? I followed up your profile, and that takes me to your company's (???) website, but maybe a link, in your profile?
yelp is ner the top of a long list of sites that

1. people love

2. cannot make money

3. should have found a way to get bought in 2006

get in line behind zuck
Moreover, only one person needs to pay someone to fix it, and everyone benefits. What goes around comes around.
I WANT TO BE A SUPER HERO BUT I WANT TO FLY IN THE AIR BUT I DON'T THINK THAT NOT 1 PERSON CAN FLY IN THE WORLD AND IF I BE A SUPER HERO IF MY PARENTS GOT IN DANGER AND EVEN IF MY SISTER GOT IN DANGER I WOULD BE THERE IN A HEART BRAKER AND IF I GOT IN DANGER I KNOW MY PARENTS OR MY SISTER WOULD BE THERE IN A HEART BREAKER!! MY MOM THINKS I HATE HER BUT IF SHE SEES THIS THEN SHE WILL KNOW THAT ALL OF THAT IS NOT TRUE AT ALL BECAUSE I LUV MY MOM WITH ALL OF MY HAERT
When I read articles like this, it just makes me sad for Hulu.

What an unpleasant predicament it must be to be in bed with such idiotic partners who just Do It Wrong so much of the time.
It isn't quite that simple; I work for an "old media" company, and for us, Boxee jumped the gun by ingesting content prior to having the requisite agreement. Since they did not consult our developers, our ads were not implemented correctly, and we weren't getting paid (even though Boxee's users may have been seeing the ads).
awesome! Thanks for the info.
I agree, except I found that the netbooks I've looked at were too small for me to use even for travel. Either the keyboards were too cramped or the trackpad was too small, or both.
DID ANY OF YOU ALL WATCH THE MOVIE CALLED BRING IT ON
Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound

I walked a friend through the installation of Ubuntu on his laptop last week. The single sticking point we had was Flash's poor interaction with the sound system. That one issue took longer than the entire rest of the setup process.
the mibbit.com video shows sound only, no video. fyi.
i'm using firefox 3 on mac os x.
Heh thanks ;)

Just to clarify though (I think this argument is along the lines of politics/religion/etc - no one ever changes their viewpoint)... Thought I'd state my case though since people seem to think I'm 'wrong' ;)

* I am 100% for equal rights for all.
* I would rather they call it something else
we have waiter and waitress to determine the sex, why not marriage and <insert_other_word_here>?
* I don't feel strongly enough about it to actually vote on it - either way.
* If I was gay, I wouldn't really care enough about it either to push for a change from the status quo.
IMHO There are more important things that need fixing in the world.

If people truly think it's a cause worth fighting for, then go for it. Hope it brings them happiness.

I'm not wrong though, I'm just a person with an opinion.
20 Steps to Better Wireframing
... AND WHEN YOU GET ON HERE PLEASE WRITE BACK INSTEAD OF SAYING IT TO MY FACE BECAUSE SOME TIMES OTHER PEOPLE THINK IM SOMBODY ELSES DAUGHTER
have you ever tried to click the tiny comments link from an iphone? it's pretty hard, without zooming in.
Isn't this something you(or they) could fix on your end?
Then work with them to forge the deal, instead of yanking your content and causing a frenzy which isn't in your favor. Maybe explain why the ads were not generating revenue, for starters. Just having it yanked begets bad blood.

There's a lot of early adopters and people using boxee+hulu, and pulling it means people will simply tune you out.