skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the difference between criminal and civil liability.

For criminal liability, it is exactly how you describe. Each actor is individually responsible for their actions, the actions of others don't reduce this.

However, for civil liability, there's an apportionment of damages based on a share of responsibility. Say the random YC user sued you, the other poster, and your friend. First, the damages against him would be quantified. This is based on the impact to him, not any moral judgment on your actions. Then, a jury would decide how much of the blame each of you was responsible for, and your liability would be that percentage of the overall damages.
OK, so, I am ardently socially liberal, and I've had a man-crush on Jon Stewart that hasn't waned ever since his appearance on Crossfire.

But.

I don't think that decreasing risk will result in more entrepreneurship.

I would support a wider social safety net for entrepreneurs -- er, business owners -- on principle alone, because I think what we should be saying is that these people are vitally important to our economy and to our nation's future, just as much as larger enterprise is, and we should support that.

But the thing is, most people don't want to run their own business no matter how safe you make it. I've spent the last few years encouraging people around me to start or run or improve their businesses, but so many of them just want to be a professional in their field; they don't want to deal with all of the other aspects of running a business.

So don't lower entrepreneurial risk because you think it will open more businesses, because you think that the guy with a good paying job and some savings is worried about his health insurance. If he (or she!) wants to open or run a business, he (or she!) will do that regardless. It's one of the few probably universal aspects of entrepreneurship that the people who will do well at it aren't really happy working for other people anyway, they have this itch that they can't scratch unless they strike out on their own, risks or not.

But do lower entrepreneurial risk because you recognize the value of entrepreneurs and you want to make sure that small business owners with families can still get good health care and dental care and afford a modest living.
Seems to me like this will be the reason Twitter fades away and dies eventually.
It's an anecdote. I have conterdotes that suggest the opposite is true. None are proper data.
I think it's a fair point.

But - what problem are we solving? Do we think there are too few entrepreneurs, and this will help create more? How many is enough, and how much should we spend to create them?

The problem Stewart seems to be solving is that he'd prefer to remove ammunition from his opponents' argument, which isn't an actual problem.
Mathematica has higher level drawing functions.

D3 tends to be more roll your own.
Startups don't forgo health insurance because it's expensive, they forgo it because purchasing health insurance is a gigantic, time-consuming pain in the ass.
Everything Your VC Won't Tell You
True but that doesn't mean there is no place for those who just want to build a small business without having to sacrifice their personal life to it.
Decreasing risk is also beneficial to society at large if a larger portion of people are allowed to build businesses that provide jobs.

There is also the thought that lowering the personal risk to you and your family allows you to take more chances with your business ideas and become more innovative.
Countries with much broader safety nets for entrepreneurs are not producing the risky innovative companies that America is. But, as far as I can tell, health insurance really is the biggest factor keeping people from starting new companies.

For myself and my peers, with new families and houses and student debt, etc., it's the one thing that scares us more than anything else. The prospect of a business going under is nowhere near as terrifying of getting caught off guard without health insurance. It's positively paralyzing, knowing that it is something that could be essentially impossible to recover from, unlike simply writing off a failed venture. Hopefully the Affordable Care Act will mitigate some of that.
Yelp needs negative reviews. This is not a site comprised of people with impeccable taste that can rival any restaurant critic or ones's own sense for restaurant choices, based on experience, or word-of-mouth (spoken word). This is yet another way to use the negativity of the web (XYZcompanysucks.com) as a form of blackmail. What a joke. The company that needs to be "outed" is Yelp. If all the accounts are true, these guys are crooks.

Anyone who bases all their dining decisions on what people post to sites like Yelp is not going to have as rich an experience as people who mastered the "old ways" (i.e. personal knowledge not acquired online). Why? Because Yelp is _primarily_ for people who want to complain. And _primarily_ for people who have no taste or worldly experience but who want to post things to the web (tech savvy). There are exceptions, but c'mon, let's be real. The web is the ultimate gripe channel.

Don't believe me? Try basing all your decisions on Yelp. You will not eat as well the the guy who has a sincere interest in restaurants and understands how to use the "old ways". There's certainly potential for such knowledgeable people to come together at a site and produce something amazing: balanced, informative, _informed_ reviews. The web is an amazing instrument for information excehange. But Yelp is not such a site. Their "business" relies lots of complainers who usually (have tech savvy but) have no taste, and on the restaurateur's fear of a fool with a megaphone.
We really shouldn't be encouraging more garbage in our dumps...
There will be no crossing if the bridge is down, though.
Trying to login with emacs-w3m, I get the error message:
"Post request without Content-Length."

Sniffing the POST request that emacs/w3m sends:

Content-length: 38

I get the feeling news.ycombinator expects the more common form "Content-Length" (capitalized l), but according to the HTTP 1.1 spec: "Field names are case-insensitive." (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.2)

So my request is to fix that to adhere to the HTTP spec, thus allowing us poor emacs-w3m users to login as well.
I absolutely support this. I think a lot more experienced people would do startups if they didn't have to risk their families' health in the process. And I think there is a lot of benefit to experienced people doing startups versus young kids who can tolerate the risk because they have little to lose.
> "But that is the apparent position of the company as a whole based on the company’s actions."

You keep saying that, I don't think "apparently positions" means what you think it means.

The position of the company is simply: "Reddit does not allow doxxing" - like I said before, any extrapolations on Reddit's intent is your own. Reddit's failure to prevent creepshots content does NOT

IT DOES NOT (repeated because you apparently don't get it) imply a "moral preference that it's okay to harass women".

This is no different than someone turning a blind eye to bullying. You can imply a certain lack of moral fortitude, or even argue that turning a blind eye enables bullies, but to go from that to "this implies you have a moral preference for bullies" is just complete nonsense.

I don't have a problem with the above arguments - the enabler and the lack of moral fiber, heck, I agree with that stance in many ways. What I do have a problem with is your wild extrapolations and presenting them as fact. Do you have any evidence that Reddit has an expressed "moral preference for the harassment of women"?!

This is ad hominem and smearing at its worst.

> "they cannot claim neutrality."

No, perhaps they can't. But you're shifting the topic again. You came out with an ad hominem appeal to emotion argument that was as completely unsubstantiated and inferred as it is inflammatory - that is what I'm challenging you on. You can't go around claiming "company X has an expressed moral preference for sexual harassment" with your sole reasoning being "they fail to stop it from happening".

You are sensationalizing and arguing from an incredibly disingenuous position.
Anyone have a working cache link?
Value is determined not by the amount of work put into it, but by the precedent set by the market. So long as there are free and sub-$3 clients, $20 is anomalous.

What gets me most about arguments like these is that you are pulling numbers out of thin air. You assert that $.99 is too little for an app, but provide no context nor any evidence to support that. Give me a number that demonstrates the monetary value to the consumer of an hour of development. You can't.

Insofar as there is no absolute value of development time— and, therefore, of apps— the only way to gauge value is based on market precedent. If everyone else is charging $2 for their apps, yeah, $20 is too much.
Unity is the new Mono. Unity is fine and I think better then Gnome Shell but I use Awesome WM since I am too leet.
I have a thinkbook. I love it to death, but I can't leave it on for more than 15-30 minutes before the sound of the fan going annoys me too much. Same with the MacBook Air for that matter. A friend of mine has one and as soon as he launched WoW on it, the fans kicked in and I was amazed at how loud the Air was.

These have no fans. No moving parts to worry about. That is one of their biggest advantages. I can use an ARM netbook while my SO is sleeping next to me. Not so for an actual laptop.
I think there should be a blog devoted just to creative uses of the cardboard tube out of toilet rolls!
Every business owner I've discussed this with -- and at this point I do have a statistically significant sample to work from -- isn't bothered by taxes nearly as much as they're bothered by not enough paying customers.

High taxes really only seems to be a problem for a certain class of businesses which are at the high end of the SME spectrum, and are already making good profit, and want to make more, but can't yet afford a creative accountant to exploit the kind of loopholes that our country's biggest businesses take advantage of.
Free Office Space in NYC
I agree that starting a business isn't for everyone. I'm doubtful that I would enjoy it, but I would like to be an early employee at a company. If that company can't afford health coverage, then I can't take that risk for my family.

It just baffles me that health coverage is so tied to where you work. What if you could only send your kids to the schools that your employer selected, or eat at the restaurants the your company had a deal with? It's just weird. I don't know if government provided insurance is the solution, but employer provided just doesn't make sense as the only solution.
Some of the postgres fdws dont pass conditions to the foreign data source because the mapping is sometimes "too hard". So the fdw will do something like select * from table, stream the results and postgres will do the rest of the heavy lifting for you.

Though for the fdws that talk to other SQL based databases, they will pass most of the conditions on to the foreign data source as it is "usually" all just sql.

So the answer is... it depends! :P

edited: I forgot how to write sentences good and stuff
We have a high corporate tax rate if you have terrible accountants. Almost EVERYTHING you do as a business drops your effective tax rate.

Then there is the whole S corp, I'm going to tax 3million in revenue at the 80k rate thing.... it isn't nearly as bad as that top number - take a look at effective rates and it isn't nearly as high as one would think
" // Compute the distance along the path using a map-reduce."
lol
U.S. Army Embraces 3D Printers: “It's kind of a magical thing"
I'm reading over the status updates a few hours after the fact, but for some reason the 1:33PM stands out because it is wrapped in quotes. Probably minor and meaningless. Just noted because it's different from the others.
12.04 on Dell E6530. Display drivers don't work properly (you need to turn Optimus off in the BIOS). Logitech wireless mouse didn't work properly. Multimon support is lacking. 64 bit version is unworkable, 32 bit requires a lot of tweaking. I spent a whole day installing 64 bit, installing 32 bit, different drivers, trying Bumblebee (doesn't work). At some point an update came that fixed the mouse issues (this was 3 months ago).

In Windows 7 everything works perfectly out of the box. Two external monitors, no problem (Ubuntu only supports one). Wireless mouse, no problem.
I've long hypothesized that a normal human from the "superhero universes" dropped in our world would still seem bizarrely sturdy, if not actually superstrong.

Another similar one that really bothers me is Oliver Sansweet's fall in The Incredibles. He attempts suicide by leaping off of a building, gets about twelve stories down, then is "caught" by Mr. Incredible leaping at him and re-entering the building he jumped from. Mr. Incredible exerts enough force to instantly stop his downward descent and enough force to also give him at least a good 20mph horizonally, probably more, and from this Oliver gets... a neck brace. That catch should have killed him, too. Yes, the maximum acceleration might have been smaller than an impact with concrete since Mr. Incredible could give him a very small buffer with his arms... though I see no evidence he does. Mr. Incredible impacts Oliver and within two frames tops Oliver has matched Mr. Incredible's velocity. Mr. Incredible also appears to have incredible mass, as he does at several other points in the movie, as Oliver's impact appears to leave his trajectory entirely unaffected. He seems to mass at least 3 or 4 tons, probably more.

Oliver is an incredibly sturdy guy by our real-world standards.
But the thing is, most people don't want to run their own business no matter how safe you make it.

In the aggregate you may be right. Just from my own personally experience, I can think of at least a dozen folks (extremely well-regarded in their field) who have all expressed to me a desire to strike out on their own, but it's the company-provided healthcare that keeps them from doing that.

And (for the most part) these are folks in Massachusetts.
Want a Google-influenced Motorola phone? Keep waiting
Hey Jason thanks for the feedback!

Queue Feedback:
You're right that we need some queue adding feedback and we've been trying to find a way to go about it that won't prove to annoying to the user. Next week you should see a small popup above the queue count every time you add :)

Dragging:
We're trying to figure out what page you were trying to drag song from. Many of the pages/grids are draggable but we still have a few places left to implement it.

Was it the Community page by chance? We'll be adding the ability to drag from there, hopefully by the end of the month.
The first section is a really roundabout and overly technical way of thinking about the force exerted on each person, and as a result, even gets it completely wrong:

> The sixth person in the human chain (the top person in a chain of six) would have to hold up a force of 660 pounds. This assumes an average human-chain person weight of 130 pounds

No. A chain of 5 would be a force of 650 pounds for the person on top (only the hand they're grasping with matters, the force of the chain against a link's ankle is pretty irrelevant, the human body has pretty good tensile strength and can probably lift quite a bit before getting dislocated joints, etc); a chain of 6 would be a force of 780 pounds.

This isn't rocket science, and really is so intuitive that this explanation is just beating around the bush. Here's how you really calculate it:

> The force exerted on the top person is the total weight of the chain.

The end. A chain of two 130-pound people exerts the exact same force as a "chain" of one 260-pound person.
Honduras court bans private cities project
Apple and iOS hacker Comex part ways after unanswered e-mail
Ask HN: Review my startup, ReminderBook
Hi All,

I've finally launched my first product after being inspired by many here. ReminderBook is a webapp for creating automated appointment reminders. I know I'm entering a heavily competitive market (with patio11 included). I would love to get your thoughts and feedback.

http://appointmentreminder.co

Thanks!
One Company Dared Compete With IBM And Macintosh Computers In 1984
As long as people in a movie are consistently more able to withstand blunt force, I don't have any problem with it. I'm only bothered if it's some kind of halfassed plot convenience that's forgotten immediately.

Comic book physics are a little bit different, and I'm fine with that.
or we could remove the tax break for employers that provide health insurance. If health insurance was tied to the individual it would stay with them in between jobs. You could also find plans with lower premiums and higher deductibles/less coverage if there was a market for insurance.
Oh my god, these are comic book movies. Get over it.
Building a scanning camera from a flatbed scanner
You referring to the removal of deprecated methods from the 2.x branch?
"...as much Internet activity has shifted to walled gardens, like Facebook, and to mobile devices and apps - worlds that Google does not dominate."

Lolwut? They only have 68% market share and second place is 17%.
So "meta"?

Better to apologize for being so meaningless.
Could that be a viable source of revenue instead of advertisement?

Charge per 10k tokens or something, with the first 100k free. Make each token worth about $0.60 and you could make some serious dough via not just 3rd party clients, but also people trying to mine data, build on top of the platform etc. etc.
This is the essence of the Peltzman Effect (http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-eco... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation)

"Risk compensation (also Peltzman effect, risk homeostasis) is an observed effect in ethology whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived level of risk, behaving less cautiously where they feel more protected and more cautiously where they feel a higher level of risk. The theory emerged out of road safety research after it was observed that many interventions failed to achieve the expected level of benefits but has since found application in many other fields."
I think I agree with where you're going, but it doesn't seem like a huge paradox to me. As I understand it, it may be that all else being equal, a better social safety net (such as healthcare available outside of a corporate group plan) encourages more entrepreneurship, but all else isn't really equal: we don't have a version of the USA that is mostly the same except that it has a national healthcare system. Instead, we have countries that differ on dozens of axes, ranging from governmental policy to culture to physical land to history to language, and are trying to assign blame/credit to each of those axes. You could even do that within the USA: why are there no big tech companies out of Alabama or Ohio, despite their governmental systems being generally American-style?

I do agree that the American healthcare situation is a major problem, speaking as an American expat in Denmark who hopes to move back to the US someday, and sees healthcare as one of the major barriers. I'm cautiously hopeful that PPACA will solve the worst of the problems, enabling me to buy individual health insurance. But I think it's hard to prove that either way based on cross-country comparisons.
Yelp should out itself for being underhanded assholes, while it's at it.
I can easily imagine a class of people who would become entrepreneurs if they didn't feel like the risk was too big. Especially people families -- not only might you be risking something on their behalf, you might also have a spouse that's difficult to convince (http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/meg-cadoux-hirshberg/livi...).
It was a case of suicide, plain and simple. They wanted to spin things their way and they were not interested in hard-hitting objective reporting.

"Want share? Try the truth!"
What open source project is complete and doesn't need any help? Besides Go or PHP and Github, you've told us no preferences, so it's kind of open ended. What has you motivated, what are you looking for? Would you mind spending four days adding a basic feature in a relatively unfamiliar language?

I've recently contributed to an opensource project myself for the first time. The project is Filezilla (the client in particular), and I added a feature to create a new, empty file on the server. About 70 lines of code in the end, but having little c++ experience it cost me two evenings, though that includes getting it to compile (also a first, compiling a project with a number of dependencies and lots of code on Linux). The patch is being reviewed now, and I have good hope it makes it to the next release. It feels really good to complete because I've actually done something measurable; solved a problem in software used by thousands.

I'd like to take such a project on again. It was small enough for me to grasp in a language that I was not very familiar with, and I learned lots of things. And it solved an actual problem. So those are things I'd be looking for in a project to take on. Perhaps you prefer something bigger? Or not? Not that I'd know a project to suggest, but perhaps others do ;)
Well it's still caloric balance; just that the mechanism of how that balance occurred changed.

What we're arguing about is the boundaries of causality. Take mental illness. Some people get fat because they have a mental illness. What's the cause of their obesity? Caloric balance or the mental illness?

Depending on the boundaries you draw, one or the other, or both.
So sad that in the US people like him host comedy shows.
YMMV with Apple TV. Specs are here,
http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

If you're like me, it will play about 10% of my collection. WDTV Live, on the other hand, plays everything.

If you're in the Apple eco-system, Apple TV is great. For those who aren't, it's Apple's way or the highway. I'm half in Apple, half out of Apple, and it's a total nightmare.
"Countries with much broader safety nets for entrepreneurs are not producing the risky innovative companies that America is."

I was wondering whether this was the case. Is there actual data to back this up, or is it just anecdotal?
Looks great - except missing the one I need for my product: LinkedIn! any timeframe for linkedin?
I'd just like to express my appreciation for the depth of this article. I always learn something from Armin Ronacher.
The big win for me is that XML supports validation, so a client can ensure a request is valid before it sends it to the server. However, JSON is by far easier to use which is why so many people choose it.
I agree entirely. I'm only one data point but I've only been able to get as far as I have in business because of the good graces of the Australian tax, welfare and health system.

Perhaps this is why the model for entrepreneurship in the US is so heavily geared towards huge, VC funded worldbeaters with far less "mircopreneurship" - a trait of the Australian economy that is said to be a mainstay of economic resilience.
What's the advantage of using this grid system, instead of a framework that contains this functionality and more (such as Twitter Bootstrap or Skeleton)?
He wasn't being sarcastic, he was being sardonic
Countries with much broader safety nets for entrepreneurs are not producing the risky innovative companies that America is.

This could also be a culture thing. When I was in Canada until 5.5 years ago the golden ticket was to work for a big co. I was an ECE major and the top employer of choice was, even for me, BC Hydro (power company). I have no idea anymore why I'd have thought like that, but maybe now I am brainwashed this way. :-)
They can revoke access for clients that don't comply with the display guidelines. They probably don't want to be in the business of policing 3rd parties like that, but they have the power if they want to use it.
History of the Color Wheel