skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What would you like to see in a new online marketplace?
Greetings,

We (me and a co-founder) are working on an online market service. Basically, we think eBay is terrible and are committed to building something better. UI issues aside (which is not to say that those aren't important), we're mostly concerned with building something that makes people more comfortable with using such a platform for pretty much anything they can buy/sell. It's a big dream, yes, but we're giving it the best we can.

Now, we know what we like to see in such a platform ourselves. But here's a small list of tihngs we'd like to ask:

1. What complaints do you have about eBay? What do you think could've been done much better?

2. What would be your prefered way of trading over the internet, and would make you more inclined to make extensive use of such a service? A trusted broker, a peer-to-peer kind of service as is used by most online markets right now, or something different altogether?

3. If you work in a sector that makes extensive use of outside suppliers and retailers, would you think you might make use of a more central internet retailer that handles the buy/sell orders of many clients?

4. Is there anything in particular you'd very much like to see implemented in an online marketplace?

Those are our questions. We would very much appreciate it if you could take a bit of your time to fill it in, and obviously hope to be your online marketplace of choice in the future!
The copyright holder of a program can legally license their program under the terms of the GPL along with extra terms of their choosing. Of course, the program's overall license may be incompatible with the plain GPL, and the program's adoption may be hindered.

The fields of endeavor stuff is from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and similar documents.
Pragmatism. The realization that taxes can be too low or too high, or that we cold be spending too much or not enough, or that the conflict isn't between too much or not enough regulation but between good and bad regulation.
Wii U hardware review: Double the screens, double the fun?
Esquire lets you shop by hovering smartphone over print mag
<rant>That's great. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to vim and gcc, because I don't have a cross-platform open source IDE that has been "relentlessly optimized" for my language of choice, to look slick, to not consume gigs of RAM and to not stop the world while I'm typing some text. What I have is a long list of text editors. Oh, here's another one. That's great.</rant>
BritRuby conference cancelled due to gender equality outrage
BritRuby 2013 cancelled
> From what I've read there was a lot of domestic overreaction during WW1 and WW2.

Yes, there was. The unfortunate difference between then and now is that then there was a clear end to the hostilities. The "war on terror" has no such clear end. Doesn't matter that Bin Laden was killed, doesn't matter that there hasn't been a successful terror attack in more than 10 years (and that nearly all the unsuccessful ones probably wouldn't have existed if not for the assistance of undercover FBI agents). When will it end? You can always claim that there are still more "radicals" out there who want to kill us, and that further fear is justified.
OBVIOUSLY 300 million are not doing start-ups. But it is a country of 300 million and the biggest economy of the world. I cannot imagine that a little incubator that signs 100 start-ups a year can possibly "shrink the pool of founders" in any meaningful way. Give me a break. It's idiotic to claim that.
> Apart from async(which Vim can't do), Vim is as extensible as Emacs in letter and spirit. Considering that you are vowing vim allegiance, I think tpope's plugins would have made it pretty obvious how extensible vim is.

Well, pastie[1] might be one of the few "advanced" plugins I've considered using (the only one I've actually used is limp[2]).

I've not come across anyone advocating something along the lines of mush or gnus for vim(x) though. That is more what I meant -- I use Vim as "just" an editor.

Also looking at the code for pastie.org support in Vim and Emacs -- I would definitively prefer extending Emacs -- and I don't even like Lisp much. I suppose one could use another scripting language to extend Vim, such as Python -- but my impression is that the focus is a little (note not a lot) different between Emacs and Vim wrt. these type of extensions:

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/pastie.el
https://github.com/tpope/vim-pastie/blob/master/plugin/pasti...

I do use pathogen, though: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2332

(x) Well, there is notmuchmail, which I suppose is somewhat similar. But as far as I understand mush is well ahead in many respects.

[1] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1624

[2] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2219

edit: formatting, spelling
Can anyone explain what happened?
Some people commute, and find listening to podcasts is a better use of their time than listening to music. Some, like me, gain value from some episodes of some podcasts - for me, B&A wasn't one of them, but the early (1-20) and mid (40-50) episodes of Hypercritical[1] (by John Siracusa) were really educating. I learned a lot from those episodes.

However I don't like it when they talk about next Apple event or iPhone, or endless discussions about app.net/twitter/... and wish Hypercritical was a more technical show (after weeks, the last episode in Intel chips was a bit satisfactory, so I hope they put twitter/iPhone discussions to rest).

[1]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical
67signals
To put another data point out there: I recently released a little kids puzzle game[1]. I payed a friend to help out with the coding, contracted out illustrations and purchased the sounds from stock sound services. I've put in around 10k$ to develop the app and it's generating around 2$/day. It will take me roughly 13-14years to break even :)

However I also see the app as a advertising for my consultation business and plan to use it to cross promote my next kids app[2], so it's hard to figure out the real cost/benefit structure.

[1] Animal Puzzle - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kids-animal-puzzle/id54051213...

[2] ToddlerTube - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504690
Apparently the non-profit conference had thus far a 100% white male line-up and got a lot of negative tweets about that recently. Example: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269863520135421952
This is great to hear, glad you're able to get to the right people so quickly!
An Ubuntu Logo made from A PCB (includes gcode and DXF)
A complete fabrication wouldn't be easy to pull off in most of the country, but there are regions/states where there is relative lack of accountability. In such cases, I would assume it will be mostly the handiwork of individuals with connections in law enforcement and politics. And of course, it will be much easier when the victim has no local connections.
I understand his decision though, show was becoming a bit redundant, he did point out a lot of good stuff throughout the way. Less shows for me to watch on 5by5 now, this one and Grubber where the most interesting ones IMO.
http://about.crowdsend.com
I am a ticket holder. I can not understand even a little bit the reason why it get cancelled. If I get it right, the reason is there are not enough female speakers? Seriously, if that is not gender inequality then what is?
It seemed because of complaints regarding race/gender diversity of speakers on twitter.

I think it started with this tweet: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264
I'd like to know what others think about other podcasts he's listed (especially, http://www.coreint.org and http://developingperspective.com). I was never a B&A fan, but enjoyed technical episodes of Hypercritical (those about programming languages, time machine, file systems, etc.) immensely (even though they were inaccurate at times, but John would address those in the next episodes and all of us would be wiser). Do you recommend these podcasts, or any other podcasts like those I mentioned from Hypercritical? Thanks.
A Twitter search for “britruby” should clear it up.

Short version: they’d invited all white male speakers; people complained about it on Twitter; the organisers got disheartened and called the whole thing off.

ETA: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264, https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360
Original post asking for help:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4739649
It's pretty well known that the warrants issued in New Zealand were invalid, but I don't think it's widely known how weak the US warrents were.

Here's an example of how far the government stretched the truth in order to get the warrant. According to Dotcom, in a previous investigation: "The FBI asked us for uploader information regarding 39 files and told us to keep their investigation confidential. We assisted and obviously didn’t touch the uploader accounts or files because of the ongoing investigation,"

The US government then used the existence of those files 2 years later as part of the evidence for the warrant to seize all of Megaupload's servers. Megaupload was never told to delete the files, and was afraid doing so would interfere with an investigation.
On point 100% as usual. You are focused, you are afraid, and you are resilient. One thing you do see due to the ups and downs is the future. By eating the shit in your industry you see whats going on. You know...fuck...this is going to happen in at least 3-6 months. Not saying you can do anything about it but you can be part of the "conversation".
An example where fractals improved efficiency does not constitute proof (or even compelling evidence) that there aren't any efficiency issues that fractals don't solve. Which is what you are claiming.
Have you all looked into pluggable types at all? It'd be nice to be able to enforce a convention like, any class annotated with type x must prefix all methods which call into y with z, and be given warnings/errors at build time. Forgive my ignorance if this is already doable, I work in OS X.
> Scrollbar chrome makes me instantly lose interest.

Scrollbar issue is with my XFCE theme, not textadept.

> If there was a screenshot without this (is there a terminal version?), I would regain interest

Gnome terminal, windowed: http://i.imgur.com/Dfh6o.png
Gnome terminal, fullscreen: http://i.imgur.com/6yoil.png

> Does it run on my platform?

Runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

> Are there any glaringly ugly things about it that will be a dealbreaker?

I don't see any.

> Is it more beautiful/cool than what I'm already using?

Well, it depends on what you find more beautiful/cool :) For example, it's similar to my current GVim setup: http://i.imgur.com/djaLS.png

> To what extent can it be customized?

It seems that most of it is written in Lua (except the core), so it seems pretty extensible http://foicica.com/textadept/11_Scripting.html

> What kind of people are using it (if you have user screenshots)?

Can't help you with this :)
Real-time Analytics: Hokusai adds a temporal component to Count-Min Sketch
I'm surprised there was nothing on LRUG. Seems like a rush decision to cancel.
What's wrong with that if it's true? My experience in poor countries is exactly the same. The shopping experience is horrible, because people are relentlessly trying to sell you things.

It's not saying anything about the culture in general, or the people, just the truth about third-world bazaars...
The "you should" formulation is a Dustin Curtis invention from several years back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704738
"the color green is stupid, it's just blue and yellow mixed together."
Whether we like it or not terrorists have shown a deep attraction to use airplanes as instruments of terror. And therefore we're going to have higher levels of security on air travel than we like. And that that security is likely to be managed by people who are newly recruited and poorly to middling in terms of compensation. I'm not sure if this outcome was fair but what is apparent is that he triggered multiple events. Watch, boots, shirt etc. It legitimately has the feeling of a "dry run" - enough at least to warrant being scrutinized. Not sure why he ends up in jail though.
Maybe it's just the airport I was flying out of (LGA), but I noticed that the TSA signs explaining the millimeter-wave scanners no longer say that you can opt-out of them. Where it used to say (IIRC) in smaller print at the bottom that you could opt-out and get a manual pat down in a private space if you so chose, there was now boilerplate text about how there were no health and safety risks associate with getting scanned by the machine, and that it wouldn't produce a photo-realistic image of me.

Once I opted-out by walking to the metal detector and (after being told to go into the other line for the L3 ProVision unit) asking for a pat-down, the agents handled it as usual (a bunch of awkward shouts for a "male assist at station 3", an embarrassed guy walking over and asking if I knew how this process worked and had done it before, and then a pretty perfunctory pat-down) - but if I didn't a priori know that I had that right, it wasn't listed on any of the many signs in the security scanning area.
After coming off a failure I think the part that really resonated with me talking about the fear of disappointment. I've been so afraid of disappointing others that believed in me and thought they wouldn't look at me with the same amount of respect. What I've found is that they saw it as much more of accomplishment then I almost did.

The other part is "You’re unemployable. You’re an entrepreneur." I am now in the process of meeting lots and lots of companies, big, small, new, old, re-invented and I'm finding that maybe its a case of once you've been a CEO you will always be a CEO. We will see what comes.
No. Thank YOU, Jacques!

I am one of the HNers who knows the details on this case. And I can say, with great confidence, that without tremendous generosity from Jacques, a talented young woman that he has never directly met would be in very bad circumstances indeed.
Awesome example of awful business writing.
Great Windows Driving Apps that Make the Road Easier
It only just happened. From the language and timing it looks like a snap emotional decision rather than a rational one; I assume the organisers got blindsided by the negative feedback and didn’t want to deal with it any more.

ETA: “@Rebeccask Due to sexist & racist remarks made on twitter last night got way out of hand. Sponsors pull out. No money no conf” (https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912)
I think he intended to reply the other comment comparing this to the evil issue. "This tool is for legal purposes" it doesn't restrict the use of the software (any legal use of the software is still legal, illegal uses are now just illegal in more than one way). The purpose of is to indemnify the author against claims when the software is used for illegal purposes. Whether it actually makes any difference (it's implied anyway) is another question.
Back to Work is next.
Show HN: Vadlue a social ad search engine
"After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, 'Lies--damned lies--and statistics,' still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of." Leonard Henry Courtney, 1895
Great News! It shows that entrepreneurship is not all about making money and ideas but also making others happy too :)
Dear HN hackers, would like to hear your constructive or negative feedback and suggestions about our startup idea Vadlue at http://www.vadlue.com/.

Ads are everywhere yet mostly impossible to interact with, except clicking. Ads only appear to you, when automatic bidding algorithms want you to see them. Vadlue wants users to be able to search, browse, share and review ads. Vadlue indexes ads and landing pages, publicized by Robads standards http://www.robads.org/ or shared through browser extensions.

1. We have 2 extremes going ahead, to be an Anti-Google, an ad search engine that also indexes landing pages or to be a Pinterest like social platform for ads. What do you think would make better sense for our idea?

2. Any ideas on getting traction?
About that extensibility, would it be possible to implement inline diffs? (Paint margin green for added lines, show a red marker for deleted lines.)
BinaryLink - A New Way To Work With Files
Code Sketching
By default comment strings are not defined in core Textadept. Add them like this:

http://foicica.com/wiki/comment-supplemental

Or install the Python language module:

http://foicica.com/hg/python/
"If you're interested in something not shown then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements."

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/more.php#languagex
I would argue that Disney alone is more powerful than either political party. It's pretty well known that the copyright extensions have happened in such a way as to keep the movie Steamboat Willie (and therefore Mikey Mouse) under copyright.

http://www.tomwbell.com/images/(C)Term&MMCurve.gif
One part where emacs beats vim is the ability to embed images. Emacs + AucTeX is by far the best editing platform for LaTeX because auctex converts the math snippets into images and displays them in emacs buffer. It is possible to write the backend support in vim as well, but not possible to display the image inside the vim buffer.
The social science approach would be to use both. Detailed case studies are essential and should be the starting point. But hypotheses extrapolated from those case studies could then be examined with statistical analysis like this.
Anonymous leaks personal information of 5,000 Israeli officials
"if he has to do it often enough, maybe he'll quit."

How is making someone with some decency quit a valuable objective, when he will only be replaced with someone with no decency?
I listen to ~ 40 hours of podcasts per week, so I'm probably on the opposite end of the spectrum from you.

If you don't understand the appeal of listening to audio podcasts, I don't think there's anything I could say to convince you otherwise. The experience is exactly how you describe it, so I don't think you're missing anything.

I find myself similarly confused whenever someone posts a link here to some video and there's a raft of comments complaining about how video is so inefficient, and how people should just post everything as transcripts.
Why is that "therefore" in there? Even if we let terrorists blow up one airliner every year, air travel would still be the safest mode of transport available. In addition, the security we have now is atrocious in terms of its effectiveness, so we could have security that's makes us safer while being substantially less obtrusive.

I don't understand why people ever defend the TSA at all. They not only make the experience of air travel fairly horrible, but they don't even keep us safe! I could understand defending them if you were afraid and they kept the bad guys away, but they don't even do that.
The graphic designer in me screams in horror. Inverted colors in images? You stare at this for extended periods of time?
Not necessarily, unless you are misrepresenting something to your own advantage I don't think you would have acted immorally.

You can sell your services to somebody who has better odds of success than you would alone because of finance or other skills experience they have etc.

As I have mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons to hire a mobile developer other than "I want to be an appstore millionaire".

Thinking about it only in this way might suggest an over-exposure to HN-think.
Yep. And we will keep the grind going. There is no try.
> Now if Apple's ecosystem doesn't suit your needs then you're still free to not use it or jailbreak your iStuff.

Oh good, I hadn't realized that a proper jailbreak for iOS 6 on the 4S was out yet. Can you point me to the URL for it?
That statement will almost certainly be true at some point, but thus far my understanding is Google's self-driving cars have not caused an accident yet.
Reading the twitter stream (https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264), I find it odd that one person comments that the lineup is "100% white guys", and then all of a sudden it's a foregone conclusion that the BritRuby organizers are sexist.

Even @johnsusser is a bit much with his comment: @BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female?

IMHO, I find that sentence insinuating that, unless you start with diversity as your goal, you are just racist/sexist/-ist. This is the wrong approach from the start; just perform a call for papers process and take the best ones.

If one looks at the speaker list, they seem to be from non-3rd world countries. Where are the dirt poor people speaking at this conference? I'm going onto Twitter to state that BritRuby is class-ist.

And while we're at it, I'm pretty sure (but I'm guessing here) that all of the speakers can speak. That's quite discriminatory to those people who cannot speak, but can code in Ruby.

Should I continue or can we just get on with the conference and be inclusive, instead of this faux discrimination bullshit?
Or replaced by someone else with decency, and then another, and then another, and then ... The training costs add up, for one, potentially leading to change.

Let's supposed eventually that position is filled by "someone with no decency." Then passengers getting screened become more and more annoyed and outraged, complaints rise, and potentially leading to change.

Now, that change might be to no longer have opt-out. But in either case, the possible course of events is likely not as simple as what you outlined.
Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup?

He's making this up in his own mind. Who's the real discriminator here?
The thing that makes your argument weak is that it's a quote from Kim Dotcom from an interview. I don't know, it might be true but the problem is, if it's not totally obvious already, that of course you'd expect Dotcom to defend his actions and claim innocence but he's a biased and unreliable source. The US and NZ governments, as much as they may have stretched the truth and been in the wrong in some areas, are still more credible than Kim Dotcom. As much as we would all like to go off on how corrupt and terrible and wrong the big bad government is, any reasonable person can't deny that Kim Dotcom is even less credible considering his history which includes a criminal record the long precedes MegaUpload and the fact that only the most naive and out of touch didn't know what was happening at MegaUpload.
I disagree. The examples for Apple and Google are spot on. Apple sells you a product and collects their profit. Google gives you a product in exchange for access to your data and eyeballs (in order to resell to advertisers).
I'm pretty furious about this. I was really forward to having a reasonably-accessable world-class ruby conference in UK. I'm really only care about whether the speakers are interesting and that I can learn from their talk.

I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the quality of speakers.
You can't call the ability to jailbreak "free to do so", any more than a prison cell is "free to escape out of".
Sure jailbreaks exist, but not for all devices, and not without significant efforts by non-apple personnel (and significant effort from apple personnel to stop said 'freedom').
It only seems to be white males that are complaining.
And Mr Packard has a domain name whose letters can be used to create a key ingredient of a dirty bomb.