skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe because not all of my friends have iPhones and cannot use iMessage to reach me, and have no idea that when they send me an MMS that it's just going to disappear into a black hole, and I'd rather have the option of not missing any communication?
A friend works at a company that sends around a beer cart at 4pm on Fridays. It seems like sort of a bad idea to provide employees with alcohol, then send them out into rush hour traffic.
How to "force" users to upgrade their browser?
I doubt they spent $45MM on the app. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they returned most of the money to investors OR are doing another type of app/business.
You might want to keep the buttons at the bottom of the object they modify (for example on the 'update my list' page). That would make it more consistent on mobile or space constrained displays. It's also more common practice.
At least Canada is not involved in wars of aggression and is a relatively peaceful nation (in comparison to the US). The point is not where we are now that is of concern, it's when the shit hits the fan, which will inevitably happen. When this happens, first thing out of the window is personal rights.
This might be a good time to reflect on the individuals who bootstrap a product without any outside investment in a seemingly dead or toxic market and still succeed.
He's talking about the California legislature, not Congress.

http://graphics.latimes.com/2012-election-results-california...
http://www.gnupg.org/

Problem solved.
Well, it's either intellectually dishonest or intellectually lazy IMHO, because without some sort of backing argument you've just got someone trying to pass off a simple correlation as some sort of evidence of his argument - innovation is good, innovation happens and patents also happen, therefore patents are good.

He's either avoiding any/all arguments in that area or ignorant of them.
As a writer I also prefer to communicate by email. I used to be very socially awkward and introverted (and still am), but knowing how to communicate in a wide variety of situations, whether it be by text, email, phone or in person is an extremely important skill to learn, especially if you're in a field like software development or engineering.

1) I can relate to this first point, but at the same time it isn't like it's impossible to have long or in-depth conversations on the phone. If you find phone calls at random times distracting just set a time and date, or tell them to call you back later. Also, in this day and age phones that support voicemail are everywhere; if they leave you a message you can think of a reply for a couple of hours and then call them back when you're ready.

2) Things like small talk don't have to be awkward. I'll agree that most small talk feels "fake," but that's because it's used to assess your mood. You don't have to pretend to be interested in the weather on Saturday or that baseball game last night. Making small talk is a difficult skill to learn, but again, you don't actually have to care or devote and thought to it. Asking how your day has been going is just common courtesy.

I'm not going to address the rest of his points as they're personal problems, but if you limit yourself to one form of communication you're going to limit yourself in a bunch of other ways, too.
The article doesn't talk enough about level of assent to Terms by users. Don't show the Agree button until they scroll all the way down. Require them to type their initials to agree. It is really easy to throw out your terms in civil litigation by showing the user never actually assented -- there wasn't a "meeting of the minds" in order to form a contract between you and your users.
Neither had they.
> I understand the situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag to stow above you.

Or in the cabin. If you're the last to board, there's a very real possibility that they may have to gate-check your bag, which adds additional wait time at the end of your journey at best, and your bag arriving in Minnesota while you're touching down in Dallas at worst.
I wonder if any HN'ers are in Vermont?
If you're not sure if there is a pain you are solving, try the Nail it Then Scale it cold call test. Cold call 10 target customers and briefly describe what you think their pain is and how your solution eliminates it. Usually you will have to leave a voicemail. If you don't get at least 50% return calls, you haven't identified a pain bad enough to support "a 2 person startup that nobody has ever heard of with a rudimentary solution" - which is what you will be!
OutboundEngine Launches with $1.6M Series A
The research was probably funded by Big Chocolate.
Sure, but it defeats the purpose of what the patent is getting at--rewarding an inventor and innovator for creativity in application of new principles. The whole intent of a patent is to give the holder a monopoly on the technology for a given time period so as to encourage innovation. The other shoe is a trade secret--publishing trade secrets would ensure literally no economic rents to the innovator.

Probably a better set of reforms that would solve a host of problems:
* 5 year patent length limit
* Nontransferability of patent (can't sell IP, say)
* No software patents. If it's written in code, get a copyright.
Is not the presence of upvotes an indication that it IS relevant?
I wouldn't consider "bitch" a sexist word anymore as in common usage (at least the common usage I know, for the last 20 years) "bitch" can be directed at a guy or a girl.
Thanks!

As far as the TLD, I have projectionable.com. That's on the short list of things to set up.

I'm pretty much just using bootstrap's buttons, but I'll take a look at your suggestions.

Thanks for the other tips as well!
knock off the propaganda. hackernews doesn't want non-technical political talk here.
FYI, the European Union has a similar model (and in many aspects much worse because unlike in the US there are virtually no rules and no transparency), and more and more power is being transferred from national governments to it.
Knowing How to Hack
Reminds me of the DEA insisting that it's worth spending billions to 'defend' citizens from marijuana.
One of their competitors in the Android space is having a very good week :)

http://swarmconnect.com/openfeint_shutdown
Sure, but why should who makes the software bear no responsibility? If a building is found to have a flaw the architect or an engineer are who get questions, not whoever noticed the flaw.
How to build an Email client:

1. Observe the continually evolving web standards of CSS and HTML.
2. Ignore them completely and build it based on Microsoft Office XML.
3. ???
4. ... probably not profit.
Since Congress is working on deals to avoid the January 1st "fiscal cliff", are the Rover guys just trying to prevent any cuts to their budget?
It really doesn't take much longer to go through the process. Show up 3 minutes earlier if you have to.

YMMV with respect to the additional time. I also opt out and have had to wait as long as 15 minutes for the pat down (and to make matters worse in that instance, there was an elderly passenger behind me who had a medical exemption from the scanner and they waved him through while I had to stand and wait).

My advice is that if you do plan to opt out, allow for more than 3 minutes.
Indeed, I'm feeling badly about it. (I'm the author of the article)

Have reached out to Matt at The Oatmeal offering to donate $500 to his favorite charity -- but I'm open to do doing whatever he thinks is right.

Although it doesn't excuse it -- I did link to the original comic, mentioned Matt and The Oatmeal by name, and linked EVERY individual image back to the original comic. I didn't mean to not give credit for the original work.
>You are a coward, and I say good riddance to you

...says the smurf account. If you actually disagree with someone say it with your main or don't say it at all.
Electricity, gas, and water all have something critical in common: they are heavily regulated, so you're paying more or less cost for them.

When Internet usage gets metered, it's because the carriers think it will allow them to massively overcharge everyone, and take more profit; and they're right.

I'm not opposed to an Internet-as-utility model, where it's metered but there is _some_ mechanism to ensure that the charges are related to cost, and not just made up.

The market _ought_, in an unregulated industry, to be that mechanism, but in consumer internet service provision we have a sort of half-regulated industry, where there is never more than about a duopoly of providers in any given market.
Aside from it being the most counter-productive form of communication ever, I see it as a measure of covering one's inability/unwillingness to explicitely put up in writing what they really want to say. Why can't you take 15minutes to think over and write your request? Why both of us have to waste an hour to talk over stuff that can be written in 15mins and read in 5?
haha, you create a new account to hide behind to call someone else a coward :)
Gotchya. I can understand that fact.

However, our page's followers are mostly students in the Seattle area, and I personally know as we've had slow and steady growth in likes in the last year.

There's no reason promoted posts should be reaching such untargeted users -- and I'm trying to figure out what's going on.
Quotes from the Nato Software Engineering Conference in 1968 | Peter Krantz
That's one way to do it, but consider the power increasing your willpower would have. Consider this extract from The Willpower Instinct where the subject builds up willpower by resisting a temptation he places in plain view himself: http://books.google.com/books?id=evc6jaibNd8C&pg=PT66...
POST TO FACEBOOK AS: The Senate is voting on a law next week that will let employees from 22 different federal agencies eat your Twinkies whenever they feel like it!!!
Let's get rid of this clown.
Those are the things they DISCUSSED doing - what ACTUALLY HAPPENED was that they sent excerpts to the media and deleted their own copies.

It looks bad but I think it's more important to focus on the fact that they ended up doing the Right Thing with the data instead of fucking anyone directly - even when distinctly aware of the various opportunities available for misusing that data.

Many greyhat researchers don't have those ethics or morals.
Historical Patent Activity: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.ht...

From the OP: "The explosion of litigation we are seeing is a reflection of how the patent system wires us for innovation," Kappos said. "It's natural and reasonable that innovators would seek to protect their breakthroughs using the patent system."

Or maybe...it is natural to file patents as fast as possible to protect ourselves from an increasingly broken system?

It'd be nice if companies could be restricted on the number of patents they could file per year. Let's say a company with 1-10 people can file 1 patent per year. 11-100 people => 5 patents per year. 101-1000 people => 10 patents per year. 1001-10000 people => 50 patents per year.... Then maybe companies would only file their most important "breakthroughs."

Of course, this system would mean that we would have fewer patent prosecution lawyers, and maybe even fewer examiners.
not to suggest anything to anyone but just think how crazy it would be to get to know his personal or official email address and sign him up here and there for some questionable websites, like piratebay emailing list, hackers emailing list, perhaps some lists for kkk etc. Sorry to drop it here BUT just the dark side of me is waking up in the light of this news...
I thought it's a general ff feature request.
He's asserting that the objections to patents are from consumers: Let me have this stuff without paying inventors (patent holders). (This would be bad because it reduces the incentive for innovation).

In my experience, the objections to patents are from innovators: Let me invent without paying people who have been trying to landgrab the intellectual frontier. (This is good because it reduces barriers to innovation).
If that sounds like a dubious assertion to you, I'm guessing you don't work in application security. Me and 'sneak do.
No, please don't, here is one voice against "let's do it totally different for idiots". Next you want to have 3 confirmation dialogs "do you really want to send" followed by "did you prove-read your mail again?" followed by "you clicked YES too fast, go back to start and prove-read again".

Also, worst thing you actually can do is to put the save/send/ok button on the bottom when all other UI elements are on the top of the UI (which is usually the case in mail clients).
I work for a somewhat hip company and we don't even have phones (other than for the support personel) -- why would we?
I agree you don't need metaphors, but not because it's not like anything, rather because it's too simple to need a metaphor: If you give something, anything, to a third party to handle or keep, the government can't demand to go and look at it without a warrant.

The government can't demand to go look in your safety deposit box, it can't get your library check out records, it can't see how many airline miles you have, it can't read the mail in your PO box etc etc without a warrant. Of course, in some of those cases, the third party will cooperate without a warrant, but they're not required to.
You're putting the burden of learning implementation details of your system onto your customers. That won't be comfortable for either them or you. Should you need to deprecate a method you'll never be able to remove it. So be prepared to write a lot of { "Error": "ErrorCodeThatOnlyMakesSenseInTheContextOfThisAPI", "Description": "DEPRECATED" }
I strongly prefer conducting most of my professional communications over email for most of the reasons listed. Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not work that way--particularly in the realm of B2B sales.

I respect Dharmesh enormously. I am nowhere near his level of anything, and no one has any reason to listen to me, but I still have to say it: if you want to make money running your own business and can't afford to hire a salesperson, unless you have a uniquely geeky clientelle you need to learn to talk on the phone. Furthermore, learn to enjoy it. It's very doable, even for introverts like us.

(FWIW, I strongly suspect that Dharmesh is very good at talking on the phone, even if he hates it, both because I've seen his BoS videos and because it is extremely rare for people to succeed in the way he has without being excellent verbal communicators. He'd be better at it if he got past his mental block, but he doesn't need to because he has hired an excellent sales team.)
Someone else did an analysis of airline travel and highway travel and came up with a similar finding. Blow up one plane per month over the continental US and flying would still be two orders of magnitude safer than driving or riding in an automobile over your lifespan.

There's no proof that TSA is making things any safer either. No one will ever pull another fast one on the passengers of a plane again. We all know that the planes themselves are weapons, so I'm pretty sure most passengers will go down fighting if terrorists try to take control of the cockpit.

This is precisely why it's called security theater.
So true! I laughed out loud when I read this line.
>SSL: It is not the onus of the vendor to ensure people are properly securing requests.

Two responses: first, Braintree customers may appreciate knowing that Braintree provides a safer implementation than whatever the (third)contractor that they hired to build thier web app might throw together.

Second, fraud does directly impact their business, regardless of the entry point used by the attacker. Even if they don't get stuck for the money directly, they are going to lose time talking to customers and helping with investigations.

They don't have to do either, but they may find that they can make some types of customer relationships profitable that would not be for a competing business that doesn't do as much hand-holding.
Sergey Bratus[1] (of Langsec[2] fame) testified as an expert witness for the defense in this very way within the last few days.

[1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/

[2] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/
How is Australia these days?
Personally I'd rather see the payment card companies nationalized. Make them operate at zero profit, and vastly reduce the friction in the flow of capital. Or, if you prefer not to nationalize, institute a government-operated competing global payment card system that's free for merchants and consumers alike. Watch the payment card companies collapse under their own weight.

It makes a lot of sense to me: the governments of the world are in the business of governing currency, and payment card systems are superseding that power. Time to take it back and return the power to citizens.
>"innovation continues at an absolutely breakneck pace. In a system like ours in which innovation is happening faster than people can keep up, it cannot be said that the patent system is broken," he said.

Nice non-sequitur.
I think this is a pretty novel argument, basically the cure is worse than the disease. Basically intrusive security measures make flying less desirable which moves people to other forms of transportation (notably cars) where they are more likely to die.

It doesn't help that people don't internalize risk well so its hard for folks to see the merits of the argument but I applaud whomever came up with it.
To each their own, but I would never want to work with someone who could not engage in small talk. We are a gregarious species, and there is so much more communicated between the stories, stupid jokes, and general banter (non-verbal)

This post reads more like a personal observation of social anxiety and the maladaptive behaviors borne of it.

I actually feel sorry for him because something so human and natural causes so much anxiety.
Nate Silver: Wednesday Night Is All Right for Loving
I worked at a startup in Malibu, CA and we had "Tasty Beverages" (a nice selection of beer) every Friday afternoon on the terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Once we grew as a company and "went corporate" we had to sign a sheet pledging not to exceed the legal limit according to an attached DMV chart. As the largest employee in the office (6', 225 lbs), I was able to drink 3 beers, while everyone else was limited to 1-2.
A simple, intuitive, low-cost alternative to NFC and QR Codes
It's not just in tech companies. A few friends of mine that worked on Capitol Hill used to have beer in the congressional office fridge provided by the Chief of Staff.
Tangentially - the thing that most surprised me about this article was reading that over 150,000 Americans have been murdered in less than a decade.

I find that number utterly staggering. Wikipedia says that the homicide rate in the US is 4.2 per 100,000, which is more than 2.5 times the rate in Canada and 3.5 times the rate in the UK.
Having been shaken down a few times in business myself, I learned to call this threat "The Sword of Damocles."

To an extent your likelihood of a shakedown is tied to your market share, but not necessarily.

As a rational person your instinct that your work was developed independently and/or earlier or other well-known work is prior art is irrelevant to the parasites because they are not interested in facts, only money. You can only hope they don't try to kill the host.

Without naming names and amounts since settlements are bound by secrecy, I'd like to hear some (hopefully successful) battlefield stories of handling the dreaded troll letters and blind-side lawsuits?
> The BBC is spending British taxpayer's money after all.

There used to be funding from the Foreign Office for BBC World Service, but that has now ended. There's a tiny payment from Department of Work and Pensions to cover the discount for people over 70.

What other tax-payer money is used for the BBC?
I used to opt out, but I also get fed up with being groped by old men. I'm not sure what the solution is because unless a significant portion of people opt out this doesn't accomplish anything and my groin has been fondled a few too many times at this point for me to want to continue opting out.

The entire procedure is completely bogus of course- everyt time I fly in the US now it's a question of: "How do I want to be violated today?"
I tried your method, it was a recipe for disaster for me.

Want to eat healthy? Eat so much bad food that you get tired and bored with it. Want to be productive and not goto facebook? Find something you want to do so badly that you forget facebook. Want to be productive and not goto HN? Go there and read every article on the first page for 2 weeks, then become bored. Want to fall asleep upon entering your bed? Stay awake until you're tired -- if this means you'll be too tired for work, then you need to change your schedule, or find a way to work tired.

---

Visualize Jack Sparrow's compass -- it always points toward what you want. But compasses are balanced metal bars, with the magnetic end pointing toward, and the other end pointing away from what you want. Visualize the rod bending in half, so both ends point toward what you want. Now do this with your wants.
Possibly not. Here in NZ lobbying goes on, and companies get named and shamed periodically, but while corruption exists (Dotcom case running close to the line with 1 or 2 MPs) it is very low by (the abysmal) international standards.
Low corruption countries exists. I should really get a better link, but here is some info http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_New_Zealand
There's a danger to elevate inability to communicate by phone (or face-to-face) into some kind of geek badge of honor. If you can run your business that way that's good for you but it's important to keep in mind that there are some potential clients, customers or partners that do better with phone conversations.

It's not always the inability to put things in writing or plain lazyness that makes some people pick up the phone instead of firing off an email or text. Some people's brains have an easier time developing ideas in a conversation and you may miss out on valuable opportunities if you dismiss them. You could hire or partner up with someone who likes to chat.
Even this will not help you in the EU. The basic rule for EULAs in the EU is that they are only valid if you show them pre-purchase.

Oh, and they become automatically invalid if you make a user sign away rights that he has under the law (of his resident member state).
Design and Impl of a Censorship Resistant and Fully Decentralized Name System
Great point and requiring your users to scroll through the TOU and then agree (only after scrolling) is the best practice. Courts, however, have not conclusively said this is the silver bullet. Many TOUs have held up in court via a mere click through (with no scroll).
That's a little much, IMO. Lobbying is a right acknowledged in the Constitution[1]. We live in a republic, and yes it has more power than the government has ever had before, but we also have more freedoms than we've ever had before, at least in the US. Zimbabwe is actually a fascist country.

This guy is just a mundane man defending his existence. Nothing more, nothing less.

[1] The right to petition your government.
Dat personal responsibility. Isn't it great when purely technical solutions exist (for quite some time) to these problems?
Yeah, could not find a better term at the time, sorry...

But yeah, It's all subjective.

I think though, that setting a time limit as the first thing in the call is far better than saying "I must go in two minutes" in the middle of a call. At least the other party knows their time is limited.

But like I said, it's subjective and you certainly have a right to handle it as you wish :-)
The Startup Ecosystem Report (2012) - Top 20 Ecosystems
Set Up Amazon EC2 for complete awesomeness
The userbase has always been about schadenfreudic justice and retribution from a perceived slight of the day. moot - or rather, his attorney - fits the bill to a t.