skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I was a billionaire looking for ways to burn money, I'd set up a legal defense fund for MAFIAA victims.

We wouldn't have go broke defending everyone they sue. All it takes is a few cases to establish their abusive practices and suddenly courts start looking at them as "vexatious litigants" who file lawsuits in bad faith; abuse court procedure by e.g. jurisdiction shopping; using the court's subpoena power to get names and addresses for the sole purpose of extorting settlements with no intention of actually going to court; improperly joining hundreds or thousands of unrelated cases to save on filing fees.

When they realize someone who has the money and willingness to sue them is looking at these cases very carefully, suddenly the police fall in line and start going "by the book" and following their own procedures: Only taking evidence that's actually needed, only keeping it as long as it's needed, and returning it in good condition. Again, all we have to do is have a few successful cases and we can prevent thousands from going through what's happening in this story.
I would say "springs" is a pun referring to the actual springs inside the relays, switches and valve sockets.
Payright: A Copyright/Patent Reform Proposal to Make Piracy Obsolete
Piracy law is getting absurd.

Imagine if this girl simply shoplifted the music, its entirely reasonable that if she was caught that shed get a slap on the wrist and if anything, no where near a 600 fine.
Ponto: Native (iOS, Android) to WebView (JS) bridge for exchanging data
Great. The composer doesn't need to have gone through emotional breakdown, drugs, or whatever, to create beautiful music. He just needs talant. And I think talant may be at some point expressed in zeroes and ones.
Twitter.com runs off the API as well.[1]

Whilst Twitter does have the odd occasion where it has the "Oops, we did something wrong" it generally works as soon as you try to tweet again.

Considering all of their issues in the early years, they have started to scale really well, they handle over 400M tweets per day[2] & during the recent U.S election they saw a peak of 15,107 tweets per second & 874,560 tweets per minute[3] sure there might be the occasional "Oops, we did something wrong" but its a lot better then the fail whale!

[1] http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/09/tech-behind-new-twitt...

[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57448388-93/twitter-hits-40...

[3] http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/11/bolstering-our-infras...
Even better, this could be a very good way to permanently kill RIAA -- and because tech like this can't really be made illegal and requires no special permission, ingrediences or tools, there is nothing at all they can do about it.
A few days ago I found myself getting a rather strange git error while running bundle after upgrading to the latest ruby. Turns out the active record serializer gem was moved just hours earlier to this rails-api location without any reason or notice. It was referenced by a git revision, because we needed the latest changes and it was also encouraged in the readme (as it still is now).

My issue with all this is that we already had tagged revisions in our application and this basically broke our older builds on which we actually relied on should things go wrong (the application is a rails engine).

So I think it would had been nice if this was announced earlier.
It is very interesting that Sinofsky was unable to get Office "Metroified" before release of Win8rt. That indicates a failure of the Office code base or a failure of the Office division's ability to adapt. This is doubly interesting in that Office is where Sinofsky "made his mark."
Interesting project, but if you're only building an API, using a much more lightweight combo such as nodejs + express seems better.
> What is a distributed commenting system? An HTML script tag to load a static file that will ping an api that will serve you comments.

This is how Disqus works. Something still has to power the API that serves the data for it and we happen to like Django a lot so that's what we use. There are also a lot of parts of Disqus that are not the embed (moderation panel, account management, etc.)
What the business traveler knows: You can be plenty thankful at a table for one
Thanks for correcting my grammar. I'm actually not a native english speaker, and I'm not writing from home where I have a grammar checker plugin in my browser... so that's my excuse ;)
I also would like to hear some investigations about serial startups. For example the Samwer brothers are doing it successfully again and again. The recipe: copy successful US-only startups/companies in europe. Another example: Richard Branson aka Virgin Group. I cannot get his recipe nailed down, but his biographical book is called "Screw It, Let's do It".
and the longest meta comment here is yours.

cancer? really, no need to get so butthurt.
He recently gave a Haskell course there, I think. Bob Ippolito was talking about that.
That is very sad and concerning.

In my libertarian opinion, the competition start when the participants can make an informed choice - ie when they have a basic education.

Basic education, teaching everyone to read and count, provides positive externalities too- so it's generally regarded as a good thing, and many government provide public basic education. (some push that even further, but let's not talk about that yet)

An alternative is having companies providing basic education, and students enrolling with vouchers - ie opening competition on the education service market while fixing demand, to keep the positive externality. It is even better than the former option.

But biasing the competition even before it is started, by having a single government-run education scheme, where bribery and cronyism replace healthy competition is so wrong!
For example, if your blogengine has an archive without stable urls, you don't want that searchengines find an archive-page with many articles instead of the article itself, because it is possible the wanted article is already on another page.

The typicial seo-way, as far as i know, would be to noindex the archive-pages, but you of course could also make the archive stable. Both ways are an optimization for search engines.
This is great, getting started guide would be nice too.
I made an Android app for calculating CFM, you can have it if you like
Then, where is it written in the law that downloading is OK as long as you keep it for only the time required to make a decision on whether to buy it or not? And why would the opinion of "most people" matter to what it legally wrong?
There's a fundamental problem here though in power beaming. A plane such as the 777 has engines which use about 170 megawatts of power. Beaming 170 megawatts continuously to a moving target the size of a plane in a way that does not cause any amount of bleed-over around the plane and also somehow doesn't manage to destroy the plane is, suffice it to say, a bit of a technological challenge.

Even if we were talking about a blended wing plane covered in PV arrays and much lighter than a 777 (due to not needing fuel) and thus requiring less power we're still talking about delivering 10s to 100s of kilowatts per square meter of plane. That compares to 1 kilowatt/m^2 of direct sunlight. That's a hell of a lot of power, and I'm not sure there's a way for that amount of power to be safely and effectively delivered without a considerable risk of destroying or damaging the plane.
What actual million dollars was walked away from? Why is this the lead with no explanation?

Why not take the actual million, then fund this? Or use the million to fund 1538 students? Seems like a waste to walk away from funding 1538 students.

What's the actual "why" of the decision? It's a nice title, but I can't find the "why" anywhere in the piece. The paragraph that purports to answer why reads like a non sequitur: "Why did I walk away from a million? I wouldn't be here without my education." Explain how walking away happened because of this education.

The piece says it's so rare to be given a chance. By whom? And in what way is it rare for 21 year olds "running a billion dollar team" to be given chances? All data suggests these are the exact guys with an embarrassment of opportunities beating down their doors.

Speaking of explanation, what is a $5M organization? Is that revenue, run rate, valuation counting good will?

Agree with ceejayoz, this reads like a "please click and donate stuff and make us a $6M organization" piece, with no substance but lots of "click and give" links, name checking a few known "geeks" (Dave Schappell, Glenn Kelman, Rich Barton, Tim Ferriss, Alex Algard, Kevin Merritt) to encourage other geeks to get named too.

We keep being told if you win, you’ll be honored on stage at the GeekWire Gala on December 6. Great motive! (And the karma's good too, adding that makes sure it's not just pure crass self promotion, right?)

The idea's great, the cause is great. A zillion charity startups are doing good work in this arena. Having lived and worked in Africa for a decade, focusing on education, this piece doesn't really persuade me of value other than getting my own name in Geekwire.

I wish the piece had also touched more on the work being done and the percentage of money ending up directly in the hands of those being helped (100% we're told in a diagram, so what's the business model?).

And I agree with you. I wish with this title, the piece had explained why he walked away from a million dollars instead of taking that and then using his own money to get going or fund students rather than leaving it on the table and approaching others hat in hand.
This is the reductio ad absurdum of current law.

We need to work more actively to make this sort of thing stop. There are a range of solutions. We could try to change the laws. We could develop technology that would make it harder to catch file-sharers. We could attack the labels directly by trying to pinch off the sources of their revenue. I'm not sure which would work the best. My guess is that they're better at manipulating legislators, and the way to beat them is technology.

So here's a question for everyone: What new technology would harm the labels most?
We've had a lot of love recently for Goliath + Grape, e.g. see: https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/blob/master/example...

Goliath is it's own asynchronous app server, and it wraps around the nice Grape API DSL. Works really well for little projects I'd rather write in ruby than CoffeeScript + node.js
Because they understand that "protecting the revenue model" distinctly different than confiscating 9 year olds' laptops.
> there will be a disincentive for artists to sign up with records who indulge in such nonsense

No, there won't be. The recording companies will keep doing what they do and the artist will occasionally tweet how awful it is but they can't do anything about it since it's the big bad corporation. The company will take the blame along with its cut.
So what.
No one's getting new wealth from washing machines.
We care about the Internet because we see it as a means of gaining financial security.
> such as an ability to dispatch events while in a loop

Not sure I understand that one, what's the problem with dispatching events while in a loop?

> or an API for screengrabbing.

That makes absolutely no sense as part of ECMAScript.
It may be, yes, but Wikipedia isn't convinced. Even further down, it states:

"Zibold's condenser had apparently performed reasonably well, but in fact his exact results are not at all clear, and it is possible that the collector was intercepting fog, which added significantly to the yield.[10] If Zibold's condenser worked at all, this was probably due to fact that a few stones near the surface of the mound were able to lose heat at night while being thermally isolated from the ground; however, it could never have produced the yield that Zibold envisaged"

That made me look for more recent data. That PDF from 2005 was the best I could find.
This can be pretty powerful motivation. I left law school a couple years ago, and the decision was pretty universally viewed as 'stupid'.

Proving that label wrong really motivated me for the first year. I accomplished more than I ever have.

I sometimes wish I still had that urgency, but on the other hand, my life is more balanced now.

My challenge now is finding a way to be as productive as I was then, but without letting work be everything in my life.
As these slides are very old, here's some updates:

* We use Flask and nginx in various areas now (the main app is still Django). Our realtime app, for example, is powered off of uwsgi and Flask.

* There are nearly 1b monthly uniques across the network serviced by the platform.

* ~300 servers

* Still Postgres (with Slony, multiple clusters), Redis, Memcache, and some Cassandra for newer things (not comments).

Also mostly confident we're still the "largest Django app" in terms of traffic.
The reality of hunting is far from the reality of most animal farming.
I've seen at least 3 independent people saying that. We're investigating (it works on OS X Mountain Lion though)
That's what the washing machine helped do for half the population.
For your typical CRUD app, you won't notice a big difference. Rails/PHP/Java/ASP.net should deliver similar performance. If you're using Windows, Rails will slow down significantly unless you're using the latest JRuby 1.7/Java 7 release. The biggest "no-no" for a node app is proxying it behind a threaded webserver like Apache.
It's ironic that China was in 587 the first to introduce competitive examinations for government positions.
The problem really is Python import semantics. As soon as you can provide me with a way to say "this imported code is identical to the one you loaded before", I'm fine with providing a way to save the JIT state. Note that "identical" means also module globals, state of sys.modules etc. etc. In short, the assumptions are all the same.
Have you seen DarwinTunes?

(http://darwintunes.org/)
exactly... few others realize are worth "doing", because (a) market isn't worth it OR (b) competition is too big..

Everybody knew search is a big market, but few people realized that you can become a big player besides Altavista ad Yahoo! in 1998

so the statement remains correct....
I wonder why Austria isn't listed, while both Swiss and Germany have a lot of requests.
http://bandcamp.com/

Edit: I'll explain. Cutting the middleman is the big idea though band camp isn't enough for that. The big labels have very strong marketing capabilities that individual acts can't compete with. Even YouTube, the land of indie, is dominated by the large labels. So maybe bandcamp needs a breakthrough marketing/distribution/discovery platform that can somehow be more meritocratic.
I agree that the laws shouldn't be as crazy as they are now, but why make it harder to catch file-sharers? It's illegal to share stuff like this, and I don't see any justifiable reason why this shouldn't be illegal. However, it should be a small fine in my opinion, and it's a waste of time to break down the doors of these people downloading music unless they are making a ton of money by selling this pirated content.
I think a fundamental point missed is that Google, Facebook and the iPhone were better than Altavista, MySpace and the smartphones of the time. The untapped market was unimportant, that's an AOL play. I recall a general frustration that things should be better and a pleasant feeling of confirmation when each of the winners launched.

Not unlike AAPL, renewables and 3D printing right now.
Hmm, no mention of Prof. Cope at UCSC

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm
The Chinese education system unfortunately seems to promote dishonesty to children. Plagiarism is endemic and sometimes students are taught to plagiarize. There may be a decent reason - they think kids should model successful thinkers rather than come up with half-baked ideas themselves - but the result is that they are teaching kids to be dishonest. A classmate of mine from China turned in a rough draft of a paper that was copied from somewhere. The university gave her a standard punishment - she was forced to withdraw from the class and they put a "required to withdraw" mark on her transcript. She was unwilling to accept that she had done anything wrong and insisted that even though the teacher told her not to plagiarize they didn't tell her that she couldn't turn in a rough draft that had been copied.

I've read that this dates back to the Chinese civil service exam system which is ancient by Western standards and has a long tradition of people coming up with clever ways to cheat.
Wouldn't this be better as a new lightweight generator for the existing rails project? i.e.

$ rails new api

instead of

$ rails new

My concern is that rails-api will diverge from rails and I'll be stuck having to decide which is the easiest starting point where I want features from both.
Purely anecdotally, my great-grandmother (who lived through the majority of the technological advances of the 20th century) rated indoor plumbing as the best of them. I think we tend to get caught up in a definition of "innovation" which is "the same thing, but 10% faster" as tech folks, and the change of perspective is worthwhile.
Self-taught African Teen invited to MIT's "Visiting Practitioner's Program"
way too much self-promotion...
"You will never pay literally more than you earn because that's not how taxes work" - if you live in normal country I would add. While I agree with the rest.
It's amazing how fired up you can get with a little adversity. What were you working on after you quit law school?
good catch- updated.
What else did it do for society?

“Women started having fewer children, gained more bargaining power in their relationships and enjoyed a higher status."

I'm not buying it. It's true women no longer require a man to pay the bills, but by the same token household appliances mean men don't need women to keep house.

The thrust of the article is probably correct, though. There were a whole lot of changes in the 19th and 20th century that had a bigger effect than the internet, though I think the interviewee glosses over online retailing. You can buy almost everything you need in life over the web now, which is a both a big time saver and a reduction in the number of opportunities to form chance relationships.
Beams and potato chips
It already is: https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#for-new-apps

This is not a fork of Rails, it's just a set of plugins that work together nicely. Luckily, all the work on Rails 3 means that Rails is super modular, and it's easy to break off just the bits that you want. See Crafting Rails Applications[1] for more on this topic.

1: http://plataformatec.com.br/crafting-rails-applications
Disqus wouldn't fit into 1TB of memory as a denormalized data set.

It doesnt even fit (indexed, at least) into 1TB of memory as a normalized data set.

At the scale we're at, you're required to make tradeoffs and come up with less than standard solutions to problems. Our solution, as many others have done before us, is to shard datasets (both Redis and SQL).
I never really appreciated washing machines until I had to wash my clothes by hand for a couple weeks. It takes forever and I couldn't even get my clothes fully clean (they still smelled a bit).

The amount of leisure time humanity has gained from washing machines must be enormous.
The part I find interesting is the ratio of user accounts specified to # of requests. E.g. the United States made ~8k requests for ~16k user accounts.
So sorry about this. I was travelling back from Europe, and we had to coordinate between everyone who owned the various gems, so there was a bit of overlap there.

I hope to not be encouraging people to use HEAD soon.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, however isn't this what Kim Dotcom was going to do with his music service? Hit the labels where it'd hurt them the most (less profits) - then the raid came.

I also wonder if Microsoft is currently thinking of something like this. I recently watched 'Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn' whilst I've never played a Halo game or anything (I've just known about it), and instead of making a movie directly to theaters they release it free on mediums people enjoy (bit-by-bit on YouTube then released it as a movie). They definitely have the distribution and technology to do more of this. I hope they do, I really liked that Halo movie, I kind of want to buy an Xbox and play the games now... :)
As someone creating a large Javascript application with a Rails API, this makes me very happy. Perfect timing!
I learned from this that if you find a vehicle, produce decent content, you can find a niche for yourself (I am the write though).
This is an example of an article that doesn't belong in hacker news. For one, the title is an example of bait-and-switch. The article doesn't explain why the author walked away from a million dollars. Even worse, it's incredibly vague and self-promotional:

"Four years ago, I walked away from Amazon and a million dollars. I was a 21-year-old kid running a billion-dollar team, but I wanted more."

Walked away from a million dollars? How? What is a billion-dollar team?

Flagged.
Awesome. Please let me know how I can help you build your apps more effectively.
Apple and Google have large enough platforms where if they publicized a "direct-to-artist" payment system, you could see it getting a lot of use.

Something like that would obviously not be healthy for their relationship with the record labels and would never happen. But you need a large enough platform to make a difference. What about Facebook?
The washing machine did not link the world, did not propel globalization. This article's arguments are deprecated and trite.
A book. I'm an LSAT instructor. Originally these were sold through an affiliate (still are) and this year I published it.

http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-LSAT-Explanations-Official-Dia...

I also built up a local LSAT tutoring business.
...I know this is HN, but there are other takeaways from this kind of essay than: "Well, let's make a business out of washing machines" or "How do we make a better washing machine?"

1. Certain inventions become ubiquitous because they fill an important, if pedestrian need. So sometimes it's worth asking, "Why do we care about X?", not just, "How do we make money from it?" In fact, I think asking why the Internet is important enough to make a viable business out of is probably one of the first questions a startup should ask in the planning stages, rather than just, "This will be successful because it's on the Internet and more and more people are also on the Internet"

2. Revolutionary inventions/reforms outside of your own domain may create new supply-and-demand forces within your domain.
Thanks! Do you need something more than what's in the README[1], or do you mean I should have linked it from my post?

1: https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#railsapi
Goliath is not only relatively slow, it limits you to using libraries which have both an EventMachine implementation and an em-synchrony-style Fibered wrapper around them, which is basically a scant fraction of the total Ruby libraries available. This is pretty silly.
Usually it's pretty irrelevant which servers are accessible except the ones that host your app/back-end. So that's what you should check when implementing such a feature.
Taking Web Apps Offline [Vid]
There was never a 64-bit version of Firefox. There were 64-bit Nightly builds, which aren't even branded as Firefox. Running them because you wanted a 64-bit version of Firefox would have been a silly thing to do, because, as unreleased software, they also crash significantly more frequently than released Firefox versions, which almost certainly would have killed any productivity increase from running a 64-bit version of Firefox.
Cat /foo/bar | ghcopy — dead simple way to copy your shell to gist.github.com