skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its precisely this reason (ie, learning by doing) that proves the point you're arguing against. US is the most litigous society in the world, in part because USA believes in the laws and writes them to be litigated, and second because there is such experience in litigating. Thirdly, there is a culture of blame and responsibility shifting; which the law and legal profession is just the hired-help (not the problem per-se).
> no major wars

That's demonstrably false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_wars
The app is still ridiculously slow for me on WiFi.
Start up takes ~10 seconds to bring up the Facebook logo/splash screen. Then another 3 - 5 to bring up my feed and load the images.

Scroll is laggy and there are only ~5 articles before I have to refresh.

I end up using the mobile version because it isn't as laggy and doesn't require location services and the potential to track me as easily.

The Facebook app should be like the Google+ app if they want to make Android users happy.
I love how one of the straw men here is actually inserted in brackets along with a quote from me.

"I'm trying, unsuccessfully, to find how Google is to blame for the shortcomings of pre-iOS6 maps."

I'm trying, unsuccessfully, to find where someone is "blaming Google".
OTOH the overall costs to them would have been much lower if they went native to begin with and not dicked around with HTML-based apps for years.
While Lamy is fine, it's bit drab looking. If you want a nice pen (both in terms of looks and in terms of writing), look at Taccia pens. They've got nice ones in the $70 range. (Here's my latest baby: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KDP9Y2/ref=oh_details_o...)
Oh God no.

I've managed to put Indiana Jones and the King of the Thing in the back of my mind. Do NOT go there.
Why didn't they call it by its actual name? Were they afraid people wouldn't know what "Curiosity" is?
Hi. @betashop here, CEO of Fab. Happy to answer any/all questions.

With regards to the "was it a pivot" comments below.

Fab was first fabulis, for 13 months. We built a ton of product and a small but loyal following. We then shut it down to pursue our passion. That's a pivot.

Regarding Fab's 2nd pivot in 2012, we pivoted our business from a drop-ship model to an inventory model. That's quite a pivot.
Why not just use the inertial sensor to always keep track of which way the phone is pointing?

I know those drift after a while, but with GPS corrections, it should certainly manage to keep orientation while someone is getting off a bus, or turning around in a parking lot.
And hey, there are "business method" patents as well as technology patents. Could we get a patent on sending threatening letters? How about a patent on shell companies

Yes, of course. This has been the go-to joke in these stories since at least SCOX v. IBM (8+ years).
Why did Fab succeed? Why would someone shop here instead of say Amazon?

I don't understand the reason for the huge growth and expansion.

What problem are they solving that is creating such huge growth?

Very Impressive, but I don't understand WHY they are successful.
But there's an astounding lack of mathematical rigor in software. It may all call crumbling down like a house of cards. And it does. People don't know theory, nor do they want to learn it. They just want to get work done. Although all theory is dangerous too, I think a healthy mix is a good order.
In retrospect, Giuliani may not have been the most influential person of 2001, but in late 2001, his was the face of American resilience in the face of unthinkable assault on the nation. He stepped up immediately after the attack and did everything he could for his city.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but it was a fairly reasonable choice at the time. Read the article:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
Thanks for your hard work as always!
You can append /rss to the pages, e.g. http://[blog].tumblr.com/page/2/rss

It'd be nice if they supported <link rel="next"> tags, but it's still extremely easy to dump the content.
I agree; I've had that problem as well. I have to use one of these cheesy mouse pads with wrist support:
http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00TBFEosetZyqr/Gel-Mouse-...
Apple had a disclaimer the first time you launched Apple Maps.
NASA's cloud computing odyssey: From Earth to Mars
I'm also curious about this. Seems like virtually all apps would be better off using what is already built into Android. Intents & BroadcastReceivers as you mentioned and LocalBroadcastManager to route broadcasts that are in-app only. I wonder if this is pure NIH or if they have some interesting special case. IME the built-in Android stuff works great once you warp your brain to Android thinking.
Private health insurance sucks ass in WA, but other than that it does look good :)
For people like me who find enlive/hiccup/stencil (template libraries) inappropriate for web development that involves more than one person I would beseech them to take notice of:

https://github.com/sjl/dram

That's all I have to say about Clojure web dev for now. It's good to know that people are shifting to a more modular approach now.
> Google Translate is now really awesome for European language

For major European languages. Try something like Lithuanian and you'll most likely get something completely wrong.
I'm not sure I completely agree with you, but these are some valid points. What happens once we run out of unskilled jobs due to the machines?
sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family

This can't be understated. As a highly technical person running my own web services, even I rarely posted photos. The support burden of managing the server, securing it, and keeping family up-to-date on passwords was just never worth it.

Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity.

I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic because I completely agree with you. Any ideas have to recognize the value that sites like FB provide (as the OP did not) and come up with better solutions.

In 1995, I would not have believed that Microsoft would not be the focal point of the industry. The Internet shifted things such that Microsoft is no longer the focal point. It can (and probably will) happen again to Google and FB.
(Disclaimer: I have a "bitcoin net worth" of about 10 BTC.)

The first thing I thought of when I discovered Bitcoin was micropayments. I can understand the comparisons of Bitcoin to a pyramid scheme, but I don't think they're valid.

A better example would be the founders not of a company, but of a state. After Alexander swept through the middle east, his generals suddenly became extremely wealthy and powerful due to their positions as de facto rulers of successor states and their control of the silver mines of Macedonia. Note that both the precious metal and the authority of the generals were necessary components of a stable currency: the durability, divisibility, and malleability of silver made it a superior medium; but a silver coin not stamped as the general stamped his coins was considered counterfeit at worst and much less valuable at best (since the new government would not accept any but its own coins as payment). This was a necessary protection against the sudden inflation and arbitrary redistribution of wealth that could be caused by a gold or silver rush.

Much later, King Henry I of England perfected the use of tally sticks as currency. Without going into detail, his tally sticks were designed to prevent counterfeit and to minimize the trust between parties necessary to use the sticks as currency. Just like the idea of using one's military supremacy and control of a source of precious metals to convert military power to wealth and financial power, the tally sticks were essentially an information technology. The paper currencies of today's governments are the current state of the art in financial information technology.

This is why bitcoin is more like an upstart state than an upstart business. Businesses don't compete with state currencies. Throughout history, the power to mint one's own currency has been largely (but not totally) reserved to the rulers of states. What makes Bitcoin so interesting is that it's taken the historical requirements of a working currency and attempted to eliminate one requirement by doubling down on the other. Bitcoin has no political authority or military might to enforce its use in trade, but it does have a very innovative information technology foundation. The question is, can a currency survive on the latter alone?
@sami36, below you asked "What are the zoning folks occupying themselves with ?"

Zoning folks just follow a set of rules/uses for any parcel. A rezoning application is usually a public process, to engage the neighborhood, which speaks to the purpose of zoning: it is intended to promote the general welfare of the community.

I am not a big fan of zoning, I'm just saying that as the law stands some Airbnb hosts flaunt the zoning laws.
true, but if it aggregates multiple services, it makes more sense to have a generic name like "analytics", than for a singular service to have that name just because it's Google. still, you're right that it will probably be confusing.

edit: a reply below points out that it's hard to search for. that's actually a quite good reason why the author(s) might want to reconsider the name.
What is a "fiber transmitter"?
I wonder what they're doing about patent trolls and what their lawsuit/settlement stats are. I'm sure they're getting plenty of them nipping at their heels. Maybe they agreed to sign non-disclosures or something.

[I have patent trolls on the brain after reading various HN articles on the topic of late...]
I don't think "shutting down to pursue a passion" is what most of HN considers a pivot.

A pivot is named as such because your business is keeping one foot in the ground while changing direction. This is done after testing your initial assumptions, normally with no more than an MVP.

This might just be semantics, but it seems like a significant difference to me.
That's really interesting. I know that type designers and foundries are historically pretty conservative in terms of licensing/sharing/etc, so it's great to see someone reaping the benefits for bucking that trend.
Is the tentative goal to have 1.0 out before we ring in the new year?
Can we at least restrict the word "hack" to using something in a way it was not intended? It's being thrown around for everything and it's downright confusing.
That and the transportation. Otherwise, Seattle is probably the place I like to live in the states the most.

The traffic and lack of good public transport options is a serious negative :(
I should be more clear. The scary thing is having malicious sites exploit the functionality. URI overflow attacks and Gifar attacks can be exploited at the website level. Exposing this functionality to the developers is unnecessary. If a developer wants to run as a native application, then they should. Not run as a chrome plugin pretending to be a native application.
"Not ready yet. Do not use this."

What remains to be done?
Is offering a higher price tier really "wringing every penny out of them"? Considering it's an optional goodie that nobody has to buy, and it's not like they're arriving at the airport only to be hit by surprise baggage fees, I can't see how that kind of statement is a valid response to Nathan's article.

Also, do you have any data for a lower price = happier customer = more referrals who pay?

That's a lot of assumptions built into that premise, each one of which could be tested.

If we're going to pretend this is all a priori knowledge and not something that can & should be tested, then let me try!

Here's mine: "People hate to feel like they're having every penny rung out of them… so they probably love buying the middle tier and enjoy laughing at the silly people who would pay $100 extra for something they don't need." Works just as well as your theory.
Is that first bullet point a solution to view "garbage collection"? Or should those of us who want that sort of functionality continue to use extra helper code?
my heart goes out to you Notch.
Another, less violent alternative would have been to step back and wait for the second cop to show up. This woman wasn't being a danger to anyone, so waiting another five minutes to arrest her wouldn't have been a problem. If she would have left the store before the second cop showed up, the problem would have been solved (the store owners wanted her to leave the store).

Tasers can definitely be lethal. People have died of heart attacks after being shot with tasers. And maybe different protocols are called for when dealing with a woman in a store as opposed to inmates in a maximum security prison.
Autonomy makes predictive coding software, which uses Bayesian algorithms to identify potentially relevant documents in a corpus. But the situation doesn't quite fit the usual "technology eliminating the need for people" narrative. Yes, now you don't need as many document review attorneys, but 15 years ago, you didn't need those people anyway, because there weren't huge amounts of e-mail to review. Technology created a huge temporary spike in the volume of documents and thus the need for document review attorneys in the late 1990's and 2000's, and technology has now eliminated a substantial amount of that demand (but not all), but that doesn't really explain longer-term (20-30+ year) trends within the profession.

Also, prediction: when everyone has Google Glass, the discovery demands will explode again until someone invents software that figures out what is happening in a video.
What was the driving factor to change from a drop-ship company to inventory based? Seems ideal if you can keep everything drop-ship to avoid the capital expense related to managing all your products.
Yeah, I'm saying that's suboptimal and maybe kinda perverse.
Offering everyone the option to pick their favorite pricing tier isn't the same thing as you're describing. It's volitional.
A good contrast here would be stencil.

Things like caching, extensive testing and benchmarking in a production environment, and differentiating dev vs. production behaviors are the most apparent right now. There could be others, I haven't spoken with Steve in IRC about it.
If only a startup had thought of this first
I'm really excited about the Event changes. Will definitely be updating our app as soon as possible. Thanks!
I've been living in Seattle for over 8 years now without a car, public transit is good enough for me...
A "civil law system" as opposed to a "common law system" draws less on precedent, past decisions made by judges on points of law similar to those at issue. Compared to common law, this simplifies the operation of courts and reduces the role that lawyers play in proceedings, which one might reasonably expect to diminish the demand for lawyers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)#Differ...
It's difficult - more difficult than for other kinds of debt - but not impossible.

http://www.bankruptcylawnetwork.com/what-is-the-brunner-test...
Depends what kind of transportation, though; when I lived there, I made use of the great bicycle infrastructure[1] every day, and really loved how much better that was than any other US city I'd lived in.

But yeah, the other forms of transportation (including plodding your own car through the traffic) kinda suck.

[1]: https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=...
And Apple is a record company.
Clojurescript at work?
Is anyone in the community using this at work? I'm in a place where we can use js, coffeescript, typescript etc... Is clojurescript a viable option?
The video does not play in my Firefox.
Many tests have been made along these lines, and the sales are usually lower for the single high price. The theory is because it makes the lower tier look like a steal.
Stop saying pivot, it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Awesome to see the support for PATCH updates, it's something I have been missing.
I think the trolls are making a strategic error by piling on (when more trolls sue a victim that has demonstrated a willingness to settle).

Once it becomes clear that settling is as risky as going to court -- because if you settle, you'll be faced with more suits from other trolls -- the calculation changes. Business owners may as well take their chances in court.

I would love to see some business owners defending themselves pro se, on a shoestring budget, and winning.

Maybe I'm just a dreamer.
I've got a job interview tomorrow for a position in Seattle. I'm now even more motivated.
Haiku is written in C++ because BeOS 5 was written in C++, using the GCC-2.95 compiler. BeOS used C++ because when it was written, C++ was the new trendy OOP language. They use GCC-2.95 because the GCC 2.96 compiler was badly broken and GCC 3.x changed the ABI. The dialect of C++ supported by GCC-2.95 is based on extensions to C++98 that were rather quite buggy. It's a bit of a mess, and I would hardly hold it up as a positive example of C++ in use.

Similarly, Windows was written primarily in C, as it predated C++. Their compiler was extremely buggy and had only partial support of features in C++98, so the vast majority of the code in Windows is C with Classes. (Unless there's been a lot of rewritten code in the last 15 years or so.) Again, not exactly a positive example.
> Where I am, the amount of lawyers per capita is one tenth of what it is in the US

I don't know where you are, so don't know if this applies, but I know that for some countries where lawyers per capita is much lower than the US, it is because the term "lawyer" has a different meaning. In the US, anyone licensed to practice law (with a few minor exceptions) and who does so is counted as a "lawyer". That would include the attorneys who represent the State in criminal proceedings, the attorneys who represent defendants in criminal proceedings (whether employed by the State or by the defendant), attorneys on staff at corporations who handle contracts, mergers, intellectual property, employment issues, and so on.

In many countries, I believe, "lawyer" is only used for a subset of these, such as only those who actually litigate, or only those who handle criminal cases. Some of the lists of seen of lawyers per capita fail to take this into account, and so end up skewing the numbers.
Any of a number of different wireless transmitters plugged into fiber.

There are laser transceivers for use in open air, but they don't work particularly well in rain or fog. So not great for Seattle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communicatio...
I would ay its curation. Sure amazon may have all this stuff (probably not) but Fab only shows you "cool" stuff. Thats also why I like http://thefancy.com
CondoInternet is awesome :) 100 mbps for $60 a month. Have only had one down time in the past year due to their equipment icing over last winter. We couldn't be happier with the service.
This sounds really good. I'll look it up.
In Technorati's defense, it's what allowed lots of savvy people to target the top 100 blogs and enjoy the network effect from doing that. A good example is Tim Ferriss' book, The 4 Hour Work Week. It was useful for figuring out which blogs one ought to be commenting on in order to create synergy with one's blog.
This guy has the most awesome title ever!

Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs

Listen to him! That's like master of the universe. On steroids. Go Anil, go!
Personally I don't want to live in Seattle because of the earthquake risk that nobody is prepared for.

See http://discovermagazine.com/2012/extreme-earth/01-big-one-ea... if you don't know what I'm talking about.
I think Facebook benefited lots from what could be called "Net Neutrality" in 2003.
Seeing God in the Third Millennium
"Private health insurance sucks ass in WA"

I wasn't aware of any place that was particularly ~good~ for private health insurance.
I for one, salute you for having the awareness to know that snippets of advice won't help and having such a thoughtful response. I often feel like the stock advice given in these situations just makes me feel worse.
This proves the quote from "Gladiator," that what we do echoes through eternity.
We have to disrupt the salsa market!
You don't have to be a Randian hero to have interest in Bitcoin. Like you said, the cryptography is interesting. We can build scripts and sophisticated contracts and smart property and open transactions, all financial instruments that cannot be violated yet have enormous potential. Distributed bond markets and all of the curious things we can build on top of Bitcoin -- stuff that couldn't _exist_ before Bitcoin.

Imagine the federal reserve releasing their own Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency with their own inflation rates and restrictions. I could see it happening and I think it would be very interesting as well, maybe even more successful than Bitcoin. You do not have to subscribe to some libertarian fantasy to be in awe of what Bitcoin could accomplish. To simply discard all of that because criminal can use it, is a weak and lazy argument. I don't know how you could expect innovation to ever occur with currencies or economies without some growing pains and experiments.

Hell the lead developer of Bitcoin meets with the CIA to tell them how easy it is to track all of the economic activity of Bitcoin. These people are not trying to start a revolution they're trying to build software.

I'm sure the government will save you from the drugs and everything else you're scared of, so don't worry about it.
If you looked at the post before 6:10PM CST, please look once more for a quote from Chris Granger and a link to the commits where I moved refheap to Compojure for reference when doing the same thing on your own.
"lack of good public transport options"

Granted, there's currently no subway, but within the city there's light rail, a decent bus system, streetcars, and generally bike-friendly infrastructure aside from the steep hills. There may be a lack of an excellent public transportation system, but there's still a good one in place.

I've been using a combination of Zipcars and Uber for my other transportation needs.
I've wrestled with this pattern (anti-pattern?) myself. One key advantage is that I can run plain Ruby unit tests outside of Rails, as long as I make sure the right environment variables are set in my shell.

I'm conflicted about it though; I hate being out of the mainstream on something as fundamental for maintenance as this and I have to jump through hoops to get Apache to set my environment variables.
Try to appreciate your family for as long as you can, since you'll never know when they're gone.

In 2004, when I was 23 years old, I lost both my parents and a sister in a car accident. We had a really nice family and great parents, never expected this to happen. It caused me a depression that lasted almost 7 years.

Personally I wouldn't want a girlfriend that wants to become a mother, the pain of losing someone very dear to you is intense and I wouldn't want another depression that lasts as long as my previous one.
BBC Podcast: Can forensic phonetics detect hoax emergency calls?
I read an interesting report on different European legal systems and how they deal with libel/defamation [1]

Comparing Germany to England there are many differences when it comes to libel. Germany has a civil law system while England has a common law system. German cases are decided by a panel of professional judges, while in England juries can be used. German lawyers are paid on a task based system, while English lawyers are paid by the hour. The German system needs one lawyer per claimant and defendant, for cases where English law would need three solicitors, a partner, some trainee solicitors, and two or three barristers. In the German system there are no punitive damages, only compensation.

Because of these differences, a claim with legal costs of 10,000 euros or less in Germany can cost several million pounds in legal fees in England.

How a country's legal system works can radically alter the costs of going to court.

[1] http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/research/project/comparative-st...