skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never said let them fail, I said that we are all victims of moral hazard. I don't profess to be able to solve all the world's problems in a HN thread, but the controllers of these companies were never held accountable for their failings and no message was ever sent to financiers that they have the same level of public responsibility that a water company does.

I don't necessarily think that straight failure is a great answer but I think that the culture needs to be changed and I know for a fact that the internal culture of the banks has not changed one iota from pre-GFC to now.
The classic drug pipeline includes pure research companies that would be NPE's.
These were the seven demands drafted by the students in Beijing (from Wikipedia):

1. Affirm as correct Hu Yaobang's views on democracy and freedom;
2. Admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization had been wrong;
3. Publish information on the income of state leaders and their family members;
4. End the ban on privately run newspapers and stop press censorship;
5. Increase funding for education and raise intellectuals' pay;
6. End restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing
7. Provide objective coverage of students in official media.
Note. That's a technical default or externally-led debt restructuring. It is not within full control of the Greek state as it would be under its own currency.

For example, a price for remaining within the Eurozone was for ensuring none of the ECB's large Greek bond holdings (approx. EUR 50bn), now or in future, will be exposed to enforced losses. This has always been politically understood.
I think part of the problem with Greece and Ireland is also that they are part of EU and are no more sovereign and in full control of their financial policies.
Tomato, tomahto. They're really pushing for the $600k goal because that's how much the 4 PB of storage that they want to buy costs. It doesn't really matter because in the end, the percentage is the same.
Yeah, I had the same thought ... but multiple sources are reporting that it was one of the patents at issue in the trial. I think it's not a generic "pinch to zoom" patent but specific logic for distinguishing a pinch to zoom from other gestures.
Ironically, Iceland's application for EU membership is cited as a major factor in its recovery.

The story here is not all that simple.
that's awesome to hear.

Even if you don't officially sanction or provide a port yourself -- just hearing that you're open to tweaking the way you do things a bit to make it easier for _others_ to port to Sass (and keep their ports up to date with bootstrap evolution) -- is super encouraging.

I'd actually suggest that as a first step, just talk to the folks maintaining the ports, and ask if there's anything you can tweak on your end to make their jobs easier.
What? $1m for 30 workers?

180sq ft per worker (average) * 30 = 5400sq ft. so $185.19/sq ft

Please tell me that either: it was used for more than just office space (so it was like 50,000sqft), or that it was plated in gold. Because if this was normal 5400sqft office space, then I'm pretty sure he lied.

For comparison, I'm in Denver. Office space averages $20/sqft[0].

Edit: found this article: 17 most expensive places to rent office space[1]. For $185/sqft, you would have to be in the most expensive place in nearly the most expensive building in the US.

[0] http://www.metrodenver.org/metro-denver-economy/monthly-summ...

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-places-for-off...
If HN was serious about patent trolls, we would have our answers by now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927832
The games are native ports, according to their Linux blog.
Ah, so he's doing UA sniffing then, I suspect. If you're using IE, even 10, you're not worthy of his blog. Nice design attitude.
Doesn't deserve a down vote but I profoundly disagree.

Profit can also mean externalising costs playing dirty and competing unfairly.

There is nothing wrong with profit, it is amoral not immoral and can be obtained and used ethically or unethically.
This is awesome, thanks for the clarification.

I got scared at 'dropping fluid', because it's become been pretty clear to me that the fluid approach in bootstrap was better for most apps, and I was wondering why in fact using the fluid approach wasn't more popular. I got worried that you were making it much more difficult -- but it turns out you agree with me, and instead are making it the out of the box default! woo!
Exactly: what he is describing is almost identical to "group MMS". The one thing he seems to have different is that he is against having words at all, but once you are taking pictures of words you really should just support it as a feature: the essential property he is against is really just that the words need to be equal to the pictures (as in, a chat where you can post either a picture or words, as opposed to a place where you post pictures and then "comment on them" using words), not below/about the pictures. If the only problem with MMS is then that it is expensive, well: iMessage solves that.
There are more than 50 US cities bigger than the whole country of Iceland. I think the kinds of conclusions you can draw from Iceland's experience is a bit limited.
Apple's Pinch to Zoom Patent Preliminarily Invalidated by USPTO
Every person that has ever been harassed by or lost a job over a web page can thank the archive for making that permanent.

It's irresponsible and unlawful to make unauthorized archives of web pages.
China's relative recent rise is predicated on copying - not innovating. As patent rights are weakened, investors are increasingly reluctant to invest in $costly American R&D that can just be copied at a fraction of the R&D $cost.

Pick your poison: compete with China on lowest cost vs. high end jobs innovating. Except the later affords a more affluent lifestyle while the former require suicide nets in their buildings: http://i.imgur.com/JwBDR.jpg
I think I could only ask questions with more knowledge about what you've been up to. But I would love to learn more!
One does, the other doesn't.
No. Financial institutions do a LOT more than just speculate and invest.

They also handle and manage capital for everyone from consumers, businesses, enterprise to other banks. And capital is every bit a tangible resource as something like electricity is.

I personally was outside the Northern Rock branch in the UK when it went under. Over 3/4 of the people in line were scared and worried senior citizens. People forget that financial institutions affect EVERYONE.
I really like this idea.

It seems to me to be one of the central aspects to design, of any persuasion. It is a deliberate, thoughtful act which requires understanding rather than 'just' knowledge. It is a process of questioning and revision rather than merely production. All (good) designers do this.

I think the interesting idea in this article is actually it's corollary. Good knowledge workers ARE actually bad at 'just' working. They think to much, they spend too much time on things that give diminishing returns, they invest in dead ends... they learn. These things are not often valued in the job market.
Thanks! That really is a good idea.
I did not mean to direct that at you, but at the author. I agree that there are some interesting points in the article, but the pervading attitude in this article and others on the site is that you can use these methods as a substitute for real passion about what you do. I submit that going through such motions mechanically won't be easy because, after all, it's still "work." If you'd rather be doing email or browsing reddit, a disciplined method of self-study isn't going to help. Only if you're already passionate about what you do will you be able to consistently engage in the "deep thinking" the author talks about.
Isn't the point of the article that Iceland "let them fail" and things got better instead of worse?

If an individual goes bankrupt through poor decisions, we castigate them. When a financial institution does the same, there are often little or no consequences.

What's the incentive for them to improve their behavior?
Wow that looks straight out of Mass Effect!
I see, "troll" because I don't conform to your opinion. What is this, slashdot?

> Try asking it to prove that the economic prosperity is caused by the patent system rather than merely correlated.

About as provable as the opposite.
It's effectively the same under ECB's monetary policy mechanisms. Those bank debts are used as collateral for borrowing from the ECB or the Eurozone inter-national bank payment processing system (called TARGET2) or Eurozone creditors.

Imagine if Iceland could only issue debts, both public and private in US dollars. That, its interest rates were set by the Fed. That, its banks could tap short and medium unlimited liquidity against this collateral. That, its USD payments went first through a US-based payment processing system. But only if you never default on this collateral.

Then, you would have something similar to the situation Ireland faced.

It is true Ireland could have tried to hold out for an externally-led, Greek-style debt restructuring, though I suspect it would have been harder for them due to the private bank debt transfer. But even that still is not elective default to their own currency with full debt control. Therefore, not the same as Iceland.
Gittip and coderbits
This could really be for any enterprise IT company.
> so hopefully they are added to Steam soon

Many are already available.
As Google Health Flatlines, Drchrono Picks Up The Slack With Onpatient
Ahh, news to me.

I did some brief searching and it seems like the time limit depends on several things (including type and amount of charge and physical location of the vendor). It could be as little as 45 days or as long as 540.

It's definitely become more common to get chargebacks over the years. Part of this is increased volume on our part and part of it is the CC companies becoming more consumer friendly.
A Science Ruby conference.
China's idea of stepping up IP enforcement is case-by-case. Read: however it benefits the Chinese company vs the foreigner.

Also useful to note their increase is mainly quantity. Superficial.
(from 2010)

3,142 people have climbed Everest, with 219 dying trying.

It isnt disneyland, and I am not shocked at how much Everest has turned into disneyland, we definitely fundamentally disagree.
Patents have a lot of "advantages" over normal publishing: investors like them, companies encourage them (as in, "if it's patented then it's a great thing for the company, if there are no patents it's not really "ours" so we're going to be more secretive about it, making it unusable in business situations where disclosure to other parties is unavoidable), you can publish something really obfuscated without really driving attention to the details or giving away much useful information, you want a larger portfolio to appear "dangerous enough" to a competitor who might otherwise want to sue you, etc. Combined with the fact that neither decision-makers nor patent examiners really understand patents, you get a lot of pressure to just go ahead and file patents and you are not unlikely to choose to do this as a part of advancing your ideas within the company.
have you considered open sourcing the processing/graph code as well as the graph UI code?
There was this Amazon scam where the scammer impersonates an Amazon user who bought Canon DSLR, and asks for replacements to be shipped to some other country.

Exactly two days later, we see a post where 50 Canon DSLRs were used to create a movie effect. Funny coincidence ;)
sure, and now China is repeating history.
I wonder if they'll ever offer subscriptions
I love it when a CEO participates in online discussions as it is the sign a company that cares. Just one thing about your post... It sounds really defensive. Maybe just me, but all the good will of participating in the conversation was lost. Maybe a "Hi, I'm CEO and love getting feedback. What's wrong with our USPS Calculator?". :)
Those are the limits most people are familiar with. They're reasonable and expected but even in the US businesses have 'the right to refuse service to anyone.' They work in the same way that you can fire someone, but you can't fire someone for being black, or a woman.

The OP claimed that that did not exist at all in Germany.
This has some parallels in the ability to declare personal bankruptcy; to start anew. Unlike the US, many countries still don't allow this and hold past debts over you forever. In Victorian England, there were special debtors prisons and workhouses where you had to spend x years literally working off your debt.
WWII baby. The US blackmailed the UK out of its patents (in return for assistance) and the US basically took all of Germany's IP as payment.
I'll get modded to hell for that - but it had to be said.
Can you help me understand that cost?

I'm having trouble imagining 10 people getting paid $100k/year, working full-time for a year on a font. The Ubuntu font family is a serious font, it includes 13 fonts covering 1200 glyphes and 200-250 languages. It took about a year to develop. While 10 people might have worked on it in total, it would have been done in phases, not 10 people for a full year. Maybe Canonical did pay a million dollars... did they?
It is ridiculous to me that people view public web pages as something that shouldn't be archived, if anything it provides illuminating snapshots to the state of the web at certain dates.

The archive.org team does follow robots.txt and I believe they remove content retroactively meaning if you update your site with a robots.txt it will delete the old content (which I think sucks).
7% chargeback rate is insanely high and I wouldn't be surprised if your merchant dropped you. Realistically anything over 0.5% and you're doing something wrong and that's even a magnitude higher than what I would shoot for.

Also, selling at $1 you're only going to make $0.67 or so per transaction (maybe less depending on how you get bilked in fees). You're going to have to do a lot of volume to make money selling at $1.
Cool, another article on a site visited primarily by computer scientist claiming that a degree isn't necessary...when the HR departments for these companies LOOK FOR A DEGREE...cool.
Aha. That makes more sense. Thanks.
That looks pretty similar. We were building a GUI tool for it and a really diverse hosting service that would let you torrent the packages and what not.
"they make you wait months for one date" - that is unacceptable, just like overpricing is.

The medical market has far too much friction and rent seeking behaviour. I do not agree with the short version, but I agree with your long version.

I dream about the day when (if?) the medical market become a perfect market in the economical sense - price taking behaviour, pure and perfect competition, factors of production being paid at their marginal productivity

I believe that, among other things, the financial incentives are a step forward. We apparently have different ways, but a same goal.
I think Greece could have taken a lesson from this too - in my view they would have been better off allowing their currency to devalue and just write off their debts. But they are probably past the point of no return now in terms of being able to do that.
Tax evasion was basically 100%. Sure, it's easy to say "I'm only cheating a little, blame the big cheaters" but everybody was in on it. The ones paying for it chose to be unaware of what was happening.
Holy EULA, Batman.
One thing OP discusses in his self-help literature (which I haven't read, but I've heard it's pretty legit) is that rather than trying to rearrange their lives around finding some "passion", people should try to bring passion to their work. It's a counterbalance against the "do what you love and the money will follow" bullshit that has wrecked thousands, if not millions, of lives.

There's some sense in this. For example, when I was a teenager, I thought being a novelist or poet was what I wanted to do, and I had no idea that I'd ever find things like "machine learning" and "functional programming" interesting because I didn't even know what they were. I realized that the market signals were probably right in steering me along the mathematical direction, because (at least for this point in my life) I'm a better fit for the high-end CS and mathematics than I would be for the literary world.

All that said, there are definite limits to that approach. He's right that people need to be more flexible regarding what to be passionate about, but for a lot of jobs, there just is no way to become passionate without also becoming unemployable and insubordinate. What most self-help writers fail to grasp fully is that most people face inflexible, life-wrecking constraints and limitations that they're powerless to change.
PayPal's "sandbox" environment is uniquely torturous to work with. It didn't take us days, but it did seem like someone had gone out of the way to make it annoying.
Apple can loose iPhone brand in Brazil
Do you guys plan to make an Android app? It would be really cool to order a print right from the camera app with the "Share" button.
Yes, I hope they launch in the UK so I can start beating the drum for Australia.
Eh. If you send out two shipments of Doritos, nobody dies. If you administer a med twice, a patient very well could die. Consequently, if you make it even 1% more likely that a med will be administered twice, patients will die.
"But we are so much bigger" seems to be the standard excuse for the US not looking at what other countries are doing successfully and learning from them.
They also have a strong export economy, which makes it easier to push the reset button and start over.
One thing I recently encountered for the first time was the idea that a software-based product, when sold as an asset to another company, can only be treated as a capital gain if patent rights are being sold. Otherwise the sale is apparently taxed as ordinary income, for which a much higher rate applies.

I'm still not sure if my CPA was entirely correct when he told me about that, but if he is, it artificially inflates the importance of software patents in a big way.
The option to log in without requiring FB would be nice.
This is what I like least about PayPal. Coinbase, for example, makes it dead-simple to test their IPN-like callback. All you do is paste the URL into a text box and send away. If PayPal had that it would have made the integration much easier to accomplish.
Some context: Here Cal Newport is extending some of the ideas presented in his latest book "So Good They Can't Ignore You".

In the book he says (among other things) that how you become 'so good that...' etc is by what he calls 'deliberate practice' - which in turn has two components -

(1) 'deep work', the doing of which actively stretches you while you are doing it (in term of guitar playing, this would be acquiring new rhythmic abilities, vs just playing/performing songs you already know). The 'practice' in deliberate practice should maximise 'deep work' (as per Newport)

(2) fast feedback loops - either by other (and ideally better than you) people, or built in (if you play a note wrong, you know instantly)

This blog entry and its neighbors seem to explore how he applies this philosophy to his chosen activity (research in CS). It is not entirely clear how to apply it to programming.
Oracle to stop patching Java 6 in February 2013
It is the entire dominion of the mighty octocat.

http://octodex.github.com/
Isn't it rather possible that the right answer for software is not like the right answer for drugs, and that it takes an expert in a particular field to propose a sensible reform (assuming one is needed in that field)?

A lot of the questions about what patents tend to do seem to have different answers in different fields: http://inventors-against-patents.org/faq.html#is_abolition_o...
LOL $2 Million dollars worth of Wii U's were stolen
Well, our currency is really just ink and paper that has a value only because we think it does. Whats your point?
Your HN profile says you're at CloudAmp, which doesn't seem to be a health IT startup at all. What am I missing?
The financial types might have been giving bad advice, but that wasn't necessarily mainstream economics - and seems like it might have been a bit self-interested too.

"Iceland did almost everything right. They stiffed the bank creditors to avoid aggravating the moral hazard problem, just like the textbooks recommend. In the eurozone the bank creditors are being bailed out. They relied of fiscal policy to address S/I and debt issues, and let monetary policy address AD, just as the New Keynesians were recommending in the 1990s. In the eurozone they combined tight money with reckless deficits. And now Iceland is growing fast and the eurozone is stagnating."
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=14895
Good knowledge workers ARE actually bad at 'just' working. They think to much, they spend too much time on things that give diminishing returns, they invest in dead ends... they learn. These things are not often valued in the job market.

I'd be curious to see some real data on the long-term evolution of (a) the insubordinate, always-learning curious people who get new knowledge out of every job even if they have to steal an education from work, and (b) the order-following ladder climbers. Within companies, (b) always wins. Who wins in the long-term career game? I honestly have no idea.
First, let's do away with the hostility. I don't know what I have done to provoke it but it's certainly not worth discussing anything in this manner. It's important not to engage in willful misunderstanding, or conflate separate points I made into some kind of chimera to distort what I said.

> You blame everything on "behavior" then claim to have a food addiction.

This is certainly a gross mischaracterization, and I can only assume you're using it to aggravate me somehow? I invite you to read again what I actually wrote regarding this and several other different issues. I'm not sure if you're just trying to troll me or if you actually want to have a discussion, but I'll just assume you're not trying to behave like an asshole on purpose and move on.

You misunderstood my point about how gut bacteria take hold in the first place. Mostly, enterobacter strains are something which lives inside people's guts anyway. There are several pathogenic strains but this is not what the article is talking about. We're talking about an organism that lives off what you feed it. There is nothing hand-wavy about that. It's just a fact. Just as food intake determines individual weight-gain, the availability of nutrients in combination with its environment determines the amount present of a given gut bacterium. It's also a fact that our daily environment is rich in gut (and other) bacteria.

> It didn't just magically pop into existence from the ether because "you ate too much".

I failed to explain this properly then. People have a certain mixture of different gut bacteria inside them, they also tend to acquire them in the "hand-wavy" manner described above. Now, a bacterium needs to eat in order to survive and reproduce. Different bacteria are optimized to eat different things in different environmental conditions. If E.c. colony size is indeed statistically larger in obese people (a point that still needs to be shown conclusively), the reason for that will be that they get a lot of nutrients under favorable conditions. There is nothing magical about it, just basic biology.

> No, I likely cannot convince you of anything. But you are equally failing to convince me.

It depends where you're coming from. I'm not even sure we're speaking the same language, otherwise I can't explain how some of my points could have come across in such a distorted fashion (even taking into account my infamous inability to communicate). In some sentences you portray my views as exactly the opposite of what I actually said. I really mean it when I say I'm sorry we're at this point, but I'm also unsure what I could have done better.

Also, a meta point: have we done this before? I'm not sure.