skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rand excessively spoke about freedom, and free competition. "Sweatshops", as we see them today, would not occur in an ideal Randian world, as, in free economies, competitors inevitably arise and are more than happy to take your underpaid employees off your hands.

The fact that sweatshops do exist does not prove this false...you'll notice that almost all sweatshops exist in third world countries that are notorious for government corruption. When Rand spoke of freedom, she wasn't joking, she meant real freedom, meaning politicians that are not on the take, that couldn't yank an operating license from a competitor who chose to offer better working conditions.

If you want to speculate and say honesty is literally impossible in human society, feel free, but that is something entirely different than saying that freedom leads to sweatshops.
Valve: How To Go From PC to Cross-Platform [Console] Development
TV is premised on such long sessions (unlike Google, which prides itself on sending users on their way quickly) that anything that takes up their time is competing with it.

We've received a steady stream of feedback regarding Stormpulse.com from people who are abandoning TV coverage of hurricanes (yes, even that of The Weather Channel) in favor of our site. We're also happy to be the owners of Stormpulse.tv.
Facebook Connect + Facebook Ads = A Social Ad Network
Maybe for more people on HN, Lisp is part of their identity, so they get defensive.
I thought the plan was to make student loans more available, if anything?
>Maybe this isn't "rational", but it is empirical

Actually it is perfectly rational; it just doesn't have as much to do with with a progressive tax as you might think:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
There's still a tremendous gulf between Justin.tv and a live telecast of a sports game or award show. Not that what they've accomplished isn't impressive, but it isn't what most people would refer to as live tv.
Some Beautiful Metamaterials: quality from shape [pdf]
Well, salaries of talented actors and writers isn't solvable. The problem is that even if a show finds a new actor with real talent, they'll just be stolen away by network TV shows, unless the internet show has a similar budget.

But I bet you can lower many of the technology costs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's an extraordinary amount of inefficiency there.
100mb max uploads, files last for 24 hours
Notice that I'm talking about capital gains, not income. They are taxed differently.

A family making 190,000 dollars a year in normal income and 50,000 dollars a year in long-term capital gains will pay the normal taxes on 190,000 dollars (as you describe it, with brackets and what-not), and 15% on the 50,000 dollars. A family making 200,000 dollars plus 50,000 in LTCG, however, will break the 250,000 dollar barrier and will have to pay 20% on that 50,000. That means the cost of that extra 10,000 dollars in income cost them 2,500 dollars in additional taxes.
Where do you get your torrents? I've tried both Mininova and tvrss.net and neither seem to reliably get them to me before the following day.
Perhaps the HN users who realized it was a fun tongue-in-cheek parable followed the rules by silently voting it up, instead of filling up the response page with posts that say, in so many words, "HAHAHA L0LZ".

What is there to do with this besides chuckle and move on? I didn't come up with anything. I suppose I could destroy its life by publicly dissecting it. But, in the spirit of the original author, I would prefer to leave the interpretation of the story as an exercise for the student.
"Creating community, in any case, is a noble goal, because it's sorely missing for so many of us. Let's keep plugging away at it."

Hear. Hear.

The principle of no meanness that pg mentions so often is one great way to start. The software defaults suggested in the submitted article have testable effects on user behavior: I'm curious what tests of software defaults other HN readers have tried in forums that you administer. Do you enjoy reading a forum better, for instance, when you follow Joel's suggestion of making the reply button out of view for anyone who doesn't read down to the bottom of a thread?
This is true, but you won't need your project necessarily projected on a 100ft screen for a blockbuster release. Film is an analog medium, which allows it to scale without becoming pixelated (it will get blurry instead). HD cameras with decent filters should be fine for web shows.

Then again, if anyone has more experience in the industry please correct me.

Edit: Also, the reason for the poor quality is probably not due to the quality of the original film. I would think it's more of a compression/bandwidth issue.

I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.
Hi korch:
Iam working on some features for which i might need web programmer. Please send me your contact details to geekupate at gmail com.Will discuss more.
Does anyone use LessAccounting? I signed up for it but it doesn't do very much. Disclaimer: I'm technically a competitor.
Yeah, when Radiohead did well releasing a CD online, everyone said "see, it works for Radiohead, it can work for anyone." The problem is that anyone is not Radiohead, or Joss Whedon. Recouping $200k is neat as an experiment, but hardy the foundation of a replacement to television as we know it. One episode of your favorite TV drama alone likely costs much more than that. If your favorite TV drama is Lost, it's 50x that.

The entertainment industry already has a model very similar to what you just described, just instead of distributing it over the net, they do so to theaters and customers by way of DVD. See http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.ht... . It explains why you see two or three production credits before the opening sequence of each movie, those are basically their equivalent of VCs.
Also, if you're an opera user or have greasemonkey the styles can be loaded as userscripts, which will just use javascript to edit the css style changes you have selected.

There are a few styles for Hacker News as well: http://userstyles.org/styles/search/hacker%20news
There have already been links here to the free html paper, but if you're more into PDFs, it's also available for free at http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
I think you are referring to how short term capital gains are taxed, but I am referring to long-term gains (most investors stick with long-term gains to lower their taxes).

Long term gains are taxed at a flat rate. If you make N dollars in capital gains, you are taxed the same % on those N dollars. This % is determined by what tax bracket you are in, but is the same over all your gains.

That was my original point: Under Obama's plan, people who enter the highest tax bracket will suddenly see all of their capital gains taxed at a higher rate.
A 24 Puzzle
In my opinion, it should be something closer to 2 weeks. I send alot of emails that don't get checked within 24 hours.
But does it compile on an Amiga?
I have about a dozen MySQL databases to take care of. The one worth serious money to me is a megabyte in size (truly, it is not the size of the data, it is what you do with it), and the biggest one is about 100 MB. So my needs for backup are fairly simple, but I still don't want to pull a Magnolia.

I found automysqlbackup.sh and it is wonderful. Setup took about five minutes (edit file to put in names of databases, create a .my.cnf file so I didn't have to put the DB root user and password in a script -- on general principles), set permissions on the backup folder and set up cron job. After that it is fire-and-forget, automatically taking backups and rotating daily, weekly, and monthlies for me.

You can find it on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/

This will probably not suffice for your needs if you are Twitter. Luckily, I'm not Twitter.
This fine article is from 2003 (oldie but goodie).

So posting rules is just a way to insult the majority of the law-abiding citizens and it doesn't deter the morons who think their own poo smells delicious and nothing they post could possibly be against the rules.

Here's a link to posted forum guidelines dated 2006:

http://www.ericsink.com/entries/BOS_Guidelines.html

No registration necessary in '03:

But requiring registration does NOT improve the quality of the conversation or the average quality of the participants.

Sifting through archive.org, even in late '07, users didn't have to register but were being gently nudged into creating accounts as anonymous posts would most likely be deleted.

In 2009, you'll now find that you can no longer post/reply unless you register:

This community works best when people use their real names. Please register for a free account.

What changed?

I'd really love to hear an updated take on this topic from Joel himself.

Any differences in creating or nurturing an online community now compared to 6 years ago?

Any new challenges?
How accurate are the arguments in JWZ’s 10-year-old "java sucks" article?
I used PrinceXML to typeset the HTML documentation for my open source scripting language Sleep into a book. You can see the results at:

http://sleep.dashnine.org/download/sleep21manual.pdf (result) and http://sleep.dashnine.org/manual (original HTML manual)

These were both produced from the same source HTML (and a lot of clever scripts).

I have nothing but good things to say about this product. It produced a nice looking result. I found its support for print specific CSS extensions made it painless to do page numbering and handle odd/even page styles differently.
Yea, there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. PrintWhatYouLike aims more for accuracy- you can reformat the page exactly as you want, but its more complicated to use and takes a bit longer. Readability is fast, but you have no control over the output.

If all you want is to select text, and then remove everything else, check out Nuke Anything Enhanced: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951
Homemade Hydrogen Motorcycle Is Ugly, but It Runs
I signed up for it but it doesn't do very much.

I think that's what they're going for :)
An overlay surface (in a PC's video driver) smoothes out all Divx, Flash, DVD, etc video sources. You'll see, when the overlay surface is not available, that the video/DVD is actually blocky without it.
Hey guys, thanks for discussing this. I meant the original post in a positive way. RMS lost something he loved: the hacker community around free software. He re-started it with GNU and later assured it's further survival with the GPL. I find this is a good reaction to a catastrophic event. To be more aware of this possibility is what I learned.
Hey, I just told Jenny she would look way hotter if we were playing Lazer Tag in tight Star Trek uniforms instead of our street clothes. That's a compliment, right? I thought I was supposed to make our new team member feel welcome.
Recent past of Finnish sci&tech includes a bewildering amount of similar cases of wasted potential.

Telecommunication is the worst area. Its mega-successes, such as SMS can be described as lucky mistakes, while several very potent innovations have gone to waste in state telco's (TeliaSonera) and cell manufacturers.

If a product reached the market, it was often too premature, such as 1999 Benefon Esc GPS-phone (5 years premature), or its launch marketing failed badly.

I believe Finland produces second most patents per capita. But lack of funding (esp. in 1-5M range) and lack of marketing/commercialization skills destroys the ample potential. Finns are generally seen as a "country of engineers".
This might be the key to understanding why recent extraordinary successes like Skype (Sweden/Estonia) have appeared in neighboring countries. Finland has succeeded lately in open source sw (Linux, MySQL), not much else.

I would place a lot of the blaim of not identifying these candidates to the Finnish VC industry. It has been dominated by lazy state controlled institutions. They haven't been greedy(?) enough to invest in big plays. Only safe bets or dumping money to major players such as Nokia.
Linux Foundation to Build New Linux.com Community
I made my own software for everything recordkeeping-related called Exponent. Aside from clients, vendors, prospects, invoices, orders, inventory, payroll, credit card processing, expense tracking, and bank account reconciliation, it does my taxes for me, which is nice.
Pirate Bay Trial Watch: The Defense Rests, Reboots the Servers from the Courtroom
I agree the network is extremely valuable, but Kiko was funded by YC before they had ready access to the best angels in Silicon Valley, and one of the most valuable things that Y Combinator gave us was just the affirmation that it is possible to go start a startup out of college. I didn't got to MIT or Stanford (not complaining, I went to Yale :P) so it was a bit of a leap to go try and start a tech startup right after graduation.
I get your joke.

But... you want a designer but don't list design - of any type - as a desired skill?

Mmmmmkay.
It's doing exactly what Stage6 did. Stage6 had amazing growth. The problem was that it was entirely fueled by the fact that they were hosting high quality pirated content. It's like standing on a street corner and handing out DVD rips of the latest movies for free. Of course you're going to be popular. Anyone with the balls and money to blow could do it, but why would they? It's a total gamble that you're going to sell the company before you get sued out of business.
FreshBooks employee here:

I think this is a totally stupid idea.

"We all hate Quickbooks?" really? Grow up. Quickbooks has made millions of small business owners' lives easier. With out them they would have to spend countless more hours figuring out which tax laws apply to them, how to account for inventory, etc...

LessAccounting should focus on their strengths (and they have a ton, seriously) rather than attack Quickbooks.

I could never dream of the company I work for ever coming out with a "We hate {insert competitor}" campaign. We have friends everywhere, even at Intuit/Quickbooks. We might compete with them, but that doesn't mean we hate them. We share many of the same goals and we are all just trying to give our customers the best solution to their needs. Hate is no way to grow a business.
How cool! $10,000 doesn't seem like that much does it?
Yes, saying it's twice as fast is a bit simplistic. And O(2N) is theoretically the same as O(N), but in practice, if you have a large list of IDs that need to be looked up in a database to do the map and the filter, mapfilter can approach "twice as fast" (how close depends on the map function). This is my general use case, and the reason I wrote a mapfilter function.

It's cool that haskell can do a single iteration by being lazy. I do wish erlang could do lazy iteration and generators.
Evan Williams on social networking and Twitters future (video)
(Please forgive the plug, but I think it's relevant to this discussion.)

We recently announced NthCode Player, an embedded Linux-based software product electronics companies can embed in their DVD players, TVs, etc. to connect them to home networks and the Internet.

It's a bit rough, but we're making fast progress. There's a Youtube video up, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DHu_nEy6Ew

Check it out and drop us a line.
New restrictions for web ads
In the short term. In the long term, a witty or angry putdown is quicker, conveys more information and gets its point across more deeply than politeness and downmodding. imo.
This is how it works when groups grow. In a group of 5 close friends it's not hard to know when someone is joking. You all know each other's style. As the group grows the safest thing is to just not joke around lest you risk someone misinterpret your joke.
5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)
someone should combine the selecting part of printwhatyoulike bookmarklet and readability, that would make it almost perfect
Afghan tech boom: Mullah embraces iPhone
Any thoughts on how to make money in tech in a warzone or the 3rd world?
I am fully aware of the nuance in Randian/libertarian thought regarding the difference between compelled and voluntary action. In an essay, I believe in "The Virtue of Selfishness", Ayn mocks the "maximin" principle (maximizing the welfare of the least well-off) and somewhat cheekily advocates the "maximax" principle (maximizing the welfare of the most well-off). So, no, I don't think she supports living a life of charity, even if it is voluntary.

I am also aware that societies which protect property rights and refrain from excessive public welfare programs have higher economic growth rates than others. In the long run, economic growth surely benefits the least well-off as well as the most well-off.

However, many people's moral feelings lead them to choose a society with lower economic growth if it would benefit the least well-off in the short term. I can't think of any reason a priori to say that their feelings are wrong.
Are you including the cost of storage when calculating the cost of serving static video?
I don't disagree with that. I'm just doubtful about this particular tax issue having a real impact on people willingness to work more or less
In my opinion - it's marketing. The point is to get you to talk about them & remember their brand. I would never have known about Freshbooks had I not met Mike McDerment in Miami. I would never have known about zoho had I not read about their HS student recruiting tactics. Companies have different marketing tactics - this is one of them.

Disclosure: I am friends w/ the less everything dudes.
QuickBooks is like the wizard behind the curtain at many small businesses and accountancy firms. Viral marketing isn't always for good.
Google forced to go web 0.0 by courts
Gotta love the legal system. They could find the copyright holders much more effectively using well, google.com.
Ask HN: Would a product or pitch workshop be useful?
I've been thinking about doing a weekly product/demo/pitch workshop down in or around Palo Alto.

I'd probably limit it to 5ish pre-VC companies, and try to make sure they're mutually non-competitive so that everyone could hear everything. Perhaps a few post-VC entrepreneurs could also chip in advice.

Caveats: I've done exactly one company and had exactly one exit.

Do you think this would be useful/fun/interesting?
I'm not going to remember Lessbooks (or whatever), just that Quickbooks is the market leader.
Must-read entrepreneurial tips
I guess the closest you could come to a real "argument" in what I'm saying is: if we adopt technology that hurts the business models of ad-supported sites, we're inviting those sites to develop more intrusive ways of monetizing us.
Hm, I think that's right.
Maybe save the html file then give it the local URL.
Yeah I signed up. Love it!! Switched from Quickbooks. Free from the bulk of options no one uses. I have enough to train people on. My assistant can actually use it without needing to attend a class! And to freshbooks employee...their marketing worked for me :)
re: Freshbooks employee --

If this is such a stupid idea why did it show up in my RSS Reader? Why are people blogging that it's brilliant? Obviously it must be working to some degree.

ps: somewhat affiliated with Less, but that doesn't change my views... or the fact that I saw this thread.
Yes, that's exactly why it's more costly to serve static video. Live video can be served straight out of memory, which is cheap. The cost of software to stream live video has pretty much dropped to zero as well.
Actually picking a fight is a great way to get noticed. It's good marketing to have an enemy. Business isn't about being grown up, it's about being effective, and sometimes seemingly childish things are very effective.
It's LessAccounting - there, now you should be able to remember it.
It would be interesting to watch these pitches online afterwards. Record it and post them!

Also the quality of the pitches will be dependent on who you can attract, which will be dependent on how many people hear about this. So you should market it a little and make sure to title posts like this something like "Founder of Del.icio.us Starts Pitching Workshop" instead of being understated about your one company. ;-)
Not sure how I feel about the "Nice guys finish last" bullet, but it was very interesting to read about all his success at a young age.

Edit: He gets very repetitive and sounds quite out of touch as you read. Regardless, I still enjoyed reading about the drive he had when he was young. Must have been hard to teach a student who makes more than you do ;)
That's too bad. Nearly every freelancer/small business I deal with dislikes QuickBooks if not hates it. I am much happier with LessAccounting personally.
for images, you cant compete with grabup (pro version uses my server via ftp):
http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/12/21/review-grabup-automatic-...

take a screenshot, it's auto-uploaded and the URL is copied to your clipboard automatically. really changed my workflow..

ex screenshot/url: http://paulstamatiou.com/images/30cb04d03a7c2f17b82f29fe1288...
The big cost is bandwidth not hardware or software. Not a lot anyone can do about that in the short term.
Top quotes from Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter
The reason there is such hatred for QuickBooks is there mac version sucks, and the web version doesn't work on Macs. They don't disclose before you try to sign in that the web version doesn't work on Mac browsers.
Secret letter: Obama offers Iran deal to Russia
Tv usage is up more than ever and continues to grow every year. I don't think TV has lost at all yet. And I don't agree that networks are grudgingly putting content online. Hulu is an object of much affection in the video viewing world, so much so that it warranted Super Bowl ad space.
I've noticed this trend for the past couple of months...comments and articles that are clearly intended humorously being voted down as trolls, or responded to as trolls, or both.

Well, see, here's the problem. 99% of articles written like this are not satire. So you get conditioned to jump down people's throats when you read something like this.

(I am not sure why the "Someone is WRONG on the Internet" effect is so strong, however. If someone really does think like this, we should just ignore them and hope they go away.)
Hmm.. you're right, I didn't realize cap gains weren't bracketed like income. Still, I have no sympathy, getting nailed for extra taxes because you make more than a quarter million a year is a nice problem to have, I wish I had it.
Did you notice that everyone who commented but didn't get it has been here for at least 200 days?

I didn't, actually. I don't look at usernames, and I definitely don't click through to see how long they've been around.

I guess it's always been this way and I just like to complain. (This sentence is sincere.)
I haven't noticed this. Most people here seem to be PHP "programmers", which I find hilarious. There is also a large Ruby contingent (whenever someone links their open source project, it's always Ruby.)
My feeling is that Jobs is never coming back, and shareholders are once again deluding themselves about his health, and that I should short their stock because of it again.
The Great Edit Wars
Regarding the third place mentioned in this post: a piece with a similar concept came across my reader the other day.

It was based on a critique of modern American religion (albeit from a religious perspective) and talked about the need for what the author calls "triangulation" in social settings.

http://gatheringinlight.com/2009/03/02/the-ironic-gesture-of...

Regardless of the religious content in the article, I thought it interesting to note the similarity of concepts from an anthropological perspective.

One could speculate that the virtualization of many of our relationships has the potential to fill similar needs that the religious seek to fill in worship.