skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you make me watch a video to get what your product is about and offer no succinct text explanation, I bounce 100% of the time.
Before I address anything you said, I'm curious.. Are you a woman? Or are you a Nice Guy?
>I opened a company specifically for this (ipad/iphone development) it was my plan to leave my current company and build something less stressful.

This seems more like wishful thinking (and underestimating the effort and polish needed) than a serious business decision.

>I reached a point where I'm no longer interested in building apps for the app store, apple asks too much and give us too little.

It asks for: a Mac to work (lots of people have one already) on, a $99/year iOS developer account and 30% of your sales.

With that you get: an quite capable IDE for free, a top-notch SDK, tons of documentation, access to a market of 100+ million devices and one-click credit card accounts that is KNOWN to sell billions of apps.

Seems like a bargain. Heck, companies used to sell a developer license for their SDK at the price of a high-end Mac itself -- and without providing access to any market or a free IDE. A lot still do.

What exactly have you provided to feel so entitled? A half-finished app, built while "learning Objective-C"?
Sudoku as an arcade: Whould you play a multi-player sudoku? - Build'n Run
Wikimedia Launches WikiVoyage
Thank you.

I would only point out that it's actually both: Not only are they unclear, even if they were clarified but still prohibited roughly the same breadth of things with the same extraordinary penalties, we still should not like them. A law that plausibly imposes the same (felony) penalty for using one's brother's laptop without permission as for breaking into a military intelligence satellite to steal classified materials is a defective law in need of serious reform.
Google's Street View car hits donkey, keeps driving
AAPL has seen serious fluctuations during the Jobs era as well when everyone thought he was healthy. The day that Jobs showed off the iPad the stock had a serious drop as well. The same goes for the day he shoed off the Macbook Air as well.

In fact, Apple has better The Streets for most of the past six years.
Hello world I am the (Not SO) new kid on the block - Build'n Run
Google Lat Long: Never ass-ume
Ask HN: Asking for community help without implicating company or co-founders
I've made previous questions here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5060421 ) and in other places asking for help, mostly wanting mentors, accelerators, and things like that.

Except my co-founder don't want any of this, and most of this is for whole companies, not individuals.

I still think I might appreciate help as individual, and I would love to be in contact with some people, but I cannot talk if the other person interacting with me think I am speaking for my company, since my co-founder don't want it.

For example: How I can enter in contact with the people listed here: http://www.quora.com/Startups-in-Brazil/Who-are-the-leading-startup-mentors-in-Brasil if they all own accelerators or schools for entire companies, and my co-founder told me he don't want a accelerator?
> and doesn't disclose information you deemed confidential

That pretty much kills most subcontracting of this type.
Thanks for the heads up, changing that now.
In this context, yes. It would just have been easier for MIT to prevent access.
It's not, except if you are a company. And if you are a company, you have a lot more paperwork to worry about than just DUNS.

Plus, it helps keep out the less motivated.
Have you applied for openings which offer six figures?
Yea! For that guy being "Smart", he isn't that smart... lol
API is now live: http://www.hellosign.com/info/api
Thanks benny, made those changes.
Yes, I'm developing an Android version, but platform fragmentation is a bit scary. And yes, there's actually a breath bar in App to help you regulate your breathing. It animates in 5 second increments, allowing you to breath in steady patterns. At this point (two months of practice) I breath in 20 second increments (so four bars up and down).
YES! I always found it tedious to download from email and reupload. Awesome work guys. Keep it coming.

One feature we're missing is the ability to have ordering to the multi-party signatures. For example, we'd like to have our sales guys fill out the contract, send it to me for a signature, and then send it out to the other party for a signature.
The other guy was probably subcontracting.
Hi, thanks for the comment. Interesting viewpoint, we'll look at increasing it to a month, do you think that would be sufficient time to test it out?
Apologies, I forgot to mention that's what I was referring to.

I'm using my phone and it doesn't play ball with URI fragments and Wikipedia. I must have clicked your link to read, was thrown to the beginning and caught the stuff about the BBC. I felt compelled to comment about it because of how ridiculous it is.

Everything about scientology to me is ridiculous really. From the founder's intentions and previous occupation as a sci-fi writer to the fact people are prepared to go militant over it.
How is this a scam? The work was getting done... no harm done IMO.
> the general public neither knows nor cares.

Exactly. The general public does not care about tedious technical things you can do. Nor should they. Spoofing your MAC address simply isn't interesting to other people.

> People attacking that which they do not understand is just as old as recorded history. I'll take that phenomenon as just an axiom of human behaviour.

This is sad cynicism. In general, people don't just arbitrarily attack things they don't understand. And people certainly don't attack things they don't care about. You kind of have to care about something in order to put in the effort to attack it.
Thanks for the tip, always good to learn new things :)
I am sad to hear that. I thought it was the right place to discuss about entrepreneurial ideas. I was wrong. I am sorry to annoy you like that. Feel free to do whatever to do you feel it is right. I will bring my discussions to other place. And many thanks to the gentlemen that gave me valuable feedback. Much appreciated.
Show HN: Marketing Bits – Real-world marketing know-how for hackers and startups
In this hypothetical moustache example, is the "gained access to something valuable" the sticking point, or is it the "deceiving guards"?

I've changed my MAC/moustache plenty of times to "deceive some guards". Actually I'm doing it right now, this Comcast modem is a utter pain in the ass...

Or, if it is the "something valuable" part, would gaining access to that "something valuable" have been an issue if there was no deceit? Was Aaron's curl script A-okay right up until the point that he deceived?
It looks to me like the donkey started rolling around in the dirt after the car went by.... (Disclaimer: I know nothing about donkeys). Its interesting that you can kind of see what happened by shuffling forward and back on the images.
haha well I both feel silly and that you have just made my day
it has been 4 months since I applied this, joined a Karate club , writing my experience on an anonymous blog ,go meeting new people ,I start learning languages and I got many certificates,but at the end it still don't work for me , I'm in a great despair , I still feel empty inside ,I simply don't enjoy life anymore,since going out is not really working (I think its a waste of time) I spend all the days at home working(programming) or playing video games, my relations with people is still not very deep , I call some friends ones a week and we meet for 2 or 3 hours , still don't enjoy going out with them . by the way I'm not depressed , I was depressed in the past years , but the doctor says that I'm fine now , may be when he tries it , it would work for him who knows .
Just politicians being politicians.
Well then is is probably a good idea to go on record about changing your mac address on boot. Otherwise I imagine you would have a hard time proving it in court.

I too randomize my MAC address at boot on all of my machines except my work desktop.
It sounds like you and your co-founder are not meshing well. If your co-founder is not open to listening to outside advice, maybe you should look into working with someone else.
> ignoring these sorts of things doesn't make them less real.

I don't get how not posting this stuff to HN equates to ignoring it. I have a life outside of HN, and so can all kinds of extremely important issues!
And the lawyer that won in that case (Orin Kerr) did a nice write-up of the case from a legal perspective earlier this week:
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
Hi, thanks for the comment. I can't quite replicate this, any chance you could email us at hi@draftapp.co ?
I think it's kinda like a fashion thing. Everybody likes blurred backgrounds today, tomorrow it'll be something else.
> show government issues the people find important

A tiny percentage of the population finds important.

I suspect that often enough we underestimate opposition to (or mere disinterest in) our ideas and tend to overestimate the importance of our opinions :(
We may have reached Peak Sudoku on mobile devices.

Also, your price is "Free". That may be why income is 0.
C++11 Via Test-Focused Learning: Uniform Initialization
Exploring the uniform initialization scheme of C++11 via unit tests
Turn Wednesdays Into Hack-Day of the Week
I'm not sure what it takes, but have you thought about trying to get on the Steam store?
I'll stand by what I said, he seemed very troubled and it is clear that he was since he killed himself. Suicide typically doesn't happen overnight so I'll assume he's had issues long before the DOJ decided to target him.

I'm not getting this from one single blog post. Others have posted how he had trouble communicating personally. There was another blog where he was sympathetic to the Joker from 'The Dark Knight'. If his blog was a personal one I bet there are probably hundreds of other examples.

If you hear something that is so profound that the you get physically dizzy at the thought, enough to require you to hold onto something, there's nothing else to say but you should get help. Like I said, if it was just hyperbole, fine, but I don't get the feeling it was.
Why would it recommend one over the other if it's something that's most definitely a user preference? I wish we had stayed with the first syntax as it's "cleaner" in my opinion, but at the end of the day that's exactly what it is: my opinion.
For Amusement Only: the life and death of the American arcade
The donkey is alive!
See: http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3882828/google-proves-it-a...
Thanks for sharing this, its a great resource.

I'm in the process of making a landing page for something I've been working on right now.

It would be great to get some feedback from the HN community - you guys all have way more experience than me.

The app is called Senso, and its designed to make it easy for children to recognise and learn about emotions in themselves and others:

http://senso.launchrock.com

The page isn't quite ready yet but its hopefully not too far off. There's a known issue with black lines appearing on the sides of the video in safari.

In particular, it would be fantastic to get some ideas for giving incentives for people to share the page. We still need to clean up the section after the signup too :-/

Thanks in advance!
Please put a random generator
Yes, but the current civil remedies we have in copyright and trade secret laws would work fine in this case.
> The bigger issue for me is why this story has been so well covered by Daring Fireball, The Loop, MG Siegler and the rest of the Apple blogosphere? Do they really believe that they will affect general opinion of the stock or force an investigation?

You're surprised that bloggers who blog about Apple are blogging about Apple? What's the issue here, again?
You either break the law, or you don't.

This viewpoint is incredibly naive, and also wrong.

The law is not black or white, it is selectively enforced all the time, and context does matter in its application.
Google didn't kill the donkey
They all look the same! Big text, picture, sweeping statement.
I'm in south Denver. I think we worked across the hall from each other, but in different closed areas.

February would be good for me. I'm trying to get a thesis submitted in January...
I hate to bash on this article, but the number of commenters calling it "nice" makes me want to warn that the implementations are not really very good.

Except for the bisection method, all of these implementations take an argument specifying the number of iterations to run. In most cases, the only way to terminate in fewer iterations is by hitting an "exact" root, i.e., calculating the residual as exactly zero. This is poor practice for a number of reasons. First, in practice it's pretty rare for a method to find an exact zero. Second, once a method has converged to the numerical precision of the machine, making more iterations just wastes flops. So a much better approach is to specify a solution tolerance (as shown with the bisection method). Even better is to provide absolute and relative tolerances, and to choose those values based on either the domain requirements, or on the machine characteristics. Dennis & Schnabel's excellent "Numerical Methods for Unconstrained Optimization and Nonlinear Equations" has a good discussion on choosing convergence tolerances.

This dependence on iteration counts to terminate, by the way, is probably why the author equates low iteration counts with greater accuracy. But in fact these methods don't vary in their intrinsic accuracy, rather, they vary in their order of convergence.

Another example of poor practice is in the bisection method implementation. One generally should not bisect an interval using c = (a+b)/2, because the nature of finite-precision arithmetic means there is no guarantee that c will lie between a and b, even if the machine can represent numbers between a and b. A better approach is to ensure a < b, then to set c = a + (b-a)/2. This expression is much less subject to roundoff errors.
> If this goes on pretty soon

Actually, we're well past that point. Until the past few years, only tiny special interest groups ever heard about things like this. Now, it has the potential to blow up into national news. Maybe this is progress.
If by right you mean wrong then you're both right and wrong. ;)
Maybe or maybe not, but jumping to that conclusion without any other evidence is certainly self-aggrandizing.
Good spot. Also, if you move along and look to the side, you can see the donkey standing by the side of the road as the car goes past.

No donkey was harmed here :D.
For those who can't get it to work, here's a video showing what it is/how it was made. Really cool stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISL1GfXwr-o
Hey, thanks for the comment. I had similar reservations but having used the app with clients I've that the majority have found it quite valuable in helping them explain their feedback, only a very small % have had issues understanding it.

With regards to transferring that information to another platform, do you mean transferring all of the comments/feedback to something like a spreadsheet? Or something else?
Build custom icon fonts with Builder for jQuery Mobile Icon Pack
Hi, I think I can help you. I have direct contact with some of the referred mentors. If I think they might be interested in your project I could hook you up.

If you want to succeed here in Brazil you need connections. That's the key resource to make your project successful if you're targeting the brazilian market.
He only do not want accelerators now, he prefer to search for angel investors and do stuff his way.

I personally don't have much of a choice, he is a good co-founder in general, and he and his investors have the money :)
Will give it some thought. Is there anything in particular you would like me to expand on?
Leaked BB 10 sales training manual reveals promised 70K apps at launch
Small Refactorings in Ruby
>My idea was to release an app every 3-5 months and make at least 60k/year. I cannot sell that much in Brazil as a individual (limit here is 36k BRL). I don't see the app store as a viable way of making a living anymore (for single developers). I'll try to build something that doesn't depend of other company's mood.

It was never a "viable way of making a living" in the sense you describe. Who told you you can "release an app every 3-5 months and make 60k/year at least"?

For one, a proper apps takes a lot more time.

Second, no app is guaranteed to make anything at all.

Especially if it's coming from someone that hasn't made released any other iPhone app, doesn't know the market and doesn't know Objective-C! The App Store is like any other market: it takes effort, determination, hard work and/or luck.

And you devised all this plan (and even paid to start a company) without even testing the waters with a single app? Perhaps seeing something in the range of 2K a year for your first app (as many developers do, and most even less) would have spared you all this trouble.

Seems to me like you had this idea that the App Store was like a money printing service, where you just churn out some apps and roll in the dough, and in the first sign of trouble (and BS trouble at that, like the DUNS requirement) you demand the free money you were promised...
I totally feel your pain. It seems a very well done game.

Unfortunately there are already hundreds of sudoku games, so a user will hardly find i.

I can give you a couple suggestions anyway: send it to the guys over androidpolice.com every 3 weeks they make a list of the best games that just came out like this one http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/15/40-best-new-android-... so I think you might have good chances of getting in there more than a fully featured article.

Post it here. I think HN is more than willing to review your game.

Post it on reddit.com/r/android it's a very open community and they often try apps for people that ask nicely.
Putting up boxes seems like a terrible example.

Really, a MAC address is a unique name. Now your pissing land requires people give their name. I find my name has been banned, so I make up a new name. I think it is clear I know yo don't want me there, but I give a new name to get in.
This is interesting as a hack, but it puts a really bad light on telecommuters. Because it basically proves two things to your employer:

1) That your job can be done cheaper if outsourced to another country, in this case china, and just as good. (Just in case there was any doubt this was possible, now the doubt it is gone).

2) That you can't trust telecommuting employees.

It is stupid for so many reasons, but as a friend of mine would say: "It is stupid if you get caught."
Another way Google is making an ass of itself. (sorry had to be said)
I actually went through the setup.rb and was surprised they don't do it. Rails itself will raise the exception if the initializer does not exist IIRC, so just removing the file and .gitignoring it would do.
How about getting into the habit of writing tests? First, they're code themselves. Second, it really forces you to think about interfaces and coupling.

Third, it's a nice habit to have if you work on a larger project.
Aaron's initial script may well have been illegal in and of itself, because it was bypassing JSTOR's limits on how many articles you can download. Aaron took so many more steps after that that it's hardly worth talking about his first action.

Two questions you need to seriously answer to make changing your MAC address on Comcast's network to be the exact same thing as what Aaron did:

1. Are you bypassing a security mechanism by changing your MAC address?

2. Did you gain something and/or cause them losses exceeding $5,000?
It's interesting how close his comments are to Fight Club. :-)

From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes

"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. "

Does this mean that the first rule of Hacker News is nobody talks about Hacker News?

But seriously, the movie (and Paul's article) hits a nerve because we are indeed consumed by our stuff. There is a carrying cost for everything - every idea in our head, every physical item, every piece of clothes.

Similar to what others have said, going abroad helped me realize how little I really need. I remember shipping all these boxes with me, only to not open most of them after I arrived. If I didn't think of something back home in storage over 6 months, would I ever need it? But it's still hard to avoid the weight of possessions.
I am target lots of markets, but Brazillian market is one of the primary ones.

I make tablet apps (for several OS), all of them have portuguese as one of the main languages (all apps launch at least in french, portuguese and english).
I disagree.
If I call your phone and one day you don't answer and I try from a different phone number and you do I think you are ok to have me call you.

Had they notified him with a web page that his mac address wasn't welcome it would have been a different matter altogether.

What Aaron did was the equivalent of trying a different laptop to see if things resumed working.
It made me think of C++.
Except it is unclear what value-add Bob provided. He may have been pivotal to the Chinese contractors being able to do the work, who knows?
Ok, well if you find your ability to appeal to women comparable to a paraplegic's ability to walk then I am truly sorry. Certain things like attractiveness do come with effort.
So he thought he had it all figured out, and was so sure we would beat 36K/year that he opened a company just to ensure lower taxes when the inevitable happens...

It's funny, but you also have to admire the optimism. If it only was accompanied with more persistence.
May I ask why? I had used Sass for along time (with Compass) and decided to try Stylus for a pretty big project, and for some unforeseeable reason I ended up with less maintainable post compile css. I really don't understand how I ended up with a mess if they're so alike to be honest and since I've been doing web development for quite some time. It may have been more fault of the project and it's inherent structure, goals, and deadlines, but I would reckon that it wouldn't have been as bad had I done it in Sass.
If he had done this above board, he would have a very profitable consulting firm. It's the subterfuge that got him.
Finish, the todo list for procrastinators
One factoid in the article about Aaron Swartz's case confuses me:

"Though JSTOR decided not to press charges – and even urged the US government to drop the case – MIT went ahead with a civil suit."

First I've heard of a civil suit by MIT against Swartz. Has anyone seen anything corroborating this?
The Challenge Of Picking A Brand Name For Your Startup
Hey, Dropbox isn't new but it still very clean and to-the-point landing page.
I thought this was about their autonomous cars at first. That would have been interesting.

This is just another random Street View driver error.
When I first read the title I thought it was a self-driving car and thought "oh fuck, people will go nuts over this"
From the HIPAA Case Files: Jail Time, Fines, and Access Rights