skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any stories about starting a direct competitor?
Any stories out there about starting a businesses that directly competes with an existing company for market share?

I know HN tends to focus on innovative products, but competition is a huge part of real business.
It would be so much better if the voting in HN ordered directly based on number of votes.
Please enlighten me.

Were you living in the Caribbean, or just a tourist? What were you doing? By any chance, were you going to the friday night?

(St Lucia is right next to my island - been there too, there is some unsafety but nothing too worrying)

There is not so much hate- we have people from all shapes and colors, and all creeds too. But FYI, in some places, including in the FWI, you should know tourist are not very welcome. They look for the sun, booze, girls but also for trouble. They hold sightseeing tours on the most poverty stricken areas and are arrogant. Many of them see local as dummies from the 3rd world.

So we don't really like them - personally I don't. We are not a bordello or a zoo, but just normal places were people work and live.
I think there's a nice case of posterior-prior art.
Just to clear some things up. The idea was invented by Doug McIlroy who said that we should screw computers together like garden hoses. This was in the 60s. They made unix pipes as a simple compromise. I wanted to make "screen" for plan 9 and because plan 9 has no TTY, you can do it just with buffered muxed pipes. It was a lucky insight into something cool. I invented nothing, I just tried to keep working in the great tradition of unix and share the implementation of ideas. By the way, ants.9gridchan.org is actually more interesting than all this patent bullshit. I'd rather have people take an interest in my current work than make a huge soap opera out of this. Advanced Namespace Tools for Plan 9 are pretty cool I think.
It's a parody, with the author providing prior art vs. the patent in question.
Article gives very good analysis of root causes of procrastination (fear) but then falls apart by trying to suggest that "doingness" will resolve it. Temporarily it will, but then person usually gets back to old patterns driven by subconsciousness, UNLESS real cause: inner FEAR is not taken care of.

Most sources (books, gurus, seminars) are all for different flavors of doingness:
Do this, do that. You haven't done this - so you'll need to do it more. Etc...

Almost no one addresses real solution - dissolving inner fears.
What do you think should be patentable -- the practice of being extremely sarcastic about IBM filing a patent on something that someone else invented and published a few years earlier? Or multi-pipes?
Actually, says 'Pull requests are welcome :)'
"Based on cryptography, it is secure and deterministic as we require for digital services."

This is a bad understanding of cryptography. Bitcoin does not provide security in the cryptographic sense, any more than Skype or Hushmail. It uses secure cryptographic primitives but can be successfully attacked (double-spent) in polynomial time.
I assumed that it was just British English ... British seems to just use "university" for any higher learning degree program, whereas Americans use "university" only for schools with grad programs as well as undergrad.

http://grammarist.com/usage/college-university/
Yes, it won't cut it for those who want control over the feeds.
> They have delay issues (try Quebec!)

Yeah .. 2 or 3 weeks to get a appointent with a doctor, 6 to 8h at the emergency service at the hospital. I prefer to be sick in France than in Quebec.

> There are already riots every 3 to 4 years, large scale ones.

Come on ! There was 2005[0], and 2007[1] but that's all. Both were due to a police blunder (or at least a supposed one).
Only civil security handled it. There was no army involved.

Appart from these two ones, I don't recall any other "riot".
And they are very localised (very poor suburbs).

> If there was a way to make a profit on my bet, I'd bet on civil war in mainland france within 15 years - and edge my bet with a smaller one, curfew and martial law within 10 years.

I hear that sentence since 20 years. It's a banality that is said by a lot of french right extremists and racists. They dream of a war to get rid of immigrants. It's sad and start to be boring.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_civil_unrest_in_France
Instapaper- PDF print each page.

You'll have sub-par formatting, and will have to combine the PDFs yourself though.
It's sarcasm in its clearest form.

I'm not into details of IBM patent, but it seems to me that the general idea doesn't feel that much innovative, given that we already have numerous projects achieving similar goal.
The Complete Guide to Evernote in Education
For lawyers to take that on there has to be some blood left in the stone.

In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.

At that point, you have to go after their backers. In this case its 10s of Japanese publishers, few of whom have US presences. Don't know the law there, but unless the publishers' lawyers were incompetent their liability is limited. I.e. an obvious way is to arrange a package deal to keep transaction costs low for jmanga to buy limited rights to publish derivative works as they did. On the other hand, if the publishers engaged in serious control over jmanga.com's operations there could be openings.

Given the foreign country aspect, Japan Inc. being very unfriendly towards lawsuits, and I suspect relatively small sales (their MVP wasn't particularly viable, and lots of people recognized the trap) I wouldn't expect anyone to try in this case. But I do wonder why no one has in previous cases like this, aside from avoiding going after behemoths like Microsoft when the potential payoff was probably very small (and e.g. Microsoft did offer a path to keep your songs, albeit at some quality loss ... and I can imagine a Microsoft lawyer asking a plaintiff "And you kept the volume turned up to 11? Let's get your hearing tested" :-).

After all, it's efforts that fail in the marketplace that are most likely to shut down; we probably need to wait until a big and for a while successful one goes down in flames....
Hi Arvind, one the guys behind bubbles here. Here is an example of open letter to see:

https://bubbles.bubbleideas.com/letters/pencil-brush-and-wat...

Great feedback, keep it coming!
That's cool! Eases the workflow when developing cpp, no need to fire up gdb to make sense of 'Segmentation fault'.

Reminds me of tiny-cc's default output for segfaults.
The reality is a little more nuanced. Basically, there are software people (people like you and me) who convince the execs that they can increase sales by reducing copyright infringement; all it takes is a little DRM they claim. Whether this is due to malice or incompetence is unknown, but one thing is for sure: we should start shunning these people. I don't care how good the money was, DRM creators deserve to be publicly named and shamed, or in the case of incompetence (believing that DRM will work), educated.

Of course, this is a supply side solution to a demand driven issue; but so is DRM :) I'm not sure how to reduce the demand for DRM, because the sad truth is that with enough demand, there will always be some idiot/huckster willing to implement it.
Plasma Workspaces 2 Coming To Wayland, KDM Not Invited
>>I use awk for many of the tasks I could call "text processing", and Python for more complex stuff.

I use Perl for both.

That was the whole point of my post. Perl was invented because you shouldn't have the need to use (awk/sed etc) + (some other language) for text processing and what you call as 'complex stuff'.
I don't think you can reset a profile, but the workaround is to just make a new profile, which will have a clean slate. Then you can go through and rate a couple things to help it learn.
No, but it is hardly news if it had been around for more than a decade. If the poster finds that there is something new about it, a link to the specific item would be more helpful.

For instance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3440777

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297071
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call it a commodity? Stocks are (usually) stakes in a company, whose employees are actively trying to make a profit for the shareholders, whereas currencies just kind of... sit there (and move around, more or less randomly, at least, non-predictably).
While that's usually true, in this case it should be "Apple vs every company involved with Android (plus Nokia)". That's not as catchy, though.
I'm not saying French health care is magical (comes at no cost) or perfect (could not be improved), I'm just saying that it's pretty damn good, and that for the majority of French people it turns out to be something they want to keep.

>No, not very long. There are already riots every 3 to 4 years, large scale ones.

It's all a question of perspective. We haven't seen anything like the LA riots, for example. And riot control has been for decades the jurisdiction of the police force and I sincerely doubt there would be the need for the army to intervene.

>If there was a way to make a profit on my bet, I'd bet on civil war in mainland france within 15 years - and edge my bet with a smaller one, curfew and martial law within 10 years.

I wouldn't be so sure.

>We badly miss a libertarian party in France. There's no hope in sight.

There's no hope in sight unfortunately because the whole political system is tightly controlled by politicians and closed to any new party. But I don't think that the grass is much greener anywhere else in the world.
More cool stuff in Kiln Harmony
I second this. Chicken's community is the friendliest and least toxic I can think of.
I wonder how one would go about taxing bitcoin transactions at all if there is no record that can be tied with certainty to a person.

You probably get the same thing you do with the cash economy where people just make up the lowest figure that sounds vaguely plausible.
Right, but a his poorly constructed example might be used against his general argument that there is no way to recover the content he purchased with his hard earned money. Of course, his example of being able recover the content itself is a weak example because not everyone will have the skillset to get around DRM.
Past performance is not an indication of future performance.
My Secrets: How I Learned That Selling Is A Key To Success
I've had fun with the barometer in my Nexus 4 - with the app 'Sensitive Altimeter' ... on flights I can see at what elevation the cabin is pressurized to :).
Perhaps some of his post might not be completely true, but I expect much the same. Recently I read that unemployment in France has risen to 15%. More unemployment means more people have little money to spend. Because of less spending, there will be reduced export from Northern-Europe countries to Southern-Europe countries. As a result unemployment in Northern-Europe will rise as well.

If the situation stays like this for a while, social unrest will increase. The increased social unrest could create a very nasty situation in Europe.

I really hope I have a chance to emigrate from my country (The Netherlands) in the next 5 years or so, cause I don't expect the situation to improve, at least not without lots of violence involved.
...without running gdb?

I think this eases the workflow if you're not always running the application from within gdb.

Btw, does gdb expand inline calls in the backtrace?
I'm considering a lisp dialect for a personal project (REST Api w/sqlite embedded in an ARM device running linux).

I'm evaluating racket, clojure, even IronScheme over mono.

Do you recommend using Chicken Scheme, what are his advantages/disadvantages over the other languages mentioned earlier?
It's even bolder to use a time machine to send software back in time. Of course Plan 9 has a time machine built in, it's just that people can't get used to rio(1) and the lack of readline support, so they tend not to get far enough into the OS to avail themselves of it.
Go - Writing a simple email client
In Austria so I don't use the US system. Retirement money is provided automatically in Austria and Canada the two countries I've worked in so that's a lesser worry. That just leaves mid investment (5-10 years) and emergency money. I'm planning to keep it roughly at 50/50 at least until I build up a decent buffer. (Online banks in Europe often give you as much as 2% on a savings account)
Google Reader's forced euthanasia
Oh god, I'm a complete dumbass.

It only took me 2 resets of the timer to check the comments and realize this.
The absolute most interesting thing about Chicken Scheme is the way it does allocations and garbage collection. I've wanted for a long time to make the time to add a always-on cpu and memory profiler to Chicken Scheme that just tallys the "return" addresses during the gc, meaning at each cg cycle you have a pretty darn good tracing profiler, and keeps the "return" addresses in cells when they are moved off stack, so at any moment you can blame your memory usage on particular code. Clearly you could do this sort of thing with a lot of runtimes, but Chicken's design really lends itself to it.
Hey Lance,

All of your links seem to be broken :/
Compared with what's out there, Steam's DRM is quite reasonable. The main reason is that you can install your games as many times as you want on as many computers as you want, it just attempts to limit how many computers can access the game at the same time. It would be even more reasonable if it allowed two computers to be signed into the same account at the same time and allow two different games to be played at the same time. For now you have to set one computer to offline mode to make this work, but even then that's a decent compromise.

But the main difference with Steam is that it offers features that are beneficial to the gamer that excuses the DRM in the first place. Plus there's the fact that for the most part the DRM is hidden from the gamer, it just works.

Although, it does allow for another third-party DRM to be involved which just sucks. Especially when the extra DRM actually cancels out features of Steam such as limited number of installs. The worst is when a game is on Steam and has Windows for Live involved. GTAIV was just awful; sign into Steam, sign into Windows for Live, sign into Rockstar's Social Club to get full functionality. Now that's just stupid.

Where Steam can possibly screw their customers is if you piss off Valve for some reason then they can ban your account, which means you lose access to all of your games. But this policy exists on other similar platforms such as Origin. Personally I think this would eventually not hold up in court as I can see them removing your access to a particular game for some reason, but not the whole collection you paid for. Especially since Steam is a delivery platform; it would be as if you did a credit card chargeback on the game store that cheated you in some way and then they somehow took back every game you ever bought from them. But so far, this type of case hasn't entered into the court system as far as I know.
> It uses secure cryptographic primitives but can be successfully attacked (double-spent) in polynomial time.

Does that kind of sentence promote better understanding how cryptography or bitcoin works for the average Joe?
Some Thoughts on RSS Readers
I have been there, done that. In my experience, the problems do not end after the business creation. If you are like I was, an unemployed guy trying to start its own business with a few equally unemployed associates, you applied for the ACCRE subvention which was, at that time (2005) the worst piece of bureaucratic form I ever experienced. Then you get a load of accounting obligations. The "siege social" was at my own address and I had to move after a while, which produced another round of bureaucracy hoopla to change the business address. It took some time and the post office was refusing to give me my mail as long as I couldn't give a Kbis with the new address. I haven't had the chance to have employees before the business collapsed, but what I've read about what to do when you hire people and the risk you take was very untempting.

Now the things has apparently been better, and a new very simplified status has been created for one-person businesses (the "auto-entrepreneur"). It is my status right now and it is quite fine. But if I start earning too much money (more than 30K euros a year) I'm forced to change my status and go trough all this again.
>You will note that both the annual and quarterly numbers total more than 100 percent; that is because all other handset makers, combined, are losing money.

http://daringfireball.net/2013/03/ceding_the_crown
The sad fact is that global, multi-million dollar production value media (film, computer games, etc.) is a seller's market.

Only an artificially created one. Take away the hype from big Hollywood movies; could you then tell the difference between them and indie productions, or even between most of the big studio ones? And I'm not just talking about remakes here (which is another issue, because of copyright terms being inflated ludicrously).

I still like Nina Paley's take on the concept: "Attention is scarce. Information is not. Do the math."
Not sure if you're the author, but I'll try. Most of the links on the blogpost are broken (:
Awww. I can't even load the text without javascript.
Lean Startup Lessons from a Crack Dealer
I think gittip does paypal etc donations to twitter accounts - it's not that bitcoin is inherently easier I guess
Never share bank accounts, ever. I'm married and we still have separate personal bank accounts and a shared for expenses. Personal accounts mean freedom to spend money on whatever you see fit. I'd never give that up.
It's nice that Scheme garners some attention on HN. It's more useful, however, when someone explains how they used it to build a business. Also, there are lots of Schemes and Lisps. Where does Chicken fit as far as libraries and support? Racket is the Scheme that I hear the most about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(programming_language)

Are these compatible?
I don't think it was completely scrapped. I know some people who use live bookmarks.
BItcoin "accounts" are not based on identities. Therefore it is very easy to accept and send payments, since there are no identities at all. No possibility for fraud, because there is only hard cash.
The reality is even more nuanced. Execs see people pirating their stuff and believe that those are truly lost sales. (and maybe some % of them are) They believe that if they can make it unpalatable/difficult enough to pirate music/movies etc... they will return to the halcyon when everything was good and they were making money hand over fist.

In truth, more people are turning away from traditional media than ever before as choices have expanded more and more. They deplore this as well, but in some cases the genie is out of the bottle (we are never going back to the days of 3-4 networks where power and profit margins were greatest), so the best they can hope to accomplish is to own all the networks and control the stores. They are winning.
Paper is a process cancer
+1 on feedly. my transition from GR to Feedly was painless and they have a great interface to boot. Ive tried others like rssminer, theoldreader and newsblur, and didnt like it. I prefer getting summaries/pictures for me to make a decision to click a link or not and not just a plain itemized list.
It looks like it should, since it has an unwinder
My colleague doesn't have a degree, the programmer I replaced also didn't have a degree. On the other side Austrian and German people see degrees as a rank and social status which means you will be generally respected more if you have a degree. Your starting salary will usually be higher as well if you have a degree.
Mailchimp charges you money as a penalty for stopping using their service
This is just weird. I had a $50 monthly plan with mailchimp with 3500 subscribers and I wanted to stop sending emails (and stop paying for next month) until I can afford it and then jump back again.

I was surprised when I found out there wasn't a way to stop the monthly payment other than switching and paying for a different "pay as you go" plan. I haven't encountered this sort of practice in any other decent web service, Ever. I contacted support and this was Mailchimp's response:

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=u1Frh4BJ

Mirror:
http://pastie.org/6514771

(tl;dr you just have to pay a penalty if you want to stop for a while or spend a whole day unsubscribing 1500+ users to get it to 2000 subscribers)
I don't think that's necessarily the conversation telcos are having regarding Skype, Facetime, etc. Skype probably is hated because of bandwidth issues but that is not the reason for the hate.

Look, Telco love for Android is around the fact that Android handsets are virtually under their control. They can do with it as they please - bloatware, ads, etc., Android also filled the lower end market with cheaper phones retaining the same functionality while Apple only caters to certain segments.

Telcos don't love iOS. iOS is popular with customers and iOS sells. Hence, Telcos are left with no choice but to support Apple and show their love for Apple.

Microsoft on the other hand is treated like a step child essentially because they want to go with the Apple way in not letting Telcos control their handsets while not having the customer love as of now. The only single reason why MS is still in the game is because Nokia stepped in to save their butts with beautiful hardware. Yes, it's a chicken and egg issue for MS as of now but I think if they hang in there, they will eventually start getting respectable number of apps and succeed as a platform. Not to mention, Nokia releasing cheap phones as well.
It really does. This dissertation explores the differences with other implemantations [PDF] http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf
I have maintained Perl code.

I don't what you mean by the term 'poorly written Perl code'. I have maintained more horrible code in languages like Java than in Perl.

>>but Perl is just asking for a bad programmer to write bad code.

And what is that wand that other programming languages have, that when cast with a spell magically transform a bad programmer into a Dennis Ritchie?
Hi - cheer for the followup.
I am looking for Manchester based cofounders in a variety of disciplines, for a variety of ideas.
Because people have various different experiences I'd expect to be able to narrow it down before meeting, so you're sure that it's worth meeting & to make sure people have thought about it properly / have previous interests in that sector etc.

Though in a lot of senses I think it's worth keeping it an informal collaboration, and jointly evolving an idea. This gives more buy in.

For me my ideal team would be two techies; one with more front end & UX knowledge, and an experienced sales/business orientated pitcher. I'd probably be one of the techies initially, but there's younger people who can do this quicker.
Looks good. I happen to need this soon-ish. I write a couple of cross platform desktop apps in C.

There should eventually be a way to combine this with SDL to target Javascript and canvas.
Bitcoin is a lower abstraction than paypal and credit cards. It doesn't worry about fraud at all, or have a bottom line, or anything like that. Think of it as the US dollars.

The cash in your hand doesn't care where it's go and what kind of business it helps facilitate. Credit companies can be politically pressured, worry about the bottom line, and block payments, and so on.
Gittip has had its fair share of fraud. It is probably lots of hassle compared to the volumes they handle, which are fairly low.

http://blog.gittip.com/post/35057426257/stolen-money-on-gitt...
You could attend my meet-up in Amsterdam, details are available here: http://coffeeshophackers.nl

Edit: Fixed Typo