skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, they have to report these donations to the Federal Elections Commission (fec.gov) on a quarterly basis, even if there have been no donations for that quarter. Further there is a pretty sizable body of law around the funding received for the obvious reason that it's a tempting target for corruption.

When I was considering my run for Congress, one piece of advice I got for "free" from a guy who I had talked to about running campaigns, was to be sure I had a good idea about who everyone was that was giving me money. That had to be reported and if it turned out a law was violated it was on the candidate, not the donor in terms of consequences.

According to this guy, there were candidates who got "derailed" by opponents who arranged a big donation to be made, hoping that it would be accepted and not tracked down. Then leaking the existence of that donation to the FEC who would put the hapless candidate under investigation (and out of the race) until the investigation was resolved. This adviser suggested that politicians were despised for the same reason that used car salespeople get despised, and that was because too many of them had no morals preventing them from making progress at your expense.

Anyway, I think it is useful for the Bitcoin community to educate various politicians about what Bitcoin is, but I expect the best they can hope to do is keep them from acting directly against its interests. Getting actual support would be quite hard for a currency whose primary driver seems to be crime syndicates.
Sorry to hear the news. I hope you and the team go on to new and greater things.
(shameless plug) Create auto-updating RSS feeds for any webpage with Feedity: http://feedity.com
I was on a path to becoming a professional golfer. I was a highly recruited player coming out of high school, and had full-ride scholarship offers from several schools.

Went to college, majored in accounting & finance. And played golf -- lots of it. Played in national championships, competed abroad, surrounded by coaches who fine-tuned my swing and improved my game. Played with many guys who have been on the PGA tour at different points. I was on a path to the tour, as well.

But it was unfulfilling, and I fell out of love with the sport. I took a job in finance and investing at a small bank in 1991. Working my way up from the bottom, I discovered a knack for technology by automating processes that had been done by hand for years.

Never looked back.
Realistically, you are just as screwed if any large organization launches a civil suit against you. Congress frequently produces laws that attempt to mandate the behavior of the Executive branch* while excluding that behavior from judicial review (which courts do not take kindly to and frequently dismiss).

A lot of legislators do not like the Judicial branch and consider it to be an annoying restraint on their lawmaking power; what looks like tension between the Executive and Judicial branches is often as not a proxy for Legislative claims. Whenever you see a piece of legislation with phraseology like '[officer of some executive branch agency] shall do x, y, z, in the following fashion...' pay attention to the word shall. In law this is understood to make the action mandatory, and where the law is very specific on procedures and actions it's basically an attempt to micromanage the operation of the agency in question.

Consider the following imaginary law:

If any person wears white after Labor Day, the head of the Fashion Police shall cause that person to be arrested and fined $1,000. This procedure shall not be subject to judicial review.

Now if you're the Fashionista-general, you have no choice but to arrest people wearing white after Labor Day [for non-Americans, wearing white after late September is jokingly regarded as an offense against good taste]. Failure to do so clearly violates the oath of office required of office-holders in the Executive branch. And the same law says that you don't get to complain about this in court, so judges are supposed to dismiss your case without even giving it a hearing. That will make people mad with the Fashion Police and frustrated with the Courts, even though the blame for this law lies with the Legislature.

Here's an example of a real law that operates this way, from a current immigration statute: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1252

Note section (a)(2)(A)(i): the law applies to people who receive orders of removal, aka deportation orders (a); it's explicitly not subject to judicial review (2)(A); and the procedures for dealing with individual cases are very narrowly specified in the section linked to from clause (i), with a lot of detail specifying how people shall be categorized and treated.
Somebody already thought about it: walkme.com
I still think this point is valid because there is a lot more to the tech "scene" than just technical advice. reading about VCs, startups etc will still help you understand the system as a whole and can help you find better places to start learning more.
Rampant wildcatting was killing the nascent US oil industry. Regulation saved that industry.
I don't see it. Bush started a literal war of aggression with press support; we're supposed to expect them to get up in arms over a few assassinations?
Wrong. The telecom's suit is the challenge that you're talking about. The second suit claims that the first lawsuit is illegal. It would mean that you're not allowed to challenge the government in court. It would make your flowery language invalid.
Yeah I can imagine that would make me pretty angry too! And possibly homeless. I'm currently living paycheck to paycheck, meaning if I didn't get paid for a months work then I wouldn't have enough money to pay rent.

It sounds like this is probably something I shouldn't risk without at least a month's financial buffer?
> By trying to be all things, they will become none.
They are on the path to becoming Microsoft.

Sounds more like Yahoo to me.
I think the first thing people should ask themselves is: Why are you trying to get into this scene without any skills?

In the last 10 years Silicon Valley and startups in general have attracted a mush of people who bring little or no value to the table. I'm not talking about business/product types or MBAs that might at least have some experience and maybe some contacts and financial know-how. No, its the kind of people who for no other reason are thrilled by the celebrity-esque world of high-flying startups that might come with free lunch/dinner/beer, parties, and items found in The Social Network.

People should learn some product and marketing skills at larger, non-startup companies first before taking sweat equity or low/no pay at a startup. Also make contacts at meetups and learn the finance side of things. THEN you will have less of a problem "Getting into the tech scene", skills in hand.
> Setting your homepage to an internet company's site is pretty much their whole goal.

That always felt hokey to me. I was always more likely to "homepage" a website that just gave me great content and proportionately less likely to "homepage" a site that wanted to be my home page. This is why HN/reddit are basically this for me.
Google X Lab to unveil new project in the coming month
How does the author plan to keep the cheat sheet updated?
Happy 28th birthday to the Internet's first domain name
How was Mailbox profitable?
Clearly you didn't read the article. Asking the court to require compliance would have meant that they would have filed a response to the telecom's suit and made the claim that the NSL was warranted and that the suit should be thrown out.

Instead they're claiming that the mere act of filing suit is in itself illegal.
While it’s heartbreaking to have to shut down something you’ve poured your heart into for many years, we have learned many things along the way that will help us for what’s coming next. Thanks for the kind words.
Google is far and away the largest source of funding-revenue for the Mozilla Foundation.
> How would you expect it to handle high and low volume blogs together "meaningfully"?

An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

I guess a unified service that usefully filtered low S/N ratio feeds of all kinds would be awesome.
It'll certainly make embrace & extend all that much more viable.
RSS was a literal life changer when I first discovered it. Instead of going to the 5-10 websites I frequented to look for new stories throughout the day, I could check my reader when I took a break and stay up to date on everything. It probably cut my surfing time by 90% or more.

Additionally RSS allows me to follow far more things than would normally be possible. Instead of 10 I have 100, including things that don't update even every month.

Previously the discussion was always about how to make RSS usable for the masses, but I suppose this problem was never solved. Social media seems to work for some people, but it isn't the same. I can only count a handful of times in the last decade that I site I was interested in didn't have an RSS feed. It is practically universal. Facebook does indeed have a lot of people, but there is also the constant friend spam, and the algorithmic filtering to worry about.

When I look at the alternatives to Google Reader, it is clear that many of them don't get me. They are focused on content discovery, but i want to do is Keep Track. I don't want to miss a word from my favorite sources, and I need my reader to hold on to their words until I get to them.

I really hope RSS doesn't die. It is my handle on the internet, and without it I would still be refreshing sites all day.
You do remember Instagram was bought for $1 billion having generated exactly 0 revenue, right?
SimCity Offline Mode Achieved By Hacker, Proves EA Are Scumbag Liars
I'm not saying that Google "gets" social (because they obviously don't), but everyone I know who uses Google Reader is definitely not the influencer type.
First, storage doesn't cost google all that much - on the app engine they charge $0.24/GB/month, so their own cost for gmail is likely a lot lower than that. And it's hardly 10GB per person - I'm a heavy user with lots of email, never delete anything, etc. and I have 0.8GB in my gmail this very minute (compressed or not? I'm not sure). So for their average user, probably less than half a gig. So maybe $0.10 a month for the storage. There are other costs, to be sure, but there's a ballpark.

So a couple ad clicks a month would probably do it - and you forget the biggest thing - gmail means you're that much closer to google. They have more info about you, you'll search through them more, you're more likely to get an android phone, etc. etc.

Gmail isn't going away.
Just something to chew on: I think you've set up a false dichotomy. It is also possible that the problem is not deregulated campaign finance but rather the increasing shift away from a constitutional republic form of government to a democracy.

One of the big benefits of a republican (small "R", not the party) form of government is that it's far more difficult to buy off because at conventions each delegate (which are generally grass-roots involved people who have no financial incentive) has the same influence regardless of which candidate has the most money.
School of Haskell : tutorials with live code
Get started with testing from top to bottom
>InstantCab drivers are more likely to actually use the app the way it’s intended. Also, there’s really no way for drivers to cancel. Once they’ve accepted a ride, there’s simply no button they can push to get out of it.

What if they hit the button accidentally?
Algorithmic Thermodynamics
> The Wave Disk Generator uses 60 percent of its fuel for propulsion; standard car engines use just 15 percent. As a result, the generator is 3.5 times more fuel efficient than typical combustion engines.

" ... oh, did I mention that I flunked math?"

60 / 15 = 4, not 3.5.
He also signed into law a further restriction of the 1st amendment; it's now legal for the secret service to a.) be sent to guard any arbitrary person and b.) to arrest anyone demonstrating (like just holding a sign) within a specific distance from said protected person.
This is exactly what's <supposed> to happen, the DoJ brought the dispute to the judicial branch...

-- Nah. DOJ was trying to <bypass> judicial review. Contra separation of powers, per constitution, etc.
I strongly do not approve of having a website that lists "pre-orders" and then links Kickstarter projects. As has already been mentioned repeatedly in this thread Kickstarter is not pre-orders even if users, and sometimes projects, treat it as such.

Treating it as such is not only incorrect but actively hurts the Kickstarter concept and brand. You are literally causing direct harm to the service which your website is largely dependent on. That's very uncool. :(
The irony is that their argumentation in court is identical to that of the Bush DOJ.
Ask HN: How do you contain complexity?
Uncontrolled complexity is dangerous. It causes things to collapse on itself. Contained complexity is useful. It allows unimaginable things to be built.

You could say the result of contained complexity is this phrase "why of course, that's obvious" (after seeing that contained complexity).

In general, what techniques has anyone discovered in containing complexity to prevent it from hindering what you want to create?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan#Stati...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal#2006.E2....

Note the dates. In fairness to the press, it's not surprising that the firs 5 years of drone strikes received little press coverage, because we had become involved in a much larger war in Iraq. I'm somewhat tolerant of drone strikes; all told they seem to have killed about 3,200 people at the highest estimate, which sounds bad until you consider lowest estimate for the Iraq war is 110,000 deaths, of which over half are civilians. The median estimate is about double that.

Drones are sort of scary for a variety of reasons, but there is at least some basis for fighting that conflict (directly responsive to 9-1--2001 attacks) and the casualties from done warfare are a fraction of those from conventional warfare, by about 2 orders of magnitude.
Jimu makes building Android apps as simple as playing Lego
rms ama - 25 Questions and Answers (2010)
They built Gmail. People need it desperately. So far, no one distrusts it or has any reason to. That's their identity moat.
list+subscribe@googlegroups.com still works. I used it last week.
What does this do to the commit history for moved files?
Great use case to think about. It is definitely suited for interviewing multiple lawyers in a short amount of time. Our primary focus is on the initial legal consultation, which lends itself directly identifying the one or more lawyers you want to work with long-term.
Thanks!
"Since July 18, 2007 you have read a total of 228,650 items." Woaw.
The OP mentions hustle - probably the most important skill of all. One good way to get into the startup scene is to actually start something, yourself.
My first inclination seeing the title of this post even before I read the article was to comment, "are you a fortune teller?"

But seriously, to put it mildly my friend, I don't agree with you. Google determined that the best thing to do was to kill it and they did. They continue building other stuff; life continues.
I have to give the author credit–I like his approach much better than poseurs who drop into the scene and start running workshops or being mentors, all while never having actually built anything or attempted a startup.
This. Just get a job in IT at any large corporation. You will fit right in.
Ian: We have worked hard to make the app easy to use for drivers to minimize mistakes. For example: when we started the company, every one of us including engineers drove cars for 10 hours shifts for 3 weekends in a row, giving rides to friends to understand how to design well for drivers.

Mistakes still happen occasionally, and we have procedures to deal with them but we took this approach to make it clear that bailing after accepting a ride is not an option.
Agreed. I'm in for $25. :-)
Finally... Living in Indy and knowing several people behind this, I knew it was doomed from day one. Social plays like this try to do nothing more than capitalize on trends without adding any real value. They pivoted from a form generating site to a virality play, which was never even executed well to begin with.

...and now they shoot for a photo app. <sarcasm> Good work </sarcasm>
This is exactly the problem my startup is attempting to tackle. We're still in the early stages of product development, but prototypes, tests and research are quite promising so far.
Usually I try hard to find the simplest solution to a problem, not just the one that works. I find simplicity doesn't hinder what you are capable of building, but I suppose this is subjective.
_it's just a GOTO that doesn't do anything about synchronous long running code problems_

_how do you think Go's concurrency actually works under the hood? It works the same way—and has the same problem you describe._

I think Go, in most uses, makes use of a thread pool to decouple it's green threads from the OS threads such that a single busy green thread does not seize up the rest of the runtime, and I think Go manages the assignment of green to OS threads in a way that is hands off for the programmer and by default.

I also think one gets a runtime in Go where I/O is multiplexed on an event loop, such that most common syscalls a Perl program might make don't hold up execution, and are instead handled in a non-blocking way by default.

Please let me know what else I can clarify so that we can find agreement.
Of course I was oversimplifying, and of course any good IT department recognises that that its job is to help other people do theirs. I did start by acknowledging joelthelion's point, and I have no problem with the idea that someone who has a genuine business need to do something outside the normal rules should be able to request a reasonable exception to whatever general policies might apply.

However, you need an awful lot of indirect benefit to make up for one screw-up that breaches corporate security, particularly if you work in a regulated industry like healthcare or finance. Lawyers and industry regulators don't care about any goodwill you got from letting Bob bring his own laptop to work if Bob's laptop was subsequently left on a train opening access to thousands of customers' medical records or credit card details. You could probably have fired Bob and hired an entire team of other people who didn't care about using their own laptop with the money you're instead paying as a fine for that one, though perhaps not so much if the business collapses due to the adverse PR and an executive or two gets thrown in jail for negligence.
Thanks Eric! Appreciate your vote of confidence. Come by the office and let's grab lunch on Monday if you have some time!
Thanks Ajay. As the commenter on TechCrunch said, ballers get baller service ;)
Amazon.com: Marching Towards Profitability (2001) [pdf]
Who needs Google Reader when there still is raggle
The ninth alone might prove rather interesting given the number of non-traditional communications providers operating there.
Jose: sending you an email
This is literally among the dumbest environmentalist ideas out there. It's a tragedy it gets so much attention because that enthusiasm could be oriented towards advocacy of things which actually make a difference.

A napkin calculation a while back factoring in the cost of farmland, light, land, and skyscraper construction showed approximately a 60,000x cost difference per pound of crops between purpose-build skyscraper-type vertical farming startup costs, and prime Iowa farmland. I'm not exaggerating.

Compare irrigated desert land under intensive greenhouse cultivation with skyscrapers, and you're still at hundreds or thousands of times more expensive.

The most sizable vertical farm at present is either a natural-light "bookshelf style" setup in Singapore which does absolutely nothing for land use by shading other land, and grows a trivial amount of crops, or a artificially-lit 30x30m area on Chiba University operated purely for research purposes, which sells its products on the side.

When someone says "X is planned for Chicago", that actually means something to some of us, something other than "An undergrad design student asked for creative solutions to save the world came up with a pretty render that any architect, engineer, farmer, or businessman would laugh at on close examination". I would ask the green energy sites to stop lying to our faces on this topic, necessitating stories like this [1].

The only way this kind of solution is remotely feasible is when your product is marijuana, and it costs $1000/lb. Expensive niche herbs like basil and wasabi may be able to grow economically in a climate controlled hydroponic system... but they can only pay warehouse rent if that, not skyscraper rent.

We owe the promotion of this concept to Dickson Despommier [2], a tenured professor of public health / environmental health sciences at Columbia University in Manhattan. Take one of the two most geographically and economically scarce land markets in the country, and apply "locavore" principles, and this stupidity is what you get.

To the people believing because a render was created and it was "planned" that this means they can absolve their share of environmental white guilt for living in a neighborhood without any trees or permeable surfaces... Stop promoting this, please. Tens of square miles of city displaces thousands of square miles of suburb, and you're living at 1/10th the resource intensity of the rest of the country by not driving everywhere. Farmland is not this scarce, and transportation for food is not this expensive.

The breathless enthusiasm of the green bloggers which are paid per post and have no formal science training past middle school has brought this concept to the forefront again and again. I've been shouting at my computer for nigh on ten years now and it will not die.

[1] http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/james-blog/1810325/so-las-ve...

[2] http://www.verticalfarm.com/
And they went to court to make that claim. As I've explained wlesewhere in the thread [1], exemption from judicial review is something that is often written into legislation by Congress. It's not the case that people in the DoJ or the WH wake up one morning and decide they can't be bothered with the courts any more. The law is designed to cut the Judicial branch out of the loop.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5383670
awesome! Just proofs that against all odds, traction is still the most important metric to show success for an early stage startup

good luck Nikhil
Neat how the founder is using his status as a single-founder instead of part of a team to get buzz in the media.
I don't know anyone in France who use Google reader or others. Maybe power users but even them... it's not that useful.
Tim, do you know about https://github.com/danlucraft/git.js ?
Regulated campaign finance...who writes the rules?

The problem is fundamental to the structure and it is inevitable that, over time, every government becomes tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson made it clear for the ages, "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Governments are of man and man is prone to taking advantage of and abusing his or her peers.

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. I am not a friend to a very energetic government."

- Thomas Jefferson

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
Meta-Rationality