skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ooh come one the NFL is cosy cartel ask a premiership football (soccer) manager about the pressure they are under.

In the UK the bottom 3 teams are relegated down to the lower division now if the NFC and AFL did that you'd seem some pressure.
It's not HTML5, it's a propietary plugin. This is like the old ActiveX days.
Soooo does anyone have any reason to believe this matters in the wild?

I like the article it's interesting though, but to me it seems purely theoretical.
> Traditional publishers take something like 90%

The Pragmatic Programmers offer their authors 50% of the net. I was lucky enough to publish one book with them, and despite that book's anemic sales I made out pretty well. Cant recommend them enough to prospective authors.
I agree with what he says, but his bio at the bottom feels a little at odds with it. Sequoia backed... Sequoia backed...
Weakly moderated forums are usually a bad place to discuss the role and funding of government.
China today reminds me of the US of the 1950s...growing fast, optimistic about the future, and willing to create it. Contrary to sentiment on HN, they aren't going to be drowned in their own pollution..they're going to win the future by not being afraid of it.
Is there any other industry where people in high demand like to talk and read so much about how they're actually overpaid?
Accounts were blocked already, wire transfers were suspended. No way to back out your money.
This makes me extremely uncomfortable and I don't understand how anyone could think this was a good idea.

We have high unemployment across Europe, Catalunya is attempting to become independent and there is open talk in the press about a military coup if that goes through. Meanwhile, Greece elected a bunch of fascist mps, and now this?

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and 10% of your savings were gone. What would you do? Take your money out of the bank, sure, but also immediately attempt to remove your government.

Not exactly a move towards stability here.
When did being a "tax haven" become a bad strategy for country or smaller jurisdiction?
Zero. I have not implemented any "classical algorithmic" code since college. Nobody writes search/sort/comparison code, or even implements data structure code such as balanced trees, skip lists, etc. because your framework or libraries provide those.
Hi, I just signed up, sounds like a neat service, but when I look at the lowest price plan, starting at 29.99 is pretty steep.
Though not comparable, there's a reason why dropbox starts at 9.99$ a month, and salesforce starts at 5$ a month (per user).
Maybe you should look into having a lower price point but with less features or less requests per month.
> there would be an entire ecosystem built up around finding these authors, then giving them enough money to write their books, in exchange for a cut of the profits down the road.

That's a great idea! We could call the entities that do that "publishers". They'd pay their authors in advance, independent of book sales, but then after that they'd take almost all the money raised by selling the books. Perhaps they'd give the authors, say, 10% of the takings, so that authors of really successful books could do well too.

It's amazing no one's thought of it before, really.

(Less-snarky version: It's perfectly true that you can't sit down, write for a few months, and reliably get rich. But what you present as evidence for that isn't, because in fact exactly the ecosystem you describe is what already exists, and it works just like you say, except that usually the authors do more work than 3-6 months and only a tiny fraction of them walk away with $1M.)
Not in order, and to be continued by others:

1. Iceland
"any program that used or linked to GPL code was required to be under the GPL"

The GPL requirement to maintain the copyright and license intact is a virus that propogates through all derivative copies of the code.
This is THEFT. I leave my country if that happens to me.

(I am from Poland, EU)
I'm Ben Thomson. I'm 13, and I made this music sharing website
This is pretty amazing.
Granted, I'm friends with the authors (@enjalot, @mrejfox), but Tributary has easily become one of my most used tools on a daily basis.
Cyprus is clearly not the most typical european country (with vast quantities of Russian money flowing through it). However this clearly demonstrates that people do not fully control what happens to their savings. I'm wondering how much it'll take for, for example, Spaniards to start removing their money from their banks. The French have already been doing so.
Are you sure you want to become a programmer?
I do have offshore company with Cyprus company current account. Does this tax also affects my company?
Thanks for reminding me about the Harper's Index. I love reading these things.
Wealthy Russians take a 10% cut on their deposits. Cyprus is a tax haven. Or the government has to bail out the banks via debt. Only the US can do that since the world buys oil in dollars and if we devalue our currency we can spread the pain. Cyprus cannot make decisions about their currency unilaterally.
Hashtags Coming to Facebook (Gawker)
Brilliant piece of writing, I thought.
The holders of those bank accounts are the ones deriving the benefit of the bailout. Without the bailout, those banks would go under, and in that situation the depositors would see a lot less than 90%.

It's still a silly idea from a practical viewpoint - the article is absolutely right about the loss of confidence - but I don't think it's immoral. The root cause here is that the depositors put their money in a bank which lent it to someone that isn't paying it back. Frankly those depositors should be counting their lucky stars that they're seeing anything - plenty in the same situation in the past haven't.
Is Satoshi Nakamoto's secret identity José Manuel Barroso? It's hard to imagine a way for the government to drive people to Bitcoin any harder (short of officially adopting it).
> Beta accounts are absolutly free and have the same privileges as the Baltus Plan.

either typo or ingeniously relevant reference to beverage
Using the OSX scheduler for some fun
This may be the most tinfoil-hat-oriented post I have ever read on HN. To paraphrase: "Google benefits in some way from Google Fiber, so it's EVIL!!!!1"

Surely you can see how utterly insane that is? Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Google Fiber is 100% altruistic by any means. The position that a large base of Fiber installations would put them in is enviable in a number of ways, involving several of the markets they're involved in. However, completely dismissing the possibility that they saw an opportunity to disrupt the necrotic oligopoly BS we have in the ISP market and jumping straight to "EVIL!!" is beyond ridiculous. Google certainly has done a lot of things in the last few years that belie their early image, but the amount of times that "evil" has been thrown around to describe them is just laughable.

tl;dr: The definition of "not evil" is not "a 100% charitable endeavor with no conceivable benefit".
Wow, I just played with the basic example, and being able to "slide" an integer in my code and watch the visualization update in realtime is pretty interesting! Looking forward to playing with this, nice work.
Notes from The Valley: The real social network
Show HN: My webkit matrix implementation in 646 bytes
I recommend a referendum to default on the European loans, convert to a new currency, and become an even larger tax haven for the russian mafia.
You're still giving your eyes and attention to "these dicks".

I suggest trying to find and support media that is offered without DRM in the first place, if that is what you consider important.
It's odd that your site isn't coming up in a google search for brombone. That's probably hurting you a ton. You might look into that. I've had even tiny pages come up pretty quick in google searches.

Good luck to you, man. I am really glad to see a real world example of what startup life is actually like instead of those one in a million instant takeoff sites that make real people feel so discouraged.
Virtual Office for Small Businesses | Small Business Consulting Group
They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain.

Except this actually used to happen a lot in European countries in the Middle Ages. Farmers would still pay taxes to the king, and they'd have to pay in goods if not in gold.
Hey,

Thanks for the reply but I don't own an iPad. If I did, I wouldn't design or code on it.
I like all the progress I've seen in web based editors over the years. However, one feature I use a lot in my IDE but have not seen in any web-based editor is code completion. When that gets implemented well, then it will be hard to resist using something this.
It often is retroactive.

California is looking at a retroactive tax on angels and entrepreneurs right now.

http://www.businessinsider.com/california-entrepreneurs-retr...
Social Movie Ratings - Rinema.com
I'm pretty sure that's called an internship :-)

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I like the ideals of free software, it's just not totally practical for everything.
wow, where to begin?
The only way for gold to inflate is for someone to dig up more gold, thereby increasing its supply.
I'm not really a potential customer, but I'll jump in: $199 and $499 per month shocked me, and the range $29 to $499 completely confused me about your target customer. You should have an option marked "FREE" and in the same text as the paid options, and not just "free beta" but "free trial".

It seems like your target customer is someone who's not going to set up PhantomJS on their own, right? For 500 dollars I'll figure out how to set it up.

Another comment: the intro two paragraphs are probably more technical than they should be. The "what for" should be above the "headless browser" section; you might even put all of that stuff on a second "technical details" page to not scare people away. You're not selling "headless browsing" (anyone knows that they want that can probably set it up), you're selling "testing" and "screenshots" (and maybe other services too).
Yes, one problem I see that this is repeatable and not predictable. Continual inflation can be predicted and planned for, but confiscation of people's money can happen whenever the government needs money. What if next week they take another 10%?
I've been thinking about this lately, and, at the risk of sounding like a doomsday kook, this seems to make sense to me (perhaps in a milder sense) no matter where one lives. My plan is, if I ever get over $X in my account, where X is some reasonable buffer to pay bills, etc., that I'll just buy gold with the overage[1]. Back in the day you'd at least get reasonable interest by keeping money in a bank, but nowadays it's really only the convenience of direct deposit and online bill pay that draws me. Even then, all these charges and penalties and sales pitches every time I enter a bank are really turning me off.

[1] I acknowledge some logistical challenges with my plan if I become a millionaire.
I wish you won't ever see the consequence of dire actions against you or your family. You have no idea how it feels like. You have no idea how unfair it is.

In case that you have not realized it, you are not paying any money. You are loaning with loan-shark rates. Have you ever heard of a loan-shark losing money?

Things are much more complicated than black or white.

Greece and Cyprus are not independent countries. Their very existence was built on loan. Loan with a purpose. And this purpose fulfills as we speak.

These countries' sovereignty is more than a joke, more than a century old.

You feel cheated. Greeks (people living in Cyprus are also Greeks) feel cheated. Every single person feels cheated.

Sadly, we live in the dystopian future where international mega-corporations (a.k.a banks) have more power than some countries.

You can however blame the rotten democratic system that we live by. You can blame human kind's greedy nature.

But you can't blame people of being stupid. The society can only be evaluated by the way it treats its weakest members. You can't blame stupid. You must protect them. This is what makes a society virtuous. Protecting its weakest links. Everything else is pure low-level greediness instinct that has driven us from living into caves to the modern world.

If thinking that poor nations had it coming helps you keep your conscious clean, so be it.

But it has always been about survival of the fittest and not survival of everybody and apparently it will keep being this way. Until human kind becomes one. Above races, religions, borders and whatever.

Amen :)
There are pan-European laws that if a bank goes under you get the funds up to €100.000 you had in the bank reimbursed by the state.

The reason for this is that is that banks are the financial glue of society, and for better or worse we can't live without them. Bankruns can bankrupt a bank in a day, thus it's incredibly important that people feel secure in knowing that the money they have in the bank is secure no matter what.

This trust has just been put to the test with this incredibly stupid move.
Show HN: Lsp - a short little lisp in Python
DVDs remain a video media which can be considered DRM free (their DRM is nominal and trivially removable). Most other video distribution channels remain seriously afflicted by DRM. Video is one of the few industries where DRM is still very dominant. Other industries such as e-books and gaming move away from DRM, though slowly. Or at least you can find decent DRM free channels for them. Music industry already dumped DRM for good.

So if you care, buy DVDs and ignore DRM afflicted distribution channels.

The problem with Netflix is not just in them using DRM, but in them actively proliferating it, up to pushing to build it into HTML standard. While the general trend goes in the right direction, Netflix pushes into the wrong one.
Man, how I hate blogs that I can't find a link to the main site!!! And it appears to be the rule!! :-/
Yea, there is a reason why Glass-Steagall was enacted.
We're early on yet.

Early on in the internet era, much less the social network era. Everything we've done so far has been just mapping out the territory. The actual building on it is yet to come.

And it's ok if you're too comfortable where you are to build it. Others aren't. They'll get it done.
My takeaway: being an author is like being a startup software developer. A few hit it big. Really Big. Tom Clancy. Instagram. The other 99.5%? You never hear about them.
My understanding is that securities (stocks, bonds, derivatives) are under your name so you maintain ownership of the securities even if the ibank that acted as your broker goes down. (This is why money management companies maintain separate accounts for each of their clients rather than have an aggregate pool)

So the Cypress banks going bankrupt wouldn't have affected these securities. The deposits on the other hand would have potentially lost a huge fraction of their value.

(Though I still don't think this was a wise move...)

edit: I wonder what warranted a downvote in this comment of mine?
I checked it out to see if it's something that interests me.

It took me a while to "get it" (i.e. understand what it does). The aha moment came with the sentence, "It doesn't display the page on a monitor."

If you can, try to get to the explanation sooner, using simple words. I think I'd seen the phrase "headless browser" before but I'd forgotten what it meant.
A lot of commenters focussing here on technical privacy solutions - but that seems to be missing the current move towards behavioural tracking. And the irony is that this is a lot of the really exciting stuff for many here - look at truelens and storm for example. Given the adulation and reverence here for highly politically engaged and extreme right-wing characters like Peter Thiel, we shouldn't be at all surprised by this kind of outcome.
If it was anywhere near 50 million active users, Google Reader would not have been shut down. Even if it was 25 million actives it would still be kicking. Plain and simple. Subscribing to CNN seems like the behavior of beginner RSS readers who abandon the concept. Seems like a good idea, but a general, high volume feed with more noise than signal for the average person doesn't really make sense for Google Reader user. I'd be shocked if the number of those actively reading the CNN feed was anywhere above 5 million.

For comparison, CNN on Twitter only has 7.7 million followers. Do you honestly believe 3x more people are reading CNN's RSS feed than their Twitter feed?
When did Iceland become a "tax haven" intentionally or otherwise? If you're thinking of the recent banking crisis, a "high-interest rate account haven" would be a more accurate term.
Physical gold bars are not money but a phyiscal, tradeable asset. It cannot be inflated except via mining - but even then there are roughly known quantities of metal in the ground that are then liberated. What can be inflated however is paper gold where more paper gold exists and is traded than physically exists - some estimate a 100 - 1 paper to physical ratio.

True that gold has no intrisic value, it's value is derived from other people valuing it and willing to trade services for it - and they have done so for thousands of years, where as a typical fiat currency (USD) does not have such a timespan. "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero." (Voltaire, 1694-1778)

btw - as i understand it wasn't a 10% tax, it was a mandatory debt for equity trade- meaning the depositors now own some part of the bank.
The first, recent, article I found on Iceland seems to be critical, though not in a particularly damning way: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/21/us-iceland-economy...

Iceland is growing at 2 percent, faster than much of Europe. But Petursson's comments underscore worries about the recovery's sustainability in a straightjacket of capital controls - coupled with questions over having a currency that one politician compared to the Disneyland dollar.

Growth has been downgraded this year from 3 percent to 2 percent. Inflation is stubbornly high and the central bank has been forced to step up intervention in the currency market to prop up a weakening crown.

Many expected Iceland's recovery to be stronger given the way smaller economies can bounce from deep recessions. The International Monetary Fund had originally forecast annual growth of around 4.5 percent from 2011-2013. It now is under half that.
The news broke out today. All banks are closed on Saturdays except Co-operative Banks. However, even those were essentially closed today as people gathered to minimize their losses (ie, withdraw all their money from the bank).

Nobody could withdraw or transfer any money today to any account, period. No matter how much money you had.

A friend of mine, a banker, said that (he hopes that) these news are just a fear mongering attempt and that it will never pass through the parliament (scheduled for an emergency meeting on Sunday).

What I'm saying is that in theory there is nothing preventing you from "just putting their savings in bitcoin" but in practice, when you don't have cash and all your money is just numbers in a bank screen, you don't really have any savings.

The fact that the state can at any time take any percentage of your money is theft, plain and simple. It's not about being politically right or left, it's just theft and unlawful and absolutely unconstitutional. I really don't know how something like this can pass through the parliament but, at the same, I have zero trust on our politicians to act like rational human beings.

Personally, I wouldn't mind paying high taxes if I saw a real social, public, shared benefit for doing so. But paying high taxes, getting lower wages, and being ripped off so easily and without consent or even a warning is just too much.

More and more educated and skilled Cypriots are not even considering of going back to Cyprus, if they are abroad, and those who are in Cyprus are eager to figure out a way to escape.

In addition to this recent economic crisis, there's also a ton of political bullshit, fighting, and wars since the early 1900's and even before that. Unfortunately Cypriots, although a strong and proud people, were never able to grow a pair, agree on something, and fight for it.
In the U.S., a new tax like this would require an act of Congress. If it passed it would most likely be found Constitutional--there are basically no limits on the power of the Congress to levy a tax.

But, it would take truly dire straits for Congress to even consider such an obviously unpopular idea. And those dire straits would have a much harder time arriving in the U.S. than the EU.

Cypress (and Greece, and Italy, etc) is in such big trouble because they cannot print their own currency. The U.S. can always bail out its banks because it can create as many dollars as it needs. In fact this is what happened a few years ago, and why the U.S. financial system is currently in better shape than the EU.

The flaws in the EU concept have been laid bare by this financial crisis. When you have financial consolidation without political consolidation, you get unelected bureaucrats deciding to take 10% of the bank accounts in one member nation, and there's nothing that population can do about it. In the U.S., the threat of getting voted out office is a powerful restraint on the governent's eagerness to levy shocking new taxes.
Is this a good idea for sorting your photos?
Know How podcast Episode 35 has some good tips on organizing your photo collection. http://twit.tv/show/know-how/35

My problem was that I had EVERY photo I'd ever taken over the last 12 years! I've never deleted anything - or looked at them. I've backed them up on to 8 BluRay Discs so far.

So I needed a way to shrink my collection to a manageble, share-worthy collection. This isn't a one day job, more like something thats going to take months - so I wrote a program that would index my collection, identify duplicates, and let me step through the unique photos one at a time and tag the good ones - then I can export to a date based folder structure.

Now my collection is a more reasonable size, and structured well on the disk - I'm exporting it as I go, and loading it up in Picasa and sharing on Google+. BTW, if I exit the app, when I reopen it I can continue from where I left off.

I've got over 50000 photos, turns out nearly half are duplicates, but I'm over 20% of the way through my collection and my family are finally getting to see the photos!

See http://photo-sorter.appspot.com/﻿

But so far, no-one has given me any feedback - not a single one - so I don't know if anyone other than me actually thinks this is a worthwhile idea or if no-one has found it yet! Any thoughts?
> Except

Pretty sure the OP was talking about the present times...
Don't repost (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1adcv8/video_chin...) stuff from the front page of Reddit. Also, politics doesn't belong on HN, so please stop.
What about if the alternative is no bailout, the bank goes under, and you get almost nothing back at all?

Like it or not, when you deposit 100 euros in a bank, you don't have 100 euros anymore - you instead now have an unsecured bank debt with a face value of 100 euros.
The good stuff starts around 3:20.
Looks like it's known as Silver Linings in Germany: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1045658/releaseinfo#akas
Gold's value in fiat currency goes up with the fiat currency's inflation.
The thing is, your country signed an agreement to help them if they need it. You don't get to punish them for the fact that you are upset to have to meet your obligations.
If you think gold is a predictable and low-volatility store of value you really should look at inflation adjusted gold prices from 1980-2000.
If you don't like the terms they're offering, just don't consume the content they create.
Would be an interesting third party tool. Does anyone do this already? Something as simple as receiving a list of usernames over time.