skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does a company have right to spam in India?
I received promotional emails from Apple, without any unsubscribe link which states,
"Since India has no anti-spamming law, we follow the US directive passed in Bill.1618 Title III by the 105th US Congress, which states that mail cannot be considered spam if it contains contact information, which this mail does."

Can a company like Apple can do this ? If not illegal, is not it morally bad ? Can gmail/yahoo mail mark it as SPAM ? What should I do to report it to them ?
Steve Yegge on ten great books
Any idea where I can get something like LeechBlock that works system wide (on OS X Leopard)? I usually access news feeds via NetNewsWire and my primary browser is Opera, so LeechBlock is not an option for me.
I meant the 'switch between what you want and what you don't want'.

It's creative.
Cached judgments of merit? Give the strained engineering metaphors a rest. This has nothing to do with caching, and has everything to do with filtering out bad information.

For any sufficiently complicated subject, your average person lacks the knowledge, experience or intelligence to weigh arguments solely on their merits. It isn't popular to say here to a bunch of opinionated techies, but credentials are a way of bypassing limitations in our own knowledge.

Said another way: there are subjects that must be learned through experience. I am more inclined to believe the opinions of a World Bank economist than I am to believe the comments of JoeThePlumber123456 in some online libertarian forum.
1 - Why is 'y' necessarily so low? An average Indonesian may be poor, but facebook users are above average income.

It may be more a case of an immature ad market. IE something that will improve over time. I keep pointing out that advertisers need time to learn about using the tools before they bid up prices. Even Adwords, which is an incredibly effective & wide-application ad system served mostly snake-oil ebook sales letters @ 5c a click in its early days. I would argue that it wasn't until the majority of advertisers' sites were redesigned with adwords in mind that the value and therefore bids for these ads increased.

2 - How often is bandwidth such a big chunk of 'x?'

As knitinblue rightly mentions, this may be an issue for video, but what about mostly text sites? Most online services have a high fixed/marginal costs. Isn't that what created this 'free' dynamic in the first place? IE If serving an additional user breaks the bank, this means you are close to a break-even point for marginal costs. This probably means you don't have a functioning business model because you will not cover fixed costs anyway. Of course, a big enough difference in the relative value of US/Indonesian eyeballs breaks this logic. A low enough fixed/marginal ratio excludes it.

3 - They mostly don't have a choice because of network effect.

What would happen if facebook or crippled itself in poorer countries? This would give an advantage to competitor that does not. Being able to see video from India & interact with people in China is valuable. Valuable enough to prefer facebook global to facebook-US. What percentage of US users have facebook friends from other countries?

Basically, I think the logic of this article can only apply to a small number of online businesses. Network effects are not important to them. They are mostly broadcasters. In other words, the benefit of using them doesn't depend on their popularity and bandwidth makes up a big part of their costs.
Nice hit!

This is pretty funny:

Wattvision also hopes to add in smart social networking features (Singh previously worked at Microsoft)
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I can vouch for the validity of a lot of what is in this article. I set policy for a network of a little over 200 computers. When I first started I was pretty lax. My opinion in regards to the internet was I didn't care what they used it for as long as it wasn't illegal or dangerous. If it interfered with their work output their boss could deal with it in the same way he'd deal with someone reading a personal book or calling a personal friend at work.

But unfortunately it just spun out of control. I had two DS3 lines at 45mbps a piece and they were getting maxed out. I had people bringing in their personal computers and using the wireless network for p2p, people watching TV in their desktop background and all kinds of other stuff.

Eventually I had to shut it down. Employees needed the internet for actual work purposes and the personal stuff was causing that to run at painfully slow speeds. In the end I still try to give them a little freedom but only to view regular websites. Anything video/audio related is blocked (to the best of my ability)
craiglist is the first place I go to buy and sell used stuff. I do search eBay to get an idea on the price to set when I want to sell something but I don't like all the effort it takes to auction an item.
Sorry, not a very good article, the arguments are simplistic and don't make much sense to me.

There is a good discussion to be had about the GPL but this is not it.
Another Firefox 3 victim!
Not from the makers of Pontiac
Isn't this a way of saying you can only monetise a site off the backs of users who have money?

There are two ways out of this. One, as described, to block off users who can't pay. I can't tell you how sad that makes me - the net, divided into haves and have nots. Progress, not.

The second one is to take the long view. Many of the places mentioned are emerging economies. Subsidise them now and that will pay off in the long run. I like this one better, but then I am not the Facebook CFO.
Motorola Launches FR Series Mobile Phones in India
Are you sure you're receiving those emails from Apple? As opposed to someone perhaps hawking iPods or something? Because everything about that screams generic Indian spammer to me, not "cautious American multinational which is obsessive-compulsive about brand image".
Intellisense Driven API Design
I think it's a well-written article, but he fails to acknowledge the economic principle of free-riders. I think it destroys his argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
If anyone could write down a game # for when this happens, that'd be very helpful in debugging!
Ask HN: A Vesting-Over-Time Scheme for Startups
To give some background, I founded a startup this January, and since have gathered three others as Cofounders. Since money is not involved yet, we need to figure out a way to share equity fairly among the team members. * I am thinking of a vesting-over-time scheme with a Monthly Schedule, and wanted to run it by the HN community and get their opinion regarding this as well.

The scheme works as following. The total ownership pie will be first divided in to two

* Fraction of fixed ownership (original founder, investors, etc)

* Fraction to be vested by the team dynamically

The fraction left for the team is to be vested and divided based on each persons contributions on a monthly schedule. At end of every month, everyone would agree on the work contributed by them (for example 50% by #1, 25% #2, 25% #3, etc). By having a log of this every month, we can calculate the total work contributed by a team members as a fraction. This would account for anyone who joins in later on, who works full time, works part time, who go the extra mile, and anyone that leaves (as some of the cofounders have obligations such as school and other work after the Summer). So end every month, the part of the startup's ownership is redistributed. My goal is to make the scheme fair for everyone.

The fixed ownership is owned by by someone such as a investor and does not change over time. For example, if we agree to give an investor 10%, that would be added to the fixed ownership fraction (and that 10% will come off the team's ownership fractions in a fair manner).

What do you all think about this scheme? Any pitfalls? Good/Bad? Any Alternatives?

Here is a spreadsheet with this. There are charts on the last three if nothing I said makes sense... The Numbers are hypothetical just to to be used an example.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rBkybK6z5iSGmpfU-EWOyzw
Allow Your Users To Upload Files
Hulu iPhone app coming soon
Online streaming video service which offers a wide range of shows and movies, Hulu, are in the course of producing a new exciting app for the iPhone, and will be with us in just a couple of months.

This is possibly the best time to release the app as it is near when the iPhone will update its software to 3.0 meaning a lot of changes, including this one, will be on its way. The one problem Hulu face is sloting in some advertising, which frankly, is a chance they must take in order to advance in the technologic world.

Why on earth would Apple abide by this?

What many people will be thinking when reading this is, why would Itunes ever approve of it? From where I stand, there are two views that can be undertaken, one of which is this is extremely bad for Apple Itunes where users purchase lots of videos + music for anytime use, if this goes forward Itunes video store could go bust, potentially as well as all the advertising Hulu can put in giving them even more benefit, using a lot of Itunes bandwidth.

The other way to look at it, on Itunes side, is that if this news is spreading fast, it will mean people will be increasingly obliged to go out to the shops or online, and go on buy an iTouch or iPhone purely because the Hulu video app is simply a too good of a chance to let by...
Yes - this. I've been doing the same for the past couple months, and I've encountered several types.

Some companies just have me recite my resume - I feel these haven't done any legwork at all, and I usually don't bother.

Others seem to have looked over things, and have me describe in detail the problems I solved, the various alternatives I considered, and so on. This is a good thing!

Only two companies sent me coding assignments, which I completed rather well, I think - I imagine these companies got the best feedback of what I was capable of.

Aside: coding problems are a fine line to walk. One assignment I got had a trivial implementation of the spec, so I actually extended it to make not trivial (basically, they removed everything but the special cases). I extended the problem and wrote the general code.

Other companies have problems that require quite a lot of coding, or at least a lot of time to think and design "correctly". They are interesting problems, but when hiring interns, companies should remember that interns are also usually full-time students (and this one hold a part-time job as well). I just simply didn't have the time to devote to implementing your complex problem, especially when I'm only half-interested in your company.

In the end, perhaps my experience was slightly unusual, because I think my resume displays a lot of experience doing the things I am looking to do more of. Also, looking for an internship is much different than looking for a full-time job.

Hiring is difficult, yes: companies have a hard time finding good engineers, and good engineers have a hard time finding somewhere interesting to work (Social networks are cool and all, but if you're building one that simply targets a specific set of people, with no extra differentiation, I'm simply not interested.) This is why I'm so interested in entrepreneurship - you get to work at a great company, and you only have the best engineers working for you! (Hopefully.)
Eric Rosenfeld Talking LTCM, Ten Years Later
How To Add Image Buttons
Coincidentally I'm watching Reddit's keynote from PyCon and they wrote their own CSS compiler called C55. Their keynote is at http://blip.tv/file/1951296/ and the slides at (starting with slide 29) http://www.slideshare.net/kn0thing/ride-the-snake-reddit-key...

The thing I like most about what they've done is to embed the functionality into CSS, rather than writing a new meta-language.
We all read it.
This article is written in a confusing manner but his point is basically that the GPL forces people who write software that derives from GPL licensed code to open source their derivative software. By doing so it discourages people from using GPL licensed software because some of those developers might want to close their source code.

I see the point but I’m not sure I agree with it. He claims the open source community “loses allies” when it enforces the GPL against companies who closed their source. But if those people are taking GPL licensed code and violating the terms than they are not allies at all. So his argument really boils down to having the GPL but not enforcing it so you can keep allies that are allies in name only.

There are more permissive open source licenses out there and if a developer wants someone to be able to use their open source code in closed source projects they can use one of those. But when people choose the GPL they are doing so to further the ideal of completely open source code. Meaning allies like the ones described above are counter-productive because they would compromise that ideal by doing exactly what the GPL users are fighting against.
You might be able to try it out in Denmark. Granted it would never fly in the public schools, but we have something called "free"* schools that are largely subsidised by the public, but with very wide rules for what they can do, so you might be able to use that.

* Free as in speech, but I don't think there is anything like that in the US.
For news feed you should use a planet aggregator like Planet Venus: http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/
It generates a static html page that I read once a day.

And why don't you switch to ff ?
we stand to lose not only Cisco as an ally, but any corporation that estimates (rightly or wrongly) that their own potential exposure to an SFLC lawsuit might be greater than their potential efficiency gains from open-sourcing.

Why should that matter if we live in universe B and their estimates are therefore wrong? The open source community, being more efficient, would just build an alternative product that works better.

OTOH, if we did not have the GPL or refused to enforce it, nothing would deter an unscrupulous company from stealing open source code and not contributing their own improvements to it to the community. Any improvements to the software from the open source community would quickly be incorporated into the proprietary version, while any improvements made by the hypothetical unscrupulous company would remain proprietary. Once a few of these companies started enjoying success, every other profit-maximizing company would be forced by the market to follow suit or perish, and we'd eventually have a clusterfuck of companies stealing open source code while the open source community dwindled to nothing because their products could never possibly compete with the proprietary alternatives.

I think we live in universe C, where, without an enforceable GPL, the most efficient method of software production would be to take what you can (from the open source community), and give nothing back. YARR!
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I tried to "shorten" http://qzip.in/ and got http://qzip.in/h4. ;)
That's because of Google's anti-cloaking policy. Webmasters are not allowed to show a different screen to visitors than they show to the GoogleBot; they get banned from Google's index if they do.

Unless of course the site is a scholarly journal. Google lets them go wild with cloaking.
US Only I assume? Or are you eyeing off the rest of the world this quickly?
Good ideas keep getting re-invented. There's about 4 or 5 versions of this with slightly different syntax, etc. But Sass alone has scripting, mixins, and libraries. These are the language features that make compass possible.

From the feature set I see there, that is where Sass was about 1 to 1.5 years ago.
When I worked on a large contract for a customer with 20,000 desktops and a couple of thousand servers we used to take great delight in waxing about our server virtualisation to major hardware vendors... and then drop the bomb that we had virtualised 250 instances of Windows NT...

NT was (then) 7 years out of support and is nearer 10 now. But if you have apps that run on it, they still run on it...

However trying getting an replacement network card with NT drivers these days. Virtualisation is your man...
I think he has fixed it now. I tried it and it did nothing.
I think Particle Tree had better coverage of the subject of styling input buttons, and using semantically more useful "button" elements: http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-el...
Social Group for HN Users?
Is there like a LinkedIn group for HN users?
Was this post written by someone marketing seesmic desktop? Tweetdeck is still ahead and in my opinion much much cleaner. Tried both of them and am definitely sticking with tweetdeck. I am however looking forward to any kinds of updates to seesmic desktop and will give it another try.
but if you swallowed a spider then perhaps you'd die.
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"It may be more a case of an immature ad market. IE something that will improve over time."

You are assuming that e-commerce works here. That people look at advertisements and a portion of which is actually converted to kind of a sale somewhere. The problem in South Asia, Africa is that this "conversion to action" is very very low. And that's because of a variety of factors, penetration is low, credit system is not mature enough, people dont yet trust businesses online yet, etc. Inept internet advertising is a symptom, not the cause.
Reminds me of Seth Robinson's Dungeon Scroll:

http://rtsoft.com/dscroll/index.shtml
The good thing is that this might mean that the civilization destroying solar magnetic storm to hit us in 2012 may not be quite that bad, giving us a few more decades to fix our high voltage power nets to be more resilient.

But then, predictions are difficult, especially if they are about the future.
Agree. OTOH, a business is not a charity, by definition. I guess that as a businessman, you'd have to calculate whether your expectation of future revenue justifies the added expense, in which case you are really "investing" in a future market, not "subsidising" it. Still, something feels wrong about cutting data/information flow on this basis on the net...
I hate Jeff, but this post makes sense: instead of being constrained by the backwards compatibility requirement, one can just pack every past version of the software on each release, just like HTTP clients and servers do when they ask for the protocol version.
Scholarly journal with a useful abstract. There are rules even for them.
I see this also as a way of getting developers to stop being so damned lazy. If I were MS I'd start stripping deprecated API calls out of the OS immediately - force anyone who's still running an ancient code base that they refuse to maintain to virtual mode. This might light a fire under their asses to get "Windows 7 compatibility" (i.e. no lame dead API hooks) higher priority.

Back-compat has always been the main force that held MS back, I'm glad they're doing something about it.
At first I was not amused by another URL shortener.

Now I respect you for having the guts to post it here. Props to you.

The only thing that you should add is an optional email address input. Now you can contact the people that are using your app. For instance, if you wanted to email everyone after you rolled out a new feature.
Like a new feature that enables your app to email the link you just created to yourself. Maybe is sends another email after 10,25,50,100 visits to let you know.
Ask HN: What software do you use for real time remote collaboration?
This is an area that I have no knowledge about. The idea of being able to travel around for a year or two to many different locations while running a company appeals to me (and many of you, too, so it seems), but I would need a way to do remote presentations and collaboration with clients in real-time utilizing voice and/or video along with something to allow me to control powerpoint-esque presentations and a shared notepad / whiteboard. Who are the industry leaders in the field for this software? Is there anything open-source available?
Can people play their XP games via the virtualized layer?

If not, then there isn't true backwards compatibility, just more bloat.
Yeah, create a twitter and maybe even a meetup.com thingee. It's always great to meet with other hackers.
Outdoor Wrist Mount GPS Foretrex 101
The economical Foretrex 101 is the wrist-mount GPS that frees up your hands so you can focus on your outdoor activities. This product joins the Foretrex 201 in Garmin's growing line of wearable, wrist navigation devices.
Nokia 5800 Reaches 20% Market Share
I recently realized that it might be possible to just point a webcam at the meter and somehow read the digits off that (I'd really like to have a way to log that electronically).

The trend in Germany seems to be for power providers to offer the data via web, though. They are not there yet, but test programs are already being rolled out (some transmitting the data via the power line, others using DSL).

Even just having online access to the overall consumption would be so nice. It would then probably be easy to create twittering washing machines and coffee makers on top of that...
The basic error of this article is that it ignores the prisoner's dilemma problem. The basic idea behind that problem, as a reminder, is that parties acting in their best interest for themselves will, in certain situations, select a suboptimal outcome.

Applied to open/closed source software, the prisoner's dilemma suggests that parties acting in their own interest will opt for closed-source software, because of the personal benefits (trade secrets, market power, etc.). Thus, even if open-source software is more efficient as a general matter, everyone will go for closed source, resulting in an inefficient outcome.

The solution to the prisoner's dilemma, of course, is contracts. By binding the hands of the parties, you can force people to choose the more optimal solution. The ideal contract adds a breach penalty that offsets whatever selfish gain may be reaped from defecting, and thereby encourages cooperation.

This is, in effect, what the GPL does: it adds a penalty to closed source software (namely, you can't use open-source with it). If open source is indeed more efficient, then developers will be willing to forego the benefits of closed source in order to take advantage of open source software.

I think that this generally summarizes what everyone else is saying ("nothing would deter an unscrupulous company from stealing open source code," "economic principle of free riders"). My own comment is offered as a general thought, not a precise cost-benefit analysis. There is much more careful thinking on this subject, much of it in the law review articles I read while in law school.