skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Court jails Pirate Bay founders
Did you have to pay anything to the collection agency?
Ask HN: Please review our (open-source) code sharing site
Fast enough, I have cable modem. They started to change very quickly after a few minutes. While the site appeared to be completely loaded, however, the widget went blank after any change within the first few minutes. I got the same result in Firefox and Safari. It most definitely could have been a glitch in my connection, however if it affects me it will affect others too. Hence my suggestion for a loading indicator, it gives us something to watch the pass the time :)

Here are some example indicators:

http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en-us&...
Link to just the text: http://tinypaste.com/4c117
The HN title and in parts the wording of the article is misleading, even if it's later cleared up in the article. For them to refuse to retain data would imply it's somehow required of them, which it isn't.
As Court Prepares Shackles For The Pirate Bay, Other Torrent Sites Are Ready To Replace It
Newer versions of Python also have generator expressions which look similar to list comprehensions but with parenthesis instead of brackets. They mostly can be used for similar purposes but they are lazy, that is they only generate results as they are requested.
you can do better, if you count new users votes the half. Newbie may vote often, as they are new.
Why people hate cable companies
Yes. Gmail added some features like the Jabber integration ('Googletalk' or so) that make it more useful if your contact also use Gmail.
we can if we vote less!!
No, not up front--part of their pitch was "we don't get paid unless you do".
A friend and I have been working on this website for sharing code-snippets for the Android API for a few months now. Over the last weeks we made many improvements and are preparing the next release of the source code. The backend of the site is based on djangosnippets.org source ('cab'), with the code being released under the BSD license.

We are trying our best to improve the website and to create a good user experience. Please help us by letting us know what you think about the project; we greatly appreciate any suggestions and feedback!
What about name and shame? Does everyone know that this company doesn't pay? Do all of their employees know? Does their bank know? Do their customers and other vendors know? The threat of going public might help you, if you know anything about their business.

Just think about what a collection agency does, they have no special powers, they just start calling people and don't stop. It doesn't take too long to have your (outsourced?) admin go through calling everyone that works there each day.
Build your career by learning R
Rubygems now has plugins
StumbleUpon Makes Discovery Easy
I'm sorry, I thought that was what you were arguing when you said:

"The delinquency letter you send out to deadbeat clients that says you work with XXX debt collection agency to recover fees is likely to get a better response rate than the one that says you'll "pursue all options"."
So here’s a suggestion to sites still hiding behind the beta wall: Throw open the gates. Get your own Fail Whale ready. And please, let me know when I can link not to your invite-only beta program, but to your cool, slightly buggy site available to everyone - now.

This is pretty much exactly what I did when I was starting my website. Instead of locking everything down, as soon as I had a reasonable working beta, I opened it up for free to anyone that happened along and wanted to sign up. Because I didn't advertise, most of those early free signups were either referrals, or random happenstance.

Personally, I think as soon as you've got a reasonable working beta, you might as well open it up and let people try it out.
That study may still not suffice from a scientific viewpoint.

You'd have to take people and randomly allow / deny them piracy. Normal Pirates are self-selected.
My annual performance review includes a category for "staying on top of recent developments in web development and software engineering." In light of that, I would not call Hacker News my personal reading agenda.
Your analogy is more wrong than right. It is right in the sense that ordering from a menu at a restaurant can be a kind of code, but it is really just a subset of the common language useable by anyone. If you don't understand what you will get when you order, don't order it, because it might be crap; ask them and they will tell you what it is, in whatever common language is used in that restaurant.

A contract is a "meeting of minds", and the minds are the minds of the parties not the minds of lawyers and judges. If the parties can't understand it, it is not a contract, any more than the signature of an Alzheimer's patient is valid, and signing something not clear and plain is a bad idea.

In the Anglo-Saxon/British-American/Western/Modern or whatever you want to call it system of law, we do not have specialized codes that require experts to be intermediaries between parties to a contract.

Humanity has experimented with the specialized code / scribe / clerk way of doing law. Often when an advanced society does not have widespread literacy, there is a specialized class through which all legal actions must flow; but as the aphormism says, "the life of the law is in experience not logic", and however appealing to technical people those special codes and classes of experts might be, experience shows that the code / expert societies are replaced by the common language / accessible court system.

Enough bullshit philosophy and history: here's some actually useful advice. Collect example, well and simply written contracts. Start from example contracts in the Nolo publications or books like "Legal Forms for Everyone" by Carl W. Battle (ISBN 978-1-58115-451-1). If you have business contacts who have done similar contracts, ask them for a copy that you can use as a template.

After all, that is all the high-priced legal firms do. They have their collection of cribs of previous documents and they re-work and re-combine as needed.

This is not to belittle the legal profession or suggest you don't need a lawyer. Simply because you can express something in simple clear language and both parties agree, does not mean it will hold up in court or that it is a good idea.
Cool thanks, I was able to get in and check it out. I thought I saw somewhere before that it has a setting for stroke order strictness, but I could not find it documented anywhere. Overall I think the UI needs a little work still but very glad to see this concept in execution. I await the release of Japanese..
Getting Brand Communities Right (HBR)
Golden Gate Ruby Conference Live Stream (starts at 9:30AM PST Friday 17th & Saturday 18th)
Be widely read, dabble in a lot of different things and always look for opportunities to apply solutions from one field to problems in another field.
World of Goo was later revised down to a little below the 5/6 seen here.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-pira...

Conversion rate appears to be 1:1000 with piracy numbers this high.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350
Thanks for the reference.

I just got off the phone with them. They seemed very professional and they said they typically charge 25-30% of the collected amount, but they usually don't do one-off collections. They typically work with companies that have at least 10-15 non-paying customers.
Stay in the UK I would.
Here's the Schedule too: http://gogaruco.com/schedule/
there is a big difference between a customer who is late on payments (such as in the case you are describing) and one who is flat-out refusing to pay. it sounds like legal intimidation is the only way the original poster is going to get any money out of his former customer.

debt collectors keep calling when you say you can't make the payment, but as soon as you tell them you are refusing to pay, they will stop calling and close the account because they know there is no way further harassment will get you to give in and pay up.
Unless I suck at reading (which is possible), I don't think he's advocating people get rid of TDD.

"While there are many other valid reasons to practice TDD, as a pure bug fixing mechanism it's always seemed far too much like premature optimization for my tastes."
This message is just from Trend Micro's Interscan Web Security Suite product (that's the "IWSS" bit. It's typically hooked into existing web proxies via ICAP.)

Trend have an "interesting" track-record of site categorisation, but it's possible that the URL is correctly categorised and the operators of the IWSS have chosen to block that category.

Then again, the people that Trend employ to visit websites probably just saw the name "Hacker news" and filed it as 'hacking'/bad stuff. They probably don't spend too much time on any individual web site.
I've done something similar to this and it's worked the 2 times I've done it. I think the problem I had was that it was obvious I was a one-man shop and they thought they could push me around. As soon as they realized my lawyers were more expensive than theirs they both changed their tunes very quickly.
I don't know if this applies to your site or not, but if you have any dynamic http requests (non-cacheable) that approach doesn't work very well. You're much better off doing it on the fly with nginx as paul suggests; the impact on CPU is not noticeable even under very heavy load.
Consultants Can Destroy Your Startup
Oh! and people are chilling in #gogaruco on freenode. :) Looks like there are gonna be some interesting talks
Small Claims Court: usually limited to 2-3k, so you're giving up 7-8k, AND you have to spend your time in court. Doesn't seem like a wise expenditure of time versus revenue given the other options.

Lawyer Letter: TJIC's suggestion is a very good one. However he's already sent them a copy of the legal contract the company signed, so it's possible this could likely be a waste a few hundred bucks of attorney fees. If he tried this, and they continued to ignore him, would a collections agency be a logical next step? If not, what would?

Social Engineering: Frankly it sounds like the new CEO isn't going to say "Oh you're going to fly here, man I better cut a check quick". So you're probably out a plane ticket a day of work.

The last thing a small business needs to do is to have a key person wrapped up for hours/day/weeks trying to recover money from a clearly uncooperative/belligerent person. They need to find the best balance of revenue versus time spent. After the threatening legal letter (which is sort of dick-ish I guess), I think a collections agency is the next logical step.
Rails 2.3.2 upgrade gotchas
I use a Greasemonkey script to achieve similar results. The search appears above the Google organic results, and I don't lose the advertising on the right (which I need to see as it's by biz)
Yahoo News needs a serious overhaul
The French translation is not good either. I wouldn't trust a website where the grammar/spelling/style is bad.

I use oDesk to find native speakers to review what I write before it is published. For less than $10, you can find a US citizen that can review a 500+ page to fix the grammar and style. You might be able to find a French Canadian to do the same for the french translation (also French Canadian and French are not exactly the same).
This is fully awesome, though I guess I should upgrade to Firebug 1.4. It doesn't seem to work on 1.3.3 at all (though I may be missing something). And I know it says it requires/recommends 1.4, I just thought I'd mention it for anyone running FB 1.3.3
Exploit Development Framework Design
Mixins Considered Harmful
Run it in nspluginwrapper, so that when Flash crashes it doesn't take down the browser. You just have to refresh the page for the Flash object to run again. Flash crashes less than once a day for me, and I use Flash a lot.
Yeah dynamic stuff is a whole different kettle of fish. The dynamic content on Mibbit is usually very small - maybe 100-200 bytes. The HTTP request headers are usually more (Which can't be compressed).

For Mibbit, I'd like to eventually do my own compression which will beat the socks off gzip, as it'll be session based rather than per request.

But yeah, I can see use cases where you're sending dynamic stuff which will benefit from gzip and where pre-caching on disk doesn't really make sense.
I think your suggestion is a good one. However, I'm not prepared to spend the time and legal fees to take them to court and I don't make empty threats.
From a comment above, United Mercantile takes 30%, so it sounds like you'd be better off with them instead of small claims court. Also, many/most states don't actually do the collection for you if you win, so you may have to resort to a collections agency anyhow. All the court does is decide "Yes party B owes party A sum Y", which frankly seems like that's already pretty clear in the legal contract.

FWIW: I'm in MA, hence my reference to the 2k limit in my comment elsewhere on this thread.
is that the full text? I didn't see anything about angels turning devils.
The Scala vs Erlang Debate : The Managers Overview
Strongbox - Secures ActiveRecord fields with public key encryption
+1 The Artists Way

Some of the disciplines she takes you through are tough but rewarding. One of my favorites is writing three pages in a journal per day. At the time it was tough, but it really helped to connect my head with my heart.
Google offers top tip to help beat bots
Seems a bit limited in scope.
Why it's news:

Job listings for smalltalk on monster.com nationwide: 13

Job listings for Java on monster.com nationwide: 4,758
Should we tell the author that 'reduce' was removed in Python 3?
I'm working on several Android projects in my spare time. I'll definitely check it out.
The keyword 'yield' comes in handy for making your own generators.
I gather the haircut you take from a collections agency depends on the duration of the delinquency, so you may be right --- although $6.5k is less than a lot of jurisdictions small claims limits.

Your comment about collecting the judgement makes a good point, although I'll point out that it's easier to collect a civil judgement than a debt; judgement debtors can levy bank accounts.
doesn't quite look ready for prime-time... but it's something for which i've been waiting to see, with no time to build it myself. firebug 1.4 should also be awesome when the beta drops (hopefully soon?).
Quince: UX Pattern Explorer (in Silverlight)
Yup. In fact, some groups are looking to push this solution even further, so that all the game processing/rendering takes place on the server:

http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/2009/03/27/server-side-rend...

It sounds like they still have some issues with latency and bandwidth to work out, but not all games need low latency. And this solution neatly solves the piracy problem -- even for single player games -- as well as eliminating publisher concerns over modchips, game resale, and client-side hacks. And it has much lower client-side hardware requirements, too, so you don't need to worry about who has what console.
Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell is Back in the Game
Just a reminder: look upthread, it's not "2-3k"; in many of the places you're likely to be doing business, it's over $7k; the mean is ~$6k, the median is $5k. Yes, MA is $2k. That sucks.
In my experience it takes a day. I don't think torrents could top that, even if they tried.

I really think South Park gets it. 24 hours after a new episode airs, they put it online. That's pretty damn reasonable.
You don't have to intend to sue, the debt collection agency has that option. And while the collection agency probably won't do that, they might. Never know.
App Rejected By The App Store Because It Could Be Used To 'Ridicule Public Figures'
Massive Server Purchase Likely in Chinese Warcraft Deal
Way to just make shit up there, guy.

From the Hacker News guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"In Comments

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. 'That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'"

I always like that it says, "can be shortened to" as a gentle reminder that disagreeing with statements of facts doesn't serve as an excuse to throw in personal insult.
Jabbify Comet Service Released
Fighting Real Parrots With a Fake Owl
Yeah, this is awesome if nothing else for giving me a tool to see what I've tweaked/played with when using the Firebug CSS editor to play with my site's styling. This should become a default addition to Firebug.
Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Sell Your House Now
It's the full text, the title is just a little misleading.
Changes at YouTube - Phasing You out of Youtube (vid)
Ask HN: outsourced support
I am in need of a simple outsourced support service. It is for a simple, end-user oriented, installable product, and so I'm not expecting an avalanche of calls nor any complicated support cases.

For starters I need a 1-800 number and someone to tell the user to look at FAQ and file a support ticket otherwise. Initially I am planning to look at the tickets myself, but that too can be outsourced as the next step.

Additionally, if tickets can be automatically created for the inquires received via an email that would be a big plus.

Any suggestions ? Personal experiences are of course preferred.

Thanks

(edit) I should probably add that I have built a one-man software service company before, which accumulated about 200k active users at the time I sold it. If there's one thing I remember with shudder, it's the support. It was exceptionally time consuming and 99.5% was a dozen of FAQs. No way in HELL I'm talking to users directly this time around. Not on a daily basis. Not over the phone nor via the forums or the email. An occasional exchange is fine, but the bulk of the support should be handled by someone else. There should be a frontline.
I don't make empty threats.

Why on Earth not? Make empty threats!

What are you afraid of, that these guys will learn that you're capable of bluffing and then push you around? That appears to have happened already.

Though I actually agree that you shouldn't bluff a lawsuit. You should give fair warning and then file the lawsuit. What are you waiting for, someone to cheat you out of twenty thousand bucks?
Haven't tried it yet, but I would imagine those are some very expensive events to be observing for.
I'd love to hear advice on hiring a collection agency as well. My lawyer renegotiated terms several times with a guy who defaulted on a business loan I made him. Each time he agreed to a repayment schedule, but never paid anything. My lawyer went to court. The other guy never went, and after a few visits we got a judgement against him. Still there was nothing forcing him to pay. The lawyer went back to court and after more $ I all i was able to do was put a lien against any 'real' property in California he may someday purchase. The next step was to force him to court and audit his accounts 'under oath', but I lost my faith in the whole process.
I think the point of the court case is that the vendor has the right to decide which scenario he will choose.
Don't forget to look at the bottom of the page and "Click to launch FredWilson.FM music player"
That blog post is ridiculously short on facts. Stardock (Gas Powered Games) didn't put paid authentication on their public multiplayer areas. There's a difference between having DRM and having a paid-to-access service. It's kind of like putting your money on the ground in the middle of a crowded market and walking away expecting it to still be there when you come back in a few hours. Pay-to-play multiplayer online games are proven to be moneymakers, with or without DRM (see: Valve, Blizzard)
>"The judge said that the users of The Pirate Bay committed the first offense by sharing files and the four assisted this.

>It appears that the court chose to not take any of the technical details into account and only judged based on intent. They find it clear that the intention of the defendants is to facilitate sharing of copyrighted works and based their verdict on this."

While I don't agree with the justice of the law, I do think the judge's logic is 100x more clear and believable than the "king kong" defense.
It's an old joke, but worth repeating ...

A sheep farmer is tending his flock when a city slicker rolls up in his BMW, hops out and asks, "Hey, if I tell you exactly how many sheep you have, can I take one?" The farmer nods, so the city slicker opens his laptop, calls up some satellite photos, runs some algorithms, and announces, "You have 1,432 sheep."

Impressed, the farmer says, "You're right. Go ahead and take one." So the city slicker loads one of the animals into the backseat of the car. "Now," says the farmer, "I'll bet all my sheep against your car that I can tell you what you do for a living."

A gaming sort, the city slicker says, "Sure."

"You're a consultant," says the farmer.

"Wow!" says the consultant. "How'd you know?"

"Well," says the farmer, "you come from nowhere even though I never asked you to. You drive a flash car, and waer a smart suit. You told me something I already knew. And you don't know anything about my business. Now give me back my dog."
WIth the amount of money they've spent on the ill-fated "war on piracy," they could've invented Bittorrent, or at least ran their own for-pay tracker that made the Pirate Bay operation look lame.

But no.
Server-side rendering actually will turn out to work amazingly well, and will surprise most of the naysayers.

I think the strategy around bandwidth and latency is going to wind up being parking container datacenters near various isp's so everything but long-distance game state syncing stays on the local network; not perfect, and higher upfront, but it works.
I believe they said after their servers were raided that they don't even know what country some of the new servers are located.
Andy Grove on battery power - The answer may lie in Silicon Valley.
> Imagine how a lawyer would feel if confronted by a large perl script that his entire livelihood may or may not depend on.

It would serve the fucker right! :-)
Gmail also used invite codes, which - at the beginning - caused false scarcity, making getting a gmail invite code itself valuable. That's markedly different than just closing off unapproved signups.
Also, I think Flash on OSX buffers more slowly than on Windows. It's why whenever I want to see something online I have to reboot into my Windows partition, where the video almost never has to stop to buffer. On OSX however, buffering for several minutes only leads to about 20-30 seconds of the actual video being loaded.
People only love the fail whale because they don't see it as often these days. Sort of like how to look back on old events that may have been painful but nonetheless provide you a sense of nostalgia.

Also, I find it ironic that this article is hosted by the NYT, who wall off their own site and force users to give up personal information in order to access certain content.