skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Y-Combinator's policy requires all notification to be physically delivered - i.e. US Postal Service or UPS or another delivery service is acceptable. Email is not acceptable - and presumably fax is not either, since no number is listed.

I'd still be interested to know the legal basis for that policy. I asked about this once before, because having read the actual text of the DMCA it doesn't seem like such a policy would be sufficient to achieve the safe harbour protection, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't think I ever saw an answer on the earlier discussion. If anyone at YC would be willing to share any information they can about their rationale, it might be of general interest to anyone running sites with user-created content, which surely applies to many people reading HN.
We use Haskell in mission critical production code at my company and we are very happy with it. So do many banks in their pricing models and many other areas of application.

This may mean that we can't just go hire your average programmer, but we have also had a bizarrely low rate of bugs in production despite a high level of inherent complexity in what we do.
Linode Boost?
Linode recently did an upgrade of its entire infrastructure. I was wondering whether anyone has felt any performance boost?

Anyone on HN did any performance comparison on their linode setup?
I wasn't implying that there was anything wrong with making money, just that if you're claiming that you're leaving the scientific study of language in the dust and insulting the people working in that field, it seems a little strange at the same time to not publish your insights. If you're competing with scientists, you kind of have to produce science, right? You made great software but why insult people working toward the understanding of language? Be more specific with what particular linguists you're talking about if you have a beef with someone. Why insult an entire discipline if you aren't even taking part in the discussion by publishing?
Great Explanation of the Y Combinator
... or (and I think this might be a pretty effect) they fail to take into account unforeseen side effects.
And I quote:

"...however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself."
No, Title II of the DMCA does not create any obligations for anyone. It is not illegal to completely ignore these notices.

Under copyright law, distributing copies of someone's protected work without authorization is illegal. Many types of internet service providers, as part of fulfilling the service they offer, distribute copies of works on behalf of others. Web hosts serve files their customers have uploaded, video sites stream user uploads, discussion boards serve messages written by users, etc. Thus, an ISP may come to unknowingly distribute copyrighted works without authorization, and would be subject to lawsuits for doing so.

The DMCA offers a way for these ISPs to avoid being sued despite having indeed infringed someone's exclusive rights under copyright law. If they register an agent with the copyright office, and follow a procedure for disabling and re-enabling access to materials they distribute based on certain notices, they then cannot be sued for having hosted that specific material in the past.

The DMCA does not require that anyone register an agent and follow those procedures, it only offers a benefit if you choose to do so.
I see your point about substantially missing data sources, but i was more thinking in terms of building a machine that is capable of all this processing and building of a database that can see the patterns that indicate a harmful intention; the software part so to speak.
You mean well, but you're mistaken on one thing. Having a registered
"Agent of Record" along with contact information and a policy is
required to be eligible for "Safe Harbor" provisions. Pretty much any
US-based site accepting user contributions must have them to avoid
copyright infringement liability. YC/HN having all these requirements
filled is entirely normal and expected, so it doesn't really tell us
anything. --Heck, I'd be really worried if they didn't have all of the
requirements filled.

As my EDIT shows, the [dead] was due to the submission being a
unnecessary duplicate post. It turned out to be a bad example for the
real question in the title.

Mentioning the [dead] post wasn't a complaint, instead, it was just an
example that led to the question in the title of whether or not HN has
received any DMCA takedown notices. The follow-on question of whether or
not PG/YC would be willing to publish any received DMCA notices on
ChillingEffects.org is also viable.

In spite of the poor example link I picked, they're still good questions
to ask publicly and it seems a lot of people are curious about the
answers. None the less, you are still correct about emailing
info@ycombinator being the right way to handle questions about stuff
that gets moderated/deleted/edited.

(BTW over the last half decade I've sent in more than enough private bug
reports directly to pg with my phone number included so he could contact
me. I probably have some minimal "good will" stored up and I sincerely
doubt he'd hell-ban me or anyone for a poor choice of example links.)
Even if you are right, that pill will never be swallowed the way you are delivering it.
If you look under features configuration there's options for turning a lot of it off. I agree that the majority probably isn't useful unless you're running without a window manager for some reason, but even just the VCS info is pretty neat.
I am happy about the renewed focus on security. As far as I remember, people were pretty skeptical and didn't think Oracle would fix the JRE once the exploits started getting discovered so frequently.
I should have RTFM before making that knee-jerk comment. Thank you for the swift kick.
Anecdotally I have to strongly disagree here.

Only one of the tens of heavy users of Excel I have worked with know of this feature on others like it. I am not a heavy use of Excel but my theory is that this is due to a failure of explanation by the software. Excel does not by its design encourage good coding, and most of the users of Excel do not have any programming background so they do not realize that these features should even be there so they wont know to look it up in the manual.
It's actually another reason people should learn programming basics along with reading, writing and algebra.
For future reference, just using slash ("/") will work for both Windows and Unix systems (linux and OSX)
Fax is listed as a delivery method and a number is given. https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html
Excuse me, but given your history of writing overly verbose, self-important Grand Proclamations: I imagine the only reason someone would have to hire you is if they wanted tomes written about how they could Do Things Right while probably not getting much actual work product done in return.
>Aristotle himself lists spectacle as one of the six essential components of drama, alongside other indispensables such as a plot.

Ever read the drama Aristotle referred to though? "Spectacle" there had nothing do with boring pre-calculated show-some-tits, car chases and explosions.
Would you like to sponsor me in return for advertising?
Hi there,
My name is Jacob and I am a 16 year old student at the Scottish high school Linlithgow Academy (Situated in Linlithgow) But in my spare time I am a budding web developer, coder and graphic designer working on a run down laptop from 2006/7 with no battery, no functioning track pad or keyboard and a screen with no backlight. So I have come up with the idea of seeking sponsorship from companies and/or individuals such as yourself in order to purchase a 15'' MacBook Pro in order to ease my studies and further myself in the world of coding and design. What I would offer in return is a space on the lid of the laptop for each company or organisation to have their respective logos or artwork engraved. This would provide advertisement as I would frequent in large cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Falkirk and Stirling and would have my laptop out in coffee shops and parks for the world to see. I eagerly await your reply.<p>Yours sincerely<p>Jacob Edgar Anderson
I would rather say that "Big Money" is preventing existing regulations from being enforced.

The biggest issue is, of course, the sequester and the general lack of funding for food inspection - if there were enough food and animal safety inspectors, food scandals would simply not exist because of inspection pressure.

The second issue, tightly connected with the funding issue, is lobbyism. The "food lobby" has only recently lobbied for making recording of animal rights violation a crime...
Interesting. That sounds a lot better than I had initially thought. Thanks for the clarification.
Hi, my web site gets three warnings:

fail: X-Frame-Options header is not set.

fail: CSP header is not set.

fail: Inline JavaScript was found.

and a score of 0% (scan id: a4c9db4c-17fc-4599-9cac-7f3c7f92c9d9 ) and cnn.com gets the same three warnings plus an extra one and a site grade of 36%.
I've always been curious if this (mail only, no email) is valid under the DMCA.
I started writing one in Dart a couple of days ago, but I know others already exist, including ones that port existing emulators (such as QEMU) using Emscripten.
I get your point, and agree that Excel is not the problem. What I reason is the issue is that Excel was marketed as the program to use to do any kind of business data calculations and manipulations. As a result, people think that Excel is a great solution to a myriad of problems. You and me know it is not. But try explaining that to a multi million business that grew to that size whilst using Excel. Sure, they need something better, yet will almost never understand why. People are also afraid of change. They are convinced Excel is the mesiah of business software. How could you convince anyone to give up their mesiah?
Now think twice before talking dirty to Siri.
I was similarly confused. I think I know what his reason is, but he never explicitly stated it. I may not even disagree with his reasons, but it's difficult to know for sure since he never actually stated those reasons. He only alluded to something that caused him to think of those reasons.
We are not Consumers, We are the People, as in We The People
It stands for "Don't Repeat Yourself," and in its most general form refers to avoiding code duplication.
Who can tell truth from falsehood any more?

I say it, and you feel it in your hearts:

no man or woman on this big small earth.

How should our sages miss the mark of life,

and our most skillful players lose the game?

your hearts will tell you, as my heart has told me:

because all know, and no one understands.

(E.E. Cummings)
Are we reading the same policy? I'm looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html and I see a fax number of "Fax: 650.360.3189" and "please send a written notice (by fax or regular mail) to the Designated Agent at the address below".

The January 2013 copy of the policy on archive.org lists the same contact information.
From the DMCA:

DESIGNATED AGENT- The limitations on liability established in this
subsection apply to a service provider only if the service provider
has designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed
infringement described in paragraph (3), by making available through
its service, including on its website in a location accessible to the
public, and by providing to the Copyright Office, substantially the
following information:

the name, address, phone number, and electronic mail address of the agent

...

To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed
infringement must be a written communication provided to the
designated agent of a service provider

This seems to suggest that an e-mail would be sufficient (it is a writing and it is provided to the agent).

At the same time, the actual form to designate an agent implies that the notification should be delivered by mail:

http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/n/news_ycomb.pdf

That said, whether YC ignores a notice it gets by e-mail because it doesn't believe it was delivered properly, or because it simply chooses to ignore the notice, the result would seemingly be the same -- YC can be sued for copyright infringement.

If the motivation for complying (or appearing to comply) with the DMCA is to gain the liability protection, YC would want to be easy to contact and act on the notice no matter how they receive it.

If YC isn't actually worried about being sued, which seems reasonable for a site that hosts nothing but minimal discussion and external links, then urging potential notifiers to jump through hoops makes more sense. That minimizes the amount of notices they have to deal with, and their impact on the site.
such as?

-
dmitrygr
Try to implement a rational agent (the AI or mathematically formalized variety) in software, and you'll see what I mean. You have to define some utility function precisely, and some algorithm to maximize it.

The problem with this is it won't really produce a "general intelligence" that can think outside the box, because it will always be maximizing some utility function defined in some rigid formal system. In other words, it will be completely unable to "understand" things outside of the formal system in which you define it.
We can make semi-rigid bodies in verlet using strings are shape matching techniques, but the pressure needed to maintain shape necessarily interferes with stacking or any other kind of stable contact. Actually, their was a solution to this in a shape matching paper by Matthias [1] but I was never able to get it to work right.

I've played around a lot with Verlet, it is very powerful in certain cases...especially since you can just update the position of a mass directly (very easy to program, very mouse/touch input friendly). However, a rigid body physics engine is probably better for most game use cases.

[1] http://www.matthiasmueller.info/realtimephysics/
Thanks. I forgot to mention before, but very clearly IANAL! :)
I have seen literally hundreds of Excel spreadsheets from banks, consultancies, and VC firms and I have never, ever seen anyone name individual cells the way you are proposing here. If I had to name individual cells in a monthly model spanning the next 10 years over 250 line items, I'd quit that job.

I'm not saying that Excel can't do it, but a) it sounds like it would take a huge amount of time, so b) it is not practically done in "the real world."
It's slightly more complicated than that.

You see, farmers have discovered that if you feed certain animals antibiotics even when they aren't sick typically the animals will grow faster and bigger. This is great for farmers because more pounds of meat means more cash. But there are some significant negative externalities to operating what is effectively a ginormous petri dish veritably designed to encourage the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
It looks promising, but it's still in its early stage of development. At least the documentation is poor. The google group link doesn't seem to work, and I have no idea how to format and load my data into this framework.
I'll keep the pleasure all to myself :-). Glad that the reply made sense.
Related, AP is reporting the FBI had investigated one of the brothers in 2011 after being tipped off that he was a radical...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-got-information-f...
Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally
Yes indeed but the principle also applies to avoiding repetition of configuration and data.
There are is a (well-backed by arguments) viewpoint that, in order for the capitalism in its current form to work, some portion of the population just needs to get screwed.
Sure, I'm glad you like it! :)

str2num parses words by iterating through them once and keeping state about the result so far and what I call the "magnitude". So, for example, when you feed it "three and three thirds", it initializes magnitude and result to zero, chomps the first "three", and then sets magnitude = 3.

If the next word were "million", then it would know that magnitude refers to million, and so it would multiply 3 by 1 million. But the next word is "and", which flushes the magnitude to result, (ie, result += magnitude), and resets the magnitude to zero.

The next word is "three", which, as before, sets magnitude to three. Then the next word is "thirds", so you know that magnitude refers to "thirds", and so you multiply the magnitude by Fraction(1, 3) and add it to result.

>>> str2num("three and three thirds")
Fraction(4, 1)

The source for this is here: https://github.com/naftaliharris/numutil/blob/master/numutil...
He's more on the side of genius, but less on the side of practical. I think he'd do really well if he tried a startup with someone who could help push him in the direction of building things with more practical use.
In practice, attention is credibility. You can look at this as a cultural problem[1], a psychological finding[2], a propaganda tool[3], a business model[4], etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Peretti
Is it possible to Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console while leaving the browser running?

Yup. With dev mode on, you can enable root access to VT2 (which is getty). VT1 is CrOS, so you can switch between the two as you please with Ctrl-Alt-F{1,2}.

There's an example of what VT2 looks like here: http://www.digifail.com/research/chrome.shtml.

Is it sandboxed or restricted in any way [...]?

With dev mode on, you're root, so you can do whatever you want =)

Ctrl-Alt-t gets you crosh, which runs hterm in a browser tab.
Excel is an incredibly powerful environment to code. I learned it many years ago; I started thinking it was some arcane tool that accountants used and ended being able to deliver amazingly powerful tools to users orders of magnitude faster than systems developers. Yes they had bugs, but... so did the industrial systems!

Excel's real limitations came around scalability of developers (beyond one developer you are in a bad place) and performance that can drop of a cliff beyond a certain size. But it is an astonishingly powerful tool.
Last year the FDA finally made antibiotics in live stock require a prescription [1]. So now you need a complicit vet before you can continuously dose your farm animals with antibiotics.

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/us/antibiotics-for-livesto...
Reminds me of a fellow who got OS X to boot on an 680x0-based Mac:
http://blog.makezine.com/2006/10/10/mac-os-x-panther-on-a-25...
What I find interesting here is that my emotional visceral reaction was that I hoped that not readying Miranda would end up materially hurting the case against this guy.

I guess that is because at the end of the day the odds of me being substantively impacted from terrorism is actually low. The odds of me being impacted from degradation of constitutional protections, actually quite high and I would argue I experience quite frequently.

I just found my own emotional reaction interesting, and indicative that winning for the terrorists is solely in how we react.
Why Your Product Isn't As Simple As You Think
Mmmh, you write so much that it would be easy to write you
off as crazy lunatic (as some here do for sure). But you amassed crazy Karma in just 2 years and I very much agree with your last two blog posts, so I'll give you the benefit of my doubt. Also this comment about Excel is spot-on.
I missed it. Faxing still creates friction and significantly so for any attempt at bulk requests.
[citation needed]

EDIT: I'm a vegetarian. I'm well aware there are nutrients that are harder to get on purely plant-based diets, but it's far from impossible. I'm getting my Omega 3s (all DHA and EPA, not merely ALA) from algae, and my B-12 from plant sources, too.

What am I missing by not killing sentient things for sustenance?
"The quote itself doesn't explain why those who choose to give up liberty for safety deserve neither--in fact, the only thing going for this quote at all was that Ben Franklin said it. Take away the attribution and you're left with an empty sound bite."

Good point. I think of Maslovs hierarchy and decisions rational people take almost every time they are in danger.
I'm not sure I understand. Is this something (to be) like Wakari.io?
I think it's pretty common knowledge that the Government is investing a lot of money into being able to do just that -- that should be enough.

I would think that doing something like this is less about the technology available, but thinking up an intelligent way of doing it. If you imagine a world where you have all the data at your finger tips: let's say you obtained every camera's footage, every phone's phonecalls,etc for a mile radius for a month before,during and after some disaster. Shouldn't be too hard to imagine.

The problem is: what are you looking for? How do each of the moments that you detect link to each other? What patterns are indicative of someone who is plotting something?

Those are very difficult questions, and that's what makes the problem difficult. Tackling a problem like that requires knowledge of voice recognition, NLP (Natural Language Processing), ML (Machine Learning -- If you don't want to put in every possible scenario yourself), and much much more. The rate of data creation (and thus data processing) would also be very high.

How to do this well is the difficult part.

If you still don't believe me: boil it down to just one source. Phones. Lets say you had a wiretap on every home in which a hitman was hired to (and succeeded in)killing a neighbor. It might be a good thing to run a simple text search on the word "kill", or "hit", and you'll catch the low hanging fruit (by this, I mean the people who are bad at hiring hitmen/commit crime), but it becomes more complex when you get more serious about catching people who aren't stupid enough to say exactly what they want to do, then you have to find patterns, assuming they are there.
Show HN: In celebration of Earth Day...
I look at excel like a car. What's happening is that most people who use don't have a license. What's worse they've mainly learned to drive on the farm.

Now rather than hire a professional or take performance driving courses they try and do the same in high end usage and things go wrong.

It's not the sports car that's at fault by someone driving it at the edge of its performance without the proper skill. If the just drove it around town they'd be fine, but taking a high performance car to the track with no experience, well bad things happen. We've all seen youtube clips of high performance crashes from inexperience ;)
Garbage in, garbage out...
Composing Reactive Animations
Anecdata, but I know a woman who's never, in her entire life, not been a vegetarian, and she's probably the healthiest person I've ever met. It's easier than you think.
If he didn't have any real insight and just pretended to, he'd be a con man.
> I missed it. Faxing still creates friction and significantly so for any attempt at bulk requests.

Does it? It's pretty easy to spool up a lot of faxes if you have an account with an email-to-fax service.
Grading the MOOC University