skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might be a serious problem already, but people are generally unaware of it. Kickstarter does not make it easy to find failed projects. And almost everyone who contributed to a project a year ago is likely enough to have forgotten about it by now. Even if they remember it, they have no way of rounding up all the other backers into an angry mob, except by posting on reddit or Hacker News.
Actually, as a user of Windows 8 in Parallels I find activating the start screen to be difficult because the Apple+C keyboard combo maps to Copy rather than to Win+C. And activating the corner of the screen is difficult because the mouse leaves the virtual machine window to go to the host OS. So having a Start button will improve usability for virtual machine users.

And it will help the usability for my parents too on their Windows computers. My mother has become confused with her Windows 8 laptop (that has a touch screen) about how to switch between modes.
Church End Man and Van N3
The distinction between eavesdropping and an irc bot is intent, context, and result.

Intent: A irc bot that provide titles do so to translate machine readable URL's to human readable Title's to benefit both the one who writes it and reads it.

Intent: A eavesdropper tries to extract meaning out of being in a privileged position between two speakers.

Context: An irc is a public forum or at least a forum for invited participants. Expectation of privacy is low.

Context: A private communication between two parties is private. Expectation of privacy is high.

Result: An IRC bot that do what everyone in an irc channel is aware of is good. People feel happy by the increased value.

Result: An eavesdropper makes people feel scared, insecure and angry. It makes society worse, causes physical damage to people, and are destructive.

It really doesn't matter if its an automated or a human that does the eavesdropping. intent, context, and result do.
I think those should probably be two separate steps for most projects. General funding to get the research going, making the prototype etc, then as a second step, allow the ordering of the actual product. There might be projects where this is unfeasible, but in general it would be good to separate the creation of the product and the manufacturing/distribution process. It would be safer for everyone involved, and for projects that fail during research - it would be clear that the money invested into this research is gone. At the same time, harsher measures should cover failure to follow through on actual orders.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not fixated about the cross-platform functionality of any game I develop yet, because I am sure I will need to iterate through the design process a few times (and it might be easier to start over once I better conceptualize my idea).

I'll keep this in mind.
Starbucks must have raised their prices again
Please, I have written pretty extensively about the problems with the ad impressions model--I think it's the root of the YT issue and most the low quality blogging we see.

I don't get paid by the pageview and if I did, it would be an inconsequential part of my annual income at this point. I write columns about ideas I find interesting. If I wanted pageviews I'd probably publish it somewhere other than the Observer
You're getting the nerd outrage talking points mixed up. This thread is about patent trolling (which the BSA is against), not copyright trolling (which the BSA pioneered).
The Lua issue is weird. The bindings are maintained (last update one month ago), and the repo provides its own Lua source files (but the API of minor versions of Lua is stable, so it shouldn't matter).

They should file an issue on GitHub.

https://github.com/xenith-studios/golua/issues
Agree with you, but it saddens me that people will listen to her just because she's "attractive." She's not that good looking, she just wears a lot of makeup. I'd have a conversation with her in a bar, but since she's hundreds of miles away from me I don't have to pretend that she's interesting because I don't get anything out of it.
It's a play on the name of the site. Mt. Gox -> MtG: OX
Guess it was only a matter of time before "the man," got involved in bitcoin somehow.

Side Note: if we think we actually own the dollars in our wallets...remember that it's illegal to deface government property (like writing on it)...so no we don't.
> it's your job as a software developer to understand how your software works and how to maintain it well

And it's the job of language (and language ecosystem) developers to make this as straightforward as possible. It's perfectly possible to blame both the author and the language.
Then what's the incentive to participate at all? Would backing a project be equivalent to a 12 month high interest loan? Or, equivalent to an IPO where "backers" get a certain percentage of the company (which I'm sure opens a massive legal mess).

I don't think most people have a problem with projects failing. It's when creators take the money and don't appear to even attempt to produce the product that something is wrong.
I haven't done a study or anything but after living in Florida for 5 years (coming from New York) I have to say that the motivation seems to come from a serious lack of other revenue sources for the state. There is no state income tax and so fee revenue is huge for the state and local municipalities. A few years ago, in central Florida, voters voted to decrease property taxes. When the measure went through revenues plunged. In response all fees at the DMV were literally doubled and a lot of public employees lost their jobs. The way Florida handles paying for itself makes no sense to me.
I agree, but I'd say that a project being fraudulent or going silent is an expected failure mode.
I agree that they should be posting updates to prove the money is being put to use. However looking through the comments I see a number of people referring to the backing as a 'loan' and complaining they didn't get the product 'they ordered'. I think it's clear this 'company' has screwed people but backer expectations are also completely wrong and Kickstarter needs to solve that problem. People seem to think if they give you money and you fail they can get a refund. That's not how Kickstarter works/should work.
I like this idea. A bit like the pause buttons on my VMs.

I have this type of issue more with Chrome than Firefox though and it always seems to be related to leaving a tab open with a video for a long time, even if it isn't being played.
I remember working with IIS at one point, and an object had a name like "site" then inside of the configuration files you had other "sites" that configured your site.

Finding errors for one was incredibly difficult because the other one kept popping up.
Last quarter, Mac sales decreased by 1%, while the PC market overall shrunk by 11% (including Mac sales). Looking at the last year, Mac sales are up 2.25%.
What do you think the hashes are for? :-)
Etsy's a pretty great company, and you happen to be quite nearby in Brooklyn. How about visiting with some of your work to meet them in person? Etsy has a monthly open house too, so perhaps that's a good time.

I've met quite a few Etsy employees and they're all quite nice, smart, and want to do right by people. Good luck!
That "easy to scale out" is a misnomer. Replica sets and sharding work in the technical sense, but the implementation isn't anywhere near what I would qualify as production ready.

For example, today my entire production MongoDB database was running 3x slower because a single replica in one shard was down, and their buggy PHP driver kept trying to talk to it despite it being marked down. I really enjoyed waking up at 2am to deal with that.

It relates back to the "easy to use" nature of their marketing. It really is super easy to use and develop on, but the minute you need to do anything important or serious, it breaks down.

You aren't doing yourself any favors going with it except as a proof-of-concept.
Can you clarify what you are saying here? That Metro is ugly? Or that it's only ugly on Big Monitors?
Thank you, that's interesting and leads to this from the wiki (corresponding to English common law, I think.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_pr...

"The rights of a finder of such property are determined in part by the status in which it is found. Because these classifications have developed under the ancient and often archaic common law of England, they turn on nuanced distinctions. The general rule attaching to the three types of property may be summarized as: A finder of property acquires no rights in mislaid property, is entitled to possession of lost property against everyone except the true owner, and is entitled to keep abandoned property.[1] This rule varies by jurisdiction"

At any rate, it basically seems to boil down to what I've said, which is that unless there is a specific law in your area stating otherwise, if you lose property, you lost it, and while it may be unethical to not report it, it's generally not illegal.

Should it be? In general I'd say no, because off the top of my head, it seems the costs outweigh the benefits. And then we come to how that impacts Monsanto.

I'd say if Monsanto can't keep it's seeds out of a silo, that's Monsanto's problem and not one that needs government intervention, which is likely to be massive and onerous to other interests. It's the nature of seeds.
Ah yes, all of those people with chromosomal diseases should just take their health into their own hands, because it clearly has nothing to do with chance.

</sarcasm>
Yes 6 is already three primes: 2+2+2

Well pointed out.

So from 7 onwards then :blush:-)
I currently work with a company that is simply blowing up. A startup in the automotive industry. It uses software to provide its main product/service, but I wouldn't call it a tech company. Last year it made a couple of millions in profits. The current year is going to be at least 5X that thanks to some new systems I'm putting in place. Did I mention its privately owned, and in the middle of nowhere? Did I also mentioned it is owned by someone who does not know much about computers? At this rate, it will corner the market it caters to in one or two years. All while running under the radar.
Bullshit. Finland doesn't have US bases on it's territory and all it's security is paid by the country itself. Plus, it always is under direct threat from Russia. Despite of that (or maybe because of that?) it does have a decent universal healthcare system.

Besides, having US base on your territory is not a guaranty of security - South Vietnam had a lot of them and it didn't help them.
From my reading the "scientific study" has a sample size of 0.
Yeah, most of the internet hasn't heard of a hosts file or AdBlock. It's a good thing though, because if there wasn't money in the advertising we would have to pay for access to YouTube.
This caught my eye:

>In operations performed to relieve chronic pain, doctors have lesioned, or disabled, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. After the surgery, the patients report that they can still sense where the trouble comes from, but, they add, it just doesn’t bother them anymore.

So there is a surgical procedure that removes the negative feelings of pain, without removing the actual feeling? What are the downsides to this procedure? I'm sure I must be missing something, but as described it sounds like something some, or even a lot of adults without chronic pain would want to get voluntarily. It seems perfect for people that need intense physical therapy in order to walk. Also for people like elite military operatives that may have to undergo extreme circumstances like torture. Would this surgery just make people not care about torture? Also for athletes, who could now push themselves to the physical limit due to now being able to endure great pain without being bothered.
Totally agree. The author, Ryan Holiday[0], here is conflating production value with something else entirely.

Then again, he's also the media strategist behind Tucker Max[1] and the Director of Marketing for American Apparel, so it doesn't exactly surprise me that his cultural taste is not in line with the Youtube viewer population, or anything outside of mainstream Hollywood-esque production style and content, with a pinch of misogyny.

I would similar expect that he would also not like sxephil or pantlessknights, but they are not in the title of his article. And I think it's ok if someone like him just doesn't "get" Youtube, user-generated content, or cats on the Internet.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Holiday
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_Max
Chrome is a big black window for me, literally you see nothing at all. So I use Fx.

Both browsers have issues.
Right now I'm in Japan. We'll be moving back to the U.S. this fall. I wasn't posting this looking for an interview, but I would obviously love to chat with anyone who wants to. My email is in my profile or on my blog.
The government may have good intentions but are too short-term in thinking. Homelessness, particularly mentally disabled homeless persons are costing the government a lot more in the long run than putting in rehabilitation infrastructure for homeless people. I strongly believe that in markets like US/Canada, privately funded projects is the way to go in order to make any real change. It's also disturbing when the city takes the piss at homeless people by fining them http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/16/vancouver-homeless-f...
This may have been true in the Cold War, but that war has long been over. To say that US defense spending now is benefiting anyone in any way now is laughable, except for maybe South Korea and Taiwan. If anything, our meddling has raised security concerns for all our European allies due to the displacement and disruption of life by our actions in the Middle East.
Perhaps Kickstarter could insist that projects account for their spending on the project? e.g. if you've raised $100k, you'd better be able to show that you spent that $100k in ways that are related to the project, and not on a shiny new car. This would form part of the contract between project & funders and could open the way to lawsuits if the project couldn't demonstrate reasonable use of the cash.

The mere threat of future legal problems would (hopefully) keep Kickstarters more honest, and would reassure funders, making them more likely to fund more stuff.
> Things pertaining to the performance of particular webpages and such are extremely difficult to tease out of the data in a meaningful way.

It seems to me that you could do this "well enough" if you put each page in its own process and let the OS tell you which are burning the CPU. There could/would be edge-cases where a page causing issues would not appear like it was causing issues, looking at it from that level, but it would sure as hell be a good start.
It's a touch-centric paradigm forced onto non-touch devices.
Transitive dependencies (pkgA imports pkgB@v1 but my code need pkgB@v2 which is incompatible with v1) are the thing of nightmares in large systems development.

This is a decided on feature by the golang team, not an oversite or something beyond their technical capabilities.
The problem here is what to do if you estimate the milestones wrong. People backed it under those terms and you supposedly can't change the terms after they give you money.

What if your initial expenses are higher than thought but you can't access your next milestone for 4 weeks meaning you miss important deadlines with suppliers/manufacturers and the company goes bust, just because you couldn't access the money people pledged in time.
Very sorry about that! I probably misread it as a spam bot (no offense either, I get like 4-5 per week and it's hard to parse them). I've unblocked and followed you, and I'll read more carefully next time :)
>People have been using Kickstarter as a pre-order site which I think is not ideal in many cases.

Kickstarter backs this perception.

"In just 24 hours, 20,000 people bought an Ouya console — a product they had never heard of before yesterday." - Yancey Strickler - Cofounder/Head of Communications at Kickstarter [0]

0: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/ouyas-big-day
Actually, it's the origin of the name of the site:

Its name was originally an initialism of Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange when it was an exchange for Magic: The Gathering playing cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mtgox
Sure thing. I'll get to work on it this weekend and let you know whenever it's done.
> It won't necessarily endanger the public if they add more delay between one light turning red and the other turning green.

This is usually referred to as a delayed green light. They are absolutely terrible for public safety.

There are drivers who look at the opposite light to get a cue as to when they should go.

It also pisses regular drivers off, because it looks like absolutely nothing is happening for everyone and they have to sit there and wait for no good reason. A yellow light, even a long one, at least shows some sort of activity and progress.
Is it that Chrome is able to do it just because it's a separate process per tab? (It shows memory consumption by each page.) I try to go to the about:memory page every once in a while, but first that doesn't show information in a very intuitive way, and second, NONE OF the 'GC', 'CC', or the 'Minimize Memory Usage' buttons seem to reduce Firefox's memory usage. Sometimes pressing these buttons actually increases the RAM usage (as seen from the Task Manager on Windows) - which is beyond my understanding. The only way to reclaim the 2 GB of my system RAM firefox has captured is to restart it.
Yay! One more way for rich people to hang out with rich and famous people.
hmmm, so I looked into this whole Rackspace vs Parallel Iron that this stems from and learned this:

1) Parallel Iron is a company that isn't a shell company but owned by the lead inventor (see U.S. patent 7,958,388)

2) Parallel Iron is the original assignee on the patent

3) According to one source, that inventor waited for 26 months while Rackspace and its mega-firm lawyers dragged out negotiations. This point is harder to confirm - but the dates seem to provide support

So I really can't see Rackspace as the victim here. I feel for the inventor who spent the time and effort to work out the details, commercialize it, and then commercialize. When Rackspace copied his technology, they shunned him and wouldn't license - forcing the inventor to no other choice than litigation. Sad, but happens all the time. Apple no less has said they won't listen to any external company/inventor UNTIL they know they are serious with litigation/court action.

In the past I am always censored/muted and have never been able to respond for days/weeks until long after the story closes - so sorry I likely won't be able to respond further after this. But hey - it's hacker news board.
But startup founders are accountable to the VCs. They have to provide updates and let the VCs know what it is they've been doing with the money. If the KS project fails, it fails. But to not provide some sort of update to backers is a serious problem.
I hope they add a feature to change the Start Screen wallpaper. I have to use Decor8 just for that, but it's worth it in my opinion. The Start Screen looks much better when you use the same wallpaper as your desktop, but blur it a bit.
> the concept of property is not limited to physical objects

Why not? The word property implies possession. So I ask, what should be considered property?

> certain assignable contractual rights are property, but are intangible, infinitely reproducible

I wouldn't argue that contractual rights should be considered property -- but I find it somewhat irrelevant considering it has no bearing on anyone outside of said agreement. Two people making a voluntary agreement is not the same as a chef demanding nation-wide royalties for copying his dish.
I would stop using Kickstarter (as a backer) if this were the case.
This sounds very unreasonable of them, hopefully if as some others have said they are a decent and considerate company they will resolve this issue as soon as they realise they have made a mistake, and I wish you the best of luck in this.
Ahh yes, the fun "Control-Z-kill-pid" trick. I do enjoy it so.
Ask HN: A free smartphone supported by ads?
Why hasn't anyone built a smartphone (with free data and free voice) that is supported via popup ads on the device? Yeah, it'd be annoying but I have to assume that millions (billions?) of people would use it?
It looks like everything is evaluated client-side (even the Java), so I believe you'd need a C++ implementation in JS ...

As far as I know, things like Emscripten (https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki) can compile C/C++ to JS, but the compilation itself doesn't happen in JS.
Simple, pretty, to the point and does what it says on the tin.

Unfortunately I can't seem to copy the link at the top of the design. Instead of making it a readonly input, make it a link or tell them to copy the URL from their browser. Using Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m on Win8

Great work though
I don't know how the fees compare (5% plus CC fees), but Tindie[1] is a marketplace specifically built for this kind of product.

[1] http://tindie.com/
Thanks, that's very much what I'm talking about. Cassandra would be my ideal store, I absolutely love it except for the ability to index across nodes. My understanding, when last I looked at it, was that indexes were only local and didn't span Cassandra nodes. Does Cassandra now have properly distributed indexes?

When I was looking at implementing Cassandra instead of Mongo DB, it seemed like we had to create reverse column family (IIRC, been away from Cassandra for a bit now). Is that still the case?
There is no denying failing to make that distinction is good for Kickstarter's business, but I assert it's bad for crowdfunding in general.
> requires every business who gets the square stand to give it a good clean daily

And this a bad thing? Cleanliness of retail stores especially food/beverage is quite a deciding factor for both new and returning customers I would imagine. To take you're point further though, which I think you may have implied, once a white macbook gets a scratch/stain, it's likely permanent and looks nasty. Let's hope they've chosen a resilient material for this stand atleast.
Well, strictly speaking, I suppose that the combination of Tor and Bitcoin is still a bit subversive from an anti-government perspective. But the problem is, obviously, not everything can be done in Bitcoin at the moment. And as long as we need to exchange between USD and BTC, this kind of thing is going to be a problem.

If BTC ever gains enough acceptance to (largely) eliminate the need to convert in and out of USD, it could be a real problem for governments who want to control all financial transactions.

Whether or not that will happen is anybody's guess. It's something of a chicken or egg problem, as BTC is less likely to gain mainstream acceptance if you can't easily convert to/from other currencies (USD probably being one of the more important ones). If BTC remains relegated to only black-market transactions on sites like The Silk Road... well... that makes it a bit less useful. :-(
The sacrificial beam that appeared to fall on top of the car behind the truck?
The content is terrible because the audience is terrible.

We are stupid.

The content is therefore stupid.

It has to play to us. It plays to what we want.

This isn't hard.
So SP1, but "SP" = "." because we "why not".
>> "Then what's the incentive to participate at all?"

Someone believes they can create a product you want. They can only create it if you give them some money to get going. The incentive is a product you want getting built. Do you want this thing enough that you're willing to risk $10 backing it? I think for a lot of people that's enough incentive.