skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, from the perspective of the U.S.'s federal structure it's difficult to conclude there's standing for federal courts here. When federal courts strike down a state law as inconsistent with federal power (either violating the Constitution, or superseded under the Supremacy Clause by federal statute), it's a dispute between the state and the federal governments, and the state can appeal. But if the state says, "on second thought, you're right" and declines to appeal the matter, there's no longer an active dispute between the two levels of government.

If it's to be remedied at any level, I'd say it would have to be handled by California. For example, the California Constitution could include a provision that officially appoints the backer of an initiative as a state officer empowered to defend the initiative against challenges.
I personally wouldn't even bother waiting three months. Bill yourself out now at $35/hour, then only put one-half to two-thirds of the number of hours you're actually spending on the project on your bill. Learn on the job.

Another thing worth trying is charging per day.
Would you pay to subscribe to a service that paid the sites you use instead of them showing you ads?
Ah, Selenium, that makes more sense. Thanks for the update.
IME a lot of low level jobs, especially where the company is offering to train people themselves, without any sort of regulatory oversight and where results are difficult to measure, have that sort of culture. If your rep's not that important to you....
We haven't done a great job at updating the main site; we have a whole bunch of changes that will be pushed in the next week that should make things much clearer.

The core idea of our service is to go a bit further than Puppet and Chef. They're great tools, but that's what they are: tools, with pretty high barriers of entry. We let you describe your infrastructure (and automation) in a much more portable and straightforward way using readable JSON files (not unlike package.json). Want to add CouchDB to your server? Just add one line (`"couchdb": "*",`), we'll make sure this is done according to best practices (properly set up the init script, adding monitoring, following security guidelines...). And if you want to override our defaults, you can do so.

Hope that clarifies it until we get our new landing pages up.
Take something as simple as Mozilla. Most of their work revolves around publishing the Firefox browser, they collect donations from Google for using Google's home page. After that it gets murky because there is another for-profit Mozilla in the background that makes its own deals for things like the Firefox Phone OS where "Free Spftware" isn't allowed.
The IRS starts caring who gets what cut of those Goohle "donations"? Who owns the offices, pays the wages, and who owns the IP? It gets extra murky when an Open Source project get SOLD and more money starts changing hands... Suddenly a "non-profit" gets its assets sold for millions of dollars... The IRS wants its TAX moment cause they got to feed Uncle Sam.

I think the problem they have are 2 college kid companies that start as "open source" while they build something (and its true they eat Ramen the whole time) only to sell that for millions later. The ITS doesn't like giving away tax money if they don't have to.. Especially when they could have been collecting it all along ... Big companies know this and I'm sure "help" the IRS know which kids to go after.
We're doing the guitar tablature thing at Soundslice: http://www.soundslice.com/demo

We've got standard notation support high on our to-do list. :-)

It's sort of a different product than RiffUp, as Soundslice is all about "reverse engineering" songs and giving you tools to help learn a song, with the philosophy that it's better to learn from a source recording than from sheet music/tab alone.
If they were paying taxes in the US then maybe they could feel a little annoyed that the US might cause them business troubles elsewhere.

Instead, they're in that awful predicament where the senators they pay are screwing them, but the government as a representation of the people doesn't care.
This is really neato. How "richly-featured" do you plan on making this?

The reason I ask is that it would be really nifty to be able to share or export these tunes. Either via MIDI, or preferably, via another notation format. If they will be fairly simple melodies, ABC might be a great output format, which converts easily into sheet music notation and midi.

Otherwise, you might want something fancy-pants like Sibelius (or whatever people are using nowadays for notation.)
Unbelievable how respectable tech blogs puts up sensationalist stories just to get some visitors over the back of a popular topic.
Because few men report such an occurrence, and because in many jurisdictions ‘rape’ is only recognized when it’s a man having sex with a woman against her will and not the other way around, it’s hard to get reliable numbers.

“Much like female erectile response, male erectile response is involuntary, meaning that a man need not be aroused for his penis to become erect and be placed in a woman's vagina; mechanical stimulation is all that is necessary.

However, male victims of sexual abuse by females often face social, political, and legal double standards. Gender-neutral laws have combated the perception that rape rarely occurs to men, and other laws have eliminated the term rape altogether.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_gender
Mutually incompatible, vendor-specific, proprietary anything is an inevitability. #1 isn't about that. That's what #2 and #3 are about.

#1 is about planning for extensibility. Just look at the hackery with JS where lonely, otherwise ignored, strings are used for things like "use strict" and "use asm". Or where Microsoft added "conditional comments", which quite frankly, was essential to the development of Outlook Web Access, which basically gave us Ajax. Or all the absurd vendor prefixes on CSS tag names. Or one of 100 other little hacks that browser vendors have invented to try to innovate past the standard. Pushing pass the standard, by the way, is the only way forward. We've learned that lesson by now, so we should plan for extensibility.
A likely scenario is something which indemnifies them against any losses incurred as a result of foreign suits related to privacy breaches, so long as they're in accordance with US law.

But that would only work in USA. What if a court in Germany fines Google Germany Ltd €1,000,000, and €100,000 per day until they stop sharing data with the US Gov? Will the US government give Google €1,000,000 to pay off the fine? What if the court in Germany confiscates the Google Germany Ltd's property? Will the US Gov reimbuse Google? What if a court in Germany forces all German ISPs to block Google? Will the US Gov reimburse Google?

Remember this companies (Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/etc.) have local companies, local offices, local property and local employees. They can ignore local law only if they leave the country.
Wow, this is even more impressive than the results imho. Kudos to you!
He's explicitly said he can't live with his partner due to DOMA, so I would expect as much - assuming they live in a state recognizing SSM rights.
GHCJS - Haskell in the Browser
Sorry but I can't help but feel that the majority of these responses have you focused too much on your short term goal.

Can you become a freelance CMS installer in 6 months with no technical background? Probably. But only just. I imagine most of the commenters below are developers (like myself) who see things like Joomla/Wordpress/etc installs as trivial pieces of work. Don't get me wrong: they are, but only if you've had a considerable amount of previous dev experience.

Let's look at what's involved in becoming a CMS freelancer:

- Setting up a working development environment: probably a few days.

- Getting to grips with PHP (or whatever language) development: harder to estimate but I imagine it will take at least three months to get to place where you're familiar with Object Orientated Programming (OOP), basic app layout, basic database skills, CSS and Javascript. Three months is actually a REALLY short amount of time to get up to speed on all of that but maybe you're a first learner - and hey, you're posting on HN so I bet you are ;-)

- Server setup : lets say you use some service like GoDaddy or Blacknight which offers 1-click CMS installers so you don't have to deal with all the SSH and CHMODing so no real work here

- Nailing your first piece of business: again, impossible to estimate but trust me when I say that this business (particular "cheap" jobs like CMS installs) is COMPETITIVE. If you live in a developed Western country then someone out there will do the job cheaper than you, no question. So basically you've going to have to operate well at a loss for the first few projects.

And here's where my BIG problem comes with the other replies in this post:

After you have X number of projects under your belt, your rate isn't going to start going up at any considerable speed. Yes you will be better than you were a few months back, yes you will have projects to show but guess what? So will all those outsourcers in places like India and Poland and they'll STILL be charging less than you.

My basic point is: this idea doesn't really scale. You'd be better off learning development "properly" (night schools, online courses etc are good) and then starting off at some entry level dev job. Yes its more pain up front but its a much more viable strategy long term.

So to answer your question (finally!): Can you become a freelancer in 6 months? Yes. Will you make any decent money at it? I don't think so.

If you're looking for any help with this stuff then I'd be happy to help you out a bit. You can find me on twitter: @modernprogrammr
Or give up on those boring planet things and just live on the ring itself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_%28The_Culture%29

[NB I prefer Culture Orbitals to Niven Rings - largely due to everything else being in the Culture would imply.]
> It's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own people are succumbing to famines in the millions.

I already said that I'm no fan of "universal liberal humanism". If someone thinks the Irish famine was progress because everything progresses all the time, they're wrong. But just because liberal humanism has problems doesn't mean that one must run to the other extreme. "If you hate my enemy, join my side" might be a useful tactic in war, but in philosophy people will just shrug and say "No way, you're both my enemies." My opinion is that humanity sometimes progress, sometimes stagnates, and sometimes regresses.

Anyway, here's my objection:

1. Agreed.
2. Agreed.
3. Nope. Human progress will be limited by the aforementioned
limit of human knowledge, but this is a very large limit,
so there's plenty of room for progress before we hit the limit.
We might have already hit the limit in some areas, but that
doesn't mean we won't keep making progress in other areas.
4. Agreed, but there is no necessary condition that says that
humans MUST revert to an inferior state, either.
Maybe they'll just stagnate until evolution produces
a superior species with higher limits of knowledge. Why not?
Just because X isn't necessary doesn't mean that
not-X is necessary. Usually, they're both unnecessary.
The article emphasizes CSS as much if not moreso than JavaScript.
this is so fucking lame lol
> "large population of gay people in tech"

Any citations to back this up? How did you come to this conclusion?
(a) It's not a lawsuit, but a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which is like a type of court. The DPC can force companies to reveal what they hold on people, and can require them to do (or not do) a thing if it breaks Irish data protection law.

(b) Facebook Ireland Ltd (an Irish company) was targetted, not because it's "where the money is", but because if you sign up to Facebook and you're not in the USA or Canada, then you have a legal relationship with Facebook Ireland Ltd, and fall under Irish data protection law.

(cf. section 19 of https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms )
Contentful: an API-first approach to content management
Aside from compatibility testing, does anyone here really use Firefox much? I use Safari, with Chrome on occasion. That's about it.

I also recall that Firefox leaked a lot of memory, not sure if that's been fixed now.

If it's the case that IE is now a decent browser and Windows people use that or Chrome, and Mac people using Safari, I'm just wondering what spot or niche Firefox fills. I suppose in the Linux world, Firefox and Chrome are the only major options.
This Glove Could Help Deaf-Blind People Communicate With Anyone, Anywhere
especially when it comes to EU-wide things or EU law. UK often implements the mininum, or opts out of parts (e.g. euro)
It gets murky.

I can sue you for using my likeness depending on how you utilize your footage.

You certainly don't have carte blanche to use images of me you took in public.
If you search Google for "cache:[interesting url]", it will take you directly to their cache for the page, if it exists
What?! Are all those companies still using IE6 (and, consequently, holding back progress for the rest of us) aware of this massive security hole?
Someone should make a paid adblocker service that shares revenue with site owners. Site owners can opt in to get a share of the revenue, so that each time a visitor using the adblocker visits their site, the site owner gets paid an amount equivalent to the potential ad revenue from that visit. That means they could serve up a custom ad-less page that's designed to look nice sans ads.

Users get a good adblocker that they don't have to feel bad about using, and site owners get to sustain the revenue they would've lost.

Maybe it could provide more benefits than just ad blocking? Perhaps it would just be a "premium membership to the internet". Site owners can take even more revenue if they implement even more features. More web app options, custom styling options, social badges, etc. The more a user pays a month, the more features he gets all over the internet.
One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is
that on some level, you’re only as good as your pitch.
The accelerators reinforce this by teaching you the
art of storytelling, a skill that helps an investor
sign a term sheet as much as it helps the father of a
young child decide to take a pay cut to be part of
something that’s amazing.

Honestly, I reckon that's what this is all about. He's telling a story. It could be an exercise in storytelling! If so, anonymous failing founder - you're doing a good job. I'm hooked!

If not, listen to the advice in these comments.
No. Not because I won't pay certain sites for their content (I subscribe to LWN, for instance), but because I don't want to pay some aggregating middleman service that by necessity can then track across all the sites I visit.

In principle I like the concept of paying a fixed amount per unit time and splitting that across the sites I care about. In practice I don't see any obvious privacy-respecting way to do that.
Canada has been spared the American insanity if my understanding is correct. I pay ~7k/year for University of Calgary. Even University of Waterloo our most prestigious computer science university is only 10k. Provided you are not an international student tuition should be reason. I expect my Microsoft internship to pay for two years of uni including living expenses. Freelancing paid for another year.

Compared to the farm work, tree planting, and landlording which my father did to pay for University I'm on vacation.
Sure, I was always intrigued by the micro payments idea. Heck, if that we're the norm I wonder if it wouldn't promote better web content. I'd be more likely to spend more time on sites I wanted to support than the sensational sites I may feel guilty about having clicked through to.

But I don't think most folks think this way, so practically speaking I don't see micropayments ever working. Would love to be proven wrong.
Light Table is very interesting (I've used it for some Clojure stuff), but it's competing with emacs. It's gonna be very hard to beat emacs. The legacy of thousands of lines of very useful code & unbelievable extensibility is a big one to overcome. I don't mind saying that I foresee emacs getting a lighttable-mode for dynamic languages before Light Table beats emacs. But I usually have a LightTable install on my computers; it's that promising of a project. :-)
The stagnant NIH and NSF budget. High-end research is expensive, and the money to keep the place running has to come from somewhere. If it isn't from federal grants it has to come from tuition.
I am always amused by articles saying how silly social media visibility is, and they have a giant bar of "share this" iconography on them. Either you care or you don't.
This was actually very help Gexla, thanks. I've been trying to learn Java as a freelance opportunity but this thing is massive and takes forever to learn it seems. Is PHP the right way for freelance web development? I noticed you mentioned Wordpress and PHP. Coming from Java how long it will take to get into PHP ? I tried it a bit but everyone here seems to hate it and rants about the language ugliness so I didn't even try and went with Java.
Signs Your Project is Headed for Failure
This is the "fact sheet" in question: http://pastebin.com/5d7rHmYe
#1 javascript, easily. #2 PHP

I know half a semesters' worth of C++ and I almost got through Coursera's Python game course (couldn't finish the last two weeks because I just didn't have the time to do it properly) but I can still easily see myself getting most of my work done in js/php.
People can't follow me around and videotape me, even in a public place. That's stalking or harassment.

But somehow if it's online, done by robots (no less creepy), and at the direction of the government, such laws don't apply.
I don't think the personal ethics issue is that simple and clear-cut. For example, I use both an ad blocker and a readability tool (in my case, it's Evernote Clearly). I started blocking ads long before stuff like Clearly was invented, but the motivation is the same: I want to read the stuff I came to read and all the other crap on the page is making it difficult to do so. If I stop using an ad blocker, I would still use Clearly.

My point is, would your ethics also preclude you from using a readability tool?

Now, one can argue that a tool like Clearly is okay, because it requires you to click on it and it gets rid of the stuff that distracts you, but the ads still get displayed in the first place. What if someone made a tool that downloads the ads, as if to display them, without ever displaying them? By using such a tool, you wouldn't be denying publishers income while consuming their content, but you would still be gaming the system. How ethical would that be?

Again, the hard line would be to either a) suck it up and consume both the content and the crap together, or b) refrain from consuming the content altogether. But the hard line approach doesn't really solve anything, except giving you the moral high ground.

There's a real problem with the ad-supported content and the problem is the conflict between what the advertisers want, which is to force you to pay attention to their ads, even at the cost of breaking your experience, and what the content consumers want, which is to consume the damn content without being distracted or even badgered.

Even most of the so-called non-intrusive ads are annoying, because they're inserted where they're supposed to draw your attention.
Plus, I think that if you strip away all the Culture magic-tech, their orbitals are still more plausible than Niven's Unobtanium-Brand scrith.
Real Time Web with XMPP
Coming Out as a Porn Addict
Why Turpial 1.6.9 is not working and why I decided to continue with the project
What are you, a teenage girl? Give up the "woe is me" act. I cringed when I read your first post, but this one is even worse.
Yes, clearly critical thinking and the scientific method have nothing in common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking#Skills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Elements_of_...

Obviously, no scientist or engineer has ever stopped to ask themselves "why does it..." or "what if it doesn't actually do..." or "maybe it's not x, but y instead?"

It'd be wise to remember that the sciences were once called "natural philosophy."

Liberal arts courses on the other hand are mostly memorization and regurgitation of the ideology currently favored by the academia's current regime. Before they moved to "~ studies" majors, liberal arts majors used to study the works written and drawn by scientists and mathematicians and engineers. It's easy to see why the humanities would prefer "critical thinking" to be redefined as something fuzzy enough to require no original thought or even an attempt at reaching a logical conclusion.
And they didn't even bother to post a corrected version, instead going back to their default position of "it's legal, trust us".
I think the radiation Jupiter puts out would kill us before the Earthquakes got a chance to.
This time and energy would be better spent either doing something about it or discussing it openly with the team/investors. If the situation is as dire as indicated, what the hell are you doing spending time griping dramatically about it on the internet? If people's livelihoods and your startup are on the line, DROP THE BLOG and go be a responsible founder.

If this is, as some have suggested, a PR campaign/stunt (which doesn't seem entirely over the top)... then it's in poor taste, in my opinion.
And why is that a problem? Isn't the whole idea of bootstrap to serve as a starting point?
Ripped off from:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2345679/Photo...
Client Side IDs with Ember Data
A message from the Egyptian people to the world
I use mainly so I can search with Google. Without adblock, it's a nightmare on many searches, the first screen of my laptop is all ads (not including youtube, maps, Google local etc.
On Excitement in the Apple Land
Boredom is over.
Possible bug?

http://sciencevsmagic.net/geo/#1A0.0A1.0L1.1L4.0L5.3L2.3A6.2...

Didn't update circle pack 3, 9 moves in origin circle for me. This is the first one I've encountered that doesn't seem to work.

This is really cool!
True, but is the distance he's using in these photos the distance from center to center or edge to edge. That also poses the question of what exactly is the edge...
Was trying to use Sibelius recently and it s*cked big time!

An open format for export would be great!
I am definitely not on the 'making CSS potentially Turing complete' bandwagon. I don't even like that it can do animations.
"One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is that on some level, you’re only as good as your pitch."

On some level that may be true. I think the primary level though is that you're only as good as your product. Smart pitches alone get you nowhere. If you don't have a solid, functional product (and one that meets a true market need) the pitch is irrelevant. Nobody buys ideas. Good products sell themselves.
I think that's a misread. The purpose of the story is to make it appear that WaPo is on the case and to keep you on the edge of your seat, even though nothing has actually happened, and the article itself strongly suggests that nothing will. It's not supposed to shift the conversation anywhere, but to keep you talking and reading the news, even though there isn't any news to talk about.
AMD Has Massive Radeon Patch Set - Power Management
Two more to go!
Good article, (need to work on colorizing REPL output tho)

Here's a Cake Pattern and type class followups:

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/marakana/ne-scala-2012-the-typeclass...

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1679797/NE%20Scala/Bakery%20from%20...

videos of above: http://marakana.com/s/post/1397/2013_northeast_scala_symposi...
An open source Google Reader replacement: Sismics Reader