skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Naïve college students really are / were too young to be baited into these traps"

I'm not so sure you can say college students are being preyed upon. While a lot of college freshmen are 17, the majority of college students are over 18 -- the age at which you are considered old enough to enter into legally binding contracts in most U.S. states.

Sure, you can argue that students rarely read the fine print and are taken in by the way credit cards are marketed on campus ("get your OWN credit card -- your parents won't see the bill!") But the way credit works is pretty clear and simple to the point where it's almost universally understood, even if you don't read the fine print: They loan you some money; you have to pay it back; wait too long and you have to pay interest on it.

It's that last part that some people willingly ignore.

Honestly, I think the way you use credit has everything to do with the way you were raised. My wife and I both got our first credit cards in college. A decade later and we still pay off our cards in full every single month. Why? Because that's how our parents did it. If you can't pay off the balance at the end of the month, you don't buy things.
If you don't have money (or you're a cheapskate), it simplifies to 'always build'.
The text is in the alt attribute of each image's HTML element. So it should be a breeze to scrape it.
Each image tag also has its source data embedded in its alt attribute.
I can only assume there was context involved. Something like:

With no money, you only have two viable choices:

1. Build something to get to Ramen Profitability

2. Raise Money.

If you don't focus exclusively on one or the other, you may be making a strategic mistake.
Pretty pathetic as it breaks the site for people with less than perfect vision. I mean they obviously take advantage of machine readable data to populate their database, pretty lame to not spit it back out. Not to mention a huge server overhead--this was a calculated decision.
While consistency is a good thing, it comes at a relatively high price in this case. Many blocks could be rendered just fine using only HTML and I'd be a much happier user if I could copy text from the search results.
The special font may not be on every user's computer. Which font is that?
Haha, nice. W|A just posted a video on YouTube [1] that explained that they weren't actually exceeding their maximum load yet but that there's a bug on some of their machines that will send back that response.

[1] - http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/16/wolframalpha-status-...
It was about the advantages of running a startup cheaply, not of having no money. And if you're running a startup cheaply, you don't need to raise as much.
Yes: the answer is that building almost always turns out to have unexpected advantages.
Perhaps they don't want other search engines 'learning' the questions (via phrases hyperlinked to wolfram) and displaying the answers as summary text?
I think you really underestimate the difficulty in distribution.
I'd assume that not everything that WA puts out will be text or tables. They've got graphs, complex mathematical formulas, general purpose image manipulation and who knows what else.

It may have made sense to "unify" the rendering engine. This makes the simple case you point out look silly of course.
That is great feedback. Thank you.
Too true.

I'm originally from an African country, and trying to get into the US was next to impossible despite my qualifications (valid), experience (in several Western countries) and financial position (good).

Five years on, with New Zealand citizenship, I can travel visa-free virtually everywhere, work in Australia without paperwork, and can expect a short application process to get into the US, based on the experience of a friend of mine, who had the same progression.

It sucks if you're on the other end, but to some extent, a greater degree of scrutiny is warranted when your origin is a country you have motive to get out from and to commit fraud to do so.
Indeed. FYI, if you click on any text in the search results, you're given a text field with its text within it. It's a few extra clicks, unfortunately, but at least they considered that.
Almost inevitably, shortly after I launch something that proves reasonably popular, I see an ad for someone wanting to clone it on Scriptlance for $200.
It can, and it looks like they're making mathematica just render things as images, instead of parsing in text and then reformatting it as HTML.
This guess makes the most sense: to correctly display formulae. An example from another thread:

http://imgur.com/gcymm.png
28K to renovate a kitchen. On a credit card. Sheesh. Sometimes I feel like I'm on a different planet as everyone else. I could sit in my kitchen all day thinking of "renovations" that could be made, and come up totally empty. I mean, if it heats up frozen pizza it meets the full specifications for a kitchen, right?
Viaweb got copied a lot, and now YC does. I've learned not to worry about it. Clones rarely amount to anything. First of all, anyone who has to copy you is probably not that good. Someone really good wouldn't be able to copy someone else, even if it was to their advantage; they'd be too proud to. Second, people can only copy what's visible. They can't copy the half of the project that's in your head, and that is probably the more valuable half.
You mean 'just wants to listen to some music' _without paying for it_.

Regarding the DMCA and fair use restrictions, I agree it's something we must fight against, but I don't think piracy is an effective way to go about it.
And in my experience buying often turns out to have hidden disadvantages. The biggest of which seems to me to be that whenever we've tried to buy (both off the shelf and contracted work), it always turned out to be as much trouble and effort as just taking the time to build the damn thing ourselves.
Meh. The only ones I really agree with are 2 and 6. The other ones from a glance either don't make sense or aren't necessarily a unique benefit of a startup.
Did they just add that now? I don't remember seeing the hand cursor over text fields a couple of hours ago.
He sounds like an Irish Bob Ross. Let's put a nice happy little tree on your resume :)
Actually, there were plenty of finance companies that I glossed over. Most of them took a beating this past year, so I didn't include them.
There is a logic in this. The trick to understand it is to place intellectualism ahead of capitalism. It was not long ago when the Internet belonged to those who just wanted to exchange information. Kids and grown ups with no money, only their knowledge and creativity have become very successful. A lot of start-up companies started with little or no money only to become a "blue-chip" in relatively short time. A fine example is Razorfish.
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i think #1 should be #6 to make sense.

after one is forced to build, do sales and being efficient, there's little time left to raise money
I'm not too sure. I just discovered it a few minutes ago. :)
But then again you have to "spend alot of time to raise money" especially when your company hasn't proven its viability yet.
It was there yesterday
In what situations is it worth to buy rather than to build?
I asked Stephen Wolfram about this and he explained that it was because sometimes the answers contain complex mathematical formulae that are difficult to render in HTML and that since he wanted a consistent display, his preferred solution was to just use images all the time.
Admittedly my mistake; I thought you had said that. Updated the original post.
I think you're right, but I'm conflicted about this (both online and in real life.) I sense there's something for me to learn here. My question: Is it right to accept abuse? Larry seems to be saying it is.

Trying not to be offensive is a skill. I think just trying to be aware of it is a good way to practice it. Trying to not be offended is harder, but when I've used the "how to disagree" approach, of examining the facts presented (minus the imaginings, opinion, connotations, tone, attitude etc), and replying to them only (also in a factual way), it has been very effective, and also seemed to somehow close it off, and I didn't feel offended anymore.

It's a pity this article is dead, because I think the issue you raise is a very interesting one. Not specific to Hackernews, but more as a "how are we to live" philosophical question, and a very intellectually stimulating one.
The one big disadvantage I see is that you can quit pretty easily. Being poor gets tiring pretty quickly, especially if someone waves a nice fat salary and benefits in front of you.
Again, the text of each image can be found in the image element's alt attribute. Since WA already uses images to make formulas easier to print out, I guess Wolfram simply wanted to reuse the code.
In particular, I was thinking of the working poor. Many of those are still "losers." It's hard for many of those people to get other than crappy healthcare, crappy food, crappy housing, and crappy education for their kids.

It's interesting coming out with a thought 3 or 4 concepts away. It's interesting to see how people fill in the gaps, and what they project onto you.

The principle I was thinking of -- those willing to cause consensual suffering and misfortune. I suspect that some take the laissez-faire stance in order to ensure that they don't run out of downtrodden suckers.
Don't most screen readers read out the alt text of an image? (Yes, the hint here is to check the alt text of the image).
for simple things, always build is better if one is less dependent to time and money

actually, scratch that, it's even better when time and money are tight

in my case, i bought baking, washing soda and lye for my hygiene. 5kg each, each kg lasts for a year. extremely cheap (like $1/kg). only one time transaction.

i no longer go to soap, toothpaste, detergent and drano section when i go to grocery. suppose that takes 5 mins for searching, picking up, queueing and paying for each hygiene run while in grocery, it easily adds up to 52*5 = 260 mins time not wasted per year.
I also have hope for more independent creation, especially since I prefer indie / weird art to blockbuster stuff. But as much as I like your scenario, copyright still plays an important role in it to enable creators to live doing this.

I wonder if people's attitudes will change when The Pirate Bay is ripping off these independent artists, as opposed to the Big Evil Cos.
You'll have better luck with Readability :) - http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
You have mentioned some important commonalities, but what do you think make psychotherapy and meditation stand apart from religions? Would you list a few of the major differences?
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PG, on that note, what would you say is the "sweet spot" in terms of time looking to raise money?
While toying with the idea of going vegetarian (to see if it would affect energy levels), and just reducing intake of red meat as whole I have started using lentils in a lot of meals, especially in dhal and potato curries.

Seriously easiest and nicest meal possible. http://www.vegsoc.org.nz/recipe_070307.html For a quick dhal recipe. Quick to zap reheat and easy to eat in a mug at the desk.
I have no past experience with anything having to do with distribution, so I can't really say with confidence, but I do think that once we enter this artist-to-customer model, distribution services of a new kind will come about where an artist could place an order and a service could "hook them up" with graphic artists to create artwork for album covers and all that, take care of CD-creations and ship them to customers, etc. Actually, such a service already exists, I just don't remember the URI at the moment.
Repeat after me, downloading music is not theft, its copyright infringement
All good advice, but things are not as simple nowadays as they used tobe, and penalties for what used to be minor errors ypeople made occasionally are now severe and cumulative. An interesting summary of how the legal environment has tilted against consumers is here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1262477
Not too hard to figure out who the biggest losers are. Just look for the liberals.

Easy to pick out. They walk funny because they're overweight and totally out of shape and they have a little stamp on their foreheads that says "I work for the government".
Distribution isn't difficult at all. It's happening without artists' consent as we speak.

The hard parts are marketing and monetization. It's possible that someone might come around and fix those problems if the record labels weren't holding it back.

That said, the best way to bring such a state about isn't to infringe their copyrights. It's to listen to music that they don't have copyright to in the first place.
Any idea if they use TeX or MathML for this?
Ask HN: iPhone button - email friend
Hi!

I'm writing an iPhone app. Everything's done, except for wanting to add in a button where when the user clicks it, it'll pop up the iPhone / iPod touch email client (with a pre-written message) so the user can just click send to send it.

How can I do this?

Thanks!
Does your programming make it harder for you to deal with an imperfect world?
As an example, you might try to be as honest as possible in your everyday communication. But people lie all the time to simplify communication. Does this bother you? Do you find yourself wondering whether a simplification is worth the (minor) deception?

As another example, you may find that almost all forms are ambiguous in some way or other and wonder if it would be appropriate to guess what is meant.
I don't know what the truth is, but doing something you aren't good at, and aren't improving at, is also draining.
Wolfram|Alpha is written in Mathematica (several million lines of it!), so I presume they're just using Mathematica to render everything.

You can actually download a Mathematica worksheet for any query response and open it up in Mathematica. Pretty neat.
I've never downloaded pirate music or movies. Software, yes. But I have worked in the music business.

Looks, all but the most successful recording artists make nothing off studio albums. The money comes from live performance and (if they're lucky) radio royalties. Revenues from CD sales or the like make an absolute pittance - most of it gets eaten up along the distribution chain, billed for marketing or whatever, and the the record companies engage in a great deal of creative accounting. If you ever read up on contract law in the recording industry you'd be horrified.

Your dollar spent in a record store benefits the the artist to the tune of about $0.01. You want to really support someone you like, buy a ticket and go to hear them sing/play, for which they'll get a decent percentage of the ticket value.
Your suggestion is off base.

As for the rest of your comment, please read my comment again. It says nothing about realtors about whom I know too little to say much. It is concerned with the meme that people seem to earn money "on a day's worth of work". I think it is in the same category as that investors earn money only by "skimming off" other people's "productive work". The transaction is only one moment in a long chain of preparation and risk. Whether it takes place over a second or a month does not matter. To make another outdated reference to the last century, Michael Jordan didn't earn his millions by winning this or that particular game for his team. It was years and years of preparation and taking the risk of ending up like the other 99.99 percent of ballplayers, i.e. with little money to show for his efforts.

The only job I can immediately think of which could fit the description of lots of money for very little work is that of Jamal's contestant in Slumdog Millionaire ;) And even there you can argue it is a long chain and that the money is earned through attracting the attention of many people.
"Healthy Foods for Under $1" was discussed a while back.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414298

Here was my suggestion (sweet potato):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414398
If you live by the coast, you can try spear-fishing and you kill two birds with one stone: you exercise and you eat healthy food ;-)
I disagree. He has two points. The first - Dont call yourself a "Java programmer" (for example) because your job most likely will use more than Java and the self-description may contrain your career options. Instead use more general self-descriptions like "Database Expert" or "Web Developer". The second - Learn multiple languages to give yourself a flexible mental framework with which to solve problems.

I don't think it's too late for anyone to hear this advice. I thought it was quite helpful.
Recent versions of at least Safari and Firefox have full content zooming, so it zooms images along with the text.

Screen readers will read the text in the "alt" attribute of the image, which matches what the image says usually.
Wolfram Alpha will fail for the same reason that Microsoft failed at search.
Microsoft tried to compete with Google by coming up with really good results for the most common queries. This strategy was not effective.

Wolfram Alpha is trying to do the same -- trying to give really good answers/computations for common sorts of queries.

Users expect reasonable answers for all queries.
It seems easy enough to agree that running a startup cheaply is good. However, seldom are people quantitative about what is cheap. Any chance we can get some numbers? What's a cheap burn-rate for a startup with 3 founders? 3 founders + 3 employees? ...?
Everyone working mobile had this idea earlier in the decade.

Had it at the resolution of a one-paragraph text description, maybe. At that resolution, Google = Excite.

I also think you're doing Sam an injustice by attributing his success to youth and inexperience. Youth and inexperience are plentiful, but they don't seem to produce much except when combined with brains and determination.
We actually do the same for math equations in LearnHub lessons (via texhub.com). Images are pretty much the only way to present complex math equations to a wide audience.

MathML would be a much better solution only if it were natively supported in IE.
Arguably not: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-...

One reason that people listen to music for free online (which I usually do via YouTube) is because the selection of music on radio is dreadful - most commercial radio is owned by the same handful of companies, and it's the same greatest hits mixed in with the latest heavy rotation day-in day-out. I don't even own a radio any more - and as an ex-DJ, I am pretty sure I have spent far more on music than you will in your whole lifetime.
This is one of the reasons the young and the nerdy tend to have an advantage in starting startups. They have inexpensive tastes. So they feel prosperous on an income that would make someone older and more conventional feel poor.
I have a few simple and general rules that I try to follow:

1. I try not to eat anything that does not easily rot. This generally keeps me away from processed food.

2. I try to eat a lot of things that are green (vegetables).

3. I purchase organic when I can.

4. Excellent ingredients minimally handled usually make for the best recipes.

These rules make for healthy and great tasting food. I am a single male and my monthly food budget is around $300. I buy from a weekly farmers market, Whole Foods, and occasionally WalMart.
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Wow, that actually works pretty well. Tried it with some random bookmarks and it seems to struggle with certain pages (http://www.softsynth.com/pforth/pf_faq.html for example), but on the whole it seems very useful indeed - thanks for the heads-up!
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Bean stew (I use black):

Two cans beans
one can diced tomatoes
one onion
other veggies? (bell peppers, etc)

bay leaf, spices, hot salsa (to taste).

Sautee onions/veggies
Stew everything until it's the consistency you want (put it all in a pot).

For about $5-7 /pot which feeds about 4, it's pretty cheap.

Also, you can prep it and start everything stewing, and then just let it boil. Furthermore, it keeps really well, so you can just make a large batch and reheat it.
a lightly-tested, monolithic program written in a dynamic language that permits monkey-patching at runtime and doesn't have Perl's taint checking support, makes me nervous to say the least

lightly-tested - Objection valid. Testing should be heavy for a MTA.

monolithic program - Erlang-style process separation might be useful here, with each part running at different privilege levels.

dynamic language that permits monkey-patching - So what? Dynamic languages are not any less secure. Machine code injection often allowed by many C programs is the ultimate monkey-patching. If you want to make a Smalltalk image secure, you just expunge the Compiler objects and disable the various #perform: messages. No more compiling! No more dynamic evaluating or altering of Smalltalk code of any kind.

doesn't have Perl's taint checking support - Objection could be valid. Taint checking is a very good thing. However, it turns out that there is something along those lines for Python.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2007-February/5...

One thing that's nice about dynamic languages, is that many of them are immune to buffer-overflow code injection. That, plus taint checking actually makes me feel better about the security of properly architected and deployed applications in dynamic languages.

I do agree that the set of apps you mention are deceptively "enticingly easy." Caution is warranted!
We're talking about smart people and inevitably they're going to look at friends who've opted for the corporate world and do the math. Certainly as long as the promise of a big payoff is there, then the math might weigh in favor of doing a startup. But it also might not. That whole time value of money thing says that sacrificing income in your twenties is going to hurt you a lot more in the long run than sacrificing income later on.

edit:
Of course, right now the "whole time value of money" is basically negative. ;-)
If you want academic work, look at anything by Merry White about Japanese children -- she covers the phenomenon of how Japanese record companies do it, and why, in detail. (Short version: the fantasy that you are just like this pop star and that they are part of your life sells records.)

If you want more informal analysis, look at anything in the press about Disney Music in the last 10+ years. It is crazy how much of American pop has come out of The Mouse -- not because they have superior access to talented teenagers but because they know what to do to craft, develop, launch and manage a brand which just happens to center around an actual human being. (They're seriously ambivalent about that, actually -- if they could do it without the human they would.)

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1564394,00.html

I also love the Onion's take on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZgXg_7kVI8&feature=playe...
There's also "bad for whom?"