skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) The Register call-to-action isn't clear what the result will be. Does it create an event? Will it let me download the app? How is this different than creating an account in the app? Can I not create an account in the app?

2) The floating "Learn More..." is unnecessary. People know how to scroll.

3) The alternating layout communicates that they're separate features rather than steps in a process. I would explore different ways to communicate the steps.

4) Make it very clear the problem your app is solving. Like petalpete mentioned in his suggestion, "event" is vague and generic. Try to use terms that clear and specific like concert, holiday party, etc.

5) Maybe consider curating the recent images. Some of them are fairly low quality.
I think the comments by Matt Kaufman (president of Crunchbase) about the damage that can be caused by "Crunchbase replicas" reflect the knowledge on AOL's part that Crunchbase is a potentially very interesting data asset. And so the reality is that they'll prob revisit rights to Crunchbase, and it'll go from very open to something less so (how far is the question). I would also guess that Crunchbase has a paid subscription offering in the works.

I would also speculate that People+ may be the first "offender" Crunchbase will target. Datafox.co, Mattermark, Inkwire.io might all find themselves in the crosshairs.

This also underscores a common mistake developers make which is creating on someone else's platform where the rules can and will change significantly especially when monetization becomes important. And it seems monetization is on Crunchbase's mind.

Update:

This post on the Crunchbase blog articulates that monetization is coming and that the above "offenders" may be hearing from AOL counsel soon.

http://info.crunchbase.com/2013/11/05/crunchbase-people-and-...

"CrunchBase must remain open to anyone who wants to contribute, and retrieving that data for non-commercial benefit must remain open as well. That said, to invest in CrunchBase’s constant improvement requires building a business around CrunchBase in a way that successfully takes into account our terms of service and our openness."
As noted in the link, Go is also moving to contiguous stacks[1]. This is supposed to be implemented in 1.3.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAaf1rYoM4S4gtnPh0zOlGzW...
The recent shutdown of Liberty Reserve, another digital currency favored by criminals, shows the extent to which the U.S authorities are willing to go in cases like this. Nowhere on earth is safe if you are running/facilitating a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation.
Author here:

What was inaccurate about this write-up?

I wasn't hired part way through the batch, I joined them as they were going through the interview process, true. I didn't stay with the company until the very end, you're right. I had a different vision than they did. I still was on the YC Founders list. I still went to every YC event, meeting, and dinner as a founder. Just trying to share what I know and learned from YC so people can still find success and community.

After I left the company I was taken off the founders list, that was fine by me. Does that make me any less a part of YC or the spirit of this community?
Apparently the video decoding and other client-side stuff is done purely in JavaScript (and in particular using WebGL), no <video> tag or plugins or anything like that. I presume that all the server-side stuff is still native code.

I'd still like to see a demo page with their JavaScript decoder.
Latency kills.
I was inspired to google for price discrimination, and enjoyed this pharase:

"consumers are being asked to reveal their degree of price sensitivity"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Premium_pr...
I always thought dude came from the Irish word "Dúd" or "Dúdaire".

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/nyregion/08irish.html
Inversely, it will only weaken Bitcoin, and erode any credibility it has.
Learning STG by example
Holy fuck. Sue them for everything, I mean EVERYTHING.
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of people here. Not enough to generate real revenue.
I was trying to decide if this was appropriate to post to hn. It shocked the conscience to the extent that people I know who are involved in government/mil/etc were discussing how they would have responded; it is basically rape under color of law.

Even more amazingly, it wasn't one officer alone by the side of the road in an ambiguous circumstance; there was a judge, a DA, multiple officers from several departments, two medical facilities, etc involved.

A civil suit is inadequate; state or federal criminal investigations should be forthcoming. It is possible there is a reasonable explanation, but an investigation is the only way to determine that.
For those asserting that removing the canary would constitute disclosure: what about stopping the report altogether?
I suppose it depends on what you want to accomplish. Most of the extra baggage could be removed within a month. Fixing other things would be much much harder.

For instance, Vim uses an internal byte queue to represent all input. When Vim receives keystrokes, it translates them to known sequences, sometimes combining them with previous bytes, and shoves them back into the input stream- ie, instead of using structs/unions, Vim uses raw bytes. The down side (besides the insanity of doing this in the first place) is that some sequences can never be represented unless you want a byte/multibyte sequence for every possible combination. Data is just lost. On the upside, Vim potentially saves a few bytes. No one would make that tradeoff in 2013. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/2bp9UdfZ63M for the discussion about this.

Another problem for attack is that Vim uses a pile of regex hacks for syntax highlighting. Presumably, the hacks make it go faster. Of course, some things are context specific, so this gets really fucking ugly really quickly. Perhaps this wouldn't be a huge problem, but Vim also lacks the ability to run any asynchronous plugins (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/-4pqDJfHCsM). IE, you couldn't do the highlighting outside of Vim and apply the rules in real time. You can't run a linter in the background and highlight errors. The patch ostensibly fixes these problems, but in reality it will never be merged because of existing bugs in Vim (ie, the extension causes Vim to crash through no fault of its own).

The design philosophy of Vim is that it should be embedded (not an IDE). This is fine, but Vim makes this hard because it uses global variables for everything instead of internal interfaces among other reasons. If Vim made this easy, you'd see Vim embedded into other text editors (instead of emulated or instead of using crazy pty hacks).

The most useful change I could see would be dropping Vim script entirely and replacing it with a single, well known scripting language. This is somewhat in the works right now- Bram is currently in the process of better bridging the gap between python and Vim (currently, python is restricted to evaling vimscript/ex commands).

Ultimately, 100K could do a bit to cleanup Vim, but that probably isn't helpful to end users. If you peruse the vim mailing list, there are quite a few topics like this- people suggesting or implementing large changes- they all get dropped. Realistically, I just see Vim stagnating.
They have a JavaScript library called ORBX.js that handles all the streaming and encoding in the browser.

You can read more about it here -> http://www.otoy.com/130501_OTOY_release_FINAL.pdf
Yeah. I also wonder if in the future people will use bitcoin to keep their cash since Swiss banks are not as independent as they used to be anymore.
Sharemarket darling Xero dubbed 'Apple of accounting'
State capitalism... you really want to go down the rabbit hole of language semantics.

So it's capitalism where all the money goes to the state, which is the government, which is the people... which is exactly what "communism" is. If you think of a "commune" as a "corporation", then it's almost identical.

I'd be happy to see the arguement, that they are a pretty bad communist state, and they don't allocate their money too well, and they (like every other country) have problems with corruption. But "they are not communist" is just as valid as "the US is not a democracy" (Technically it's kind of true, but it isn't useful as a discussion point).

My point is, Communism is pretty much just as popular as democracy... so saying it's died, is just being ignorant.
Web Performance Tools
Researcher skepticism grows over badBIOS malware claims
> abridging the freedom of speech

The freedom of speech isn't absolute. For example, you can get arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater.

> I can't see why people don't just ignore gag orders

Because people don't think it's worth the consequences. Which might include: Going to jail, financially ruinous fines and/or legal expenses, company being forced out of business which destroys your workers' livelihoods and shareholder value, being sued by shareholders for breaching "fiduciary duty" (making decisions that are blatantly bad for the company).

My guess is that, for a lot of people, the potential reward doesn't justify the stakes.
> The two parts of the announcement, JS+WebGL decoder and the GPU cloud driving the encoder, combine to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

So, it's some client JS WebGL code, and something else driving the encoder in the cloud

I like the idea of scriptable VNC like streams.
Is it just me, or should this title be "Zero-Day Attack"? What's the "Under" all about?
The scary thing for me with Tesla stock is primarily the risks in going to large scale mass market cars, as well as the risk of another car company, or another startup, emerging to win the mass market EV space.
Talk about underestimating.

If the USA wanted to, it could easily destroy bitcoin, they have more than enough computing power.

It might not be legal for them to do so, but that's their own self imposed limitation, not inability.
This happens routinely at Disrupt. I remember a fabulous startup called Prism Sky Labs (could connect to any network camera with drag and drop software and was quite cool in ambition) lost to Qwiki.
I personally like the simplicity of the SQL dialect. It's a universal way to query data every programmer is familiar with it. Alternatively using functions and code to query data easily gets very complicated.
"The thing underlying the security" is a dynamic thing, it grows or shrinks based on the market for their products, the execution of its executives, and the quality of its products.

If it is not going to be making significantly more money next year than this year, you'd want to build that into your decision to buy the stock. Fundamental value can be defined in a lot of ways, but growth is not reliably quantifiable. Which is why there is fluctuation in stock prices.

If I believe Tesla will continue to grow at 50-100% per year, then it may be valued reasonably right now. It may even be a bargain. If, on the other hand, I believe it is a static business now and has reached saturation of its product line in the market as it exists, I'd be a fool to pay this high a price.

There are so many variables...if you're value investing rather than growth investing, TSLA is not your stock, and won't be for another decade or two. I tend to buy into growth companies, so this looks like a chance to buy into a company I missed earlier at a slightly lower price (I don't suggest trying to time the market, but sometimes the market puts something on sale that you wanted to buy anyway). It was just such a sale (only on a much larger scale) many years ago, that led to me holding a few shares of GOOG. I bought as many shares as I could afford with what was in my trading account, and I may buy as many shares of TSLA as I can afford now (after a bit of research, of course).
I can understand why Ford's CEO would be considered for the lead job in the automotive industry (as he helped build Ford's reputation back) but being the head of Microsoft? I'm wondering what value there is in hiring a CEO that does not have a technology background/vision.
> mete out secret criminal punishments for violating national security, directly to whoever they gave the NSL to

I've read that in the case of the NSA wiretaps, companies were directly threatened with having their executives sent to prison if the taps were disrupted or revealed.
I am an artist and tech is my medium
I would say it has stood the test of time for a few years now. Every attempt thus far (directly or otherwise) has strengthened it economically. The price is now around $250usd, doubled in the last month since silk road was closed down.
This article is well-written and The Verge's production quality is tremendous. Can we get more like this?

On Everpix - pretty shocked at the candor/level of disclosure in this article including from the founders and Index Ventures. VCs tend to keep mum about their misses so a bit refreshing to see.
What's to stop Apple from simply leaving the canary up even though they're shoveling data out the back door? Is their transparency report legally binding?
In some sense, there is nothing to stop the government from executing anyone it wants for no reason at all. Indeed, there is nothing to stop me from killing you or you from killing me, not unless you indulge the premise that "law" can stop someone from doing something they otherwise have the ability to do.

If you are willing to indulge that premise, then what stops the government from acting out your hypothetical is that it would be clearly illegal.[1] There is widespread misunderstanding about the basic nature of FISA. Yes, it's a secret court and that's bad, but it's a secret court with one power: to grant FISA warrants. Furthermore, the whole process pertains to something, foreign intelligence surveillance, that didn't require any judicial supervision at all prior to FISA.

[1] As opposed to what the NSA is doing now, which is just debatably illegal, and if actually illegal is only illegal at the edges. It doesn't sit well with technologists, but most of the things that inspire outrage, from surveilling foreign leaders to collecting phone metadata to getting e-mails pursuant to court orders are well within the bounds of the law as it's understood. Now, maybe we don't want the NSA to engage in these activities, but the fact that they do isn't a sign that they've totally disregarded the law and are ready to start executing people at random. They're clearly trying to work at the boundaries of things like the third party doctrine, but that's different from ignoring the law.
So this man had nothing to hide?
I'm sure Dropbox gets better volume pricing than Everpix did.
Actually Canada has fantastic lipid clinics. (Disclosure: lipoproteins were the focus of my research and I collaborated with these folks.) Rob Hegele is a big name in lipids and his clinic is in Southwest Ontario, I believe.
Even a schlub who decided they wanted to test the system would likely receive an embarrassment of legal talent volunteering to represent them pro-bono.
"we must also ensure that rash or uninformed actions don’t stifle a potentially valuable technology"

I love how they judge the utility of bitcoin based on monetary value.
Words fail. The doctors are even trying to bill him for the procedure.
Would you pay differently for a lottery ticket that had a payout of 1MM if you had the chances of A) 1/2 B) 1/5 C) 1/50 D) 1/5000?

The potential payout is unchanged, but the value of the ticket changes as it gets more likely to pay out.
There are plenty of YC companies with employees before entering YC, even. Certainly not a majority, but there are some surprisingly far-along companies entering YC.
Ruby's been my main language for nearly 4 years now, can't say I remember going to rubyforge much in that time. Between rubygems.org and github they've got it pretty covered.
Yes, cash is more anonymous. Though, large deposits and withdrawals of cash receive more scrutiny.
Unfortunately, Leanpub exclusively uses Markdown, which doesn't support things like using a BibTeX bibliography for references. I also don't think there's a way to customize the design of the print book, apart from cover images and such.

I'm writing using reStructuredText and Sphinx because they give me a bibliography, an index, full-text search, cross-referencing, custom environments (e.g. boxes for examples, tips, etc.), and all sorts of other cool features. For example, if I needed matplotlib plots, I can embed the code in my documents and Sphinx will generate them.

I'd immediately put the book on Leanpub if I could get some of these features. A Leanpub using a customized Sphinx would be incredibly useful for people writing textbooks.
When the author wrote this article yesterday:

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/how-to-wri...

Had he forgotten about co-writing this trenderrific, millenials-as-failed-commodity dreck last year?
You just attacked the credibility of the person instead of the credibility of the points and you said it's "full of inaccuracies" without going into specifics.

Have you changed your stance on whether you feel those two things are in the spirit of a quality HN discussion?
So the future is full of cloud outages during which you can't play any of the games you paid for?
The fact pattern for his conviction can only be called "insider trading" as a technicality.
"Functional Reactive Programming in Elm" by Evan Czaplicki
I like the idea, but isn't this illegal?
Computer model snares online pedophiles
It isn't really a discussion list so much as people sending important announcements or sometimes sending posts asking a question, soliciting private answers, then compiling and potentially anonymizing the results before posting a consolidated response a few days later -- super efficient.

Per batch email, group discussion (FB mostly, for us), group chat, etc usually involves a subset, or direct asks of other groups. I personally know nothing about consumer stuff, so no one ever asks me for CSS advice, but plenty of times hosting, security, etc questions come up.

Plus the purely social stuff is usually with a self selected subset; YC is diverse in interests. There is even basically a YC gun club, and a bunch of YC anti-gun activists, coexisting peacefully :)
Can't I download some binaries, and have my own local instance running instead?
I can think of very few positive effects of this - what's the purpose? Anyone care to elaborate on how this is beneficial?
prior post and discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6677664
I don't want to stay in the same place as creepy old dudes and shitfaced teenagers.
No metric will be great right now because Dart is so new compared to CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript 1.0 was released 3 years ago. Give us a chance to get 1.0 out the door :)
The latter part of what I quoted wasn't phrased as speculation, which was what irked me. But the fact that OP has heard this opinion expressed by lawyers certainly makes the comment more interesting.
Thanks. I had seen some of his work, but browsing his list of publications I found a few more interesting papers. I've already worked one into my draft.
If your first sentence were true, then the stock shouldn't have been affected much by today's news. Instead, it fell significantly.

The price of the stock has to do with how much money it might make in the future, and where they are on their growth trajectory. The news today signifies that the trajectory might be lower overall, or they might be further behind than investors thought.
All involved will likely be promoted and cited for their courageous pursuit of justice.
Nope, their lowest tier is $5/mo.

http://www.smugmug.com/features
Ask HN: Our 1-month-old wine startup just raised a huge round at a $5m valuation
Dear HN,

We just raised a large round at a $5 million valuation.

We’re packing our bags, renting a sick place in San Francisco, and changing the wine industry forever.

We’re looking for a badass engineer to join us.
This isn’t a job. What we’re offering you is a fully-immersive startup experience.

You will become a part of our core team - living, working, eating, partying, and sleeping under the same roof as us.

WHO ARE WE?

- Our team hails from successful startups like AppSumo, WineAccess, McKesson, ID Creator; and our advisors are from Google, Society of Wine Educators, and leaders of Fortune 500 companies

- Our marketplace connects wineries to online buyers

- We absolutely hate Groupon and deep-discounts – they kill brands and bastardize pricing structures.

WHAT ARE WE OFFERING YOU?

- Co-founder title and equity

- Room in our upscale loft in SOMA

- Monthly cash

- Any computer set-up you want, headphones, monitors, anything.

- Fully stocked bar with high end wine + unlimited snacks

YOU:

- Are a hustler and get shit done quickly

- Have senior-level experience with the following technology stack: PHP, jQuery, CodeIgniter, Ajax, MySQL

- Are an expert at quickly becoming an expert

- Have experience managing a team of remote junior developers

- Can routinely work 16+ hour days

PLUS SPECIAL BROWNIE POINTS IF YOU:

- Have a love of wine

- Can speak Spanish

- Experience with: Server administration, e-commerce marketplaces, API’s

- Have a burning hatred for deep-discount marketplaces like Groupon

- Like eating carne asada tacos and playing poker

HOW TO APPLY

- Send an email to ycwinestartup@gmail.com and answer this question “I am perfect to join your team because…”

- Feel free to check out our site: http://bit.ly/17E26g7
Whoops, thank you
Are you trolling? The Pirate Bay is doing better than ever.
Video via javascript? Advertisers must love the idea of this. I hope that there will be a way to turn this kind of thing off.
He resisted, so clearly he had something to hide.
It's peer to peer, they'd have to take down the internet to stop it.
Nik - good stuff. Was there ever a monetization plan when you were building it or was it always just always viewed as a complementary asset to TC as you highlight above?

Comment from TC article left by IronToby which is a great point:

"Sounds like they wanted people to contribute content for free while they're the only ones allowed to profit from it."
>You book guys think you can just push levers on a printing press and write around the Vatican. So naive.
There are so so many things wrong with this situation i don't even know where to begin.

The judge granted a warrant, an almost facially invalid one (and it turns out, completely invalid for other reasons), but will still be immune from anything here.

The DA will be immune from anything here.
The Officers will claim qualified immunity, and may or may not win.

At least there is supreme court precedent that should have put them on notice:
Winston v. Lee - 470 U.S. 753 (1985)

"(a) A compelled surgical intrusion into an individual's body for evidence implicates expectations of privacy and security of such magnitude that the intrusion may be "unreasonable" even if likely to produce evidence"

Here, it wasn't even likely to produce evidence.

The doctor will certainly be sued for, among other things, battery, false imprisonment, etc.

(Looks close, they threw some other stuff in there. Here is the complaint:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/181747773/Complaint-David-Eckert-v...
)
There is also a way older "computer" from 100BC called the Antikythera mechanism which was used by ancient Greek astronomers and sailors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
I couldn't believe that when I read it. If anything, they should be billing the police, considering they were the ones who requested the procedure.
...erm... more 'C for newbs'.

Although, it does point out some interesting idioms of the language and I agree that scanf is bloody cool. IMO every language should have printf/scanf equivalents :o)
In some ways that is the most staggering thing of all. They assaulted the man and did horrible things against his will, and now they're attempting to charge him money for the privilege?