skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.

Maybe I'm out in left field here, but I thought that one of the hallmarks of infrastructure was a monopoly due to geographical concerns - it wouldn't make sense to run twelve different parallel power grids all over town. There is no such constraint here. Google, Facebook, etc are all big, but there's no lack of place to run power lines in play to stop a competitor from competing in their space (See DuckDuckGo, for example).
That sounds brutal. Do you have anyone that you both trust, like an older advisor, college professor, etc. that could maybe sit down with both of you and mediate?
I'd like to see iA being hit with their own medicine, to taste what it feels like.

Let some patent holders hit with other text editing patterns that they violated in iA Writer and Writer Pro.

The "font adjusting size to the size of the window" would be a good start. Or how about "word count based on text selection". Or "auto formatting markup syntax". Or "modal writing workflow".
Show HN: CiiMS 1.9 - A Better Blogging Platform & CMS
Example, email users who joined in the last 30 days who have not used our service. That is something you need to build yourself for your specific product no matter what back-end you are using.

Exactly, that's a great example of why keeping everything in rails seems to make more sense.

EDIT: To clarify my app will remain in rails. Just trying to figure out whether my mktg site should be migrated away to wordpress.
It seems to me that the primary function is purely punitive and expends very little effort to rehabilitate anyone.

Which stems from humans liking "just deserts" and liking people to be punished for their crimes. A rational theory about deterrence, rehabilitation, and harm reduction may be more humane, but also difficult to implement and propagate through the populace. That being said, we humans are getting better at treating minority and animals.(Say, gay marriage is being legalized in more states) So I have some hope that our treatment of society's most unsympathetic and hated group better will improve as we become more rational and "nicer".
The API exposure is a good benefit
Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Now Offers Access to 475,000 eBooks
Haha, I don't think you know what libel is.
Is it possible to obtain life insurance on someone without their knowledge?
Is it possible to obtain life insurance on someone without their knowledge?

I was wondering if it is possible to obtain life insurance on someone ..possibly an employee.or close family member with out their permission or them knowing about the policy.
For those wondering why this is important, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

> "If negative stereotypes are present regarding a specific group, group members are likely to become anxious about their performance, which may hinder their ability to perform at their maximum level. For example, stereotype threat can lower the intellectual performance of African-Americans taking the SAT reasoning test used for college entrance in the United States, due to the stereotype that African-Americans are less intelligent than other groups. Importantly, the individual does not need to subscribe to the stereotype for it to be activated. Moreover, the specific mechanism through which anxiety (induced by the activation of the stereotype) decreases performance is by depleting working memory (especially the phonological aspects of the working memory system).
Checksums do not offer this property if both the remote file and checksum are both sent unsecured. If an attacker can MitM the remote file, then they can also do the same for the checksum file.
He shouldn't have to go on an apology tour to ask questions. He's already been judged by the courts. You stay out of it.
Well considering that California spent almost $50k per inmate in 2008 alone [1], it's certainly cheaper for the "student", but not exactly less expensive all told.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...
The 'problem' with the reals is that there are numbers that cannot be constructed.

Every number that we can construct can be constructed in a finite amount of symbols. For example sqrt(2) is an unambiguous description of itself. Without use of the sqrt function, we can also call it the number x such that x*x=2. However, every description is a finite string constructed from a finite alphabet. We can easily show that the set of all such descriptions is countably infinite. However, we can also show that the set of all real numbers is uncountably infinite. Therefore, there is an uncountable infinity of real numbers that cannot be constructed.
I'm also very surprised at peoples responses to this. If I have a serious crime committed to me I'm not going to confront a potentially dangerous individual. It simply isn't worth the risk. Why put yourself and your family at risk just for the chance of securing some kind of respect from a criminal?
I'm pretty sure there are Indian YC founders, just not Native American ones.
People who behave this way are generally too self-absorbed to realize that they are behaving this way.
If I talk with my boards on his misbehaviour it will get them stressed and stop believing on the company

Sorry dude, looks like that is precisely what you are going to have to do. Don't worry about the board stressing; they can handle it. That's their job.

Focus on YOUR job: the success of the company. The board will stop believing you when you prolong this longer than you should have, actually making the situation much worse.

When you go to the board, GO PREPARED. Assume the board does not know anything. And treat it almost like a trial where you will get to present your side, and at some point, your co-founder will get to present his. In these cases, I like to open up a document and put down the facts in bullet points. When presenting, remain calm and stick to the facts, which when evaluated by a sensible party(your board), should have them arrive at the same conclusion as you.
Yeah, real programmers use butterflies.
It's hard to say for sure because we don't ask people what race they identify as, and we don't know offhand which people are citizens and which aren't. But Michael Seibel seems a good bet if you want an example to encourage kids.
> But if points have zero extension then even an infinity of them cannot sum to anything greater than zero.

Can you make this rigorous? Because using the standard definitions, this statement is not true. It's true that a countable number of points must have total length zero (and you can even give a rigorous proof of this) but not necessarily true for a non-countable number of points. The study of "lengths of sets of points" is called measure theory.

I think it is unnecessary, however, to bring in the whole concept of length when defining lines. For example, we could simply define a line as a set of points obeying some special properties.
Rap Stats: 'f*ck that shit, Google'
I disagree. The vast majority of students take math classes for the practical applications - science and engineering - not to continue theoretical pure math study. Therefore the focus should be on effective teaching of applied math. I am sure that if a student wishes to explore their studies in pure mathematics they will be clever enough to learn whatever they need in specialized classes.
Unfourtuantly, there exist numbers which are definable but not computable.
Actually you're overthinking it. It's nothing of the short (I've bought Writer Pro).

It's exactly this: you select "verbs" and the verbs are highlighted. You select "nouns" and the nouns are. Same for adjectives, adverbs, prepositions (as, from, in) and conjuctions (and, or).

Nothing earth shattering, nothing you can't do with simply tagging words, nothing marchine-learning or AI about it.

Here's an example:

http://imgur.com/NrseuZV

P.S Damn, it's even worse than that. All the hard work -- which was not that hard itself -- was already made by Apple in their CoreText API. According to the Verge:

"the heavy lifting is already baked into Apple’s developer platform. Since iOS 5 and OS X 10.7, Apple has provided a class called NSLinguisticTagger that segments natural-language text and labels the text with various bits of information, including parts of speech".
I don't have any experience with Amazon, but at least with Oracle we found it very difficult to actually get them to use some of those "financial resources" for even basic things. I would imagine Amazon is willing to do whatever it takes to make the best possible product/ecosystem. I don't have the same confidence that Oracle will.
How do you know it's a democratic voting system? Just because you assume it is, doesn't mean it is. Just ask around, plenty of stories about being mysteriously shunted off the front page.

RapGenius is a YC company and always seems to get attention on HN whenever there is some kind of perceived grievance against the company. Whether it's Google or Heroku, there's always a lot of screaming and shouting.
That was a nice read.

How exactly did your "felonious history" affect your career?

Just curious, do the world of startups and hackers, actually bias on things like this?
Yes, someone whose family barely escaped with their lives from a communist state may indeed have strong opinions on the subject.
I wrote a short paper on the topic once upon a time[1] which you may find interesting. It's part history of math, part philosophy of math.

It's not a great paper and most of the insights in it come from others but here is some of the arithmetic of nilpotent[1] infinitesimals as shown in the appendix.

Imagine an entity which is not equal to zero but that when raised to the power of 2 or higher is equal to zero! Sounds odd, doesn't it, but it works! (ϵ is an infinitesimal)

ϵ != 0 but ϵ^n = 0 | n>1

ok? so we get:

(ϵ + 1)^n = 1 + nϵ
thus: (ϵ + 1)^−1 = 1 − ϵ

e^ϵ = 1+ϵ

(ϵ + 1)(ϵ−1) = −1, or alternately (1 + ϵ)(1 − ϵ) = −1

and finally (for calculus): ϵf′(x) = f(x + ϵ)−f(x)

1: http://leto.electropoiesis.org/propaganda/The_Analyst_Revisi...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilpotent

edit: clarity, line breaks!
Then maybe we should be doing more to engender an attitude of calculated risk-taking. The dearth of leadership that fits whatever category you can come up with (race, education level, gender, whatever) can be overcome with tenacity and courage.

Maybe we shouldn't be selling these kids on people who are like them. Maybe we shouldn't continue promoting a concept as poisonous as racial consciousness. Maybe teach these folks to disregard role models...
I agree. Dell monitors' matte screens are really nice.
I have found this to be the most helpful way of setting things up
Great story.

Watching the Jobs / Antenna Gate presentation again just reminded how well Apple manages crisis. Other companies/startups could take note.
Seems like they should add one. Might be a good reason to learn Scheme... https://github.com/wting/hackernews
The Oregon law in the link is practically useless for making a determination pertaining to four-way stops (it looks like it might be referring to two-way stops with cross traffic). Whatever, maybe you quoted the wrong statute, I thought to myself, or maybe my not-a-lawyer brain just can't parse it. Let's go to the OR drivers manual!

"At any intersection with stop signs in all four directions, it is common courtesy to allow the driver who stops first to go first."

Good Gawd, "common courtesy"?! What's wrong with your lawmakers down there?

So I stand corrected. Apparently not every state has this clearly defined.

(As an example of a state that does clearly define it, first thing I find on Google is Michigan, which matches exactly what I described: http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/05/traffic_talk_wha...)
Wow, vector multiplication suddenly makes sense. I had never seen it described with polar coordinates.

It's wonderful to have this little insight now. It's unfortunate that my math knowledge is so filled with holes.
I would imagine a spike in the amount of Amazon Prime memberships increased this week due to console purchases.

This year I signed up for a free 30 day trial of Prime so that I could skip on the cost of shipping for Christmas. I will cancel it before the trial period ends. Last year my wife did the same thing on her account.

So I would be curious how many of those are trial memberships, and what the statistics are after 30-60 days once all of those trials expire.
Also, apparently "rice" is a now a singular specific quantity.
Just use common sense. Everybody with half of brain should know that delivery of stuff takes time.
I really disliked the author's attitude for "reality check". One almost could get impression that people in tech have no idea what is around them.
Basically, I gave a ride to a couch-surfer that ended up committing a robbery. Instead of turning them in when I found out, I just kicked them out... but the police said that made me an accomplice so I went to prison for 6 months and was on probation for 10 years.

I was charged as an adult, so it can't be sealed. Even if I managed to get the records expunged by donating enough money to $partyInPower, it wouldn't matter much because all the data brokers have already bought that information and are under no obligation to remove the information from their databases.
"We need to stop fetishizing race in particular."

Who is "festishizing race"? And, what does that phrase mean in this context? Do you believe I'm fetishizing race? Or OP? Or some other comment in this thread?

I'm merely saying that to insist that race not be part of the conversation is a passive approach to maintaining the status quo. Or, to quote Elie Wiesel: "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim."
I can't see any pixels on the 1080p Nexus 7 screen, even holding it up close to my face and staring, but that's higher DPI than Retina.
I was in a slightly similar situation (without a board), and I did wait too long to act, and by then it was too late and the only option was to break up the company.

It sucked, and I felt like I had wasted 3 years of my life, and while my co-founder definitely did his own damage by not holding up his end, my biggest personal mistake was to not immediately, and aggressively, deal with the problem when I saw it arise (and after initial cooperative attempts at resolution went nowhere).

If you are putting everything you have into your startup, then you have everything to lose if you let someone else fuck it up for you.
funny. i was in this position many moons ago with 50/50 ownership between me and my partner.

it blows and there is never an easy way to dissolve such relationships. i had to threaten 'going nuclear', i.e. closing the business, to get him to leave.
Good things tend to happen in tech when the mainstream isn't looking.

During bubble times, you get douchebags from MBA-land who come in and, because they generally have superior social polish to real technologists, hog the resources and funding and attention. They make a hash of it, create loads of embarrassment, and slink away after the bubble deflates. Then the real actors get to work for a while... until that generates enough success to draw in the wrong crowd, and the cycle repeats.

Progress is occurring, but there's a shitload of nonsense that can distract one away from seeing it.
anti-aliasing is only needed because of low pixel density. With higher res screens it becomes irrelevant.
" It seems that any proper theory of real numbers presupposes some kind of prior theory of algorithms; what they are, how to specify them, how to tell when two of them are the same.

Unfortunately there is no such theory."

http://njwildberger.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/difficulties-wi...
Social Cam was spun out as a separate company and participated in the same batch of YC as me (W12) They also sold it to Autodesk for about $60MM if I recall correctly only a month or two after the batch.

Michael was a super nice guy and should be considered a great example here. I always appreciated him bringing beer to the dinners personally though I remember the group office hours with him and his great insights into problems or struggles we were having just as fondly.
Do many people really place orders to be delivered on christmas eve and imagine they aren't running a risk the item won't arrive on time?

I mean, I've placed orders for next day delivery on christmas eve, but I'm a realist. I know the postal system is busy at this time of year, and that my item may be late or damaged.
US jurisprudence has a primary flaw when comes to privacy: individuals have no rights to most of their own data. Once it is "out there," it's available to be bought and sold without much limitation.

Yes, it would be much more convenient if I could forbid people I don't like (or who don't like me) from ever talking about me. Unauthorized gossip should be illegal even if it doesn't qualify as slander or libel. The law should assist me in maintaining a wall between my public image and my not-deliberately-publicized (but still done somewhat in public) actions.
I made this account just to reply to this comment. The email about the releases come from the release engineer and are signed. The signed email has the SHA256 of each file. It's just not as apparent when looking at the archived version of email. Also, nearly every subdomain and page on the FreeBSD website cluster has HTTPS available.
Cannabis Equation
You may in fact be legally obligated to discuss this with the board. I would also give a heads-up to your lawyer about this. If this gets messy, you'll want some ironclad legal protection for the company.
Another great resource., thanks for these links. very excite to have a great conversation with these young people.
Yeah it doesn't look well for my 1024x600 laptop, all looks chopped and cluttered.
Thanks for the well-reasoned response; always happy to talk about this stuff.

My main concern with that style of thinking in general is that, while it is good at finding principles, it is less good at finding cases where those principles do not apply. For example, one important idea from Objectivism is the principle that "there can be no conflict of interest between honest men". This is clearly usually true, and classical economics does a great job at explaining why, but there are also cases where it's false. For example, if I am a monopolist selling pharmaceuticals for $1000 when their marginal cost of production is $1, it will benefit me to raise the price to $2000 even if it reduces my potential customer base by 30%, but it hurts those people who can't afford the product anymore, and it also arguably hurts society as a whole. You can't make this argument in non-monopoly circumstances, for reasons discussed by Bastiat, Mises, etc, that I'm sure you're well aware of, but you can here.

As another example, there are circumstances in which it is personally, and arguably universally, beneficial to initiate aggression. For example, if you are starving in the woods and see a hut with its owner absent, you would probably want to break into the hut and steal food from it. If you are honest, you will come back in a month and pay for everything ideally 2-5x over, but even then you technically violated the property rights of the owner of the hut. Of course, the owner would probably be delighted that you stole the food and paid 500% of what it's worth and would have consented to such an arrangement had he known, but the practical communication difficulties of the real world make such consent impossible in that particular circumstance. Indeed, this problem is fundamental; the Chicago School of Economics proves that essentially all so-called market failures are the result of high communication costs.

Some objectivists will make exceptions for at least one of those cases, saying that standard ethics are not intended for emergency situations. If you admit that as an excuse, however, do you support the laws in the United States requiring hospitals to admit non-paying patients for emergency care? If you do not, then you will need to have some reasons why not. And at that point, your philosophy is basically consequentialist - so why not just cut out the middleman of an overarching philosophy and directly support those policies that have desirable consequences?

I do think there are good answers to that question, but I am interested in what you would have to say.
Incidentally, I was in prison with Agent Steal when he wrote that article. It's pretty accurate from what I remember. We were in FCI Bastrop (I was there from '95 through '99), and we were absolutely not allowed anywhere near a computer. At one point I had a "good" job working in the Unicor factory, which would have paid me $200/month after a while (good money for prison). But they fired me when they discovered I had a web page. Apparently they thought I had set up the web page from within the prison.

As a side note, Agent Steal (Justin Peterson) died somewhat mysteriously in his apartment a few years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Tanner_Petersen
The gallery has my chuckling really hard
Anyone know how "thousands of packages" cited in the original article turned into "millions of customers" in the gigaom piece?
pg has been fairly against making any unnecessary changes to HN. I think email should suffice, no need to overcomplicate things.
Here is one way you could structure this. Create goals for him to reach. If he repeatedly fails to reach them, then you can ask him for compromises such as giving up equity, etc. If you do it in the right way (that is a win-win, helping him to make more contribution), then it can be worked out. If he repeatedly fails, then you can involve your board and work out a solution that is best for the startup.
So well and concisely said.
Let's hold off on the proclamations about 2013 being a dead year for breakthroughs.

The truth about technology is that "breakthroughs" are backed by a long, mostly invisible, period of hard work.

Has it been a "lost year" for technology? No, because millions of people have gone to work, built things, learned stuff, and there's a little more value in the world than there was before. Has it been a terrible year in terms of the high-profile idiocy that occurs, without fail, when the wrong sorts of people get into technology's upper echelons? Absolutely. But that's a cyclical phenomenon and doesn't really make the case for a year that has been completely wasted, any more than winter is a waste of time.
There is some context-awareness required, though. Verbs can almost always function as nouns, too. To determine which requires some reasoning about the sentence a word appears in.

"Drive to the store." vs. "I'm going for a drive."
"Don't punch Judy!" vs. "I gave Judy some punch."

You're right, though. It's not AI-level intelligence required for this.
Former VIm user... Current Emacs user.

IMHO, Evil Mode makes to use emacs doable OTOH, the fact that there are so much extensions and possibilities under the hood makes to use emacs mandatory! :P
Thankfully other languages have evolved separate words (e.g. índio vs indiano) so witty remarks from both sides can be avoided.