skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. This would get the user out of the business of "saving" their work. When you've just written stuff down on a notepad, you don't have to "save" it. It's just there. Computer apps should be like that.
They were sending a copyrighted PDF to their job candidates. O_o
For a startup, I think #1 should always be, "Everyone is a sales person."
This stereotypical perception of Houston is false, as it does have a diversified economy.

I've lived in Houston longer than I've lived in any one city since I was 13 years old. There is a diversified economy. But a lot of that is here because oil is here.
i do not up-vote comments i disagree with. however, i also do not down-vote them.

i only down-vote the irrelevant/spammy/obnoxious responses. the responses that don't add any value to a discussion.

this way, if someone says something unpopular or whatever, they're not penalized (by me, at least). they're just not really rewarded so much, either.
5 Reasons Schmidt Left Apple Board
if someone is storing the data for you, you are pretty much locked in. spending the extra time and managing the data yourself is probably a really good idea.
Modern Love: Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear
He worked too hard. The website has a button that gives you a list of comparables.

Cool story though.

And I believe the alleghency county real estate tax system has recently been ruled illegal.
Google Voice battle: What is Apple afraid of?
Motivations, skills and connections can be multiplied with multiple founders. If you are the rare person who has each of those items in spades, that's great. However, I would still argue that having additional people in the group lessens the individual burden, assists in getting to the right answer for solving problems, and keeping things moving forward when things are hard.
Social gaming is the next big thing
Assuming you have a statistically sound sample size, then these imperfections should even out overall.
Tell HN: I want my account back
Hi, I'm Dag.

I can understand if some of you didn't appreciate my "Why I Don't Find HN Useful Anymore" submission. I'm fine with that, I'm even fine with the comments. Many were insightful (though some were vitriolic) even if they didn't agree with me.

I'm not fine with you guys disabling my account. I had a huge list of saved URLs from stories that I upvoted. I want those back. I would also like to express my dissatisfaction to whomever disabled my account.
The discussion of biotech was interesting. It made clear that Y Combinator is replicating the biotech model of mass production of innovation.

Paul said (more or less) that the risk investing in Biotech was in some ways lower (because it's easier to identify the 20 leading scientists from whom the next wonder-discovery will emerge). I think this correct, but the comparison between that and what YC does is misguided.

Those leading scientists are like the companies who've already been through YC, presented on a platter for the big money to get at.

So what's the YC equivalent? Paul said it himself - grad school.

For Biotech, a PhD program is the way to mass-produce seed-funded innovation. You give someone a few years, let them attack a problem and generate data. The best PhDs coming out get labs and professorships (equivalent to venture funding worth $1-$2 million), etc.

Hacking is not science. Therefore a seed-funding model that works for science does not work well for software innovation. YC is the replacement - it's your PhD in software innovation. People go in, work with mentors (I meet my PhD supervisor once a week, and regularly hear talks from the best in the field, just like YC founders). The best innovators come out and get funded for $1-$2 million and hopefully go on.
Straight out of Roger Dean:

http://www.rogerdean.com/architecture/index.htm

http://images.google.com/images?q=roger+dean+buildings
Terrible that they didn't notify us via email or something. I saw a bunch of declines come through and customer complaints before I had to search the web to find out what was happening.
Daniel Lyons, (aka. Fake Steve) also wrote this article for Newsweek called "Lyons: Why Good Web Sites Should Not Be Free".

Lyons pandered to the Newsweek demographic which for the most part wouldn't be heavy Internet users.

Newsweek Article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/208163
Reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/942qd/why_old_people_sh...
HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722991

Not intending to cut Lyons at the knees, more hoping to add perspective to his body of work.
I would also like to express my dissatisfaction to whomever deleted my account.

That appears to be done. To speak at greater length, you might want to consider paying for server time, as the operator of the HN site does.
I have to wonder how Goncalves felt when the police came to arrest him. Did he accept it with stone-faced, expectant, but tortured resolve? Or was he shocked, jaw agape, as his panicked brain played "How could they have found me," on repeat? Or perhaps he was surprised not that they found him, but that anyone other than the Angels even cared. The officer who showed up after the original report didn't know what a "domain" even was. Did the arresting officer? "You're under arrest for... er... well, you're under arrest. For... the internet." I wish I had been a fly on the wall for that moment.
You're assuming things that could be very well not be true. Maybe he would have gotten the same offer if he just showed up empty handed and maybe your imaginary poker player would have folded regardless of your aggressiveness. Believing the effort didn't all go to waste sure feels better though.
The main problem is that Apple didn't know the submitted apps violated copyright at the time they were submitted. (And how could they, until the owners started filing complaints?)

While there are plenty of examples of inconsistencies in App Store policy, this is not one of them. The article is wrong in this respect.
You could probably write a REPL with the appropriate commands that would build rudimentary test code from lines you executed that did what you wanted them to.

I did exactly this, in a previous job where we were required to unit-test a lot more than I liked. I always mess around with stuff in the REPL a lot anyway, and it was dead simple to write an Emacs command to turn my REPL sessions into unit tests.
Great questions. I think finding co-founders is about finding people who share your same passions, ideals, etc. Getting into a founder relationship is not unlike a marriage, except that you will probably be spending more time with the founder than your spouse. If finding a spouse is challenging, finding founders is more so.

The upside of our current era is that finding like minded souls is made much easier, even if you aren't living in a startup hub. However, from my experience living in Houston for a while, it's hard for non-founder types to understand why you would want to start your own thing. The startup hubs have more people who embrace this possiblity of failure.

I have met many an intersting potential founder at events like the bar camps, startup weekends, etc. It's not going to happen over night for sure.

Working with a remote team can be challenging, but with Skype etc, it's much easier than it used to be. However, when you are slogging out the long nights, having proximity to your team matters, especially your co-founders. It's not a deal breaker, but it will help.
That's the problem! With an open platform, the copyright holder could only come after the developer. All of a sudden, Apple is liable for 100% of the content!

I would never want to be the gatekeeper to anything.
In Europe, lower classes* are obsessed with upper classes, and vice versa. In America, neither cares about the other. The upper classes are free to live in their own world (much as the great artists of the Renaissance), while the lower classes, left to their own devices, become grotesque. America is really two separate nations.

Am I delusional? This seems so clear to me, and yet I haven't heard it anywhere.

*I'm not talking about "class", exactly. This is not about social standing or money, but the ability to influence the world, and not necessarily in a highly visible way.
I was meaning to imply more than I did by saying "organic". IMHO, "organic" growth spells disaster for a codebase, because it means (to me, specifically) growing without conscious curation on the part of the developers. I should have explained myself fully instead of using such a loaded word; it seems that the only question these developers asked was "How do I make this new feature work?" instead of "How does this new feature change the silhouette of my application?"
Nah, that's all I want to say.
The LtU writeup here: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3540

has a useful link to the authors' "How To Design Worlds" book and web site: http://world.cs.brown.edu/
They have yb.nl too .. (they are in the netherlands)
> The record companies did indeed prove unauthorized use of the songs by Tenenbaum, and thus the approximately $0.99.

a) "and thus" is a deduction that you form yourself. At no point did the plaintiffs assert this to be their figure for the financial damages resulting from the defendant's actions. If you can find such a statement in the transcripts, please produce it.

b) Even assuming the plaintiffs had made a statement of fact regarding the financial damages wrought by the defendant's unauthorized reproduction of the copyrighted material, there is the significant unknown of the financial damages wrought by the defendant's unauthorized distribution of the material. You conveniently assume that by not providing evidence as to the size of this figure, the plaintiffs, defendants and jury have valued it at zero. This is of course completely wrong.

c) Since the financial damages wrought by the defendant's behaviour is the sum of the financial damages wrought by each individual infraction, and the damage of one of those infractions hasn't been determined by either the plaintiffs or the defendants, and moreover, the jury hasn't provided us with the formula they used to arrive to their value of the damages, we have no way of knowing the punitive/compensatory ratio, and your argument breaks down.

To look at it somewhat differently, supposing the plaintiffs had only filed suit for unauthorized distribution. What happens to your argument then? Answer: depending on how dim-witted you are, you'll either argue that the ratio is infinite or (more sensibly) you'll acknowledge that the ratio is indeterminate, whence one can't draw any conclusions as to its constitutionality.

> Are you arguing there is no punitive element at all to the statutory damages?

Of course not. It is right and proper that there is a punitive element to the statutory damages, simply to deter further unauthorized distribution. All I'm saying is that you're not in a position to say that this quantity is (total damages awarded) - $1.
When it was originally posted it was two paragraphs, but with leading spaces that set it as two really long pre-formatted lines. My "reformat" was just to de-pre it.
Posting the error to Hacker News probably isn't the best way to get support. Email the Philtro people: http://www.philtro.com/contact/
The Authorize.net downtime a few weeks ago was just as bad if not worse. They didn't even send an update+apology after things came back up. Terrible customer service.
The willful destruction of my car would seem pretty monstrous to me. I would also probably blame the people who did it, before I blamed society.
Outsourcing Benefits U.S. Workers
Please see the ext directory:

http://github.com/tenderlove/phuby/tree/4f198354c537586aa167...

and extconf.rb:

http://github.com/tenderlove/phuby/blob/4f198354c537586aa167...

It is quite embedded and dynamically linked.
When I was interviewing, an applicant showed me some code that didn't hash passwords -- that's exactly what I expect in a co-op student. I think there's two problems:

-it's too easy to take sample code off the web, and it's easier to take exactly what you want rather than some general pseudo code written by BSchneier

and

-it works until it doesn't
Would you show up empty handed? I wouldn't.

In general, I don't consider preparation wasted effort even if I don't need to call up the actual materials I prepared. If I was better at signaling preparation without actually doing so (read: bluffing), maybe that wouldn't be the case.
So you need to use something that you don't find useful anymore. I'm sure (well, maybe I'm not) you can understand our confusion...
Not a stub, a bridge. As you can see in the readme, there IS a php runtime embedded in ruby. So that covers your redundant requests for interpreter and runtime.

Compiler? Why?

Embedded and dynamic linking? Does that even make sense in the PHP world? Sounds nonsensical to me, but I've avoided PHP until now.
The end of Twitter as we know it
> most applications and most people do not have to deal with that and it's a pure waste of time to add timezone handling.

If your application deals with times at hour resolution or finer, you need to handle timezones, or you will have bugs. Maybe that's ok for your programs, but it's not ok for everyone.

>Dealing with dates and times is enough of a headache without taking care of timezones and daylight saving times.

You have it exactly backwards. Dates and times are a headache because of timezones and daylight saving times. If everyone worked in UTC time, there would be no corner cases, no converting between timezones, and no half assed timezone implementations. DST causes ambiguity in converting between time representations.

> make my code harder to understand and more complex than strictly necessary to do it's job and the jobs it may reasonably be expected to do in the future

Time handling is a library problem. The problem is too many library authors think "oh, time handling is easy. I'll just whip this up", when it's really not. I've encountered bugs in the standard libraries of several programming languages and databases. When you have the API properly defined, dealing with timezones is no harder than dealing with timestamps without timezones, because the library only allows you specify things in the correct representation. Joda Time, for Java, http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ is the only correct API I've encountered. If you're using a library that hasn't learned the same lessons as Joda, you will have bugs.
From the above explanation: "I had a huge list of saved URLs from stories that I upvoted". That and some of the stories have some great comments on their HN page that I want to keep my easy link to.
It boggles me as to why a programmer would willingly submit to a fascist scheme like app store.

I wonder if it is something in human nature, where the presence of a big brother makes you feel secure.
Seeing a few PayPal checkout failures in our log. Wonder how many didnt even make it to the blog. Authorize and PayPal outages all in a few weeks. Bad for business!

Blog says they are currently experiencing 10s delays on the API. Blog took like 20 seconds to come up for me.
Click on to the main site and there's a whole series of these.
Then your paper notebook is also implicitly incorrect, since you have not recorded complete information anywhere.
It seems to be having issues, yeah. Spottiness.
Then just write your strings-that-represent-timelike-things in your text editor and be done with it. What, exactly, is your point? You think that because you don't need your personal strings to actually denote time, this isn't a problem that ever needs to be addressed precisely and accurately?
Synthetic Life (The End of the Information Age)
And if it's really large, "the anvil that broke the camel's back".
According to the article's author, "EA didn't want to be involved in the article so I couldn't say one way or the other if they paid or not."

http://twitter.com/SimonParkin/status/3104511092
If that screen cap is legit then wow.
Dos Hacks
For displaying this kind of data I've recently been shown: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualizati... and I'm 100% convinced. Plus Wilson Miner provides such nice and simple HTML+CSS even people who are bad at design like me can work with it and have something good looking.
Most thieves are pretty arrogant, most of them absolutely never expect to get caught. If thieves were good at probability then they'd make their living in a decent way.
Where to hide your money - advice from a burglar
Joda time has this concept, it calls it a partial http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/key_partial.html . A partial is a datetime without a time zone, so it only partially specifies a time. You can combine a partial with a timezone to get an instant, a fully specified date time.

It's also interesting to note that some operations cannot be performed with partials. For example, you can't add an instant and a partial (because that would be buggy). In order to add them, you have to first convert the partial to an instant (by specifying a timezone). In the parent's example, nap time would be a partial of 15:00, and your calendar app would notify about nap time by specifying the current timezone of the computer.
>> I'm not fine with you guys disabling my account.

As a person who runs a large online community, may I politely tell you that I would be very annoyed by you at this point? Very often members grow disgruntled with the community and do stupid things, like start new threads just to complain about the administration. I think you had some valid comments, but you chose to do this in a more dramatic, more rude, more confrontational way than it needed to be done.

If someone did that on my community, I'd assume they were drunk or having a bad day and place a temporary (1-day) ban on their account. If that person then registered a second account with the sole purpose of "expressing dissatisfaction" to me, I'd permanently ban their IP range from the web site.

Understand that although you don't think you did anything wrong, your behavior was border-line trolling. You have no interest in seeing politics and public outrage - we have no interest in seeing comments like yours right now.

If you really have a problem, contact the administrators discreetly and politely, and apologize. It isn't YOUR account, it's free (gratis) access to THEIR servers they're letting you have. It's on their terms, so be respectful to them.
I sent one to PG a couple hours ago. I don't know who else has admin rights around here.
"But for that to work, he’ll need the nation’s economy to start performing more like Texas."

Well, that's easy. Just discover large quantities of oil and gas under every other state. Texas' relatively good economy has nothing to do with Republican policies and everything to do with a strong energy market. Silly article by a Republican cheerleader.
Already sent an email a couple hours ago.

I don't think it's a 1 day ban, I don't recall seeing that capability while reading the arc code.

And I don't particularly care about the account, I just want the data that I accumulated (upvoted story URLs).
Lots of success stories from TextMate to Vim/Emacs lately. That's on my list too; I just need to force myself to make the jump (and allow for the short-term productivity hit).
pg is the person you need to speak to about this kind of thing. Moderators can't prevent you from logging in, as far as I know. They can only deaden stories.
Please take this nonsense back to reddit/digg. It doesn't belong here, and personally you and those upvoting you have annoyed me twice today.
I love that there is another reference to Born to Run on HN. I think that the book appeals to the hacker in us with the way Chris McDougall ignores any pre-conceived notions of running and just starts looking for what is the simplest answer that works?

Shoes? Why use them when your feet are evolved into perfect shock absorbing springs.

Training Schedules? Here is this tribe of people who run only for the joy of it and to get where they want to go and they are some of the best runners in the world.

The whole book reads like a great paper. It makes something that once seemed complicated simple, and after you wonder how you could ever have thought that it was complicated.
I would say that the Android Market is a much more open distribution channel than the App Store but still there are mechanisms built into the Android Market to counter illegal or harmful apps such as users being able to flag an application they consider to be one

The difference is that in a more open scenario it's the community that does the majority of filtering and not a corporation or a group of corporations. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not but still an interesting contrast.
Disclosure: I'm a lifestyle vimmer, and have often made additions to my .vimrc in the dead of night, having awakened in a feverish panic from a hypnagogic vision of some most excellent new macro that I absolutely MUST map to <Leader>k RIGHT NOW, before I forget how much it'll help when I'm trying to replace CamelCase variables in HTML files but only when I load their buffers on alternating Tuesdays and I'm in diff mode...

This article is a reasonable assessment of vim, with what I consider to be some novel surprises. For example, he apparently found its configuration simpler than emacs: maybe he just hasn't tried it yet! Also, he considers it less distracting. I found this interesting as well, because he mentioned expertise in emacs as a journey rather than a destination. I have found this to be patently true for vim.

Still, I'm glad there are still people out there who are converting to vim. I'm puzzled by this particular blogger's experience, but maybe he'll find the traditional gotchas in due course as he continues to use it.
Your argument is just plain silly. Since the plaintiffs didn't have to "prove" the amount of damages due to unauthorized distribution, you unilaterally and rather brazenly set the figure at zero. You then use the figure used during a separate demonstration (by the defendants, I might add) of how easy it is to download music legally, along with the courts determination that unauthorized reproduction took place, to get to your 20,000-to-1 ratio. You do see that this is preposterous, don't you?

Essentially, your logical flaw is to apply a court case that has nothing to do with copyright to one that is purely about copyright. In the case you reference, it is in theory possible to determine the damages caused: just sum the quantities spent by each of the plaintiffs on doctors' fees and other medical expenses. It is impossible to do that in the context of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. This is why the statutes give the courts leeway in this domain -- as you have acknowledged elsewhere.

If we take your argument it its logical conclusion, the maximum damages for sharing a song should be $4, since one can never "prove" the quantity of damages resulting from unauthorized distribution. Do you really think that damages of this size are going to deter anyone from filesharing?
And the url is http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...
Vim is nice, MacVim is nicer. It'd be perfect if it had the the project drawer from textmate on the side, instead of wierd-textmode treecontrols which i never quite master.
What really amazes me is that people are amazed by this. Isn't it kind of normal? Not to scrape the web (he only had to do that because the web site did not present information in a useful manner), but to prepare for a court hearing with facts and arguments?

I know I am being naive.

Well, anyway, it worked out for him well. Congratulations!

There is one thing I wonder about though. It may not be 100% relevant for HN, but it is relevant to the extent that we live in a heavily lawyer-bound society, to coin a phrase. Would it be possible for him, or more likely his lawyer, to press a case against the silly estimation done by the district, based on the figures he was able to extract? Not having experience in the matters of law, I have no idea what the answer may be.