skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people have a choice, they'll make it.

Which is why beating them in the standards war is important. The business world can't afford to support monopoly rents at this time. Requiring your vendors to support ODF and open formats is a first step.
There is a degree of overlap in the hydrocarbons used for gasoline and diesel fuel, and refineries routinely adjust the ratio they produce to match seasonal variation in demand. It's also possible to crack the heavier hydrocarbons in crude oil into molecules suitable for diesel, which is an important consideration as lighter crude oil supplies are being supplanted by heavier oils from tar sands and shale. In the longer term, there's also the possibility of refining less oil and supplementing with biodiesels.
Ask HN: No reply link as you get further into comments causes silly editing.
This seems to be a fairly recent feature, but it just doesn't seem the right way to go about things to me. Fairly irritating.

I was just reading the comments here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830939

Interesting discussions, but then you have people editing their previous comment because they can't reply yet.

>> EDIT: good points in reply to this... (I can't reply any deeper in the thread, so I'll just acknowledge it here)

Is there a description somewhere of the problem this solves and why it's needed? Hacker news seemed to function pretty well when you could reply to whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to.
The idea that a corporation should be reduced to a contractual agreement strikes me as problematic.

Since corporations necessarily have contracts with other entities and a contract as an entity can't be a party to another contract, then your corporation would have to somehow specify a process for employees to hold contracts in proxy.

Also, a corporation that's just a contract between individuals can't provide any protection from lawsuits by people who aren't employees or shareholders.

Certainly there's a place for the kind of construct you're talking about, but it seems to be fundamentally incompatible with anything remotely similar to the way business is structured today.
Sneak Peak At T2, Twine’s Semantic Search Engine
Hm. See, well, at least in the technical publishing arena, this is the case 'cause we already get paid a lot more than all but the most famous authors. Your average writer of non-technical books is probably going to make very little money, and the bar to get a non-technical book published, I think, is higher than a technical book, in terms of writing skill. (a technical book, if technically correct, can

editors and fact-checkers, from what I understand, make less than half what a competent computer janitor makes.

Both these facts would point at people willing to do editing, fact checking and writing for less than what they could get doing other things. (assuming that the attributes needed to be a good editor or author are not a lot more common than the attributes required to be a SysAdmin.)

Now, there is a lot of difference between doing something you like for not very much money, and doing it for free, so you might be correct that people won't do it unless there is at least some money, but I see evidence that people will do it for less money than they could get doing other things.

as for the 'chicken and egg' part of the credibility issue, you are certainly correct if the same gateway/content producer relationship as we have now continues, but there are other models, like the model hacker news and other aggrigators use. If creators 'publish' content themselves to the 'net, then the 'gateways' just link to the content they find credible.

Now, the question is "how does the aggrigator decide what links are worthy?" there are many ways to do this, but I suspect the best may end up being subject matter experts running small aggrigators that cover their own interests.
Old thread so hopefully you read this later. We use Dell's bought with Ubuntu pre-installed at work. If we have a problem we call up Dell and they fix it. If you are doing desktop Linux in an office it is the best way to go.
Clearly you dont know. Somehow "ErrantX" was able to get the jist. But you seem to have missed it. Regardless of what kind of company it is really. New, old, startup, whatever. The extremely simple point here is that feuding destroys working relationships, no matter what way you choose cut it. And PG says this in his article, in black and white That this is what he dislkes the most about startups. And therefore the two are related. Who cares what stage the company is in. If it is a partnership or whatever. The notion applies to all. You missed the point. Read the article.
FDIC Considers Borrowing From Treasury to Shore Up Deposit Insurance
I have a couple.

Biggest one was a social networking site (which technically is still in my mind, but pretty dead) to compete with the big boys. In the end I was offered enough money for the work I had done on caching and some other bits that it was silly not to take it. :)

I'd love to have another go some day.

There was Qoppa which was intended to be an extensible Browser game server written in Python. That fell apart when there was no one much to work on the artistic side.
http://hg.errant.me.uk/errant/qoppa (dont smirk :D)

What else. A quite-advanced attempt to write a distributed file store for really large write-once/read many files (2GB+) in Python. I got as far as implementing a REST interface and then got bored of the tedious work on the replication side.

A CMS/Blog tool specifically for magazines. Gave up when it turned into a massive amount of work and the magazine who tentatively were my first client decided not to "go online".

I could list a few more. My theory is just to keep plugging away at a few projects till one makes it. I was nearly there with the social network.

Currently Im planning to try and assault the blogging empire with a Wordpress competitor.
Because they'll have vast swathes of rather dodgy VBA, some of it probably has been patched and tweaked for 20 years, without which they'll be utterly unable to function, and the risk of porting it straight across is that the SEC comes and craps all over IBM for not keeping its accounts straight.
Gary Vaynerchuk's Startup Advice
VW says the L1 is perfectly safe, with the driver and passenger safely ensconced in a carbon fiber safety cell and protected by head and side-curtain airbags. The front of the car features an aluminum crash structure.

Saying it is safe and passing NHTSA are two extremely different things. That is why the smart costs so much.

As a side note, some similar ideas have gotten street-legality by being officially motorcycles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Sparrow
> And why does it seem like there's an unwritten law that any sufficiently fuel efficient car has to look like a robot turd?

Concept cars have always looked like that. Even before the 'concept' was a fuel-efficient one. I remember going to autoshows (living in the Detroit-area the International Auto Show is just downtown every January) in the 90's and seeing sketches of cars that looked like that (style-wise), and sometimes prototypes on display as well. I think that it's more of an auto-industry thing.
It's in situations like that where you see flight attendants doing their "real" jobs.
The reply link does appear eventually; there's just a delay that gets longer as the nesting gets deeper.

It's supposed to slow down rapid back-and-forth threads that are usually between just two or a few people, often are arguments, and occasionally "take over" posts by generating dozens of comments.
A mechanical ant trap/killer to be the only "conventional weapon" for my war on ants.

I attract a line of ants to eat the bait (in my case, cat food), then periodically suck (or blow) ants into an un-escapable garbage bag, but only a few at a time to keep the line of ants stable. (or until the entire colony is exhausted)

Compared to the traditional poison method, it is much more satisfying for me to dispose of a garbage bags full of ants which I might make good use of. The mass of corpses could be good fertilizer, or bird feed.
Darwins Radio was a great read but I don't find the idea of ready made features for future use in our DNA very plausible.

He spins an amazing yarn around it though, and plenty of the social consequences are very believable.
FWIW, I founded a casual-gaming + social-networking site in 2007. So I'm including myself in that smart-people-doing-useless-things complaint.

And I maintain that a social networking entertainment startup is most likely useless. If that's what you wanna do, more power to you. But don't kid yourself about its importance.
Sotomayor has not suggested such rights don't exist - how you drew that conclusion, I cannot understand - and the WSJ's summary of proceedings seems misleading to me.

The transcript is at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transc... and I urge people to read it. The relevant portion is as follows:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Going back to the question of stare decisis, the one thing that is very interesting about this area of law for the last 100 years is the active involvement of both State and Federal legislatures in trying to find that balance between the interest of protecting in their views how the electoral process should proceed and the interests of the First Amendment.

And so my question to you is, once we say they can't, except on the basis of a compelling government interest narrowly tailored, are we cutting off or would we be cutting off that future democratic process? Because what you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with, not Austin or McConnell, but the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.

But we can go back to the very basics that
way, but wouldn't we be doing some more harm than good by a broad ruling in a case that doesn't involve more business corporations and actually doesn't even involve the traditional nonprofit organization? It involves an advocacy corporation that has a very particular interest.

In other words, she is asking the attorney for Citizen's united if he is aware that the basis of his argument for invalidating Austin McConnell (in which a court ruled that Congress had the right to balance electoral and first amendment considerations) would create the basis for a challenge to corporate personhood itself, by making the right of corporate speech pendant on past court decisions which assumed the validity of corporate personhood without ever having formally established it.

Your point about employees and shareholders enjoying free speech qua individuals makes ethical sense, but have you considered that treating the corporation as proxy for the rights of its human owners or agents would conflict with the idea of corporate severability, the legal framework which protects shareholders from direct legal liability for wrongdoing carried out on behalf of a corporation by its officers?

sorry for the long-windedness :-/
It's very fast for me too.
first big payoff for a Web 2.5 company.

Why do tech companies and media have to compartmentalize business into discrete iterations? This isn't software; we have some larger events that can act as Game Changers, but there's more continuity in the evolution of tech business than what seems to be perceived.
Corporations as they're structured today may not be contract-like, but they certainly aren't person-like either. I hope a high court or two finds the cojones to admit this and stop trying to do legal code by analogy.
Absolutely. A tailor can make a pair of $50 pants look like $200 pants.
I may be crazy in that I don't think the gov should see this as protecting Google, but as using the case to clarify consumer rights. I'm obviously a huge fan of "I bought it, its mine, stay out of my way". Additionally, as a fan of the potential of free markets (we rarely get to see one in action, so who knows, maybe I'd change my mind if I actually lived in one), I feel Apple and other's behavior potentially creates less-free markets (its one of the many things "I believe but can't prove").

Let me setup a really crazy example:

A home builder AppleHomes is selling high quality homes at hefty discounts from other builders. Made in China, "designed" in California. About a year into selling a few million houses, AppleHomes turns on their AppleCam network. A million homes live for everyone to enjoy their reality fetish. Sorry, you can't turn off your ShowerCam, its embedded into your product. Doing so is a violation of rule 234.43B in the 1984-page ThinkOfTheChildredAct. AppleHomes is being quite generous in discounting your AppleEnergy power bill with 50% of the revenue it generates from viewers of your AppleCams.

This example is meant to sound crazy. But according to your views on business can do what it wants, isn't this scenario just as possible (though hopefully not probably)?
I hear some echoes here of the pre-deal announcement of the MySQL acquisition by SUN.

I'll believe it when two years have passed and Intuit has indeed seen the wisdom of leaving the team in-tact and giving them free reign.
I think TB3 has a way to do this. However, its still pretty rudimentary. For example, if Im in threaded view and the thread is closed, I can click on the first email of the thread and it shows me the conversation-style message. However, it seems like each conversation has a limit and so after a certain legth of the message, it shows ...
if you have too many messages in the thread then you just end up with
PersonA
...
PersonB
...

Useless.. but hopefully something that will be customizable before 3.0 is released.
Sexual Assault Facebook app.

Allow people to report when they are victims of sexual assault. I started discussions with the local sexual assault center, but after hearing feedback, it seemed like people did not want stuff like "3 of your friends were inappropriately touched last night" popping up on Facebook. Although, I do still think part of the problem with sexual assault on college campuses is that nobody talks about it.

Has a possible business model too: rev share with legal teams.

Feel free to run with the idea!
It's marketing/douchebaggery and demonstrates a lack of creativity. "Web 2.0" was coined by a dude trying to sell more books.
The sloppy layout made me think "blog spam"... quick Google search turned this up.

http://www.ronpatrickstuff.com/
With all the writing about this deal and what gets stored where I think yodlees' profile in the blackhat community has risen considerably in the last couple of days.
[sorry, late to the party -- traveling & running several DC events last 24hrs; just jumping in]

as a Mint investor, friend of Aaron's, and someone familiar with most of the other Mint investors, i can only summarize my feelings on this by saying that Jason Fried is 100% wrong and pretty much completely full of shit on this topic.

if he'd bothered to even lift a finger to check a few sources on this issue, he would quickly have realized how WILDLY INACCURATE his conspiracy theory was.

in my opinion, blogging at length about a subject which he fully admits he knows little about -- and had not attempted
to research -- is incredibly ignorant & irresponsible.

please forgive my anger, but when someone attacks my friends with stupid lies, i tend to get a little pissed off.
While effectiveness can easily vary by 10x, a team charging a 50% premium has a tough sell.

The poster later hints at the correct solution, which he is too polite to say outright, which is that the best way to make money out of a guy who is ten times as productive as average is to team him with nine mouth-breathing idiots and charge the average rate for all of them. "Nine mouth-breathing idiots" is an exaggeration, but in the dot-com days you'd get one brilliant guy, two experienced coders, six recent grads who barely passed their sophomore data structures class, and one person whose role in the project was completely baffling. (He can't even read code, much less write it... he doesn't write documents... he doesn't know the design... he doesn't know what's going on on the project... is he a bodyguard? A chaperone? Why are we paying for him?) Some of the best developers I've met were the "one brilliant guy" on a big team we hired from a consulting firm.
But Hugh, one might very well ask in that case why there is no constitutional provision for corporations.

Constitutional protections appear to be limited to citizens qua human persons; no protection is offered to institutions, even though powerful non-governmental institutions (churches) were well-established at the time of the United States' founding. being as how no special protections appear to be extended to any organizations other than the states, one might reasonably ask whether the founders ever intended for private organizations to have a distinct legal identity to begin with (as opposed to, say, a board of directors acting with common purpose but individual responsibility).

tl;dr if corporations enjoy constitutional protection, why aren't they mentioned in the constitution?
I recently quit my job at IBM, and there are two more important, albeit unwritten, tenets:

1) Getting manager approval is next to impossible. A friend of mine that's a tech writer was unable to obtain one in the time I was there (approximately a year).

2) The learning curve cost for new users simply exceeds the cost per license. For high-paying employees, a couple hours learning this stuff will cost them a couple hours of productivity. Evidently, large corporations don't function with this in mind.
This is so full of epic win. The scooter is better than the VW. lol
It was coined by a dude trying to sell more conference tickets.
Non-plagiarized version of Ron Patrick's VW with jet engine
The guy sells books and conference tickets :).
"Web 2.0" was coined when it was given as a name to a conference.
This seems like it could go places, but I can't seem to grab a copy of the file. The server keeps running it!
Is there a description somewhere of the problem this solves and why it's needed?

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/

That's 242 realms, US only. Probably similar number of realms in the EU and China regions.
New Lawsuit Brings Clarity To Skype’s IP Problem (Prognosis: Screwed)
Nevertheless, it's pretty amazing.
Since corporations necessarily have contracts with other entities and a contract as an entity can't be a party to another contract, then your corporation would have to somehow specify a process for employees to hold contracts in proxy.

That's exactly what a corporate charter is. It's the shareholders delegating the management and contracts associated with a piece of property to a process determined by the corporate charter.

Also, a corporation that's just a contract between individuals can't provide any protection from lawsuits by people who aren't employees or shareholders.

The contract can protect from lawsuits by creditors. When a creditor loans to a limited liability company, the creditor knows that he only has recourse to the funds pledged to the corporation. He can not claw back into the shareholders personal funds. Again, it's a matter of voluntary contracts. If the creditor wants that right, he can explicitly demand that the shareholders pledge their own assets as part of the terms of the contract. ( in fact, that's exactly what banks do when lending to very small businesses).

But an LLC designation should not protect from criminal liability. Shareholders should be held to the normal standards of criminal culpability for the actions of the management. A shareholder who knowingly profits from the management committing criminal acts should be held to the same level of guilt as anyone who knowingly profits from criminal acts.
How often have you seen this? I find it's extremely rare.
I think a face-off is needed between this, and the Jet powered Minivan

http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/03/03/jet-turbine-van/
Going for it: I'm not unemployed, I'm an entrepreneur
Ah thanks. I think it needs tweaking personally. Maybe wait until 5 levels deep or something.
"[WoW runs on]" is actually an incorrect summary. It states the "Blizzard online network services", which includes starcraft, warcraft II(?), warcraft III, and WoW. Not to mention they may even host blizzards website?
I was thinking of putting it into an import car show but the promoter told me that it looked too plain and recommended that I put some decals on it, lower it, and put on some aftermarket wheels.

/me boggles. This is either a joke or an incredibly sad commentary. "I built a jet car!" "Yawn. Where's the bling?"
Rackspace cloud incoming bandwidth 100% free & un-metered? Is it really true?
Please wait for a site operator to respond.

You are now chatting with 'David M.'

David M.: Welcome to Rackspace Cloud. My name is David. May I have your name and email address in case we are disconnected?

you: With cloud sites. For 100 p/m how much incoming bandwidth do I get?

David M.: 500GB per month

you: How much outgoing bandwidth do I get?

David M.: the 500GB is the outgoing

David M.: all incoming is free

you: What happens if I use 500GB incoming bandwidth p/m?

David M.: you can use as much incoming as you want... we don't bill for incoming with Cloud Sites

David M.: only outgoing

you: Ok, just to be clear. I'm thinking of hosting a web based Twitter client http://tweetminer.net on the rackspace cloud. If I had 1000 users running the client at full capacity it would equate to 879GB per month incoming bandwidth

David M.: if you're running your website on Cloud Sites.. then that 879GB of incoming bandwidth would be free

David M.: the $100/mo includes 500GB of "outgoing" bandwidth so if you don't exceed that.. then you don't have to pay bandwidth overages

you: hold one sec... let me run a calc by you

you: Based on my calculations I could host 3578 users @ 500GB per month outgoing. But those 3578 users would consume 3145 GB's Are you saying I can consume 3145 GB's per month for free?

David M.: the only free part is the incoming bandwidth to Cloud Sites

David M.: any incoming bandwidth regardless of the amount.. is free with Cloud Sites

you: What about 1000000000000GB incoming bandwidth?

you: Free?

David M.: yes it will be free... we don't measure incoming bandwidth with Cloud Sites

-----

My question to HN is... Do you think this is really true?
I haven't read the full Sotomayor transcript, but this overall quote exists in the context of a debate about whether corporations are allowed political free speech, and I have some strong guesses about which side Sotomayor is on.

Your point about employees and shareholders enjoying free speech qua individuals makes ethical sense, but have you considered that treating the corporation as proxy for the rights of its human owners or agents would conflict with the idea of corporate severability, the legal framework which protects shareholders from direct legal liability for wrongdoing carried out on behalf of a corporation by its officers?

Corporate severability is bogus. Shareholders should be held to the same level of criminal liability as anyone else who knowingly profits from criminal acts. In practice, this would be rare, as shareholders in public companies would not knowingly profit from criminal actions, because if the actions were publicly known, they would be immediately stopped.
Oh, the US refers to it as English Units does it? That explains a lot. In the UK one talks about the two systems as being Metric and Imperial.
I'm sure I could find better hackers here than just about anywhere else, but I don't want to be Linus.
Linden Lab Targeted in Second Life Sex-Code Lawsuit