skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for your post jodrellblank.

You raise several important points "for someone who isn't an iPhone coder" and probably not interested in the subject.

For the record and to prove how serious I am to the people who this post is targeted at, I will answer your questions. Please find my reply below:

- Although the main aim is Utilities and Games/Entertainment (as categorized in the App store), other areas could be targeted as well giving the right circumstances.

- I'm thinking internet collaboration since I do not wish to limit the possibilities to people living in my area, whereas in another part of the world, there might be (is) someone with better skills.

- I have very high respect for coders and do understand how hard it is to put a clean fast running app, bug free, therefore the mere concept of a 90/10 split is silly to me. In other words, EQUAL splits for the PARTNERS.

Regards.
if only :)
try and renegotiate them higher. especially if they want you to move and you have a family, they should understand. i'm not saying to renegotiate necessarily to market, but try and drag them up to what you think is fair, to that balance point where you're not worried about the implications of taking the job.
Do we often read that when beginning a startup, you should do the opposite of what big enbcumbant companies are doing?
I don't follow law very much. What nastiness has been perpetuated by corporations as the result of corporate personhood?
45,000 annual American deaths due to lack of medical insurance
This is pretty cool - I used Thunderbird for a very long time and tried the beta out briefly.

Don't count out Outlook 2010 though...it has some pretty solid improvements too. I can't stand the conversation threading in Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird 2, but the way Outlook 2010 does it is pretty comfortable for me.
Google Reveals Full FCC Response, Contradicts Apple On Google Voice Rejection
Audio White Paper - Acceleration 102: Asymmetric or Symmetric?
Actually, Tornado is both a nonblocking web server and a complete web framework. He didn't confuse them so much as focus on the part you're not interested in.
What about the chimp who would gather rocks when the zoo was closed to throw at visitors the next day?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article5877764...
Great screencast, but did anyone else zone out after 30 seconds because the music was so good? I had to play the screencast a second time to actually watch it.</digression>
I always wondered if corporate personhood meant that corporations would lose some of their their rights if convicted of a felony. And are corporations eligible for tougher sentencing under "three strikes you're out" legislation? If a corporation kills someone, is the death penalty a possibility? It seems like corporate personhood gives the benefits of being a real person, but without all of the responsibilities or negative consequences.
How are they engaging people on these flights? What's the opening line? Are they recording them? I'm really interested in how they're pulling this off.
A fairly transparent attempt to cover their ass, methinks.
Maybe I'm not thinking about it in the right way, but I don't see how most of those things signal status (and some don't signal anything at all). Or perhaps I was just too terse in my list. Here are examples of what people might be thinking with some of them:

- To enhance one's body (appear more attractive, muscular, thin, etc): being thin is inherently better than not, so I want to appear more thin.

- Self expression of any number of things: it's important to me that people not kill animals, so I'll be conspicuous in the ways I don't wear leather.

- Aesthetic taste: I prefer the look of the color red, so I'll wear it for my own pleasure.

- Entertainment: keeping up with fashion is stimulating to me, so I'll do it for fun.

Could you expound on why you think these things signal status in some way?
Funny that you call fashionable people worthless shits while citing the essay that's used most to point out that lots of nerds are worthless shits.

I don't see the point in denigrating people's passions, Bill. Paul Graham likes programming and making money. Not everybody does. Other people like to write music. Others, buying attractive clothing and learning how to look good. These things aren't inherently better than one another unless you want to buy into a specific social idea, and then we aren't required to go along with you.

The one thing I do detest are people with persecution complexes. Nerds are frequently unpopular because they insist so passionately how unpopular they are. That's unpleasant and leads to people not liking them. As I've discovered, if you talk to people about designing web sites and programming innovations, they'll still like you. You've got to understand going in what other people will be interested in and what nobody gives a fuck about, and that some people will never care, but if you know that going in, you can make delightful friends even with non-nerds.

The other problem is that some nerds know nothing but one specific thing, and they look down on everything else, so nobody likes them. There are people who know nothing but fashion, too, though they're rare and they're just as unpopular as nerds.
Well, WoW is a service. A service with 10 (11?) million active subscribers. So 2056 GMs sounds pretty reasonable. (I've never had to interact with a billing manager and don't really know what they do.)
Absolutely and training a neural program on a particular problem does not turn it into AI.
There are a couple of reasons I'm not a huge fan of plans like this. I have a friend running for state legislature under a similar goal (though only district residents would vote on his votes, not all state residents), and these are the two big points I made to him.

1. Most people aren't equipped to think about the kind of issues that come up with legislation. There are subtle interactions between laws, small economic provisions can have huge market effects, and many sentences end up meaning the exact opposite of what they seem to say. Ideally (for me, though you may disagree), the person getting voted in is equipped by experience, education, and general smarts. I want someone voting who is studying law, proposed and current, and making informed decisions. I don't always get that, but I'm more likely to get that with one person than with many.

2. Many Americans are terribly prejudiced. Pick any poll you have handy showing that more than 50% of Americans believe in something ridiculous and imagine them voting on a law related to that belief. Historically, perhaps, this vision is dimmer. It's a cultural issue, not an absolute one, so if we get better as a people, this argument against will become less important.

I do like when these kinds of ideas are brought up, however. Lots of interesting talk happens.
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

It's not necessarily a waste, but it's not unquestionably a good thing, either. There should be something other than blind acceptance or rationalization of its impact.

Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and non-mean opinion.
That's why I said "different from any other site online." I don't think we're any more entitled princesses than Redditors or Diggers, though.

I don't feel entitled to good service on HN (and thank God, because we sure don't get it), but I think it would be nice to have. If Hacker News could somehow turn itself into a competitive start-up, I'd like that, because I do think this site suffers from a lot of things.
Not much, that was one of my focuses in the current release as we needed to deploy a sinatra app. I think the only thing that missed the release was generating a Rakefile into the project root for non-rails projects. Here's what ours looks like: http://gist.github.com/189256

Ping me on the rubber mailing list if you have any questions - I'd be interested in hearing how this works out for a non-rails app for someone other than myself :)
An idea that's not novel, but perhaps worth revisiting: your points are still valid without the insults and condescension.
Man, these guys get away with a lot of editorializing.

Have they been hit with a libel suit yet? I mean, I don't disagree that Apple's duplication claims are dubious, but they're outright calling them liars here. I'm not sure that's warranted; one could make a pretty convincing argument that GV does duplicate functionality.
I think this has more to do with manufacturing consistency than anything else. If a hard drive fails in a few weeks than it's quite likely the lot it came from is also likely to fail.

Unless something fundamental has changed about hard drives I think my point is still correct. Hard drives are electromechanical devices that also wear; bearings wear, fluids evaporate, and heads hit the platter. They spontaneously fail like light bulbs spontaneously fail. It's not spontaneous at all. If you know a light bulb is about to blow or is near the end of it's life cycle you change it.

In the greater scheme of things the cost of the hardware is miniscule compared to the data on it. If drives start randomly blowing up in your face it's time to get a different model.

What I'm getting at is we put more care into the maintenance of our cars than we do our data. If you think hard drives are expensive than what do you think of the cost of productivity while an office full of people wait for a RAID to rebuild. Instead of waiting for the inevitable failure wouldn't it be better to cycle old drives on a friday evening when usage is low.

RAID6 is just a bandaid on a bandaid. It came about because drives are of the same age when a RAID is built. And start failing around the same time. RAID 5 can recover from one failed drive, RAID6 can do 2. But you are still vulnerable if a 3rd. But this is still reactive thinking, "I will replace them as they fail", rather than using proactive solutions.
Uh, no. Being arbitrary and protective about what products you allow people to build onto your own products is not inherently a restraint of trade.

My cable set-top box is a Cisco product. There are lots of cool things I could do with it. It controls a critical communications channel for me. I can't even swap it out for a different component. Clearly the FTC does not care that Cisco and AT&T have colluded to prevent me from modifying it.

When someone can convince the DoJ that Apple has seized control of the phone market, so that no viable alternatives exist to bring connected mobile software to market, Apple will be in a position to violate the law by capriciously denying applications. They're not there yet.

People want to develop for the iPhone because it's the best, most popular platform. They don't have to.
I'd like to see a corporation put in jail, or equivalent. Maybe prevent it from doing any business for the duration of the sentece.
I think this is just the nature of supporting a very large (in terms of population) interactive system. There are over 10 million active accounts. In the US, there are ~240 realms, let's say each realm has 500 to 1000 concurrent users. That means at in the US alone there are around a couple of hundred thousand paying customers online at any given moment - any one of whom might need and expect real-time or prompt offline support.
Craigslist is a good indicator of the world at large in regards to fraud and such.

You could make it "better", but you would find the overhead required to make it better would also require a lot more resources to operate properly.

So, you'd have to charge for more things, which would likely lead to decreased usage and accessibility to society at large, which ends up with the exact inverse of what you were trying to do.
This last bit, which you dismiss, is my point. Corporations have leaders which are elected, and their actions are subject to review by stakeholders. So why shouldn't they have similar rights?

It might be useful to separate "business rights" from "speech rights", but there should be a way for people to speak as a group. Class-action lawsuits, for example, allow a lot of people to be represented in court without personally being involved in the legal proceedings. Political institutions speak on behalf of significant chunks of the population on a regular basis.

And how would a corporation publish a prospectus without the right to speak? If prospectus contains lies, would you hold the individual who wrote it accountable? That defeats some of the protections a corporation provides, and means the stakeholders get a lot less money if they sue.
- TV Channel that streams video from various strip clubs.

- Filter than mounts to the front of your tv and polarizes in alternating directions based on a sync signal hidden in the channel that lets you do 3D tv at home for cheap.
Here's a similar phenomenon from the authors of Freakomonics:
"...names move through the population from a higher socioeconomic level to a lower level. Levitt and Dubner found “a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high-income, highly-educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder.” When the name is adopted “en masse,” then “high-end parents begin to abandon it,” and presumably, the whole cycle repeats itself with a new batch of names."

http://www.babynamesgarden.com/freakonomicswatch.aspx

They're testing this idea by issuing predictions for popular names in years to come.
Wait--when a person goes bankrupt, nobody is charged with murder, so I am not following the argument here.
If the corporation is convicted of a felony, it should lose the right to vote, right?
People say exactly --- I mean EXACTLY --- the same thing about Craigslist every day, and Craig Newmark keeps saying "anything I add to the site could take away from it in some other way", and there you have it; Times New Roman, browser-default <a> listings in non-semantic, hard-to-scrape lists, etc.
see previous thread http://mashable.com/2009/09/18/google-apple-fcc/
True. But I, for one, would be perfectly happy with $160k per year. ;)
Its just like borrowing your friend's car. You use it for a weekend, and return it back, don't you? Does your friend take "deposit money" from you for it? Does he charge you "rent" for using his car? No. That is the difference between your friend and a rental car company.

You are putting a dollar amount on the friendship

Nope, I am not. All I am saying is, if I am in a better position than my friend, and he needs help, I am willing to help. He has to borrow money from someone anyway, why not from me, interest free and trouble free? He can sleep peacefully at night, knowing that I wont foreclose his house or something, if he is going to be late in repaying, or even if he is not able to repay at all.

If they don't pay you back, will you still be friends?

Yes. We are talking of FU money here, and also assuming that I am in a situation like Mint founders. I am in a position to loan money, without affecting my own lifestyle. Obviously, if I am myself living paycheck to paycheck, this won't apply.

why not just give them the money?

because, I don't want to patronize them, and don't want to insult them.

Frankly, I don't understand why you call this bullshit. Loaning money to friends happens all the time. I've done it many times, and have always been repaid.
the video is now online: http://www.vimeo.com/6624203
1.Don't know about the numbers, do know that it is a serious concern.

2. "A few months ago, I was appointed the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Permanent Memorial to Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which will be erected on the grounds of the UN in New York City." Frankly, a commission in the Coast Guard, or a job with the Department of Labor or the vice squad, would be likely to accomplish a lot more.
Your examples of "contributions" seem a tad myopic and species-serving, if not merely self-serving. Apply your line of reasoning to the range of capabilities seen in humans, and see where that leads.
Slow to load, but interesting concept.
Would you really be gaining 8% per year? I'm not sure how returns work when you're talking about millions of dollars. I assume you are going to leave 3% behind per year for inflation. Just to be safe, I'd rather say you take 3% out each year which would still be $240k, so it's still a lot.
How We Really Use The Web [pdf]
Just because a corporation does not have rights of free speech under the 1st amendment does not mean that all of its speech rights should be destroyed. They can just be controlled in some ways for the public good as allowed by law.

Thus, an organization should have the right to speech and to voice its opinions, but those rights can be controlled for the public good, for example by laws that prohibit them spending too much money for campaigns or requiring them to identify themselves when buying TV ads.

And of course any organization can fall back on the first amendment rights of its members -- thus as you mentioned they can have all their members sign a document or have them all go to a demonstration, etc. I don't see anythign wrong with this system.
His deal seems particularly attractive given this new information. One can imagine that he has been working 100-120 hour weeks, has no external life. Now he has buckage, gets to continue doing what he did over the last two years, and gets to run something similar. Given that he still gets to work on his startup, what is not to like?
That's exactly what someone who was under the thumb of an evil VC conspiracy would say!
We tried to use Basecamp for internal project scheduling stuff, and it fell down badly for us. I went through a period of thinking Basecamp kinda sucked. I've started using it for customer evals for our product, and it is shining for me.

When you have the problem of managing lots of short-term relationships with defined processes and lifecycles, where you need freeform comms throughout the relationship that multiple people on both sides of the engagement can keep track of, Basecamp just-works. I went looking for alternatives and, apart from the pricing, I don't see a better alternative.

I think a big problem with Basecamp (and to a lesser extent Highrise) is that the marketing appeal is broad but the business value is narrow, so they bring in customers who get turned off. But why would they care? It's easy to cancel service, and they're doing well with their core customers. It seems kind of silly to go through a lot of effort to make people happy that aren't your core customers, or to sacrifice a single marketing lead to avoid irritating the Hacker News Commenters of the world.
Really? It loads instantly for me, and the server is basically idle.
FCC to unveil open Internet rules
TechCrunch50 Wrap-Up.
I agree with you on both points. I have had several similar discussion with a political analyst friend of mine.

I think that because of the way things run now we are also predisposed to think that other people will take care of the minutiae. The only problem is that in a direct democracy there is no 'other people'...

I think that a direct democracy is possible, but I think that the transition to it and the period afterward would be very rocky, possibly rocky enough to bring back the old system.
I don't use Craigslist, but HN is not the same sort of site at all. There are features that would add positively to HN that wouldn't detract anything from it.
Some signals are accurate. If you work out, have tattoos or a magnificent beard, that's a lot different to just putting on a shirt.
Ask HN: Rate my Friday fun app - "Let Me Search Twitter For You" [lmstfy.com]
www.lmstfy.com for "Let Me Search Twitter For You"

This one is a fun app designed to pwn noobs who use Google to search realtime events. Typically it goes like this:

1. Something happens (gmail down, etc.)

2. Noob Googles for it but finds stale info, so IM's a Pro to find more info.

3. Pro goes to LMSTFY.com and inserts the noob's stupid question.

4. Pro sends noob a quick LMSTFY link.

5. Noob clicks on the link and is guided to Twitter search.

6. Noob has no idea what Twitter is, but likes the chatter and links in its search results.

7. Pro sits back, thinking "Google for the greatest, Twitter for the latest."

The app animates a cursor across the twitter search page, seems to type in a keyword, clicks on the search button to take you to the twitter's SRP. This one is obviously inspired by lmgtfy.com - "Let Me Google That For You."

In the process of writing this app, it was fun learning Google Apps framework, python and some javascript animation foo.

I would love to hear any feedback people have.
You ever find a place to work later than 6-8pm?
Well in that case apology accepted. And to your second remark I agree with you - I'm genuinely against built to flip companies. I just don't think Mint was one of them.
http://www.lmstfy.com
Ode to an expert wordsmith
http://www.twitread.com

Started to gain some traction, but beyond a (very) few amazon affiliate sales, I couldn't really see how to effectively monetise it.
An AJAX api library where you specify types and RESTful actions and it builds an object with type-checked methods.

The code looks like:

var api = new AjaxAPI(
"page = /testapi.php \n" +
"mydate= (^\\d\\d-\\d\\d-\\d\\d\\d\\d$) \n" +
"int=(^\\d?+$) \n" +
"text = (^.+$) \n" +

"get_messages : GET /messages/project={int}/date={mydate}/ \n" +
"get_comments: GET /comments/project={int} \n" +
"save_comment:POST /save_comment?project={int}&comment={text} \n" +
"delete_comment :POST /delete_comment/project={int}?comment_id={int} \n" +
"echo: GET {page}?_method=echo&[foo={int}]&name={text}&[baz=(text)] \n");

api.call.get_messages({project: 12, comment_id: 21}, function (request, response) {...});

Its done and been sitting on my hard drive for 2-3 years.
Not to mention that if your house is already paid for, you can live on much less than 5%. Housing is far and away most people's biggest expense.
Making the choice to decrease our lifestyle is certainly a significant factor in why it feels hard to "follow the dream." I do have a wife and kid and that complicates it a lot. Although my wife does not work in a very lucrative field and she's open to a little adventure, so she's not pushing against this much - although it's still hard to have her leave her family and current status at her current job. :/

Your last point is very interesting. I hadn't thought of an approach like that. Hmm...
I can absolutely 100% guarantee even IBM isn't boneheaded enough to tell its accountants to dump Excel!
Writing Your Own Toy Compiler Using Flex, Bison and LLVM
I would love to see that implemented on a large scale...

If someone like Google were to implement this as a response to every email that had positively been identified as spam then the scammers would spend so much time trying to sort the wheat from the chaff that they would never get anything else done!

At the moment the signal-to-noise ratio is low for us, as spam receivers, but if we made the signal-to-noise ratio lower for the spammers and scammers then they would have a much harder time making money!
Your somewhat extreme example notwithstanding, are you saying it's unreasonable for a student to point it out when a teacher is giving incorrect information to the class?
I'm sure the aerodynamic wheel fairings are really good for fuel efficiency, but I predict they'll be a lot smaller on any production car that comes from this idea. People do like being able to drive over speed bumps after all.
Interesting. I wonder if there is any possibility that this will have an effect on Intuit in any way comparable to the NeXT acquisition on Apple?
Just because a corporation is a person doesn't necessarily mean it's a US citizen. Maybe it should get deported? :)
I think that's the cinematics group for all Blizzard games, not just WoW. From the article: "Machinima sequences, teasers, and the amazing pre-rendered cinemas that make Blizzard games kick off with a flash are all created in this group."
Good job on the presentation. I had a lot of fun reading the GEB-inspired description.