skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copyright law doesn't care whether something is an original -- derivative works are also protected. Copyright protects creative works, however original, where creativity is defined by some semblance of originality (in content, arrangement, form, etc).

You can totally ask an author for a spare CD; however, he's not obliged to give you one.

Also, you are mixing up contract law (licenses) with copyright law ("default" law which applies in the absence of a license or certain licensing terms).
37% of Shotput Ventures startups stayed in Atlanta
Fair use would protect your ability to use the software, and to make backup archival copies of the physical CD for use in case the original breaks.

It would not extend to making copies of the software or CD for your friends or coworkers to use.
Ask HN: As an "IT Professional" do you/should you get to claim overtime?
I'm curious to learn about how other jurisdictions from my own (the province of Ontario, in Canada) stack up in regards to IT professionals' ability to claim overtime. Is it common or uncommon where you work/live? Moreover, do you think that IT professionals should qualify for overtime?

For a little background, in Ontario, an "IT professional" is defined as "professionals who use specialized knowledge and professional judgement to work with information systems based on computers and related technologies." (http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/guide/guide_22.html#information)

This definition is so broad that it covers everything from tech support staff to software engineers. According to the Ontario Employment Standards act, an IT professional is exempt from sections VII and VIII of the act, which cover Hours of Work, Daily Rest Periods, Weekly/Bi-Weekly Rest Periods, Eating Periods, and Overtime. This means that there are no regulations for IT professionals in these areas. Naturally, it seems you'd be hard-pressed to find an ITP that can claim overtime in Ontario, and, I suppose, technically, employers here do not even have to provide you with time to eat or sleep.
I hope they remember what (almost) happened to the Ringworld.
I certainly think you should be able to claim overtime. I never work overtime myself, but if I did, I'm sure I could claim it. Then again, the company I work for basically rocks, so... your mileage may vary.
I can't believe you left out Tang.
LOL who would have thought Google would have indexed ask.com pages showing their own Adwords ads!
Tim Ferriss gives a good example of this in the book Four Hour Work Week, when he discusses how he used Adwords to pick the book name.
How is this any worse than the collateral damage of war?
Saatchi & Saatchi does some of NZ's marketing, and they're doing a pretty damn good job!
I think that was the point...

Most people aren't aware of this.

Hopefully it was a success for you!
Or any of the other soft/partial/gradual typing work that's been ongoing since the 80s. Check out Jeremy Siek's papers on gradual typing for some of the latest. Also Tobin-Hochstadt and Felleisen's work on Typed Scheme.

On the one hand, this is ridiculous. On the other hand, I'm happy to see people outside of PL thinking about programming languages. There are a number of texts that can help a novice learn more about the topic, with Pierce's Types and Programming Languages being the foremost.
“It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology office of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

Couldn't they just have spoken to telecoms in Tokyo? Then they could've benefitted from their hindsight.
I had a debate with pg over 5 months ago about how many startups from Atlanta seed fund Shotput ventures would stay back after the program was over. The program got over 3 weeks ago and as of now, three out of the eight startups are in Atlanta. I know that at least one (and probably more than one) of the startups were originally from elsewhere but even if you ignore that, the current retention rate is 37%.

pg, based on his larger data set, had predicted a 2-3% retention rate. As Lance mentions, it's early days, but I have a hunch Atlanta is going to maintain the higher retention rate. Why? Because we are working hard to make it so: http://academicvc.com/2009/05/entrepreneurial-atlanta-2/

Addendum: Let me restate what I said in that thread. I am not saying people should not move to the valley if that's the best thing for them. I am saying that building an ecology that supports startups in cities outside the valley is possible and it's a good thing. There are many people who don't want to or cannot move to the valley.
If they could fix Austin by bringing in some temporary cells, then they're facing something besides the laws of physics, at least for that one town. How does the denisty & bandwidth use compare with Tokyo, Japan?
you can telecommute.
I wouldn't say I suffer from insomnia...
Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point.

If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code.

Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem.

Cutting out the death penalty just hides the problem. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to avoid putting these people to death, but the actual problem needs to be identified and dealt with.

Cases of such magnitude need rigorous scientific oversight, not just the say-so of whatever self-proclaimed "expert" was on hand to drag into court that day.
By definition, collateral damage is unintended killing, whereas capital punishment is doubtlessly intended killing.
Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet?

To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.
Should a funeral be held just before the person dies?
The ceremony could be viewed live by the dying person from his/her hospital bed.
Ask HN: what good music composition web apps are out there?
I'd like to be able to compose basic songs, save associated musical scores, and listen to playback. Where can I do these things?
this is my entry
"Dropbox synchronizes files across your/your team's computers. It's much better than uploading or email, because it's automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There's also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don't."

That is probably the most amazingly succinct and interesting elevator pitch I have read/heard. It clearly defines the product, the problem it solves, and provides metaphors for better understanding.
I’ve asked a similar question over here at serverfault.com http://serverfault.com/questions/47914/tools-servers-service...

“For a dev who doubles up as a sysadmin in small web startup, what services/servers/devices do you recommend running?
I am also open to best-practices suggestions

To get the ball rolling- here are some of what I have.

•	OSSIM suite

•	Pingdom to verify stage and production status(I have custom scripts hooked to a paid SMS gateway)

•	OpenDns

•	SVN server (Linux).

•	Backup server (Linux).

•	Mail’s on Google apps. (prioritizing LDAP integration)

…………. “
I don't mean regret having "not" done it. I'm talking about regrets from doing things and "failing" or fear of that happening.
Puppies Behind Bars
I try to mention that whenever a major company which competes with Microsoft in some way is involved. Even the most innocent of statements have a way of getting badly misinterpreted, taken out of context, etc.
The reason so many of the startups we funded left Boston was that we flew them out to Silicon Valley to demo to investors there. If you don't introduce the startups you fund to investors from other towns, then of course more of them will end up staying wherever they were. But you're not exactly doing them a favor in that case.
Actually the fact that LivePerson still charges an arm and leg for their product is a sign it matters.
If you already know what subversion, trac, and rsync are.
I like part of your idea, but really, just go ahead and let anyone sign in and sort introductions based on where you are if that's your point.

Why the exclusionary school thing? Isn't your point to enable people to find each other based on locale? Then just enable locale publication. Who gives a damn if you're currently or have been enrolled in the same institution. I for one, never used my school email. Well, that was 20 years ago, so maybe things have changed since then. But the only people I see using their alum email address in post-school life are ones that want to impress others with how much they paid for school.
"Hey! That bastard owes me a lot of money!" :)
good thing ichat supports a cross platform protocol like SIP then!
As an aside, my life goal is to have a room like the pictured operations center.
I am not personally involved with Shotput Ventures, but I know that the people involved are fairly connected and I am sure would introduce startups to anyone who would provide funding including valley investors. Not to mention they are financially motivated to do everything they can to maximize the probability of a successful exit and their returns upon such an exit.

Sure, they may not be as connected to SV investors as YC is.
The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_.

Capital punishment in it's current form is not a deterrence to crime, it doesn't fix the problems caused by the crimes it is punishing for (it doesn't bring back the murdered, etc), it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole, and innocents have died at the hands of overzealous police, judges, politicians, and public opinion. So the question then becomes, why do it?
Gosh that's involved.

I'd just turn dot into '0', dash into '1', building a binary string; then when space comes along, use the binary as a pointer into an array.

Luckily, all Morse characters fit in 8 bits. Baudot too.
And how does the red tape required to add a tower/antenna compare?
J.Crew Excels Amidst a Recession: Multichannel Retailing Success
Meta-Nigerians
I think by that time, China and India will be well embroiled in trying to overtax as well. Do not assume the U.S. position is unique in that somehow the water here makes our brains fuzzy. It is simply a case of position relative to others.
Curious: what happened to accoladeprep.com?
I live in California, and we have a similar law here:

http://www.philtres.com/vlb/CA_515_5.html
There were reports months ago AT&T has started testing home microcells -- that plug into your home broadband, and create a tiny cell zone for voice/etc traffic that's then routed over the internet.

Has anyone seen or tried such a thing?
This example has been beaten to death. Google was at least an order of magnitude better than other search engines, and was the first that actually worked, so it didn't matter how crowded the space was.

When evaluating an opportunity, "___ is a competitive/crowded space", "___ has already won this market", or "does the world need another ___" are all valid objections to raise. The rebuttal should be "but ___ is better/different because of ___" rather than a comparison to Google.
Tracing The History Of Mitsubishi In Australia
While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that.

So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.
I have no idea what you're asking. 1500 dollars isn't much money, so you should probably get a job, at least until you sort out your thoughts.
Breast Cancer Facts - You Should Know the Symptoms of Breast Cancer
Comparing death penalty to exception handling is the most distasteful metaphor ever. The real problem is that death penalty does not serve as deterrence. That is the problem.
Snow Leopard ships with vulnerable Flash Player
Misleading title. Videogame streaming is not here (at least not in the form of the OnLive service), and a great number of people still have some pretty fundamental questions about the technology. There was a tech demo at a videogame tradeshow, but as people here surely know, a controlled tech demo is a whole different beast from a real live service.

The other funny thing about this write-up is the idea that OnLive is challenging the videogame industry. Rest assured, most big companies in this space would love to have this technology be a reality: it offers greater control than consoles, and makes piracy next to impossible. If OnLive can make this work for a wide market (and not just hotels and the like), we'll see lots of offers to buy them and lots of copy-cat technology.
The generated password does not work for me.
If email introductions worked as well as demos followed by in-person conversations, neither we nor any of the ycomorphs would have Demo Days in the first place.

You couldn't physically make that many email intros. We had 24 startups demoing to 210 investors. We couldn't make 5040 intros.
It sounds like his mom is willing to back him up if he goes broke. If that's the case, I don't see any reason not to do it.

If you make it to Austin, you can probably sleep on my air mattress and I might be able to introduce you to a couple of people.
Or just clear your NY Times cookies.
Ask HN: How do you manage projects?
Since February, I've been running my ISV/startup full-time. I've done a terrible job and released very little, but at the same time I've been lucky in that sales have quadrupled and I'm making more than I did at my job. And I finally have some idea what's going to happen to the company over the next 6 months or so, and a couple new products in development.

However, I've realized that to get over the current hump and be able to meet next year's goals, I'm going to need to be a lot more disciplined.

There have been a few weeks this year where I've been able to stay focused for most of the day and get a lot of stuff done -- usually I set micro-deadlines for particular features or aspects of a certain project. But that's pretty rare.

Lately, I tend to wake up and work on whatever strikes my fancy out of the available things to work on, get demotivated after a few hours, then go do something else or do administrative work/support. It's absolutely pathetic, especially compared to some of the better weeks I've had.

I've gotten better at estimating how long stuff will take and figuring out the complexity of a project before doing it, but I've had the hardest time lately setting schedules for any of my projects. Even when I have most of the project mapped out. And as a result, I wake up and burn a lot of energy trying to figure out what to work on next.

So I need a better framework for planning things out on a day-to-day/week-to-week level. I get pretty uneasy whenever I sit down to do it and never come up with anything.

Most software packages for project management seem to be extremely complicated. And a lot of books (e.g. the recent Scott Berkun one) seem to be focused on managing projects in a big company with lots of people and dependencies.

So where should I go to educate myself about this kind of thing? Is this something I really need to learn about, or am I just procrastinating by thinking about something so meta?
Nowhere. Latency is just too high with Flash or JavaScript or Java applets, even the best online apps are atrocious. I always tinker with them when I see a link to them, but they always disappoint. Most iPhone and Android music apps are also pretty much useless, unfortunately...I love composing in odd places.

There are many good free (and low cost) installable apps, though.

On Linux, there's LMMS, Ardour, Audacity, which all do different things...I'm guessing LMMS is the one that fits your description best.

On Windows, there's FL Studio, and dozens of others.

On Mac OS X, I dunno the low cost options, but I'm sure they exist, since Mac is a very heavily used music platform.

My toolchain contains the following software:

REAPER
Renoise (on both Linux and Windows)
LSDJ (on Gameboy)
MSSIAH (on C64 with a SID2SID)

I will probably add FL Studio to the bunch eventually, but I mostly do live music and chiptunes, so it's not something I really need. But it's cheap enough to buy just to tinker with.
Re #1: Calls+textmessages are already completely segregated from data.

I'm calling bullshit on this article. HSDPA (3g data) runs on completely different channels than voice calls. Saturation of HSDPA channels will -not- cause calls to be dropped, poor call quality, or delayed text messages.

It will, as you might expect of a well designed system, instead degrade the quality of other data connections.

That's it.

You'll notice that in the article, no one quoted blames the data usage on dropped calls, except one random 'systems administrator' who owns an iphone.

Thanks for playing, NY Times.
Luckily, the analogy had nothing to do with the death penalty, and was simply about focusing on the symptom instead of the root problem.

You'd have to really go out of your way to read it wrong to draw any sort of "this is comparing death penalty to exception handling" conclusion.
This is true, not to mention a demo is obviously much more effective than an email introduction.

I am not disputing the fact that YC's physical presence in the valley and your connections give you a big advantage with investors in the valley.

I am only pointing out that there is no reason Shotput would not introduce their startups to those valley investors they can. I am sure they would invite all the valley investors they know to attend demo day in person and flying their startups out to meet investors in the valley or anywhere else also sounds like a great suggestion. I'd love it if I was in that batch.
RSS Is Dead, So Is The RSS Fund
anyone here actually buy CDs? other than signed (and still sealed) CDs or really interesting ones like (moldover's), I haven't purchased a new CD in years...

maybe I should considering the MP3s I do buy require me to agree to Amazon's licensing agreement.

eloquent argument nonetheless
"I am currently the sole founder. This has to change for Fleaflicker to survive."
Since we're already paying for service, femtocells seem like an insult (unless they're free, which I doubt).
Absolutely not.

There are still MAJOR questions about these high-end "games on demand" services that have so far gone completely unanswered, aside from PR type non-answers.

Latency - how will they perform when round-trips take 30-100ms+?

Bandwidth - Even assuming a mediocre resolution of 800x600 at 30fps, games are going to guzzle bandwidth.

Hardware - While a decent spec server can happily serve up dynamic webpages to thousands of users, that's just not possible for games. Modern games require a modern spec machine per user - and don't forget the heat/power issues either!

And wow - we haven't even talked about all those publishers who are going to demand top dollar for their latest titles!

So we'll see. I do look forward to seeing the what the service is like, but my feeling is that unless they can sign deals with ISPs to colocate then they're doomed. That said, such a service could be very attractive to cable operators as an additional extra to offer their customers.
It will be interesting to see if the ones that stay in Atlanta can get funded as well as the ones that are getting SV intros (a Shotput Ventures partner lives in SF and 2 Shotput companies moved West). It's early, we will need to do an update in 90 days.

You were dead on in your comment that Y Combinator style seed funding is not regional:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528924

Half the Shotput companies came from outside the South.
Their world view goes something like this:

(subscribers + news subscribers - churn) * average rev. per user (ARPU, like "arr-poo") = $$$

How do you increase profits? A few options:

- Get more subscribers. Costs money in marketing $$$, only helps a little bit. Requires more infrastructure.

- Reduce churn. Customer satisfaction has been in the toilet for some time and will be for the foreseeable future. Multi-year contracts w/ termination fees help keep it under control.

- Sell more stuff to your existing customers (you have lots of those) as long as it doesn't cost you much (SMS, ring tones, ...). Minimal infrastructure requirements.

In this view, crappy phones with expensive additional services like SMS, roaming, ring tones, for-pay WAP, for-pay instant messenger, music stores, push-to-talk, etc., all make a ton of sense. Your incremental profitability is great because you don't need too much gear to support these things and you're already billing the customer. On top of that you can negotiate content deals and pretend that customers care about the exclusivity (mMode, VCAST, whatever).

This stuff is what carriers meant by "data services" a few years ago. What's happening now doesn't fit this model; rolling out better infrastructure costs a lot of money and one person can use a lot more capacity in data than voice. 1000 minutes of GSM audio is only about 200MB and costs about $60, meanwhile the same price gets you 5GB of data. Worse, porting a number is often a big hassle but nobody cares what my IP address is. Imagine a world where your company just moves bits and the government is starting to question your key protection against churn (ETFs). If you're an exec at a phone company this is unattractive. Their attitude is "we don't want to be a pipe" (actual quote from a C-level).

So it's not that they didn't know, they just dragged their feet a little bit. To be fair, AT&T in particular cobbled their network together out of a lot of acquisitions so they probably have had a hard time of it.
Well then you need a benevolent AI and universal surveillance nanotechnology.
:) Hey - I was the winner in the race of about 180 million. (And that was before I was even born!)

We're all one-in-a-billion!

// Agree with the point though - it's like assuming that all runners are as fast as Usain Bolt.
"I used to support the death penalty until I realized the government can't even run the Post Office." - my father, Moshe Yudkowsky
Google patents single-box/two-button web page
This requires all api changes to touch the version (to be pedantic) which then becomes a major source of version control conflicts (in my experience).
Yahoo recruiter wants my resume (2006)
Minimizing Code Paths in Asychronous Code
What happens when I read this:

File syncing. Superset of backups, which people will pay for.
Good. Single founder. Bad. But at least he's looking for more
people. Went to MIT, 1600 SAT. Probably fairly smart. Wrote a
poker bot. Now I'm starting to get interested; has the right
attitude. Description of the software sounds plausible but generic.
Maybe it's good, but who can tell. But little sister uses it;
that's impressive. Scroll down to what he understands that competitors
don't get. Wow: very concise and unequivocal. I'm now basically
sold. Scroll through the rest. No red flags. Did not make the
usual joke single founders make when asked how long the founders
have known one another. Good answer to what might go wrong. A-.
(Would be an A with a cofounder.)
> it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole

Do you have a source to back that up?