skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, that's how the internet should work and that's how personal computers should work, for everyone but people like us.

Closed platforms rock. The mythical End User just loves himself a closed platform. It means there's some company out there betting their reputation and their bottom line that no malicious, harmful, or otherwise undesirable software will find its way on their device. And that's a guarantee that sells devices. Look at what the "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality" did for video games, for instance.

The future of development is closed source on a closed platform. That's where customers' attention, and money, will be focused.
please, regurgitate some of those views here as well!
I have no idea what about this you think would be 'elegant'. It's elegant in the same way that using computed offsets into raw memory is elegant in C, which is to say that it's inherently fragile, prone to very subtle bugs, and detrimental to readability.

And given that it's in PHP, it doesn't even really have the absurd machismo of doing dubious things with pointer arithmetic in C going for it.
Definitely go for it.

FYI, my monthly expenses while living in a city outside Shanghai was about $400 per month. I think $300 would be pushing it in a lot of places. I would budget $500 just to be safe and to not have to restrict your lifestyle that much.
Pioneering op gives female circumcision victims hope
You are correct in assuming that I've read very little Robin Hanson. I'll definitely give it a further look.

I've just become tired recently of every large (and usually socially beneficial) charitable donation being followed by a wake of "how could he/she have used his/her oversized wealth for that cause when there are so many more worthy causes that I care about?"
As far as I can tell, your argument boils down to:

$125B+ (inflation adjusted) was worthwhile for inspiring people about what was possible.

Listen, I don't disagree that there were some benefits of the space program. But $125B+ is a lot of money for Velcro and inspiration. Let's keep a sense of scale here: if you assume YC invests $25k per company, $125B is 5 million startups (and 15 million or so founders). [1]

Just remember that the resources have to come from somewhere, and that if you're going to do it through government, you're spending other people's money to get things that you want. Someone else may not care about technology or the moon, and may prefer to spend that money on social programs or farm subsidies. Once you open the door that government takes the money and spends it, how can you possibly determine whose value system is better?

Also, to tie this back around to where we started, whether you support the idea of spending other people's money on projects that you like or not, my initial point was simply that risking money that isn't yours is not brave, whatever else you want to call it, because the politicians are not personally at risk of any loss. Worthless boondoggles don't even seem to negatively affect their reputation, and may even get them called bold.

[1] Note that I'm not proposing that the government should have invested in 5 million companies, but that an equivalent amount of resources was removed from the economy -- resources that could have built other things that people want.
It's amazing how little some of them have changed (Google, Craigslist especially)
Nobody is arguing those facts, and I don't think anyone at 37 Signals is naive enough to claim that you can't grow faster by spending more money (and going into debt, in whatever form).

From where I'm sitting, the point is that such a company shouldn't be called a success. Projections may be good, it may be very likely they will pan out, but until they actually do, the business is not a success, it's still theoretical.

If it turns out, because of unknown factor X you completely deplete the market before you become profitable, your business model is no longer a success. There are too many unknowns to guarantee that any company which looks likely to be profitable actually will be.
Steam and I have a tacit agreement.

In exchange for my loss of right of first sale, Steam continues with the aggressive pricing.

Not being able to resell games matters to me less when I can buy games cheaper in the first place.

This is especially true of archival titles, which (when I could find them) would often be a forgotten beat-up box on a shelf, with an ancient $39.99 price tag still on it.

Steam also does a good job with the price drops on recent games. If the game isn't something I necessarily have to have at $50 on release day, I usually don't have to wait too long for a price drop.

Obviously, price drops depend on the publisher, but Steam is a storefront geared toward price mobility, and Valve has created a model with their aggressive sales for other publishers to follow.
Am I missing something about the database section? It seems like if I add, e.g. a right child to node B in the diagram, I will have to update the "right" values on nodes A & B, as well as both the "left" and "right" values on C & E. Imagine doing this with a much larger subtree where C is, and you're looking at a ton of UPDATEs to store one new node, aren't you?
Similar to Everynote there are lots of companies that have taken money from VC's and have not yet become profitable e.g Vonage.2011 is a big target though since it is 2 years away and nobody know what might happen then, there might be a much better killer product then Evernote running at much lower cost.
While i agree that profitability is important but in the field of Web and according to the market you sometimes have to give away something for free to charge for something else.Even 37signals gives away tadalist etc for free.The best part is they have a bunch of products to earn cash from.
I'm up for that!

I'll see if I can bamboozle someone at Disney to give us a copy of the film on opening night we can screen here at Anybots/YC. Failing that, we can meet up at the Shoreline theater and go for beers at Anybots/YC afterwards.
The point is not that the money went to a valid cause that the author doesn't care about; the point is that the money went to an invalid cause. Which is fine and legal and all, but it's not really charity.
No robotics section yet...
Me too. This "attack" is very old and well-known on the browser side. It doesn't work particularly well on me because I keep no history.
Yes. The good news is that you read hierarchies much more often than you update them, and hierarchies in a bug tracker are going to be relatively tiny, so taking a minor write-hit in exchange for a massive read improvement is a logical trade.
When you mix it up with sports its not awkward any more.
Maybe those who are comfortable with sharing their ideas should do so here on HN, then submit as a team. (if they aren't busy with their current projects of course)

They're handing out cash for projects they want to be open-sourced. I think we as HN-users get the idea of community news fairly well - we just need some new ideas for tackling this locally.
You can actually just hold the mouse button down and drag over a pile of checkboxes in the right column. No need to hit shift/ctrl.
Many years ago, I developed an extension named AdBlock for the Phoenix browser, instead of studying for an exam.

I unfortunately haven't taken part in its development for a long time, but I still get a small kick out of seeing it mentioned around the net, and I love seeing how the project has been adopted by people far more disciplined than me.

Some other side-projects, which achieved less renown, can be seen on my homepage.
Stanford Full Professor John Perry on the Academic Career
You're exactly right. Any insert will end up incrementing every node on its right. Any deletion, will end up decrementing every node on its left.

It's possible you could do the deletions silently, because you don't actually care about gaps. But I don't see any way around inserts being expensive.
Content From Multiple Feeds/Services Instant : Pubwich
My company, LightSail Energy, started as a simple question: whether enough power could be recovered froma garage roof to power a daily commute. It's now a small startup that's raised money from a top VC, we have a working prototype and excellent forward momentum. :-)
Thank you Byoung2.
the copyright prevents you from duplicating it

No, it gives the copyright holder the default right (except when specifically waived) to enjoin you from freely making copies via legal action.

It also causes a number of relatively-narrow federal criminal statutes to automatically apply to persons that the feds find to be infringing on the owner's copyright.
> The copyright holder has all the rights to the work, and you are granted none beyond "fair use" rights (quoting small portions for critique, backup, resale, etc) defined in copyright law.

So how do you work the DMCA in there? It's legal for me to make a backup of a copyrighted work... but if the copyrighted work is 'protected' then I can still make a backup copy... but no one is allowed to sell or distribute the means to make that copy?

Couldn't the argument be made that the copyright holder is actively trying to take away my fair use rights by using DRM?
Which was open-sourced, then sold to MSNBC last month.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/msnbc-picks-up-hyperloc...
Emacs's artist-mode (mentioned in another of the comments here) offers something rather like that.
Actually, upon further reading, I think ck113 has got it dead on. Its not about the money, the individual or even the charity where the money actually ended up. Its about the bizarre social pressures that drive the decisions.

Wish the blog post had spent a few extra sentences setting up some context for those of us who are less "Hanson literate".
http://www.amazon.com/Competition-Michael-E-Porter/dp/087584...

for starters...

Plenty of empirical evidence out there in the decline in shrinked wrap software, the disappearance of successful IPOs, and the inability of the vast majority of websites to charge for any service whatsoever.
Job Security
ADO.NET Data Services Toolkit for PHP (with proxy code generation)
But it doesn't solve the problem where the browser caches the html but not the one of the js files. In this case the user would load one .js file (?version=old) and get the new .js file because they are all pointing to the same file on the disk (url parameters are not separate files). By physically naming the file after the hash you are guaranteed to get either the old set of files or the new set of files.
What Snow Leopard is missing for Developers
> (except when specifically waived)

Realize that it's pretty hard to put something into the public domain... which is why we have all sorts of licenses like Creative Commons to try and work around the holes in the law.
This article is good background to understand Hanson's health care perspective: http://hanson.gmu.edu/feardie.pdf

Unfortunately his argument really only addresses marginal health care and shows that we may be over-cared-for and suboptimal, not that basic health-care is worthless. The effectiveness of work against polio and eradication of smallpox are perhaps the easiest examples of unqualified success.

There's a vast difference between saying that we have too much or suboptimal health care, and that hospitals are worthless.

Robin's post criticizes Grass's spending as worthless "signaling," but it seems to me to be guilty of the same thing. This post doesn't do anything to prove the claims that hospitals and academics are worthless, or that profit motive is the only way to do good.

I actually agree with many of Hanson's broader points about ways to be more effective, but classifying all charitable spending on libraries, hospitals, and universities as "pissing it away" is needlessly sensationalist.

[edited to reduce my own needless sensationalism]
I've worked with MacHeist on a few of their promotions, with two of my products, and it's been a positive experience.
On a related note, I have a special place in my heart for this beast:

http://www.controller.com/listings/detail.aspx?OHID=1084742
I hate that too, but the DRM has a very powerful positive side-effect: getting caught cheating online means you lose your license! The only time you see exploits in TF2 is during the occasional free weekend.
22 Facebook Funded Startups to Watch
History of the iPod + iPhone w/ rare videos + pictures
I don't think he's saying that hospitals and academics are worthless, but that their current marginal worth is well below their cost. The charity didn't create hospitals in needed areas, it simply expanded an existing hospital. An extra building on a sufficiently large campus isn't going to improve academics by any appreciable amount.

edit to respond to your own edit:

You're still being needlessly sensationalistic yourself. The phrase "pissing money away" features once, in "But when folks like Alex spend their later years trying to “do good” with the millions they were paid for actually doing good, they usually end up pissing it away."
Note that this is qualified with 'usually', and doesn't say hospitals and academics are "pissing money away". He does note that extra wings and additional lecture halls are unnecessary, but this is neither saying that hospitals are worthless, nor saying that charitable spending on hospitals, universities, or (the nowhere mentioned) libraries is worthless. Be careful with language.
Book Review: Coders at Work
It's a rotten move, but at least we'll have some consistency now, and no longer have the consumer confusion.
Ask HN: Automated shipping calculations for a shopping cart
I'm working on a marketplace app ( http://doleaf.com ) and we'd like to offer automated shipping quotes and shipping label printing, via the Fedex, UPS, and USPS web service APIs. It seems like a pretty simple requirement, and the APIs definitely support it, but I'm stumped. My source of confusion comes from algorithmically figuring out how many shipments/boxes will need to go out for each order, and calculating the correct shipping for each shipment.

For the most part, our sellers will be shipping plants. Only so many will fit in a single box, and for many, like trees, it's pretty much 1-1. So, if a buyer can order any number of plants in any combination, how do we calculate the correct number of boxes, the weight of each one, and so forth? There might be a way to do it, given a lot of info up front, but we're also trying to minimize the amount of work for sellers when they're adding a new item. Shipping weight might be reasonable to ask, but complicated dimensions and questions like "How big is the box you use to ship?" are probably asking for too much.

Am I making this a much harder problem than it actually is? I looked over the Fedex API docs and was instantly confused by the 1000s of different options and parameters. So, I'm coming here in the hopes that a fellow HN'er has dealt with this before. If there are any resources or howtos that you know of, please send them my way.
While I agree that this is an important, world-wide social issue, it doesn't seem to me to be relevant to HN. If you think otherwise then I'd be interested to hear why.
> The hashing approach is fine, but I don't get why they do this at runtime instead of at site push time.

Mostly for development turn around. It's annoying to "make" between every save and reload. It also makes site updating convenient. We "darcs push" to our test site, make sure nothing is broken and then we "darcs push" to the main site and that's it.

It works fine for the site at its current scale (stats are fast!) and there is a clear path to making it create the files statically should it become a bottleneck.
Direct link: http://www.doleaf.com - The actual site isn't really related to the problem, but come take a look anyway ;)
> A construction company that loses money is not going to be worth $50MM any time soon. A tech company with similar financials might be.

In other words, it benefits from speculative bubbles.
Yuck. Really, you like that thing?

IMO, if you're going Soviet heritage, it begins and ends al-Fresco. :-)
I'm missing a tool like FARR "Find And Run Robot", to start any program. But I guess Windows Vista and 7 have that now in the start menu. Still FARR has a lot more features.

Also, AutoHotkey changed my life!

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/
Yes. France and Saudi too. Wikipedia is your friend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-3_Sentry
I'm definitely going to apply in the open version especially as I'm looking for a partner/first employee.
The trick, then, is to get a job based on work you haven't done, and stick around until the details of what you did are forgotten. That's when the true rewards of academia set in.

This is why I wish academia was a totally different beast.
From arithmetic to algebra
Hoisted by one's own petard...
Hacker News is among the 5000 most popular sites!
How Twitter should make money
The tribunals may have inconsistent moral standards, but I do not.

There's a distinction between a criminal regime and instances of war crimes committed by a country's army. When a country's leaders organize the deliberate and purposeful extermination or forcible relocation of an ethnic population, that's a type of criminal regime. (There are other types, of course.) I would apply this standard to Andrew Jackson, Hitler, and Milosevic, and to the American, German, and Yugoslav governments under them. So while the Luftwaffe and flak gunners didn't kill any Jews themselves, they protected an illegitimate regime. Same for Zoltan, same for the US troops deployed outside the removal operation (for instance, the troops sent to menace the South during the nullification crisis).

When individual units or troops commit war crimes without the authorization of superiors, that's a separate issue. I would have rather seen Calley and his troops face trial in an international court, but there wasn't one then. There is one now, but the US is not yet party to it. I wish it were.

I think there may be evidence that the Bush administration was a criminal regime. I would not have fought for Bush.

I still don't know how to judge Zoltan, though. I'd say the same for a soldier in Iraq or a Luftwaffe pilot. I can appreciate his achievements, but I still raise questions about the morality of them.
People who are familiar with that definition for "characters" probably aren't the audience he was thinking of. =)
SEOMoz gives free 24 access to their competitive link tool
Even though most animals won't eat carrion, I don't think snoring helps when playing dead. I'm a heavy sleeper and when something jars me awake, I could do a mile run in my boxers, so I really believe exercise has a serious effect on your alertness . . . although that could be the effect of adrenaline and dopamine released during exercise.
I think it's different for an established company like Matasano where 1) there isn't the financial risk to the paycheck that characterizes a new startup (pre-funding) and 2) everyone around someone is working 60+ hours. The culture's already there. With a two- or three-person startup, the culture isn't all-encompassing. Each person makes the culture.
> what I don't like is that their solution is still dependent of the file date of the script and all its dependencies. While usually accurate, file dates can be misleading

I'm curious what you mean by that. File dates are what "make" and all the other builders are built upon. If they weren't to be trusted then you could never compile programs correctly...

> not to mention the performance hit of doing stat() on all the related files.

The thing is stats are really really fast. Check onedognight's benchmark above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800778). On my server I get 1.6 million stats per second.
It's a PR and brand management thing. Apple knows that anything heinous or broken on the iPhone reflects poorly on Apple. However Apple tries to wash its hands or disclaim responsibility, the animus attached to bad apps will rub off on Apple. That's reality; it can't be changed by fiat.
As near as I can tell, this article says "The U.S. won't turn a blind eye to private banking tax evasion schemes anymore, so we're out of here".

So long and please don't come back. As long as there exist large loopholes for high-net-worth folks to evade taxation, we will never get to bottom of "what is fair and reasonable taxation".
Thanks, I'll make sure you get one.
I solo road tripped the lower 48 and it was one of the best learning experiences of my life. A few of the lessons that can be applied to entrepreneurship that had nothing to do with what I saw but rather the journey:

Flexibility, adaptability, and dealing with uncertainty -
Things never go as planned when long-term traveling to the point that sometimes it is better not to have a plan, but rather pick a general direction and adapt. Same goes for your business plan, especially when developing new technologies in unproven markets. You don’t know enough to be able to plan out the details. A lot of times the random unplanned things end up being the best. Run with random even if you don’t understand it.

Dealing with the highs and the lows –
One day you’re on top of the world feeling accomplished after you hike up a mountain. I’m queen of world! The next day it is raining, your feet are covered in blisters, you’re feeling run down, you have a cold coming on, your tent has a leak, and you are alone in the middle of nowhere eating yet another granola bar. But eventually the sun while shine again, your cold will go away, and you’ll be on your next exciting adventure. Kind of like – One day you are full of enthusiasm for your new feature that is going to change the world! The next day (make that weeks) you are dealing with bugs, angry customers, anxious investors, getting no sleep and living in a dump eating yet another bowl of beans and rice. Fortunately something good will happen eventually to balance it out if you can ride out the storm. Life is cyclical.

*Going solo is crazy hard at times...you need to build a team that compliments and balances –
I solo road tripped and camped most of the time. I totally recommend solo travel because it will stretch you way beyond your limits and you’ll experience tremendous amounts of personal growth because it is crazy hard at times. But eventually you’ll get sick of going it alone - worn out from shouldering all the work and having no one to celebrate with except some strangers you just met. You need a team (travel companions or founders/partners/employees) that compliments each other. My typical group travel adventure goes something like this - I’ll lead a kayak expedition in the Everglades, get everyone there and paddling through the mangroves with alligators, but I’ll forget to pack lunch. As cool as it would be to have another rockstar kayaker along what I really need is someone who can make sandwiches. And not just the crappy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I would throw together. Like fancy sandwiches with Dijon mustard made by a rockstar sandwich maker.

Those are just a few things I learned (or at least reinforced) through traveling around the country that can be applied to entrepreneurship. I could write more but that is all I have time for right now and all the talk of Dijon mustard sandwiches is making me hungry for lunch.
Doesn't the Betamax case specifically say that it's fair use to duplicate things for personal use? I can photocopy the book to keep a backup, I can scan it and put it on my computer, I can put my CDs on my iPod, regardless of what the copyright holder thinks.
Yes, I really like that thing. Performance at cruise on the Туманскиы Р35-500 is 40.21 kN, which puts it at just about Mach speeds. For $45k.

That. That is entertainment.
Mobile hacking
He's talking about "the average punter", not businesses.