skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's much simpler than that. YC is a stamp-of-approval, and there is a very large amount of money available for pre-vetted deals because this substantially improves the chances VCs have for a return on their investment.

So the YC advantage is what creates this scarcity, and that's rapidly starting to exhibit network effects and this is one of those.

The 'classes' model is a stroke of genius, it reduces the question of whether or not an investment is a good one to is this investment a good one against the backdrop of a whole pile of possible investments. That question in isolation is much harder to answer than the question with a lot of material around it to compare against.
I think you would be surprised, both at the tiny number of cases that would actually make it to a jury, and the number of jurors who would proudly support the police even in blatant atrocities.
I'm gonna go ahead and say it: Perhaps in retrospect C is an inappropriate choice of language for these kinds of applications.

This "Performance at all costs, including safety and predictability" thing may be appropriate in video games, but for security-critical applications that philosophy is downright negligent.
MRAPs and Bayonets: What We Know About the Pentagon's 1033 Program
Also probably more durable. Loon is a one-shot mission lasting at best a few weeks. I suspect the ultimate limit is UV degradation of the mylar balloon envelope. The fact that you'd be littering the planet with yet more plastic (though on a pretty small scale) also comes to mind.
No, they are just trying to maximize their return. They still carry plenty of risk but the ratio changes in their favour if they use YC as a vetting machine. And with a couple of out-of-the-ballpark hits under its belt YC is now a proven kingmaker.
Given that Gruber gave "Strict Markdown" and "Pedantic Markdown" as examples of names that he would "probably" be okay with, apparently not.
Does that mean every fork of markdown must have written approval from gruber until he kicks the bucket?
Emacs Lisp used to be close to `the' standard Lisp. But since a few decades all Lisp have static scoping by default now.

Racket and Clojure are both Lisps, and, yes, they are incompatible. They are different, if related, languages.

Our local guru, Paul Graham, has his own (incompatible!) Lisp dialect, Arc, loosely based on and implemented in Racket.
I think it's way more complicated than you're making it sound.

So, these things happened:

- Gruber announces Markdown, and releases an implementation in Ruby and some basic documentation

- Someone ports Markdown to a different language. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?

- Said implementation differs from the original implementation in some minor ways, although it still matches the documentation (which is vague enough). This might not even be intentional; it wouldn't be the first time any software has had bugs. Or it might be intentional fixes of actual bugs in the original Ruby implementation of Markdown. -> is it okay to call it Markdown?

- Other people port Markdown to other languages. Said ports become more popular than the original Ruby implementation, such that pretty very few people who claim to use "Markdown" have actually used said original Ruby implementation. These ports are all subtly different from each other, although they still match the documentation (which is vague enough).

- A bunch of people decide to create better documentation (since said original documentation has been vague enough to cause problems with interoperability) -> is it okay to call it Markdown?

After answering these questions, I'd encourage you to replace "Markdown" with "HTML", and imagine how that originally went down.
John Gruber doesn't really look very good here.
For a while there was a standing offer from Yuri Milner to invest a substantial amount as a convertible note in any YC company (this has changed in the meantime, but it gives you an idea about how hot YC companies are).
"Someday, a commercial product may replace stool, making some of these issues less fraught..."

A synthetic product has been developed in Canada and tested successfully: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fake-fecal...

Curiously, one of the barriers to commercialization cited is the easy, low-cost availability of the "natural" alternative:

"However, economic barriers to such a synthetic pill are significant. Elaine Petrof, an infectious-disease expert at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has created RePOOPulate, a mix of 33 different types of bacteria grown in the lab to mimic the microbiome1. Her team spent two years getting the equipment to grow the bacteria up and running, but the process is still expensive and the bacteria finicky. 'Honestly, good luck to you,' she says to companies trying to commercialize the technology.

The high cost of producing bacteria in this way would be less of a barrier if the alternative were not so cheap. As Tom Moore, a physician and infectious-disease specialist in Wichita, Kansas, puts it: 'It’ll be difficult to compete with the ready availability and very cheap costs of human poop.'" (http://www.nature.com/news/faeces-filled-pill-stops-gut-infe...)
Are you sure that was meant in earnest? After all, the license [1] is clear:

Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

Plus, if somebody names "specific prior written permission", saying "we haven't heard back since last night so it is okay" seems dishonest to me.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license
omglol is not a credible source for any reviews of news sites...
Everybody's heart bleeds red--only difference between criminals and noncriminals is that they are not following some law on the books. Some subset of them are violent, insane, or malicious, but for most crimes it's something that harms nobody in any meaningful way.

The worst part of the current state in America is this creation of an other.
It still has "Markdown" in the title though. Gruber's silence is not going to be considered equivalent to consent by a court if it ever gets there. It really has to stick to the letter of the license, or its invalid. I'm assuming its trademarked though, not sure about any of the details.
It might have something to do with confidentiality. You'd be handing a huge and valuable chunk of info to another party.
clicking around the screen without intent has resulted with some more interesting melodies than i had in mind when i started. instruments like this are great for brainstorming.
How long until it hits the Canadian store?
And for those who don't follow links: this was the phone number advertised by BSD Unix, a fork of AT&T's Unix, when BSD launched its own commercial distribution.

The resulting legal battle came to be known as "the UNIX wars", and resulted in a legal finding that AT&T had little to no effective copyright ownership of the BSD codebase (a few minor files IIRC). This decision was issued under seal, later broken in the subsequent SCO vs. IBM lawsuit of the early 2000s.

The contretemps has been argued as among the reasons Linux emerged and became as popular as it is: it was a de novo, fully independent, largely POSIX-compliant reimplementation of the UNIX environment that was good enough for those who wanted that sort of thing.
Why emoji and not arbitrary icons?
Looks good. The clothing tooltips are slightly buggy on Chrome (sometimes they don't appear).
I'd argue that using a CRM isn't in the sales people's best interest. If they can keep all of their contacts in their personal contact list they are better off. Plus, from their perspective any time entering stuff into a CRM System is time when they're not closing sales.

It is in the companies best interest to use a CRM system. It gives reporting, visibility, and a different sales rep can pick things up with some history if the old sales rep leaves (turnover can high).

In my opinion the only way to get sales reps to use a CRM System is to tie it to comp. Any other method is a waste of time.
First thought I had.
> In his email John graciously indicated that he would "probably" approve a name like "Strict Markdown" or "Pedantic Markdown".
I'm not aware of any language that would be better. Most languages don't even let you touch memory to try to zero it.
I don't learn a new lang atm but I've heard it works great for that.

There are shared decks [1] and you can create your own very easily. Whenever I stumble over a new fact throughout the day, I (try to) add it to my deck. To test the system, I learned all european countries with capitals and all US states in 4 hours total (spread over weeks, just 1-2 minutes spent every other day). It's really easy and fun.

I use both the desktop and the mobile apps, they keep in sync.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
This is a great idea. I would be careful going too cheap on the recommended pieces. For example, on the Theo James, there is no way I would buy a Haynes T-shirt. If super-cheap is your target market, then great. But, you could also go thewirecutter style and have "Get this look for under $100" and "A more expensive version". Good luck on the execution!
Explain to me then why Gruber was okay with Github-flavoured Markdown?
it still is in violation of the license, correct

That's arguable. More elaborate software licenses define terms like 'derivative work', but BSD-style licenses generally don't.

Do open specifications count as 'products derived from this software'? There's obviously no code being shared.

Legally, it's probably more of a trademark issue, and trademarks can be lost, in particular if they are not enforced and lose their distinctiveness.
Thanks! As a backend dev who did the UI I appreciate that very much!
That just creates another dead store which will get eliminated.
It is a little mind boggling that support for proper handling of this didn't arrive until c11. For a symmetric cipher without a demanding setup/init phase - would it make sense to just do a few rounds on a buffer using the zeroed key? Obviously quite a few more cycles, but should at least be a predictable (constant) overhead?
I'm hoping it'll be an allusion to Rust and an article about how none of this nonsense is necessary, but I don't think so based on his past writing.
Yeah, this feels petty (on Gruber's part).

So the whole issue comes down to the word "Standard" versus "Common." Not the word "Markdown." And not any of this (silly) "it's supposed to be ambiguous" argument.

Done and done, I suppose.

Oh, and it's the "don't redirect standardmarkdown.com" bit that really strikes me as juvenile, for some reason.
I agree it's relevant, but not because it supports the argument. While investment banking is, at least today, seen as prestigious and a pathway to executive management, trading is viewed as boarish and generally does not carry over to anything outside of trading. So Thiel may have gained access to capital from connections he made in finance but not substantial leadership-related prestige.

(Also I don't think jumping from super-elite-law to finance is particularly difficult, it seems pretty common).
The license requires explicit written permission by Gruber before using "Markdown". It's not fuzzy at all about this point. He didn't okay any name like X, he said he might approve of a name similar to X. That's not permission of anything yet.
Sent this to a budding developer in our business. Thank you for the article. I too tend to think of objects as actors with contracts.
GCC also has an `optimize' function attribute which might make sense to use here. This can set optimizations for the function to -O0. But I haven't tried it.
An off the wall idea: have the pilot duplicate work being done by the computer. Not to control the plane, but just to keep them alert.

i.e. imagine a driverless car that only works when you tell it to do approximately what it was going to do anyway. Otherwise it beeps at you and pulls over.
It's not obvious what counts as being derived from the software.
It's hard to understand from Jeff's post (and possibly John Gruber's email) why the name 'Standard Markdown' was infuriating. But I see little reason to think that 'Common Markdown' would be any better, other than the fact that 'Common' doesn't imply quite as much that this is the correct markdown version as 'Standard' does.
Yes, and that's the reward part of the risk/reward equation.

I'm actually not concerned at all about the rewards, 'unfairness' or any other philosophical issues. What I don't like is that there's a myth "the founders bear most of the risk", while in fact, for VC-financed startups the opposite is probably true "the VCs and employees bear most of the risk."
Why not just do something completely original and get away from this mess?

And by original, I include the concept of using traditional ASCII markups. For instance, doing this (asterisks) for emphasis long preceded Markdown. As did _this_. As did -this- and various other ASCII markings. None of those are innovations of markdown, or are they inventions of John Gruber, and their intention is directly paralleled in HTML.

Beyond that...the link mechanism of Markdown is and always has been pretty weak, and outside of that it's pretty marginal grounds.
That's not quite right since it's now reading memset_ptr twice, but the concept does seem to be right -- the volatile pointer must be read but the standard doesn't require that the function is invoked.
In Colombia that wasn't any guarantee when I was there, not sure how it is today but you were very strongly advised to never hail a cab, always call them in advance and get the taxi id from the dispatcher.
I have this problem too. I think the key to this is what i've acronymized as "TTR" -- Time-to-revenue. Any idea with a High TTR ( for instance a product that needs enterprise sales ) is out as a side project. Ideas with a Low TTR are in. The key is to get a passive or near-passive income and then be able to go for High TTR/ High TTMVP (moonshot) businesses later.
The UI is a reflection of the state. UI nesting is not part of the state itself. The route is just a serialized representation of the state.
5 Lessons from one year of freelancing
Thanks for this, you've pretty much said most of what I'd have to say on the subject. The only real question is the enforceability of the license clause on naming of derivative works. Though of course, a spec (which doesn't quote the BSD code itself) isn't a derivative, nor are other implementations based on that spec. Gruber is attempting to turn his copyright license into a trademark license, which given a decade of genericization and non-defense is fairly likely to fall if tested in court.

I forsee a possible recursive acronym of the form Foo is Not Markdown in the not-too-distant future.

Or a Mozilla / Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox contretemps.

Gruber really should put on his big-boy pants though, IMO, and thank those who've picked up his ball and run it further down-field from where he'd abandoned it quite some time back.
Org-mode has all of this. Non-proprietary? Easy capture? Indexing? Search? Agenda? Mobile-capture and sync? Org-drill for spaced repetition? Integration with snippet capture in browser?

Every single one checked.
Cat gets attacked by bird and dog
http://www.supernifty.org/bmi.php + http://famousoutfits.com/ = WIN
It's not a BSD License, it's styled on it. But anyway, all of this has nothing to do with code/specifications/philosophy. It's a copyright issue.
I've thought for a long while that Jeff Atwood was a bit egotistical - I've mostly kept it to myself, but this really takes the cake.

There's a few key things you need to have to properly apologize[1]:

- a detailed account of the situation

- acknowledgement of the hurt or damage done

- taking responsibility for the situation

- recognition of your role in the event

- a statement of regret

- asking for forgiveness

- a promise that it won't happen again

- a form of restitution whenever possible

Most of those things aren't there. And, most notably, Jeff spent the majority of this post explaining why he wasn't at fault. That may be a fair opinion, but keep your ego to yourself - don't post an apology if you don't mean it, and don't act like this fulfills Gruber's request just because you put it on the internet.

Furthermore, Gruber is right. He has a license on the name Markdown[2] - the name is not up for grabs. And the name "Standard Markdown" very directly implies that the rest of the "flavors" of Markdown are wrong. I would say "Common Markdown" is no better - it implies that all other flavors of Markdown are uncommon. If Jeff really had any intention of making things right, the least he could have done was wait more than a day to hear back from Gruber - it's not like this is really a time-sensitive matter.

[1] http://www.perfectapology.com/how-to-say-im-sorry.html

[2] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license
There is an argument that the cop would have been more likely to not have roughed up Eric Garner if he knew he was being recorded by admissible means.
I haven't found that to be the case. I don't mean that Clozure's performance is bad, but optimizing numeric code is SBCL's reason for being. When I switched from SBCL to Clozure, I had to move things like password hashing out of Lisp, because I couldn't get acceptable performance out of Ironclad.
https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507661953498890241
Gruber said in the talk show that it was a flavour of Markdown that had extensions specifically suited for Developers which had elements that wouldn't make sense to have everywhere.
Show HN: SaleFlare
Actually, it's never been reliably confirmed from any of the scientific reports I've read. Maybe they do still exist and I want to believe it, but so do a lot of other people and that may be skewing the evidence. Just some blurry pictures and video[0] (from 2005) that some have inferred shows its flight pattern is that of an ivory billed and not of a pileated.

> "Like many in the conservation arena, the Fish and Wildlife Service was hopeful that field searches would lead to additional evidence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas and other parts of its historic range. Additional evidence was collected during the past four years (including both auditory encounters and sightings concentrated in certain areas). This additional evidence supports the hypothesis that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers continue to exist in Arkansas and other parts of the range. However, due to the inability to reliably locate birds, we cannot at this time conclude that a population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers is established in this region."[1]

[0] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/308/5727/1460/suppl/DC1

[1] http://www.fws.gov/ivorybill/
Images and video?
Yes yes yes yes yes yes YEEESSSSS! I hope this is the stake that goes through the heart of that undead thing known as MUNI.
That's definitely not the Levi's trucker jacket that Efron is wearing, either. (His jacket has buttons on both sides, and what looks to be a sheepskin or fleece collar, and the breast pockets have hidden buttons. And so on — it's completely different.) People who care about fashion care about details like these.

Personally, I find it disingenuous. I like the idea, but associating these outfits with glamorous celebrities doesn't make the products automatically better. At the very least you should offer a choice between the real item and, if it's expensive, offer a cheaper item as an alternative.
It's not just police officers, but really anyone is subject to prejudice.

I was sitting in a hotel once (I wasn't staying there), and some thug-gy teens came in asking if they could use the phone to make the call. They were denied the privilege so they came to me to ask if I could let them use their phone. I let them use the phone under the condition that I hold it and put it on speaker. No one picked up so I went to the hotel staff and asked them if they could let them use their phone. To my surprise, the staff started to apologize to me and said they'd called security.

Point of the story is that almost everyone is prejudiced against thug-looking-people and it's often misattributed to racism.
Yes I can see you've carried a passive aggressive resentment of Jeff for a while and now you've found a way to comprehensively express it thank you. Even with footnotes to back up your correctness. This entire topic just isn't important.
Ask HN: How do you raise seed money in SV?
I'm new to the Bay Area and I don't have any connections or rich family or friends. I have interviewed a couple of times with Y Combinator but haven't made it in.

I'm bootstrapping a company but would like to accelerate its growth and be able to work on it full time.

Everyone is always talking about how freely capital flows around here but I don't see that. How can I raise seed money for my company?
And if trademarks are not enforced, they are lost. Anyway, I clarified my post.
"Measurements of bones from its leg and arm..."
"...leg and arm..."
"...arm..."

Really?
Another strategy would be to use mixins: rather than think of objects as being programmed via SI classes, you instead program them as layers of functionality (mixins). Few languages have good support for mixins, however (Scala being one of them).
Nevada strikes $1.25B tax break deal with Tesla
Your Startup Can Thrive Without VC That It Will Probably Never Get Anyway
I would like to be able to unfollow artists, or selectively follow from my library.
> should be entitled to current-valuation equity that's equal to the difference between their market rate and what they get paid by the startup

Rrright. Only a founder can decide to dilute the stock while keeping that quiet, or do any number of other things. While an employee is on the receiving end.
images are important, that's how I learn countries (point on map) and birds
I've used it as a backend for an android app recently.

Not too bad. The JSON is kind of messy though
What incentives would the 3rd party have to destroy recordings? They would be liable, and could be held in contempt.

Presumably they would be paid to record and archive from the LEO feeds, with an expectation of storage durability and availability. That would be their primary incentive.
> Gruber's silence is not going to be considered equivalent to consent by a court if it ever gets there.

I don't see what the formerly "Standard Markdown" project has done to accomodate Gruber as something done because they accepted that he had a legal claim that they were required to comply with, I see it as something that they did because they thought he made a demand that, whether or not it was mandatory, they felt it was reasonable and appropriate to comply with to the extent reasonably practical without tying things up for the project in an open-ended way.

Its not clear to me that Gruber has any basis for a claim in court here:

1) Its not clear to me that the license applies at all, in that its not clear that writing an spec that abstracts and regularizes the common behavior of several programs (which may or may not be all legally derivative of the one at issue) is a non-fair-use derivative work of the program at issue under copyright law, such that a license for that program would be required,

2) Further, its not clear to me that, aside from the copyright license on markdown.pl, that markdown was ever a trademark and, if it was, that it hasn't been either abandoned or genericized.

Of course, Gruber can sue and try to establish any basis for preventing the use of the name that he'd like.