skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of points from someone who works in the online ad business:

1. People who block/remove ads are a tiny, tiny minority (right now)

2. If you're that opposed to ads, I'd just as soon not show you one. It costs money to show it -- something like $0.00003-9/impression. That adds up.

3. A site which doesn't perform at all -- e.g., no one clicks, all ads are blocked, etc -- will eventually cease to make money from ads and will be forced to seek another revenue model.
I hope this and the mobile client gives enough incentive for people to sign up for the premium accounts. Spotify is a great product that I enjoy on a daily basis, and I would hate to see it go under.
I agree with your premise, reasoning, and conclusion. However, I'd disagree about what your biggest fear should be.

A horrible, Fundable.com meltdown should be, by far, a bigger fear than getting abused by a shotgun clause.

Even in the land of the do-over, I can't see how this won't destroy the confidence that investors would have in either party going forward. Your future is so very much more important than your ownership in a startup with a co-founder who has no qualms about ripping you off.

As you say, there is no legal solution to the problem of bad humans. But there's no legal solution to death or car accidents, either; what we have are legal measures to manage those risks, in the form of contracts of some kind.

A shotgun clause is a last-resort clause, and from its very nature, it appears to me that it would only be invoked when you would most want it to be invoked.

( disclaimer: mr_luc has no personal experience with shotgun clauses and may very well be talking out of a suboptimal orifice. )
I want to know, but do not know, what other people think of me; which of my traits matter to them and which don't; what determines their reactions to my words and deeds; and how a person can learn such things in general ("just asking" obviously doesn't work). For looks we have sites like hotornot with anonymous reviews and ratings, but what to do about personality?
Fortune favors the bold.

But unfortunately, if you build something of great enough value patent holders will do their best to recognize their ideas in your solution.
OpenVPN + NAT.

Unlike most VPN technologies which rely on additional encapsulation in Layer 3/4 like GRE and IPSec (which have signatures that can be filtered out easily without deep packet inspection), OpenVPN works over userspace TUN/TAP drivers and a UDP transport. So, it just looks like plain old application-layer UDP traffic. The standard port it uses (1194) can be changed easily.

Although not impossible, it would be very hard to block something like that without catching in the same rules many other ordinary applications that use UDP, such as most online games, Skype, etc.

It does, however, require that you tunnel to a concentrator outside the GFW.
It's fun to watch the Justification Machine rumble on, here on HN. Not that it ever turns off.

The past few days I've been counting the number of articles on the front page that are "meta." That is, to do with HN itself, or meatless 'questions' such as "What are the true traits of an entrepreneur?" (Not an actual news item, but it captures the idea nicely.)

It hovers around 30%.

Everybody here is getting high on their own supply.

The value of HN to me has dropped dramatically over the past 9 mos. The critical thinking has all but disappeared, and the boosterism (Yay startups! I have the traits of a true entrepreneur!) has gone way up.

This author makes very many excellent points, but sure, go ahead, dismiss them out of hand as jealousy or aversion to "risk" rather than a well-formed critique.
This question keeps me up some nights wondering where I have been a git in my recent history. I tend to heavily err on the side of caution and then apologise ASAP to people if I think I might have used the wrong words in a scenario (been mis-interpreted), have made a mistake or potentially some other social faux pas.

In most cases they laugh it off and say it was nothing but maybe in some cases it does help, I dunno.
IBM undercuts Google with discount e-mail service
Congratulations, now I'll never find your address if you invite me over. Last math I took was "advanced" algebra & trigonometry my junior year of high school.
Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod (Excerpts)
1. Ignore everybody.

The more ori­gi­nal your idea is, the less good advice other peo­ple will be able to give you. When I first star­ted with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard for­mat, peo­ple thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for mar­kets to digest i.e. cutey-pie gree­ting cards or whatever?
From the book:

"The more ori­gi­nal your idea is, the less good advice other peo­ple will be able to give you. When I first star­ted with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard for­mat, peo­ple thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for mar­kets to digest i.e. cutey-pie gree­ting cards or whatever?"
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I used to set transient-mark-mode to t myself. But being able to set a mark and use C-xC-x to switch the cursor and the mark point is too powerful. It allows you to set a mark, go edit something else, and then go back to where you were.

Granted, you could probably do that with transient mark mode, but seeing everything highlighted would be too annoying.
I've done it for two ex employees that were really very good. I would do it for most of the others with a couple of exceptions, and I doubt those would ask me for a recommendation anyway.

One of the guys I wrote a recommendation for wanted to interview at google, the other at vmware. The vmware guy got the job, the other didn't.

Whether my recommendations were the deciding factor or not I'll never know, but I did do just what you would do, I addressed their good sides and their shortcomings both, which I think is only fair.

But it still was a recommendation, from the heart, I'd hire both of these guys myself in a heartbeat if the situation would allow it, which is my criterion for whether or not I would write one.
uniquify is awesome!
I think the reasoning there is that sum(1/(n^2)) is rather well-known to be pi^2/6. They then need to invert and remove the pi^2.

I think it's a reasonable part of the game to put the pi on the inside.
And it's this Buckeye's opinion that THAT explains a lot :D
Hi-tech Trek through the fascinating world of Computer Science
As I understand it, there are two streams of Japanese cultural life. One comes from the Samurai, the feudal system, and the Bushido code. The other comes from village/farm life. The latter emphasizes cooperation and community. Open Source seems to be an excellent fit for the second.

(Corporate hierarchy is a good fit for the former. Organized crime hierarchy even more so.)
I would not expect meritocracy from the admissions office of a selective American university. When it happens it is a side effect of a process that is more about fulfilling institutional imperatives, including flattering the admissions's office view of itself as an agent for social change.
Get everyone in US online, high-level panel says
I didn't do anything except post here, so I assume it's a feature of that blog.
I use anything: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything

And then I have this in my .emacs:

(require 'anything-config)
(global-set-key "\C-c\C-a" 'anything)
(global-set-key "\C-c\C-e" 'anything-for-files)

I try to get in the habit of using C-cC-e instead of C-xC-f or C-x b. Anything is just too useful as a file/buffer finder.
I'm glad I am not your mailman.
I think it's actually relatively easy to figure out what people think about you. If you do something, and a number of people react, you can generally start to draw a "trend line" through the behaviours of different people towards you over the course of some amount of time.

I think it's just important to pay attention.
I blame the computer guys for knowing jack of signal processing / communications theory and misusing the technical terms due to plain ignorance.

It's revenge!

But seriously, we also do it a lot to ourselves. There seems to be a programmer mindset -- experiencing our ability to figure things out using deduction and documentation, we get conditioned to think we can quickly get a working handle on anything. As a result, engineers and scientists of all sorts are constantly annoyed at computer guys posting stupid things. (But at least we can unite in our exasperation at journalists.)

We programmers live, "There's nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge." Often we live with the consequences. (In the late 90's I despaired at the dilution of the language around Object Orientation. Things have gotten better since then, somehow.)
yep, I'll be there, and I'll probably write it up.
Do VC Dollars Equal Success?
OK, perhaps I didn't phrase my objection very well.

> The purpose is to review various people that didn't like me and explore why.

I guess my problem with the article was that the tone implied that most of these people weren't justified in not liking you, or that it was some natural effect of a bad situation, rather than something caused by your own actions.
Also, emacs.
Smart lawyer, use the popularity of twitter and some inane posts that nobody would ever read to promote himself in the national (and now global) media.
Somebody who repeatedly sends invites and then calls is not going to get a recommendation from me. If you are actually worthy of recommendation, people will probably do them with very little encouragement.

Hounding people for recommendations will either lead to refusal (which will inspire you to write a blog post about people who don't like you), or people will write you a mildly insincere recommendation to avoid causing offence. At that point, you should be grateful that your acquaintance has considerably more social graces than you do.
New Apple Multitouch Patent Enables Typing on a Large Screen
Who in their right mind would choose Notes over anything else (Gmail, outlook, pine, telnet)?
Linux is Not the Answer to Security Problems
As I understand it, there are two streams of Japanese cultural life.

Do me a favor: any time you hear a claim about Japanese culture, mentally replace all occurrences of Japan with Britain. If the statement strikes you as merely wrong now, this heuristic tells you nothing. If the statement strikes you as sounding like it came from a blithering idiot, consider that it may not be as profound as it sounds.

As I understand it, there are two streams of British cultural life.

Wait, big country with long history and over a hundred million very diverse people in it, and I think I can encapsulate it in two sentences. My blithering idiot light is blinking.

One comes from the... feudal system

Wait a second, what relevance do knights in armor have to the London stock exchanges? Nothing, or I'm a blithering idiot.

The other comes from village/farm life. The latter emphasizes cooperation and community. Open Source seems to be an excellent fit for the second.

So the Brits are uniquely good at open source because, at one point, they had agriculture? AGRICULTURE?! Every modern nation has agriculture! Well, I suppose it is an indirect pre-requisite for Computers on the Civilization tech tree WHAT UTTER TRIPE AM I SAYING.

(Corporate hierarchy is a good fit for the former. Organized crime hierarchy even more so.)

In addition to the London Stock Exchange, the knights also cause crime!
Infinite Ranges in Ruby
>>> from math import pi
>>> 1/sum( [1/(pi*n)**2 for n in xrange(1,1000)] )
6.00365160802217
Are you entirely certain that RedHat is not worried about future 'submarine' warfare in future? (Sure, they have a steady supply of peasant soldiers, but the empire rules the seas...)
That's such a weird thing to see coming up over and over again.

Finding an investor is like being in the casino and having a high roller give you money to bet in return for a share in the stakes because they believe you have better luck than they do themselves.

Success is when both you and the investor cash out with significantly more money than you put in or when you make the business so profitable that your accumulated dividends exceed the initial outlay.

To see VC money as 'success' is simply wrong, it may increase your chances of success, and it may cushion your losses a bit (because not all expenses come out of your pocket).
Thinking about Programming Languages
Congratulations Gideon Gono, Awarded IG prize in Mathematics
NoSQLBerlin Schedule Published
Pet peeve:

There may be a steep learning curve ...

Can someone explain the axes of the graph in which "steep learning curve" equates to "takes a long time" ??

I can.

It requires that you put knowledge on the X-axis, and time on the Y-axis, which is completely at odds with the usual way of doing things.

Like many idioms you have to read this as meaning one thing even though it says another. You have to read this as "it takes a long time," even though that's not what it says.

Language - I don't know how it works.

And sometimes it doesn't.

</rant>
Not only that, but which corporation would outsource their email to a third party like IBM, Gmail, Microsoft or anybody else for that matter ?

I know that plenty of companies do it, but I really wonder if they've thought it through.

Email services are not just an expense item to be outsourced, it's a very critical item that is best kept in-house under your own control as much as possible.
Short article, but voted up simply to voice my love for Vim.

It took me a long time to finally get comfortable with Vim. I would load it up every few weeks, learn a couple of commands or things like using split windows and then get frustrated/held up enough that I would go back to Textmate.
After going through the process for a good few months, I then somehow managed to make it through a day without getting frustrated once. Then on the second day I literally felt like I was flying through my code. TBH I have never felt this productive in an editor before.

I would constantly read people saying that watching someone in Vim is like a work of art and never quite understood what they meant. But now I do. The speed at which I can navigate through a file, move text around, move around my project. Even simply never having to move my hands away from the home row makes me feel more focused on what I'm currently working on.
When two immature people get together to form a business.
Understanding python *args and **kwargs
It does not matter how fucked up things became, you don't go broadcasting it, if for no other reason because its a taint by association.
John McCarthy (and others) vs. Lighthill on AI in 1973
Speaking as a 3.0.1 user, thanks for the (future) update. :-)
$14 dollars less, but only 1 gig of storage - compared to Google's 25. 1 gig is laughable in the age of sub $100 TB disks.
I don't think "takes a long time" is necessarily right - learning vim in an adjustment, you can make that adjustment over a long or short period. Also, that adjustment will be easier if you are looking forward to the advantages it can bring.
Scroll down to where it says:

BBC TV - June 1973 - Lighthill Controversy Debate at the Royal Institution

This is a debate broadcast by the BBC in 1973, involving James Lighthill (of Lighthill Report fame), Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy.
let's not get all fizzbuzz-y in here...
I always thought that productivity was on the X-axis and the cumulative summation of effort was the Y-axis, and the steepness of the curve was about the large size of the derivative. But now that I write it all out, that is probably too much math to attribute to a common phrase.
Oh please, here we go again. Stop advocating your love for that 30 year-old piece of software. Please. Stop it. You don't hear ME expressing my love for Eclipse on a daily basis, now do you? Seems like you have some convincing to do?

Plus, I'm not buying it. If it's so great, why do you even have to market it? Wouldn't it just sell itself? But no. Instead we get these "VI is great" vs "Emacs is better" discussions every-f*cking-time. And I've had it. Just use your old, old, old piece of software, be happy about, and stop trying to convince me.
$ wc .vimrc

427 2342 16457 .vimrc

Way too much
Shorter but, "ad hoc" like everything in Python (the reason I never liked it). The Ruby version looks like math, if you know the concepts of map and reduce it's trivial to understand what's going on.

Compare this with sum() + "for n" and "xrange". Also if I remember some Python correctly "xrange" is almost like "range" but it's something like a lazy version, another ad-hoc stuff.

Sorry, didn't resisted.
Type 2 Diabetes is Really Not a Mystery
The value is that it helps you cement the value of your business with potential investors and the bank, it establishes credibility when marketing yourself to customers.

I'm fundamentally opposed to them, but the reality is that they exist. Because of this, I found myself organising patent protection for our software.

If they are abolished, I'll be upset about my £8k investment - but more happy that sanity has prevailed.
I gave up on running in things [0] frequently when I turned eight or so. That was a long time ago. I even mastered the art of reading books while walking.

[0] To be more precise, things that I do not want to run into.
Ask HN: What's bleeding edge today? (Webdesign and interaction)
Which page or pages would you say are bleeding edge on the web today, in terms of site design and interaction design? Which sites are pushing the next big thing?
Absolutely...I mean, look how Sergei and Brin's and Steve and Steve's ventures turned out... sheesh.
Ok, I would have expected to be downvoted. Dissent on VI vs Emacs is not tolerated among Computer Scientist (and I'm one myself).
Yes Vim was started a long time ago (1991), that means that it has had that bit longer to refine. Eclipse is great too, and people do say so. Add Vim to Eclipse and you can have the best of both.
I just ask myself, "Is there anything you can do to fix it right now?" If the answer is no, I feel less stressed and am more able to focus on other tasks.
The Invite
The Invite is a powerful tool for creating artificial scarcity and buzz. But its usage is more of an artform than a science.
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It ought to be the contamination of the mental images of a graph and a steep hill (which is hard to climb).

Neither a pedagogical nor an intuitive analogy -- but fun!

Since I don't write parsers for natural languages, I like that kind of expressions more than they irritate me.

vi fans might think that is related to me prefering emacs... :-)

Edit: Grammar, spelling. Sigh.
I've never associated a "steep learning curve" with the time it takes to learn, more that there is quite a bit of knowledge that is needed to have a baseline proficiency in it. I suppose that would put Usefulness/proficiency on the Y-axis and knowledge on the X.
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I believe the reason it comes up so often is because the depth of the software. I'm just starting, but from what I have been told there is a ton of things to learn, and its hard to know where to go after the first tutorial or two.
My cure for that is putting my .vimrc on my site; then, from a foreign machine, I just do:

wget -O ~/.vimrc http://lucasoman.com/vimrc

And just like that, I'm in my comfort zone. Of course, this doesn't cover plugins and such, but I don't use those very often.
You may want to check these resources I published, too:

* Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?
http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

* Graphical vi/vim cheatsheet & tutorial
http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
Is it worth learning how to use vim (well) if I already feel fairly comfortable in another text editor? The author only touched on speed and how you're more "involved" with the code, which were vague enough that I was left unconvinced.
but who wants to read about it

And why here?
From what I've seen of vi (mainly as a result of editing files directly on a server via ssh), it seems like an efficient text editor, undoubtedly. But what about if you're constantly bouncing between different files in a project? Like a Rails project, for example, with its many different files for models, views and controllers?

I.e. how good is it at handling projects, as opposed to just files?
Kindle isn't the future of reading - yet
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_clause#Economics for a potential solution. (Though they do not tell how it would solve the problem. You'd have to think of it on your own.)
So perhaps it's time for the East to take charge again.
Each to his/her own. This isn't intended to be a language war. If you prefer map and reduce then you can have them:

>>> from math import pi
>>> add = float.__add__
>>> def f(x): return (pi*x)**(-2)
>>> 1/reduce(add, map(f,range(1,1000)) )
6.0036796863530508

Or, as a one-liner:

>>> 1/reduce(float.__add__, map(lambda x:1.0/(3.1416*x)**2,range(1,1000)) )

People who aren't mathmos often find the list comprehensions more comprehensible, hence the version I wrote not as a competitor, but as an alternative, to yours.

Horses for courses. Personally, I've found the Python version to look more like math when I choose to express it like math, but I'm programming, so why not make it look like what I'm doing? Golf is a stupid game in programming. Understandability is the goal, but different readers find different things natural.

That's never going to go away.
Probably much faster, but also doing half the work yourself. It'll depend on the situation which is the better solution.
Nope, that's still the wrong way round. If "usefulness" is Y and "knowledge" is X, and you needs lots of knowledge before it's useful, then the curve is shallow.
There are a lot of ways to use Vim on multiple-files/projects, and the documentation is probably the best place to start.

You can also plug it into Eclipse via eclim http://eclim.sourceforge.net/
The value is that it helps you cement the value of your business with potential investors and the bank, it establishes credibility when marketing yourself to customers.

In other words: a legal cudgel, often useful to business people and often useful to startups. I'm sure the economy does not benefit from the ensuing posturing and cudgeling, but I can see why someone would see having one in their self interest.

I think you could cut out a lot of software patent trolling if you required a working device to be submitted. With the widespread availability of small, cheap, microprocessors, this wouldn't be an insurmountable requirement for individuals. Also, it would make silly software patents like "One-Click" less straightforward to apply for. (Amazon: this box implements the "One-Click" functionality. Reviewer: how can I make it work? Amazon: well, it has to be plugged into our test data-center.)