skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still don't get it. You've described an abstract issue: universities have a fair amount of power to control what messages about them are disseminated. But what are the use cases? Why would I want to visit your site? Give us a couple of specific examples, preferably in the form of stories.

Also, I would say that the interface needs to be revamped. Right now it's just confusing: it looks like a blog, none of the posts are even marginally relevant to me, and I have no idea how to get to any content I want to see -- or even what that content might be.

I could see a case for the existence of some sort of university-targeted Stack Overflow-like site. Basically public Q&A boards for particular universities, structured by topic, and with a good method for pulling useful content to the top. Maybe this already exists and I don't know about it, or maybe it's not what you're going for, but I at least know why I would use it.
It seems that, pairwise, it is pretty easy to decide. Maybe one could go further than this and eliminate the absolute scale all together (at least at rating time).

I'm imaging a UI which asks you to pick a favorite among the item you are viewing and one similar item. You could stop there, or ask repeatedly with new comparison items until the viewed item's position on the absolute scale is unambiguous. The user could provide some rating data with just a single binary decision, but some ajax-y fade out/in of another pair could enable further ratings if they desired.
Don't screw around. You've described yourself as the sole witness the commission of a serious crime. Passivity and/or trying to resolve this "politely" in back channels can bite you by making you an accomplice. If it really was as bad as you describe - your next call should be to the FBI and you should prepare for that by writing down every detail you remember, as carefully and accurately as you can.
Like all measures against piracy, this one doesn't work.

Step 1: Go to the grocery store and buy a $20 prepaid debit card with cash.

Step 2: Via Tor, buy the e-book from Amazon.

Step 3: Upload to Bittorrent.

Step 4: There is no step 4. The book is pirated forever.
In spaceballs the characters are not doing it - the author of spaceballs is, and is putting words in their mouth.
"The net result is that Internet Explorer will execute this script, but other browsers will ignore the script altogether. This makes your page load faster in browsers that don’t need this hack."

Though he means "faster than IE", it sounds almost as if that script will speed up the page.
I disagree. Integers are a property of the Universe. If you have 4 sticks, it's intrinsic in the way the Universe works that there are two groups of two.
You don't need proof. Proof is their job, not yours.

Yes, it will hurt your firm, short term, odds are. Tough it out. Adhere to the rule of law. Protect your longer term interests.
This would be disastrous for scholarship. While I don't know anybody using the Kindle right now to conduct research, it's not too hard to imagine that this could become commonplace in the future. I already use Amazon's Look Inside feature when I need to refer to a section of a book. But if they were to implement this patent, then I can't rely on any quotes from a source as being accurate.

Imagine now that you have cited some text that Amazon silently munged and included it in your own book, which is now, of course, offered for sale via Amazon. The original text could now be doubly harmed!
ASK PG/HN: Do you have a video of the talk that Paul Buchheit gave at SS09?
I have been searching for it online but the usual suspects only have short feeds for them. I missed the initial talk and hoped that there would be an archived feed. That was one of the main talks that I was really interested in.
Start everything off with a single 50-point score. That way one person ranking it 100 will bump it up to 75, the next to 83, and so on. Such a system would cause teas that have more people upvoting them to rank higher than those that just happen to have one or two good opinions.
Well.. Ubuntu Font rendering was way better than XP (for me). I never used any windows version after that.

But now I'm pretty sure that no operating system can beat my Ubuntu system in font rendering. maybe after this little hack.
http://rewind.themasterplan.in/2007/07/15/sexy-smooth-fonts-...
> For a lot of New York Jews, Hebrew isn't just "another language", but simply a decoder ring they use to read aloud in cultural rituals. They still have a cultural and personal Jewish identity.

Most have accepted a version of American culture and are completely ingrained with American mainstream life.

> speaking African-American culture and

African American culture emerged in the USA. Not much of their pre-slavery culture remains – they lost most (if not everything) of their pre-slavery culture.

> you fail to acknowledge any of the presented arguments

The argument you mentioned (that there are roughly almost equivalent words in English) does not hold water.

> If all you'd like is a soapbox, please just go write a blog.

You are turning nasty. I did not expect you to understand – but you could at least have respectfully disagreed.
Your view of mysticism is wrong.
I am going to write it down. I will have to think a lot and come to an agreement with my partner before I can decide to talk non-anonymously to the authorities.

I do appreciate your advice on this.
Copying the table may be illegal (although probably not; you can copy the phonebook), but referring to it while figuring out how to make a flat screwdriver unscrew a phillips-head screw is probably not. How is using a flat screwdriver to unscrew a phillips-head screw different from using your own OS on your own calculator instead of using TI's?
Watch out! Go to a lawyer first. Always lawyer. And a good one.

FBI might squeeze you to do things you don't want to do. Also the accused will retaliate in some way to discredit you and your company. Never deal with law enforcement without going to a lawyer first, unless it's an emergency (911 first, lawyer 2nd.)

Lawyer first, always. Not even your co-founder as he could mess things up (Unless he is a lawyer.)
Yes writing it down couldn't hurt (I think).
FWIW, anyone can sue anyone for anything. And any prosecutor can dream up any charges he wants.
Do the country a service and stand up for what is right. You may lose this sale, but you will have your honor and integrity.
My cofounder is a solid guy. I would trust him with my life. So I have already shared this with him.

The advice to get a lawyer is sound though. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of money and what money we do, we would prefer to pay our handful of employees with. We are not profitable.

But I do have some friends who went to law school. So I'll ask a friend pro bono.

As you can imagine, any legal step would be a huge distraction, and as a startup that really hurts us.
the way i see it, twittering lends itself to blogging and vice-versa. you hammer out a blog post then use twitter to get eyes on your post. plus, how much time could twitter possibly take from blogging? you can't get very much across in 140. symbiosis is the key
The comment that the link leads directly to is devastatingly good. If you don't want to do a lot of reading, just skip the main article and read that comment.
Good to see that he decided not to cave and is retaining legal counsel.
At this point I do not care about the sale. As I mentioned elsewhere, having to 'manage' this person without paying him a dime is going to be a task. It's not like I can bar him from meetings. I will be dead before he sees a rusty penny from us though.

There are other concerns, outlined in my other comments. Doing anything has implications on people other than myself. And an anonymous tip, while not the most surefire way of getting this guy caught, is also an approach to doing the right thing.
Part of this article talks about the index tables they use. The rationale for having separate index tables is they can create or drop them without locking tables or anything like that. It takes a little more manual work to keep things updated though.

I too use a hybrid approach on my site. Only columns that aren't specifically referenced in indexes aren't kept in the serialized attribute hash.
I agree with the article as it perfectly explains why I never joined Twitter in the first place. I can't see wasting my time and that of other people by spamming them with 140 character tidbits.

Twitter is useful for sending small bits of information and telling people about simple things, but it isn't designed for complex ideas. It is more designed for applications such as sharing interesting links that you have found.
Forgive me my lack of insight, but I'm not entirely certain what that has to do with this particular case. What you are listing is a mechanism for copyright protection - while the numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted, the book containing them might qualify for copyright (depending on the local legal system).

The question here is not about copyright, however. (Probably. Maybe.) The question here is whether it is legal to factor an arbitrary number and inform others of the results.
Instead of "simple" it's likely they really mean something more like "elegant". Elegance can resemble simplicity because they are both small or appear easy to understand at first glance. To my mind, elegance also leverages deep principles and idiosyncrasies in its environment.

Iterating "by hand" in Ruby is simple in the way a homemade chair is simple. The second example is elegant because it actually takes advantage of the things that differentiate Ruby from Generic Imperative Language X.
I've been considering Fever (http://feedafever.com/) but it's tough to know how well it will fit my needs without a demo, or at the very least a refund policy.
Finland comes close. Swedish is compulsory here from primary to tertiary education. It is only used in coastal Finland, not at all elsewhere.

Of course there is more practical purpose with Swedish than with Gaelic, but nevertheless it does not affect majority's day to day life. It is equally resented because learning is forced.
Cool.

> My cofounder is a solid guy. I would trust him with my life.

Good guys can mess things up unintentionally. Consequences on things this big can affect your life forever.

> Unfortunately we don't have a lot of money and what money we do, we would prefer to pay our handful of employees with. We are not profitable.

If you are in US there have to be several organizations to give you free advice on similar matters. I bet they even have 1-800 numbers.

> But I do have some friends who went to law school. So I'll ask a friend pro bono.

Good start.

> As you can imagine, any legal step would be a huge distraction, and as a startup that really hurts us.

Take this as training. Surfing the legal ecosystem is part of entrepreneurship. Ignoring this costs (in both time an money) can cost you more than your investment. Be smart.

I dealt with exactly the same situation but not in US. People doing that in the open tend to have a network of support. Do not underestimate the consequences of your (or your cofounder's) actions. Watch out.
How big a fleet of drone aircraft would you need search the US in a couple hours? It'd be tens of thousands, but it might be doable for a few million bucks. I think you could fly pretty high and use large telephoto lenses and high-speed video cameras to see red dots while scanning quickly. That'd be a more interesting project than trying to enlist a lot of volunteer spotters with iPhone apps.
How to deploy Windows XP Mode
You want Uncov's product Persai. Or whatever he ended up calling it.

It pretty much did that.
That was actually a serious question.

For anyone that sits for 17 hours a day, you would understand the importance of the ability for your ass to breath.

I switched from an Aeron to Steelcase and it was a huge mistake, for the simple fact that I could not fart sitting down without the odor lingering far longer than it normally should.
Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Kickbacks is what drives business deals in many countries, including the US, Canada and you name it. That's an integral part of business culture. In some places to a lesser degree, in some - to greater. Government contracts are especially lucrative type of deals, and I would very surprised if you somehow waltzed in from the street without any prior connections and got a contract. You have to "know" people, you have to have "contacts" and you have to work to keep these "contacts" alive. Take a guess what it usually translates to.

Just say, no, can't do and walk away.
All website designers should read Apple's UI design guidelines. The idea is simple: the main operation of the website or application, or whatever else it is, should be visible and prominent. Other extra features can be built-in such that users eventually find them one by one like easter eggs or pleasant surprises.

Slamming them with row after row of buttons and boxes is disconcerting. For a new company I would say that simple is best, as long as it is elegant simplicity.

Asceticism is a whole different story. Your page should have just the right amount of appeal without being loaded down. I feel that Google, Apple, and others have mastered this fine balance, and that is perhaps the reason why it is better for new companies and startups to not try to imitate it, at least not right away. It is a hard thing to master because if it isn't done properly it will ruin the effect.

However, if a startup can pull it off right it will be much more successful then a similar complicated interface.
The point about organizations is a good one. I will look them up. The advice to be very careful is also on the money. I appreciate it and will do so. Certainly, one of the things worrying me is that he might not be alone.

Hope your situation turned out o.k.
TED Talk: Jay Walker on the world's English mania (4 mins)
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_...

Summary:

2 billion people are currently trying to learn English.

In China you are required by the law to learn English beginning from the 3rd grade.

China will become the largest English speaking country in 2009
I agree.. Creating a separate channel for app notifications is a great idea. And if notifications are of VALUE, users may pay more attention.
Isn't he better off just walking away from this (and yes OP: forget the sale)?

Per his own account here, he (a) discussed potential issues with "hiding" the kickback, and (b) tentatively agreed to discuss the possibility with his "by the book" partner.

I am not questioning your righteous outrage here, but this is a can of worms if there ever was one. And I'm just guessing that the sleaze ball in DC acted that way because its likely a norm in the seat of our government. (Would that really surprise you?)
Without prematurely compromising your identity or giving more details than you're comfortable sharing, can you say

(1) which country;

(2) which level of government (fed, state, city, etc.);

(3) anything else about the geographic region or field-of-work?
don't need the & before :+
Thanks. Yeah, it turned out well. It was a good eye opening experience for me, personally. It's the way to learn many things. And what doesn't kill you...
I've heard that a lot of VW dealers won't work on RVs like the Rialta or Vista -- these are too big to fit in their service bays. And from their point of view, only the front 6-feet or so is VW, the rest is something else they can't fix.

Still, everyone I know with one, or even those with EuroVans, love them.
Unfortunately, public protocols like HTTP need to manage communication between parties that do not trust each other. This is not a legal matter, so there is no necessity to establish motives or plausibility. A secure protocol is charged with limiting the damage any malicious party using the protocol might do. This addition to the spec is contrary to that fact.

Allowing a site to scrub its outgoing connections assumes a certain level of trust, which on the web ought not exist by default.
Puppet and Chef are both Ruby based configuration management systems. One might say that CFEngine begat Puppet which begat Chef.

Puppet was written by Luke Kanies after years of frustration as a systems administrator working with CFEngine. It's roughly three years old. It's mailing list has over 2,000 subscribers, and when I attended the recent PuppetCamp there were roughly 200 active participants in attendance. My very anecdotal estimate is that there are at least 30,000+ nodes using Puppet (My old consulting company was responsible for 6,500 nodes). Puppet is now maintained by Luke's startup, http://reductivelabs.com/ which took a $2m Series A round from True Ventures this summer. Puppet is written in Ruby/Rails, and implements it's own DSL for describing the configuration of your systems and applications.

Chef was written by Adam Jacobs of HJK Solutions, now http://opscode.com/. Adam was a vocal Puppet consultant, and wrote Chef in response to dissatisfaction around the handling of Puppet Bug #1010 (http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/1010), related to problems with idempotency initiated from Puppet's directed graph. Chef is maintained by Opsocde, whose CEO is Jesse Robbins from Oreilly and whose CTO is Adam Jacobs, they received a Series A round of $2.5m from Draper Fisher this summer.

Both are open-source, and sit somewhat in the same genre as CFengine, ISconfv4 (mostly abandonware), and BCFG2.
Unity Releases New & Free Versions of Web/Mobile Dev Platform
"Just say, no, can't do and walk away."

Yes, but talk to a lawyer first before talking to ANYONE else.
That certainly wouldn't be ethical (as it would cause havoc for the other contestants) and it would be ludicrous (as DARPA would obviously know that your balloons were fake).
Ustream Pairs Live Video With Simultaneous Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace Chat
Then why talk? Reading is faster than listening. And this alone will get your audience horribly out of sync with you.

Use slides as a support structure, don’t duplicate what you are seeing. And if you really want to make all those happy that prefer reading to listening don’t just dump your uncommented slides on them afterwards.
How Sanjay Jha Overhauled Motorola’s Culture
I wonder what happens if you run 7 inside VMware.
Google Music: What Were Ticketmaster And Facebook Thinking?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem.
Why did you stop? Do you still have a boat?
I don't think anyone would read my blog if it were the same content as my twitter. An endless stream of 140-character tidbits is different, to readers, than 140-word rants about the same things.

There are many times when I want to write more than 140 characters about something... but if I did that, nobody would read them.

(Twitter used to let you submit the form with more than 140 characters... now it rejects those posts server-side. Fucking Twitter...)
The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36
Just to clarify, I did not "discuss" potential issues with hiding a kickback. When I mentioned that his employer may not allow his "consulting" with us, he rattled off a bunch of ways he could hide it and I responded by asking him to check the legality of it. To any sane person the message that I did not want to do this would have been obvious. The fact that he ignored it tells me that he thought he could bulldoze me into paying him (because he does not seem dumb).

What I precisely told him, and I was careful about this, was that he should investigate the legality of doing this and I would discuss the same with my by the book partner. I wasn't clear about his in the original text, but my survival instincts did kick in and I remember telling him this precisely.

Further thinking has left me wondering how he would have responded to a simple "Sorry buddy, don't take it personally but we can't do that. How's the steak?". It may have been the better thing to do. But if he had continued bulldozing it would have ended up in a similar place.

As an aside, I have never paid even for a coffee for a government employee who is a potential customer. It is not that I do not know the rules. I just wish I had been more familiar with the playground and had thought about what I would do in a situation like this beforehand. Hopefully this will serve as an opportunity to do that for other entrepreneurs who read this.
I think that's an irrelevant distinction - the same is true for everything a fictional character does.
It'd also be interesting to know if the number of ratings decrease or increase. I wonder if your users will find the added granularity a nuisance or an incentive.
faster to decode it by typing google "tea javascript decode" than to type your message
Facebook Rewrites Privacy Policy, Foreshadows Location Based Services
I think you overestimate how closely "the masses" pay attention to fonts. (Unless you're talking about "the masses" of programmers and designers, which actually is still a healthy chunk of Ubuntu's potential market at this point.) Yeah ok the hinting isn't so great and Bitstream Vera Sans is a little too wide but it's not THAT bad.
About time someone created a better rating systems. (Stars RIP). It will be interesting to see if users like and use the slider.
I see. The difference between demo user and customer wrt to posterous approach did not occur to me, but you are right - a demo user would not have as much incentive to return.

I was meaning to redo this part to allow conversion form demo to real account. This will demo more sticky.
Markov Text Analysis for Fun and Profit
I don't see what's wrong with showing off your product on your homepage. Even if you have a service, have a sexy screenshot and say why it will benefit the viewer ("It will increase your conversion rate by 5%" or "Improve your customer service by being responsive").

It probably isn't as sexy as an Apple computer, but that doesn't mean you should feel the need to hide it.
Wow - thanks for all the fast feedback. I will respond tomorrow, but for now I definitely have the clue that the sites function and purpose need more in-your-face presence and explanation.
I'll jump on that quickly.
I did love your talk - I thought it was definitely one of the best. I certainly learned a few things.
Sounds crazy but this is pretty typical stuff...
From the post:

"As I alluded to in the title, I don’t mean for this to be an indictment of Twitter. I’m still going to be using it regularly for quick status updates or to notify followers when I have a new blog post ready. Like most shiny new things on the Interwebs, it’s all about finding the right tools for the job at hand."
He is right, A/C is a luxury not a necessity. I stayed in Thailand during the hot season for five weeks with no A/C. You get used to it after a few nights.
If you have enough time, they don't have to be. But if publishing is a side-venture, you probably need to make a choice.
" It seems hard for TI to argue that it's illegal to post a mathematical fact".

Yes, absurd, but if you can patent genes (!) is it that much of a stretch to assert copyright on specific numbers?

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/pate...
> Is editing the registry or hunting down drivers for a new version of Windows better?

I can't remember the last time I edited the registry or had to install a driver manually.

Don't get me wrong, I run Ubuntu and I like it. The upgrade process on the whole is much better than a even a few years ago. I just loathe upgrading since it can take weeks to iron out problems with the upgrade. Invariably there are issues with suspend/resume, video drivers, randr, gnome preferences borked, etc. Perhaps these problems will go away in the not too distant future now that more and more manufacturers are shipping Ubuntu pre-installed.
VW dealers will grudgingly work on EVs, and a lot of independent VW garages won't touch them (and the point about the service bays is well-taken). I'm guessing you might have to travel far and wide to find an RV shop that's knowledgeable about the VW internals, too.
Scoopler (YC S08) Digs Up Some Funding, New Features