Hacker News Reader

dreamuxon Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright Public Domain Works

Interesting issue. I wonder if it would be possible for a country to set up an extremely long copyright term (with a huge administrative fee) that would have to be respected under US law (and other adopters of the treaty).

I'm sure many music/movie studios and authors would gladly pay $100K to copyright each of their works internationally for 500 years...

dreamuxon Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?

We should also consider the media message we'd be sending to the uninformed. A site called Hacker News opposes SOPA; what do you think the average person's response to that would be?

Frankly I think that HN is the wrong vehicle to bring attention to the matter strictly from a marketing/outreach perspective.

However, YC is a great channel to carry this message, and PG has already taken a very public stance on the issue.

dreamuxon 4Clojure hits 100K solved problems.

Stop by #4clojure on freenode, the site devs hang out there (myself included) and happily give pointers on problems. Also, the main #clojure channel, while busy, is a great resource -- Clojure has a pretty welcoming community.

dreamuxon In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

He was my favourite thinker and orator, I'm very sad to see him go.

dreamuxon Louis CK self-produces, self-publishes content on his webpage

About 14 cents per download (streams are probably even smaller) on the lowest tier of S3 (once you're over 10TB/mo it gets even cheaper).

dreamuxon The Clojure Community and Me

Raynes is amazing.

dreamuxon China to cancel college majors that don't pay

I think that's backwards. Make Science/Engineering cheaper and liberal arts more expensive... arts degrees should be considered luxury items: nice to have but not strictly necessary. I think many people would be better off not going to University than get an arts degree, whereas there is huge societal benefit to pushing out more scientists and engineers.

Liberal arts should exist, just at a much smaller (frankly, more reasonable wrt actual demand) scale.

dreamuxon John McCarthy Has Died

He has a string of accomplishments that still live on in active development... and he made it to 84. That's a good run.

dreamuxon VC funding continues record pace in third quarter

The WSJ is saying the opposite: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3105596

They're both probably right, investors can be more selective with the glut of entrepreneurs while still paying out top dollar for great companies/deals.

dreamuxon [dead]

The tricky thing is that project management is a very mature industry, so saying that I'm going to build a badass PM tool says even less -- my thought was to focus on the reason for building the tool. My take is that project management in the software space fails because the stacks of tools companies use are rarely interoperable. Efficiency and predictability are hugely dependent on a tight coupling between the different phases of software dev -- and that's where there's still huge amounts of room to innovate.

I hear what you're saying, I just don't know how to rephrase that question to focus on what's innovative...

edit: just to be clear, I think you're right. I'm going to takle this this all day to try to make it clearer. Thanks.

dreamuxon [dead]

I've been refining this application for the past few weeks -- but I'm always looking for any feedback I can get. Let me know if you think I should make any last-minute changes (or even what you liked/disliked about it).

Just a reminder that applications are due in tonight. Good luck to everyone!

dreamuxon Interesting math puzzle - harder than it sounds

31 feet.

Ant jumps off the wall and onto the floor (no walking necessary, and easily survivable), walk straight across the 30 foot floor and 1 foot up the wall.

dreamuxon Tell HN: Startup School 2011 emails are out

Got in, I went last year too and it was absolutely amazing... looking forward to another great experience!

dreamuxon Facebook is showing a real time like count on Mark Zuckerberg's status updates

More likely a propagation/aggregation issue.

dreamuxon Poll: Facebook usage

You're right that sucks. But if you think about it it's probably more of a technical issue than evil policy, just imagine the permission graph for visiting one of your friend's profiles -- FB would have to do a reverse lookup of all of you friend's friends and filter ones with closed photo sharing (or what if you are a friend common to both?). Further, scaling that out to 750M people is non-trivial.

Anyways, I'm not excusing their policy, but I expect they'll fix it whenever it is technically possible to do so.

dreamuxon NYC Startup Paying $350 a Month in Manhattan for 1500sqft Apartment

From story:

- Lease a 4 bed apartment, get better rates by paying full year of rent in advance (not easy for most people).

- Sublet the 3 remaining rooms at near market rate.

- Accept the risk of default and/or not finding tenants.

What you really get for 350$ is a single room in a big apartment. Still a good deal, but there are substantial risks and lots of upfront investment. Like picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer, it'll work out for the better... most of the time.

dreamuxon Clojure 1.3 Released

You can now also follow other users and see their solutions... not always idiomatic (esp with the code golfers) but it still gives great insight to different ways to solve problems. Also, its not just for beginners, there are some genuinely hard problems on there.

dreamuxon Clojure 1.3 Released

https://github.com/4clojure/4clojure/issues

I think the only restriction is passwords being more than 7 characters, but if you raise a ticket the team _will_ look at it.

dreamuxon Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Culture inside Bing

Anyone have a link to the study referenced in here which says people prefer bing results to google's when logos are reversed? This seems like something MSFT's marketing department would be trumpeting at every opportunity...

EDIT: The closest I've found is this - http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ which lets users vote up anonymous result sets. However, the last reported numbers (from 2009) show Google in the lead. Oh well.

dreamuxon Facebook puts off IPO until late 2012

Groupon probably damaged software IPO sentiment, and people want to see how Google+ will play out. Also, they don't really need the cash and waiting will allow them to build a consistent revenue history (which will probably be disclosed, along SEC rules of 500+ investors). They can wait this one out.

dreamuxon Ask PG: What has changed since you wrote Hackers and Painters in 2004?

I read it a few months back, it's still a good read. PG's blog posts aren't easily dated, as you'll often see posts from 5 years ago linked here on HN.

dreamuxon Personal jetpack in 2012 for $100,000

Or just walking.

dreamuxon HP 15c Scientific Calculator to be Re-issued

I appreciate the sentiment, but that seems unnecessarily expensive with modern hardware.

dreamuxon Ask HN: What's an appropriate multiplier for stock-as-salary w/ sm biz/startup?

You don't need an estimate of an appropriate equity stake, what you need is leverage. Even if you asked for a single share tomorrow, it doesn't sound like they have any reason to give it to you. Find the places where the bus factor is low (a specific technology that only you hack on, something falling apart that only you can fix, etc.) and point out that the costs to keep you (in your example ~80-120k in equity) far outweigh the downside they'd be exposed to if you left. Basically, find out how much value you create, get leverage by showing them that you're a pivotal part of the business, and then approach them with an offer that balances the two.

dreamuxon Zuckerberg Quits Google+ Over Privacy Concerns

He's still there: https://plus.google.com/104560124403688998123/posts

dreamuxon Rich Hickey's Wikipedia page nominated for deletion

Can someone explain the rationale behind Wikipedia deletionists? I don't understand their motives.

dreamuxon Punchd has been acquired by Google

I met Reed at StartupSchool last year, he was pretty passionate about this project -- and it was clear they were on to something. I hope Google continues the project, there's lots of potential here. Congrats to the team!

dreamuxon Judge Denies Apple Request To Stop Amazon From Using "App Store"

I think its good for users to associate "App Store" with a generic place to find and download applications on any platform; like the terms "program" and "browser" it helps to have standard ways of communicating basic concepts of computer/device use. Its a benefit to _everyone_ (Apple, Android, Microsoft...) that users can more easily interact with their systems sans training.

dreamuxon Facebook's Three New Products

While I can appreciate (in fact, I probably don't) the technical difficulty of delivering a chat/video service to a userbase of 750M; these simply aren't compelling innovations for most (especially younger) people. Of particular note, these features aren't sticky (the usability of these features is common to _many_ other services) nor do they raise particularly high barriers to entry for competitors (Google has already nailed these services at large scales, integrating them into G+ is probably trivial). What FB (or Google for that matter) needs to nail is social search based on the graph of what your friends are doing/reading/buying... this is one area where FB has a distinct early advantage (they have more mature social graphs). I'm convinced social search will be the single feature that displaces or entrenches FB, not chat.

dreamuxon Why the Internet is America’s greatest weapon

I think people are overcomplicating the issue, social media simply gives community to people who may have otherwise thought their ideals lacked popular support. This was previously done with outspoken radicals speaking to the masses, but is now accomplished with a general consensus of individuals.

Interestingly, I see the same effects promoting atheism instead of political change here in the west.