skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Unisys does not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services.
Concerning developers of software for the Internet network, the same principle applies. Unisys will not pursue previous inadvertent infringement by developers producing versions of software products for the Internet prior to 1995. The company does not require licensing, or fees to be paid for non-commercial, non-profit offerings on the Internet, including "Freeware"."

--Unisys 1995 (http://web.archive.org/web/19981203000955/http://lpf.ai.mit....)

Unisys has frequently been asked whether a Unisys license is required in order to use LZW software obtained by downloading from the Internet or from other sources. The answer is simple. In all cases, a written license agreement or statement signed by an authorized Unisys representative is required from Unisys for all use, sale or distribution of any software (including so-called "freeware") and/or hardware providing LZW conversion capability (for example, downloaded software used for creating/displaying GIF images).

--Unisys 1999 (http://web.archive.org/web/20021203075728/http://www.unisys....)
You seem to forget that tax brackets are marginal.
I think the analogy there is pretty inaccurate: businesses do cut back on services they offer when their revenue decreases. If business A loses half their revenue, it's probably because they've lost half their customers, meaning they're now only providing half the services. In the worst case, they go out of business and no longer provide any services at all.

If a city government loses half their revenue, though, they're still expected to provide exactly the same services to the same number of people as before, and everyone cries bloody murder when services are cut, assuming that there must be something else to cut instead.

Logically, the analogy doesn't add up.

I totally agree that the incentives for government to be capital-efficient are very difficult to align properly, but I just don't buy the comparison to how a business is run.
The docs for the javascript mapreduce are available here: http://hg.basho.com/riak/src/tip/doc/js-mapreduce.org
Along these lines, it would be cool if browsers supported some sort of "LispScript" (or at least "SchemeScript"). I hate JavaScript with a passion. This is all just wishful thinking, of course.

And yes, there is a LispScript project, but it compiles to JavaScript. I'm thinking more of a native interpreter in the browser.
Courts determine Australian ISPs not liable for users piracy.
"Unisys does not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services. Concerning developers of software for the Internet network, the same principle applies. Unisys will not pursue previous inadvertent infringement by developers producing versions of software products for the Internet prior to 1995. The company does not require licensing, or fees to be paid for non-commercial, non-profit offerings on the Internet, including "Freeware"."

--Unisys 1995 (http://web.archive.org/web/19981203000955/http://lpf.ai.mit....)

"Unisys has frequently been asked whether a Unisys license is required in order to use LZW software obtained by downloading from the Internet or from other sources. The answer is simple. In all cases, a written license agreement or statement signed by an authorized Unisys representative is required from Unisys for all use, sale or distribution of any software (including so-called "freeware") and/or hardware providing LZW conversion capability (for example, downloaded software used for creating/displaying GIF images)."

--Unisys 1999 (http://web.archive.org/web/20021203075728/http://www.unisys....)
Touche, sir :)
You claimed: "Either corporations speak on behalf of actual human beings, or they're sentient financial entities."

Let's take Exxon. http://www.google.com/finance?q=exxon

Which humans does this corporation speak on behalf of? Are they all American citizens, for example? Do you think that matters if, say, Exxon decides to run for a seat in Congress?
Thanks for the link. Well it wasn't maybe clear in the article, but I don't intend to live from the income of my savings.

I wanted to point out the fact that one is able to drive his way by tweaking expenses, income and mobility.

But I definitely have a part of my capital that is earning some income :)
If expending money is speech, taxes are compulsory speech, which is a pretty serious abridging of free speech.
Dark text on a light background (on screen) gives some people migraines too. This scheme is my preference, has always been, therefore it's what I make for my own site. Feel free to use your preference for your own.
"Right, and it takes about half a second of thought to figure out why"

Well, yes - many of the people pushing this argument around the country really like labor unions.

"unions don't typically have billions of dollars they can use to further their agenda"

Interestingly, neither do most corporations. Even the biggest aren't going to throw away their profits and alienate ~40% of US consumers (no matter who they pick) by running billion-dollar political ad campaigns.
I agree. Lisp just plain looks weird because of all the parentheses and the prefix notation. I also can't help get the feeling that even with macros available to me, coding directly in the form of parse trees just might not be optimal. Also, it makes my head hurt sometimes.

As I sit here writing this, it strikes me that someone who's using these kinds of things to avoid learning Lisp is a lot like the Python newbie who's discovered the language and wanders on to comp.lang.python complaining about the syntactically significant indentation. As with most matters, I'm inclined to believe that Lisp's problem here is primarily a people problem rather than a technical problem.
I'm not familiar with the exact legalities, but I'm pretty sure it's not legal to flat-out lie.

That's the point of forming the corporation. It will do something illegal and take the hit, shielding its owners from liability for illegal conduct.
Ruby's yield is essentially just calling an anonymous function given to it in the form of a block. e.g., the following code snippets are equivalent

Ruby:

def foo(bar)
if block_given?
yield bar
end
end

foo 5 { |x| puts x } # prints 5

Python:

def foo(bar,fcn):
fcn(bar)

foo(5, lambda x: sys.stdout.write("%d\n" % x))

The only real difference being that the ruby code is calling a block versus a "real" function.

edit Oops, had this page open for a while, didn't realize someone had replied in the interim, making my response somewhat redundant
Install SUSE Linux on Hyper-V
Bug Growth is Proportional to User Growth, and Bugs are not Technical Debt
Cheap partisan fair. The gas station hotdog of political commentary.
Exactly, it wasn't a bad move considering the model s looks pretty good and twice as cheap, thus a lot more likely to sell.
Amazon Buys a Little Multitouch Company...ready to go to war against Apple?
Yes, the first thing any corporation with a budget crisis does is cut executive perks, because...

Wait, what?
In the EU Italy is not exactly first on the list of 'markets' that you think of when starting out.

First off, the UK & Germany, then France, Spain, Scandinavia, Benelux, then Italy, and Greece. Switzerland usually gets pulled in alongside Germany and France with the portion of the country that only speaks Italian to come along when Italy goes in, Austria usually around the time that Germany is done. That's simply a consequence of the amount of business done online and the size of the populations of those countries.

Former eastblock countries usually follow last, but there is a shift happening there, they definitely figure higher in the consciousness of start-ups today than they did even 3 years ago.
This link to an audio interview was posted previously:
http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4325.html
Gamow talks about meeting Bohr and his wit: He says that he was startled to see a horseshoe nailed above the door to Bohr's house. Gamow asked Bohr why he had it there. Bohr said "I've heard that it works even if you don't believe in it."
When you conflate the two objectives of profit and social decision-making, you're implicitly encouraging people to sell out their values. That's not democratic.

This is also a problem when the government takes money from some and gives to others. A socially conservative union member may vote democratic because he wishes for the government to restrict the rights of his employer and transfer wealth from customers to him. A social liberal working for a defense contract might vote republican because he wishes for the government to transfer wealth to his employer (and indirectly to him).

Anytime the government transfers wealth from some to others, it implicitly encourages people to sell out their values. I don't see why it is more of a problem for shareholders than for union members, people on social security/welfare/unemployment, or employees of corporations.
This right here is the exact reason that I, as a fairly experienced and hopefully pretty good Python programmer feel absolutely no desire to learn Ruby. It doesn't offer me anything in terms of making me think differently about programming than Python, and I don't see any particular domain (other than, of course, Rails) where it offers an advantage in libraries or anything. On the other hand, had I stumbled upon Ruby first and then found out about Python, I'm sure I probably wouldn't feel any need to learn Python, either.
The UAW takes in about a third of a billion dollars a year in union dues ...

Drops in the bucket compared to what their corporate issue adversaries take in. For instance, the minimum revenues of any Fortune 500 company right now is measured in the billions (profits at around half a billion).

Currently unions are prohibited from contributing directly to candidates due to being tax exempt entities, but that doesn't stop them from spending tens of millions of dollars during election campaigns to support the candidates they favor.

And you can say the exact same thing about corporate interests (both individual corporations and their "unions" of trade associations). The only difference is that corporate interests have literally orders of magnitude more money available to pursue their agenda, as well as a disproportionate set of connections in Washington.
Consider sin taxes, which Time Magazine calls "an established tactic" to reduce consumption of popular vices [1].

The hostile takeover argument isn't even necessary to make my point. Consider the fact that a corporation can own another corporation. Corporations are people under the law. Therefore, if we literally interpret the constitution, the ban on slavery makes a corporation owning another corporation illegal. Of course this is rather silly and shows why strict constructionist interpretations of the Constitution are irrelevant.

I am not trying to make political statements. The one and only thing I want to point out is the flaw in the highest voted comment for this article that advocates a strict constructionist interpretation of the 1st amendment [2].

[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889187,00....

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098741
For patents filed after 1995 the patent term is based on the filing date of the application, not the date the patent is granted.
Vegetative state patients can respond to questions
Corporations are not citizens, they do not meet the requirements to stand for election. Similarly, corporations can't cast votes or sit on juries or be drafted into the armed forces.
I think there is our nod: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/03/shut-up
"Which humans does this corporation speak on behalf of?"

Those same people "it" (or in reality, the people within it) acts on behalf of.

"Do you think that matters if, say, Exxon decides to run for a seat in Congress?"

Why do you dive on this red herring instead of trying to address whatever your real concern is?
the article touches on the fact that a sentence of any length could be constructed entirely out of buffalo, but it doesn't really explain how. here's how to make it arbitrarily long:

start with "Buffalo[place] buffalo[noun] buffalo[verb] buffalo[noun]"

after any "buffalo[noun]", insert "Buffalo[place] buffalo[noun] buffalo[verb]" to change the meaning to 'bison that Buffalo bison intimidate'

youve just created a new grammatical sentence of length n+3. iterate and enjoy
Content appears to be identical to this item:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1095157
Crazy. I knew about the second version of their policy, but didn't realize they actually did say it was free at first.
I'm pretty sure Python picked it up after Java did. But, I don't think it's a case of imitation; it's just that the glyph '@' happened not to have syntactic meaning attached to it and it looks okay.
Without the ability to have a robust, open political debate voting is meaningless as no voter would have context for their vote (unless they happened to personally know both candidates).
Scantastic
Blippy Clone in 2 Seconds and 3 Lines of PHP
Well, yes - many of the people pushing this argument around the country really like labor unions.

That's just a variation of the "liberal media" argument I already pre-empted.

Interestingly, neither do most corporations.

Yes they do. At least, the Fortune 100 does.

Corporations and their unions (trade organizations) spend exactly what they need to in order to effectively promote their political interests. If unions had more money to spend, you'd start seeing billion dollar corporate campaigns.
Nicely put. It's also worth remembering that the first amendment states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech..." Neither individuals nor corporations are mentioned nor do they matter. What matters is that Congress was expressly denied the right to regulate speech.
NameCheap is Down
As of 16:45 MST, looks like http://namecheap.com is down. Happened right while I was in the middle of updating some DNS records for a domain of mine.

*edit - added time.
>> The vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to be down the hall from that guy and for the vast majority of people a large helpful community will be infinitely more valuable.

Which means what to Fog Creek?
While the first sentence helpfully has a footnote, it does not actually cite anything. Unfortunately, the second footnote lends no more actual factual basis to this argument either. The wikipedia article linked to uses equally vague generalities and has a similar pessimism towards elected officials -- it cites two articles from the NRO and a pretty bad article from the LA Weekly. This comment is a conjecture -- one that assumes the worst in our public servants, and which does not actually cite evidence that people behave that way.

In fact, to show the lack of rigor in the argument, the point he makes could apply equally well to a business: "It's not unusual" for a shafted department head to try to cripple his unit (on paper or in practice) to demonstrate the vital need to have his budget restored in the next year. Sounds just as plausible!

or, to use the same rhetorical technique to make the opposite point:

I would argue that "it's not unusual" for the city officials to make their cuts to cause the _minimum_ pain possible, on the grounds that they want to be re-elected.
Why does this belong on Hacker News?
And taken to the extreme. Get the whole town utterly addicted before you start charging.
Everyone is talking about Theora vs. H.264. What about Dirac (a.k.a. Scrödinger)? It was developed by the BBC, and has a free license. It's only disadvantage is a lack of defensive patents (they had some applications, but let them lapse).
Ask HN: How important are terms and conditions?
A lot of websites seem to have "terms-and-conditions" upon getting an account. How important is it to have them? Many of these are very verbose, and I don't know anyone who actually reads them. Is it possible to get away with a simple set terms such as:
-> You are limited to one account per person.
-> We will send you a cheque if you have earned more than $50. If you have earned below this amount, we are not obligated to pay you.
-> You, or we may choose to cancel your account at any time, without reason.

Thanks for your opinions.
Cool article!

I have no idea on the true scalability of it to billions of people, but Havana is a good example of low-tech high-yield food production that helped out when lots of people were going hungry in Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed.

A byproduct is that it's relatively labor-intensive to get high yield out of the small urban farms, thus providing extra good jobs.

Would be interesting to see if these kind of low-fi solutions could contribute meaningfully to the problem of feeding 9 billion people in the coming years...
Don't Take Angel Investments From VCs
that's one of the thinnest wikipedia articles i've ever seen. C'mon, outside of the hysterical NRO articles it has at the bottom, can you show me another example of it "happening throughout history?"
Tax your meetings
"That's just a variation of the "liberal media" argument I already pre-empted."

What does the "liberal media" have to do with this? Are you discussing a point or running a partisan script?

In point of fact, "most corporations" are not "the Fortune 100" by definition.

Also, you continue to overestimate the available disposable income they have to spend on enormous political campaigns.
Watching Wholesale Electrical Price Spikes
PHP Blippy clone in 1 line of Ruby: http://dpaste.com/154321/
Otherwise, you couldn't sue a company for damages.

Deep down, I think this is the issue that many have a problem with: Shareholders aren't responsible for the actions of this entity.

I would love to see some more work done on attaching the legal liability of corporations to individuals that are subject to full and proper citizenship. Yes I realize what I'm saying, I think it's ultimately unethical to suggest otherwise though.

This is already the case for most small businesses. (sole proprietors)
You win the LoC wank!
Perhaps some of the patents cover optimizations that don't affect the bitstream format. Or maybe they're just bogus patents.
Well, I think that's far and away the most obvious interpretation of your second paragraph, but it's ambiguous enough that I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you're saying that's not what you meant.

Your last sentence surprised me, though. Clean-slate thought experiments are useful to figure out whether you're doing something because it's the best way to do it, or just because of legacy. That goes for both code and law.

In particular, some of the other critics of the Citizens United decision, including ones who are a little more serious and a little less playful than the OP, are talking about a long-term campaign for a constitutional amendment to address this issue (I'm in particular talking about Larry Lessig and Change Congress, but there are others). Such efforts might be political longshots, but how do you engage in discussions with them if you don't want to consider all the ways the law could be radically different, or could have evolved entirely differently?
One of the commenters on the article points out that we already produce enough food to feed more than nine billion people, so the reason people go hungry isn't because there isn't enough food it's because the food isn't in the right places. The infrastructure in places like the U.S. can handle food distribution for a much larger population, but in third world countries there is obviously a problem even with the current population. So what we really should be thinking about is how to get the food to the people who need it, not how to produce more food.
You also need to understand what these so-called "benefits" cost you. Sure to work at Google means I can take one of their shuttles, but it also means I would have to live a lifestyle I dread: being someone who lives in a great city and commutes to a soulless suburb.

My favorite was always the companies who try to convince you to work later by offering you some half-assed dinner. I worked at a "Netscape startup" (because in the valley we like to brag what failed company our founders come from), and every night for 6 months they ordered some awful thai food for dinner, in order to try and convince everybody to put in an extra 2 hours.

And then you need to ask existing employees if the benefits are real. I had lunch with three of my friends in Google's SRE when GOOG was trying to convince me to work with them. Their response on the benefits:

- Daycare: bullshit, 1-2 year waiting list
- Shuttle: Only if you don't mind working a crazy schedule and being at the whim of the shuttle schedule
- 20% time: too over-worked to take advantage of it
- Google tech talks: So what, they're free on Google Video

Valuating an offer is a complicated process. That's where "Show me the money" or "fuck you, pay me" is an effective mentality when a future employer is trying to con you into taking less than market rate. It's a sale, you convince them why you're worth the number you write on the piece of paper, or they convince you why you're not.

Do you want to work for an employee who thinks your work is worth less than you believe it's value to be?
" In my comment I tried to show how silly the logical conclusions of absolute interpretations look. I tried to avoid saying anything about the political side of the issue."

Avoiding the actual argument while trying to cast the side you disagree with as ridiculous and extreme is the essence of the strawman fallacy.
So individuals (such as George Soros) don't have billions of dollars or a disproportionate set of connections? The UAW and NEA don't have a disproportionate set of connections in DC?

Your statements aren't backed up by the facts. According to opensecrets.org a big ol' scary mega-rich industry such as oil and gas has so many "orders of magnitude" more money to throw around and so many disproportionate connections in Washington compared to, say, teachers and education interests that they managed to overspend said education interests by a whopping... 37% over the last 2 decades. Indeed, donations from education interests just barely exceeded those from the entire pharmaceutical industry during that same period (note that this includes soft-money contributions as well). The situation does not appear to be quite as unbalanced as you would suggest.
The legal system is not a programming language compiler, mindlessly deterministic and oblivious to loopholes. Violate the intent of the law egregiously enough, and they'll find something that will stick.
While MPEG-LA clearly has the prerogative to go after people who infringe its patents by distributing decoders and encoders, isn't this whole "Internet Video" fee thing only enforceable if you enter a contract with them?

There's no way they have a valid patent on vanilla HTTP! I could see some of their patents covering some stuff like generating a seek table, but how the hell could they enjoin you from sending a blob in response to an HTTP request?

Isn't it possible for a video site to never directly enter a contract with MPEG-LA? Is the shrinkwrap EULA on second-party encoder software valid?