skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For "competent", I think an adequate definition would be "Having the institutions in place that encourage technological innovation and then allow the fruits of that innovation to spread freely through the population."

Happiness is a funny thing, because it tends to depend more on relative status than on absolute standard of living. We can look back now and say those people were so primitive and boy am I glad I live today (well, except you ;-)), but that doesn't really the fact that we murdered a few million people who were probably quite happy with their life the way it was. It'd probably be morally unacceptable today, but it happened.

I'm not trying to make a moral judgment here. My comment is an argument based on facts - "this is what happened, this is how things tend to work extrapolating from what happened, and here is why it is still relevant today." If you want to make a morality play out of it, go for it - I don't exactly think that the native American genocide or Bush's justification for Iraq was a particularly nice thing to do either. But I think a debate on how things work is a bit more productive than a debate on how things should work.

"This statement seems extraordinarily naive to me. What is it based on?"

It's based largely on personal memory of a lot of the things said during the lead-up to the invasion. "Beacon of democracy" was used several times in his press releases to drum up support for the war. The "domino theory" of liberalization was discussed in my International Relations course. In both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, there were widespread discussions about how to "win the peace".
Depends, there is some use like content filtration. However the user ratings could fill in for a lot of that on amazon.

Also, as came up in another branch of the article's discussion, this could cause certain things like freelance editing to get a real boost from potential increased customers.
Google's decision amounted to depriving the Chinese people of the knowledge of which search terms were being censored, information which, I think, would be tremendously valuable to any Chinese person concerned about censorship -- at least it helps him/her figure out what to be curious about.

There is probably a role for advanced crypto in helping to free information. However be careful that it doesn't get stopped by US export restrictions :) I've had some ideas about low-tech approaches to getting by censors but haven't worked on the project for a bit.

Military response is a much tougher issue. As I pointed out earlier, Americans are raped every day in American prisons. Would we want China sending an aircraft carrier near Los Angeles and demanding that the human rights atrocities stop? Or maybe you believe that such a move (if it resulted in an increased appreciation of prisoner rights) would be a good thing.

I'm enough of a cynic to realize a few things:

- Some people in China have total access to the full internet, even if it's just b/c they have a cousin in the US who downloads the articles, encrypts them, and sends them via email...

- The military angle is all about international power relations. The US sees China as an adversary and it is thus important to make sure that Americans view China as being morally bankrupt, since Americans generally prefer to go to war when they feel that they are on the side of "good".
I love this idea. I'll try it out on my next trip. I love the videos they're awesome - although since your site looks AJAX-ie you might want to consider opening the videos in a "lightbox" popup - I tried several times to find the close button on the first video I opened - because I didn't realize it open a new page ...or you can just sum it up to my stupidity :p
What does any of this have to do with the discussion? Google is not going to start using individual security findings as marketing collateral.
It's also much easier to find the songs on google. And if you're more dedicated, ripping the audio from YouTube.
That would be a fine argument if these products were simply desktop apps.

Reputation matters when it comes to web apps. If you don't trust MS with your data it's perfectly reasonable to avoid using any app that would send your data to the MS cloud.
I'm not sure what's hard about Boxee, Netflix over the XBox, or even just having a computer hooked up to a television in general. It's not like there's a difference between them now, other than size.

Definitely agree about Boxee and Netflix. They are designed around providing a simple user experience, and all the consumer needs is familiarity.

Plugging in a computer is another matter though. There's a mental barrier there that people will just never overcome. Computers are complicated, and people use them for other things (okay maybe only web surfing and email). They don't want to plug it in and start a program, no matter how simple it is. Even if the program was henceforth telepathic and let you watch any content instantaneously in HD it would be a hard sell.

Dedicated boxes are the way this will go.
I'm not sure how following the law for the purpose of destroying the law seems lawful...
Actually, in the original story about the photo the photographer claimed to have set up everything in advance, and used some sort of sensor to have it automatically fire when the wolf jumped over it; he may have said that he'd previously seen them doing so.
that's true for me (using publishers as filters) when i'm in a bookstore. but i don't think i've looked at who the publisher of a book is when buying from amazon for ages - typically i read amazon's comments and then google around for what other people are saying.
Appboy: share ideas and opinions about mobile apps
True. It's going to be ongoing, but it's already holding better than my standard double knot. Switched the other shoe to it too.

Also, keep in mine that I like to tie my shoes once every week or so and slip them on/off as I use them.
IPTV is not part of my vocabulary. Bittorrent is a pain. I use netflix, ted, fora.tv, youtube, vimeo and whatever else percolates into my spectrum of social content aggregators, google reader, facebook.
Do you think that's true? I mean, I know they have a pretty big bias toward the poly community... hm. I wonder if there's any data on that.
In my consideration, theft and copyright infringement seem fundamentally different in every detail. What similarities lead you not to distinguish them?
The slate piece kind of echoes the old Sam Kinison bit about TV coverage of natural disasters, famine, etc. "Couldn't the cameraman just give the kid a sandwich?" but there are some complex issues at play. Media coverage of disasters enables the world at large to understand what's going on and act in order to help those affected. How many readers have donated money in the past week to Haiti relief? By comparison, how many donated money in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which killed upwards of 140,000 people in Burma in May 2008, but received far less global media coverage, owing to press resitrctions in the country?

One other thing to consider about the press coverage of Haiti, and other disasters: The stress on the journalists covering death and destruction can actually trigger PTSD. The Nieman report just had an entire issue devoted to stress and other issues experienced by journalists covering traumatic events or interviewing the victims of disasters and crimes. You can see it at http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=101958 but be forewarned, some of the content is disturbing.
Okay, off topic, but true story...

My wife was at this direct sales party for kitchen stuff. Fancy spices, stuff like that.

The sales lady was pitching 'Low sodium salt'. My wife and a few of other other science geeks in the crowd almost managed not to laugh.

So what is it then? KCL? NiCL2? Mercury sulfide?
Then to me the question/quote is really subjective. Design is SO critical no matter what your company does and for some companies it is even more critical than SO! If you are sure this designer is talented and you are very clear about how you handle feedback/revisions/etc then, to me, $2k is not a bad quote.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065488
hacking biology
Second Life’s economy grows 65% to $567M
Legal Eagles Building Foundation for Protecting Linux
Payment gateways, merchant accounts ... there's gotta be someone working on simplifying this side of the equation.
We weren't offering any discounts. We just said please write reviews and give your honest feedback since you are our customers. Seriously they took most of them down.
the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does.

Filesharers do no damage. Theft does damage, but filesharers create value.
time and effort yes. At this time my collection of web services is basically an organism that feeds my mind. It took time and effort to start the feedback loop but now the loop provides more than I can consume.
I agree. I would suggest having one of them already opened, with tabs for the rest.
We've recently started using google wave.
I saw a post here not too long ago (i wish i could find a link). Its pretty handy. You can start a wave, and start threads and build off of it.

Another tool ive tinkered around with was mindmapping tools. There are a few out there where you can share and collaborate mindmaps. I really liked the UX www.mindmeister.com. Check it out!
I think your last sentence is on the right track. To paraphrase Kant, if theoretically the RIAA could receive compensation to the tune of 150k/per infringement from every single U.S. citizen that has ever shared a copyrighted song, would that be just?
Facebook API replacing notifications with email
IE6 - why the UK Ministry of Defence is safer than you
Nobody is entitled to anything, not even your starving artist or starving authors. If the majority of the people don't want to support your career choice, you don't have the right do anything about it.

If that mean that the creation of arts and musics grind to halt, so be it. That's how a free society work.

Artists, programmers, and everybody else are supposed to die and live by their creation. It is their job to convince everyone else that their career is worth supporting.

Consumer sovereign are sovereigns for a reason, because they have the money. They are your lifeline, and they're alway right.

You can whine about how authors are being ripped off, or you can choose to look at reality and the economics of it. Your choice.
But what are the inherent rights of the creator of an intellectual work over his product?

Accepting the concept of copyright, do you consider $675,000 a proportionate penalty in this case?
Do you believe that a $675k judgement is reasonable for sharing 30 songs? I'm genuinely curious about the math behind this line of reasoning.
> Plugging in a computer is another matter though. There's a mental barrier there that people will just never overcome.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Of course, there'll always be Luddites, but even my non-technical friends do stuff like this.
When someone wants to use dropbox, they fill out an HTML form to create an account. Once 4M people do that (or a little more since some people delete accounts), they have 4M users.
Bill Gates's new website: The Gates Notes
Copyright infringement and kidnapping are also fundamentally different. The comparison to theft is an inept rhetorical device, nothing more and nothing less. It has no bearing on whether a publisher can claim damages.
Thank you Tyohn. We decided to go with separate URLs for better SEO, but we will try to make it clearer for visitors :)
Robots.txt that obey Asimov's three laws
I Love Dropbox. I got in as an early beta tester and have been a paying customer since the day the option was offered.

Dropbox helped me convince my old boss that I could work from home.

I use Dropbox to back up my iTunes music library...for some reason I used to lose a lot of my music every time I got a new computer.

All my work and personal files can be accessed and emailed right from my iPhone.

I sync 4 computers: work laptop, home laptop, a dell zino for my tv and my iPhone. I never have to worry about a thing... Dropbox just works.
I guess you used Chrome for Mac, right? Chrome for Windows is working fine. Maybe Chrome for Mac, too, but we haven't completed QA there yet. We will complete it soon, though.
Lamest gimmick since the "W-W-W-Windows 386" rapping lady.
This assertion is repeated often by defenders of file sharing, but it's been uniformly rejected by the legal systems of --- from what I can tell --- most of western civilization.

The RIAA makes over-the-top claims about the evils of file sharing, but district and appellate court judges in the US are not uniformly shills of the RIAA, and none of them adhere to your logic.
Great ideas for the videos! Thank you. We will try to implement them ASAP.
Interesting... Link?
I wonder if it's much like the advice for guys in The Game - it's the best way to attract the attention of the opposite sex, if you don't care what sort of person's attention you're attracting.

The data also showed that MySpace shots were among the least likely to result in actual conversation. It could be that guys see the much-ridiculed MySpace shot, figure the girl has low self-esteem and would be an easy lay, and then message her with a "hey u sexy". Then they either hookup or she never speaks to him again.
Spinning it's propoganda to make it seem like the west is trying to enforce it's ways on the Chinese...
The "bounding box" idea is quite experimental. Your feedback is highly appreciated!

We definitely have an issue pointing some links to our staging environment. Thank you for pointing that out.
At the very least, the idea that the owner of a copyrighted work can't at least control the distribution and price of that work reproduced in its entirety seems like an argument that is destined to fail.
Thanks, very helpful.
I like this reversal. Nobody is entitled to anything. Not artists. Not authors. Except for random people on the Internet. They're entitled to the works of those artists and authors.

Anxiously awaiting the 19 paragraph response that will clarify this for me further.
All Our N-gram are Belong to You
"If the phonebook has 10,000 entries, on average you'll need to look through about half of them—5,000 entries—before you get lucky."

How could one possibly search a phone book so poorly? Even a dumb binary search would eliminate about half the remaining entries each time, getting the job done after only checking around 15 entries.
To be fair, he says he made these predictions in 1996. The PalmPilot personal, which I would say was the first widely-used PDA didn't come out until 1997.

From what I remember, there weren't really any commercially available 802.11 devices until 1999.

So while these things were on the horizon, I wouldn't say they were commonplace just yet.
I feel the same way about a Gomboc (self righting shape)
http://www.gomboc-shop.com/

I'd love to play with one and leave it on my desk as a fidget toy but it's not worth 99 euro to me for just that.
But in a way, isn't there a precedent in mass torts and an effective change in practice? When video recorders came out, it was clearly forbidden to record programs off the air. Enough people did it that there wasn't any prosecution, and there was eventually a settlement that validated this practice?
> If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement.

Actually, I think a $150,000 judgment for stealing a single CD would be outrageous.

I can see where you're coming from, but it seems to me that you are justifying making an example of people via massive financial penalties for causing no actual harm, only theoretical harm. If I make an unauthorized copy of an MP3, what is the actual harm? In what sense can an unobservable event be said to have happened? At best you can argue that it's a quality of life crime - if everyone did it, there would be reduced incentive to create and hence a lower standard of living. But if that's the case, why aren't other quality of life crimes punished as harshly? Drunk driving or speeding in a residential zone massively increase the chances that you will kill someone, and yet the punishment is nowhere near as harsh.
Kill a Feature Every Week
I would be curious to see if Photoshopping all that together would have the same effect
I agree it's a great shot. I can't really speak to whether it is fake or not. You make some good points about the perfect and complete lighting.

I've been lucky enough to spend time with wildlife photographers in the field. As far as I can tell they spend almost all their time creating and waiting for perfect opportunities. We spent time scouting out locations and doing test shoots to figure out what would work in that location. Looking at different angles so the background and lighting at that time of day was ideal. It also quickly became my understanding that professional wildlife photographers have a crazy knack for choosing appropriate settings (exposures lighting etc). Since opportunities are so rare and perfect moments fleeting... I guess that makes sense. All of that being said I don't remember any actual photos being taken at night. At dawn and sunset, almost always.

I have also been in the field with a guy who took his own photographs for a national geographic article. It was a wildlife and nature article not human interest. For his one article he took 50000+ shots. Then national geographic would use approximately 10-20 shots. This was back when digital was still gimmicky and professionals were using slide film. So they were developing 1500 rolls of slide film... this all seems so crazy now-a-days.

I'd be interested in how many photos people take now. Having to remove the film and put in new roll cold kill a wildlife shot. So you were often limited to 36 shots. The cameras used to create a horrid sound loading new film - the nicer the camera the louder and more obnoxious the sound. (not really but it seemed like it)

EDIT: Grammar and rolls of slide film ~ Added a bit.
Thank you! Would you mind sharing the link with me? I am not sure to which interface you were referring to.
You hardly have to do all the heat/waterproofing and miniaturization: build it into a belt buckle. I wonder if anyone's done this yet? Google gives 10 pages of results: there are a lot of those out there. Kurzweil was right!
Shutter speed has nothing to do with the flash duration. You can have a shutter speed of 1/10th sec (to get background light) and the flash that's 1/10,000th sec to light the wolf.
Dave McClure featured this slide on its own. It's one of many from his FoWA talk from October:

http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...
Parrot 2.0.0 Released (Parrot VM)
I don't think that's really true - most of my friends who have used it were looking for potentially long-term relationships. Most of them have also complained about how hard it is to find long-term partners on OKCupid. So I think it's more likely that OKCupid is used to find long-term relationships, but it's successful at casual flings. (Which makes perfect sense, since long term relationships take a long time and a lot of effort, so naturally you'll see fewer of them.)
Hmmmm... Good point. In fact, there in interpreter for that, but you've got a good point. We will try to make it easier to understand. Thanks Drew!
I read that paper some time back, and it strikes me as a pretty good idea.

In short, a (potential) writer would propose: I'll write this book for a minimum of $X. Interested readers would put into an escrow system whatever that book is worth it to them. If the total escrowed contributions reach $X (presumably by some deadline), the author will write the book and release it for all to read, collecting the escrowed funds. If the kitty doesn't reach $X, or the author doesn't make good, the escrowed funds are returned.

Obviously this generalizes to other media as well.

The only think I don't see this covering well is the speculation on as-yet-unproven writers. Who is going to take a chance on you so you can make your reputation? Maybe that doesn't matter; I think that today, writers, musicians, etc., typically produce their first works on their own to get a publisher interested.
Nope. I will not argue anything further than that. Nobody mean nobody. Not me, not you, not filesharers. Nothing and nobody.

EDIT:

I made it very clear that if nobody wants to buy from the authors, artists, programmers, the incentive to produce will suffer.

If this is what the consumer sovereign truly intended, than it is an ethical outcome and an outcome that cannot be changed.
The practice that was validated was time-shifting content that was provided for free over the public airwaves.
I think it would be really interesting to get into his mind occasionally.

actually he just tweeted about a blog he started documenting what he's learned through his foundation work:

http://www.thegatesnotes.com/
I have, to date, had zero trouble using my N1 phone anywhere yet. Two key points:

1) It's winter in New York City. Even outside there's not a lot of really bright sunlight.

2) The N1 has a feature (which I like) whereby, with a light sensor, it adjusts the brightness of the screen to compensate for ambient light automatically. Or: readable in light, not blinding at night.
There are so many ways I see to bypass this (pseudo)problem starting with (techno)logical and ending with legal solutions, I don't see how it matters at all.
Cool looking site .. but where did you get the voice from?
The comparison to theft might be an inept rhetorical device, but it seems to influence perceptions of this issue very often.

So what is the claim of damages ultimately based on? In a case of theft, there is an objective loss that can be quantified and compensated; but in copyright infringement cases, it seems like publishers most often talk about unrealized revenues. Is it appropriate for the courts to award damages based on the plaintiff's predictions of the future?

What do you suppose Atari would have sued for if they discovered someone distributing unlicensed copies of the "ET" 2600 game back in the '80s - the same game they eventually buried thousands of unpurchased copies of in a landfill? Would they have based their damages claim on the same sales projections that made launching the game look like a good idea?
Or Opera, for that matter.

(Edit: On a Mac, if that matters.)
You're right. I was wrong in my thought process about this, and it was probably dark enough out that there wouldn't have been any ghosting from the dragged out shutter.

Add-on: If the light source was constant (not strobes), then I think the shutter speed argument stands. However, I can't imagine that this wasn't done with strobes. Furthermore, that the background was exposed at all suggests some shutter drag?

I am realizing that I need to spend more time playing with my cheap off-camera flash set-up.
It never has, even back when all the Android devices had LCD screens. I'd mostly chalk it up to not having the UI bits that normally were blue in (i.e.) gmail, so the blue just didn't show up. Text is black on white, buttons are black on grey, and there's not a lot of space left.