skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Corporate personhood goes back to the beginnings of the English common law and was not the product of a mere "legal accident" by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Blackstone's Commentaries (11th edition, 1791), volume 1, p. 467 (ch. 18, "Of Corporations"):

"We have hitherto considered persons in their natural capacities, and have treated of their rights and duties. But, as all personal rights die with the person; and, as the necessary forms of investing a series of individuals, one after another, with the same identical rights, would be very inconvenient, if not impracticable; it has been found necessary, when it is for the advantage of the public to have any particular rights kept on foot and continued, to constitute artificial persons, who may maintain a perpetual succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality.

These artificial persons are called bodies politic, bodies corporate, . . . or corporations: of which there is a great variety subsisting, for the advancement of religion, of learning, and of commerce; in order to preserve entire and for ever those rights and immunities, which, if they were granted only to those individuals of which the body corporate is composed, would upon their death be utterly lost and extinct." (my emphasis)

I cite Blackstone, no small figure in either legal history or the law undergirding the U.S. constitution, to emphasize that he regarded it as central to the idea of what constitutes a corporation that it was to be treated as a legal "person." This is found in my 1791 edition of this work.

Thus, this doctrine is hardly new or radical and certainly no one felt the need to mock it over the 200+ years during which it has been in effect by suggesting that a corporation exercise rights of a citizen by running for office.

All that said, I understand your point about its being claimed that this doctrine was accidentally incorporated into the Court's constitutional analysis but the core doctrine runs much, much deeper than the particular case cited in your linked article and (as reflected in the Blackstone quote) is and always has been fundamental to understanding the legal idea of a corporation.
well of course. Its a last resort in python too. while it's much easier to do in python, its far from idiomatic. It's getting into 'too much magic' territory.
Most political organizations can be similarly characterized as dictatorships with oligarchies; depending on what level you look, pretty much all of them can.

Consider your last question, though: What do you mean by influence?

Multi-nationals based in the US and elsewhere already had plenty of influence in various forms before this decision. Now...they can pay for commercials. They can now make blatant, public statements of support in front of American customers, roughly 40% of whom will take some degree of umbrage or offense to this no matter who they support.

How does this hurt democracy?
What software do people actually use to capture the screencast? Is there anything good for linux?
Good tips. Here are a few further comments.

> 1. Start with an Outline

It's not a bad idea to have a rough draft of your script ready that outlines what you're going to say for each slide or during the coding sessions.

> 2. Focus on the Audience’s Needs

Be as practical as possible. Theory may be necessary of course, but a screencast is an excellent medium to SHOW rather than simply tell someone how to do things. That's the whole point behind screencasts.

> 3. Get a Good Mic

The cheapest microphone that could possibly get the job done is the Logitech Desktop USB Microphone (under $30). If your budget permits it, the next step up would be the Samson C01U with a stand, shockmount and pop filter. We've found it delivers the best bang for your buck.

> 4. Lock Out the Noise Makers

You'll hate ambulances, trust me. Two quick tips regarding that: 1) Pick the quietest room in the house; 2) If you hear a temporary sound, keep recording while repeating what was interrupted by the loud sound. Cutting the undesired part of the audio/video is far easier than stopping and restarting the whole recording session.

> 5. Consider Separating Audio and Video

Doing both simultaneously saves time, but it's really hard and the best results are usually obtained when audio and video are not recorded together. In my experience, most authors have found that recording the two things separately takes longer, but it's far easier. In the beginning, you can expect an hour of work for every one minute of production quality screencast. With experience and a well tested workflow, this number can be drastically improved upon.

> 6. Clean Up Your Desktop

Use a white background or a solid color, and be consistent about it. Some programs, like ScreenFlow for Mac, have a "hide desktop" option that automatically hides all the icons on your desktop.

> 8. Plan a Dress Rehearsal

If you record fragments of video without too much care for the audio the first time around, you'll get the timing right and it will act as a rehearsal. Once this is done, you can discard the audio track, and go for the polished recording of the audio as the video rolls.

<shameless-plug>My startup, http://ThinkCode.TV is doing pretty well in the Italian market, and we plan to go live with an English catalog by the end of March. If you are interested in recording engaging screencasts about programming, feel free to drop me a line at antonio@thinkcode.tv.</shameless-plug>
By interface, I assume you mean git's command-line interface? I agree; it's terrible.

My impression is that projects like grit are far enough along that it should be possible to build an entirely new git front-end/porcelain on a clean technology stack. Something with more sane exposure. I don't know if anybody's actually working on something like this right now?
JavaScript was based on Scheme with a "C-like" syntax to make it more widely appealing, so spiritually JavaScript is LispScript. More to your point, other browser scripting languages have been done and already failed. IE supports VBScript, Firefox could at one point support Python via an extension. The reality is that browser implementors want to support all sorts of things, but the only ones that matter are those that are supported in all browsers. Since you cannot create a new browser without supporting JavaScript, and JavaScript solves the code problem, it is the only language that will ever be used in browsers.

Which leads into the second question: whats wrong with compiling to JavaScript? Compilation is historically (outside of a VM) the only way to write portable code. Most compiled languages have a toolchain that covers compiling, profiling, and debugging, and there is no reason to assume that a language compiled to JavaScript could not have these as well (ex an external profiler might look like dynaTrace Ajax).

You might not like JavaScript, but its all we're going to get. Most people don't like programming x86 assembly, but I don't see them complaining that CPUs need to support a different assembly language.
On Mac OS X, one of the easiest programs to record screencasts and to do some editing, is ScreenFlow. On Windows, Camtasia Studio is definitely the best option, granted it's fairly expensive. On Linux, recordMyDesktop is one of the nicest programs, and of course it's open source and free of charge.
You can't ask this question because you can't not already know the answer.

This isn't true. Here's a trivial scenario for you: a user inputs a URL which represents a web service and a method name. Your code needs to determine if the object which will get returned as JSON by that web service implements the method or not.

There are more complicated examples which occur in actual production systems. For example, suppose you're interfacing with Big Freaking Enterprise code that you can't change, and there is a rule that certain objects have to have certain checks done prior to being sent over the wire. Those checks might be implemented as methods decorated with @FireThisCheckBeforeSendingThisOverTheWire annotations, but that isn't the only way to skin this particular cat. In particular, your million lines of legacy code might have a coding convention where any method starting with "check" gets fired. This worked fine when the code was only running in its own little world and teams of overpaid engineers maintained lists of all the check methods for various classes, but now that code needs to get exposed via a new API to meet some emergent business need, and you want to accomplish this without touching the million line codebase that nobody really understands. Enter the reflection API.

Incidentally, expecting a coding convention like that to actually work isn't totally insane. JUnit 3, I think, treated any method starting with test as a test. I personally prefer it for usability over "slap an annotation on it".

Anyhow, Enterprise Java: abandon all hope ye who enter here.
I can't wait to hack my next rails app with Pycharm
This function doesn't implement the same functionality. It doesn't even take the same arguments.
Technically it's one line without semicolons in Python
Aerogel is now cheap enough to produce to be used as housing insulation
And this is a problem how? If the kind of students who actually study don't show up to lectures, that means the lectures aren't worth going to.
Check upthread a few posts for just such numbers (opensecrets.org also has that data). The idea that corporations have excessively more influence due to campaign contributions than, say, unions just isn't supported by the available data.

Also note that publicly held corporations represent a large number of individual shareholders as well.

The problem, in my view, isn't that there is too much money in politics, that's merely a symptom. The underlying problem is that government has too much control and influence over everything anybody does. That makes it not only attractive but often necessary to maintain influence with and access to government representatives in order to get along.
Famine was a solved problem three hundred years ago in peacetime Europe. The challenge isn't growing food. The challenge is making sure thugs with guns don't take it between the place where it is produced and the place where it is consumed. (It matters little to this analysis whether the thugs with guns are cops or robbers, since if you live in a country with famine they are probably only distinguishable by the color of their uniforms, if that.)
Port Elizabeth and Addo Hotels Accommodation - Port Elizabeth and Addo Tour
You're mistaken.

Animal animal = zoo.getAnimal();

Can I do animal.bark() or animal.fly() ? All I know is that it's an Animal of some sort, may or may not be an instance of the Dog or Bird subclasses of Animal.
you mean it's not a series of tubes???
Here's a trivial scenario for you: a user inputs a URL which represents a web service and a method name. Your code needs to determine if the object which will get returned as JSON by that web service implements the method or not.

You wouldn't do that by reflection, you'd have a mapping between service method names and objects that perform the service. In fact, this sort of thing is pretty typical in web frameworks based on dynamic languages as well. I don't want you calling Object.notifyAll or whatever just by fiddling with urls. Reflection does come up but it's usually in more magical places - serialization (the built-in serialization is an example of interface-by-convention), profilers, debuggers, prototyping tools.
Ask HN: How do you send mails from Amazon EC2?
I'm using Amazon EC2 to host a web server, but Amazon EC2's IP address space is blocked by Trend Micro MAPS DUL (http://securecloud.com/help/en/about_the_dul.html). Given that sending emails from a web server is often necessary, I need a way to send emails from the web server. I was using the Google Apps SMTP server for this until our website had enough users that we passed the Google Apps daily email limit. So now I'm looking for an alternative way to send emails. I'm sure many other YC News readers have encountered this... any suggestions?

Clarification: I don't mean email marketing services like ConstantContact.com but rather mail servers that can be used directly from our web server to send email notifications.
Welcome to HN, Dmitry, and nice work!
15 books seems like a bit much. If it were shorter (~5-7) it'd be alot easier to grok.
Good tips indeed. I do lots of screencasts to give my clients documentation on how to use the sites I build them. I've learned a few things:

As the tips say, audio is really important, and setting the levels correctly is also important. You want the loudest you're going to be to not quite top out the level meter. In OS X, the system prefs show you the levels, as do most sceencasting apps. Even with levels set properly, I usually run my audio through Levelator, http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator, which does a really good job of automatically adjusting levels and smoothing out clips and chirps.

If you're on OSX, using Universal Access and making the mouse cursor larger is a great and easy way to call out where you are on screen. I tried working with OmniDazzle to get mouse halos and such, but it's just not worth it.

I'm usually pretty lazy and don't want to go into after effects or a bigger program to edit my videos afterwards if I need to show text, so I usually just prepare a text edit window or two ahead of time with any text I'll need. Drag them on screen, talk about whatever, and edit out the second it took you to drag it on later on.

Editing, I usually just use Quicktime Pro. My stuff doesn't need to be overly polished, so this works great.
Inkless and tonerless rewritable printer
Corporations have been in existence in Western culture since at least the high middle ages. Corporations existed in the Americas since before the American Revolution was even an idea. The Hudson's Bay Corporation is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and one of the oldest in the world, incorporated in 1670, over 100 years before the American Revolution and 120 years before the Constitution was ratified and the Bill of Rights ratified. One of the U.S. founding fathers--Benjamin Franklin--was an entrepreneur and businessman, and he used his position as a businessman to engage in all sorts of (often underhanded) political pamphleteering and advocacy.

Corporations most certainly did exist, and without a doubt engaged in political activity. While the doctrine of corporate personhood and the equivalence between money and speech are later inventions, it's not clear that the founders would have supported a reading of the Constitution that allows bans on corporate (or any other) political speech. Especially since it was common practice at the time, and continued to be a practice after the ratification of the Constitution.
This kind of synthetic example is silly, though. The fundamental questions would be the same in Python as well. How did you end up with this heterogeneous collection of objects? Why are you unable to get a collection of objects that are known to support your desired protocol at that point? What happens if they don't? Etc, etc, etc. You might make very different design choices in a statically or dynamically typed language but thinking about zoos and animals with no context isn't particularly informative.
How Voices.com increased their conversion rate by over 400%
the joojoo ODM, CSL from Malaysia, are the guys who create the fake blackberry devices that have littered Asia in the past few years.

http://www.cslcare.com/index.php/products/mobile-phone/blueb...

One rip-off merchant partners with another, match made in heaven.
>When that consumer goes to Google News, it lists the

> number of sources. You immediately become one of 2,172

> articles. It is never good for a brand to be considered

> one of 2,000 plus sources. Ever. That makes you a

> commodity. All that promotion you did saying how good

> your reporters are ? On its way to becoming worthless.

TL;DR = You've been trying to pretend you matter, but Google is revealing this as lies.
Well thats half of what Yahoo paid us!
Hacker News app for Android now works for 1.6 too, but not 1.5
iBooks is not part of the system software. There is no reason to believe that the duplicate functionality rule would apply, even it its most extreme interpretation.
I'd agree. WordPress has gotten where it is by doing two things: making it easy to use, and keeps adding useful features that work, more or less, pretty well.

The quality of the code behind WP is very different discussion, but I'd say you're right.
$ port fetch wget

$ port build wget

$ sudo port install wget

> "is no different than creating a 2nd home directory for that purpose"

except that a million build scripts and make files out there assume /usr/local/ as a default location. setting up something like '/home/shared/' is not a problem, just don't mess with paths that are defaults
People usually point to the BSD license and better code-base as the main selling points. Then they point to vertical split (which you can patch screen to do).

Bottom line is, if you have a screen config you like - there's not much point in switching. If you're just getting into terminal multiplexers, it's worth a look.
I voted no because I've actually done research into this and I've talked with the *chan software developers.
Earlier today I published a Hacker News app to the Android Market and disappointed a lot of people because the app wouldn't run on their devices. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097568

So, I recompiled for 1.6 (G1), but I couldn't compile error free for 1.1 and 1.5 (Hero) - complaints about the "res" folder. I'll have to follow-up and see how to fix that. The URL I posted here is a blog post where I assembled a bunch of links that deal with Android versioning woes. I'm very open to guidance on this topic.
> Moose is from Smalltalk and CL...

... and Perl 6.
Correction. You get paid the minimum the company you work for thinks they can get away with.
JooJoo will be manufactured by Malaysia’s CSL Group
Man for a second I thought the ansible was within reach. Pft. =)
I wrote about this before. I doubt the JooJoo, at least at its present price point, will disrupt any iPad success here in the United States. They're only 'killer' feature is that "we're like an inch or so bigger"

That being said, do you ever see the JooJoo picking up in other countries, namely in Asia? Lemme know.
Anyone got tips for eliminating the lip-smacking noise that sometimes shows up on recordings of speech?
> Perl is also for dedicated professionals who want a tool that rewards more study and practice with more and more power -- mastery of Perl is a never-ending road with a seemingly never-ending escalation of power and awesomeness.

That sounds more like programming (which you can teach yourself in ten years) than any specific language.
The DogHouse Diaries Comic: 20 Things I Already Knew About iPad Before Release
"... Any Australian HN readers could explain why Australia (or at least its government) seems to be obsessed with controlling the Internet? ..."

For the answer to that I think you might want to study the "classics": rhetoric and the Roman Republic ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Republic You will find all the answers there. Legacy seen through the lens of history has a way of sorting the barbaric from the visionary government.
I don't really care how many lines of Java this takes, if someone commits a garbage scenario like this I'm concerned with how many lines of comments they have explaining why they're doing it instead of solving the problem correctly.
@GrandMasterBirt: Personally, I am not now and never will touch Blu-Ray. I don't trust Sony to have any qualms about screwing everyone over. I also think that, before Blu-Ray gets majority market share, downloadable videos will be widely enough accessible to completely replace my media players for 99% of my viewing. </rant>

This assumes that nothing will come along to challenge or supersede h.264. If nothing else, we can hope that Theora will get more developers, at which point the whole browser-battle will resume, and the same solution will likely arise: further delay in fees, or switching to a free codec (remember, Theora will have improved in the meantime).
But how does that go against anything Chomsky says?

(Obviously generative grammar doesn't tell the "whole story" about language, but generally speaking, nothing tells the whole story about anything.)
>The human mind is recursive, but is it simply that it only have a "stack depth" of 3 or 4 and can't parse more deeply than that?

That was Chomsky and Miller's theory (although they weren't dealing with that particular example).
You can't actually send information faster than light though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_than_light_travel#Quantu...

"Certain phenomena in quantum mechanics, such as quantum entanglement, appear to transmit information faster than light. According to the No-communication theorem these phenomena do not allow true communication; they only let two observers in different locations see the same event simultaneously, without any way of controlling what either sees."
> ... the point is to be at least halfway readable to a non-programmer reading over your shoulder.

That's the same argument for filing the serial number off of TDD and calling it BDD: sometime, somewhere, somehow eventually some non-programmer is going to have to maintain source code without a trained professional programmer around to help.

I don't get it; FIT's been around much, much longer. What kind of non-developer business rule expert can read the punctuation-sprinkled pseudo-English pidgin Ruby spreads around but doesn't know how to manipulate tabular data in a spreadsheet?
Matching brackets and braces? Your editor should do more for you.
There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. Niels Bohr

Reality is not "running on a quantum computer" it is just that QM is the best description we have of what we can observe of the external world.
Fantastic story, and a great non-tech example of the importance of 'releasing often', shifting your focus and business in the direction of the best opportunity.

Reading the story, I don't doubt that Johnny is an energetic person to be in the room with, and he seems to have transferred that into creating an exciting brand experience.
Types of Online Chat Rooms
Chat rooms are indeed one of the best ways of getting in touch with friends. You can also make new friends online using this facility. If you are new to online chat rooms, it is best to learn about different types of chat services available online so that you can get the best of these services. Initially when chat services were introduced only big names like Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AOL, etc., were offering this service.
Ask HN: Please review my web app for web designers with no programming skills
Linux Chrome 5 Beta is a Go
What exactly makes aerogels expensive to produce? Is it the materials or is it the manufacturing process?
David Roundy (author of Darcs, a DVCS that predates git and has one of the nicest command-line interfaces) is working on a git porcelain that has the same user interface and semantics as Darcs:

http://github.com/droundy/iolaus
Storing the username and password in the cookie is completely ridiculous, but I just want to point out that it doesn't appear as though twitter itself uses SSL either.

Unless I'm completely missing something, neither does facebook, or reddit, or hacker news, or really any other website other than my bank.

edit: I had a complete lapse of thinking here and am totally wrong about this. There are still lots of websites that do not use SSL, but twitter and facebook are not among them, nevermind.