skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it just means that the money that they do spend they redirect towards PS3 games. There are obviously people who always go for the 'low-cost' option which is usually pirating the music/game/video/etc. But you can't make that an absolute. You can't say that everyone operates in the fashion, just the way that I didn't say that my explanation applied to everyone.

People have a limited amount of income, but an insatiable desire to consume. How people deal with this varies from person to person. Though we can generalize it a bit, there is no catch-all generalization that applies to everyone.

In the future though, don't use anecdotes to try and prove a point. 'everyone does X because my friends in Brazil do X' is not a valid argument.

> Saying that you couldn't afford an item and therefore wouldn't have spent any money on that doesn't really mean you'd never spend any money on that given a free pirated option wasn't available.

If I download $3,000 worth of media per month, but I only make $3,500 per month after taxes, how can you posit that I would have bought all $3,000 worth of media where pirating it not an option? If I use the 'pirate market' as a way to consume outside of my income level (i.e. outside of my ability to consume without the 'pirate market') then how could I have purchased all of those things?

To your Brazil example, what were your friends spending that money on when they were pirating PS2 games or did their income level suddenly jump when the PS3 came out?
The $9.99 Textbook
Seriously, if Flash disappeared, ads made by canvas or SVG inserted via obfuscated javascript is harder to block than plain Flash ads.
exactly. and he had the exact same issue with the exact same site in the past
http://www.seobook.com/images/jason-calacanis.png
so I am 100% positive it was intentional
I think that's more like sniffing the bus, or the buffer, in which images are "held" between eyes and encoding, or after recall.
Blu-ray Maker Re-Boxes $500 Player, Charges $3,500
I don't think I do. There is a certain irony in you saying everything just works, when the blog post explicitly says that hardware acceleration doesn't work for flash, and seemingly by Apple's design.

You hate there being a whole separate version of the OS, far out. I think the needing universal binaries is a little silly. The fact is Windows biggest strength is its gigantic amount of software available for it and it doesn't require rebuilds all the time. Stability can be a good thing.

I find Apple constantly releasing upgrades a little ridiculous. It's nice to know my PC will be able to run just about anything without need to spend $100 every 2 years.
Good comment. I just want to react to the last sentence.

I use `git commit -a` plenty and without compunction. There are many times where a tweak or very simple feature doesn’t involve any exploration, and in those cases I rarely need the elaborate staging dance to make a sensible commit. I review the patch and find there is no need to break it down… why go through the index in that case?

The index is just a tool, and so is `-a`. Judge their use, not the tools themselves.

(Of course, sometimes I realise belatedly that a simple feature commit is not as straightforward as it seemed. Well, it would be belated if we weren’t talking about git. Rebasing (interactively, in particular) saves the day in that case. Once again: git goes out of its way to get out of mine. This is really the central point.)
The patent covers the bytecode interpreter that reads the hinting instructions in the truetype file, not the hinting itself.
An Introduction to Bayes' Theorem
“Pianobar” : Console-based replacement for Pandora.com’s flash player
Great idea for follow up post. Thanks!

Follow KartMe at http://twitter.com/kartme and you'll definitely hear about it!
That's exactly what I expect to happen. Steve said the tablet is the most important thing he's ever done; I believe that's because he ultimately intends it to replace general purpose computers for most consumers. If it's as locked down as the iPhone, I fervently hope that does not come to pass.
This sounds like a preemptive attempt at a "tu quoque" (aka "no u") defense. China has been caught out in a fairly blatant cyberwarfare attack and is now trying to defuse blame. Not to mention attempting to justify their vast, ridiculous censorship efforts.
Ask HN: Review my app. Better search for Mail.app
Hi! I just launched my search app for Mail.app today. I've been working my butt off on it for almost 9 months during off hours (I have a day job right now).

It is a Apple Mail plugin that takes over the search field and provides a better engine. It does stemming, contact auto-suggestion, has powerful filters, and supports a large range of syntax.

I'd love to have HN take a look at my site and product, and let me know how I can make it better.

http://www.getrocketbox.com
Clickable link: http://www.getrocketbox.com
This 'hack' was in place years ago. IIRC, I used to back in 2003 or maybe before then. Maybe at some point they removed it, then Google made them put it back?
When it was blurred out with JavaScript, I always was able to find the actual content further down the page. I think that the 'blurred out' version of it was just to make people give up. Either that or their JavaScript was broken for Firefox.
Alternate ideas:

(1) Make it so that each user only sees a deterministic subset of 'new' (unless they try really hard to enable 'all'). Essentially, this means every 'new' article is seen by a random panel of users, and stays on the 'new' page longer. Tinkering with the assignment function could achieve any balance between submissions/users/views/duration-on-first-page that is preferred.

(2) Segment 'new' by number-of-votes-already-received. Make the default 'new' only 1-vote stories. Only allow viewing and voting on 2-vote stories by people who have already cast a vote on a 1-vote story, and so forth. (That is, force people to pay more attention to those less-reviewed, before piling-on to already-popular stories.)
That's true, I supposed I'd never considered what it would be like from a publisher's perspective. Does HN push enough traffic to make it worthwhile to create content directly targeted at its users? Knowing what to expect for traffic would help me evaluate if its worth it to invest 2-3 hours at a x% chance of hitting the homepage.

So far as the value of 'x%' goes, there are certainly ways you could game the current system in your favor: linkbait the title to appeal to a very specific demo, get a few friends lined up for a quick upvote... it doesn't seem like it would be too much trouble. I often see very recently submitted articles with 3-4 upvotes at or near the top of the homepage. If the only reason you're writing is for traffic, there certainly appears to be a lot of opportunity. Am I wrong?
> I wonder if taxidermists ever receive emails about stuffing beavers?

Ah, the bless of ignorance. (My own ignorance of certain idioms of the English language.)
That's just it, though...blocking flash is easy and 99% of the time, all I'm missing is ads and video. And one click displays the video if I really want to watch it. Whereas if flash goes away, I'll have to start blocking things that are more useful on more levels, like images, javascript, etc.
I would argue that Call of Duty is exactly the kind of game I am talking about. As someone who has beat both CoD2, Modern Warfare 1 and 2 on Veteran difficulty, I can say for sure that most of the difficulty is due to the exact reasons I mentioned. More enemies with more health and better accuracy. Beating the game on Veteran was more about figuring out hacks to the game mechanics (knowing when to rush through enemy fire to reach the point that stops enemy respawns) than due to any true challenge with the combat.

One of the few examples of where good challenge was added was the point in the first Modern Warfare where you have to make a long distance sniper shot. On the harder difficulty settings, the wind and other factors were more pronounced, making the shot much more difficult, but in an interesting and challenging way instead of a more frustrating way. Unfortunately the rest of the game was filled with enemies with x-ray vision and what seemed like heat-seeking grenades.
See? Now you do!
I'm not sure I get it. Is the point that Jobs is a better leader than Obama? Or more charismatic? Or that if Obama accomplished as much as Jobs, people would like him more?

I can understand responding emotionally to this article. But it isn't funny, because there isn't a detectable premise.
Interesting. Do you know which version of Splunk you were using? Our latest version has vastly improved our query performance over large datasets.

Re. an open source log indexer: Agree, this is a space that will eventually become dominated by open source tools, used particularly by startups and small businesses. I think most people ignore this use of a MapReduce-like framework because they conceptually understand how it could be used, but 99% of all work is in the implementation, not the idea. And as of yet, I don't believe there has been a specific implementation beyond what companies like Shopify are doing where they add nice GUI tools on top of awk and grep (which admittedly is probably good enough for most people / business on this forum).
Link is broken. Here's a corrected one: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Get_Paid_What_You%27re_Worth
Gloobus Preview 0.4.2 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
I do it when I think the post is of sufficient quality. That extra vote within 5 minutes of posing it usually bumps it to the front page where it actually stands a fair chance of getting noticed.
Is the private benefit from having a child smaller than the social benefit?
It sounds like you should probably just tune out anything new from Apple and save yourself the time.

Sadly I'm getting to that point. I love my MacBook Pro and Mac minis, but I left the iPhone for Android, and am expecting the tablet to be another piece of excellent engineering deliberately crippled by Apple's marketroids.
But they can get first spot for "The magazine formerly known as the beaver".
Ha ha - I found that site in the first place because my wife saw me playing GoldRunner on KDE and freaked out. "Oh my gosh - is that LEMMINGS!?" That, of course, made me freak out. "You know about LEMMINGS!?" So I just HAD to play Lemmings that day.
Statements like - "Katz doesn't believe that people are morally obligated to pay back their debts."

I'm not sure I disagree -- "Usuary" used to be thoroughly illegal/immoral/etc didn't it?

... and "People are brainwashed to think that paying a credit card is more important than paying for the necessities of life." - Maybe if people spent more time worrying about the necessities of life and less about luxury they wouldn't be in debt in the first place.

I definitely believe credit cards are less important than basic necessities.
His business would come crashing down if he admits even to an inch of this. I have to respect that he knows how to run his business and respond to these types of concerns that are raised about his ethics. But that still doesn't excuse the facts.
precisely, I think this is a perfect page for what he is doing:

http://www.mahalo.com/card-games

SEVEN powered by Google areas.
Cool. Splunk also does this and it's good to know that people don't perceive Splunk to be capable of operating this way so we can fix this perception.
Officer pay != Contracting firm pay.

Every government on earth wants to tear Tor open; he stands to make it big, if he can lie hard enough :-)
Why is a federal agency developing this? How is this in the national interest?
I'm more of an assert / test suite / REPL and printf debugging person. I've used gdb when debugging wrappers for C libraries, but my use of the Lua debugging API has mostly been for profiling, code coverage, etc.

GDB works across the language boundary, though. As far as it's concerned, Lua is just a C library.
I agree. Though I am interested if there's a discussion going on, and if it has grown since I last visited it.
From the source code:

<!--function Hi() { window.status='Please use proper postage.'; } // -->
I see several problems with this method.

1. You need to run an exit node for unencrypted HTTP traffic to be able to inject html.

2. Tor warns you when you are potentially leaking DNS requests when you are using an old protocol like socks4 instead of sock4a. Anyone who is using Tor is presumably smart enough to activate this option on Firefox or whatever browser they happen to use,

3. The Java applet leaking DNS requests is a big hole which I believe is fixed by now. Even if it did work, it is entirely dependent on point 2 which is easily preventable.
This is besides the point but the Megaman X series is much more fun than the "classic" series. I wish they would remake some of those.
> The fact that it is easier (less expensive) for a company to settle a case for $1K, rather than fight and win a case while costing themselves $10k gives the companies no incentive to fight back.

Of course, that works both ways -- debt collection agencies frequently pile on their own fees to the original debt, which for small debts can double the amount the consumer pays back. Most people don't fight these charges because it's too much trouble to do so. This is just giving them a taste of their own medicine.
> I am not perfectly fine with political ads that pretend to be impartial depictions of reality.

Let me guess - you think that documentaries are typically "reality". They're not.

If you think that news is reality, you've never seen coverage for something that you experienced personally.

That said, there is no objective line between political speech and truth. And, more to the point, political speech is supposedly what the first amendment protects. (In practice, the protections for porn are stronger but even there the excuse is protecting political speech.)
Sooner than later.
Seriously, it's not that hard. A hell of a lot easier than "dealing with C++'s warts". (And unlike writing a Scheme, you don't have to figure out how to implement continuations.) Here's the source to one (http://www.annexia.org/forth), it's great reading.

If you're looking for a practical "low level but high level" setup, I'd recommend Lua + C first. I haven't done iphone dev, but if you can work with C, you're golden. Forth is fun, though.
The Original Free Media Search Engine
Tell HN: The HN submission race made visual
A lot of the people that frequent HN have remarked on the high techcrunch content and other frequently submitted sites.

The reason for this is that there is a relatively small group of people that all 'race' to get articles from these outlets submitted.

The first one to make it is the one that will get points from all the other submitters, mostly because in their haste to be 'first' they forget to check whether the link has already been submitted.

It's the HN equivalent of the /. meme of 'first post', only with a karma boost as an incentive.

This leads to lots of borderline articles getting lots of time on the homepage, which in turn is a small but persistent factor in crowing out the more interesting stuff.

To protect the guilty and the innocent alike I've removed the usernames from the following report, the sort was by number of points per domain per user, so every line reflects a single individual submitting a certain domain.

So, for instance the first individual has submitted 716(!) links from the same domain (and first!).
> Each incremental physical good deprives someone else of a copy of that good which could otherwise be gained. This is not true for digital goods, which have zero marginal cost. No tangible good has a zero marginal cost.

While true, that's irrelevant to an argument that claimed that sunk costs were an externality that wasn't all that important.
Steve Krug (author of Don't Make Me Think) has a new book on usability testing
How Bands You've Never Heard Of Are Making Tons Of Money On iTunes
Set up pingdom.com to monitor for us. Will likely be shelling out for some extra servers as well.

Your advice is much appreciated!
I think this is a critical subject for many people here working on consultant jobs, considering a new job or even frustrated with their current compensation. I have known many people to undervalue their contribution and still others who inflate their importance.

My simple rules for happy employment:

Rule number one: Always remember you work for yourself. Your employer has merely rented your time to complete a task. Time has long passed when an individual could be secure in a lifelong working relationship with a corporation. Get everything you can from your employeer through fair negotiation upfront before you enter into agreement. Do not be afraid to ask. Squeaky hinges get oil.

Rule number two: You are worth as much as someone is willing to pay you - no more, no less. Every single conversation regarding compensation should be considered a negotiation. There are no hard and fast rules, only guidelines and suggestions.

Rule number three: Never, ever, take the first offer. Sleep on it.

Of course, the best employer is you. If you can be your own boss - do it by all means necessary. If you are not at that point yet, that is what rule number one is for. Own what you do for an employer as your own. That way you are the boss every day.
I don't even think it's just people spending a lot of money building a site. Outside the tech sector Flash is the #1 choice of every graphics designer turned wannabe web designer. These guys generally have no idea how to code but can sell to small business customers with a few canned flash effects. So you see a lot of flash in smaller sites too.
The Paradox of Inefficient Routines: What will Apple’s latest creation change
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels

True in the 1940s and still true today.

If a lie is stated often enough it begins to feels like the truth. I notice this just by reading articles from Chinese 'official' news, how much more intense must it be when in the country itself?

Not that I'm saying the US (and any other country) is 'right' in its dealings with the world either - these issues are never black and white. But the Chinese version of the 'truth' always appears to be the darker shade of grey.
Get paid what you're worth
> This is a concept people use all the time in everyday life without provoking ontological crises.

+1 for common sense; however:

> This is why forums are such a time sink.

I doubt that you can realize the benefits of an open forum without paying what we might call the free speech tax - the inevitable disruptions of pedantry and/or trolling, which under the right circumstances are insightful and even revelatory.
Semi-unrelated to the actual content of this particular post:
(I apologize about that, by the way)

Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis?

He's often propped up as some sort of guru/authority/etc. of start-ups and the Web in general, and I just don't see it at all. I've never read any words of his and felt like a smarter or more knowledgeable person afterward; I only ever see rather mundane platitudes.

Perhaps I just haven't read the right pieces of his? If anyone believes this might the case, please consider responding to this post with a link or two. I'm seriously very baffled by his image (and to be honest, I don't think highly of Mahalo as a concept, for many various reasons I won't detail here unless someone is interested in them).
World's first 3D office photocopier launches
I completely agree with the judgement that Flash is the cause of most application crashes on Safari. It is time for flash to die. Not only are most flash plugins terribly inefficient (demanding 100% processor power on both cores to run a simple movie is ridiculous) but they also tend to consume more memory than they should.

The only people who would want flash to stick around would be flash based ad providers and flash based games. Movies and other formats are easily dealt with using HTML 5.

I think it would be best if Apple created their own flash implementation, yet Adobe probably wouldn't want them doing that.
I think this is a critical subject for many people here working on consultant jobs, considering a new job or even frustrated with their current compensation. I have known many people to undervalue their contribution and still others who inflate their importance.

My simple rules for happy employment:

Rule number one: Always remember you work for yourself. Your employer has merely rented your time to complete a task. Time has long passed when an individual could be secure in a lifelong working relationship with a corporation. Get everything you can from your employeer through fair negotiation upfront before you enter into agreement. Do not be afraid to ask. Squeaky hinges get oil.

Rule number two: You are worth as much as someone is willing to pay you - no more, no less. Every single conversation regarding compensation should be considered a negotiation. There are no hard and fast rules, only guidelines and suggestions.

Rule number three: Never, ever, take the first offer. Sleep on it.

Of course, the best employer is you. If you can be your own boss - do it by all means necessary. If you are not at that point yet, that is what rule number one is for. Own what you do for an employer as your own. That way you are the boss every day.

EDIT: had to repost, bad url. thanks to orborde for the heads up.
My sense is that the Osprey is pretty complex due to it's VTOL features. I don't quite see how this is any less complicated, I wonder how reliably this could be made to operate.
The fact that it is easier (less expensive) for a company to settle a case for $1K, rather than fight and win a case while costing themselves $10k gives the companies no incentive to fight back. Also, The plaintiff is already in debt and is having trouble paying, so what would a company get out of counter suing?

The right incentive is for enough people to do this that the companies find it cheaper to train their phone collectors about what they're legally allowed to do.
Are you suggesting artists or non-programmers to create animations not by using an authoring tool, but by typing numerous for's and setTimeout's ?

1. Write new authoring tool that outputs numerous fors and setTimouts

2. ...

3. Profit!
NASA has a long history of working on jet packs. Initially these were proposed for hopping around the moon:

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/RPIF/beta/
This might be more practical than a jetpack (assuming there's actually a mission for it), but in terms of cool, it looks like an airborne Segway.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels

True in the 1940s and still true today.
Check out that toolbar!

Sorry, but I couldn't concentrate on the article, there was popup advertising from the website telling me how awesome it was and it was too distracting.
It's nice to know my PC will be able to run just about anything without need to spend $100 every 2 years.

Snow Leopard didn't cost anywhere near $100. I paid about $30 for it.
I would have to assume that the landings must be somewhat assisted via a fly-by-wire system of some sort. Given the size of the rotors vs the lightness of the airframe this thing would be very very touchy to land so some sort of intermediate computer translation of the pilot input would be a given.