skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Public opinion settled in the other direction."

And we all know public opinion is never wrong.

It's really easy to share copyrighted files. It's easier, in fact, than downloading them. Both are so easy people overconsume. They download more music than they will ever hear - music they would never buy if they had to incur the cost.

More interestingly, how do plaintifs prove the sharer allowed the copy of the whole file? It's easy to imagine any downloader got the files from a number of different sources, each effectively sharing a tiny part of the file.

Thinking about it... Couldn't the protocols not advertise the parts of the file the sharer has, but, instead, receive a list of wanted parts from the downloader and respond with some, but perhaps not every, part of the file? What would happen to these lawsuits if nobody ever shared the whole file with anyone?
Being from the UK, and having travelled Europe, the women aren't any different in any appreciable way. The only main difference between an 'American' girl and any other is the lower educational standard in the US. [Ed: However, with a smaller percentile of highly educated males, this shouldn't really be a major problem for the vast majority of people.]

I would also give a caveat, in continental Europe it's a more acceptable social norm for women to groom less. I'm not necessarily talking about the underarms (I've actually seen this less in Europe than I have elsewhere), but facial and leg hair. This can get bad with more southern-European where hair colour tends to be darker.

I groom my facial hair, and if I need to I groom my body hair (I have a mildly hairy back, which I personally dislike so it gets shaved) too. So I personally believe it's common courtesy for a woman to do it too.
Maybe I can connect the dots for you. Optimization is the general problem of finding the minimum of some function f in a region. The problem with this is that it's hard. One of the reasons why it's hard is that f could have many local minima. So we look for conditions on f that make the problem easier.

That's where convexity comes in. There are two different things that can be convex: sets and functions. Convexity of sets and convexity of functions is related but not the same. Convexity of sets is well explained by the pictures on wikipedia. A function is convex if for any two points you choose, the value of the function stays below the line that connects these two points.

An example of a convex function is e^x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=e^x
Take any two points on the graph and connect them with a line. The graph of e^x will stay below that line.

An example of a function that is not convex is sin(x): http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sin+x
You can find two points on the graph such that if you connect them with a line sin(x) will go above that line. For example x=0 and x=pi.

If the function is convex then it will have only 1 minimum. So what you can do to find the minimum is just start at an arbitrary starting position and walk down hill and you will arrive at the minimum of f if f has a minimum. Note that if f had two local minima at different heights you might end up stuck in the higher minimum if you apply this method.

Now there are several techniques to walk down hill. One thing you could do is approximate f by a line. This tells you the slope of f at the point you're standing, so you know which direction is down hill. You walk a small step in this direction and repeat. This is gradient descent.

Another way to do it is to approximate f by a parabola. A parabola has a minimum that can be computed exactly. So you compute the minimum of the parabola and jump to it. Because it was an approximation this minimum will generally not be exactly f's minimum, but close. So you repeat the process to get closer and closer. This is Newton's method.

A complication is that many optimization problems have constraints on the parameters of f. For example f(a,b) could represent the profit you get from investing a dollars in product 1 and b dollars in product 2. But you only have 10 dollars so the constraint is a+b <= 10. If you just start looking for the maximum of f by taking steps or jumping around you will have to keep in mind that a+b cannot go above 10.

Another complication is that f may not be differentiable, which makes it harder to compute a line approximation and even harder to compute a parabola approximation.

There are books written on solving these issues. This one is available online: http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/
Juniper Kernel Crash - scapy Code
Facebook to Build Its Own Data Centers
I upvoted because at its core, the plurality approach is a fundamentally good idea. However, two caveats. First, beliefs aren't on a spectrum, so get several opinions, not just two. Second, diametrically imposed still shouldn't mean extremist; you'll get higher signal:noise ratio in more moderate sources.
Also, Ruby has much more complicated rules for method dispatch. Lua just has functions, and if you want to implement any more complicated dispatch, you have to do it yourself. Once I implemented Ruby-like dispatch on top of Lua, and it was terribly slow:

http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/09/disappointment/

To make a long story short, porting my existing Lua project to use my Ruby-like method dispatch resulted in a 4x slowdown.
Man, you only have to say something once and then the Internet replicates it for you. :)
Samsung SCH-M480 BlackJack III | Gatzet.com
Yes! That's the point I gravitated towards as well, there really is a similar playful yet polished vibe from several New York startups like Vimeo, Boxee and Tumblr, off the top of my head.

As for the main point of the article - couldn't disagree more, from my personal use case. I'm a Bay Are startup geek but also a designer, so hopefully my biases cancel each other out. I like Tumblr's look but abandoned it after a few days because I didn't want to get sucked into their community features. I'm not a big fan of design subcultures like deviant art or livejournal, really the only online community I've been attracted to and stuck around for is HN. And it's a pet peeve of mine when sites or apps have only good import tools and not export, it's like they want to pretend the identity you've built up around the rest of the web doesn't exist. I'd rather see better integration with my existing networks elsewhere - that's where posterous' autoposting feature really impressed me. After starting up a posterous account as part of the ycombinator application process a few months ago, I gave it a try earlier this month for personal blogging and it's completely reinvigorated my site.

And I really disagree with his contention that posterous is only for geeks - the main feature set is pretty newbie-oriented. I can have my mom set up a blog in seconds via something she already understands - email - and have it autopost to her flickr and facebook accounts, which saves her the hassle of having to refer to her notebook on my instructions on how to upload and manage those services.
Also known as "smoothed" max/min which in my opinion is better name as it is mathematically more meaningful as the max function [NOT smooth] is approximated with a smooth function.

There is no such thing as soft function in mathematics! Please be consistent when naming...
would be interesting. too bad the comments are turned off.
Really? There are no unbiased media sources. Bill Gates of all people should recognize that every publication he mentioned is biased and be aware of, and mention, their perspective. I read some of these publications, but I'm at least cognizant of their leanings and know where to go for an alternative point of view.

The Economist is great if you want the Keynesian perspective on economics and not much else. Per wikipedia: According to former editor Bill Emmott, "the Economist's philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative." The bias is clearly stated.

Scientific American is purely mainstream science. It represents the cathedral of academia.

Slate - Do they even try to be non-biased? Again, wikipedia also describes it as liberal.

NYT/WP/FT/WSJ - No comment. Anyone who has read them can form their own opinions.
I think you underestimate the fickleness of the general public. It probably wouldn't take more than a sex scandal to wipe all awareness of this from the public consciousness.
The Customer Is Always Right
Apple Tablet Heads to Verizon
At the very beginning of the article the author writes: All my bar charts are zeroed on the average picture.
In the introduction note, Bill says:

"I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through email"

Besides email (which isn't that great if you don't have GMail style threads), I wonder whether he and other prominent personalities use a closed discussion forum to engage in discourse about interesting topics like HN does. I can understand why he would be hesitant to comment on a public forum like HN.

That said, it's great to see people like PG, DHH (and others) mix with the no-names (or future-names) on HN.
PS - we won't start charging people. We recommend and sell shit from Amazon.
Did I say that? It really makes discussion a lot more interesting if you reply (however indignantly) to something that was actually said rather than something that merely makes you indignant.
The article is behind a pay wall.
And I've got some money.
Why not just do it with IP address? Too annoying for most people to spoof. The few who have shared IP addresses get screwed, not really a big deal.
For me the ultimate criterion is the degree of quality investigative journalism.

Congruent with that is the avoidance of sound bites.
For a better toppcloud link: http://toppcloud.colorstudy.com
I don't know , maybe its because I jumped in late, but I click on to answer and all I see are a bunch of ads. bad taste IMO
"The food is flown by helicopter to points throughout the capital and distributed by paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division. At the tent city, set up at a golf course, more than 10,000 people displaced by the Haitian earthquake lay under makeshift tents. Each day, hundreds of people, many young children, line up for a meal.

Tuesday morning, the helicopters came only with water. Soldiers carried boxes of water in the hot sun and supervised Haitian volunteers who handed the supplies out."

Obama's "Brownie" moment.
You should allow me to give you a bit of a background. In the eighties I got involved with a Package called Pastel (previously known as Pink Software), the external Accountants created most of the demand for it (they never actually sold it or made money out of it), but it made their job easier. You will also be surprised as to how many small businesses need sophisticated accounts. Take for example a pharmacy they probably have more stock items than a supermarket, all with expiration dates etc. Very different for a software start-up or a webshop but that is where the market is. One good selling point is to have good looking paper prints. There is no such thing as paper-less accounting.

Please don't take my comments as negative. I think the concept of attacking an established field is a very good one, but you need to give it a hard kick. You don't want to lose the battle. As for free ask any Accountant if he can do your books for free, why should a programmer's time be given out for free? Free trial period, limit accounts to a certain volume etc, I would agree as a marketing strategy.
I dunno, I think that a comment section for an author as famous as this would just be a fire-hose blast of noise.
There is no such thing as unbiased news. What you want instead is the Hunter S. Thompson model where the journalist makes their opinion clear and upfront. Then, you can judge the rest of their reporting yourself. A lot of journalism majors I know try to pretend their unbiased, but that isn't how humans work. Say it upfront like programmers do ("First of all I have to admit I use Lisp/Python/Whatever but here is what I don't like about Ruby 1.9 blah blah")

edit: typos
How is the economist Keynesian?
I suggest we take news from People's Daily - the official list of Communist Party of China - with a grain of salt.
Great feedback, I was using some test data that I should of gone over more for using it in our main screenshots. Fixed a few of the things you said onto the rest.
...new money in old media indeed.
Many of Charles Dickens' works were written in this way. They were published in periodicals and magazines, and he would normally be writing them as they were being published, rather than writing the whole book first.
Economic freedom isn't worth squat if you have no human rights.
By which measure is Bing inferior to Google? Other than what you 'know'.
Australian Economist Steve Keen talks at Google
Yeah, it would only work if he had paid moderators.
Really interested in what people think of this feat. Useful?
That's actually a refreshingly well-thought-out treatment of the subject from someone who has (and says as much up front) a massive ideological bias against the whole concept. I wish more people with "fringe" political opinions were that sensible, maybe then we'd actually stand a chance of seeing politics be about something other than petty Team A vs. Team B squabbling.
It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I meant the non-empty ones
I had thought the point of these extra fees was to make it more difficult to compare pricing between airlines. Add-on fees that don't get displayed with the fare make the actual price hard to see, which is good when they're all providing essentially equivalent goods. It's like online stores that all display the same price for an item but have wildly different shipping fees.
"The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement 'creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred.'"

I wonder how much campaign contribution money the RIAA had to spend to get those five lawyers (or lawyers with that resume) into those five positions?
It's interesting to read their spin.
I take all the comments as constructive, you've been a great help. The good looking paper prints is going to be a big focus.

I understand the free vs paid discussion but there is so many great things to sell people on top of this like custom reports, payroll, and taxes to name a few.
Interview with VaynerMedia Co-Founder, AJ Vaynerchuk
Glad I could help in some way. A few other thoughts I had after reading your response.

First, don't let the VPs of Revenue Management make you deviate from targeting chains. They have THEIR profits to account for, just like each hotel has their own profits to account for. In a way, this scares them because the revenue is not coming in through THEIR channels. If you think you can help a hotel in a chain profit, if you can prove it with data and you're passionate about it then go for them too! There are some really awesome online tools I want to use, but there are just so many policies that don't allow it. Hotel industry right now is stuck between being "innovative" and "head stuck in and around the ass cheeks region". Simply put, the hotel industry is dropping the ball in many areas where they can thrive. I would LOVE to work for a chic independent hotel doing marketing, I think I know enough about the industry and online marketing to help them immensely.

I am going to discuss it with the owner of the establishment I work at to check out the site and see what they think. They are fairly old school in their thinking and I am scared that they might fall behind. I have been trying hard to be persuasive in transitioning them into online marketing. They might be willing to test it out at their smaller property first and see how it goes. I may get back in touch with you via email in the next couple days.

All I can tell you when negotiating with sales/gm/owner is put emphasis on their value. They do want to fill a room, as a room is perishable just like a food item. A room not sold is a room that can never be sold again. Just a quick question with regards to bidding on a guest - does the hotelier see other hoteliers bidding? Or is this private?

Regardless, I am very interested to see how your venture plays out. Again, good luck!
Not the infringement itself, and not for the consumer. My main point was that the relation between copying and copyright infringement is arbitrary(1). Someone who argues that people won't create things if there is widespread copying, needs to realize that copying already is widespread.

I do get your point though. fashion and files are not the exact same thing, but are more related than one thinks. There's also other effects of the consumer being the distributor. Even 10 years ago there where no scalable method to distribute out-of-copyright works in a non-profit way, and therefor a lifetime of copyright made more sense.

(1) Hopefully has the same meaning in English, what I mean is that it's constructed and not a prerequisite for the act of creating things. Copyright law is cultural, not 'natural', as demonstrated by the pressure of US companies and government on other nations regarding copyright law.
Just chiming in as another Lua fan; I really like it because it's like the Scheme of imperative scripting languages. And while we're passing around links to papers, I've found the following the be good for additional insight:

Lua Performance Tips: (http://www.lua.org/gems/sample.pdf)

A No-Frills Introduction to Lua 5.1 VM Instructions: (http://luaforge.net/docman/view.php/83/98/ANoFrillsIntroToLu...)
I didn't vote you down, and please don't read this as an attack, it's an honest question:

Yes, he obviously has a strong opinion on the matter, because it's a direct and obvious consequence of his ethical worldview. Is this really a bad thing? Do you see a distinction between "political bias" and "ethical belief"? These aren't necessarily issues with a single objective answer, and I don't understand the tendency to dismiss ethical stances as being "political" or "impractical", typically in favor of some ambiguously "pragmatic" status-quo.

How would you rather see things work?
Just out of curiosity but how do you know this?

EDIT: I am not being sarcastic or anything.
Come now, everyone knows the iPhone battery wouldn't last 55 hours.
Well, if there is someone motivated enough to search for it.
It looks like you're whitelisting User-Agent strings, which is a ridiculously stupid idea.

You should only ever blacklist substrings in response to known issues, and regularly test that your assumptions still hold.
There are zero adverts. These are feeds - picasa, amazon, digg, youtube, wikipedia, even yahoo answers, etc. Did you not notice that? There's a sample of almost 800 questions to see how well this works.. Try to click on "more like this", just try..
What are you using instead?

I could use read-only sharing permissions as well. It would avoid me situations where my boss moves files on his desktop away from Dropbox or add a full application to a shared folder…
Spoiler: LuaJit compares even better when comparing single-threaded performance.

Edit: replaced "performs" with "compares", eliminating ambiguity around competitive performance vs clocktime performance
You will find an answer to that question in those..
My iPod didn't manage 10 hours new, I know the iPhone has a bigger battery, but with cellular and gps, I doubt a 5 fold increase in life.
Economic freedom is a human right.
It's been on my todo list to take some time to grok luajit's internals for awhile. Awesome to see Google parting ways with some cash!

This sort of makes me want to try to write a Python->Lua compiler.
On the Origin of Gravity
Neolithic Windows security hole alive and well in Windows 7
There's plenty of explanations out there, if you care to look.

Of course, there's also plenty of explanations about how government policies have created new jobs.

Measuring results and identifying causal relationships is incredibly difficult in economics, and with all the associated political issues at stake it's hard to cut through all the bullshit.
Ultimate Genesis: Sega's Official Console Emulator for iPhone
Perhaps, then, this whole discussion is moot, for as Stephen Colbert would have it, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
clickable: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870340570457501...
Starting up with a day job isn't that bad.
A pretty, rendered version of the markup is available here: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/
I always thought people who were looking for unbiased news were actually look for news that matched their own bias. I know I read certain publications/sites because I am more likely to read an article that presents a series of facts couched in a (tone|bias|opinion) that agrees with mine.

Plus "unbiased" is really hard. It's been in the 40's (F) in San Francisco today, the online paper (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/as/qr?scope=term&sourc...) has had headlines talking about how cold and rainy its been. In this case "cold and rainy" is biased, many people would consider our weather recently pleasant and balmy. That makes the chronicle biased, but not necessarily not worth reading.
"The Chinese society has generally less information bearing capacity than developed countries such as the U.S., which is an objective reality that no one can deny."
Love this quote:

"I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." - Jerome K. Jerome
You think it's possible he had one of these?

http://www.mophie.com/juice-pack-air-p/1059_jpa-ip3g-blk.htm

If I were traveling to a country like Haiti where reliable power might be an issue, I'd sure get one.
"The Chinese society has generally less information bearing capacity than developed countries such as the U.S., which is an objective reality that no one can deny."

The concept of societal "information bearing capacity" blows my mind. What a fascinating and bizarre rationalization. So inside that mindset, preventing access to information is a a public service!
Body Wrap Treatments
No, I wouldn't recommend this. It'll cost you anywhere from a few thousand to 10k+ per month. There are much better ways for you to "get the word out".
Spoiler: The Lua benchmark submissions are not parallelized.
Actually, before Sulzberger took over the NYT, the Times was the gold standard in objective reporting. I loved it back then.
You can publish ebooks through Lulu with a base cost of 1.49 http://www.lulu.com/publish/ebooks/?cid=publish_portal

I've not gone through their tutorial to see what the minimum cost is, however. Their comparison suggests how a 13$ ebook can earn you more as a writer than a $20 physical book, but once again I dont know what the minimums are.
> Some of Ruby's more excentric semantics are really hard to optimize away by a compiler.

Any examples in particular? Besides name resolution and method dispatch (and callcc, but I think that may have even been removed from Ruby 1.9) none of Ruby's semantics seem all that different from Lua. Am I missing something?

I guess there's also throw/catch and exceptions.
If you do want the SICP route, there's a free course going on right now at http://www.crunchcourse.com/ for SICP. I'm taking it at the moment ;)
1) It's insanely effective for SEO and as reputation-building.

2) They're active developers, they have client/employer work that can't be public but needs coordination, and they're the ones who will be setting that up. It's as old as sending free samples to purchasing agents, but much more effective.
I haven't found Chrome's debugging tools inferior to Firebug. I therefore use Chrome for increased browser startup time and reduced memory usage. What feature of Firebug do you use that Chrome doesn't have?
I want a pony from Guido too
I noticed that no where in the article is there any mention of the actual reason that Google came out with this announcement (i.e. they were (cyber) attacked by sources that were presumably linked with the Chinese government). It seems to only be talking about censorship and comparing China to other Western countries.
The tablet's second biggest question: Connectivity