skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't map reduce patented by google?
Most large assemblies of people are like that. Unions are like that. Political action groups are like that. Underground movements are like that. The impracticalities of having everyone agree on everything means that whenever you have a large assembly of people you must hand over control to decision-makers.

Shareholders do have ultimate control over corporations, by the way. But shareholders, generally, would rather sell their stock--or fall asleep at the wheel--then exercise corporate governance.

But that's besides the point.

You are downplaying the fact that the Constitution clearly grants us right to assembly, in the same amendment that grants us free speech, and an assembly of people has the right to speech just as much as a person does. According to jurisprudence, the government may only curtail these rights with laws that meet a "strict scrutiny" standard: they must meet a compelling government interest, they must be narrowly tailored, and they must be close to minimally restrictive. McCain-Feingold does not meet the second and third standards, and 4 justices think it does not meet the first.
Because corporations are immortal. Their stock price is based on the net present value of all future profits they earn, which is why a company can suppress short-term profits and still have their stock price go up (by, e.g., investing extra in R&D).

Politicians are mortal, but, worse than that, their political "assets" can be taken away if they don't have high enough approval.

Basically, politicians have an artificially high discount rate; they put a huge premium on certain benefit now over possible benefit later, because they won't be around for the "later".

Corporations have the lowest possible discount rate, because the people who end up owning them (i.e. those who value the stock the most) are the people with the lowest discount rate at that point in time.
Well, if campaign contributions are limited (to level the playing field) then a company's expenditures should be using the campaign contribution allowance of its shareholders.
Text of the Supreme Court opinion:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html
Firefox 4 Mac Theme Mockups
Free speech protections for individuals don't protect us against prosecution for making fraudulent claims or certain types of lies (e.g. libel, slander, yelling fire in a crowded theater, perjury, and so on). Why would a right to free speech protect corporations for making fraudulent or otherwise endangering statements about their products?
Have you never heard of PACs, MoveOn - or for that matter, political parties?

These are organizations that exist for this sort of purpose. Why would some special-purpose single-election non-profit be any more "dangerous" than the sort of organizations that already exist?
When should you store serialized objects in the database?
my tmux is cvs. You can just comment out the options that fail, but I recommend getting a newer release. It builds really painlessly.
VortexBox 1.1 has been released - Linux Critic
You must be joking. People like Dons run or use a blog spidering program for anything that mentions Haskell.

In less than 10 minutes after posting anything remotely negative about Haskell, I have a horde of angry fanboys telling me how I am an idiot.
Good luck with that Italian government.
Welcome to the Milky Way Transit Authority
By coincidence I decided to properly configure screen yesterday, getting rid of the two stupid defaults that it comes with:

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/screen/
Corporations are already formed for the sole purpose of electing an individual aka. The Committee to Elect Barack Obama.

Also, buying all the airtime is basically impossible as it decreases supply while increasing demand. Once investors realized someone was trying to do that, they'd buy ad space just to sell to that company. It would be incredibly expensive to organize all the sub-companies needed to buy it all with out anyone noticing. If anyone notices the gig is up as investors will swoop in to take a cut of the action.

Besides, if anyone actually managed to do that, it would be VERY easy for the other side to get articles written about how their viewpoints can't be expressed.

It would generate so much free publicity for the other campaign that it would likely be counterproductive. I'd love to be the candidate opposing the guy who bought all the ad time. It's pretty much a guaranteed victory because of the public backlash that would result.
Does no one remember what happened with GIF? It got so widely adopted that is was impossible to stop using it. The other image format supported by the web was JPEG, which wasn't suitable for non-photographic images because of it's lossy nature and imprecise control over colour.

And then suddenly, Unisys asked for lots of money from everyone producing software which wrote GIFs.

Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Ahh, so we're finally cutting out the middle-man then. Nice.
"It's not a group of people, either, or they would call it a collective, co-op, or a partnership"

That seems circular.
It's simple, really. Italy profits from being connected to the internet more than it costs them, so they'll do the right thing eventually.

This goes for any country that wants to control / regulate the internet that gets a substantial portion of their telecommunications via the net.

If Djibouti or Upper-Volta would decide to legalize stuff like this they could get away with it because the public outcry would be relatively small, if they do it in Italy then whichever political party was the one to make that decision will find themselves without any power at the next elections.

I would take this with a substantial grain of salt. Less than a week ago Italy's prime minister suggested that Israel should join the EU:

http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&nid=...

think of it as publicly funded entertainment.
Apparently, obscenities pass for arguments these days. It says something when all you can do is spew obscenities at a dead person instead of arguing why she was wrong.
If you don't want to spend your time on fluff hate pieces, pass.
For an interesting discussion about "What's living & dead in Ayn Rand's moral & political thought", head over to http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/whats-living-and-dead-in-...
I'd say it would be a problem if half the class just doesn't show up, figuring they can just watch the lecture online later. Some professors think this will make undergrads lazy about showing up to class, and more likely to fall behind.
ScaleWell grant for Entrepreneurs.  We're having a party.
>will there be a purpose formed corporation whose sole goal is the election of an individual?

I believe this already exists and is called a campaign. There are already rules governing fair play for campaigns, along with political action committees (PACs) and 501(c)3 groups.
Cognitive dissonance: it's what's for breakfast.
Ask HN: How to find a mentor/advisor?
Hey guys,

Me and my co-founder are in the process of writing our MVP, but as we're both students without serious connections in the tech world, particularly the entrepreneurial/valley world, I feel like we should have a mentor or advisor to give a little guidance. Not somebody to really help with the code or anything but rather grant some wisdom on the other parts of startup life. Would it be wierd/rude to have an open-call of sorts, of people that might be interested? Should we, perhaps, aim and cold call somebody we admire and respect and see if perhaps they would take us under their wing?
Edward Tufte's advice is to visualize your audience (i.e., "users") as "smart but busy".
Why wouldn't it scale to sue people? As long as one lawyer can make more money than he costs, they could employ more lawyers? Also, a lot of people might just be scared and pay licensing fees through their automated web form, without the need of a lawyer.
Indeed it is (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...). I'm not aware of them ever attempting to enforce it though. There are plenty of examples of companies which hold patents that they've never enforced (IBM comes to mind).
Revere Security Appoints Whitfield Diffie as Chief Cryptographer
Monster buys Yahoo HotJobs for $225 mil in cash
Kind of like "Montgomery of the El Alamein," which means Montgomery of the the the Amein.
> "I'm pretty sure all you have to prove is that a corporation isn't a "person" or a "citizen"."

All of this really sounds like a lazy engineer inherited from the wrong class...
Email accounts at risk from not-so-secret questions and census data
Why is there a persistent assumption that a politician accountable to voters is under less pressure than a corporate director accountable to shareholders?

Because when things go bad, corporate officials get fired a lot more often than incumbent politicians lose elections.
Prozac and the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications
This is as atrocious as banning public speaking.
This move is obviously motivated by politics and business. Berlusconi basically runs Italy like a corporation that he owns, and since he controls 90% of Italian media his interests don't align with sites such as youtube, Reddit, Digg, etc. that pose a threat to his business. What he's doing is what any (heartless..) savvy businessman would do: Cut out the competition. Of course this is absolutely terrible for Italian democracy and free speech.

It's nothing personal - only business.
They do make code more readable sometimes... but I think they are often used in Ruby as an alternative to @obj.method(:foo) -- in other words the Rubyist would use lambda{@obj.foo} and the pythonista would use obj.foo
Hope to see everyone who can make it here. YC and Techstars alum are greatly encouraged to attend. These participants are looking up to you.

It's also a good opportunity to meet mentors and potential cofounders for startups who can make it.
This is a project that is giving away money, $1000 at a time, to startups, in Chicago, and this is the first time I've ever heard of them. I'm very confused.
Google-kontoer
And if you did, it isn't really that hideous to embed the python interpreter in your C++ app...
Yea, noticed the newest is 1.1... I'd prefer to find a debian package for it rather than building it though, I often need to rebuild machines and I always regret adding steps like this (I can just stick with screen since it's everywhere for free). I'll see what I can find... Thanks.

Edit: 1.1 package: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/tmux/tmux_1.1-1_...

Some commands are still not working (pane-active-border-bg and capture-pane, it seems) but I can take a closer look at those after playing with it for a while and getting comfortable.
True, though I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's a mish mash implementation. It's more of a silo'd approach. One section of the website might be a wiki, so we use a particular tool there. It's a self-contained unit but perhaps pulling in some common stylesheets to retain a consistent look and feel. Another section might be a blog part of the site. Again, it might pull in some common assets for the consistent look and feel.

Instead of thinking of code re-use, we're left with a UNIX style resource re-use. Every component can stand alone, but they all work in conjunction with each other and can be re-arranged to work in different ways.
Android and the Linux kernel community
Which doesn't suggest anything either way for the issue at hand.
In a world where you have to pay for things, the ability to freely use your money is necessary for most rights. Unless everyone can will themselves TV and radio time and wish pamphlets and websites into existence, restriction of spending for political speech is a questionable proposition at best.

Though, to be fair, everyone will likely be able to do these things (or their equivalents) in the distant-but-not-too-distant future.
Rael Dornfest's http://www.blosxom.com/? I'd say that blazed the trail ~10 years ago for this type of software. I know for me at least, Blosxom was incredibly eye opening.
From comments on the page:

Mark, you’re absolutely right that it “is never good for a brand to be considered one of 2,000 plus sources.” Is this Google’s fault for creating this perception in the eyes of you and me? Absolutely not. Newspapers have become a cheap “news” provider- in no way consistent with what they stood for years ago – legitimate reporting, digging up facts and stories that actually mattered and were relevant to people, etc. not just the ridiculous garbage they call front-page news nowadays.

Sums up the problem with this article.

The claim that Google is bad for the newspaper business is certain but the question is whether that's bad thing (also, craigslist has actually been much worse for newspapers than Google). If newspapers in general could make claim for consistent quality, for integrity in editorial policy and so-forth, the claim for Google being a bad thing could be justified but they can't. Ruppert Murdoch defending journalism? Please!

The newspaper business have both been hit terribly by the Internet. The problem is, they were fat, greedy monopolies which wilted in the face of open competition. I'd probably feel more for literary journals - but I think these have been hit more by how much people read.
This seriously must be a joke. Isn't it? From their website:

"Murray Hill Inc., a diversifying corporation in the Washington, D.C. area, has long held an interest in politics and sees corporate candidacy as an emerging new market.

The campaign’s designated human, Eric Hensal, will help the corporation conform to antiquated “human only” procedures and sign the necessary voter registration and candidacy paperwork. Hensal is excited by this new opportunity. “We want to get in on the ground floor of the democracy market before the whole store is bought by China.”"

This seems like mockery to me.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday
It's disturbing to me how easily some people's absurd hatred of corporations in the abstract can override even the most dearly held liberties in the western world (such as freedom of speech). The recently overturned campaign finance law was a horrendous attack on free speech. Something as simple as posting about a local candidate on your personal blog could have been considered a campaign contribution in kind, falling under the regulation and restrictions of said law. And that's hardly the most egregious aspect.

As the saying goes, those who sacrifice liberty for safety deserve (and receive) neither. In the same manner those who sacrifice liberty toward reducing corruption in government deserve (and receive) neither.
Rephrasing that point: if a corporation was really merely a group of individuals working collectively, why invent another word rather then reuse one of the many existing ones?
This will give ARM a leg up.
Welcome to HowToNode.org
No, they're exactly the same beast!

I've used decorators to add attributes to function objects in several projects in the past -- you don't have to wrap the original.
I would be surprised, actually. With vague software patents covering nearly everything related to video encoding ("Method for the computation of the sum of two integers"), it's a legal minefield. If people could freely implement their own ideas, then we would definitely have something better. But thanks to software patents, this is not possible.
H.264 to Remain Fee-Less for Free Internet Video Through 2016 (via DF)
I am completely opposed to web standards including proprietary codecs

h.264 is not in the HTML5 standard and nobody is trying to get it put there. The reason it is a hot topic is that it is what people are actually using, not because of web standards.

HTML5 should have Theora (or some other open gratis and libre codec) as the standard which all browsers wishing to be HTML5 compliant must be able to handle

The point of the spec is to document what is shared in common across browsers. Mandating something that was not going to be shared in common would have turned the spec into a work of fiction.
It would be incredibly expensive to organize all the sub-companies needed to buy it all with out anyone noticing.

Rockefeller did it. Both Senior and Junior, actually. On multiple occasions. Now, there's probably nobody alive today with that kind of capital and influence to burn on this (with possible exception of Bill Gates and the House of Saud, both of whom seem to have other plans for their money).
Ironic considering he is an investor in Mahalo http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097661
We're moving fast and hope word spreads quickly. The important thing to note is this is a bottom up movement and strives to be as egalitarian as possible.

More info at http://www.scalewell.com and http://twitter.com/scaleswell
Too Early = Wrong (2007)
I didn't understand your acronym USSC at first. Normally, the Supreme Court is referred to as SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States).

Also, you're right.
At that point, they will use different justifications to try to restrict political speech.
They might, but will they? My experience is that most people really don't want to run businesses. They want to come to work, do the job, get paid and go home. Most also go for a comfortable lifestyle rather than absolutely maximizing their income (too much work!). In that case, the college student who likes computers will probably choose to work in that field for $9/hour rather than for $10/hour at WalMart.
Amazon, Netflix and Me
As an author, I am looking forward to getting better deals by working with Amazon, Apple, etc.
In practice, you see both: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSC
It is not surprising this comes from Mark Cuban, he has had it in for Google since they bought Youtube.

But I have to give Cuban some credit here. He actually provides plausible, logically consistent, well reasoned arguments. I am not sure he is correct, but at least his arguments are well reasoned. He does not go into hysterics about how Google is stealing like some other billionaires you may have heard of.

There is however one counter argument that Cuban did not mention. If a well known newspaper leaves Google News, then they are opening the door for competitors. If a person goes to Google news, and sees a story by their trusted paper, they will click on that story even if it is one of 2000. But if he does not see their trusted newspaper, will they go to the trusted newspaper's webpage or would they simply say "well lets try this new site I have not heard of before" and then discover that the new site is just as good or maybe even better than their trusted newspaper.
I'm sorry, that's indeed what the root comment said. Thanks for the correction.

Still, I imagine they must use a lot of the same code - half the PHP standard library is just a thin wrapper of some C library, and reimplementing all of them sounds stupid.

Then again, they may just not support the majority of such libraries.
Possibly, but someone qualified enough to be a good programmer could probably also make way more in a financial or medical field. Having the ability doesn't necessarily correlate to having an interest. Many smart people may choose to repair computers because of the interaction with a variety of people daily rather than stuck in a cubicle somewhere.

Hell, I could make more money as a dentist, but I don't find the idea of poking around in people's mouths every day to be very appealing.
So you're saying we already have reasonable exceptions to the first amendment to protect society from behavior deemed objectionable as determined by congress? Kind of like when congress decided that corporations should be kept of the political process.
See also this HN submission for the original article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097567

Figure 1d in the linked-to paper illustrates the difference between high k-shell and high k nicely.

To quote from the paper (where k = # of edges a node has): "We start by removing all nodes with degree k = 1. After removing all
the nodes with k = 1, some nodes may be left with one link, so we continue pruning the
system iteratively until there is no node left with k = 1 in the network. The removed nodes,
along with the corresponding links, form a k-shell with index kS = 1. In a similar fashion,
we iteratively remove the next k-shell, kS = 2, and continue removing higher k-shells until
all nodes are removed. As a result, each node is associated with a unique kS index, and the
network can be viewed as the union of all k-shells."
"..this is a legal premise that has existed for over a century. Otherwise, you couldn't sue a company for damages."

The way our particular laws have been written and interpreted by the Supreme Court, then yes, these things are indeed tied together. But there's no particular reason why one could not have a legal system with one and not the other. That's the entire point of the OP.

Why exactly is unrestricted freedom of speech a necessary condition for corporate immunity? Assume you are building a constitution from scratch: Can you construct an argument for why you can't have corporate immunity without corporate freedom of speech, without referring to existing US case law?
At what point do these wide ranges cease to be a choice? ;)
People like to think those sorts of restrictions affect only the big players, when it's more the reverse - the largest companies have the most resources to devote to carefully jumping through legal hoops.
It is true that small differences can mean large conflicts, but I think Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy is a better illustration of this. The only doctrine that the two denominations disagreed on was the exact way in which the Pope is higher-ranked than the other metropolitan bishops; this plus language barriers and differences in cultural atmosphere produced something like 1500 years of mutual hostility which were only ended by John Paul II.

However, we can sometimes mistake _subtle_ differences for _small_ ones; but just as there's a substantial difference between the Mac OS and Windows, there's a substantial difference between Catholicism and Calvinism (which was the most successful form of Protestantism) -- the difference between God seeing that you went to Hell, and God sending you there. I could go into much greater detail (I count nine paragraphs in how I'd previously structured this comment), but that's the nutshell of the nutshell.
Corporations are legal persons. This is not the same a human beings which are natural persons. The defining issues in corporate law came from the anti-slavery amendments to the US constitution. All hinged around the usage of the term natural person vs the term person.

Edit: this means that the generic person covers both natural persons and legal persons
Not having used either program, I'm more inclined to try tmux just because it seems to give some visual cues about what's happening. Gnu-screen seems oriented entirely towards remembering commands, something that doesn't appeal to me.

That said, I think both programs more explanation concerning what they do.
My 2 cents:

Attend and participate in local technology and business meetings/events. Even if you are not in the immediate 'Valley', you will still meet some local business folks who might be willing to serve as a mentor and open up additional contacts for you.

You also mentioned that the both of you are students...possibly approach a professor for advisement?
1) Buy a large corporation
2) Create lots of child companies
3) Run them for congress
4) Create lots more child companies
5) Use them to vote
6) Take over government
7) Profit!
NASA's new mission
Fusion Garage, Strategic Partnership With CSL Group of Malaysia
You'd be surprised what you'd get just by asking politely. Find people you think can help you and that would be good teachers and just ask.
Fake Microsoft Outlook Update Installs Pandaworm Trojan
Shutup.css — Hide Comments on Many Popular Websites
Jabber's OTR-encryption lacks widespread acceptance