skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you discussing a point or running a partisan script?

Actually, I was going to ask you the same thing. The general argument that "most of the population likes unions, which is why you don't hear this conservative point of view" and "the media is liberal, which is why you don't hear this conservative point of view" are both variations on the same tired theme.

In point of fact, "most corporations" are not "the Fortune 100" by definition.

Obviously. But talking about "most corporations" in some general sense is so broad as to be practically meaningless for the purposes of this conversation.

Also, you continue to overestimate the available disposable income they have to spend on enormous political campaigns.

You're asserting that without proof. My argument (which, to be honest, should be obvious) is that corporate interests generally have far more money available to them than union interests.
I was wondering if a non-Italy EU startup could be caused problems by the Italian Gov?
thanks :D
I'm absolutely assuming a company is purely a vessel to voice the shareholders opinions, provided that doing so is in accordance with the corporate charter.

For example, if Apple, who sells computers, decides to push an agenda to segregate schools using the money and influence it acquired from selling iPods and iPads, do you think this is okay?

It depends. As far as I know, the corporate charter of Apple is the standard "increase shareholder value" charter. In that case, it would not be acceptable for Apple to do this unless somehow segregation increased shareholder value. In fact, pushing segregation would be violating the rights of minority shareholders.

However, pushing a "windows sux" law or candidate would not violate the rights of minority shareholders since such a corporate strategy could reasonably increase shareholder value.

On the other hand, the corporate charter allowed Apple to devote 10% of their profits to general racism (or perhaps to general social causes, as agreed to by the board), then it would be acceptable regardless of the opinion of the minority.

This is simply a question of contract law. If you don't like the charter of a company, don't buy shares.

!!!If you let people use power accrued through unrelated methods push certain agendas, then special interests that stand weakly on their own merits' will have undeserved representation in our government!!!

This is not an issue restricted to corporations. In general, we allow people to persuade other people to vote in all sorts of ways. Some people have persuasive power accrued through unrelated methods.

For example, Barack Obama has verbal persuasive power accrued through methods (community organizing and teaching law) completely unrelated to government insurance, union bailouts and cash for clunkers. Should he be forbidden from speaking?
Hollywood loses case against Aussie ISP
The recent SCOTUS decision was indeed correct if precedent is to be taken into account. However, I think 100 years of bad legal precedent and the status quo has blinded you (and the Supreme Court, for that matter) towards the real issue. Corporate personhood might be a red herring on the actual issue of campaign finance reform, but it is one of the most important issues facing our civilization and this Supreme Court decision is drawing needed attention to the underlying issue.

It is a legal accident that corporate personhood was established in the first place. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2469/how-can-a-corp...

While corporations are not flesh and blood people, we as humans can certainly define intangible entities into existence. They are still made up of people, but that does not diminish the realness of an entity created only by our civilization's power of words and ideas.

I think people should have rights; not inanimate entities. I think corporate personhood is one of the most egregious mistakes ever committed by humanity as it has allowed living people to no longer be accountable for their crimes. I also think it's too late to fix -- if the USA eliminated corporate personhood, the stock market would crash and there would be a mass exodus of corporations to more business friendly countries.

It's not a hopeless situation though; there will continue to be restrictions on the rights of corporations. I'm optimistic that Congress is going to overturn this most recent Supreme Court decision.

We could be doing more. As an important first step, I suggest a drastically increased use of the corporate death penalty, starting with multiple-time convicted felon (and statistical mass-murderer) Pfizer. If Pfizer was a flesh and blood person, it would be spending a very long time in prison. Instead, it has only paid some of the largest criminal settlements in DoJ history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer
What's wrong with compiling to JavaScript? It's already widely supported and if you're compiling another language to it you can pretend like it doesn't exist.

I can understand not liking JavaScript, but hating it with a passion seems excessive. Do you really hate JavaScript or just having to deal with the issues of incompatible browsers? I prefer languages like Haskell that enforce strong static typing, but as far as runtime typed languages go I think JavaScript is pretty nice.
You misunderstand. There is no side I disagree with. The only thing I disagree with is using strict constructionist interpretations, whether such interpretations argue for or against campaign finance reform. Similarly, I am opposed to literal interpretations of religious documents, independent of how I feel about the morals behind them. I think rejection of absolute interpretations is an essential prerequisite to a constructive debate, which is why I bring it up. You may look to the religious right in the United States for examples of the effectiveness of debates that do not reject absolute interpretation.
There is a core principle in human factors and ergonomics - the hand is a lousy holding device. Too many small muscle groups - fatigue easily. More prone to injury. Maintaining neutral postures in wrist a real challenge - static wrist flexion &/or wrist extension causes pain, discomfort, then injury. iPad is a Musculoskeletal Disorder waiting to happen. Check out our blog post on this issue - http://bit.ly/ERGOLABiPAD
The prototypical ruby case would be:

def some_method(x, &block)
yield x
end

then to call it:

some_method "hey" { |v| print v }

That might not look like much, but it allows you to create methods that can extend the language expressively and then use them without extra crufty syntax or sigils obstructing their meaning.
Space: It’s Still a Frontier
Film Industry loses Australian piracy case
"Your last sentence surprised me, though."

Human political freedom in the US is something I'm interested in, and I'm not actually interested in wandering off the topic. I would hope someone engaging me in discussion on the issue wouldn't try to pull off into other directions - that would be disengaging.
Your statements aren't backed up by the facts.

Sure they are.

According to opensecrets.org a big ol' scary mega-rich industry such as oil and gas has so many "orders of magnitude" more money to throw around and so many disproportionate connections in Washington compared to, say, teachers and education interests that they managed to overspend said education interests by a whopping... 37% over the last 2 decades.

You're conflating available capital with actual money needed to win. Suppose we're playing cards. If you've got $100 in your pocket and I've got $1000, I can browbeat you out of the game without spending my whole $1000. I only need to spend until you're out of money or, to mix metaphors, until I've bought up all the TV time and drowned out your contributions with the relevant congress members.
A Wikipedia alias counts as evidence of usage? I've never heard USSC either. Google thinks its United States Stove Company, or United States Sentencing Commission: http://www.google.com/search?q=ussc
I guess the issue with terms and conditions is that they're not important until they're important. Suddenly you act in good faith and get taken to court because a customer interprets something differently - precision leads to verbosity, particularly in the law.
Do customers of your employer really want their money to indirectly support your political views? Probably not. Therefore, you (like a corporation) should be forbidden from spending your own money trying to persuade people that your point of view is correct.
"You're asserting that without proof"

Without proof, you're making the remarkable claim that the Fortune 100 companies each have billions of dollars they're ready to throw at political races.

'The general argument that "most of the population likes unions, which is why you don't hear this conservative point of view" and "the media is liberal, which is why you don't hear this conservative point of view" are both variations on the same tired theme.'

As I didn't say either thing, I must assume you are running a purely partisan script. You won't need my further involvement then, I trust.
Offtopic question: where can I get a hierarchical category/index/guideline to many of these * laws ?

I'd like to quotes these cool stuff as well, just need a way to look it up :)
Here's a few more uses from google:

"I think it's unfortunate when some use what has often been called the Washington Monument strategy," Mr. Pataki said at a news conference. "When you make a cut, you immediately say you are going to cut the Washington Monument because it is the most visible way to get public attention."
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/15/nyregion/suny-trustees-pla...

http://writteninfo.com/2009/04/fire-department-in-fairfax-co...

http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/24528.html

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/07/15/the-washington-mon...
pumping lemma?
Serious question: is Mixergy considered a worthwhile site? Haven't I seen it dissed on HN before?
A privately funded fire service would only put out fires in those buildings or neighborhoods which had paid the fire fee. Poor areas, where the residents could not easily afford the fire fee, would be at risk of burning down. Capitalism is not a reasonable way to provide firefighting services.
"Mr Cobden also suggested that the companies should ask the file-sharing program BitTorrent to do more to crack down on piracy."

I think people may not quite understand how this works (again).
I hate JavaScript with a passion.

Pray tell us, why?
That's why we have sites such as http://thefunded.com so we can share that information with all the people who need to know (the founders), while avoiding public embarrassment.
Get Rid of DSL and Go Wireless
"There is no side I disagree with"

So your misrepresentation of a pro-free-speech stance as "absolutist" and likening it to religious fundamentalism is disinterested trolling?
This looks very helpful. I've had some trouble migrating from a GUI Subversion client to command-line Git.
> I'm absolutely assuming a company is purely a vessel to voice the shareholders opinions, provided that doing so is in accordance with the corporate charter.

Then the company will become a vessel to voice the opinion of the corporate charter.

> It depends. As far as I know, the corporate charter of Apple is the standard "increase shareholder value" charter. In that case, it would not be acceptable for Apple to do this unless somehow segregation increased shareholder value. In fact, pushing segregation would be violating the rights of minority shareholders.

So isn't pushing agendas that have the sole purpose of increasing shareholder value potentially contradictory to the interests of the general public population of citizens, whom the government are obligated to serve?

> On the other hand, the corporate charter allowed Apple to devote 10% of their profits to general racism (or perhaps to general social causes, as agreed to by the board), then it would be acceptable regardless of the opinion of the minority.

Again the company now is acting as an inhuman entity. It has interests characterized by a charter, not by a human being's potentially malleable opinions.

> This is simply a question of contract law. If you don't like the charter of a company, don't buy shares.

Yes but some of us can't say no to an iPhone. Should we be forced to indirectly support segregation?

> This is not an issue restricted to corporations. In general, we allow people to persuade other people to vote in all sorts of ways. Some people have persuasive power accrued through unrelated methods.

Yes we allow individuals to do that. But there is a reason corporations imposing their influence is frowned upon. I think your misunderstanding stems from the fact that you see a company as having the rights of a person. But a company is not a person. A company does not have the same needs as a person and thus it has the possibility of having conflicting interests with those of a citizen. The government is here to provide equal representation for citizens, not arbitrary entities.

> For example, Barack Obama has verbal persuasive power accrued through methods (community organizing and teaching law) completely unrelated to government insurance, union bailouts and cash for clunkers. Should he be forbidden from speaking?

No because Barack Obama is a human, he is not a corporation. He has a right to speak for human beings' interests because he is one (at least the last time I checked). A company is not a human. It has a distinct non-human character defined by your so called "corporate charter." A corporation accruing power (through money) is different from a human accruing power through money, or otherwise. A corporation does it because it has to, a human does it for a plethora of reasons unknown. But we do know that whatever the human's reasons are, they are because he/she is a human. And the government is supposed to represent the interest of human citizens.
Can I use this to charge my laptop?
Oracle Hacker Gets The Last Word
I think most people who "hate javascript", dislike working with the DOM, is that true for you? I personally think javascript is a pretty simple & beautiful language. It has its warts, but so does ruby, python, and other dynamic languages.
No, because I've made that mistake before. I took a job at Napster in 2001 making $80k, turning down a less stressful company for $110k. The year I spent at Napster was the worst year of my life, but I believed in the company and thought it was worth it. It was not. Since Napster, Money is my number one criteria for a job. I'm not 21 and naive anymore.
Well, yes, as it's a use, it's evidence of use. I didn't exactly invent it. :)

Try googling +ussc "supreme court". It's a less-used, but real initialism.
I think there's a difference between sharing their names in the appropriate places (eg, a startup school presentation), and publishing them on a social news site. It's contextually similar to a common discussion about celebrities and criminals, which compares "the public interest" with "of interest to the public".

I'd be interested to know who they are. But until / unless I get involved with the VC community and meet with pg to discuss, it's not beneficial for me to know.
Support for Legacy Browsers
IMHO, Mixergy is the best thing since sliced bread.
Using BeTwittered? Did you know it sends your Twitter u/p plaintext in the url?
BeTwittered is a pretty popular and visually appealing iGoogle, etc gadget for Twitter.

I've been using it for a while until today I saw that it sends your Twitter username and password in clear text, without SSL, as a GET parameter, making it extremely easy to intercept.

Here's a sample request: http://betwittered.com/api/?_=1265242511260&req=verify_credentials&username=foo&password=bar

You've been warned.

The obvious solution is to switch to oAuth, of course, which should be easy enough to implement, considering all the oAuth libraries floating around for all the popular languages.

P.S. I also tweeted this to the BeTwittered creators, so that they can fix the problem.
With the indirection that corporate structure creates, the following are some of my concerns:

1) You mention "Those same people "it" (or in reality, the people within it) acts on behalf of."

a) 'the people within it' --> a company does emphatically not speak for the people within it. This is in stark contrast with a political party or other groups joined by individuals for political purposes

b) you could argue for the shareholders --> but, the major shareholders are mostly pension funds etc. Membership to these funds is mandated by employers, with little choice by employees (i.e. most voters).

2) And your 2nd comment: "Why do you dive on this red herring instead of trying to address whatever your real concern is?"

The United States Constitution preamble: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

If a corporations can run for a seat in Congress, and, if they are the voice of shareholders, and these shareholders can be foreign, where does that leave our democracy?
Dogproxy: HTTP proxy using node.js for avoiding the dogpile effect
I think in those contexts, DSL is more a description of how an API feels to use, than a precise technical categorisation.`

Ergonomic distinctions are useful though, as is the distinction between declarative-style APIs and more imperative ones, which 'DSL' is often used to make.
I think you are interpreting "legal personhood" in a manner that is incorrect.

"Legal personhood" means that the corporate entity is a legal person in the matter of contracts and lawsuits. The "person" of the corporation is just a facade (in the design patterns sense) which provides useful simplifications in contracts and lawsuits.

You could completely replace corporate personhood with contract law. You would just have 10,000 page contracts that would specify the liability of each individual shareholders is limited to X, a lawsuit must target all shareholders and damages/debts are limited to Y, etc. Basically, each contract would reproduce corporate law.

Then whenever you wanted to collect a debt or sue the company, you'd need to dig into the contract to figure out how.

Instead, we've created a useful simplification/standardization: you say "Company X owes me $50,000", and it's up to Company X to figure out internally how to deal with this. It's also standardized to a few specific forms (LLCs, LLPs, S-Corps, C-corps, etc).

That's all corporate personhood is. A corporation has no inherent rights except those rights granted it by it's shareholders. Similarly, your computer has no rights, but that doesn't mean the government can pass a law saying "your computer may not criticize Obama." Such a law doesn't violate your computers rights, it violates your rights.

Similarly, laws against political speech violate the rights of the owners of the corporation who are ordinary flesh and blood people (as opposed to legal facades to simplify lawsuits and contracts).
Newspapers are burdened by their failure to break out of the convolution of the idea of their identity with their historical form. Newspapers are still stuck on the model of providing a "full" news experience to its readers much in the same way that many failed big dot-coms (Excite comes to mind) held too long to the "portal" model of the web during the first dot-com boom/bust.

In an era where communication is difficult there is value in aggregating that communication (local news, national news, international news, business news, sports, weather, broadcast advertisements, etc.) into one coherent source. There's a great network effect in that model. However, that model is broken by modern technology which has dramatically lowered the cost of communication. There no longer is any value to regurgitating the same AP wire report in the local paper since the cost to distribute such reports to the entire world are practically nil in the modern age.

There is still value in unique, original reporting but modern news institutions do so little of that. This is where the conflict comes from. The value of a newspaper was once the sum of the value of the network effect of the readership (e.g. in regards to classified ads) and the transmission of non-local news and the original reporting. Today none of those things have true value except the last. And, unfortunately for most papers, this is the most difficult, most costly, and lowest margin aspect of the entire paper.

There's still value in some of the things newspapers do, but newspapers still insist on defining themselves in forms that are no longer financially sensible in the context of modern technology. Until that changes (maybe via most newspapers dying and being replaced by more modern institutions) newspapers will continue their long slow slide into oblivion.
I would sum up HN's general feeling towards Mixergy as "pretty positive." Many proclaim it as a must read for entrepreneurs. Others praise AndrewWarner for always improving his interviewing skills. There's naysayers for sure, but this is the interwebs after all.
Nonblocking disk IO is a pain compared to nonblocking network, and redis compiles with minimal deps.
Google App Engine 1.3.1 SDK Prerelease
"But there's no particular reason why one could not have a legal system with one and not the other."

Yes, but if it's a matter of "a corporation should have some rights a human has, but not other rights", we're already there. The idea that corporation has all human rights is already transparently false. For one thing, anything that requires a "citizen" is going to be something they can't do.

Anyone who thinks that we've transitioned from "corporations have some of the rights of humans" to "corporations have all of the rights of humans" is emoting, not thinking. We've gone from one subset of rights, to another, to yet a third.

And they still have responsibilities, and in fact have some responsibilities that normal citizens don't have. The casual presumption, for those that are so presuming, that this particular transition is some sort of unique disaster or major shift in the balance of rights v. responsibilities is not justified.
> the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system

That set off my bogometer. What is "quantum energy"?

The devil is always in the details, but I have yet to see a popular account of anything having to do with entanglement that didn't completely ignore the fundamental fact that entanglement and measurement are the same physical phenomenon. Once you realize that most of the mysteries simply evaporate.

http://www.flownet.com/ron/qm.pdf
Perhaps BitTorrent should run for congress, and just confuse the judicial system in multiple countries, on multiple fronts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098559
15 Books Every Entrepreneur Should read
Judiciary down. Executive and Legislative to go.
My jaw dropped after I read the first few words: "The Australian film and television industry has lost a case."
The modern 'post' relationship
In addition, it stores your Twitter username and password in unencrypted cookies. /sigh
Vegetative brains show glimmers of awareness
Hard to believe that people actually think that unions have the same amount of money to get their message out as corporate interests.

If you believe that, please do downvote me and add a comment letting me know how you've come to that conclusion.
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