skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charles Stross! I flew to America to buy a copy of Merchant Princes. Well, OK, not really: I tried to buy it in Japan from my Kindle with the intention of reading it on my annual trip back, and I was denied because of some licensing agreement your publisher had. I eventually bought it while passing through Detroit Airport.

Despite the fact that this is ridiculously convenient for argument I am about to make, I am actually telling the truth: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002315

When you say"rent-seeking intermediaries" I think of a different player than you do. See, Amazon makes my reading experience awesome. Your publisher? They have not made my experience awesome. I know they spend a lot of money on, e.g., typesetting and wood pulp. That must suck. I am having a hard time mustering up sufficient sympathy to back your publisher's attempt to charge me more so that I can subsidize the continued practices which result in 50% of print runs getting pulped.

Is Amazon's contribution to total awesomeness worth 70%? Eh, I don't know. I'm a software vendor. Google takes fifty cents out of the last dollar of sales for me (for advertising), despite the fact that I do all the "actual work". I use the scare quotes because if the last couple of years have taught me anything it has taught me that making the sale -- which is what Amazon does for you -- is a non-trivial bit of the business equation.

I don't see my profit split with Google as a moral issue -- I see it as a fairly simple business decision. To whit, I sure like getting that last fifty cents. I think I managed to get about $20 of your books on my trip to America. Now, I don't know whether you see $1 or $3 of that at the end of the day, but either is a darn sight better than $0, which is what your publisher is pushing hard for you to get from me.
I was able to get it through the coral cache:

http://www.mikeindustries.com.nyud.net:8080/blog/archive/201...
Does anyone know an effective way on how to filter out this drivel with greasemonkey?

Unfortunatelly it doesn't use always one single word/expression we can use to catch it.
What about people starting small businesses in accounting and law?
For me, Flash crashes multiple times every day in OS X 10.5. Clicktoflash is a godsend for Safari stability without plugin process separation.

(offer an anecdote, receive an anecdote.)
Sinomania
I've had the full komodo IDE environment for a few years, for a while somebody else paid the $$ for the license. It's nice if you do the full suite of languages targeted: ruby, python, JS, CSS.

http://www.activestate.com/komodo/

The other non-cheap IDE specifically targeting python is wingware, I've heard good things but never used

http://www.wingware.com/

-------------

I also played with the vim plugins and textmate bundles for ruby and python (at least a year ago) and thought they werre well done, quite usable. I'm one of those people who thinks you should learn vi/vim cause it'll be installed on platforms / servers where you don't have root access.
Cell Phone Laws Have No Impact On Accidents
For a different perspective on it.

You have a guaranteed monopoly on the price of Bingo Card Creator. I am not sure you would appreciate it if Paypal/(Insert other card processors here) said that they will only let you sell via them if you sold it for 9.99$. I don't that not fair either. You should be free to set the price of your goods, it is not a question of pro-consumer, its a question of using near monopoly to get a power which the market enabler should not have.

(Sorry if the last para reads like a personal attack, as it uses a personal example. That is to use an example which you and other hacker news readers are familiar with.)
They do - it's called annual shareholder meeting where shareholders vote on issues. Getting something on the ballot isn't that hard, provided a lot of people care about the particular issue.
F00 Tzu, the Art of Cyberwar.
An SEO Fable: Grasshoppers Beware
And I thought the first letter was going to be an F.
Agreed. I don't freelance, but I work remotely a few days a week, generally from home. Where my wife homeschools our sons. We have ground rules, though, that help both of us manage:

1. I walk to the cafe from 9:00-12:00-ish while she does the bulk of the work with the kids. The local cafe is quiet, so it's not a problem for me to work there, and get a lot done in that time.
2. If I can't be distracted once I'm back home, I simply close the door to our office.
3. If my wife is working with the kids, I stay out of that area of the house.
4. On days that I spend some time with the kids, it's understood that I'll need to "make up" that time in the evening after the kids are asleep.
Exceptionally smart and driven people generally - they'll move into doing more productive things than dealing with the government. Also, thinking that creating new bureaucracy creates new value through accounting/legal probably is an example of the Broken Window Fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
This can't be it, because Amazon already has their OWN mobile app in the App Store. They're only preventing third parties from using API data on mobile devices.
Some of the smartest people I know work, or have worked, for NASA. Some of the most cutting edge work is done in aeronautics for military aircraft. The Manhattan Project had its share of exceptionally smart people.

I think you're confusing exceptionally smart with exceptional business skills.
The real impossibility is getting this idea passed through congress. Unfortunately, you don't get votes by simplifying things. Instead, you have to make "progress" by adding on pork projects, subsidies, tariffs, quotas, etc. that benefit your constituents.
> but to translate that into creating jobs is a bit of a stretch.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch. It's generally not a good idea (or practiced in reality) to hire people until you have a corporation setup.

The largest barrier to setting up a corporation is cost and paperwork time. If you reduced or eliminated those, you would very likely see a lot more corporations spring up and then a lot more jobs created.

Even if many of these corporations went bust and the jobs didn't last at these ones, at least you would greatly reduce the time and cost for experimenting with a new company and you'd see the number of successful companies (which add permanent jobs) increase.
I've published a work on Kindle DRM free, downloaded it, and copied it to as many devices as I want. Where is the confusion about what DRM-free means?
Anecdotes are fine. It's extrapolating to "It's always easy to spot people who make a living programming solely in Flash" that I'm taking an issue with.
Musical Predictions
In a nut shell:

<middayc-> I have to invert my brain from stuff I am used to and
then it all makes sense
<RobertFischer> Pretty much.

A very good read. Makes me want to do something besides C/C++ this afternoon. FP actually stands for "Fantastic for Procrastination"
If your barrier to entry is the cost to incorporate, how could you afford to create a job? Surely, in any state in the union the cost of even a minimum wage salary exceeds the cost to incorporate. That's not even considering the salary cost of skilled labor.
Definitely not uncached. Fully cached, but unfortunately running on a brand new Dreamhost PS setup that apparently is not as robust as it should be. Either that, or it just needs to be tuned. Anyway, site is back up and looking into what happened.

Thanks...
Nth-to-Last Element in a Singly Linked List
In tough economic times, shoppers take haggling to new heights
Jason Calacanis' response to Aaron Wall
Amazon is behaving like Walmart here: squeezing suppliers in order to provide lower prices.

Walmart is certainly not good for Walmart suppliers, because if you want to sell there, your profit margins will go down and down, and you will need higher and higher volume and lower and lower marginal costs. It's what Walmart does. The resulting type of product is generally known as junk.

Is it good for consumers? Probably, because low prices are good, and if you don't want junk, you can go elsewhere. If the same thing eventually happens for books, then Amazon will be selling mostly cheap and trashy stuff, while other, more expensive, online bookstores will show up and get exclusive deals with better authors.

In such a scenario, Patrick's comment:

I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me. I might get a little depressed over not being able to read my favorites, but if you haven’t noticed, I read a lot faster than you can possibly write and that makes me promiscuous by nature.

strikes me as wrong. While you may substitute other good stuff for good stuff, you won't substitute The Duke's Boardroom Affair for Pride and Prejudice.
All i see is a bunch of ads, no way to vote, no figures how many "votes" there have been... soo.. scam?

edit: plus the "hey, buy ads on our site!" all over the place
The real reason why Flash is not on the iPhone or the iPad is:

Apple gets 30% for every purchase in the AppStore. With Flash on the iPhone many could go around that.

This is also the reason why there are no interpreters or a JVM on the iPhone.
It looks like a Google Sponsored Ad.
> His view is that there is no way to be a truly long-term investor in tech companies because management never allows companies to transition from growth companies to mature, income-oriented ones.

I'm not sure if this is true if you looked at the tech industry as a whole. I think it is, but my view is biased from almost purely following GOOG, AAPL, MSFT, etc.

But if it is true, it would be a good explanation as to why Warren Buffett does not invest in tech companies.
1. This assumes that judges (priests) are honest and neutral to the case, and doesn't believe in the intervention of God themselves.

2. This assumes people innocent in this case won't be afraid God won't help them because of theirs other sins (and who is not a sinner?).

3. I don't think people were that much religious then. I mean - sexually medieval people wasn't more puritanical than we are, why should we assume they were believing in God thah strong (to put hand in the fire etc).

4. How do we know ordeals worked? It's obvious that priests were describing their work in superlatives. And they were the most literate class then.
Well, they have their own app, so I would say this probably isn't the reason.
Apple’s proxy war with Amazon over ebook pricing and market
OK, I am not very deep into the Kindle vs publishers thing, but isn't it a bit dangerous to root for Amazon to build their monopoly? As an avid reader, I am not sure I want one company to be in control of "my drug".

Not saying the publishers are necessarily the good guys (probably aren't). But this isn't about loving books, this is about market dominance and control. Not exacty the thing that inspires me to write a love letter to Amazon (though I usually buy from them and I like their service).

Ultimately, do we really need Amazon for a proper ebooks distribution? It seems to me in theory every author could put their books on a web site right now, using whatever payment system he likes. The Kindle seems more like a Trojan horse to me - we let it into our lives, and then we can't get rid of it anymore, unless we are willing to let go of the 1000 books we bought, too.

I, as a reader, don't want to be held hostage, neither by Amazon nor by book publishers.
So they'll fare better with the Kindle--70% of $9.99 with no printing or shipping expenses.
Hitler's response to the Apple iPad? | Technology
Your analogy is confusing. Thermonuclear weapons have nothing to do with morality.
Maze-Solving Oil Drop
noticing it's about to download a .flv

The browser doesn't do this. The Flash applet in the page does this. Also, most of the Flash video content on the web is in .mp4 these days, and most big video sites already stream it to iPhones, etc. as .mp4, as if Flash didn't exist.
Another aspect of it that gets to me is the competitiveness drain that all of these add to a company. If a competitor in another county, state, or country has less bureaucracy to deal with, or has to pay lower fees (not in dollars, for example), they can win.
Wow, you just called someone a liar on the internet. Good job, you totally deserve five up votes for that observation. Note that what I say has no necessary relation to the truth or what I actually think.
"designers speak human and developers speak computer."

I hate this generalization because it can be used as a blanket dismissal of a developer's opinion.
It's about capacity for harm.
Kill the Fed.
I think an economic hip-hop video is relevant here:

"Fear the Boom and Bust" - a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
"Don't be evil" was an internal slogan popularized by Google's founders.

"Think Different" was an Apple marketing campaign in the late 1990s.

That said, I agree with you that both are pretty ambiguous in their relation to each company's operations.
Walmart sells junk because the marginal cost of junk physical goods is lower than the marginal cost of quality physical goods.

In contrast, the marginal cost of an ebook is zero. The marginal cost of a paper book is independent of the quality of the book.

A book makes money on volume (enough volume to cover fixed costs), not price. A junk book will simply not achieve enough volume to cover fixed costs, even in the Amazon marketplace.
Yes CPNI is technically part of MI5 but they're not full on spooks per se (and MI5 don't do CPNI's job). They receive intelligence from other departments and are responsible for certain elements of gov.uk security, although the primary source for information assurance/security is CESG based at GCHQ (which is more MI6 than 5).

CPNI also handle liaison what's called the Critical National Infrastructure. That is to say things that are not government owned but would cause problems if affected (like power companies, transport firms etc.).

As an analogy CESG are probably closer to NIST and the standards part of the NSA, whereas CPNI are closer to the FBI. Note that in the US model something like that type of tactic would be a CIA or military operation, not NSA - MI5 and MI6 would be the same, offensive security if anywhere would have fallen in the remit of the armed forces, at least until the recent cybersecurity strategy came out which establishes the structure of the UK's offensive function.
The Apple iPad and why you will buy one (yes, you too...)
It's exactly the business of a retailer to decide on how much its sells goods for. That's one of the single most important functions of a retail business. It can also be great for the consumer--do you think Wal-Mart would have just as low of prices if the prices were set by the manufacturer?

If you want to be able to set your price you just open your own store. Retail isn't as fun of an idea at that point though, there's a lot more to it.
For some reason I'm strangely reminded of the episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon talks on NPR whilst having helium pumped into his room. That would be an authoritative Schneier.
I think the issue is that often tech company founders / management have preferred shares and therefore greater voting rights than general common stock shareholders. So even if a large group of common shareholders wanted to see dividends, they wouldn't have much authority.

I may be wrong though, I'm just starting to learn more about corporate finance.
Fusion energy hurdle swept aside
The resulting type of product is generally known as junk.

I know I'm supposed to feel class disdain for poor people because their Chinese-factory-made T-shirts cost a fifth of what my name brand Chinese-factory-made T-shirts do, but my brain has never been good at mental gymnastics. It is even less good at them when I can do bitwise comparisons of the two products and be guaranteed of equality.
I just posted this to the comments of Patrick's blog

I think you’re misreading the publishers, Patrick-- I haven’t seen any of them proposing "windowing", except as a retaliatory move against Amazon. Instead, the main point of disagreement is about the price-point, and your post provides support to the publisher’s position.

Amazon is trying to set a universal $9.99 price point for e-books, similar to iTunes $.99 price point for songs. Macmillan, on the other hand, wants a sliding system with e-books starting out at $12-$15, and gradually dropping in price over time (similar to the current system, whereby the price drops as books move from Hardcover to Trade Paperback to Mass Market paperback to Remainders.)
Gnome-Colors su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
I think you’re misreading the publishers, Patrick-- I haven’t seen any of them proposing "windowing", except as a retaliatory move against Amazon

You're incorrect. From the horse's mouth:

This past Thursday I [John Sargent, from Macmilla]n met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale [i.e. the ones where Amazon acts as a wholesaler and can set prices], but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles.
Yes, but it's not being modified in place, so you can selectively re-use it. Immutability is the big thing.

In FP, you typically "change" a data structure by creating a shallow copy of it with a few parts replaced, but the rest just pointing back to the original - nothing's changed directly, and when data is no longer used, it's eventually garbage collected. (Typically, with a generational and/or copying collector, whose costs are proportional to surviving data.)

This works better with trees and lists than it does arrays and hash tables, because changes to those usually require adjusting as a whole. To add to the head of a linked list, you can just create a new cell of [new value, head of old list], which is very cheap. (Adding to the tail can be done with e.g. a deque). At the same time, anything that adds to the list won't interfere with other code that is holding a reference to the same list, or even accessing it concurrently.

Probably the best way to learn about purely functional data structures is from the book of the same name by Chris Okasaki.
More control of the software, and providing options for how they can be used. Google doesn't just want to offer phones for one or other carrier; they want phones that work independent of any carrier. They want to change the mobile device landscape.
3_Day_Diet_Reviews
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:http://www.tobiasbuckell...
http://[2a00:1450:8002::84]/search?hl=en&safe=off&tb...
100% on the same page with these letters. It frankly astounds me how out of touch the media companies are with their respective customer bases, and this Amazon v. publishers battle is just more evidence of that. Sadly, it shouldn't astound me that this is going on, since I've been it time and again. Maybe Publishers 2.0 will get this right...
According to [1], it was because the costs of connecting are too high. Since Google voice is a free service, I (at least) see no issue with it; you get what you pay for.

However, saying that Apple never did that while Google did makes no sense; Apple isn't a service provider, while Google is, in this case. It makes just as much sense to say that Google never required their devices to be jailbroken to be user-controllable, while Apple did - or that Google never said that jailbreaking was illegal, while Apple did.

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/66661-pressure-on...
I was one of the first people at Macromedia to talk up FutureWave SmartSketch and CelAnimator. From what I've personally seen, the innovation of the entire Flash Platform under Adobe's stewardship has surpassed even the growth under Macromedia.

You don't have to believe it. But that's what I've seen.
What stops you just going to Amazon's website. Why would you need a specific app?
I agree with the basic argument, but for most of the 1980-2000 period it was more tax efficient to return money to investors through long term capital gains, rather than dividends. This situation will return next year if the Bush tax plan expires.
Yes, you can; just block all of Google's known IP blocks in /etc/hosts.deny, or send all their domains to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts

A bit more than the average user can manage, and not so good as actually opting out (in the sense of getting Google to throw away all of their records on you), but you always have complete control of which pages your computer will load.
So what country has been more evil in the last decade?

That probably depends on who you're asking.
The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later
why do you need licenses? Are you a brick and mortar business?
They probably do it because dividends are seen as somewhat obsolete, but firms have to continue paying them because they set a precedent. They are small because they have to be consistent or investors freak out, so the actual earnings aren't distributed anyway. I'd personally rather not have dividends for several reasons:

1. the stock price should accurately reflect the earnings of the firm. When a dividend is announced, the price of the stock decreases by the amount of the dividend. If you want some of those earnings, then sell a share. There's no need for the company to issue a dividend. This is a common misconception most people have.

2. You're taxed on the dividend payments (exceptions tax deferred retirement accounts). This is annoying, especially if you don't want them now and would rather have them just reinvested. Ignoring taxes, the value to the shareholder is the same regardless of whether dividends are paid or not.

My professors in finance all go on long rants against paying dividends, and it really does seem that they're antiquated. Most newer firms just don't pay dividends, and tech companies just happen to be newer firms usually. It's not necessary a property of just tech companies.
I manage a team of 6 software engineers, and while I like most of this list, I think #3 will only work for a small team and small-medium projects.

If I took most of the burden on to myself to do the work my engineers don't like I would be a major bottleneck.

Alternatively, what I like to do, is couch and encourage my engineers through these less savory tasks so they can get to the development as quickly as possible.

Edit: You could also argue that it might be worthwhile hiring a business analyst, but I haven't had much good experience with BAs.
Far better and simpler than flat taxes would be to eliminate all income taxes, both business and personal, and depend entirely on tariffs, excise taxes, and fees. Arithmetically this is completely feasible. Imagine if outside of import and export business and those industries affected by excise people had practically no interface with the federal government on a year by year basis.
I'm definitely stealing from someone else's comment a long time ago but they said it very well: The difference is that scripting languages have no main function (as far as I know).
Actually, I don't want you to back MacMillan, I want you to back everyone else who is pushing towards an open, free format for eBooks. I think this includes Apple even if they aren't selling free books today. My understanding is that Kindle books can be played everywhere, but only purchased from Amazon, because they're in the distribution business. They want to monopolize distribution and commoditize players.

Apple go the other way. You can get all sorts of content for iPads, including eBooks from other sources. They want to monopolize the player market and commoditize the content. The best way to commoditize content is to make it completely open: witness their original "Rip. Mix. Burn" campaign that got them hated by the music industry, and Steve's famous call for an end to DRM.

All things considered, I'd rather fight Apple over hardware than fight Amazon over DRM. JM2C.