skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If they're smart, News International's managers might start to roll back the damage of 30 years of complacent lard-assed journalism — hire new investigators, train them to go for the throat and chase the scandals, and start raising hell. A combination of targeted micro-news coverage and turning over rocks to see what's underneath could pay off. The Daily Telegraph started an avalanche running in the UK last year with their series of explosive revelations on the subject of MP's expenses; there hasn't been anything like it in the USA this century, as the insider-culture of the Washington beltway has captured the journalistic corps. When the press cosy up to power, the result is a culture of collusion, and both news and open and accountable government suffer."

We've all lamented the quality or simple lack of investigative journalism these days. I really hope there is a shift back toward news organizations going for quality over regurgitated crap.
UK Government Launch New Public Data Site - More Than 3,000 Datasets
The "Soft Maximum" function
It's a simple application of higher order law.
I made one out of wooden cubes and two colors of duct tape.
I'm currently employed in the hotel industry. I really have no defined role, but I perform a lot of the GM roles. I can give you a few things to think about.

First and foremost, the chain to which we belong just got out of a long fight with a large Online Travel Agency [OTA]. During this "fight", the chain really noticed that OTA's had a stranglehold on the online room distributions, especially the rates so in response, they have "initiated" some policies to nip that in the butt. (OTA's are currently killing Vegas)

I will show you the breakdown of our reservation distribution this year: 55% CHAINWEBSITE.com, 27% CHAIN Call Center, 9% GDS Travel Agencies, 9% Third Party Websites (broken down into Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity). In short, due to our policies we CANNOT offer a lower price outside of our best available rate available on the CHAINWEBSITE.com - we could null our franchise agreement.

I only speak for one chains policies, but this chain has 6k properties and another 1k or so in development. It's not small.

Thats one thing to think about. Some more thoughts:

Getting GMs to lower rates is tough; if you give guest X rate Y, and guest Z finds out, they also want rate Y. It sometimes makes a messy situation dealing with this. Selling rooms in important, but keep rate integrity intact is also important.

Chicken/Egg conundrum. How do you plan on getting hotels to participate?

-- In response to the above, I would personally like to search my geographical area for any travelers without having to sign the hotel up. Can I do that? Why not?

Some solutions to the above thoughts:

Instead of getting hotels to directly negotiate prices, why not use a combination of that and a GDS system like Amadeus, SABRE or Galileo. You know, so if a hotel doesn't bid on their trip to offer occupancy, then they have the option of making a booking through your system opposed defaulting to Expedia (which books through the same systems). It might solve the intermittency between the chicken/egg problem, and having an active user base - attracting one before the other would be essential. Overall, I don't think the hotel industry will take kindly to having to bid for guests. On the other hand, there is LOTS of money to be had and I wish you the very best. Its an ambitious start!
Default settings definitely matter. It would be a huge win for Bing. The bar for most people to change settings is very high. Being the default is almost as good as being the only choice.
"Raises the question" is a perfectly acceptable usage.
Savant spends 10 years rendering the most realistic CG film ever
I think that Bill can do a world of good by sharing his thoughts via a blog like this. Assuming he is candid and fosters real communication, that is. Sections like 'What I'm thinking about/what I'm learning' is exactly the right attitude.
Also if you look at Google owning web advertising with a critical eye, one question seems to appear to me.

How is it that Google has become essentially the equivalent of a broadcast advertiser in a narrowcast distributed ownership venue like the web.

The answer as I see it is, that we are still accustomed to the old ways and have a tough time trying the new models and tend to leap on the biggest bandwagon out of fear. Fear of missing out on the imaginary gravy train.
What makes you think that the careful body balance of the buddhist monk and the graceless laying down of the couch potato are the same thing? They both are called "sitting" because share the same pivot point (the buttocks), and both are motionless too; but one requires much more effort and energy expenditure than the other.
Keeping the poor uninformed is important for modern democracy.
There's someone recording raw footage straight from the satellite feeds to the news station and putting it on Youtube. Really interesting to see it raw:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQMjCzyZ_jw
I wouldn't mind telling Boxee more about myself if it meant fewer advertisements per show. How much more is an impression worth if the advertiser knows my age, sex, and zip code compared to a random impression for the same show?
I`m using Chrome/Ubuntu 9.10 and got the warning message. Everything worked fine though.

After selecting my travel dates, I got the impression that the whole page would scroll down, not just the left column. It was a bit confusing I think.

I´m not a fan of nesting scroll bars.

I will test the service out for real in a couple of months.
Their update states that their is no Group Policy Manager outside of Windows 2003 - however the "God Mode" hack for Windows 7 supplies this option without the need for messing with registry keys. Just create a folder on the desktop with the name "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" and the Group Policy Manager can be access under "Administrative Tools".
Yep... Amazon, Paypal, and Google.
The Iranian protests also draw into sharp relief the assumption of quality on the part of information gathering by 'real' news sources.

How long was it until American news even acknowledged the protests existed? And how much are they truly vetting their facts, when they run transparent propaganda (government dismissal of the actions of a 'few hundred' when nearly a dozen independent sources contributed pictures of at least tens of thousands) and trivially photoshop 'counter-demonstrations'?

Citizen-journalism has its flaws, but it's very similar to the case of Wikipedia (for lack of a more succinct explanation): Any one person could easily post lies, but lies tend to get exposed and corrected. And in the aggregate, it's more accurate than any individual 'expert' or 'authoritative' source.

Fark is the stand-by example of preferential comment treatment. TotalFark subscribers are kicking in $5/mo for early access to a veritable cess pit of dupes and spam, in exchange for getting first crack at discussion and token member features.

I also have personal experience with several small discussion boards that went for-pay specifically to squash spam and cover the moderator costs of abusive behavior.

It's pretty easy to see where making people give you $5 before they can post shifts the economics of spamming, flaming, harassing, etc.
He's "Verified by Twitter" - I think that has something to do with it.

If the original owner pretended to be Bill Gates (even as a joke, or as an imposter), they could legally take it away without much hassle. However, if it was just the URI stub for someone else tweeting as their real selves: good question!
My sister is on USS Bataan -- there are many reporters who hitched a ride on that ship. Apparently they are hogging the internet connection so I don't get nearly as many "inside scoop" updates as I would like.
I think the other thing is that governments rot: almost every state begins cohesive and ends decadent. The Mongols went from cohesive to decadent in less than a generation; the North African groups that ibn Khaldun lived among tended to last 2-3 generations; the western Roman Empire lasted somewhere around 1400 years.

The history of the rulers of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul also illustrates this cycle. The Byzantines began dynamic and powerful, then they became self-seeking and were conquered by the fiercely cohesive Ottoman Turks (omitting the history of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which went through this cycle almost as quickly as the Mongols did), then the Ottoman Turks went from fiercely cohesive to fiercely self-interested (look up the Auspicious Incident) and collapsed in turn.

Now, the collapse part of the cycle is slowed down by a world peace that will last until/unless the United States disintegrates (and it's in trouble; look at the self-serving corruption of groups as unlike each other as the Pentagon and the labor unions) -- but I discussed both the merits and the problems of this situation in another post on this subject.
Clojure Autodoc
To borrow, or to inform?
Freemium models usually have a low percentage of paying accounts, i.e. between 5%-15% paid subscriptions.

Short of polling a random sampling of users we probably have to hear from dropbox for those numbers.
Mystery visitor to Poe's grave is a no-show
I'd get rid of the yellow note at the bottom---at least from the home page. You could handle uncaught exceptions and then display the note, for example, or put it in the About Us page.

Us Colombians are too polite, so it would probably be OK to display upfront if it was local. The Beta logo should be enough for most people. The note just predisposes users to think something might go wrong.
Does anyone else have the same problem as me in this area? I am more than happy to pay for things, I just find it very hard to justify paying for some things that don't give any benefit over a one that I can get for free. So if they were to find a way to totally stamp out piracy or make it as likely to get punished for as taking goods from a store I'd be happy to pay for everything.

A good example is things like the WSJ, sure I probably don't read them enough to pay anyway, but the fact that you can just Google search things to not pay means that I would never see the value in paying.

I think when you feel that you are paying to support the content producer rather than to acquire the content something is wrong.
The announcement post with more details can be found here:
http://jquery14.com/day-07/new-jquery-forum

The previous discussion is here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057012
"Google-like"? Sophisticated ranking algorithms don't enter into this. All they needed was a decades-old technology like soundex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex ), or one of its refinements.
Hard to take someone who calls himself an "Austro-Anarchist Libertarian Legal Theor[ist]" and went to a law school I've never heard of (note: I am a law student now) seriously. From a legal perspective, this guy's political biases show through. Editor of the liberatarian papers? Check. In the end, I thought it was a long article that is 1) fanciful and 2) a rehash of prior ideas.
thanks - that would have been a perfect fly-on-the-wall meeting when they debated and took this decision. obviously their numbers are different and more optimistic, but I commend them for giving it a go.

since we entrepreneurs have irrational expectations/optimism, why can't they?!
> You can always teach a girl how to dress and make herself up to your tastes, which I did for my last serious girlfriend who was getting her PhD in physics. Too much jeans and sneakers when I met her, lots of skirts and dresses and leather boots and heels when I moved out of the USA.

Her next boyfriend thanks you. :-)
With a VHS you had to fast forward the ads and still be somewhat exposed to them, I think now TV networks are more worried by the fact you can easily skip them all together.
Looks really good, great design. A couple minor specific notes...

-"Lodgings" is an awkward word to use in the main description. I agree that it is the most accurate word to use, but I think few people think of the term "lodgings" when looking for hotels.

-Your "How it works" section looks cool, but it's an image. No text. That's not very semantic. It also means I can't copy and paste the description to tell a friend.
The layout reminds me of the food pyramid -> http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/documents/image/... (Not a bad thing!) except the style of the layers is not consistent. Applying some color theory would certainly help. There seems to be ~9 different fonts on the front page.
As for the concept of the site: the notion of inverting the business model is really neat, I hope it succeeds.
You have good points. I would like to see them be more devleoper focused. With that said, I can see reasons not to.

Right now, it is extremely simple. I have friends that use it and are virtually computer illiterate, and it just works for them.

By opening up their APIs people will build 3rd party applications on top of it. Those 3rd party applications may not just work. Then even though it is not dropboxes fault, they will likely be asked to provide support for it. Then when people don't get the support they want from dropbox, they may drop the service.
Well, yes, as bvtff implies, most people don't write that well. I suppose they do better than if they hadn't had the English classes, but still...
On the other side of the ledger we find this famous quote from Tim O'Reilly:

> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
Really pretty, really well-done website. (Even if it's going to get grief because it uses Silverlight).
People aren't getting sued for burning a copy of CDs that they own just for shits. That may in fact be all they've done, but what's being claimed is that they're copying and distributing content.
So you're arguing that maybe he just doesn't care about the issue or the case?

That's the defense? "No no, he doesn't support it. He's merely so disinterested in the situation that he doesn't have any idea, or interest in, the position his administration is taking on his behalf."
Kurzweil's predictions relate to the level of computational power for a given cost and what we can do with that power.

Indeed they do. And there's an order of magnitude separating the computational power and cost of iPods from what we can currently incorporate into reasonably priced clothing. A friend of mine does research in the area of wearable computing. We're not at the iPod-in-shirt level yet.

Further, if we don't hold predictions to what they actually said, then there's no point. We can always manufacture an interpretation in which the prediction is true.
The competition for Dropbox will be fierce I expect. I love how easy it is to work with and that it works on Windows, OS X and Linux but it lacks proper in-document search on the web interface and no editing capabilities. Also, Google Docs has an excellent PDF viewer. Nonetheless, great app.
Invulgotracker 0.61 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
A listener not paying for something they weren't going to pay for anyway is a victimless tort when the record label doesn't actually lose any money.

Cory Doctorow puts it best in explaining why he Creative Commons licences his books:

> Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tec...

Someone is harming the music industry, but it's not the listeners. It's the RIAA.
I honestly wouldn't have guessed. The layout is understated, the page loads quickly, and it's easy to navigate and read. I wonder if the site is based on some existing content management system, or if it's something custom. It would be kind of a cool surprise if it turned out that Bill authored the site himself for fun (but that seems unlikely).
Or just click "Don't Allow".
Some notes on the design: IMO { The navigation feels a little fragile, maybe because of the small font size and delicate lines. But it's also quite original, especially the "view by topic" branch. The right column (only visible on some pages) could easily be mistaken for advertising, possibly because of the tiny sans-serif type. Overall the style and copy gives a personal, likable impression. }
Neo in Wonderland - Kenji Saito's Cautionary Novel
Congrats to Dropbox! I wish I hadn't flubbed on investing in them.
The problem is that Bill Gates only reads books that reinforce his existing beliefs. That's why he's so pro-KIPP, because he doesn't have any interest in authors like John Taylor Gatto. (Or at least this is what I heard from someone who had lunch with him recently.)
Or a deeper question, are the publishers making your friends' lives easier by doing it first? Do your friends read thousands of self-published books to provide you with recommendations? Or is all their action applied after the mainstream publishers' filter?

I'm sure there is self-published stuff out there that is worth my time. Unfortunately, I don't want to read the literary equivalent of MySpace to find it.

A good publisher has a quality bar I can trust, and they've taken on the burden of reading unsolicited submissions. And as the blog post says, 75% of it is unreadable crap, 24% is readable but not worth your time, and 1% or less is quality and publishable. That's a lot of hours you and your friends would have wasted.
That's sounds high. Isn't it closer to 2-3%?
The executive, legislative, and (most importantly) judicial branches of our government disagree with you, as do virtually all mainstream producers of copyrighted content.

I appreciate arguments that Congress is captive to the "copyright cartel", but it's harder for me to accept the notion that every judge that has ruled against a file sharer has done so because of lobbying. And, if you read the case material, they aren't primarily making those decisions based on the (bad) new laws we're getting about copyright protection --- in fact, I feel like the courts have a pretty decent track record on navigating the bullshit laws Congress is generating. Basic security and circumvention research, for instance, hasn't been shut down.

I understand the point you're making, but I think appeals to different theories and interpretations of the copyright act are ultimately destined to fail.
Check out flashbake. It's a set of Python scripts for automating git and adding various metadata to commit messages, and was written as a personal writing tool for Cory Doctorow.

http://wiki.github.com/commandline/flashbake/
I agree, but I couldn't help thinking that a Christopher Walken video would really have sealed the deal for me.
I'm not sure if Lulu gives the same effect, because you have a higher cost per book that isn't going to you, since there is a flat cost per book (unless you wanted to charge a lot, of course). But if you want to sell a $5.00 book this will let you, pretty sure there's no way to do that w/o losing money via Lulu.
Hey man this is Tony from CrossBrowserTesting.com. We have a great service. ;)
We let you connect up to our service run a browser and OS combination, all through VNC (either a java applet or your own local VNC). We also do screenshots.

If you have any questions ask away! I will try to answer anything you can think of. thanks!
I think one of the reasons that nobody who "matters" in this debate agrees with points like this is that nobody is being forced to buy content. If you don't want to pay for Miley Cyrus, don't listen to it.
This is my problem with mathematics. The concept of a "soft maximum," the principles behind calculating it, and its startling similarity to a hard maximum, are all fascinating and exciting to me. Look at that! Two completely separate functions, and such magical results. According to this post, it's useful for "convex optimization." I clicked through to the "related post," which was merely a comment about someone else's opinions on "convex optimization," so I looked it up on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_optimization

Ah! A technique used to "minimize convex functions." Maybe some of this notation will make sense to me if I understand the underlying concept of whatever a "convex function" is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_functions

Great. An entire article that is completely and utterly meaningless to me. I mean, absolutely nothing in that article--oh! "Convex sets?" That looks promising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_set

Jackpot! The pretty pictures make the idea of a convex set clear to me. Unfortunately, by now I'm 4 clicks away, and my actual understanding of the subject is clearly just scratching the surface. Connecting my newfound--and obviously still naive--understanding of convexity* to "soft maximums," which initially inspired this search, feels dumbfoundingly impossible.

Am I approaching this all wrong? Am I expecting too much? Thinking too little? I would love to understand more about this subject, and I have tried to learn it the same way I learned how to program: by Googling and working on my own problems. However, the resources simply don't seem to be there in the same way. What's the deal, here?

* Would it be more accurate to say "Euclidian convexity?" What would that mean, exactly?
Is there any reason to use twitter if you have no need for social networking? I completely understand people joining a trend like say ricky gervasis to promote his hosting and oprah to promote her show but I honestly don't see a point for most normal people.
No. Fair use does not cover reproduction and distribution of works in their entirety. The Betamax case validating time shifting. You've made an entirely faulty argument.
I don't see how that's a troll. Seems like an intelligent comment to me.
Briefly terrified by a past in which almost no one could read.
First to summarize what he says:

It used to be short life expectancies led to people having more children. Not anymore, as most countries are in the high life expectancy group.

Basically better family planning, womens rights, and health care leads to higher life expectancies leading to: SMALLER FAMILIES.

Now I will add:

i) Divorce laws, and strict enforcement of it. I think this contributes heavily to lowering populations. But you need that because of point (ii) below.

ii) The lack of religion leads to a lifestyle that breaks down the family unit. Once the patriarchal mode of life goes out of the window, so does the population growth. In other words, women's rights. So its a trade-off.

I'm looking at you Europe.
Well he does have a very large interest in the success of technologies still being a large shareholder.
I prefer websites to use silverlight over flash, I think you like silverlight a lot more after using it, even if it is exactly very web friendly.
While we could argue the first sentence, it's not germane to the discussion. People are getting sued for distribution, not for personal use.
it probably works better at the granularity of "chapter" instead of "novel".
Normal people just throw them out.
I really liked in the video that you could skip ahead to different parts. What did you use to do that?

I liked the videos, and thought the different voices was an interesting gimmick, though I personally would load a video as soon as the user clicked the first link, and while it is loading give them the option to switch between voices. How many people click the first link without clicking to watch the video?
I am more disturbed by your accusation of the (grand)parent being sexist than by the contents of their posts. You kinda sound like someone who would accuse people of being "sexist" because they use the word "mankind" instead of "humankind".
Very PG-esque, don't you think?
Just confirming.. built with Microsoft technology :)

http://builtwith.com/?http%3A//www.thegatesnotes.com/
You sound awfully sure of yourself. You must know a lot of things about product security that I don't. Would love to hear them sometime.