skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say that's just the tip of the iceberg. Money and production values are just way more abundant on a television network. Even though talk show budgets are a drop in the bucket compared to scripted dramas, it's an astronomical cost for Internet publishers who can't bring in any advertising dollars.

The only way it makes sense for Conan to move his show to the Internet is by starting his own business and making a real go of it. Figure out a real business model, and yes, salaries would have to take a hit, but he could conceivably create something amazing and future-proof rather than riding the (slowly) sinking ship that is traditional network television. Signing on to try to help someone else's startup would be insane; nothing more than an act of charity. However there is an opportunity, however slim, for Conan to go big on the Internet and prove that he is still innovative and do something that's never been done before.
Reminds me of the mantra I repeat to myself whenever I start going to the gym again:

"Everybody's got to start somewhere"
'Of course, it is hard to describe what an "institution" really is. It is even harder to convert a bad institution into a good one.'

How does the government keep from eating itself in corruption? We assume this government has reached a steady state by taking only half but not all. However, as the article cites the more corruption you do the more your supporters will do, and the only way to stay in power is to let your supporters be corrupt. Since you're not really building any value, or letting value take root it seems like a prolonged history of this will eventually eat itself without fresh infusions of capital from outside parties. The article hints at this, but it's hard to control it because your supporters are doing it too and might not realize you can't take too much. Plus when outside markets go down I doubt corruption wants to take less in those times. It seems like it will lead to eventual erosion because rebuilding value when markets come back are less likely to happen.
Google is the evil empire.
I might if they didn't display any appreciation of the flower's beauty, yes.

However, I'm not sure if this is a very good analogy. I don't think many people here have anything more than a passing interest in the evolutionary biology of mate selection. It seems to function more as an excuse to avoid talking about dating in more personal terms.
Is it something to do with the "china hacked google" thing after doing nothing for quite some years? just a thought.
This makes me extremely angry. $675,000 verdict to the average person is basically going to ruin their life. Per-capita income is still only about $21,500 in the US, so you're asking for 30 years of their working life.
Maybe you've misread the post he's responding to? 'fun to be around' did not figure, it starts out with clothes, make-up, hair, looking 'sexualized' and after a self-congratulatory bit about imposing his idea of style on some woman, it goes right to the cattle market to outline the preferences in walk, skin, hips, musculature, shoulders and diet. That tone is not 'nerd', it's 'obliviously misogynist clod'.
I may share technical details in a few hours, but from a use perspective: http://ourdoings.com/2009-09-08
The problem with wearable computing has always been how much it costs. People don't want to wear the same thing every day and washing machines and dryers are extremely harsh on electronics. Stepping outside the classics like wrist, ear, and eye is going to require a dramatic advantage. Cell phone watches are possible but holding your risk up to your ear is uncomfortable.

PS: IMO eyewear is the final external location for electronics, but it's going to need to be extreamly light, inexpensive and useful to make it there. Some sort of adaptive bifocal technology that watches your eyes and auto focuses might be the first winner.
I find the phrase "quality of people" pretty jarring. YMMV, I suppose.
If deleting cookies is all that's required to break their paywall, it will take minutes to repurpose Financial Times paywall breaker greasemonkey script to work with NYTimes.
What? The patent was filed in 2004.
I know, that was kind of what I was thinking!
WLAN well established? Really? Sure, some bigger institutions used it. But today you can be dropped pretty much anywhere in any city and have ten or more WLAN access points show up on your iPod touch. That you just pulled out of your pocket.

Everything seems obvious in hindsights.
Ask HN: Is lisp a language for a newbie?
I have a question for Lisp programmers. I am fairly new to programming and I have been playing around with Ruby. Mostly building simple Rails apps and scraping sites. I have read a lot about Lisp that intrigues me. However, it always seems like Lisp programmers are experienced programmers that become evangelists once they see how easy something was to accomplish in Lisp.

So my question is: Do you think that Lisp is a language you can cut your teeth on, or should I get more experience with Ruby and wait till I hit a wall, then turn to lisp to solve my problems?

To be fair, it seems the documentation for Lisp and ruby are quite different. Where Ruby seems to cater to new programmers with the coddling we need, while Lisp documentation is more sparse for veterans don't need intro material. Does that seem correct or an I mistaken? And I would love to hear the path Lisp programmers here took to become proficient.
I submitted via the bookmarklet, I don't change the titles at all. I have, however, modified my submission to match the current headline. Sorry for the confusion.
Thank You from 123Greetings
Your comment was gray when I saw it, so I restored it to >0, but I disagree. This move makes it easier for authors to get their product into readers' hands, gives them a better cut than the publishing industry generally did, and provides better value for the user. Amazon can't cause "less choice," because for one thing, they have effectively unlimited inventory; and for another, if there's an untapped demand, a competitor will arise.

Sure, nobody else can publish to Kindle, but the next few generations of smartphones, netbooks, and possibly tablets are very likely to make that a nonissue.
It depends how much work you're willing to put into it. Yes, you can treat Lisp as a first language, MIT has been doing it for years (until recently). Their Intro to CS class, CS 6.001, used Scheme and is very highly regarded.

Their text book[1] and lecture videos[2] are free on the internet. Can't hurt to give it a shot.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

[2] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
Bait-y title. I read the article, perhaps a bit casually, and I'm left with doubts that Obama even knows about this verdict.
Clojure OpenCV Detecting Movement
And that reminds me of an observation I made after going to the gym for a few months (and that after doing nothing for 30 years) :

I'm not good at anything, but I'm better at everything.
Please change title to Obama [administration] Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict

It’s what the article actually says and is far less link bait. The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.
It wasn't too expensive to change in the rest of the world, though.
just watching 'tv' in the historical definition is a massive waste of time. I have multiple lifetimes of content already tagged and queued. I have no time for bullshit old school network control and manipulation. I made my own network.
Prediction: Dropbox will enter a cloud platform race with a set of APIs in a bid to become a File System of the Web.
Agreed.

Kurtzweil has the general thrust of where we're headed -- the details and timing are going to work out in a manner completely unforeseen, however.

Personally I think Kurtzweil is off in his timing by about five hundred years. There's just some really tough stuff out there that needs nailing down. But that's just a SWAG on my part.
Ask HN: Anyone have experience using CrossBrowserTesting.com or similar?
Looking for a service that lets us easily test across popular browsers(phones would be cool too).

I looked at Selenium, but it was way too confusing.

Any recommendations?
Google is getting too big and being too much a dick. Everyone will turn against it soon or later.
Freelance Nation: Why Permanent Jobs May Not Come Back
Keyboard shortcuts (like Google Reader) that work in Chrome, Firefox, or IE.
I just upgraded to this (Leopard 10.5, FF 3.5.7), and the feature I used the most is now borked. Right-clicking an element and selecting "inspect element", or expanding Firebug and expanding the nested child elements (clicking the arrow to expand the contents of the div > the form > the fieldset > the input) is now completely broken. Has anybody else had this happen? Any fixes you can recommend?
Safari & Chrome on Mac, neither works. Firefox works though.
Have you (or the OP) tried Safari's (or better yet, a WebKit nightlies) Web Inspector? Its more powerful than the one in Chrome.
Don't feed the troll.

(Who is voting this guy's blatherings about his sex life up? On HN!! Looks like some kind of voting ring)
nice back of the envelope numbers. And good enought to convince me, to be sure. But I'd love to know the numbers the NYT ran...
re: small minority. Yesterday I was sitting in a dark old-timer bar in MT and heard two of the old salts telling some younger guys (mid-40s) about the wonder of Netflix. I am experiencing this more and more with people. Just a short matter of time.
I'd suggest sticking with ruby before switching to something else, first because you need to have some basic programming experience before learning a new language, and second because it's much easier to get things done in ruby than in lisp, for a beginner (because there are tons of ready to use libraries - in lisp, not so much).
in one reality, they suspect it's a phony during the judging process and do NOT award it a prize.

in this reality they didn't suspect a problem during the actual judging, award him the prize, take away his prize and ban him for life.

seems to me like the judging panel screwed up.
ah yes when it's probably just run of the mill porn. mystery over ladies.
The only way it makes sense for Conan to move his show to the Internet is by starting his own business and making a real go of it.

Some years ago I recall reading a list of top entertainment money makers. The top two women that year were Madonna and Oprah. The interesting thing was that while Madonna grossed more revenue overall, Oprah made more money because Oprah owns all of her own businesses and almost everyone is an employee. Madonna, by contrast, did business with people who took a portion of the proceeds.

This is not to say that Madonna was doing the wrong thing. It allowed her to focus on her 'core competence.' Perhaps business is Oprah's core competence, so each might have been doing the right thing for themselves.

I would say that Conan could make a lot more "running his own show" on TV or the Internet, but only if he has a talent for it.
Just imagine if no reporters were there to inform the rest of the world of the disaster and bring the scale of destruction home. How much aid and money would be available to Haiti then?
I'm not saying that the alternative of only accepting reviews from a small population of regular/power users is necessarily a good thing either. I'm just stating that it's not a black-and-white issue with an easy answer.
TWiST, Comes to the rescue
A $675,000 tort judgment is going to send you into Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which will take 3-5 years to resolve. It's bad, but it's not going to ruin your life.

I think there's cognitive dissonance here between the ease of committing torts on the Internet and the severity of the penalty.

If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement.

But on the Internet, we all know that the same tort is a couple clicks away, and that it's widely practiced. So there's outrage and surprise when the law works the same way against those filesharers.

I guess I see things a little differently because my career has been spent in close contact with other torts that, while far more damaging than file sharing, are often just as simple to commit. Nothing stops you from sharing files, and so you feel somewhat entitled to do so. But nothing stops you from crashing any number of important web applications, either.
These methods aren't going to make people share music less -- it will simply make them find more secure ways of sharing. Lets all remember, that at the end of the day, if I burn a few gigs of MP3s to a dvd and pass it to a friend hand to hand, the music industry will never know.

Ultimately, sharing is something people want to do as a natural inclination. I like this band, so I want you to like this band, so here's their music. I personally have found the vast majority of the music I love in this fashion.

I love passing on my love of music to other people. I've run private MP3 servers before. It brings me much joy to share music and then talk about it.

I don't really know what these large verdicts do. They are still effectively like being hit by lightning, it's so unlikely it will happen to you.
"find a good man" is a classic saying and means the same thing as high quality.
What if I also criticize the US for those human rights violations? Am I disallowed from commenting on China just because I live in the US even though I don't agree (and actively denounce) the actions of the US government?
What's the definition of "user" here?

edit: Not sure why the downvote. "4 million users" can mean pretty much anything.
How is he not directly responsible for his administration's statements and positions?
Starting from last week, I changed my facebook email address to a throw away email address. Not as an impressive piece of foresight, however: simply to stop companies finding my facebook details via my email address. Still, I'm especially glad I did now.
Making your own network took effort and time, no?
I upvoted you even though I disagree with you.

Ultimately, it's still not the same thing as one is a physical object that cost actual money for actual materials to produce, and the other is simply a computer process that duplicates bits.

I apologize for starting this conversation. That being said, I haven't seen it on HN before (though I'm sure it has happened). I'd be curious to see where the readership lands on this issue.
Amazing Illustrator Tutorials #3
Very good comments - worth reading through those.

I posted one too:

---

Would your 3000 rabid fans be willing to sponsor you at $1/m in exchange for some kind of precious items? Like a personal thank you note and access to all your books in ebook format the minute they're done?

That'd net you $3000/m, which is not a huge amount, but a start. And maybe you can get more than $3000, by asking for a floating donation - i.e. set the minimum to $1/m but let them specify an amount (some people would possibly be willing to donate up to $10 or even rarely $50/m to you if they really are rabid fans?)... or by increasing your fan base... If you can reach new markets and get, say, 10'000 rabid fans instead, or if you can convince people who are not quite rabid fans to sponsor you anyway, you could make a very comfortable revenue from this subscription model.

Ultimately, you are a "business" whose product is a flow of cool new books. The current model suggests that people pay for book that you've already written, but perhaps you need to turn it on its head and ask people to pay for the books that you're going to write. This would basically be a kind of micro-patronage.
There was some speculation internally on this too (I work at MSFT). One theory is that Ashley Tisdale is involved in charity work too and Bill might know her personally. No idea as to how true that is though :)
The marginal cost of a single compact disc is very low. It is clearly not the physical cost of goods sold that is driving the damage estimates.
Ask HN: Rate My Startup - LetMeGo: Let lodgings bid for your stay
LetMeGo is a new service that allows travelers to submit their itineraries so that lodgings bid for their stays: http://letmego.com

LetMeGo is the result of the famous/infamous immersion discussed in here "Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730031

I know I don't participate a lot in HN. In part because I discovered you only a few months ago and in part because I've quite busy getting LetMeGo ready for launch. Anyway, I look forward for your feedback and to participate more and more in here.

Thanks!
America's can't-do list
There are a lot of varieties of Asian - which one are you? I'm basing all of the above off my experiences with the Chinese, particularly college-aged Chinese international students that I've had extensively dealings with in the past.

There is some selection bias here, but this is acknowledged: the Chinese regime doesn't enjoy a great deal of popular support from the working class (read: manual labor), but enjoys widespread support from educated intelligentsia (the sort that would send their kids overseas for education).

I've also surfed through Chinese social networks, and the amount of anti-American and anti-West media on them (and being passed around like LOLcat pics) is pretty alarming. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people on these networks are young, grew up without witnessing the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, and are the direct beneficiaries of China's capitalism. Oh, they're educated to boot, which makes the whole deal just that much scarier.
Other photos in the competition http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions...
From what I've seen, that's how sharing has been going since the extortion/lawsuit campaign started.

The average person doesn't hit TPB. They ask their friends. On the edges of the graph people are downloading, but it's a small minority of the actual sharing going on.
Agreed. Don't try to become bilingual when you aren't even fluent in your first language. I don't buy the argument that your first language permanently changes how you view programming. I started in QBASIC and now my programming style is generally to program almost functional programs in object-oriented languages. QBASIC had neither functional programming capabilities nor objects.
Hmm...if I were a botanist, I think I'd get a bit weary of always having to interrupt a high-bandwidth dialogue with a peer to insert sufficient fawning to appease those who might otherwise judge us for the things we did not say.

About the merits of the analogy: professional versus passing interest is not really relevant. The salient point is that anything can be discussed on multiple, distinct levels of abstraction, and speaking of it on one level of abstraction does not invalidate or denigrate another level. Have you read Douglas Hofstadter's classic Godel, Escher, Bach? I recommend it highly.
what useful data did you find there?

I love these two graphs:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Freedom1996.gif
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/FreedomChange.gif

from http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/FreedomIndex.html
You are in a very small minority. I think the better question is: do your parents? I'm ten years out of college, and while I am able to connect my computer to my TV to watch Hulu, etc, it isn't a permanent setup. I have the cables in place to just plug things in, but only on the TV in my living room. My bedroom TV is capable, but I don't have the cables in place.

Conan has a pretty broad fan base. He's been doing this for years. So, unless you can sell me on the fact that 85% of his target audience has this type of setup, it's a bad idea.

Not only that, but the setup has to be permanent and drop-dead simple. So, unless you are a 100% Hulu kinda person, we're talking about a dedicated device attached to the TV that could tune in his show from a remote control. Access to the show would have to be as ubiquitous as a traditional TV. This is the only way to keep the numbers in the range that advertisers would demand.
Very nice solution for the very common problem of load-balancers not supporting sticky sessions.

It's worth a read if you're in the web application business.
This is much more a statement about how simple the ATA port interface is than it is about Forth. Writing for hardware only sounds complicated to modern folks who have never tried it. Remember that these were devices built with a few thousand transistors at most. There's only so much complexity you can pack into that structure.
Indeed, we held Bush responsible for things that we know his administration was deliberately keeping out of his immediate purview for deniability reasons.
And why should it be? Nothing in tort law says that damages are limited to the physical cost of goods - all sorts of other damages exist.
How much of that is original IPTV content? In this context, pulling things down from bittorrent doesn't count.
How to Create Dynamic InCopy Article Templates Inside of K4
Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers
I have to agree with the gp on this one. It's still software theft (at least in my book) to copy a CD/DVD instead of shoplifting one from the store. I can't really find a logical distinction between that and stealing music.

The verdict amount, however, is ridiculous. But so far, it's just been debate. I'd love to see a study on how many actual copies of music are made through a given file share, and how many of the downloaders avoided a purchase they would've made otherwise.
227,000 followers in 24 hours isn't too shabby :) I don't think he'll have too much problem getting followers.
reminds me of disassembling a sphere and reassembling into two spheres. damn topologists.
I wonder how much of the MySpace shot effect is due to age. I'm guessing that those who take the MySpace shot would more likely be younger and in a generation which finds online social networks second nature.
First Artificial Muscles Used to Control Eyelids
I absolutely love the intro videos, especially the one narrated by Obama and Ozzy Osbourne
Any idea how he acquired that twitter account and for how much?
> "and junk Kindle-only books flooding Amazon"

I actually think this would be a great idea - so long as it does better than the App Store in terms of filtering for the best. Amazon's recommendation/review system has always been pretty strong, though.

Democratization of publishing, of content distribution and production, is one of the chief reasons why the internet has been the most important invention in recent memory.
The point is that people brought it to their attention that the wolf and the location looked similar to a captive wolf and the area where it is located. The judges had no way of knowing this. It was only with this evidence that were able to make their decision to take away his prize.
ha! I just googled for it after I saw it, same link. However cool it might be, I'm not paying 65$ + s&h for it!
This makes for an excellent academic challenge that may actually bear fruit. I'd do it and see where it takes you. The experience alone will be worth it.

I do silly stuff all the time (I'm not calling this idea silly!) and I always take something away from it. This is a much better idea than the stuff I usually come up with.
At the same time, theft isn't wrong because of marginal costs. Theft and infringement are fundamentally different activities.
Maybe, but the kind of backwards compatibility Windows offers is very unique. It's like being able to run Apple III software natively on a modern Macintosh. ;-)

I think IBM can provide a mainframe fresh off the assembly line that can run 70's software.

Most amazingly, many do.
Repeat the study for Duchenne vs. Pan-American smiles?
" It's the most complete of its kind by a long shot."

Is it even done? It looks like only 4 chapters have been written, which barely cover the basics.