skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For more technical details on the machinery that the ancient greeks used to select folks:
http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.ht...

From the OP article:

> The pressures of party politics have ensured that, although the formal mechanism remains the same, today's electors are bound by their party mandate to vote for the party's candidates; hence, the outcome of the election turns entirely on the party composition of the Electoral College.

In many states, it is against the law for an electoral college elector to vote for anyone other than the party that appointed them.

Disclaimer: I actually ran for elected office in 2008. While I came in dead last, I learned a lot and had a blast. In your local community, you will find that there are part time positions that you (hah! even you!) can run for. If there is an office you care about, then I recommend you learn what it takes and then run for office.
Lida Bitkisel Zayiflama
As far as I can tell, both apps are basically compilations of stand-alone utility apps. I'm sure with enough digging one could find screenshots that can make an equally convincing case that each feature from each app was "ripped off" from an earlier single purpose app.
So what they are saying is rather that "power attracts the already corrupt" you just don't get to see their true colors until they are in power.

Your stereotypical abusive politician is typically someone who has been a nasty piece of work since childhood, they were just powerless to act on it until some suckers voted them into office.
Same here. What's with the 'fill out the form to stay on our list' bit? Did I not already pay you money to stay on your pre-order list?
Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams[1 hour video]
The Free Software Foundation defines the traits of Free Software as having 4 freedoms (not rights) and explains them in simple language at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

The freedoms are enforced by the GPL, just like any other EULA. So, trying to question why there are only "4" principles, is missing the point. The GPL itself has several terms and conditions.

So, equating the 4 freedoms to the notion similar to the "religious 10 commandments" and then invoking the argument of "dogma" seems disingenuous.
Not mute. No.

It's called a moo point. You know, like a cow's opinion.
The Official Patron Saint of the Internet
They say this doesn't block ads, it hides them, so publishers still get paid for CPM traffic. I guess they're just compositing the new ads over top of the old ones. In a way, I think that's actually much worse, both for the site owner, and the advertiser. Site owners get lower CTR, and advertisers end up paying for ads that were never really shown.
Test suite == automated checklist
I agree with all your reasons. I stopped buying the newspaper years ago. Today, I'd not buy it because the local paper is more popular news than hard news if it's news at all. The number of newspapers worth reading can be counted on one hand but I'd rather pay to read those online so their searchable. (Ack! Newspapers don't read HN, do they?)
That's also close to a best case example, the average road in the US is far less traveled.
NYTimes Skimmer
not to protect my rep, to avoid a personal problem I have, which is an overwhelming compulsion to have the last word in every discussion. I can get just about anybody to agree with me if I spend enough time to find out what mistake they made when they misinterpreted my words, and I have a really hard time accepting that people are going to say things about me which are inaccurate or illogical. so I end up wasting a lot of time arguing with people who never bothered to read what I was saying carefully in the first place.

I created this account so I could come on here and correct these comments. I had to create a new account because I threw out my HN password about a week or two ago in hopes of staying out of these kinds of discussions. I don't know which specific incident on Reddit of deleting my comments and/or my account you're referring to, because I've done that many times, but it probably involved wasted time or inadequate explanation on my part and poor logic on the part of several other people.

it's basically a failure of discipline and priority-setting on my part. I'm getting better at it, though.
I'd like to note that this is probably the biggest borderline-plausible hard SF idea not to have caught on (at least on a large scale) in genre fiction. And that I shamelessly strip-mined Mr Bradbury's mountain of ideas for props in "Accelerando".

(In case you were wondering where SF writers get their ideas from ...)
if you take my argument to its logical conclusion (and there's no apostrophe in a possessive "its", dammit), then you can't trust anyone without affilate links.
I dont think its about the $5 a month. If you read a lot of posters, WakeMate simply got the whole announcement wrong. It ended up being very ambiguous (no exact date, free service for EACH month that it's delayed, what are the new features- take 10 extra minutes to explain those, etc) which was bound to piss people off.
It didn't take me long to find stuff supporting my take, e.g. from the horse's mouth http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/neontommy/2009/12/charles-john...

"I've been telling people for a long time, if they wanted to listen, that I was a social liberal. I actually fought against being classified as a right-wing blog for a long time."

Read more at that link; that plus a little Google Fu shows that his issues with the "right-wing" go way beyond the "hateful religious right".

ADDED: Ah, here's his "Why I Parted Ways With The Right" essay (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_W...). Very little of that has to do with "the hateful religious right" or even the GOP.
We no longer have the choice to get a fitbit because we already promised to buy a WakeMate.

I don't understand the comparison at all; they're completely different devices that serve different purposes. Additionally, you don't have to buy the WakeMate; I'm sure they'll refund you the $5. Even if they didn't, if that $5 is the clincher, then you're only proving Patrick's point.
Everybody knows that the Patron Saint of the Internet is St. Postel.
How to disrupt Wall Street
almost sort of works on the Nexus One (links don't have the proper hit states; typography gets bizarre; attempting to zoom in activates an article). Curious as to how it does on the iPhone and given it's sponsored (today at least) by Blackberry, how it does there.
I actually just registered http://www.churchofturing.com for such a purpose. I am thinking lambda the ultimate but with more of a focus on the parallels between [meta]programming and philosophy.
He may style himself as a "liberal in the classical sense of the word", but his behavior is pretty illiberal in the old sense of the word, e.g. see Tangurena's comment on his dedication to open discourse or rather lack thereof.

He also has too many fixations that are characteristic of the Left/new style liberals for me to take that self-characterization very seriously.
It's not a parody. It's funny, but it's real. This diet saved my life. I mean you could spend a lot of time debating what I really mean, or you could just assume I mean what I say, get the book, improve your nutritional habits, lose tons of weight and live longer. Just consider the possibility that maybe it is that simple. What kind of crazy-ass dipshit would kid around when he was talking about having heart surgery three times by the age of 35?

Anyway, as far as your other question, there are tons of people making money hand over fist in affiliate marketing. I hate to be a dick but if you want to make money in affiliate marketing, you shouldn't just build some random complicated system in the hopes that maybe it might work, you should PAY FOR ADVICE. Just buy a couple ebooks on affiliate marketing and figure out which systems work. Even if you buy a bad book, you learn a little about how to spot bullshit. $35 or $97 on an ebook costs a lot less than several weeks or months of programmer time at a startup. I mean that's just crazy.
Timesplice 3D Effect Examples
Heh, sorry, it's early.

*moot
The answer is simple: corporations only have the rights they are granted by their owners.

I have the right to free speech and and I can use my possessions to exercise this right. I can criticize Obama verbally, in a document on my computer or I can publish that document to my website. Why can't I use my corporation to pursue the same goal?

I also have the right to vote. I don't get a second vote for my computer, however. Similarly, my corporation doesn't give me another vote.

Corporations don't have free speech. Their owners have free speech, and they can use their corporation to exercise those free speech rights.
This post would have made much more sense had it been written in 2007. Three years have past and the community has grown. His arguments are based on anecdotes and outliers from a bygone era. He fails to mention that yea there are a ton of hedge funds in nyc - you can start one in your basement with about a million bucks.

It would have been worth mentioning that NYC seed is a public private partnership that includes a mentoring program and that there are hundreds of millions(if not billions) of dry powder in vc funds here that are just about ready to start investing heavily again.
"'Running a community is hard,' says Markos Moulitsas of the liberal Web site Daily Kos"

Same with Daily Kos. What's more, it's not a 'liberal' blog, it's a blog dedicated to getting Democrats elected. The FAQ specifically says it's not a liberal blog, and most of the people who get banned are liberals.
The internet does have some useful productive things on it as well as time wasting devices :/

For a start it's pretty useful for documentation.
Sending customers to a blog which hasn't been updated for two months for more information probably isn't the best idea either...
Flowtown – meet your customers
Agreed. This does seem like an over-complicating of something very simple.

Five guys sit in a room and decide to use their poker profits to run a political commercial. It's all fine.

Same five guys sit in a board room and vote to use company money to run a political commercial. It's all bad.

I must be missing something.
According to the interview he only has an internet connection two or three times a day at most. In that sort of scenario his set up kind of makes sense. If I only had short bursts of internet connections during the day I'd probably also set up a system where I could queue up URLs to be automatically downloaded for offline reading next time I had a connection.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
It's interesting to draw an analogy between this and Apple's lack of support for Flash, especially given the lack of support for the prior but the large amount of support for the latter on here.

I can only conclude you think it's equally selfish for Apple to cripple the experience of their users so their ideological views can prevail (and that they won't anyway).

I can also conclude that you don't think that the deliberate weakening of the #1 smartphone browser over such trivial matters is a win either, ideological or otherwise.
Multi-page HTML link was posted 3 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1064027
Hi! I'm working on making It's All Text! work with Firefox 3.6. If you have troubles (such as right clicking on gumdrops) then turning on "Remove all bugs" actually does what it says, for a change. o_O

I looked at doing a chrome version of "It's all text!" but chrome doesn't have a way to launch an external application short of creating an NSPlugin. Which I'm not sure I want to have to support across all the chrome platforms.
The link code isn't hidden.

You can clearly see the "tag=fsck-20", which means an affiliate link, just by hovering over the link.
Not everyone knows who Bill Gates is.

http://www.geeks.co.uk/12352-bill-gates-is-a-thief-and-a-don...
Yeh but you'd have to walk from your house, to your office in the rain, instead of rolling out of bed into your office.
I think this is an inherent problem with any social system that encourages a "one up/one down" mentality. I suspect the antidote is to promote a culture where all people are treated with equal respect, which isn't easy to do at all.

One problem that I have witnessed is that "nice" leadership tends to get disrespected and abused. When my kids were younger, at one point I spelled it out clearly for them that if they didn't quit being pains in the butt, the nice mommy they were taking for granted could disappear (along with a great many privileges they took for granted) and be replaced by an evil mommy. I choose to be nice because I prefer it, not because I don't know how to be awful. My kids stopped taking me so much for granted and stopped assuming that I was some kind of doormat.

As an example with adults, I currently participate in an online forum where the moderator is sometimes viciously attacked. The attackers then justify their attacks by saying things like "She must not mind. If she did, she could remove me." Things improved after I got after the attackers and then, when someone suggested the moderator could leave, stated publicly that "Maybe it is lost on you that she is the moderator and the only reason her attackers can remain is because she is a great deal more tolerant than they are." The entire tone of the forum changed.

As long as most people are so generally disrespectful and so willing to take good things for granted, "corrupt" leaders may be the only kind who can survive.
Team sports? Alpha Course ( http://alpha.org , appears to be down at the moment)? Art class?
It's funny, but I'm already starting not to care about the NYT now that they've announced they're going to implement a paywall. I didn't realize it till I saw this headline, but when I read it I noticed I was thinking "Oh, well, news about new NYT features is no longer relevant to me." I'd never made a conscious decision not to pay for the NYT. From their point of view, it was something even worse: I'd never even considered paying. When they announced they were going to charge, I implicitly wrote them off. I took it for granted that once the NYT disappeared (which is how I thought of it), I'd be getting my news from somewhere else.

The funny thing is, paying for the NYT would be no problem for me financially. The reason I'd never considered paying is that it just didn't seem conceivable to pay for content. There's information you have to pay for, like research reports, but buying that sort of thing is a whole different category in my mind. Maybe I could be trained to think of news as something one pays for, but I can't see how. No paywall has done that so far.
Locking in users and their data removes incentive for developers to please their users. If you know that all your user could cancel their service contract and be set up with a competitor within an hour without losing anything, you have a damn fine incentive to keep those users happy. If on the other hand moving to a competitor means losing access to years of data and weeks or month of work just to get back to where they started then you have to suck pretty damn hard for people to leave you.
Corn flakes yellow this morning?

I like the way jacquesm has been downvoting all of my posts.

Talk about passing judgement.
If the H.264 video tag wants to win over Flash, they'll either need a huge market share or budget (which they don't have) or technological superiority over Flash (I don't think this is the case either). They're also fighting against Mozilla, who don't want H.264 to succeed.
Geolocation, question
Hi,
I believe about a week ago someone posted a link to an article describing the current state of the art in finding geolocation. I think it was by IBM. I believe it mentioned SIN/COS formulas, as well as current database techniques in querying by location.
Unfortunately, I was at my parents' house reading it on my mom's computer, and she went ahead and closed the browser once I stepped away. In the meanwhile, I flew away and forgot about it. Not sure what she did, but now she can't find it in her browser's history.
I would like to read this particular article, as I now have an idea I'd like to implement.

Can anyone help?? If not, could you suggest some other resources? (I mostly care about location-enabled DBs I could query).

Thank you all for your help,
~D
Problem is not that Theora isn't capable enough now that MozCo has poured money on it. The problem is that Google and every other video service has already their videos in h264, which is playable in Flash. So if YouTube were to support Theora they'd need to re-encode all their videos, and store them as duplicates.

Another problem with Theora is hardware. There is a lot of hardware h264 encoders and decoders, allowing even cellphones to play HD h264. AFAIK there is absolute no Theora hardware currently.
What you are missing is that the people pushing regulations also want to prevent 5 guys spending their poker profits on political speech.

Some history: Back in 2000, a bunch of guys decided to use their money to run political commercials. These commercials persuaded people vote against McCain in the Republican primary. 2 years later, McCain pushes a law which tries to prevent this.

The goal of political speech limitations is to prevent anyone besides certain elites (and not other elites) from affecting an election. Since spending money is necessary to get a message out, they try to restrict spending money on political speech.
That's not quite a fair analogy. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone, it would have real consequences: lower battery life, higher RAM usage. I don't doubt for a minute that there's an ideological component as well - Apple want to see Flash gone. But at least that decision is based on technological problems with Flash.

On the other hand, if Firefox were to support OS H.264 decoders, it would harm nothing but Mozilla's ideologies.
>Sure, I'm agreed software patents are bad. But average users just want stuff to work.

Right. Yet you've said before that you'll get rid of your iPhone if "they put Flash on it". How do you reconcile your position that "average users just want stuff to work" against being so vehemontly against Flash on the iPhone?
Ask HN: What makes you happy?
Did you put off your happiness when you were young so that you could be better off when you grew older? Did you enjoy it as it went along? Do you get happy from big things? Little things?
try searching http://searchyc.com/geolocation
http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_s...

The link above is to a fermi lab program to look for Dyson spheres. The Matrioshka brain is a subset of the Dyson sphere. Something made famous, unfortunately, by Trekkers.
One would imagine that on a Dyson sphere sized computer, intercommunication (limited by speed of light) will become major bottleneck. At some point amassing components will stop winning you performance due to physical dimensions.
Of course it has. Dyson Spheres are famous in SF.
The Matrioshka Brains are just distant relatives of the same.
Give me IF statements (preferably with nesting support) and variables, and there's nothing that cannot be done.

I know you were exaggerating here, but simple conditional statements aren't actually sufficient. You need some construct that allows repetition, if only implicitly. "while" loops would be easy, but even simple function calls suffice if you have function pointers (in fact, allowing function pointers alone ought to be enough, without conditionals or even variables).

At any rate, it's the lack vs. presence of repetition constructs that makes SQL not a full general-purpose language, where XSLT actually is.
Deleted twitter names
Is it possible to register deleted twitter names again? I found one I'd really like to use but it seems that it's still taken altough the URL for it doesn't exist.
No, I'd think the guys into sex slavery and organ theft are probably more "evil". This guy is more like an opportunistic sociopath. That seems more like the norm with this war...
Hello hypervisor, I'm geohot (PS3 hacked by the guy who hacked the iPhone)
Lack of curly braces?
Fairly much awesome (not totally awesome because I'll have to maintain old projects as-is, not worth updating with so many API changes).

While I use a few different programming languages in my work, I am now fairly much only using Rails for web applications. This process was finalized when I converted a customer's project from Common Lisp to Ruby and Rails last summer.
The worst customers you could possibly have are those that have paid a trivial amount (say less than $10) of money.

Just like there is a price-elasticity that has shows a curve that says that any price at all is a drawback to adoption, the customers that pay $100 for something are most of the time not such jerks as the ones that pay $5.

For $5 everybody somehow expects stellar personal service and attention, whereas people that spend $100 are a bit more mature and more likely to see both sides of a story.

In fact, they may simply wait until you are ready to ship.

The fun thing here is that even though both parties are 'in the right' in demanding they get top notch service you may not be able to deliver that service at a pricepoint that is too low. Even for a pre-order you have to make that calculation.

That's why it is a good thing to research your support costs before you commit to a certain price.

At a $5 pre-order you are simply asking for trouble, the barrier to entry is so ridiculously low that you will get a large number of people that will simply cross the threshold that might not have bought your product at full list price at that moment in time.

You essentially sell a promise for $5, if you are not 100% sure of your ability to deliver on that promise you are setting yourself up for a pretty nasty fall.
This is one of the big problems with the App store. If you develop for it, you are really at the mercy of Apple's decision process

"Decision process?" I think you're really at the mercy of some mid-level manager or some clueless flunky.

If they have a "decision process" I would love to see the documentation they have on it, and the notes from this one!
Russ Swift does it without geometry and uses much less space. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REpXf0cmJ64 (Sorry I couldnt find it in English.)

The new world record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Eqn_BiQus (Watch it with the sound off to avoid the screaming commentator.)
And then Apple opened its iPhone app store, and in a Cupertino minute everything changed. Suddenly, the idea of tethered software seemed normal again. (Ironically, when Apple was struggling to survive in the 90s, the Web's run-anywhere ethic had served as an important lifeline for the company, reducing the importance of Microsoft's control of the PC software market.)

Ironically? Hells no. This is just how it works, and Apple knows how to play smart. When you're at the bottom, you want everything open and free, but when you start getting more control and market share you want things locked down.
All these pages with the angle brackets -- I think I did some of that a dozen years ago. Where's the number for my lawyer?
I'm hoping part 6 will include a beta gem. :)
You have access to the voting log of HN?

For the record, you can not downvote posts that reply to yours.

You could not know that because you do not have enough points yet to downvote at all.
yes, I tried that before, but no success. The problem is that the title in HK did not contain "geolocation" but something else (not GPS, either). I'm hoping the person who posted it would come back :-)
I had Google index a site with no inbound links the other day. It was under development and no big deal, but it surprised me. I'm still wondering how they did it.
Forgive my ignorance, but what practical purpose does this serve? Is it just to be able to use a PS3 for something else like a render farm, or does it affect how games can be played?
DNS Pre-fetch Exposure on Thunderbird and Webmail