skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it all comes down to the damage that patents deal to independent invention. Painters can't tell you that your painting is a violation and cannot be sold because you used an arrangement of elements that they had used before.
Is it bad that we all use the same implementation of printf and strlen? It's important that something as fundamental as HTML rendering becomes plumbing that we don't even notice.
I urge everyone not to read this. We should not reward murderers (or attempted murderers) with out attention.
Cool article and informative anecdotes, and I ultimately agree that a $500 of wine is overpriced but for different reasons. I can't agree with the article's reasoning which is essentially: products should be priced based on how much they cost to manufacture.

A couple counter examples: Apple computers and high-end cars.

A few more extreme counter examples, where the cost to "manufacture" is almost $0: a $30 ebook, a web app subscription, or a top 10 iPhone app.

If you are going to say something should be priced based on the cost to produce, I think you need to prove that it has been commoditized.

What I mean by that is that if there are, for example, one hundred different pure gold nugget distributors, you should choose the cheapest, pure gold you can find since it is all exactly the same. If you pay more than the base value for your gold nugget, you are truly paying for nothing more than the packaging, marketing, and other fees, since the end result is simply a pure gold nugget.

So has wine been commoditized? That would be a more interesting article, and I don't know the answer myself without doing more research. My grandfather founded a famous California winery which actually holds its own against ye olde European vineyards in many high profile taste-tests. He was an engineer at SRI and produced wine with a scientific philosophy, happy to share his "secrets" with anyone, so my guess is that he would agree. I'd love to ask him his thoughts but sadly I can only speculate.
What Steve Jobs Said (about Flash) During His Wall Street Journal iPad Demo
That's not skill, it's being fast at one thing.

Being fast at one thing is definitely a skill, if not a talent.

http://www.nbcolympics.com/
China already produces a lot of people with higher skills (design & development, etc...). It is probably going to be fine.

African countries should start to worry - the time when the development goes from

commodities -> manufacturing -> development

to industrialize your country is coming to an end. In most African countries there are no industrial development (taking advantage of low cost labour). The economy is commodities& subsistence farming.
Girl's arrest for doodling raises concerns about zero tolerance - CNN.com
That's pretty harsh and unobjective! I haven't read anything to suggest patent trolling is equivalent to a Ponzi-scheme. Furthermore, give the man benefit of the doubt. For a person who did a Post Doc with Stephen Hawking, it's difficult to believe he is absolutely lacking in ethics and morals.
Can you elaborate ? I have been in similar situations before where the organization didn't have a purpose and the strictly top-down management didn't have that much experience to know that they were headed down the wrong path (even when the employees told them so)

It was pretty hard to motivate oneself in that environment. Even when you tell yourself that you have a purpose and try to do your best, you always know what the reality is.
I'm not really sure how Compete could be getting that from our stats. We've actually seen some nice growth over the past year. Maybe I should just get our site quantified and put it all out there via Quantcast. Alexa is usually the most accurate I've found.
will fix that, thanks for the heads up.
Can you have it specify that DST is being used?
But that's not a problem with patents in concept, or the people who deal in them, it's a problem with the implementation of our patent system, which almost everyone on both sides of the argument agrees needs a drastic overhaul. If you enforce novelty and non-obviousness properly, that problem disappears.

Also, musicians sue each other over this all the time.
Fortunately - and not surprisingly - it's barely readable anyways. I read most of it and I still don't have a clear picture of what made this guy so mad.

[Edit: While I don't agree with lliiffee, I think it's a valid point of view and I wouldn't vote it down. I wavered between wanting to understand this person's state of mind, and not wanting to "reward" him with attention. But even if he were alive I don't think he'd get any satisfaction from people's reactions to this meaningless, incoherent screed.]
No, but they do it by putting a lot of their alumni into the US Dept of Treasury, which somehow miraculously gets them sweetheart deals from the gov.

It's hard to admire a company that readily takes welfare handouts from the government, while at the same time asking for hands off when it comes to taxes and regulations, especially when mixed shady practices.

GS is made of a lot of clever individuals, that's not questioned. Reputable and admirable? That's another story.

Almost forgot, the banks haven't really paid up.: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/10-ways-say-no-banks-have-n...

There's another article that shows that the Fed Reserve opened up new loans to the banks to replace the 'paid up' TARP loans.
Citations can be gamed as well unfortunately.
cache removed at google but bing still has it:

http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=%22embeddedart+com%22&d...
Moral decision making in Fallout(3)
> To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing. It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this.

No doubt because much of the advertising is spent with the mainstream wine media.
Last.fm's data is amazing, and definitely more valuable than ours for predicting trends in recorded music. We focus 100% on live music though, so have some interesting information of our own on the concert industry - for example which tickets are selling fastest. One interesting stat I just discovered relating to your point is that 90% of tickets are now bought online, which is up from something like 40% a few years back.
What would you think of germans that tried to weasel out of paying their fair share during the nazi years?

Naive and narcissistic?

I guess the real deal is if you're not going to pay your taxes, or otherwise chisel/wiggle, just do it. Don't brag about it.

Keep cash around, have people you trust for title to cars and property, and generally be prepared to live low on the food chain.

The key to happiness is low expectation, which clearly the author of the article didn't have.
That's still better than Wince.
I've just finished playing Fallout3, and was looking for more resources on the web to enhance my gaming experience when I stumbled upon this thoughtful article. I think it is a good read, even if you are not a games designer/developer.
I'm glad I have some choices left. Your wish to have only ONE of anything sounds a bit constrained to me.
The short answer is that it hurts. I still remember the moment I managed to grok this, some 10 years ago.

Say some people manage to design machines which can build stuff a whooping 20% cheaper. Because it's an obvious thing to do, you'll have all the factories in the country switch to these machines, and fire a majority of their workforce. Now, on one hand you have a 20% increase in productivity and on the other hand you have 50% unemployment.

You don't have greedy capitalists making money: most of the 20% goes to the consumer, thanks to the competitive market. The biggest share of the money probably goes to the machine builders, but they earned them fair and square: they innovated and thanks to them the job can be done better, easier and cheaper. But overall you still have huge unemployment.

So what is the answer? The answer is a shift in the workforce away from manual-jobs. Simply put, continuous education. It's a fact of life that almost nobody is truly safe in this day and age. Not programmers, nor prostitutes. We could all have our jobs innovated away from us. But this is only a bad thing for those who let the current job become the sole means of paying for the mortgage.
According to the article, I.V. demands cash "for a combined promise not to sue over those patents and (here's the sneaky bit) a bit of a pyramid scheme, where those in early supposedly get a cut of later deals."

I'm not sure that being smart and accomplished in science is a reliable predictor of ethics or morals.
A neat tool to create QR codes with any text
(1) "gets it" -- in which case doing well in those easy classes would be trivial.

You assume that "gets it" translates to good grade. If large portions of your grade are based on busywork/class attendance/memorizing trivia, that's a bad assumption.

Given that all the students know what the game is (get high grades)...

What if the student was playing the game of learning? I prefer that student to a grade grubber.

C/A indicates a smart person who doesn't feel the need to play games. I can use a person like that.

A/A may be a person who plays games when useful, or a person who thinks producing GPA is their goal in life. The latter sort of person is useless outside of some well defined roles. Or an A/A may be a C/A person who wasn't required to attend class, or a C/C person who took the right classes.

Overall, I don't see any reason to prefer the A/A person over the C/A person. As I said, a cool side project will easily tip the balance.
Why do people think they can pay developers nothing? [reddit discussion]
They need sliders for this type of thing. I'd like to dial-up the salaciousness and racism and dial-down the terrorism and felonious words.
It's pretty nice that you know enough about banking to provide us with an explanation of the financial crisis, yet you think a derivatives exchange is a "bank" and that the crisis somehow put us in danger. 30 seconds on Google Finance would have shown our balance sheet is rock solid and our operating margin is about the same as it was before.

I wouldn't call myself an expert, either. I don't think what I'm saying is obscure or expert knowledge--just paying attention to the facts.

I'm getting tired of responding to so many attacks, so I'm going to leave this in a DH5 on the PG disagree-o-meter.
That's also the starting cost of a lawsuit between a big company and another big company. We are currently not moving forward with some development our customers are requesting because of a ludicrous patent held by a subsidary of a large company.
What are people's thoughts on the hosting company pulling the site so quickly at the request of the FBI?

Would they legally be required to? IANAL but I can't think of any reason.
The Department of Homeland Security released a statement calling this a criminal act, not terrorism. I am confused. A few years ago everything was considered terrorism and now nothing is.

This guy wasn't targeting individual people in the IRS, he was targeting the whole establishment. This is akin to the Oklahoma City bombing. If that was a terrorist incident and 9/11 was a terrorist incident, this is too. He even has an IRS hate manifesto.

I think it is a shame that the government uses certain words to its advantage, but I guess propaganda is just the nature of the beast.
Lost in Translation
The telephone game between two translators,
This is currently the only story the TV news networks are covering.
Clojure Library Coding Standards
If he couldn't pay back taxes on $13K, I'm curious how he acquired the plane.
“I’d say the anime community’s reaction to this, since day one, has been almost exclusively one of support for Handley and disgust with the U.S. courts and legal system,”

I'd say the reaction of any intelligent, decent person would be the same. Which, I guess, is why his lawyer told him he'd better not face a jury.
"My parents and I are the ones who know my school's absences policy, how my teachers feel about my missing school and what my grades look like – not anyone else."

Most adults couldn't come up with a more polite and blunt "mind your own business."
My father always told me (and it's worked for me):

- The cover letter gets you an interview. From a huge pile of applications, it makes you somehow memorable to a hiring manager who would just like to make the right decision quickly. So don't bother with flowery nonsense and don't worry about being off-putting (unless you're only applying to one job...), just say something bold.

- Some people have a hard time selling themselves. Other people have a hard time not lying and overselling themselves. Be honest but explain the value proposition of how hiring you will make a difference to the company.

- Because you have to stand out, and because the hiring manager has a lot of context for what the position is which the applicants lack, researching the company, the opening, the culture, etc. will let you write a letter that stands out as a good fit for what they want.

- One page only, one font only, print it out on nice paper, don't misspell anything.
It is not terrorism it was a guy named Joe Stack from Austin. The founder of a software business. Apparently he was ticked off at the IRS for interfering with his business.

He founded his company in California but moved to Austin to take advantage of the growing high tech industry in Texas.

Here is a copy of his online posting just before he did this:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack...

Austin is so nice and crime free something like this is crazy.
I tell you, I can be sympathetic to a letter such as his, to some of the things any of us can easily see are wrong right now in the USA, but of course I do not condone his extreme by any means.

However, here was the kicker for me: "But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income". Let me get this straight -- he was in love and married. Forget all the money stuff, tax liens, unemployment, whatever it was. He was so in love that he just got married. And then what does he do? He pilots a plane into the IRS building. I also read somewhere that he burned his house down before doing that. It's probably anyone's guess that his wife was at work while all this was going on. So this troubles me that a man focuses so myopically on purity principles such as anti-corruption, that he would block out one of the purest principles at all, which is love.
Electric vehicles key to nuclear's revival
yup, that's what i based it off of (being objective). It's also similar enough that he takes money from the big companies THEN goes back to sue them. I don't think it's being harsh either. I'm absolutely against throwing people in jail for dumb things that don't deserve the time. If we don't do something about patent trolls like this, things will continue to get even worse.

Being smart (studying under hawking) != having good morals.
Ask HN: I'm an idea guy. Apparently I'm worth nothing?
Execution is everything. Ideas are a dime a dozen.

I have seen from a lot of places that it's not ideas that count, but the execution. This leaves me in a quandary. I have ideas, all the time, every second of every day. Every piece of information I come across, whether it be an article here on HN, my rss feed or on the web, gives me ideas. Walking down the street I see something, it gives me an idea. I sit at home, drinking and watching the fire, I have ideas. They never stop coming. Never.

I have worked, consulted and taught and mentored people, and been successful (meaning made them be successful), because I have ideas. But as I look around me, I see no way to "monetize" (how I hate that misused word) my skill.

Now it's not that I don't know that execution is king. Part of my success with helping people, companies etc, is due to the fact that I believe in (and enforce) disciplined execution. Take an idea and do it. Do it, do it, do it. But my strength is in ideas. I hear something from someone and immediately come up with ideas about it. It's what I do. It's what I'm excellent at.

The latest idea I have come up with to solve my problem is to follow through on the premise that "information wants to be free". I will be shortly putting up a website where I will put all my ideas out there (I'm thinking under a creative commons license) for anyone to take and use and execute. I really hope some people from here will find something on it that they can run with and make the big "exit". Or have fun with. Or ridicule in a constructive manner (I'm a big fan of iteration). Most of all I hope someone will chat with me about the ideas. My forte is improvising and exploring ideas with another person. I'm a real jack-of-all-trades so I'm held back on a lot of things because I don't have the in depth knowledge. (Especially math related ideas, I have a crap load of stuff I want to explore in the math world but my abilities are sorely lacking due to an extended period in my life when I was a child and missed out on school. But I really want to explore them) But I seem to have a skill in bringing out that knowledge from people who do know. And I am always learning as I go.

But I would like to know some of your thoughts about what kind of place there is in this world for for a person such as I, whose ideas take him into places that are far out of his depth, ability and means, but who knows he can make a contribution, and change the world. Please, don't hold back, I am pretty thick skinned, critism only makes me more informed. One thing to keep in mind: I don't want to go the way of the guru. I don't want to be the best in a field. I have to keep a beginners mind. It is the only thing that keeps the ideas coming.
stolen.
PHP, Ruby, C#: How to choose the right platform at a startup
Sierpin-Skiing
Water as well. Is bottled water that much better (however you want to define that) than tap water put into any other container? There's a good deal of marketing in the bottled water industry.
Setting Up LemonPOS
My biggest lesson from The Design of Everyday Things is that if a lot of people are confused with how something works, it's the designer's fault, not the person's.
From my understanding of the methodology, I don't understand what conclusions I could possibly draw from reading these reviews. My experience has been that people who don't drink much wine tend to prefer sweeter whites over those more dry. If you asked 500 of those people to compare a bunch of Chards in the $15/bottle range, they would end up choosing the sweetest of the bunch. As someone who drinks wine frequently, I would probably be upset if I paid $15 for those bottles. Like Netflix recommendations, I want to know which wines I will likely find enjoyable.

How can this problem be solved? I want to know which wines are liked by people who tend to like the same things I do. Could one do something like Netflix recommendations for wine? Would every user have to be calibrated by a bunch of blind tastings? Is there a more efficient proxy for calibration? Could a set of small, unlabeled bottles be sent to one's home where each represents a wine of a know, objective quality (oaked white, etc.)?

Unlike Netflix, I want to know if I'll like a $20 bottle more than another $15 one. It's not like movies are different prices, and we want to know if the $10 rental is sufficiently funnier than the $2 rental to justify the price differential.

Is there some way to crowdsource good wine data?
Rob Dyrdek - America's Coolest Workplace
INC: You've been pretty effective with social media. That is something pretty much any company can try to replicate. How important is that for you and your brands?

Drydek: I don't think it's very important.
Taxes.
and yet when a president makes a state of the union address.......
Not according to reports.
As an occasional employer, I can tell you people who like to work are appreciated way beyond their actual ability. If you're one of them, it's too good an advantage to give up.

Now, there are several problems with this. First is that it's simply not as easy - what the others do has a real effect on your motivation. Your manager may not be also your employer, so he may not have good enough reason to appreciate you. Being too conscientious and good for a job may keep you in that job forever. Etcetera.

In the end, if you feel staying at this job prevents you from working as hard as you'd like, it's a valid reason to switch.
It sounded to me like he made a lot of really stupid money choices in his life and blamed all his losses on the IRS, the government, and anyone else of "power" that happened to be nearby at the time rather than taking personal responsibility and manning up.
Thanks for response.

Although it will be an uncommon situation, is there any alternative set of guidelines for writing a cover letter when you know it will be read by your boss (instead of a hiring manager)?
There is a problem with Argentina. For example see the hour at the capital city "Buenos Aires" and compare it with some of the local newspapers (http://www.clarin.com.ar or http://www.lanacion.com.ar).

I think that the problem is that we skipped the "Daylight saving time" this year (2009-2010), so we are at GMT-03:00.
How Brightcove is mediating in mobile video wars with Flash, H.264 players
That's a little misleading. Managed code/Silverlight on WPS7 is the equivalent of the iPhone SDK. How low-level does this guy want to go?
I like the idea, always provided that "personal and noncommercial use" is interpreted as "transfer to iPod, reading to one's children, burning CDs for personal use, writing fan fiction, etc." and not as "Napster." We have the problem that our popular culture is all under copyright, and this would do a lot to resolve that -- not impeding the profits of the creators of the works in question, but simultaneously not dampening cultural expression or exposure to the culture.

This sounds particularly appealing as an aspiring content creator: finally a legal standard that neither requires pursuing creators of fan fiction, fan mods, and so on, nor creates a risk of accidentally losing copyright over one's own works!

@anigbrowl: I agree that there's a potential issue with sufficiently negative use of material under the expanded fair use rules; but then again, philosophies, governments and religions aren't given legal protection from rotten eggs. A creative work, too (even the architecture of a mall), becomes part of the culture; other members of the culture have the right to react negatively as well as positively to it.
The next guy that does this will learn from his predecessor's mistakes, and use a bigger plane.
I certainly can't say I know the law in this respect. His rant did include the names of a few people which could possibly be bad for them, but it's too late now - it was posted online, cached by lots of spiders, copied by lots of people... Pulling it down now doesn't seem like it'd much matter.
I tend to agree with the cynic in me that says it's because the guy's name was "Joe Stack". Had it been Mohammed something then it would've been terrorism.
Kinda funny coming from an Android-centric blog, since by that definition, Android's Java-on-Dalvik apps aren't "native" either.
I disagree, it is information (although poor quality information tbf) about what motivated this guy to do this.
The information should be public so people can come to their own conclusions about the event, otherwise the story is one sided.

HOWEVER due to copycats and the general suggestability of the public, organisations who broadcast should think twice before broadcasting this text. This is because it provides a "reward" for people contemplating doing this kind of thing, fifteen minutes of fame.
Unfortunately this is exactly what news channels typically fail to do.
E.G. High school shootings
The concern is in setting a precedent that anyone can have a wide hearing of their ideas by killing people, which creates copycats in the future. (We have seen this happen with, e.g., school shootings.)
cnn even has a copy posted on their site.