skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like most people, I guess, my gut reaction to large powerful corporations making massive political expenditures is one of discomfort.

But, at the end of the day, aren't said expenditures just SPEECH? It's not like corporate entities have a vote (and while they can, now, post-Citizens-United, endorse a specific candidate, they still can't give money directly to a candidate). So, they are simply putting their point of there for those who actually can vote to consider.

I struggle to see what exactly is so wrong with that?

And, consideration #2: Wouldn't a better way to keep corporate/business influence out of Washington D.C. be to reign back in the overwhelming influence the Federal Gov't has? When you have FedEx and UPS jockeying over who can better us the government to screw the other over, something's gone awry, but it's not due to corporate speech.

And the final concern, what about small organized groups, that might, like, want to put together a movie about a candidate, which express some sort of opinnion about said candidate, and sell/distribute/advertise that movie 60 days before said candidate's election?
For me, I looked at the market in July 2008 and saw an opportunity in a darts game of all things. I'm not an avid darts player but I had just installed a dart board in my basement a few weeks prior to the start of the project.

My thought was something like this:

"I see no good darts games for the iPhone. I bet you I can create one and get all those 20-something guys from the UK to download a copy"

And that basically worked. Darts went #1 in the UK in December 2008 and in the US shortly thereafter.

Part of the answer for me was to just make a good app with good gameplay mechanics and 3D graphics that didn't look like a toy, and hope that my concepts of the marketplace were right.

The app going #1 got me a lot of exposure, enough to leave Yahoo and work on iPhone consulting and secret big projects (way too big -- I need to ship the thing already).

The ad revenue (I hate ads and am very sorry I have to put them in the app) also helps a great deal to help fund my foray into self-startup mode.

For the curious, the app has 40K games played daily, about 10K downloads a day, and about 12MM downloads since day 1 in October 2008.

http://fictorial.com/darts/
Successful Weight Loss In Five Easy Steps
This makes me think of events like Michael Jackson's unexpected death. Social websites were crashing or having serious performance issues due to the volume of information being posted in such a short period of time. Users were posting what limited information could be shared on the topic. Unfortunately, searching for information on the big search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo), relevant information was not indexed fast enough to display this breaking news in the top search results.

A day after MJ's death, Google announced they were going to modify their approach.
It's why modern militaries prefer to train with real weapons. In the scenario the OP mentioned, it's about getting accustomed to facing a real weapon.

Note that I'm not advocating this for "play", or even amateur martial arts. Someone training for situations in which a real weapon will be pointed at them and they have to remain calm will benefit tho'. (I'm offering evidence to support your point BTW, not arguing with you!)
Untrue, compared to both previous decades in the US, and other nations today.
Hubble 3D IMAX documentary coming to theaters March 19
No, but it's a start. Raises the barrier, especially in a potential future crisis where the PRC is disconnected from the net.
Basecamp turns 6
First 5,000 "iBad" petition signatures delivered on giant iPad
Sure, I'm reviewing the gambit code a bit. I'm really busy so I'll have to follow up later.

Right off the bat I can tell you that Fexl's combinators aim to be written in readable C.

I suppose the simplest combinator to show would be "I" (the identity function). In Fexl I have a file named "type_I.c" which says:

#include "node.h"
#include "type_I.h"

static struct node *reduce(struct node *parent)
{
return parent->RIGHT;
}

static struct type type = { reduce, clear_pair };

struct node *make_I(void)
{
return make_pair(&type,0,0);
}

(Quick note: all node values are reference counted. Cycles are impossible, and unnecessary because of the wonderful Y combinator.)

Speaking of Y combinator, here is "type_Y.c":

#include "node.h"
#include "type_app.h"
#include "type_Y.h"

static struct node *reduce(struct node *parent)
{
return make_app(parent->RIGHT,parent);
}

static struct type type = { reduce, clear_pair };

struct node *make_Y(void)
{
return make_pair(&type,0,0);
}

Those are easy. The most gnarly one is the S (fusion) combinator ... which ... oh well I might as well paste it in:

#include "node.h"
#include "type_app.h"
#include "type_S.h"

static struct node *reduce(struct node *parent)
{
if (0 == parent->LEFT->LEFT || 0 == parent->LEFT->LEFT->LEFT)
{
parent->type = parent->LEFT->type;
return parent;
}

struct node *x = parent->LEFT->LEFT->RIGHT;
struct node *y = parent->LEFT->RIGHT;
struct node *z = parent->RIGHT;

struct node *fun = make_app(x,z);
struct node *arg = make_app(y,z);

hold(fun);
hold(arg);

parent->type->clear(parent);
parent->LEFT = fun;
parent->RIGHT = arg;

return fun->type->reduce(parent);
}

static struct type type = { reduce, clear_pair };

struct node *make_S(void)
{
return make_pair(&type,0,0);
}

OK now I'm pushing the limits of long-windedness, but I just wanted to feed you some information right away while I work on some other things.
George Whitesides: A lab the size of a postage stamp (video)
Turns out there's a window option "xterm-keys" that makes things better.
Startup idea: Amazon S3 / CloudFront cost distributor
This seems too simple, so I may be missing something but here goes.

Right now Amazon charges $0.15 / GB of Amazon CloudFront data transfer. However, if you do a higher volume, it gets progressively cheaper, until at over 1000 TB, you are only charged $0.03 / GB.

Someone should create a competitive CDN that sells premium bandwidth for say, $0.05 / GB, dramatically undercutting everyone in the business by a huge margin.

How would one or two co-founders possibly compete with Amazon CloudFront in quality and price? The backend would actually be Amazon CloudFront! Since you would rapidly exceed the 1000 TB amount, you'd be able to pass the savings onto your customers.

To be 100% sure that you make a profit, you could wait until you get enough people to pledge to switch to your service before launching for it to become profitable from day 1.

Sign me up for 10 TB of usage.
When I said "if I made porn", I was referring to me, the porno company. Not me, the citizen.
I want the restricted republic back. No interest in democracy.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." --Mencken
yep, you can coast this far. corporate inertia is an amazing thing, and revolutions don't come along that often. I think the coming revolution in mobile devices in companies will be a break the current PC inertia and might get some new players in the door.
PR battle for the ages: AT&T vs. Verizon
Although I agree that amending the constitution takes things too far, I also think that corporations already have too much influence on American lives and I disagree with the recent SCOTUS decision because it validates that influence to a degree.

I think the real solution (to corporate and government overreach) is to consume less, buy local, invest local, use community banks, etc (and also, to think about who we vote for, for a change). I think Lessig's ideals would be better served if he focused on the small but growing movement around these things. But, alas, as Lawyer, he's part of the system in many ways and, as such, a bit of a top-down problem solver.
How 3D works, why it's back and where it's headed
What I want is true liberty, not this nonsense called "democracy".
I'm having trouble coming up with an evaluation function for game states. How can you tell which move is advantageous over another?
How to setup Ubuntu linux, step by step tutorial
Amazon-Macmillan fight heats up: "Available everywhere except Amazon"
Perpetual motion?
Gah, wordpress. I serve static pages off of a PII-500mhz with 256MB RAM, and 50 concurrent users look about the same as 1. MySQL is not your friend. I'm using blogger specifically because it pushes static files, but I want to check out http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll (Ruby) or http://github.com/lakshmivyas/hyde (Python).
And the judges are complicit! This upsets me a great deal. I was in court once, waiting my turn to be reprimanded. This old woman is called for a speeding ticket and pleads her case: she was keeping up with traffic on Sunday morning in a part of town well-known to the judge. "Yeah, if you were keeping up with traffic on Broadway, you're going too fast."

No, judge, the speed limit is set unrealistically low.
However, that's not a reasonable long-term salary. [..] you walk away with 100K [..] It's like making less than 50K at a job with benefits

I'm glad that there are people who believe that 50K isn't a reasonable salary, because if you get used to spending less than half that, you can deal with almost any crisis while everyone else gets into panic mode as soon as they're out of work for a month or can't pay for fancy private schools or bizarrely structured retirement funds :-)

NYC's expensive, sure, but 50K is above even the NYC median personal income (and to the best of my research, just above the median NYC household income too).
You might be interested in this article that made it to HN about a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481392

I found it fascinating even though my interest in the NBA is lukewarm at best.
I think it's pretty clear the answer to that is no.
I'm aware of some jurisdictions where building codes are only enforced when a building is sold. If you build it yourself and never sell it, there's effectively no building code.

I think that's a happy medium between this sort of absurdity and a complete lack of regulation.
The problem is: "Assume perfect efficiency."
Puisi Romantis - Romantis : Rokok Makan Gratis - Bismillah Slamet
The War on the Young
Yes, if you install a passive hole in nearly every computer made, well, having those computers phone home is silly. You call the target machine, when you want something.

Packet wouldn't have to crash the machine, just start up a more active trojan.
Help fund videogame set in Iran during post-election riots
For those more interested on the results of the pilot program in Nambia, you can read more about it in their report here: http://www.bignam.org/Publications/BIG_Assessment_report_08a...

I read through it and was pretty surprised at the findings. The increases in education and health are particularly staggering.
Often they have really cool projects by really competent people.

But big companies, even with good innovation, are still bad at entrepreneurship. It's hard for a cool new innovative idea to get off the ground, and harder since the folks at big companies are less likely to get rich doing them...
"Today Defective by Design will deliver the first 5,000 signatures on a giant iPad tablet, direct to Steve Jobs."

Somebody had to make that giant tablet... See? The iPad actually encourages tinkering and creativity! And it's not even out yet! ;-)
Care Homes
Personalised professional nursing care, social care and specialist dementia care to elderly people who would benefit from a period of short-term respite care through to a tailored long-term care solution. Website designed to provide quality accredited care homes which are located throughout England and Scotland.
make an app that runs Windows 7
In the typical case such a device is really only useful in the first month or two. After that all optimizations have been done. So I think that this monthly subscription model is a bit flawed in that regard. I'm probably wrong..
From a historical context, I do find it a bit odd this fear of "corporations". It's really difficult to argue that they function in any way as a cohesive group. Sure it can be argued that they're all profit seeking (some more than others) but the search of profits is done in such radically different ways.

If anything, the power of corporations has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 company and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual company is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry.

The perverse irony is that larger firms like regulation because they're the most able to adapt to them and can use them to keep upstarts out.
TEDxVancouver Neill Blomkamp
Thanks for the pointer -- I played with Darcs back in the day. This looks interesting.
> A company is not a distinct entity. A company is nothing more than a group of people acting together according to some mutually agreed upon terms.

People lose their individuality when participating as part of a mob. A group is a distinct entity formed by a mob. It is not like any of the individual singled out people.

The mob when formed acquires distinct characteristics and behaviors that distinguish it from any individual human being, who may be governed by neurons, emotions, and psychological disorders, etc. A mob can also be potentially a million times more powerful than a single human being, so how can you give such an entity the rights of an individual? Moreover, humans may like chickens and dogs, but a mob, through some freak compromise, decides to satisfy itself by breeding a half dog / chicken. Such a thing would never be concocted at the individual level, but is potentially possible at the mob level. And if it works out, it could actually be the most logical solution to satisfy the mob (an entity).

> But lets ignore that. Do you believe that after forming a group, you give up all constitutional rights when acting as part of the group? I.e., while the government can't censor me, it can censor papers I publish as part of my association with a larger group (NYU, my employer)?

That depends. If the sole purpose of you publishing your paper is to advance the factional agendas of NYU, AND if NYU acknowledges that your paper is speaking for NYU, the entity, then yes. But that doesn't mean you can't personally publish the paper. The only thing that can be potentially forbidden is NYU, using it's power to give your paper more voice and merit than it deserves. However if you are publishing it personally, then no such regulation can happen because constitutionally your rights are protected.
who mentioned national lines? I don't regard imaginary lines with much respect. we're talking worldwide here.
Microsoft's lack innovation is a result of a couple of factors I can think of:

-Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present.

-Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later.

-Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users".
For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful.
In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it.

-Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.
"It violates the laws of thermodynamics." This dismissive statement allows one to know that the machine won't work -- regardless of its details. But it is an unsatisfactory answer because it doesn't tell you why it won't work. Essentially it is a statement of faith that somehow the universe won't allow it.

Essentially it is a statement of faith that somehow the universe won't allow it.

statement of faith

GTFO of my science.
I don't think so. In analysing designs for perpetual potion machines you're allowed to assume perfect efficiency, unless you can show it to be physically impossible. Here we only need to assume the conversion is sufficiently efficient. That's within the laws of thermodynamics, and the machine still works.

The problem lies elsewhere.

EDIT: In response to a down-vote, let me explain further.

By the laws of thermodynamics, even a perfectly efficient machine cannot result in a net production of energy. In the analysis of an engine the assumption of perfect efficiency is allowed, because really one is saying "assume sufficient efficiency that the production of energy will compensate."

In the case here we're assuming that we can convert mass to energy and vice versa and getting net production of energy. That shouldn't be able to happen, and the falw isn't in the assumption of perfect efficiency. The flaw is elsewhere, and the challenge is to find it.

I do know where it is, but it took me a long time to find it. I'm sure many people here will find it much more quickly than I did.

But the flaw is not in the assumption of perfect efficiency in the mass/energy conversion(s).
I don't know if the library situation is good in Common Lisp. It's just enough worse in Scheme that it's kind of ridiculous to consider actually using it for other than academic purposes.
This kind of thing is playing with fire but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

There were reports that the Chinese attack on Google involved leveraging the law-enforcement door that is in some Google servers. And there's the problem - any time one entity opens a back door, they run the risk of letting another entity take advantage of it. Despite competing with the West and liking the idea of a quiet back door, the Chinese state would likely be unhappy with something the telegraphs their willing to completely steal all Western IP. That would put a bit of damper on Western investment (why Western companies ever imagined that the Chinese wouldn't just take their IP is beyond me, but I think a lot of companies still think their safe in China and that's a benefit to the Chinese economy).
Gov't warns of wireless network congestion, rides iPad to push its spectrum
I was hoping that this was going to be a tech-talk about scalability given the title!
Very nice attack...

After reading about this, and thinking back to how the original xbox was hacked, seems like having legacy support for anything in a secure system is asking for trouble.

Also everything has a reddish hue after reading the whole thing.
The Flynn effect is too short a timescale.

I don't really disagree, mainly because the idea that our ancestors were mostly very unintelligent compared to today's average seems absurd given their known accomplishments. However, I do wonder from time to time if that could be explained almost entirely by selection effects. The short timescale of the Flynn effect could possibly be attributed to the lack of reliable tests for g prior to the 20th century, for example...
How to Replace IMAP
Review HN: Heykiki - Find an instructor or practice buddy for an activity
> And thus, approximately:
v = 0.9999999999999999999999951 c

Okay.

>So taking 3×108 metres per second as the speed of light, we find that the particle was traveling 2.9999999999999999999999853×108 metres per second,

Oh dear, that's a rather alarming piece of innumeracy. The speed of light is approximately 3x10^8 metres per second, All those 9's in 2.999 etc would imply the speed of light was exactly 3x10^8 metres per second which would be an extraordinarily weird coincidence.
What with the whole "buy local" and "invest local" idea?

Have you ever the of the word "trade" and "merchants"? Do you "buy"? There's a reason for "specialization" and "division of labor". It's why we're so wealthy, because of our economy's vast ability to make stuff and transport stuff. Utilize people's comparative advantage, we can produce more unit of goods than we would otherwise if we do not specialize and trade.

Trade is the stuff of civilization. We should encourage more of it.
A friend asked if I had any feedback, and I thought I'd ask the rest of HN what you guys thought. All ideas/suggestions/comments/critique welcome!
Ancient tribal tongue dies out
I'd say that learning Scheme is more likely to convey what's interesting about Lisp, and there is quite a bit of great programming literature associated with Scheme. I'm not sure if it's easier to learn CL after Scheme or vice versa, though.

I still haven't done anything with Prolog past using it for prototyping, but it has some really cool ideas, and I hope to have a good excuse to play with it more soon. (And it, too, has some great books.)
I don't find this to be the case. Very very few non-techy people I know (young or old) have a decent grasp of the file system, enough to have any confidence in using it beyond dumping a few files into a folder, if even that. People who use computers all day long in an office setting have issues with it. Kids who use "Internet stuff" all day have issues, too -- because they never have to deal with it, normally.
Perhaps, but it should be noted that:

(1) The Xbox did not conflict with any of MSFT's existing businesses.

(2) It was an established product that MSFT did not add much to. It was a console, which was operated the same way that other consoles were operated. It does not require much business leadership to do that. Ironically that's kind of like Linux's development model. For a band of scattered, (formerly) unfunded hackers, that's ok. For a company in an evolving area like tech, it's not really acceptable.
Ah, arbitrage. I have long wondered what Amazon's justification is for this tiered pricing; their cost per GB should be the same for all customers.

Also see previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960123
you're allowed to assume perfect efficiency, unless you can show it to be physically impossible

Even then, his specification is at too high a level of abstraction for us to prove that it's physically impossible. That seems unfair.

If the author wants people to ignore the abstractions that quickly prove something impossible, then he or she should provide enough detail to analyze it from a practical perspective.