skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they're pressuring them to stop giving Amazon a day of exclusivity

Moreover they aren't even threatening to stop selling their product (as Amazon did with Macmillan's books), but to "[withdraw] marketing support for certain releases featured as Daily Deals". i.e. "If you use their promotion, you won't get ours." The idea that the labels don't like this is not surprising, because the labels love getting favors from everybody. What is surprising is that so many comments here seem to be in favor of the labels' interests.
Automatic Refactoring Framework for Common Lisp
Graph Reasoner for Clojure
"screws and bolts... non-Turning (sic) complete"

Pun intended?
... yet xe is a member of Category:Wikipedians_who_like_Futurama
Ever heard of chargebacks? You use my card, I complain to my cc company, they refund my money and attack the seller with fees for lack of verification.

So,
>CC Thief gets whatever he bought at an empty house
>CC holder gets stuck in an infinite customer service loop
>CC company avoids charges
>Seller gets fined
Wikia / Dell Spat Highlights Divide Between Corporate and Web Computing
How to Get Funded by VCs
I love this kind of talks, it always motives me to keep up working on my projects.
If your business continues to grow I would say the article applies but if I hit a bump I would certainly look carefully
at the competition to make sure nothing over there has changed the rules.
Ask HN: Help me pick name for a photo sharing app.
The app is a photo sharing/blogging app and we need more awesome people to help us decide, please help me choose between these names; PicLyf vs Picwy vs PicPing. and if possible state why you chose that.
Ayn Rand (and in my experience, most Objectivists) didn't want an honest debate "I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer.... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement."[1] (I recommend the whole essay.)

[1] http://www.mclemee.com/id39.html
The "Attractive City Generator"
Her characters are certainly often exaggerated and unrealistic, but they are so in her crafted fictional world setup to convey her philosophy while a telling a good story. However, the dialogue and surrounding thoughts of her characters still provide incredible insight (at least to me). Maybe I am an ignorant jerk needing to read more sophisticated philosophy (likely on both accounts), but she introduced to me, through her characters, a compelling way to think and live

And even if you hate her characters and her philosophies, with exchanges like the below, she is a least interesting to dissect and deserves more than dismissing her writings to fourteen year olds.

"Do you believe in God, Andrei?"

"No."

"Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An
upside-down question, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life,
they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It means nothing. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do--then, I know they don't believe in life."

"Why?"

"Because, you see, God--whatever anyone chooses to call God--is his highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception over his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your life and to want the best, the very greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it."
Seems like a philosophy built to justify being a jerk.

That's reason enough to be keen on it, if you're a jerk.
I used to have occasion to read transcripts of first degree murder trials when the convicted murderers appealed their convictions to my states's Supreme Court, where I was a judicial clerk. It is a fact that when people are put on oath to testify at trial, and subject to cross-examination, their memories will be both faulty and internally contradictory. But that doesn't mean that nothing they report happened. The jury's job at trial is to figure out which partial, or biased, or mistaken recollections best correspond to what happened, but something happened.

What do you say is what to hold on to after you "throw out objective reality"?
No, I have seen a lot of his videos and he always comes off as a tool. I've heard Loren and others justify his attacks on people as comedy, but comedy is meant to be funny. And trust me when I say that the dude can dish it but he certainly can't take it.

More to the point of this article though is that he threatened to expose someone and possibly damage their reputation without any proof of wrongdoing.

There's nothing wrong with expressing your opinion about or making light of a situation. What he did is closer to blackmail or defamation.
Old Concept, New Program: Rip MP3's from YouTube
Ask HN: Your thoughts on Lisp, and how stable is Arc?
I was inspired by some of Paul Graham's essays to start exploring Lisp, and I'm so glad I have. Even after just walking through one tutorial, it seems clear to me that Lisp (and functional programming in general?) has big advantages over Python, Perl, C++ and Java - the languages I've been using. The most surprising thing so far: after getting used to the idea of S-expressions, I feel more at home with Lisp than with traditional-syntax languages.

I want to start using Lisp in my own projects whenever I can. I've started with Common Lisp because it seems like the incumbent dialect for all-purpose programming. Though really attracted to Arc, I've gathered it's still relatively unstable, is this accurate? (If yes, I may still get involved with the community development.) Any other comments for a new Lisp programmer or about Lisp in general?
There is only a Rashomon-like reality and it is getting worse thanks to compressed sensing technology. Just kidding I think. There are generalizations like mathematics that are objective, at least until we try to apply them to the world.

I always find it interesting that she says many of the same things that an anarchist of the left would say yet they would both hate to be identified with the other. It also seems to be impossible to bring about and maintain the systems objectivists, libertarians or anarchists advocate without a widespread shift in morality if not human nature itself.
That's an application, though, not a patent.
An Experiment in HTML Data Extraction
(I haven't watched the interview.)

I suppose that whether reality is objective or subjective is both one of the greatest questions in philosophy, and one of the most useless. But, what you're talking about is the difference between reality, and perception of reality.

I happen to think that reality is pretty objective, various nuances of quantum mechanics aside. I certainly think that reality existed long before we as individuals or as species appeared on the scene, and I think it extends far beyond our relatively meager sphere of perception.
It is safer to be feared than loved, if one must choose, but above all else, one must avoid being hated. (Paraphrasing Machiavelli)

It's interesting to me that a few year ago I'd have been scared to compete (in any way) with apple for fear of being beaten by a better product. Today the picture is much muddier, but the feeling of revulsion is new...
You're contradicting yourself. If you don't believe in objective reality, you can't use biological arguments involving the brain. If you doubt objective reality, then you have to doubt all those observations about the brain you mention. (Natural) science presupposes the existence of an objective reality you can measure. If you don't believe in that, then you have to doubt all observations you make about that "reality".
That's the key.

I don't mind a flash app that adds optional functionality (like an auto mfg having a slick rotating view of the inside of their cars), but I absolutely hate having basic functionality buried in flash (what models do they offer, how much horsepower do they have, and how much do they cost.)
Genius Funds – Earn up to 1.9% daily
Forget hotels, Go with YC's own AirBNB.com. Get cut rate housing and meet some cool new people at the same time.
I still don't understand why Ticketmaster doesn't just sell all tickets as dutch auctions with some minimum price. They'd then easily cut out these brokers in the middle for popular events.
Why would your memory disprove objective reality? Does a painting of a garden disprove the garden existed?

Did you mean, objective perception?
Are American VC's pushing clean tech in the wrong direction?
> If you want alternate tracks (for subtitles and audio) to work consistently, use Matroska.

And avoid GStreamer-based players. Totem is absolutely horrible if the subtitles are complicated (i.e. karaoke timing or multi-language). VLC seems to get it right most of the time.
Improved Zombie dynamics
The City of Google,Kansas
On Windows & Linux?

Doubletake. (Or an OEM version - HP OpenView Storage Mirroring).

We keep 25 million files in sync between two sites across a WAN.

DNS?

Load balancers do that automatically. They have features like GSLB that test each site and dish out 'A' records for the one that's up.
Fair question. The short answer is simplicity and practicality:

* Most people don't own a .com (or .whatever) for personal use - and never will - so what are the advantages?

* The suffix indicates the capability. It wouldn't be obvious that andrewtj.com contained your contact records. I'm not sure how you could change public perception of .com/etc, but you at least have a shot at it with a TLD exclusively for this purpose.

* TelHosting providers are obligated to provide standard public APIs, and there are also specs for consuming structured data from DNS. Would you use these, or create your own?

* For people who do own a .com they most likely won't be running their own nameservers, so you'd have to persuade nameserver operators to agree on API specs and run your management software.

* .tel has a system for brokering encryption keys used to encrypt/decrypt records - if you want privacy you'd need a system like this.

* Using a common namespace offers us a publicly accessible zone - convenient!

* Marketing. Hundreds of registrars selling a common branded product gives it the best chance of adoption.

* It's actually pretty hard to do by all accounts.

I have nothing to do with Telnic - I'm just an advocate/fanboy :)
While the outcome of the Monsanto case was beyond absurd, that wasn't what I was referring to wrt genome patents. If you invent a lifeform, then I think it's fine that you patent it.

What makes no sense to me is how the genomes of naturally occurring life forms can be patented. By the same rationale, Clyde Tombaugh could have patented Pluto, and Galileo would have patents to Jupiter's moons. It makes no sense whatsover.
I just watched the video. Excellent! Thanks for the thumbs up review. Here's a few nuggets (it's worth the entire 50 minutes and rewatching):

For three years, Omniture was the fastest growing software company in the world. And the 22nd to ever reach a billion total in sales.

"I think one of the problems that you see with..I've invested in a bunch of companies - it's really quite... appalling's not really the right word - that's being overly judgmental - it's interesting to me the number of people who don't understand and focus in on... Revenue Revenue Revenue. Like who cares if the desk isn't put together. Who cares if you don't have time to call that person back. Who cares if that persons mad about that and they want talk about it and they want to sit down and talk about when they get health care. Who cares if that guy wants to go to a Chamber of Commerce of Meeting. All that really matters is that you sell some stuff.

In 2002 we had a bunch of people we fired and they were saying really untrue stuff about us in the valley. It's a small valley. We were just a $4M business - who cares about a $4M business - investors don't. We were saying 'you know we would never do it - you guys know us but you know it was he says, she says. But you know what, the day of reckoning must come. You just build the business. The credibility comes with the quality of business. Then they realize that the stuff you were saying was true.

A lot of people when they start a business are worrying about way too many things other than sales. And that's really all that matters in the business is a sale. And if you can't get a sale, then you go back and fix the product. And as soon as it's minimally good enough to sell, then you sell it."

Another one: He would have a single meeting in SF and he would go and buy 15 books on marketing, branding, guerilla marketing - and find 5 after 10 min. sucked, 5 had a good chapter and 5 he read cover to cover. That is how he learned to build his confidence when going into big meetings "That idea is stupid.. well, Coca Cola didn't think so (snap!)"
That would be an interesting overlap. It begs the question, however, if our society should be modeled after an object-oriented program, or if people should be treated like objects within it.

My problem with objectivism is that it fails to account for the complexity that exists in our world. It might work better if we were truly rational beings, or if people were only constrained by their own decisions or a set of fair, logical rules. We don't live in a computer. I wonder if this similarity has anything to do with the reason why so many objectivists I know have a technical background?

(I hope I didn't just open up a bad can of worms here... I do appreciate your contribution.)
The flawed human brain and its ability to remember is merely evidence of a flawed observer, and not evidence of a flawed reality.

The processing your brain does to fill in details is irrelevant when there are multiple methods of observation and multiple observers, and all agree with reasonable precision. When multiple observers can measure an object and find that it has volume and mass, we can all agree that the thing exists. We might disagree on what to name it, or what it "means", but it'd be pointless to argue that it might really not be there.

While one could argue that everything, including all the other observers, are a product of my imagination, it isn't productive to do so. Whether it is all in my head (or in a supercomputer and I'm really just a simulation) isn't a useful theory. I can't do anything with that theory. It is untestable, and thus is mere superstition.

In short, objective reality is a good model for...reality. And, so, it makes sense to behave as though jumping off of a cliff will probably end ones existence.

I believe the notion that someone on HN would be "pro objective reality" (whatever that means...I'm not sure there is any way to win against what is, so why fight against it?) comes from the fact that we are all mostly nerdy, science-oriented, and we tend to be more likely to know how things (where "things" can be mechanical, biological, electrical, etc.) work. We know that when you feed voltage into a particular semi-conductor, the same thing happens every time...so, we tend to be less likely to fall into the trap of thinking things happen because of magic or because we imagined they happened or whatever.

In short, I reckon accepting objective reality has a net positive value in my life. I'm not sure how denying reality would do me any good. I'm pretty pragmatic, and I like having some level of control over stuff in my life, so I reckon I'm a believer.
"This is pretty cool because it means that anything that can speak DNS (pretty much everything) could have programmatic access to this data."

That scares me. It then becomes simple for anyone with an internet connection to pull the phone and email addresses of anyone using this. DNS isn't exactly designed to withstand that kind of abuse (You can't block someone, you can't ratelimit someone, etc).
Congratulations Doug and Jordan! I look forward to seeing where the adventure takes you.
What we need is not only open source microblogging, but also distributed, decentralized microblogging network.

I suggest each personal domain's _microblogging.example.com has a TXT to show the current status.
"The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly."

Nokia's N770 was close to this in 2005, and the N800 even closer by 2007. It didn't have phone hardware, but it's not a great stretch for anyone to see that phone hardware would be a useful addition at that point.
"Where I disagree with Jonathan is on what’s known as “business-method” patents: one-click ordering, per-employee pricing. I’m having trouble seeing the benefit to society in granting patents on something that could never possibly be done secretly."

That I think should always be the type of reasoning involved. It's not the whole story (some things that couldn't be done in private would still stay uninvited if patents didn't exist) I can't get my head around IP moralising. The bottom line is that patents are intended to be an instrument to encourage innovation to the benefit of society.

I really think there is no sane way out of all this. We tend to act as if there must be some hard definition that will include all novel innovations that wouldn't be worth developing in a patent-less world and exclude those obvious derivative things that would be invented anyway and really need to be freely built upon. There probably isn't such a definition. Even if we do find some complex and inelegant way of mostly accomplishing that it wont last forever.

Making a morality around that seems absurd.
Hawaii vacation rentals
Kauai Honeymoon accommodations: Hawaii family vacation rental & Kauai Vacations with private lake..is a beautiful, secluded Hawaiian retreat.
You can remember http://henri.tel, but if this takes off, it's gonna be like the old AOL user ID's or most of the big webmail providrs where the namespace is so crowded that everyone ends up as http://henriloveshiscat182.tel. :-)
For a sample of Gruber-pretentiousness, check out the last sentence (while picturing him wearing a monocle):

I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary.

Oh do say Gruber ol' lad! Your taste is so precisely exquisite.
Have you checked out Clojure, the current Lisp de Jour? It brings with it bags of advanced from all over the place and a healthy dollop of pragmatism.

The language is very young (2 years) but has a very active community.
That's a good list of suggestions to deal with difficult people. Getting flustered sure isn't the answer. When I am having difficulties with someone and they say: I have no idea what you’re talking about, it's red flag time, and I'll tell
myself I will have to handle this person differently..
What’s wrong with that sentence?
(2003) more specifically from August 2003. Maybe someone can add that to the title.
At first I was not thinking the branded url shortening would be that big of a deal, but I admit I like seeing them. I don't have a problem with bit.ly links since I use tweetdeck to unshorten them before following them, but it's nice to know the target up front in the tweet.
Mi5/spooks Seasons 1-8 Dvd Boxset
The Alternative El Nido website - Palawan
Car guy here. (Working on an authentic 1917 model T speedster, also have a 1972 Jeep J-4000, 1990 Firebird, and a 1987 AMC Eagle in pieces.)

It's ... well, it's an interesting vehicle, anyway. I'm not sure how someone would say that they "restored" a 14-year-old vehicle by giving it Corvette colors; I'm not sure why you'd put a Chevy engine into an old Jeep and then mate that up to an automatic transmission, and figure it's good for anything other than the easiest of Jeep trails. The fact that the seller uses the phrase "they tell me" when talking about bubbling paint being a sign of water leakage is somewhat worrisome -- if he's not sure about that kind of thing, then what does that say about the rest of the work done on it? And, blaming the vehicle's inability to brake easily on the engine's power and the size of the tires is just wrong. Braking distance is a function of the braking system, the vehicle's speed, the vehicle's mass, the vehicle's front suspension, and the vehicle's tires (where bigger tires are better).

Daniel and I disagree pretty strongly on environmental matters, and I'm trying very hard not to let that affect my reaction to this. But, as a car guy that can really appreciate a custom vehicle done right ... well, I sincerely wish him good luck on the sale at that price.

I also think that putting $30,000 into a car project to get that sort of result might, on reflection, provide some insight into what's holding back his startup ideas.
I believe he's trying to use "unnecessary" to mean Gruber finds it unnecessary because Apple products are so superior and always will be. This is used to:

1. Nullify all the arguments in the post because people
imagined wearing monocles must be wrong.
2. Point out the fact that it is wrong for anybody to hold
an opinion on anything.
Gruber chiming in without adding much substance while attempting to stay firmly footed in the center of the debate by avoiding words with "extreme" connotation despite having roughly the same meaning ("foolish" == "unwise", etc.). For me it invoked images of a stuffy monocle wearing Briton.

Really you're putting words in my mouth though, the comment was mostly a facetious. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, I just found it amusing.
I’m not opposed to idea of the patent system on general principle (as Stallman, and many others, are).

I'm not aware of RMS claiming that the patent system should be abolished for all fields. I'd love to be corrected on this point, but it's my understanding that Stallman is against software patents only. You can actually read Stallman's own words on the subject in "Free Software, Free Society", Chapter 16. And yes, you can legally download the entire book for free.

http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/
A Fresh Look for Ubuntu?
You can encrypt your records.

>DNS isn't exactly designed to withstand that kind of abuse (You can't block someone, you can't ratelimit someone, etc).

It's hard to take out somebody's nameservers, since there's no single point of failure (unlike with most web setups). But even then there's still (hopefully) some resolvers with cached records :)
You have very unique needs. I am always with a lot of open windows, using small fonts and icons and usually have more than one screen at hand, but I am sure I would feel lost on a 3200x1200, at least for a while. A couple weeks ago, I discovered the big Integraph (I restore and collect interesting computers and this one was just gathering dust) screen my mother uses was capable of going up to 2048 by about 1500, I felt oddly agoraphobic.
Facebook CEO in No Rush To 'Friend' Wall Street
Has Amazon's enforcing of their one click patent really affected them negatively? Certainly their customers have no idea about the whole ordeal. Have great hackers refused to work there because of it? Would some percentage of hackers refusing to work at a big company like Amazon really make a difference to them? Somehow I doubt it...

I think the same is true of this HTC suit. I'm not sure why everyone is making such a huge deal out of it. The patents probably won't hold up in court, or some of them will and HTC will have to pay Apple N million dollars (like Adobe vs. Macromedia). Everyone will forget about the suit within the year. The only affected people (as one of the Tim Bray quotes suggests) will be the lawyers, who collect their entropy-like tax.

Why would Apple do it if it's truly pointless, you ask? Well, Gruber has a few solid bits of speculation in his penultimate paragraph, any of which might be true, but only Apple knows the real reason.