skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's almost comical that you wax poetic about the capitalist system, and then in the next sentence blithely assert that art must necessarily exist outside of it! Especially given that the two have fruitfully coexisted for some four hundred years. Oh, but I guess the interweb changes everything, doesn't it?

Non-sequitur.

Our economic system is a dynamic one? Well done, Sherlock! To say that dynamic systems can't lead to equilibria ('so often at heart of economic models' -- I chuckled when I read that little pearl of wisdom) is patently wrong and frankly asinine.

Prove it instead of saying it is.

And I think we should ignore people whose prose and logic are reminiscent of Manuel from Faulty Towers. Remember that the 'reason to buy' -- as opposed to stealing -- in the physical domain is the fear of being locked up. Getting stuff for free, in case you haven't noticed, will usually 'satisfy consumer preferences'!

Is copying stealing? Is depriving someone of potential profits stealing?

Because a) it's unethical not too, and b) if people don't do it (i.e. if property rights aren't respected) then markets cease to function. Do you not agree would be unethical to steal a purse from a stall in Portobello Market? Do you not also agree that policemen, the agents which 'give [you] a reason to buy', as opposed to just grabbing the stuff and running, are a form of 'government intervention'?

Unethical on what ground? I am not stealing anything. I am duplicating content. I am not depriving anyone of anything, except their potential profits.

You assume a pro-market, libertarian mantle, but the truth is that you are a fraud who uses such lofty talk in much the same way that New Agers use quantum physics to make vacuous points about the inter-connectedness of everyone and everything. Markets rely on the respect of property. That is no less true in the physical domain than in the intellectual one.

Yes, we must imagine that copyright are really property rights, and the consumers can go to hell for attempting to make use of their actual property rights. We must also imagine that copyright laws and patents laws are not really a form of economic intervention with abritary rules.

And yes, we must resort to name calling, copying IS stealing fallacy, and non-sequiturs to make our argument.

I don't even care if artists starve to death on the street. Why don't you make your ethical argument to someone who actually care and actually be tricked by your copying is stealing fallacy?

Do you even know who you're talking to? You're talking to a die-hard anarcho-capitalist who love and respect property right. You know how many anarcho-capitalists who hate copyright and patents? Do you want my friends over at the mises.org forum and the #mises channel at freenode to come over to show you how many hard-core libertarians despise these kind of laws? You want me to show you anti-IP articles written by libertarians?

You want to call me a fraud who really disrespect property right in the disguise of libertarianism? You know, maybe I really do think copyright and patent are not property right.
“Do not have anything in your home that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” -- William Morris

As of a few years ago those became the words I lived by. I threw out anything that had no sentimental or significant monetary value, and things I thought were ugly or junk. I had very few things left -- all of my furniture was gone except for a chair, a desk and a lamp. Most everything else fit in a trunk. I had exactly a week's worth of clothes. Some cookware, dinnerware and basic kitchen tools. My girlfriend was livid, though honestly I found it a good excuse to break it off with her too.

Now when I look at something, I always ask myself - depending on what it is - how it will be 5 (for non-durables like clothes), 15 or 25 years from now. Would I still want it after that time? If not, there's no way I'd ever buy it.

So when you're an apartment with absolutely nothing, you learn what you can live without, and you develop a deeper appreciation for simple things like chairs. You don't just go buy a new sofa, you lay on every sofa in the city until you find one that looks great, that you'd want to reupholster after 30 years and that you can fall asleep on near instantly. You really examine how your clothes hold up over time because... honestly, you don't any spare shirts or pants around. Simple things like plates... if they're ugly, you'll notice all the more. If you don't have enough, you're not so bombarded by other things you're more aware that you seem to be cleaning them an awful lot. Your place stays clean too. A shirt on the floor in a sea of nothing is very much out of place.

You also don't... buy all that much anymore. I have a bed and nighstands and lamps again. And a dining table, chairs, sofa, coffee table and another lamp or two and my lounge chair... but that's been it aside from 5 or 6 articles of clothing and a pair of shoes in 3 years.

Now I'm sort of at a point - still in my 20s - where there really isn't anything I want to buy anymore. Having been brought up by "gotta-have-this"-trend parents, it's a very peculiar feeling. Almost as if you feel lost.
Memory Reel is the simplest way to maintain a personal journal of your life.
Yeah, I am finding the same thing. Why wouldn't they include those two items I don't understand... kind of makes it useless after testing it for a day.
2009's: 10 Most Dangerous Jobs
As 2009 comes to a close, the most dangerous jobs list has arrived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). You may want to reconsider your career from a cost-benefit analysis perspective.
I'll follow up with you on this by email, probably tomorrow night when I have time, but I think the quest for money is based on 5 stages:

1. Basic needs: food, housing, essential security, and the ability to procreate (which means the ability to afford housing in which it's possible to raise children, and to pay for their education).

2. Leisure: books, music, sports, travel, sexuality, the freedom to choose more interesting work.

3. Comfort and time: maids, doormen, business-class air travel, professional autonomy, and other provisions to make life a lot less annoying.

4. Social status: expensive art, trophy real estate, invitations to (and the ability to throw) ridiculous parties, five-star hotels, private jets, AmEx black cards.

5. Power: this is the level of the rich people who have no strong political drive but run for political office (Forbes, and to a lesser extent Romney) or otherwise strive for influence.

I differentiate the last two levels because the 5th is usually observed in billionaires who don't have to answer to anyone, nor to prove themselves, so they tend not to care about social status per se (it comes to them) but still strive for high levels of power and influence.

Achieving #1 is so difficult in our society (due to the outrageous prices of housing anywhere worth living, plus healthcare and education) that a lot of people bypass it and shoot for #2; this is the "hipster" movement-- young people who are rich at level 2 but poor at level 1 (because it's impossible for them to achieve security). It's relatively easy to be happy on a low income if you don't plan on having kids and actually can, unlike most people who are just aping a cliche, "live in the moment" instead of worrying about healthcare, family (in the future) and retirement. Whether this is reckless or enlightened is a matter of opinion.

Money is happiness-producing at levels 1, 2, and most of 3. Where people get tied up and end up miserable, despite ridiculous levels of wealth and income, is when they end up chasing #4-5. These concerns can easily lead to overspending, "golden handcuffs", professional unhappiness, and general malaise, because it's not straightforward to "buy" social status, as nouveaux tend to find out the hard way. When people have their basic needs taken care of and choose to focus on social status in a major way, they become childlike.

However, what we take for granted, as elite technologists, is the possibility of filling out levels 1-3 (basics, leisure, comfort) without having to muck around in the bottomless need pit of #4 (social status). Except for very smart technologists and entrepreneurs, it's literally impossible to reach an income sufficient for level 3 (~100-400k, depending on geography and family size) without getting involved in the social status lemon party. We're lucky in that we don't have to.
Life is a game. The objective is to decide what your own objective is. Any person who completed his or her own objective before they die, wins.
Wait... so you just have to open the mails to get paid? What is there to stop me from just going through and opening all of them without reading?
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church
What's this thing do that my spam filter doesn't?

This SMBC on science reporting seems apropos: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623
I suspect that, like any other simplistic and too-obvious-to-be-interesting theory, this one too will never go beyond the question of whether birds fly. Just a slightly improved expert system. And good luck in entering all the rules of the world and watching your "AI" failing at the most simple questions such as "what time is it?" or "what was my previous question?" - questions that even kids can answer. Shame it's published under such a monumental title at mit.edu.
Tis a joke. Some people speculated that there's a chance the LHC could cause a black hole.

See also: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
Apparently the wisdom of the Interwebs has never heard the phrase "fiduciary responsibility". Google is your friend.
This is my BIGGEST qualm about the StackOverflow line extension strategy. A Q&A site is NOT a community site, a proper community site has discussions, sharing, along with some Q&A.
There is also igraph, for Python, R, Ruby, and C.

http://igraph.sourceforge.net/
Mafia Wars 10 Million Fan Appreciation only Two days
Wow, I love it! I hope you don't mind, but I made a GreaseMonkey script out of your gist: http://gist.github.com/349227
I have no idea.

What will make me happy is to realize what I actually want.
I think financial freedom is best achieved with a balanced combination of "spending less than you earn" and "earning more than you spend."

Personal finance expert Ramit Sethi has a lot to say on this subject; he leans more towards the "earn more than you spend" approach, but he focuses on brutally cutting spending on anything that doesn't really make you happy.

One of Ramit's favorite rants is to criticize people who encourage budding savers to avoid spending money on "lattes" (in Ramit's rants, it's always lattes). The way Ramit sees it: if lattes, or expensive cars, or Fabergé eggs make you happy, there is no reason not to spend money on it--as long as you have your other vital expenses, which includes savings, taken care of first.

I think that's the biggest takeaway from the "spend less than you earn" approach: lots of people buy expensive cars or big houses because they think it's what they want, or because they assume it is what they're "supposed" to have or want, but closer examination would probably show that often, enough is enough, and more is too much.
I't all depends of what OS have HN users. If for example 80% use XP then they all will see Arial, Mac users will see Helvetica. I don't think that Arial/Helvetica works well for HN.
As of right now, no, I do not need the money. In fact, I am burning through my savings sitting in a room and exploring ideas right now. When I get low on cash, I'll take a contract job or two. Also, starting in the fall I will be perusing an advanced degree in the field I enjoy.

However, I still want the money because it is project lubricant. Some projects I am interested in require many people, full-time.
So is there a registrar with good security measures who is relatively inexpensive? I've always just used GoDaddy, but maybe it's time for a change.
I think GM is going to really be sweating considering the Leaf will end up being $10K+ cheaper (after rebates and credits) and will be produced in higher quantities from a brand (Nissan) that doesn't have all that negative press associated with it that GM has had over the past 18 or so months
IPad still looks uncomfortable to use for hours at a time
The site makes it look smaller than it actually is.
250 Word Essay Tips
The most difficult part in writing a 250 word essay is to remain restricted to the word limit! After all, it is not easy to say what you want convincingly and compellingly, when you have restrictions of time or word limit.
That's a fair clarification.

But I'd claim this is turtles all the way down. The politicians that they're covering exhibit the same dichotomy of actual morals versus play acting for market share.

I could go on for days with examples, but here are a few:

* Apparently Republicans themselves were the first to suggest an "individual mandate" for health insurance. Yet they're opposed to it now. See discussion here (http://volokh.com/2010/03/29/was-the-individual-mandate-a-re... ) for example.

* Barney Frank and friends twisted the arms of mortgage lenders to get them to extend loans to people that wouldn't traditionally be considered good candidates. A few years later, he's on TV crucifying banks for doing just that.
Wow. Considering PHP is used primarily for generating HTML, UTF-8 is the de-facto standard encoding for unicode on the web, and PHP files are usually ASCII or UTF-8, going for UTF-16 seems like a phenomenally bad idea. I can see how UTF-16 looked promising back when it was still UCS-2 and there were no surrogate pairs. These days though, UTF-8 and maybe UTF-32 seem to be the realistic choices when working from scratch; UTF-32's advantage in some areas is probably too weak to make it a real contender unless your strings are literally linked lists, not codepoint arrays. (i.e. you don't care that it uses 2-4 times as much memory or storage)
"As far as I can tell, it's profitability comes second to it's function of being able to drive the news cycle and move public opinion."

I would think these two goals are very well aligned.
What about JQuery, which uses CSS selectors everywhere?
Looks like PixelCase technology, which has a similar styled aerial view of Australian cities: http://melbourne.com/ - and New York http://www.pixelcase.com.au/vr/2009/newyork/
The Pirate Bay e la fine della libertà in Internet
I would like to recommend my own project, GarlicSim: http://garlicsim.org

It is a Pythonic framework for simulations. It's still in alpha, and I'd be happy to help people start using it in research.
If Tk doesn't look old and crufty anymore, you wouldn't know it from the official website: there are no screenshots to be found. I spent five minutes trying to see what a modern Tk GUI looks like then gave up.
The real problem is probably my desk. If you can't adjust the desk, you can't adjust the chair.
Freemium ain't new (a study of 3 public companies and xobni)
Imagine over a Good Framework for Your Great Gastby Essay
Great Gatsby essay is a kind of essay that can be assigned at university, college or school. It is one of the literature essays that is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biggest novel that was published in 1925. The main character is Jay Gatsby, who was young and fell in love with a girl, Daisy Buchanan, from the upper class of the society.
FWIW, the reason I replied was to attract attention to the joke, rather than praise, per se. But I also didn't want to give the joke away.
You cannot be happy due to biological reasons. Happiness is a transient state, a peak, like an orgasm.

Knowing that, pursuing happiness is akin to pursuing highs: a futile endeavor.

You can only be comfortable. Financial comfort, emotional comfort, physical comfort. However, comfort makes you weak. Avoid it.

The rest is bullshit. Consumerism & earth saving crap have NOTHING to do with happiness. Just brainwashing. Avoid that too.

However, considering your field of interest and how you formulated the question, I venture to guess that is the main substance you work with. You came here not looking for answers, but just for affirmations of the things you are already thinking.
This just seems like trolling for extra website views by making another useless iPad story.

"Books still seem uncomfortable to read for hours at a time. I mean, you have to hold the thing the whole time you want to read it, and you even have to figure out fancy ways to keep it on the right page, since it keeps trying to close itself. You'd think after hundreds of years someone would have figured out this problem."

Oh wait, it isn't actually a problem. A whole 1.5 pounds? Oh no!
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path
The Church probalistic extentions to Scheme (http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church) look interesting enough. I am not sure how practical things like the fuzzy list equality (using Levenshtein distance) would be, but still really interesting ideas.
http://www.tkdocs.com/
I liked that this included the question "What is the minimum viable product?". It reminds me of a game design article I read a long time ago, which mentioned that the best way to figure out if you have a game that will be fun when it's finished is to "start with the stupidest thing that could possibly work." In other words, starting small and focusing on the core mechanic, and building on that only once you've "found the fun," is a reliable way to produce fun games. This is in stark contrast to the way many projects are run (game or otherwise), in which thousands of features are planned out right from the start and presumably developed in parallel, like a hundred people simultaneously trying to stuff themselves through a single doorway.
Government goes to war with Google over net censorship
I have many dreams, not one specific goal has determined what I do in my life. It's a juggling act though, to work hard so some of them become reality, and hope that other people will take on the rest of my dreams (because I also know I won't be able to do it all myself). Regarding American Dreams, as an immigrant to this country, strangely I have none. I have learned so much while living here, I think that is an undeserving gift to me. My american dream is that America can evolve and find new ways to prosper, innovate while never forgetting the real reasons their founders fought for. The same way, many things can make me happy:just seeing a sunset or a sunrise or just the clear clouds after rainy days or seeing that my cousins learned something after a turbulent programming class.
I think that "Software is Media" is one of the most important things we all should have in mind.
Company should fight for something, polarize audience and never ever try to be everything for everybody.

We don't see that too much in the marketplace.
Grow your app from (db) seeds
Here we favor:

* have good time together as a family and as a couple

* work on things that make sense (useful end-goal + way of work that makes sense)

* intellectual open-ness (learn useful things etc)

* financial independence as much as possible (along the lines of http://evolvingworker.com/2010/2/3/alternate-wealth)

We (my wife and I) don't care much about having a lot of money (although we appreciate jaguars and classy houses, if we could afford them), but we care a lot more about our freedom.

We've been reducing expenses to ensure we're able to go live in the country side of France next month, as well :)

Hope this helps, and nice topic!
Tcl is one that I kind of want to learn but can't find any excuse for. I came to the party too late, I guess - Python does just as well for my scripting tasks, and "EIAS" scares me away from trying it for a substantial application.
How to Manage Virtual Employees (by Wufoo founder Kevin Hale)
Sure, if you learned to code in dynamic langs like Python and Ruby.

I didn't, I learned in C. I'd rather take the safe route and non-virtual by default.
" like a hundred people simultaneously trying to stuff themselves through a single doorway."

Great analogy.

It also made me think of a clown car, with an endless series of zany features emerging.
Actually if you look at the syntax from a mathematical point of view, Tcl synax is much simpler.

Also behind the clean Python look (that almost seems pseudo code in simple programs) the Python semantic is really complex compared to the one of Ruby for instance.
Never knew that tool. Their Video need to be improved because the product seem nice but they really do not sell it well :P
Using capital letters is similar to screaming, according to conventions understood by everyone.

I'd like to see some data on your statements here. It sounds a bit dogmatic, to say something is dogmatic without actually rebate it with ideas and data.
That's how iPhone game "Pocket God" has done it: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2009/06/app-store-insider-pocket-...
Yep, the 12 rules and that's all there is to the language. Tcl is really well designed and elegant. It's almost a Lisp, but one that has the libraries and installed base that it can be used for production work.

e.g. it's easy to add your own control structures to the language
One-page version here: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...
I concur with these findings. m1.smalls are nearly worthless. c1.mediums are roughly twice the hourly cost, and are much faster and more stable when it comes to high-cpu tasks (like an application server).
The EIAS thing is not really that bad in practice, since you get lists and hashes and numbers, which can be used to build a whole lot of things. You also have namespaces to help organize code, and an OO system is on the way.

The things that come to mind where Tcl might be worth trying as opposed to Python are fairly niche:

* Tcl still handles threads a bit better than Python, IMO.

* "Starkits" are kind of cool if you want to distribute a single executable. Don't know what Python has in that department or how easy it is to use. http://wiki.tcl.tk/3661 . To tell the truth, though, "distributing" a web app is way easier than even starkits.

* Tcl, for some things, might still make a better "embedded" language because of its extensive C API.

That said though, Tcl isn't too different in its "ecological niche" from Python/Ruby/Perl, so I think if you know one of those, you'd probably be better off with something "further afield" like Erlang or Scala.

BTW, some shoots off the Tcl tree are worth looking at if you want to play around with a relatively smaller codebase: antirez' Jim Interpreter, at http://jim.berlios.de/ and my own Hecl, at http://www.hecl.org
A very well-written, thoughtful analysis, relevant to all languages and to the high-tech hype cycle in general.
Ask HN: Board member compensation?
Our board of directors has so far (7 years) gotten by without remuneration. It consists of representatives of our various share holders, who sit on the board to protect their own interests. Now at least one board member is demanding compensation, even though the board cannot be said to do much of anything.

What is the general approach here? Do investors in young companies sit on the board for free (since it is in their interest) or do they get compensation?
Can someone please turn this into the start of a counter-strike map?.. I swear I looked down and thought the pope had sprayed his tag there
Sam Harris responds to critics of TED talk, Science can answer moral questions
I agree, but on the other hand, the Leaf has a range of 100 miles, according to the article, while the Volt will have a range of ~300 miles. I see the 100 mile range as a serious limiting factor for the Leaf (at least for Texans like myself). It'd make an excellent second car, however, or would be great if you live in the NE or area with good rail systems for inter-city travel.
Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211567