skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't see how current [copyright law?] is hampering arts and science, really.

Seriously?

As one example, people who go to prestigious universities with big libraries can get access to all of the scientific output in the world, while others, especially in places without good public libraries, can't get access to that material. If copyright was a more reasonable term, all of that material older than some date could be digitized and widely distributed. This couldn't but help science.

As another, a large portion of the current amateur cultural output (youtube videos, covers of songs, &c.) is currently illegal. But this illegality is out-of-sync with common understandings of the legitimacy of various uses.

It's absurd to justify people's grandchildren (or unrelated people or corporations who bought the rights sometime) collecting royalties for the creative output of 70 years ago with the argument that the original creation wouldn't have happened without such "incentive".

* * *

As for constitutionality, this is a matter which properly belongs to the legislature IMO, not the courts. I just wish our legislators were a bit less beholden to Disney & friends.
> Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this done by Sunday.

It might not be so quick a thing to test, so no mockery from me.

It took me years to figure out how to increase retention on my sites, little by little tuning it so that the 'pipeline' from users just visiting to users signing up did not get disturbed.

So, yes, they're all testable claims. For me tuning this worked well, it was - at some point - the difference between $5,000 / month and $ 50,000 / month so the pay-off of the time invested can be immense.

I'm conservative by nature though, and it took me a long time to clue in to a/b testing (this was back in 2000 or so), which didn't help at all.

Best of luck with that, I'm curious about the results.

Btw, I agree that getting your users to go from 0 to the breaking point quickly can make you some money, but on the other hand there is no such thing as a 'bad' user, and if you can somehow engage them to generate some buzz for you that's a pay-off as well.

It may not be such a simple relationship between the two, the sales curve might lag quite a bit behind the 'buzz' curve. It's about 'mind share', and that's one of the hardest to quantify variables.
Not a bad idea. If they could get this down in size and up in quality it would make really super small cameras in everything possible.
Why not ? Email allows you to reach everybody that is online somehow, the iphone only allows you to reach a small subset of those.
How is this materially different in concept from WebTV?
just set up an account on the website, then downloaded the iphone app. It doesn't seem to integrate too well with 1Password. I generated a password for the website, but the phone app wouldn't accept it until I made it simpler. The website and phone app should have the same password requirements.
Parrot AR.Drone: Coolest iPhone accessory ever? [video]
A simple Google search would have sufficed:

http://code.google.com/soc/

https://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/highschoolintern...

http://www.fastweb.com/college-jobs-internships/articles/205...

http://www.google.com/search?q=%27high+school+internship%22+...

Obviously the number of these internships is limited. But that is also my point: a high school student (not you necessarily) is rarely suitable for creating commercial products until many months or even years of training. That is why people hire college graduates.
Nice! Consider my objection withdrawn, and my compliments to the developers of bash.
Just ask yourself: what would be best for the super rich? What would be best for the banks? And then you can make an accurate guess what Bernanke will do.
Hospital Packing Checklist | Home Improvement & Health Care
Nice - I already made a sale!

I didn't see it posted anywhere, but on a $4 sale, I received $3.68, so that's an 8% fee if it's a flat rate. (Or it could be something like $0.28 + 1%)

@matthodan, you might want to post that somewhere / make it more obvious.
up to the team, if you email me I'll forward it to them. Or just use the contact email on the needlebase site, that goes right to them.
The End Of 9-To-5: When Work Time Is Anytime
I am about to begin a startup if you have skills at SEO and landing pages etc. My holding page is at www.familytreeonline.com
"They say they simply wanted to see if we would go so far as to kill someone for entertainment."

The ancient greeks built the Colosseum for this kind of entertainment. So it's not surprising really.
Is there already something for generalized push to regular computers as opposed to phones? Forgive my ignorance.
This reminds me of a book I've been meaning to read for over 10 years: http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-People-Profit-Hard-Manageme...
Etude does.

Really? Etude is a cool app, and is certainly nice looking, but it's nothing new; I remember doing the exact same thing (even "professionally engraved" notation, via lilypond) 6 years ago on my Linux box. The difference is that on your real computer, you can actually connect your MIDI keyboard, and you can see two entire pages of music at once. And you already have it, so it's free.

So while nice, I don't think the iPad or iPhone is the best device for this application. The iPad is certainly nice for reading HN while waiting for the train, I would imagine.
What's wrong with a jalapeño bagel?
Yeah, the "flip page" setting definitely plays the note on the left-edge of the highlight whereas the continuous setting plays it in the middle....
Avoiding the Dogpile Effect
I don't think I ever implied he was a hypocrite. I was just pointing out that, although people are willing to relocate, it can't be taken at face value.
Why is this better than http://notify.io/ ? Notifyio has been around longer and has a better support for people who don't use iPhones. Plus it's open source...

Plus, I am really suspicious of the whole the names only differ by one letter thing...
So where did this radical work system come from? It was created by two human resource workers who became frustrated that the daily grind wasn't only constraining, it was also inefficient.

Some good points, but I don't really think they invented the non-traditional work system, but this article sure makes it sound that way.
Besides MRI research, has any useful applications come out of this?
Misleading. Just because scientists are not using the tool correctly (that is, reading more into it than they should; misusing numbers in ways they shouldn't) doesn't mean they are shortcomings in statistics. It is what it is. You cannot read more meaning into numbers than is there in the first place.

Maybe these scientists are really looking for an oracle, and all they have is statistics.
The Healthcare Diff Part 2
Scientists create invisibility cloak
There might be something to it. I doubt he's thinking of a big brother scenario; he was referring to checks and balances. The government has a lot of information that would be useful about whom to trust and perhaps Craig was mostly thinking about government in a collaborative, information-sharing role.

But at first glance the thought of the government telling me whom to trust gives me the creeps, too.
"If our priors say psychopaths are less likely to give to charity - and it's a tough row to hoe if you want to say they give as much or more as the average - and we observe even weak evidence that a person doesn't, then our likelihood of the person being a psychopath must go up."

In that case, I think you're a psychopath, since you've given me absolutely no evidence that you donate to charity. ;) (Don't try telling me that you donate to charity without evidence, either! That's exactly what a psychopath would do, assuming he didn't want to be exposed as a psychopath!)

"Death to all extremists, eh...That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these."

Interesting. You have absolutely no emotional distaste to discussing (without sufficient evidence) whether or not some of our particular fellow human beings are psychopaths, as long as you can continue to amuse yourself. That demonstrates a serious lack of empathy. Very concerning.

Seriously though, I don't think a psychopath would have as much interest in changing the world as a young Steve Jobs did, nor would a psychopath name something after his daughter or adopt her into his family. I'm not saying there's no similarity between what we've all read about Jobs and the psychopath archetype, but there's enough differences that it doesn't quite fit.
Today, we let any input device (such as a keyboard, or any USB device actually) take full control of our computer. If it's a hacked device (even something just inserted into the USB) it can type anything to our computer, issue commands, make it download stuff, sniff passwords, etc. It takes a lot of work to make a computer secure enough that you can plug a non-trusted keyboard into it. It may not even be truly doable if you consider the habits of computer users.
I don't understand why people think that some company's hiring process is broken because they reject good or even excellent people. A hiring process is bad only if it leads you to hire incompetent people or -- to be more precise -- people who you later regret having hired.

> ignoring experience by offering salaries or positions significantly below candidate's current levels in the industry.

I've heard Microsoft also does that. Though I don't know their rationale, I think it's in line with these two assumptions:

1) There's a large variation in skill among programmers
2) There's no strong correlation between programming skill and years of experience

So while newly grads with no work experience will likely get an above average pay in those companies, more experienced people might take a pay cut. I think it makes sense.
Freedom to schedule work around life instead of life around work is literally the #1 benefit I'm looking forward to from self-employment. No more showing up for 14 hours just to be seen at the office for the right 14 hours, huzzah.
Sounds like you'll still be meaning to read it in another 10 years.
I meant his Stanford Speech. It made me realize there is no better time to start a company then now.
I agree that government shouldn't take an active role in running the system, but protecting the system by preventing abuse seems like a good fit. Maybe something very similar to the way government enforces contracts.
It's petty to take sides in either end of this - I doubt anyone is well read enough on the patent portfolios of either company to pass a legitimately informed comment.
Mark Cuban nailed this early on:
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/18/breaking-down-bernie-mado...
This proves what we already know - people are idiots. The dude with missing fingers is an idiot for sticking his hand in a spinning blade. The judge is an idiot for not throwing this case out and the jury is 12 idiots that found the table saw maker guilty.

My grandfather cut all four of his finger tips off in a planer and I know the only thing he thought was - "that was an idiot thing to do". If I cut my leg half-off with my chainsaw that is the first and only thing I would think of too... but so many people don't want to take any share of the responsibility and we end up with this. I will step off the box now.
Then I guess I'm petty, because my next phone is going to be made by HTC.
I don't get it. Reading music is the easy part, and it's best learned with a real instrument.
I don't think the iPad will increase reading anywhere near as much as the Kindle simply because of the screen. EInk is awesome. Even the iPhone hurts my eyes in dim light, imagine 4 times the brightness.
If you only look at the people who would have been better than average here and get lost for that reason, sure.

What happens if you include the people who would have been worse here and get lost for that reason?

Unless you can make the case that the ones who are unwilling to come really are better than the ones who do come, then there is no net difference. Given the difficulties with measuring relative talent at that level, this is a really hard case to make. (You could try to do it by A/B testing two different hiring processes...)

In fact my inclination is to believe the opposite. People who are more excited by the culture, co-workers, and problems that Google has are generally willing to take that drop. Which is a sign that they will fit in better here in the long run.
Well, one may be against sprawl, but the point is that you can't really stop people from doing what they want to do. You can bend behaviour with the odd law but not that much. Governments have tried to stop sprawl in tons of ways but they don't have much success. However, we can try to examine where it's going and plan what can be done within the context of what's possible to do
That does look cool.

I gotta say, I'm mighty disappointed that the iPad is just an overgrown iPhone. If it had been a MacPad and ran OSX I would have been all over it. :-(
I don't see this being all that relevant to hacker news other than possible links to social engineering.
Oh, I didn't put that very well. I meant that I thought the public domain manifesto, while far from perfect, is a good idea. RMS appeared to me to be criticizing it too harshly because it didn't meet his standard of perfection.

However, I prefer not to comment on him as an individual. For one thing, his accomplishments significantly exceed mine, and for another, I see many similar personality traits in myself.
I can see it already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euWgjOhSqWA#t=4m02s
I guess it depends on your exact plan, but I think a lot of people think that and then find out self-employment is more like finding any life because of how much time you have to put into it.
Really? so you don't have any "meaningful relationships" that involve contracts, laws, things like that? You don't drive a car? Use a phone? Benefit from Police and Fire protection? Those things are all government regulated.

Really when you think about it, government has a lot to do right now with regulating trust. Think of how much more difficult trust between businesses would be if contracts didn't have the force of law? If disputes couldn't be settled in the courts?
So people that design and sell handguns are not liable for murders with those handguns, but people that design and sell computer software are liable for crimes committed with that software?

We need more lobbyists.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's only good for browsing the web. The ease of use of different devices brings about incredible behavioral changes that can't simply be disregarded.

I have the luxury of testing a lot of mobile devices lately. I have a macbook pro, iPhone, Kindle DX, Nook, Sony Reader, and ASUS EEE 1005H. I never use the netbook because my 13" MBP is almost just as small and a million times better. The readers are neat, but I don't bother unless I'm reading a novel. They are essentially like books and their value cannot really be maximized unless you're the type of person who reads at any available moment (and I don't live a lifestyle that provides me with such moments).

There is this huge middle ground where my MBP is a bit too clunky and my iPhone a bit too small. The iPad fills that gap perfectly. I'm the type of person though that prefers to read my email at work standing up and on my iPhone rather than on my desktop. And I suspect as more comfortable devices come to market (like the iPad), these sort of behavioral changes will become more apparent.
I can summarize. Mostly just people making snarky comments about opposing products. The guy from CouchDB is particularly annoying. Apparently he feels like he has to raise his voice and cut people off to defend his product.
Ask HN: How do you handle battle between self-doubt and hope/persistence?
Something that must be familiar to most who start a startup is the roller coaster between the self-doubt and hope they experience. In PG's "What startups are really like", he says

"In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I mean a couple hours later",

Of course, persistence is what is needed to sustain you through the lows.

On the other hand, I'm thinking that if things look bleak (the startup isn't doing great, you're getting no investments, no traction, etc) maybe that's a good sign to hang up your boots and stop wasting any more of your time on your current project and look for something that has a better chance of succeeding.

So, my question is, when things look bleak, how do you decide between "Things will work out in the end. I will persevere" and "This will not work out. I must listen to the clues and exit" ?

Of course, there is no single answer, but how do you guys personally handle this situation?
The ones I know and work with don't so I guess I was taking that as a good sampling, but I was wrong. It is one thing to show-off something you created, but another to just "talk" about it.
Nice. Just registered. Various glitches on the website where you fill out a form (received via https), hit submit, and get the API error page saying https required.
Caribbean Hotel reservations
I found a really helpful website that specialises in hotels in the Caribbean.they had very competitive hotel rates and were able to arrange my transfer from the airport.
yes... fixing that now.
Even tech savvy people sometimes want to step away from the computer and just read a book or play a game without too much complexity or required hoop jumping to get there.
Fractional reserve is so named because the reserve is a fraction of the total deposits. The reserve is the numerator.
It is surprisingly hard to simulate load in a way that realistically matches what load will do with various caching layers.
In the real world, they'd be more like taxis and less like cozy little recliner-bearing offices. Smelly, worn out, and filthy. Not something you'd want to spend a lot of time in.

The problem they'd really be solving is parking, allowing downtowns to be more dense without huge expenditures in public transport. I think a more reasonable approach would be to admit we have just about completely failed (in the US) when it comes to public transport, put aside our pork for a year or two and build some.
yeah, its easy to self employ and get by, its pretty hard to self employ and make it a career.

i have a pretty damn flexible job, as long as i get my work done etc. definitely don't need to be self employed for it
"They are charged with conspiracy and falsifying records of a broker-dealer and of an investment adviser."

If the people selling handguns assist in the murder, they too are liable.
I didn't realize there was a "content preference learning system" in place... Sounds neat, but if it's a differentiating feature, you should probably make that more apparent.
Cognitive biases don't mean that the brain as a whole is irrational. While we can't always stop the cognitive biases from occurring, we can avoid situations where they occur. For example when choosing a candidate for a job you want to make a decision before comparing with other people's opinions to avoid the bandwagon effect.

However some you can actually mitigate, just by knowing they happen. For example everyone has loss aversion - where we overvalue the loss of something in compared to how much we value gaining from it first place. By knowing that you have loss aversion you can focus on thinking about how much you actually gained when thinking about how much something will cost when you lose it to get a more "real" estimation. For example I'm giving up a business I've been running for years - it's painful to do and something I've been putting off, but I can mitigate the pain but genuinely examining what benefit I've gained, not just making the decision based on the vague "I don't want to give this up" feeling. It works for lots of things; relationships, jobs, etc...

Personally I do it mostly because I like control. I don't like not understanding my decisions. Understanding why I did something makes me "feel" better. That in itself is reason enough :)
That's a big assumption. We don't know the circumstances of the accident.
The general flavor of technology used here is the 'handgun'. The two programmers indicted would be the hit men. I'm pretty sure that Stroustrup will not be held responsible. :)
Is there space to compete with personal organizers like Evernote, but with a stronger focus on user-sharing? Like Google Reader or Delicious focused not on pages, but snippets of content?
Amazon has so many customers at this point that have probably purchased most of the books in their system, that I imagine they could remove all non-customer reviews of products and end up with a significantly better signal to noise ratio.
Why Blockbuster Australia should be worried
I don't really ever have trouble reading a (good) LCD, and specifically would prefer reading on an iPad rather than a Kindle because the iPad is backlit and I read a lot in the dark before bed. I know many disagree, though.

I never turn the iPhone's brightness above 60%; I usually turn it all the way down in the dark and would very much like it to be able to go even lower. What a funny change from a few years back when we were always excited about upcoming LCDs being brighter than their predecessors and spent much of the time with our screens at 100% and still a little too dim.
Basically we just keep going until we feel foolish and give up?
Just curious, why do you believe Scandinavia is more equal than the US, UK or Australia?

Gender equality metrics, eg. see the World Economic Forum report, generated from "hard" indicators:

http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/rankings2008.pdf

where the top 3 countries are Scandinavian (4 if you include Iceland). On the same list, the UK is 13th, Australia is 21st, and the USA is 27th.

This list is consistent with my own impressions. You will also note the reasonably high correlation with the math gap list I referenced upthread.
There is no debate. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is also not murder, arson, or vandalism. Words mean something. That's why we have different words for different things. When someone says "Copyright infringement is theft", they're making a rhetorical point by conflating two different things, just like when someone says "All property is theft." This does not mean there is any debate that "property" and "theft" are the same thing.
Google Will Soon Allow You to Opt Out of Google Analytics Tracking
How I Became (Mostly) Google-free in About a Day
It's similar. And most have never heard of it. Perhaps some value of being YC vs. not-YC. TC coverage and all.
Mint.com in 2010 - Is it Safe?
Interesting. I travel a lot, and try to avoid taking too much with me. The Kindle + netbook is a good combination for me. I also take my happy hacking keyboard. (As for laptops, I think they are a waste of money. A quad-core desktop + netbook is cheaper than a decent dual-core laptop. And if you lose the netbook, it's no big deal. $300 and you have a brand new one.)

The problem with the iPad and devices like it is that most of my activities in front of a computer involve typing; writing or programming. Just sitting and reading content is nice, but that's what the Kindle is for. And if I need to type, I need a real computer. So the iPad is the form factor that I would like to carry around, but it's worse than a Kindle for reading and worse than a netbook for computing.

I also have a portable music/movie player, and a phone. Way too many devices, and yet they are all good at one thing and all suck at everything else. Sigh.

Edit: after re-reading this comment, I've realized that I've failed at traveling light. netbook, kindle, keyboard, phone, dc-dc-converter, archos, headphones. I wish I could combine all these devices into one :(