skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well I'm sure it is since it doesn't handle css properly.
Apple Stores still selling screen protectors, but not for long
My favorite quine is in Factor:

[ [ dup curry ] dup curry ]

(Credit to Slava Pestov)

When called, it puts [ dup curry ] on the stack, then creates a copy of it on the stack. curry then takes the second block from the stack and prepends it to the first. Rather than being a program that evaluates to its code, it's a code block that evaluates to itself (similar to most Scheme/Lisp quines).

(Off topic note: I originally read the title of the article as "Zip Flies All The Way Down" and was wondering what zipping my fly down had to do with hacker news.)
"Maximum Annual Payment $32,000 per PC Software Product"

http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/AAC_fees.cfm

This sounds dirt cheap.
> The question is what motivates Ben Bernanke's decisions as the head of the Fed?

He is still Ben Bernanke, right? Does the hat he wears change him? Assumption that people undertaking government position will forget about what their life was all about up to that point seems far fetched.
Mad lib form style does seem to convert better
Not that I think apple is thinking this (though they might be) but by putting this on their homepage they attract positive attention from the interweb and are cast in a very positive light. This in the long term leads to good branding and more sales.

Heartfelt condolences and good business can go hand in hand.
Is there still any doubt about the power of the television!?
This advice is doubly true for the first words a potential user/customer sees on your homepage.
Home-taping, however, is mentioned; a comparison only slightly less egregious.
The name of the company is Data Marketplace i.e. a marketplace for multiple vendors. I think their goal is going to be to aggregate the various providers of data and through competition, quality should be relatively stable and hopefully improve. I'd compare it to buying a ticket through orbitz. There might be a little bit more customer service overhead if you have a problem with your ticket (or data), but the tradeoff is you don't have to shop at 20 different places to get what you want, plus the price might be more competitive.
That backpack anecdote is a play straight out of Guy Kawasaki's The Macintosh Way (http://www.amazon.com/MacIntosh-Way-Guy-Kawasaki/dp/00609733...), which is on Joel's recommended reading list for managers (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum...).
A reasonable question.

They are reconciled by narrowly observing that the clause "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" describes a specific public interest. You can also narrowly observe that there is no specific enumeration of what comprises an "exclusive Right".

Stallman also (used to?) advocate for "media taxes" and to paraphrase that idea and draw it to its conclusion for the contemporary environment: This would be something like a tax on IP traffic, an enforceable right of verifiable authentication, and a disbursing of those tax revenues to popular Authors and Inventors based on some formula settled by Congress. Such would be radically different from what we have. It would not preclude the freedom to share. It would be consistent with the Constitutional mandate if it genuinely encouraged Authors and Inventors to publish. It would be especially attentive to the purpose ("To promote...") of the regulatory power ("limited Times ... exclusive Right").

Beyond the narrow readings, you can look at (for example) the correspondence between Jefferson and Hamilton and its historic legislative and jurisprudence context. Exclusivity of publication was only grudgingly added to the powers of Congress. It was added in part because of a historic pattern of several of the Colonies to establish a state-run monopoly on printing. It was added in part because of a then more current familiarity with the early economics of print and the role of patronage in inventing. The early US copyright and patent laws make far less sense, given how they were argued for, in the current technological climate. Substitutes - even radical substitutes like a "media tax" - would seem to better fit the goals the founders were trying to achieve (if we can judge that by their own writings).
My thoughts center not so much on all of the conjecture, but of the concept of negative mass itself. The author asks where it might be, but I think it would be better to ask when it might be. It's likely mass is always positive because time is always positive. We take it that all things in existence have mass; if it doesn't have mass it doesn't exist. The concept of negative mass would imply not only that something doesn't exist - it doesn't occur in time - but it specifically doesn't exist, and impacts the universe in the opposite way it would with positive mass. An illustrative example would be a tennis ball on a table. The tennis ball has positive mass, and relates to the universe in ways we are familiar with. If we said the tennis ball's mass was negative, then we are saying that in the universe on the table there specifically isn't the tennis ball, and not just that it doesn't exist, but it's missing (because we're negative) at that point and time, and the universe is affected proportionally.
the same vague shit people say every year

Odd, I thought her blog post was quite specific about the things she was complaining about.

I'm given a lot of pause by how many techies can't wrap their heads around the idea of people minding drunken assholes, gropers, and thieves.

EDIT: And looking at both posts, isn't both of their objections exactly "a crowd of new attendees that I don't want to meet"?
While the show is about TV, the dynamics behind it have nothing to do with TV, as any amount of time in a school yard will show you.
A lot of people donate to charity anonymously, and I don't see why a psychopath wouldn't give money to charity anyway.

This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs.
Perhaps my article "The Definitive Guide to Bash History?"

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-bash-co...
Are you implying people have the right borrow money?

Yes.
"between 2002 and 2004 Forgent was able to obtain about US$105 million by licensing their [JPEG] patent to some 30 companies." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG#Patent_issues) Sounds pretty gloomy to me, yet regular people never noticed.
My dallas VPS seems fine.
Pricing is set by the provider, but we don't mind haggling. We're trying to build a community around buying and selling data tables, so if the price isn't right, that's good feedback for the seller.
He forgot the Wikipedia factor: Wikipedia probably won't be using H.264 anytime soon, and it's one of the top sites in terms of traffic.
Abundance of data sources and collectors can usually increase data quality. For instance, when we post something on mechanical turk we can ask multiple users to repeat the same task thereby scrubbing the output better.

(I also wish TC crowd-sourced grammar checking of their articles prior to pushing them out:-) )
Stallman's written on that before; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html .

His position (which, for what it's worth, seems correct to me) is that I.8 of the US constitution says that the purpose of copyright is simply "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", and sees "protecting and rewarding the author" as a means to that end, not as something to be balanced against it. (Note also that the Constitution doesn't say that there must or should be copyright; only that Congress is permitted, for the specific purpose mentioned, to establish copyright.)

If it turned out that copyright actually works against "the progress of science and useful arts", a believer in "balancing" might think it should stay anyway, to protect and reward authors. Stallman would not, and the US Constitution does seem to be on his side.

(I am not claiming, and I don't know whether Stallman would, that copyright laws that can be shown to impede the progress of science and useful arts would actually be unconstitutional.)
Conceptually git thinks about snapshots of trees. The pack format uses deltas but that's a mostly hidden detail. The pack format didn't exist for the first months of git's existence.

I haven't bothered to read the blog post (Joel strikes me as someone with a huge ego and without any exceptional insights), but doesn't the above fact mostly refute his thesis? I like git and hg but they are just tools. You could do the same development model with patches.
We want to be as transparent as possible about who is selling the data. Ultimately, it will be the reputation of the seller that determines how 'trustworthy' the data is (and how much you should be willing to pay for it).
Viral. I like it.
Yeah, I hate experiencing nature for one week every 17 years. We should agent-orange the trees they are feeding on, and stop the cycle forever.

Let's also pump a bunch of toxic gas into the atmosphere to block out the sun and stop global warming. What could go wrong!
Yet git doesn't remember those things either and can still merge as well as hg (arguably better in some rename cases). What was his point again?
*A company to make money based on advertising has to be able to reach a very large audience. Do you think that your application that your geek friends like is going to be like that? If not, forget the “ads” model.8

Is this actually true? It would seem to me that ads could work for a small, but focused web site, because the ads could be targeted really well.
"criminal means" is the key word. Removing comments from a website that you operate is not criminal. I hope.
I remember when FePy was first coming out, and Jim Hugunin was encountering considerable slowness in regard to exceptions, and he conferred with Guido about it because the fail-first idiom is a preferred python strategy. Anyways, Guido was like, you are functionally equivalent so it doesn't matter. (I'm just regurgitating my rough memory of Jim's blog about it.) But that was also the first time I learned how disruptive an exception was to .Net program flow. I've also seen it in general with other .Net languages -- exceptions kill performance, and defensive programming is very worth the extra effort.
Agreed. It's easy to become lazy, but it takes motivation or a swift kick in the pants by a mentor to get somebody to begin "leading" their peers and affect the direction of the company.
What is stopping them from revving the spec and breaking compatability?

Basically that's Dirac, except they started from scratch rather than improve incrementally from Theora. There was also Sun OMS Video (which has probably been canceled) that attempted to incrementally improve H.261 in a patent-free way.
I was puzzled how that can impact data mining or machine learning as a whole, too. The difference between data mining algorithms and image processing/string matching algorithms is huge. It requires more data to get some meaningful intermediate results on one computing kernel. For example, a typical scene in my research is to compare the performance of many proposed features (tens of thousands) against large volume of data, and pick the best one. It is an embarrassing parallelization problem, but the data throughput is huge. On supercomputers, it is easy since every computer can have a local copy of either feature set or data set. But for GPGPU, there is no way for each core to have a local copy of either set. Thus, to compare against each other, GPGPU must go back and forth to its shared memory, and the limited bandwidth may harm the performance badly.

Disclaimer: I am not very experienced in GPGPU field, so my worrying may be proved wrong.
If memory serves, this was important for cgi scripting -- where a new page hit launched some python code (and hence a new interpreter process).
I appreciate the blog / opinion content on HN when it's well written, or written by a credible source. This fails on both levels.
By your logic all witnessable acts of good must be viewed with suspicion. I don't disagree, but it's a hard way to approach the world.
And putting the burden of proof of explanations for this probably nonexistent phenomenon on anyone trying to argue the point.
You may wish to open a support ticket for assistance if you're experiencing issues.
It depends on where you define traction to have occurred. In the classic "crossing the chasm" terminology. A "good enough" solution that is open can attract early adopters and these same early adopters can become evangelists, developers who improve the open product, or developers who use the open product to create additional products (and sometimes show others how they did this in a devel/evangelism hybrid.) The improvements in awareness, product quality, and product ecosystem that come from all three of those variants of the early adopter are what gets the product into the mainstream and it is usually not until progress has been made on all three fronts that anyone claims that a product is "getting traction."

The lack of an alternative choice will push a lot of people into the early adopter space for some product niches, which can lead to a fast elevator ride into mainstream usage for some products (c.f. MySQL, Linux, etc.) This is not the case with video codecs. The field is technically rigorous so only a few have the chops to contribute code, the alternatives (h.264) are currently better and widely available so few have much to gain by building the Theora ecosystem, which really only leaves the evangelists who are interested in the product as a mission rather than as a tool. This group is unlikely to gain significant traction with the mainstream computing audience.
I guess where I get into the problem is the wording specifically mentions "exclusive right", but none of the wording says "public interest". Progress is good for the public, but it isn't a 1-to-1 correspondence with "public interest". Also, it mentions this exclusive right as the solution, not a suggestion of one possible solution.
I'm sure there's an opportunity here for someone to hook this up with Amazon's mturk and provide an "automated" data provider ...
New College Graduates To Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves
How is time positive? All we have in the universe is change in time; right now, 1 second goes by every 1 second, if that makes any sense. So time itself is the integral of this quantity, and because of the +c term, it could be positive or negative.
I thought I read that there is some dispute over the data.... like the user doesn't own it, can't d/l to excel spreadsheet and you have to use their website and software to analyze and plot the date. The company side steps the issue because they are hoping to monetize the data of 1000's of users. Any thoughts?
holy cow! hey Brad... it's funny who you run into on hn!
Yes I agree that is isn't specifically about TV. It's about the power of peer pressure and the behavior of crowds. It's known that people try to align themselves with whatever they believe is "the norm" in any situation, even if this contradicts their prior beliefs.
As a piece of advice, while you don't have a choice, obviously work where you can. Once choice presents itself, pick a job where you're the dumbest kid in the group. While all startups talk about how they have the smartest people, most actually don't. Really good people are in a very limited supply. In my experience they're uniformly distributed across startups and big companies, so when you pick a job, pick based on the quality of people you'll be directly working with, not based on the size of the company.

Do not assume that smart people are likely to be in a startup (even if it's funded by the best investors) - it's not necessarily true.
http://newsyndicated.com/embiggen.cgi

Do you think I could get a tech crunch article out of this?

edit: (I misread the joke, nevermind)

re-edit: (Added support for saving messages..I wonder if twitter would buy this from me for a million dollars?)
I don't mind Gimp either. It just takes a bit of getting used to, but its interface is actually pretty well thought out.
Is it just me, or are more YC companies launching early this cycle? I can count 5--Etacts, Crocodoc, Cardpool, 140bets, and Data Marketplace--that have already launched.

Is this just a product of them having more companies this cycle, something they're stressing this year, or just a coincidence?
I recommend reading "Perfect Rigor - A genius & the mathematical breakthrough of the century" by Masha Gessen. It provides the best possible insights into Perelman's life and work and details why he most probably will not ever accept this prize.
This is why divide and conquer can work.
Price is just another criteria used to evaluate what's "good", but it is not an independent factor. The importance of price varies along with everything else.
Again I don't think this is about authority as much as it's about alignment with the perceived norm. People in positions of authority usually claim that they're merely upholding normal, necessary or desirable values, and others try to align themselves with that - often even without any explicit coercion, and especially if the authority is perceived to be of a higher social status.
Jerome York is a great businessman to study. He was involved in some really fascinating turnarounds. After all, most businesses run into a few bumps along the way.

I think one of the more interesting ones was with GM, in 2006. Kirk Kerkorian had taken a stake in GM and asked York to be his advisor on the situation. York gave GM some frank news: they needed to be put into crisis mode, sell off Saab and Hummer, cut their dividend, and adopt meaningful restructuring goals a la Carlos Ghosn at Nissan.

Now -- GM rejected practically all of these.

They bought out some employees, yes. But they kept Hummer and Saab, when they should have sold them at peak earnings. Now they are trying to sell them at trough earnings to no avail. The dividend was kept in place and as a result, cash exited the business when it could have been used to pay down on debt. Then, on July 10, 2009, General Motors filed for bankruptcy.
Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what he meant.

Chill out man. People are allowed to think things are fascinating and kind of annoying at the same time.
I was just reading up on that today. Here's a link that gives you more links to useful articles: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-ad...

The standout advice for me seems to be

* show how useful your service is (as Geea says too)

* make it easy to be written about - prepare a press kit

* be genuine, cultivate relationships, and don't be a wh*ring spammer

Please drop back and let us know what works for you.
Perhaps someone should start a new Wiki that can be overlain on Wikipedia. Then all the deleted content could be kept, but we would still be able to access all the information via one site.
As a pay-for-service approach, it seems reasonable: you say you need some data, the appropriate people come up with it in the format you want, and you pay and get the data. But the Amazon-like angle seems odder to me: How will each of the bits of structured information manage to be sold more than once? Since most isn't copyrightable, anyone can buy a copy and then put it up online for free. I could go buy that Wal-Mart Store Locations data set for $30 right now, and publish it on my blog. Are you hoping EULAs will be enough to prevent this, or just that in practice it won't happen enough to matter, or people won't notice that the data is free online and continue buying it anyway?
The problem with the Cravath system is that the rewards have to be significant for making it. Partners in law firms earn a LOT more than mere associates. Most established businesses aren't going to offer enough to make it worth putting up with this.

The result of such a system would be constant job shopping to get a better wage, and low satisfaction for many workers. I think this would have destructive effects on most organizations, although if you managed to survive that initial change, it might be self-sustaining.
For me it's mainly as you said on another comment... The overhead of managing and switching between branches is just too big a price, for no gain that I can see.

I have a hard enough time remembering the state of a single trunk, let alone if I had several branches on the go at a time. I'd fail spectacularly at remembering which branch has what on it...

It's easier to just do:

* Never break the build / functionality of code (Good idea anyway)
* Architect your stuff well with minimal dependencies so you can
can swap in/out modules/components easily.

Personally, I feel branching+merging is as much use/fun as filling out TPS reports.
I can't ascertain if you are being sarcastic or honest in your post, so I'll give my 2 cents.

If you run an organization that experiences the phenomenon of a lot of an organization's alumni become customers, then this is a pleasant and welcome side effect of what is described in this article.
Amazon Readers Shorting non ebooks
I have never seen reviewers give 1 star ratings for not supplying books in e format. Does this signal something?
I was merely referencing the article:

"Sociologist Jean Claude Kaufmann says the French version combines Milgram's use of authority with the power of live television."

The article clearly demonstrates the amplification of the pressure and stress because of television environment.

In this experiment, 80% of the participants kept on buzzing. In Milgram's experiment, 65% of the participants kept on buzzing.

A 15% jump, to me, would show that the variable of the "TV" played a part.
>> "What about topic branches? You have a cool idea and you don't want to break the main line of work. You at the same time want history of the development of this new cool idea. You also want to be able to continue to bring in critical work from the main line of work."

Why not just develop that new idea, without breaking the main line of work :/

Can you give an example of an idea you can't implement without breaking the main line of work?
Please consult Feynman's Lectures on Computer Science and see the errors of your way.

(Zeros are as good as ones and converting doesn't cost high-quality energy. It's deleting information. Thus going from an unknown state to a defined state cost high-quality energy, i.e. has to increase entropy elsewhere.)
It doesn't. Joel is a little bit off base here, in that it makes no difference whether a VCS tracks snapshots or deltas. What does matter is whether it keeps track of merges. If you merge one branch into another, your VCS must record that information, so that future merges can be done correctly. SVN doesn't do this, Git and Mercurial do. (And note that Git stores snapshots, not changes.)

Joel's absolute right about one thing, though. Being able to merge correctly and reliably make a huge difference. It's what makes the distributed part of DVCS possible. Without a central repository, branches happen a lot more often, and merging has to work right. The contortions that teams go through to prevent branches are a thing of the past.
Man wins $1.5m in first of its kind saw case
One iPhone, Two Different Numbers, Courtesy Of Toktumi’s Line2 App [Review]
Away3D Lite and Haxe - MD2 Model Loading
Do you cheat (i.e. reading back the source file), or do you write real quines?
To clarify, I mean time always goes in one direction: forward.