skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Corporate leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to act like greedy assholes. We have to understand that. It's required by the SEC and the law.

Corporations must grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead.

That's the problem with our system. But this system violates the laws of nature. Organisms in nature don't continue to grow forever. Those that don't stop growing eventually collapse under their own weight. That's exactly what is happening to our corporations -- and our society.

We have to create a new system, whereby corporations -- organizations -- are rewarded for their stability, for their consistency. For their remaining the same for a long time.

Small businesses can do this. At some point, the small business owner can say, "I have enough." But corporate leaders cannot say, "Our corporation is big enough." If they say that, they are fired. If you go public, you have to grow forever until your corporation collapses -- or is broken up by regulators.

There is only one destination for public companies -- destruction, either through collapse or regulatory fragmentation.
I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.

I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters).

However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for.

For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area.

This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
The iPhone's 3.1.1 rejection of CS5 is very dangerous to Adobe, because it undermines their platform's relevance. Particularly during a changing of the guard. One response is to ensure their great tools work well for HTML5 (which is probably in their interests anyway); but Flash remains valuable and worth protecting. IMO, they now have an extremely strong motivation to make Flash work on ARM.

Wonder what's stopping them?

I agree with the article that ARM smartbooks need the whole web, since they are competing with the near-universal applications on the x86 platform. But maybe even that isn't enough, since the network is intrinsically slow and unreliable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput... and consider the demand for iPhone native apps.

Perhaps faster javascript and RIA will fix this, enabling "native" webapps.
How the iPad gobbles up netbook sales
And off course how could I have forgotten the one and only Edge, Bono and 'em in "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
Because they only need to pass it once.

The same happened here in the Netherlands with the EU charter, we got to vote on it, voted no, they kept repeating it until not enough people showed up and rammed it down our throats under a different name.
I didn't mean it in the "Let me google that for you" sense, but meant "try looking for iSCSI related things instead of PXE related things - look here are some results which support the idea that it's possible using that approach, but I don't know enough about diskless Windows booting to be able to pick a result which isn't terrible and unhelpful".
I have considered it, ok scratch that, dreamed about something like this around the time Friendster craze started.

Even for a decentralized project you still need the big "seeders", that is the problem.
Where in brooklyn are you? Where I'm at it's $2k for a 1 bedroom.
The different ways the world counts
I remember when a nonexistent person won student body president in college.
Yes! My university uses Live, or whatever it's called this year and it sucks in a majestic fashion. Different versions open in different browsers, the mobile site just doesn't work at all, there's an enormous redirection song and dance when logging in. Loads of basic usability flaws. Want to archive an email and create a new folder at the same time? Not possible. Oh and it's down far too often.

The only reason I don't pump it through my Gmail account is the level of crap that gets sent on mailing lists.
I trade forex on currensee.com (which is a social network of forex traders) - a lot of them are shorting the EUR/USD because of it, and a poll in the discussion area say that 50% of members who voted think the eur will crash due to greece.

Just an interesting insight. I don't have an opinion one way or the other.
>Some dynamic languages will happily convert values from one type to another even when that's not the desired result -- you might not get an error at all, just some bad data you might not find until much later.

This happens with algol style static languages too (And is one of the reasons I find people arguing for Erlang instead of python more persuasive than those instead arguing C++ instead of ruby).

You are confusing strong types with dynamic variables. Most of the algol languages have weak to medium type strength.

For instance, python has much stronger types than C. However, it's variables are all dynamic references.
I'm crossing my fingers for the US launch...
controls wealth? isn't wealth created?
Have you considered trying affiliate sales? Pick something that you like, mention it with an affiliate link. Blogs with some kind of focus seem to do pretty well with this approach.
A big part of the problem here, both in Greece and Italy is that they have a huge corruption problem, hopefully this will give them the incentive to address that.

Indeed. In the past many countries tried to devalue their way out of the problem; euro membership is forcing them to address the actual fiscal problems rather than obscuring them with monetary policy. I'm Irish myself and we too had been down this road before joining the euro but I think the Irish government has learned the dangers of that.

Portugal's economy is also small so even if they have problems, it's more about appearances than fundamentals. Italy's is bigger but the one thing they have going for them is that much more of their debt is internal; Spain is my biggest worry.

I see Angela Merkel has been throwing a shit-fit this morning over the fact the many of the same banks that were begging for government support in 2008/9 are now taking a leading role in jacking up spreads on Greece. Eurozone bankers are likely to find themselves under severe regulatory restraint before too long: this is going to cause further tension between the UK and the rest of the EU.
Because your genetic heritage is unlikely to be used to it and with humanity's short history of chemical knowledge and expertise on processing food (what, 30- 50 years?) I wont be convinced that humans know better.
The copyleft lobby actually has more energy, but in this case the public consultation was ignored. What the intellectual property lobby has is more dear to the hearts of politicians: money and connections.
I haven't read the Macro Chapter yet, but I can say the rest has really helped me understand Clojure a bit better, been reading it since the first MEAP hit. And both authors are very open to feedback so if something doesn't make sense or the like don't be afraid to tell them. They seem very dedicated to helping people better understand and use the language with this book.
Nobody Encrypts their Phone Calls
I remember when I could vote for "RON" in college.

It meant "Re-Open Nominations", or "I don't want to vote for any of you so let's call this a failed vote and we'll redo it in future. And we'll keep doing that until there are people or policies we positively want, instead of choosing the least worst option".

I miss that in 'real' politics. Imagine if everyone's default vote was 'nobody' and we had 'no government' until someone makes a party which is so good people really want to vote for it.

Would parties be any different then?
"Sort of" = the opposite in reverse, where as palindromes are the same in reverse...
Are u`you saying modesty is useless because it prevents people from expressing immodest things? If that's the case I think you're confused. Discussing personal hygiene is considered immodest because people shouldn't have to hear about it. It's unpleasant, distracting, and completely irrelevant to most relationships. In other words, news about your scrotum is noise not signal.

What should be considered modest and when, I think is a complex issue, whether some things should be kept private at least some of the time, I don't think is up to debate.
The intellectual property lobby can channel campaign money to the politicians and likely offer them connections for further contributions or future career opportunities. The copyleft lobby can't compete with that. This is why democracy isn't representing the will of the electorate on this and many other issues.
I built an opportunistic cluster a few years ago using PXE boot. You can read the write up here: http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/49654
Is Yuri Milner, the founding partner of DST, going to become the next Warren Buffett of this era?
The issue is that network advertisers don't have the bandwidth they say they do. So they really can't give everyone 24 sustained, only burst.
Vespene gas.
Following YouTube's related videos trail - this is based on Argentinian political ad which won the silver lion in the Cannes Lions Ad Festival in 2006:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFz5jbUfJbk
You're being funny, I know. But just FYI, you do not need to put a stamp on letters to Members of Parliament.
I'm with you that 'better' is highly subjective, and in the case of inexperienced and wanting to learn vs any amount experience and excessive pride I'll take inexperienced any day. Technology is too diverse and filled with rapid change to ever think you don't need to be open to new ideas and improvement.
I think a very small % of founders raise money solely for their own salaries. However, given that human capital is often the majority of costs for early stage start-ups (especially consumer Internet) and that small teams can accomplish a lot it doesn't seem off-base for lean startups to extend their runway by raising venture capital to pay salaries for founders and early employees.

In unrelated news, an associate at a VC firm makes an average salary of $194K/year. :)
The FCC had a choice here (after losing in court on the question whether it had so-called "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose net neutrality rules on carriers).

It could have gone back to Congress to get clearer statutory authority for its mandate to regulate the web. If successful, that effort would have led to a solution in the form of a new statutory provision that carefully defined what the FCC could or couldn't do in regulating the internet. While that would have been an ideal solution, it would have meant having to get support for the agency's net neutrality goals in Congress, and that support was doubtful.

The other choice was to do what it did here, and that is to take its existing authority over common carriers in the telephone market and attempt to extend it to the internet. The problem with this is that such authority is very broad-based and includes (among other things) the power to regulate pricing through a complex system of tariffs.

The FCC is claiming to do a "hybrid," however, by saying that, yes, we are going treat internet access providers like phone companies but we don't intend to regulate their pricing or exercise any of the other broad regulatory powers we might otherwise exercise once we use this this approach. In effect, the agency is saying, "we plan to come in with a scalpel and do only what is needed to implement our narrow regulatory plan that is focused primarily on net neutrality rules - so, don't worry about the rest, trust us that we will not overreach."

Of course, nothing is in place under the FCC's chosen approach to stop overreaching by the agency except its own discretion. By invoking existing statutes designed for another purpose altogether, instead of seeking to get a new statute from Congress aimed at solving the immediate issue of net neutrality only, the FCC is exerting government power in a way that may not have been contemplated by the original statutes and in a way that will most certainly be challenged in the courts.

Maybe this approach will work for proponents of net neutrality but it comes at a price of the government staking out a pretty broad claim to regulate the internet without any particular checks on that power beyond the FCC's own judgment as to what it should or shouldn't do in the future. Thus, this is basically an agency power grab - perhaps supportable, perhaps not - but almost certain to have unpredictable and potentially unpleasant side effects as always happens when there are insufficient checks on government power.
Part of their oversight is the court system.

Legislative branch sets out what should happen (but misses details)

Executive branch fills in the details via implementation

Judicial branch tells them when they screwed up the details or the legislative branch did something that conflicts with higher law.
Who would get to decide if it's a joke candidacy?
Ask HN: Wanted: reliable, very slow file copying over UDP
I have a bizarre requirement that I'm about to have to code, but I was wondering if someone already has what I need.

I have two machines separated by a network connection that only supports UDP. The network is heavily loaded, but I can put a few packets per second on it, perhaps up to 10. I need to reliably copy a file from one machine to the other.

I don't have RDP (who does!) and I don't want (or need) to replicate all of TCP.

Any suggestions?
Yes. A result of winner-take-all elections is that we have trench-style (as in World War 1 trench warfare) politics: two parties stand very close to each other on the political spectrum with ~45% support each, very little gets done, and the only thing that really happens is that the front where the trenches are moves a few meters to the left or the right. Right now, both trenches are deep into center-right territory as far as the left/right economic spectrum is concerned.

I think there is a difference between the parties, but not so much along left-right lines. These cultural issues (gay rights, abortion, evolution) might seem trivial to Europeans, but that's because there isn't a credible threat of abortion being recriminalized in Sweden, nor of evolution being stricken from the classrooms in France. The Religious Right isn't a majority in the US, but they are powerful. Bush would not have been able to get domestic support for the War on Iraq without the dominionists (those who believe bringing violence to the Middle East will hasten the End Times and Rapture) on board. They're about 10-15% of the voting populace.

The Democratic party is a center-right party that would be labeled conservative by European standards but generally considered reasonable; the Republican party is not much further to the economic right but is far more authoritarian and zealous.
I can summarize The Silmarillion far more efficiently:

It is a collection of stories that share a fictional world and span thousands of years. It's not a novel so much as an anthology.

Hence the many characters, no long story arcs, etc. Break it down into short stories and it's much easier to tackle. You don't have to remember every single character's name, because you likely won't see it again after a certain point.
Fixed-Sparsity Distributed Representations in the Neocortex
By "apparently" I just meant that I had thought I read it, but had not verified. Thanks for the link and clarification.
<2cents>

1) There is no way to "determine" this directly. Launch is when YOU (you being the company) say it is.

2) Not necessarily IME, but expect a management shakeup if funding does occur. Your current leadership may be considered unfundable, but if the product is viable the company (legal entity) may be fundable, albeit with some chaos.

3) You can't, however if you've learned things and can articulate how you have learned and grown from the experience (on paper and in person) you should be fine.

4) This is an unlikely outcome on your current path. You would need to have shown some exceptional leadership and insight skills to get to an EIR role. It is possible to do that in the next 6 years, but you would need a launch in the next 12 months, then 3-4 years of steep growth, with yourself playing a highly active role in managing a large aspect of the business through that growth curve. IE: you need to deeply experience the growth and success of a company, be involved in the details, and have clear responsibility for key decisions. You would likely be best off seeing this through and then founding/co-founding something on your own (and taking that corp to an equity event that is considered a success).

</2cents>
I've never bought this argument. It is mathematically unsound. Systems behind my firewall, touched by one or two people, and with fewer hackers trying to break in are exposed to fewer threats. Many people want to break into gmail, because it's gmail. Many fewer people care about breaking into one university. There's no wire over which to transmit information. The more access points there are and the more hackers there are who can reach the systems, the greater the probability that one of those hackers will succeed.

Google's sophisticated systems have already been compromised by unsophisticated hackers in China.

A house with 5 doors is less secure than a house with 1 door. A house with no windows is more secure than a house with windows.
Posterous no longer includes site names in Facebook streams
While piracy may influence the perceived value of the good (although this is _very_ arguable) so does almost everything else. What competing products are on the market, and what are their price points? What are the trends in consumer preferences? What do the macroeconomic indicators look like this week/day/hour, and how are they influencing buying habits?

"Will customers buy my product, and if so, at what price?" is an enormously non-trivial question, and the entire discipline of marketing revolves around trying to answer it.

How much weight would you give to piracy against all of the other relevant variables in assessing the potential market value of a product?
Corporations must grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead.

True, although do they have to do that by trying to decrease service at every opportunity, and by trying to enter markets outside their core competencies?

There's nothing wrong with being a big dumb pipe. For a cable carrier or telco, trying to do anything else will either divide the company against itself, or pit the company against its own customers. It could be argued that by trying to grow into inappropriate areas, the carriers are contravening their fiduciary duty.
Hacking Is Easy
God forbid they actually advertise their real and burst rates instead of picking a completely unrealistic, sky-high number.
I think there's ATT and satellite, so not sure they are no other options.

When I think of the free market, I don't mean the present situation. This is not a free market. Cities set up exclusive contracts with cable providers like comcast.

In a free market, people would be banding together to negotiate for better terms and to lower infrastructure costs, but not at a city-wide level where they are frozen into the solution negotiated by grafty politicians.

I don't pretend to know how a truly non-coercive free market would play out, but I imagine condo home owner associations being able to choose from a variety of options.

They already do so for other services and would probably do the same for utilities if we didn't have the current system of regulated monopolies.

In a truly free market, the type of suits you refer to wouldn't work. Municipalities wouldn't even be involved.

We can add more coercion to the system, but I think undoing the coercion we already have is a better long term approach. Of course, its not often easy to see that path, especially when it looks so politically impossible.
Really not sure why I'm getting downvoted, because they don't have USB3...

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
IPad gobbles up netbook sales
Microsoft readying Hadoop for Windows Azure
Teamviewer, DropBox and Skype are the best tools I've used for remote working.
Actually the problem is too much privacy. University staff have access to your email without any problem if you store it on their system. However, on Google's system, they can't access it at all. They probably don't like this very much.
Grading Union Square Ventures' Portfolio
Tunnel tcp over udp.

http://code.google.com/p/udptunnel/

http://thebends.org/~allen/utunnel/
I would suggest a forward error correction model. Your problem is not unlike satellite radio transmission (essentially a 1-way UDP transmission) and FEC is the method used in Sirius/XM to minimize audio garbling from brief signal loss.

Google should yield many results and more info.

If the connection is mostly reliable (just slow) you shouldn't have to chew up a lot of wasted packets with error-correction data.
Yeah, keep voting this down, that will make the Internet being controlled by the FCC better...somehow.
According to http://www.thesevenfive.com/about/ that's not the case. In fact, your statement is backwards. His price is a reflection of his brand, not the other way i.e. his brand is "75"... thus changing his price won't matter much in the future, as his brand won't change.
Amazing Speech About Why, How, and What.
It is a fine British tradition to make serious points by taking absurd positions and making fun of "evil" people.
That's the first of the translate feature I've seen (trying Chrome 5 beta as my primary), didn't work for me on that page though - internal server error.
DHH at Startup School 08
I've read that the exposure of Spanish banks to Portuguese sovereign debt is dangerously high. Any opinions or knowledge about that?

I suspect the biggest issue in general is cascading failures.
Yeah, it was return-on-investment that I was wondering about, not total return.

Good to know that after all the work you put into running YC, you're earning slightly more than minimum wage. :-)
689 TED talks ranked by engagement (spreadsheet)
heh, I do actually, maybe I should have phrased it better ;).

My point was, Sun was trying to be a hip and modern company, open sourcing a lot of their work, and then Oracle bought them and in the best impersonation of Eric Cartman, just said "you damn hippies" :), and fucked all that effort up.

I did expect it to happen, but I'm still sad it did happen.
Yes. For a while we tried Amazon links to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Affiliate links to hostels. That made maybe ten dollars after 6 months, and dropped the site into Google's "Hotel Affiliate Site" black hole for the next year. Bad move.

The problem with monetizing the Travel side of a site like this is that there are dozens of big money sites devoted to doing exactly that. Blogabond's whole appeal is that we don't surround your blog with banner ads and we don't try to help you book flights and rental cars.

So yeah, we could do that sort of stuff and maybe make a few dollars, but it would just turn us into another TripAdvisor instead of a cool place to host your blog.
The part of the article I want to know more about is the post mortem organ harvest. How long after death did they wait before harvesting the heart?