skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where I live (the United States), there is case law that found that where neither the individual pieces of data nor the selection criterion contain or are products of originality (read, "require editorial control" in the selection criterion aspect), the owner of a database has no such rights. For example: you can simply copy the phonebook and put it on the Web. It doesn't matter if you hire typists who type it all in manually after you've told them "Copy this." or if you use OCR technology.

The phonebook example was exactly the subject of Supreme Court case Feist v. Rural.

It seems like the only way Snap-on could win this one is if they demonstrate that their selection criterion met the standards for originality, which, though incredibly low, don't permit "Mitsubishi parts" to pass for originality.

Edit: This deals only with the copyright aspect of the suit. This doesn't cover the trespass and trade secrets aspects, which O'Neill might be found guilty of if there were terms and conditions they violated. But I don't know—I don't know much about business/contract law.
Tips on small business
The funny thing is we were just having a discussion at work trying to figure out where Microsoft's $9.5 billion R&D budget goes (that's per year). I wonder how much of it was spent on this last year?
And this is surprising to who exactly?

Microsoft has shown repeatedly in the last few years that they excel at creating pretty renders and hype for products that never appear on the market in comparable form. Anybody remember the Origami project? If not, here's a reminder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXHKCS28z1s. The same is true of the original Longhorn videos (which were revealed to be shockwave animations) and to a certain extent surface.

Contrast this with Apple's approach, which is to show absolutely nothing until they have a shipping product. Microsoft drives hype; apple makes products.

All that being said, I do hope somebody takes the ideas in those videos and makes a compelling product from them. I doubt the technology is there now, but it will be in a few years.
700+ votes is ridiculous.

But compare those 700 votes on a single post to all the votes for posts calling Steve Jobs a crazy loon for the iPhone SDK TOS fiasco.
Ask HN: Need some tax advice...
I am a freelance software developer living in NYC. I'm 25, somewhat new to the whole contracting thing, and I feel like my accountant is taking advantage of me. I came up $27,000 short on my tax payments this year and I ended up having to file an extension. The reason I hired an accountant was to avoid being in a situation like this. I am now very in debt to the IRS and on top of that my accountant just keeps sending me expensive invoices.

I feel like I should take my business elsewhere, but I don't really know how to break it off a with a CPA. Does anyone have any advice? Or know a good accountant in the NYC area?
Why was this downvoted? I thought it was a reasonable point.
Much obliged; thank you!
The Yellow Ads Articles
What is the source of this? If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_crisis_impact_timeline and search for subprime you'll see many cases of Freddie and Fannie buying or guaranteeing subprime activity.

- In 2000 Fannie buys $600 million, and Freddie buys $18.6 billion, and guarantees 7.7 billion more.
- 2002-2006 the GSE's buy 38-90 billion a year in subprime mortagages

As far back as 1999 you can find stories stating that Fannie was being pressured into subprime:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-...

Their activity appears smaller than the market at large, but it's not non-existant. It doesn't seem on face value that they were not allowed to invest. Is there some rule I am missing?
I wonder would James Chartrand have been found out ... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994284 [Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants]
Sounds intriguing. I'll get in touch...probably next week.
Works pretty well on my iPhone though. It totally breaks the back button, but I love that I can swipe left and right to navigate.
Apple is attempting to define the boundaries with all these statements. If they say it enough and people don't call them on it then that will become the de facto truth.

The reality is that they want full control of products they make, and 'open standards' for products that they don't make. Nothing to do with the supposed benefits of 'open'-ness, entirely to do with that is and is not under their control.
Currently, A New Approach To China, 1125 points. See http://top.searchyc.com/submissions_by_points
Sony I understand encouraged the use of the playstation for acedemic research, hence Folding@home. This move by Sony may affect research as PS3s were being used for cheap supercomputing power.

http://www.ps3cluster.umassd.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
I was using Chrome and found it surprisingly speedy. At the end, I was able to whisk from slide to slide faster than I generally can do anything on my computer.
Funny thing is that the real world has much more finer grained privacy controls. You can stash your magazines in a box, data is not very discoverable et al. In fact at the risk of being self promoting I have a blog post about privacy online and in the real world at http://www.bitcrumb.com/blog/2. By most metrics online privacy trails real world privacy in sophistication.
Try using wget or curl. Chrome hung for me, but wget downloaded the 70MB file in about 30 seconds.
Richard P. Gabriel's Review of "The Art of Metaobject Protocol"
Broadband in the United States is worse than you think.
That's just a temporary halo effect, the result of increased foot traffic brought in by the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
My webapp: pik
In other words, a Snappy Chrome Demo:

(from the disclaimer)

The presentation was originally meant to run in Google Chrome. Some experimental features might or might not be coded to run in other browsers for now.
To be fair, 'programmer' meant something slightly different back then, and what it used to refer to no longer actually exists.
Not surprised. Just like UMPC and Surface, it's just another fancy mocked up commercial for Microsoft. History repeats itself.
In the last month since quitting my job I've traveled almost all around Honshu (Tokyo to Osaka and back again, huzzah) talking to entrepreneurs, and I'm very optimistic for the future here. Japan has a lot of things going for it: dissatisfaction with salarymanhood as a career and life plan is at an all time high, the talent pool for engineering and visual design is deep and cheap (approximate salary of engineering employees in Nagoya: age times $1,000), and outside of some parts of Tokyo bootstrapping is a very appealing option.

The cultural issues are tractable, especially after we get a few exemplars of success in local communities. In my town we have a little iPhone development subculture because a handful of guys struck it rich on the App Store lottery, and folks tell me about it everywhere I go. When I went to file the tax papers for my business they assumed I was in iPhone development because, hey, young guy with a software business, clearly he is one of those new App Store millionaires. That beats the previous image of a young guy with a software business: homeless vagrant.

There are now about twenty-ish firms doing iPhone stuff within two miles of my apartment. This is in Gifu. (Americans can pretend I just said Kansas, which is our spiritual counterpart in the US.)
Hmm, oddly I don't recall the 1st party apps being HTML apps, with access to the camera.
> Good for you? This discussion is for those who do care.

Thanks.

For those who need OtherOS, you are undoubtedly in the very small minority with special undoubtedly non-gaming or game-purchase-inducing activities.

Therefore the needs of this minority aren't going to be put in front of the needs of those who purchased a PS3 to play games with. If they divert resources to fixing the OtherOS somehow, that detracts from their resources to provide for the game-playing movie-playing users of the PS3.

In other words, if you purchased a PS3 for the OtherOS functionality, why should you expect to also have the cutting edge system updates targeted at people who bought the PS3 for games? You do have a choice to not upgrade and continue using your OtherOS, and for many people who do use OtherOS this is a viable option. For example if you have a cluster of these for scientific research or whatever, you're not going to complain about it not playing some new game.

I think it's one thing if Sony secretly patched your PS3 and removed the OtherOS, but they explicitly ask you if you want to upgrade. You can either choose to upgrade to the new stuff they are providing gratis (after all they are not obligated to provide updates are they?) or maintain the system exactly as you had purchased it, which contain the EXACT functionalities it had when you purchased it (including the ability to play games released at the time you purchased it).
Microsoft's Guide to Humor
It's the one thing I love about chrome -- when flash crashes, I just hit reload. It happens about once a day for me. One time flash crashed so hard, no other flash sites would work until I rebooted the computer.
Tried wget, no luck. No worries, I'll try later, should really get back to work :)
Although it is cool that they have this so quickly I would have expected a week before it's release as that is usually the case with new ubuntu releases on linode.

My best guess is that they have be mucking around with the RC to make sure everything is working properly and did some final checks once it was released and threw it up on the site while the other hosts actually waited until release.
I own an iPad would have given the Courier a serious look. I have to wonder if Microsoft wants to go in a different (even better?) direction?
First of all, fire your CPA. Sounds like that will help you pay off the debt faster. If you can't find a better/cheaper CPA in NYC, Turbotax online has a special version for contractors, which is what I use.

Next year, make estimated quarterly payments to the IRS, Just take 30-40% of what you make each quarter and send it to them, their website explains how to do it. Then at the end of the year you will either get a refund, or the amount you owe will be small enough that you can easily pay.

EDIT: I use Turbotax online, not Quickbooks online.
In fairness, those guys have little reason to upgrade to the latest firmware. At least Sony have reduced the temptation of playing some games to finish up the day at the office. ;-)
Yes! There is no xorg.conf. And I'd guess since Hal is gone xorg is now auto-configured through udev somehow.
Wow, really? I didn't realize you could swipe in this presentation. Looks like this was all it took to implement?

var addTouchListeners = function() {
document.addEventListener('touchstart', function(e) {
touchStartX = e.touches[0].pageX;
}, false);
document.addEventListener('touchend', function(e) {
var pixelsMoved = touchStartX - e.changedTouches[0].pageX;
var SWIPE_SIZE = 150;
if (pixelsMoved > SWIPE_SIZE) {
nextSlide();
}
else if (pixelsMoved < -SWIPE_SIZE) {
prevSlide();
}
}, false);
};
All that being said, I do hope somebody takes the ideas in those videos and makes a compelling product from them

What, actually make something? Sounds like a good way to get hit with a patent suit.
One, they did buy subprime mortgages; two, they've lost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars so far (and will lose more) paying for their distortions of their mortgage market. Hundreds of billions of dollars burned, lost, destroyed fueling housing demand, and you think that had nothing to do with the subprime crisis?
Same here, at first I thought the title was referring to Microsoft's Courier New font. I guess someone at Crunchgear made the same connection.
Microsoft Cancels Innovative Courier Tablet Project
Why Mediterranean Diet is Different from American Diet
You don't think Apple "drove hype" for the iPad? Seriously?

Also, I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft ships more new products each year than Apple (meaning a larger number of different products, not just more total).
The author is oblivious to the irony that he is publishing his rant on the exact platform that he chooses to vilify.

The fact is that the web is a monstrous success at its purpose - to share information. The fact that it isn't rich enough for his taste just shows exactly how great it is. He is taking the entire thing for granted, and whining about what really are extra features.

Could we find something better for some apps? Sure, but that in no way invalidates the gigantor success of the web as a whole.
He addressed 3.3.1 here

"Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."

Agree with him or not this is his view. And I think its a valid view. The first macs with a mouse didn't have arrow keys. And the early generation touch devices don't allow intermediate steps.

This is not stopping anyone from compiling from lisp to html5. Apple is fine with this. Buy native apps on their platform, for the time being, wont have intermediate layers.
HTC Cuts Licensing Deal with Microsoft for Android Phones
Using Chrome 5.0.342.9 beta on Ubuntu 10.04. Got a popup saying "The latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari are recommended for using pik."
Thanks, wasn't aware. Seems like list not realtime.
I think 'hilarious' is the word to describe this.
make estimated quarterly payments to the IRS, Just take 30-40% of what you make each quarter and send it to them

If you bank with Bank of America for small business, there is a tool to help you manage your taxes:
http://www.bankofamerica.com/small_business/online_banking_a...?

It's basically bill pay for taxes.
The Smalltalk Medicine Show (74 short video tutorials)
No. The packages themselves weren't up to date, it wasn't just the mirror failing to fetch the new ones. Hence threads like this one (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808) with suggestions like "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7."

I didn't do an "upgrade". It was a first-time fresh install.
> in Greece you pay no taxes on a building 'til it's completed, but since the weather is fine all year anyway, why not just leave the top floor unfinished? And they do, private individuals and corporations alike.

This. Athens reminded me a little bit of Cairo, with mile after mile of "unfinished" occupied buildings.

It seems also that good policy is a major problem. No taxes till complete? That's fine, now make it illegal to move into an incomplete building. No sane person can make a rational argument that people should be able to move into construction sites.
Wired identifies iPhone 4G finder
Microsoft/IE's thoughts on HTML5, Flash, and H.264
Worked well on Safari. But this was funny:

"Chrome Frame
Minimal effort for bringing IE6, 7 and 8 up to the latest HTML5 technologies"

I loaded it up in IE8 and chose not to use the chrome frame. The presentation returned a javascript error and nothing at all to read. Just a blank page now in IE 8.

This stuff is awesome, but what sucks is I fear that it's going to be way too hard to convince people to install something called a chrome frame to view the stuff they want. Although it was once that way with Flash, so maybe history will repeat.
I find Firebug generally more useful for JS debugging.

Try the Chrome PageSpeed plugin - I like the "sluggishness" chart. Its Very cool!
10 days a week anyone? (A Guide to Metric Time)
So can you tell me which email client out there works as consistently same on Linux, Mac and Windows as Gmail does?
See also SpotSigs ("...stopwords may however be very good indicators of the actual interesting parts of a web page...")

http://infoblog.stanford.edu/2008/08/spotsigs-are-stopwords-...
There's no relationship there at all.

The current Adobe execs are pretty much just business folks brought in to make money, once the founder/CEO/CTOs (Geschke and Warnock) left.
Apple doesn't have to drive hype.

The tech media does it for them... For free, to boot.
Okay, thanks for the clarification, I wrote my original commentary without much caution, the user just not followed the EULA, that what I wanted to say, which to my knowledge is illegal in my country.
I love the balsamiq stories (and use it). Thanks for this.
Beijing security know-how rules irk suppliers
There is a package you can install called gpointing-device-settings that I've been using to tweak my touchpad. I believe it has an option to disable.
You'll have problems in Denmark - pik means dick.

I must admit that I found the heading "Do more on the web with pik." rather amusing.
Just do it the New York way and tell him he's fired.

Then again, did you just not pay in and then hire an accountant in hopes of making reality go away? There's not that much an accountant can do if the real problem is you're not paying your bills...
"People use web search today because they don't know how else to find high quality information. The web is a mess of content with no organization. On an iPhone, I launch the appropriate app."

How is launching the appropriate app a way to find high quality information? You would have to know which app contains the information you're looking for, in which case you already found it.

I would rather do web search and get a direct link to the information I'm looking for than search the app store for an appropriate app and then have to find the relevant information within the app.
Say "Aidsfart" four times fast. Now say it backwards. Now stick out your tongue.
I don't know if this is an easter egg or just how Google's calculator naturally parses things, but it knows exactly what 10 days a week is:

10 (days a week) = 1.42857143

http://www.google.com/search?q=10+days+a+week
Absolutely, 100%, spot on. Adobe, please turn your attention to making great HTML5 authoring tools.
I think the implications are huge. It has now become HTC + Google + MS vs. Apple.
Why Does This Pair of Pants Cost $550?
I think what the OP means is that the webapps have changed application model from client side to a more server side approach. UX needs to change across platforms (devices) yes, but the number of versions of application "out there" is just one (or a few, unless you're doing split testing).
Building iPhone OS apps is free if you have a Mac and don't want to test or use those apps on an actual iPhone OS device.
Unless there are a whole bunch of Greek collective farms and forced labor camps that I'm unaware of, "stalinist" might be overstating it.
At first I thought this was a joke. But it's dead serious.
Sorry Gawker and Google

"Gawker Media Web sites will not be supported in Safari. Purely for technology reasons. Same for advertisements sold by Google. They were fine in the PC era. But now they just look ugly."
I put her four posts written right before the "reveal" post through the first gender guesser I found on Google, and they all came out female. That proves essentially nothing, granted, but this has been studied fairly extensively. If you want to do twenty minutes of work with automation you can grab everything she's ever posted on CopyBlogger and run it through your classifier of choice. Then, heck, run the guys on CopyBlogger against it and see if you peg them right, too.

Natural language processing remains my first love.
AFAICT VirtualBox does nothing to enforce it.
No it isn't. Where did you get this idea?
Martin's site seems to be down at the moment, so it may be worth linking to the video of our DSL DevCon talk / demo. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dd727740.aspx

(Full disclosure: I work for Intentional Software. Feel free to ask me about what we do; I'll answer if I can. We're not so much "secretive" anymore as "small and busy.")
I believe it's just memory overcommitment, so you can assign more memory than you actually have available on the host and it will dynamically handle it for you. Crazy stuff, though.
I think the vast majority of people who bought PS3s for linux-computer use are dual-booting home users.
"they probably dislike laypeople more because they prefer to deal with professionals"

If they've got a clue they most certainly do. There's few things worse than dealing with a squirrelly non-professional investor (been there, done that, both myself and my father).

Still, if you have to get money somewhere to attract bigger investments and if this bill passes without fixing these problems you may find yourself pretty much limited to "very close "friends and family"".

I.e. if you live in a state where all others are forbidden to invest ... and from that TechCrunch item posted to HN the association of those state regulators may be the entity that's pushing this hard. Which means we may get much less of a fix that we desire/need.
I read your comments on node.js with interest, but I object to being called an 'algol-like' programmer just because I can't deal with erlang.

I work with haskell and lisp just fine, and I can find my way around monads, closures and continuations. It's just the prolog syntax I can't get past.

That and a million little niggles. How do you quit from erl, anyway? Is there a faster way than C-g C-c a? [update: argh, C-\ has thwarted me for years. http://www.erlang.org/faq/getting_started.html It's hard to describe why - it's always obvious in hindsight - but erlang has been extremely painful to learn. I have no trouble with documentation and man pages, but with erlang it seems there's always one more place to check.]

I can't wait for lfe to mature.
Even though I don't use it as much as I should, I enjoy having a small box with Linode. Great VPS provider. Looks like the weekend is upgrade time.
"Since you are reading this because you or others don't think you are good at using humor, the best technique is to follow the lead of others."
The Linode Ubuntu 10.04 images were released after Ubuntu made their formal announcement.
I think Apple's behavior towards Adobe (and by extension the end-users) has been pretty piss poor. Jobs' pretend "rationalizations" are also rather poor.

However, I agree with this blog post. Flash is going the way of the past, HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe doesn't make money on flash players but does on content creation applications. It makes sense (and if Adobe's demonstration of targeting HTML5 for output is a demonstration it does to them also) to build HTML5 content creation tools. Adobe is the best at making content creation tools, they should do this.
Well, it meant someone writing assembler code, and in some shops they'd be given very detailed instructions of what to implement by "program designers" that read almost like English... or code in a high-level language. So yeah, those kind of programmers don't exit anymore, and "designers" are now programmers - but they have to know more about programming because there is no separate programmer to iron out the quirks in the design.

Heaping layers of abstraction onto each other is NOT something that will inevitably yield "do what I mean" functionality.

What the article describes as Simonyi's "revolutionary idea" is no different than CASE, MDD and MDA - the same (at least) 20 year old pipe dream in various guises that nobody has ever gotten to work except in very narrow fields.
Same in The Netherlands. 'Pik' is slang for penis.
That's a pretty sweeping statement.

I hated Flash on Windows.

I happen to hate it more on Mac.

I would go so far to say it's a bad format AND a bad port. It's not an either-or situation. Just because Flash sucks less on Windows doesn't mean it's a good format.
It goes to Haskell!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304685