skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are incorrect and you shouldn't be surprised:

1) Computer repair shops very frequently format computers and re-install pirated copies of Windows. Considering the spyware problem of not too long ago, this is incredibly common.

2) Many parts of the world don't have stores like Best Buy and Dell might not ship there. Many computers are sold as brand new with a pirated copy of Windows.

3) In some nations, pirated Windows copies are sold by street vendors right next to pirated movies and video games. If you don't understand or respect intellectual property rights, you might as well upgrade from XP to Win 7 for next to nothing.

Microsoft estimates that 1 in 5 computers has an illegal copy of Windows:
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/computeractive/news/2173265/...

Even if you adjust for source-bias, that's a pretty bug number.
They zoomed in at the location of the Opera headquarters:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

I'm not sure where the video is set, but it might be in the area.
Yeah--- it's hard to read, but the census form on that page did indeed distinguish "free white males" from "free white females", "other free persons", and "slaves". If the sole purpose of the question were to count slaves and non-slaves for the purpose of the Constitutional enumeration, they could've just had two checkboxes.
Dammit, I'm really close to that profile, yet by no means elite. Worst of both worlds.
The Rise of Nanofoods
What makes a tablet a tablet?
If they really believed that they would stop supporting IE6.
California government did one thing right that few other states can match to encourage innovation - California Labor Code Section 2870. This single law negates many of the bullshit employment contracts required by companies to confiscate new idea and innovation from employees working at their home and at their own time. This actually helps to spawn off new startups. I will never move to and work in another state that doesn't have similar law.
guess, I didn't go far enough - the examples were not good - some of those are pretty nice. Most are way to busy - its a flag and will move in the wind - needs to be simple.
"Indian" is a race.

Second of all, as you can clearly see at racebox.org, the race box was originally used to count free people, indians, and slaves.
Experiments with (Javascript) audio
I'm so glad we've moved toward a more objective definition of "correct". I remember trying to tell people that IE didn't do things the way it should, and they would just respond with that it was "correct" because they only ever used IE.
I think the big dividing lines today depend on education and family cultural background, but I am not sure how a decennial census might track that.

The Census Bureau also continually sends out the American Community Survey to a subset of the population. It asks much more detailed questions, so the data may already exist.
Right. My point was that the job of decennial is basically to get a 100% count of bodies and residences, and that is hard enough without going into sociological detail.
The maneuvers look like something out of The Empire Strikes Back.

If the maneuvering could be calculated locally in relation to sensed objects and other quad rotors, then robust swarming behavior combined with this degree of agility is easily achievable.

Small swarms of such quad rotors equipped with video cameras could autonomously patrol a certain volume around a base vehicle. Low res video feeds could be used for automatic heuristic recognition of bipedal targets.

Perfect a lightweight weapon like a Gyrojet, and this becomes a very effective area denial and recon system. Combine this with Taser projectiles and you could have a very effective crowd control or prison security system.

14 minute battery life doesn't seem like a lot, but with a swarm, individual units could be programmed to return and perch on a battery exchange dock. Such a system could be installed on a vehicle like a Humvee or an APC.
slick - thanks for the tip!

Any advantages of this over other grid systems, besides size? Any drawbacks?
These sorts of things are actually good, and a reason to continue using wikipedia in preference to other sources.

Here's the horrible truth: no other encyclopedia is any more accurate. However, if by using a "professionally edited" encyclopedia you are lulled into a false sense of trust then you are at a disadvantage. If instead you use an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone and everyone on the internet, perhaps you will retain your senses of judgment and critical thinking. Perhaps you will double-check "facts" that seem a little fishy.

That, ultimately, is why wikipedia is a better source of information in the long run. Any source of information compiled by any group of people will be full of biases and errors. It's infinitely more important that the public become more savvy information consumers, improving their critical thinking abilities, than that any given source of information is incrementally more "accurate" than another.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Pi in this thread yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(film)

It's a low-budget philosophical/mathematical/surrealistic geek film.
Leaderboards as Decision Mechanisms
I won't work for Google via recruitment neither. The only case if Google buys my company.
That explains it. Thanks! (and I won't complain anymore :p)
Operate them in swarms around base vehicles, where they can dock with a battery-exchanger. Each unit's endurance is 14 minutes, but the whole swarm is only limited by the fuel available to the base vehicle's generator.
Ask HN: Can you save stories without upvoting them?
I could use an extension to bookmark certain stories for reading later, but the ability to save stories without upvoting them would be great.

Is that possible?
With a Gyrojet style weapon, it would be easy to fit 4 or 5 rounds of ammo with the stopping power of a 45 caliber on such a platform. Taser rounds could also be quite doable, and even adapted to the same launcher. This would be complimentary, as Gyrojets have a minimum range of 15' or so, which is a practical max range for a Taser.
It's true, these small patches make me smile the most.

I had a contributor to a project of mine that basically just formatted the README file. I certainly appreciated it.

It's nice knowing you're not coding in a vacuum.
Tabs are still SDI. MDI was a full windowing environment inside of the program itself, including icons and sub windows and a separate, distinct notion of maximization, minimization, window position, and... well, it was as if it were designed to be as confusing as possible by adding a second unnecessary dimension of potential confusion to virtually every core concept in the UI. Tabs are just tabs, nowhere near as complex on any level while still accompling pretty much everything you could want.
Nope. It's come up a few times recently though. Guess you're stuck using one of the bazillion link saving services.
Another difference is the low barrier to entry for editing. This, I think, is a more important difference because it not only leads to much faster corrections but also allows almost anyone to participate (in most cases).
Indeed, it's somewhat disconcerting the extent to which people don't apply similar skepticism to other sources. There's a lot of people who say you shouldn't trust Wikipedia because it's just edited by people on the internet, and then they'll go read one single book by an "expert" on a subject, and assume they now have a correct view of the subject.

In many cases, when reading one book, even by an expert, you've gotten a much more biased view of the subject than Wikipedia, because nobody makes a name for themselves by writing a book that regurgitates the neutral consensus. A new book by a historian, for example, will frequently make controversial new claims, which may or may not end up being accepted by other historians in the long run.
I like how the 1940 census lists "Indian" and "Hindu" as separate races. I'm pretty sure I know what they mean, but just the same...
The information was on the forums somewhere, a Mac version is promised also.
First fluid grid I've seen.

I like fluid layouts for apps, but can never seem to design websites around them. Too difficult to place photos or graphics and get them to look right at all resolutions.
I think you're looking at woman as they where a computer. There is no logic, there are feelings. I know it's pretty hard to explain, but look around you. I know quite a few normal guys, better looking then me who never have girlfriends, not because they don't want but just because.

Trust me on this one, it's not logical, but hey, love just isn't...
I have the opposite being a woman. The men I date always think I am not into them because I never have time for them.

What I tell my friends who have this issue with their husbands is that a good life requires that much work, that if you want a guy who can make sure he can give your kids a nice school and take the family to Hawaii every year, this is what it takes. There is not one person I know who is successful that's not working a lot.

Also try to live in slivers -- sneak away little bits of time to hang out when you can, even if it's an hour. Make it special.

What has worked for me has been to date men who are also founders.
Wait, he's using an ad campaign as proof that somebody believed this stuff. Read his links. I don't think the ad company was fooled. They wrote, "As Wikipedia will attest to, it's all true – even Freed's inflatable shrimp trap." They just liked the article and didn't see any reason to correct it.
Could you turn this into a business model?

Write and maintain a generic finder app, as well as a generator for specific finder apps (eg. ATMs, Indian restaurants, etc).

Sell the generic app at a premium, but offer cheaper data for the specific layers. Sell the specific apps for a little more than the cost of the data for the generic apps.

I haven't really thought this through in detail. It may not work. Just a thought.
What specifically is he doing wrong or what's not happening with the sales stuff?
Is Amazon Losing Its Edge as a Media Retailer?
I really think we're all underestimating how much value the "shared by default" setting gives to facebook's users. And I'm not talking users like us, I'm talking users like my girlfriend. Whenever she's on facebook (which seems to be constantly) she's looking at pictures or profiles of people I've never met. I'll ask her who that is, and she'll respond "Oh, I don't know" and go on clicking through that person's pictures.

The default privacy policy might seem awful to us, but for the average user it's one of the things that makes facebook <del>engaging</del> addicting. I really don't think this privacy controversy will affect facebook as much as many of us think it will.
Email Posting Things for Sale, Rent, Trade, etc. What Do You Think?
I just launched a first version of this. It's sort of like Posterous + Craisglist. It may be rough around the edges and buggy. Simple idea and it's free. No $1 per image nonsense.
In 2009 and 2008, NSS Labs did very similar reports with very similar results. They were paid for by Microsoft. I don't know whether this one was also paid for by Microsoft (it doesn't seem to say anywhere in its text, though I didn't look very hard).

Obviously there's reason to be a bit more skeptical about a paid-for study than a truly independent one.
More Money or More Friends? Pick One
Venture-Backed IPOs Head to Taiwan
Ironically, the homepage for TFG is broken on my 1024x600 netbook screen: It has both horizontal and vertical scrollbars, the headline text and controls are cut off, and the gray/silver background doesn't extend all the way across the control area, even when I scroll to the right.

I have the same problem on preview, even with min width set to 800 px.

This doesn't seem all that fluid to me (Firefox on Linux), I get scrollbars unless my window's width is at least max width.
I was once asked by a Ghanaian student at Princeton how long it took to become incorporated.

"What? I don't know. A day, and month? Something like that?"

"and how much!?!"

"Dunno. $150?"

"My god -- I thought incorporation was the hardest thing."

That's because in Ghana, it is. 3 years to get a permit! I suspect if you bribe the right people it would take only one year. But still -- a big advantage the US has in starting companies is that, somewhat tautologically, it is easy to.
FTC protects journalism’s past
It is forever intertwined. Ford was against financing war (but also supported Hitler), but the roads and interstates that made the car viable in the US was military driven by Eisenhower's interstate system (and the railroad monopolies).

I agree things are made/innovated on outside of war, but somewhere along the line most technology is defense driven or funded.

What was the Wright brothers invention used for first? Later came commercial flight.

The solar system research is driven by science but the science programs are largely defense supported and dual purpose. For instance, many of the shuttle trips have a defense purpose or classified payloads. Even the trip to the Moon was for defense leverage on Earth.

From Archimedes to Tesla to science and technology innovation today, most technological advances are closely linked to defense funding or war technology.
In some ways I agree with this sentiment, but in others I think it's deeply flawed.

Your argument relies on a couple of deep assumptions, the main one being that the general public know how Wikipedia is made.

Based on my (albeit anecdotal) evidence, I suspect that the vast majority of internet users (non-technical) may not know much at all about Wikipedia. They just look something up on the internet, find it on something that calls itself an 'encyclopedia', and believe it. They know nothing of who has created the page, or the checks (or lack thereof) that go into each page.

Search for a random subject on Google - e.g. 'Canada', and click on the first result (Wikipedia, of course). How would any user know about the methodology behind this encyclopedia? Twice on the page it refers to itself (prominently) as "The Free Encyclopedia" - to me, as a non-technical user, that might sound like a reliable (albeit free) source of information?
I wish he'd hire someone to get 1.x working on platforms other than osx :)

Also I was not aware that Textmate was the product of a single developer. (is it?) It's actually pretty motivating to consider!
Joel Spolky wrote a popular essay on why you should never do The Big Rewrite. I mostly agree with it but it's not always clear cut (Mozilla - his example in the essay - eventually got re-written as the most popular browser in use today)

It's a difficult decision to make, the choice between improving an existing code base that has grown warts against the temptation of starting fresh and fixing what went wrong the first time, under the guise of learning from past mistakes.

I guess the lesson is: Don't try to rewrite your codebase from scratch unless you understand that you will spend an order of magnitude more time on the rewrite, even factoring in the experiences you have gained from doing it once.
The man is burned out and has given up though he doesn't realize it. The best thing he could do at this point is to team up with some extra hackers, promise a revenue share, and let them get something out the door in 6 months while he recuperates in time to start fixing bugs after launch. I don't normally like revenue shares but it's quite clear that TextMate 2 would make some decent coin.
Ask HN: I'm working on a project and i would love to hear your opinion
The other day I was playing Final Ninja Zero, a cool flash game, and I asked myself would this be possible in Canvas?

My problem there aren't much canvas frameworks, and if there are any, they are really low level.

I created a high level framework in java and used GWT to translate it to javascript. In this framework you only have access to a canvas context and you manipulate shapes, images, etc. you can create handlers, like in a GWT app etc.

I was thinking about creating a website like miniclip or kongregate but for canvas games and provide this framework so people could create the games. These games would be embeddable in pages, had server side services as saved games, multiplayer support etc.

So what do you think?
Google Tricks That Will Save You Time in School
Yes, because old media weren't keen on hyperbole...

Say, the Hearst papers...
People will be arguing over it forever (especially since people on different parts of the political spectrum want different answers to be true), but it's hard to say exactly what impact the high-tax/high-benefits regime had on Silicon Valley. As you imply, the taxes themselves are a negative, but some were spent on things directly relevant to Silicon Valley. One of the biggest was tons of university funding, especially up through the late-80s/early-90s (and especially compared to other states). In addition to the state generously funding UC Berkeley, Cal Poly, SJSU, etc. directly, Cal Grants used to pay full tuition for even private universities for CA high-school students above a certain academic threshhold, who chose to attend college within CA. That funneled lots of poor and lower-middle-class smart kids to in-state private universities, and indirectly subsidized the universities as well by having the state take on most of the need-based aid burden.
Yes, I totally agree, but I was assuming we were talking about evaluating people who were for the most part unproven in the work world. Many investment banks and consulting firms hire fresh undergrads on contract.
Git Source Control Provider for Visual Studio 2010
This makes me feel the same way as when a boss said he'd rather be lucky then have skill.
Rendering != JS.
I want portability and I prefer services that offer some kind of API with which I can manage my data, or at the very least, a usable RSS feed. Google is pretty great about this. I felt burned when Yahoo closed Launchcast after I'd been using it for years.

But again, it feels like one of those things only YC/slashdot readers really care about. For instance, a few weeks ago, the CIO of our company had suggested one of those bookshelf sites to me. So I did a little research and emailed him a couple reviews I had found, pointing out that I would prefer a site with greater data portability.

His response (paraphrasing): Yeah, I was looking at those sites you sent me. And then I thought, why I am wasting an hour of my time trying to figure out which book site has the best data portability policy?

But you're probably going to spend a lot more time contributing your content to the site. Wouldn't you like to know that all that time and effort wasn't going to be wasted?
Essentially, it is. I believe Allan hired a developer relatively recently to assist him to TextMate 2 and other things.
Video: Walking robot navigates bumpy ground
Euroface - font readable while moving at high speed
I agree

From the original source code...

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned
among the several States which may be included within
this Union, according to their respective Numbers,
which shall be determined by adding to the whole
Number of free Persons, including those bound to
Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not
taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The
actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years
after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United
States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years,
in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

After the 14th amendment, Indians were still not counted, but all others were counted as whole persons.

So, if you wanted to ask if somebody was indian or not, that's fair, since they are, legally, still considered in many ways to be a sovereign people from the United States (which is why you have casinos and fireworks stands on reservations)

Asking any other question regarding race, in my opinion, is inappropriate. Our government should be color blind.
Not really. The problem isn't "people are debating trivial things instead of letting shit get done". It's "people are debating all sorts of things, and it's impossible to work out what state each of the separate debates is in".
Some info on those deals: http://www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers/age/1910/military.cfm
Yes. This was all an unfortunate result of Microsoft taking the "Browser is the OS of the future" hype a little too literally...
Thanks. Guess I'll look into one of them. Any suggestions?
If California's state laws are truly a boot on the neck of entrepreneurs, by all means someone launch a startup in Alaska, New Hampshire, or Tennessee (The three states with the lowest tax rate and least amount of regulation) and prove this notable economist correct.
Are you talking about robotics for making prostheses, or robotic prostheses? The latter will require considerably more and more specialized knowledge: control systems and signal processing, switching power converters, radio shielding, etc.

Programming these days tends to involve a lot of gluing libraries together. Python in general has much more extensive libraries than Lisps and Schemes. (The Python claim to fame is "batteries included".) Python also has excellent support for using libraries written in C and Fortran, which are the dominant languages for numerical modelling and math code.
The article, like the controversy, is a cup of very vague weak tea with a hint of general conspiracy. It would be more informative if the author provided any information about the specific laws allegedly broken by Google and who Google's adversaries are.
Why Taxing Carried Interest As Ordinary Income Is Good Policy
Woman Follows Google Maps “Walking” Directions, Gets Hit, Sues
The difference between software and surgery is that in surgery you can make unfixable mistakes. Not so in software, unless your program is controlling a Therac-25 or something. The key thing to realize is that even when you go to school to learn, they can't possibly teach you "everything". You still have to learn a lot on your own after graduating.
Ask HN: What are the useful, lesser known keyboard shortcuts?
I'm a Mac user, and suspect I only use six or seven keyboard shortcuts regularly (close window, quit, new, application switch, save, copy/paste, etc).

I suspect we find it difficult to learn TOO many (i.e. all) shortcuts, so which are the lesser-known ones (on whichever operating system) that you think people should know?

For example, I just learned the incredibly useful Apple-` shortcut to switch between Windows (not Apps), e.g. for working on multiple documents.

Any suggestions?
I'm not saying the opposite is true (hence the "perhaps"), I'm saying that the author seems physically incapable of entertaining that option.
In fact neither you nor he are right, and there is little connection either
way.

SV is where it is because (a) it got established here back in the late 50s, and (b) once established, hubs persist by default. And historically those factors were not what caused SV to be established here. Rather it was things like the universities,
the climate and scenery, and the adventurous atmosphere of the
Bay Area, which was already a magnet for optimists.

At most one could claim that SV and California's policies have
some of the same causes: that the optimists the Bay Area attracted also favored leftish legislation, at least a few decades ago.
Wow, thanks for this. I'll see if I can figure this out.
The Magic Behind Rating Apps