skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fundamentally object to the notion that the government gives you a right to a monopoly on an idea, for what looks like perpetuity -- nothing has gone out of copyright since 1923.

Second, you seem to confuse stealing with copying. Stealing means you've lost something i.e. no longer have it. This is clearly not the case with copying.

Third, the comparison to slavery was only to disprove your assertion "Doing something wrong to someone else who did something wrong is still wrong." It was in no attempting to compare the two, the injustice found in slavery is far more egregious than that of any IP case.

Do you think it's ok for a teacher to photocopy portions of a book or article to pass out to their students? This is allowed under the current system. Shouldn't each student be forced to buy the book or article? Are they stealing from the author? What about showing a clip from a movie? How does fair use apply to software? Why does fair use apply to other forms of creation but not software? Why don't mathematicians or physicist get to copyright their discoveries - i can't reuse the plot of a movie (hell, I can't even summarize it: http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/996/996.F2d.1366.92...), but I can reuse someone else's discoveries? This is not an easy issue. Do you think wikileaks should be shutdown since it posts material it shouldn't have? Why is it ok in some cases and not ok in others? How are the lines drawn?

Do I think that people should be compensated for their work? Of course I do; however, I do not think that copyright is the correct mechanism. Injustice is injustice and should not be left in place just because it's convenient. I think a better way would be to have those purchasing your software sign an agreement that if they distribute it without your permission they must pay X amount of dollars, for they are the only ones you have any legal claim on. I'm not trying to encourage piracy, but I am taking the position that copyright is not legitimate.

I think your stuck in a mindset in which people can be compensated only by through copyright, and I don't think that's the case. I can't predict what the business model that would eventually arise is going to look like. But I am certain one would emerge. Additionally, I think that majority of software developers are actually employed on applications that are not sold to the public commercially so perhaps large portions of the software industry would not even be effected (banking, aerospace, hr, etc).

As for the personal references, yes i create things and understand the effort and all that jazz. But once again, I think that the current system in unethical and will eventually be replaced, perhaps by thinking through it now we can hope to improve the situation and not re-architect the internet and destroy many civil liberties to try and keep an outdated business model going.
Ah, but some of the exercise time is time that would be spent commuting anyway. That's one major advantage of commuting-as-exercise.
I've been registered twice as long as you and have three times the karma so I don't think I'm the one who is confused.
There'a no SkypeIn in Canada, I'm sure we're not the only forsaken country. (Or has the CRTC really screwed us that bad?)
Yes, Windows tablet computers relied on the stylus. I've used a couple.

Did you read the article? The article is not about the relative minor success of Windows-based tablets; it is about how the lack of constraints on price (how much it will cost to manufacture) and manufacturing (how you will make it on a mass scale) can make prototype concepts alluringly too easy.

For example, Apple had to develop state-of-the-art manufacturing technology to produce the Aluminum unibody MacBook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0fe800C2CU&feature=relat...
Tips for Finding Venture Capital
I was talking about this device today, and a friend in education perked up when she heard the price. The price is low enough that public schools can do stuff with them on regular funds.
Y-Combinator, with 100% less funding! ;)

In all seriousness, if these guys can actually find the time to reply to the avalanche of queries they're about to get, then more power to them for lending a hand where it's needed.
For what type of squats, and what does bad for your knees mean? Risk of acute injury? Risk of longterm damage? Are we talking half squats or full squats? Sets of 6 reps with heavy weight, or sets of 100 reps with light weight? With feet flat on the floor, or on an incline (with heels slightly higher than feet)? Does the damage occur at any weight, or at some threshold? What about jumpies?

Saying squats are bad for your knees doesn't really mean anything, and I doubt your orthos would actually know offhand. If you have a question, go look up the relevant studies from the academic literature, and then ask if you don't understand something.
CodeLathe TonidoPlug Reviewed
Sorry would edit if I could but I can't so replying. I'm actually kinda into this stuff and have gotten pretty good results doing what im doing. i have done 100 pushups as well, i was doing at least 150 a day doing 1 set of 100 one set of 50, i am in far better shape now. so if you do disagree please at least post why because I really do wanna know what you think. Always looking to train more efficiently...
FIPS 140-2 mentions some tests. [1]

[1] http://www.fdk.com/cyber-e/pdf/HM-RAE103.pdf
Another week, another use for carbon nanotubes: batteries
While I understand you are playing devil's advocate, I think one problem they would have is that they'd have to prove that Power Ventures is doing this themselves, which they aren't. One argument could be that power ventures built the application, and users of Facebook are in fact utilizing the software to perform these actions. If Facebook were to approach anyone, it would be the users of the software.

I think that argument holds as much water as Facebook's, if not more so.
Twitter for iPhone 3.0.1 is out OS 4 & Retina display compatible.
I am definitely seeing GV joining the playing field of these carrier companies. I can't wait.

Just forwarded all of my text messages to GV. Sweet!
Designing a RESTful Web Application
Ads, until the introduction of iAds, would not have gone through apple, and therefor would not count towards total revenue.

You do have a point with in app purchases, but I doubt that they would significantly skew the numbers - they would make them worse for developers of paid apps, in fact. Given the other optimistic decisions the article has when dealing with numbers, I think that ignoring in app purchases fits with it: it's a best case scenario for paid apps.

It would be quite interesting to see how much money has been made through in app purchases, though. Not merely anecdotes, but the percentage of free apps which have in app purchases, and the average/median income through in app purchases in those apps.
No doubt - I grew tired of Firefox and flash constantly crashing it. I watch a ton of online video/TV.
First iPhone 4 reviews: the spoilers.
I'm guessing you're missing their definition of "application".
Seriously, any other explanation for this is like noticing that 50% of the US population doesn't have a uterus and deciding, "Well, birth control is very popular in more highly developed nations, so maybe Americans commonly have their reproductive systems removed."
There is definitely a bias favoring Apple on Hacker News, but that doesn't mean that posting anything that does not praise Apple will get you voted down.

You just have to make sure that when you do decide to make a post that points out flaws in Apple this or that, your post should be well thought out - and avoid being inflammatory.

Yes, these should be guidelines for any post here on HN, but you probably have less leeway when you're challenging someone's relatively established mindset. Protip: Throwing around the phrase "fan boy" does no one any good, and certainly won't help your karma.
Wouldn't a contract make it a civil violation, not a criminal one?
Google Voice makes its (US-only) public debut
lol, witt was a terrible philosopher (if one can even call him a philosopher -- he did not have philosophical problems). if you try reading Popper instead you'll find philosophy is rather better.

epistemology is a very important and useful field. at least i think so, feel free to post or cite a criticism. i'll accept that most of the rest of philosophy is a bad signal to noise ratio.
Fire away...my Gmail is fast again.
If that fixed % breaks your AT it does. Which is what happens if you lift heavy weights with a decent speed right?

If not please explain, I'm a bit new to the concept.
How's it compared to other distributed m-blogging tools, say PubSubHubBlob and SatusNet?
It's far broader than DoD. See the solicitation I referenced or:

http://www.sbir.gov/federal_links.htm

(I managed a small SBIR category for NASA.) Despite the rhetoric, they do provide a sustainable flow of work to many organizations (sometimes referred to as "SBIR shops").

About basic vs. applied research: What I was trying to say is: The relative lack of breakthrough success for SBIR seems to imply that smaller, more nimble (market-responsive?) organizations are not the answer.
> That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations.

And that's why they are useless. Because correlation isn't causation. Or in other words, because "aggressiveness is correlated to GTA" is fully compatible with GTA reducing aggressiveness. Whenever correlation studies try to give conclusions, they are reliably compatible with the opposite of their conclusions, so they are just nonsense...
It is past time to start awarding prodigious damages against corporations who egregiously and willfully write unlawful provisions into their terms of use, consumer contracts, etc. etc.

Parsing and correctly interpreting pages upon pages of legalese presents an undue burden on a well functioning market economy. Corporations can slip clauses into agreements that can give them vast power over their customers who do not understand the full ramifications of what they are agreeing to. There is very little cost involved to the corporation that tries to get away with this. There is a very great cost to our society in tying up our court systems with stupid crap such as this.

The only solution is to make the cost of writing illegal provisions into contracts greater to the perpetrator than the potential reward. I know there will be unintended consequences to what I propose. But surely there must be a way to send a stronger signal to corporations who willfully push legal boundaries and seek to obfuscate exactly what it is that consumers are agreeing to?
If you use Google Reader, try this: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-a...
The best part of testing random number generators is playing 200,000 games of craps. My boss protested, but I just questioned his commitment to security…
"So adding a competitor will not help you - eventually they will get big too, and you will hate them as well."

Two big competitors are much better than just one.
I'm building CloudHoist.com, a cross-cloud console that does node provisioning, configuration and administration.

http://cloudhoist.com/

Lisp in general is amazing, and being able to deploy to the JVM is a huge win for Clojure.
What is this Android? I have never heard of it.
Do you mean a restore and reinstall all your apps?
Risk it When You're Young
"They want that to be treated just like other California Penal Code unauthorized access -- access like exploiting a bug or stealing someone's password to view or change info never intended for you."

But isn't this viewpoint stark raving mad?
Being able to play the game on a budget is a (valid) argument against video replay, but it still doesn't explain why refs don't have to specify what rule is being violated by whom. The ref is under no obligation to explain what he thought he saw, even after the match, and that's something that doesn't take expensive equipment. If it turns out the ref was wrong on instant-replay in hindsight, that's one thing, but the complete lack of transparency and accountability is aggravating. I'm still not entirely sure what the call in question actually was, other than one that would disallow a goal.

FIFA is a political entity, and it acts in its own interests, not those of the teams, the fans, or even the sport. My British co-worker told me that he thinks FIFA keeps the refs unaccountable because getting people riled up over bullshit calls makes them more emotionally engaged with the sport.
It's awful, but my impression is that although this is an unusually high-profile example, it's not entirely uncommon. As much as it pained me to witness, I think any kind of retroactive change affecting the outcome of the match would be much more unorthodox.
I would say that it ceased to be "your" data once you typed it into facebook. Common sense should say that anything you send to a remote server is no longer under your control. I don't understand what the other side of this issue is.

If you keep data on your local machine and facebook comes and takes it from you, that's a problem. But if you voluntarily send it to them, then they're going to do whatever they want with it. How else would you expect it to work?
Rework, A Book Review
That's the EFF's argument. Have you donated to them recently?
I'm told the 2012 comp will involve predicting the predictions of predictions.
On http://www.hackerangels.com/ they say:

Let us know what you're looking for, and please include a prototype if at all
possible. This is an informal association and not a fund. If inclined, we may
provide feedback, advice, mentorship, hacking, investment and/or serve as
advisors or independent board members, on an individual basis.

Why do you assume 100% less funding? They have all had successful exits. It seems like an approach that's at least as flexible as YCombinator and perhaps better able to nurture over the long term.
We do most everything in ruby. It is very cool for the kind of work we do. And being a lisper, I must say that I really do like Ruby.
Here's a nice bug for Firefox with Flash on 64bit Fedora [1]. I'm getting updates about new crashes from other users almost daily.

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=532456
Not to mention the controversial red cards on Klose and Kaka! Yeesh, what's going on with the refs these days? Why can't they embrace instant replays like those of the third umpire in cricket?
... or send gizmodo an iPhone 4 box with the iphone missing inside.
It's really hard to find any world cup coverage on the standard sites.

It's really sad. As a huge soccer fan I cringe that I have to watch the US play on ESPN.
It scares the crap out of clients.
Everyone keeps saying that Google will become the "evil next Microsoft." I'd argue that Facebook is racing to that department a whole lot faster.
Could you offer a citation? I tried to find the result you mention, and I'm at a loss to even pin down a definition of "random distribution" that might be used.

The closest I can come is the coincidence that a random variable is used in the proof of the Prime Number Theorem, but that's just a modeling technique.

At least I did find this awesome quotation, which seems to play both sides:

In a 1975 lecture, D. Zagier commented "There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that, despite their simple definition and role as the building blocks of the natural numbers, the prime numbers grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance, and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout. The second fact is even more astonishing, for it states just the opposite: that the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, that there are laws governing their behavior, and that they obey these laws with almost military precision" (Havil 2003, p. 171).

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeNumber.html
Are we (USA) the last country stuck with a single carrier iPhone?
iPhone OS updated
I think this CPAN module is a great idea, but is there any team of Perl programmers that would consent to actually using this? It seems that anyone who thinks this module is a good idea would already be using a different language entirely. I say this as someone who in the past year or two has had to work with a team of Perl coders, and most of them could care less about the awesomeness that this module has to offer. I couldn't even get them to agree on a uniform exception-handling strategy! do_blah or die "failz"; was good enough for them. :)
Not winning in terms of trending. They've opened the door wide-open for Android, and it's making rapid inroads. The new iPhone is a great phone, but it's no longer leaps and bounds ahead the competition. With Froyo I'm not sure that it's even a clear-cut leader in software anymore. The cloud-level integration of Android is already putting some strain on Apples market lead.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple is 'winning' at this point. All of the current trends look like a dog-fight is coming. I continue to believe that Google wins this (by a wide margin) in the end.
I was hoping someone would mention ReadyTalk - I worked there a few years ago and can attest that they are very focused on user experience and personalized support and training, and have been building a really strong webinar offering. Give them a shot!
I found this little slide deck while trying to figure out what semantic microblogging is: http://www.slideshare.net/bengee/semantic-microblogging-pres...
I recall hearing about something similar to this being done (using Facebook, as I recall), but didn't even think of applying it to google ads, to convey messages to specific people. Simply brilliant.
I really like the idea of awarding grants to institutions based on aggregate performance, and then awarding funding within a department based on internal metrics.

Getting rid of some of the direct competition might make people more compelled to share thier ideas with one another as well.
Seconded. In Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Durham? I like Morning Times blend. http://www.morningtimes-raleigh.com/ I think it's roasted by Carrboro Coffee.
He actually says "I'd say that Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive new features and is still, overall, the best device in its class". The tone just seems different from the submission.

Got a chuckle at this (he's talking about the "retina" display) - "I don't know how it compares with the human retina, but I do know that, just as Apple claims, text on the screen shows no jagged lines, even when expanded to giant size"

Yuk yuk. I picture someone zooming into a fractal, desperately trying to get to the end. Mossberg is hardly the first person who has exploded a vector graphic (in this case fonts) looking for the pixels, as if it demonstrates something about the display.
Anyone noticed any changes regarding signal strength or reception for better or worse with iOS4? When I upgraded to OS3.1 and I went somewhere without coverage, my 3GS sometimes refused to come back from "No Service" until I either did a cold reboot or switched in and out of Airplane Mode. Then it would work fine again, so I suspect it was a software issue and not the network (Vodafone in Perth, Australia).

Has this happened to anyone else here and have you noticed any change in iOS4?
They control the data access but if they dump it to HTML and send it back to me then I can do whatever I want with that HTML.

All we're asking is for symmetry. If I send them data, they can do whatever they want with it inside the law, their ToS and privacy policy. If they send me data (even the data I previously sent them), I can do whatever I want with it inside the law.
Trying now, thanks.
Studying perceived performance of Firefox and Chrome
We're using both, but right now this project is the first use of Clojure. We have a lot more Scala code.
I don't use Silverlight...I have never had Quicktime crash...flash...I am at the point where I am surprised it doesn't crash.
The clojure code is a hand-rolled algorithm that sits behind a compojure web service. The front-end is just standard jQuery hackery :)
Direct link to all projects+description page: http://twitter.com/about/opensource
RESTFUL Web apps are great if you want cookie cutter and just a simple service (done some myself).

But more trouble than they are worth if you want fairly custom url schemes and are doing something a bit more useful then just plain old CRUD.
(Tell them it's just another jar file deployed with the application. Unless they need to see the source code...)
It actually builds RDF onto PubSubHubBub, so it integrates there as well: http://apassant.net/blog/2010/04/18/sparql-pubsubhubbub-spar...
Wow. Epic misreporting. The iPad may be vulnerable to any number of the bugs fixed in iOS 4. The iPad will get iOS 4 in Fall. It does not follow from those two statements that the iPad will remain vulnerable until Fall.
Didn't work. Restore failed. Trying to restore to iOS4 now.
Here's a lightning presentation from today's SemTech 2010 that describes this in more detail: http://www.slideshare.net/terraces/smob-a-framework-for-sema...
I was just teasing, captain serious.
Checkout a list of many more alternatives at http://vzhai.blogspot.com/2010/06/30-amazing-remote-desktop-...
You are absolutely right. I didn't word my feelings very well. I am not so much scared of the money part or the responsibility of a marriage; I am put off by the ugly nature of the divorce - fighting over money with someone with whom you have spent a good part of your life and will still have to keep some sort of relationship going after divorce because you have children together.

I would understand if one party seems to be unfairly screwing over the other person and not giving them enough money. They are both independently wealthy and have very successful career.

Anyways, I am sure I have much to learn about human relationship and marriage life. It just seems very sad and the only people who are benefitting from this ugly situation are the lawyers, who are going to milk this case for as long as they can for as much as they can.
To those of you who are all for this kid playing GTA-

Would you feel differently if this was Manhunt 2? Or would that be totally cool as well.
The reviews of the iPhone 4 have to leave Apple a bit concerned. The iPhone 4 is Apple's big yearly extravaganza, and they simply can't react to an endless stream of competitive phones.

In prior years the entrant has been held as head and shoulders above the competition (really what could seriously be considered competition for the 3GS? The Hero? Not really. How about the 3G? The G1? Somehow the competition hung on when their entrants really were trash comparable). This year it is dramatically more tempered and disclaimed, and the truth is that on a purely objective basis individual consumers may prefer a Evo or a Samsung Galaxy S or a Droid X or Droid 2...and that's just the start of the 4's cycle year.
eBay in a couple weeks
Small nitpick: Your definition of "regulatory capture" is very wrong. Regulatory capture is when a regulated industry manages to gain control over those regulating it. The Mickey Mouse Protection Act is almost the canonical example.

Very well thought-out comment otherwise, though.
Yes, you are are a criminal (not necessarily a thief), according to facebooks terms of service.

Of course, facebook would not prosecute you, but this is not the point. Facebook has been going after services that make it easier to delete your account, or move information to another service. This is what FB does not like.

Of course, what they are doing is completely disgusting, but facebook seems to be able to do whatever they want, and their users do not mind, as long as they don't change the profile screen too much. Then there is an uproar.
Student evaluations are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance
That's my friend Peter, too! He's wicked smart.