skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to apply for a programming job on Craigslist
How Priceline Became No. 1 on the Bloomberg Businessweek 50
Social Commerce Startup: 3 guys, $7k/m revenue, eyes world domination
Copyright is not a basic human right. You may like that you have copyright on what you make, but to claim ownership over ideas is like trying to grab a handful of water.

Also, please don't try to frame this argument as, "If you are against copyright then you must be a pirate!" Please let McCarthy-ism stay dead.

Since you've consistently posted in favour of copyright recently:

* Do you feel the *need* to have copyright 90 years
after you are dead? Is that your only incentive to
create?
* What about retroactive copyright extensions? Are you
planning on 'un-creating' things that you created in
the past because you weren't retroactively granted a
copyright extension so you now have no incentive to
create something that you already created?

If copyright terms were 14 years long (IIRC like they were originally), I think people wouldn't have such an issue. The fact that black & white films like Steamboat Willie are sill under copyright long after anyone can make any significant amount of money off of them is a travesty. This is especially true because a lot of things that are under copyright have become part of our culture (the 'Happy Birthday song' anyone?).
The Bloomberg Businessweek 50
Pretty cool, now we only need to bring hw accel to linux and firefox :). My main browser will allways be a open one since we really shouldnt trust corporations in keeping the we open.

//Anders
Good to hear. Anyone on HN that makes something - whether it's been ripped off before or not - needs to be able to know they can do something about it should it happen.
Not entirely; books would still be written, that's for certain. Except, the books that are written with no expectation of money whatsoever or as a personal project are either statements for political reasons, or often not worth reading. Most of the popular books and series are written by career authors. Would anyone be a career author if it didn't pay? I don't think anyone tries to be an author for riches, but if it can't pay for food you can hardly do that for a living.

It seems like you presume all the authors will simply continue to write out of passion for writing. Some will, but I feel that's an incredibly narrow-minded and self-interested view.
In light of HTML5 developments, I think that is a losing strategy in a big way.
What should I hack on today?
The current developer build of Chrome/Chromium has hardware acceleration (switch enabled). The 3.7 developer build of Firefox also has it (and it's supposed to be faster than IE9). Why didn't they compare those, since IE9 is also a developer build?
From the looks of it, this will shred the inserted penis and likely cause bleeding directly into the body of the victim. As traumatic as rape is, this seems like guaranteed infection, whereas not wearing the device should give the victim at least a few seconds to attempt to fend off the attacker.
Google released a trillion-word corpus with frequency counts for all sequences up to five words long... contains...all sorts of other errors...But the fact that it's a million times larger than the Brown Corpus outweighs these drawbacks.

Maybe not: http://nlpers.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-5gram-corpus-has-u...
Bonus points to the first person to write a FUSE filesystem to mount shared Dropbox folders so you can easily download the entire contents of a folder.

Or they could just add a "download folder" link, but that sounds boring. It also looks like they want people to use "Copy to my Dropbox" for that, which would lead to more signups.
Vuvuzela Inventor Now Selling Earplugs
I'm not claiming ownership on my ideas. I'm claiming the right to prevent copying of my software and writing!

> Also, please don't try to frame this argument as, "If you are against copyright then you must be a pirate!"

I'm not - the article isn't about copyright reform, it's about stopping piracy. This post is filled with n-2 people who apparently don't want piracy stopped, and 2 people who've actually had experience with having their works ripped off and oddly enough aren't so keen. If you made something, then someone distributed the source code for that against your wishes, you'd join us.

> While we're at it, do you feel the need to have copyright 90 years after you are dead? Is that your only incentive to create? What about retroactive copyright extensions? Are you planning on 'un-creating' things that you created in the past because you weren't retroactively granted a copyright extension so you now have no incentive to create something that you already created?

1. I'm quite fine with my work going PD after I die. I support copyright reform too - people that support piracy at the same time harm the cause. Saying 'hooray, taking things without permission is awesome' isn't the best way to have a debate about copyright length and PD.

2. No, my incentive to create is that I enjoy it. Money is what I exchange for goods and services in return for my work. Do you make something and get paid for it?

3. Er, no. I just don't like people stealing my work. Do you work on an app? Would you like it if someone ripped off the source code and uploaded it to TPB?
Many of those writers actually read hacker news and I've seen them break stories that were on hacker news the previous day (e.g. note Jolie replying in one of the threads on this page).
They have money to fill great convoys of dumptrucks and you have nothing?

This is not a joke, it's the reality. If you managed to scrape enough money together to have power in the world, you could start playing power games too.

We need to address this with a decentralized system they can't crack down on.
Silly typo on my part, its http://mariettaoh.net , with only one R. If you get a page with some combination of marriettaoh.net/index then its probably to do with your browser using a search to find a page that works, or something even stranger. Sorry about that though. I wonder if the city is losing hits to to the misspellings though, now that I think about it.
Please point me at the comment where I state support of piracy.
Why are you surprised that a $25/hour designer uses templates and tables? Are you expecting someone who keeps current in, or takes pride in, their craft for that rate?

This seems like a pretty dubious experiment.
too long didn't really want (?)

Worrying about canvas graphic acceleration without having a standard canvas implementation may be jumping the gun a little, although traditionally that is how HTML has been advanced. Its a case of premature optimization, but then there is potential for payoff in being first to market with a winning strategy...
I'm assuming s/July/June/g ? Otherwise I'm confused. I'm not following the iPhone 4 coverage too closely.
What's frustrating to me is that they could fix the problem of high usage of old IE versions. They just seem to be unwilling to.

They could add in IE7's and IE8's rendering engines into IE9 as compatibility modes, push out IE9 as a forced or automatic update and have HTML5 ready to use in a few weeks. But they seem to be more worried potential whining from update-averse users than holding back the technological progress of the entire internet.
You want to make something, start by first creating the universe (as Carl Sagan put it). Since you didn't, you already owe a large debt to the universe for just existing (assuming a you've a good life) and to a lesser extent to society for supporting you (with doctors, farmers, builders, roads, schools, stability, security, existence of an economy etc) which is not really repaid in taxes. So, there's a social contract, which people now feel is being abused by creators.

Edit: But yeah, I'd like to live in a stable utopian anarchy as well.
I'm disappointed they didn't make a three-way comparison with potatoes.
I felt cured of any lingering traces of snobbyocity until I saw a Taurus
You said you don't believe copyright is a right, so I presumed you don't respect it.

That may be incorrect - if you don't support piracy, I apologize if I've mischaracterised you. There's a lot of people on HN that don't seem to realize that piracy affects small people too and it's sometimes a little frustrating when they themselves, as makers of apps and games, benefit from it.
I can browse google groups again after resetting cookies etc (not just cache), but I still can't access gmail, neither via http nor https.
Warm intros from influentials. YC helped us a bunch, as did our existing network.
And the irony might be that he gets a company that outwardly looks exactly like he wants. The sheep willing to conform will stay and others will move on. Now I'm not saying anything about productivity, that's another question then.
Yeah, the analogy with theft, particularly physical theft, is unconvincing. Counterfeiting is nearer the mark, but there are obvious differences there as well.

My big complaint with these analogies, though, isn't with their accuracy or lack therof. It's that they shed absolutely no light on whether copyright laws are good, bad or indifferent. They imply a moral imperative for copyright laws. This is, to put it mildly, controversial.

The theft analogy has no bearing on the question of whether the bad effects of copyright laws outweigh the good. I'd rather see the copyright lobby concentrate on that question (other than by quoting implausible estimates of the cost of "piracy"). That, at least, is a defensible position that can be debated constructively.

edit: spelling, punctuation.
If I saw this sort of ad coming from people I follow, they will be unfollowed pretty sharpish.
Could Accessing Your Own Data On Facebook Make You Criminally Liable?
HN London meetup tonight (New Venue)
Quick reminder that London HN meetup is tonight at The Water Poet in Shoreditch from 18:00 http://www.waterpoet.co.uk/ . Please note that we recently changed the venue due to (unexpectedly) high demand. Look forward to seeing you all there.
Interesting that you mention that.

I haven't played around with it too much, but the guy who (made? works on? is in charge of?) jQuery made a Flash=>JS interpreter.

http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

It's fairly nifty in the demos that I saw, and works on the iphone with no problem.
The universe wasn't made by humans. But yes, I pay for my MacBook, I license the fonts I'm using in my web app, I'm going to pay the guy who does my graphic design, I respect the licenses of my Python modules, I write the odd OSS app myself, and I pay taxes. Yes, people do things for other people. Those people - doctors, builders, famers, teachers - deserve to be compensated just like software makers and writers do.
Yeah. I was promised days in lieu, but these were conveniently forgotten or "unable to be taken" due to other, new deadlines. I'm actually surprised I got any holidays at all, apart from the fact that HR got involved. My boss certainly wouldn't have let me have holidays, and I was terrified of losing my job at the time so I didn't want to question it.
No, Apple will make even more money by selling those overpriced plastic shells.
You know, there's the off chance that:
1. He is smart.
2. As the President of the United States, he is getting all the data he needs.
3. You're the one who's wrong.

I'm not saying it's necessarily true, but it sounds a little funny to say "yeah he's either stupid or ignorant" about someone who is very likely neither. It's possible he just disagrees with you, despite being smart and knowledgeable.
ActionScript is almost exactly the proposal that Mozilla and Adobe put forward as ECMAScript 4, which was boo'd and veto'd by Microsoft and Yahoo. Hence we now have ECMAScript 5, née "Harmony", née "3.1", which is minimum-viable-upgrade to the current ECMAScript 3 without all the useful things that ActionScript added.

While ActionScript is similar to ECMAScript, the standard libraries they work with are very different, and most of the trouble of writing a Flash -> Canvas cross-compiler would be in trying to write an ECMAScript layer that could do what the Flash runtime does in C, with the efficiency of C.
I mean to say that if one is genuinely interested in solving a problem, ranting/cribbing in front of people who cannot do much, instead of bringing the issue up with the source of the problem, is rarely an effective solution.
I would say the best way is by the outcomes, by the results.
By productivity - be it units produced, share price, value added...

Productivity is not = hours worked.
Good video on Mac Rumors showing this issue:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=948533

Phone 4 Drops Calls when Left Corner is Touched
This is more than lip service, Obama filled the DOJ with former RIAA lawyers. And Biden's always been pro-RIAA. It may be cynicism, but Biden's statement is really not surprising.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
If that were true, then we'd expect the big budget stuff to be among the least pirated, not the most pirated.
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It's funny how a lot of people say it's not possible, though there are hundreds of thousands of people on the internet who've done it (and I don't mean just exceptions).

For example: affiliate marketing and the whole internet marketing scene is making teens millionaires. I've been in London on this guy's conference:

http://www.georgemontagubrown.com/

He's become a millionaire in 2 years, starting when he was 17. Sure, he is somewhat "special", but I've been following internet marketing and there are 15 year olds that are making 5k$ /month just with affiliate marketing.

You think you're at least as capable as 15 or 17 year old? I sure think I am. Though there is a bitter taste to it all - the above guy made 100k$ with a method, then he sold the method to the public and made himself a millionaire.

Browse a little through IM scene and you'll see it's a totally different world. But it might not be your cup of tea. ;)
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Nice sense of entitlement you got there.

I'd like to rephrase your statement to:

People who create things should be compensated if we can figure out a system to do so that's not too costly to the general public. "Intellectual property" is a contradictory concept. Claiming that ideas, thoughts, and other non-physical entities "belong" to someone is contradicting the very nature of the universe.

Note: I am an independent content creator (though I don't live from my content at the moment).
Unsigned bands and authors have always been hurt, not by piracy but by those who didn't sign them.

It used to be that the only way to fame was through the distribution channels that was owned by a few large corps.

That's not how it is today and that's a good thing not a bad thing.
Who to piss off: the IT department at almost every major corporation worldwide who pay us billions of dollars a year, or a bunch of bloggers who run Firefox on Macs and would still hate our bones if we cured cancer tomorrow.

Decisions, decisions.
I've tried every combination of fingers and hands on every part of the phone in every configuration I'm physically capable of, and I can't make it lose signal with a touch. Similarly, plenty of videos have been posted of people who can't make it happen.

Which suggests that... wait for it... there's not some huge fundamental design/manufacturing flaw in the iPhone's antennae that Apple didn't notice or wants to cover up. Instead, it's just another cell phone that's picky about signal strength, like pretty much every other cell phone ever manufactured. Hell, Macrumors published video from 2008 showing an old iPhone doing exactly the same things people are now claiming to be a brand-new phenomenon unique to the iPhone 4:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/23/iphone-4-signal-declines...

Add to this the fact that the "story" started at an outlet which has a pretty big and well-known axe to grind against Apple, and I feel like we need a whole lot more than some youtube videos and a bunch of "me too" posts in a forum to make a big issue out of this.
Wow. I'd never work there. If I did, I wouldn't work there for much longer. We work on the principle of letting people manage their own time. When there's stuff that needs doing, it gets done but there's always at least some time off afterwards to make sure people can recover from late nights or weekends.
What they also fail to see is that the outputs of this process are also the inputs of this process. Imposing artificial scarcity on the output restricts the input, which diminishes the output, which further affects the input, etc.

Every piece of intellectual output takes as input many, many pieces that have come before.
As the article states these funds were largely raised in 2006 and 2007.
Pirates are cool. I say, let's keep calling it piracy.
From my understanding, the biggest barrier to using hadoop/cassandra is that they are very difficult to install. Unless you have a lot of experience with similar technologies, the time spent learning new concepts isn't worth it for most startups.

Simple question: Does chef make it any easier to install/configure hadoop and cassandra? Or does this make it easier to deploy them once you already have things set up?
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I forget where I heard it, but in some interview a Microsoft exec claimed no one at MS likes IE6 and they all want to see it die, but that they have signed long running service agreements which basically makes them contractually bound to keep it alive. Now this could all be bullshit, but that appears to be the official line.
IE9 does have compatibility modes for IE7 and IE8 already (somewhere on the official IE blog there's a flow chart describing how IE decides what rendering mode to use for a given page; it's terrifying)

My understanding is that IE's entire user-base consists of update-averse users these days - everybody who can stomach the idea of changing browsers is already using Chrome or Firefox.
Tried it, can't reproduce it. Or any of the other "sure-fire" configurations people have claimed.

If it really is a hardware issue, it's probably due to a defect in some batches of phones. But for now I'm sticking to the most likely explanation, which is just that cell phones are finicky little beasties and people are quick to spot patterns where none exist.
Yes they do. But what's fair compensation? If a doctor saves your life, do you then become his slave? Because if not for him, you'd not exist anymore. No? Then it's obvious that the compensation is only upto a point. What if it was some medicine discovered a century ago that saved you? How do you compensate that person? You need to rely on society to have taken care of or provided for him when he was alive.

If technology progresses to a level where an individual is independent of society (to the point of one planet per person maybe), your ideas would work. Right now society has the upper hand over the individual.
People Twitter to relieve their existential anxiety
If it were powering on the GPS that would be significant. Aside from the privacy perspective, many people power down GPS to save the battery which is something which should absolutely be something which remains under user control.
I work about 30 seconds away from the Water Poet but I'm not in the office today! Have a good one and hopefully I'll see you all at the next one.
All humans are killers by nature. And at that age girls are taller and stronger than the boys are.
I don't think you've thought this through very well.
It all boils down to the public goods problem, and which solution to it that you prefer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
Isn't there some old anti-trust thing that doesn't let them push IE updates? That was my recollection.

Edit, security ok, version upgrade not ok.
Well yeah, but how do you communicate what is meant to be there and what not? Diapers, well it's obvious that that shouldn't be there. But ground up biological waste actually improves the functioning of water treatment stations (depending on the technology used). So now is a tea bag OK to grind up and flush? What if it's one of those newfangled plastic tea bags? Those are not OK but it's not obvious that they aren't (I wouldn't have known if one hadn't got stuck in my grinder...).

An interesting problem - improving on a system that is so behind the scenes that hardly anyone ever thinks about its functioning. To make changes to that, you need large scale social engineering techniques to implement those changes - a 'message of general interest' or two on TV isn't going to cut it.
Ah, but it's not bad to work for someone who has the guts to take action.
You still get raped, but only for a moment, instead of potentially for hours.
No they certainly could not. Have you ever worked in a big company before? The end users get their updates from in house sources. Introduction of MS updates is strictly controlled. If they can't quantify what the change will do then it's not going in. Of course security patches get priority and something like a browser version change has broad sweeping effects that are extremely difficult to quantify.

So if MS did what you ask tomorrow, nothing would change in 99% of big corporations.
I don't know about this Skype phone, but I make Skype calls (including video) on my Nokia N900. Have been doing this for some time.
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The problem is that MingW is a completely alien environment for the vast majority of C developers on Windows, and Visual Studio is a completely alien environment for POSIX projects.

That way you can't use the majority of Windows C developers, many of whom would love to contribute to open source projects, and who has the knowledge of the technical difficulties of porting to Windows.
I am with Apple.

On the web I use readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability) a lot. I am happy to be able to read with fonts readable for me. If I could I'll always surf using readability.

For books I believe overriding designer choice by _yours_ is the best solution for a good read.
If charging for virtual goods isn't a viable business then you need to start doing something else, just because you "want" to make money this way doesn't mean there should be the law for it. People download my software for free and I think it's great.
Once your information is in Bobs hands, what he does with it is out of your control. Even if we consider a network that doesn't allow apps, what if Bob downloads SleazoCo Birthday Reminder (comes build-in with your Bonzi Buddy) that scrapes your birthday from the site? At least Facebooks terms forbids app-producers to save anything about users for more than absolutely needed, and SleazoCo can theoretically be banned from making FB apps if caught in violation of this.

Unless we're willing to consider DRM for social networks, this won't change with Diaspora or any other kind of software that puts your birthday on Bobs computer in any kind of standardized format.
Safari and to a lesser extent, Opera, definitely matter as well.
Why would IT departments be pissed off if IE9 was fully backwards compatible? Honest question.
I don't believe you can do that. I have tried, but it failed. The interface is primarily for viewing a folder via a web interface I suppose.
A woman could hack a vuvuzela instead or blow one (the horn).
My understanding is that if you dock people part-days for not showing up, you can get in trouble if you don't pay time and a half overtime, even if your dudes are 'exempt'
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Service Design?
Just curious, as it seems that everyone is switching to divine power and ambiguous skills like "creativity" for their inspiration, when it seems like there are a lot of good tools to use.

http://designforservice.wordpress.com/
And Dan Saffer's Designing for Interaction are good references. Just so you know what I'm talking about.
What about that big furnace up ahead? Seems pretty bright from here. It's getting nearer/brighter all the time, too!