skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument tends to support the point that it is better to be a citizen than a consumer, but that doesn't imply that it is better to call Americans 'citizens' rather than 'consumers.' If Americans really are better summed-up as 'consumers,' then it would be a kind of political correctness not to apply that label. Do you see it as inaccurate to call most Americans 'consumers'?
That guy is no more an idiot than anyone who's ever looked longingly at a Ferrari, or a super highend stereo system, or a supercomputer, i.e. most men.

Note that he did not, in fact, buy the $77,000 watch (which is, btw, not the most expensive watch you can buy by far).

Yeah, it's mainly a status symbol, with added collector and engineering angles to appeal to the inner geek. And it keeps time less accurately than a $10 watch from WalMart.

So what? $77k is a joke compared to what rich people blow on cars, art, yachts, and jewelry for their wives or mistresses, and it doesn't even take 1000th of Warren Buffet's wealth to be able to do that without going broke.
Why the XBox 360 Kinect needs a Marketplace for Apps
I think the true potential of Kinect and it's 3D realtime tracking ability will lie in marketplace apps. Thousands of new applications with minority-report-style UIs can be built to do everything from internet browsing to trying on clothes at your favorite stores to video editting. The possibilities are endless.

What app would you design?

I would create a dressing room application filled with the latest styles from dozens of popular stores, allow the user to try them on in 3D and then quickly make a purchase. I could see this being quite the killer app for shopping...
If you put it on Fifobooks (my startup), our platform automatically converts it so it is downloadable for Kindle as well.

You can set the price to free.
> I guess you also need a way to suppress spurious warnings.

man gcc
...
You can request many specific warnings with options beginning -W, for
example -Wimplicit to request warnings on implicit declarations. Each
of these specific warning options also has a negative form beginning
-Wno- to turn off warnings; for example, -Wno-implicit. This manual
lists only one of the two forms, whichever is not the default. For
further, language-specific options also refer to C++ Dialect Options
and Objective-C and Objective-C++ Dialect Options.

> And C compilers normally don't warn you about follies, like using global mutable state.

I mean no great disrespect, but if you need a machine to remind you not to use global mutable state, get back in the oven, you're still a bit gooey on the inside.
If you're worried about inflation, consider TIPS (US treasury inflation-protected securities) or an index fund that consists of them (e.g. TIP or VIPSX). That way you're less likely to lose a lot of your savings suddenly. The stock market can be flaky so the usual advice is not to invest money in stocks that you might need in the next 5 years or so. Also you might try going to the Bogleheads forums and ask for their advice, they are a helpful bunch: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=1
It was easy to grab an ePub reader from the Android app market to read this on my phone.
I still need to plug my iPad into my computer to "sync" the file to the iPad to read it in iBooks. This is lame IMHO.
Back on topic, this is a great book. It got me into Scheme when I first read it 5 years ago (I didn't attend MIT unfortunately)
Note: XNA for creating games exists, but this isn't the powerful app-store / developer API functionality that it would need (http://creators.xna.com/en-US/)
"Go to their site and look for something pushing illegal content. Their name contains pirate - that's a stretch. The mention they have music, movies, games, and software but these are not illegal in themselves. That's about as far as the rabbit hole goes."

Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better. TPB changes their main search graphic to various copyrighted books, software, and movies to flaunt it in the faces of the content creators.
If you have a bit of time it's not that hard to convert a simple ePub file to a single Kindle-friendly HTML file, since ePub is already HTML. Use your favourite HTML library in your favourite scripting language to pull out the contents of the <body> elements in each chapter, catenate them, throw a ToC at the top if you want, e-mail it to your Kindle, and read.
Could a brain parasite found in cats help soccer teams win at the World Cup?
"Stealing a credit card is stealing in itself"

no it's not. If you don't have the original card in hand, you just have data. Data can't be "stolen" according to the responses here, only copied.
It's a binary file.

Edit: Ah, just a zip file. Change the extension to .zip and you're good to go. :-)
Oh my god. That monster looks like that coin-operated binoculars around the beach and mountain viewing areas.

http://midmodmapretroroadmap.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/lob...
This is unbelievable. He created a business that he knew was on the wrong side of the law and then gets self-righteous when he's accused of breaking that law.
What's with the see-saw of meditation articles lately? It's better than expected, science™ proves it! It's a waste of time, news at eleven! We'll show you how for only some monies!
Regardless of whether the exchange happened or not, the claim that "[the email headers] were legitimate, and that the entire thread would be extremely hard to fake, if not impossible" is an exaggeration. For reference, open up the headers of an email you've recently received from a Gmail address. Notice the DomainKey-Signature field?

DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws;
d=gmail.com; s=gamma;
h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:subject:from:to
:content-type;
b=IBLt9oYlFSwflVBrLP4Rq64gpUeIHJMkvAjbVoYin9vugJBa4E4hxqfKeFLp/Gw3XT
2V/PR4M4M/Kz9CU8n7poGJ+JUBcxyT4LZc4SYNHTV1TD6nmk77Pvl7E7f8uY1sAMrR9c
F+2HiY9MMKgb0SlPdRVqUUF0QX9XoQRzA3jFs=

That's there because Gmail (along with a few other providers such as Fastmail) implement what's called DomainKeys Identified Mail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail). It can provide cryptographic assurance that the domain name associated with an email is valid. So using the DNS records on the Gmail domain, I can pull the public key and verify the cyptographic signature.

mil:~ tim$ host -t txt gamma._domainkey.gmail.com
gamma._domainkey.gmail.com descriptive text "k=rsa\; t=y\;

p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDIhyR3oItOy22ZOaBrIVe9m/iME3RqOJeasANSpg2YTHTYV+Xtp4xwf5gTjCmHQEMOs0qYu0FYiNQPQo
gJ2t0Mfx9zNu06rfRBDjiIU9tpx2T+NGlWZ8qhbiLo5By8apJavLyqTLavyP
Srvsx0B3YzC63T4Age2CDqZYA+OwSMWQIDAQAB"

If the signature is valid, I can be reasonably confident that the email is valid. (Note that some sort of DNS compromise or attack would allow an attacker to pass me a fake public key)

Now take a look back at the email headers in the article. There is no cryptographic signature that you can verify. Note that if these headers are made up, the forgery is quite good. There's even some nice SPF authentication going on in there. But it's not impossible to forge these headers. In a targeted attack, I could do just that. Depending on how much the guy got paid for the story, it might even be worth the time.

(If there's someone with domain knowledge/experience etc. in this area and has an addition or correction, I'd love to hear it)
Yeah, finally a usable filesystem for my iPad :)
Ah. I'm not a Netflix subscriber, nor do I have Silverlight (on Linux). Just a hunch but I suspect I'm not in the minority at HN.
For me that's an instant disqualification.
I am not sure how to do that. I'll look into it in the near future. Thanks again!
Alter-ego - A Reactive AI Library
"There's a reason why the world should work this way. I can use a wide array of objects as a lock pick (i.e. a banana). To prosecute me for walking down the street with any of these objects (including actual lock picks) is just ludicrous. Hence why the law says that I actually have to demonstrate the intention to use a tool to steal something in order for it to be a crime. And in any case, the took maker is usually never liable."

Your examples are ridiculous.

Here is an example from TPB:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5666626/Adobe_Photoshop_CS5_...

it's for photoshop CS5. The readme, which is on the website, clearly states what it is. There is no confusion. You aren't getting a demo or a trial.

TPB is also not like google because they also run many of the trackers used to download these files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker

"Hence why the law says that I actually have to demonstrate the intention to use a tool to steal something in order for it to be a crime. And in any case, the took maker is usually never liable."

If you sell knives, you won't be prosecuted for murder. However, if you have a website detailing exactly how to kill someone, their schedule, and sell knives along with this guide, you probably will be held liable.

"It's an impossible task to go after the tool makers, so just go after the criminals."

It's not impossible to go after the tool makers. By going after TPB, they can potentially stop millions of downloads per day in one shot.
Ah, so it sounds like 'More Obscure' means 'Make this artist more obscure in the playlist'? I interpreted it as 'drill down into even more obscure, less known, less listened-to artists'.
Way to miss the point...a lack of distribution channels means less consumer choice too.
This comment is really a tangent to the above topic.

Like 8 years back, I was in a java one conference, James gosling was on stage and some one asked him a question about emacs. His reply was, there are so many good editors now and emacs was written for his earlier times.

Before this incident, I used to feel so much pressure to learn something command linish and primitive like vim or emacs to fit in with the geek crowd and look more techie.

After this incident, I never touched emacs again.

The question here is mastering vim why? is it worth it?
Just a small correction: Apple actually has introduced the ability to organize your apps in iOS 4. Nothing revolutionary, basically just folders, but it is something.
It is not supposed to be safer or easier to remember - it's just supposed to help you let your friends know what kind of content they are going to see - I hate clicking bit.ly just to see it's a TechCrunch link, which I usually don't like reading, same goes for video links.
It'll be fragmentation, yes, but hopefully it will be smart fragmentation, not chaos. The purpose of a distributed social network is for there not to be a single centralized server. They're not building a Facebook clone, they're building an open social network.

The way people use social networks right now is fragmented. People have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. and they have to continually check those. What Diaspora potentially offers is a way to unify that communication, if you so choose.

Diaspora doesn't necessarily have to move people over from Facebook to their service completely. People may not need to leave any service at all. All Diaspora needs to do, is provide the same access to their social network, but with a little bit more control and extensibility.

There are currently 3,208,579 people on Facebook who want a dislike button. If Diaspora can provide that in the form of a dislike plugin, there's a lot of potential users. If Diaspora does not force any changes to their interface, but instead allows users to theme and customize them, then there are a few million more potential users.

As far as how long it will take before Diaspora has all of the features that Facebook has, I personally believe that it will take less time. The technology is more established than it was when Facebook first started, and they were still trying to figure out what would work, what wouldn't, and how they can make money.

In Diaspora's instance however, there are quite a few case studies (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare) that they can look towards for inspiration. People are in general a bit more open, and engaged on social networks than they were when Facebook was founded (Facebook after all was first limited to college students only). Plus, there are the untold number of developers who would be willing to contribute towards the project when it is finally open sourced (just look at how many backers they got, and that was money, not code).

Phew, this comment turned into more of an essay, but I think it sums up my views, and hopes on Diaspora. Agree or disagree, thanks for reading at least :)
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page has a ton of great info. Good starting point.
The email exchange was never that interesting to begin with. But if this is true then it means Apple PR lied on the record about the story, which would be significant.
It is not supposed to be safer - it's only purpose is to help you let your friends know what kind of content they are going to see - I hate clicking bit.ly just to see it's a TechCrunch link, which I usually don't like reading, same goes for video links.
While we're discussing this: I've written some software that generates approximately $200k/year in passive income (and growing), with almost no ongoing maintenance or support required. Anyone working on it full time could double it quite quickly, I think. (I'm working on some other projects.) At that level, how should I go about selling it?
> I have reduced the text color scheme to use only two shades of gray

Did you? I'm counting at least 4 gray colors, 3 of which are competing: The background, the text, the login field's text and the login field's background. Maybe there are even more different gray tones, I didn't check thoroughly.
FaceTime is an open protocol: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apples_biggest_news_vid...

and

http://blog.imtc.org/index.php/2010/06/09/the-technology-beh...
Keep this cheat sheet somewhere visible near your workspace:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3047291.stm
So you are billing out 110k a year which is 733 or less hours per work a year.

Somewhere between 110k and 733 hours of labor is an asset you are just looking to throw away.

If you look at subbing it out to someone else(though they get full source, i mean they have to) and if you pay this/these guys 60/hr, you are looking at paying out around 44k-ish a year plus lazy bloat so probably 60k a year.

You should hopefully realize you have built something pretty awesome, you are just missing the steps covered by: http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

which basically means that you need to put processes into your system where you can sub yourself out as needed and someone else can handle this. Support requests and RFQs going to your personal email aren't conducive to this. Using things like zendesk, some other support app etc would be really beneficial.

So really you have 25k a year + a hose of consulting money you can divvy up/spray around as you see fit.

You really have something cool here, you should value it correctly. People buy jobs all the time, isn't that what college is all about?
I've been using the scribd version of SICP. Last I saw the ipad version looked great too.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15556326/Structure-and-Interpretat...
If Apple falls behind on features that developers want, the App Store numbers they like to tout to loudly will stop growing so rapidly.

Highly unlikely; unless they lose their consumer market too.

Because, at the end of the day, developers will jump through a few hoops (and rightfully gripe) to sell to the biggest user base.
Thanks, I was looking for that.

What are people's opinions of ES4? I am using it to learn the good parts of Javascript. Is it recommended?
"What do you propose instead that will have the effect of limiting downloading and sharing of the above, since that's what you seem to be after?"

That people respect the wishes of the content providers by not going around them and downloading their content for free. Since it's obvious this isn't going to happen, it's going to have to happen by force.

I hear so many arguments on this site about respecting your fellow man when it comes to health care and paying your fair share of taxes. Yet, when it comes to someone selling software online, they don't deserve the money. It just seems very hypocritical to me.
This rather related to my startup in development. I hope to release this service soon.

Anyways, I use a decent editor (Notepad++ is a good one) for most code that doesn't need debugging (besides the good old trace statements) and for debugging I use eclipse.

In the latest version of Node.js (0.1.100) a console.log() was added.
I'll say it again. Apple iOS and the platform is at least 5 years ahead of all competitors.

Keep this in mind, noone has an answer for the iPod Touch or the iPad yet. The iPod Touch outsells the PSP and nearly the DS in devices and in terms of content sales via iTunes (games and entertainment, none come close).

The iPad is another gaming console in a way and a pretty cheap laptop replacement. Not to mention the book market.

The iPad and iPod Touch make up over 65%+ devices sold by Apple and brings the total iOS devices to over 100 million.

Other companies keep thinking this is a Phone only market. When in fact the iPhone is only about 35-40% of Apple's devices that use the iOS and the iTunes/Appstore platform.

Where is the response to that? How many years will it take others to understand this. Apple is owning the mobile and handheld market and is making a ploy for all entertainment devices not just phones. Apple has to love that the competition looks past 65%+ of their market every new device.

The iPod Touch and iPad are the equivalent of Apple II's in schools and candy cigarettes when it comes time for kids to grow up and buy a phone. All their apps and games will be there waiting for them when they get one. This market is about so much more than phones...
The title is somewhat misleading. It's not really a new tax, just a different interpretation/application of an existing tax. I do love how these bills always come under such monikers as the "Main Street Fairness Act."

Lack of regulation is one part of what makes internet-based commerce so great. I wonder if services (ie: Basecamp, git, etc) would fall under the sales tax, further complicating the legal landscape of 'net based tools.

In the state of Tennessee, software development services that I render to local companies is already taxable under a 10% "use" tax (the state has no income tax, and developing software is considered creating something of 'use,' therefore, taxable).
I'm not particularly an Apple fan boy, but I do admire their design decisions. Apple has an _uncanny_ ability to take a block of marble (a set of features for a phone) and grind away at it until what's left is a minimally complete set of features that are (in general) perfect.

I was definitely the first to gripe and complain when the iPhone didn't have cut and paste, but I'll also be the first to admit that they _did_ get it right when they finally released it.

I was also one of the many loud voices complaining that I couldn't run backgrounded apps, but when you look at the HTC phones coming out right now running Android and full backgrounding, and you hear the stories of how the battery runs out by the early afternoon, you start to realize that, it is true, "it is easy to add <feature x>, but it is hard to get it right" (or whatever it was that jobs said in his announcements)

I'm not saying that the features in Android aren't impressive, they very well may be, but Apple's design decisions don't just go after "impressive", they try to go after "perfect", and sometimes getting features perfect means cutting them until you're ready

Your entire post is targetted as "features that developers want" and you're right, you need a healthy ecosystem of developers, and Google is certainly building one. However, you also need a healthy ecosystem of consumers who love the product, and at the end of the day, I really think most developers will go to the platform where they can reach the widest audience. Apple cares about their consumers first, and their developers second (and sometimes it feels like second last), but it seems to work for them...

edit: of course, sometimes apple's PR doesn't respond to consumers as best as it could (i.e. the "you're holding it wrong"), but I'm trying to focus on design/product decisions
Even more ironic he was trying to sell consultancy services to help companies avoid the very thing he was doing to them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacemen...
If this comment was meant to be sarcastic then it was expertly executed! BTW, you really don't need a teacher to learn meditation... just sit down, shut up and focus on your breathing for a few minutes each day... and watch how wild your mind is.
How Movity (YC W10) built a noise dataset of the Tenderloin
Nope, not inaccurate at all. We're also 'excreters', 'respirators' and metabolizers generally.

The document discussed here and the word 'citizen' refer to a conscious sense of responsibility to and for the "Commons" in addition to oneself.

This is, of course, why I favor a rational solution to our undocumented resident issues. This involves BOTH a more secure system... but also a path to CITIZENSHIP for those here.

The 'elites' of BOTH the LEFT and RIGHT, each for their own reasons have encouraged a lax approach to the issue of labor... and thereby have degraded both the role of work and of citizenship.

Being a CITIZEN is about taking back that power over and responsibility for... the Commons.

And so now American workers and Undocumented people who've been given a very mixed message are pitted against one another.

Degrading the role of citizenship for everyone.

Ask yourself who benefits from this division?
Flywheels come up every once in a while (I remember seeing them for the first time about 20 years ago).... but I wager they'll never become mainstream. The problem is the more energy they store, the more explosive they become.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage#Advanta...

Same kind of thing with the Dymaxion car (1930) - a 3 wheeled car that could transport 11 passengers @ 30mpg, reach speeds of 120mph and do a U-turn in it's own length. Sounds brilliant.. except what happens when something happens to one of the tires.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car
Learn by doing, taking things apart, exploring. A good school helps too. And legos.. I'm not sure it matters whether you're an EE, or SE, or CS major. It hasn't in my experience, I know crappy engineers from each faith as well as good ones.
Ronald Reagan liked to describe the sequence of actions that government typically takes toward private business:

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870457530457529...
I've never seen that, but if you have a source other than your mouth I'd love to see it. I've seen them change the graphic, but never to copyrighted works. Oh, and I wasn't saying that to "[make myself] feel better," I was saying it because it is true afaik.
For most of the article I was able to accept that he might have actually had the good intentions that he claimed, despite his rather questionable methods.

Then he mentioned that his couple dozen hotmail typo domains, that he supposedly created to give to Microsoft before scammers bought them, were all redirected to his own site where he sold exercise equipment. All his claims of holding the moral high ground pretty much imploded right then.
It does make some sense to me to rationalize it somehow, though not necessarily in this direction. It seems somewhat strange that if I sell stuff to people near me, sales tax is collected, but if I sell stuff to people far from me, sales tax isn't collected--- leads to perverse incentives against buying things that are already near you, and instead encouraging you to buy exactly the same thing from somewhere else where it has to be shipped to you.