skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So basically, according to you there could be no legal security for large software firms in the software they license? Because all the employees retain their copyrights as original authors? So anytime you 'buy' (to use a colloquialism) Windows, you are effectively entering into an agreement with the 1000's of people who contributed to it over the years and if one of them decides that he no longer wishes to license his contribution to others, a replacement for that work needs to be made?
Wow. Thanks for reply! I'll work on a new draft now and replace the body later after getting more feedback. Thanks for your two minutes!
Travel-related queries of any sort are probably the one query I most shy away from ever entering into a search engine. The results are just so filled with garbage that it's rarely useful--- I'll go straight to a booking engine, to Wikipedia, to Wikitravel, to Lonely Planet, or to some other known site to get info, rather than deal with thousands of content-mill pages and resellers of vacation packages.
Just cos you can write code doesn't mean you can start a business:

1) You need a decent idea. This is the "cheapest" bit, and actually even this is quite hard. what businesses or consumers want (and how they want it) is usually quite different to what you'd naively think.

2) Can you really execute it well? Most ideas will require more than the skill set of one developer.

3) Do you have a route to market? This is the hardest. You can have the best executed product in the world, if you've got no way of selling it it's worthless. And this doesn't just mean oh I'm going to sell it to telcos - it means which telcos, and WHO at these telcos? Are you going to be cold-calling a massive company trying to find the right person to speak to about your product? (if so, good luck!)

4) Are you prepared to work ridiculous hours for sod-all pay, and go through all the stresses, uncertainties and ups-and-downs that starting a business involves? There's a lot to be said for a regular, essentially risk-free check every month.

Yes: you can start a software-based business with little more than a PC and an internet connection. But so can everyone else: there's no advantage here.
I think you have to register a copy with the Library of Congress before you can actually sue anyone, and can't collect damages for anything that happened before you registered.
Well, bluntly, yes. Copycat crime ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crimes ) is a known fact, brought into the public psyche by media at large (see: school shootings, media asking themselves "how much covering should we really give this?") Given a largely publicised slashing with a katana on that same campus mere months ago (perhaps even less time had elapsed - thinkgeek does not clarify when they received the email) it is not unreasonable to assume a higher potential risk.

I am not a criminology expert, so could not reliably say how much of an increase it would be. But it would probably be enough to justify unusually strict enforcing of an existing rule barring weapons on campus.
This is such a one-dimensional piece of hoo-ha. I'm going to mostly skip the obvious reasons why a person with years of legal reasoning already 'on the books' might become less nuanced as they get older.

Looking in the wrong place

"Another study conducted by Mr. Keltner and Cameron Anderson, a professor at the Haas School of Business, measured "Machiavellian" tendencies, such as the willingness to spread malicious gossip, in a group of sorority sisters. It turned out that the Machiavellian sorority members were quickly identified by the group and isolated. Nobody liked them, and so they never became powerful."

This ignores, of course, what just about anyone has realized from the time people realized they were realizing things: the best devious people are able to be devious while being thought to be good. The gossip is quickly excluded because nobody likes a gossip. But beware the gossip that nobody even realizes is a gossip, who spreads their news by craft and artifice (perhaps without realizing it). They often spread gossip by rallying people to 'help' where their help isn't wanted and doesn't belong. Yet, because they're ostensibly being 'nice', it can be hard to object.

More practically in our domain: There are people who are good at noticing why things can fail. This isn't a particularly novel skill. Yet in some organizations, they're applauded from saving the group from disasters that were certainly around the corner! This is a devastatingly bad way to approach problems, and prevents progress. Yet it's easy to applaud because A) people like to be afraid; B) You only have to be right once to get to say 'I told you so' forever.

Much better is the person that can deliver. But of course, this is more risky: building new things risks mistakes, yet also can have opportunity. But note how quickly does the work of releasing several new products get ignored when one of them is a problem child.

Mini-tangent aside: You don't want to look at people who everyone thinks is devious and see if they succeed. You want to find people who are devious but hide it, and see if they succeed. My bet: they do. They just can't hide it forever.

Selection Bias

This article also fails to account for the selection bias at play. Are executives more likely to cheat, lie, or injure others? Or is word about their lying, cheating, and injurious behavior simply both more likely to be talked about and also more wide-reaching in impact? Sally in accounting cheating on her husband isn't likely to attract as much notice as Susan the CEO. And if Bob's stealing $100 in supplies a month, how does that compare to Barry stealing $100,000 as the COO?

The fact is that such corruptions are more interesting because they make for a better story, for some definition of 'better' including "fall from power" and "the powerful are like us".

(There may also be a factor at play where a person with power never gets told 'no'. I can think of celebrities where people 'latch on' for the ride, and won't ever say anything corrective or actually helpful to the person, because to do so risks the free lunch. The crash and burn can be painful.)
And now it's over :)
It's also a lot more rewarding to work on something that's released regularly than ploughing through a never ending queue of work.
I think this is the first homepage for a travel site I've seen that doesn't hide the calendar picker. Whoever is designing this site knows what they are doing.
What Happens to Your Twitter Account When You Die?
There may be prior art for this.
Doesn't seem like it was that long ago. Interesting that over time people started to believe Google itself created Android, when it's actually closer to being a hiptop successor.
"up to" broadband speeds are bogus
I expect it's so that you have an increased chance of remembering what went wrong, presuming you survive, so that you don't do it again.
OT, but it's always amusing to see an answer to this question (which comes up at least once a month) hit double-digit points. The rich get richer...
Exactly. If you live through the event, the knowledge/memory of that event would be helpful in avoiding another near-death encounter. Isn't that what memory is for--to increase our chances of survival? This is just the most extreme example.
Actually, we're not in agreement.

> vastly underestimating the amount of state that is associated with the exact details of a developing organism.

Sir, kindly indicate where Myers makes that point. I read him as going straight into protein folding, and the complex interactions required for the expression of the genome. (I believe you agree that state in the environment that is caused by the expression of the DNA is not information originating in the environment - ie that this is merely magnifying information, as you put it.)

While there is an incredible amount of state created, in the from of gradients and so on, this is directed by the genome...

Or maybe this is our basic disagreement: do you think that an image of a mandelbrot set creates information as it is generated (and that pi creates information as each digit is calculated), or do you think that the information is defined within the algorithm that calculates it? [there are other issues, but just taking this one alone]

So I'm not 100% sure what you mean; please clarify if I understand you correctly.

While there's information in the environment, there's not very much: consider the white and yoke of a chicken egg. Like letters etched in metal with acid, most of the information is in the placement of the letters; the exact nature of the chemical reaction contributes a very small amount of information. Can you indicate why you think there is a great deal of information originating in the environment?

Yes, the heath of the mother can have an effect, but that's if she is unhealthy, and development does not proceed normally. Assuming she's healthy, the specific condition of the mother doesn't determine whether or not a human being is created. Are you suggesting otherwise?
Narwhals! Narwhals!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwqXuMPsoc
Filter my comments through your knowledge and beliefs. Don't trust anything I say - strive to understand, then adapt.

As I say - I'm weird. What works for me won't necessarily work for others, and others here will have different opinions. Probably better.
Mathematical Operators
I like the idea, but as a cost-savings measure, wouldn't it have been cheaper to just sandblast the glass and forego the artistic motifs?
How could a domain name designed to publish contact information be useful for a payment platform?
What does it mean for "Google itself" to have created Android? The product they acquired was fairly different from what's out there today. To me, this is a good example of a very successful talent acquisition.
That's not surprising, considering that "Android has operated under a cloak of secrecy".
It has worked great inside their cities for almost 50 years - as my post clearly stated, the urban electrical infrastructure of Sweden has been entirely underground since the 60s. The ongoing change is replacing the pylons spanning the country with underground cabling. I'm pretty confident they know what they're doing. Not all underground solutions have to be the same, but by nature, the pylon model is always vulnerable, and it always suffers the same risks.
buy E&O insurance? that sounds like a later stage tip, if at all. felt so out of place it almost smells like front-running. screw that, just find paying customers, tune and scale up.

even rent is not something you have to think about when starting a company. use homes (that everyone should have anyway), garages, sheds, Starbucks, libraries and bookstores to start.
"Two screenshots compressed at just insane levels like Google has run out of hard drives, and four hundred characters for a description. That puts anyone in the mood to spend, right?"

I know it doesn't really remedy much of the problem, but if you click on the screenshots, they become fullscreen and don't appear to be of lossy-quality. (I'm using 2.1)
Tangent interested should check out http://www.greenermedia.com/hec.html for more on HEC(human elephant conflict) and to read about their recent trip to Sri Lanka(second) to finish filming a documentary called Common Ground. Can't wait to see it! Elephants and rural farmers need all the help they can get.

Also: Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society www.slwcs.org
That was a refreshing piece. It's good to see Ubuntu doing so well, and it is pleasing to hear that 11.04 will have some focus on more behind the scenes stuff like making more use of powerful GPUs. VLC is already doing some of that (an area where Mac users can envy their Linux brothers a bit). Hopefully many other projects will follow with those sorts of under the hood improvements. 10.04 was slick, Good work guys
Maxim is for dumb guys who don't get Wired (or laid).
Programming Language Popularity (StackOverflow & Ohloh)
It was a good interview with him. I just wish they would have asked more substantive questions about his project. I guess it is a tech show and was very short.
I'm not sure it would be possible to train yourself to turn this on at will, but you can train yourself to make the best of it when it happens. That's what visualization & drills are about in e.g. skydiving emergency procedures.
hype-r. ie, makes the title sound more sexy.
Basically the same as for a first-time founder, which we explain here: http://ycombinator.com/about.html

We've never claimed connections are the most important part. That's probably the most common misconception about YC, and one we try actively to dispel, among other places on the page linked to above.
You're doing it wrong; the purpose of mass lawsuits is to create business for lawyers.
I've always been a fan of their numbering scheme and regular release schedule, but I'm not a fan of the 6-month interval. It seems a little quick to me. 9 months would be better (though irregular) in my opinion.

First off, if you are installing mid-way between two releases you basically have 3 months before your distro is obsolete. I just put 10.04 on my laptop in July and already I'm thinking about upgrading again (which has not always been smooth, 9.04->9.10 sucked), and I haven't even gotten around to my desktop yet, and now I just decided to wait until 10.10 because why bother doing it now? So I'll still be on 9.10. It becomes a hassle for users after a while. I remember when I was downloading the release on the night it came out and updating my machine, but the releases these days are less and less noticeably different.

I also wonder if they could accomplish more in 9 months than in 6, some percentage of time is spent doing overhead for each release and a slower release schedule would allow them to bite off bigger chunks. 6 months made a lot of sense when it was a new project and there were a lot of low hanging fruit, but these days I feel like the path forward requires bigger steps and more time.
I suppose that's a good argument for open-source-style licensing. What you're describing fits Linux perfectly, and I don't think any driver author has tried to pull that. Also: authors are perfectly free to write up licenses that allow use until the copyright term is up.
Consistent support without worrying about major changes in versions of software you depend on.

Especially for the LTS releases, you want to be able to get security fixes without wondering if there's some backwards-incompatible change to stuff you use.

Is there any major Linux distro that doesn't use a release cycle of some sort? If there is, you'd have to be mad to use it for production environments.
Rob Beschizza points out that "speeding up Sigur Ros," however "does not result in Biebage":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6YC0zy1IYY&feature=playe...
Ha. I told my daughter about this this morning - she hadn't heard about it. I give it 2-to-1 odds she would have heard about it by this evening. That there's a meme a-borning. Brilliant. (Also I'm always happy when I see something before she does; it mildly confuses her. I alluded to Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog last month and she said, "What? You've heard of that?" Child. Of course I've heard of it.)
Tech Investors vs Any ‘Ol Investors
If you're referring to the `git merge` command then the actual things they do are quite different.

In svn it applies specified changes to your working copy, while in git it either fast-fowards branch-a to branch-b if applicable, or finds a common ancestor for the commits and creates a 'merge commit' so the commit history won't be linear (it will branch and re-converge). If all the branches are local, you can also use 'rebase' and that will make the history a little cleaner (well, linear at least).

The chapter on branches in the pro git book is enlightening:

http://progit.org/book/ch3-1.html
I think the difference between the way you look at HN and the way I do is that I think this isn't a site that is strictly about 'how to win' in the business world but on how to improve your game in a much more general sense.

It's about skills, not about 'how do I win'. And if enjoying the game makes you practice longer and harder that's a valid way to go about reaching your goals. Neglecting your long term health at the expense of trying to win means that if you don't win in the short term that you will not be able to try again.

The narrow and shortsighted goal is one that you may want to achieve but I almost guarantee you that you're not going to be a winner without improving your game first and without enjoying the game even if you don't win and without protecting your long term health.

There is no 'winning' in this sense in the businessworld, you can set a goal and by achieving that you can make money almost as a by-product. HN is (at least in my perception) partly about achieving those intermediate goals.

If rich to you means having money then you're going to have to achieve that goal in an indirect way (or you'll have to rob a bank).
Sun employees competed to see who could file the goofiest patent ... Viacom sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.

Ah, the things employees of companies who sue Google are capable of. Horrific.
The ideas are worthless argument has been made more than enough, that's not the purpose of this post. I think your argument that "Most decent ideas need great execution, and a lot of great ideas need good execution since they are easily copyable" makes sense. My goal, and the purpose of this post, is to share my ideas, for the motivations explained in the post.
I don't think a new release makes the old release obsolete - that comes when they stop providing patches for it. If you're using an LTS release, like 10.04, you've got three years worth of support.

You don't need to update to the latest version every time - the 18 month support window for non-LTS releases is pretty decent. It means that they can have a quick release cycle to get support for new hardware out fast and get a fresh round of attention for each new release while not obsoleting old installs too quickly.

And if, like many people here, you feel the need to upgrade just because there's something new, odds are there'd be something else shiny demanding your attention anyway!
I dunno, to me these don't look like anything to sneeze at:

http://www.flypfc.com/index.php?i_id=29

http://www.fidelityflight.com/newmotion.htm

http://rkaplan.hypermart.net/simulator.html

Though you are right in that these are still only currently certified as FTDs, you can still fulfill, for instance, up to 50 hours of seat time for your ATP certificate. See FAR 61.159(a)(3)(i)
That's very illuminating. I have some ideas for displaying / managing flight and travel information that I would really love to implement, but the "Data Problem" has loomed large for experimentation. I didn't in fact realize that it was even as burdensome as you describe.
I have often wondered why people would attribute this and other events where one has super human strength or super perception (where time slows down) to adrenaline. This is becasue it is a hormone that is released from the adrenal gland..it would take some time to get to the parts of the body where it would make things function this way would it not..at least longer than the times we are considering would allow. So if I am right, what else could be the "switch" to switch these functions on?
Could be.

It sounds like I'm making a new-agey argument against reductionism, but I'm not. What I'm arguing against is overzealous reductionism... the idea that you can get a grainy image of something and quantize it and you're done. You might be able to do that in some areas, but in biology you can't get away with that. Very small causes can be just as important or more important in living systems than very large ones.

To avoid the philosophical zombie problem, I think at the very least we need a solid theoretical understanding of the phenomenon that we are trying to capture. We have to know what we are trying to do, otherwise we do not know how to start to go about doing it or whether we have done it or not. If you want to land on the moon you need to know what the moon is, where it is, and where you are in relation to it.

That means that we need:

1) A quantitative, hard, solid definition of life. Right now what we have is a qualitative phenomenological definition of life as it exists on Earth. I'm imagining a definition of life that's as solid as the thermodynamic definition of entropy or enthalpy. Based on what I've read in this area already, I would say that it's almost certain that a definition of life will be stated in terms of thermodynamics. Google Ilya Prigogine and dissipative structures to get started.

2) A definition of some sort for consciousness. Right now we have basically nothing here... not even a qualitative set of criteria like we have for life. We know that we are conscious, and we suspect that at least some other living things are conscious. We do not know whether all living things are conscious or not. We do not know whether the set of all conscious entities is entirely contained within the set of all living entities or whether something could be conscious but not alive.

IMHO dismissing #2 is chickening out. Dismissing #1 is definitely chickening out. Not answering the questions means you don't know where the moon is and you might be landing in New Mexico instead.
Android Game Is a Spy App in Disguise
It would be nice if this article had two consecutive paragraphs on the same topic.

( puff )
Google's python class actually would be right for you. You can go as slow or as fast you'd like. http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/
Similarly how should social networks handle the "in jail" problem? I tracked down a high school friend and someone helpfully(?) posted on his wall that he was currently incarcerated. What is the etiquette here? I goes he should have delegated updating his site to someone else.
The Automated Workforce: Rise of the Robots
PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.
The iPhone component - or "Verizon Wireless Blackberry", whatever it is - infuriates me.

I changed my mobile signature on my Incredible to say "Sent from mobile." That way, people know why the spelling might be bad, but I don't feel like I'm being used for free advertising.
The truth about the Segway stroller lady
This has apparently inspired knockoffs: http://www.suncountry.com/programs/fallFreeForAll.shtml
I'm trying that approach, with a little more incrementalism thrown in for good measure. Too soon to tell if it'll work, but at least contracting is paying the bills (plus padding), and still leaving me some time to build out a couple projects on the side.

I started contracting in March when my last startup ran past its runway and focused exclusively on that for four months. In July, I had some free time, so I started writing a handful of very simple iPhone apps to learn a few things:

- Can I build an iOS app in a single day that will make money? (A: maybe, but too soon to tell)

- What are the most effective strategies for monetizing an iOS app with advertising?

- How do some of the new iOS 4.0 frameworks work? (especially SMS and iAd)

Demand for my contracting services has grown sufficiently over the past five months that I'm planning on raising my rates this Fall, with the intention of taking on fewer clients while maintaining my same level of income.

The free time I have will be spent on building out a suite of web and mobile applications. I don't expect to strike it rich on any of them, but with a couple moderate successes and maybe one home run I'll be able to further ratchet up my consulting rates, ratchet down the hours, and make up any discrepancy with quasi-passive income from the apps I've built.

The final goal, of course, is to be able to transition entirely to living off income from products already in-market so I can focus on bigger and bigger projects.

We'll see what happens, but—regardless—it's better than getting a salary.
Tyrell Corporation created the Androids. Everybody knows that.