skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "making them available for sharing."

It's a really big slippery slope:

The jury was instructed that merely "making available" sufficed to constitute an infringement of the plaintiffs' distribution right, even without proof of any actual distribution.[1][11][12] The issue of whether copyright infringement required actual distribution was raised by the defense during examination of Sony BMG's head of litigation on the first day of trial, but the court sustained the plaintiffs' objection and did not permit the topic to be revisited until jury instructions were prepared just before the end of the trial.[12] Despite disagreement from the defense, the court proceeded to interpret making available as distribution for purposes of instructing the jury.[12]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas
I guess that's what happens when money is imaginary. I'm sad that more politicians (citizens?) don't care about the budget. It's not that hard to balance a budget!
Yes, he committed copyright infringement - I'm not going to argue that. I'm talking about intent - did Martin have malicious intent? I don't think so. I don't think he ignored the license - I think he assumed it was under a permissive license - a silly mistake, but since the book is "free" it's not hard to see how someone could make that mistake.
Sorry, we're not several guys, I'm a one man shop who manages each project, chases every deal, and does all of the hiring. Unfortunately, the hiring is priority three, I have a backlog of hiring emails to get to because the response has been really good. But I'll definitely get to you.

Does it sound like I need to hire someone to help me? Yeah, it's a fucking chicken-and-egg problem. :)
You apparently think the Pay TV providers can issue new smart cards on a semiregular basis. No, they can't. They operate under approximatelly the same constraint Microsoft does; updates to their core protection scheme are ludicrously expensive.

(Microsoft could use the exact same scheme by bricking their devices with fuses when they fail some routine checkup; they could also brick every device and then issue a recall/reissue. They have better options than that, though).
Ask HN: Retainer and rate question for software engineer
I'm curious how a contracting software engineer would structure an agreement for work where there may or may not be time spent actually doing work. Simply put, it's an "on call" type arrangement for server administration and hotfix/bug fixes if the need does arrise.

I've contracted before, and have my standard rate, but have never been in a situation where I'm on call, but have the potentiality to not do any work what-so-ever.

What is the industry standard for this sort of arrangement? Thanks!

I'm also sorry if there's a similar ASK HN posting. I perused google and HN a bit and didn't find any similar posts.
I don't follow. People used to hack DirecTV machines to receive the service for free. DirecTV detected that, and shut all those people down. How much does it cost today to obtain a device that gets free pay-per-view?
> Zed wrote a Python book and explicitly said it shouldn't be ported to Ruby.

Just to make it clear, Zed said that his book shouldn't be 'ported' to _anything_. An inspired work based on Ruby already exists, by @krainboltgreene, and Zed is aware and supportive.
Ask HN: Looking for a rails mentor
All I need is access to someone that has a really good grasp on Rails to be able to give me some advice every now and then (specifically to do with building my app) - and explain a few things to me that are confusing.

Any takers?
I agree that "The Little ____er" books aren't the best to learn how to apply a language in the real world. I also agree with your "piano finger lesson" analogy.

However, where "The Little _____er" books excel and overcome all other teaching formats I've seen is in introducing complex paradigm-shifting concepts in a way that is digestable in tiny chunks.

Concepts such as monads, zippers and list comprehension are exactly the the type of concepts that are very difficult to teach/explain using common teaching approaches that "tell, but do not show"

The socratic method used in "The Little Schemer" makes sure to dismantle these extremely abstract concepts into atoms '(pun intended). You really need to understand each atomic piece before you move on.

In most explanations of monads the teacher rattles off a long run-on sentence that touches on several facets of a concept such as monads, making it all that much harder to digest. In fact, most sentences/paragraphs attempting to explaining monads just cause the learner to choke on the terseness and density of information being communicated in one utterance.

The way I see it, both types of books are very valuable. The Little Schemer teaches recursion as a concept better than any other text I've seen. I've never seen anything else that come close. In fact, most texts that touch on recursion quickly move into comparing it to iteration both in form and performance. SICP is an example of a teaching resource that does this. If I remember correctly, the first time you really see recursion in SICP is when the book discusses Ackermann's function and the pros and cons of recursion versus iteration.
not do downplay the charity aspect, it would be cheaper to spend some time building a great mvp and apply to yc to get more than lunch with pg and gang. but then there's the chance of not being selected ;)
The closest observation point is three miles from the launch pads, so yes, the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building; it's insanely large) is probably around three miles as well.

Why the three mile distance? Back during the Apollo program, engineers determined that if the Saturn V were to explode on the launch pad, the resulting fireball would be around four or file miles in diameter. I think it's a similar radius for the Shuttle as well.
You might want to limit the length of the posts. Some of the stories are funny, but it oftentimes takes too long time to get to the catch.
made a job posting.
You should email me :)

http://hangwith.me/about#jobs
I don't see the "slap" unless someone asks a question about some detail and someone responds with a link to a broad overview. Like, "How does memcached handle XYZ with W if you T, U, or V?" and someone throws out https://github.com/memcached.

If someone throws me a useful link, I see that as em trying to help me, not chide me.
Experiments with Amazon's Mechanical Turk
If "might is right" is the ethical/legal regime we're all going to be working under, you realize Microsoft has access to talent of the same caliber as Bunnie Huang, and in significantly larger quantities?

These arguments make sense if you believe that "DRM" (software protection) has lost the technological war. But it hasn't! You just don't see the high-end stuff deployed in places where hackers care about it --- with the possible exception of the hypervisor-secured game consoles.
i have some rails skills, though i'm sure others are more qualified. are you in the bay area?
I don't have all of the relevant information. The obvious missing piece is how much other people value the item.

It seems kind of silly to be upset by being outbid when you are participating in an auction with public bids.
The Social Index
The biography of Paul Erdős, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, is a great read. http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Loved-Only-Numbers/dp/07868636...
> Edit Wow, this comment just went from +7 to +4 in a minute… I guess some people feel very threatened by the idea that humans are overly dismissive of other species.

This adds nothing to the discussion. Stop worrying about a tiny, short-term karma swing. As I write this response, the parent has 12 points. /rant
The way silent auctions (charity or otherwise) I've participated in usually do it is to have a list of bids near each item. You can circulate throughout the evening, changing your bid until bidding closes.
Allergies is certainly something we're preparing to deal with. Thanks for confirming it :)

And I agree with your last point, will keep it in mind when I talk to the chefs.
Science (and reason in general) can only tell you how you should act given a goal. It cannot tell you what goal you should have except by reference to some other goal, so there is ultimately no way to reason with someone about their morality unless you and they share (at least for the purpose of the argument) a high enough goal.
You're ignoring the fact that the flags were there. This isn't simply putting one's own flag, it's seeing another country's flag up and taking it down, then going, "What, we thought we were in the right place, despite the flags."
Google Does Away With “Sponsored Links” Label, Now Ads Are Labeled “Ads”
> Kind of interesting how English forces us to deal with this issue all the time.

How do other languages handle it?
Yes, as ay says the "format" of neurons isn't actually that mysterious. It's actually one of the few things we do know. We also have a pretty decent comprehension of the encoding for audio and visual stimuli, at least as they come out of the sensory organs. It's not a perfect understanding, but it's not a complete mystery either. (Cochlear implants actually to some extent directly interface with the nervous system.)

(Actually we can trace the visual input some ways up the core processing path, too, which is interesting. I don't know what the state of the art is now but a few years ago when I was learning about this in school we had a clue that there's a lot of neurons dedicated to edge detection, orientation detection, and movement detection. It's not a miracle that humans see better than computers, rather a lot of our brains are dedicated to doing a lot of computation in parallel long before this rises to the conscious level.)

Picking an appropriate encoding for a new sense may not be absolutely trivial but it is something we might be able to do today. What I wouldn't expect to happen any time soon is the direct memory interface, or anything that interfaces any more directly than a simulated sense or simulated limb. I can imagine a phantom limb interacting with a simulated computer desktop and overlaying the visual system without more than the expected leaps in technology; imagining something that allows you to simply remember Wikipedia just as if you memorized it is much harder to even imagine.
It is a silent auction.
My brain stalled for about 20 minutes just trying to get some thought around all of the implications of this. Then it was gradually replaced by a the sinking feeling one gets when watching tremendous opportunity lost.

Her husband, Doug, drums up business. “We deliver food, flowers, whatever anybody needs,” she says. “We charge $5 for delivery in town.” Money is tight. Each time they get ahead, there’s a financially draining trip to Vancouver.

What!?

Some of the greatest leaps in understanding about how our brains work, not to mention untold wonders in technological advancement might be presented to us on a platter via this once in a multi-generation opportunity and they're housed in some crap rental trying to deliver flowers to make ends meet??? This family should immediately be declared a national treasure and have the full support of the Canadian government.

Expensive? Morally nebulous? Look, we yanks will build a multi-100-million dollar prison and get over the moral gray-ness of water-boarding just to find a few bombs. Helping out what might turn out to be a simple disabled pair of twins in exchange for knowledge that may improve humanity forever shouldn't be that much of a stretch.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion and attract downvotes, but I just got a +70 for what I though was a throwaway one-liner. If that's how the karma flows, then bring it.
Percona’s Commitments to MySQL Users
No, it is a completely different argument: if you do something that requires a license, and you don't have a license, the damages reasonably should be at least what a license would cost.

Otherwise, there would be no point in ever buying a license. You'd always be better off just using the item without permission, and then paying the penalty if caught.
Regardless of her poor judgement, the end result is that RIAA is being awarded $1.5 million dollars for an action that caused less than $24 in economic harm.
Then Google will just do the choosing for you.
Ask HN: any suggestions for a Lisp project to start with?
I am just about starting to learn LISP. I am not expert in programming. I was thinking of a one month project(1-2 hours per day) for introduction.

I am not interested in anything internet-related, and the less graphics the better.

Any reasonable suggestions?
$50 Facebook Ads Credit
To help make the move from Pylons, I'd love to see a document introducing Pyramid from a Pylons perspective and explaining what it does differently.

Please say Pyramid has a debug mode like Pylons :)
>An employer is willing to pay an extra 20%...

I'm sorry, but this is an accounting fiction. The cost of an employee to an employer is the total cost; dividing up the total cost and ascribing it to this or that is irrelevant from the perspective of the employer, and disingenuous from the perspective of the employee.

In the US we have social insurance taxes which are sold as having an "employee" portion and an "employer" portion, but this too is just accounting fiction:

Perceived:
Gross Salary: $100,000
Employee Tax Rate: 7.65%
Employee Tax Amt: $7,650
Net Salary: $92,350
Employer Tax Rate: 7.65%
Employer Tax Amt: $7,650

Actual:
Gross Salary: $107,650
Net Salary: $92,350
Tax Amount: $15,300
Tax Rate: 14.2%

The employee is worth $107,650 to the employer; that part of the money goes to taxes, or to a recruiter, or to a gym membership is wholly irrelevant.
This is really interesting. For people trying to make money, the barrier to entry is minimal. Moreover, since people can upload right after you take a picture, you get rid of the bulk upload headache.

People are dying to make money on the fly. Think about the popularity of Mechanical Turk and other work at home sites.

One thought: Because it's so easy to post images, you may end up with a lot of subpar photos.
And your argument is nothing but a legal fiction. There is no such thing as a license to give away copies of as much copyrighted music as you want.
There's a huge problem with user generated reviews in general that makes it very hard to go by top rating. Some peple will give 5 stars to a mediocre product, some will give 2 stars for a perfect product just because they wish it was something else (example: the # of people complaining that the Breville is made of plastic, at least the us verson gets that complaint a lot). At the last office I worked at we had the Breville kettle for a few years. Everyone in the office drank tea, so it was in use nonstop. It lated longer there than I did. I'd say it performed admirably, and if I was going to buy a plastic kettle in that range, I'd buy that one. I'd rather not be boiling water in a plastic container, but I'm not going to reduce the rating for it, unfortunately many other people will, so stars don't necessicarily have a strong correlation to quality/durability.
Great tool, have been using it extensively today. Thank you for sharing!
Don't know the legalities but it sure is convenient. Is there a photo processor service like this for one's own photos?
Please understand: when you do something wrong, when you "ignore" or "assume" away that you're doing something wrong, when you react belligerently to the person telling you to stop doing that wrong thing, your original intent just isn't that important.
You already know all about PG, so what's stopping you from deciding the most it's worth to you?

Speaking of eBay, it's amazing how many users harm bidder proceedings by 'staking their claim' rather than making a single bid at their latest opportunity.
So, 12,8m/3,78541178l or EU standard combined: 29573,53l/100km?

I wish at least sciency articles used SI.
Lead Generation Companies Secrets
"... odd to propose it as a chat about your startup. I think it'd be fun to do lunch with PG ..."

Access to pg talking about startups might have a higher auction value than other topics.
:-) I guess I'll have to copy&paste to support my argument. A link isn't good enough:

Due to the use of sub-classing, extensive, sometimes confusing, use of Stacked Object Proxy globals, and issues with configuration organization

As an active Pylons user I never, ever heard of these issues in Pylons circles. Translation: nobody asked for these improvements. Statements like "sometimes confusing" aren't doing it. When? Confusing for whom? I, for one, loved stacked globals. "from pylons import config" was great. Rails wasn't that simple. This is a big shock coming from nowhere. It just wasn't something that came up often on Pylons mailing list.

Let me make this clear: do I believe Pylons could be better? Yes I do. Do I think killing it to make it better was a good idea? No, I don't.

Anyway, I have tremendous respect for Ben and can't blame him for getting bored and wanting to work on something different.

EDIT: I just realized that you may be Ben. In that case thanks for building the greatest web framework for my favorite language! The fact that I'm passionate enough to bitch and moan about its death on the Internet should be the best testament to its greatness! :)
Yes, you must choose Monopoly partners very carefully. Some people were just not intended to play that game - they get resentful and petty.
I like this and wish they had a US version. Their no-cost no-hassle return system makes me a lot more inclined to just trust their recommendations even if the review systems they are built on top of are somewhat flawed. If you don't like it, no big deal.
it's only a half hour worth of work now

but it's a maintenance headache down the road, I'm sure.
Remind Yourself To Respond To Emails With Nudgemail
How are sexually-confused insects helping small farmers?
Well, if I perpetrated graffiti, got caught, and the building owner said to pay him essentially the cost of painting over the graffiti and he'd consider the matter settled--otherwise he'd take me to court, and then I found out that the anti-graffiti law had been written with major offenders who cause massive damage in mind, and so the minimum I'd be out if it went to court is $150k...guess what?

I'd freaking settle, and write to my legislators suggesting that the law needed to be tweaked to allow for small time graffiti, where a reasonable penalty would be the cost of clean up plus enough to sting enough to discourage repeat offending.
Bathed in light: how the Kinect paints your room in IR
I would probably focus on building value for the current users first, before going into international versions, where the market may be very different and you yourself are not a target user so it's harder to build something useful.
Small correction, Linus rejected Monotone because it had been horribly slow on the huge Linux source tree. Git was focused on performance from the outset, where Monotone cares more about integrity and correctness than speed.

That said, it's definitely true that Linux has strong and negative opinions on C++.
Farewell GOOG-411
The numbers you just put above mean nothing to me. Feet per Gallon is something humans can visualize.

I'm sure I'll get downmodded to hell for expressing this opinion here, but I really do prefer imperial measurements.
Very cool. I had to compare it with the Airbus A380-800:
1,300,000 lbs max takeoff weight, using 85472 us gal max fuel capacity, and 6400 mi max range

= 395 ft/gal or 513.5e6 ft-lbs/gal
I second you. My mom offered and I said NO....
Yet Ethics is a reasonable area of study, maybe not a science but certainly amenable to reasoned arguments.

Maybe you can't add 1 and 1 and get Moral, but you can certainly reason that people shouldn't be killed carelessly. And who better to know if dolphins are people, than the people spending their lives studying them?
<span>?
You're welcome to contact me anytime with questions. (emails in profile)
The thing is, I don't think it'd be that awkward for him. I bet he'd find a way to say, "you know, I got rejected once..." and you'd walk out ready to rock and roll.
Ask HN: How many people applied to startup school 2010?
I am writing an article about the fantastic event, which I was fortunate to attend a couple weeks ago. Does anyone know how many applications were submitted for SUS '10?
There is a war on evolution by the religious right. How is one to try to take that on without talking about God?
UGG Delaine Womens 1886 in Fire engine red
This looks like good news to me: I've noticed that Pylons and Repoze shared a lot of common ground. Ben and Chris are seriously smart dudes, and I'm excited to see what they come up with when they put their heads together.

I am a bit surprised though by the way that this was done. As an outsider, it sounds to me like this decision was made among the lead developers of each framework privately, developed in private, and announced as a fait accompli. Was there really no step that involved consulting users of both frameworks to find out what they wanted?

I ask because we (Django developers) spend a lot of time obsessing over backwards compatibility, often to the point where we have to compromises our grand goals for more pragmatic ones. I'd be terrified of making a move like this, so I'm curious to hear if users feel they've been slighted, or if they're pretty much happy to go with the flow.
For me at least, they fixed it by reverting to the backup HTML version:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=44c9d...

In a nutshell, using FF 3.6.12 on Ubuntu 10.04 x64, with all addons disabled, gmail will only load the backup HTML-only version. No ajaxy goodness. Even if I manually select the standard interface, it refuses to use it and references the browser upgrade recommendation page.

Anyone have any idea what the problem could be?
Where are you hosting this and what type of memory usage are you getting? Thanks, neat site!