skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Canadians pay levies on recordable media

I find this concept very objectionable. If I buy a blank CDROM for the purpose of distributing my own software then music companies receive some of the proceeds of the sale because I could have used the discs to copy their work.

That's a bad law because I'm assumed to be guilty and I have no recourse to prove innocence. Furthermore, why is the levy specific to recordable media? If we're going to be fair then we should have similar levies on cars, crowbars and numerous other items which can be used in crimes that deprive people.
You realize that almost every other public good is funded this way, right?

Edit ... not that Miley Cyrus is a public good, but still.
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Its interface is what I find most impressive about it, but functionality-wise the commenting and reviewing features are really nice -- there's a floating icon that lets you nestle comments into the margin and if you click on a comment it spotlights the region of the text it refers to. I've been in a lot of situations where this sort of thing would've come in handy, and combined with the other collaboration features they're introducing, it could make for a pretty great setup.
I think the point is that we should be more careful with the words we use. Saying that copyright infringement is theft is just sloppy thinking, and is likely to confuse the issue and lead to even more sloppy and confused thinking.

You might argue that both are wrong, that both are illegal, or whatever. Fine. Just don't say they're the same thing, because they're not.

Redefining words for purposes of brainwashing consumers is propaganda pure and simple, even if you believe that copyright infringement is wrong and should be illegal.
Facebook Open Sources Much of its Platform
Whoever cracks the image analysis algorithm will be the king. There are so many applications for this its crazy.
I did an internship one year at Intel working on Image Analysis algorithm optimization. Even though we were not super accurate with our algorithms, it was obvious that this is going to be a big thing and the computer hardware would play a big role.

Any one here working on Image analysis algorithms?
Good abstractions don't require you to understand the whole stack. Effective use of a function, for example requires you to know:

* What the valid arguments are

* What will be returned

* What, if any side effects calling the function will cause

* (sometimes) What resources the function will utilize

Use of most other data types is simpler. Your framework or library should give you this information in the documentation. If your development environment is reasonably friendly, it will give you the arguments, and in many cases, you'll be able to guess the rest of it based on the function name.

If you have to RTFS to figure out how to use your libraries, something is wrong. Institutionalizing that by always putting the source right in front of you is a Bad Thing.
Collison only mentions 'up to 60x' in a parenthetical about Fukamachi's distortions. To note that tiny bit, as if it's a 'wishy-washy' hyped claim (as opposed to just a clarification of the original presentation) is equally distorting.

Also, the point of Fukamachi's critics is that the MagLev claims aren't "rather bold" at all, given the well-established performance of other Ruby-like language environments. Some doubt is healthy. Vigorously doubting things well-known to the dynamic languages community is sophomoric.
Old school (news) but still going: http://www.pythonware.com/daily/

IronPython a bit more lately: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/index.shtml

Reddit programming section gets some good Python (news) sometimes.
Google to offer real-time stock quotes
Awesome post:-)
In UK law, theft is when someone is permanently deprived of something. The thief doesn't have to gain from the act for it to be theft. The similarity between theft and arson would be that rightful owners would be permanently deprived in both cases.
yeah, that bugged me too. (i'm a safari user)
This guy's blog is awesome. Go read his archives.
I think the last example is a little off. It compares taking a friend's book to simply copying it, but the friend presumably does not own the copyright to the book.

The idea of copyright extends beyond money. By being able to freely copy an artist's work the artist loses control of his creation. Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, did not license out his characters for lunchboxes or plush toys because he felt it would hurt the artistic value of the comic, even though he could have made much more money licensing it. He was able to prevent licensing because he owned the right to copy his creations.
It's equally bad to elevate a semantic argument so you can use it as a straw man, as you implicitly do with the word "even" in the sentence "even if you believe copyright infringement is wrong".

And face it, the Free Culture side of this debate uses that tactic a lot. "Copying isn't piracy! Pirates kill people! Abolish copyright!"
I also think it is a direct result of the power of the giants. In the US, the RIAA can sue individuals for large sums of money.

In Canada, you can't sue for any amount - you have to show damages. So if downloading a song was copyright infringement here, you would only be able to sue for the cost of the song.

So, it is in the recording association's to have a levy rather than to pursue individual legal action here.
Bloomberg's speech:
http://mashable.com/2008/06/02/nycseed/
Programming is hard. Learning to do it well requires above average logical thinking and a significant amount of study. Good use of OO, FP, pointers, recursion, data structures and concurrency are all hard. Most people here will have limited experience with something on that list and will likely consider it hard.

The idea that programming is not hard or that X will save us from the fact that it's hard, where X is OO, FP, structured programming, DSLs or even Lisp is an insult to the trade. Worse, it applies pressure to stop advancing - after all, X is going to make this easy any day now.
Will Steve Jobs Set Me Free?
Bits: Let the Internet Tax Collection Begin.
Taxes may be levied unfairly and they may provide facilities that individuals don't use. However, they are for collective benefit, public ownership and with nominal charge for use, at most. In the case of recordable media levies, the law enriches a private industry to the detriment of the public, distorts a market to the detriment of the public and doesn't exempt us from further fees. Specifically, after you've bought one blank CDROM, you're not exempted from one album sale.
Facebook: Applications Aren’t Meant to Be Installed
It's not impossible to cross with the advent of the 'Long Tail'. "1,000 True Fans" sounds like the new 'fame'.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fan...
Not to mention, there are a lot of people who don't care about the medium, but rather the price (e.g., college students). I know if an e-book was priced $8 versus the $10 paper version, I'd go with the $8 for pretty much any book. It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version. Finally, although I can see reasons for pricing it above the paper version (you have features like search, copy and paste, etc.), I think many people would find this absurd. Hence, the only remaining option is to price them at the same cost as the paper version. Clearly, any of the other options are possible, but the reasons listed here are, I think, valid for not doing so.
Darknet fiber is the way to go. But I don't know enough about internet backbones.

I do know that the side benefits of starting your own country could easily finance it. Surprisingly, this is somewhat relevant to Tipjoy if you go out on a long enough timeline.
It's not a semantic argument. The syllogism Matt is using, implicitly, is:

Copyright infringement is a kind of theft.
All theft is bad.
Therefore copyright infringement is bad.

He talks about stealing songs and says, more or less, "Well, you can argue all you want, but downloading a song is stealing and stealing is wrong."

No, it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. The two are distinct along legal, historical, and moral dimensions.
Ask HN: easiest way to set up secure development environment with public urls?
What's the easiest way (cheaper is better of course) to restrict access to most urls of a development server while allowing access to some urls (for widgets which might be placed anywhere). The urls which should be publically accessible are not easily routable to the same directory.
As is his right to do. But violating that right is not theft, which involves depriving someone of their property.
A big problem with OO is that most GUI interfaces are not a good match. It's quite natural for people with a GUI builder to start writing a program from the GUI down. Of course, since people tend to like attaching ideas to things that are more concrete, like the window they've just made appear. This tends to produce bad designs from the OO standpoint, however.

On the other hand, if people start writing up and passing around CRC cards, they tend to produce better designs. My conclusion is that GUIs have too much baggage from documents. In some important way, they are much worse than 3x5 cards that you can pass around. Once we figure this out, some aspects of programming will improve.

It will probably always be hard.
Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?
Demonstrate how this isn't a semantic argument? People aren't "brainwashed" into thinking copyright infringement is wrong. Copyright infringement is intuitively wrong.
Ask YC: Advice on startup idea and funding.
This is a two part advice seeking piece.

A)

For a while now, a couple of friends and I have been joking around about a getting into a particular venture. This startup idea in no way relates to cs/web/etc. The idea is to open a very hip and chic cookies and milk store, in someplace like LA. We will be selling only a small variety of cookies, and milk/water. The store itself will sport a very modern/chic vibe, with free wifi - a place where college students can come chat and study, and for hipsters to stop by. As we see it, there aren't any stores that only sell cookies and are packaged in a way that appeal to a young demographic.

Would you go to a place like this? Anything you'd like to see? Any problems you see with the idea? Please provide any sort of advice you may have.

B)

The second part deals with the funding aspect. This isn't a web startup where the cost barrier of entry is relatively low. We'd need to build the interior, the kitchen, buy supplies, etc., so as you can see, a venture like this could get pretty expensive. I was wondering whether any of you have experience with this sort of venture, or whether you happen to know anyone that does. Do you know anything about funding? Is there a world of VC's out there for this sort of stuff? Any other funding ideas?

Thanks.

EDIT: The cookie place next to UCLA in Westwood is Diddy Riese, and yes, I know about them. :P
Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software (book, free online)
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AI problems
I'm not arguing that in every case one should say with 100% certainty that someone's outcomes will correspond to test scores. But aiming for a math-intensive career with an IQ of 90 would be like a 5'2" guy hoping to be a basketball star, or a 7'3" guy aspiring to be a jockey. You could tell them that, with the right willpower and determination, they can make it -- or you could tell them that, with a lot less willpower and determination, they can have a much better chance of being successful elsewhere.

I would appreciate it if you could explore some middle ground between omniscience and total ignorance. Tests that actually measure stuff give you data, and proudly claiming to be unswayed by data because you can imagine an exception is not rigorous.
You should be skeptical of vendor benchmarks. But being ignorant of how far VM technologies have come and how far Ruby has left to go is not excusable. (Or more importantly, not being self-aware enough to figure out what you don't know, then having the bad luck to get posted on social news.)

In any case, most of the time it matters more to programmer's egos now than anything else. CPython is already fast enough for low-level bitwise operations on large amounts of data, provided you are clever with optimizing and you're willing to implement key routines in C. Just look at Mercurial! It's in the same league as Git for speed, and Git is written entirely in C by one of the best C hackers around.
I used to have one like yours. All set up with many environments zipped up & ready to extract. I vaguely remember writing batch scripts (yukk) to automate 7-zip's encryption for a locked up computer that didn't allow truecrypt.

In the end it just wasn't worth it. However long I worked on it, it just didn't compare to having my own laptop. These days I just use my USB drive for transferring documents.
I'm having flashbacks to Slashdot... circa 2000. At least back then we had Napster to talk about.

Durn kids, get offa my lawn!
If you want something like C, but with virtual functions, then you should look at Lua. It's fast, minimal, and designed to be embeddable. It doesn't start with OO, but you can actually easily build as much OO as you want. In fact, "something like C, but with virtual functions" almost describes Lua. (You have to add that it's Dynamic and Interpreted.)
I'm pretty sure Pandora, etc. do give a small amount of money to the music owners each time the song is played. Is that not a source of revenue?
If the code is so simple that I can hit a button and have my IDE generate my code for me then I really question why I need to write the code in the first place.

A simple example of this is generating getters/setters. Autogenerating the code works great 99% percent of the time. The problem comes in for that 1% case where a non-templated getter or setter is needed. That special case is easy to lose track of in the forest of automatically generated code. Groovy solves this problem by automatically generating all of the getters/setters for you, but if you need to you can still override the automatic definition with a specific implementation.

I won't argue you with that too much magic can be a bad thing. However, for the code I typically generate with my IDE I really think I'm wasting time and bloating my code.
Agreed with everyone. Programming is hard. Computers are hard. Just ask my nana.

I suppose I should revise my question a bit. What I really meant to understand was what was it is about OO that makes it a focus of conversation as a hard technique, when compared to all these other programming techniques you hear little no arguments about.

For all its usefulness, you don't see too many blog posts vehemently defending or refuting recursion. It's simply another way to write some code. You don't hear joel or jeff going on about whether or not data structures are useful or on the whole a degradation to programming communities. These are all just different techniques used to accomplish the same thing; in some cases, those techniques make achieving a goal easier or the code more elegant.

I do hear these things about OO programming, and yet, OO is just another one of these techniques! So, my question now becomes - not what is so hard about OO - but instead - what is so arguable about OO, that people feel the need to call it hard, useless, or revolutionary, while leaving the other techniques like poor recursion out in the cold?
Build and sell a web startup... use the profits to open a cookie store?
Would copyright infringement still seem intuitively, morally wrong, if there were no copyright laws to begin with? If creators were never promised a legal expectation of control over their work, would you be violating any legitimate expectation by copying?

Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?

Is it the same amount of moral wrong as copying the work of someone who produced an album relying on the promise of legal protection for it?
You mean like Diddy Riese? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddy_Riese
What makes you so sure it's harmful? There is hardly enough data yet at a systemic level to prove that argument.

You can maybe intuitively say (as many do) that artists not getting paid will obviously result in less incentive to create and hence less art will be created, but you see, the tricky part with complex systems like this one is that they tend to actually be counter-intuitive and respond to many feedback inflection points.

Better access to more works of art, for example, would undoubtedly lead to some people being inspired to create that otherwise would have not.
Spyced (Jonathan Ellis): http://spyced.blogspot.com/
I would say something like this...if you haven't already, this is the kind of thing you need to really create a business plan for.

Read this - http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/ - it might give some perspective. The profit margins on these things can be very narrow. That isn't to say it's a bad idea - just be sure you know what you're going into. I fear too many people think about how cool a place is, but don't think about how profitable it is at the same time. I know this is heresy in the web start up world...but at the same time we all admit that starting a web site these days is mad cheap - starting a brick and mortar place like this is not. ;)

I'd honestly pool some money up amongst your friends who are looking into this and run a market survey. Maybe hire some college kids who are majoring in marketing on the semi-cheap, or run it yourselves if you have that background. Use the survey data to indicate viability - try to find your target market, and project profitability with an expansion plan. Maybe a franchise? Or do you just want to do this to pay a salary and have a fun job? These are questions that the business plan with hash out.

The real problem is the idea is easily reproducible, and the returns are going to be semi-low, so you'll probably have a hard time attracting VC or Angel money - but I could be wrong. I'm guessing the most feasible thing is to raise money through friends, family and maybe a credit union one of you guys belong to. If you do have a solid business plan and can convince yourself and others to put your own/their own money on the line, it's an indicator that it is a good idea.

There are those trendy cereal places in LA, right? Maybe you guys should go into one of those places and just ask the owner how it's going so far. Throw your idea out, who knows, maybe they'll know someone. Find out all you can from them.

Anyway...just some random thoughts. I'm doing a low-tech venture myself right now reselling a diesel fuel additive (despite my programming background), and have been going through a lot of this stuff (market surveys, business plans, viability, projections, etc) myself.
No, not like them. Maybe a much more chic/hip/cafe-esque/free wifi/come and study/bring the family version of Diddy Riese. Also, they're really the only place in Westwood that sells those types of sweets, and them being right next to UCLA has helped bolster their popularity. There's room for competition.
I really like the idea, but are you sure you'd be able to sell enough milk and cookies to make up for the cost of running the place? Seems like the only way to make it work would be to sell "gourmet" cookies and overprice them, and that kind of moves you out of the hipster/student arena and into yuppiedom.
Cool idea, very questionable business model. College kids excel in many areas; unfortunately for you, being cheap is one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to hang out at a place like this, but I would crunch the numbers first and figure out if it's actually viable first (i.e. how much would rent, renovations, supplies, staff, etc. cost -- and how much milk and cookies at what price would you have to sell to make a profit).

P.S. I forget the name, but there actually is a very popular cookie and ice cream place right next to UCLA. You might want to think about broadening your horizons beyond just cookies.
A word is a word before it gets put in the dictionary. A dictionary is a subset of the language. You cannot prove something isn't a word by showing that it is not in the dictionary, but if its in the dictionary, then it is definitely a word (unless it's a lexicographical error).
Picking Perfect Passwords
I believe this is what they would call a "hit" in the public relations world.
> It wouldn't make sense to NOT have an ebook option, but it also wouldn't make sense financially to price it below the paper version.

Assuming, of course, that lower prices mean less profits. That's not always true. It's more complex than that.
Thou shalt not copy this scroll without the author's permission? I don't buy it and it doesn't hold ground historically.

Did people not intuit it before the 18th century? It took over 300 years from the invention of the printing press for modern copyright law to form.

Copyright (and patent) law exists and has always existed because it makes political and economic sense.

See Section I, Article 8 is the US Constitution, for example, where Congress gets its authority to establish copyright. Why do they have that authority? To promote the progress of science and useful arts.

Copyright law is a fundamentally different creature than the criminal law that governs theft and, IMO, this is just a reflection of their differing moral status in society.
It means you should find some friends to become your beta tester then ask him/her to submit some articles about your product (press release/faq/about us/how to get started) to famous social bookmarking site like Digg, Mixx, Reddit.

This will prevent you by what he called "self-promotion". Wouldn't be nice if it is other people who submit you to digg and co's rather than yourself. Isn't?
No-nonsense, No Guilt-tripping -- Improving the lives of the "bottom billion" (video)
blender is a great example of how poor people can be at UI design. why open source usually very shitty UI?? it's unfortunate, and is the major reason i stay away from linux (that and font rendering, which is related)
Congratulations on launching the biggest startup yet!
don't delude yourself
You still haven't rescued this from semantics. What's intuitively wrong is freeloading. Tax evasion is a criminal offense, even though it too is simply an example of freeloading.
Interesting idea, but be wary. I opened up a hookah lounge last year 2 blocks from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn NY. Before we opened we were hoping to get the chic, hip, free-wifi crowd, but instead got 18yr old troublemakers that don't spend a dime.

It's one thing to want a particular clientele and it's another to actually get it. There's no guarantee, and with something like cookies, you don't know who you'll get. To combat this problem we're acquiring a liquor licenese which of course comes with it's own cost and potential set of problems.

Furthermore, it's quite scary to see your weekdays come and go with only a handful of customers, and then need to rely on your weekend. If it rains that weekend you're hosed and better make sure you can make that rent, utilities and labor.

It's a tough, and this doesn't even include all the city issues, permits, violations, etc that you'll be sure to have some issues with.
Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?

Uh, yeah? Like, very?
And your point is exactly what?