skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> significantly benefits everyone else making a living off intellectual property.

Doesn't that presuppose that the incremental gain from adding another N years of copyright coverage after an author's death is greater than the potential gain if it was accessible now to people who are making their living or--even--simply living?

It's not unreasonable to assume that an extremely large proportion of creators (who are only a small--but potentially growing--portion of society) will gain no real benefit from their works being covered by copyright for 70-100 years after their death but are negatively affected by everyone else's creations being covered in the same way.

It's not just a question of profit--it's also a question of culture. What wonderful and ground-breaking reinterpretations of culture from the 20th Century are never created--or illegal--because of current copyright law?
Reminds me so much of this well known verse

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
Real iPhone users are woken up merely by the amazing design.
Sorry, but programmers don't have a monopoly on technical complexity.

Actually we pretty much do. These days anything really complex can only be effectively analyzed and managed with code. That's why biologists, economists, political scientists and even journalists are finding they need coding skills to do their jobs (which isn't to say that coding skills alone are sufficient, domain knowledge is essential as well).

As for sysadmins I've heard it's pretty difficult for people without coding skills to get sysadmin jobs at cutting edge companies like Google. One big reason is that to perform those jobs efficiently you need to be able to automate tasks, and that requires coding in some form. I also think that having worked with the API's and having implemented at least some sort of semi-non-trivial piece of code, say a simple network client/server pair gives one a depth of understanding of the technology that really can't be obtained in any other way.
The date of an author's death has little to do with the value of her creation at the time of its creation. Copyrights are transferable. This business about death is a red herring.
> On a side note, it seems like people value persistence more than creativity because it's more attainable by everyone. We can't all be creative freaks like Tesla, Van Gogh, or Einstein, but we can all work really really hard at what we do.

I find it interesting that many people on this site are convinced that creativity - even the really unique kind that great inventors possess - is not actually "special" but can be replaced with hard work, as though we're all Einsteins who just lack motivation.

I wonder if that's just rooted in irritation with web designers, many of whom are fond of criticizing programmers for their often poor graphic design skills.

Although intelligence is wasted on the lazy, I somehow doubt that many here would disagree that it is both important in order to be a truly great programmer, as well as something relatively rare enough to be valuable.
Right. "Mousekeys to the rescue." The painful, awkward "got it takes forever to move the cursor... Ah! Missed!" rescue.

If Mousekeys is the solution, your problem is pretty bad.
That is the crux of my concern.

If a cracker were using an automated method of trying passwords that had been compromised, I would expect that they might simply get a failed attempt and move on. In a file of, say, a couple hundred thousand accounts, would they bother having an automatic retry with different characters?

If it were someone getting the password and trying it manually, however, I could definitely see them figuring out that all they needed to do would be to change the first or last character, particularly if it were an obvious one, such as the first letter of the website or something.

Clearly, I need to have a way to alternate multiple characters in a method that I can reliably remember.
They can't. Only the proprietor of a copyright has standing to sue over copyright violations.
Some of these seem like cheats -- either a science demonstration with a ton of PR spin or worse. The hoverboard, for example, is a piece of art that will only "hover" over its pedestal and won't support any weight. I saw a similar DIY project in either Electronics Illustrated or Popular Electronics 40-some years ago where a tin globe would levitate in a magnetic field. (If the globe dipped, it obscured a light beam aimed at a cadmium sulfide photocell which increased power to the electromagnet.)

As for the "teleportation", demonstrations of quantum effects have been around for quite a while. I remember having my mind blown back in the 1960s when I read up on how the tunnel diode <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode>; was a practical demonstration of quantum tunnelling.

The jetpack entry made me smile. Last year there was an episode of NCIS whose plot revolved around jetpack technology. McGee, the computer geek member of the team, was so taken with the technology that he had created his own video presentation of jetpack history and would inflict it upon his team mates in a manner similar to pictures taken on his vacation.
Yes, you remember correctly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) but GNU would have an issue with the term "IP". :)

I don't have a link but my impression is that part of the need for the GPL to exist in the first place is due to restrictions of copyright and the GPL uses copyright to enforce itself as a way of reacting against the system which it would rather not exist.
'Coupon generation' wields consumer power in China
I don't like to use password storage systems - not because I'm worried about their security, so much as being worried about not having access to them.

If I am using someone else's iPad, let's say, and need to get into a site, I want to be able to remember my passwords.

I've thought about something like a Vigenere cipher on a piece of paper that I keep in my wallet, but I can't imagine remembering passwords without resorting to the "cheat sheet."
Google's strength has long been tackling the difficult, hairy, algorithmic tasks of data processing, ranking and retrieval. They rose to absurd prominence by coupling a smart approach to search with a virtuous mechanism for targeting ads.

Users won – they found what they were looking for. Advertisers won – they found customers they needed without wasting money. Google won – they became essential for everyone.

Google's strength is emphatically, absolutely not anywhere related to user experience or design. Their early product succeeded because the under-the-hood functionality was superb and they didn't have any taste to design anything beyond the absolute simplest interface that would work. Simplicity and efficacy beat mediocre, complex competition.

When you look at the Google of today, there's zero focus and a pile of products where UX is essential to success. They compete with people who can deliver outstanding user experience and reliable results. Can Google evolve to the point where UX is a strength instead of a liability? Can they succeed with such a scattered approach against focused competition?

Maybe. I give them even chances – they have more money than god. But if their boredom with their original, solely-profitable core product continues to manifest itself in the sloppiness and neglect we see today, I fear they aren't long for this world.
Interesting that solitude has now largely been made obsolete by mobile devices. Moments where you might have previously spent mulling things over (such as sitting on the bus or waiting for your wife to select an item in a clothing store - true, not exactly a walk on the beach but as close as it gets for many urban dwellers on an average day) are now spent texting, checking Twitter/Facebook, etc.
MySQL+PHP iPhone app
Actually, I would believe you could have had that even if it was in copyright, as it would be considered parody. Would it not?
The Newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages is made exactly for this purpose.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.anonymous.messages/topics
One question, why? Why would you do that scaling back?

And in my arguments I said that the having the opportunity and/or the right set of circumstances to execute on the idea is crucial to actually, you know, executing on the idea. It does not affect the value of the idea itself as a billion-dollar idea, just whether you'll ever be able to prove it or not.
Fair enough but CssUserAgent is a far lighter solution than Modernizr. I find that 99.9% of my CSS is the same per browser so I just need a slight tweak here or there which CssUserAgent does without a lot of overhead. Modernizr is about 5x the size and spends time manipulating lots of DOM objects to test features which might not even be used.
That makes me think of the rolling suitcase problem, where all that was needed was placing the wheels so the bag wouldn't tip over while rolling. That took decades for something to click in someone's head.
Congrats on getting people to pay. The biggest surprise the first time that you create a product is how hard it is to even get anyone to use it frequently, let alone pay.
It's almost painful to see them drilling holes into the rock face. I understand the need but a part of me wants to get all greenpeace and kick the human invaders out.
If this is the case, the only solution is for competition in search to return - it's much easier to exploit one ranking algorithm than it is to simultaneously exploit multiple algorithms. It's not really a problem in Google so much as a result of Google's popularity.
I think this article really captured why it is so important to be honest with yourself. Instead of making work your life, you found a way to make life your work.

How many people are wearing golden handcuffs and wasting their life away out of inertia? How many brilliant people apply themselves to make informed decisions and do amazing things at work, and treat life as an afterthought? Your story is inspiring, and thanks for sharing it.
Augmented reality, merging digital information with real-world representations, still seems like science fiction to me.

In the last couple of years we've seen demonstrations of growing body parts to order from your stem cells. Heck, when you think about it, a good part of modern medicine seems like science fiction by mid-20th century standards.
As a practical matter, an unenforced copyright is as good as no copyright. However, if citizens routinely feel they can violate the law because it is neither enforced nor harmful to do so, the law should be rewritten to restrict it to scenarios where it is meaningful.

Also, 'out of print' is not 'not findable'. When Google created their Google Books system they encountered many books they wanted to scan whose copyright holders could not be located. The same is true for many old video games: many people remember playing games in their childhood that would now only be available if someone posted a ROM because the original game cartridges or consoles are difficult to come by. However, because the copyright holder cannot be found, there can be no legal means to distribute said games for many decades.
Well, the idea here is to prevent third parties from knowing which senders are communicating with which recipients. If only 2 people are using such a system then obviously that's pointless, but as n increases then there are n(n-1)/2 possible conversations in progress, obscuring the pattern as well as the content of communication.
Nothing wrong with competition. Let the makers of the better movie prosper.
Aha - this is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Thanks!
Unpaid internships are common in the career beginning: companies won't employ you if you have no prior experience (they always look for 3 to 5 years of experience). That's very annoying to study 5 to 8 years and being told that you're not qualified.
And about going abroad: speaking 5 languages can help, but I doubt that an italian law degree will give a job.
Why doesn't the same apply to patents too then? What makes a work of art more valuable (in terms of copyright limits) than a life-saving medicine?
It would be nice to be able to create a blacklist of sites that I want to never show up in my search results. If any search engine implements this, I'd switch.
The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU
How are these sites spaming PageRank ? I understand that it's fairly easy to create sites with dynamically generated content for common search words but how are they getting enough incoming links to rank highly on Google's search pages ?
I think dealextreme.com had a few a while back. Yeah:

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.17230

$66
Fixed. Apparently only the 'about' section of your profile is publicly available, while the 'email' section is not.
The definition of exactly what is a system call and what is not varies by platform. For example, some OSes may implement sleep() as a system call; others may implement it using nanosleep() or even alarm() and sigwait(). Even fork() has been implemented as a library function, eg in cygwin. What method is used to implement low-level library functions like this should be considered an implementation detail.
Mickey is an actively used character in European-drawn Disney comics. He's usually either a serious detective protagonist, or just a friend of Donald or Goofy.

For all his detective skills, he somehow has never figured out that Goofy is the same person as Super-Goofy (there is a peanut plant in Goofy's backyard that turns him into a Superman-style hero).
I don't understand your point. If you mean he could have made a LOTR movie, I still don't see how that's relevant, given that:

1. That wouldn't happen, for a large number of reasons.

2. That happens even in the current system (see "The Exorcist: The Beginning" for an example in the movie world).

3. Michael Bay already had movies in competition with the LOTR franchise — copyright does nothing to prevent that. It just requires that some people distantly related to people who paid some money to Tolkien get paid if you want to use the LOTR names and characters.
If your function is simple enough, it pays to define it inline.

It's the same with array literals and dictionary literals.

What would you rather?

somefn( {a: 10, b : 20} )

or:

dict = new Dictionary()
dict[a] = 10
dict[b] = 20
somefn(dict)

The inline case is clearly a win.
Your comment reminds me of a scene from the old show "Three's Company": Jack (the male roommate) asks why the ditzy blonde's smaller suitcase is heavier. The answer: "Because it's smaller". This, of course, explains nothing. Then the two women open up their suitcases and explain that the larger suitcase doesn't wrinkle up the clothing, so no iron is needed, but the smaller suitcase does wrinkle the clothing so the gal with the smaller suitcase also carries an iron. The iron is what makes the smaller suitcase heavier -- and wouldn't be needed if it weren't so small.

Uh, maybe the only connection is the word "suitcase" but it's a great little idea that I have always loved.
Although others have explained things a bit, I'll try making an analogy to win32: Section 2 ("system calls") contains functions which are traditionally serviced directly by the kernel. In win32, this would mean that they (historically) correspond more-or-less directly to a Nt*() function in ntdll (or a kernel entry point). Section 3 ("library functions") are all other library functions, including ones serviced by third-party libraries.
Lean Startup Machine SF - Customer Development-athon Weekend
No, he detailed specific differences in the branch predictors of the two mentioned architectures. Branch prediction is part of the microarchitecture of a CPU, not its ISA. These two should not be confused.
The article is fighting strawmen. I've never heard anyone say that starting off with a good idea isn't important.

A good idea is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

What the author doesn't argue against is that potentially good ideas are fairly abundant and easily obtained. These 'potentially good ideas' (that is, ideas which sound like they would work, but for which there is not yet any good evidence either way) are not worth much not because it isn't important to start from one of them, but instead, because they are not a scarce resource. Give me a 'potentially good idea' along with some quantitative data that suggests there is a huge market, and that the likely cost to acquire customers is far less than the likely lifetime present value of each customer, and suddenly the former 'potentially good idea' is much more valuable - because ideas that come with the data to back them up are much more scarce.
Good point - Word Lens, which was on HN about a week ago, seems like absolute science fiction.
Good advice.

I really only started working with the command line after I started working on a Django project about 3 or 4 years ago, and I was constantly frustrated by the inefficiencies of the GUI tools. I needed to script commands and repeat them over and over.
Jspp: A JavaScript Pre-Processor
How to Save Money by Migrating to Cloud Computing
Sorry if that looks like nationalist to you, but it obviously doesn't look that way to whoever downvoted you. I'm definitely not pretending I know everything about americans or that you're all the same or that we can't agree on anything.

But bringing up scars of war is definitely not something we europeans like to engage in. Especially not as a response to criticism.
Some other good ones (not all entrepreneurship-specific):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442022
Perhaps not the _sole_ purpose, but check out opencourseware: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
You are not the customer. You are the product. Google works just fine.
They let you parametrize code. They aren't as powerful as macros but still have notable use-cases.

A case that comes up over and over for me is when you are generating a GUI with a set of numbered list items and you want the click events to go "action(1)" "action(2)" "action(3)" with each corresponding item, you can both generate widgets and define anonymous functions for each one within a 0..3 loop. The less-appealing alternative in that case would be to dump more state info on the widgets and then run a general-purpose function to parse the widget data on the click event.
Get over there - worth seeing. Don't miss Halong Bay:

http://www.google.com.au/images?q=halong+bay
It's audio so I can't hear it. Anyone care to provide a brief, nutshell, summary?
Google cache (more readable than your text dump):

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&...
Most legal analysts now believe that no more works will ever enter the public domain. Copyright is perpetual.
Having to define that extra line becomes really annoying if you are working with code that requires defining lots of callbacks/event handlers (Javascript comes to mind). Additionally, anonymous functions usually form closures, which can be incredibly convenient as well.
CSV to RDF Web Service
What is the name of the software for the electronic blackboard used in Khan's videos?
Tell HN: A Cr-48 Support Experience
Hi everyone,

Google's horrid customer service is well known on HN, but I wanted to give a point of superb customer service to Google on their Cr-48 notebook program.

I received my Cr-48 at the beginning of December and immediately tried to use it on my wireless at home. The system worked, but was slow and miserable to use. I fiddled with several settings on my wireless router but couldn't get it to do anything. I took it to work and tried it on their wireless with a much better result. While there I filed a problem report at the customer support website (http://www.google.com/support/chromeos/bin/request.py?contact_type=device_issue). I received an e-mail confirmation from a bot and was immediately concerned that my problem would get filed among thousands of others and I would never get contacted. I was quite wrong.

The following business day I received a personal e-mail from the Google Ninja assigned to my case. He wanted to know the most convenient method and time for contacting me (Google Talk, phone, e-mail, Skype were all options). Some phone tag resulted, but he ended up diagnosing the problem, doing some bug searches and found I was experiencing the bug reported here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=10249.

After this diagnosis he thanked me for my time and informed me that any further issues could go directly to his e-mail instead of through the website.

I realize that this support is specific to a developer testing program, but it was certainly a great experience. It would be wonderful if Google took the time and money to apply this sort of experience to other Google products as well.
That's easy: the patent covers the whole idea and precludes whole avenues of further exploration. Copyright only covers a single expression of an idea.
Here's my cache of the page using my side project:

http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://broadstuff.com/archiv...
disclaimer: I don't know the terminology here, so I might be terribly wrong

I thought the main advantage was that you could pass a function to anywhere, whereas having explicitly defined tied you then in scope of what could access that function

chosen_numbers = numbers.select{|n| n%3==0 || n%5==0 }

yes, this is a block, but I think is's implemented that same as an anonymous function.
Depends. Parody is covered under fair use in the United States and is subject to the same test used to determine fair use.
Python-public-suffix-list: Extracts the public suffix from a domain name
I think onion routing, like the Tor project, satisfies the criteria of obscuring sender and recipient.
Not just RMS -- the RFID trusted traveler pass I used to use (a NEXUS card to be specific) came with a foil storage envelope that DHS/customs recommended you use whenever the card wasn't in use.
Predication is one of the signature features of the ARM ISA. Could you be specific about the costly X86 ISA features you're talking about?
There's a lot of these sorts of "Google not useful" articles going by all of a sudden. Is this a 5th column PR attack by Microsoft et al?
Precisely, the article is FUD. There are many similar patents and the invention disclosed in this particular application is quite specific.
She also writes and produces The Guild ( http://www.watchtheguild.com/ ) and its associated comics. I think the show qualifies her as both creative and a successful web entrepreneur.
I think you'll be surprised how quickly you can eat up 4 days. If you were staying longer, I'd recommend Yosemite.

The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is a great place to go with family.
There's also the cave-related https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Descent_(... which I quite enjoyed.
Just because you can't find the copyright holder doesn't mean they don't exist. If your derived work is a big hit, some corporate lawyer somewhere might realized they acquired the rights two generations ago, and bankrupt you with an infringement suit. This is why projects go through the whole clearance-of-rights licensing nightmare, and whenever clearance fails, society loses because those projects never see the light of day.
Fast Web Performance Starts with DNS
2011 is the year of hardware
Square, Wakemate and other hardware startups create more defensible businesses than apps.
>One can easily sit and dream up 100 ideas in a day, but one can't develop 100 projects in a day.

Exactly, so then - if that one idea - which the dev could put together using his skills were the billion dollar one - then the IDEA was what was so valuable. Not the fact that he had development skills.

I just cant believe that ideas are worthless at all. They are worth what you can make of them - but they are never worthless.

You can develop 100 projects, but you also cant develop 1 project without an idea behind it. And then, its the value of the idea, the resultant product or service that has value.