skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course not. Obfuscation gets you something (it takes few minutes of work to get the key for new Blu Ray releases), but the only secure solution is hardware that melts itself when you give it the wrong password. Even then, things like this have been broken in the past. Given infinite time with access to a device, anything that it is securing will be stolen. (The same goes for physical systems. No safe is completely secure. They even got the gold out of storage in Cryptonomicon eventually!)

The real solution is, "if you have data that's so secure that stealing the phone and running the software on a virtual machine threatens your security, maybe the data should not be on a fucking cell phone".
This looks like a software-based system to manage IP, sensational headline notwithstanding.
$.02 / sms. Have you hashed out any monetization plans?
Let me save you eight clicks:

Laser guns, moving 3d holograms, levitation, hoverboards, mind reading machines, teleportation, invisibility cloaks, commercial jetpacks.

Most of these are kinda-sorta technologies that don't really do what you expect, anyway.
"There is a compelling natural rights justification for intellectual property. It typically gets ignored (e.g. by people like Lessig)."
No, it most certainly does NOT get ignored. What the proponents of change are saying is that IP rights should not be granted in perpetuity. Even patents expire after 20 years; so why not copyrights?

Given the money that Disney is making, I would not be surprised if the copyright law gets extended again to "life + 100". This (modifying the law to benefit 1 corporation) is simply WRONG.
> It's almost a tautology - the execution guys say the execution is most important, the idea guys think it's all about the idea.

Isn't that opposite of what you'd expect? I'd expect in general for people to think their part is the easy part, and the other part is the hard part. After all, presumably that's why the execution guys can't come up with the ideas, and the idea guys can't come up with the execution. If the other part were easy they'd do it themselves.
IPhone ECG System Monitors Heart Rate, Streams Info Over-Air to Cardiologist
> I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit

I actually use the part of my palm directly underneath my pinky to hit the Ctrl key. It works quite well on a ThinkPad keyboard (for my hand shape/size, anyway).
Predictions for the next 25 years
The Million Dollar Homepage may be a shooting star, but it is certainly valuable idea. You can make a decent living if you come up with an idea like it every year.

I would argue that Chatroulette has staying power. It's not as popular as it was during the media hoopla, but they still get 250k users day. That's not Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, but that's enough to get by.

I would also look at Groupon, Woot, and HARO. Simple ideas that have created sustainable businesses.
A smaller iteration would be the ability to import/export your black lists.
JackThreads: Bootstrapped, Profitable & Sold
I'll comment myself, to say that I'll probably not check for an answer, because if you haven't answered my reactions to your video reference by now, you won't do it.

I always get this experience when reading/hearing Chomsky.

First I notice something weird, like point "A)" above:

What... Chomsky says he could not influence the atrocities in Sudan?! What the Hell, it would have major impact if the foremost academic critic of USA/Israel said in multiple speeches: "Darfur/South Sudan is a total genocide that must be stopped -- and the muslim world is pure evil when supporting the Sudan junta!". There is obviously a high probably that would have saved lots of lives.

I write this -- and don't get a serious answer, like e.g. "A point, Chomsky is full of sh-t there" -- or "Wrong, that was incomplete source about Chomsky's position. See X and Y".

Instead, you Chomskyists/trolls refuse to understand what I write and/or write flames and/or write large text blocks on trivialities.

(Was that the third or fourth time I explained that trivial point? Never mind...)
Words fail me in trying to explain how painfully difficult it is to try to explain "simple" concepts to folks who think some specific problem is hard and, therefore, has to be really complex/involve huge hurdles/etc. Not that it's really as simple as it seems to me, because that elegant solution ...well, never mind. (Prepares to regret even bothering to try to comment on it.)

Anyway, thanks for noting this.
I agree, my whole point is that the Idea cannot be separated from execution, and execution cannot be separated from idea. They both can be objectively measured - but they are linked.
2011 starts with a glitch for some iPhone users
>Without copyright (which is granted by the government) the work would be in the public domain the moment it is published/given to someone else.

I think private contracts would be sufficient. The author doesn't yield his work to a publisher without terms; for the publisher to pretend it is in the public domain (e.g. to start distributing copies without royalties to the author) would violate a contract. The same could apply to end-users; without any explicit copyright protection, you could be required to sign a contract as a condition of purchasing a book, agreeing not to reprint/redistribute. I don't see that the essential parts of copyright protection add anything fundamental; enforcing IP can be reduced to upholding a contract. It's not artificial.
This is a much better argument than your original one, but it's still off. Is there 7 million of any man-made things that are worth a billion dollars? I would argue that if something is worth a billion dollars, it's necessarily rare. It sounds like you mean to say "bright" ideas rather than billion dollar ideas.

But besides that, it takes more than sheer numbers to make the argument you're making. Seven hundred million ideas is a lot, but it's nothing compared to the 6.3 billion bad ideas out there.

You are correct in saying that it's difficult to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. So people tend to get bitten by one of the many bad ideas out there and then throw their hands in the air and say "Ideas are worthless!"

Personally, I think that good ideas take far, far more work and intelligence than you're acknowledging. Even if everyone can have good ideas, and good ideas are common, it takes work to develop a good idea into one that is worth executing.
when you accept that the LOTR movies are just fanfics we've spent millions on, you'll understand why we need more fanfics.
If using Windows, then Powershell.
Your points are valid, although I fail to understand why you feel it's necessary to adopt such a condescending and superior tone both in your comment and in your article.
The url isn't loading for me, and I can't seem to find a cache of it. Is the url supposed to look like this?

http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-useles...
Different techniques depending on the photo, but for any of the shots with vegetation you know there is decent light at least some of the day.
> Except that the Ruby community (or large parts of it, at least) are now suggesting that all Ruby development be done using bundler.

I don't agree with that either. I think that there are legit as well as illegitimate use cases and that people don't always understand which is which. That said, I don't think it's any reason to dismiss Bundler.

I believe the core of Bundler - the multiple gem activation algorithm - should be part of RubyGems itself. If that is part of RubyGems then it would take away the need to use Bundler for many non-web app projects.
Sendza - central MA

Software engineers (any of the following: HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, Java, Python, iPhone Dev)

bconway - at - sendza dot com
I know many customers who, before rss, had to open websites by hand, copy the relevant news articles from the websites and then compile this articles into a company newsletter. Work which sometimes took days before is with rss a matter of hours (they still have to read the articles and decide which are important enough for the newsletter). So, "real people" may not have this problem, but more than one company has.
Nice, I'll try it out over the next few days!
Didn't he just make the opposite argument, and with evidence?
You could set this up like Adblock, where sites being blacklisted are anonymously reported back to a central location. Highly blocked websites are offered to be automatically added to the blacklist when you install the extension.
The inability to use <%= for form_for was a limitation in ERB. Using <%= for form_for to make things consistent is a new feature since Rails 3. This has got nothing to do with compatibility.
I agree with you 100%. Maybe it's better to call them a "concept person" rather than "idea person". Ideas are fleeting. Concepts need to be refined and fleshed out.
It's hard to tell someone they failed at something basic without coming off as condescending or superior. I'll try to do better next time, though. I don't like posting negative/attacking stuff, generally. :-/
Customer Feedback for Search Engine Blacklist : http://seblacklist.uservoice.com/forums/94117-general
I think there's a more succinct explanation of this somewhere, but I think people usually overvalue their own contribution whilst simulataneously undervaluing that of others (see: http://books.google.com/books?id=YywIHNBn_YEC&lpg=PA147&...).

So perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I would expect people to be justifying their own importance. I do agree with you though - it should be the reverse!
Maybe so. But I think the more likely explanation is that people are starting to find better results by using Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, IMDB, Blekko, DuckDuckGo, etc. that Google, comparatively, looks worse than it did before.
Reviving the Hand-Held Game Business
>If they in exchange of this protection returns nothing to society (i.e. infinite retro-active copyright extensions), then we as a society should have no reason to provide this protection for them.

Society isn't owed anything. Government (which is distinct from society) protects IP, not because they benefit from it or society maximizes utility from it, but because that is what justice is about. This isn't a free service; the authors pay taxes for (among others) the legal system that protects their rights and enforces their contracts.
Ok, I am really getting sick of TechCrunch spinning off articles from Quora. It was cute with the Netflix stuff (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/quora-netflix/). Then came the AOL CDs (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/), now this is just too easy. Come on guys, you can do better. I am not saying this isn't good stuff, but just that your loyal readers notice these patterns.

If you are going to continue this, at least contribute back to Quora more.
It doesn't just benefit one corporation. It profoundly benefits one corporation, and significantly benefits everyone else making a living off intellectual property. The longer the copyright term is, the greater the value of a copyright is.
I understand Lucas' decision, however it leaves some worrying questions about the state of ruby on Debian systems.

Despite the rumours, the ruby1.8, ruby1.9 and rubygems packages are are excellent shape thanks to the hard work by Lucas, Diago and Akira.

There were consistent fundamental workflow clashes between upstream and the Debian packagers that have made their job exceedingly difficult. These clashes aren't malicious or antagonistic, they're just the meeting of two very different communities with very different priorities.

To name a few of the clashes: API changes in minor releases, effective forking of rubygems by copying it into the 1.9 tree, opaque decision making (mostly due to the language barrier), allowing installed programs (ie rubygems) to update themselves and expectations on what is allowed in /usr/bin.

I'm not saying either community is necessarily correct on these issues, just that they add up to some pretty big differences for debian-ruby to navigate.

I use the Debian packages for ruby1.8, 1.9.2, jruby and rubygems in both my development and production environments. I've found them stable, rapidly updated in response to security issues and predictable. Lucas - thanks for your efforts, they will be missed.
The alternative talk describes some controllers that Johnny Lee did for the Wii when he was a graduate student at CMU.
That is correct. I posted the abstract because I felt that there were members of the HN community in the Bay Area who might find the talk useful and interesting.
Are CPUs even that much of a laptop's power budget these days? I know that the transition from CCFL to LED backlighting helped, but I think displays are still the biggest power draw. If you look at an Atom system, the chip with the biggest heatsink isn't the CPU, it's the chipset (or the GPU if it's discrete).

It seems to me that in order for an ARM processor to be viable for something like the MacBook Air (which is already using all the easy power-reduction measures like LED backlights and SSDs), the ARM chip will have to be twice as fast and draw half as much power as an Atom.
Instead of "terrible analysis" you could talk about where it has "room for improvement" -- you know "Glad to see you making an effort to figure out how to improve the site. That's a great start. I know you already know (because you said it in the article) that it wasn't a very well designed test run. Some suggestions on how you can do it better the next time around: (blah de blah, all kinds of intelligent stuff here). Thanks for sharing."

Or something like that.

I'm fond of the quote "I'm too truthful to be good". But I also am fond of the remark about how folks who "love the brutal truth love the brutal part more than the truth part". So I've spent a lot of years working on trying to develop some desperately needed velvet gloves. If I can manage it (er, at least somewhat -- though this post might not exactly be a good example), surely you can. :-)
Hey, I appreciate your feedback and will improve in the areas where this experiment was weak in future tests.
I don't buy that explanation. Who taught the U.S. to drive one Hummer per person? Isn't it more likely that whatever caused the U.S. to consume in this way is also responsible for the emerging consumer classes in newly-wealthy nations like China and India?

It's true that in some poorer countries there is a cachet specifically to American things (that cost a lot more than an ordinary person can afford).
You shouldn't regret demonstrating your point. For some reason it is difficult to communicate 'simple' concepts. Only guess I can manage is the simple solution makes sense either after truly understanding the entire problem, or if it's the first thing you're told after the problem.
Instead of doing something like this, why not give Password Gorilla ( https://github.com/zdia/gorilla/wiki ) a try? It will let you create completely random unique passwords for each site instead of having one fixed component (which if it ever gets out allows someone to quite easily guess the remaining passwords).

Plus if you use multiple computers, it will let you keep your passwords file synchronized between the multiple computers.
Great, but where can I buy one now? My apartment compex issues only one single bulky RFID+garage opener that I hate carrying in my keychain.
I have had a hard time with the tone thing in the past as well. One thing that worked for me is trying to think about how my favorite educators in the past would try and reach out to me to "lift up" my level of skill instead of "put down" the work that I had done. I know that you are correcting the OP because you'd like to help, but your help is more effective if it is seen as a helping hand and not a disapproving glance.

A basic formulae could be a) acknowledge the positive attributes of the attempt (it is great to see you trying to optimize, and you are right to keep detailed numbers about what was going on, your funnel analysis was also spot-on.) b) Point out that he could do better. This emphasizes the growth potential instead of the shortcoming (one has an implicit expectation that the person can and will do better, the other is frequently taken as a rejection of the person.) An example might be: "you ran the test, but your test would be more helpful if you did it in a more controlled way..." c[optional]) suggest additional resources so the person can follow-up at their own pace, in the manner they prefer. Ex: (see this great post about having a control when testing your site...)

Now, if someone has ignored your previous feedback and it is your obligation to help them, things get a bit more nuanced.
The BRIGADE real-time path tracer developed by Jacco Bikker uses hybrid rendering utilizing both the CPU and the GPU as much as possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm6hz2-gxZ0
There are quite a few clever tricks to manage irregular problems. See poster:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC/posters/2010/A06-Task%20Ma...

Also a presentation on OptiX shows how to implement ray tracer:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/gtc2010-presentation-archive.ht...

Ray-tracing could be done well on GPU (see OptiX), but it is not trivial and needs some tricks (persistant threads, work donation etc. which are not that common on CPUs)
http://www.alice.com does this for toothpaste an a number of other products.
but youre using the population of the globe - try scaling that back to our sector a bit, and assume that there are a fraction of a % of the population involved in tech, and in a position to execute.

You're attributing the ability/capability and access to requisite resources to people who will never have such access/resources.

So, even looking at the overall population of the bay area - with the high % of tech people we do, it still is only a fraction of the ~7 million people here.

So, lets assume that 20% of the 7M people in the valley are in tech and actually pursuing this billion dollar idea - and I still think your assumptions are off. with 1.4 million people in tech, we certainly are not seeing as many ideas as you would suggest.
Best Movies of 2010
This makes me really wonder about the saturation of knowledge in SEO, the number of companies in the SEO, and the maturity of the Google "algorithm".

As I understand it, the history of SEO/Google is as such (simplistic view):

1. Google creates a search algorithm (that is not 100% known to externals) that tries to match your search term with valid, true content.

2. SEO strategists -- whether by legitimate or deceptive means -- tailor content, HTML, etc to match this algorithm.

3. Google has constantly improved and tailored this algorithm to prevent spammy type sites.

4. There is a growing consensus that spam is taking over Google search.

This all leads me to believe that either Google is losing it's touch on it's search algorithm or it's simply matured to a point that it can no longer out-game the gamers (SEOs).
It's something real people want. To say it's not is ignorant. People don't 'need' ESPN to consolidate sports news, but they will pay out the ears to have it. Plenty of people use RSS to get the newest info from multiple sources. It is a useful feature to have, regardless if it was RSS's original purpose
"As the web goes mobile, those who pay more will get faster access."

In effect, the writer predicts the death of net neutrality without explicitly saying so.
Haha, you responded before my post, saying roughly the same thing. Cheers.

The "too truthful to be good" has a bit of danger in it; it seems to juxtapose goodness and truth, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I could just be misinterpreting it, though.
> This is plain-old piracy

That isn't clear - the relationship between a journal and an author is generally that the author retains copyright ownership (i.e. there is no assignment), but grants a copyright license to the journal, and in the case of non-open access journals, the license is generally largely exclusive.

Linking to a PDF put up by the author (i.e. the copyright holder) is not copyright infringement, because the copyright owner has clearly authorised it. However, the author may, in some cases, be breaching their contract with the journal, and if the site operators deliberately incite people to breach contracts, it could be tortious interference. However, in many cases, even where the journal has an exclusive license, the terms often allow for preprints to be distributed, sometimes immediately, and sometimes after a specific amount of time.
Well, yes, I agree that every business started as an idea. Everyone needs a starting point to act on, and that's what ideas are, starting points. However, I could have an idea to open a donut shop, and turn that into a profitable business even though there is nothing revolutionary or novel about such an idea. So, yes, you need both, but the thing to realize is that ideas will vary greatly in how much value they can provide to a venture. And unfortunately the only way to find out how much is to do the hard work of executing on the idea.

If developers are so much more valuable than ideas - why isnt every single developer building something amazing?

I find this a horribly unfair comparison. One can easily sit and dream up 100 ideas in a day, but one can't develop 100 projects in a day. If one could do such effectively I'm sure that you would find many more developers reaping rewards from their actions. Success is often about a hit / miss ratio.

On the other hand developers can generate value fairly easily. Let's say a developer decides to go out and build websites for local businesses. Again, nothing revolutionary here, yet there is certainly value that can be created by executing and with near limitless potential. Execution is what pays dividends. And as one would expect, it's what is hardest.
As a matter of fact they loosened the rules, as direct result of the efforts of John Mcintosh to be able to run Scratch on the Ipad.

However his efforts although were enough to change apple policy, they weren't successful enough to get Scratch to run on the ipad.
:-(

Here is a quick summary of the story:
http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Scratch.html
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/2010/12/john-mcintosh-at...
It's a beautiful country. You should definitely visit. I lived there in the 80's and driving from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi and back was quite a fabulous journey
Another possibility: Instead of squabbling with the publisher/Tolkien Trust, Michael Bay could have simultaneously made a movie as well to compete with Jackson's vision of the movie.
Well, in this case, I am specifically thinking of the example of getting myself well when doctors told me it could not be done. I think doctors (and the rest of the world) focus on the really complicated and convoluted tertiary (and whatever "fourth" would be called) effects of not addressing the real problem for years and years and years. I found that addressing the real problem at it's root is, conceptually, not terribly complicated. But then trying to understand/explain/execute...yadda yadda....gets pretty complicated at times. But it's really a very simple idea: I have a genetic disorder. We know what malfunctions in my body at the cellular level. Address THAT appropriately and aggressively, and a lot of the really complicated secondary, tertiary (etc) problems just magically disappear.

This idea goes over so well that I get called a liar, charlatan and snakesoil salesman to my face. And moderators side with the folks who attack me.

Welp, time to work on a webcomic or some such and let folks who think the problem is just too freakin hard to resolve keep raising big bucks for the CF foundation. It seems to be okay to monetize an entertainment site. :-D

Later.
I think your example timeline doesn't show off a lot of the cool features you have, and that is unfortunate. In your future A/B testing, you may want to explore a timeline that includes pictures... perhaps of something like the Homestead Act or such.
There is definitely scope for sentiment misinterpretation in written communication, and these are excellent pointers addressing the problem.

This is exactly why I love this community.