skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The value of a copyright isn't really part of the equation though (I know this is orthogonal to your point). From the Constitution (emphasis mine):

"[Congress shall have the power] to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Further, from Fox Film v. Doyal (again, emphasis mine):

"The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors."

Copyright terms come down to a simple metric: if the public would benefit more from a work being in the public domain, the work shouldn't be copyright (insofar that the progress of science and innovation is not stifled). Corporations and anyone making a living off intellectual property have nothing to do with it; copyright exist only for the benefit of the general public. And with some of the most innovative systems software of the last decade being developed for free, you're going to have a hard time arguing that such lengthy copyright terms are needed to ensure that innovation happens. Linux is billion dollar project that happened organically; I just don't buy it that ~100 year copyright terms are necessary.
That anecdote is from a book called Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orlando. It's a short, excellent study on the exact thrust of this thread: i.e, the collision of talent and persistence and how a successful artist harnesses both of them.

On talent they say, "By definition, whatever [talent] you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have -- and probably no worry more common."

Which to me sums up the topic nicely.
Kerie cable
Perhaps Google can facilitate the competition in search by becoming infrastructure for search companies.
Seven billion. Can the planet take the strain?
Yes, moderation is definitely necessary. For instance, easylist for adblock which has over 10000 filters is maintained by five people and is updated with input from the forum members.
wifi routers?
It's amazing and kind of freaky how often explorers still find new things on Earth. I cannot wait for more money to be spent on undersea exploration.
Bookmarklet:

javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion)%7Bvoid(z=document.createElement('script'));void(z.src='http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js');void(b.appendChild(z));%7Delse%7Blocation='http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)%7D

The link isn't always there, but it appears at times on the "home" page for Reader.

edit: it will, unfortunately, take you to Reader if it finds a feed, to give you the option of subscribing. So it's not quite Instapaper-like. But, better than nothing :) I get a lot of use out of it.
Understanding the PDF file format – How images are stored
The only reason it's precisely 20 cals above maintenance for 20 years is because he asserted it to be this.

The mainstream theory predicts similar weight gain with 20 cals above maintenance for 10 years, or a random walk with mu=20 cals and sigma=250. It also doesn't predict that a 50 year old should be precisely 40 lbs overweight - the people who only hit a mean of 15 cals above maintenance were only 30 lbs overweight and are simply excluded from his hypothetical by the premise.

The precision you seem to be describing doesn't exist in the real world and no theory needs to explain it. It's purely an artifact of his assumptions.
Is it actually not possible to bypass the copyright system and distribute material under contract instead? I'd imagine such an arrangement would be incredibly expensive to set up and do horribly in the market, but is there actually a legal reason you couldn't do it?
I doubt the FDA will let this live too long. They regulate the medical industry and I'm fairly certain that any device that is placed in direct contact with a patient needs to be approved and certified (by the FDA) for use by a doctor.

I am by no means an expert, but there are several large companies (one of which I used to work for) that had prototypes like this for quite a while that couldn't go anywhere because they had to have FDA audit protection (lots. of. documentation.). Hopefully small medical startups like this have figured out a way around these problems while maintaining patient safety.
Teaching 5-6 graders how to manage debt and borrowing
Ask HN: Gruber's Objectivity
Today's DaringFireball reads:

"

"Best Take on Alarmgate"

I guess they take alarm clock bugs pretty seriously in the Middle East.

"

I know he's the world-renowned expert on all things Mac etc etc, but given the number of people who actually missed their flights ( http://twitter.com/#search?q=iphone%20missed%20flight%20-almost ) and perhaps worse due to this bug, can someone explain why his views are so respected?

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/02/alarmgate
>Microsoft might have done themselves some favors by giving it a whole new naming scheme away from the Windows brand.

Why on Earth do people consider the Windows brand to be tainted? I've really only heard this from Mac fanboys who seem to forget that Windows has a 90% market share. Tying Windows Phone 7 to Windows 7, a great OS by any definition as well as a very popular one is a stroke of genius. People will look at their smartphone and think, "this is a small computer", rather than, "this is a fancy phone". That gives Microsoft huge leeway to push their Windows integration line. It doesn't have to look or feel anything like Windows for the average consumer to realize that they can sync their emails, access their office documents, get on Internet Explorer, etc.
The photo gallery requires flash which my iPad does not have. :(
Data is dangerous
Ask HN: What should every programmer know?
I am about to graduate college, I have had an internship for almost the past 3 years as a software engineer and prototyper, mostly working with Java. I am about to look for a full time job and was wondering what should every programmer know? This can be anything from web development, to requirements, or to database entry. So that way I can be prepared for an interview and become a better programmer. I looked online and wanted to know what you guys think.
Remarkable! Thank you for sharing this.
sorry for the duplicate.
please Y-god add a search link in the top left corner of any hacker news page...
it's not so hard:
1. buy them http://searchyc.com/
2. <a href="http://searchyc.com/ title="search">Search</a>
Ideas matter, great execution of a bad idea = failure
That doesn't seem like a smart design. It seems less secure than an old fashioned metal key.
Cellphones, Though Banned, Thrive in U.S. Prisons
I really like KeepPass and I use it on all of my computers (Ubuntu and MacOSX). It's so awesome that it's available on all three major platforms including Windows. What I'd like to see, though, is iPhone, Android and webapps - all syncing through a remote server (Dropbox, maybe?). That would make this thing absolutely awesome.
I was wondering the same thing. He should sell a kit.

By the way I had the exact same problem last time I lived in an apartment. Stupid management refused to give me a second card.
In my experience, if you're using a lot of browser hacks then you're doing something wrong. With that said, IE continues to be the problem child, so most of the time a hack or two is required. In this case, I think Paul Irish's method helps tremendously without the overhead of JS...

http://paulirish.com/2008/conditional-stylesheets-vs-css-hac...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

I'm not a constitution expert, so my interpretation is probably wrong in several ways, but this line suggests to me that it's not so much a right with a time limit, the works of authors and inventors belong to Society and this passage grants to the creator a temporary exclusive privilege to capitalize on the ideas.

For my own bias, I'm with the crowd that feels "Creators gonna create" whether this passage existed or not.
Can you name some academic libraries that offer free membership cards to the general public that enable web access to journals? I've never heard of this, and the institutions I am personally familiar with certainly don't allow this. At the closest three universities to where I am now, a library card for the public costs $500-$1000 a year. This was also the case in other cities I have lived in. If there are research libraries for which this is not the case I would love to know about them. Obviously from your post you have found some, so if you would name them it would help others.
Ok, maybe its not #1, but it is important.

Newton did his best work hiding out in his country house during Plague season.

Einsteid flourished in a Patent office - nobody bothered him much, he could spend all day thinking.
Why haven't major companies succeeded at social networking?
Au contraire: the Debian world has crippled RubyGems, which focusses on making Ruby packaging work everywhere, while Apple made modifications that made it work as Rubyists expect without causing problems for Apple's own needs. Eric Hodel modified this to make it easier for Linux distro maintainers to allow RubyGems to work as Rubyists expect yet not break the distro's expectations. The Debian maintainers chose not to adopt this. I don't use other distros, so I don't know whether they did or not.

What I've never personally understood is why the distro maintainers didn't embrace RubyGems. There's no reason that a .deb couldn't simply wrap a .gem and use the RubyGems infrastructure to install it into a "protected" area (preventing 'gem remove' from working, per the modifications noted above). A .gem can even be a repackaged version that includes platform-specific compiled code so that it could be distributed to machines without compilers (this is one thing that could be improved for RubyGems; allowing users to gemify a built gem for deployment purposes). I've suggested this in the past and it's been met with derision from OS maintainers. I don't understand why: as I understand it, this is what happens with BSD ports of gems.

So no, the Ruby community hasn't thrown rocks from the sidelines. We've made constructive suggestions that have been derided or ignored; so ignored, we've made our own solutions that work well for our needs.
Scared to fall asleep: Ars reviews The Dream Machine
Is Borders the First Casualty in the E-Reader War?
The Ivory Coast: Are the ghosts of Rwanda about to strike back?
Your Architecture Sucks and I Don't Care
Search Engine Blacklist - Block Spam Sites in Chrome
It's the relative ubiquity of good ideas that makes them worthless. How much would someone pay you for your "great idea"?

Developers are constantly bombarded by "idea men" who want someone else to do all the work because they think the "idea" is somehow worth half (or more) of the profit.

Here is a perfect example, it was posted 12/29 on Craigslist Boston (under Gigs->Computer)

need Android and iphone app creator and partner for next big thing

"I am looking for someone who can create and program an Android and iphone app, integrate the apps into a customer database and billing program and also serve as the tech side of the venture.

My idea is gold and EASY and low tech and can spread virally fast, there will be money for you on the back end if this works. U.S AND india welcome.
my only requirments are that you be available to communicate via email, text, IM and phone reliably, AND that you have a burning desire to make the next big thing. "
Track "emotional tweets" with http://smood.it
A new feature of microblogging application Smood it allows to "feel" emotional tweets and to track them to your social network.
What is Enlightenment? (Kant)
Google is trying here too, at least in Fashion and Local. They've put a lot of weight behind the launch of Boutiques.com and behind Google Local (even trying to buy Yelp a while back).
Muir Woods -- It has redwood trees, which are a "must see" if you go to Cali, and it is local to the SF bay area, unlike most of the remaining redwoods (which tend to be out in the middle of nowhere).

The big park in SF has an aquarium and an oriental-style garden. My kids thought the aquarium was a big yawn (after visiting the huge, world-class one in Tennessee, all other aquariums were forever ruined for them) but really liked the oriental garden, which was a new experience.

Just drive around SF. It is the only large city I have been in on two continents that made me go "Wow. I wish I could live here." The city itself is amazing.

Six Flags has a theme park in Vallejo: http://www.sixflags.com/discoverykingdom/index.aspx I never went to it (I'm not a big fan of theme parks) but you did ask about theme parks.

Point Reyes is unique. I never made it out there (unfortunately). It is a piece of the Pacific Plate that is above water. The land is, therefore, geologically distinct from most of California and this helps contribute to a unique ecosystem with (IIRC) some species unique to that little piece of land.
...saying "everything falls down" doesn't get at what newton was really interested in,...

I know it's tangential, but this is precisely what Newton was interested in. The entire point of Newtonian gravity is that everything (including the moon and other celestial bodies) falls down in exactly the same way.

(Before this, you had one set of rules for celestial bodies, another for apples.)
I think it may even be true that distribution maintainers should look at installing the scripting languages their OS requires in different privileged places and version-locking their system scripts, as upgrading Python from 2.4 to 2.7 can break some system scripts, yet useful tools like Mercurial don't like very old versions of Python.
He probably meant that one bug isn't going to chase people away from Apple, unless there are a good deal of bugs that they've had to deal with or the bug is serious enough in itself. This bug seems pretty bad but I doubt it will chase everyone away, except the ones who felt the repercussions of it.

Off-topic: BTW, we've yet to find out what the problem was (I have doubts we'll ever find out,) so we can't 100% say if the bug would have been found sooner or later if the software had been FOSS.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054059
Excluding work-for-hire, does a copyright transfer affect the copyright term in a way that makes the date of the original author's death no longer relevant? (IANAL and couldn't find a discussion of this when I had a quick look.)

Ignoring the impact of author death still doesn't change my original question of whether a longer term "significantly benefits everyone else making a living off intellectual property" and society in general.
It looks like sniffing GSM is much simpler than I thought, I had no idea! The only thing stopping it to be more common is probably the need of hardware...
Information in hard-to-read fonts is better remembered
Social Gaming Market Overview
In the caption of the 5'th picture, they say the Viet Cong hid in the caves.
Billion dollar ideas which are novel and highly advantageous to execute on are very rare, and even then they require more than just having the idea. The founders of Google or YouTube, which could both be considered billion dollar idea/ventures, I'm sure will tell you making their businesses into successes was NOT a cakewalk. Things could have went (and did go) wrong along the way.

I just cant believe that ideas are worthless at all.

I've already said above I don't believe ideas are always totally worthless.

...but they are never worthless.

I disagree. I can generate a list of many totally worthless startup ideas fairly quickly.

You still seem to be placing a lot of value in ideas, as if they are the main thing that determines the success of a project. I fundamentally disagree with that, and as evidence of that most successful projects end up looking different than they did when they first started out. I also feel almost like you are suggesting developers are helpless until an "idea person" comes along. Again, I disagree with that. Anyone can have an idea, even great idea, including developers.
if you'll excuse my naïveté, but what's the purpose?
Link farms, comment spamming, etc.
I watched a movie[1] about exploring some (huge!) caverns in Venezuela and IIRC they used many strategically positioned remotely controlled charges/flares. The guy was cavern-photographer and it seemed to be the standard way of doing it.

[1] http://www.k2studio.sk/?cube=text&c=559&lg=en
These chips aren't supposed to be used for secure applications (though no doubt some people do use them that way). They are intended to be used more like a UPC code.
Nice 3D fly-through. Nat geo also made a documentary about surveying the cave (World's Biggest Cave).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-iZ6WJeqhE
As the other commenter pointed out, I'm talking about instruction predication (also called conditional execution) instead of branch prediction. In any ISA you have branches that might or might not execute depending on some conditions. With ARM, the first four bits of every single instruction - not just branches but loads and stores, addition and subtraction, etc - are used to specify under what conditions the instruction will be executed - so you can have small 'if' statements that don't actually need any branches when they're compiled.

All that is really pretty awesome if you're designing your processor to go in order, but if you want to try out of order execution it becomes more complicated. Now you have to check every instruction to see if its predicated, and if it is you now have a new dependency on the previous arithmetic instruction even if there isn't any data dependency between the two. Of course you could argue that if you find a predicated instruction in ARM code then its replacing a branch that would be in x86 code, and that overall your job is no harder. And you could go back and forth arguing over it.

The important thing to remember, though, is the things that give the ARM ISA inherent advantages when you're making low power, in order processors aren't necessarily advantages when you're talking about high performance, high power processors.
I think you could, it's just not a fail-safe system. If one judgment-proof guy breaks your contract by sharing a single copy, you have no power to stop the recipient from making all the copies they care to. Copyright is imposed on all of us, so you get more than one chance to stop infringement.
I have a couple links:

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html (Why IP is a bad term.)
This isn't complicated. A copyright is worth more if it lasts longer. An author can sell her rights to a work for more money if copyright is going to protect that work for a longer period of time. People making a living off intellectual property can be expected to make a better living in a world in which copyrighted works have more economic value.
The software under test is designed to allow employees to use their personal phones for corporate use. Being a personal phone, corporate policies are irrelevant because we cannot apply or enforce them. The software is in use by some very large companies and being evaluated by others therefore it is far from implausible that some of those personal phones haven't got a device lock code set.

I agree it is not an Android issue though, it is the poor design of the app.
I think that is next week's post.
4chan was the perfect environment for something like Anonymous to occur. With no (official) archive, individual posts don't survive long. But you can get "ripples" of comments to persist for a while by a) re-posting it incessantly or b) creating an idea that other people want to repeat (basically a meme). Over time, the surviving memes created a sort of "standing wave" or self-replicating system out of channers' brains.

I guess what I'm saying is, Anonymous is the cumulative effect of these strong memes on human brains. The Ghost in the Shell is on a substrate of part-internet, part-human.
Good ideas. Even though the article severely exaggerates, I agree that the browser is the ideal integration point for rss from a ux point of view, but the implementation needs to be totally reimagined for it to appeal to a mass audience.
Looks like a great project, I wish I was in town for it!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060994
Well, Android and iOS both use OpenGL ES and have a majority of the market between them. This will make porting easier between them than to WP7. I would not overlook the impact of marketshare on time allocation decisions.
I agree with 3D printing - shapeways.com really changed my mindset about what is possible in the 3D printing space as a public mainstream endeavor.

Once the tools to help amateurs create 3D objects become more mainstream, I think we'll see a Cambrian-explosion of art and tech objects.

3D printers printing 3D printers - then we'll have the future Cory Doctorow keeps talking about :)
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

Yes, we do.
direct link: http://vimeo.com/15840418
Clickable: http://smood.it/

and it hasn't launched yet.
Given the lack of comments on this, I thought try and write why I posted something that's not exactly HN material

I found this collection of pics put me in a very melancholic mood. For me, they remind me that everything we do, no matter how much work, sweat and love we pour into it, is ephemeral. Work is required to keep decay at bay and slow the increase in entropy, and one day, sooner than we expect, people (sometimes us) will decide (often not a conscious decision) that what was once worth preserving/keeping is no longer worth the effort

Saddest of all was the picture of the library with books still on the shelves. It's like it wasn't worth the effort moving them to another library (or even giving them away!) or perhaps they were never willing to admit this was the end; perhaps they were always telling them selves it was just temporary, someday they'd reopen the library. someday soon. so sad
Would definitely consider staying for longer, possibly even the whole 2 weeks - just depends on what is recommended.
I just hope no one in Hollywood sees these and decides that'd be a cool location for a movie
Next, I'd like to be able to share my blacklists ;-)
Chien luoc phat trien thuong hieu nhu the nao la hop ly?
Theo kinh nghiệm của nhiều công ty, thì chính sách thương hiệu trước hết phải có một chiến lược lâu dài bao gồm cả các chương trình tiếp thị và xúc tiến giới thiệu sản phẩm phù hợp. Chính sách thương hiệu nên tập trung hướng tới khách hàng, làm sao để sản phẩm của mình đem lại cho khách hàng cảm giác thật nhất và đáng tin cậy nhất.
nor does mine, but this is one of those cases where it's worth the effort of dragging yourself across to a machine that does (and I'm sure you've got one). trust me.
Really? I haven't used RubyGems, but one of my favourite things about Python packaging is that I can take a proper Python distutils-based package, and in about thirty seconds create a usable RedHat package that my sysadmin colleagues can safely and easily deploy to our production systems, alongside all the other updates they manage.

I believe various Debian packaging "helper" scripts (like Joey Hess' "debhelper") have built-in support for Python distutils packages too.
"I ended up paying for a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers"

I've found the value of consumer reports giving a me a general overview of any given genre of consumer goods has not been diminished in the internet age.
I don't understand ... what is the systemic problem that is keeping these buildings from being bought and repurposed into something else? Is it a screwy tax code or building code situation? What?
It's 1975 and this man is about to show you the Future
Did you see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060994