skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It is in the public interest to have works move into the public domain, so that others can build upon them"

Could offer some examples of "building upon" others' works which are not allowed without permission under current copyright law? I would like to understand what we as a society might be missing out on.

More generally, I become concerned when I hear "public interest" arguments because they usually apply a relatively static analysis of benefit rather than a dynamic economic model. It might be deemed in the public interest for pizza parlors to be forced by law to provide free pizzas. In the short term, we can imagine all the happiness these pizzas would provide. However, in the slightly longer term, it is obvious that there would be no pizza parlors at all. How does one show that limiting copyright would not have the longer-term effect of fewer works being created?
I really do love the idea guy, they rail and rail "hey I am worth something" but the fact remains they are worth very little. Lets say for example I decided to start a company, I have a good group of guys that can do anything and we have capital. We don't need an idea to form a company, we could start a fabrication shop or a coin laundry and potentially profit just as much as venturing off and building a new and novel widget. It's the execution, there is nothing sexy about fabrication but the world needs it and companies start every day that provide fabrication services. The guy that says hey lets start a fabrication shop is worth very little to that equation even if he has an idea about how to revolutionize how fabrication is done. Somehow when it comes to software this fact get's muddled, people think because software is complex that somehow the ideas for software are worth more when in reality the idea guy is not bringing much more to the table than "hey lets start a fab shop". Every so often we have a series of post challenging this conventional wisdom, but I have yet to see an effective argument for the idea guy being worth much to the total equation.
I don't have any specific opinion on how long it should be, as long as it's at least author's life plus some FIXNUM amount of years, to cover for the case where someone wants to invest in your work, but you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.
If you're coming to the end of your cycle at the end of this month why are you thinking about leaving anyway - why not see how you find the next placement before you make any decisions?

Talk to your manager and explain that you're not going to make the deadline, you're not going to be the first person to have missed a deadline and I doubt you'll be the last. It's highly unlikely that you'll get fired.
Of course it's behind, and that's what end users want. Bleeding edge is called that for a reason.

Python on Debian works fine. There are a whole bunch of apps written in old versions of Python that just work, and you never have to fiddle with dependencies, and you never break them.

If you want to develop in Python, you install virtualenv and you get a bleeding edge setup exactly like you want it, and it doesn't break your working apps.
I really can't say whether or not I am "naturally creative". But I routinely come up with "creative" solutions (polite euphemism for "something no normal person would have thought of", and often not appreciated by others as it is "disruptive" behavior). I think solitude is valuable not for having ideas per se but because it removes some of the pressure to conform and allows you to be "out of step" with others (without having to fight someone every step of the way over that detail). It is these "out of step with the crowd" answers that are typically labeled "creative".

When I was trying to figure out how to get myself well after being diagnosed late in life with a form of cystic fibrosis, I intentionally chose to not join any online support groups for CF or otherwise expose myself overly much to conventional views of the problem. I did this because I was already doing better than I was supposed to be and so was my oldest son (who has the same thing) and I wanted to figure out what we were doing right and improve on it. I felt that listening overly much to the mantra that "people like you don't get well" would have put me in danger of believing such brain-washing and thereby helping it to become self-fulfilling prophecy. I also felt that listening overly much to the conventional framing of the problem would pollute my thinking and deny me the opportunity to come up with a more accurate/effective view of the problem. Einstein supposedly said something like "You cannot solve a problem from the level of consciousness that helped create it." So I didn't want to be immersed in or exposed too much to the thought processes of all those folks who believed the problem to be unresolvable. I felt clear thinking on the matter was my only hope of salvation. The pay-off was huge. (And I'm an extrovert, so this was not a particularly easy path for me to follow. Had my life not literally depended upon it, I don't think I would have pursued such a path with so much persistence.)
Copyright didn't seem to stop authors of D&D or many derivative fantasy novels that have more in common with Lord of the Rings than West Side Story with Shakespeare.
The concept of RSS itself, like any other piece of technology, is not something users should understand directly. What RSS lacks is a simple, friendly concept to act as its public face. The ways people have explained RSS in the past have been daunting, unappealing, or inappropriate for the web.

"Subscription" is the most common term used, probably because it is a reference to the underlying technology (publish/subscribe) and to a vaguely similar concept in userland (subscribing to a publication.) But subscription is not a good metaphor. Subscriptions do not lessen your commitment; they increase it. Having a bunch of magazine subscriptions is a burden! They fill up your mailbox and clutter up your apartment. A "subscribe" button scares people away because it evokes a much more consequential decision; the user wonders if it is worthwhile to commit to this burden. And of course subscription is not the only way to use RSS.

What web sites and browsers need to do is simply SAY in their UI what the RSS features do, without saying "RSS" and without trying to train users to recognize the RSS symbol.

I am not a UI designer, but I think the word we're looking for is "updates." Buttons should say:

"Show me recent updates to this site"

"Show me future updates to this topic"

"I want to see future updates to this site"

The button to show your RSS feeds should say "Updates" and should have a tooltip saying "Updates to your web sites."

To help people discover this functionality, I think it would be great for browsers to check for RSS feeds on the sites a user goes to frequently and work that into the UI somehow. When you open Chrome and see thumbnails of your favorite sites, each thumbnail might have a button saying, "Recent updates...."

And there's one simple feature that people would easily figure out and would actually use. When you're on a site that has an RSS feed, there could be a little pop-over button in a corner (like the button added by Feedly's Firefox plugin) that you can click to see a list of recent updates to a site. It's a simple feature, some people would figure it out for themselves, and anyone could grasp how it worked after seeing it used once or twice. It would put pressure on websites to provide good RSS feeds, because they would know many users were checking them. Here's a tip: put the words "Recent updates" on the button.

tl;dr Don't say RSS, don't use a symbol, don't say "subscribe" or "subscription," just use the word "updates" and say what you mean.
Ruminations on Twitter
Wealth is fine in literal terms. If you want to pass money on to your progenitors, that is just fine, as it is with all real property. The key here is that intellectual property and real property have some very fundamental differences. Ideas are assigned owners only to make it plausible to spread those ideas massively -- a stipulation that was necessary when it was expensive to spread ideas (printing). With the internet, dissemination of ideas is much cheaper, though there are often still production costs.

Ideas cannot be owned; they are like fire and can only be equally shared. We assign monopolies to make publishing feasible, not to ensure the wealth of two or three generations that live off of the creativity of their grandfathers without contributing anything themselves. If the grandfather wants this to happen, he can convert his copyright to real money while it lasts (and afterward too, though it's harder without the monopoly, of course) and then transfer that money to his children. He shouldn't be able to hold ideas hostage from the people that he shared them with, however.
Yes, I agree, but back in the Apple ][ DOS era (before Pro-DOS) there were even not directories.

As an example that went in the other direction: The Common Lisp language specification! It even has host, path, version number for describing file names - but I think this now hampers the language's image if one stars coding in it for the first time.
I guess Google Reader uses a database of feeds that other people subscribed to.

For one thing, it shows you the whole history of the feed -- even when the XML itself contains just the few most recent items.
iOS has had a handwriting-based keyboard for Chinese since iPhoneOS 2.0.

But I'm guessing drawing letterforms with your finger isn't a very enjoyable input method, and most of the iPad styluses available aim at replicating a finger (since that's what most applications expect).
IPhone Alarm Glitch Greets New Year
I think the OP meant "creative" as seeing a shortcut e.g instead of spending 10 hours trying to solve a problem, a "creative" person could do it in two using a different approach.

In this case, persistence is inefficient. You can see it happening with workaholics who will take the "hard/long" path and feel like heroes after 72 hours of work.

Persistence and dedication can be real time suckers. Especially if giving up means failing.

The beauty of laziness and postponing things is you let your mind process the information in the background. Unless the task is frustrating/urgent, I'd rather wait for an "humm, interesting" moment.
Does this really make sense to be on HN over reddit or Metafilter?
EntreprenURLs - news and blog aggregate for entrepreneurs
Ask HN: secure password creation
I'm trying to select a personal password policy that will actually be memorable and strong. If any security experts could weigh in, I'd really appreciate it.

My plan is to use a eleven character password - it's made of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters, no dictionary words or repeated characters, and the final character is changed depending on the site.

This password would be used repeatedly, except for the final character, which would be variable.

Would this be secure?
Ask HN: What's the point of creating a parent company for a web property?
Sniffing (and decrypting) GSM [pdf]
RunKeeper Pro for iPhone free until end of January
dope one there! am in for it, as I've personally been doing my own hacker-workouts from my room every once in a while. normally, i just point rythmbox at some trance or hardcore techno from last.fm and dance myself to fitness for like 30-45 min. sometimes i love it so much i just decide to continue dancing for fun for an extra 30 min! we all need it :)
I guess I just wasn't comfortable cooking in a dorm kitchen and there were multiple appliances that I was missing.

But, yes, Jules, a big sharp knife is definitely necessary.

We didn't compare, nor we set a wager, but I got my 6packs and learned to control my weight, which I count as a win.
Amazing work, thanks for this!
Reining in freedom on the Web
We just did phone number + password only for our SMS app textweight.com and the sign up rate is pretty amazing. I need to do some A/B testing with requiring e-mail.
I own the book The Ruins of Detroit to which this article refers, and live in the greater Metro Detroit area.

Lot's of photos in the book look posed. An american flag, clean and shiny in the middle of an old dusty scenery, or a basketball lonely in a gymnasium with full air pressure after some decades. However, it's an impressive piece of work, and it could be, that it just hurts me looking at these kind of photos.

In documentaries like Detroit - between Utopia and Perdition they go into more detail to what happend and still takes place in the Metro Detroit region.
( www.lavafilm.de/en/p_detroit.html )
It was aired in france and germany, so I don't have a youtube link available. European countries analyse the phenomena Detroit in great detail to understand what happend.
Thanks for writing up this analysis and sharing.
The author should post a rubric, so that others can determine what's acceptable and what should be covered.
> I see gems as just snippets of code instead of "real" OS packages. They change a lot, they are application specific, and (most of the time) they are simple.

And, like me, if you're using Rails, they are code that is visible to the outside world. That is code that you want to make sure is secure, and is not just some minor detail.
It's very interesting to note the backgrounds of the various people involved in this debate.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielwhittemore would lead me to believe Nathaniel is not a "code"/execution person (I could be wrong, obviously).

Whereas the people on the other side of the debate seem to be largely execution guys - coders or self-styled "product" guys (YCombinator, Eric Ries).

It's almost a tautology - the execution guys say the execution is most important, the idea guys think it's all about the idea.

Like most things, the "best" answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes.
Okay, I signed up for Quirk. Now what?
There are a few,but not many: Hyde park produce, treasure island, village foods and the one on 47th & wood lawn. The problem is that they're expensive compared to the south loop Target.

But I agree with the earlier comment that choosing your apartment shouldn't be based on DD but rather groceries (and transportation)
Indeed. I'm thinking Kinect might be a big deal, once the open source hacking community really takes off.
This seems to be a joke project or something similar. A pdf with 170 pages and very very little content, except the three at the end with a joke about the project and the team.
What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

In Comments

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Michael Silence: Online backlash might be near
I would be interested in a experiment comparing resource based limitation vs a time-based trial.

For ex. "upload 20 screenshots before paying" compared to "try the app for 14-days before paying".
"Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7-10 were first published in 1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community theater."

As far as I know, you can teach a class using Toynbee or Kissinger; the students just have to find copies. As for community theater, they put on works far more recent--one friend appeared several years ago in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1995), another in "Lips together, Teeth Apart" (1991; or whichever MacNally play gave him a chance to shed his clothes--"Love! Valor! Etc" of 1994 maybe). What the terms are, I can't say; but it doesn't seem to run anyone broke.

I do agree that the copyright extension gone beyond reasonable bounds. The critic Hugh Kenner made an interesting case that the extension of copyright in the United Kingdom about 100 years ago had a dramatic effect on the public's impression of what literature was, creating a discontinuity in perception that made the modernists' work appear to have come about without its actual context.
You'd need a thin stylus for that, and Apple doesn't ship one which means they're not going to built it into the OS.

But surely it wouldn't be too hard (where too hard means technically infeasible) to create an application based on hand-written input (Graffiti or Rosetta/Inkwell-type technologies).
Google's official spam reporting extension:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...
I think all you've discovered here is that users find it annoying to be taken through a bunch of signup screens before finding out a website is not free.

You've drawn a lot of conclusions out of a very small experiment with a lot of uncontrolled variables. I'm glad to hear you're thinking of testing again more carefully.
It was interesting to me...a democracy in the Middle East sliding away from democracy and we can all see it coming. That's a significant story that transcends mere politics, especially when that country is a nuclear power.
Crazy thought: phone number only, then after they are in, require they enter one? If they don't set one or forget, they just get a text and reset it? The psychology of this is interesting because on one hand they might feel less safe but on the other they might not care and just want to jump right in!
I'll bite. I don't care if WB makes a Mickey Mouse movie. Walt is dead. We're not talking about the state stealing "Rearden Metal" shortly after its invention. Generations have grown up with this character and it seems just as outrageous as state-based exploitation to hold this character captive forever.

How does inifinite copyright extension do anything but favor the sad corporatism you oppose? Entire generations will never re-sow the seeds of these cultural works. If you're on this planet to tell the next great Mickey Mouse story then you better be lucky enough to get the right spot inside Disney.

So I don't see any compelling Randsian arguments here. Each generation should get a shot at profiting (or simply engaging publicly) with the cultural fruits of a prior generation. Creators will be fine.
Microsoft gets a better overview of your home ;-)
Because unless he's God himself and has perfect information about everything it can't be possible that every SPECULATION he makes turns out to be true?
I think your premise, "that we can't all be creative freaks... but we can all work really really hard" is not actually true. Dig up the biographies of any of the people you listed and you'll find that they devoted enormous amounts of time an energy into their work. Tell me that you could really pull 10-14 hour days doing one single thing? And not just 10-14 hour days of 'work' but true practice, which pushes you further. Additionally find me a single case of someone with "natural creative" talent who achieved any sort of success without the requisite amount of hours put in.

I personally find the "natural creative" to be a myth that people prefer to persist, it means that if I'm not Van Gogh, I can more easily say "well I just don't have the talent" and give up right away, and if I'm a bright college student I can just get pissed at the world for not recognizing my "genius" rather than just work at something all day.

In short: extreme amounts of hard work and dedication are more rare than cases of natural talent.
IANASE, but it feels pretty secure to me.

Me, I rely on my growing up in the Swiss-German speaking part of Switzerland. Swiss-German is not a written language, so basically any way you could write your (region- and dialect-specific) password variant means there's no dictionary attack available :D
It should be very, very easy for you to produce a URL illustrating this phenomenon for those of us who are skeptical of it.
If you have a paywall with no-trial, you must very clearly demonstrate the value proposition on the sales website.

Hiding the price until after the user enters their email is also bad UX. Not everyone is going to the pricing page before clicking sign up.
Why are November and December weird months?
Fail to see how that's exciting in the least bit, when the G2 has been oc'd to 2 GHz.
I quit my job. Shipped 2 products. Launched a Services business. Now what?
On the increasing uselessness of Google
Ah, this is a longer discussion than I'd like to have at the moment, but you're still assuming that IP is actually 'property.' It's not, at least in my mind.

You're still right though: market would be a better fit. Markets and capitalism are pretty much interchangeable in my mind, which is why I made the slip.
Cobol's been dying too and I'm not concerned about that either.
Nobody may remember WW I, but there are lots of other wars that people remember. And in lots of countries, Nov 11 is the day set aside to remember it.

Personally I cannot think of Nov 11 without remembering school assemblies where a WW II vet had put together a program to impress upon us the seriousness of the occasion. In particular I can't forget a picture of a man whose throat had just been cut by a bayonet. The wall of blood coming out had not yet hit the ground.

YMMV. But for me, personally, November 11 will never be a day of celebration.
I don't see that as a "fair exchange". One side (the government) sets the terms unilaterally. There is no voluntary mutual transaction; the author doesn't consent to have his work forced into the public domain, or to the terms under which it is done.
New scientific discoveries are virtually always germane to HN.
I think the naturally highly creative people are the ones who get the most gains for the same amount of conscious effort.

My experience of working with creative people has been that many of them work very hard, yes, but many of them do so because they want to get the most out of their natural creativity and talent. To an observer, it looks like their gains are strictly a result of their hard work, but that's because we don't see that hidden multiplier that's scaling their efforts into ability.

I don't mean to imply with my last post that some people just aren't creative altogether when I said that some people have it and some people don't. I just mean people that people have it in different areas (programming, carpentry, painting, organization, conversation, etc), and if you don't have it in an area, you're probably not going to manifest it. You can try to mimic it with persistence though :)
I was expecting rollerblading - or skateboarding in a trenchcoat.
Fireman 3 Bombacı - Fireman oyunları
Really badass piece of work, Jason, thank you for taking a bite out of this problem. Simple, effective.

Some gravy on top would be an in-line blacklist button beside search results but even spending thirty seconds to set up the blacklist in advance gives you a Google that's a lot more useful than the default. Bravo, sir.
From the article:

"""
It's a little-known feature of C that if you put two string literals next to each other in the source code, they get concatenated:

char *helloworld = "hello, " "world!";

"""

That's a good tip that actually works in other languages too. It helps in Python, for example, when creating long strings. Wrapping parentheses around the string and using the quote-continuation rule makes it nice and easy to read.

For example:

foo = ('hello world this is '
'a long string')

is better than:

foo = 'hello world this is ' + \
'a long string'

...for two reasons. It avoids string concatenation (the "+" operator) and it avoids the backslash.