skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right. The "marginal difference", as you say, is key. So let's assume theft of parts happens rarely. Don't we still need a process in place to adjudicate when it does happen? Let's say the theft is not of a water pump but a car radio or, let's say, the owner left his radar detector or his daughter's ipod in the car and the renter walked off with it. What's the process for adjudicating that claim? Does getaround need to get involved? What if it's a false claim and the renter is unfairly charged for it? The same applies to scrathes and damages. If the owner claims the car was scratched during the rental, does he need to back up that claim with photographic evidence - before and after pictures? And what's the process for authenticating those pictures as valid? All I'm saying is there's a minefield of potential disputes here, especially because there is not necessarily a hand-off between the owner and the renter when the car is returned.
Bathroom Monologue: Sunnier Titles for Books
1) The fact that there is a second item below "Access my basic information" would seem to make that fact abundantly clear. I'm not sure how much more explicit it can get.

2) While I agree that it would be good to give users a greater level of control, most apps are unfortunately not designed to play nicely with varying levels of permissions. Such a change would require significant advance notice to Platform developers.
I genuinely enjoyed this comment. Really. It's probably the most passionate response I've received.

I was going to argue with you point-by-point, particularly about your false claim that I didn't include any examples (which another commenter addressed, and you acknowledged). At the end of it all, after a lot of flailing, I think this is really your thesis:

"Software is a constant process of settling for mediocrity."

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree there. If that's how you approach what you do, then I understand your position. If that's your approach, then sure, AIR is a reasonable choice. That isn't my approach, and I think it's also not the approach of the people who, much to your befuddlement, keep upvoting this story and tweeting positively about the post.
Sure: you didn't say anything in your comment. You intimated that Marsh Ray was perpetrating a false and puffed-up attempt at (your scare-quotes) "journalism". You ought to have supported that argument with evidence.

For what it's worth: if you're following the story closely enough to have an educated opinion about it, the name "Marsh Ray" means something to you.
I could imagine there could easily be a big array of ARM cpus on the server system; not a single one that is on par with Intel's fastest chips but they come in huge numbers and are presumably much cheaper.

And it seems that since they will integrate their GPU on the same die then it could provide massive parallel computing power as well via Cuda.
Inventions such as this give me hope for the future of humanity.
While I agree, the publisher should be providing books in every region they can, it's not as simple matter of the publisher saying "I hate China, let's make them wait for the new book cause I'm a jerk." It's a matter of if they print an edition there do they believe they can recoup the losses of printing it. Publishers are out to make money.

Saying that there is nothing wrong with illegally downloading a book or whatever just because it isn't legally available in your area is rubbish. It's like saying having your friend in the US steal an Xbox from a store and ship it to you is ok because you can't legally buy one where you are. It's obviously not as simple as that, but it's just lame to rationalize breaking the law because you want to.
Exactly. Give this app "all" of the information it is requesting or give "nothing." People want more granular control.
That wasn't my aim. In fact I'm not using Debian at the moment as I indicated, I just know the commands better to give examples. This isn't about a specific distro, it's about the huge benefits of system packages and their toolchains in general. I'm not even really concerned with official packages and the official blessed package repos.
Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has actually done this? I'm not entirely convinced this model is as repeatable as you think. I'd be interested to see more data on the subject.
Most Important At CES: Flexible AMOLED Displays, Motorola Atrix 4G & Unifi
Because the works are unique?
Shadow Blister Effect
I'm surprised to see that as many people use the Back button as the Awesomebar.
You are 100% correct. Perhaps this argument only stands true for movies.
Checkinstall is brilliant: http://checkinstall.izto.org/

It's also guilty of being unattractive to the developers I'd love to see use it. The site says "Recent News: Dec 26th, 2009" and then concentrates on a NOTE TO SLACKWARE 8.0 USERS.

Showing the hello world of checkinstall would be much better imho, and it's what developers from the web world expect.
HowTo: EC2 for Poets
What happened to SeaMicro? http://www.seamicro.com/ I remember there was a boom with their PR and then silence.
At least in the US (I'm Canadian, FWIW), it's explicitly legal to lend dead-tree books under the First Sale Doctrine[1].

The reason that this doesn't work for ebooks is that, unlike a physical book, you're only buying a license to use it (i.e. the same limitation you get on software).

I personally see this as a huge step backwards, and for that reason alone I'll be buying hard copy books for the foreseeable future. I'd love to have a Kindle or another eReader, but I just can't abide the limitations.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
Note that the post was edited in the mean time. Sadly no history a la stackoverflow.com .
I think it's ridiculous to use one game like Minecraft to announce a new era for videogame developers. Who's to say Minecraft wasn't an anomaly, a result of a ridiculously talented person like Notch and a perfect storm of hype and word-of-mouth PR?

> Why it matters

>

> Sounds interesting, you say, but why should I care that a few guys have put together a cool little indie game? The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development. And it’s not just a fluke. The Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo, Braid, and a number of other extremely low-budget titles have electrified the gaming community, while games with millions in marketing budget like APB and Kane & Lynch fall flat on their face critically and commercially. Gamer discontent with these barren blockbusters is palpable, and Minecraft is the new poster boy for it.

Oh, they've "electrified the gaming community", have they? But how well are they doing financially?

Apple's App Store has enough successful apps to give developers hope, but the PC videogame scene needs more data points, before I'll start considering going "indie", as the kids call it.

How well does Minecraft do in terms of protection against piracy? I haven't heard a lot about it, and considering games like the aforementioned World of Goo's problems with it[1].

This is like saying that the success of Audiosurf on Steam ushered in a new era that developers would now be able to repeat. Steam has definitely made a big different, but everyone, calm down and take a deep breath for a second.

Notch is a friggin' wizard, and as much as people will try to reverse engineer its success, don't try to create a trend graph with one data point. I think it'd be devastating to give aspiring developers the impression that the road to success has been paved. Notch has found a way, but he hasn't paved it for the rest of us.

[1]: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/14/world-of-goo-vs-p...
RVM is great. But by design it's a solution to compiling software on every machine. This simply doesn't work for lots of sysadmins, especially with lots of machines - it means installing a complete build environment which opens up much more evil.
He mentioned that he did it himself. Occasional success stories pop up on HN, too.
Last Facebook Status Update Of Man Who Sparked Tunisian Revolution
Why the Smartphone Will Be Your Main Computer
Most people also didn't use their real name online. Facebook played a huge role in changing that.
Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
There's only one way to compete with free: easy.
I once wrote a letter to the publisher of a scientific journal asking him why his information wasn't free. I was in Uni. at the time a bit idealistic and I spent a long time explaining how if it was free he'd get money from people 'in thanks'

The publisher was very generous and took the time to write a thoughtful, considered response to my letter in which he said something to the effect of

"Thanks Alex for your feedback, I respect your point of view and it would be a wonderful position to take, however - under your proposal, we sustain our business off the chance of public generosity. Wheras under the current model, we are guaranteed to get the revenue, which makes it a much safer bet"

He worded it much better than that, but the premise holds that sometimes the guarantee of a little money is better than the hope for a similar amount (or possibly more).

All respect to the anecdotal evidence of "I give it away and stay in business". But it's a heck of a gamble. I'm sure there's a lot of anecdotes out there of people saying "I gave it away and people took it. End of story"
excellent point, often that is the case. I should have followed up with more concrete evidence, but as jdp23 points out, CNN coverage was after the fact. As is my posting of this article to HN. jdp23 comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110158

It will definitely be interesting to see how long CNN and others covers the events in Tunisa moving forward.

[edited for clarification]
It's not a new trend. I haven't allowed comments on my blog for years. I want people to post thoughtful responses on their own turf. If someones care enough, they can respond on their own blog.
I like the audible menacing drone. Any autonomous robot should emit a menacing drone.
Drones don't have lives, families, or seasonal affective disorder. There's no reason they can't work at night if it's less bothersome.
To be honest, this is almost bordering on the ridiculous. Why should people go to extreme lengths to find a hardcopy of the book? There is this feeling of entitlement, "I am an artist, so I am not supposed to have to worry about all this commercial stuff". Meanwhile, other people have discovered that convenience actually makes people buy stuff rather than pirate it.
Now let us re-sell our "used" e-books and I might see a sense in paying (dead-tree-price - $2) for an e-book.
The Brain Behind Teledyne: Henry Singleton (2003)
Most of all, google cannot find information in my blog (it is in russion and it is Lifejournal one) for a long time while yandex still can (Yandex Blogs).

Google search is quite forgetful. After certain amount of time you just cannot find something you need.
This story makes me sad because the author is trapped in an outdated business model and isn't likely to get out of it anytime soon.
I can't comment on the vending machines, but the panties are sold in S&M stores still and it's quite disturbing. (Disclaimer: I noticed them as I was following a friend through den den town.)
This is actually something we've been thinking about in terms of hiring and culture. Less on an intern basis (though would have same access, just would be shorter period of time) and more on the basis with full time team members. The people we'd want to bring on board should most likely be entrepreneurs, but for some reason aren't ready/want to join a company first.

How can we educate these team members and give them access to all the cool/smart people we meet? Essentially how can being a part of our team, also help get you ready to start your own company in a couple of years?

The greatest companies ala paypal, fb, goog, fairchild,etc. end up spawning a subsequent generation of entrepreneurs. We want that to be built into OnSwipe from day 1 and not a haphazard bi-product.

Really open to some suggestions on the above concept as it's still rough and we're working on it.

If this interests you, email me: j@onswipe.com . We're hiring (front end+back end) and I know we're doing something like this, just figuring out right approach. You can help us shape it.
Katie the Prefect
Even though they are bare bones, they still require some design knowledge to be very successful. The usage of typographic hierarchy and grids can be seen in all of them - some more successful than others.

Being simple is just as hard as creating more 'fancy' objects, I would suggest having a look into swiss design/ new international style where your sure to be inspired and help see just how people use layouts and typography to create simple designs which work.
On the site it says,

"You will be asked to log into Facebook. Getaround is a community built on trust and by connecting with Facebook, you enable safe and open sharing."

Probably the reason is they want to verify your real identity (i.e. legal name) and they have a better chance at that with Facebook. Although they could presumably do that with a credit card.
While I agree that it would be good to give users a greater level of control, most apps are unfortunately not designed to play nicely with varying levels of permissions. Such a change would require significant advance notice to Platform developers.

They can obviously live without contact info since they haven't had access to it until now.

This is actually an interesting potential solution to the permission dialog problem: force apps to handle certain permissions in a granular way. Always let the user deny those permissions independently. Then the app can be forced to make a specific case for why it needs each of those permissions.
Why couldn't small drones build things out of small elements? A lot of our assumptions about what is a reasonable unit of work are based on examples with humans in the loop. It might make more sense to think of a fleet of these things as a form of 3D printer.
what, why was this downvoted? I'd buy stammy lunch, even if we didn't raise money. He's the man.
Zipcar seems to be fairly successful despite leaving the key in the car.
I almost signed up until the Facebook app asked to post to my wall. Too far.
Interesting article on "Agency Pricing". So all the big players in the industry come together, make a pricing compact that no one can break, and as a side effect lock out all the smaller players.

How is this not price fixing and collusion?
More background information on the research program reported in the submitted link:

http://educ.jmu.edu/~westrf/papers/Stanovich-Dev-Rat-Advance...
Financially speaking, Google is very much "just search".
In 2011, there are a finite number of people, corporations, and sovereign entities which can be said to own wealth. Wach of those has a finite total number associated with their various bank accounts.

Yet no one who is still taken seriously says wealth is zero sum.

If your point is holds true, and we are at saturation for attention, then if radio contact was made with an alien probe tomorrow, the amount of attention people are paying to the news would not change, but merely more of it would be devoted to your discovery.

That's crap -- the overall amount of attention people are paying to news would actually increase. Other stories would indeed be overshadowed (hence your confusion in thinking attention is zero-sum) but the total amount of attention would not be constant. Instead, it would crest like flood-level waters moving downriver.

The total amount of attention being paid to news is not constant.
Israeli Court Enforces for the First Time a Creative Commons License
Well, it's neat that he's doing this and all, but... why? What benefits? What is the reason?

I even followed the link to where he begins the experiment, and it seems like this is just a sample challenge set forth, for no reason other than because it's there.

So, then, where is the relevancy?
I liked your lessons learned, but you should add a lesson 5:

/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 techcrunch.com
Things that will keep shaping the web this year
> "They can obviously live without contact info since they haven't had access to it until now."

This is such an illogical statement that I'm not quite sure how to respond to it.
I think flying swarm rebotics would be best weaponized. You could call them hack-mans, man-chops, person-hacks...HRM
I have met a lot of Iranians here who do not like the regime in Iran but I have little perspective on those in Iran. I had a Farsi teacher who said that those in rural areas were more loyal to the current regime than those in populated cities.
With a multi-billion dollar valuation, I'm sure that the majority of Facebook's value is in all information it gathers about you. Is this any surprise to anyone? One way or another Facebook is trying to monetize your info. Maybe it's just me but there always seem to be some kind of news fading away about Facebook privacy. I'm my theory that's why they are worth so much. Don't think they are going to stop doing this anytime soon.

Opt-out..hahaha maybe opt-out of only the really obvious ways Facebook is selling your info.
Mostly because Digg went and made itself irrelevant. It's the equivalent to getting your news from the week-old papers used to line your cat's litterbox.
Who says journalism is dead?
Correcting our record
The stolen Xbox is gone, nobody can buy it.
The Ebook can be downloaded no matter how many times someone does so without paying.
I'm not sure about books, but at least for US movies/tv-series it can take quite an amount of time to be legally available in Europe. Even if they are available via Hulu inside the US!
I understand the reason (earning money by selling licenses to foreign TV channels), but it surely encourages "stealing" the content by using nonofficial media-portals.
ReadWriteWeb-sponsered submission? Check the URL, it has a tracking string (for want of a better word) with "hackernews".
The new decade's version of http://www.amazon.com/dp/0735201374/
It's patronizing shit like this, western world. 3rd world people can't be bothered to turn a crank for 5 seconds to get hours of reading light from an led, but you can trick them into it by sneaking it into a football?

Next we can make the goal-nets out of mosquito netting, so we can trick them out of dying of milaria.
I can't imagine that Amazon being afraid of anything is the limiting factor here, but rather book publishers being afraid. Amazon has sold DRM free mp3's for years now so it's not like they have some sort of pervasive fear of people sharing things they bought from Amazon...

Furthermore, some books are loanable and others are not. It's definitely a publisher thing.
Oldest? Most of those ads are from the early 80's. There are a few real old ones though -- the IBM AutoPoint 610 was released in 1957.
I agree that debunked pseudo-science should needs to be called out as such. However, I'd rather Salon re-publish the article bookended by the counter-evidence rather than take the article down and have the URL return an HTTP 410 (Gone) error. Here's the article in Google's cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DEZc9b-...
Most likely because it is a non-Arab power in the Middle East that is threatened on two sides by the world's only standing super power -- a super power that has routinely threatened invasion of Iran. Look at the WikiLeaks cables that exposed the pressure from other Middle Eastern governments for the US to invade Iran. Given the geopolitics, Iran's desire for nuclear weapons is perfectly rational.
Doing a good job and having a good reputation are not just for rockstars. I doubt this will ever go out of style.

The CV? The CV will always be around, just as many cultural artifacts remain, despite their obsolete functionality.
GPS + Accelerometer is already pretty darn accurate, I'm not really sure why they use the IR room. Perhaps simply easier to set up, and easier to co-ordinate the bots?
That's a perfectly reasonable business model for a site with almost no ongoing costs other than hosting.
This seems to only be true for the 1st and 2nd generation kindles. The PINs for the drm on the 3rd generation kindles don't seem to be generated from the serial number of the device.

Prove me wrong, please ;)
I predict that this is primarily going into a Cell like architecture -- (relatively) pissweak main MPU surrounded by a bucketload of kickass specialized processors (in Toshiba/Sony's case, beefy vector units, in Denver, super high end nVidia GPU cores) on a v. fast memory bus. The presence of Windows for ARM is interesting, too -- I wonder if we're looking at the beginnings of XOBX 720 here.
Our plan to destroy chinese industry is 50% complete, now if only we can get them to adopt Powerpoint, 6sigma and management consultancy their competitiveness will be destroyed.

<evil genius laugh>
I'm sorry, I didn't know that I had to :) But, alright, for one, I think it serves no use other than bringing false attention to the topic when introducing the Stuxnet/SCADA angle in the discussion. There's no juicy coincidence of any kind to take note of. "Coincidence? I think not!".
> EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.

Have you published a balance sheet of one of these documentaries, with numbers like how many people followed you on Twitter, how many signed up for your email list, how many donated money, and so on? A good writeup of how to use this model might help a lot with getting people to consider it as a realistic option, at least if it gets some attention.
People who read HN, myself included, want more granular control, sure. I don't think most of Facebook's users would care or understand about the granular control -- I think a simple yes/no like Facebook has right now is probably the best option for most users.
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to create and so easy to destroy?
This is exactly what I do, which is why it frustrates me so much when some authors/publishers/wives of dead authors (like with the Wheel of Time series) won't allow the release of the ebook until well after the hardcover. Instead I resort to piracy because the whole reason I got a kindle was to avoid buying physical novels and particularly hardcovers, since I travel/move countries so much.

Publishers and authors and whatnot who do this are just insane. You should tap into the fact that many fans of popular fantasy/science fiction are also gadget freaks, and allow them to buy your books when they come out instead of losing sales due to piracy.
A Tale of Two Terminals
NEW UK Bingo Sites
Another approach would be to have a small electric lock built into the pieces. When a piece senses it is touching another piece this electric lock screws into place.
not cool. the service is already giving you a bunch of music for free, offers a paid way to get rid of ads, and it's their livelihood.
Science journals are parasites. They don't pay for the research they publish -- nor do they pay for the refereeing (which is done by volunteers). Their costs amount to the administrative details of the journal, like emailing copies to referees, and the actual printing costs, such as they are.

They're able to maintain their position because of the prestige effect, as getting your paper into the Journal Nature is worth a hell of a lot more for the researcher than getting it published in No-Name Open Access Journal.

Journal publishers are aware that their position is a lot like that of the music industry. They're middle men between producers and consumers of science, and are becoming increasingly redundant. This has made them highly conservative, reactionary, and litigious as they try to maintain their white-knuckled grip on what they have.
Because creation fights the second law of thermodynamics, destruction "goes with the flow."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
robots building robots. that would be cool
It is not flawed by any means - from Facebook POV.