skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When modern copyrights were first created in the US, they were viewed as a necessary evil. Society trades some of its liberty (publishers' copying for 14-28 years, mainly) hoping this will increase incentive and thus authorship of new works. Back then, they were viewed as a "necessary evil".

Since then, a few things happened:

* The public domain is no longer expanded, copyright terms have become effectively infinite

* The view of copyrights as a trade was replaced by a view of "protecting authors"

* This view of "protecting authors" almost implies the view that infringement is "stealing".

* Everyone can now copy easily, not just publishers, so that the restrictions that applied to a tiny minority now restrict everyone's freedom much more harshly

I agree with the view that it may be a necessary evil (even though even at the time of copyright's inception there was some empiric evidence that copyright was in fact unnecessary to form business models around authorship). I personally believe:

* 5 years are a more reasonable copyright term in the modern age

* Copyrights should only apply to for-profit institutions (e.g: publishers), similarly to how they were practically applied in earlier days. Individuals should not be restricted by copyrights, and we shouldn't have a police-state surveillance to enforce copyrights or any other law against people in the privacy of their homes.

* Copyrights should not apply to "functional" works (e.g: Software). I see short copyright terms restricting our enjoyment of the arts and entertainment as reasonable, but copyrights artificially restricting our use of existing resources as very harmful.

* Software tends to form a "net-effect" following which makes it difficult to compete, even when you have better software (e.g: Windows isn't technically superior to Linux, but the huge net effect around it is simply too overwhelming to compete with). This means that opensource software cannot gain traction when competing with closed-source software, and that's harmful for society. Software should be open for everyone to modify and distribute by law.

* There are plenty of more efficient business models that will allow creation of useful software in the absence of copyrights (Contract work, pay-per-feature, support, etc)

* Any loss in incentive to create new works will be more than offset by the increase in efficiency (anyone can improve and extend any existing work, rather than having to duplicate it, in order to implement any idea).

* Derivative works are likely to form a huge stream of new works that we're currently losing out on, which is also likely to offset any loss of work due to lesser incentives.

In summary:

I don't view copyright infringement as theft at all.
I wondered the same thing at the time. Google needs to start tackling the patent system head-on. They dabbled a little bit in the Bilski case but I think it would be a more valuable use of their energy than the ill-considered h264 battle.

I wonder how much assistance the $100 million they spent on On2 could have provided to the patent reform movement?
Apple goes after Facebook?
That's a pretty strong ad hominem attack. I didn't like Al Franken until he got elected and started doing a lot of things that make sense (e.g. his proposed bill to fix how rating agencies work, while not getting rid of rating agencies as a private market).
It's not a bad idea but your own front page has way too much information on it. What are we supposed to read first? Have a look through the hn archives for gradual signup patterns. Look at the front pages of some really successful sites and you'll see there's usually just a single call to action. You might also want to switch to a front-page layout that's similar to the kind already widely in use. It's not just that it's good in itself - it's that because many other sites use it, it's clear how to read it: demo video / call to action / bullet point info at the top, more info lower down and below the fold.

This is all totally separate from how well your own service works, but it's just as important, because if you don't get your own front page right it doesn't matter how well your service works.

Oh, and I have a bunch of parked domains, so it's a worthwhile idea.
Neither Python nor PHP run garbage collection continuously in a separate thread. Python is reference counted, and as far as I know PHP is too.
I think the return on investment probably needs to (and intends to) include the public relations events (like the Wired article) created, as well as direct conversion rates.

It's entirely possible DDG / Gabriel will have more new users from that article than from a month of the billboard, but of course the article wouldn't have been written if he hadn't done something novel like old-school advertising a new-school product.
still takes about 7 seconds to load, don't feel like something has been fixed.
UK government appoints new head of IT
No company, including almighty, do-no-evil Google should be trusted this much.

It isn't just about trusting the CDN: relying on popular public static resources like this increases your vulnerability to DNS poisoning attacks.

If some malware manages to redirect requests for Google's static content servers to their servers they could inject a key-logger or username/password/credit-card info scanning code into every site (even small and/or low profile sites that would otherwise not be as likely to be targeted) using that as a source for libraries like jQuery that the infected users visit.
If you prefer your software free, use Mpegstreamclip like everyone else

http://www.squared5.com

Windows too
IIRC you can use cell tower loc only when using background location & geo-fences on the iPhone for local notifications.

Maybe notify a user only for 'popular' punch'd locations?
Netflix of UK would be far more apt.

I see on their website that they have versions for Germany and most of Scandinavia, but I have no idea how big they are there, and that's a far cry from the whole of Europe anyhow.
Yeah, you might have a point here. What I was going for was let a visitor play with the controls and preview the page without having to sign up, so I actually had a gradual signup in mind. :)

I'll think about reducing the clutter. Thanks a lot!
Just ask all your contacts to stop sending/receiving texts and stick to e-mails. Voice and SMS are legacy technologies, so they cost more than pure data. Although, the reliability of a voice connection is higher than the equivalent VoIP tunnel.
Following http links (especially to javascript and css) on https pages opens the door to all kinds of exploits. It undermines most of the security that https brings. The http links can easily be man-in-the-middle attacked, insering content into the protected page. This can be used to steal data, for starters...
Google's exactly the company I'd expect to follow a policy of saying "Don't sue us or we will invalidate your portfolio." I'd be more than a little confident that they could do it, too.

Sure, it's more expensive than a licensing deal, but it's also a much bigger stick than a cross-licensable portfolio - disproportionately so, in my opinion.
He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security (via Ben Franklin)
But I'd bet both of them perform far better than MzScheme.

In any event, it's a "solved problem". The sheer amount of time and effort going into this is silly. Just pick a better language/platform and use it.
"To give an example: the "PRIMES is in P" paper gives a poly time algorithm to determine if a given number is prime or not, but in practice, it runs slower than tests like probabilistic algorithms like Miller-Rabin."

I agree in principle, but the example is a bad one. Here, a deterministic polynomial time algorithm is stacked against probabilistic polynomial time algorithms.

In SAT, we'd have the (hypothetically) polynomial algorithm against exponential time algorithms. Theoretically, the constants in the polynomial might of course be so large as to erase the advantage on non-galactic problem sizes but this happens rarely.
Amazon beats Netflix to purchase LOVEFiLM
Google bans Kongregate from Android Market
Yep, Apple could be the provider of the devices that can play everything! Both the paid, hardware accelerated, hollywood/DRM-ed stuff from ITMS and the free amateur/amazing content of youtube(hopefully harware accelerated eventually too).

Apple supporting both vp8 and h264 would continue to be the company with the best mobile devices, but if they don't embrace the open unemcumbered format that firefox, opera, chrome and youtube uses they will be giving an either/or kind of choice for mobile consumers, they would be making them choose between hollywood and youtube, stating that their costumers cant have both.
Some more info: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/19/kongregate-ceo-jim-greer-o...
The problem with the ellipsoid method is not speed but rather numerical stability. It would work great if we only had "real reals", i.e. reals with infinite precision.
Here's a Nature article that's pretty readable

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/selman/papers/pdf/99.nature.phase....
Mengenal Lebih Dekat Prof DR Ravik Karsidi MS « Dwiki Setiyawan's Blog
If at least local or state governments were barred from loading on debt, these matters would not arise at all. When today's politicians can mortgage the future to pay for present perks, they will surely do it.

If each increase in expenses were immediately covered by an increase in taxes, it would make the public much more aware of the costs of political promises.
Newport beach
Amazon buys remaining stake in Lovefilm DVD service
I was once a resident of California. I know a little more than you probably think I do.
That fact that they fixed the problem seems to be counter to the CEO's statement that it wasn't actually a problem.

They clearly weren't validating all of the form inputs on the server side. Hopefully this was a learning experience for the engineering team.
The US has a class of visas (J1) specifically for trainees and interns. I don't think they are capped like the H1B so they should be easier to get.
It would be wrong, imo, if they were charging a higher tier to use a community built plugin.

The nature of contributing to OSS is that you are spending your time for the benefit of for-profit companies. That is, very possibly, a poor business decision if you are not being compensated directly while doing it. If you aren't being compensated, then you should expect to receive everything the MIT license lists under Section 42: Stuff The End User Owes You.
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Perhaps these concerns are registering. As of this morning the article's headline has appended to it: "(update: option disappears)"
Something is going to happen on startup scene...
Follow the link to get early access to StartupElevator.org
The same word is likely to mean different things to different people. DDG doesn't have the infrastructure to handle this, Google has (with Search History). What you get with DDG is generic Bing results, lightly filered and in a different UI.
A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world
Goes to eleven ...
In case you're wondering, it appears that the volume control on the video player goes to eleven. There's a hacker somewhere in the BBC with a sense of humor.
awesome. couldn't you make your own makeshift home alarm system with this?
Check out http://www.thomasnet.com
As best I understand it, bsnes is purely a bytecode interpreter. It does fancy tricks with stack-swizzling to quickly switch between different parts of the code to get the timing right, but it never ever generates instructions for the host CPU architecture.
That search engine is still Google’s most important and profitable product, to my knowledge.

While I agree that its search engine is its most popular product it is not profitable in its own right. Google claims that "advertising revenues made up 97% of our revenues" in its Q3/2010 filings and that means advertising placed through AdSense/AdWords on other sites too:

We derive most of our additional revenues from offering display advertising management services to advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers, as well as licensing our enterprise products, search solutions, and web search technology.

-- http://investor.google.com/documents/20100930_google_10Q.htm...
I'm in Norway, and a film buff, and I've never heard of them before. If they've done any marketing at all, it has managed to escape me-- which seems unlikely.

So my guess is: not very big in Scandinavia.
Oh, it goes on from that. He makes bizarre comments about jQuery every chance he gets (strange, immature snipes like "your jQuery is showing"). He's obsessed. I just mentioned what I did because I know it would make him feel so vindicated... he's essentially claimed before that jQuery is the reason for all of the world's JavaScript errors.
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I think this is a brilliant idea and this is very cheap. In fact, he put up a bill-board and also he's on Wired now ;) Nice, two birds in one shot ;)
I don't think this is 1960s mentality, it's just new rules introduced post 9/11. Before that, it cost something like $50, and now it can be in the range of several $1K. Can you document your experience further?
Yes! More of this, please! I don't care if the world doesn't need Yet Another Kernel. What it does need is more inquisitive creativity, more ideas being thrown at the wall, and a few less nay-sayers.
No, yes (10x), yes, grow the user base.
8 Things Grandmas and College Students Have In Common
You might be surprised to find out how many things they actually have in common (although not always for the same reasons). Things such as...
My secret hope is that Google is letting themselves be martyred before they launch a crusade against the entire patent system. If they let consumers feel the impact of litigation, they might build some public awareness of the problem.
Wikileaks:  beware the danger of Too Much Transparency
What is the chart measuring? The article implies that it represents App Store visits. Do they buy anything, though? That's the metric that's important to developers.
It's pretty close to what I have right now:

* Wake up (and get up) at my leisure: no alarm - I'm able to maintain this for the most part, unless of course there are specific commitments.

* Catch up on info-glut before breakfast - forces me to get through it all faster. Work-related email and information is included in this set. Anything not supremely important gets sent to Instapaper so I can get over my need to feel like I should read something, and promptly forget about it and move on with my life.

* 30-60 minutes of exercise (usually a jog or the treadmill, but swimming when convenient) that lets me digest the information I've just been exposed to if necessary, and think about what's important today. I take notes during.

* Shower / hygiene (also good for thinking)

* Breakfast (preferably alone and in quiet), while I outline my plan for the day.

* Work (repeat as necessary). I work while signed onto restricted IM accounts that make me available to very few people - namely, work associates and immediately close friends with whom I can be completely free to ignore or converse with at my leisure. When I need/want to focus, I ignore. When things are slower, I'll socialize more.

* Breaks - Sometimes I'll interrupt work with a longer form break. Sometimes a walk, sometimes a conversation. Never RSS/Twitter/Facebook.

* Stop for lunch / dinner when I'm hungry. Either meet up with people or read longer-form non-fiction if solo (picking off vignettes from Instapaper)

* Evenings (read: late night) before bed is for [optional] leisure. If I'm productive and enjoying my work, I won't stop and I'll cancel plans as appropriate. If I'm not enjoying my work but I'm behind schedule, I'll keep going if I can. Otherwise, I'll do any subset of {social, videogames, reading, watching, writing}.

* Sleep iff I'm at the point where I want to sleep more than whatever I'm doing.

Days of travel, guests, or otherwise special significance deviate from this quotidian rhythm.
I think this is his website: http://keithclarksolutions.wordpress.com/
Do you know how one would go about this? Can Google actively invalidate patents which they are not being accused of infringing?
Europe is a lot bigger than the UK. There is practically no service to most European countries by LoveFilm, therefore "Netflix of Europe" is an almost entirely inaccurate description of this service. The UK isn't Europe.
I don't understand. Why would anyone read playboy on an internet machine? That's like getting an iPhone and calling a special number to hear what the temperature is in your city.
Well, the decapped chips have been photographed, but they haven't been made into working diagrams like that 6502 one.

The important thing about the decapped chips is that any on-board ROM has been dumped (electrically, not visually) so that they can be emulated with an opcode interpreter, just like other emulators.
Security through obscurity? It will get abused eventually.
I must sadly agree. Woobius is written in Flex (Java-like ActionScript 3) and Rails. Guess which I've spent most time in over the last 3 years?
>I wish I could end this essay with some sort of moral, or an idea for solving this problem, but there’s not much. All we can do is try to cut as many bad technologies as possible out of our lives, and just tolerate the rest.

The author said they can't extract a good moral, but the moral is really self-evident. Don't distract programmers!
That kills the scrollbar. A better way to do it would be to show far fewer comments per page, so that you get approximately a screenful at a time, then make the "next" and "previous" links huge and blindingly obvious. I think you should scroll or navigate, not both.
Yes, we are in violent agreement then.

Easy to generate random hard instances does not at all mean that highly structured "non-random" instances can't be hard. The "phase transition" only means that the fraction that are hard at a given non-critical ratio decreases with n, but there very well could be a large absolute number, that increases with n. The space of problems of size n grows exponentially, after all.
Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?
EU carbon trading system taken down after major online fraud
Free Adobe Flash Cs3 Crack, Key, Activation Code
My Presentation Creation Process
Reminds me of,

Facebook is more like undergrad. Something needs to be done, and people do it. Most of the time they don't read the literature on the subject, or consult experts about the "right way" to do it, they just sit down, write the code, and make things work. Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens, they fix their problems, replace bottlenecks with scalable components, and (in most cases) move on to the next thing.

http://www.quora.com/Which-is-better-to-work-for-Google-or-F...
One would think it would be relatively trivial for "More" to become "256 More" or similar...
There's a moral, but the author couldn't find it. The moral is not "don't distract programmers" but:

Programmers need to grow up.

If you program just to program, or "solve problems" as so many put it, then of course, you will be miserable when your pure programming is disrupted.

But work on something bigger - something you believe in - which gives you a big-picture outlook, you'll look at programming as the means to your end. And you will suffer a lot less. Even with no technical change. Because the pleasure you experience will be mostly to do with achieving your bigger goal, rather than (just) crafting the most beautiful line of code.

So many of the programmers I know set themselves up to be used as tools by people with ideas, because they claim they only care about "solving problems." So they get themselves hired by people with "interesting problems." And then, because they end up miserable, they quit in short order (1 year, 2 years, or less)... and repeat the cycle again.

It's not that jobs are inherently terrible, but that the way certain groups of very smart and capable people LOOK at jobs.

Granted, lots of people who want to "do a startup" do the same thing. They look for an interesting problem, not a bigger thing they want to achieve in the world. Their work is all about "the problem," and so they get stuck... and work on it for 1 year or 2, before they quit and look for another, more interesting problem.
Photos of the Tunisian revolution
This is the human equivalent of Amdahl's Law. Say that you have a boring task where 90% of it can be automated, and that part can be sped up by a factor of 100. Now, the workload that used to take up 90% of your time takes up only 0.9%. The part that can't be automated remains constant, however, and so you now spend over 90% of your time doing work that can't be automated. The total amount of work you can do increases dramatically, but a much higher fraction of it (by time) will be distasteful.

In practice, it doesn't seem quite as bad as the article makes it out to be. I've found that by now, I spend the vast majority of my workday learning things, and the limiting factor in my productivity is how fast my brain can learn. Typing speed ceased to be a bottleneck in high school when I got up around 90 WPM. Thinking speed ceased to be a bottleneck a couple years after I started programming professionally, once I became fluent enough with the syntax and basic libraries of the languages I typically use that I don't have to reach for the docs all the time. The bottleneck is now learning libraries, data sources, requirements, and algorithms that I don't typically use. And while this can be a little annoying - it's mentally exhausting and not great for the ego that my productivity is limited by intrinsic problems with my brain - getting paid to learn things all day is a pretty nice state of affairs.
That was exactly the first thing that came into my head too.

The trouble with declaring a particular revision of HTML as 'supported' is that a standard as complex as HTML (or ECMAScript, or CSS) has many parts, and it's quite possible to correctly and completely support some parts and not others.

For example, HTML 4 defines that tables can have a <col> element with an "align" attribute that declares the visual alignment of cells in that column. HTML 4 became a recommendation in December 1999, and yet I know of no browser that supports the "align" attribute on <col> elements. Does that mean that every browser has to mark HTML 4 as 'not supported'?
You can argue all you want! I have just expressed my honest belief that all successful sites use "PR and faffery" in some way or the other, even if its not obvious.
The only thing I know about lovefilm is they RL spam my postbox with "offers" that go into the bin none of which have mentioned that you can do anything other than get DVDs by post. I looked at their site today and it seems I can watch their entire catalog online. Useful information perhaps?

And I really question "very big"; asking around 20 or so friends (20+ all very IT literate/gamers) pretty much everyone said something like "who?" or "they do delivered DVDs right?".
Your argument turns on Gruber hating Flash for being closed. He doesn't: He hates Flash because he thinks it's crap

Not entirely:

Let me be clear, though: there is nothing wrong with playing a video in Flash. I mean that seriously, no sarcasm. What there’s something wrong with is requiring Flash Player to play video. That’s the whole point of the HTML5 <video> element: to enable web video without requiring the use of proprietary plugins.

From http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/practical_vs_idealistic