skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though I consider the specific situation with iBooks and DRM to be both mild and reasonable, it does invoke a thorny legal and moral question: exactly how much of your rights are you allowed to sign away voluntarily?

Extreme ends of the spectrum are very clear: selling yourself into indentured servitude is a violation of basic human rights, while selling your time for eight hours a day is not.

Many advocates for digital freedom would argue that allowing customers (particularly the non-tech-savvy who don't know what they're agreeing to) to give up the rights to their devices and content is inherently immoral. I don't agree entirely, but I see their point, and if there was a ballot initiative proposing consumer protections against things like DRM lock-in, I would likely vote for it.
Why would you want to go digging through old documents for the recipe when you could use a chromatograph?
With object-oriented I/O, the write primitive is unnecessary (1983)
Yea, androids is much better than iOS. The notification system is by far the worst thing about iOS, but I'm sure that the iOS solution will be good when they do revamp it.
I am running 4.3 beta, so I have got the first I couldn't care less about the second. Why do you need better ways to get interrupted? I honestly cannot understand all this talk about Android having better notification system. I can see missed calls and new messages on the apps badges, that's enough for me.
I've heard a proposal, which I generally tend to think is a good idea: eliminate the insanity defense, but give judges the option to send criminals to the insane asylum rather than prison.

Does anyone with greater knowledge see flaws with this idea?
As amazing as many of this we have are, we should never lose the hunger to solve any of the 25 listed reasons. They are real and they are serious.
That's quite the course correction, going from backbone/node to CLI/Haskell.
You forget that the kindle isn't an app, it's a device, and the convenience of the kindle on alternate platforms is just that. It's still simply added value to those platforms which get the app. This won't hurt Amazon -- they'll pull their app and Apple will lose some value on their platform.

Realistically, it has cost Amazon nothing to support the iOS platform other than a few weeks of dev time to build the app and deploy it to the store. Complying with these ridiculous demands would cause a zero cost platform to suddenly have a very noticeable cost.
FIOS is the happy exception to the rampant crappiness in the US broadband ISP field. Unfortunately, it never seems to be available. My parents in rural MD have had it for years, but it hasn't been available in my past three apartments in NYC, two in the Bay Area, or one in the LA area. Instead, I've been stuck with inconsistent on-and-off service from cable providers who are all basically the same except in name.
I know this is off-topic but does a similar thing exist for the nexus one? Is there a repository for such files?
Louis CK is hilarious, but this guy is not an asshole.

Dying, aging, being sick, drinking, eating and breathing pollution are not trivial problems. We ought to demand solutions for them.
A bit more on v.2 side buttons:
Make them on one side only, probably the standard right side, to account for need of opposing thumb's empty space. Make it 3 buttons, all three for single action contextual buttons for single action context menus; top & bottom can also act as scrollers for lists and long messages, middle button being 'OK' button. This button layout will still be useful even if you have a touch screen because of the small screen real estate.

A bit more nitpicking suggestions:

- First 2 videos are too noisy, replace/edit/re-do if you have time.

- Overall tone of the website and watch's usage and features is a bit too hacker oriented. This may be the audience you're after now. You'll need to sell to mainstream audience after you figure out what they are after. IMHO, its the smartphone/tablet pairing. Do not take no as an answer, either talk to Apple to get around iOS terms or if that fails, start with the jailbreak route.
Knowledge of likely punishment and knowledge of wrongness are entirely separate things. Protesting the government in Iran might get me punished, but that doesn't make it wrong.
Also, static electricity will build up on a wire like that unless you bleed the charge off to ground with something like a nice high-ohm resistor.
IE9 is a huge improvement over previous versions. The big improvement in IE9 is the attitude that MS have with the browser. Clearly good HTML5 support is a big goal of Microsoft's, as well as speed, stability and javascript performance.

These things were just not there before. Sure the feature set is still somewhat lacking but they are developing at a great pace. At this rate it will soon be a true competitor to the modern browsers.
Where can I meet a cool and smart co-founder in the SF Bay area?
I have had a couple ideas for a few months that I want to start hacking on. I have some coding skills but I would need someone with hax0r skills to help me make this happen. Where is a good place to meet parties interested in forging powerful alliances for good?
My HDTV antenna is a paperclip stuck into the back of a TiVo. I get solid HD reception, no artifacts or other problems. It is all about how close you are to the broadcast towers. I have line of sight to towers that are about 12 miles away.
don't even post articles from MG here. Too bias and too useless.
The next big thing, connected machines
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=air+time

2.	air time: the time you spend sexually with women or vice versa

I'm getting old. I would have had no idea.
What size is the cardboard tube?
dying is a problem? you need to read more sci-fi.
Ask HN:  What are LBS like foursquare and Gowalla missing?
Six hours in the air as opposed to faster-than-sound flight or instant teleportation or virtual reality?

Yes, we're still in the stone age.
"Because so much of the game revolves around it, my first task was the creation of the map. ... You can see that it is indeed an intricate representation of the world.

How, people ask me, did I digitize it? My answer drops jaws: I did it by hand.

I started with a map of the world, which I traced freehand onto graph paper. I then redrew the lines to conform to the rectangular grid of the graph paper. I then scaled up the map to be more appropriate to the Mac's screen.

This rescaling was non-integral, so I did it by hand again, estimating rescaling values for each line segment. Some fudging here and there gave me the final map, represented on some two dozen sheets of graph paper. The only task remaining was to get it into the computer.

I sat down with a tape recorder and started reading coordinates from the graph paper: "Nigeria. Origin at X = 138, Y = 227. One step north, 1 east, 2 north, 3 east ..." Then I sat at the computer and replayed the tape, typing in the values as they came tumbling off the tape.

The string of directional steps marking the course of the border was translated into a compact sequence of numerals and single letters, like so: NE2N3E.

I then wrote routines that converted these strings into the graphic representations of the countries."
Isn't that what the insanity defense already generally does?
If the "solution" to paying taxes is privatizing everything, I'm all for living in the stone age.
Show HN: voice activated mp3 search for chrome browser
It looked like he went to the 4th row to find the daily double, then just went through all the cheapest questions, as he was most likely to answer those. He finished all of the $200s, then went to the $400s, etc. I don't think it was to trip up his opponents, I think it was to have a better chance at answering.
Does the USA even have lifetime psych confinement?

Different jurisdictions have different laws. Loughner looks set to be tried both under United States federal law and Arizona state law.

John Hinckley, Jr.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hi...

was found not guilty by reason of insanity after attempting to assassinate President Reagan. He has been confined since then as an involuntarily committed psychiatric patient who is deemed a danger to other persons, although he has had some supervised furloughs from the hospital. He is likely to be under court supervision his entire life. The law under which Hinckley escaped conviction has since been changed, so that an insanity defense for a crime committed in DC is now much harder for the defendant.
ok so programmable bluetooth item that vibrates, this is a great idea, so great I'm going to let this comment about it be lost amongst the sea o' comments
Yes, psychological treatment is almost ridiculously obviously a better thing to do with criminals than lock them in boxes for an extremely long time. The problem is not with the idea, but with changing a system as entrenched as the prison-industrial complex.
It can hardly be disputed that 1. pretty much everyone on the web is affected by dom rendering speed, 2. dom rendering is vastly slower in ie than chrome / firefox (for their related versions)

IE has a large market share, that has absolutely no correlation to its quality as a piece of software, web developers have to make their stuff work in ie because of its market share, lots of large web apps* either degrade or do not work in internet explorer even with the tremendous amount of extra effort required to develop for it comparatively to firefox + chrome

* Google Wave didnt support ie, offline gmail support is firefox only? google drawings didnt work in ie last time I checked, I am sure maps degrades in parts as well
> Firefox, the WebKit team, and Opera are basically already operating on this model. Team IE isn't.

And for the reasons I have explained elsewhere in this discussion, I think team IE are the only ones who have an approach that can actually work in the long term. A standard isn't a standard if it's constantly changing, and progress at a rate the world can keep up with is more useful than browsers progressing at a much faster rate but actual web pages not progressing at all.
I wonder if we are actually happier than people x years ago. And of course whether it is at all possible to determine that.
Laser-assisted rockets
Check out your local startup scene. Go to every event and talk to other like minded individuals. Going to conferences can also be a good way to meeting people.
I've occasionally bought books via my Kindle device. More often I buy using my computer's web browser and have the book delivered to the kindle.
"MeeGo now appears to be a solution looking for a problem."

Nuff said
Regardless of which model you think is right, the reality of the situation is that HTML will be changing all the time.
Do you say that because you think his search history is the piece of evidence that is going to prevent him from making a successful insanity plea?

The requirements for an insanity defense are far too strict in their current state after the reform legislation in 1984. Legal sanity is a backwards concept, but given the amount of effort that is being put into this case (and that he's being tried in federal court for killing a federal judge) this is exceptional and not something we should use to define what is common practice.

However, it's certainly wrong and I dislike it, but at least my internet license will be shiny.
Ask HN: Is there a YC 3-month road map for companies?
I know there are companies and startup teams of different sizes and different stages that enter YC but if you are entering the program and starting from scratch are there any milestones that you should be achieving at certain stages that relate to product and customer development?
Apple Says Chinese Supplier Made Changes After Suicides
Jeff Atwood wrote about how the internet has overthrown the major telephone companies, specifically naming Bell: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/the-importance-of-n...
I think it's funny (ie., sad) that Bell is pretty much completely in control in Canada. The federal government overruled the CRTC, but the CRTC has set a very poor precedent.
We seemed to have lucked out with FIOS in MD. Just about the entire central part of the state is covered. The exception seems to be Baltimore city.

FIOS has also helped to push competition with Comcast here too.
It's not about customers, who don't necessarily care to whom they pay $9/month, NetFlix or Apple.

It's about platform vendors who are being strong-armed into providing a huge chunk of their revenue to a company who is doing relatively little to earn it, proportional to the amounts involved.

Apple is no better or worse than any other corporation for pursuing this policy. They have the installed userbase to call the shots, and they know it, and they'd be foolish to not take advantage of it.

But they're also putting publishers in a tough spot, especially when they're already struggling with a new business model and a market of unknown size. Apple does run the risk of killing the golden goose, or alienating publishers to the point where they pull their wares from iOS entirely, which is bad for both users and the platform.

In short: of course Apple can do this. It doesn't mean they should.
Going through common antenna design compromises...

Depends on your location, of course, but the most effective thing I could do is get out of this valley. Next, I'd straighten the antenna wire and move the antenna outdoors (with a 75Ω coax line connecting it to the TV). You could also adjust the length so it's resonant at a particular frequency, but that will weaken the signal you receive on other channels. Alternatively, cutting it way longer than the minimum resonant length (like an order of magnitude or so) seems to make for a pretty forgiving frequency response. Then again, commercial broadcast transmitters are probably running enough output power that unobstructed line of sight makes more of a difference than anything else can.
That "definition" includes eight distinct meanings. In time, any of them might be useful and the word might become an accepted part of the English language. For now, it just muddies the waters, when there are clear and unambiguous alternatives available. Perhaps that is why not one of the on- or off-line dictionaries I have just checked recognises any similar meaning of the word "performant".

This post has been brought to you by the "ironic parallels with the topic at hand" department.
very good article...but I think it's underestimating the culture shift of companies not even considering IPOs in that range
Wired has a short article on removing Kindle DRM at < http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from... >. You can also use the more technical solution at < http://stackoverflow.org/wiki/Removing_DRM_from_Kindle_books >, which is more annoying for one-offs but much easier to automate.
We are entering what I call the "Orwellian Era" of computing. Google, Apple, and your data carriers (wired & wireless) are battling it out right now to become the one all-powerful big brother.

Encryption will absolutely be outlawed in the future.
Mine is just a copper wire, no fancy cardboard tubes or coils.
You can order tasks and to-do lists so doesn't that meet the needs? First task is most important, last is the least.
Hackathon 22: Redesigning Facebook's internal image sharing tool
I went to fiddle with the cable and noticed it was not even plugged in.

Back in college, we were watching a, umm, adult video on my roommate's VCR. The guy from the room next door walked past, and said "oh, you're watching the movie too?". It turns out that we'd mistakenly connected the VCR's RF output to the antenna, so the guy next door was watching our transmitted movie. (although his picture was poor)
Plus I could easily imagine a View.io-like app directed to event planners and attendees that leverages the badge printing service: an event-specific "mobile app that 'tells you what you need to know, wherever you are' could be useful for people networking (like their original business plan), visitors new to the conference city, or promotions of related events/services.

When you have to turn away interested, paying customers, it's time to increase your rates and leverage that relationship to sell them more products and services.
I'm not sure I understand point #2 (decimalization). Can someone explain what he is getting at?
Forget security, programming is mathematics. If you program, you should be doing this whether you're writing security code or not. Nothing saves me more keystrokes or debugging time than proving things about my algorithm before I code it, and I know this comes from math because my CS-only friends can't do it. I don't care if you want to go in to algorithm theory or get a software job at a bank, if you're a CS major, you need to take some rigorous math or you'll be at a disadvantage.
So what is the name of the company who bought the label business?
Both Finnished? Nice pun. Regardless, Qt was Norwegian originally. Qt is better off with out a parent company that doesn't need or understand them. Nokia's new business partner Microsoft might appreciate them staying in a cage, though.
Could you say more about why Bump's implementation of network-based queued logging is "hacked-up" while facebook's (by implication) isn't?

To answer your question, simply put, no one here had heard about Scribe.
Limiting speeds on roads that cut through farmland is probably a good idea. Imagine the damage that would be caused if a car hurtling down the rocketway at 90 intersected with a loose cow, tractor, or someone checking a mailbox that's perilously close to the road.

Drivers have time to react at 60.
Caltrain July Proposed Service Changes
You could always go back to the jungle. No taxes there at all.
This is the problem: the things you claim certainly can be disputed, not least because the second hasn't been true for several versions of IE. I know, the web apps I work on do a lot of this stuff, and there has been roughly an order of magnitude improvement in performance from IE6 to IE7 and then again from IE7 to IE8, which is now close enough to the other browsers that we don't notice the difference in day-to-day use.

I think you're making my point for me with the rest of your post: if you read it back, you'll see that you repeatedly contradict yourself about what does and doesn't work across different browsers, not just for IE but for Firefox vs. Chrome as well.
Because there's another weakest next in line.
Hillary Clinton's speech: Shades of hypocrisy on Internet freedom
Perhaps Google's tests of gigabit internet to the home (Stanford, future U.S. communities) will help break the broadband logjam: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/bringing-ultra-high-s....
Whether they have "Mathematics" on their diploma is immaterial; I'd bet good money that most of these guys took some real serious math classes in school.
Not so at all. The person traveling slowly enough to break the otherwise smooth flow of traffic is creating a danger exponentially greater than the one created by a honking horn. If they're drunk or severely fatigued (as opposed to merely distracted) then the problem is even worse, and the need for corrective cues from surrounding drivers is even greater.

Contrary to what you say, the signal provided by the honking horn - while certainly negative - is actually pro-social and pro-safety, in that it's prompting an anti-social and dangerous actor to change his behavior.

Obviously, if this corrective behavior extends to aggressive tail-gating, screaming and yelling, brandishing firearms, or any other objectively dangerous act that makes the honker a part of the problem, then yes, they're both in the wrong. Once the honker's response escalates to actual rage, then he is - almost by definition - more dangerous than the trigger.

However, if the necessary negative feedback is provided with a reasonable measure of restraint (i.e. one that's likely to reduce, and not exacerbate the larger problem) then it's a good thing for everyone. Indeed, the willingness to assert yourself for the sake of safety in situations where others are distracted to the point of becoming general impediments is something that distinguished good drivers from bad.

And yes, promoting good flow is synonymous with promoting safety. There is an inverse relationship between the quality of flow and the likelihood of a collision.
This is somewhat answered here

http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html

in the section called "Office Hours."

But basically the answer is no. Each company should go as fast as it can, but how fast you can reach a milestone like e.g. getting a beta in the hands of users depends on what you're building and when you started. Some startups can have a beta in the hands of users within a week, while others might take a year.

To paraphrase Einstein, a startup should launch as soon as possible, but no sooner.
I don't know if they will be successful in their endeavors but if Apple follows through, there will be a backlash.

Take Netflix, for example. Does it make sense to provide in-app subscriptions for 30% discounted distributor rate ($8 * 70% = $5.60) when that same account can be used for Roku, etc?

No. What will happen is that all these service providers will make an Apple subscription (which has separate features) that won't work with other devices.

Balkanization of content channels... this is not consumer friendly.
word of mouth is typically a one-by-one recommendation, where doing your own research is straightforward and quick. ie, if a friend recommends a movie for you to watch, you might check it out, read the reviews, and then add it to your netflix queue.

with a long list, doing the due diligence becomes orders-of-magnitude more labor intensive, so users are more incented to just copy/paste an entire list. in the case of netflix queues, perhaps there isn't too much at stake... but with a domain blacklist, SEOs and spammers have their entire livelihoods at stake... if this extension takes off, and if google starts using this data, i would expect well-funded SEOs to start heavily promoting their lists (with their sites omitted, and their competitor's sites included).

of course hacker-news users may be immune from such tricks, but we represent just a minority of the data that google will get from this tool... if it goes mainstream, i am sad to admit that my parents are likely fall for "follow these simple steps to dramatically improve your google results"
Greek official wants to magically transfer gov debt to Greek citizens
A big problem with these types of ciphers is that you need to transmit the key somehow. If you have had no previous encrypted contact with the intended receiver, you have to get the key to that person in plaintext. This is why public key cryptography was invented.

As a side note, isn't this just a less secure Enigma cipher? Alan Turing would have your u-boats for dinner.
I didn't know Charlie had a math degree! That's two. :)

Rolf Rolles is more of a security researcher --- a lot more --- than Daniel Bernstein. But I'll concede it! He's a third.

We're at 3. Do you think I can't name 10 more notable security researchers, justifying each of them, to back up my point here?
Considering chrome and firefox are switching off websockets until they resolve the security issues that wouldn't be very viable. I guess you could fallback to flash sockets or long polling.
Booga booga!
Imagine if the PC revolution had unfolded this way. It's pretty crazy to think about.

Essentially, Apple is acting as the big box retailer, but without any other big box retailers, they set their margins and the software vendor just has to live with them. No real competition.

Not sure how I actually feel about this. On one hand, Apple is creating an ecosystem, and all they're asking for is $99 to distribute apps. Much better terms than $x / seat for MS Studio and the like. But, they're going to insert themselves at every aspect of the chain when they don't necessarily have to. It gives me an uneasy feeling, but I think the company is optimizing for business instead of goodwill.