skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm truly worried about the progress of science and useful arts. I don't give a damn about money in and of itself.

Accordingly, I release what software I can as FOSS and have put other works into the public domain. In one case, I assigned the copyright on something I wrote to a university so that they could use it in one of their classes, for free, of course.

If this is all a game, I'm doing my best to play it so that everyone wins.
Is it possible we could stick to relatively new content here? I read through all of the Netscape-related JWZ stuff more than 10 years ago. I suspect that anyone who has an interest in the rise and fall of Netscape has done the same.
Is anyone doing this at a site where serious money is involved? For instance, that 4 minutes of downtime described in the article would be a loss of something like $120k at Amazon.
Infringement suits are expensive. It's premature to ask how many YC startups have made camp on landmines, because very few are big enough yet to set them off.
Just a thought: maybe the sound loop they are referring to is a stock piece from elsewhere, that both Apple and Nokia have separately bought license to use?

Like you hear bits by E. S. Posthumus (http://www.esposthumus.com/) all over the place. One of their tracks was use (with permission IIRC) in plasmapong (killed by the kind folk at the game company previously know as relevant) and I've heard part of the same track (and others that I think are their output) looped behind film previews and adverts. It was odd when I heared it behind an advert once - the game immediately spring to mind when-ever that advert was on and I could never remember what the product was afterwards either...
See, the article is not arguing that. The article has nothing against latent variable(s) to account for what we observe as intelligence. What it is against is, misapplication of methodology. The myth is not in a latent variable summarizing intelligence, that may very well exists as admitted by the author. The myth is that g is derived in a meaningful way and explains the correlations in data instead of being a by product of the fact that the data is made to correlate (these days) and is just a measure of the correlation of the tests (now made to correlate). Again, I remain sceptical you read the article in full.

g is not as useful as T, since its ability as an explanatory variable and verification in experimental settings are sorely lacking.

Also, even if a valid concept of a single explanatory variable for intelligence were created, I personally, remain sceptical of the scope of its usefulness considering the space of complexity at hand (humans, genes, environment,...) and likely a lot less profound and far reaching as the insights of Boltzmann. And on the political side, the capacity for damage it would entail could be large - many people's lives could be impacted negatively. So it would have to be wielded carefully, one eugenics movement is enough.
Ask HN: Am I correct about FOSS licenses and open source software?
Earlier today, I tried to answer frederickcook's question about which software licenses are compatible with proprietary software. I posted my answer several hours late on a small thread, so I am reposting it here for your convenience and/or corrections. (The original is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210218)

* If you are building a website and you do NOT redistribute the website's software (e.g. allow people to run the website on their own server), you can incorporate code from most open source licenses. Specifically:

* The MIT, BSD, PSF, and Apache licenses are fantastic for proprietary websites, even if you do redistribute the website's software. (In which case you will need to include a disclaimer, copyright notice, and/or copy of the license, depending on the details of that specific license.)

* Libraries licensed under the AGPL may NOT be used for proprietary websites. The regular GPL's language is unclear about proprietary websites, so you may want to avoid GPL libraries altogether. (I have been told that the FSF claims that the GPL covers websites. Note that the AGPL was written to firmly and explicitly address this issue.)

* You may use LGPL libraries, but if you modify them then you may have to release the code that you modified. (Due to the aforementioned uncertainty.) Again, I am not certain about this, but I have seen that claimed before.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and nothing I say is legal advice. Use the information I provide at your own risk. It may be wrong. I have no legal liability if you use it.

Feel free to correct me. I would be happy to hear that I am incorrect regarding the GPL.
"How do you come to this conclusion?"

How do you come to the opposite? It's not like there's an enormous repository of objective data we can just go run to and crunch numbers on with pre-agreed algorithms.

However, I would say that you're committing a logical error; we have a certain set of patent laws, we have software leadership, and you seem to conclude therefore there is a causative relationship. That's not logically sound.

What I see out there in the world is that very few people are creating software because they are incentivized by a patent system to do so. It's almost absurd to think that someone would be incentivized by a system guaranteed to get back to them a year after their application or so. Nor is the patent system successfully putting knowledge into the public domain; in order to fulfill the contract a patent is supposed to be offering one should be able to reconstruct the patent from the description, generally either trivial or impossible. They create software for other reasons. On the other hand, there's a lot of litigation out there for no real gain.

It's not hard to conclude the value of patents are negative in the software domain when almost all the entries on the ledger are negative, and the negative ones are also larger than the positive ones.

I'd also observe that I did not say the metric is benefit to the patenter, which I think you may have missed. I said benefit to society. This idea is written into the very Constitutional authorization for Congress to create laws regarding patents and copyright in the first place. So the idea that the relevant metric is benefit to society isn't obscure or something I made up, it's directly from the authorization granted to the government in the first place, I couldn't be any more mainstream.
Headline is misleading.

The article only mentions "a genuine stuxnet copy" (the Stuxnet "application") whereas the headline title mentions "source code to Stuxnet" which implies the C or assembler or code was used to create Stuxnet in the first place (which be an incredible find indeed).

The article seems rather ridiculous in any case. I recall an analysis of Stuxnet describing it as a conventional virus and it became visible specifically because like other viruses, it spread through a variety of systems.
This is the RFC April fools from 1998. You can see a list of all the April Fools RFC's here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools_Day_RFC
Boarding school?

http://www.seedfoundation.com/index.php/seed-schools/marylan...

It's one possibility, anyways. (There are a myriad of reasons to be uncomfortable about essentially putting the responsibility for raising poor children on the state, but the SEED schools seems to be working).
is this mostly for marketing agencies and stuff? i'm not sure why i'd want to buffer my tweets, instead of just send them right away.
It usually means: "I don't like it".
The curious thing is that he uses Github... does he expect forks? Or patches?
The article pretty much specifies that it's just a Stuxnet copy. There seems to be no basis for HN headline.
OK, sorry to be pedantic, but, no. MobileSafari != WebKit view.
At a surface, conscious level, you're right. Google wants any tolls paid to appear in their results to be paid to them.

But considering the whole competitive ecosystem, and indirect effects over time, nasty SEO can help make Google money. Consider these mechanisms:

• when the natural results get polluted, the vetted AdWords placements become relatively more attractive to clickers and advertisers.

• Google' self-image requires they reserve some ostensibly 'non-paid' slots on the front-page. If in practice these all still have a high cash cost, even though paid to third parties, then everyone needs to open their wallets, rather than just do pure-of-heart helpful info-design, to appear on the front-page. That is, amounts paid to third parties serve as a short of shadow bid, placing a rising floor on the value of AdWords placements.

• SEO tactics that mildly or temporarily fool Google, but that Google then overcomes, provide a dynamic, ever-growing barrier-to-entry to other later-entrant search engines. Competitors don't have to do as well on the same web Google first mastered; they have to do as well on the web mutated by Google's economic incentives and iterated cat-and-mouse game.
So, you're essentially promoting terrorism… neat.
I really hope Anon keeps a happy attitude. I don't want to see the governments getting stupid on everyone because they feel the must do something about things they really have no control over.

What I mean is this: Anon or others with similar resources will always be able to take governments to brinkmanship. I say that because governments always want to have the upper-hand. Of course, in some places (like the internet), the only way they can really have the upper-hand is to destroy it, because its very nature (evolution and breadth) means they will never be able to maintain the upper-hand. They are only one player, a good one, but they aren't the referee.
NLP: Determining support or opposition from Congressional transcripts
From the point of view of the TSA, maybe. In reality, it's just talking and sharing information.
If you don't think about it too hard, the idea of a life-compiler sure does sound kind of godlike.
I hate to say it but I really want a Groupon for Activities (ONLY).

Horseback riding, trap shooting, skiing, fishing, and that kind of thing. A site that gives me something to do on the weekends when I'm in the mood for an activity.
There are a number of caveats, but bugsy is essentially correct in how to do it. It's those caveats that make life difficult.

I don't remember all of them, but you can't disclaim some things like moral rights (usually not applicable, but they relate to things like vandalism of the work & the right to attribution as the author and vary by jurisdiction), with some works like music, you can end up with the licensing organizations collecting royalties on it without your authorization, there are always trademark issues to consider, doubly so for some special trademarks like that of the Red Cross and the Olympics which are enshrined in laws that implement international treaties, and probably a host of other things, including strange things like common law copyrights (there was a case in NY about what should have been public domain music falling back under copyright a few years back).

So... yeah, you can disclaim your work into the public domain, but there are still gotchas out there and you need proper legal advice to avoid them even when you're using what should be copyright-free works, because there are all sorts of weird formalities like the requirement in the USA that copyrights can't transfer without a "written memorandum of transfer."

If you just want people to be able to use your software, I'd probably just use a BSD license instead of the public domain. It's permissive enough that it shouldn't create problems for anyone.
It's particularly odd because he was writing for DirectX/x86, and thus had lots of power compared to the contemporary console hardware. Wolf3D(1992) used C; Ultima 7(also 1992) used C++. RCT came out in 1999, when this transition was essentially complete, with the possible exception of a few holdout platforms, e.g, Game Boy Color.

On the other hand, Sawyer did have some rationale to continue going all-ASM, since he had been building up the engine code over the course of the decade, and when he first made it for Transport Tycoon(1994), hand-optimizing the rendering code was probably the only way to achieve a smooth high-res isometric renderer.
Yeah, just noticing it.

I actually figured out what the basic strategy was, but Doug dug up a ton of data on exactly what they were buying. Some of it is kind of insidery stuff you'd want to know if you were an SEO but not if you were a typical Times reader. (David Segal does a really impressive job in general of writing about this stuff in a way that's understandable to the average person. I hope he does an article about white hat SEO some time, so I can cite it when I explain SEO to my clients.)
There is no such thing as fair pricing, the only price is the lowest you can get (if you are the buyer) or the highest you can get (if you are the seller).

Getting a fair price is handing power to your enemy in a zero sum game.
Skype and a computer with a camera?

Seems like it fits all your requirements.
When I'm writing this, most of the articles on the top HN page are from today or yesterday. The rest are a few days old, a month tops.

And then there is this one and some other that's from 2007.

I think that's pretty much a good ratio. I'm sorry that you've read this particular article already but sticking just to a new content wouldn't completely solve that anyway (unless Hacker News is your only source).

Personally, I've found the log both fascinating and illuminating. And for the record, I honestly didn't even know I should "have an interest in the rise and fall of Netscape". Maybe a critical flaw on my part, but there you go.

I haven't found this article 5 years ago because I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for it.

You can never fill Hacker News in a way that would please everyone and where all the articles would be fresh and worth reading. As long as there's a decent quality threshold and a sensible new/old ratio, it's all right.
You can buy a DNA synthesizer on eBay: http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=dna+synthesizer
Wait until this game comes out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0-lsyo28SU&HD=1

Eve Online + procedurally generated + 'minecraft-solo' ambition.

More link and description here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bykpz/this_space_mmo...
This is exactly what I'm trying to do. Please sign up for our beta test at UpOut.com.

We also have simple and clean filters... already have 200+ submissions just from my friends.

We're also planning to put in a bunch of great plug ins.
We're doing something similar but got it going for most major cities out there. We have a different UI though. Your site reminds me a lot of Toronto.com
Software authors are different from musicians - we don't go to the government and pay money to have our problems fixed by fiat.

So thats why the price should be different too.
The trolls are rampant and ill-informed. Socialcam is a Justin.tv project under a new brand and all of the founders are still with the company.

Only someone without a functional understanding of basic math could look at our funding history and believe that the founders own less than 10% of the company.
data-powered insights. love it.
Iran's opposition planning protests (Anon shows support)
Roller Coaster Tycoon came out in 1999. Superscalar pipelines were already the norm (the Pentium Pro had been out for nearly 5 years at that point).
Flavien Brebion, not quite famous but is making a highly anticipated sci-fi game. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28M...
Mac MXF to iMovie Converter - How to import MXF to iMovie on Mac?
People have already forked it, obviously as a joke: https://github.com/TeMPOraL/dna/network
The existence of a contrary view is not in and of itself a contradiction to a point.

I've read that section. I don't believe it to be a contradiction of the parent. If anything, it strongly contributes to the point that alexqgb is making.

The quotes you've strung together appear to make a separate point in rebuttal to alexqgb, but it's selective quoting and I don't think it is a good representation of the flow of the article.

You could present the logic you believe to be valid in the post, and then cite where appropriate.

--

travisp: the web system won't let me reply to your next post. I'll try to cover here. I think the distinction is this. When the paper is talking about pre-existing value for something, it describes value to the holder of it for the purpose of their purpose. For example, you write some software, you get to use it in your business for the purpose you generated it for. it has value to you. Whereas when alex is talking about commercial value, he/she is talking about value in the marketplace where you can get paid for something.

OK, next bit. The choice of language changes - one voices it in a way that appears virtuous, preventing those darstardly freeloaders. The other focusses on the mechanism by which this prevented: creating artificial scarcity. It's the same thing. It's easy for advocates of IP to lean on the idea that freeloading is wrong and evil as a foregone conclusion. It's not.

The paper you linked to is complicated and involved, and if you feel it contradicts Alex so strongly as to call him out as you did, it would help for you to make the points yourself and to cite. I realise you were echoing the parent.
I have not seen any empirical evidence to suggest that IP laws are necessary other than what people said.

Nonetheless, I am experimenting to see if it is true. It's only one sample. So far, I am not suffering any ill effects.
Ford: Don't call it a comeback
isn't the whole lets make a platform kinda obvious...is that really what you were thinking(or not thinking) at the time or is it just a PR spun story to get coverage.

it's like the Goog guys designing Google just so they could better find their own stuff, only to realize that other people might like to use it too

I mean, even in the story you are talking about mass producing the hardware, when you were supposedly just doing the show
TeMPOraL already forked and made improvements: https://github.com/TeMPOraL/dna/commits/master/

"Eyelids now close in proper way. Fixes issue #42."
Node.js 0.4.0 released (link to changelog)
"The first type of problems are easy to fix. You can throw more money at broken printers and leaky roofs."

Can you? Schools receive a lot of money, and have been receiving increasing amounts of funding per student over the last few decades. Some of the worst performing schools spend some of the most per student. I doubt the problem is truly a lack of funds, it's more likely to be a mismanagement of funds. In that case throwing more money at the problem may eventually "trickle down" results to individual class rooms and teachers as a side effect but ultimately is not a solution to the problem.

The second type of problem seems as much of a ready scape goat as anything else. If the school system is horribly mismanaged what would motivate them to enforce discipline in the classroom? Then they couldn't blame the students for the inevitable failure of education.
You're his nephew's roommate? Ask him "May I send you my resumé?"

Seriously, I presume that his budget was large, but not inexhaustible. Ask him what he could have accomplished if he'd thrown more hardware/people at the problem.
I disagree that our idea was bad because lifecasting had been done before. First of all, you are calling it "lifecasting" because we thought of and popularized that term, and the fact that we were similar to two movies didn't prevent the idea from getting a massive amount of attention because it captured the interest of people and the media. Almost every idea has been "done before", but winners often emerge by innovating in an existing space (Google, Dropbox, Facebook, the list continues to infinity).

I said this earlier today to a friend: the most important things are team and perseverance. While it is true that we had the luxury of great advisors and investors who believed in the team from the beginning, many of my friends (Airbnb comes to mind) have gone from a great idea that NO ONE believed in, stuck with it, and got the funding later.

Connections and funding cannot save a team that isn't strong, and often times just set up a larger failure.
How about X-Plane creator Austin Meyer?
Co-founder of Webpop here. Honored to see our landing as one of your examples :)

We actually had exactly this discussion internally when we created our landing. We even had at least one prototype of the more mysterious kind with little more than a signup form.

I think both can work well, but for our beta we felt it was quite important that our users had an idea about what they signed up for. We're not doing a consumer product, and it wouldn't help us much getting lots of emails from people who would be completely lost when given access to a tool for professional web designers.

I suspect that being more mysterious would work well for sites with more of a social networking or entertainment focus.
In general, I wouldn't give advice based on what I have been told.

About the GPL, see http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/the-gpl-and-softwa...
New people are born every day. HN is for them, too.
Yup, as with most instances of mass starvation in the late 20th century the problem is never lack of food, it's mismanagement.
You raise a valid point - certainly for the Amiga 500 you knew you only had a certain number of platforms and CPUs and you could even make snap judgements like, "No-one's going to run Stunt Car Racer on a top-end Amiga 3000." - thankfully cookie didn't and Stunt Car Racer was awesome regardless of platform, but Mercenary on the other hand was never built with an 060/66 Blizzard board in mind and was impossible to play.

I think the PC world encouraged the use of higher level languages as waiting for VBL's became more important than squeezing all the juice you could because of the potential variations.

Thanks for your comment, it's inspired a new sense of respect for 486 progrmamers (25/33/50? SX, DX? - we can't worry about that, we have TIE fighters to render!)
Blatantly off-topic, but...

Matt, you are everywhere. I'm amazed that you have time to actually do work, let alone sleep, considering how prolific you are on blogs and forums.

It gives me the Warm Fuzzies™ to know that an actual human being is indefatigably fighting search spam 24/7. On behalf of teh interweb, thank you.
The entire US visa system is flawed.

The H1B visa allows an entire family to be kicked out of the country with very little notice simply because an employer wants it done.

To extend a visitor visa the person needs to leave the country (further than Canada and Mexico) and return. Great for airlines.

Many companies have employees sitting in Canada who they bring down for meetings every now and then. They just have to stay away longer than 30 days at a time.

Many technology companies have complained, Bill Gates and Google included.

Hillary Clinton (immigration head) is not going to allow anything to improve under her watch. The only real hope is to see what happens with the next election. Hopefully Hillary will be shown the door.
Streeme - a private, HTML5 based music server (alpha release)
Give the kids ownership in the school.

It's ok to give them an education, but make them earn it and own it to some degree. I'm not talking about money necessarily, but I am talking about having some kind of investment in the institution.

College dropouts or coasters typically aren't paying for their own education, and high school students who steal and f*ck up school property don't have any feeling of obligation to the school.

I'm not sure exactly how one would do this -- at the extreme, they could participate in the building of the school itself -- or perhaps there would be a requirement to participate or get booted. That sounds a bit draconian, but I can't think of another way to cure apathy other than being emotionally involved.