skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...OK.

I'm not sure you understood the point. In what way is a 220V electric cable (those are the only ones they bury, but hell: I'll spot you the high tension lines if you like) or a truck (as jobeirne mentioned above) anywhere near as dangerous, as a box of post-fissile nuclear material?

Even discounting the possibility of terrorism, think of the possibility of poisoning the groundwater after an earthquake.
There's gigantic gap between beauty and usability...
EFF launches Coders' Rights site at Black Hat conference
The New Sony Ericsson W350 music phone
The Sony W350 is basic phone that performs like a high-end model. Sony has decided not to skimp on any of the features and the style of the phone certainly brings something new to the table. When resting on a table, the phone looks like a work of art.
The article takes it on faith that the current margins Apple has can't last. Maybe I missed the part of the article where they back that up, but overall it seems like Apple's done a bang-up job selling (the perception of) lack of computing misery for a premium. If people want to pay extra to have the experience debugged for them out of the box, good for them, and great for Apple.

That quoted blurb from Wilcox about the Apple announcement of dropping product margins ignored the other parts of that announcement, when they also said they were planning on releasing a new product. Maybe the Macbook is staying upmarket and the new product is going to be a low cost / high volume machine that would eat into the cheaper machine segment.

It would actually be quite novel (for the PC business) if Apple was intending to invest in their brands and move them up and out instead of down and out. The Mac Pro (formerly known as a Power Macintosh), as a nearly $3k, 8 core Xeon desktop, has been positioned as an ultra-premium product that is suitable for only the highest level users, the MacBook Pro (formerly known as a PowerBook) is holding the cost line and too expensive for anybody but professional users or monied geeks. The MacBook is currently the laptop a non-geek would buy, but Apple has not addressed the lowest mobile market segment, which probably should be considered the sum of the cut-rate laptop market and the eeepc-type market.

This is a pretty common strategy in the automobile industry. The current Honda Civic is larger than the first generation Honda Accord. The Honda Fit slots into place where the Civic used to be. Honda has spent decades moving brands upward, keeping them relevant to their customer base and fixing segment gap with new vehicles that are the right size and marketed toward the appropriate people.

It's nice to see a tech company market their products more like major investments (Honda Pro) than like disposable consumer goods (Gillete Mach 8 Vostro 2100xblqi).

tl;dr: Apple cares about their brand -- don't expect to see a $500 MacBook, Apple probably will create a new product to combat the threat in the article.
Funny seeing the comment from Dave Sifry. We were more or less weeks/months away from an IPO at Linuxcare, hot on the heels of Redhat and VA Linux... then, poof.
EFF coder's rights website
FTA:

Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. (HPG) was formed to bring to market the unique Hyperion (formerly Comstar)

Maybe they're just 80's battletech geeks like me. But in FASA's game, Comstar was the cult-like organization that held a monopoly on the use of Hyper Pulse Generator communication technology.
Can you poison a thousand people with a minivan?
I'd be more annoyed with 529s. I can only spend $2300 per candidate, but then I can turn around and dump as much as I want into nothing but smear campaigns.
To me, who is about to buy a new laptop, these were some of the most interesting comments on HN for at least a week.

I consider the Macbook's price tag to be quite good with regards to performance and design. Too bad it's not very Linux-friendly...
I bought my mac because I wanted OSX, I write software. I'm shocked at how many of my friends that bought a PC with Vista say it's utterly horrible. I'm happy I chose to switch given that common sentiment.
Yet another Apple-bashing article. Really, I thought HN was above this crap, this kind of submission is better on Reddit or Digg...

Cmon folks, get real. Most of the people who buy Macs want OSX, they aren't even considering a Windows machine. And this article had deliberate mis-prints on the Apple specs, for example the iMac has a Core 2 Duo processor, not the older Core Duo.

When I bought my MacBook Core 2 Duo laptop in December, 2006, I went to Dell.com and the exact same machine spec'd out to a few hundred more for the Dell vs. what I got with my Mac.

Apple does indeed have an entirely new laptop line planned and rumors say they will be introduced in September. And they also say the Apple laptops will have entirely new Intel processors in them.

I can run Windows and OSX on my MacBook, very useful really. But I only run Windows to play games, I get my real work done on the Mac. :-)
Good point, but many have a buy it now price. Maybe only show ones with fixed price from reputable sellers?
Well, there's the real world answer, and the legal answer. Not too sure about the legal answer, thats always murky. Some things are copyrighted, some aren't. You can't just take someone's story, or art, and use it on your own site without permission. Usually the creator has all rights until they are given away. Even if they have uploaded it to another site, that doesn't mean they have given you permission though. On the other hand, some information can't be controlled. If Bob says it's 70 degrees in San Francisco right now, you can totally say its 70 degrees. If the Mets won, you're welcome to say the Mets won. The Drudge Report does nothing except report headlines.

In the real world, however, people steal information all the time. Its not polite though. Usually people ask for attributes. I don't think a policy of only removing it when someone asks you to would be polite. That's like stealing something when no-one is home and leaving a note saying you'll return it if they ask you to.

Also, pure scraping, even of non-copyrighted information can get you into trouble if the other person had paid for that information, like a news site. They pay for their news. Scraping it and making your own news site (with full content, not just headlines) is illegal.

So the short answer is that the original creator still owns the content, and no you probably can't have it.
No, it's the same thing. The purpose of a painting is not to have gleaming edges or colorful patches - it's to awaken emotions. The point of a software application is to allow us get work done as easily as possible. The point of a car is to transport us from one place to another as painlessly as possible.

Success is when a creation achieves the goal of what it is supposed to be. Being great in what you do is the ability to create something that achieves that goal.

Software applications are like paintings. It's easy to create a mediocre painting, and the difficulty in the magnificent paintings lie in the attention to detail.

If you really think usability is not the CORE of any software application, then you are not just on the wrong path, you are going in the opposite direction.
Is Crunchbase API to blame for Techcrunch being slow lately?
Its not constant but once in a while it slows down big time. And since this started after the api was introduced I'm guessing it is the culprit?
from TFA:
The concept is rather simple: use information about the density of text vs. HTML code to work out if a line of text is worth outputting. (This isn’t a novel idea, but it works!) The basic process works as follows:

1. Parse the HTML code and keep track of the number of bytes processed.
2. Store the text output on a per-line, or per-paragraph basis.
3. Associate with each text line the number of bytes of HTML required to describe it.
4. Compute the text density of each line by calculating the ratio of text to bytes.
5. Then decide if the line is part of the content by using a neural network.

You can get pretty good results just by checking if the line’s density is above a fixed threshold (or the average), but the system makes fewer mistakes if you use machine learning — not to mention that it’s easier to implement!

for whose who too scared to follow link...
Here's what I learned:

stock_market = legalize(gambling);

Class dismissed.
That would be very cool. I suspect Australia would top the list.
The point I was making is about whether people should make computer purchases based on carbon emissions. I think people would be insane to sacrifice their own happiness by using a computer they do not prefer just to buy from the company with a good carbon record.

I am not taking a position on whether carbon emissions are important. I'm just saying that having the computer you want is very important. If you want to cut back on carbon, do it somewhere else.

Please note that this is not a matter of apathy, it is a matter of respect for human beings and desire for them to have good computing experiences.
I guess my followup with that would be this:

What if the user is submitting content that they would very clearly want re-distributed? I guess my question with that is, if you take the end-user who is submitting the content out of the equation, does the site that is being scraped from have any kind of leg to stand on if they don't want you scraping their content (excluding technical means that they might implement), assuming that the site being scraped from does not force their end-user who is submitting the content to agree that the site that they are submitting the content to "owns" the content, once it is submitted?
I was tempted to talk some trash about the Flyers, but figured the code base of this site might implode if we got into a sports-related discussion.
What problem is worse than monopolistic broadband providers being able to sell favor to anyone with a web presence? That seems like it would jeopardize the entire future of our information economy.
Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)
How to Leverage Current Web Technologies to Enhance Marketing - Part 1 Video
A few years back I wanted to set up a menu service - putting a bunch of restaurant menus online so that others could search. My lawyer advised that because the restaurant made these materials open in the public domain, we could basically do whatever we wanted with them. As if they were public property.

I'm not sure how this relates to other kind of content from a legal standpoint, but I've used it to ask myself 'did this person intend for this information to be public' as sort of an ethical guideline.
indeed, how many times could they plaster "jesse james garrett" up there???sheesh
What is a Website Video
Microsoft To Counter Open Source With 'Basic' Software Line
Yeah, I thought something was familiar but couldn't quite place it :-) Read the books but never played the game.

See here: http://pearl1.lanl.gov/external/Research/peterson_FLC.html
I agree. There is a great lesson to understand here about pricing and profiting from a premium product offering that customers enjoy.
There isn't much of a discussion imo. The people who like it still like it, the people who don't won't. As for me, I've been meaning to try out Time Machine & ZFS so I just started up my OSx86 torrent.
thefunded.com
In the legal world, whenever text is set in fixed form, it is automatically copyrighted by its author, whether they claim it or not, unless they specifically say otherwise. "Specifically say otherwise" probably includes anything they might have agreed to in the TOS for a particular site, although the legal waters there are largely untested. The only exemption to this auto-copyright is statistics, phone numbers, or other non-copyrightable content (see CBC vs. MLB).

IANAL, but depending on the nature of your service and specifically how the content is collected, you may qualify for DMCA safe harbor protections. This means that if you remove things in a timely manner upon request nobody can sue you. This is how Google caches the whole internet without getting sued.

That's all legal mumbo-jumbo. The real world answer is that some people will get mad regardless of the law, so take their content down and apologize. Follow robots.txt guidelines. Don't post takedown replys a la PirateBay. Generally act sane. If you do all of the above you'll probably be ok.
Note that the use of small mobile nuclear reactors is 40 years old now (submarines) - that's a lot of time to refine a technology.
Woah, that is seriously not correct advice. Was your lawyer even a copyright lawyer?
I'm more than happy to see info like this come out and put apple in its place as an expensive computer.

I was shocked at the low prices and great hardware I've been seeing on PCs compared to Macs. If this forces apple to be less stingy with hardware specs on macs then its a good thing. Its great that apple is going so well but i care far, far, far less about their bottom line than mine and other consumers.
To be honest, having a mac doesn't let you escape the too many cable curse. I have a cable for my mouse, one for my printer, one for my itouch, one for my cellphone (iphone = unwise in canada), one for my backup HD, one for my second monitor, one for the gigabit ethernet, one for the power and one for my headphones which equals 9 different cable outputs. I could go wireless(ish) w/ the HD, printer, mouse, headphones & network, but that compromises speed or quality in some way.
Can I have some of your dirt?

For me (and I'm guessing for most others), MacBooks cost the majority of a paycheck... Certainly not cheap enough to buy spares.
Yes but good public schools have that too.
Web 2.0 Marketing – 5 Concepts That Matter
In my experience, it's very difficult to describe any of those names in Spanish without writing the name down for people. Latin America may not necessarily your main market, but why alienate people? Fotolog is readily pronounceable, and has been doing very well here, despite getting little traction in the US market. Not saying the name is everything; it's just one of the little details that helps word of mouth.
Check to see if the site that you're considering scraping has any sort of "terms and conditions", "terms of use", "legals", etc page. If it does, read that page in detail. If it doesn't, ask the site for permission to scrape.

If the site doesn't have one of those pages and you don't ask for permission, you're not only putting yourself in danger of legal action, but you're also depending on a data source that isn't reliable.

Remember, it'd only be a matter of time before they notice you scraping, and take measures to stop it.
Funny thing, I just discussed this with a friend. We are both mac users. I think they are overpriced if you compare hardware only, but he maintained that if you compare the hw specs on the best MacBook pro with an HP laptop, you only save like 40 bucks (at least in this part of the world).

Anyone got numbers?
Another startup launches our idea
I will suggest that you mention clearly the origin of anything you get from anywhere on the internet.

The truth is, it’s hard to find a site without the mention of copyright in terms and conditions page.

Overall it will depend of the use you make of the copy content. Trouble starts when you use someone’s material in a line of business that competes with the owners.
The sad irony is that I read that title and assumed it was an essay on font choices in development environments.
I had the same exact thought.

But still, a very fascinating article. I'm a bike commuter in SF, and I can related to some of the bullet points.
just put in a deadpool startup and try it out. simple.
Technically, you own whatever you write. So I own the copyright on this message, unless I granted the copyright to YC News when I signed up (I don't remember). Assuming that I did not, then I retain copyright, and you have to get the ok from me, individually.

That's the theory anyway. Talk to a lawyer.
It more depends on the carriers than the laptop.
Many laptops have a "built in 3g" card option to order, but it's not significantly popular outside of business due to carrier retardation.
"Is the path dependence there?"

The IQ boost is not permanent. However, schools sort children into ability groups in first or second grade. What track your child gets put into is very important and is fairly permanent, so if temporarily boosting your kid's IQ got them into a good track it would be worth it. (Albeit track sorting is usually done based on verbal ability and not IQ, but similar idea.)
Relevant recent discussion on slashdot:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/08/1245204
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...

Newegg bestsellers is a great place to find anything. Those are all $500 - $750 & all very decent.
I remember reading this Wired profile of David Galenson from 2006 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html

The book sounds interesting.
It seems like you are defining beauty AS usability. To me they are orthogonal. Beauty is a quality that appeals to my aesthetic sense, and usability is a quality that appeals to my practicality. There are beautiful websites that are unusable, and ugly websites that are very usable, I'm sure you can think of examples for both cases.
The myspace suicide case really muddles this and makes it a problem. If the site you want to scrape from has TOS that say you can't re-use the info, (and it most likely would), then re-using the info would be a violation of the terms of service. Basically, in the MySpace case the feds are trying to make it a crime to violate a website's terms of service.

But like someone else said, if someone wants their content distributed, the user is not going to give you any trouble, and if they do, you're very protected if you take the offended material down right away, as someone else mentioned.

The website you're stealing from does have legal measures they can take, especially if you're directly competing with them. I think someone else mentioned that they could also just reconfigure their website to mess up your scrape, which is probably what they'll keep doing. They'll also likely publicize your bad business practices and you'll end up with a horrible reputation. Nobody likes a copier. Its like people who steal designs. They hardly ever outperform the website they're copying.
I'm not saying it's not the core. I'm saying that the creator of the interface is in no position to objective judge the usability because they have an innate knowledge of the system because they designed it and they know exactly how it functions and how it's supposed to be used. If you want a real measure of usability, you have to get someone who understands the problem domain, but has never before seen your interface, and then objectively determine how easily they can figure out how to perform tasks and get things done. The fact that you, as the designer, already know exactly how the interface is built and operates precludes you from having an objective opinion of how easy the interface is to understand.

Similarly, a painting's artist cannot objectively determine how beautiful/emotional/successful the work of art is, because he has an innate sense of what it is trying to convey to the viewers. Just because the artist sees the subtles details, nuances, allusions, etc, does not mean that other viewers will be able to glean the same information.

And to drive the nail home a third time, an engineer could not possibly be an objective judge of how easy a car is to operate (usability), because they already know where everything is and how it works. They need to have a real person sit in the seat to realize that putting the cigarette lighter and cup holders inside the center console is a bad idea and not at all intuitive...
Interesting article I wonder how many people here bike to work and how long of a bike ride is usually for them?(Miles/Minutes)
I'm not a lawyer, but had to do a bunch of legal research regarding this topic for some of my sites.

I think what most of the responses so far are missing is the importance of accrediting the content to the content owner (likely the site, not the contributing users), and providing a link to the source.

Check out this pdf <a href="http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol16/sab...">Sableman's authorized linking</a> and search on Google v. Perfect 10.

You haven't really given much to go on with respect to what you are scraping, and what you plan to do with it. But I think a bunch of common sense and ensuring that your site in no way harms the original source's site (defamation, etc), are the most important things to consider.

Hope this helps.
It's easy to find price differences when you compare the wrong specs. In their example, they compare a 19" LCD with no viewing angle, slow updates, etc. with a 20" one of better quality. Yeah, that's going to cost more. You can't compare the 20 to 19 and assume they are the same; there are lots of different 20" panels and lots of different 19" panels.

Anyway, I still think my Thinkpad is much nicer looking than any Apple laptop. (Oh, and it's more expensive than a Dell. It must be some sort of conspiracy between Apple and Lenovo, yeah, that's it!)
I already reported this to Tom over AIM, and he said he thought it might be a caching issue, and he might have fixed it...
DZone (http://www.dzone.com/)
The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/) Not exactly a community site, though there are enough good comment threads that it does a good imitation of one.
I'm a developer, I've run various OS's over the years, Windows first, Mac OS X after that, and after my iBook's hard drive failed, I now run Linux on a refurbed ThinkPad. Windows was the only environment that I had to get out of. The amount of friction Windows created in my everyday development was enough that I felt it necessary to switch to maintain productivity.

The difference, though, to me, between working on OS X or Linux, though, is negligible. I suspect that most conference goers with glowing Apple laptop lids can be just as productive in Linux as they can in OS X. (I'm not a Mac developer, I imagine that crowd would disagree)

I use a text editor and a browser to get my work done, Macs don't offer me any software advantages in that department.
The patterns could be formed in a more formalized way by applying Shannon's principles of information entropy across the document, lines of text, word patterns, N-Grams, etc. Then Bayesian inference can be applied for probabilistic pattern matching (vs the neural network).

Not that this approach is any easier, its just perhaps more robust for applying to other problem sets.

Nothing new of course, according to their website, Autonomy (Europe's 2nd largest software company) uses these techniques as the basis for their core technology to analyze text, audio, video, etc.
That makes me sad :-(
I agree with that as well-this is more balanced and informative than other sites.
I'd really like to let my manager at work read your comment. He recently went to a local "Web 2.0" conference and was surprised by all the Apple laptops everyone else had (both attendees and presenters).

Yet, he still continues to bury his head in the sand when the people he manages complain that they want a Mac for work (web development and design). He says there's no room in the budget, but we seem to get a steady stream of new Dell shitboxes every year or two.
My Eee PC has pretty well replaced my MacBook as my portable. It's smaller than what you're looking at, though there are larger models out now like the Eee PC 1000. Linux is already on them, no Windows Tax necessary if you buy a Linux preinstall. Dev tools install easily, or you can get a different distro that already has what you want, there are several that are tuned for Eee's.

A large part of the reason my Eee goes with me rather than my MacBook is that it's a lot more robust than the MacBook. I can treat the Eee pretty much the same way I would treat a book when I take it with me. It's a solid little chunk, and it cost about 1/4 what my MacBook cost.