skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A web index is not the same thing as a database about people. The original blog post explicitly says he built such database, he didn't just mirrored Google's data.

It's not illegal if you get the necessary permissions from the privacy agencies (which will ask things like: how is the data stored, do you do join with other databases, can a user ask to have its information removed, etc.).

(IANAL I just happen to have dealt with that kind of things when building a lobbyist database out of public documents for an advocacy group)

Edit: removed part about database rights, lets not complicate the subject.
Even better: work remotely or move closer to the office or change work location closer to home.
Well I've just tried it for 10 minutes, and I have to say it seems to work better that i initially expected/feared. So you might not be as crazy as you sound :)

I might actually give it a few days and see what happens.
Probability Decision trees, and an oddity In tennis
I promised a few people I'd post this when I wrote it up, so here it is. The same techniques can be used to analyse decisions in business, but I'm leaving that for another day.
"You WANT it to be distributed - isn't that the whole point?"

Authors want their books distributed. Musicians want their music distributed, too. They just want to make money, as well.

Honestly, I'm not disagreeing with your main point, which is interesting. I just think we have to work on the terminology. Because anyone can see that there's a big difference between snapping a picture and putting it on Twitter, vs. writing a book and trying to sell it.

(+1, by the way. You made a good argument. You might want to remove the "<b>" though, that kind of formatting doesn't work here).
You mention that it has better compression, which Microsoft certainly claims for it, but can you find any comparison that shows XR as better than standard JPEG when measured with SSIM rather than PSNR? Or subjective human tests[1]? There's quite a few showing it losing to JPEG. Surely they can't all have messed up their testing methodology, though creating and standardising a purpose built photo codec in 2009 that's worse in quality at many common rates than JPEG seems somewhat unbelievable too.

1: "the visual performance of HDPhoto showed notable
deficits, both in subjective and objective tests."

from Visual Quality Improvement Techniques of HDPhoto/JPEG-XR by T Richter

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=04712398
Go back to the start of XKCD and it mostly sucks (IMO). And he currently makes his living from XKCD so he is clearly a professional today. Where each of those lines crossed is difficult to say, but at best I think it demonstrates the transition.
Does TinEye Work At All?
Sharing secrets: In case of attack from aliens, there is a big red button ...
I think that the problem is students are being taught "how to think", not "what to think".

Back in the bad old days, students crammed lots of facts in into their heads. That gave them an understanding of how the world worked, how it has worked in the past, and a solid platform for thinking about how it might change.

Now, students learn "how to think". Of course, nobody can teach that. So instead, they learn how to churn out 3 point essays, pretend to examine both sides of the argument, then to declare that, on the balance, the side which they gave the most air time to has more points in favor of it.
The TwitPic debacle recently—TwitPic changed their TOS to state that TwitPic could sell their users' pictures without authorization from or revenue sharing with, said user. So, TwitPic?
It's not as helpful as you would think. The people who would activate the second step sign in and the people who fall for the phishing scheme don't overlap that much.
You mean, if the students did their homework? ;-)
1 hour bicycling every day is a very solid exercise.
Flickr doesn't exactly act as an agent for customers; they do however have a partnership with Getty to sell pictures, but as far as I know only a very small percentage of pictures are concerned.
Here's a version with slashed zero (there's also another version with dotted zero from the same author): http://blog.cosmix.org/2009/10/27/a-slashed-zero-droid-sans-...
It's a bit of a stretch to say that a congresswoman is responsible for the narrowing of university curricula, as if they're central planners.
The point is more "the photo was taken from Twitter without permission and now hundreds if not thousands of media organisations are using it to make money, without any compensation to the photographer."

Those organisations are used to paying for content. They make money from its distribution. Often they charge for their own.

By taking the picture without paying they are essentially being hypocritical, and the lowest form of pirate, without even the "it might mean I buy some other pictures in the future" or "she needs a new business model, not my problem" defences.

It has nothing to do with the photo's intrinsic value, whatever that is.
I think it would be a mistake to confuse the artistic value of something with its monetary value—the two are only loosely coupled.

The monetary value here is tied to the rarity of the picture. Sure, it sucks, and it was taken in 2s. But it's still unique. And interesting. So it's worth a lot.
More ridiculous to me than the long terms is the perpetual extension - that copyright terms are increased regularly to prevent works from entering the public domain. The US Supreme Court ruled that protection "forever minus a day" (as Larry Lessig put it) is not incongruous with the definition of copyright as a "temporary monopoly".
i need an invite code to sign up could u send me please one : amourgh@gmail.com
I certainly agree that the current implementation in many jurisdictions is far from the spirit of the original idea and leaves much to be desired. Still, copyright isn't about an author's right to credit/fair attribution.
At best, it would cost you $7 to buy and $7 to sell in commission fees. That means $14 round trip or 7% of your initial investment just to break even.

Respectfully, the above is a very basic concept. Not knowing that means you're new to investing. In that case, don't even think about day trading until you've had many years of investment experience. Even with that, people still get killed day trading.
Why does Google Images get a free pass then?
I didn't even notice the date! I started getting really confused at the Java/Javascript part before I realized it wasn't a serious article.
Very nice font. Just replaced Vera Sans Mono with it on my VIM configuration. Great tip.
I have a small hope that the recent review in the UK and our government's current political drive to win over small companies will act as some sort of catalyst for at least starting change in the right direction. Even more than the Gowers review a few years ago, this latest survey describes the current copyright system bluntly as being unfit for purpose in the Internet age. Combine that with the disaster on top of a screw-up surrounded by mess that is HADOPI in France (how many laws have they and their agents clearly broken now?) and we might actually make some headway in the coming months.

I may actually go and visit my MP to discuss this issue in person (as opposed to writing, which I have occasionally done in the past but which I suspect doesn't make the same impact as someone looking you in the eye and saying you're doing it wrong for reasons X, Y and Z).
It seems that locals at Berlin are not keen on taking photos of their own city.

What's that area center-right in SF that apparently no tourist likes to go?
A rough example. Moving closer costs 100K more, working for 200 days a year, less commuting provides 1.5 hours more time per day, same client (place of work) for five years. Cost of hour of free time is (/ 100000 200 1.5 5) = 66.7 units of money per hour.

Worth it? Don't think so.

Working remotely is often impossible because of security policies and also not the same in terms of presence.

Difficult :)
ErlangCamp Boston 2011. A great chance to learn OTP from seasoned professionals.
Show HN: Collapse and expand comments in a Hacker News thread
Nobody talks about the copyright owned by the creators of shuttle. In some countries you have to pay to use photographs of buildings (taken by you). Why should a photograph of shuttle be different?
Cray XK6 supercomputer smashes petaflop record
Sadly some parts of the World are almost dark.
A/B test discovers a squeeze page that converts at 28%
Looks more like a McKinsey line-up vs. a CEO line-up. We shall see how it goes - picking the brightest doesn't mean they'll be a good CEO.
The youth become the adults, and if the majority of the voting citizens dislike copyright, then you may see copyright wane in power. In theory, anyway.
Dear Facebook can you please start treating developers like we mean something?
IMHO, PyCharm is the best IDE you can get for Mac. I went from MacVim to Textmate to PyCharm and stick with it. BTW, I'm also a former .NET and VS person.
Sorry, but you're wrong.

> But has anyone done that?

Good examples of paid-for TwitPic photos include pictures in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, or the pictures taken of the Boeing which emergency-landed in the Hudson.

> Whey would they pay, given that it's available anyway?

Because they have to—the user only relinquished part of her rights on the picture, namely distribution on the Twitter/TwitPic medium, not her entire rights. If you think that were the TOS to change, the users would still upload pictures, you're so very wrong—see the TwitPic debacle recently and how MobyPicture gained a few k users because they state in their TOS that they can't sell their users' pictures without prior agreement.

You seem to think that your analogy is good, but I don't think it is. Were a magazine to publish SO answers in a Q&A section in a paid magazine, I think SO would be subject to licensing fees. In that case, the relationship between SO and you is governed by their TOS. Check them out, you'll have your answer.
A Rundown of WordPress Theme Files and What They All Do
Doesn't show up for me in FF 3.6. Maybe you have to have Chrome.
Well, there's APL. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AplLanguage
Andreessen Horowitz-backed TinyCo launches $5m Fund for iOS/Android Game Devs
Brad Fallon, an SEO Expert Available for Free for the next 48 Hours
What a surprise, an old media outlet is in favor of old-style copyright.
Based on the 7M valuation you are only taking about 56K, I guess you have to ask yourself, is it going to be a 7M company or a 70M company when it is all said and done, because you could most likely get at least 116K (every year) in the corporate world without the worry of failure.
"Fountain", by Marcel Duchamp. You might argue that Duchamp was an experienced professional at art in general (being 30 and the producer of less-famous works), but it's a urinal that he purchased in a store and signed.

It's also one of the most influential art pieces of the 20th century. It, and his "found art" movement in general, are the cornerstones of the redefinition of art and mark the invention of conceptual art. Art no longer has to do with who made it, or how, or how much effort was put in. It's about intent. If you buy a pencil and say it's art, it's art (if perhaps not very good art).
CSC in scandalous attempt to double cost of NHS IT system deployment
How To Let Your Online Company Personality Shine
Ouch. Really sorry about that. Wish i could delete it. I would also add any paper by David Deutsch on quantum communication like this: http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/quant-ph/9906007v2
Want to create an addictive game? Make sure you code in some near misses
The article makes a case against hammers by showing how ugly it is to see one bashing a skull.

Meanwhile, hammers still useful.
Twitter cannot be allowed to operate outside the law
GigaOm doubles down on research, raises another $6M
Do you mean that moving 50 minutes closer to work would cost $20K per year more?

What location are we talking about?
My opinion is as it stands, the site needs a lot of work. It doesn't convey what the motivation / advantages of your web app. With the actual functionality being very much in the early stages you really need to give a stronger message out about the concept itself. You may have great ideas to take the app further, but at the moment a visitor has no way of knowing. The design is somewhat bizarre - it looks like it would be better formatted for a television screen rather than web / mobile browser. I do like the idea of the sidebar with icons in a web app. But you really need to refine your project if you want to make something of it.

As far as helping you to become a web programmer, it would probably only help in so far as you actually have something up and running which to some extent proves you have some rudimentary skills. You may do better to contribute to an open source project, or carry out another project in which you clearly solve a specific problem.
Downtown Oakland
Hmm, I like this somewhat, but I'm not that sure it's an improvement from an information perspective. It seems that the main win of a 3d version over a map is that two axes of information can be displayed: color of the dot, and how far it projects up from the surface. But I have trouble interpreting the heights in any meaningful way; they seem mostly like noise, and in reality what I'm looking at to get an idea of editing activity is the density of the dots in various regions, not the height of the individual spikes--- exactly what I'd do on the 2d version of the map.

It does strictly provide more information, because there are two kinds of density displayed: how many spikes/dots are in a region, and how high each individual one is. But this two-factor density visualization seems more confusing than helpful; I think I'd rather have a single smoothed density estimate. Then maybe that could be displayed as height in a more terrain-type way?
I've been using Verdana for coding for years, with some modifications. I've changed the parentheses, braces, operators etc. to be more prominent - that makes it just perfect for me.

Edit: screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/xv5oz.png
>Instead of this discovery process, students get pre-canned little happy meals.

This really seems to me the biggest problem of academia as far as i've experienced it.

In the first 8 years of school i've been very bad at school so at first it seemed impossible to me that i ever could become a student.

Therefor i just dreamed about it,taking the verb "to study" very seriously, imagining that i would be able to pull all the knowledge that i wanted just from the university shelves of knowledge and be able to built myself and my knowledge in that way. I thought i'd be working on cool projects which were driven by my ideas.

Instead when after really working hard on my discipline and other things to be able to go to university i find that all i can get, at least in germany, seems to be prepackaged happy meals. I can go and make my bachelor or masters in computer science without ever having built something that was my truly my idea. Of course i can do all those wonderful things i dreamed about when i was younger too, but i won't find many people that would help me do it and i would have a hard time doing it because i've not that much time on my hands.

To get through all those tests, all those university homework assignments(when i first heard of that i literally went "wtf") and still built up a parallel career, so you have something to show off on your CV other than "went to university", takes so much time that it seems going to university and doing the courses like they are laid out to me stands in the way of the kind of education i hoped to gain from going to university.

I'd like a university that takes "to study" seriously, allowing students to look at problems, find solutions from all angles and encouraging them to self-educate in a healthy way.
> American "copyright" is not quite the French "droit d'auteur", which, if I'm not mistaken, is what you're mentioning.

Yes.

> And then, even the "droits d'auteur" are broken down in the patrimonial rights and the creation attribution—you can cede your patrimonial rights (rights to profit from the picture), but never the creation attribution: the picture will always be your creation.

Sure, but the fact remains that, under french IP laws, it is legally impossible to put something in the public domain yourself, as the creator of that thing.

And checking SQLite's "copyright" page (which made me realize this nit of french IP law) there seem to be places where the very concept of "public domain" does not exist.
I use Pragmata as my programming font. It isn't free, but I've used it every day for years, so it certainly has justified its cost. Visiting his site, I see there's now a pro version, so I'll have to upgrade.

http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm
Inconsolata looks like it is nice for Mac users, but on Windows 7 with Cleartype enabled (the default) it is the blurriest font I've ever seen, regardless of what size I used.

Consolas, on the other hand, is exceedingly crisp.
Yeah, I can see that. Thanks.
ICO gives UK businesses a year to get websites in order
time to upgrade to 4.0, brother.
Having gotten to the final round of the Fellowship application process and met all of these people individually I can say with confidence that we will see some very very cool things from them in the next 2 years. Every single one of them is highly intelligent and motivated and well deserving of the Fellowship
That's a stretch. Of the 40-50 kids I knew in college, not a single one took College Alegbra. Not to mention that my freshman English Comp classes was one of the most intense, interesting, useful classes I took in college. If some are guilty of comparing the tippy top of the US college system to the rest of the world's average, you are certainly guilty of comparing the bottom of the bottom to the world average.
I'm talking generally here: the fact that youth don't care about copyright is not an argument against copyright. Young people believe all sorts of things and have all sorts of ideals. As they grow up they (hopefully) starts to see the bigger picture: many of these positions will change as they mature.
Why was Boston's winter so horrible this year?
I don't wish to troll, but I see this a lot and I can't for the life of me figure out how anyone needs to give this any more thought than 'monospace, next question?', despite many explanations each time.

Can someone shed some light on any advantages they feel are of a reasonably significant importance, and why? I mean, I can see plenty of advantages, but they're all so negligible they're not worth even the time it takes to change font, IMHO.

...and do please note the IMHO - I'm asking, not telling :)
If you're downvoting please explain why.

Okay. I'm downvoting because your legal argument is incorrect, and I don't want as many people to see it, in case they get the wrong impression.
I think students should be tought "how to think" and not "what to think". Teaching what to think is, to some extent, brainwashing. The problem, as you pointed out, is that institutions try to teach "how to think" but fail at it.
My IDE is misconfigured, and for html/css code uses Arial, or some other proportional font.

It's just painful to watch!

The non grid alignment, randomness, just makes it more distracting to me. Perhaps if I was exposed to it for a long er period of time, a week as you suggested, this uneasiness will slowly fade.

But, let me ask you: What's that you find so good about it? More content in less space? Why won't you go back?
In Canada, lottery winnings aren't taxable. Buying lottery tickets can't be claimed as a business expense, so paying tax on the winnings would be hypocritical. Of course, being hypocritical rarely stops governments.

Lottery winnings in Canada are always advertised in the "lump-sum payout" amount.

The threshold varies slightly depending on how many tickets are sold, but for Lotto 6/49 in Canada, any payout above about $32M is "in the money". This isn't common, but it does happen several times every year.
Probably confused with trademark/patents in that lack of defence constitutes giving it away.
The problem is that you can't align things in the middle of a line. I do that all the time to make repetitive code easier to read (when repetition can't be avoided entirely).
I've tried many monospaced fonts.

For a long time I was a ProFont guy.
But I recently switched to Liberation Mono, and I just LOVE it.

EDIT: pic or didn't happen > http://i.imgur.com/UAag3.png
Fair point, I looked at their mentors and assumed their benchmarks for angels were similar:
http://www.google.co.za/intl/en/umbono/people.html
Holes in Japan nuclear reactors?
This is similar to what I was once told is the foundation of the Islamic sciences: logic, linguistics and rhetoric. These are essentially the "meta" sciences, which teach you how to think.
nice article, I was ever searching for something like that!
I only use monospace fonts with well differentiated Ls and 1s. This is a pretty important issue to me as I was constantly making dumb mistakes, and in general it improves readability.

On another note, you probably change the default font when writing a major document in a word processor (unless your using LaTex in which case Computer Modern is often the way to go). Changing your coding font is exactly like that. People like to customize and give their system a personal flavor. Changing fonts and syntax colors is just one part of customizing a system.
I'd never heard of John Filo before so I followed your link. His account implies his picture didn't result from merely being in the right place at the right time.

- He had been shot at once (by a representative of his own government), began running (for his life?), but had the presence of mind to return and take pictures.

- Being a photographer, he had useful equipment at the ready. Many other people were around, but they didn't have the equipment. This was 1970 -- not everyone had a camera in their pockets.

- Being a photojournalism student, he may have sought and framed pictures differently than the average person. He said he was running out of film, implying he had to choose wisely. An untrained person may have run out of film or taken images that wouldn't become iconic.

I'm not arguing for or against the main issues in this thread. I was just impressed by the photograph, what it took to take it, and wouldn't characterize it as the result of just being in the right place at the right time. Someone holding their ground when someone is shooting at them is ipso facto specifically choosing their place.

Despite the disagreement on that characterization, thanks for sharing that link. I'm glad to have seen the photograph and learned the story.
I'm still using 7pt Dina, a monospace bitmap font, in all console windows and my IDEs - all except Visual Studio 2010, that is, which doesn't properly support bitmap fonts (leading me to avoid using it whenever possible).
90% of it is really just how purdy it is. Picking the 'right' font will make you feel better when you stare at it all day. It's like how functionally, you could compose a 6000 word essay in comic sans, but really rather not.

But in other cases, depending on your display size/setup, I guess there will be advantages to certain fonts. Now, mind you, the 10 on this list are all 'good' so you won't really see it between them, but certain monospaced fonts have letters/symbols that are more easily confused with each other... like single quote, versus the thing under the tilde (whatever its called >.<)
Vote for Amsterdam as the last city to host Euruko before the end of the world
GigaOm Raises Another $6 Million At $40 Million+ Valuation
I'm not trying to make an argument that fits within or agrees with current legislation. I am making a purely logical argument - I'm sure for example there's stuff in twitters ToS that give them rights over whatever you post so that you couldn't claim compensations from them, and ditto SO.
Two women. Gender balance much?
Tornado Season 2011 continues with major Oklahoma megatwister (video)