skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"bits" is a very disingenuous way to look at creative work. The end product is "just" 1s and 0s in the same sense a Porsche is "just" atoms.
Nice. The first time I heard a node.js talk my first thought was, "shouldn't be too bad to implement with IOCPs". Glad to see it happening.
This post is a great post to remind entrepreneurs that getting funding is not a success. I often discuss with companies coming to us looking for funding that things change when they get money. You now have shareholders with expectations and you have obligations to them. When you are running on a shoestring, often decisions are easy because only the most important things can get done; everything else falls by the wayside. When you have cash in the bank, suddenly the universe of options is much larger - do I hire more people, do I invest in marketing, etc. It's an exciting but daunting moment. Congratulations on the funding; your job just got harder:)
Was that dig at Android and iOS's reliability intentional? I find iOS very stable and reliable (started with iPhone OS 3.0).

Android less so but not too bad. My Nexus One had an occasional problem with the lock screen in 2.2 that has since been fixed. It was a terrible bug when it decided to strike, had to turn the phone off and on.

Your comments about Android being "open" & "easy" to develop for and "iWhatever"s being "shiny" makes me think you're judging these platforms from afar instead of being in the trenches using them all and developing for them all. Just fyi they raised the "this guy is not objective" flags.
No, I don't think so. The value of just the artwork alone would eclipse Valve's value.
One person's "transformation" is another's "mutilation."

Right… it's subjective, hence his warning that you should seek permission even if you think it's obvious.

Regardless of who's side you fall on in this disagreement, I think everyone can agree that the subjective nature of it and the ambiguity of the law has a chilling effect. There is a risk to use any copyrighted work in any capacity. Defending yourself can bankrupt most artists.
I'm a bit confused by the database license. Why do you want people to contribute additional data specifically back to you, rather than requiring them to release it under a compatible license which would allow you to incorporate it if you wish? This is substantially different from usual copyleft licenses.

As an example, notice that Wikipedia does not require people to send modified articles back to the Wikimedia Foundation, or to allow them to use the data as they see fit (this is clause D. 3. d. in your license). They just require people to contribute under a copyleft license, and they can thus incorporate derivative versions published elsewhere if they want. This is nice because it ensures that the Wikipedia content can be useful even if the Wikimedia Foundation disappears.

Anyway, awesome work, congrats!
Also, why is it that only humans can 'think'? Animals have 'instinct' for their basic survival and some (dolphins, orcas) are more equal than others, but only humans have a 'mind' to 'think'. Hmm..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
He willn't.
"You just educated me"
If they aren't too different then we have sex with them, and if they are too different we kill them. We can project the future of our species using our awesome minds that can conceive of a "self", "species", and "time", and we deal with perceived future threats to our species in quick and ugly fashion.
> But when it comes to building spacial indexes on hierarchical dimensions, or whatever, Postgres just isn’t going to have a feature for that. I’ll have to figure that one out for myself.

In this case, yes it is, Postgres probably has the best type system and extensibility of all SQL databases. GiST and GIN are very good technologies that also exist in Informix.

If I had to choose something that is missing in Postgres and very far away for sheer want of implementation effort, it's parallel execution of queries.

Oracle RAC is also quite a crazy and neat feature, except when it has problems, in which case you get even more crazy for that crazy.

On the other hand, Oracle is also not a strict superset of the features in PostgreSQL. For example, 9.1 has the only credibly fast implementation of SERIALIZABLE level isolation that I am aware of. There are also interesting features like "index exclusion constraints" that have no equivalent in Oracle, and solve problems hard to solve otherwise (example constraint: there are no overlapping circles in this table)
Even though I also believe that it is fair use, I would still defer to the artist's judgment on this, because it is their right to decide where the line gets drawn, not mine. That's why it's smart to ask for permission for these kinds of things.

Two sides disagree - the tiebreaker should be the fact that one side created the original work on which the clearly recognizably derived work was based. That side gets more weight.
I find the theory of Neanderthal predation (NP theory) of homo sapiens, set forth by Danny Vendramini[1], to be persuasive. It explains the genetic bottleneck in an elegant and intuitive fashion, along with a host of other related anthropological questions. In fact, it kind of opened my eyes to how much of human behavior and morphology deserves an explanation and could possibly be explained by a central selection pressure.

One epiphany that played a role in confirming my fondness for the theory surrounds the so-called Neanderthal Late Flowering. I'd never heard of this period before reading Vendramini's book, but while reading, based on NP theory, I wondered to myself why such a thing had not happened, as it would seemed to have been predicted by the theory. Theories need to have predictive value to test them of course. As it turned out, the last few chapters discussed a Late Flowering, and I was a bit blown away.

Also, within a few months of reading the book, a genetic analysis study came out which showed we have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA (but, importantly, no female DNA) another crucial prediction of NP theory.

Anyway, it was a fun read by a talented amateur anthropologist. I recommend it.

[1] http://www.themandus.org/
> it becomes nearly impossible to pirate that software without first hacking Apple’s data center in North Carolina.

I'm not familiar with Final Cut X in particular, but most centrainsed "connect-to-our-server" software DRM services for digital downloads failed rather miserably in terms of stopping piracy. A few hackers will take it as a challenge and break it, while the so-called pirates will gladly grab their work for free instead of shelling out $299 for apple.

Assuming a piece of software cannot get pirated strikes me as naive. The only software that never gets pirated is either a) free or b) useless.
SSDs are actually cheaper per IOPS.

Considering that everything we knew about hard disk reliability was shown to be wrong (by Google), I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds for SSDs.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with cygwin? I'm not a big Node guy, but I run it on cygwin for the sake of CoffeeScript and I've written a few small Node apps as well. Hasn't been even slightly painful.
I didn't claim that the issue is a "plot" or 'intelligence'.

My main explaination was "the medium is the message", and old media found that pushing emotional content, drama, formula fiction, etc. got them the best ad revenue. I suspect it did. So, in particular, the 'medium' led to emotional, superficial articles such as in this thread, That was my explanation for the article.
How would you gather significant independent data on this subject matter ?
Congrats on getting funded. Even if it doesn't change your day to day it is an excellent milestone. Where did you post your open positions?
What happend to Vimcasts.org (No update over a month)
Define "think"
'Therefore, the "entire project" wasn't "above board"'

Pet peeve of mine: I hate it when people cut quotes down in a way that changes the sense of the original, then start arguing based on the faked up quote they just provided. The full quote, why you even provided it yourself, was:

"I went out of my way to make sure the entire project was above board"

The point is that he was trying, and trying very hard. His failure to license the cover was the entire point of the article. He is saying that the reason for it was simple, honest oversight, and we can believe that his motives were pure by virtue of how much money he put down for the other portions of the album. How can you accuse him of being disingenuous when its his own article you're citing back at him as the evidence? It's pretty ineffective disingenuousness!
Because it's the product of his or her hard work? I really don't understand the question.
Have you considered running Synergy on the machine?

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

I use this at work across two or three machines and it works really well.

Once you get this set up the way you want it, you could probably go (literally) headless---remove the display from the laptop---and administer it over an SSH connection from another machine as necessary.
How time flies. It was two years ago today that I blogged this: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-fro... which lead to great things: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html
For lots of applications, the workloads are either memory only or large sequential IOs. SSDs matter less in both situations.
Agh, this is something I absolutely hate about Hacker News.

mortenjorck made an incredibly insightful comment.. Why do you feel the need to pull him into a debate that has no possibility of ever coming to any kind of resolution.

Not every comment needs a fucking counterpoint or a "citation needed" or a "can you give me an example?" or a "how would you solve the problem?"
"...it becomes nearly impossible to pirate that software without first hacking Apple’s data center in North Carolina."

I'm not sure he's correct about this. As I understand it, software downloaded through the App Store is rather easily pirated if you know what/where to copy it.

I think Apple is solving the problem from the opposite direction. Rather than try to prevent users from pirating software, they're A) making software prices far more accessible, and B) making the purchase and acquisition (download) of software ridiculously easy.

This is built upon the theory that people generally want to do the right thing. Apple has (more or less) proved this with the success of the iTMS. If given a good value proposition and low barrier of execution, most people will purchase their music legitimately. Having said that, there will always be pirates, but this same theory says that "pirates will be pirates", and they never would have bought the software to begin with.

If you can make your millions on legitimate users, why waste time crying over spilt milk? With the App Store, Apple is trying to bring to Mac software what iTMS and the iOS App Store brought to their respective markets.
It's weird that English has a special word for a human that has breasts and a vagina as if they're not human.

Oh wait no. Maybe it's completely normal, maybe the words aren't synonymous, maybe one is hyponymous to the other, and maybe you're wrong.
Exactly. Plus, from the comments there: "There are pirated versions of FCPX already up, and it’s not too difficult, it’s about switching one file to make it seem valid."

... That's what he thinks is 'nearly impossible'? Phone-home DRM has existed for years and only works marginally better (if at all) than regular DRM.
Ooh, node on Azure. Finally a good excuse for a .Net guy like myself to finally play around with Node.
I think probably you should increase the price to $1000 :)
"High school" WOW! What distant planet did you just arrive from?

You didn't get the memo: "All content is to be at the level of a not very good student in the fourth grade. There are two exceptions: Math is to be at the second grade level or below. Sex is to be at the tenth grade level or above."

Now you have the memo and know not to expect anything as far out, absurdly advanced, totally unrealistic, super genius level as high school physics!!!!!!!

Yes, you may want to rush back to your home planet. Have any extra space on your ship?
You might also be interested in Predator Object Tracking: http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html

previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403290
Hulu Seen at 50 Times Earnings in Sale
Windows 8 for software developers: the Longhorn dream reborn?
ICANN: New domain endings... "Forget .com -- here's .coke."
I think you're correct. His interior function is still just another closure around the original var i.

Also, this feels like piling on, but I think the original (intentionally erroneous) example would print '5' repeatedly rather than '4'. var i ends up with the value 5.
Cool stuff. The link at the end seems broken. This one worked for me http://logic.csci.unt.edu/tarau/research/LeanProlog/
corona is cross platform http://www.anscamobile.com and is more flexible/higher performance. (disclaimer: I work for them)
It was not an appeal to authority, nor was it intended to support any of those arguments. It was intended to underscore the point that a particular philosophical argument is not automatically invalid simply because some people, no matter how intelligent and rational, do not find it convincing. In effect, it was a rejection of gp's appeal to his own authority as a student of philosophy.

As for your latter point: if you disprove the possibility of deities with a particular quality or set of qualities, I can then describe a deity which lacks those qualities and is therefore outside the set of deities you have proven impossible. For example, if you can somehow prove that there has never been divine intervention of any form (which I highly doubt is possible to prove), then I could respond by positing a deity that does not intervene in the temporal universe at all, but instead rules only in the afterlife. Since the afterlife is beyond temporal measurement, it is by definition beyond empirical observation, and there is therefore no way you can disprove the existence of an afterlife. By extension, there is no way you can disprove the existence of a deity which rules the afterlife.
I'm still pretty excited about turntable, but not because the music is so phenomenal.

Turntable is the first web service that gives me the sense of physically hanging out with friends while online.

I consider chat rooms or IM to be v1.0 of simulating real-time social interaction on the web, like sitting around a campfire and talking.

But people don't do that very often IRL - they meet at places that have something interesting going on and chat in a low-intensity way while also listening to music, watching a show, eating, etc.

Turntable gives a nice integration of passive entertainment, active participation, and social interaction that makes me feel like I'm hanging out at a club with friends. I can go see which friends are there & what they're doing, listen to a little music, or just say hi.

I think that's cool.
Arduino Cat Faucet with Mongodb and Rails
Was it really a scare tactic in this case, though? The copyright holder felt that his copyright had been infringed, so he sent a cease and desist, backed up with the threat of legal action. What should the copyright holder have done instead? Sent a polite note? Threaten violence? Like it or not the court is where Fair Use is decided. Just because the threat of a lawsuit is scary doesn't always mean it's being used as a scare tactic.

The real, real story here is, as the author asks, where do you draw the line? Personally I don't think the author had much of a leg to stand on given that the image was being used to sell an album and was easily recognizable as a simulacrum of the original work.
If they had, they might have gotten more money from MS (or been purchased outright)... as it stands, Nokia feels "non-exclusive" was worth something to them, and I would tend to agree with what I've seen of the N9 and it's version of Meego.
Driving the Audi A7, the first car with Google Earth onboard.
Thanks for the clarification billybob. :) Part of my perception was driven by the unknown; what would happen if Oracle stopped putting money into it? It's nice to hear that Percona appears to be a potential candidate to continue its development if anything bad ever happened to it on Oracle's end.
Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars
Wow. To add some other interesting info to this, Jay Maisel is the owner of (and lives in) a large building in lower manhattan 190 Bowery. If you've ever walked past this building you'd recognize it as it's covered in street art all the time, and is constantly changing as more art is added and falls apart.

I always though Jay was a good guy for letting artists use that space (even if it was a silent agreement), but maybe that's not the case...

Not that it directly involves this case of fair use, but that building is worth millions of dollars, so Jay was doing this for the sake of "artistic purity" or whatever you want to call it, not because he's a starving photographer...

An article about his building a few years back:
http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2008/09/50481/
Yup. The key to defeating piracy is giving value for the money and not putting any roadblocks in the way of legal acquisition.

Different people pirate games for different reasons. Some do it for the money, some do it because they just can't get the product, some do it because they can't get the product when they want it, some do it because they've been burned in the past and are covering their rear-ends, and others do it just because.

The last one is never going to be a customer. All the rest can be converted, if you're willing to flex far enough. (Some of the money-based problems can't be overcome without pricing yourself too low, though.)

In this day and age, the distribution problems are ridiculous. Steam sells a LOT of games because they can be downloaded at launch, instead of waiting for the mailman, standing in line at midnight, or just generally waiting on something. They even let you pre-load to save the download time as well.
> And yet it should be the artist's choice on how THEIR work is used, regardless of how you, or 99.999% of the people feel.

Why? You seem to think you have scored a point by using "should" and uppercasing THEIR.

I disagree that how THEIR work is used "should" be the artist's choice. The artist's choice is in whether to release the work, and then whether to use applicable copyright laws to control distribution of derivative works for the duration of copyright.
This looks useful, thanks!

I would prefer a USB solution and Synergy uses ethernet, but it is a possible fallback position.
I wonder how the photographer would feel if the company that manufactured the trumpet played by Miles Davis had claimed that his photograph violated the copyright of their "sculpture" and the tailor Miles got his suit from also protested. Of all art forms, photography has some of the least claim on being an entirely original creation of the artist.
The Blackberry does have some advantages over other consumer smart phones. RIM's built a lot of infrastructure for dealing with corporate clients and security. It's probably going to be a long time before the president of the United States switches from a Blackberry.
The Illusions of Psychiatry by Marcia Angell
I have never encountered a situation when beating a defenseless person seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

The law should be changed.
Ask HN: Do you use git submodules?
Login required but it looks like this is the site in question: http://www.spotbanks.com

Here is a previous (failed) attempt at selling the site on flippa: https://flippa.com/128889-new-retail-bank-social-media-site
Note that the author of that admits that he has not looked at the app in question and has no idea what it contains.
I don't understand this comment. You're replying to someone who points out an acknowledged flaw in Baio's logic: he "went out of his way" for the music but ignored the rights on the cover art. Even Baio wouldn't disagree with that; had Baio known, he obviously would have tried to license the art and, failing that, come up with some other cover.

I don't see how the quote here has been misappropriated at all.

Further, the subtext of your comment seems false. "The point is that he was trying, and trying very hard". Well, no. That's not the point. The legal system often does give credit for trying, in the sense that a good faith effort may ward off treble damages. But compliance with the law is often not a best-effort thing, and you do not in the real world always get points for effort.
I think I'm the same as you and wonder if most people are

The OP question is something I would've obsessed over when I was in my teens, wanted to start programming, but spent more time planning my eventual entry into programming.

Once I started programming and making real applications, I became really confident in my ability to pick up any other language as needed. I totally agree that learning new languages are part of a natural progression that's hard to avoid if you're truly enjoying your craft in whatever aspect of the territory interests you.
For a mental model, pretend that variables are referring to storage locations in an array and you reference them using indices - v = [..., v[100], v[101], v[102], v[103], ....]

For example, take the function in the stackoverflow answer -

function foo(x) {
var tmp = 3;
return function (y) {
alert(x + y + (++tmp));
}
}

When you make a call to foo(10), pretend that the bound variables in the body of the function get assigned sequence numbers starting from 100 -

function foo() {
v[100] = 10; // x = 10
v[101] = 3; // var tmp = 3;

return function (y) {
alert(v[100] + y + (++(v[101])));
}
}

So you get as the result,

function (y) {
alert(v[100] + y + (++(v[101])));
}

'y' remains as such because it hasn't been bound to a value just yet. That will happen only when you call this result function.

Now, when you call foo another time like foo(20), the sequence continues from 102 ...

function foo() {
v[102] = 20; // x = 20
v[103] = 3; // var tmp = 3;

return function (y) {
alert(v[102] + y + (++(v[103])));
}
}

So you get another function as the result -

function (y) {
alert(v[102] + y + (++(v[103])));
}

The store now reads v[100] = 10, v[101] = 3, v[102] = 20 and v[103] = 3.

It becomes clear what the two result functions do. Note that they do not share the same storage locations and therefore the two ++ calls increment different storage locations.

In this model, each "var" statement and each argument of a function causes the index assigned to be incremented on a function call, and unbound variables do not cause increments. The behaviour of closures created in javascript is as though such an indefinitely increasing numbering scheme is being used under the hood.

(edited a bit for clarity).
FBI raid of Web hosting firm knocks out sites of more than 100 companies
Responded. Can you give us a sense of your timing in responding to the inquiries?
"Not that it directly involves this case of fair use, but that building is worth millions of dollars, so Jay was doing this for the sake of "artistic purity" or whatever you want to call it, not because he's a starving photographer..."

I could see it being a mix of both.

I don't think it makes him less of a good guy.
Ironically, I was not motivated enough to read through this entire article.
How to Handicap Hulu, Even Before a Sale
Not fast, ugly, bad integration in the OS, often outdated, bad package manager. Well, still better than not having a Unix prompt I guess.
>And yet it should be the artist's choice on how THEIR work is used, regardless of how you, or 99.999% of the people feel.

So... down with fair use?

Everything created is copying something else in same way or another. An artist that expects complete control over their work is more than just delusional in their expectations, but also ignoring how their creation is riffing on previous works by other people.