skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised that so many people dismiss the legality of Psystar. Psystar is:

- selling PCs

- selling legal copies of OSX

- patching copies *for interoperability*

Now, reverse engineering and patching a product for interoperability is not generally believed to be illegal.

Apple has two main arguments, the EULA and copyright infringement. From my European perspective, the EULA argument seems very weak. By EULA, Microsoft tried to prohibit sales of OEM CDs to private customers in Europe, and they got overturned in court. The reasoning was that it is not for a company to dictate what a customer will do with
his property.

The copyright argument seems stronger, except that an operating system is not a work of art or literature. You couldn't sell a painting with modifications, unless you have the permission of the artist.

I'm pretty sure, however, that you could take a Mercedes engine, make minor modifications, put it into a BMW and sell the product, provided that the modifications are according to the customer's wishes.
To me your comments make the article seem more convincing, not less. Like when it says:

To folks in Silicon Valley and those that share their business values, a big payday for steering your company into catastrophe smells.

I share their business values.

Conversely, "Heads I win tails I win" is a business value I don't share. It doesn't seem very entrepreneurial at all.

Edit: Who's saying that "all high-level pay needs to be regulated"? I didn't see that in the article.

Edit 2: changed wording in response to comment below.
I suspect it wasn't so much accidental discovery as a trial and error refinement

Trial-and-error = accident.

We use science because it is more efficient than brute force (trial-and-error; accident).
Well, seeing as how you computer science people regularly abuse equals signs, I figured it didn't matter much. Interpret it as:

Nanotechnology + Swords = O(Awesome)

where equals is the usually CS way of saying "they're close"

hehe
2001 saw the crash of a startup and technology bubble, so it was brutal for startup companies moreso than for the economy as a whole. Although the 2000s saw an increasing number of technology startups, this change was based on fundamentals rather than a bubble, per se.

The 2008 crash is worse than 2001 from a broad-based, whole-economy perspective, but since the bubble's been in real estate and finance, it's the people in those industries who are going to get hurt the worst, not startup entrepreneurs. It's going to be like 2001 for investment bankers and real estate agents, but not as bad for technology.
Just look at our healthcare system. That alone stops any discussion of whether or not American society works. Europe successfully implemented universal healthcare decades ago.
Hey guys - someone just emailed me that this post made it here on y-combinator. So cool! I like the idea to try out the frogpad, by the way. I wasn't able to find anyone who's hacked the frogpad usb to a digital device like the Arduino, so I just placed an order for one, and I'll try my best as soon as it comes in the mail. Hopefully, then someone else might find that code useful :) And thanks for the comment about the TouchShield, that's really flattering! Chris and I spent quite a few weekends hacking it out, so it's nice to know it was worthwhile... -Matt from antipastohw.blogspot.com
Last.FM Releases Highly Anticipated iPhone App Update
Why isn't it actually redirecting though? Seems to be pointing, which is kinda strange. I don't even know how that is done.
Examples of Funny Videos about the financial crisis
hi folks! who has examples of funny videos/slideshows that helps explain the financial crisis:

Here are my contributions:

Hilter as Fuhrer of Financial Stocks
http://www.youtube.com/v/fzuinISI9Bk&hl=en&fs=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/HO3N1Xtg4H4&hl=en&fs=1
http://www.youtube.com/v/EmXnPESPaQ8&hl=en&fs=1

Comic Explaining Subprimes and CDOs
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2190705/CDO-Powerpoint-SubPrime-Primer
We are all Japanese now
Microsoft and Nokia start supporting jQuery as a dev platform
What about libertarians? I don't know of any at Google (except for that guy who wants to build a libertarian city on an offshore platform), but I do know that they're highly overrepresented among hackers.
It's very unpopular to do "moral calculus" - generally only economists will really do it. For a great presentation on prioritizing solutions or "moral calculus" as you call it, see: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...

If Google has nothing to do with AIDS orphans in Africa - that's their choice. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Bono, etc would normally have "nothing to do with AIDS orphans in Africa", yet they have chosen to.
JQuery finds its way into Microsoft and Nokia stacks
"Rich" isn't the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they hear about Steve Jobs, any more than "powerful" comes to their minds when they hear about Barack Obama. People think of them as "successful", because they like those who have vision and succeed at implementing it, but "the rich" and "the powerful" have negative connotations. There's a one-step mental transition in realizing that, in fact, Steve Jobs is rich (but that's okay) because he is successful, and likewise for Obama.

Silicon Valley is ostensibly positive-sum. Some of what occurs on Wall Street is also positive-sum: for example, arbitrage and market-making provide liquidity to markets. Some financial activity, however, is not. Unfortunately for Wall Street's reputation, people tend to focus on the activities that are excessive and destructive, such as the subprime mortgage fiasco.

In general, people tend to resent most those who make money in manners that are zero-sum (or negative-sum). Examples of this would be NYC landlords, who are becoming inordinately rich based entirely on others' pain and misfortune, and health insurance executives, who enrich themselves by charging ridiculous premiums and then denying care to sick people. Most people, when they think of Wall Street, think of traders; few would draw the distinction between, say, corporate finance and what traders do. Trading isn't actually zero-sum, given that it provides liquidity, but it seems to most people like a zero-sum game, and so it's not well respected.
It's a CNAME, and I guess the hacker news web server doesn't care what the HTTP host header says.

www.hackerne.ws.	3565	IN	CNAME	news.ycombinator.com.
news.ycombinator.com.	4235	IN	A	67.15.104.17
This is great news! I was just about to post this but you beat me to it.

A good follow up post about it: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and...
As I recall, they did that, and the alphas ended jockeying for status and killing each other.
Wow, that's a pretty big deal. It's totally unlike Microsoft to ship a not-invented-here API set, as-in, in the box.
And a post from Scott Hanselman about it:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/jQueryToShipWithASPNETMVCAndVi...

And the original announcement on the jQuery blog:
http://jquery.com/blog/2008/09/28/jquery-microsoft-nokia/
Can you learn enough to know a meaningful difference in a few days, though?

Also, it seems to me that Haskell is harder to learn /incrementally/; ie, you have to learn much more before you can write anything useful. I got ~halfway through the 'monk' book without feeling I could write anything useful; but maybe that's just me.
ahh, I didn't see the link at the bottom... most webpages, I guess i'm used to firefox's rss icon in the addresbar
what do you think about this service: http://tr.im/? (as an alternative)
>that doesn't seem very free-markety at all.

You're wrong. The free market comes from the board of directors who approve such the "heads I win, tails I win" package. The board was not forced by any non-free-market laws. Thus, these compensation packages show the free market working.
"What happens if you take all the rules out of a football game? Everyone will cheat"

Technically, if you take all the rules out of a football game then nobody can cheat.
the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts

That's a factor of 10^20. Such a huge discrepancy with GR beggars belief, so I'd bet there's something else (and probably more banal) going on. On the other hand, if their measurements and interpretation are right, this smells like a Prize.
The 50 most significant moments of Internet history
The 14 best Linux distros
Interesting. Got any links about the approach you're taking to decide what would be optimal? It seems like that would be a very difficult problem.
Congratulations to the whole jQuery team. They are constantly amassing success stories and they could not be any more deserving. They put out a great library and foster one of the nicest developer communities on the web.
Agreed 100%. No news piece (even on the internet) has an infinite word count available to dedicate to a particular topic. This means that the reporter for the story and the responsible editor have to decide what is actually relevant and newsworthy enough to merit inclusion in the story, and what is chaff. That's not editorializing or biased reporting, it's good newswriting.

Dedicating half of your story to, for instance, a crazy windbag representing a tiny minority for the (professionally misguided and misinterpreted) purpose of an unbiased piece is where the insanity comes in. If in researching a story you find that there are some dissenting views, you include a quote from them somewhere in the piece, but you don't turn your piece into that one guy or one group versus the original focus of the story. That's sloppy and misrepresenting the issue because you've mistaken "unbiased reporting" with "50/50 equal time for two views."
The thing is that the current rules in the USA for telecom & cable companies encourage monopolization and got us in this telecom mess in the first place. Municipalities giving local monopolies, huge government subsides to a small few companies, preferential laws, the FCC, and a long history of acting like monopolistic assholes. If all legal advantage and monopoly was REMOVED from telecom, you would all of a sudden see a huge change in the system.
uhmm.. where?
or is it online?
100% online, distributed.
By this logic you also advocate replacing any state or federal use of the term "marriage" with "civil union" for heterosexual couples as well, and leave "marriage" as a term exclusively to religious groups, then?
So it's not a box, it's more of a hypercube.
Probably the best name yet for this kind of service.
what does hot-short mean in this context, the duration of the heating cooling cycles?
"Free market" can mean a lot of things. I seem to recall that the robber barons were pretty forceful advocates of a "free market" (by their definition of course). However, my point really doesn't depend on that, and I don't want to dispute terminology, so I've revised the wording to say "entrepreneurial" instead (by which I mean something like rewards-following-value-creation).
Gash:  Ruby Hash interface to Git
I nominate Richard Stallman.
How to Use the Web to Transform the World
10 articles to better understand the financial crisis
The primary argument for gay "marriage" seems to be equal rights for both gay couples and married couples. Another key argument I keep hearing is to "keep government out of the bedroom."

Couldn't both of those goals be accomplished without getting into a cultural war over the term "marriage"?

If "civil unions" are legislated to having the same rights as marriage - then that solves the equality problem.

Also, "civil unions" can have a much looser definition. So if there is a threesome of men that really love each other and want to make a life commitment to each other and have equal rights as a married couple, they could do so. However, with gay "marriage" that would not be possible unless it also included plural marriage - and given our nation's history that's pretty unlikely.

"Civil Unions" just seem to be much more flexible in preserving rights of people in minority situations. Even for non-homosexuals. I had good friends who were cousins in their 50's and had lived together non-sexually for over 30 years. They were inseparable and they shared all their resources. When one of them had a brain tumor and was in the hospital, fortunately because they lived in Germany, it was no issue, but if they had lived in the US, there would have been issues with visiting, etc from what I hear. For them "marriage" would not be something they wanted obviously, but it would have made their lives much easier in many situations if they could have had a "civil union".

So, I'm all for having equal rights and government out of the bedroom, but gay marriage just doesn't seem to be the right solution for those two goals. 1) It leaves out other very legitimate situations where companions - either non-sexual or plural arrangements would not have equal rights, and 2) it starts a divisive cultural war that could be avoided. Peace and love right?
I despise URL shorteners. They mostly exist to triage broken email client linewrap; more recently they fit links into SMS for twitter. This is functionality that should be fixed in the mail client, or be built into twitter/whatever.

Recently they add follow-counting, which I suppose makes people feel good - they want credit around sending people to a link, and they want metrics, I suppose. Again, this should be built into the app that is hosting the link.

It adds a layer of unreliability to the internet. Long-term they all will almost certainly have failures, disappear, bugs, database corruption, etc, rendering email and other documents useless.

They also make the link blind, so you have no sense of what you're about to see, whether it might be worksafe, etc.

They're marginally useful for the linker but they're bad for everyone else.
I don't have an opinion one way or another on that one.

Since the gist of my argument was "let's not fight over something we can solve" perhaps we just add the term "civil union" wherever the term marriage appears. Or perhaps we have a constitutional ammendment that makes the two phrases equal. For instance, I don't think you could go back in the historical record and change terms. The answer to that question may be based on how you make laws.

Another poster made a comment about 3 or more people in a union. I believe this follows naturally as well from an extension of the term "marriage". Things like multiple partners seem just fine in the 21st century. At least to me, but I'm a libertarian. Since the term seems to be opening up, as a hacker I say make the new definition in one place to be equal to anywhere else the term "marriage" was used.
In light of the Wall St bailout, here's a question to ponder: Is Google too big to fail?

In the event of capital inadequacy due to fraud/investments-gone-wrong, should the government bail out Google with taxpayers' money since Google is so integral with the Internet economy?
Fantastic news. MS's libraries are crude and far behind the existing open source alternatives.
Absolutely not true. It seems that a lot Wall Street allocated the money where THEY would make the most profits. And this happen to be the housing mania. For few years the profit from housing was so juicy, that they decided to ignore the fundamentals, and their myopia brought us to this situation.

In a good scenario, wall street will be allocating money to where it is more efficient, in our case, they just shuffled money around in esoteric papers, and pinched a bit of it every time it changed hand, which contributed nothing to the economy, except their own pockets. Now the music has stopped, and a lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand, and brought us to this mess.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297260

ericwaller 21 days ago | link | parent | flag

It'd be interesting if a down vote were actually a special case of reply and required an explanation.

.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57134

aswanson 374 days ago | link | parent | flag

You could make down votes more expensive by forcing someone to type a rationale of why
Ha! That is true. I should have said what happens if you take all the regulation out of a football game. I was trying to emphasize the point that deregulation (or taking away neutrality rules) is bad and will allow larger media companies free reign to do whatever they want. With that much power, they're bound to exert absolute control over the whole system.

The idea of regulation is not to stifle younger, newer innovators. It's to prevent the larger players from taking over and locking out competition. At one point, it was illegal to own more than 40 TV stations.
Great point. Their integrality is dependent on all their data servers. Should data storage become a government regulated utility to guard against this?
gentoo hands down.
Everyone knows about the basics, he should have done specialized distros. I recently found that BackTrack 3 is very good.
This doesn't work because it would mean every dumb "FIRST!" type comment would result in a chorus of posts saying "I voted you down because you just said 'first'." This is much worse than simply downvoting such posts into oblivion.
That ignores the fact the traditional societal supports for marriage are all based around the fact that it is a generative relationship. That is why more resources are devoted to it.

Sure, maybe same sex relationships can be artificially generative, but this is no where near the capability or likelihood to equal the basis for traditional marriage.

So, same sex relationships should not have the same benefits that are accrued by a generative relationship, since they do not require them and are thus just squandering resources.

Emotional issues are important, but they should not be the bottom line in a situation that clearly has a functional basis. However, the pro side seems to be mainly emotive in their driving arguments.
Right, I actually did read that far. I'm just trying to illustrate unless he defines it in a way the excludes cases like that, I'm not sure you can call it a law...a generalization with exceptions, maybe. As his law is written, the cell phone example kinda disproves it. I think the problem is that paragraph you quoted can't easily be reduced to language that fits in that blue box. Just playing devil's advocate...
Why don't you pair it? The advance with opencalais is that they offer a production-level service that's very easy to use and integrate. (Especially when they get normalization working.)

Jump start != produce a complete end-to-end solution including whatever components you happen to think are essential
Time lapse video of global air traffic over 24 hours
Gentoo -- "Control freaks only."

True and exactly why I use it.
At a high level, jQuery has two main things going for it:

1) It has awesome functionality.
2) It's indistinguishably close to being browser-independent

It looks like MS has adopted jQuery for (1), and their developers will get (2) for free.

Of course, (2) may also have figured into MS's (apparent) decision to adopt. If that's the case, more power to 'em. Nothing would please me more than seeing (one division of) MS get a clue.
It is now impossible to create your own TV network

Justin.TV to the rescue! ;-)
Hi there, thanks a lot for your articles! Much appreciated. :)
The 50-80% is a safe bet because the failure rate is at least that anyway. But it would be remarkable if startups started to die of a bad economy instead of the usual cause: not making something people want.
I've been running gentoo for a couple of years, and been liking it. Quality of the repository did go down a bit last year though. Been looking at Arch, but will probably start to use ubuntu or debian again.
Rails gained a ton of momentum because it was significantly better at a number of things than existing tools. It was way more organized, clean, and succinct than lots of PHP code out there, and way, way more compact, and less of a time sink than the Java frameworks.

Merb needs to spell out why I should give it a try; what makes it not just a bit nicer than Rails, but way better. If it's just not that much of an improvement, the network effects of having tons of users, plugins, etc... make Rails more attractive.
> The reward is doing the right thing, even if it means profits go down

Unfortunately, the law says that the Google Board of Directors has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. If they decide to use the company in a way that is damaging to their shareholders' interests, they can be sued.

Securities laws were introduced about eight decades ago to protect the small investor. The concern was that the small investor had little control over the actions of a company. Therefore, he had to be protected from the possibility that the managers might take his capital and use it for their own private purposes. The law makes no judgment about whether those private purposes are base or noble. If you want to sell shares to large amounts of people, then you are constrained by law to act in their best interest.

Privately supporting equality for our gay brothers and sisters is one thing. Repurposing a publicly-held web services company to do so is quite another.
I can't say I took the time to read all of the articles. I will say that the few I did read stop short of explaining root causes. Here's what I've been passing around http://mises.org/story/3128
Ridiculous, utter, nonsense? And what other pointless rants of mine are you talking about? If you want to make a point, then make a point based off my argument, not by descending into personal name calling.

What other pointless rants are you talking about?

(And by the way, I've been several times in the general conflict zone area. What are your info sources that make you so sure I am wrong?)
LOL - reality kills 90% of all startups anyway.
Scott Guthrie's team is one of the most forward-looking groups at Microsoft, and I think the developer division makes the best Microsoft products to begin with: Visual Studio and a few essential plugins is a much better IDE than Windows is a consumer operating system.
Motorola Building Up 350-Person Android Team. Nokia Also Sniffing Around.