skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems the collective wisdom of HN disagrees with me, but....

Microsoft were barred from compulsory bundling with Windows after bundling that essentially gave away MS-DOS with Windows to try to undermine DR-DOS. There were recorded cases of them developing software specifically to sense a competitor title and induce incompatibilities that weren't necessarily there. Back when Microsoft Office still had significant commercial competition it was noted that it had substantially weaker copy protection than other Microsoft software, suggested to be on the basis that an illegal copy of Office was better for Microsoft than a legal copy of competitor software.

Microsoft were recorded as saying they were giving away Internet Explorer to 'cut off Netscape's air supply'. Netscape were marketing their web server as a superior product running on NT Workstation to IIS on NT Server, so Microsoft bundled IIS with NT Server and changed the terms on NT Workstation to prevent its use as a server.

Microsoft were specifically challenged that their line on IE being inextricably integrated with Windows was incorrect and produced false videos in testimony to back up their case. When they were ordered to produce an edition of Windows without IE they insisted they could then only produce either an obsolete or non-functional edition. Bill Gates' giving of his testimony was described as 'evasive and non-responsive' and many of his denials were directly undermined by his own emails. Bluntly, in trying to defend the case they committed repeated perjury.

From this, findings of fact were issued (which still stand) which stated that Microsoft's standing in the x86 operating system market constituted a monopoly and that they had taken actions to crush threats to this monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Real Networks, Linux, and others.

Microsoft's behaviour was illegal under US anti-trust law and had abused market positions to the detriment of competitors. Microsoft's business tactics were illegally stifling their new entrepreneurial challengers.

Which is why, still, I consider Bill Gates' money to be tainted. He may well be doing a fantastic, dedicated job of his philanthropy at present. He may well have been somewhat similarly wealthy regardless. But, regardless, he still worked to obtain a dominant position for his company, at the expense of competitor software that could have promoted a more dynamic, diverse ecosystem, by means that were found to be illegal and anti-competitive.
This post reminds me of a favorite passage from Lord of the Rings, when Frodo is debating whether he should wait for Gandalf in the Shire, or press on:

“… The choice is yours: to go or wait.” [Gildor said.]
“And it is also said,” answered Frodo, “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”

“Is it indeed?” laughed Gildor. “Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; how should I choose better than you? But if you demand advice, I will for friendship's sake give it.”

The problem is, most of your advisers probably didn't know and, more importantly, couldn't know if the IBM sale would pan out. If they said stop, and you did, and failed anyway, what if they felt bad at whether the IBM sale might've worked?

The world is big and unpredictable and replete with stories of people advising others that something can't be done or shouldn't be done that way, only to have the advisees ignore the advisers and do great things. Hell, see this post: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-f... for an example of well-meaning advice that, if taken would've been wrong.
> The notion that one has rights to their own ideas is a marvelous development of liberal productive societies

If by "liberal productive society" you mean "capitalism", then yes, copyright is indeed a capitalistic invention. Only in capitalism could the notion of "owning" something which by its very definition is impossible to own remotely make any sense at all.

> It has allowed value to accrue to things that were actually valuable while also being intangible.

Ideas had value even before someone decided that you have to be able to assign them a monetary price. They were invaluable, by virtue of being free. The compulsive need of capitalism to monetize everything has actually destroyed the true value of ideas. We "pirates" fight to restore that value.

> The mere existence of art and innovation is not enough to make up for the destruction of rights to one's own work or ideas.

Except we aren't destroying anything. We're restoring it to the way it's supposed to be. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the truly destructive thing is copyright.

> Putting the progress of art and innovation solely in the hands of hobbyists is like saying the start-up world will work fine if no one gets funding anymore because people can always code stuff themselves at home on the weekend.

First, abolishing copyright (and by extension, intellectual property - which is not to be confused) does not mean you put progress into the hands of "hobbyists". We're just taking it out of the hands of monopolists, for the good of everyone.

Second, you're committing a very common fallacy made by pro-copyright people: you assert that copyright is essential to do business. It isn't.

Third, you imply that we have to care that business models will fail. They do all the time. Now, I ask why a business model that relies entirely on artificially constructed, nonsensical laws has any right to exist in the first place?

> But to dismiss rights out-of-hand is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and choosing a very weird solution [turning back the clock] to a very modern problem.

And another fallacy. You assert that since copyright was invented at some point, it was progress, and that abolishing it again will therefore be a step back. It's the opposite actually. The invention (and implementation) of copyright was a step back in the first place, so abolishing it will bring us back to where we are supposed to be.
Re: the can't afford advertising problem, you should be able to find a $100 adwords coupon fairly easily. Hopefully you can make enough from that to cover further advertising.
DoubleClick’s Guerilla Marketing Legacy
Nokia WebGL Earth with 3d terrain and textured buildings
Inspired Talks: Mills of ustwo on the Upcoming Whale Trail 
We had a chance to sit down and talk again with our friends from ustwo™ about their upcoming iPhone app that generated a lot of buzz over the Interwebs recently – Whale Trail.
Sound vibrations will still be picked up in a vacuum in this case. Vibrations through the rocket body will be transmitted to the camera body (direct contact) which will then be transmitted to the microphone (again, direct contact). According to Wikipedia[1], 90% of the Earth's atmosphere, by mass, is at an altitude of 52,000 ft or lower.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Pressure_an...
What Is Do-Follow And No-Follow Links – Should You Care?
"You shouldn't be communicating with the phone" -- Andy Rubin, Google
Why San Francisco is tech's utopia
They make a point about the Bay Area by giving numbers for California.
Does that law apply GLONASS as well?
> 3.0 and 4.0 aren't a fork for tablets though, are they?

3.0 was essentially a fork for tablets. 4.0 is where they merged that fork back so it works on both phones and tablets, which is why they will be releasing the source of 4.0.

This says to me that Google felt that the user experience on phones is so important to them that they're ok with a closed source fork for tablets as a way to keep people from running Android 3.x code on phones and having a poorer user experience.
Down voters would you like to explain?
Write a long memo: "This is too long to read"

Write a short memo: "This is just your opinion"

I'm not going to try to parse Brin's response, but realistically, if Yegge had just written a page-length summary of his argument on this subject no one would have paid attention. Short-form writing lacks the scope to argue a point on factual arguments. It tends to rely on the author's personal credibility. In a large company, it's hard for people outside senior management to have the personal relationship with the CEO that's required to be persuasive with a short memo.

Engineering reports and academic papers get around the problem by including an abstract. It's not really the style to include them in informal business memos, but it might help in a situation like this.
If you mean just the slides, most of them are in this github repo: https://github.com/strangeloop/2011-slides
:-) Thanks!

Corrected.
The only café's I see around the bay area that are Speciality Coffee Association of America members are those that are long-established and shockingly up-scale.

Does this study apply to newly founded coffee shops, or just the failure of existing ones? The analogy in the article is more toward newly founded businesses. Citation?
Since there is still no carrier that provides reasonably priced global plans (including data) this looks like the next best thing to me.

I think we will add our vox.io profiles to our business cards when we order the next batch.
I was a TechStars Seattle finalist this year. We applied with a product/idea that was also implemented by another company in the most recent YC batch (I also applied to that batch before TS but didn't get an interview).

To answer your last question, yes, I think it's somewhat of an indicator that you have potential. It means, at the very least, you piqued the interest of smart investors. Not getting in just means a few dozen people had better ideas, better teams and/or more traction in their minds.

Of course, being a finalist doesn't beat having a product out in the market that people are buying/using.

For me, it was a good experience doing the interview with TS staff/investors, understanding what they want, etc. I've had moderate success with bootstrapped startups–but the accelerator/angel/VC world is new to me. Knowing you were in the top 25 applications out of 600 is an ego boost for about ... a week.

Here's the deal, though ... I've shuttered that idea. Partly because I know other people now have a leg-up, partly because I'm not in a big metro where it's easier to get traction, but mostly because I'd rather do something I'm a little more passionate about (Cilantro) and experienced in. I've applied to YC again–if I don't get in, I'll still plow forward. I've already got an MVP and users. I doubt I'll apply to TS again (moving to the valley is easy for me. Seattle/Boulder, not so much).

I don't know if that answers any of your questions, but that's what I got.
Caring about the product seems to be the most dangerous. It's how the coffeeshop fallacy pops up and it's how people end up spending years building stuff nobody wants to buy.

Steve Jobs might have disagreed with that particular point.
Code School now offers access to all courses for $25/month
Note: I made a similar comment a few days ago.

It seems that you might be slightly misinformed about energy. Since the 1950s, there have been a number of advancements in energy production. Some examples are efficient shale oil extraction, tar sands oil extraction, horizontal drilling, deep water drilling, and high Arctic drilling.

As The Futurist discusses in depth[1], annual world oil consumption has been hovering around 32 billion barrels since about 1982. That means oil consumption, at $100/barrel, is $3.2 trillion, or 5% of nominal world GDP.

My take away from that is technology has made the oil supply a non-issue. And, it will continue not being a problem for the foreseeable future. It is not a hard resource limit.

Also, check out the the research going into liquid fluoride thorium fusion. It seems to have potential as a way to do cheap, safe, "easy" nuclear fusion.

Personally, I think that the problem is human willpower and chicken-little attitudes. To increase my technology optimism, I read nextbigfuture.com. Nearly daily, I see an article posted there that makes me go, "Holy crap! We can do that now??!"

[1] http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran...
Get Ready for a New Human Species
Hi,

Could you describe was buggy about the demo? Did it load really slow or was it something else :)?

I'm currently working really hard on the commercial version of Observer which will be much more speedy less hacked up. So any feedback is still more than welcome at this point :D

Thanks,

Arnout (developer of Observer :D)
Siri Can Open Up Your New iPhone to Attack
As a legal immigrant American citizen living in Elk Grove California, let me be the first to say "duh". Movies are a fantasy world. Before I moved to the US, I saw Dangerous Minds and thought all kids in all schools carried guns with them. Of course, this wasn't reality when I moved here.

America has her faults but you really shouldn't discount her beauty based on the news and it's mismatch to movies.

"Hollywood is destroying little guys' lifes for downloading a bunch of songs" - technically they've only sued a few people... and really, people shouldn't be stealing music anymore with songs available for 99cents now.

"insane financial schemes" - ya, there are a few really ethically challenged people who are smart enough to take advantage of others in America. But really, there are a lot of really fantastic people here as well. My business partner is someone I would be comfortable giving a blank check. I've accidentally forgotten my iPhone at Starbucks a couple times and it was returned both times. The area I live in is very safe (knock on wood.) Our garage door has accidentally been left open twice in the last ten years and we had left for the weekend. The first time nothing happened. The second time, our neighbor stayed up all night to keep watch. True story.

There are a lot of good people and yes, there are some bad people. America is a diverse collection of people. That is her strength.
Famous Thought Experiments, Animated in 60 Seconds Each
How does it compare to http://tablesorter.com/?
Mickey Mouse and John Coltrane are widely and continuously available because people enjoy them. If their copyrights expired tomorrow there would still be plenty of Coltrane MP3s and torrents out there a year from now. However try playing Coltrane in your restaurant without paying a license or try uploading Steamboat Willy to youtube to show the world this strange old cartoon you found. Then you'll discover that people are prevented from enjoying these works because companies are using copyright to remove them.
That section is descriptive of current practice. The semantics of 511 are the previous section.
Isn't it the same runtime environment as a worm's?
Reminds me a lot of those "draw a puppy using only three essential shapes". Yes, the basic framework isn't that hard, the devil's in the details…

(I do have to work through that "Draw on the Right Side of your Brain" book sometimes, though)
I guess my point was just that calling him out, while strictly correct, is doing nothing to refute whatever statements he may have made on the singularity, nor is it doing anything to promote the idea of the singularity.

Replying to "evil exists, therefore God does not," with, "that argument has been made before," doesn't say anything about whether God does or doesn't exist, and it doesn't do anything to refute the argument.

The point of PG's How To Disagree is that the point of disagreeing is to address the truth or falsehood of a proposition, not the way the proposition is presented.

The DH# levels (at least DH0-2) can be restated something like this:

DH0: I don't like the author, therefore his argument is false.

DH1: The author has a relevant fault or weakness, therefore his argument is false.

DH2: The author didn't present his argument well, therefore his argument is false.

While it's nothing against him personally, the first three paragraphs of Kurzweil's reply read like "the author didn't present his argument well, therefore it is false." He recovers later, sure. He easily reaches 5-6 on the DH scale, but the rebuttal would be stronger without the first three paragraphs, and they certainly aren't the best, or most praiseworthy, part of it.
Same as the comment above, is it different from a worm's instruction set?
Worse, there are about to be seven billion brains on the planet. Not merely one.. and human brains aren't so great in isolation.
Glad to hear, however isn't that form added to his record/file with the company? I don't see HR shredding it. Unless I'm wrong.
Well, there's the womb, and interaction with other humans, school, etc.
At least DuckDuckGo is a memorable and easy to spell name. Most sites these days have such odd spelling or nonsense words that you must spell out the name (and dots) when talking to other people.
"To prevent someone from accessing Siri and taking advantage of what you thought was your own private, personal assistant, go to the Passcode Lock screen and disable access to Siri on locked phones."
The State of Venture Capital and the Internet
Neat implementation, but hasn't he just made a slightly kludgier version of Device Anywhere?
This seems pretty different from the Canadian asset requirement [1]. The Canadian asset requirement is meant to ensure that new (skilled worker) immigrants can support themselves (and it's on the order of $10 000. The immigrant keeps this money and can spend it however he likes.

Canada does have something similar to this visa though[2], but the investment is managed by the government.

1. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/funds.asp

2. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/investors/in...
playing DnD doesn't feel the same as making tools for DnD

That's absolutely true, and I'd take it a step further. Playing DnD doesn't feel the same as making tools for and running a business around DnD.
What the market wants is every map, book, song, movie, game, and poem ever made to be instantly accessible, searchable, and reviewable. They want their work to be autosyncing, autobackedup, and to follow them from device to device. They want to be able to securely talk with friends and family at any time, to publically talk with friends and family at any time, to discover new friends and family, and to be able to completely disconnect from friends and family at will. They want intelligent tools that keep them from making dumb decisions, tools to help them make even better good decisions, and tools that won't get in the way of them making dumb decisions.

I think that the market for computing power has a looong way to go before it taps-out what the market demands.
Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 -- Review
If we're actually being precise, you grant them an irrevocable license to your code, which is not at all the same thing:

http://source.android.com/source/cla-individual.html

eg
"Except for the license granted herein to the Project Leads and recipients of software distributed by the Project Leads, You reserve all right, title, and interest in and to Your Contributions."

> I'm all for freely contributing to projects, but I will never assign my copyright to a corporation. A not-for-profit at least, but corporation, come on.

The Mozilla committer's agreement, for instance, isn't that different in practice. You agree to specific licenses for your contribution (various shades of copyleft, MPL, GPL and LGPL) -- which amounts to anyone using that code being granted an irrevocable license -- but you retain copyright.

http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/committer/committers-agreemen...
Open source, Arduino-based pocket camera dolley
I only realized there were examples on the front page after visiting HN. They're completely below the fold for me (1440x900).

The examples page had a similar problem. The examples (pretty close to the fold) looked like comments. I went to read the comments, seeing if anyone had suggested live examples be put on the site.

The contact list example won't let me add contacts if I click "edit" on one row, then delete that row. The table also seems to degrade if you remove all elements.

"Documentation" and "Source" link to the same (Github) page. At least link to README.md for the documentation. Why is the "Download" link bold?

The front page has no indication of the name of this library above the fold.
:) thanks! vox.io profiles are soon to become even more useful, so stay tuned. And our iPhone app is just around the corner.
DuckDuckGo is in the default search engine list, but it is not the default search engine.
I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc.

The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested.

Peak oil, for example, is not about running out of oil. There could still be tons of oil around. It's about EROEI reaching near 1:1. When it costs the energy content of a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil, we are out of oil as an energy source. This could occur after only ~5% of the Earth's hydrocarbons have been extracted.

EROEI for oil has been steadily declining. The first oil drilled was, of course, the easiest to get. Drop a well and it spurts out. Almost all of that is gone outside a few supergiant fields, and those are or will soon be entering decline. Heavy oil, shale oil, and tar sands require a lot of energy to extract and process... far more than "light sweet crude."

All fossil fuels follow the same pattern. Coal and gas have not peaked yet, but they will... almost certainly in the next 50 years. Oil probably peaked in 2005, though it won't be possible to say for sure except ~25 years in retrospect.

I'm also aware of the thorium cycle, etc., but I am skeptical of the ability of such things to scale fast enough. Keep in mind that to maintain growth new energy technologies will have to scale faster than the fossil fuel EROEI decline curve.

I personally do not believe in the "doomer" scenario. However, I do think this: I think the first half of the 21st century will be dominated economically and technologically by the energy transition. The story of this era will be a mad rush to do everything we can to increase efficiency and build out new resources simply to tread water against the fossil fuel decline.

And of course our political class will make it worse by doing the absolute dumbest possible things: subsidizing oil prices to prevent price signals from working, going to war over dwindling oil reserves, interfering in the market for new alternatives, restricting new alternatives, NIMBYism against renewable and nuclear energy, etc.
5 Tips For "Pitching" Infographics - Does Your Company Need Them?
Very few jobs, I imagine, are anything like they seem from the outside. Every glamorous-looking job has many hours of painstaking drudgery involved.

On the other hand, dull-looking jobs probably have great parts that outsiders never know about.
Funny they make the case for the Bay Area with numbers for all of California.
Ordasity: Building Stateful Clustered Services on the JVM
Guiced Jetty on Heroku Cedar in 15 minutes
For some reason, these slides are only available in a flash widget that's synchronized with the video. Here's a little script to grab the flash and build a PDF for yourself.

ImageMagick and swftools required.

#!/bin/bash
for s in {1..39}; do wget http://www.infoq.com/resource/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/en/slides/$s.swf; done
for swf in *.swf; do swfrender $swf -o $swf.png && rm $swf; done
convert `ls *.png -x1 | sort -n | xargs echo` slides.pdf
rm -f *.swf.png

[Edit: required packages]
Developers & Publishers: Take Advantage of Facebook Ticker TODAY
TouchFire - A screen-top keyboard for iPad
I'm not sure they conflict. The post you linked is about keeping an open mind and offering advice on specifics, instead of just shutting someone down because you think their idea isn't viable.
Why would it need to be in isolation? Machine vision, voice recognition, speech synthesis, robotics -- there's no obvious reason why if we could build such a brain we couldn't find a way for it to interact with people.
Buy a home, get a US visa, Senators propose