skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Statistic wise, natural gas has killed more people than nuclear.
Thoughts on SimpleDB, DynamoDB and Cassandra
Australia may loom large in the consciousness of the world, but economically, politically and militarily we are a minnow.

The point is that defence is the one area where you are meant to take the very long view. Australia has fastidiously and consistently kept up its end of the ANZUS alliance. We had experience in exercising secondary sovereignty due to our long allegiance to Britain. When the mother country proved to be incapable of defending us in World War II, we started sending our soldiers to fight in American wars instead of British ones.

You think we'd have learned the lesson that empires can be selectively blind when time comes to deliver the serious help.

The one interesting little twist in the Australian defence architecture is that we have a nuclear science organisation that has been maintained since the 1950s. The official reason is for the science, but it just so happens that we have a cadre of several hundred scientists of the kind you'd need to build a bomb in a few years if that seemed necessary. Plus quite a few British scientists who worked on the British weapons program retired here in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps as a thankyou for letting the Brits blow up Maralinga they passed on a few hints.

But really, it all comes back to the central problem that none of our politicians can tell their elbow from their arsehole, or TCP from tea. The guy who was chosen to negotiate the AUSFTA was a farmer who didn't understand the fuss about the IP provisions. We've had a series of Communications ministers who are an exciting mix of different species of arrogant ignorami.

Technology is not taken seriously in this country. That's the bottom line.

If the USA interfered with our footy finals it would be war.
On the other hand, there is the problem of abandonware that is so old the owner don't actually enforces copyright on it anymore but technically it is still copyrighted.
What's the opinion of people from Hollywood?
http://www.quora.com/Future-of-Entertainment/What-are-all-th...
Started reading the article and got stuck reading the http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/omdyt/what_is_the... thread for 30 minutes or so.

That's how.
Specificity, experience, and expertise
Totally agree, man! Education is always the key.
people edited their posts without signing their changes.
I've been a huge proponent of "green" energy for years, and after watching it for those years, it's becoming more and more obvious the technology just isn't there yet. The best we can do is pump more money into research and ignore these poorly planned start ups that are only profitable due to subsidies. Every major type of renewable energy has some aspect which makes it at least a decade and several breakthroughs away from viability.

Cellulosic/Algae Ethanol: About an order of magnitude off on cost, many orders away on capacity. They are still immature technologies but seem to have a lot of promise.

Photovoltaic Solar: Cost is almost there, but no one has a plan for what to do when the sun isn't shining. Solar systems can only produce energy for about 6 hours a day, which presents a problem when we need energy for 24 hours. It doesn't produce energy during peak demand (~5-9pm) to even help with load balancing. People can currently make a small profit selling back to the grid, but there's virtually no chance of it providing more than about 5% of demand.

Solar Thermal Collectors: Better than photovoltaic as they can generally produce power for about 8 hours, then molten salt batteries can provide energy for another couple; but still not a viable large scale solution.

Wind: Geographically limited, very high maintenance costs.

Hydrogen: Only an energy storage medium, not a means to produce energy. In most cases there are more efficient ways to use the energy directly without the additional loss of producing hydrogen.

Corn Ethanol: Energy storage medium, and a bad one. The most optimistic numbers I've found indicate it requires about .84 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. Most numbers are significantly worse, in the 1.2-1.4 range. It sounds great if the lower numbers are accurate, but 1 gallon of ethanol contains ~2/3 the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline so it's still a net loss. (note: I haven't done any serious research on sugarcane ethanol, which at first glance appears somewhat better)

Hydroelectic: Great technology that is proven, cost effective, and viable; but is severely limited geographically and the dams can cause major environmental concerns.

After years of following the news, studying it, and taking classes in renewable energy; it always comes back to nuclear. If it wasn't for legislative bungling, lawsuits preventing new plants, and the occasional (comparatively) minor failure of 40 year old technology we wouldn't even be talking about a clean energy problem. I'd love for one of these technologies to prove me wrong but there is little indication they will in the near future.
I forgot to mention some other side things: how about ideas on "Killing Piracy". (Also would be cool to Fix Privacy, but that is not really entertainment related per se).

Note to self: I use a lot of "quotes" (and parentheses)...
What are people's opinions on removing copyright laws? Not just copyrights on music and movies, but also all copyrights on software, computer graphics, wordpress themes, etc. Is this something that the YCombinator community is behind?
When the Chinese people have had enough, they'll demand change. Who are we to force change down their throats?

In 2003 our President invaded a country that had nothing to do with the war on terror. We didn't listen to anyone including our closest allies. Why would China or anyone else give a shit about what we have to say now?
I agree with your general critique, but these guys have a structural problem in their model:

Their description of their model[1]:

Our model is defined as follows. We consider a population
of N agents, where each agent has two simultaneous roles:
donator (e.g. a buyer) and rewarder (e.g. a seller).

This simply does not correspond to the reality: we have locally interacting agents (gas-station owner, vehicle owner) that exist in a (relatively) 'flat'/'simultaneous' information space (e.g. the news of troubles in oil region x) and the fact that one set of agents (e.g. gas-station owners) are themselves engaged in affinity based relationship[s] with global agents (e.g. oil companies).

"No need for conspiracy: Self-organized cartel formation in a modified trust game" -- sure, in a purely locally bounded space of action and information. But that is not the reality of life on this planet. (Not for the past 200 years, for sure.)

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.3798v1.pdf
There's a startup called Votizen that I think makes your voting profile visible and therefore be easily considered by political parties. I would imagine that if there is critical mass of people in that platform interesting tools can be derived for any mass actions for/against politicians.
https://www.datashack.net/dedicated/ I definitely recommend datashack, we've run a very successful minecraft server on it (averaging 50+ players).
I don't think that's the flipside to my point. I think the flipside to your point would be "why have IP protection at all? It's an idea in my head now, why should someone else have control over that and my ability to execute it?"

And I don't actually program anymore, so let's go with writing: should anyone have the ability to republish it without my consent after the copyright has ended? Yes. Even a big publisher.

Should anyone have the ability to take my created work and extend on it, using my creations outside of the created work? Yes, after the trademark ends.
Yea, but I don't think this alone explain what led to SOPA/PIPA/etc. Can you explain what led to them? To be honest the MPAA is also to blame, but...
Siri is incapable of telling you what time it is outside the US
http://astroaficionado.net/2012/01/21/siri-time-conundrum/
I guess the point I was trying (badly) to make is that long-term contracts are not the same thing as buyer inflexibility, though they can be a cause of it.
The killer feature that reddit has is subreddits.

I disagree with the article; there is no one reddit culture. One can go to r/politics, r/gardening, r/fitness, or r/askscience for example, and they all feature their own cultures and own biases. For example r/fitness has a culture focusing on weight lifting for fitness. But for people who are into fitness through running, there is r/running. The same thing goes for politics: r/politics tends to be left leaning, but you can find right leaning people in order subreddits.

There are thousands of vibrant community subreddits were people with similar interests (and sometimes opinions) participate. All with their own cultures and moderation rules for what are acceptable posts.

Subreddits combined with voting and good moderation make reddit way better than usenet, Digg in its heyday, or 4chan.
The issue with "cartel-like" price is that it is not the perfectly competitive price, and the perfectly competitive price is the most efficient price - the perfectly competitive price is, in the absence of externalities, the one that brings about the most benefit (by equally aggregated utility) to society as a whole.

The significance is because of the loss of efficiency, not because of the name/label given, or how the price is determined.
I should get a fields medal.

Tri() triangle waveform zero to one

FullTri() triangle wave form, -one to one

Saw() sawtooth waveform Sin() version

FullSaw()

Caw() sawtooth waveform Cos() version

I have invented new transendental functions!
Steve Wozniak loves Android over iPhone
It's not that statistically coal and natural gas are less dangerous, it's more how the disaster distribution works out.

Coal and natural gas may have a constant payout that remains relatively low, rare, and random, perhaps a uniform distribution, and it's average value may be bigger than the distribution of nuclear.

But the issue with nuclear is that its distribution might look like an enormous Dirac Delta function, and when it hits, it takes out many people even wiping out entire communities, if not regions, for hundreds of years.

As a species we are probably used to hearing and feeling badly about the random ape being struck by lightning or forgetting to tend his fire and burning his tree down and being able to move on.

But when we find an entire village is suddenly gone, their part of the forest gone, and strange unknown diseases attack us when we move through the now forbidden zones, we feel differently.
Blogs vs. Term Papers
Both of those events were predominantly due to 1960s technology, namely generation II nuclear power. Generations III and IV are significantly more robust with many more fail safe mechanisms.
Just giving you some feedback from someone working in a (virology) research lab so I'd say I have a fair idea of what academia is like.

My biggest question is, how do you plan on gaining traction to bring in credible editors that can actually challenge journals that have been around for decades in their respective fields? I would imagine that it is going to be very hard to change the mind of the more resistant peoples in academia (i.e. the older crowd that has been using the same journals their entire career) who actually control the money. How do you plan on attracting credible reviewers to review the submitted articles?

In regards to your proposed pricing, isn't the entire idea for disruption of academic publishing to get rid of having to pay for articles?
> Nearly every single American green energy program, from the 1970s to today, has failed, or is in the process of failing.

Solar is booming and doing much better than in the 1970's, and there have been many breakthroughs combined to helping getting the cost per watt way down.

> And the batteries are hazardous.

You do know gas and oil are hazardous and toxic right? You do know that the extraction, processing and consumption of oil and it's byproducts are putting very large amounts of bad stuff into the air we breathe and water we drink, right? You did hear about the various huge oil spills, including the BP Gulf disaster, Nigeria, etc?

The whole point of government, one of many, is is to act as a neutral guardian for society's shared resources and common benefits. Individuals and businesses are relatively free to pursue their own interests, but only so far as it does not harm others (ideally), or bring about Tragedy of the Commons kinds of situations. Thus, some regulation, and some punishment/reward mechanisms are in place to help maintain or bring about the kind of world we want to live in. This should be pretty clear, and has no malevolent intent.

I do find it funny that some folks never complained that Big Oil was getting subsidies, incentives, breaks, special treatment, etc. but when it comes to solar, wind, anything intended to be a cleaner or renewable energy source, suddenly there are complaints that government is distorting the market place or picking winners. The difference, clearly, is which technology or industry one would personally rather see favored. Put me down for favoring energy sources that are renewable or better for health. This should not be some kind of radical position, because the benefits are pretty clear.

We agree that taxing pollution is probably a good thing for government to be doing. But the oil/coal industries world-wide are fighting such things, and they spend lots of money on Congress. And the Republican Party, in particular, does their bidding almost every time a relevant bill comes along.
I think net neutrality and proper labeling work perfectly with his list. And I don't think that "bad for established media" should be the guiding principe, just "good for people". To that end, "no artificial geographic restrictions" seems reasonable to me.

That said:

* Legal recognition of public domain donations.

* Legal recognition of public domain recursive work (in the vein of the GPL, where work from it must also be in the public domain.)
Sencha is great. I wrote demo apps for Sencha associations, grids, MVC, REST, XTemplates, etc.

http://github.com/sixarm

Then search for "sixarm_sencha"
If you aren't specifically trying to disrupt that, then what ARE you trying to disrupt? Authors are still going to target prestigious journals first and work their way down if they can't get into the top.
Yea, where do you think the claim that every piracy equals a lost sale comes from?
Not just Australia, but NZ too. The US has been angling at free trade agreements with NZ and Australia for a while now. They all contain 'interesting' copyright provisions. The sad thing is that too few people here care or know enough about global politics to even notice what's going on, let alone try to stop it.

Luckily NZ is too small for anyone to care. Hopefully we get to keep our ban on software patents a little longer. Although the recently introduced "3 strikes" law (ISPs are forced to monitor your interent use, and warn you if you get caught on an MPAA honeypot torrent. 3 warnings and your internet connection is cut) is dubious.

3 strikes law: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/254485,new-zealand-passes-thre...

NZ/US FTA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand%E2%80%93United_Stat...

Interesting side note, the founder of Megaupload was hunted down in New Zealand.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/21/idUS17541848922012...
The fast ones become rich. They perform trades equivalent to front-running and/or scalping. The enterprising fast becomes a middleman to the slow.
I've worked at a lot of jobs where people have on-site company-provided housing; it's common in defense, oil and gas, mining, etc. in remote areas.

Depending on how it's done, I have no problem with it. It's definitely better if you're a high-paid worker than someone who might end up borrowing from a company, doing the company store thing, etc. which caused so many problems with labor in the past.

In a lot of cases, the housing is contracted out to specialist "man camp" providers, who run the entire facility and charge a per-resident rent to the employers. This probably removes a lot of the perverse incentives.

It's a great way to save on housing, commute, etc. if you're single/don't have a family. A lot of older people would maintain a home elsewhere and then do 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off type shifts, which doesn't save as much money, but does make work a lot more efficient.

Corporate apartments, dorms, etc. wouldn't be unreasonable for someone doing a startup or tech company in a place where rentals are inefficient -- it's pretty easy to rent an apartment and have some roommates in silicon valley, but if you were doing a startup in a rural/suburban place where people usually bought vs. rented, maybe the company should work something out for them.
Can you prove that? I'm not familiar with the Scala drama.

Even if that innuendo is true, why don't you blame the one who hurts his feeling? Instead of blaming him. Open source developers are human, too. They have taken on far too much abuses from ungrateful users.

I don't see the need for David to be a doormat to every abusive user out there. I would snap too and say fuck it, you guys are on your own.
Yes, because even the founders recognized that intellectual property is not real property. You can't stop people from copying ideas, and so they permitted copyright to be applied for a limited time in order to encourage people to release more creations (because they got rights to exploit them exclusively for a while), because the idea was that these creations entering the public domain would enrich the public domain for everyone. The fact that nothing is falling into the public domain (and probably never will again in our lifetimes if the status quo continues) is the biggest flaw in the current copyright system.

No, you don't get to own an idea forever just because you thought of it first. The very concept of 'owning ideas' is silly, but even if it wasn't, the second you tell it to someone else, it becomes part of the collective society and culture. If you don't like the deal that copyright gives you, you have a choice: don't share the idea at all. And that's fine, and I'm sure that the world would have kept spinning if nobody ever drew up MickeyMouse.
Softlinks aren't just a different version of hardlinks, they have totally separate semantics. Hardlinks allow you to link multiple files without worrying if the original is destroyed, softlinks link to a file location. Take backups for example, I can have versioned backups and hardlink identical files to a previous version. The advantage of hardlinks is that I can treat the backups as fully independent, and use them with any program. If I were to use softlinks, or even deltas, I would need to use the original software to delete, or even extract the contents. With hardlinks, I can delete and copy the backups with any application. (Rsync and time machine actually implement this mechanism).
But was there a component of Irish people working in England and repatriating wages?
Israeli hacker posts ‘100,000′ more stolen Facebook logins
After reading this, I donated to the EFF and the ACLU. Because there are already lobbying organizations for the tech viewpoint.
The problem with that idea is that in the current political climate any new carbon tax is a dead on arrival. Realistically, the only options that are politically feasible are to either do nothing or else subsidize green tech industries that seem promising.
..and those might be billed to 'recruiting' rather than 'customer acquisition'.
I was citing facts that clearly refuted your position:

> We've had clean, green, safe, carbon-neutral energy for nearly 60 years.

And whether the original design used for those failed facilities was created today or 60 years ago is irrelevant if today, right now, they can cause dirty hazardous life-threatening disasters. Which again, clearly and directly disproves your claim.
I don't really agree. There is definitely a general reddit culture (a bland white male young american type of culture) and it seeps into all subreddits to various degrees. It's pretty awful for the "default" subreddits but it affects the entire site. If you want to have intelligent discussion outside of the biases of the above demographic, god help you if your subreddit gets popular or someone does a search that finds it.

You could compare it to 4chan having a culture despite there being dozens of different boards.
Find a new job. Seriously, you are going to (likely) be working for the rest of your life so it might as well not be boring!
Because they are market actors at one end of transaction. This is not about "rights" other than property rights - nobody is being forced in to anything here - you don't have a right to work for someone, they have a right to refuse your service for whatever reason - plain and simple. Unfortunately there are laws that restrict this freedoms because most voters are workers and not employers.
Fine, the copyright protection for Google's algorithm has evaporated. Where do you plan on getting a copy of it? And even if you did somehow acquire it, how do you plan on using it without violating Google's trade secret protection on it?

There are existing legal frameworks in place (trade secret, trademark, service marks, etc.) that complement copyright and would enable software (and movies!) to remain viable enterprises even with drastically shorter copyright terms (or no copyright at all.)
If this is an argument that, when there are economic profits to be made in a market:
1. The "size" of the firms will increase to compensate : Do take note of diseconomies of scale beyond a certain size.
2. New firms will enter to compete in the market : Depends on the barriers to entry.
Sadly, you mean "was".
Just to explain my downvote: you're arguing that, when locked into thermonuclear war, one side should just unilaterally disarm. You obviously know this is absurd. Unless all parties agree to a compromise (or they are forced to by higher authorities), the first mover will always be a loser.

Oh, and the 10-years copyright is extreme, of course, but current rules are also extreme and need to go. That is Joel's point: in order to get a sane compromise, we must ask for an insane target.
In Canada the government used to give funds to each party that had more than x seats in the parliament. One of the first things the current neo-con government did was abolish that, and let donations from individuals and businesses fund each party. It's disgusting to be honest - businesses always have deeper pockets and could care less (actually actively oppose) individual liberty.
Fukushima: despite a massive earthquake, tsunami, fire, and loss of power, no one died. Yes, the plant was trashed, but just how disaster-proof do you expect something to be?

Chernobyl: Horrible Soviet-era reactor design that was never approved in the West.

No member of the general public or plant worker has ever been killed by a Western-designed power reactor. That's a better safety record than any other source of power. We've got 60 years of experience. There have been three major accidents, two of which produced no loss of life whatsoever.
That would be the one where no one was killed, despite the plant being struck by an earthquake, a tsunami, and losing all backup power?

As with the other poster: just how disaster-proof do you expect something to be?