skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Moonbot studios and their iPad interactive books might be a model for the next wave of storytelling entertainment. Although, the people doing those are film veterans, and an obvious exit would be a sale of the company to Disney... so it might not change much.
Do you realize how many people will find it offensive that you are using this quote to compare a treaty to the holocaust? There is a big difference between a treaty which may infringe on civil liberties and killing people based on their beliefs or ethnicity.

It's okay to make slippery slope arguments, but let's not get into Godwin territory.
"iBooks kill how many trees? Zero. That is a big win."

This is a misconstrued argument. False, misunderstood nonsense.

Here's how its actually done. Paper for books comes from huge forests of Eucalyptus trees grown especially for the purpose of paper making. They grow very fast (and anywhere) and are constantly being replenished because paper is a commodity. There are MORE trees grown now because paper making exists than not. An additional benefit also being that they are great CO2 sinks!

Mature, rare trees are never used in paper manufacture. Its easier, cheaper and kinder on the environment to just keep growing Eucalyptus.

Now, lets look at recycling. Paper recycling is cleaner as an industry than it used to be but it still is more environmentally damaging than making new paper from scratch.

But don't allow facts to get in the way of a good prejudice.
NYT Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands
Forban - a simple link-local opportunistic p2p free softwar
i'm not convinced. if someone earns $20,000 over their lifetime and consumes $20,000 over their lifetime I would say they are richer than someone who earn $1.2 million their lifetime and consumed $10,000 over their lifetime. it is total lifetime consumption that matters. so if people are not spending all their income than it can't increase regressivenes it can only help to increase consumption equality.
Haha! That is a strange coincidence indeed but not altogether surprising given the subject matter. It's possible someone read your post and submitted it.

Just to clarify, raphman did post his link before it was submitted as a story should anyone be wondering once this moves out of the resolution of a day.

raphman 7 hours ago
[link]

Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border...
144 points by llambda 5 hours ago
Well, that's actually very inaccurate. It's accurate for text-only books, but we're talking about next-gen iBook textbooks here.

The next-gen iBook textbooks contains a lot of images, 3D and even video which takes up a lot of space.

All the textbooks released so far takes up over 1GB of space each. This one, a biology textbook, is 2,77GB for example:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/biology/id490038442?mt=13
A numbers proof for an argument I have observed repeatedly: The American Congress, on the balance, seems to be more about staying in Congress (or affiliates i.e. Lobbying) than about jobs for Americans.

When will we develop a digital representation system that allows us to dismantle the American Congress? We have the tools...

Edit: Another HN post that could be part of the solution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3495623
It sounds very pretty, but our evolutionary heritage is all about exploiting opportunities in order to secure a more advantaged position.

The problem with a meritocracy is that it must be policed in order to make sure that it is indeed operating as a meritocracy. However, all it takes is a little leverage over the watchmen to change it into a meritocracy in name only. All systems requiring policing have this weakness. And since there is a strong economic incentive to subverting the system for personal gain, corruption is an eventuality.
My problem with the "MVP" concept is it assumes you can generally know what it is you need to learn. This is true sometimes, but often not. Often taking the extra leap of faith on something results in richer, more meaningful understanding than the surface-layer assumptions you have before you actually make the leap. Launching a landing page can only tell you so much compared to if you got a working prototype in front of test uers, and a working prototype in front of test users can only tell you so much compared to having a real-world product being used by pilot customers. Learning that people don't sign up on your faux landing page could mean any number of things, and your reaction to it depends largely upon your assumptions about what you think it means.
I can't imagine anyone who's spent 3+ months in Vim and hates it. It's become an extension of my fingers now, and I'm unbearably slow editing text without it.

I can't wait for Sublime Text 2 to have a fully developed Vintage mode so I can switch to the superior UI. But in terms of key bindings + modes, Vim is irreplaceable.
Why China Wins
I completely disagree with the author saying that the name isn't important, and with his citing "a great story" (especially one about Xerox) as "proof" of this. Most startups will never become a common word like Xerox or Google, and having a name that is both easy to remember and easy to link to the core benefit they offer is very important.
> I left Ladies Learning Code having accomplished my goal. I built a WordPress.org

What does this actually mean? The sentence itself seems to indicate that the class was focused around learning to program by building a WordPress clone. My suspicion based on reading the whole article is that she took a class showing her how to use WordPress to create a blog. If she doesn't know the distinction, I'm skeptical that she really learned to program in any meaningful way.

I do think it's great that people who are mostly technically illiterate are making efforts to change that, though.
That's really helpful... thanks. I'll try to start with pricing that's closer to $0.30 / GB - that should be workable. I'm trying to look at usage patterns now to see what prices are viable.

Also, would you take the "I'll cut prices as and when I achieve better utilization" promise into consideration? Or is that irrelevant?
The first event was learning Ruby.
See: http://ladieslearningcode.com/events/
A comment on the OP from somebody associated with Ladies Learning to Code mentions that they have a much broader range of courses available, with more planned for the future. It's great to see this program meeting success, the number of similar initiatives that just sort of wither can be depressing.
Where is that clear definition of "Work"?
Nice guys finish first. Eventually.
They talk about needing to know enough to effectively communicate with developers, not being a start up whiz.
Virtual Trips with your friends to explore the real world. Something like Street View. You will go in your car with the possibility to invite people to join your car. Your friend could take the drive too. The platform would have video chat and would create environment sounds(city buzz, birds in the park, etc). There will information layers for history, culture, restaurants, etc.
Two things:

1) Feingold can't introduce anything anymore, since he is no longer a Senator. (This tells you how long it has been since this section of the wikipedia article has been edited).

2) Even for US citizens, there is no right for people to bring whatever they want into the country. Once you leave the country, you lose 4th amendment protections. So, if you don't want to be searched, don't bring anything with you. It has nothing to do with the Constitution since the Constitution stops at the border.
How To Format Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
And your mobile. And... And...
Is it (remotely) possible that the Guardian has an agenda (gasp) to misdirect its global readers?

Spain? What about the European powers? Does that mean UK (nuclear power), France (nuclear power), Germany (fine ~occupied, but still a major economic power), are broken democracies subject to "threats" from, and cowering before, United States of America? (Poodles, one and all?)

America is the scape goat of the /Global/ oligarchy. My opinion, of course. You may wish to continue to trust in The Guardian (of Truth).
Disrupting the streaming ad space
I couldn't dig up any additional details re: the photos in question.

Some are claiming the crab-like object in the photo linked to above is a fractured piece of the probe's protective shield. The fully intact probe can be seen here pre-launch: http://www.myspacemuseum.com/v_venera13i_24.jpg
Put copyright aside for a sec and lets try to actually frame it in the case of child porn or drug trafficking. How can any legislator conclude that disrupting the public like this is acceptable after having a reasonable discussion about how easy it would be for criminals to circumvent?

Did you see the excerpts from the SOPA hearings? The legislators can conclude that this degree of disruption is acceptable because they are morons.
You need to click on the arrow icon or the logo. It's buggy as hell. Click Help then all the windowing system is gone south. I found major bugs after playing with it for 2 minutes. Why hasnn't the author spent at least that amount of time to test it before putting it in the wild? It's mostly javascript btw. So the title of the article is wrong.
So I'm reading this, then I skim down and see how long it is. I read some more.

Is it me or did this make no real point at all?

Ladies learning code. Good idea, because more people coding is good, ladies or otherwise. I fail to see why the author is so amazingly hung up on whether or not it's feminist.
Part of my comment is backed by the implicit constraint on HATEOS, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS.

I've downloaded the original thesis. I'll look there to see what's mentioned about the hypermedia linking process.
Dungeons and Debtors
how on earth has it come to this??

Why do you believe that it has come to this? Has this happened to someone? Or are you just believing what is on wikipedia?
Just because a copyright has expired doesn't mean you have to actively distribute it
In Communism (Stalinism), all the enterprises are owned by the Government.

In Fascism the Government is owned by (some of) the corporations.
The first event that I see on that page is "HTML and CSS or Beginners."

It seems like the class the author took was "WordPress with Wes Bos," since she mentioned that he was the lead instructor
Anonshort
I'm assuming you have some sort of evidence to back up this conjecture with?
My (slightly altered) version: http://nul.co.za/freedom.txt
My point was not to attack those people, that word means something different. What if they would refer to a member of the Marines as a jarhead?

My point was that The Daily Show may be slightly anti-SOPA by being liberal, but they still have a point about the fact that they:

a) don't understand what they are legislating and rely on experts
b) don't appear to have enough respect to refer to these experts as anything other than nerds

I don't care if they are for or against SOPA, that was not my point.
Derek Lowe wrote a good post about the RWA last Thursday, http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/19/the_research...
I think it would be sad if Niemoller's point, that one must speak up for the rights of others, or no one will speak up for yours, was decided to be inapplicable in all situations, since his experience involved Nazis.
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> “If we allow the future of the web, software, hardware, video games, etc. to be conceptualized, created and maintained by just one sector of the population, it’s impossible to expect that it will serve the needs of the entire group.

I don't think it is so bad, if there is an user base soon or later a web site will be created serving the needs of this user base, because this means profit for the site creator. It seems strange to think that to represent everybody's need the web needs to be developed by everybody.

Just to make a more concrete example, games appear to be really developed with men in mind, but this is because the population of players is mostly dominated by teenager males.
One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will force border searches" story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269

Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496475

Normally it's not a bad thing to have a new discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.

Additionally, the person who submitted it as its own story received (as it now stands) 145 points for the effortless submission, far more than would be likely for even an incredibly well-written and researched reply within the original thread.

HN has gamified participation by rewarding people with karma. Even though it's only a bullshit number, it triggers a desire to maximize this number. As it stands, submissions are too highly rewarded relative to the value and behavior like 80+ submissions per day results.
You know what, I hate (its a strong word, i know) this whole lean startup movement. Yes, a lot of point make sense, iterate whats working, throw out whats not working.

But theres a giant conundrum to it, especially for certain types of startups. Lets take the startup I am working on now as an example. I am working on a Bookmarking framework for real life. Or you can call it, delicious for worthy experiences in life. But what was delicious without users? Not just do I want to bookmark material, I want to discover them too!

I had a "MVP", and it was really minimal. I spent 2 days coming up with a landing page (ctrleff.com), 1 day to plan and create the mockups, the second to actually turn it into fruition. Result? I frontpaged iPhone and Android's subreddit, and got about 10% conversion rate, while it is by no means great, it was certainly encouraging! But if MVP is all for motivation, then yes, I agree, by all means go ahead with building a MVP. But this landing page did nothing to tell me if my startup is going to be adopted or not. There were people who liked the idea. Thats it! This is no metric for any form of success. (Not every startup can be dropbox)

In my books, an MVP is an actual product that would determine actual user adoption. So the next step, or 2 months since the launch of the landing page, I'm done with the backend, and almost done with the Android App. And the app is by no means a sketchy app, I actually spent some time making sure that it looks exactly as what it should in the mockup, that it was not jerky, scrolling was smooth. Feature set? A minimal one: that is, the creation and digestion of Checkpoints (aka bookmarks). Thats it! But I am not stopping here, then there is the iOS app. Only then, would I consider my MVP done. A MVP that I won't hate to use and would continue to use. No double standards here, I will not release a product that I personally would not even use. I can be wrong, but I want to be proven wrong. Did I mention I'm a one man armt?

TL;DR: I hate the MVP movement, just build a real product with a minimal set of features.
I don't know. Women have always coded. I was taught assembler (my first programming job) by a woman.

They have always been there (admittedly in smaller numbers then men) but they have always struck me as being excellent coders.

We have women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Murray Hopper as fine computing minds to emulate and admire.

Women have always been able to take to coding in my experience and be first class at it. They tend to be good at languages -- better than men generally -- and that includes programming languages, too.
While he really seems to be a well known scientist, the photo of a "scorpion" [1] is not the best confirmation of his theories.

[1] - http://www.mk.ru/science/article/2012/01/20/662678-na-venere...
that is why the "fair tax" where everyone receives an equal rebate to cover a certain base level of spending has merit.

15% tax rate applied at point of sale universally. Say $20K in spending per person is exempt. Each person receives rebate (or prebate) check for $3K.

You end up with a progressive consumption tax.
The writing definitely struck me as pretty meandering. I was pretty sure I was going to read about what the class was like and what she learned at first, but then it just kind of veered off into debating whether or not it was a feminist organization with no real direction. It's only tangentially about learning to use WordPress.
Exit Interview: The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain
I believe that is what the flag button is for. Down vote button on a story could lead to people downvoting something they don't like because it is the opposite of upvoting. Flag is more of a "this is an inappropriate story" word.
Patator – Multi-Purpose Brute Forcing Tool
This website is horrible to read, occupies about 12% of my screen and does not even support turning pages using keys! EFF, you can do better than that.
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Hollywood regroups after losing battle over anti-piracy bills
Diophantine equations in Common Lisp (2008)
I think people in a HN/Reddit/Slashdot type form have been saying this since it was implemented, and everyone was nodding their heads.
If you know HTML+JS+CSS (and know it really well), then you're the hottest technical specialist on the market.

Compared to back-end programming it's harder to learn by accident (surprisingly so), it requires less common character traits, it's less rewarding in the weird programming sense than coding neat gems in ruby. But the demand is huge because most projects has bigger front-end than back-end these days.
A few very slick transitions - it's a little irritating that the font sizes, window borders, drop shadows, hover states on close/minimize buttons, etc are all slightly wrong though.
Y Combinator is right to be mad, but wrong about the target.

Smith also attempted to expand the DMCA in 2006, again pushing for new wiretapping privileges for police. It's a question whether this guy is trying harder to destroy the Internet or the Fourth Amendment, but imagine how awesome it would be if that was just an academic question about a guy who didn't have a career in politics any more.

The bad news is he's been in office since 1987 and has won his most recent elections with crushing victories. The good news is he's a Republican, and SOPA is wildly anti-business; the other bad news is it may be tough to make that stick, because it's only obvious to the technologically literate. Fortunately, he also he has motivated, successful enemies on his home turf; his district includes parts of staunchly Democratic Austin, and that's because the Supreme Court ordered his Congressional district redrawn after the League of United Latin American Citizens won a gerrymandering lawsuit against then-governor Rick Perry. This probably also means he's extremely corrupt, but it's hard to imagine SOPA coming from anybody who wasn't extremely corrupt in the first place.

Let's all form a political action committee called the Coalition To Defend The Internet From Ignorant, Corrupt Assholes and get contributions from every millionaire in Silicon Valley so we can deep-six this guy so completely "Lamar Smith" becomes a synonym for "no career in politics ever again."

We can use a two-pronged attack; fund his Republican competitors, and find ways that they can show how pro-Hollywood and anti-business SOPA was (Republicans hate Hollywood), while at the same time also funding his liberal opponents. A Democratic victory in Smith's district is very unlikely, but his Democratic opponents probably hate him enough to make some noise, and I think it's extremely likely that Texas is full of younger Republicans who would love to take his place. There's got to be at least one who understands the Internet.

If you want context, I also posted nearly exactly this same thing on my blog, plus a bunch of links (mostly to Wikipedia) providing factual backdrop:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/01/lets-end-lamar-smit...
A flat tax is completely independent of whether or not the tax system is complicated. There are basically two issues when designing an income tax:

1. For a given taxable income, what is the tax?

2. What is taxable income?

To make a flat tax you fiddle with item #1. This involves changing a page of the tax code.

To make a less complicated tax, you fiddle with item #2. This involves changing the other 71000 pages of the code.
Those Foxconn workers would be worse off without their job (otherwise, why not quit?). Of course, when you have millions of employees, there will inevitably be some nut-jobs among them.[1]

Also, I think you misunderstand the meaning of externalities. From Wikipedia:[2]

In economics, an externality, or transaction spillover, is a cost or benefit not transmitted through prices that is incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit.

As far as I know, everyone part of the iPhone manufacturing process agreed so.

Disclosure: I live a few blocks away from the Foxconn's plant in Shenzhen.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Wordpress dot com is a blog hosting service based on wordpress. Perhaps she meant they were setting up a web server to run multiple blogs with multiple users, using wordpress as as a platform (and specifically the MultiSite feature https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network ).

I can see how this would be a useful endeavor. In any case, yes, her language may be imprecise here but remember to be forgiving to people who are just learning!!! You are skeptical of her skills; I am skeptical of the notion that you have enough information to evaluate her skills or the class. :)
I realise this is always a sensitive area, but please consider that there are in fact laws on the books and government policies in many Western countries today that are every bit as evil as the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at that time.

We have detention without trial for extended periods, or indefinitely if you mutter the magic word "terrorism".

We have outright torture of detainees, and people dying in prisons.

If a suspect does get to trial, it might be in a secretive court where they have no opportunity to confront their accuser or see and challenge all of the evidence against them.

We have laws that allow government agents to infringe on almost every fundamental civil liberty by one kind of executive order or another, some of which are strikingly similar to the Enabling Act in their effect even if the intent was not necessarily the same.

We have routine invasion of privacy and monitoring of the general populace without any reasonable grounds for suspicion/probable cause/whatever you like to call it. There are well-documented cases of routine national surveillance being set up by police or security services without any oversight or consent from elected governments.

We have seen far too many cases of obvious abuse of peaceful protesters (or simply those caught in the wrong place at the wrong time) and in some cases we have seen courts accept a defence of the indefensible.

We have seen deaths at the hands of police actions that were later shown to be completely unjustified and an operational screw-up from start to finish, for which no-one has ever been held accountable.

The biggest difference between the situation today and the situation in Germany around the Second World War is a matter of scale, nothing more. And I think that is exactly the lesson that Pastor Niemoeller was trying to teach. While matters of intellectual property are hardly the stuff of revolutions, when you get into things like routine searches of private matters without justification, which in turn build on other obvious abuses that have been going in in the interests of "security" at transport hubs in recent years, I think you're way over the line into "why haven't we stopped this madness yet".