skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
US manufacturing output has never been higher; the US is not losing manufacturing capabilities. We're losing jobs. We're hiring fewer people and making more product value than ever before.
The EFF is a public interest organization with its own goals. We need an industry lobby. The closest things to that that we currently have are ACM and IEEE, both of which suck hard as lobbies.
The biggest hurdle with copyright is the Berne Convention. Copyright isn't merely an American problem, but one that needs to be tackled globally.
There are many organizations you can donate that $100 to instead. It may not make the world a better place for those specific people who assembled your particular iPhone but it'll make just as strong an impact someone's life.
Though a fun paper, Technology Review's write-up of it is worthless. At most, all you should take from reading this paper is that "cartels" potentially can emerge without coordination, not that they do or that they are likely to. Or that this phenomenon has anything at all to do with the dynamics of prices at your neighborhood gas-station.

As anyone who has studied complex systems understands, the evolution of interactions among even very simple agents is enormously sensitive to initial conditions. (That's often taken as the very definition of chaos in deterministic systems.) So it is almost always wrong to draw strong conclusions about a complex part of the real world based on your computational model of it: vary one parameter a little bit and you end up with something that looks completely different.

This is why agent-based models, like the one employed in this study, are widely despised in economics and the other social sciences despite offering a way to do experiments that would otherwise be impossible in these fields. We simply don't know enough about people and how they interact to build meaningful models, and we probably never will.

For example, an economist might point out that the model presented in this paper doesn't account for the spacial distribution of gas stations and consumers, for buyers' and sellers' expectations of future prices, or for any number of conceivable and inconceivable factors—almost all of which would affect aggregate outcomes in the model, I would bet, just as the authors found that the speed of reacting to price-changes did. (That was the only parameter the authors varied, by the way.) And of course we could model the problem in many fundamentally different ways to start with.

In other words, this is much different (and harder) than building an N-body model of the dynamics of Alpha Centauri, where's there's basically one force (gravity) that operates in the same way on a bunch of things that can all be described adequately by a single parameter (mass).
They will if we tax human suffering.

Internalize the externalities. It's not complicated.
If you are looking for fast end to end modern web apps you should look at wavemaker, VMWare picked them up. For just knocking out quick REST / js CRUD apps they are in a league of there own.
I'd ask if we need to extend copyright on Mickey Mouse films? What good does that do?

Now, extension of trademark, that I get to a limited degree. They can be the sole Mickey maker for a while. But why should they not have to make new material to generate new income from it?
You could send a DMCA notice to Apple for the app, but I find it strange that you would ask people on this site on protecting your copyright when YC is so vehemently opposed to copyright monopolies like yours. I support copyrights though, so good luck. Here is the link: https://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/claimsofcopyright.html
Windows 8 WinRT is unmanaged/native; this has caused a conspiracy theory blaming infighting between Microsoft teams:

Why is WinRT unmanaged?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7457371/why-is-winrt-unma...
Not available to non-US merchants.
I think I still have that edition in my basement.

I'm expecting the worst for Ender's Game. I really can't picture anything of the real story remaining in battle high-school.
Why do Mickey mouse films require longer copyright; has Disney not recouped the costs of production?

The point of copyright is to get works into the public domain by allowing creators to recoup the costs of production and make a little bit of profit, the point is not to allow an endless revenue stream from something that is public domain.

If anything works that create more revenue should have their terms expire faster.
Why is [Windows 8/Metro] WinRT unmanaged?
This is my layman's understanding of Godel's incompleteness theorems: Any set of axioms powerful enough to decide all its theorems will always have inconsistencies in its theorems (e.g. "if true then false"). To be consistent, the set of axioms must be incomplete (some of its theorems are undecidable).

The following sentences have some of the 'flavor' of Godel's theorems:

"This sentence is false." →if true, then false.

"These are not words." →if true, then irreconcilable with its own truth.
Huh? I think you have things misunderstood. These executives are intentionally driving down the value of their employees and restricting their opportunities in what should be a free market. These are not products we're talking about, they're people..
Economic development doesn't end slavery, enlightenment values do.

It was the intellectual enlightenment that modernized Europe. Slavery is not a transitory "stage" it typically lasts for thousands of years.
Political campaigns are not, in the broader context of the U.S. economy, that expensive. The average cost of a winning House campaign in 2010 was less than $1.5 million. The max limit on a personal donation to any federal political campaign is $2,500.

These are numbers that are pretty small compared to the value and salaries generated in either the entertainment or tech industries. The difference is that the entertainment industry has developed the culture and institutions to direct some of their value toward political activities. The tech industry largely has not.

Joel's idea of free political advertising on tech properties could be problematic because advertising, even if freely given, has an economic value. Corporations are expressly forbidden from donating money to federal political campaigns, so this whole idea might be squashed by the FEC.
You need to be in the content, distribution, marketing/PR, talent (writing, acting, tc.) business to kill Hollywood. Thn You need to have billions to pay movie stars, scripts, movie rights, distribution, marketing, crew, equipments, etc. you need to have distribution, marketing,etc. muscle worldwide. Then you need to deal with agents, publicists, cast, crew, writers, etc. unions.

You can disrupt technology, but its hard to disrupt content (there are exception ofcourse (3D, IMAX, Pixar,etc.)
No he didn't. there was no call to transition. There was this statement.

"The Scala community should be serviced by the company that is making money off the efforts of the Scala community, Typesafe, rather than a bunch of people contributing thousands of dollars a year of hardware and bandwidth and time to do something that could be done by the commercial Scala entity."

Combined with this statement

"Whatever I think that monetary value is, it's likely a few orders of magnitude more than others think the value is. It's not even worth, in my opinion, trying to price it."

This is about money and the lack of it going to Pollak for a site whose sole value is that it is used by members of a FOSS community. There was no call for transition people would have stepped up for that. What there was was a call to keep running _his_ site for _him_ and keeping the ownership and value in _his_ hands. I can understand why people didn't jump at that opportunity. If he would like to transition the domain and repositories to community ownership and no one stepped up to administer the site then more power to him let it go dark, but there are plenty of people willing to host and administer the domain, David isn't interested in them.
Living in Australia I happen to know a few other people who also live here. Occasionally I'll speak to them. I've you to speak to anyone here who's appreciative of the way our government relates to the US

One of our prime ministers once referred to Australia as "the arse end of the world". Seems more like the US is the arsehole of the world and they've got us (and others like the UK) puckering up

I really detest the way our politicians, from both sides, grovel to and fawn over the US. The reaction of Gillard (our current PM) to Obama's recent visit was just downright embarrassing. But what can we do? I wish we were more like the NZ of old who told the US Navy where to go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANZUS#New_Zealand_bans_nuclear_... (very much watered down account. it was a huge political rebuff to the US at the time)
I agree with your point. IMO its all about communication. Currently, I am building a product with somebody and between the both of us the wireframe is more than sufficient. But, after 2 weeks of coding we started showing it to our friends and instantly we could see the ranges of communication errors - some got it despite the 'bad ui', some just could Not look beyond the ui fails, some were kinda sorta struggling.
My suggestion for YC: As an experiment, get some people together and produce a full length feature film. I think you'll learn a bit about how hard it is.
I think it's fair to include in our assessment how much these people would be suffering if these jobs weren't available. People take these jobs because they're the best thing available. They definitely suck when compared to our sit-in-a-chair-programming-all-day jobs, but would they even be able to afford to live without them?

The solution is probably for these places to voluntarily start providing better working conditions and pay, which is unlikely to happen. However, I can't say with certainty that taking those jobs away from them and bringing them back here is going to provide a net gain for those people.
Only individuals are stuck with 24 month contracts. AT&T and Verizon can change their prices for new contracts / renewals without any problem so they can use daily ticks. Even though they keep their customers long term.
You realise you're sounding a lot like you've never had to deal with the problems of the effectively single dns namespace before?

Trademarks don't automatically apply to domain names - since ordinary trademarks apply to a narrow protection of people offering "that same type of goods or services". ("Generic" trademarks exists, but need t meet much wider standards of public recognition than Scala-as-a-programming-language has.)

Apart from trademark disputes, which "The Scala Community" have no chance of winning here, domain names have _always_ been first come first served. If _you_ thought scala-tools.org was a worthwhile asset, you should have registered it before he did. Same with any scala-* domain.

Feel free to get huffy about whether or not you think he should have done things differently, but trying to frame this as some sort of abuse of domain name ownership is, frankly, naive...
Is this the "we're thinking about a product" page or the "we have a product you can start using now" page? I can't tell... the question not answered is "when?"

This led me to pay slightly more attention and notice the pretty background pegging my CPU. It does look nice though.
What if a non-profit was the middle-man for placing ads, for example? The crowd-funding covers the donation requirements from individuals, many who do not donate to normal elections but might put $5 on this. I'm sure there are tricks already used to get around funding caps that could be taken advantage of.
Lift really lost traction over the past year. I think he is put off that his project and involvement in the community is being disregarded for other alternatives, seeing his star falling I think he jumped to his next thing ( Haskell and Obj-C apparently )
I take issue with your description of /r/jailbait. None of the images in that subreddit qualified as child pornography under the definition of child pornography on the Wikipedia page.
http://shop.siriusxm.com/edealinv/servlet/ExecMacro?nurl=con...

So, you're saying we're in the short window between when they stopped making them (a few weeks ago?) and when they no longer sell them?
I think calling r/jailbait pornography could be debatable. Technically speaking there wasn't anything illegal with the sub-reddit, which is why it upset a lot of people - even those who wouldn't go close to r/jailbait (such as myself).
Can anyone tell me how this is possible? Im vey dubious.
MESH: SSO via SSH public key authentication
To be fair though, I think that almost everyone has made a few off-by-one errors.
Consider how long it takes to make a movie sometimes. The Tolkien estate realized quite a bit of value on the Lord of the Rings copyright via the Peter Jackson films, several decades after it had been written (not sure of the exact timing of the various payments).

Now--is that a good argument for such a long copyright period? I don't think so. I think the only time copyright should survive the author's death is if they have kids who are not yet adult.
You would have fucked it up.
You're referring to repudiation?

Note that PKI offers two independent options:
- Encryption, by any entity (repudiable) against a well-known public key.
- Authentication, by a single entity (non-repudiable), using a secret private key.

I get the impression you're trying to say that there are times when a person would want some reasonably plausible claim at repudiation. THis is also available, and can benefit from PKI as well.
Yes, it's known as the Overton Window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) and has certainly been a primary tactic of the entertainment industry for the last several years in their war against the internet.

It's high time we began using it ourselves.
> what's stopping Google from declaring war on the MPAA

Google bends over backwards to make sure that their rankings are entirely algorithmic so that they can retain the moral high-ground and various legal protections. It would be insane for Google to jeopardize either of those things or to risk anti-competitive and anti-trust prosecution.
It uses the camera, which is triggered by the high-energy photons in Gamma radiation. That is why they need to cover the lens with something that only lets radiation through, but no light.
No doubt that's how it shall be taken, but it is not having the desired effect.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/30/foxconns-brazil-ipa...
I agree that being reasonable is the reasonable thing to do. However, censorship cuts both ways, which I was trying to demonstrate with my earlier comment.

If playing the lobbying game works, then no reason not to play.
Apple owes its existence to American education, infrastructure, and a host of other services provided by American taxpayers. Why shouldn't they support the same families that supported them all these years?
If everybody who signed an anti-SOPA petition were to put in $10 it would exceed Hollywood's money.
You're so timid. The solution is obvious. Take wealth from the privileged superrich and use it to educate the poor.

And I mean actual education, like khans academy, not fake education, like American public schools (politically correct obedience training)

When 1% of the population hordes 50% of the wealth through nepotism, cronyism, monopolies, oligopolies, and bribing politicians, the solution to poverty is obvious. Guillotines.

The markets can't be free when bribery, nepotism, cronyism, monopoly and oligopoly dominate them. Free the markets from the cartels of privilege.
I'm not sure I agree with that at all.

Someone retiring from participation in any particular community has no obligation to enforce any sense of urgency on the remaining people.

This all reads to me as though the "fight against human nature" is revealing more about the currently-offended section of the Scala community that about David. From my reading, he let them know he was out many months ago, and their reaction was "Whatever. We'll just keep freeloading on his time/hosting-costs/sense-of-responsibility." Now their "human nature" lack of urgency has bitten them on the ass, and they're trying to make out like that's not their own fault... Not classy...
The ACM and IEEE probably suck even more than they need to, but I don't see much hope of the tech industry being a good lobbying force even with a better organization. Part of the problem is that it isn't really all on "our" side (if you read "our" to be the EFF side). We do have a fairly strong industry lobby of sorts already, the BSA, but it almost always takes the Hollywood side (and initially supported SOPA). I think, unfortunately, a lot of "our" companies just aren't on "our" side (Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc.), because of their MPAA-esque paranoia about piracy, jailbreaking, etc.

If it would be possible to make a professional association like the ACM take a stronger and more visible stance, imo that'd be a better approach, because the tech industry's employees are often intelligent, but the tech industry's companies would imo be more likely to just lobby as a special interest, not in any sort of enlightened way. So it needs to be structured so the employees, not their employers, control the lobbying organization.
Opt out of it / ignore it, if the US can opt out of the Geneva convention then it shouldn't be a big deal to get out of the Bern convention.

I'm sure John Yoo could find something in the Constitution to allow it.
Not to worry, the Citizen's United vs FEC decision already "fixed" this problem. Internet companies can donate their advertising space to super PACs rather than directly to candidates. Problem... "solved" :)
Isn't the LotR universe protected by trademarks? I'd imagine the books and movies are protected by legally distinct copyrights.

Trademarks clearly should have much longer protection periods than copyright. In fact, a business should be able to operate infinitely under the same legally protected name as long as they remain an active business in good standing and the haven't lost their brand name to a word in common usage.
To bring up a potential real-world example:

A friend of mine has done a lot of research on the major credit card companies for his hedge fund. He noticed that these companies tend to raise their fees basically in lock-step (when one does it, the others follow quickly).

This behavior seemed counter-intuitive to me -- I would have guessed that the companies would compete to keep fees low. But this actually makes some sense in a world where the seller (the credit card company) reacts much more quickly than the buyer (the fee-paying banks and merchants). Banks and merchants can only switch credit card issuers if they can get their customers to (i.e. the card-holders). Therefore, it's possible for a card company to raise fees without losing market share right away. Other card companies take note and their dominant strategy is to raise fees as well.
Non-profits are corporations too; they are also forbidden from donating to political campaigns.

If you created a PAC, then you could solicit donations from individuals and spend it on whatever candidates you, the PAC director, chose. But, PAC contributions and distributions are also pretty strictly limited: $5,000 per person, and $5,000 per candidate, respectively.

Political parties can spend a lot more money, but only on candidates who are members of the same party. So for instance if you started the Internet Party, you couldn't give much money to a politician who is a declared Democrat or Republican.
Sure, or the Internet companies could just make their own ads supporting each candidate, and run those. For instance Google could create ads telling voters to vote for Sen. Wyden and pre-roll them before every YouTube video served to Oregon.
Project Page: http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/projects/mesh/

"Mesh is a secure, lightweight grid middleware that is based on the addition of a single sign-on capability to the built-in public key authentication mechanism of SSH using system call interposition."
Copyright fight contributes to media industry decline
The problem with that approach is a bunch of smart and interesting non-oligarchs also get the chop during the ensuing Reign of Terror. Then after a while, Napoleon steps in to fill the power vacuum.
Political Action Committees can raise unlimited sums from corporations:

'In 2010, the landmark case filed by Citizens United changed the rules regarding corporate campaign expenditures. This ruling made it legal for corporations and unions to spend from their general treasuries to finance independent expenditures. Direct corporate and union contributions to federal campaigns, however are still prohibited.'

'The 2010 election marked the rise of a new political committee, dubbed "super PACs," and officially known as "independent-expenditure only committees," which can raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and other groups, as well as individuals. [...] Super PACs are not allowed to coordinate directly with candidates or political parties since they are "independent".'

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee
I did some work in 2011 with a number of local bands, one of which has quite a big international following. This band recorded and produced their latest album themselves, yet despite this, still went to the major labels to release the album. I asked why they would do this since they own the copyright to their work and have a large enough following to get the coverage? Because the major labels still have the promotional might to reach more people. This was pretty much the only reason.

It was really interesting having an insight to the process as the band went along. I think I was most shocked at just how behind and locked in tradition the major labels really are. This was most evident in the actual release of the album. As I've mentioned, this band had recorded, produced and had artwork done when talks began. Despite this, the labels wanted to wait 4 months, 4 MONTHS, before releasing the album. Obviously, you can imagined what happend. The album ended up on torrent sites 2 months before it was released.

It's exactly this sort of unwillingness to change and adapt that has been undoing the major labels. The whole point of a digital file is that is can be distributed the second is it ready. If a digital version of the album had have been made available immediately, I sure a lot of fans would have bought it straight out. Instead, they get impatient and use a torrent site resulting in a loss of sales.

The main thing I took away form the whole experience is where we need to focus in order to remove these fools from the game. The music industry no longer has room for three players. Where once it was the band, label and fans, now it's just the bands and the fans. Major labels are only still relevant because they can offer something that the current suite of online tools can't, publicity. Work out a way to crowd source that, and bands will have no desire, or need, to approach a major label.

Just as a farmers market fosters and nurtures the relationship between producer and consumer, so to does the music industry need such a 'market' to foster direct relations between band and fan.
Apple is a boon to the US economy. It adds a market capitalization exceeding the GDP of other sovereigns, high-paying jobs, and international prestige in design and technology.

Apple also pays taxes to the US Treasury. These taxes, in addition to those on the incomes of its stakeholders, are meant to repay the presumed social debt Apple gains from being here. Whether those rates are set badly or the taxes squandered isn't Apple's question.

A person across the Pacific could similarly ask, if Apple hired only Americans, why Apple insists on supporting the richest country while denying people in East Asia a meager income for a crime no greater than not being American.