skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Wave tax"... not bad. I've been trying to work out an analogy myself, flush-right law. Imagine it, we could set up a paradigm in which the plumber who installs a toilet includes a little gadget that makes sure you don't flush a toilet without buying a flush-right from him by authorizing a little payment. Call the technology a Effluent Rights Management (ERM) system. It would need to be complemented, of course, with some legislation making it illegal to circumvent ERM, etc, etc, wouldn't want flush thieves simply taking the devices off their toilets.

And there it is, an artificial market created through technology and legislation, just like the copyright market. I'm sure plumbers would be eager to point out the virtues of having such a system.
Straight-up humor isn't actually banned by HN community standards, it's just the bar is quite high. It should be something that took some effort, not a one-line meme reference or something equally trivial or obvious.
I agree. It's 2012 for God's sake, How times do you have to see the commercials and ads about not backing your stuff up before you get a clue?? I would also add if you think using shady file serving companies to store your legitimate files is a good idea, then you're also doing it wrong.
The message from the Wikipedia Blackout: Please leave the Internet alone
That's a good idea for frontpage and best polls.
This isn't a counter-example if the FriendFeed guys all worked part-time on the startup.

The point isn't that only full-timers can be founders, but rather that all founders should share a roughly equal level of commitment. If some of the founders are full-time, and some are part-time, then you've got a really severe imbalance in terms of contributions to the company, not to mention risk.

This will cause huge bitterness later on, so it's totally reasonable to say "We're all going in full-time, so if you want to be a founder, you are too. If not, that's fine, and we'll make you hire number one when we can afford to pay you a salary, plus back-pay for hours worked as an IOU."
If you don't agree it is fair, then the author's method will never work for you. The perception of fairness always comes first and prior to the details of share distribution.

The challenge, however, is not to identify the time value of money and the inherent risks of not taking a salary. The problem is to quantify those risks and costs in a way which all the cofounders will consider fair...all the while recognizing that forty percent of a startup is probably worth just as much as sixty percent, i.e. Nothing.
Average wine bottle 750ml average glass of wine
5-US-fluid-ounce (150 ml). So 5 glasses / bottle. Drinking 1.4 bottles of wine over 2 hours is significant, but not all that much. Assuming that's all you drink for the night AND you drank during a large meal. For example my BAC would probably peak at around .07 which is below the drunk driving limit in Virgina. (Yea, I am a big guy.)

PS: His comment was simply that 5 drinks in a short period is not exactly reasonable definition for binge drinking.
The actual wording (annotations mine):

"The Congress shall have Power (1)... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts (2), by securing for limited Times (3) to Authors and Inventors (4) the exclusive Right (5) to their respective Writings and Discoveries (6)" (Article I, Section 8)

(1) This is a grant of power, not a mandate. Congress may exercise it, but is not compelled to do so.

(2) The goal is for the public benefit, not for private gain. It is meant to advance our knowledge and culture, not provide a permanent rent-seeking scheme.

(3) There is nothing "limited" about "life of author + 70 years"; the life of the author is technically indefinite, and furthermore 70 years is on the order of a person's life expectancy. The original term of copyright in this country was 14 years from date of publication.

(4) In no way is this protection afforded to publishers, producers, distributors, or other people whose contribution to the work is laborious but not novel. Novelty is subject to protection, not labor.

(5) Nowhere is there a requirement for violations of this "exclusive Right" to be crimes; nor is the government charged with enforcement of it. Copyright was meant to be a civil, not criminal, matter.

(6) The recording of a musical production or motion picture is not a "writing or discovery" and is thus not technically subject to these protections to begin with.

As I understand it, all of these limitations have been overridden by various treaties signed by the United States. Nevertheless, if you're going to use the Constitution as the source of your argument, it's best to know that what we have and what was intended are two drastically different things.
March-ish, IIRC? This would be fairly consistent with some past Apple release schedules. For Apple, I would hold off purchasing ATM unless immediate need is pressing. This also corresponds with the next tick or tock (I forget which, without looking it up) in the Intel schedule. Meaning a revision in their architecture. Meaning, in turn, that also in the non-Apple domain, you may want to wait a bit to see what's coming.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not by trying to define a quantitative relationship between piracy and stealing, but here goes anyways:

First of all, relatively pricing should not matter. By your logic, if Toyota's price was suddenly 0.5 * price, then stealing just got two times better! What's wrong is wrong.

Second, your equation does not do justice to math. If your definition of X is the same as mine (i.e. average likelihood an individual will buy this item, independent of the world population) then you're saying Toyota's lost income can potentially be GREATER than the price of the car.

In clearer terms, if

dX / d(world population) = 0

then

lost income = X * world population * price

does not have an upper bound! With the explosive nature of the world population, it would seem that theft gets exponentially worse as the years go by.

Where does the logic break down? Well it seems you've modeled the world's purchases of A SINGLE CAR as independent of each other. (In other words, you've modeled the lost income if Toyota had a car stolen by every human in the world.) What you really want, for n people, is

X*P + (1-X)*X*P + (1-X)^2*X*P + ... + (1-X)^(n-1)*X*P = P*[1-(1-X)^n]

- and there's our upper bound at P.

So now the comparison is between (1 - (1-X)^N) and X. In the case of software like Windows 7 where relatively few people will go for a free alternative, X is pretty damn high. I won't argue that it's greater than (1 - (1-X)^N), but it's nowhere near your estimate of 7 billion.

In all seriousness, I definitely agree that the "relative virtue" of digital theft is better than other forms. But, as you acknowledge, there is indeed a loss of value.
Why doesn't everybody use UTF-8? How much overhead is incurred in encoding a non-ascii language (say Chinese) in UTF-8 compared to UTF-16?
I just added it to my list of books to review. Thanks for mentioning it. What did you like about Bishop's Book?
Show HN: Skimling - A Platform to Help Kids Improve Their Writing
Not to be a broken record for everyone else but I always keep a local copy (several) of all my data. I have a folder called "Store" and it is a large tree of everything I ever plan to keep long term. Parts of it are on various cloud services (mainly DropBox) depending on the type of access I need but everything resides locally somewhere in that tree structure. From letters I wrote in 1990 to photos (critical ones) to pretty much every line of code I've ever written. That folder is backed up across several devices by a nightly sync because I came perilously close to loosing it a couple years back when I got lax. In short, when it comes to my long term data I trust no one. :) Not even myself most of the time!
The Recurly costs are inherent in the calculation being made there. The Gateway costs were being added on top.
Release notes: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/3_2_release_notes.html
Turing's story is especially heartbreaking. Imagine what another 30-40 years of Alan Turing's genius would have done for computation.
Hi everyone! I'm the sixteen year old founder of Skimling! I'm going to be launching this weekend, but wanted to get feedback from the HN community! Let me know what you think, and feel free to email me at jack@skimling.com if you have any questions!
I made a preliminary effort towards a Windows port a few months ago. It's running, but not really usable.

Here's a screenshot:
http://radiapp.com/radi-windows-sshot-20110805.jpg

I haven't looked deeply at Edge since the initial release. One fundamental difference is that Radi's output is completely custom rendering into either <canvas> or <video>, while Edge uses CSS for animation. I wrote a blog post about that with lots more detail: [1]

Although there's some overlap, the approaches are basically complementary. Hence I'm hoping to make Radi into not so much a competitor to apps like Edge and Hype, but rather a more creation-oriented tool that can be used together with these other apps that focus more on building entire sites.

Now that e-books are becoming basically HTML5 packages, I'm hoping to find some opportunity for Radi in that market as well... But I haven't done any deeper research into that yet.

[1] http://lacquer.fi/pauli/blog/2011/08/why-radi-uses-canvas/
Ah, yes we weren't looking for functional languages specifically, just languages with expressive type systems. As far as I know, the only languages with expressive type systems are also functional so we end up with a functional language as a consequence of that requirement, not due to actively seeking a functional language.

We use scala in a pretty functional way, but most of the gains there come in the processing/displaying side rather than the model. Just because that portion lends itself to a functional style of applying chains of functions on data to transform it.
Every election cycle I think, this is the year that the big business/libertarian and social conservative/religious wings of the Republican parties finally break up, but it keeps not happening, though I think it's the dynamic behind the let's-find-a-not-Romney weird surges that have been happening throughout the GOP campaign so far this year. Bizarrely, Gingrich, who has a certain amount of cred in both camps, might be the compromise candidate of both wings, and if he goes down in flames in the general (as he almost certainly would) it could speed that divorce.

On the other hand, the US's first-past-the-post election system makes a multi-party system pretty difficult to maintain, so who knows.
Building an API and Mobile Platform for 10 million Users
Though I didn't kill or sleep with anyone - I regret last night right now.
Untethered jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 now available
Do VC’s with “Operating Experience” Add More Value?
Im sick of people going on about SOPA and PIPA. Take the recent megaupload incident, the American government wanted the site down, the site is now down. No new law needed, simples.
As others have said, "widely known" is an awfully big assumption to be granting yourself with no argument. There is a wide gulf between a user expected to competently interact with a web front end, per the features and cost/benefit directly expressed by that front end, and a user who is expected to evaluate (on what basis, exactly?) the probability with which a given Company/Ownership is likely to be obliterated by fiat.

What's worse, HN readership is arguably an upper-crust-of-savvy environment for making that sort of appeal, but imagine:

- two weeks ago, someone offers HN readers $100 bets that megaupload will get raided / shuttered / data frozen in the next two weeks

- if you take the bet, and you win (megaupload raided), you get $200 back

- if megaupload doesn't get raided, you get $90 back (i.e. you pay as much for losing the bet as a megaupload user pays to access to service)

Do you honestly think more than 10% of HN readership would have taken the bet and tried to double their money? Or would the "smart money" (and again, some of the smartest money available on the internet) been on megaupload staying up and available?
> Seems I can't create a semi-anonymous email at gmail anymore?

Correct me if I misunderstood, but I believe you can just use the old gmail sign up url http://mail.google.com/mail/signup

As mentioned in the article, you can also still use the old google account sign up to url https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount .
Looking at its config, I'm reminded of Cassandra 0.6, but then I see the ZooKeeper functionality. Interesting. Love the open-sourcing! I showed an example of how to distribute inter-mingled DBs using MQtt a bit ago, but never posted here: http://franklovecchio.tumblr.com/post/13051814890/mqdb-distr....

One thing is for sure -- NoSQL isn't so mysterious anymore :)
Agreement to the terms does not mean that one perceives them as fair or will continue to do so under stress in the future.

The problem with negotiating little details of ownership early is that anyone who believes they did not negotiate well is likely to feel taken advantage of.
> The Libertarian community

Note for the future: This adds no value to your comment, and makes you look like you're trying to spin this story in someway to benefit your political alignment.
Yup, though I'd probably pass those in using a POST request. A 5,000,000 character long log entry sticks out a bit, and most people aren't logging POST params by default.
2.2 million Jobs, or, the Long Reach of Industry Research
Zynga confirms its move into online gambling
But how about all the other examples of people leaving work to work full-time on their startups. Remember that YC expects to not leave work but relocate to SV for three months.

The quote is, of course, over the top, after all we're not fighting for our lives in a foreign land. But I don't think it's that out of context: I'm 42, have a child, pay a high rent and support my larger family. For me to quit my daily high-paying job to pursue what mat turn out to be a dream does require a huge amount of courage. If the company doesn't succeed, say, after 2-3 years, I may not be able to find another job like this. That's why quotes like that resonate with me.

Please understand that not all would-be founders are 25 year-olds with little to lose.
Salaries may increase but more likely it will become like wall street for the most valued employees--that is, a bonus & stock options culture. So, for example, your base is 90k with 30k in options that vest in 3 years and a 15k year end bonus. So if you're thinking about making the jump to MegaCorp Inc. they're going to need to offer you a significantly better deal to cover your lost earnings.
Looks like the marketing copy is off from the actual implementation, AFAICT.

Sensei (先生) means teacher or professor in Japanese(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensei).

It shares the same pronunciation and writing with the Chinese word that has the same meaning. This name indicates that the system can be used in place of Oracle database in many applications.

Okay, so on the name alone I can replace my Oracle database! Great!

Seriously though it goes on...

They claim the database is ACID: http://javasoze.github.com/sensei/data-guarantee.html

But they built the entire thing around "eventual consistency."

And statements like:

"Sensei provides a high-level of durability by maintaining N replicas of each shard to guarantee a level of availability and fault-tolerance"

Don't seem to make sense when talking about ACID given that a write operation will happen at some point. Looks like the data event producers will shard the data across N replicas without quorum... so there's no guarantee that there will be N replicas available... is that right (and that the transaction won't be lost mid-stream either)?

Skimming through the source it doesn't seem to be doing anything terribly revolutionary... and I can see the usefulness of the trade-offs they made in this database for certain scenarios. However I don't think the claims of ACID guarantees and "real time" are particularly representative of what this DB will actually do. They just don't seem to jive with "eventual consistency" models.

I'm not a hardcore database guru though so maybe I'm missing something?
"RAID is not a backup" Please explain...
If I understand it correctly, history is repeating itself in that some business also helped push for rights in the 1950s, ie. serving everyone at the same lunch counter at some stores even though it was illegal at the time.

The difference is this time at least people aren't being beaten and killed over this (at least not in mass).

But it does not help at all when the President of the United States says that gay rights are okay when they need fresh bodies for the wars to kill and be killed but on gay marriage "well he's still not convinced". It boggles my mind.
I agree with the general theme of the comments. "Postponed" sounds more like "regrouping" to me.
I don't get this. We're* quick to shoot down any arguments which equate online piracy to real world piracy, but when it's "our" files which are affected, we're quick to go back to the online-real world analogies.

*"We" might not include you, OP, so apologies. Not directed at you. Just noticing a trend.
That's pretty much the situation. But I think the lesson is the other way around: if you make $150M and don't share it with the fatcats in Washington through some strategic campaign contributions to protect your business model, prepare to have some Federal Acronym Agency come busting down your door.

If Megaupload had played ball and used some of that cash to buy a few Representatives and maybe a Senator or two, they'd probably be fine.

That's how business works today.
That's a joke right?

You have your employees bid on either getting paid or taking equity every month?
Why is UTF-8 not an encoding for Unicode?

From the Unicode website (http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#UTF8): "UTF-8 is the byte-oriented encoding form of Unicode."

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8): "UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format — 8-bit[1]) is a variable-width encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode character set."
No, the next thing be polygamy.

(You might reasonably think that is just something delusional fundamentalists cry to make a slippery-slope argument, because it is something they cry to make a slippery-slope argument, but if you hang around the right parts of the world - e.g. certain corners of San Francisco or the Internet - it's not very hard to see that it's at least plausible. The interpretation of the validity or invalidity of these potential developments and society's possible reactions to it are left as an exercise to the reader, however.)
A to Z of programming languages: Smalltalk-80, a talk with Alan Kay
If - else coding style best practices
A promise to pay, e.g. a promissory note.
Megaupload is one website ( angry hackers responded ). SOPA and PIPA means mass takedown. ( imagine the state of angry hackers all over the world )

Morever Kim Dotcom has done more than just Megaupload to take him down. American government probably was waiting for a perfect reason to take him down.
"shift towards"? The Republican party has been fundamentalist by all but American standards, and I'm not even talking about the more extreme tea party folks. Those are just plain insane.
Cutting-edge electronics will require US to revamp auto defect investigations
Yes, I does happen. It did to me and it did to others. I think you are right as well: A lot of things in life need planning and good execution. But there's another very important ingredient: opportunities.

You go to a bar to meet new people. That's a good plan to create opportunities.[1] But there are a lot of opportunities when you are not looking for them. And when you are not expecting these they can be very hard to notice. I think that's the point of not planning: Not a anarchistic approach to life but going into the world with open eyes.

I leave you with a bit of science: A bunch of poeple are asked to rate themselfes how 'lucky' they are.

"I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-a...

[1] Well, that's the clichée at least. For me, this is not such a great plan, as I'm too socially awkward... :/
I have a feeling it will be postponed until the "2012 Omnibus Save the Children & Support the Troops" bill is up for a vote and it is added as a rider to the section dealing with funding terrorist groups. Probably right before the November elections.
Julian Assange interview on Spy Files | The Hacker News (THN)
Getting Started With Clojure
I hear JGC's Pie Chart Challenge calling... http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/pie-chart-challenge.html
As alluded to by Steve Yegge in a blog post in 2005 (http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem), if you are using a Lisp, storing data as sexp means that you can define the appropriate functions, and "execute" the data to transform it however you like.
At my work we get Vim for free with your dev enlistment. It's 7.3.46, and the version that works inside cmd.exe.
I don't think that's true. If we are talking about SOPA here, it wouldn't matter where the servers were. They were using a US based TLD MegaUpload.com and therefore their domain could be "erased". If they didn't have a domain address, then they could look at where the servers were.

Meaning: If they were MegaUpload.ch, they would have needed to SOPA to take the domain down. But they still would not have been able to seize the servers and arrest the operators.

tl;dr: Relating this to SOPA is a bit of a stretch.
Dropbox has builtin 30 day history for everyone, through the web interface. You're saying they keep track of things indefinitely (when you haven't purchased that addon)? Do you have a citation for that?
I think this has more to do with being able to offer competitive employment benefits than it does with any kind of social or political philosophy.

Seattle's 13% LBGT population is second only to SF (15%). Attracting talent north is a practical matter.
It's a shout-out to the parent poster's use of the phrase "the hacker community" and its own attendant "I-told-you-so"-ism (which I'm pretty sure is construed as a negative). It's a community I personally completely identify with but I've read some of their work and respect certain parts of it. Here, let me write a 50-page essay on the minutae of my political views, that'll be real interesting reading for the HN people.

cut me some slack, jack.
It would be more encouraging to see the Chinese government praising the actions of legislators like Reid and Smith. If they praised SOPA and PIPA, the Chinese government would look as if it were telling the US government Internet censorship was needed. Since there already are fears of the US looking like China, the every day citizen might draw the conclusion that the US is turning into China, and could potentially hurt lawmakers seeking reelection because of this so-called equivalence.

I'm not an expert in Boolean algebra. Is this a logical fallacy?
Bootstrapping To 5x Yearly Revenue Growth And Hiring Your First Employees
Yes, although I have no idea how one could effectively legislate against DDOS since it's already basically illegal.
The general point I was trying to make was that something will succeed this as the next big fight for rights and that it would be related to marriage, so people who oppose these unions should just take the smart exit and stop fighting it.
Flexible ranking in Lucene 4