skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Boredom is a reason people pirate that's
> probably not really worth solving.

There's also hoarding urges. If everything is free, it's possible to have a huge comprehensive collection of films, tv, etc. More than one could ever actually watch.
Your confusion is really puzzling to me. You seem to understand why it's useful (ability to share contact info, payments, photo sharing), but how is that different from the "value proposition"? As far as I can tell that's the value proposition! It's like Tri Flow for device communication, making it simpler and easier and faster and more convenient. Sounds like value to me.
SWTOR Saviour Guide Review
This SWTOR Saviour guide is probably one of the most effective nowadays, not to mention the fact that it's a lot cheaper compared to most of its competitors.
Show HN: LoveChirp pays you for translating and recording love messages
"Nuke", in this case, was being used as a shorter way to say "nuclear reactor". Nuclear reactors are, of course, completely different from nuclear bombs.
Magic Square Math Trick
The Magical Math Tour is a magic assembly, so you know the kids will love it. The program reviews math concepts that your students will be tested on during their standardized tests, so you’ll be cheering as well.
When reading the headline I thought for a second they were talking about the 'other' football...the one that 90% of the world are infatuated with. I imagine the end of that would occur roughly the same time as the extinction of the human race.
"Do you list your degree on your resume?"

Sure, it's on my CV. But I could say I had a law degree from Harvard there as well, just listing something proves little. It's been some time since I actually used a CV in my career, but when I did there was not once an attempt to validate any claims, my skills and talents were evaluated from the thinking I demonstrated and rapport I established in each interview, not from validation of credentials which never once happened.

"Do those approaching you with proposals for work know that you went to Stanford?"

Those who approach me and talk to me don't know anything about my education as far as I know, it's just not been discussed in years, my reputation and track record are what is important. I wouldn't even mention it here except as an example of a credential which I think that most assume is a big deal, but which in reality, practice, and life experience doesn't mean anything at all.

Hm, wracking my brain here to think who knows where I went to school. I'm pretty sure no one I work with. My (life) partner knows, but only because I'm sure it's come up in conversation, it's probably been years since I've even discussed it.

Anyway, the point of this is I see the potential of these classes as immense and able to change the world. I am also a bit cynical that that will happen. The power of an elite, expensive certification as a validation of class and not talent is too valuable. MIT is now saying (on their MITx web page) they intend to, after working out the kinks, start offering credentials with their MITx program and "validating" students identity. How this will work internationally one can only imagine. Remote classes can't really be validated as to who took the class: it's impossible unless they plan to monitor each student via a video camera, which is unlikely. Given that "identity validation" proves little, why even bother with it? Why not just allow anyone to take the class, given that it is intended to be free -- if education is the goal. But if certification is the goal and not education, then identity is very important since it's the certification and not what you know and what you can do that is important.
Concussions aren't going to cause the "end of football". A lot of people forget that football used to be a MUCH more dangerous sport. Take for example that in 1905 there were 18 football related deaths with 20 times fewer players than there are today. If it weren't for Teddy Roosevelt pushing for rule changes and the use of leather helmets then we probably wouldn't have football today.

Football is a dangerous sport, I'm not denying it. But the players know the risk when they start playing. The risk is why they make as much money as they do.

Source: http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/kidscorner/football.htm
> That argument, however, doesn't actually square with reality. Rugby, as it turns out, has plenty of problems with head injuries. According to one study, in South Africa about 14% of high school rugby players and 23% of professional and club players annually are diagnosed with concussions. Further, Michael Keating, the medical director for USA Rugby, says that a review of the scientific literature indicates that the number of incidences of concussions among rugby players and American-football players are similar.

From: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2027053,00.ht...
The funny thing is if you put in an IPRA (Inspection of Public Records Act) request at the county where I work, you'll have the entire parcel layer in three days for the cost of a blank DVD. Counties need this data to do their job, there is no reason to see it as a further profit source. If people stopped asking for the data, we would still keep and maintain in. Of course, I'm not in California were people seem to get overcharged for everything.
It is a difficult issue, as often government data can only compiled because money comes from its sale.

A good comparison example is the UK's Ordnance Survey, who now release all high-level data for free (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-openda...) however the detailed data is only free to government institutions and their contractors. Private users of the detailed information pay alot of money for it (generally for site-location plans toward planning applications), which I assume is generally used for updating the database.

This all works quite well generally, though arguments could be made from either side as to more or less information being publicly available.

The key really is - if we want more government information to be free, we have to fund it more...
> But the funny thing is, the same people that are fine
> with pirating are against essentially the same thing
> with the GNU license.

Do you have actual concrete example of this? Or are you just attributing opinions to 'HN' as some sort of singular entity?

"The funny thing is" that I see claims like this all the time from both sides of the fence. "HN is just a bunch of Google apologists!" "HN is just a bunch of Google-haters!" etc...
Yea, don't sweat it. :)
You mean that 'other' football where players kick a ball with their foot ?
Wow, harsh comments. Apart from navigation being somewhat ambiguous, I thought this was an elegant app.
Submitting your Windows 8 apps
Unsubstantiated, un-sourced theory: football players are helmeted, and that helment makes them feel as if 1) they are risking no head damage to themselves, and 2) there is no risk of head damage to others. Thus, lots and lots of targeting of the head and/or usage of the head as a lead component in making or breaking tackles.

On top of that being probable, players try to hide concussions (resulting in compounded head injuries the next time), and players rebel against the NFL's attempts to legislate fewer dangerous head-related hits and tackles. Actually, even fans and the media have the tendency to pine for skull-crushing, cringe-inducing hits at high-velocity.

I could probably have summarized the problem in one word: "culture".
I live about 30 minutes from Clemson (the football town mentioned.) Football is huge in the south. I'm not used to it, and have, in fact, never been to a football game. Except maybe once, but that was for the girls.

It's quite crazy though how much these football towns rely on a sport. The rivalries, the competition, and the booze. I always said if you wanted to rob a house, a friday night would be ideal because literally 50% of the town is at a football game. I really think it's just something everyone can relate to. In these towns where textiles and industry are prominent and there isn't much innovation, looking forward to that friday night football game with the guys is something that gives peoples lives meaning. I'm not sure my point, but I figured I should but in and say that there are such things as these towns and football is very real in the south and without it I would be very interested to see what people cling to next.

Basketball is big-ish, but most schools either have one or the other. I'm a big fan of Kentucky basketball, but everyone knows their football team sucks. That's usually how it goes. So maybe it would go like the article said and basketball just gets huge and more rounded in all towns.
I live about 30 minutes from Clemson (the football town mentioned.) Football is huge in the south. I'm not used to it, and have, in fact, never been to a football game. Except maybe once, but that was for the girls.

It's quite crazy though how much these football towns rely on a sport. The rivalries, the competition, and the booze. I always said if you wanted to rob a house, a friday night would be ideal because literally 50% of the town is at a football game. I really think it's just something everyone can relate to. In these towns where textiles and industry are prominent and there isn't much innovation, looking forward to that friday night football game with the guys is something that gives peoples lives meaning. I'm not sure my point, but I figured I should but in and say that there are such things as these towns and football is very real in the south.
50 Rules for Dads of Daughters {by Michael Mitchell}
Yes. 90% of the world, including me, are infatuated with.
People would watch more Hockey!

I don't have much constructive to say about the issue, but this is a fun comparison I came across the other day: http://proxy.espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/id/7550059/nhl-john-buc...
they themselves will have to produce value - they will just be producing those value not as part of employment, but for themselves (e.g., subsistance living? cottage industry?).
... and Amazon offers this service in all countries around the world?

... and I don't need to download a 'special' piece of software to download an entire album at once (vs. requiring me to click on each individual track and download it separately)?
The risk isn't why they make so much money. It's the crowds. If tomorrow everyone started watching soccer in America instead of football, then the players would make a lot less money, despite the risk to bodily injury.
Has anyone on this thread RTFS?

Semicolons are not optional. They are inserted for you as a convenience when the parser can figure out what you meant.

This situation wasn't a big deal in the early days. But the patterns of coding that have emerged to deal with Javascript's scoping problems have brought this from a curiosity to something profoundly crazy.

Using an operator (i.e. !) to fool the parser is hilarious but really not OK.

Writing code is an exercise in communication. You are communicating with other programmers (including your future self) and the parser. The zero semicolon style espoused by @fat is problematic for both other programmers and the parser. Perhaps one day @fat will win and his style of communication will be sufficiently accepted to be valid but this is not that day.

The relevant section of the ECMAScript spec is included for your convenience:

7.9 Automatic Semicolon Insertion
Certain ECMAScript statements (empty statement, variable statement, expression statement, do-while statement, continue statement, break statement, return statement, and throw statement) must be terminated with semicolons. Such semicolons may always appear explicitly in the source text. For convenience, however, such semicolons may be omitted from the source text in certain situations. These situations are described by saying that semicolons are automatically inserted into the source code token stream in those situations.

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
Exactly - I never buy vitamins because i'm under the impression that i have enough vitamins in my food. The body can only process so many vitamins an hour, and you get no benefit from having extra vitamins that pass through your system.

Have you seen the movie limitless? Make some pills that augment my abilities :)
That wouldn't necessarily be safer; smaller players tend to be faster, which means the total momentum of an average collision might not drop much.
Meh, it's not solving the right problem to "kill TV". Content distribution isn't an issue. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, HBO Go and more are all effective distribution mechanisms. At best this lowers the barrier of entry which is good, but that's not the real problem.

The real issue is coming up with a sustainable business model that users are willing to pay for. Thus far monthly then monthly cable bill plus ads is ahead by a huge margin in terms of revenue. Content owners cutting out middle men is a good step, but the harder one is getting users to pay for it.

Of course it could kill TV with copyright infringing streams, but that would be illegal and send people to jail ala MegaUpload.
here is their kickstarter page, if anyone else was curious as to what the larger contributors got: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adv...

The top 3 tiers:

PLEDGE $1,000 OR MORE

100 BACKERS SOLD OUT (0 of 100 remaining)

Mini portrait of YOU, painted by the game's artist, and all previous reward tiers.
Estimated Delivery: Sep 2012

-----

PLEDGE $5,000 OR MORE

10 BACKERS SOLD OUT (0 of 10 remaining)

Larger original painting of art used in the final game, and all previous reward tiers.
Estimated Delivery: Oct 2012

-----

PLEDGE $10,000 OR MORE

1 BACKER • Limited Reward (3 of 4 remaining)

Lunch with Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, a tour of the Double Fine offices, and all previous reward tiers.

-----

THERE ARE MORE REWARDS but we can't post them here because they're too big! For premium rewards past a $10,000 pledge, see www.doublefine.com
Leaflet holders
Range of Leaflet Dispensers, Brochure Holders and Menu Stands, ideal for counter or table point of sale displays to dispense promotional literature.
Sorry, being pedantic here, but it's a pet hate.

If you say something is 20 times less. It means you take the original value and multiply it by 20, then subtract the new value from the original. This will always give you a negative value.

x-(x * 20)

What you want to say is that it's one 20th of the original value :)
Navigating red tape?
Interesting read. But the authors assume that most people would move from obsession with football to watching no sports at all. It seems more likely to me that people would simply replace football with some other sport.

I saw this firsthand in Seattle when the Sonics left for Oklahoma City. Several of my friends who were lifelong fans swore they would never watch NBA basketball again and became hardcore MLS (Major League Soccer) fans.
Based on this, one would think that the "support/administrative/service corps" would receive much less compensation than the "talented individuals" who do all the real work. A lot of organizations preach or follow this philosophy, but I have yet to find one that puts its money where its mouth is and distributes compensation accordingly.
That's a nice sample app. My only (small) complaint is that I feel using MySQL is a bit of overkill for a sample application.

To throw my hat in the ring as well I've been working on a Backbone project that could help newcomers to Backbone. I'm in the midst of refactoring it a little bit to use lesscss as well as RequireJS and its module system.

Please feel free to fork or contribute! I love Backbone and JavaScript :D.

https://github.com/hswolff/forgetmenot/tree/dev
For a good chunk of people it is still the cable companies that provide the last-mile pipe that something like this requires. And because they control it they can skew the bandwidth allocation towards their own digital TV side. You never hit a Comcast bandwidth cap by watching too much cable TV. But you can quite easily hit your "unlimited" bandwidth cap on the same pipe if you stream too much video over that very same cable prompting nasty email warnings and eventually termination of service. I don't see how BitTorrent Live addresses this in any way.
Sports fans have been using live P2P streaming for many years, the most obvious being Sopcast (sopcast.org - even the website is copyright 2007). The quality is pretty good, and the 'danger' posed was made clear with some of the first domain seizures being the stream aggregators - myp2p, rojadirecta etc.

The difficulty with this technology 'replacing TV' is that realtime is only truly relevant for a few things - sports, maybe concerts and awards ceremonies - beyond these the on-demand paradigm is much more attractive.

That's not to say that at scale a certain amount of bandwidth offloading couldn't happen to equivalent-timecode peers, but I suspect the biggest challenges to the complete overthrow of the cable networks model right now involve the notorious impossibility of negotiating agreements with the content owners, not the bandwidth/hardware cost of server-client streaming.
Yep, player safety is one area that is constantly evolving with technology. I think concussions will be solved eventually, allowing football players to play without risking their brains.

Beyond that, maybe robot football would take off instead. Sort of like in the movie Real Steel, where robots brought boxing back to prominence.
The problem is, and always has been, on the content side.

Most people in the mainstream still want to spend their time watching mainstream shows - and no mainstream US-based content holder is interested in offering internet-based streaming of their TV channels (as a live stream of the live broadcast). If they were, they would have done so already.

[this just launched today, and read the cavets: http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-co...]

Case in point: There is no Comfast Xfinity or Dish style subscription that is online only that doesn't require a cable box or dish as your primary source of reception. I'm sure everyone on Hacker News would love to subscribe such a service but the rights holders are having none of it.

What's stopping these companies is not that they can't push the bits but that they want to protect their existing investments and not find themselves in a commoditized and highly competitive market with many players.

Comcast in most markets has no competition for cable, Dish has no competition. They don't want to race to the bottom and compete with upstart startups that we might be running - so they're playing hard ball with the rights holders (or they are the rights holders too - Comcast owns NBC) and having none of it.

I like Bram, I like this technology and I think there are lots of awesome things we (away from mainstream) can do with it.

But it won't kill TV because the majority of people want mainstream content. And that's going to sit on TV (in some form) for some time to come.
Second Biggest Bitcoin Exchange Closes
I think the 'problem' here is that you are equating legality with morality. Should I be concerned about the 'problem' of medical marijuana clinics (e.g. in California) profiting off of a Federally illegal substance?
The Senator Experiment
And now these writers occupy HN. 597+ upvotes. Seriously? Sigh.
Iran Shutdown Google ,Yahoo and other Major sites using Https Protocol
Ask HN: Ok, so I just moved to SF.. Now what?
I don't think Dan shares a direct financial stake in the targets of his punditry like MG, MA, and SL do.

Money makes for a powerful conflict of interest.
Mobile Phone Insurance
Get Gadget Cover for 5 Gadgets upto €500 with Gadget Insurance in Ireland for just €79 and upto €1,000 for just €139 per year.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. Read the comments, it's pretty unambiguously spelled out here.
I think a lot of this anger stems from the way many tech bloggers write - a combination of a "fuck the haters" and a "told ya so" attitude. It's easy to breed hatred with thinly-veiled disdain for those who criticize you, and I think that's a good part of what's happening here.

A lot of dislike for TechCrunch and affiliates also forms because these bloggers are part of a "good ol' boys" crowd in Silicon Valley. While the article casts this effect as one of VCs indirectly paying for stories and conflict of interest, I think personal ties are more important. Most of these tech bloggers spend a lot of time with a small group of VCs and founders-turned-investors, and it shows in what they choose to write about (and in who funds them when they go to found their own sites). For many, especially those outside this close network who are founding a startup or those who choose to eschew venture funding, it's frustrating to watch an already quite small echo chamber (tech startups in general) grow even smaller thru the lens of the VC-affiliate media.
I am sure it all works fantastically when set up properly. For me, I was new to remote notifications, and I was struggling to get my notification certificates copasetic. The Parse debugging tools (logging) made it a challenge for me to find the root cause, which ended up being an improper setup on my part. If I remember correctly, I tried asking them for help over Twitter(?), so probably a poor choice on my part.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by either point. Lots of things were more dangerous a hundred years ago, and people did many more things that were dangerous routinely. I've also heard many people make the exact opposite point about football, complaining that it's become more dangerous over time as the players have gotten more and more armor.
"The factors that appear to make a business successful change from week to week, article to article, tweet to tweet, blog post to blog post."

While our perception of the leading indicators of success may be changing from week to week, the fundamentals of good business stay the same: sell stuff at a profit. Many things can get in the way of that: bad markets, feuding founders, incompetent execution, poor timing, etc...
what is this? i just see some wood panel and two circles
I'm not so sure about that. I think they would watch more basketball and baseball first. It's part national pride, part familiarity. Basketball, baseball, and football are all "American" sports. Baseball and football evolved from cricket and soccer, and basketball was created in the US. There are professional soccer and hockey leagues in the US, but neither sport has really taken off. I'm not so sure that would change in the unlikely event that the NFL folds.
This is cool in all, but this is probably more information than I need to know about these people's lives. I would have rather had something more useful on the front page.
Sure hope he used galvanized nails on that or he's in for some surprises in a few years.

And how would you get something like this past a city inspector?
I would challenge the "sub-$300" qualifier.

I had one of those $50 task chairs when I started my business. After nine months I had incredible lower back pain. It felt like I was seventy years old.

I'm the cheapest bastard in the world, so I looked long and hard to find a replacement that wasn't that much more expensive, but eventually I ended up biting the bullet and buying a Steelcase Leap [1]. It was expensive -- $900. But looking back on the decision a year and a half later, it was totally worth it. The back pain went away nearly overnight.

In other words: on this, don't cheap out. If you're looking for a chair that's going to be your primary work chair, you're going to be spending a significant chunk of your life sitting in it. It's worth spending the money to get something good. It doesn't have to be a Leap, there are lots of options, but resist the temptation to be penny wise and pound foolish.

[1] http://www.steelcase.com/en/products/category/seating/task/l...
Get ready to have so many problems with Wayland in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2..