skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article does a poor job of explaining specifically why he may see jail time. Misuse of a copyrighted image in itself is rarely cause for imprisonment (at least today).

Fairey is in hot water not because of the copyright issue, but because of the falsified evidence he provided as part of his lawsuit against the AP. So everyone understands the series of events, Fairey saw the heat coming and filed suit against the AP pre-emptively. In that suit, it is now clear that he did broke some laws completely unrelated to the copyright infringement. This statement is based on the quote (from this article): "...later admitted that he had been mistaken and had tried to conceal his mistake, by destroying documents and fabricating others."

So, Fairey, like others before him, will not suffer the greatest penalty from his canonical crimes, but for his subsequent actions attempting to avoid the consequences and lying to the courts.
+1. Having users micromanage their commits to their repository because of fear of losing "popularity" is not the solution. Automation is the path to the future, let the computer aggregate the content for us and display a cleaner news feed.
Upper classes 'more likely to lie and cheat'
> In short, manage contractors like employees ..

Actually you have to be very careful about that in the US. In particular if you control how the work is done then they are legally an employee. All sorts of nasty things can happen.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...

> ... they are much easier to fire ...

This always amused me. My contracts always say I can be terminated at a moment's notice and without reason. But I'm in an at-will state and the employment agreements and state law have exactly the same provision. Despite that most companies treat employee termination far nicer than law allows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

> ... they are generally cheaper in the long run

Also more productive. As a contractor I don't have to get involved in corporate politics, can avoid many meetings and can focus on the work at hand. It is also simpler to deal with me - pay the amount on the invoice. I deal with my own taxes, healthcare, benefits etc. I also have a reputation to maintain so I can't be an underperformer.
signed up for troutwine's mailing list too
Are you arguing the HN title or the site description?
My father, formerly a union rubber worker in Akron, once noted that, when the big tire manufacturers stopped paying workers in cash on payday, their wives were ecstatic. This was because, on payday, a not insignificant fraction of guys would take their wads of cash and head off to the bar. Or, they would take out $20 and hand the rest over to their wives, telling them that the remainder was the amount they had earned. Apparently, it was not until the 1960's that paychecks became the standard in Akron for union laborers at the Big Three. My dad's view, from having talked to many men working in the factory, was that the majority of the era's blue collar married men simply turned their checks over to their wives, asked for a few dollars for beer/cigarettes, and allowed the women to manage the financial matters of the household. This is in stark contrast to anecdotes I've read/heard about the wives of white collar men during the same period who were largely in the dark about household finances.

Perhaps a significant fraction of men were never terribly ambitious, but they maintained social acceptability through the ease by which they could earn a middle-class living as a union factory worker? Their wives seemed content to "wear the pants" by taking care of financial affairs. Of course, to outsiders, they likely allowed the man to maintain some sense of dignity by feigning subservience (my presumption of the era's cultural standards). I'm not suggesting that factory work was not physically taxing, but jobs were generally available for anyone who wanted one. My dad recalls collecting factory job offers from Firestone, Goodyear, and BF Goodrich in a single day. Some guys who couldn't read or write very well would bring someone with them to fill out the application forms.

Is it that today's men lack the ambition of those from a generation before, or has the disappearance of union manufacturing jobs and other for-the-asking means of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle take away the false floor keeping men grounded?
I think the back-catalog access is digital-only.
A year long vacation? With what money?

And by that logic a wage slave can stop by quitting his job and taking a year long vacation.

Do you suffer from the belief that if you own a business you must be rich?
What bdunbar described is more an animation than a game.
Github also add "bookmark" button with list of tags.
Of course one can use something like delicious for this, but built-in service is much more convenient.
You are new to this "startup" scene, aren't you?
This is exactly why I had to un-watch ry/node - it was drowning out my newsfeed. Perhaps collating updates from individual projects would help?
'I don't have a button on Facebook for "bookmarking someone."'

Facebook and GitHub live in different problem spaces and may need different solutions. You probably don't have one friend that literally posts 200 times more posts than your average friend, but GitHub commits can very easily have this sort of pathological distribution. They're going to need to deal with that in a way that Facebook does not.

Pathological distributions can really be a pain in general. This sort of spiky, long-tail distribution can wreck up a lot of good plans.

For that matter, contra some suggestions about "machine learning" solving the problem I'd lay a few bucks that "commits I'm interested in" is so pathologically distributed that it is effectively unlearnable itself.
Or if you really think about it... this idea survived long enough and got popular enough to support itself with just 5 out of every 100 people.
For your exact specified needs what you could do instead is just offer a bounty. That way you don't need to deal with contractors, worry about budgeting, interviews or anything similar. Do make sure it is clear how acceptance/the winner is judged. This possible due to the open source nature - require submissions to be on github. If you want things to be closed too then you'll have to do it the hard way.

You can point to the other language versions as a template for the solution.
In the GP, I wrote about your claims about a whole country, based on some T-shirts.

That showed you to be a totally non-serious debater, ucee054.

You can't answer that (for the fourth time), so you link to an 86 year old individual and some activist organisations?!

Sad. You can't even admit failure, afterwards. You know the other side is evil.

What now? You'll lie? Here is a link to my first comment. You could maybe delete the parent?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637264

Also, your claim that it is possible to debate this subjects with fanatics is proven wrong. QED.

Edit: Since you don't seem to know it, you can find groups having most any opinion in a democracy. So activist web sites is not exactly the best support.
Yeah.. this is what I'm still unsure of.. what I'd like is to order the print subscription, and then receive all of the back issues to #1, and start receiving the new issues each month.

Im located in australia, so I dont know how this would work. (The $88 subscription price already increases to $174, just for postage to AUS)
Absurd absolutism and a false dichotomy. So absurd, in fact, it borders on being diagnostic of the writer of the sentiment. Networking creates value -- for you. That value comes in the form of relationships with the right people.
It's possible the CEO didn't mean that his company intended to copy the technology, but rather that it would be easy to copy it, and thus that it wasn't worth anywhere near the figures being tossed around. In that case, this wouldn't have anything to do with enforcing an NDA; it would simply mean the parties disagreed on the value of the technology and couldn't reach a deal for that reason.

The article didn't say whether the other company actually did try to copy it, which is why "It doesn't look so hard, we can build it ourselves" is at least a little ambiguous -- especially because it's unlikely that's a direct quote (might "can" have been "could"?).
It's interesting how we put down companies for their abusive labor conditions in China but at least 50% of the population will rally behind forces that prevent any sort of government regulation or unions that help prevent this kind of abuse "in the homeland".

Oh and I don't just mean the right wing, fun fact, Hillary Clinton was a bigtime lawyer for walmart to help them prevent unions. Walmart even has a swat-like team to respond to possible union formations.
wow! i love reading posts like this. kudos lim for doing this, and i love the graphics used too.
All good reasons for NOT sharing your startup's IP with prospective partners, not with their CEO, not with anyone.

This story could have been written about GO's negotiations with Microsoft almost 2 decades ago. When MS shined-on GO their lead in the tablet market, and many, many jobs, were lost.

We must remember that large Corporations are looking out for their own interests in ALL cases, recognize when they would benefit by putting us little guys out of business, and act accordingly. If they won't buy us without a detailed look at our IP so be it.
I read both Jobs and Buffett's biographies (Steve Jobs & The Snowball). I understand these guys' mindsets reasonably well.

The article says that, ironically, Buffett himself never bought Apple stock. The reason is simple. Buffett is an extremely cautious investor who only invested in businesses he understood perfectly, down to how the products were made, what made them superior to competitors, what the cost was of each part, who were the suppliers, etc. Buffett has always admitted he is not a technology guy. During the dotcom bubble, for example, he never invested a single penny in any of the Internet companies.

The advice that Buffett gave to Jobs ("if you think your stock is undervalued, then buy it back") is perfectly logical (after all, who better than the Apple CEO would understand perfectly his own business?), but for that same reason (Buffett not being familiar with this business), it was also logical for Buffett to not buy Apple stock.
Yes ruby threads will block on all IO
XMarks is a classic example -- in 2010 they announced that they would be shutting down because their user base (2m mau or so?) did not bring in revenue to support operations.

In the aftermath of the announcement they sold, presumably at a fire sale price.
The copyright belongs to an author or poster, respectively, depending on whether it is an article or comment. HN gets an implied license to display the comments and cannot be held to infringe from a typical link to an outside article.

I have to confess to having felt pretty idiotic when I went many months ordering individual print issues, thinking all along that Hacker Monthly might not last for a full subscription year (in time, I subscribed). This is far and away the most popular item in the reading area of our office, with many, many clients asking for copies of articles from it. It is a great product and I am happy both to subscribe and to feature it for clients. Lim has done something pretty amazing here.
"If you're smart, letting you into the country is probably an easy win."

Many smart people waste away in academia and don't contribute very much to the economy. I know a lot of smart people that are doing absolutely nothing with their life.

It's not a very good determining factor for an "easy win".
Even just a really naive solution: offer me a view that shows only the most recent 2-3 updates for each project I watch.

That would solve about 95% of my problems with the news feed.
I wouldn't mind seeing a version of a the Github dashboard where my feed was grouped by projects.

I don't think having a timeline where you see all commits of all projects sorted by time really helps. The commits in project A don't effect the commits in project B, so they do not need to be viewed in sequence or relation to each other.

Let me have a dashboard where I can see all my projects then some recent/popular issues and commits to that project, keeping all projects separate.

Don't add a like/favorite/bookmark button, I think that's too many options. Watch already says "I'm interested in this", so we don't need additional buttons to express the same thought.
As much as I like moo cards I find their shipping options frustrating. You can order 2nd day shipping or even overnight shipping. But you can't jump ahead in the print queue, which can take as long as a week, making most of the shipping options completely meaningless.
Technically, there is a such thing as a "collection copyright": http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm

But I mention this mostly to be technically correct (the best kind of correct), and for the entertaining prospect of trying to determine exactly who or what actually created the collection in the first place, from a legal point of view. And then it would require whoever that author or set of authors may be to sue, and that's either effectively impossible (the group of submitters) or impossibly unlikely (if the law decided it was YCombinator, because my goodness would that ever be a stupid no-win lawsuit for that entity).
Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.
I spent the first five years of my professional life developing software for these places. I've seen lots of warehouses and even worked in them briefly to test our software. Not the most glamorous work, but I could do fun stuff like use genetic algorithms for optimization problems or create a dynamic 3D visualization of the warehouse space.

It took me a while to realize that my work is making other people obsolete and replaceable, but I guess so does a big portion of software and technology in general. But it was surprisingly refreshing to switch off your brain for a few hours and do whatever the scanner tells you to do. Though of course I didn't have any pressure to do more than 1,000 picks a day, that is insane!

This was in Germany though, so the unions and worker's council made sure that the working conditions were more humane than described in the article.
It's probably this: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

It's actually issued to Namco, but it seems to describe exactly that.

I think I have a PSOne Namco game with a preloader, possibly Tekken. I never so much as dreamed that was patented, though.
Sure, it's just a specific kind of type-checking decorator in the same vein as the ones you can see at e.g. [0]. Obviously it can be made a lot more sophisticated to only pick up certain arguments. You can do a similar thing with metaclasses to prevent object attributes being set as None, too.

def isnotnone(fn):
def decorator(*args, **kwargs):
for arg in args:
if arg is None:
raise TypeError("{0} does not accept None".format(fn.func_name))
for arg in kwargs.values():
if arg is None:
raise TypeError("{0} does not accept None".format(fn.func_name))
return fn(*args,**kwargs)
return decorator

@isnotnone
def f(a, b=dict):
return a(), b()

>>> f(None)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 5, in decorator
TypeError: f does not accept None
>>> f(b=None)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 8, in decorator
TypeError: f does not accept None
>>> f()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 9, in decorator
TypeError: f() takes at least 1 argument (0 given)
>>> f(str)
('', {})
>>>

[0]http://code.activestate.com/recipes/454322-type-checking-dec...
Hacker News doesn't seem to be trademarked, I see no claim for that anywhere on the site. Even if it were trademarked, the vast amount of sites already using the term Hacker News could cause the trademark to be invalidated since, in order to keep a trademark valid, you must actively defend it from being infringed upon.
I appreciate Patrick's intent and mission to get engineers to value their wares more but I don't think his anecdote makes the most compelling argument.

For a counter-anecdote, I will say that in +10 years of a software career I have never, not even once, seen a "decision maker" say anything near "Doesn't matter. Get a copy for everyone, put it on the company card." ¥

¥ Most likely because that would be a stupid and reckless thing to say.
Depending on the number of visitors your sites have, this could be horrifyingly slow. I was testing it out on a site that has maybe had 800 visitors tops. Haven't really had a chance to check it with anything more yet.

Is it way slow for people with tens of thousands of hits?
I followed his advice, nearly to the letter, and have had some small success. The Version 1.0 worked well, but it's too early to see how well it will work as I go forward.
Re-read that article and tell me you want any human being to have to work like that for more than a week in a supposedly 1st-world country.

Those people are subsidizing your low prices by taking 800mg of advil a day to be able to get a paycheck and deferring the health disaster they will have in a few years without insurance.

If you do not have unions or government regulation, big business sets the rules and you end up with that story and in the bigger picture, the criminal health care system that plagues this nation.

I find it absurd that the answer for the USA is to pull us down to the lowest level of workforce conditions elsewhere in the world to remain "competitive". The only people who win in a race to the bottom are the ones on top enjoying their 2nd vacation home purchase while everyone else working for them rents.
I don't use the watch or follow feature of github, as it seemed kind of pointless to me. The main strength of github is collaboration, not discovery. If it were up to me, I'd remove the more SNS like actions as they just seem like an afterthought.
I love it. Hopefully my friends join soon. I love the background image specific to my city. HTML & CSS isn't my favorite thing to work with in the world but I'm a sucker for eye candy. I'm excited about this.
These conditions aren't unique to warehouse jobs; the customer call-center industry is similar in many ways. Time is tracked down to the second, you are being recorded and/or monitored at all times, tardiness and absenteeism are ruthlessly enforced with no excuses, and there is relentless pressure to "hit your numbers", which are often nearly impossible. And of course, you're still expected to "always put the customer first" under these insane conditions.

If you don't live up in any respect, they're happy to let the next batch of trainees have your job. In fact, they prefer it; those with 5+ years of experience have the most to fear, as they acquire raises and cushier benefits over time, and so are often fired for the same infraction that gets a newbie a write-up.

I suppose that call centers are preferable to warehouses, in that there is little risk of injury, and there are more opportunities to move up or transfer careers. Still, this is one of the human costs of corporate capitalism in general: if you don't have rare or specialized skills, you have no negotiating power, and have to take whatever you can get. And don't even think about uttering the word "union".
It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s)
I would find option 1 and possibly option 2 off-putting in anything other than a game. I realise progress bars are a more-or-less rough estimate (ie. "they lie"). Just make it as good an estimate as you can reasonably do, and that's fine.

For bonus points, display the underlying data in some way so that I can draw my own conclusions, supplanted with "sidechannel" information I am likely to have, e.g. previous experience with the process if nothing else. Extra bonus points if you make this information optionally visible so that I can tune it out if I don't need it and my mom doesn't get confused. I really like modern copy dialogs in that regard (and not-so-modern ones on decent file managers).

If you can't make the estimate reasonable at all, don't make a progress bar and display progress in some other manner instead. E.g. if you are copying files, and you have no way of knowing how large each file is, consider simply putting down a simple count ("Files copied: x/y") and if at all possible some indication that the program is progressing at all ("Current speed: x MB/s").

Finally, please do try to add some kind of progress information for any task that can take more than a few seconds. It's incredibly frustrating to stare at a "busy" mouse pointer[1], having to guess whether an application has locked up or if it's just taking extremely long. If you get it wrong, you usually end up re-trying and being faced with the same situation. I have had to play detective around applications misbehaving that way, and having to use top, iotop, etc. to determine whether an app is using CPU, hard disk or network resources is both a lot of work and non-conclusive (not to mention beyond the capabilities of most users).

(This started out as a short reply and ended up quite being a more general rant; the second time this has happened to me tonight. Sorry about that.)

[1] Though terminal utilities are often just as bad, because they're not just designed with interactive usage in mind. However, each individual terminal utility tends to do less, which means complex process are broken down anyway, which yields some progress information.
Sex, Lies, And Game Development
I completely agree with your reasoning on why weather data is public data. Its actually not an argument about business at all but one of the public interest.

To expand on you reasoning a bit I think there is a general test we can apply to all government data collection and publishing practices. If the data is being collected then its been determined to be in the public's interest to do so and therefore it's also in the public interest to release it freely in a reasonably accessible format. If the set is not useful then releasing it serves to at least inform citizens that we're wasting money so we can exert pressure to stop collecting the useless set.

The exception of course is gov data that may have privacy or security implications but nevertheless eventually it should be released when those concerns are no longer valid.
The argument was invoked by John C Calhoun, Thomas Roderick Dew, and George Fitzugh in the beginning of the 19th century in their defenses of slavery.

Additionally, any form of socialism advocating for the abolishment of capitalism through political organization rather than voluntary abandonment also presupposes that one can legitimately claim ownership over the output and life of another through use of force.