skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's what inspired this post:

http://andrewoneverything.com/dude-its-a-laptop-you-want-not...

and the subsequent discussion here (can't find it right now)

Your point on lower tech support costs stands, though :)
Get an email address for your phone
Yes, you're correct (I up-voted you). But, if you don't like the fact you are purchasing only a license then don't purchase a license to the digital content. Buy the REAL property, the book, instead of the intellectual property.
The allure of Kickstarter, I think, is that the end product is something that a typical layman can enjoy/use/appreciate, e.g. phone stands, documentary films, weird art, etc. Compare and contrast with the following example, from the algal spore research proposal:

"Your support will go towards financing the raw materials to make a device that simulates the types of forces (shear forces) that spores are likely to feel in a boundary layer..."

This is cool and I would like to support this research but this is more like a charity than Kickstarter to me since I don't even have a good understanding of the motivation and the mechanism of this work.
The terms of the GPL are clearly spelled out and have a legal meaning that people have tried very hard to make unambiguous. The Free/Non-free debate happens outside of the interpretation of the rules.

If I made a license that said:
"You may modify and distribute this so long as you do not violate the spirit of Free Software",
then I've made an ambiguous license like Crockford's, where it seems like I could probably withdraw permission from anyone for any reason that suits me, at any time.

If you have a license under terms that are unclear - you don't really have a license. In some contexts that will made a difference to you, and you'll have to find some other solution than to run this software.

But as a piece of performance art, I think Crockford's license is brilliant.
It's the mid-sized redistributions that can have trouble, because they will lack Mozilla's money but have larger user bases that might trigger the fees.

If they just ship Mozilla's official binaries the license would be carried along. The only problem is that distros insist on recompiling stuff that already works fine.
As a hacker, I'm sure you know, ideals are often different than what actually happens. I often see kids in restaurants. Half of them are screechy. The other half have something to play with. Usually iPads or iPhones, because they're easy to carry, and don't get boring. They're not a choking hazard and won't cut you. Sure, you might like the idea of keeping them away from video games, but it's probably not going to work out that well when you become a parent. The real world is often more difficult than general statements on HN.
Corporations have even tried to make rainwater collection off of roofs illegal.

They've succeeded. Offhand, rainwater collection is illegal in CO, UT, and WA, and may be in others, too.
There's marketing hype and there's the reality of operating a business under US law.

And really, if that was the actual goal then twitter could use plenty of existing encryption technologies to make twitter actually useful for tyranny circumventing communications. That wouldn't be a twitter-sized business though, not even close.
Hi, I'm the creator of Plunker. I'm looking for feedback on the site and for what features I should consider adding.

The source is in Github: https://github.com/ggoodman/stsh (MIT)

Don't forget to check out the landing page: http://plunker.no.de

Here's a neat example of what can be done on Plunker, but not on other similar services: http://plunker.no.de/edit/ecEEbA
The plunk has several files, some of which are coffee-script that is requested from the client-side over XHR. This type of dynamic loading wouldn't be possible in other similar services.

Why should you consider Plunker?

* Arbitray number of files per plunk

* Make XHR requests to files in the plunk (think client-side coffee-script, jade, less, etc..)

What is planned?

* Download a plunk

* Resize panels

* More editing options (indent size, etc..)

* Export to Github gists

* Oauth2 login to better interact with github

* Voting/tagging/social stuff for plunks

* History of own plunks

What else needs to be done to make it better than jsFiddle?
If only hardware research and optimization had gone the way of stack machines instead of register machines. I can only imagine the world of Lisp machines, Forth machines and APL/J Machines that would exist if the hardware more closely matched our expressive languages.
It's ok, you always have to skip one version of Windows out of two. It will all be figured it out in Windows 9.

What's funny is that they put Windows in phones and it didn't work, so now now they try to put Windows Phone in pcs.
True. I'm mainly concerned with the business aspect of the content world, however. I think the world should be able to accommodate both, and so I think it's an interesting exercise to figure out how content actually can be monetized.
I kind of assumed most folks from overseas who were doing this were using Tor + Anonymous Twitter account.

Maybe US Agitators just aren't as savvy as their counterparts in the more oppressive parts of the world.
It also made me think about post-scarcity economics. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
The real world contradicts the theory that only people with deep pockets or deep-pocketed patrons (other than, y'know, a day job) would create skillful artistic works. People do it for free every single day.
If there's some RIAA lawyer tearing this analogy to pieces, please point us to them. I thought they worked mostly on the level of talking points, with their favorite argument being declarations that piracy has cost us $X for some large X. And Ars Technica already rebutted those figures.

But if they're making some new arguments, I would like to read them. By all means, please point us to them.
As perviously stated, the article touches on data gathering from Twitter in another Wikileaks related case where data was legally seized without a warrant.
As an anecdote, most of what I know about the Harry Potter universe comes from reading Elezier Yudkowsky's remix. I've never read the original and only seen two or three of the movies.
Pop star KE$HA Twitter Hacked | The Hacker News (THN)
Your problem is with PKI then - someone who has some measure of authority has to sign the certs.
Announcing Find And Replace (fnr.exe) 1.0
No, I'm just curious. I find the idea of abolishing intellectual property both hard to understand and fascinating, so I want to see how other people see it working.
We should just send them billions of scanned dollar bill images.

That'd be a great campaign actually. The entire internet sending billions of "dollars" to the RIAA/MPAA for their "property".

Update: Put this page up: http://www.sendthemyourmoney.com/
SparkleShare - sharing work made easy
How Android developers can avoid the fragmentation blues
Paul Graham consistently says ‘um’ ~7 times per minute
Some things I found were highly valued: Creating software fast, and designing it damn well. The latter takes a skill all in itself. I'd suggest partnering up with someone with stills in that. Also 2 people = helpful support structure. Unfortunately there's no "free money" and often making a business requires lots of leg-work. After starting working on a startup I developed an immense appreciation for how much value someone working full-time on business building brings.

I wish I could tell you good programming skill alone is enough, but often its the trio of Programmer [the builder], Designer [the lure], and Product [the meat]. By being solo, you take on all 3 roles.

Especially in a poor area, having 3 means $33 each not $99 and it's ok to split the profits. Also means you can work cheap. At the beginning you can undercharge to make a name for yourself, and use that as a playground to improve skills. Remember that clients appreciate people pushing back on requirements you think will hinder the product.
Exactly, we have evolved and adapted to the internet. Which is exactly what we're asking the entertainment industry to do.

It would only be an hypocrisy if hackers were trying to push laws to protect software from being pirated. But you don't, quite the opposite actually, I'd guess most of us would rather see less IP enforcement, than otherwise. Personally, I'd invite you to share my creation as much as you can, please do so.
Watch a Google Search Quality Meeting
I've played these games and worked in the Addictive Game industry. In my experience, every time the addiction is wearing off, you have to 'up the ante' (either by introducing new content, new mechanics, upping the difficulty curve etc). But the problem is that the addiction is mildly stressful on the player, and every time they increase the addiction mechanics, they increase the stress.

This inevitably leads to burnout and it usually happens in one of two ways:

1-they run out of content or master the learning curve, therefore they run out of stuff to be addicted to; this usually causes a general tapering off of play time

2-the stress overcomes the addiction and they flat out quit, even though they are still addicted

It would be interesting to examine the play patters of various games that have different variations on addiction vs stress vs fun.

LoL
-high fun, high stress, low addiction

WoW
-med fun, med stress, med addiction

farmville
-low fun, high stress, high addiction

edit: the stress of a game like LoL is very different from a game like FV. LoL is high because you must play perfectly in order not to be ridiculed by your teammates. FV is high because you are given a dozen new things to do every time you just want to do the basic stuff, but your compelled to do everything, which generally requires you to keep a large mental queue of everything it throws at you every time you log in.
Absolutely brilliant - I have been mulling over this problem in a very abstract way for a long time, knowing what it was but not how to express it, and wishing I could come out with a comparison as accurate and eloquent as this, and here it is. Well done pg, well done.
It would be great "to have a productive conversation about intellectual property as adults interested in advancing the arts and sciences" but property rights have always come down to enabling making a living. Artists and scientists until a few hundred years ago had patrons to support their work or were independently well-off to begin with. Only when mass dissemination of art or the products of science became possible did it start to make sense to argue over property rights to these "goods".

I agree with pg that property rights and what is considered property change slowly. These rights have been quite well entrenched in most agricultural and, later, industrial societies.

For example, the first Google link to "property rights in the bible" leads to http://www.keyway.ca/htm2009/20090328.htm, which lists a number of Old Testament property considerations including theft, damage of goods, damage to sold property, etc. It appears these property rights were detailed and established, and extended also (it's to the link's detriment these aren't mentioned) one's wife, the wives of deceased brothers, children, servants/slaves, buildings, debts, etc.

These Old Testament laws gave way to or were aggregated with laws adopted from conquerers of O.T. Israel -- Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. These laws usually reflected a balance between benefiting those in power, the "good of society", and individual property rights (to enable a reasonably prosperous society, even for conquered peoples).

Attempts at massive overhaul of property rights have been attempted in the last century, leading to not-very-spectacular results. Incremental changes are best, I believe. And "rule of law" at its most basic comes down to property rights.
Both mindsets are legit. The only way to find out which one trumps the other is to vote on it. Surprisingly, nobody on the planet ever voted on copyright. It was decieded from the top down, in shady backroom deals and behind closed doors. It has always strategically excluded any democratic elements, because it was always enforced against the masses. The game is essentially rigged and under the current representative democracy system, there is no way to correct it, because the special interests simply buy out whomever we elect to represent us. And since we cant change representatives as fast as they can buy them out, theres no way for anything to change in the short term, unless we start getting rid of representative democracy alltogether and upgrading it to direct democracy.

What the MPAA/RIAA are doing is despicable, but at the same time it is an indicator that there exists a more fundamental flaw in the system which allows them to easily exploit it and buy their way out of the democratic framework.
What would an analogous solution form Music look like?

Labels which only offer their music (song catalogs) as a service, thus requiring a listener to subscribe to their service (and multiple services if one enjoyed music from artists belonging to different labels)?

Maybe someone could offer a platform for musicians to undercut (cut-out) the label middle-person. One would still likely see multiple direct to consumer music platforms --many requiring some kind of subscription service?

There could be a free service which would be subsidized or supported via advertising.

The solutions above could all be undermined by people recording the music and saving them locally.

One can't easily "save" Google services locally and get the same benefit out of them. I mean, one could make a good effort, but the result would require much effort that is beyond the tolerance of most people, I think.
I look forward to all the source code and databases of the world to be made freely available to everyone.

Of course engineers rely on intellectual property as much as anyone does.
looks like your site is down?
Can you provide sources for that and locations?
This comment will get lost in the chorus of "no, selling art is like warping society to charge money for smells!" but I want to chime in to say I agree with you completely; normally I'd just upvote, but that won't suffice here for obvious reasons.
I don't know that that's a great analogy - there is a compiler market but it's not necessarily one that people notice.

Microsoft sells it's compilers in the form of Visual Studio.
Intel sells a variety of C++ and Fortran compilers.
There's GCC, there's LLVM/Clang.

They all compete against each other in a variety of ways, thus there is a market, albeit one in which the currency is to extents eyeballs as opposed to money. (in the sense that if you're in an area where a for-money compiler is required, the cost of it is likely not an issue - so it comes down to which compiler do your devs want to be using)

In my opinion, a world with lots of free games is worse than a world with a few expensive games. I see at being almost analogous to mass-production vs artisan craftsmanship. I'd rather enjoy the fruit of a craftsman's labour than I would gorge myself on the cheap, cheerful and unpolished wares of the assembly line.
Well, just to be a contrarian, I don't agree with your analogy. The analogy is more like the hippie selling people beans, but then putting a condition on the sale so that people couldn't then put the beans into a pod compatible with their favourite coffee machine. This annoys people for the same reason that DRM annoys people - deep down inside, we feel that when someone gives us something, it is now ours to do with as we like. GPL-style licenses break this unstated assumption, as does DRM stopping you from watching your favourite TV show on your media player of choice.

In fact in the case of the coffee-growing hippy, it's worse than that. He doesn't mind if you personally take your beans and put them in a pod, but this operation is time consuming and requires a not-insignificant investment in plant to make the pods. It would be wonderful if someone else could start a business doing this stuff for you and everyone else, but they can't, because the hippy wants everyone to buy into their value system, using the oh-so-good coffee beans as a trojan horse.

Yes, I know, you're probably screaming something about entitlement right now. But let's bring it back to software. Most people in this world are not capable of writing software, so they're thrilled when someone comes out with an app that meets their need just right. But then that app gets pulled from the app store because the author included some GPLed code. This is the equivalent of the kid with the bat losing at a match of cricket, so he leaves, and now the other kids can't play. They generally aren't impressed. Note that if the kid had to leave because it was dinner time, or his parents were calling him, or he just broke his arm, the wouldn't be any drama. I suspect that many people feel that someone pulling code from an app store for ideological reasons is more like sulking than leaving because it was dinner time.
I think PG is actually arguing something closer to the opposite of this - instead of property being a natural concept with a single, universal, and unchanging definition, it is something a bit more ephemeral. A smell is valuable property on the moon, but not on the Earth. A song was valuable property twenty years ago, but twenty years in the future...who knows?

How this definition changes has a lot to do with technology, society, and human nature. That last one gets pretty close to 'natural law', but there's a lot more going on there as well.
Sure, but those people are (by definition) not professional artists. There is a demand for well crafted art, people will certainly pay for it, but the old model (RIAA/MPAA) doesn't work and is counter-productive.

It seems that the question is not "should artists get paid," but "what is the best model for artists to get paid?" For example, if all music everywhere was always free for personal use, musicians would still be able to make money touring and selling merchandise and licensing their songs for commercial use.
"The real world contradicts the theory that only people with deep pockets or deep-pocketed patrons (other than, y'know, a day job) would create skillful artistic works. People do it for free every single day."

That wasn't what I meant to say, and I apologize if I worded things confusingly.

Rather, my point was that people who spend a lot of money creating content need to recoup that investment, unless they can afford to give it away (or are financially sponsored). I didn't really say anything about quality levels, or about whether a profit motive is necessary in achieving something of skill.
Basically it walks you from low level boolean logic up through processor design, compilers, operating systems, and languages

Isn't that what his university degree should have already covered?
"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

Surly this is just a statement of fact. That once embedded in your software, you program will be considered Good.

It doesn't change the line above which grants the user the rights to use the software "without restriction"
We're Circle, and we do CI for web apps. If you want to try our beta, send me an email: paul@circleci.com
New TED Ed Has Vids With the Best Teachable Moments
This is meaningless. The alleged infringer does not live in the United States and this was a default judgment. The U.S. default judgment cannot be enforced in Chile. Now if they claimed criminal copyright infringement and extradited him to the U.S., it would be a newsworthy article.
I've always gotten the impression that PG's essay are aimed more at people who are somewhat unsure of what to think on a subject, who aren't fully informed and haven't reached any strong conclusion yet, and PG seeks to present his thinking and conclusions in an edifying manner that assumes that the reader can recognize and appreciate good reasoning. Writing for this audience (as opposed to targeting people who cling to conflicting beliefs) is not preaching to the choir, and is probably much more productive than railing against people who "just don't get it".
From what I can tell everyone is going to have to use the Metro UI because it has replaced the Start menu as the built-in launcher. There is also a new menu on the right side of the screen that let's you access search and settings among other things. So even producers must use some of the Metro UI on a daily basis.

I predict we will see a number of utilities emerge in the next few months to emulate the Start menu or otherwise provide alternatives to the Metro UI for said tasks.
Violent crime in Portugal has been rising steadily. Even if it had simply held steady after decriminalization (which seems not to be the case), that would still refute the idea that legalization is a good way to stanch the rate of incarceration.
The Science of Using Pictures to Persuade
0 Users is Better Than 200,000
I have to disagree with #9. In a large company, there is an HR department and a hierarchy that balances power. In a startup, you may have to deal directly with the personality of the founder - which can be an overwhelming and socially bizarre experience on its own - but, worse, that opportunity can attract sycophants and yes-men and backstabbing and all sorts of politicking that can't happen in your minor engineering department in BigCo, because at BigCo there's no access to powerful people, so no way to try to manipulate them. Sure, BigCo has politics in the executive lounge, but I don't have to hang out there.
Much love for lisp machines, but stack machines do not offer any performance advantages over register machines, and actually make optimization much harder. See Ungar's 1993 thesis on the Self 93 compiler for an early realization of this, where he examines what microcode / register windows / etc could do for him, and how he was able to do just as well with registers.
UX: Product Image Categories
Suggestion: Only apply to external links, the "More" link is annoying when it opens in a new tab. Otherwise - Good Job.
Here's an idea I've been kicking around lately that I'm sure I'm not the first to consider, so maybe someone can predict the ways in which it will fail: what if, instead of imposing artificial scarcity and attempting to require before-use licensing on intellectual "property", we allowed free use of all IP and attempted to reward valuable contributions after use?

So a certain percentage of tax revenue could be distributed as awards for the creation of successful software, inventions, music, etc. There are a number of free variables in such a scheme: percentage of economy dedicated to such awards, measurement methods (observed use vs. voting) and weighting of importance (do you get more award for making music that rich people like?). I wonder if some choice of parameters wouldn't make this scheme an improvement over what we have now.

(I'm assuming capitalism remains for scarce goods)
Hey, you might be onto something here! But I doubt that's going to happen soon, if ever...
Let me respond with my opinion:

If a water fountain is a private object, then the owner can pass whatever restrictions he or she wants on its use.

However, during the Jim Crow era those restrictions were passed by the government as part of a policy of institutionally enforced segregation. The governments passage of those laws constitutes an "imitation of force" on both the water fountain owners and users.
Don't most cell providers already support this?

I seem to recall <phone-number>@<service>.com seems to work for most major providers.