skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is interesting. Consumer prices increased 24% from 1998-2009, passport renewal increased 269%. It seems the product has greatly changed and adopted technology and more bureaucracy. It appears the major reasons for £56 price increase were:
* 40% new anti-fraud measures
* 27% update passports, new anti-fraud, interview for 1st timers (2006)
* 12% to deal with 500k backlog in 1999
* 20% because of falling number of passport applicants and to pay for ID cars.

The world has changed a lot over the last 14 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_passport#Fees
You can consider the GPL a contract, but consider the hypothetical situation: I download a GPLed software, implicitly accepting the license/contract. Then I violate it by giving you a copy of the software without making you accept the GPL.

If the GPL is just a contract, then you can now distribute the software as you wish, since you're not bound by such contract. Copyright, on the other hand, doesn't work like that: everyone is bound by default, and you need a license like the GPL to "break free" from copyright's restrictions.
That is a really good example of such change.
Just another sign that there's a huge VC bubble forming in the Valley.

Yes, there are plenty of legitimate companies that will generate substantial value for VCs, but when you see money being thrown at companies who exist to make infographics it smells of trouble.
Analytics on PandoDaily, HN, and an Eric Riese Tweet
One aspect of the RIAA/MPAA mess missing here is the fact that they are middlemen. It's much easier to "steal" from them when you realize they are largely screwing the people who create the content. Its hard to say how much of the copyright infringement we see now would be happening if there was a distribution channel for media where people felt like they were rewarding the artist more directly.
How is Stallman's version of free software socialist? I've heard this before, and I don't understand it.
Guess what? I consider that a bad thing too.

But you're still reading things into my comment other than what I said.

(1) Rails had insecure defaults which encourage bad programming

(2) pthreads has an API which - at least, in its designer's view - fails to sufficiently discourage bad programming.

(3) The post I was originally responding to was suggesting that it would be in some way an unusual mindset ("startling" was the actual word used, I think) for a library author to wish to discourage bad uses of his library. I think otherwise. Rails was pretty much the first (recent, well-known) example that came to mind where a library author had (imo, anyway) not sufficiently discouraged bad uses of his library.

That's all. I make no argument about the comparative size of the communities,nor the comparative intellectual smarts of their members, nor the reach/impact of the design decisions that the library authors made in each case. That's all I said. Library authors can and do and should design their libraries to encourage their consumers to do the right thing, and this should not be startling.
Well, that still as an analogue: jailbreaking.
Being Honest To Yourself
Truth is windows will always lose, as long as a microsoft peripheral works better on linux than windows. similarly, any HP printer works perfectly on linux, but on windows it is a tedious work. I stopped supporting my circle's windows for those reasons; simply suggest them linux or bye.
I hope that one day all this talk of property and whether piracy is stealing or not isn't needed any more because people have RESPECT for each other and their work, enough respect that if someone wants to sell their work they can without worry it will be taken by people who didn't pay. If an artist, musician, game developer, programmer etc creates something and wants to sell it for $100 nobody will take it without paying, if they want to give it away for free instead of charging that should be their choice.

Piracy shouldn't be a crime like murder or pyshical theft, but it should still not be something that is accepted by society, it's disrespectful to the creator of something. It should be the creators choice and consumers should respect that.
Selling things to the general public seems like a series of depressing lessons about human nature, particularly of the sort "people say they won't do/don't like x, but reality begs to differ."
I read quite a bit of that, despite the very hostile opening, and found it to be a quite a rant. He seems to be claiming that everything is relative, and thus the NAP is meaningless.

I really don't think the initiation is so meaningless. I know that a lot of people like to rationalize the initiation of force because they think the ultimate result is better (Which gets into practical debates, and at the end of the day is still an ends-justify-the-means argument.)

It is true that the NAP is meant to be something everyone should agree with, because we believe everyone is naturally a libertarian and just gets convinced otherwise via a lot of sleight of hand, and rationalizations.

I'd be willing to discuss it if you can provide a concrete example where the NAP fails to provide the right outcome. Or where initiation becomes "meaningless".

I certainly don't deny that there are sticky areas (abortion and rights in land being two of them.)
Top daily deals sites in India in 2012 | Comptalks
Narcissus Prime
He didn't say the touch screen will be vertical.
> When building components try and keep a DRY, OO frame of mind.

Two different things here. OO can mean having excessive numbers of things (files, objects) to do something that can be done more clearly and consisely without them, and it could be argued that having additional files is less DRY if you don't need to provide the same amount of code. So it is good to be DRY before OO.
>More specifically, the GPL is a contract you agree to when you use the product. While strictly speaking it should be a more explicit contract, strictly speaking there's a lot of those kinds of issues with our society.

Wrong. You do not agree to anything by using GPL software. You must abide by the GPL terms upon redistribution to maintain permission granted by the license.

It is not a contract. The differences between license law and contract law are significant. Groklaw covers the issue thoroughly.[1]

>The GPL is saying "Here's my work, I'll trade it with you on these terms". The aggression would be in breaking those terms.

The GPL does not say that. It says "Here is my work. You may redistribute it under these same terms." It has no requirement you give your changes back to the original author. No trading[2] occurs.

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851

[2] Yes, there is the special case of submitting patches upstream which is by convention, not by license or contractual obligation.
Paper poster plays pop music
Excellent article.

I do slightly disagree with his point about evolution of property rights.

This issue comes up often in the context of the Great Divergence - a topic of economic history that describes and seeks to explain why there was such a rapid difference in development between the West (modern powers) and the East (classic powers).

It can be easily shown that private property rights in the West at the very beginning of this divergence were not only critical but also preceeded even the widespread use of the technology of parchment let alone the introduction of paper by some 200 years!

Another one is, of course, slavery.

That said, technology is undoubtedly the commonly fastest means to change the definitions of property. At least, it is faster and often more equitable than having a monopoly on violence (which is what the state and it's laws at any given time essentially represent).
I was about to type the exact same opening line, then saw your post with a well crafted response. My response to the article at first was: "whoever equates open source software with socialism has no idea what either open source software or socialism is." In that, both the author (of the article, not the quote), you, and I agree. Great response, thanks!
Your assertion about intellectual property is inaccurate, libertarians only believe in intellectual property rights protected by contract, not government

I don't think anyone who calls themselves libertarian (edit: should have been 'anyone who is libertarian') could approve of any kind of government. Your argument about collectives taking a vote to justify actions applies just as readily to theft and extortion as it does to rape. That is essentially what every government does to its citizens by taxing them — a sufficient number of people have voted by proxy to take a certain amount of your property gains and use force in order to ensure that you comply.

There is a bigger problem with enforcing intellectual property rights by contract. It is easy to illustrate with a book. Let's say that a book has as its first page, the terms and conditions of sale which are, basically, standard copyright provisions. If the first buyer of the book loses the book, is the person who finds the abandoned property still bound by the terms and conditions of the sale? Perhaps, perhaps not. If the book becomes old and worn and some pages fall out, including the terms and conditions of sale, whoever finds the book can't be aware of the rights protected by this contract. Similarly, an unscrupulous person can violate the terms and conditions of sale, and all violations of the contract thereafter can only be attributed to that one unscrupulous person. Enforcing a copyright contract is simply untenable with physical objects. And with digital objects, assuming the absence of Digital Restrictions Management. It seems that free market forces would make most copyright-via-contract schemes unpopular.
I wish it wasn't that way, but it's a tough lesson as to why you have to make your decisions based on hard data and not just survey data.
Two years ago I was contracted by a local phone survey company to replace their dumb terminals with Linux desktops. After a few hiccups with supporting old (Dell) hardware, we successfully rolled out 25 Ubuntu 9.04 desktops and got them working with their custom hardware and software. I made a LiveCD and a reinstall disc so if something broke during the day, everything could be run from the LiveCD, and replaced with the reinstall disc at night.

Only problem was, they didn't tell me it was a contract position, they told me I was an employee in charge of installation and support. Very surprised when I got to work and my keycard access was revoked.
Reminds me of what happened the other night.

I was on my way out of town and stopped at the new supermarket to pick up a sub for dinner. As I was checking out, a young guy and his girlfriend were in line in front of me.

He says to the cashier, "you know your cell phone coverage sucks."

The cashier says, "yea, only Verizon works."

The reply was, "I bet they're sorry the didn't think of that when they were building it."
Google: Can America’s most loved campaigns be re-imagined for the web?
Virtual USB Analyzer
If a given ID element is uniquely styled (a very common use case), it seems backwards to me to explicitly give it a class so that you can select it by class instead of by the ID that already exists.
Eating Vegetables Makes Your Skin More Attractive [Health]
Best Viewed Using Internet Explorer 9? #SRSLY?
I was joking, and meant "any other OS besides GNU/Linux". Perhaps not perfectly clear though. Removed unnecessary text.

You should've seen it before though! Had to scale it back from "or another OS ({folds arms} {slowly shakes head} [long sigh] tsk tsk tsk)". ;)
Agreed, this is a very odd piece which hinges on the idea that the number of hours you put into a game is indicative of its quality, but you'll find people ploughing hundreds of hours into very poor games. Every game has its fans.

Borderlands balancing itself to only being interesting after 50 hours (assuming the author is correct) is odd and does not help it sell copies or win mindshare. It sounds like the author actually liked Playthrough 2.5 because it didn't have any of the MMORPG trappings, but was actually a balanced first-person shooter.

I've been researching "retention" mechanics (dark patterns/addiction patterns) in games from the POV of behavioral economics for my PhD thesis for a while now. My intuition (no data yet) is that what people seem to miss is that the tricks work for a while, but then they stop working. I'm reaching a conclusion that the tricks work just long enough to keep people playing until their social network joins, and then they're locked in until the game gets boring, and then they jump to the next game, where it seems the retention patterns work again.

What these patterns don't do is make a game enjoyable. The Borderlands gun mechanic, in particular, is not a very good retention mechanic. It'll work... for a time, until players see the inevitable archetypes of variation, and then it won't. The guns are not really valuable, because Borderlands will always give you another one in five minutes. If the player isn't being given something of value, it's not a very good mechanic. The value in the guns isn't the gun itself, but the surprise from the variation, and when that dries up, I'd expect it stops working.

It seems to me the author just really liked Borderlands, which is fine, but is confusing some of the trappings of Borderlands with why she likes it. I think some deeper introspection through the MMORPG smoke and mirrors will find that she just likes the gameplay.

This is not to say MMORPG stuff doesn't work, just that it tapers off. And I think for most people, it tapered off way before Playthrough 2.5.
Ask HN: Has anyone read "How to create your own freaking programming language"?
Hello,

Has anyone read "How to create your own freaking programming language" ? I'm curious if from a 77 pages book someone could learn how to implement a programming language.

At first, the webpage of the book looked like a scam to me, but I see this book was used to implement the first version of CoffeeScript. Also, the book seems to be recommended by Matz.
Similar story, my 14 month old mocks everything we do. If I knock on a door, he knocks on the door, if I sneeze, he'll try to make a sneeze sound, if I fold laundry, well...he'll unfold it and scatter it on the floor, but you get the idea. But since we use the phone, he wants to use the phone, there's no avoiding it.

I don't see the big issue, it's something in his environment that he's curious about. It's not a direct physical danger, I let him explore it.
So now the artists are screwed by the middle men and the audience both.
PeepNote: The Rumble, The Startup, And Now…The Conclusion
The end of a Rails Rumble launched "startup".
Yes, but the point of the top-level comment was the analogy being a poor fit.
Excellent, it looks as though I may have found my first customer.

Step this way McDaid, and we shall immediately start installing the green rubber flamingos.
> I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

You'll be glad to know, then, that Proudhon, the first to self-describe as an anarchist, is also perhaps most famous for coining the phrase "property is theft". It's hard to imagine how socialists could be co-opting anarchism, given that both ideologies were born in the same intellectual climate and have, as a matter of historical fact, been associated time and time again.

You said: "The workers taking over a company and kicking the owners and managers out to run it as a 'workers collective': Immoral. Using force to take property from others violates the NAP." Am I wrong in taking this to mean that you consider a workers' occupation an act of force?

> I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe.

I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas which lead you to believe that defining a term, enumerating your own beliefs, and speaking for an entire political movement, are one and the same.

> FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

Do you object to my using of Wikipedia to simply note the existence of a leftist journal calling itself "The Libertarian" over a hundred years prior to the founding of the U.S. Libertarian Party? If so, feel free to read the French yourself:

http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire/libertaire.htm

No engagement with my second-to-last paragraph, I see. I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not.

Edit: spelling.
One of the points to remember wrt to property rights is what, in fact, you are purchasing when buying a piece of data - be it a song, movie, program, what have you. Many times, we think we are buying something wholly ownable, we assume that, since we paid money for an item, we own it to do with it as we may.

The legal truth is a bit trickier. Often, we are simply buying the rights to use an item for a stated purpose for a stated time. It's a tricky ground, and one that is sometimes counter-intuitive. For instance, when I bought my iPhone, I believe that I purchased a piece of hardware divorced from the OS on it, therefore letting me do anything I want to it. That may hold true at the moment (despite Apple's claims otherwise), but that scenario could easily be changed. Think of the scope of modifications one can and cannot make to a car to keep it "street legal" - there are always limits within law to what one can do with property, and much of that relies on what you purchase at the time of purchase.

All that is to say, however, that current definitions and understandings of property rights do not match up, either in the public sphere, or in the apparent practice of many companies. The systems being used to enforce copyright and property rules are clearly broken, and beg for new paradigms.
A bit of design advice:

- Remove your logo from the header. Your users already pressed the icon on their homescreen to launch your app - they're not confused about what app they're looking at.

- Settle for fewer textures. You have two distinct wood textures that clash, and paper scrolls on top of that. You can distinguish yourself without resorting to a custom background for everything. All the texture obscures the things users can interact with (the refresh button, the scrolls, etc).

- Make the text bigger/make the contrast stronger. Take a look at any app you read a lot in - the font is generally significantly bigger, and on a more distinct background. You're trying to make it look "old" - try old parchment. That's a much more reasonable than a wood floor for reading text.
Thanks for the fantastic articulation of the distinction between socialism and libertarianism especially with regards to FOSS. Personally, I am adamantly libertarian and adamantly anti-socialist, something that at times I find at odds with the socialist factions within FOSS communities. Nonetheless, I find the large minority (majority?) of libertarian/free-market capitalists within the community to be encouraging, though they tend to be less vocal.

At the core of the issues is the use of force and the NAP. One way this is often contentiously illustrated in the US is with government protected labor unions. As a libertarian, I view labor unions as the to-be-encouraged populist counter to incumbent monopolies, yet I find myself all too regularly unwilling to support them due to their violation of the NAP and insistence on socialist values/tactics. This is unfortunate, since it seems to create a de facto support of wealthy "capitalists" by libertarians in the view of detractors.

Government protected labor unions are the populist equivalent of corporatism, corrupt by definition, allowing workers to explicitly violate employment agreements without repercussions. Until government protected labor unions are abolished, they'll consistently fail to receive support from a large majority of the people that may share their otherwise noble intentions, pay for the value you create. The problem of course with socialists though is that value should be objectively decided by others, aka the _free_ market.

The software community and Silicon Valley seem to have gotten at least this part right, an oasis amongst many tragically morally unsupportable industries. (I would absolutely _love_ to whole-heartedly embrace support of the teachers union, but cannot.)
IPad Point Of Sale (POS)
Minorer nitpick: A L^3 is a thing, in the sense of being a unit with real meaning, equivalent to (?) a dm^9; it's just not a thing that can be meaningfully represented in 3-D space.
The thing that always worries me when I see software people talking about songs not being property is then what does that make software?

I see the act of creating software and creating a song or a movie as being very analogous.

It takes a lot of work on the front end to create the master copy, but then that master copy can be digitally reproduced at no marginal cost.

Movies and songs grew up in an old style situation where distributors and producers put up the money and in exchange for the risk take a lot of the back end.

Software came later, and so we have, for instance, the open source movement. There's not a lot of open source movies.

If we don't respect songs as property, but we do think of our own software creations as property, is that not hypocrisy?

I can hate the RIAA and MPAA and all their evil actions, and still think of these products as property... many movies cost a hundred million dollars to make.

I think it might be more productive to point out that the RIAA and MPAA are doing bad things... than to try and throw out the idea that easily reproducible goods can be property.
> I can't accept that the vast majority of computer users are morons who can't understand it at all when interfaces change and have to start at square one every time.

You're right, that rather hyperbolic interpretation of what's being described isn't quite true.

But it sounds like those kinds of users are quite a bit more common than you realize. And when it comes to driving the PC market, those users are powerful. The reason why most companies in my industry are still standardized on XP is precisely because there are a lot of people like that, and the potential benefits of switching to Windows 7 are minuscule compared to the productivity (read: $$$$) losses that would result from getting these users back up to speed on the new OS.
Ah yes, the almighty consensus has spoken. Dare not disagree or we shall smite you.
While the premiss of this column is nearly right, the arguments are wrong.

Rather than being guilty of "Exploitative manufacturing" (cheap labor that out pays the median income many times over), "Indifference to Copyright" (making things easy to find), "Disregard for privacy" (making money from advertising from people who don't take easy steps to block tracking and ads), "Crony Capitalism" (fighting off harmful legislation written by other industries' lobbyists), and "The Murdoch Model" (selling shares in a company no one is being forced to purchase), I propose that they are guilty of other real crimes:

-Collusion on hiring & wages (already proven)

-The formation of a patent cartel which virtually eliminates tiny companies from becoming meaningful competitors or serving comparative services.
The law should be predictable. This is obviously also not perfectly attainable, but we should not deliberately put ambiguities in there. Unpredictable laws directly lead to rule by men (as opposed to rule by law) and there's a lot of history and tradition on why that is undesirable.