skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why yes I can. I remember using a PC for the first time and typing all sorts of things at a prompt trying to work out the range of commands that were available.

The user will likely type "help" first. On Kubuntu I get this:

username@loclahost:~$ help
GNU bash, version 4.2.10(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
These shell commands are defined internally. Type `help' to see this list.
Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.

A star (*) next to a name means that the command is disabled.

job_spec [&] history [-c] [-d offset] [n] or history -anrw [filename] or histor>
(( expression )) if COMMANDS; then COMMANDS; [ elif COMMANDS; then COMMANDS; ]... [>
. filename [arguments] jobs [-lnprs] [jobspec ...] or jobs -x command [args]
: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill>
[ arg... ] let arg [arg ...]
[[ expression ]] local [option] name[=value] ...

Which is surprisingly helpful and would give you a start at interacting with the computer at least. How far you'd get if you were literally thrown in at the deep-end with this I don't know.
Report Says Circumcision May Reduce Risk of Prostate Cancer
I'm being very radical here, but the thought of the only books being published being by people who actually want to be read rather than waant to be rich is not a problem for me. For craftsmen whose primary goal isn't to communicate or entertain, I'd suggest patrons. I'd certainly sponsor about 1/50 of a writer spread across a curated pool. I'd probably sponsor about 1/200 of a curator. They wouldn't have to even send me the books, I'd just buy them from the printer with the best quality to cost ratio.
Interesting. The angular resolution of the human eye is about 0.02° according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_eye#Basic_accuracies), which, using the provided calculator on this page, corresponds very nearly to one pixel (0.938 to be exact). Pretty sweet.
As a follow-up to this, my HS English teacher broke me of this by forcing the mantra, "if you are about to say 'um', STOP TALKING'". These works are generally used to fill the speech gap while you are thinking. It seems weird at first to pause, but eventually it becomes natural.
You could always give performances and charge for those!

Oh, wait...

Joking aside, I think that IP is and should remain a messy compromise. There are no easy answers. Were it to cease to exist completely, it would reduce the incentives for producers, and thus consumers would be worse off too because they would have less software, books, movies and music to enjoy. I don't have all the answers in terms of details, but copyright terms right now are too long. Patents should vary by sector, taking into account the real world. Biotech patents applied to medicines are useful because those medicines are easy to copy, more often than not, but take years of research to come up with. Software patents just seem like bunk to me. Other things are probably in the middle somewhere. And all of this should be reviewed every 10 years or so to see how the facts on the ground are changing.

As for enforcement... that's tricky. With no enforcement at all, it's sort of silly to even pretend that producers have any rights. Too draconian is obviously bad as well.

Anyone have any thoughts on the details, wherein lies the devil?

Also, speaking of smells and property, Googling for "perfume intellectual property" turns up some interesting stuff, like this:

http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2010/01/19/smelly-rig...
Sure! This is actually a good reminder that I should write something more in-depth on this topic, since most of what I think I know is based in large parts on oral-history with some conjecture.

Lisp Machines started at MIT, some of that code is actually available online now (http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/mit/mit_cadr_lmss.html). That software became the basis of two companies: Symbolics and then later, Lisp Machines Inc (LMI). This Wikipedia entry does a good job at explaining the impact this part of history had on RMS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#Folklore_about_LM...

So, here is where the history of Genera is non-existent or murky. Yes, you can download a torrent of Genera. But how do you obtain a legal license Genera? Who actually owns the IP to Genera?

In learning the answers to those questions, I was left with even more respect for RMS and an amusing, if not ironic, anecdote showing how his vision for the future turned out to be correct.

> How do you obtain a legal license Genera?

You purchase a copy of Open Genera for the DEC Alpha for $5000 from David Schmidt.

> Who actually owns the IP to Genera?

John Mallery (http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/926). He's the most recent owner. Before he got the IP, it was owned by a series of law firms and ex-Symbolics employees.

Why do I find this this amusing? Well, the software that RMS worked so hard to protect and that ultimately helped "inspire" him to start GNU has been relegated to the footnotes of history. Meanwhile, GNU software is used on millions of machines.
>Recordings have only existed for barely more than a century. Musical performers survived long before and will survive long after.

True. But that's saying the future is the past? That's not so much transformation, as devolution. I was trying to think how they would transform into the future, not "can they survive by looking back".

Live performances, I think, would create a strange situation where the listening was scheduled to the artist's performance, rather than being on my (on-demand) schedule. Even if I could schedule it to fit into my time, what about someone else in a different time zone. What woud I do about curating songs into a moody sequence?

My take on the musical profession, before the advent of recordings was that it was more a matter of survival, for most musicians --even good ones. That is to say, they barely survived on their musical income. That's not unlike lots of amateur musicians, but the difference is there was no "up" unless you were a virtuoso performing for a royal, or something similar. I would like for musicians to still be able to make a decent living from their art. Not necessarily millionaires (alto not against that).
> 6. I don't know how difficult this is from a development perspective, but if possible, make the app resistant to having non-active fingers touching the screen while active fingers are attempting to use it. Kids will often grasp devices, especially phones, in such a way that fingers from (say) their left hand are touching the screen, and on some apps this causes them to cease responding to touch events from their other (right) hand.

To get at the "raw" multitouch taps and gestures programmatically in a custom manner is complex to handle a case where the user is going to be "resting" fingers in a random area of the screen intermittently or for an extended period of time (i.e., a continuous gesture).

One solution is to put nothing interactive in that area (effectively ignore all taps / gestures), and that's quite easy to implement. I haven't used many apps targeted to children, so I don't know whether that's realistic from a user perspective.
Yes - these notes are definitely from 6.042. I TA'ed the class a couple of times as these notes were being developed. In my opinion, they are fantastic. Entertaining and engaging, while still maintaining an appropriate level of mathematical rigor.
You are technically correct, which Futurama calls 'the best kind of correct', but it isn't really.

When you're arguing about what kind of thing a thing is, you can call that a semantic argument, but if you're trying to characterize something that exists in practice, this is different from fighting over dictionary definitions.

(Interestingly, I got into the contrapositive of this argument on HN the other day: I tried to use a math term to mean something closely related to the standard definition, and people jumped on me for misusing it.)
Microsoft Can Make Your Voice Speak Foreign Languages
It fits completely. If you purchase the coffee, you've exchange money for coffee, and expressed rights. The same could be said for GPL'ed code. I can purchase the code with specific rights. MySQL is a prime example of this happening in the software world.
Definitely a sign that Yahoo stopped getting profit from doing anything useful, since they fell so low as to use software patents litigations for their income.
Respect? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
> This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them

The phrase you cite is "endlessly amusing" because it is a contradiction in terms; communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government, and anarchism is predicated on the lack of one. If you need that explained, I'm not sure why you're participating in this thread.
>That's roughly spotify's business model, isn't it?

Yes. Would we (everyone/most) be comfortable with that model being the predominant, perhaps only model? Perhaps. Not sure.
Intel Developing Web-Based TV Service
There is an Arabic folk tale version of that story:

A poor person gets hungry, so he sits down outside a kebab house, and starts eating his bread and smelling the kebabs. The owner sees him, gets angry and tells him "You can't just sit here and smell for free, you gotta pay!". The poor person looks at him and says "Oh, I'm sorry, I'll pay.". He then takes out his change purse and shakes it until the coins make some noise, then goes back to eating and smelling.
Tags are a great suggestion. I was originally thinking of just showing individual properties (creative, flat etc.) but tags are much flexible. We've been thinking a lot about "discovery" of Minecraft worlds and tags seem like a great Web 2.0 solution!

I've also been working for the last little while on "public" worlds where anybody can join. Spleef arenas are coming soon!
Again, time to change how you've been using computers for years. Sorry Grandma.
The complaint is going to be the same tired old saw that "OMG if you release under anything that isn't the GPL with assignment to FSF, um, I mean, anything that isn't strong-copyleft, then some EVIL COMPANY might take the software and build it into a commercial project!"

GPL folks are willing to accept fewer rights in exchange for a guarantee that at least that subset of rights will be passed on to all parties. Permissive (BSD/MIT/etc.) folks are OK with the idea that someone might build proprietary software someday, and prefer the license that lets you do the most stuff right now.
I agree that when you're very familiar with the control panel, it's frustrating to have to adapt to the non-classic categorised view. However there are clear advantages to some changes, and I would argue that the Windows control panel is more usable now than it has been in the past. The large directory of icons with no clear grouping by function is a user interface nightmare, and it's only because we're familiar with it that we can navigate it.

And for reference, if you go to the control panel in Windows 7, "Uninstall a program" is right there on the bottom left. If you want to install a program (like IIS), clicking "Programs" takes you to a convenient menu that lets you "Turn Windows features on or off".

It's not quite how it was, but it's actually more intuitive. I'd imagine that you learned the old way of doing it by trial and error. The new system makes that process easier.
Traffic Cop: 'Super lightweight messaging system'
Hmm,

As I recall, average have jobs. Jobs are becoming PC oriented all the time. That is because the PC architecture (screen, local storage, keyboard) is pretty much needed for full-time production on a PC (and when has been computerized that means that less, not more, physical activity will be needed).

Post-PC products may indeed continue making inroad in consumption and those jobs where people need to walk-around. But outside that, the form factor that is the tablet's advantage become its disadvantage and only obsessive cool-aid swallows will take it beyond these areas.
Posterous acquired by Twitter
The biggest reason is that most css properties ignore fractional px values—you can't draw a .5px border, for instance.
If the non iPhone person has MMS disabled on their account, then they won't see the message at all.
We've been hearing this lament from GUI developers for a long time. App development on the web is an abuse of HTML and HTTP and that it's a huge step backwards even from decades-old GUI toolkits.

The problem with that line of thinking is that GUI toolkits will never be cross-platform and cross-medium in the way the web is. It's not like there haven't been attempts, but they are all half-baked because there is no incentive for platforms to support them. The web on the other hand is must-have for every device. This momentum is what gives web app technology real legs.

It's really a textbook example of how worse-is-better can be disruptive, and how what we end up with has no correlation to what any one individual thinks is best. It doesn't really how much better an idea someone can come up with, the question is what can the industry be mobilized to get behind.
That should really read "should the internet be taxed to subsidize brick and mortar retailers?" because that's the next step if the e-book publishing model is taxed.
Quite frankly, I don't see too much to take offence at in cmhamill's words.

It really doesn't appear to me that there was an intention to attack you personally, although it was perhaps blunt in places.
Your analogy of a server based app is not a great one. If Google shared all of its source code, it would be a huge security risk and embarrassing amongst other things, but it would not lead to the end of their business by any means. Google makes money because they create a massive infrastructure that is NOT simply copyable. The fact that you can't read the actual Java, C etc. code that is executing on the server doesn't really matter: even if you could there is so much more value in the business than just that. Duck Duck Go is a great example: it has roughly the same quality search results as Google, but if you just gave the Google source code to DDG they wouldn't all of a sudden eat Google's lunch.

If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression.

What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly.

Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.
In your example, the "signal" would be what he says and I'm assuming you mean the silence to be the "noise". Large enough gaps between information could lead to a distortion of the message, regardless of how profound the information may be.
I wasn't referring to an entry level engineer. I was referring to non-tech entry level position (marketing, sales, whatever).

At 75-100k you're not losing that much happiness and stress wise if you take a pay cut at a start-up.

If you have an offer of 40k at an established company and are taking a lower salary (30-35k) to work at a start-up, that will hurt significantly in terms of your happiness, stress, and your ability to pay your bills.
Seems strange for a company this "developed" to go as part of a talent acquisition, does this imply that the company doesn't see a way to grow beyond what it is now and believes that what it is now isn't good enough to warrant continuing on with the option to join Twitter? Although I guess 4 years isn't that old in the grand scheme of things.
Im located in central-ish london, uk
Welcoming the Posterous team to the flock
Why would we want individual software services when we have one software service that solves all those problems?
How to multiply numbers by 9, 99, 999 and so on in just 5 seconds
Stop building apps. Start with strategy.
I think they were trying to take on Tumblr in the earlier days but were never able to. They then tried to create a Path like product which was for families to use but kept all of the old features so it got quite confusing from a users perspective.
I've been trying to keep people from learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time since in most cases it just leads to frustration. When you're learning a new language, your editor is never a bottleneck, so it makes a lot more sense to wait till you're comfortable in the language with your current environment before changing editors.

Anyway, it's kind of orthogonal to learning Clojure, so it seems a bit out of place here. Perhaps a second article would make more sense, though contributing to the official documentation would of course be much better.
Thanks. Its always good for anyone who has even a passing interest in a programming language to know the motivation for it given the amount of programming languages out there.
The idea that there may be greater purpose in the universe.
Central london, uk
I've also seen pg speak several times, and each time I've found it frustrating to listen through such a poor delivery of such good content.

He'd be so much more powerful if his speaking skills received even a small amount of focused effort.
Neat post. Good way to highlight how easy it is to use your app (I'm assuming it's easy).

I clicked on your logo on that page, and although it is a clickable element, NOTHING HAPPENED. Please, please, please, please link your logo to your home page. Please.
What's with the Google link on the maps? I clicked it on [1] and it took me to somewhere in the sea near Africa!

[1] https://minefold.com/chrislloyd/minebnb
There probably was an internal tool, but it was also probably too complicated and convoluted to use. I don't work at DOJ or the Senate, but at my agency (NASA) there is a "large file transfer tool". It requires an obscure login with inane password requirements (and short expirations, so passwords expire more often than people probably use the tool), and the site can only be accessed from behind the firewall, making it useless for sharing files while on travel or with contracting organizations and collaborators at universities.

The result? Nobody uses it. Thankfully the organization I work at has our own security plan, so we created our own large-file tool that was easier to use. Before that people would give me (the web developer) a file to upload to an obscure URL on our web server, since that was easier and more reliable than dealing with the approved NASA solution. If I wasn't there I could totally see them using megaupload or something similar instead.
15$ for quality product is ok. Chaptered games/applications (iWork etc.) are ok. ADs are not. IAPs are not.

This should be tattooed on every single iOS dev.

PS: I actually wish there would be at least few 30-60$ games in the store. And not those crappy ports of gamepad/mouse games (shooters etc.) with unplayable controls. Or some good, but very old, not so polished ports of ports of classic games (FFT). It would be nice to play some great western RPG, with interesting story (not that boring save the world stuff), it should be turn based to adjust to device controls, some good graphics (not like those Top games from store) - look up Bastion on the PC, THIS is how AAA iPad games should look like.
And no sequels. Please.
Maybe the new CEO is just looking for some attention?
I wonder how much of a community bounty it would take for John Mallery to open source it.
Disclaimer: MSFT employee working closely with Windows 8

I speak as a former programming team member from a very high ranking school in the SE Region according to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest regionals.

"He's also been primed to expect a difficult task by his annoyingly condescending son. I'm not at all surprised that he struggled with it."

This has an enormous effect on a person's ability to solve problems. I learned this one day speaking with one of our coaches. I took what I recall to be a 1000 or 1100 point TopCoder Level 1 problem and told him it was "easy". I was being sarcastic, but he took me seriously and efforted more at the problem because it was "easy". He even postulated a few theories on how to solve the problem in our conversation. He said the reason he even did that was because I told him it was easy. Had I said it was hard, the results may have been different.
For some reason (maybe it's the fact that I'm currently reading 11/22/63), a picture of a battered wife staying with her abusive husband comes to mind.
Moreover, many restaurants deliberately leak smells, as free advertising. What the store owner was really objecting to is the rice-eating student breaking the sniff-through EULA.
Isn't this backwards in some sense?

It used to be the case that the cost of listening to recorded music was a combination of creation and distribution. The cost of distributions is now effectively zero, and so therefore, society should now no longer listen to recorded music, because it's not possible to cover the cost of creation with the profits from distribution?

As the combined cost of creation and distribution is lowered, I'd want society to have more creation and distribution.
You don't get to just pick on one side. I could equally well say that "You have not lost anything by me copying this software." is not necessarily legitimate.

I personally know many examples of people who have pirated things they would have paid for, had they not been able to successfully pirate it. You can therefore I believe argue that the piracy lead directly to a loss.
I think that was Jemka's point. Sidnal/noise ratio is not the same thing as throughput.

For instance imagine that instead of stopping to think, your uncle turned on the radio during the pauses. The same amount of useful information would be transmitted but we would not say that both scenarios are equally desirable.

Silence is the desirable pause method. It allows the audience to absorb and understand the signal better.
Posterous' Acquisition FAQ's
They never really figured out monetization and they didn't manage to get the traction of tumblr, plus with the loss of a founder it was a hard position for them to be in.

I doubt the investors made a return.
Why is it everyone assumes that making a pity post on the internet will fix their issues with PayPal? File a suit in a small claims court if you want some relief.
Would've been fine as a comment on the thread posted 3 minutes earlier about the same news:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3695407
What do you mean? Corporations can't just start selling stuff either, they have to be registered, comply with the prerequisites, pay taxes, etc. Some countries are very lax, some are more restrictive, but that's true for citizenship too.

If you mean they aren't bound as in, forced to be in just one country, then citizens aren't either: I myself am a citizen of two countries.
Yet in linux when I assign things to [Windows] + letter, it says [Super] + letter.

Super + L is my friend for locking the screen
SPDY: What I Like About You.
This is why I can't wait for a Square or Stripe in the UK. At the moment you have PayPal as your only option to take payments rapidly for say a quick idea you have had and want to hack up.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/12/appcod-es-launches-app-stor...
This matters more still for a display with head-tracking. As I read this, the apparent angular size of 1px within a human’s FOV ought to remain constant, regardless of viewer position or physical pixels.