skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Bob is the first person to wake up and discovers the food dispenser. Knowing the value of this natural resource he claims it as his property. He later trades food from the food dispenser for favors from everyone else in the box. The other libertarians have to do what Bob asks otherwise they will not get food since they are not willing to break the NAP.

Examples like this often provide strong challenges to the right-wing libertarian view on property. As a left-libertarian, I'd like to offer that some of us do consider monopolization of natural resources to constitute aggression, since resources are originally unowned. This is known as Georgism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
How much value can a miserable and unproductive person deliver?

I don't want to buy a beta product from a company, only to find out that it went out of business five minutes after the founder hung himself with his belt.
Yes, they do...
You can't "deliver value" if you're a burnt-out 200lb unmotivated antisocial overworking mess...

(been there, done that... NOT good)
6 Foot Floating Arm Trebuchet Plans and Pictures
i dig how you changed the cancellation process, because it encourages ppl to do what your app is intended to do - get groups of 3 together in real life. your old policy was giving incentives for your core mission NOT to happen. i wonder how your service plans to thrive in nyc, where a similar service - ignighter - had to go to india to really succeed. would love to hear your thoughts.
The problem with that is that the RIAA/MPAA produce no products. They are lobbying organizations for the publishers in their respective industries; they don't have much relation to the artists at all.

If one was truly inclined to pay the artists who produced an album (or the equivalent in a different content industry), it would be best to send it to them directly. Then they'd realize (a la Louis CK) that the publishers are unnecessary middlemen in the creator/consumer relationship, thus obsolescing that entire segment of industry and the RIAA/MPAA with it.
I know of two non-US versions that somehow manage the same thing with their local banking system:

http://www.pozible.com.au
http://pledgeme.co.nz
well, that is exactly what we are using.
:)

@xuding what I mean how to create the API & service behind the url
You are right, I remember seeing that on my laptop.
Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner (2000 free videos and podcasts)
i've always loved that a cubic decimeter is a liter is a kilogram of water.
Respect for the sake of respect, especially if detrimental to getting your point across is highly overrated.
Algorithms: what are they good for?
what are they actually useful for?
ive been programming for a few years and i've never had to actually use one...

i just started learning about them and they are pretty cool but i'm not really sure what to do with the knowledge.

if they really are useless, i'll still keep learning them just because they are cool.
Show HN: My new GitHub issue tracker, BugHub
A user just created a video for us - Thank You So Much!! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnlUMHUlNc
Sorry, you are right, I did mean that /usr/bin/python is usually 2.7.

For someone just starting out with python (on linux anyways) that means they are probably going to fire up that interpreter first.

I was wondering myself actually if any of the distros would switch to 3.0. I think a lot of packages would break if that were to happen.

As you've said, Arch has already switched but their package release isn't really typical for most distros.
I think using too many fish/aquatic puns is unhealthy psychologically. You otter look into finding someone who can kelp you with this issue.
Yes these people broke the rules, but it seems that PayPal hasn't told them which rule they broke! How hard is it to say "preorders are not allowed, so we froze your account"
Homeless as Wi-Fi Transmitters Creates a Stir in Austin
Kickstarter's mission creep
I have as little respect for people who redefine open source as for the people who redefine free software.
tldr: master passphrase
Uh, what?

1m pageviews a month is about equivalent to 10/second. A single app server can handle that easily. Add on a redundant app server, two database servers, and some static/queue/mail ones, and you're looking at 10 servers _tops_ for that level of traffic (and much more).
I am a sir, and thank you. :)
This is my first iOS app, so it was definitely a learning experience, but I'm happy with the what I shipped! I'd love to hear your feedback and I'm already planning new features and UI improvements for the upcoming versions.

Here are some promo codes for you all:

WYJEYEAJWJPX

F666KME3X44R

XEPLYKPXHNMT

WNPE47WY6TJ9

7P3K4LXFXEFN
I thought I'd have a very quick look at the claim that PayPal is particularly small compared to credit card companies.

PayPal is a direct subsidiary of Ebay Inc. which has around 11 billion dollars in revenue, so compared to American Express, which has 29 billion in revenue, it is smaller but in the same sort of ballpark.

You know, despite their tiny size, I think they might just about have the available funds and resources to work out fairly quickly if a book for a known cancer charity featuring popular authors is likely to be fraudulent or not. And to provide proper arbitration.
"I'm sorry, doctor, I'd like to pay you for the emergency brain surgery, but since the accident I can't remember my money."
I think any argument that involves file sharing has to start with an understanding of copyright. I wrote a bit about it here: http://zacharyalberico.com/day/2012/01/24.

The utility and ownership arguments become more problematic in this context.
Yes, I did type in 2012 and I did copy the display contents by hand due to no copy/paste from the terminal window. I think I got it right, but I might have missed a digit.
Here's some guesswork on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Twitter-Inc-company/How-much-did-Twitte...
I do not believe "Ad Hominem" means what you seem to think it means. Furthermore I don't think anyone has ever won an argument by calling out the names of random logical fallacies. The purpose of them is you call them out, in your own head, to yourself. And then you use that information to explicitly examine and question the argument at hand. Oftentimes it is not necessary to point out any fallacy at all if the overall conclusion of the argument does not depend on the truth value of the fallacious statement- So the best strategy in argument then, is to first identify what that overall conclusion is, identify the premises that the conclusion depends on, discarding any premises that are irrelevant, and address those explicitly. To call out things like "strawman!" and "ad hominem" is to be pointlessly distracted, or, in a less charitable reading, a strategy intended to distract the reader, so you can avoid having to do all that hard work of addressing the person's actual argument. I believe in this case it is the latter, but I may give you the benefit of the doubt if you can come back and address the content of the argument instead of throwing a fit and refusing to negotiate with intellectual terrorists, as you have.
> unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation.

So... how do we figure that? Seriously: How do we do the math in every possible case to ensure I'm not exploiting the person who freely agreed to work for me?

> Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Most anarchists need to study the Sorites paradox.

> But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

This means there still would be a hierarchy based on the fact that, one, a government with no ability to make binding resolutions is pointless; two, unless some group has the ability to veto others the body gets mired in endless debate due to bikeshedding; three, despite the previous point, most people don't want to govern nearly as much as they want to argue over the trivial things they feel entitled to have an opinion on, so trying to even things out by putting everyone into government would require a draft backed by, you guessed it, the threat of force.

> Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.

I understand this. I wonder what someone who actually believed in this would be saying.
I actually think “little-s socialism” is about the workers owning the means of production, not the government. The difference is palpable when we’re trying to fit that word onto software development.

Government owning the means of production would be the government issuing licenses to write software. Workers owning the means of production would be that anyone can write a program without needing a license (or the fear of patent litigation from monopolists).

Licenses are anti-socialist to me, as are patents.

The whole “government runs everything” thing is sometimes called big-S Socialism, sometimes called Fascism, sometimes called Communism... But it isn’t the little-s socialism I had in mind when I wrote the post.

The government running everything is trading the farmer for some pigs.
Impressive for a first app, what did you use?
Beautiful Geneva cell phone usage visualization
Show HN: Launching Namevine, Instant Domain & Social Media Vanity URL Search
It's more than that, though -- the bitcoin private key isn't _encrypted with_ the passphrase, it's _generated directly_ from the passphrase. So there's no data on disk; only data in your mind.
The producer can certainly set the price, but can they attach other strings? The first-sale doctrine says no, except where explicitly allowed.
> If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

Ultimately, in the legal system implementing patent laws. However, as you well know, patents and chairs aren't the same kind of property, in that chairs are a rivalrous good and patents are not.
It's a passphrase to autogenerate keys deterministically accordingly to an algorithm. Once you finish using the computer, you can just destroy the keys or even destroy your computer.
Classical economic theory suggests that the switches would happen only when they were truly advantageous to both parties -- in this case, one would assume that the poor would gain in experience and knowledge, and the rich too. Otherwise neither of them would have made the trade in the first place.

It's certainly debatable, but it would be my hope that it would lead to increases in opportunity for all parties.

But these are exactly the kinds of moral concerns I alluded to...
Small Avalokiteshvara Statue Red Pearl HB32 Online
I think it actually is quite difficult, nearly all of PayPal's competitors were bankrupted by fraud (early on it was organized Russian crime rings).

"The origins of Palantir go back to PayPal, the online payments pioneer founded in 1998. A hit with consumers and businesses, PayPal also attracted criminals who used the service for money laundering and fraud. By 2000, PayPal looked like “it was just going to go out of business” because of the cost of keeping up with the bad guys, says Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder.

The antifraud tools of the time could not keep up with the crooks. PayPal’s engineers would train computers to look out for suspicious transfers—a number of large transactions between U.S. and Russian accounts, for example—and then have human analysts review each flagged deal. But each time PayPal cottoned to a new ploy, the criminals changed tactics. The computers would miss these shifts, and the humans were overwhelmed by the explosion of transactions the company handled.

PayPal’s computer scientists set to work building a software system that would treat each transaction as part of a pattern rather than just an entry in a database. They devised ways to get information about a person’s computer, the other people he did business with, and how all this fit into the history of transactions. These techniques let human analysts see networks of suspicious accounts and pick up on patterns missed by the computers. PayPal could start freezing dodgy payments before they were processed. “It saved hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Bob McGrew, a former PayPal engineer and the current director of engineering at Palantir."

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/palantir-the-vanguard-o...]
I think they won't, that it's no longer a point of uncertainty, and that Arch essentially made a mistake in switching their /usr/bin/python prematurely.

The consensus from Python list discussions like "Shebang lines for Python 3" and "Support the /usr/bin/python2 symlink upstream" seemed to be that /usr/bin/python is to remain Python 2 indefinitely and that newly-written scripts should call python2 or python3 explicitly. If I recall right Guido's stance was the latter, but leaving plain python up to distros.

There's also PEP 394: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

This is further cemented, if you will, by the new Windows launcher in 3.3 that extends shebang support to that platform and supports the same mappings.

That said, one of the KDE applications I maintain contains a fair amount of Python code, and since I consider Python 3 to be a much nicer language, it of course runs fine on 3.x. And purely from an emotional POV the fact that the Arch packages get to install those scripts without their usual sed call to replace "python" with "python2" does bring a smile to my face.
store the key in case of amnesia.
> Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

I'd say that 'government' would be nothing more than a debating society, like the League of Nations, and just about as useful in preventing, say, homicide as the League of Nations was at preventing WWII.
Thanks, it's all native for the most part.
Briton's NZ rescue - with help from 18,000km away
Good god, absolutely everything. (sorry, couldn't resist)

An algorithm can tell you how to do something, but, doesn't necessarily contain the code to do so.

When faced with a list of items, you might be inclined to just use someone else's library to do a bubble sort or a quicksort or a merge sort, but, when you know the algorithm behind each method, you can make a determination whether your list is mostly ordered, or mostly unordered and make a decision as to which one to use.

Similarly, when you're dealing with compression, it makes sense to know that deflate and bzip are fairly similar, but, other compression schemes might be different. lzfx uses a simple run length encoding and doesn't compress as well, but, works very well for streaming data. Sample size would tell you that short 120-240 byte strings won't do well with bzip due to the dictionary token header, but, longer files where you can determine longer repetition strings can provide better compression.

Knowing how things work helps you make the decision of which library to implement rather than just taking the Internet's word for it. Yes, sometimes the Internet contains bad information.

Almost everything you code, probably uses an algorithm somewhere - you just may not be making that association.

Sure there are algorithms that you may never use, but, in general, knowing what to look for can help you find a library that more closely handles some problem you're trying to solve.
Three shall be the version of the Python, and the version of the Python shall be three. Version four shalt thou not use, nor shalt thou use version two, excepting that thou then upgrade to three.

Perl 5 is right out.
Love that it is 404 :)
I don't have a problem with them freezing accounts pending review, or with them going after fraud, etc.

What I do have a problem with is freezing accounts for 180 days with basically no input from their legitimate customers. Yes, I have had Paypal accounts frozen in the past. They are extremely trigger happy here and they do not work with their customers to unfreeze accounts or even get customer information for their review process. Every other processor I know of including ones which address high risk areas of processing (like porn sites), engages in such freezes largely on the short term while review is done in order to determine what steps need to be done in order to bring the site into compliance or terminate the account. In no case is money held for such a period of time or with so little feedback.
pg also ends a lot of sentences with "right?" I used to have the same affectation, and have worked hard to eliminate it. The main one that remains in my own speech is saying "so" (as a transition) a bit too much. I have the video to prove it; you'll see what I mean on Pi Day.
Bitcoin - Don't Get Zhou Tonged
The war for the desktop was lost long ago. Apple realized this when they switched their emphasis to mobile. There's some room in the laptop market but hardware quirks make this an even tougher nut to crack than the desktop.

Android is Linux's future.
> Obviously you can't pronounce a sound that you don't even know exists.

It's possible that they could interpolate those sounds. For example, Bengali has a sound that's halfway between a 'd' and a 't'. Using some statistical heuristics, it's possible that they could approximate that letter using your pronunciations of 'd' and 't' (and knowing how bilingual Bengali-English speakers who pronounce 'd' and 't' similarly to how you do also pronounce that letter).
I respectfully disagree good sir!

Most arguments can be made so that the 'opponent' is receptive and thankful for your input. The arguments which cannot, are perhaps best left unsaid.
Ubuntu's Python maintainer Barry Warsaw recently announced their goal to have no Python 2 in the "main" part of the repositories by their April 2014 release: http://lwn.net/Articles/469939/

I think that's probably a too aggressive schedule to actually keep, but here's hoping.
Not to mention a large swathe of religious teachings, folk tales, myths and fables. Next thing you'll be telling me "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is completely made up to serve a point, rather than a factual account of the issues facing agrarian animal husbandry workers.
Why God never received a PhD
There really should be an effort to get people to write new code in python3 and use 3to2 to backport (rather than writing in python2 and using 2to3 to convert).
"I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice."

My blog post on the topic is here:
http://intellectual-detox.com/the-case-for-legalizing-drugs/

That said, I think legalization is much less of a pipe dream than any of the solutions I'm proposing. Which is unfortunate, because I don't think legalization alone will do much of anything about crime, I think most of the major cities need a period of fairly draconian and strict law enforcement to bring back from essentially a state of civil war back to civilization.
> Copyright and patents only appeared in the 18th century.

I find the argument that copyright and patents appear only recently in historical terms unconvincing. Following that line of reasoning shoudln't we be even more wary of e.g. universal suffrage and civil rights laws?

Moreover, that these laws occured relatively late in human history is IMO unsurprising, even to be expected given the state of human evolution. At the risk dilettantism, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the history of "copyright":

> Copyright was invented after the advent of the printing press and with wider public literacy.

Whether or not one agrees with copyright law, I would argue that the relevant laws followed technological innovations at some lag -- and did not just appear randomly or as a result of some kind of conspiracy.

Wikipedia puts the original date for Patents at 500BC, but if you read a few sentences further the industrial revolution appears. So again, the argument applies: effort expended on legal action followed effort expended on technological process, at some lag.

And even if we look before the industrial revolution, and before the printing press, history provides us with a wealth of examples of groups of individuals trying to preserve or protect their "edge" in crafts (often acquired through hard work and ingenuity, sometimes, through fortune), techniques, or otherwise "patentable" methods, with often far higher consequences than what are being proposed currently. (Though, admittedly, that means nothing.) I'm thinking for example of guilds of various forms throughout Mideaval Europe, as well as China. My knowledge in this area is not that extensive, but there are a few colourful examples in "The Rise and Decline of Nations" by Mancur Olson, e.g. IIRC one guild in China collectively biting another master to death for taking on too many apprentices (copies!) for fashioning gold leaf -- gold leaf for the king (no less), whose protection was worth nothing to him in the face of the guild's desire to protect its "IP".

So I think a case can be made that IP of some form has been around for a long, long time; it's not some accident brought about by a single, poorly-written law. It's not a relatively recent, arcane (thus exploitable) area of justice. Mankind has been grappling with these issues, these tradeoffs, for as long as human progress has existed, and will presumably continue to do so at each "singularity". It's right and proper that we have this debate; it's right and proper that the creative industries demand a say in new technologies, insofar as those technologies depend on the transmission of creative works to be interesting and demanded.

> The RIAA's version of morality is not handed down from Heaven, you know: its rectitude is at least as questionable as its practicality.

Agreed, sadly, none in the filesharing camp has offered anything even remotely resembling morality. You tend to see something along the lines of "I'm not talking about morality, I'm just giving you reality etc" (followed by "want some of my cash? dance, bitch!").
Just because copyright still works for protecting authors works from movie studios, or protecting the Gottman method from therapists doesn't mean it works in protecting distribution channels from the internet.

I don't think there are any appropriate legal remedies capable of protecting distribution channels on the internet. If that means movies don't have as large budgets then so be it. The level of movie budgets in years past reflect a high water mark in the ability of content producers to control distribution and reach large numbers of people - they aren't of value to society in any inherent way.
The kind you can answer if you have any experience with the situation.
They don't even pertend to care about the original artist, they pretend to care about the middleman who told them about the artist. You're one [share] button click away from calling yourself a 'curator'.
I'll take the pirated 1080p version that doesn't have unskipable adverts, copy protection, and the extra commentary track. I don't care about any of the "extra features" that Hollywood seems to sprinkle into every DVD. Their business model is broken, but they are not going to go down without a fight.
Lemonade Stand Startups
I. Am. Speechless.

I'm no patent expert but to me... these patents are so vague and so obvious that I cannot believe they've been granted in the first place. And secondly, that Yahoo is actually delusional enough to think they'll hold up in court. These are "glitter patents" at best. Things you patent to look strong in front of investors. But they amount to nothing when it comes to actually trying to enforce them. Then again, with our "great patent system with terrible enforcement of rules" who knows...