skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, we should not use emotional events to find ways to regulate the internet - or let politicians creep in where they shouldn't be meddling.

If you want to try this guy, try him on privacy violations, breaking and entering, or someting along those lines.

The last thing we need is a precedent for increasing punishments because they used the internet as a tool.

Christ, we can't even prosecute the bankers and politicians that stole trillions and crashed the economy. Or cops that murder and maim citizens. Go get them. Why not focus on fixing the shit that is really broken as opposed to simply looking for ways to make more and more laws.

The laws we DO have aren't even working.
Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology
No, I'm talking about caching: keeping data around that you have previously used, assuming you will use it again. However, in order to support caching, you must pre-allocate memory.
Maybe some kind of virtualization would work for ARM-based Win8 tablets?
Decorative Art Painting Amazing Collection Background Pictures Free Download
wouldn't a place that needs parking meters already be on the grid

Sure, but not having to dig additional holes in the ground is a huge cost saver.
The SXSW Economy: Umbrellas, Tacos, and a $215 6-Pack of Shiner
The last two years, Google has said "There are no plans for giveaways." And of course, attendees actually got about $1000 worth in stuff in 2010 (Droid phone, EVO, Google TV), and $1200 worth in freebies in 2011 (Galaxy Tab 10.1, Chromebook, Verizon hotspot).

They could say there are no giveaways, but nobody's going to listen to the boy who cried wolf anymore.
Yep, I just bought it for my girlfriend's Kindle. We've been talking about how computers work lately - this seems like a great supplement.

I'm sort of curious to read it, too.
I agree, but the risk is this: the current model produces the majority of the world's NME's (new molecular entities, or truly new drugs that aren't just old drug + ibuprofen and a new name). We can sit here and talk about what's wrong with the system, but it ignores that this is the most successful system in the history of medicine for producing truly effective pharmaceuticals.

But ultimately I agree, we may be in for a rough transitory period as far as drug research goes, but what arises from the ashes will likely be a far leaner and more effective beast. It's not like scientists care who is paying the bills.
that's exactly what rickmb is talking about. he says

> sell-out to the US
You seem to be missing that it is always a good idea to save power.
len and __len__ may have made sense when they were first implemented, I do not disagree.

Having tutored students learning python as their first experience programming, I recall that it was confusing that len was a function which merely calls a method on its argument. They wanted to know when they should write their own functions in a similar style.

I looked into it, and the best answer I came up with was that len is an historical artifact. If it were designed with the capabilities of modern Python, then there would be no good reason for doing it that way that I can find. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The article as a whole is quite good. Its arguments in favor of len being a builtin function are quite bad. I've noticed this as something of a pattern in the Python community that I'm speaking out against. It's ok for there to be things in a project the size and age of Python that are historical artifacts. Python is certainly far and away better in this regard than its sibling languages.

Defending them as good design is counterproductive. I don't want newly designed languages to ape the mistakes of the old.
If Yahoo has any "brand value", it's with users who are very non-technical, and have no idea or opinions about patent lawsuits.

So brand isn't a good argument against this suit for Yahoo.

Morality might be. But it's hard to get people to act against their financial best interest over the long term, so I still feel the real issue is the patent system.
I agree most education should be free -- just not that 4-year residential institutions (particularly mediocre ones) should be subsidized. The purpose of partial payment by the user for a service like community college is to discourage waste; something on the order of $100-200 per class would be adequate for that. It would be payment by the student, not by his family.

The community college model is that you can work while attending. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect someone to do so -- working full time while attending a 4 year university is probably not viable (I tried doing it, and ultimately dropped out), but I think the Internet should allow an expansion of the role of online courses and community college, both highly compatible with work-study.

I would go so far as to eliminate non-merit scholarships and financial aid (subsidized loans, etc.) for 4 year institutions (except for things like the GI Bill which are a form of compensation). They should not be the mainstream form of education.

This only works if we can remove "must have 4 year degree, we don't really care from where or in what" as a job qualification for most jobs. I'd like there to be qualification tests for jobs, vs. checking a box for a degree. In this case, only circa 1900 level of 4 year college attendance would happen, and the vast majority (95%+) would have high school for general education and some specialized training beyond that for employment.
>Back in June 2010, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized O'Dwyer's tvshack.net domain name after a closed, one-sided hearing before a judge.

That shows they believed he is guilty before a trial. It was a linking site, he wasn't hosting anything. Google aids in copyright infringement as people use their service every day to find download links to things. But they are fine? The legislation in place across the globe is not equipped to handle these types of cases. Combine that with ignorant octogenarian judges, equals one messed up "justice" system.
Funding for Entrepreneurs (and We Don’t Mean Venture Capital)
Rape and murder victims just don't have any pull, I guess.
She disparages, but then makes an "ass joke" (cf. "asshaterry"). The language of business is crude. Don't pretend otherwise. You sail the seven seas and you're going to hear sailor talk.

Granted : too much spice and the food is ruined.
Bash as a Service
I'm just making an observation.
The album The Quantum Hack Code by Amogh Symphony could be fun for this. http://youtu.be/nlpelyRRpCo or http://youtu.be/iPAdsGsDSKY

Chimp Spanner Bad Code would also be neat http://youtu.be/hnLYc0c5yBA
then there's over-commit, e.g. "you want to malloc 200% of the ram? here you go! enjoy! oh wait, you wrote to the second half? have fun finding the power button, sucker!"

can someone explain to me why so many distros, including "enterprise" server stuff, ship with /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory set to 1?
Walmart Announces Disc To Digital Program To Convert Your Old DVDs
It's still an information asymmetry story. From my cursory reading, the contribution is to identify what kind of information asymmetry is involved in healthcare, namely that it's more about the cost of treatment than about the probability of illness.

I know that health insurance is often used to teach asymmetric information models, but it wasn't always obvious that it's a good example. Someone selling a used car might know a lot more about the car's hidden costs than anyone else, but does the typical buyer of health insurance really know more about his or her probability of illness than a sophisticated insurer with good doctors and actuaries and a lot of data?

This led some economists to argue that the problem in health insurance markets is not asymmetric information, but rather too much information—the insurer already knows you will be a bad risk. This research makes it clear that there really is asymmetric information and spells out what it is.
I came here to say just this. In the United States, though, we use "Insurance" to refer to a very expensive form of prepaid health plan. We keep costs up by making laws that prevent employees from knowing how much their prepaid health plan costs. Just in case people might want to react to the high costs by not purchasing a plan, in the near future everyone in the U.S. will be required by law to purchase a prepaid health plan.
Most people have found UIs built by developers to be hard to use and ugly. Based on this fact, it's logical to discount approaches to interaction design that are rooted in software development principles.
It costs ~$1B to bring a pharmaceutical to market because of the amount of testing and clinical trials required to make sure you're doing more good than harm. Of course some are copycat drugs, but that's going to be inevitable.

There are real advances too, and those wouldn't happen without some ability to generate a return on the $1B or more you spent on the drug (let alone the hundreds of millions on drugs that didn't make it).

R&D being a small part of the budget doesn't change that. The fundamental business is still based on the patent system.
How was the money made? Ads? Google has ads and finding a video of any show on there is pretty easy. They are also profiting from infringement.

In the end I just don't get why linking is why if what he did is not it's not illegal where he is he could still be extradited even if he never had servers in the US and never promoted directly to Americans (I'm assuming he didn't go out and ask Americans to his site). Thing is, if his site was in French I would be there would be no case for extradition.
its subjective, arguably a style using ternary operator is better because it is composable - it evaluates as an expression, as opposed to a series of statements. it's something the lisp and functional programming people like - no implied dependency on order in which statements execute.

i dunno if this is valid python but it demonstrates the idea

doSomething(
identify_vertebrate(animal) if animal.is_vertebrate() \
else identify_invertebrate(animal))

doSomething( if( is_vertebrate(animal)
identify_vertebrate(animal)
identify_invertebrate(animal)))

(doSomething (if (is_vertebrate animal)
(identify_vertebrate animal)
(identify_invertebrate animal)))

this is part of "referential transparency", and once you get past "OMG parens" you realize its a Good Thing. parens are caused by a style preferring composition of expressions over executing statements, not lisp.
This is true of every prosecution. Prosecutors don't move forward with trials they think they'll lose. Nobody has time for that.

The judge that will hear this trial, on the other hand, will not have already made up their mind.
In a copyright-free world, that merchandise could be made by anyone; there's no guarantee that any merchandising money will make it back to the movie's creators.

Crowdfunding can be a viable option, but paying large sums of money before any work is done makes it tempting to abscond with most of the money and produce either an inferior or nonexistent product. How would you prevent this from happening on a regular basis? Would your solution make it too risky to attempt large projects out of fear of them not being deemed "good enough"?
Agree to disagree I guess.
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way
“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.
> When the extradition process is started, it is because the relevant authorities have already decided the individual is guilty

what's the alternative? you try the guy in absentia (which would actually be an illegal trial in the united states) and then extradite him afterwards? never extradite anyone?

> Juries are invariably biased against foreigners, so the chances of an acquittal are basically zero.

there is absolutely zero evidence for this statement; you just pulled it out of your ass.
WordPress: 250% spike in the number of imports from Posterous
The double price thing is something that pains us Europeans constantly when we buy something from the US.

It's always tax, shipping, duty fee and so on. The price is usually over 200% at the checkout. Sometimes (talking to you Amazon) only there you are given the notice you can't actually order this piece of hardware to Europe.
So wait- am I reading this right? Essentially Bayer didn't sell the drug cheap enough, so the Indian Gov't gives an Indian company the 'right' to copy the drug and send Bayer checks for 6% of the proceeds?

And on the flip side of intellectual property, the US is able to extradite a kid over piracy of TV shows? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699325)

Neither seems right to me. Maybe they aren't the same thing, but if ThePirateBay was sending the MPAA checks for 6% of what they made on the site, and saying "This should make it right, you weren't cheap enough so we distributed it ourselves" then the US would be trying to seize and detain people involved.

Hasn't India signed some intellectual property treaty with... well pretty much the rest of the world? How in the world can they do this?

And totally on the flip side- props to India for sticking it to the man. Kinda...
> Plus the USA is hardly the PRC.

Yeah, guess which of the two has more inmates per capita.
Great job! It has already proven itself to me:

I was doing a diff on an svn repo. Unfortunately, svn diffs are not in color, and being spoiled by git's color diffs, I looked at "svn help diff", but found no color option. A quick "fu color svn" yielded:

1	# Paged, colored svn diff
svn diff $* | colordiff | less -r

Awesome :)
Under the Hood: Building the Facebook Location API
Read the The Cartoon Introduction to Economics Volume One, page 50. Everything more or less is there.
As Posterous Flies To Twitter, I Remember This Post
"not quite as rapey as what you might expect of, say, a typical S&M scene"

I'm disappointed that an article purportedly aimed at dispelling misconceptions about pornography would so shamelessly perpetuate misconceptions about BDSM.
Sure he made a lot of money doing it but he just posted links. How is this different from Google (or any other search engine)?
Millennials Traveling Drive Changes in Hotel Industry
You can get it directly from scala-lang.org:

http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads
Tesco Direct sells iPad 3 for £50, website crashes after online tip-off
It makes many Americans increasingly angry as well.
That isn't actually true. Ask any doctor about patients who just lost the will to live. Also read about the research about morphine and placebos, how a morphine blocking drug actually blocked the placebo effect - without the person knowing they got the blocker drug!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/cannabinoids-place...
Although it's good to give money to charity I don't see the point in this. The tickets would most likely go to non-devs. This is an event to help developers learn about new tools and platforms. As many tickets as possible should be going to them.
> The vast majority of non-US websites has very little to lose from blocking US traffic.

Yes, but US websites comprise the vast majority of top websites on the Internet....
That's not correct. Placebos work even when the person knows it's a placebo. All that is required is belief that it will work, even if you have knowledge that it doesn't.

i.e. if they see they got better on the placebo they won't care when they find out - they have clear evidence that it does work.
> That shows they believed he is guilty before a trial

if "they" refers to the prosecution: well, i sure hope that the prosecution believes he is guilty before a trial starts. i think the alternative is that the prosecution prosecutes people at random?

if "they" refers to the judge: definitely not. seizures like this are because they have evidence against him and have what the judge believes to be a reasonable case; this does not mean the judge believes the defendant to be guilty. maybe you don't think the case is reasonable, and maybe its not, but its a far cry from "guilty until proven innocent"
Ah, but direct to consumer isn't necessarily the right play in this market. HIPPA is still a major pain, and the sick (and families of the sick) tend to have less cash. (Though, they have a lot of points where their lives could be made better by software. The low hanging fruit has been done in the app store, of course.)

Further, if you go B2B, the aqui-hire might be more interesting if you have multiple hospital groups that like your product. (for example) In fact, it makes you more likely to be acquired for your technology.
You completely missed my point. The reason the US approved the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage has nothing to do with the reason it approved IP protection for foreigners.

The US approved IP protection for foreigners when Americans wanted to start having their copyrights protected in other countries - something that happened when it reached developed nation status. Now, the US is criticizing developing nations for taking the same approach for their own devlopment, and not respecting IP rights until they can afford to.

Not to mention that equating IP rights violations with acts such as enslaving people or not allowing them to vote is the epitome of absurdity.
With all the automation Google tries to implement, couldn't they set up each service with a support email address that has its incoming mail analyzed, held for a limited time, and then expunged? Then all they'd have to do is get someone to look at the mailboxes when unusual patterns show up.
Welll.. :) Actually, low traffic EC2 instances are also free (albeit probably harder to set up): http://aws.amazon.com/free/
Uruguay (the country where I live) has compulsory vaccination, there's a family undergoing a lengthy trial for their right not to vaccinate their children:

(Spanish)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_7661000/7661114...

"In Uruguay, vaccination is compulsory. The law states that you must have a current vaccination certificate to go to school and access other services and benefits, such as receiving family allowance payments or process the health card, which among other things enables joining sports clubs." (I'll add that the health card is compulsory for working as well)

They had to go to exile to Argentina

A summary with their point of view (both Spanish and English)

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:giFW-FhFxFsJ:...

"Imagine in a small town (Tarariras), a family
(Borgogno Arce) which would not give their
children the required shots, because they react with
convulsions and the doctor had recommended no
vaccinating; a school principal—requested by other
parents—that would not admit the children to class
if they didn´t get their shots; the people of the
town—out of ignorance—would point this family
with their finger wherever they went, because they
thought that the parents didn´t give the children their
shots because of religious or ideological reasons; a
government that compels them—without legal
grounds—to give them the shots under the force of
the law; and an exile in Argentina, painful and
humiliating, an offensive alternative to anyone with
a small amount of humanity."

Government states that they didn't want to get vaccinated for religious or philosophical reasons (those are not valid in Uruguay):

"The case was well known and controversial in the country, they would not vaccinated for religious or philosophical issues " said Dr. Savio, a local expert.
I was looking at Heroku as well for hosting some MVPs and I was wondering how good they are for hosting Python. Any ideas ? Naively, I'd hope they're as good as hosting Rails.
Engineering project
I wonder how important is the academic project of final semester of engineering in India. Do the companies even take a look at that or its just for the sake of academics?
Only if you're ignorant of the facts.

http://london.usembassy.gov/gb140.html

"The United States has not denied a single extradition request from the UK under the treaty. While the U.S. does send more extradition requests to the UK than it receives, this difference is largely due to the differences in the size of the respective populations. The panel report notes that the U.S. has a population about five times the size of the UK, but there have been fewer than twice the number of people extradited to the U.S. than to the UK. The number of U.S. requests is not disproportionate."
Yes, yes the potentials here are limitless!
Only downside: Less privacy and freedom.

At the moment it might be a nice discount for those who choose to volunteer. Its easy to see a future where it will be impossible to get affordable insurance if you opt out.

Now exchange car insurance with health insurance. My health habits are probably better than average. I do plenty of sports, no overweight, no smoking, not a heavy drinker etc.. In order to get an appropriate discount I would have to record my whole life.
The main dispute of the US-UK extradition agreement derives from the fact the US has to show 'reasonable suspicion' however the UK has to show 'probable cause'.

However some argue there is no difference namely Sir Scott Baker who's reports stated: "In our opinion there is no significant difference between the probably cause test and the reasonable suspicion test"

However, critics of the treaty say it is much easier to extradite people from the UK than the US because the US does not need to present evidence to a British court.

Conversely, the UK must provide "sufficient evidence to establish probable cause" in order to secure the extradition of an American citizen.

The other argument is the agreement was post 9-11 for the speedy extradition of terrorists but between 2003 and 2009 only one of 63 extraditions were terrorists.

To be honest I don't really know whether the extradition agreement is one sided, I feel it might have something to do with the respective cases being so high profile.

Perhaps the UK's punishment of crime in comparison to the US is also an issue, sentence lengths in the UK generally tend to be a lot less.
No one else finds it appalling that things in the 1800s are not the same as in the 2000s.

It is a bit appalling that you expect nothing to change in 200 years though.
What non-industry rich person would actually want to attend? (maybe a few non-devs in law or vc, but you already get non-devs from tech companies)

There are plenty of rich tech people. If I were worth >$100mm, and couldn't get in on the drop, I'd probably be ok donating $10k (well, moving another charitable contribution for the year up to this) for a ticket.

I don't think Jay-Z is likely to want to attend.
yay rands!
Now I really wish I used Akka instead of Jetlang...
Any chance you could post (or privately send to me) information about the process by which you contractually set up patents so they can only be used defensively? I'm very much interested in doing the same.

BTW, you're taking a lot of heat in this thread that you don't deserve. I work at a VC funded startup (with USV as an investor no less) and I basically agree with you.
It's fu -c 1
True that.

I've worked on publicly funded projects and in the private sector. The publicly funded projects were the worst for pointless reporting, accounting, and paperwork.

In the private sector, the boss pops his head in and asks what I've done to day and what I'll finish by the end of the week, and we adjust goals. It takes about 5 minutes a week to do this.

When I was working on a publicly funded project, there was a report to be filed every day that took an hour of my time to do, a report to be filed every week that took about three hours over the course of the week, meeting with management to make sure that the first two reports were complete, accurate, and not fudged which took an additional two hours a week, and an end of the month assessment for both spending and time clocked in that took about twelve hours over the course of a month.

So guess where I'm more productive.