skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 1825 Night Success
If you can't have value without scarcity why would something be pirated? Value can be intrinsic without scarcity.
Wp Auto Affiliate Links reached 10,000 downloads
Never underestimate the bandwidth of several autonomous drones loaded up with ultra-light USB drives :)

Now all we need is a more advanced drone which can generate or pirate its own power. I love the idea of these homing in on power lines, clamping on, and sipping juice like some sort of mischievous electrovorous jellyfish - I'm assuming this isn't practical since AC clamps are metal and rather heavy, and I don't know how much current you can actually get out of them (they're usually just used for measuring current) but it's a cute image :)
While I sympathize for the person, I can't help but wonder if it was the right decision. She's going to be facing the same problems in every male-dominated industry; is it worth giving up the thing you love? I can't answer, obviously, because I'm male, and in a different position besides that.

Thankfully, I've never run into this in real life. I've always worked with coworkers respectful of each other, and I can't imagine tolerating that kind of sexism without any confrontation. One would think people would learn to interact—or rather, which interactions are harmful—with people of different genders at a younger age.
This is a recurring cycle in application development. We've gone from mainframes and minicomputers serving plain text to dumb terminals, to programs running on personal computers accessing applications and data on servers, to web servers serving structured text to 'dumb' browsers, to powerful in-browser runtime engines accessing applications and data over the web.

There's no magic bullet.
it does sound kind of weird. if they wanted a sample of your coding most places just do a pair programming session with you.
I'm saying it's not a 'right' to expect profit from something. The right to pursue a profit exists as long as the law of the land allows it.

Markets already provide a "pay-what-you-want" model, it just happens that not everyone is willing to accept what you want to pay.

Selling capital goods is very different than selling digital copies of something. There is a limited amount of corn in the world, you can purchase it at the going rate generally set by the supply and demand. In digital goods, the supply is unlimited, there are no natural market forces.

Apple heavily protects its products with patents and copyright where it can. You cannot take an ipad design and improve upon that design without cutting a deal with Apple. I think that strongly supports the case that the few (Apple) benefit from the current system while the many (anyone who thinks they could enhance the design of ipad) do not.

There are, however, a few open and free items of software, Linux, MySQL, Apache, Firefox to name a few. Arguably, depending on what you want to do, there isn't even a better closed alternative (yes, yes, substitute whatever SQL package you prefer for MySQL).

I personally have a cable provider (so I pay for the minimal tv package to get internet), a netflix account, Amazon Prime, see the occasional movie in the theater, etc.

When people talk about copyright though, I generally see some stuffed suit making a bonus, not a bunch of creative people.
Gordon Brown may have made an apology, but UK government recently refused to posthumously pardon Turing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/02/07/uk-de...

The argument for not pardoning is mostly reasonable, I think. It was a crime at the time, and you can't go around posthumously pardoning everyone retroactively whenever the law catches up to society a generation or two later. (Edit: I still think what they did to Turing was wrong, of course.)
There's already work that's been done to supply quadcopters with power over monofilament line to enable instant comm towers. Just have these tethered in random locations, then enable them to "bugout" in the event of a search warrant.
At least the author makes it clear that that Nokia was a turkey before and adding two turkeys doesn't make an eagle. What I think he misses though is the long game and how I think Elop is thinking about this business:

- Windows 8 is adopting elements of Metro, the UI interface in Windows Phone. People will start being exposed to it and reports from Windows phone users suggest if people give it a try, they tend to rate it well so maybe people will be more open to Windows Phone in their consideration set.

- Imagine Windows Phone integrations with the PC or laptop in a much more seamless fashion, maybe there's some synergies there.

- How about the easiest way that MS knows to gain immediate market share in new territory: bundling. Package every Windows 8 upgrade with a certificate redeemable for a free Windows Phone. This market share boost will charge their app marketplace and they should further juice this with higher margins and lower commissions than Apple because right now, profitability can take a backseat to market share and growth.
The Business of Style
Your comment in no way actually addresses what he's saying, which is a hypothesis to the justification for why people do things. In fact, he didn't even conflate the terms as I see it, unless you want to say piracy is only related to theft. And the section you quoted doesn't even have the term "theft" in it (which you also quoted). In short, it's a tired talking point of a technicality that adds almost nothing to the larger discussion.

It sounds like you have strong opinions on the topic -- I'd love to hear more about how you think people justify copyright infringement.
http://vimeo.com/36267881

This is art guys, forget energy supply for a moment and enjoy the idea. A politcal statement, as a counter measure to oppressive use of modern technology.
Top Intellectual Property Mistakes Made By Emerging Tech Companies
Protons don't exist? O.o I thought they were a cluster of quarks with a positive charge O.o. Naming a set of objects as one unit isn't bad.

Were you taught we're made up of cells? If you answered yes, you're wrong, but many people believe they do, and the real answer is complex, and protons are a "good enough" answer blah blah. The reality is much more complicated, with mitochondria and nucleii, etc.

My physics-fu is lacking, but I was also taught that protons are made up of quarks. If a proton is really just a silly term for a collection of quarks then it's not lying, there's just a smaller thing when we break them apart.
Don't mean to hijack the thread but it's interesting how these "HN TC launch articles" have died down to such a large degree on HN. Not as many companies launching, TC not covering Y Combinator, TC just being bad, or some combination of all three?
Strange that there's no mention of Rails new/potential "API only" mode: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/efd557a60cd976ac17be9e23...

This will make it much easier to only use Rails as an API and get rid of a lot of the bloat/complexity people seem to complain about.

This was posted on edgeguides but it's since been removed some reason (http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/api_app.html).
That's basically correct, although there are certain phrases and grammatical patterns that don't quite match up in Mandarin/Cantonese - most will try to avoid those.
Have them tethered on monofilament, which also supplies power. (This has already been implemented.) Keep the battery charged up in case of an "emergency" where they have to fly to a safehouse.
I am located across the country... though there are A LOT of remote tools that could be used. I can see both sides.
Now that native App-centric ecosystems exist, the client-server model is more pronounced. Supporting these different clients forces this perception shift to a more client agnostic server back end.
Video games alone are a 16 billion dollar per year industry. It employs over 22,000 software developers. (http://www.theesa.com/games-improving-what-matters/economy.a...) Are you seriously suggesting that this industry would produce just as much software if their work wasn't copyrighted, or that listing 35 open-source projects says anything about what would happen to the industry overall?

You're focusing on one very small part of the software industry and ignoring the rest.
>The person I was replying to was trying to contend that content is scarce. I showed that, no, it indeed is not. Had they put in your caveat that undistributed content might as well not exist, I would've cheerfully argued and perhaps ceded the point. But, their statement, as given? Wrong.

It would be better if you spend some time to understand what they MEANT with by "content" in their statement, instead of attacking their statement "as given", i.e with only considering the more basic meaning of the word content.

Also: it's not just that "undistributed content might as well not exist", it's also that content not done to a level the public wants "might as well not exist". Even if you distribute (say, online, on YouTube) your "movie" made with a camcorder, it doesn't mean it will replace an actual, budgeted movie, for the majority of people.

>Also, you claim (as does everyone else in this debate, it would seem) that creators must be compensated or less content will result. You cannot prove this, or if you can, you have not shown a reasoning chain that results in it. Use logic.

Why don't YOU use logic? I don't have to "prove" anything, it's obvious.

1) People produce content for two reasons: for free and because they are paid to do so.

If they are not paid, the second reason ceases to exist. (If you don't believe that some of the professional content creators would not produce stuff if there were no money involved, talk to some of them). A lot of content is not produced "out of passion" at all, but solely for money. Justin Bieber songs, hollywood blockbuster, etc.

2) Content creation costs money. If content is not paid, expensive content will not be produced by anyone, even those that do it out of passion. A money, which can get to $100 million budget easily, is expensive content.

3) Content creation takes time. If professional creators cannot do it as a full time job, they will work some other full time job, and if they still feel the urge to do it out of passion, they would do it on their spare time. Again, volume will drop.
Isn't that just the hawala system? That's been there in the Arab world, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh from what I remember.

This system is disrupted and imo should be. It's been used as the primary way to funnel 'black money' and criminal organizations.

system D is a sign that the market is not working, and in those situations, hawala and so on are useful tools to avoid getting stuck having to bribe someone.

This would be OK if your government was corrupt (say 60%) - the moment you start reforming though, and actually need things like running electricity, water, mass transit, Roads!, you need governmental income.

It ends up allowing people to dodge paying for basic taxes. - IT assessments are hard when you start with a non formal economy and then have untraceable money changing hands.

In short: hawala is pretty cool, but also an absurdly effective way to hide money and transfer it around the world. Hard to stamp out, and ends up being used by criminal systems.
What would it look like if the earth had rings like Saturn? [video]
Uh no. I've seen Aziz's standup live. I thought it was terrible. But not surprised to see no one else agree - he is really popular with some folks.
Epic Rap Battles Of History
Probably the most amusing rap battles on the web!
Good analysis.

I think though that we can go a step forward.

I agree that we all should look at it much more in a symbolic and metaphorical way than a logical way (there are several points in which the internal logic is severely weak).

And exactly because of all the reasons you mentioned above, I've always considered the whole movie being representing something related to Cobbs.

Cobbs is the one receiving the Inception.

No matter if by God or Ariadne, or God through Ariadne or viceversa. Or if this happens in the real life, afterlife, parallel life, dream levels or what. The whole movie is about Cobbs and his subconscious. It's also interesting that Nolan used the name Cobbs for one of the characters of his first movie, Following, in which Cobbs was some sort of serial burglar. Just to keep the metaphor going.
"API only" mode was removed (perhaps temporarily), here: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/6db930cb5bbff9ad824590...
> you own it forever and without limits.

The only reason this is true is that the laws say it is. Same as with those patterns of yours -- the laws could easily be changed so that you own the pattern always and forever. It's quite pointless to argue about the shoulds of the situation based on current law.

When we're talking about incentives for production and utility, it actually makes quite a bit of sense to conflate cars and music. They have many similar properties. On the consumption side, you do have to consider the added utility of making the music free, though, because some people will be able to consume it who otherwise wouldn't have paid.
Best Old School Video Games
Old school video games - going back to the early 80's
I think I left that a little vague (the original title was clearer about me staying in IT). I'm still a developer.

It may exist in every industry, but this is the one I've chosen, and this is where I can start to make a change.
Watercolor Map Tiles
> We need to get away from the absurdity of contemporary body mod culture: tooth sharpening, scarification, branding, horn implants, sclera tattoos, gauging, suspension, tongue bifurcation, lip discs, genital modifications…it’s too much.

... why?

> That kind of modification is a dead-end because it doesn’t fulfill its nominally transhumanist goals.

Does art have to?
Quite a few people get paid to work on GCC. Mozilla has paid staff. Rails work was paid for by 37signals, etc. Mono has paid developers, etc...

Just because you're not paying for these products directly, doesn't mean someone else isn't.
I agree that the concept of the movie is not hard to understand.

But then I read trevelyan's post above and I feel stupid.
Maybe iTunes "addressed the issue," but not in a satisfactory way. iTunes is not remotely convenient for me. I can't watch an iTunes movie on my TV without either a) Buying a useless gadget from Apple, or b) Removing the DRM. Also, things are generally available for piracy way earlier (we're talking months in some cases) than they are on iTunes. That is a huge, massive inconvenience.

As for prices, yes, iTunes is also much too expensive for many things — when I can buy a physical copy and have it shipped crosscountry to my house for a fraction of the cost of iTunes' lousy crippleware, something is wrong — but that seems beside the point. Yes, a lot of piracy happens because it's free. Most of that piracy doesn't really seem to be replacing sales and so isn't really relevant from an economic standpoint. Those people just want something for free. It seems like the point where piracy really becomes a problem is when it's the superior option even for people who could easily afford to buy your wares.
Ed Thorp And Blackjack: Life Magazine 1964
cnbeta.com
Ask HN: Why the recent resurgence of Logo?
It was one of the fastest growing langs last year:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
When we fully understand how the human brain works, it will probably also seem purely mechanical.
my point is still the same. the question is not how people consume apps, its how many of those apps are produced.
I was trying (badly, I admit) to point out that letting possibly over-simplistic answers sit is not equivalent to promoting creationism. Freehunter does much better above.
I'm saying as an attendee. If the organizers can't do it otherwise, I'll take the servers. Nothing like idle flirting with someone you'll never talk to again.
Lots of adventages. The most improtant is - one small institution serves big amount of traffic, freeing rest courts in Poland to judge regular cases. This makes long wating time for each case shorter, and this is very important in many cases.

It's the difference between functional law system, that people treat as one of the options to solve problems, and dysfunctional one, where nobody bothers suing anybody, because it will take 5 years and cost fortune.

I don't think we in Poland have good law system, because waiting time is still too long. But it's step in the right direction.
I think you're assuming something I haven't said.
Adam wants to work at a game studio
I've been one of Streak's biggest advocates for a while now-- I use it for everything. In particular, it's been extremely helpful for hiring, fundraising, and business development at MixRank. I highly recommend it.
The mechanism for vending the rights and distribution to sound waves has changed. If all you need is a sound recorder to capture the IP of a work of art, then the governing environment must change.

Smells are similar, but are not yet distributed as a temporal frequency.

Software is much easier to control, since after all, logic is embedded in the work of art, an OS can govern the rights and/or TCP requests can act as a conduit for authentication.
What we've seen in the US is that Android's market share lead eroded as the iPhone became available on more carriers. You may expect that trend to continue as they fill out tiers they aren't competing on.

Considering that not being on China Mobile in China is the equivalent in the US of being exclusive with Sprint... you'd imagine the same thing will happen in China once "the new iPhone" comes out with China Mobile.

Which isn't to say Apple will win China's market share, they'll probably still trail but their disadvantage is less then you're suggesting here except in the short term.

[edit] Even in the short term I doubt it's accurate because iPhone just launched on China Telecom in the last two weeks so that effect has yet to be fully seen. [/edit]
YC raised an $8.25m fund in 2010, and the investors care about IRR and liquidity.
Haha, having black people serve beer would be incredibly racist.

Alright, fine.
No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated for many people, but probably not if you're a computer programmer in which case you literally have years of formal education in the structures that this plot is built on, and even a formal vocabulary to describe it with. (e.g. "Inception is a movie that keeps pushing other movies onto the stack.")

You're suffering the mathematician's disease, ably satirized by Feynman in that quote I can't stop paraphrasing: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because once proved any theorem is immediately seen to be trivial."

But I think Inception succeeds as a film only because following the plot thread in real time isn't of the essence, just as I was able to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony long before I was taught its formal structure. Without the education required to really dissect that structure, you nevertheless sense that it's there, and it enhances the emotional experience that the work is trying to convey – in Inception's case, the experience of being a man (well, two men, actually, and possibly also a woman) immersed in a dreamlike world full of symbols, mazes, masks, bluffs, and distractions, a world that he himself is creating to distract his own attention from the pure, simple, but unthinkably awful pain at the center of his life.

---

EDIT: Fixed my prose, which got away from me. So tempted to just delete this whole thing, but I try to avoid erasing history even if it's really embarrassing and exhausting.
"What do you say to the guy who sits across from you when you dress up and makes a comment to everyone about it? "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!"

Yikes! What sort of a place was this, what sort of people was she working with? I've never seen/heard anything remotely like this.

It is sort of hard to generalize from such morons to the whole tech field.
Lone hackers will always exist. It's just the layers of abstraction that change. Wozniak worked on top of ICs and electronic components. Now we tend to work on top of complex kernels, libraries and so on. So what? The stuff below tends to be a million man-hours achievement, hackers work on the fringe... I don't think that pattern has changed.
Then why do we need The Pirate Bay?
Yes, it looks like these guys were not pretty honest. I had similar challenge (one week "test" assignment that was a part of a bigger project), but I was paid for my time and then continued to work with employer. But don't be upset - if they can't distinguish between Grails and RoR they are unlikely to create sufficient product in their startup :)
ACLU: "Your Facebook password should be none of your boss’ business"
This is very true. Also, the software development process is very empathetical. We need to be in constant touch with the end user and make sure we're pushing for the right features.

In regards to your second point, I think we should optimize for the best team, not necessarily for the best programmers. Ergo, try to hire the best team player, not the best lone ranger.
very rarely, closed-source projects are released as open source (e.g. Doom 3), but I think we can all agree that that is the exception to the norm

Well, if we compare to the list in the parent, it's much more. At least Firefox, Blender, Rails qualify. These were products that had no future in closed-source form. If they had, it would have been financial madness to open source them.
3) Though the plane _is_ reality (in my opinion) Fisher could only have entered a dream without realizing it if:

He was dreaming ever since Yusuf demoed the sedatives the first time, showing lots of people who dreamed all day (the "no, they come here to wake up" scene).

Fisher tries to check his totem at that time but can't do it because he's trembling so bad.

Thus, if he were under sedation, dying would not wake him, though my argument doesn't explain how he moved up multiple dream levels to the plane...
In your opinion, what is a potential solution to this problem?
Meet The Hackers Who Sell Spies Exploits And Get Paid Six-Figure Fees
Show HN: I just released a super simple/barebone alternative to Chef and Puppet
It's called Shoestrap (because Bootstrap was taken ;-) ). I'd love to get your feedback!

The code/readme is here: https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap and you can see a sample Shoestrap project here: https://github.com/cmer/shoestrap-example
You know, I think you're on to something. I think the frequency for overhead power lines is basically just 50 or 60 Hz, depending on region.

You could probably setup a lightweight tuned secondary coil on the robot, and then use some clever rectifier/zener tricks to get a reliable trickle charge out of it.

Hm.

EDIT:

BAHAHAHA THIS IS TOTALLY POSSIBLE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogowski_coil)! WE CAN HAVE DRONES LIVING OFF THE GRID! FUCK DA POLICE!

:D :D
Why does it have to fly? I mean, it's cool, but surely there's better and less obvious solutions. Also, launching a UAV during a protest? Good way to get yourself shot.

A camouflaged server can be left anywhere. Wifi detectors will pick it up, but if that's a concern than a remote drone is going to be even more likely to get taken out. If you waterproof them, you could toss them down a drain, and hope they stay in place. You could strap them to a vehicle. You might be able to strap them too a medium-sized dog. Obviously, you'd run the risk of getting traced back, but the same could be said for launching a UAV.

There's millions of ways cheap, weatherproof servers can be used.