skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to pointless, the iPhone most certainly can be setup to lock when you hit the sleep wake button.
Inception's plot was certainly straight forward. But just about every movie that exists is packed with layers of meaning and open to wide spectrum of interpretation. Inception may seem deeper than the average movie only because talk about dreams is a fairly reliable way to trigger philosophical thought in people.

The -confusion- around Inception is probably just because the narrative is fairly dense.
> If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music, the only reason they don't now is because stealing it is consequence free.

so basically $10 per CD, everyone CAN AFFORD a wall full of CDs, lets say 10,000 of them, but they choose to steal instead? OK.
Not only an unusually good looking customer team, they're also unusually helpful and entertaining. Proud to work with them.
This is interesting but it also means I would have to use gmail.
I'm arguing that there are things people need to be aware of but don't necessarily need to know the intimate details of. I know how my car's engine works and I know how to find out what broke when something went wrong, but I don't know (and don't need to know) how to tear down and replace any broken part. For that I take it to my mechanic. He knows how to rebuild an engine, but doesn't know how to set up and run his website. That's where my specialty lies. This isn't ignorance, it's accepting that you can't be an expert at everything. Every bit of information you learn comes with an opportunity cost attached.

The difference between neuroscience and my engine is, people know how the engine was built because someone actually built it. In neuroscience, even the experts don't know how everything works, and it's a matter of much debate. Do you think we should teach this debate to every student in our schools, knowing that the kids aren't going to keep current with that debate as they age and will be running on misinformation the rest of their lives? Or should we teach them what they need to know then give them the tools to learn more as they gain interest in the subject?

Let's teach scientific facts in schools. To quote Wikipedia,

What constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a sense is.
"i'm not sure it's possible to actually curate a comprehensive MP3 catalog without active cooperation from the musicians, at some level."

It's already being done; it's just not public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.cd
you're logical reasoning is incredibly flawed. please stop arguing by way of pleading obviousness ("OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS, MY ARGUMENT IS SO OBVIOUS THAT I WONT EVEN MAKE IT!!!11")

> What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations ... there’d be less of it

the claim here is that if you disallowed charging for software, there would be less software.

> Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it?

great, linux exists and is awesome. nobody disputes that. this fact does not contradict the claim in question.

the existent / awesomeness of linux contradicts claims such as: "people who don't get paid will not create things" and "unpaid creators cannot create great things". however, the original claim is none of those statements. the original claim is merely that when you don't let people charge for software, fewer people will write it.

> Do I honestly have to connect the dots here?

i honestly have no idea what you think the connection between the dots is.
Even if I had to compile it myself in every box I had to work on, I'd still use it.
Better yet, Draw With Friends.
Look, the entire debate is/ought/mustbe centered around means of distribution, right?

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.

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.

EDIT: Downvote away, but for chrissakes at least provide your reasoning. What is this, reddit?
> The realization we all need to come to is that our value compared to one another does not determine our worth. The greatest human being is not substantially different from the least human being. And in realizing that the difference between human beings is unsubstantial, the only way to determine your worth as a human is how well you treated your fellows.
> Feed a hungry person. Clothe a naked person. Shelter the shelterless. Cheer up the depressed. Comfort the mourning. That's where you'll find validation. That's where worth is derived.

I very much agree with your statement, but wonder how many students force themselves through school by comparing themselves to others.

For so many years, I would push myself in the desire of the shortcomings of others, and success of myself.

Now with this anxiety and comparison gone, I am no were near as committed. My performance has drastically decreased (practically failure in one class), and my selfish hopes have subsided.

Do you have any advice on how to overcome this complacency without comparing myself to others?

School feels insincere and not in agreeance with treating my fellow students kindly.
No, you're not paying for the content itself, you're paying for the band's time, and the limited amount of space in the venue - like you said, the performance; but not the content. Those are both scarce resources, whereas the actual bits are not: you could stream that out on the internet to a virtually infinite number of people.

Now, how about authors?
This reaction seems to be the result of some combination of my own social ineptitude, and your being sensitive about the issue. Either way I can see why it's not going to be that easy.

> 2. You imply that being out-programmed by a woman will hurt a man's ego. This is outright sexist and perpetuates the idea that men should be better than women.

The point was to make fun of sexism, really. It makes fun of the side of us that is intimidated by smart women, and encourages the more adult behavior of not being afraid of smart "girls".

> 4. Pointing out you hired an all female staff makes explicit you cater to straight men.

Well sure, I don't want to make a purely PC joke either, sortof defeats my point. Sexism mixed in with anti-sexism, I would hope, sortof diffuses things with some absurdity. If done right. Which I still have to figure out I guess.

> 5. By prefacing it with "Women:"

I guess a play on the fact that in the first version, women was a perk. Here it's directly about encouraging women to show up. I guess it doesn't work out of context. How about pretend that I didn't put it in the perks section.

> You keep trying to force the idea but it won't ever work in an inclusive way.

I don't know what you mean by keep, this was my first attempt. Any case, I think that with your attitude taken to its extreme, you take away all possibility of fun. It may seem forced because there's no hope for turning this particular "joke" into something viable. I wouldn't have tried it in real life. I'm remain unconvinced that there's zero room for humor related to gender, maybe it has to be made very carefully and mildly. A female friend of mine pointed out that it's going to be a bad idea altogether while women are still less than 5% of the scene. The idea of waiting until things are less tense, I can get behind, I just would hate for this whole thing to result in a permanent taboo.
Congratulations, you're smart. Do you want a cookie?
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=zynga&...
Have Your Eye on a Parked Domain Name? How to Make the Dream a Reality
the vast majority of all computer and board games that exist are not made by Zynga, including 99%+ of the masterpieces. so I'm not too worried about one particular computer game company being bought by Zynga. The most key people, the game designers (to the extent they have them) will be free to create new games again, whether at Zynga or elsewhere after leaving.
'The Idea Factory': How Bell Labs invented the future
The problem with fat client-side models is that allows malicious users to potentially break your code. Inject bad things. Re-assign users. Etc.

We'll always need some sort of server-side last-mile, tamper-proof validation. So given that, I'm not sure the benefit of duplicating it on the client side.
first world problem?
I do agree that pg's essay was not encouraging piracy. Its main thrust was prescriptive with respect to public policy-- that means prescriptive to legislators, voters, and to a degree industry. Rob's essay, as I understand it, disagrees on the policy advice.
What the hell is "Games List?"
He just inspired me to write this blogpost about our startup and Space.

http://blog.localuncle.com/2012/03/21/localuncle-goes-to-spa...

I really wish sometimes, I would've tried to become an Astronaut. I do have a Master's in Mech. Engineering...
This is technically a book review, but reads like a regular article. It's really amazing how much came out of Bell Labs.
Pity they don't use nukes anymore; they worked great, until people started cremating them.
Seems to be a product of the platform http://svbtle.com/
> Reverse split doesn't screw employees

It absolutely screws the employees when the common is reverse split, but the preferred-to-common conversion factor remains the same.
do you have evidence? traditional vc funds don't recycle their money, but yc is not a traditional vc fund
It seems like they are hedging against allowing the mega gaming companies (EA etc) from getting too much of a foothold in the mobile / social space.
Entrepreneurs lobby senators to pass jobs act
At first I assumed it was a hybrid blimp technology that would float above the weather, it's power is only needed for purposes of changing direction and transmitting with a directional antenna. It can have a large solar panel on top for recharging operating the bare minimum amount needed for operations.

This was of course not true. So anyone with a rifle can just shoot these babies down, and so can rain, and so can battery drainage.
The game changed, it went beyond the "microcomputer" concept in ways this guy couldn't conceive. But that does not mean he was wrong.

The days of the lone hacker writing assembly code for the "microcomputing" business DID came to an end. So did the days of the lone hardware hacker building and selling computers from his garage.

And programming did became a generally collaborative effort.
I think this comes with particular weight after this...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17405016
I've been using Rapportive forever -- I am actually surprised there aren't more startups trying to eat Salesforce's $65-200 per seat per month lunch.
Government: Do You Really Need An API?
New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain
It's time for an App Store 2.0
You are dancing around a point, here.

You can't simulate scarcity with access provision. We've solved that. We wouldn't be having this same stupid tired runaround if access provision worked or could be made to work without being repugnant.

As for the Elvis singles, those were physical goods, housed in physical places, with physical companies. This is vastly different from people giving away byte patterns to one another--and the sooner this is accepted, the sooner we can all productively talk about it.

As for your GPL license...

I'm willing to wager that, shock, there are a lot of companies that use in-house tools having modified GPL source without publishing their changes. I'm willing to wager even more that in developing nations there are lots of IP violations of that nature occurring.

Your law means nothing if it cannot be enforced.
What I like about is that everyone wins. Both & the person you are playing with get a reward (coins) for a successful guess. There's no cheating to worry about, no sore losers/winners, etc.

Also, having a little bit of coins may or may not entice you to get more (which means bugging more friends to play, or busting out the wallet).
Thanks for adding this. This is brilliant on the part of the judge.
Thank you! I think you're right on both points.
So? I've never seen it before. Not everyone can be as hip as you.
I hate Zynga games because of how buggy and slow they are.

But it's not like Zynga doesn't add value. The examples I've seen of Zynga copying the base of other games also have them making significant adaptations to better fit the market. Zynga really understands the market a lot better than many of the little guys, and they add lots of value to lots of users that way. I'm curious if there are counterexamples.
even up to the acquisition, ViaWeb's source code wasn't that valuable. What was really valuable is the knowledge of the code that its developers have, and the relationships with the customers, the minds of the leaders who made the company successful, and the brand.

So, if a guy more connected than PG in the Valley at the time stole the code, and had some top notch Lisp guys study it and expand it, and had $$$ to spend for marketing, it would still be OK to take ViaWeb's code?

It's not that any or all of those things are an impossible secret sauce. For example, they guy could be an ex-employer, familiar with the source code AND with relations to existing customers.

I've never heard of anyone building and selling a closed-source project once they obtained the source for it

That's mostly because they would be sued to oblivion in a case like we describe. But in other cases, where they legally obtained the code to a project used by some business (e.g if it was open sourced) people HAVE built competing businesses. From MariaDB to Slashdot clones to OpenStack, to competing Unices, etc.
Zynga acquires OMGPOP
I've had experience hiring employee #1 and my wife's had experience being employee #1 at other companies.

At that stage the founders should be comfortable talking about cash on hand and burn rate with you, so while insolvency is a risk, you'll at least see it coming. Confirm that they're open about this before joining. I wouldn't join any startup as employee #1 unless they were totally open with me about cash on hand, burn, and equity.

In my opinion, the biggest risks at a company that small are a) the founders not getting along and you feeling like a kid caught in a messy divorce, b) pivots transforming your job or your product into something you're not interested in, and c) soul-crushing workload transforming you into a burnout case. But those are hard to detect in advance.

The one thing you can detect in advance is whether, administratively, they've got their act together - formal offer letter, assignment of intellectual property paperwork, copy of the options plan, etc. Don't ever enter an employment situation where you're starting now but formalizing the paperwork later, when they can afford to spend money on a proper lawyer. That's amateur hour and you'll get burnt.
Ask HN: Where's your overnight business/app/framework today?
People often post messages on HN announcing the launch of a new business, a new app, a new framework, etc that they created in a weekend.

I was curious to hear from people who have done this where their business/app/framework/etc is at today. I know each response could be a case study in itself, but it would be interesting to get a quick update and lessons learned.
Looks like the underground will need to find an alternative currency. Bitcoin?

In the long term, Bitcoin might be a viable alternative. It really hinges on the adoption of cellphone applications for exchanging them, I think.

In the short term, though, cash is king. If they stop printing paper kronor in Sweden, then the underground will start using somebody else's paper, be that NOK or USD.

As an example, I'd guess there are areas in Mexico where you can get by entirely in USD, because there's so much of it there.
The exact opposite. They lack any financial security or a society that protects then so they must hustle to survive.

In Star Trek they live in a society with abundance and so the state can provide everything.
Houston, We May Have A Fake
A lot of meteorites would be necessary for this to happen. Of course depending on how big and widespread the evidence would be. Some "well-directed" hits, and our footprints and scientific things would be gone. If they had a bigger base, they probably dug a lot of underground tunnels which are a lot more resistand (one of the reasons to build them to begin with).

The BBC actually made a documentary, showing what would happen, if the human race would suddenly vanish from earth:
http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people

There's a short summary on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh-lqtxZisA&feature=play...

[EDIT: The movie linked above talks about craters on the moon which are "billions of years" old.]

[Dinosaurs on the moon. What a crazy tought. But certainly interesting ;)]
Absolutely they would. Similarly, an even greater majority of American drivers will disobey road safety laws (most commonly the speed limit) which are statistically shown to mitigate traffic fatalities. In other words, they will buy a ticket to a lottery of potentially killing other human beings solely to increase the perception that they're getting to their destination faster. And why? Mostly, because it's easy and there's rarely consequences.

And then, after they do that, they will spend countless hours writing message board posts on fora all over the Internet about how their speeding tickets are elaborate scams set by the government to raise revenue. Their justifications are almost as elaborate and refined as those of music pirates.

(I'm not on a high-horse here; I speed too.)

"Everyone does it, so it shouldn't be illegal" is --- and this is so obvious I don't even have to provide the most vivid examples --- historically a very dumb argument.
Seriously ? Been losing money for 5 years. Got one hit that makes money (not $200M money) and they sell.

Excellent choice by OMGPOP
So what's the future for Rails? If you talk to the likes of 37Signals and GitHub, it's pjax and server side rendering. This involves fetching a partial of HTML from the server with Ajax, updating the page and changing the URL with HTML5 pushState.

I really hope not. Rails is awesome and I love it to bits, but I will hate to have to use a framework that is massively invested in Ajax/Pjax. The reason for this is simple: UX. Companies don't seem to understand that there's more to the world than just America and America's top-notch Internet [1]. A lot of web traffic comes from places where the connectivity is simply shit and interfaces like Quora, GMail, Twitter et al that have so much functionality with server-side JavaScript as a prerequisite make it seriously difficult to have an enjoyable experience more often than not. If you've ever tried to access Google Analytics on a 1mbps shared connection in a relatively populated office, you'll know what I mean.

Yes of course Ajax and the interactivity and convenience it offers are awesome, but they come at a massive expense, and this is something that will be very saddening if Rails starts considering it as a major part of its core sooner rather than later.

[1] Alright so it's not just America, but my point stands.
You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do
A recruiter's guide on how to get mo' money...
Overriding insert in DBIx::Class
Epic Pull Requests
I really think it's a setting he didn't notice or understand.

There is the auto lock function which just puts your phone to the lock screen. Then there is the timer for when you need to type in your pass code once your lock screen is turned on(either from you hitting the sleep button or from the time out).

So the failure i can see is the writers own for not understanding the difference.
The biggest companies in the YC portfolio are independent and getting bigger all the time. It still remains to be seen whether a Facebook or Google will come out of YC.
Thing is, AJAX should help with this stuff. No more wasteful page reloads where 90% of the HTML is the same, etc. Granted, we don't see that all the time, but the theory is sound.
>> but I don't see support for recursion as being too important for this type of programming.

That is a fair point, recursion is not directly used very often in conventional programming. However, to me, recursion is the missing link that makes a language a programming language (Turing complete).

There is still work to do to find a better structured representation for computer programs than a string of characters is.

PS. I think your son is old enough and motivated enough to get an Arduino or a Python book and start learning ;) That's about the age I started programming after seeing my dad stare at a blue text-filled screen all night trying to make ends meet as a freelancer.
University professor helps FBI crack $70 million cybercrime ring
Yes, market value is probably not the term we want to use to make statements about what should be done around copyright law. Anything you can't force people to pay for has no market value. Making a normative statement about whether people should have to pay for something based on market value is begging the question.

It's more important to think about utility, because that can help us answer the question of whether the government and laws should be used to create market value where there is none by trying to make a good excludable.
Ask HN: Is this a normal developer hiring/recruitment process?
I am a software developer about a year out of college, and I'm not exactly experienced in the realm of "technical" interviews (I wasn't overly picky about my first job...). I'm hoping somebody can help me figure out whether what I experienced is typical or not. This may very well categorize me as "ignorant"... hopefully not.

I was recently contacted by a small startup company in the Bay Area (found me via LinkedIn) looking to hire a web application developer. I'm currently employed at a reputable big company, but the idea of joining a startup and playing a bigger role in the creation/creative process was (and still is) pretty appealing. I figured there was no harm in at least continuing with the process.

The first thing they wanted me to do was send them some source code. I understand that to be completely normal. I sent them a few domain, controller, and service classes from a web app I had created. They said it looked good and wanted to move forward.

Next they asked me to complete a coding challenge that required creating a web app (in a week's time period) that has functionality similar to Twitter's primary services... user creation, message posting, user following, displaying all the messages from users being followed, etc. They required some portions of Ajax as well. They asked for the app to be hosted on a server, and they wanted to see the source code. They requested Java, Spring MVC, and mySQL. Pretty typical. I asked if Grails would suffice. They said yes. Cool.

I thought the "challenge" was interesting and went about working on it during my free time outside of the day job. Upon finishing it up, I deployed to a home server and sent them my github link.

A few days later I got a response asking if I could have completed the challenge "without using any ruby code" which was weird since there's no ruby in Grails. Maybe a common misunderstanding... Rails... Grails... sounds similar. I emailed them hoping to clarify things, and I have yet to hear back from them (been a couple weeks).

So is that sort of coding challenge common for software interviews? I feel like I may have been conned into doing some free work... having just thrown them the source code and all. I mean it wasn't a ridiculously complicated application, but it definitely would take some know-how to get it done.

So am I stupid for just sending them the source code? Am I stupid for thinking they'd use what I created (ego check)?