skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What? Are you retarded?

In a comment starting with such question and attitude you'll very rarely find anything worthwhile...

>How many songs/stories/etc. are dreamed up by kids and never published? How many love poems are written and not saved? Content is far, far from scarce.

So, songs/stories "dreamed but never published" and poems "not saved" mean that content is ...far from scarce?

For one, "not published stories" are as good as NO stories at all, with regards to scarcity.

Second, we are not talking about every BS story everyone thought up at some point as content.

We talk about actual worthwhile content. Most of it is done professionally. Or, if you want to avoid the quality judgement, most of the content people WANT and DO consume, is done professionally.

If the creators weren't compensated there would be less of that content. And , surely, not of equal budget and scale. You can't record "The Wall" or film "The Matrix" without getting paid. Except maybe for some talented multi-millionaire, doing it out of passion. Not many of those around.

I don't think many would take an interest in "songs/stories/etc. are dreamed up by kids and never published".
> Great for the VC's and angels - bad for the founders and early employees.

Actually PG has publicly stated that it's almost never good for YC for a startup to exit early. I can't seem to find the comment though.
The two are one and the same--the only way to force people to pay for something is to make that thing scarce. In the case of information, which is not naturally scarce, that scarcity has to be entirely artificial.

If something wasn't scarce--e.g. information sans copyright--then anybody could get it without paying. This is a practical reality that copyright attempts to change by legal means; the argument is that the legal means impose a larger cost than benefit on society.
how much data did you use for the semantic analysis?
On Becoming a Unix Wizard
It already more or less is; the idea is not new, and decent PR people will already do something very similar (if they are allowed to do so; some companies will be unwilling to admit guilt, whether through fear of liability or pride).
Ask HN: How do you manage code/build for Android app stores (Google/Amazon/etc)?
I have an Android app that's downloaded primarily from Android Market (now, Google Play). We made a few tweaks to the source and also submitted to the Amazon App Store to see what sort of traction it gets. I'm now looking for a sustainable way to develop from a common code base and yet build so that I can submit to either/both.

As you may know, Amazon's store has some restrictions about available APIs, and hence I'd like to conditionally remove/modify features from that version. Since Java doesn't support traditional conditional compilation, and conditionally including files in Eclipse doesn't seem trivial (is it even possible?), I wanted to ask what others are doing to solve this.

Admittedly, I'm no Eclipse/Java expert so feel free to school me.

What I'm looking for in a solution:
1) Building/debugging using Eclipse.
2) Static code files, with environment/settings toggles to control what to build.
3) No duplicate code or conditional logic in code to pick code flow at runtime

Is this something you've solved for Android apps specifically, or for other Java/Eclipse based projects? Suggestions for where to begin?
It's a shame the NYTimes hasn't figured out how to typeset "E=mc²" correctly, over 100 years after the original paper. (It's right in the court's decision.)
The thing about proof by contradiction is that you can invalidate it by showing that the contradiction is not, in fact, a contradiction.

Linux is used everywhere, but it's also paid for. If it weren't paid for, it wouldn't be used everywhere.
Pacemaker installation is now an arthroscopic outpatient process. (Mine was in conjunction with open-heart valve replacement - not so much an outpatient process, but they're starting to do 'em that way too now.)

Battery is single-use. I wouldn't want a rechargeable, because that would require far more frequent charging - to wit, much more room for error. Missing a charge would mean a dead...me. I'll take the ~5-8 year hard-way replacement.
This is great news. OMGPOP would have headed in that direction anyway and now their talented, hardworking employees will see their careers boosted a bit earlier (maybe even a nice little payout?)

All the value OMGPOP might have ever had ( which besides Draw-something, they really didn't have * ) will evaporate into the creativity-destructing teeth of soul-grinder Zynga, leaving a big piece of the market available for Indie game-devs <3 that are awesome and actually give a d * mn.

* ) OMGPOP has actually been struggling for any kind of success in the casual/social game scene.
This is something that's been in Firefox's JS way back since FF 2.0.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_JavaScript_1.7
For the founders:

When you click on a piece of work on /browse/ it takes you directly into the "gallery view" for that piece, rather than to the artist's profile page. This is a bit jarring. I would consider taking users to the artist's profile first and letting them enter the gallery view from there.
> This likely means YC gets about $3-5million out of the deal, funding even more startups in the future. :)

I'm fairly sure that YC doesn't recycle the money off from wins, but instead returns it to their investors. YC is a for-profit fund that uses other people's money to give about $20k cash and $20k of training in exchange for 6% of their company.
Well, yes, but "oh, those are the sexists who can't spell and are bad at admitting responsibility" is not necessarily the reputation they'd like.
Can you prove they would be?

How many closed-source, for profit software projects were rescued after the supporting company went under? (I am intentionally conflating closed-source and for profit as the majority of financed projects are closed source).

What you have to consider here is the rate of progress, as well as the length of development time. Open source projects have essentially infinite development time, whereas closed-source, for profit projects have a finite development time (whenever the company decides further development isn't worth it anymore)+. However, open source projects tend to have a slower rate of progress versus financed projects.

After 6 months or 1 year, sure, the financed project will probably be ahead. How about the 5 year mark? 10 year? It becomes much less clear which project will have accumulated more man-hours.

+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
What if musicians freely allowed the distribution of their music, but charged for concerts? That would be a clear parallel to the "smells" analogy. Many musicians would be able to survive, and it will encourage them to put on more spectacular shows to draw in the crowds.
("thought experiment"--you keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means. What are your terms? What are you trying to show? How does one lead to the other?)

How many artists produce one-hit-wonders and then do basically nothing else, living off of payments? How many other artists produce more in their free time (Zappa, Waits, Infected Mushroom) then others do in their career (Chinese Democracy lol).
I don't know. I'm not particularly educated or well-versed in these matters.

200MM for a talent acquisition seems high which is why I also wondered whether it was to capture future revenues from Draw Something. It was an innocent question.
What a cool idea for a company! Congrats on the launch. I hope you guys kill it.
Thanks for the feedback. It actually used to work that way, but users were telling us that they wanted to go directly to the image that the clicked on. We'll work on a happy solution.
we've adapted this kind of style 3 years ago on one project and have worked quite well for us. and i think now it's going to be better with the likes of https://github.com/nesquena/rabl and https://github.com/rails/jbuilder on the view layer
the reason they don't steal cars is consequence

Are you saying that 46% of US citizens* would steal a car if it was consequence free? Because I'd like to see some evidence of that.

* The number who have said to have committed copyright infringement.
About that wireless connection to the device connected to your heart, and such things as security and bugs, here's a really excellent talk by Karen Sandler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XDTQLa3NjE
I don't get the difference? The NSA hiring experts to work on SELinux extensions is the same as the NSA paying some experts for the SELinux extensions.
Agree. I apologize.
We have to make sure that we do not conflate utility (absolute value) with market value.
As one of my close friends said recently, "yet another Facebook token that Zynga will soon own."
> One thing the article doesn't mention is that the Somalis are actually making a pretty big impact as proprietors of a sort of 'banking' system for these kinds of transactions.

That system is "hawala"[1]. The Somalian diaspora (caused by perpetual civil war) is spreading the institution into many countries where it's not been practiced historically.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Maybe it's £10 in binary.
The OP strongly implies that "The presence of copyright" is the same as "The ability to charge money," and much of the discussion here also assumes that. It is simply not true, though. I would rather discuss what the OP is actually about than the thing that the OP would prefer to substitute for its subject matter to make its case seem better than it is.
When you pay a door fee to see a show, you are paying for the content: a live band performing their songs.

Also: some bands sell CDs, some give them away, lately fewer are selling, but instead are giving away passes at download sites. Even those that sell the CDs give away at least half if not more of them, because they would rather people listen to them and come back for the next show, and tell their friends, making $3-10 per person per show, than make $10 on the CD one time.
Just to supplement another response to this point... commercial entertainment does compete directly with free/amateur/semipro/fansourced material all the time.

I would argue that this is more of a danger to Big Content's bottom line. There are only 24 hours in a day. Youtube and reddit compete directly with Universal, Sony, and the New York Times for people's attention.

The fact is that entertaining videos and music are not only easier to distribute than ever, but also easier to produce. You don't need a degree or the backing of a large corporation to be funny, insightful or clever. IMO there is a lot of noise about piracy which masks this even larger "problem" for traditional media.
Actually adding discussion pages to the Emacs Wiki is just one setting away. Maybe this issue needs simply to be raised again?
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsWikiSuggestions#toc17
Clickable: http://rdfc.is/
fyi- i have seen a number of auto shops on groupon now and living social live.

I think having an online reminder system might be good - instead of the sticker on the windshield - send the customer an email to let them know about time to get an oil change and perhaps offer other maintenance items as well
I apologize.

Anyway, how about books/song/movie purchases?
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.

Plenty of companies get their source code leaked, and yet they keep on selling the software. The code itself is treated like a curiosity - some people play with it, but not many, and I've never heard of anyone building and selling a closed-source project once they obtained the source for it.
When I see the average software product and it's code in the wild I believe sober coding is not very effective either, so this might be a brilliant idea.
The difference is one of those exists, and the other doesn't.
Yes, if nobody could get paid for writing code, there would probably be less of it. (Barring some sort of post-scarcity economy, I guess.)

However, your original assumption does not flow from the premise--just because selling software becomes impossible does not mean programmers won't get paid. I recall reading somewhere (too lazy to find the source) that the majority of programmers work on bespoke, in-house software rather than consumer-facing proprietary software. Even if it is not a majority, it still shows that there are viable ways for programmers to get paid outside creating scarcity with copyright.

Just because people contributing to the kernel get paid does not mean they would not get paid without copyright. Companies like Google and Red Hat do not really rely on copyright for money.
Market value is determined by scarcity and demand, right? Scarcity is finished for digital items.

No, just demand.

You can simulate scarcity with access provision. Else you don't get to have an economy in the digital age.

People talk like this is something new, but it's not. Sun Records made Elvis's singles. Nothing even in that analog era prevented ANY OTHER COMPANY to reproduce and sell the same singles and not give Elvis a penny. Nothing, that is, except the copyright law.

This also holds for software licenses. If digital copying means "forget about copyright law" (a prerequisite to declare that "scarcity is finished") then why should anyone respect the GPL license any more than Metallica's copyright?
What is an LLC?
Metal fabricator of my acquaintance probably can't have an MRI, as he's got too many metal splinters floating around his body. So probably true, though I don't know about tattoos...
They could be healthier if we seized 20% of everyone's paychecks to fund them too, but that doesn't mean we should.
It took me a bit to realize this wasn't Dustin Curtis' website; is this a theme or what?
For India, there's a lovely community called HackerStreet http://www.hackerstreet.in/
It just feels like fighting the same battles from 15 years ago. How long will it take? Before people stop trotting out the argument that "you gotta charge for everything! otherwise how does stuff get made eh?" It's old guys. It's been debunked a billion times over.

Open source ain't communism, nor is it doomed to failure. Even if you bind your hands to make it legally impossible for you to control the distribution of your work that doesn't mean that you can't make money off of it or that you must stop working.
It's not clear that the personal cloud needs to be webscale; did you consider not using any database?
To me, what I find jarring is how common bad code is and how incredibly rare well-designed systems and good code are

I've mentioned before my rule of three. That is, my code will pretty much suck until about the third time that I've solved (or refactored) a problem.

If I ever come across code that I think is particularly nice, it's quite likely that the developer either reworked said code or has solved a very similar problem multiple times. If, on the other hand, I come across bad code, I generally assume the developer was simply pressed for time and created as much value as possible under the constraints.
Omgpop? They've been in business for four years.
We're also taxing browsers more, while simultaneously trying to run on less-powered devices. It almost defeats the point of a thin client.
We're using this combined with yesware and it's been great.
This was obviously a throwaway account, but nevertheless I just thought I would say that if you want to find out where your ego is too strongly invested, you need only look as far as those areas of your life where you are unable to laugh at yourself. I mean come on, man. I actually agreed with the rest of what you wrote...
I'd argue that Darwin is even more important, we should petition to keep him on there.

Alan Turing is a huge personal hero and agree that it'd be great to have him on a note, but just wish it was another one.
And what happens after 10 minutes of flying, when the batteries will be drained? Charging the battery takes at least as long as the flying time.
Off-topic but: Anyone know if Alex is hosting the code for that Kudos widget anywhere? Couldn't find it on his Github.
The reminder system is a great suggestion. Reminders could come in via email or text (at the customer's discretion). This also highlights the potential for recurring revenue in this simple model.
Asking musicians to produce music for nothing more than the sheer joy of it is exploiting them, and impolite

Don't fall for their mental trap: questioning copyright doesn't mean that: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...

besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back.

And people shouldn't be dicks, doesn't mean we should make it a crime. Morality != Law.
I once broke my finger handling magnets from a really old hard drive. I don't want to think about what would have happened if I had magnets implanted in my fingers.
The scarce good in this case is the experts' time. In some cases, this works out well as a way to create open source software: if there's a big entity with lots of cash, who really needs that thing and can pay for it in its entirety. But what's being charged for is generally the developer's time, not the software. This is easy to see because, whereas the NSA may pay for SELinux, the next person down the line does not pay for it - they're getting it for free.

This has important implications in terms of the ability to spread the costs around. With proprietary software, it's possible to do so: charge 100 people $10 instead of charging one person $500 and letting the other 99 people copy it for free. You make more money, and in some cases, the market will clear when it wouldn't for the single-payer model.

I think this actually shows up fairly clearly in what's open source and what isn't: stuff that would be a one-off consulting job in any case may or may not be, stuff that's more consumer-oriented is more often proprietary, and stuff that's used by lots of developers as infrustructure is quite often open source.
Probably somewhere more efficient but with less useless (but admittedly cool looking :)) eye-candy.

The main reason common distributions have features similar to Windows and OS X is to make transitioning easier. Really serious people using e.g. Arch with XMonad are more efficient with very little Windows/OS X influence.

And hey, Linux could borrow those features even more easily if Windows or OS X were open source. Windows being open source would be complicated, but Apple is a hardware company and would work well enough with an open source OS at its heart.
This feels very conciliatory towards Rails, like that of a boss praising the employee he just demoted.

I'm bearish on Rails because its maintainers don't want it to just be an API. The fight to become the best backend API is much different than the fight to become the best html server. Rails isn't even participating in the fight. Rails has a lot of cruft not needed in an API, Sinatra or Express feel much better for that.
Yes, I am absolutely stating that if you asked the "average American" whether or not they would steal cars if there were no consequences (financial, legal or moral) they would absolutely say "Yes, I would have no problems stealing a car".

Another way to ask the question is to say "What are the consequences of stealing a car from your neighbour?" and I would say the answers would be "Legal (theft), moral (I have taken someone else's car) and financial (I have saved money on a car)". If stealing a car was consequence free then none of these would matter.
This is, at least for now, a rather pointless rant.

You can turn your phone off completely. I don't know what he means about "burns battery for the 5 minutes it takes to boot up", but my iPhone boots up in about a minute (I'll admit I haven't timed it, but it's WAY quicker than 5) and I never notice significant battery drain.

Also, it's pretty rare that you go past the TSA doc-checker drone and through the X-ray in under 5 minutes. So, just leaving your phone alone (tossing it in your bag) after you do the boarding pass scan would solve this "problem" for 99% of the common cases.

In the scenarios where you DO go from doc check to all the way through security in under 5 minutes things are usually so light at the check-in line that it is pretty easy to keep an eye on your stuff, and any handling of it that the TSA agents may be doing.
How long did it stay on?
This service is a middleman. Most people just found an artist on Deviant Art and commissioned the piece directly from the artist. I have commissioned plenty of digital art this way.

This is a case where a middleman steps in and provides a service that is useful to both the artist and the customer.

A middle man is not always a bad thing.
http://svbtle.com/
No. All this means is that the delta will be lower, and new kernel work will be able to cross-polinate a bit more easily. Though manufacturers don't really follow the mainline's upgrade path, and it seems like they will converge on this (embedded LTSI) instead: https://lwn.net/Articles/484337/
Two more comments:
I was about to email you about it when I noticed you actually have something about gift cards on your website. Make it more prominent! I think gifts would be really awesome here, but you make it so hard to find :)

Also, it'd be nice if you could somehow give an example of artists' price ranges. I don't know if I'll be paying $15, $50, $500, or $1000, and especially for someone new to art commissions, this could be a point of serious confusion.

Either way, awesome idea. I really hope this takes off. Consider me a hopeful future customer!
Maybe check out: http://svbtle.com/
Just wanted to let you know I used your boilerplate for my first jQuery plugin recently - https://github.com/indyarmy/jQuery.awesomeCloud.plugin/

Thanks a lot, it saved me a pile o'trouble :)
Super magnet man is your guy: http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=48
Lawrence Livermore National Lab Fires the Most Powerful Laser In History
I'm Icelandic, and although I love my country... I am wary of the spin put on some of these things. A lot of the events that followed the crash were pure luck or even incompetence - I suspect the government would have liked to prop up the banks, but just failed to do so. :-)

But these moves towards Free Software are on the other hand genuine, as are a lot of the grass-roots efforts (I know many of the people involved personally and have helped out with a couple of related projects).

These changes are also very fragile still, it's early days and one wonders what would happen if Microsoft decided this was P.R. problem and decided to throw money at trying to make "the problem" go away.
They're not up to Primer's level of complexity, but for bending your brain a little, try:

eXistenZ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/)

Naked Lunch (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/)

(And other David Cronenberg movies. While I'm at it, although it's completely linear, I'm going to plug: "Crash" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115964/).)

Jacob's Ladder (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/) is almost a great brain-bending movie, but for some damn reason at the very end there's a, "Let's explain what really happened!" scene. F'idiots. (I recommend stopping the movie when you get to the scene where the Jacob and his son (played by Macaulay Culkin) dreamily walk up a back-lit stairway together. Let the movie percolate in your brain for a while. Then, start the movie up again and see how they ruined it.)
bringing the discussion back to its original topic, the music industry is subsidized by large players as well. every famous musician makes good income from just the fact that they are a celebrity. product endorsements, festival and tour sponsorships, etc. companies pay musicians to produce music in a way that is totally abstracted from the actual sale of music.