skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quick! Were you taught that protons exist?
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 that the entirety of chemistry pays very little attention to anything deeper. So protons and neutrons are still taught, and getting into quarks properly quite often only happens in college-level courses.
It's not about whether hackathons should have female waitresses. It's about whether "women" should be listed as perks right under massages.

Only women are not listed as percs.

The PRESENCE of beautiful women serving beer is used as a perc. It's not like you BUY these women or use them as slaves...

In other words, not very different from a Hooters.

And for what was supposed to be a professional event (in the eyes of its sponsors and potential audience at least), the answer is a clear "No."

I'm unsure about the "clear" though.

How much of the potential audience would rather enjoy such an event, but is afraid to say so, because it's not PC?
Human powered flight?
> It would be cool to have something like this that defaults to north, but could be programmed using GPS and a smartphone to point somewhere else.

Absolutely, bike rides to unknown places would be a joy.
Content is scarce if you think not just about distribution, but creation. As a thought experiment, if no one earned anything off of information goods, at all, then fewer of them would be produced.
One thing I find interesting is the balance of the Rails model and the Backbone model. On a new project, I generally have fat Rails models and skinny Backbone models. On legacy projects, I put most of the logic into Backbone (since I'd rather not tamper with a legacy backend) making liberal use of parse() and toJSON() in order to get the model the way I want to use it.

Rails/Backbone will work well for the time being but I wonder which way the balance will swing? Will we have fat Rails models or fat Backbone models? If it is a fat Backbone model, then maybe direct database queries is the solution, cutting out Rails entirely. CouchDB and others already support this and could make it even simpler in the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYW5G2kbrKk <- the video
"Graham doesn’t offer any alternatives"...ok, here's an alternative. Let the public pay for music creation in advance. When files are released, they function as advertisements to help the musician sell more creation.

Musicians can help the pledge process along by releasing low-quality or partial files, and releasing the full files once pledge targets are reached.

There's a game theory argument that this won't work, but million-dollar pledges on Kickstarter pretty much prove that it works just fine in the real world.
TL;DR: "Paul Graham has written some very insightful and entertaining essays, but I disagree with one of his more recent ones, so he has obviously 'lost the plot'. PS, I make my money from imaginary property, which is what the Paul Graham essay I don't like argues against."
Yeah, it comes down to trust, which Bitcoin currently is lacking compared to "hard" paper currencies like the US dollar or precious metals like gold. It could take Bitcoin years or even decades to gain similar credibility.

It also comes down to familiarity, ease of use, and functionality. Bitcoin wins on the latter, but is far behind on the other two dimensions. Paper currency and precious metals are currently far better known and easier to use, and this won't change in the near future.

Over the long run, if Bitcoin continues to gain credibility (and becomes easier to use for regular folk), I'm persuaded it can become a viable alternative to paper currency and precious metals for System D transactions.
And they do, whenever they perform those skills for an audience. The market doesn't pay for effort, it pays for things people want.
This seems a tiny bit inhumane...
> and even worse for people who were heavy drinkers and then quit

Can you provide links or elaborate on this? I'm curious.
If you get somebody to pay for either one of your masterpieces feel free to post sales numbers.

Edit: And perhaps you should expand on why YC deserves value from its investments and other industries do not. That's more important than either of our snarkiness.
A trip to The Internet Archive. An amazing place.
The reason there are two passages through what seem to be limbo is that Inception is Christian allegory. If you look at the structure of the film you can see Nolan using the opening and closing heist sequences as allegorical bookends to demonstrate Cobb's character development. In the first Cobb is a faithless and money-oriented thief who embraces violence and selfishly abandons his team when this fails ("every man for himself"). At the end Cobb takes a "leap of faith" when he rejects Mal, whose seduction of him is framed as a temptation of faith ("you don't believe in one reality anymore.... so choose to be here"). Cobb reaffirms his faith in his children "up there", rejects violence even when he is attacked and then sacrifices his own life to save Saito.

So you're not supposed to worry too much about the logic of the dream levels, since all dreams are basically metaphors for life: mazes where people "get lost" and from which they need to "die to wake up". The only thing that makes limbo special is that it is particularly symbolic. Nolan is presenting a metaphor of life itself as a Penrose staircase, and portraying faith as the way out. When Ariadne shatters the mirrors that trap Cobb in a recursive chain, the image is symbolic: she is a gift from Cobb's father ("ask and ye shall receive") and her role in the film is to guide him out of the maze that is the mortal world. This is presumably why she is the character who accompanies him to immigration.

For more evidence that this is intentional, look at the overwhelming creation imagery and the narrative emphasis on father-son alienation and reconciliation (with Fischer as with Cobb). Look at the curious way Michael Caine seems to be playing God when he shows up in Paris. And then look closely at the ending, which shows us neither a dream nor reality. What Nolan presents is symbolic: we see Cobb's judgment and forgiveness of sins at immigration, and then his reunion with his family in the heavenly garden. The film closes with Cobb ignoring his totem (as a crutch of faithlessness it is no longer needed) and then his son James (who represents faith and like his sister shares an apostolic name) telling him that they are building a castle on a cliff.

A what? That last bit circles back to the opening shot of the children on the beach. It is a bookend reference to Matthew 7.24 and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. The contrast (beach -> cliff) reinforces Cobb's character journey while telling us that the ending is NOT a dream (something reinforced by the lack of the water imagery associated with the other dream levels). It also reinforces the parallels Inception creates between the buildings of limbo and the sandcastles on the beach, and explains why all are ultimately washed away by water just as death washes away life in the Christian parable.

Brilliant movie.
Until you make money because people are willing to pay for what you have and will do so even in the presence of cheaper alternatives, yeah, it's a hobby.
I paid, received no email at all, then got a support reply the next day (today), which successfully let me log in, but left me with no downloads and no streams. Incredibly shitty UX. Anyone else encounter problems?

As someone who bought both this and the Louis CK download, the difference in UX is huge. I wonder to what extent my experience is not unique and to what extent the success of Louis CK's experiment was due to the seamlessness of their website experience. These guys should probably using Stripe; I'm beyond impatience with PayPal.
Question: Why did the title of this post change? Was it the original submitter who changed it? If no, who?

https://img.skitch.com/20120321-81k4yxffg161n1rh9f2dc4kf56.p...
Perhaps show vertical indentation lines? (Best would be in two or three different styles). In the more popular threads with a lot of comments-on-comments, it gets rather hard to see what that comment down there was actually referring to.
Fair enough. I could have made the same point with better wording. I removed that sentence.

fwiw I was talking about the investors/CEO etc, the people who made the decision on the sale. Not the employees.
> IBM, RedHat, the US National Security Agency, Canonical, DARPA, Google, etc. all pay for open source code to be written.

IBM: sells tons of proprietary software.

Redhat: genuine open source deal. Legit example.

Government: money comes from taxes. I don't think I fancy a world where information goods are mostly paid for through taxes.

Google: makes most of their money from the proprietary bits of their software.
Graham draws a comparison between the ridiculous situation of a shop owner wanting to charge passers-by for smelling the delicious cooking smells coming from restaurant, and record companies going after people who’ve illegally downloaded music or movies. The supposed point of comparison is that ‘information is like air’ and can be freely transmitted, so it can’t be treated as the property of one party.

If PG is making that point, it's stupid. How about someone stealing his ViaWeb source back in the day before the Yahoo acquisition? (Actually, it wouldn't even be stealing, because he would still have the source himself).

Would he still be using that "information wants to be free" meme?
I could have sworn it rather mentioned Lisp. Maybe I'm imagining it though.

On a pro-python note, I'm also reminded of the not-that-long-ago idea by the SEC to require certain securities to include executable documentation: https://jrvarma.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/the-sec-and-the-pyt... and http://www.itworld.com/government/105031/will-wall-street-re... for example.
Show HN: Baryon - personal cloud file management system
The goal of this project is to allow users to build personal cloud file storage using MongoDB. Thanks to GridFS this is possible!

Project is open source under AGPL v3 license.

It started as a weekend project, for personal needs, but evolved into a bit more. Current version is v0.1-b0. I used Grails 2.0.0 and mongodb plugin.

Work is in progress, but it already has basic features for this kind of system:

- upload (multiple), delete, move arround files

- create, delete, move arround folders

- trash

- import an entire folder structure through a zip file

- basic text and image viewers

- couple of other goodies...

http://code.google.com/p/baryon/

Any feedback from you guys is welcome.
Android forum
Copyright has on its side reams of academic literature and centuries of apparently successful implementation. Some alternate systems, like patronage, have been tried at relatively limited scales, but there are in general strong theoretical or evidentiary reasons to believe that none of those would produce as much media as we have today.

That doesn't mean that there isn't some better system out there, but I think the burden is on the copyright-dissenters to develop a theoretically sound alternative and implementation plan. Stallman's work in this area is incredible and inspiring, but there isn't, so far, nearly as much theory or evidence on that side (despite the work of Benkler et al.).

Meanwhile, low protectionists--like most people here, myself included--are frequently going to assume a version of the current system stays in place, while proposing tweaking some of the knobs (types of content covered, expiration, penalties, enforcement mechanisms, etc.).
Ask HN: Sites like HN in other languages?
The best way to boost reading skill in a second language is to chew through material, which is a lot easier if you've got material that you're interested in.

After seeing the thread about similar sites to HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3734303), I started wondering if there are similar sites for speakers of other languages?
The distributors wish to control the scarcity of the copies of content. If there is an overflowing abundance of copies then their model of enforcing a 1:1 sale for every copy breaks down.
When you need 2000 patents for something like a codec, isn't it about time you start questioning what's the point of having those patents in the first place?
Thanks for your feedback. We'll look into how we can make the links copy & pasteable without that annoying side effect.
In the case of your first paragraph, I'd say just don't apologize then. Say nothing, or, if you must, explain why your thinking differs with those criticizing you.

For example, if Sqoot is not sorry, they could remain silent. Or they could say, "We understand that this is sexist. We care more about getting large attendance, and have a reasonable belief that attractive women serving beer will accomplish that end." That will probably enrage people even more so I think silence is the best option in this case.

> We need to make sure we are not trying to tell people how to think.

It is fine to tell people how to think if they are thinking wrongly. It is fine to use what force you have available to you, be it economic, social or political, to change their actions if you think those actions are harmful enough to warrant it.
This is how I feel about Flask.
I've been using it with Backbone.js and they make a great combo: Flask API serving JSON, and the rest of the logic on the client.
And they are welcome to keep paying for it--as the rest of us download free copies.

As for convenience, I may find it more convenient to download music from TPB or a college FTP than from iTunes, because I don't want to deal with their installer or give away my billing info. Convenience is an utterly subjective measure.

(also, your car analogy is shitty and bad and you should feel shitty and bad)
I'll start with my Japanese contribution:

http://www.venturenow.jp/ is the closest thing I've found for Japan; it's more like a news site than HN, though, and I'm really looking for a discussion site.

Anything in Mandarin, German, or Spanish?
This a really cool product. I'm so glad someone is tackling this space because we get requests for it at Artsicle all the time but it's really not our focus at all. Glad to see other companies looking to tear down the artificial wall between artists and collectors.
Beyond SOPA: Obama’s Privacy Bill of Rights
Newspapers were providing a valuable service, but were funding the bills and the payroll by selling ads. Sounds familiar.
Why does Firefox ask me whether I want to allow storing offline data? What do they want to store?
> In the first place, I don't like when people are so sensitive that there's no room for a harmless joke.

But there was no joke. None. It wasn't even an offensive joke (not that they're all that rare in the community, sadly), it was just offensive. I think their characterisation of it as a joke is just an attempt to get themselves out of hot water.
What? Are you unable to understand the difference between making a statement with unspecified assumptions, and making a crafted argument with carefully specified axioms and clear logical reasoning--while also noting obvious facts about the real-world implementation of the topic you debate?

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.

(also, that isn't a thought experiment you suggested: it was an assertion provided without reasoning.)

EDIT: Amended to better address inflammatory language.
> If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music

I think you've missed the parent's point. We have left the world where pirating is impossible. The question is how to deal with it. Thinking in unrealistic hypotheticals does little to inform the debate.
That abundance of music isn't created by independent effort. We aren't talking about trade in covers of "Sergeant Pepper." The abundance is created by the violation of the legitimate and rational rights of individuals in the product of their own work.

I can make a lot of things abundant, for a time, with similar violations. But that doesn't mean those are right, or an intelligent way to get along with other people. No one but the strongest and sneakiest have an interest in the economy of what you can get away with.
"Lighten up"
Everest Climbing Gear — Then and Now
Here is something that most people missed: Reality was a dream the whole time. There are hints throughout the movie, but the entire thing was a dream. Most people point to the wedding ring theory as evidence that it wasn't, but that just shows the lead's state of mind, not reality.
It seems like the author is missing a huge chunk of this analogy: the aroma from the restaurant is not merely a by-product, but also a free advertising channel. Heck, many restaurants strategically vent exhaust from the kitchen to get more people to notice them. They are paying to distribute the smells for free yet not charging for them! (A fact the author asserts would strictly result in a reasonable charge for the aroma).

Similarly, the recording people have regularly paid big bux to radio station to freely distribute the music. The exposure gets a song popular, hence more sales. Yet, instead of looking at an even greater chance for big exposure, the industry is looking to clamp down on it. Granted, it involves changing the product from the recorded music to something else surrounding that. Still, this I felt was the main point of the analogy, rather than "derp music is just air", like the author suggests.

I will be glad to see the "big music" bubble burst and all these companies go out of business. I find myself hoping the execs stay jobless and penniless for long after they do. I'm not worried about the lower echelon people, skilled talent will find a way to earn their living either in a small scene, specialized way, or in a different industry.
Travel & Your Entrepreneurial Side
The thing you guys are missing is "that which is not seen":

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

Just because there is some open source code doesn't mean that there is an "optimal" level of it. In other words, maybe due to the relative lack of funding, there's a lot less open source than there could be if there was a better financial feedback loop between people getting value from the software and those developing it.

This isn't just something I'm making up - I've spent a lot of time around open source, and seen a lot of good people who could have done lots more if they had had more time to dedicate to working on the code, rather than working a "day job".
Nice article... very timely and fits in with my perception of where I'm headed with my own Rails development.

I usually just go with wherever the Rails team is taking the framework. For some legacy sites, I may stick with wherever they're headed.

For new projects, I really view Rails as just the web api that feeds my Backbone framework.
So off base. Where to begin...

> And you're misunderstanding economics too. Just because you can get it for free that does not mean there is no market for people paying for it.

He says the opposite of this. Redthrowaway on free vs. paid content:

The formatting was wrong, it was inconvenient, and the metadata
was filled with crap from the rippers that meant it would never
sort properly. So I bought an ebook from Amazon.

> 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.

What are you saying? Are you advocating for harsher consequences and more enforcement of existing law or more DRM? It's unusual to see so many luddites on HN. Personally, I'd prefer to see modernization of IP laws.
That is a good point.

One of the things I loved, though, is that the characters don’t bother to mention things they already know, or explain things they already understand. They say real things like “um” and “y’know” and “could you hand me the…no, the other—yeah, thanks”. This is undoubtedly a major source of confusion, but it serves less to increase complexity than to convey a sense of the characters’ relationship.

The plot could absolutely have been told simplier without changing it, but the feel would have been very different. I know the movie isn’t perfect, but I like it for what it is.
Are you this boorish in real life?

I don't "hate apps" at all, and your claim to that effect makes you look a little juvenile, continuing your bizarre "bisect the world" fetish. Nonetheless in a discussion where you herald the spend of iOS buyers (the devices are "expensive"? They are some of the least expensive options in their respective realms), it is kind of humorous considering the actual reality that most iOS users in aggregate spend very little. Just tried to load up my new iPad and it was actually difficult to get much past $75...a few days ago I spent $600 on Vegas Pro for the PC.
> It's not a matter of bringing in the "PC police". It's about respect.

99% of time, when people whine about being oppressed by 'political correctness', what they're really complaining about is ordinary human decency.
I don't think it's a question of what they expect. More like they have no idea how to program and Flash has let them get away with it. Seriously, there is no other sane reason why you should experience slow downs on a machine with that spec (assuming Flash can even harness most of that power).
The author, and the content industry in general, are misunderstanding basic economics: Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.

And your are misunderstanding even more basic economics: being able to take something (or a copy of it) without paying, doesn't mean it doesn't have value either.

Value is where there are people willing to pay.

And people ARE willing to pay for music and movies.

So, the problem is not that the content has no value, but rather that the payment step can be bypassed very easily.

But bypassing payment easily != the thing has no value.
>Are you retarded?

Please try to avoid this.
> What? Are you retarded?

No, and that kind of comment is not welcome here, either.

Information goods most certainly are scarce if you look at the effort it takes to make a song, a movie, a complex piece of software. That time and effort is not free. 'Dreamed up' is a lot different from 'sat down and worked hard on it for months'.
Well the labels paid specific artists despite cheaper alternatives immediately taking them out of the "hobby" category.
Downvoted for being rude and combative. The parent comment contained nothing that would lead anyone to such a strange reply as yours.
Out of curiosity, does anybody have an estimation about how much money the link (which I assume to be affiliated) may generate?
> I anticipate that there will be another story at some point where an actual funny, but edgy, joke will be told and I will have to find myself on the other side of the argument

I think if there was an actual joke involved (a proper one, which was coherent and possibly even amusing) the reaction would be rather different.
That gets messy for multi-line quotations, and paragraphs. :(
3) Which kind of proves that the plane was reality. If Fisher dies in limbo he'd wake up in real life (the level above the plane), not on the plane.