skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the mistake may be in discounting the long tail: Even if the top n% are still in print, the bottom (100-n)% aren't. The volume from a million out-of-print old books that would each sell on average fifty copies a year can easily dwarf that of a few thousand in-print old books that each sell a thousand copies a year.

As for the e-book explanation, even if that turns out to be the case, isn't that an even stronger argument for shorter copyright terms? Now that public domain books are "free" you get a lot more public benefit out of something being in the public domain, because instead of the price going from $17 to $15 it goes from $17 to $0, which results in far more people getting access to the book.
How to get started unit testing
I don't think that would be a good move for Microsoft. RIM would cost them probably $10B at least. What do they get out of it? They can't really back-port WP7 to the existing BB devices for a quick market-share grab. They don't want QNX. They don't need RIMs enterprise software. They would be spending $10B or more to layoff 90% of the company and throw away most of their existing software & hardware. Microsoft would be better off just doing another Nokia style deal with RIM.
Samsung Galaxy S3 to get Long-Range wireless charging tech.
Running Linux on a 8bit AVR
Wikidata: New Knowledge Base from the Wikimedia
2% per event = 50% after 35 events.

Assuming 1% of partners have AIDS and someone had 10 partners and 35 events per partner.

.01 * (1 - .98)^ 35 = 0.5% per partner. And 1- (1 - .005) ^ 10 = ~5% chance of an infection in a lifetime.

Or working the other way if the average person with aids has 35 'events' per partner and 2.1 partners after infection the infection rate will increase.

PS: Real models include differing M/F infection rates, stratification by age and other vectors like transfusions and IV drug use.
I am curious for more. Does the source book have more on this story? I'd like to know whether the letter was ever shared in the community.
If copyright doesn't begin until exhibition, then the outright theft of private works is legalized. [1] You'll have reintroduced the problems that implicit copyright existing at the moment of creation was intended to solve.

So to fix that, we can then either recognize the right of the author prior to publishing/exhibition with more complicated rules, or simply extend the term a little and maintain simplicity.

[1] Joe writes a book. He shows it to Bob for notes. Bob publishes it under his own name. The copyright would belong to Bob.
If you are some manager in a big company and looking at the press, there is little distinction. In fact, more stories have been posted about Python 2.x to 3.x conversions (mostly because Perl 6 is not a story). Heck, I would imagine a couple of people on HN have run into the "can't use Python 3 because it isn't compatible with anything"-meme. Carefully considered logical analysis with realistic risk mitigation gets trumped by headlines in ComputerWorld and InfoWorld quite often.

I still have quite a bit of hope for Perl 6. I use Perl 5 as my goto short scripting language. I really want it to work.
Summify: The Impetus behind Startup Visa Canada
Some very interesting perspectives in the video -- particularly the references to touch interaction. If you watch at 11:58, he also makes references to how the newspaper industry can avoid obsolescence by leveraging these new mobile technologies.
1h 30m commute is only if you insist on busing down to Apple or Google every day. There are plenty of companies you can work for in SF that you can reach in much less time.

And if you think it's going to be affordable to live five minutes walk from your office in NYC, think again.

(disclaimer: lived in both)
Google incorporates traffic trends into Google Maps
Quick bug report for ya. If you visit the "clientPager" demo, and navigate to any page but the first, before clicking on "show 9", or "show 12", it will break.

http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone.paginator/examples/net...
HTTP requests are actions -- that's why they have verbs. URIs should be concepts those verbs act upon.

GET /orders/42/pay is a verb on a verb. Maybe not complex, but definitely confusing.
The Robotic Nature Of Y Combinator
To me RIM was never actually alive. I heard the raves and saw the devices and from the start it seemed like they aimed squarely at a transitional niche and haven't been able to move their company focus away from that. This is not to say that there haven't been and/or aren't things to like about their product, rather it's the focus of the whole that's short sighted.

Edit: I should add that there's nothing wrong with transitional technologies, as there's real value there. And lots of money to be made. But if that's what you're doing then you should realize it, and plan for a graceful demise or a transition to something else.
While not nearly as important, the idea that authors are real makes me immediately relate to my own experience that customers don't seem to understand that software is made by real people too. People with feelings, who are fallible. Several comments on blogs or reviews on the app store show to me that people don't feel they are being insulting or rude if they aren't facing the person they criticize. The more I wrote this comment the more I started to seem the Internet as a whole falling victim to anonymous words that cut deep. We've had to develop unnaturally thick skin.
The e-mail I used for Facebook is with a different provider than Yahoo.
It must have been shared with at least one other person as it explicitly states that there is only a single copy in existence. For us to be reading it means either the recipient or the person they shared it with subsequently shared it with others.
I appreciate the appeal to what feels like common sense, but right now more than ever, the distinction between "classical theft" and replicating a series of ones and zeroes is extremely important. A war of minds is going on, and the relegation of all things copyright into the category of "theft" attempts to subtly justify any reaction to copyright infringement by making it equivalent to deprivation of property.

This is a tough topic because the word steal does have a valid semantic meaning in this context, and anyone who argues with common use of language always comes off as pedantic ('what is an iTouch? It's an iPod Touch!!!'), but its important for those of us who understand how digital media works continue to continue emphasizing the real world differences between theft and copyright infringement.
All these acronyms for a browser-based service? Even if you trust this company to have good intentions, it seems that the weakest link by far is the possibility of an XSS, a malicious extension, or a CA compromise. And of course the whole thing depends in multiple ways (verifying your identity, logging in if you clear localStorage, etc.) on the security of your inbox. Their crypto and protocol might be fine, but they should be more forthcoming about the many pieces of software that you are trusting when you use their service. I skimmed their whitepaper but didn't see any mention of the ways that they or someone else could in fact see your data.
What Developers Can Expect at Google I/O 2012
If it's of any consolation, they don't cut open the whole scrotum or anything. They make a pinhole (that's tiny!) incision, and reach for the vas deferens just enough to inject it with a syringe.

And I don't think it does anything to make you feel like your balls are "frail". So far the only side-effects I've read about are a possibility of swelling for 1 week after the operation. Then, you're back to your old non-frail-balls self!
[Inc.Com] 6 Habits of Strategic Thinkers
You can consider just volunteering to do a project for a biology lab. You have the tools (quantitative thinking, programming, etc) but to work in biology you need to know about some specific biology knowledge domain. There is shortcut, you need to read text-book and then review articles in a sub-discipline until you are comfortable with the area. After that, reading current research papers will get you to the cutting edge and you will start to see where you can contribute. It is possible to do this on your own but it would be much faster to get guidance, either through a course or as I said above to work directly in a lab that is doing some biological research. You would also have to figure out what areas of biology you want to work on.
Openstreetmap has the same problem and it handles it well.
Fair enough - it does look obvious to me that those are automatic 'rubber stamps'.

They don't read as particularly condescending to me, but I imagine that if one was used in error or with questionable judgement it might well come off that way.

Is there any mechanism for quality control on how they are used?
Also see this edited version of the Starfire video from Sun in 1993, which shows touch interactions.

I've only seen the full-length version, so I'm not sure if it's in this truncated clip, but there's an amusing bit where she leaves her sandwich on the 'desk' part of the monitor and the computer scans it. When she picks the sandwich up and notices there's an image of it on the screen, she 'sweeps away' the image with her hand - another gesture.
Cool. To elaborate a bit more.. while "Big Data" is more than just Hadoop, I'd say that Hadoop is, for now, the Elephant In The Room (no pun intended), when it comes to Big Data processing. If we take that as a truism, I'd say:

If you want to get into the programming side of this stuff, you would be well served to spend some time learning Java. I know Java isn't considered the "coolest" language to know anymore, but if you want to work with Hadoop using the native APIs, well... it's written in Java. Now, that's not to say that you can't use Hadoop to distribute work in other languages (say, Python) but if you wanted to master Hadoop, some Java background would help, IMO.

Of course one nice thing about Hadoop isn't that you don't have to write directly to the map/reduce API in Java. There are layers built on top of it, that abstract some of that away... you get things like Pig, Cascading, etc. that make Hadoop easier to use. But knowing some Java will help if you want to hack on Hadoop itself, or if you need to write directly to the API for some reason.

If you have a good stats background but not much programming, I'd recommend start learning Java + Hadoop, and then grow outwards from there, pulling in other technologies (see above) as you go.
Copyright was setup by the people to give incentive to create new works for the people. If you can rest on the work you did decades ago, there leaves no reason to continue with the arts†, which goes against the whole spirit of copyright in the first place.

† Assuming profit is the driving motivator, as copyright does.
Shit For Links
I absolutely agree. In an ideal world, Fair Use should have been codified long ago, and a more-broad 'non-commercial' qualification added.

That said, given the state of lobbyists and legislation in the US, I sometimes feel that it's better for all of us that they aren't being given a shot at re-writing (and thus inevitably eroding) those rights.
As I recall, OKCupid offers a way to only search for new friends, etc. I'd be interested in how many people on OKC have that marked in their profile, and how many successfully find new friends that way (that statistic may be harder to obtain).
I think you need to take into context the difference in 20 years here. Back then there was no concept of digital photography or gps or bluetooth, etc.

As technology evolves, then many of those improvements naturally contribute to enhancements in other products. I believe that if a small, commercially viable camera existed at the time that video was made, it would have been featured.

You can't say that the features/technology that we have taken for granted for the past 10 years are not natural upgrades all existing products in this category.

In other words, I think the details you mentioned are trivial. The overall concept is pretty much the same, with some varying details.
This article reads like a rationalization by a college student who is basing all of his knowledge of these places on second-hand accounts and stereotypes. Does this guy really think that San Francisco isn't diverse? Does he really not understand that he's going to be around engineers (the vast majority of whom are white dudes) all day anyway and that the diversity of the area has little to do with that? Does he really believe that all anyone talks about in SF is social media and daily deals?

How about come back in 6 months after you've moved and list the preconceived notions you had that were wrong, and the ones you had that were right and how you like living in NYC? Because this kind of reads like it's going to be this way because this is how I expect it to be.

Disclaimer: I'm moving to New York City in less than two weeks
Even on the "evolutionary" web, I don't think anyone in 2007 would have predicted the rise (and now... fall?) of MVC frameworks or the explosion of jQuery, both of which existed and were relatively popular at the time. Likewise the NoSQL rebellion was a surprise. Five years from now, we'll all be using WebGL-based dyanmic UIs. Or will we?

I think the point is more that 5+ year planning in the tech industry is simply pointless, not that all technologies will be replaced. Sure, there are some constants. We can all safely predict that in five years we'll still be writing drivers and middleware in C, still be using zlib and libjpeg, etc...
They emailed me the agreement, which they wanted back with my signature before an "in depth" discussion with them (another odd sign). It turned out to be worse than they let on: liability for the entire amount, with an additional 20% in case the fee has to be turned over to a collection agency. I replied in email that I was not interested in doing business with them and would not enter into any agreement.

One thing I neglected to mention to this recruiter: I free-lance as an expert witness in computer forensics cases. I've done this for a labor lawyer in the state where this firm operates. I will forward this "agreement" to the lawyer.
They do. But (and maybe I'm cynical here) is your other half OK with you being on a dating site to "make friends"? What ratio of those potential friends are of the opposite gender?
It's not a problem, but you don't get all the benefits of HTTP if you don't respect REST. This since HTTP is built around the idea of REST.

To me it seems logical to embrace the ideas of the tool you are using. If you are not utilizing the power of HTTP, why not just use a pure RPC protocol?

I think that we eventually have to open up for more protocols if the web continues to develop into a generic dev platform. In a sense we are already heading in that direction with WebSockets. But since HTTP has been and continues to be such a success, I think that we can atleast try to promote it.
I'm curious, how, if "... no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands." is true, how is it reproduced on this site?
Ex-Facebook Designer: "Facebook Model is Self-Serving, Egocentric"
> You can do nothing, and then only statement "you are not doing the right things" would be true.

The statement "the things we are doing are not the right things" would also be true in this case. (Statements about the empty set are usually called 'vacuously true'.)

> You can also do both the right things and the wrong things, and then only the statemtnt "you are doing the wrong things" would be true.

I agree that "you are doing the wrong things" would be true, but what Schneier said, which is "the things that we are doing are wrong", would not be, at least by my reading with an implicit universal quantifier: "[all] the things that we are doing are wrong". I would describe your situation instead as "some of the things that we are doing are wrong"; and even that is implied by, if not equivalent to, "we are not doing the right things".
Facebook appoints former Google engineer to improve its search function
C++: A Language for Modern Times
Based on my previous experiences trying to get help from Google, you're pretty much screwed. Just make your name a fake name.
I assumed they were talking about tagged fixnums, which have primitive-like performance but can still be treated like objects. https://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/fixnums_in_the_vm
Starting a dating site with fake or scraped profiles just makes it a ghost town. New members would leave quickly before you built up a real user base.
> this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule

I don't need to do that.. I just need to point out that by picking an example of what one or more communists did or said doesn't make their actions a part of communism.

The only logical fallacy here is yours - I could equally point at some American murderers and say "capitalism is terrible, look at those capitalists murdering people for money".

So good job anticipating my response... the response of pointing out that your argument is basically bullshit, because sadly for you it isn't easy to back up racism.
This Sunday, the U.S. will have the highest corporate tax rates in the world.
It's not theft of the digital entity, it's theft of the time and effort that went into creating the digital entity. The relevant concept is Theft Of Services.
Founder of Daily Toaster sleeping in his car in Palo Alto
اهداف ريال مدريد واوساسونا اليوم 31/3/2012 الدوري الاسباني
Most singularities are probably not good things. (I would say one that starts as a war between the US and China would go South pretty quickly.)
Wow Knight Ridder was on the ball in the 1990s, it's a shame they didn't own the space. I wonder what happened.

These days they are still an excellent "hard news"
> finding souls to mate

Obligatory meme image, after which I'll be a good HN contributor for the rest of the day: http://i.imgur.com/s70a7.png
The last paragraph should have been the first. Why write this piece on "stealing" and infringement when you don't even know the facts?
Apple, Foxconn set new standard for Chinese workers
I don't really buy the cheap argument. The galaxy Tab 10.1 is $448 on Amazon, while the ipad 2 is $449.99.

The galaxy tab's in the other form factors may be cheaper, but those are the markets that Apple is not trying to, and may never, compete in.

So please, before saying Android products are knock-offs or cheap clones, do some research.
I bet a lot of it could be mitigated by allowing works to pass into the public domain, but allow parties to keep the characters / settings under some type of trademark for new works.

I would say infinite sequels, reboots, and remakes are killing culture more than infinite copyright.
To exchange that money for goods. To invest those money into something that will bring you more money back.
chrome os?
I wrote a simple Backbone module to add infinite scrolling to any view a few months back (https://github.com/joneath/infiniScroll.js).

It's good to see a classic paginator implementation though. I will take a look at the source later. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if RIM was a victim of its own success: wild expansion leading to everyone wanting to join the company and partake of the golden goose, an accelerated version of the usual tech company slide from competence.
I agree with you on SF. There are certainly a bunch of great companies to work for there. However, at the risk of angering a lot of people, the majority of promising startups are in the South Bay.

NYC is expensive, but not unbelievably so, especially when put next to SF. To live within a 5-10m walk of Palantir's office in the West Village is roughly $4k for a 2BR(so I'll be paying $2k/month). Certainly not low rent by any stretch of the imagination, but it is definitely affordable with an engineer's salary. Also, the difference in salary compensates for this cost.
If I hadn't mentioned a camera it wouldn't have changed my point at all.

What this tablet (and the non-clone tablets) actually show is that there is no need for Samsung to have copied Apple's trade dress of not using a bezel, having an all glass front, an aluminum back, black buttons etc.

If, as you concede the details are trivial, then Samsung should be able to easily vary them and produce a tablet that doesn't look like a cloned iPad.
The ratio of potential friends' genders doesn't matter, only the gender of friends I'm looking for. (Are super-conservative parents worried about the ratio of potential mates being of the same gender?)

And mine, personally, would be ok if I explained what I was doing and didn't actually cheat on her, and showed her some actual friends I met. But I agree, it may be a problem.
This came up a while back I'm sure.

Yep: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=tablet+vide...

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=knight+ridd...
Possible massive data breach of Visa-MasterCard accounts under investigation
The scrotum isn't "cut open". It's a pinhole-size incision.
Samsung really tries to confuse the public? Really? Where can you go, intending to buy an iPad and get a Galaxy Tab instead?

I mean, that's just silly. Being a flat panel with rounded corners, it indeed looks very similar to an iPad (I'll skip the argument as to whether rounded corners and black and white color choices constitute a protectable "design language" or not -- that's been done to death). But trying to argue that they're deliberately trying to steal sales from Apple via fraud seems ridiculous on its face.

edit: two replies now have argued with this, apparently equating mere "copying", which is legal and pervasive, with deliberate confusion of the buyer, which is FRAUD, and a crime. If you want to condemn Samsung for the former, go right ahead. Personally I find that boring and silly, but whatever. It's a personal aeshetic or moral call, and yours to make. But accusing them of fraud is not remotely the same thing, so stop it.
OkCupid is pretty popular with a lot of people living "alternative lifestyles" although it's probably only a few percent of their main customer base.
BBM is the only reason I am still using my BB. If BBM was available on WP7 then I will go out tomorrow and buy one of the Nokia phones!
Cognitive dissonance. If you really think this justifies copyright violation of software and films you need to grow up.
I work in an office with WP Engine and Other Inbox (recently acquired by Return Path.) There are plenty of startups here; the Capital Factory folks probably know many of them.

I moved here from the Bay Area (with a 2-year stay in San Diego in the middle) and I'm really happy with the quality of life and the tech community here in Austin. I can buy a house and live comfortably here, and the taxes are far cheaper--important when you really start earning money!
Yup ;-)
No problem, no offence taken :)

I only picked the micro because it's cheap, and AWS let me fire one up, build the config, break it, trash it, and start again, all in rapid succession.

One thing though, this configuration doesn't actually need much real CPU or disk resources - it's pretty much all memory, and as far as I know, AWS doesn't overcommit RAM. this means it should be "relatively" stable. The CPU usage is at around 5-10% even at the peak.

Personally, my own blog runs on Linode, because I think EBS is broken, but each to their own :)
Spotify's Facebook Timeline chronicles over 1,000 years of music
Not if you have bots messaging new members from fake accounts, and/or having them respond to queries.
Downton Abbey Anachronisms, Season Finale edition
This configuration can still be RESTful as long as you POST to those endpoints. The complexity I was referring to is the snowball effect of adding different actions.

If you use hypertext in the resources to specify the places the client can go, the complexity is severely reduced. However, properly enabling discovery is where most "Rest" APIs fail.
Shakil Khan Moves to Path
Google Drive to launch with with 5GB free storage, mobile app document editing