skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The currency on HN is karma points. I can only hope you will do the right thing ;^).
What I Learned This Year
Searching with iterated maps
Pirate Party Gets Massive Support in Sweden
Widget Developers Await Clarity from Facebook on 4th Party Connect Policy
First time I saw a personal computer was when a teacher brought in a Commodore PET and it was running lunar lander - the graphics were all text characters if I remember, but I was fascinated and I wanted a computer so I could make games like that.
Either way, the developers of World of Goo are still screwed.

"Screwed" relative to what? The cloud-cuckoo-land business model where they have the same development and distribution costs and the same marketing effectiveness but a 0% piracy rate? That plan only works in your imagination.

Seems to me that the World of Goo developers might be doing pretty well by their business model. They've got 10% of their users paying $15. If they'd made an iPhone app 100% of their users would be paying something... but how much smaller is the universe of users, and would they have built as big an audience in that universe if they had charged $15 for a game? Here's something claiming to be a bestseller list:

http://thumblounge.com/topapps/

SimCity for iPhone seems to be pulling in $10 a unit... but SimCity is a legendary existing brand with no marketing problems. Somewhat obscurer games -- which nonetheless have pretty well-known existing brands -- are Enigmo and Bejeweled, which are charging $2 each. So: much less revenue per user, smaller potential universe of users, but a much lower piracy rate. Does it pay off? Should every new game be exclusive to the iPhone, now?

Now factor in this: Which game developers are now in a great position to get some big game company to sign a contract for the Wii, PS3, or XBox rights -- or to port their game to iPhone and leverage their piracy-built brand to get lots of people to pay $4.99 to play it again? Is it worth allowing pirates to copy your game onto half the machines in the world if one of those machines happens to be sitting near a manager at Electronic Arts?

I don't know the answers to these questions. But they would be interesting to explore. Without doing so, sitting around and complaining about the "unfairness" of a 90% piracy rate is just an unenlightening fantasy exercise, like imagining how much better you could fight if you were Colossus from the X-Men.
Because 'doing it right' means going from a 90% failure rate to a 60% failure rate.
Actually, rather than a false choice fallacy, my real point is that no matter how prepared you are, you can always hypothesize a situation for which your preparation is insufficient. Concluding that therefore, any given action (in this case, saving dollars) is a bad idea because it "might not be enough" is an invalid argument. One must argue about probabilities. I personally do not rate a hyperinflation of the US dollar without massive upheaval a very strong probability; your other cited examples weren't the foundation of the global economy. (I rate it much lower than either no hyperinflation, or hyperinflation with massive upheaval. The people stealing your goods in the massive upheaval case is likely to be the government, so merely "a gun" won't cut it.)
Was looking at your profile box; you should update it. =)
I love threads like this because they show who's who.

One of the many reasons I joined hacker news was to meet like minded people for possible future collaboration. Sometimes you really get to know each other here.

AFAIC, there is no gray area in ethical matters. Right is right and wrong is wrong. If you use situational ethics to justify what is clearly wrong, you may have made an interesting argument, but you have also done one other thing: you have automatically disqualified yourself from ever doing business with me (and probably many others here, I suspect.)

A little background:

I once wrote some software that a partner installed in a remote client site for which our company got paid. Unbeknowst to me, he also installed that software at another site and kept all the money.

I bought the used car from one of my partners at an agreed upon price and found out later that he had disconnected the speedometer for as many as 50,000 miles.

Another partner of mine had a side business selling hardware and negotiated a backroom deal with our customer that jeapordized our major project.

One IT director where I worked had software salesmen leave their documentation for "project review", photocopied it, and used it for our own functional specs, with no intention of ever buying anything.

Starting to get the idea of how "you wouldn't have made any money anyway" easily morphs into "fuck you"?

And as far as software pirating goes, I have only this to say:

If you steal from me, I will seek recourse any way I can. Period.

And for those of you who want to debate ethical considerations here at hacker news, you may want to think twice about the persona you end up revealing in this public forum.
You seem to be overlooking the scarceness issue. It's not about Just Another $20. It's about Just Another $20, And Another. And Another.

You are saying that it would be wrong for me to download something, even if the very act of doing so does not make anyone lose any money, take the food from anyone's mouth (etc etc)?
I thought you were talking about depriving OTHERS. Which is what matters, is it not?
A game is not an embedded system, a video game console (or a router, or any special purpose computer) is!

I see what he means, but it shouldn't be call embedded system. What about "embedded world", "contained world", "digital ecosystem"? I don't really like those names, though, sound too much from a 90s 'hacker' movies. What names would you use?
I'm french and living in japan. Japanese patent law is not much better than the us one (or at least from the little I learned about it) and in europe we are constantly fighting to prevent software patents...

Now in truth, while I used to be interested in this, I haven't looked much in the question in the last few years.
>>I personally do not rate a hyperinflation of the US dollar without massive upheaval a very strong probability; your other cited examples weren't the foundation of the global economy.

Well, I cited at lest some foundation to my argument - there were numberous cases where serious devaluation did not coincide with too much social disorder. I don't see how being "the foundation of global economy" makes Americans any more likely to riot and pillage. The only cases I can think of this happening in developed countries is an outright revolution, for which there does not seem to be basis in US right now.

You're quite right to worry about government doing the pillaging though. While probability is low, the consequences would be disastorous and if one is hedging their bets might as well include this possibility. Hence why I suggested keeping your goods abroad - that way you are diversified across two political systems.
Q: What’s an anagram of “Banach-Tarski”?
A: Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski
Low, like the piracy rate for X360 titles.
I'm not an expert, but what from what I've gathered the outcry over malpractice suits is misplaced. There truly is a massive amount of medical malpractice.
Scalable Datasets with Bloom Filters and Ruby
You're tunneling on one particular example of a potential accident. Instead, you should look at overall probability of getting in trouble across all possible scenarious, not just one particular case. Smaller vehicle might be twice as likely to avoid a hazard, but it may have 4 times the chance of being overrun by a truck, so it may still come out as a net loser in the end.

Imagine all the cases when you did not get into an accident because other drivers knew to stay away from you.
Because building viaweb again, the same way, wouldn't make any money. You have to do something a little different than pg did.
Both hackerspaces and coworking facilities are kind of operating on the "gym membership" model, where a lot of membership fees are pooled to get something that is shared but no one could afford to buy for just their own use.

However the people there don't totally overlap, any more than they totally overlap with Gold's Gym, TechShop, a Country Club, Hunting Lodges, organic co-ops, or any of the other things that people do in the same pattern.

Co-workers are there to make money, mostly either by freelancing or by doing a startup. They have in common that they have rejected (or been rejected by) the large corporate organization, and that their work consists mainly of typing on a keyboard and looking at a screen (instead of shaping metal or cooking food or something), so they have similar facilities requirements.

Hackers might like to make money, but the primary goals of the endeavor are expansion of ability and knowledge. Thus, hackerspaces can succeed, and then completely disappear as people wander off; they tend to have more counter-culture type themes; people often live there; since the part of hacking that is typing on keyboards and looking at screens is easy to do from home, the stuff in the hackerspace tends to be the stuff that needed money and physical space, so there is more hardware crap all over; and a portion of the people are generally interested in hacking human society in various ways, leading to the political interests and "hacktivism" and etc.

Both hackerspaces and coworking facilities are not new. HQ and BusinessSuites and many hotels are essentially more expensive co-working facilities with less emphasis on community, and the insurers who agreed to do all their business at Loyld's coffee house in 1600s London or the lawyers who all worked from the Inner Temple Inn even before that must have been doing something similar. I am pretty sure that CoD had a loft hackerspace in Boston in the early 1990s, and I know of a few other shared apartments and houses that were hackerspaces for a few years.

The basic idea is, if you want to do something, and you can't drop the cash to do it yourself, see if you can find some like-minded friends. "Co-founders" is what they are called in the startup context.
What's so great about being patriotic? I'm American by birth, so I guess my views are pretty uncommon but I just don't personally see the point in being proud of something that happened by complete chance, and I certainly don't feel like I owe the place I was randomly born something.

About taxes; I don't mind paying taxes if I see some benifit for it. In e.g. Sweden you pay 40-50%, but for this you have free healthcare and free education (plus lodging and food!) for as far as your willing/capable of going.

The US, on the other hand has taxes higher then I would pay in e.g. Switzerland, Lichtenstein, etc. while having a much worse health care system, a much worse public school system, etc., etc.

(NOTE: These comments don't have anything to do with Obama/McCain, just patriotism and taxes)
Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would otherwise not demand per-seat registration and kernel module license monitors. Thank you for depriving me of a great deal of software that would not cost $600 retail if it wasn't so hard to keep users from circulating it.
Yep. iTunes connect is down for maintenance so I can't even tell what's going on until tomorrow or so.
I find these anti-tax sentiments nuts. My recent history is essentially the same he describes. I currently employ 12 people.

My attitude is the polar opposite however. I worked so hard over the last couple years so that I could create the best environment on earth for me and my friends/employees. We have fun at work and because of that our products are excellent. There is no debt or guild about them having a good time while I wasn't, in fact I do have a good time now because they do.

Outside of the business, the reasons we live well, are directly related to the taxes we pay. Can you imagine stepping out of your office and hitting a dirt track? Taxes payed the paved street. Can you imagine that sprawling towns, such as the ones we live in, would function for a moment without Police and oversight? Do you think software businesses could be made outside of sprawling towns?

There is a certain basic infrastructure that needs to be in place to get the best out of people and that's what good government provides. I lived in Germany and Canada, both countries with welfare systems and health systems that the states now finally aspires to, and I have enjoyed (relatively) good government for my entire life.

If we cut out taxes of all kind we will end up without those basic infrastructure and the foundation on what the OP build his business will no longer exist.
Depriving how, exactly? I'm talking about non-sales. I am talking about people who literally DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE MONEY. If they download something, how can you count that as a 'lost sale' or a 'loss to piracy'?

You just can't. That's making something from nothing.
Adobe doesn't "hunt the 90%" because doing so would impose conditions so onerous on the remaining 10% that they would lose business. So instead, they jack the price of Illustrator and Photoshop up to the limit of what the 10% will pay.
For me it's Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon (Deluxe), without a doubt. That game was and to this day is (in the form of OpenTTD) like a highly addictive drug for me. If I start playing, I'm compelled to optimise my transport network for many hours. I got it when I was 11, and incidentally, was the first computer game I bought with my own money.

Oddly enough, when I introduced my girlfriend to the game, she instantly showed the same obsession with it. At university, when most other people were out drinking, we'd occasionally start playing Friday evening and play for most of the weekend.

Although I didn't start programming based on it (I started programming because soldering increasing networks of an increasing number of logic gates became tedious and expensive) I did start learning graphics programming because of it. I dream of creating a worthy successor to it one day. (I'm too scared to start, considering what playing it does to me)
Big Brother is not watching you
What Carriers Aren't Eager to Tell You About Texting
Personally I try to only comment the "why", as this is what you can't figure out from code. Having a good revision control system allows you to log the "why" why even better.

Comments themselves have, especially when you have lots of them, a really high danger of not getting updating and therefor becoming a liability.

When you write code you are supposed to write (1) the tests, (2) the documentation and (3) the actual code. Only one of those can make what you want to happen happen, and one of those is annoying if it doesn't get fixed but one of those wont do anything if completely wrong. At least not right away.
Most of the people who pirate Illustrator do not "literally have no money". They simply choose not to spend it on Illustrator. So they take it, and let people like me pay extra to make up for it.
A terabyte costs only $100? Someone had better tell NetApp.

I dispute that so-called professor's assertion about the size of a text message making it cheap; for transmitting data over long distances the limiting factor is packet latency; for tiny messages proportionally greater of the system's time is going to be spent waiting for packets to move on the wire. It's quicker and easier to move a gigabyte file 3000 miles than 10,000,000 100-byte files. Per byte of data, SMS traffic is probably the most expensive traffic to route and switch.
No, because the software title itself is still software, dongle or not; the exact same techniques crack dongle titles as crack downloadable shareware. Which is why very few titles use dongles.
I think that misses the point.

Suppose someone is selling clay pottery. They bought a machine to help them make it, but the clay itself is freely available. They just go down to the riverbed and grab a heap of clay. You could go get the very same clay. It's free; it's a public resource. We'll even say there is infinite clay.

Now then. The producer is using a totally free resource to produce clay pots. It takes a few hours to make each one, and they are very nice. But the only material in the product is a free resource. If you were to steal the pots without paying for them, the producer isn't out anything, because the producer can just go get more clay; no big deal. You've taken no money, you've taken no food. All you've taken is a clay pot, made out of a substance of which the producer has an infinite supply.

Is it okay to steal the pot?
MUDs.
Dependent choice is often enough to work with, and BT does not follow from DC.
Agreed. With that sort of backing you'd expect a bit more traffic than they have left.
I think 50k for a car is a bit ridiculous unless you're pulling in $150k+. For more modest salaries, a nice stylish car with some extras can be found with the VW Jetta, Saab 93, and Volvo S4. I drive a 93 and love it. It has, in my opinion, much better style than most American and Asian cars but is still cheaper than a German car. During GM employee price, I think the 93 started around 20k. I haven't looked at car prices during the auto market downfall, so I'm not sure where there at now.

The problem with any European car is upkeep. I can do my own brakes and other minor repairs, so I'm not so worried. If you don't have money to spare for repairs later on down the road, buy a Toyota or Honda. Parts and labor on European cars are a lot more than on more mass-produced cars.
Or maybe these people don't have the $600 for it either.
cancer-wiki.com

canceria.com
And maybe the small fraction of people who literally don't have $600 should spend $30 on Lineform, or help out with Inkscape, instead of just taking the $600 piece of software and pretending that the rest of the market doesn't exist.
How to raise VC funding: Tips from a professional VC negotiator
No. Because the producer isn't, once he's made his Clay Pot 1.0, simply using a replicator to run off infinite copies of it.

But if he WAS, then yeah, it'd be fine, providing you had no way to getting the pots yourself.
This, of course, is a strawman. The taxes being railed against are not the libertarian-esque ones like infrastructure and defense, but more controversial ones like corporate bailouts.
Thanks for your thoughts logjam
the incentive is not for you to "blow" money...the incentive is there for you to invest back into your business, grow and expand.
The bandwidth for the account was used up. Figures, seeing as the page is up here on news.yc.
Thanks, that explains a lot for me. I've slowly come to realize this is my problem, and have been surrounding myself with "finishers". It's akin to running a race, where you are always told to run through the finish, but once you see it, there is little drive to continue.
The two most interesting posts I've read in defense of gold are these two:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/who-hec...
and here
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/02/return-...

Both are much better than the Krugman piece.
When you say "exported to the rest of the world" what countries do you mean? I live in western Europe and health insurance must be covered by the individual, and the school system is a lot better then what I experienced in the US.
This is by far the most disturbing (and beautiful) animations I have ever seen in my life.
Yes, believe it or not, that seems to be what he's saying: that if someone demands $20 for something that costs them $0 marginally to provide you, it is in fact still wrong for you to take it without paying $20.
I'm not surprised that Japan's solution isn't very good (especially considering their some-what toxic property/business ownership laws), but it's a big step from "all the ones I'm familiar with suck" to "they all suck".
Even if you don't have $20? And it costs them EXACTLY $0 to provide you?
Poet among PlentyOfFish
That's debatable... if they store the footage and are able to produce it upon a law enforcement/court request then Big Brother is still watching, when it matters.

Might be a good opportunity for a real-time image analysis start up, though...
Iceland needs some serious answers to some serious problems. This is PR fluff.

Edit: I had written something much more critical before, but maybe Iceland needs the morale boost. It's unclear to me how $800k is going to save Iceland's economy through feminine values and environmentalism, but maybe it could work. However, I think it's more likely that Iceland will simply be forced to compromise and pay its debt for the next several decades selling energy and toxic dumps to smelt aluminum. I hope that they can do so without sacrificing their environment and culture entirely.

I already pity the scabs the heavy foreign industry will be pressuring to emigrate to Iceland...
I certainly don't have all the answers to this one and I certainly can't claim sainthood when it comes to software piracy. I have copied more than my fair share of programs, but, like Jeff, this was mainly done in my younger days. Now I don't. You can argue that when I did copy things it was in my younger days when I didn't have any money and so I justified it by saying it was OK because I wasn't hurting anyone, and now I don't because I have more money and can afford it. That is the argument that Jeff makes to explain why he doesn't pirate software anymore. But I think the "now I'm older" may have more to do with it than he realizes. I could logically say that I'm not depriving someone of a sale, but emotionally I could not reconcile getting value from something without reciprocating. So in some sense I feel I would be depriving the creators of realizing the value they have created for me. For me, the moral/emotional balance sheet wouldn't add up somehow. From a pure economic standpoint there should be no reason for me to pay for something when I can get it for free. However these arguments are complicated by the fact that I am a programmer by trade so perhaps I feel more of a need to reciprocate to my own kind than I would otherwise.
Fair point, but I assume they paid themselves a decent salary out of that 33 million. Plus they're incorporated so the worst they face is bankruptcy proceedings, which, again, will not have an impact on the individual members.

Perhaps we could talk about a failure on the part of the VCs that invested in them but even they have an excuse - they were supporting "the next Google".

The members of Cuil will come away with a significant high profile experience on their resumes and no doubt every member will have a story that will explain away the "failure" as someone else's fault. The members of Cuil have profited, learned and lost nothing - in other words, they are in an enviable position.
Ask HN: How do big web sites roll out new versions?
The operations of big websites fascinate me. Sites such as http://highscalability.com/ give an glimpse into the architecture of Amazon, Twitter, and other large systems, but leave out the operations side. So, can anyone explain how they deploy new versions of their sites? For instance, I can't imagine Amazon choosing to go down for even a minute, so what do they do? Am I wrong? Thanks!
Agreed. A PhD is an apprenticeship to become an academic. It doesn't actually say anything either way about how smart someone is (i.e. most people smart enough to get a good first degree could probably complete a PhD if they chose to). In industry a PhD is only of value when hiring into the R&D group (or in the case of investment banks, wanting to impress unsophisticated clients).
It really depends on the price elasticity; that is, how reducing price will affect overall demand as well as quantity demanded.

So, if it's cheaper, people might purchase it more, and it might spread virally more. But at some point that price reduction is no longer worth it.

Is $20 the sweet spot? I think $1 is nicer; but then again we learned from the iTunes App Store that $1 doesn't necessarily increase purchasing 5x. I bet that $5 or $10 could even be pulled off. Maybe that could increase profits.
All that I read in this article was: Slam dunk for economic hitmen in Iceland! Ding ding, here come the smelters!
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