skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's a weird blog post -- I don't know whether the author is a lawyer, but this isn't how most lawyers would go about writing a blog post about whether "look and feel" is copyrighted. The guy treats the Copyright Office web site as gospel, never mentions key Supreme Court cases, and only barely looks at the statutes. Yet, his ultimate conclusion is pretty much correct.

But, this guy has given me courage. If programmers are comfortable writing about law, maybe this lawyer should start writing about programming.
Of course it's not just stainless steel appliances - the thrust of the argument is that it's silly to think of buildings as more important than the people inside them.

Direct payment like you're advocating is a political non-starter. As paternalistic as it is, taxpayers don't like the idea that their money could be spent on anything, they want it to go only to the things they approve of.
I appreciate the hosting might be difficult but could we get links to Xvids or MP4 videos, even if it's a perma-seeded torrent?

I'd love to have these on my phone for the train in.
Code that runs with a purpose. Why is this not an application?

I get what you're saying, but a widget is a subset of application. Widget has all attributes of application (code that runs), and then has additional attributes (limited size & scope).

I don't think the word application has any semantics that limit it to "useful".
Didn't look close, but this gem might do it: http://twitter.rubyforge.org/

In addition, there are more generic atom parsing gems that make coding quick.

The great thing about ruby is the ease of making mini-dsls that make things like this trivial.
Yup, I filed issue #901:

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=90...

Seems like a serious bug, but I haven't seen any updates as yet.
Presumably, we're just meant to go look all these things up at the Cato Institute.
Could it be that the larger iPod Touch will be the new kindle for movies? If and when our bandwidth catches up to our foreign counterparts, renting movies via the embedded iTunes app will seem natural enough.

However, unlike books, movies are best experienced in an environment dedicated to it. So even if the iPod Touch is the next kindle for movies, something like Apple TV, or the numerous netflix set top boxes will most likely be the next step in movie rentals and purchasing.
I don't understand how that conclusion follows from the data. Amazon and Netflix have totally different shipping patterns and business models. Nobody forced Netflix to use USPS; if UPS/FedEx was better for them I'm sure they'd use them.
I've heard of people mailing themselves a copy of their work, and leaving the enveloped sealed. Presumably this would also be enough proof?

edit: here's a description of the concept: http://www.copyrightauthority.com/poor-mans-copyright/ ...doesn't sound like a very good solution
Christmas Eve was Facebook’s busiest day ever
Several states are trying to change their tax laws to collect sales tax on Amazon; if they succeed then Amazon can go ahead and buy Netflix.
Direct payment like you're advocating is a political non-starter.

It is the only non-distorting form of wefare possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income

.

taxpayers don't like the idea that their money could be spent on [just] anything

What if no one paid or owed discrete taxes? In other words, what if there were no taxes on income or consumption?

.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/ConsumptionTax.html

The political wrangling obscured the real issues underlying a question that has occupied economists and tax experts for many years—whether individuals should pay any taxes at all on capital income. Strange as it may sound, most economists would agree that having zero taxes on capital income is theoretically the best thing to do.

.

http://www.irefeurope.org/col_docs/doc_26_fr.pdf

Several studies even demonstrate that, from the point of view of maximizing economic growth, the long-run optimal taxation is zero. Milesi-Ferretti and Roubini (1994), for instance, show that under very general assumptions the optimal tax burden on labour and capital income is zero. Jones, Manuelli and Rossi (1993b) and Bull (1993) add that even consumption taxes ought to be equal to zero ... no such thing as a progressive tax system should be allowed to exist. More precisely, as Sir Mirrlees (1971) showed, the marginal tax rate at the highest level of income should be zero. And finally, in our eyes, there should be no capital income tax.
If I wanted to read another fluff piece about Apple I could've gone to wired.com
I wonder what their costs are to keep the site running.
A couple jobs ago I worked with DoD types so I know your pain... except that IE6 is shockingly recent for the military to be using ;)
Public economic policy is a hard problem, and with all Respect to Philip there are a couple of points from the list of promises to business managers that are somewhat contradictory.

1) world's lowest percentage of GDP (among developed nations) spent on government; only with a low spend will investors have faith that taxes will stay low - This has the consequence of bad infrastructure, an uneducated workforce, less investment in basic sciense which lays the ground for innovation and high-tech industries, etc. A country like Sweden has a high percentage of GDP spent on government, and yet it has managed to create companies such as Saab, Ikea, Ericsson, Electrolux, Hasselblad, Hennez and Maurtitz, Mysql, Volvo, etc.

2) corporate governance that relieves investors from worry that profits will be siphoned off by management - This is one of those things that sound easy but turn out to be extremely hard. History shows that when you try to protect investors from fraud, mismanagement, etc. all you get is more red tape and, bigger government and make things harder for small companies. Sarbannes Oxley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act) was an attempt to solve this very problem and it turned out to be a disaster.

3) world's best school system and best educated workers - America has a long way to go here. The problem is that it takes many years to get educated workers: You start in kindergarten and get educated workers 15 years later. Besides empirical studies show that a good education system requires considerable public investment, and thus a larger percentage of GDP spent on government.

4) world's cheapest transportation system and one that is virtually free from uncertainty caused by congestion - again this requires substantial public investment, and is a long term commitment. You will have to spend a good amount of GDP on infrastructure and will only reap the rewards after a decade.

I have to admit that this reads a bit like when you hear politicians talk about technology - it is apparent that their understanding of the domain is not very deep.
Facebook Is No Friend of Power.com
These are nothing but assertions of fact which are really unsubstantiated opinions. It is striking to watch people engage in this level of intellectual onanism.

I dont mind people making arguments that are reasoned and carefully successively built. But to just start with one opinion, pretend it is a fact, and then build another assertion on top of that is a bit much. I do not believe that you have to have a degree in economics to opine about economics, but whatever your arguments are, at least make them as arguments as opposed to "I am smart so everything I say must be true" style pronouncements.
"Limited Life Experiences + Overgeneralization = Advice" - Paul Buchheit
I got the impression we weren't the only ones. Good to see a bug filed, will star it!

Were you ever able to find an isolated repro case?
From http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/webtexts/stat06.htm:

Normal in statistics generally refers to the gaussian distribution or the "normal" way we would expect errors to be distributed.

When Mandelbrot says: "Granted, the bell curve is often described as normal—or, more precisely, as the normal distribution. But should financial markets then be described as abnormal?", he has reason. But I don't think he even meant it as a very serious remark.
The man speaks the truth.
So, what is the best way to over come this? If I already have a career in the suburbs and a family, how do I emulate this environment?

That's the general case, which might be the easier one to address. In my specific case, I have a career in the suburbs, and I'm about to get married and probably start a family. How do I go about finding/creating a more stimulating environment? What do I look for in recognizing the highly stimulating environments? I feel like I'm in a medium environment now, and outside of the suboptimal online contact, it seems to be moving in the wrong direction.
There are a few cars that fit that bill other than the "seat at least six" part.
like with communistic propaganda - people are having weird problems not a political system that doesn't work.

Or as Easter Germany chief of communist party said in the 50s - "The Party is really disappointed with the people in this country". If M$ is disappointed with their customers reactions to their flaky products - let M$ got to hell.
The only alternative is to not use Twitter apps. Until there's a real alternative (OAuth), people will be giving away their passwords.
Android installed and running on Eee PC
"Is this going to keep Windows competitive with OS X?"

I think you got that backwards. Windows is the one with 90% of the market share. OSuX will be playing catchup for a long, long time.
You're right, I should have realized we won't have to wait for years for it. Microsoft certainly is in a bit of a hurry.

But since it's going to be a re-branding of Vista, why should anyone - especially HN - be excited about it?

It bothers me in general that hackers, 'morally enlightened' people, are excitedly discussing Microsoft, a morally corrupt company, and their offerings.

Remember that thing where Microsoft had bribed countries/companies to vote for OOXML to get it ratified by ISO?

- Maybe a month after that, it was like it never even happened. Hackers were talking about being interviewed by Microsoft, excited about a chance to work there, and so on..

</rambling>
Spot on. Many of Greenspun's points make intuitive sense and thus seem like a good argument on their own, but they are quite incompatible. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

I really like your point #1, and it's the most important. I'm not sure if there are empirical analyses to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). It lifts the whole economy up on its own, and makes it more competitive in the world, which is very important re: Greenspun's comment about today's globalized world being very different compared to the 1930s.

As for the rest... those are nice to haves, but I think that lowering taxes to encourage foreign investment is an asinine comment. There will be low investment in the next few years, as he comments, if there is a poor political and economic environment for it, not if there are unfavorable tax conditions. Investors are sitting on mountains of cash right now; if the government creates policies and programs that incentivize people to put that cash to work (i.e. government/private sector co-sponsored infrastructure projects) then they will.
Application autodiscovery via website metadata
In the same way that we can find a website's RSS feed via a browser's address bar if they add the appropriate metadata tags, a new set of rel types (e.g. "app/facebook") would let users know if a website has alternative access methods -- an iPhone app, a MySpace widget, a Facebook application, a Yahoo app.
Here's a choice quote, just so you know where he's coming from philosophically:

"If the product kills someone with a salary of $50,000 per year and 20 working years remaining, that is approximately $1 million in liability. [...] Punitive damages must be eliminated."

Somehow, I'm just having a hard time believing that the challenges we face are due to businesses not investing because they're afraid of transit union strikes, or businesses not building products because of our failure to adopt a Rand-ian strategy for valuing human life.
You have a point, but unfortunately, the only discipline which claims any real insights into fixing the economy is economics. You know, the "dismal science." It is the discipline in which the introductory books outline the basic rules. Supply, demand, production possibilities curves, all that sensible, good stuff. It all makes sense --- experts in economics should be able to wisely guide nations and markets, right?

Then, the intermediate-level books and classes teach you that some of that intro-level supply-demand stuff is pretty wrong. It only operates under all sorts of unrealistic conditions, kind of like equations in high school physics which disregard friction. So intermediate econ outline all sorts of complications which supposedly help in the real world.

Then, in the seminar-level classes, you learn that none of the intermediate-level theories really ever worked except by accident, and no one who tries to predict or model real-world economic conditions agrees on anything.
Based on the article posted here on rent control the other day,it does indeed seem as though greenspun uses the same unsubstantiated assertion strategy for building arguments as does the cato institute. I guess I have to give him credit for being no worse than folks that get paid to write this crap.
Do You Wanna Hook Up? - example of a facebook connect app
The better alternative is to use random passwords (from a bookmarklet, for instance) so that you'll have no psychological resistance to changing it to ditch a crappy service.
I don't think it matters as much how great a percentage of the GDP government spends, so much as how it is spent. Is the government spending money in ways that produce net positive social return? This becomes much harder as the absolute size of the bureaucracy grows. It is harder to manage a multi-trillion dollar budget than it is to manage Sweden.

The United States has a large amount of military spending and redundant bureaucracy, so we have high taxes and low social benefit. For example, the US is usually either #1 or #2 in the world in the amount of money spent per pupil in public schools, and yet the results are not good.
Denmark has unionized teachers, and has a long history of public schools. Danes have invented C++(Bjarne Stoustrup), Turbo Pascal, C#, Dephi (Anders Hejlsberg) and Ruby on Rails (DHH). For a country with a population half of New York I think that's pretty impressive. I can't help to notice when working with foreigners that Danes have a much better knack at understanding a problem domain and coming up with creative solutions. This is widely accredited to the system of public schools that encourage all students to help each other, argue about possible solutions and come up with the best one.
I still contend a beginner practice project can be built around some of these bigger problems. Why not?

The essential quality of a beginner practice project is that it is guaranteed to be finished quickly. There are many reasons for this.

It's important to get the positive feedback -- the warm glow that comes from a finished thing. Otherwise you just become frustrated and sad and you'll quit instead of sticking around long enough to stop being a beginner.

It's important to test the full stack -- you want to practice the stuff that happens near the end of a project as well as the stuff at the beginning. Often it's only when you try to launch the "finished" product that you discover the terrible flaws in your original design. Often, the features of the new tool or technique that you're trying to learn will only make sense after you've experienced every part of the design cycle.

As a beginner, you are really underqualified to choose an appropriate project. You have no idea how good you are. You have no idea how hard the hard problems are, or why. Best to make sure that your badly-chosen project is a short and sweet one.

Having said all of that: Of course it might be possible to put beginners to work on tiny, solveable, easily-shipped pieces of these larger problems. That's what a teacher's job is. Why don't you write out a set of suggested projects and suggest them to some beginners?
FTA: but the bigger question is when will Twitter users decide to stop handing over their passwords to unvetted third parties who may abuse those details?

Won't the service need to gather a significant number of users/passwords and remain secure for sometime before they are vetted? So won't some people then be giving their details before it is officially vetted.
This doesn't sound right - citation?
The SitePoint sale seems like a red herring; it's not like you trusted the original app developers any more than the buyers.
With all due respect to the people I like that work on Twitter, it's not like Twitter itself is "vetted". There's no "vetting" to be done here.
>"I'm not sure if there are empirical analyses to support this, but I believe that investing in education has the greatest returns (up to the limit when your whole population is educated maximally--but that's a far ways off from where we are right now). "

Most people don't get this point, but the US spends A LOT of money on education, more than most countries. "More money" is the easy answer, the one that politicians like to use. But I don't think the returns of spending more federal money on the current educational system are positive.

Here is a chart comparing US education spending with the performance of its students on international math tests. I don't think you can look at stats like this and say "more money" is the answer.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/features/issues/charts/Ed_K...
I think a netbooks's screen is too small to use it as a convential desktop.

This just got me thinking. If Apple is rumored to launch a Netbook and a Ipod Touch with a bigger screen, maybe they are going to launch both in the same device. That is, Apple's netbook and the new bigger Ipod touch will be one.

Something like the new OLPC prototype, with a virtual keyboard on the other screen. It would be the Nintendo DS killer.
A small business is making money... :o)
I think this needs to be read under the same terms as his blog - "A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…". Of course it's up to you to decide which this is...
I find it interesting that TFA is a response to someone harping on about the changes being made. I can see both sides of it in that there's obviously a need to provide an improved experience and at the same time reduce complexity, yet people want 'different but the same'.

The interesting thing I find about TFA though is that the arguments he's coming up with in favour of Windows 7 are all similar to the things that have been present in Linux and OSX for a while. The switch to Visa/Win7 from XP is significant in terms of experience, it's so significant that the switch to OSX/Linux may be less so for some users. I get the impression though that if Microsoft had a carbon copy of Ubuntu or OSX's desktop the guy in TFA would still be singing its praises.
Greenspun goes by "philg"
The suburbs outside Arlington county near DC have great public schools as well. They regularly send their students to Ivy League schools and many go on to become CEOs and Senators.

I don't see what either example has to offer a diverse, sprawling nation of 300,000,000 people where school unions often block any education reform proposal that is not "more money for schools".
Genetic Algorithms: Cool Name & Damn Simple
Yeah, that's one - there's actually two APIs going on here. One's the search.twitter.com API, and one's the official Twitter API. The search API is used for finding them, and the Twitter API is used to fetch profile images and follower counts.
Good age! She's interactive now.

Before you buy any books on parenting strategies, you need this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Doggy-Picture-Book-Thingy-Things/dp/07...
Think about it this way: I take two coins out of my pocket and hold them inside my hand so that neither of us has seen them. I show you the coin in my left hand and you see that it is tails, what are the odds of the coin in the other hand being heads? 50%. This is the chance of a head/tail combo in this case.

I now put the coins back into my pocket, shuffle them about, and again take them out inside my hands. This time I look inside both my hands, not letting you see, and tell you (truthfully) that at least one is tails. Given that information, you can deduce three mutually exclusive possibilities each of equal probability - both are tails, only the coin in my right hand is tails or only the coin in my left hand is tails. Hence we have the odds in this situation of 2/3 for a head/tail combo.

It is easy to see that the first situation is akin to knowing that a particular child is female, whilst the second is akin to knowing that at least one of the children is female. Also, in either case it does not matter if the coins are distinguishable - one could be a euro and the other a pound.
One of the few problems the Cato people don't have is being strong, reasoned, effective debate opponents.
Are Default Character Sets Harmful?
Interview with Alex Payne of Twitter
You're hinting at a very interesting problem here: The absolute size of bureaucracy.

It seems ( I have no data to back this up) that the efficiency of bureaucracy decreases exponentially with it's size. This is obviously a bigger problem for large countries such as the US. There are advantages to size (setting the global agenda, advantages in areas where absolute amounts of money matter (for instance military - your military is twice as good if you spend twice the money no matter how large your population. Roughly...) . , etc.). Whether these advantages outweigh the disadvantage of a large bureaucracy I don't know.
lol.I am not going to opine about their entire body of work. But if you think they never have the problem of which I speak then clearly you didnt read the rent control article which explains new york's and other big cities high rents on rent control. Whether you agree with rent control or not, this is an insane unsubstantiated assertion.
Agreed.

My little project, Twistori (http://twistori.com/), is served up as a static file, which is periodically compiled from a SQLite database of scraped tweets (which is in turn created by a Ruby cronjob).

It took about 14 man-hours (1 working day x 2 people) from initial concept -> completion.
I don't have any empirical studies to back up my point, either, but the way spending is allocated by the US government is anything but rational. I have severe doubts that adding $1 more of revenue into the system will produce greater than $1 of benefits.

There is something to be said for the design choice of federalism; pushing all possible decisions down to the smallest unit of population effected. However, our government has moved away from this since the Roosevelts time in power.
Using Git to Update a Personal Website
Perl 6, Python 3