skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This simple issue shows the big, huge, gaping problem with the future of digital media.

In the past, the labls/publishers/whoever wanted to create content, be able to sell it, and have a monopoly on it. The way to do this was to sell physical instances of the creation, like books, DVDs, and CDs. This worked wonderfully, because it's simple for people to understand giving money over to receive a physical good, which you own, and which you can e.g. later sell, or transfer to your kids.

In short, the old way was: "buying" == "getting a physical copy of the media".

The problem is, since digital media arose, there has been a slow shift in the meaning of buying content. The producers are acting like "buying" no longer means "getting a physical copy of the media". They're acting like it means "having access to consume the media". E.g., buying a song from Queen means I get to listen to the song. It has nothing to do with having the physical file.

In other words, the new model is: "buying" == "getting the (legal) ability to consume the media".

This is true in many ways, both good and bad for the consumer.

The good is that, e.g., when I buy an audiobook on Audible, the physical file is irrelevant. I can delete it, and download it again. It's my ability to get the book that they're selling. I can have many physical copies of the book, on my computer/iPhone/laptop/whatever, and they're fine with it. The bad is that a lot of the rules for physical media are no longer relevant - I can't sell it, I can't lend it, I can't let people inherit.

Actually, this doesn't bother me much. Because I don't think of owning an Audiobook in the same way I think of owning a physical book. My thoughts are "I pay $10 to hear this book, once". Of course, this says a lot about me, because I don't have this same thought about ebooks - I do equate them to physical books.

My prediction is that the world will be going in a direction in which physical ownership of digital media is irrelevant. This has to happen, because of the way digital media works. People will be buying the "ability" to listen to songs, not buying actual songs. Programs like Amazon's "lend books" will be seem very antiquated and irrelevant. Arguably, the way these will work is by buying subscriptions to services, i.e. $10 for all the music you can listen to ala Spotify. I think this is the only way the world can go which will make sense to consumers, although I fear for the publishers.
I'm quitting my job and moving to the Bay Area. Anyone looking for an intern?
I am a recent college graduate with a B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and over the past summer I’ve been working as a lab tech at my school. I’ve realized though that this is not what I want to do. Throughout school I’ve taken a few CS courses, and worked on a couple random web side projects (https://github.com/aaronroth), and I would really love to transition into working as a web developer. I’ve decided to stop waiting around, so I am leaving my job and moving to Bay Area this October. I’m hoping that the move will push me even harder to make this transition work.

Currently, I have a basic skill level in some common web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP, and Python. I am also familiar with jQuery and JSON. I am a very hard worker and looking to build on what I know.

If anyone needs an intern or junior web developer, please let me know! I’m very open to any opportunity, and I think working at a startup would be awesome.

Contact: aaronroth28 at gmail dot com.

Thanks for reading!
The current version of iOS is easily jailbroken and f.lux is a free package, available right from cydia without any detours. It's not as smooth as a built-in solution would've been, but much better than I ever expected.
This is different because of what is being cut. I can't remember having used one of those "goodies". They end up like the "toys" that come in cereal boxes: junk you throw out every Spring. And something as personal as a case is something stylish people would rather pick out themselves.

Firstly, we're basically talking about the mission statement of the retail stores. It was originally to provide a great experience. Now it is maximize profit. This is definitely a big deal. No longer giving away junk was not a change of Apple's mission statement.

What does that mission statement mean to the customer? Well... I would lean towards believing many customers are loyal to Apple due to quality. It is logical to think Apple believe[s,d] in quality because it lends to customer satisfaction, which lends to brand loyalty. If customer satisfaction is no longer their driving motivation... does that mean Apple has killed the very reason their customers are loyal to them? Those "goodies" probably were never considered the very reason Apple has brand loyalty. If it was, Apple was able to change that reason to a new reason (quality).

Secondly, how much a customer can trust the word of a salesman is often determined by whether the salesman is commission or not... there's a reason people pay attention to it. This is far larger than no longer giving away items which were never used & thrown away. Although the employee don't seem to be paid via commission now, they basically still are (points tallied on how many high profit items are sold).
Never heard of it. Because it is silverlight, never would have been able to run it. Sounds like it did a lot less according to http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/14/popfly-and-pipes/

Lemme guess, you worked on it?
related: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
Someone has to fill the coffee ;-). Jokes aside, having someone else ask you questions about your software is a pretty good way to become familiar with it.
Some more optimizations that come to mind:

- You could also calculate which color is the most used color in the image, and make that the background color of the table. If 10% of the image have that color (for example white, in a logo) you could leave the class or id out of the table for these pixels.

- if two or more columns have the same color in a row, one could add a colspan. Since the word is rather long, it makes only sense from 2 columns onward, I guess, but if, say, the first 100 pixels of the image portrait a white line, instead of having 100 x '<td id='ff'></td>' you'd have <td id='ff' colspan=100></td'.

- The same could be done with column for colspan, albeit a bit more difficult.

- If there're certain pixel color patterns that appear throughout the image (say a white pixel next to a black pixel) one could create a css .before and .after rule for these, that defines the pattern for one td, making the 2. unnecessary.

There's probably more.
There's a lot of other tweaks which make iOS a much nicer place. More recently, Nitrous is a pretty amazing tweak which enables the Nitro JS engine for non-Safari apps. Speeds things up big time.

Aside from that you can have a way of having a particular browser open besides Safari, scrobble your iTunes tracks automatically, password protect apps, have a much better lockscreen experience, much better folder experience, theming, retina-fy low res apps, have a download manager, etc.

For me personally, there's plenty of reasons to jailbreak.
Wow - evolution has been directly observed and is the overwhelming consensus among biologists, if not among fundamentalists whose theology is threatened by it... yet you have carefully impugned its existence by referencing "fantastic parts," as if evolution were a matter of unicorns or Roswell or something.

Go learn about Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, then come and lecture us on how evolution isn't really a fact.

I will never understand why basic facts of biology are supposedly left-wing.
5 Real Robots Made From Everyday Stuff
Of course! No other reason to mention a Microsoft project that's been dead for four years otherwise :)
Feature creep - that is what I'm guilty of.
I have to disagree with his first example. He says "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features".

The first example is "Abortion is murder". He then says, "If you define murder as 'killing another human being', then abortion is technically murder."

The problem is that in this case, his "if" applies to roughly 56% of the US population, as they define murder that way. In other words, he needs to select a category that has a unanimous agreement about its features instead of selecting a category that has a myriad of definitions and then choosing his own favorite definition and its corresponding archetypes.
I think I've read the term "growth hacking" too many times between the post and the comments and now it sounds like something a bad oncologist does.

I should go to bed.
I recommend this talk if you're in the Bay Area and interested in distributed systems. Jay is great, and he really knows the stuff.

Also, check out the Kafka design document. It's an excellent read:

http://incubator.apache.org/kafka/design.html
> because no one on those forums seems to be having any of your problems

My most enlightening online experience is probably hanging out in #polyphasers for a while. It's a tiny echo chamber full of people trying überman sleep and similar sleep rhythms without any success (in the time I've been there). Yet everyone only blames themselves for not having enough discipline.

(Not implying that early rising is as dubious as überman sleep, and even the latter has its use cases for a day or two.)
You can't create culture with edicts, culture is an emergent property of the community that either is supported or fought by the power structure at hand. A corporation is like an ecosystem, you can create the conditions that will allow a healthier culture to flourish but it will likely take a huge amount of time for that culture to take hold, assuming that there aren't other roadblocks still in the way such as entrenched middle management with different ideas about the place they want to work.
This idea pretends that all arguments turn on factual assertions - never framing or non sequiturs - and don't have any meaningful social context.

For example, in a public argument, if you get too far drawn into proof that you don't STILL beat your wife, you will inadvertently establish in the minds of the audience that you used to do so; moreover, your excess of protest may actually be taken as evidence that you do beat your wife.

If someone poses such framing you are really remiss not to address the framing or refuse to dignify such a malicious and dishonest line of argument with response.
I remember I've studied this a while back, but the exact answer eludes me. I suppose they use techniques akin to what JVM uses (see [1]).

[1] www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dgrove/papers/oopsla01.pdf
sure. but it seems to me that this woman was hired with a mandate to 'make the place more google-like' -

I'm with you; my belief is that 95% of leadership is picking the right people, but, then, I'm a bad leader.

It seems like it's worth a shot. I mean, Yahoo has tried and failed many other strategies.
Nike Free Run,Nike Free Run 2,Nike Free Run 3
you're probably right, and it sounds like a nice idea to create an exception wrapper that on exception does `import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()`.

However, having worked with both pry and ipython / ipdb, the difference in responsiveness and performance is quite significant and very noticeable between the two. ipython / ipdb feels faster by an order of magnitude. The most obvious difference is tab-completion. Perhaps this is enhanced even more comparing rails to django (the stacks I used pry and ipdb with, respectively)...

I guess at least tab-completion slowness is down to the fact that by its nature ruby has far many more functions that can run on any object than python, and hence more options to tab-complete?
I've tried various Facebook iPad apps and they all sucked. I think it's simply that Facebook has so many features and changes at such a rapid rate that it becomes unfeasible to write an app for it. Compare that to the wealth of Twitter- and RSS clients and weather apps. They're all gorgeous front ends around conceptually simple data.
> Please - this is not about hacking, this is not about technology, this is not even about entrepreneurship

Sorry, but it is. It's a masterclass in how to do a bait and switch. Start out completely open, let open developers build your community, then shut them all off once you don't need them any more.
I do a lot of these things. It's called taking in technical debt. Debt has it's place in this world, especially in startups.
I'm certainly no cultist of MVC, but I would tend to agree with them that tightly coupling presentation details to the basic model is usually unwise.
I remember how happy I was the first time I really grasped my nads.
If we came from monkeys, why are the monkeys still there??
Isn't Go's approach quite similar to what Wirth used in Oberon? (Which the Plan 9 guys really like to copy in general)
I hate to say this, but I found this article absolutely terrible.

All of these "Martin Luther King IS ...", "George Washington WAS ...", etc. statements (form: Noun TO BE Adj.), really remind me of the arguments in favor of E-Prime and its associated benefits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime. The author likely intended this, of course, but reinforces exactly the same kind of thinking and tone in nearly every other sentence! (Do a quick scan for the verb to be)

Some might call E-Prime a fairly extreme philosophy / didactic tool, to be sure ;), but one shouldn't overlook that this article undermined its very own core point ("don't make a certain class of categorical / binary Aristotelian statements") through its very language (e.g., the phrase 'Now, because most arguments are rapid-fire debate-club style, sometimes it's still useful to say "Affirmative action isn't racist!"').
Apple-Samsung jury foreman says evidence 'spoke overwhelmingly'
You get what you pray for. God says, "Kill the niggers, India-niggers first."
I played with the same kind of hack back in the nineties and then in JavaScript+HTML table in 2001.
http://plea.se/me/galen_man.htm (it was hideously slow to scroll down back then)

http://plea.se/me/mandelnikala.html
Founders of Diaspora, Intended as the Anti-Facebook, Move On
ok, it's actually a demo of Sinne.getUserVideo() [0] (a high level abstraction of getUserMedia() made simple) plus transform:rotateY(-180deg);

it's probably not going to be the next big billion dollar business, but it might come in handy if you have a big VC meeting and just ate a burrito and want to know have bad the state of your face is. (well, it's one of the use cases i had in mind) - hope you like it.

[0] https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/Sinne
Keep a programming journal
You certainly aren't helping anyone on HN except Republicans with vapid remarks like 'republicans can't read'.
Humans and monkeys came from a common ancestor. The evolved independently from that point.
>Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them.

Heh. well, I've been on call forever. Nearly everyone I know that works at google is also on-call. (they seem to have a hierarchy, where the more valuable folks don't get called very often.)

So yeah, company cell phone? yeah, sure, that is expected. I think the thing is that most people think of an iphone as nicer than your average cellphone. From that perspective, e.g. we are going to call you anyhow, they might as well give you a nice cellphone to carry around.

(that said, a cellphone without a keyboard is of limited utility. I need to be able to type and see the screen at the same time. SSH on iphone doesn't cut it.)
Evening Edition, an afternoon paper for a mobile world
This post has so much flame-bait in it I almost wonder if it's a meta-post-- a practical joke to see how many people go after these various politically-charged statements rather than comment on the article itself.

I'll assume it's not though. In which case, I really don't see how adding more politically-charged examples to this discussion, or any other for that matter, is at all productive.
Exactly. It's not just the existence of the endpoints, though. It's also having developed the client from the first release to be HATEOAS-aware which makes the whole thing interesting. If you do that you'll have conventions in the client code which, even if you're not doing automated discovery, will make it easier to add functionality to a new release.
I'm guessing the forum simply blocks all img tags
What Happens to Our Brains During Exercise (and Why it Makes Us Happier)
This may be horribly off-topic, but your link to your old tripod site made me nostalgic for my own preteen tripod/angelfire/geocities days. They don't seem to be live anymore, nor can I find them on the Internet Archive WayBack machine. I suppose they are gone for good, but do you have any other suggestions for trying to find them? I heard there was a huge dump of GeoCities available as a torrent, but I don't recall that I ever used my GeoCites page as much as the others.
cgdb is a nice visualization frontend too: <http://cgdb.github.com/>;
> I realize that epidemiology can be sloppy science, but it's the only way we can even hope to tackle immensely important questions like this.

First, that's false -- straight-up false. We can violate ethical guidelines and get terrific, reliable science. All we have to do is abandon our principles, and victimize innocent subjects. Example the Alabama Syphilis study:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~thabif/newfiles/tuskee.html

The above is a despicable example of subject treatment, but it falsifies your claim.

Meanwhile, without abandoning our principles, we can use animal models, as is done with many kinds of study -- heart disease, cancer and many others.

> This study is one of possibly many future studies that will attempt to etch away at the null hypothesis "there is no relationship between intelligence and smoking marijuana before adulthood".

The study under discussion is a sham masquerading as science, it has no scientific value, the design is so poor that no reliable conclusion can be drawn from it. The level of control for confounding factors is nonexistent. Apart from that central design flaw, both the subjects and the experimenters know who the pot smokers were. It's a joke pretending to be science, and abandons every recognized experimental discipline.

The study certainly doesn't "etch away" at the null hypothesis, because there are too many pedestrian explanations for the outcome that aren't even in the thinking of the experimenters.

> One day ten other studies like it may provide a more convincing story, or may disprove the idea altogether.

Disproof is also impossible with such a sloppy study design. I can't believe what you're saying.

> Until then, this is probably the best research on the question yet.

Or the worst, and both claims can be true at once. Your remark reminds me of a Woody Allen joke. His girlfriend says, "But sex without love is an empty experience!" Allen replies, "Yes, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best!" As meaningless science goes, this study is one of the best.

As I said earlier, I've been reading such studies for about 35 years, and (a) they all suffer from fatal design flaws, and (b) they always support the prejudices of the granting agencies and/or those of the experimenters. Also, important, studies that come to the opposite conclusion, or that don't come to a clear conclusion, tend not to be published.

> It is what will help get scientists further funding on the topic. And that's why it's important.

More bad science is important? I ask you to think about what you're saying. This study is trash masquerading as science. Anyone can design and carry out an equally sloppy study (and psychologists do this all the time) that comes to the opposite conclusion, through the simple expedient of ignoring the many confounding factors inherent in retrospective studies that don't have a control group or the kind of experimental discipline that can lead to reliable scientific conclusions.

This is not science, it is psychological science.
This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric "arguments", he's building a huge strawman.

Take abortion - according to opponents a fetus is a living human being, and actively and purposefully killing a living human being is murder in the Charles Manson style. The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human, it's that fetuses aren't independent human beings, they're an extension of the mothers body. It's really not a relevant metric for wether murder is murder if there are grieving friends and family, or if people live in fear - it seems every other crime show deals with the murder of a miserable, lonely homeless guy or a prostitute. According to this argument, that's not murder at all.

The eugenics example is even worse. In the 1930s, people were absolutely certain eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread, then Hitler showed the world how bad that could go. To deny "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it" as a guiding principle seems rather hubristic to me.

"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" is a different beast: some people have decided, not through science, but though politics, that material differences between men and women (or the races for that matter) doesn't exist. Thus science finding otherwise is unacceptable. Of course it's a bad argument to reject science because it doesn't fit your political agenda.
Users urged to disable Java as new exploit emerges
I like the acknowledgement that we aren't all perfect—not even as close to perfect as we tell ourselves and others we are. It actually reminds me of this collection of Isaac Asimov stories I've been reading called The Edge of Tomorrow, with each essay or story featuring a scientist. Asimov denies a deliberate connecting theme, but what I keep noticing is how scientists are just humans too; they aren't these ultra-intelligent, purely rational subspecies. Similarly, programmers may have an understanding of computers that others lack, but we are just as prone to imperfections, mistakes, and inefficiencies even though we work in our own domain of expertise. Acknowledging that seems more useful and honest (to me) than claiming that a certain methodology will make you capable of coding the perfect program the first time around or something.
Personally I've decided to accept that buzzwords and titles will proliferate, and that this is impossible to prevent. Isn't the whole not-caring-about-titles thing part of startup culture? As long as you can do your job, I don't care if your business card says growth hacker or marketzilla or SEOgasaurous. You might face greater scrutiny if your resume says "Rails Ninja" on it, but in the end it's about whether you can program, and whether a Rails Ninja is a good culture fit when everyone else is a Javascript Pirate.

Doing due diligence (i.e, a proper interview) for a hire means figuring out the truth behind the bullshit. If you don't actually have enough knowledge to differentiate between a bullshit $TITLE and a good candidate who happens to call themselves $TITLE, then you don't have enough information to make a good hire anyway.

Hell, the titles are helpful sometimes. Candidates non-ironically self-identifying as a trendy title can help you filter out idiots. They're doing you a favor.
My personal opinion on the causes of the inability to keep virtuous habits is that people lack external stimuli, review and pressure.

Talk to teenagers who train for swimming competitions. They have to be in the swimming pool by 6:30 or 7:00. This means that they, their instructors, their parents, even the swimming pool janitors will have to wake up at around 5:00 or 5:30, every day for years and years. Unsurprisingly most of the swimming athletes wake up at those ungodly hours and do that for years.

I suppose that the thing that helps swimmers wake up early is the social stigma that would arise from being late. Being late means disappointing your instructor and wasting the time of your parents and all the people that work at the swimming pool. This pressure, if well balanced, keeps you in check, even after the Hawthorn effect fades away.