skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "life" is sufficient. With that, someone can capitalize on their work for their entire career. Anything past death simply serves to allow offspring to ride the laurels of their parents.

As for corporations, I'd be open to a pay-as-you-go system like you propose, only I'd make the payment grow at some exponential percentage. Say the first year costs $1 and the fee grows by 25% a year. Adjusted for 3% inflation, the fees would be something like:

Year Fee/yr
1 $1
10 $5.71
25 $104.17
50 $13,169
100 $210 million
150 $3.36 trillion

This would put a natural limit on corporate copyright, due to their willingness to pay. With this system, Disney would pay $5,659,799 this year for the Mickey Mouse copyright (assuming it started at 10 cents in 1928, which is assuming 3% inflation backwards from now). By 2033 this would be a billion dollars a year... by 2064 a trillion. (Again, at 3% inflation, a trillion dollars in 2064 is like $200 billion today).
> Uh, what? All those facts seem pretty consistent with artists losing sales due to piracy.

All? I don't see the relationship between piracy and the number of songs on an album or song length.

Music competes competes with other things for attention and "wallet share". For example, online gaming is exploding among the population that is not buying as much music.
That was fixed (without comment) in the recent Security Update for Leopard.
Doing mobile (phone) health right
At this point I'm not sure deregulation is the answer to anything.
Ask HN: What blogging engine do you use at your startup?
I'm looking towards starting a blog as an offshot of some business ideas I've been having. To that end I need some recommendations and thought I would pick your mind.

What blogging engine do you use at your startup? What advantages does it have?
I'd be hosting the blog myself. I considered rolling my own, would you recommend/discourage trying that?

Thanks for any advice, I'll keep HN posted as things progress.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I like free. If you are maxing out your free quota (which I'm not even close to), the CPU adjustment means what was free will cost you (46.30 - 6.5 cpu/hours) * $0.10 = $3.98/day or about $120/mo. The bandwidth adjustment drops 9GB/day at 0.10/GB in, 0.12/GB out -- that's $1.98/day or about $60/mo. There's also the issue of how much CPU burn a datastore write takes:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_frm/t...

On the other hand, I want a well-supported platform from Google and if reducing the free stuff means they have a good business model, can hire more engineers, etc, then that's a good thing.
Rack::Cache is neato for development, but you're better served using Varnish for production -- it acts as a caching reverse proxy to multiple machines, is insanely fast and battle-tested, it can be configured to serve stale content if the backend becomes unreachable, it supports ESI, and more!

And yes, Sinatra & Rack are super cool.
The evolutionary consequence of a species ceasing to age is that it also ceases to replicate. Replication is needed to replace the older generation. If no replacement is needed, no replication is needed.

In simpler terms, the trade off here is that if you want to end aging, you also have to end sex. Christians would love that, I know, but the rest of us might have some qualms about that.
For the Record: Seed and Early-Stage VC Data Dump
Just remember, if you're in Ruby working with strings, you want a local variable, because MRI leaks memory otherwise. See http://groups.google.com/group/god-rb/msg/3f5b13d6d4fa6480
It is recent enough to support CSS explicit animations, one of the newest visible features added in WebKit. For example: http://webkit.org/blog-files/leaves/index.html
I honestly dont understand why you think the sexpr syntax will lead to fewer errors? The syntax is just as complex, and there seem to be plenty of quote signs and nested parentheses to forget or mismatch.

Of course I don't doubt that you are able to write syntactically correct sexprs with the help of Emacs. A great number of tools (including Emacs I'm pretty sure) can help you the same way with XML. But for whatever reason - buggy software, bad editors, uneducated developers - invalid XML still happen. Why do you think substituting pointy brackets with rounded ones will change that?
I do my scrapping with BeautifulSoup from Python, actually from an iPython shell. With a urllib2 opener you could easily handle cookies and UserAgent pretty easy, the later is also important for some sites.
There is a difference between good regulation and bad regulation, and they both definitely exist. I'm all for deregulating bad regulation.
What about the cost of Google lockin? Can you imagine App Engine going offline like GMail did this morning?

Make me feel uneasy.
I'm hoping that Parallels can handle it for OS X. This could be a big change for gaming.
There seems to be an inconsistency in the cited storage pricing. The blog post says $0.15/GB/mo, but the docs and my app dashboard (which are most likely to be correct) say $0.005/GB/mo, which is a huge drop if true.
Community Cloud Computing
I wrote my own shell script -- given my minimalist needs that was much easier than figuring out how to use someone else's blog code.
I initially thought of work as this Boolean condition -- off or on.

I think about the time I started consulting I left that concept behind. If I'm watching TV and working on an ad mailer, is that marketing or goofing off? If I'm walking in the morning prepping for a sales pitch, is that exercise or sales? When I'm working on a report to a client and grooving on the iPod, is that having fun or work? When I wake up at 2 in the morning with some cool blog article idea is that marketing or a hobby? The categories just don't fit. It's not like you punch a clock or something. You should always be doing stuff that has value. You should always be goofing off. No need to split the two up. If you think you're only working when you are on some schedule where somebody else is paying you by the hour, you're wasting your life away.

And even if you think of 9-5 only as work, what amount of that time are you actually doing something of value? An hour? Even if you're humping code 14-hours a day, or especially if you're humping code 14-hours a day, you're getting in to a rhythm. Work a couple of hours, read email. Work an hour, stare out window. Eat lunch, drink caffeine, etc. It's all geared towards finding a natural rhythm. Maximizing your productivity is all about finding your natural rhythm and going with it. That means, yes, "goofing off" while you're on the clock. Some of the best teams are the ones that are able to have fun and relax. And it's well worth paying for their time to do so.

Sorry about getting on the soap box.
There's also mechanize for python. It can be found here : http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/ . It handles cookies by default, and is a pretty good tool.
A Way to Show Employers What You Can Do Before You Get the Job
Run IE8/7/6, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera from the web
Although government isn't great at directly producing entrepreneurs-- that's not its role-- the sort of infrastructural spending Obama is proposing can make the country more hospitable for entrepreneurs.

For example, if this country had a cheap, fast passenger rail system, people would be more mobile. This would lead to further condensation into startup hubs and there might be more of them. Rents in existing startup hubs would go down, which would be an excellent thing.

Also, universal healthcare. If the U.S. were to join the First World on this issue, it would be immensely valuable to small businesses, and remove a significant component of the risk inherent in starting a company.

I'd also propose this, although it (by definition) has to come from a private source rather than government: an "educational program" targeted toward serial entrepreneurs. The program would be sponsored by a VC firm and provide support, networking, and possibly (but not necessarily) funding. The VC firm would mentor the entrepreneur while he launched startups for a minimum of 12 years. At the end of the program, he would have the option of a job at the VC firm. Thus, entrepreneurship would have "exit options" that are competitive with (or better than) those of investment banking, law, etc.
I used my own simply because I had already written it and polished it for release before needing it for a business site.

If I was starting from scratch and needed something, I would use wordpress and spend my time elsewhere.
I accomplished this effect with Keywurl (http://purefiction.net/keywurl/) but apparently it doesn't work with the beta.
Here's their functioning google code site:
http://code.google.com/p/functionaljava/
Got any pointers to "gotchas" articles or guides for cross-site JS widgets/includes? If not, want to write one? I've been looking for some blog articles on this recently for our team.
Interesting that this release lacks the one notable feature of the Safari 4 Developer Preview. I wonder whether it's been cut entirely or simply cut from the beta release.
Google TechTalk: Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow
But the article is suggesting just copying cookies from Firefox into a simple Java based scraper. That won't support Javascript either.

If you needed Javascript you could use one of the Firefox scripting bridges (Selenium or MozRepl).
My problem with this article and this approach to "saving the economy" make little sense to me. While I believe startups and entrepreneurs who are starting now will lead the next wave of great companies, I don't think giving them money now will yield immediate results that we seem to need.

Yes, startups are strapped for cash, but even if you give them money, it doesn't mean job creation like the tagline of the article says. Growth and job creation won't be significant until the company is more established.

Secondly, most startups want to stay small, not because of lack of capital, but because they can be adaptive and nimble. Again, until the company matures, growing tthe company != growing the employee head count

I feel like instead of smaller startups, there should be something similar for small business. They won't have to go through the hardships of establishing the company and hopefully they'll already be profitable, etc. that a startup won't have/
Think Twice Before Allowing Your 10-Year-Old to Work
Thanks for the book recommendation, thats my favourite way to find new material to read. I've put your recommendation on my ever increasing list of books to read this summer.
Huh? What he did is completely automatable, you don't have to touch Firefox. And if you really did need JS to log in, which I have never seen outside misguided banks, there's tools for that too. Selenium and JSSH come to mind but for 99% of sites you'd just need Mechanize.

And Java? Why the hell would anyone write a script in a compiled language like Java? Desperate for that 2ms time saving between 10 second waits for the pages to come down, eh? And any for-real scraping script would have a time delay built in anyway.

The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Want to enable 1password in the Safari 4 Beta? Here’s how.
> PS: I recommend all aspiring coders to telent to www.google.com at least once just to feel the magic.

I'm pretty sure it's illegal in a couple of ways. </bitter>

But yes, the magic is there.
This is an interesting viewpoint.

Can you point to other situations where an advanced infrastructure created by government led to an increase in entrepreneurial activity?

I ask this because about every state nowadays has special departments and programs to promote hi-tech startups. But of course they are actually only flourishing in a small number of spots. I've worked with a few of these programs, and some are led by extremely talented and skilled administrators. And they're well funded. Is your premise that direct involvement like this will not work but that indirect involvement would? Kind of like putting out a fire by building a swimming pool?

Not trying to mock you or start an argument, but I don't understand how much indirect contributions can actually help. Seems to me, and it's just my opinion, but societies with lots of government-provided goodies actually have less startups. It's the ones where there's this balance between chaos and order where you get the most growth. Not ones with lots of danger or ones with lots of cushions.
There's always a degree of lock-in to any setup. That said, you can minimize lock-in by going with Django as much as you can and providing an abstraction layer to whatever APIs you use. Open-source key-value stores are popping up everywhere, so non-Google-hosted App Engine frameworks will probably appear in the next year. (AppDrop provided a fast check on porting App Engine SDK to EC2.)
And, in this home-grown music future, would people pay for recordings of good music? Or is recorded music just worthless?

I produced a recording last year that cost about $20,000, to get best-of-class session players for the sound I was after. While I'd rather people hear the music than not, even if they don't pay for it, I would sure appreciate folks buying a copy.
Thats an interesting explanation for how art comes to be. It reminds me of the novel 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', in which the author talks about the beauty and art in technology, and fixing motorcycles.
"Android is not open. It's a marketing label"
I wrote one of these a while back: http://knot.appspot.com/e/simple-python-scanner

For his example, it needs one more line:

simple = Scan(
IDENTIFIER = r'[\w_]\w*',
OPERATOR = r'[-+\*=]',
DIGIT = r'\d+(\.\d+)?',
END_STATEMENT = r';',
SPACE = r'\s+',
)
simple.ignore('SPACE')
simple('foo = 5 * 30; bar = bar - 60;')
# generates tokens.
Terry Childs case puts all admins in danger
Classifier Showdown: Naive Bayes vs SVM vs MLP Neural Net
Unless I'm mistaken, that absurd notion is only entertained in the US.
I personally use Django with disqus for comments. It takes less than an hour to create a decent blog engine in Django if you know the framework, although it took me significantly more than that the first time I did it. With disqus, you can easily add a comment system in seconds.

For me, Django was the best choice because I use it for everything else and I really like Python. If you are currently using a more typical LAMP stack, then something like WordPress may be the way to go.
It's still $0.15/GB/mo. The unit wasn't given but it was $0.005/GB/day.
Well, even if it can be done, why? There are perfectly fine languages that don't fight you every step of the way.

This, btw, is the content of the front page since the site is hosed.

[quote]

Functional Java is an open source library that aims to prepare the Java programming language for the inclusion of closures. It also serves as a platform for learning functional programming concepts by introducing these concepts using a familiar language. The library is intended for use in production applications and is thoroughly tested using the technique of automated specification-based testing with ScalaCheck.

Functional Java currently includes the following algebraic structures:

* Immutable, in-memory singly linked list (fj.data.List)
* Immutable lazy singly linked list (fj.data.Stream)
* Array wrapper (fj.data.Array)
* Optional value type-safe null (fj.data.Option)
* Disjoint union a superset of exception handling (fj.data.Either)
* Monoid (fj.pre.Monoid)
* Functions with arity 1 to 8 usable with Java 7 closure syntax
* Products of 1 to 8

Functional Java now includes the Reductio automated specification-based testing framework.

Functional Java includes usage examples and notably, code examples that make use of the Java 7 BGGA proposal syntax. Here is one such example (import statements omitted) that maps a transformation across an array by adding 42 to each element.

final Array<Integer> a = array(1, 2, 3);
final Array<Integer> b = a.map({int i => i + 42});
arrayShow(intShow).println(b); // {43,44,45}

[/quote]
You're seriously missing the point. If you read the article, Leonardo also failed to finish a great number of paintings and sculptures. These were clearly completable within the technology of the time and within Leonardo's personal skill.
I definitely didn't. The article mentions that you login, pull out the cookies, copy the value INTO your code, and since his examples are using java, recompile it.
This is not for those of us who do not use Windows: "Xenocode WebApps [...] run instantly on any Windows desktop."
The example wasn't written in Java for performance gain. It so happened that I had NetBeans open , and it was easier for me to write it in Java at the moment :).
Of course there are frameworks to do this for you, and I'm sure jwebunit will work perfectly well. I guess I'm disappointed that the author didn't understand the fact that Firefox doesn't perform magic, and that a login page is no different than anything else being scraped.
A Netbook that makes you go wow
Actually, that's one of the main reasons why I go to the gym (keeps the mind sharp), and one reason I feel justified going during working hours. But I still don't "bill" for those hours - i.e. I don't consider these working hours.

Think of it this way: if you bill clients for hours while you are at the gym and if they find out, you could very plausibly be sued by the client for that money back. Very few people consider the gym "working."

If you really are more efficient during your working hours (according to my definition) because of what you do in your non-working hours, you can justify charging more for your working hours.
Standard is just to use alt text on your logo. That's better for accessibility, and doesn't take up extra space.
The financial crisis - stick men version
The PC Industry Is Looking Even Worse
Yahoo Store! Bet I'm the only one.
in short... make a website usable. thx for the tip
HD movies and HD internet video needs power. I mean, that is where we're moving, isn't it? After all, the auditory for video is almost everyone.
Short summary: the author of this opinion column disparages Obama's science nominees because when they weigh in on global warming and CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, they don't treat ignoring the problem now and removing CO2 from the atmosphere in the future via technology to be developed at unknown expense and feasibility as a perfectly rationale alternative to emission cuts now. Because everybody knows when you wave the magic technology wand, what you want always pops right out at a price and opportunity cost that you are willing to bear.
You can bring the process indicator back, as well as some other things, as I just found out at this blog post: http://swedishcampground.com/safari-4-hidden-preferences
Easier!? You wrote pages and pages describing the most inefficient way imaginable to do something I can do in 5 lines of Ruby, and you call it easier? And unless I'm very much mistaken, you'd have to compile the code anew whenever the cookie changed?

Well, good luck to you, and the more script kiddies
you confuse the better I guess, but there are seriously much better ways to do this. Go look at Ruby Mechanize (I think it's also available for python); coming from Java you will be blown away by just how easy this kind of thing is. How do you think we all test? ; )

Update: Oh I see you know Mechanize from another article. So why not just use that ... you do know it can do all that logging in stuff for you, right?
This is good, but old =)
Wow! That figure is much higher than I expected.

Excuse me while I go back to refreshing slashdot every minute.
Netbooks with great usability and gizmos that make for interesting apps(gps, touch etc) combined with a billing system that allows for subscription pricing for services would be as explosive as an iphone and the app store. It would be great way for companies to drive up the revenue beyond what they get from laptops today.
Hidden settings: http://pastie.textmate.org/398861 (including blue progress bar and tab bar placing)
DVDs and CDs still exist? Oh.

Anyway, the point of the 9" screen and 8GB flash drive is that it makes the machine easier to carry around with you. You can pick it up and shove it in your bag without worrying about whether the disk spun down or not. The battery lasts 6 hours, so you don't have to constantly wander around looking for an outlet. You just open the thing up, and can work for as long as you like. It's not heavy, so you don't even know that that computer is with you.

It's not just a "price point", it's about having the power and convenience of a "real computer" with you where ever you go.

(And FWIW, I don't really mind working on my 9" EEEPC all day. The screen is stunning, much better than my 15" Thinkpad. The keyboard is nasty, however, so I tend to carry around my HHKB with me. But with that, there is basically no productivity loss. I can, and do, work all day on that.)
It seems entirely plausible to me - they neither steal, nor illegally download their porn but pay for it like all orderly citizens should.
Haven't heard of AppDrop - thanks! I can't wait for Ubuntu 9.10 and other projects that make building your own cloud easier. That'll bring a much need dose of competition to the market.
illegal!? why!?
To be fair, at 300Gb/month of free stuff they would have killed most web hosting companies out there. That's a lot of data.
My 9" eeepc plays 720p h.264 video just fine. The only issue is that it has to scale the video down, because there aren't enough pixels on the screen to display 720p :)
The poll should have at least specified between "professional" work and "support" work. Is meeting a client work? Is driving 1.5 hours to meet him work? If an employee, then both are on the clock.
The more I read about this case, the more it seems like a witchhunt.
Posterous. Easy to blog, they host it, pity you cannot theme it (yet)
Not news. Thinly disguised marketing ploy.
Can I upvote you as a poll answer?
That's not a very objective summary. The author's main point is actually that some scientists try to disguise their political agendas as scientific fact, and that two of Obama's appointees seem to fall into this camp.
Twitter's approach to account deletion. Does this have any purpose?
This is the only example I have encountered; when you close your account on Twitter it prevents you from creating a new account with the same username or email.

This is neither practical or useful security, it does however put barriers in the way of return customers.

Does anyone know of websites that also use this approach? What is their justification for it?
Seemed promising, but turns out to be irrelevant to me. If I ran Windows I could already run all those browsers. It would be really nice if they released a version that could run on OSX.