skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Progess is slow, and it's hard to get people to change, etc, but Boxee seems extraordinarily dedicated to getting real partners onto its service, and serving as much legal content as they can. I do think that they might be overstepping or at least stepping out of being "professional" by just integrating things like Hulu content, basically "rogue," but it's what they have to do to get a userbase and to get the buzz that they have.

But now, they're here, and they want to play. There is a service and a userbase who are all clearly invested in supporting your legal content, sitting here staring content providers in the face. Surely entertainment hubris or ego will get in the way of things actually going smoothly in a situation like this, but its one of those times where I wish everyone would just shut up, play ball, and make money.
yeah or get a mac mini and put in your tv cabinet and connect it to your LCD TV. Use a wireless mouse as a remote. You can watch Hulu, YouTube, theWB, joost, cbsnews.com/video, tv.com, wbkids.com and others this way.
This is called abuse of authority. They won't drop all charges since they want to save face; however, when they are proven wrong, it is our government who must pay. Can we, as taxpayers, sue the individuals (such as the Sergeant)?

The hilarious part is that Robert Taylor works for MTA and he was photographing MTA trains.
Hulu probably signed an agreement with say Tivo or Microsoft(360), nintendo, sony, heck even samsung. To do the same thing but have people pay for it and get some royalties. This product only

Hulu wasn't making any money with this. Boxee was full of people who would use Hulu without boxee and see the ads but the Hulu brand and ads wouldn't be connected as clearly as they would be online.

In a recession things like that can fly but when your trying to make money you gotta work for it.
Wouldn't this start to overlap with other links?
Automatic Differentiation: The most underused tool in the machine learning toolbox?
Intel Wants Court to Ban Nvidia from Making Chipsets for Latest Processors
There is some background to this that is interesting. The reason why the content holders behind Hulu didn't want their content on Boxee was because it came too close to replicating the television experience.

While the advertising was kept in place, it still doesn't attract the rates that normal television does. Given a choice, content holders definitely prefer viewers to tune into ordinary broadcast television to watch their shows - online content is about capturing the potion of viewers who miss shows and don't watch broadcast television.

With Boxee, there is the potential that the online content will cut into the broadcast TV audience - hence this decision.

What is interesting is that the true motives are now more obvious. Online content, in the form of both iTunes and Hulu, is fine as long as it doesn't cut too close to the broadcast base.

Content holders have gone from vigorously defending their network broadcasts to now accepting online content, but only to a point. The next battle will take place when more intelligent PC-like DVR's come out on the market (like the PS3, but at a $100-150 price point) allowing viewers to easily stream online content to a television with a remote. The content owners have a short time window between now and then where they have the best of both worlds - both broadcast and online, but once it all goes online the very lucrative and protected broadcast market will be threatened.

With online, there is no more having to acquire broadcast licenses, no more large-scale infrastructure networks to reach your potential audience and no longer limited competition and cable monopolies with packaged channel selection.
In his defense, he doesn't seem to care if they're married, he'd just prefer it was called something else.

I campaigned against 8 in my area, but I think that if we're going to argue against its supporters, we ought to at least argue against what they're actually saying. :-)
ZunaVision Is Trying To Monetize Online Video By Making It Unwatchable
Will Obama Break Up Google?
There's a link in there to my automatically updated sales data. It rescales automatically. Feel free to submit that page if you want, I try to keep bragging to a dull roar. ;)
Intel is just asking for anti-trust scrutiny. A good rule of thumb is if you have 75% market share, don't start sueing people out of the market if you don't want to have to deal with the justice department.
I'll stop hijacking your thread now but if you're looking for a partner for a project or something I wouldn't mind... Me email is lpgauth at gmail.

:)
It sounds like Singularity will have more influence over their next mobile OS than over Windows.
An iTunes moment for readers?
Does Google break the law because it makes it easy for me to search for mp3s to download?

Google isn't hosting the files that point to trackers and ultimately other peers to download from.

There are cases similar to this:
Galoob v Nintendo.
In this case Galoob was cleared of charges as it was found that users of Game Genie, while altering games, were not creating derivative works that violated Copyright.

Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation
Professional photographer vs image search service. It was decided since Arriba was just showing thumbnails and did not have the actual files on their servers they were in the clear.

I personally think the charges are a little out of hand. That said if you don't have rights to the files you are doing something wrong. The repercussions of the pirate bay winning or losing this case are definitely going to be interesting.
Laptop facial recognition hacked
congrats axod!

getting into firefox is huge.

we (http://www.amahi.org) use it to help our user community better and we saw a bump in the number of people using our channel for support, questions or just plain cheering us up, when we started using mibbit.

while i am here, a suggestion: we do very consistently see that sending PMs to users (most of them are fairly new to irc) that use mibbit is nearly impossible for them to see in the default skin. not enough visual variation or attention to catch their eye. liven it up a little :)

kudos otherwise!
What matters is the percentage of your target users that are Linux users. Although Mac & Linux are small shares in the general population, they are over represented in the population we are all trying to sell to. Our startup sees over 15% from Linux and over 30% from Mac/iPhone hits, and we're getting in the thousands a day. Those people are out there and they're buying our product.
The scary thing when I read all that is that I find yourself agreeing with much of the Unabombers premises

What have you studied about economics? I asked once here on HN for recommendations of economics books

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683

but didn't get as many replies as I expected. I think a lot of the Unabomber's ideas are characteristic of one kind of thinking by people unacquainted with economics, but perhaps you are more acquainted with economics than I am.
Further, here is a comparison of CPM rates and revenue for a typical TV episode.

Network TV: $20-40cpm per ad - 15-19 ads shown in 30 minutes

Cable: $1-15 cpm per ad - 10-22 ads shown (plus subscription revenue)

iTunes: $0.80 per viewer, so CPM of $80 total (est network
share)

Hulu / Online: CPM $10-40. 1-4 ads per show.

If you do the math, its obvious that network broadcasts really rake it in. A 30 second spot on a prime time network show sells for anywhere from $400,000 to $800,000 per spot (for 15-30M viewers).

If everyone started watching Hulu instead, they would lose 80-90% of revenue. If everybody downloaded on iTunes (assuming 3 viewers per download, or more is likely) they would still lose out but not as much.

The problem is if the networks start offering a la carte shows for $2 a pop, they lose the bundling revenue (ie. channels you receive in a bundle but would never pay for on their own).
Some of the behavior of which Yelp is being accused in this article is plainly illegal. Which makes me question why these "anonymous sources" are talking to a reporter at an alternative weekly newspaper instead of a lawyer. Color me dubious.
"But there is another way that pagination is used on the Web today. Content pages, like blog articles, are sometimes split into several pages. Why is this done? What’s the gain? It’s unlikely that the article is so long that it requires pagination; in most cases, it is used to increase page views."

Hear. Hear. Gratuitously going to an extra page encourages me to STOP reading the blog, not to read it more.
So? He denies it, engages in character assassination, and uses a (presumably) co-conspirator to provide supporting evidence. I heard about this two months ago.

Never overestimate the integrity of a CEO.
But it's not a mistake. It's brilliant.
Boxee: The Networks’ Biggest Threat
There have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.

Not really true. https is good enough to buy things online. It's better than giving your credit card to a waiter.
AppEngine isn't "released" yet.

Background tasks and queues are still on the roadmap, the open-source Jaiku port hasn't been released, and most importantly you can't pay for quota yet!
My wife Erin came to work for Matasano a couple years ago, and while she might express some reservations, I'd say it's been an unalloyed positive in our relationship and for the business.

For the relationship, working with Erin has I think made long hours and at-times-fanatical devotion to the company more bearable. For instance, she is "by default" included in the happenings of the company and in the work (Erin develops and consults with us); before she joined up, it was too easy to clam up about what I was working on, because who wants to explain the details of a long, tedious, crappy day?

For the company, the win is that we get a strong technical resource with huge flexibility in compensation and scheduling. We take a tax-advantaged joint income from the company. And we can switch-hit taking care of the kids; since we're both working on the same thing, there's less tension working out who's staying home when one of them gets sick or when they have a day off from school.

Apparently this is a well-known minefield, and so I'm hesitant to write all this stuff up knowing that it could all blow up in our faces down the road. But it's been a couple years now, and while I can't say they've been drama-free, I'm think the decision has vindicated itself.
How is it that they have a monopoly on Search and Cloud Computing exactly?
It's too late in the day for me to give a coherent reply to all your questions.

But your first, I think, is easy:

The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms. Why?

We apply new technologies in new ways to help improve and regulate our society. Each decision is well-intentioned, improves society and -- taken alone -- is a good idea.

Examples: (1) Red light cameras (2) RFID passports (3) National ID Cards

Each decision is also a tiny reduction in personal freedom. As the libertarians say, the incremental destruction of our liberties. Or, as Kelly condensed -- "the less our freedoms."
This presumes that the goal of all websites should be to maximize use of screen real estate. But that goal is in conflict with the basic principles of typography, which suggest that line lengths are not going to scale up with monitor sizes.
I'm just learning stuff right now, I don't possess enough knowledge to "hack". But I suppose I'm a hacker at heart, dunno, maybe I don't have enough experience to know yet.
IE8: Standards Mode Opt-In is Back From the Dead
Dumb, question but what is boxee? Why would I use it? I honestly couldn't figure it out from their website nor the wikipedia article about boxee.
Why Isn't American Unemployment Worse? We Offshored It.
Google accused of raising the advertising rates of potential competitor
Relatively few startups need scaling all across the stack. For instance, some portion of folks who sell downloadable software have bandwidth issues but largely uncomplicated websites.

For those folks, you can recommend S3 and tell them "This will cost you essentially nothing, it will fix your problem, and integration into your existing site will take ten minutes if you type slowly."

What is the migration path from a successful business to the App Engine?

Step 1: Learn to write Python.

Step 2: Forget everything you've ever learned about databases.

Step 3: Get a cup of coffee. You're not anywhere close to done.
Hopefully someday they'll realize that when they cut off people from having legal access to their content, people will go back to their illegal methods. When will old media learn?

How is bit-torrenting TV episodes illegal?

They are broadcast into my house for free, so why would it matter if I record them, or if Some Guy On The Internet records them for me? (I never watch TV un-timeshifted, so I don't see ads either way.)
VentureBeat To Produce DEMO
DEMO Gets Desperate: Shipley Out, Marshall In
First, thank you for providing actual numbers.... but...

Supply and demand. If everyone started watching on Hulu they would be able to charge more per advertisement. These are rates given the current situation, not the future. Why do I say this? I watch Hulu. I do not watch TV otherwise. If the advertisers (and networks) want my eyeballs they need to provide content via Hulu.
> It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises.

Reminds me of Facebook's encroachment into (most) of our lives.
It could. You'd want to choose the expansion size judiciously, with less size for closely-packed links. Making the background light up during hovering would really help disambiguate click targets.
Even once is enough for this to be a bother.
If not one person on the Earth cares about solving the problem, it is probably not that important. (Uh oh, here comes a rant about global warming and overfishing.)
Extortion 1.0 presumably being the 'protection money' that Chinatown gangs asked for to 'protect your business'.
After reading through it doesn't feel like there is much content in his writing, anybody else have this feeling?
YUI 2.7.0 Released
Lightroom is an extraodinary case -- the entire UI was written from scratch, mostly in Lua, by a new team at Adobe. It wasn't bought from some other shithead company like most of their products. The only code that's shared with other apps is the image processing engine.
They definitely don't, at least not right now.

They are a big company with a huge market share, and that scares people. However, they don't generally do things that give them an unfair advantage over their competition.

Yahoo, Ask, etc are definitely competitive in the search market. Google is the clear front runner, but they are not without significant competition.

The idea that they have a monopoly on cloud computing is completely absurd. They don't even have online storage for normal users live yet. They provide users with a place to store and edit documents online, but they are far from the only company doing that. They don't come close to competing with S3.

The only reasonable allegation is the charge of having a monopoly on online advertising. I'm still not entirely sure why they were able to buy DoubleClick, and I would not be too surprised if the advertising portion of Google was forced to split at some point in the future. As far as a monopoly on search and cloud computing go though, I would definitely agree that those are not valid in the current market.
More evidence from fellow hacker - http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html
Newegg does that with the menus and sidebar and it pisses me off. I find the text uncomfortably small, but when I fix it their Javascript jams it back to a small size.

With high-res screens and/or people with vision trouble, setting a particular font size is generally a bad idea.
I'm waiting for them to lift usage caps. They keep dragging their feet, and I keep waiting. :-)

Seriously, they probably spend all that time making it more robust, so I appreciate them taking time to get it right. But I'm not going to put any serious stuff in there until usage caps are lifted.
Google Docs: Start the Downloads
> Tune in tomorrow for the second part of the interview, in which Dorsey talks about ...

What?! This isn't a tv show with a cliffhanger ending, this is a fluff interview. You didn't interview him in two parts, so don't give it to me in two parts.

It's crap like this that's killing old media.
Why VCs are rude
Apple Slows Down Mac Upgrades
The british version is much better, a lot less yelling and gimmicks -- more about each restaurant.
My friend's father works for a textbook publisher. 35-40% of his yearly sales comes from one textbook. The main thing stopping textbooks from being available electronically are the niche textbook publishers. They are trying tactics like a generous sprinkling of web URLs in the physical textbook (for additional material/discussion). Books are cheap - it's the college bookstore markup and the 'you need this specific revision of the textbook which if diff'd is minor' that equates to extortion.
There's that legalistic nitpicking again. Google is a general purpose service. People actually use it for lawful purposes, maybe even most of the time. On the other hand, the whole point of the Pirate Bay is to violate copyright. I've never seen it used for a lawful purpose, though I am sure it is occasionally. That's a substantive difference. It would ring a lot more honest to me if the defenders of Pirate Bay said "I like to download things and I think current IP laws are wrong".

That's a valid position that can be argued. This position just seems childish to me, and not a brilliant defense as some say.

If I sold guns in packages with maps and schedules of the daily habits of people's enemies, who later ended up dead, I am pretty sure they would still lock me up for being an accessory to murder. As they ought. On another thread, Pirate Bay's defenders said that such a business should be legal, too, as the businessman isn't actually doing anything wrong.

That, to me, is a sign that they have sacrificed prudence in support of their agenda.

I like The Pirate Bay. I want to see them survive. That doesn't mean I have to accept bad arguments just because I am on their side.
If you go to the FAQ, where you can download an excel copy. If you're interested, there are 18750 projects asking for 150 Billion of YOUR tax dollars.

Also, according to the FAQ, this list is not exhaustive, the mayors can still pile on more projects.
I disagree with the vast majority of the piece, but this bit has something to it at least some of the time:

The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms.

Technology makes certain forms of social control a whole lot more viable than they were prior to the technology. (Conversely, it makes certain forms of freedom more viable, too.)

Here's a relatively benign example: technology makes it possible for a computer to make a decision on your credit worthiness in the blink of an eye. This is a wonderful thing for many reasons: for one, it greatly cuts down on the amount of discrimination in lender/lendee relationships.

It also means that your insurance company knows that you missed a credit card payment 7 years ago. This has been factored into your premiums. Have a nice day. (I suppose theoretically you could go to Ask No Questions Insurance, Inc but since credit scores are scandalously good predictors of insurance risk you're not likely to get a bargain there.)

You can, of course, opt out of this by opting out of a) credit cards and b) insurance agencies. Ahh, seems like you're legally required to deal with the second to drive.

So if you want the freedom to have your previous dealings not attached to you, which I gather at least some people might desire, you need to stop driving.
Absolutely disagree. I read the entire book (24 chapters) this summer in preparation for AP English. It's a must-read for anyone writing non-fiction. That means businessowners too: there's one part about not using tangly words just to sound more professional. There's also stuff about not using "quotes" like that, and about word choice. Everyone, especially bloggers, would benefit from reading this book.

It's simply brilliant, and I highly recommend it.
Because its not very hard to validate and can catch minor errors and typos. If you're a C programmer, do you also ignore warnings from the compiler?
HN: Know of a telco with an API I can use to buy virtual phone numbers + query for logs?
I'm building a directory services application and I need an API to buy virtual phone numbers on the fly, which will just forward to a different number. I'd also like to be able to query the API for the number of calls received and their duration. I'm predominantly interested in the USA and UK.

I'd be very grateful if somebody could point me in the right direction.. my google-fu seems weak today.
Yeah, I think the excerpt exceeds fair use length requirements. Still, while reading two chapters is nice, it can't be worse than providing a one-chapter excerpt. After all, the book is a package deal, and it's important to read the whole thing if you plan on improving your writing.
Blue Frog Gaming (YC S07) Looking For Hackers Who Like To Make Games
Blue Frog Gaming has recently experienced significant success with social games on the Facebook platform. We are now profitable and are expanding.

We're looking to hire hackers who like to make web-based games. We offer competitive salary, benefits, and stock options to new employees.

Required:

Strong hacking ability.

Love of games.

Able to beat me in Mario Kart on the office Wii. (j/k)

Preferred:

Level 78 Ruby on Rails mage. (Python/Django and similar frameworks also a plus).

Experience writing apps for Facebook/MySpace.

We're based out of Ohio. Please contact me at matt at blue frog gaming dot com.
Ummm...No, I don't.

I'll be honest, I have to resisit the temptation to be rude here because I think so highly of the book that it makes me inclined to just tear you apart. But that inhibits my ability to defend it point by point (since going point by point I would end up tearing you apart)

But needless to say the book has been used in writing classes (and has been constantly in print) for 33 years so I think the criticism that there's "isn't much content" is unfounded.
In 1972 Chile was run using cybernetics with a 'socialist internet'.
Add proper RSS/Atom/etc. support on every relevant page. For example, all blog and news posts.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example RSS Feed" href="http://example.com/blog/?feed=rss" />
Flourish, an Open source / Software libre conference in Chicago
I am not taking sides, just providing references to relevant information.
If they're not selling review placement and/or editing, what exactly are they selling of value?
Papers is finally available for the iPhone
How to make a better measuring cup
This is also a good reason why companies shouldn't worry only about satisfying customer requests, but should also be willing to do their own thing.
Sites like yelp don't give value to the local businesses.
A better solution is to allow the businesses to reply to the customer's post like a forum.
My team and I are working on this right now and will be launching soon!
Just stick ie6 only content between these two tags <!--[if IE 6]><![endif]--> in your html.
Why not eschew taxes altogether, and find a good way to convince people to pay for music? Anything else is going to be unfair.
Have you looked into the open source Telephony/PBX solution "Asterisk"? http://www.asterisk.org/

It does not exactly fit your requirement of an API to buy virtual phone numbers but I believe you should be able to use it to cheaply setup forwarding service for phone numbers. I am not speaking out of experience but I think Asterisk might be able to do what you are looking for.
I don't know if it does quite what you want, but Twilio.com is worth checking out/asking if you haven't.
Having too much money can be a problem