skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cost is enormous...we take away the ability of people to hunt and fish and subsist on that land as they would in nature.

This cost is negligible as well. The cost is merely the cost of providing hunting/fishing levels of food, and it is only owed to the small subset of people who would be better off as hunters. We're talking about $1-5/day here. A few $B in a $12T economy.

In addition to your wildly incorrect accounting, you seem confused as to what a public good is. Education is a private good, being rivalrous and excludible. You again cite a tiny fraction of what is provided (literacy + numeracy) while ignoring the vast majority of spending (most of high school and college).
Ask HN: What is the future of jvm as a platform?
Are there any competitors? If there are no (Don't take mono) competitors, is the future of jvm locked?
Will I see Java being used when I am grandfather? (I am 17 right now.)
Companies have privacy obligations. If they inaccurately link you to a fraudulent user and then tell you all the activity of that fraudulent user, they've probably just broken the law.

That's a specific example where it might not be legal but I agree that this is widespread and there are lots of things in the real world where it would be fine to tell you, but they choose not to. In my experience this is to protect internal process (so you can't cite why they're idiots) or so that they can sell you another product (credit score improvement, etc).

But I do agree, the withholding of detail is widespread to a point where it suggests people just plain don't want to tell you anything.
NEW OLD GAME - is face detection the way to go??
Hi everyone. I have just developed a new game called Eye breaker, which is practicaly just an ordinary brick breaker game, which you can play by moving your face left or right. The game is on the app store for three months now. The downloads are there, but not as expected. I am wondering what you think - are games using face control the way to go or should we stick with normal touch control?
I wonder how difficult it'd be to create an end-user app... User plugs Kindle into the computer, user runs app, app backs up user's books, free from DRM. I guess people could use it to pirate as well, but c'est la vie.
Not that taxes are out of control in the UK or anything...
They were/are being paid very large sums of money to save Windows Phone, hence announcing that Windows Phone now has manufacturer support is part of what they've been paid to do. And they got far more money from that than they would have from selling those symbian phones.

edit: after reading the article I see that this is the actual point he's making, though he claims that they could have made an extra 3 Billion from selling the symbian phones if they'd focussed on that, and only got 1 Billion from Microsoft. Except he pads the numbers by assuming they'd have hit their 150 Million sales targets and sold another 50 million devices at an average of $200 (unsubsidized) and got 33% or $66 dollars profit from each one (neatly equalling the subsidy of $68 they get from Microsoft from each WinPhone they sell at current sales rates).

Of course, the Microsoft payments continue and were guaranteed, whereas Symbian was a gamble and is, frankly, now dead so the "price" of this choice becomes less with every passing day and depending on which numbers you pick out of the air, they could already be ahead on the deal.
Wat? I've bought in .com, .ca, .co.uk, .fr and .es with (both) France and Spain based credit cards with no problems whatsoever.
Post a stacktrace? You can take a photo for us of the kernel panic.
I'll definitely donate through kickstarter in the future if I get a cog or something that comes from the main production run.
> Please Amazon - please move to one global store

Aren't they stuck by territorial rights deals? It's weird that books have region lock out.
This is the reasoning behind Win8 being so bad. Microsoft has abandoned the desktop in a fairy dream to chase the iPad.
I don't think. Instead, will evolve.
There's a twist in asking customers to pay 20%, and taking that from the authors, and then (according to GP) not paying the 20% in England but paying just 3% in some other country.
The sledge hammer approach.
There are some videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/mshelengelena but it's not complete and doesn't appear to be official.
Life in an accelerator program
I love the idea for one particular reason. It has 'curation' natively built in. Worthless stuff (which isn't popular, accessed, shared, commented) would be automatically filtered out. Sure there's risk that Internet would change in homogenic pop-pulp but it can be avoided.
I can't find that link. Can you tell me where you found that link so I can fix it?
How to build a 3-Column website design with CSS/HTML
A bit of catch 22 really. If they have inaccurately linked you with a fraudulent user and they accuse you of having committed fraud, they've just defamed your character.

If they were in the U.S. I'd be suggesting they lawyer up.
Hey nnq, it took me months to master using a straight razor, but it's definitely worth it if you're willing to spend the time on it :). I could have written "take a sauna", which is equally relaxing to me, but just costs more.
DNSRecon from Hack3rCon 3
Don't know about that, I thought it was a common thing to say about life :)
Facebook exec - London to become "the number one location for tech in the world"
I tried that and it asked me for my account details. It doesn't seem to be doing that now, though.
Bypassing a technical copyright protection mechanism is a criminal offence, isn't it?

I agree that it's the sane thing to do. "Back up your documents" is important advice.
This logic doesn't hold. Either Amazon is certain her account is operated by the same character guilty of whatever violations of policy behind the "linked account", in which case they're not disclosing any additional information, or they're not, in which case they know they might be punishing somebody innocent (the "Let God sort'em out" customer policy).

In any case, it sounds straight out of Kafka: you're punished, but you don't know what crime you are supposed to have committed.
RFI Leads to Hacked Weather Site
You did purchase the book. It says "Buy" on the website.

Amazon: "Would you like to Buy this book for your Kindle?"

Customer: "Yes" click

Looks like a sale to me. They don't use the word "Rent" or "Borrow". You "buy" it.
User pays money for something. Company withdraws products without notice and deliberately harms the user's device. Yes this is awful but the solution is as simple as it's always been:

1. Complain. Keep complaining all the way to the top.

2. Sue. If complaining doesn't get you want you've paid for (or your money back, inc the Kindle you now can't use), you've just been robbed and you need to take legal action. You might think you're under a billion and five EULAs but when challenged, courts seem to side with the user when the EULAs attempt to restrict rights that they're not allowed to impinge upon. There are various sales laws that are protected well beyond the words of an EULA.

If you don't do anything about it, you make it worse for everybody else because <<insert horrid company here>> thinks they can get away with it now.
FBI Website Breached … Not
Have you programmed Salesforce?

It's a steaming pile of poo. SOQL is really terrible and don't even get me started on apex, it's like someone took all the worst bits of Java and made them into a programming language. It's really slow to boot, I was using it with a client last week and it was taking 10-20 seconds to load any page.

I also really don't get how they're not making more money given the prices they charge.

Expect nothing at all out of them.
Those are good countries to compare US to for public policy. I go nuts when people draw in Scandanavian examples for diverse anglo nations.

But that doesn't mean that the alternative of universal health as it's practiced in those other countries is a good alternative, just the obvious one.

The current US system is stupid: tying your healthcare to employment. It's no surprise that creating distance from the people who pay and the people who consume significantly increases costs.

In Australia you can opt for private health insurance, and get a rebate. Nothing like that in the UK. People in London who can afford it often pay for private service to avoid dealing with the state facilities. I'd be interested to know whether that was factored into the books for the figures you cite - I'd expect not.

The big issue is aged care. If the official system is so awful that you find ways to keep your parents at home longer - how does that get reflected in the numbers. Also quality of life issues - whether people in state aged care in country A are having a good time at greater expense, whereas those in country B are being dosed up with drugs to keep them quiet. What choice does the person and relatives have in that care? With universality - very little.

I can't see how universal care could deliver good outcomes for aged care. It has all the makings of a numbers game, an exercise in muddying the waters about who is responsible so they can ship a cheap one-size-fits-all model.
Do you think that if stallman cut his hair and put on a suit his message would be better received?
Defamy wouldn't apply as it's a private relationship.

They're not broadcasting to the world that they think you're a con, they're just telling you... Which is fine.
Surely this is what a small claims court could be used for?

In principle, possibly. It's a bit difficult to sue if you live in Norway & have been buying from Amazon US though: your costs will exceed any potential return very quickly!

(I'm assuming that filing a small claims suit remotely is either not possible or not effective here of course.)
I've always assumed the attack vector was to leave the sticks lying around. If I'm not mistaken, some people have left them at banks in hopes that the employees will plug them into one of the computers there to see what's on it. Almost everyone I know has plugged a USB stick they don't own into their computer at one point or another.
TIME Magazine Redesign
I'm just going on my gut here, but it's doubtful that many startups are using the MS stack. It's not for lack of a good IDE, community, or even language features. It simply comes down to cost.

There are a myriad of free or low cost alternatives that make the MS stack seem monolithic and unusable.

Hell, I work for a company that had been using a MS product for years. We recently switched to PHP, and are likely to use Flask or Django and PostgreSQL for our next product.
Pro Tip: Skip 2 steps by entering cache:{URL} into the Google search box (either on google.com directly or via your browser search box)
What's funny is this:

Fine let's say it's not a rental, and forget about the DRM issue for a second.

But what's your cost in keeping the data "alive"? I could copy it from machine to machine, maybe backup it on S3 (or similars), but all that has a cost (time, money, new reading devices, etc).

A physical book has a cost as well: space, weight, etc.

At some point, abandoning the book may be more cost effective, and even if digital books have a 'expire date' it looks like they may be cheaper in the long term
Cybersecurity Job Growth Expected as Other IT Areas in Decline
If you read and actually considered the worst case in every contract/website terms and conditions/software licence that you come across it would probably take about a day a week and you would never actually agree to anything that wasn't a GPL/BSD/MIT... software licence. For one thing most give the party offering the agreement rights to change it which should be an absolute no-way.

For most things such as online purchases I tend to rely on law and reasonableness of people and take the chance without reading expecting the maximum downside to be tens of pounds related to that purchase. I am a little more careful when locked into eco-systems (Kindle/app-stores) but still go a fair bit on taking the risk with the reputation of the provider and the size of the risk and the cost of getting the content another way.
How did you arrive to that conclusion? The article is making exactly the opposite point: the lost profits from the lost sales were much more significant than the support money from MS. And it also shows the (rather reasonable) calculations used for this analysis.
Well, it is, at least in good implementations. One that I know about and use regularly is somewhat dated, but "feature complete" and as Pythonic as it gets: MochiKit and it's Deffereds: http://mochi.github.com/mochikit/doc/html/MochiKit/Async.htm...
Bayan Saat Modelleri — Seiko Saatler
They should have licensed the name Metro from Metro AG and called it that. Instead they gave it the same name as their runtime? Seriously? It boggles my mind as to how they didn't anticipate this being confusing.
Understanding Stock Options at Startups (and at Moz)
Unobtrusive Email Signing: PGP/HEADER
"But he appears to be oblivious to a signifiant new problem facing Windows 8: people and businesses aren’t buying as many PCs as they once were. They’re buying iPads."

I don't know what office you work in.. but no; iPads have not replaced PC's. Yet. There are too many applications that just don't work well enough on a tablet device. This will change of course. But not today.

Granted a lot of people in the office have ipads, but most bought it themselves. And use it with a PC. Not in place of.
There is a related cool system: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/lapis/

It is actually a text editor, and doesn't come up with Regular Expressions but similar textual constraint patterns.
The irony is, all that you have to do is get your entire book list, then hunt down the books you already paid for and then you can get them DRM free.

Then you never pay Amazon another cent. After all, they didn't want your money! If they have refused to let you buy content that you require, then I can see why some people feel a moral justification to pirate the books.

It's really quite simple. If this happened in the U.S. then they could take court action against Amazon. If you are from overseas, you really have no recourse. Therefore, merely because of where you live, you are restricted from material that may enrich your life. That's discrimination, and I can well understand that someone might feel justified in breaking the law to download pirated books.

Amazon... hurting themselves as only a greedy corporation can.
That's exactly my point: They don't want to tell you.

If a company has such rigid internal processes that it can't come up with a way to reveal at least some information to allow a paying[0] customer to successfully defend an allegation of fraud, then that process is broken.

0 - I leave as an exercise to the reader the question of what should be done for free services.
Well, good luck with the "1-click" button defense. heh.

I agree that Amazon could be a LOT more open and clear about what it is that changes hands (ie some "rights") when we pay "applicable fees".

But, it took me the best part of 10 seconds to find the license agreement. And, once found, couldn't be clearer.
> > I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals.

>Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.

Lawyers and librarians also do. There are big discussions in those circles about the meaning of the verbs "to buy" and "to possess" as used by Amazon, Apple and other big DRM "retailers". It is not only about DRM. Libraries are realising that paying for access to a website of a publishing house is not exactly like paying to receive a copy of a published journal or magazine. Have a look at all the dark archives and to who is financing them.

First it was an hacker problem, now it has spread to humanities, in five years the DRM will finally become a layperson problem. The first signs surfaced some years ago, when kids started complaining about the fact that their iPod could not be used to pass or share music while a cheaper Creative MP3 player could without a problem.
Learning neuroscience with cockroach legs
Not in europe. Here, it's fair use.
take a look at Calatrava then http://calatrava.github.com/

open source, mobile cross-platform logic, freedom to build great UIs
It absolutely is not legal.
Trouble is, you are bound by the license agreement, not by the text on the buttons, as the Conditions of Use and Sale makes clear, which is linked to on every page of Amazon's site.
I can see how this supports TDD. Write a test suite and it will generate a regex that passes it.
WTF

that guy writing that email ... should be hanged on his balls

is there no moral anymore??

you wouldn't act that way face 2 face now would u?

fucking companys acting like friggin internet thugs
hiding behind their corporate not identities

ima just soo fed up w/ u suckers

rant on and on and on ....
Spain waits for US to finish nuclear clean-up
Why not just have called it 'Surface OS' or something similar? "Surface looks like Windows, but isn't Windows, just like iOS looks like OSX but isn't OSX" would have been easy to explain, but using the name 'windows' in there confuses the point.
You can find it in contrib: https://github.com/gitster/git/tree/master/contrib/credentia...

See man 7 gitcredentials on how to set it up.
Many PCs are patched now so there's no default autorun.inf (or similar) functionality. So you'd have to run a binary on it to trigger this exploit it seems. Doable of course, but one step harder.
The JVM will be around for decades to come.

Java as a language is still dominant in the enterprise and the growth of Scala/Groovy will see it branch into new areas. Oracle has been a fantastic steward of the platform to date so overall there are lots of positives ahead.
A look back: 36 years of Apple products
I'm getting irritated with the watering down of the word "spam" to mean, essentially, "any communication I am not or do not believe I would be thrilled to get".

Spam is permissionless mass mailing. If someone has Liked a friend's band on Facebook, they've given permission for contact. If you're just not a fan of self-promotion, fine, say that, but don't claim that something's spam when it is nothing of the kind.
Monopolies tend to die. Sure, there might not be any competition from other companies, but their biggest competition is in the mass distributed and downloaded pirated book market.

As an example, I only buy non-DRM PDFs, but I never distribute them. Ever. And I never will, because those who use non-DRM PDFs get my hard earned money as I will then get to enjoy and profit from their works on any device that I so desire to use.

Now if, for example, I got a DRM encoded book and it was taken away from me due to some ridiculous arbitrary decision, I would be sorely tempted to get a non-DRM encoded copy of the book that I purchased. I think, in fact I know, I would be justified.

But given that I don't buy DRM encoded books, this will never be an ethical dilemna for me. And I'm no dirty hippy :-)
The kindle license agreement is relatively short and perfectly understandable.

The moral of this story is: if you give a website some money, find out what you are getting for your money.
What is the point of buying a Kindle then? You could have bought one of the many ebook readers available out there. What about a Kobo? Or a stylish Sony PRS? A small Booken? A feature-packed Onyx? An hackable iRiver Story?

Why giving money to Amazon in the first place if you do not agree with their core business practice?
We know how cancers work to a pretty good level of detail. This means that it can be fairly straightforward to classify many treatments as ineffective.

The other point is that cancer research is incredibly well funded by non-partisan, non-commerical organisations (charities like Cancer Research UK don't have an active stake in one approach over another). The notion that these alternative remedies are being wilfully ignored doesn't stand up to any remotely rigorous evaluation.
Interesting link to an Amazon.com Kindle Help discussion by the blog author:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/kindleqna/ref=...
That's certainly true for the office. But, as the author points out later in the article, many PCs were bought to serve as cash registers and info terminals, and those are replaced by tablets more and more.

So IMHO it's not that far fetched to say that individuals and businesses are buying less PCs than they were when Win XP came along. Doesn't say they aren't buying them anymore, just less.
The ugliest C feature:
Dear Microsoft application developers: Grow up
Yeah, this is gonna be a serious problem for MS. Frankly I can't believe their marketing/PR division is so inept.

I hope MS will come up with some kind of "cross-over coupon" for those who brought RT thinking it was a full version of the OS with Office included (which is why people are buying it). Cause if not, there are gonna be some VERY pissed off customers.
the discussion about the meaning of 'PC' underneath the article is pretty hilarious
I had never heard of "dark archives." Is this what you mean?

(from: http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives)

So, what is a dark archive? It is, simply put, an archive of information that is not used for public access. Most often it serves as a failsafe copy of a light archive, i.e. a publicly available version of the information, for use in disaster recovery operations. Dark archives need not be a fully operational copy of an information system, rather just the content behind the information system.
Seriously? Wow. Amazon really are dominating that particular market.
How To Avoid Social Media Phishing Scams
The site seems to be auto-banned on HN or something, which is surprising to me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682525
That presents a bit of a problem. As digital stuff is being increasingly sold across geopolitical lines you get a situation where you have little practical recourse if you have an issue with anything you have bought.
http://movies.io uses the put.io API!
Http://www.leerwiki.nl/Wat_zijn_de_gevolgen_van_een_maagverkleining
I know most people would probably call this a bad advice, but if the reason you want to start to learn programming is to develop websites, PHP would be the easiest way for you to start with, and really, when PHP starts being a 'bad' language for developing websites for you, you should be able to learn and switch to other language easily.
But, if you just looked at web development as a starting point and plan to dive deeper in programming, Python is a great choice. It is a language that is widely used in many fields, not to mention the community support it has..
Could you spell out what a "dark archive" is? The top few Google hits don't give me a precise sense of the thing.
Fogus wrote recently[1] about hosted languages, and how going forward it makes more sense to build a language on top of an existing runtime rather than creating one from scratch.

[1] http://blog.fogus.me/2012/10/09/hostiness/
That's what http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/about/ is for. Free software licenses for 3 years. The catch is that you'll be then tied to the Microsoft platform. And afterwards you'll have the privileged of paying for licenses.

And really for an established company it's not that expensive. Except for SQL Server Enterprise. They like to rob you blind on "Enterprise" licenses (which is what you need for the useful High Availability features).
DesignModo Milestone: 1 000 000 Downloads and 10 000 Sales
This week, DesignModo passed the milestone of 1 000 000 Downloads and 10 000 Sales! This is our first indeed important milestone, and we would like to share our success with you.