skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. The GPL (in all of its various incarnations), for all of its faults, is a fantastic example of a practical, usable solution to a real problem.
eBay now owns a stake in Craigslist

http://www.craigslist.org/about/press/ebay.stake
Heh, you even have your HN account named after a 007 character :)
I have no idea how someone would make something like this. Good job!

I should investigate CSS3 animations further.
I was thinking of commenting that the retail value was $20 and nobody should bid higher than that, but I figured that nobody would... Oops.
Pentagon Is Ending Exclusive Deal With Blackberry
US7028023? (http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...)
This makes no sense. Is Stallman so focused on software that he isn't considering the implications of continuing to apply broken software patents to hardware?

FPGAs? Is an algorithm implemented on a FPGA a software or hardware implementation?

Sufficiently popular software algorithms like mpeg4 (including avc) are often implemented in ASICs for speed. Stallman's suggestion does nothing to help in those cases.

What if Intel introduces new instructions that assist with some patented algorithm but do not carry out the complete algorithm? Software completes the algorithm using the chip instruction. Is that covered under Stallman's software patent immunity proposal?

The dichotomy between software implementations and hardware implementations is unhelpful. If you oppose software patents on principle, whether because you think they're harmful or because you think they're math and are not supposed to be patentable in the first place, why let the camel's nose into the tent by campaigning to allow hardware (ASIC?) implementation patents, but not allowing pure-software implementations?

Perhaps this is better framed as an economic argument. If cost were no object, more algorithms would be implemented in ASICs. There's a limit to the total chip area you'd want to fit into a computer, but a lot of algorithms could be implemented in a few custom ASICs. It's likely that some of those algorithms would be covered by patents. Stallman's proposal seems like discrimination against algorithms that are important enough to make faster execution worth a lot of money.

If software patents are not valid, and I don't believe they are valid, then allowing them to apply to hardware implementations is just applying a band-aid and punting on the real issue. Stallman's proposal may be pragmatic, in that it reduces risk to most start-ups and other entities worried about violating patents in software, but it sustains the confusion about what software patents are and whether they can be valid. I think there's more at stake than the money at issue in patent lawsuits every year. I think broad appreciation of the value of open culture, and recognition that algorithms should be part of that, is worth more than any extra value companies might be able to extract from hardware implementations of patented algorithms due to artificial monopolies created by patent protection.
It's necessary to distinguish between kin and non-kin altruism in these cases.

Kin altruism follows easily from the perspective of gene replication. Genes that lead parents to ignore infants that require care tend not to get replicated; genes that encourage nurturing helpless infants tend to survive on to subsequent generations.

Non-kin altruism is much rarer, but not impossible. There's a lot of cool math and game theory revolving around reciprocality rates and cost-benefit analyses in demonstrating rates of non-kin altruism in non-human species. (E.g., vampire bat blood-sharing, prey warning calls.)

Of course, humans are the major outlier, since we will frequently hold a door open for a complete stranger with no realistic expectation of reciprocation.

Lastly, some cases of cross-species altruism represent, not real altruism, but instinctive nurturing and bonding activities that have been "hijacked" by circumstances. E.g., a lioness whose cubs died will allow piglets to feed, which will placate motherly instincts.
I think he did it for all the time wasted and dealing with such a horrid experience on top of the $2. It's also opened up a discussion here where people have had even worse experiences. I think it's a great discussion to have.
A coworker has one, but I don't actually know who made it. I asked once, but I think they said it had been discontinued. I'll try to remember to ask again tomorrow.
There was a bug that allowed you to get back up into the ventilation duct through which you enter the level (in single player mode). You have to go into the bathroom stall, crouch on the toilet, and spin around a few times IIRC. Once you're up there, no one's getting you out until you run out of ammo.
I hope you're kidding about his contributions to political debate. Chomsky has the maximalist attitude that represents everything that is wrong with political debate today. His hatred of U.S. foreign policy is so extreme that he will defend absolutely everyone the U.S. opposes which means occasionally defending tyrants and denying genocide.
Renowned author Oliver Sacks tells that he wrote his first book in 10 days. He had committed to kill himself if he didn't make this goal. The story is in this RadioLab episode:
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/
That's a fuel mix to be very proud of. Unfortunately even here, most people in the metro area live outside Seattle city limits, and right across Lake Washington in the burbs the fuel mix is 32% coal, 16% natural gas http://pse.com/aboutpse/EnergySupply/Pages/Electric-Supply.a...
Cheers dude :)
Also, when I go in for brain surgury, I want a neurosurgeon who has learned to operate on brains by "just trying it out" and Learning from experience, rather than one who has spent long hours painstakingly going over the routines and outcomes of past procedures, past brain surgeons, theory of brain surgury and other text books related to brain surgery.

Programmers should do the same, whatever you do, keep doing trial and error, don't look at code written by the coding legends, don't know their names, don't go over their code, don't learn from them. Just fiddle about with your own programs, if it's good enough to know, you'll find out yourself.
What's really fascinating is wild chimps use a rich form of communication that's far from an actual language. But, they can be trained use complex sign langue which they will then use to communicate with each other. So, language may have developed fairly rapidly relative to the underlying biology.
Citation needed. Which papers and of what importance?
Installing all the GUI stuff from ports is kind of painful and mostly defeats the security guarantees anyway. OpenBSD is the perfect OS for a router. Everything else is like trying to put square pegs in round holes.

Use FreeBSD on the desktop if you don't like Linux. But I find Debian to be the easiest-to-use desktop OS. (Unlike Ubuntu, they don't randomly ruin everything every 6 months, which is kind of nice. But it still stays up to date with changes that actually matter.)
Coming into a market as a new seller is always hard. The established merchants have already figured out who the thieves are, so the thieves generally target the new sellers. The established merchants don't want new sellers there, so they elbow them out in various ways.

Your experience would also be bad the first few times selling at a flea market or a street corner. Only with a fair bit of experience can you get your profit margin above zero.
Closures, and when they're useful. (2011)
The Roadster is definitely expensive, but now the Model S, just a few years later, is 1/2 to 2/3 the price, and is a superior car. Thus, the price is declining rapidly, and this is obvious to anyone who cares to look at actual facts.
My point is that you can find these terrible deal-breakers with every transition. It's not enough to just point them out.
Microsoft's Plan to Sell Answers
Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the 1960s. Compiler theory incorporates a huge amount of his work. Calling his contributions negligible or detrimental is like saying Freud's contributions were the same.
I'm sorry, but to be honest, no, this doesn't make much more sense to me after rereading.

I'm sure there are elements of macroeconomics that don't apply in disasters, but all I'm talking about is the law of supply and demand, and how a 10% cap on gasoline price increases causes problems with it. I feel like basic supply and demand remains meaningful the day after a hurricane.
How Army Engineers Are Planning to Drain NYC's Tunnels
Writing these sorts of articles I think is where Stallman really shines. Pragmatic write-ups legal solutions; a more 'fanatic' stance would be to propose unlikely to occur changes to the system that would invalidate (otherwise render tooth-less) "software patents" in the context of hardware implementations but in this case he (correctly I think) concedes that as a problem for another day. Getting to hung up on that idea will prevent us from making headway on anything.
I was coming here to post the exact same thing. Perfectly summed up - why are they stressing themselves out about such an inconsequential thing right now?

Yes Comcast handled it badly, but if I were worried my house was about to be destroyed, I would not be thinking about disconnecting the cable box. (In fact I have had my house flooded, and I can tell you nothing like this ever even crossed my mind).
> My assertion is that since all interpretations lead to the same exact predictions for every imaginable experiment

This is not the case. Other than MWI and Bohm, the major interpretations (not including Copenhagen) make different predictions that are, in theory, distinguishable. It's just that it is completely infeasible to perform the experiments at this time. Maybe in 100 years or in 1,000 years, we'll have the technology to perform these experiments.

When the time comes that we can perform these experiments, one of the possible outcomes is that we narrow it down to MWI/Bohm. Once that happens, however, we will have no way to scientifically determine which of the two is the correct interpretation, except to the degree that we trust our intuitions about Ockham's razor. But that is certainly not going to let us know the answer for sure.

> The Copenhagen interpretation is the closest to "no interpretation" in that it's the most direct way of translating the math into actual predictions.

If we ever want to actually do experiments to determine under precisely which situation the probability wave collapses, then we have to do better than the Copenhagen Interpretation, since it doesn't define what a "measurement" is. Without such a definition, there's no way to test whether it is correct or not.

> Quoting the guy who said you shouldn't multiply entities without necessity, to justify the introduction of infinitely many parallel worlds, is an interesting rhetorical maneuver.

It's not a "rhetorical maneuver". I'll just refer you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more info:

It seems that the majority of the opponents of the MWI reject it because, for them, introducing a very large number of worlds that we do not see is an extreme violation of Ockham's principle: "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity". However, in judging physical theories one could reasonably argue that one should not multiply physical laws beyond necessity either (such a verion of Ockham's Razor has been applied in the past), and in this respect the MWI is the most economical theory. Indeed, it has all the laws of the standard quantum theory, but without the collapse postulate, the most problematic of physical laws. The MWI is also more economic than Bohmian mechanics which has in addition the ontology of the particle trajectories and the laws which give their evolution. Tipler 1986 (p. 208) has presented an effective analogy with the criticism of Copernican theory on the grounds of Ockham's razor.
I wonder if there's opportunity for a publisher to specialize in this (or create a series). I will ask them!

Here's the idea: they sit down/have a long call with an interesting character, talk with them extensively, get them to type out some further stories, then the publisher does all the work of making it readable without killing the subject's voice.

PeepCode and Tekpub do something like this in the screencasting world where they sit with respected developers and bash through a project and talk about tools for an hour or two. I've not seen it done in the written word other than, perhaps, feature articles for magazines.
I figured one way to protest the system would be to get a bunch of bogus patents and troll, while opposing software patents and pointing to your suit as an example of why the law is broken.

Not sure if that would be legally viable though. One would have to contact a lawyer and ask.
check out http://craftcoffee.com for coffee delivered monthly
Also, I'm still not able to access my Interest Graph. It just pops up with a blank background.
Here's one: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

If you read the claims, doubly linked lists are a special case. However, the prior art for doubly linked lists goes back decades.
tl;dr: "We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement."

He goes on to say "generally used computing hardware" is the opposite of "special-purpose hardware" but I think that definition needs to be really explicit.

Of course then, would anyone in Congress actually pass such a bill?
Measurements retroactively force photons to be both wave and particle
Particulary in the last few releases, the installer will do the partitioning for you, and do it reasonably well, an of course you can always override it.
Elephant Speaks Korean
Amazon AWS now runs Ruby apps on Passenger
The Apache License 2.0 was not acceptable.
It's not a perfect solution, and (like most things in the patent system) it's an obvious ugly hack, but it would be a lot better than the status quo. Do you have a realistic alternative that's better?

(I just realized: you may be in the dubious position of being less pragmatic about something than Richard Stallman. It's not often someone can say that!)
On the other hand, imagine the effort Comcast would have to make to verify each such claim. If they don't verify such claims, I bet they will get at least a hundred scammers for every real claim, once their leniency becomes known.

In this case, the only thing I see is that this may not be the best moment to bring that message, but I also wonder how anybody would even think of giving Comcast a call so short after this happened to them.
Having read a bunch of the comments and the OP, I think everyone has shared something that makes good sense. The problem is, though, that as much as these "lessons" make sense to us when reading them, it makes absolutely no sense to try and apply these lessons to ANOTHER PERSON.

Each and every one of us have formed our own opinions about things, shaped by each and every one of our unique life experiences. To try and apply it to someone else is pointless, and futile.

Instead, be happy. Do whatever it takes to find happiness. Apply whatever lessons are necessary to find the motivation behind YOUR happiness, and go after it. Strong, focused motivation is the most scarce resource for a human's life, and the path to finding that motivation is different for every one of us.

We live for nothing else but the pursuit of happiness, and there's an infinite number of shapes it can be. Find yours.
Google Now has a built-in Pedometer
> no one would ever make a single statement

Maybe that would be a good thing. Most people don't know jack about economics, physics, finance, engineering, artificial intelligence, the future, technology or pretty much anything outside of their day to day job.

You'll notice that whenever someone like that does open their mouth in your field without knowing jack about it - you immediately understand that he has no idea what he is talking about.

The real problem comes when he's talking about an industry you don't know - because for all intents and purposes you won't know either.

> You can bullshit all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot bullshit all the people all the time.

This is how MBAs (or Master Bullshit Artists) can exist. If you don't know much about tech, he can say pretty much whatever he wants and you will have no idea as to whether he is telling the truth unless you yourself have knowledge of the relevant area.

> Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.

-- Tao Te Ching

Remember that the next time you are listening to a discussion of a complex field - where none of the participants have degrees, industry experience or in depth on the ground knowledge of said fields. Bullshit is everywhere.
Not a scientific source:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
I looked up that claim about the origin of Python’s block-starting colon. It turns out that making Python easy for editors to parse was indeed one reason, but not the primary reason. The primary reason was that Guido thought that the code looked more readable with the colon than with just an indent.

Sources: http://markmail.org/message/ve7mwqxhci4pm6lw, http://docs.python.org/2/faq/design.html#why-are-colons-requ...
The credit bureaus have sided with me every time I've made a dispute.
I said that thinking of the billions of people on the earth that can't get cable at any price.
As a result they also have an 8-year stale (and growing) feature set compared with Linux or FreeBSD. And bringing in used, tested, and maintained code from others brings in their bugfixes as well as their bugs.
At the same time... Verizon (never used them, was on T-Mobile, now AT&T and TWC for cable) - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57543855-94/verizon-offers-...?

"Verizon offers phone charging and free calling for Sandy victims"

Yes, easy way to get more customers to sign for you in the future... Comcast just failed there...
Didn't expect to get to the frontpage :)

We're going to start another auction at 5pm PST since it looks like there are still a lot of people checking it out.
Wow. It never occurred to me that when you provide a service like that, someone could use it to literally ruin Christmas.

That is heavy.
Perhaps it's because I'm tired and I'm not understanding correctly but what is the practical difference between Stallman's suggestion and simply abolishing software patents?
That only covers linked lists that have multiple "next" pointers, so you can traverse it in more than one order. It's still stupidly obvious, but does not cover singly-linked lists.
Nitpick: "example" is misspelled as "exemple" a bunch of places.
Poe's law almost caught me out here.
Let me guess, hidden surveillance of law enforcement by citizens is not covered, right?
New apartment buildings under construction that want to game the LEED system are always looking for ways to get points. Adding a charging station or two to their underground parking garage is an easy way. The trouble is, investing in an electric car you're going to keep for 4-5 years starts making less sense when it means you might be locked into your apartment for just as long.
TakeTwo moving to Downtown Las Vegas
'Years of work' lost as Hurricane drowns rats at NYU disease research labs
That's eBay's property too.
No matter, saying HTML5 tools are the "wild-west" was "wildly" inaccurate.

On the UITable thing... the efficiency is the whole point of this article. Does you UITableView code compile directly to any other platform?

As for implementing, from a quick google search it looks like it would be trivial. A one day project, if less. How long would it take you to RE-code it in cocoa from scratch without going off the original code? Also, see Enyo if you want an easily re-usable kit like that[1]. Not to mention tons of other ones. If anything that example works in favor of HTML being easy and open.

[1] http://enyojs.com/sampler/
It's to incentivize buyers to Buy It Now.

If you know that Buy It Now disappears as soon as someone bids, then you're more likely to Buy It Now because if you don't Buy It Now, you can't buy it later; you can only bid on it later, and then you might not get it. So if you want it, eBay wants you to Buy It Now.

Buy It Now.
I think that the word "miscarriage" carries extreme connotations with it, you instantly imagine giving birth to a dead baby.

In Germany, if a fetus or embryo does not continue development at an early-ish stage and is expelled by the womb, midwives (I used to date one for 2 years) usually use the word "Schwangerschaftsabbruch", which translates to "discontinuation of pregnancy".

I think that's a word which much better describes what's happening without the emotional baggage and which might prepare people better to what's going on - my girlfriend is 37 and we're trying to have kids but it's hard, and I know that we're going to run into a few "discontinuations" before anything is going to happen.
Out of sheer curiosity, is the restart a manual thing, or is it just on a cronjob? I'm thinking by the wording of the OP, it's done manually, but I'm still going to ask :-)
TEDx: The Geometry of Chocolate
With competition from Square I hope that PayPal is finally being forced to mend its evil ways.
"Richard Stallman: Let's Do Something No One Will Want To Do"

j/k of course, <3 rms...but it's kinda true. As much as I'm for limiting the effects of software patenting, the utter bane of the free software movement, I'm also a realist. I know that it probably won't happen, since the multi-billion dollar court cases this year have ultimately proven that software patenting is a great business, if you're a copyright or corporate lawyer or a big company.

I find striking similarities between the patent wars and the drug war, in the sense that our government has absolutely no reason to put a stop to either of them until mass populist resistance to the law occurs, and then only under the massive force of the people will these laws get passed. But to think that our government or anyone who's in charge of this shit actually thinks that limiting the effects of patents are a good idea, especially now that they have realized how valuable software patents are, is just plain foolish in my opinion. Maybe I'm too cynical, but rms would know this better than me because the case of SCO vs. Linux was a pretty significant thing at the time, a lot of companies were really freaking out about their choice of Linux should the verdict sway in SCO's favor. And now it's all happening all over again, because software patents are valuable to someone.

The fact that they ruin other people's inventions, ideas, and practices, is completely irrelevant in the eyes of our legal industry.
You should work with Brian Armstrong to allow sellers / buyers to use bitcoins on the site. The advantage is that bitcoin does not allow chargebacks. Their interface is very close to PayPal, and makes it much easier to get started with.

http://coinbase.com/
You're implicitly referring to the subset of end users that have chosen or would like to choose devices from incompatible ecosystems.

I suspect this set of users is relatively small, given that it excludes what seems like the most common case: people that are satisfied with the platform they're on. I don't know that there are a lot of Android users (for example) that are eager to buy iOS devices but hesitate because they won't be able to use their existing apps.
It's a hostile stake, isn't it? They bought it from a former principle, and Craigslist has been trying to dilute the stake away.
Just thought it was a cool idea. We've seen a lot of augmented reality used in advertisements and smartphone games, but not really to this effect. With the CTO of Pixar as its founder, i think they might be able to do some pretty interesting things - think games & movies with, and stories told by your favorite toys.

P.S. - I tried to downplay the title when posting to be a little more realistic re: the mindblowing, but it got changed back on me.