skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually yes, well actually approaching zero, and I realize it doesn't sound right. The cognitive dissonance comes from the economics of information, they work differently than the economics of goods.

Imagine this thought experiment. Imagine there was a 100% fool proof copy protection scheme in China, and the only way to acquire Microsoft Office would be to buy it. Try to imagine how many people, who make $1000 in a year would then cough up the $495 to buy it?

Its not hard to imagine because there is no manufactured good in China that commands a 'half annual salary' value proposition that is not critical to a person's survival. And Microsoft Office isn't that item.

There is an exemplar that there is a $6M value for Word based on the $2 CDs that sell, so its not 'valueless.' And there are benefits to owning a legitimate copy over a pirated copy. Further, the cost of producing a pirated product (box, CD, getting started guide, etc) is less than $2 so there actually a real-goods sort of economic value analysis possible as well.

So all we really know is that the number is >= $2 and < $495. And in information economics this poses an interesting challenge. How do you capture the maximum value for your information? Microsoft later introduced a plan where Office for this market was significantly less expensive than it was for the US and European markets [1]. That increased the value they extracted for office out of those markets tremendously. It was more than 10x that $1.50 price at $29/CD. And they captured a lot of value for it, millions and millions of dollars. But not billions of dollars.

Many have argued that much of NetFlix's streaming revenue has come from previous BitTorrent users [2]. Prior to NetFlix you could say BitTorrent was a "$xB" problem where $x is the money that has been re-captured by offering an alternative with an acceptable price.

But to understand how that works you have to think about what gives information value, its much more market driven that fiat driven. Sony can say "Its worth $X to own this movie" but if nobody buys it and it is heavily pirated they guessed wrong. Since the replication cost is nearly $0 they really are guessing at consumer value. Lots of DVDs sell for $9.99 or $4.99. At that price I won't even bother looking for a torrent, I'll just get the DVD. Its a market, it has different mechanisms that drive it.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/09/23/microsoft-china-di...

[2] http://gigaom.com/2011/05/17/netflix-p2p-traffic/
Why do some people on this site immediately jump all over the rep button over disagreements?

What's wrong with just having a good old argument?

You think I said something stupid, call me an idiot and tell me why.
The CD burning product must have been CDRWIN, I remember the frustration of searching for a working crack for that one (as a poor student, of course!)
I used to be impressed by Taleb (when I was younger and more clueless) but having read two of his books and many articles I find the negativity tiresome and petulant, and his finance theories questionable.

Eric Falkenstein:

"Another key to understanding Taleb is that he has a French post-modern tendency to write to impress rather than explain. He provides hundreds of loosely related anecdotes, reminding me of the Talmud quote that 'when a debater’s point is not impressive, he brings forth many arguments.' I actually agree with a lot of Taleb, such as the intractability of risk because it is endogenous, and I think he's vaguely libertarian, but he says so many inconsistent things that doesn't mean much (when he's right it's probably a good example of the Gettier problem)."

Gettier problem = whether being right by accident still counts as being right.

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-frag...
how do you do #2?
There's also the 128 GB option that comes with the $250 fusion drive. If you don't want the fusion drive, you could always reformat it to be two separate drives instead.
How To Lose Weight And Keep It Off
Ok, here goes my highly controversial sweeping generalization: men suck at multitasking, women are actually much better at it. My source? Just years of active observation. I'd be very interested to see any actual research on the subject.
I know this might be a borderline inappropriate comment for Hackernews, but sometimes I wonder whether having horrible, racially insensitive, biased, outdated ideas is the definition of being Republican.
filepicker.io is cool. But your backend service wouldn't be needed if the image uploading & resizing straight to s3 could be done in the browser. Your product would simply be a javascript lib.
It's at http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-...
I'd like to see a news aggregator where all of the submissions were as well-written and thoughtful as this one. It doesn't matter whether his perspective is wrong or right, the fact is that the writing here simply makes reading it a pleasure. I'd say that 1% or less of articles have this quality.
This is the order they are defined in the source data (Natural Earth - Admin 0 countries), and it appears to be sorted by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. Spain is ESP, United Kingdom is GB1.
Let's not forget there's still a model that allows storage/RAM upgrades easily, the Mac Pro. I've always seen the iMac as one of these TV-like devices, just due to the form factor alone.

The display is one of the primary elements I like to have an upgrade path for, something the iMac has never offered. The new model's sealed form factor is the logical conclusion for the product line.

I'm interested to see what they do with the Mac Pro.
Jesus, Russia.
That's the point. It's not an out-there idea.

The Constitution was written by people who had taken arms against a government. It's reasonable to infer that they thought doing so was important and might be necessary in the future.
Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much

I'm not so sure. Those pleasures all continue to exist but except for wine, the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression.

Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different planet.

Life in 100 years will seem similarly bizarre and intense to us now. I think the author of the article has a certain notion of what 'cool' is but I think radical changes in expression and society are also 'cool' - they're just not jetpacks or spacesuits.
> the idiom of using hashes as named arguments working well enough that the core team didn't feel the need to address it earlier

Hashes are hideously expensive, though: For every method call, an entire object has to be populated and hashed. The hashing is fast enough for symbol keys, sure, but it's still a whole data structure that must be allocated and later garbage collected.

Since Ruby hashes are mutable and there is no way to track the mutation across methods, the compiler cannot optimize single-use hash literals into a constant. (When all keys and literals are values it could pre-allocate a structure that is copy-on-write internally, but to my knowledge it doesn't do this.) For example, this is a typical pattern:

def generate_useless_stuff(options = {})
path = options[:path] || @default_path
value = options[:value]
File.open(path, "w") { |f| f << ("*" * value) }
end

generate_useless_stuff(value: 42)

In a statically-typed language, the compiler would know that {value: 42} was created once and never reused, and since the value is a literal, the :value key could simply have been plugged directly into the value variable. Also, the lookup of :path is completely unnecessary in this case.

Often all the options are optional, and even then a call to generate_useless_stuff() will generate an empty hash. This is why I tend to write methods, when performance-sensitive, as:

def generate_useless_stuff(options = nil)
path = options[:path] || @default_path if options
value = options[:value] if options
File.open(path, "w") { |f| f << ("*" * value) }
end

Of course, this decreases allocation while adding complexity.

So yes, I absolutely agree that it's amazing. :-) I think the core team should have considered it earlier.
> My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness"...

I think this is pretty naive or at the least, a simplistic way of viewing technology. In the early 20th century, people in the US were using rational ideas to promote terribly racist and oppressive social practices. Suburbs and urban policy may have been an improvement for some, but they also greatly contributed to the death of urban cores, which lead to decades of poverty for the people who couldn't get out of those areas. The two world wars demonstrated how technology can be used for incredible death and destruction. Technology now is enabling global competition that puts a great deal of strain on the blue collar middle class in developed nations who used to have manufacturing jobs, meanwhile other countries get rich using their low wages and lack of labor and workplace safety standards to be more competitive.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a luddite. I think it's fine to say that over the longer term, technology improves things. It's possible the people who lost their manufacturing jobs can eventually get higher-skilled jobs that allow them (and our society) to produce more advanced goods, and the people overseas will eventually be able to demand higher standards. People are noticing that living in an urban area has a lot of advantages over suburbs, and cities are springing back to life. But to gloss over the bad periods in between by saying that technology is monotically good is simply not an accurate viewpoint.
The future will be plenty cool. What it won't be is what the cool people (or, indeed, anyone at all) thinks it will be. It will be, as it has always been, the cool future that nobody thought of.
I'd really like to know if people on HN "share an absence of literary culture" as Taleb suggests. Can you please respond if you read literature other than science fiction?
I guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before. Things don't seem to change that much, after all. Sadly. Which is coincidentally the theme of this article.
See previous response, Microsoft actually did change their pricing and captured a huge chunk of value. It was significantly higher than $2/CD. When selling information there is a tail, a few people will pay whatever you ask, a few more will pay less than that, Etc, until you get to all of the people who would obtain a copy if it were zero cost. That defines the "value curve" of the information. It is not a straight line. Because it is "hard" to justify large differences in price for the same product, one of two strategies are used a "steadily decreasing price" or a "fixed but relatively low price". Depending on the product different things make more sense. Games for example benefit from the 'expensive at first but cheaper later' model, reference works benefit by capturing as much market as possible quickly.
Whether he's innocent or guilty who knows, but there does seem to be reason to fear police custody either way.

From Amnesty International;

"Abuses by police
There were several reports of abuses by police, including torture, ill-treatment and arbitrary detention.
* Three men, a father and his two sons, were arrested separately in July, on suspicion of withholding evidence related to a bank robbery. All three were reportedly beaten and subjected to electric shock torture before being released without charge."

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/americas/belize
To call cookies "bits of code" is inaccurate, but I'm being pedantic.
And yet, starting just 8 years later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapper

I think it's easy to overestimate the difference between people in the past and ourselves. The lack of shame with which people pursue their pleasures now may be different, but it's silly to think people 100 years ago didn't enjoy getting smashed and having sex.
John McAfee Captured After Weeks on the Run
Uh... did you read the article?
I concur. From my limited experience with Lua, I'd say it's a very beginner friendly language, and it's blazing fast in certain conditions. There's also an app called Codea which runs on iPad that allows beginners to code games within. It works suprisingly well, and there are a few games on the app store that are written entirely on iPad in Codea.
Early epiphanies as a late cofounder
Well, riding my motorcycle on the California freeways has shown me that women seem much more skilled than men at simultaneously driving, texting, adjusting the radio, and running over motorcyclists ("I just didn't see him there!")
It's not just inappropriate, it's bigoted and extraordinarily ignorant. You just slandered at least 100 million Americans.

Care to discuss all the scary laws and accepted practices Obama has ushered into existence the last four years? Let's talk about the indefinite detention, the torture ("enhanced interrogation"), the right to assassinate (murder) American citizens, the drone killings worldwide, the NDAA, the continued war in Afghanistan and killings that go with it, the extreme spying powers and general violations of civil liberties by the Obama admin that seems to have become the every day norm. What happened to the elected Democrats being the protectors of civil liberties?

And then let's talk about whether there are actually any differences between the Democrats in power vs the Republicans in power. All I see is an Obama Administration that is continuing where Bush left off.
>Article fails to mention that when CloudFlare has issues, they present Captcha's to the Google Bot, and your site gets delisted.

As someone who uses CloudFlare on a site that depends on Google traffic (~800K/month directly from G), this is simply not true.
"Has technology really made your life significantly better?"

I'm a professional filmmaker. It's what I've always wanted to do. I've also always wanted to make epic fantasy/sci-fi films.

Currently, thanks to 3D animation, Machinima, motion capture, and a bunch of other things, I get to make movies in my bedroom that would have been flat-out impossible 25 years ago, and would have cost in excess of $10,000,000 15 years ago.

So, yeah. Tech has made my life better.
I do exactly this--I use namecheap's dynamic DNS thing and a Comcast home connection to serve my personal website. Namecheap lets you update DNS with a GET request to a URL, so I just set up a cron job to do that every night. Works great.
Hey guys/gals, I set up a Boston HN meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/hn-boston/

Join if interested. Want to meet at a bar after work the week of Dec 10th?
My undergraduate degree was in Literature. I've read lots of classic novels, poetry etc.

I also like sci-fi.
You're correct, this is an inappropriate comment which offers no insight and broadly dismisses a diverse group of people and opinions.
IndieCity Coming to Linux
Why don't you try to stop preemptively dismissing other people. Calling it "immoral" doesn't mean anything unless you define morality and that's a loaded gun. The point is that legally, there is a distinction between depriving others of property and infringing on a copyright.

If they're different crimes, they're treated differently, addressed differently, etc... how on Earth is it not relevant to discuss?
There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things (and off-by-one errors)
In the absence of a government, "we" will manifest itself in other formats, most frequently tyrannical.

Tyranny implies government. In the absence of government, therefore, there can be no tyranny. It's not clear to most people whether society without government is possible, of course (or, rather, most would assert that it isn't).
I'd like to see a static site generator that still runs some kind of administrative backend somewhere. Then I could have clients or friends I do sites for log in to one of my personal machines and enter new stories/content, and it would generate the pages and push the updates. That would combine the best of a simple CMS with the best of static generation. Does something like this already exist?
Do you mean cloudflare has had issues presenting your site to googlebot and you've not been delisted, or you use cloudflare and you've not been delisted?
The present -- the past's future -- is weird. You may not notice, because you're used to it, but some aspects of our world would certainly raise eyebrows in the not-far-distant past. America elected a black president in 2008; fifty years before, there were still racial segregation laws. The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information. Or, if that's too mundane, it also has vast amounts of nigh-uncensored pornography. The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.

I think these examples would once have been widely regarded as weird, surprising, and non-superficial.
I read Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and of course, Taleb...
The Neurosciences of Religion: Meditation, Entheogens, Mysticism
This has to be one of the worst straw man arguments I've read on this subject, and I'm in favor of seeing games as art. Yes, if you reduce art to prints, it does seem like games have a leg up. However, film and theatre and music have long since been considered to he art, and this is usually where the debate takes place.

The examples she cites aren't convincing either. For games to really be seen as a great art form, IMO, it can't be that they simply provide a vehicle for other art forms, such as music and film (I.e. cutscenes).

The key dimension that games add is interactivity...in that sense, the art of games is more along the lines of modern performance art in which the viewers actions amplifies the artistic meaning.

The first time I really felt that a game had hit me in a narrative way that was impossible in film/theater/literature was in Portal, in the scene in which Glados compels you to "kill" the Companion Cube. At the end of it, I felt this huge sense of comic relief because I half expected the box to start screaming, and then I laughed and marveled at how the gamewriters were able to create a sense of attachment to an inanimate box, merely by having you pick it up and move it to places. I haven't played portal 2 yet, but I can't think of any other game that elicited such a strong emotional reaction from me through the mechanism of interactivity.
No, wrong. I assume you haven't used the Flash platform. A movie clip is like a library that can be replicated and instances of which, as many as you want can be created. Similar to creating a variable and calling it how many ever times you want it. So, in an interactive mesh-up movie clips will help you stay well organized with fewer lines of code, comparatively.
I mean I've not noticed any negative trends in Googlebot spidering my site, and my site's rankings have not changed since I switched to Cloudflare 3 months ago.
My comcast ip hasn't changed in 5 years. Although I have to use the mac address of a long defunct computer nic I had 5 years ago.
I'm curious as to what other factors drove the MySQL to Postgres conversion. Can you share any additional details (I assume it's not just because Postgres is the new hotness :] )?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4856914
I guess we, in our youthful arrogance, dismiss our seniors as enterprise relics of a lost age, without considering what led them to that place before.

This is a maddeningly vague statement. It sounds like something I'm supposed to agree with, but without at least one concrete example, it could be total bullshit and still sound wise.
Inappropriate comment to an inappropriate article (Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon[1]).

[1]http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Didn't they give up on porting it to mobile?

This runs choppy on my old iPhone, but it doesn't make the page lag.

Flash often kills my browser and brings my entire system to a halt.

Sorry, but it's still buggy as all hell.
Leading with self-deprecating self-reference doesn't make it any less harmful and slurred, just more subtle.
This is another time; and not even half America would be able to take out the government even if they really wanted to... back then not even tanks existed.
Even with Unblock-Us I can reach CloudFlare just fine here (Berlin, Germany):

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> @208.122.23.22 cloudflare.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12445
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;cloudflare.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
cloudflare.com.	300	IN	A	173.245.60.249
cloudflare.com.	300	IN	A	173.245.60.250
cloudflare.com.	300	IN	A	173.245.61.248
cloudflare.com.	300	IN	A	173.245.61.249
cloudflare.com.	300	IN	A	173.245.61.250

;; Query time: 61 msec
;; SERVER: 208.122.23.22#53(208.122.23.22)
;; WHEN: Sun Dec 2 01:24:29 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 112
I sometimes wonder if perhaps there should be criminal penalties associated with a government official drafting a bill or amendment or action or whathaveyou that clearly violates the Constitution.

I mean, Congress seems to want to try to attach a criminal penalty to everything else. Why not put them in prison for trying to violate the Constitution?
That has got to be the most biased statistical sampling technique ever. If you want to know about "literary culture" among HN readers, asking for replies from people who read non-SF is not going to answer your question. At worst, it'll give you the illusion of knowledge.

(Maybe a more interesting question would be: what's so ontologically distinct about science fiction? Why is it specifically excluded from Literature?)
"It is remarkable that the tools that seem to currently dominate the world, such as the Internet, or more mundane matters such as the wheel on the suitcase of Book IV, were completely missing from these forecasts."

This is completely wrong. I can think of at least 2 victorian examples imagining the internet: 1, a series of drawings where video telecommunications is imagined, and the other a story I cannot find, written over 100 years ago I believe, about a son and mother communicating from their pods where all the worlds knowledge is accessible, and the son chooses to go "offline".
Very cool. My current project is to help the production side but this is what PG was talking about in killing Hollywood.

Best of luck.
IOS Synths in the studio
Well, yes. Taleb's point was that life's basic needs and pleasures don't change. My counter-point (which was in agreement with what you're saying) is that more people can enjoy those things, and there are more ways for them to do so.

Also, I don't think there's a time in history when alcohol/drug use and premarital anal sex weren't common. All of that is ancient. People tend to think of sexual norms in the 1837-1967 era (and even then, only middle-class and higher, and more in polite myth than actuality) as "traditional" but that's not how things "always" were.
Does anyone know what ever happened with Kiji, it seems a generational GC for Ruby has already been coded twice, yet in 2.0 it seems the only big change is the CoW friendly GC
Python API for Clipper Card (Bay Area transit card)
This is my unofficial Python client for the Clipper Card web service.

pypi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/clippercard/
The mention of software bugs seems worrying - I mean, isn't avionics supposed to be second only to NASA in code quality and being bug-free? Or do they just not care that much since there's not a pilot involved?