skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh good. Another reason I can reasonably dislike this band. I find them to be a poor version of one of my favorite bands (The Avett Brothers).

I would think that having more people hear your music would be a good thing. Controlling or attempting to control whom hears it smacks of echoes of the Metallica 'Down with Napster' stuff. Either enjoy people listening earnestly to your music, or well, you're just a really interesting marketing project and not musicians IMHO.
Common problem with the Register.
Two important issues to take into account:
1) The use of "worse" or "better" keeps the conversation very subjective. Better in what sense? What metrics are you using to measure the skill?

2) Deliberate Practice: same as with physical training if you practice in ways that strain your capacity, it will grow as long as the necessary amount of time is put into the activity.

Highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer...
Lots of people are doing this / have done exactly this.

My parents and many of their generational peers (boomers +/- 10 years) did the large house thing in the 1960s-1980s in order to raise the kids, then sold their large house and moved to a smaller house or condo as the kids moved out in the 1990s-2000s.
I don't have cable either, yet I've purchased the Bluray sets of Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific; all HBO productions. External USB drives are pretty cheap these days (DVD and/or Bluray) in case your computer doesn't support optical media.
Everyone will be a billionaire soon!
Hmm. I'm not so sure about his analogy with writing. Of course, most people who take creative writing don't go on to become great writers; that pretty much goes without saying, most people in any field don't go on to become "great" (the very definition of "great" is that it's exceptional). So that part is a tautology.

Now, I wonder about how many people who go on to be "great writers" received training in writing? Of course, "creative writing" as an academic discipline is rather new, but English has been around as a discipline for years. From a quick poll of the authors mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_in_literature and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_in_literature, almost every one had at least a college education, mostly in the humanities (which generally require a lot of writing, and train you in writing). And most of them have worked at lower-level writing jobs before becoming great writers; copy editors, journalists, corporate writers, and the like. Several of the more recent "great writers" of the late 20th and 21st centuries have indeed gone through creative writing programs.

So his analogy, at least, seems to be false.

How about in writing software? Well, as I mentioned, it's pretty much tautological that no training program can produce entirely great programmers. The purpose of training is to turn lousy programmers into mediocre. Mediocre into passable. Passable into good. Good into very good. And very good into great. You are not likely to train all of your lousy programmers into great; so claiming that training does not produce great programmers is attacking a strawman.

I have seen plenty of people who have gotten a degree in computer science who are lousy programmers. And I have seen great programmers with no formal education. But on the whole, when I've looked at programmers with equivalent amounts of experience, but where one had formal training and the other did not, I would prefer the one who had some formal training. People who have not had formal training tend to not have much experience with reasoning about algorithms, or invariants, that can make their code a lot better.

While its true that nowadays we have many libraries and tools that mean that the average programmer can just use built-in data structures and do a pretty good job, I've seen enough code that was so horribly inefficient that even a little bit of algorithmic analysis upfront would have been helpful. Or a lot of code where someone just hacked away at a problem until they had something that worked, rather than trying to formulate a model that would underly it and keep the code well-organized and understandable.

And among those programmers who are self-taught but great, they have put in deliberate practice, and deliberate study, even if its on their own.

So sure, there are some people who are just untrainable; I've worked with some of them. And there are some people who are naturally brilliant and able to study independently. But all else being equal, I think that deliberate training definitely has value in improving the quality of programmers as a whole; and so yes, training will lead to more great programmers.
It's not a pointless battle. There are two possible reactions to any such post: engagement, which provides the possibility of changing the other person's mind, or disengagement, which at minimum gave you a little practice at making your point. The cost is the time and energy expended to write the post in the first place; as long as that doesn't outweigh either possibility, it's not pointless.
Unions don't have a legally enforced monopoly on labor. They obtain a monopoly or oligopoly through market power.

The problem being that without unions, labor becomes subject to oligopsony buying power and Ricardo's Law of Rent kicks in.
Hmm, the torrentverse has surprisingly good taste,

> Game of Thrones

> Dexter

> Big Bang Theory

> How I Met Your Mother

> Breaking Bad

> The Walking Dead

> Homeland

Well, except for the last one ;) I kid, I kid.
Breaking the Taboo - End the war on drugs by legalizing them
What is your objection to having the work deemed work for hire?
You mean the fourth one.
Radar or GTFO
I find it disturbing that so much power is in the hands of bankers -- regardless of their benevolent plans for me. Why should any group of men have the authority to inflate or deflate a currency? We're talking about manipulating the common denominator in most transaction -- the value of money. I think the cost of unintended consequences will far outweigh any perceived benefit.
VLC for Windows RT passes £40,000 Kickstarter target
The classic trap ... is that they're not considered for jobs because they don't have experience, and can't get experience because they can't get the jobs

This has always been a problem and IMO the solution in previous generations was that a time came when the job market was tight and companies just had to hire somebody, so they were willing to take a chance. Or people at the top had retired, and everybody moved up, and there was some slack in the budget, so they brought some new grads on board. With a persistently weak economy and people delaying their retirement, both effects are getting suppressed.
Looking for a Microsoft partner agency to work with? 10 question to ask
The author of the first free Chinese input method on Mac passed away today
Feng Huajun wrote the first free Mac Chinese input method Fun Input Toy (http://funinput.com) in 2006. Before this software came out, it is difficult to write Chinese by using the default input method on Mac OS X.

He also write one of the very first free Chinese input methods for iPhone in 2008.

Feng was born in 1980s, died of cancer. His blog is http://huajun.w18.net.
It is also why your settings must be absolutely simple, logical and follow conventions of whatever platform you are on (if any).

If I have to dig through 10 pages of arcane settings to find some "simple thing" like the one described in the OP's example feature, it might as well not exist (assuming the context that I'm a new user and not already committed to using this software), I've already moved on to the next candidate app.
>Doesn't "provide better context" just push the problem one turtle away? How could I communicate to the website that the item for which I'm shopping is for a friend, not for me, and that I don't want the current actions to figure into future adaptive behaviour?

That's part of the implementation, again, I think. It would be silly for the implementation to treat just once instance of a behaviour so seriously. If the user buys it once, but then never shows any interest in such products again, then they should slowly be ranked less and less relevant. If the user instead continued to purchase or look at baby items, then the system could have more certainty of desire in them. Again, it's not just the products themselves, but the behaviour surrounding them. Temporal context is important, too.

I agree fully that just heaping on more interface for "special cases" is a bad idea. We just need to be smarter about...how our software is smart.
It gets sticky depending where you are, but the sort of copyright law that works for commissioning marketing materials is a lot different than the sort of arrangement software developers should be looking for. You can otherwise get in a position where you're not able to reuse your own code across multiple projects.
I was arguing from a legal viewpoint: neither copyrights nor other property rights are more fundamental in the law.

Re: intuition, it's strange that you'd characterize movies, music, and software as "information." While most people would find laws regulating the information they can share with other people to be unintuitive, people also don't perceive movies, music, and software to be "information." The reduction of these things to "information" in the sense of "strings of ones and zeroes" (no different than say a phone number or someone's birth date) is a distinctly techie abstraction. People perceive these things not as information, but as products, analogizing them to any other product they may buy. Indeed, I think that's where the intuitive appeal of the first sale doctrine comes from. People find the first sale doctrine intuitive not because they think there shouldn't be restrictions on the "information" they can share with other people, but because they see movies, songs, etc, as akin to physical property, which they can resell.
I'm in Shanghai where I've lived off and on for 8 years. I've been using an ec2 image with Poptop installed. The problem is the IP addresses of the major vpns become known and blocked.

Any suggestions of software that would deploy images to various cloud services on behalf of users? I don't think China would be able to block all of ec2 and Rackspace, though they do sometimes seem to throttle ec2.
I think one of the first comments on the Wired article sums this all up pretty well:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/12/mumford-sons-lending-...

TL;DR: The term lending has been on most records in the last 20 years and actually refers to public rentals, or something to that effect, and has nothing to do with letting your friend borrow your CDs.
Double-barrelled 50 kW laser weapon shoots down drones and mortar rounds
"Textual analysis" also sounds like the sort of thing that could be profitably outsourced. I understand that in the medical world, reviewing medical images may now be done by qualified technicians in lower-wage countries.
Ah. That, then, changes the meaning of this quote entirely. If he's merely saying that training alone, as opposed to a combination of training and education, is insufficient, then that is much more plausible. I was reading the original post as including what he defines here as "education" in "training".
Yes, this is the point that needs to be made every time someone rages at HBO. It's not that they are doing this despite fans "wanting them to take their money", it's that cable partners have made it financially unreasonable for HBO to split from them.
An archive tool for Svbtle blogs, in 29 lines of Ruby
"Can I adjust my feature set and specifications as we go?"

Client: "Now, this TODO list app is great, but we want something more like Facebook and Linkedin combined"

This is exactly how you get feature creep and is a really bad idea for fix bid projects. But of course it depends on how big a pivot it is and how big a contract it is.

"Can I meet and work directly with the designers and developers on my project?"

Sure, you can meet and get advice from them, but you may not work directly with them. There are some pretty crazy clients out there, and it is the management's job to keep them from driving developers insane. That is why management gets the "big bucks". They have to deal with the crazy.
Actually, in comparison, the German Reich under Hitler appears to be more like a paradise.

You have violated the advice in the Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

and I have downvoted accordingly.
That's nice. A lot of my former college friends are on food stamps, and workaholism is no dream of mine.
Avdi Grimm has a "book" on separating business logic from Rails - http://objectsonrails.com/
GitLab.org got updated a few days ago, there is definitely room for improvement. But I don't get your points. 1) There is an installation guide button on the front page. This contains the clone source command under point 6. Just downloading something is not enough. 2) The tagline says 'Distributed under the MIT License', it's free! 3) First and second line of the installation guide refer to the hardware requirements, but I agree the website could be clearer on this. 4) What kind of 'more' are you looking for?
Everything you wrote reinforces the article.
> Their search engine also fails to find most good fares

Do you have an example of this? We get our data from the same place that Matrix does
Heh, I am sure everyone can find one in that list to dislike ;) But I still think the quality of the bittorrent top 7 is surprisingly good, compare to more typical popularity listings:

> Big Bang Theory

> Voice

> X Factor

> NCIS

> Two and a Half Men

> Person of Interest

> Dancing with the Stars

http://www.tvguide.com/top-tv-shows

Those are mostly terrible.
While no interface is better, it is not always the simplest or the most utilitarian.

The Mercedes proximity based, keyless entry system is actually a complex digital abstraction over a mechanical key/lock.

Mercedes has to address a bunch of security concerns such as preventing an adversary from sniffing my key information through my jacket pocket, digitally cracking codes, etc. Since the system tries to protect you from locking your key in the car, more technological components need to be thrown into the mix to detect if the key is inside the car. If the driver has to reach into his pocket to turn on the ignition it would defeat the purpose of going "keyless" so presumably the ignition system also gets a few layers of complexity. The cost of whole system would also go up. Repair and maintenance don't sound so appealing either. The whole thing can fail in a lot more ways.

I am not inferring it's a bad idea. It very well might become commoditized technology some time in the future and pave the way for other interesting possibilities.

I prefer utilitarian design which is more concerned with simplicity through and through rather than just minimizing the footprint for the user interface.
Great. Then obviously we should make life even harder for the masses so they can achieve even more glory from overcoming the even more overwhelming odds. And if they fail, they deserve what's coming to them!

/sarcasm
How to escape a sinking helicopter
Honestly, I don't have a major moral problem with piracy. It's the lowest tier of price discrimination. The vast majority of people who pirate would simply not pay for the content if piracy were an option. There are content creators who encourage piracy because they have a better chance of becoming viral (and making more money) if it occurs.

I pay, when I can. I have enough money, and if I pirate, then I'm disenfranchising myself because, in pop culture, money is a vote. If I don't pay (vote) then I can't complain about garbage being produced because I'm a non-contributor. Piracy was OK when I was a college kid with very little money, but now that the cost of content is trivial in comparison to the time it costs me to watch something, I feel like I should take the legit route.

However, I don't buy cable. It's too expensive given that most of the channels I'll never watch, and Time Warner Cable is the epitome of Suck. Why should I pay so much for such terrible service? I am not going to "vote for" TWC just to watch Game of Thrones, which only requires a cable subscription because HBO was beaten into submission by the bad guys.

So I say: until HBO will take your money directly, pirate on.
At issue is the part "laws enforcing a requirement."

I'm hard pressed to think of any advocate of a free market who wants this law in place.

But a closed shop arose not from legal statute but by an agreement between the company and the union. There's no need for government involvement, except to settle contract disagreement.

In fact, it's quite the opposite! Closed shops are illegal in the US, under Taft-Hartley Act, though they are legal in some other countries. Union shops are legal, except where the states have prohibited that practice.

The question to the audience is, shouldn't a free market advocate want to reduce both the laws which give unions specific power AND those which take power away from unions?

If your concern is about monopoly powers, well, 1) that's a restriction of free trade, so our hypothetical free market advocate might not want those restrictions either, and 2) why aren't they regulated under anti-monopoly laws, rather than specific anti-union laws?

As to the net neutrality issue, well, that's a mixture of morality and an abuse of monopoly power. I believe you're only focusing on the latter issue for now. (And I think our government is and has been entirely too closely intertwined with business, and especially big business, for too long, which has allowed these abuses to grow.)

Is an employer a sort of monopolist? I believe they are. While there are exceptions (IT in the Bay Area during the dot-com era being an obvious one), for many people it is not easy to quit and easily find new employment. Otherwise Nevada wouldn't have a 10% unemployment rate. The problem with monopolies though isn't that they are monopolies, but that they can abuse their monopoly power.

You rightly pointed out that unions can abuse their monopoly power. But so too can companies.

So the modified question to the audience is: shouldn't a free market advocate want to reduce both the laws which give unions specific power AND which take power away from unions, so long as there is no abuse of the monopoly power?

Unfortunately, the easy answer by an anti-union person is that unions are, by definition, an abuse of monopoly power, so this question has no real utility. And I can't come up with a better phrasing.
As the WalMart manager, it's none of your business what the customer is doing with the crayons.
The problem with this description is that I don't know what kind of benefits I can get from using different computational rules... Can you show me?
How so?? I see no issues with that at all.
There is such a law but you should not assume it means what you think it means. Talk to a legal professional if it's important to you. One IP lawyer I interacted with maintained that the rulings in actual court practice are very unfavorable to the moonlighting employees. To the point that CA labor code 2870 might as well not exist (although of course he didn't say that in so many words.) "Actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer" can be made to mean anything. I asked, "Say I worked for a company that makes software for medical devices, and I work on cell phone apps in my spare time, could they still claim that it's related to their research and development?" He said, "Yes."
Settings are for microwaves. Computer-based tools should be reprogrammable. Still, the tool should be easy to configure for the 80% case.
Why Not a Mac Pro Mini?
I think the points raised in the five questions would mostly come up in underfunded projects. Sure, you can have everything you're willing to pay for. Especially things like

> Can I adjust my feature set and specifications as we go?
I doubt there is a wide choice of professional tools in most areas. You have to choose between a few suboptimal fits, and that's where you start valuing flexibility.
I'm pretty sure this is a foregone conclusion. There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.

If you go back 50 or 100 years, productivity-per-hour was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Why do we decree by fiat that everyone has a moral obligation which we will enforce via the economic system to spend at least half their waking hours working for most of their lifespan?
This show is not aired in Russia. And I can agree that eventually it will became available in some format. Maybe even translated (I, personally, do not care much about translation).

What about Japanese shows?

For example: Bakemonogatari was aired in 2010. It is available in DVD in Japanese (maybe Korean/Chinese). In 2012 there is still no official English/Spanish/Russian/other release.

But there are a lot of fan translations. So, piracy is only way.
Hipmunk seems to be marking things up. For the few flights that I tried recently, tickets were $30..90 more than from the airline's own website.

Oh, and getting tired of Himpunk's promoted ads on the site that shall not be named.
XDA University
"Note that this doesn’t mean that Daniel will always lose the game but that he can lose by at most 1/12 the value of the game. If Nick doesn’t play optimally (Nick doesn’t use his optimal mixed strategy), Daniel will most likely win!"

I don't think this is correct. I think if Daniel plays his optimum strategy, Nick will get the same payoff no matter what he plays.

I think this is a fairly general result, if one player is playing the optimal strategy, once the other player has eliminated options he should never play, it doesn't matter how his choices are distributed among the remaining options.
This is a partial product still being built (as it's domestic at the moment and will obviously go international I'm sure).

But the speed and data quality is where they will win out. The faster the interface allows people to do what they want to do: many searches until an ideal candidate is found. Other sites appear slow and most of the information they bring back is useless (to the user) so speed is the name of the game.

Turns out Google is pretty good at that game. Just my thoughts.
Yes, bit lower and less 'ringy' than the manual typewriters I used for years but fits in with the clicks used for the characters. Nice find
It sank like a turd.
Storm in a teacup will result in more bittorrent seeds...

More seriously: my kids school are always using their smart whiteboards to play YouTube videos and DVDs on, particularly on pre-Xmas slacking week (the one that the teachers think everyone is entitled to in the UK). How does this fair with such terms? Would they sue a school?
Some of this is awfully bad advice - why is it useful to work directly with multiple designers/developers rather than a single point of contact/project manager? isn't this pushing the project management onto the clients side?

As a developer do I really want the client being able to dominate all my time when I have multiple projects on the go at the same time?
The poor are poor because they have an average IQ in the 80s, barely above mental retardation. Their children are the same way because it is genetic. The school busing amd integration programs are about political subjugation of the high class, not assistance to the lower class.
What's the definition of a good programmer anyway? It seems rather vague to me. Someone who writes clean, readable code? Someone who writes efficient and elegant algorithms? Which is it?
Gittip is my résumé