skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe not as much when compared to piracy of new releases, but very little? That's simply not true.

How do you explain the majority of modern independent music being heavily inspired by 80s pop and 90s hip-hop, especially when most of the producers are too young to have remembered listening to it over the air? What do you say when you look up an old music video on Youtube, and 70% of the time, the top comment is from a teenager? "Today's music sucks I'm 12 and none of the kids in my class listen to this but I think it's awesome like this if you're watching this in 2012!!!" has even become something of a cliche or a running joke at this point.

How do you explain What.cd, probably the largest private torrent tracker in existence, being largely dedicated to preserving and distributing out of print music? Anyone can find the latest Skrillex album on The Pirate Bay, but the true music lovers come to sites like What.cd to discover and trace the lineage of what they'll never hear on the radio.

How do you explain the ROM piracy scene, loved both by nostalgic 30-somethings and kids who never owned a Nintendo? How do you explain the people that spend months or even years painstakingly reverse engineering old, obscure games and translating tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of text, just to give them the treatment they wish had been available to them on a store shelf as children? What about the ones that do it completely anonymously, never receiving real credit for their contributions to history, in fear of legal repercussions or being socially stigmatized based on the subject matter of the works they translate?

Ditto for the anime/manga scene, where there is a seemingly endless supply of interesting old works in need of a translation?

How do you explain the continued love for classic films, from everything Disney's put out, to the original Star Wars trilogy, to Blade Runner, and so on?

There is a lot of cultural value in media that isn't exactly fresh. Private collections have allowed us to preserve the physical artifacts of human creation over the centuries, but a manuscript sealed in the tomb of a museum quickly fades from the public consciousness. The magic of internet-enabled piracy is that it has allowed us to keep mankind's creations culturally significant long past their expiration date, on an unprecedented scale. Today, we don't just remember the most standout works from previous decades that our parents passed down to us (or the ones their parents passed down to them). We discover things that few cared about when they were actually created, and give them a new life that their creators could never have predicted.

I suppose it may be hard to understand if you aren't in the thick of it, but so much of our modern culture is about appreciating and drawing inspiration from the past that an assertion like there's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old completely baffles me.
3 iOS Apps to Get Social
What speed does this actually mean? 100/100?
They are inherent in peer-to-peer because peer-to-peer transactions are based on trust, and trust ultimately has to be based on accountability. If I'm in a small town, I can trust a local resident because I know their history and where they live. If they injure or steal from me in some way, I have some recourse, if nothing else with the social shame that can be brought to bear in a small society. But in a large-scale business, in a society of strangers, that accountability has to be enforced by some kind of regulatory body. And that kind of regulation implies at least some kind of comparatively centralized authority, which is at odds with a true peer-to-peer ideal.
Show HN: API for detecting people, cars, and everyday objects in images
The "only if" part is false: it is certainly possibleto be fine having done sudo !! without meaning to do it.
You're totally right, of course. I originally wrote 55 degrees (using exactly your argument) then looked at an actual clock and edited my post. Overthinking...
I don't care about your T61. Not the slightest.

But when I come to the shop I see a long line of laptops; all with Windows 7 or 8, all made of ugly plastic, all with expected battery life under two hours, all bulky and all costing 3X the netbook price and climbing.

That's what gets sold to people and that is what I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy.

Yes, another thing I don't care about is comics you try to illustrate your post with.
It'll probably happen. Right now as mass market devices the 6" screen is the only one E Ink makes enough to be a viable product at the prices people are willing to pay (kind of circular logic but that's the situation).

Soon though, after tablets eat enough of the e-readers' lunch, they'll have to specialize and do some more interesting things. Right now there's so little differentiation between the e-reader products that it's embarrassing to everyone involved. I hope that in a year or two they'll diverge, though.
Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques
Entrepreneurs enter stealth mode because they have an idea or technology that is, in their opinion, too young for public exposure. It’s a business strategy of secrecy and seclusion meant to avoid alerting competitors to pending products or ideas.

I work for a startup in stealth mode, and we're actually not in stealth mode because we're afraid of a competitor stealing our idea. We're flying under the radar because we are doing a massive amount of scraping to amass a big data set to analyze. We respect robots.txt, but fear that if the big guys caught on they'd change their policies or block us or worse, sue us. They could stop us before we ever launch. But if we have a surprise launch and gain traction, we should be able to partner with them to get the data. The idea is that it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
Be careful. The idea behind patents and IP law in general isn't protecting the innovator. It's incentivizing the innovator to advance society through new ideas. The subtle difference is that, when society no longer benefits from protecting the "innovator", that person shouldn't get protection from IP law.

Unfortunately, IP law today is a perversion of this original principle.
> The point of questions like this is "Does this guy have any common sense?"

GROOOOOAAAAN

Maybe twenty years ago, and maybe if you were the individual to think up the question.

Honestly I'm so goddamned bored with these unoriginal blither-blather questions I consider them a strike against the interviewer and the company.
They are electrifying Caltrain with high speed rail funds according to the brochures onboard.
Yes, wages for the best players would be higher, but wages for everyone else would be lower. The unions are designed to protect the majority of the players at the cost of the truly elite players.
When we see things like this it gets the sci-fi nerd going in me and makes me wonder if we could possibly be seeing the formation of a Tipler Cylinder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder) or similar structure. Or if it's a time-bubble so that a civilization can survive to discover other sentient life.
Exactly. My first thought upon seeing the name was "Wow - even Google has been reduced to using lame domain names."
I'd like to see the next step, in which each iteration can run in parallel with each other iteration. The way this is done, the loop as a whole can run in parallel with unrelated code, but each iteration is only scheduled when the previous one runs. You could imagine requesting a different network resource on each iteration; in such a case the truly parallel loop would typically take much less time than this sequential-iteration loop. Someday soon, languages will make this very straightforward.
Any kid whose parents are hackers, writers, journalists, scientists, accountants or any other profession that actually has to type stuff on their keyboards will still have real computers in their homes in addition to tablets.

For that matter, kids might still find machines with big displays and keyboards useful, since writing an essay or term paper on an iPad probably wouldn't be a very pleasant experience. (Or do kids not get writing assignments in school anymore?)
I've always hated "isDeleted" flags because it adds something that you have to remember to every query you write.

I would almost prefer some way to "ghost" a row where without a specific switch the DBMS will never return it from a query.
Some of us remember…

The Guide to VMS Performance Management[1] suggested that you enable smooth scrolling on your VTxxx terminals and cut your user's baud rate from 9600 to 4800 in order to support more users, since the smooth scrollers wouldn't notice that their baud rate was lower. Yeah, I was a jumper.

[1] http://odl.sysworks.biz/disk$cddoc04mar21/decw$book/d32va177... [2]

[2] I can remember enough of this paragraph from the '80s to google it in one go, but I can't remember my wife's cell phone number. I should have words with this brain.
Anybody have good ideas for a booth? I'd like to get hired as a front-end developer/UI designer. Outside of just bringing my iMac down there to show off stuff I've built, I'm drawing a blank.
This is very interesting and something I've been thinking about lately.

My research is in molecular dynamics. I've only been a grad student for one semester, but I've written a lot of code. The code I am currently working on takes a force-field description, combines it with a listing of atom coordinates, and completely automates the production of an input file to a simulation program. (This is less trivial than it sounds. All stretching, bending, torsional, and improper atom connections must be generated. Bond-orders must be determined, solely from the structure. And then this is combined with equations from the paper describing the force-field to give an energetic potential for each connection type).

I would think this code could have a lot of value to other researchers. Though I doubt anyone in non-CS departments have even heard of Github.
Statistics is the new plastics.
Looks like their servers aren't quite up to the task - I'm only getting half-formed content.
Well, not all new homes - homes in neighbourhoods where fibre is already available. The article says that China is aiming for 40 million households to have fibre connections by 2015, which is just under 10% of the total households (if you go by Wikipedia's figures).
Really not that much of a subtle bug I'm afraid, the pattern of "mutating the condition itself on success" is error-prone in single-threaded code too.

A good example being asynchronous javascript, where you'd do this to prevent issues like the exposed in the article:

var some_mutable_condition = false;
var requested = false;

if (!some_mutable_condition && !requested){
requested = true; // ensure one request is performed at most
$.ajax(/*async code that'll set some_mutable_condition to true*/);
}
From the article:

The standards will take effect from April 1, 2013, and will also require residences to offer equal connections to services from various telecom companies allowing customers to choose which service they want.

Amazingly, this means that China is now ahead of the U.S. regarding net neutrality.

Now, if they'd just do something about the Great Firewall..
I think someone would develop a browser plugin to auto-check those boxes.

You could classify the text using a machine learning algorithm using a training set of downvoted comments, and if the comment is classified as likely impolite- then you could
ask the user to make sure their comment is appropriate.

You could have a line of text which said "Thanks for being civil and courteous"
> Can I use your house while you are away? On the nightstand, I'll leave $5 or whatever the wear and tear might be for the night.

Ah, see?--"while i am away". Possession of tangible items deprives someone else the use of it. There is no such natural limitation on ideas or expression of ideas. It requires additional government "interference" before ideas and expression are made to be scarce.

> If you can copy my code /book or whatnot what rights do I have?

Exactly! Additional rights are granted by the government, not taken away. You possess the original copy. Why would you assume to have an additional rights? If you don't want people to copy it, don't let them see it.
We need to do that here as well!
I got a great deal (basically half off) on a well equipped y470 model and aside from minor cosmetic issues (the shiny paint on the top of the body is wearing out on spots where the monitor frame scrapes it when open/closing, and the monitor is a bit more wobbly than on my wife's MBP) I've been very happy with it.

Finding a good deal was pretty easy too, I just checked lenovo's website semi-regularly for a month or 2 until they were discounting something I wanted.
Are Marketers Now Required to be Engineers Too?
Major blow to Microsoft: Samsung cancels Windows RT plans in US
I can't even get the first lesson. This is a lesson to all developers. Don't underestimate the power of HN.
Nobody still has managed to copy Apple's model of success. It's true, people won't steal your ideas if you really think different. They will look at the shining truth in front of them and be not able to grasp it in their mind, because they are stupid talentless biomass.
Best idea would be to apply the workarounds presented for Rails 2.3 in the group post: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security....

Place a couple of lines in a file in config/initializers, and you're good,.
Almost all of the interesting stuff comes after you've made your estimates (although the process of getting to the estimates is not completely uninformative).

If the candidate performs well on this question, then they have shown:

1. They have the ability to reason about problems in a potentially new domain.

2. They have the ability to pare down a problem to what is important and what can be neglected.

3. They can make good order-of-magnitude estimates (very important for an equities trader).

4. They are aware of the typical size of their errors, or can estimate them.

5. The are aware of the typical sources of error.

6. They understand the notion of a confidence interval and can apply it to real-world situations.

7. They can reason about bets with different characteristics (e.g. different expected value, different skew characteristics) and choose a good portfolio of bets.

I think that knowing how GDP is calculated is useful information for someone working in finance. Especially someone who is going to have to trade through economic announcements. Would you hire a trader who didn't follow economic news?

PS re "shows you've visited London" - the interview was in London. I assume if it had been in New York, they would have asked about the New York metro.
> to at least support good commuter rail

I personally don't see any problem with Caltrain. It's relatively reliable and goes often enough. The only thing that's missing is free wi-fi, but I think they plan to put it in there eventually.
Yeah that's because it's what people want to pay i.e. not much. As for a NetBook - have you ever used one to do something serious on? Absolute joke. The things are the worst thing on the planet.

As for my T61, I bought it for half the price of a new netbook when it was 3 years old... (well actually I bought two so that I can just grab the other one in a complete failure scenario).

It's not a comic - it's an engineering cross section.

As for looks, I don't give a shit what it looks like or if it's heavy or whatever - I want something that works and doesn't fall to bits after 5 minutes and is repairable and replaceable if it does. Why? Because it pays the bills and can be trusted.
Let's not conflate the theoretical (and very achievable) advantages, with the shit being peddled to date. The current state of available systems is really abysmal, and I'm sure it's true that using any of most of the systems on the market won't save you money.

"Fundamentally there is not as much value to be obtained by having the ability to do a structured query into multiple patients’ data. Nor is there much value in being able to do a structured query into a single patient’s data."

I supremely disagree with this point, especially the first bit. Specifically, the author is comparing the labor of him looking for information he's thought to look for in one or more patient's records via computer or paper, and finding them similar. That's the sign of a completely failed system. Most EMR systems are built to act like the file cabinets they replace, which is a shame. Meanwhile, my mint.com account sends me emails when I'm charged an ATM fee and facebook knows way too much about my current interest in purchasing a juicer.

I believe the unrealized benefits of automated predictive, proactive, and historical analysis of patient health data is enormous. The author is excused for disagreeing with me though, because presumably billions of dollars at this point have been poured into building software that rivals late nineties Visual Basic POS systems in quality and effectiveness. There's so much untapped potential here it's unreal. It's just such a shame that the Health IT industry has eroded the patience of caregivers over the last decade, especially ones who were eager to explore the possibilities early on.

[Full disclosure: I build electronic medical record systems for a living - http://www.quora.com/What-product-is-ElationEMR-building]
I can't get the page to load, but judging by the title, this is something I desperately need as a programmer with zero aesthetic talent.
There is the justification that no content will ever be put back into the public domain.

If copyright is never going to expire, what does it matter how old the content is that is getting pirated?

(i'm not saying there is a justification, but i can understand the OP's logic)
I will say that, in the mid nineties, a lot of my friends had cassette tapes of the beatles or pink floyd. If people pirate music today the same way they copied tapes back then, I don't think your assumption is very good.

Certainly, you need actual numbers rather than handwaving arguments.
So it is ok to post links to various media with no commentary? I will try that too.
I continue to think this would be a pretty awesome ipad/kindle app. The whole 'remote printer' where you implement lpr in the app, can turn it on and off when you need it and then 'print' to it as probably pdf documents.

Instapaper does this pretty well for web sites but if you could include folks who had legacy applications/machines which just wanted to review the printout 'offline' it would be pretty cool.
Site loads fine for me. Cool first lesson, love the idea.
I disagree about the disclaimer of interest threat ending the lockout.

If you look back to the previous two lockouts, you'll see that the NHLPA was bullied (or felt like it) and wanted that to end. The hiring of Donald Fehr, a known hard liner on the side of labor with a history of labor disputes. When Fehr was hired, there was going to be a lockout. Almost no negotiation was done prior to the actual lockout which is par for the course for the NHL but something new for the NHLPA. Fehr's strategy was to make lockouts in the future not seem like such an painless move for the NHL and he did so.

As the process moved from forward after the lockout, it was the NHL negotiating with itself. All of the proposals the NHLPA suggested were only small ideas of what could eventually be in the final agreement. Each successive comprehensive NHL proposal incorporated some of the ideas the NHLPA had suggested. It wasn't until Bettman announced that there would need to be at least 48 games in the season for it not to be cancelled and that the deadline for that amount of games would be Jan. 19. Only when that deadline approached did we see the NHLPA actually counter an NHL proposal with their own, comprehensive proposal. That's when the horse trading began and the deal was done relatively quickly after that point.

Donald Fehr's strategy all along was to drag his feet for as long as possible to not only get the best deal for the NHLPA but to, more importantly, frustrate the NHL and show them that a lockout is not an easy button for labor disputes.
I appreciate your experience (and it's good to learn that using these tools in the outpatient clinic didn't violate any regulations) but I don't think Phil is really suggesting Google Drive specifically here. He's suggesting instead that medical records should be more like a blank page (document) that physicians can fill in than e.g. a FoxPro app (dbms). Personally I think the "ideal" would fall somewhere in between. Physicians should probably be allowed to keep records however they like, but lives would be saved by the structure of a well-implemented [what a caveat!] digital checklist system.
100 Mbps is pretty much the minimum speed for fiber; gigabit is not much more expensive. ISPs may offer lower-speed plans, of course.
On it, fellas. We weren't expecting so many beta signups... didn't think we needed more dynos until launch ;)

Check back in a few minutes, we're already working on it.
I actually have never asked an estimation question, but I understand the motivation for asking this kind of question.

I'm curious--what do you ask in interviews to get at a candidate's common sense? It's not very easy to do.

Or do you think you don't need to assess common sense at all? Maybe it's not, but like I said, a lot of the hires I later regretted came down to something like that.
Nice try, person-trying-to-steal-my-idea.
I'd settle for the res stated in the article.
Java 7 runtime zero-day exploits in wild
So does:

du -sh *
Greatest Boxing Classics Video: Archie Moore Vs. Yvon Durelle
I agree the systems in use seem horrible and expense from a cost, engineering, and IT perspective, but I'm also a big fan of my doc being able to see my records in digestible format, IE graphs showing a series of test results over time and such, rather than just 20 pages of paper to eyeball in a hurry and hopefully spot a trend. Or the old situation where you'd inevitably be asked about a test or other visit and they'd have to get results and such faxed over to look at later basically wasting the whole visit. "Oh, sorry, we haven't received the x-rays/blood work/random other diagnostic, referral, or test yet..."

Now most times they just bring it up on their computer and are like "oh, I saw you had X done 2 weeks ago, no sense in doing it again..."

But that's possible because all my providers are using the same system.
Exactly - if I could make any change to my engineering education, it would be to have taken even more statistics.
I haven't read past the first few paragraphs, yet, but they confirm my suspicion: Another Google+ / Google Profile initiative.

I may end up setting this up for some clients, but personally, "No, thanks."
Doesn't this just make homes unnecessarily more expensive?
1) You can make a big board behind you which looks like a website visually and explains why you're a good hire

2) You can bring a big monitor (and a power strip) to place behind you which shows screenshots of your work on rotation

3) If you do logos, print them out and stick them on stuff

4) Make fun of a little-kid's science fair tri-fold board and print out areas that say "methodology" "data" and shit. Show a UI experiment and your results in this light.

5) Show a project you've done at various stages, pointing out how things changed over time, and why you did it.

6) Show a before and after for a project revision, showing what you changed and why
> pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.

Absolutely not! Why let them get unlimited extensions? How does that give back to the people?
You're welcome. ;) Let us know what you think after you've tried it.
I never even realised flux was still installed. Definitely helps my eyes at night, and I never even notice its on.
Groupon acquires Glassmap (YC S11)
You can enable click-to-play for all plugins by toggling the about:config pref "plugins.click_to_play".