skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So J. K. Rowling, who spent seven years developing her universe before she even began writing her first novel, who spend inordinate amounts of time developing her systems, her characters, her plot, the morals and concepts she focused on... once she finished it, that's yours? You own some sort of a right to it?

You have exactly as much a right to Rowling's universe as she wants you to have. That begins with her novels: she has decided that you have a right to read her stories once you pay money for her books, or once you access her books in some way that involves, somehow, her making money. Once you've done that, you're free to discuss those ideas, you can talk about them with people, you can write about them. But that doesn't give you a right to alter or modify her writing in any way, and I don't think it gives you a right to alter her works for commercial purposes in any way. If you want to make a free online resource, go for it, but if you're going to make money over 17 years of J. K. Rowling's life, there may be a problem. (It's better phrased: she has the right to give you a problem.)

Interesting concept: perhaps authors could sell licenses to enter a world's commercial universe. Asimov made a universe for other writers because he wanted them to keep out of his own, then never wrote a story in that second universe himself. Perhaps an enterprising writer could create these huge worlds and scenarios and license them for profit. That would make for a fascinating take on the idea of creative world design that we've already seen explored with things like Dungeons & Dragons.
Commentaries, no. Summaries, yes. If you're adding your own creative action to what I've done, then the resulting work is yours. So, as I said in another comment, that Gospel According To Harry Potter is a creative work unto itself. It creates things that I didn't create initially. But Sparknotes isn't doing that: it's just summarizing what I've written, and while that takes work, it's not creative work, it's mechanical summary.

Fantasy adds a new element, because a huge part of fantasy is the mechanics of a created world. I think that a fantasy writer ought to control their world. If Rowling wants people to stay away from that creation, it's her right, in the same way that a programmer ought to have the right to stop people from taking their source code and making new things with it if they want. If I hacked my iTunes.app to give it new functionality and then sold it as a new program, I'd get nailed by Apple. That's completely good.

I should have final control over my creation because it's mine. I have every right to it. I support the actions of people who want to maintain their creative control. What other explanation is sensible?
The Sparknotes are not you're creation though, so why should you be able to control it?
Intel "Nehalem" Xeon server processors released
Taming Conficker, The Easy Way
Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0 released
What does this mean? Why is this news? What got done? What remains to be done? How does it compare to what normally gets done in a week for the project? Is this a news story, or a blurb? Are we voting it up because we just like the project?
WOW! Insightful.</sarcasm>
I'm sorry, but I have yet to hear a solid argument that ignoring easy-to-capture metrics is better business. I'm not talking about anything esoteric, I'm talking about core business metrics, like the number of people who sign up for your service.

That's because a lot of people, namely the intuitive sort, don't track that stuff enough for there to be a good counterargument.

That said: intuition has long been a part of design. Architects don't design buildings according to a numbers game: there's a part of the process that's wholly creative. Obviously, artists don't rely on metrics. They go with their gut. Numbers can show some things, but not always. Would you say that Rotten Tomatoes, by being fair and balanced, is really showing us the best movies? Is Toy Story 2 the best movie ever made? According to their reviews it is. According to ticket sales Titanic is the best movie ever. Are either of those metrics true? If I make a movie expressly intending to score better numbers than those movies, am I doing justice to a movie?

Get rid of this "right decision" argument. Past a very basic point, that's all subjective. There is certainly an objective layer design, but past that it's a matter of "like" and "don't like." The argument is like the Mac versus Linux argument, where one side says they "feel" better and the other side brings up numbers. The numbers are accurate, but to assume that the other side has no argument merely because they base opinions on intuition is stupid.

(By the way: there's more to a business than number of users. I'd rather have a site that had a very bright, small userbase than a site with a lot of users that I personally didn't like. Hacker News versus Digg, for instance.)
Don't Be Evil but Intentionally Deceptive is OK
On the High Side: iTunes Store Likely to Skew Towards $1.29
I figured this discussion would get nerdy in a hurry.

As far as I know, the trend towards more and more products having fruit odors is very recent. 10 - 20 years ago we had lemon and orange, but mostly things smelled like soap or like flowers.

This has all changed with SuperFruits just a few years ago ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfruit )

For more information on the fruity trend, try this http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+new+smell+of+clean:+fragra...

Key quote: Through consumer research over the years, we've learned that fragrance is a competitive advantage in driving performance...Emerging superfruits, including mangosteen, jujube, baobab and camu camu, are fragrances of interest for future product launches in the household product category
Silicon Valley, did you feel the earthquake this morning?
So the US Geological Survey (USGS) has a great site, but their "did you feel it" form about recent seismic activity asks for SIX pages of input.

A simple Yea or Nay will do, here.
If anyone is going to Web 2.0 expo, you can also sign up for the hackathon and get a free expo pass too!

Just use this code: websf09hack
Designating one or more devil's advocates is a good strategy. That way the naysayer isn't perceived as a negative person.

Of course, the company culture also goes a long way in facilitating this.
I think this is mistake, as raising costs will not go down well today. It's possible that I'll save a few bucks in that my tastes aren't current, but I don't think this is the correct move during "lean economic times".

People will probably claim this will increase piracy. I suspect anything can be used as that excuse...
Hacker News isn't a business. It's a site. A business has to make a profit.
Having just installed hit on windows, the feeling I got was that there is msysgit, or running it on cygwin. Msysgit's homepage feels... Precarious, like it's part abandoned.

It does work, once you answer a question of which of three ways it should awkwardly integrate into your PATH, but within a cygwinesque bash shell.

So yeah, functional but nowhere near as smooth and seamless as python on windows is, or as one might pick up from your comment.
Atwood rebuttal: Mandarin Chinese programmer communites
Dell 24-inch HD monitor for $209
But 37signals is making a profit. Quite a lot of a profit. So after they're making money, isn't it their choice whether or not to follow their gut? Obviously the results are working for them.
Seeking help from a shareware expert
Publish and licence your tweets with Creative Commons: http://tweetcc.com/ The site was started after a discussion with a book publisher wanting rights to use tweets in a book.
Of course it's their choice. That doesn't mean it's the optimal choice or one to be admired.
My tendency was to react the way you do. Upon years of reflection and experience, I concluded I was being a snob, and that there was very little information I could use in those errors.

Despite my own genetic predisposition towards words (kiss me, I'm half Irish) it was not until the advent of spell checkers that I discovered I had been writing "signifigant" all my life. And I am/was a snob about this stuff!

I still identify strongly with the more articulate, but I actually think this works against my B.S. detector rather than in favor of it. The amount of B.S. emitted by the verbally competent is almost certainly reams more than by the verbally challenged. IMHO
I think designers should use their gut and artistic skills to design. But I think the effectiveness of that design should be judged on some quantifiable set of metrics, to the extent possible. Business isn't an art contest.
These slides are hilarious. Definitely good to see a group of developers that don't take themselves too seriously and don't inject a macho attitude into their work. Refreshing for sure.
Algol 68, one of the grand failures in programming language history, allowed for multiple representations of the same source code, including allowing for each natural language to define its own set of keywords. You can see a code sample with English or German keywords in the Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68

Just to be clear, I consider this to be an argument against the idea.
But where will I find the official Microsoft approved truth now?
Bouncing Like A Jackalope - Jaunty Release Parties
The final release of the latest and greatest to come from the Ubuntu stable is around the corner and from the Ubuntu Wiki, it is clear that communities around the world are starting to get real excited and the release party plans are emerging very quickly. Share your plans with the communtiy.
http://twitter.com/devinjames/status/1420799605
There is nothing to this article. Pure fluff. Hell, I'm not even convinced 'sprints' produce any useful code. This does nothing to inform me.
How to install rails 2.3 and ruby 1.9 on ubuntu for mysql and sqlite3
This trend has been going on for years. I always thought Aloe Vera was something used in women's shampoo. Imagine my surprise when I recently found it popping up in the supermarket in the drinks division. (Not bad, btw).

Lets not even start on the soaps, gels, bath ointments and friends which are all orange, vanilla, apple, pear, grape, etc these days.

If you feel like reading up a little more on this, hit up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume for some mildly surprising information.
When I read your comment, I thought, “Holy shit, he wants to use H₂O₂ because FeCl₃ is dangerous? Talk about ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire!’” but the Instructable you linked to just uses the standard 3% H₂O₂ USP solution, which isn't particularly dangerous.
You're thinking of the wrong customers. People that manage brands, entertainment, and sites are their biggest users.
This article doesn't matter once they make games available on-demand via OnLive where there is almost no installation. Everyone forgets that BitTorrent and other pirate sites also have the benefit of being on-demand.

It's still tough for the majority of the population to use BitTorrent, they'd rather prefer a Hulu.
Forests are out of date, but IIRC mpm is planning on personally tackling submodule support for release some time this summer (whenever the 1.3 release schedule is, I don't remember offhand).
Now we'll never know who invented DOS!
just posted my rebuttal http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communi...

The HN post is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=539276
I like the description of audience aggregation. I've always felt like advertising based services were thinking the wrong way. It's not that you're finding users (audience) and then monetizing them with ads. Your audience is your product. You could build a big product, a niche product, or a well-defined product. Then, you must sell your product. Your audience is not your customer. They are your product. Your advertisers are your customers.
Engine Yard: Hardware failure in redundant switch caused today's downtime
English as an interlanguage among Chinese people has become much rarer since the retrocession of Hong Kong strongly promoted the use of Mandarin there. Most of the examples I had in mind date from the era when an educated Hong Konger would be much more likely to speak English well than to speak Mandarin at all.
They are doing a hackathon project opening up government data for particular states around the U.S. They are literally making government data free so that people know what is going on.

It's not fluff, more like a sparse post.
Microsoft To Shutter Encarta
I just downloaded and installed it. It's looking good so far. Nice to be able to just sign in directly to Skype. Can't use the voice function over 3G of course.

I don't really have anyone to call at this time of the day, but calling the echo service seems to work fine.

It crashed after my first call though :(. Still some work to do!
I've been using Mono for about 3 years now, and I must say C# is great. Mono has gone a long way, and it is pretty solid now. I really love the fact that I can use the same language, and same libraries, for Desktop Applications, command line tools, and to create a web site. The option to be able to create standalone program (no need to have the Mono libraries installed on the client) is also a great plus.
Explorer 8 - Szukaj w Google
Secure Computing (a DARPA-funded network "security" company, not to be confused with the Trusted Computing chip), can identify and block Tor traffic. Have tried.

http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/2008/06/fascist_bias_in_censo...
IPv6 And Security: What You Probably Don’t Know
As many have commented around the web, Microsoft should contribute all the content and data to Wikipedia. It would be a smart move on their part in terms of garnering goodwill.
From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts’o
Everything original you write is automatically copyrighted (in the US and Australia at least, and I'm sure most other countries).

In the context of Mark Cuban's tweet, republishing it is fair use (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use).
cough

Actually, distribution and COPY (i.e., reproduction) rights are at the heart of copyright law.

She has every right to control distribution of her works.

Do not confuse the copyrightability of ideas with the copyrightability of an expression.
BTW, every court that has seen this sort of case has ruled that a fictional fact or character is considered an expression, not an idea.
IDEA = boy goes to a school for child wizards
EXPRESSION = harry potter (a specific example of the idea)
I always find it strange that when people suggest doing weight training, there's often a disclaimer that you won't become huge and muscular with regular workouts. It's like a disclaimer saying that you won't get all brainy and smart if you study physics or math. I would imagine that if you had the potential to be a world class bodybuilder, it's worth exploring, just as if you had the potential to be a world class physicist, it's worth exploring.

About weight lifting helping cure social anxiety, I think it's more than just testosterone. If you get serious about weights, you start watching your diet. Eating well is a large component of feeling well, and cutting down on junk and processed foods makes a noticeable difference in mood and energy.
That's wrong. Fictional facts are considered expressions, not ideas (See the James Bond and Seinfield cases).

JK can control any fictional facts from her work, like Hogwarts, or the characters.
She can't control the underlying ideas, such as a wizard school, or an orphan boy hero.
True Story: My first experience in making PCB's didn't go so well.

I was in junior high and just started getting into electronics because I was obsessed with the dream of creating my own car-audio amps (think Kicker, JBL, etc). Note I was way to young for even a driver's license but that didn't stop me from planning out for when I was old enough to roll (aka Weird Al - White & Nerdy)

Anyway, I created my first PCB in autocad and took it out into the garage for etching...

"Hmmm I needed something to pour the etching acid into... Something that I could throw away when I'm done... Ah! This pie tin will work out nicely!"

So I took the pie tin and placed it on the surface of my Dad's table saw and then placed my unetched PCB in the tin. Then next step of course was to pour the acid in the tin......

$%^&!!!!!

The acid reacted violently with the metal of the tin and within seconds the bottom of the tin was completed digested by the acid which then proceeded to flow out of the tin, onto the table saw, and then all over the garage floor.

To this day, the table saw still has a rusty look to it and there is a nice brown stain in the concrete.

My career as a "EE" was founded on pure genius!
Although the overall applicability of telepresense idea still remains iffy, I really like what Anybot does and it's no doubt one of the leaders in research of self-balancing stuff. I cannot wait till they "teach" their Dexter to jump up to the ceiling and run across the walls like a ninja :-)
It's not actually a hash of the URL, rather it's typically simply a base 64 serial number that increments for each new URL. That's why the URLs start at 2 characters and grow to 4 or 5, though the number is so large that they'll rarely see 6. http://tr.im (my weapon of choice) for instance is still at 4 characters.
There's no irony at all.

You're respecting someone else's rights. You're doing the right thing.

The anonymous scribbers are not doing the right thing. Don't change who you are just b/c of them.
Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain
That was the first thought that popped into my head upon reading the title. That's the problem with acronyms - namespace collisions occur far too frequently (and it's even worse in this case because both variants of PCB are used within the same technical domain). Fortunately, the authors at least bothered to define the term at the point when it is first used in the text (as is standard practice in science literature). There's nothing quite so annoying as encountering a blog full of alphabet soup that makes no attempt to define abbreviations properly.
Careful if you're planning on ordering this! I don't know anything about this one in particular, but the quality of Dell's 24" monitors are very mixed now. I've got three, two of the expensive ones and one entry model, and the entry model bugs me to no end. The image quality and viewing angle are both horrible, night and day compared to the nicer ones.
Find me the thing that says that if I make software, I lose rights to it once it gains "importance and acclaim."

There is not anything that says this, that's just the way I believe it should be, for many reasons. Put simply, I don't think anyone has the right or the ability to keep complete control over something as large and important as Harry Potter.

Perhaps I can't ERASE software, but are you saying I can't stop IMPROVING it just because it becomes big?

Never. My claim is that you shouldn't be able to stop others from improving on it. I know definitions of "improve" are going to vary across the board, but the Encylopedia example is something that is an obvious improvement. What if Linus didn't want anyone else to improve on Linux?
Could you clarify what problems you are seeing with the entry level model?
I don't see it in app store. How did you download?
I've had this monitor, and while the price is good the monitor uses a TN panel.

It's much less bright than a PVA panel monitor like the Dell 2407WFP or 2408WFP.
In writing (and I imagine in programming as well) every "expression" has been mimiced by some other author somewhere. Asimov has done extensive writing on this issue, and as he makes clear, it's not nearly as black and white as you are implying.
Tell HN: I was fired today
Hello,

I live in Chile and until today I was working for a Credit Card Processing Company. The layoffs began last year since some banks and retails decided to process themselves, trying to cut costs. The truth is that the recession hit the credit industry and therefore hit our market.

The problem is that even though I'm single and I have no children I give to my parents some financial aid. So at least I have to earn some money to support them (it's not a huge amount BTW).

I've been working (in parallel) for my startup since 2007 and although this is a kind of a disaster to me, I could survive three months with the severance compensation and without a job. So I will devote all my "leisure time" on my startup. And now I'm finishing the design of the UI and I'm starting to code the app (I'm not a programmer), so it's the right moment.

Well,I feel very optimistic but the sad truth is that now I'm vulnerable to some threats (health problems for example). So looking for another job is an issue to me too but I don't want to waste all my time in interviews and in all that corporate crap.

So I can say that this financial orgy did hit me.

Best Regards.

PS: I can give some advice about credit cards (Visa, MC and Amex) if you need it.
Guitar Hero, Grand Theft Auto, and the Effects of Video Games
I've got a 2407WFP, and love it, although the brightness needs to stay at the absolute minimum. Those things really are amazing monitors.
Great read.

I really appreciate it when posters take the trouble to link to the printout version. So much more readable, this is bliss. Thanks!
These too-cheap-to-be-true screens use TN panels that have just terrible viewing angles. I bought an HP 22" panel the other week and got rid of it almost immediately as the colours would shift as you moved your head.

Replaced it with a Dell 2408WFP instead which is 100x better, if significantly more expensive.

It's confusing as you'd think 2409 > 2408 but that's very far from the truth.
I have never taken a single neuroceutical that did what it was supposed to. Ever. Including caffeine. Eventually I gave up and decided not to try messing with my brain chemistry in any way ever again ever.
The entry model uses a TN panel, which has a terrible viewing angle (as in, the bottom and top of the monitor are different brightnesses due to the viewing angle if you're close), and the color quality is low as well.
Even better discussion if you read the entire topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508132
The terminology used in music composition are in Italian, but are the research papers and discussions written in Italian?
This one is very different. You bought a normal, reasonably good quality monitor. The one in the link is TN-garbage for Wall Mart.
I wouldn't be so confident.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/gdc-why-onlive-cant-possib...
Nature v nurture? Please don't ask
It is already available in some localized app stores, but not at the US store yet.
We've got interop already. Some Mozilla devs use git for work. Official mozilla repo is mercurial, but devs can and do use git if they prefer: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2008/12/changes-to-git-mirror-o...
Why Micro Niche Finder Is The Best Keyword Suggestion Tool For Niche Marketers
Doing your keyword research online can be a very time consuming task when you don’t have the right tools at hand. Believe me I now.
But not all designs are equal in terms of profit yielded. A business which chooses a design that produces more profit than another design will have more profit. That business will therefore be more successful than one which chooses a less profitable design based on their gut.
I have a pair of 2408WFP's and love them.

And yeah, the difference is very noticeable. These cheap TN panels will start to color shift at very slight angles, whereas mine look normal at 80 degrees off center.
How would they be killed? It's effectively a large hot tub sitting in his garage. No more dangerous either.
Total Functional Programming
How I convert loose change into iTunes gift cards...
Oh, good to hear about try() -- that totally beats Object#andand.
Yes. Here's a link that worked for me:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...

I couldn't find it in the app store, but the link worked fine
It's true, the iphone gold rush is missing gold in essense. There are tons of farting like apps, but very very few of any value. And again, casino always wins.
TechStars finalists out tonight