skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you enjoy this, you should also pick up a copy of the Davie translation of Seneca's "On the shortness of life"[1]. Seneca is another stoic, and a much better writer than Aurelius.

"Nothing concerns the busy man less than the business of living: nothing is so difficult to learn"

"There is, therefore, no ground for thinking that, because of his white hair or wrinkles, someone has lived too long: he has not lived a long time, but existed a long time"

Epictetus's "handbook"[2] is also very good. You will get a lot out of both.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Dialogues-Essays-Oxford-Worlds-Classic...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Epictetus-HPC-Philosophical-C...
Wait, but then you have to regulate speed to each joint. Is there an easy way to do this I haven't thought of?
That's a false dilemma. Your choices:

1. Slight inconvenience
2. Strong inconvenience
3. Giving away "content" for free

I propose 4.: No inconvenience for the users, charge as you wish and simply sue the people making money illegally off your works.

Because the argument that it doesn't stop illegal copying anyway is correct. Consumers don't like it:
http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-2-Pc/product-reviews/B...
http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/product-reviews/B000FKBCX4/
Those people giving 1 star reviews, those are the people who are interested in the game, research it, many of them probably pay money for it and then they are dissatisfied.

For text articles I think the big problem is really if someone copies an article and has some kind of decent traffic on the copy. This should be trivial to find via a search engine and you can take appropriate action directly.

For music and videos... I am not a friend of watermarks but it may be the best method of just selling drm free and going after those people who share the most "commercially".
It might be so that there's a lot of clever Swedes living in London, but as far as I know Stockholm has a rather strong entrepreneurial scene. In my view, the main reasons why a Swedish entrepreneur wouldn't settle in Sweden is because of the high expenses when it comes to housing and consumption; not because of a high tax rate or other directly politically controlled factors per se.

Swedish entrepreneurs get many things in return as well. First of all, because the government covers most of the financing of studies, they don't get out of university with a significant study debt. This is great, because debt inhibits taking risks (i.e. becoming an entrepreneur.) Also, where most startups fail, an 'unfortunate' Swedish entrepreneur has a decent safety net he can count on.

Providing the example that Sweden is cutting on its government expenditure, in order to convince readers of the idea that small government is good is just wrong. Due to the differences in welfare state, a baby born in Sweden has a much greater probability of having good prospects than a baby born in the US or the UK.
Probably because that god has rules.
Note that Smith did call out the moral failings of market failures in capitalism, and the need to address them politically.
How 3D Printers Could Build Futuristic Moon Colony
Show HN: A beautiful and open-source paste service
"You can have all the "Doubts on progress and technology" you want, but if you only count one kind of loss (electrical conversion) and not another (mechanical friction and inelastic fraction) you're going to end up with a non-realistic bias in favor of mechanical systems every time."

I've been wondering for a while whether anyone's trying to re-capture some of the "lost" energy from household electrical systems. I wonder why my fridge, aircon, and stove aren't "pre heating" the cold water going into my hot water heater? I even wonder why all my "fixed electronics" - I'm looking at the TV, Playstation, audio gear, media center PC, home networking gear - have all got heatsinks and fans "disposing" of "waste heat" (which I sometimes then spend more money dealing with by cooling the room down with aircon).

Is there _really_ no good way to capture all that "waste heat" and use it to offset the energy I consume having a hot shower every day?

(I'm guessing I'm not the first to ever have these thoughts, and that the answer right now is "power is so cheap that the payback time for any available technology that could do this is way longer than practical". Which satisfies the pragmatist in me, but still makes the tree-hugger in me slightly melancholy.)
The source code is available here: https://github.com/jdiez17/pastepm
What you are missing is that the reason why Amazon aren't "making a profit" is because they are spending all their revenues on infrastructure.

While they are still rapidly growing on an international scale, with very low margins they can hide all their profits in expenses.

The long game is not to jack up prices, profits will come as soon as they slow down growth. Which will not be for a while.
You can bypass this absurdity directly from most browsers by pressing Ctrl-P and printing the page to PDF. The PDF does not have any restrictions on copying, and the user doesn't have to know what JavaScript is.
Did the same and it's working out quite well. Still, having a dog implies more responsibilities than just a walk in the evening.
Completely transparent smartphone
Fifth post I've seen this week from the Economist and nordic countries' economy.

What's the agenda? And what's with the astroturfing of articles here on HN?
Wait, the quoted text is considered advice? Ugh.
Indeed, one of the critical flaws with Pascal's Wager, from a decision-science standpoint, is that it's Judeo-Christian-centric. AFAIK, only the gods of monotheistic religions seem to demand singular worship. Gods of other religions and belief systems don't seem to give a crap how many of them you worship, or whether you blend them into admixtures of faith.

Given that there is no evidence that the Christian God is more likely to exist than, say, Zeus, we must provide equal statistical weight to Zeus as to J.C. And so on for all the other possibilities, ad infinitum.

But it doesn't stop there. Some religions' tenets conflict directly with the tenets of others. So it can be said that there are multiple sets of compatible religions that can be held at a given time. Most of these religions are polytheistic. By contrast, adopting a monotheistic religion limits you to just one chip on the cosmic roulette table.

Ergo, from a statistical standpoint, choosing a monotheistic religion (such as Christianity) for the Wager is taking the worst possible odds.
The 99cent sim on their site works fine.
Could you give an example of an edit you found annoying?
For me it depends.
If the new title is a better description of the content, then I'm in favour.
If the new title is a poorer description of the content, then I'd rather it wasn't changed.
The seq dependency has been removed in HEAD.
James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley (Cambridge 1965)
Religion has the great advantage of being practiced in community. It may not have the pure wisdom of Seneca, but what good it can offer is more likely to stick.

Unfortunately, the Christian community offers more social capital than the Stoic or the atheist in the west.
Why did the mods remove the relevant context from the title?
Forward P/E only looks at expected profit over the next 12 months, which is likely to be very high for Apple, and very low for Amazon. The big question is, what will the situation be in 5, 10, 20 years?
when instead they've accidentally built dependencies on other people's implementation details

I think it would be very interesting if you could give an example or two of this.
I noticed, but I don't consider it overmoderation (yet). Most often than not it appears to me as the middle ground between sterile titles and Your Average Aggregation Site (TM).

In a perfect world there might be separate polls to vote for the best title for each submission. Of course I don't assume it would make sense to implement such a fringe feature on HN.
Nice, different post. This is relevant to my interests...
When the actual text of the article doesn't match the title.

Link Bait.

In these instances, the submitter to HN can use a more appropriate title for the content.
It is somewhat annoying when a link's "natural title" is not good and the submitter improves it - only to have it reverted.

It is somewhat annoying when a link has a misleading "natural title" but is not changed.

In short, I like editing when it makes sense and don't like it when it doesn't. Hence you cannot please everyone with either absolute, so I would say err on the side of least effort - therefore no editing!
Why the girl-boy split? Oh, not counting married couples as combined units. Weird.
As a counterpoint, perhaps it is reasonable, if interpreted more strictly.

Taking the perl-over-c-stdlib example (but I think it applies in other cases), if the "perl layer" was more strict in what it sent to the stdlib layer, there would have been no problem.

i.e. the error is in thinking of only the network as the place to apply the maxim. In fact, you should scrupulously adhere to every interface you pass data to (internal or external) - and interpret as reasonably as possible all interfaces you receive data from.

[I'd agree that the latter pt can be weakened. But it does help interop - and if you clean up your act before you hit the next layer then you limit any damage.]
I am slightly sad when a title is edited, but far sadder when an article has a bad title which either makes no sense or fails to get the amount of attention it should.

I wish bloggers/etc. would just make better titles for their original content, then there'd be no debate.
Video: Matt on designing controls for touchscreen games
There is a very simple solution to this if you are in an area where electricity is cheap and the climate is cold. Simply use electrical heaters with a thermostat. Using electronic appliances, including light bulbs, increases the temperature and reduces the time your heaters have to run.

This is also the reason why low-energy light bulbs are less profitable in certain countries.
It's surprisingly difficult to sue people for IP infringement if they are foreign unfortunately.

I have a friend who published a bunch of her artwork online and later found out via google image search that it was being used by a fair sized company with only slight modification for branding purposes without her being paid or made aware.

She contacted the company in question directly who basically responded "LOL, screw off". At that point she contacted an IP lawyer assuming it would be an easy case. But was basically told the process would cost thousands of $ and she would most likely lose.
Consumer of the Future: What You Really Want Is A Wearable Computer
People can inject just about anything they want into
themselves

Actually, that is expressly not what the Cowan or the earlier Rutherford decision on Laetrile say.

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?page=4&xmldoc=19981...

In Court, Plaintiff argued that he should have the right to
take whatever treatment he wishes due to his terminal
condition regardless of whether the FDA approves the
treatment as effective or safe, and that to prohibit him
from taking the treatment he wishes violates his rights
under the United States Constitution.4 The United States
Supreme Court previously addressed and rejected this
argument in Rutherford. In Rutherford, cancer patients
requested the right to use Laetrile, arguing, as does
Plaintiff, that for terminally ill patients the
effectiveness or safety of the proposed treatment is
irrelevant since such treatment is a last chance effort.
However, as identified by the Supreme Court in Rutherford,
to permit terminally ill patients to seek any type of
treatment regardless of the effectiveness of such treatment
would create a cottage industry existing solely to provide
potential panaceas to highly vulnerable patients. The
language of the Supreme Court in rejecting the Laetrile
argument is equally applicable here.

"If history is any guide, this new market would not be long
overlooked. Since the turn of the century, resourceful
entrepreneurs have advertised a wide variety of purportedly
simple and painless cures for cancer, including liniments
of turpentine, mustard, oil, eggs, and ammonia; peat moss;
arrangements of colored floodlamps; pastes made from
glycerin and limburger cheese; mineral tablets; and
`Fountain of Youth' mixtures of spices, oil, and suet. In
citing these examples, we do not, of course, intend to
deprecate the sincerity of Laetrile's current proponents,
or to imply any opinion on whether that drug may ultimately
prove safe and effective for cancer treatment. But this
historical experience does suggest why Congress could
reasonably have determined to protect the terminally ill,
no less than other patients, from the vast range of self-
styled panaceas that inventive minds can devise."

I don't know about you, but this argument strikes me as bizarre. Terminal patients are to be protected from their own good from a "drug [that] may ultimately prove safe and effective for cancer treatment" because they might be scammed by "inventive minds"?

The absolute worst case scenario is that they lose some money and die a little sooner. The best case scenario is that they live!

To say that someone else can or should have the power to constrain another human in this way, to keep them from a chance at living, in the name of "protecting" them from doctors or companies...well, we are likely at a fundamental philosophical impasse. Which is why I return to my original point. Feel free to stay in the United States with the FDA. Those with a different cast of mind need a jurisdiction where we can take conscious risks, where we aren't "protected" from medical innovation.
Timothy B. Lee: another victim of Poe's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law). Let us remove our hats and have a silent moment of meditation in his honor.

...

Now that the silent moment is over, I exhort everyone to double and redouble their efforts at preventing commone folk from being victimized by Poe's Law.
Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
I haven't noticed a recent surge, and without evidence I'd be skeptical that there has been one.

That said, my general feeling is: it's probably anti-annoying most of the time (an option which you've left out), and sometimes somewhat annoying.

It's annoying when the submitter improves on the original title and a mod reverts it. But it's anti-annoying when the submitter uses a bad title and a mod edits it. I don't think I've ever explicitly noticed one of those, but I'd still guess they're the majority. (I only notice the annoying ones when someone complains.)
Accepting credit cards online for recurring payments in Europe
Did I already look at this? I don't remember this title... Why's it grey? Oh yeah, I did read this!

This website isn't really a democracy. We, the users, can complain all we want, but until a) people are taken into the back alley when they bring it up, or b) enough people at the top get fed up with the complaining that they stop doing what they're doing, nothing will change.

Not that I care in slightest (not my problem, I'm happy as a clam), but the admins are actively doing something that many people don't particularly like, which seems like it would be easier on both sides if the action stopped (unless the admins enjoy the work).

Which one would save more of humanity's time - all the time spent complaining about title changing, or the time spent changing titles?
I wonder if the mods will change the title of this poll to something likely to be completly ignored by HN - something like "Super Bowl predictions" or "What's new in .NET 4.5".
It would be fascinating, if hard to do fairly, to measure how "clumpy" technology purchases. As you say, I often read on the internet that "everyone" is switching from X to Y, when I don't know anyone in real life with a Y, our even see people switching away from Y altogether.
Isn't that problem more-or-less another indication of the failure of DRM? That is, only rich people (or other entities with personhood, like corporations) can use the laws in question. DRM increases the cost of the content, and the legal follow-up on real instances of "Intellectual Property Theft" is quite expensive. Either way (increased cost to get content out, or expensive policing) the DRM hurts personhood's with smaller amounts of cash.
There was recently a link to a register[1] article covering a scientific study[2] where not just the title, but the whole URL got switched to the original study. Now, I'm not disputing that it probably would have been better to link to the article titled "Empathy among students in Engineering Programs" originally, but the Register article contained quite a bit of satire. It's title was "Engineers are cold and Dead inside".

The Register article contained slang and sarcasm aplenty, and most of the discussion revolved around that. When the URL changed, most of the comments suddenly became not only irrelevant, but incredibly confusing if you hadn't seen the originally linked register article.

So, I don't have a very strong opinion on article changes. But I'm pretty strongly against actually changing the URL. Yes, a lot of the time the submitted link is blogspam. But a lot of the time there's some added commentary or color, and people start discussing it. Changing the URL is like pulling the rug out from under the people who already commented. I know it's intended to elevate the content on the site, but it just ends up being kind of rude.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/engineers_cold_and_d...

[2] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03043797.2012.708...;
This is very much a YMMV thing. Some things work an order of magnitude better than others under wine.

I've also had things which have worked fine under wine get an update, or I've updated something else on my system and then all of a sudden it completely breaks.
Relatively more recent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cu_Chi_tunnels
When I voted for this the question was "Do you find keeping the original article titles annoying"...
Inside the mind of Graeme Obree
Children and the culture of pornography
If done well I much prefer an editorialized title to the original title (providing the original title is not a good fit as per the guidelines.)
I believe Hacker News users would find more utility out of descriptive titles that let them know whether or not they are likely to want to read the article, rather than the copy the editor's title.
Depends.

If you copy the article's original title and it was sensationalist horse shit then you deserve everything you get.

If you manually enter the title yourself and it's sensationalist horse shit then you deserve everything you get.
Agreed on a lot of your points. After owning Apple stock for several years, I'm considering selling it now.

It looks to investors that Apple has run out of ideas, or don't have the design instincts Jobs did and their well has run dry. Sure they've introduced smaller versions of existing products, but where is the next Apple product which is going to make waves and disrupt industries like their other products?? The investors haven't heard anything, and I think Wall Street is getting itchy about the long term prospects of a company whose product ideas seem to have evaporated when Jobs passed away in October of 2011.
> Is it your assertion that science is not at all about scientists?

What are you going on about? I never said that science isn't about scientists, I said it isn't about authority. Do try to read before inventing positions for the other person.

> As for Einstein, he had a PhD at the time that four of his Annus Mirabilis papers were published

False. Check your history.

> In five seconds when I drop this pen, it will fall from my fingers to the ground.

I said a scientific truth, not a single observation. You haven't the slightest idea what "truth" means. Science requires more than one data point, and it also requires an explanation, and you certainly are not qualified to explain why your pencil takes the path it does. And were all that not so, gravity would still suffer from being a provisional set of ideas that are incompatible with quantum, another very well-supported theory. I understand this is all outside your education.

> As for evolution, yes evolution is true.

Evolution is a scientific theory, it is not true now, and it will never be true. Were this not the case, if evolution had been declare true, then all those evolutionary biologists could be sued for fraud. The reason? They are still working out evolutionary theory, the theory that you think represents truth.

> As to there still being details to be worked out, that doesn't detract from trueness.

Jesus Christ! This proves that you have no idea what "true" means, with respect to science. Why do you think scientists insist that what they craft are called "theories"?

Science requires falsifiability -- this is so everywhere, and it is not a debate topic. Because science requires falsifiability, there are no truths in science, because truths cannot be falsified -- that property is reserved to theories.

Source: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Quote: "Falsifiability is the ability of a theory—a working framework for explaining and predicting natural phenomena—to be disproved by an experiment or observation. The ability to evaluate theories against observations is essential to the scientific method, and as such, the falsifiability of theories is key to this and is the prime test for whether a proposition or theory can be described as scientific."

Couldn't have said it better myself.
Show HN: tool to manage my startup ideas
Because I don't want to live in a world of profit and power.
I maintain an old ircII script. The guy that originally wrote it (srfrog - the LiCe script) is just an amazing programmer. The whole thing is clean and beautiful.

I feel ashamed when I touch it I dirty it up.
Strangely this article and the comments above (at the point I read it) don't seem to argue for further Apple growth. Yes people have pointed out that Apple may have peeked, but I didn't read much sign of where they can rise up in the near future....?
Up next, a post-apocalypse JRPG mod: YOU_ARE_ALREADY_DEAD
This one did annoy me, fwiw:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5151227

The original submitted title was "Minecraft's Monster Profits". Minecraft was something I recognized and was interested in. When I tried to find the thread again to see what people had been saying, I couldn't see it and had to hunt around for a bit. Mojang meant nothing to me, and my eyes even kept misreading "Mojang" as "Mahjong", just to add another layer of confusion.
Well ideally URL changes are to get rid of blog spam, in the case that a site is doing a terrible job reporting and has less data. I'm okay with them usually.

But these nigh-automatic title changes, 90% of the time, are taking a title that had context added or explained the relevance to HN and reverting it to something generic and less useful.
The Askers and the Guessers
This is exactly the problem. A good title on Hacker News is itself a valuable piece of content. A good title here will concisely convey the point of an article, so that each of us can decide if we want to check it out.

Often this is directly at odds with the purpose of a "natural title", which is designed by the author to entice and tantalize in order to drag eyeballs to it. Not to communicate, but to manipulate.

If the natural title is also good as a HN title, great. But if not, and if the submitter made a good effort to construct a good HN title, then it should not be changed.
I like the concept, the only thing that I'm wondering after reading it is what the metrics are for when you will send out the messages.
The first has pitfalls. For example, is it even possible to grant a non-exclusive, non-revocable license?

So, they are going to prefer the second, as the pitfalls of the second are primary the objections of students.