skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are physical goods that are reproducible for very low marginal costs. Clothes, food, etc, medicine, etc, are all very cheap to produce in large quantities. Is there a moral obligation to provide those goods--not for free but for their low marginal cost, to anyone who will prosper from it?

A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.

You have a network in which it is so convenient to share that it's almost begging you to. There's a lot of fundamental rethinking of commerce here, and I was quite bugged by it all when I started looking into it myself. But when you see how badly the bigger half of people in this world are suffering it's easier to see why this is necessary.

You're going to get a much better explanation of things from Moglen himself than me -- here, the transcript to the video I linked (if you're unable to watch the video): http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Software:_Paradi...
But 9 isn't prime. So it would be 11 and 5.
Still doesn't mean I owe them anything, if I want to give away code for proprietary companies to use then that's genererous and perfectly fine.

Likewise there's not something wrong with with only writing open source for open source, where you will be priviledged to have any enhancements made to your code available to you.

And if 'you actually want to make money writing software' then you really can't demand that there should be code lying around for you to use and sell.

Complaints about people not wanting to write code that proprietary companies can use for free and sell simply appals me. As if the 'companies' should have some god-given right to use open source and make money?
There is no reason for unreliable reading to be with us forever, accounting for temperature and driving-style in an estimation system is non-trivial but far from impossible. It is the sort of problem that will be incrementally solved as the technology matures, Telsa themselves will learn from their more northerly deployments.
Unfortunately, while a lawyer can certainly make a request to PayPal, their user agreements are loud and clear on the issue of freezing accounts. Essentially, you agree that they can close your account and hold your funds for any reason or no reason at all. The freeze can last for up to 180 days from the date of your last chargeback, or from the date they froze the account, whichever is later. As you can see, they apply this policy liberally and always to their benefit.

TBH, you have already played your best card by getting this to the front page of Hacker News. You may well get your money released relatively soon because someone at PP has or will soon see this. It's sad that this is what it takes just to make them be honest, but that is what you get when you deal with PayPal.

Good luck, and never use Paypal again. Use Bitcoins or Stripe.
How is it any way remarkable that we haven't yet ruled out the possibility of life on Mars, given what you correctly said about the high standard of proof?
New native Basecamp App from 37signals
Find an american friend with a SSN? I am not sure this would really work, but it's definitely worth a shot. Of course your friend will have to count it as income; but honestly this will probably be a lot cheaper than hiring a lawyer if it works. I don't really see a downside to trying this method; since you can't really lose the money that's already gone.
Dbpatterns now supports private patterns
I agree, on the northeast, 30F isn't extreme. I'm biased, I live in California where I wear shorts and t-shirt almost 365 days a year. :)
Great tips for non-technical people from a business student turned Googler
That seems extremely unlikely. If a few dozen planes crashed on Earth (on land), how likely do you reckon you'd be to ever run across significant debris from any of them just by randomly driving around?
course outline looks great. What time zone is this course in? and is this course recorded for replay somewhere?
Wow, the sheer quantity of unhelpful advice in this thread is simply mind boggling. Hey, let's all hate paypal because they "steal" people's money. Ignoring the seriously thorny legal bramble that the OP has run headlong into with nary a concern. There is a bounteous variety of comments of the form "Paypal sux! {Use X instead!}" Where X may be stripe, or wepay, or whatever. Ignoring the fact that stripe wouldn't help in this case (it's US only), if you go read the terms of service of stripe or wepay you'll find exactly the same things there as are at issue here. You'll need an SSN or EID or tax ID with stripe too, just as you would with a WePay business account. There's a reason for that, and it has to do with the law.

There are maybe only half a dozen reasonable, substantially helpful, and actionable replies in this whole thread (which would put it at maybe a 4% SNR), almost all the rest is useless. If this is what HN is going to be, I don't want it.

As for my advice, it's simple. Go talk to a lawyer as soon as possible, you have a lot of issues that need sorting and a good lawyer is absolutely necessary to get through those issues, and they'll help to put you on the right footing to deal with paypal. It sucks that you have been acting in good faith and doing good work and have gotten tangled in the mess that is the many layers of laws, regulations, and corporate policies that make up our modern immigration, taxation, and financial systems. You have my sympathies for that and I wish you the best of luck, hopefully you'll be able to keep the proceeds of your excellent work without any serious negative repercussions.
Show HN: CrushIt Compiler - minify scripts from a web page
+1 for anyone that takes the time to put stuff like this together.

With that said a cursory glance at the material raised a couple flags with me when I got to best practices...

Keeping in mind this tutorial is an introduction I think it would be really great to include the following:

1. Settings module in the project module with a simple example with base settings that can be extended/overridden with a local settings file. I've never worked on a Django project where this isn't needed and think it's a very good "best practice" that should be addressed.

2. Even if it is personal preference I do not think the slide detailing app specific templates in a project level template directory should be included. To spend time making code subdivided in to distinct application logic it doesn't make sense to have the templates excluded which reduces the portability / reusability of the app. Django contrib app structure (especially auth/admin interaction) is a good example of Doing It Right™ (or at least in the spirit of doing something right :)
Does anyone know NASA's policy on further observation of crowd-sourced findings?

BTW, you absolutely have to love the tack NASA has taken with making images virtually immediately available for the public to consume and research. Imagine if the Curiosity photo archives were only made available months after the fact - it'd be too late to do anything based off of community findings!

Way to go team!
I didn't check the roof for snipers, but I had nightmares of heavy cavalry charging at me in the open field while I was one of the poor underequipped peasants. That's what Total War games can do to you :) BTW - a heavy cavalry charge is very scary, I don't recommend standing in its way.
So you just want to see all religions on earth, dead.
'And permissive licences is a giant stink eye for many people. It deters people wanting to make enhancements in the first place.

There's no point with enhancements being made when they are kept under proprietary lock and key.'

There, your arguments hold no water. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' licence, there is only the needs of the code author/owner.

And if someone builds a 'superior' alternative then it doesn't much matter what licence it uses, the point is it being 'superior' code which in turn is what would make something 'irrelevant'.
The human brain is a remarkable pattern recognition machine with a keen penchant for extracting meaning from noise.

This, of course, will turn out to be nothing more than an unremarkable optical illusion; an urban legend is born.
Samsung laptop bug is not Linux specific
The downside is that it then starts to look even more like fraud or money laundering and possible legal action, in addition to the freezing of the account, happens.

This is the worst advice in this entire thread. The money isn't gone, it's just frozen. It can get unfrozen quite easily provided that Emmanuel is smart and makes sure to get a good lawyer who can walk him through all of the necessary steps to get his business set up correctly.
I must say I find the ratio of positive:neutral:negative comments on Reddit vs Hacker News (1:16:24 vs 21:119:21) to be spot on. It's one of the reasons I absolutely love HN (going meta here and a little off-topic!): well-phrased dissenting views are just as likely to be featured and upvoted as the "common take" and on most topics, there is no substantial "group think" effect.

It's also my biggest problem with Reddit, you get instakarma for simply being a d^H jerk or off-topic. I'd like to see this kind of comparison more often, esp. with more data points (17 comments on Reddit is not enough).

Also interesting would be a fourth category being "off-topic" for comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the OP, but somehow propagate like wild fire on certain forums. (Ironic, since this very post is off-topic, no? :smirk:)
Here is a map of mars landings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_landing#Image_map_of_Mars_...

They are separated by hundreds/thousands of miles.
Ask HN: What are my options to save up for Hacker School in NYC?
I currently work for a consulting shop, but pretty soon I'll be out of a job. A couple of clients pulled back on their commitments, so the company lacks the cash flow to keep me around.

I have 2 years of experience with Ruby on Rails as well as a few months with Backbone.js and Titanium mobile. I know these skills are pretty marketable right now, however, I'd like to apply to Hacker School this year. I feel that applying to a full time position would be misleading if I say nothing, or a waste of time if I communicate that I'm interested in working for less than a year.

What are my options to build up some more savings to do Hacker School? I've created an Odesk account but given what I've read here, I'd prefer to explore alternate routes.
> A physical good (food, clothes) is depletable, and in that way too unlike digital data, which is for all practical purposes undepletable. But if you consider even highly inexpensive physical goods, they have various substantial costs of transportation, inventory, etc. associated to them, and thus they are not truly as fluidly and effortlessly reproducible in the way that digital data is reproducible for zero cost.

Right, that's why I said "not for free but for their low marginal cost." You're hand-waving with the "zero marginal cost" argument without addressing my counter-point. If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?
Couldn't agree more...this would be amazing.
Scratch is another option, much simpler than a ruby-based tool (it's fully visual) but dramatically more accessible. My 5 year old can't get enough of it; tonight we covered the Cartesian plane. Kids will probably outgrow it after a couple years since it has no means of abstraction, but it's superb at grabbing their attention.
Yes. The real solution is to have two separate, linked bank accounts, only link one of them to PayPal. Set PayPal to sweep into bank account A daily, and then have your bank set up an automatic sweep from account A to B either daily or as it reaches a threshold.

However, even if you don't do this, PayPal transactions are via ACH (actually, this isn't a PayPal-only thing - technically anyone with your ACH account info (the stuff at the bottom of your checks!!) can push/pull money into/from your account, it's the nature of the beast) and that has many failsafes and undos available, though it is a real PITA.
He seems to be trying to portray himself as a victim here

I don't see that; it doesn't seem like he cares about the comments at all except as an indicator that it's not worth his time participating in public fora. Which is a judgment call he's entirely entitled to make for himself.

he spoke out stridently, insultingly in violent and profane language against a whole field.

Intended for an audience that was used to his rants, and could take what he said in context. He wasn't the one who posted it to reddit.

avoid "public unmoderated fora" because then he can initiate all the monkey dances he wants and apparently he believes people will then civilly discuss what he has said.

Which is what the group he intended the rant for did. In other words, what he did was not a "monkey dance", and his "belief" was based on actual fact.
> What's fascinating in itself though is that no person, however sceptical, can immediately rule out the possibility that stuff like this is some form of life or even evidence of non-human technology.

You can never completely rule out that possibility, regardless of how much evidence you collect, but it's a matter of semantics at that point. Immediately and without collecting anymore data, we can dismiss the hypothesis that this is non-human technology as unworthy of our attention. It's not merely that the hypothesis has an immense burden of evidence to heft, but that it's a waste of time to even consider it.

Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition.
Interesting theory. I had to check, and yes, Mars does have dry lightning (in dust storms).

If not that, I wonder if it's something produced volcanically like onyx.
That's not a good advice. If you care about your present and future ability to legally stay and work in the US, you should first consult with an emigration lawyer since it appears that you're breaking emigration laws and only then try to get your money back.
I don't think it's about compression. I think Skype's invested most of their resource into, eg. noise and echo cancellation, reducing environment noise, working around glitchy / clicky sound capture devices, latency, ...
it didn't occur to me that the same dynamic might be at work in big internet discussions.

Really? How many "big internet discussions" have you participated in?
Until you install PicArchiver from the Cydia store.
Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org.

It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.
Lie to the authorities... what could possibly go wrong?
New Place API
Warren Buffett?
If the object really is 0.5 cm tall, it could be similar to this calcium vein in a rock which is comparable in size: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=5017
It's not really fair to say that the up front costs are paid by society. First, roughly half of university R&D budgets come from government funding. Second, even if the development of a product is fully funded by government money does not mean the government has fully paid for the result.

E.g. say the government gives me a $1 million grant to pay the costs of developing some military technology. As part of the bargain, I get to keep any commercialization rights. Should the resulting technology be free to the public? No. Nobody sane works simply to cover their costs. The commercialization rights are my profit in the arrangement. If I had known that they would be rendered useless by the government giving away the resulting technology, I wouldn't have settled for a grant that simply covered my costs--I would have bargained for costs + profit.
Your comment highlights exactly why comment scores should not be shown.

If you use comment scores as a proxy for agree/disagree you are much more likely to downvote comments you don't agree with even if they add to the discussion.
Not all religious people have gods that they have so narrowly restricted you know. Only those who have assigned an unjustifiable importance to themselves or really love cramming their gods into artificial boxes would find such a discovery disturbing.

The realization that those dots moving across the sky are not gods did little to eradicate religion. Nor did the realization that gods did not carve the canyons or raise mountains, or even create the species or the stars. Why should finding some living junk on Mars be the game changer that everything else failed to be?
How To Write Compelling Copy with Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers
i've no idea.
But wish u good luck
Knowing your audience: professional website in a gist.
Your argument seems to be that since feminists invented the word, it's pretty much up to them what it means. Fine. My response: that definition still packs in assumptions unfairly and it would be better to abandon the word entirely, at least in forums where the assumptions packed into that word's definition are not universally held premises.
No Apple
I was an F-1 student too, and here's my suggestion:

This coming Summer, apply for pre-completion OPT.

You are allowed to start a company (register a corporation), and work for it under OPT status. I have inquired about this on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1523021 I also verified with the DSOs (Designated School Officials) at my university, who are authorized to give legal advice on this matter, and they said that it was indeed possible to be self-employed / do a startup while on OPT.

What you should do is:

1. Apply for pre-completion OPT right away. Once you get your EAD (it'll have a start date on it), register for a C-Corporation after the start date. (Unfortunately, non-citizens cannot start S-Corps, which are actually more suited to startups).

2. Then get a bank account on the company's name; link that account to your PayPal account, and cash the money to the company's bank account. You can then pay yourself a lump-some "salary" or cash it out via stock dividends.

3. Since your pre-completion OPT is authorized only for the summer, you'll have to stop "working for your company" at the end of the OPT period. So that this doesn't bite you again, in the meanwhile you should find a different solution to charging customers such as an international PayPal account or some other payment solution that is not based in the US.

4. Once you graduate, you'll be able to work for you company for atleast 12 months; and if you have a STEM degree (Comp Sci counts as one), you can work for it for an additional 17 months (adding up to a total of 29 months). After that there really aren't any other visas for startups / being self-employed, as the H1B requires that you own less than 50% of the company employing you (the real issue is that "you are not in control of your employment" and that you're fireable -- so even substantial ownership under 50% might be problematic -- but IANAL and I don't know about this. It might indeed be possible to do a startup on an H1B with 3 co-founders. Check with a lawyer.)

5. After the 29 months of post-completion OPT, if you are not particularly attached to the United States, there are many countries that welcome startups and self-employed freelancers and issue visas for such people. One such place is Dubai, a modern metropolitan city with people from various backgrounds. The DTMFZA (Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone Authority) issues Freelance permits (for $3k/year) that let you be self-employed in the country. One of the great things about Dubai (and the UAE in general) are the zero taxes. To top it all, Dubai happens to be a really great city. Other options, perhaps include Singapore and other cities/countries, but I don't know about the immigration/visa deal for freelancers in those countries.

Good luck! If you have any further questions, feel free to reply to this thread -- I'll be monitoring it.
NodeJS CLI tool for minifying scripts
Well, it's a more reasonable explanation than aliens at least.
Oops, sorry I misread you.

> If the fact that something has a marginal cost approaching $0 means you are morally obligated to provide it for a price approaching $0, why is there not a similar moral obligation to provide something that has a marginal cost of $3 for $3?

If it were up to me, it would be -- or roughly something like that. But I have supposedly radical views on a lot of things (FWIW I affiliate to a local socialist party). I think a lot of the decisions made by big pharmaceutical companies, retail corporations, etc. are morally reprehensible. To give you a more direct answer of why I do not go down the streets at night shouting for change on this: because it'll be much harder for me to achieve that change. It'll be much harder for me to be an influencing force of bringing about a system I would be happy with. But because I am someone of a technical background, this fight is the fight I choose to participate in. Also, charging something $3 for something that has a marginal cost of $3 sounds kind of lousy -- I'm sure there's got to be a more elegant way of doing that. :)
BBC coverage here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21383632

BBC changed many inaccuracies, including a change in the article title, after people pointed them out on social media.
Do Not Work On Your Weaknesses
Religion will survive. It survived learning the sun didn't revolve around the Earth. It survived learning disease wasn't caused by demons and that Zeus wasn't hurling lightning from Olympus. It survived evolution and the Big Bang. People will say the mysteries of God* were just greater than they realized, and their mythologies will start to seem a bit more like Star Wars.

* or what have you
Interesting paper, I hope to see a follow on that actually describes the algorithm in full. As written, it doesn't cover the failure recovery, data-drift and timeout cases.

Also maybe you could speak to a few constraints:
- missing updates
- unique index

and outline your thoughts as to how an application developer might avoid pitfalls. Most applications I have seen tend to require/run in to these issues.
I wasn't able to find a proof of concept of the password system, is there one available publicly?
The actual title: "Senators Marco Rubio, Orrin Hatch, Amy Klobuchar hate America". Lovely.

My political views are somewhat out of the norm for this site (even on immigration), so I'll restrain myself and just point out: if the amount the average IT worker was payed went up, that would increase the income disparity, not decrease it. The average IT wage is already higher than the average wage. So the real issue here isn't "income disparity will increase" - the real issue is "dey terk er jerbs!" A message that meshes quite nicely with the title.
>I have no idea why I was flagged as "high risk", I'd be interested to know.

Email their customer service and they'll whitelist your account.

Of course they won't tell you why their automatic risk algorithm flagged you. But they will be helpful and make sure that you aren't flagged again.

Their customer service is seriously top notch.