skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The job of a distributer is by definition obsolete in the face of the internet. Most intelligent people I've met agree that fighting the ability to copy content has no future. Distributors may not be dead yet, but they are in the ER hooked up to monitors, with lawyers running around trying to defibrillate them with lawsuits.

For the most part they can't change either, because they are often under contract to provide content to certain channels and certain times. They can't just start offering a pay or advertising based torrent service. If they ever had that chance I think the window has closed.

In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...." or "hey everyone vote up our spec album"

Well I can dream can't I?
just tried it out. works great! now if they only had better filtering of my inbox(more than 90% of my messages a day go unread---creating filters manually is not the answer).
Please clarify?

While I can totally see you biometrically logging in with your fingerprint or something, I'm having a hard time imagining how I'm going to send an email to that.
they had paper schedules?
Yeah, but uh.. Google doesn't use exchange ;)
A New Business Model For Skype: Turning Phone Numbers On The Web Into Paid Ads
You want mh (mail handler) or perhaps a modern variant. I haven't used it in over a decade, but it's totally command line. Messages are actually files and folders are directories, so there's no need for FUSE or any wierd hacks like that. And there's a pretty decent emacs mode.
Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software?
Especially since it is not true: I'm a very fast coder too and some product I sold or that is working well today started like one/two days of hacking where an alpha was already working.

The point is that this is just the start. Even if you don't add new features after the first two days you need weeks or months more to make this product rock solid, with a good UI, seriously scalable, documented, easy to use for the newcomer, and so on.

To get started fast is an invaluable thing, it helps building a lot of things in your life so you simply trow away what appears useless, not working as expected and so on. But to do great things a lot of work is needed anyway.
The video points out that there are 2200 conference rooms, so while using white boards will save paper, but doesn't address the manpower needed to keep them up-to-date, nor the expenditure on dry-erase markers (not to mention the PR this kind of project gets you in all the right places).
Looking for the Northwest Passage, are ya?
Do look at MH and similar systems
That makes little sense. If you can remember what folder it's in, you must remember some criteria that you can search for.

You should give it a try. It's a new way of working...
I've been really enjoying sup -- http://sup.rubyforge.org/ -- in fact, that really wordy quote about five down is mine.
I like the idea of this product. Don't like the social aspect. I think that there are a lot of product that are waiting to be discovered and implemented by new startups that just involve yourself and the computer. Email is one of this things where to filter spam the social bit can be interesting, but probably the sorting of the email is just local to you and nobody else.

If I rate emails form Tommy are very important, and Tommy thinks email from Bob are very important, I still don't care to receive email from Bob as important emails and so on. The only useful bit of information that can be extracted from this stuff is that if I really didn't scored Foobar then the importance assigned to Foobar by my friend can be better to start without a clue at all, but anyway in the long run I've to compare Foobar with few of other guys for the system to really know if I care or not about it.

Btw it is a good start. If gmail were a pay-for product I bet that the email system of today would be much, much better. Instead a key component is uninteresting to startups since there are huge companies like Google pushing products that are good enough for most people, for free, and this in some way blocks evolution. It's better to pay 50$/year for a great email system than 0$ for a good one.
Nope, not really. The folders themselves are the reminder that I need, often.
Average users? One informal writing group I'm a part of sends emails like that, because it makes intuitive sense. You just type in the names and then you send. Making a group takes too long (even though it would save time in the long run, most people see it as unnecessary, and nothing exists to automatically make groups of people as you send), and CC isn't intuitive, especially not to people who are young enough not to be entirely certain what a "carbon copy" is. It's hard to understand what the difference between "multiple recipients" and "multiple carbon copied emails" is if you honestly don't care that much, and most people honestly don't care.
Thanks magical, mysterious editors! :)
People Who Switch To Macs Like To Dance, And Other Strange Hunches
Yes its like Rocky in 5 minutes, and this time she wins.
hmm I get>

sh: dot: command not found

Graph saved to:

RubygemsAnalyzer.png

And then a confirmation box that says: "RubygemsAnalyzer.png Couldn't open the file...."
There was so much estrogen in that article it was hard to read.

When you open with a line like that, you sound stupid and brutish. When you then assume that feminists are all liberal arts majors, you sound the same. Of course they're not.

If you want to rant about the liberal arts, go ahead. I'm in a liberal arts school and I'd love to have a discussion about your criticisms. But don't open with what ought to be the firing shot from an impassioned argument, then pander off and not write the criticisms that you'd best be backing yourself up with.
The Valley offers no edge here– in fact, some people wonder if the “echo chamber” doesn’t actually get in the way of understanding the rest of the world.

This was my experience at Startup School last year. I regularly run into business owners who need all kinds of technology, but no one I ran into at the meetups knew anything about it.

If another person had pitched me his flash card app, I would have jumped out the window (except no building had more than 2 stories).
Apologize to HN: Sorry for Trolling
I was reading my comment history and came to the horrible conclusion that I am a troll. In particular I'm the worst kind of troll, the kind where it's not always clear that I'm trolling.

My childlike enthusiasm for debate (or maybe just my lousy social skills) have led me to say things that are nasty, inflammatory, sometimes clearly false, and ultimately that I have no desire to see appear next to my name.

So if I've offended any of you then I'm really sorry. I promise to reform, effective immediately.

Regards,
Ben
If you're talking about the native Python modules, I'm pretty sure Python simply ignores repeated imports (and there is no version number in most module names).
Another interesting feature would be if you could schedule mails to be sent at a particular time maybe, like the 3mindme post which was posted some days ago.
There are multiple decisions Hulu (and more importantly their owners) are making that really don't make any sense.
Explain from the Questioner’s perspective, not your own
Regardless of whether the data is "perfect", I haven't seen anything more than anecdote supporting the SV hypothesis. Great article!
I think I'm going to use this for some week.

Mutt -> Gmail -> Sup ? I hope so.
I did say among other things, and one of the issues was that things were still running on the beta servers initially, which were not configured for the load they had come Monday through Tuesday.

I am trying to mention this from memory, so I may have the specifics wrong.

Edit: Again, this all stems from Gamestop breaking the street date, and not by only a day or two either but the Friday prior.
Hybrid Hummer Promises 100 Miles per Gallon
J. Peterman: Selling stories, not just products
I just walk into an empty one ~10 minutes after the hour-- which a large percentage of the time at my company means it's free for at least 50 more minutes. If not, I leave when people come by.
You have any more details on how you put it all together?
Recommender systems are hard to do even within domains with well understood semantics. Applying them broadly across all human decisions seems to be a bit of stretch. Makes for very amusing anecdotes though.
In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...." or "hey everyone vote up our spec album"

That sounds more like a nightmare to me.

I've got a lot of friends who lack the ability to distribute themselves well. Actually, it's almost all my friends. Most musicians I know aren't good at publicity. In a scenario without effective distribution, the viral scene favors not the best work, but the most easily digestible work. That means a trend away towards complexity, which is not necessarily a trend I'd want to see.

Trent Reznor seems to be the flagship of this attitude of "a musician ought to do everything himself and publicize himself to death." That's great for him to say, but what about the people who can't do that as well as he can? I mean, NiN isn't particularly a brilliant band; it's good, but there's a lot better out there. Reznor is iconic not because he's the best but because he's the most savvy. Again: not certain that's a good thing. Not every talented person is good at promotion; we'd lose a lot of meaning for the sake of a lot of fluff. Distributors aren't a perfect solution, but they at least act as a sort of safegate. They do the work other people can't.

If I saw the opening 10 minutes of 2001 I wouldn't be excited. Ditto Blue Velvet and every Lynch film, ditto most Coen brothers films, ditto pretty much every movie I love that isn't made by Edgar Wright. You're asking people to judge a book by its cover, and that's not exactly fair.

The crowd sucks. The crowd is stupid. Look at Shirky's recent article about #amazonfail. Individuals become stupid when they become part of a mass. That's why the best producers and distributors tend to work alone or in small groups: because crowdsourcing doesn't work when it comes to finding good things. I don't trust even my handpicked Facebook friends to like good things, so I don't know why I'd trust the rest of the users on Facebook any more.
From Blog to Print, Laughing All the Way to the Bank
I don't understand. If I hit reply, then I reply to the person who sent. If I hit reply-all, then I reply to everyone who got the email (barring bcc, of course).

This is unaffected by To or Cc was used.

Did I miss something?
Ford Bets the Fiesta on Social Networking
I like the conversations, but what I really want is the ability to turn off conversation views, especially when searching.

Sometimes when I'm searching tech discussions with colleagues/clients, etc, I just want to see the emails with the relevant terms, not all 75 emails in the conversation in a big cumbersome list.
Sorry guys, I did not realize that the prior link redirected to the page in which the article was originally posted. My mistake.

The first link seems to have been pretty well received before it was taken down, hence the post to the original link.
Posterous (YC S08) Takes On TwitPic With New API
No, think there was an Alitalia on the factory floor when I worked there, but I can't remember.

Most memorable event on the factory floor was when a hydraulic jack failed on a sim, and the resulting jet of fluid punched a hole through six layers of hand wire-wrapped PCBs on the sim next door.

I think it put them back six weeks. Luckily the penalty clause for lateness was only $50,000 per day. Gulp.
Rainn Wilson likes it. That's big news: http://twitter.com/rainnwilson/status/1529141277
Thanks, looking ..
Actually, I think it might be a bit better than that. The question is - what biases are there to acquisition with regards to location? Let's say you are more likely to be acquired if your are successful (surely we can all agree on that). If SV is the navel of the world, then you would expect startups in SV to have a higher chance of being acquired, than say a startup in Philadelphia.

Now the question is - is being acquired a good trace marker for a not-particularly successful startup? The answer is it doesn't matter - because the original PG essay was talking about being a major economic driver, so in some ways it is irrelevant what the non-successful startups are doing.

What it comes down is, is acquisition a fair sampler of successful startups. I don't know the answer to that, but I think a fair number of people would be surprised if it was "Hell, no".

Back to the sporting analogy, it is like trying to figure out the fastest nationality by looking at their 100m record. If each country trains and sends to the Olympics its fastest people then yes - but you have no simple way of knowing whether that is true. However you may draw some conclusions about who the fastest race is, on the basis that you would expect any bias to work against them.
Polaroid: a great name taken in vain.
>"I don't know how you can really get a handle on the millions of 'startups' that just make money reasonably quietly."

There are millions of startups? There are millions of startups making money quietly? Does anybody know, because from where I am sitting I'd be surprised if there were 10,000. And yes, it does make a difference to the argument.
The difference in how values are treated alone is enough to quintuple the test cases. :)
Read through the prosecution's arguments in this case. It's amazing just how little the lawyers and witnesses called by the IFPI seemed to know, even after what must have been months, if not years of preparation. The heads of the recording industry seem to be ignorant of technology to such a degree that they don't understand the whole nature of content distribution is changing. Running their own for-pay tracker would be as alien to them as an assembly line would be to neolithic man.
no but i'd pay ten times that much for twitter. with a little luck they'd spend it whale hunting.
Thanks. For some reason, this critical bit of information was missing from the AppJet app, the article, and the comments. I had to spend some of my time actually looking for it.
There existsa reason: the map/filter version can improved with a threaded map/filter variant, the list comprehension line not.

And yes, a list comprehension produce a list with the same length, reduce not.
For those who like to compare copyright infringement to theft, here goes my take:

Suppose a neighbor of buys that new awesome European car, great style, full option . The car is instant hit among neighbors, since they all suffer form products of Detroit Big Four. `Chicks dig him', so to say.

Enter copyright infringement.

One night you venture near the car, wielding necessary tools, dark clothed and masked. You write down every detail carefully. You visit local distributor next morning, you order exact same car, down to last detail. Later on you show off, driving in it around.

Will the neighbor be angry at you? Surely you deprived him of some of the car's value (uniqueness).

Yet you stole nothing anything from him. You copied information. No theft of property.

Is this example legal? I guess it is.

Is this morally OK?

What if the neighbor in question lived off of a business model based on having the best car around (scarcity, perhaps artificial)?
College is not even remotely as necessary as most people think. Education, however, is twice as important.
Didn't they give everyone Android phones last year? Shouldn't that interface with Google Calendar pretty well?
>"Regardless of the Pirate Bay verdict, the lesson here is clear: Don't try to fight technological revolutions with clumsy, antiquated legal actions. Harassing customers, threatening Web sites, and standing in the way of progress are doomed to fail."

The author's argument comes down to "it won't work, because it won't work".

Like it or not, fining people and throwing them in jail does create some incentives. I am not so confident a priori that enforcement mechanisms are doomed to fail. Then again, maybe I just need to replenish my kool-aid stock.

One thing is certain: if I were a passionate file-sharing advocate, I would check my premises about what events can and cannot happen.
I currently use gnus in xemacs.

I don't like it, but it is better than the other options I have tried. However, I may revist mutt, it has been a long time since I messed with that.

I originally went to gnus because I am on a lot of mailing lists and I liked the idea of handling mailling lists the same way I read usenet. I still want that, and I would probably need to do a lot of custom configuration to get that with mutt.

It took me a while to realize that by your "FUSE" comments you expected the mail reader to keep the mail in it's own format, and you just wanted it exposed to other tools. The useful mail clients offer a variety of back-ends, from Maildir to mbox to a remote imap server, and you can handle mbox and Mailder with grep and etc.
how about no pay restrictions but put every banking executive's salary on whitehouse.gov. now shame and pride figure equally.
don't think so. Students are brainwashed from the first grade that you need a college degree to get a good job, newspapers never had that
Why your taxes could double
> As long as the lambda is limited to single expressions, map and filter are pretty much useless

Not really. It is not too difficult to actually define a named function and the code usually ends up being easier to read/understand so that lack of multi-line lambdas is not a serious problem. Additionally, now that map and filter return iterators they are a bit more flexible than they used to be. OTOH, if you are using map and filter in your python code you should probably take a close look at what you are attempting to accomplish and see if a generator expression might do the job better.
Online universities don't have near the reputation of old ones. Its not the education that counts, its the diploma, sadly
Where can I get one? Need to get my company to do the same thing.
This is not a monkeypatching problem, per se. It is a problem of scope-independent class definition. There are languages wherin you can monkeypatch the class definition (or the definition of a single instantiation of a class) wherin those patches only are in effect in certain contexts.. so you have a scope to your monkeypatching. I think that this would allow for Interesting Things, while being "safe".
and then oddly enough sarah silverman ignored his suggestion and began using twitpic: http://twitpic.com/photos/sarahksilverman
...the football coach, and other expensive things that cost more than they bring in.

This statement by itself shows how utterly ignorant the author is about university cashflow.
When faced with any threat, Universities will take the steps to evolve and become more efficient. Newspapers failed to do so...hence their current predicament.
After the first 10 minutes of testing, imported my gmail account, wrote few test emails, I don't think this is really read for prime time. Also does not play well with my messing with my IMAP account via other clients. Is slower than gmail since for some reason the IMAP account is accessed to retrieve messages when I open a thread.

Btw to be able to write new emails with vim again is a joy... Still almost everything Sup is doing is in theory possible to do in a web-based or resident application with improved font rendering, simple icons to signal status of messages and so on.

Remember xchat? This IRC client had a lesson, it was possible to retain everything of good there was in text-only IRC clients, and add the good stuff of GUIs. The nerd email client I'm waiting for is something like this.

Fast: just scan IMAP for new messages but take everything local otherwise.

Great interface: mixed between curses but with improved rendering and config menus thanks to GUI toolkit or even web-based can be ok.

Easy to configure: unlike mutt for example. Spun is nice from this POV at least for the first steps.

Give me my editor: if resident, fire vim for me in some way, otherwise implement a decent editor with vim and emacs key bindings if it's web based.

It's worth to note that even a web-mail can be scriptable, using javascript.
That sounds right for Gmail. Maybe his experience is with another email client.
We need a flat tax.
Personally, I have little trust in documentation. Not that it's useless, but that documentation rarely holds everything you need to know about the code. Usually, I'll take a high-to-low level approach, and use visualization programs/plugins which graph the class dependencies and overall structure. I'll take a look at the Jdoc/similar for class/function definitions, and then look at the run a debugger and look at the stack to see the flow of functions. This strategy works well for 99% of cases.

Though planning ahead is good, sometimes the extra, non-implemented features are dead weight until finished. I would recommend designing for expansion structure-wise, but working on just the immediate changes. This way it makes the code easier to read, and simpler (relatively speaking).

I'd like to know people's opinions for performance vs ease-of-readability/ease-of-extensibility. Personally, I find that when the code I've written is too complex, then the code probably isn't very good. In that case, I'll rewrite if the architecture is off, or just refactor to make it prettier/more extensible, even at the cost of a little performance.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/09/flat-tax-plan-obama-opinion...
Slashdot - A double-edged sword of geekery
I thought this data was interesting, and I used it as an excuse to play around with some data analysis / visualization tools that I've been exploring lately, Many Eyes and DabbleDB.

I wrote a quick blog entry discussing how I used them to perform some further analysis on the data:

Visualizing and sharing data ( http://daniel.yipyip.com/77049.html )
I've considered trying different keyboard layouts, but it seems like it would hamper "portability". Nearly every device with a keyboard is QWERTY and mentally switching my muscle memory between a primary workstation and all those other things sounds exhausting.
Well most 'affiliate' websites I know of don't call themselves 'startups', and make a lot of money. Quietly. I don't know if you want to call them startups, depends on your definitions, but they're online businesses that make a lot of money. Then what about all the ebay businesses out there making a lot of money.
One of the interesting things here was this graph (when you change it to $ per state);
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/wikified/acquired_startup...

Texas brought in almost as much money as CA in acquisitions in this snapshot of data.
What is the difference between the two? I never understood it. I know what BCC is for.
You asked if you were wrong about any of that. Yes, I would say that the criticism of Abraham Lincoln was misplaced. Especially, you don't mention at all how much the preceding Buchanan administration and the Dred Scott decision by Justice Taney during that administration had made civil war all but inevitable before Lincoln was even elected.

Nobody's perfect, but some pretty good presidents are subject to unfair criticism by those who know too little history.