skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a completely bald-faced appeal to authority, and it's not even a very good authority: it costs much less for Big Media to keep 110 decision-making people quiet over the years (through downward pressure from the other parts of government lobbied into agreement with them) than the amount they make while doing so; however, it costs much too much to convince the entire public of their side. In a democracy, if the public disagrees with a law, it's not really a law, no matter what the legislators say.
I believe this article may be absolutely devoid of actual content.
How is causation shown? Isn't it most likely that those most into music both download more music and buy more of it on physical media?
Which places are those? Also, not ll democracies are equal, maybe sometimes the system simply has flaws. For example, in Germany Hitler managed to rise to power even though his party did not even have the majority at the beginning. Since then, rules where introduced with the aim to prevent the same thing from happening again (I remember from school that for example a minimum share of votes became required to prevent too much fragmentation).
HN would probably be against any Sarah Connor jokes, so I'll just observe that I think we are near the nexus where AI and robotics have a (hopefully) harmonious merger.

And if not, I hope someone listens to Yudkowsky.
Does it belong to the 800 Series or the T-1000?
MS should take some time to write an HIG document and put it online for everyone to see. That would help a lot.

I also hope MS uses fewer "violent" colors in Win7. I'm a Mac user, and I love the way the Mac UI just recedes into the background with gray as it's dominating color. I don't like the reds and greens in the Vista UI. Of course, I could turn on classic mode, but why should I have to do that? I like the modern Aero UI, and I want to keep it - sans the violent colors.

All those horrid bright colors make the Vista UI distracting, especially for someone who spends a lot of time in CLI environments.
Would they have rights? Currently I know for sure of one country in which they would have all the legal rights of humans: Spain. The Spanish parliament extended human rights onto all the Great Apes, which would likely blanket cover any cloned Neanderthals.

The question would be other countries, which the cloning of a Neanderthal would likely help extend legal human rights to at least every species in the Homo genus.

Personally I usually avoid the whole human rights for Great Apes (even though I completely agree with it) because I can see both sides of the argument (I believe saving a humans life is more important than any animals life). However, I'd be joining any protest (here in Canada) to extend human rights throughout the whole Homo genus.

Although once we establish human rights for all of the Homo genus, would that legally prevent the cloning of Neanderthals without their prior legal consent?
100 Free Courses & Tutorials for Aspiring iPhone App Developers
Lots of developers are creating their own iPhone apps, and with the right know-how, you can too. Check out our list of courses and tutorials to learn everything that’s important about developing for the iPhone.
Human rights have already been extended to all the Great Apes in Spain. Why would we make Neanderthal rights and not simply follow precedent (you know, the thing all western countries do because we're all lazy SOB's: example, DMCA's cloning by most western countries as a legal base for their own laws) and extend legal rights to all of the Homo genus.
An interesting hypothesis about Neanderthal brain size is that most of their behavior, including tool making, was hard wired in neurons rather than learned through intelligence and culture. Neanderthal tools and dwellings are identical across tens of thousands of years. Human tools vary a lot from culture to culture and across time even if function is unchanged, because of imperfect propagation across generations.

The idea is that the extra gray matter in a cloned Neanderthal's head would have him instinctively finding good stones to shape into tools in a specific way, even if nobody ever showed him how to do that.
It validates their decision. If anyone points it out as a stupid deal, they can say that IBM wanted to go through with it and IBM is never wrong.
You forgot the apostrophe, (Annoyed Grunt)!
So far as I can tell, this study shows that freely available music increases sales. There is no indication that piracy increases sales.

I have yet to see a study that takes "freely available" vs "pirated" into account, and that takes into account that there is a certain barrier to buying music online and p2p-ers have already overcome that barrier. Until such a study is made, I don't see how we can really say anything has been proven.

(edited for tone, I was being a bit argumentative)
Skeeviness? Did memcachedb offer him sex for crack?
Air: 13" screen, GeForce 9400M, Core 2 Duo

netbook: 9-10" screen, integrated graphics, Atom processor
It's an appeal to authority in an argument about authority. The question kubrick set up wasn't "is copyright law right" or "sensible" or "practicable"; it's "is it constitutional". The answer: yes.
Note: better coverage of the same (I think) study on Ars:

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-...
that, and the fact that is needed an account to access nytimes... post a free link please.
Great list - needs a legal/filing section though.
Appeal to authority is not always wrong. In terms of "Is it Constitutional?", the Constitution itself says the Supreme Court decides. Citing the Supreme Court on the question of whether something is constitutional isn't an "appeal to authority fallacy", it's just plain correct, whether or not it is also an "appeal to authority".

And as near as I can see, tptacek is correct in the citation. It may be vague but it is substantially correct; if it were unconstitutional to treat copyright as a property right, it would have been ruled so sometime in the last 200 years, instead of becoming the foundation of the system.
So Scala?
Then you just poor a ton of liquid nitrogen down afterwards and cryonics will take care of the rest (give or take 50 years).
DING

Torrents have become to much work. Maybe I have just been "out of the scene" or whatever for too long... In the days of suprnova, the front page would be filled with albums or movies with plenty of seeds and MODERATORS that removed torrents that contained crap or trojans. Bittorrent now is as bad as kazaa (if that is even still around).

I buy TONS of music...mostly bands that I found back in the suprnova days, actually, and I buy most of it on iTunes...

I'm at work...dealing with the idiots at the pirate bay is too much of a pain in the ass and not worth the $9 an album costs on iTunes.

As soon as somebody comes out with something better, I'll migrate to that.

You're exactly right, it is all about ease of use. Using torrents used to be easier than going to the music store. That is no longer the case.

Although....there is still IRC ;-)
It's false, but it's not off by much. As of 2002, there were 562,700 programmers in the U.S:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/43888.html

2002 was the last year they had full data for the series ID given there (I checked at the Bureau of Labor Statisics), but it had been stable for a few years.

I wouldn't be surprised if blogging crosses over within the next couple years. It's a very labor-intensive profession, and as the article notes, many people will pay for a friendly opinion.
+ Timestamp and referrer, please.
Um, isn't it supposed to be anonymous? I'm pretty sure it says, right on the front page, kind of big letters: "Collect anonymous comments".
That depends on how determined you are to exaggerate the point, I guess. In the latest stats from the BLS:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/table1.pdf

there is a line item labeled "computer programmers" giving the number so employed as 394,710. However, I think most people would include the two categories of "computer software engineers", bringing the total to 1,239,660 (still not including researchers and people with more nebulous titles, many of whom, I imagine, would identify themselves programmers).
Is it just coincidence that by far the longest survivor of ALS also happens to be super smart?
Ummm...downmodded for what? If the study doesn't claim the relationship to be causal (downloading causes buying), then its uninteresting as it doesn't support anyone's position.

There was no indication that the study controlled for an individual's interest level in music (overall amount consumed). So, if we presume the study to simply examine the correlation of two binary variables (downloaded_at_least_1x and bought_at_least_1x), the results could be explained if most of those polled did not download or buy music or did both. Am I thinking about this correctly?
Sorry, this was at 0 when I replied to myself.
True. However, while there is an extremely low reputation threshold for being able to vote, there is a significantly higher threshold for closing and opening. The term "reputation" is sort of a misnomer in that it doesn't particularly signify technical skill, but rather an investment in the community. With a daily cap of 200[1] and a minimum of 3000 required for closing, an extremely active user would need to spend at least 15 days asking great questions and giving great answers. I think that after such an investment of time and effort, most users would want to maintain the level of quality on the site.

Also, one thing that I didn't mention before is that Stack Overflow has a setting called "Community Wiki" that, among other things, is customary to use when posting subjective or off-topic material to prevent reputation gain. Whether or not a question is marked as Wiki can mean the difference between staying open and getting closed, and a question that gets over 30 answers is also deemed subjective and rolls over to Wiki. This means that not only does a closer have to earn 3000 rep, but it's also granted primarily through on-topic posts. The question you mention, I assume, is this one [2], which has been Wiki since it was posted.

1: It's possible to exceed the cap by hitting it then having an answer or bounty accepted, but this is very hard to do regularly for normal users.

2: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/306708/must-haves-for-dev...
It takes a little bit of study and I was put off at first, but then it became very interesting. He's communicating quite a lot with each path, it just takes a moment to get used to. It looks to me like it will become second nature.

Nice work.
Let me know when they release a Varia Suit with Screw Attack option.
"not a dry eye in the house" ... man that was corny
That's surely a rational response. I took care to write "some money" not "all money".
That differential equation only holds for positive x. Try something like the following:

x'' = - signum(x) * (x^-2)
It sounds to me like this is a case of "right tool for the job". Regardless of what the "future" of programming languages is, I don't think we'll ever be free from making those sorts of decisions.
+touchscreen
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does pretty good work compiling statistics, but that isn't a guarantee that journalists will do a good job of reading them.
Go straight from 0 -> 4. Get feedback before spending more money. If you can't find customers with just your prototype, you either won't be able to sell it later, or maybe just no-one wants it.

I've found that most of my product ideas fail in the "marketing" step (which you omitted): either I can't clearly identify the customers, or the cost/difficulty in reaching them is prohibitive. In either case, it's a fail.
But strangely, so many things in the tech world are ugly and useless. They often seem to go hand in hand, in fact.
I'd also like to add that beauty can be useful.
"The problem with OOP is that it encourages the proliferation of mutable state."

It should be pointed out that this is a characteristic of the languages and not actually OOP. The original insight, something like "Hey, let's bundle together data structures and their methods into one unit, and communicate with them via messages!" (which got turned into "method calls") actually has nothing to say about mutability. You can and people have build object systems based on immutable objects.

The implications of doing that are deep and profound and color the rest of the system and are beyond the scope of this posting, but it can be done.
1 of 4 Facebook Users is on a LOLapp App
I'm not sure how a source from 2002 proves false a citation of a source from 2007.

Edit: Look, whoever keeps downvoting this, would you PLEASE read the sources? Is that too much to ask? See my other comment below, explaining how the article arrived at its number, and why it doesn't sound right.

It's really disappointing to see HN devolve into such sloppy thinking.
There's something creepy about a company called Cyberdyne creating robotic things ...

You have to admire him for saying he won't sell to the military, although the inevitable big check from Uncle Sam will take some refusing.
Of course your 10 times more likely to buy music, because your looking for it. But I find it hard to believe that if you pirate music you are more likely to buy the album. I understand the "try before you buy" thought. But there are easier ways to preview music than just pirating it. There is Itunes, Amazon, and a ton of other music services you could use.
and numbers like that are nothing to LOL at
An Apple netbook makes little sense.

The desktop operating system would invite desktop apps onto hardware never meant to run them. The experience would never match the expectations. And frankly, people aren't using netbooks for the full features of desktop OSs, so there's no benefit to shipping with one. Notebook makers used them only because they didn't have a more appropriate alternative 2 years ago when these things started coming together.

Similarly, Windows tablets never took off because they've been running operating systems and applications on hardware that was never designed for them. Is anyone surprised those bad experiences didn't turn people into converts and evangelists?

It's for those same reasons I would not be surprised at all by an overgrown iPod Touch. The expectations would be that it can do what a Touch does --essentially, everything most people are using netbooks-- but with a bigger screen. It would easily cross that low bar. And developers would climb over one another to re-imagine their software in an app specifically designed for the interface and the hardware driving it.

It wouldn't have the lodestone on it that windows tablets started with. To the contrary, it would hit the market with considerable momentum due the success of the App Store and iPod Touch.
I wonder how Shaped Charges would perform. They're relatively inexpensive, would easily produce the temperature needed for glassing the rock and have excellent range penetration. A single shaped charge can easily penetrate beyond 10 times its diameter.

Based on the Beach Pneumatic Transit diameter of around 2.5 meters, a single shaped charge designed to penetrate at this width (cone diameter of around 2.5 meters) would easily penetrate between 25 or 35 meters. Although on such an industrial scale, I wouldn't doubt some military contractor would go commercial with one that could penetrate up to 50 meters.

The question would be, could such a destructive method (on the small scale) be more useful than current explosives used. There would likely be less shockwaves sent through the rock than traditional mining techniques, plus the potential glassing could help structural strength.

The use of something so easily mass produced like a shaped charge could easily be used in vac-train mining like this. Although personally, I doubt any system like this would ever be used between continental plates.
I think experiences vary wildly and that itself speaks volumes about quality of Vista. You've had a good experience, some people have had bad.

Personally, I don't like it. I bought it installed on a new laptop. UAC is annoying, but not overly so.

However, I have had a Vista-specific process run wild and take up over 2 gigs of RAM. When I looked it up, audiodg.exe (for those who want to know), it turned out to be a process solely concerned with the DRM protection scheme of audio coupled with video. Neither my wife and I have watched an HD movie on the laptop nor consumed any form of media that would kick this process off. It just sat there, sucking up ungodly amounts of memory. The kicker is, if you killed it, you'd kill sound for the entire machine!

I'm sorry, but when I hear shit like that, it immediately turns me off of the OS. I don't care about any niceties it might have, if this is what happens just so MS could pander to RIAA and MPAA.
Airtel Digital TV Dishtv DTH Services india - Online
4Chan Takes Over The Time 100
There are always private sites, eg: waffles and what.

Quality is good, and it is easy to find new independent artists.
A year and a half ? How many SLOCs was that ?
Though I don't have a source to back this up, I really think that population densities were too low during those times for much Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal (funny how one's capitalized and the other isn't) interaction. That said, aggression would not have been enough for humans, especially since the Cro-Magnons were probably weaker physically.

There is always the possibility that there were changes in the environment that they couldn't cope with but our ancestors did. Longer childhoods could have been a hindrance.

As you know, a larger brain does not necessarily mean a higher intelligence. It could have evolved to simply create a higher volume-surface area ratio that helped preserve heat in their heads.
You mean that real programmers have coded an Account class with a Withdraw method and a Balance property, like in OO for Dummies? Sure glad I'm not a real programmer then.

I wrote my first object oriented program a few years ago, and it seemed obvious that database fields would keep getting added, deleted and changed. My goal was to isolate this stuff from the rest of my program, not try to hardcode it everywhere.

I got a bit lost in all the buzzwords, but if that what his point, I agree.
man techcrunch is pretty slow, I think this 4chan thing is like a week old
Of course it was all a scam to raise prices. When I can get a TB of month of download on a server for $20, that tells me they planned on overcharging massively.
I'm not sure about that. Piracy of Windows desktop/end-user software is rampant. Maybe it's less for Windows server-related software?
I should have mentioned that talking with Hawking himself was fun, but also very, very slow...
I don't think it's limited to the tech world, I think the tech world is just where we (the HN demographic) focus our attention.

(that doesn't make your statement any less true, just sayin...)
i now use stevia leaf

it's true, the dried leaf is sweet

i left the leaves on a table for a week or so, no ants appeared on the open container

the okara (soy pulp -- i make my own soy milk) next to the table had 3 ants roaming on the jar

casually, from these ants, i draw a conclusion that stevia has few or no calorie -- that's as unscientific as i can get :D
Hacker News Startups: Listing/Wiki of startups founded by HNers (not just YC)
SurveyMonkey Acquired by Private Equity Firms
I think it comes down to novelty.

When I'm a regular working stiff, the months seem to fly by because each day is so similar to the last. They all just blend together in your memory, and you find yourself looking back and thinking, "Where did last month go?"

Humdrum days are also forgettable and you don't really think about them as you go through the motions. So at the end of the day, there isn't a lot of substance that your mind holds on to. Looking back, it's like they were over in an instant.

I remember when I was traveling, some weeks seemed to go on forever, because every day was crammed full of new, interesting experiences. But as soon as I got into a routine, time seemed to speed up again and the days started to run into each other.
Character Encoding Issues with China's New ID System
"The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common."
The World’s first fully sustainable race car
Chicago (IL) - With a vehicle body made from potatoes, a steering wheel made from carrots, the ability to run on waste chocolate and vegetable oil, the 140 mph Environ-MENTAL is the first formula 3 race car designed from materials that are both sustainable and renewable.

Image

Used by the WorldFirst Racing Team, a project of the University of Warwick’s UK-based Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (WIMRC), the team plans to show the automotive industry that designing and building an environmentally sustainable competition level race car is possible. The team hopes to change public opinion, and prove that environmentally-friendly can be both fun and exciting.

The Environ-Mental is green from start to finish, from building the vehicle; to its disposal it puts the environment first. You will find

- 3D woven natural fiber composites in the barge board Composite steering wheel composed of carrots and other root vegetables
- Wing mirrors comprised of potato starch
- Wing end plates comprised of both flax and cellulose composite
- Lightweight wiring which utilizes recycled plastics and aluminum
- A biodiesel-powered, race calibrated engine
- Plant oil based lubricant
- Side pod composed of glass fiber and resin from recycled plastics
- A seat designed using flax fiber shell, recycled polyester and soybean oil foam
- Recycled carbon-fiber for the damper hatch and engine cover
- Pre-impregnated woven flax fiber for the big
- Non-carbon disks with low embodied energy for the brakes
- A catalyst which generates oxygen on the radiators and cleans the air when the vehicle is in motion

The chassis is based on a Lola B05/30 that integrates a BMW M47 diesel engine. The 2.0 liter power plant generates about 220 hp and will accelerate the car to a top speed of about 140 mph.
I've been trying to make a point of walking every day, though it works out more to every 2nd or 3rd day.

I used to listen to music, but found it too easy/tempting to skip around to find a better piece, and my mind kept focusing on all sorts of "must do" shit that made me want to go back in and work.

So I started listening to audio books. It makes up for the reading I used to do when I lived in NYC and traveled on buses and trains (now it's walk or drive, so less reading :( )

I prefer short stories; more immediate sense of satisfaction and completion, and greater variety. Right now I'm going through Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins. Great stuff, and I find that I make myself walk longer if I think I can get to the end of the current story.
" Is it OK to pop up a notification bubble if you only do it every once in a while?"

No it isn't. For critical or really important messages that require user decisions, yes.

The idea of using pop-ups for notification of important or critical issues is not the problem though, he problem is so many teams within Microsoft and software vendors abused it. For example - "There are unused icons on your desktop."

Worse than that is the abuse by installing an icon in the notification area - have you seen the appalling state of many Windows users' notification area? 20 to 30 icons is not unheard of.
Your eyes suck at blue (neat image compression trick)
I believe the point of the article is that usefulness extends beyond the merely functional. Beautiful isn't cognitive eye candy, but rather a necessary component of empathy.
Wow...
not sure what to say to that
Interesting Japanese water 'show'