skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may not have even been intentional; rather, its probably just a side-effect of their twitter-scraping. They likely didn't have the other site in mind when building their twitter-scraper.
I think it's pretty clear that the question is asked by http://twitter.com/fluther.
Yeah, but the user doesn't get real attribute on the Fluther site either, beyond a screen name and a profile that (as far as I can tell) doesn't even have a field for a personal link or bio about the author.

Most sites are essentially "stealing" content from their users -- the people who submit it and retain the copyright on it (or should, if they don't) -- so this forces me to ask the overriding question here: Who really cares?
Actually, Twitter just says that they don't claim any right to your words. ("We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service.")

Whether you can copyright text as short as 140 characters is at least debatable-- it may be that nobody holds copyright over tweets.
Vmware 6.5.2 opensuse - Buscar con Google
The best way to get rich is selling insurances. There is good money to be made with what is basically shovelling papers and.. ... doing well in marketing / sales. And that's the kicker. Because the good sales people have much better jobs, which are interresting to the sales geek. But if you are the only smart guy in your region, you can pull it off quite easily. Off course it is boring work, that's the downside. And the real reason for taking up venture capital: to get your world changing idea funded (realized).
There are downsides to being a great salesman. Sometimes you get what you want. Raising tens of millions of dollars and starting a company has got to be fun. Facing the reality of building a boring ass SEO company? Not so much. Fortunately, he's got enough runway and personal wealth to procrastinate for the next couple years. Maybe a few cheap tricks and shortcuts will keep his traffic growing enough to keep his investors off his back. No? Shit.
If they made it seem like the page was written by google, then yes, they would be.
That might be Fluther's best claim. But it hardly seems Fluther is adding much originality (via "selection, coordination, or arrangement") in the raw log of questions. (Perhaps, in the editing and rating of answers -- but Mahalo isn't taking the answers.)

And Fluther's very complaint against Mahalo -- the removal of Fluther's full context -- suggests Mahalo isn't infringing the aspects showing originality at all.
Here is a slightly better link:

http://gizmodo.com/5273957/microsoft-e3-keynote-archive?skyl...

I'm really looking forward to CoD Modern Warfare 2 - the trailer looks ridiculous. I've wanted a new video card for a while, but I'm not going to let myself buy one (or an accompanying 24" monitor) until I get my product launched. Looks like my deadline is November.
At first I was really skeptical that the motion stuff was more Hollywood demo than reality. Then I took a closer look at the sensor bar:

http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/e3xbox/e3xbox300.jpg

I don't think that yellow thing to the left is a camera, but if both those other holes are cameras, then that would mean the XBox could indeed be getting full 3D information on you, and that really does open up some interesting possibilities. I doubt the demos are possible with silhouettes, but with full 3D information... maybe.

I remain skeptical until I try it, but I have to admit I'm intrigued. This really could be a big deal. It's cool not because current games will translate to this; they're all specialized for current controllers. It's cool because this will enable new things, some of which are things that the Wii seemed to hint at but doesn't seem to have been able to execute on.
either that or its legit. It is not impossible that Apple sees value in allowing other devices to seamlessly sync content they sell. I guess in another week we'll know either way.
But that doesn't apply here, as Mahalo is linking to the Fluther twitter account.
True, isn't there a difference between the tweets shown by, say, http://cursebird.com (which are clearly tweets), and repackaging a tweet as a different form of content.

If they maintained the integrity of the tweets -- complete with the links present in them, that's something else.
Build a superhuman intelligence (duh).
Use of Binding Arbitration
Use of Binding Arbitration
Seems like somewhat of a jackass thing to do on Mahalo's part, but I don't think it's anything illegal - the copyright-ability of a tweet is pretty unclear (as in there's no precedent and disagreement amongst lawyers). Additionally, the Fluther TOS has nothing to do with this; Mahalo is simply pulling things off Twitter, without ever interacting directly with the Fluther site, and hence never hitting anything covered by their conditions.

It is, however, somewhat of a dick move - especially since the two companies are somewhat competitors. OTOH, Fluther is putting it out on Twitter, and hence seems like they're accepting the risk of possible misuse for the reward of greater distribution. If a tweet is indeed copyrightable, then it seems a whole lot of other services (including, for example, today's hit almost.at) would be screwed.

If this is so much of a thing, perhaps work out a licensing deal for the questions with Mahalo?
I once posted a random startup idea on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/callmeed/status/1422601143

Later that day, it was magically turned into a Mahalo Q&A (I've never used Mahalo before this):
http://bit.ly/15HX9T

Interestingly enough, Calcanis himself replied to the thread in Mahalo ...
If you read the article, you observe that Pre's show up in iTunes as iPods. Whatever Apple may think of being the center of the media sync ecosystem, they're certainly not playing loose with their brand.
That's nice, except you're ignoring the economics of schooling. It's expensive to pay teachers, to make schools work they need to be nearly at capacity (per-pupil funding, student to teacher ratios, finite amount of space, etc). If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed.

In other words, there is never an incentive to to do better because your competitors can't take your customers.

This could be solved by having lots and lots of mostly empty schools, but... no one is going to pay for that.

It's a lot like the last mile- it's a natural monopoly.
oh I read the article. I also realize we're speculating on a product that hasn't been released yet.
As much as I do not like Jason Calacanis I think he's 100% right. If I publicly ask the question "Why is the sky blue?" does that mean I basically own the intellectual property of that question? No one can ever ask it again without crediting me? If that's the case I'm just going to preemptively copyright "Why?" and "What?" right now suckers.
Nice post and trying to not pick one or the other :P

So from what you said...is there any reason for a normal someone not too good at coding to choose Drupal over WP if you're making a site with minimal user interaction? There are a lot of WP plugins to help with turning it into more of a CMS for sites than just a blog so that part can be taken care of.
I assume that the tech inside the camera is same as the 3DV ZCam, who MS purchased a few months ago. One camera captures RGB images, the other captures depth information from infrared pulses. The depth cam isn't very high res (I think 320x240 @ 30fps), but it doesn't really need to be for gesture recognition.

I've worked with the ZCam and its kind of finicky - its very sensitive to how the depth sensor is calibrated. Also, the depth sensing doesn't work well with reflective surfaces that I've seen. I'm curious if/how they've gotten around those issues.
Neat. I've always kept using Google, while having a sneaking suspicion that in some areas the other search engines had surpassed them. However Google was good enough, and the only way to really tell is to do large amounts of side by side comparisons, and who has the time for that?

Now thanks to this plugin, I do.
Here is a video of the Natal. Wow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03thQvGRVvQ&feature=playe...

I just hope it works as advertised and I hope it has an easy to use API/SDK.
Another way to decide questions like this is to poll rich people and see what percentage took investment to do it. I don't know what the numbers would look like in other fields, but nearly all the people I know who got rich from software took money from investors. In fact Steven Wolfram may be the only one I know who didn't.

The danger of this method is that you're measuring how things were in the past. Maybe things are different now than they were 10 years ago. But considering how many people in how many different industries (from restaurants to hedge funds) use investors' money, my default assumption would be that it's a reasonable idea.
Neither do the collars on polo shirts, or the patterns (or dye, for that matter) on the t-shirt you're probably wearing. If all we wanted was practicality, everyone would be wearing un-dyed ponchos - but we're not.

Some people like ties - they see creativity and individuality in the patterns, the material, the composition, the knot, and the ensemble. Just like other people see the same things in the patterns and designs on their t-shirts.

All of fashion serves no practical purpose - no need to single out people who wear one particular implementation of this.
Very good point. You can't copyright a question asked on the public timeline on Twitter.... that's like trying to copyright something you say on the subway to your friend--you can't.

In this case a couple of questions (like five or six) were imported by a users looking to answer them... it's really such a minor issue.

We're going to delete them.... it really doesn't matter to us (i mean, six out of 100k+ questions isn't going to make a difference for either site).

rock on... jason
Google also releases stuff by subsidizing them like crazy. Guess what happens to people who make better products? No one hears about them because all the techies are circle jerking themselves over the new Google product.

Sad, really.
If you think your tie is uncomfortable, it's likely that the real culprit is a too-small shirt and an improperly-tied knot.

When the two of those things are done right, you shouldn't even notice that you're wearing a tie.
Going through that list is hilarious. It doesn't look like they've made any product from the ground up without buying something out.
I think the issue here, at least in part, is that the government likely doesn't advertise their fiber locations. So when those doing the digging seek approval, nobody knows the fiber is there.
"And while China gets a rap for ripping off U.S. Web start-ups now, I think we’re going to start seeing U.S. start-ups copying a lot of elements of Chinese entrepreneurs’ business plans...[lists some business models]"

Interesting slight of hand there.
For those of you (us?) that wear ties, what knot do you use?
Me neither, especially since after that I did searches for database servers and web servers and they served up links to Apache and MySQL rather than IIS and SQL Server, but I thought it was an interesting contrast nonetheless.
Try getting customer support with Adsense or Adwords (almost all of Google's money source). It'll suck or be non-existant. Oh...that is unless your in the 1% of top spenders.
If you find a necktie discouraging you from independent thought and creativity, you probably never had any to begin with.
That's peculiar. Are the results skewed according to the geographical location of the searcher, you think? I'm in Singapore.
The Millionaire Next Door was somewhat interesting. However the follow-on book, "The Millionaire Mind" was packed with statistics instead of anecdotes and for me at least, had a number of ideas and changes to my perspective to offer.
Okay, how about I go to a newspaper and print an article saying that you're a 'homosexual, terrorist pedophile' with a nice big picture of you next to it. Do you want this to be allowed? Or do you agree with the libel laws that censor free speech in the US?

Yes, I think this should be allowed, and yes, I think libel laws censor free speech.

Everyone has the freedom of speech, anywhere in the world. However, it doesn't mean you're not going to be punished for what you say.

Actually, that's exactly what it means. What it doesn't mean is that other people are prevented from disliking you for your speech. If you make a habit out of publishing false claims about people, eventually nobody is going to care about your claims anymore. Newspapers may stop carrying your column or publishing your letters. This isn't a restriction on the freedom of speech, it's merely editing.

If I called you a homosexual, terrorist pedophile to your face, I'd probably be expecting you to punch me in the face to shut me up.

Talking to me is not a crime. Me assaulting you is. Therefore, I'm confused as to why you'd expect this outcome.

If I posted it in a newspaper, I'd expect you to sue me and the newspaper to silence my outright lies.

Or I could just write an article with my side of the story. No need to involve the courts when we are both free to communicate.

Now I question everyone; if there was a button somewhere in the continental US that would destroy New York, do I have the right to publish its location or should the US government have the right to silence me? Because the justification that they're saving lives is why people can be silenced for national security.

The courts have upheld our right to publish the location of the secret button. Remember the MIT students that hacked the Charlie Card? The order to prevent the students from explaining their methodology was overturned. (http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/19/eff-clobbers-boston.htm...)

Also, so what if I am a "homosexual terrorist pedophile", anyway?
I wondered along these lines recently. A relative is getting caught up in the "water-car", "Brown's Gas", Hydrogen internet scam.. Where you convert water to 2H2 + O2 and burn that to power the car, house, etc for "free".

What would you do if it actually worked? How would you convince people? Where would you share it?
I mitigate this issue by gambling with myself. I make my best estimate and if it is close enough to never or always I use those words. I benefit from this because more often than not if I'm wrong it's because my mental estimating model is wrong -- not because I got unlucky.

My wife's pretty forgiving, so I don't have much to lose by being wrong or getting called on things, but that might not be a good course of action for everyone. :)
Maybe, but Google took some of their profits and invested in open source projects like Wave. Microsoft took the money they made and spent it on Vista and 7.
Just out of curiosity, why is E Ink the important thing here? I'm located outside of the US and I don't know who either company is, so they both hold equal importance to me.
Actually if I was from Taiwan, PVI would be the important thing to me.
The Beatles: Rock Band
Java's original sin is checked exceptions.
I also kind of agree with Jason - you shouldn't be able to copyright a question. If you ask a question in public, why can't someone else answer it elsewhere? The whole idea of 'copyrighted questions' seems made up, and really only benefits the site that is generating the question in the first place. How does the question asker lose out, if in fact they want the question answered, if their question is asked in more than one place?
High. Definitely a high point. ;)
Acceptance of authority and teaching to the test are two entirely different issues, and these guys are teaching to modern American standardized tests, not the recitation-style tests described in the Feynman excerpt. On the standarized physics tests I took, you typically got a somewhat simplified physical situation and were asked a question about it. You had to decide what physical principles were involved, what kind of reasoning to apply, and how to set up the equations (if math was involved.) Sometimes the problems were quite concrete. Sometimes they were abstract. Sometimes they only required simple application of an equation (but you had to figure out which equation to apply!) and sometimes they required deep reasoning. Very often the situations described resembled laboratory experiments, and solving the problem correctly required recognizing factors that the problem description intentionally failed to call your attention to -- like the inertial component of the ball-rolling exercise described by Feynman.

The school in the article is being compared to other schools on the basis of standardized tests that reflect decades of agonizing over how to design standardized tests so that they can't be gamed through regurgitation. Besides cultural bias (which I think is a real, valid problem, but which doesn't materially affect science tests) the primary criticism you hear of standardized tests these days is that tests are too holistic and can't separate out all the variables that affect a kid's ability to choose the right answer. For instance, a kid might have a wonderful abstract understanding of chemistry but not be able to balance a chemical reaction, read an electron dot diagram, find "Cl" on the periodic table, recognize the word "titration," add two numbers, or figure out which end of the pencil to use on the Scantron. Modern testing techniques have not yet developed to the point where they can tease out that magic variable of "conceptual understanding" from the background noise of "functional incompetence."

Sarcasm aside, and acknowledging that lab skills are much too expensive to test and can safely be neglected by test-obsessed teachers, teaching to modern multiple-choice tests isn't such a bad way to teach science.
Before There Was Twitter...
I find constraining clothes discourage thought. They're kind of like noise. The constraint makes you notice them, and that takes some small amount of attention away from whatever you're thinking about.

Back when people used to dress more formally, everyone knew this, at least unconsciously. When someone needed to work late into the night on some hard problem, they'd take off their jacket and loosen their tie. This was so common that in movies it became a standard symbol for working hard.
If a necktie did for my head (or pects) what heels do for the calves, I'd occasionally wear one.
I've done a fair amount of job interviews and cover letters are always stripped by our (internal) recruiters. When external recruiters are involved it looks like they do $ cat resume.doc | strings | mail iigs@company.com.

Maybe there's a strategy here:

Cover letter: I love frat-houses and beer! I want to bring my spiky hair to work for you!

Resume: When I'm not submitting patches to the RoR team I'm writing Scala code for my EC2 cluster.

It's a shame the economy is so bad. It would be fun to do some exploratory job hunting to see if this strategy would work.
6 months ago I could easy find a jQuery animated effect somewhere that got sluggish if you start generating many simultaneous effects. There is an article by Dave Shea on A List Apart that would visibly choke if you moved your cursor around the links quickly; someone wrote one in Mootools and it was smooth. But I just revisited the article and it wasn't choking anymore.

My hunch is Mootools will still give you an edge. But it might not last long.
I gave it about 30 seconds to load and then left. I saw it was just TC'd so maybe I'll try back in a few days.
I am confused as to how masquerading as an iPod is not legit. It's effective, and legal under US law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galoob_v._Nintendo

(This might not be the case I am looking for. I am thinking of one where the use of the trademarked word "Nintendo" was required to interoperate with some Nintendo system. The court ruled, IIRC, that this was legal even though Nintendo was Nintendo's trademark. I think identifying as an iPod is the same sort of situation. It would be illegal to sell the Pre labeled as an iPod, but it is legal to lie to iTunes in order to interoperate with it.)
I remember when Real was advertising their iPod Compatible DRM. About 4 months later, Apple upgraded the iPod firmware and that was the end of that - and Real offered no upgrade path to make your music iPod compatible other than ripping to CD and back.

This will be a mistake that will make their product look unreliable. It's one thing to hook into a system where the company is doing nothing to help you, but also isn't actively trying to hinder you. Apple will hinder them.

There's even one easy way. The way that Palm is doing this is by having the Pre tell iTunes that it's an iPod that doesn't udnerstand FairPlay DRM and, therefore, iTunes should sync all of the non-DRM'd music with the Pre. However, there is no iPod or iPhone that doesn't understand FairPlay. So, Apple can simply update iTunes to eliminate that backdoor. Yeah, then Palm can just throw away the tracks it can't play. And then Apple can fool them some more.

I'm not saying it's righteous. Apple likes you to be 100% in their ecosystem and not play so nicely with others. However, it's hard to reverse-engineer a protocol that can be changed at any time. Sure, you can break DVDs, but that's because you can't replace every DVD player in the world that's already been sold. Apple can break compatibility with software updates.

Palm has created what looks like the best iPhone competitor to date. Clean, polished, and very Apple-like. And this just isn't a smart plan. It's a hack and won't be a reliable one and that will make the device look second-rate in a way that it doesn't have to.
The Importance of Corporate Culture
Wouldn't writing a complete test suite take equivalent effort to writing the program in the first place? I mean, wouldn't they require the same amount of information? Then, to simplify the task of writing test suites, you might want to design a programming language that compiles into test suites, but would you use your program-writing program to write the program that describes the test suite? And also, who watches the watchers?
There's trivial to implement, then there's trivial to implement in our product without breaking everything else.

Also, they missed a category: Stupid. As in: I could do that, but it would be Stupid.
Chicago Highway Accidents
Chicago Highway Accidents
Are you sure that's a good way of deciding?

To take investment you need to be able to convince someone that yours is a good investment. Your pool of people that could have done this at some point may be heavily weighted towards those tat did.
I can't think of a reason not to choose WP over Drupal for the scenario you're describing. You sound like you're on the right track.
Or even a video would be helpful.
To me actionable means "something I can act upon," not necessarily something I can do, e.g., a specific piece of information that makes the next decision obvious.

If I meant "something I can do" I'd say "possible."
Firebug Extensions
I'm in agreement with the article, but I think it's more of a way to leverage a bit more publicity for the Pre. It can go both ways:

1) Apple does nothing and Pre makes it a selling point, or

2) Apple sues them and Palm makes themselves the victim, crying for equal rights for all media devices under iTunes. Palm gets publicity as the underdog, and Apple is the big bad Death Star.

At best, Palm capitalizes on the anti-Apple sentiment out there. At worst...the Pre loses syncing?
Forget TOS, legal stuff & all that crap. Still I believe Calacanis has a serious problem with ethics.
I find constraining clothes are constraining because they are ill-fitting. Solution: do not buy ill-fitting garments. Most men do not know how to buy clothes that fit. For those men who do know, they were fortunate enough to learn from their well-dressed father or from books or from a proper tailor. Also, you have to care to know.
Its not the question of whether or not to take VC, its a question of when. Timing is everything. For a lot of businesses, there is that brief moment where the extra money can help get you in the mainstream