skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The answers to those questions are yes, yes and no.

Lending != Copying.
Don't they usually do this right before they announce a new product? Regardless, I don't see how this is important news.
Congratulations! What are the problems like though, who has an example?
The WWDC keynote starts in a little less than an hour (10AM pacific) - taking the store down to update products is normally a standard occurrence during the keynote.

See either http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=647448 or http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/08/phil-schiller-keynote-liv... for keynote coverage.
It is not a solved problem. Here's an example.

In the late-80s and early-90s, emerging sampling technology gave birth to a bunch of new kinds of music, which used samples of existing music to great effect. The best of these were not rip-off art forms, they were amazingly original and innovative.

And then the lawyers came in and destroyed everything. I've been sad for a long time about the loss of all that new art, and I'm very happy to see the pendulum finally start to move in the other direction.
At the time there was no way of recording music so it didn't protect reproduction of the music in a form you could listen to. But as the court case "Bach vs. Longman" established in 1777 that statute did cover sheet music which was how Bach made money.

http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cgi-bin/kleioc/0010/exec/aus...
Ask HN: What are your last-minute predictions for WWDC?
I was glad to see this link go [dead] as it doesn't add anything to the mentioned '40 years of Unix' thread. I like some of the CH posts, but many are just trolling for eyeballs. This is one of them.

I wish I could block everything that comes from TC though.
"For you non-Brits out there, unfortunately there aren’t any plans to offer the service internationally just yet."

Buggers.
At least no renter is upside down on their mortgage right now.
That's an interesting way to handle the auth problem, I'll look into it...
Oh absolutely, I've been struggling with java, ajax, comet and flash sockets for a multiplayer game.

But imagine all the possibilities for IM, Email, web alerts, twitter, etc.
UNIX: "...this is a disaster and it won't get fixed."
I wonder if the author of this article has noticed the correlation between "people who don't use twitter all that much" (ie, the staff at twitter) and "people who actually get things done" (ie, the staff at twitter).

I cannot imagine how anyone with a job manages the kind of usage the author seems to expect at a minimum, unless your job title is "Twitter User". Words are kind of failing me contemplating that point, actually. Who are these people who can afford to use Twitter all day every day, and still somehow remain in the technocracy?
This story is ridiculously stupid (and this is coming from someone who makes a service that favored well in this review: Tipjoy).

If anything, twitter is defined by making as open a system as possible, and letting the community decide how to use it. I think that's awesome.

It also makes it completely irrelevant how the employees themselves use it.
Pretty standard really.
Ask HN:  Taxpayer funded open source?
I think open source development has the potential to produce far superior software than closed source. I think the only thing that keeps it from revolutionizing the software world overnight is that it's tough to make money at it.

If governments funded various software projects you would remove the need for those projects to turn a profit, thus removing a big obstacle to the sharing of code. I believe this would benefit society greatly.

If the code is released under a business friendly license, corporations could effectively have their R&D costs outsourced for free. This would allow them to focus on their customers more. This would be good for the economy.

I could see excessive regulation being a problem. I'm not sure how much oversight would be appropriate. I wonder what would happen if you just gave 100 hackers $20K over the course of a year and let them choose what to work on, just so long as it was open source.

A more realistic pilot program would not take much funding at all. Let's say we pay 1000 programmers $50,000 a year to work on open source projects. Toss in another $10 million for regulators and whatnot and that's $60 million total. Peanuts, really -- less then .01% of the U.S. federal budget.

What do you think? Is this a good idea?
Honest question - what exactly does a "professional networker" do?
Who pays them, and for what?
Has its skepticism towards language, for example, led to anything new over what was given to us by Wittgenstein?

This is my question exactly. I would like to see a short intro to postmodernism that starts with Wittgenstein and explains in relatively clear language what new insights it produced. I don't know if it's safe or unsafe to assume that the postmodernists read Wittgenstein.
I think it's the tech equivalent of an "it girl" in celeb-circles.
So, when Portland's Office of Emergency Management uses twitter to notify people of severe weather alerts, or the public transit system tweets about system breakdowns, that's not serious or important? Just because you assert it doesn't mean Twitter can't be a useful broadcast medium.
It's exciting stuff!
Nothing busts my trust faster than lies. Indeed, the company mentioned as an example (Microsoft) lost my trust by overpromising and underdelivering with some releases of Windows back in the day.
Renters didn't loose money on the down true, but they also didn't gain any on the up (and they may have paid more rent).

For a single person it could be a big difference (some are up, some are down). But over the whole US it's a wash - the number of people who are upside down is exactly balanced by the number of people who made a lot by selling.
One huge plus of buying vs renting, is that when you buy you can get a home equity line for emergencies. A huge line of credit at very low interest rate, that doesn't expire, or change due to future events.
I used to think the same thing.

My Brother in Law is a very seasoned pilot, so is my dad.

I asked them about this one day. Like "guys, how do you go from flying around in little Citation 5s to flying around in massive jumbo jets?"

They were confused about my question.

Why?

Because flying isn't flying, it's systems. You learn the GPS, you learn the autopilot, you learn the radio, and after that, you follow the checklist.

You're just there to press the buttons, the rest of it is planned.

They always joke that, "if you're flying IFR (instrument flight rating, meaning that every single one of your movements in controlled by the tower), you have to get clearance from control before you can scratch your balls".

I still don't believe them, but just thought I'd chime in.
Yes but many many landlords are, which cause some very sad stories of people being kicked out of their house or apartment because the bank foreclosed on the landlord. Renters have almost no rights in that situation.
I'll admit, I have not looked in many years. It hasn't gotten much better.

I meant more along the lines of on-line delivery.
Encouraging buying instead of lending discourages a flexible labor market. Basically the government, with the mortgage tax break, is lining the pockets of developers and home builders, and making it difficult or expensive for families to move where there is a higher paying job or even better school district.
If you were renting you would have that money (that equity) in your pocket, and wouldn't need to borrow against your house to have access to it.
Symbian tries to crash Apple's WWDC party
If you have to ask if its okay, it isn't for you.
So when Twitter is down people die in hurricanes? I don't think so, somehow.
Opportunity in the demise of the Boston Globe
Maybe you didn't read the article completely.

He isn't just repossesing airplanes from businessmen, he is repossesing them from psychotic foreign dictators, drug dealers, warlords, etc.

This is why he has ended up in South American prison.
Microsoft seems to be on the roll (or should I say 'on the bing')

With the smooth loading bing and now the open API, Microsoft seems to be taking the battle straight to Yahoo and Google's court. This time Microsoft does seem to 'get' the future of search, and with Bartz screwing up the Yahoo open API program (with usage quotas and all) and Google just plan scared of releasing its own, the folks at Redmond seem poised for the next big leap in search.

I am not really a Microsoft fan, and use tons of great Google products, but search needs to move ahead, much faster than what Google is taking it.
As a couple of counter-stories, an instructor I once had asked another instructor how long he'd last in a high-performance twin that he hadn't checked out in.

"About two minutes" was the answer

Another _very_ seasoned instructor I know confided in me that he was concerned that a private student with a very expensive airplane wanted highly-technical training and he didn't feel like he was up for it. Now this is coming from a guy who is in the top ten or twenty instructors worldwide.

I get the gist of what they're saying -- but I think there's a bit of malarky in there somewhere. Airlines pay big bucks to get pilots current on gear just a little different than what they've already flown. There's good reasons for this.

Flying your seventh type of airplane is sorta the same, but it's nowhere near like using your seventh version of a word processor.
It's really not that complicated, maybe if I write it in code people will understand:

if( {current value of house}*{interest rate} + {taxes} + {insurance} + {maintenance} < {rent} )
return 'buy';
else
return 'rent';

_Ignore_ any change in the prices of houses! It has no bearing on the decision.
Interestingly the exact same arguments can be applied to open source software.
Jon Huntsman says the same thing in his book "Winners Never Cheat". Incidentally the company he started is a multi-billion dollar company, so I would not say it is essential to tell "soft lies" in order to succeed. He gives some good examples of how being honest helped him get ahead in the long run. My personal gut answer to these type of moral questions is that if you have to ask the question you (most likely) shouldn't do it.
synopsis: the problem with dynamic languages is that they are dynamic.

my response: nothing is a win win in life, there is always a trade off somewhere. the ability to modify a running system on the fly means you can get runtime errors that a static system would be able to find before startup.
The Joy of Less
Google video search works in this way too.
>He employs 65 "super repos"

I doubt that he employs 65 full time pilots. It sounds like more him, his wife, and his two sons.

The other people are probably just brutes that he calls up every once in a while for doing large things like taking a fleet of helicopters.

Also, I suspect that that "tidy six figures" is a net after he has paid his employees. (I'm going to assume that they get paid per job, not per year).
I think you missed the point. Being a well renowned author in Sweden does not, in most cases, equal wealth. As I said only a few authors make a living being an author. Most of the authors who actually gets wealthy have started their own publishing company or other related businesses, like public speaking or magazine.
I'm as much a fan of free, hackable APIs as anyone. But... how is this not a really clear anti-trust violation? It's one thing for MS to release a product that competes directly against Google's free offerings. Quite another to use its revenue from other sources to undercut Google's pay services. MS isn't competing on price here at all.

Maybe, I suppose, the argument would be that a target Google's size is so large that MS has no effective monopoly power to leverage. Google could just as easily (and, in many areas, is) fund free alternatives to MS software too. But still, this seems like a borderline-scary regression to some pretty ugly MS behavior.
Well, this is a median, not a mean, so the quants can't raise it that much. A bifurcated distribution with a couple peaks could though, which is why I was thinking tenured professors + industrial researchers + Googlers on one end, with post-docs on the other.
oh i know, i didn't think it was an odd occurence - i just thought it was an exciting stage of the build up to new apple product releases
Run your question through the argument in "Be Good": http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html Quite apart from your self-respect (value: priceless), telling soft lies is not going to help you be good, and there's a reasonable argument it may harm your company.
But over the whole US it's a wash - the number of people who are upside down is exactly balanced by the number of people who made a lot by selling.

There's no such implied symmetry in markets. Trading is often very asymmetrical.
I think this community is special in that regard. I feel the exact same way, and I'm sure a lot of other people here do as well. But the thing is that it works and it works well. Microsoft are doing incredibly well.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there who are easily convinced by lies, or marketing as some might want to call it.
50p from every copy of The Geek Atlas sold in the UK donated to Bletchley Park
I don't think the situation is so black and white. I have always preferred this approach above everything else:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/02/27/renting-versus-buy...
Whenever the idea of government getting involved with startups or silicon valley comes up it makes me sick to my stomach. Picking the right startups, open source or otherwise is a hard thing to do and especially for the government. They have done that in the past, the government trying to fund the semiconductor industry in the 90s, and failed remarkably. I wish they learnt from their mistakes but alas seems like they don't.

As far as your idea of funding open source only projects, that already happens in universities. Most of the good open source project you probably use comes from these universities that get federal funding.
We don't really need to turn this into another Apple keynote liveblog.
I would like to do this too. I've thought about it a bit, and it seems like you could create a latex template that would allow for easy parse-and-export into HTML.
That way, you retain your latex styling, and adjust it accordingly for the HTML version.

Honestly, though, I don't change my resume enough for something like this to be worth the time-input for me. I'm probably going to just live with having two versions to build/update.
Yeah, and sometimes the renters first notice is the deputy showing up telling them they've got 2 hours to get out before the locks are changed. Apparently there are cops in Vegas working 12 hour days just doing evictions.
Tools to test your site in multiple browsers
99 bottles of beer, rendered in more than 1000 programming languages
In enterprise software, there is another angle to this problem. If you know that the deployment process is going to take 3 years, should you tell your customers that there are features in your product that are right now sitting on your immedidate roadmap? what about medium term roadmap? How do you determine where the line is?

Also, if you know the base feature is there; but you know there are customizations and configurations that will need to be done on top for the deployment, do you say its there out of the box? or do you say it can be done? (Note that nothing really works out of the box in the enterprise; and if you keep saying 'can be done' to everything, you are going to lose the sale to a guy who says out of the box.)
This is completely wrong.

To use HELOC, you need to have equity in your house. In current market where house prices are down significantly, most of the folks have either no equity or they are upside down on their mortgage. These folks can't get HELOC.

Even if you could get HELOC, it may not be worth it. HELOC is amortized interest only like a credit card. That means you will keep paying towards interest for first few years before you even touch the principal. Also, HELOC rate is tied to Prime rate and if it changes your payment will change. Federal Reserve has kept the Prime rate too low since 2001 and I think it's bound to go up.

Please be very careful (I can't stress this enough) if you are considering HELOC.
Writing Inspired Software Using Crypto
But I'd suggest that the disappointment people felt with MS products was at least part of what spurred open office & ubuntu (for example) - and open source software certainly threatens MS's revenue stream.
Why REST (Representational State Transfer) ?
The internet is destroying their business model, or so the media dinosaurs think. The internet is made of nerds, right, computer nerds! So the dinosaurs think if they get some nerds to work from THEM, that might save them or at lest stop the internet. Like with superman and kryptonite, they're both from Krypton, right!
Javascript InfoVis Toolkit - New Version Released
Great documentation, like the previous commenter mentioned. Question, is this just a drupal installation or what?
I think home ownership is a good aspiration to have.

Just like 'working for yourself' is something a lot of people would like to achieve, 'owning your own home' features on the list.

It's also good for society, giving people more of an incentive to look after their home, their surroundings and to take an active part in society. As well as removing some of the separation of society - land owners, and renters.

Being less likely to move around has its good points as well as bad.
"... I doubt I've done anything anyone would care about in 100 years."

No way. For one thing, I'm convinced that "What You Can't Say" will be read in a hundred years and long beyond. Imagine if someone had written essentially the same essay centuries ago. Wouldn't we still read it?
Let's say we pay 1000 programmers $50,000 a year to work on open source projects.

What makes you think that $50k/year is enough to attract good developers? We're talking about people who could easily earn double that -- and many of the top open source developers spend most of their paid time writing open source code anyway.
Ok, so government should fund code development, not startups. Companies can then take the resulting code and figure out how to turn it into consumer value. I'll change the title to "Taxpayer funded open source".

Yes universities are a good source for OSS, but the obvious problem is that they're restricted to university students and faculty. Plus academic bureaucracy is probably not conducive to effective software development.
You don't take into consideration the utility value of a house vs. a rental. Houses are generally nicer, offer more privacy, yard, etc.
How many Girlfriends a Geek should have?
They used the word "fee" in the article. That isn't ambiguous. A six-figure fee is a gross amount.

I'm leaning towards calling shenanigans on this.
1. But it shows that something is completely wrong and needs to be changed, hence the Pirate Party

2. Yup
Then double it. I'm brainstorming here.

The chance to benefit society could be a compelling factor. Why do people become school teachers?

Also there's the fact that hackers like to share code and ideas. Actually, this is probably the biggest reason I would choose to participate in something like this. Hell, I'd do it for 10K.

Yes there are currently people doing open source work, but there could be far more. Also the areas in which they work are limited to those that will provide direct benefit to the funding companies (Mozilla, the Eclipse Foundation).
Ask HN: Would you use this?
I see this a lot on HN: people want their projects/startups reviews. A nice, simple site with a small but knowledgeable community willing to review/beta test your latest venture, project, startup...

I thought this might be a nice little project, personally, and was wondering if HN users would use it. I'm not interested in profiting from such (which means, no ads), though I'd have to find a way to offset server costs (micro-donations from each pitch?).

Along with the comments, each pitch would be supplemented by ratings, charts, etc.

Not only for HN users to pitch their stuff, but also for HN users to review. Would you take part in such community?

Thanks. If you vote no, please let me know why :)
It's cool to see ideas like DNA Origami getting researchers' attention. But it might be better to get the information from further up the food chain.

Drexler collects some nice background papers here:

http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n...
T-Mobile Network Allegedly Hacked
Before y'all go celebrate the mainstreaming of copyright reform, keep in mind that the white-only British National Party won two seats in the same election (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/8088607.stm).

So neo-Nazis are twice as well represented in the European Parliament as copyright reformers.

Sigh.
150k apps in the first day, annualized rate of 50m. Apple's annualized rate is about 1b, or 20x that. Not bad.

Like any other platform this one will face chicken and egg problem - developers will not develop until there is profit motive (a big user base willing to use apps and willing to pay for them). Users will not buy until there is a compelling reason - visiclalc for mac, word for wintel etc. This is the assymetric network effect.

Apple side-stepped the problem by offering iTunes integration (so music was the platform-driving "app" for iPod and then the iPhone), slick UI and a sence of elitness that comes standard with white earbuds. This allowed them to build 6m of users over the first year and use that as bait to lure developers in. In all, a non-trivial amount of effort to jumpstart the virtous cycle of platform adoption.

Even having spent as much time on this, Apple had to lean on the iPod franchise to get into the ne market. What can Palm use? I see two things - their exisiting palm app catalog and webkit apps. This isn't cofidence inspiring as it's too late for old apps and too early for the html5.

I guess we'll see.
I've always been an opponent of the "throwing money away" argument. In fact, the argument played right into the housing bubble. There was a sense of urgency that you HAD to buy a house now or else.

Renting provides you near elasticity in where you want to live. Besides your lease (which could be month-to-month) you have nothing binding you to an area. You also don't face the risk of a declining asset. While housing typically increases in value, we've certainly seen the opposite happening a lot lately. When you're young, you probably don't want to be tied down to an area. Things change quickly at this stage in your life.

Ironically, a lot of these people who were afraid they were "throwing money away" while renting got into situations where they literally were throwing money away to PMI and too large of interest rates.

If renting was such a god-awful idea, it wouldn't exist. There are tons of reasons to rent instead of buy and anyone who insists that home ownership is the only way is foolish.
I'm amazed how fast Ulocate gets from one platform to the next so fast... weren't they also one of the first on the Iphone?
That is no longer correct.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30891380/
Currently wishing I switched carriers when I stopped working there...Crap...
Writing a face recognition library interface is hard. Really hard.
I don't think b) sounds like usage quota.

If you have an unlimited ride Metro Card, you can use it as many times as you want during the month but you won't be able to swipe it back to back to prevent abuse.

Similarly, 7 queries per second is a decent limit as it allows you to send more than half a million queries (Exact number = 604800 queries) in a day.
Not to forget that some of the tutorials and examples floating through the Internet are outdated.