skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The EU needs disbanding :( Complete waste of money. This is just another example of them making up work for themselves to do to justify their existence.

Only someone with no clue about programming would suggest something like this.

It's very worrying that unelected 'officials' being paid by us can try to pass laws that no one wants.
There's a reason why most entrepreneurial endeavors start in the United States and not in Europe. Bureaucratic laws like this stifle innovation rather than promote it.

How about we make the EU politicians and lawmakers liable for the laws they pass? If a law they make happens to harm the economy in any way, they'll have to cover any such losses out-of-pocket.
Ask HN: can I transfer a $6,000 Kindle book onto PC, DRM-free?
After spending some time on Amazon and googling a little bit, it appears all my books I buy for Kindle will disappear once I throw the device away in 2 years. [inevitable fate of all portable electronics]

I'm very disappointed but as a last resort decided to ask allmighty HN community if this is true.

If so, I am astonished, frankly... Books aren't MP3s, I actually do want many most of them to be around forever. So can I transform Amazon books into PDFs? Or maybe into some other standard ebook format? (I have never owned an ebook before).

Also, maybe there are other big book stores that sell DRM-free books? (although I'd prefer to hack Amazon's - it's just too damn convenient)

Imagine buying a book for $6,400 and loosing it only because your Kindle breaks and Amazon decides to ditch the product a year later.

BTW yes, $6,400 Kindle book exists:

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Nuclear-Materials-Engineering-ebook/dp/B001QTVXAK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1240809725&sr=1-1
Not afaik. Pownce had features.
It's not a Google Killer, but the post explains why people will still still look at it like that.

Got to read past the first sentence :)
Hypochondria is pretty insidious. You actually believe you have the disease. It's reality.
Maybe there's a build dependency between govt. services and software and sometimes it breaks?
It seems strange that so many people are concerned about bacteria. When was the last time you got sick from bacteria (In the US)? It seems like most infectious disease these days is caused by viruses.
This was proposed by Meglena Kuneva, the consumer protection comissioner for the EU. I attended a talk she gave in Harvard. While she seems dedicated to her work she often blames companies for consumers' lack of judgment. For example, she blamed Apple for corrupting the youth with iPods.
Tell YC: PageMass launching in 22 days
IIRC, Twitter was started as a way to send personal bits of info to people you knew. Why else do they have the tagline "What are you doing?".

That idea didn't work. Hence I would definitely agree that a lot of luck resulted in Twitter being repurposed as an broadcaster of impersonal information to people who you don't know. (which is pretty much the opposite of the original intent).
Is FriendFeed close to being twitter + reddit?
FriendFeed can just add "Hot" rankings of submissions from friends, groups, and overall.

Why blog using one service and have social news in a separate service when you can have both in one place?

The fact that many posts to social news services are blog or "self" posts shows that this would be a compelling combination.
anything you buy on your kindle remains in your amazon.com account, and you can redownload it anytime (e.g. if you get a new kindle). http://qzip.in/n9

i don't think you can put it on a PC unless you hack it.
Writing fiction with GURPS
It looks like anybody with a start-up that was some sort of technology / personal-hygiene combo would guarantee a write-up in techcrunch.

I'd like to announce my Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer service. We also do keyboards.
I have no idea who this guy is, apparently he is popular around HN (I'm not really into startups or that culture I guess), but I feel bad for saying it like this - stop being a pussy and be a man damnit.
why do you think Amazon will ditch the kindle?
A catamaran - a multi-hull sailing boat.
Google Tips for the Entrepreneur (2002)
IANAL, but it looks like this only covers commercial transactions. I'm guessing it applies to things like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but not free as in beer software.
Wash hands, dry hands with paper towel, open door with paper towel
I got this as a gift a while back and it's okay.
Take the Michael Jackson way out. Wear creepy white gloves.
I've also seen some pretty comprehensive answers to questions over at http://www.chuwe.com.
I liked The Entrepreneur's Bible since it provided a great foundation of all the topics. From there, then you can pick and choose. I like Art of the Start, Founders at Work as well for various reasons.
As a followup anything UK specific would be interesting to hear about. I've seen the various 'small business guides' which are good for some topics but not so great on others.
Can't the new Kindles read pdf? I'm sure there are conversion tools out there.
Well, that's what the BSA director said. The article says almost nothing about the actual proposal. So we have to read it at EC pages here (link is not included in the article, of course). http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/rights/cons_acquis_en.htm

It's in this PDF: http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/rights/docs/COMM_PDF_COM_2008_..., page 20. Well, I'm not really sure what does it mean.
Someone is so going to steal all the paper towels from the men's bathrooms at the next tech conference in order to trap Michael Arrington.
Most products eventually disappear, particularly electronic gadget types.

But that's not the point here.
The point is that I want to own my books, there are many reasons all of us should want this.

For one, ebook market is growing and Kindle isn't even close to being "iPhone of ebooks": there are some interesting models from Sony, plus I'd like copies of my books on my computers and on my iPhone. I don't want some cheap disposable device to have full control over (eventually) thousands of dollars of my books, that's just silly.
To be quite honest with you, most of these books written by people like Guy Kawasaki, Jessica Livingston, Buffet, etc., are all great, but are pretty much compilations of stories or opinions. I know what you're after, because I was after the same thing not too long ago. I just went to Borders and picked up some text books on the subjects of interest - business, marketing, etc. I'm not sure if you'll be able to find text books on 'how to structure options,' but I'm sure there's some text that Harvard MBA's and the like have read throughout their time in school that covers that topic.
There is no mathematically rigorous way of proving that any given piece of code does or doesn't do anything. It all depends on the context in which the code is being used.

Building software is a trial-and-error process, and building large pieces of software is a large trial-and-error process. They are asking for the impossible, like providing airport security or anything of a similar scale.

If a law is made of this it will serve nothing but annoyance to actual users of said software. There is just no conceivable way anyone could regulate and enforce that law. It's a good idea in general but it shouldn't have an application in legislation, that's like forbidding pigeons to litter monuments -- no offence, but what the...
The Four Steps to Epiphany by Steven Blank - a great manual for creating a successful, data-driven, hypothesis-based, and iterative-heavy startup.
Every now and again, a government representative decides that they would like to do something relating to technology, or medicine, or whatever. Whether this something is practical, possible, or legal is largely immaterial. They will bring it up, and it may even get passed (American CDA, Australian internet filtering thing); at that point it will die amongst legal challenges or simple impracticality. Business as usual.
Oh man, oh man, this is exactly what I want to do when I grow up. I keep hoping satellite access will get cheap(er). In the Caribbean, apparently, it's not so horrible.
It's about consumers rights, where consumer is: (quote)

any natural person who, in contracts covered by this Directive, is acting for purposes which are outside his trade, business, craft or profession;
This isn't a law. It's a bizarre, stupid suggestion.

>> "There's a reason why most entrepreneurial endeavors start in the United States and not in Europe"

I'd like to see your data for that one. I really don't think it's due to bureaucracy. Starting up in the UK at least is ridiculously simple, and cheap - £25 will get you a Ltd company.
Regarding "shuffle the Array":

list = list.sort(function() Math.random() > 0.5 ? 1 : -1);

I'm wondering just how reliably random the result is. Does JavaScript make any guarantee whether the comparison function will only be called once for a given pair of values, and if not, could this affect the result?
All well and good, except that git doesn't explicitly store delta sets.

Which doesn't mean storing SQL dumps in git is or isn't a good idea, but the git repository itself probably won't bloat up too much just from moving stuff around in a file, especially if the initial commits were small.
There is no mathematically rigorous way of proving that any given piece of code does or doesn't do anything.

Sure there is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
the population of the world will change their habits accordingly

I went to dinner tonight with 9 people from 4 countries and got bowed, hugged, and airkissed, but the only other shaker in the room was the Japanese salaryman. OK, check that, the other Japanese salaryman.
> Dynamically perceiving, picking and placing irregular objects is really hard and completely unsolved

wrong. it is completely solved, but simply too expensive. in a couple of years this technology will be cheap and replace most human pick & place processes. The same thing happened during recent years and will continue with exponential groth.
The files are in a standard format (mobipocket with the extension changed to azw). They do have Amazon DRM on them, but you can still back them up over the USB connection.

You can of course also break the DRM; the program to do that is here: http://www.mininova.org/tor/1412688.
Hey thanks for the link :-)
Not books, but useful online articles, are the articles listed in the Hacker News Library:

http://ycombinator.com/lib.html
Sprint marketing for Palm Pre: very cool flash widget page - all about "Now"
That's a retarded statement. There are tons of derivatives. Would you care to be more specific?

A counter-example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2008_Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_...
That's what I do :) I've noticed an increased number of garbage cans near doors as well, in many places, so I think it's catching on.

I wasn't trying to bash Arrington, btw. He has a point about germs. Especially with the sheeple freaking out about Fludor the Burninator and such. But a handshake ultimately is about showing trust (whether rooted in showing lack of a weapon or not), and here he is saying outright that he does not trust anyone else to keep their hands clean to his obviously-high personal standard. I repsect that he's willing to be forthright about it, though I think carrying a travel-sized bottle of Purell might be a solution with milder social consequences in certain business settings.
I believe there is a "showdead" feature.

Seriously, tho', Chomsky? Would an Ann Coulter diatribe last as long?
Really cool stuff ... the other clips in this series look like they're worth checking out too
Can be a Startup For Startup.

Another idea I had boiling in my head was a spin-off idea from Collaborative Spaces for tech startups (pretty much a bunch of startups sharing office space).

Same concept, except for the Legal/Accounting Work. A few startups come together and hire a Lawyer and Accounted. Early startups don't have the capital to have their own, so this way the cost is divided.
Chuwe looks pretty cool. I almost didn't click because the domain name didn't look 'serious'.
Oh, that's just one part of the inconsistency shown in the BSA quotes.

"Digital content is not a tangible good and should not be subject to the same liability rules as toasters" is also interesting seeing how in regards to [intellectual] property they very much push the opposite stance.

"extending consumer regulation to software could lead to less interoperability between software products" is just shameless seeing how the EC had to force some (much fought against) interoperability down some of the bigger memberst of the BSA.
Stanford's entrepreneurship corner: book list:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/search.html?keywords=book&x=...

MIT Entrepreneurship center: book list:
http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/booklist.php

"Must have resources for startups?" at StackOverflow.com
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/120272/must-have-resource...

"books for startup" at StackOverflow.com
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/412677/books-for-startup

Hope it helps you. :-)
It's really simple. Amazon may make things convenient, but, they're also holding you to their beck and whim with these devices. Hold out until you can can own drm-free software and products so you can actually own things. If you don't, you're leasing something from Amazon and stealing it if you break the DRM.

Support fair business practices. DRM isn't.
Hm, wonder why that book has no reviews...
They should put forward computer scientists to refute this, rather than business representatives. Oh well, we can laugh at their ignorance but it's easy to miss overlook the fact that companies in a large fragmented market sometimes gouge consumers for years and falsely shift the blame for high prices onto whatever government happens to be handy. Having worked for some privatized utilities over there, management is often focused on accumulating as much money as possible rather than improving service for the consumer.
Don't Shoot In Auto - Advice For DSLR Newbies
The second paragraph though makes a great point.
and I want to own my iTunes music, but I didn't for a long time - welcome to the digital age.
"My friend that's not from the US" claims it works.

I would never try something like that, of course, since it's illegal and I'm a Good Citizen. Yeah...
I second this -- I think it's what the OP is looking for.

It's published by CafePress, so the fastest and cheapest option is to get it directly from them: http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0976470705
Eh, not so sure it's bad sci-fi, given that it's not far from historical norms.

Most of human history is a comparative handful of people executing effective control over most of the available resources, isolating themselves in heavily-barricaded encampments and putting lots of effort into maintaining that control (castles/cities/gated-and-guarded-communities/etc).

It's a pretty stable equilibrium: once you've got effective control over most of the available resources, you can easily afford to maintain your barricades, and if on the other hand everyone else is effectively shut out from those resources it's going to be pretty hard to organize much of a revolt; most of the shake-ups are due to sudden shifts in technology or unexpected "black swan" events (eg a mongol invasion or a plague).

The exact nature of the relationship between the barricaded and the rest varies with circumstance: sometimes the rest are useful for labor (like tilling the fields), or to raise an army; in the modern era it's often the case that the rest are left to fend for themselves, at least as long as they're not causing trouble.

You don't have to travel far to see the same pattern surviving into the present era: just go to Argentina, or Brazil, or Africa, etc.

So social organization resembling the dystopia in "Manna" has been more-or-less the normal human experience since Sumeria, if not earlier, and is still existent today for maybe 20-40% of the world's population (depending on where you draw your lines); it's possible that "western" modernity -- of the sort you have in the US/EU/Japan/Korea/ -- marks a turning point in history, but it could just be a brief interlude between variants-on-the-theme-of-feudalism, also.

On the face of it Manna is cartoonish and whatnot, but positing a return to quasi-feudalism is pretty much betting on mean reversion, which could be a bad bet but isn't necessarily comical.
I've been disappointed so far too.

For example, I read an article about a hard driving sales guy whose rule of thumb was n calls a day, and n appointments and to make them like you within the first minute.

I'm looking for books passing on this type of rule of thumb wisdom from entrepreneurs.
Only someone with no clue about programming would suggest something like this.
It's very worrying that unelected 'officials' being paid by us can try to pass laws that no one wants.

Unfortunately, that type of thing happens all over the world, not just in the EU parliament. I don't think that disbanding the EU would resolve the problem of politicians making decisions about things they have little to no understanding of.
I also recommend checking out http://venturevoice.com/ specifically the treehugger mp3
This is clearly the best Human Computer Interaction article I've ever read. Great stuff. Thanks.
I'm not quite sure where or when that rule of thumb applies... I've had articles that gathered 200 votes, and they certainly didn't gather 20k page views....
Windows Mobile Marketplace: For Unicorns Only
Test-Driven Development vs. Test-After Development
This is about risk allocation, the idea being to make the party bear the cost is who in the better position to do something about it.

If corporations were liable for defects in their software, they would need insurance to cover claims, and this would be passed on to consumers as higher prices. They would also be more precise in specifying and communicating how the software should be used. They would start using techniques that might not be efficient or clever, and they might be overkill and more expensive, but that were known to work - similar to how civil engineers design bridges that don't fall down. And they'll need teams of lawyers to handle the litigation.

Software will cost more in the EU.

This focus on security and consumer rights is what happens after the cowboy phase of an industry is over. But as we move into cloud computing, SaaS, and netbooks and smart phones, that age is yet over for us. Probably it will last at least as long as Moore's Law holds.
The Business of Software by Eric Sink is pretty good.
http://www.amazon.com/Eric-Business-Software-Experts-Voice/d...
Oh how I'm wincing at this comment:

I had a boss who got so wrapped up in software he was developing you could barely wake him out of his trance. If you concentrate too much on a task you become oblivious to the world and become like the absent-minded professor. There is something to be said for situational awareness.

But multi-tasking is ruining my life because I’m not accomplishing the things I want to do.

>_<
Something that people might not realised, but the Fallout series of games was originally based on GURPS, although Steve Jackson and Interplay fell out so it was never used in the end.

Here is a usenet post from 1997 detailing it:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg/msg...
I'm pretty amazed that noone has released a cheap, open e-reader with an e-paper screen. Seems like such a beast would be an easy sell.
Formal verification works for algorithms, but not for interactions.
What Do You Believe But Cannot Prove?
From Open Source Software to Open Culture: Three Misunderstandings
Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur is probably the most useful book I've yet read when it comes to startups. Topics covered: Financing maps; Cash flow and risk of early stage ventures; how much capital raise and what to spend it on; getting behind how VCs think (really informative), business plans, valuation of early stage ventures, term sheets, splitting rewards, allocating control, aligning interests (options, vesting, noncompete, IP, etc.).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071496025

I've read Founders plus a couple of other titles on the subject, but this one really stood out.
Oh OK. I thought it was a rather abstracted joke =)

After thinking about your query, the only good idea I had was to take something like a large open source codebase and write a program to search for string/char declarations. It'd probably be faster just to try your idea and see whether it helps or not :-/

Oh, and nothing about that on Alpha, sorry. I did ask it 'how long is a string' for fun, and it suggested that the length of a given random string is 12. And who am I to argue?
I was a bit confused when solving the puzzle. It would have been clearer if he wrote that the game is over when nobody has anything to eat. This is implied. The other clarification he could have made was that if an alligator eats a family but itself has no eggs, the alligator simply dies and disappears.

The color changing rule is also a bit clumsy. If I were a kid I would wonder if the two question marks are the same kind in that puzzle. In fact, they may or may not be the same, but appearance wise they look the same.

Hope that helps with anyone who decided to sit down and figure out the puzzle on paper.
True, but at least without the EU, the UK would be free again to govern itself unhindered, with its own elected politicians.
Why Jeff Bezos Is Obsessed With Waste
This is how exciting 7th grade math can be:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerfu...
Reddit and FriendFeed are very different. Reddit tends to have single conversation about any one topic. FriendFeed has many conversations for a topic where each conversation is scoped by some social circle.
Being passionate != thinking you're right about everything.
Here's Marcus Ranum on Software Liability:

Inviting Cockroaches to the Feast (http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/l...)
CBSE Papers
"People who fume inside are people who are already pretty sure they're right about everything"

How does that follow?
I think he is referring to the notion that amazon could in theory discontinue the ebook/kindle line of products leaving him stranded without the books he paid for.

This is not as far fetched as it seems. Look at a few examples from the music business: Microsoft discontinued support for their music download service. Walmart did the same thing to their DRM laden music. Now anyone that purchased music with DRM from those two is sol if their computer/OS goes down and they need to reinstall. since they cannot authenticate to the DRM servers the music stops.

Solution to the music: use providers that do not want to cripple you. (Amazon MP3 download is the way I have been getting all my music.)

Solution to the E-Book: You could probably strip out the drm from the kindle protected books. It is probably against the law in some countries though.
It's because the reader is only as good as the content and an open reader has limited content.
I love the idea that Chomsky fills the Coulter niche for a certain audience.
Me too. It really shook me to the core when it suddenly turned up dead since I found it such an interesting read, and I couldn't understand what seemed to be arbitrary deletion.

I guess I gotta read more about HN works and why such things can go from #1 to dead in moments.
HTML is the answer, it is future proof, it is 100% portable.

Now we need a solution to move all ebook formats to html.
Ask HN: How old were you when you got your first computer?
I was 9. It ran windows95, and I waited a gazillion years for every web page to load just to have my connection broken every time someone answered the phone.
There is also the fact that you quite simply cannot do a combination of "cheap" and "e-ink screen" right now. Manufacturing is still too expensive, even in volume.
Twitter Dance?
Our family had a DOS PC when I was very young, but the one I remember was an old Compaq running Windows 3.1 and TabWorks.
A benefit (of cash) is that it allows anonymity -- excluding the cashier of course.