skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're right - these look exactly like the Banksy 'reproductions' that are sold in high street poster stores up and down the UK. Most of them looked like a 30 second version of stencils / originals / prints that were released a long time ago.

I think that most people who knew who Banksy was prior to this probably would have looked, laughed and walked on. As for the guy who bought 4 of them for the walls of his new house - he can probably pay off a fair whack of his mortgage!

Over the last few years I'd imagine Banksy's made a fair few unsuspecting people a significant chunk of change... Good on him :-)
It's not really violence if it's the government you're killing, I guess...

Though this might not be so much a libertarian solution as an example of the degree to which libertarian ideals can be twisted to achieve the sort of ends they claim to fight against.
This is such an obvious puff piece. Has T-Mobile been paying these people to write these things for them? I'm still awaiting a response from T-Mobiles legal department after I threatened to sue of their refusal to release me from my contract without the $300 fee http://www.scribd.com/doc/169303371/Demand-Letter-T-Mobile
ha! ok.. That's definitely spread all over the world, unfortunately we are not free from the spooks yet.. but what i meant is that they are a step further.. and think that countries with stronger industries and big lobby groups will have a hard time to elect and create real politics that can benefit the interests of the population in the digital rights ground..

So its not that they are not suffering from the same diseases of the democracies all over the world.. its the observation that by electing this class of representatives, prepared for the XXI century and the digital age, they are more prepared against those evil and corrosive effects on governments imposed by a industry formed in the XX century and with a hard time to adapt to new times
Generally, if you or I take what belongs to another person (wealthy or not) it is called theft. However, when we start talking about governments expropriating wealth for its own ends - such as paying off its spending deficits - that's considered OK. No one argues with the concept that necessary government services should be paid for by the people who live in a country and make use of those services.

What is usually objected to is when someone gets the bright idea that because wealthy people have money, that money should be taken to pay for irresponsible government spending. It's no different than infamous bank robber Willie Sutton. He was asked why he robbed banks and offered as a reply, "Because that's where the money is."
Are these companies all hoping...

I think the answer is yes?
keep writing, this stuff its picking up a lot better these days
I would hope this project could be that hub. Propose an interop data exchange format where information can be freely shared among all "exchanges". I'm definitely not seeing this as an easy problem to solve but it would make all of this more accessible to the grandmas of the world.

The major problem I see is geeks always think their idea is perfect and have a hard time justifying the technical cost of implementation when it doesn't directly affect them ("You mean I have to make feature x to help my competitor that's actually doing way better than I am at this? Psh!") Openness shouldn't only be about the ability to export and keep that information but to also interop and play nice with others.

I think it sucks that Disapora didn't have the traction it should have and I would hope that a data exchange format among all social networks would be beneficial to all. Unite against the Facebooks of the world. I believe united we can do this much better but its clear we haven't found the perfect disruption yet. I'm glad we haven't stopped trying because it's out there. Somewhere.
and that's the art.
Or building codes restricting things to an arbitrary height, or the fact that the aristocracy still owns the majority of the land in the U.K[0].

[0]http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari...
98% of people have no clue who Banksy is, certainly in the US.
Netflix in talks with cable TV providers
"Killing the government" is a euphemism. He's talking about killing government employees who implement things you don't like.

What you're ultimately talking about is terrorism - if you're a government employee, don't do bad things* or we might "predict" your death. The choice they're presenting seems to be either bad, violent actors in government, or bad, violent lynch mobs.

*Where "bad things" might be anything from "invading Iraq" to "free healthcare".
“Experts” Weigh in: Carbs, Calories, Cardio And Everything In Between
In sum: "dead beat" isn't just an insult. It refers very specifically to a father who does not support his children, which this guy appears to be doing.
"At either end of the social spectrum there lies a leisure class."

-- Eric Beck
When it comes to street art/graffiti, the context is just as, if not more, important than the art itself. For example, massive roller paintings on the sides of buildings or pieces on trains are interesting partially because of the danger involved in putting up the work in the first place. When the context is removed and it's just put on a piece of canvas, it loses a lot of its significance. It's a similar reason why some feel that paid murals aren't true graff since then it's not really street art, it's just art on the street.
You're Banksy, right?
Recall elections are one way that's sometimes used to handle the "electee turns around and goes nuts" problem: if enough people petition, an early election is held, so people get another chance to vote on whether they want to keep the representative. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_gubernatorial_recall...

A downside of that is that it can intensify populism, since you are essentially always campaigning, never governing. One person wins, but instead of getting a few years to try their agenda, the opposite party is every day looking for openings to get them booted out of office early. An in-between idea is just the classic impeachment. It can remove someone from office early, but is supposed to be used only for serious breaches of trust or lawlessness, not mere political disagreement. If Obama totally went nuts, Congress could remove him from office, if they weren't also on board.

Overall I think I'm more worried about constant campaigning (and the amplification of political advertising and PACs that entails), so these various measures strike me as more worrying than the problems they try to solve.
I don't think it was Banksy. Most likely just a guy Banksy hired to sell the pieces.
Really? Most of my 20-something american friends can't shut up about him.
In the U.S., the top 10% earners pay 70% of federal taxes. The bottom 50% pay nothing at all (they do pay about 12% to state/local/sales taxes).

Then we have business owners and majority share owners and the like, who are rich on paper, yet do not earn significantly more income than most middle class salary earners. Should they be paying out more taxes since they're in some kind of millionaire bracket, even though they're largely devoting their assets to employing people to produce goods and services?

I realize these are over-simplified kinds of generalizations and there are undoubtedly very wealthy people and cash-rich entities that pay little or no income taxes or corporate taxes, thanks to offshoring their assets and other workarounds.

But, I just don't see where all the money is, that's supposedly lying around, waiting to be scooped up by the tax man. In fact, the situation seems to be rather the opposite. Most of the money controlled by the rich in fact is being put to work in companies, and attempting to get at it would probably cause great damage to the economy.

To my (supply sider) mind, a simpler and far more effective choice would be to cut government spending until outflow meets intake (and then go a few hundred billion farther, so that debts can be paid). Among other things, this might have a positive effect on business optimism, and we would experience an uptick in hiring for start-ups and established companies alike.
Not a typo:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00234.html
This is by no means a quantitative study, but I live in the U.S. (in a fly-over state, none the less), have very little connection to the arts and every friend I can think of, off the top of my head, knows who banksy is.

It's obviously a pretty self-selected population, and I mean, I haven't formally surveyed all of my friends, but there you have it, for what it's worth.
I think it's more because graffiti is, by nature, defacing. So, someone defaced a defacing.
Legislators are beholden to rich benefactors. Look what happened to estate tax exemption during Bush era. It went from $675k to $3.5million.
http://wills.about.com/od/understandingestatetaxes/a/estatet...

And rather than letting Bush law expire, Obama boosted the exemption to over $5 million.

This was a huge boon to wealthy class, and most people didn't even notice this crappy legislation from going into effect.
More proof of the irrationality of the art market and how artwork is priced. Reminds me of [1].

[1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/53857118493/is-wine-bullsh...
I wonder how many fakes will show up on ebay now.
These people had easier access to loans anyway because of their ability to pay. All the subsidy does is make it a no-brainer when it comes to where to invest their money. People put their money into whatever gives them the best ROI and for the last decade or so that's been real estate. All it does though is drive prices up and the middle class out.
Dark Dark Future for Humans Because of Tech
Wow, that is one hell of a smug article.

>As metro stations go, L'Enfant Plaza is more plebeian than most.
Well, also...he's messing with the people who value his stuff at ridiculous prices, but can't pick it out of a lineup.

This is great not because it was anonymous (that was just a requirement -- if it weren't, he'd have been swamped by idiots), but because it illustrates the fundamental absurdity of the art "scene". It's a nice bit of mockery.
I hate to say it, but if I ran an art stand, I'd put up a few around central park right now.

Wouldn't be surprised to see some stands going up to make money off the "halo effect" here.
Presumably companies like Apple and Google spend a decent amount of money abroad (e.g., manufacturing phones). Can't they use it for that?
I don't think an analogy about hammers is a particularly strong way to make a case for or against software frameworks. There are many situations where a framework makes a lot of sense and lots of situations where they don't. Some simple heuristics like ' you don't want to use a framework when your project has the following properties... ' would explain the case better and also help create discourse rather than black and white opinionating.
Reminds me of this experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell#Washington_Post_ex...
No change. That particular case just happens to hit his "states rights" stance, and since it's a dissent, he can make the dissent without changing how the decision actually goes. Also, he appears to be a bit schizo on the drug issue:

http://www.ontheissues.org/Clarence_Thomas.htm

But it appears that the appearance of conflict of interest (http://www.thenation.com/article/155499/clarence-thomass-eth...) is still with him: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/ginni-thomas-gro...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587707/
Mechanical popcorn that forces your lips and tongue to simulate the names of the products being advertised, thus annulling the negative effect of chewing. Win-win.
You say it like they are not already a massive telco. They might not have the market share in North America, but elsewhere they are very established.
I would like to know where this $750K number is coming from. Generally Banksy originals of this kind are priced closer to low five-figures, but if someone has inside knowledge here please share.

This article puts the value at around 20K pounds: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/banksy-sells-origina...
His point is something along the lines of, the older you are the more likely that you've heard of it, especially if you have a history of reading HN much.
Well, unless you design them for high performance from the very beginning, SOA also helps in building slow systems that your customers will hate and that will fail in the marketplace if the people who buy the software actually use it.

(I was at Altassian's San Francisco office a few months ago and I said half-jokingly that I quit my last job because I couldn't stand waiting for Confluence, and all the other off-brand webapps my employer used, to load.)

Now I use Github, which offers true interactive performance even over crappy DSL connections. I'm not going to work for anybody who makes me use some off-brand webapp that makes me wait 30 seconds to put time on a ticket or to edit a Wiki page.

SOA can be part of the solution rather than the problem, but it takes a clear architectural view from day one and a commitment to avoid stupid and obvious mistakes, as the article points out.
And it's no small leap to extend that to any government employee, to the party, to anyone who votes for the party, to anyone whose politics you just don't agree with...
I don't have such a problem, but in my current project, I am integrating with various APIs such as Twitter + Facebook, and unit testing my code can be a nightmare at times since I'm dependent on them being stable.
I don't care about Banksy either and don't feel to despondent having known it was right there, its the kind of crap I'd just walk past every other day of the week. The question does beg though why the hell this is on the front page of HN (and how much was actually sold? I'm guessing not a lot!). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LP5-AjCCNw
Since they are including TV shows, how could they have missed Futurama? Episode 6ACV10, "The Prisoner of Benda" involved a machine that could swap the minds of two people. However, it turned out a given pair could only be swapped once. So if A and B swapped, and then wanted to swap back, they could not just use the machine together again. They would need to find some intermediate bodies to swap through--but then those people might no longer all be in the right bodies, and they would need to find some intermediaries, and so on. Thus, the question arose if, given a group of people who have done assorted swaps, is it always possible, with the help of a finite number of volunteers, to get everyone back to their original body and also leave the volunteers in their original bodies? And if so, how many volunteers do you need?

The Harlem Globetrotters are called in to help, and they prove that any group of swapped people can be restored to their bodies with the help of two volunteers. Their proof of this appears on a blackboard in the episode, and it is fact a correct proof.

Furthermore, not only is it correct, it was a new result, proved by Futurama writer Ken Keeler (who has a PhD in mathematics). This is, as far as anyone as been able to determine, the first and only time that a new theorem has been first published as part of a TV show.

Details, including the theorem and proof, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Benda
Although Facetime Voicecalls are not the same thing, its similar and works with any iOS 7
I concur. I'm 25, and the most money I've ever made in a year is less than $6,000. I've still managed to travel the country and live with not much strife. Once you're comfortable with completely disregarding all the bullshit that people in America think they need to be comfortable you're free to do whatever you want. I have no intention of attempting to change this situation because I'm genuinely happy with it.

EDIT:I'm also not on any form of welfare or food stamps or the like. I live entirely without state assistance, happily.
Actually it totally cycles. Availability of cars as well as a government policy encouraging home ownership (cheap loans) created a shift of people moving out to suburbs. If you're really familiar with the biggest cities, you can see this shift over time and it happens with subways and commuter rail lines too. Certain areas of New York's outer-boroughs have seen large shifts in class/demographic over the past 200 years. Coney Island used to be a resort/hotel town for the mega rich. With cars and the completion of major highways, the rich moved out to Westchester and Long Island. The subway eventually reached Coney Island and it became a poor neighborhood. It is now starting the swing back the other way because of new construction and the convenience of the Q line. The biggest shift happened right around when the subway lines were first connected at Times Square and the companies merged.
Could this price be the estimated value for all of the pieces put together?
Many bright, independently minded people go through rebellious phases as they ascend into adulthood.

"Why must I adhere to society's unwritten rules? I'm better than that. I'll never join the bourgeoisie!"

Those were my sentiments in my early 20's. But I was being rebellious for the sake of being rebellious. It was a knee-jerk coping mechanism, not the articulation of well-reasoned philosophy.

I was very immature. As if I would commit my life to forgoing and perhaps even scorning the richness borne of productivity in favor of squaller! Why would I want to punish myself in such a way?

I believe the same holds true for many people like the subjects of this article. They are bright people, but the messages they articulate about society and its inequities and injustices are riddled with serious contradictions.

You can be an empathetic, generous, and extraordinarily charitable human being without imposing poverty on yourself.
Not for nothing Gary Brooks Faulkner supposedly "attempted" to assassinate Bin Ladin.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870400980457530...
Totally agree - just the size of some of the pieces alone and the fact they are on canvas. $60 seems like a great price.
Also an excellent point. I'm a libertarian and I'm thoroughly fed up with both parties; neither hold true to their supposed core ideology when faced with the choice to do the right thing or to accrete more power. As such I'm really interested in ways to scare the shit out of politicians in the hope that they'll think LONG and HARD about whether what's being proposed is RIGHT or EXPEDIENT. As such the whole notion has a certain appeal, it's a way to try and curb particularly egregious abuses of power.

For example you might see $50mm worth of bounties on a lot of higher-ups at the NSA for letting this spying-on-innocent-as-well-as-guilty Americans business go on for so long. Those programs might then get shut down, or at the very least those people might retire to very private places immediately.

Possibilities for abuse? Absolutely. Are those abuses worse than what the folks in power are currently doing to us? That all depends on your viewpoint. I'm honestly not sure where I stand on that one because it's really tough to figure out the exact magnitude of the unintended consequences of any change in policy.
"More likely" is a far cry from "there's a lot of 16-year-olds around here" (paraphrased). There's no reason to think that's the cause rather than the alternate theory that there are new people joining HN all the time (as you suggest), or simply that even people who have seen this thing before still upvote it.
The UK does not have property taxes. The figure given is presumably council tax, which is a fixed fee per household, vaguely based on the house's supposed value. The highest council tax band is quite low; i pay £2,000 per year, and my flat is worth a lot less than $20m.
I bought a car a couple counties away from where I live for the lower sales tax rate than my home county. How is this ethically any different than that (other than the scale)?
Interesting that apparently Christians are more emotionally stable, and that "anime" is the single biggest word in the introvert group. The latter wouldn't surprise me.

Also interests me, as a transgender girl, that I don't really use most of the words in "male" or "female" groups much at all, though I seem to lean on the "female" one. I certainly use "shopping", "can't wait", "my hair", "her", "she", "cute", "^_^", "<3", ";D" and "^.^" a lot more than most of the words on the male one, in spite of my interests being more stereotypically "male". Though I do use "fuck" a lot.

Not sure if this is particularly validating or not.

I'm also very definitely on the "neuroticism" side, which is no surprise.
I had no idea who he was until Colbert decided to make him part of his schtick last week.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/42957...

Like most things, just getting people to talk about him will raise his profile. Being mentioned on national TV and the network news doesn't hurt either.

That said, I must confess my ignorance as I'm unaware of why Banksy is relevant. I don't mean high level ignorance, as I have googled around and I get the general idea of his works and some of the social issues his works relate to. What I mean is I'm unaware of how he became relevant in pop culture. Does anyone here know?

Banksy's wikipedia article[1] doesn't particularly spell it out. Did his first works show up in a particularly public area in response to a poignant event and the British media noticed it? Did his work catch on organically?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy#Early_career_.281992.E2....
Well, I would disagree. I do enjoy seeing some old, but very good stories crop up again after some time has passed.
I think your assessment that grown-ups ignore fascinating things, because we have a filter that only lets us see the mundane, is spot on. This is probably unfixable. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, he gives this phenomenon a straightforward personification — whenever the character Death enter the real world, he gets lots of attention from children and cats, but is invisible to grown-ups.

I've often seen people say that one of the great things about having kids is getting an opportunity to see the world through their "everything is interesting" perspective. So there's an option…

BTW, my favorite part about Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize-winning Joshua Bell subway busking experiment is that after he won the prize, someone noticed that this experiment had also been performed in 1930 with similar results — see http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-06-29/opinions/36873... .
But Adleman, the scientist behind the assessment, is one of the most prominent cryptographers and number theorists.
The more pleasures you have the more masters you serve.
The technology on that list can be traced back to two scientific breakthroughs. The germ theory, from the 1860s, led to vaccines, antibiotics and surgery. Quantum mechanics, from the 1920s, led to the transistor and the laser. The list ought to mention some chemistry. That came from the atomic theory, around 1800. Once you've been told those ideas, it's a matter of working out details; the details get tricky and progress slows with time. I'm sure there will be another breakthrough on this order. If we're around to see it, no doubt it will come as a complete surprise, like all the others did.

Condoms are another matter. The Romans knew how to make them, and the problem was being allowed to. The solution wasn't a sudden breakthrough, but a hard grind over many centuries. A social breakthrough as powerful as the atomic theory could be amazing.
I think, and I am not an expert by far, that this just shows what the market value of those art pieces are when removed from their context. You won't pay more than $30-60 for it unless you are told otherwise by someone of authority - an art critic or a market of affluent and competing buyers motivated by various reasons. There is also the fact that he did it in NY, where $60 is acceptable to many buyers. The sales would have been diffirent in rural Alabama or New Delhi.