skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pay requisite damages to the copyright holder

Do you realize how much those damages could be? Copyright violations have multiple tiers of damage that add up quite fast; the actual loss of sales is considered, and statutory damages sit atop that and can run into incredibly large sums for willful infringement.

It could be considered by the court to be an ongoing willful violation with fines assessed on a daily basis, per copy, if Amazon could stop the violations and didn't. It's extremely dangerous to go into a copyright case without having done everything you can to alleviate the damage to the copyright holder, because fines could be accruing throughout the trial.

Amazon could potentially have negotiated a deal with the copyright holder, but if they weren't in a negotiating mood, then there really wouldn't be much to be done other than fix the violation to the best of their ability. The fact that the system has mechanisms for removal of purchased books is probably something potential Kindle buyers should consider.
What the fuck are 250 paid employees doing at Mozilla?

There's fewer people than that at Apple, Google, Nokia, Palm, etc. combined being paid to hack on WebKit or browsers using it!

That's the kind of bloated headcount I'd expect at Microsoft working on IE team at its peak in the late nineties.
Psychogenetic Fallacy: if you learn the psychological reason why your opponent likes an argument, then he's biased, so his argument must be wrong.

A good example of one of those sort-of fallacies. In reality, everyone is biased, and understanding those biases is part of politics. Politics is not a truth-seeking endeavor, and so fallacies are very much acceptable strategically. Someone who surrenders his own biases, and also surrenders examining his opponents' biases losses every time.

over-simplifying. As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Political slogans such as "Taxation is theft" fall in this category.

Right, exactly. Actually, all taxation is in fact theft. The nuance that is missed by people who say that, is that some theft is positive-sum, even to the victim.

Similarly, a common justification for bribery is that "Everybody does it". And in the past, this was a justification for slavery.

"Slavery: Everybody does it"? Uh, no. I doubt anyone ever put together those words.
Or use portknocking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyan_Worlds

They created Myst, which was for many years the most popular game of all time. Several pretty successful sequels followed. Then they frittered away many years on several iterations of a mostly-failed MMO. In 2005 they laid off all employees but two. What the heck happened?

There must be a little life left, since they recently released Myst for iPhone. But they don't get much ink.

EDIT: this is a reply to a now-deleted comment, wondering what Cyan is.
I think the "VC funded" title is misleading: In the article he says "We’ve got quite some money as a seed investment from a VC."
Not even S&W is immune. NPR did a segment on the book a few months back and some English lit types where complaining about how vague, unoriginal and even wrong it is. How can one be vague in a book of 50 pages is beyond me.
Keep in mind that systems like this have been working for years. Composers get paid royalties via ASCAP and BMI, for example.

And I believe all the schemes, both existing and proposed, divvy up the money based on the number of times certain compositions are played. Artists can't compose unlistenable music and then claim a check. It's a game, but it's not entirely unlike a market.

The fact that it might be gamable doesn't seem like much of a scandal. What's our gold standard here? An imaginary fairyland? The existing, supposedly free market for music is not merely gamable... it's been corrupt since it was invented. Just try to get your tune on the radio without paying bribes.
Not even S&W is immune. NPR did a segment on the book a few months back and some English lit types where complaining about how vague, unoriginal and even wrong it is.
While I agree mostly with your view, I just spent quite a bit of time looking over the local sex offender lists of several cities I've lived in, and I can say for sure that at least in these random samples, the outliers you mention (public urination, high school sweethearts separated by too many years, etc) are nowhere to be found on any of the lists I have looked through.

I think it's strangely primitive and archaic for this sort of public humiliation to exist in our modern society either way, but a few moments of clicking around these samples at random goes to show that a vast, vast majority of these people have been convicted of what most would consider "serious" sex crimes.
Or they let people join who don't live in one of their cities.
As someone extremely new to Hacker News, the posts and threads have all been insightful and interesting. To me, Hacker News represents a close community of intellectual technical experts and entrepreneurs. I'm excited to be apart of it!
Article about pitching version .01 of your software, not version infinite?
Hi, there was a great blog entry a month or two ago from a Venture Capitalist that I read and can't seem to find again.

He explained that it was common that the pitch to him for a new startup would be presented as the "new Facebook, with dating, and it does your finances for you too!" when he was concerned most about the very first version. The first version which provides the core value and from which you build upon.

I'd really like to re-read it (and bookmark it this time!) :)

Thanks!
Security is not supposed to be convenient.

If there is an option between a convenient way to do something and an inconvenient (but much secure) way to do the same thing. You should do it the inconvenient way, specially if you make a living in security.
30M synapses * 2^28 ~= 10P synapses

That's 56 years of Moore's law. I think you're right that they'll have to do something other than scale up.

Luckily there's room for tons of optimization, especially if your goal is an AI instead of a medically accurate simulation of the brain. Simulations like Blue Brain will reveal the key features of neurons as they relate to computations performed by the brain. That will allow us to drastically simplify future brain models without losing accuracy, possibly even wiring them directly into hardware. I think it's plausible that this approach could yield a humanlike AI within 20-30 years.
Say what you will, but at least Americans don't sweep their race relation problems under a rug like some other countries.

Good point. Besides, America is a young country, relatively speaking to white settlement. I have actually attempted to really think logically about why I'm almost never . . . um, "attracted" to white blondes from the western hemisphere, and have reached the conclusion that it's all about diversity in the gene pool. After tracing some of my genealogical roots to Native American ancestry, I guess I'm also partially resentful to the dominance of white culture and its concept of property usurping. That, and I'm pretty revolted by the concept of inbreeding.

Anyway. It actually makes little sense for countries to hold fast to their racism, if they want to survive and thrive. There are two genetic mutation varieties that occur in heavily homogeneous populations: mutation and recombination. They either ensure the continuation of a line of genetics, or destroy its chances for survival. With inbreeding, the mutations / recombinations are usually manifested in unattractiveness or stupidity. Not trying to be mean, just stating my observations.

So since in the USA we have this huge population of immigrants, our gene pool is actually primed to produce better people (survival of the fittest). Not specific to any race.
Witness the saga of ECGS -- people had to fork GCC because the FSF refused to take patches from the community.

The FSF's concern was to have employees maintaining (and controlling the development of) the software and as far as they were concerned that was that.
Wow, this is the biggest idea I've seen in computing in some time. It makes me wish I knew more about hardware. The fact that it involves Ivan Sutherland, one of the great visionaries from the early days, is really cool. If you don't know who Ivan Sutherland is, watch the following now (it's not long and, trust me, you need to know about this):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg

Sutherland's Sketchpad system is from 1962; the video is Alan Kay talking about it in the 80s. The best bit is at 3:45, where Kay says: I once asked Ivan Sutherland: How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, and the first object-oriented software system all in one year? He said: I didn't know it was hard.

If you want to see it do 3D, go to 4:00 of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKM3CmRqK2o

That Sutherland did these things in the early 60s never fails to astound. The machine it ran on was built in 1956.

Regarding the Fleet stuff, one thing I noticed is that they're using Guy Blelloch's work on data parallelism from the 90s, which is also the basis for the recent work on parallelism in Haskell. (Edit: turns out this is one of the models they're considering for programming Fleet, but it isn't a perfect fit. See the link to the other slides posted by abecedarius.)
Apparently not, and i'm somewhat dismayed at the lack of opposition to this point of view ... so i'll try to make a case against it.

Creating smarter than human AI would be humanity giving up its dominion, and who can say what will happen as a result of this. It is not being melodramatic to say that there is a major chance that it will be the end of humanity, the end of history and the end of everything that most humans value.

I would submit that our values, what we find wise, beautiful, kind, humurous or otherwise virtuous, our appreciation of the natural world and our legacies, they are all relative to our human condition, and that jeopardising this - for everyone - is wrecklessness without comparison. Yet enough of us would do it

Were is this complicity in our own demise coming from. Are supporters of ai and the singularity misguided - by their own values - or do we have irreconcileable philosophies on the matter.

My suspicion is that a lot of support for the singularity comes from death anxiety - the way things are, in the long run i'm dead anyway so may as well have a punt (50-50?) on immortality, with humanity as the stakes. That is the singularity is a plausible alternative to an after life. Call me a wanker, but i think that one should take fatality like a man (i.e and die), and not be so selfish.

For me, one good, or at least indisputable reason, is disillusionment with humanity... i would not be able to argue against someone who lived through the trenches in WWI and had such an opinion, that this world as we know it is just not worth it. However I would not agree.

Finally I think a lot of support for the singularity comes down to pure hair-brained optimism and reading too much sci-fi. It actually made me a bit sad to watch the recent star trek movie and its clumsy attempts to make the characters relevant (a sword fight? come on!). Traditional, speculative, science fiction used to be about final frontiers and buckaneering captains, now its struggling to reconcile the future and anything that we might want from a narrative.

Smarter than human AI may be our story is coming to an end ...
While these "why ___ may be the next ____" articles might make startup CEOs feel good, I've never seen much correlation with actual success.

I don't think this game looks compelling at all. Twitter is a communication and promotion tool, this is a location-based game; it's completely different. I think Mashable is out of touch. I'm so confident this app will never be a mainstream success I'd probably bet actual money on it. I'm not saying no location based games will be popular - I think they will be amazingly so, but this is not it.

And why does this company persist in calling their apps after irrelevant ball games? First dodgeball, now foursquare. Annoying.
http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/
Restated: copy-based hacks have a limited window of effectiveness.

Fortunately for us all.
Yeah, and you just posted something I posted to HN to your blog :-)

Your RSS feed is crap though -- linklogs shouldn't have permalinks to themselves in the <link> element -- put what you're linking to there.
"US is empire of the devil": A visit to North Korea
I disagree. I think hacker news serves as a great platform for the community to benefit from what other members have found works. There are countless postings, whether they relate to CSS, analytics tactics, or tips like Dustin's "follow me on twitter here" that we all benefit from. I recently shared tips from my personal experience running a small e-commerce, and I hope some members get actual value and implement some of my findings. I thank and applaud Dustin for a great article and proudly utilize his findings. Keep sharing.
The definitive guide to minimizing mindshare for your project: Offer documentation as PDF only.
As an American with lots of time abroad, I can second this. Americans are extremely uptight when it comes to race, but that might be a good thing. With all of the talk in America about race, you might start to expect, as I have caught myself doing several times, that the US must be a race relations disaster. Upon returning, I was shocked to rediscover that it wasn't any worse than the other places I'd been, and in many cases better.

The thing I really like about Americans, is they're just don't throw up their hands and say "oh well, that's the way its always been, can't do anything to change it now." (The gypsies definitely come to mind here) For better or worse, they try.
Is a VPN significantly less likely to be exploitable than SSH?

Yes, for a few reasons.

First, a VPN provides defense in-depth -- compromising a server now requires finding two unpatched vulnerabilities:

* You must find a vulnerability in the VPN implementation that allows you to leverage the VPN or the VPN host to forward your traffic.

* You must then find an additional vulnerability to use against the actual secured hosts made available over the VPN connection.

There should be a firewall between the VPN entry-point and your internal networks, to limit access to unapproved services.

As a single point of entry, a VPN is also easier to secure. If all servers are inaccessible except for approved services, then a single server running an unapproved vulnerable service (or an account with a weak password or key) does not open the door to immediate external compromise.

This single entry point also allows you to offset the likelyhood of user failure (such as choosing poor passwords) by using additional two-factor authentication. RSA SecurID or PKCS#11 are often too heavyweight for using every time you want to SSH'ing into a host, but they're far more reasonable for initially connecting to the VPN.
More at http://fleet.cs.berkeley.edu/

http://fleet.cs.berkeley.edu/docs/slides.pdf seems a better intro to the project, with more of the basics (I haven't finished it yet).
That's the kind of bloated headcount I'd expect at Microsoft working on IE team at its peak in the late nineties.

Why? Microsoft has a total of what . . . 6 or 7 real "releases" of its Internet Explorer browser since 1990-whatever?

I think it's about speed and efficiency in responding to potential vulnerabilities that web browsers subject their operating systems' users to. Microsoft hasn't had any cookies on me in years. ;)

[Edit - whoops here's a stat, if you choose to believe it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-explorer-usage-da...]
> I'm always amused when I read "stop making progress, there are some risks!". Of course there are, duh.

It's ironic that you characature one point of view as facile, yet your point of view is similarly so - with no characture needed.

What is being discussed is existential risk, and 'unfortunately' you'll probably never get to look silly for taking your point of view, because if it does come to pass we won't be here to discuss it.

I mean to take the concept of making progress and it having associated risks and then make such as generalisation is just not sensible. Progress does not have to continue having the same properties it has had historically (which is why perhaps putting too much stock in history and its wisdoms is dangerous). We could be heading towards a proverbial waterfall.

The last remark about intelligence seems rather optimistic... resources, time and luck are largely limiting factors because of our own biological limitations.
I think most proponents of strong AI include the idea that they should be built on the foundation of a "premise-state" compatible with our human ideals such as intrinsic respect for life, appreciation of complexity and diversity, decentralisation of power, privacy of thought and freedom of action, etc etc.
The technology to end humanity is already here (nuclear and soon biological weapons). In the long run superhuman AI may be the only thing that can prevent us from destroying ourselves.

Even if it were desirable, stopping the advance of technology is impractical. If superhuman AI is possible, it will be built. A more practical argument would be that superhuman AI should be strictly controlled, though advancing technology will eventually make that difficult too. The only solution in the long (really long) term is for us to become superhuman ourselves and attempt to preserve the things we find important in the transition.
"Slavery: Everybody does it"? Uh, no. I doubt anyone ever put together those words.

I am sure someone rationalized slavery to themselves like that. "All my neighbors have slaves, so I guess it's OK for me to have one too."

This is how I convinced myself not to go to class in college. "Nobody else is going."
Printable Coloring Pages
I don't think their main motivation was openness, but ease of use. Most (or at least a lot of) people already have iTunes and iTunes offers an easy ability to buy music which Palm probably couldn't achieve on its own...
We all understand that a sex offender is low on our list of people we care most about, But taking such a medieval, and profiteering approach like this app, Doesn't make us much better than the offenders.

The authorities are already aware of where these people are, The target audience here being only those who feel threatened, or scared, to know these people might live nearby, But that chance has always been there.

I feel this app can only serve to boost paranoia within the public mind.
I'm not so sure it'd be dishonest unless they lied about who they were when they interviewed someone and purposely misled someone who had never seen the show during an interview.

That said, though, it does make sense to me (in hindsight.. :P) that they'd rather script and control the process than rely on luck/talent in getting a good set of shots to use - after all, it's a big business and sending a film crew + on-air talent all over the country (or world) to film could get rather expensive if they couldn't be assured of being able to make the required joke(s) afterward.
GAME THEORY A Nontechnical Introduction by Morton D. Davis is great.
I don't think their site makes clear why using Smalltalk to teach web development solves any problems.

The PDF halfway through their tutorial series on Smalltalk explains Seaside as a "framework" that addresses some of what I'd consider smaller annoyances in development (One example they offer is the ability to add <em> tags to every occurrence of specific words in a file.

Such tools might be of use to a small audience, but I'm not sure anyone would want to learn web coding in such a roundabout way. Open Wordpad, go to W3Schools and practice an (X)HTML tutorial. Maybe consider Seaside once you've practiced the basics.
I think you're misunderstanding the previous comment. It says the objective of the monogamous strategy is to increase the chances of survival for a particular set of offspring, not a particular type. That is, if a man partners with a woman and provides for the children they have together, he increases that set of offspring's chances of survival.

The point about marriage and/or monogamy benefitting lower status males is that, in a polygynous system, all or most of the females will be having sex with the few high-status males who can provide for them and their offspring (barring rape). High-status males would have lots of sex partners and opportunities to produce offspring, low-status males would have few or none.
When i look at conditional comments, I at least feel comfortable knowing that everything is plainly laid out, And looks cleanly formatted enough for me to be comfortable.

Slapping these one star hacks into my css everywhere would start to look very very messy.
Well, you can build a business on homeopathy too.
"Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life" by Len Fisher. Great introduction to the area of study.

Follow that up with the EconTalk podcast episode with Dr. Bruce Beuno de Mesquita: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/_featuring/bruce_bueno_de_m...
Uh, again, no. At least in the United States, there was the status quo which is not a matter of truth or falsehood, and then there were arguments. Slavery was always a matter of debate, and the South had lots of "good" reasons for the practice, and it was never "because everybody's doing it." That's a straw man, not that it matters.
It's disappointing to think that because your as well known as Bill Gates, you cant have a simple, public page to share with your actual friends.
Personally, I plan on pursuing a career where game theory would play an important role in my research or work (teaching or intelligence research).

In many ways it's the science of cause-and-effect (hence why the Tit-for-Tat game solution works so well). By applying the concept of how one event can determine another on a predictable basis, one can help explain and potentially solve many of the world's greatest problems.
See my previous meta submission on this topic.
I wonder how many MSFT shareholders would have wanted Microsoft to pursue all of these diversions? It's a shame companies can't just focus on what they're good at and send all of their excess cash to their owners (the shareholders) as dividends.
Brain fart. Doh!

Yes. You're right.
… which is usually empty.
> Were is this complicity in our own demise coming from. Are supporters of ai and the singularity misguided - by their own values - or do we have irreconcileable philosophies on the matter.

This reminds me of an (unintentionally?) hilarious LW post:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/134/sayeth_the_girl/y4i

"For example, most existential-risks activists (scientists doing networking and research about risks like unFriendly AI) are male, and I plan a top-level post to assert that not having reliable access to sex with the kind of sexual partners who can most improve the life of an existential-risks activist should be considered a large disability in a male prospective existential-risks activist -- in the same way that, e.g., an inability to stop rationalizing one's own personal agenda should be considered a large disability."

So there you go. When skynet gets invented, blame it on sexual frustration :).
Azureus? The Bittorrent client?
More after the break.
The only thing I really dislike about it is having more "here" hyperlinks. Even if conversion rates are slightly better, where would the web be if the majority of anchor texts were "click here"?
Because it did so well when it was still Dodgeball.

Just make a better client and have it feel like a game instead of 'just another social network.' Brilliant.

Edit: And if I recall correctly, Dodgeball predated Twitter, which might be something to mull over in the context of their argument.
Does this help? http://searchyc.com