skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are; see Publications International v Meredith Corp. (1996).[2] Therefore, you can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without infringing copyrights. But if you rewrote every recipe from a particular cookbook, you might still be found to have infringed the author's copyright in the choice of recipes and their "coordination" and "presentation", even if you used different words"

So, facts are not copyrighted, but the way facts are presented are copyrighted.

I still find it hard to believe that what this person had been doing is legal. What is the difference between the scraping he does and copying the phone directory and selling it on. In fact that is not a fair comparision since the wikepidia article suggests that the fone directory was legaly obliged to list these businesses while an individual or google and yahoo are not legaly obliged to enter every business in their directory. In this regard then the choice of information that these directories have made makes their directories copyrighted perhaps.
I really don't understand how Google Docs (GDocs) gets taken seriously as a competitor to Office. (And I'm depending on GDocs for my own strategic purpi.)

The formatting capabilities of GDocs are abysmal, not much better than a typewriter with a few fonts and four styles (paragraph, headers 1 through 3). Oh, and some poor table support.

Office Web will blow them away for serious document production needs.

Perhaps there are lots of non-serious document users out there, and perhaps GDocs serves them well. It's hard to know.
Social Skydiving Day 21: Ignore the Clouds, It's Sunny
In addition to safety from hackers, I would do it because it removes the risk of Google closing my account by mistake, causing me to loose all my data.
There's one argument in there that's semi-sensible: in case of a power outage, it would seem important for the police to be able to continue processing data. Yes, aggregates help, but keeping everyone's desktop computer running isn't as effective as limiting it to critical systems (and extended power outages shouldn't be crippling either). The good old pen and paper will only take you so far, especially with the atrocious handwriting of people these days (accustomed as we are to mashing buttons of all shapes and sizes for communicating).

To use them in the day-to-day business seems foolish, because most of it could be far better handled electronically. But considering the massive amount of paper and toner bureaucracies waste printing out information because the business processes don't evolve along, switching to such a system isn't necessarily an improvement in the short term. And of course there's a very significant initial cost that will be harder to justify to management than just maintaining the old system. Many and unsubtle are the stories of IT systems that are built to replace an existing "analog" process which end up delayed, inefficient, feature-crippled and way over budget. This is the sort of inglorious government-budgeted project that's especially prone to attract overpaid, unmotivated bunglers (no offense to the underpaid, highly-motivated geniuses out there working on such systems :-)

Whether the $0.5-$1M budget is warranted is another matter. The argument that they have a $4B total budget will sooner make people question whether the $4B is entirely needed than reassure them that the typewriters only take up a minuscule fragment of said budget. This also doesn't factor in the very real but hidden cost in terms of time and frustration for the users -- imagine the police department using no computers or typewriters at all, but requiring that all information exchange go through hand-written forms. The ballpen budget might be very small, but personnel costs would balloon.

Now, let me tell you about this voice recognition software I've been working on...
Apple unleashes new MacOS10.5.8 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server
I really don't look forward to giving everyone the ability to use whatever crazy, hard-on-the-eyes font they want to use.

Hitler on fonts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDiDATbIG-o

(Not for the humor-challenged.)
cloud is really about getting your data away from your own network

For startups and individuals, i.e. those that usually don’t have millions to spend on datacentre infrastructure, this is the case. However, large corporations like banks and multinationals can easily afford their own data centres at multiple locations around the globe, and so already have a solution for better redundancy and lower downtime. I think that the 'cloud' concept to them is about moving data from a fragmented set of desktops and file shares to an internal cloud rather than moving data off their network all together. This allows them to yield the benefits of the cloud (data consolidated, employee access from anywhere on their network, virtual workstations, easier distributed working) without the perceived disadvantages (data ownership and security). M$ have obviously realised this and made a shrewd move that makes use of their existing Office market share (they can claim ‘skill reuse’ when marketing the product and capitalise on the Office brand).

I agree Sharepoint is awful but the sad truth is that the senior managers that make these type of decisions barely use the software, will just see the feature list and trust a brand like M$ over the other solutions out there that work perfectly (and sometimes better) for the rest of us. This is just one of the reasons why enterprise software usually sucks.
Obama Science Advisor proposed forced abortion and sterilization
Verify email. Wtf?
Too weird...here's what I'm getting:

Name results for: danielbmarkham

Search for a username, first or last name

Did you mean daniel garnham ?

We couldn't find anyone named danielbmarkham.
Ask HN: MP3 Crawler
I have been looking into a good way to implement this. I am working on a simple website crawler that will go around a specific set of websites and crawl all the mp3 links into the database.

I don't want to download the files, just crawl the link, index them and be able to search them. So far for some of the sites i have been successful, but for some they use url redirects and stuff which confuses the crawler..

any ideas? how does beemp3.com index all these links?

thanks
What is the difference between L1 and L2 cache? I know that L2 caches are generally larger. Is it more expensive so far as silicon real estate, to make 1k of L1 cache vs 1k of L2 cache?

The last I heard, both L1 and L2 cache were sram based which used 6 transitors per bit. I also remember that ram takes either 2 or 4 transitors per bit + a capacitor. If L1 and L2 cache take the same number of number of transistors per bit, what is the difference?
I prefer to think of this as a way to prevent text in stupid fonts from being useless: at least if it's styled with CSS, you can restyle and copy it, which is a step up from pictures of text.
... finds that some of science's conclusions are widely mistrusted, and hints at a widening partisan divide.

Obviously. Lets face it, the majority of kids don't actually think through and convince themselves of everything they are thought.

Partly because kids are like little fact sponges for facts that come from adult authority. And partly because they don't have to think to pass exams.

The earth goes around the sun. Sure thing Mr. Teacher, I can see the sun going around the earth but I still believe what ever you say. And that's not fake, that's really how it works most of the time. I'd guess only about 15% or less actually think it through.

But now in some regions, for some groups there are competing authorities and they say the earth is 6000 years old. Sure Mr. Preacher, what ever you say.

Fact is, public education is a mass product, a government provided mass product/service. It's crap. More often then not we get smart kids despite public school, not because of it. What public school does reasonably well is teach you the three Rs. You want anything more? Educate yourself.

Solutions:

1. Improve, and I mean really improve, public education in this union of states which covers most of a continent.

2. Do nothing. Wait for this strange modern day cult of anti-Darwinists to run its course and peter out.

3. Give them more rope to hang themselves. Radically shrink the size and role of the feds and increase the economic competition between the states.

Problems:

1. Extremely difficult will take centuries.

3. Counter to the strong natural tendency of governments to grow and grow and grow.

2. Requires no effort - is most likely scenario.

A humble suggestion. Stop trying to save the anto-evolutionists from themselves. Why not ignore these real life trolls? Please point out where they are doing real world damage that matters? And no, it hurts (their) kids is not something you can help with.
The post links to a 114 page paper titled 'What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory" take can be found here http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
Ask HN: Adsense Fake Clicks
For the past 4 days some persons or perhaps a bot keeps coming to my website and clicking on the ads. I went through the logs yesterday and they all seem to be different IPs from what seems legitimate businesses, yet on google analytics it shows them all under one network location.

Am I able to stop this bot or people visiting my website through blocking it somehow by using network location? If not what can I possibly do since they seem to use different IPs all the time?
This is the kind of big player that will cause people to upgrade. It's the old saying that if people want dancing bunnies, people will click on anything put in front of them to get those dancing bunnies.

Other apps will still have to support IE6 though, b/c BigCo's IT Department will be happy to stick with the browser that prevents employees from watching YouTube.
This article contains no apparent information and is from 2005. I had a comment about it, but instead I'm flagging it, and urge you to do the same.
Open sailing: open source floating ocean colonies
They are quite costly compared to other online backup services — and money tends to help with scalability.
the revolution has begun
You know, it's funny. People frequently accuse credit cards of enabling you to spend money freely because you don't see physical cash changing hands, so you don't think about it. Yet here we have a case where if you could actually hand two dollar bills to someone, you might be more likely to do so, whereas when the transaction is entirely virtual you hesitate.

I can't speak for everybody, but I can see where my reluctance to buy XBox games online comes from. (I don't have an iPhone but it would be the same way for me there.) My brain circuits for game buying were initialized when I was a kid, when $10 dollars was a lot, not because of inflation but because it was all the discretionary income I had for several months. (Think 10 or 12 here.) I've gotten over this, because I have noticed the irrationality of dropping $20 for a movie in the store on a whim on some item but choking on a $5 game that will last ten times longer, but it took me a while. Now, while I don't think of myself as rich and actually don't *want" to think of myself as rich lest I become too loose with the money, the truth is that the occasional $10 or $20 purchase isn't going to meaningfully change my financial position. It has taken my brain a bit to notice that. It doesn't help that I've spent several years of my adult life where $20 did matter.

Brains are funny things.
One of the Most Time Consuming Startup Roadblocks
Maybe, but Google Docs is nowhere near as mature as Office. Its main advantage is being web-based, which I'm not sure would translate well to an appliance.
Ask HN: What's your monitor set up?
I'm using a 28" monitor at 1920x1200. I get to see a lot of text, and the text is as big and clear as it gets. I used to work with a dual 19" monitor setup, but now I don't have space on my desk for an extra monitor...
Yes. I'm glad that the web is moving toward the easy signup: [username] [password] [email] (optional), and do everything else later. As a user more than a developer, it's so nice to move past the usability problems of last decade.
I remember when I first saw an episode of The Wire where they were using typewriters. The computer has become so synonymous with the workplace that I thought their office looked really, really barren without one.
I think scientists are partly responsible for their loss of credibility by bowing to leftist pressure and endorsing slogans like "global warming", "global cooling", "the population bomb" and other such nonsense.
This is a nice step forward from services like Outlook Web Access so I can see how it can be easily incorporated in corporate environments.
When licenses attack
"I tend to avoid using 3rd party code, as it invariably ends up being garbage"

Huh? So what do you do, re-implement the whole world from assembler up?
You ppl recommend only UK universities... this is sad, in my opinion. What I like about Europe is that it's the frontier of West and East. Thinking only about the west is narrow mindedness. The western learning philosophy is too "materialist" in my opinion, that's why there is no soul in western (american and english) science. I live in Hungary, and there are some very good universities here too, where you don't have to narrow your "mindsight", as I call it.
I don't talk about chinese and indian computer science... it sucks, I know it very well. But look at Japan or Korea... CS is very advanced there, but they could preserve the soul of science too. There are some countries and universities in Europe too, where you can find the same.
Real-Time Startup CoTweet Raises Real Money
This is a perfect copy of AppleInsider's article:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/07/13/apple_unleashe...
Kind of amusing, but dubious legality.

This is better: http://rsync.net/products/encrypted.html
Ruby on Rails is only infrastructure too, but the equation didn't turn out the same way. Actually, all programming is "just infrastructure".
Simply: Apps are so cheap because the bar for entry is low.
People can't successfully charge $10 for something a reasonably talented high school student could make (and consider a runaway success if it brought in a couple hundred dollars). And I don't think that's a bad thing.

And the popular 'app vs subway token' kinds of comparisons are ultimately unfair.

You don't pay $2 to ride the subway. You pay $2 to get somewhere; because the destination is worth it and you know you'll get there.

If you had no idea where the subway stopped and whether it would get anywhere close to where you were going, let alone in a timely manner, how eager would you be to step through the turnstile for $2?

Similarly, if you didn't know anyone who had successfully gotten where they were going via the subway, or if the last few times you rode the subway you had terrible experiences, how eager would you be to step through the turnstile for $2?
Maybe it was harsh of me to use meebo/libpurple as an example here in that case. Hopefully they're getting a good chunk of the VC money etc.
I dunno, I think this would be a great experiment to try out now and see what you get. It's a great way to weed out the pretenders from the real thing (provided you want programmers who know something about Linux). Plus you're almost guaranteed a larger sampling size due to the economic environment we're in. I'd love to see the statistics and demographics now versus then.
If most of the population arrives at age 20, it would almost totally cut out infant mortality. As the article points out on the first page, infant mortality has the greatest effect on their longevity numbers: "By the same logic, one infant’s dying during childbirth -- 77.8 years too early -- is equal to ten people’s succumbing to lung cancer at age 70."

However, the article is not only about how much healthier New York is relative to the rest of the country -- it's also about how much healthier it is relative to itself about ten years ago. One has to wonder if the immigration rate of 20-year-olds has increased that much in that time.
Dual 24s set up horizontally
The value of this depends on whether you can afford to make that trade of money for time.
Ghost's operating system comes alive
Dear designers: COLUMNS DO NOT BELONG ON THE WEB.

If you want a thin column for design reasons, hey, go for it, but I hate scrolling down, then up, then down, then up, then sideways (in my browser there's a horizontal scroll on that page right now). ONE thin column. ONE. I should be able to read your page with my hand on the space bar and nothing else.

Think of this as the equivalent of the suggestion that no matter how awesome your 10" x 15" design may be, when it needs to fit on a 8"x11.5" paper it doesn't work. Jamming columns into this medium is simply bringing over old, inapplicable biases to a new medium; work with the medium, not against it.
You can report the fraud but #### - Google is just not usually going to say, "You're right and we're wrong" in my experience. I've reported fraud many times and, although I can't be 100% certain due to years of advertising, but I don't recall Google ever once coming back in my favor.
How is this different from doing a google search for filetype:mp3? I don't remember...
The reason is simply that some sites value having a valid e-mail address over the percentage that they loose by having a validate e-mail step.

Like it or not, e-mail is pretty much the only way to get in contact with people who don't login all the time.
Here's where you point out that you compete with Meebo.
I realize that on the whole, broadband connections are getting faster, but 3.3MB for the full font set seems like it might be a little much: http://imgur.com/Y3SHZ.png
Lawyers shine light on real cloud concerns
Firstround and Genacast Ventures Fund: Demdex.com
Keyword spam is another issue. Yesterday i was watching a Microsoft conference on digitalwpc.com and it shows tweets with the #wpc09 keyword. Initially it seemed nice to show tweets on the site, but spam (and sometimes stupid comments) made it annoying after a while.
At home, 15" laptop set to 1440x900 and external 22" set to 1920x1080.
At work, 15" laptop set to 1680x1050 and external 19" set to 1440x900.

Obviously I use two different laptops, but I'd rather go with my home setup than my work setup.
Not really, Meebo don't really have a large groupchat offering, and Mibbit don't really have much of an IM offering :)

point taken though... As I said at the start, I wasn't beating on Meebo, I think they've done a great job.

I'm sure there's other examples, but Meebo was the one that sprang to mind.
That's only one point of several in the article, but I agree that it is one of the most questionable:

"She and a group of scientists assembled 3,075 seniors in their seventies and asked them to traverse a 400-meter course, walking as fast as they could. [...] For every minute longer it took someone to complete the 400-meter walk, he had a 29 percent higher chance of mortality and a 52 percent greater chance of being disabled. People who walk faster live longer -- and enjoy better health in their later years."

The article doesn't explore the alternate explanation that healthier seniors are able to walk faster. (...although, to its credit, it does raise the possibility that people who like to walk are more likely to move to New York.)
in case of a power outage, it would seem important for the police to be able to continue processing data.

I'd say "data processing is a very relative term when typewriters and police officers on hunt & peck shift are involved.

If hospitals can survive a power outage then I'm sure someone could find a way to make the police survive through one, too.
Yes, he does. Not much though. But he has quite some students working under him. Van Steen is also there and very active. But it largely depends on your field - software engineering sucks but AI, OS, DS or bioinformatics are pretty good I think.

Plus it's loads of fun studying in Amsterdam ;)
Real life Wall-E
I'd like to learn more about the relationship between keywords and tweets.

Are there programs that capture tweets in realtime that have certain keywords? Are there correlation tools that map between users and keywords? Can you have something like PageRank, only for tweets (or tweeters?)
The inaugural issue of Rejecta Mathematica is now available
Rejecta Mathematica is a real open access online journal publishing only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences.

The URL for the journal: http://math.rejecta.org/
The first issue is at:
http://math.rejecta.org/vol1-num1

enjoy!

Igor.
I have reported it already. Google is able to detect that the clicks are fake, so in adsense it shows 0 earnings and ecpm. I do not know if this will effect future legitimate earnings though and I do not know how to stop it.
Ask HN: Do you trust IE8 Compatibility View?
I'm just wondering how reliable IE8's Compatibility view is for testing purposes. I've viewed my site in both IE8 Compatibility View and IE Tester, and they look similar, but the javascript performance seems better in IE8 CV still.

I'm actually wondering if either of these are an accurate representation of IE7?
Vista Health
This is great. It's going to take big and popular sites like Youtube and Facebook to finally kill of IE6.
Oh, I think this will be hilarious...Everyone loves to see Comic Sans in every corporate email, because it's a "laid back" font. Now we get to have it plastered all over the web too. Every blogspot blog will not be graced with paragraphs of it.
It was all incredible then and there was a value to the experience which is far cheaper these days. Further, you are fearful of getting suckered into something that's a thirty second glance and which you realise is rubbish. The 'desktop' real-estate on the phone is precious and you don't want it to be cluttered with rubbish but on the other hand once you've paid for something you won't get rid of it because you've paid for it.
The reasons are: 1. People who don't like you won't be able to subscribe you to (legitimate) stuff you don't want, therefore flooding your inbox with legitimate e-mails that won't be blocked by SPAM filters. 2. You are making sure you didn't make a typo in your e-mail in case you need to reset your password, so that somebody with similar address doesn't get your password. 3. Obvious marketing legal reasons (double opt-in, i.e. you did confirm that you want to receive marketing spam from us).

The "easy" signup isn't with username-password-email-submit, it's with OpenID.
Not bad. Immediate thought is that I would like to have the ability to make more than 1 digest. I don't really want -everything- all at once. I might want all my deal feeds to come in one email, and all my news feeds to come in another email.

A simple [Add new digest] feature would be nice, where each digest can be set up on a different schedule, and with a custom email subject line. Then when you add, you add a feed to a particular digest.
Delicous Thumbnails or alternate service?
Hello, I use delicious bookmarking service a lot and would really like to see a thumbnail view of each bookmark.

I previously used favthumbs.com before they decided to shut it down.

Does anyone have a browser based solution for providing thumbnail views of all their bookmarks in delicious.

Much appreciated.

Also, if you have a better bookmarking service that supports thumbnails please chime in.
The problem is how the media presents science.

When 1 whack job PDH with 3 assistants and a new theory is given just as much air time if not more as what 100,000 PHD's think on the average story people can't tell what the trends really are. It's a breaking story when Bubba and his 6 month study of 50 people says soda might cause or prevent cancer, but it is old news by the time the results of a 10 year 50,000 people study disprove that link.