skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah but sending digital data is so fucking cheap that they'd digitize it for maybe the first 100 screens in the country, right?

It may be a wise investment for distributors to just buy the damn digital projectors for the theaters. It's expensive but they'll amortize the distribution costs over time.
It's somewhat unfortunate that the beer is so terrible - like I'd forgotten how much I don't like Dos Equis until I ordered one (as a result of the ad).
Saying newspapers aren't in the fact distribution business because they're in the advertising business is like saying Google isn't in the search business because they're in the advertising business.
I think it is more aimed at making him look very sophisticated. He is above always drinking beer.
I don't read it that way. I think it's part of the character in the ads - for lack of a better word, he's too cool to always drink beer, and to always drink one particular brand. Doing so wouldn't be very...interesting of him.

Similar to what the article suggests:

But the most interesting man hasn't actually been conceived as a brand icon a la Mr. Clean or Ronald McDonald. He's more like a celebrity endorser. One who happens to be fictional. He doesn't shill with brio for the simple reason that it would undercut his claim to awesomeness. The most interesting man in the world, by definition, would not be found enthusiastically endorsing a mass-market consumer product.

I think it's also designed to be a link that the guys watching the ad can hook onto. Most guys (and this ad is squarely aimed at guys) won't only drink beer at a bar, and if they do, they won't generally only have one type. So if you follow the analysis that he's a celebrity endorsement, what he's saying is Interesting people - like yourself - vary what they drink, so when it comes to beer, try this one.
What you are talking about is market efficiency at work. You can't accept some things about the market and not accept others. The market can be viewed as a machine that takes information and turns it into a stock price. Previous information, such as an analyst's predictions, do influence the price of a stock. If the company releases their earnings, a new piece of information, it is only natural that the price would adjust to reflect that. What many people fail to understand, is that an earnings announcement carries with it much more information than just how the recent quarter was.

Now, with that said, I will say that I don't believe the markets are 100% efficient. No matter how many papers Sharpe, Fama, French, and others publish, I will never change my mind. Globally, the markets are extremely efficient, but there are local inefficiencies. Identifying and exploiting the local inefficiencies are what makes one really good at making money off of the markets.
Huxley & Orwell's Dystopias
This gives me some interesting ideas for ASCII-oriented obfuscated code...
"hNews can be thought of as inheriting from hAtom, since parsers and tools that do not understand the hNews extensions can still parse the hAtom content."

So in other words if you dont use their parser then you wont get any of their restrictions. Are they going to FORCE us to use the parser they decide?
sounds more like indentured service
It's refreshing to see a beer ad that doesn't take the viewer for an idiot. What we see here in Montreal right now is just ridiculous:

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/1517/bud1t.jpg
JAJAJAJAJAJAJA JAJAJA
-elguason
Are America's Millionaires Disappearing?
Obviously, creating a better product would not be difficult - people brew more delicious beer in their basements every day. Creating a better-tasting product at the same price point and volume as Dos Equis, however, is probably extremely difficult.
99% of Google's revenue is directly from ads. Less than 1% comes from licensing search technology and selling search appliances. Of course they're in the advertising business!

Search is just one vehicle (among several) for delivering targeted ads. Heck, they make about as much money selling ads on non-Google sites through AdSense as they do selling ads on their own search results pages.
Absent any other license, it depends on how the courts define "redistributing" and "copying."
Hard liquor or alcopops. I read it as targeting men who don't really like beer, but drink it sometimes to fit in. "Drink Dos Equis: it doesn't suck as much as other beers."
I don't think Gruber was arguing from his own position there. He's talking about the way most people think.
英聯合王國-- pretty much a direct semantic translation of United Kingdom. It's pretty formal sounding, though.
Micro payments are the solution. There needs to be a third party micro payments company that acts as an "Open ID" for logging in. Then you could just pay $0.05 per article you read, or whatever the content provider chooses.
I downvoted because I believe that slavery can be created as a best alternative. Imagine if someone said to a starving person, "If you become a slave you'll have food every day."

That person may become a slave by choice, but only at the loss of freedom. Because the negative ramifications of slavery are not presented to the potential slave, they are making a choice with limited information.
Okay, I get it, it's funny... but seriously?

You're a company whose business model depends almost entirely on Microsoft being around to write its software so your software can run it on other OSes. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets
Pure capitalist principles do mean that everything has to have a cost. I'm a die hard capitalist but give away source code, and other content for free.

Google gives everything away a lot for free and makes a ton of money, so obviously it's not giving stuff away that the problem -- Its outdated notions of how their business should be operating and what their value add is.
The ads are created by a company that imports the beer and markets it in the U.S. So they actually can't make the beer better.
Ask HN: What are the best tools for doing reports on your data?
What are the best tools out there (open source preferably) to produce reports regularly from our app database?

Like many of you, we track a lot of things in our startup, from analytics to the funnel, to internal business processes. However, periodically we'd like to see other more detailed events for sanity or cross checking, in a report-type fashion. This is the kind of thing that Excel would do nicely, after extracting from our DB (MySQL, via csv), but that's a pain to do periodically. We'd like to see things like a graph of events of type X per day, or per day of the week, or per week, for a certain period. At the moment we have a few reports generated on demand in the admin pages, with our app (in RoR) a graphics library using a fixed set of queries.

What tools do you use/recommend for doing this?
Some friends and I once devised a Dos Equis ad campaign. Never did anything with it, but it was awesome.

Goes something like this:

Wide sweeping view of a town in Mexico, dusty and full of life

Voice (singing): Dos Equis, a Mexican beer

Voice: Ray, the guy I buy it from

Ray: Hola!

Voice: Me, the guy, I buy beer for

Voice: Far, a long way to the bar

sweeping shot of the town

Voice: So, I think I'll have a beer

Ray offers a beer

Voice: La, lalalalalala, HAVE ANOTHER BEER

A few people have gathered around Ray

Tea vendor offers tea to the camera

Voice: Tea? No thanks, I'll have a beer

Voice: That brings us back to....

A small crowd has gathered, all singing now

Large chorus: Dos Equis, a Mexican beer

Shot of Mexican flag

LC: Ray, the guy I buy it from

Crowd, with Ray at the front shouts

Crowd: HOLA!!!

LC: Me, the guy, I buy beer for

LC: Far, a long way to the bar

By now, the entire town is partying

LC: So, I think I'll have a beer

Sound of hundreds of tankards clinking

LC: La, lalalalalala, HAVE ANOTHER BEER

Crowd cheers
Crowd mocks tea vendor

LC: Tea? No thanks, I'll have a beer

LC: That brings us back to....

Fireworks start going off

Entire Town: Dos

fireworks

ET: Equis,

fireworks

ET: a Mexican beer

fireworks

ET: Ray, the guy I buy it from

Ray, completely naked, jumps off the roof using a Mexican flag as a parachute, screaming

Ray: HOLAAAAAAAA!!!

ET: Me, the guy, I buy beer for

ET: Far, a long way to the bar

Entire town marching down the road, out of the town

ET: So, I think I'll have a beer

Crowd cheers

Fireworks

ET: La, lalalalalala, HAVE ANOTHER BEER

Crowd cheers louder

More fireworks

ET: Tea? No thanks, I'll have a beer

Tea vendor throws a bucket full of tea over the crowd

ET: That brings us back to....

Town explodes, fireworks everywhere, buildings shattering into shards that turn into splashes of beer. A huge column of smoke now rises where the town used to be. Green flashes are seen in the cloud of smoke, and the Millennium Falcon swoops out of the smoke, with two Tie fighters hot on its tail.

Fade to logo
When I was an intern, I witnessed, helpless, a newborn losing most of his left hemisphere in the first hours of his life because of a massive meningeal hemorrhage (he's hemophiliac). He was only left with an atrophic, gliotic frontal lobe (and an intact right hemisphere).

It was 5 years ago. Today, he can walk, use both hands, speaks two languages and has a normal mental development. He's paretic (reduced force) on the right side and a bit temperamental, but he should live a quasi-normal life (he will have some difficulties at sport).

That's just amazing :-)
Ahhhhhh yeah, I'm going to have to buy some of this beer just because the ads are so good. Much better than all the other beer ads.
Actually, I don't think micropayments PER content is ever going to be popular. For example: "Monetize The Audience, Not The Content" I don't know whether I should even read the article, because the title gives utterly obvious advise, even if content (maybe) isn't. On the contrary many promising titles deliver disappointing content. How do I decide whether I want to pay those 5 cents to read particular article?

On the other hand, there's a monthly subscription, which I would probably buy from some reputable sources.

But, I agree with your "third party micro payments company" idea - it's 2009 and online payments still suck. Especially for micropayments. Especially for all of us outside of America.
Thanks Scott! I formatted it a bit better and put Ask HN. I should have realized.
Internet Service Provider, Indeed
I can understand your complaints. But syndication (the last S in RSS acronym) means exactly that. And that's what the protocol is intended for. Feed readers came later.
The great thing is that they can hit the radio well, and their websites are great: http://dosequis.com/academy/
I calculate this differently. Instead of extrapolating the 17% decline year over year I extrapolate the negative growth in revenue in dollars. A straight line drops much quicker.

By this projection I can arrive at the conclusion that whatever I happen to be doing in 2012 my company will overtake Microsoft since their operating revenue will be negative.
HiFi Downloads
download games music movies ebooks graphics videos from multi servers
Awesome joke. Reminds me of my (actual) business plan projections which extrapolated will allow me to repay the entirety of US debt to china in 15 years time.
So you AP and this guy together: http://gawker.com/5305503/lets-screw-up-the-entire-internet-...

and what do you get?
"Its not stealing if you don't get caught" bullshit!
Advertising to men who drink alcopops or cider is very different, it's much less traditionally masculine and much more, ermm, metrosexual. I don't imagine there's much crossover.
Have you considered just putting together something that ties together the amazon shopping APIs and a blog. If your client is making cds and getting the UPC/EANs it should be trivial to sign up for amazon services and this has the added benefit that your product becomes available through amazon itself and through the various shopping formats they make available.

this link http://bit.ly/yaIpc goes to the sign up page. From looking at it you need at leas the pro version if you want to create new products.

Good luck.
Mike Merrill is an American individual who already has succeeded in becoming a publicly traded person:

http://kmikeym.com/

Shares are valued in real time by trades made on his open public market, implemented as a web application. Shareholders vote on major life decisions, such as whether he should engage in certain business ventures, and even on very personal questions, such as whether he should get a vasectomy.

Buy some shares, try it out!
In frequent interaction with native Mandarin speakers, I'll vouch for the first statement: mistaking 'he' and 'she', 'him' and 'her' is easily the most common mistake I hear.

The character is different, sure, but the female ta (她) is a relatively recent linguistic invention. I'm not sure about the inanimate ta (它) but I imagine a similar story. In casual speech there is really little distinction. If someone needs to clarify, they tend to use 女 and 男.
Modern Hobo Codes
I was a little surprised to learn that they blatantly shoot the stuff they're going to use in out-of-context edits. (Like the reaction shots, sitting there while Wyatt just reads off answers in different tones and styles, etc.) I always thought they just asked a ton of questions - some of them odd on purpose to get reactions - and then cut together stuff from that, but it seems they're even more direct.
Google sells attention to advertisers via its distribution channels. Their search engine is certainly the most successful distribution channel, and they have (with somewhat less success) added other distribution channels such as AdSense, which is a partnership distribution model.

Whereas NYT is obligated to invest in journalism to generate distribution, Google invests in useful tools. It appears that investing in useful tools is a more efficient way of generating distribution than quality journalism, at least for the time being.
I wouldn't worry. Whites are going down the crapper pretty fast too. Take a look at this chart: http://blog.american.com/?p=714

Marriage is for wealth-preservers and wealth-creators. That's not the direction that society is trending.
> Some consultant really sold them on something that is going to be quite lucrative (for the consultant obviously)

There are a lot of managers and high-placed people who have no understanding of computers, but are impressed by pretty diagrams. And many consulting firms exist to part them from their money.
Just goes to show, it's only a matter of time before enough breakthroughs occur that solar power overtakes fossil fuels.
There's kencc compiler/linker suite, written by Ken Thompson. It's almost ANSI compatible, with preprocessor limited on a purpose and an extension for easier nested structure member access.

I think there's a port to POSIX/ELF environment.
I hate those ads.

They're the very definition of "uncanny valley". The women are just real looking enough so that they look human from a distance but closer they're very obviously cg plasticy. It's so creepy.
Nice concept: Asking visitors how much time they have.
This is what Zattoo is supposedly working on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zattoo

They've been trying to expand into the U.S. for at least a year now, but it hasn't happened so far.
How much of this is scientific breakthroughs and how much is the climate? Israel is hot and sunny for most of the year, the same is not true of the upper Midwest US for example.
The 500 Millisecond Advantage
"Each of us gets the right to download and play whatever we want, and in return we're legally obligated to pay an annual fee to some ASCAP-like organization that divides the money up among music publishers. Now, I like this idea, but the obvious downside is: Who is a music publisher, and how do we figure out how to divide the money?"

I don't like this idea at all. Why should I, as a non-artist, have to find a way to provide a work product or service that people are willing to pay me for and artists are allowed to create stuff that no one is willing to pay for? Or artists are allowed to create something which can not be marketed and an income stream can naturally be built around? If no one is willing (or able) to pay for your service, there is no market for it. And without a market, there's no way to determine which is the "good art" and which is the "bad art" and which artists should be encouraged and which should stop making art and get jobs flipping burgers. The very fact that it is massively gamable (as we've seen in other industries), as you point out, is reason enough, for me, to avoid even attempting it.
> I suppose I should be happy they didn't decide that I need to install a Silverlight player to read their articles.

Maybe that idea just hasn't occurred to them yet. After all, we're all gagging for their news, so much so that we're not only willing to pay for it, we're happy to install special software (which only runs on Windows, naturally) to view it!

My prediction: AP will waste about $50 million on this, then quietly forget the whole idea. The idiot responsible for it won't get sacked, they'll get a big bonus and pension.
seems to me it would be a little dishonest to do it any other way. At least this way the interviewee can't come back and claim they didn't know they were going to be made as ass of.

Then again I can see some of the characters they are interviewing just doing whatever simply to "be on tv".
The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

That's an amazing trait. As an aide, to get a more complete view of what Thinking Machines was don't miss this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Thinking-Machines.aspx
built completely from scratch, no framework.
I'm sure your depth perception is perfectly adequate for anything you'd need it for, but I doubt it's truly as good as someone with two eyes.
The One Percent [2008]
The web is a great place to explore new and more usable alternatives for keeping track of entities/objects. It's too bad these are just flashy hierarchical tree views.
Ask HN: Why ESP do not allow you to cancel a message if not read yet?
Ask HN: Why ESP do not allow you to cancel a message if not read yet?
I like the French word which serves as a sort of vague (in person and gender) third-person pronoun: on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_personal_pronouns#On

It's short and adjacent enough in meaning (one person) that I think English could adopt it wihtout much trouble. "On who hesitates is lost." "Let on who is without sin cast the first stone."
HadoopDB: MapReduce over Relational Data
It wan't meant as a boycott.

I just think that the author's recommendation for bloggers is ill-advised. It would be better to ignore AP rather than to pay extra attention to them.
This is a very timely post as I have been researching a very similar approach that the US, Canadian, and UK governments among others have been using for years.

It turns out that this is how the US Government has been financing its operations since FDR declared the US bankrupt in 1933 (remember when they took all the gold?)

Here is how it works:
1. Your parents applied for a birth certificate creating a corporate legal fiction with the name spelled in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS which is a public trust that they control.
2. The government floats a bond in the amount of $1 million dollars against the name and upon various events (applying for SSN#, completing high school, university, etc) the value of the bond is increased.
3. The bond is backed by YOU (well actually, on their ability to tax and levy your future labor)
4. They collect the proceeds of this bond to fund their operations and 'pay you benefits'
5. Since your parents (on your behalf) applied for this 'benefit' this fraud is considered legal under contract law. It doesn't matter that they do not know the implications of what they are doing. This falls under the Latin legal maxim Caveat Emptor (Buyer beware)

I know this sounds outlandish. I thought so too, until I looked into it. Check for yourself by Googling 'birth certificate bond'

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this information is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Do your own research!
Silly Javascript
Retrieving Kernel32's Base Address
I don't think people understand the consequences of not being the administrator of your own hardware. It's like we're leasing everything, and always hoping our providers give us what's best for us. It's a lead society, as opposed to a thinking culture.
As an aside: Reuters pushed for an open syndication standard--NewsML--back in 2001 (http://about.reuters.com/newsml/). It's become a standard endorsed by the International Press Telecommunications Council.
Haven't they aired those exact same ads every year since the dawn of man? >:(
Yeah, that graphic is a great example of the ability to turn any crap idea into a flashy graphic. The stage that is missing on this flowchart is "and a miracle occurs", although putting the word "container" and "beacon" in quotes kind of says that. Magic beans indeed.

I keep seeing this meme pop up though:

"Format protects content everywhere and enables RSS syndication, enhanced search, mobile apps and pay content models"

The only thing it potentially "enables" is "pay content models", Big Media always throws in the other "benefits" as if those things don't currently exist ("finally, RSS syndication will be ENABLED by this!") or don't currently work.

RIAA tried this one too: if only we can sprinkle this magic pixie dust over our dying industry, all these things that we already have will be provided to us. I at first had typed that as "magic pixel dust", which is a good name for DRM.

And this appears as a technical solution, but then the usage of iconography like a gavel for "enforcement" reveals that they either know this is an unworkable solution and they need expanded legal support, or they think that using this needs to be legally mandated, neither of which will actually work in the end.
That's a good suggestion. They currently sell CDs and vinyl through traditional distributors. They might also sell other merchandise too. Amazon would be a good way of tying it up.

The only objection might be is that they are part of a very independent/non-corporate scene which might see using Amazon as "selling-out" (not my view, but some people seem to think like this...). Still, Amazon's definitely something to investigate, thanks.
Thanks for the interest, but at the moment the focus is on Europe, US and Canada.
Chomsky's an odd one. He gets a lot of respect from academics and laypeople alike but a) no one in academia has ever gotten his theories to model anything in the real world and b) the laypeople who like him tend to already share his politics.

He's a very, very talented public speaker and writer - talented enough that no-one questions what he's saying.
Two of the four examples still use the gendered possessive pronoun 'his', so really don't illustrate the use of 'yo' for gender-indeterminate reference.

Really, the challenge isn't when a specific person of known gender is referenced, but when a person/role of unspecified gender needs to be referenced.

'Yo' is so close to the second-person pronoun 'you', and already used as a call-to-attention 'Yo!', that using it for third-person singular would be problematic.

"You should be detail-oriented, but your secretary must be detail-obsessed. Still, yo should be able to overlook minor errors by others."

Does 'yo' refer to the 'you' this is spoken to, or to the secretary? (A 'he' or 'she' or truly useful gender-indeterminate third-person-singular pronoun would be clear in that position.)