skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the plaintiff proved only $0.99 in actual damages per song from Tenenbaum's use and apparently

The plaintiff didn't "prove" "$0.99 in actual damages per song", or any other figure, for that matter. It was in fact the defence that brought in the expert witness who demonstrated downloading the song via AmazonMP3 (this turned out to be counter-productive, because it showed just how easy and cheap it was to behave legally).

Let me say that again: Plaintiffs did not prove any figure for "actual damages", whether $0.99 or otherwise. When asked this specific question by the defence, the plaintiff's experts and witnesses repeatedly stated that it is up to the jury to determine the statutory damages.

You cannot separate the awarded damages into the compensatory and punitive damages, because the jury hasn't given you the information to do so. Therefore your argument on the constitutionality of the compensatory/punitive damage ratio falls apart.

If you think I'm wrong, the right way to proceed at this point is to provide evidence from court materials, not other cases that you think are relevant or your guesses. All the information is freely available, so there's really no excuse for you to be more specific in relation to the facts of the case. In particular, if you can provide me with evidence from court documents that the jury used or was instructed to use a certain figure as the "compensatory damage" figure and told to derive a punitive one on top of that, then you will have proved that you are correct.

Otherwise, you're just another lawyer emitting hot air -- rather like Professor Nesson.
This sums up pretty much exactly how I feel about America having lived here for 6 years. I both love it and hate it here. This bit was particularly good:

A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents.
I disagree, but had to mod you up from the zero you got before I came here: I think your opinion is legitimate and does not deserve a down vote. I think what is -- not killing, but corrupting -- HN is down votes on opinions one disagrees with. This is a crack for groupthink to seep in, which is dangerous.
This paper by ewd gives his overview of the industry and some of the reasons that "reality" seems out of step with good approaches.
Now try the agony of not being in grad school.
Build Profit Not DMCA Suits: YouTube and the Wedding March
This article was strong because it balanced critique with commendation. It's an interesting observation that America's "bigness" in many things is simultaneously it's largest advantage and disadvantage.

I've often felt that Americans tend to have a kind of naive optimism compared to folks from other countries. In fact, while living abroad I've felt judged by Western Europeans in particular for that quality in myself (some of my best friends are German and French, FWIW). But I think that attribute is what has contributed to much of the success in America, particularly in the entrepreneurial crowd.
So is this a meta meta discussion?
The Economist ran a cover story on this a few weeks back.

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13990207

A much better piece than this one IMO.
One way to solve this is "subreddits," but that has a lot of its own problems (e.g. its almost impossible to start a new subreddit, even for an important distinction).

I always thought a Netflix-prize like mechanism, e.g. "people who voted similarly to you also liked," would be much more fine grained & much more useful than subreddits.

Give PG's influence on using Bayesian classifiers (a form of machine learning) for detecting spam email, using machine learning on HN would seem to have a sympathetic ear.
Here's an addendum to my story:

I called my Dad, a lawyer, as I was walking out of the courthouse to brag that I was officially 1-0 in trial and planned on keeping it that way.

I told him that I was upset all my preparation went to waste. He said it wasn't wasted, as you've said. Basically, in these types of areas... they just try to win the cases against the unprepared, and don't even bother with the people who are prepared. He said you'd be amazed how often that simply showing up prepared is sufficient to win without a fight. (he wasn't talking about tax assessment stuff in particular, just in general low-end legal stuff).
Maybe the title wasn't titillating enough? Or maybe it was the link to scribd (I avoid scribd, its just a personal annoyance thing though).

Or maybe people here would rather read a brief news summary than a paper? Who knows :)
I've flown back and forth Between Toronto and Amsterdam on a two week schedule for over two years. My take away lesson is this:

The body can adapt fairly easily to a longer day but it hates shortening days (and that's my body, so YMMV).

My trick to deal with jet-lag was very simple. Extend your day. Make sure you have plenty of low energy things to do but stay awake on the day that you travel.

Going 'west' makes your day 6 hours longer, going 'east' then makes your day 18 hours longer. 18 is pushing it a bit so I usually would go to bed around 10 in the evening and sleep for 9 hours instead of going to bed at 12 and sleeping for 7.

This simple trick seemed to work for me and I never suffered from jet lag after I started doing it, before it was absolute hell. It would take me roughly until the time that I was ready to leave again to acclimatize.
"who I call" is a massive subset of my social graph.

Most of the things I do are arranged by email/IM. We agree to go to someone's house at a particular time, and then we do so. I'd only call if I managed to get lost.
Comparing the ECommerce Strategies of Sears & Walmart
I often use tests as quasi documentation when learning someone else's code. How does this function work? Let's check out the test.
Related blog post here: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/07/31/tracking-trends-with...

Full source code on Github: http://github.com/datawrangling/trendingtopics/tree/master

Dataset on Amazon Public Data Sets: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...
I was referring to the unproven damages you wrote about above, the unproven distribution damages. Fact is, at trial, the only actual damages proven was the unauthorized personal use of a $0.99 song.

"Had there been more of an onus on the record companies to provide more evidence of actual damages, they would almost surely have been able to provide at least rough estimates ..." Yet, it looks like they didn't, likely because they would have been much, much lower than the $150,000 per infringement available under the statute, and they wanted the jury to think big numbers. It was a tactical gamble, the same type made daily in trials across the country.

Like I wrote in the post, Congress can't simply call a duck a goose and get around the due process protections established by the Gore, Philip Morris, and Campbell cases. The statute's language does not trump due process and the fundamental fact that we have actual damages proven at trial (~$0.99 per song) and a grossly excessive award ($22,500.00 per song) awarded by way of a punitive element ("willful"). They are "punitive" damages by any measure.

That undoubtedly triggers due process protections.
RE: Wikis: Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki, and is very easily installable on an intranet environment: (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki)

RE: Twitter: Yammer. (https://www.yammer.com/)
The real agony of grad school starts when the classes are over and you have nothing do distract you from working on your used-to-be-interesting-but-now-not-so-much research project .all. .the. .time...

Plus it was at that exact time that my RSI hit. Classes had apparently proven enough of a variation in tasks that when I started doing research all the time, 99% computer work, it rapidly went downhill.
At the local level it's less interesting I think because then you could have a complete economic collapse based on local phenomena (such as a plant closure).

It's at the state level were you can really see the aggregate effects of the competing ideologies.
Why did you give up? It sounds like you were on the way to profitability.

If you want to do it on a larger scale, the trick would be to a) sign on sufficient lecturers of sufficient quality, b) obtain the proper facilities, and c) attract enough students. In terms of c), I imagine that it might behoove you to talk to talk to the unemployment office in your country; I know that here in Norway there are a lot of funds available for retraining of out-of-work workers.
Tim Langdell is well-known for being a total dick about the use of the word "Edge" in games. He's also on the board of the Independent Game Developers Association. There's a recall effort afoot as a result of his pigheadedness: http://corvus.zakelro.com/2009/07/its-fun-to-stay-at-the-igd...
Building Startup Sales Teams: Tips For Founders
"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill." - Robert Heinlein
>Just goes to show that if you make the extra effort a lot of the time things will tend to work out.

That makes no sense. His effort had no influence on how things worked out.
Thanks for asking. Because I file names phonologically in my brain, I may have been confusing Farber with Fuller, mentioned in the link I posted above. I do NOT recall anything I specifically disliked about Farber's book, upon review of that link, so consider that comment withdrawn and applied to Fuller's book.
Awesome stuff. Nice to see a deep practical discussion on building working systems.
how about handpick?
No, I mean much cheaper with better objective health outcomes. Or are you seriously suggesting that the current US system works better than (for example) the current UK system?
Under No Circumstances Should You Decide To Go It Alone
You might be interested in some of the ideas of Subtext (http://www.subtextual.org/).

"Subtext takes the position that both text and diagrams have the same inherent limitation: they are paper-based media. Subtext represents programs as complex data structures that can not be fully printed out in a human-readable form. Text and diagrams are used to interactively present the program, not as a source encoding of it. This is the same approach taken by WYSIWYG applications like word processors and spreadsheets. Subtext is WYSIWYG programming."
Interview with Chong Yidong and Stefan Monnier, Emacs maintainers
I made the suggestion above

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736241

that anyone who claims that Esperanto is easy to learn and easy to understand is welcome to post parallel texts in Esperanto alongside statements in English about how much harder English is to learn than Esperanto. People get a lot of practice in English, because of the abundant opportunities to use English to communicate, but few people make much use of Esperanto, even when arguing in favor of Esperanto.

See also my extensive list of factual questions about Esperanto posted further above,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=734594

which no one has answered in this thread.
A pandemic doesn't come about from diseases that evolve within the same population, for at least 2 reasons. The first is that the disease co-evolves with the population, and being a pandemic is not a good survival strategy. A dead host cannot continue to spread copies of a disease. Secondly, large parts of the population would have partial immunity from infections leading up to a would be 'pandemic' strain, causing it to not be a pandemic at all.

So to answer a later point, lots of disconnected hamlets are far more likely to breed pandemics, since a disease can evolve to be highly virulent in one population, and suddenly get dumped on a population with no natural (through antibodies or natural selection) resistance to it.
Apple bans App Store’s 3rd-most prolific developer
Radioshack Rebrands as The Shack
Oh gawd, reading thru TC comments confirms my impression that they jumped the shark.
U.S. condemns eviction of Arab families from East Jerusalem
"Someone (unfortunately I forget who) mentioned that the best thing an academic can have is a good enemy. Your friends will, perhaps, read through your papers and make a few comments. But only an enemy will read through an entire book, for free, finding every error and questionable statement."

That's a good point that gets no argument from me. Here on HN, we can all appreciate best those fellow participants who hold us to our facts and ask for proof of our statements. I learn a lot from HN participants like that.

Obligatory link to a Paul Graham essay on a closely related topic:

http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html
It was great to have Pete Skomoroch speak about this at the hadoop meetup in DC. I am really glad that it is being shared with the rest of the community now. Cloudera is collecting good use cases and providing innovative ideas in their blog. Thanks again for sharing Pete.
Doh, not sure if I can update it
Counterexample:

I, personally, am in love with the "Trends" pie chart on mint.com. It allows you to drill down and expand each wedge of the pie into its sub-components. I feel like this would be much less meaningful if it were expressed as, say, a bar graph.
The article makes good points, but I really haven't come across all that many such badly-executed or badly-conceived pie charts. Admittedly, that might be like the way I don't personally happen to come across a lot of hand-made signs with quotation marks used as emphasis, but they're definitely out there.
That's pretty bullshit, I don't care if the guy's apps were questionable, don't approve them. Killing an entire business in 1 day, is pretty fucked up.
On the same note, people should find this useful as well - http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Also, nitrogen fertilizer an be made out of thin air, if you are willing to expend enough energy to do so. Nuclear, solar, wind and tidal power are virtually limitless. Sure, the price for such fertilizer is higher than natural gas derived fertilizers, but isn't the weekly standard crowd the one saying that if you get out of people's way they will innovate us out of any and all problems?
http://www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperi...

That's not a super practical domain name.
Sounds like burnout. (My one-year graduate school foray was strikingly similar.) This is why I think it's generally a bad idea to go into grad school straight out of undergrad.

Students are encouraged to go straight in because of the (false) perception that a mathematician's best work is in his 20s, meaning that a two-year gap between undergrad and graduate school would be a tragic loss, but the reality doesn't line up with this perception.
I suppose Americans do have a naive optimism--I've always perceived British culture in general to be cynical and negative, but that may simply be in comparison to my own optimistic culture. I attribute a lot of that to history. The fall of Europe's empires in the 20th century was the failure of their grand national experiments, and on top of it, much of the world faced immense death and destruction during the wars of the 20th century. Europe, China, and Japan were destroyed in WWII, Korea and Vietnam faced significant destruction in their wars, and most of the communist states faced significant internal destruction through mass murder of various kinds. America largely escaped this level of destruction.
Yes, better to move further away from the fringes where they have experience and can actually be heard through all the noise. Moving into a crowded, commoditized industry with entrenched players where everybody sells the same shit is definitely a safer bet. Throw in a little rebranding to lose countless years of brand equity and I think we've got a recipe for success!
Did you find the work world even more time-fragmented than grad school?

Hmm, the post comes down to saying that grad school is run on the manager's schedule rather than the maker's schedule.

http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
I did mention off-campus housing as acceptable. Most med/law students I've known did live in apartments close to campus, but they were definitely immersed in their respective student communities.

Perhaps the issue with living in your parents' home is that you aren't forced to opt into the campus community because you can still hang out with your old friends from high school.
He's submitted 900 applications and he's only the third most prolific developer? Who are 1 and 2?
Warn HN: Paypal is completely down this morning
Paypal has been flaky and crashing all morning, random 500 errors for authenticated pages. Around 10:45AM PDT paypal.com was changed to read:

We're sprucing things up right now, but we should be done by 11:20AM PDT.

Want the details? Checkout the PayPal Announcement Board.
http://announcements.paypal.com/us/
As far as I know, and if I am missing something please point it out.

Monoculture is efficient because of our methods of working and harvesting. Not because the plants grow better that way. If we had better lighter machinery that could discriminate different types of plants, we wouldn't need monocultures.
...there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take.

Both of my grandfathers sacrificed everything to come here so that I could have a better life. They knew 100 years ago what many, sadly, still don't understand. The "poverty of alternative" transcends time as well as space.

They created the drive. It's my job to make sure it continues.
I think that from the very beginning, Yahoo was build as a destination website, and search was never their core business. It was a good move from their part to stop wasting money on search and focus on developing their content. The only thing is that they could have to do it sooner...
In the law office environment, Word fulfills at least the following functions:

1) It avoids incompatibility issues in document formatting (i.e., you know that, if you created it in Word, others in your own office and elsewhere will be able to open, use, modify, and save it without any problems - a critical item as documents are exchanged among different parties in a variety of ways in such an environment).

2) It fits in with document-management systems that allow you to create and store your documents, in all their different versions, on local servers that you control and with which you can preserve the confidentiality of client documents.

3) It provides a baseline for determining that new employees will be efficient in their word processing skills (i.e., they must have a minimum set of skills that includes being able to work efficiently in Word).

4) It does all the things the you point out in your items 1-4 (particularly your observations about being bound to the idea of the "page").

Any substitute for Word would need to leave me capable of interacting with clients, staff, fellow workers, opposing attorneys, courts, government agencies, etc. in this same seamless manner without incompatibilities while using the "page" model through which we all are accustomed to relating to one another.

Call it the pull of the legacy, but it is an overwhelming pull. Everything else is bleeding edge from the standpoint of having to run a real business in the current environment.

This does not mean it can never change, but it will not change based merely on an idealized set of ideas of how it can be done better or on something that might work in one environment but does not port well into the standard office.
Clever, yet informative and to the point. I can't upvote you enough.
what are they going to call their whois service?

nslookup?
> Fact is, at trial, the only actual damages proven was the unauthorized personal use of a $0.99 song.

Wrong, as I've pointed out to you numerous times. Defence did not have any expert testimony on damages (this was indeed one of big blunders of the Tenenbaum team, and was due to their basing the case on whimsical fair-use arguments). Plaintiffs did have an expert on damages (Stanley Liebowitz), but neither he nor any of the plaintiffs witnesses contributed any proof of the "actual damages." If you wish to persist in making this claim, please provide documentary evidence.

> Yet, it looks like they didn't, likely because they would have been much, much lower than the $150,000 per infringement available under the statute, and they wanted the jury to think big numbers. It was a tactical gamble, the same type made daily in trials across the country.

They didn't because they didn't need to, as I've said elsewhere. Everything else is pure speculation on your part.

> the fundamental fact that we have actual damages proven at trial (~$0.99 per song)

Show me evidence of your "fundamental fact". I submit that you can't: there was no determination of actual (or compensatory) damages.
Hilariously, this morning is one of two times a year that the nonprofit I freelance for normally does $25k+ in Paypal transactions.
Supposedly it isn't too hard to port Windows games to Linux, yet game developers don't do it. I don't see why iPhone games would be any different. Also, games that use multi-touch and the accelerometer wouldn't play well on Linux PCs.
I'm really torn by this article. Part of me wants to dispassionately bark, "They should have obeyed the Single Responsibility Principle and the Open/Closed Principle from the start!" and coldly click on to the next link that tickles my fancy. But another part of me feels an inexplicable sympathy for the original developers here. Everyone has worked on that one app or library that organically evolved into a monster.

I almost feel like it's impossible to "judge" what happened as described by the author without understanding more context: How brutal were the requirements changes? Could they have been predicted? How much was the app designed before that fateful first revision was written?

I think this also has to do with the framework or language being used. If the app was written in Python, maybe it would have been less ridiculous to create an explicit "fix our stupid mistake" TimeDelta and pass it around. I definitely think that someone, at some point, should have had the sense to take a step back and say, "Maybe we shouldn't be fixing this by manually modifying the second count and checking for DST edge cases." The libraries exist for a reason, but without knowing which one they were working with, one can't really say definitively what they "should" have done.

In summary, it sucks that the author FTA has to deal with this date/time kluge that he didn't create, but... that's software development.
It seems like he was banned primarily because of repeated third party intellectual property violations:

Apple has informed you of numerous third party intellectual property complaints concerning over 100 of your Applications and reminded you of your obligations to obtain the necessary rights prior to submission of your Applications. Nevertheless, we continue to receive the same or similar types of complaints regarding your Applications despite our repeated notices to you.
Article says: “he feared harassment from staunch Apple fans who actually believe those Mac versus PC security commercials”.

Here’s an advice, don’t make statements like “the many weaknesses in Mac OS X and Apple applications” or “Apple had a tendency to rush hardware to market” unless you can back these up.

You already made a significant exploit which no-one can dispute, don’t give “staunch Apple fans” a reason to dismiss the article.