skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is where Google Collections comes in handy:

Lists.newArrayList(1, 2, 3)

Or, if you don't need to modify it:

ImmutableList.of(1, 2, 3)

Such an awesome library.
I'm sure this is a very nice piece for the members of the audience currently working in small firms; it's very reassuring. Apart from the feel-good "do your best and things will be okay," I'm wondering if the implicit advice to not worry about competition makes a lot of sense.

It seems that paying attention to the latest trends in your industry would fall under the category of "worrying about competition", as would trying to differentiate your product from similar offerings. The linked story mentions the strengths of the product of over Microsoft's future offerings, which makes me think that the author (or at least somebody at his firm) has been worrying about competition.

Without making the tautologically-false claim that focusing too much on other's work is a good idea, it seems safe to say that you should care about what your competitors are doing.
I'm definitely not great with the healthy eating (I have Taco Bell leftovers sitting on my desk as I type this), but I really like Michael Pollan's little manifesto thing: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." To me, this covers the three major guidelines of healthy eating:

1. Eat real food, not over-processed empty calorie junk.
2. Don't eat too much of whatever you eat.
3. No need to give up meat & dairy, but don't go overboard.
I still have a copy of the NetShare tethering host that the App Store accidentally posted for about two hours soon after they opened for business. Apple yanked it from the store in a hurry but they've made no attempt to delete it from my phone. I have to believe that AT&T tried very hard to talk/threaten them into doing just that.
I couldn't disagree more with that. With the greater freedom of the electronic world comes a greater ability for people working within the law to do their jobs.

We should firmly be on the lookout for abuses of this power, but in this case:

* Amazon found out that they were accidentally distributing something illegal

* Amazon happened to have the power to fix their problem entirely, without missing a single copy of the illegally-published book

* This happened near-instantaneously, without anybody's time being wasted

* Amazon refunded every single person their money back, so they lost no money whatsoever

Amazon doesn't look scary, they didn't come in armed with weapons, they didn't illegally access anything. If I was in Barnes & Noble and bought a book, then was approached by an employee saying "We weren't actually allowed to sell you that copy of the book, here's your money back," I might be disappointed at not having the book, but Barnes & Noble retains the right to take that book back from me if they're also returning my money.

You know how we like to loudly trumpet that PIRACY IS NOT STEALING! because there's no physical copy and therefore no cost to how many times a file can be replicated? Well, that works both ways. When you're dealing with a thin sliver of data which can be modified without even a chance of damage to any other data, and when you have a moral imperative to remove that data and can do it without harm to anybody, then you have every right to jump back in and edit that data, precisely because it isn't meatspace.
I'm quite glad Apple decided that myself, and I'd have liked Amazon not to delete this book. What I'm saying, though, is that if Apple had wanted to delete NetShare remotely and offer a refund, I wouldn't have considered them doing that to be at all offensive. It would have been their right.
Where is it documented that you get one re-download per lifetime?
i believe the parent's post is (successfully) making a counter argument that though a publisher may have an incentive to minimize risk, primarily they are deemed a 'publisher' because they publish (that is, broker the distribution of) books. approached from this perspective, it's hard to see this blog post's defense of publishers as simply minimizing their risk exposure as anything but shallow and counter intuitive to their primary goal of distributing books. that said, i don't work in publishing - i only consume it's published products - so i reserve the right to be wrong about how they make their money. i speculate here solely on the assumption that most business still does require someone to consume a product in exchange for a currency commensurate to an agreed value.
If I was in Barnes & Noble and bought a book, then was approached by an employee saying "We weren't actually allowed to sell you that copy of the book, here's your money back," I might be disappointed at not having the book, but Barnes & Noble retains the right to take that book back from me if they're also returning my money.

That argument would make more sense if Barnes & Noble owned my computer, or if I were still physically present on their store's property.
Should I edit the title to mention that it's about game design? (Though the thoughts in this article could easily relate to the idea of designing web sites using leaderboards and user scoring to maintain user attention online, if you want to make that leap.)
It seems like it would worthwhile to improve K-12 education before swelling community college enrollments by 50%.
But why should you have to be? With my Kindle, I am always in Amazon's store, as close to physically as matters. I can buy a book from anywhere. Why, then, shouldn't they feel free to approach me, so long as I'm still on Amazon's property?

(I'll also clear up, since I figure it'll be brought up in a moment anyway, that if Amazon had targeted copies of 1984 that weren't from their Whispernet store then I'd be more offended.)
Ah, then I should have made the distinction between "publishers" and "copyright owners", please do a mental:

s/publishers/copyright owners/g

Publishers have nothing to do with negotiating copyrights with Amazon, unless they are also the copyright owners, and copyright owners don't give a shit how their books are consumed, as long as they keep getting paid.
With my Kindle, I am always in Amazon's store,

That question is far from legally settled.
Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that.

Unless you mean "into the conversation", I think you meant "remove the government". After all, it is government which enforces copyright - removing government protection of copyright for 90 years after an authors' death is probably the best way to stop companies from being so adamant about enforcing every last bit of it. It's a bit of a Catch 22 that since copyright is so valuable, it's worth a lot of money to lobby congress to extend it (increasing its value even more).
to not clarify that the books were illegal when rescinded is nearly as grave a mistake as to allow them to be sold in the first place. rather than being in front of this and stopping these books from being sold - which was something they had every right to bar & would have been a pr conflict for exactly no one- amazon instead designed a system that allowed bad content to be sold with a kill switch in place so 'in the event of a mistake, it could be rescinded' - they deserve this pr storm because they've earned it. they've broken trust with their consumers on not one but 2 fronts here - foremost, they offered an ILLEGAL product for sale on their website. secondly, rather than explain the fact that this was illegal, they immediately attempted to go back in time and undo it - something that directly conflicts with a value proposition offered on the premise that books create memorable value and that their consumers might notice if a book suddenly goes missing. Amazon deserves what it's getting and we can only hope this will be loud enough to set the precedents & standards that define a better eventuality next time a similar situation arises.
That's true, but I see no reason for that not to be the case. If I've got access to books from anywhere, it makes sense that Amazon should have the right to access me as well. Then the rules of the free market dictate that if people should be offended by Amazon doing that, another company could make money from choosing a different path, and then Amazon would be forced to change its policy.
Perfect, if you are powering specific lab engines. Not perfect if you are powering an animal. Can someone explain to me where the confusion is here?

To explain further, since further explanation is obviously needed: There is the physical calorie, which is ONE THING, and then there is the vernacular, "nutritional" calorie", which is something ordinary people deal with day-by-day. They are VERY different, in that kerosene calories and celery calories are handled differently by the human body.

Again, very simple until it comes up against people who don't interact often with reality.
"but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet"

Sorry if I made it seem that way. I don't mean to call them simpletons. They're very intelligent, thorough, but optimizing very different constraints than people think. In the situation they're in, decision makers become extremely risk averse, and in this context, their actions make complete sense.

"the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book"

The questions about "un-publishing" aren't awkward - they're perfectly natural from the "minimizing risk" perspective. What smaller risk is there than being able to undo all sales?

Publisher relations are a B2B sale with professional career sales-people. A sale from a big copyright owner is negotiation with hours of meetings, decks of power point slides, loads of cost/benefit analysis, and various value propositions (depending on whom in the organization you're talking to). Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk.

the whole point of being a publisher is to publish books

By the same logic as the point of a record label is to sell records with their label on them, or by some other?
I love reading articles like this precisely because I don't feel this way toward programming. I do toward writing, music, design, theatre, but code feels sterile to me. I hope one day to have it click and suddenly understand how so many people here feel to look at a page of code.
Back then, people didn't know any better than to trust the scripted talking head coming-out of the magic box across from the bed. I've never understood why newsreaders have been afforded any gravitas. Cronkite was much more of a reporter and journalist than any current teleprompter reader, but his effect on the public was due to being one of two or three "all knowing" entities beamed into people's homes.
I'll take the skeptical approach and say that "hacker" is a word used by certain people to define certain other people, and that we're as likely to figure out a good definition of "hacker" as we are of "love" or of "life".

Personally, I see a hacker as somebody that changes things in an unexpected way. It's the unexpected that makes somebody a hacker instead of a coder or an entrepreneur.
that doesn't change the original replies basic point: without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money. and pretty much everyone on the planet that's not a publisher/copyright owner/bookseller really doesn't care in the slightest about the perspectives of their business. sorry, but we never will. when you're selling something as abstract as a story you should consider yourself lucky that ANYONE is willing to devote any portion of their non-survival budget to such trivialities. While it's become common lately for people to be able to do so, this is a very new (less than 2 centuries) old phenomenon that's still quite fragile. And as the music industry has so effectively proven - if you push consumers hard enough they're not going to give up on their content, rather, they'll route around the choke point and take over distribution (and by extension content production) through less centralized means. this, in my mind, is a much greater risk facing the publishing/copyright holder industries than simple ebook platforms.
Psychological testing for employment is a joke
In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that

How about justifying it by the fact that it could cause a huge backlash and cause customers to decide buying ebooks is just too risky, and paper books are too bulky, and by god the whole "book" thing is just too much of a hassle and we'll just stick to blogs and wikipedia. I mean it's not exactly an inelastic market.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with "enlightened." That sounds an awful lot like you think this is about some RMS-inspired freedom ideology. No, it has nothing to do with that. It's not even a digital issue (other then that technology enabled it). It's the fact that if you sell shit to people and then take it back they don't like that. It's utterly moronic.

Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk.

So cancel the deal and stop selling more copies. What exactly is the risk of someone keeping something they purchased? If it didn't sell well that will be very few people. The production and distribution costs have already been sunk, so the undo button is doing nothing but pissing off customers. Are they scared it's going to be pirated? Well if it was going to be pirated, it already is, and now there's no other way to get it.

I agree with you about how they think, but you still haven't shown what risk they are minimizing and how it's anywhere near the risk of discouraging sales by pissing off customers like this.
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I was making a joke about the irrational hubris and hype from startups/dotcoms. Forget about it, it was a neat read regardless.
Heh, whoops. Ignore me, I need sleep.
If it is anything like graphics on the version 1 Kindle, it would look like complete crap. E-paper does a beautiful job with text, not so much anything else.

Hey, so maybe an xterm would look ok!
Anyone know more about the hardware behind this? I tried looking for info on their lab site (http://senseable.mit.edu/) but the publications page (http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/publications.html) doesn't load in Chromium and I get a javascript error in Firefox.
"""A CEO isn't being paid to make his company an ethical actor in the world, he's paid to maximize the value of the company. If a CEO's ethics regarding DRM don't agree with maximizing the value of the company, he'll say "I can't do my job because it's unethical" and be replaced with someone else."""

That is wrong, and wrong in a way that is very symptomatic of the illness afflicting our society as a whole. A CEO or other officer of a company has a fiduciary responsibility to her shareholders, but she also has an ethical responsibility to the society in which her company exists; and without which it would not exist.

That the myth that fiduciary responsibilities trump all other responsibilities is so widespread that many here hold it up as an unquestioned truth should be disturbing to you. If you believe that your companies profitability outweighs any moral, ethical or legal obligation; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others.
I started in college as EE, but the physics requirements were wearing me down. I had to take some programming courses, and decided that I much preferred the opinionated reality of software to the unforgiving objectivity of the real world. So I switched to CS.

I've always loved creating stuff, and programming gives me an unbelievable set of resources.
I like making things.
I think when technology makes certain laws enforceable, it's missing the point to complain about the technology (as people have been doing).
I never got into smoking dope, but a number of my friends did. It ended up being really boring to hang around with them, they would be content doing nothing and getting stoned. I wanted to do something. They also stayed like this for a number of years, whereas I moved on, finished my degree, got a job. They are now doing working in gas stations.
wait, they charge many times over what it costs to co-lo your hardware, then they charge what is a fairly reasonable per-gigabyte transfer (well, fairly reasonable if you don't use much. Often co-location providers will charge you north of $60 per Mbps if you are buying less than 10Mbps; usually it's closer to $10 per Mbps if you buy 100Mbps or so.) and you say the bandwidth is the hidden cost? wait, what?
With regards to the sever images Softlayer just mailed to me confirm they do have them so please disregard that point.

"On the topic of the server images, we do have that capability. If you
view the image details page there is a "Create Image Template" link."
I was told this by Apple customer support when I informed them that my hard drive crashed and that I didn't have a backup.
But once you've decided on what should be (let's call that B), wouldn't it make sense to figure out what is (let's call that A), and then figure out a way to get from A to B?

Off-topic: your comment made my night, it reminds me so much of my own reasoning once :)
" ... and "The Mythical Man Month", with he co-authored with Tim Lister, continues to influence."

Fred Brooks wrote that book. Perhaps you meant Peopleware?
It's not the only thing to worry about:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070427/095314.shtml
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The reason that rights have to be rights is that they're not always economically favorable.
I like Bill Hicks take on Marijuana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSH6ofHbeUw
Don't Let Yourself Get Unitized (2004)
It's preposterous to compare copyright protection to the authorization of a doctor to prescribe you drugs.
And this software recovery system Amazon has in place is foolproof? It can't be hacked, it cannot be misused or accidentally cause harm? Then I applaud their software expertise -- the rest of us have a hard time making such perfect software.

This of course implies that the doctor would be within his rights if he caused no disorder. "I wouldn't trust a doctor to...". You didn't trust Amazon to either -- they just went in and did it, at someone's request.

Hmm.. why does this prescription bottle have an antenna on it...
Yep. Everything boils down to that. I like making things that work, and that people (or even just I) can use.
Exactly what I thought! Talk about statistical manipulation...
I'm about to partially violate "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" - but on behalf of zimbabwe.

I vehemently disagree with almost everything he is saying about Amazon deleting an ebook that I've purchased, but, he is _absolutely_ adding to the discussion in an clear, concise, and interesting manner.

Sometimes the HN "I disagree with this person so I'll try and make his comments dissapear" attitude drives me absolutely nuts.

Stop it already. Please.
What do you mean? That's not the article title and as far as I can tell from it, there is not a clear explanation.
Hmmm...but isn't the fiduciary duty of the CEO imputed in this case? From the Wikipedia article:

in many jurisdictions, in cases of where a corporate insider "tips" a friend about non-public information likely to have an effect on the company's share price, the duty the corporate insider owes the company is now imputed to the friend and the friend violates a duty to the company if he or she trades on the basis of this information.
> 6% housing appreciation in a few years is FAR from another housing boom. In fact, it's under most estimates of inflation.

If it's under inflation, this equity deal is a bad one for the bank.

> I was just trying to explain how the bank can get "equity" (a share of ownership) from a homeowner who is underwater in their current mortgage.

No - you were claiming that this sort of deal made sense for a bank. Getting equity isn't actually a problem. And, there are many deals that a bank can do, so inventing one isn't actually all that interesting.

The relevant deals are profitable.

And, you still haven't addressed the real problem, that the vast majority of these folks can't afford an $800K loan either.
Anyone that supports drug prohibition is either extremely ignorant, extremely stupid, or extremely evil, or some combination of thereof.

A brief look at any history book covering alcohol prohibition should be more than enough to convince any reasonable and honest person that drug legalization is a moral imperative.
But isn't the reason to maintain copyright on this particular dead man's work to help him make a good living and thus greatly increases his ability to contribute with even more creations? Oh. Oh, wait...
I don't mind. Sometimes the downvotes are indicators that the argument's not worth it. I figure I'll bow out of this thread of conversation. I'll disagree quietly and stick to my Kindle.
without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money

And that doesn't change my point: most customers don't care. If customers cared, DRM would be a business risk, and acted on accordingly. But they don't, and so it's not. I wish customers cared. I really do. I wish they cared about their shoes being made by little slave children and civilian Iraqi deaths, too. But they don't.

Now, we can make ourselves feel better by sitting here and bitching about it, or we can understand the world and try to make it better in whatever little way we can.
Could you elaborate on that, please?

It seems that RIAA and MPAA are the luckiest of these middle men and the most persistent, and that is why they came to make such a huge profit from what was relatively obscure nook of an intellectual property regulation. After all, the concept of an artist having the privileged right to his, already published, work comes first, and all the delegations and copyright issues come second.

DRM is designed to keep power in the hands of rights holder, the creator, and, by necessity, away from the consumer, and only the monstrous bulk of MPAA allowed them to effectively pretend that they are not the simple middle men, but the focus and origin of all the rights that anybody can ever have on IP.
Suppose I buy a copy of Acid Pro and create an awesome dance mix using some Jay Z and some Garth Brooks. In an ideal DRM'ed world, I could set a price for this song and sell it via bittorrent -- the original license holders of the songs would each get their cut but if I charged $3 then I'd get a dollar for each sale (for example).

DRM is the sort of technology that could enable this kind of free, expressive creation. That we don't have it is a failure of businesses to come up with creative licensing terms, not a failure of DRM technology.
Ok, point well taken.

Let's divide them up in to two groups to be able to tell the difference:

Conspiracy skeptic: Someone who does not take everything the government says for granted and who would like to see evidence rather than be kept in the dark

Conspiracy nutcase: Someone who in spite of all the available evidence sticks to some theory when the time to let it go is long past.

Does that help?
Nice article, here is a similar piece from Fred Brooks that I think nails it slightly more eloquently - http://www.grok2.com/progfun.html

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."