skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're not alone. Yesterday I improvised an opera with toys.
Every purchase has terms of sale and a price. Whether those terms are dictated by the counterparty or by laws and social customs is irrelevant.

You can buy a car but you can't drive it 100 miles per hour. You can buy 1000 smoke detectors, but you can't harvest the radioactive isotope and make a nuclear reactor. You can buy a book on paper, but you can't re-publish it as your own work, etc.
Migrate MySQL tables - Zero downtime
My right to the book provided to me straight from Amazon's private store, delivered to Amazon's private device, which I paid money and signed a contract to use? Do I have a right to it because somebody illegally published copyrighted work and handed it to me?

I just said I was going to bow out of this conversation, so I'll end my line of thought with this: A company has the right to do what it wants with its products, and when that company is Amazon and has made countless innovations that help me find the stuff that I want, when it gave me my second-favorite gizmo, and when it has not once in the near-decade I've been a member violated my trust, when it's one above and beyond to make me happy, then I'm going to look with skepticism upon claims that Amazon's removing an illegal book and offering a refund equates to a sacrilege of justice. The people comparing this with 1984 are bizarrely wrong.
Google finally starts a travel guide service, sort of
The other way around. Sleep deprivation and fevers can indeed induce hallucinations, but I would speculate that they are not as pleasant or controllable as hallucinations from drugs.
The really interesting thing here is that people are now so far removed from what humanity is capable off that they have no choice but to take it as possible that all this was faked.

If they had a good general education and a healthy dose of common sense they could easily figure out for themselves what is possible and what is not.

I attribute this to general education being a lot worse than it was two generations ago.

Sure we have pretty toys, computers and all kinds of media devices. But people in general (not the HN crowd) can't do general arithmetic anymore without a calculator, which gives them a bad intuition about numerical problems and they're more concerned with 'stuff' than with knowledge.

Of course there are exceptions, I'm sure there are plenty of schools that do a great job and that hold the tradition of education high. But the general case has slipped backwards, every school that I have had contact with because of my sons education couldn't hold a candle to the highschool I was in when comparing the level of the knowledge taught in the various classes.

I remember my son coming home and telling me they do this weird thing called 'touch math' here and how the teacher wanted them to use calculators for simple arithmetic questions...
"Wrong" meaning you wish it wasn't that way, or wrong meaning inaccurate in describing the state of the world? The former I agree with, the latter you don't seem to give much evidence for.

If you wish it wasn't that way, how do you suppose we should define corporations? You can't just stick a "must has an ethical responsibility to the society in which her company exists; and without which it would not exist" clause in a law somewhere...

myth that fiduciary responsibilities trump all other responsibilities

Again, this is like talking about the myth of gravity after a rock falls on your head. Fiduciary responsibility is the law under which corporations like publishers operate.

If you don't like the law, it would be a nice exercise to suggest an alternative (which we can debate).

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

Let's simplify: a rock fell on a baby's head and smushed it. I point and say "hey look, a rock fell on a baby's head and smushed it, because it's really heavy". You say: "If you believe that babies should be smushed by rocks; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others". See my point?

See, and this confuses me - in your last sentence, you used "fiduciary responsibilities", which makes me think you went to college. But this shows such a lack of reading comprehension... oooooh... are you one of those "globalization" majors?

<offtopic>Geezus fuck, has news.YC really come to this!?</offtopic>
One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning.

Your example of the word 'sell' is one of those.

It takes the word and stretches it to a plausible but wrong new meaning. You're putting it somewhere between 'convince' and 'argue' whereas to sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency.
A memorial to one of Reddit's oldest members
Tampa Tarpon Fishing, St. Pete Deep Sea Fishing, Tampa Fishing Charter
Tampa Tarpon Fishing - Bentcharters - We offer special trips such as overnight trips, booze cruises, offshore loan closings, and we are for hire in fishing tournaments. For more details, please call us or email us.
It's the most rewarding form of creation (for a man at least) and it's the only thing I can do for 12 hours straight.
I am beginning to feel the same way about people using non-SI units as I do about people using non-standards-compliant browsers and non-unicode character encodings.

Calorie? What the hell is a calorie? I always have to look it up. Oh, it's 4.2J. Except when it's 4.2KJ. So one KCal could be 4.2KJ or maybe 4.2MJ. The article is using the small calories. Other comments here are using large ones. Man, I love it when there's a 3-order-of-magnitude context-dependent variation in the base unit of measurement!

See this? Look at the date:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/ae906e/ae906e17.htm

1971. I wasn't even born. I should have never even learned the damn word. Oh but no, people have to have their "customs". Well, customs are the enemy of progress!

Why is this article using Calories at all? They are deprecated and have been for almost 40 years. I know many Americans derive a perverse enjoyment persisting against all logic in their use of obsolete and inefficient forms of measurement, on the sole and often mistaken grounds that they are somehow more "American", but the Calorie is French anyway.

There's the real "Calorie Delusion"! The delusion is that there's even such a thing as Calories. Joules, baby. It's all about the Joules.
Every bully is in charge of their own body, they make choices every time they go for someone that's weaker (or they will use a couple of buddies if they're real cowards).

Abusive families do not come in to play as an excuse.
Have you tried yours lately? I think they disabled the functionality with a software update :-/
Jashnn Movie| Watch Jashnn Movie
Jashnn another movie of Bhatt productions house. Jashnn is very touchy kind of a movie About an struglling singer. Jashnn would be a high expectetions movie for Adhyan suman. women are strong and needy and vulnerable, all at the same time. The men are the weaker sex, and shed tears freely. There’s also a deeply obsessive brother, and an abusive lover. And there’s some mandatory sex.
You could have that same interest in just about anybody, the fact that they are former classmates means absolutely nothing.

Every random stranger has a story, and some of those are quite interesting.
Right, as I've stated-- this is not an excuse. There may be explanations for bullying, but when one commits a transgression that has a victim there are real consequence (e.g. the example I gave of those excuses not standing up in court). I'm in full agreement.
Well, from the various followups on the original story, it looks like the reality was much more complicated than this article (and your comment) make it out to be.

Specifically, it looks as if the publisher of the Kindle edition was an outfit that distributes digitized public-domain books. The specific books in question are in the public domain in Canada, but not elsewhere. Therefore:

1. Neither that publisher nor Amazon had the right to offer these books for sale outside of Canada, and

2. The publisher receiving the payments for these books was not the entity which owned the rights to them in countries where the books are still under copyright.

The exact means by which the screwup happened, I don't know; maybe the public-domain publisher mistakenly thought the books were PD everywhere, maybe they forgot to check a box for "only sell to Canadians", maybe Amazon mistakenly listed the books where it wasn't supposed to.

But regardless of how the situation came about, this is not the publisher of a book trying to "unpublish" it, or changing their mind about whether to offer an electronic edition. This was copyright infringement which was discovered and remedied.

Did Amazon do it in a way that sucks? Yeah. Should anybody be surprised that this functionality exists in the Kindle? Absolutely not. Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android.
Hicks was a great comic, but if you're going to take his act as lifestyle advice then do bear in mind how & when he died.
>mind how & when he died.

Um... pancreatic cancer?
"... Everything that's wrong with the world, well, High School is a perfect microcosm of that ..."

Nice summary.
It's not exactly hidden, but it is where they make the money. If you're compute bound and lean on bandwidth you stand a chance in the cloud. If you're pushing tons of data with little or no computation (say piles of files) the cloud is not for you.
No, but that is their right. They're not required to continue to support the app forever with their own network resources, but they don't get to physically (logically?) yank it off my phone.
What is really sad here is that your average not-so-strong kid doesn't stand a chance in a regular school. There is hardly any oversight that will give all the kids the feeling that they are safe in school.

My son is 15 and is going through a very hard time in school.
the DRM version should cost more, given all the time and work put into wrapping the item in some annoying "protection"

Since when does price have to do with how much something cost to build? If I spend $10 building a shitty chair, it's still a shitty chair. DRM-protected music costs less because you're buying the right to listen to a song with restrictions not present in non-DRM-protected music.
The "flashback" that they talk about in DARE is a sympton of PTSD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percept... is more common in heavy users.
Network transparent objects were tried and found wanting before - how are you going to do it differently? Specifically, distributed programs normally have to be network aware in order to avoid large numbers of round trip times.
Doesn't work like that. If you're a major digital salesperson and somebody's transmitting data illegally, as they were in this case, then it's your responsibility to withdraw the book.

Withdraw the book from further sales? Absolutely and no doubt. Withdraw it from people who already purchased it without doing anything wrong? Absolutely not. The legal questions are complicated and IANAL, but morally they had no right to remove something that was rightfully purchased and in use from people who had done no wrong.

letting people keep illegal content was out of the question here.

Hardly. The users did nothing wrong. Amazon (or arguably the publishers) made the mistake, the purchasers did nothing wrong. Any penalties (if proper) to be born should have been born by and only by Amazon.

Really? Because I've always thought that deleting pirated content would be a great punishment for piracy. If I've stolen something, I have no right to it. That's implicit in the idea of piracy. Deleting the stuff I pirated seems like a harmless punishment.

This is getting off on a tangent since this case is not about piracy (the customers did everything right and purchased the book, Amazon thought they were doing everything at the time).

But to go off on that tangent, no one should have the ability or right to delete anything or deliver any form of "punishment" without a judge being involved, and once it got to that point then simply deleting the files wouldn't be nearly enough.
yes, at age 32. It seems his lifestyle (not just pot-smoking of course, but it likely didn't help) contributed to his early death.
scribd doesn't have pdf. it has documents in flash. i don't use flash (only flash video outside a browser). [scribd] makes me not click the link. seeing [pdf] might make me click the link. the sooner people stop using scribd for things i find interesting, the happier i am.
I like making things, and code is free. We're only limited by our imagination, not physics, money, politics, etc.

(well, computing resources and time, I suppose, but those limits seem much less constricting than the previously mentioned ones)
You gave a lot of examples, but you missed the important one: Why would a publisher waive any of the rights the government (elected by the people) has granted them.
How can you disagree with #2??

Someone had the copyright and they were clearly able to have the works deleted. QED.

Maybe they weren't in their immediate legal rights merely by virtue of their copyright but their possession of the copyrights gave them enough other leverage to force Amazon to take the actions that they did. So by having the copyright, they were able to get the books erased.
It's cool that they can make locator beacons out of GPS and cell transceivers. But why throw more circuit boards in the garbage just to learn what routes and schedules garbagemen follow? Aren't those known in advance?
Interpretation Equipment Audience Response Conference Microphones
Rental & Sales of Simultaneous Interpretation Equipment, Translation Equipment, Audience Response & Voting Systems, Message Management, Silent Auction and Conference Microphones with Queuing SW & Cameras. Operating throughout Asia & Australia.
To me it's a love hate relationship.

I love programming because there is no limit to what I can dream up and realize.

At the same time I hate it because of the terribly convoluted way we have to take in order to achieve a certain goal. In this sense I feel that computing has actually gone backwards compared to where it was in the 80's on simple 8 bit micros.

On a simple 6502 machine it was possible to:

- boot the thing
- type in a small program at the prompt
- observe the result (graphical or textual)

In under a minute. No GUI toolkits, no web interfaces, 300 call APIs and hundreds of megabytes of memory dedicated to the operating system.

If there is anything I would like to change about how computers work I'd like to get away from monolithic operating systems and environments and move towards a more 'lego' like computing architecture.

That would make the 'hate' go out of the love/hate relationship in a heartbeat or two.

I have a really strong feeling that computing is on a dead end path, that at some point we are going to completely ditch what we've got and replace it by something much better. We're still stuck in the 70's for the most part (and yes, that includes the latest hot new little language that is only new because its creators have no sense of history).

I know this sounds like the rant of an old guy, but I really think there is a very bright future hidden in all this and I can't wait to get there.
Your logic does not take into account the entire ecosystem in which these companies exist. If you take it as law that companies exist only to make profit and they cannot help it, then you should also take it as law that when companies do things people don't like, people will get upset, and this will, hopefully, reduce the company's profits. This is how people can try to make companies do what they want, and this is how markets work. So, using your logic, there is nothing wrong with people getting angry and blaming the company - it is part of the system to make the market produce what people want.
How about justifying it by the fact that it could cause a huge backlash...

Heh, I sure am glad I don't work in market research for you ;) "WHAT DO YOU MEAN PEOPLE DON'T KNOW OR CARE ABOUT DRM!? IT'S WRONG!"
Well, it got really frustrating after that.

It dropped stuff in at least three different directories, and then I had to track down where its config files live, which config happens to contain what, and so on.

I changed the data directory, but the new data directory was not "formatted" or something, so I got a hand-wavy error message that naturally said nothing about formatting the new data directory, and so on.

All in all, it was a painful experience.
This product contains material that may be objectionable to children under 17.
> That's likely only a result of your unfamiliarity with Postgres relative to MySQL.

True, but the first time I ever did anything with MySQL was far less painful than with PostgreSQL.

Besides, setting up a database should be easy because it's easy, not because you remember exactly what to do.
Not only that, but speaking as someone who taught himself 6502 assembly on an Apple II+ as a 15-year-old, I can state categorically that I would never be able to repeat that feat today, with the insane complexity and bewildering diversity of modern languages and environments.

Oh, I'm sure my 15-year-old self could picked up Python scripting or the like, but C++? Nunh-uh. No way. I'm always impressed when I see some kid teaching him/herself advanced programming languages. Even with the Internet at your disposal, becoming a serious programmer these days is hard for anyone with a sub-genius IQ.
But we were talking about morality, and I'm afraid markets aren't moral when it comes to externalities. Most people don't care if slaves picked their strawberries or if children made their shoes.

Business transactions are business transactions - I give you $$$, you give me laptop. Whether or not you dumped toxic waste on villagers halfway around the world to make it just isn't part of the equation for most people.

[AGAIN: Not saying this is right, or optimal, it's just reality folks, with no way I can see of changing it]
If a single typo puts you off content then try this:

Language and - by extension - writing are a means of transferring information from one person to another. It is the meaning of the information that matters, not the format in which it comes to you. So if the same piece had been spoken to you (which is just a switch of medium) you would have loved it.

So, just like the first braindead compiler you refused to 'compile' (understand) a perfectly good piece of information because of a syntactical issue. Compilers are not programmed to deal with this sort of thing (it has been tried, see the fiasco of the error correcting pascal compiler) but humans are more flexible than that. There is no need for you to balk at the first error in grammar or spelling.

Plenty of people have a very valid story to tell, even if their delivery may not be 100% on the mark. As a non-native English speaker/writer I'm often quite shocked at the level of spelling and grammar displayed by 'the natives'. But I try hard to not let that stand in the way of understanding the message.
I've had the same experience, and had been avoiding such links as well. Regarding your 'hate', though, it may be worth noting that Scribd is a Ycombinator company.
Bpython interpreter uses curses and inspect to better python shell experience
I'd like to add the following note: for me, at least, while regular marijuana use did not particularly affect my academic abilities, it did affect my ability to meditate, both while under the influence and during the following day.

"Proper" meditation (where you forget yourself and bask in theta waves) is a definite state which one can reliably enter with regular practice. As a long-time meditator before ever trying pot, I was used to having this resource 15 minutes away, whenever I needed it.

I discovered that it was nearly impossible to achieve this state under the influence or the following day. I enjoyed using pot for it's own sake - but, I would urge you to consider your priorities in mental development. I eventually quit pot because the meditative state was so much more essential.
Because people have different goals. "People" like IBM do not have the same interests as people like Zed Shaw. IBM made Eclipse available under a non viral license in order to combat VisualStudio (and maybe Sun).

They want as many corporations as possible to build on Eclipse to take the wind out of VS's sails. They are not interested in making money from Eclipse. They are interested in limiting the influence of Microsoft on their enterprise customers. So the license is a strategic tool.

Linux is kind of an accident in that regard. Linus chose a license long before the big corporations found that they had to support Linux after they had successfully crushed each others' Unix business in a decade long war of attrition.

So Linux is GPL, but fortunately they found a way to interpret GPL in a way that didn't preclude closed source software on top of it. It's all in their definition of "linking".

Where this ingenious trick doesn't work, in the device drivers space, the whole thing breaks down, which every Linux on Laptop user has been able to experience for many many years. A single non-cooperative device manufacturer can prevent sleep and resume, power management and many other functions to not work properly for many users. So Linux has become almost exclusively a server platform, contrary to Linus Torvalds personal desires, but in agreement with the BigCorp strategy.
Interesting. I took a second look and noticed that at the top of his blog he talks about squashing fools.

One of the insidious things about violence is that it goes along with the conviction that one is in the right.
Heh, we're both illiterate. More from exploit.c:

Began port to RHEL5 2.6.18-157:	7/12/09 12:00PM

...

The buggy commit was backported to a RHEL5 test kernel on April 15th
(the latest test kernel is still vulnerable and likely without this
exploit being released, the code would have made it into the next
RedHat kernel update)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495863

That bug report says the first test kernel with that 'fix' applied was kernel-2.6.18-148.el5.
Equilibrium anyone?
Aptana scores $7.8M for open source web building tools
From the google library:

The two papers that I most enjoyed reading to date where the one on the google file system and the one on pagerank.

Then there is map-reduce...

If you're done with those how about k-means clustering ?
the problem is the lumping of calorie without saying which originates from meat, veg and fruit

in china study page 74, chart 4.3, a standardized body-weight 65 kg (143 lbs) is used. it takes 2641 kcal/day for chinese person to weigh 65 kg while it takes 1989 kcal/day for united states person. it indicates that calorie counting is flawed. i won't say why, you just need to draw your own conclusion based on this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=FIRLLcLjyC8C&pg=PA74...

i guess history repeats herself (google mcgovern), it's politically easier to blame everything on abstract thing (like fat, calorie, etc) than on specific thing (like milk, meat, etc)
In the same vein (not likely), Lyle Alzado claimed his cancer was due to steroid use - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyle_Alzado#Steroid_use_and_dea...

Cancer is pretty random. I'd guess that smoking unfiltered anything would increase the risk of lung/throat/oral cancer, but beyond that, you're really grasping.
I got in to coding very young and I didn't really 'grok' it until one day it all fell in to place, the proverbial 'a-ha' moment, and overnight I went from programming 10 or 15 line little 'helpers' to work out little electronics problems to a 3000 line piece to compose sheetmusic on the screen :)

The low barrier to entry was definitely a big factor in hanging in there, getting some results and learning from that.