skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The smartest members of the music industry (but not, alas, the influential ones) have said for years that the realistic way forward is a blanket licensing scheme: 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?

As you point out, lots of people have proposed system along these lines. And there does appear to be a problem that needs solving (e.g. less news means less oversight of politicians, means more political corruption). There are a lot of quesestions that schemes like this need to answer, such as:

If we do this for music, why not othrer sorts of content such as films, TV shows, news, software, games, etc?

I don't listen to music / am not interested in X type of content, why should I have to pay for it?

How do we prevent people from gaming the system? e.g. a musician might pay a botnet to download multiple copies of their work.

I've attempted to answer these questions here: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man
How High Blood Sugar Levels Affect Your Sex Life
This is closely related to 1/89 expansion as discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=653214
The useful distinction is probably between "republishing attributed content" and "plagiarism".
More like "it's not rape if they consent".

Arguably it would be slavery if they agreed at first and then decided they wanted out, but the statement is not obviously bullshit.
No way to avoid it, I think. Javascript calls Object.toString() to determinate the key. But yes, kind of silly...

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602004

Actually there may be a way to avoid it: redefine the toString() method of the String prototype or something like that (just an idea in the wild, haven't tried it)...
And this company is going to earn money how exactly ?
You forgot to mention all the foreign bureaus that will get closed and the reporters and photographers who will get laid off without benefits or severance...

http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/commentary-transitio...
There are plenty of places that are dry and sunny, and if solar cells are used there, it'll push down the price of other fuels in the rest of the world.
Aside from a few idiomatic expressions, on is generally used in everyday French as the third way suggested - as a casual replacement for nous (we).

As for bringing it into English, would you propose to use the English or French pronunciation? I like the French, but can't think of another example of the nasal o that it uses in English.
For specialized niche sort of work, it typically took longer than expected, but the quality was reasonable. Not guru-level, beautiful code necessarily, but workable where it counted -- when interfacing with various third party packages, being used by other third parties, without support from us.
Can news (information) be monopolised?
a) Chomsky, N.: Three models for the description of language, IRE Transactions on Information Theory (2): 113–124. 1956.

I would like to bet, that you are using formal languages. In case you don't, consider the following:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/411934 [GOOG feels as if it is what RAND used to be, as Daniel Ellsberg noted in an @ GOOG talk]

b) He is still at MIT, an Institute with strong DoD/WhatNot links (follow the money). Judging by the daily news, I am in doubt if they really do share politics...
Is not most energy consumed in places that are not dry and sunny? On account of the correlation between clouds, rain, irrigation and people.

This was T. Boone's mistake: overestimating the portability of electricity.
Yes, JavaScript arrays are not true arrays. Yes, all property names are strings. If you use an integer as an index, it'll be converted to a string.

I suppose it's silly at first, but hopefully at some point, you grow used to it. Crockford's book JavaScript: The Good Parts is a good book that explains many of the oddities in JS.
Tell it. In intensely focus-based knowledge work, the economics of human task switching - to borrow Joel Spolsky's term - is a formidable and intriguing science that managers who look at time as an interchangeable commodity or a cluster of cells on a spreadsheet simply don't grasp.
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First of all, I would strongly recommend you read Doug Crockford’s, JavaScript: the Good Parts. JavaScript has a lot of quirks and rough edges, but please do not try to use a language in a professional capacity without learning it first. To be fair, JavaScript pretends to be Java just enough to invite all this ill-advised behavior.

To answer the question fully: JavaScript arrays are really just plain objects. All objects in JavaScript are simply associative arrays, and all associative arrays are string indexed. So, subscripting always causes a string conversion. The Array class provides some convenience methods with .push() .pop() to gloss over this fact, but arrays are really no different than other objects.
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Sorry, can someone explain why this comment has been downmodded? The original article is quite ambiguous: the author saw the decline of marriage as both bad and good (or at least practical.) This is a common attitude to hold towards change, and I don't see why pointing it out would be improper etiquette.
Three days ago called. They want their breaking news back.
Not to mention that when the status meetings - or, even more significantly, other kinds of meetings (design meetings, planning meetings, etc.) - are spaced that far apart temporally, every meeting just becomes mostly a rehash of everything forgotten since the last meeting. The "agile" folks have the additional insight that reporting early and often is good.
This isn't really surprising, but it is a little disappointing (I always hoped these guys were just ridiculously witty with their comebacks). Seems like it's par for the course though.

Back when the election season was in full swing I had the opportunity to appear in a taped segment for Real Time With Bill Maher. I'll probably write a longer blog post about the experience at some point, but long story short, most of his really biting jokes are pretty set up. For our segment they got members of the UCLA Democrat and Republican clubs, as well as a few "indies" who they had found at bars the night before (I was one of these).

It basically felt like the point of the Dem/GOP club members was to provide predictable responses. Bill would lob a highly controversial statement to a member of the Republican club, they'd respond with the same arguments everyone had heard a million times before, and he'd smack them down with a wisecrack. There was still some decent debate, but it was a bit of a let down. I don't get HBO, but my friends have told me they never saw the segment air, so apparently the producers weren't too fond of it either :)
What about "he or she" and "his or her"? This is what I was taught was proper, though it does sound clumsy in speech.
I believe that (expensive, politically problematic) high voltage DC lines can transmit electricity across the US (or europe, or china) with minimal losses. The more serious problem may be that the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day. Though that can probably be tackled by charging all our electric cars during the day, building dams for pumped storage, charging different rates for electricity at different times, etc.

So, if solar has a cost per KWH the same as coal, it will hugely expand, but it won't put coal out of business unless it becomes even cheaper (or coal becomes more expensive).
Blacks and their slavery shoulder chip, GET OVER IT

Newsflash : "more Irish were sold as slaves to the American colonies and plantations from 1651 to 1660 than the total existing “free” population of the Americas"

http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT

http://www.scoilgaeilge.org/academics/slaves.htm

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland's population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain's solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-...
I'm not a huge fan of Doug's book, but I think this is an excellent read:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/A_re-introduction_to_JavaSc...
It does blow away a social life and is antithetical to a significant other. PG clearly states elsewhere that he had neither for all but a very short part of the time that he was working on Viaweb, and implies or states in numerous places that this kind of dedication is necessary to achieve startup success.

The theory goes that the financial reward of a startup is a highly dense, compressed version of what you would otherwise be collecting through decades of salaried work of some sort, but is risky and always close to the margin of failure. So, the account goes, it requires a level of commitment that pretty much necessarily precludes a "healthy work-life balance."
It takes one click to clear your cookie / reset your ip.

- http://AppUseful.com
That's an interesting paper.

I wonder why we can't make a "soap surface" computer? Just translate your NP-Complete program into a Steiner tree problem, make the appropriate glass plates and pegs model, get the results and translate back?

I wish I knew more computer science. I'd love to try it.
Arrays are not hashes
Software is hard
And how does this relate to hacker news?
Yep I did a lot of work on that - we rebuilt reuters.com from a normal corporate site into a news publishing system, ATG Dynamo on top of the TIBCO back end, running out of an otherwise empty datacentre in New Jersey. Chicken parm subs for lunch every day. Good times.

ATG's Droplets were way nicer than the EJBs that everyone else was using, but the writing was on the wall for them... JBoss is only just now catching up to what ATG had back then.
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Microsoft to issue emergency patches next week
> Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage.

The American legal system right now is absolutely draconian and broken to men. A man can try to be a good father and husband, do nothing wrong except be a bit of a putz, then his wife divorces him, gets full custody of the kids, and 30-50% of his after-tax income. She receives more money if he doesn't get custody of the kids, so women who don't like a man often fight for that.

So people mention prenups as a way to make sure these things are understood. Unfortunately, prenuptial agreements "that weren't fair enough" routinely get thrown out of court. If the prenup was "under duress", it gets thrown out. That includes the man saying he won't get married without the prenup - that means it was under duress and coerced, toss that sucker, split everything up.

Now most guys give it a try anyway, and say, "Well, I'm different, I'm going to have a stronger relationship and do xyz and zyx and...." - and that's admirable. But a lot of people look at the courts and want nothing to do with it. Anyone who is familiar with how otherwise good and nice people act when they're given ridiculous leverage and power gets a little scared at the court system.

There's other factors. But black people know this. I had the radio on yesterday, and "celebrity news" came on. A rapper named Nas - black man who was married to a black woman - is now getting divorced. One child. He's got to pay $150,000 per month in alimony and child support.

Some teenager hears that on the radio, thinks it's crazy, and decides he's rather uninterested in marriage. If the laws were made less brutal, I think you'd see more people marrying, marrying at an earlier age, having more children, and paradoxically - I think the divorce rate would go down. Certainly, it'd be hard to make something worse than the current state of affairs.
Not really. If I share a Metallica album on a P2P network it's fully attributed, Lars Ulrich still wouldn't be happy about it.
We have an equivalent of On in British English (I'm not sure if it's used in America) but it's considered posh.

E.g. One is not amused.
I'm talking about RSS.
There's a reason that freedom is usually held to be an 'inalienable right' (one that can't be sold). Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.
Yeah I don't know why the author expected any reasonable behavior from using a string as an array index.

However, the same behavior is true of plain Objects.
Reminds me of a story where one of the major investment banks figured out (with some pretty advanced statistical models) that certain buyers of stocks set bought in certain intervals to avoid getting pushed up into a higher price. For example, say Sun Life was to buy 100k stocks of Microsoft stock. Rather than buying all 100k at once for a price of 23.45 - 23.60 per stock they would split it up into 5 orders of 20k stock that would execute on the 11th minute of the hour. The investment bank would see what was going on, based on Sun's past actions, and would temporarily long MSFT stock for 60 seconds before the order went through and make a tiny bit of profit.
The NDK is new, and not that powerful. It's nice if you have some big chunk of legacy C++ you want running underneath an Android app, but you have no access to most of the internals that are also written in C++ (radio, media, hardware, graphics, etc).

You're still going to have to code in Java and talk to the native code through the JNI. You can also download the open source tree and work with the entire native layer, but that's undocumented territory.
This functionality makes perfect sense as soon as you realise that at its core JavaScript only has a single data structure, and that is objects (aka dictionaries, associative arrays or hashmaps), and arrays are simply a special case with some syntactic sugar built on top of it

I actually think that it's one of JavaScript's better ideas, it's just a shame that the JavaScript doesn't have very strong getter/setter/subscripting functionality so you could implement data structures like JavaScript arrays completely in native JavaScript.
I'd build giant robots like this: http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/technology/watch/...
Bit of a cou for TC. I really like NSFW too :(

I hope they really do let him keep "editorial independance" - he's got an acid tongue but he tells it straight (like with the last.fm nonsense)
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From the HN guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
That's like, totally irrelevant to what the article is about. The author points out the fact that it's strange that the marriage rate was higher during slavery than in present times. It's just an observation, not a whine.

The article overall is very interesting (from a woman's point of view, at least) and IMO applies to most modern women nowadays, not just black women. But the title smells of linkbait.
Ah. First rudderless.
German companies are investing $555 billion on a huge solar farm in the Sahara to supply electricity back to Europe: http://www.solarfeeds.com/recharge-news/7540-german-group-to...
I had never read the comments on TechCrunch before.

I won't be making that mistake again.
What is the American obsession with race? I'm sure there's a more useful explanation behind these rates (perhaps family tradition of marriage, income, place of living etc. etc.).
First - great collection of links. The history of slavery deserves a more thorough understanding than what's normally taught in high school.

And yet, it was not the Irish who couldn't vote as late as the 60s, nor were the Irish the ones in segregated schools through the 70s, nor were there Irish divisions of the armed forces in World War II sent on the most dangerous missions. There were not masses of Irishmen enslaved in the south (de jure, and then defacto) through the 1800s and 1900s.

Are black people the only people to be oppressed and discriminated against in history? Clearly not. But as late as 4 decades ago, well within the lifetime of people still alive, black people have suffered a far greater weight of discrimination than any other ethnic group in America.

The after-effects of recent black slavery and segregation continue to be felt today. Saying "get over it" suggests a lack of understanding of the ways that those effects still persist.
I already use Dropbox so I'll give it a try.
Wow awesome idea - I think I'll probably be using this soon! The question of security etc. could be an issue but I imagine reviews (which I can't see yet) would help that.
It’s a stretch, I’ll grant you that (I didn’t submit it). But to me this is an interesting challenge to the technology community. Having people in good marriages is a positive thing. It’s good for society (it promotes stability in a population), it’s good for individuals (who always have someone to rely on no matter how tough things get) and it’s good for children (divorced parents show up as a negative factor in every study that includes it).

So people not wanting to marry is a problem.

It’s already been proven that technology has the potential to correct social ills that modern society inflicts. For example, sites like eHarmony step in and use profiling for busy adults who don’t have time to hang out in bars every night looking for the right person. That in mind read this quote from the article...

Among African Americans, the desire for marriage seems to have a different trajectory for women and men. My observation is that black women in their twenties and early thirties want to marry and commit at a time when black men their age are more likely to enjoy playing the field. As the woman realizes that a good marriage may not be as possible or sustainable as she would like, her focus turns to having a baby, or possibly improving her job status, perhaps by returning to school or investing more energy in her career.

As men mature, and begin to recognize the benefits of having a roost and roots (and to feel the consequences of their risky bachelor behavior), they are more willing to marry and settle down. By this time, however, many of their female peers are satisfied with the lives they have constructed and are less likely to settle for marriage to a man who doesn't bring much to the table.

You see, there’s a disconnect here. One technology can fix. One that should be presented to people who can fix it (namely, people who read Hacker News). Again, posting it here is a stretch but I’m not sure it’s an unacceptable one.

P.S. It also might help solve problems with hacker news. Like...I wish there was a "QUOTE" tag...for example
Maybe it'll be like europe some how where people seem to not get married in large numbers.
C++'s Standard Template Library? I bet you're talking about how it complains about your out-of-spec code. Lots of not recognizing c-string functions like strlen, strcmp etc? 4.x doesn't include <string.h> along with <string> anymore, you have to add it explicitly.
Posting your content in RSS means you allow anyone to read it. It does not mean you have granted permission for it to be copied and reposted - as the copyright holder, others have to ask you for the right to copy the content. The fact that it is easy to copy does not mean it is legal.
All this is total dark magic to me.
Exactly. The real distinction is republished with permission, and republished without permission. The beauty of GPL is that you explicitly give permission. On a wider rant, the open source movement is not for people who want to ignore copyright, it is for people who value intellectual property so much they go to great lengths to explicitly share and build only on the work of others who have shared.
Truly, the death of Tech Journalism. Techcrunch has always been quite terrible and now this :|
Many of the conclusions drawn about marriage apply to many Americans...regardless of race.
Try to use additional single quotes:

var x = [];
x['3'] = 3;
x['"3"'] = "three";
alert(x);
It is reasonable to expect to be able to set arbitrary properties on an Array and have them behave differently than it's indexes, despite the fact that this is not how it works. The language even suggests this is possible by providing certain properties that are not enumerated (such as "length"). What's worse is that the true answer to why this behaves the way it does is that in JS arrays are (kind of) hashes.
I've always said I'm a victim of the liberal educational system. They taught me to treat people of all skin colors equal and then threw me into a world where everyone with a different skin color (I'm white) treats me unequally.

The problem, it seems to me, is that people of other races don't realize there will always be prejudice. That someone who has prejudice against another because of their skin color is no different than a person who has prejudice against someone for any other reason they couldn't prevent (grew up in a certain place, speaks in a certain way, etc...)

So racial prejudice will never fully go away and people who think they can define themselves by race until it does will always define themselves by race.
They're like Youtube comments, but with more self-promotion
First - great collection of links.

Eternal World Television Network, Rasta Livewire and the Gerry Tobin Irish Language School is a great collection of links?
You're right, but what's your point?

I think we agree that stealing someone else's content and republishing it with your own ads is both legally and morally wrong. I don't see how publishing in RSS changes that.
I don't consider Techcrunch tech journalism personally; I consider it tech company/tech startup journalism, which is slightly different.
Personally, I believe that it has to do with the role of women in the current society, not exactly with the race. I don't live in America, but I think the trend is present in most western countries anyway. We're jumping from the "dependant housewive" to the "independent worker". I remember my mom used to say when I was a kid that I had to find a good husband. But now I have my own house and a good job... I don't need to marry a man to provide myself.

It sounds cruel, but I don't think people married in the past just because they loved each other so much. As said in the article, it was a necessity, but such thing is ceasing to exist, so the disposition of people for marriage is decreasing.
Yeah, but the larger issue is that wire services are hurting as some newspapers fail and others cut back on expenses. Obviously they shouldn't do what AP is doing, but Reuters probably does have to make some changes to survive long term.
Dunno why he wants to kill anonymity on the internet. I really miss the time it was hard for people to find out about me without actually talking to me.
Fake Steve Jobs: Orwell versus Huxley (comic repost with added tech commentary)