skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cross-border ownership rights are enormously complex; international copyright laws make tax laws look simple, and that doesn't even take into account the differences in copyright laws between countries.

You hear about the conflict over the Watchmen IP rights, or Superman, or Terminator? Those all took place entirely within one country. Now try figuring out the rights for hundreds of shows, with hundreds of different writers and producers (including dozens of each for a single show), with rights spread out over multiple holders across multiple continents and countries with different IP and contract laws.

Difference between a TV show and a Hulu show: first and foremost, Hulu is available everywhere; a TV signal (however transmitted) is not. Hulu is on-demand. TV is not. Hulu requires a conscious effort by the viewer to select what to watch. TV is entirely passive, except for turning it on (and even that requires significantly less effort than starting up a computer). Hulu streams are individualized to each viewer; TV broadcasts are indiscriminate. There are more differences, but those are the big ones.
Maybe the problem is I just hate bloggers in general.
And comments on blogs, even good ones, are also generally afflicted with the dumb and just aren't worth wading through to find the handful of people who hate to look like gibbering idiots (and have the intelligence to avoid it).
The Future of the Facebook iPhone App, According to the Man Who Made It
Sharing is often "something meaningful and important".
Dear WhyIsThisOnHN,

I note that your account was created less than a day ago, and already has over -20 karma. The three comments that you have posted have been the same, "Why is this on Hacker News?"

You seem to care about the quality of content on Hacker News; at least, this is what the spirit of your comments would indicate.

However, by posting solely inflammatory comments such as "Why is this on Hacker News", the only thing you are doing is further diluting the quality of content here. Not only that, but you are getting others - such as me - to write these lengthy metaposts, which definitely don't help either.

I don't know whether you are just trolling or genuinely want to help the community, but please, stop. Your time would be better spent finding interesting articles on topics that interest you, submitting them, and then commenting on them if they get somewhere close to the front page.

Thanks, and I really do urge you to consider your future comments. I wish you well.
Yeah, it was just launched yesterday, though. I was hoping we could help em out getting started.
Traffic isn't really an excuse. I've lived in the Bay Area for 13 years, and our traffic ranks in national rankings as some of the worst. With that said, during rush hour, from Downtown Oakland to Downtown Mountain View (880, Dumbarton Bridge, 101), the variance on my Commutes over three years was 52 minutes to at _most_ 1 Hour 15 minutes. 95% of the time it was under 1 Hour. The 1 Hour 15 minutes occured during a flash flood in which most major roads were having water issues. A few accidents pushed us to 1 hour 10 minutes.

Another way of saying this is if I planned to arrive 8 minutes early, I would have been on time 95% of the time for an appointment in Mountain View driving from Oakland.
Python, cutting and pasting doc tests into your shell.
9. You comment on a link about a blog post about burnout :-)
i'm pretty sure the correct way to do this is to identify (in linear time) all the words which correspond to substrings of the number(s), then use dynamic programming
It is indubitable that people should be judged by the totality of their actions, yet it is rarely so. I think at least some communities judge _why by the way he exited stage right in the middle of the play.

(Full disclosure: I don't like him)
I've begun tinkering with the C64 again (I bought a couple for making chiptunes). There's something very satisfying about a system that is comprehensible, in its entirety, by a single human being. I'm also amused and amazed that new hardware and software is being built for the system nearly 30 years after its release. I bought an internal "hard disk" that reads SD cards, and a MIDI interface and synthesizer package called MSSIAH. Both are awesome and modern (as modern as something running within the limits of an 8 bit 64 KB platform can be).

I also find it really astonishing how concise code for the C64 is. It takes as much, or more, code to get sound out of a Linux or Windows box as a C64, because the C64 has a dedicated synth chip...feed it values and out comes sound. Likewise graphics. You can replicate this kind of experience on a modern machine with something like a SmallTalk environment or Shoes or PyGame, of course, but there's a charm in hitting the hardware so directly, and knowing what every bit is doing.
I'm not personally attacking you, but that's the point of the articles. According the Georgia law (the blow job example), that woman is on the sex offender list and her offense is listed as "sodomy". Georgia's creative definition pretty much causes that woman to be on the receiving end of a lot of reactionary hatred and possibly puts her in danger, because people have no idea what her actual "crime" was. A lot of people don't think beyond hearing "sex offender" and "children".

There's a constant climate of fear concerning sexual crimes, especially ones that involve children, that are making us do very irrational things to feel safer.

Also, I appreciate your commentary on your personal feelings about this issue. It's a complex issue and I think some of the down-votes might've been a bit too hasty.
That's not necessarily a good sign
To some extent, it's intuitive: if you want someone's cooperation, you want to signal that you're not a threat to them.
According to this the class clown is at the top of the social hierarchy.

I think humor is a bit more complex then that.
137 Rails ideas hacked together in 48 hrs
That is my understanding. I've seen the previous summers one and it looked different, if I remember correctly.
Meet the Marijuana Snack Kings of the Future
Inspiring, to say the least.
This is just confusing. As far as I understand it, the problem with solar panels has very little to do with where they are put--it's their prohibitive cost that is the real issue.

And anyway, roads seem like a pretty poor place to put a solar panel anyway. Vibration from cars and wear and tear are bad enough on cement and asphalt. I'm not sure what translucent covering they're going to use on the solar panel, but it's going to be expensive or wear down quickly--or both. Also, having to support an active electrical grid that spans the entire country sounds like a nightmare to me.

According to the Solar Roadways website [1], the US Interstate System is 25 million square miles of road. That is coincidentally very close in size to the Mojave desert [2]. Wouldn't that be a lot better choice? (I'm not saying a giant solar array in the desert is a good idea, just a lot better than trying to hybridize roads and solar panels)

[1] http://www.solarroadways.com/The%20Numbers.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_desert
This is actually a relevant if not explicit point from Catch Me If You Can.
Heh, the search returned nothing for "quick sort" and "hoare".
That's jacked. I used to be an event promoter and that kind of behavior from fellow promoters would end up harming me in some way (not being able to book a venue, extra heavy deposits, etc). Amateur at best, unprofessional completely.

On a side note, I am now blind because of the lime green on black. 1994 is calling and wants its "cyber" vibe back.
I believe this article (and all the MySpace neigh sayers) are misreading the data. They are looking for MySpace 'users' and assuming these people exist. Isn't it possible that as a social network, MySpace has failed, but that the site still has a huge number of visitors. Music fans will regularly end up on MySpace site due to the number of artists, and high google ranking. But that doesn't mean these people are MySpace users. They may not have a MySpace account, but they are regularly counted in the visits.
It sure is! But here's a question: How do these "I hacked together 50 websites overnight" sites stack up in the long run ?

I've gone through a couple of those lists now, including a large number of 'rate my startup' type posts on HN and usually when I visit them a couple of weeks later there is either nothing left of it or the site has been taken over by spammers.

It's like with children, making them is easy, supporting them over their lifetime is hard, very hard.

So, what's the story, how many of those 'one night hacks' make it in the long run ?
I don't know, I have read some very good and critically acclaimed books from the so called modernist period and I never thought they were particularly boring or lacking of plot. That includes the Great Gatsby which has a pretty good plot, and some hemingway books.

Also my favorite authors like Nabakov, Heller, Vonnegut, PKD, Chandler, Hammet, etc. always had pretty interesting plots. They were not idiotic "made for tv plots" where every single conflict had to be neatly resolved by the end of the book, but they were interesting and absorbing. They were also very critically acclaimed.

I think really the problem is that there is a subjanre of novels that emerged that is intended exclusively to be read as assignments in college classes. These tend to be incredibly boring, so that literature professors so that lit profs can justify their existence and because most readers are essentially forced to read them. If those types of books are dead, good riddance.
"An unexpected result of my research on the mafia," he writes, "was to find out that mafiosi are quite incompetent at doing anything" other than shaking down legitimate businesses and enforcing trade agreements among smaller-scale hoodlums. "Mafiosi are good at intimidation and stick to it.... They let the professionals and the entrepreneurs take care of the actual business operations."

Rather than getting involved in running a restaurant or dealing drugs, they joke about their cluelessness in such matters and simply collect payment for "protection."

I came to the US as an immigrant and applied for asylum. At one of my INS interviews I was recounting a story of government corruption and organized crime when the INS agent took issue with my story.

"That's not how the mafia operates!" He said, "They don't just collect fees, they take over the business! The protection racket is how it starts but it quickly progresses to where they wrestle control from the owner and then they own the business. That's how the mafia always operates!"

This left me quite stunned and speechless, I did not know how to respond, do I tell him that The Soprano's is not a documentary. Do I try to reason with extremely impatient person.

Low story short, I won in the green-card lottery, pure luck.
That's not really what the FB vs ConnectU issue is about. ConnectU wasn't upset because Mark took "their idea." By all accounts he was actively working on their product.

So it's not like the Winklevoss brothers approached Mark, pitched him, and he thought, "I can do this better." He actually went to work on their product and then, later, while he was ostensibly working on ConnectU, launched a competing product.

That is, it's not "he stole my idea!" It's "he took our code and confidential information and used the opportunity we gave him to harm our business."
http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/7+hours+before+tomorrow+at+noon
http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/7+hours+before+noon+tomorrow
Very cool. Noticed it doesn't always throw an error when it's sent nonsense:

http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/first+firday+this+september

Gave me the third Wednesday of this September.
Nice gold rush analogy, selling the tools seems like the best deal; although how that pans out for the smaller open source projects is still quite risky. It's still the lucky few who make the money.
Google bans sites critical of scientology but continues to advertise for them
I hear there's a more comprehensive fix in TM 2.0.
IMVU makes heavy use of this technique:

http://thespeedbump.livejournal.com/63798.html
http://thespeedbump.livejournal.com/64053.html

It's the only way we've found to write understandable, maintainable flows that touch network requests and user input. Explicit continuations are way too error-prone, in our experience.
The problem is that you're conflating incompetence with a lack of capacity for competence. In other words, the mere fact of not knowing something implies that one can never know it. If that were true, nobody would know anything.

What I'm saying is, you may well be correct in your assessment that she was incompetent for the job, but that assessment doesn't qualify you to make the further implication that's she's not smart, or inherently incapable of competence.

I've noticed you added the bit about her being indignant and suggesting that such knowledge was beneath her. That does suggest she would be resistant to acquiring domain competence, which certainly doesn't bode well even if your company was open to letting the hiree acquire it on the job. On the other hand, I can understand her getting pissed off about someone using such a question as a litmus test.
This has always been pretty obvious to be. What has also been obvious is that writing well is a hard and rare skill which is quite distinct from other skills, skills like dancing, welding, math, physics, etc.

You can be a great physicist and a great writer, or mediocre writer, or terrible writer.

Some times you may have to put up with hard writing because the subject is very hard, and you're just not going to find an easier to read explanation.

Just about the only subjects that can't get away with that, are frivolity and pure entertainment, they HAVE to be written well.
"Randi, of course, has offered to test Geller and to give him $1 million if he can prove his claims. But Geller has always declined, saying anything that would quiet skeptics — and by extension make him less controversial — would hurt his career. "If someone wants to stay in the business of being a psychic," he says, "they should simply ignore the skeptics.""

That's got to be the most obnoxious bullshit I ever read. Ever.
I'm too ignorant to be skeptical.
This is a problem with Chronic and not with the webapp. It looks like Chronic doesn't understand the distinction between midnight and noon.

*Edit: Looks like a lot more is wrong with Chronic.

http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/seven%20hours%20before%20tomorrow
pet peeve: having to scroll a page to find the 'close' link on a lightbox.
They've since updated it.
Those are mostly successful open source projects. I'm not sure how you can count that as a "bad sign".
Very cool, anyone know one for PHP?
Really impressed by some of the ideas and execution. Great stuff.
My college art teacher told me these are done by taking a photo, making a slide out of it, and projecting that slide onto the canvas.

Apparently some of the old master painter used a camera obscura and one might have even nudged his in the middle of a painting thus moving one of the ears way out whack in the final painting.

I can't be bothered to google it right now.

And I'm not accusing this guy of doing it that way, but how would you know?
Your toolbar bookmarks?
I've got room for 15 bookmarks along my Firefox toolbar. What have you got up there?

So far I have:
Hacker News, Share on Posterous, Shorten with bit.ly, The Funded, Tumblr, Twitter, Kickstarter, Presspack it, BBC News, Virtual Worlds News, Crunchbase.

What do you suggest for the remaining spaces?
icey - no need to feel like a jerk - three blogs upstream is the original article http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/23/... and it specifically says that spending money on your social network "buys you" mutually positive social effects.

But I need to point out there are huge cultural specificities here. In the US it is common for two unrelated (and even related!) people to split the bill. Hence, picking up the tab may have a positive social effect in the manner described because that runs contrary to expectations.

In other cultures it is traditional for one person to pick the bill. Either this designates social status (the most senior person pays) or a close-knit culture that ensures future reciprocity - eg. I'll buy you lunch today because I feel like it, and I know we'll have lunch many times and sometimes you will pick up the tab so it will all wash out in the end.
Interestingly enough, this is true of basically every industry: our food production is controlled by a select few (who own farms), our car production is controlled by a select few (the car companies), our computers are controlled by a select few, etc.
The article could as well be called "three wrong ways to hire".

I don't understand why academia has long known the right way to hire, but the software industry keeps missing it. The right way is to let the candidates give a 30-60 minute talk about their previous projects, and then fry them with questions that came up in the talk.

Imagine a famous university wants to hire a top-quality math professor. How about asking him tricky high-school math questions for an hour, to see if he makes a mistake? Or how about cutting it down to 5 minutes, since that's enough to assess the "chemistry"? Or, what about choosing only from a pool of contractors that worked with the university before, rather than letting the best ones to apply? Sound stupid? Well, yes, it is stupid.
I am not defending her blanking you , but what was unwise was not paying for her, but doing so behind her back. "Look, I'm the person who likes the overpriced beer, let me pick up the tab" would have given you some additional data points with which to decide whether it was safe to proceed or desist.
I am not being manipulated, and you didn't get the point I was trying to make. My mistake for not wording my thoughts precisely enough....

OK, let's forget the labels "hacker" and "business person" for a second. The point is that the ones who have the money, are the ones who set the rules. Imagine that I am someone who wants to start a business, and that you are someone who has money to invest. I spend 5 years of my life trying to build a business (not necessarily tech related) and I fail. You invested in 99 other companies and, overall, obtain a return on your investment. Since you have the money, you have the power to spread the risk. If I succeeded, you would reap a great deal of the rewards, even though you had little skin in the game.

Sure, I can hire a bunch of programmers for my company, but it's my company, so I am the first wave who's gonna take the heat if things go wrong... the programmers can always get a job elsewhere.

The point is that the rich and powerful can afford a risk-reward profile that someone who is "in the trenches" cannot afford. Being "in the trenches" is what entrepreneurs, hackers, scientists do. Being a rear echelon pussy is what VC's, politicians and managers do. That's what I meant.
"although how that pans out for the smaller open source projects is still quite risky."

Yeah -- my theory doesn't account well for that issue. But during the boom, it seems that the people who really raked in the money (real money, not inflated stock options) were the Suns, Dells, and Herman Millers of the world more than the Yahoos and Pets.coms of the world.

Today, it's still probably better to be Microsoft or Apple or Wordpress than someone who's trying to make it as a writer by producing words on a MacBook Pro and posting them on a Wordpress blog, except in some circumstances noted elsewhere (like you're a consultant who partially uses a blog as advertising and to establish expertise).
Hey, you should use the date_range gem! (Shameless self-project pimping) Look at some of the things it adds to chronic:

http://github.com/fizx/date_range/blob/459812f091a67ce8d4b0e...

Edit: Oh, and you should add a batch api. Request latency will easily trump parsing time.

But yeah, keep up the good work. I need to find/create a good open web/api/scraping/big-data meetup, preferably in SF, not the valley.
Ye gods. Some of it, at least, appears to be implemented in Mathematica.
Good novels don't have to be hard to read, but they can be, and some of them should be. This either/or argument is pointless. Of course extremely difficult (and rewarding) novels like Infinite Jest and Ulysses will not be for everyone. But saying the opposite, that the mark of a great work of fiction is an easy to follow plot, is just ridiculous. Sometimes it's worth it to read something very difficult.
You're right, that isn't A/B testing. :)

Everything you said is right, though, and are exactly the types of situations where Simpson's paradox can occur.
Throw a Knife - Wired How-To Wiki
Of course, if you're a women's clothing store you might wind up iterating yourself into a men's clothing store if you follow that advice too strictly. :)
MIT Guide to Lockpicking
That color scheme dates back to about:jwz, in the first version of Mozilla. =)
Just means he'll have an excuse to value your investment round instead of just participating in convertible. Now in the valley we have SofttechVC, Lowercase, OATV, FirstRound, Baseline, and a handful of others trying to extract 20% from you for money you used to be able to get for 3-10%. On the bright side, more competition is good.
Getting rid of silverlight might help
Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular?
I mean, I work for a Microsoft Gold partner building (mostly) internal business apps, and I spend literally hours trying to get ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript to all play along nicely. I'm exactly the sort of person who should be switching to Silverlight, it seems like it's designed specifically to save people like me a whole load of trouble. But I (and many of my peers) just haven't gone for it and I can't really explain why. Any ideas?
Threaded Awesome: Understanding Ruby 1.8 Threads
To add to this, this statistic is also misleading because it doesn't mention HOW LONG viewers watch for. My guess is the average Hulu visitor watches 1/10-1/50 (or less) the amount of programming that a Time Warner subscriber does. Think about how much video the average person watches on their computer vs. on their television.
http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/this+friday+at+lunchtime

by design?
Yeah, but it seems they have no other connection point than through Github... Then distributed turns into isolated...
> Imagine that I am someone who wants to start a business, and that you are someone who has money to invest

If you are starting a business, then YOU are the business person. It doesn't matter where the money comes from. There are business people who specialize in investing money, but then there are also business people who actually run the god damn businesses.

> Being "in the trenches" is what entrepreneurs, hackers, scientists do.

ENTREPRENEURS ARE BUSINESS PEOPLE. Holy fucking shit, stop reading Hacker News and try to hang out in reality for a little while each day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_person
Probably a perception thing. I haven't looked into Silverlight much, but my gut says it's probably geared toward .NET developers (I could be completely wrong here). It is hard to beat Flash integration with Adobe CS4, especially on Macs (can you develop Silverlight apps on Mac?).