skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest issue with copyright today is that the law itself is contemptible, so people do not respect it. Our constitution (for those in the US) allows the government to create a time-limited copyright law, for the purpose of promoting the arts. As it stands today, no work has returned to the public domain in most people's lifetimes, and very few people expect it to happen.

Copyright is an agreement between society and creators of art, literature, music, etc. It says that if they will share their creations with society, then society will allow them to profit from that for a time. After that time is up, everybody gets to share the works freely. Society has been granting the artists the monopoly on distribution, but we haven't been getting the ability to share them after a period of time. It's this imbalance that causes people to lose respect for the law. I don't think copyright should be abolished, but I do think it needs to return to its original term, and I believe that retroactive extensions are an abomination against what copyright is supposed to create.

I'm not terribly eloquent, but Thomas McCauley was. His words are at http://baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright .
So, I have to admit that it's been a long time since I've read the code (version 2.x). I don't find Hungarian notation offensive, as long as naming conventions are consistently applied. If they aren't consistently applied in SQLite, then I guess that'd be a problem worth complaining about. I also don't find terseness and compact functions offensive. Whitespace is good, but not mandatory, as long as there is consistency...humans are adaptable, and once accustomed to a particular whitespace convention (whatever it is), it's usually fine. More lines fit on a page, anyway, and that has some value.

So, even if naming conventions are inconsistent and there's not enough whitespace, it is still a nice piece of code. The interfaces are very nice and clean (which does apply to internally used interfaces, as well, as I recall it), which is extremely important. It is also among the best tested pieces of C code in the world, with ridiculously high test coverage, which is good, too...it also means it is better documented than a lot of code, since the tests tend to provide a second tier of code documentation (you can see how the interface, both internal and world-facing, is used and what it's supposed to return).

I won't argue that Linux or WebKit aren't nicer. I've spent more time in the Linux kernel sources than any other major C project (except maybe Squid), and it is definitely a really great codebase. I don't know WebKit, at all, so won't comment. Linux has dramatically less test coverage than SQLite, and is also tersely commented and documented. I kinda suspect your opinion of the SQLite bits that are poorly commented comes from the contrast with the places where it is commented in vivid and verbose detail (I seem to recall there was/is some form of literate programming going on in SQLite, but maybe that was another project).
So you're advocating simply ignoring the laws you don't approve of? Or of scolding the RIAA for demanding they be enforced? I don't get it. Nobody's saying the RIAA's business model is your fault. You are free to avoid the RIAA: don't use their offerings.
Five Days to a Django Web App: Day One, Get Ready
What a red herring. That the media industries have distorted the time frames of copyright has nothing to do with the fact that people are rampantly downloading new media over the Internet.

The movie industry in particular would be perfectly happy --- overjoyed, in fact --- if they could just get movies locked down within a new release window measured in weeks.
91% of the people that answered attended college. Can we stop with all the "College is useless" submissions now?
There's still the matter of confusion when [name withheld] is responding to [name withheld], though -- and for that reason alone, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion.

It's also the case that sometimes I'm not entirely sure what someone's trying to say unless and until I look at it within the context of his or her earlier comments in the same discussion. If I can't match someone's comment with the context of previous comments, I sometimes can't tell if they're being sarcastic, accidentally saying "can" instead of "can't", and so on.

I judge by the content of a comment rather than by name, and I agree that's a good way to do it, but I don't think that needs to be enforced by withholding information from us.
I have to wonder about the commenters that took it seriously but only objected to 1 or 2 things; do they actually use the rest of the method?
The "Imagine Parallels on Mac OS X without the need to fish out money on an extra OS" comment regarding XP mode strikes me as a bit disingenuous. The more apt comparison I think would be Classic/OS 9 or PowerPC compatibility - which Apple did provide for free (Classic mode and Rosetta).
You make it sound more difficult than it is. In other words, they mounted your partition, cat mykey.txt > authorized_keys, then ssh'd in and shut down your misbehaving app. They probably have a script for it since I bet it happens all the time.

You're dangerously close to whining, did you know.
Confused. The OP says it was a hidden feature, not a press
release?
I don't think most copyright abolisionists would want to either, simply out of principles or sprites.

My comment were mostly in the context of a competition, not customers.
Why would child care takers make less money than people who build companies?

It is called the laws of supply and demand. Child care workers are in abundant supply, require few skills to do properly. However, people who build extremely large businesses are far fewer in number and require a lot more specialized skills. Plus, there are plenty of people who try to build a company and fail and don't make anything. If your services/products aren't good enough for people to voluntarily exchange money for them, then the business fails.
IBM takes first 3D image of atomic bonds
Which is ironic because colleges switched to Java because Java is used in the "real world".

Of course, Java with all its class-and-interface scaffolding adds too much accidental complexity too. It's not a matter of higher-level, it's a matter of verbose. Scheme is a high-level language but it's still "the hard way" in a very important sense.
Who cares? He should only be using the other 7/8s when nobody else is; that's the entire point. If their virtualization isn't setup to keep people from bogarting resources on a "first come, first keep" basis, that is their poor decision to live with; they shouldn't be taking it out on customers by killing processes and so on.

A VPS host shouldn't be asking or telling customers to manage their own CPU resources, period; that's the point of a VPS in the first place. It's a virtual private server. It should be isolated in a fashion such that even if I'm using 100% CPU 24/7, it doesn't affect anybody else. If a host told me to "use less CPU" I'd tell them to "acquire better virtualization" and find a better host. Ridiculous.
Heh. Maybe, instead of anonymizing names, pg should just ensure that once you pass 200 points your point value is replaced with the word "ensouled". That way, we can still tell who's who, newbies still get drawn in and invested by the karma system, and people with 20,000 karma don't get automatically upvoted by impressionable people just because they have high karma scores.
Glitch Forces NASA to Cancel First Moon Rocket Test Firing
The Cisco smart grid initiative makes perfect sense to me; it's barely even an extension to what Cisco already does.

Here's the situation they find themselves in: if they can control or influence the design of residential power meters, which are tiny boxes made by 10 different companies that cost less than $1000, then they can dictate terms for how those meters will talk to the utilities. And what they'll dictate is IPv6.

The result will be massive purchases of IPv6 connectivity gear, by utilities, from Cisco. They have to see it as a second ISP gold rush.

Since smart meters are deployed in only a tiny fraction of markets, but will absolutely inevitably be deployed everywhere in 10 years, it may be that all Cisco has to do to make this happen is buy a smart meter manufacturer; these are companies with (perhaps) 8 figure revenue streams.

If you wanted to get all blue-sky about the opportunity, you could point out that Cisco would end up with a second end-to-end network, including the last mile, that would touch every residence and business in the country, all running on equipment that Cisco had de facto design control over. What else could they do with that? Who knows. I'm sure someone there has some idea.
What -- so now we aren't allowed to refer to people by name? I think that's a terrible idea, especially when I'm talking to foo about something bar said.
Yes but that's called marketing (viral). An easter egg found by a prominent blogger whose audience would spread the word and to press outlets.

Wonder how many more easter eggs we will now see in apps?
no brainer for write-often read-rarely types of applications (logging, metrics

I'll probably be re-writing some logging functionality in it, actually. I love asynchronous operations. AKA, "YAY! NEW TOYS!"
Well . . . the word "Maybe" in pg's comment is the only reason I didn't downvote it.
The longer you stay with a provider, the more likely you are to find a tech having a bad day ...

I'm sorry, but the behavior described in the article is completely unacceptable. I don't care how bad of a day anyone's having, you don't break into your customer's server and shut off Apache without notice.
Nowhere does apotheon advocate the breaking of laws, just whether a law is right or wrong.
No-one else is posting from the perspective of an employer, so let me point out what seems obvious to me. No-one who works for a non-profit is going to be making what you refer to as "market rates". You signed up for a lower salary when you joined, and so unless you get satisfaction from the mission of the non-profit you should move on. Otherwise the salary issue will canker over time and you may even come to resent the non-profit for being... a non-profit.

The most important thing is that you do not leave the organization in the lurch. You do not want to be remembered as the guy who pushed them onto ROR and then bailed leaving them with a system they couldn't use. Or the guy who signed on when the economy was rough and then started complaining about salary six months in. Basically, avoid letting the money issue come between you and your coworkers/employers since it is probably not their priority. Figure out your long-term goals and move towards them while giving others time to adjust.
Could you please explain this logic? Wouldn't ~90% of us attending college, then seeing its effects, qualify us to comment on the topic?
Joe Abercrombie reveals details of next book: "The Heroes"
readwriteweb is one big continuous press release. Yelp scored with this one. It's all a game.

That said, I personally think AR will be absolutely freaking massive so it's actually good to see them trailblazing in this new space. Kudos.

edit: Actually, I think AR will obliterate much of what we know as the web today. I advise HN peeps to go watch a japanese show called Dennou Coil. That's the future right there and if you don't believe me, go watch anyone playing nintendogs on DS.
Not cats, but cat feces. (i.e. she shouldn't be changing her cat's -- or cats' -- litter box)
LinkedIn charges $250 a year to view users' full profiles.
This is a good book, and one of the easiest to find, on independent learning. But it has its problems, and there are better ones out there. I wrote short reviews of several last spring http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/books-on-self-lear...
Under the pink light: flagging teenagers' acne to drive them away
Not sure what conclusion you can draw from that - it was a self-selected sample. For example I didn't vote because of the non-existent "academia/research" option.

I think if you wanted to get a better handle of how many women are in HN, a poll entitled "Are you female" with the options of yes-no-it's complicated- will give you better traction.
There's a similar article that ran a few years ago (I think) about LA, in the LA Times. It talked both about how hard it is to fire teachers, and also how hard it is to know ahead of time which teachers are any good.

I wish I could find it again, but it's remained elusive in the few minutes I've spent looking.
I thought the person who wrote the article said it well:

"To quote Samwise Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings: 'I don’t know why, but it makes me sad.'"
WOW! this is a big breakthrough. I have friends working in my collaborators group using STM and AFM at UHV (Ultra High Vacuum) and ULT (Ultra Low Temperatures), and know second hand how difficult/near to impossible it is.
also, i think AR uses an undocumented API (another reason to use an easter egg) so I can see apple pulling this app.
When Google Calculator sees GB, it sees binary GiB/Gibibytes, not classic SI GB/Gigabytes. The disk drive industry uses SI; RAM and most OS readouts of file sizes use binary-based units but often display using SI-like names and abbreviations.

The whole set of binary prefixes is one of those things that looks silly when you first see it, but then when you see year after year of confusion, it grows on you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
You make it sound more difficult than it is.

Hmm. I'm sorry, but I don't see how this matters at all Sho. Do the ethics change based on whether you have a rootkit or you do everything by hand?
That is fucking awesome.

It's depressing to consider the fact that it would probably get downvoted on the science subreddit.
True, I guess, but it seems a bit extreme to say that anyone downloading a Greasemonkey script should be examining the javascript inside it to figure out what it does. That's all I meant by my 'Wait, what' comment. Should've elaborated, then.
Just tried it, even with the compass it's still a bit halfassed. The internal compass simply isn't accurate enough for this - and the margin of error is huge. I have had the iPhone think I'm facing in the direct opposite way.

IMHO we can't get true AR until we actually start making sense of the picture coming into the camera.
Laws that breed contempt for themselves won't be followed. If we had a respectable copyright regime, content producers would have a leg to stand on. There will always be scofflaws in any society; the goal is to minimize that behaviour, not to eliminate it.

Besides that, what is lost when a penniless student downloads a song? A sale? From a student who has no money? The losses are from people who can afford to make purchases. Those people must be convinced to follow the law, and the essential first step is to make the law something that people can respect.
Hmm. I whipped up a quick python script to test this theory.

Age,Hours Wrkd,Income was unique ~89% of the time
Age,Hours Wrkd, Yrs in industy,Income was unique 97% of the time
Age,Education,Hours Wrkd,Income was unique 94% of the time
Age,Education,Hours Wrkd,Yrs in Industry,Income was unique 98% of the time

Here it is if anyone wants to play with it.
http://paste.pocoo.org/show/136649/
Hey whoa pal, I didn't say I was going to hand him a copy of L0phtCrack and tell him to get to it (note my use of the word 'innocuous'):

First of all, I said that we would be talking about deprecated tricks, just silly things where the exploit environment would have to be set up such that one could use these tricks.

Secondly, more of the citizenry should be aware exactly of how the most common exploits work as to prevent future pieces of software from suffering the same poor design.

Thirdly, I chose security topics because I myself am interested in them; I wanted to choose a topic that I'd be interested in as well because that way I have the tenacity to actually develop lesson plans, lectures and homework throughout the year.
Have you ever had a negative karma score placed on a comment?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190451

( my memory is a gift and a curse ;) )
Need to do the nanotube thang first, though. We need materials with enough tensile strength to withstand the stress of a space elevator. Then you'll see space mining and solar collection.
He's not completely new; he's done some C and Lua, so it wouldn't be a dead start. Great information, thanks very much.
Indeed. For those of us raised in the heyday of the tragicallly misguided self-esteem movement, studies like this are vindicating.
You're telling the, at most 9% of the rest of us how useless it is. I just don't think it really contributes anything.
If one can't afford something, one generally doesn't get it at all.
The data loss stories I've heard, in particular, are enough to keep me awake at night.

Over four years ago, I was helping my father-in-law establish a web presence and e-mail system for his small business. Things were fine on my personal dedicated server but I decided to move their stuff to Yahoo's "proven" business service. One day, I found out everything was removed -- email accounts, web site -- for no explainable reason. The whole sordid affair was documented here:

http://billkatz.com/2005/6/Run-Dont-Walk-from-Yahoo-Small-Bu...
I was pretty severely ADHD, and one of the things the check for is various learning disabilities, etc.

I didn't know at the time, but my parents eventually gave me records of all that stuff.

More informally, I was just one of the "smart kids"
Would you mind posting what the offending CGI was doing? If you coded up your index.cgi to walk all over the CPU as badly as it sounds like you did, something was probably very very wrong.

That said, they were absolutely in the right to do this (except that they should have notified you first...).

I saw that you (or somebody) used the analogy of a landlord and an apartment. Let's explore that further...

Say you are renting an apartment, and the landlord doesn't charge you anything for water (which is pretty common, if not standard). Now, there is a bit of a gentlemen's agreement here. Yes, you have "unlimited" water but, like everything else in life, this needs to have the words "within reason" appended to it.

Now lets say that, for some reason, your apartment was using 10x as much water as everybody else in the building...so much so, in fact, that nobody else in the building could reliably get any water.

Your landlord calls you and says "Hey, joao, would you mind cutting the water back, please? You're kindof using too much", which you ignore.

A couple of months later, again, the landlord calls

"Hey, Joao, you're still using a shit-load of water, and your sortof hogging it all. Some of the other tenants are complaining...if you want, leave a key to your place in the office and we'll go check it out!"

Which you respond "over my dead body".

So, finally, after months and months of you hogging the water, they just use the master key to the building to go into your apartment, where they see that you've had the shower, the sink, and the toilet all running constantly for the last 4 months. They shut them off, then call you

"Hey, joao, yeah, we noticed that you pretty royally messed up and kindof left EVERYTHING in the bathroom on at the same time. Not cool...so we shut it off. Sorry for the inconveinience. BTW, sorry for having to go into your appt. like that, but the other tenants were complaining. Here are some instructions so that you can change the lock on your door an keep us from being able to help you like this in the future. Have a nice day!"

And your response to ignoring their totally legitimate requests for you to stop hogging all the resources is "WHAT A BUNCH OF PRICKS!!"

I think somebody needs to calm down and take a step back from the situation.
living on 18 months worth of ramen ... :)
It's not about effort, it's about self-control. If you had been able to make yourself work on the class assignments, even if you didn't like them, you would have better grades.
Ethics? Ethics don't enter into it, this is pure business necessity. Fact is, a $20/month VPS account has no rights and if it causes trouble it will be shut down, simple as that.

Pay $250/month for an account at Rackspace (or whoever) and you will be treated very differently.
you can make the argument, that it is good to have empirical evidence of something that is intuitively true, because intuitively true things aren't always intuitively true.
I wonder how much it went for?

Also, a friend of mine once bought and sold bank.com possibly at the height of the boom - though he won't say how much for.
By that logic, all of the linux zealots out there should stop encouraging people to use linux since all the linux people already use it.

Is that about right?

We're telling the other 9% "Hey, guys, learn from our mistakes! Have a nice day!".
Upvoted for "differently efforted" - awesome!
How about withholding the name still, but offering a way to 'opt-out' from voting. You don't see the name until you either vote up or opt out. After you've withheld your voice, you can't go vote again on that submission/comment.
Overmighty finance levies a tithe on growth
On the subject of compiling other languages to JavaScript, you might be interested in frp-js. It's a Functional Reactive DSL in Haskell that compiles to JavaScript.

http://github.com/sebastiaanvisser/frp-js/
social shame/reward is a more powerful force than intrinsic motivation to be good/bad
Billable hours for an accountant or lawyer are usually around 1800/yr. (The job also requires non-billable hours.) That's 420*1800 = $756,000, assuming the accountant themselves takes home the whole fee. But they don't, just as a programmer doesn't take home every dollar of value they bring into the company. If they take home roughly 2/3 of it (generous, probably unrealistic) that's $500k. So how does a programmer get $500k per year?

One way is to perpetually earn $500k on a 5% rate of return from $10,000,000. That's 33% equity in a startup that's acquired for $30,000,000--probably more rare than a tax accountant.

A programmer doing consulting work might make around $420 per billable hour, but probably as a peak rate and not sustainably.

You could combine income streams: a high paying software job (that's $100,000-$200,000/yr at the top levels) plus consulting (another $100,000+ worth of contracts in a given year is doable for some) plus some equity as a founder or early employee ($100,000 as 5% return on $2,000,000 in wealth) could get you there. It's not as convenient as putting in hours at an accounting firm, but a lot of good programmers fall into it anyway.
Actually the post says it will run for a period of time shorter than half of the length of the first contest which could have run for 5 years (10/2006 - 10/2011).

From the post...

And, like so many great movies, there will be a sequel.

The advances spurred by the Netflix Prize have so impressed us that we’re planning Netflix Prize 2, a new big money contest with some new twists.

Here’s one: three years was a long time to compete in Prize 1, so the next contest will be a shorter time limited race, with grand prizes for the best results at 6 and 18 months.

While the first contest has been remarkable, we think Netflix Prize 2 will be more challenging, more fun, and even more useful to the field.

Stay tuned for more details when we announce the winners of Prize 1 in September.
How hard it was for them to do something isn't the issue.

From the blog post:

> In December they set a CPU cap on my VPS.

Then from their response email to shutting down Apache:

> We can set it so that you get a fixed amount of CPU (and then we don’t mind how much CPU want to use).

My first reaction is, "Huh?" They state that they don't care about your local CPU usage if they bother to put a cap on your usage of the actual CPU. Yet they didn't do that. Instead they broke into his box to shutdown a rogue process that was 'using too much cpu.' That doesn't make any sense.