skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's a mystery to me why in a case of clear and substantial wrongdoing such as this, no individual prosecutions occur

It's not at all clear to me that any wrongdoing took place.

Pfizer communicated true information that the government wanted censored.

OK, let me correct my statement: I think that there was wrongdoing, but it was on the government side.
The stereotyping is basically what makes it satire.
9.5mm Firefox browsers use Adblock Plus Daily
This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-users-use-add-ons/) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?
In fairness, Pfizer acquired a company that was later found to have violated the law in this area. But on the other hand, they were surely aware of that after performing their due diligence before the acquisition. It's a tricky political issue.
This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-u...) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?
"If we feel it, then it's real."

The word "real" loses all meaning once we start saying that what we feel -- any old fantasy, delusion, speculation -- is real. We also indulge one of the central fantasies of human reflexive identity -- that we are supernatural -- when we say that what we feel is therefore, ipso facto, real.

As for Dennett, he is a serial question-begger and equivocator on this topic. He doesn't merely change the definition of "free will" in that book. He arbitrarily changes the definition to a trivial one; argues that that new kind of free will is possible; and then reinserts his conclusions into a debate in which the definition has not changed. Hence he has offered absolutely nothing to the issue that we're all talking about -- free will that would allow for culpability, or what I call non-trivial free will. I recommend Peter Van Inwagen and Galen Strawson instead, who offer much more rigorous good-faith arguments about free will.
Excellent and prescient reference.
"the fidelity isn't the same as a CD"

At what bitrate? I don't think I can tell the difference by 256...
"Clearly I have enormous difficulty accepting that that my conscious experience of choice is false. The very possibility threatens my sense of self;"

Hmm, so let's assume the writer is a non-religious materialist. Logically, why would it be hard to accept the idea that one's brain is what is generating one's decisions? What the heck else would be doing it? Do you need an experiment, even, to take note of this? Does the time at which the brain generates the results even matter?

Given all this, I would say that "Free Will" is an illusion in the sense that the operation of human brain seems to often generate the sensation that some undifferentiated "self" or "I" is what's doing things and when a person is confronted with strong evidence that their brain must be what's ultimately generating their choices (as well as the sensation of "choice"), it's threatening to this "sense of self", a sense that isn't even logically consistent with our other understandings of the world.
I always thought http://www.irider.com/demo/index.htm did this well. Costs money though.
How so? The jive-talking men are incomprehensible due to their subculture, not their race.
Heh, I actually think the enterprise has much in common with universities/government tools. Because it's internal, it can hide its cobwebs from the public and get away with being quite delayed.
its a pretty good story too
"MP3" can mean a lot of things (to some people it just means "digital music"). Quality depends on the bitrate, on CBR vs VBR, on the encoder used, on the playback device, etc.

Personally, I ripped most of my CDs in 256kbs VBR AAC (no DRM), and that's fine for me. But I wouldn't go back to 128kbps MP3s (especially if encoded with something else than LAME).

I'd love to use more OGG Vorbis, but iTunes just plays better with AAC (even if you install the quicktime codec, you can't have the artwork inside the files).
Nvidia in a rough spot?
Send me an email and I can send you some resources. Also note that it's probably a better idea to write a slide deck than a business plan -- in Silicon Valley anyways, a deck is universally preferred.
I've given them my email, it's the seemly endless remainder of the form I object to, especially asking my gender. Why should they care?
Yeah, I understand that, but the examples were supposed to be impressive in their simplicity. You can mix types in an array even in C, but the code you'd need to write to do so makes it unattractive.

If the comment was "But you don't get any type checking" instead of "My language can do this too", then it'd make perfect sense.
Interestingly the whistleblowers who got this get started will get a sizable fee -- I think something like $100 million between the 5 of them. Will that encourage more employees to come forward with evidence of wrongdoing?
The best is the enemy of the good.

-- Voltaire
It's funny and intuitive for someone to say this but imagine someone saying "I have trouble accepting the fact that my stomach digests food. I thought I digested the food myself. This is threaten to my sense of self". This would be on the same logical level as the above statement, yet it seems ridiculous whereas the statement about "...conscious experience of choice..." seems perfectly reasonable.
Static cling printing, presentation folders printing, folders printing
What are you listening on? I expect that most people could tell the difference if they listened on a reasonable quality separate CD player, amp and speakers and compared that with an MP3 player plugged into the same amp and speakers. Unfortunately I don't have an experiment I can cite but having tried it myself, I can say the difference is substantial.
True. But because there's far more companies and far more diversity in the enterprise than in universities -- the enterprise social software state-of-the-art is far more advanced than what exists in universities.

There's enough companies willing to experiment with using social software that there's some very large + sophisticated installs of social software. In universities. . . there's only a handful and not yet particularly impressive.

But I'd grant your point that the average university and average enterprise/government are both equally backwards when it comes to using social software.
Ask HN atheists & agnostics: Are you strictly materialist? 
Or do you believe there may be more going on within our day to day realities than meets the eye, or that science hasn't detected yet?
> The response is usually, "Oh, cool. my computer has been doing this funny thing for the past month and I can't figure it out, would you mind taking a look at it?"

Fixed your response.
Why the Tech-led Recovery Has Not Materialized
Phototoshop has apparently had this feature for some time. They call it "non-linear history". You can go back to earlier revisions, try new things starting from there, then if you don't like it, erase that history path and go back to your first one. You can also "snapshot" your history so points on it have intuitive labels.

They don't display it as a tree, but it's logically identical -- just flattened out into a list form with the inactive branches grayed out.
Thanks, I'll check them out next when I get the chance.
I agree with lot of posters but there is one point I haven't seen addressed so far: do you expect this to be a surprise for him? If not, you've probably done something wrong. Were your expectations made clear to him?

Since I have had to fire someone in the past (not a pleasant experience even if it went well), when I announced it, it wasn't really a surprise to him, his attitude was more "it's sad but fair". But it went that way because I had a few discussions earlier about what I was expecting in terms of actions and how what he was doing was not meeting these expectations. Also make sure he knows which things you don't really care for right now and find unnecessary right now. It is possible he is not delivering because he is putting more energy on things you don't care for. Creating this shared vision is one of the most important things you need to learn when managing employees.
"Sixth, it never gets dull. There are always shiny new toys to play with."

I wish I had that perspective. Instead, I find myself growing weary trying to keep abreast of all the shiny new toys, and feel like it gets in the way of accomplishing or mastering new things.
After things like live player-helmet and umpire cameras, I don't think you can be so sure. About those cams:

http://www.cbssports.com/info/about/press/2000/nfle

Sure, it'd be banal -- "we really need to make this 3rd and long"... "my linemen are doing a great job today"... etc. -- but it could happen.

And if not on Twitter, it could be official league-sanctioned Facebook status updates, etc. as part of some other promotional tie-in with the league websites or cable network.

And if not the NFL, a scrappy upstart, like the UFL or new USFL or AAFL could try it.
You're obviously not familiar with the research on software development and productivity. I would strongly suggest that you pick up some books from Steve McConnell (eg Rapid Development) as well as some classics like Peopleware. You may find some of the lessons invaluable.

Researchers have studied variation in speed of development between programmers. A common scenario are coding tests where different programmers are asked to do the same task. These studies have consistently found differences in speed of a factor of 10 or more. Follow-up research has found that programmers at the fastest end of that scale spend the smallest fraction of their time actually programming. Instead they spend time in other activities such as design and testing. So time invested in design and testing pays back during development. And not just in a large project, but in a sample coding exercise of less than a day.

Here is another data point of interest. Another study assigned multiple professional teams the same project, but asked each team to optimize a different thing. A few of the dimensions were performance, development speed, maintainability of code, and memory usage. Most of the teams managed to win on the characteristic they were optimizing for. The team that was aiming for maintainable code came in second on most of the other dimensions.

When you consider that as an industry we spend about 70% of our software development dollars in maintenance, aiming for maintainable code has lopsided benefits relative to the other options. Your code is done almost as fast as possible, performs reasonably well, uses a reasonable amount of memory, and costs a lot less to maintain. Situations exist where that isn't the optimal trade-off, but it is optimal often enough that it should be treated as the default.

Which is exactly what this article was arguing.
Really, it's all about confidence in the delivery. When people ask "what do you do?" they're looking for a stereotype to fit you into. Take the opportunity to show them how they might be wrong.
(from DOJ press release): Pfizer promoted the sale of Bextra for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns.

From http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10004061/pfizers-west-side-s... (hysterical title, but good linkage): In Kopchinksi’s district, doctors were given article reprints by sales reps addressing off-label uses. The articles’ first page indicated what Bextra was, and was not, approved for. But Pfizer had a way around that, according to the complaint:

Pfizer sales representatives were instructed, when leaving these reprints with doctors, to fold this first page over, so that it became the last page, not the first page, of the reprint as it was presented to the physicians.

Hrmm.
This is so funny, because ever since I was first introduced to OOP (about 19 years ago - C++), I've had visuals in my head for objects - not clear ones, but somewhere floating in there is the idea of some shape with sockets and protrusions, switches and dials, representing getters, setters, methods, etc. Again, it's always vague, but the concept always seems to be there. I can tell you, though, that they are an off-white color.
Google user comment in 2000
Mashable has an article listing several social networks for entrepreneurs. You may want to check some Quantcast stats to see which sites have the highest traffic from your geographic area.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/12/entrepreneur-networks/

I'd also take a look at tech / entrepreneurship / startup -related groups on http://meetup.com
>Are we lowering our standards as a society

My MP3 player sounds a hell of a lot better than the cheap ghetto blaster on which I played cassettes (often filled with songs recorded off the radio) as a child in the early 1980s.
Er, I'm not quite sure you read the article, which basically propped up a kinda-lame joke intended to poke fun at VCs, then missed the point of the joke entirely while explaining its punchline.

I say marketing because the Ice Cream Glove is a joke, whereas the Snuggie has marketing.

I'm fairly sure that if you marketed the Ice Cream Glove with shouty ads in Australia, it'd sell like hotcakes.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7ZAGE0AIcE
That's Not a Memory Leak, It's Bloat
Think you know the source of the issues in your Rails app? Check again ...
Keep in mind that most people don't really care much about what you exactly do. They are starting a conversation. They are being friendly. Don't get all existential on them and feel like you have to justify your life. You are only going to come off as an insecure whiny neurotic if you go off on a monologue.
How To Get People To Reply To Your Messages In Online Dating, Part I
"I make computers go fast."

If they bite, I'm happy to talk about it. If not, conversation moves on.
Google home page patented
Probably the same as a normal text undo. You store the "actions" the user performs against the document on a stack. Each action is a replacement of one text string in the document with another (where strings can be zero-length and can start and end at any point).

Actions can "do" and "undo" themselves against the document trivially. Then to save space, you compress adjacent actions into single actions (e.g. add('a', 0) and add('b', 1) compress to add("ab", 0)).
After seeing this link I realized that it's time to read the book.
Haha, so true and reminds me of this xkcd post: http://xkcd.com/627/
Uquery.com - The Appstore Search Engine
Is Linux For Losers?
There would be all sorts of unintended consequences from doing something like this.

Look what happens to humans who feel no pain: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16185231/ns/health-more_health_n...

Then extrapolate to large herds of cattle.
The restriction in Python is not on the first-classeness but on the anonymity.
I really love getting this question. I'm pretty young so I've only had a couple jobs and am now a student, but answers I've given to this:

- "I keep our analysts from investing in evil companies by making sure all the info from NGOs/ratings are at their fingertips. When they're gonna buy evil, the screen turns RED." Go on to say why it's awesome because investing in The Good actually gives decent returns, etc.

- "I build a crazy anime fusion of Facebook and Zelda on cellphones for Japanese kids." Go on to explain why it's awesome because you make tools for these kids and they go nuts building themselves characters and really it's all a way for shy people to meet each other in a culture that makes it hard.

- "I'm trying to figure out what the cells in your brain say to each other, and how we can talk to them." Whip out iPhone to show picture of Brainbow mouse. Talk about the guys curing blindness with CCD cameras and electrodes.

(And try not to burst out laughing when they start talking about The Secret or how they can control the future because of -gasp!- Quantum Physics)

The point is that ... if you really like what you're doing, it's because there's something cool about it. And probably not just a little cool, but seriously, deeply cool. If you believe in it (and don't feel bored by the question) then that'll come across, and people will be genuinely interested.

Also - I try to make up a slightly new variation of the answer every time. It's a fun game for me, and it keeps me from looking/feeling like I'm giving out a canned line.
Is there a tactful way of saying, "No, I do my computer stuff for a living, and these are my rates"?
Yeah. Same with Amazon when they were a few years in. Were they worth writing about back then? I think so.
I find scientific models of the world satisfying; I think our understanding of the world as being made of material and no more is capable of explaining everything we experience. The sketches of how this and that could be so that are written by this and that philosopher seem more plausible to me than any "supernatural" account. (Of course, if we discovered something "supernatural" to exist after all, then we would immediately start to consider it "natural".) So I say, with reasonable small amounts of doubt, that we've managed to hone onto the 'gist' of reality via the scientific method.

However, I'm more interested in trying to be right tomorrow than I am to defending any given position that I hold today, so I'm not strictly anything. I.e.: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
If making money is your passion, the you are making money doing your passion, then you seem to be doing alright...
I recently left my sweet, sweet university job running a development team to start a private firm with some colleagues. We launched http://wejustquit.net for our friends and family just after the announcement. When I need a little kick in the butt, I just swing by and it scares the motivation right back to me.

If only it would try to eat me every so often, I'd work all the time.
People should look at Smalltalk if they want "first class" everything.
It's called version control and branching and merging. It's a solved problem.
Sony To Sell 3D TVs By The End of 2010
So automatic version control? Now if only our operating systems would incorporate that...
Pick one: Autoposting is the end/salvation of blogging
I just looked at the layout in the patent document and the Google homepage, and the two are not the same.
http://venturehacks.com - read up on "the deck" and, well, the entire site.
Well said. I think part of the reason entrepreneurship is so hard is that we are really good at after-the-fact rationalization.
I've been coding for almost 20 years, and plan to do it until I am no longer able to, for all the reasons that the author mentioned.

I feel very blessed to be a coder. I think of coding as a form of alchemy. I sit at this keyboard, move my fingers around, and can create things of great value out of thin air. That's pretty amazing if you ask me.
Ask HN: AdBlocker Software
As a micro ISV looking to build a web app, the notion of monetizing via ads still works for some. However, depending on the target audience, some more than others will have ad blocking software. Does the HN community use ad blocker software?
That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one.

He's concentrating on disk-to-board throughput, but this being network attached storage on a LAN, using the motherboards' single ethernet port the amount of data read or written to those drives per second will never exceed 1 Gbit/second anyway.

I agree with the reliability analysis though, backblaze seems to be on fairly thin ice there.

Still, it seems to work for backblaze, I'm taking it as read that they've lived through a bunch of drive failures by now and they seem to still be in business.
Clean and simple, no signup required.

Looks like the patented? Google home page, but that is good change for me. I really don't like the other sites with the same purpose that I have tried (appsafari, apptism or 148apps).

I also think that iTunes or the included inside iPhone AppStore app are not very useful to find anything.
MIT license is compatible with BSD and GPL licenses, so I don't see a big issue there. But I could put it in public domain, so that there were no license issues at all.
For an alternate POV, see:

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/08/steve-jobs...

In particular, Jobs is quoted as saying "It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do."
Ah yes, when you put it like that I could see it happening easy, at least in an "NFL Films" or "mic'd up" kind of way where the player is only passively taking part.

My reaction was to the word "dictate" really, the idea of a player (which would have to be the QB) actively twittering in-game while on the field, eg actually saying "hey coach, tell twitter we're going to go long and school the Browns secondary".

As for non-NFL leagues, well I wouldn't put anything past them, they have no brand to protect so they'll try anything.
This guy takes the "anti-audiophile" sentiment a bit too far. If you know what a FLAC is, you must also have more money than sense and want oxygen-free copper cables?

FLAC is a good means of conveying audio losslessly. Monster Cables are snake oil. These things are not the same.

(And I'm on the older cusp of the "MP3 generation," so this isn't somehow an age thing.)
Two words: repeat sales.

Those who care about audio quality won't abandon their hardware playback platform for exactly this reason. Even those who don't understand the technicalities are vaguely aware of the problem.

The solution is FLAC, but since it's free, lossless, and (typically) 2-3x larger, it has had fairly slow growth. Still: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html
These are great, I had forgotten about them!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803165
This article is almost 2 weeks old and appears to be related to pre-release versions of Snow Leopard.

The headline of your submission also appears different from the article itself and makes it sound like a much more definitive case than what seems to be happening (from the articles description).
To some extent this will always be a problem with fields that require in-depth knowledge or expertise.

"What do you do?"

"I'm a mechanic / plumber / electrician / etc."

"Oh."

The problem is, that's not a useful answer, unless the person knows at least something about the field. "I make websites" picks the most general and vague answer possible, and therefore the least interesting.

Compare

"I fix mechanical devices"

with

"I fix and restore vintage American cars from the 60's."

Or

"I make websites"

with

"You know all those stupid quiz apps on Facebook/fart apps on iPhone? Well, I don't make those, but I try to make more useful stuff on Facebook/iPhone, like X, Y and Z".

Of course, "I make payroll software" will probably never be interesting, but "I make payroll software for this media giant you must've heard about, you know their shows A and B?", or "for this financial company, man last year was tough", or "for this small company you've never heard of, they're working on interesting trend foo".

The point of the question - other than to fit you in a stereotype - is to find some common ground to talk about. Work with the question, not against it.