skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought by giving money she meant in return for "work" as she defined it repeatedly throughout the article, not as charity. But on rereading I guess the second half could be talking about charity or patronage.

I don't think looking after kids or climbing remote mountains is easy, but I think they may be rewarding in ways other than monetary. I also think society benefits from these things but if we're talking about society's benefit then copyright is the wrong tool to reward artists.

But I stand by my point, doing something artistic that may not pay off financially,regardless of your hard work or skill, is a choice just as buying many lottery tickets is a choice. Many people choose careers that they know in advance will not provide financial security (and this includes some artists). Save your sympathy for them, not the ones gambling without understanding the odds.
I'm not sure what I think about the article, but: If you haven't seen Haley's movie Sita Sings The Blues, you are missing out on one of the coolest and funniest movies of 2008, and it's available for free downloading/torrenting.
Only if they aren't profitable. Given the economic efficiency and execution speed of startups relative to freelancers/consultants and big organizations, it seems more likely they'll be the business class emerging victorious from the information revolution. It's what happened last time: those who built industrial tech that scaled beat both the cottage workers and the monarchs.

Some of the industrial giants might survive the wake of the computer, but it will probably be the same way the crowns did the engine: in name (and static, material wealth) only. Eventually the most valuable asset of the New York Times will probably be the brand and real estate.
I'm uncomfortable with this essay because the author seems to be buying into the general idea that there is some bundle of Natural Property Rights that all humans are entitled to, and the job of a lawmaker is simply to align the statutes as closely as possible with those rights. The main difference between her and the pro-copyright lobbyists is that she excludes intellectual property from the bundle and they want to include it.
Definitely one of the most under-appreciated parts of Snow Leopard; anyone who has used BeOS can appreciate the value of making it easy for developers to "thread pervasively"...
For what it's worth, I recall the top HN comment initially being something about the paper printing hoaxes.
It happens all the time that people do not realize what the actual driver is in an experiment. (The cuprous oxide vs the hair mat.)

For example look at: http://www.physorg.com/news171643486.html

I don't know anything about physorg.com, it sounds like they should know science - except they don't. The electricity does not come from the tree, it comes from the metal probes.

Cold fusion has the same problem. One person reported how a certain batch of palladium worked great and made energy, but now the palladium is used up, and new batches don't work.

His mistake is that the palladium and the cold fusion had nothing to do with it. Palladium is sometimes refined from nuclear waste, and that batch was slightly contaminated.

Doing science is hard, especially correcting for all the variables. Very few people learn how to do it properly.
Funny, it was also pirated today. (I have an RSS watch for "darksiderg" on Mininova.)
I don't think art or buggy whips are useless. But if my sole goal was to generate income, I'd not start my business plan with either.

Luckily for everyone, most people's goals include factors other than profit. Hence symphony orchestras and philosophers exist despite lack of potential upside on their time investment.
Of course. Thanks for the correction.
Yes. However they optimize for speed and have the resources to test their pages in every browser.
I wish it was possible to buy a PDF version.
> But they forget that the Fundamentals can destroy a company. And a company that doesn't exist, doesn't trade anymore.

A wise company with poor fundamentals but a good image and an inflated share price could, however, use that overvalued currency to buy other companies (with better fundamentals) in an all-stock deal.

There are some who would say that this is pretty much how the entire internet industry works...
I believe the ebook option at http://apress.com/book/view/1430219483 is a PDF.
Frankly, reddit is a truly horrible source of information about business and the economy. The loudest commenters on those topics tend to be educated primarily via blogs.

Personally, I'd advocate a subscription to the Financial Times, which is brief and factual in nature, with opinions kept to the opinion page.
How to Really Measure Software Teams
Masterminds of Programming[0] is another cool book on the subject.

[0] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515171/
It is. I've been reading it during my commute (it's ok - it's by train!) for the last week.
In a culture where the financial value of work trumps all other methods of measurement there will be no "rational" way to support all forms of art.

For something like this to work in a sustainable way, the means of managing liquid value need to evolve.

Some say that the difference between your "work" and your "job" is that you would do the former if you were paid for it or not, keep this in mind.
bullshit. The cause of obesity is and always was gluttony. Quit trying to apologize for overeating. I don't care if "you have a low metabolism". Quit listening to the FDA's bullshit on what a "balanced" meal means. You need to figure it out for yourself.
Absolutely. VR helmets is something that was promised ages ago but never really broke through. Or am I wrong? Any experiences here?
I love that completing all of the steps in "Getting Started" earns you an extra free 250MB of storage. Thanks guys!

Also, for those that rather read the Dropbox blog post about this, rather than the TC story: http://blog.getdropbox.com/?p=81
How web-savvy companies are going to burn some money, make some money, and leave the college world essentially untouched, I suspect.
What an awful article. The salient fact about the obesity epidemic is that it has more than tripled in frequency (in America) since the 1970s. It can't be genetics. It's unlikely to be gluttony.
Taking Time to Teach
It also implies you don't need to do threads. Blocking IO means you need a thread per client. Threads have an overhead.
I have a question (an actual question, not meant to be a nudge towards any conclusion): is there any research that suggests your level of body fat may be set (i.e. almost like an annealing process) by your level of body fat in childhood? I know there has been research that suggests that body fat plays a very large role in your endocrine system -- therefore causing positive feedback -- but does it do the same for any other systems that might affect metabolism?
Related question:

What happens when funded startup decides they want to completely change directions? For example, Flickr was some sort of online game at first, right? Assuming they had investors, is it as simple as saying to the board of directors "Hey, we want to drop the idea you funded us for completely shift directions for these reasons..."?

On the other hand you have funded starts that, for various reasons, decide to shut down the business all together. For what reasons would you do this vs change directions like Flickr?

In short, as a founder of a failing funded startup, how do you decide whether to close the company and start a new one or whether to come up with a new gameplan for the existing company?

Also, how does having closed down a previous company vs shifting gameplans affect future investors?
I wonder how hard it is to make libdispatch available for Leopard. I don't mind requiring Snow Leopard for development, but the resulting binary should be runnable under both Leopard and Snow Leopard, without requiring potential new developers to jump through hoops. Possible?
To be fair... I'm sure they would have updated the post as soon as an official FB comment came in. That's one thing good about online media, it can get better over time.
I personally guarantee that if you eat less, eat higher quality fresh produce, less sugar, less meat, and less processed food you will lose weight and live longer. If this revolutionary new diet does not work, please contact me.
Quote from the article:

"Our modern lifestyle is thus a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the high prevalence of obesity in our population. "

So some people cope better than others with the modern diet, presumably because of their genes. That doesn't imply that there is nothing they could do about obesity. But they presumably have it harder than the people with more favorable obesity-genes.
His point in a nutshell:

1. Virtualization should be called *machine* virtualization
2. Machine virtualization is useful, but not revolutionary

"useful but not revolutionary"... maybe that's why adoption is so high: you don't have to throw away everything you know.
That, and hope. A good rule is that if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. Check and check again before you make a fool of yourself in such cases.

I really don't blame these kids, I blame their teacher and the dailymail.
It's not pure genetics alone, it's a combination of genetics and gluttony. It's really simple: if you intake more energy than you consume, then you will gain weight. Our energy utilization varies and is regulated by genes, to beat this problem means simply to eat less (intake less energy) or to exercise more (burn more energy).
That's not a good analogy. Mathematicians are employed a) by universities, so their compensation is their salary (+ tenure) or b) by investment banks, so their compensation is their salary (+ bonus). There're no freelance mathematicians selling directly to the general public.
> "If I decide to sit behind a desk, take calls, devise flawed business plans, and lie, do I DESERVE to be compensated like a bank CEO....If I sing and prance around on stage, am I entitled to $110 million a year? It's the same work Madonna does, and that's what she makes."

Theoretically, what if you are exactly as good as a bank CEO? What if you sing and dance and compose exactly like Madonna?

Then do you deserve to be paid after the fact?

When an artist happens to make a piece of art that someone puts value on, what's wrong with the artist receiving money? Especially if the "buyer" were going to pay someone else instead (a shrewd middle man). Perhaps this money is supposed to be thought of as a donation?

Still, people want to own art. When an artist randomly makes art and then goes to a market to sell them, is that more like a comission? What about all the farmers and other folks at a market selling wares that weren't pre-comissioned? It's a natural exchange, though. Or maybe I'm brainwashed by culture.

Finally, why not just say that "Artists should be compensated for good artwork"? Who cares if it is art or work or whatever. People should pay where they see value and do their best to pay smartly; eg, pay the artist so they produce more and are rewarded, and don't pay, eg the record labels more than their fair share (damn extortionists!). Technology seems to be helping in this area.

Sometimes work doesn't have a lot of value for other people. That's ok, too. It doesn't matter whether it is art or serious. Honestly, my best projects are those that merge the serious and artistic, but that's a whole other story and cultural perspective.

ps - this reminded me of KickStarter http://kickstarter.com
It's both. Some people can eat like garbage and not get fat, others can't. If you can't, don't eat like garbage.
No sample/preview chapter?
Personally, I take the approach advocated by Benjamin Graham. I have separate accounts for investing, and speculation/trading.

I just view them as fundamentally different activities, with different risk profiles, and different sorts of analysis required prior to taking or selling any given position.
They are usually teaching and doing research for a school something that is not available for all chosen careers
UK 'could face blackouts by 2016'
The government's new energy adviser says the UK could face blackouts by 2016 because green energy is not coming on tream fast enough.
Palm Rejects First App
Nobody? Too bad!
Why developers love Apple's Snow Leopard
Now that many Mac users have had a couple of weeks to install the new Apple Inc. operating system, Snow Leopard, and explore its new features, some aren't so enthused with the
Also: exercise.
10ren - Interesting points. I've always liked what Alfred North Whitehead says about notation:

"By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that ... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility ... Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation. [...] By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically, by the eye, which otherwise would call into play the higher faculties of the brain. [...] It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

--from An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
Highway in the sky
Gravitational corridors could help spacecraft fly across the solar system like ships on ocean currents, it was revealed today.
1) I do not care about what government "should do", only what should I do. Yes, I think the government is bad, but this is like telling rapists he shouldn't rape. He will try to rape. Government like to tax, go to war, and fund pork projects. The only revelant question is what you, personally, should or could do something about it?

2) Beside current evidences indicating that copyright is an unnecesary evil(Read Against Intellectual Monopoly for more info) it doesn't matter if any of us are unable to make a living off software because of no copyright because it indicate that individuals would never have want it in the first place. Nobody have the right to any potential profit.
Why do you insist on the word "theory"? It makes you sound like you dismiss the evolution theory because it is "just a theory". This word says nothing about the validity of the claim.

Now, if the evolution theory is silly, what is not? Intelligent desing? If you think that, I'm out, except for a url:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm

The section labeled "Anti-Evolutionism" may be of particular interest, here.
I see it now, getting bought by Disney, fire everyone except those keeping the servers alive, add marketing.
If Backups Were People
How It's Made: The Dropbox Web
Reduce overwhelm, expand your reach and have more fun with partnerships
The school I was in when it happened is about two miles away (under that smoke trail) and I lived about ten miles away (also under that smoke trial).
No it's not really simple. If you eat more energy than you use you may not gain weight, and if you eat less energy than you use you may lose weight but gain fat at the expense of muscle and other tissues.
From the brief description on the site, it sounds possible.

Kernel support is not mandatory, as it only provides optimizations. So you're good there.

You will have to supply a build of the GCC compiler that supports blocks, and make it play nicely with Xcode (provided you're talking about end-user apps to take advantage of libdispatch). This shouldn't be too bad, but requires more Xcode-fu than the majority of Mac devs have.

The thing is, you should still use NSOperation for most multithreaded coding tasks in Snow Leopard, as it is now implemented using GCD underneath. You should only really monkey around with libdispatch calls directly if you're seeing performance problems with NSOperation (verified using profiling, of course).

I think the real benefit of this OSS project is going to be porting libdispatch to entirely different platforms (Linux, BSD, Windows, ...), and building NSOperation-like constructs in other languages/APIs to be used on many platforms (including the Mac, in the end).
There's no reason to pre-order, since it was released today. I did pre-order last week, and Amazon told me it'd be shipped on the 15th, sigh.
Frequent releases change software engineering
See also "Using BitTorrent with Amazon S3" : http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html...
Launching Software Products: Niche vs. Mass Market
Sorry, but I don't understand how your comment constitutes an objection to my comment - it's more like sideways. Universities don't receive copyrights on theorems either. This proves that copyright isn't a necessary condition for the creation of publicly beneficial intellectual property. Society can create mechanisms to compensate creators by other means: make a university-like institution for musicians, and you'll be OK.
Scrapboy Facebook Messenger Aracı indir | iYiblogcu
A lot of people seem to miss the point of social news. Hackernews is not a place where "people vote on stories they think that mynameishere will like", it is a place where people vote on stories that they like.

The idea is that it is a group of like-minded people, and most of them probably have similar interests.

If you want a website with moderators, possibly try fark.
What really irks me about this article is that the author uses anecdotes and vague references to science to strengthen his stance. Not only is this shoddy reporting, but it commits a much worse crime. It commits the crime of giving the obese an easy out, a way to say, "Hey, it's not really my fault so I shouldn't even bother to try to lose weight." No. Wrong.

I've personally seen dozens of people go from being very overweight to being healthy and fit. How'd they do it? Through lots of very dedicated, smart work in their diets and exercise. Now, maybe those experiences were simply aberrations that somehow converged on my life--but I doubt it.
The teaching option is certainly available for arts and music, I'd guess moreso than for mathematics.
would also allow us to collectively focus on what is most important - one's health rather than one's weight

You mean - one's health rather than one's fat, yes?

http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/l_pyecra.htm (Short story - H.G. Wells - The Truth about Pyecraft)
What I'm taking away from the article is the ol' KISS prinicple.

I don't see why building on an RDBMS necessitates added cost, though. I can think of at least two production-quality products that are free, and depending on the application, using the structure provided by database tables and SQL queries can actually be simpler than using a mishmash of hashtables and XML files.
Get Decked: A Look at TweetDeck
new and equally profitable means of monetization can and should be created

And sites like Etsy are doing exactly this. By empowering artists to sell directly to their followers, we can help.
Some background: http://www.josefsipek.net/blahg/?p=364
The problem with art is as soon as you take money for creating it, before it's created, it's not yours. The many facets of the graphic design profession, for instance, is arguably the equivalent of working artists. But the work they create is work that is agreed upon for a predetermined price.

Same with writing. Textbooks, manuals, reference, PR, maybe even journalism are all writing professions - a piece written for a predetermined salary. Work.

What sets work and artistic expression apart is that 'art,' as she's defining it, is whatever the f* you want it to be.

That's what you can't 'expect' to get paid buckets for.
Only two in the list are women. However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the far future.

That's because as AI becomes more sophisticated, programming will become more like teaching.

And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.
Great no cost sowfatre for start ups by start ups
isn't this an old article that pre-dates Zeldam's involvement with the HTML 5 spec (http://www.zeldman.com/superfriends/ "We, the undersigned, wish to declare our support for the direction in which the HTML5 specification is heading").
Script to open the source file of a python module in vim. Ex: pyvi os.path
Stunning. I had always thought scribd was the most annoying thing ever, but they revamped their UI and completely proved me wrong. Now, to actually get to the pdf (I don't run flash), I have to go to "classic view", click the download as pdf option, login, walk through about three pages of demands that I "give back" to scribd, and then I can actually get my pdf. It's always impressive when bad gets worse, I guess.

Why not just link to the actual content?
Like everything that grows too complex, someone will find a way to hide a lot of it behind a simple abstraction layer, and call this layer a framework. And when that framework is around long enough and has grown sufficiently complex, it will get abstracted again.

It seems to me that when things become messes, that's when people step in to clean them.
Zeldman has written a fair bit more about HTML5 since this article. [1] One of those articles has the title "Loving HTML5", and says "the more I study the direction HTML5 is taking, the better I like it." [2]

Along with various other well-known 'standardistas', including Dan Cederholm, Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer, he has also formed the HTML5 Super Friends [3], an interest group to support the HTML5 development effort and push for their own concerns about the new standard [4] to be recognised.

Ian Hickson, the editor of the specification, has told Zeldman (and anyone else) to email him or one of the HTML5 mailing lists if they want anyone to pay attention to their suggestions (in other words, don't expect the working group to take any notice if you just write stuff on your blog). [5]

[1] http://www.zeldman.com/category/html5/

[2] http://www.zeldman.com/2009/08/31/loving-html5/

[3] http://www.zeldman.com/superfriends/

[4] http://www.zeldman.com/superfriends/guide/

[5] http://www.zeldman.com/2009/09/04/html5-redefines-footer/#co...
Despite endless debate on these abstract HTML things, I'm wondering is there a better approach we could take, so that every party involved will be better off.
It's pretty funny. If we accept your assumptions, we can conclude that most programmers in the far future will be AIs. No idea if those AIs will be male or female; more wild speculation is always welcome.
Another thing about genetics is that it could probably affect appetite. You know how you feel if you haven't eaten for a day, no amount of will power is going to stop you from eating. Now what if your genetics made you feel like that all the time?

So sure you could lose weight if you ate less, but your genetics wouldn't make the motivation equation work out.
Eh, then how come America has become more fat in the last 30 years? Do the genes degenerate that fast? The article is so bad that I suspect the author is trying to score with a fat chick and published this to make her feel better or something;-)
Angry, much? :)