skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Therefore anyone can make a record that sounds like an 8. If you want to stand out, you either make it sound like a 4 or raise money somehow to put out a 9-10 sounding record."

I agree that good recording sound is important. Gone are the days of Buddy Rich: 1 mic over Buddy and 1 over the remaining 14 guys. However, the sound quality difference from 8 to 9 to 10 is well past most listeners' interest and possibly capability (sensitivity of the ear drums and processing of the messages they send differs in individuals). To get through the barrage of songs with looped lines from Top40 (regardless of the chart used) songs, a band needs to have a truly unique style. What makes a recording stand out is interesting music elements like song form, rhythm, tonality, etc...

A band stands out to me when they use any polyrhythms and song forms away from the basic AABA or ABABC. I'd like to hear instrumentation other than the standard bass/guitar/vocals/drums. Something interesting and polished from non-Western 5-note scales mixed with our 7-note scales. I'd also like to hear songs get a little longer. While I don't need Rush Hemispheres length songs I want something more meaty than 3.5 minutes.

Low-key venues is where every musician should start out. It's where you develop your skills as an entertainer and learn the business before there's a lot of money and legalities on the line.

I choose to pay for songs because I want proceeds, however small, to go to the artists. My qualm is being restricted to a particular medium for the song and its implications.
Before the App Store hit and iPhone web applications were all the rage, I started working on a restaurant locator. Oddity Software was a company I came across that provides datasets like the ones from AggData, though I'm not sure if it's from scraping the web. I figured I'd give it a mention in case people came here searching for additional resources. They definitely have more in the way of free lists (http://www.odditysoftware.com/free_lists.html), though I can't personally vouch for accuracy or timely updates as I haven't used them.

Listable (http://www.listable.org) is another list type service, though it's lists are much less complex and are user created.

I'll be adding AggData to my bookmarks, though. I could see myself using at least one of their "FreeData" lists in the future and possible some of their paid ones.
To summarize for my own learning, you can't copyright facts themselves, but you can copyright the representation of facts (page layout, etc).

The question then is if a CSV file counts as "page layout". How customized does something have to be, before it is a creative work? I doubt CSV goes far enough. I wonder if the ordering and presence of columns in the CSV is enough?

I believe I heard a story about a dictionary suing based on the page numbers being copyrightable, but I can't verify that via google. If that is in fact true, then perhaps a CSV is a creative work protected under copyright.

Boy is copyright broken when faced with computers....
Using parallel processing computing could save thousands by using an Xbox
The UK isn't REAAAALLY Europe, now is it? Culturally, it is much more American than any other place I've been, in terms of individualist boosterism and the desire for grand entreprenuerialism.

And London already has quite a lot of VC, look-at-us-we're-high-tech! puffery.

The smart tech people / startups from places like Vienna, Berlin, etc., already leave their homes and flock to London precisely for that reason.

I, for one, want to figure out how to keep them in Vienna.

Also, yeah. TechHub. How more generic can you get?
Hmmm... The ISS seems a waste.

How can the ISS cost 37 times more than the MIR space station?

Also, why isn't the birds nest staduim in Beijing on the list? Was it cheaper? What about the different canals that was built in the USSR?

It is interesting to see that a single B-2 costs more than a space shuttle.
If you're in information technology, please get out
OAP unicycle unveiled in Japan
The 2 main influences for this book:

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
You fall into the category of people already on the Microsoft stack then, don't you?

I got the impression from this whole thing (and Microsoft's recent behavior in general) is that they're trying to entice the non-Microsoft people over to their stack... And I (personally) think this is a weak offering, especially considering how happy I am with my current workflow and tools.
Scientology: Operation Snow White
Spot on. Even with proper auth rules it would still trouble me knowing I had my source exposed to the world. I'm a big fan of exports and now, thanks to you and masskin(sp?), really digging the symlinks idea.
I did not indicate in my comment that the article says so, I wrote that I SAID SO before. This is obviously the first step on the way to blocking it. Please try to read first and understand before complaining.
Comments are not for repeating what the articles say but to add your own opinion.
Also you're not my father to tell me how I should behave.

Here is the link where I said it in case you still don't get the context:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839002
"The collection as a whole" isn't necessarily copyrightable as far as I know (not that I'm anywhere near a lawyer...). I think curated collections (say, of short stories) are copyrightable since it requires artistic decisions to be made, but a website like McDonalds that has a big list of locations is just a statement of fact, with no artistic basis.

Maps have artwork that is protected, and phone books have page layout, font choice, etc. I don't think that textual addresses of a set of facts would be protected, but I think that it's a gray area of law that hasn't been decided.
After some clicking around from yesterday's Wired article I found this, incredibly scary stuff.

I realize it might be considered off-topic, but I'll leave it up to you guys to decide that. I think the amount of interest generated by the submission yesterday proves that the community in general is interested...
I bet he can find himself in a lot of trouble if he republishes something slanderous. He would be a co-defendant with the site that originally published it.

Imagine a scenario where somebody makes a slanderous comment on some silly little web page that not very people know or care about. If his page becomes very popular, the financial damages may be almost entirely due to the fact that people saw the comment on his page rather than the original.

Anyway, didn't we banter about another company pulling an asshole move like this a while back? They set it up so it looked like companies that didn't use their service were neglecting their customers?
You can get a zip code database for free: http://www.populardata.com/zipcode_database.html
As I said, C was my first language. As for Cocoa, it wasn't that bad considering by the time I really got into it there were plenty of examples out there (chances are, if you have a question about Cocoa for iPhone, it has been answered by now).

Well, the app is out there, but it is useless unless you are in the City of Pittsburgh. My approach to the startup is unconventional: I'm laying down pieces which will be played later on. It feels like chess. Not a chance a VC would ever fund us because of that. Yet it is no doubt as likely or more likely we will fail among startups.

Thanks. Do it because you love it.
As the lead maintainer of the Wasabi compiler project, it actually feels pretty good to have someone call it duct tape :)
Wouldn't it make more sense to link to the source?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/google_sued_for_gmai...
Senior Health - Diabetes and Its Warning Signs
Excellent, thanks for the additional information.
Can someone explain how aggregation (for blackmail) is "value-adding" to a business? My company considers $4,800 a year in bribes to Squidoo as evil as an e-paparazzi goblin. No business with any internet savvy would cave to these ransom notices, as anyone with a Google search can still turn up the "dirt" that business paid $4,800 to bury.

Not only do I consider Seth's move unethical, but it's lame too.
The next one will definitely be edited. I just wanted to get this one out to gauge interest. The funny thing is is that one of the guys on the podcast (Paul) has a professional audio setup with a sound booth at his game company office.
If your next physical time is in March you need to find a new doctor my friend!

And for the record I both acknowledge the issues in the Canadian system and support exploring ways the private sector can help improve them. But I agree, there is a lot of ideological resistance to private services, particularly because of the example the US sets.
I actually have a similar story.
As it turns out, I share a first initial and last name with an incumbent congressman's campaign manager.

During their last campaign, I received quite a bit of wholly unsolicited email bound for the manager. Despite a couple "I'm not the guy you're looking for" emails, (i even sent one directly to his 'official' address on the campaign website) I continued to receive the emails.

Most were fairly benign. Some were harmless, but definitely from the sausage-making side of politics.
Quite a few were... very personal. I can easily imagine they'd leverage this precedent if they realized what I was getting.

So this whole topic hits pretty close to home when I wonder about what extents these rulings might go to.

Would they turn over my account itself? Would they scour my outgoing messages to see if I forwarded it? Would they pop open every archive I emailed to see if that might contain the information? Would I be compelled to turn over passwords and keys for secured archives? (violating my client's privacy as well) Would they supply a list of IP addresses where I viewed the messages (and might have made copies)? Would they demand access to those machines?

Exactly how much of mine (and thereby my associates) privacy would these courts be willing to violate due no fault of my own?
Why Presentation Is Important
If you employ someone you should really consider a form of group insurance, as both theirs and your rates would be cheaper.
Depends, what qualifies me as being on the Microsoft stack? My day job deals with .NET to COBOL/JCL, my free time I spend with Rails and supporting other peoples poorly written php(grr...), on OSX, not in Windows....so I don't think I'm already on the stack, I use it for my day job because it's the standard I have to follow (no one I know willing chooses vb.net over C# :().
It depends on what you mean by broken even. I bought a Mac Air for $1900, spent xx hours learning the Cocoa framework, spent 10 hours writing the app. At this rate, it makes $75 / month post-royalty, and it probably will never need to be updated.
Goodbye call centres? O2 launch customer-powered mobile phone network
Dear Developers, We Think You’re Idiots, XOXO...Microsoft
It looks ridiculous, like a kitchen stool. Using it outside the kitchen might result in gatherings of laughing bystanders.

Compared to this the YikeBike is really cool:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810787
Internet Explorer 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in
What Makes Web Sites Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study
Da Lat ‘Crazy House’ joins bizarre global list
Yeah, but the factory probably isn't doing it just for the water. It's primary purpose will probably be He3 extraction, with water as an incidental-but-very-important sideline. Perhaps other valuable things too.
Self-employed are frozen out of mortgages
I'd like to see a readable version of the chart.
Good old Basic Computer Games.

I was so disappointed by what a racist David Ahl turned out to be. (He was responsible for the incredibly disrespectful "Ninja-Endo" character in late-80s Atari comics.)
Subpixel Favicon Generator
Intel Concurrent Collections for C++
Yeah basically accurate so far as I know (disclaimer: for awhile I worked @ a publisher of reference works; we had rules-of-thumb explanations for what we could get away with but I'm not an expert).

The real story behind the story you might've heard would've been more like a page-layout type defense with the fact that the contents of each page (by #) were identical between two competing works; throw in the usual misreporting and there you go.

If you track it down please do share.

The CSV thing is really where it gets tricky: generally "trivial" obfuscations or rearrangements to get around existing laws don't fare well in court (and sadly even "trivial" isn't really well-defined), so if a CSV "counts" then rearranging the columns (or randomly sorting the rows, etc.) won't help you. But it's not obvious that a CSV doesn't count either.

Basically the model is supposed to be:

- you see a printed pages containing representations of facts

- you "learn" the facts (eg: "copied" them to your brain)

- you produce printed pages containing representations of facts

...and of course there may be incidental and/or unavoidable resemblances between the two representations but insofar as what you "copied" was just the facts you had fair game.

It's sort-of tacitly assumed that if you did make an exact copy it'd be pretty obvious and that if you went through the above process what you did would look different enough to be pretty obvious also (unless you deliberately cloned something the hard way, which is stupid enough to be rare).

With straight-digital "database" dumps (like the CSV) you have a situation in which if you went through the full process you'd create something that's pretty much indistinguishable from what you'd get if you just hit ctrl-d; this pretty much breaks the rules of thumb / intuition behind the rules around "facts".
A "statistical impossibility" is an outcome with probability 0.

Or, depending on how badly you've botched up your math, probability less than zero.
Modify javap to output to String, view decompiled information at runtime.
A Poor Man’s Guide to Getting Started With Scala
Dr. Barski has been at it for ages; see his site.

http://lisperati.com/

Conrad, I am from the D.C. area; I have been putting off coming to D.C. Fringe for ages until I got a call from Australia and I was told I was on next week's flight. What a bummer. I lived in Arlington Virginia (on Columbia Pike, right near Falls Church and Alexandria) and I worked in the city at 17 and N. How on bloody earth did I miss a Lisp meeting I would never understand; where I live, I am lucky to find a computer programmer.
Better next year then never! I wish the authors of all the books we are interested in answered all of our questions so quicky and personally. Keep up the great work.
No it isn't. The Second System effect is about wanting to put in all those features into version 2 that you left out of version 1.
I'm currently having this experience. Trying to buy a house, but because my income has come from a variety of sources over the years - a small consulting company, a startup, and my own independent consulting - it's going to be tough for me to qualify. Specifically, my income source changed from 2008 to 2009, and they won't accept the 2009 income at all, because the entity is new. I've had steady income - and provided steady income for employees and contractors - but that's not enough.
Twitter raising up to $100 million at $1 billion valuation
Try peer to peer lending instead:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841484

Who trusts banks these days anyways? When they go bankrupt you lose your home.
I think the idea is awesome. It's so much more convenient to go to one place aggregating information from internet to decide whether brand is trustworthy instead lurking around different hard to read forums to get the info yourself.

Therefore it's a good free service for customers.

It also may become good service for companies because as massive amount of people starts using his site to get information about brands, he offers the companies cheap way to cover up their errors for large part of their potential customers.

Guy is a genius and Lisa Barone just doesn't get it. Being Chief Branding Officer probably makes you angry about anything that may help customers recognize true value of brands.
the american software patent system is a total joke.
Seems like Microsoft FUD policies at work. This is not the result of any kind of study, just a measure to maintain market share.

Increasing avenues of attack?

I've heard that Chrome is currently has the most impressive security credentials, working hard at security does not equal effective security http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/03/chrome-is-the-o...
In a Tight Market, Borrowers Turn to Peers
Yup. Had this problem in '05. Not even going to talk about what we did to solve it --- extremely skeevey. I doubt I could have bought at all under current conditions.

Buying is overrated anyhow, though.
Will p2p lending work for mortgages? Do they have p2p loans configured towards mortgages? It would have to be pretty different to the normal unsecured loans
The CRTC tries to eliminate ISP competition in Canada
He may not be your father, but judging by your comment score, he's the voice of the community.
I agree: "the time required to process financial month close transactions was reduced from 4-6 hours to 10-11 minutes" doesn't give any insight into how this was done, how it was set up before, etc..

On a side note, I had installed DB2 Express-C on an Ubuntu machine, did a distribution upgrade, and DB2 refused to work again. In fact, it broke in such a way that apt-get couldn't remove DB2.. and I couldn't find any information on how to fix it. It could be 10x faster than MySQL, but at least MySQL is well documented and supported and has an active community. To me, that counts for a lot.
I'm confused. The bank that held my mortgage went bankrupt. Strangely enough, I still seem to have my house. Seriously, what are you talking about?
Grocery delivery charge? You mean to say you can have your groceries delivered to your door on a regular basis? I want that!
More on our overconfidence bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect

and it's twin brother, certanity bias: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/10/the_certainty_bias_1....

The human brain just isn't built to handle probabilities very well.
Very fascinating! According to the website 8% of the male population is colorblind. On a major website that could equate to a fairly large number of users.

The examples on the blog are clearly defined and annotated to explain why they are good or bad. As a web developer I will have to keep this site in mind.
Imagine that you are the owner of jgc.org and that there's a popular web site called igc.org. Now imagine that amount of email you receive daily misdirected to jgc.org.

A lot of this mail is mailing lists that didn't do double opt-in and hence *@jgc.org got added to the list. But quite a lot is just personal mail.

For a while I used to receive the itineraries for the private jet of a famous entrepreneur because they were meant to be CC:ed to someone at igc.org but came to me instead.
Back when the system was created I had never been a "TDDer" before and the tools that exist now did not exist...

Amen. I think a lot of the heated arguments about the value of testing arise from the fact that not everybody is using the same toolset. I'm sure unit testing in C is a major pain in the neck. (Can anybody link me to a document suggesting how to do it?) I know that unit testing in PHP is no picnic. But testing in Ruby is a joy, because the Ruby community has lavished attention on the subject over the last five years and the language, the tools, the idioms, and the culture are highly developed.
do you need any proof readers? I have already pre-ordered but I am so excited and would love to lend a pair of eyes if you need it.
I think his optimism comes from what he has experienced as an average annual growth over the life of the market, I haven't checked the figures myself though.

I often wondered why Dave Ramsey wasn't more popular with HN, he promotes starting businesses like a startup needs to start, work on the side, build your business logically, work your tail off and run LEAN (though he goes a little further and says pay cash for everything).
Twitter near closing $100 mln investment deal
One way I know that people have used was to set up a corporation, put savings into the corp then hire themselves and pay whatever salary they required for a few months. Three payslips later (a common requirement until recently, at least) they could get a mortgage. To do this "legally" requires you paying the taxes on that "income" but that could be worth it.

In my case I got a mortgage in 2007 (one month before the market peaked, woo!) through a mortgage broker who convinced the mortgage company to be happy with 3 years of self employment tax returns, and it wasn't a self certified mortgage or anything crazy.
The interface for Mathematica, which typically consists of bracketing special characters with escape characters, is a lot less cumbersome than LaTeX for writing something quickly. For example, the integral of the square root of x is entered

esc int esc ctrl-2 x left arrow esc dd esc x. Shift-enter evaluates the thing to 2/3 x^3/2.
Freedom languages
This may actually be a good thing in the long run. Assuming Google wins the case, this would set a good legal precedent around unsolicited email.
Brands In Public's sole purpose as a moneymaking enterprise is to convince brandholders that paying for control of their brand's page is a good idea.

The only way to effectively do this is to make the alternative, leaving control of the page to Squidoo, a bad idea for the brandholder.

All legality issues aside (and I don't believe there are many), either Squidoo decides to showcase the less desirable side of a brand in hopes of getting money, or they don't make money because the brandholders are satisfied with the way their page looks.

It is totally different from Yelp, who collects business reviews independently of the business owner. It is different from XXXXXsucks.com sites, which do not offer to remove certain content for a fee. It is different from local search sites, whose purpose is to collect as many business addresses as possible in hope of SEO.

Just like GetSatisfaction, this is a protection racket. You pay, or you lose something valuable -- "maybe". Without the "maybe", the operation loses its teeth. With the "maybe", the operation loses its ethics.
Bit.ly/robots.txt and the Dangers of Custom Shortened URLs
Branf*ck:

<>[]+-.,

What did I win?
The original site where this was published first is gone. I am not able to find that. This link seems to contain too many junk characters. It's still a fine read.
Separated at birth: Tech honchos and their famous lookalikes
Gmail Goes Down. Crash?
We are in the process of debunking Keynes yet again. How many times does his theory have to fail before people stop believing it ?
I have been programming perl and php for many years now - I don't agree with rbranson here. Its not that perl is the best tool , if it solves your problem use it , otherwise please stop whinging about it. If you really feel so strongly about the issue, you are welcome to fix it.
In scheme does this mean all standardly available functions or just the truly fundamental special forms?
I'll go for Whitespace then.
PCI compliance has nothing to do with how you handle your loan information.
I'm not sure the point you're trying to make.

But Warren Buffet isn't really a stock investor (he is but thats not where he made his money). So if you're saying he's one of the stock investors playing musical chairs - I don't think you're correct.

Buffet buys "good companies" he invests in businesses more then stocks. If you're saying Buffet made his money by doing what this article said then I think you're right.. ;-)
"Thus lowering interest rates increases investment — it reduces the cost of getting money, which reduces the cost of making stuff, which means more things can make a profit."

The problem with this reasoning is that Keynes only considers the demand side for capital. What about the supply side? Will lower interest rates encourage savings?