skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I understand it, Austrian economists tend to define property with respect to scarce goods; because intellectual property is not a scarce good, they (and, in particular, those at the Mises Institute) argue that an individual cannot legitimately own it as "property." Instead, they view "intellectual property" as something of an oxymoron. More properly, it is a government enforced monopoly on particular ideas -- not property at all.

For much more about Austrian views on intellectual property, take a look at Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella.
I've noticed that using the trackpad or mouse is far worse on my hands than typing... Switching to emacs and mostly using the keyboard has helped tremendously...
Here's a working link:

http://www.osnews.com/story/6282
If you watch some of his "Random" videos with Kevin Rose (especially the ones related to their trip to China), you can hear Tim speak/use Chinese. In Episode 6, he interacts with their waitress and places a customized order.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/category/random/

I'm impressed with his Chinese speaking abilities. And I'd guess that Chinese is a more difficult spoken language than Japanese since Chinese is a tonal language.

Chinese is my first language, but I was raised in the US. I'd guess within a couple of days my pronunciation would be better than Tim's, but he probably has a better vocabulary.
Clayton Christianson (of The Innovator's Dilemma) has a story about Digital, the minicomputer manufacturer that was the second largest computer company in the late 80's:

Their management used to be the darling of the tech press and they could do no wrong. In fact, they were excellent management. Then, when Sun workstations, and PCs appeared, customers switched to them, and Digital didn't make the transition. The press blamed management. But management was the same; it was doing just as good a job as before. The problem was the disruptive innovations are almost always fatal to incumbents.

So that's what's happening here. Microsoft rode a disruptive innovation, the PC, and now it's over. Can't really blame management for that.

It's worthwhile noting that Google has only been successful in one business (search+ads) - great though it is, they don't rake in comparable revenue with gmail (or other products).

Apple is an extraordinary exception in their success with PC's, then with iPods, and now with iPhones.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Re: pfiles equivalent (now I'm not on the phone and can chase it up)

http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-9942
Delicious/tags/rubier28
Consider me most impressed. How long did it take you to get to that level ?
I did something which is sort of similar for my site.

Quick takeaways:

1) You can break almost all spambots by requiring them to evaluate CSS or Javascript to avoid a tripwire. For example, I have a field on all my (publicly accessible) forms labeled "comment" and hidden via CSS. A before_filter bounces anybody who puts anything in it. Simple, took 5 minutes to implement, reduces spam registrations to essentially zero.

2) It was easiest for me to create virtual user registrations in a private namespace (trial users provide an email address, virtual users are given an unguessable email address on my domain that does not actually correspond to a mailbox) and assign them a particular limited role, which let me reuse almost all of the code for "real" trial users. This lets you upgrade people out of virtual userhood trivially -- grab the virtual user, write over two fields, save to DB. Done.

If you do it like this, and give the virtual users sensible defaults, you minimize the amount of almost-duplicated-but-not-quite code that you have to include in views. That will save you on a lot of bugs and aggravation. (Reproducing bugs for particular well-used "virtual" users is a pain in the keister.)
This is a question I've often posed to friends of mine, and the responses I've gotten seem to point to societal pressure.

Most women whom I've asked have said that they were told at some point in their careers that they couldn't or shouldn't work in math, science or computers, because they were female. Some of them where good at it in school, but just didn't feel a calling for it, but who I most feel for are some of the women who actually enjoyed it in school, but felt deterred.

I hope that, in general, we stop assuming people do things for biological reasons, unless there is strong evidence otherwise, and even then we shouldn't live by stereotypes.
If you start posting those, others will start posting Krugman or whoever on the left. Both will attract people not interested in hacker news.

As I post this, the number 3 article on HN is a Krugman piece which has nothing at all to do with software, so it looks like those will get posted anyway. Not only that, but Krugman is, as usual, late to the game. The dollars been getting hammered for a long time and he finally notices.

This artice, however, at least uses the interwebs as an interesting example of a free market.
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He's not exposited it well, but he's saying the documentation of the libraries is more important than the libraries themselves [middle, 4th paragraph].

It's an interesting point, like saying that advertising of a product is more important than the product itself. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

But if you don't know about the product, or what it can do, or how it can be used - it is of 0 use to you. It might as well not exist. No matter how great it is nor how much its creators know about it...
I'm still astonished about this post[1] showing Hadoop MapReduce using 40x as much hardware as Greenplum MapReduce.

1- See http://databeta.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/bigdata-node-densit...
Exactly. This is why YouTube is still a usability disaster, for instance. You can see it iteratively getting "better", but it's in need of more than just tweaks.
You're right. It was an oversight on my end.
Would also recommend Pydev: http://pydev.org/ -

an Eclipse plugin bringing Python and Jython support. The debugging leaves a bit to be desired, but has interesting stuff like code completion.
Sector/Sphere: High Performance Distributed File System and Parallel Data Engine
i think they buy ISP data logs
Maybe it could have then been positioned as portable mathematica + cool data sets.

BTW: I don't get all the contempt for Wolfram. He's accomplished more than most (all?) of us. I think he's entitled to as many mistakes and delusions as it takes in between accomplishments. And we'd all do better if we followed his example, of optimistic experimenting.
The interesting bit (to me) is the section "The Spec". He raises the issue of whether a specification should use SHOULD and MUST so that only 'well behaved' services can be said to confirm to the specification.
A description of DailyBooth that I like is 4chan with completely different context.

So I wonder what other applications can be created from changing the context. Hacker News is reddit with a different context.
Don't down mod the parent - he is only referring to the old comic about what happens when you ask medical advice on a forum.

In this case, I think he is wrong though - the people on this board knows more about this particular aliment than do most doctors.
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I had really strong tendonitis (endured 1 month of pain) and this is what I did:

* Got hardware: Kinesis Freestyle (which is not the Advantage, but still highly recommended!) and the Kensington Expert Mouse (which is probably the best trackball around)

* Started using workrave on work and home computers; using intervalls of 48 work : 12 rest minutes. Workrave includes some excercises which are highly recommended. There are also a couple of excercises you can do at your workplace, I used: http://www.ehs.utoronto.ca/services/Ergonomics/exercise.htm

* Started to excercise: 3 x running a week (-> check runnersworld.com excercise plans, please use a hrm if you are beginning slowly); after 1 year I can run > 10 miles without any problems and it even resolved my troubled back problems. Compensate this with upper-body training, crunches, push-ups, and pull-ups. Running with small 2 pound weights is very good for strenghening wrist strains without being forced into a gym -- I clearly prefer nature, even in winters. (Seeing green trees and breathing forrest air certainly is relaxing in its own right, too.)

* Diet. When I was in college I ate pizza twice a day. While essential (nomen est omen) at that time, I put on a lot of weight and did not feel good. Now I try to eat salad at least once a day, start with a healthy breakfast and never eat after 8pm. In addition to that I eliminated any form of soda -- the carbonic acid is not good and can lead to gastritis or worse. Watered down ice-tea or apple juice alternating with mineral water or just water (if it's drinkable in your geography).
I agree. Krugman/NYTimes articles do not get a warning like the link above.

The link above shows what happens when a series of tech innovations allows a group of people to interact with little to no Gov't intervention. That is a lot more interesting than the latest Krugman/NYTimes perspective on engineering a miracle recovery.

However, I also agree that Mises.org links do not belong on Hacker News. The HN audience, like most Americans, seems to have embraced the idea that you can engineer economic miracles. Anything remotely related to Mises.org is slapped with a warning.

This is Neo-Keynesian town, buddy. No Miseans need apply.

Try post-2012. That's when some Austrian sympathizers are predicting The Greatest Depression. People, even on HN, will be more open to the Austrian POV then. (Maybe even to the Hoppean view. Oh joy!) Meanwhile, I'm going back to this Celente PDF linked on LRC. It mentions micro-farming as a growth industry.
I flagged that one too.

> This artice, however, at least uses the interwebs as an interesting example of a free market.

And doesn't mention that the hated, loathed government was the one that actually created it.

They also don't mention some of the more problematic businesses on the internet such as as spyware, botnets, DOS extortion and so on.

But when it all comes down to it, just like Krugman's columns, they're pushing a political point of view, which is why I don't think either one belongs here.
Which other sites show such a large discrepancy between self-reported and quantcast/compete/alexa numbers?

It's one thing to be off by a factor of 2 or 3, but 15K --> 6MM is an error of 400X! Is there something different about how DB is built?
For fairness' sake, I'll post this here, too, since the mises.org fans were irritated that it wasn't attached to this article as well.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885138
You are 100% correct. The fact that it's called intellectual property is a misnomer, it's a temporary government granted monopoly.

One common confusion is that Trademarks are often called intellectual property where they are more realistically anti-fraud devices. Though I believe that a trademark can only then be enforced by the defrauded party (the person buying the knockoff good) the person being knocked off has no recourse, unless they purchase the knockoff.
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ML goes mainstream

You're referring to official support for F#, a functional language derived from ML?
That depends very much on whether you let Tim Ferris define the word "work".

Tim Ferris is claiming that he:

1) Learned to understand

2) the oral instructions regarding

3) a single simple, limited domain

4) from a single speaker or small set of speakers

5) in a very rote, ritualized context

Back in the real world, you will frequently be called to:

1) Read, write, speak, and listen to

2) an unbounded variety of discourses (including "instructions") regarding

3) an unbounded variety of topics, many of which you have little prior interest in (such as "Compelling Reasons To Not Arrest Me")

4) from a very diverse set of speakers numbering in the millions, representing many dialects, speaking styles, social statuses, verbal ticks, and dispositions with regards to you (such as "Skeptical Small-town Policeman")

5) in a variety of contexts ranging from heavily rote conversions or ritualized interactions to extraordinarily fluid situations which you you may never encounter prior to really desperately needing to perform well in them.
Um, Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000. Most current Microsoft flops such as Vista started development after that. You're probably confusing his stepping down as chair in 2006 with his stepping down as CEO in 2000.

Also I can assure you that Microsoft temporarily caught up after missing the boat. Just review the history. Until partway through 1995 they didn't think about the web. But by early 1998 they had the dominant browser, successfully destroyed Netscape, and had a strategy for taking over the server side of the web that people were genuinely concerned about.

Then the lawsuit hit. Microsoft's plan to use the browser monopoly to leverage a server monopoly had to be put on hold. In the next 2 months several major competitors (Informix, Oracle and IBM) jumped on the open source bandwagon. The dot com era exploded. And Microsoft lost control.

Post lawsuit they tried several things to get control back, with no success. Nothing they tried there had any traction. (Remember Hailstorm?) They poured energy into trying to get control of DRM, which customers didn't want in the end. They got sued again, more painfully, in Europe. They are being sued again over antitrust issues by Novell.

So the question is this. Has the lackluster performance of Microsoft since Ballmer took office been because of the lawsuit, or because Ballmer is a worse CEO than Gates? I'm inclined to say "lawsuit + accumulated ill will". But it is hard to separate the two.
It's funny - when I read that list of names, even though I knew a few, I thought of my younger brother. I'm quite sure he wouldn't have even heard of any of them, yet he's developing for some company all kinds of systems - from web, to Java and C++ backends and even software for GPS and other devices. Would I not hire him only because he's not interested in inspiring stories about people he doesn't know? Just because he chooses to use the algorithm or formula and not be interested in whoever came up with it? It might make sense in author's company - he might want to have people who are exactly the same as him around him so they can talk and talk about the best practices and such, but it doesn't make sense for me.
He is though, you can say cultural, economic, and diplomatic, but at the end of the day if you say, or I'll kill you it doesn't matter.

"I'll do my best to get your money through providing services, selling products, and ultimately armed robbery" is the same line of reasoning.
I suspect that people who voted you down are people under 30 who don't remember what life was like when Microsoft truly dominated everything.

pg commented on the phenomena in http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html.
One gotcha is that to truly making the code concise also can be over-engineering. It takes a phenomenal amount of work to really understand something, well enough to make it as simple as possible.

And then you release it and discover that the problem is a little different from what you thought, or you solved the wrong problem. It wasn't that you were stupid, just that you didn't have the data that can only come from outside yourself.
Aw - that is an adorable story. :)
SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Change Super Freaking Wrong.
I moved from a normal sized mouse to a "portable" mouse and relieved a number of similar problems. Since a move to a Macbook Pro trackpad it hasn't been an issue.
I've wondered that too (mostly about extra arms). Then I wondered how much it would cost to add an extra arm versus the cost of the drive itself. Eventually I stopped wondering.
I agree on the "language learning abilities" comment. For some people, learning a second (or more) language is easy; for others it's hard.
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This is complete rubbish. I speak a couple of languages and I seriously doubt even now I could pick up another in 3 months (unless it was very similar to one I currently know).
Man, reading that I can imagine Microsoft doesn't just price their OS so high to make loads of money but just to break even.
True, not every month, but every so often. It's more like punctuated equilibrium. In between, you might have something like 10-15 years.
The presentation doesn't really offer any evidence to disprove the explanatory value of biology in addressing the empirical fact that there are low numbers of women in computer science. It just says that assumptions predicated on biological differences are false, without elaboration.

I'm confused. Was there supposed to be a thesis to this? I mean that sincerely; no disrespect to the author. Personally, I didn't need any convincing that the factors which lead to the gender asymmetry in this field are not reducible to biological distinctions per se to begin with. Still, I'm not sure what the point of the procession of slides is; perhaps it was explained in the verbal narrative to which the slides were an accompaniment at a conference, presentation or other event?
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I found this piece very interesting. The main advantage of the CLI seems to be the fact that it only shows the user information relevant to what is currently going on. This makes it far less intimidating to new users than a multi-process windowing operating system where the screen can have hundreds of buttons on it at one time.

I myself have experienced this problem when teaching new users: people who haven't grokked the basic logic of GUIs find it extraordinarily difficult to infer what to do next in a particular situation. And all of us who design GUIs have grokked this, so we can't help the people who haven't.
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Niche. For a startup or mISV, catering to a particular internationalization locale makes a lot of sense. But I think you'd need some expertise in that locale, e.g. be able to speak the language, for support, and know the customs and conventions.
i don't care about this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885138 and it's content. I care about the article and it's relation to startups. thus letting the founder possibly see that success is solely on their own shoulders. ie - you fail if you don't listen to customer's bug reports/requests. Similar to determining what link should/shouldn't be posted on HN. Let the HN people vote; if you feel insecure about a mises link, I bet you don't have a startup...
Perfect Web Design Width
Odd - doesn't that guy have Tux on a shirt?
Do’s and Don’ts of Photoshop Retouching : reddit.com
Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website
This is a classical example of a typical startup - simple and obvious idea - instant photos, instead of texting. But I think this will not last long.

For example, an easy, deep integrated tool for upload photos right from mobile phones (they have a 3-5 megapixel cams nowadays) seems like next step in that direction, and Nokia's Ovi might gain the ground very fast.

Anyway, they probably should think about mobile apps to evolve.
The gov't had to fund the early beginnings of the Internet because it took so much out of the economy to fund Moon/Space/Spy satellite programs against an enemy that could barely produce a decent TV set. They even took a small army of scientists and engineers out of the economy.

This does not even include the telecom regulations preventing competition and innovation during the 50s through 80s. MCI prospered and gave AT&T competition after some regulations were dropped.

When the Gov't takes so much, it's no wonder why scientists/engineers needed it as sugar daddy back then: That's where all the money was.

> spyware, botnets, DOS extortion and so on

We have a market to develop countermeasures: YCombinator and its copycats. The last place you would want protection is from the same gov't that still has problems running the post office and Amtrak.

> the hated, loathed government was the one that actually created it.

The Gov't also used private firms and pre-existing innovations from the market to develop a lot of the programs. Mises.org has published articles about NASA and related programs using pre-existing technologies from the market. The growth of the Internet and Web also came when the Gov't de-regulated large portions of it.

> they're pushing a political point of view

True. Their political POV is: get politicians out of lives, businesses, and private property.
Did someone really submit (to HN) a link to (on reddit) a link to (on digg) a link to an article?

Original link: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/10/dos-and-donts-of-pho...
Surely the biggest surprise was auctomatic being acquired? and not seemingly for the product but for the team. :/
I have the same as number 2. I think that good programmers tend to be introverts with a bit of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder amongst others traits.

Those are clearly not social facilitators but they really help in the job when you have to internalize a whole program to find a bug or add a feature without breaking everything.
"...a good product is so much more important than first mover advantage"

couldn't agree more.
So true - unfortunately Java is still the best language in that respect, and Ruby falls flat big time.
Personally I find that the sample code is often the most important part of the library. I like to learn by doing, and rewriting sample code into my own style is a great way to do that.

It needs to be supported by high-quality documentation, of course - preferably there should be a walkthrough of the code with relevant documentation links that go into more detail to explain the thinking behind the library.

What I really hate is documentation that's obviously written by technical writers who understand the concepts in the abstract, but have never written any code using it. It's frustrating to wade through pages and pages of patronizing explanations when a real-world example would do the job so much better.

(The worst example of this documentation genre I've ever seen is probably Symbian's C++ API documentation. First they spend an eternity justifying their pseudo-Hungarian type naming convention. Then they introduce a class hierarchy of a dozen classes for basic buffers and strings, dither over all the irrelevant details of the implementation, and claim that it's an "elegant example of object-oriented design". I guess they expect their audience to be of the captive kind that is forced to sit in a class room for a few weeks listening to trivialities, so it makes sense to waste all that time going over outdated '90s buzzwords.)
Ask HN: Should Microsoft be broken up?
We used to ask this question 10 years ago with the government in mind; today, looking at articles such as the one in the NY Times today (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/business/18msft.html) it seems like a question worth asking from the standpoint of shareholders, Windows/Office users, etc. Would love to hear the HN community's perspectives on pros and cons, and what a division would look like.
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