skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article makes a good point, but I don't think I'd call it the death of authenticity. A deceptive banner ad is just the new version of a fast-talking door-to-door salesman. It's the method of reaching consumers with the lowest barrier to entry, and that's why it is so popular with the inauthentic.

In the days of expensive print advertising, the investment required to take out an ad was often enough of a barrier to legitimize a business to consumers. The model has changed, but I believe consumers are still looking for companies that make some kind of investment to prove their authenticity. The new version of the expensive print ad is the investment in time and effort required to gain the trust of industry experts and influencers.
Yet the maker of a software product can aid or hinder your ability to modify it by choosing to distribute as source or binary. That particular "right" requires no law.

I often wonder what RMS would do if he had the power to enact a law mandating that all software be free software - as a form of "positive liberty". Judging by his writings, I get the feeling he'd do it.
Global GDP since 1820: a small china is an aberration
Well, it bugs me in a sense that it makes me wonder how much of the whole thing is propaganda and how much of it is really true.

I find that I have less and less trust in media reporting. The few times that I've been eye witness to something that made it to the media made me wonder if we'd been in the same place.

Sure, there are a bunch of people hell bent on destruction. But they are either not very numerous, not very successful, not very smart or a combination of these three.

The number of them that are willing to kill random strangers is quite probably a lot lower than media attention would make you believe. Conveniently, really hard numbers do not exist.

That doesn't say they do not exist. But given the amount of attention, funds and legislation (most of which seems to affect non-terrorists) that is being spent on this there would have to be a lot more fire than I can perceive.
_In the corporate structure the to do list doesn't appear at the "C" level._

I guess nobody at "C" level has actually anything that he has to do. These people just wander around dreaming solely or collectively with similar people and/or yelling at subordinates.
Dismissing the tripling of Microsoft's net income just because PC sales almost tripled as well seems a bit, for want of a better word, simplistic.
Blurtt Brings Postcard Artwork to the Masses
IE6 and IE7 are a major roadblock to Google's vision of the future web, since next-gen Google applications can't work well in those browsers, ie. Google Wave and Javascript-rich apps. Ultimately they want to get people away from IE and into a different browser, preferably Chrome, so they can increase their web dominance.
The critical thing about a job as a decision maker (a CEO) is not to never be wrong, it's to usually be right. If someone were to cherry pick a bad decision from my past, I'm sure they could find a doozy.
<quote>
and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
</quote>

For a moment there I didn't see that this one was for work on CCD; And was surprised thinking Bell labs is still producing Nobel quality stuff;
Well, if it helps people stop referring to browsers as "the internet," I'm all for it.
The algorithm is optimized for dogs/Frisbees and bears/fish.

Reminds me of a company I worked for they were working on a video compression and the video source the developers had was a security camera.

The compression was optimized for bookshelves and hand waving.
Uh, I don't think Stalman or anyone else wants to keep people from writing programs on they own computer and then running them however they want to.

What you're talking about is 'copyright', the right to give your creation to someone and restrict their ability to use said creation once they have it in their possession. That's more a little more complicated than ' to do what you please with your own creation'.
What people forget is that child labor on farms was just as oppressive and dangerous. Just like we see in the third world today, children work in factories because it is their best option (as compared to starvation or farm labor) rather than because of inadequate laws.

Technology, a capital infrastructure, and pervasive wealth solves this problem, not politicians.
This is the "makers' schedule" vs "managers' schedule" again. Donald Trump doesn't need a "To do" list because he (presumably) works on a manager's schedule -- if he decides he needs to do something he'll tell his assistant to set up a meeting with the relevant person, then he'll meet with the relevant person at the appropriate time and the thing will get done. Also, he doesn't need to worry about the minor errands which most of us need to fill our to do lists with either, since he can just bark "make me a dental appointment!" at somebody and it gets done.

To do lists are only relevant to those who actually need to sit down and do things on their own. Did Einstein have a To Do list? I don't know, but if he didn't then it was for very different reasons to Donald Trump.
>if our choices as a society are: 1) major government intervention and problems, or 2) little government intervention and problems, I think I'd prefer the latter.

If this summation was accurate, I would tend to agree with your conclusion that little government intervention is preferable. However, I respectfully disagree with the premise, pointing to the success of Glass-Steagall (read 'government intervention') in maintaining a healthy separation of depository/commercial financial intermediaries and their investment bank counterparts. It was, clearly, the deregulation and removal of said safeguard that allowed for the conditions of 'too big to fail' and gave meaningful, even disastrous implications for the average citizen. Finally, the author is either misinformed or intentionally ignoring the causal relationship between deregulation embodied in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the financial meltdown.
Unfortunately, it can also be neither. It's easier to simplify than make it fair.
I am one of the burned out ones ;)

I worked in the industry for approximately 6 years (2 companies) and got out due to the stressful crunch periods and associated drama of working in a game studio - if you are working on multiple titles, the stress increases by orders of magnitude. In addition to the bug fixing and testing there is the necessary hassle of submitting the games to SONY/MS/Nintendo, marketing coordination (with what seems like infinite number of mags and gaming sites), etc. and etc.

...now doing geospatial web applications.
While I find this interesting, I'm not sure it applies to the lion's share of people, especially here on HN. Maximizing your opportunities is a great principle, and for people working in startups and especially in marketing/sales positions, it's something they might face everyday.

For people in a "makers" role on a day-to-day basis, however, I wonder how they can do what is being said here. For those, I think that swombat is right - todo lists serve to get the things that need to be done out of your head so you can use that brain power more effectively.
Straw man. Who the hell uses their todo list like that? Who are those "proponents" who suggest playing this sort of silly "estimate the task and match it to a time slot" game? I've never met one.

You've never seen a Gantt chart? You're lucky, then.
And the exact application of those few laws in nearly infinite situations would require first a caste of extremely powerful judges, and later an accumulation of precedents which would effectively become a massive and complex legal code in itself.
Also worth reading is the link to the actual announcement from Palm: http://pdnblog.palm.com/2009/10/what-you-need-to-know/
Flash websites are one of our main products ... after the Eolas/MS thing happened back in '05/'06, we had to update tons of sites because the Flash ActiveX control no longer auto-started.

Wonder how this one will play out ... patent trolls FTL
Tymelie makes scheduling as easy as 1-2-3
Disclosing a conflict of interest is always a good thing.

Agreed. But this isn't about disclosing a conflict of interest; this is about the creation of a federal regulation that is both vague and unnecessary.

Why is is challenging for a blogger to disclose that his "review" was preceded by a payment from the company whose product he is reviewing?

As I stated earlier, it's a hurdle just to become familiar with the regulations that exist and confirm that you are in compliance. Imagine that a person doesn't blog today but wants to get into it - that person may be deterred by knowing that there is a world of federal regulation out there that they don't understand.
Ah, but that's within a pretty limited domain.

If the movie theater also restricted your right to write a negative review afterwards, say, it would be a bit dicey.

Some contracts that suppress rights might be defensible BUT the point is that such contract are not apriori valid.

Indeed, your the military example shows the need for limits; there's a reason that only the state can operate with the contract you describe. If a private organization could do such a thing, there would serious trouble on many fronts (private armies = bad things).
Sorry for the late reply. Actually, there's no need to ever grant glunote access to your Twitter account, it's only needed if you want to use the web interface.
If you never need the web interface just follow "glu", and the system will follow you back. Then you can take notes by sending a direct message to glu, i.e. "d glu discount socks 1-800-555-SOCK". Then to retrieve your notes send another direct message with a ? and the search terms, i.e. "d glu ? discount socks" and the system will direct message back the matches.

This way you never need to give glunote access and you can still use the system.

The reason we need access is that if you access glunote through the website we need to set your account to follow glu so that we can direct message you your search results. Thanks for the feedback and we'll change the language so this is clearer.
That's the beauty of EULAs in the US: if there's a clause in there that's unconscionable or illegal, even if you agree, it's not enforceable. We already have a well-established first sale doctrine in the States. I could see - but I wouldn't guarantee - that a court could find it unconscionable that a EULA wrapper that prohibits aftermarket sales is unenforceable given that it wouldn't apply to the same/similar content distributed in another medium.
>> "or at least you're assuming that there are no negative consequences for ignoring the rest of the environment and doing what you want."

You're right. I don't think there are. But then I'm completely against the minimum wage for similar reasons. You're not forced to get a particular job.
A Gantt chart is not a todo list. And a todo list is not a Gantt chart. Ranting against the evils of over-planned projects is one thing. Equating that to the humble todo list is not only silly, it's also very wrong. Terrible advice.
Yea, but there still isn't anything in those docs referring to the User-Agent string/property.
PhotoSketch: Draw Sketch, get Real Images
False dichotomy. The FLSA allowed children to work on farms with their parents. That too should have been illegal, and correcting it complicates the law.

Once again we see free markets failing to cope with externalities and twisted incentives. Children don't want to work on farms, nor are they qualified to make such judgements, nor are their parents, in exactly the same way that parents can't consent to numerous other things for their children (for instance, a parent can't consent to marry off an 11 year old daughter).

Whether you're poor or not, having your children pad your income isn't a viable solution, nor is it efficient, and yet it is the short-term solution the free market demonstrably arrived at.
>> "Sacrificing your life for the freedom of others"

Are we still talking about the guy who wrote some software and made it open source?

Do you not think Linus would have just made his own compiler+toolchain?
The cases cited in the story are more in line with bureaucrats maintaining budget. By that I mean you have an agency that needs to justify their budget of X dollars with Y convictions to show for it. It's hard to imagine any of the agents mentioned being much concerned about orchids. It's easy to imagine them being concerned about their careers.
Some brilliant thinkers centuries ago developed an ingenious technology for constraining judges: juries.

Of course, juries work better when they are able to find on both the facts and the justice of the law. We've deviated from this at our peril.

Mens rea, criminal intent, has historically been the simplifying agent in law. That's why you don't see a terribly complicated set of case laws surrounding, say, murder. The problem with lots of current criminal statutes is that you can be guilty of violating them without any intent to harm.
Certainly, not all regulation is created equal. Historically speaking, Glass-Steagall was one (actually two technically speaking) of the most effective bills passed in the past hundred years. It was written in the wake of the stock market crash by people who were determined to make sure that such a calamity did not reoccur, attacking a systematic problem with the financial market at its root cause. I contest that the other regulations you refer to tend to be far less significant and effective, likely (though I may have my work cut out for me substantiating this) because the legislation treats symptoms rather than basic issues.

Additionally the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that removed the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall (the parts that are related to this argument) happened under Clinton. The trend of financial market deregulation started in 1980, due to a shifting tide in economic though in the neoclassical (chicago school) vein and a multi million dollar banking lobby.
Universe has more entropy than thought
Amazon and the art of service
Your first point is well taken. Your second point isn't. A lot of things aren't easy, and we do them anyways because they're right.
If a movie theater would want to restrict your rights to write a negative review, why would you attend that movie theater? If a contract is bad, you don't enter into it
I wonder what other cool Physics phenomenon could be used for advanced message sending? Maybe Aliens communicate through gravity waves?
You've disregarded the second, stronger portion of that argument. Constrained though they may be, the trail of precedents judges would generate in the "1000 laws" scenario would simply constitute a complex shadow law.
True. However, for every simulation game it seems that there are at least two or three first person shooters.

And the big ones like Grand Theft Auto are very popular. Back in 2007 they had already sold 50 million units, making over a billion in revenue. And that was two years ago. With a cursory check I couldn't find recent sales stats.

Btw World of Goo is a great game and really shows that fun doesn't have to be violent. ;)
You can get away with one, really -- protection of private property, with one's own body defined as a property. However, it's probably easier to codify without an accompanying philosophical treatise if you write it as three to four laws, banning violence, theft, fraud, and possibly defamation.
This isn't just some schmoe replying to the GNU Manifesto. This is a person replying to comments made about him by Richard Stallman. So it's not "a response to...", it is "the response to..."
This was killed the last time it was here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722676

That time via Fox News:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/07/21/heritage-house-law...

They're essentially identical and both written by the same partisan think tank dude.
>Your studies are all observational garbage, as were the two links I posted, more to make a point than anything.

The studies I've referred you to are the largest, the most rigorous that have ever been done to date on the topic. They are not "observational garbage".

>You can use google as well as I can.

Well, that's the thing. My knowledge comes from readining actual journals and having doctors in the family who can interpret them. You're the one googling "runners die young". In fact, the actual study behind your NYT link paints a different picture than the NYT article did. See the conclusion:

"We conclude that SIT is a time-efficient strategy to elicit improvements in peripheral vascular structure and function that are comparable to ET. However, alterations in central artery distensibility may require a longer training stimuli and/or greater initial vascular stiffness than observed in this group of healthy subjects."

I repeat, Can you refer me to any peer-reviewed research linking sprint training or weight training with equal or greater benefit in any of the health indicators that Paul Williams's 100,000 person study found distance running improved? I seriously doubt it, because I've scoured every journal I have access to for comparative studies, and every one of those studies found greater longevity and fewer lifestyle diseases in endurance athletes than in speed or power athletes.
Web-enabled software radio receivers
I don't think it's a bad idea to have more than one table on the leaderboard. Having one "overall" table is nice, but having a bunch more stats would be fun.
I totally disagree - Palm's biggest hit in years was the Centro. The Pixi is the replacement for that. All the stuff with their App Catalog and the Pre were just training wheels for the real mass-market product: the Pixi.

Remember, the first year of the iPhone had lackluster sales, as well - mainly because they didn't have carrier subsidies. The Pixi will sell like hotcakes because 1) it's gonna be cheap and 2) it'll be everywhere.
Very fascinating and a good thing to keep in mind if I ever forget my combination lock number, thought that's unlikely. The only thing you would use this for is breaking into other people's locks. ;)
I've seen large mono project with unresolvable memory leak problems.

The problem is that .net is such a vast 'hunk of stuff' that there isn't any way for a single person or a small team to implement is perfectly and the imperfect implementations are fundamentally flawed - ie, memory leaks and strange bugs making mono apps fundamentally unreliable.
I take a false dichotomy charge seriously. I think you misunderstand me.

I'm certainly not defending the FLSA's farm exemption, which was clearly just a bow to a powerful special interest group [1].

Of course children don't want to work on farms or in factories. Does anyone want to work in a factory?

My point is simply that if you go to some random third-world country where children are working in factories, and you do nothing else than prevent them from working in factories, you very likely have not increased their quality of life. To your horror, you will see an increase in children scrounging for food in dumpsters. You will see them selling wares on the street. And you will see fewer families escaping a brutal life of farm labor to seek a better life in cities.

Your point about free markets also misses the mark. You could repeal all the child labor laws today in the US, and you would not find (a statistically significant number of) factories hiring children for the simple reason that with modern industrial techniques children wouldn't even be productive enough to justify their space on a factory floor. This is part of the reason why teenage unemployment is so high even though teens will work for minimum wage.

[1] Not to say that I think much harm comes from this today.
While I agree with the "test of the time" point of view, I don't think the other part of your argument makes much sense:

1)better alternative model: generally it would not be that hard to guesstimate the possibility of a significant improvement in the very near future. And even if someone comes along and proposes a better alternative next year, I don't think there is anything to feel humiliated about, as long as the original work that was recognized by the award is really Nobel material.

2) Disproving the original model/theory: Do you know of any theory/model in physics that was considered proven to be correct, and later disproved? improvements, enhancements, yes but disproved?
Obligatory comment: keep the right-wing news off of HN, please. Scare quotes don't mean it's important.
Microsoft Research shows off multitouch mouse prototypes
To-do lists can work for some people, but here's why they're dangerous:

1) The urgency-importance matrix theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MerrillCoveyMatrix.png). Given the 2x2 matrix of (important, unimportant) x (urgent, not urgent), the two urgent quadrants tend to get done and the other 2 don't. In the case of the (unimportant, not urgent) quadrant, that's probably fine. But for the (important, not urgent) quadrant, this is a problem. To-do lists can make it even easier to focus on the urgent, short-term tasks while starving the important, long-term ones.

2) To-do lists provide fuel for the procrastination fire by helping you find ways to occupy yourself while you put off a big task that you don't want to do. See http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I think that's the crux of his argument. People who achieve a lot can see the big picture; they can see the long term. They don't let the small tasks get in their way.
Thats what I was thinking. Most probably I am going to go this approach. Use the datasets and refine my program. I was always looking for real datasets. My Program can process all the 170 datasets together without any problem. I looked at some of the datasets, they are not all huge. I am not going to publish my program but approach the VC's directly to showcase my application. With so much effort I don't want to give my program for free. I don't know if you can converge publicity into decent funding for your startup.
I totally agree with Pelle

I will stick with the standards, I dont want to build custom interfaces for each service provider, the original purpose would be defeated by it.

I remember XML-RPC being so simple and elegant. Vendors and committees have screwed SOAP, made it so complex no one person can either explain it all or code it all.

I am building a oauth provider and a set of consumer apps.

I could refer to the standards, sample implementations in various languages and then write my own implementation in a couple of days.
Watch Private Practice Streaming Episodes
I am a fan of authenticity, after all it's hard not to be. But I just don't know (a) how important it is (b) what it even means, especially as your company grows.

Where's the "authenticity" in the biggest corporations making tonnes of money? And does not having authenticity make you unauthentic? I am not sure.

Is authenticity another way of saying if your product rocks, you won't need to do marketing? True in some cases, not so in others.
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers [video]
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creating full employment or income equality would be INCREDIBLY stupid. any country that attempts to do so will be throwing money into a giant hole until they stop or go bankrupt.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
Looks like a misleading headline. This isn't about posting bills online; online bills is a canard being used to promote a 72-hour waiting period on bills.

There are arguments for or against the 72-hour waiting period (the GOP proposal, like similar arguments made during the Bush presidency by Dems, is crafted to increase the ability of the minority to delay action by the majority; it isn't simply a "good-governance" measure). But they have little directly to do with whether bills can be posted online.